Spain’s National Court opens probe into Israeli military officials over Gaza flotilla interception
Spain’s National Court has opened an investigation into senior Israeli military officials over the illegal detention of activists during the interception of the Global Sumud flotilla, limiting the probe to incidents involving Spanish-flagged vessels, newspaper El Pais reported on Friday.
Judge Francisco de Jorge accepted complaints filed by the Communist Party of Spain, United Left Federal and several activists against Israeli military Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and Israeli Navy Commander Ram Rothberg.
The complaints relate to the interception of the Global Sumud flotilla, which was carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip when it was intercepted by Israeli forces on Oct. 1.
According to the ruling, Israeli forces boarded several vessels in international waters about 70 nautical miles off the coast, including ships flying the Spanish flag.
READ: Italy’s Foreign Minister Tajani blasts Ben-Gvir remarks amid probe over flotilla detainees
The judge said the complaints allege that Israeli personnel forcibly took control of the vessels, damaged property and illegally detained crew members, including dozens of Spanish citizens.
According to the ruling, the plaintiffs further alleged that the detainees were later held at Israel’s Ketziot Prison, where they were subjected to torture and denied effective legal and diplomatic assistance.
Judge de Jorge also asked the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to clarify whether the alleged illegal detentions fall within its ongoing investigations into alleged Israeli genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territories, or whether the Spanish proceedings could conflict with those investigations.
READ: Spain receives 20 Palestinian children from Gaza for medical treatment
IDF Destroys Hezbollah Weapons Depots and Tunnels in Southern Lebanon
Israeli troops operating in the security zone in southern Lebanon located and destroyed Hezbollah weapons facilities, underground tunnels and caches of arms during recent operations, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.
Troops from the Golani Brigade Combat Team, operating under the 36th Division, uncovered weapons depots containing launchers, machine guns, explosive devices, missiles and additional Hezbollah weapons.
⭕️🔎LOCATED: Weapons facilities in the Security Zone in southern Lebanon, containing launchers, machine guns, explosive devices, missiles & additional weapons belonging to Hezbollah.
IDF soldiers dismantled the facilities & the weapons found inside them, which were intended to… pic.twitter.com/mdA0xmsbmQ
According to the military, the forces destroyed both the facilities and the weapons stored inside them. The IDF said the weapons were intended to be used against Israeli troops and civilians.
During operations in the Majdal Zoun area of southern Lebanon, soldiers also discovered two underground tunnel routes with a combined length of approximately 200 meters.
⭕️DISMANTLED: 2 underground tunnel routes with a combined length of ~200 meters in the area of Majdal Zoun in Lebanon.
Inside the tunnels, troops discovered living quarters, 3 launch shafts aimed toward Israel & dozens of weapons. Additionally, the troops located a cache of… pic.twitter.com/32lCdD2oBz
China recovered its first reusable rocket and showed a new way to do it
China’s sprawling state-owned rocket developer, maker of the country’s Long March rocket family, announced it recovered a reusable orbital-class booster for the first time Friday in the South China Sea.
The milestone mission began with the liftoff of a Long March 10B rocket from the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province. Powered by seven kerosene-fueled engines, the approximately 209-foot-tall (63.6-meter) rocket took off at 12:15 am EDT (04:15 UTC), or 12:15 pm local time at the seaside spaceport at Wenchang.
About 10 minutes later, the Long March 10B booster descended from space and guided itself into a four-legged frame affixed to an offshore vessel. Tensioned cables stretched over the ship in a grid pattern captured the rocket as it shut down its landing engines, leaving the smoldering booster hanging in midair. The rocket’s upper stage continued into orbit and deployed a payload known only as CX-26. Chinese officials hailed the flight as a “complete success.”
A growing number
“A historic day in China’s space program!” wrote Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, on X. “China’s Long March 10B has successfully completed its maiden flight—and recovered its first stage via a sea-based net. This marks the country’s first-ever controlled rocket recovery. A major leap toward reusable launch capabilities.”
The landing on Friday makes the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and its subsidiary, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), the third enterprise to accomplish this feat. SpaceX did it with its Falcon 9 rocket in 2015 and with its Starship/Super Heavy booster in 2024. Blue Origin landed its New Glenn booster on an offshore platform for the first time last November.
SpaceX and Blue Origin use propulsive landings to return their Falcon 9 and New Glenn boosters to offshore platforms or onshore landing pads. With Starship, SpaceX pioneered a new method of catching the rocket’s reusable booster back at its launch pad using mechanical arms mounted to the launch tower.
