In the headlines

The murdered student Henry Nowak repeatedly told police “I can’t breathe” as they handcuffed him minutes before he died. Newly released bodycam footage of the incident in Southampton last year shows Nowak telling officers he had been stabbed, to which one replies: “I don’t think you have, mate.” Vickrum Digwa, who lied about Nowak racially abusing him, was handed a life sentence for his murder yesterday. Keir Starmer’s authority took another hit yesterday with the release of the so-called Mandelson files, which lay bare ministers’ private criticism of the PM’s premiership. Contained within the almost 1,500 pages of correspondence was Peter Mandelson saying the PM lacked “verve”, and senior cabinet minister Pat McFadden complaining that Labour MPs only care about who they can tax to “pay benefits to others”. Mushrooms are set to be deployed in rivers to filter out toxic pollutants that pose a risk to human health. Ofwat has awarded Anglian Water £1.5m to use fungi to clean up waterways after a trial in Devon’s River Erme showed that fungal spores absorbed as much as 80% of the water’s E. coli.

Comment

An Apollo Go car on the roads. Baidu

Beware China’s robotaxis

The first Chinese robotaxis have arrived in London, says Tym Syrytczyk on Substack. Apollo Go, owned by Beijing tech giant Baidu, is the third autonomous vehicle company to test its driverless machines in the capital. But unlike Google’s Waymo and British-founded Wayve, its cars are designed and built in China and operated entirely by Chinese software. Shouldn’t we be more concerned? Last year, Norway’s transport agency discovered a widget buried in its Chinese-made buses capable of cutting the power supply remotely. What happens if there are similar “kill switches” in Apollo Go’s cars? Chinese firms are legally required to support their country’s intelligence work when needed. So the more deeply embedded they are in our transport infrastructure, the greater the potential for Beijing to use that infrastructure against us.

It’s not just the risk of vehicles being remotely powered down, causing traffic chaos or worse. Driverless vehicles scan hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles around them, making them potent tools for mobile surveillance. And even if Beijing isn’t up to any dodgy tricks, what of cybersecurity? Earlier this year, hundreds of Apollo Go’s robotaxis in Wuhan stopped suddenly in live traffic, reportedly because of a hack. Other countries have come up with policies to mitigate these issues: Switzerland struck a deal with Baidu but insisted on Swiss-based remote operators, full ownership of the vehicle data and the right to dismantle cars to check for kill switches. What we don’t want is a repeat of the Huawei saga, when Britain allowed the Chinese firm to build out the country’s 5G network only to then rip it all out to mitigate the surveillance risk. Robotaxis look certain to become critical national infrastructure. The time to ask who controls them is now.

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Photography

Winners of this year’s National Geographic Traveller (UK) photography competition include snaps of the sun breaking through the clouds in the Dolomites in northern Italy; a colony of king and Adélie penguins in South Georgia and Antarctica; the Gulf Dove shipwreck in the waters of Socotra island in Yemen; women gathering for Eid prayers in Ethiopia; the snow-covered head of an Arctic fox in Iceland; and a pedestrian walking along Kolkata’s “colour corridor”. Click the image to see the rest.

Please disperse

One of the pieces in the rest of today’s newsletter is about an explosion at a fireworks factory in Malta, which for many people of a certain age will bring to mind Lieutenant Frank Drebin trying to disperse the crowds after a similar incident in The Naked Gun (1988).

Appropriately enough, there is something to see here, namely our extraordinarily generous offer for new paid subscribers:

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