Latest news with #AnnArbor-based
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
University of Michigan student fled to China after being charged with voting illegally, FBI says
() — A Chinese national charged with voting illegally at the University of Michigan has fled the U.S., according to a criminal complaint filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was unsealed on Friday. Haoxiang Gao was attending the Ann Arbor-based university in October 2024 and lived on campus, authorities said. Safety officials with the school spoke with Gao on Oct. 28 after hearing reports that a student had unlawfully cast a vote in the 2024 general election, according to the recently unsealed court documents. CBS Detroit previously reported on the case, but authorities didn't identify Gao at the time. Gao admitted during the conversation with the school that he registered to vote and did cast a vote at a polling location on campus on Oct. 27. He was charged by the state on Oct. 30 with one count each of unauthorized elector attempting to vote and making a false affidavit for the purpose of securing voter registration, court records show. During Gao's arraignment, a judge ordered him to surrender his Chinese passport and not to leave Michigan, according to the criminal complaint. The passport handed in had a serial number ending in '1332.' A warrant for Gao was later issued after he missed court hearings on March 6 and April 24. The FBI said in the filing that Gao's passport was in the possession of school safety officials during a court hearing. However, according to prosecutors, Gao boarded a Delta flight from Detroit International Airport to Shanghai, China, on Jan. 19 using a Chinese passport in his name with a serial number ending in '7137.' CBS News Detroit has reached out to the university for comment. Gao has been federally charged with flight to avoid prosecution, though the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with China. The case is among the very few instances of noncitizens voting in federal elections in modern history, studies and investigations have found. Analysis by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found 30 cases of noncitizens suspected of voting in the 2024 general election reported by election officials out of 23.5 million votes cast in the 42 jurisdictions reviewed. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Bev's Bagels opens in Detroit's Core City with chewy, crisp bagels and diner vibes
After an early May soft opening, Detroit's new spot for bagels that started as a pop-up and grew to a loyal following officially opened its brick-and-mortar home. In Detroit's Core City is the beloved Bev's Bagels from Max Sussman, a Huntington Woods native and James Beard Award semifinalist. Now open seven days a week and billed as a 'bagel diner,' Bev's Bagels, named after Sussman's grandmother, pairs Jewish bagel traditions in a diner setting. Various bagels are offered paired with wild-caught fish, schmears and as inventive sandwiches. 'Our standards at Bev's are probably a little obsessive, but that's the only way I know how to do it,' says Sussman. Sussman says he's 'spent years chasing the perfect bagel' and found it using 'organic ingredients, wild fish, and a product that makes you actually feel good.' Chewy and crisp are what Bev's Bagels signature bagels are noted for. Bagels are $2.50 each, or $5 for a bagel and schmear. A baker's dozen of bagels is $30. Bev's Bagels menu includes: Bagel varieties include plain, salt, sesame, everything, pumpernickel, pumpernickel everything, za'atar, poppy seed, cinnamon raisin and spicy furikake. Pizza bialy and salt sticks. Cream cheese schmear flavors are green goddess, chili crisp, roasted garlic and scallion, pimento cheddar, za'atar and olive cream cheese, plus classics like plain, lox & chive, and a vegan alternative. Bev's Bagels sandwiches ($10-$15) include those with salmon, whitefish, tuna and even one called the 'Healthy Elvis' with peanut butter, banana and ham. Breakfast bagel sandwiches are with a fried egg or scrambled eggs with lox and onions, according to the shops online menu, are $8-$14. Sussman also plans to introduce a rotating seasonal bagel variety. The interior of Bev's Bagels, designed by Chelsea Hyduk, leans more to a diner feel than a bagel shop and is centered around a counter with 10 barstools and with open-kitchen views, according to a news release. 'When we designed Bev's, I wanted it to feel like the kind of place that's always been there,' Sussman said. 'I've always loved diners, where you can sit at the counter, chat with the cook, and feel like a regular the first time you walk in. That's the energy we're bringing to bagels.' Sussman is a cookbook author along with his brother, Eli, and is known for his work in New York's culinary scene at Roberta's and The Breslin. In 2012, Sussman was named a semifinalist for a James Beard Award Rising Star Chef of the Year in New York. Bev's Bagels began in 2023 out of Sussman's house and has since attracted a cult-like following. More recently, the pop-up has been taking place at the Argus Café on Packard in Ann Arbor. At Bev's, customers can sip on Ann Arbor-based Roos Roast drip coffee and a selection of non-alcoholic drinks including those from Detroit's own Casamara Club. While Bev's Bagels had a early May soft launch, the shop is now open 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily unless they sell out. In Detroit's Core City, Bev's Bagels is at 4884 Grand River, Unit 1B. On Instagram follow @bevsbagels or visit Contact Detroit Free Press food and restaurant writer Susan Selasky and send food and restaurant news and tips to: sselasky@ Follow @SusanMariecooks on Twitter. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Bev's Bagels opens in Detroit's Core City with chewy, crisp bagels