The Long March 10B employs a different approach for recovery, combining an offshore vessel floating downrange with the catch technique somewhat like what SpaceX uses for Starship. Catching the rocket in this way reduces the effect of reuse on payload capacity. The Long March 10B doesn’t have to carry the extra mass of landing legs, and recovering it downrange reduces how much fuel the rocket must consume during its descent.
In a statement, CASC said the Long March 10B test flight “validated key core technologies” for a reusable launch architecture, such as multiple engine restarts with high-altitude ignition, high-precision navigation and control, and the first capture and recovery using a net system on a sea-based platform.
A Long March 10B rocket lifts off from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on July 10, 2026, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China.
Credit: Ding Yi/VCG via Getty Images
A Long March 10B rocket lifts off from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on July 10, 2026, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China. Credit: Ding Yi/VCG via Getty Images
Friday’s launch was the first flight of the Long March 10B, a medium-lift rocket with a payload capacity of approximately 16 metric tons (35,000 pounds) to low-Earth orbit. This is slightly less than the lift capacity of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The Long March 10B has two stages, with seven YF-100K engines on the booster consuming kerosene and liquid oxygen, and a single methane-fueled YF-219 engine on the second stage.
“Moving forward, the Long March 10B development team will continue to optimize the vehicle’s performance and accelerate the iterative upgrading of reusable rocket technologies,” CASC said. “The first stage reuse flight test is expected to be completed by the end of this year.”
The Long March 10B is similar to China’s Long March 10A rocket, which is still awaiting its first full-scale test flight. The Long March 10A has the same first stage booster as the Long March 10B, but a different upper stage and a payload fairing to accommodate cargo and satellites. The Long March 10A, on the other hand, is designed for future crew launches to China’s Tiangong space station using the country’s new human-rated spaceship, the Mengzhou, replacing China’s Shenzhou crew capsule and the Long March 2F rocket used to power it into orbit.
Chasing the Moon
A heavier configuration, known simply as the Long March 10, is a key part of China’s Moon program. This more powerful rocket will combine three Long March 10 first stage boosters—each reusable—together to generate more thrust at liftoff. A second stage and third stage will propel Chinese astronauts and their lunar landers toward the Moon. The Chinese government says it aims to land its citizens on the Moon by 2030. Friday’s launch was a small step toward that goal.
China launched a scaled-down version of the Long March 10A rocket in February with a prototype of the Mengzhou capsule to test the spacecraft’s launch abort system, which would trigger to whisk crew members away from a failing rocket. The Mengzhou test went well, and remarkably, the Long March 10A continued flying after the capsule fired away from the booster, eventually coming back to Earth for a controlled splashdown at sea. The Long March 10B took this achievement a step further with a midair catch.
Multiple commercial and government-backed Chinese rocket companies are trying to level the playing field with the United States. China is the world’s second-largest spacefaring nation, but US companies, dominated by SpaceX, are launching payloads into orbit about twice as often as Chinese rockets. SpaceX’s blistering launch cadence is made possible by the partially reusable Falcon 9, something Blue Origin and Chinese companies are seeking to emulate.
US military officials have identified China’s advancements in reusable rocketry as a key to unlocking the country’s ability to potentially threaten US assets in space. “I’m concerned about when the Chinese figure out how to do reusable lift that allows them to put more capability on orbit at a quicker cadence than currently exists,” said Maj. Gen. Brian Sidari, the Space Force’s deputy chief of space operations for intelligence, at a conference last year.
Seven kerosene-fueled engines power the Long March 10B rocket into the sky with nearly 2 million pounds of thrust.
Credit: Liu Yang/VCG via Getty Images
Seven kerosene-fueled engines power the Long March 10B rocket into the sky with nearly 2 million pounds of thrust. Credit: Liu Yang/VCG via Getty Images
SpaceX has used the Falcon 9’s rapid-fire launch cadence to deploy more than 12,000 satellites for its commercial Starlink Internet network. Starlink has spawned several spinoffs for the US military, including a secure communications network called Starshield, a constellation of spy satellites based on the Starlink design. More recently, SpaceX has won contracts to provide the Space Force with a new Space Data Network and support an emerging capability using satellites to identify moving targets on the ground and in the air.
All of this would give US forces an advantage in any future conflict with China, which is still in the early stages of launching its own versions of Starlink. China’s mastery of rocket reuse would significantly expand the country’s launch capacity, accelerating its ability to close the gap.
