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Iran is accusing U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of "a brazen interventionist plan" to change the current government that violates international law and the U.N. Charter.

Iran's U.N. Ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres circulated Tuesday that Tillerson's comments are also "a flagrant violation" of the 1981 Algiers Accords in which the United States pledged "not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs."

Tillerson said in a June 14 hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the 2018 State Department budget that U.S. policy is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons "and work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government."

"Those elements are there, certainly as we know," he said.

Kohshroo said Iran expects all countries to condemn "such grotesque policy statements and advise the government of the United States to act responsibly and to adhere to the principles of the (U.N.) Charter and international law."

He noted that Tillerson's comments came weeks after President Hassan Rouhani's re-election to another four-year term and local elections in which 71 percent of the Iranian people participated. Rouhani is a political moderate who defeated a hardline opponent.

"The people of Iran have repeatedly proven that they are the ones to decide their own destiny and thus attempts by the United States to interfere in Iranian domestic affairs will be doomed to failure," Kohshroo said. "They have learned how to stand strong and independent, as demonstrated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979."

He said Tillerson's statement also coincided with the released of newly declassified documents that "further clarified how United States agencies were behind the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the popular and democratically elected prime minister of Iran on Aug. 19, 1953."

At the June 14 hearing, Tillerson said the Trump administration's Iranian policy is under development.

"But I would tell you that we certainly recognize Iran's continued destabilizing (role) in the region," Tillerson said, citing its payment of foreign fighters, support for Hezbollah extremists, and "their export of militia forces in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen."

U.S. lawmakers have long sought to hit Iran with more sanctions in order to check its ballistic missile program and rebuke Tehran's continued support for terrorist groups, and on June 15 the Senate approved a sweeping sanctions bill..

The bill imposes mandatory sanctions on people involved in Iran's ballistic missile program and anyone who does business with them. The measure also would apply terrorism sanctions to the country's Revolutionary Guards and enforce an arms embargo. It now goes to the House.

Senators insisted the new Iran sanctions won't undermine or impede enforcement of the landmark nuclear deal that former president Barack Obama and five other key nations reached with Tehran two years ago.

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Iran accuses US of 'brazen plan' to change its government ...

Deadly heat waves are going to become more frequent according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Ryan Sartor (@ryansartor) has that story. Buzz60

After a high temperature of 129 on Thursday, "cooler" weather is forecast for the next few days in Ahvaz, Iran.(Photo: AccuWeather)

The southwestern Iranian city of Ahvaz soared to a brutal 129 degrees Thursday, which is Iran's highest temperature ever recorded.

It's also one of theworld's hottest reliably measured temperatures and the highest June temperature in Asia on record.

The information comes from Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist with Meteo France, the French national weather service.

Officially, he said the temperature was53.7 degrees Celsius, which is128.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Irans previous hottest temperature was 127.4 degrees.

Another weather source, the Weather Underground, said Ahvaz hit 129.2 degrees Thursday afternoon. The heat index, which also takes humidity into account, hit an incredible 142 degrees.

Fortunately, the weather forecast for Ahvaz on Friday is for "cooler" weather, with a high of only 119 degrees, according to AccuWeather.

The official all-time world record temperature remains the 134-degree temperature measured at Death Valley, Calif, on July 10, 1913. However, some experts say that temperature isn't reliable. Weather Underground weather historian Christopher Burt said in 2016 that such an extreme temperature was "not possible from a meteorological perspective."

Scorching heat is one of the most expected outcomes of man-made climate change, according to a 2016 report from the National Academy of Sciences and a 2015 study in Nature Climate Change.

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Ahvaz, Iran, reached 129 degrees: Earth's hottest temperature ...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates Once expunged from its official history, documents outlining the U.S.-backed 1953 coup in Iran have been quietly published by the State Department, offering a new glimpse at an operation that ultimately pushed the country toward its Islamic Revolution and hostility with the West.

The CIAs role in the coup, which toppled Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh and cemented the control of the shah, was already well-known by the time the State Department offered its first compendium on the era in 1989. But any trace of American involvement in the putsch had been wiped from the report, causing historians to call it a fraud.

The papers released in June show U.S. fears over the spread of communism, as well as the British desire to regain access to Irans oil industry, which had been nationalized by Mosaddegh. It also offers a cautionary tale about the limits of American power as a new U.S. president long suspicious of Iran weighs the landmark nuclear deal with Tehran reached under his predecessor.

It exposes more about what we know about this milestone event in Middle East history and especially U.S.-Iran history. This is still such an important, emotional benchmark for Iranians, said Malcolm Byrne, who has studied Iran at the non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University. Many people see it as the day that Iranian politics turned away from any hope of democracy.

The 1,007-page report , comprised of letters and diplomatic cables, shows U.S. officials discussing a coup up to a year before it took place. While America worried about Soviet influence in Iran, the British remained focused on resolving a dispute over the nationalization of the countrys oil refinery at Abadan, at the time one of the worlds largest. Many also feared further instability following the 1951 assassination of Premier Ali Razmara.

