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Times Community News won 14 Orange County Press Club awards at its 2021 virtual awards ceremony on Thursday night.
Daily Pilot reporters Sara Cardine and Andrew Turner combined for six awards. Cardine won first place in the education category for her July 2020 story on how a push for reopening schools without masks had ties to a pro-charter group.
Cardine also earned second place in feature story, for her story on a goat herd clearing up a hillside headache, as well as second-place finish in environmental news for a story on Costa Mesa’s Fairview Park Wetlands.
“It’s a privilege to be a reporter in a place like Orange County, where there is never a dull moment and where groups strive to accomplish visions they believe will move communities forward but often face conflict from people with different ideas,” Cardine said. “That dynamism keeps things interesting and provides fertile soil for storytellers and journalists of all stripes.”
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The Orange County Sheriff’s Department cordoned off a section of Fountain Valley’s Mile Square Regional Park on Friday after parkgoers discovered a body floating facedown in a lake on the north end of the property.
Sgt. Todd Hylton confirmed an O.C. Parks ranger received a call about 10:45 a.m. from visitors who were boating on the park’s North Lake when they saw something in the water.
“From what I understand the [reporting parties] were in a swan boat,” Hylton said Friday afternoon from the scene, where members of the department’s Homicide Detail had taped off the shoreline and closed the area to visitors.
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Orange County residents hankering for a corndog and pig races will have to act fast, as O.C. Fair organizers say the regional festival sold out on opening weekend for the first time in more than a century.
Demand for tickets on Saturday and Sunday exceeded 45,000 single-day capacity limits imposed by organizers. And since tickets must be purchased online in advance, anyone who may have waited until arriving to book slots would have been turned away at the gates.
The monthlong event opened Friday and runs Wednesday through Sunday each week through Aug. 15.
A young fairgoer poses with mascots Olivia the Orange and Strawberry Jan on the O.C. Fair’s opening day.
For Derek King and many like him, Mary’s Kitchen is a sanctuary.
King, who has been homeless for nearly a decade, found Mary’s Kitchen in Orange when he had reached his limit. Physically and spiritually malnourished, he was ready to give up.
Mary’s Kitchen provided him with food, a shower and clothing. It helped restore something that many homeless people have had to relinquish: Dignity.
He found meaning again, in the relationships he made and the spirituality fostered by the nonprofit’s leadership. “There’s times when the fear of living for nothing will strangle you,” King said.
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A civic conundrum is unfolding on Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula just in time for the Fourth of July, as the city’s code enforcement team considers removing a flagpole with a long but somewhat mysterious provenance for encroaching onto publicly owned land.
Officers responding to a complaint arrived this week to a row of homes along the oceanfront Newport Balboa Bike Trail, where the U.S. and California state flags flapped freely atop a flagpole mounted into a sandy beach berm.
Neighbors say the pole has probably been there since around the time the nearby houses were built in the 1950s.