Sudan's army says it struck RSF command centres in South Darfur, but the RSF and its allies say a crowded livestock market was hit. The UN says drone strikes are now the leading cause of civilian deaths in Sudan, as Al Jazeera's Almigdad Alruhaid reports from Khartoum. Why is Trump now encouraging mail-in voting? Paris residents tell Al Jazeera they're dismayed by protest damage'No Kings' protests spread across the US ahead of midterm elections

Is the war entering a new phase? Ukrainian drones struck the Saratov region. The regional governor reported one person was killed and several homes were damaged. Vatican confirms Pope Leo's surgery was successful Food shortages in Yemen's Taiz as Houthi siege hits supplies

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Waymos are safer than human drivers. Why are people heckling them, egging them, and smashing in their windshields? The wheel turns: when one of Waymo's autonomous vehicles is in motion, its steering wheel moves, too--twitching out the car's maneuvers from the usual position, facing the front-left seat. Generally, on American roads, this is known as the driver's seat. In a Waymo, such a designation is arbitrary. The Waymo Driver, as the company calls its autonomous-driving system--a force guided by sensors, cameras, custom maps, and machine learning--is all around. No one is allowed to sit in that front-left seat. Before I'd ridden in a Waymo, I had wondered about the wheel. What was it doing up there? One answer, a boring one, is as follows: it is fulfilling a legal mandate. Existing safety standards assume that cars have steering wheels, and, because Waymo's vehicles are regulated as cars, so do they. Besides, the company has spent much of its decade-long existence retrofitting normal cars with self-driving technology; the wheel is largely a vestigial inheritance. "We were very curious about whether people would react positively or negatively to the fact that the wheel turned," Megan Neese, Waymo's "Head of Insights," told me recently. We were sitting in her employer's San Francisco offices. Neese has been at the company since 2019, when it began offering fully driverless rides to the public; she was tasked with gauging passenger reactions. It was not hard to see how a wheel steering on its own might look spooky--the suggestion of a ghost in the machine. Yet, to Neese's surprise, riders reported that it reassured them. It seemed to convey that the car's actions were "recognizable; they're relatable; they're continuing to happen." The Driver doesn't need them.)

Waymo and two Japanese firms, Go and Nihon Kotsu, will jointly launch driverless taxi services in Tokyo in 2027. Metropolitan Police Department plans to set up next spring a section dedicated to the investigation and prevention of accidents involving autonomous driving, the force has said. High-level knowledge and skills are necessary to investigate the causes of such accidents and the Tokyo police hope to accumulate expertise and share it with police departments in other prefectures amid the spread of autonomous driving trials held across the country. The new section, to be created within the police department's traffic bureau, will be in charge of handling applications for Level 4 services -- under which a system handles all driving operations under specified conditions -- as well as investigating accidents and advocating accident prevention. Taxi-hailing app operator Go, U.S. self-driving technology firm Waymo and taxi operator Nihon Kotsu announced in September that they will jointly launch driverless taxi services in Tokyo in 2027, marking Japan's first such commercial service.

Drone strike kills 30 people in Sudan's Blue Nile region Share Drone strike kills 30 people in Sudan's Blue Nile region on social media At least 30 displaced people, including women and children, have been killed and dozens of others have been wounded following a drone attack in southeastern Sudan. The governor of Wad al-Mahi province told Al Jazeera on Friday that a drone belonging to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) targeted the centre of the province, killing 26 women and four children. He said the drone was launched from "inside Ethiopia", according to the AFP news agency. Al Jazeera Arabic's Sudan correspondent, Wadah Al-Tahir, explained that the attack was the latest in a wave of drone strikes targeting the Blue Nile region and this time Wad al-Mahi province near the city of Damazin was struck. Friday's attack was just outside a displacement camp, near an informal gold mining site, where women earn a daily wage using chemicals and their bare hands to clear gold nuggets from the earth extracted by men.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects Look Up Say More Top creators, ranked Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Creator Playbook In My Bag AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now All Series Lawmakers are pushing for national emergency response standards. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. California, a hub for robotaxis, sets fines for vehicles that get in the way. Hundreds of thousands of autonomous vehicle rides are completed every week across the U.S. Most of them go off without a hitch. But all it takes is one wayward car to ruin someone's day -- and potentially threaten lives.

Autonomous car manufacturers have long claimed that self-driving vehicles would reduce traffic accidents. Thus far, the stats are largely in their favor. According to a report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), Google's Waymo robotaxis were involved in roughly 65 percent fewer car crashes than human drivers last year. Waymo's own internal statistics, meanwhile, claim that the autonomous vehicles (AVs) reduce accidents with serious injuries by 94 percent. Some critics are understandably dubious, however, noting that more testing needs to be done before anyone can meaningfully certify these safety gains.

Russia's attacks on Europe are getting more brazen and more dangerous Firefighters extinguish a fire inside a train carriage that was damaged by a drone strike near Ukraine's border with Poland on Saturday. Over the course of the summer, Russian attacks have been pushing ever deeper into European territory. On Aug. 11, military divers destroyed two drones floating off the coast of Romania near a €4 billion ($4.7 billion) energy project. Nine days later, Bucharest scrambled two F-16s to take out a maritime drone near the same Black Sea gas platform with hundreds of workers on board. Earlier that month, German police detected an armed UAV at Leipzig airport, while this week NATO jets downed another unmanned aircraft that entered Lithuanian airspace from neighboring Belarus, an ally of Moscow.

Is the war entering a new phase? Ukrainian officials say that a Russian drone strike on a bus near the front line in southern Ukraine has killed at least five people and injured seven others. The attack on Wednesday hit an area around the city of Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region governor Oleksandr Hanzha said on the Telegram messaging app. Photos posted by Ukrainian officials showed windows blown out of a white minibus, with a trail of blood streaming down the side of the vehicle. "Russians cynically struck a passenger bus. They targeted a minibus which carried people going about their daily business," said Mykola Lukashuk, head of the Dnipropetrovsk region council.