Aid workers trying to deliver supplies to Gaza were left stranded on a burning ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea after they say it was attacked by drones. The ship was part of an attempt to challenge Israel's two-month blockade of Gaza.

A ship carrying aid to Gaza in a bid to break Israel's blockade has been hit by drones in international waters off Malta, according to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), the group that organised the mission. The FFC said in a statement on Friday that the vessel, now located 14 nautical miles (25km) from Malta, was the target of two drone strikes while on its way to Gaza. The ship had been seeking to deliver aid to the besieged enclave, where aid groups warn people are struggling to survive following a two-month total blockade by Israel. "Armed drones attacked the front of an unarmed civilian vessel twice, causing a fire and a substantial breach in the hull," the group said. The statement did not directly accuse Israel of carrying out the attack.

The NGO appeared to accuse Israel of being behind the incident and called for Israeli ambassadors to be summoned to answer for "violation of international law, including the ongoing blockade and the bombing of our civilian vessel". The Israeli military said it was looking into reports of the attack. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition uploaded a video showing a fire on one of its ships but did not indicate whether anyone had been hurt. It said the attack appeared to have targeted the generator, which left the ship without power and at risk of sinking. The ship was 17 nautical miles (31.5 kilometres) east of Malta when it was hit.

An aid ship heading to Gaza has sent out a distress signal after crew members say it was hit in a drone attack and has caught fire. There are 30 aid workers on board the Freedom Flotilla ship, which was attempting to break Israel's 2-month aid blockade.

Vance made the comments in a wide-ranging interview, in which he defended Trump's approach to the war in Ukraine. "Yes, of course, [the Ukrainians] are angry that they were invaded," Vance added. "But are we going to continue to lose thousands and thousands of soldiers over a few miles of territory this or that way?" Trump this week suggested that Ukraine might be willing to cede Crimea - which Russia invaded in 2014 - in order to reach a truce settlement. But Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky had earlier implied that he would be unable to accept Russian control of the peninsula, citing the Ukrainian constitution. In a separate interview with Fox News on Thursday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there needed to be a "breakthrough" in the conflict soon, otherwise Trump "will have to decide how much time to dedicate to this". Russian president Vladimir Putin this week announced a temporary three-day ceasefire from 8 May, to coincide with anniversary celebrations marking the end of World War Two.

Russia accused Ukraine of deliberately targeting civilians during a recent drone attack that killed at least seven people and wounded more than 20 on Thursday morning in partially occupied Kherson. The drone strike hit a market in the town of Oleshky in Russian-controlled Kherson at approximately 9:30am local time, when many people were outdoors due to the May 1 public holiday, the region's Moscow-appointed governor said. Ukraine's military said the attack targeted Russian troops, and only military personnel were killed, although the claims by either side have not been independently verified. A Russian strike on Ukraine's Odesa killed two people, and a Russian drone attack in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia set a building on fire on Thursday night, injuring 14 people, with no fatalities. Ukraine's SBU Security Service said it has thwarted the attempted murder of Sergiy Sternenko, a prominent activist and video blogger, and also detained a suspect.

As machine learning is increasingly deployed in autonomous systems, verification of neural network controllers is becoming an active research domain. Existing tools and annual verification competitions suggest that soon this technology will become effective for real-world applications. Our application comes from the emerging field of microflyers that are passively transported by the wind, which may have various uses in weather or pollution monitoring. Specifically, we investigate centimetre-scale bio-inspired gliding drones that resemble Alsomitra macrocarpa diaspores. In this paper, we propose a new case study on verifying Alsomitra-inspired drones with neural network controllers, with the aim of adhering closely to a target trajectory. We show that our system differs substantially from existing VNN and ARCH competition benchmarks, and show that a combination of tools holds promise for verifying such systems in the future, if certain shortcomings can be overcome. We propose a novel method for robust training of regression networks, and investigate formalisations of this case study in Vehicle and CORA. Our verification results suggest that the investigated training methods do improve performance and robustness of neural network controllers in this application, but are limited in scope and usefulness. This is due to systematic limitations of both Vehicle and CORA, and the complexity of our system reducing the scale of reachability, which we investigate in detail. If these limitations can be overcome, it will enable engineers to develop safe and robust technologies that improve people's lives and reduce our impact on the environment.

Ukraine's parliament is expected to ratify a controversial minerals deal with the United States in a decisive step towards securing the latter's long-term commitment to the war-battered country amid stalled efforts to strike a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire. The deal, signed by Kyiv and Washington on Wednesday, pushed by US President Donald Trump and after protracted negotiations, marks an inflection point of sorts in the war, granting the US priority access to Ukraine's critical minerals as a means of deterring future Russian aggression. However, it stops short of offering specific security guarantees and questions remain over accessing minerals in areas under Russian control. Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said on Thursday that the deal "marks an important milestone in Ukraine–US strategic partnership aimed at strengthening Ukraine's economy and security". "We're expecting it to be discussed and ratified by Ukraine's parliament later today," said Al Jazeera's Zein Basravi, reporting from Kyiv.

Following several months of numerous high-profile aviation accidents, new data suggest pilots are facing a specific threat when it comes to keeping airline passengers safe in the skies. Last year, drones accounted for approximately two-thirds of reported near-midair collisions with commercial aircraft taking off or landing within the country's 30 busiest airports, according to the Associated Press. The findings come as aviation safety data indicate drones accounted for the highest number of near-misses since 2020, with the first reports dating back to 2014. "The rise in recreational and commercial drone use has simply outpaced education and enforcement," aviation attorney Jason Matzus told Fox News Digital. "More people are flying drones without fully understanding the rules or the risks."

The enemy is attacking Odesa with strike drones. There is considerable damage to civilian infrastructure, particularly dwellings,