The post Music Academy’s Big Plans for Downtown Santa Barbara Get Warm Embrace  appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

SANTA MARIA, Calif. (KEYT) - A Santa Maria man has been reunited with his five-year-old daughter who was held in an ICE detention facility for 20 hours, along with his wife who remains in holding for the time being.

Milenko Faria moved to Santa Maria in 2017 after fleeing Venezuela, and his asylum case is pending after nearly a decade.

He and his wife Dr. Rubilez Bolivar, another Venezuela native, had their five-year-old daughter in Santa Maria, a U.S. citizen who calls the Central Coast “home.”

Dr. Rubilez Bolivar has been lawfully present in the U.S. under her own work visas and a pending asylum case of her own, serving residency in an underserved community in southern Texas.

Dr. Bolivar was traveling with their daughter at a Texas airport and were about to board a flight back to Santa Maria.

They were going to be present in support for Milenko’s upcoming asylum hearing in Tustin.

At the airport in Texas in the wee hours of Saturday morning, an immigration official told Dr. Bolivar that her documents, having originated from Venezuela, were invalid.

She and her five-year-old were detained.

A relative had to travel from Florida to Texas to take custody of the child and transport her back to Santa Maria so she could be reunited with her father.

Both Dr. Bolivar and Milenko Faria have received outpourings of support from their employers as well as their communities.

Milenko told your News Channel that while he doesn’t want to say too much too soon, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel, and his wife says she is not being mistreated in any way.

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The post Father & Daughter Reunited in Santa Maria, Mother Remains Detained In Texas appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — On Sunday, in the midst of a Truth Social tirade against Pope Leo XIV, President Donald Trump shared an image depicting himself as Jesus Christ.

The picture, which appeared to be AI-generated, presented Trump as a healer dressed in the kind of red and white robes seen in biblical art. Towering over devotees — with the American flag, bald eagles and warplanes flying in the background — the Trump figure rested one hand on the forehead of an ailing man, while a beam of divine light emanated from the other. (The right-wing influencer and State Department special envoy Nick Adams shared a nearly identical image in early February; in Trump’s version, one of the soldiers in the background has horns.)

Christians across faith traditions — even many in the MAGA universe who have otherwise supported Trump — roundly denounced the rendering as “blasphemy.” Some on the right went further. “It’s more than blasphemy,” Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. “It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

On Monday, the post was deleted, and the president denied that he had represented himself as Jesus: “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better,” he told a reporter. “And I do make people better.”

As president, Trump has embraced both religiosity and self-promotion to degrees far beyond anything done by his White House predecessors. By combining the two, though, the image earned a secular political office an unusually intense chorus of theological criticism.

“Blasphemy” entered English around the 13th century from the ancient Greek “blasphēmia” via French and Latin, generally describing speech or actions that show irreverence for God, sacred people and sacred things. But before it came to mean denigrating the divine, the word referred more broadly to the act of slandering someone, says Kim Haines-Eitzen, a professor of early Christianity and early Judaism at Cornell University.

Though “blasphemy” appears in the Bible in both senses, it eventually took on a religious meaning with serious implications: God tells Moses in the book of Leviticus that “Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death;” In the New Testament, Jesus himself is accused of blasphemy before his execution.

As the followers of Christianity came to equate Jesus with God, Haines-Eitzen says, blasphemy also came to include words or actions that denigrated Christ. Over time, this would also extend to institutions such as the church, to saints and the pope, and to religions beyond Christianity: In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” an insult to Islam and issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – UC Santa Barbara researchers confirmed that parts of the neural network that inhibit movement in fruit flies plays a critical role in coordinating their movements.

Neuroscientists Durafshan Sakeena Syed, Primoz Ravbar, and Julie H. Simpson with the Neuroscience Research Institute and UC Santa Barbara's Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology published their findings earlier this year in the non-profit research journal eLife.

In 2024, scientists fully mapped the over 130,000 neurons and about 50 million synapses that constitute the neural network of fruit flies.

The tiny organisms have been used for genetic research for over a century because they are easy to care for, have a short lifecycle of 12 days, and, most importantly, share about 60 percent of the genes involved in human genetic diseases and some cancers.

That full diagram of how messages are transmitted in the minds of fruit flies, also known as the connectome, has paved the way for expanding neurological research ever since.

"All animals with limbs face the challenge of coordinating their movements to achieve precise motor control. Despite a limited set of muscles in each limb, the nervous system produces multiple flexible actions to generate behavior," opened the researcher's paper Inhibitory circuits control leg movements during Drosphila grooming published in January. "We investigate the role of inhibitory neurons in coordinating which leg muscles in adult Drosophila [the genus of fruit flies] work together or antagonistically, and how they might produce rhythmic alternations."

One common movement used by fruit flies is related to grooming.

Flies swipe debris off their faces and bodies and UC Santa Barbara researchers triggered these grooming reactions by using light among other stimuli.

What the researchers found is that the simple understanding of a stimulus, like dust on their eyes, leading to motor neurons firing a message to limbs to wipe awa

By Tal Shalev, CNN

(CNN) — The incoming director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency believed a war with Iran could trigger the swift collapse of the regime, according to three Israeli sources familiar with internal consultations – an assessment that has failed to materialize after more than 40 days of fighting.

Roman Gofman, currently serving as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military secretary, told the Israeli leader in planning discussions that the Iranian regime could be toppled, a view shared by the agency he is set to lead, and one that proved overly optimistic.

Gofman is slated to assume the post in June for a five-year term, replacing David Barnea, who also believed that a war could topple the Islamic Republic.

Barnea, who has led the Mossad since 2021, played a key advisory role in the lead-up to the US-Israeli strike on Iran on February 28 that began the war, according to two Israeli security sources. The New York Times reported that Barnea pitched Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump on the idea that assassinations of Iran’s leaders, followed by a series of intelligence-led operations, could mobilize the country’s opposition and spark protests, riots, and acts of defiance that would lead to the collapse of the regime.

“The Mossad’s position was that regime change is a likely outcome and that they can make it happen,” one of the Israeli security sources told CNN.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had reservations and was more nuanced in its goals, the source added, instead advocating aiming to weaken the regime and create the conditions for a public revolt. “The Mossad made a series of promises it didn’t deliver,” the source said.

The killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening wave of attacks and the subsequent US-Israeli destruction of Iran’s military and government infrastructure have so far failed to bring about any meaningful change in Tehran’s leadership or hardline positions. The new Supreme Leader – the son of the slain ruler – is believed to be more hardline than his father and closer to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Barnea, in his first public statement since the beginning of the war, said Israel’s mission in Iran was incomplete. “We certainly planned for our campaign to continue and to manifest itself even in the period following the strikes in Tehran,” he said, speaking on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day Tuesday. “Our commitment will be fulfilled only when the extremist regime is replaced.”

Severely wounded on October 7

Gofman, 49, was born in Belarus and immigrated to Israel at the age of 14. He spent over three decades in the IDF Armored Corps, holding numerous frontline and command positions.

Severely wounded in battle on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, he has served since his recovery as Netanyahu’s top military aide, and he was involved in all of the key strategic and operational decisions around the region over the past two years, including in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. A