Blizzard begins to slam Northeast

A blizzard blew into the northeastern United States on Friday, cutting short the workweek for millions who feared being stranded as state officials ordered roads closed ahead of what forecasters said could be record-setting snowfall.

Authorities scrambled to prepare for the storm, which had already resulted in a massive traffic pile-up in southern Maine and prompted organizers of the nation's sledding championship in Maine to postpone a race scheduled for Saturday, fearing too much snow for the competition.

From New York to Maine, the storm began gently, dropping a light dusting of snow, but officials urged residents to stay home, rather than risk getting stuck in deep drifts when the storm kicks up later Friday afternoon.

Even in its early stages, the storm created some panic. Drivers lined up at gas stations to top off their tanks, grocery stores were swamped as shoppers stocked up on bread and milk, and travelers were forced to confront flight delays and cancellations.

With the worst of the storm yet to come, the governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut declared states of emergency and issued bans on driving by early Friday afternoon.

“The rate of snowfall and reduced visibility during the evening rush hour in particular will make safe travel nearly impossible,” Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick told reporters.

The early edge of the storm led to a 19-vehicle pile-up in southern Maine, snarling traffic on a major interstate highway north of Portland. No major injuries were reported. A smaller accident briefly closed an interstate near Bolton, Vermont.

“It was close to whiteout conditions, it's sort of a precursor of what's coming later,” said Stephen McCausland, a spokesman for the Maine State Police.

Officials across the region closed schools and more than 3,000 flights were canceled. Several thousand customers lost power in New Jersey and points south, though officials warned the number was likely to rise as the snowfall got heavier and winds picked up.

Governors and mayors ordered nonessential government workers to stay home, urged private employers to do the same, told people to prepare for power outages and encouraged them to check on elderly or disabled neighbors.

The light snow falling across much of New England on Friday morning was a taste of the weather to come, said Jerry Paul, senior meteorologist with Weather Insight, a unit of Thomson Reuters.

“That's going to be gradually building today as time goes on,” Paul said.

A wide swath of New England, including northeastern Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, and the Boston area, will likely see 24 inches to 30 inches (60 centimeters to 76 centimeters) of snow, with some areas seeing more than three feet (one meter) by the time the storm ends on Saturday morning, Paul added.

At the storm's peak, winds could gust up to 65 miles per hour (105 kilometers per hour), he said.

Boston's record snowfall, 27.6 inches (70.1 cm), came in 2003.

CHEERING ON STORM

Organizers of the country's championship sledding race, that had been scheduled to get underway in Camden, Maine, on Saturday, postponed the event by one day.

“As soon as the weather clears on Saturday and it is safe, the toboggan committee will be out at Tobagganville cleaning up the chute as quickly as they can,” said Holly Edwards, chairman of the U.S. National Toboggan Championships. “It needs to be shoveled out by hand.”

Some 400 teams were registered for the race, which features costumed sledders on a 400-foot (121 meter) chute.

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McDonald's January sales down 1.9%

McDonald's January comparable sales fell 1.9 percent, due to weakness in the Europe and Asia, the company said Friday. 

The Oak Brook-based burger giant warned during its fourth-quarter earnings release that sales at restaurants open more than one year would be down. But analysts polled by Consensus Metrix had expected a decline of 1.1 percent.

Shares rose nearly 1 percent in morning trading, to $95.38.

Of greatest concern to Wall Street, same store sales in Europe declined to 2.1 percent. The company cited particular weakness in Germany and France despite solid growth in the U.K and Russia. Europe is the chain's largest market.

Comparable sales fell 9.5 percent in McDonald's Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa division, for which the chain cited weakness in Japan, and declines in China, attributable to a calendar shift in the Chinese New Year, and the ongoing fallout from a poultry crisis.

In the U.S., comparable sales rose 0.9 percent. McDonald's cited popularity of its core menu and moving the grilled onion and cheddar burger onto the Dollar Menu.

