AFP: A colleague of the Nobel Prize winning Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Abdolfattah Soltani, was arrested on Saturday, a fellow lawyer said. A group of men appeared at a legal building where Soltani, already the subject of an arrest warrant, was holding a protest and “put him into a car and took him away,” Mohammad Sharif told the student agency ISNA.

Reuters: Iran is denying basic amenities to its ethnic and religious minorities and in some cases confiscating their land, a preliminary U.N. report said on Saturday. The report focused on accounts of discrimination in areas across the country’s western borders, home to Arab and Kurdish minorities, where ethnic unrest has flared this week.

Iran Focus: Paris, Jul. 30 – Iran’s officials and state-owned media have been launching virulent attacks on the British government for supposedly hosting an Iranian opposition leader in London. In a “special report”, the semi-official daily Kayhan wrote in its Saturday issue that Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the opposition coalition National Council of Resistance of Iran, held a meeting with British Parliamentarians in the House of Lords “to present a report on the status of the group in Iraq”.

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Jul. 30 – The showing of a play
staged by Iran’s leading playwright and theatre director came
to an abrupt end on Friday night on the orders of the Islamic Republic’s authorities. “A Play Portraying the Passions of Master Navid Makan and His Wife Engineer Rokhshid Farzin”, written and directed by Bahram Beizaii, debuted in Tehran’s …

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Jul. 30 – A human rights lawyer representing the family of slain Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi turned up unexpectedly at the Tehran Bar Association on Saturday and began an indefinite sit-in, after police raided his home and tried to arrest him. Abdolfattah Soltani’s troubles began when he publicly accused Tehran’s Revolutionary Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi on Monday of involvement in the July 2003 murder of Zahra Kazemi, …