Across New Jersey, reports of mysterious drone sightings have been rising for weeks, with people contacting authorities and posting on social media about aerial vehicles behaving strangely, especially at night. The reports have spread in New York City as well, with alleged sightings in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens. The United States Federal Aviation Administration imposed a temporary ban in New Jersey this week on flying drones over the Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Wharton and a golf course owned by US president-elect Donald Trump in Bedminster. While the mystery has become a growing sensation, virtually no information has been available about whether the sightings are connected or represent anything out of the ordinary. Vague and noncommittal statements from state and federal authorities have only complicated the matter and fueled public intrigue.

A spectre is haunting the United States--the spectre of drone warfare. Since the middle of November, unidentified unmanned aerial vehicles have lit up the skies above New Jersey, startling residents and baffling military and government officials. The US Army's Picatinny Arsenal research and manufacturing facility in the state's Morris County reported 11 confirmed instances of mysterious drones illegally entering its airspace since the middle of the month, while a dozen drones were spotted hovering over US Naval Weapons Station Earle in Monmouth County in early December. Similar sightings were reported in at least six other counties throughout the state; according to the Coast Guard, a group of drones even followed one of the service's vessels "in close pursuit" near a state park. The spate of drone sightings in the skies above New Jersey have caused alarm among state lawmakers, prompting one to call for a "limited state of emergency … until the public receives an explanation" regarding the source of the unidentified drones.

Reports of mysterious drone sightings in New Jersey have now spread to multiple states, as residents and local officials demand answers from the US Government. Numerous'car-sized' drones have been seen hovering throughout the state since mid-November, sometimes appearing in groups and often remaining in the same place for hours at a time. The first drone sightings appeared over the US Army's Picatinny Arsenal and over President-elect Donald Trump's golf course in Bedminster on November 18. But reports of varying levels of credibility have now spread to at least 12 counties throughout the Garden State, as well as eastern Pennsylvania and Orange County, New York. The FBI and other agencies are investigating, but the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday: 'We have no more information as to where these drones are coming from, where they're launching from, where they're landing.'

We've lost the ability to protect our own airspace. We have a complacent and incompetent Biden administration in charge that has set our drone industry back years. President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration can't come soon enough. We need an overhaul of our drone defenses nationwide. Our national security infrastructure is not set up to defend against what's coming.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., responds to high-ranking officials who have dismissed his previous claim that'reliable' sources said mystery drones flying over New Jersey originated from an Iranian mothership. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said he is "frustrated" by the government's lack of transparency surrounding the recent drone sightings in his state and surrounding areas in the mid-Atlantic region. On Capitol Hill on Thursday, the senator said that he has issued a letter asking for more information because Americans should be aware of what is happening in the skies. "I've been a little frustrated," he told reporters. "There hasn't been enough transparency letting people know what's happening. It's allowing a lot of potentially misinformation to spread, or at least fear. We should know what's going on over our skies."

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.

Fox News senior White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich speaks with White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby about the mysterious drones in the Garden State on'The Story.' A U.S. Senator from Connecticut said the mysterious drones spotted recently flying over states in the mid-Atlantic region should be "shot down, if necessary." In an interview on Capitol Hill Thursday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said intelligence analysis is needed on the drones and the U.S. must act "more aggressively" against the sightings that have been reported. "We should be doing some very smart intelligence analysis and take them out of the skies, especially if they're flying over airports or military bases," the senator said. "They should be shot down, if necessary, because they're flying over sensitive areas."

A social media user filmed what appeared to be drones flying over the Fairfield train station. Several drones were allegedly spotted in the skies above a Connecticut suburb on Thursday night, adding to recent drone sightings that have perplexed locals and raised questions about possible national security and public safety concerns. A social media user on X posted videos of possible drones in Fairfield, 55 miles northeast of New York City. Drones hovering over New Jersey and near Staten Island, New York in recent weeks have raised concerns amid a lack of clarity over their origin. A social media user said she filmed several drones hovering over Fairfield, Connecticut on Thursday night.

Internet connectivity in schools is critical to provide students with the digital literary skills necessary to compete in modern economies. In order for governments to effectively implement digital infrastructure development in schools, accurate internet connectivity information is required. However, traditional survey-based methods can exceed the financial and capacity limits of governments. Open-source Earth Observation (EO) datasets have unlocked our ability to observe and understand socio-economic conditions on Earth from space, and in combination with Machine Learning (ML), can provide the tools to circumvent costly ground-based survey methods to support infrastructure development. In this paper, we present our work on school internet connectivity prediction using EO and ML. We detail the creation of our multi-modal, freely-available satellite imagery and survey information dataset, leverage the latest geographically-aware location encoders, and introduce the first results of using the new European Space Agency phi-lab geographically-aware foundational model to predict internet connectivity in Botswana and Rwanda. We find that ML with EO and ground-based auxiliary data yields the best performance in both countries, for accuracy, F1 score, and False Positive rates, and highlight the challenges of internet connectivity prediction from space with a case study in Kigali, Rwanda. Our work showcases a practical approach to support data-driven digital infrastructure development in low-resource settings, leveraging freely available information, and provide cleaned and labelled datasets for future studies to the community through a unique collaboration between UNICEF and the European Space Agency phi-lab.

The security of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become an important research topic since the emergence of ChatGPT. Though there have been various effective methods to defend against jailbreak attacks, prefilling attacks remain an unsolved and popular threat against open-sourced LLMs. In-Context Learning (ICL) offers a computationally efficient defense against various jailbreak attacks, yet no effective ICL methods have been developed to counter prefilling attacks. In this paper, we: (1) show that ICL can effectively defend against prefilling jailbreak attacks by employing adversative sentence structures within demonstrations; (2) characterize the effectiveness of this defense through the lens of model size, number of demonstrations, over-defense, integration with other jailbreak attacks, and the presence of safety alignment. Given the experimental results and our analysis, we conclude that there is no free lunch for defending against prefilling jailbreak attacks with ICL. On the one hand, current safety alignment methods fail to mitigate prefilling jailbreak attacks, but adversative structures within ICL demonstrations provide robust defense across various model sizes and complex jailbreak attacks. On the other hand, LLMs exhibit similar over-defensiveness when utilizing ICL demonstrations with adversative structures, and this behavior appears to be independent of model size.