Gay and straight students alike gathered for a candlelight vigil in Wynn Commons last night to commemorate the death of Matthew Shepard, who was brutally murdered 10 years ago for being gay. The vigil was hosted by Allies, an organization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and straight students.

Waiting at the 38th Street crosswalk while you're late for class isn't the only horror on Spruce Street. Penn Dance and Glee Club's seventh annual collaboration, "Nightmare on Spruce Street," opens today in the Prince Theatre at the Annenberg Center. The Glee Club, founded in 1862 as an all male a cappella group, has toured over 35 different countries on five continents, while Penn Dance is experienced in its own right, with over 30 years of bringing modern dance to university audiences and beyond.

It has long been the norm for the University to deny funding to student political groups. So when the price tag for Republican presidential nominee John McCain's November 2007 visit to Penn came to nearly $5,000, members of the executive board of the College Republicans had to reach into their own pockets to help cover the costs, said College junior and College Republicans president Zac Byer.

37 + 19 = ? The calculation may not seem that hard now, but try doing it while drunk. That's the goal of Google Mail Goggles, a new feature for Gmail that requires users to complete a series of simple math problems before sending an e-mail late on weekend nights.

What do you get when you combine comic books, TV weathermen and the military? The premise for a vaguely funny joke? Possibly. But according to sixth-year graduate student Roger Turner, these three seemingly incongruous institutions actually have a shared history, dating back to the First World War.

Engineering senior Ryan Goldstein said he remains enrolled in the University and intends to graduate in the spring. On Tuesday, Goldstein was sentenced in federal court to five years probation, a $30,000 fine and one year in various forms of custody for his involvement in hacking into the School of Engineering and Applied Science'scomputer server in February 2006.

Students in one section of Math 104 were forced to retake an exam this month after the professor suspected cheating had occurred as students handed in their tests. According to several students in the class, the alleged cheating occurred on Wednesday, Oct.

It was a gloomy day on Wall Street yesterday as well as in the Annenberg Center, as a panel of Wharton professors delivered a bleak outlook for the current economic situation.

Law & Order is the second longest-running primetime drama in television history, and yesterday Penn students could've killed for the chance to meet one of the writers responsible for the show's success. Jonathan Greene, a writer and co-executive producer of the NBC television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was brought to the Kelly Writers House by English professor Gail Shister.

"Yes, al Qaeda is an Islamic organization," affirmed Imam Zaid Shakir to a group in Logan Hall on Tuesday night, "in the sense that it is an organization associated with Muslims." But Shakir was anxious to divert the audience's attention to "the very real question of whether such an organization actually exists, or whether the U.

Engineering senior Ryan Goldstein was sentenced yesterday to one year of various types of confinement and was fined $30,000 for his involvement in a hacking scheme that caused a Penn server to crash. He received five years of probation from U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson.

Two higher-education groups are asking colleges and universities to provide them with completed copies of a questionnaire recently distributed by the Internal Revenue Service. The Association of Governing Boards and the National Association of College and University Business Officers hope to collate and analyze the data from the form, which Penn has not received.

With less than two weeks left before Election Day, recent polls in Pennsylvania suggest Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama leads Republican nominee John McCain by as much as 10 percent. But this doesn't eliminate Pennsylvania's battleground status just yet.

Four robberies were reported on or near campus over the weekend and early this week, marking an unusually high number of violent incidents in the area. On Monday night, Kasim Brown, 26 and unaffiliated with the University, was arrested in connection with a robbery at the World Café Live, located at 3025 Walnut Street, a little before 11 p.

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The whole 2008 election cycle played out in just under two hours at Clark Park on Saturday afternoon. Enormous puppets of elephants, donkeys, oil wells and ballot boxes wheeled and danced around the park's main lawn, as about 200 spectators alternately cheered and hissed.

Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, held a rally in downtown Philadelphia yesterday morning touting her husband's candidacy and stressing his readiness to "put country first." The rally, held at the National Constitution Center, came just 14 days before the country goes to the polls to vote for president on Nov.