The legal battle over the future of Santa Monica Municipal Airport widened Tuesday when a major aviation tenant filed a federal complaint challenging the city's effort to reduce aircraft services and eventually shut down the historic facility. Atlantic Aviation, which provides fuel, hangars and other services for aircraft, asked the Federal Aviation Administration to determine whether the airport's leasing policy, a proposal to restrict fuel sales and plans to force Atlantic to leave violate federal agreements with the city. The complaint alleges that the city is ignoring federal grant requirements that prohibit "unjust discrimination" against aircraft uses as well as unfair and unreasonable dealings with airport tenants. In Santa Monica's ongoing effort to close the airport, Atlantic notes that the city has provided airport leases for nonaviation uses but has refused to enter new leases this year with the company as well as other aviation tenants. All are operating month-to-month, and the city has threatened to evict them at any time.

Attorneys defending Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's order to bar agencies from helping Syrian refugees resettle in his state faced unusually fierce questioning before a federal appeals court Wednesday, suggesting the panel might side with a lower court that found the order discriminatory. A three-judge panel for the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago zeroed in on the intelligence and intent behind the Republican vice presidential candidate's order, which a federal judge said in February "clearly discriminates" against refugees from the war-torn nation. Judges suggested that Indiana could've had a stronger argument for opting out of the refugee program -- in which states disperse federal money to resettlement organizations -- instead of excluding Syrians. "If you're in, you play by the government's rules," Judge Frank Easterbrook said. The oral arguments came the same day the White House announced that the refugee program will be expanded in the next year as concern continues about the refugee crisis stemming from Syria's civil war and conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When police officers removed the mirrored doors behind which Yonatan Daniel Aguilar had died hours earlier, they found a crumpled blanket on the ground, obscuring his emaciated body -- pale and stiff, curled in a fetal position, with cuts on his face. One officer lifted a corner of the blanket and two cockroaches crawled out. The child was so tiny that officers thought maybe he was 6 years old or so. Details about the condition of Yonatan's body when it was found last month in his Echo Park home were disclosed in more than 100 pages of heavily-redacted case records and police reports released to The Times by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services this week. The records show that Yonatan's risk of abuse at home had been marked as "high" four times from 2009 to 2012 by a county program intended to guide social workers' level of intervention.

Bayer buying Monsanto, Uber's self-driving cars, a Navy commander faces attempted rape charges, and Hesperia's halfway houses might be closed. Bayer buying Monsanto, Uber's self-driving cars, a Navy commander faces attempted rape charges, and Hesperia's halfway houses might be closed. Shirley Teeter was punched while attending a Donald Trump rally on Sept. 13 in Asheville, N.C. Shirley Teeter was punched while attending a Donald Trump rally on Sept. 13 in Asheville, N.C. For decades, environmentalists have rhapsodized about the tranquil beauty of California's deserts while battling fiercely with energy companies, the government and within their own ranks over what if any power production should occur on those sun-baked, wind-blown, geothermally active expanses of land.

As a cease-fire in Syria entered its third day, authorities said Wednesday that the government was to begin withdrawing forces from a strategic road in the besieged rebel-held area of Aleppo, a move that would open the way for U.N. relief shipments. Syrian forces, with Russian air support, closed the road in July, thereby completing the encirclement of rebel districts with a population of as many as 300,000. A withdrawal south of Castello Road was to begin Thursday morning, according to Russian state news agency TASS. Rebel forces reportedly were to retreat simultaneously to positions north of the road. But it remained unclear whether residents of the city would accept the sacks of flour and food baskets the United Nations hopes to deliver.

As if visiting the dentist wasn't scary enough, Orange County health officials are alerting parents to an outbreak of oral infections that appear linked to a children's dental office in Anaheim. At least one case of a Mycobacterial abscessus infection has been confirmed in a patient who visited the Children's Dental Group, in the 2100 block of East Lincoln Avenue in Anaheim, according to the OC Health Care Agency. The infection was detected after the child underwent a pulpotomy procedure to remove or treat an infected tooth, health officials said. The healthcare agency received multiple reports last week of children who had developed infections after undergoing the same procedure at the office. Eight children showed signs of "slowly progressive oral cellulitis" with dental abscesses and/or respiratory infections, officials said.

Dataset from the U.S. Department of Education that includes various metrics on outcomes from degree-granting undergraduate institutions from 1996-2015, including student debt, college completion rates, job placement, and more

Dear Everyone, This is part two of Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future. Part two is going to delve into why a highly automated society has all sorts of benefits--even if it creates high unemployment. Technology is the greatest destroyer of jobs since the industrial revolution. With automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence moving into society at an exponential rate, unemployment could hit close to 50%--and that's just in America. Numbers in China could reach an estimated 77%, and 69% in India.

If a given behavior of a multi-agent system restricts the phase variable to a invariant manifold, then we define a phase transition as change of physical characteristics such as speed, coordination, and structure. We define such a phase transition as splitting an underlying manifold into two sub-manifolds with distinct dimensionalities around the singularity where the phase transition physically exists. Here, we propose a method of detecting phase transitions and splitting the manifold into phase transitions free sub-manifolds. Therein, we utilize a relationship between curvature and singular value ratio of points sampled in a curve, and then extend the assertion into higher-dimensions using the shape operator. Then we attest that the same phase transition can also be approximated by singular value ratios computed locally over the data in a neighborhood on the manifold. We validate the phase transitions detection method using one particle simulation and three real world examples.

This is a tiny robot tank with lasers for killing mosquitoes. Flyswatters are a primitive tool from a more primitive age. Anyone wanting to go to war against mosquitoes in the 21st century needs lasers. Spotted by Shephard Media's Max Rotor, the "the Laser Movable Mosquito Killer Robot" is amazing and ridiculous. Rotor wrote up the Laser Movable Mosquito Killer Robot for Quill or Capture, a blog covering odds-and-ends that fall on the periphery of Shephard Media's usual defense coverage. This bug-killing robot is made by LeiShen, a Chinese company that makes laser navigation tools for home robots.