The Latest from Iran (29 January): A Woman is Executed

0425 GMT: The government of the Netherlands today froze its diplomatic ties with Iran over the hanging of Dutch-Iranian Zahra Bahrami. 

Bengt van Loosdrecht, the Dutch foreign ministry spokesman, said Uri Rosenthal, the foreign minister, was "shocked, shattered by this act by a barbaric regime.'' He added the hanging was especially shocking as Abadi had assured the Dutch minister on Friday that Bahrami's legal avenues had not yet been exhausted.

2200 GMT: I Can't Think of A Tagline to Adequately Capture the Irony in This. From ISNA: "A well-informed Foreign Ministry official...called for Egyptian officials to submit to people's rights and avoid any harsh treatment with protestors."

2155 GMT: Soft War Alert. Given that sedition has supposedly been defeated by Iranian authorities, Commander Masoud Jazayeri, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, is sounding a bit jittery: "soft war" is very intricate and its casualties are in the millions.

1736 GMT: Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, the head of the Accounts Bureau, in Isfahan told Fars News that almost 40 trillion tomans were unaccounted for in the government budget. According to Fazli, the government's total annual income is 72 trillion tomans, but only 32 trillion of that finds its way into the budget. 

He added that it was the country's biggest financial problem and was a result of bad management. 

1717 GMT: Riding Tehran Metro is going to get expensive soon. How expensive? By about 30% because the government has yet to pay the metro's budget for this year. And if the government decides not to pay the budget set aside for the Metro next year as well, then, another 30%.  

1705 GMT: Latest update on Mohammad Hossein Karroubi: Saham News now claims that he had only been detained for a brief period of time and now has been released after 'answering some questions'. Apparently, the government detained Hossein because they alleged he had 'disclosed information' about the Kahrizak detention center. 

1658 GMT: Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, the head of the Accounts Bureau of Iran, told Mehr News on Thursday that the biggest problem with the country's finances was the fact that nobody knew exactly what the amount of government's annual income was.

Fazli added:

"The budgets that they announce is only mentioning the money that the government earns from the sale of petroleum products. There are other means of income for the government which bring a lot of money in and exhaust a lot of energy to acquire." 

Not that the people of Iran don't care, but do the mullahs?

1646 GMT: Mir Hossein Mousavi released a letter of support to the people of Egypt protesting against Hosni Mubarak today. The letter published in Kaleme, calls Hosni Mubarak 'a present pharaoh'. Part of the letter reads: 

Today, the slogan of “Where is my vote?” of the people of Iran has reached Egypt and transformed into “The people want the overthrow of the regime”. In order to discover the secret of these links and these similarities, one does not have to go too far. You just have to compare the recent elections in Egypt with our own and compare it with the chairman of the Guardian Council who explicitly says there is no need for millions of votes by Green citizens. If we look at the collapsing political regimes in the Arab world and the Middle East carefully, we can identify a similar pattern of invading and shutting down social networks, the press and the cyber space. In an amazingly similar fashion, they have all blocked SMS systems, mobile phones and the internet, have banned all writers and taken dissidents to prisons.

Our nation deeply respects the glorious uprising of the brave people of Tunis and that of the people of Egypt, Yemen and other countries in quest for their rights. We commend the courageous, cognisant and resisting people of Egypt, Tunis, Jordan and Yemen and we pray to Allah that they may be successful and victorious in their struggle for their rights.

1639 GMT: SahamNews reports that Mohammad Hossein Karroubi - Mehdi Karroubi's son - was arrested by security forces today. Hossein Karroubi is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, who joined active duty at the age of 15. 

1215 GMT: Apologies to readers that because of the combination of Egypt developments and my commitments today, updates from Iran will be suspended until this evening.

0745 GMT: We start this morning with the feature, in a separate entry, of this morning's execution of Dutch-Iranian Zahra Bahrami.

Meanwhile...

An Internet source says Dariush Homayoun, the co-founder of the Pan-Iranist Party, has died at the age of 82.

Mehdi Mahmoudian, the journalist who brought the news of the post-election abuses and killings at Kahrizak Prison, has reportedly suffered a heart attack in prison. 

Women's rights activists have protested against the detention of Fatemeh Masjedi of the One Million Signatures Campaign. Masjedi was sentenced to six months in prison for "propaganda against the system".