Aid workers trying to deliver supplies to Gaza were left stranded on a burning ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea after they say it was attacked by drones. The ship was part of an attempt to challenge Israel's two-month blockade of Gaza.

Ukraine's parliament is expected to ratify a controversial minerals deal with the United States in a decisive step towards securing the latter's long-term commitment to the war-battered country amid stalled efforts to strike a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire. The deal, signed by Kyiv and Washington on Wednesday, pushed by US President Donald Trump and after protracted negotiations, marks an inflection point of sorts in the war, granting the US priority access to Ukraine's critical minerals as a means of deterring future Russian aggression. However, it stops short of offering specific security guarantees and questions remain over accessing minerals in areas under Russian control. Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said on Thursday that the deal "marks an important milestone in Ukraine–US strategic partnership aimed at strengthening Ukraine's economy and security". "We're expecting it to be discussed and ratified by Ukraine's parliament later today," said Al Jazeera's Zein Basravi, reporting from Kyiv.

The enemy is attacking Odesa with strike drones. There is considerable damage to civilian infrastructure, particularly dwellings,

Russian drones attacked Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odesa early on Thursday, killing at least two people and injuring five, the regional governor said. The attack sparked fires and damaged residential dwellings and infrastructure. In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city in the northeast, the mayor said another Russian drone had struck a petrol station in the city centre, triggering a fire. Ukraine's SBU security agency claimed responsibility for a drone strike on a defence manufacturing facility in Russia. The strike on Murom Instrument-Building Plant, 300km (186 miles) east of Moscow, sparked a fire and damaged two buildings, the region's governor reported.

With the recent development of new geometric and angular-radial frameworks for multivariate extremes, reliably simulating from angular variables in moderate-to-high dimensions is of increasing importance. Empirical approaches have the benefit of simplicity, and work reasonably well in low dimensions, but as the number of variables increases, they can lack the required flexibility and scalability. Classical parametric models for angular variables, such as the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution, provide an alternative. Exploiting mixtures of vMF distributions increases their flexibility, but there are cases where even this is not sufficient to capture the intricate features that can arise in data. Owing to their flexibility, generative deep learning methods are able to capture complex data structures; they therefore have the potential to be useful in the simulation of angular variables. In this paper, we explore a range of deep learning approaches for this task, including generative adversarial networks, normalizing flows and flow matching. We assess their performance via a range of metrics and make comparisons to the more classical approach of using a mixture of vMF distributions. The methods are also applied to a metocean data set, demonstrating their applicability to real-world, complex data structures.

A Russian drone attack on the Black Sea port city of Odesa overnight injured three people, sparked fires and damaged homes and civilian infrastructure, regional governor Oleh Kiper said. Russia's Ministry of Defence said its units destroyed 26 Ukrainian drones overnight. Nine of the drones were shot down over the southern Voronezh region, while eight were taken down over the border region of Belgorod. The remaining drones were downed over the Kursk, Lipetsk and Moscow regions, as well as over the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula, the ministry said. The Defence Ministry also said Russia has taken control of Kalynove village in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region.

It can have serious implications in critical application scenarios like that of Knowledge Graph-based multilingual data integration. In view of the above, the thesis argues that the current understanding of the problem of semantic heterogeneity as the'existence of variance', while being crucially necessary, is not sufficient and under-characterized. There can be no variance without a prior notion of a unifying reference taken as the basis for computing the variance itself. To that end, the thesis proposes the problem of representation heterogeneity to emphasize the fact that heterogeneity is an intrinsic property of any representation, wherein, different observers encode different representations of the same target reality in a stratified manner using different concepts, language and knowledge (as well as data). The thesis then advances a top-down solution approach to the above stratified problem of representation heterogeneity in terms of several solution components, namely: (i) a representation formalism stratified into concept level, language level, knowledge level and data level to accommodate representation heterogeneity, (ii) a top-down language representation using Universal Knowledge Core (UKC), UKC namespaces and domain languages to tackle the conceptual and language level heterogeneity, (iii) a top-down knowledge representation using the notions of language teleontology and knowledge teleontology to tackle the knowledge level heterogeneity, (iv) the usage and further development of the existing LiveKnowledge catalog for enforcing iterative reuse and sharing of language and knowledge representations, and, (v) the kTelos methodology integrating the solution components above to iteratively generate the language and knowledge representations absolving representation heterogeneity. The thesis also includes proof-of-concepts of the language and knowledge representations developed for two international research projects - DataScientia (data catalogs) and JIDEP (materials modelling). Finally, the thesis concludes with future lines of research.

Russia's territorial gains in Ukraine are slowing down dramatically, two analyses have found, continuing a pattern from 2024 at a time when both nations are trying to project strength in the face of United States-mediated negotiations aimed at ending the war. Britain's Ministry of Defence last week estimated that Russian forces seized 143sq km (55sq miles) of Ukrainian land in March, compared with 196sq km (76sq miles) in February and 326sq km (126sq miles) in January. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC-based think tank, spotted the same trend, estimating Russian gains at 203sq km (78sq miles) in March, 354sq km (137sq miles) in February and 427sq km (165sq miles) in January. These estimates are based on satellite imagery and geolocated open-source photography rather than claims by either side. Should this trend continue, Russian forces could come to a standstill by early summer, roughly coinciding with US President Donald Trump's self-imposed early deadline for achieving a ceasefire.

It has been 113 years since the Titanic sank beneath the waves, claiming the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. But new evidence has finally cleared the tragedy's Scottish scapegoat: First Officer William Murdoch. For years, Officer Murdoch has been accused of taking bribes, abandoning his post, and was even depicted shooting a passenger in the James Cameron movie. Now, more than a century later, 3D scans show that Officer Murdoch did not flee his position, but died while helping passengers escape until the very end. Deep sea scanning company Magellan has snapped 715,000 photos of the Titanic wreck 12,500 feet beneath the Atlantic.

In a video game year dominated by dark, bloody fantasy adventures – and continued job losses and studio closures – it was a cute robot that stole the night at the 2025 Bafta video game awards. Sony's family-friendly platformer Astro Bot won in five categories at yesterday evening's ceremony, including best game and game design. The rest of the awards were evenly spread across a range of Triple A and independent titles. Oil rig thriller Still Wakes the Deep was the next biggest winner with three awards: new intellectual property, performer in a leading role and performer in a supporting role. Clearly actors looking for Bafta-winning roles need look no further than the North Sea.