The Brief

The water shortage crisis on the Colorado River is improving, but it’s far from over.

That was the message from the Biden administration on Tuesday, as officials announced they would loosen water restrictions on the river in 2024. Thanks to robust winter snowpack that provided about 33% more moisture than the average year, the water levels in the riverʻs two main reservoirs have begun to stabilize after plummeting over three years. This has lessened the need for states in the Southwest to cut their water usage.

The total cuts will be about 20% lighter than they were last year, requiring three Southwest states and Mexico to save around 600,000 acre-feet of water — enough to supply roughly 1.2 million homes.

Some restrictions remain

Even so, the administration left some mandatory restrictions in place to account for the fact that the reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are still emptier than they have been at almost any point in history. That’s due in large part to a millennium-scale drought that researchers believe was made much more likely by climate change. And even as federal officials eased up on mandatory restrictions, they were also preparing to dole out billions of dollars to the region’s farmers and cities in an effort to further reduce water usage on the river.

“The above-average precipitation this year was a welcome relief,” said Camille Calimlim Touton, the commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees the river, in a press release. “We have the time to focus on the long-term sustainability solutions needed in the Colorado River Basin.”

During the past three years, as the Colorado River has dried up, the federal government has used the elevation of Lake Mead as a benchmark to determine what restrictions it needs to impose on Arizona, Nevada, and California, the three states in what’s known as the riverʻs “Lower Basin,” as well as Mexico. In practice, the state that has suffered the most under this system is Arizona, which has junior rights to the river as a result of a compromise it made in the 1960s to secure funding for canal infrastructure; it has borne almost all the early cuts.

What it means for farmers

The Biden administrationʻs announcement this week, which will move the river from a “Tier 2a” shortage back down to a “Tier 1” shortage, should give Arizona cotton farmers and Phoenix-area cities a little more breathing room next year. But the river’s long-term prognosis means that it may not be wise for farmers to start planting more fields, or for cities to keep adding new golf courses and lawns.

“I’d say it’s probably not going to help that situation much,” said Paco Ollerton, a farmer who grows cotton and other crops outside the city of Casa Grande, south of Phoenix. “The acreage has dropped quite a bit. We’re probably about 25% fallow in the district this year.” The easing of drought restrictions might help some farmers increase their acreage, Ollerton added, but many will hold off on replanting because they’re wary of future cuts.

Even as the Biden administration sets a more relaxed standard for 2024, officials are preparing to roll out a larger series of water cuts that will last for the next three years. These bigger cuts, which the administration hopes will lift the river out of the drought-induced crisis of the past few years, were the result of a hard-fought compromise between the seven states that use the river — and in particular between the two largest users, Arizona and California.

The announcement of the compromise plan in May brought an end to a year of tense negotiations between the states and the Biden administration, triggered by unprecedented fears that Lake Powell and Lake Mead would bottom out altogether. In that doomsday scenario, hydroelectric plants that provide power to millions of people would have shut down, and water might not have been able to move past the reservoirs at all. The compromise plan uses about $1.5 billion in drought funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to compensate farmers and cities for using less water over the next three years.

This was a welcome outcome for farmers in places like Imperial County, California, who had expected to take uncompensated water cuts for the first time in history, as well as for city leaders in Arizona, who had stood to lose a huge share of their Colorado River water during the negotiations. The compromise was only possible because of this year’s wet winter, which deposited enough snow to prop up water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. With reservoirs recovering, the states could get away with more modest cuts — and pay for them with money that Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona secured within the Inflation Reduction Act last year.

What's next?

Even so, the compromise leaves several questions unanswered. The biggest question is how the states can reduce usage over the long term to account for the gradual aridification of the river. Farmers and cities can save water through techniques like drip irrigation or wastewater recycling, but these technologies are expensive to implement. In all likelihood, some places will have to farm less or build fewer houses. Furthermore, many tribal nations along the river still can’t access the water to which they have legal rights, and satisfying those rights could mean taking water away from other non-tribal users.

The federal government needs to hash out answers to these questions with states and tribes by the end of 2026, when the current operating guidelines for the river will expire. The Biden administration already kicked off that process last month when it asked stakeholders to weigh in on the river’s future. The negotiations won’t kick off in earnest for months or even years, but the administration’s goal is clear: Avoid a repeat of the past yearʻs crisis at all costs.

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.

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. 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.”

CalMatters asked the company, Instructure, if it paid a ransom, but did not immediately hear back.

The attack seems to have begun on or around April 29, when Instructure “detected unusual activity,” according to a class-action suit filed in a Texas federal court. The attack exploited a vulnerability in Canvas’s free tool for teachers.

On May 4, some Cal State campuses experienced a brief shutdown but were operational within 20 to 30 minutes, the university system said.

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.”

The hackers, 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 (course content, submissions, credentials) was not compromised” and Cal State has said that Canvas does not store social security numbers.

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, according to the hacker group and other media, 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, all 22 California State University campuses and all 116 of the state’s community colleges.

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.

‘Eggs in one basket’

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.

In the best case, those companies have diligent cybersecurity teams protecting student data.

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.

What now?

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 also actively considering additional data protections.

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 district disclosed last year that a telehealth vendor it worked with experienced a breach.

