Drones
Israeli drone attack kills two in expanding occupied West Bank operation
An Israeli drone attack on a vehicle near the occupied West Bank town of Qabatiya has killed two people, the Palestinian Ministry of Health says on the fourth day of a large-scale Israeli operation in and around the nearby city of Jenin. The Israeli military said the air attack on Friday in the Jenin governorate hit a vehicle with what it said was a "terrorist cell" inside, but it gave no further details. The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that it was a drone attack that happened just before Israeli forces stormed Qabatiya and began "sweeping operations". The air attack coincided with the ongoing military operation against Palestinian fighters in Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp, which has already resulted in the deaths of 14 Palestinians and injured about 50 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah. The Israeli military also announced the arrests of 20 people it considers "wanted suspects" and said it had seized weapons.
Where2comm: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Spatial Confidence Maps
Multi-agent collaborative perception could significantly upgrade the perception performance by enabling agents to share complementary information with each other through communication. It inevitably results in a fundamental trade-off between perception performance and communication bandwidth. To tackle this bottleneck issue, we propose a spatial confidence map, which reflects the spatial heterogeneity of perceptual information. It empowers agents to only share spatially sparse, yet perceptually critical information, contributing to where to communicate. Based on this novel spatial confidence map, we propose Where2comm, a communication-efficient collaborative perception framework. Where2comm has two distinct advantages: i) it considers pragmatic compression and uses less communication to achieve higher perception performance by focusing on perceptually critical areas; and ii) it can handle varying communication bandwidth by dynamically adjusting spatial areas involved in communication. To evaluate Where2comm, we consider 3D object detection in both real-world and simulation scenarios with two modalities (camera/LiDAR) and two agent types (cars/drones) on four datasets: OPV2V, V2X-Sim, DAIR-V2X, and our original CoPerception-UAVs. Where2comm consistently outperforms previous methods; for example, it achieves more than 100, 000 lower communication volume and still outperforms DiscoNet and V2X-ViT on OPV2V.
Three killed in Russian drone attack on Ukraine's Kyiv region
At least three people have been killed in a Russian drone attack near Ukraine's capital. The interior ministry said on Friday that drone debris killed two men and a woman in the overnight attack on the central Kyiv region, damaging a residential apartment building, eight houses, commercial buildings and several cars. The attack came as Russian authorities said the country's air defence systems intercepted and destroyed 121 drones launched by Ukraine overnight. The drones were downed over 13 Russian regions, including seven over Moscow and the nearby region, the defence ministry said in a statement on Telegram. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the drones had been intercepted at several locations around the capital.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events – day 1,065
Russian aerial attacks in eastern and central Ukraine killed at least three people and wounded dozens. Among those killed were a 53-year-old in the Kostiantynivka area and a 54-year-old in the northeastern Kharkiv region. The mayor of Russia's Ryazan region, Sergei Sobyanin, said air defence units intercepted three Ukrainian drones headed for Russia's capital Moscow. No damage or casualties were reported, but specialist emergency crews were deployed to the site. Ukraine ordered the evacuation of some 267 children and their families from 16 settlements along the front line in the east of the country that were under threat from advancing Russian forces.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events – day 1,063
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia launched four missiles and 131 drones towards Ukraine overnight. The Air Force also said that 72 of the drones were destroyed while 59 disappeared without reaching their targets. Moscow's Ministry of Defence said its troops intercepted and destroyed 55 Ukrainian drones in six Russian regions overnight. Six drones were downed in Voronezh where, according to the region's Governor Aleksandr Gusev, falling debris started a blaze just six days after remnants of another intercepted drone triggered an earlier fire. Kyiv's military claimed responsibility for attacking an aviation manufacturing plant in Russia's Smolensk region where "combat aircraft[s] are being modernised and manufactured", as well as an attack on Voronezh which resulted in a fuel depot fire.
New Jersey drones are BACK as interactive map shows activity ramping up... after Trump promised to release truth
An interactive map of UFO sightings has revealed shockingly new reports of drones in New Jersey and other states, suggesting this bizarre mystery is still unfolding. The map, created by the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) tracking website Enigma Labs, shows hundreds of sightings logged as recently as January 7 in multiple Northeastern states. The mysterious drones along the East Coast appeared in November, with 22 people issuing reports to Enigma starting on the 20th. But that number dramatically increased to 347 by December 31. A drone ban was issued from December 18 to January 17, during which Enigma labs said the average number of reported sightings dropped by 43 percent.
A New Group Aims to Protect Whistleblowers In the Trump Era
The world needs whistleblowers, perhaps now more than ever. But whistleblowing has never been more dangerous. Jennifer Gibson has seen this problem develop up close. As a whistleblower lawyer based in the U.K., she has represented concerned insiders in the national security and tech worlds for more than a decade. She's represented family members of civilians killed by Pentagon drone strikes, and executives from top tech companies who've turned against their billionaire bosses.
Russia, Ukraine continue strikes despite Trump promise to bring swift peace
Russia and Ukraine have continued to exchange barrages of air attacks, despite Donald Trump having said he would end the war within 24 hours of becoming US president. While Trump was inaugurated on Monday afternoon, neither Kyiv nor Moscow have shown signs of de-escalating the drone and missile strikes they have been launching against one another in recent months. Both launched barrages overnight on Tuesday. Russia said it downed 55 Ukrainian drones, more than half of which were intercepted over regions on the border. Kyiv said it struck an oil depot near the town of Liski in the Voronezh region, sparking a blaze at the facility for the second time in less than a week.