The Latest from Iran (20 April): Ahmadinejad's Powers of Intelligence?

2140 GMT: Ahwaz Watch. Most Iranian media may be avoiding any reference to clashes in Khuzestan Province in southwestern Iran, which activists claim have killed up to 15 people, but the conservative site Tabnak has made an indirect but blunt approach....

Tabnak, linked to Secretary of the Expediency Council Mohsen Rezaei, has written that militant Wahhabi groups are being supported by Gulf states to foment separatist unrest in the region and that the British are encouraging this.

Tabnak claims that the "British Ahwazi Friendship Society", a group claiming to promote Ahwazi Arab culture, is co-ordinator of the Wahhabi separatists of the "Arab People's Front".

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The Latest from Iran (13 April): The Movie, The Hidden Imam, and Ahmadinejad's Right-Hand Man

2040 GMT: In an interview with RASA TV, Nooshabeh Amiri speaks about her interview with Said Tajik, the man accused of verbally assaulting Hashemi Rafsanjani's daughter Faezeh Hashemi in February.

Amiri says Tajik, who was briefly detained over the incident, was released out of fear of his supporters. She said he questioned why he had been interrogated and was "very arrogant towards the judiciary".

Amiri has also written an article in Rooz Online about the encounter.

1945 GMT: Setting the Election Rules. Conservative MP Habibollah Asgaroladi tries to set the ground rules for the 2012 Parliament elections --- those who are against the Iranian system (nezam) and the clerical supremacy of velayat-e faqih cannot run. He continues with the observation that reformists are not yet "off the record", i.e., eliminated"; they are, he says, "serious rivals" in the elections.

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Iran Story: The Movie, The President, and the "Hidden Imam"

The "End Times" film about the Hidden Imam --- translation is by Reza Kahlili, a US-based critic of the Iranian regime

We begin this morning with a look at a curious, tangled story which has run for several weeks --- it includes a movie, President Ahmadinejad, and the "Hidden Imam", the 12th Imam of Shi'a who will return at some point.

This weekend Ali Asghar Sijani, the producer of a film about the Hidden Imam which has widely circulated on CD in Iran, declared that the epiphany of the 12th Imam is near. He added that the Supreme Leader led the movement welcoming the imminent return, and Ahmadinejad was the prophet Shoaib (a rough parallel in Christianity would be of John the Baptist paving the way for Jesus the Messiah). Sijani said that part of the $15 million cost of the film was funded by the Revolutionary Guards.

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