BBC News reports: “The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has nominated its deputy chairman, Khairat al-Shatir, as its candidate for the presidential elections in May.

The choice of Mr Shatir, the group’s financier, reverses a pledge made earlier by the group’s leaders not to contest the election.

It will raise concerns among liberals and the military that the Brotherhood could become too powerful.

Correspondents say its ties with the ruling council have steadily worsened.

There had been much speculation about whether it would opt to field a candidate following the party’s legislative election success in November.

The movement’s political arm then won around a third of the vote, and nearly half the seats in the first parliamentary election since the fall of Hosni Mubarak last year.

Mahmoud Hussein, the group’s deputy leader, said it had decided to field a candidate following ‘attempts to abort the revolution’. Only a few days remain before the close of nominations…” (Cal Thomas, the famous American journalist, warns that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is as vicious and death dealing as al-Qaeda and the Taliban – Ezekiel 33:3; Acts 20:31. See the next report.)

AFP reports: “White House officials held talks with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood in Washington as the Islamist group threw itself into the fray in Egypt’s presidential election.

The meeting with low-level National Security Council staff was part of a series of US efforts to broaden engagement with new and emerging political parties following Egypt’s revolution last year, a US official said.

The White House pointed out that Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and other US lawmakers and officials had also met with Brotherhood representatives in Egypt and elsewhere in recent months…

The Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, said on Saturday it would nominate Khairat al-Shater, a professor of engineering and business tycoon, to contest Egypt’s first presidential election since a popular uprising ousted Hosni Mubarak last year.

The Islamists, who control parliament, had repeatedly said they would not put forward a member for the election in order to mitigate fears that they were trying to monopolize power…”