Russian troops are making a concerted push in eastern Ukraine and have gained a foothold in the strategic hub of Pokrovsk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says. Moscow's soldiers outnumber Kyiv's 8-1 in the area and Ukraine cannot match that, Zelensky added while insisting Russia had not yet achieved the planned result. Russia has been trying to capture Pokrovsk for two years. The key supply and transport hub provides supplies and reinforcements to the eastern front - and it would get Moscow closer to occupying the entirety of the Donetsk region. It would also put towns of the heavily fortified fortress belt - Kramatorsk, Slovyansk, Kostyantynivka and Druzhkivka - within easier reach of Moscow.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Russian attacks on Ukraine's southern Zaporizhia killed a 44-year-old man and wounded several others, Governor Ivan Fedorov said on Monday, as the death toll from other assaults on Sunday continued to rise. Ukrainian officials said the attacks on Sunday killed two people in the eastern Donetsk region and a 69-year-old man in the northern Sumy region.

Remote monitoring of drones has become a global objective due to emerging applications in national security and managing aerial delivery traffic. Despite their relatively small size, drones can carry significant payloads, which require monitoring, especially in cases of unauthorized transportation of dangerous goods. A drone's flight dynamics heavily depend on outdoor wind conditions and the carry-on weight, which affect the tilt angle of a drone's body and the rotation velocity of the blades. A surveillance radar can capture both effects, provided a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio for the received echoes and an adjusted postprocessing detection algorithm. Here, we conduct a systematic study to demonstrate that micro-Doppler analysis enables the disentanglement of the impacts of wind and weight on a hovering drone. The physics behind the effect is related to the flight controller, as the way the drone counteracts weight and wind differs. When the payload is balanced, it imposes an additional load symmetrically on all four rotors, causing them to rotate faster, thereby generating a blade-related micro-Doppler shift at a higher frequency. However, the impact of the wind is different. The wind attempts to displace the drone, and to counteract this, the drone tilts to the side. As a result, the forward and rear rotors rotate at different velocities to maintain the tilt angle of the drone body relative to the airflow direction. This causes the splitting in the micro-Doppler spectra. By performing a set of experiments in a controlled environment, specifically, an anechoic chamber for electromagnetic isolation and a wind tunnel for imposing deterministic wind conditions, we demonstrate that both wind and payload details can be extracted using a simple deterministic algorithm based on branching in the micro-Doppler spectra.

The coordination of multiple autonomous agents in high-speed, competitive environments represents a significant engineering challenge. This paper presents CRUISE (Curriculum-Based Iterative Self-Play for Scalable Multi-Drone Racing), a reinforcement learning framework designed to solve this challenge in the demanding domain of multi-drone racing. CRUISE overcomes key scalability limitations by synergistically combining a progressive difficulty curriculum with an efficient self-play mechanism to foster robust competitive behaviors. Validated in high-fidelity simulation with realistic quadrotor dynamics, the resulting policies significantly outperform both a standard reinforcement learning baseline and a state-of-the-art game-theoretic planner. CRUISE achieves nearly double the planner's mean racing speed, maintains high success rates, and demonstrates robust scalability as agent density increases. Ablation studies confirm that the curriculum structure is the critical component for this performance leap. By providing a scalable and effective training methodology, CRUISE advances the development of autonomous systems for dynamic, competitive tasks and serves as a blueprint for future real-world deployment.

Autonomous landing in unstructured (cluttered, uneven, and map-poor) environments is a core requirement for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), yet purely vision-based or deep learning models often falter under covariate shift and provide limited interpretability. We propose NeuroSymLand, a neuro-symbolic framework that tightly couples two complementary pipelines: (i) an offline pipeline, where Large Language Models (LLMs) and human-in-the-loop refinement synthesize Scallop code from diverse landing scenarios, distilling generalizable and verifiable symbolic knowledge; and (ii) an online pipeline, where a compact foundation-based semantic segmentation model generates probabilistic Scallop facts that are composed into semantic scene graphs for real-time deductive reasoning. This design combines the perceptual strengths of lightweight foundation models with the interpretability and verifiability of symbolic reasoning. Node attributes (e.g., flatness, area) and edge relations (adjacency, containment, proximity) are computed with geometric routines rather than learned, avoiding the data dependence and latency of train-time graph builders. The resulting Scallop program encodes landing principles (avoid water and obstacles; prefer large, flat, accessible regions) and yields calibrated safety scores with ranked Regions of Interest (ROIs) and human-readable justifications. Extensive evaluations across datasets, diverse simulation maps, and real UAV hardware show that NeuroSymLand achieves higher accuracy, stronger robustness to covariate shift, and superior efficiency compared with state-of-the-art baselines, while advancing UAV safety and reliability in emergency response, surveillance, and delivery missions.

