South Korea on Tuesday apologized to its citizens for failing to shoot down North Korean drones that crossed its borders for the first time in five years. Lt. Gen. Kang Shin Chul, chief director of operation at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a televised address that the military deployed warplanes and attack helicopters but they were unable to take out the drones – including one that remained in South Korea for three hours. Five drones were detected by South Korea's military Monday, but not a single drone was shot down before they either returned to North Korean airspace or disappeared from Seoul's radar. In this photo provided by South Korean Defense Ministry, A U.S. B-52 bomber, C-17 and South Korean Air Force F-35 fighter jets fly over the Korean Peninsula during a joint air drill in South Korea, Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022. The mishap has drawn major concern over Seoul's defense abilities as Pyongyang's force posture has become increasingly aggressive.

North Korean drones entered South Korean airspace on Monday for the first time since 2017 in the latest example of escalating tensions between the neighbouring countries. The South's military was caught off guard, drawing criticism on Tuesday from President Yoon Suk-yeol, who sought to assuage concerns by announcing his cabinet would fast-track plans for a special drone unit. South Korea's military fired warning shots and some 100 rounds from a helicopter equipped with a machine gun but failed to bring down any of the drones. The military said it chased one of the five drones over the greater Seoul area but did not fully aggressively engage with it out of concern for civilian safety. A defence ministry official confirmed a South Korean KA-1 fighter jet was involved in an accident while flying to counter North Korea's drones after departing its Wonju base in the country's north.

South Korea sent drones across the border into North Korea for the first time Monday, an unprecedented tit-for-tat military move after Kim Jong Un's regime dispatched five unmanned aerial vehicles into its airspace. The exchange of drones, which briefly stopped flights from taking off at major airports near Seoul, came as Kim opened a major political meeting to set security, economic and political policy for the coming year, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Tuesday. He has spent the past year improving his atomic arsenal, showing no interest in returning to nuclear disarmament talks that have been stalled for three years. Kim's regime sent five drones across the border on Monday, the first time he has done so in more than five years. The first one crossed the border at 10:25 a.m. and returned after flying for about three hours.

FedEx employees are working around the clock to make sure packages get to people in time for Christmas. For the first time ever, some Walmart customers in Florida, Texas and Arizona will be able to have their packages delivered by drone. Walmart's drone service officially launched for select customers in Tampa and Orlando, Florida; Phoenix and the Dallas-area just ahead of the holidays. The nation's largest retailer has been working with national drone services provider DroneUp since 2020 when it began trialing deliveries of at-home COVID-19 self-collection kits. Walmart announced in May 2022 that it was expanding its DroneUp delivery network to reach 4 million U.S. households across six states including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Utah and Virginia by the end of the year.

Object detection models commonly deployed on uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) focus on identifying objects in the visible spectrum using Red-Green-Blue (RGB) imagery. However, there is growing interest in fusing RGB with thermal long wave infrared (LWIR) images to increase the performance of object detection machine learning (ML) models. Currently LWIR ML models have received less research attention, especially for both ground- and air-based platforms, leading to a lack of baseline performance metrics evaluating LWIR, RGB and LWIR-RGB fused object detection models. Therefore, this research contributes such quantitative metrics to the literature. The results found that the ground-based blended RGB-LWIR model exhibited superior performance compared to the RGB or LWIR approaches, achieving a mAP of 98.4%. Additionally, the blended RGB-LWIR model was also the only object detection model to work in both day and night conditions, providing superior operational capabilities. This research additionally contributes a novel labelled training dataset of 12,600 images for RGB, LWIR, and RGB-LWIR fused imagery, collected from ground-based and air-based platforms, enabling further multispectral machine-driven object detection research.

A team of researchers from Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, Unither Bioelectronics Inc., and Techna, University Health Network, has demonstrated the feasibility of using drones to carry human organs for transplantation to nearby locales. In a Focus piece, published in the journal Science Robotics, the researchers outline the factors that went into the groundbreaking event, and what it could mean for future patients around the world. As drone technology has become more reliable, engineers have begun to use them for more critical applications. In this instance, a drone carried a human lung donated by a deceased patient at one hospital in downtown Toronto, Canada, to another patient needing a new lung waiting in another hospital, also in downtown Toronto. The feasibility study was not the first to use a drone to carry human organs or medical supplies, but it is perhaps the most stringent. The effort was meant to test the use of drones for carrying donated organs on a regular basis.

Retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane on President Zelenskyy's trip to D.C. and the need to continue supporting Ukraine. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Monday that his country wants to hold a peace summit at the United Nations by the end of February but that Russia should first face a war crimes tribunal in an international court. "Every war ends in a diplomatic way. Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table," Kuleba told the Associated Press on Monday. "The United Nations could be the best venue for holding this summit because this is not about making a favor to a certain country."

Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich joined'America's Newsroom' to discuss Zelenskyy's visit to the White House to request additional aid in the war against Russia. Russian forces continued to wage war on Ukraine over the holiday weekend, with more than 40 missiles being launched into Ukrainian towns on Christmas day, according to Ukraine's military. According to Russian news agencies, which cited the country's defense ministry, three Russian military personnel were killed Monday by falling wreckage of a Ukrainian drone that was shot down as it was on its way to attack a base in Russia's Saratov region. Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated Sunday that he was open to negotiations and accused Ukraine and its Western allies of not engaging in talks. The U.S. has previously dismissed this stance from Russia as posturing given the ongoing attack on Ukraine.

Three Russian military personnel have been killed from the debris of a Ukrainian drone that was shot down and fell on a military base deep inside Russia, the country's defence ministry has said. "On December 26, at about 01:35 Moscow time, a Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicle was shot down at low altitude while approaching the Engels military airfield in the Saratov region," the Russian Defence Ministry said on Monday. "As a result of the fall of the wreckage of the drone, three Russian servicemen of the technical staff who were at the airfield were fatally wounded." The ministry added that aviation equipment was not damaged. Earlier on Monday, Roman Busargin, the governor of the Saratov region, said that civil infrastructure facilities were not damaged in the incident either.

In the previous reported attack on 5 December on the airfield and another air base in the Ryazan region, three servicemen were also killed by debris from a downed Ukrainian drone, Moscow said at the time. Two aircraft were lightly damaged.