Nationalization of the oil industry possibly combined with further assassinations of top Iran officials, including even the shah, could easily lead to a complete breakdown of the Iran government and social order, from which a pro-Soviet regime might well emerge leaving Iran as a satellite state, one undated CIA analysis from the report warned.

Out of that fear grew TPAJAX, the CIA codename for the coup plot. Papers show the CIA at one point stockpiled enough arms and demolition material to support a 10,000-man guerrilla organization for six months, and paid out $5.3 million for bribes and other costs, which would be equivalent to $48 million today. One CIA document casually refers to the fact that several leading members of these (Iranian) security services are paid agents of this organization.

The CIA also described hoping to use powerfully influential clergy within Shiite Iran to back the coup, something that would be anathema by the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It offers no definitive proof of that, though several documents show American officials in contact with Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, an anti-British leader in the Iranian parliament who turned against Mosaddegh.

The agency faced problems, however, chief among them Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi himself. Diplomats and spies referred to him as a weak reed and petulant.

His inability to take decisions coupled with his tendency to interfere in political life has on occasions been (a) disruptive influence, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran warned in February 1953. Ultimately, his twin sister Princess Ashraf and a U.S. general helped convince him.

Mosaddegh was tipped off about the coup, and it appeared doomed as the shah fled to Baghdad and later Italy. But protests supporting the shah, fanned in part by the CIA, led to Mosaddeghs fall and the monarchs return.

The report fills in the large gaps of the initial 1989 historical document outlining the years surrounding the 1953 coup in Iran. The release of that report led to the resignation of the historian in charge of a State Department review board and to Congress passing a law requiring a more reliable historical account be made.

Byrne and others have suggested the release of the latest documents may have been delayed by the nuclear negotiations, as the Obama administration sought to ease tensions with Tehran, and then accelerated under President Donald Trump, who has adopted a much more confrontational stance toward Iran.

Byrne said the new administration needed just two months to agree to release the documents. That kind of speed is unheard of in the government unless there is some sort of political foundation, he said.

Die-hard opponents of Irans current government might look to 1953 as a source of inspiration. But the Americans involved in the coup acknowledged at the time they were playing with fire.

Widespread Iranian anger over the heavy-handed Western intervention lingered for decades, and fed into the 1979 revolution, when Iranians seized control of the U.S. Embassy and held those inside captive for 444 days. To this day Irans clerical leaders portray the U.S. as a hostile foreign power bent on subverting and overthrowing its government.

As President Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his diary in 1953, if knowledge of the coup became public, We would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear. (AP)

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Declassified files show US hand in 1953 Iran coup - The Philadelphia Tribune

The skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan had been violating US sanctions since 1995. Its tenantswho have included Juicy Couture, Godiva Chocolate, and Starwood Hotelshave been paying millions of dollars a year to, ultimately, the Iranian government.

Through all the efforts to sanction and isolate Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, the owners of 650 Fifth Avenue gave the Iranian government a critical foothold in the very heart of Manhattan, acting US attorney Joon H. Kim said yesterday in a statement.

However, despite first filing a lawsuit in 2008, only yesterday did the US government win the right to seize the 36-story building, which is valued somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion.

How did Iran manage to evade the authorities for so long? In two words: shell companies.

The building was nominally owned by the 650 Fifth Avenue Companya shell corporation set up in 1989 to avoid paying federal taxes on the rent it was raking in. That shell company was then owned by another shell company registered in Jersey, a tax haven and UK crown dependency. Through this web of cut-outs, rent from the building was then channelled to Bank Melliwhich is owned by the Iranian government, the court determined.

Even though it had been set up to avoid taxes, the structure then came in handy for keeping ownership concealed from the US government once sanctions were put in place. Proving in court that an Iranian bank was the ultimate beneficiary took an investigation involving no less than five institutions: the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the New York police, the Department of Justice, and the Manhattan district attorneys office. The court decision this week was the biggest terrorism-related civil forfeiture in US history.

Efforts to stop to nefarious actors secretly setting up US companies have failed time and again in Washington. But a bipartisan set of lawmakers hopes that by highlighting the risks to national security, their latest effort to pass a law forcing shell companies to disclose their real owner will succeed this time. In an interview with Quartz this week, New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney pointed out exactly this potential for using rent or earnings from US property to finance terrorism.

How irresponsible do you have to be to not know who owns your properties? she asked, the day before announcing her fifth attempt to pass a bill on the matter. We had a bomb go off in my district on 23rd street [in Manhattan] maybe four months ago, and you wonder where they got the money fromthe longer we wait to fix the the problem the more we put our country at risk.

For Stefanie Ostfield, deputy head of the US office of anti-corruption NGO Global Witness, its a stark case of how the law allows unscrupulous actors to involve themselves in the US. The fact that we allow individuals to hide behind US companies and not disclose who they are enables the Iranian government, or a terrorist network, or organized crime to hide [from law enforcement]and potentially hurt US companies and citizens, she said.

