Council President Anna Verna's announcement of a Nov. 7 special election for the three vacant City Council seats seemed like good news for Florence Cohen. The 88-year-old widow of late Councilman David Cohen would have a chance to finish the term of her husband, who died in office last fall at the age of 90.

New Student Orientation is over, which means a whole new class of freshmen is about to learn that college is not only about partying - unless you're an upperclassmen crashing NSO again. Those same freshman are about to learn that their peer advisors, those beacons of maturity during orientation, will most likely show up to Thursday-morning class quite hung over from Wednesday-night sink-or-swim at Smokey Joe's.

Just four days removed from making Lehigh "look like superstars," senior Dan Cepero and the men's soccer team will face an even stiffer test.

City Council President Anna Verna can order a special election to fill three vacant Council seats as early as today, but several local groups are calling the process undemocratic. Because Verna announced the election in August - therefore eliminating the possibility of a primary - ward leaders, not voters, will select the party nominees.

Penn basketball freshman forward Justin Reilly was a senior in high school when coaches from around the country started contacting him to play for their universities and sending him messages frequently - on his cell phone.

Student financial-aid records have been helping to fight the war on terror for the past five years - but without students' knowledge. The Department of Education acknowledged last week that one of its offices had been running a program, which was discontinued last June, that searched for evidence of terrorist activity via financial-aid records.

This July, many full-time employees of the School of Medicine received a pleasant surprise in our mailboxes - a $500 bonus, to be credited to our September paychecks.

You can't check out these new professors on Penn Course Review, but you might want to look into their classes. The new faculty members - most of whom previously taught at other universities - have come to Penn to share their expertise in fields ranging from political science to the modern Middle East to Romance languages.

With the first week of the semester under their belts, administrators and students are starting to buckle down to discuss the fate of Hey Day. But nobody's sure exactly what they want to say. Discussions are set to begin within the next two weeks. The Office of the Vice Provost for University Life is planning to work with both the junior class board and other members of the Class of 2008 to make the annual tradition "safe and fun," according to Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum, head of VPUL.

A Philadelphia smoking ban - long discussed and passed by City Council this summer - may have again hit a snag. Mayor John Street has recently voiced concern about the bill and says he is considering vetoing the legislation by Thursday's deadline. His main complaint is that the ban does not extend to outdoor cafes, though some attribute his failure to sign this and previous legislation on the issue to personal differences between himself and former Councilman Michael Nutter, a proponent of smoking-ban legislation who is currently running for mayor.

Back in 1982, my mom was studying for her teaching certificate when she met my dad in an English class. He mustered the courage to talk to her one day over verb conjugations, and they began dating. It was love. In 2006, the game hasn't changed too much. A significant proportion of women still find their husbands while they're attending school.

An unusually high number of Advanced Placement exams were reported missing this summer after high school students took the exams in May. Tom Ewing, a spokesman for the Educational Testing Service, which scores the exams, said that roughly 1,500 exams or portions of exams remain missing and unscored.

U.S. News & World Report may offer the most-recognized academic rankings for universities, but another group offers a list with a twist- an evaluation of schools that is catered to the student-athlete. Penn is not commonly thought of as an athletic powerhouse, but it ranked 11th in the most recent edition.

While Benjamin Netanyahu says technology is not necessarily the key to economic growth, modern gadgetry certainly helped keep the former Israeli prime minister safe when he visited Penn yesterday.

Spending a month working in a Tanzanian hospital seems like an unlikely summer vacation for most students. College junior Rebecca Davis begs to differ. A nearly 20-hour trek to Tanzania, via Amsterdam, led Davis to a tiny village outside the city of Arusha, where she spent a month working in a local hospital.

Sometimes, child sex charges are not enough to fire a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. University policy allows for the firing of professors implicated in serious crimes, but Penn officials say charges previously brought against ex-Wharton professor Scott Ward Ward were not significant enough to dismiss him.

There are 25 freshmen on the Penn football roster. And if the last couple of years are any indication, odds are that only seven will see action in 2006. In a school where freshmen in other sports are often immediate contributors, football players have not had the same impact.