Sudan's army has denied it carried out a deadly attack on a major hospital on Friday night in a city in the west of the country held by its rivals, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said 64 people - including 13 children, two nurses and a doctor - had died in the strike on el-Daein Teaching Hospital and 89 others had been wounded. Enough blood has been spilled, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on X, urging the warring parties to end the conflict, which started nearly three years ago. The RSF said an army drone had hit the hospital in el-Daein, the capital of East Darfur state, on the day Muslims were marking the festival of Eid. Sudan was plunged into a civil war in April 2023 when a vicious struggle for power broke out between the military and the RSF, who had once been allies after coming to power in a coup in 2021.

Recent language models have shown impressive multilingual performance, even when not explicitly trained for it. Despite this, there are concerns about the quality of their outputs across different languages. In this paper, we show how disparity in the treatment of different languages arises at the tokenization stage, well before a model is even invoked. The same text translated into different languages can have drastically different tok-enization lengths, with differences up to 15 times in some cases. These disparities persist even for tokenizers that are intentionally trained for multilingual support.

A drone attack on a mosque in central Sudan has killed two children and injured 13 more, according to a Sudanese doctor's association, amid a rise in similar attacks across the region. The Sudan Doctors Network said the attack was carried out at dawn on Wednesday by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group engaged in a three-year civil war with the Sudanese Armed Forces. "Targeting children inside mosques is a fully constituted crime that cannot be justified under any pretext and represents a dangerous escalation in the pattern of repeated violations against civilians," the doctors said. The Sudan Doctors Network said the RSF has previously targeted other religious buildings for attack, including a church in Khartoum and another mosque in el-Fasher, reflecting a "systematic pattern that shows clear disregard for the sanctity of life and religious sites". "The network calls on the international community, the United Nations, and human rights and humanitarian organizations to take urgent action to pressure for the end to the targeting of civilians, ensure their protection, open safe corridors for the delivery of medical and humanitarian aid, and work to document these violations and hold those responsible accountable," it said.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed 27 people in a reported drone attack on a Sudanese army base in the southeastern city of Sinja, a military source told Al Jazeera. Monday's attack coincided with an announcement a day prior that the government, aligned with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), would be returning to the capital, Khartoum, three years after it had shifted its base of operations to Port Sudan. The military source, who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, said Monday's drone attack targeted not only leaders in the government forces but also the security teams and civilians accompanying them. It was unclear how many people were wounded in the attack. Al Jazeera received reports that 13 people were injured, while some estimates have put the number much higher.

The Sudanese armed forces (SAF) are renewing efforts for an operation to retake the Kordofan and Darfur regions from the control of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as the civil war rages deep into its third year. The army has been assessing the RSF's capabilities and resources in readiness for launching the military operation with a large number of military formations fully prepared to launch an attack, it said. Reporting from Khartoum, Al Jazeera's Hiba Moran said the Sudanese army had reorganised and redeployed troops in various part of Kordofan. "We have also seen the Sudanese army retake control of territories in the Kordofan region as well as launch air strikes and drone strikes on several RSF positions in Darfur and Kordofan," she said. "And it looks like these are the preparations or the first steps of that offensive that the army has been speaking about in efforts to regain control of territories in Kordofan and Darfur," she added.

Major cities across Sudan, including the capital, Khartoum, and coastal city Port Sudan, have been plunged into darkness after drone strikes hit a key power plant in the country's east. Flames and smoke rose from the facility in Atbara, River Nile state on Thursday, which is controlled by the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and under attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the ongoing civil war that has ripped the nation apart. Sudan's RSF trying to hide atrocities: Report Two civil defence members were killed, power plant officials said, while trying to extinguish the fire that erupted after the first strike, adding that rescue workers were injured when a second drone hit as they battled the flames. Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamed Vall in Port Sudan reported that residents initially thought a routine power cut had occurred, only to learn it was linked to incidents in Atbara, roughly 320km (about 230 miles) north of Khartoum. He added that such strikes have become a frequent occurrence in Sudan's war.

The challenges of ongoing war in Sudan highlight the need for rapid monitoring and analysis of such conflicts. Advances in deep learning and readily available satellite remote sensing imagery allow for near real-time monitoring. This paper uses 4-band imagery from Planet Labs with a deep learning model to show that fire damage in armed conflicts can be monitored with minimal delay. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using five case studies in Sudan. We show that, compared to a baseline, the automated method captures the active fires and charred areas more accurately. Our results indicate that using 8-band imagery or time series of such imagery only result in marginal gains. Keywords: 1. Introduction The ongoing armed conflict in Sudan began in April 2023.