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Khamenei’s Military Adviser Runs for Iranian Presidential Elections

Khamenei and his military advisor Hossein Dehghan. Photo: Khamenei’s website
Khamenei and his military advisor Hossein Dehghan. Photo: Khamenei’s website
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Khamenei’s Military Adviser Runs for Iranian Presidential Elections

Khamenei and his military advisor Hossein Dehghan. Photo: Khamenei’s website
Khamenei and his military advisor Hossein Dehghan. Photo: Khamenei’s website

A military adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has officially announced running for the presidential elections, scheduled for June 2021.

Iranian news agencies circulated on Tuesday a video recording in which Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan, a commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), said he will run for the elections.

Khamenei has repeatedly stressed the importance of having a young president to run a revolutionary government.

Dehghan was the first to announce his candidacy to fill the post of the eighth Iranian president after the 1979 revolution, which toppled the Shah's regime.

The elected president will assume his duties after the incumbent’s second term ends in August 2021.

Few days before his announcement, Dehghan, who has been sanctioned by the US Treasury since November 2019, held an exclusive interview with the Associated Press in which he warned against any potential US attack on Tehran.

He said any negotiations with the West could not include Iran’s ballistic missiles, which he described as a “deterrent” to Tehran’s adversaries.

“The Iranian government will not negotiate its defensive power ... with anybody under any circumstances,” he stressed. “Missiles are a symbol of the massive potential that is in our experts, young people and industrial centers.”

Dehghan held several positions before being appointed as the Supreme Leader’s advisor for defense affairs in 2017.

He served as defense minister under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and during President Hassan Rouhani's first term (2013-17) and as deputy to the then defense minister, Ali Shamkhani, during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami from 1997 till 2003.

The senior official described himself as a “nationalist” with “no conventional political tendency.”

Among former senior IRGC commanders to run in previous presidential elections are Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, currently parliamentary speaker, and Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Expediency Council since 1997.

In the first response to Dehghan’s candidacy, former Minister of Culture and Information Ali Jannati tweeted that given the multiple problems facing the country, such as the sanctions, economic pressures and public discontent from living conditions, as well as the president’s limited powers to decide on foreign and domestic policies, “we must doubt the mental health of those who want to run for the presidential elections.”

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Man Arrested after Pepper Spray Attack in London's Heathrow Airport Parking Garage

File photo: A plane prepares ahead of taking-off, after radar failure led to the suspension of outbound flights across the UK, at Heathrow Airport in Hounslow, London, Britain, July 30, 2025. (Reuters)
File photo: A plane prepares ahead of taking-off, after radar failure led to the suspension of outbound flights across the UK, at Heathrow Airport in Hounslow, London, Britain, July 30, 2025. (Reuters)
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Man Arrested after Pepper Spray Attack in London's Heathrow Airport Parking Garage

File photo: A plane prepares ahead of taking-off, after radar failure led to the suspension of outbound flights across the UK, at Heathrow Airport in Hounslow, London, Britain, July 30, 2025. (Reuters)
File photo: A plane prepares ahead of taking-off, after radar failure led to the suspension of outbound flights across the UK, at Heathrow Airport in Hounslow, London, Britain, July 30, 2025. (Reuters)

Police arrested a man in London on Sunday after a group of people were assaulted with pepper spray in a parking garage at Heathrow Airport.

The victims were taken to the hospital by ambulance but their injuries were not believed to be serious, the Metropolitan Police said.

The incident in the Terminal 3 garage occurred after an argument escalated between two groups who knew each other. It was not being investigated as terrorism, police said.

One man was arrested on suspicion of assault and held in custody. Police were searching for the other suspects who left the scene.

