SANAA, Yemen – Yemeni security and tribal officials say suspected U.S. drone strikes have killed three alleged al-Qaida operatives in the country's southwestern Bayda province. They say the two Saturday strikes killed Abu Anis al-Abi, an area field commander, and two others. They spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release the information. U.S. drone strikes against suspected al-Qaida targets have been commonplace in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington as a retaliatory measure. Saturday's strikes were the first to be reported since Donald Trump assumed office as Barack Obama's successor.

BY PATRICK WATSON: The news headlines after last week's jobs report proved it again: Life is hard (and getting harder) for low-skilled workers. Illegal immigrants take their service industry jobs. Robots take their manufacturing industry jobs. According to the media, many low-skilled workers have simply given up. Their lives are terrible, and everyone wants to help.

Australia's international airports are in the process of automating 90 percent of air traveler processing by 2020 by implementing facial recognition technology that involves biometric recognition of faces, irises and/or fingerprints, hence eliminating the need to carry essential traveling documents such as passports. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection, while building on the Seamless Traveller initiative announced in 2015, said Sunday that it will make a transition toward a "contactless" system for arrivals this year, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Under the new system, manned counters will be replaced by automatic electronic booths and the existing SmartGate that scan passports electronically will also be overhauled. Before introducing it to a major airport (scheduled for November), the program is to be piloted in July at Canberra Airport where international flight operations are limited to New Zealand and Singapore. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection is scheduled to implement the technology in all major airports by March 2019.

Artificial intelligence (AI) on its own isn t enough to compete -- companies need industry-specific solutions to business problems. So said Martin Schroeter, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) s company senior vice president and chief financial officer, on the company s quarterly earnings call Thursday afternoon. Cognitive computing technology (IBM s term for AI) is just "table stakes," said Schroeter, claiming that his company is going the extra mile. IBM is building datasets for Watson to serve specific industries, including healthcare and finance. "You need more than public data or algorithms to solve real-world problems," Schroeter said.

NEW YORK - As soon as you approach Pepper, a 4-foot-tall robot, she starts sizing you up. Thanks to facial recognition capabilities, Pepper can determine your gender and age bracket. And as you begin asking her questions, she can draw from a vast volume of cloud-based information to give what she thinks are relevant answers. If you smile, she can tell the conversation is going well and that you're finding her answers helpful. If you don't, she might ask you if she's misunderstanding your requests.

Amazon and Google always thrive in the fourth quarter as people get out their wallets for Christmas. Both companies – or in Google's case, its parent group, Alphabet – are therefore expected to announce booming revenues in their fourth-quarter results over the next fortnight, with Alphabet going first on Thursday and Amazon the following week. But analysts are already looking beyond the simple question of how many cardboard boxes Amazon filled and how many searches Google answered. They're wondering which company will win the battle to control your home. That battle is being fought by two carafe-sized cylinders from the respective companies.

Many technology commentators got all excited a few months ago when Microsoft launched how-old.net, a website where users could upload a photo and the site would guess the age of the person in the picture. The service was a great way to showcase the opportunity that applying artificial intelligence to a problem set introduces. Insilico hopes to deliver a similar sort of an offering, but with a far more important purpose. Insilico Medicine is an organization focused on aging research. Headquartered at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore, it has R&D resources in Belgium, Poland, Russia and China employing 39 scientists worldwide.

For the last 5 to 10 years, connectivity and mobility have been on top of the agenda for many industries, both are essential enablers for a digital transformation. But while mobility and connectivity continue to be important enablers to expand the internet of things, there is something much bigger at stake that starts to emerge now. As more devices get connected you also start to collect more data and gain more insights and intelligence on how to optimize and automate tasks and processes. So here are a few questions related to the impact these changes could have on our society. How many of the tasks done today by various types of employees can be fully automated?

Because of its chaotic streets, India will be the last place on Earth Uber intendeds to bring its self-driving cars, joked CEO Travis Kalanick in an interview with Indian television station NDTV. "There's going to have to be major, major advances in AI to navigate the streets of India," Kalanick said in an interview, explaining long lead time of replacing taxi drivers with self-driving cars. Indian automotive technology and design firm Tata Elxsi is seeking permission from the government to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in Bangalore. The supplier has retrofitted two Tata vehicles with Lidar, ultrasonic sensors, radars, cameras, vehicle-to-everything technology, and artificial intelligence platform, and has already been testing the vehicles on the outskirts of Karnataka's capital--home to many technology companies' Indian headquarters. Navigating India's often unmarked streets, loosely observed traffic laws, and free-range mammals would be the ultimate stress test for any autonomous vehicle company--even Google has expressed skepticism over introducing the technology to the traffic-challenged country.

So the UK, it seems, is headed out of the European Union's single market, perhaps also out of the customs union. Prime Minister Theresa May has said she wants to preserve barrier-free trade between the UK and the EU as far as possible. One option that has been floated, if the two sides can't agree a comprehensive free trade agreement, is sectoral deals. They might cover cars, for example, or perhaps financial services. But there is a problem with this approach: World Trade Organization rules.