The most important stories for you to know today
The breach of online education platform Canvas hit especially hard in California, where the software is used at all 24 California State University campuses and all 116 community colleges.
Tina Rocha’s laptop displays a maintenance screen as she tries to log into Canvas at her home in Stockton on May 7, 2026. Hundreds of thousands in California lost access to the all-important academic software Canvas when it was brought down by a hacker group Thursday afternoon. By Monday evening, the company behind Canvas had told customers, including the University of California, that it had struck an agreement with the hacking group.
A group calling itself ShinyHunters claimed to have obtained sensitive data, including billions of messages, and threatened to release the data if they weren’t paid a ransom. The CEO of Instructure has said that core “learning data was not compromised” and Cal State has said that Canvas does not store social security numbers. CalMatters asked the company, Instructure, if it paid a ransom, but did not immediately hear back.
Losing Canvas meant losing assignments, tests, and required reading material along with a way to communicate with instructors. The timing was especially bad for UC students, who were hunkering down for midterms or finals. Almost 9,000 colleges, K-12 schools and school districts, and offices of education around the world were reportedly affected by the Canvas outage. California seemed to be hit especially hard.
The institutions relying on the system and affected by the cyberattack included Stanford, at least some campuses at the University of California, USC, all 22 California State University campuses and all 116 of the state’s community colleges. It may be too early to identify the consequences of the hack for schools and for Canvas. It’s still not clear, for example, how the breach happened, or the full extent of data that was compromised.
At minimum, schools will want to reassess how much information they’re willing to give over to third-party software companies in the name of efficiency. Esther Mejia and Kelly Merchant had a question Friday afternoon for their professors: Where were you? The UC Riverside public policy students were among the likely hundreds of thousands in California who lost access to the all-important academic software Canvas when it was brought down by a hacker group Thursday afternoon.
Losing Canvas meant losing assignments, tests, and required reading material along with a way to communicate with instructors. The timing was especially bad for UC students, who were hunkering down for midterms or finals.
“This is a very crucial time for students to be able to access their coursework. So I definitely do think that professors should reach out,” Mejia said in an interview.
“And they did not. ” Merchant heard from only one professor by Friday who addressed the downed website. She learned about the hack attack on the social media site Reddit after she was logged out of her account while finishing an assignment. The Riverside students’ experience underscores just how central Canvas has become to higher education in California — the outage likely affected more than 1 million of the state’s university students.
The hack has raised serious questions about how schools should be vetting and balancing their use of online platforms, to what extent they may be held liable for breaches, and what role policymakers should play in protecting student data and regulating edtech. , that it had struck an agreement with the hacking group.
In an email shared with CalMatters by UC's systemwide Office of the President, the company's CEO stated that “we reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident” that returns data and assures it is no longer held by the attacker nor any other outside parties. Further, “we have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted. ”class-action suit filed in a Texas federal court By May 7, Thursday, the platform was offline.
The University of California system blocked access to Canvas the same day, and wrote on its website that it won’t “be restored until we are confident the system is secure. We understand this disruption is concerning. ”On the evening of May 7, one of Merchant’s professors, she said, shared the material students needed to complete an assignment due Friday. The professor did so using a Discord group they created for the class at the beginning of the term.
Merchant appreciated the initiative, but observed that not every student checks Discord as regularly as they would their email account. By May 9, Saturday, UC Riverside mostly restored access to the platform, with other universities coming online in the following days. Mejia had a quiz and assignment due Monday at 2 p.m. She received a note from the professor of that class only at 9 a.m. that day through Canvas, she said. The professor granted a two-day extension.
Merchant wants more professors with a communication back-up plan, especially since Canvas has been down before.
“Whether it’s a cybersecurity thing or routine Canvas maintenance, it’s going to continue to be a risk. And we have to prepare for it. ” “These situations are fluid and campuses and UCOP communicated as quickly and completely as feasible,” said UC Office of the President spokesperson Stett Holbrook. For many colleges and high schools, Canvas has become indispensable, with teachers using it to give quizzes, message students, post grades, and more.
