AFP: At least three people were killed Sunday when a series of bomb attacks targetting public buildings rocked Iran’s restive southwestern city of Ahvaz, an interior ministry official said.
Interior ministry spokesman Jahanbaksh Khanjani told AFP there were four explosions and that “three or four people” were killed in Ahvaz, the capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province and an ethnic-Arab majority city close to the border with Iraq.

Iran Focus: Tehran, Jun. 11 – Iran’s former paramilitary police chief and presidential hopeful said in an interview with a state-run daily that he supported Internet censorship and state control over satellite channels. Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, until recently commander of the State Security Forces and a top brass in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, told the daily Keyhan, “We support the principle of Internet filtering and it’s the right thing to do”.

Knight Ridder Newspapers: A dizzying array of campaign posters across this sprawling city promises Iranian voters a brighter, freer future in the most contested presidential race in Islamic Republic history. But it’s unlikely that any of the eight candidates vying in June 17 elections to replace President Mohammad Khatami, who can’t run for a third term, will win the kind of victory that swept Khatami to office in 1997 and 2001 with hopes of political and social change.

AFP: The United States has not waited for the first ballot to be cast before dismissing Iran’s presidential election as rigged and exhorting the Iranian people to rise up for democratic reform. US officials took no pains to hide their concern after Iran’s hardline clerical regime barred more than 1,000 hopefuls from next Friday’s poll and narrowed the field to a handful of mostly conservative candidates.

Reuters: An Iranian investigative journalist, jailed for linking officials to political murders, was back behind bars on
Saturday and resuming a hunger strike after vanishing for three days. Akbar Ganji was granted home leave last month to have medical checks for asthma and back pains. Iranian authorities said he should have been back in jail on Wednesday but had given them the slip. On Saturday, Ganji returned alone to Tehran’s Evin prison, clutching a hold-all and a bag of medicines.