Latest news with #neighborhoods
CBS News
4 days ago
- Climate
- CBS News
Alert Day Sunday for high heat and potentially strong storms
A few storms early on Sunday morning may have woken you up before the sun on Sunday morning. Once those storms moved out, it was a foggy and dreary start to the day for many neighborhoods. We may not see as much sunshine to end the weekend as we did on Saturday but it will be just as hot. High temperatures will return to near 90° and some will peak in the mid-90s this afternoon. Humidity continues to run high, which will make it feel like up to 105° during the afternoon. With it being another hot day and the risk for strong storms, Sunday is another WJZ Weather Alert Day. The storm threat increases this afternoon (a few spot showers may move through during the morning). Any storms could produce strong winds, heavy rain and lightning. Things are expected to quiet down after sunset for a dry night. High heat continues through much of the next week. A midweek cold front fires off more storms on Wednesday and Thursday. A much more comfortable pattern sets in behind that front on Friday to start August and into the first weekend of the new month.
The Verge
18-07-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Ring reintroduces video sharing with police
Ring has once again started letting police request footage from users. Axon, a law enforcement technology company and maker of TASER, announced in April that it's partnering with Ring to allow customers to share 'relevant video with law enforcement to help solve crimes faster and safeguard neighborhoods,' as spotted earlier by Business Insider. The move reverses Ring's plan to step away from sharing video with police. Last year, the company discontinued 'Request for Assistance,' a feature that allowed law enforcement officers to ask people for camera footage through Ring's Neighbors app. At the time, the company said it would only let police to request footage during 'emergencies,' which still allowed law enforcement to obtain footage without a warrant, raising privacy concerns Now, Ring's partnership with Axon will allow police to solicit footage from Ring users through Axon's digital evidence management system, though it's unclear whether this will surface in the Neighbors app. Once the request is sent, Ring users can decide whether or not to send the footage, and if they do, it will be 'encrypted and securely added to the case file,' according to Axon. Axon also claims Ring won't share information about the users who declined to share footage. A source tells Business Insider that Ring is 'exploring a new integration with Axon that would enable livestreaming from Ring devices,' if customers give permission. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who returned to Amazon in April to head up the teams dedicated to Ring, Blink, Amazon Key, and Sidewalk, said the integration will help further Ring's mission to 'make neighborhoods safer.' Ring has come under fire in the past for allegedly helping police convince users to share their video footage, Motherboard reported in 2019. In 2023, Ring agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission that claimed its cameras enabled Ring workers and hackers to illegally spy on users. Siminoff said in the April announcement, 'This integration with Axon will foster a vital connection between our neighbors and public safety agencies in their communities, giving them a way to work together to keep their neighborhoods safe.' By 2021, Ring had partnered with over 2,000 police and fire departments in almost every US state.
The Independent
15-07-2025
- Business
- 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
Daily Mail
13-07-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Stunning red state suburb explodes as thousands flock there for the perfect life
Just north of Houston, a sleepy commuter town has gradually been growing, with stunning neighborhoods proliferating amid ancient green forest land. Comprising a sprawling network of pretty villages, The Woodlands expanded by almost nine percent between 2020 and 2025 to a population of 124,500 people.
Washington Post
10-07-2025
- Washington Post
Deadly strikes hit residential area in Kyiv
World Deadly strikes hit residential area in Kyiv July 10, 2025 | 8:15 AM GMT Explosions rocked Kyiv on July 10, with officials confirming that residential neighborhoods were among the areas hit.
