What does recognising a Palestinian state mean? At least four children were killed in the latest Israeli air strike on a school which was being used as a shelter for displaced Palestinians in Gaza. Al Jazeera's Ibrahim al-Khalili shows us the aftermath of the strike. Drone strike on mosque kills dozens in Sudan's el-Fasher Russia becoming'more dangerous', EU foreign affairs head warns

Ukraine says three killed in'massive' Russian aerial attack At least three people have been killed and more than 30 injured in a massive overnight Russian aerial attack on Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky says. He says regions across the country were targeted as part of a deliberate strategy to intimidate civilians and destroy our infrastructure, with one direct missile hit reported on a residential building. Ukraine's air force says Moscow launched 619 drones and missiles. Russia's defence ministry says its massive strike used precision weapons and targeted military-industrial facilities. Separately, Russia says four people were killed in a Ukrainian drone attack on the Saratov region.

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The Department of War hosted 'Falcon Peak 25.2' to explore cost-effective counter-drone technology to eliminate drone incursions over sensitive national security sites.

Russia has continued to provoke NATO and the EU. The drone incursion into Polish airspace earlier this month has Western leaders scrambling for answers. Putin, meanwhile, has made it clear he won't be backing down any time soon. NATO fighters shot down at least three of more than 20 Russian drones that flew into Polish airspace. German troops monitor the airspace over Ukraine around the clock. Night after night, they see Russian drones deployed across the region, with increasing numbers recently turning up in the western part of the country. On a recent Tuesday night dots began appearing on the troops' radar screens - hardly unusual here in the southeastern corner of Poland at the Rzeszów airport.

Drone strike on mosque kills dozens in Sudan's el-Fasher NewsFeed Drone strike on mosque kills dozens in Sudan's el-Fasher At least 70 people were killed when the paramilitary RSF struck a mosque in Sudan's el-Fasher in Darfur. The attack came the same day the UN warned of deepening ethnic violence in Sudan's civil war, which has already killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. Russia becoming'more dangerous', EU foreign affairs head warns

A drone crashed into a hotel in the southern Israeli city of Eilat on Thursday, causing a fire but no casualties, authorities said. Yemen's Houthi group, who have been firing drones and missiles in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, claimed responsibility for the attack. Palestinians turn to the sea to flee Israel's bombardment Trump says US wants Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base back from Taliban What did Jimmy Kimmel say about Charlie Kirk's killing?

Kim Jong Un declares AI military drone development a'top priority' North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un has said the use of artificial intelligence is a "top priority" in modernising his country's increasingly sophisticated weapons technology and building up drone capabilities, state media reports. During a visit to the Unmanned Aeronautical Technology Complex in the capital Pyongyang on Thursday, Kim presided over performance tests of multipurpose drones and unmanned surveillance vehicles, North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said on Friday. Kim also called for "expanding and strengthening the serial production capacity of drones". The visit to the aeronautical complex comes just a week after Kim oversaw another test of a new solid-fuel rocket engine designed for intercontinental ballistic missiles, which he hailed as a "significant" expansion of Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities. North Korea's military power includes nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles, an increasing stockpile of nuclear weapons and a nascent spy satellite programme, according to the United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Ukrainian drones hit a key oil-processing and petrochemical complex in Russia's Bashkortostan region, as well as an oil refinery in the Volgograd region, as Ukraine escalates its campaign against Russia's extensive oil and gas sector. Russian military units claim to have breached Ukraine's western village of Yampol and secured new positions near five residential areas in the same area, according to Russia's state TASS news agency.

Abstract-- While model-based controllers have demonstrated remarkable performance in autonomous drone racing, their performance is often constrained by the reliance on pre-computed reference trajectories. Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have revealed that many model-based controllers optimize surrogate objectives, such as trajectory tracking, rather than the primary racing goal of directly maximizing progress through gates. Inspired by these findings, this work introduces a reference-free method for time-optimal racing by incorporating this gate progress objective, derived from RL reward shaping, directly into the Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) formulation. The sampling-based nature of MPPI makes it uniquely capable of optimizing the discontinuous and non-differentiable objective in real-time. We also establish a unified framework that leverages MPPI to systematically and fairly compare three distinct objective functions with a consistent dynamics model and parameter set: classical trajectory tracking, contouring control, and the proposed gate progress objective. We compare the performance of these three objectives when solved via both MPPI and a traditional gradient-based solver . Our results demonstrate that the proposed reference-free approach achieves competitive racing performance, rivaling or exceeding reference-based methods.