Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour has been killed, Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security confirmed Sunday afternoon after several hours of uncertainty. The Afghan intelligence agency said Mansour, who was officially named the group's leader last year, was killed in an "airstrike" in a remote area in Balochistan in southwestern Pakistan Saturday. Prior to that, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani also confirmed that Mansour had been targeted in a drone strike by the United States. "Mullah Akhtar Mansour refused to answer repeated calls by the people and Government of Afghanistan to end the war and violence in the country. While sheltering himself in hideouts outside Afghanistan, he was also involved in deception, concealment of facts, maiming and killing innocent Afghans, terrorism, intimidation, drug smuggling as well as obstruction of development and progress in Afghanistan as he obstinately insisted on continuing the war," the Afghan president's office said in a statement Sunday.

The movie's opening may as well arrive with an on-screen statement. Loud shrieking lends the impression a couple is having sex, but the first sight is a close-up of a cat. Then the camera cuts to the source of the shrieks, and it turns out what sounded like love was actually an assault. Needling, absurd, sexual, kinetic -- all those adjectives apply to Verhoeven. The Dutch-born director has followed one of the more improbable career arcs in modern cinema -- from European obscurity to Hollywood heights to industry punch-line ("Showgirls," anyone?), back to European acclaim.

This photo taken by a freelance photographer Abdul Salam Khan using his smart phone on Sunday, May 22, 2016, purports to show the destroyed vehicle in which Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Mansour was traveling in the Ahmad Wal area in Baluchistan province of Pakistan, near Afghanistan's border. A senior commander of the Afghan Taliban confirmed on Sunday that the extremist group's leader, Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Mansour, has been killed in a U.S. drone strike.

KABUL – Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mansour, who according to U.S. officials was probably killed in a drone strike, took over as head of the insurgent movement last July following the revelation that the group's founder, Mullah Omar, had been dead for two years. He was initially thought to favor peace talks with the government, but after becoming leader he repeatedly refused to come to the negotiating table. For some Mansour was the obvious choice to succeed Mullah Omar, the one-eyed warrior-cleric who led the Taliban from its rise in the chaos of the Afghan civil war of the 1990s. Born in the same southern province, Kandahar, some time in the early 1960s, Mansour was part of the movement from the start and effectively in charge since 2013, according to Taliban sources. Mansour spent part of his life in Pakistan, like millions of Afghans who fled the Soviet occupation.

This week's economic calendar is pretty light. Market participants will be looking to an early getaway for the long weekend. While there will be plenty of entertaining FedSpeak, I expect a different topic to be at the fore. The news was pretty good, but the stock market was not. In my last WTWA, I predicted that the punditry would be asking whether it was "springtime for housing". That was the recurring topic as housing news was reported on several different days and garnered plenty of discussion. Competition came from the Fed Minutes, some dramatic earnings reports, and the election race. I always start my personal review of the week by looking at this great chart from Doug Short.

The Taliban has denied reports that a US military drone strike had killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor and another fighter in Pakistan. Earlier on Saturday, a US official said that the drone attack "likely killed" Mansoor inside Pakistani territory. Authorised by US President Barack Obama, the strike took place at about 6 am EDT (1000 GMT), the official said, which would have placed it late on Friday night in the target area. Multiple US drones targeted the men as they rode in a vehicle in a remote area in Pakistan along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, southwest of the town of Ahmad Wal, the official added. The Pentagon confirmed that the US targeted Mansoor in a statement released on Saturday.

U.S. special operations forces launched an airstrike Saturday against Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in a remote town in Pakistan, U.S. military officials said, and initial evidence suggested Mansour was killed. U.S. military and intelligence officers were still assessing the results of the strike by multiple armed drones, they cautioned. The operation, which was authorized by President Obama and took place around 3 p.m. local time (3 a.m. Pacific time), hit Mansour as he traveled in a vehicle with another man along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, southwest of the town of Ahmad Wal. Mansour has emerged as the leader of a resurgent Taliban that in recent months has mounted a powerful insurgency against the Afghan government in a string of attacks that have killed civilians, Afghan forces and U.S. military personnel.

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming one of the most powerful tools in the tech industry, and while AI can be used for harmless tasks like defeating world Go champions, it also has the potential for misuse. A malevolent AI would be like a computer virus on steroids, and while there are currently no known cases, researchers Federico Pistono and Roman Yampolskiy from the University of Louisville in Kentucky believe that we should already be preparing for them. Pistono and Yampolskiy have published a research paper called "Unethical Research: How to Create a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence." In it, they explain that it is entirely possible for a malevolent AI to be created in the right environment, and they lay out what sort of warning signs the cyber security industry should be looking out for. First and foremost, Pistono and Yampolskiy say that any organization interested in creating a malevolent AI would resist any form of oversight on their research.

These last few months have presented some complicated security stories, and this week we took steps to untangle them. We looked at the many, many ways in which the FBI hacks people, revelations of which have been trickling out for decades. And we broke down just how hackers were able to lift 81 million from a Bangladeshi bank in a matter of hours--well short of their billion-dollar goal, but still a hefty sum, cleverly obtained. In the world of software, Google has finally offered end-to-end encryption in its messaging products. It's Allo and Duo, new chat and video apps that use the stalwart end-to-end encryption known as Signal. On Allo, end-to-end kicks in only when you're in incognito mode, which we guess is better than nothing.

California has been in a drought for almost five years now, making water an extraordinarily precious resource--one that Californian residents and governments are eager to protect. On Wednesday, California suspended its mandatory drought restrictions, saying that the state is turning over responsibility of the water restrictions to individual communities, letting them set their own restrictions based on their water budgets, with the state only stepping in if the budgets are unrealistically optimistic. But how can a community keep track of its water budget? IBM's Watson program has already beaten Jeopardy!, invented its own recipes, assisted in treating patients with chronic conditions, and is currently used by over 80,000 developers. Now, in partnership with environmental analytics company OmniEarth, Watson will help save the existence of humans on Earth--or at least in California.