AP News in Brief at 6:04 a.m. EDT

The latest effort to broker a deal comes as an indefinite ceasefire has paused most fighting, but the economic fallout is still mounting with global energy shipments disrupted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

On Saturday, Iran resumed commercial flights from Tehran’s international airport for the first time since the conflict with the U.S. and Israel began about two months ago. Iran’s state-run television reported that flights were scheduled to depart for Istanbul, Oman’s capital of Muscat and the Saudi city of Medina. Iran partly reopened its airspace earlier this month amid a ceasefire with the U.S. which halted fighting between the two countries.

The airport opening comes as Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met twice with Pakistan's top military and political leaders since arriving in Islamabad on Friday night, officials said.

According to Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, the Iranian delegation will hold talks with Pakistan’s senior leadership as the U.S. envoys were expected to travel to Islamabad on Saturday. Officials have not specified when Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are due to arrive.

US imposes sanctions on a China-based oil refinery and 40 shippers over Iranian oil

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration is placing economic sanctions on a major China-based oil refinery and roughly 40 shipping companies and tankers involved in transporting Iranian oil.

The move, announced Friday and first reported by The Associated Press, makes good on Trump's threat to impose secondary sanctions on companies and countries that do business with Iran. It's also part of his Republican administration’s overall ramped-up campaign to cut off Iran’s key source of revenue — its oil exports.

Concurrently, the U.S. this month imposed a physical blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf waterway that is crucial to global energy supplies.

The sanctions, which cut off the companies from the U.S. financial system and penalize anyone who does business with them, come just a few weeks before President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping are due to meet in China.

Included in Friday's sanctions is Hengli Petrochemical’s facility in the port city of Dalian, which has a processing capacity of roughly 400,000 barrels of crude oil per day, making it one of the biggest independent refineries in China.

The Latest: Trump sending Witkoff and Kushner to Pakistan for talks with Iran's foreign minister

U.S. President Donald Trump is sending envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan to take part in a second round of ceasefire negotiations with Iran, the White House said Friday.

Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met late Friday with Pakistan Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir shortly after arriving in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad. On Saturday morning Araghchi met with Munir and Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, officials said.

Pakistan also is preparing to receive Witkoff and Kushner for the start of the renewed talks, although officials have not specified when they are due in Islamabad. Vice President JD Vance will not attend, the White House said.

The Trump administration announced it is placing economic sanctions on a major China-based oil refinery and roughly 40 shipping companies and tankers involved in transporting Iranian oil. The move appeared to be part of the administration's threat to impose secondary sanctions on entities doing business with Iran in order to cut off Iran’s oil exports, a key source of its revenue.

Here is the latest:

Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing the way for Warsh

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has ended its investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as his successor.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said on X Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.

The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell. Powell's term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.

Republicans praised Warsh during a Tuesday hearing even as Democrats questioned his independence from Trump, the lack of transparency around some of his financial holdings, and what they said was his flip-flopping on interest rates. Still, Trump's previous appointment to the Fed's board of governors, Stephen Miran, was approved by the full Senate just 13 days after his nomination.

Pirro’s investigation focused on a $2.5 billion building renovation that Trump criticized sharply last year for its cost overruns. Trump visited the building last July and on camera presented to Powell an inflated cost estimate, which Powell corrected as the two stood at the construction site in hard hats.

Appeals court rules that Trump's asylum ban at the border is illegal

WASHINGTON (AP) — An appeals court on Friday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access at the southern border of the U.S., a key pillar of the Republican president’s plan to crack down on migration.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that immigration laws give people the right to apply for asylum at the border, and the president can’t circumvent that.

The court opinion stems from action taken by Trump on Inauguration Day 2025, when he declared that the situation at the southern border constituted an invasion of America and that he was “suspending the physical entry” of migrants and their ability to seek asylum until he decides it is over.

The panel concluded that the Immigration and Nationality Act doesn’t authorize the president to remove the plaintiffs under “procedures of his own making,” allow him to suspend plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum or curtail procedures for adjudicating their anti-torture claims.

“The power by proclamation to temporarily suspend the entry of specified foreign individuals into the United States does not contain implicit authority to override the INA’s mandatory process to summarily remove foreign individuals,” wrote Judge J. Michelle Childs, who was nominated to the bench by Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump has paused 3 Mideast wars, but the grievances remain and could reignite them

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — The post-Oct. 7 order in the Middle East — such as it is — is barely pieced together by conditional ceasefires and mutual threats.

