CentrePoint News News That Matters

By Iran News Now

[3:35PM Tehran Time]

After almost an hour of no new information, an unconfirmed report of tanks moving towards Enghelab Square (Revolution Square).

I have to pause for a bit. Next update at 6:00PM Tehran time (2.5 hours from now).

[2:48PM Tehran Time]

Photo of vehicles in Tehran being used to suppress demonstrations. (Photo courtesty of Iran News Now)

Reporter, Omid Habibinia reports that Mashad’s Azad University is protesting a Basij attack that occurred there yesterday in with allegedly 30+ people were injured and 2 people actually killed.

[2:41PM Tehran Time]

Unconfirmed: report of crowds forming in Hafteh-Tir Square (Seventh of Tir Square) in Tehran.

[2:26PM Tehran Time]

I want to stress that this is completely unconfirmed, but there has been some chatter about planes being prepared for Khamenei to possibly be flowned out of the country if necessary. Again, this is unconfirmed.

There were similar reports circulating yesterday, as I mentioned earlier, but these reports were about senior opposition leaders fleeing to the north of Iran.

This could be a bit of psychological warfare occurring between the regime and the opposition or their supporters.

For the rest of the story, click here…

http://www.irannewsnow.com/2009/12/live-blog-iran-december-31-2009/

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By CNN/Iran News Now

(CNN) — Iranian intelligence officials have detained the sister of Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and human rights activist said.

Ebadi said Monday that three men and a woman arrived at the Tehran home she shared with her sister, searched the house and seized Nushin Ebadi, 47, and her computer.

“They have detained her so I stop my work,” Shirin Ebadi, 62, told CNN’s Reza Sayah in a phone call from London. “She has done nothing wrong. She’s not involved in human rights work, and she’s never participated in any of the protests.”

Nushin Ebadi’s arrest came in the middle of a deadly crackdown on anti-government protests that has left at least eight dead, according to the Supreme National Security Council, although the Iranian government denies its forces have killed anyone.

Shirin Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her human rights work, left Iran for a conference in Spain the day before June presidential elections that sparked an earlier round of violent protests. Friends, she said, warned her not to return to Tehran.

For more, click here…

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/12/28/iran.ebadi.sister/index.html

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By BBC

Lithuania has shut down its one and only nuclear power station in Visaginas.

The Ignalina plant, the only nuclear reactor in the Baltic states, stopped producing electricity at 2300 local time (2100 GMT).

The closure of the Soviet-era plant was a condition of Lithuania’s membership of the European Union.

The move will mean an increase in power prices for Lithuanians and more reliance on Russia for energy supplies.

Just before the shutdown, Energy Minister Arvydas Sekmoka said: “We are keeping our word to our European partners.”

For more, click here…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8435628.stm

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By AP

(CBS/AP) The Associated Press has learned that the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA employees at a remote outpost in southeastern Afghanistan had been invited onto the base and was not searched.

A former senior intelligence official says the man was being courted as an informant and that it was the first time he had been brought inside the camp.

The official says a senior and experienced CIA debriefer came from Kabul for the meeting, suggesting that the purpose of the session was to gain intelligence.

The former senior intelligence official and another former official with knowledge of the attack spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The CIA has declined to comment.

For more, click here…

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/31/world/main6042742.shtml

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By AP/Jerusalem Post

In a setback for US investigators probing links to the attempted attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, a Somali official said Thursday that another suspect who tried to board a plane with chemicals already had been freed.

His release earlier this month will hamper efforts to learn if the incident in Mogadishu was linked to the attempted attack against the US-bound plane on Christmas Day. Terrorism analysts had said the arrest in Somalia could prove highly valuable to the US investigation.

For more, click here…

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1261364564456

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By Reuters

LAGOS (Reuters) – A Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a U.S. passenger jet on Christmas Day began his journey in Ghana and spent less than 30 minutes in Nigeria’s Lagos airport, the Nigerian government said on Thursday.

U.S.

“Further investigations by the Nigerian government have revealed that Abdulmutallab spent less than 30 minutes in the Nigerian airport before boarding the flight to Amsterdam,” Information Minister Dora Akunyili said in a statement.

