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Protesters in the Iranian capital reportedly swarmed its
historic Grand Bazaar on Monday and forced shopkeepers to close their
stalls, apparently angry over the Islamic Republic's troubled
economy, months after similar demonstrations rocked the country. The
unplanned demonstration came a day after protests forced two major
shopping centers for mobile phones and electronics to close in
Tehran.
Iran said it doesn't believe buyers of its oil will get
waivers from the U.S. government that would allow them to continue
purchasing cargoes after President Donald Trump's renewal of
sanctions... "I don't believe they can receive waiver from the
United States," Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said
Friday in a Bloomberg television interview. "We are going to
find some other way."
The Iranian rial plunged to a record low against the
U.S. dollar on the unofficial market on Sunday, continuing its slide
amid fears of returning U.S. sanctions after President Donald Trump
in May withdrew from a deal on Tehran's nuclear program.
NUCLEAR DEAL & NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned
Sunday that failure to save the nuclear deal after the exit of the
United States would be "very dangerous" for Tehran.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday warned
Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons, saying it would face the
"wrath of the entire world" if it did so, but added that he
hoped it would never be necessary for the United States to take
military action against the country.
Christophe Eck, a senior partner at GIDE, says that the
French law firm will remain active in Iran regardless of Trump's
decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC NEWS
Based on the latest reports from Tehran, the value of
each U.S. dollar climbed to 80,000 Iranian rials on Saturday, the
first day of the week in Iran. The Iranian currency has lost almost
one third of its value in the last two months and the dollar has climbed
from around 40,000 rials a year ago to double that amount.
Iran plans to establish a secondary market for foreign
exchange to help get around a dollar shortage that has hurt trade and
is likely to worsen as U.S. sanctions resume. The secondary market
will allow exporters of non-oil commodities to sell their foreign
currency earnings to importers of consumer products...
Iran said on Saturday the world will see little extra
oil reaching the market if OPEC and its partners adhere properly to a
supply pact, underlining a disagreement with top exporter Saudi
Arabia.
SYRIA, RUSSIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
Facebook and Twitter accounts belonging to Hezbollah
have been closed, the Lebanese terror group said Saturday... Despite
the closures, internet users were directed to new and already
existing pages associated with Hezbollah, the Ynet news site
reported.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps announced Saturday that
one of its senior commanders was killed on Friday while fighting
Islamic State fighters in northeastern Syria. The exact circumstances
of Shahrokh Daiepour's death were not disclosed, but the state-run
Fars news agency said he had been involved in training fighters from
the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy which has been
fighting in Syria alongside forces loyal to President Bashar Assad.
Eight members of Hezbollah were killed in northern
Yemen, said the Arab Coalition on Monday as it continued to advance
in the provinces of Saada and Hodeidah.
The Iran-aligned Houthi movement launched missiles on
the Saudi capital Riyadh on Sunday, and reinforced Yemen's main port
city of Hodeidah as an Arab coalition moved closer to the city center
in the largest offensive of the war.
Saudi Arabia says it has intercepted two missiles over
the capital, Riyadh, that were launched from rebel-held territory in
neighbouring Yemen. Yemen's Houthi rebels have fired a series of
missiles into the kingdom in recent months in retaliation to air raids
by a Saudi-Emirati coalition backing pro-government forces in the
Arab world's poorest country.
Lebanon's army chief arrived in Washington on Monday to
discuss counterterrorism co-operation, aid to the Lebanese Armed
Forces and his country's border security.
The deputy commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards
Corps (IRGC) said that the Islamic Republic has expanded its soft
power and hard power across the region by creating an
"international Islamic force" from different nations.
A former head of the Shin Bet security service said
Saturday that prior to being recruited by Iran to spy on Israel,
disgraced ex-minister Gonen Segev was a kidnap target of the Lebanese
Hezbollah terror group, an Iranian proxy.
Hezbollah on Friday aired new footage from the 2006
border attack on Israeli soldiers that sparked the Second Lebanon
War.
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
A brother of an Iranian Kurdish man sentenced to death
for belonging to a Kurdish nationalist group says the dissident has
told a lawyer that he has hours to live after being transferred back
to death row.
Iran has charged prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin
Sotoudeh with security offences after re-arresting her earlier this
month, her husband was quoted as saying on Saturday. "
Iran's semi-official ISNA news agency is citing the
husband of a prominent human rights lawyer who says authorities have
set bail at 6.5 billion-rial (around $152,500) for his imprisoned
wife, who rejected it.
Her late father was a pillar of the Islamic republic.
But for Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, the survival of the system in Iran
that her family helped create requires negotiations with the US
president Donald Trump and the kind of domestic reforms the regime
has avoided in its near 40-year rule.
In mid-May, Iranian judge Abolghassem Salavati told a
British-Iranian prisoner to expect a new conviction on fresh charges
of "propaganda against the state." Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whom Salavati first sentenced to five years in
prison in 2016 on equally specious espionage allegations, constitutes
one of more than a dozen known dual and foreign nationals - including
at least seven U.S. citizens and permanent residents... While the
European Union sanctioned Salavati for his human rights abuses in
2011, Washington has yet to follow suit. A U.S. designation of
Salavati, one of the harshest figures in Iran's judiciary, would mark
an important way to increase pressure on the regime for its
longstanding repression of Iranians and Americans alike.
On Friday, 18 influential Iranian women living in the
West, published an open letter to FIFA calling on the organization
that governs international soccer to help put an end to a decades-old
ban on women attending male sporting events in Iran.
The Kazakh Consulate in the northern Iranian city of
Gorgan has said Kazakh filmmaker Qanat Beisekeev was detained by the
Iranian authorities on suspicion of a "violation of visa
regulations."
IRAQ & IRAN
Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric who emerged
as the main winner in Iraq's parliamentary elections last month,
campaigned on a platform to end sectarian politics and replace it
with a government that puts Iraqis first. Instead, he has forged a
postelection coalition with a rival Shiite bloc that includes some of
the most powerful militias operating in Iraq - groups that get their
funding and support from Tehran.
Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, an umbrella grouping
of mostly Iran-backed Shi'ite militias, said on Sunday it would not
remain silent over an alleged U.S. air strike it said killed 22 of
its members across the border in Syria last week.
MISCELLANEOUS
Head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar
Salehi said Friday "If Europe and rest of the world's countries
that support the nuclear deal don't actively oppose the US's policy,
the region and the entire world would have a terrifying future with
no security on a scale that has not been seen yet."
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