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The United States recently repatriated a Chinese national suspected of drug trafficking, a “first” such return in recent years, Beijing’s public security ministry said on Friday.

China is the primary origin of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, a highly potent opioid underpinning a deadly drug epidemic in the United States.

Beijing says it is open to working with Washington on curbing the crisis, although the United States maintains an extra 10% tariff on Chinese goods it says is to limit fentanyl trade.

“This is the first drug-related fugitive repatriated by the United States to China in recent years, marking a new achievement in China-U.S. cooperation on anti-drug law enforcement,” Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security said in a statement on social media.

U.S. immigration authorities followed “clues” shared by China’s narcotics control commission to repatriate a Chinese national surnamed Han, the ministry said.

Han is suspected of “smuggling and trafficking drugs,” the ministry said without elaborating, only saying the handover took place “days ago.”

The ministry did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.

The joint action comes ahead of a scheduled May visit to China by President Trump.

Mr. Trump has used tariffs to pressure China to crack down on sellers of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, but he agreed to lower fentanyl-related tariffs after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in October. In return, China has pledged to work with the U.S. to crack down on the drug networks.

In March, state media reported that China arrested seven people in an operation targeting traffickers of fentanyl precursors, according to the Reuters news agency.

In November, Chinese authorities, acting on intelligence from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, seized 430 kilograms of cocaine from an international shipping container, Beijing’s public security ministry said.

The niece and grand-niece of deceased Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major Gen. Qasem Soleimani were arrested Friday night after their lawful U.S. permanent resident status was terminated.

The State Department said Saturday in a statement that Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter are now in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Soleimani Afshar promoted Iranian regime propaganda, celebrated attacks against U.S. forces in the Middle East, and denounced America as the “Great Satan,” all while “enjoying a lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles,” the statement said.

“As identified by both press reporting and her own social media commentary, Soleimani Afshar is an outspoken supporter of the totalitarian, terrorist regime in Iran,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement.

CBS News confirmed Monday that Soleimani Afshar is being held in ICE detention at its detention facility in Pearsall, Texas, where detainees await legal proceedings or deportation. It wasn’t immediately clear whether her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, is being held at the same facility.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Soleimani Afshar’s 2019 asylum claim was “fraudulent,” citing at least four trips back to Iran after being issued a green card. Her husband has also been barred from entering the U.S., the State Department said. The government is now moving to strip them of their green cards and ultimately deport them, DHS said.

President Trump outlined the U.S. operation that rescued the two-man crew of an F-15 after the fighter jet was shot down on Friday in Iran. He called the mission “one of the largest, most complex, most harrowing” the U.S. military had ever conducted.
A diplomatic effort is underway to avoid a major escalation in the war, with the president considering, among other ideas, a Pakistani proposal for a 45-day ceasefire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Hanging over the effort is Mr. Trump’s profanity-laced threat to destroy Iran’s power plants and other civilian infrastructure if Tehran doesn’t agree to a deal by Tuesday night.
Mr. Trump said Iran appears to be negotiating “in good faith” and any deal with Iran would need to ensure the “free traffic of oil.”
U.S.-Israeli strikes continue, with the intelligence chief of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards among dozens killed on Monday. Israel and America’s Persian Gulf allies are bearing the brunt of Tehran’s retaliatory fire. Four people were killed by an Iranian missile attack in Israel, the military confirmed.

Iran calls for human chains around power plants to protect them
An Iranian official urged youths to form human chains around power plants to protect them as President Trump’s latest deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz drew closer.

The official called on “all young people, athletes, artists, students and university students and their professors” to form human chains around power plants ahead of the threatened strikes.

“Power plants that are our national assets and capital, regardless of any taste or political viewpoint, belong to the future of Iran and to the Iranian youth,” Alireza Rahimi, identified by Iranian state television as the secretary of the Supreme Council of Youth and Adolescents, said as he issued the video call in a newscast.

Iran has formed human chains in the past around its nuclear sites at times of heightened tensions with the West.

Later, a Revolutionary Guard general urged parents to send their children to man checkpoints, which have been repeatedly targeted in airstrikes.

Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan, which is mediating indirect talks between Iran and the United States, said Tuesday that efforts to end the war were approaching a “critical” stage.

“Positive and productive endeavors in Good Will and Good Office to stop the war is approaching a critical, sensitive stage,” Ambassador Reza Amiri Moghadam wrote on X, without giving details.

