A China Coast Guard vessel is seen on a giant screen showing news footage about the coast guard's law enforcement patrols in waters around Taiwan, outside a shopping mall in Beijing on April 1. | REUTERS TAIPEI - China is increasing military activities near Taiwan and honing its ability to stage a surprise attack, as well as seeking to undermine trust in the government with hybrid online warfare tactics, the island's defense ministry said on Thursday. Democratically-governed Taiwan, which China views as its own territory, has faced increased military pressure from Beijing over the past five years, including at least seven rounds of major war games around the island since 2022. China has been using artificial intelligence tools to weaken Taiwan's cybersecurity and to scan for weak points in critical infrastructure, the defense ministry said in a report released every two years. Beijing is also using hybrid warfare to weaken people's trust in the government and support for defense spending, and stepping up grey zone harassment, it added, referring to non-combat operations such as coast guard patrols designed to pressure Taiwan. Through both conventional and unconventional military actions, it aims to test its capabilities for attacking Taiwan and confronting foreign forces, the ministry said.

BUCHAREST - Romania scrambled fighter jets on Saturday when a drone breached the country's airspace during a Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure near the border, the defense ministry said. Defense Minister Ionut Mosteanu said the F-16 pilots came close to taking down the drone as it was flying very low before it left national airspace toward Ukraine. A threat of drone strikes also prompted Poland to deploy aircraft and close an airport in the eastern city of Lublin on Saturday, three days after it shot down Russian drones in its airspace with the backing of aircraft from its NATO allies. Romania, a European Union and NATO state which shares a 650-km (400-mile) border with Ukraine, has had Russian drone fragments fall onto its territory repeatedly since Russia began waging war on its neighbor. On Saturday, it scrambled two F-16 fighter jets and later two Eurofighters -- part of German air policing missions in Romania -- and warned citizens in the southeastern county of Tulcea near the Danube and its Ukrainian border to take cover, the defense ministry said in a statement.

One person was killed Sunday as Russian air strikes hit the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, while the death toll from Friday's deadly attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih continued to rise. The Kyiv victim was found close to the strike's epicenter of the attack in the city's Darnytskyi district, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. A further three people were injured in the strike, which saw fires break out in several nonresidential areas, damaging cars and buildings. In a statement on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the intensifying Russian attacks showed that there is still insufficient international pressure on Moscow. US WILL KNOW IN'MATTER OF WEEKS' IF RUSSIA IS SERIOUS ABOUT PEACE OR USING'DELAY TACTIC': RUBIO He said Russia has launched more than 1,460 guided aerial bombs, nearly 670 attack drones and more than 30 missiles at Ukraine in the past week alone.

Russian air defenses downed an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan's investigation into the disaster said on Thursday. Flight J2-8243 crashed on Wednesday in a ball of fire near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of southern Russia, where Moscow has repeatedly used air defense systems against Ukrainian drone strikes. The Embraer passenger jet had flown from Azerbaijan's capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia's southern Chechnya region, before veering off hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea. It crashed on the opposite shore of the Caspian after what Russia's aviation watchdog said was an emergency that may have been caused by a bird strike. Officials did not explain why it had crossed the sea.

Russia has established a weapons program in China to develop and produce long-range attack drones for use in the war against Ukraine, according to two sources from a European intelligence agency and documents reviewed by Reuters. IEMZ Kupol, a subsidiary of Russian state-owned arms company Almaz-Antey, has developed and flight-tested a new drone model called Garpiya-3 (G3) in China with the help of local specialists, according to one of the documents, a report that Kupol sent to the Russian defense ministry earlier this year outlining its work. Kupol told the defense ministry in a subsequent update that it was able to produce drones including the G3 at scale at a factory in China so the weapons could be deployed in the "special military operation" in Ukraine, the term Moscow uses for the war.

Former U.S. ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchinson discusses Biden's recent effort to show American allies that he is fit to serve as president and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy's concern about delaying action against Russia. Russian forces have overrun two front-line villages in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, a Ukrainian army sergeant said Monday, after relentless assaults that are part of a Kremlin summer push to overwhelm battlefield defenses there. Separately, attacks in Russia's Kursk region by the Security Service of Ukraine, also known as the SBU, struck a number of substations causing power outages, according to a statement from the General Staff of Ukraine. The claim of responsibility came after Russia said it thwarted a nighttime Ukrainian drone attack. "They pressed non-stop" to capture Vovche and Prohres, the chief sergeant of Ukraine's 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade, Oleh Chaus, told Radio Svaboda.

The Defense Ministry is planning to test the use of lasers to counter drones, sources familiar with the matter have said. Under the plan, a laser system will be installed on vehicles of the Ground Self-Defense Force, including high mobility vehicles, and tests on its response capabilities will be conducted, the sources said. In March, the ministry signed a contract to buy lasers to be mounted on GSDF high mobility vehicles from Kawasaki Heavy Industries for about 1.5 billion and a 1.9 billion deal to purchase lasers for trucks from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

EXCLUSIVE: JERUSALEM – Israel's Defense Ministry is taking advantage of its country's vibrant high-tech scene to create an artificial intelligence-driven information platform that will help keep track of the increasingly deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, even as Israeli troops continue to battle the Iranian-backed Islamist terror group Hamas, Fox News Digital has learned. Commissioned by Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the NRTM system, which resembles ChatGPT and other AI platforms, relies on open-source information materials such as reports from international aid organizations, including those affiliated with the United Nations, satellite imagery, news stories and social media posts coming out of Gaza to create a real time picture of living conditions for some two million civilians in the Palestinian enclave. "The idea came from the minister, who has said that Israel's war is against Hamas and not the people of Gaza," Hadar Peretz, a senior adviser at the Ministry of Defense, told Fox News Digital. "The minister wanted to make sure that we were collecting as much data as possible in order to make a full assessment of the situation." Peretz said the goal was for this platform to become an additional tool to enable decision-making for Israeli leaders and for the minister to use in his myriad of meetings with world leaders, as well as with the heads of international organizations working to mitigate the chaos in Gaza and improve conditions.

North Korea tested a nuclear-capable underwater attack drone designed to destroy naval vessels and ports, it said Friday. North Korea's military said it conducted the test in the country's eastern waters in response to naval drills by the U.S., South Korea and Japan which ended Wednesday. The underwater drone is among a broad range of weapon systems North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un continues to test and develop as he expands his arsenal of nuclear-capable weapons. "Our army's underwater nuke-based countering posture is being further rounded off and its various maritime and underwater responsive actions will continue to deter the hostile military maneuvers of the navies of the U.S. and its allies," North Korea's Defense Ministry said in a statement. It added: "We strongly denounce the U.S. and its followers for their reckless acts of seriously threatening the security of (North Korea) from the outset of the year and sternly warn them of the catastrophic consequences to be entailed by them."

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy gives his outlook on the conflict and offers an update on his countrys counter-offensive on Special Report. Russia's Defense Ministry said Ukraine launched a series of rocket and drone attacks into Russian territories with local officials reporting that two people, including a child, were killed in the attacks. Russia said 13 rockets and 32 drones were shot down over several Russian regions, according to Reuters. A child, born in 2014, was killed in the Bryansk region, while a man in the Belgorod region was also said to have died. Both regions are in western Russia and adjoin Ukraine.