China-based Hesai appeals ruling over US linking firm to Chinese military
U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington ruled on Friday that the Defense Department's finding that Hesai contributes to the Chinese defense industrial base is supported by substantial evidence reflecting lidar's military application, national security concerns around Chinese lidar makers and Hesai's cooperation with Chinese agencies.
Hesai said it appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
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The Independent
44 minutes ago
- The Independent
Nextdoor social site, looking for a revival, pins hopes on partnership with local news providers
Nextdoor, the social media site that aims to create connections among neighbors, is trying to shake off an uneven past and a nagging sense it is being underutilized. How? It is turning to professional journalists for help. The company announced a partnership Tuesday with more than 3,500 local news providers who will regularly contribute material to the app. As part of a redesign, it is also expanding its ability to alert users about bad weather, power outages and other dangers, along with using AI to improve recommendations for restaurants, services and local points of interest. 'There should be enough value that we are creating for neighbors that they feel like they need to open up Nextdoor every single day,' said Nirav Tolia, the company's co-founder and CEO. 'And that isn't the case today.' The potential for Nextdoor to help itself and journalists at the same time is most intriguing. Nextdoor is carrying portions of local news stories from providers in the area where the user lives. If people want to learn more, a link to the news site is included. At launch, Nextdoor says it has more than 50,000 news stories available, representing just over three-quarters of the app's 'neighborhoods.' A future for news that never arrived When Nextdoor began in 2011, the local news industry was in the early stages of a freefall that continues today. The number of journalists in the U.S. dropped from 40 per 100,000 residents in 2002 to slightly more than eight today, according to a study issued this month by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. Nearly a third of the nation's counties have no full-time journalist. Into this tumult came an app with a promising premise and infrastructure, perhaps a template for local news of the future. Its users — Nextdoor likes to call them 'neighbors' — were organized into more than 200,000 distinct neighborhoods, with the ability to start conversations once shared over back fences: Do you know a reliable babysitter? What's that building going up down the street? Who serves the best burger? Yet Nextdoor's developers knew technology, not the news business. They didn't see a role for professional journalists at the outset. 'We thought in our early days that neighbors would take over, almost as citizen journalists or local reporters,' Tolia said. 'I think we've come to the conclusion that neighbors can only do so much.' Even worse, the site became a magnet for racists and cranks, the kind of neighbors you try to avoid. Nextdoor became so filled with suspicion — why is a person of a different color or nationality walking down the street? — that its moderators had to spend considerable time rooting out racist posts and changing rules to prevent them. For some users, the negatives outweighed the positives. 'Nextdoor has been a valuable resource for my family,' Ralinda Harvey Smith, a woman from Santa Monica, Calif., wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2020. 'I found a nanny share for my kids on Nextdoor. When I posted looking for a mechanic to replace my car headlight, a neighbor offered to change it free of charge. When the pandemic struck and disinfectant wipes were impossible to come by, a woman on Nextdoor DM'd me offering to leave some on her porch.' 'Yet I've long seen remnants of racism across the site that have left me with a bad feeling not only about the app, but the city I love,' Smith wrote. That made her log on less frequently. Trying to make Nextdoor essential for users Whatever the reasons, enough users consider Nextdoor inessential that its leaders were compelled to make the changes being announced now. The site has 100 million registered users, but only about 25 million are on the site at least once a week, Tolia said. Nextdoor, which went public in 2021 to attract a new round of financing, wants to see them more often. Nextdoor hired a former executive at The New York Times, Georg Petschnigg, as its chief design officer to oversee the changes. The company said its surveys found users wanted to know more about what was going on in their communities beyond the utilitarian information. Other social networks are similarly bringing in more outside material, Tolia said. 'When you rely on user-generated content, it's kind of unpredictable in terms of quality, timeliness and relevance,' he said. 'If I were in their shoes, I'd be doing this. I don't know why they didn't do it sooner, but that's for them to answer and not me,' said Chuck Todd, the former 'Meet the Press' moderator who has taken an interest in local news since leaving NBC. Semafor this spring speculated Todd might be interested in buying Nextdoor. Todd wouldn't discuss that. He is waiting to see if Nextdoor has a real commitment to news or just to reaching more eyeballs. 'It's an opportunity to do the one thing that Facebook could have done but chose not to,' Todd said. 'You don't want this to go down the road of just trying to get traffic for traffic's sake, because that's what happened to Facebook after it went public.' The irony of engaging with professional journalists isn't lost. 'It's like what is old is new again,' said Sam Cholke, manager of distribution and audience growth for the Institute for Nonprofit News. Its hundreds of members include the Texas Tribune, the Plateau Daily News in Highlands, N.C., and the Daily Yonder in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Several of its participating news organizations are joining with Nextdoor, and 'my hope is that our members see significant benefits from it,' Cholke said. Hoping for mutually beneficial relationship The local news industry continues to suffer from the same problems that have led to its downfall the past two decades: a dwindling number of readers and advertisers. An offhand comment by Tolia — about how people used to pick up 'a piece of dead tree' from their driveways to get their news — speaks to fading prospects. Facebook's deemphasis of news on its platform and Google's increasing use of AI at the expense of referrals to news articles are adding to the death spiral, said Tim Franklin, head of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern. 'If Nextdoor is another vessel to get readers to news sites, and local news sites in particular, it would come at a real moment of vulnerability for local news organizations and would be a real opportunity,' said Franklin, whose worry is that relying on third parties is unpredictable. Josh Schneps, who runs a series of local news operations in New York City and Long Island, like the Flushing Times and Park Slope Courier, has already had material appear on Nextdoor in a soft launch and is seeing an increase in traffic to the sites. 'I feel like media is in a state of evolution and there's no playbook,' Schneps said. 'My goal is to get our content in front of as many people as possible. I'm more than happy to be the guinea pig' for Nextdoor, he said. An industry — and a company — both need help. Maybe they can help each other. ___ David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at and
