'Appropriate and unambiguous': White House defends Trump over middle-finger gesture at heckler The White House has defended US President Donald Trump after he aimed an offensive gesture at a heckler during his appearance at a Ford factory in Detroit on Tuesday. Footage of the incident published by TMZ appears to show the president responding to a man who shouted at him from afar. The White House said: A lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the President gave an appropriate and unambiguous response. The heckler has been suspended by Ford, the United Auto Workers union told the BBC's US partner, CBS News. A Ford spokesperson told CBS: One of our core values is respect and we don't condone anyone saying anything inappropriate like that within our facilities.

Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? The United Kingdom is sending military equipment and personnel to Belgium after a spate of disruptive drone sightings forced the temporary closures of two major airports. Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton told the BBC network on Sunday that the military had agreed to "deploy our people, our equipment to Belgium to help them" after a request from Belgian authorities. In the past week, both Belgium's main international airport at Brussels and one of Europe's biggest cargo airports at Liege were forced to close temporarily because of drone incursions.

The integration of machine learning (ML) is critical for industrial competitiveness, yet its adoption is frequently stalled by the prohibitive costs and operational disruptions of upgrading legacy systems. The financial and logistical overhead required to support the full ML lifecycle presents a formidable barrier to widespread implementation, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper introduces a pragmatic, API-based framework designed to overcome these challenges by strategically decoupling the ML model lifecycle from the production environment. Our solution delivers the analytical power of ML to domain experts through a lightweight, browser-based interface, eliminating the need for local hardware upgrades and ensuring model maintenance can occur with zero production downtime. This human-in-the-loop approach empowers experts with interactive control over model parameters, fostering trust and facilitating seamless integration into existing workflows. By mitigating the primary financial and operational risks, this framework offers a scalable and accessible pathway to enhance production quality and safety, thereby strengthening the competitive advantage of the manufacturing sector.

Effective disaster response is essential for safeguarding lives and property. Existing statistical approaches often lack semantic context, generalize poorly across events, and offer limited interpretability. While Large language models (LLMs) provide few-shot generalization, they remain text-bound and blind to geography. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Geospatial Awareness Layer (GAL) that grounds LLM agents in structured earth data. Starting from raw wildfire detections, GAL automatically retrieves and integrates infrastructure, demographic, terrain, and weather information from external geodatabases, assembling them into a concise, unit-annotated perception script. This enriched context enables agents to produce evidence-based resource-allocation recommendations (e.g., personnel assignments, budget allocations), further reinforced by historical analogs and daily change signals for incremental updates. We evaluate the framework in real wildfire scenarios across multiple LLM models, showing that geospatially grounded agents can outperform baselines. The proposed framework can generalize to other hazards such as floods and hurricanes.

This study investigates how railway professionals perceive safety as a concept within rail, with the intention to help inform future technological developments within the industry. Through a series of interviews with drivers, route planners,and administrative personnel, the research explores the currentstate of safety practices, the potential for automation and the understanding of the railway as a system of systems. Key findings highlight a cautious attitude towards automation, a preference for assistive technologies, and a complex understanding of safety that integrates human, systematic and technological factors. The study also addresses the limitations of transferring automotive automation technologies to railways and the need for a railway-specific causation model to better evaluate and enhance safety in an evolving technological landscape. This study aims to bridge thegap between contemporary research and practical applications, contributing to the development of more effective safety metrics.

