He began improving this week, but had an ugly encounter on Thursday, Ms. Abuhasna said, when several boys jumped him and said they hoped his brother "would come back dead."

But no one expects this visit - by coincidence, exactly 30 years after President Nixon's stunning first meeting with Mao - to yield major advances or ugly encounters.

I had a series of ugly encounters with a disturbed man the police assured me was "harmless," even as he was flinging rocks at passing cars and menacing pedestrians with sticks.

And on Tuesday he made an appearance at a parochial school in Harlem to commiserate with youngsters who have had their own ugly encounters with the police.

But in a game that featured two flagrant fouls, four technicals and one more ugly encounter, this was a touch foul by comparison.

Spiridon could, of course, have gone off into the forest again, and indeed he did try it once, but they had an ugly encounter with some bandits, and his daughter had a narrow escape from them.

There were a couple of ugly encounters in the middle fifties.

Yet nothing could wash away the memory of that ugly encounter.

They were high school cheerleaders together living in Dallas, Texas until an ugly encounter ended up in the death of Eve's boyfriend which resulted in Eve spending 15 years in prison.