A new mural by artist Robert Vargas titled "Songs My Father Taught Me" was unveiled in Boyle Heights.
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Laura Anaya-Morga
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Boyle Heights Beat
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Topline:
Boyle Heights artist Robert Vargas unveiled a new mural Tuesday titled “Songs My Father Taught Me,” depicting a handcuffed mariachi and a child as the Eastside continues to grapple with the effects of ongoing immigration raids.
About the new mural: It’s one of five murals Vargas plans to paint this week as part of his “#WeAreHuman” initiative, which he said features images that show “truth and resiliency in our culture, and hopefully empower us and give us strength,” according to an Instagram Reel announcing the unveiling.
The backstory: The mural at 2426 E. 4th St. was unveiled about a week after the Eastside was hit with some of the heaviest immigration activity it had experienced since the raids began last June.
Read on... for more about the new mural.
This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Feb. 3, 2026.
Boyle Heights artist Robert Vargas unveiled a new mural Tuesday titled “Songs My Father Taught Me,” depicting a handcuffed mariachi and a child as the Eastside continues to grapple with the effects of ongoing immigration raids.
The mural, located at the corner of 4th and Mathews streets, shows the wrists of a mariachi handcuffed, the red, white and green colors of the Mexican flag are visible on his charro suit. Beside him, a child wearing a T-shirt featuring a patriotic cartoon bald eagle looks on while holding a guitar.
It’s one of five murals Vargas plans to paint this week as part of his “#WeAreHuman” initiative, which he said features images that show “truth and resiliency in our culture, and hopefully empower us and give us strength,” according to an Instagram Reel announcing the unveiling.
At the unveiling on Tuesday, about two dozen people watched as Vargas put his finishing touches on the painting. In attendance was East LA-born actor Edward James Olmos, who called the work “a great statement to who we are as a people.” “We will rise way beyond this,” he said.
For Vargas, the full message lies in the small details of the painting, including the wedding band on the mariachi’s finger, the eagle on his jacket facing the cartoon eagle on his son’s shirt, the guitar the boy is holding and the somber look in his eyes as he watches his father being detained.
“When I see this image, I see myself. I see brown faces, I see representation…but I feel heartbreak,” said Michelle Lopez, who was at the unveiling. “Seeing his father hand off that guitar to him, the passing of the torch. …To see the two eagles facing each other, ‘How is one eagle illegal?’” Lopez said.
The mural at 2426 E. 4th St. was unveiled about a week after the Eastside was hit with some of the heaviest immigration activity it had experienced since the raids began last June. A few blocks north on Mathews Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue, a man identified by his family as Abraham was detained by four masked agents in a driveway. According to his nephew, Chris, who witnessed the incident, Abraham had been standing on the sidewalk when agents approached him. Two days later, his family said, Abraham was back in his hometown of Puebla, Mexico.
The intersection of 1st and State streets in Boyle Heights has been dubbed “Robert Vargas Square” in recognition of the artist’s work and ties to the neighborhood.
Laylah Rivers shows a photo on her phone from a 2016 training mission in Italy during her time as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army, in Culver City.
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Ariana Drehsler
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CalMatters
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Topline:
California’s community colleges are now giving college credit for students’ previous work experiences. The state has a goal of rapidly expanding access to these credits, though tracking progress on that goal has been difficult so far.
The backstory: Since 2017, California’s community colleges have slowly expanded the number of ways that students can get school credit for their prior work experience, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has made it a priority, in part by approving over $34 million in related state funding in recent years. By 2030, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office wants at least 250,000 students to have earned college credit for their work or other “prior learning” experience, and in January, Newsom proposed putting an additional $37 million toward it.
How is it going? Many colleges use their own internal methods to track the credits they award, so there’s no authoritative system showing how many students across the state have actually been served. The chancellor’s office operates a public dashboard, which says that over 40,000 students in California have received at least one credit for pre-college work or education in the past few years. Samuel Lee, a senior adviser to the community college chancellor who oversees the dashboard, said the real total is roughly twice that, though he couldn’t provide any exact figures.
Read on... for more about how a current West L.A. College student's experience is going.
Laylah Rivers had already been a paratrooper in the U.S. Army and worked at various tech companies across the West Coast. But when she enrolled at a Los Angeles community college at 31, she was just another freshman — alongside students nearly half her age.