“Clearly, they admire the work that’s being done by SpaceX and are trying to replicate it, and at the same time take it away from the United States if it ever came to it,” said Charles Galbreath, a retired US Space Force colonel and director and senior resident fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute think tank’s Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence.
“We’ll see what happens next,” Galbreath told Ars. “Are they able to rapidly turn and increase their launch rate as a result of this potential reuse? What impact will that have on their ability to field an operational architecture of satellites?”
More to come
Two Chinese rocket companies have already tried to recover their rockets after launching from one of China’s inland spaceports. The first was LandSpace, a privately funded firm that debuted its medium-class Zhuque-3 rocket in December. The rocket reached orbit, but the booster crashed near the landing zone in the Gobi Desert at high speed. A few weeks later, another one of China’s state-owned rocket builders successfully launched the first Long March 12A rocket, but the booster again lost control on descent and could not be recovered.
The next flight of the Zhuque-3 rocket could happen later this month or in August, with LandSpace again expected to attempt to land the booster downrange. Other Chinese rockets that could soon achieve reusability include Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3, China Commercial Rocket Co.’s Long March 12B, CAS Space’s Kinetica-2, i-Space’s Hyperbola-3, and Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1. Further into the future, China aims to debut a huge new reusable rocket on the scale of Starship named the Long March 9.
In the United States, there are SpaceX’s Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship, along with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Rocket Lab is aiming to launch its first medium-lift Neutron rocket with a reusable booster by the end of the year. Relativity Space is developing a partially reusable heavy-lifter named Terran R, and Firefly Aerospace is partnering with Northrop Grumman on the Eclipse rocket, which officials say will eventually have a recoverable and reusable first stage. Stoke Space has the bolder ambition of a fully reusable rocket called Nova.
Several European companies also plan to test reusable rocket technology, but their vehicles are not as mature as many of the US and Chinese rockets. Rocket builders in India, Japan, and Russia have reuse in their roadmaps, with varying degrees of realism.
The proliferation of Chinese rocket companies, scattered across four land-based spaceports and multiple ocean-going launch platforms, should set up China to quickly ramp up its launch cadence.
“It probably won’t be but a few years before they’re able to achieve a much higher launch cadence,” Galbreath said. “They also have more launch sites than the United States currently, so if you couple their number of sites with reusability, they could surpass us in terms of launch rate, which in and of itself is more of a pride thing. But it’s the capability that’s being launched as a result of that that could actually have a significant impact on our competition, and if we got to it, a conflict.
“There’s nothing wrong with competition as long as it’s peaceful,” Galbreath said. “That can drive innovation, but I’m concerned that the historic example of Chinese behavior has not always remained peaceful. So, we have to look at everything they do carefully. On the one hand, they’re competing with SpaceX, but we know that because of the way China has organized its military, its space capabilities, all under military control, that there is significant utility that their armed forces will receive from this race.”
The number of non-EU nationals employed in Italy increased by more than 35% between 2019 and 2025 and now represents about one-seventh of the country’s workforce, the head of Italy’s social security agency said Thursday.
Presenting the National Institute for Social Security’s (INPS) 25th annual report in the lower house of parliament, INPS President Gabriele Fava said the figures underscored the growing contribution of non-EU workers to Italy’s economy.
The head of Italy’s social security agency said the country should strengthen legal migration, training and integration to meet labor market needs.
“Setting aside ideological divisions, this is a statistic that must be taken seriously,” Fava said.
He said the data showed that an increasing share of Italy’s productive capacity and tax base depends on the country’s ability to manage migration flows in line with labor market needs.
Fava said this required policies that direct migration toward sectors facing labor shortages while supporting training, legal employment and integration. He also called for what he described as “a pact of coexistence and responsibility.”
10-Year-Old Boy Found Dead He ‘Sleepwalked’ Out of Home
A heartbreaking search for a missing 10-year-old Missouri boy ended in tragedy Thursday after authorities found him unresponsive in a pond just hours after he was believed to have sleepwalked out of his home.
Jackson S. Georgari was last seen shortly before midnight on Thursday, July 9, wearing a gray T-shirt and gray shorts, according to a missing person alert issued by the Kansas City Missouri Police Department.
Police said Jackson, who was 4 feet 8 inches tall and weighed about 80 pounds, had a history of sleepwalking. His family believed he may have wandered out of the home while asleep.
The boy had no diagnosed medical conditions, according to police.
