The U.S. military carried out another round of drone strikes in Somalia Wednesday. A trio of drone strikes hit the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab terror group killed six militants, U.S. Africa Command announced. The strikes took place 160 miles south of the capital, Mogadishu. They came after two separate drones strikes last week. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers have returned to Somalia for the first time since the "Black Hawk Down" incident in the early 1990s.

Tech visionaries may tantalize us with visions of instant gratification via drone delivery, but Silicon Valley has yet to deliver on such promises. Meanwhile, halfway around the globe in an African country barely the size of Maryland, drone deliveries have already taken flight--with more serious cargo than burritos. Jeremy Hsu is a science and tech journalist based in New York. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. In October 2016, Rwandan crowds cheered the launch and landing of delivery drones developed and operated by Zipline, a San Francisco-based startup.

In early May, New York-based tech startup Agolo completed its first seed round of funding, pulling in over $3.5 million in investments from Microsoft Ventures and CRV, with participation from Point72 Ventures and Franklin Templeton. But how did this entrepreneur go from Egypt to snagging such overwhelming corporate interest in the heart of the Big Apple? An interview with Mohamed AlTantawy - Egyptian, AUC graduate, and co-founder of Agolo - reveals how the startup progressed from ideation to actualization. AlTantawy's AI-powered startup provides machine summarisation software that gathers documents from around the web and breaks down key points for the user, eliminating the need to spend hours sifting through information to find the most important details, and works through natural language processing technology. "This is the area of computer science where algorithms try to make sense of human language," the entrepreneur explains.

First, Symantec revealed that hackers--probably based in Russia, although the security firm didn't go so far as to name names--had hacked more than 20 power companies in North America and Europe, and in a handful of cases, had direct access to their control systems. And then Equifax confessed it had been the target of a breach that stole 143 million Americans' data, one of the worst data spills ever, and one that raises questions about data centralization, particularly for Social Security Numbers. Megabreaches aside, Facebook admitted that a Russian troll farm had spent $100,000 on influence ads during last year's election. Google patched a flaw in Android that would allow a nasty "toast overlay" attack to take control of devices. WIRED dug into the long-running series of scams and theft plaguing new currencies in the cryptocoin economy.

Passengers' baggage is collected by robots, they relax in a luxurious waiting area complete with an indoor garden before getting a face scan and swiftly passing through security and immigration - this could be the airport of the future. It's a vision that planners hope will become reality as new technology is rolled out, transforming the exhausting experience of getting stuck in lengthy queues in ageing, overcrowded terminals into something far more pleasant. The changes also represent major challenges that could upend decades-old business models at major airports, with analysts warning operators may face a hit to their revenues to the tune of billions of dollars. Facial scanning in particular is generating a lot of buzz. Changi in the affluent city-state of Singapore, regarded as among the world's best airports, is set to roll out this biometric technology at a new terminal to open later this year.

A new computer algorithm, developed by researchers at Stanford University, can correctly determine someone's sexuality with up to 91% accuracy just by analysing a photo of their face. It's the robotic equivalent of a "gaydar" and it's sure to stir up a minefield of discussion, but first, a few caveats. The study used 35,326 photos from a US dating site and the artificial intelligence only distinguished sexuality between two photos (always one straight, one homosexual) of people of the same gender – the study did not include transgender or bisexual people. The photos used were portraits of faces, so the AI's judgments are made based on a "faceprint" determined from things like eyebrows, cheeks, hairline, neckline and nose, rather than clothing or hairstyle. Among men the system was accurate 81% of the time, and with women it was 71% accurate, but when given repeated photos of the same man (and so, more data) the accuracy increased to 91%.

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Anthony Falvo, tells The Associated Press that "no civilians were anywhere near the site." He says he does not have the identity of the al-Shabab member killed.

Giancarlo Zaccone has more than ten years of experience in managing research projects both in scientific and industrial areas. He worked as researcher at the C.N.R, the National Research Council, where he was involved in projects relating to parallel computing and scientific visualization. Currently, he is a system and software engineer at a consulting company developing and maintaining software systems for space and defense applications. He is author of the following Packt volumes: Python Parallel Programming Cookbook and Getting Started with TensorFlow. Rezaul Karim has more than 8 years of experience in the area of research and development with a solid knowledge of algorithms and data structures, focusing C/C, Java, Scala, R, and Python and big data technologies such as Spark, Kafka, DC/OS, Docker, Mesos, Hadoop, and MapReduce.

A 22,000-strong multinational African Union force known as AMISOM has been helping to support Somalia's fragile central government after more than two decades as a failed state. Both it and the U.S. military are trying to prepare Somalia's armed forces to take over the country's security before AMISOM's planned departure by the end of 2020.