Luckily, West Los Angeles College has a program that acknowledges students’ prior work experience. The college gave her seven credits, the equivalent of about two classes, after she provided a copy of her military transcript and evidence of computer courses she took while working at Amazon. “Of course, with 13 years of experience, I should get more credit for what I’m doing,” she said. “But I’m grateful.”
Since 2017, California’s community colleges have slowly expanded the number of ways that students can get school credit for their prior work experience, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has made it a priority, in part by approving over $34 million in related state funding in recent years. By 2030, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office wants at least 250,000 students to have earned college credit for their work or other “prior learning" experience, and in January, Newsom proposed putting an additional $37 million toward it.
But many colleges use their own internal methods to track the credits they award, so there’s no authoritative system showing how many students across the state have actually been served. The chancellor’s office operates a public dashboard, which says that over 40,000 students in California have received at least one credit for pre-college work or education in the past few years. Samuel Lee, a senior adviser to the community college chancellor who oversees the dashboard, said the real total is roughly twice that, though he couldn’t provide any exact figures.
Laylah Rivers at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, on Jan. 29, 2026.
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Ariana Drehsler
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CalMatters
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Among the students who count toward this 2030 goal are those who gain credit by taking Advanced Placement, or AP, exams — which have existed for decades. What’s new is awarding students credit for work experience, such as computer courses or military training. Because it’s so new, “it’s taking the colleges a while,” Lee said. “Some are nowhere and some are really down the road.”
Historically, veterans have benefited the most from these credits, but students with professional experience in plumbing, first aid, foreign languages and hundreds of other skills can also qualify, either by showing an industry certification or taking an exam. At Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, for instance, students can get college credit for wine courses if they can prove sufficient knowledge in French, Italian or Spanish wines.
Just a few additional credits can save students over $14,000, according to one California study. These students are more likely to graduate, too.
Because she’s a veteran, Rivers’ education and living costs are supported by the federal government, including through the GI Bill. These benefits only last a few years so every class she can skip saves her time — and ultimately money that she can put toward her future education.
Want to get ahead in tech? Get a degree
Even without a college degree, Rivers was doing well in tech, making over $70,000 a year, first at Amazon Web Services and later as a support engineer at a startup.
California’s tech industry has been vocal about dropping degree requirements for jobs, but research by the Burning Glass Institute shows that employers still prefer college graduates, even when college education isn’t a requirement.
“Computer science is really male-dominated, white-dominated,” said Rivers. “I’m a Black woman, but it’s hard to get my foot in the door. Even though I have 13 years of experience, they move the goalpost.” When the startup she was working at was sold to another company in 2024, she enrolled at West Los Angeles College, hoping to eventually transfer to a four-year institution, get a degree and land a management job in the tech industry.
But Rivers didn’t know that any of her prior work could translate into college credits until months after enrolling, when a college dean noticed her military and computer science experience.
“I think it should just be built into the registration process instead of people having to find out about it,” she said. “It took me a whole semester to figure it out.”
Laylah Rivers at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, on Jan. 29, 2026.
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Ariana Drehsler
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CalMatters
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The Technology Learning Center building at West Los Angeles College in Culver City, where Laylah Rivers has taken computer and IT courses.
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Ariana Drehsler
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CalMatters
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Starting last fall, West Los Angeles College made it a requirement that all transfer-oriented students learn about opportunities to get credit for prior work experience, either during meetings with a college counselor in the first semester or at orientation, said Allison Tom-Miura, the dean of academic affairs and workforce development for the campus. “This is a big equity issue,” she said. “How can we help students from repeating courses that they do not need?”
In 2018, the state Legislature passed a law that would eventually mandate that every college adopt a policy for awarding students credit for prior learning or work experience, but colleges received little or no funding to implement it. They scrambled to create systems to assess students’ work experience and streamline the process of petitioning for credit, according to interviews with community college leaders across the state.
Administratively, the process is still tricky today. Students need to submit evidence of their work experience, which faculty then evaluate and translate into an equivalent course at the college. Most students gain credit by showing a military transcript, a certification or by taking a test, but sometimes, in more subjective fields such as photography, faculty assess a student’s portfolio.
Lee’s statewide system lists the skills and certifications that community colleges already recognize so that students can petition for credit more easily. But he said that only about half the state’s 116 community colleges are actively participating in the effort.
Getting all colleges on the same system
Often, Lee is on tour, visiting colleges across the state, sometimes meeting with a school six or seven times in an effort to promote his credit tracking system or otherwise improve the way they log students’ credits.
