North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has personally supervised his country's testing of new AI-equipped suicide and reconnaissance drones and called for unmanned aircraft and artificial intelligence to be prioritised in military modernisation plans. State-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said on Thursday that Kim oversaw the testing of "various kinds of reconnaissance and suicide drones" produced by North Korea's Unmanned Aerial Technology Complex. The new North Korean drones are capable of "tracking and monitoring different strategic targets and enemy troop activities on the ground and the sea", while the attack drones will "be used for various tactical attack missions", KCNA said, noting that both drone systems have been equipped with "new artificial intelligence". Kim agreed to expand the production capacity of "unmanned equipment and artificial intelligence" and emphasised the importance of creating a long-term plan for North Korea to promote "the rapid development" of "intelligent drones", which is "the trend of modern warfare". Pictures from the tests, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday, were said to show attack drones successfully striking ground targets, including military vehicles.

Intelligence analysts have revealed why they believe Russia is behind the mysterious drones invading the skies over New Jersey. US Army general Darryl Williams described a situation that mirrors what has unfolded at American/NATO bases across Europe that are known to supply arms to Ukraine. And retired police lieutenant and intelligence analyst Tim McMillan told DailyMail.com Lt McMillan and other experts have noted that the New Jersey sightings circled around Picatinny Arsenal, home of the US Army's CCDC Armaments Center, which is responsible for manufacturing and supplying Ukraine with artillery ammunition. These experts suggest that Russia could be carrying out an intelligence-gathering mission known as'ferreting', meant to intentionally trigger and test their foreign rival's airspace defense procedures and response time.

High-dimensional data must be highly structured to be learnable. Although the compositional and hierarchical nature of data is often put forward to explain learnability, quantitative measurements establishing these properties are scarce. Likewise, accessing the latent variables underlying such a data structure remains a challenge. In this work, we show that forward-backward experiments in diffusion-based models, where data is noised and then denoised to generate new samples, are a promising tool to probe the latent structure of data. We predict in simple hierarchical models that, in this process, changes in data occur by correlated chunks, with a length scale that diverges at a noise level where a phase transition is known to take place. Remarkably, we confirm this prediction in both text and image datasets using state-of-the-art diffusion models. Our results show how latent variable changes manifest in the data and establish how to measure these effects in real data using diffusion models.

Russia has tailored its nuclear response doctrine to the specific threat of the long-range attacks it faces from Ukraine, even as Kyiv's forces demonstrated during the past week the devastating effect such attacks can have on Moscow's conventional war effort. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently "outlined the approaches" to a new edition of the Fundamentals of State Policy on nuclear weapons use, wrote his right-hand man, deputy head of the National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev, on Telegram on Wednesday. "A massive launch and crossing of our border with enemy aerospace weapons, including aircraft, missiles and UAVs, can under certain conditions become the basis for the use of nuclear weapons," he wrote. "Aggression against Russia by a non-nuclear-weapon state, but with the support or participation of a nuclear-weapon country, will be considered a joint attack," Medvedev added. These threat profiles are exactly tailored to describe Ukraine, which gave up nuclear weapons in 1994, but is supported by nuclear-armed states the United Kingdom, France and the United States, and which has been forbidden to use Western-supplied weapons to attack deep inside Russia.

Russia and Ukraine traded deadly aerial attacks on civilian centres in the past week of the war, but Ukraine also scored hits on military and economic infrastructure deep in the Russian heartland, extending its reach to St Petersburg for the first time. Ukrainian military intelligence said it had struck an unspecified military target in St Petersburg on Thursday, using drones launched from Ukrainian soil. Ukrainian strategic industries minister Oleksandr Kamyshin confirmed the attack, telling the World Economic Forum in Davos that the attack was carried out by a Ukrainian-built drone that had travelled 1,250km (780 miles) from Ukrainian soil. Russia's defence ministry said three drones had been launched and it had downed all three over the Gulf of Finland that day, one near an oil terminal. On Sunday, Ukraine attacked again in several locations, and this time, the evidence of its success was clear.

Ukraine will forge ahead in the battle against Russia's invasion, Kyiv's top diplomat has pledged as he seeks to rally Western support. Ukraine will not "back down" in fighting against the Russian invasion, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told a summit of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, even as its military locked into a bloody stalemate with enemy forces amid signs that the provision of weapons and funding is slowing and that the war in Gaza is limiting global attention. "We have to continue, we have to keep fighting. Ukraine is not going to back down," Kuleba said. "The issue here is not just Ukraine's security, it is the security and safety of the entire Euro-Atlantic space."

The United States is reportedly planning to send Ukraine another $1.3 billion in military aid as it continues a counteroffensive against Russia. The weapons package includes air defenses, counter-drone systems, exploding drones and ammunition, Reuters reported, citing two unnamed U.S. officials. Weapons manufacturers will provide the arms purchased by the United States to Kyiv through President Biden's Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) program, so U.S. weapons stocks will not be depleted. Among the systems and ammunition the U.S. plans to buy for Kyiv are counter-air defenses made by L3Harris Technologies called the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment or VAMPIRE, Reuters reported. Military aid, delivered as part of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, is unloaded at the Boryspil International Airport outside Kyiv, Feb. 13, 2022.

The United States has announced a new $1.2bn military aid package for Ukraine that will include air defence systems, conventional artillery and counter-drone ammunition, satellite imagery services, as well as funding for military training. In the package announced on Tuesday, Ukraine will also receive technology to allow the integration of Western air defence launchers, missiles and radars with Ukraine's native air defence systems. "The Russians have launched waves of missiles into Ukraine, whose military has been adept at knocking them down. The package also contains ammunition to shoot down unmanned aerial systems," the US Department of Defense said in a statement. Ukrainian cities have come under renewed aerial attacks in the past week with scores of Russian missiles and drones targeting the capital Kyiv and other key cities.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to Helsinki for talks with the prime ministers of four Nordic countries Wednesday as part of his effort to secure greater firepower for his country's armed forces as they figure out how to dislodge Russian troops from occupied areas of Ukraine. The Nordic countries -- Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark -- have been among Kyiv's strongest backers since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Before the meeting with Zelenskyy in Finland's capital, Nordic officials appeared ready to provide more aid as the war stretches into its 15th month.

Russian troops and mercenaries have rained artillery down on the last access routes to the besieged Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, bringing Moscow closer to its first victory in half a year after the bloodiest fighting of the war. The head of the Wagner Group, a private Russian army, said on Friday that the eastern salt-mining city, which has been blasted to ruins, was now almost completely surrounded with only one road still open for Ukraine's soldiers. The Reuters news agency reported intense Russian shelling of routes leading west out of Bakhmut, an apparent attempt to block Ukrainian forces' access in and out of the city. Ukrainian soldiers were working to repair damaged roads, and more soldiers were heading towards the front line in a sign that Ukraine was not yet ready to give up the city. To the west, Ukrainians were digging new trenches for defensive positions.