Tuesday, April 28, 2026

‘A Betrayal:’ California to Share Data On Immigrant Drivers Nationally

by Khari Johnson and Wendy Fry, CALMATTERS

California is preparing to share with an outside organization detailed information about driver license holders, including immigrants who do not have legal authorization to live in the U.S.

That breaks a promise the state made a decade ago when it began issuing licenses to unauthorized immigrants, advocates say, and it means more than 1 million people may face higher risk of deportation.

But if state officials don’t turn over the data, the Department of Homeland Security may refuse to accept California licenses and IDs at airports, the advocates believe, following a briefing with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month. State authorities confirmed they plan to share the data to comply with the Real ID Act of 2005, which set requirements for accepting state identification in federal facilities like airports.

Representatives from four advocacy groups who participated in the briefing told CalMatters the shared information will show whether a person has a Social Security number,

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Seven ArtCenter MFA Artists Turn the Recent Past Into New Work

Free Pasadena exhibition draws on pop culture and fading technology to explore how yesterday shapes today

The 1970s motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel has found an unlikely second act at ArtCenter College of Design, reimagined in new work by graduating Master of Fine Arts student and artist Milan Aguirre as part of a group exhibition that treats the recent cultural past as raw material for the present.

“Days of Future Past,” the Pasadena college’s annual Graduate Art MFA thesis exhibition, opens May 1 at the South Campus on Raymond Avenue and runs through May 22. The free show features work by seven graduating artists whose pieces range from Aguirre’s reinterpretation of Knievel to Jessie Edelstein’s installations built from near-obsolete digital content, according to an ArtCenter press release.

The exhibition takes its name from the 2014 X-Men film in which characters rewrite the future by acting on the past. Curator Hyesoo Christina Valentine, ArtCenter’s associate director and curator of exhibitions, organized the show around what the press release describes as a loosely shared throughline: the artists examine the recent past not with nostalgia but with curiosity,

Monday, April 27, 2026

24-Hour Enforcement Period to Begin Throughout California to Combat Speeding

CITY NEWS SERVICE

The California Highway Patrol will conduct a 24- hour Maximum Enforcement Period beginning Tuesday, focusing on speeding to help reduce serious and fatal crashes across the state.

The MEP will be in effect from 6 a.m. Tuesday until 5:59 a.m. Wednesday. The enforcement effort will take place throughout the day and night, “emphasizing that there is no safe time or place to drive at unsafe speeds,” according to the CHP.

During the operation, officers will monitor roadways and take enforcement action against drivers who exceed posted speed limits or travel at unsafe speeds for the conditions.

“Speeding continues to be one of the leading causes of serious and fatal crashes on California’s roadways. When drivers choose to exceed safe speeds, they reduce their ability to react and increase the risk for everyone on the road. Slowing down is one of the simplest steps that drivers can take to protect themselves and others,” CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee said in a statement.

Monday, April 27, 2026

Pasadena Unified Holds Final In-Person Town Hall Before School Closure Vote

With 14 campuses still under review and a $30 million budget gap, Tuesday’s session at Pasadena High offers the public its last scheduled chance to weigh in before the advisory committee delivers its recommendation

On Tuesday, the Pasadena Unified School District will hold its second and final scheduled town hall on the school consolidation process, this time in person at Pasadena High School from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

The session comes one day after the Superintendent’s School Consolidation Advisory Committee meets for its sixth session — with only one meeting remaining before it is expected to deliver a recommendation to the Board of Education in May, according to the PUSD website.

PUSD is projecting a budget shortfall of $30 million to $35 million for the 2026-27 fiscal year. Enrollment has fallen roughly 23 percent over the past decade, from 17,267 students in 2014-15 to 13,228 in the current school year, according to district financial reports. Fourteen campuses across Pasadena, Altadena,

Monday, April 27, 2026

In Altadena, Webster’s Pharmacy Turns 100

The Altadena pharmacy — which its owners say is the community’s oldest operating retail business — held its centennial celebration Saturday, 16 months after the Eaton Fire forced a six-week closure

For six weeks after the Eaton Fire, Webster’s Community Pharmacy went dark.

The pharmacy, which its owners say has operated on Lake Avenue since 1926 — making it Altadena’s oldest continuously operating retail business — marked its 100th anniversary Saturday with a free, four-hour centennial celebration from noon to 4 p.m. at 2333 Lake Avenue.

The milestone comes 16 months after the January 2025 Eaton Fire, which destroyed more than 9,400 structures and killed 19 people according to Cal Fire, and forced the pharmacy to close for approximately six weeks. During that time, co-owners Meredith and Michael Miller coordinated with a neighboring Pasadena pharmacy to keep prescriptions flowing to their customers.

“We weren’t allowed back into the building for several weeks,” Miller said in a previously published interview. “We immediately coordinated with a neighboring pharmacy in Pasadena to ensure our patients continued to receive their life-saving medications without interruption.”