Last month, he sat on stage at a conference in Sacramento to present about the benefits of a shared tracking system alongside the interim president of Palomar College, Tina Recalde. Like many schools in the San Diego metro area, Palomar College has a high number of enrolled veterans and was an early advocate for awarding additional credit to them. In their joint presentation, Recalde said her college has given over 3,600 students credit for work or other prior learning experiences.
But that data doesn’t appear on Lee’s platform or any other public dashboard. Palomar College has its own system for processing the additional credits, which it created before Lee’s platform existed, said Nichol Roe, the college’s dean of career technical and extended education.
Soon, nearly all schools will have to begin logging information on the same platform. The Legislature approved a budget last year that guarantees $50,000 to every community college campus that wants it. In return, the colleges that receive the money agree to use certain aspects of Lee’s data system and to screen all veterans and incoming students for potential additional credits.
College of the Sequoias in Visalia said it doesn’t need the money and chose not to apply, according to its president, Brent Calvin.
Lee said that every other college applied for the funding by the deadline and that he would “gladly” make an exception for College of the Sequoias. “Our goal is not for them to meet the deadline,” he said. “Our goal is to get people funding and support.”
Why it matters: The proposal, which is part of a regulatory filing for the test, comes months after President Donald Trump — in the middle of a redistricting push for new voting maps that could help Republicans keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives — put out a call on social media for a "new" census that would, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude millions of people living in the country without legal status.
More details: Results from the 2026 test are not expected to be used to redistribute political representation. Instead, the test is designed to inform preparations for the next once-a-decade head count in 2030, which include a report on the planned question topics that is due to Congress in 2027.
The proposal, which is part of a regulatory filing for the test, comes months after President Donald Trump — in the middle of a redistricting push for new voting maps that could help Republicans keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives — put out a call on social media for a "new" census that would, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude millions of people living in the country without legal status.
In Congress, a growing number of Republican lawmakers are backing similar controversial proposals to leave out some or all non-U.S. citizens from a set of census numbers used to determine each state's share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes.
According to the 14th Amendment, those census apportionment counts must include the "whole number of persons in each state."
And in federal court, multiple GOP-led states have filed lawsuits seeking to force the bureau to subtract residents without legal status and those with immigrant visas from those counts. Missouri's case goes further by calling for their exclusion from all census counts, including those for distributing federal dollars for public services in local communities.
Results from the 2026 test are not expected to be used to redistribute political representation. Instead, the test is designed to inform preparations for the next once-a-decade head count in 2030, which include a report on the planned question topics that is due to Congress in 2027.
The planned questionnaire for the test comes from an annual Census Bureau survey that is much longer than recent forms for the national tally. It's not clear why the bureau is using the American Community Survey to test methods for the census. Spokespeople for the bureau and its parent agency, the Commerce Department, did not immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment.
In addition to citizenship status, the form asks about people's sources of income, whether their home has a bathtub or shower, and whether the home is connected to a public sewer, among other questions.
The form, however, does not reflect changes to racial and ethnic categories that the Biden administration approved for the 2030 census and other federal surveys, including new checkboxes for "Middle Eastern or North African" and "Hispanic or Latino." A White House agency official said in December that the Trump administration is considering rolling back those changes.
As with all surveys conducted by the bureau, federal law bans the agency from putting out information that would identify a person to anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement.
Still, many census advocates are concerned the Trump administration's plan will discourage many historically undercounted populations, including households with immigrants and mixed-status families, from participating in the field test at a time of increased immigration enforcement and murky handling of government data.
Previous Census Bureau research has found that adding a citizenship question would likely undermine the count's accuracy by lowering response rates for many of the least responsive populations.
During the first Trump administration, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from being added to the 2020 census, while declining to rule on whether the president can carry out an unprecedented exclusion of people without legal status from apportionment counts.
In one of its new filings to the White House's Office of Management and Budget, the bureau says the form for this year's census test "will ask no questions of a sensitive nature." Whether its proposed questions move forward is now for OMB to decide.
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Published February 5, 2026 9:30 AM
Former L.A. mayoral candidate Austin Beutner speaks during a news conference.
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Kayla Bartkowski
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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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Topline:
Former L.A. Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner has dropped out of the L.A. mayoral race, saying he's still in mourning after the death of his daughter Emily.
Why now: In a statement, Beutner said a successful campaign "requires someone who is committed 24/7 to the job." He said family has always come first, and that's where he's needed at this time. Emily Beutner, 22, died in an L.A. hospital in January. No cause of death has been revealed.
