PayvandNews – Iranian actress Golab Adineh won Best Actress Award for ‘Abji‘ (The Sis) directed by Marjan Ashrafizadeh at the 7th Beijing International Film Festival in China. The seventh Beijing International Film Festival (BJIFF 2017) wrapped up on Sunday as the Tiantan Award went to ‘Luka’, a Georgian movie by Giorgi Barabadze. There were 15 outstanding films shortlisted for the award from …

PayvandNews – Germany’s Volkswagen says it has picked a local Iranian auto company to represent it in one of the biggest markets of the Middle East. A classic beetle in Iran (source: Imgrum) Volkswagen in a statement named the Iranian company as Khodro Sazi Sina (KSS) which it said had been chosen after “thorough and intense studies”. The company emphasized that …

theguardian- Of all the places one might encounter Shirin Ebadi, Tallahassee should not be one. I was to meet her in the state capital of what is officially known as America’s sunshine state, but is more widely regarded as America’s weirdest state. Ebadi was in Florida for PeaceJam, which connects Nobel peace prize laureates with youth. But I found it hard to imagine …

huffingtonpost― A lawyer representing two American citizens imprisoned in Iran appealed to the United Nations on Tuesday to intervene on behalf of his clients. In a 27-page petition submitted to the U.N. Working Group On Arbitrary Detention, Jared Genser argued that the Iranian government is arbitrarily depriving Siamak Namazi, 45, and his father Baquer, 80, of their liberty. Their treatment …

RFL/RE – U.S. prosecutors said they will show that a Turkish-Iranian gold trader coordinated an illegal scheme to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions with people at “high levels” in Turkey and Iran. During a pretrial hearing in a Manhattan district court on April 24, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dennis Lockard said he would prove that Reza Zarrab and his co-conspirators offered …

Al-Arabia – A UAE source has said that an Emirati soldier was “martyred after an Iranian boat entered Emirati territory.”

Amnesty – Peyman Barandah, who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, is due to be executed on 10 May in Shiraz’s Adel Abad prison, Fars Province, Iran. He was sentenced to death after a grossly unfair trial which violated principles of juvenile justice. He was detained in prolonged solitary confinement during which he said he was …

CHRI – Payam Shakiba, a political science graduate student at Tehran’s Allameh Tabataba’i University, has been held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison’s Ward 209 since his arrest by the Intelligence Ministry in late February 2017, an informed source told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). Shakiba, 30, has not had access to a lawyer and no reasons have been …

CHRI – Ahmadreza Jalali, an Iranian-born Swedish resident detained in Evin Prison since April 2016, has been denied a lawyer of his choosing for the third time, an informed source told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). “Unfortunately, Ahmadreza’s trial has been delayed for several months only because Judge [Abolqasem] Salavati has not accepted any of his three …

Al-monitor – Ties between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have been strained for years. Incidents such as the stampede during the Hajj pilgrimage in 2015, in which hundreds of Iranian pilgrims were crushed to death; the execution of prominent Saudi Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr in January 2016; and the subsequent attacks on Saudi diplomatic compounds in Iran ultimately led to …