An account linked to Israel's national intelligence agency, Mossad, said Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spends his days sleeping and getting "high on substances."

European and Iranian diplomats have arrived in Istanbul in a renewed effort to resolve the standoff over Tehran's nuclear program. The talks mark the first formal engagement since June's 12-day war between Iran and Israel, a conflict that included U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and heightened tensions across the region.

Authorities have said several Afghans were arrested on espionage charges and found in possession of bomb- and drone-making manuals, although the claims have not been independently verified

After a five-year drought and decades of mismanagement, Tehran is at risk of running out of water in several weeks, the government warned.

It is another symbol of deepening strategic cooperation between Russia and Iran, a point of concern for U.S.-led Western allies.

The MEK, known in English as People's Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, were a powerful leftist-Islamist group that staged bombing campaigns against the shah's government and U.S. targets in the 1970s but ultimately fell out with the other factions of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Officials in the Islamic republic are seeking to rally a population rattled by war and increasingly averse to the Muslim theocracy’s dominant ideology.