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MORNING GLORY: Has President Trump ordered the big re-think?

FOX News

Neither President Franklin Delano Roosevelt nor British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, nor any of their senior military or political advisors, saw the Japanese attacks of late 1941 coming. The forces of Imperial Japan achieved total surprise across the Pacific. The intelligence failures in the U.S. leading up to Pearl Harbor were catastrophic. So was Great Britain's general underestimation of the threat from Imperial Japan. The U.K.'s fortress outpost in the Pacific at Singapore was thought to be, if not impregnable, than as close to it as possible.


Ukraine's 'Spiderweb' drone assault forces Russia to shelter, move aircraft

Al Jazeera

Russia's increased sense of vulnerability may be the most important result of a recent large-scale Ukrainian drone attack named Operation Spiderweb, experts tell Al Jazeera. The operation destroyed as much as a third of Russia's strategic bomber fleet on the tarmac of four airfields deep inside Russia on June 1. Days later, Russia started to build shelters for its bombers and relocate them. An open source intelligence (OSINT) researcher nicknamed Def Mon posted time-lapse satellite photographs on social media showing major excavations at the Kirovskoe airfield in annexed Crimea as well as in Sevastopol, Gvardiyskoye and Saki, where Russia was constructing shelters for military aircraft. They reported similar work at several airbases in Russia, including the Engels base, which was targeted in Ukraine's attacks on June 1.


Ukraine bombs Russian bases: Here are some of Kyiv's most audacious attacks

Al Jazeera

Ukrainian drones struck multiple military airbases deep inside Russia on Sunday in a major operation a day before the neighbours held peace talks in Istanbul. The Russian Defence Ministry said Ukraine had launched drone strikes targeting Russian military airfields across five regions, causing several aircraft to catch fire. The attacks occurred in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions. Air defences repelled the assaults in all but two regions – Murmansk and Irkutsk, the ministry said. "In the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions, the launch of FPV drones from an area in close proximity to airfields resulted in several aircraft catching fire," the Defence Ministry said.


How will Ukraine's attack on Russian bombers affect the war?

Al Jazeera

Kyiv, Ukraine – Any description of Ukraine's attacks on Russia's fleet of strategic bombers could leave one scrambling for superlatives. Forty-one planes – including supersonic Tu-22M long-range bombers, Tu-95 flying fortresses and A-50 early warning warplanes – were hit and damaged on Sunday on four airfields, including ones in the Arctic and Siberia, Ukrainian authorities and intelligence said. Moscow did not comment on the damage to the planes but confirmed that the airfields were hit by "Ukrainian terrorist attacks". Videos posted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), which planned and carried out the operation, which was called The Spiderweb, showed only a handful of planes being hit. The strategic bombers have been used to launch ballistic and cruise missiles from Russian airspace to hit targets across Ukraine, causing wide scale damage and casualties.


Ukraine's 'Spider's Web' drone strike burns over 40 Russian warplanes, Moscow calls it 'terrorist attack'

FOX News

Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy questions President Donald Trump about the Russia-Ukraine war. The brazen Ukrainian blitz of Russian warplanes Sunday was 18 months in the making and the Pentagon was kept in the dark until it was over, sources told Fox News. "Operation Spider's Web," a series of coordinated drone strikes penetrating deep into Russian territory, is believed to have taken out dozens of Russia's most powerful bomber jets and surveillance planes as they sat idle on five military airfields. The stunning operation was personally overseen by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's security service (SBU) said. Ukraine used small FPV drones hidden inside wooden cabins mounted on trucks.


Ukraine drones strike 40 bombers during major attack in Russia

BBC News

Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities reported a massive overnight drone and missile attack on its territory. All this comes as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are heading to Istanbul, Turkey, for a second round of peace talks on Monday. Expectations are low, as the two warring sides remain far apart on how to end the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula annexed in 2014.


Ukrainian drones target Russian airbases in unprecedented operation

Al Jazeera

Officials say multiple military airbases have come under drone attacks in Russia in a major operation taking place ahead of peace talks with Ukraine due to start in Istanbul on Monday. The Russian Defence Ministry said that Ukraine had launched drone strikes targeting Russian military airfields across five regions on Sunday, causing several aircraft to catch fire. The attacks occurred in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions. Air defences repelled the assaults in all but two regions – Murmansk and Irkutsk, the ministry said. "In the Murmansk and Irkutsk regions, the launch of FPV drones from an area in close proximity to airfields resulted in several aircraft catching fire," the ministry said.


Watch: Video appears to show Russian planes bursting into flames

BBC News

Ukraine claims to have left more than 40 Russian bomber planes "burning" in a large scale drone attack" in the Murmansk region. The footage appears to show Russian warplanes on a runway being struck and bursting into flames. Sources from Ukraine's security service, SBU, told the BBC "enemy strategic bombers are burning en masse in Russia". They also said Ukraine was conducting "a large-scale special operation aimed at destroying enemy bomber aircraft," according to a statement sent from sources within the service to BBC Ukraine.


'Putin is vindictive': Russia pounds Ukraine as Kyiv pursues Kursk assault

Al Jazeera

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russia's aerial attack on Ukraine was colossal. Moving in waves from several directions and at different speeds and heights, 127 missiles and 109 drones attacked 15 of Ukraine's 24 regions. The attack is being seen in Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin's revenge for Kyiv's daring incursion into the western Russian region of Kursk that began in early August and has resulted in the apparent takeover of more than 1,000sq kilometres (386sq miles). "He is a vindictive person, he got offended," General Lieutenant Ihor Romanenko, ex-deputy head of the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera. The attack began in predawn darkness on Monday as buzzing swarms of explosives-laden heavy drones took off from the Azov Sea town of Yeisk in southwestern Russia.


W-RAG: Weakly Supervised Dense Retrieval in RAG for Open-domain Question Answering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering To overcome the limitations of LLMs' parametric knowledge, retrieval (OpenQA), Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle augmented generation (RAG) [11, 27] is explored, equipping to generate factual answers relying solely on their internal (parametric) LLMs with a retriever to gather necessary evidence from external knowledge. To address this limitation, Retrieval-Augmented sources. Among the two components of RAG, improving the retriever Generation (RAG) systems enhance LLMs by retrieving relevant information is more feasible due to the recent trend of black-box APIs from external sources, thereby positioning the retriever [33] and the high cost and time requirements of fine-tuning opensource as a pivotal component. Although dense retrieval demonstrates LLMs [10]. The retriever, a critical part of RAG, is typically state-of-the-art performance, its training poses challenges due to either a traditional unsupervised retriever like BM25 [38] or a more the scarcity of ground-truth evidence, largely attributed to the high advanced neural retriever, such as dense retrieval [20, 21, 32, 51], costs of human annotation. In this paper, we propose W-RAG by which encodes questions and passages into the same embedding utilizing the ranking capabilities of LLMs to create weakly labeled space and then measures the question-passage relevance score by data for training dense retrievers.