Time Bomb

His parents remember Chad Prisbrey as the perfect son: handsome, smart, dutiful, popular and always healthy--until a voracious cancer killed him at the age of 28. "He was having headaches, that was the beginning," his father recalled. Then one night in 1975, he came home from his job as a dispatcher at the police department and said: "Hey, Dad, I can hardly lift a quart of milk. I feel terrible."

“The Bellflower Sessions” refers to therapeutic interviews between a downsized bourgeois and an unhinged shrink. If they represented the sum of Andy Bloch's black comedy, this uneven vehicle might equal its ambitious parts. Under Bryan Rasmussen's direction, the exchanges between ticking time bomb Jack Calvin (the valiant Rob Nagle) and Dr. Wendy Bellflower (an assured Stephanie Erb) carry wild, satiric thrust. Jack, first introduced via incarcerated direct address, reluctantly contacts Bellflower on the tacit recommendation of drinking buddy Grant (Michael Monks)

Without the formality of a trial or even a chance to see the alleged evidence against them, four Palestinians accused by Israel of being among the "instigators and organizers" of riots in the occupied territories have been deported to southern Lebanon. Five other Palestinians face a similar fate. The four expellees are all natives of the West Bank, although Israel had earlier sought to blame "outside agitators" for the violent demonstrations that began more than a month ago.

Life can work in such cruel ways. Saturday night, Joe Cortez was the man in the middle of one of the more controversial moments in boxing in recent memory. He was the ring referee for the huge pay-per-view show at the MGM Grand Garden Arena that pitted unbeaten veteran Floyd Mayweather Jr. against fast-rising Victor Ortiz. From the day they announced the matchup, this one was a ticking bomb. Mayweather is brash and vain. He recently changed his nickname from "Pretty Boy" to "Money.

South African police defused a guerrilla time bomb in a post office on the Namibian coast just 42 seconds before it was due to explode, police said today.

Bryan's out. Terry's in. And the Washington Capitals go their Murray-Murray way. Let's see if I've got this brother-for-brother swap straight. Bryan-the-elder has one of the 15 best records of any coach in the history of big-time puck-swatting. He has gotten a once-inept franchise routinely into the National Hockey League playoffs, though never into May. The Capitals are oh-for-the-'90s and on an eight-game losing streak, but the town has not gone after Murray's scalp with any passion.

The stock market has been taking no prisoners among financial stocks for about a year now. The assumption by investors is that every financial company is just a time bomb of decayed assets waiting to explode. In the ranks of alleged bombs that have yet to go off is Broad Inc., the Los Angeles-based life insurer and annuity giant. While the stock has been cut down to $3.875 a share now from $11.

It begins beneath the Pacific Ocean off Crystal Cove State Park, then silently glides inland between the Newport and Balboa piers. From there, an earthquake zone known as the Newport-Inglewood Fault continues northward up the Orange County coast on a 45-mile journey through the heart of the Los Angeles Basin. Scientists regard it as nothing less than a geological time bomb.

Proposition 1B is intended to restore $9.3 billion in "lost" funding that public schools and community colleges normally would have received under Proposition 98, money they haven't received recently and won't for a couple of years more because of the dismal fiscal outlook. The problem is how much more it might do.

Assemblyman Keith Richman is towering over a table cluttered with statistical charts and pointing at one. "Los Angeles County is having trouble paying for healthcare services, right?" he says. "So look at this." The Northridge Republican is pointing to a figure that shows the county is saddled with a $3.9-billion unfunded pension liability. That's the money it is short of being able to pay for all the pensions it has promised present and future retirees.

By Chinese standards, Chu Yang and Geng Chen should have had a child years ago. The married couple in their early 30s are always reminded of that by family when they return home for the spring festival holidays. "They say we're too different and that we're weird and pathetic," said Chu, who runs a trendy boutique with his wife in an aging section of Beijing filled with classical courtyard homes. But Yang and Chen have their reasons. They point to uncertainties that have accompanied China's breakneck development, including a string of food safety scandals and a deadly crash on one of the nation's showcase high-speed rail lines.

With legions of baby boomers starting to retire, a growing number of Americans will soon need some kind of long-term healthcare, whether from a nursing home or from an in-home health aide. A new survey by the SCAN Foundation and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, however, finds that Californians are woefully underprepared for the cost of such services. The survey is a wake-up call to the public, as well as a warning sign to lawmakers who want to pull the plug preemptively on a new federal insurance program for long-term care.

Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani immigrant who admitted he'd hoped to kill as many as 40 people by detonating a car bomb in Times Square in May, was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison. U.S. District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum handed down the mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. Shahzad, 31, appeared proud but defiant in court and unapologetic for trying to kill as many Americans as he could. He wore dark blue prison garb with a white knit cap on his head.

U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday that they are seeking life in prison for a Pakistani-born American citizen who tried to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square and revealed that he had planned a second attack. Faisal Shahzad, 30, pleaded guilty in June to the failed May 1 bombing in busy midtown Manhattan. He was arrested two days later aboard a plane bound for Dubai, United Arab Emirates, minutes before it was to leave New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. Shahzad admitted that he received training in bomb-making from the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, and said the group had funded the failed attack.

Pakistani authorities have charged three men with terrorism-related offenses for allegedly helping failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad prepare for the attempted May 1 attack by arranging meetings with top Pakistani Taliban leaders and sending him money, a senior police official in Islamabad said Wednesday. The three men, Shahid Hussain, Shoaib Mughal and Humbal Akhtar, are relatively young, middle-class Pakistanis who have been close friends with Shahzad for several years, said Deputy Inspector Gen. Bin Yamin.

Faisal Shahzad was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges that he attempted to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square after undergoing explosives training from a militant extremist group, receiving thousands of dollars in cash from a co-conspirator and leaving a loaded semiautomatic rifle in his second car. The indictment, returned in U.S. District Court in New York, charged Shahzad with 10 criminal counts, including the...

Gregory Howard found his calling in an infectious disease ward in Newark. He'd gone into detox to withdraw from a decade on drugs. Suddenly, he'd begun losing weight and his lymph nodes had swollen. His skin crawled as though infested with bugs. Lying there, he heard the doctors talking about a new disease. It was killing men who injected drugs and who had sex with other men. Howard had done both. He called his parents and told them he was dying.

Pakistani authorities have released a former Pakistani army major arrested in connection with the failed Times Square bombing in New York, saying they had determined he had no links to prime bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad. Adnan Ahmad was detained in mid-May on suspicion of having links with Shahzad, the Pakistani American accused of rigging a Nissan Pathfinder with explosives that he tried to detonate May 1 in midtown Manhattan. Pakistani law enforcement sources said investigators suspected Ahmad because they believed he and Shahzad had exchanged cellphone calls and had met once in Islamabad.

A couple of decades ago, Hamid Gul could trek into militant camps in North Waziristan like an old friend stopping by for dinner. Back then, he was Pakistan's intelligence chief, and his hosts valued him as their benefactor in the struggle against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. "I used to travel there frequently," Gul says. "Everything was hunky-dory." The neighborhood has changed, and the friendships too. Islamic militant camps still dot the region's rugged mountainsides and basins, but these days they shelter and train a caldron of disparate exremist groups with varying roots and an evolving network of allegiances.