Almost 9,000 colleges, K-12 schools and school districts, and offices of education around the world were reportedly affected by the Canvas outage,, along with likely millions of students and teachers. California seemed to be hit especially hard. The institutions relying on the system and affected by the cyberattack included Stanford, at least some campuses at the University of California, USC,The number of students ultimately affected by the breach could be staggering.
The Cal State system alone enrolls more than 400,000 students. The UC system, where hackers claimed to hit six of 10 campuses, enrolls about 300,000. The hacker group listed the Los Angeles Unified and Fresno Unified school districts as among their targets — they too enroll more than 400,000 students combined.
Deputy chancellor of the LA Community College District, Nicole Albo-Lopez, told CalMatters that Canvas was being used by students in thousands of courses, including as a “repository for gradebooks, sharing of course materials, and messaging. ” The district is among the largest community college districts in the country, with nearly 200,000 students annually. Canvas, she said Friday, still hadn’t informed them of what’s been exposed in the hack.
“We’re supposed to receive specific information about what was accessed in our specific system, but we have not received that yet,” she said. One expert said the incident highlights the problem of relying on “all-in” solutions for online education tools. The attraction of software like Canvas is that it allows institutions without technical expertise to easily manage everything on a single platform.
But the hack shows the danger of relying on such centralized systems, where a breach of one company exposes the data of the countless institutions that rely on it.
“The beauty of these software as a service systems and what they sell is, ‘Hey, your staff members don't need to run this, we'll just handle it,’” said Jake Chanenson, an education technology researcher and PhD student at the University of Chicago. Many schools without tech departments, by contrast, may only be equipped to give any new tools “a cursory, at best, privacy and security assessment,” Chanenson said.
Small schools, especially, may then struggle to recover from a breach or outage. But a centralized system also means that only a single point needs to be hacked for every school that uses the software to be affected. Chanenson, who is currently researching “critical infrastructure" in schools, said that “when you put all your eggs in one basket across schools, it makes these targets very attractive. ” One state lawmaker wants a legislative audit into California's heavy reliance on Canvas.
“The Canvas breach exposes the growing risks of concentrating massive amounts of student records, academic systems and institutional operations into a single platform," said Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat from Bakersfield, in a written statement. It may be too early to identify the consequences of the hack for schools and for Canvas. It’s still not clear, for example, how the breach happened, or the full extent of data that was compromised.
At minimum, schools will want to reassess how much information they’re willing to give over to third-party software companies in the name of efficiency. Those companies, Chanenson said, should also take a look at their policies around data collection and retention to minimize how much sensitive information they store.
“You think in your head that any data set that you have has a non-zero probability of being leaked or breached or some sort of privacy loss, then you want to start thinking about things like data minimization,” he said. Past data breaches have led to legal consequences for the companies and institutions involved, including action by state attorneys general.
There are federal legal protections for data belonging to children under 13, through the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, as well to students, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In California, the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act protects data for K–12 students. Lawmakers in the state are The state has grappled with previous compromises of school data. Los Angeles Unified School District has faced a series of class-action lawsuits related to data privacy breaches.
Most recently, the Chanenson points out that schools are prime targets for hackers since they hold immensely sensitive data but often lack the technical prowess of other large institutions, like banks. Published May 12, 2026 1:30 PM Soccer fans celebrate at watch party Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022, in Los Angeles, after the United States scored a goal on the Netherlands.
Here’s what to know about all the games, official FIFA fan events, Inglewood street festivals and free watch parties scheduled in and around South L.A. and Inglewood. The eight games to take place at SoFi Stadium — which will be renamed Los Angeles Stadium during the tournament — include a few major ones. Inglewood will host a pair of free “Wood Cup” street festivals on Market Street during the tournament in partnership with Metro.
