Senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot provides details on the major strike on an Iraqi militia leader and the U.S.'s response to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea Iraq has condemned the United States after U.S. forces carried out a drone strike in central Baghdad on Thursday that killed a high-ranking militia commander. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said Friday that the U.S. targeting and killing Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi -- or "Abu Taqwa," the leader of the Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, an Iraqi Shi'ite militant group -- was a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. A U.S. defense official confirmed that Thursday's drone strike on a vehicle containing the militia leader and three other militia members was authorized as he was responsible for recent attacks on U.S. personnel. Sudani said Friday that the U.S. had bypassed the Iraqi government, which is "the body authorized to impose the law." In his statement, he also reiterated calls for U.S. troops to withdraw from the country.

A U.S. Special Operations drone strike in Baghdad on Thursday killed a senior figure in an Iran-linked militant group that is part of Iraq's security apparatus, drawing sharp criticism from the Iraqi government, as well as allied groups. The Pentagon acknowledged responsibility for the strike, saying in a statement that U.S. forces had taken "necessary and proportionate action," adding that the attack "was taken in self-defense" and that no civilians had been harmed. A missile fired by the drone struck a vehicle carrying three men near the logistics headquarters for the 12th brigade of the group, Harakat al-Nujaba, killing a brigade commander known as Abu Taqwa and two others, according to Iraqi security officials. The group, closely linked to Iran, was designated as a global terrorist organization by the State Department in 2019. Nujaba, however, has remained part of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella organization that is in turn part of the government's broader security forces.

This research addresses the challenge of executing multi-UAV survey missions over diverse terrains characterized by varying elevations. The approach integrates advanced two-dimensional ergodic search technique with model predictive control of UAV altitude and velocity. Optimization of altitude and velocity is performed along anticipated UAV ground routes, considering multiple objectives and constraints. This yields a flight regimen tailored to the terrain, as well as the motion and sensing characteristics of the UAVs. The proposed UAV motion control strategy is assessed through simulations of realistic search missions and actual terrain models. Results demonstrate the successful integration of model predictive altitude and velocity control with a two-dimensional potential field-guided ergodic search. Adjusting UAV altitudes to near-ideal levels facilitates the utilization of sensing ranges, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of the search. Furthermore, the control algorithm is capable of real-time computation, encouraging its practical application in real-world scenarios.

The integration of Multi-Rotor Aerial Vehicles (MRAVs) into 5G and 6G networks enhances coverage, connectivity, and congestion management. This fosters communication-aware robotics, exploring the interplay between robotics and communications, but also makes the MRAVs susceptible to malicious attacks, such as jamming. One traditional approach to counter these attacks is the use of beamforming on the MRAVs to apply physical layer security techniques. In this paper, we explore pose optimization as an alternative approach to countering jamming attacks on MRAVs. This technique is intended for omnidirectional MRAVs, which are drones capable of independently controlling both their position and orientation, as opposed to the more common underactuated MRAVs whose orientation cannot be controlled independently of their position. In this paper, we consider an omnidirectional MRAV serving as a Base Station (BS) for legitimate ground nodes, under attack by a malicious jammer. We optimize the MRAV pose (i.e., position and orientation) to maximize the minimum Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) over all legitimate nodes.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is claiming responsibility for the suicide bomb attacks in Iran this week, Fox News Digital has learned. ISIS claims to have orchestrated the double suicide bomber attack at the memorial to deceased Iranian military official Qassem Soleimani. A statement from ISIS published to Telegram named terrorist operatives Omar al-Mowahid and Sayefulla al-Mujahid as the suicidal attackers behind the "dual martyrdom operation."

Fox News senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram has the latest on the foreign policy issues facing the Biden administration on Your World. Four members of an Iran-aligned Iraqi militia group -- including a high-ranking Iraqi militia commander -- were killed in a drone strike in Baghdad on Thursday, according to reports by The Associated Press and Reuters. A U.S. official has confirmed to Fox News that the U.S. was responsible for the strike which targeted an Iraqi militia leader in Baghdad who is believed responsible for attacks on U.S. forces. The official says this was a precision strike on a vehicle and not a hit on a whole facility as other outlets have reported. The strike targeted a leader of the Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, an Iraqi Shi'ite military group, the U.S. official said.

Iraq's government has accused the United States-led international coalition forces of carrying out a drone strike targeting an Iran-aligned paramilitary group in the capital, Baghdad, that killed and wounded several people. The strike on Thursday targeted the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), also known as Hashd al-Shaabi. Hajj Mushtaq Talib al-Saidi (Abu Taqwa), a senior PMF commander, was among those killed. The total number of casualties was not immediately clear, but the Reuters news agency reported that four PMF members were killed and six wounded. "The Iraqi armed forces hold the forces of the international coalition responsible for this attack," Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's office said in a statement, calling it a "dangerous escalation and aggression".

Just 24 hours before he took to the podium on Wednesday, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon's powerful armed group Hezbollah, was preparing to deliver a speech commemorating another of Israel's former arch foes, Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian commander killed in a U.S. drone strike four years ago to the day. But in the wake of the suspected Israeli assassination on Tuesday of Saleh al-Arouri, a top Hamas leader killed in the heart of Hezbollah's stronghold in southern Beirut, Mr. Nasrallah revised his comments to commemorate not just one of his closest allies, but two. In a highly anticipated speech on Wednesday that gained new significance in the wake of Mr. al-Arouri's assassination, Hezbollah's leader denounced the attack in Lebanon's capital as a "dangerous" milestone, pledging revenge for the killing and threatening to meet any wider Israeli conflict with unrestrained warfare. "If the enemy considers waging a war against Lebanon, our battle will be without boundaries or rules," Mr. Nasrallah said. "We are not afraid of war. Those who think of going to war with us will regret it. War with us will come at a very, very, very high cost."

The explosions that killed more than 100 people in Iran on Wednesday took place at an anniversary commemoration for Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the top Iranian commander who was killed by a U.S. drone strike four years ago. General Suleimani, the most powerful Iranian commander at the head of the foreign-facing arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, was considered a hero by some in Iran and in other parts of the region for building an axis of allied militias to defend Iran's interests across the Middle East, to counter the United States and Israel, and for helping to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. In the United States, he was regarded as a force behind international terrorism campaigns, and President Donald Trump said his killing in January 2020 was ordered "to stop a war" because General Suleimani had been plotting attacks on American diplomats and military personnel. General Suleimani was designated as a terrorist by the United States and Israel, where he helped orchestrate waves of militia attacks.

Accurate trajectory tracking control for quadrotors is essential for safe navigation in cluttered environments. However, this is challenging in agile flights due to nonlinear dynamics, complex aerodynamic effects, and actuation constraints. In this article, we empirically compare two state-of-the-art control frameworks: the nonlinear-model-predictive controller (NMPC) and the differential-flatness-based controller (DFBC), by tracking a wide variety of agile trajectories at speeds up to 20 m/s (i.e.,72 km/h). The comparisons are performed in both simulation and real-world environments to systematically evaluate both methods from the aspect of tracking accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. We show the superiority of NMPC in tracking dynamically infeasible trajectories, at the cost of higher computation time and risk of numerical convergence issues. For both methods, we also quantitatively study the effect of adding an inner-loop controller using the incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) method, and the effect of adding an aerodynamic drag model. Our real-world experiments, performed in one of the world's largest motion capture systems, demonstrate more than 78% tracking error reduction of both NMPC and DFBC, indicating the necessity of using an inner-loop controller and aerodynamic drag model for agile trajectory tracking.