A senior commander with the Afghan Taliban says the militant group's leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. Mullah Abdul Rauf told The Associated Press Sunday that Mansour died in the strike late Friday night. He says the strike took place "in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area." The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed the strike but could not confirm Mansour's death. Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, however, says that Mansour is "more than likely" dead.

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.

North Dakota State University agricultural researcher John Nowatzki points to a mechanical panel of a Hermes 450 drone before the aircraft took off from the Hillsboro, N.D. airport on Friday, May 20, 2016, to collect agriculture data. The drone can fly higher and longer than other aircraft currently being used for commercial purposes in the United States. The 20-foot long drone can fly for 20 hours.

FILE - In this April 14, 2016 file photo, a drone operated captures videos and still images of an apartment building in Philadelphia. A panel of privacy experts and technology companies organized by the Obama administration has issued guidelines for using drones without being overly intrusive. The suggestions are voluntary, but some business interests involved in the debate hope the guidelines head off tougher regulations that they fear could smother the drone industry in its infancy.

From movie shoots to search-and-rescue operations to your neighborhood park, drones are everywhere. This week, the Federal Aviation Administration released data revealing the exact whereabouts of the country's registered drones. Among the findings: Los Angeles County is the drone capital of America, with 12,250 registered drones. In second place is Arizona's Maricopa County, home to a number of Phoenix-based aerial photography companies. Looking at the data from a per capita perspective, Hinsdale County, Colorado wins out, with 5.2 drones for every 1,000 people.

Rumors of a Xiaomi drone have swirled for some time, with early reports suggesting that the UAV may use the company's Mi Band as a beacon for a possible "follow me" feature. Xiaomi has confirmed "something wonderful and cool is flying to us very soon," but is keeping quiet on any possible features before next week. May marks a big month for Xiaomi. It's already unveiled its huge 6.44-inch Mi Max smartphone and earlier this week announced the US release of its 4K-ready Mi Box streamer. The company also confirmed at Google I/O that it will work with search giant to build a VR phone that will support the new Android Daydream virtual reality technology.

The National Telecommunications & Information Administration released Thursday a list of voluntary privacy best practices for commercial and non-commercial drone users, in the wake of concerns that drones could encroach on individual privacy and open a new front in the collection of personal data for commercial use. The privacy guidance, arrived at in consensus with drone organizations and companies like Amazon and Google's parent Alphabet, recommends that drone operators who collect personal data should have a privacy policy that explains what personally identifiable information they will collect, for what purpose the data is collected and if it will be shared with others, including in response to requests from law enforcement agencies. The guidelines also encourage drone operators to avoid using or sharing personal data for marketing purposes without consent of the individual. Drone operators should also not use personal data without consent for "employment eligibility, promotion, or retention; credit eligibility; or health care treatment eligibility other than when expressly permitted by and subject to the requirements of a sector-specific regulatory framework." Data collected should also not be held beyond a reasonable period, without the consent of the individual, or in exceptional circumstances, such as legal disputes or safety incidents.

This tiny robot uses electro-adhesion to "perch" on objects. A Harvard-turned-MIT researcher and his colleagues just dropped some pretty cool Spider-Man tech in the latest issue of Science magazine: surface clinging via "electrostatic adhesion." It's a widely applicable breakthrough that will, for instance, keep future robots perched while they wait for instructions. Flying drones use a lot of energy hovering, but the researchers, who hail from institutes across the U.S. and Hong Kong, may have found the first step in a path to conserving energy during activity. Like birds and insects, drones could save tons of energy if they were able to "perch" instead of hovering, as shown in the video below.

They might not be delivering our mail (or our burritos) yet, but drones are now simple, small, and affordable enough that they can be considered a toy. The Parrot AR Drone has an API that lets you control not only the drone's movement but also stream video and images from its camera. In this post, I'll show you how you can use Python and node.js to build a drone that moves all by itself. So given that I'm not a drone, or a machine vision professional, I'm going to have to keep things simple. For this project, I'm going to teach my drone how to follow a red object.