Area News in Brief

Inova Ranks Among Top 50 Hospitals

A data-driven list by HealthGrades America has ranked Northern Virginia’s largest hospital, Inova Fairfax, among the top 50 hospitals in the nation. Rankings were based on mortality and complication rates in handling 26 common procedures and conditions over a six-year span. Procedures and conditions included heart attack and pneumonia, as well as a wide range of surgeries and body part replacements.

Three-fifths of the hospitals on the list are concentrated in four states—California, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Virginia’s Henrico Doctors' Hospital, located in Richmond, also ranked among the top 50. No Maryland hospitals—including Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital—made HealthGrades America’s list.

Home Depot to Lay Off 103 Fairfax Expo Employees

According to a notice filed by the company with Virginia, on April 26 Home Depot Inc. will lay off more than 100 workers from its Expo Design Center in Fairfax. The notice comes a month after Home Depot said it would slash 7,000 jobs, freeze officer salaries and close 34 Expos, as well as other stores, due to the recession and housing slump.

Two other area Expos—one in Bethesda and one in Columbia, Md.—will also close as Home Depot continues restructuring its operations. The cuts from the overall Expo business include about 5,000 at the associate level and 2,000 in support functions.

Va. Supreme Court Rules Man Can Keep Declaration Copy

The Supreme Court of Virginia has ruled that a wealthy Fairfax County collector can keep a rare 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence. The print was copied into a town record book on Nov. 10, 1776. It was found in the attic of a daughter of a former clerk in 1994.

Technology entrepreneur Richard Adams Jr. purchased the document for $475,000 from a London book dealer in 2001 in Wiscasset, Maine. The state’s attorney general’s office claimed the 15-by-20 inch piece of paper was a public document that belonged to the town. The justices’ decision upheld an earlier ruling that Adams had the strongest claim to the document.

Man Pleads Guilty to Keeping ‘Slaves’

A Falls Church man pleaded guilty last Wednesday to harboring as many as 24 Indonesian illegal aliens in his basement and profiting from their slave-like labor. According to the court documents, Soripada Lubis, a naturalized American citizen originally from Indonesia, along with his wife, Indonesian citizen Siti Chadidjah Siregar, has kept up to 11 undocumented Indonesian women in their basement since 2000.

During the week, the women would live with and work as housekeepers for wealthy families. On the weekends, the couple transported the women back to their basement. Passports were confiscated, and rules were imposed restraining freedom of movement.

Court records state the couple charged the women $375 per month for "rent" and transportation, as well as fees for "taxes" and to send money to Indonesia. Lubis and Siregar allegedly made more than $90,000 over the last five years.

-Compiled by Kevin Loker, ­News Editor, from The Fairfax County Times, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Washington Business Journal, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.