Jackson’s sister, Semina Richard, told KMBC that this was not the first time he had sleepwalked away from home.
“The first time it happened was when we were in San Diego, and he sleepwalked and then someone found him on the street and they called 911,” she said. “They brought him over and he was found safely.”
She said the family had recently moved from San Diego to Missouri, where Jackson had wandered off once before.
“The second time, it was here,” Richard said. “We recently moved here from San Diego to Missouri. And he ran away again, and he went, like, all the way up there where his school is at because that’s the only place he recognizes.”
Jackson’s sisters told KMBC they believed he may have followed a route he recognized from his school bus rides — a path that ran through wooded areas near streams and ponds.
By shortly after noon, police delivered the devastating update. Jackson had been found unresponsive in a pond near Briarcliff Village on North Mulberry.
Kansas City Police Capt. Jake Becchina later described the pond as “very large” while speaking with reporters in a video shared by KCTV5.
“Fire and rescue personnel immediately began resuscitation efforts but unfortunately he was declared deceased there at that location,” police said in an updated alert.
Authorities said the case has now shifted from a missing person investigation to a death investigation. Police noted there were no immediate signs of foul play.
Jackson’s cause and manner of death will be determined by the medical examiner.
Becchina said the tragedy was the kind of update no department ever wants to give.
“It hurts in your community when you have a kid that goes out in the middle of the night and whatever the circumstances were that led to him ending up in there,” he said.
“It’s not an update we ever want to provide, and it’s truly unfortunate,” Becchina continued. “I really feel for the family involved in this. It’s unimaginable. Can’t even imagine. They went to bed last night, and everything was normal, and now today they have to deal with this.”
Maine Senate Candidates Claim They’re Just Like Platner — But Entirely Different
Candidates entering the Maine Senate race after Graham Platner suspended his campaign following a rape allegation are walking a fine line between distancing themselves from the disgraced candidate and embracing his base, which they’ll need to beat Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in November.
As of Friday, at least six candidates have officially declared that they will enter the race, with others still considering their options. All of them have been wary of aligning themselves too closely with Platner, who had already been plagued by scandal before being accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend. But they run the risk of alienating Platner’s energized base if they distance themselves too much from his policy commitments such as fighting military spending, ending the genocide in Gaza, advocating for Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and strengthening protections for unions.
In the running are at least six candidates, three of whom who lost in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in June. Former state Sen. Troy Jackson, whose gubernatorial campaign was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was the first to enter the race. Next came Dr. Nirav Shah, who previously directed the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.
Brewery co-founder Dan Kleban, who dropped out of the Maine Democratic Senate primary and endorsed Gov. Janet Mills in October, also entered the race this week, as did social worker Paige Loud and former Capital Hill staffer Jordan Wood, both of whom lost the primary for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.
Of the first three candidates, Shah has faced the most skepticism of his progressive bona fides, despite what he says is his long-standing support for universal healthcare, dating back to his time as a public health official and his career as a doctor, and his stance against the genocide in Gaza, expressed during the gubernatorial campaign. His critics have painted his declarations of support for Medicare for All and focus on criticism of Israel amid his Senate launch as an effort to pivot to the left after taking a more measured approach as a candidate in the gubernatorial primary.
He told The Intercept that those criticisms are a mischaracterization of his record.
“Critics who are suggesting that this is a newfound policy position, they are putting politics over the facts,” Shah said.
Asked if he would echo Platner’s call to abolish ICE outright, Shah said the agency is “out of control” and “cannot continue to exist” in its current form. “Whether we reform ICE, whether we disband it and start from scratch, or whether we transfer their duties to CBP, ICE, as it currently is constituted, cannot continue to exist,” he said.
Like Shah, Jackson and Bellows are now doing their best to prove to Platner’s base that they will carry out his policy vision.
While Platner was a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Jackson faced criticism for not mentioning Israel or Gaza in his Senate launch on Wednesday. But a day later, he issued a statement denouncing the genocide in Gaza as “unconscionable” and saying he would “never vote in favor of US taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel.”
Bellows, who differentiated herself from her Shah on issues from labor to renter protections during the gubernatorial primary, has said she’s running on Medicare for All, workers’ rights, and to “protect our neighbors.” She and Jackson both criticized Shah’s gubernatorial campaign for ads backing his campaign run by a group pushing school voucher programs. Maine Education Association, a union of educators, endorsed all three candidates for governor but ranked Shah third.
