Free Republic

At the end of a rare visit to Egypt, a senior Iranian envoy said Tuesday the two regional Muslim heavyweights are making progress in normalizing diplomatic relations, cut nearly three decades ago over regional policy disagreements. "There is no major problem and everything is moving forward," Ali Larijani, from Iran's powerful National Security Council, said after talks here with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit. Larijani, who is also a close aide to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, described the talks as "positive and constructive." Teheran cut diplomatic ties after Cairo signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979...

A "dictator" is a head of state who exercises arbitrary authority over the lives of his citizens and who cannot be removed from power through legal means. The worst commit terrible human-rights abuses. This present list draws in part on reports by global human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International. While the three worst from 2005 have retained their places, two on last year's list (Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan) have slipped out of the Top 10-not because their conduct has improved but because other dictators have gotten worse....

Iran is developing a nuclear program, ostensibly for energy, but likely also for acquiring a nuclear weapon. Seyyed Ali Khamenei is the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a life-long office that his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini created and instituted in the Iranian Constitution. He has held this office since 1990, after the death of Khomeini in 1989. Perched in this position, he gets to appoint members to the unelected institutions. Iran is a theocratic “democracy.” It is democratic insofar as the people elect the President (now Muhammad Khatami since 1997) and the deputies of the Majlis or Parliament....