Oh, thank goodness. I think we all needed some good news this week.

That is wonderful. My heart's cheered for Nazanin and her family... aw seriously, reading that description of her return to her family's arms made me get teary-eyed. I hope to God that her future is a bright one.

I add:

Hopefully her release will be an example to help blow this issue into the public's eye... this issue of unjust imprisonment and execution of 1) minors, 2) women who have the audacity to defend themselves against rapists. As the old proverb goes, this is one beached starfish returned to the sea, but people will likely have an all too easy time forgetting her and women like her.

Also Twisty had some good points over at her place. How many other Nazanins are out there who didn't have the good fortune of getting a pretty spokeswoman?

I'm so damn glad she's out, and it *is* wonderful news to get at the end of a stressful week. But the resultant victory-party's gotta be a party with purpose.

The down side of it is that “Although the court recognized that Fatehi acted in self defense, it
ruled that excessive force was used. Therefore, the court asked Fatehi to
pay "diyeh" (blood money) to compensate the family of the deceased -- a
judgment that her lawyers, Shadi Sadr and Mr. Mostafaei, vehemently oppose
and will appeal.� Blood money is a lot of money and her family live in a slum.

YES!!!!!!!!!!!

That bail was set at $40,000, by the way. That's a lot of money.

Even if each activist had $100 extra to donate, that's 400 activists who have to hear of the story.

Impressive.

I thought Twisty had an interesting point to make about this at her blog.

That's great news. My heart goes to her and her family.

I hope she leaves the country bc i honestly dont think she can live a normal life there after this. Honor killing os so prevalent its possible she needs to be afraid for her life.

Katie, honor killing is not “prevalent� in Iran. Please don’t make things up! She doesn’t need to fear for her life. Her family has been very supportive of her. Why should she leave the country? She only has a 3rd grade education, she doesn’t speak any other languages, and she wants to be with her family. What would she do in another country other than be miserable and be looked down upon by people like you for wearing a headscarf?

Reports submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights show that honor killings have occurred in Bangladesh, Great Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Sweden, Turkey, and Uganda. In countries not submitting reports to the UN, the practice was condoned under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, and has been reported in Iraq and Iran.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/02/0212_020212_honorkilling.html

But anyway, hooray for Nazanin Fatehi!!! Be safe, Nazanin.

Calculating tangibles in a world of intangibles. We live in a ‘weightless economy’, or an economy of ideas, where 80 per cent of wealth is created through intangibles. We talk too of the importance of people. Yet our systems of measurement and the calculation of value are out of step and lag behind realities.

For instance, accountancy systems invented in a mercantilist age and developed under industrialism remain largely focused on measuring assets as material entities. People, who as ideasgenerators create most value, are by contrast treated as an accounting cost even though in the sale of a company they are part of its goodwill.

As mentioned earlier, too much of our data gathering is based on nations and static measures when it is cities that are the driving forces of national economies and it is relations and flows that reveal more about urban dynamics than quantities of attributes such as population.