After challenging Sen. Susan Collins in 2014 and losing by more than 35 percentage points, Bellows was elected to the state Senate in 2016. Bellows has previously led the ACLU of Maine as well as the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine. She has not made many public comments on Israel, but signed a proclamation from Mills recognizing Israel’s 75th anniversary and its “friendship and cooperation” with the U.S. in April 2023.
Shah has also faced claims that he’s taken money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, though the group does not spend in state-level races. He is endorsed by 314 Action, a group that backs candidates with a background in science, which took $1 million from the super PAC for AIPAC in 2024. On Friday, in response to claims that Shah had taken AIPAC money, 314 Action’s executive director said it hadn’t taken money from AIPAC this cycle and would not. He characterized the criticism as “worse than the MAGA scare tactics.”
Shah told The Intercept he has never taken AIPAC money and would not accept it if offered. He also said that he would not support any form of military aid — offensive or defensive — to Israel. He also pointed to a digital ad his campaign ran toward the end of his gubernatorial primary that highlighted “standing against the genocide in Gaza.”
In a campaign kickoff on Thursday, Shah opened the event with remarks from two former Platner volunteers before highlighting what he said was “little daylight” between their platforms. He ended the event by telling a reporter he would not seek Platner’s endorsement.
“I spent most of my life watching decisions get made by people who will never have to live with the consequences of them, and my generation is expected to just accept that,” said 18-year-old Liv Drewniak, co-founder of the group Midcoast Youth Activists and a former youth organizer and volunteer for Platner’s campaign.
“It was never about one person. It was about a movement.”
“I thought that my time of feeling powerless had come to an end when I started working with the Platner campaign, but the last few days of news have been heartbreaking, and I saw all the hard-fought and harder-won progress that I was so invested in crumble before me,” Drewniak said.
“But then I remembered why I was so excited for that change in the first place. It was never about one person. It was about a movement, a movement hand-built by the people of Maine. And that momentum has not stalled, and that energy will never fail. It will now have a new leader.”
A senator from a different state weighed in on the new crop of candidates on Friday. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said Shah should not be the nominee due to his handling of veterans’ health issues in her home state. Duckworth and her Senate colleague Dick Durbin called on Shah to resign in 2018 over his handling of a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at a veterans’ facility.
Shah said the attack was “recycled” after his critics raised it during his gubernatorial primary campaign. He said he had addressed voters’ questions about the outbreak, and his campaign noted that Collins had complimented his response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Maine.
“I have deep respect for Senator Duckworth and the sacrifices she has made for our country. I’m the outsider in this race, and outsiders get attacked, so I want to speak directly to the people of Maine, because they’ve seen this playbook before,” Shah said in a statement to The Intercept.
“Voters can judge my record by this: a Democratic Presidential administration reviewed my record and then hired me to help lead the U.S. CDC. … Mainers made up their own minds and that’s why they gave me more first-choice votes than any other candidate in the gubernatorial primary.”
“The people of Maine saw with their own eyes who I am during the pandemic, when I stood at that podium every day and told them the truth, even when it was hard,” he said. “I’d invite people to ask when Susan Collins last did the same. Every day Democrats spend attacking Democrats is another day Collins doesn’t have to answer for her record. I won’t take that bait, and I don’t believe Mainers will either.”
The Maine Democratic Party will hold a nominating convention to choose one candidate; it must submit its pick by July 27.
Increased drone surveillance of illegal July 4th fireworks led to $100K fine
More cities and towns deployed drones to spot illegal fireworks during the Fourth of July celebrations commemorating America’s 250th anniversary—leading to a $100,000 fine in one instance and coming as part of a broader national trend of first responders turning to drone surveillance.
Police and fire departments have described using both increased drone surveillance and steep fines to deter people from shooting off illegal fireworks, with many departments publicizing their drone videos on social media and warning that their drones will be watching in the future. Incidents involving illegal fireworks have led to costly fires, injuries, and evenmultipledeaths each year, along with creating local air and noise pollution for residential neighborhoods.
This year, the $100,000 fine for illegal fireworks came from the Sacramento Fire Department in Northern California deploying its own drones for the first time on the Fourth of July, according to CBS News Sacramento. Sacramento Fire Captain Justin Sylvia described the fire department’s drones as being capable of recording scenes in high-resolution video to help investigators identify the house or closest location using Google Maps.
Such drone capabilities allowed the fire department to count the fireworks being fired from a gathering near a home in the Del Paso Heights neighborhood of Sacramento, according to the TV news station KCRA 3. The drone also showed a U-Haul trailer containing fireworks catching fire at one point, although the people at the gathering managed to put it out.
