Daily News Channel
A former Iranian deputy prime minister who headed a group supporting increased freedom and democracy was pulled from his hospital bed and arrested Wednesday in Tehran, his granddaughter told CNN.
Defying threats of arrest or worse, witnesses to protests in Iran are managing to leak reports of violence after the country’s disputed presidential elections. “Censoring is very bad here and they have reduced Internet speed,” two Iranians said to a friend outside the country. The pair wanted to broadcast images of damage and casualties after a reported attack on a dorm at the University of Tehran
A web designer in London was amazed to discover that Iranian election protesters are attacking the Iranian president’s Web site using software he developed in his spare time, he told CNN Wednesday. With anti-government activists in Iran sidestepping official attempts to silence them on the Internet by posting photos, videos and blogs on sites like Facebook and Twitter, others are using a site that automatically refreshes a Web page every few seconds, potentially overloading the host server. The page reboot software means that dissidents can “attack” sites with a barrage of hits — known as a denial of service attack — causing them to appear to users as “unobtainable.” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Web sites was one of those displaying this message on Monday, according to Britain’s Channel 4 News, although on Tuesday it was loading correctly.
Observers with a working knowledge of Iranian politics have largely been able to shrug off President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s bluster and bullying, knowing the diminutive President must still answer to a far more powerful figure: Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since 1989, the shadowy cleric — a former president himself — has sat at the apex of Iran’s complex hierarchy as the final word in all political and religious matters.
Israel is discussing an "accommodation" on settlement activities to show good faith with the Obama administration, a senior Israeli official told CNN on Tuesday. The comment came in advance of high-level meetings this week between two governments
The Iranian-American community is half a world away from the turmoil in Iran, but they are tuning in, logging on and even stepping out in demonstrations to show solidarity with relatives and friends.
Iraq and Iran have rarely had the luxury of ignoring each other; in the 1980s, the two fought a bitter eight-year war, and more recently, since the U.S. toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iran has taken an active — and some would argue malign — interest in its neighbor to the west.
Iranian presidential challenger Mir Hossein Moussavi’s hometown of Tabriz is Exhibit A for his supporters as they argue that last week’s election was rigged. Official results from Friday’s polls show that the city and its surrounding province, dominated by ethnic Azeris like Moussavi, voted to re-elect hard-line incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It’s a result many observers of Iranian politics find incongruous but just one of the things that have raised eyebrows among Western analysts.
Move Along, There’s Nothing to See Here, June 16, 9:12 p.m. IRT The Financial Times reports that “Iran on Tuesday banned journalists working for foreign media from leaving their offices to cover protests in the capital.” Wire services also announced that due to the ban on their photographers covering the demonstrations, they were forced to relay only images from official Iranian sources.
Seven people were killed after they reportedly attacked a military post in central Tehran, state television said Tuesday.