作者： admin

Against the backdrop of a persistent, deadly national gun violence epidemic that has plagued K-12 campuses across the United States, one private company has introduced an unconventional new approach to stopping active shooters before first responders can arrive: human-piloted unarmed drones designed to disable attackers.

The concept is the creation of Campus Guardian Angel, a U.S.-based firm that has already launched pilot programs for the technology at schools in Georgia and Florida, with mounting interest from education communities in Texas — a state that has seen some of the country’s deadliest school shootings in recent years. To date, the system has not been tested in a real active shooter scenario, but its developers say it fills a critical gap in campus safety between the moment an attack is reported and law enforcement reaches the scene.

The framework mirrors a long-running ideological strain in U.S. gun violence policy debates, which argues that the solution to recurring mass shootings is not stricter firearms regulation, but additional defensive technology in public spaces — similar to the controversial push to arm teachers and school staff.

Here is how the system operates: When a potential shooter enters a school campus, a teacher or staff member triggers an alarm via a smartphone app that simultaneously alerts local police. While officers are en route, a drone is immediately activated from a pre-positioned hiding spot inside the school, serving as the first line of defense against the attacker.

These small, black, roughly square craft weigh approximately two pounds (one kilogram) each. Unlike military offensive drones, they carry no bullets or lethal projectiles. Instead, they are controlled remotely by human operators based in Austin, Texas, who navigate the drones through school hallways using custom 3D maps of each campus pre-loaded into the system.

According to Khristof Oborski, Campus Guardian Angel’s director of tactical operations, the idea grew out of observations of small drone effectiveness on battlefields in the war in Ukraine. Bill King, the company’s CEO and a former Navy SEAL, noticed how even lightweight, low-cost drones could disrupt and disable targets, prompting him to adapt the technology for the growing U.S. crisis of school shootings.

Oborski explained that the drone’s response is tailored to the attacker’s actions. If the suspect is still moving through hallways without opening fire, the drone’s built-in two-way radio allows remote operators to communicate directly with the attacker, attempting to persuade them to surrender and lay down their weapon. Operators maintain constant contact with responding law enforcement, guiding officers directly to the attacker’s location to cut down on response time. If the shooter has already begun firing on students and staff, the system immediately escalates to disabling tactics: either direct kinetic impacts by flying into the attacker, or a blast of less-lethal JPX pepper gel to incapacitate them.

Data from the firearms incident database IntelliSee shows that U.S. schools recorded 233 separate incidents involving firearms in 2025 alone. The 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas — which left 19 children and two teachers dead — highlighted catastrophic delays in law enforcement response, with officers taking 77 minutes to engage and kill the attacker. Proponents of the drone system say it addresses exactly this gap, providing an immediate response while police are on the way.

Campus Guardian Angel offers the system through annual service contracts, with pricing adjusted based on a school’s student population, size and number of campus buildings. Beyond the ongoing pilot projects in Florida and Georgia, the company reports that groups of parents in Houston, Texas have already expressed interest in installing the drones at their local children’s schools.

King emphasized that the ultimate goal of the system is deterrence, rather than active use. “The best-case scenario is we put this in every single school in America and then never have to use it, right? Because it’s got a deterrent quality to it,” he said. King also addressed common concerns about autonomous operation, confirming that no artificial intelligence is used to pilot the drones — a detail that many school stakeholders find reassuring.

Alex Campbell, a 30-year-old system operator and professional drone-racing competitor, framed his role as a quiet contribution to campus safety. “To be the nerd behind the scenes, to help the heroes on this Earth saving us from the bad things happening, it’s really fulfilling to be able to have a hand in that,” Campbell said.

Every spring, one of Europe’s rarest avian species embarks on a grueling 5,000-kilometer odyssey from wintering grounds in Africa to ancestral breeding habitats across the Balkan Peninsula. By April, dozens of Egyptian vultures — recognizable by their striking lemon-yellow facial skin and contrasting white plumage — would normally be settled into their cliffside nests for breeding season. This year, however, conservation researchers tracking the endangered birds have counted barely a handful of individuals, sparking urgent concern that ongoing wars across the Middle East have pushed an already precarious migration to the brink of collapse.

For decades, Egyptian vultures have faced a growing cascade of threats along their migration corridor. The scavengers, which play an irreplaceable ecological role cleaning up animal carcasses and stopping the spread of disease, have been decimated by accidental electrocutions, unregulated poaching, and toxic poisoning from agricultural bait left out for predators. Over the past 30 years alone, Balkan populations of the species have plummeted by 80%, leading the International Union for Conservation of Nature to list Egyptian vultures as endangered across the globe.

The Middle East sits at the heart of this critical migration route, making regional conflict an extra, catastrophic layer of risk for the already shrinking population. “The war is adding to the risks already present along this species’ migration route,” explained Nikolai Petkov, project manager at the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds, in an interview with AFP. Xhemal Xherri, a conservation specialist with Albania’s Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment (PPNEA), echoed this alarm, noting that widespread bombing and military activity have created unquantifiable danger for all migratory birds passing through the region. With ongoing active conflict making on-the-ground research nearly impossible, even leading experts lack clear data on how many vultures have been killed or displaced by violence. Beyond the impact on this single species, Xherri warned that the sharp drop in returning vultures could be an early warning sign of broader ecological disruption across the Middle East.

Targeted conservation efforts in recent years have yielded small but hopeful gains. Protection of critical roosting sites and captive breeding programs have helped stabilize and slightly grow vulture populations in Bulgaria, which now hosts the majority of Balkan breeding pairs. Still, the species remains extremely vulnerable, with accidental poisoning from farmland bait continuing to be a leading cause of death.

