In the story about construction on the Hill, “Hill construction fails to build” (News, Jan. 21), Hedrick Hall is singled out as being a residence hall with so many disadvantages that there couldn’t possibly be anything good about living at the “top of the Hill.” This is an unfair assessment. Read more...

The presidential primaries and the upcoming elections have unlocked the dormant issue of public education and thrust it into the limelight. In his State of the Union address, President Bush reaffirmed his support for the No Child Left Behind Act. Read more...

The Supreme Court announced this week that it will soon hear a new case, Roper v. Simmons, regarding the constitutionality of executing minors. For years, the high court has tacitly approved of executing teenagers who were at least 16 years old when they committed their crime by allowing states to set their own minimum age limit. Read more...

Lawsuits often represent the last desperate gasps of those unwilling to take real, substantive actions. Case and point, the Recording Industry Association of America sued 532 more people last week for illegal file sharing. Read more...

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On Jan. 17, UCLA Professor Jayne Spencer passed away. As a lecturer for the history department, the chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Disability, the director of Computers without Borders, the coordinator for the Tarjan Center for Developmental Disabilities and a leader in the movement to establish disabilities studies at UCLA, Spencer has certainly left her mark on campus. Read more...

When the invasion of Iraq was launched last March, a huge number of private military contractors went into war alongside coalition forces. These were the employees of private companies, the products of outside agencies who have become so valuable to modern western warfare that without them the Iraq war would have been a much more difficult war for the United States to fight. Read more...