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Russia will give 'decisive response' if provoked by the West, says Lavrov

Al Jazeera

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Russia will give'decisive response' if provoked by the West, says Lavrov Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned NATO and the EU that "any aggression against my country will be met with a decisive response". Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Saturday, Lavrov insisted that Moscow had no plans to attack the West, but that it was prepared to act if provoked. "Russia is testing their ability to defend themselves and trying to influence societies so people begin to ask: 'If we can't protect ourselves, why should we keep supporting Ukraine?'. This is intended to reduce assistance to Ukraine, especially ahead of winter," he wrote on X. Moscow continues to deny violating Polish airspace with drones and Estonian airspace with fighter jets this month.


Israel's justification for Gaza hospital attack false, Reuters probe finds

Al Jazeera

Israel's justification for bombing a Khan Younis hospital in southern Gaza, claiming it targeted a Hamas camera, is false, according to an investigation by the news agency Reuters. Israeli forces planned the August 25 attack on Nasser Hospital using drone footage that, a military official said, showed a Hamas camera that was the target of the strike. But a Reuters review of visual evidence and interviews with witnesses established that the camera in question actually belonged to the news agency and had long been used by one of its own journalists. Their deaths bring the number of journalists killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza to more than 200 since the genocidal war began nearly two years ago. A day after the hospital strike, the army said troops had fired on a "suspicious" camera draped in cloth, claiming it was operated by Hamas.


Denmark reports new drone sightings overnight at military sites

Al Jazeera

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Unidentified drones have flown over Denmark's military sites, including its biggest base, the latest in a slew of incursions near airports and critical infrastructure this week, which officials have called a "hybrid attack" and hinted at possible Russian involvement. "The Danish Defence can confirm that drones were observed at several of the Danish Defence's locations last night. Several capabilities were deployed," an army spokesperson said on Saturday, without specifying where the drones were observed.


Drones seen over Danish military bases in latest air disruption

BBC News

Drones have been seen near military facilities including Denmark's largest, following a series of incidents that caused air disruption earlier this week. The devices were observed above Karup airbase, among others, forcing it to briefly close its airspace to commercial traffic. Possible sightings were also reported in Germany, Norway and Lithuania. It is the latest in a string of suspicious drone activity in Denmark, raising concerns about the nation's vulnerability to aerial attack and sparking fears of potential Russian involvement. Danish authorities said Thursday's incursions appeared to be a hybrid attack, but cautioned that they had no evidence to suggest Moscow was behind it.


Watch: Polar bears occupy abandoned Soviet-era research station

BBC News

Drone footage has captured a group of polar bears living inside an abandoned research station on Russia's Kolyuchin Island. Travel blogger, Vadim Makhorov, shared video that shows several bears inside the scattered building, looking through windows and walking around the island. A bear could be seen trying to catch the blogger's drone as it approached. The Kolyuchin weather station was abandoned in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian Alexey Molchanov breaks his own 2024 world record in one of the most technically challenging freediving events.


Watch: Moment freediver sets new world record with breath-defying 126m plunge

BBC News

Russian freediver Alexey Molchanov plunged 126m (413ft) in a single breath to set a new world record at the AIDA Freediving World Championships in Limassol, Cyprus. He descended deep below the Mediterranean Sea with nothing but a headlight, two fins and a rope as a guide, in a feat considered one of the most technically challenging freedive categories. Mr Molchanov broke his own 2024 world record of 125m, during which he held his breath for a staggering four minutes and 32 seconds. The BBC's Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, reports from joint manoeuvres by Russia and Belarus, as part of the Zapad 2025 (West 2025) military drills. 'Looks like a toy, but it's real': BBC examines a downed Russian drone Drones like this one were shot down over Polish airspace in the early hours of Wednesday.


Drone maker DJI loses lawsuit to exit Pentagon's list of firms with Chinese military ties

The Japan Times

Drone maker DJI loses lawsuit to exit Pentagon's list of firms with Chinese military ties A U.S. judge on Friday rejected a bid by China-based DJI, the world's largest drone maker, to be removed from the U.S. Defense Department's list of companies allegedly working with Beijing's military. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, D.C., said the Defense Department had substantial evidence supporting its finding that DJI, which sells more than half of all U.S. commercial drones, contributes to the Chinese defense industrial base." DJI had urged the court to order its removal from the Pentagon list designating it as a Chinese military company, saying it is neither owned nor controlled by the Chinese military. The judge rejected some of the government's other justifications for listing DJI. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.


A Simple and Reproducible Hybrid Solver for a Truck-Drone VRP with Recharge

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study last-mile delivery with one truck and one drone under explicit battery management: the drone flies at twice the truck speed; each sortie must satisfy an endurance budget; after every delivery the drone recharges on the truck before the next launch. We introduce a hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) solver that couples an ALNS-based truck tour (with 2/3-opt and Or-opt) with a small pointer/attention policy that schedules drone sorties. The policy decodes launch-serve-rendezvous triplets with hard feasibility masks for endurance and post-delivery recharge; a fast, exact timeline simulator enforces launch/recovery handling and computes the true makespan used by masked greedy/beam decoding. On Euclidean instances with $N{=}50$, $E{=}0.7$, and $R{=}0.1$, the method achieves an average makespan of \textbf{5.203}$\pm$0.093, versus \textbf{5.349}$\pm$0.038 for ALNS and \textbf{5.208}$\pm$0.124 for NN -- i.e., \textbf{2.73\%} better than ALNS on average and within \textbf{0.10\%} of NN. Per-seed, the RL scheduler never underperforms ALNS on the same instance and ties or beats NN on two of three seeds. A decomposition of the makespan shows the expected truck-wait trade-off across heuristics; the learned scheduler balances both to minimize the total completion time. We provide a config-first implementation with plotting and significance-test utilities to support replication.


EU to develop 'drone wall' amid regional airspace violations

Al Jazeera

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? EU to develop'drone wall' amid regional airspace violations European Union defence ministers have agreed to develop a "drone wall" along their borders with Russia and Ukraine to detect, track and intercept violations of their airspace, according to the bloc's defence chief. Friday's announcement comes after rogue drones entered Polish airspace on September 10, rattling eastern EU members. Although Danish authorities have not concluded their investigations, Frederiksen stressed that Russia was currently the primary threat to European security. The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the drone incidents in Poland and Denmark.


Israel Attacks Yemeni Capital, a Day After Houthi Drone Strike

NYT > Middle East

After significantly weakening other Iranian-backed groups in the region, Israel's military has turned its attention to the Houthis, carrying out a series of punishing strikes on Yemeni ports and other infrastructure. Last month an Israeli attack in Sana killed senior members of the Houthi-led government -- including the prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi -- but appeared to leave the group's military leadership largely unscathed. Israeli strikes in Yemen have also killed and wounded dozens of civilians in recent months, according to human rights groups. The United States has also bombed Yemen, in response to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthis say they have targeted ships linked to Israel, although some of the ships they struck have no clear connection to the country. Houthi attacks on Israel are typically blocked or intercepted by the Israeli military, as was the case late on Thursday when sirens sounded in parts of Israel and the military soon after said that a missile from Yemen had been thwarted.