The U.S. Secret Service (USSS) should have "one set of standards," according to Republican Oklahoma Rep. Josh Brecheen. Brecheen introduced a bill on Tuesday called the Secret Service Readiness Act that aims to create "a uniform fitness standard for Secret Service special agents and uniformed division officers" after the assassination attempt that wounded former President Trump at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. "We believe that there ought to be one set of standards for Secret Service agents. There shouldn't be multiple different ways you can qualify based upon your sex or your political beliefs. If people who are being protected by [the] Secret Service – if they want the opportunity to let those who can't meet full historic standards on their details, let them handle it. Don't force it upon everybody else and potentially make them more vulnerable to an assassination attempt. There should be one set of standards."

Formation flight of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) poses significant challenges in terms of safety and formation keeping, particularly in cluttered environments. However, existing methods often struggle to simultaneously satisfy these two critical requirements. To address this issue, this paper proposes a sampling-based trajectory planning method with a hierarchical structure for formation flight in dense obstacle environments. To ensure reliable local sensing information sharing among UAVs, each UAV generates a safe flight corridor (SFC), which is transmitted to the leader UAV. Subsequently, a sampling-based formation guidance path generation method is designed as the front-end strategy, steering the formation to fly in the desired shape safely with the formation connectivity provided by the SFCs. Furthermore, a model predictive path integral (MPPI) based distributed trajectory optimization method is developed as the back-end part, which ensures the smoothness, safety and dynamics feasibility of the executable trajectory. To validate the efficiency of the developed algorithm, comprehensive simulation comparisons are conducted. The supplementary simulation video can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSxbUN0tn1M.

Israel strikes Yemen Houthis Dek: Israel launched its first ever strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen just days after Jerusalem vowed revenge from a drone strike on Tel Aviv. A secret meeting between the U.S., Israel and the United Arab Emirates has been held to discuss a potential strategy on how the Gaza Strip will be governed once there is an end to the months-long war, Fox News confirmed Tuesday. The meeting, held in Abu Dhabi on Thursday, suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be looking to establish a plan for Gaza once the war is over, following repeated calls for a cease-fire. But details on the Thursday meeting – first reported by Axios – remain scarce, and it is unclear if options for ending the war were also discussed. Smoke and flames rise in the wake of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Nov. 2, 2023.

One person has been killed and others wounded in a Ukrainian drone attack on a ferry at port in southern Russia, the regional governor has said. Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev said the ferry had caught fire at Port Kavkaz but there was no risk of it spreading. The port lies a few kilometres from the Kerch bridge, which enables road and rail travel between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. "Unfortunately there are injured and dead among the crew and port staff," Mr Kondratyev said. He added that emergency services were on the scene.

Russia downed 25 Ukrainian drones overnight, the Ministry of Defence in Moscow said on Tuesday. At least 21 UAVs were "intercepted and destroyed" in Crimea, two over the Bryansk region, and another two over the Belgorod region. Russia also said that it shot down 85 Ukrainian drones the previous day, including 47 in the region of Rostov. Authorities in the Russian Black Sea town of Tuapse in the Krasnodar region said that debris from one downed drone sparked a fire at an oil refinery and killed one person. Russia has announced that starting Tuesday, it will restrict entry to 14 areas in Belgorod, which have been subject to heavy attacks.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide agile and safe solutions to communication relay networks, offering improved throughput. However, their modeling and control present challenges, and real-world deployment is hindered by the gap between simulation and reality. Moreover, enhancing situational awareness is critical. Several works in the literature proposed integrating UAV operation with immersive digital technologies, such as Digital Twin (DT) and Extended Reality (XR), to address these challenges. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of current research and developments involving immersive digital technologies for UAVs, including the latest advancements and emerging trends. We also explore the integration of DT and XR with Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to create more intelligent, adaptive, and responsive UAV systems. Finally, we provide discussions, identify gaps in current research, and suggest future directions for studying the application of immersive technologies in UAVs, fostering further innovation and development in this field. We envision the fusion of DTs with XR will transform how UAVs operate, offering tools that enhance visualization, improve decision-making, and enable effective collaboration.