Miami Herald
16-05-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
Trump wants to bring US manufacturing jobs back. Robot companies see an opportunity
DETROIT - President Donald Trump wants to see a resurgence of manufacturing jobs in the United States with his tariff policies, but many of these factory roles of the future will ultimately be filled by robots. That's why attendees of this week's massive Automate conference in downtown Detroit - North America's largest robotics and automation gathering - see opportunity in Trump's reshoring push, which comes just as factory automation technology rapidly improves with artificial intelligence. They are quick to point out that the country is already dealing with a shortage of about 450,000 manufacturing workers, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A study last year from Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute said that number could surge to 1.9 million by 2033. "I see us in an acceleration period right now, and I think you can sense that here at the show in terms of the crowds and the type of people that are here," Mike Cicco, CEO of FANUC America, a large robotics firm headquartered in Rochester Hills, said on a Tuesday panel alongside several industry leaders. Automakers and suppliers are a big focus of the automation industry. About half of North American robot sales go into car manufacturing, and many robot companies have a home base in Metro Detroit. But several executives said their current sales growth is fueled by other sectors. Across two massive Huntington Place show floors packed with more than 800 vendors, companies showed off robot and automation products catered to streamlining restaurant kitchens, stacking boxes at distribution centers, performing surgery at hospitals, and sanding wood for construction projects. "You can't think of an industry right now that's not automating," said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Ann Arbor-based Association for Advancing Automation, which hosts the conference. He said Automate has rapidly grown in recent years with registrations for 2025 topping 40,000 people. The event will shift to Chicago next year and Las Vegas in 2027. North American robot sales slipped in 2023 and 2024 after surging during the pandemic as companies responded to supply chain and labor shortage issues. In the first quarter of 2025, sales were flat compared with a year earlier, with companies buying 9,064 units worth more than $580 million - an average of about $64,000 each - the association said this week. Automakers were a key growth sector in the quarter, snapping up 3,668 robots worth $263 million. But Burnstein said another run of investment is ahead as labor issues persist, as robots get cheaper, and as companies try to keep pace with rivals in China, where factories are automating faster than anywhere else. In auto manufacturing, steps along the process like painting and body production already are highly automated. Now executives say they are pushing into more complex areas traditionally reliant on humans, including general assembly. Paul Stephens, global strategy manager at Ford Motor Co., said the carmaker wants to automate more of its manufacturing processes as the costs of robots and accompanying technology start to come down. Ford also is pushing its smaller suppliers to do the same in a bid to increase the quality of their parts. He said during a panel discussion that U.S. manufacturing is on the cusp of an "automation revolution." Several companies pitched artificial intelligence tools as a way to spot quality issues with parts or vehicles - a task traditionally done with human eyes. Rajesh Iyengar, CEO of Lincode Labs Inc., said in an interview that a primary reason customers are turning to his AI-powered visual inspection tool is that they are struggling to fill their quality inspection roles, or retain those employees for more than two or three months. About 70% of the company's customers are in automotive. "There's a lot of interest and a lot of movers in this space," Iyengar said, especially amid the current push to relocate car factories to the United States. Also driving more automation in manufacturing is the rise of the collaborative robot, or cobot. These smaller-scale robots can be adapted to many types of jobs and have safety features allowing them to be installed alongside human workers. Cobots could be