South Sudan
Drone attack in disputed Sudan-South Sudan border region kills at least 153
A drone attack on a market in Abyei, a border region disputed by South Sudan and Sudan, has killed at least 153 people, according to a South Sudanese official. The Abyei administration's caretaker minister of information on Tuesday blamed the attack, which took place a day earlier on Amiet Market, north of Abyei town, on Sudan's military. He told the news agency Reuters that the "situation is terrible", adding that some bodies had been burned to ashes. Blaming the Sudanese military for the attack, South Sudan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said drones hit several locations in the market. It said it has summoned Sudan's ambassador and called for its northern neighbour to "refrain" from acts that endanger civilian lives and property.
Multi-fidelity approaches for general constrained Bayesian optimization with application to aircraft design
Cordelier, Oihan, Diouane, Youssef, Bartoli, Nathalie, Laurendeau, Eric
Aircraft design relies heavily on solving challenging and computationally expensive Multidisciplinary Design Optimization problems. In this context, there has been growing interest in multi-fidelity models for Bayesian optimization to improve the MDO process by balancing computational cost and accuracy through the combination of high- and low-fidelity simulation models, enabling efficient exploration of the design process at a minimal computational effort. In the existing literature, fidelity selection focuses only on the objective function to decide how to integrate multiple fidelity levels, balancing precision and computational cost using variance reduction criteria. In this work, we propose novel multi-fidelity selection strategies. Specifically, we demonstrate how incorporating information from both the objective and the constraints can further reduce computational costs without compromising the optimality of the solution. We validate the proposed multi-fidelity optimization strategy by applying it to four analytical test cases, showcasing its effectiveness. The proposed method is used to efficiently solve a challenging aircraft wing aero-structural design problem. The proposed setting uses a linear vortex lattice method and a finite element method for the aerodynamic and structural analysis respectively. We show that employing our proposed multi-fidelity approach leads to $86\%$ to $200\%$ more constraint compliant solutions given a limited budget compared to the state-of-the-art approach.
28 powerful Sony World Photography Awards 2026 honorees
Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In the Congo Basin, two groups of wild western lowland gorillas encounter photographer Hugo Hebbe. One group is familiar with humans, reacting with indifference to the attention. The other remains cautious, scamping off when humans approach. The images captured during the encounter (seen below) document "an evolving story of fear, patience and trust," the photographer explains.