OC Weekly started publishing in September 1995, something I remember because I'd been hired on the editorial side four months before that. It's also my memory that our cover story package dissecting the 1994 County of Orange bankruptcy, fallout and lessons learned/ignored was among the first to win us notice as practitioners of "real" journalism as opposed to our ever more popular snark wrapped around futon ads.

Now comes word that the architect of the financial free-fall that led to the bankruptcy has died.

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Jack Gould

Feral Ferguson's day of infamy

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See the update at the end of this post on Sonia Hermosillo's insanity plea today.

R.I.P. Noe Medina, Jr.

ORIGINAL POST, JAN. 2, 9:38 A.M.: Two Orange County mothers named Sonia enter 2013 in very different places. At 12:03 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 1, at Western Medical Center Anaheim, Sonia Gonzalez delivered Pamela Cristal Beltran, Orange County's first baby of 2013. Today at Superior Court in Santa Ana, Sonia Hermosillo is scheduled to be arraigned on murder charges for tossing her 7-month-old son Noe Medina, Jr. to his death from the Children's Hospital of Orange County parking structure in Orange.

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​The Friends For Fullerton's Future blog is asking people to show up to tomorrow's city council meeting with a copy of the OCWeekly in hand. Since there is a three-minute limit per person during the public comment section, each person will pick up reading where the last person left off, the blog suggests. More »

​Ricardo Dagoberto Diaz-Nivarez's mother was sentenced in the spring to 25 years to life in state prison for plotting with her son the 2005 robbery and murder of Mario Hernandez, a 78-year-old Santa Ana jewelry salesman whose body was never found.

Today, a jury deadlocked 10-2 in favor of convicting the 26-year-old Garden Grove resident, prompting Judge Richard F. Toohey in Santa Ana to declare a mistrial. The judge also scheduled a Nov. 4 hearing to set a new trial date.

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​Go behind the scenes of our Summer Guide 2011 (click here to read it in its entirety!) cover shoot with photographer Star Foreman.

After the jump: Models! Bikinis! Balboa!

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​Orange County residents have bemoaned the encroachment of suburbia and loss of our orange groves for decades. In 1963's Historical Volume and Reference Works: Including Biographical Sketches of Leading Citizens, a three-volume compendium of Orange County history, author Mildred Yorba MacArthur--scion of two pioneering OC families--wrote an essay titled "The Vanishing Orange?" where she called the county "the land of disappearing citrus groves" and longed for the days "when an orange was something to be eaten, not poured from a can." At the time, though, there were still more than 28,000 acres of Valencias left. She held out hope that South County--still largely rural then--might "keep the citrus industry alive for many years."

Behind the jump: See where OC's last orange groves stand. 

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