In a series of calls with reporters on Monday morning, incoming Trump administration officials outlined dozens of executive orders the president-elect planned to take when he officially takes office, including 10 focused on what one official described as "common sense immigration policy". Officials said that Trump plans to end birthright citizenship, meaning that the children of undocumented migrants living in the US will no longer automatically be considered US citizens. Birthright citizenship, however, is enshrined in the US constitution and would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress to change. The official provided no further detail on how Trump plans to accomplish this. As part of the national emergency designation at the border, Trump will also direct the Department of Defense to "seal the border" and surge additional resources and personnel, including counter-drone capabilities.

--Egomotion estimation is crucial for applications such as autonomous navigation and robotics, where accurate and real-time motion tracking is required. However, traditional methods relying on inertial sensors are highly sensitive to external conditions, and suffer from drifts leading to large inaccuracies over long distances. Vision-based methods, particularly those util-ising event-based vision sensors, provide an efficient alternative by capturing data only when changes are perceived in the scene. In this work, we propose a fully event-based pipeline for egomotion estimation that processes the event stream directly within the event-based domain. This method eliminates the need for frame-based intermediaries, allowing for low-latency and energy-efficient motion estimation. We construct a shallow spiking neural network using a synaptic gating mechanism to convert precise event timing into bursts of spikes. These spikes encode local optical flow velocities, and the network provides an event-based readout of egomotion. We evaluate the network's performance on a dedicated chip, demonstrating strong potential for low-latency, low-power motion estimation. Additionally, simulations of larger networks show that the system achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in egomotion estimation tasks with event-based cameras, making it a promising solution for real-time, power-constrained robotics applications. The estimation of egomotion plays an important role in applications such as autonomous navigation, robotics and Augmented Reality (AR).

Amazon's drones won't be making any deliveries in the foreseeable future. According to Bloomberg, the company has paused all commercial drone deliveries in Texas and Arizona after a previously undisclosed event in which two of Amazon's MK30 drones had crashed at the Pendleton, Oregon airport it uses for testing. MK30 is the company's next-gen drone model, which is lighter and has a longer range than its predecessor, the MK27. The incidents took place in December, with one of the drones even catching fire after it fell. Amazon reportedly determined that its drones crashed due a software issue that's linked to the light rain drizzling at the time the tests were being conducted.

At least four people have been killed in a Russian drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital. Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv's military administration, said the attack at dawn on Saturday took place in the city's centrally located Shevchenkivskyi district. "Stay in shelters," said Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, in a post on Telegram on Saturday morning. He had warned of a "ballistic missile threat" against the capital hours earlier and said air defences were in operation around the city. Windows were shattered in Shevchenkivskyi district, including those at the entrance of the Lukianivska metro station, which was closed down, according to the mayor.

Three people have been killed in Kyiv overnight, according to the head of the Ukrainian military. Explosions were heard across the Ukrainian capital as air raid sirens sounded and air defence crews responded to a Russian ballistic missile attack. Ukraine has continued its drone attacks against Russian oil infrastructure, hitting depots in the Tula and Kaluga regions south of Moscow overnight. Images said to depict the burning depots have been shared online as Kaluga's regional governor claimed several drones had been shot down. The governors of Russia's Bryansk and Smolensk regions reported that air defence units had shot down a total of 14 Ukrainian drones with no reports of casualties.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has signed a 100-year partnership agreement with Ukraine to provide support across various sectors, including healthcare and military technology, while pledging to provide security guarantees if an end to Russia's war comes. During Starmer's first visit to Kyiv since becoming prime minister, the British leader told a news conference on Thursday that the United Kingdom would examine "the practical ways to get a just and lasting peace … that guarantees your security, your independence and your right to choose your own future". "We will work with you and all of our allies on steps that would be robust enough to guarantee Ukraine's security," Starmer said. "Those conversations will continue for many months ahead." While Starmer was speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the presidential palace, loud blasts and air raid sirens were heard over Kyiv as air defence systems took aim at a Russian drone attack. The British leader said the Russian attack served as a reminder of the situation on the ground.

A fire has broken out at a Californian power plant housing one of the largest battery energy storage facilities in the world. The blaze began in a building containing lithium-ion batteries on Thursday afternoon, an official at the Monterey County Sheriff's office said. The Moss Landing power plant, run by Vistra Corp, was evacuated, as were people in the surrounding area. Officials are not actively fighting the fire, the Monterey Sheriff spokesperson said, and are instead leaving the building and the batteries to burn on the advice of fire experts.

Video shows the moment drones started falling from the sky during a drone show at Eola Lake in Orlando, Florida on Dec. 21, 2024. The National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary report on Thursday into what went wrong at a Florida drone show last month that caused some of the aircraft to go rogue, leaving a little boy seriously injured. The mishap took place during a Christmas light show put on by Sky Elements at Lake Eola Park in Orlando on Dec. 21, 2024. Hundreds of people were watching the aerial show when several of the drones flew out of formation – some colliding with one another before falling to the ground. One of the rogue drones struck a 7-year-old boy in the face and chest, knocking him out upon impact.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as Drones, are one of 21st century most transformative technologies. Emerging first for military use, advancements in materials, electronics, and software have catapulted drones into multipurpose tools for a wide range of industries. In this paper, we have covered the history, taxonomy, architecture, navigation systems and branched activities for the same. It explores important future trends like autonomous navigation, AI integration, and obstacle avoidance systems, emphasizing how they contribute to improving the efficiency and versatility of drones. It also looks at the major challenges like technical, environmental, economic, regulatory and ethical, that limit the actual take-up of drones, as well as trends that are likely to mitigate these obstacles in the future. This work offers a structured synthesis of existing studies and perspectives that enable insights about how drones will transform agriculture, logistics, healthcare, disaster management, and other areas, while also identifying new opportunities for innovation and development.

The rapid development of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) technology has spawned a wide variety of applications, such as emergency communications, regional surveillance, and disaster relief. Due to their limited battery capacity and processing power, multiple UAVs are often required for complex tasks. In such cases, a control center is crucial for coordinating their activities, which fits well with the federated learning (FL) framework. However, conventional FL approaches often focus on a single task, ignoring the potential of training multiple related tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a UAV-assisted multi-task federated learning scheme, in which data collected by multiple UAVs can be used to train multiple related tasks concurrently. The scheme facilitates the training process by sharing feature extractors across related tasks and introduces a task attention mechanism to balance task performance and encourage knowledge sharing. To provide an analytical description of training performance, the convergence analysis of the proposed scheme is performed. Additionally, the optimal bandwidth allocation for UAVs under limited bandwidth conditions is derived to minimize communication time. Meanwhile, a UAV-EV association strategy based on coalition formation game is proposed. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in enhancing multi-task performance and training speed.