WASHINGTON, May 24 (UPI) -- Insider notes from United Press International for May 24 ...
Rumors are sweeping Tehran of a failed assassination attempt against Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supposedly plotted by four Republican Guard commanders. The rumors add the four men were captured, but their execution was stopped by guard colleagues who insisted their death sentences be commuted to exile in Afghanistan. The other popular rumor says the elected but powerless President Mohammed Khatami, dispirited and exhausted at the prolonged frustration of his reform plans by the Mullahs, has submitted his resignation to Khamenei. Certainly he threatened to resign, in a speech to teachers last week, but Khatami was in fighting form Thursday in a speech at Khorramshah, celebrating the port's recapture in the 1980s war.
"This revolution said that we want an Islamic republic; not an Islamic dictatorship and that all the components of the system should rely on the people's vote and then the constitution took shape," Khatami declared, and went on to issue his fiercest warning to the Ayatollahs. "When all the roads are blocked and the society sees itself under the siege of force and intrigues, it is drawn to use force in order to break the deadlock," he said.
Political tension has been rising ominously in Iran since last year's football riots, and is peaking after conservative cleric Ayatollah Ebrahim Amini's warning this week the regime was "on the verge of collapse." Ayatollah Khamenei delivered a message to all university students late Thursday saying, "Arrogant enemies are attempting to lay siege to the Islamic Republic" and calling on the students to "be alert and frustrate the plots of our enemies." But the ayatollah did not appear. The message was read out for him by Hojatoleslam Mohsen Qomi, his special envoy to the universities.
In a move certain to inflame local anti-nuclear activists, 28 U.S. nuclear powered submarines have made unannounced port visits to Japanese navy bases in Yokosuka, Sasebo and Okinawa since local governments after Sept. 11 stopped announcing port visits in advance. The municipalities changed the protocol in deference to a U.S. request about increased concerns of possible terrorist attacks. The largest American presence in Japan is maintained in Okinawa; its government called in riot police from around the country after the Sept. 11 attacks. The additional forces left nearly three months ago and the transport ministry has lifted some no-fly zones put in place over U.S. military installations. Before the terrorist attacks, information on the submarine port visits, including the boat's name and time of call, was usually communicated to the local governments and the Japan coast guard as a courtesy 24 hours in advance.
Few people in the former Soviet Georgia had ever heard of the Christian Conservative Party but now it could be their way to vote against veteran President Eduard Shervardnadze in elections scheduled for June 2. The main opposition, the CUG -- Union of Citizens of Georgia -- led by former parliament Speaker Zurah Zhvania, was excluded from the elections after a highly controversial court ruling found the party's internal split disqualified it from standing. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal until after the election, in what Zvaniah calls a political fix to keep Shevardnadze in office. It was then the tiny Christian Conservative Party, which had registered in time for the election, offered to stand its candidates down in favor of Zhvania's list.
The city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, commemorated its bid to be Europe's next capital of culture by demolishing the Ashley Avenue house where the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney, had lived for seven years and had written many of his poems while teaching at nearby Queen's University. The house had been empty for some time, and bureaucratic delays in protecting it as a site of cultural importance allowed a local developer to legally knock the place down. Northern Ireland's experiment in self-government clearly has some way to go.
Sen. Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who is famed for using his post as chairman of the Appropriations Committee to shift every possible job and building in the federal government to his home state, was spotted entering a Washington cab this week that carried one of the new-fangled ad hoardings on the roof. From the White Meat Council, it read, "Time flies when you're having pork."