The focus of this paper is to increase our understanding of the Longest Processing Time First (LPT) heuristic. LPT is a classical heuristic for the fundamental problem of uniform machine scheduling. For different machine speeds, LPT was first considered by Gonzalez et al (SIAM J. Computing, 1977). Since then, extensive work has been done to improve the approximation factor of the LPT heuristic. However, all known implementations of the LPT heuristic take $O(mn)$ time, where $m$ is the number of machines and $n$ is the number of jobs. In this work, we come up with the first near-linear time implementation for LPT. Specifically, the running time is $O((n+m)(\log^2{m}+\log{n}))$. Somewhat surprisingly, the result is obtained by mapping the problem to dynamic maintenance of lower envelope of lines, which has been well studied in the computational geometry community. Our second contribution is to analyze the performance of LPT for the Drones Warehouse Problem (DWP), which is a natural generalization of the uniform machine scheduling problem motivated by drone-based parcel delivery from a warehouse. In this problem, a warehouse has multiple drones and wants to deliver parcels to several customers. Each drone picks a parcel from the warehouse, delivers it, and returns to the warehouse (where it can also get charged). The speeds and battery lives of the drones could be different, and due to the limited battery life, each drone has a bounded range in which it can deliver parcels. The goal is to assign parcels to the drones so that the time taken to deliver all the parcels is minimized. We prove that the natural approach of solving this problem via the LPT heuristic has an approximation factor of $\phi$, where $\phi \approx 1.62$ is the golden ratio.

In situ imageomics leverages machine learning techniques to infer biological traits from images collected in the field, or in situ, to study individuals organisms, groups of wildlife, and whole ecosystems. Such datasets provide real-time social and environmental context to inferred biological traits, which can enable new, data-driven conservation and ecosystem management. The development of machine learning techniques to extract biological traits from images are impeded by the volume and quality data required to train these models. Autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are well suited to collect in situ imageomics data as they can traverse remote terrain quickly to collect large volumes of data with greater consistency and reliability compared to manually piloted UAV missions. However, little guidance exists on optimizing autonomous UAV missions for the purposes of remote sensing for conservation and biodiversity monitoring. The UAV video dataset curated by KABR: In-Situ Dataset for Kenyan Animal Behavior Recognition from Drone Videos required three weeks to collect, a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. Our analysis of KABR revealed that a third of the videos gathered were unusable for the purposes of inferring wildlife behavior. We analyzed the flight telemetry data from portions of UAV videos that were usable for inferring wildlife behavior, and demonstrate how these insights can be integrated into an autonomous remote sensing system to track wildlife in real time. Our autonomous remote sensing system optimizes the UAV's actions to increase the yield of usable data, and matches the flight path of an expert pilot with an 87% accuracy rate, representing an 18.2% improvement in accuracy over previously proposed methods.

Russia launched its fifth drone attack on Kyiv in two weeks, with Ukraine's air defence systems destroying all the air weapons before they could reach the capital, Ukraine's military said. No casualties or damage was reported, Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv's military administration, said on Telegram. Russia's air defence systems destroyed eight Ukrainian drones overnight, the Russian Ministry of Defence said. Three of the drones were destroyed over the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, and three were intercepted in the Black Sea, the ministry said on Telegram.

Israeli military personnel may have also missed the drone simply because of human error and "contributed to the Houthis achieving a lucky shot," said Fabian Hinz, an expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Residents said the sound of the blast had awakened them in the predawn hours. Yochai Afek, 35, said he had looked out his bedroom window to see his car in flames. Thinking that an air-conditioner had fallen on his vehicle, he and his wife ran outside with a fire extinguisher and a hose, and were surprised to find a large crowd outside at 3 a.m. "We didn't understand why the whole neighborhood came out to the streets because of a fallen AC unit," Mr. Afek said.