Woman held captive in Nordstrom Rack raped 'multiple times'

Prosecutors said one of the five people charged in connection with the take-over robbery at a Nordstrom Rack department store in Westchester raped one of the female hostages.

Prosecutors offered no details. But a district attorney's office spokeswoman said the victim was sexually assaulted "multiple times."

Five charged in Nordstrom Rack take-over robbery

Raymond Sherman Jr., 34, who authorities said was the most violent in the group, was charged with two counts of forcible rape, one count of oral copulation, one count of kidnapping for rape, one count of assault with a deadly weapon and 14 counts of second-degree robbery.

Troy Marsay Hammock, 29, and Everett Oneal Allen, 24, face 14 counts each of second-degree robbery and one count each of assault with a deadly weapon, identified as a knife, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.

Rochelle Monique Sherman, 33; and Paula Roneshia Bradley, 29, were charged with one count each of accessory after the fact.

The complaint also alleges Sherman, who is awaiting extradition from Phoenix, where he was arrested Saturday, used a handgun in the commission of the crimes.

Police have not detailed the roles of the suspects in the robbery and hostage situation. But those in law enforcement familiar with the investigation said there is strong evidence linking the crimes to those charged, including physical evidence and security video.

The incident began about 11 p.m. Thursday at the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center, near the 405 Freeway. Sherman, Hammock and Allen allegedly confronted the employees as they were leaving the store, which had just closed.

As the incident was unfolding, one of the employees called her husband and told him to call 911. The LAPD called a tactical alert and closed off the area around the shopping center. When the police department's SWAT officers arrived, they surrounded the store.

At one point, one of the suspected burglars exited, saw the police and ran back inside. A second suspected burglar walked out with an unidentified woman, saw police and also headed back inside. The officers entered the store at 3:30 a.m. and freed the captives.

At least three of the employees were injured, including at least one woman who was sexually assaulted. Another woman was stabbed in the neck and sustained non-life-threatening injuries, and a third employee was pistol-whipped, police said. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck praised the employees for their bravery and composure.

Beck would not discuss whether the robbers hid in the store or gained entrance after it closed. Nor would he say how long they remained in the store before fleeing in a white SUV, or discuss how much cash was taken in the robbery.

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Video: Discovery of the Spider That Builds Spider Decoys

In December, we reported on a new species of spider discovered in Peru. Tiny, and likely a new member of the genus Cyclosa, the spider builds large, spider-shaped decoys — and vibrates its web, acting as a master puppeteer.

Here is a video shot at the moment the spiders were discovered.

“I don’t know of any potential species discovery that has been caught on video to the same level that this one has been,” said the videographer who goes by Destin, who was accompanying biologist Phil Torres in the Peruvian Amazon. “It’s fun to go back and watch the video because it reminds me of how confused and perplexed we were.”

Indeed, the captured moment of discovery includes the following exchange:

“It’s a tiny spider disguised as a big spider!”

“Shut up.”

Video: Destin of Smarter Every Day/YouTube

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Cotillard named Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Academy Award-winning actress Marion Cotillard (koh-tee-YAR’) has been named the 2013 Harvard University Hasty Pudding Theatricals Woman of the Year.

The French actress, who won the 2007 best actress Oscar for her role in “La Vie En Rose,” will be honored with a parade and roast, and given her ceremonial pudding pot, at Harvard on Jan. 31.

The 37-year-old Cotillard has appeared more recently in “Inception,” ”Contagion” and “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Claire Danes was the woman of the year last year.

The man of the year will be announced at a later date and honored on Feb. 8.

Hasty Pudding Theatricals is the nation’s oldest undergraduate drama troupe. The awards are presented annually to performers who have made a lasting and impressive contribution to entertainment.

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Well: Ask Well: Do I Need a Flu Shot if I've Had the Flu?