The street festivals will take place on Market Street between Florence Avenue and Hillcrest Boulevard, south of the Downtown Inglewood Metro K line station. So, you’re a fan of the beautiful game. You get up early on Saturdays to watch matches in Europe, whether your team is any good or not.
Or maybe you’re finally ready to bite on this whole “football” thing now that some of the best players on the planet are flying to Inglewood this summer to play in the FIFA World Cup. Either way, there’s a problem: You’re not interested in burning hundreds on a match ticket at SoFi Stadium. You’ve come to the right place.
There are a few opportunities for Angelenos to join World Cup festivities this summer, even if they don’t get a match ticket. Here’s what to know about all the games, official FIFA fan events, Inglewood street festivals and free watch parties scheduled in and around South L.A. and Inglewood. The eight games to take place at SoFi Stadium — which will be renamed Los Angeles Stadium during the tournament — include a few major ones.
Here’s the schedule, with kickoff times: Here are the official FIFA World Cup fan events in and around South LA: For the first four days of the tournament — June 11-14 — the LA Memorial Coliseum will host the FIFA Fan Festival with food, music and live match broadcasts. Adult general admission tickets are $10 each; kids 12 and under get in free with a paid adult. More expensive seats are also available for $30.
Tickets are available, Earvin “Magic” Johnson Park: Matches include knock-out stage games. Inglewood will host a pair of free “Wood Cup” street festivals on Market Street during the tournament in partnership with Metro. The street festivals will take place on Market Street between Florence Avenue and Hillcrest Boulevard, south of the Downtown Inglewood Metro K line station. The first is scheduled from 2-10 p.m. on June 12 during the USA vs. Paraguay match at SoFi Stadium.
The Wood Cup is scheduled to go live again from 12 to 8 p.m. on July 10, according to city documents, when SoFi Stadium hosts a quarterfinal match. Don’t miss these free World Cup watch parties in South L.A. : Parks in Los Angeles will host a total of 100 “Kick it in the Park” watch parties during the tournament, scattered across 18 sites.
Full details are availableThe free events will have soccer mini-clinics, family fun zones and city resource tables. Families should bring their own blankets, chairs and snacks.
Portugal vs. Congo DR 10 a.m., England vs. Croatia 1 p.m., Ghana vs. Panama 4:00 p.m., Uzbekistan vs. Colombia 7 p.m.Argentina vs. Austria 10 a.m., France vs. Iraq 2 p.m., Norway vs. Senegal 5 p.m., Jordan vs. Algeria 8 p.m.Panama vs. England 2 p.m., Croatia vs. Ghana 2 p.m., Colombia vs. Portugal 4:30 p.m., Congo DR vs. Uzbekistan 4:30 p.m., Algeria vs. Austria 7 p.m., Jordan vs. Argentina 7 p.m. Germany vs. Curaçao 10 a.m., Netherlands vs. Japan 1 p.m., Ivory Coast vs. Ecuador 4 p.m., Sweden vs. Tunisia 7 p.m.Switzerland vs. Canada 12 p.m., Bosnia-Herzegovina vs. Qatar 12 p.m., Morocco vs. Haiti 3 p.m., Scotland vs. Brazil 3 p.m., Czechia vs. Mexico 6 p.m., South Africa vs. South Korea 6 p.m.USA vs. Australia 12 p.m., Brazil vs. Haiti 3 p.m., Scotland vs. Morocco 3 p.m., Turkey vs. Paraguay 8 p.m.Preparations for the World Cup are in full swing, as Los Angeles marks 30-days out from the start of the tournament at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
Organizers celebrated the milestone on Tuesday, standing on the ground floor of the stadium, which is mid-transformation from a football field to a soccer pitch. Workers had to remove 400 seats from the stadium to make room for the soccer field and installing an irrigation system. What comes next is the fresh grass, which is currently being driven down from the state of Washington in refrigerated trucks, Benedict said. Tomorrow, crews will begin to install it.
Preparations for the World Cup are in full swing, as Los Angeles marks 30 days out from the start of the tournament at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Organizers celebrated the milestone on Tuesday, standing on the ground floor of the stadium, which is mid-transformation from a football field to a soccer pitch.
