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Drone attack on market in Sudan kills 11, as air war civilian toll mounts

Al Jazeera

A drone attack on a busy market in western Sudan has killed 11 people and wounded dozens more, including children, as the United Nations warns that the country's rapidly escalating air wars have claimed more than 200 civilian lives in little over a week. The attack on Adikong market, near Sudan's border with Chad, ignited fuel reserves and sent flames tearing through the area on Thursday. MSF described it as the second deadly drone attack on the same area in less than a month. Drones have become a key weapon used by both sides in the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that began in April 2023. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said on Thursday he was appalled by the scale of intensifying aerial assaults on civilians in the war, warning that more than 200 people had been killed by drones across the Kordofan region and White Nile state since March 4 alone.




Learning Superconductivity from Ordered and Disordered Material Structures Pin Chen

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, some critical aspects of it, such as the relationship between superconductivity and materials' chemical/structural features, still need to be understood. Recent successes of data-driven approaches in material science strongly inspire researchers to study this relationship with them, but a corresponding dataset is still lacking.



UnderstandingHyperdimensionalComputingfor ParallelSingle-PassLearning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Weextend our analysis to the more general class of vector symbolic architectures (VSA), which compute withhigh-dimensional vectors(hypervectors) thatarenotnecessarily binary.


UN, US condemn RSF drone strikes on aid deliveries in famine-hit Sudan

Al Jazeera

Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have launched a series of drone attacks targeting humanitarian aid convoys and fuel trucks across North Kordofan, killing at least one person and wounding several others, officials and medical organisations said. The North Kordofan state government condemned Friday's strikes on a convoy linked to the World Food Programme (WFP), urging the international community and United Nations bodies to impose sanctions on the RSF paramilitary group's leadership. The attacks occurred along the key road connecting the state capital, el-Obeid, with Kosti in neighbouring White Nile state. Fighting between the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF has intensified across the Kordofan region since October 2025 after el-Fasher fell to the RSF, where the group committed atrocities - a "crime scene" according to the UN. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the first strike at dawn hit three trucks in Er-Rahad.


The drones being used in Sudan: 1,000 attacks since April 2023

Al Jazeera

During Sudan's civil war, which erupted in April 2023, both sides have increasingly relied on drones, and civilians have borne the brunt of the carnage. The conflict between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group is an example of war transformed by commercially available, easily concealable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones. Modular, well-adapted to sanctions evasions and devastatingly effective, drones have killed scores of civilians, crippled infrastructure and plunged Sudanese cities into darkness. In this visual investigation, Al Jazeera examines the history of drone warfare in Sudan, the types of drones used by the warring sides, how they are sourced, where the attacks have occurred and the human toll. The RSF traces its origins to what at the time was a government-linked militia known as the Janjaweed.


Dozens killed in RSF drone attack in war-torn Sudan's South Kordofan

Al Jazeera

Dozens killed in RSF drone attack in war-torn Sudan's South Kordofan Dozens of people have been killed in a drone attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on a key town in war-torn Sudan's South Kordofan state, according to local media reports. Multiple areas of Dilling, including the headquarters of the Sudanese army's 54th Brigade and the central market, were struck by suicide drones during Wednesday's attack, the Sudan Tribune reported, citing local sources and medical groups. Dilling lies halfway between Kadugli - the besieged state capital - and el-Obeid, the capital of neighbouring North Kordofan province, which the RSF has sought to encircle. The RSF and the SAF have been waging a brutal civil war for control of Sudan since April 2023, which has killed thousands of people and displaced millions. Since the siege was lifted, Dilling has endured a wave of drone attacks that have destroyed service facilities and caused several casualties.


A Statistical Framework for Spatial Boundary Estimation and Change Detection: Application to the Sahel Sahara Climate Transition

Tivenan, Stephen, Sahoo, Indranil, Qian, Yanjun

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Spatial boundaries, such as ecological transitions or climatic regime interfaces, capture steep environmental gradients, and shifts in their structure can signal emerging environmental changes. Quantifying uncertainty in spatial boundary locations and formally testing for temporal shifts remains challenging, especially when boundaries are derived from noisy, gridded environmental data. We present a unified framework that combines heteroskedastic Gaussian process (GP) regression with a scaled Maximum Absolute Difference (MAD) Global Envelope Test (GET) to estimate spatial boundary curves and assess whether they evolve over time. The heteroskedastic GP provides a flexible probabilistic reconstruction of boundary lines, capturing spatially varying mean structure and location specific variability, while the test offers a rigorous hypothesis testing tool for detecting departures from expected boundary behaviors. Simulation studies show that the proposed method achieves the correct size under the null and high power for detecting local boundary shifts. Applying our framework to the Sahel Sahara transition zone, using annual Koppen Trewartha climate classifications from 1960 to 1989, we find no statistically significant decade scale changes in the arid and semi arid or semi arid and non arid interfaces. However, the method successfully identifies localized boundary shifts during the extreme drought years of 1983 and 1984, consistent with climate studies documenting regional anomalies in these interfaces during that period.