Mordechai Treiger

In shying away from the term “swine flu,” officials ignore the source of the problem

Nobody wants to get swine flu, and for good reason. With symptoms like fever, coughing, headache and possible death, the disease is the greatest threat to our health since the Great Meningitis Outbreak of 2009. But there is one thing people seem more afraid of than contracting swine flu - calling it that.

As classes wrapped up before Thanksgiving, alert students still caught one final lesson: Unplug your appliances, even if they're not turned on. The brothers of Pi Kappa Phi learned that better than anyone. Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush blamed last week's fire in the fraternity on a circuit overload caused by a large number of refrigerators and microwaves.

Believe it or not, Penn's dining halls serve a lot of healthy food. But if Dining Services are serious about helping students eat healthily, it isn't enough to just serve nutritious food and hope students choose to eat it. They need to provide the accurate information students need - when they need it.

Everybody knows that Tuesday is Election Day. But it's a mistake to think that it happens only once every four years. In fact, you vote nearly every day. And unlike ACORN, you're not just trying to destroy the fabric of American democracy. There are striking parallels between what Americans do in the voting booth and what they do in the shopping aisle.

We're a nation of borrowers. According to Wednesday's USA Today (or does that make it the "USA Two days ago?") the average borrower's credit-card debt now stands at $1,717. The government borrowed billions from China to finance its no-tax and spend policies and doubled the national debt to $10 trillion over the past eight years (though, to be fair, I got this figure from the most recent Presidential debate, so there's no guarantee).

Spring Break 2008 saw 175 Penn students make the pilgrimage that care forgot. Their work was hardly a big easy: Students cleared wreckage, rebuilt houses and even helped out at an animal shelter. But the sad truth is that despite these students' best efforts, New Orleans will still succumb to the next major storm.

Business Services executive director Doug Berger would not fare well in the current election. He spent his entire summer working against change. "In the day-to-day life of being a student, [change] shouldn't be one of the things you're really worrying about," he declared.

About 15 minutes before most students returned to Philadelphia, they were instructed to return their tray tables to the full upright and locked position. Better advice would have been to carry them off the plane: Trays on Penn's campus have begun to make themselves scarce.

A contest is hoping to find a just solution for just Jerusalem. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is currently accepting submissions for the Just Jerusalem competition, which aims to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict by focusing on the issues that divide that city.