Otto Benedict, SoFi Stadium's head of operations, stood in front of the field— currently a brown, rectangular plot framed by two soccer goals — and described what was required to turn the home of the L.A. Rams and Chargers into a professional soccer pitch.
" The American football field is sitting underneath us right now," Benedict told reporters. "We put in an overfill to protect the synthetic fibers. We put down a layer of flooring material to protect it, and then we built this entire system on top of that field.
" SoFi Stadium's field is currently a brown and framed by two soccer goals is getting transformed into a soccer pitch. That project included removing 400 seats from the stadium to make room for the soccer field and installing an irrigation system.
Next comes fresh grass, which is currently being driven down from the state of Washington in refrigerated trucks, Benedict said. On Wednesday, crews will begin to install it. Metro launched special Tap cards to mark the occasion, and is encouraging fans to take its special shuttle buses to the matches.
" Parking and riding Metro is going to be a lot cheaper and a lot more hassle-free than trying to drive in to get to the stadium or one of the many fan zones throughout our city and the larger Southern California region," Stephanie Wiggins, Metro's CEO, said Tuesday at SoFi. As preparations ramp up, so do questions about the unintended consequences of the World Cup coming to L.A.
, including the role ICE will play in security for the tournament. Labor unions and human rights advocates have raised the alarm since Todd Lyons, the agency's head, said earlier this year that ICE's investigatory branchKathryn Schloessman, who leads L.A.
's World Cup host committee, told reporters Tuesday that ICE would be at the tournament, and that its presence was typical at these types of major events. But she said she couldn't guarantee there would be no immigration enforcement.
"We are working very closely with them to make sure they're just focused on us, providing us a safe and secure event and nothing else," she said. "But having said that, I am not the ultimate decision-maker on that. " ICE's presence introduces another unknown to World Cup preparations, just a month out from the first match in L.A. SoFi Stadium's food and beverage workersIf you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report.
Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less. Recent polling suggests it’s unlikely that two Republicans would lock Democrats out of the November gubernatorial election. But some liberal activists are still panicking about the possibility of a MAGA governor. Their solution could delay California’s already slow ballot-counting..
That fear has morphed into wariness, leading some party activists and influencers to encourage people to hold off on voting early, watch the polls, then vote for the candidate with the most support just before Election Day. The push to vote late flies in the face of recent pleas from election officials and Gov. Gavin Newsom for voters to get their ballots in early in the hopes of speeding up California’s notoriously slow vote-counting process.
Attorney General Rob Bonta, a fellow Democrat, told reporters last week that the social mediaSome California Democrats have a plan to avoid disaster in the governor's race: Wait until the last minute to vote. With no one candidate emerging as a clear favorite and an open primary where the top two advance regardless of party affiliation, panic has set in for some who plan to vote Democratic.
That fear has morphed into wariness, leading some party activists and influencers to encourage people to hold off on voting early, watch the polls, then vote for the candidate with the most support just before Election Day.even though the Democrat is not likely to advance to November given her current polling. But this year the stakes are higher, she said, and as a lesbian woman, any of the Democrats would be more aligned with her core values than a Republican.
She fears supporters of President Donald Trump who have soured on him could back Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, giving him enough of a boost to match the power of, the former Fox News host who is leading all other candidates in the polls. That would send both Republicans to the runoff.
“The thing that flipped for me was going from, ‘I don't really know what to do,’ to, ‘I strategically am not making a decision,” Evans-Reber said. , the former Health and Human Services secretary who surged from single digits to the top of the polls after Swalwell’s downfall. As his popularity soared, so has the scrutiny of his record at HHS and as California’s, a former businessman turned billionaire activist, and Porter.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan has also positioned himself as a tech-friendly moderate and ally of Silicon Valley. Evans-Reber and other impassioned Democrats have been urging others to follow the wait-and-see strategy by sharing videos and posts on social media.the strategy to Heather Cox Richardson, a political historian and popular Democratic influencer who writes the Substack newsletter Letters from an American. That erroneous post was the first one Evans-Reber saw and forwarded.
