Distribution

Baltimore police are planning a mass search Saturday for Phylicia Barnes, the North Carolina teenager and track star missing since a December visit to the city. The new search will involve more than 200 law enforcement officials. Police are also seeking volunteers to help distribute fliers in the Northwest Baltimore neighborhood where Barnes had been staying with her half sister. Anyone interested in helping should call the public affairs unit at 410-396-2012. Anthony Guglielmi, the chief spokesman for the city Police Department, would not identify the precise area to be searched or what is prompting detectives to concentrate there.

A federal judge on Monday sentenced a 31-year-old College Park man to 150 months — more than 12 years — in prison for possessing crack cocaine and intending to distribute it. Josue Monroy, who pleaded guilty to the charges, must also serve five years of supervised probation upon his release, under the terms of the sentence pronounced by U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt. The judge noted that Monroy is a "career offender" with two prior drug convictions.

Retailers Kohl's Corp. and Wegmans Food Markets announced plans Tuesday to start hiring workers for new locations in Harford County that will create 1,800 jobs. Kohl's plans to open a distribution center in July in Edgewood that will employ 1,200 workers by 2014. The facility on Trimble Road, which Kohl's purchased, will fulfill online orders. The department store operator anticipates employing more than 200 full- and part-time workers when the center opens, with hiring for hourly and management positions beginning this month.

Union leaders representing hundreds of workers at a Giant Food distribution center in Jessup said the operator has given them oral notice that part of the facility would be shut down, resulting in hundreds of job losses. The company that runs the dry goods distribution facility denies giving workers official notice of impending layoffs but declined to answer questions about shuttering the dry goods distribution facility. Giant, the region's largest grocer, announced last year that it would outsource the dry goods business at the facility to New Hampshire-based C&S Wholesale Grocers.

Digital entertainment has shaken the retail industry, shuttering your local brick-and-mortar record store, bookseller and video rental outlets. Could the neighborhood comic book shop be next? Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. hopes not. The Timonium company is the country's largest distributor of comics to about 2,700 small retailers. It has been fighting the same forces — online sales, changing consumer habits and even digital piracy — that are pushing other retailers to the brink.

Baltimore Gas and Electric residential customers will pay on average an additional $16 on electric bills and $10 on gas bills annually, under an order released by Maryland's top public utility regulators Monday. The increases will raise an estimated $30.9 million in electric distribution rates for BGE, as well as $9.75 million for gas delivery. According to the order, the new rates apply to charges incurred since Saturday. Monday was the deadline for the Maryland Public Service Commission to issue a decision on BGE's request, filed in May, to increase distribution rates — the price that customers pay to have power and gas delivered to their homes.

A former youth counselor pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to drug distribution, admitting that he conspired with a colleague — a Black Guerrilla Family gang leader — to sell heroin while both were employed at a tax-funded community outreach center. Ronald "Piper" Scott could receive a maximum of 20 years in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 24 in Baltimore's U.S. District Court. Scott was indicted on the drug charge in April alongside Todd Duncan, who has since pleaded guilty in a separate case to racketeering and admitted to a BGF affiliation that included drug trafficking, money laundering, bribery and gang discipline responsibilities.

The clergymen stood inside the Lansdowne gun shop on Hollins Ferry Road, in front of a glass counter containing what they called the "instruments of death" responsible for turning the streets of Baltimore into a killing field. "The city is devastated by violence — gun violence," pressed Rev. Eugene Sutton, a bishop with the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, whose group protested this store on Wednesday. "We're trying to get the illegal guns off the street. Too many people are dying.

Giant Food, the region's largest grocery chain, has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union that will save hundreds of jobs at its dry-goods distribution business when it outsources the work to a Jessup firm later this year. The head of Teamsters Local 730, the union that represents workers at the distribution plant, said Tuesday that 341 full-time workers will keep their jobs at the Giant dry-goods business that's being contracted out to Jessup Logistics LLC, an affiliate of C&S Wholesale Grocers.