Topping coverage of Egypt in the foreign press this morning were the UNESCO leadership elections. Egypt’s candidate for the job, Moushira Khattab, is within the top three, just under the French and Qatari candidates, who were head-to-head after yesterday’s ballot.

“We all have the right to vie in election as long as we fit the conditions,” potential presidential candidate Mohamed Anwar Sadat told Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. Sadat was kicked out of parliament after being accused of leaking the draft NGO law to foreign embassies, a charge he denies. “The atmosphere of this competition will make us decide whether to run or not,” Sadat says.

The arrest of members of the LGBTQ community in Egypt is “not necessarily any broader effort at diversion … This is the way that the government responds. It’s much more elemental than that,” Century Foundation senior Fellow Michael Hanna tells ABC News. He says it was unclear if the arrests were pre-planned to “draw attention away from Egypt’s weak economy or unrelated political developments,” but they “do follow a clear pattern.”

Also making the rounds this morning:

• Egypt win of a berth at the 2018 World Cup after a nearly three-decade absence is still finding its way to international headlines, with the latest piece coming from the New York Times.
• Egyptian authorities released an Israeli tourist from custody yesterday who had been arrested for having bullets in his bag crossing into Egypt, say the Times of Israel. The bonehead apparently left the bullets there from his army days.
• A recovery diver relives the horror of pulling up bodies from a refugee boat that sank off Rosetta last year and prompted Egypt to pass an a law criminalizing human smuggling, according to an article on the UNHCR website.