Total sales rose in January 0.3 percent, or 0.7 percent adjusted for the impact of currency.

While McDonald's expects sales to improve later this year, the worst isn't over. The company said it expects a 3 percent hit to February sales as a result of a shorter month in 2013.

"While January's results reflect today's challenging environment and difficult prior year comparisons, I am confident that our unwavering commitment to delivering an exceptional restaurant experience will enhance our brand's relevance and drive long-term results," McDonald's CEO Don Thompson said in a statement.

In a Friday research note, Janney analyst David Tarantino wrote that McDonald’s performance in the U.S. was ahead of expectations and the broader quick-service restaurant industry.

Though he expects comparable sales to be down through March, "we remain optimistic that planned initiatives can support better operating momentum after the first quarter," he said.

eyork@tribune.com | Twitter: @emilyyork

Reuters contributed to this report.

MCD data by YCharts

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Freezing rain, then snow

CAPTIONS

Weather warriors
Two ladies walk with umbrellas behind the Museum of Contemporary Art. Rain is forcasted to turn to sleet and then to snow as the day goes on. (John J. Kim, Chicago Tribune /February 7, 2013)

Staff report

12:20 p.m. CST, February 7, 2013

A freezing rain advisory had barely expired when the National Weather issued a winter storm advisory with up to 4 inches of snow expected to fall this afternoon and night.

Rain is expected to change over to snow by the middle of the afternoon "in time for the evening rush," the weather service said in the advisory.

"The threat for a period of heavy snow could result in reduced visibilities under a mile at times and rapid accumulation on area roads during the evening commute," the weather service warned.

The most snow is expected to fall north of I-88 and the North Side of Chicago, it said.

The morning commute was slickened by sleet and freezing rain across northeast Illinois, mainly along I-88 and north of the expressway, according to the weather service.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter: @chicagobreaking

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EveryBlock shuts down

Hyper local news and social media site EveryBlock.com has shut down, the company said Thursday.

"Though EveryBlock has been able to build an engaged community over the years, we're faced with the decision to wrap things up," a item on the EveryBlock.com blog said.

 The posting said Everyblock faced increasing challenges to build a profitable business. It had 10 employees.

The company was founded in 2007 by Naperville native Adrian Holovaty and acquired by MSNBC.com in 2009. NBC News acquired msnbc.com last year.

NBC News Chief Digital Officer Vivian Schiller said EveryBlock's financial losses "were considerable," although she declined to offer specific financial results.

"Hyper local is a very tough business. This isn't about anything being a failure, but more about our need to stay focused on the strengths of NBC News' digital portfolio," she added in an email.

Schiller said the company looked for various options for EveryBlock, such as a sale, but none of the options ended up being viable.

Hyperlocal sites in general have surged in popularity in recent years, but with the success came an explosion of competitors, making generating revenue extremely difficult.

"EveryBlock was among the more innovative and ambitious journalism projects at a time when journalism desperately needed innovation and ambition. RIP," Holovaty wrote Thursday in a blog post on his site Holovaty.com.

Holovaty wrote that he believes EveryBlock, founded with the help of a $1.1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was a successful attempt to push innovation in newspapers and journalism.

"It was a great site, beautifully designed and lovingly crafted. It made a difference for people, particularly in Chicago," he wrote.

Holovaty left the site in August to pursue other interests.

-- Tribune reporter Samantha Bomkamp contributed. sbomkamp@tribune.com

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License number leads cops to salon robbery suspect

The Evanston man charged with robbing nearly a dozen hair salons in Chicago, Skokie, Morton Grove, Broadview and Niles was apprehended seven hours after the last reported robbery, when a witness provided a partial license plate to authorities, police said today.

Jason Logsdon, 41, of the 900 block of Chicago Avenue in Evanston, is charged with 11 counts of felony armed robbery, according to the Cook County state's attorney's office.

