The Tribune

• The WNBA is offering an assist to players trying to stay safe while traveling overseas.

The league has partnered with LiveSafe, a safety communications platform, to provide a mobile security app to its 60-plus players competing in Russia, Turkey, China and other countries this offseason. The app debuted this week and players are already signing up.

“This was a proactive effort to protect our players and secure their personal safety,” WNBA President Lisa Borders said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “Our partner in this endeavor is LiveSafe. It has multiple features and functionality. It’s a real-time way for our players to ask for help and receive help in dangerous situations or threatening environments.”

The app will allow the players to communicate directly with the league and its security team. It also can send security advisories and notifications to players when they’re overseas, similar to what one might get from the state department.

• There’s good news for Rudolph and his friends — an app is helping officials reduce the number of reindeer killed in traffic accidents in Finland.

Some 300,000 reindeer freely wander the wilds of Lapland in Arctic Finland. An estimated 4,000 are killed every year through road accidents, officials say, and compensation to reindeer herders can be expensive.

Most of the accidents occur during the dark winter months when the animals are hard to spot.

Several methods to cut roadkill have failed, including spray-painting antlers with fluorescent colours, hanging reflectors on reindeer necks and using movable traffic signs to warn of reindeer as they wander through the lichen-covered fells.

In their latest attempt, officials are using a smartphone app called “Porokello,” Finnish for “Reindeer Bell.”

And it seems to be working — at least last month, when there were 300 less reindeer accidents on the roads of Finnish Lapland compared to the same month in 2015.

• Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey last week welcomed the arrival of a fleet of Uber self-driving cars delivered via a self-driving truck that transported them from California.

Ducey’s office says the governor welcomed the truck carrying the self-driving Volvos at the State Capitol in Phoenix.

Uber announced Thursday that it was shipping the cars to Arizona after they were banned from California roads over lack of required permits.

Uber made the announcement after Ducey on Wednesday and Thursday promoted Arizona as an alternative to California for the ride-hailing company to test its self-driving cars.