College Students

Brush in hand, UCLA junior Jacob Castaneda was hard at work Tuesday, spreading a fresh coat of brown paint on the exterior of a classroom bungalow at Samuel Gompers Middle School. He was among an army of about 4,600 UCLA volunteers who came to the South Los Angeles campus and seven other spots around the region for a day of community service. "It's always nice to reach out to the community and it's always great to help out kids," said Castaneda, a Mid-City resident who recently transferred to UCLA from Santa Monica College.

In a ceremony filled with tears and song, the people who loved Annie Le best said goodbye to her on Saturday. The private Mass, held in the sloping foothills of the Sierra Nevada, not far from Le's hometown of Placerville, came nearly two weeks after the 24-year-old graduate student's body was found hidden behind a wall in a Yale University laboratory building in New Haven, Conn. In eulogies, Le's family and pastor tried to reconcile the young woman's vibrant life with her violent death.

Khalid Fazly arrived on U.S. soil last month carrying his mother's homemade cookies, a prayer rug, dried dates and thousands in $100 bills tucked into his trousers. He was pretty certain he was prepared for America. Except for a car trip to Pakistan, Fazly had never been outside Afghanistan. Now he almost certainly is the only freshman at Indiana's Ball State University who has been threatened with death by the Taliban, survived insurgent ambushes and braved roadside bombs. In Afghanistan, Fazly worked as a translator and "fixer," or problem-solver.

The recent arrest of a UCLA student in the brutal stabbing of a classmate in a campus chemistry lab has again focused attention on an issue that gripped the nation after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech: the mental health of troubled college students. The Virginia Tech shootings, which left 32 victims and the gunman dead, raised difficult questions about how a disturbed student could have been allowed to remain at the school despite danger signs. Since then, campuses in California and around the country say they watch their students ever more closely for signs of possible mental illness or other problems.

Three missing North Dakota college softball players were found dead Tuesday in a Jeep pulled from a pond, and police said they thought the women were in the vehicle when they made two desperate calls for help. Dickinson Police Lt. Rod Banyai said officers were investigating the cause of the deaths and autopsies were planned. He said he thought the women were in the white 1997 Jeep Cherokee when they called for help, but he didn't know whether it was already underwater or how it got into the pond.

Hannah Giles was in the middle of her guerrilla warfare lecture this weekend at the young conservatives leadership conference when a man in the audience interrupted her. "We love you!" he cried out. The crowd erupted in applause and whistles. "Aw," Giles said into the microphone. "I love you guys too." At age 20, Giles is a rock star of conservative activism. She shot onto the national scene in September after posing as a prostitute at ACORN offices around the country, where she secretly videotaped employees who appeared to give her advice on tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution.

This is a story for those in business who are depressed about the possibility that our technological lead is faltering, about the dearth of Americans studying hard science or about the futility of individual initiative. To anyone subject to fits of such despair, I offer Barbara Neuhauser, human Prozac without the side effects.

College students may not make it to religious services as often as they did in high school, but their interest in spiritual and ethical issues often increases as they go through college, a new UCLA study shows.

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now it says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Assn. of America claimed that 44% of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

In an unusual lawsuit against the American Dental Assn., 13 students at UCLA's School of Dentistry contend they were falsely accused of aiding cheaters on a national examination and unfairly denied a chance to defend themselves. The dental association alleges that the students did not cheat during their own tests but violated rules by remembering and writing down exam questions distributed later to others preparing for a test.