First, how do you know you had the flu? There are more than 100 viruses that can cause “colds and flu” symptoms — though a bad flu is worse than most of them. Doctors often describe it as “high fever, aches and the feeling that you’ve been hit by a truck.” The country is having an early flu season, plus a big wave of norovirus (sometimes called “stomach flu” or “winter vomiting flu”), plus its worst whooping cough outbreak in 50 years, plus the usual spate of winter colds. Unless a doctor took a nasal swab, you can’t be sure that what you had was flu — and unless it was sent on to a top state laboratory or to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab for sequencing (which is not routine), even your doctor wouldn’t be able to say for sure exactly which flu virus it was.

Second, even if you had the flu, you presumably had only one strain, which you now have antibodies against. There are at least four strains circulating this year: H3N2, H1N1, and two different B strains. The flu shot contains vaccines against three of them (it only has one of the B’s). By next year, some flu shots will have four vaccines. So a shot would still offer protection against flus you have not had. I suppose your chances of getting flu twice in one season aren’t huge — but some people just get unlucky. And if you have any reason to particularly fear flu, like a depressed immune system, serious obesity or diabetes, or if you are pregnant, you should definitely talk to a medical professional about this.

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Deepening Crisis for the Dreamliner

Noboru Tomura/Asahi Shimbun, via Associated Press

An All Nippon Airways flight in Takamatsu, Japan, after an emergency landing on Wednesday.

TOKYO — The two largest Japanese airlines said Wednesday that they would ground their fleets of Boeing 787 aircraft after one operated by All Nippon Airways made an emergency landing in western Japan.

The latest episode elevates the safety concerns about Boeing’s new flagship airliner.

The emergency landing followed a string of problems in the past month with the Boeing 787, known as the Dreamliner, including a battery fire, fuel leaks and a cracked cockpit window. All Nippon said the problems Wednesday involved the same lithium-ion batteries that caught fire last week in Boston on a Dreamliner operated by Japan Airlines.

Last week, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration ordered a comprehensive review of the Dreamliner’s manufacturing and design, with a focus on the plane’s electrical systems. During a news conference last Thursday, the U.S. transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, made no mention of grounding Dreamliners. But if the problems continue, tougher measures could presumably be taken.

Boeing executives declined to comment Wednesday on the Japanese groundings. The company’s shares were down 3.7 percent in afternoon trading Wednesday in New York.

Eight airlines now fly the Dreamliner. All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines in Japan own 24 of the 50 delivered by Boeing since November 2011. The other operators are Air India, Ethiopian Airlines, LAN Airlines of Chile, LOT of Poland, Qatar Airways and United Airlines of the United States. Orders for about 800 additional 787s are in the pipeline.

In the episode in Japan early Wednesday, the 137 passengers and crew members aboard Flight NH692 from Yamaguchi Ube Airport, in western Japan, to Tokyo used emergency slides to leave the aircraft early after battery trouble and an “unusual smell” in the cockpit prompted its pilots to land instead at Takamatsu airport, according to All Nippon. The jet’s main battery in the front of the plane was later found to have become discolored and to be seeping electrolyte fluid, All Nippon said.

Ryosei Nomura, a spokesman for All Nippon, said Wednesday that the airline was temporarily grounding all 17 of its Dreamliners for inspections, leading to the cancellation of 38 domestic and international flights. Japan Airlines also said it would ground the five Dreamliners it was operating; two other aircraft were already undergoing safety checks.

Akihiro Ota, the Japanese transportation minister, said that the emergency landing had raised concerns about the Dreamliner’s safety and that he would dispatch officials to investigate. “I see this as a serious incident which could have led to a serious accident,” Mr. Ota said in Tokyo.

All Nippon and Japan Airlines said the planes would return to the air after safety checks, although it was unclear how soon that might be. All Nippon said it would keep its Dreamliner fleet grounded Thursday, canceling 35 domestic flights and using other types of aircraft for its international routes.

The review by the U.S. aviation administration is unusual, just 15 months after the plane entered service following a lengthy certification process by the agency. That review is in addition to a formal investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board of what caused a battery fire on a Japan Airlines plane that flew to Boston from Tokyo last week.

The safety board said Wednesday it was “currently in the process of gathering information about the B-787 emergency landing in Japan earlier today.”

