News

Four men were arrested early Tuesday morning following a high-speed car chase that started in Watsonville. California Highway Patrol officer Sam Courtney said the ordeal began when a CHP officer tried to pull over a black 2017 Hyundai Tucson on southbound Highway 1 north of...

SANTA CRUZ—UC Santa Cruz police are investigating a rape that occurred during a party late Friday night in a forest in the Upper Campus area. According to police, the female victim’s friends found her passed out around midnight after a large party, and brought her...

An upbeat ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Pajaro Valley Prevention and Student Assistance headquarters at the corner of East Lake and Brewington avenues unfolded under sunny skies Thursday in Watsonville. The new facility is an expansion of PVPSA, a local nonprofit that aims...

This home at 20 9th St. in Watsonville is boarded up early Wednesday morning after fire tore through the living room.

WATSONVILLE—Since the outbreak of Covid-19, Second Harvest Food Bank Santa Cruz County has been distributing almost twice as much food to local families than usual. As such, the organization’s parking lot is now full of distribution and refrigeration trucks, forklifts and storage containers. Staff, volunteers...

The Watsonville City Council on Tuesday voted to end public comment via Zoom at its meetings, a decision spurred by two racist 'zoom bomb' calls made anonymously on Oct. 24. The city of Capitola also experienced so-called “Zoom-bombs” around the same time. In the calls, both...

A local group is calling on the nation’s largest berry grower to cease the use of pesticides on farm fields located near schools. The Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture (CORA) will hold a press conference and community gathering on May 21 to ask Driscoll’s...

WATSONVILLE—Vanessa Quiroz-Carter leads Frank Barba in the race for the vacant District 2 Watsonville City Council seat. Unofficial results released by the Santa Cruz County elections department at 8:57pm on Tuesday night showed Quiroz-Carter had a 59-vote lead on Barba.  Only 339 votes had been counted...

The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a plan to use money from a recent successful lawsuit against the opioid industry to fund programs that will help people addicted to opioid-based drugs. In all, the county expects to receive $26 million over...

WATSONVILLE—In the span of less than a week, Dignity Health-Dominican Hospital was able to set up a mass Covid-19 vaccination clinic on the outskirts of Watsonville to inoculate 1,000 people in the agriculture industry. Dignity Health’s parent corporation, CommonSpirit, said it would have 2,000 extra...