Plot

Often film sequels are slam dunks at the box office, a seamless continuation from where a previous hit left off. But as the new installment of the 15-year-old franchise "Men in Black" proves, getting to the big screen isn't always a cakewalk. One of the most troubled productions in recent Hollywood memory, Sony Pictures' latest movie in the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones sci-fi-comedy franchise encountered multiple script rewrites, a discontented star and a three-month production shutdown as writers and studio executives scrambled to fix a project that nearly fell apart . By the time it was over, the studio had run up a tab of nearly $250 million - making "Men in Black 3" one of the most expensive releases of the summer.

HESPERIA - Worried that her daughter may be on drugs, or worse, Angelica Aquirre did what any parent of a rebellious 13-year-old might do. She cracked down, set a curfew and thought about moving closer to her family in Mexico. Now a distraught Aquirre is left wondering whether she was too harsh. Her daughter on Wednesday was in a juvenile detention facility in Apple Valley, accused of hatching a murder plot with two of her middle school friends. The target: her mother. "I don't know what to say. I just can't believe it," Aquirre said, weeping as she sat at a kitchen table in the family's tiny mobile home, a framed picture of Jesus on the wall.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

A Newport Beach woman who arranged for a former NFL player to kill her wealthy boyfriend in a 1994 plot to collect $1 million in insurance money was sentenced Friday to life in prison. But sentencing for onetime New England Patriot linebacker Eric Naposki was continued to Aug. 10 after he refused to leave his courthouse holding cell. The prosecutor called Naposki's actions "a final blaze of no class and cowardice" by the man who fired six gunshots into the chest of Bill McLaughlin, who died in his Balboa Coves home.

Belabored best describes the humor of "The Supporting Cast" by George Furth, and the current production at Westminster Community Theatre plays right into all of its manufactured laughs. The forced feel of this play starts with the premise: A writer summons four friends to her Malibu beach house to read her new novel, which features all of them as thinly disguised characters. When they discover that she has revealed confidences and described them in less than flattering terms, they feel betrayed.

The preflight intelligence Here are some key pieces of information known to U.S. intelligence officials before the failed Christmas Day bombing attack that, they said, should have kept suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off a U.S.-bound jetliner: The United States had electronic intercepts linking an individual with the partial name Umar Farouk to Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen. The National Security Agency had learned that the Yemeni group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was planning an operation using a Nigerian.

The FBI arrested a 26-year-old Massachusetts man in a plot to blow up the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon after agents lured him into an undercover sting operation in which he allegedly provided "step-by-step" instructions on attacking Washington from the air with a drone-like, remote-control explosive device. Rezwan Ferdaus, a U.S. citizen and Northeastern University graduate from Ashland, Mass., was allegedly plotting the strikes through the recent 10-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he told FBI undercover employees posing as Al Qaeda members that he would load aircraft with C-4 plastic explosives, and then use GPS equipment to fly over the Capitol area.

Three men suspected of preparing to mount a terrorist attack were arrested in Norway and Germany on Thursday in what authorities said was an Al Qaeda plot with strands in the United States and Britain. After a lengthy period of surveillance, the men were taken into custody by police, who had feared that information about the investigation might be revealed by the news media. Two suspects were arrested in Norway and one in Germany. Their names were not released, but police in Oslo described all three as legal residents of Norway, one a citizen and the others holders of permanent residency cards.

An immigrant from Morocco armed with a jammed automatic weapon and wearing a suicide vest packed with what he thought were explosives was arrested Friday near the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, officials announced. Amine El Khalifi, 29, who allegedly had overstayed his visa after arriving in the U.S. when he was 16, was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against government property. FBI agents had been closely monitoring him for more than a year in an undercover sting operation.

An elaborate Iranian-backed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States was disrupted by FBI and DEA agents, officials said Tuesday. Members of an elite Iranian security force planned to detonate a bomb at a busy Washington restaurant, killing Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and possibly over 100 bystanders, according to documents filed in New York federal court. The State Department has listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984.

