Capture

A pregnant woman who was pulled over for talking on her cellphone - and then hurled to the ground and hogtied by CHP officers on the shoulder of the busy Harbor Freeway - has been paid $250,000 in damages. The 30-year-old woman was charged with resisting arrest and driving with a suspended license, but the charges were dropped after a judge was shown a video of the incident, captured on a camera mounted on the dashboard of a California Highway Patrol cruiser. "The conduct here is outrageous.

The nimbly conceived and constructed documentary "Sellebrity" takes a vivid look at the megabucks industry of celebrity photography through a cogent variety of lenses. It's an enjoyable snapshot that effectively explores the colliding - often complicit - worlds of fame, entertainment publicity, the public's infatuation with gossip and the dogged paparazzi at the epicenter of it all. Sadly, the recent death of L.A. photographer Chris Guerra, who was hit by an SUV after taking pictures of Justin Bieber's Ferrari, makes this exposé seem especially timely.

NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope is providing fresh views of oddly bright black holes and breathtaking supernovae, scientists said Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach. NuSTAR mission scientists released high-energy X-ray images of two strangely bright black holes in the arms of spiral galaxy IC 342 about 7 million light years away and of Cassiopeia A, the shell of an exploded star, known as a supernova, just 11,000 light years away. Since its launch last summer , the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has been snapping shots at energies up to 79 kiloelectron volts - far beyond the roughly 10 KeV limit of other X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Team USA won the gold medal at the World Junior Hockey Championships on Saturday, riding two goals by Southern California native Rocco Grimaldi and another strong goaltending effort by Ducks prospect John Gibson to a 3-1 victory over defending champion Sweden at Ufa, Russia. Gibson, drafted by the Ducks in 2011, was voted the top goalie and the most valuable player of the tournament, which features the world's top under-20-year-old players. The competition, always interesting as a preview of future NHL stars, provided welcome entertainment for hockey fans who have missed the game during the labor dispute that has delayed the NHL season at least through Jan. 14. Grimaldi, an undersized but skilled forward who had trouble earning ice time earlier in the tournament, scored his goals less than three minutes apart in the second period.

As a collaborative endeavor, cinema is especially prone to happy accidents. Rarely has a film demonstrated the possibilities of happenstance as vividly as the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes' "Our Beloved Month of August," new to DVD from Cinema Guild. With a handful of shorts and three features to his name, Gomes, 41, is one of the most original and exciting voices in world cinema today. (Three of his shorts are included on the "Beloved Month" DVD.) A defining attribute of Gomes' films is that they defy classification, partly because they refuse to stay for long in any one genre.

In spring we previewed the 3.5-acre North Campus at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which was putting the finishing touches on a garden designed as urban wildlife habitat, a place where L.A. critters could come to escape city life just like the rest of us. Cameras set up throughout the Mia Lehrer-designed landscape were intended to capture feathered and four-legged residents, day and night. To find out exactly what the cameras have recorded, we recently checked back with Sam Easterson, senior media producer for the museum's Nature Lab, who described the results as nothing less than “thrilling.” The opossum babies that we pictured atop their mama in a night-vision photograph have grown up, Easterson said.

"This Is 40," Judd Apatow's new comic rant, picks up the family squabble five years after "Knocked Up" left off. Settle in for a major dose of the bratty behavior that has become the writer-director's marquee move, because 40 is turning out to be a very good year. Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen, the central punch line in "Knocked Up," are nowhere in sight and the film is better for it. In fact, not since Apatow so thoroughly crashed (and trashed) the romantic comedy scene in 2005 with the foul-mouthed charm of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" has Apatow gotten relationships this right.

NBC News' chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and two members of his production team, producer Ghazi Balkiz and cameraman John Kooistra, have been released after five days in captivity in Syria. The network released the following statement Tuesday: "After being kidnapped and held for five days inside Syria by an unknown group, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and his production crew members have been freed unharmed. We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country.

Automakers are vying to win various annual sales crowns while dealerships are trying to achieve both year-end and month-end goals, a confluence of events that's good for car shoppers, said auto analyst Tom Libby of R.L. Polk & Co. That's why the airwaves and weekend newspaper ads are stuffed with year-end deals for new cars. Libby said that employees at dealerships and the sales staffs at manufacturers are compensated in part on whether they achieve year-end sales objectives as well as December goals, "which in effect doubles the pressure to sell new vehicles," Libby said.

Watching water stream under parked cars and through the gutters every time it rained made Alice Abler cringe. "What a terrible waste," Abler recalled thinking, pondering all the pollutants being swept down drains and into waterways. Her chance to act came with a new program that provides homeowners with free rain gardens installed in their yards. These shallow depressions surrounded by dirt berms and planted with climate-appropriate flowering plants are designed to hold rainwater from rooftops and paved surfaces and keep it from flowing to streets.