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Why Iran got away with using a $500 mln New York skyscraper as a secret slush fund for 22 years - Quartz

Police officers stand outside Iran's parliament building following an attack by several gunmen, Tehran, Iran, June 7, 2017.(photo byMajid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Author:Fazel Hawramy Posted June 30, 2017

Iranian authorities have rounded up at least 150 people in Tehran and in the Kurdish areas in the west of the country following the June 7 terrorist attacks in the capital, which claimed 18 lives.

The five young attackers who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) in a video released shortly after the attacks appear to have traveled from Kermanshah province to Tehran undetected in early June. The rare but deadly strikes targeted two of the most guarded locations in the capital: the parliament and the mausoleum of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

How these men obtained firearms and explosives to carry out the attacks is not clear, but Iranian officials have admitted that the country's security establishment was taken by surprise. On June 27, parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission held its second closed-door session to examine the June 7 attacks. "In this session, the new plan to maintain the security of the parliament and the ways to confront future possible incidents were discussed and necessary measures were taken," the semi-official Iranian Students' News Agency reported about the meeting. Iran has held IS directly responsible for the attacks, but it ultimately blamed the United States and "regressive" regimes in the Persian Gulf region for supporting the group. As a symbolic gesture, on June 18 Iran fired several missiles from the Kurdish areas in the west of the country, where the attackers came from, at an IS position in northeast Syria. "Our enemies should know that Tehran is not London or Paris; this was a small measure, and if they make another mistake, we will strike them with deadlier attacks," said Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Aerospace Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Since the June 7 attacks, security forces have taken no chances and have rounded up a large number of individuals mainly associated with Salafist groups in a bid to crack down on their activities, sources inside Iran and human rights activists from outside the country told Al-Monitor. "More than 50 individual terrorist backers were arrested in Kermanshah province following the terrorist incident in Tehran, and a number of explosive belts, electronic detonators and weapons were discovered," Mohammad Hossein Sadeghi, the prosecutor of Kermanshah province, said on June 25.

"No one has been freed apart from two women," said a source from the town of Paveh, where four of the attackers came from and where the Iranian authorities are said to have arrested more than 50 individuals. At least one of the attackers, Saryas Sadeghi, was reported to have been on the radar of the intelligence services, said sources in Paveh, but it is not clear how he managed to travel to Tehran to carry out the strikes along with four other attackers. "One of Saryas' brothers has been arrested, and he is still in custody," an activist who monitors the human rights situation told Al-Monitor.

In prisons across the Kurdish region, authorities have reportedly taken severe measures even against Salafist prisoners who were imprisoned before the attacks on Tehran.

According to a tally from Hangaw Human Rights News, a web-based organization that documents human rights abuses in the Kurdish areas of Iran, close to 150 people have been detained since the attacks in Tehran. While the real number could be much higher, Hangaw has verified the identity of 45 individuals who have been taken into custody across the Kurdish region in western Iran. "These individuals were arrested on charges of connections with Wahhabi groups, and according to witnesses, they were beaten during the arrests," Hangaw reported, referring to the puritanical Islamic doctrine originating from Saudi Arabia.

On June 24, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi confirmed that several people have been arrested in the capital and are under investigation in connection with the attacks, but he refused to divulge information about the cases to the press due to "security and intelligence reasons."

While government officials have maintained that terrorists cannot cause damage to the security of the Islamic Republic because of the readiness of the IRGC and other security forces, some officials have admitted that IS took them by surprise. "Given the huge improvement in the level of security in our country in recent years, the Daesh [IS] forces used the element of surprise, but I am confident now that the security and intelligence forces will maintain a safe environment and will not allow another terrorist attack to take place," Seyed Qassem Jassemi, a member of parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said June 26, adding, "If it was not for the defenders of the shrine [Shiite fighters deployed to Syria], no doubt we would have had to fight Daesh [IS] in Kermanshah and Hamedan."

Jassemi's remarks echo claims repeatedly made by Iranian officials that to avoid fighting terrorist groups inside Iran, they need to be fought in Syria and Iraq. To this end, thousands of Shiite fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon supported by Iran have been deployed to Syria since 2011 to shore up President Bashar al-Assad's forces against jihadi groups, including IS. Iran also provides military assistance and advisers to the Popular Mobilization Units in Iraq to fight IS militants in the country.

But while the battles in Syria and Iraq are important for Iran, the attacks in Tehran appear to have been a wake-up call for Iranian officials, reminding them that domestic threats are as important as those from abroad. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that blowback from the military interventions in the region may be a very real and serious prospect. In the meantime, perhaps the most immediate question is whether Iranian security forces have cast too wide a net in the search for terror suspects. If so, it has the potential of causing more trouble than it seeks to thwart.

Read More: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/06/iran-tehran-attacks-crackdown-salafists-kurdish-region.html

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Iran cracks down on Salafists in wake of Tehran attacks - Al-Monitor