🏗️ The construction of the Jintang Subsea Tunnel of the #Ningbo-##Zhoushan# Railway has reached a decisive milestone! 💪The shield tunnelling section on the Zhoushan side has officially entered the final 100-metre sprint. This steel giant that cuts through mountains and seas to link both banks is speeding from blueprints into reality!🚄⛰️🌊 #ZhouShanGrowth# #TravelinZhoushan#

Life-or-Death Alarm: Imprisoned Early Rain Pastor Reportedly Has Advanced Liver Cancer ChinaAid has raised an urgent health alarm after receiving reports that Pastor Wang Yi, founder of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church, may be suffering from advanced liver cancer inside Jintang Prison. Detained in December 2018 and sentenced in 2019 to nine years for “inciting subversion” and “illegal business operations,” Wang remains a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom prisoner of conscience. Independent verification is impossible amid severe restrictions; his wife, Jiang Rong, has had only one known visit since 2018, in October 2021. Demand transparency now: urge authorities to grant Wang Yi’s family access and independent medical care before secrecy costs a life. Read Now #FreeWangYi# #ReligiousFreedom# #ChinaAid# #EarlyRainChurch# #PrisonerOfConscience#

NEW RESEARCH: Robot hands can now spin pens! This project involves @Ying_yyyyyyyy, @HaozhiQ, @Junwang_048, @JitendraMalikCV, and others A four-fingered Allegro Hand (16 DoF) learnt to spin pen-like objects in-hand for continuous revolutions, deployed on proprioception alone (a 30-step window of joint positions and previous targets, no vision, no touch). The recipe is three stages: 1. An oracle RL policy is trained in sim with privileged information. 2. Rolled out in sim and its action sequences are replayed open-loop on the real hand to harvest the ones that happen to work. 3. A proprioceptive student, behavior-cloned from the oracle in sim, is then fine-tuned on those real successes. It exists because the group's usual teacher-student distillation (DAgger) fails on this task, and because direct sim-to-real fails outright. From UC San Diego, CMU and UC Berkeley (Jun Wang, Ying Yuan, Haichuan Che, Haozhi Qi, Yi Ma, Jitendra Malik, Xiaolong Wang). A proprioception-only policy cannot even converge in simulation (it drops the pen in the first few steps); a vision/tactile policy learns fine in sim but the real pen oscillates so much that the image distribution shifts and it collapses to 90 degrees then drops (rotation pinned at 1.57 rad, 0 percent success on 7 of 10 objects). So vision and touch were dropped not as useless but because their sim-to-real gap is larger than proprioception's, while proprioception alone is too weak to learn the skill. Replaying the oracle's action sequence open-loop never needs a sensorimotor policy to survive transfer! More real demonstrations overfit rather than generalize. Going from 45 to 75 demos without sim pretraining lifts a training object (A: 53.7 to 76.7 percent) but barely moves or even hurts unseen objects (F: 16.4 to 15.0). Sim pretraining buys the generalization that raw real demos cannot. The entire real-world dataset is 45 trajectories (15 each on 3 objects, "fewer than 50"), and they were harvested for free. The oracle is replayed open-loop on the real hand and a trial is kept only if the object rotates more than a full revolution; no teleoperation, no human demos. Sim is cheap too: the oracle is 500M steps, under a day on one GPU. A dynamic, contact-rich skill bootstrapped from under 50 real rollouts. The sharpest stated lesson is that the pure physics gap survives even after you remove vision and touch, and domain randomization alone cannot bridge it. Pen spinning is dynamic and contact-rich enough to break the randomize-and-transfer playbook that carried this group's own earlier cube and sphere rotation work (the Hora lineage). The takeaway is that for these tasks the sim-to-real burden has to move off the fragile learned policy and onto a robust open-loop action replay. Also worth mentioning imho: the control frequency is not high enough to catch a fast-falling pen, and the shifting center of mass destabilizes the grasp.

“Faith Is Not a Crime” Shu Qiong and Chen Yan, members of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church, recently held signs publicly calling for imprisoned Pastor Wang Yi to receive family visits in accordance with Chinese law. One sign declared, “Faith is not a crime.” Wang was arrested in December 2018 and later sentenced to nine years in prison. In an Oct. 3 statement, his church said family members have visited him fewer than five times, while normal correspondence and telephone contact remain severely restricted. The appeal followed renewed concerns about Wang’s health, although reports of a serious illness remain unverified. Church members have urged authorities to provide accurate medical information and uphold his family’s legal rights to visitation and communication. Send Pastor Wang Yi a note of encouragement: Pastor Wang Yi Jintang Prison, Sichuan Province, Huopan Road, Qingjiang Town, Jintang County, Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, China Post Code: 610409 王怡牧师 四川省金堂监狱 四川省成都市金堂县清江镇火盆路 邮编：610409 Read Now #FaithIsNotACrime# #ChinaReligiousPersecution# #PastorWangYi#

"Regional ambitions", "expanding the Military Footprint", "extend military reach", "a foothold in Southeast Asia", "a new outpost", "carving new military presence", showing "attack" jets, "encircling Vietnam", "quiet overseas expansion", etc. Can you guess which country gets so much speculation, worded in such loaded vocabulary, as to what its "real" intentions are for opening an airforce training facility in Laos with the local government and army ? International media claim since September 29th that China "has opened its second military base abroad in Ban Keun, Laos", (about 50 kilometers north of Vientiane, close to the Thai border). Both the Chinese and Lao governments officially described the site as a jointly maintained and operated training facility, rather than the exclusive Chinese military base that Western media report on. China’s Ministry of National Defense stated that the center is meant to help train Lao Air Force pilots, is not directed against any third party, and does not feature an independent Chinese garrison or exclusive PLA control. Lao officials and military representatives have pushed back against foreign media labels of a "military base," pointing out that Laos's constitution does not permit foreign military bases on its soil. Reuters deceived and lied about it right off the bat with its headline : "China's latest expansion of its overseas military footprint, which was "carved from a patch of farmland in Laos over the past year." Headlines like this one maliciously imply that on top of military expansion, China is destroying the livelihood of local farmers. In reality, it was already a military airfield used by the CIA-operated Air America airline during the Vietnam War, as a logistics and support hub for secret operations in the region. Not only is it not built on precious farmland, but the site is still certainly as heavily polluted as every other base abandoned by US forces when they are done with a country. It does not stop Western media outlets and security analysts (such as reports by Reuters, NPR, The Diplomat, and the Lowy Institute) to portray the facility as a significant step in China's incremental, low-key military expansion in mainland Southeast Asia. Satellite imagery confirmed a 2,000-meter runway with trainer/light attack jets (such as JL-8 / K-8 aircraft) parked on site. These jets are actually used for counter-insurgency, border patrol, and light strike missions alongside flight instruction. Not exactly a tool of hegemonic expansion. The 2,000-meter-long runway is also hardly a tool of power projection. Such an air strip is too short for large strategic bombers, and the parking apron can only accommodate 22 small training aircrafts. By that logic, should we conclude that the US has already opened its new military base in Taiwan, since former managing director of Taiwan Tsai Ing-wen admitted herself that hundreds of US soldiers were back in Taiwan (including Jinmen and Mazu) to train Taiwanese forces ? And this is just the tip of the iceberg of how many US forces are actually stationed all over the island.