The United States on Thursday unleashed a volley of actions to censure China's treatment of the Uyghur minority, with lawmakers voting to curb trade and new sanctions slapped on the world's top consumer drone maker. The United States has been ramping up pressure on China amid a crop of disputes, with President Joe Biden's administration a day earlier targeting producers of painkillers that have contributed to America's addiction crisis. The U.S. Senate unanimously voted to make the United States the first country to ban virtually all imports from China's northwestern Xinjiang region over concerns of the prevalence of forced labor. "We know it's happening at an alarming, horrific rate with the genocide that we now witness being carried out," said Senator Marco Rubio, a driver behind the act, which already passed the House of Representatives and which the White House says Biden will sign. After prolonged negotiations to secure its passage, Rubio lifted objections and the Senate confirmed veteran diplomat Nicholas Burns as ambassador to China.

Still not sold on foldable smartphones? But companies continue their efforts to make them happen, with Oppo the latest to reveal its first take on a foldable flagship. It has a different screen ratio to devices from Samsung and the rest, resulting in a more horizontal (possibly more useful) touchscreen. Engadget Chinese Editor-in-Chief Richard Lai is testing one out -- expect to hear our full verdict soon. The US government is adding eight Chinese companies, including drone manufacturer DJI, to an investment blocklist for alleged involvement in the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. military downed a drone deemed to have hostile intent Tuesday that was headed toward a base in southeast Syria that houses 200 American troops, a senior defense official told Fox News' Jennifer Griffin. Two unmanned aerial systems were spotted entering the At Tanf Garrison Deconfliction Zone located along the Iraq and Jordan-Syria border. One of the two drones traveled deeper into the zone and was shot down after "demonstrating hostile intent," Capt.

Policy Search and Model Predictive Control~(MPC) are two different paradigms for robot control: policy search has the strength of automatically learning complex policies using experienced data, while MPC can offer optimal control performance using models and trajectory optimization. An open research question is how to leverage and combine the advantages of both approaches. In this work, we provide an answer by using policy search for automatically choosing high-level decision variables for MPC, which leads to a novel policy-search-for-model-predictive-control framework. Specifically, we formulate the MPC as a parameterized controller, where the hard-to-optimize decision variables are represented as high-level policies. Such a formulation allows optimizing policies in a self-supervised fashion. We validate this framework by focusing on a challenging problem in agile drone flight: flying a quadrotor through fast-moving gates. Experiments show that our controller achieves robust and real-time control performance in both simulation and the real world. The proposed framework offers a new perspective for merging learning and control.

Defense startup Anduril has moved closer to its ambition to build a new industry giant with the acquisition of drone maker Area-I. Combining Anduril's cutting-edge AI with Area-I's proven air vehicles could breed a formidable new range of smart drones. This was the first time the Valkyrie had launched another drone. Area-I was in the headlines this week with the U.S. Air Force reporting the successful launch of one of their Altius-600 drones from an XQ-58 Valkyrie unmanned jet, hinting at plans for a future of unmanned motherships releasing fleets of drones. The Anduril acquisition is likely to take the already successful Altius to another level by opening up a new range of missions. Anduril, founded in 2017, aims to bring a fast-paced Silicon Valley approach to the defense sector, challenging the existing giants like Boeing BA, Northrop Grumman NOC and Raytheon which are geared to the traditional crawling pace of military acquisition: "We deploy in hours, not years," states their website.

The US government will place eight Chinese companies including drone manufacturer DJI on an investment blocklist for alleged involvement in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims, the Financial Times has reported. The firms will reportedly be put on the Treasure department's "Chinese military-industrial complex companies" list on Tuesday, meaning US citizens will be barred from making any investments. DJI is already on the Department of Commerce's Entity list, meaning American companies can't sell it components unless they have a license. At the time, the government said it was among companies that "enabled wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance." However, unlike products from Huawei and others, DJI drones are have not been banned for sale in the US. The latest moves are part of an effort by US President Joe Biden to sanction China for repression of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

Washington, DC – The United States is sending a "dangerous and misleading message" by failing to hold any US military personnel responsible for a Kabul drone attack that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, human rights advocates have said. Calls for accountability for the deadly bombing on August 29 grew on Tuesday, a day after US media outlets first reported that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had accepted a recommendation from top commanders not to punish any members of the military. Rights groups also urged President Joe Biden's administration to do more to help the survivors of the attack in the Afghan capital to relocate to the US. The bombing targeted the car of Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for US-based aid organisation Nutrition and Education International (NEI), killing him and nine of his family members. "I've been beseeching the US government to evacuate directly-impacted family members and NEI employees for months because their security situation is so dire," Steven Kwon, founder and president of NEI, said in a statement.

Washington – The Pentagon said Monday that no U.S. troops or officials would face disciplinary action for a drone strike in Kabul in August that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. Spokesman John Kirby said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had received a high-level review of the strike that made no recommendation of accountability. "He approved their recommendations," Kirby said. "The secretary is not … calling for additional accountability measures." "There was not a strong enough case to be made for personal accountability," Kirby added.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has decided against disciplining any members of the United States military for an August drone attack in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, the New York Times and several US news outlets reported. An internal Pentagon review concluded last month that the August 29 bombing in the Afghan capital did not violate the laws of war and was not caused by misconduct or criminal negligence. The New York Times first reported on Austin's decision on Monday, citing an unidentified senior Pentagon official who said the defence secretary had approved a recommendation from two US military commanders not to discipline any personnel involved in the attack. The Washington Post, NBC News, and The Associated Press later confirmed the decision, also citing unidentified US officials. Asked about the investigation during a news briefing on Monday afternoon, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby did not directly confirm the media outlets' reports.

DJI may have dropped the "Pro" from the Mavic name with the third generation of its flagship drone, but make no mistake--with a brand-new, high-quality camera, two lenses, and full manual exposure control, the Mavic 3 is aimed squarely at video pros. It's a fun drone to fly, but the $2,200 price reflects the camera and lenses, not the flying capabilities. If your primary use for a drone is capturing high-quality photos and videos, this is the best drone on the market by a wide margin. Chances are you don't need footage this good, but it sure is fun and offers incredible results if you can afford it. The Mavic 3 is available in two versions: the standard model, which is what I tested, and a "Cine" version that adds more built-in storage (a 1-terabyte SSD to the standard's 8-gigabyte SSD), and support for ProRes 422 HQ video recording. The ProRes support is a big deal for video pros, and the file size of ProRes footage is the main reason for the larger SSD as well.