Humiliation

INSIDE ROOM 309,a third-floor classroom in concrete-and-brick Van Allen Hall on the University of Iowa campus, Ken Nishikawa was standing at an old-fashioned blackboard. He was lecturing to a weekly graduate seminar in plasma physics when Dr. Lu Gang's first shot rang out. * At first, some of the graduate students in the room thought it might be a firecracker. It was Friday afternoon, last Nov. 1, and one of the students later recalled thinking it must be some sort of prank.

Before last week's by-election in a rural bellwether constituency in Wales, Great Britain's ruling Conservative Party held 396 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservative candidate came in a poor third, but the Tories still have a commanding 140-vote majority. And Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher need not call a general election for three more years. But the Conservatives have suffered a humiliating setback going far beyond the mathematical count.

If you were brave enough to wear that hideous, unflattering, overdone bridesmaid dress once in public, you should be stoic enough to do it again. The Young Professionals Against Cancer host the Bridesmaid's Charity Ball June 5, calling all former bridesmaids and groomsmen to haul out their most outre wedding outfits and model them for a panel of judges.

Why not Iran? Egypt and Tunisia have overthrown repressive regimes. Citizens in Syria, Yemen and other Middle East countries are demanding change. Yet in Iran, where a wave of 2009 demonstrations helped spark the movements we are now witnessing elsewhere in the Middle East, the populace is strangely silent. What accounts for the relative quiet in Iran? The answer, at least in part, is that one of the great human rights tragedies of the modern era is underway in Iran. From the moment the first protesters hit Tahrir Square in Cairo, Iran's leadership has cracked down hard, instituting a brutal campaign of terror against its own people.

He once lived under the Taliban's protection, met with Osama bin Laden and helped found a group the U.S. has listed as a terrorist organization. He died in a secondhand U.S. military uniform, ambushed by Moammar Kadafi's men as he cleared a road after an airstrike by his new NATO allies. Aides to Abdul Monem Muktar Mohammed say the Libyan rebel fighter was leading a convoy of 200 cars west of this hotly contested strategic city Friday when a bullet struck him on the right side of the chest.

The Iowa House of Representatives today rejected a move to force convicted drunken drivers to apologize in their local newspapers. "We got away from the scarlet letter a long time ago," said Rep. Dan Jay. The measure, defeated on a voice vote, would have allowed a judge to order motorists convicted of drunken driving to write a public apology, which would be published in their local newspaper along with a picture of the motorist.

President Clinton escaped conviction by the Senate in his impeachment trial in February, but he could not escape the justifiable wrath of a federal magistrate in Arkansas on Monday on a matter closely related to the impeachment case against him. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that Clinton lied when questioned last year in the Paula Corbin Jones sexual harassment case.

The milk of human kindness does not flow through Neil LaBute's films. Taking the baleful futility of personal relationships as a theme, his is rather a cinema of humiliation, embarrassment and misery, the celluloid equivalent of a 'round-the-clock news station that offers all jerks, all the time. Writer-director LaBute's remarkably sour and cynical view of human nature couldn't be better suited to gather plaudits in the times we live in.