The backstory: Beutner entered the mayoral race in October, focusing on homelessness, safety, the cost of housing and the loss of jobs. Even though he said he voted for Karen Bass, Beutner questioned her leadership following the Palisades Fire. Before serving as L.A. Unified superintendent from 2018 to 2021, Beutner was L.A. deputy mayor for three years during former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's second term. He was also the publisher of the Los Angeles Times from 2014 to 2015.
What's next: Despite quitting the race, Beutner says Los Angeles needs new ideas, "along with leadership capable of implementing them." He said, in time, he hopes to continue his efforts "to make sure Los Angeles' best days are ahead of us." Candidates still considering whether to enter the mayoral race have until Saturday to file election paperwork.
These Winter Olympics will feature a new sport for the first time in over three decades.
Why it matters: While the Games regularly add events within existing disciplines, they haven't introduced an entirely new sport since the return of skeleton in 2002. That changes this year with the debut of ski mountaineering, aka "skimo."
The new sport: In ski mountaineering, athletes navigate a set course amidst rugged terrain. They attach climbing skins to the base of their skis while they ascend a mountain, quickly maneuver their skis off to tackle a series of steps on foot, then readjust and ski back down.
Read on... for more about the new sport and brand new competitions in the Games.
These Winter Olympics will feature a new sport for the first time in over three decades.
While the Games regularly add events within existing disciplines, they haven't introduced an entirely new sport since the return of skeleton in 2002.
That changes this year with the debut of ski mountaineering, aka "skimo."
The sport, which involves hiking up and skiing down a mountain, will feature three events: women's sprint, men's sprint and mixed relay.
That's in addition to five brand new competitions in longtime Winter Olympic sports — for a grand total of eight new medal opportunities at this year's Games. Here's what to know about them.
The new sport: ski mountaineering
In ski mountaineering, athletes navigate a set course amidst rugged terrain. They attach climbing skins to the base of their skis while they ascend a mountain, quickly maneuver their skis off to tackle a series of steps on foot, then readjust and ski back down.
The sprint race consists of an ascent and descent, starting with time trials and seeding athletes into groups of six. In the mixed relay, teams of one man and one woman alternate four laps — two ascents and two descents — on a longer course (with an elevation gain of 460 feet compared to 230 in the sprint).
According to Team USA, ski mountaineering has its roots in the "need to traverse the snow-covered landscapes of Europe in prehistoric times," and can officially be traced back to the mountains of Switzerland in 1897.
But the sport known as skimo really took off in the 21st century, hosting its first world championships in France in 2002 and establishing a World Cup circuit two years later.
It was added to the Winter Youth Olympic Games in 2020, and the following year was approved for inclusion in Milano Cortina — a fitting country for its Olympic debut, since the sport has a long history and many international champions in Italy.
Ski mountaineering competitions will be held in the Valtellina Valley town of Bormio, at the same venue as Alpine skiing.
The U.S. team narrowly qualified for the Games in a high-stakes Utah race in early December, the very last chance for teams to earn Olympic ranking points.
The mixed relay team of Anna Gibson and Cam Smith won its race by a minute and a half on home snow, beating rival Canada to take home a gold medal and secure for Team USA the continent's last Olympics spot. It wasn't just a major victory, but a chance for Team USA to educate curious Instagram followers about the sport itself.
New events within skeleton, luge, ski jumping and moguls
The other new events are additional variations of existing competitions, giving more athletes — particularly women — a chance to compete:
There's dual moguls, a freestyle skiing event in which two athletes compete side by side, performing aerial tricks on two jumps of a bumpy course. Traditional moguls, featuring one skier at a time, have been part of the Winter Games since the 1990s. This year will feature both men's and women's dual moguls.
Another new event is mixed team skeleton, which pairs one man and one woman from the same country to race down an ice track head-first on a small sled.
This year also marks the debut of women's doubles luge, in which two women from the same country double up on the same sled to race down the track, feet-first. The existing doubles luge competition will officially become a men's event, which it effectively has been since the 1960s, since women were technically eligible but never previously participated.
Ski jumpingis also getting a brand new event, the women's individual large hill competition. That means both men and women will compete in normal and large hill events, as well as a mixed team event, which made its debut in the 2022 Beijing Games.
Men have one additional ski jumping medal event, which is rebranding this year: the super team, a new format that replaces the traditional four-person team competition with pairs of two competing in up to three jumps. Olympics organizers say the restructuring makes the competition more dynamic and paves the way for smaller nations to participate.
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