Category: Games

Hundreds of U.S. Special Operations Forces, including Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, are now in the Middle East, as well as thousands of Marines and Army paratroopers, according to sources familiar with the deployments.

The sources said having the forces in the region gives President Trump military options in Iran, including operations that could target opening the Strait of Hormuz, take oil from Kharg Island or seize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.

The New York Times first reported the forces had arrived in the region.

U.S. Central Command declined to comment.

President Trump said Monday morning on Truth Social that his administration was continuing to negotiate with Iran and expressed optimism that an agreement would soon be reached to end the war, now in its fifth week, that was launched by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28.

But Iranian officials have repeatedly said that no direct talks are underway and dismissed a 15-point ceasefire proposal from the White House as “excessive and unreasonable,” raising doubts that any common ground might be quickly found.

In the same post, Mr. Trump warned that if a deal “is not shortly reached” and the Strait of Hormuz isn’t immediately opened, the U.S. would attack all of Iran’s “Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

More than 3,500 U.S. troops, including the USS Tripoli with about 2,500 Marines, arrived in the Middle East, officials announced Saturday, as strikes in the Iran war intensified. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit is on its way to the region.

The U.S. was also expected to send elements of the 82nd Airborne to the region, a contingent of under 1,500 service members.

Indian police have arrested a man for smuggling alcohol into the capital Delhi using camels, seizing two animals and a large consignment of liquor.

The camels were used to carry the alcohol through “forest routes” from the neighboring city of Faridabad in Haryana state across state lines into the sprawling megacity of Delhi — where taxes on alcohol are far higher.

Delhi police said on social media Tuesday that 1,938 containers of illegal liquor were recovered.

“Staff… busted an illicit liquor smuggling racket using camels for transportation,” police said in a statement after the arrests on Monday. “The contraband was seized and the camels were rescued and handed over to concerned authorities.”

The animals were later brought to the Delhi Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals shelter, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

Authorities said the smuggler turned to forest paths and camels to avoid road checkpoints after police increased monitoring along the highways between Faridabad and Delhi.

Police say five men allegedly used the animals to transport liquor over a four-mile forest stretch at night, according to the newspaper.

The Hindustan Times reported that the same camels had been stopped last year for alcohol smuggling.

It reported that the smugglers would offload the contraband once inside city boundaries and deliver the drink to clients — using bicycle rickshaws.

India has also grappled with the issue of tainted liquor. Hundreds of people die every year in India from drinking cheap alcohol made in backstreet distilleries. Bootleggers sell vast quantities at cut rates to the poor, without paying taxes to the government. To increase its potency, the liquor is often spiked with methanol that can cause blindness, liver damage and death.

The Iran war is not only disrupting the global energy market but is also threatening the world’s supply of helium and aluminum, key materials used in products such as semiconductor chips, medical equipment and other everyday goods.

Qatar, which accounts for roughly one-third of the world’s helium supply, stopped producing helium this month following Iranian strikes on two liquid natural gas (LNG) facilities owned by state-run QatarEnergy.

Helium is a byproduct of natural gas processing, and attacks on Qatar’s liquefied natural gas facilities mean it could take years to rebuild production lines. Earlier this month, QatarEnergy told Reuters that the attacks wiped out 17% of the country’s LNG export capacity, and that repairs could take three to five years.

Those complications could add to the strains on the global economy beyond the impact of higher oil and gas prices, which so far have drawn the lion’s share of attention from consumers, businesses and economists. The helium shortage has largely been overlooked because the effects of oil supply constraints have been so acute and immediate, with the average price of gasoline on Tuesday hitting $4 a gallon for the first time since August 2022.

“We were so focused on gas supply that we didn’t see the helium shortage,” Vidya Mani, a global supply chain expert and associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, told CBS News.

Only a handful of countries produce helium, which means that a disruption from one of those nations can destabilize the global market. The United States is the biggest producer, accounting for 81 million cubic meters last year. Qatar, Algeria and Russia are the other major producers, but Russian supplies are banned under U.S. and European Union sanctions.