The resulting $100,000 fine came from counting the number of fireworks and possibly other factors. Sacramento County assigns fines for illegal fireworks starting at $1,000 per device and as high as $10,000 per device used near sensitive areas such as schools or parks. But felony criminal charges punishable by imprisonment are also possible if illegal fireworks cause a fire that leads to property damage or bodily injury.
The Sacramento Fire Department issued 70 citations on July 4, totaling $300,000 in fines. But the department was also looking to assign additional citations on July 2 and July 3. Sylvia told KCRA 3 that the department had previously issued a $1 million fine to a single individual in 2025.
In Central California, the Salinas Fire Department posted a promotional sizzle reel to Instagram featuring drone footage of various illegal fireworks activities and warning that it expected to issue nearly 100 citations from the Fourth of July weekend. The department first began training a dozen of its firefighters to become certified drone pilots in 2022, Monterey County Now reported.
The trend of first responders deploying drones has accelerated significantly since 2025, when the US Federal Aviation Administration reworked its regulations to enable faster approvals of waivers enabling police and fire departments to fly drones beyond the operator’s visual line of sight.
Sacramento Fire’s drones crack down on illegal fireworks.
Unleash the drone sizzle reels
Several police departments in Southern California also deployed drone teams for the first time in 2026 to identify the locations of illegal fireworks activity. The Anaheim Police Department used drones to help issue 40 citations and confiscate 2,500 pounds of illegal fireworks, according to The Orange County Register.
The newspaper also confirmed that the Santa Ana Police Department deployed drones for the first time this year. The drones assisted the department in issuing 107 citations—though the citations were issued to property owners at addresses where illegal fireworks activity took place rather than to specific perpetrators.
The Santa Ana Police Department further claimed that its drone operators assisted in the seizure of nearly 1,300 pounds of illegal fireworks in a promotional reel posted to social media, which played the “Bad Boys” music of the American TV show Cops as the soundtrack.
Meanwhile, the La Habra Police Department posted a less flashy video to Facebook showing a drone video of a person lighting a firework in the middle of a residential street. It described its drone unit as helping with the issuance of “numerous citations” and leading to arrests in some cases for fireworks violations.
The Riverside Police Department has attributed its increase in citations for illegal fireworks to having deployed drones starting in 2025, according to the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper also listed other California cities such as Downey, Artesia, Brea, San Bernardino, Stanton, Chino, Hemet, and San Jose as deploying drones over the Fourth of July holiday.
California cities may be the most aggressive in using drones to hunt down illegal fireworks so far, but there are examples elsewhere. This year, the Lewisville Police Department in Texas shared footage with CBS News of its drone responding to 19 fireworks incidents on July 4, and reported several instances in which people firing off fireworks decided to stop and clear out once the drone arrived.
Washington state’s Renton Police Department also posted drone video from this past Fourth of July weekend and has deployed drones for the past three years to spot people setting off illegal fireworks in the suburb of Seattle, according to MyNorthwest.
This all fits a broader trend of “drone as first responder” programs growing across the United States, as tech companies pitch law enforcement on drones equipped with a variety of surveillance capabilities. More than 1,800 police departments and sheriff’s offices have operated drones in the United States, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance database. Such drones “should require clear policies around retention, audits, and use, including when the cameras shouldn’t be recording,” according to Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Incidentally, some US communities used drones on America’s 250th anniversary for a very different purpose—supplementing or even replacing official fireworks displays with drone swarms that put on coordinated and colorful shows in the sky. Such displays are both cleaner and quieter than fireworks, while significantly lowering the risk of starting fires in dry summer conditions.
Ships stranded in the Strait of Hormuz. Image: YouTube Screengrab / CNN
Iran’s move on Hormuz is ultimately a short-term maneuver. And if it doesn’t get its act together soon, the whole region could turn against it.
The new wave of US attacks against Iran has an undefined time frame, but at least a clear, limited objective – to reopen the Strait of Hormuz against Tehran’s claim of control. And it ushers in new possibilities and threats for Iran.
Thirteen tankers crossed the Strait of Hormuz on July 8 compared with an average of 33 per day over the previous week. Traffic slowed after Iranian attacks on at least three ships triggered a renewed round of fighting with the US.
And while oil markets have not yet priced in a complete closure of Hormuz, they could become more nervous next week if a truce isn’t re-established.
