The son of a disgraced Chinese leader Bo Xilai received three traffic tickets while driving a Porsche [costing around $80,000] in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Bo Guagua, son of the ousted Communist Party chief at the center of a widening corruption scandal, had earlier this week sought to downplay his allegedly lavish lifestyle as a student at Harvard University.

Harvard must be pissed. If they’re ever going to begin growing their endowment – currently an anemic 32 billion – it’s going to have to come from guys like Bo.

… in which two students were killed, there’s been another robbery of students. As the suspect fled, campus security officers wounded him, and he’s now in custody.

From a New York Times roundup of Tribeca Film Festival offerings:

Andrew Semans’s “Nancy, Please” conveys a similar turbulence lurking just under the civilized surface of everyday life. In the story, which traffics in the ghastly-funny misanthropy that is the specialty of Neil LaBute, a doctoral candidate and his angry former roommate engage in an escalating battle of wills when she refuses to return his copy of “Little Dorrit,” which contains the notes for his thesis. Observing this conflict, which begins to destroy his sanity, is like watching a slow-motion car accident. As much as you may loathe the characters, you can’t avert your eyes.

… to get UD‘s attention, and these three Saudis, two of them residents at the University of Ottawa’s med school, and the other lately tossed from said med school, are doing that. Background here.

And here’s an update:

A Saudi doctor who is suing the University of Ottawa for more than $55 million has lost his bid to overturn his dismissal from the Faculty of Medicine’s neurosurgery residency program.

In a decision earlier this month, a panel of Ontario Division Court judges rejected Dr. Waleed AlGaithy’s argument that the university’s Senate appeals committee violated procedural fairness and acted unreasonably when it upheld his dismissal from the residency program …

Plus, since they decided to sue for all those buckaroos, they can’t even do the Human Rights Tribunal thing!

In three decisions dated March 29, 2012, the Human Rights Tribunal dismissed the complaints from AlGaithy, Aba-Alkhail and Alsaigh, saying it was barred from proceeding because the three had commenced civil suits based on the same facts and allegations and were seeking similar remedies.

That violates provisions of Ontario’s Human Rights Code that prohibit the tribunal from hearing complaints that are the subject of civil proceedings, the decisions said.

… have been killed in what looks like an attempted carjacking near campus.

… has been found dead. His roommate “found him about 7:40 a.m. on the floor of their room in Roy Wilkins Hall.” It’s not yet known how he died.

… critical condition. They were driving to the airport, on their way to spring break, and were hit head-on by a person going the wrong way on the interstate.

… Scroll down to Colbert Report clip. Start at 2:41 and realize the emptiness behind your religious delusions.

… runs the headline, but the cause of death of MIT undergraduate Brian Anderson simply hasn’t yet been determined. No foul play, and no clear signs of suicide.

Here are two other possibilities:

Maybe Anderson had an underlying health problem – weak heart, epilepsy. He may have had a condition of which he himself was not aware.

The other possibility that has to be considered is alcohol/drugs.

… at America’s worst university.

Could go to prison for as many as forty years. My guess is that he’ll get twenty.

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Huguely’s father will testify as part of the sentencing deliberations. Given the gin-soaked existence he and his son both apparently led (Huguely wrote to Yeardley Love days before he killed her that “alcohol is ruining my life”), he may not be the best person to give this testimony. He will probably break down on the stand and speak of his mistakes and his feelings of guilt; but while this will certainly make him and his son look pathetic, it will not necessarily stir sympathy.

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Update: Huguely’s father did not testify. Good call.

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Another Update: He has been sentenced to 26 years.

First it was this guy, who kept evading capture. Now it’s these guys, who gathered at a student’s window to watch her having sex with one of their teammates. Just like the first pig, they got caught, and now they’re squealing.
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UD thanks Andre.

It’ll work as well as this chick’s Prozac defense worked.

A former Temple University student killed himself the other day, shot himself in the head, in the busiest part of campus. Plenty of students saw it happen, or saw the immediate aftermath.

UD readers might remember Mitchell Heisman, who shot himself in the head in the middle of Harvard Yard a few years ago, on a busy morning. Or Nora Miller, who, on another busy morning, immolated herself on the Wesleyan University running field where she (a track star) practiced.

Most suicides are private; UD remembers a GW woman going across the river to a hotel room in Virginia to kill herself. The main character in Doris Lessing’s famous story, “To Room Nineteen,” similarly chooses an anonymous hotel room for her death. Many suicides are committed in hotel rooms.

Public suicides literally want to make a spectacle of themselves. It seems important to their conception of their deaths that they be seen, that people be riveted to and disturbed by their charred or bloodied bodies in the public square. Heisman distributed, just before his death, a long manuscript about the meaninglessness of life. His public gesture seems to have been the endpoint of an elaborate argument to which we were meant to pay attention.

Private suicides seem a reckoning with private demons; public suicides often feel like an angry message.

… the sudden, quiet exit of a Kenyon freshman.

Kathryn Currier, eighteen, “died unexpectedly … after falling ill in her room.”

She loved literature, passionately. But she wanted to study everything. She “was very frustrated she could only take four classes. There was just so much she wanted to experience and learn and do.”

She wrote this about herself.

I can be a bit shy in class at the outset, but this is something I am working on; I should get better as the class progresses and I (hopefully!) gain confidence. I am looking forward to four years of learning in one of the best English departments in the country.

She also wrote

[T]he beauty of literature and poetry [is] that it can be experienced by anyone. Indeed, sometimes reading, sometimes words, are the only thing a person has; reading can be the most wonderful means of escape from this world, and reading can also be the most wonderful means of connecting to this world.