Egypt Rules Out Resuming Diplomatic Ties with Iran, Agence France Presse, May 6 

CAIRO - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak held talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati here Tuesday but ruled out an immediate resumption of diplomatic relations severed in 1979…

Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Mussa said the possibility of Cairo reopening ties with Tehran, which were broken off after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, was not raised. "We are not talking about that now," Mussa told reporters.

Ties between Egypt and Iran have been tense for many years, with Egypt accusing the Islamic republic of being behind a violent anti-government campaign by Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists which erupted in 1992.

 

234 Disqualified, 4 Allowed to Run in Election, Associated Press, May 7

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's ruling clerics selected four candidates Wednesday to run in the May 23 presidential election, turning down 234 other hopefuls.

All four support Iran's fundamentalist Muslim establishment. None of the nine women who signed up -- the first in Iran's history to put themselves forward as presidential candidates -- were chosen.

The decision was made by the 12-man Guardian Council… It said the candidates would be Parliament Speaker Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri; Mohammad Khatami, a former culture minister; Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri, a former intelligence minister; and Syed Reza Zavareie, deputy head of the judiciary.

The winner will succeed President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who must step down by law at the end of his second four-year term in August…

 

No Votes for Candidates Soft on West, Reuter, May 7  

DUBAI - … "The (Iranian) nation will certainly not vote for any candidate who shows the least flexibility towards America, towards the Western states' interference, and towards foreign political and cultural aggression," [Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei said on Wednesday in a speech carried by Tehran radio.

Khamenei on Saturday told a gathering of clergymen they should help voters make the right choice by telling them who the best candidate was according to Islamic principles…

Cannes Jury Head Raps Political Pressure, Reuter, May 7  

CANNES, France - Cannes film festival jury president Isabelle Adjani on Wednesday denounced political pressure from China and Iran, saying Cannes had been created 50 years ago to counter the Nazi hold on the Venice festival…

Earlier on Wednesday, festival boss Gilles Jacob said in a curt statement that Abbas Kiarostami's "The Delicious Taste of Cherries" would run in Cannes though the Iranian director had quoted Tehran authorities as refusing him a green light.

… The director had last month quoted a Culture Ministry official as telling him that Tehran would not allow him to take the film to Cannes because it should first be shown at the Fajr (Dawn) festival in Tehran which marks the country's Islamic revolution every February.

 

Head of Mullahs' Judiciary Says There Are No Prisoners of Conscience In Iran! Iran Zamin News Agency, May 7

In a gathering of directors of prisons, Mullah Mohammad Yazdi, head of the Tehran regime's Judiciary, boasted: "No one is imprisoned in Iran for his thoughts or beliefs." He went so far as to claim that the regime's laws were "the best and most consistent" in the world.

The Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance issued a statement in which it termed Yazdi's remarks "impudent" and "brazen."

The NCR statement noted that Yazdi spoke just weeks after the United Nations Human Rights Commission had expressed grave concern at the excessive number of executions, use of torture and inhuman punishments, and "grave breaches of human rights" in Iran.

According to the regime's penal laws, any "insult" to the mullahs' leaders or any gathering of more than two persons opposed to the regime, even outside Iran, may be punished by death. "On the basis of this law, many dissidents and political prisoners are executed under the bogus pretext of espionage," the NCR statement said.

The NCR also noted that the number of executions publicly announced in the state media in 1996 was three times the total announced in 1995.

Most executions are carried out in secret, and the actual figures are much higher.

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