Feelings

WASHINGTON - They returned home to a politically traumatized nation that treated them with indifference and scorn. Now, veterans' advocates fear the country will again miss an opportunity to recognize the toil and torment of the 3 million service members sent to fight the Vietnam War. The Pentagon's plans to celebrate the veterans - five years in the making - are sputtering. This Memorial Day is supposed to be the curtain-raiser for a series of gatherings to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of US involvement in the decade-plus war and to honor those who served.

Mohamed Nizar says he and his fellow rebels have the will, the fervor and the money to bring down Syrian President Bashar Assad. What they lack, he says, is the firepower. "If I make a phone call, I'll have maybe 2,000 Stingers," Nizar said, then acknowledged he could not get the shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles because the government is choking off all the main smuggling routes into Syria. Small arms purchased on the black market are being smuggled in, but for all the international community's talk of helping the rebels to bring down Assad, no government is known...

What's in a face? We generally see it as a window into our inner lives — so much so that it's possible to read our emotions from our facial expressions. And in recent decades, we have become enchanted by the notion that with a little specialized knowledge, we can read these feelings very, very accurately. A program launched at Logan Airport last year has trained security personnel to converse with passengers while scanning their facial movements for suspicious emotions. Companies like Affectiva, a spinoff of MIT's Media Lab, are developing ways to automatically judge a person's mood in part by observing...

When some filmmakers focus on children or childishness, they're often just interested in nostalgia for childhood. The kids in Wes Anderson's films and in a lot of movies Steven Spielberg produces are generic placeholders or evocations of other times and eras and experiences — loss of virginity, love of movies, discovery of a bygone world, precociousness as a means of self-flattery. It's not always false. But with a director like Hirokazu Koreeda, you never feel a childhood being remembered or a quaint longing for a lost moment in time.

Q. I have been dating this guy since last summer. We hit it off right away, and things were great — until his ex came back in the picture. He said he needed to go back to her and make sure he did what he could to make that relationship work. Well, it didn't work, and he came back to me after a couple of weeks. A month later he decided to go back to her. When that didn't work, he came back again, and we've been going at it since then. I know, you must be thinking: Didn't this girl ever hear the saying, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!"

LOWELL - "Love is fleeting and embarrassing and debasing and for the stupid," proclaims a woman named Margaret Whitney, even as she prepares to test her own proposition by reconnecting with the reprobate she divorced two decades ago. "Mrs. Whitney," John Kolvenbach's too-clever-by-half comedy, now at Merrimack Repertory Theatre, explores the disruptive consequences of that reunion: for Margaret, for her ex, for his current wife, for his son, and for the longtime friend of Margaret who's carrying a torch for her. As a study of the wayward path of love, "Mrs.

The word "rattlesnake" is capable of arousing the same feelings as a real rattlesnake. S.I. Hayakawa

Q. My ex broke up with me about a year and a half ago after seven years together. He dragged his feet through the breakup, and it was really painful for me. Despite all of that, I moved forward, took control of my never-been-single-before life, and moved into the city. I got a new job and landed on my feet. I still missed him terribly, but I pushed forward. When I moved to the city, most of my friends were too far away to randomly hang out, so I took advantage of those who were close by — one of whom was a mutually close friend and happens to be one of my ex's best friends.

One of the most poignant moments in the late Marjorie Williams's book "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" occurs when Williams asks her oncologist how she could have gotten the liver cancer that would ultimately kill her. " 'You've got no cirrhosis,' he said wonderingly, ticking off the potential causes on his fingers. 'You've got no hepatitis. It's wild that you look so healthy.' 'So how do you think I got it?' I asked. " 'Lady,' he said, 'you got hit by lightning.' " In her first novel, Nellie Hermann sets herself a daunting task: to tell the story of the Bronstein...

John Shea's new play, "Comp," is set in Somerville and doesn't go anywhere particularly surprising from there. It doesn't need to. Somerville, after all, is Shea's home turf. It's also pretty fertile ground for the tightly constructed tale of familial love and guilt he wants to tell. The title is short for "worker's compensation," which is what the central character, Kevin, is waiting to receive after a construction accident leaves him paralyzed from the waist down. But it could also stand for competition, as in the fierce rivalry between Kevin and his younger...

