Iran Focus: Tehran, May 27 – Nearly a thousand homeless people rounded off the streets of Tehran in the past five months had university degrees, according to the head of the social affairs section of the city’s Office of the Mayor. “948 of these people had university degrees or higher credentials”, …

Iran Focus: Baghdad, May 27 – Some 3,446 Iranian dissidents belonging to Iran’s main opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin (PMOI), declared in a statement entitled “Human Rights Betrayed”, “The May 18 report by Human Rights Watch on the [PMOI”> is a travesty of human rights”. “As a distorted report, it flagrantly violated all basic legal and international standards. In short, HRW has auctioned away and degraded human rights”, they said.

Iran Focus: Baghdad, May 27 – Iraq’s acting National Human Rights Inspector released a report today on his findings during fact-finding visits to the main camp of the Iran’s most active opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, a week after a U.S.-based rights groups accused them of having violated the rights of their own members. Sofyan Abbass, a prominent legal expert and advisor to several international NGOs, is Iraq’s acting National Human Rights Inspector.

AFP: The United Arab Emirates has told Tehran to free five
crew members of a boat which Iran has held in the Gulf since early May, the daily newspaper Al-Khaleej said on Friday. “The Emirates wants a solution, as fast as possible, to this continuing affair, to avoid harmful consequences,” the paper quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.

UPI: The U.S. State Department told Saudi Arabian officials that the United States has a view of what freedom entails and that Middle Eastern countries like Iran will need to answer to the basic hopes and rights of its people. Counselor Philip Zelikow from the State Department speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington was discussing the future of U.S.-Saudi relations.

Iran Focus: Tehran, May 26 – A warrant officer of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shot to death a young man in cold blood at an underground railway station in the city of Karaj, west of
the Iranian capital, sparking off widespread clashes between angry protesters and security forces in several neighbourhoods of the city.