“Everyone had a common goal, to get an offender off the street that was terrorizing small business owners,” said Tom Byrne, chief of detectives for the Chicago Police Department, during the news conference in Skokie.

Logsdon was taken into custody Monday in Skokie, hours after a robbery on the North Side, authorities said. He is suspected of robbing hair salons that include one in Broadview; five in Chicago; one in Morton Grove; two in Niles; and two in Skokie, authorities said.

Skokie police found that they had stopped Logsdon for two minor traffic violations within the past year, before the string of robberies occurred.

The DuPage County State’s Attorney’s office is pursuing additional charges against Logsdon in connection for two robberies in Lombard, one in Glen Ellyn and one in Bensenville, officials said.

The Cook County charges were filed after witnesses viewed line-ups at the Skokie police station, authorities said. Officials declined to discuss the type of weapon used, but said that his motive at least initially was financial.

A pattern of robberies began emerging in late December, said Brian Baker, Skokie’s commander in charge of the investigative division.

The person who owned the car that Logsdon was driving had “no knowledge that these (robberies) were occurring,” Baker said.

Baker said that Logsdon was taken from the courthouse to a hospital but he did not know why.

Logsdon was arrested after a salon in the Wicker Park neighborhood was hit. A man stole about $250 in cash from a Great Clips salon in the 1200 block of a well-trafficked North Ashland Avenue around 10:45 a.m. Monday, police said.

The man took out a handgun before presenting a dark bag to three salon workers, which one of them filled with money, Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Daniel O'Brien said. Wearing a red and gray jacket, blue jeans and a hat and scarf, the man walked north on Ashland and hopped in a gray colored sedan, which left driving southbound, police said.

No one was injured, police said.

A witness from that robbery provided a license plate number that was one digit off, Baker said. Chicago police ran variations on the number until they found a vehicle with a similar make and model as reported by the witness. The person who owned the car that Logsdon was driving had “no knowledge that these (robberies) were occurring,” Baker said.

Last Tuesday, a man robbed a Great Clips salon in the 1000 block of West Webster Avenue in the Sheffield Neighbors neighborhood, according to police. The man was given cash and fled the store, police said. Police think the same man may have held up salons in the 1200 block of North Clybourn Avenue on Jan. 21 and salons in the 1200 and 1300 blocks of West Fullerton Avenue in December.

Other police agencies have warned that the same man may be responsible for robberies in Niles, Skokie, Morton Grove, Bensenville, Lombard, and Glen Ellyn.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking

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Chicago sees surge in foreclosure auctions

More than 35,000 homes and small multifamily buildings in the Chicago area completed the foreclosure process last year, the highest number since the housing crisis began, and the vast majority of them became bank-owned.

An increase in foreclosure auctions was expected since lenders shelved many foreclosure cases while state and federal authorities investigated allegations of faulty foreclosure processes. Still, the heightened level of auctions — 35,244 in 2012, compared with 20,281 in 2011 — along with an increase in initial foreclosure filings, shows the local housing market has a long road to recovery, according to the Woodstock Institute.

"There's going to be pain in the housing market in the short term," said Katie Buitrago, senior policy and communications associate at Woodstock. "There's still high levels of filings. Five years into it, there is still work to be done to help people save their homes."

The Chicago-based public policy and research group is expected to release its report on 2012 foreclosure activity Wednesday.

The year-end numbers show that, with few exceptions, all Chicago neighborhoods and suburban communities saw high double-digit percentage gains in auctions last year. Across the six-county area, 91.3 percent of the foreclosed properties were repossessed by lenders. At the same time, notices of initial default sent to homeowners, the first step in the foreclosure process, increased by 2.9 percent last year, to 66,783.

Real estate agents have worried for more than two years about a glut of foreclosed properties — a shadow inventory — that banks would list for sale en masse and cause home values to plunge. That largely has not happened, but the vast number of distressed properties in the market has kept a lid on local home values.