Boeing has sought to ease concerns about the plane’s design and reliability, and has said it is no more trouble-prone than other new commercial airplane programs.

Updesh Kapur, a spokesman for Qatar Airways, affirmed on Wednesday the airline’s view that the Dreamliner was safe but declined to comment on the decisions by the Japanese carriers. Qatar Airways operates three Dreamliners and has orders and purchase options for 57 more.

Last week, Akbar Al Baker, the Qatar Airways chief executive, played down the recent string of Dreamliner incidents as “teething issues with various components” and expressed confidence that Boeing would resolve any problems. He added that his airline was taking “every precaution” to ensure its fleet was safe to fly.

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L.A. City Council drops $3-billion bond measure for this year

The Los Angeles City Council scrapped plans Tuesday for placing a $3-billion bond measure on the May 21 ballot, opting instead to consider it in a future election year.

Councilmen Mitchell Englander and Joe Buscaino, who had proposed the bond, said they would spend more time communicating with the public about the proposal before trying to send it to voters. "We're going to continue working on this, obviously," said Buscaino, whose district stretches from San Pedro to Watts.

The proposal, which would have increased property taxes for 20 years, had signatures from seven of the council's 15 members only two weeks ago. But in recent days, some on the council complained there hadn’t been enough outreach to the public.

Some neighborhood activists had warned that a protracted debate over the bond measure would doom passage of a proposed half-cent sales tax hike, which is on the March 5 ballot and being promoted as a way to eliminate potholes. The sales tax, known as Proposition A, is seen as a way of erasing a $220-million budget shortfall.

The search for street repair money is being driven, in part, by a fear that major sources of funding for road work are disappearing. Money from Proposition 1B, a state measure that provided $87 million for streets over a three-year period, runs out in June. Funding from President Obama’s stimulus package was depleted in summer.

A 2011 survey found that nearly one-third of the city’s streets are in D or F condition, the worst rating possible. With the current funding available, repairing those streets will take 60 years, city officials said.

The general fund, which pays for basic services, provides less than 1% of the money allocated by the city for street maintenance and repairs. Nevertheless, city officials have managed to increase the amount it spends on road work anyway, by tapping state and federal funding and special transportation taxes.

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Facebook's Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search

Beast had a birthday last week. The First Dog of social networking — live-in companion to Mark Zuckerberg and his bride, Priscilla Chan — turned two. The proud owners baked a cake for the Hungarian sheepdog and decided to throw an impromptu party. Naturally, when it came time to compile the guest list, the couple turned to Facebook, the $67 billion company that Zuckerberg founded in his dorm room nine years ago.

To date, sorting through your Facebook friends could be a frustrating task. Although the site has a search bar, there has been no easy way to quickly cull contacts based on specific criteria. But Zuckerberg was testing a major new feature that Facebook would announce on Jan. 15 — one that promises to transform its user experience, threaten its competitors, and torment privacy activists. It’s called Graph Search, and it will eventually allow a billion people to dive into the vast trove of stored information about them and their network of friends. In Zuckerberg’s case, it allowed him to type “Friends of Priscilla and me who live around Palo Alto” and promptly receive a list of potential celebrants. “We invited five people over who were obvious dog lovers,” he says.

For years now, Facebook watchers have wondered when the company would unleash the potential of its underpowered search bar. (Nobody has feared this day more than Google, which suddenly faces a competitor able to index tons of data that Google’s own search engine can’t access.) They have also wondered how a Facebook search product might work. Now we know. Graph Search is fundamentally different from web search. Instead of a Google-like effort to help users find answers from a stitched-together corpus of all the world’s information, Facebook is helping them tap its vast, monolithic database to make better use of their “social graph,” the term Zuckerberg uses to describe the network of one’s relationships with friends, acquaintances, favorite celebrities, and preferred brands.

