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Drone mystery: New Jersey homeowners threaten to take matters into their own hands if government doesn't act

FOX News

New Jersey residents frustrated with a lack of answers regarding dozens of potential drone sightings in the skies above their homes are threatening to take action on their own if the government doesn't start providing answers. James Ward, a Jersey Shore Realtor, shared video on Facebook that he said shows "SUV-size drones" above Island Beach State Park taken Sunday. It's difficult to judge their size in the clip, which shows a number of lights hovering in the sky. "Dozens of SUV-size drones in all directions," the caption says. "Emerging at same time and flying over the ocean and then heading in different directions – what do you think?" "A good shotgun will fix that problem," one commenter replied.


Pentagon yet to ask NORTHCOM to intervene against New Jersey drones

FOX News

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., addresses concerns over mystery drones flying over multiple New Jersey counties and details what sources have told him about their origins. The Pentagon has not yet asked U.S. Northern Command to intervene amid reports of mysterious drones witnessed flying over New Jersey, according to a military spokesperson. The large drone sightings have caused concern and confusion as dozens have been reported and officials are at a loss to explain where they come from. Northern Command confirmed some of the drones have been sighted near U.S. military installations. "We are aware and monitoring the reports of unauthorized drone flights in the vicinity of military installations in New Jersey to include Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle, and we refer you to those installations for information on any efforts they are may be conducting to ensure the safety and security of their personnel and operations," a U.S. Nothern Command spokesperson told Fox News Digital.


FBI leader says it's 'concerning' how little his agency knows about mysterious drones seen over New Jersey

FOX News

Fox News contributor Brett Velicovich discusses House Subcommittee on Aerial Systems' role in investigating multiple sightings in the Garden State on'America Reports.' A top FBI leader revealed the agency knows concerningly little about the mysterious drones that have been seen hovering over New Jersey. Asked if Americans are "at risk," FBI Assistant Director of the Critical Incident Response Group Robert Wheeler told Congress: "There is nothing that is known that would lead me to say that, but we just don't know. Dozens of drones have been spotted flying near sensitive sites like a military research facility in recent weeks. The FBI has been investigating the incidents and has called on the public for additional information. According to Gov. Phil Murphy, there were 49 reports of drones on Sunday alone, mostly in Hunterdon County. The FBI assistant director's comments came during a joint hearing of two Homeland Security subcommittees on unmanned aerial systems. "We do not attribute that to an individual or a group yet.


US lawmakers ask feds to help investigate mysterious drones over New Jersey

FOX News

'Fox & Friends Weekend' co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy opens up about seeing drones outside her home. U.S. lawmakers from New Jersey joined in many residents' frustrations over dozens of reports of drones being flown near sensitive sites like a military research facility in recent weeks, and they are now calling on federal agencies to immediately help investigate and address the escalating issue. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., joined law enforcement leaders in his district on Monday on Long Beach Island, having been one of the key figures leading efforts to investigate the source and possible risks associated with the drone activity. "I have been speaking with Ocean County Sheriff Mike Mastronardy, Monmouth County Sheriff Shaun Golden, and national security officials located in the area to discuss the widespread reports of unidentified drone activity across my central New Jersey congressional district and across our state," Smith said in a statement. "Understandably, New Jersey residents are very alarmed at this significant and reoccurring phenomenon – and the tepid response from our state and federal agencies so far is totally unacceptable. As we saw with the Chinese spy balloon last year, our fiercest adversaries will stop at nothing to surveil our homeland and threaten our national security."


Drone sighting reported over New Jersey's largest reservoir as feds investigate unnerving phenomenon

FOX News

Fox News correspondent Nate Foy breaks down what witnesses are saying about the drones flying over New Jersey on'Your World.' Officials in New Jersey say they're taking mystery drone sightings, now reported in 10 counties across the state, "seriously," with the suspicious aircraft recently confirmed to have been spotted near the state's largest reservoir. The reason for the drones' presence near the Round Valley Reservoir in Hunterdon County, near the Garden State's border with Pennsylvania, is unclear, according to NJ.com. Similarly unclear are any potential connections to other drones spotted in the recent onslaught of suspicious activity that's taken the state by storm, the outlet continues. The drone sighting near the reservoir wasn't the only recent one in Hunterdon County – another was reported near its 911 Center in Flemington. "There have been reports of single drones hovering over people's houses for hours at a time," Hunterdon County Commissioner John Lanza noted at a Tuesday board meeting.


Authorities stress 'no known threat to public safety' following unusual drones near Trump Bedminster club

FOX News

Officials are still investigating unusual drone activity that has been reported in recent weeks in New Jersey. The FAA set temporary restrictions above Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster in response. Authorities investigating the unusual drone activity observed several times in northern New Jersey in recent days, including the vicinity of President-elect Trump's Bedminster golf club, continue to stress that there is no threat to public safety. Multiple videos show drones flying in Somerset and Morris counties over the past few weeks, including Dec. 1 and Dec. 3. In a video from Nov. 25, a Morris County resident named Mike Walsh spotted drones flying over Black River Middle School in Chester.


Drone activity near Trump Bedminster, Army arsenal spurs NJ flight restriction: FAA

FOX News

Fox News' Stephanie Bennett reports the latest on the unidentified drones from London. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed Tuesday it issued two flight restrictions following questionable drone activity in the area of President-elect Trump's New Jersey golf club. On Nov. 18, the FAA first received reports of drone activity within Morris County, the border of which lies about two miles north of Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in Somerset County. Upon request from "federal security partners," the agency issued two TFRs, or temporary flight restrictions, and several reports of drone sightings continued into this week in Central Jersey. One restriction covers an area near Solberg-Hunterdon County Airport that consists of airspace above Trump Bedminster.


GRAM: Global Reasoning for Multi-Page VQA

Blau, Tsachi, Fogel, Sharon, Ronen, Roi, Golts, Alona, Ganz, Roy, Avraham, Elad Ben, Aberdam, Aviad, Tsiper, Shahar, Litman, Ron

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing use of transformer-based large language models brings forward the challenge of processing long sequences. In document visual question answering (DocVQA), leading methods focus on the single-page setting, while documents can span hundreds of pages. We present GRAM, a method that seamlessly extends pre-trained single-page models to the multi-page setting, without requiring computationally-heavy pretraining. To do so, we leverage a single-page encoder for local page-level understanding, and enhance it with document-level designated layers and learnable tokens, facilitating the flow of information across pages for global reasoning. To enforce our model to utilize the newly introduced document-level tokens, we propose a tailored bias adaptation method. For additional computational savings during decoding, we introduce an optional compression stage using our C-Former model, which reduces the encoded sequence length, thereby allowing a tradeoff between quality and latency. Extensive experiments showcase GRAM's state-of-the-art performance on the benchmarks for multi-page DocVQA, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.


Who Is Jess Cliffe? Counter-Strike Co-Creator Arrested For Sexually Abusing Minor

International Business Times

Seattle police arrested video game "Counter-Strike" co-creator Jess Cliffe on Thursday morning for the alleged sexual exploitation of a minor. The details of the arrest were not immediately released by the police. Cliffe was taken into custody by the police, however, he was not charged with the offense, according to a report by the Seattle-based local news station KIRO 7. The report also stated Cliffe was not a history-sheeter. According to jail records, as cited by the news station, Cliffe was arrested at 1:17 a.m. He was arrested from 2300 S.W. Webster Street, Seattle, a law enforcement source told the news station under the condition of anonymity.