On Tuesday, for instance, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's websites listed 2,415 Cook County homes for sale that the two agencies had repossessed.

Chicago-area home prices, including distressed sales, fell 2.3 percent in December from a year ago, housing analytics firm CoreLogic said Tuesday. Illinois was one of only four states to see home-price depreciation.

The increase in auctions "is a mixed blessing," Buitrago said. "We've been having a lot of trouble in the region with vacant properties that have been languishing for years. The longer they're vacant, the more likely they are to be a destabilizing force in their communities."

Woodstock found that within the city of Chicago, there were 20 communities where more than 1 in 10 owner-occupied one- to four-unit residential buildings and condos went through foreclosure from 2008 to 2012. Five of those neighborhoods are included in the city's 18-month-old Micro-Market Recovery Program, a coordinated effort to stabilize neighborhoods and property values hit hard by foreclosures and vacant buildings.

Also designed to benefit hard-hit areas are the recent establishment of a Cook County Land Bank and legislation waiting for Gov. Pat Quinn's signature that will fast-track the foreclosure process for vacant, abandoned homes while providing financial resources to foreclosure prevention efforts.

mepodmolik@tribune.com

Twitter @mepodmolik

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Northwestern-Cubs deal: 5 Wrigley football games

NU athletic director Jim Phillips talks about a new partnership Tuesday with the Cubs at Wrigley Field. (Abel Uribe/Tribune Photo / February 5, 2013)

By Teddy Greenstein, Tribune reporter

12:29 p.m. CST, February 5, 2013

The partnership between the Chicago Cubs and Northwestern was so logical, so low-stress, that Cubs exec Crane Kenney said it was completed “with a handshake and a thank-you.”
 
And yet the deal is the first of its kind, a union between a school and professional franchise that will benefit multiple NU teams while enriching the Cubs and its employees who seek graduate-level education.
 
While executives on both sides imagine the marketing and signage possibilities, Chicago-area football fans who enjoyed the 2010 Wrigley Field football game will get to witness five more, starting in 2014.
 
Those dates are all to be determined, given that Big Ten schedules need to be reworked because of the additions of Rutgers and Maryland. They could be played every year from 2014-2018 or it could be five games played over 7-8 seasons.
 
But NU fans won’t have to wait that long to see some purple at Wrigley Field. The Wildcats baseball team will host Michigan on the North Side on April 20.
 
NU baseball coach Paul Stevens said that after he told his players, “they were just elated. The energy, the attitude and the enthusiasm have never been like that in any single practice.”
 
Kelly Amonte Hiller will bring her women’s lacrosse team – winners of seven NCAA championships over the last eight seasons – to Wrigley for a 2014 spring game against Notre Dame.
 
Football games, though, will get the most attention.
 
“It’s really a cool deal,” coach Pat Fitzgerald said. “Once we got off the bus (in 2010) and came out of left field, it was ridiculous … I don’t think anyone has ever had a bad day at Wrigley Field.”
 
NU Athletic Director Jim Phillips called it “a marriage of brands … in the greatest sports city in the country.”
 
Phillips is tight with Cubs brass, including owner Tom Ricketts and Kenney.
 
But this was a complicated deal that took months to iron out.
 
“We do have something more,” Phillips said, “than a handshake.”
 
tgreenstein@tribune.com

Twitter @TeddyGreenstein

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U.S. sues S&P over mortgage bond ratings

The federal government is embarking on one of its most ambitious efforts to assign blame for the financial crisis, going after Wall Street's biggest credit rating firm for its role in pumping up the housing bubble.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit late Monday in Los Angeles federal court against Standard & Poor's Corp. The suit accuses the company's analysts of issuing glowing reviews on troubled mortgage securities whose subsequent failure helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The action marks the first federal crackdown against a major credit rater, and it signals an untested legal tack after limited success in holding the nation's banks accountable for the part they played in the crisis.