Key to the truce is a hazy compromise in which Iran doesn’t threaten the Strait, without explicitly declaring such a threat. Behind the short-term tactical agreement lie medium- and long-term considerations.
By threatening traffic through Hormuz, Iran deprived itself of long-term leverage (the possibility of closing the Strait), which would have worked only as long as it wasn’t used.
Gulf States are developing alternatives to bypass the Strait of Hormuz via pipelines to the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean. Eventually, the Hormuz chokehold will apply only to Iranian oil, with no clear alternative routes. Tehran would then be trapped by its own strategy.
Some in Iran may believe that, in this situation, they need to maximize their short-term advantage and try to partially close the Strait. This is enough to pressure the market.
Even if 90% of traffic continues, a few sporadic attacks are enough to drive up insurance premiums and, consequently, oil prices, affecting global markets. It’s minimal pressure for maximum results.
To avoid that, some in US circles talk about occupying Iran’s Kharg Island, which controls access to Hormuz. But after Iraq and Vietnam, who can guarantee this won’t be the first step into quicksand?
If the US occupies Kharg, then the next day, US troops there become targets of missile batteries it hasn’t identified or eliminated. And then it must go deeper, sinking further into the quicksand.
Some in Israel may want outright regime change in Iran, but Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, to name a few, do not because today they have something like a “sporting” alliance with the US and difficult or less-than-cordial ties with Israel.
But if Iran becomes pro-Israel and pro-US via full-blown regime change, this would quickly redefine the region’s power balance. All the others would have to reconsider their relations with each other and the US.
No one wants a nuclear Iran or one that controls Hormuz, but a pro-Israeli Iran would be another matter entirely.
Amid this general chaos — with an open war in Ukraine, an undefined conflict with China, and a runaway nuclear rearmament in North Korea — is it wise to embark on an uncertain adventure in Iran?
In this situation, Iran appears to have only a short-term game, threatening Hormuz and dragging its feet with its fissile nuclear material.
There are two competing strategies in the US and Iran. US President Donald Trump’s administration may want to bring some form of closure to the war as soon as possible to avoid interference with the difficult midterm elections in November. Iran may want to drag on opening and shutting the spigot of threats until the elections.
But this strategy, like the Hormuz threats, has a short shelf life. Before the elections, Trump may be interested in concessions, but after the elections, that interest will diminish.
Moreover, the nuclear threat and the chokehold on Hormuz have de facto created a new convergence of interests beyond Israel’s position.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India may all have an interest in pushing back against Iran and, with time and patience, could be coaxed into acting to reopen Hormuz and halt Tehran’s nuclear program. Such action would be very different from US-Israel moves.
This would create new openings and challenges for both Israel and Iran. And Tehran may not have much time to decide how it wants to play its high-stakes cards.
This article first appeared on Appia Institute and is republished with kind permission.
Quantum error correction can constantly recalibrate a processor
There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states needed to perform universal computation on those logical qubits. But there are also many less prominent challenges that will need to be solved before we can perform calculations.
One of those challenges, which only affects some types of hardware, is calibration. For devices we manufacture, like superconducting qubits, there are always subtle variations among individual qubits. (This is not true when we use something like an atom to hold the qubit, but the lasers that control them can drift.) As a result, this hardware is put through a process called calibration, where we test different frequencies and amplitudes of the microwave pulses that control them to find the combination that produces the lowest error rates, and then save those settings for use in calculations.
However, you can’t perform the typical calibration process while e you’re doing calculations, which means drift becomes an issue for long and complicated algorithms. Google, though, has figured out that it’s possible to do calibration using the same data that’s used for error correction.
Reinforcement learning
The hardware that Google and a number of other companies rely on are transmons. They consist of a loop of superconducting wire connected to a resonator, and they’re controlled by pulses of microwave photons. Those pulses are controlled by hardware that is kept outside of the refrigeration, including classical computers and the microwave sources they control. This hardware is used to test different combinations of wavelengths and amplitudes during calibration.
This equipment can also drift from its initial settings due to random factors, such as the hardware heating up as it’s used. And that could be an issue for the sorts of complicated algorithms we ultimately intend to run on quantum computers, like those that could crack current encryption. Currently, if the system shows signs of drifting away from calibration, Google says that it simply stops the computations and recalibrates. However, that is not going to be an option partway through a complicated calculation.
