1745 GMT: Where's Ali? Today the Supreme Leader paid surprise visits to the families of two assassinated Iranian scientists, Masoud Alimohammadi and Majid Shahriari.
1735 GMT: The Nuke Talks. Teymoor Nabili at Al Jazeera English picks up on our analysis, posted in a separate entry, of the key reason for failure at the Istanbul discussions on uranium enrichment and how it was missed by the US media.
Lots of political grandstanding to cope with today. The international media will be occupied with all the posturing on the eve of resumed nuclear talks in Turkey.
We already know that script, however, as the Ahmadinejad Government gives itself space to negotiate by showing how tough it is and as the "West" gives itself room with the story-lines that 1) its efforts, and those of Israel, have delayed the date of Iran's nuclear weapons capability and 2) Ahmadinejad is not actually crazy but very practical.
More intriguing today are the domestic showpieces.
"On the one hand the regime has consistently said since the last presidential election that the protesters, that the Green movement, are a bunch of street hooligans, they're small in number, they're insignificant, we've crushed them, it's over," said Hashemi. "But, on the other hand, seemingly, every single week, a high member of the Iranian regime is speaking out and condemning and raising new charges against the Green Movement. So, if the Green movement is insignificant, is dead, is crushed, why do you constantly speak about them?"
1200 GMT: Your Tehran Friday Prayer Summary. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami's message from the pulpit today....
1. We defeated the "sedition" with our march on 30 December last year.
2. Subsidy cuts are excellent.
3. Help Pakistan's flood victims. (And, Pakistan, don't send us your terrorists.)
4. The ban on the hijab in Azerbaijan is very, very bad.
1140 GMT: Rafsanjani Sedition Watch. On the surface, it was just another ritual denunciation of the evil British. Minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi told an audience in southern Tehran on Thursday, "One of the intelligence services that sought to overthrow the Islamic Republic since the advent of the Revolution, was British....[It] acted quite diligently with precise knowledge of our culture to influence individuals, and they learned that one of the ways to harm people was through their relatives.”
Go a bit farther, however, and you'll see that Moslehi had a target closer to home....
2030 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Lawyers Sara Sabaghian and Maryam Kianarsi have been released on bail.
Sebaghian, Kianarsi, and fellow attorney Maryam Karbasi were seized at Imam Khomeini Airport in mid-November as they returned from Turkey.
2025 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. More from the statement of Reza Khandan (see 1154 GMT), the husband of detained attorney Nasrine Sotoudeh, about his wife's situation....
Khandan explained the new charge in Sotoudeh's file of “failing to adhere to the Islamic code of dressing (hijab)”: “Two years ago Sotoudeh had been awarded a prize by the Italian Human Rights Committee and to express her gratitude, she had recorded a video message in Iran without covering her hair. The message was not shown in Iran.”
Khandan also denied the most recent claim of judiciary official Mohammad Javad Larijani that Sotoudeh had met with terrorist groups: "[She] has at no time been linked to terrorist groups and no such charge is in her file.”
In April 2007, an MP and senior member of the Islamic Iran Participation Front offers some provocative comments on Iranian politics to the US Consulate in Dubai.
Supreme Leader Khamenei aspires to become the "emperor" of the Islamic world and is willing to sacrifice Iranian national interests for this goal. He sees President Ahmadi-Nejad as merely a puppet of the Supreme Leader, under the leader's complete control. Ahmadi-Nejad, in turn, sees more pragmatic conservatives such as [Speaker of Parliament Ali] Larijani and [Tehran Mayor Mohammad-Baqer] Qalibaf as his main rivals.
2205 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Actually, I don't want to finish with smog. Instead, I note Fereshteh Ghazi's interview with journalist Emaduddin Baghi just before he returned to Evin Prison to serve a seven-year sentence. Baghi explains, "It is impossible to work through legal channels in the Islamic Republic."
2200 GMT: Back to the Smog. To almost end the day where we began....
Like the Washington Post, the Financial Times prefers to discuss pollution rather than protests: "Tehran residents are blaming the Iranian government’s production of poor-quality petrol for the serious air pollution affecting Iran’s capital city."Do not fear, however. The solution is at hand. Reviving a proposal offered by Tehran Friday Prayers leader Ayatollah Emami Kashani, the Basij-e Mostazafin organisation has issued a statement to the people: Pray for Rain.
2115 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Journalist Masoud Lavasani has been summoned to Evin Prison to serve his 4 1/2-year prison sentence.
Lavasani was arrested on 26 July 2009 at his home.Ahmad Reza Khadem of the National Front has been sentenced to 40 months in prison.
Muhammad Nawaz, a follower of the detained Ayatollah Boroujerdi, has been detained.
2043 GMT: Parliament v. President. I know 16 Azar has been dramatic, but don't forget the ongoing story of the challenge to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
MP Darioush Ghanbari says that several reformists have signed the letter, organised by principlists opposing the President, to summon Ahmadinejad to the Majlis for questioning.
>A group of 16 Iranian political prisoners, including prominent reformist politicians Mohsen Aminzadeh and Mostafa Tajzadeh and journalists Bahman Ahmadi Amoui and Mohammad Nourizad have written an open letter to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, describing their continued incarceration “in violation of the law” and in the “framework of settling political accounts”.
Is this the prelude to a renewed Rafsanjani initiative?
"The GPO [Green Movement] has a strong 'brand' - green, freedom, peace signs, silent marches, stolen election and martyrs like Neda Agha Soltani. But like the regime that seeks to crush it, the GPO is not monolithic. To characterize the GPO's active core as now primarily (but not exclusively) university students and university-age youth in a country so demographically young (for example, approximately one quarter of the population is in its twenties) is not to belittle its potential. Outside of the active GPO core group there is a larger, relatively passive group, whose support now mostly manifests in the anonymous shouts of 'God is Great' from night-time North Tehran rooftops or who scrawl or stamp anti-regime slogans on ten thousand Toman currency notes. Presumably many of them have fled the field due to fear of regime reprisal but might be drawn back into the fray if the prospects of a GPO victory, however defined, became more real to them than the prospect of blows from a Basiji baton."
Sunday, January 23, 2011 at 7:19