Opinion

Even the most cynical observer might have been surprised by the Orange County District Attorney’s decision to press charges against the 19 students and workers who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Feb. 24, 2010 sit-in on the fifth floor of Aldrich Hall. This might only be because the district attorney’s office decided to inform the students of the charges through an online press release, publishing each student’s full name and location (forever linking each of them, via Google, to a criminal case) on the Thursday of finals week, with an arraignment scheduled during Winter Break, and a full six months after UC Irvine itself completed disciplinary proceedings against the students involved.

Although Time magazine readers recently chose WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as “Person of the Year,” Time editors preferred to feature a far less controversial figure on the cover of the magazine. They decided to select Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook and the youngest choice for the honor since Charles Lindberg in 1927. While both Assange and Zuckerberg are founders of tech empires that have transformed today’s social landscape, the difference between the two is clear. In short, Assange’s innovation has targeted government secrecy while Facebook has changed our personal lives.

All of us have been there. It’s 8:00 a.m. on a Friday, you have just completed a somewhat successful caffeine-fueled all-nighter, and you are now sitting in a lecture hall preparing to take your last final of the quarter. Two hours later, your right hand — or left hand, if you happen to be a genius by no choice of your own — feels like it has been participating in a never-ending arm-wrestling match with a malevolent celestial creature for whom sleep and rest are unnecessary. The only clear solution is to drink until you can no longer feel feelings.

Old habits die hard. A recent poll revealed that 4 in 10 Americans believe in some variant of creationism, 38 percent in “theistic evolution” — that is, evolution guided by God — and 16 percent in evolution tout court. The expected, incredulous reaction of the average reader of this article is as follows: “Really? In 2010?” But the charts show that this is the lowest occurrence of belief in creationism in decades, and progress — if this is progress to you — comes at its own pace.

On Dec. 23, Scott M. Reid covered the UCLA-UC Irvine basketball game much like any mainstream media outlet — from UCLA’s perspective. The only problem: Reid was writing for the Orange County Register.

If you’ve been keeping up with the news for the past month or so, the name WikiLeaks should sound more than familiar, as well as the constant battle between the site and many governments. WikiLeaks, an international non-profit organization that publishes private, secret and classified media, has recently been releasing classified documents of detailed correspondence between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions from countries around the world.

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