The government selected Los Angeles as the venue to file the lawsuit in part because it was one of the regions hardest hit when the bottom fell out of the housing market. Hundreds of thousands of California residents lost their homes to foreclosure, and others saw their wealth evaporate as properties plummeted in value.

"The DOJ is playing hardball and they're coming at the ratings agency in a very different direction with a potentially very powerful weapon to push S&P to the settlement table," said Jeffrey Manns, a law professor at George Washington University.

In addition to the Justice Department, several state attorneys general are investigating the ratings agency. States such as California and New York are expected to pursue their own investigations and legal action, people familiar with the matter said.

S&P has faced other lawsuits from investors and the states of Illinois and Connecticut.

California is expected to sue S&P under the state's False Claims Act, one person familiar with the matter said. The law makes it a crime to defraud the state, and damages of up to three times the amount of the claim can be awarded if the victim was an institutional investor, such as one of the state's pension funds.

The federal action does not involve any criminal allegations. Critics have complained that the government has yet to send any senior bankers or Wall Street executives to jail for potential illegal behavior that led to the crisis.

But civil actions typically require a much lower burden of proof.

Investors rely in part on rating agencies to decide what stocks, bonds or other securities to buy based on the agencies' recommendations about their safety. The three major raters – S&P, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings — have all been criticized for giving perfect AAA ratings to complex bonds in 2007 that later turned out to be nearly worthless.

It was not known why Standard & Poor's was singled out in the federal lawsuit.

The government and S&P have tangled before. The rating agency in August 2011 issued a historic downgrade of U.S. creditworthiness and threatened to lower it even further.

The two sides were reportedly in settlement talks that broke down during the past week. The ratings firm could face hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and new restrictions on its business model if found liable of civil violations.

S&P, which is a unit of publisher McGraw Hill, denounced the lawsuit in a detailed and strongly worded response. The company said the claims were unjustified, adding that it acted in "good faith" to warn the world about some of the securities that went belly up.

"A DOJ lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit," the company said, adding that even the U.S. government "publicly stated that problems in the subprime market appeared to be contained."

The rating firm has steadfastly maintained that it was protected under the 1st Amendment to state an opinion about certain financial products. That argument may not hold up if federal or state investigators are able to prove that the ratings agency knowingly gave improper evaluations.

The lawsuit zeros in on a series of collateralized debt obligations that were created at the height of the housing boom in 2007, according to S&P. The value of these exotic mortgage securities was nearly wiped out when the subprime mortgages they were tied to imploded.

Lawrence J. White, an economics professor at New York University's business school, believes that the housing crisis could have been more contained if ratings agencies had been more careful.

"If they had been more conservative in their ratings, fewer bonds would have been sold, the interest rates would have been higher, fewer mortgages would have been granted," White said. "There would still have been a housing bubble, but it might not have been quite so severe."

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$5 million bail in 'exceptionally brutal' Aurora murder

An Aurora man was ordered held on $5 million bail today for allegedly beating a young woman to death with a hammer and then torching her body and her car, a crime a prosecutor labeled “exceptionally brutal.”

Juan Garnica Jr., 18, of the 400 block of East Ashland Avenue, appeared briefly via video in Kane County bond court, his first court appearance since he was charged with first-degree murder and other crimes in the death of Abigail Villalpando, 18, of Aurora.

It was the first homicide in Aurora since 2011, more than 400 days ago, according to city spokesman Dan Ferrelli.

Two other men have been charged with concealing the homicide.

Judge Christine Downs set bail for one of the men, Enrique Prado, 19, of Aurora, at $100,000. Assistant State’s Attorney Bill Engerman told the judge that police have no evidence that Prado, who also faces arson charges, participated in the murder of Villalpando. Prado has also been cooperative with police since his arrest, the prosecutor said.

A third man, 20-year-old Jose Becerra, did not appear in court this morning. He may appear this afternoon on his charge of concealment of a homicidal death.

