PENGHU, Taiwan – Taiwan fired warning shots at a Chinese drone which buzzed an offshore islet on Tuesday shortly after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said she had ordered Taiwan's military to take "strong countermeasures" against what she termed Chinese provocations. It was the first time such warning shots have been fired during a period of heightened tensions between China and Taiwan. Beijing views the island as its own territory, while Taiwan strongly disputes China's sovereignty claims. 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.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. Navy stopped an Iranian ship from taking an American sea drone in the Arabian Gulf Monday night. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy was in the process of towing the drone, which belongs to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet at 11 p.m. local time when the American Navy immediately sent out the nearby Navy coastal ship USS Thunderbolt. The 5th Fleet also repeatedly called Iranian officials, who then let the drone go.

The video of the aftermath of the Reading Festival shows the extent of the clear-up needed.

The Mohajer-6 has the capability to carry out surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and the Shahed series is considered among the most capable of Iran's military drones, according to comments made by the Iranian military to local news media. Iran is a pioneer in drone technology, with at least four decades of design and manufacturing experience, and it has been providing combat drones to military groups and proxy militia in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Officials in Israel, the United States and some Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia have said they are increasingly concerned that Iran's advancing drone technology could destabilize the region and empower militias backed by Iran. In the shadow war between Iran and Israel, Iranian drones have been involved in attacks on ships and have targeted U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria. Israel has also attacked a secret facility in western Iran where hundreds of drones were believed to have been stored.

Russia's defence ministry has said Russian forces shot down a Ukrainian drone that was trying to attack the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex, while other officials said a Ukrainian missile hit a fuel depot at the plant.

Taipei and Beijing have traded barbs over a recent string of drone sorties that have flown from the Chinese mainland to an outlying Taiwanese island, some surveilling military outposts. Photos and video taken by Chinese drones of the Kinmen islands have been circulating on both Taiwan and Chinese social media, with one video showing Taiwanese soldiers hurling rocks at one to drive it off. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was not "anything worth making a fuss about" as the drones were "flying around Chinese territory" when asked to comment on the videos on Monday. But that response triggered an angry riposte from Taipei which compared the drone harassment to the acts of a "thief". "Those who come uninvited are called thieves, whether they are breaking through the door or peeping from the air, the people of Taiwan do not welcome such thieves," Taiwan's foreign ministry said in a statement late Monday. "The authoritarian expansionist government of the Chinese Communist Party has always made harassing other countries a daily routine, and therefore its title of a'regional troublemaker' is well-deserved."

BEIJING/TAIPEI – China on Monday dismissed complaints from Taiwan about repeated harassment by Chinese drones very close to Taiwanese-controlled islands as not anything "to make a fuss about", prompting Taipei to label Beijing as nothing more than thieves. Since China began war games and military drills near Taiwan earlier this month after the visit of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the Chinese-claimed island, the government in Taipei has reported repeated flights by drones on islets it controls close to the Chinese coast. 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.

Taiwan has said it would shoot down drones that intrude into its Kinmen island from the mainland, amid tensions in the Taiwan Strait. The Kinmen Defense Command said in a statement that it would drive Chinese drones out of Kinmen County, and shoot them down if warnings are ignored. The announcement comes a week after a Chinese civilian drone intruded into Taiwanese territory and recorded visuals of two soldiers manning a guardhouse. These visuals were later widely circulated on Chinese social media Sina Weibo. Taiwanese military sources then claimed it fired warning flares to repel Chinese drones while refraining from more aggressive measures such as shooting aircraft down to avoid further escalating cross-strait tensions.

In this work, we study the trade-off between the reliability and the investment cost of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) consisting of a set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carrying radio access nodes, called portable access points (PAPs)), deployed to serve a set of ground nodes (GNs). Using the proposed algorithm, a given geographical region is equivalently represented as a set of circular regions, where each circle represents the coverage region of a PAP. Then, the steady-state availability of the UAS is analytically derived by modelling it as a continuous time birth-death Markov decision process (MDP). Numerical evaluations show that the investment cost to guarantee a given steady-state availability to a set of GNs can be reduced by considering the traffic demand and distribution of GNs.

Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot provides details on the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that mistakenly killed 10 civilians. There is a lot of unfinished business following last year's messy U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Taliban were taking over, including the fallout from a drone strike there that went horribly wrong. Three days after the Islamic State suicide bomb attack at Kabul Airport, which left 13 U.S. service members and many more Afghan civilians killed, the military thought they were on to another ISIS terrorist. All day on Aug. 29, 2021, they tracked a car making what appeared to be suspicious stops across Kabul. Late in the day, they let loose a Hellfire missile from a Reaper drone, obliterating the car, its surroundings and those at scene.