Orange County

State officials have fined two nursing homes in Orange County for providing care so inadequate that it led to the deaths of two patients. In one case, a woman died from dehydration. In the other, staff failed to provide CPR to a man suffering a heart attack because they mistakenly believed he was under orders not to be resuscitated.

It was nearly two years ago that 19-year-old Donna Jou left home with a man she met on the Internet and then disappeared. For almost two years, her parents believed that John Steven Burgess knew what had happened to their daughter but refused to tell them. On Thursday, Jou's parents finally got answers to questions that have haunted them. Burgess, a convicted sex offender, had pleaded guilty earlier this week to involuntary manslaughter and to concealing Jou's body.

Attorneys for three men convicted in Orange County 4 1/2 years ago of sexually assaulting an apparently unconscious 16-year-old girl while videotaping the incident asked a state appeals court Wednesday to toss out the convictions. Two of the attorneys said evidence excluded from the trial might have given jurors a different view of whether the defendants, all of them 17 when the assault occurred in 2002, had reason to believe the girl would have consented to the sexual acts. It also could have given jurors a different picture of the victim and her credibility, attorneys Dennis Fischer and Brett Harding Duxbury said.

Many have weighed in on Barack Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation during the presidential inauguration. But what has interested me most isn't so much the controversy about the Lake Forest pastor and his homophobic thinking, but rather the pride I feel in his ascendancy to such a prominent stage. To have a local boy help out our president-elect tells me that Orange County Christianity has made it, and it's about time.

A federal consumer safety agency launched an investigation Thursday into this week's accidental death of an Orange County child caught in a washing machine. Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, said investigators will examine the front-loading washer to determine if the design poses a safety risk.

Two years ago, Calgary real estate executive Ryan Alexander Jenkins was sentenced to 15 months' probation and ordered to complete domestic violence counseling after hitting his then-girlfriend. But Jenkins came to Los Angeles and was selected as a contestant on the VH1 reality show "Megan Wants a Millionaire," on which wealthy men compete for the love of a young woman. Now Jenkins is wanted in the slaying of his ex-wife, model Jasmine Fiore, and "Megan Wants a Millionaire" has been abruptly pulled off the air by VH1. The case raises questions about how a man with a record of domestic violence got onto a show on which the object is to marry a woman.

A doctor who treated AIDS patients admitted to watering down medications and pleaded guilty to fraud charges, the U.S. attorney's office announced Thursday. Dr. George Steven Kooshian, who practiced in Orange and Los Angeles counties, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Santa Ana federal court to a total of four counts of billing fraud and making false healthcare statements. The charges stem from Kooshian's treatment of two patients in 2000.

A man who reportedly advertised cures for cancer, AIDS and peanut allergies has been arrested on suspicion of pretending to be a medical doctor, the Orange County district attorney's office said. Daryn Wayne Peterson, 37, was charged with unauthorized practice of medicine, operating a healthcare service without a license, treating cancer without a license, offering an unapproved drug for cancer treatment and misrepresenting himself as a licensed medical practitioner. The charges, according to prosecutors, stem from an Orange County Register newspaper article that profiled Peterson and those who sought treatment from him. In the course of the district attorney's probe, an undercover investigator was sent to Peterson to pose as a cancer patient scared of chemotherapy.

Zov Karamardian started her popular Orange County restaurant, Zov's Bistro, as mostly a takeout restaurant with four tables, three employees and one of the few female chefs in the county. Now 22 years later, with a staff of 200 and a 13,000-square-foot operation, Karamardian is championing the first Orange County Restaurant Week, running Sunday through Feb. 28 at more than 75 neighborhood cafes, fine-dining rooms and luxury hotels countywide.

Orange County is experiencing a rise in swine flu cases -- a third of its 12 reported deaths were in the last two weeks -- a trend that mirrors much of the state. The virus has become so widespread that officials are stepping away from tracking individual cases, instead mustering resources to deal with the illness. As of July 16, health officials throughout the state stopped monitoring individuals who contract the H1N1 virus because doing so was sapping too many resources.