<i>Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing series that tracks the city’s expenditures appearing on upcoming Santa Monica City Council consent agendas. Consent agenda items are routinely passed by the City Council with little or no discussion from elected officials or the public. However, many of the items have been... Read more →

SM MOUNTAINS — Two small earthquakes shook the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu Saturday night, according to the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. The first, a magnitude 2.8, hit about six miles northwest of Malibu at 8:39 p.m. Just 45 seconds later, a second quake of magnitude 2.6 hit about one mile west of the first. The quakes... Read more →

CITYWIDE — Starting today, Santa Monica kids can trash can relay, putt for points and bottle bowl their way to saving the environment. The Clean Air Olympics — which includes these tasks and many more — is just one activity available to kids at Camp Santa Monica through the O24U curriculum. O24U activities like making smog... Read more →

Dear EarthTalk: Don’t some scientists point to sunspots and solar wind as having more impact on climate change than human industrial activity? — David Noss, California, MD Sunspots are storms on the sun’s surface that are marked by intense magnetic activity and play host to solar flares and hot gassy ejections from the... Read more →

SMC — Teachers on the first day of summer school classes today may find far more students in their rooms than they bargained for, and more that never signed up. Many high school students enrolled at SMC to take classes over the summer to get credits out of the way, fulfill graduation requirements or simply to boost grade point... Read more →

WEST L.A. — For eight long days, Santa Monican John McInally Jr. and his family combed area streets looking for their Alzheimer’s disease stricken father who had wandered away from his Venice home on June 10. Calls to area hospitals yielded nothing. The Los Angeles Police Department and even the FBI got involved and still nothing.... Read more →

SAMOHI — Far away from the Los Angeles Coliseum and the confetti, there was a dimly lit classroom in Santa Monica that played home to a very different kind of Lakers celebration on Wednesday. This one involved meditation and a pair of scissors. Victoria Rosner, a volunteer yoga instructor at Santa Monica High School, followed... Read more →

DOWNTOWN — It took Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins more than two months and roughly 1,800 miles to ride from Vancouver to their hometown of Santa Monica, taking with them two bikes, a few bags and half a dozen jars containing a murky mixture of plankton, water and some colorful bits of plastic. And they aren’t done with their... Read more →

MARINA DEL REY — Boaters and beach goers are being asked to keep their distance from a California gray whale that has been swimming in and out of the Marina del Rey channel for the last two weeks. The 25-foot long whale seems to have stopped its migration from Baja to rest before continuing north to Alaska. California gray whales have... Read more →

BORDERLINE — A recent string of crimes along the southern edge of the city have rattled the nerves of some neighbors who say that despite incidents over the past several weeks, they generally consider the small community to be safe. The Santa Monica Police Department met last week with the Borderline Neighborhood Group (BNG) to address... Read more →