Iran: review

According to Japanese authorities a Japanese student has been kidnapped by an armed group in Kerman province south-eastern Iran.
The student crossed into Iran after travelling in Pakistan. His identity has not been released.
IRNA reports that the student was abducted on Monday while visiting Kerman's Old Arg Citadel.




A media adviser to president Ahmadinejad, Mohammad Kalhor said to Reuters that when Ahmadinejad was quoted saying there were no gays in Iran, he was misquoted by the translator.
What Ahmadinejad said was not a political answer. He said that, compared to American society, we don't have many homosexuals. Kalhor said to Reuters that because of historical, religious and cultural differences homosexuality was less common in Iran and the Islamic world than in the West.



An Iranian animal-rights group claims a recent clampdown against keeping dogs as pets appears to have abated in Tehran.
The clampdown began in late September on the orders of the head of Tehran's security forces who said that walking a dog in public is against the law.
Police in the capital have confiscated dogs and placed them in what animal-rights defenders have called a "dog prison."
A member of Iran's Society to Defend the Rights of Animals, Payam Ehtisabian, told Radio Farda that officials appear to have abandoned their most controversial tactics.
He says that pressure by his group and foreign news coverage has led authorities to send some of the animals to a veterinary university and eventually return them to their owners.


Shirin Ebadi was in Prague this week for the Forum 2000 conference.
In an interview with Radio Farda she said that rights abuses have worsened in Iran in the past year, but that military action is not the solution to Iran's domestic problems.



In Iran there are childoffenders, still on death row.

Children are being hanged to death.
A child will be hanged to death.
Poster amnesty.nl