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Protest at synagogue in Koreatown ends in arrests, hate accusations

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. The Audrey Irmas Pavilion, left, at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, center in background, in 2021. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Two were arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest at Wilshire Boulevard Temple that ended in confrontation.


What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert)

MIT Technology Review

What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) Mike Rothschild has spent years studying the rise of QAnon and antivaccine conspiracism. After his house in Altadena, California, burned down, he found himself mired in similarly sticky webs of misinformation. On a gloomy Saturday morning this past May, a few months after entire blocks of Altadena, California, were destroyed by wildfires, several dozen survivors met at a local church to vent their built-up frustration, anger, blame, and anguish. As I sat there listening to one horror story after another, I almost felt sorry for the very polite consultants who were being paid to sit there, and who couldn't do a thing about what they were hearing. Hosted by a third-party arbiter at the behest of Los Angeles County, the gathering was a listening session in which survivors could "share their experiences with emergency alerts and evacuations" for a report on how the response to the Eaton Fire months earlier had succeeded and failed. It didn't take long to see just how much failure there had been. After a small fire started in the bone-dry brush of Pasadena's Eaton Canyon early in the evening of Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the raging Santa Ana winds blew its embers into nearby Altadena, the historically Black and middle-class town just to the north. By Wednesday morning, much of it was burning.


MGA: Memory-Driven GUI Agent for Observation-Centric Interaction

Cheng, Weihua, Ni, Ersheng, Wang, Wenlong, Sun, Yifei, Liu, Junming, Shen, Wangyu, Chen, Yirong, Shi, Botian, Wang, Ding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal extensions (MLLMs) has enabled agentic systems capable of perceiving and acting across diverse environments. A challenging yet impactful frontier is the development of GUI agents, which must navigate complex desktop and web interfaces while maintaining robustness and generalization. Existing paradigms typically model tasks as long-chain executions, concatenating historical trajectories into the context. While approaches such as Mirage and GTA1 refine planning or introduce multi-branch action selection, they remain constrained by two persistent issues: Dependence on historical trajectories, which amplifies error propagation. And Local exploration bias, where "decision-first, observation-later" mechanisms overlook critical interface cues. We introduce the Memory-Driven GUI Agent (MGA), which reframes GUI interaction around the principle of observe first, then decide. MGA models each step as an independent, context-rich environment state represented by a triad: current screenshot, task-agnostic spatial information, and a dynamically updated structured memory. Experiments on OSworld benchmarks, real desktop applications (Chrome, VSCode, VLC), and cross-task transfer demonstrate that MGA achieves substantial gains in robustness, generalization, and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The code is publicly available at: {https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MGA-3571}.


Scenes From Saturday's Nationwide 'No Kings' Protests

WIRED

Organizers say the "No Kings" protests drew more than 7 million people across 2,700 cities. The crowds included high-profile politicians, A-list celebrities, and more than a few creative inflatables. On Saturday, crowds gathered in cities across the United States to protest President Donald Trump and his administration. Organizers of the No Kings rallies claim that more than 7 million people attended in all, across 2,700 cities in the Unites States and beyond. The gatherings provided a clear picture not only of how widespread the resistance to the Trump administration has become, but also the diversity of the coalition driving it.


SPADE: Spatial Transcriptomics and Pathology Alignment Using a Mixture of Data Experts for an Expressive Latent Space

Redekop, Ekaterina, Pleasure, Mara, Wang, Zichen, Flores, Kimberly, Sisk, Anthony, Speier, William, Arnold, Corey W.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid growth of digital pathology and advances in self-supervised deep learning have enabled the development of foundational models for various pathology tasks across diverse diseases. While multimodal approaches integrating diverse data sources have emerged, a critical gap remains in the comprehensive integration of whole-slide images (WSIs) with spatial tran-scriptomics (ST), which is crucial for capturing critical molecular heterogeneity beyond standard hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) staining. We introduce SPADE, a foundation model that integrates histopathology with ST data to guide image representation learning within a unified framework, in effect creating an ST-informed latent space. These authors contributed equally to this work. Pre-trained on the comprehensive HEST-1k dataset, SPADE is evaluated on 20 downstream tasks, demonstrating significantly superior few-shot performance compared to baseline models, highlighting the benefits of integrating morphological and molecular information into one latent space. Introduction High-resolution whole slide images (WSIs) have propelled the development of powerful deep learning foundation models in computational pathology, demonstrating robust performance across diverse tissue types and tasks [1, 2, 3, 4]. These models are typically trained using self-supervision, enabling learning from large unlabeled datasets and producing embeddings robust to institutional variations, including differences in staining procedures and other image-quality factors [5, 6, 7, 8]. By visually capturing cellular arrangement, WSIs enable the study of spatial organization and disorganization of cells in tissues, characterizations that are especially relevant in cancer research [9, 10]. In clinical settings, WSIs are commonly stained with hematoxylin & eosin (H&E), a two-color stain that highlights nuclei and cytoplasm but offers a limited view of molecular-level heterogeneity [11]. As tumor tissues are known to exhibit high variability within and across patients, deciphering the heterogeneity at the molecular level is critical for improving deep learning applications that can more precisely inform diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis [12, 13]. While H&E provides crucial morphological insights, its inability to capture molecular heterogeneity limits its utility in fully characterizing tissue complexity. Spatial transcriptomics addresses this gap by providing spatially resolved gene expression data, allowing for additional molecular context for a given tissue specimen. Although both ST and H&E data have independently proven useful in various applications, their combined potential for creating a more comprehensive representation learning framework remains unexplored. To this end, we introduce SPADE, a vision-ST foundation model that uses a mixture of experts, each trained via contrastive learning, to unify ST data and H&E images to produce slide representations that encompass both modalities.