The effects of personnel scheduling on the quality of care and working conditions for healthcare personnel have been thoroughly documented. However, the ever-present demand and large variation of constraints make healthcare scheduling particularly challenging. This problem has been studied for decades, with limited research aimed at applying Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). SMT has gained momentum within the formal verification community in the last decades, leading to the advancement of SMT solvers that have been shown to outperform standard mathematical programming techniques. In this work, we propose generic constraint formulations that can model a wide range of real-world scheduling constraints. Then, the generic constraints are formulated as SMT and MILP problems and used to compare the respective state-of-the-art solvers, Z3 and Gurobi, on academic and real-world inspired rostering problems. Experimental results show how each solver excels for certain types of problems; the MILP solver generally performs better when the problem is highly constrained or infeasible, while the SMT solver performs better otherwise. On real-world inspired problems containing a more varied set of shifts and personnel, the SMT solver excels. Additionally, it was noted during experimentation that the SMT solver was more sensitive to the way the generic constraints were formulated, requiring careful consideration and experimentation to achieve better performance. We conclude that SMT-based methods present a promising avenue for future research within the domain of personnel scheduling.

Natural disasters often result in a surge of social media activity, including requests for assistance, offers of help, sentiments, and general updates. To enable humanitarian organizations to respond more efficiently, we propose a fine-grained hierarchical taxonomy to systematically organize crisis-related information about requests and offers into three critical dimensions: supplies, emergency personnel, and actions. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce Query-Specific Few-shot Learning (QSF Learning) that retrieves class-specific labeled examples from an embedding database to enhance the model's performance in detecting and classifying posts. Beyond classification, we assess the actionability of messages to prioritize posts requiring immediate attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline prompting strategies, effectively identifying and prioritizing actionable requests and offers.

This paper showcases an experimental study on anomaly detection using computer vision. The study focuses on class distinction and performance evaluation, combining OpenCV with deep learning techniques while employing a TensorFlow-based convolutional neural network for real-time face recognition and classification. The system effectively distinguishes among three classes: authorized personnel (admin), intruders, and non-human entities. A MobileNetV2-based deep learning model is utilized to optimize real-time performance, ensuring high computational efficiency without compromising accuracy. Extensive dataset preprocessing, including image augmentation and normalization, enhances the models generalization capabilities. Our analysis demonstrates classification accuracies of 90.20% for admin, 98.60% for intruders, and 75.80% for non-human detection, while maintaining an average processing rate of 30 frames per second. The study leverages transfer learning, batch normalization, and Adam optimization to achieve stable and robust learning, and a comparative analysis of class differentiation strategies highlights the impact of feature extraction techniques and training methodologies. The results indicate that advanced feature selection and data augmentation significantly enhance detection performance, particularly in distinguishing human from non-human scenes. As an experimental study, this research provides critical insights into optimizing deep learning-based surveillance systems for high-security environments and improving the accuracy and efficiency of real-time anomaly detection.

At Fort Sill, service members from across the military are undergoing counter-drone training at the Joint C-sUAS (Counter small Unmanned Aircraft System) University (JCU), also known as "drone university." The program has become a critical part of the Military's efforts to combat the rapidly growing use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by adversaries. "It's the Army's premier Counter-Small UAS training institution," said Col. Moseph Sauda, the program's director. "Our mission is to prepare and train the joint force to counter the threat, to be able to understand that threat, how they operate, and how they attack us… We can then develop not only tactics, techniques, and procedures, but also the employment methodology that maximizes the capabilities of our existing systems." A 3D-printed drone flies above from Oklahoma's Fort Sill at the U.S. Army's Joint C-sUAS University.

Workforce optimization plays a crucial role in efficient organizational operations where decision-making may span several different administrative and time scales. Existing work focuses on specific sub-problems such as resource allocation and facility location, which are solved with heuristics like local-search and, more recently, deep reinforcement learning. However, these may not accurately represent real-world scenarios where such sub-problems are not fully independent. Our aim is to fill this gap by creating a simulator that models a unified workforce optimization problem. Specifically, we designed a modular simulator to support the development of reinforcement learning methods for integrated workforce optimization problems. We focus on three interdependent aspects: personnel dispatch, workforce management, and personnel positioning. The simulator provides configurable pa-rameterizations to help explore dynamic scenarios with varying levels of stochasticity and non-stationarity. To facilitate benchmarking and ablation studies, we also include heuristic and RL baselines for the above mentioned aspects.