World

US Envoy Kellogg Says Ukraine Peace Deal Is Really Close

A Ukrainian serviceman walks near apartment buildings damaged by a Russian military strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in the frontline town of Kostiantynivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine November 15, 2025. (Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via Reuters)
A Ukrainian serviceman walks near apartment buildings damaged by a Russian military strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in the frontline town of Kostiantynivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine November 15, 2025. (Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via Reuters)
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US Envoy Kellogg Says Ukraine Peace Deal Is Really Close

A Ukrainian serviceman walks near apartment buildings damaged by a Russian military strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in the frontline town of Kostiantynivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine November 15, 2025. (Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via Reuters)
A Ukrainian serviceman walks near apartment buildings damaged by a Russian military strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in the frontline town of Kostiantynivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine November 15, 2025. (Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via Reuters)

US President Donald Trump's outgoing Ukraine envoy said a deal to end the Ukraine war was "really close" and now depended on resolving two main outstanding issues: the future of Ukraine's Donbas region and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

The Ukraine war is the deadliest European conflict since World War Two and has triggered the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War.

US Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg, who is due to step down in January, told the Reagan National Defense Forum that efforts to resolve the conflict were in "the last 10 meters" which he said was always the hardest.

The two main outstanding issues, Kellogg said, were on territory - primarily the future of the Donbas - and the future of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, which is under Russian control.

"If we get those two issues settled, I think the rest of the things will work out fairly well," Kellogg said on Saturday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. "We're almost there."

"We're really, really close," said Kellogg.

Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who served in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq, said the scale of the death and injuries caused by the Ukraine war was "horrific" and unprecedented in terms of a regional war.

He said that, together, Russia and Ukraine have suffered more than 2 million casualties, including dead and wounded since the war began. Neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose credible estimates of their losses.

Moscow says Western and Ukrainian estimates inflate its losses. Kyiv says Moscow inflates estimates of Ukrainian losses.

Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

A leaked set of 28 US draft peace proposals emerged last month, alarming Ukrainian and European officials who said it bowed to Moscow's main demands on NATO, Russian control of a fifth of Ukraine and restrictions on Ukraine's army.

Those proposals, which Russia now says contain 27 points, have been split up into four different components, according to the Kremlin. The exact contents are not in the public domain.

Under the initial US proposals, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, whose reactors are currently in cold shutdown, would be relaunched under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the electricity produced would be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that he had had a long and "substantive" phone call with Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The Kremlin said on Friday it expected Kushner to be doing the main work on drafting a possible deal.

World

7.0 Earthquake Hits in Remote Wilderness Along Alaska-Canada Border

Hubbard Glacier, located near Yakutat, Alaska, is seen on Aug. 1, 2024. (AP)
Hubbard Glacier, located near Yakutat, Alaska, is seen on Aug. 1, 2024. (AP)
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7.0 Earthquake Hits in Remote Wilderness Along Alaska-Canada Border

Hubbard Glacier, located near Yakutat, Alaska, is seen on Aug. 1, 2024. (AP)
Hubbard Glacier, located near Yakutat, Alaska, is seen on Aug. 1, 2024. (AP)

A powerful, magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck in a remote area near the border between Alaska and the Canadian territory of Yukon on Saturday. There was no tsunami warning, and officials said there were no immediate reports of damage or injury.

The US Geological Survey said it struck about 230 miles (370 kilometers) northwest of Juneau, Alaska, and 155 miles (250 kilometers) west of Whitehorse, Yukon.

In Whitehorse, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Calista MacLeod said the detachment received two 911 calls about the earthquake.

“It definitely was felt,” MacLeod said. “There are a lot of people on social media, people felt it.”

Alison Bird, a seismologist with Natural Resources Canada, said the part of Yukon most affected by the temblor is mountainous and has few people.

“Mostly people have reported things falling off shelves and walls,” Bird said. “It doesn’t seem like we’ve seen anything in terms of structural damage.”

The Canadian community nearest to the epicenter is Haines Junction, Bird said, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) away. The Yukon Bureau of Statistics lists its population count for 2022 as 1,018.

The quake was also about 56 miles (91 kilometers) from Yakutat, Alaska, which the USGS said has 662 residents.

It struck at a depth of about 6 miles (10 kilometers) and was followed by multiple smaller aftershocks.