Western Illinois U. pitcher Devin VanBrooker was killed in a motorcycle accident late Tuesday night when his motorcycle collided with an SUV. He was pronounced dead at 11:50 p.m.

The SUV was driven by Macomb resident Shameka Beard-McAllister. According to police reports, she was making a left turnand turned in front of VanBrooker..

Whitley Klingler, who was riding with VanBrooker, suffered a broken arm and a broken leg in the accident. Klingler, 20, and also a WIU student was airlifted to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, where she underwent surgery on Wednesday morning.

Police stated that Klingler was wearing VanBrooker’s helmet at the time of the accident, and she was listed as being in serious condition.

The native of Plymouth, Illinois and College of Lake County graduate signed with Western last summer and had a 3-4 record in nine starts this season to go along with an 8.07 ERA. His 40 strikeouts and 54 and two-thirds innings pitched were the most among pitchers on the Western staff.

“Devin’s passing is a shocking, tragic loss. He was not only a standout pitcher, but a great teammate as well. I only knew Devin for a few short months, but I am honored to have had the opportunity to coach him and get to know him as a person,” said Western Illinois head baseball coach Mike Villano. “We want to extend our thoughts and prayers to the VanBrooker family in their time of grief.”

VanBrooker’s first start with the ‘Necks was a series-clinching victory against Furman. He got his second win is his next outing, when he pitched five strong innings against Stephen F. Austin in the Sooner Classic.

Earlier this season, VanBrooker led the ‘Necks to a 6-3 victory over North Dakota State for his third win of the season. In the contest, he pitched a career high seven and two-thirds innings, striking out seven while giving up three runs.

The ‘Necks had been scheduled to face Bradley on Wednesday, but the game was cancelled after Villano spoke with the head coach from Bradley.

“Western Illinois’ athletic department has lost so much this year,” said Bradley head coach Elvis Dominguez, “having lost their former coach, Stan Hyman. Our prayers are with them.”

This weekend’s series at Centenary has also been cancelled and athletic director Dr. Tim Van Alstine stated that make-up dates for the series are still pending.

“Devin was an outstanding young man. He may have only been with us a short while, but Devin made an immediate impact on our baseball team. He was going to be a key player as Coach Villano works to rebuild our baseball program,” said Van Alstine.

A funeral service for VanBrooker is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Saturday at Southeastern High School in Augusta where he was an all-state pitcher during his senior year. Visitation services will be held from 4-8 p.m. at Southeastern, and VanBrooker’s family has asked that donations be made to the Western baseball team instead of flowers.

When refried beans are smeared in the shape of swastikas on a state Capitol’s window, two things come to mind: Someone is mad, but at least refried beans are being put to some use.

This deafeningly loud declaration of disapproval occurred on Arizona windows in response to Gov. Jan Brewer’s “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” (SB 1070), which is an effort to combat illegal immigration that astonishingly solicits racial profiling.

Addressing anti-immigration may seem like progress for a border state frustrated with the lack of federal initiative for such a prevalent issue. But the writers of this bill, its irrelevant language and the fact that such harsh enforcement is being implemented without more structural analysis of a flawed system makes the bill morally and legally corrupt, and people are angry as ever.

SB 1070 will definitely create only more tension for an extremely sensitive and racially charged debate – tension that probably won’t be corroborated by lower crime rates and more safety.

Leading up to and since its passage, the bill has engendered intense criticism from a variety of people and groups across the country, including student organizations (such as Bruin Democrats and IDEAS at UCLA), politicians, civil rights agencies and President Barack Obama. Religious leaders from several denominations have also expressed unified concern through an online press release, calling the bill “misguided” and claiming that it is “exacerbating a climate of fear and suspicion that pits neighbor against neighbor.”

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony said that this was the country’s “most retrogressive, mean-spirited and useless anti-immigrant law.”

The bill has become so hotly discussed mostly because of its method of implementation. Local police are mandated to question people about their immigration status where “reasonable suspicion” exists. Of course, it’s all too expected that the bill would set no guidelines for what exactly could and should beget such suspicion. An accent? The color of one’s skin, perhaps?

To further complicate the fact that local police, who are obviously not federal immigration authorities, can decide on a whim who needs to be checked for valid documentation, the bill also allows Arizonians to sue any agency, county, town or official that they believe is not effectively implementing the law.

Just imagine what will result when the power to deem someone reasonably suspicious is given to virtually every citizen of a state already so aggravated – of a state already frequently accused of racism. Allowing citizens to step in will snowball the injustice; police will probably question even more undeserving people out of paranoia for personal financial complications.

What with the governor’s public statement on Friday, ridiculously intolerant election campaign commercials lately (by all means, watch Tim James’ ad for Alabama governor), and organizations like the Tea Party running stupidly rampant, it seems that using sensationalism to frighten citizens instead of providing them with accurate knowledge for complex political issues is as hot a trend as ever.

In her public statement, Brewer adamantly stated that citizen safety could no longer be sacrificed to the “murderous greed of drug cartels,” that Arizona “cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life.”

Of course, the issue of drug wars are of dire and pressing concern for those on the U.S. border. And this is especially true for Arizona, which encounters more illegal trespasses and drug transactions over its border than any other state.

But neither this bill nor Brewer addresses the violence that results from drug cartels in a constructive manner, aside from increasing a first-time offense from misdemeanor to felony for gun or drug possession. Her statement only seems to equate criminals peddling drugs in America with all who have failed to achieve citizenship status, which is unfair.