The message came hours before a deadline set by President Trump for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping or face attacks on key infrastructure.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal is citing senior American negotiators and officials as saying chances of an agreement with Iran by tonight’s deadline are slim.

Former CIA director David Petraeus has traveled to Ukraine 10 times since Russia’s invasion in 2022. During his most recent trip last week, he told CBS News that Russia “no longer has the upper hand.”

“Over the last two months, the Ukrainians have actually made greater incremental gains than have the Russians,” Petraeus, a retired U.S. Army general, said in an interview in Kyiv after visiting units near the frontlines.

Petraeus said that assessment might have seemed unlikely given Russia’s advantages in manpower, firepower, and economic scale. But he argues that Ukraine has offset those disadvantages through its innovation in its unmanned systems.

Ukraine’s edge, he said, is not just the drones themselves, but the system built around them.

“What’s the real genius is how they’re pulling it all together,” Petraeus said, pointing to an “overall command and control ecosystem” that integrates surveillance, targeting, and strike capabilities. At the center is Ukraine’s Delta battle management platform, which serves as a sort of “military Google maps,” displaying a digital map of positions, targets, and other relevant information, an engineer familiar with the technology told CBS News.

That integration allows Ukrainian forces to possess nearly absolute surveillance and strike capabilities, within roughly 20 miles of the frontline. Petraeus described watching a frontline engagement in which a Russian soldier was tracked continuously by rotating surveillance drones before attack drones were deployed.

“Once you’re observed on this battlefield and you can’t get into a deeply buried position really quickly, it’s not going to end well,” he said.

Ukraine is also scaling production of low-cost first-person-view drones at a pace far beyond Western militaries. One Ukrainian manufacturer that Petraeus visited last week told him that it “is going to make 3 million drones this year alone,” compared to roughly 300,000 produced by the United States last year.

Artificial intelligence, Petraeus said, will accelerate these innovations. Currently, drone warfare is limited by electronic warfare. In the roughly 20 miles around the frontlines saturated with remotely piloted first-person-view drones, combatants jam connections between drones and operators, decreasing their effectiveness. One solution has been fiber-optic drones, which connect to their operators through long cables spooling out of their tails. But fiber-optic drones have limitations on how far they can fly and how much cable is available.

Using algorithms, rather than GPS connections, to fly drones will ease these constraints. “What’s coming is going to be algorithmically piloted drones that you can’t jam,” Petraeus said. These systems will be able to operate even in heavily contested electronic warfare environments by reducing reliance on GPS, he added. The technology will also allow human operators to control more than one drone at a time.

Petraeus said fully autonomous systems, where humans still define the missions but machines execute them, may also emerge soon.

“I think that will be possible within a couple of years, and we may well see it first here,” he said, noting that advances in technologies like object identification and facial recognition are already enabling greater autonomy.

President Trump said “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless a deal is reached with Iran by his Tuesday night deadline.

“I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president said in a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning.

Mr. Trump has given Iran until 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday to agree to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or else he says he will order attacks to destroy all of the country’s power plants and bridges. He said on Monday at the White House that “the entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.”

In his post Tuesday morning, the president also suggested that something “revolutionarily wonderful can happen,” arguing that “different, smarter, and less radicalized minds” are now leading Iran.

“We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World,” Mr. Trump said.

The deadline comes amid a renewed diplomatic push. Mr. Trump told reporters Monday that Iran had made a “significant” proposal, which he called “not good enough” but a “very significant step.” He also said he believes the Iranians are negotiating “in good faith.”

He called Iran an “active, willing participant” in ongoing negotiations.

A U.S. official on Tuesday morning confirmed that American forces had conducted new strikes on military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island, a vital location for Iran’s oil exports.

The official said that, as with similar attacks launched in mid-March, oil infrastructure was not targeted in the overnight attacks.

Democrats in Congress panned Mr. Trump’s latest rhetoric, voicing concern about the possible escalation.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the president “an extremely sick person.” He and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged Republicans in Congress to express opposition to the war.

“It’s time for every single Republican to put patriotic duty over party and stop the madness,” said Jeffries, a New York Democrat.

Rank-and-file members in both the House and Senate expressed outrage after Mr. Trump’s threat. Some called for impeachment and for the 25th amendment to be invoked to remove Mr. Trump from office, while others demanded that House Speaker Mike Johnson call Congress back into session immediately and said the president’s threats could constitute war crimes.

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin stressed on John Solomon’s podcast Monday that he did not “want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure.”