SEOUL (Reuters) - There was no evidence that North Korea had diverted wages paid to its workers by South Korean companies operating in now-suspended industrial park on their border to its weapons programs, a South Korean official said on Thursday.

U.S. officials have reportedly decided to allow a group of Afghan girls, who has previously been denied entry, into the U.S. to attend a robot competition. The decision followed backlash when it was reported the six teens would not be allowed to participate in the competition. Politico reported the decision came at the urging of President Donald Trump. The group, which consists of six Afghan teenage girls, applied – and was denied – twice for visas by the U.S. At the time, the State Department declined to comment on why the visa were denied, saying "all visa applications are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis in accordance with U.S. law." Afghanistan is not part of the Trump administration's executive order temporarily banning travel from six Muslim-majority countries.

FILE- In this Thursday, July 6, 2017, file photo, teenagers from the Afghanistan Robotic House, a private training institute, practice at the Better Idea Organization center, in Herat, Afghanistan. U.S. President Donald Trump intervened to allow the group of Afghan girls into the country to participate in a robotics competition. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the president's intervention Wednesday, July 12, 2017. The six female students from Afghanistan had hoped to participate in an international robotics competition this month, but their visa applications to enter the U.S. were denied twice.

WASHINGTON – U.S. officials will allow a group of Afghan girls into the country to participate in an international robotics competition after President Donald Trump intervened, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed Wednesday, ending a saga that had sparked international backlash. Homeland Security Department spokesman David Lapan said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved a State Department request for six girls from the war-torn country to be allowed in, along with their chaperone, so they can participate in the competition. The girls' applications for U.S. visas had been denied twice. The non-profit organizing the competition celebrated the reversal in a jubilant statement Wednesday. "I truly believe our greatest power is the power to convene nations, to bring people together in the pursuit of a common goal and prove that our similarities greatly outweigh our differences," said Joe Sestak, the president of First Global.

US officials have decided to allow a group of Afghan girls - whose visa applications had been twice rejected - to travel to the country and participate in an international robotics competition, ending a saga that had sparked international backlash. Homeland Security Department spokesman David Lapan said the US Citizenship and Immigration Services approved a State Department request for six girls from the war-torn country to be allowed in, along with their chaperone, so they can participate in the competition. The non-profit organising the competition celebrated the reversal in a statement on Wednesday. "I truly believe our greatest power is the power to convene nations, to bring people together in the pursuit of a common goal and prove that our similarities greatly outweigh our differences," said Joe Sestak, the president of First Global. He credited "the professional leadership of the US State Department" for ensuring that all 163 teams from 157 countries, including a team of Syrian refugees, would be able to participate.

A team of researchers is working to build trust between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) by creating an "interpreter" that can explain how an AI arrived at the answer to a specific... AI has reputation as a threat to our working lives, but it might not be as bad as we think. Research shows that 230,000 jobs in the business sector could disappear by 2025, filled by "artificial intelligence agents". It's widely accepted that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a huge impact on our lives in the coming decades - but what's its value to the global economy? Whether it's renewable energy investment, supercomputers, building megacities or mobile technology, China is spreading its wings and taking flight.

An academic who is a vocal critic of the price of renewable power is the government's preferred choice to head a review of the financial cost of energy in the UK. Dieter Helm, an economist at the University of Oxford, has been chosen by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to carry out the review, the Guardian has learned. The Conservative manifesto promised that the resulting report would be the first step towards "competitive and affordable energy costs". Theresa May is among those in the government taking an interest in the cost-of-energy review, which will examine how power prices can be kept down while meeting the UK's carbon targets and keeping the lights on. But the choice of Helm, author of a new book on the slow demise of oil companies in the face of energy trends, will be controversial in some quarters because of his criticism of wind and solar power.

The cost of cybersecurity is proportional to the square of the number of products required for adequate defense. This Cyber Law (you read it here first) means that the proliferation of types of cyberattacks and attackers leads to the proliferation of innovative security solutions, each focused on one narrow aspect of cyber defense. The result is increased cost and complexity of cybersecurity management, including increased number of false alerts and increased investment in the resources required to orchestrate the multitude of products and to train security personnel in the specific language and rules of each security solution. "Enterprises invest in so many security tools because there is not one product that can protect them from all types of attacks," says Avi Chesla, founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup Empow. "What is needed is an ecosystem that will treat these siloed tools as one defensive system, from detection and identification to investigation of the attack and then mitigation and remediation."

Video Researchers have crafted algorithms that can take an audio recording of someone talking and map it to a video clip of them speaking to create a new convincing lip-synched video with the replacement sound. In other words, the resulting video carries the injected audio, rather than its original sound, and the frames are manipulated so that the speaker's face and mouth movements match the new audio. You can be forgiven for seeing this as a vital stepping stone to creating the ultimate fake news – highly believable forged videos. Imagine taking a clip of someone important speaking at a private event, and using the aforementioned software to dub in a completely new script, voiced by a skilled impersonator or generated by another AI such as Lyrebird, and then distributing that fraudulent footage. Thankfully, technology is nowhere near that level right now.

The civilians crowd together in a narrow alleyway, stranded near house-to-house fighting and surrounded by the stark devastation of western Mosul, where the battle against the Islamic State was supposed to be over. Video taken from a drone on Monday quickly confirmed that the battle to seize Mosul from the Islamic State continues, and that at least 100 civilians were still trapped by the fighting. For days since the government officially declared victory in the city, Times journalists and other witnesses in Mosul had confirmed that the sounds of intense fighting could still be heard from pockets within Western Mosul. Now, these drone images have provided the clearest account yet of a grinding battle that continues against the Islamic State's holdout force. And in one section of the city, a large number of civilians can be seen in a tight and enclosed section of alleyway, confirming fears that many Mosul residents have been unable to escape.