PITTSBURGH – Local law enforcement repeatedly offered to provide drone coverage in the sky above former President Donald Trump's July 13 campaign rally – where he survived a failed assassination attempt – but was rebuffed by the U.S. Secret Service, according to Sen. Josh Hawley, citing a new whistleblower. "According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally," Hawley, a Missouri Republican and member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. "This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. WHISTLEBLOWER REVEALS WHY TRUMP RALLY OFFICER ASSIGNED TO SHOOTER'S PERCH MOVED Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, Saturday, July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pa. FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose agency has taken a lead role in the investigation, confirmed during a congressional hearing this week that the would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, flew a drone of his own overhead before Trump took the stage.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. JERUSALEM (AP) -- The Israeli military said Friday that it dismissed two officers and reprimanded three others for their roles in drone strikes in Gaza that killed seven aid workers on a food-delivery mission, saying the officers had mishandled critical information and violated the army's rules of engagement. The findings of a retired general's investigation into the Monday killings marked an embarrassing admission by Israel, which faces growing accusations from key allies, including the United States, of not doing enough to protect Gaza's civilians from its war with the militant Hamas group. The findings are likely to bolster widespread skepticism over the Israeli military's decision-making.

The San Francisco police could use robots to deploy lethal force under a policy advanced by city supervisors on Tuesday that thrust the city into the forefront of a national debate about the use of weaponized robots in American cities. The possibility is not merely hypothetical. In 2016, the Dallas Police Department ended a standoff with a gunman suspected of killing five officers by blowing him up with a bomb attached to a robot in what was believed to be the first lethal use of the technology by an American law enforcement agency. Supporters of the policy, advanced by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by an 8-to-3 vote, said it would allow the police to deploy a robot with deadly force in extraordinary circumstances, such as when a mass shooter or a terrorist is threatening the lives of officers or civilians. David Lazar, assistant chief of the San Francisco Police Department, cited as an example the gunman who opened fire from his Las Vegas high-rise hotel room in 2017, killing 60 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

A local defense company hopes artificial intelligence can help stop mass shootings. Training started on Saturday, all with the goal of eventually saving lives. The training was as realistic as possible and put on by the security company Defendry. A host of actors came together to replicate a scene where an active shooter comes toward them. Recordings of the drill will be marked down and uploaded to program artificial intelligence; all to develop a system that spots a gunman before any shots ring out.

In this July 30, 2019, photo, Paul Hildreth, emergency operations coordinator for the Fulton County School District, works in the emergency operations center at the Fulton County School District Administration Center in Atlanta. Artificial Intelligence is transforming surveillance cameras from passive sentries into active observers that can immediately spot a gunman, alert retailers when someone is shoplifting and help police quickly find suspects. Schools, such as the Fulton County School District, are among the most enthusiastic adopters of the technology. Paul Hildreth peered at a display of dozens of images from security cameras surveying his Atlanta school district and settled on one showing a woman in a bright yellow shirt walking a hallway. A mouse click instructed the artificial intelligence-equipped system to find other images of the woman, and it immediately stitched them into a video narrative of where she was currently, where she had been and where she was going. There was no threat, but Hildreth's demonstration showed what's possible with AI-powered cameras.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A gunman opened fire Sunday at an online video game tournament that was being livestreamed from a Florida mall, killing multiple people and sending many others to hospitals, authorities said. Sheriff's officers did not immediately confirm the number of dead at the Jacksonville Landing, a collection of restaurants and shops along the St. Johns River. But an official close to the investigation said the shooting left four people dead and that the gunman died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was not clear if the official included the suspect in the death toll. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to release information.

Gaming retailer Steam will continue to allow controversial content on its online store, the company has confirmed. The announcement comes less than a month after Steam was heavily criticised for allowing a school shooting simulator, which allowed players to take on the role of a gunman on a murderous rampage inside a school, on its online store. Steam eventually pulled the video game, dubbed'Active Shooter', after more than 271,900 people signed an online petition calling for its removal. The move appears to have prompted the online retailer, which is owned by Valve, to review its screening policy. Steam has now confirmed that it will not remove any content from its online store simply because some users deem it to be in bad taste.

A blood-thirsty video game that encouraged players to take part in a school shooting has been pulled by the publisher after it triggered a furious backlash. 'Active Shooter' was marketed on its ability to allow players to take on the role of a gunman on a murderous rampage inside a school, as well as a SWAT team member trying to stop the bloodshed. As the lone gunman, players would be shown a tally of the number of civilians and police officers they managed to kill during their simulated shooting spree. Anti-gun violence charity Infer Trust described the game as'horrendous' and in'bad taste' given the recent mass shootings in the US. An online petition calling for the game to be scrapped gained more than 194,700 signatures.

Six-year-old Jamil starts school on September 11. There will be no ISIS fighters in his first grade class in Ulm, Germany, but Jamil, haunted by nightmares, is still fighting the ISIS demons. The boy's ordeal began in northern Iraq on August 3, 2015. Then four-years-old, he was one of many Yazidis captured by ISIS, crammed into a bus, and taken to Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, then under ISIS control. The Yazidi people are an ancient, non-Muslim religious community regarded by radical Islamists as infidels worthy of death.

Robot-maker Sean Bielat says he's fine with the Dallas Police Department's apparently unprecedented use of a police bomb-disposal robot to kill a gunman on Thursday. "A robot was used to keep people out of harm's way in an extreme situation," said Bielat, the CEO of Endeavor Robotics, a spinoff of iRobot's military division. "That's how robots are intended to be used." Joergen Pedersen, the CEO of RE2 robotics and the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association's robotics division concurred. "If these robots are used in manners for which they were unintended, we would expect that the officers who are there to keep citizens and themselves safe would use good judgment where the application of lethal force is a last resort," he said.