PERSIAN GULF

IRANIAN REFORM MOVEMENT DIVIDED OVER BOYCOTT OF RUN-OFF ELECTION

Iran’s reformist camp, suffering a devastating defeat in the first round of the presidential elections, is divided over a call to boycott the second round.

The conservative-turned-moderate cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani faces a tense run-off battle next Friday with the ultra-hard-line former mayor of Tehran, Mahmood Ahmadinejad, who placed second.

The reformists, headed by Mehdi Karoubi and Mustafa Moin, came in third and fifth, putting them out of the contest.

The heads of the reformist parties will meet in emergency session today to discuss their future role in addition to deciding whether to call on their supporters to boycott the second round. The liberals have an awkward choice: vote for the pragmatic Mr. Rafsanjani or urge a boycott.

“Between bad and worse, it’s better to select bad,” the managing editor of the reformist Eqbal daily newspaper, Morteza Fallah, said, labelling Mr. Rafsanjani as the lesser of two evils. “The elections have showed us that those with power and money have influence in Iranian politics,” he said. “But we have accepted the people’s choice, and we will continue to push the new government on social and democratic issues.”

However, many residents in the affluent northern suburbs of Tehran fear a win by Mr. Ahmadinejad could reverse the cautious social reforms that have been achieved under President Khatami and further dent Iran’s sluggish relations with the West. As mayor of Tehran, Mr. Ahmadinjad moved to “Islamize” the capital by promoting Shiite religious festivals and restricting social and cultural activities.

– The Daily Telegraph

NORTH AMERICA

PATAKI RAPS RUSSIA

Governor Pataki spoke Thursday to a gathering of local Jewish leaders about his trip to Cordoba, Spain, earlier this month as the leader of the American government’s delegation to a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“The conference was a success,” Mr. Pataki said, but he said he was “very concerned” by movement by some countries to group anti-Semitism with other forms of bigotry. “There was an active effort to have anti-Semitism no longer treated as the unique horror it is,” Mr. Pataki said. He spoke of “countries that would almost like to look the other way.”

He named Russia and Canada as countries that were not as supportive as America would have liked. And he said that 26 of 29 counties did not keep statistics on anti-Semitic incidents. The conference dealt with anti-Semitism as well as with anti-Christian and anti-Islamic bigotry.

The governor said his own sensitivity to the issue arose in part from growing up with Hungarian immigrant families in Peekskill, including Jewish families like the Hershes, the Grosses, and the Weisses. When Mr. Pataki visited Hungary after being elected governor, he found many of his own cousins, but no Hershes, Grosses, or Weisses. He found those family names listed on a nearby memorial to those who had been killed during the Holocaust.

-Staff Reporter of the Sun

CENTRAL ASIA

U.S. MILITARY STRIKES TALIBAN, KILLING AT LEAST 20

KABUL, Afghanistan – Fighting raged across southern Afghanistan yesterday as the American military pounded suspected Taliban positions with air strikes that killed as many as 20 militants along a narrow mountain footpath.

A Taliban spokesman, meanwhile, claimed his fighters had assassinated a kidnapped Afghan police chief and five of his men for collaborating with the American-led coalition. American aircraft opened fire on a group of suspected Taliban along a narrow footpath in the high mountains northwest of Gereshk, in southern Helmand province, after rebels had pinned down a coalition ground patrol with rocket and small-arms fire.

“Initial battle-damage assessments indicate 15 to 20 enemies died and an enemy vehicle was destroyed,” the army said in a statement. No Americans were injured.

– Associated Press