White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby said the White House's assessment, in coordination with the FBI and state and local officials, is that the mysterious drones flying over the country are in fact "legal" and "lawful." Kirby told Fox News anchor Bret Baier Monday on "Special Report" they've examined roughly 5,000 sightings and to date, their analysis is "lawful, legal, commercial hobbyist and even law enforcement aircraft activity," is responsible for the sightings. "Some of it's manned, some of it's unmanned. We absolutely acknowledge that a lot of these are probably drones, but they're flying legally. And it is legal to fly drones in non-restricted airspace as long as you're registered with the [Federal Aviation Administration] FAA and there's thousands and thousands of these kinds of flights every single day," he added.

Ocean County, New Jersey Sheriff Michael Mastronardy shares how he launched his own drones to learn more information about the mysterious drones hovering over his state on'Your World.' Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced Monday that he will move to advance drone legislation this week that will give local officials more authority to respond to the growing concerns of drone sightings. Reports of drones flying over New Jersey and New York, particularly near military research facilities and Trump's Bedminster golf course, have prompted lawmakers to press the Biden administration for more transparency when it comes to who is flying the suspected unmanned aircraft and why the government is not doing anything about them. Schumer has called on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to "quickly deploy" any drone-detecting tools that are available to help New York and New Jersey deal with the mysterious drone sightings that started a few weeks ago. "This week, I will also come to the floor of the Senate to seek passage of legislation that will give local officials greater authority to swiftly respond to these sightings," Schumer said while speaking on the Senate floor on Monday.

As language models become integral to critical workflows, assessing their behavior remains a fundamental challenge -- human evaluation is costly and noisy, while automated metrics provide only coarse, difficult-to-interpret signals. We introduce natural language unit tests, a paradigm that decomposes response quality into explicit, testable criteria, along with a unified scoring model, LMUnit, which combines multi-objective training across preferences, direct ratings, and natural language rationales. Through controlled human studies, we show this paradigm significantly improves inter-annotator agreement and enables more effective LLM development workflows. LMUnit achieves state-of-the-art performance on evaluation benchmarks (FLASK, BigGenBench) and competitive results on RewardBench. These results validate both our proposed paradigm and scoring model, suggesting a promising path forward for language model evaluation and development.

We present flight patterns for a collision-free passage of swarms of drones through one or more openings. The narrow openings provide drones with access to an infrastructure component such as charging stations to charge their depleted batteries and hangars for storage. The flight patterns are a staging area (queues) that match the rate at which an infrastructure component and its openings process drones. They prevent collisions and may implement different policies that control the order in which drones pass through an opening. We illustrate the flight patterns with a 3D display that uses drones configured with light sources to illuminate shapes.

Predicting the location where a lost person could be found is crucial for search and rescue operations with limited resources. To improve the precision and efficiency of these predictions, simulated agents can be created to emulate the behavior of the lost person. Within this study, we introduce an innovative agent-based model designed to replicate diverse psychological profiles of lost persons, allowing these agents to navigate real-world landscapes while making decisions autonomously without the need for location-specific training. The probability distribution map depicting the potential location of the lost person emerges through a combination of Monte Carlo simulations and mobility-time-based sampling. Validation of the model is achieved using real-world Search and Rescue data to train a Gaussian Process model. This allows generalization of the data to sample initial starting points for the agents during validation. Comparative analysis with historical data showcases promising outcomes relative to alternative methods. This work introduces a flexible agent that can be employed in search and rescue operations, offering adaptability across various geographical locations.

Abstract-- This paper presents a ROS 2-based simulator framework for tethered UAV-UGV marsupial systems in Gazebo. It supports both manual control and automated trajectory tracking, with the winch adjusting the length of the tether based on the relative distance between the robots. The simulator's performance is demonstrated through experiments, including comparisons with real-world data, showcasing its capability to simulate tethered robotic systems. The framework offers a flexible tool for researchers exploring tethered robot dynamics. The source code of the simulator is publicly available for the research community.

Breonna Moffett were the U.S. soldiers killed in the Iran-backed drone attack. Two Iranian men, including a dual Iranian American citizen, have been charged in connection with a fatal drone strike earlier this year that killed three U.S. military service members and injured dozens more. Mohammad Mahdi Sadeghi was arrested in Massachusetts and Mohammad Abedini was arrested in Italy and was in the custody of Italian authorities, federal prosecutors said. Both men are charged with export control violations. They are accused of exporting sensitive technology to Iran that was used in the fatal drone attack.

Radioactive material went missing in New Jersey earlier this month, fueling conspiracy theories that it could be linked to the mysterious drone sightings. A piece of medical equipment used for cancer scans was shipped from the Nazha Cancer Center in Newfield on December 2 for disposal, but the'shipping container arrived at its destination damaged and empty.' The device, known as a'pin source,' contained a small amount of Germanium-68 (Ge-68) that is used to calibrate a medical scanner's accuracy. If handled without proper gear, it can cause radiation poisoning. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an alert for the missing shipment deemed'less than a Category 3,' meaning it could cause permanent injury if mishandled.

An experienced drone pilot in New Jersey has come forward to demonstrate how advanced the state's mystery drones are compared to ordinary consumer models. The pilot known to fans of his paranormal investigation series'Terror Talk' as Michael B, witnessed his own drone crash and burn as he attempted to steer it near one of the many, still-unexplained drone UFOs that have swarmed the state. 'When this started, I tried to take my drone over Picatinny Arsenal to follow a drone that was just hovering over there,' Michael explained, 'and as I got closer my drone lost power, spun out, the battery died and it went down.' 'But the other drone,' he noted, ominously, 'remained sitting in the air, unaffected.' Picatinny Arsenal, a US Army base that houses military research and manufacturing facilities, has proven to be ground zero for the Garden State's bizarre drone crisis. Officials at the arsenal, in fact, recently revealed that the aerial incursions above their base began five days earlier than previously reported, with one base police officer making a confirmed sighting on November 13. What makes these mystery drone flights so concerning, according to Michael B, is that sensitive sites like Picatinny Arsenal and major US airports already have drone jamming technology that prevents commercial drones from entering their airspace. The'Terror Talk' host even demonstrated how similar FAA-mandated jamming capabilities prevent models like his own from even taking off near local airports.

Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., joins'America's Newsroom' to call out the Defense Department for failing to act in response to the mystery drones that have sparked concerns over national security. The mysterious drone phenomenon centered in New Jersey has prompted government officials to issue fresh calls for expanded power as their counter-drone authorization is set to expire this week. The current drone-countering authorities -- authorized as part of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 -- grant both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) authority to use advanced detection technologies to identify, track and intercept drones that aren't complying with the law. The 2018 measure exempts the agencies from other laws that prevent interference with aircraft and wiretapping without a warrant. It expires on Dec. 20, and lawmakers must attach a last-minute extension to a stopgap spending bill to fund the government this week in order to prevent a lapse.