At least one person has been killed in an Israeli drone attack on a vehicle in southern Lebanon, just one day after Israeli troops withdrew from most of the border area. Lebanon's state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that "an enemy drone struck a vehicle… in the town of Aita al-Shaab" on Wednesday. Sanad, Al Jazeera's fact-checking agency, identified the victim as Yusuf Mohammed Sorour, the son of the mayor of the town, targeted while he was sitting in his car in front of his home. NNA had earlier reported that in a separate attack, one person was wounded in the Wazzani region after Israeli forces opened fire "while residents were inspecting" restaurants and cafes in the area. The NNA also reported Israeli forces shot towards homes near the town of Shebaa.

An Arizona state bill would allow local and state authorities to shoot down drones used by drug cartels. House Bill 2733, sponsored by Republican state Rep. David Marshall, would provide qualified immunity to authorities for injuries that may be caused by taking out an "unmanned" drone within 30 miles of the southern border. Cartels regularly use drones as a tool to monitor law enforcement activity around the border in hopes of evading them in their own smuggling operations, even using the technology to send their drugs into the country. Although the situation at the border is calming down, there are still plenty of issues to tackle when it comes to crime, according to one sheriff. A drone reportedly flew into a crowd of Boston Celtics fans Tuesday night at an outdoor party.

Cambridge, United Kingdom – The fate of Ukraine and the future of European security hangs in the balance as United States and Russian diplomats prepared to discuss an accelerated peace plan this week. The uncertainty and dreadful possibilities of this historical moment, with Russia occupying a fifth of Ukrainian soil, dominated the atmosphere of Firewalling the Future, a conference on the future of Ukraine held at Cambridge University on Monday. Organised by programme leader Victoria Vdovychenko and professor of Ukrainian studies Rory Finnin under the auspices of the Centre for Geopolitics, it brought together Ukrainian, European and British diplomats, soldiers and academics. Dominant among the Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans present was the sentiment that with Trump's re-election, the international order is irrecoverably lost and needs to be rebuilt. Some spoke openly of a post-NATO reality in which Europe must form new structures and alliances to fend for itself.

"What I do not understand is that we are supporting big tech instead of protecting European creative ideas and content." The EU's AI Act, which came into force last year, was already in the works when ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can generate essays, jokes and job applications, burst into public consciousness in late 2022, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history. ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI, which is also behind the AI image generator Dall-E. He would like legislation to fill that gap, but said it would take years, after the European Commission's decision last week to withdraw the proposed AI Liability Act. "It might be getting very difficult.

Meta has presented the Waterworth Project, an initiative aimed at building a 50,000-kilometer undersea cable that will provide internet connectivity in five continents. The company seeks to strengthen control over the management of its services and guarantee the necessary infrastructure for the development of its products, especially those based in artificial intelligence. Submarine cables support more than 95 percent of intercontinental internet traffic. "Project Waterworth will be a multibillion dollar, multiyear investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world's digital highways by opening three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation around the world," the company said in a post about the undertaking. The project was first reported last fall by entrepreneur Sunil Tagare.

The Senate Judiciary Committee soon will hold confirmation hearings for Gail Slater for assistant attorney general, antitrust division. Slater's antitrust understanding is broad and deep; she previously worked in the Trump 45 administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the private sector. She already has support from several senators and Attorney General Pam Bondi; she ought to be confirmed easily. Slater, once confirmed, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, and their respective agencies should return to following the Consumer Welfare Standard ("CWS"), which has been the law of the land since the Supreme Court's 1979 Reiter v. Sonotone opinion. Reiter adopted CWS from Professor Robert Bork's seminal 1978 book, "The Antitrust Paradox," which explained that competition leads companies to benefit consumers through, for example, lowering prices, growing output, improving customer service, expanding research and development, and increasing innovation.

Kyiv also said that Russian forces launched two missile strikes and 72 air strikes, and used 1,024 kamikaze drones, along with 4,200 artillery attacks that targeted Ukrainian positions and settlements, AA reports. In Ukraine's Kharkiv region, Ukrainian forces said they prevented Russian advances towards Mala Shapkivka and Topoli, while Moscow's troops launched 16 attacks in Ukraine's Kupiansk region, with Kyiv's forces claiming to have repelled 14, as battles continue, Anadolu reports. Russia said oil flows through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a major route for supplying Kazakhstan and exporting to the global market, have been reduced by 30 to 40 percent after a Ukrainian drone attack on a pumping station. The Caspian pipeline, which ships more than 1 percent of daily global oil supplies, stretches over 1,500km (939 miles) and carries crude oil from Kazakhstan's Tengiz oilfield on Russia's northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea as well as from Russian producers. Freedom in Russia and the end of Russian President Vladimir Putin's government depends on Ukraine winning the war, former chess world champion and Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov said.

Trump border czar Tom Homan discusses the administration's latest action to secure the border. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been conducting surveillance flights with drones over Mexico in partnership with the U.S. neighbor to the south, to gather intelligence on cartels and fentanyl laboratories, according to a senior U.S. official. The Biden administration authorized the use of MQ9 Reaper drones, which the official said are not armed and "not lethal," over Mexico to focus on locating fentanyl labs and cartels. President Donald Trump's administration continued the program, which is being done in coordination with the Mexican government. The intelligence is shared with the Mexican government, which in turn has the authority to act on shutting down any illegal activities associated with the cartels and labs.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted entrepreneurs at a rare meeting in Beijing in 2018, the executives granted coveted front-row seats came from industries ranging from tech to energy, and few were familiar names. Fast-forward seven years and that line-up has changed markedly as Beijing buckles down to navigate a deepening technology war with the United States and celebrate powerful Chinese firms that have triumphed in the face of U.S. pressure. On Monday, Xi mobilized to the front lines a private sector battalion that included the founders of electric-car maker BYD, tech giants Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi as well as artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek.

Designing modern industrial systems requires balancing several competing objectives, such as profitability, resilience, and sustainability, while accounting for complex interactions between technological, economic, and environmental factors. Multi-objective optimization (MOO) methods are commonly used to navigate these tradeoffs, but selecting the appropriate algorithm to tackle these problems is often unclear, particularly when system representations vary from fully equation-based (white-box) to entirely data-driven (black-box) models. While grey-box MOO methods attempt to bridge this gap, they typically impose rigid assumptions on system structure, requiring models to conform to the underlying structural assumptions of the solver rather than the solver adapting to the natural representation of the system of interest. In this chapter, we introduce a unifying approach to grey-box MOO by leveraging network representations, which provide a general and flexible framework for modeling interconnected systems as a series of function nodes that share various inputs and outputs. Specifically, we propose MOBONS, a novel Bayesian optimization-inspired algorithm that can efficiently optimize general function networks, including those with cyclic dependencies, enabling the modeling of feedback loops, recycle streams, and multi-scale simulations - features that existing methods fail to capture. Furthermore, MOBONS incorporates constraints, supports parallel evaluations, and preserves the sample efficiency of Bayesian optimization while leveraging network structure for improved scalability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MOBONS through two case studies, including one related to sustainable process design. By enabling efficient MOO under general graph representations, MOBONS has the potential to significantly enhance the design of more profitable, resilient, and sustainable engineering systems.