The U.S. military is flying surveillance drones over the Gaza Strip, according to two Defense Department officials and an analysis by The New York Times. The officials said the drones were being used to aid in hostage recovery efforts, indicating that the U.S. is more involved than previously known. The aircraft are MQ-9 Reapers operated by U.S. Special Operations forces and were first spotted on Saturday on Flightradar24, a publicly accessible flight-tracking website, though Pentagon officials said that the aircraft have been active in the area since the days after the Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel by Hamas. While Israel frequently conducts reconnaissance flights over Gaza, U.S. defense officials said it was believed to be the first time that U.S. drones have flown missions over Gaza. The flights are operating at a critical juncture.

Russia has launched dozens of drone attacks and fired shells and missiles against civilian infrastructure, Ukraine reports. Kyiv said two dozen Russian drones and a missile were downed overnight as concern grows that Moscow is once again targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure ahead of winter. Officials in Kharkiv reported civilian targets were hit by shelling and drone attacks. The General Staff of Ukraine's military said Russian drones targeted several areas across Ukraine and were launched from Russia's Kursk region and the Primorsk-Akhtarsk area. "As a result of combat operations, in cooperation with the defence forces of Ukraine, 24 attack bpla'Shahed-136/131' [drones] and one controlled aviation missile were destroyed," the statement said, using the acronym for "bezpilotniy letayuschiy apparat", or "pilotless flying equipment".

Two people were killed and the power supply was disrupted in Russian shelling of Ukraine's southern Kherson region. There were more than 40 hits in the village," regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on the Telegram messaging app. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces repelled a new Russian assault near the town of Vuhledar between the eastern and southern front lines in eastern Donetsk. Zelenskyy said the Russians had suffered "heavy losses" with many soldiers killed and wounded. Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesman for Ukraine's military command, said Russian forces were trying to regroup and recover their losses near the eastern city of Avdiivka before trying to press ahead with its attempt to encircle the ruined town. Russia accused Ukraine of risking nuclear disaster after it shot down nine Ukrainian drones near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, which has been occupied by Russia since early March 2022. The drones were shot down near the Russian-held city of Enerhodar, where many of the plant's workers live. Russia and Ukraine have each accused the other of attacks near the plant. Russia said its air defences also brought down five Ukrainian drones over Crimea and one over the Black Sea. Russia jailed two more Ukrainian soldiers who fought in the city of Mariupol to lengthy prison sentences, as it continued to put dozens of prisoners of war on trial. Russia took thousands of Ukrainian soldiers captive after it seized Mariupol last May. Some were sent to Russia while others have been tried by Moscow-backed courts in occupied parts of eastern Ukraine. Under international law, soldiers cannot be prosecuted for having fought for their country. Two people were killed and the power supply was disrupted in Russian shelling of Ukraine's southern Kherson region. There were more than 40 hits in the village," regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on the Telegram messaging app.

Former El Paso U.S. Marshal Robert Almonte reacts to the latest report on border encounters from CBP. FIRST ON FOX: Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., is seeking information from top border and homeland security agencies about the potential threat posed by drones operated by terrorist groups and cartels at the southern border amid heightened awareness of a terror threat in recent weeks. Grassley sent letters to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) citing reports that Mexican cartels have increased their use of the drones at both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. "These drones are used by the cartels to carry out targeted assassinations and violent attacks by dropping explosives in Mexico, monitor and gain reconnaissance on the movements of U.S. Border Patrol agents and other U.S. law enforcement officers, and track the progress of their smugglers illegally crossing into the U.S.," he said. Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote to Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Department of Homeland Security has noted the use of drones by cartels as a threat to the U.S. in its FY 24 threat assessment.