By Peter Abraham, Globe Staff BALTIMORE — The Red Sox were disconsolate about Cody Ross on Monday, believing they had lost the run-producing outfielder for perhaps two months because of a fractured navicular bone in his left foot. But Ross was somewhat more optimistic after the game tonight, saying his foot felt good and he's hopeful of returning to the team sooner than first expected. "I'm definitely not going to put a date on it. Is it going to be 6-8 weeks? Is it going to be 2-4 weeks?

They say their M16s are dust-prone antiques. Their boots fall apart after a couple of months, they complain, and many of their helmets are cracked and patched. Yet they set out on patrol. They are the men of the Afghan National Army, the critical part of the huge machine being built to protect Afghanistan's security after the NATO alliance is gone in less than three years. With Afghanistan topping the agenda at a gathering of NATO leaders in Chicago on Sunday and Monday, an Associated Press reporter and photographer traveling with Afghan army forces in...

Myanmar's President Thein Sein was resting at his home in Yangon on Friday after military doctors paid a house call but an adviser said his condition was "nothing to worry about. " It was not immediately clear what was ailing the 67-year-old leader, but he could be suffering from exhaustion due to a heavy workload, presidential adviser Ko Ko Hlaing told The Associated Press. "The president's health condition is not critical and there is nothing to worry about," he said, declining to elaborate.

Jean Alesi thinks his slow car is a safety hazard at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Seven months after Dan Wheldon was killed in a crash at Las Vegas, the former Formula One driver acknowledged Wednesday he is uncomfortable going so much slower — more than 15 mph off the pace Wednesday — than just about everyone else practicing for the Indianapolis 500. . "Right now, I feel very unsafe, being quite slow in the middle of the track," Alesi...

Avenue Q is, in one way or another, the street where we all live. That's the premise of the 2004 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical inspired by "Sesame Street. " True, we didn't all graduate from college with a bachelor's degree in English literature, move to a New York City apartment building where Gary Coleman is the superintendent, and get downsized out of our jobs before we could even start work — which is what happens to young Princeton at the outset of "Avenue Q. " But we can all relate to a story about hard economic times and difficult personal...

The red clay courts of the Italian Open are a bit of heaven for Novak Djokovic after a week on the experimental blue surface in Madrid. The top-ranked Djokovic was one of several top players who were highly critical of the blue clay tested at the Madrid Open, especially after he lost to fellow Serb Janko Tipsarevic in the quarterfinals. "It feels great," Djokovic said Sunday. "After that blue clay, this clay seems like paradise. " "The most basic thing you have in our sport — the most important — is the movement," Djokovic said.

Q. I recently ended a relationship with a wonderful guy. Let's call him Mr. Green. He was my stab at "green dating" (the recycling of ex-boyfriends) after my marriage of 15 years ended. Mr. Green contacted me out of the blue via Facebook almost a year after my breakup, and we reconnected there. We spent the past two-plus years in a relationship that I knew was doomed from the start. I was honest with him from the get-go. I am not interested in ever being married again or even living with another man. I enjoyed his company, and he was great with my kids, but the same issues we had 20-plus years ago were...

Follow the guilty leader If you're tired of feeling guilty all the time, here's one surprising piece of good news: This tendency might make you an excellent leader. Researchers at Stanford found that being more prone to feeling guilty leads people to think you have more leadership potential, and guilt-prone business students were judged by co-workers to be more effective leaders, controlling for other personality traits, sex, and test scores. Moreover, in an experiment where teams had to come up with a product pitch and then pretend they were lost in the desert, team members who...

With the London Olympics less than three months away, the season-opening Diamond League meet on Friday offers a chance for many of the world's elite athletes to chart their progress and renew old rivalries. Some of the most intriguing matchups are in the 100 meters, with Jamaica's Asafa Powell facing his countryman Nesta Carter and American Justin Gatlin. Olympic champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce faces off against Veronica Campbell-Brown in the women's 100 in a possible prelude to London.