Featured Articles from the Daily Pilot

With an $18-million renovation of the Pacific Amphitheatre planned over the next few years at the Orange County Fairgrounds, the public is getting a chance to learn about the first phase this week at an open house. Scheduled from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the fairground's administration building off Arlington Drive, Fair Board members will be on hand to meet and answer questions from the public. The board approved the first phase of the project, a $4.5 million improvement, late last year.

The Airborne Law Enforcement agency has tapped two private brokers to sell off what remains of the former police helicopter program. Jack Schafer Aircraft Sales will likely be the first to get a crack at selling ABLE's three police choppers, which were grounded in July after the Costa Mesa City Council voted to stop funding its half of the agency that it shared with Newport Beach. Newport quickly followed suit, and ever since the program, which had a run of 30-plus years, has been slowly shutting down.

NEWPORT BEACH — Sitting on an oversized plush chair in baseball legend Chuck Finley's Newport Beach home, actress Tawny Kitaen seems to be in a much different place than she was eight years ago. A soccer goal is visible in the backyard, and her daughter's art covers the refrigerator in the family home. Her adopted dog, Woody, nuzzles Kitaen as she talks about a new off-camera passion: helping others. A volunteer at Kathy's House, a shelter for at-risk women in San Juan Capistrano, and a member of the board of directors at Testimony Life Resources, an alternative counseling center, Kitaen appears to be a far cry from her role as the eccentric star of "The Surreal Life," or the woman battling a dependency on prescription pills on "Celebrity Rehab.

The wife of Lakers guard Kobe Bryant will keep the couple's three Newport Coast homes as part of their estimated $75 million divorce settlement, according to public records reviewed Friday. Property records on file at the Orange County Clerk-Recorder's Office in Santa Ana show that all three homes, valued at $18.8 million total, were transferred into Vanessa Bryant's name since their divorce proceedings began in December. While the home transfers indicate that the couple has worked out a settlement, the divorce is not yet official, according to records reviewed at theOrange County Superior Court'sfamily law branch in Orange.

A Santa Ana man who jumped to his death from a UC Irvine parking structure has been identified by the county coroner. Andy Chau, 18, jumped from the seventh level of the Social Sciences Parking Structure shortly after midnight Sunday, according to the coroner. Chau died at the scene, according to Supervising Deputy Coroner Daniel Aikin. Chau, a freshman at UC San Diego, was visiting a friend at UCI, said campus spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon. Counseling services were offered for the students who discovered Chau's body, but they were declined, Lawhon said.

"He would watch you without winking/And he saw what you were thinking/And it's certain that he didn't approve/Of hilarity and riot/So that folk were very quiet/When Skimble was about and on the move. " — "Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat" * Now in its 31st year, Andrew Lloyd Webber's hit musical "CATS" has seen more than its share of nine lives. Performed across several continents, "CATS" got its start when Lloyd Webber picked up a copy of T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" in an airport bookshop.

SANTA ANA — Family and friends of a slain Newport Beach businessman cried and hugged in a courtroom here Monday when the second of two killers was convicted of murder. Following almost four hours of deliberations, a jury of nine women and three men convicted Nanette Packard-McNeal, 46, of murder for financial gain in the 1994 shooting of her then-boyfriend, Bill McLaughlin. Eric Naposki, a former NFL player, was convicted last summer of pulling the trigger. While Packard-McNeal was with McLaughlin, she was also dating Naposki on the side.

COSTA MESA — To the crashing of cymbals and beating of drums, a brilliantly adorned troupe of Lion Dancers at South Coast Plaza on Thursday heralded the arrival of the Year of the Dragon. The shopping center was kicking off its 13-day celebration of the Lunar New Year. A 40-foot red paper dragon coiled itself in the two-story space around Jewel Court, and a ring of holiday greetings from the balcony above proclaimed "Happy New Year" in English and the languages of four Asian countries marking the occasion: China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.

SANTA ANA — Jury deliberations began Thursday in the case of a woman accused of conspiring with her lover to kill her wealthy boyfriend. The majority-female Orange County Superior Court jury began meeting just before 3 p.m., as attorneys finished their closing arguments in the trial of Nanette Packard-McNeal. Packard-McNeal, 46, is accused of conspiring with former NFL linebacker Eric Naposki to murder Newport Beach businessman Bill McLaughlin in December 1994. Naposki was found guilty over the summer of murdering McLaughlin, 55. Packard-McNeal's defense attorney, Mick Hill, told the court that she wasn't involved in McLaughlin's murder, and that her actions after the murder are the antithesis of someone involved in a plot to kill.

COSTA MESA — Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market is set to open its second location in the city Feb. 22. Construction is underway at Harbor Boulevard and Gisler Avenue for the newest location of the El Segundo-based grocer, whose parent company is Tesco, the British supermarket giant. The store will be similar to other Fresh & Easy locations in that it will contain a 10,000-square-foot sales floor and offer natural and high-quality products at affordable prices, said company spokesman Brendan Wonnacott.

A pre-trial hearing in the case of a Costa Mesa man accused of killing his neighbor for financial gain and trying to derail authorities by killing his neighbor's tutor has been continued to Aug. 26. Daniel Wozniak, 27, is accused of killing and dismembering Samuel Herr, 26, and Juri "Julie" Kibuishi, 23, his tutor. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case. Prosecutors allege Wozniak killed Herr, who served the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan, and lured Kibuishi to Herr's Costa Mesa apartment, killing her there in an effort to frame Herr, according to a statement released by the district attorney's office.

Hoag Hospital announced plans Tuesday to lay off about 175 employees. Accounting for about 3.5% of its 5,000-person workforce, the cuts will affect its hospitals in Newport Beach and Irvine as well as its network of health-care centers, according to Nina Robinson, vice president of corporate communications. The layoffs were a result of "the weak economy, high unemployment" and insurance payment changes, according to a written statement. None of the hospital's 1,400 physicians will be affected.