The United Arab Emirates has said its air defences are engaging with missile attacks and incoming drones from Iran. The UAE Ministry of Defense said late on Monday afternoon that it was intercepting ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones across the country. The emirate of Fujairah said that an Iranian drone sparked a fire at an oil facility. Civil defence teams were deployed immediately to contain the blaze, the Fujairah Media office said in a statement. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Russian missile attacks have killed at least eight people in Ukraine following a rare overnight drone strike on Moscow. A Russian strike midmorning on Monday on the town of Merefa in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region killed six people and wounded more than 30 others officials said. "Today during the day, the occupiers attacked civilian infrastructure of a town quite far from the front with a missile," he said on Telegram, adding that it will take another day or two to clear the debris. Officials said Russian forces appeared to have used an Iskander-type ballistic missile. To the south, two men were killed during various attacks on the Kherson region, according to the regional prosecutor's office.

How well do you know Iran? What is the Ukrainian anti-drone system Sky Map being used in the Gulf? Cheap, mass-produced one-way drones have played a major role in the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran since the first attacks on Tehran on February 28. As Iran uses these drones to target energy facilities, airbases and other strategic sites across the Gulf and Israel, the US and Israel use expensive interceptor missiles for defence. To counter the drone threat, Gulf states and their US partners have turned to Ukrainian-made anti-drone technology, battle-tested against Russian drone attacks.

The Iran war has strengthened Ukraine in surprising ways. Could a ceasefire with Russia be closer? When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, serious-faced and clad in black, strolled down a lilac carpet in Saudi Arabia in March, it marked a moment in the US-Israeli war in Iran. In a post on X, he said his visit was to strengthen the protection of lives. Zelensky, who carries the weight of Ukraine's own war with Russia on his shoulders, has been seizing the moment, flying to the Gulf to publicly showcase the international value and marketability of Kyiv's learned-on-the-battlefield military nous in drone warfare. Ukraine says it has now signed deals with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar - all hit by Iranian missiles and drones in recent weeks - to share drone expertise and technology, tightening alliances and benefitting from business - and it hopes defence deals - with wealthy US-allied countries.

Activists sailed to Gaza to deliver aid, but were met with drone attacks and imprisonment. "All of this preparation, all of this work--it's actually come together and we're sailing east, finally," said Dane Hunter. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Last fall, hundreds of activists from all over the world crowded onto several dozen boats and set sail for Gaza. They thought that by sharing their journey through social media, they could capture the world's attention.

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Russia has continued heavy attacks on Ukraine for the past 24 hours, with several coming overnight on Thursday and in the early hours of Friday. At least one person has been killed and several have been injured. A Russian drone attack overnight damaged port infrastructure in Ukraine's southern Odesa region and wounded two people in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, regional Governor Oleh Kiper said on Friday morning. Two high-rise residential buildings were damaged in the attack, which destroyed apartments and caused fires, Kiper wrote on the Telegram messaging app. "This night, Russia again massively attacked the civilian infrastructure of the Odesa region: two people were injured," he said.

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' What do Ukraine's robot soldiers mean for the future of warfare? In a scene reminiscent of a computer war game, three battle-fatigued soldiers, dressed in white snow camouflage, emerge from a war-torn alley with their hands raised above their heads. They crouch down, following the orders being blasted at them, fear and shock etched across their faces as they stare down the barrel of a machinegun mounted on a so-called ground robot. In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that, for the "first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms - ground systems and drones". "Ground robotic systems have already carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front in just three months," he wrote in a post on X, alongside images of green machines with tank tracks and weapons mounted on top.

Representation learning based on multi-task pretraining has become a powerful approach in many domains. In particular, task-aware representation learning aims to learn an optimal representation for a specific target task by sampling data from a set of source tasks, while task-agnostic representation learning seeks to learn a universal representation for a class of tasks. In this paper, we propose a general and versatile algorithmic and theoretic framework for active representation learning, where the learner optimally chooses which source tasks to sample from. This framework, along with a tractable meta algorithm, allows most arbitrary target and source task spaces (from discrete to continuous), covers both task-aware and task-agnostic settings, and is compatible with deep representation learning practices. We provide several instantiations under this framework, from bilinear and feature-based nonlinear to general nonlinear cases. In the bilinear case, by leveraging the non-uniform spectrum of the task representation and the calibrated source-target relevance, we prove that the sample complexity to achieve ε-excess risk on target scales with (k)2 v 22ε 2 where k is the effective dimension of the target and v 22 (0,1] represents the connection between source and target space. Compared to the passive one, this can save up to 1dW of sample complexity, where dW is the task space dimension. Finally, we demonstrate different instantiations of our meta algorithm in synthetic datasets and robotics problems, from pendulum simulations to real-world drone flight datasets. On average, our algorithms outperform baselines by 20% 70%. 1

China will ban the sale of drones in Beijing and require permits to fly them under new rules that take effect on Friday. Drones and key components will be prohibited from being sold, rented or brought into the Chinese capital. Drone owners will also be required to register their devices with the police. China has gradually tightened regulations on drones in recent years, with authorities citing public safety concerns. Drones and flying taxis are part of the so-called low-altitude economy, a strategic priority for China that is expected to generate more than two trillion yuan ($290bn; £217bn) by 2035.

Why is Israel still in southern Lebanon? A war to shape Lebanon's future How Hezbollah's fibre optic drones test Israel's sophisticated radar system In the skies over the Lebanese town of Taybeh, Israel's multibillion-dollar defence systems were rendered useless by a spool of cable, according to a report by the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth (Ynet). As an Israeli medical evacuation helicopter rushed to rescue soldiers wounded in a drone attack, another unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) hurtled towards them. With their electronic countermeasures failing, soldiers on the ground were forced to point their rifles at the sky, firing at the incoming threat before it detonated just metres away. The chaotic scene underscores a lethal new reality in the escalating conflict.