Monday, April 27, 2026

Altadena Forum Puts Three County Agencies in One Room Before This Year’s Fire Season Opens

A free Zoom meeting Tuesday gives residents a direct line to county officials on brush clearance, crime, and rebuilding — with inspections starting in three days

Fire season’s paperwork deadline is 72 hours away, and Tuesday night, the county agencies that hold the answers are all scheduled to show up at once.

The Altadena Coalition of Neighborhood Associations (ACONA) has organized a 90-minute public Zoom forum for Tuesday, April 28, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., bringing representatives from LA County Fire, the LA County Sheriff’s Department, and LA County Regional Planning and Public Works before an open community audience. The meeting arrives three days before the county’s annual defensible space inspection season opens for inland communities on May 1, and just weeks before the May 31 deadline to apply for the Measure E parcel tax’s low-income senior exemption.

According to ACONA’s agenda, LA County Fire’s presentation will cover three subjects that have generated steady questions in Altadena since January 2025: the specifics of brush clearance compliance,

Monday, April 27, 2026

The Last Harpers Ferry Raider Is Buried in Altadena. A Film Is Telling His Story.

The man who outlived every other participant of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry is buried in the Altadena hills, at the north end of El Prieto Road. He has been there for 137 years. Most Pasadena and Altadena students have never heard his name, according to the group that made a documentary film to change that.

Owen Brown — third son of abolitionist John Brown, one of the five raiders who escaped the October 1859 attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and the last of those survivors to die — spent his final years in the foothills above Altadena, where he died in 1889 and was buried on a hilltop the community named Little Round Top. A 20-minute documentary, “Owen Brown’s Body,” was commissioned by the Owen Brown Gravesite Committee specifically to bring that story into classrooms. On Tuesday evening, filmmaker Pablo D. Miralles and historian Michele Zack will discuss how the film came to be at the Pasadena Civil War Round Table’s monthly meeting at the historic Blinn House in Pasadena.

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Altadena’s Poets Laureate Invite a Community to Tell Its Story Onstage

The library series born from the Eaton Fire closes with an afternoon where the audience writes the script

Sixteen months after fire tore through Altadena, the stories still outnumber the people willing to tell them. On Sunday, an event at the Bob Lucas Memorial Library will try to change that — not with a microphone and a podium, but with actors who listen.

“After the Fire: Honoring Stories From the Community” pairs poetry with People’s Playback Theater, an interactive performance company whose actors take audience members’ spoken memories and transform them, on the spot, into movement, music and improvised scenes. The event runs from 10 a.m. to noon at the Bob Lucas Memorial Library and Literacy Center, 2659 Lincoln Ave. Registration is required.

The program is part of “After the Fires: Healing from Histories,” a yearlong poetry initiative led by Altadena Poets Laureate Sehba Sarwar and Lester Graves Lennon. The Academy of American Poets awarded the pair $50,000 fellowships in 2025 to launch the project,

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Free Workshop Offers Eaton Fire Survivors a Single-Team Path to Rebuilding

The nonprofit behind a turnkey summit in March returns with a second session — this time in Pasadena

Eaton Fire survivors weighing how to rebuild their destroyed home can hear Saturday about an approach that puts one team in charge of the entire process — design, permits, and construction — delivering a move-in-ready house.

The Altadena Recovery and Rebuild Corporation is hosting the free, two-hour workshop at Pasadena Senior Center, its second event focused on what the building industry calls “turnkey” or “production” rebuilding. The concept, according to ARRC, consolidates steps that homeowners would otherwise coordinate among separate architects, engineers, permit consultants, and general contractors.

More than 15 months have passed since the January 7, 2025, Eaton Fire. destroyed. Many survivors remain in temporary housing, navigating insurance disputes and a complex rebuilding process.

ARRC held its first turnkey event, the Altadena Turnkey Rebuild Summit, on March 15 at Loma Alta Park in Altadena. That summit gave attendees the chance to meet builders and housing professionals and attend speaker presentations,

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Pasadena Assemblymember Condemns Trump for Omitting ‘Genocide’ From Armenian Remembrance Statement

The rebuke came on the 111th anniversary, as Pasadena held observances at its permanent memorial in Memorial Park

Assemblymember John Harabedian (D-Pasadena) condemned President Trump on Thursday for refusing to use the word “genocide” in his annual April 24 statement marking the anniversary of the systematic killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

Trump’s White House statement, titled “Presidential Message on Armenian Remembrance Day,” used the Armenian phrase “Meds Yeghern” — meaning “Great Crime” or “Great Catastrophe” — but did not include the word “genocide,” according to the text published on whitehouse.gov.

The Armenian National Committee of America, an advocacy organization, said it was the sixth time across two presidential terms that Trump has declined to use the term.

“By refusing to call the Armenian Genocide what it is, he is perpetuating a dangerous false narrative,” Harabedian said in a statement released by his office. “As an Armenian American, this is a betrayal of history and a deliberate act of denial.”