Property Damage

Here's your thank-the-Lord-for-the-nighttime Thursday roundup of consumer news from around the Web: -- Another Seattle company is heading to India. First Starbucks announced plans to open 50 outlets in India by year's end. Now Amazon.com is launching Junglee.com , a smaller version of its global shopping portal. Junglee offers 12 million products from more than 14,000 Indian and global brands. The site allows shoppers to compare prices, but most actual purchases must be made through a network of third-party retailers.

In scenes that evoked the seizing of the U.S. Embassy in 1979, hundreds of demonstrators stormed two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran on Tuesday, hurling gasoline bombs, ransacking offices and tearing down the British flag. The hours-long attacks, which followed a move by the Iranian parliament to expel Britain's ambassador over new sanctions, marked a sharp escalation in the tension between Iran and the West over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. Britain promised "serious consequences" and summoned Iran's charge d'affaires in London to the Foreign Office.

A 300-pound metal pipe encased in concrete hurtled through the air and crashed through the roof of a home next door to a synagogue in Santa Monica, prompting an ultimately unfounded bomb scare. In the end, authorities concluded that it was a "freak industrial accident" that sent the pipe flying early Thursday morning. "We're absolutely positive it was not a terrorist act or a hate crime," said Santa Monica Fire Capt. Judah Mitchell. Authorities initially feared that a pipe bomb had exploded next to the Chabad House synagogue, a modest blue building on 17th Street between Broadway and Santa Monica Boulevard.

Officers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Transit Bureau arrested two suspected graffiti vandals and are searching for a third suspect after serving search warrants Tuesday at their homes in Whittier and El Monte. The three men are members of a tagging group called PCN, which stands for Painting City Nightly or Painters Causing Nightmares, deputies said. They are accused of causing $338,000 in damage to freeway bridges and L.A. County properties.  They started tagging about 1 1/2 years ago, officials said.

Thousands of people were flooded out of their homes and businesses in Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi on Monday as rivers and streams overflowed their banks, blocking major highways and leaving at least 22 people dead. Authorities feared the death toll could rise once floodwaters recede. In Tennessee, state rescue teams and Coast Guard crews plucked people from flooded homes and hotels. Volunteers used canoes, motor boats and jet skis to reach stranded people, and helicopters rescued some residents from rooftops of homes cut off by roiling brown waters.

Residents and public officials on both sides of the border were assessing damage and looking to repair shattered nerves Sunday amid aftershocks from the magnitude 7.2 earthquake that struck on Easter, the strongest to hit the region in more than a century. In the California city of Calexico, most of the city's downtown business district remains closed as structural engineers decide whether the aging buildings can be saved. A squad from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected this week.

As the Red River crested Sunday, Fargo, N.D., residents watched with relief as their man-made clay and sandbag barriers held back the near-bursting waterway and signs of normality -- dog-walkers and packed after-church brunches -- reappeared in the state's most populous city. But not so in Harwood. That's not to say the city has been inundated. Most homes sit on high enough ground or were protected by strong enough levees to escape the water. But parts of Harwood, a pastoral blip of 701 residents (and more outside its boundaries)

George Allen said the calls came regularly last month, telling him and other La Cañada Flintridge residents to evacuate as rain soaked the wildfire-scorched hillside above their homes. But early Saturday morning, when intense rains unleashed massive mudslides in his neighborhood, he got no reverse 911 call. By 7 a.m., more than 40 houses had been damaged, cars had been tossed around and thick mud had rendered some streets impassable. Allen's Dodge truck was swept away and crushed.

One day after a river of mud brought havoc to a La Cañada Flintridge neighborhood, residents faced a massive cleanup Sunday, with chest-high mounds of muck lining the streets, damaged homes rendered uninhabitable and nearby catch basins filled to capacity with debris. Authorities lifted evacuation orders that at one point Saturday had affected 500 homes in the fire-ravaged foothill communities of La Crescenta and La Cañada Flintridge. Forty-three homes in the communities were damaged, and nine were red-tagged, preventing residents from entering until the structures could be stabilized.

An unexpectedly powerful rainstorm unleashed a torrent of mud that inundated more than 40 houses Saturday, leaving La Cañada Flintridge's northernmost neighborhood awash in boulders, dented cars and broken homes. The force of the mudflow appeared to catch residents and officials off guard, as the forecast initially called for a light to moderate rainstorm. No evacuations had been ordered Thursday or Friday, when the rain began to fall. But before dawn on Saturday, an intense band of rain cells formed over the mountains burned in the massive Station fire.