These computations will be taking place using error-corrected qubits, in which measurements on a subset of the hardware qubits are used to detect and characterize any errors that occur on the ones that hold the data. As the Google researchers point out in their paper, some of the errors they’ll detect will be the product of calibration failures: “errors from imperfect calibrations produce detectable syndromes just like all other errors.” In theory, we could use the same error detection to identify both random errors and those produced by calibration issues.
The challenge is telling the two apart. The team’s solution? Reinforcement learning, in which the computer tries different configurations of the 1,000 or so control parameters it has access to, and scores their effectiveness at limiting errors. “We deliberately apply small, simultaneous perturbations to all control parameters during the computation to explore the control space,” the team wrote. “These perturbations translate into subtle changes in the statistics of error-detection events.”
Using that information, the system can infer how adjusting these parameters can minimize certain errors. If those errors start to show up, it can make the appropriate adjustments. And that can be done in parallel with the error detection and correction system that manages the logical qubit.
The system was put in charge of two logical qubits hosted on a calibrated system. The two were using different error correction schemes (a surface code and a color code). These were set in a specific state, and the error-correction system was then used with and without reinforcement-learning-driven corrections. Having the system active led to a 20 percent increase in the ability to detect and correct errors in the logical qubits.
Going real time
The limitation of this approach is that it works only if the drift keeps the system reasonably close to the state the system was trained in. The corrections that might bring things back into alignment from one state might not be effective when the system’s in a significantly different state.
The solution to this is to constantly re-evaluate the effectiveness of different changes. But this has an obvious problem: You can’t simply randomize all the potential control configurations in the middle of a calculation. Even with limited variation, the system will necessarily operate outside its optimal error correction. So, the question was whether the frequent sub-optimal error correction paid off by keeping drift from causing even larger problems. “The favourable resolution of the exploration–exploitation trade-off would mean that the aggregate performance of all sampled policy candidates, most of which are worse than [the optimal one], is still better than the performance without reinforcement learning steering,” the researchers write.
Performing many simulations with a very small error-corrected qubit showed that the trade-off worked out, provided that drift was slow enough. The team showed that it could work in real time with a large error-corrected qubit, in which the reinforcement learning system had control over roughly 40,000 parameters.
This is clearly not a solution for the present; we can only keep systems operating for long enough to perform relatively short, simple algorithms, so drift isn’t even a concern. Ultimately, our intention is to build hardware that can perform the sorts of calculations where issues like this will matter. And there’s some value in demonstrating that something we know could be a problem can be dealt with.
Speaking to Iran’s president, Pakistani premier urges US-Iranian commitment to peace pact
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday urged the US and Iran to uphold the commitments made under their framework peace deal signed last month, known as the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, Anadolu reports.
In a telephone call with Iranian President Masoud Pizishkian, the Pakistani leader called on Iran and “all other parties” to exercise restraint and refrain from any action that could jeopardize the “hard-earned” peace gains achieved over the past few months, a statement from Sharif’s office said.
Describing the framework pact – reached with Pakistani mediation – as an “enduring” framework for promoting mutual understanding, respect, and shared prosperity in the region and beyond, Sharif expressed “deep” concern over the recent escalation in tensions in the region and underscored the “urgent” need to restore regional peace and stability.
Reaffirming Pakistan’s steadfast commitment to regional peace, he assured Pezeshkian of Pakistan’s readiness to continue playing an “honest and sincere” role in facilitating dialogue and supporting all efforts aimed at preserving peace and stability.
Pezeshkian, in return, thanked Pakistan’s leadership for attending the funeral ceremony of slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who was killed on Feb. 28, the first day of the war.
READ: Iran security chief warns Israel ‘will not be safe from response’
He also reaffirmed Iran’s commitment to peace and praised Pakistan’s “constructive” support and sincere efforts for regional stability.
The two leaders also reviewed implementation of the decisions taken during Pezeshkian’s visit to Islamabad last month and agreed to expedite follow-up actions to further strengthen bilateral cooperation across numerous fields.
The leaders agreed to remain in close contact and continue consultations on matters of mutual interest and regional peace.
In a separate telephone call, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thaniand Sharif called for “sustained” diplomatic engagement and dialogue and adherence to the commitments made by all parties under the peace memorandum.
While conveying Pakistan’s solidarity with and support for the people of Qatar on the recent attacks, Sharif stressed that “all parties” should exercise restraint and refrain from any actions that could undermine peace in the region.
The Qatari leader, for his part, thanked the Pakistani leadership for playing a “leading” role for peace in the region and assured him of Doha’s “continued” support in this regard.
