Most of the female team members were either infants or not yet born at the time of the U.S.-backed military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 that toppled the Taliban regime – whose ultra-hardline interpretation of sharia (Islamic law) banned girls from school, women from working outside the home and all females from leaving home without a male relative.

While cybercriminals are able to compromise a system in hours or minutes, the reaction of companies usually takes months or even years. In fact, 18% of new malware remains undetected in the first 24 hours and 2% continues 3 months after infection, according to IDG Research. In this situation, artificial intelligence is becoming the strategic ally of business security, reducing that time frame for the detection of threats and even anticipating attacks that have not occurred. Cybercriminals are aware that information is the most valuable asset that companies have in the digital economy and, therefore, take advantage of the abundant entry points that hyperconnected work environments have generated. Traditional security methods are demonstrating their inability to protect companies against threats that grow in volume and sophistication, leading to a greater "window of opportunity for malware."

FIRST Global holds the annual robotics competition to encourage learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM, around the world. It invites one team from each country in an effort to build bridges, organizers said. This year's competition takes place from July 16-18.

So the data deal between Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and DeepMind "failed to comply with" the law. So says the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK regulator charged with upholding data protection rules. The deal, the ICO said, erred in several ways. Royal Free should have notified its patients before handing their data to DeepMind, giving them a chance to opt out.

The future of work

During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war in the U.S.; in Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan, a new Joan of Arc for a global-warming era battles fascist forces. Given the obvious real-world resonances of the three books (the admittedly more fantastical Borne tackles out-of-control capitalism via a futuristic desert city terrorized by a giant flying psychotic bear), VanderMeer organized a three-way conversation to examine what he calls their "parallel evolution"--as well as dicuss how to take on a troubling present reality in an meaningful and productive way. They feel like boundaries that mean less and less, attempts at containment or to say "this couldn't possibly happen to anyone reading this now."

A school robotics team made up of five students from The Gambia has joined Afghanistan's all-girl robotics team in having their one-week visas rejected by the U.S. in order to attend the First Global Challenge robotics competition in Washington D.C. The five Gambian students on the robotics team will have their robot shipped from the West African country to the First Global Challenge competition in the U.S., which takes place from July 16-18. But the teens will not be able to attend the prestigious international event themselves, Al-Jazeera reports. Despite saying they worked "rigorous shifts" of seven hours during Ramadan to complete the robot, they will instead have to settle for presenting it via Skype. Director of The Gambia's ministry of higher education, research, science and technology, Moktar Darboe, told Al Jazeera that the students are "very disappointed" they won't be able to attend the competition.

Facebook is challenging a court order preventing it from telling users about secret US government requests for their private account information, according to court documents. The company says the order threatens freedom of speech. The search warrants were accompanied by a non-disclosure order prohibiting Facebook from informing the users about the requests before it actually complied with them. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

An artificial intelligence (AI) system, which can record and analyse customer conversations, will be trialled by Natwest in order to ensure they provide better quality information and advice, a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) press release announced last week. Natwest has partnered with Recordsure, a London-based fintech company, whose AI, with customer consent, will record face to face and over the phone customer interactions, which will be analysed by human agents and the AI itself. According to Natwest's press release, the Recordsure AI can identify distinct parts of a conversation, so it will know, for example, when a customer is being given an initial disclosure, financial advice, and general conversation. It should be able to inform staff if certain topics or issues have not been discussed. Security is said to be a top priority in the introduction of the AI, and conversations are immediately encrypted and uploaded to a secure cloud, before being archived at former UK and US military facilities, originally built as nuclear bunkers.

On the day U.S.-backed forces made a major breakthrough in the battle for Islamic State group's (ISIS) operation capital Raqqa, reports said the terror group's poster girl Sally Jones, also known as Mrs. Terror, is desperate to return to the U.K. This was revealed by the wife of a former ISIS militant who is now living in a refugee camp in Syria, in an interview to Sky News. The woman, known as Aisha, said of Jones: "She was crying and wants to get back to Britain. She told me she wish [sic] to go to her country. Aisha said Umma Hussain al Britani, the name adopted by Jones, was distraught and crying as her plea had been denied by ISIS leaders on the basis she considered a military wife. READ: Who Is Sally Jones? Jones is originally from from Chatham, Kent, became the leading female recruitment officer for ISIS after moving to Raqqa and marrying a now-dead jihadist in 2004. She is now the most wanted woman in the world after climbing to the top of the CIA assassination list, the Sun reported. Jones, 47, has remained at large since her husband, ISIS recruit Junaid Hussain, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2015. The couple are thought to have been behind at least a dozen murderous attacks both in the Middle East and abroad. On September 28, 2015, the United Nations sanctioned Jones as an agent operating on behalf of a terrorist organization, the Mirror reported. Jones is believed to have enticed scores of would-be European jihadis to join the self-declared caliphate through her influential recruitment network called the "Raqqa 12," the Sun reported. Jones has been attributed with the recruitment and training of young girls in Syria. The Express quoted a counter extremism website as saying Jones's activity online was in line with her role as leader of the secret "Anwar al-Awlaki" battalion's female wing. "In this role, Jones is responsible for training all European female recruits, or'muhajirat', in the use of weapons and tactics.