“My friends were out at 1am smoking weed at Kit Carson Park in Escondido when they saw Bill Murray walking through the woods like a phantom.” — Jibby_von_HaHa on Imgur and Reddit Secret Pokemon Go character? Look-alike or hoax? Big Foot, abominable snowman and Hodgee the friendly Lake Hodges monster be damned, meet the latest myth to blow through Escondido town, the ghost of Bill Murray….
Dateline Rancho Santa Fe. March 26, 1997. A 911 call came into the San Diego Sheriff’s Communications Center. It was treated as a prank call at first. From what turned out to be a nearby payphone, the caller said something so preposterous that dispatchers took their time in relaying the information to central command. “This is regarding a mass suicide. I can give you the address,” the…
People have been debating D.B. Cooper ever since his Thanksgiving 1971 leap into history and out of a commercial flight from Portland to Seattle with a whole bunch of money. The same, on a smaller scale, appears to be happening with North County’s own Geezer Bandit, so-called. He hit Vista — twice — Rancho Santa Fe, La Jolla — twice — Poway and 10 other…
While Encinitas Senior Living’s corporate pattern is playing out well beyond North County San Diego borders, the problems residents describe are not abstract. They are structural. When senior living companies say that legal disputes, bankruptcies, closures, and complaints at different properties are unrelated, they are usually asking readers to focus narrowly — one building at a time, one issue at a time — rather than…
A story published April 26, 2025, in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, reported and written by Phil Barber, was about a senior facility 400 miles north of Encinitas. Swap out the vineyard views for coastal fog, and replace every mention of that facility with Encinitas Senior Living, 504 S. El Camino Real, and the piece starts to read less like regional news and more like…
If Hollywood, and film award season beginning with the Golden Globes Sunday night, needed reminding that San Diego exists south of the Studio Zone and north of the border, it’s about to get a pleasant nudge. “One Battle After Another,” the new Warner Bros. picture written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opened recently—and it doesn’t merely visit San Diego. It…
Carlsbad just joined the very small club of places where science quietly does something important while everyone else is arguing on cable news. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis has opened a new 10,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Carlsbad, built not for vitamin gummies or mood-enhancing seltzer but for cancer drugs that come with an expiration date measured in hours. Not days. Not weeks. Hours. Like milk,…
On Friday, January 9, Gov. Gavin Newsom released his January budget proposal for fiscal year 2026-27. The proposed budget maintains the planned expansion of the California Food Assistance Program (CFAP) to all income-eligible Californians, ages 55 years or older, regardless of their immigration status. The Food4All coalition appreciates seeing a continued commitment to providing food benefits to Californians ages 55 and older, regardless of immigration…
Hundreds of acres of land in North San Diego County are now protected in perpetuity by The Escondido Creek Conservancy (Conservancy) following the recent acquisition of two key properties: the White-Atterbury property, extending from Harmony Grove into San Marcos and Elfin Forest. These acquisitions represent critical components of the Conservancy’s Connecting Conservation Corridors Campaign, which aims to link fragmented native habitats so wildlife can survive…
The Trump-inspired Jan. 6 Capitol riot did not start in Washington. It started in places that look a lot like San Diego County—suburban streets, online message boards, small protest circles, group texts, and social-media feeds that steadily hardened into belief. When the crowd breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, San Diego did not watch from the sidelines. Residents here packed bags, booked flights,…