KABUL – The Afghan Taliban confirmed on Wednesday that leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and said they had appointed a successor. In a statement sent to media, the insurgent group said its new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of two of Mansour's deputies. It said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which was believed to have been held in Pakistan. Mansour was killed in Pakistan on Saturday when his vehicle was struck by a U.S. drone, an attack that is believed to be the first time a Taliban leader was killed in such a way inside Pakistani territory. Pakistani authorities are believed to have given shelter and support to some Taliban leaders over the Afghan border.

Sony Corp. shares rose as investors ignored a weak profit forecast, looking instead to the company's long-term prospects in entertainment and sensors needed for driverless cars and other emerging products. In New York, shares rose even after the company issued an annual profit outlook that fell short of analysts' estimates due to costs for repairs after the Kyushu earthquakes. The impact of the quakes and a slowdown in demand for image sensors that power cameras in smartphones -- including Apple Inc.'s iPhone -- are testing Sony's ability to generate more of its earnings from PlayStation gaming consoles, streaming services for its 65 million online users as well as movies and music. Still, profit at Sony's games and network services business will rise 52 percent to 135 billion ( 1.2 billion) on anticipated sales of PS4 consoles this year. "All the bad news is probably out for the time being, and we expect the focus to shift to the pace of recovery" in image sensor operations, Takeo Miyamoto, a Tokyo-based analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, wrote in a report on Tuesday after the earnings.

A suicide bomber killed at least 10 people and wounded four on Wednesday in an attack on a bus carrying staff from an appeal court west of the Afghan capital, Kabul, officials said, and the Taliban claimed responsibility. The attack came on the same day the Taliban announced a new leader to succeed Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike at the weekend. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the attack on staff from the judicial system was in response to the Afghan government's decision earlier this month to execute six Taliban prisoners on death row. Other attacks would follow, he said. "We will continue on this path," he said in a statement.

The Afghan Taliban Wednesday confirmed the appointment of a new leader following the death of Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a U.S. drone strike last week. This is the group's first official confirmation that Mansour was killed. In a statement sent to media, the Taliban declared that their new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of two of Mansour's deputies. It said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which was believed to have been held in Pakistan. The U.S. military carried out an airstrike Saturday targeting Mullah Akhtar Mansour (seen in this undated handout photograph by the Taliban) in a remote area of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

The Afghan Taliban has confirmed that its former leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and appointed a successor. In a statement sent to news media Wednesday, the insurgent group said its new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of Mansour's two deputies. It said he was chosen at a meeting of Taliban leaders, which was believed to have been held in Pakistan. Mansour was killed in Pakistan on Saturday when his vehicle was struck by a U.S. drone, believed to be the first time a Taliban leader was killed in such a way inside Pakistani territory. Pakistani authorities are believed to support Taliban leaders in cities over the Afghan border. The insurgents have been fighting to overthrow the Kabul government since 2001.

FILE - This Saturday, May 21, 2016 file photo taken by freelance photographer Abdul Malik, purports to show volunteers standing near the wreckage of the destroyed vehicle, in which Mullah Akhtar Mansour was allegedly traveling in the Ahmed Wal area in Baluchistan province of Pakistan, near Afghanistan border. The Afghan Taliban has confirmed that its former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike last week and appointed a successor. In a statement sent to media Wednesday, May 25, 2016, the insurgent group said its new leader is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, one of two Mansour's deputies.

The Afghan Taliban have named a deputy to former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour as their new leader, a spokesman said in a statement on Wednesday, the group's first official confirmation that Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone strike. Haibatullah Akhunzada, who was named in a United Nations report last year as the Taliban's former chief justice, is reported to be a respected religious scholar but little is known of his background. Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of a network blamed for many high-profile bombs attacks in Kabul in recent years, and Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of former leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, will serve as deputies, Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban's main spokesman, said in the statement. "All people are required to obey the new Emir-al-Momineen (commander of the faithful)," the statement said. The announcement, following a meeting of the Taliban's main shura or leadership council, ends three days of confusion during which the Islamist movement had provided no official reaction to the death of Mansour in a drone strike in Pakistan on Saturday.

An article explores how Nvidia Corp. microchips, the kind that are used in video games and by social media networks for photo tagging, are being applied to medicine. They are being used to add machine learning to medical imaging. The idea is to use the technology to spot conditions such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease earlier and faster. But one potential consequence of advancements in this area is reduced dependence on radiologists. Luminex has raised its offer for Nanosphere to obtain its molecular diagnostics technology from 83 million to more than 100 million.

Andrew Lo, director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has announced that, "The capability is here," suggesting that, "The biggest hurdle is the cultural barrier. You've got a lot of central bankers who are not as open to technology." The use of computers to do economic modeling is not new, and is an important tool in answering specific questions, but predictions made using computers are often less accurate than that of their flesh and blood counterparts. Lo suggests that artificial intelligence, or AI, will bridge the gap, using the process whereby technology learns to do tasks for which it hasn't been programmed. Called'machine learning,'the concept is already being applied to perform complex tasks, including classifying DNA sequences, detecting credit-card fraud, information retrieval, marketing, online advertising and stock market analysis.

Consistently predicting the next disruptive company is the holy grail if you are interested in start-ups. We've been testing out some Deep Learning techniques on our data to help make such predictions, and have had some interesting early results we thought we'd share. Word2vec is a Deep Learning technique first described by Tomas Mikolov and his team at Google in 2013, and in basic terms it allows a model to be built for a particular dataset (or corpus) in which words are represented as vectors. One of the most interesting outcomes of this approach is that we can gain insights about text by analysing word vectors arithmetically. In a classic example of the power of Word2Vec (trained on a large dataset), the vector of Queen is found to be almost equal to King Woman – Man.