American commandos deployed deep into Iranian territory to rescue a downed airman, US news outlets reported on Sunday, hours after President Donald Trump announced that the crew member had been recovered "safe and sound."

Tehran said this week it had shot down an F-15 warplane, the first US fighter jet to go down inside Iran since the start of the war. Washington has not confirmed the details of how the fighter went down.

Pope Leo XIV on Sunday urged "those who have the power to unleash wars" to "choose peace" in his first Easter blessing as pontiff with the Middle East conflict raging.

Christians around the world marked the holiday under the shadow of a war that began with US-Israeli strikes against Iran on February 28 and has drawn in the whole region, convulsing the global economy.

"We are growing accustomed to violence, resigning ourselves to it, and becoming indifferent," the pope told a crowd in St Peter's Square.

A Pentagon AI program called Project Maven is at the center of the US strikes against Iran and potentially one of the most consequential transformations of modern warfare.

- What is it? -

Project Maven is the Pentagon's flagship artificial intelligence program, launched in 2017 as a narrow experiment to help military analysts make sense of the torrent of drone footage pouring in from conflict zones.

By Ismail Shakil

WASHINGTON, April 4 (Reuters) - Satellite imaging firm Planet Labs said on Saturday it will indefinitely withhold visuals of Iran and the region of conflict in the Middle East to comply with a request from the U.S. government.

California-based Planet Labs announced the decision in an email to customers and said the U.S. government had asked all satellite imagery providers to indefinitely withhold images of the conflict region.

By Enas Alashray and Phil Stewart

CAIRO/WASHINGTON, April 5 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Israel on Saturday stepped up pressure on Iran to open the strategic Strait of Hormuz or face attacks on its energy infrastructure, while Iranian and U.S. forces searched for a missing U.S. crew member from one of two downed warplanes.

Trump, who has sent mixed messages since the conflict began with a joint U.S.-Israeli bombardment of Iran on February 28, told Tehran that his latest deadline for a deal to end the war was fast approaching.

By Joshua McElwee

VATICAN CITY, April 4 (Reuters) - Pope Leo led the world's Catholics into Easter at a Saturday night vigil Mass in St. Peter's Basilica and urged people not to feel numbed by the scope of the conflicts raging across the world but to work for peace.

Leo, who has emerged as an outspoken critic of the Iran war, said that mistrust and fear have been allowed to "sever the bonds between us through war, injustice and the isolation of peoples and nations."

PRAGUE, April 4 (Reuters) - Authorities detained two more people in connection with the arson attack on a Czech optics and drone factory last month, Czech police and a public prosecutor's office said on Saturday.

A previously unknown pro-Palestinian activist group has claimed responsibility for the March 20 fire at an industrial complex in Pardubice, about 120 km (75 miles) east of Prague.

Czech authorities have previously announced five detentions, including of an Egyptian and a U.S. citizen, since the fire that targeted a building used by Czech defence group LPP Holding.

Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran's only operational civilian nuclear facility, was built by Russia and officially handed over in September 2013, after decades of twists, turns and delays linked to Iran's turbulent history.

The facility, located in the south of the country and equipped with a 1,000-megawatt reactor, was hit Saturday by a US-Israeli airstrike, killing a security guard, Iranian state media reported.

The Middle East war "presents a serious risk to Africa", the African Union and the African Development Bank (AfDB) said in a report seen by AFP Saturday.

The conflict threatens to increase the cost of living and curtail growth on the continent, the report warned.

The Middle East accounts for 15.8 percent of Africa's imports and 10.9 percent of its exports, the report noted.

MOSCOW, April 4 (Reuters) - Russia's state nuclear company Rosatom evacuated a further 198 of its staff from Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported.

Rosatom has been evacuating staff from the plant since the Iran war broke out at the end of February.

Saturday's evacuations had been planned before the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a post on X on Saturday that one of the plant’s physical protection staff was killed by a projectile fragment and that a building on site was affected by shockwaves and fragments.