BAGHDAD – Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi escaped unharmed in an assassination attempt by armed drone in Baghdad on Sunday, officials said, in an incident that dramatically raises tension in the country weeks after a general election disputed by Iran-backed militia groups. Six members of Kadhimi's personal protection force stationed outside his residence in the Green Zone were wounded, security sources said. Three drones were used in the attack, including two that were intercepted and downed by security forces while a third drone hit the residence, state news agency INA quoted a spokesman for the interior ministry as saying. A spokesman for the armed forces commander in chief said the security situation was stable inside the fortified Green Zone, which houses the residence, government buildings and foreign embassies, after the drone attack. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi said he was unhurt and appealed for "calm and restraint" after a drone attack on his residence early Sunday that heightened political tensions in the war-scarred country. The attack in Baghdad's Green Zone was the first to target the residence of Kadhemi, who has been in power since May 2020. It came as Iraq's political parties negotiate alliances over who will run the next government after elections last month. That vote saw the Conquest (Fatah) Alliance, the political arm of the pro-Iran Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary network, suffer a substantial decline in its parliamentary seats, leading the group to denounce the outcome as "fraud". The big winner, with more than 70 seats according to the initial count, was the movement of Moqtada Sadr, a Shiite Muslim preacher who campaigned as a nationalist and critic of Iran.

Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi said he was unhurt and appealed for "calm and restraint" after a drone attack on his residence early Sunday as political tensions mounted in the country. The attack in Baghdad's Green Zone was the first to target the residence of Kadhemi, who has been in power since May 2020, and came as Iraq's political parties wrangle over who will run the next government after elections last month. That vote saw the Conquest (Fatah) Alliance, the political arm of the pro-Iran Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary network, suffer a substantial decline in its parliamentary seats, leading the group to denounce the outcome as "fraud". No group has yet claimed responsibility for Sunday's attack, which left two bodyguards injured, according to a security source. In a tweet, Kadhemi called "for calm and restraint on the part of everyone for the good of Iraq".

Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi said he was unhurt and appealed for "calm and restraint" after a drone attack on his residence in Baghdad's Green Zone early Sunday as political tensions mount in the country. "I'm doing fine, praise be to God, and I call for calm and restraint on the part of everyone for the good of Iraq," Kadhemi wrote on Twitter, after what his office called a "failed assassination attempt". Two security sources earlier confirmed the attack in the heavily-guarded Green Zone, which also hosts the US embassy and is frequently targeted by rocket attacks. A large number of security forces were deployed in and around the Zone following the attack, according to a security source. The attack came amid soaring political tensions over the results of October 10 elections.

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has made it possible to solve complex robotics problems using neural networks as function approximators. However, the policies trained on stationary environments suffer in terms of generalization when transferred from one environment to another. In this work, we use Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDP) to train the drone control policy, which combines ideas from Robust Control and RL. It opts for pessimistic optimization to handle potential gaps between policy transfer from one environment to another. The trained control policy is tested on the task of quadcopter positional control. RL agents were trained in a MuJoCo simulator. During testing, different environment parameters (unseen during the training) were used to validate the robustness of the trained policy for transfer from one environment to another. The robust policy outperformed the standard agents in these environments, suggesting that the added robustness increases generality and can adapt to non-stationary environments. Codes: https://github.com/adipandas/gym_multirotor

Law enforcement use of surveillance drones has proliferated across the United States in recent years, sparking backlash from privacy advocates. But newly leaked aerial surveillance footage from Texas's Dallas Police Department and what appears to be Georgia's State Patrol underscore the breadth and sophistication of footage captured by another type of aerial police vehicle: helicopters. The transparency activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, posted a 1.8 terabyte trove of police helicopter footage to its website on Friday. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that they don't know the identity of the source who shared the data, and that no affiliation or motivation for leaking the files was given. The source simply said that the two police departments were storing the data in unsecured cloud infrastructure.

A modified commercial drone may have been responsible for an attempted attack on a Pennsylvania power substation last year, the first reported case of a drone assault on the U.S.'s energy infrastructure. Authorities believe a DJI Mavic 2 drone with a thick copper wire tethered to it was found in June 2020 was likely intended to disrupt operations'by creating a short circuit to cause damage to transformers or distribution lines,' according to a joint intelligence bulletin from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center released October 28. If the wire had come into contact with any of the power plant's high-voltage equipment it could have resulted in a short circuit, power failure or even a fire, according to New Scientist. The Drive reported the drone was recovered by authorities from a substation near Hershey, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles from Philadelphia. No groups has claimed responsibility: The device's camera and internal memory card had been removed and identifying labels were removed, in a likely attempt to obscure its origins.

In July of last year, a DJI Mavic 2 drone approached a Pennsylvania power substation. Two 4-foot nylon ropes dangled from its rotors, a thick copper wire connected to the ends with electrical tape. The device had been stripped of any identifiable markings, as well as its onboard camera and memory card, in an apparent effort by its owner to avoid detection. Its likely goal, according to a joint security bulletin released by DHS, the FBI, and the National Counterterrorism Center, was to "disrupt operations by creating a short circuit." The drone crashed on the roof of an adjacent building before it reached its ostensible target, damaging a rotor in the process.

A modified consumer drone was used in an attack on an electrical substation in the US last year, according to a report from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and National Counterterrorism Center. The report, which is being circulated to law enforcement agencies in the US, highlights the incident at a substation in Pennsylvania last year as the first known use of a drone to target energy infrastructure in the US. The location isn't specifically identified, but the drone crashed without causing damage. The drone was modified with a trailing tether supporting a length of copper wire. If the wire had come into contact with high-voltage equipment it could have caused a short circuit, equipment failures and possibly fires.

Chinese tech company Da-Jiang Innovations, more popularly known as DJ, finally unveiled its highly anticipated drones, the Mavic 3 and Mavic 3 Cine, on Friday, with its most expensive bundle costing almost $5,000. The more expensive model packing the most impressive specs is the DJI Mavic 3 Cine, which retails at $4,999. It comes with a built-in 1 TB SSD and can film Apple ProRes 422 HQ footage at 5.1K up to 50FPS. This feature offers much more scope for processing in various software, including Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, or DaVinci Resolve. The DJI Mavic 3, on the other hand, does not share the ProRes or a built-in 1 TB SSD of the Mavic 3 Cine.