She later had to follow up with a disclaimer that Cox Richardson was not the author.
“It's just a bad message,” he said. “I think they should always have a message of, ‘As soon as you get your ballot, fill it out, turn it in, mail it in and get it done. ” Mitchell said although activists might talk about and push for a strategic voting plan, trying to organize a movement like that at scale would likely not produce significant results.
“I think people vote for whoever they were going to vote for anyway,” said Mitchell, whose company tracks how many ballots are turned in each day statewide. The push to vote late flies in the face of recent pleas from election officials and Gov. Gavin Newsom for voters to get their ballots in early in the hopes of speeding up California’s notoriously slow vote-counting process.
Attorney General Rob Bonta, a fellow Democrat, told reporters last week that the social mediaTurning in a mail-in ballot on Election Day, as some activists propose, is the worst possible scenario for election administration officials. It creates what Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, calls the “pig in the python effect.
” County election offices are inundated with in-person ballots on Election Day, as well as mail-in ballots that require a meticulous process of signature matching, envelope opening and extracting the ballot before it can be counted. Mark DiCamillo, who runs polling for the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, said pollsters are doing their best to produce accurate results, but in an election with so many variables, even the best surveys could be off-base.
The past trend of low voter turnout in gubernatorial primaries, plus a potentially confusing array of 61 candidates for governor alone, make it difficult to determine who the likely voters will be and account for that in their surveys.
“This election's got all the elements you have to deal with,” DiCamillo said. “It’s a challenge for the polling profession. ” Despite the concerns about a slow vote count and imprecise polling, Evans-Reber says she still plans to stick to her last-minute voting strategy. She doesn’t trust that mailing her ballot will reach the county elections office in time.
She plans to bring her completed ballot to the office or one of the county’s vote centers and hand it directly to an election official.
“I am going to cast the ballot at the very last possible moment,” Evans-Reber said. “I’m going to wait until polling day. ”Brenda Lopez-Ardon holds a mattress to show a staffer from state Sen. Sasha Pérez’s office mold growing on it in a children’s bedroom during a tour of the property.
March 26, 2026. Tenants of a close-knit Altadena complex say Regency Management ignored toxic contamination and basic repairs long before the Altadena fire. Although Regency Management replaced the windows, residents said they were forced to camp out in their apartments without electricity or hot water for months in the fire’s aftermath because most could not afford to move as the fire strained the area’s housing market.
Brenda Lopez-Ardon, a community organizer and tenant, spoke at a press conference last month in front of the building where she has lived her whole life and is raising her young daughter. Lopez-Ardon and several tenants ushered state Sen. Sasha Pérez through the property, pointing out damages from the fire and water, along with buckling floors and discolored tap water.
More than 15 months after the Eaton Fire, residents of an Altadena apartment complex say they are still fighting a “notorious” landlord to repair a fire-damaged building that remains unlivable and contaminated with toxic ash and soot. Longtime tenants of 403 Figueroa Dr., who describe the complex as a close-knit village, say their property manager, Regency Management Inc., has ignored years of repair requests and pleas to clean up the property after the fire razed most of the block.
Although Regency Management replaced the windows, residents said they were forced to camp out in their apartments without electricity or hot water for months in the fire’s aftermath because most could not afford to move as the fire strained the area’s housing market.
“Homes in this community are being rebuilt up to code, but our building remains frozen in time since Jan. 7,” said Brenda Lopez-Ardon, a community organizer and tenant, at a press conference last month. Brenda Lopez-Ardon speaks at a community rally and press conference with members of tenants’ union Comité 403 in front of their building. March 26, 2026.
She spoke in front of the building where she has lived her whole life and is raising her young daughter. Later that evening, as kids raced on scooters through the courtyard of the rundown two-story building, Lopez-Ardon and several tenants ushered state Sen. Sasha Pérez through the property, pointing out damages from the fire and water, along with buckling floors and discolored tap water.