In the weeks leading up to the launch, Facebook executives were still trying to come up with a name for the new product. They were hoping to stay away from the word “search,” to distinguish it from web search. (Only a few days before the launch, one Facebook executive slipped and referred to it as “browse.”) But after hours of contortionism, they relented; nothing topped Graph Search. “It’s descriptive — it’s search,” Zuckerberg says. “And the graph is a big thing.” The idea is that Facebook’s new offering will be able to extract meaning from the social graph in much the same way that Google’s original search unearthed the hidden treasures of the web. “People use search engines to answer questions,” Zuckerberg says. “But we can answer a set of questions that no one else can really answer. All those other services are indexing primarily public information, and stuff in Facebook isn’t out there in the world — it’s stuff that people share. There’s no real way to cut through the contents of what people are sharing, to fulfill big human needs about discovery, to find people you wouldn’t otherwise be connected with. And we thought we should do something about that. We’re the only service in the world that can do that.”

The result is surprisingly compelling. The mark of a transformative product is that it gets you to do more of something that you wouldn’t think to do on your own. Thanks to Graph Search, people will almost certainly use Facebook in entirely new ways: to seek out dates, recruit for job openings, find buddies to go out with on short notice, and look for new restaurants and other businesses. Most strikingly, it expands Facebook’s core mission — not just obsessively connecting users with people they already know, but becoming a vehicle of discovery.

Zuckerberg says that this is in fact a return to the company’s roots. “When I first made Facebook, we actually offered some functionality that was like this but only for your college,” he says. “Facebook then was arguably as much for meeting new people around you and exploring your community as it was for keeping in touch with the people you already knew. But it was such a hard problem to do it for more than a few thousand people at a time. We transitioned from connecting with whoever you wanted to primarily staying with people you already knew. But Graph Search is like the grown-up version of that discovery aspect. Exploring your community is a core human need, and this is the first big step we’re taking in that direction.”

The first of many steps, that is. Graph Search will be improved based on how people actually use it. So Facebook plans a slow introduction, limiting the initial rollout to a small number of users. Zuckerberg’s expectation is that by the time it becomes available to millions it will be considerably improved.

For example, he thinks he can make it easier to find invitees for a canine birthday party. “We don’t have the ‘who has dogs’ field yet,” Zuckerberg says.

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Netflix to carry more Time Warner shows

(Reuters) – Netflix Inc will carry more shows from Time Warner Inc, intensifying efforts by the video streaming company to attract more subscribers and beat back competition.

Netflix signed licensing deals with Warner Bros Television (WBTVG) and Turner Broadcasting System Inc for previous seasons of shows from Cartoon Network, Warner Bros Animation and Adult Swim for U.S. subscribers.

Shows such as Cartoon Network’s “Adventure Time”, “Ben 10″ and “Johnny Bravo”, and WBTVG’s “Childrens Hospital” will be available from March 30.

Adult Swim shows “Robot Chicken”, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, and Sony Pictures Television‘s “The Boondocks” will also be available on Netflix.

The first two seasons of Warner Horizon Television-produced TNT series “Dallas” will be exclusively available on Netflix in January 2014.

Netflix said last week that it would carry previous seasons of popular shows such as “Revolution” and “Political Animals” produced by Warner Bros Television.

It also won a deal in December to stream movies from Walt Disney Co’s live action and animation studios, including those from Pixar, Marvel, and the recently acquired Lucasfilms.

Netflix shares were trading up 3 percent at $ 103.92 on Monday afternoon on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore; Editing by Roshni Menon)

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Vital Signs: Nutrition: Vitamin D Doesn’t Reduce Knee Pain

About 27 million people in the United States have osteoarthritis, an incurable condition with few effective treatments beyond pain control. Some observational evidence suggests that vitamin D supplements might slow progression of the disease.

But a two-year randomized placebo-controlled study found that vitamin D did not reduce knee pain or restore cartilage.

In an article published in The Journal of the American Medical Association last week, researchers described a study of 146 men and women with painful knee arthritis who were randomly assigned to take vitamin D supplements or placebos. Vitamin D was given in quantities sufficient to raise blood levels to 36 nanograms per milliliter, a level considered sufficient for good health.

Knee pain decreased slightly in both groups, but there were no differences in the amount of cartilage lost, bone mineral density or joint deterioration as measured by X-rays and M.R.I. scans.

