Jason

White-haired and missing several teeth, a 79-year-old retired steel salesman sat barefoot in a stained undershirt at his modest Cerritos home Wednesday, trying to explain how he had ended up at the center of a major federal smuggling investigation. It all started when Robert Olson took a trip in the 1970s to Thailand, where he said he picked up an ancient bronze ring and was required to buy it after it broke in his hand.

Neil Gordon's third novel, "The Company You Keep," consists of 42 e-mails sent by various members of "The Committee," a mysterious group of "balding ex-hippies" to 17-year-old Isabel, or Izzy, who is at school in England, where she can be protected (and monitored) by the bodyguards of her powerful grandfather, a former senator and currently the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The first e-mail is dated 1 June 2006; the last, 26 June 2006.

Jenny and Jason Messam couldn't be more different: She is white and Jewish; he is black and Christian. At 38, she is 15 years older. There is one other important difference: Jenny is American, and Jason is Jamaican. They married in January 2010, and Jason applied for a U.S. visa a few months later, hoping to join his wife in Los Angeles. Immigration officials in the U.S. initially approved the petition. But workers at the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica were suspicious and, after interviewing the couple and sifting through phone records, pictures, emails and other documentation, they decided that the marriage was probably a fraud.

"Drugs had destroyed my body and my mind and my spirit. I could no longer experience happiness or surprise. I couldn't remember the last time I felt spontaneous joy. Why was I even alive?" Josh Hamilton in his autobiography, "Beyond Belief" WESTLAKE, Texas -- It was 2 a.m. when Josh Hamilton, strung out on crack cocaine, his once-robust 6-foot-4, 230-pound body withered to 180 pounds, most of his $3.96-million signing bonus squandered on booze and drugs, staggered up the steps to his grandmother's house in Raleigh, N.C. Homeless, dirty and barely coherent, Hamilton was a few days removed from a suicide attempt -- an overdose of pills -- and in the fourth year of a harrowing drug addiction that caused the former can't-miss prospect to be banned from baseball for three full seasons.

In his private journal, Jason Michael Handy once described himself as a "pedophile, full blown. " Handy snapped more than 1,000 photos of girls at the elementary school across the street from his house, using a camera with a telephoto lens, according to court documents. He volunteered at a Malibu church, where he worked with 6-year-olds. And his job as a production assistant at one of the nation's most prominent producers of children's television programs, Nickelodeon, gave him access to child actors on and off the set, and allowed him to exchange email addresses and phone numbers with them.

Any correspondence about possible Clippers' off-season moves needs to go straight to the top. So, Chris Paul, here's a primer on what you should instruct your franchise to do in the coming months to take that next step, otherwise known as getting past the first round of the playoffs. It's not going to be easy, the Clippers creeping toward taxpayer status for the first time in franchise history, assuming you come back. You're going to have to help persuade Donald Sterling to pay those more punitive taxes or risk multiplying the disappointment Clipper Nation experienced in recent weeks.

Irony is the main entrée in the news this week: An unofficial spokesman for the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas died of a heart attack Monday. John Alleman, 52, who scoffed at healthy heart warnings by waving in customers outside the downtown eatery while dressed as a hospital patient, is the second unpaid mascot to die in two years. Alleman was taken off life support after suffering an attack last week while waiting at a bus stop in front of the diner. Though never on the payroll, Alleman came to the restaurant daily and encouraged passing tourists to try calorie-heavy offerings such as extra-fat milkshakes, Flatliner Fries cooked in lard and a Quadruple Bypass Burger that contains 9,982 calories.

The road to hell is typically paved with good intentions. For Greg Mortenson, it was laid down with two New York Times bestsellers, hundreds of public appearances and the idea that Afghanistan and Pakistan could be saved if you built enough schools in them. Hidden beneath those efforts appear to have been “significant lapses in judgment” involving charity money. Those lapses have led the Montana state attorney general to toss Mortenson out of his own charity, the Central Asia Institute, and now to force him to pay back $1 million, according to the results of an investigation announced Thursday.   “The story of Central Asia Institute and Greg Mortenson evokes notions of the best of our aspirations to do good and the generosity of the American public,” Montana Atty.

The U.S. government has agreed to pay $880,000 to the estate of Roxanna Brown, the 62-year-old Southeast Asia scholar who died in federal custody last year. Brown was arrested in May 2008 amid a federal investigation into donations of allegedly looted Thai antiquities to four Southern California museums. Four days later, while awaiting a court hearing, Brown suffered a perforated ulcer and died in her cell at a federal detention center in Seattle.

The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see. He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide. Polanco looked at the cuts and said they "were weak," according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. "Carve deeper next time," he was said to have told the boy. "Look," Polanco allegedly said, "you can't even kill yourself."