“He arrived in Nigeria on 24 December from Ghana via Virgin Nigeria. His passport was scanned on entry into Nigeria at 20:08 and was scanned in at check-in for departure to Amsterdam at 20:35,” she said.

For the rest of the story, click here…

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BU33J20091231

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By CPJ

New York, December 29, 2009—The Iranian government, struggling to silence the many critical voices in the country, has arrested at least 11 journalists since Sunday, including former International Press Freedom Award recipient Mashallah Shamsolvaezin and the prominent writer Emadeddin Baghi. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the arrests and called for the release of all detained journalists, who now number more than 30.

“The arrest of every journalist in Iran fills us with indignation, but the detention of Mashallah Shamsolvaezin hits especially close to home,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “We have honored him and stood by him as he has defended press freedom against all odds. We are deeply concerned about his welfare and call for his immediate release.”

The new arrests come amid massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities, protests that sprang from commemoration of Ashura, a day of religious significance to Shiite Muslims, and the death of Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri. The influential cleric, who at one time was designated to become supreme leader, had recently criticized the conduct of the June presidential election and the government’s post-election crackdown.

For more, click here…

http://cpj.org/2009/12/top-iranian-journalists-jailed-in-wake-of-ashura-p.php

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By Brian Montopoli

Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Edward Albee and A.M. Holmes were among the writers who gathered Thursday to call on China to release writer and activist Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” in his writings.

Liu, the most prominent dissident in China, was sentenced on Christmas day. He was one of the authors of Charter 08, a petition circulated last year that calls for greater freedoms and democratic reforms in China.

The petition includes the line, “we should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.”

The writers who assembled for the protest read the passages deemed subversive by the Chinese government, as well as poems Liu wrote during a three-year term in a labor camp in the late 1990s. They also read from the verdict against Liu.

Among the sentences deemed subversive is Liu’s assertion that “since the Communist Party of China took power, generations of CPC dictators have cared most about their own power and least about human life.”

As snow fell and a small crowd watched, writer Honor Moore, standing on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, read a portion of the verdict against Liu.

For more, click here…

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/31/world/main6042285.shtml?tag=stack

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By Josh Kimball

The head of a conservative media watchdog group is alerting the “Religious Right” of the race-related issues that he says has been and still remains in their “blind side.”

“We saw the evil flooding in from the ‘right side’ of the line (e.g., abortion, amoral sex education in the public schools, ‘gay rights,’ pornography, the decline of standards in the mainstream media, hostility to religion in the courts, etc.),” says Morality in Media (MIM) President Robert Peters, recalling the rise of “morally conservative” Christians in the 1970s and 1980s through a football-based analogy.

“[B]ut for one reason or another didn’t see the evil coming at us from the ‘left side,’” he added, later listing issues such as chronic unemployment, family breakdown, failing public schools, and crime in Black communities.

After watching the movie “Blind Side,” however, Roberts was compelled to share the film’s need-to-hear message with the “Religious Right,” which he also affiliates himself with.

For more, click here…

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20091230/media-watchdog-draws-attention-to-religious-right-s-blind-side/index.html

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By Elizabeth Palmer, Khaled Wasef and Tucker Reals

Investigators believe Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab received practical lessons in terrorism in Yemen – a small country on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

It is a desperately poor, failed state; the perfect place for al Qaeda to regroup when Islamic radicals were forced out of neighboring Saudi Arabia by a government security crackdown. They also came in from Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed out by American military operations.

Reunited in Yemen, top militants banded together under the new banner of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) — the Yemen-based group which claimed responsibility for training and equipping Abdulmutallab.

The government in Yemen doesn’t seem to be fully able to get a fix on the problem and deal with it internally,” Sajjan Gohel, director for international security at the London-based Asia Pacific Foundation tells CBS News. “That is a huge concern based on the fact that groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula aren’t just operating on a regional level, they have a translational nexus.”

For more, click here…

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/12/30/world/worldwatch/entry6037446.shtml?tag=cbsContent;cbsCarousel

Posted under News