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How will Ukraine's attack on Russian bombers affect the war?

Al Jazeera

Kyiv, Ukraine – Any description of Ukraine's attacks on Russia's fleet of strategic bombers could leave one scrambling for superlatives. Forty-one planes – including supersonic Tu-22M long-range bombers, Tu-95 flying fortresses and A-50 early warning warplanes – were hit and damaged on Sunday on four airfields, including ones in the Arctic and Siberia, Ukrainian authorities and intelligence said. Moscow did not comment on the damage to the planes but confirmed that the airfields were hit by "Ukrainian terrorist attacks". Videos posted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), which planned and carried out the operation, which was called The Spiderweb, showed only a handful of planes being hit. The strategic bombers have been used to launch ballistic and cruise missiles from Russian airspace to hit targets across Ukraine, causing wide scale damage and casualties.


Ukraine's 'Spider's Web' drone strike burns over 40 Russian warplanes, Moscow calls it 'terrorist attack'

FOX News

Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy questions President Donald Trump about the Russia-Ukraine war. The brazen Ukrainian blitz of Russian warplanes Sunday was 18 months in the making and the Pentagon was kept in the dark until it was over, sources told Fox News. "Operation Spider's Web," a series of coordinated drone strikes penetrating deep into Russian territory, is believed to have taken out dozens of Russia's most powerful bomber jets and surveillance planes as they sat idle on five military airfields. The stunning operation was personally overseen by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's security service (SBU) said. Ukraine used small FPV drones hidden inside wooden cabins mounted on trucks.


Watch: Video appears to show Russian planes bursting into flames

BBC News

Ukraine claims to have left more than 40 Russian bomber planes "burning" in a large scale drone attack" in the Murmansk region. The footage appears to show Russian warplanes on a runway being struck and bursting into flames. Sources from Ukraine's security service, SBU, told the BBC "enemy strategic bombers are burning en masse in Russia". They also said Ukraine was conducting "a large-scale special operation aimed at destroying enemy bomber aircraft," according to a statement sent from sources within the service to BBC Ukraine.


Web-Scale Visual Entity Recognition: An LLM-Driven Data Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

Web-scale visual entity recognition, the task of associating images with their corresponding entities within vast knowledge bases like Wikipedia, presents significant challenges due to the lack of clean, large-scale training data. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to curate such a dataset, leveraging a multimodal large language model (LLM) for label verification, metadata generation, and rationale explanation. Instead of relying on the multimodal LLM to directly annotate data, which we found to be suboptimal, we prompt it to reason about potential candidate entity labels by accessing additional contextually relevant information (such as Wikipedia), resulting in more accurate annotations. We further use the multimodal LLM to enrich the dataset by generating question-answer pairs and a grounded finegrained textual description (referred to as "rationale") that explains the connection between images and their assigned entities. Experiments demonstrate that models trained on this automatically curated data achieve state-of-the-art performance on web-scale visual entity recognition tasks (e.g.



Air Force F-16 struck by drone during training flight over Arizona in 2023

FOX News

A routine training flight over Arizona in January 2023 took an unusual turn when a U.S. Air Force F-16D was struck by what was initially reported as an unidentified object, but now U.S. defense officials say was a small drone. Fox News confirmed that the incident, which occurred near Gila Bend, Arizona, on Jan. 19, 2023, was a routine training mission and was witnessed by the instructor pilot seated in the rear of the two-seat aircraft. According to a U.S. defense official, the pilot observed a "mostly white and orange object" collide with the left side of the aircraft canopy, the transparent covering over the cockpit. Initially, the object was thought to be a bird, a common hazard for aircraft. But after conducting checks during the flight and a detailed inspection upon landing at Tucson International Airport, the crew found "zero evidence" of a bird strike.


UFO crashes into US Air Force fighter jet over Arizona during terrifying encounter

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A UFO slammed into a US fighter jet over Arizona, cracking the canopy protecting the pilot, and forcing the 63 million plane to land, new reports have revealed. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the F-16 Viper fighter jet was hit by an'orange-white UAS' - which stands for uncrewed aerial system, better known as a drone - on January 19, 2023. Within a day of this collision, there were three more unidentified aircraft sightings over the Air Force's Barry Goldwater Range, where the fighter was damaged, the documents stated. Barry Goldwater Range is an expanse of desert along the Arizona-Mexico border where the military practices air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. The FAA's report of the F-16 collision revealed that the fighter was flying in restricted airspace near Gila Bend, Arizona, when it was hit by the object in the rear of the canopy, the glass bubble which protects the pilot.


Sudan's RSF carries out drone attack near Port Sudan airport: Army

Al Jazeera

Sudan's army says the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked a military airbase and other facilities in the vicinity of Port Sudan airport. The army said on Sunday that the airbase was targeted using a drone, as well as a cargo warehouse and some civilian facilities, in the first attack in the eastern city by the RSF. There are reports of some damage after drones hit an ammunition depot. "Both the civilian and military airports are in the same place. What we know from residents in the port city is that five drones were launched by the RSF and targeted the airbase," Al Jazeera's Hiba Morgan said, reporting from the capital, Khartoum.


REVEALED: The UFO sightings taken seriously by the US government

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A'flame in the sky,' eerie red glowing objects and swarms of UFOs over military bases are just some of the many sightings that have gravely concerned the US government. There are dozens of unsolved cases going back to the 1960s that occurred over nuclear missile installations, Navy ships and a desert in New Mexico. The FBI, CIA, and other government branches have spent years looking into these reports, but have yet to determine what the objects were and where they came from. One report in 2019 detailed how'drones' appeared over Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas as locals reported spying a mothership hanging in the sky. In just the last few months, the skies over New Jersey were filled with unidentified aircraft and drones that required a formal response from both the Biden and Trump presidencies.


Japan defense force scrambled fighter jets 704 times in fiscal 2024

The Japan Times

The Defense Ministry said Thursday that the Air Self-Defense Force scrambled fighter jets 704 times in response to possible airspace violations in fiscal 2024, up by 35 from the previous year. Of the total, scrambles against Chinese military aircraft accounted for 464, or 65.9%, down by 15. In August, Chinese military airplanes violated Japanese airspace off the Danjo Islands in Nagasaki Prefecture for the first time. The number of Chinese drones detected by the ministry more than tripled to 30, exceeding the 26 detected between fiscal 2013, when the first Chinese drone was spotted, and fiscal 2023. "China may have developed a system to (fully) operate drones, upgrading from trial flights," a ministry official said.