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A drone strike in Yemen killed at least 15 people on Saturday, including 12 suspected al Qaeda militants, three Yemeni Defense Ministry officials told CNN.

At The Hobby Center in Danbury, Karl LaLonde, the store's owner, holds the Proto X in the palm of his hand. It's the size of a fairly healthy tarantula. LaLonde has decorated it with an orange piece of plastic shaped like a bird's beak. Switched on, its four tiny propellers spin. Under LaLonde's control via a joystick, it lifts off the counter and scoots around the store's airspace. The Proto X costs $50. "You can get a camera to fit it," LaLonde said. It's the smallest of the many UAVs -- unmanned aerial vehicles -- LaLonde sells. Business is good....

DJI Phantom Vision Video drone presentation at Reaganite Republican...

Google has acquired drone maker Titan Aerospace, the Wall Street Journal reports. Titan is a New Mexico-based company that makes high-flying solar powered drones. There's no word on the price Google paid, but Facebook had been in talks to acquire the company earlier this year for a reported $60 million. Presumably, Google paid more than that to keep it away from Facebook.

A Bay Area federal judge says the Obama administration can keep secret a memo spelling out the legal rationale for a 2011 drone attack in Yemen that killed a U.S. citizen and alleged terrorist mastermind. The ruling dismissed a suit by the First Amendment Coalition, an open-government advocacy group in San Rafael. The organization sued after a September 2011 drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Muslim cleric whom authorities suspected of organizing an attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009. Another U.S. citizen was also killed in the drone attack, and Awlaki's U.S.-born, 16-year-old...

In March 2012, volunteers spent four days looking for a 2-year-old boy who wandered away from his home outside Houston, Texas. They found him only after volunteers reviewing images captured by a drone-mounted aerial camera saw a flash of red in a pond that had already been searched. It turned out to be a shirt worn by the child, who had drowned. That was not the first time members of Texas EquuSearch had used these small model planes to help locate a missing person. But if the Federal Aviation Administration has its way, it won't happen again. In February, the...

South Korea has long taken unusual pains to keep people from aerially photographing its presidential palace. On a mountainous hiking trail that winds behind the blue-roofed palace, cameras are restricted. The satellite mapping service produced by Naver — Korea’s version of Google — resorts to a Photoshop trick, depicting the Blue House, set just north of Seoul’s downtown, as a bushy forest.Such covertness is often excused as the duty the of a country technically at war. Decades ago, North Korean commandos tried to raid the palace. Pyongyang could presumably plan worse.It was with a degree of chagrin, then, that South...

Gene Robinson of Wimberly, Texas, is a licensed pilot and also flies radio-controlled model airplanes—not an unusual combination. About a decade ago, he realized that a model aircraft outfitted to take aerial photos could be enormously useful in locating people who have gone missing—perhaps because they’ve been abducted or maybe just because they are very young and have wandered off into the woods alone. His efforts have paid valuable dividends over the years—helping find the remains of nearly a dozen people. But since late February his search-and-rescue model airplanes have been grounded: That’s when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration notified...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Imagine a world where drones never have to touch the ground after takeoff. That’s what MIT PhD. candidate Joseph Moore did, and now he’s on the cusp of creating a drone that can “perch” on power lines just like birds to recharge its batteries. Mr. Moore gave Business Insider a demonstration of the technology he’s perfecting by using a glider as proof of concept. In short, if a drone is equipped with the a magnetometer it should be possible to make the aircraft capable of identifying magnetic fields given off by power lines, home in on the signal they emit,...

Attorney General Eric Holder admitted Tuesday that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was in the process of looking at the use of domestic drones. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, questioned Holder during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, asking the Attorney General if he believed if the Federal Aviation Administration or Congress should regulate of drone use. “Would you think that it would be better that Congress intervene and employ legislation safeguarding the Fourth Amendment, right of privacy basically on citizens or do you suggest as Attorney General that the FAA still control who gets a drone or not?”...

A federal court has rejected the claims of family members of Anwar al-Aulaqi and his teenage son, who were both slain by U.S. drone strikes. In a 41-page opinion Friday, U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer offered some critical words for the Obama administration’s handling of the case while still concluding the relatives couldn’t pursue damage remedies from administration officials. “(Officials) must be trusted and expected to act in accordance with the U.S. Constitution when they intentionally target a U.S. citizen abroad at the direction of the President and with the concurrence of Congress,” Collyer wrote. “They cannot be held personally...

The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun. ........................................................... The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is...

Adam Kredo reports for the Washington Free Beacon that Obama is planning to cut America’s key reconnaissance fleet by 25 percent:

An administrative judge on the National Transportation Safety Board has ruled that the commercial use of small drones is in fact legal, despite six years of Federal Aviation Administration statements to the contrary. Today Judge Patrick Geraghty dismissed a $10,000 fine levied by the FAA against Raphael Pirker, a Swiss drone operator who used a camera drone to film on the University of Virginia campus. "At the time of respondent's model aircraft operation ... there was no enforceable FAA rule or FAR Regulation application to model aircraft or for classifying model aircraft as an UAS," the judge writes. The ruling...

Obama administration hiding costs, names of decision-makers from publicA planning document uncovered by WND reveals that the Obama administration is hiding certain details from the public – including costs and the names of decision-makers – regarding “special projects” governing the federal government’s global deployment of U.S. and ally drones. The document indicates the government is extending support of unidentified Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCOs, for up to 15 additional months. A break in service also could have affected what was, as of January, the “imminent release” of armed MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drones to new Foreign Military Sales,...

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Nope — it’s a Facebook drone. The social media site reportedly wants to use drones to bring Internet connection to the two thirds of the world that still lack connectivity, starting with parts of Africa. The initiative is part of the internet.org project, which Facebook backs.

​Marine innovation engineering department at Rolls-Royce has presented a draft design of an ocean-going robo-vessel that could enter service within a decade. Experts remain highly skeptical that computers could replace human instincts anytime soon. Rolls-Royce (RR/) Holdings Plc, which started designing autonomous cargo vessels in 2013, have presented in Bloomberg original computer design of crewless cargo ships. The vessels have a distinct difference from all modern ships: they lack any deck housing whatsoever. "The idea of a remote-controlled ship is not new, it has been around for decades, but the difference is the technology now exists,” announced Oskar Levander, head...

Complaining that “the release of information on the Administration’s use of drones to kill its enemies has led to unforeseen consequences,” Presidential Press Secretary Jay Carney said “there will be no further information forthcoming about any aspect of this program.” “The thinking was that the Administration’s aggressive use of this technology to counter threats to national security would be met with a greater sense of appreciation,” Carney opined. “Unfortunately, it has not. Instead it has resulted in a spiral of annoying questions from the media wanting to know too many details.” “Some opponents of the President are raising accusations that...

A U.S. drone strike in December that killed at least a dozen people in Yemen failed to comply with rules imposed by President Obama last year to protect civilians, according to an investigation by a human rights organization released Thursday. The report by Human Rights Watch concluded that the strike, which was carried out by the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, targeted a line of vehicles that were part of a wedding procession, and that evidence indicates “some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians.” The findings contradict assertions by U.S. officials that only militants were killed...

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters Thursday that the Obama administration will not be releasing any more information about the controversial use of drones to kill American citizens. Carney’s remarks, via the White House’s transcript of the off-camera press gaggle: “This is not an open-ended process. This is a specific and unique accommodation in this circumstance. The fact is, when it comes to public disclosure, we have been — not with the kind of attention that’s been given it this week — but we have been publicly discussing these matters at the highest levels of government for the...