A 50-year-old troubled-youth ranch is getting a $27 million upgrade, about half funded by a state grant and the rest by Santa Clara County.

The year 2013 will be remembered for its political turmoil, local and nationwide. A former county supervisor went to jail and the spotlight subsequently landed on his political buddy, a San Jose councilman. The Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to get married, and the president lied to the nation about domestic spying. San Jose Inside runs down the list of stories that caught our attention this year.

For the last several months, a fight with multi-million dollar implications has quietly been waged over fire safety requirements in San Jose’s tallest buildings. The clash—featuring a tangled array of alliances between elected officials, developers, lobbyists, a monopolistic breathing device manufacturer, a union spurned and an ambivalent fire department—will come to a head Thursday afternoon, when the Public Safety, Finance & Strategic Support Committee meets to discuss the city’s tri-annual review of its fire and building codes.

Almost three weeks afterKTVU afternoon anchor Tori Campbell read fake, racist names while reporting on the July 6 Asiana flight 214 crash, the news station is still cleaning up its mess. The station confirmed Wednesday that it has fired at least three longtime producers over the on-air gaffe, which went viral a few seconds after Campbell stopped talking. But in an effort to erase any video evidence of the blunder, KTVU has also begun using copyright law to demand that YouTube remove videos of its anchor’s mistake.

Why wait for “Anchorman 2” to hit theaters when we can just tune in to KTVU’s coverage of the Asiana flight 214 crash? Proving some newscasters will literally say anything put on a teleprompter, Channel 2’s afternoon anchor Tori Campbell read four obviously fake—and blatantly racist— names that supposedly belonged to the pilots of the Boeing 777 that crashed while attempting to land at San Francisco’s airport on July 6.