In the remote, mountainous wilderness of southern Albania, local shepherds in the village of Salaria have long viewed the vultures’ annual return as a natural harbinger of spring. This year, as April drew to a close, the shepherds spotted just two birds circling above their flocks. Confirming the sighting took Xherri hours of careful searching across steep, rocky nesting terrain, until he finally spotted one of the white-plumed vultures descending to a ledge 400 meters up a sheer rock face. Even after that confirmation, he was forced to wait days longer to confirm the second individual had reached its traditional high-altitude perch.

The painstaking work of counting returning vultures means that even in peacetime, experts cannot say exactly how many birds successfully reach Balkan breeding sites each spring. Petkov offered a note of cautious optimism, suggesting that unseasonably cold weather earlier in the season may have delayed the vultures’ journey rather than cutting it short. “So they might be a bit late, but hopefully, as we often say, you count the birds in autumn,” he said.

A Sydney killer obsessed with notorious American serial killer Ted Bundy, who murdered one 17-year-old girl and left another seriously injured in a 2020 Parramatta hotel attack, has had his total prison sentence cut by seven years following a successful appeal ruling.

Kristian Kovaleff was just 19 years old when he carried out the brutal, premeditated attack on two teenage friends who had booked an apartment at Parramatta’s Meriton Suites to celebrate one of the girls’ birthdays. The victims had only invited Kovaleff to join the gathering because they needed an adult over the age of 18 to complete the room check-in process, court documents confirm.

Weeks before the attack, court records show Kovaleff developed a deep, pathological fixation on Ted Bundy, one of the most infamous serial killers in US history, and began plotting a murder to experience the “thrill” he believed killing would bring. He prepped for his attack by purchasing binding materials including rope and duct tape, acquiring a handsaw, and running repeated internet searches for potential weapons. He initially planned to kill just one victim a week before the birthday gathering, before expanding his plan to target both girls.

On the night of December 13, 2020, at roughly 8:40 p.m., Kovaleff launched his attack. One of the teens was in the bathroom preparing for a swim when he entered and stabbed her repeatedly in the abdomen. He forced both teens into the bedroom, where he continued his assault on the first victim. When the second girl bravely stepped between Kovalev and her injured friend to block his path, he stabbed her in the stomach as well. Even as the surviving victim begged him to call emergency services, Kovalev refused to request help, instead pacing the room while muttering that he knew he would face life in prison for his crimes and singing a song with lyrics referencing being an explosive about to detonate. When the surviving victim regained consciousness after passing out from her injuries, she found Kovalev had loosely bandaged her wounds — a move the court confirmed was only to preserve her so he could sexually assault her. After the attack, Kovalev fled the apartment with both victims’ phones, turning himself in to local police the following morning. First responders found one victim dead in the bedroom, while the second was rushed to hospital for life-saving emergency surgery.

After his arrest, Kovalev spent two years behind bars faking symptoms of psychosis and claiming he heard internal voices, in an attempt to build an insanity defense. A full assessment by a forensic psychiatrist ultimately ruled he did not suffer from any clinically significant mental illness. He later entered guilty pleas to one count of murder and one count of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

Initially, New South Wales Supreme Court Justice Stephen Rothman sentenced Kovalev to a 36-year total prison term, with a 26-year non-parole period that would have made him eligible for release in 2046. Justice Rothman only granted a 15% sentence discount for Kovalev’s guilty plea, citing the extreme severity of the crimes. Kovalev subsequently launched an appeal against his sentence, arguing the original penalty was too harsh.

On Friday, the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal delivered a unanimous ruling to quash the original sentence and issue a reduced penalty. In their judgment, Justices Ian Harrison, Deborah Sweeney and Edward Muston agreed the original 36-year term was “manifestly excessive”, accounting for Kovalev’s age at the time of the crime. “Acknowledging the seriousness of the circumstances of the offending, I have concluded that when regard is had to Mr Kovaleff’s youth, immaturity, and emotional and intellectual dysfunction, the starting sentence of 40 years imprisonment, and the sentence after discount for the murder offence, was too high having regard to those personal characteristics,” Justice Sweeney wrote in the published decision. The appeal court also increased the sentence discount for Kovalev’s early guilty plea from 15% to 25%, ruling that the level of culpability did not justify restricting the discount that is typically granted for early guilty pleas in the state’s justice system.

The new sentence hands Kovalev a 29-year total prison term, with a 21-year non-parole period that will make him eligible for release in December 2041, five years earlier than his original release date.

A mass recall of a widely sold children’s walkie-talkie model has been rolled out across Australia after a critical manufacturing oversight left the devices operating on radio frequencies legally reserved exclusively for licensed communication operators. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) announced the public recall for Anko brand Long Range Walkie-Talkies, which were distributed through major national retail chains Kmart and Target. The affected units were sold between September 30, 2013, and February 6 of this year, putting tens of thousands of household devices potentially in violation of Australian communication regulations.

According to ACMA’s official statement released Friday, a simple but consequential oversight during product configuration left the walkie-talkies calibrated to operate on the 467.425 MHz frequency band. This specific spectrum is designated as a licensed private band, reserved for use only by certified radio operators who have gone through official regulatory approval to operate on that range. The regulator has urged all consumers who purchased the affected devices to immediately cease use, warning that unlicensed operation on this frequency can create harmful, unintended interference for licensed services that rely on the band for critical communications.

Retail partners Kmart and Target have backed the recall effort, confirming that any customer who returns the recalled walkie-talkies to any of their Australian store locations will receive a full refund, no receipt required for most cases. ACMA also noted that continued unlicensed use of the devices not only creates interference risks but could also put users at risk of violating federal communication laws, which carry penalties for unauthorized spectrum use in Australia. The recall comes as regulators across the country continue to crack down on misconfigured consumer communication devices that encroach on licensed frequency bands, a growing issue as more consumer-connected devices hit the market.