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.

“They’re happening with enough of a frequency that it’s more of a when, not an if,” he said.

CalMatters reporter Adam Echelman contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

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. 

When are the games anyway?

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: 

Group Stage:

• Friday, June 12, 6 p.m.: USA v. Paraguay 
• Monday, June 15, 6 p.m.: Iran vs. New Zealand 
• Thursday, June 18, 12 p.m.: Switzerland vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Sunday, June 21, 12 p.m.: Belgium vs. Iran 
• Thursday, June 25, 7 p.m.: Türkiye vs. USA 

Round of 32: 

• Sunday, June 28, 12 p.m.: Group A runners-up vs. Group B runners-up
• Thursday, July 2, 12 p.m.: Group H winners vs. Group J runners-up

Quarterfinal:

• Friday, July 10, 12 p.m.: Winner match 93 vs. Winner match 94

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 on Ticketmaster or at the gate, when not sold out.

FIFA is also hosting a series of official fan zones on specified days. Some tickets are free but still must be reserved ahead of time online. Here are the three closest to South L.A.: 

• June 18-21, The Original Farmers Market: Matches include USA vs. Australia and Mexico vs. Korea Republic. 
• June 25-28, Union Station: Matches include Türkiye vs. USA, Uruguay vs. Spain. 
• July 4-5, Earvin “Magic” Johnson Park: Matches include knock-out stage games.

Here’s what to know about The Wood Cup street fests in Inglewood:

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. 

The Inglewood City Council approved plans for both street festivals during its May 7 meeting. 

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 available here, including how to get to events via public transit. 

The free events will have soccer mini-clinics, family fun zones and city resource tables. Families should bring their own blankets, chairs and snacks.

The city is looking for volunteers for the events. You can apply online.

Three sites are in South L.A. and South Central. Here are the schedules for each location. 

Jackie Tatum Harvard Recreation Center:

• Friday, June 12: Canada vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina 12 p.m., USA vs. Paraguay 6 p.m.
• Wednesday, June 17: 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.
• Monday, June 22: Argentina vs. Austria 10 a.m., France vs. Iraq 2 p.m., Norway vs. Senegal 5 p.m., Jordan vs. Algeria 8 p.m.
• Saturday, June 27: 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. 
• Thursday, July 2: Round of 32 match 12 p.m., 4 p.m., 8 p.m. 
• Tuesday, July 7: Round of 16 match 9 a.m., 1 p.m.
• Wednesday, July 15: Semi-final match 12 p.m.

South Park Recreation Center: 

• Sunday, June 14: 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.
• Wednesday, June 24: 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.
• Monday, June 29: Round of 32 match 10 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 6 p.m.
• Saturday, July 4: Round of 16 match 2 p.m., 10 a.m.
• Sunday, July 19: Final match, 12 p.m.

Green Meadows Recreation Center:

• Friday, June 19: USA vs. Australia 12 p.m., Brazil vs. Haiti 3 p.m., Scotland vs. Morocco 3 p.m., Turkey vs. Paraguay 8 p.m.
• Friday, July 10: Quarter-final match 12 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.

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.

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Libby Rainey

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LAist

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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.

Preparations around the city

While SoFi prepares its pitch, the Los Angeles region is preparing for the tournament, too. L.A. Metro launched special Tap cards to mark the occasion, and is encouraging fans to take its special shuttle buses to the matches.

Metro launched special Tap cards to mark the occasion, and is encouraging fans to take its special shuttle buses to the matches.

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Libby Rainey

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LAist

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" 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.

Fans who won't be at the tournament can attend the FIFA Fan Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum June 11-15, or a number of other fan zones and watch parties.

Human rights issues

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 branch will play a key role in security for the tournament. They've also criticized the local host committee for not mentioning immigration enforcement in its recently released human rights plan.

Kathryn 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.

Metro is encouraging fans to take its special shuttle buses to the matches.

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Libby Rainey

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LAist

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"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 workers have threatened to strike if they don't get guarantees that ICE won't be at the tournament.

Some 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.

To avoid a dreaded scenario in which Democrats are locked out of the November general election, many Democrats coalesced around former U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, who ultimately flamed out after multiple women accused him of sexual assault.

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.

In a “normal year,” Katie Evans-Reber of San Francisco said she would probably back former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter 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 Trump’s endorsement for Steve Hilton, 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.

In pole position is Xavier Becerra, 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 attorney general.

Behind Becerra are progressive Democratic challengers Tom Steyer, 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.

One post even falsely attributed 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 not like, bad advice, but it's 100% not coming from me,” Cox Richardson told CalMatters in an interview.

Democratic political consultant Paul Mitchell disagrees.

“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.

An empty stage after the gubernatorial debate on the campus of Pomona College in Claremont on April 28, 2026.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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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 media posts urging late voting could be misinformation, disinformation and “potentially unlawful,” and Secretary of State Shirley Weber said her office would “look into” those social posts.

“Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold,” Newsom wrote in a recent letter addressed to all 58 county registrars urging them to “tabulate and release results quickly and accurately.”

Turning 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.

Returning ballots even a few days earlier can give counties a head start, Alexander said at a recent CalMatters forum on election integrity.

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.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Sign up for CalMatters' newsletters.