Villalpando’s body, which was so badly burned that it had to be identified through dental records, was discovered in a wooded area near Montgomery Sunday morning, about two days after her car was found engulfed in flames under a bridge in Aurora.

Police said the victim met Prado and Garnica Thursday at Prado’s home, and that Garnica hit Villalpando in the head several times with a hammer after Prado left the room. Engerman declined to disclose why VIllalpando went to the house, but police did say she knew Garnica and Prado.

Police have not disclosed a motive for the attack.

Sometime Thursday night , Garnica allegedly drove the victim’s car to the High Street bridge over the railroad tracks on the city’s near east side an left it there. Villalpando’s body was concealed in a container in Prado’s garage, police said.

On Friday, Garnica and Prado bought a can of gas, which Garncia used to torch Villalpando’s 2003 Nissan Altima. Garnica then allegedly burned the victim’s body in a barrel in the backyard at Prado’s house. He then enlisted Becerra to help dump the body, police said.

Villalpando’s family reported her missing about 2:30 a.m. Friday, after she failed to show up at her waitress job at a  Denny’s at the Fox Valley Center shopping center. A restaurant employee called the family around 5 p.m. Thursday to report that she had not showed up for work.

Engerman said Garnica has a 2011 arrest for a stolen car, a charge that was later reduced to criminal trespass to a vehicle.

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BlackBerry shares jump after Bernstein upgrades stock

TORONTO (Reuters) – Shares of BlackBerry rose more than 8 percent in on Monday after Bernstein Research said it was upgrading the stock to “outperform” after last week’s launch of the company’s new line of BlackBerry 10 smartphones.

The brokerage firm, which has not had an “outperform” rating on the stock for more than three years, also lifted its price target to $ 22 from $ 12, saying it has grown much more confident about the success of the smartphones, powered by the new BlackBerry 10 operating system.

Shares of BlackBerry, which is in the process of changing its legal name from Research In Motion, rose 8.9 percent to $ 14.18 in early Nasdaq trading. BlackBerry’s Toronto-listed shares were up 9.1 percent at C$ 14.21 at 10:30 EST.

The stock began trading under the “BBRY” symbol on Nasdaq on Monday and under the “BB” symbol on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The stock used to trade as “RIMM” on the Nasdaq and “RIM” on the TSX.

“We upgrade BlackBerry to outperform today as we believe BB 10 is set for a strong launch,” Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu said in a note to clients. “Even if the long-term prospects for the platform are very uncertain, we believe all is in place for BlackBerry 10 to enjoy a great debut.”

BlackBerry, a one-time pioneer in the smartphone industry, has ceded market share in recent years to the likes of Apple’s iPhone, Samsung’s Galaxy line and a slew of devices powered by Google Inc’s market-leading Android operating system.

In a make-or-break move to regain market share and return to profit, BlackBerry introduced its new line of smartphones to much fanfare on Wednesday. However, its stock fell more than 10 percent following the launch as investors were disappointed that the new smartphones will only go on sale in mid-March in the crucial U.S. market.

“The strength of this launch is overlooked by investors, creating strong opportunity to buy BlackBerry,” said Ferragu, adding that he expects strong initial corporate demand for the new devices.

“We believe BlackBerry should trade in the $ 20-$ 25 range once a decent launch for Blackberry 10 and a stabilized trajectory for fiscal year 2014 are priced in,” he said.

BlackBerry unveiled both a touch-screen device and a physical-keyboard device last week. While the traditional keyboard model only goes on sale in April, the touch-screen device is already on sale in the United Kingdom and hits store shelves in Canada this week.

Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry said the U.S. launch was delayed until mid-March because U.S. wireless carriers have a longer testing phase than carriers in other countries. The devices, which are set to retail for C$ 599 ($ 600) in Canada, are currently attracting bids of more than $ 1,000 each on auction site ebay.com.

(Reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn; and Peter Galloway)

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