Iranian police on Wednesday cracked down on illegal money changers in Tehran, witnesses said, in an apparent bid to halt a dramatic plunge in the value of Iran's currency this week.

Unlicensed vendors who usually walk the streets in the capital's central Ferdowsi area buying and selling small amounts of dollars were rounded up and arrested, witnesses said.

A small group of protesters, most of them women, on Tuesday trashed an Iranian police post protecting the French embassy in Tehran and threw stones at visitors to the mission before being arrested, a diplomat inside told AFP.

The unannounced, violent demonstration lasted 90 minutes and involved around 15 people, the French diplomat said.

International sanctions against Iran are biting but are not slowing the country's nuclear program, Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon said on Tuesday.

"The sanctions and the pressure in place against Iran for around the past two years are effective, but the centrifuges continue to turn," Yaalon told Israeli public radio.

The son of Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was the target of the abduction of the 11 Lebanese pilgrims in Syria in May, reported Ad Diyar daily on Tuesday.

He was thought to be on the bus carrying the Lebanese back from a pilgrimage in Iran, Syrian opposition sources told the daily.

Iran on Monday added its voice to warnings against Syria ever using chemical weapons in its increasingly large-scale war with anti-government insurgents.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said in New York that Iran could not support any country -- including ally Syria -- that used such weapons, calling this "a situation that will end everything."

Iran on Monday removed online blocks on Gmail but a government Internet filtering committee official said other, additional censorship was being prepared against YouTube, according to reports.

Internet users in Iran found themselves able to freely access their Gmail accounts for the first time since the blocks were suddenly established on September 24.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged China, Iran and Russia Sunday to end their support for the Syrian regime, warning that "history will not forgive" their stance in the face of mounting bloodshed.

"Please rethink your current attitude. History will not forgive those who have sided with these brutal regimes," Erdogan said in a speech at a congress of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

International sanctions could trigger a popular uprising in Iran similar to last year's revolution in Egypt that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, Israel's foreign minister said in statements published Sunday.

"The opposition demonstrations that took place in Iran in June 2009 will come back in even greater force," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in an interview published by Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

The opposition People's Mujahedeen of Iran welcomed Friday's U.S. decision to strike the group from its terror list and vowed to step up its international campaign against the Tehran regime.

Maryam Rajavi, leader of the group also known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, "welcomed and appreciated" U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's decision to delist the movement, a statement said.

A joke by the satirical newspaper The Onion appears to have gotten lost in translation.

An Iranian news agency picked up — as fact — a story from the paper about a supposed survey showing an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama. But it was made up, like everything in the just-for-laughs newspaper, which is headquartered in Chicago.