A ship operated by a group founded by anti-whaling activist Paul Watson collided with an industrial krill trawler in Antarctica in what the ship’s Norwegian owner said was a “deliberate attack” that endangered its crew and could’ve caused a disaster in the same environmentally sensitive waters the activists claim they want to protect.

A two-minute video provided to The Associated Press by the Aker QRILL Co. shows the moment Tuesday when the M/V Bandero, operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, slowly steams toward the stern of the fishing vessel, hitting its port side at a slight angle.

The collision underscores the growing battle in the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean over the future of Antarctic krill, a shrimplike crustacean central to the diet of whales and critical buffer to global warming that’s also in demand for use in health supplements, fishmeal and other products.

Aker said Wednesday that the Bandero came within centimeters of striking a diesel tank on its vessel, the Norwegian-flagged Antarctic Sea, and put at risk a habitat teeming with multiple whale species, seals and seabirds — all feeding on the Southern Ocean’s abundant but environmentally sensitive krill population.

The company said its multinational crew was shaken but unharmed and it would pursue all available legal action.

“Our crew were put at risk in some of the most remote waters on Earth, and only luck avoided potential environmental damage,” Aker CEO Webjørn Barstad said in a statement.

“If the steel plates (…) had ruptured, it could have caused a spill. It was probably just luck that it didn’t cause more damage,” Barstad told the Reuters news agency.

In a statement to Reuters, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation said that it was “an accidental collision” and that it was committed to “lawful, responsible, non-violent action in defense of marine ecosystems”.

In its own news release, the foundation characterized its actions as “aggressive nonviolence.” It said the crew, led by French activist Lamya Essemlali, managed to disrupt all krill fishing during a five-hour “direct intervention” against two Aker-owned vessels. It also provided images showing the crew launching giant metal net shredding devices intended to disrupt fishing.

Two gay Iranian men seeking asylum in the United States over fear they could be executed in Iran are facing an uncertain future, with U.S. officials offering no clarity about whether they could be deported amid the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war with Iran if their asylum cases are unsuccessful.

Ali and Adel, who are using assumed names to protect their identities, entered the U.S. from Mexico in 2025, just before President Trump took office for his second term. They were facing charges at home over their sexuality, Rebekah Wolf, director of the Immigration Justice campaign at the American Immigration Council, told CBS News.

In Iran, “they were charged with a crime that is punishable by execution, by hanging, in fact,” Wolf said. “In many cases, it is not so stark or obvious what an asylum seeker is facing. I think this is by far the clearest case of why our asylum system exists. They are facing execution by a regime that we believe should not be in power. That, we’ve demonstrated through our own actions … in United States foreign policy.”

The couple initially fled from Iran to Turkey and “stayed there for a number of years” before traveling through South and then Central America to reach the U.S., Wolf told CBS News.

“Turkey is not particularly friendly to the LGBT community either, but also … they don’t have laws that allow you to seek permanent asylum there,” Wolf said. “The question of whether or not there were other places that they could have stayed, there’s sort of two answers to that. One is that many of those countries themselves are not friendly to LGBTQ communities.”

The other reason, she said, was that at least some of the countries they traversed “have policies about certain nationalities and they, you know, saw significantly higher barriers to being able to resettle in one of those countries” as Iranian nationals, she said.

Since arriving in the U.S. and being detained on the southern border in January 2025, Wolf said Ali and Adel have been held in poor detention conditions and faced mistreatment by guards.

“They are experiencing a sense of impunity by guards and ICE officials who don’t have any kind of repercussions for small things like calling them names, outing them to other individuals in detention, things of that nature that we did not see in previous administrations,” Wolf said.

Adel said he was hurt in an attack in Mexico before he and Ali crossed the border into the U.S., and Wolf said his injuries, which haven’t been properly treated, left him wheelchair-bound.

The two men were unable to retain lawyers for their initial immigration hearings, because counsel in such cases is not assigned for free, Wolf said. Both had asylum applications rejected for reasons Wolf and the American Immigration Council said could have been prevented if they’d had legal representation. They are both appealing the earlier decisions in their cases.

“They can’t be removed while a case is ongoing, but we have not received any assurances that, if those stays are lifted for whatever reason, that they would not be removed,” Wolf told CBS News.