Peter Galbraith refused to beat-around-the-Bush during his lecture on America's involvement in Iraq on Wednesday, calling the war a mistake and a failure in front of 100 students and faculty members who gathered in Silverman Hall to hear his speech. Galbraith, the former United States ambassador to Croatia, delivered a decisive and resounding seminar for 45 minutes.

Penn is getting a little more Hollywood. From one alumnus who directed treadmill-oriented music videos that are viewed 20 million times since its release on YouTube to another who became a singer-songwriter, Penn alumni like these were featured last week at PennFest - an annual alumni festival that takes place in Los Angeles, Calif.

Yale linebacker Bobby Abare, an All-Ivy first-teamer, is a singular menace on defense. But coach Jack Siedlecki is the first to admit that a locker room can't be filled with players as impassioned as Abare - and Siedlecki probably wouldn't want one. "The players sometimes laugh at his intensity, but he rubs off on people, no question," Siedlecki said at a media luncheon this week.

Deep below the surface of the earth, scientists are researching the best ways to dispose of nuclear waste left over from defense projects without harming the environment. As an inaugural speaker for its 2007-2008 lecture series, the Institute for Environmental Studies invited Laurence Brush from the Sandia National Laboratories to talk yesterday afternoon at the Lynch Auditorium in the Chemistry Building.

Joanne Tong is a Wharton senior from Manila, Philippines. Her e-mail address is tong@dailypennsylvanian.com.

According to the rhetoric of some of the Western world's most visible political leaders, poverty and lack of education are to blame for terrorism. But when Princeton economist Alan Krueger came to the Penn Bookstore last night to promote his new book, What Makes a Terrorist, he told an audience of 22 people that both associations were false.

NEW YORK, Oct. 13 - When Joe Sandberg received his 22nd and final handoff last Saturday against Columbia, he finished off one of the best performances of his career. It was fourth down and he needed only one yard. He got 13, enough for his fourth score of the game.

The Board of Trustees is the University's highest governing body, but some trustees are still in the dark about the reasons behind the departure of former Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson. About half of the trustees who spoke to The Daily Pennsylvanian said they had not been told why Stetson abruptly resigned in late August.

WILMINGTON, Del. - Contradictions posed by previous sworn statements played a key role yesterday as the defense once again tried to discredit Robert Bondar, the ex-boyfriend of Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya. Malinovskaya is on trial for the third time for allegedly bludgeoning Bondar's then-girlfriend, Irina Zlotnikov, to death in Dec.

Who's honoring Al Gore now? These days it seems like just about everybody is. Last Friday, Gore - along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts "to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.

The Penn volleyball team won two out of three matches this weekend, but nobody is happy about it. The Quakers did start off the weekend with a convincing 3-0 victory over Brown, though the Bears (2-15, 0-5 Ivy) sit at the bottom of the Ivy League standings.

Former Neurosurgery professor Tracy McIntosh will proceed with his court-mandated resentencing for a 2002 sexual assault, and could potentially face time in state prison for the crime. McIntosh and his lawyer, Joel Trigiani, announced the decision Friday in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.

Those can't-live-without-'em college essentials - Word, Excel and Outlook - are now available for almost half of what Penn's Computer Connection charges. The promotion, available at Microsoft's Web site theultimatesteal.com, offers the Microsoft Office software for $59.

Halloween approaches, and our thoughts turn to wicked things. Vampires, ghouls and . problems in urban planning. Wicked problems are practically indefinable. Issues like poverty, crime, broken infrastructure, failing schools and racism are tangled in a knotted mess.

Columbia will add M. and W. Squash Finally, every university in the Ivy League will have squash. Columbia, fresh off jumpstarting a $100 million athletic-fundraising campaign, announced yesterday that it make its club squash teams varsity ones. The promotion process will end in fall 2011, when the team will officially begin full varsity competition.

Tom Haxton wakes up everyday before dawn and heads to the Schuylkill River trails for a run. After that, it's off to Franklin Field for a workout with the Philadelphia Runner Track Club. And sometimes, when the fourth-year physics Ph. D. student has finished his research for the day, Haxton will head out for a short evening run as well.

This Saturday, Penn will launch the public phase of its five-year capital campaign with a celebration on College Green and a highly anticipated public declaration of financial goals.