Iranian Transport Minister Abbas Akhoundi said Tuesday that Paris and Tehran have a "love/hate" relationship, as he urged France to throw its weight behind a draft deal on Iran's nuclear program.

"In a word, I would say that love and hate dominate all aspects of our relationship," Akhoundi said at a conference in Paris.

Iranian state television, controlled by conservatives in the Islamic regime, has taken the rare step of giving airtime to a high-ranking member of a silenced reformist opposition leader's party.

Javad Haghshenas was a founding member of Etemad Melli (National Confidence), the party led by Mehdi Karroubi, a former parliament speaker held under house arrest since February 2011 for disputing the result of a presidential election two years earlier.

An Egyptian court on Tuesday upheld a death sentence against ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi for plotting jailbreaks and attacks on police during the country's 2011 uprising.

The same court also sentenced Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president, to life in prison on charges of spying for the Palestinian Hamas movement, Lebanon's Hizbullah, and Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday pressed his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to ensure that Moscow respects the ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, the State Department said.

In a telephone call to Lavrov, Kerry "urged Russia to seize the opportunity of upcoming meetings of the Trilateral Contact Group and its Working Groups to accelerate progress on implementing the Minsk agreements," signed in February, said John Kirby, a State Department spokesman.

A senior Iranian official arrived in Saudi Arabia Monday for talks on the Yemen conflict that has seen a Riyadh-led coalition carry out air strikes on Iran-backed rebels, Tehran said.

Deputy foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian will attend a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation as U.N.-sponsored peace talks between rival Yemeni factions are set to get under way in Geneva, the ministry said.

Nuclear armed states continue to upgrade their stockpiles despite an international trend towards disarmament, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported Monday. 

Between 2010 and 2015 the number of warheads fell from 22,600 to 15,850 according to the institute's annual disarmament report which said the U.S. and Russia represented the bulk of the reduction.

Iran has asked Austria's government to take immediate measures to protect the cyber security of nuclear talks, media reported Saturday after reports emerged of suspected espionage at negotiation venues.

Swiss and Austrian authorities said on Thursday they had opened separate investigations into alleged spying in hotels where the nuclear talks with Iran are taking place.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry -- upon his release from hospital after breaking his leg -- insisted Friday he would soon head to Vienna as the deadline to finalize an Iran nuclear deal approaches.

"I talked to our team in Vienna. I will be absolutely fully and totally engaged in those talks. I am now. I haven't missed a tick," Kerry -- on crutches -- told reporters as he left Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Russia's negotiator said Friday that there has been a "very worrying" slowdown in progress in nuclear talks between Iran and six major powers ahead of a June 30 deadline to finalize an historic accord.

"The rate of progress... is progressively slowing down," Sergei Ryabkov was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying as he arrived for the latest round of talks in Vienna.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said that Iran and Hizbullah continue to threaten the U.S. despite a report released earlier this year by the intelligence claiming that Tehran and the Shiite party have been removed from the U.S. terror list.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Clapper told Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran and Hizbullah “directly threaten the interests of the United State and our allies.”