Students rushing to class may find it just a little less arduous to navigate Locust Walk, if the Undergraduate Assembly has its way. At last Sunday's meeting, the UA passed a proposal - spearheaded by Nursing junior Alexandra Kotsovos - to urge the University to start fixing the many problems that they believe plague Locust Walk.

Jurors will likely decide the fate of Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya sometime today, lawyers say.

Some Penn students thrive on cheesesteaks and chili fries, and Penn Dining - let alone the city Health Department - doesn't seem to have any plans to stop them. But some government officials are on a hunt to remove the unhealthiest of fats from their citizens' diets.

In 1993, George Anastasia says, Philadelphia mob boss John Stanfa ordered his death. The plan was supposedly to throw grenades through the windows of Anastasia's New Jersey home. However, his life was saved when his would-be killers landed behind bars before they had a chance to whack him.

If studying for midterms makes you want to go out and splurge on expensive clothing or gadgets, you may be more than simply a procrastinator. A recent study suggests that 5 percent of Americans are compulsive buyers, meaning they frequently purchase items they do not need or want.

Bill Berner compares himself to Igor, the famed lab assistant to Dr. Frankenstein. Both toil in windowless basement laboratories - though Berner's is in David Rittenhouse Laboratory, not Bavaria. Berner, like Igor, concocts things that buzz, fizz and bang, although the professors he works with aren't insane; they're in Penn's Physics department.

This year, budding entrepreneurs competing for thousands of dollars worth of prizes in the Wharton Business Plan Competition need to fulfill an additional criterion - they must be Indian. The annual competition - which usually requires that candidates be affiliated with the University - recently teamed up with a leading Indian newspaper to offer the same entrepreneurial opportunities to Indian college students.

A quick fix for Penn InTouch isn't going to make class registration any easier, officials say, but neither will just talking about it. Penn InTouch has been under heightened scrutiny since last month, when Engineering and Wharton senior Danny Panzer released ClassBuster, a computer program that notifies users when space in a closed-out class opens up.

Just as a rubber bracelet fad struck America a few years ago, terra cotta ornaments were all the range in ancient India, one anthropologist says. University of California at Los Angeles professor Monica Smith used colorful PowerPoint slides to discuss the findings from her excavation of the ancient Indian city of Sisupalgarh yesterday in the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - On Saturday night, Harold Ford Jr. was in fine form. Saturday marked the first debate in the Tennessee Senate race - a race that may decide which party controls the Senate come January - and Ford, the Democrat and a 1992 College graduate, certainly had his own style.

In certain respects, Ben Eithun is the typical all-American jock - he stands 6 feet 4 inches, weighs 265 pounds and was once a lineman for his football team at Edgewood College. But one thing separates him from the rest of the pack: He is a male nurse.

Voters "have to drain the swamp that is Washington, D.C.," Nancy Pelosi told a crowd in Logan Hall's Terrace Room. The Republican Congress has made a mess of everything from Iraq to education, but the Democrats can clean it up, Pelosi (D-Calif.), the U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader, announced to students Friday morning at a rally on Penn's campus.

Text-messaging may have taken impersonality to the next level in America, but it is literally changing language in China, according to one scholar. Victor Mair, a professor in Penn's East Asian Languages and Civilizations program, along with his colleagues Brian Spooner and Aslam Syed, spoke yesterday afternoon to an audience of about 20 at the Penn Museum on the evolution of language, in both written and spoken forms.

Some are graduate students. Some are middle-aged and balding, their college days long behind them. Others are running for political office, but their T-shirts and moptop hair appear more fit for a Grateful Dead concert than the campaign trail.

Researchers at Penn's School of Medicine have discovered a major protein related to Lou Gehrig's disease and a type of dementia.

Though graduate students can join three different representative organizations, not all of them are created equal - at least in the eyes of Penn administrators.

Rufus Wainwright may be an acclaimed musician, but even he makes mistakes from time to time.