In one apartment, mold bloomed through paint on a wall in a children’s bedroom, and also grew on a mattress and plush toys. Residents complained of rat and cockroach infestations. Brenda Lopez-Ardon shows state Sen. Sasha Pérez water damage from a leak inside an apartment at her Figueroa Drive building during a tour of the property.
March 26, 2026.
“We are not animals, to be living this way,” said Yoselin Ayala, one of the tenants sharing her experience with Pérez. “Things like broken bricks and falling walls and, you know, other fire damage, melted parts of the building, those are things that should have been taken care of a long time ago,” she told The LA Local. Regency Management and its owner Swaranjit “Mike” Nijjar, have not responded to requests for comment.
Brenda Lopez-Ardon speaks at a community rally and press conference with members of tenants’ union Comité 403 in front of their building. March 26, 2026. The Eaton Fire blew out nearly all of the building’s windows, destroyed large sections of the property’s perimeter wall, burned down carport shade structures in the parking lot and left the building without power or hot water for months.
Lopez-Ardon said many of the apartments were cleaned by local volunteers, and when Regency Management finally sent cleaners, they were maintenance workers, not a professional remediation company with special equipment and training on dealing with disasters. Children take part in a community rally in front of their apartment building in Altadena. Parents say they’re concerned about toxins left behind from the Eaton Fire affecting kids’ health. March 26, 2026.
In response, the residents formed a tenants’ union to demand their rights as renters and move “from the defense to the offense,” Lopez-Ardon said. Their efforts have met with limited success, and the group is now exploring options including forming a co-op to buy the property from Nijjar, a man California’s attorney general, his companies and several of his relatives last summer. The suit alleges “inhumane living conditions” across properties owned by the real estate developer, his sister and children.
It also alleges the company had several breaches of lease agreements and violations of the state’s Tenant Protection Act.
“The Nijjar Companies rent out unsafe and uninhabitable units, disregard tenants’ requests for repairs, and fail to eradicate pests, inflicting harm and anguish on tenants,” according to the complaint filed in June in Los Angeles Superior Court. The family’s empire encompasses 22,000 rental units throughout California, owned through a byzantine collection of more than 150 limited partnerships and corporations and administered by 11 management companies, including Regency Management.
Brenda Lopez-Ardon stands with neighbors at a community rally and press conference with members of tenants’ union Comité 403 in front of their building. March 26, 2026. For the tenants on Figueroa Drive, the fire damage was simply the last straw on top of longstanding neglect and repair requests they say Regency has ignored for years. Lopez-Ardon, 26, said the pedestrian entrance gate has been broken off and wide open for at least 10 years.
Lax security has also made some residents fearful of another major threat in the area: ICE. Blanca, who only gave her first name because of privacy concerns, has lived in the building for more than 20 years. She said that immigration enforcement agents have entered the building twice in the last year looking for a specific person. They left empty-handed both times.
Spots of mold on a plush toy in a children’s bedroom where it also grows on a wall and a mattress in an apartment at 403 Figueroa Dr. in Altadena, owned by the Nijjar family. March 26, 2026.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Academic institution will vet plan to replace San Diego’s Golden Hall with educational centerThe San Diego Community College District will, per the terms of a just-inked agreement with the city, use the next six months to determine whether it wants to move forward with the redevelopment project.
Read more »
California schools scored big increases in funding but not in academic performanceWe shouldn’t kid ourselves, or allow politicians and school officials to kid us, that spending more will automatically increase achievement.
Read more »
Walters: California schools scored big increases in funding but not in academic performance‘We shouldn’t kid ourselves … that spending more will automatically increase achievement.’
Read more »
Viral video of students unable to read show why Education Freedom Tax Credit is neededThe Education Freedom Tax Credit can provide better opportunities and improve students' academic proficiency in America’s public schools.
Read more »