Kaveh Mousavi alerted me to a news item that he discusses at Margin of Error:

It’s always good to see good news after a week of horrifying news. Last week we saw serial acid attacks against four women in the Iranian province of Isfahan. Today people have poured into streets in both Tehran and Isfahan to protest these heinous crimes.

I’m not sure I think that quite amounts to good news.* There are some kinds of good news that are so dependent on previous terrible news that it’s hard to see them as really good. “People protest the random torture of women” – well good, but better if people just didn’t randomly torture women.

Still. I know what he means, of course, and I point out that kind of “good news” all the time.

Via Al-Monitor:

Four individuals have been arrested in connection with a number of gruesome acid attacks on women that shocked and terrified the residents of Esfahan. […] The first incident was reported Oct. 16. Men on motorcycles allegedly attacked women in their cars. Rumors immediately began to circulate that religious vigilante groups were targeting women with improper hijab. But as the acid attacks, which left the faces of their victims disfigured, increased, some Iranian media outlets reported that some of the victims were from religious families and were not improperly covered.

So for real just throwing acid on women because they are women. Yeah. Sometimes I wish we could have a complete species-overhaul.

Today Iranians took to the streets to protests. These photos are taken by the readers of BBC Persian and submitted to that website:

Their report doesn’t indicate how many people were there, but since Iran’s climate is very sensitive these days, the very fact that these protests were allowed to happen with no resistance from the regime is enough cause for celebration.

Well…maybe not quite celebration.

*Edited to add: Kaveh clarified that he meant that the fact that the demonstration was allowed to happen was the good news. Now there’s a bit of privilege-blindness for you – because I’m not up close and personal with life in a theocracy, I totally failed to think of that. [slaps self upside head]