The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Landmark Tesla trial after ‘autopilot car runs red light & kills stargazing woman sending her flying 75ft through air'
A LANDMARK trial against Tesla has begun after one of the company's self-driving cars killed a woman as she was stargazing with her boyfriend. Naibel Benavides, a university student, was sent flying 75ft through the air after she was hit by a Tesla that allegedly ran through a red light and a stop sign in Florida. 4 4 4 Naibel's boyfriend was left seriously injured in the 2019 incident, while her body was found in a wooded area following the harrowing smash. The trial began Monday in Miami, with a jury to decide if Elon Musk's company is partly to blame for Naibel's death. Lawyers argue that Tesla's driver-assistance feature - Autopilot - should have warned the driver and braked before the tragic crash. The Model S blew through flashing red lights as well as a a stop sign and a T-intersection at nearly a staggering 70 miles an hour in the April 2019 crash, it's alleged. Tesla lays the blame solely on the driver, who was reaching for a dropped mobile phone at the time. George McGee, who was behind the wheel, was sued separately by the plaintiffs before reaching a settlement with the victims' families. Tesla said in a statement: "The evidence clearly shows that this crash had nothing to do with Teslas Autopilot technology. "Instead, like so many unfortunate accidents since cellphones were invented, this was caused by a distracted driver." Musk's company has continuously worked to convince the public its self-driving technology is safe during a planned rollout of hundreds of thousands of Tesla robotaxis on US roads by the end of next year. A jury trial is rare for the company - with past suits over crashes being often dismissed or settled. Heartstopping moment self-driving car smashes into van parked in driveway as driver is slapped with a ticket And what's more, this case could be the rarest one yet as a judge recently ruled that the family of the stricken Naibel can argue for punitive damages. The 2021 lawsuit alleges the driver relied on Autopilot to reduce speed or come to a stop when it detected objects in its way. This included a parked Chevrolet Tahoe that Naibel and her boyfriend had gotten out of near Key West, to look up at the sky. The Tesla rammed the couple's car at highway speeds, causing it to rotate and slam into Naibel, throwing her into a wooded area and tragically killing her. In legal documents, Tesla denied nearly all of the lawsuits allegations and said it expects that consumers will follow warnings in the vehicle and instructions in the owners manual, as well as comply with driving laws. Tesla warns owners in manuals that its cars cannot drive themselves and they need to be ready to intervene at all times. Lawyers argue that Tesla should have a geofence on Autopilot so it could only work on the big roads it was designed for rather than smaller ones. They also say data and video evidence shows the Autopilot did detect the couple's car but then failed to warn the driver as they claim it should have done. Tesla has since improved its driver-assistance and partial self-driving features, but still faces lawsuits and investigations over what critics say is a gap between its depictions of how well they work and the actual reality of what they can do. In 2023, federal auto safety regulators recalled 2.3 million Teslas for problems with Autopilot failing to sufficiently alert drivers if they weren't paying attention to the road. They then put Tesla under investigation last year for saying it fixed the problem - though it was unclear it actually did that. Musk has also continued to suggest that Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology allows cars to drive themselves - despite warnings from regulators not to do so as it could lead to over-reliance on the systems, crashes and deaths. The technology has been involved in three fatal crashes and is under investigation of its ability to see in low-visibility conditions such as sunlight glare or fog. 4
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
China's economy beats expectations in face of Trump's trade war
China's economy grew more strongly than expected in the second quarter as it proved resilient in the face of Donald Trump's trade war. China's gross domestic product (GDP) grew 5.2% in April to June compared with a year earlier, slowing from 5.4% in the first quarter, but just ahead of analysts' expectations for a rise of 5.1%. The world's second largest economy has so far avoided a sharp slowdown in part due to support by Beijing and as factories took advantage of a US-China trade truce to make shipments before tariffs kicked in, or 'front-loading'. Last month, the US and China extended the truce after two days of talks in London that resulted in a 'framework' deal over export restrictions on rare earths and semiconductors. However, investors are bracing for a weaker second half as exports lose momentum, prices continue to fall, and consumer confidence remains low. China's policymakers face a daunting task in achieving the annual growth target of about 5% – a goal many analysts view as ambitious given entrenched deflation and weak demand at home. Wei Yao, an economist at Société Générale, said: 'Despite a strong first half, the outlook is set to sour in [the second half of the year] as export front-loading fades and the impact of US tariffs becomes more visible. 'Renewed weakness in house prices and the fading impact of subsidies also cast doubt over the sustainability of the consumption recovery.' Indeed, the solid headline GDP numbers held little sway for most households including Mallory Jiang, a 30-year-old doctor in the southern tech hub Shenzhen, who told Reuters she and her husband had pay cuts this year. 'Both our incomes as doctors have decreased, and we still don't dare buy an apartment. We are cutting back on expenses: commuting by public transport, eating at the hospital cafeteria or cooking at home. My life pressure is still actually quite high.' On a quarterly basis, GDP grew 1.1% in April to June, the National Bureau of Statistics data showed, compared with a forecast 0.9% increase and a 1.2% gain in the previous quarter. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Investors are closely watching for signs of fresh stimulus at the upcoming politburo meeting due in late July, which is likely to shape economic policy for the remainder of the year. Beijing has ramped up infrastructure spending and consumer subsidies, alongside monetary easing. In May, the central bank cut interest rates and injected liquidity as part of broader efforts to cushion the economy from US tariffs. Some analysts believe the government could increase deficit spending if growth slows sharply.