ATLAS: Constraints-Aware Multi-Agent Collaboration for Real-World Travel Planning

Choi, Jihye, Yoon, Jinsung, Chen, Jiefeng, Jha, Somesh, Pfister, Tomas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in reasoning and tool use, they often fail to generate optimal, grounded solutions under complex constraints. Real-world travel planning exemplifies these challenges, evaluating agents' abilities to handle constraints that are explicit, implicit, and even evolving based on interactions with dynamic environments and user needs. In this paper, we present ATLAS, a general multi-agent framework designed to effectively handle such complex nature of constraints awareness in real-world travel planning tasks. ATLAS introduces a principled approach to address the fundamental challenges of constraint-aware planning through dedicated mechanisms for dynamic constraint management, iterative plan critique, and adaptive interleaved search. ATLAS demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the TravelPlanner benchmark, improving the final pass rate from 23.3% to 44.4% over its best alternative. More importantly, our work is the first to demonstrate quantitative effectiveness on real-world travel planning tasks with live information search and multi-turn feedback. In this realistic setting, ATLAS showcases its superior overall planning performance, achieving an 84% final pass rate which significantly outperforms baselines including ReAct (59%) and a monolithic agent (27%).



The LA Fires Spewed Out Toxic Nanoparticles. He Made It His Mission to Trace Them

WIRED

The LA Fires Spewed Out Toxic Nanoparticles. Nicholas Spada is one of the only scientists in the world using a nuclear x-ray process to study deadly nanoparticles in wildfire smoke. What he's uncovered in California is a nightmare. Nicholas Spada was used to fielding urgent requests when wildfire smoke blanketed cities. Winter was supposed to be the quiet period when wildfires die down and researchers like Spada perform instrument maintenance, write grant proposals and go home for dinner. Instead, 2025's so-called offseason ignited January 7, when the Santa Ana winds came howling through Los Angeles, bringing gusts upwards of 100 miles per hour, after more than eight months without meaningful rainfall. By nightfall, thousands of homes in Los Angeles' swanky Pacific Palisades neighborhood and the Altadena community north of the city were gone. The next morning, Spada was fielding call after call at the University of California, Davis, from fellow air researchers at universities across the country who were packing instruments and other gear and heading for Los Angeles, many on their own dime. They would be studying urban fires--not normal wildfires or even urban-wildland interface fires--but urban fires in which most of the fuel was manmade: lawn chemicals, asbestos insulation, lead paint, lithium batteries. They asked Spada which instruments to bring, what measurements to take, where to set up downwind and when he would be there. The calls quickly morphed into a WhatsApp group that's still going strong, as results continue to roll in sporadically all these months later. Spada, a trim, energetic man with a close-trimmed beard and reddish hair, is a project scientist at UC Davis' Air Quality Research Center. He is one of only a handful of scientists in the world proficient at using a nuclear method for detecting toxic substances in air particles to understand their impact on human health and the environment.


V-shaped UFO filmed hovering over Los Angeles as expert reveals incredible details of sighting

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Trump drops bombshell Tylenol autism announcement as he vows to rip up'disgraceful' vaccine schedule in major medical shake-up Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return TOMORROW after host was canned over Charlie Kirk comments Tylenol maker responds to Trump's plans to link everyday drug to autism The six hidden messages in the texts between Charlie Kirk's'assassin' and his trans lover DECODED Top plastic surgeon reveals secrets behind Catherine Zeta-Jones' youthful appearance: 'This isn't what happens when we age' Common kitchen spice may reverse Alzheimer's disease, study suggests Barack and Michelle Obama arrive apart on Spielberg's yacht after ex-president's startling marriage confession Miley Cyrus shares the medicine that has kept her'grounded in a sober lifestyle' for 5 years Jimmy Kimmel steps in to'protect' Ivanka Trump from handsy comedian in resurfaced video Seven charities including Teenage Cancer Trust cut ties with Sarah Ferguson after leaked email showed her apologising to'supreme friend' Jeffrey Epstein Heather Locklear fans can't believe how amazing the Melrose Place vet looks at 63... 40 years after fame hit'Brazilian Josef Fritzl' makes chilling claim to police after'holding stepdaughter captive for 22 years' American'sexpert' deported from Indonesia after furious Muslim officials accused her of hosting KAMA SUTRA demonstrations Beloved actress who played loud, loving matriarch in 2002 romcom makes rare outing in LA...can you guess who? Face of man who tried to'murder Jeffrey Epstein' days before pedophile financier's mysterious suicide Candace Owens says she'll make Brigitte Macron submit to MEDICAL EXAM after'French first lady is a man' claim sparked lawsuit Blindfolded and awaiting death: Horrifying footage shows Hamas executing'Israeli collaborators' in Gaza streets as baying crowd screams'Allahu Akbar' All the'Biblical signs' pointing to the Rapture coming TOMORROW as believers spread fears the end is nigh New'loaded water' trend slashes cravings so you can lose weight... as expert reveals how to maximize benefits Clear and startling images of what appears to be a UFO were captured over Los Angeles, sparking fresh debate about what's flying over America's biggest cities. A pair of Los Angeles residents were on their balcony when they spotted a black, V-shaped craft covered in lights moving slowly over the city on August 28. The sighting went on for roughly 25 minutes, with the UFO flying south until the witnesses eventually lost sight of it around 11:38pm local time (2:38am ET). The pair was able to capture both pictures and clear videos with a cellphone camera, zooming in to see nine white lights along the UFO's hull.


Predator drones shift from border patrol to protest surveillance

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. An unmanned Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan in 2010. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . MQ-9 Predator drones were deployed over Los Angeles to monitor anti-ICE protests in June.