Drones could be used for NHS-related missions in remote areas, inspecting offshore wind turbines and supplying oil rigs by 2026 as part of a new regulatory regime in the UK. David Willetts, the head of a new government unit helping to deploy new technologies in Britain, said there were obvious situations where drones could be used if the changes go ahead next year. Ministers announced plans this month to allow drones to fly long distances without their operators seeing them. Drones cannot be flown "beyond visual line of sight" under current regulations, making their use for lengthy journeys impossible. In an interview with the Guardian, Lord Willetts, chair of the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO), said the changes could come as soon as 2026, but that they would apply in "atypical" aviation environments at first, which would mean remote areas and over open water. Referring to the NHS, Willetts said there was potentially a huge market for drone operators.

A new bill moving through the Florida Senate would give homeowners the right to use "reasonable force" to take down drones infringing on their right to privacy, directly conflicting with federal airspace regulations while raising new legal questions regarding how far a person can go to defend their home from surveillance. The bill primarily focuses on further regulating the use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) while broadening the scope of locations that are protected from drone flights within the state, such as airports and correctional facilities. Notably, the bill would permit homeowners to use "reasonable force" to stop a drone from infringing on their expectation of privacy. A bill proposed in the Florida Senate would allow homeowners to use "reasonable force" to take down drones infringing on their right to privacy. "No one wants to have a drone sitting over their property, filming what they do for any number of reasons," Florida-based attorney Raul Gastesi told Fox News Digital.

Microsoft has officially set the expiration date on Windows 10 support, and once it hits, you'll stop receiving critical security updates. If you're still running the old system, this is your sign to upgrade to Windows 11 Pro. Windows 11 Pro brings a polished interface, faster multitasking, built-in AI with Microsoft Copilot, and upgraded security with features like Smart App Control and TPM 2.0. Gamers can take advantage of DirectX12 Ultimate for smoother, more immersive performance. This is a lifetime license for one compatible PC -- no subscriptions, no recurring costs.

Russia unleashed a barrage of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine as a short-lived Easter ceasefire expired. Russian forces launched 96 drones and three missiles on eastern and southern Ukraine overnight, Ukraine's Air Force reported on Monday. The swift return to major hostilities following a pause declared by Russian President Vladimir Putin comes as the United States struggles to persuade Moscow to agree on a longer-term ceasefire. The overnight assault targeted Ukraine's Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Cherkasy regions, the Air Force wrote on Telegram. Air defence units intercepted 42 drones and redirected another 47.

World economic and finance chiefs want an off-ramp from the worst global trade crisis in a century. Washington makes for a turbulent backdrop to the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, headquartered in the U.S. capital as anchors of America's economic and financial clout. President Donald Trump's tariff war hasn't just roiled markets and raised recession fears: it's also called into question U.S. economic and security leadership -- a pillar of the post-World War II global order -- like never before. The stage is set for "one of the most stark and dramatic meetings I can think of in recent history," says Josh Lipsky, senior director of the GeoEconomics Center at the Atlantic Council and former IMF adviser. "You have at this moment a deep challenge to the multilateral rules-based system which the U.S. helped build."

At least three blasts were heard in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine amid an Easter ceasefire declared by Moscow, Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing local "operative services." Ukraine's forces reported nearly 3,000 violations of Russia's own ceasefire pledge, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, adding that Kyiv's forces were instructed to mirror the Russian Army's actions. Russia's Ministry of Defence said Ukraine had broken the Easter ceasefire declared by the Kremlin more than a thousand times, claiming that Ukrainian forces shot at Russian positions 444 times. The ministry also said Kremlin forces encountered more than 900 Ukrainian drone attacks during this time. At least three blasts were heard in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine amid an Easter ceasefire declared by Moscow, Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing local "operative services."

HBO's The Last of Us showed viewers in season one that it would lean heavily on the source video games for major plot points and general direction of the season while expanding on the universe, and season two has followed that to the most extreme end possible. Episode two sees Tommy and Maria lead the town of Jackson Hole against a massive wave of Infected, the likes of which we haven't seen in the show (or video games) yet. This was a complete invention for the show, one that gives the episode Game of Thrones vibes, or calls to mind a battle like the siege of Helm's Deep in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's epic in scale, with the overmatched defenders showing their skill and bravery against overwhelming odds; there is loss and pain but the good guys eventually triumph. That mass-scale battle is paired with the most intimate and brutal violence we've seen in the entire series so far, as Joel's actions finally catch up with him.

On a misty Saturday afternoon in Shenzhen's Central Park, a gaggle of teenage girls are sheltering from the drizzle under a concrete canopy. With their bags of crisps piled high in front of them, they crowd around a couple of smartphones to sing along to Mandopop ballads. The sound of their laughter rings out across the surrounding lawn – until it is pierced by a mechanical buzzing sound. A few metres away from the impromptu karaoke session is an "airdrop cabinet", one of more than 40 in Shenzhen that is operated by Meituan, China's biggest food delivery platform. Hungry park-goers can order anything from rice noodles to Subway sandwiches to bubble tea.

Constrained optimization with multiple functional inequality constraints has significant applications in machine learning. This paper examines a crucial subset of such problems where both the objective and constraint functions are weakly convex. Existing methods often face limitations, including slow convergence rates or reliance on double-loop algorithmic designs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel single-loop penalty-based stochastic algorithm. Following the classical exact penalty method, our approach employs a {\bf hinge-based penalty}, which permits the use of a constant penalty parameter, enabling us to achieve a {\bf state-of-the-art complexity} for finding an approximate Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution. We further extend our algorithm to address finite-sum coupled compositional objectives, which are prevalent in artificial intelligence applications, establishing improved complexity over existing approaches. Finally, we validate our method through experiments on fair learning with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) fairness constraints and continual learning with non-forgetting constraints.

Two major tasks in applications of hidden Markov models are to (i) com pute distributions of summary statistics of the hidden state sequence, and (ii) decode the hidden state sequence. We describe finite Markov chain imbedding (FMCI) and hybrid decoding to solve each of t hese two tasks. In the first part of our paper we use FMCI to compute posterior distributions o f summary statistics such as the number of visits to a hidden state, the total time spent in a hidden st ate, the dwell time in a hidden state, and the longest run length. We use simulations from the hidde n state sequence, conditional on the observed sequence, to establish the FMCI framework. In the second part of our paper we apply hybrid segmentation for improved decoding of a HMM. We demonstra te that hybrid decoding shows increased performance compared to Viterbi or Posterior decodin g (often also referred to as global or local decoding), and we introduce a novel procedure for choosing the tuning parameter in the hybrid procedure. Furthermore, we provide an alternative derivation of the hybrid loss function based on weighted geometric means. We demonstrate and apply FMCI and hyb rid decoding on various classical data sets, and supply accompanying code for reproducibility. Key words: Artemis analysis, decoding, finite Markov chain imbedding, hidden Mar kov model, hybrid decoding, pattern distributions.