Feel free to smoke up downtown — as long as it doesn’t conflict with businesses’ profit margins. If local business owners get their way, those could be the unfortunate parameters. “We’ll give...

The world as we know it (always a dicey proposition) will come crashing to an end in 2012, we have it on good authority. Something like a mystery planet will come hurtling out of nowhere, or a neighborhood...

More than one month ago, Gov. Chet Culver ordered a 10 percent across-the-board cut in the state budget, a percentage more than twice as large as any such cut in the state’s recorded history. The action...

Over the weekend, the UI Student Government served beer at an event for the first time ever. And it was in the IMU. It comes at the same time UI officials are working hard to curb students’ drinking...

Too bad Iowa’s gubernatorial race doesn’t resemble a physical one. If it did, Culver’s down-hill plunge in approval rating would seem like a relief. Culver’s approval rating, down 20 points since...

To the President Barack Hussein Obama: We are three young Muslims who came to the USA from Turkey as international students holding F-1 visas. We moved to the United States before you were elected, and...

A blatantly censorial lawsuit filed against a Butler University junior is a threat to students’ freedom of speech everywhere. The student, Jess Zimmerman, was writing an anonymous blog, “TrueBU,”...

In accordance with our government’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, an openly gay soldier is deemed “an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit...

Iowa courthouses are struggling, to say the least. As part of statewide budget slashes, courthouses in all 99 Iowa counties will close down for 10 days over the next seven months. Employees across Iowa...

Dan Reicher, director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google, summed up the effort to pass a U.S. climate-change bill as an “epic, epic struggle.” This summer, the U.S. House of Representatives...

UI President Sally Mason charged us last year to mobilize a campuswide effort — in collaboration with community members — to change the culture of high-risk drinking. At stake is the future of our...

While I was in the Army, I had the opportunity of being stationed in Germany for more than two years, and while I was there, I went traveling a bit. Weekend getaways to London, snowboarding in Garmisch,...