Iran has suffered severe blows, yet not enough to shake its posture at the negotiating table. Its allies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza are degraded but functioning, with Israel still regularly launching strikes at both. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under mounting pressure to translate military achievements into clear dividends ahead of elections later this year.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who boasts of his peacemaking abilities, still appears to be seeking a nuclear deal with Iran and wider peace in the Middle East. But talks so far have produced no results and the two countries are locked in an escalating standoff over the Strait of Hormuz.

Major military operations have halted, but the underlying grievances — which long predate Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack — have not been addressed. Millions of people are still displaced, and many fear the fighting could resume at any time.

Ceasefires “don’t fix anything — they just stop things from getting worse,” said Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It’s part of an answer to an immediate political problem, which is (Trump) needs to get out of war and can’t figure out how do that.”

Despite Iran tensions, King Charles III will follow his mother's lead in celebrating US-UK bonds

LONDON (AP) — The challenge for King Charles III when he embarks on next week's state visit to the U.S. is, as always, to live up to his mother’s example.

The late Queen Elizabeth II wowed Congress in 1991 with a speech that celebrated the shared democratic traditions of Britain and the United States, quoted Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and highlighted the deep bonds between the two nations.

Those themes will also be at the top of Charles’ agenda as he celebrates America's 250th birthday and seeks to calm tensions surrounding Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal to support U.S. President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University in Texas.

“We’ve got to always make the distinction that there’s a difference between the government of the U.K. and the kings and queens of Great Britain, who are really always coming to try to put (on) a good face,” Brinkley told The Associated Press. “Politics come and go, prime ministers, presidents, come and go, but there’s something deeper about the special relationship between the United States and the U.K.”

Beneath the pomp and pageantry of Charles’ four-day trip to Washington, New York and Virginia beginning Monday is a carefully choreographed diplomatic event staged, like all royal visits, at the request of the British government. Starmer resisted pressure to cancel it after Trump belittled the British military’s sacrifices in Afghanistan and criticized him personally for failing to back the U.S. in Iran.

US military strike on alleged drug boat kills 2 in eastern Pacific

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military said it launched another strike Friday on a boat accused of ferrying drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people.

The Trump administration's campaign of blowing up alleged drug-trafficking vessels in Latin American waters has persisted since early September and killed at least 183 people in total. Other strikes have taken place in the Caribbean Sea.

The military has not provided evidence that any of the vessels were carrying drugs.

The attacks began as the U.S. built up its largest military presence in the region in generations and came months ahead of the raid in January that captured then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He was brought to New York to face drug trafficking charges and has pleaded not guilty.

In the latest attack Friday, U.S. Southern Command repeated previous statements by saying it had targeted the alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes. It posted a video on X showing a boat floating in the water before a explosion left it in flames.

Justice Department to allow firing squads for executions in move to ramp up capital punishment

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department will adopt firing squads as a permitted method of execution as the Trump administration moves to ramp up and expedite capital punishment cases, officials said Friday.

The Justice Department is also reauthorizing the use of single-drug lethal injections with pentobarbital that were used to carry out 13 executions during the first Trump administration — more than under any president in modern history. The Biden administration had removed pentobarbital from the federal protocol over concerns about the potential for unnecessary pain and suffering.

The moves were announced as part of a broader push to step up federal executions after a moratorium under the Biden administration. Only three defendants remain on federal death row after Democratic President Joe Biden converted 37 of their sentences to life in prison, though the Trump administration has so far authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants.

“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”

The federal government has not previously included firing squad as a method of execution in its protocols, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Five states currently allow executions by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah.

Gunfire heard near Mali’s capital airport and in several cities, AP reporter and residents say

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — Gunfire was heard near Mali’s international airport in the capital Bamako early Saturday, an Associated Press reporter and residents said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the gunshots and no armed group has claimed ⁠responsibility for an attack.

An AP journalist in Bamako heard sustained heavy weapons and automatic rifle gunfire coming from Modibo Keïta International Airport, around 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the city center, and saw a helicopter over nearby neighborhoods. The airport is adjacent to an air base used by Mali's air force.

A Bamako resident living near the airport also reported gunfire and three helicopters patrolling overhead. The resident spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his security.

In 2024, an al-Qaida-linked group claimed an attack on Bamako's airport and a military training camp in the capital, killing scores of people.