Special to WorldTribune.com

Iran’s regime on March 10 elected a new leader of its national Assembly of Experts, the state news agency FARS reported.

The Assembly of Experts is comprised of clerics who appoint, can dismiss and monitor the supreme leader.

Even as the regime denied as propaganda foreign media reports that said Supreme Leader Ali Hoseini Khamenei was critically ill, it announced the appointment of Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, who headed Iran’s Judiciary branch between 1989 and 1999.

[Related: Rise of Iran’s warrior class: Succession in the air with reports of Khamenei’s decline, March 8]

Iran is currently ruled by an Islamic Republic that justifies its moral authority on the basis of the Islamic scholar chosen as “supreme leader.”

Yazdi’s selection was announced following reports that Khamenei, said to have stage four prostate cancer, was hospitalized last week in critical condition.

Last week, western analysts said Khamenei’s disease had reached terminal levels and that he had at most two years to live, an finding denounced by the regime as “Israeli driven lies”.

“He carries about his work very normally. His business is as usual, work as usual,” said Mohammad Marandi, the Ayatollah’s chief surgeon.

  Iran selects new head of ‘Assembly’ in charge of ‘Supreme Leader’ position, WorldTribune.com