Abstract--Low-altitude wireless networks (LA WNs) represent a promising architecture that integrates unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) as aerial nodes to provide enhanced coverage, reliability, and throughput for diverse applications. However, these networks face significant security vulnerabilities from both known and potential unknown eavesdroppers, which may threaten data confidentiality and system integrity. T o solve this critical issue, we propose a novel secure communication framework for LA WNs where the selected UA Vs within a swarm function as a virtual antenna array (V AA), complemented by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to create a robust defense against eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously maximizes the secrecy rate while minimizing the maximum sidelobe level and total energy consumption, requiring joint optimization of UA V excitation current weights, flight trajectories, and IRS phase shifts. This problem presents significant difficulties due to the dynamic nature of the system and heterogeneous components. Thus, we first transform the problem into a heterogeneous Markov decision process (MDP). Then, we propose a heterogeneous multi-agent control approach (HMCA) that integrates a dedicated IRS control policy with a multi-agent soft actor-critic framework for UA V control, which enables coordinated operation across heterogeneous network elements. Simulation results show that the proposed HMCA achieves superior performance compared to baseline approaches in terms of secrecy rate improvement, sidelobe suppression, and energy efficiency. Furthermore, we find that the collaborative and passive beamforming synergy between V AA and IRS creates robust security guarantees when the number of UA Vs increases. Jiahui Li, Xinyue Liang, and Hui Kang are with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China (E-mails: lijiahui@jlu.edu.cn; Geng Sun is with the College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China, and also with the Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China. He is also with the College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 (E-mail: sungeng@jlu.edu.cn).

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in dynamic wind fields must generate safe and energy-efficient trajectories under physical and environmental constraints. Traditional planners, such as A* and kinodynamic RRT*, often yield suboptimal or non-smooth paths due to discretization and sampling limitations. This paper presents a physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework that embeds UAV dynamics, wind disturbances, and obstacle avoidance directly into the learning process. Without requiring supervised data, the PINN learns dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectories by minimizing physical residuals and risk-aware objectives. Comparative simulations show that the proposed method outperforms A* and Kino-RRT* in control energy, smoothness, and safety margin, while maintaining similar flight efficiency. The results highlight the potential of physics-informed learning to unify model-based and data-driven planning, providing a scalable and physically consistent framework for UAV trajectory optimization.

Abstract--With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), their capabilities in various automation domains, particularly Unmanned Aerial V ehicle (UA V) operations, have garnered increasing attention. Current research remains predominantly constrained to small-scale UA V applications, with most studies focusing on isolated components such as path planning for toy drones, while lacking comprehensive investigation of medium-and long-range UA V systems in real-world operational contexts. Larger UA V platforms introduce distinct challenges, including stringent requirements for airport-based take-off and landing procedures, adherence to complex regulatory frameworks, and specialized operational capabilities with elevated mission expectations. LV system processes natural language instructions to orchestrate short-, medium-, and long-range UA V missions through five key technical components: (i) LLM-as-Parser for instruction interpretation, (ii) Route Planner for Points of Interest (POI) determination, (iii) Path Planner for waypoint generation, (iv) Control Platform for executable trajectory implementation, and (v) UA V monitoring. We demonstrate the system's feasibility through three representative use cases spanning different operational scales: multi-UA V patrol, multi-POI delivery, and multi-hop relocation. Beyond the current implementation, we establish a five-level automation taxonomy that charts the evolution from current LLM-as-Parser capabilities (Level 1) to fully autonomous LLMas-Autopilot systems (Level 5), identifying technical prerequisites and research challenges at each stage. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed numerous domains, such as mobile services, vehicles, and robotics [1]-[3]. These fields have become increasingly intelligent and user-friendly through LLM integration, enabling command and control through natural language. Equal contribution L. Y uan and C. G. Brinton are with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. C. Deng and I. Hwang are with the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. Han is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Y onsei University, Seoul, South Korea. E-mail: djh@yonsei.ac.kr S. Brunswicker is with the Polytechnic Institute, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. LLMs fulfill diverse roles within these systems. LLM-as-Router can orchestrate task allocation and model selection for human pilots, LLM-as-Agent can execute actions on behalf of humans, and LLM-as-Judge can conduct evaluations in place of human judgment.

Can Israel annex the West Bank if the US says no? Will the US plan for Gaza fail? 'We survived the war, we may not survive the ceasefire' Who are the 95 healthcare workers held by Israel? Hamas has handed over the remains of another dead captive to Israel, hours after an Israeli drone attack in southern Gaza killed two Palestinians amid a fragile ceasefire. The Israeli military said on Monday that the Red Cross had taken custody of the coffin and was in the process of transporting it to the army's troops in Gaza. The remains of 16 had been handed over as of Monday.

Can Israel annex the West Bank if the US says no? Will the US plan for Gaza fail? 'We survived the war, we may not survive the ceasefire' Who are the 95 healthcare workers held by Israel? The United Nations and France have condemned an Israeli attack that hit UN peacekeeping troops in southern Lebanon. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Monday that the previous day's attack on UNIFIL troops, which he said involved an Israeli drone dropping a grenade in the vicinity of a patrol, as well as a tank opening fire on peacekeepers near the border town of Kfar Kila, was "very, very dangerous". Israel has violated the truce on a near-daily basis.