found in nearly every corner of the Automate conference floor, and are in contrast to larger industrial robots that move faster, handle beefy tasks like moving sheet metal, and are often fenced off from workers for safety reasons. Travis Langford, automotive industry sales manager for cobot maker Universal Robots, said the company's offerings serve as a sweet spot between a human worker and a full industrial robot. They can more easily be retrofitted into factory layouts without costly redesigns and equipment overhauls. He said the company's robots are used for tasks ranging from picking parts out of a bin, to glazing car windows, or dispensing glue. In more than 15 years, the Danish company with a North American headquarters in Novi has sold more than 100,000 of these smaller-scale robots. Langford said he sees a surge in sales around the corner as large global manufacturers start to catch on: "We haven't really hit the mass-adoption yet." Brian Breuhan, senior manufacturing engineer with General Motors Co., said during a presentation that cobots could be used more along auto assembly lines, helping workers carry out tasks. He and others also mentioned humanoid robots as gaining early traction in some car factories; there was at least one humanoid robot giving high-fives to attendees on the Automate show floor. In Breuhan's presentation - which explained how to develop the "factory of the future" - he acknowledged there would be fear and resistance among workers. But he said those concerns could be minimized through clear communication from leadership of the automation plan and by offering retraining programs, where workers might be shifted to new tasks in the plant if their current jobs were phased out - like servicing the robots themselves. "Reutilize those people doing something fun, or that's useful, problem-solving or whatever it might be, to try and calm that fear," Breuhan said. Cicco, the FANUC leader, said in an interview he hears a few reasons why potential customers want to automate, like a desire to increase quality, or up their production rate. But the most common response is: "I can't find people, or I've had to shut down my factory because of absenteeism, and things like that," the executive said. Yet FANUC and the larger robotics industry is dealing with its own staffing challenges, Cicco said, which can't be solved with more automation. He said his company is tackling the problem by funding robotics training down to the high school level and putting several thousand robots out into schools to facilitate teaching. "We need to bring more people into the workplace that know how to program robots, and maintenance robots, and fix robots, and install robots," Cicco said. That recruiting effort becomes especially critical if demand for robotics accelerates as Cicco expects - including as the Trump administration uses tariffs to try to force more manufacturers to relocate domestically. "Long term, there's a huge benefit," the CEO said. "I think we do need to make more things in America, and I do see that as a benefit to us long-term in the (robotics) industry." Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Another Robotaxi Service Will Launch in Texas. But It's Not One You've Heard Of
Uber teams up with May Mobility to launch a fleet of robotaxis in Arlington, Texas, by the end of 2025. The effort is the latest partnership between a leading app and an autonomous tech developer, with the ride-hailing industry now taking steps to add driverless vehicles to its fleets. Texas is increasingly becoming the most important state in autonomous vehicle development and launches, including driverless trucks. Waymo isn't the only robotaxi developer in the US at the moment, even though it easily has most of the momentum as an operator of its own fleets. After years of backing various SAE Level 4 development efforts, Uber is now progressing to the roll-out stage with a number of partners. The ride-hailing giant is teaming up with May Mobility in a multi-year strategic partnership, with the latter set to launch thousands of robotaxis on Uber's app platform. And the first location that will see May Mobility's autonomous vehicles under the Uber umbrella will be Arlington, Texas. The robotaxis are scheduled to launch there by the end of this year. "The partnership highlights both companies' shared ambition to quickly scale AV use in ride-hail, broadening access to AVs across diverse markets and driving greater consumer choice," May Mobility noted. In practice, this means that later in 2025 Uber will offer its users in Arlington the option of using May's hybrid-electric Toyota Sienna models on certain trips, at first with safety drivers on board, before moving on to driverless operations. So human Uber drivers will still remain on the roads of the city. Last year Ann Arbor-based May Mobility has also teamed up with Lyft to bring the same Sienna robotaxis to Atlanta by 2025 in a partnership model that is becoming very common in the autonomous vehicle industry, with an existing ride-hailing app providing the user base and the fleet services that robotaxis require. Hearst