June 2, 1991

"DORK, nerd, jerk!" Name-calling pelts a middle-school student, tormented by classmates because his clothes aren't "cool" and he reads at recess rather than play basketball. When he sits down in the cafeteria other kids pick up their lunches and move, so he begins avoiding the situation by eating in a sympathetic teacher's classroom. Teasing becomes a litany of cruelty from students goaded by their friends to pick on him. For the victim, choices are limited by the knowledge that verbal cruelty can take an ugly turn into physical abuse or property damage.

JEFFREY LIPTON sold his dairy herd in 1986. But at the time, he said, he never imagined that he was going out of the business for good. His family had run a farm in Somers for three generations when he signed up that year for a Federal program called the Whole Herd Buyout, agreeing to slaughter his herd and stay out of dairying for five years. The program was intended to eliminate a milk surplus that was driving prices down and farmers into debt. Mr. Lipton was losing more than $8,000 a month, he said, and he figured that the money he would get for his 500 head of cattle would cover most of his debt. He hoped that by the time he got back into dairying in 1991, the going rate for milk would be high enough to cover expenses, he said.

By any measure, Alfred C. Sikes has a bold blueprint, and he is in a hurry to put it in place. As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, he sees a world in which people could use satellites and high-speed fiber-optic communication lines to take college courses at home, have television sets double as multimedia computer work stations, use communication networks to transmit the contents of an entire library in seconds and track down a person anywhere on the globe to deliver the data.

GEORGE BUSH, the Eveready President, just keeps going and going and going. Despite a thyroid condition that left him thinner, wan and tired, Mr. Bush has recently seemed for all the world like the mechanical bunny with the bass drum on the battery commercials.

AN office-retail building with a roof designed to suggest a Cambodian temple is the centerpiece of efforts by Asian immigrants and this city's officials to revitalize a depressed commercial district. Susan Shick, the city's Director of Community Development, said the $2 million, 22,000-square-foot UCC Plaza will be a "catalyst" for the redevelopment of the Anaheim Street area, a watershed of several immigrant neighborhoods.