Ukraine's Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said 118 settlements in 10 regions of Ukraine's east had come under Russian fire in the previous 24 hours, marking the heaviest day of Russian shelling this year. Ukraine said the Kremenchuk oil refinery in central Ukraine caught fire after a Russian drone attack that knocked out the power supply in three villages while falling debris from downed drones damaged railway power lines in a nearby region. Officials said the fire was quickly extinguished. Ukraine's air force said air defences shot down 18 of 20 Russian drones and a missile before they reached their targets. Writing in The Economist newspaper, Ukraine's commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny said the army needed new military capabilities and technological innovation – and air power, in particular – to break out of the current attritional fighting along the front line.

In recent years, legged locomotion controllers have exhibited remarkable stability and control across a wide range of terrains such as pavement, grass, sand, ice, slopes, and stairs [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. State-of-the-art approaches using sim-to-real learning primarily rely on proprioception and depth sensing to perceive obstacles and terrain [5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. These approaches discard valuable information about the terrain's material properties beyond geometry, such as slip, softness, etc., conveyed by color images. A primary reason for this choice is that sim-to-real transfer has been shown to work with depth images [5, 7, 10], but it remains unclear how well the transfer will work with color or RGB images. To utilize information beyond geometry, some works learn to predict task performance or task-relevant properties (e.g., traversability) from color images using data collected in the real world [16, 17, 18, 19, 20]. However, the terrain property predictors learned in prior works are task-or policy-specific, which limits their applicability to new tasks. To perceive a multipurpose representation of the terrain, we propose predicting the terrain's physical properties (e.g., friction, roughness) that are invariant to the policy and task.

Yemen's Houthi militia claimed an attempted attack on southern Israel on Tuesday, saying it had launched a "large batch" of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones toward Israeli targets. The Iran-backed militia carried out the attempted assault in response to what it called "brutal Israeli-American aggression" in Gaza, the Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said on the social media platform X. Mr. Sarea said the attack was the third operation conducted by the Houthis "in support of our persecuted brothers in Palestine," and threatened further missile and drone assaults. The Times could not independently verify the Houthi claims. On Tuesday, the Israeli military said its aerial defense system had intercepted a surface-to-surface missile fired toward Israel "from the area of the Red Sea."

FOX News' Greg Palkot reports the latest from the Israel-Lebanon border. A drone attack on a U.S. base in Syria was thwarted on Wednesday, according to a report. Two drones targeting Syria's al-Tanf region were disabled or destroyed by the base defense system, an Iraqi government source told Reuters. The thwarted attack comes as U.S. and Coalition Forces at Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) installations in Iraq and Syria have been attacked at least 27 times between Oct. 17-31. Of these attacks, 16 happened in Iraq and 11 took place in Syria.

The Pentagon placed 2,000 U.S. troops on a 24-hour notice to deploy. U.S. forces in western Iraq were targeted in another drone attack early Tuesday morning, according to a report, marking the latest in a string of assaults on American troops in the Middle East as the Israel-Hamas war continues. Two armed drones were used against Iraq's Ain al-Asad airbase, Reuters reported, citing a security source and a government source. The base hosts international troops that assist Iraq in defeating a terror group called the Daesh, or the Islamic State. No casualties or damage were reported.

Some multi-agent scenarios call for the possibility of evaluating specifications in a richer domain of truth values. Examples include runtime monitoring of a temporal property over a growing prefix of an infinite path, inconsistency analysis in distributed databases, and verification methods that use incomplete anytime algorithms, such as bounded model checking. In this paper, we present multi-valued alternating-time temporal logic (mv-ATL*), an expressive logic to specify strategic abilities in multi-agent systems. It is well known that, for branching-time logics, a general method for model-independent translation from multi-valued to two-valued model checking exists. We show that the method cannot be directly extended to mv-ATL*. We also propose two ways of overcoming the problem. Firstly, we identify constraints on formulas for which the model-independent translation can be suitably adapted. Secondly, we present a model-dependent reduction that can be applied to all formulas of mv-ATL*. We show that, in all cases, the complexity of verification increases only linearly when new truth values are added to the evaluation domain. We also consider several examples that show possible applications of mv-ATL* and motivate its use for model checking multi-agent systems.