The suspected drug traffickers, the lone survivors of a U.S. airstrike, were sprawled on a table-size piece of floating wreckage in the Caribbean for more than 40 minutes. They were unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift as they repeatedly attempted to right what remained of their boat. At one point, the men raised their arms and seemed to signal to the U.S. aircraft above, a gesture some who watched a video of the incident interpreted as a sign of surrender. Then a second explosion finished the men off, leaving only a bloody stain on the surface of the sea. Footage of the two men's desperate final moments made some viewers nauseated, leading one to nearly vomit. 'It was worse than we had been led to believe,' one person told us. The video was part of a briefing that Admiral Frank 'Mitch' Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, gave lawmakers yesterday about the September 2 attack. Bradley told legislators that, after consulting military lawyers, he authorized the follow-on strike, judging that the men still posed a threat because of what they could have done: radioed for help or been picked up with what remained of their cargo of suspected cocaine. The video suggested they didn't actually do any of that, but Bradley defended his decisions in the first episode of the Trump administration's newly militarized counternarcotics campaign....

The company said it's taking action because 'analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls.' Citing industry sources, Reuters reports that the event in question was an October 30 JetBlue flight from Cancun, Mexico to Newark, New Jersey, in which the plane suddenly lost altitude and had to make an emergency landing in Tampa. The Federal Aviation Administration has reportedly issued an emergency airworthiness directive calling for the affected planes to revert to earlier software before they can fly again. A smaller subset will need to have their hardware changed, Airbus said. StrictlyVC concludes its 2025 series with an exclusive event featuring insights from leading VCs and builders such as Pat Gelsinger, Mina Fahmi, and more. Plus, opportunities to forge meaningful connections....

Defense tech startup Anduril Industries has faced numerous setbacks during testing of its autonomous weapons systems, according to new reporting by the WSJ. The problems cited include more than a dozen drone boats that failed during a Navy exercise off California in May, with sailors warning of safety violations and potential loss of life; a mechanical issue that damaged the engine of Anduril's unmanned jet fighter Fury during a summer ground test; and an August test of its Anvil counterdrone system that caused a 22-acre fire in Oregon. Founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, Anduril raised $2.5 billion back in June at a $30.5 billion valuation led by Founders Fund, which help incubate the company. The company has won numerous military contracts, including programs to build autonomous aircraft and counter-drone systems. Beyond testing failures, the Journal reports that Anduril's only real battlefield experience in Ukraine has also been problematic. Front-line soldiers with Ukraine's SBU security service found that Altius loitering drones crashed and failed to hit targets. The issues were reportedly severe enough that Ukrainian forces stopped using the drones in 2024 and haven't fielded them since, though Anduril maintains that its challenges are typical of weapons development, that its engineering team is achieving meaningful progress, and that the aforementioned incidents don't indicate any underlying flaws in its technology....

Stay with me ' it's not entirely far-fetched. Thanks to advances in AI, computing, and superconducting magnets, fusion power is closer than ever to commercial reality. It's increasingly looking like fusion is more a question of 'when' not 'if.' And when it does happen, it promises to deliver large amounts of clean power from a plentiful fuel source ' water. Putting a reactor on a ship isn't necessarily unreasonable, either. Today, submarines and aircraft carriers powered by nuclear fission reactors routinely prowl the seas. They're quiet, powerful, and can operate for decades before they need refueling. The civilian sector even toyed with the idea of nuclear-powered cargo ships back in the 1960s and 1970s. Fusion promises to give ships similar capabilities but without concerns over meltdowns, proliferation, or radiation. For now, the sector has been focused on building the first reactors on land. 'I'm pretty sure we're the first people to ever really look at what is it like to put a tokamak on a ship,' Cohen said, referring to a leading fusion reactor design....