Owned This year is shaping up to be a big one for May Mobility, just at a time when robotaxis are starting to see launches in major markets outside the west coast and the southwest. May's planned launch in Arlington later this year means that Texas alone could see three different robotaxi services, with Tesla planning its own Austin launch for June after Waymo kicked off operations in its hometown earlier this year. "Launching on the Uber platform is a big signal to the market that May Mobility is ready to quickly expand to major markets as the pre-eminent autonomy-as-a-service provider," said Edwin Olson, CEO and co-founder of May Mobility. Of course, one of the reasons this is happening in Arlington, of all places, is not because there is a shortage of human-driven Ubers or privately owned vehicles. The Lone Star state has a very liberal regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles of all types, and Texas has also been the focal point of most of the country's autonomous truck testing and deployment efforts. In fact, driverless trucks are already in operation in Texas, and more are on the way soon. It remains to be seen whether any robotaxi service will be able to catch up to Waymo, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft are bound to play a major role in Level 4 services' expansion in the US and overseas via partnerships with autonomous tech developers. Will robotaxis outnumber human gig-economy drivers by 2035 in the US, or will they remain a minority in the ride-hailing app fleets? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Another Robotaxi Service Will Launch in Texas. But It's Not One You've Heard Of
Uber teams up with May Mobility to launch a fleet of robotaxis in Arlington, Texas, by the end of 2025. The effort is the latest partnership between a leading app and an autonomous tech developer, with the ride-hailing industry now taking steps to add driverless vehicles to its fleets. Texas is increasingly becoming the most important state in autonomous vehicle development and launches, including driverless trucks. Waymo isn't the only robotaxi developer in the US at the moment, even though it easily has most of the momentum as an operator of its own fleets. After years of backing various SAE Level 4 development efforts, Uber is now progressing to the roll-out stage with a number of partners. The ride-hailing giant is teaming up with May Mobility in a multi-year strategic partnership, with the latter set to launch thousands of robotaxis on Uber's app platform. And the first location that will see May Mobility's autonomous vehicles under the Uber umbrella will be Arlington, Texas. The robotaxis are scheduled to launch there by the end of this year. "The partnership highlights both companies' shared ambition to quickly scale AV use in ride-hail, broadening access to AVs across diverse markets and driving greater consumer choice," May Mobility noted. In practice, this means that later in 2025 Uber will offer its users in Arlington the option of using May's hybrid-electric Toyota Sienna models on certain trips, at first with safety drivers on board, before moving on to driverless operations. So human Uber drivers will still remain on the roads of the city. Last year Ann Arbor-based May Mobility has also teamed up with Lyft to bring the same Sienna robotaxis to Atlanta by 2025 in a partnership model that is becoming very common in the autonomous vehicle industry, with an existing ride-hailing app providing the user base and the fleet services that robotaxis require. This year is shaping up to be a big one for May Mobility, just at a time when robotaxis are starting to see launches in major markets outside the west coast and the southwest. May's planned launch in Arlington later this year means that Texas alone could see three different robotaxi services, with Tesla planning its own Austin launch for June after Waymo kicked off operations in its hometown earlier this year. "Launching on the Uber platform is a big signal to the market that May Mobility is ready to quickly expand to major markets as the pre-eminent autonomy-as-a-service provider," said Edwin Olson, CEO and co-founder of May Mobility. Of course, one of the reasons this is happening in Arlington, of all places, is not because there is a shortage of human-driven Ubers or privately owned vehicles. The Lone Star state has a very liberal regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles of all types, and Texas has also been the focal point of most of the country's autonomous truck testing and deployment efforts. In fact, driverless trucks are already in operation in Texas, and more are on the way soon. It remains to be seen whether any robotaxi service will be able to catch up to Waymo, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft are bound to play a major role in Level 4 services' expansion in the US and overseas via partnerships with autonomous tech developers. Will robotaxis outnumber human gig-economy drivers by 2035 in the US, or will they remain a minority in the ride-hailing app fleets? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
