NEWPORT BEACH City prepares to celebrate 100...

NEWPORT BEACH

City prepares to

celebrate 100 years

Planning is underway for the city’s centennial celebration --

officially, the city’s birthday is Sept. 1, 2006, but some are hoping

for a year of events -- but the proposed budget hasn’t put the City

Council in a festive mood. The council on Tuesday committed $175,700

to centennial plans in the current fiscal year but declined to set

aside $525,700 in next year’s budget, which won’t be adopted until

June.

The estimated price tag for a beach party, family carnival, Rose

Parade float and other trappings is $890,000 but private fundraising

is expected to offset all but $200,000 of that. However, the money

will funnel through city accounts, so the council would have to put a

“placeholder” amount in the budget to receive and disburse the

funding.

EDUCATION

District moves to

ban R-rated movies

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District last week adopted a

policy forbidding the screening of R-rated movies in classrooms,

following controversy over a violent film shown in a seventh-grade

history class last week.

Jaime Castellanos, the assistant superintendent of secondary

education for the district, said that on Monday, the district agreed

to ban all R-rated films from classrooms and to allow PG and PG-13

movies only with prior approval from the site principals. Numerous

parents complained after Corona del Mar High teacher Dan Granite

screened the R-rated film “The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc”

last Wednesday.

* Jeff Sheng, a master of fine arts candidate in studio art at UC

Irvine, was one of 30 students chosen this year for the Paul and

Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Sheng, 24, who was born to Taiwanese parents and lives in Thousand

Oaks, has published photographs in Out magazine, the New York Times

Magazine and the Boston Globe. He received his bachelor’s degree,

magna cum laude, from Harvard University and also spent a year on a

Harvard-Yenching Fellowship at Peking University in China.

ENVIRONMENT

Stay away from

the river mouth

Ocean bacteria levels that spiked during recent rainstorms have

begun to fall to normal levels, with the exception of the waters near

the Santa Ana River mouth.

“Pretty much the whole area’s recovered, except for the area

around the Santa Ana River because Prado [Dam is] still discharging,”

Orange County Health Care Agency spokeswoman Monica Mazur said.

Prado Dam, west of Corona, is about 30 miles upstream from the

ocean. Water from the dam has flowed down the river channel to the

ocean since the January storms, picking up litter and debris along

the way, Mazur said.

* The Newport Beach City Council approved a deal last week to pay

slightly less than $90,000 to Todd Engineers, an Emeryville company

that specializes in groundwater analysis, to study pollutants in Buck

Gully.

The study will focus on water that ends up in the gully as well as

nearby Morning Canyon and in three creeks near Pelican Point. Results

could be available by October, said Robert Stein of the city’s Public

Works Department.

PUBLIC SAFETY

Defense rests in Haidl trial

Defense attorneys this week rested their case in the trial of

three men accused of gang-raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl when

they were teenagers.

Kyle Nachreiner and Keith Spann, both now 20, and Greg Haidl, the

19-year-old son of a former sheriff’s department official, are

accused of gang-raping the girl at a July 2002 party after she passed

out from drinking too much alcohol. Five former friends testified

this week in a defense attempt to discredit the alleged victim, and a

neurologist testified that in a videotape the defendants made of the

incident, the girl appeared conscious enough to have told them “no.”

Closing arguments are expected to take place Wednesday.

* A fourth man now is charged in connection with the disappearance

and presumed murder of a retired couple who had been living on their

yacht in Newport Harbor.

Newport Beach and Long Beach police on Thursday arrested Long

Beach resident John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 39, on double murder charges

for the deaths of Tom and Jackie Hawks, who disappeared in November.

Prosecutors have already charged Pico Rivera resident Alonso Machain

and Long Beach residents Skylar DeLeon and Myron Gardner with murder.

* Prosecutors opened their case Thursday against a Corona del Mar

woman accused of molesting a teenage girl. Victoria Hawlish, 41, is

charged with five counts of committing lewd acts upon a child. The

alleged victim lived with the defendant over the summer of 2003.

Jurors listened to testimony from the alleged victim and her mother.

The alleged victim, who said Hawlish would watch her undress, is

scheduled to return to the stand on Monday.