The drones used to attack Russian ships in the Black Sea in Crimea were equipped with Canadian-made parts used in the navigation systems, according to Russia's defence ministry. It said 16 Ukrainian drones attacked the fleet in the Black Sea in the annexed Crimean Peninsula early on Saturday. Russia said its navy "repelled" the assault in the bay of Sevastopol. The Russian military "conducted an examination of Canadian-made navigation modules" found in the shot-down unmanned aerial vehicles. "According to the results of the information recovered from the navigation receiver's memory, it was established that the launch of maritime drones was carried out from the coast near the city of Odesa," the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

Russia's blockade of grain exports makes it "impossible" for fully loaded ships to leave port, Ukraine charged Sunday after Moscow claimed drone attacks on its Crimea fleet had exploited the grain corridor safe zone. Kyiv's maritime grain exports were halted after Russia pulled out of a landmark agreement that allowed the vital shipments. The July deal to unlock grain exports signed between Russia and Ukraine and brokered by Turkey and the United Nations, is critical to easing the global food crisis caused by the conflict. "(A) bulk carrier loaded with 40 tons of grain was supposed to leave the Ukraine port today," Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov tweeted. "These foodstuffs were intended for Ethiopians, that are on the verge of famine. But due to the blockage of the'grain corridor' by Russia the export is impossible," the Ukrainian minister said.

Western governments are calling on Russia to reverse its decision to pull out of a UN-brokered grain deal, a move that undermines efforts to ease a global food crisis, with Ukraine saying Moscow had planned the move well in advance. The Turkey and UN-brokered deal was signed between Russia and Ukraine in July under which Moscow allowed the grain ships to leave Ukrainian Black Sea ports. The agreement has already allowed more than 9 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain to be exported and was due to be renewed on November 19. Moscow suspended its participation in the deal on Saturday, effectively blocking shipments from Ukraine, one of the world's top grain exporters, in response to what it called a major Ukrainian drone attack earlier in the day on its Black Sea Fleet headquarters near the port of Sevastopol in Russian-annexed Crimea. "Russia's decision to suspend participation in the Black Sea deal puts at risk the main export route of much needed grain and fertilisers to address the global food crisis caused by its war against Ukraine," European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Twitter on Sunday.

Technology being developed in a nondescript office building in Reston could change how Army soldiers train for and operate in combat thousands of miles away. The Army's Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) runs on a pair of Microsoft goggles and links to a microsized drone that flies autonomously and collects video analyzed in real time by artificial intelligence algorithms trained to identify threats, like an enemy combatant with an assault rifle coming around a corner, or a vehicle of interest. Detections are sent to a heads-up display within the goggles and are shared across a squad. "It can all be done at the tactical edge out on the battlefield, using new-edge computing technologies, which basically puts the power of a supercomputer in the soldiers' hands," says Rob Albritton, a vice president at Reston-based Octo who heads up the AI Center of Excellence at the federal contractor's oLabs tech accelerator. Octo has been working on developing AI technology for IVAS since 2020 and is currently working with about 20 government agencies on a variety of other AI projects.

Russia on Saturday suspended participation in a U.N.-brokered Black Sea grain deal after what it said was a major Ukrainian drone attack on its fleet in Crimea, dealing a blow to attempts to ease the global food crisis. U.S. President Joe Biden denounced the move as "purely outrageous" and said it would increase starvation. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites. If this does not resolve the issue or you are unable to add the domains to your allowlist, please see this support page.

Supervised object detection methods provide subpar performance when applied to Foreign Object Debris (FOD) detection because FOD could be arbitrary objects according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) specification. Current supervised object detection algorithms require datasets that contain annotated examples of every to-be-detected object. While a large and expensive dataset could be developed to include common FOD examples, it is infeasible to collect all possible FOD examples in the dataset representation because of the open-ended nature of FOD. Limitations of the dataset could cause FOD detection systems driven by those supervised algorithms to miss certain FOD, which can become dangerous to airport operations. To this end, this paper presents a self-supervised FOD localization by learning to predict the runway images, which avoids the enumeration of FOD annotation examples. The localization method utilizes the Vision Transformer (ViT) to improve localization performance. The experiments show that the method successfully detects arbitrary FOD in real-world runway situations. The paper also provides an extension to the localization result to perform classification; a feature that can be useful to downstream tasks. To train the localization, this paper also presents a simple and realistic dataset creation framework that only collects clean runway images. The training and testing data for this method are collected at a local airport using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Additionally, the developed dataset is provided for public use and further studies.

Russia has suspended its participation in a landmark agreement that allowed vital grain exports from Ukraine after what it said was a drone attack on Russian ships in occupied Crimea. Russia's defence ministry said Ukraine attacked the Black Sea Fleet near Sevastopol in the annexed Crimean Peninsula with 16 drones in the early hours of Saturday, and that British navy "specialists" had helped coordinate the "terrorist" attack. London bluntly rejected Moscow's claim. The Turkey and UN-brokered deal to unlock grain exports signed between Russia and Ukraine in July is critical to easing the global food crisis caused by the conflict. The agreement has already allowed more than 9 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain to be exported and was due to be renewed on November 19.

Australian surf lifesavers are increasingly using drones to spot sharks at the beach before they get too close to swimmers. But just how reliable are they? Discerning whether that dark splodge in the water is a shark or just, say, seaweed isn't always straightforward and, in reasonable conditions, drone pilots generally make the right call only 60% of the time. While this has implications for public safety, it can also lead to unnecessary beach closures and public alarm. Engineers are trying to boost the accuracy of these shark-spotting drones with artificial intelligence (AI).

Fox News contributor Mike Pompeo joined'America Reports' to discuss Putin alleging Ukraine will use a'dirty bomb' in the war and the latest on Hunter Biden's business dealings. Russia announced it is withdrawing from the UN-facilitated Black Sea grain export agreement after an attack on its naval forces in Sevastopol, Crimea. "We've seen the reports from the Russian Federation regarding the suspension of their participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative following an attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet," Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. Secretary General, said in a press release Saturday morning. "We are in touch with the Russian authorities on this matter." "It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative which is a critical humanitarian effort that is clearly having a positive impact on access to food for millions of people around the world," Dujarric added.

British navy personnel planted explosives and blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month, Russia's defence ministry says, a claim London called false and designed to distract from Moscow's military failures in Ukraine. Russia did not give evidence for its allegation that a leading NATO member had sabotaged critical Russian infrastructure amid the worst crisis in relations between the West and Moscow since the depths of the Cold War. The Russian ministry alleged "British specialists" from the same unit that directed Ukrainian drone attacks on ships from the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea earlier on Saturday were responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. "According to available information, representatives of this unit of the British Navy took part in the planning, provision and implementation of a terrorist attack in the Baltic Sea on September 26 this year – blowing up the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines," the ministry said. The United Kingdom denied the accusation.