GOOD news from Iran is rare, and the IMF is seldom a font of happy tidings about anything. So when a mission from the Fund cheered the Islamic Republic s economy earlier this month, heaping praise on the policies of its ruthless government, eyebrows spiked upwards as in a comic scene in a Persian miniature. The shock was even sharper given that the IMF, whose biggest shareholder happens to be the Great Satan, America, is a pillar of global capitalism, a system that Iran s maverick president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, gleefully lambasts as evil.

IN THE Byzantine corridors of Iranian power, a tussle between Iran s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is becoming steadily more bitter. The latest bout began in April when Mr Ahmadinejad discovered that Heidar Moslehi, the minister of intelligence, was bugging the offices of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, his own chief of staff and a close ally. Mr Ahmadinejad fired Mr Moslehi. But Mr Khamenei, who dislikes Mr Mashaei, fast reinstated him.