The lead author, Dr. Timothy McAlindon, chief of the division of rheumatology at Tufts Medical Center, said taking vitamin D in higher doses or for longer periods might make a difference, but he’s not hopeful.

“Although there were lots of promising observational data, we find no efficacy of vitamin D for knee osteoarthritis,” he said. “There may be reasons to take vitamin D supplements, but knee osteoarthritis is not one of them.”

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Euro Watch: German Economy Shrank in Fourth Quarter

FRANKFURT — The economic stagnation in Europe has taken a significant toll on Germany, with government figures released Tuesday showing that the Continent’s flagship economy contracted in the fourth quarter of last year.

Ina Fassbender/Reuters

A ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Bruckhausen, Germany. Economists expect the German economy to resume growth quickly this year.

The Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden estimated that the German economy shrank about 0.5 percent in the final three months of 2012, compared with the previous three months. The decline was largely the result of sagging investment by German managers worried about the future of the euro zone.

And despite reassurances from economists that growth would bounce back quickly in Germany, the data underlined how closely the country’s fate remained tied to its ailing euro zone allies.

“This idea that Germany is a powerhouse dragging the rest of Europe along with it is a bit of a myth, to be honest,” said Philip Whyte, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London. “You have a very weak periphery, and a core which is not as strong as everyone seems to believe.”

Throughout the European debt crisis Germany has managed to float above the bad news, enjoying record employment, rock-bottom borrowing costs and export-led growth that kept chugging in spite of the cloud hanging over the euro zone. But Germany’s European partners are also among its biggest customers, leaving it vulnerable to the Continent-wide slowdown made worse by the very austerity policies championed by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Portugal’s central bank on Tuesday cut its economic forecast for this year, saying the economy would contract more steeply than expected. France has probably missed its target for reducing the budget deficit, according to data published Tuesday, raising the prospects of deeper spending cuts and additional taxes. Meanwhile, elections pending in Italy next month have ground that country’s drive toward economic overhauls to a halt.

“The longer the euro crisis lasts, the more difficult the situation becomes for Germany,” said Stefan Kooths, an economist at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. “We have always said Germany is not a Teflon economy.”

The German government is scheduled to release its report on the economy Wednesday and will forecast growth of 0.5 percent this year, the Handelsblatt newspaper reported, saying it had obtained a copy of the document. In the context of the euro zone as a whole, which is in recession with record unemployment, any growth is considered positive.

But most forecasts are based on the assumption that financial markets will remain calm. If anything were to shake investor confidence in the euro zone, like political turmoil in Italy or Greece, the weak growth rate would mean that Germany would not have much of a cushion against recession.

France is en route to missing its deficit reduction target this year, according to preliminary data released Tuesday by the French government. Although the government aimed for a deficit of 4.5 percent of gross domestic product, data for November suggest the shortfall will be 4.8 percent, ING Bank estimated.

That means the French president, François Hollande, would have to find an additional €5 billion, or $6.7 billion, in revenue to meet the 2013 budget target, and could risk another downgrade of the country’s credit rating.

The data also indicate the challenge of keeping France’s overall level of debt from rising beyond its current level, which is already above 90 percent of G.D.P.

“Today’s figures underline how difficult the task will remain for François Hollande to keep the debt below 100 percent of G.D.P. during his mandate, and France’s rank in the core of the euro zone,” Julien Manceaux, an economist at ING, wrote in a note.

German public finances contrast with those of France. Together, German federal, state and local governments recorded a budget surplus for the year equal to 0.1 percent of G.D.P, the statistical agency in Wiesbaden said. That is the first government surplus since 2007, and it creates leeway for Ms. Merkel to stimulate the economy with public spending if the downturn is worse than expected.

The fiscal strength in Germany underscores the inequities within the euro currency union. Already, the government has been expanding a program that encourages companies to cut worker hours rather than eliminate jobs. The so-called short work program uses government money to compensate employees for some of the wages they lose by putting in fewer hours.

Within the region, Germany has served as a crucial counterweight to the struggling economies of Southern Europe, and helped to stabilize the euro zone as a whole.

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