The federal government has moved to seize a Carmichael mosque and seven other properties from Texas to New York owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization that federal prosecutors allege is a front for the Iranian government.

Deputy U.S. marshals posted forfeiture notices Thursday at the Qoba Foundation, an Islamic center on Marconi Avenue that, according to its Web site, offers an array of services to local Muslims.

The forfeiture action marks the latest step in a long-standing investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan into the New York-based Alavi Foundation, which owns all the properties targeted in Thursday's complaint. » read more

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Iran offered on Wednesday to take part in a "collective approach" to resolving an escalating Shiite rebellion in Yemen that has pulled Saudi Arabia into the fighting. But analysts cautioned that hostilities did not yet add up to a proxy regional conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

One day before making the offer, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned regional players - though he did not name Saudi Arabia - to keep out of the Yemen fight. "Those who pour oil on the fire must know that they will not be spared from the smoke that billows," he said.

The surge of fighting, which has seen Saudi aircraft target Yemen's Houthi rebels along the border in the past week, has raised concern that Yemen's long-running local battle was beginning to follow the traditional sectarian fault-lines that often define the Persian Gulf rivalry between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. » read more

ISTANBUL, Turkey - Iran has charged three Americans with espionage, after they strayed during a hiking trip in northern Iraq this past July, in a move likely to complicate U.S. overtures toward Iran.

"The three are charged with espionage. Investigations continue into the three detained Americans in Iran," Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said on Monday. Family members have made appeals for their release, shown snapshots of the three visiting tourist sites in the Middle East, and say they wandered into Iran by accident.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton renewed her call for the release of the three hikers from Berlin on Monday. » read more

ARLINGTON, Texas — Rick Kupke was busy encrypting classified messages inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran when the Marine Corps guard yelled over the radio, "They're coming over the wall!"

Hundreds of Iranian student protesters were scaling the 7-foot wall around the embassy and making their way into the building through the tear gas being sprayed.

It was Nov. 4, 1979, and the administrative officer told Kupke to send a telegram to the State Department saying, "Demonstrators . . . are taking the embassy over." » read more

WASHINGTON -- Iran hedged Friday on accepting a deal that would transfer most of its low-enriched uranium out of the country to be converted for peaceful uses, saying it wants more time to study the deal and suggesting that it prefers a different approach.

The draft proposal, which Western powers hope will set back the clock on Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program, was agreed to formally Friday by the United States, Russia and France, whose envoys discussed it with Iran this week in Vienna, Austria,.

Iran, however, as it often has in past nuclear negotiations, sent mixed signals about whether it would agree. » read more