As self-consciously precocious teens go, the high schooler at the center of"Girl in Progress"is an exceptionally contrived example. But contrivance is the engine of this young-adult comedy, which pretends to deconstruct storytelling clichés while never really transcending them. The transparent postmodern manipulation of Hiram Martinez's screenplay revolves around Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez), responsible daughter to an aimless mother, Grace (Eva Mendes), who had her when she was just a teen herself.

WASHINGTON — The CIA takedown of an Al Qaeda plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner involved an international sting operation with a double agent tricking terrorists into handing over a prized possession: a new bomb purportedly designed to slip through airport security. U.S. officials Tuesday described an operation in which Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, working closely with the CIA, used an informant to pose as a would-be suicide bomber. His job was to persuade Al Qaeda bomb makers in Yemen to give him the bomb.

WASHINGTON - The FBI is analyzing a sophisticated explosive device, similar to the underwear bomb used in an attempt to blow up a passenger jet over Detroit in 2009, that U.S. officials believe was built by Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen in an effort to target Western aircraft. U.S. officials said Monday that no one was captured by U.S. agencies as part of the operation. The officials emphasized that they found no sign of an active plot to use the new bomb design against U.S. aviation or U.S.-bound jetliners.

The Transportation Security Administration labeled the drug-smuggling case at Los Angeles International Airport that came to light Wednesday as a "significant" breach in security . If so, there's a bigger problem than just the LAX case. Earlier this month, a former TSA officer admitted his role in a drug-smuggling scandal from 2010 to 2011 on the East Coast. The case is taking place in New Haven , Conn., and others involved have already pleaded guilty. Here's what the Hartford Courant reported on April 17 : "Three Transportation Security Administration officers, two police officers and more than a dozen drug dealers in Florida, New York and Connecticut are charged in the smuggling conspiracy that delivered illegal oxycodone pills from Florida to the Waterbury [Conn.]

Our one shared national moment of fiscal soul-searching is behind us for another year — of course I refer to the filing of tax returns — but tax reform theater in Washington, like the melody in the old Irving Berlin song, lingers on. So while individual and business taxpayers watch to see whether any tax reform plan has any chance of passage, the Obama administration's "Buffett rule" proposal succumbed Monday to the threat of filibuster by...

DETROIT — In a sharp rebuke, a federal judge Tuesday acquitted seven members of a Michigan militia of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government with weapons of mass destruction — crimes that could have landed them in prison for life. The ruling is an embarrassment for the government, which secretly planted a paid informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia four years ago and contended that members were armed for war in rural southern Michigan. Nine members were arrested in 2010.

Three young Britons were declared guilty Monday in a London court of planning to blow up transatlantic planes in a spectacularly scaled, Al Qaeda terrorist plot that could have killed thousands of people. A jury in Woolwich Crown Court convicted Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, Tanvir Hussain, 28, and Assad Sarwar, 29, of conspiring to murder by setting off liquid bombs smuggled aboard seven North America-bound airliners in sports-drink bottles. Police have said their plan was possibly days from fruition when the men were arrested in August 2006 amid the biggest counter-terrorism investigation in British history.

The U.S. government believes it is highly likely that Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei signed off on a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies here, senior U.S. officials said Wednesday. "This is the kind of operation -- the assassination of a diplomat on foreign soil -- that would have been vetted at the highest levels of the Iranian government," said a senior official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive analysis.

A small, determined cadre approaches a location - be it a hospital, bank, symphony hall or power station - not with destruction in mind, but creativity. In each place, members of the group use objects on-site to perform musical compositions. The group's interruptions and shenanigans get its members labeled "terrorists" by the authorities, but their actual goal is anything but the spreading of fear: They want to turn the world upside down to find unexpected beauty in the mundane and everyday.

  It was not just another day on Alexei Burkov's little dairy farm west of Moscow. In a country where political campaigns are conducted with scripted television events and carefully orchestrated public appearances, a presidential candidate was coming to share a hearty winter lunch of homemade dumplings, pork chops, herb-seasoned cheeses and a raspberry drink. To the delight of half a dozen photographers, Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets NBA basketball team, visited Burkov's barn and awkwardly touched the horn of one of his cows.