This is simply missing the bigger picture: Illegal immigration is the product of an unintelligible visa system and an overall difficult path to legalization. Furthermore, border violence is a horrible compound occurrence that can be dealt with in other ways. More National Guards on border patrol is one way. The bill also takes away authorities’ rights to ever release guilty prisoners early. I wonder if Brewer has planned for the inevitable increase in incarceration funding.

The true intentions of controversial legislature become exponentially less perplexing when the source is considered. This bill was introduced by Republican Sen. Russell Pearce, whose name is remembered for a 2006 controversy in which he “mistakenly” circulated an e-mail that condemned the media for erroneously “forcing” on the public ideas of racial equality, the Holocaust “tale,” and that “(halting) the flood of non-White aliens” is wicked. A charming man.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform also claims credit for assisting politician Kris Kobach in actually writing the bill. This is an organization widely criticized for accepting prolonged monetary support from The Pioneer Fund, a non-profit group self-described as “pioneers for the Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary trend, and the eugenics movement.” Intentions are disgustingly unraveling, or at the very least, the political allegiances of those behind such legislature.

In response to a Fox News correspondent’s question about public concern for the racial profiling that will occur under SB 1070, Pearce actually responded by saying, “You know, my – I have two children – two grandchildren that are Hispanic.” Charming and quick on his feet.

The bill even goes so far as to state that the “attorney general or county attorney shall not investigate complaints that are based solely on race, color or national origin.” I’m glad to see that race as an additive factor is perfectly lawful. In the words of Rachel Maddow, “Would it count if it were, say, based on race AND color?”

Arizona, and to a lesser extent New Mexico, has an incredibly serious issue on its hands. Drug cartels are creating utter disaster in border communities, and the violence has been steadily escalating. Unfortunately, SB 1070 is nowhere near the solution.

The best I can hope for with this draconian legislature is that it is deemed unconstitutional and that it will spur comprehensive immigration reform on the federal level, including a better visa system and employment opportunities where labor is needed. The migrant population of this country provides an incredible number of services that many do not seem to want to address. I hope this debacle will lead the way for that acknowledgment instead of setting the stage for resurgence of a type of blatant racism that this country should be well beyond.

Challenge: a class of eighth graders at a New York middle school, 24 hours, no texting. Result: initally severe anxiety, and a serious realization of their dependence on this social medium.

To us mature college students these middle schoolers seem like average, socially absorbed teenagers, but do we have more in common with them than we think? The day I woke up confused about whether I sent a text in my dream, or if I had actually sent it in a half-asleep, groggy state, was the day I realized texting is occupying too large a role in my life.

Texting, which started as an easy means of communication when you can’t call, is now the de facto way we contact people – in most cases, it is preferred to actually talking.

Texting makes you feel in touch socially at all times, you don’t have to force yourself out of your comfort zone and it can become like a security blanket. The college students who recently participated in a 24-hour “no text challenge” were experiencing withdrawals – it’s like social heroin.

We get antsy in class and literally crave an interesting text that can distract us from some professor who is droning on.

Students our age can definitely find something better to put endless energy toward.

Since when did texting letters rather than words, phrases rather than comprehensible sentences, and shortened acronyms become an acceptable form of communication? We now limit ourselves and thoughts to 160 characters.

Receiving text messages and constantly being in conversation with friends is a strange way our generation, flooded with social networking, feels significant. The “standing awkwardly at a party and texting” scenario feels all too familiar.

I’m tough on the invention, but I, too, fall victim to the addiction.

Over the summer I worked at an overnight camp, where my only real means of contact with the outside world was text messages.

It wasn’t until a camper cracked my screen and I couldn’t read any of the messages I was sent that I realized how reliant I am. I started forwarding my messages to my friend so I could read them. Pretty pathetic, huh?

Few of us can even conceptualize college life for our parents, where an entire dorm floor shared one phone. How could you contact your friends to head to the dining hall or, better yet, contact that someone you met at a party the night before?

The best part about text messaging is the ambiguity.

You have no idea how the person intended the text to be spoken – there is no voice intonation, expression – nothing. I love reading a text with different attitudes.

For example: “I don’t care, whatever you want to do tonight” could be read as “I really don’t care and genuinely want you to pick because I know you care,” or “I actually don’t even want to hang out, I just don’t know how to blow you off.”

It’s making us lazy: Rather than picking up the phone for a few minutes and clarifying plans, we just choose to send dozens of texts debating an activity.

Instead of contacting a friend you haven’t seen in a while with a phone call to plan something, we just text.

Since we get so many texts, it becomes increasingly easy to not respond to such acquaintances but not feel guilty because we have the justification that “it’s just a text.”

Also, it’s providing a new relationship outlet that extends the anxiety of “are they interested in me?” You can play up either feeling with texting – you can show interest, or let someone down easy.

Personally, I think the stress is cluttering our lives. It makes it so much easier to say things you would never say in person.

Whether it is texting way too late at night or starting a fight that is portraying a real emotion via text – the distance you have between you and the other person through the phone encourages absurd communication.

Why is there a “do you want to delete this” second notice and not a “are you sure you want to send this”?

Texting does bring some humor to my life. I have a few choice messages in mind that are ridiculous to reflect upon – “I’m oytsde/scaed whwer is everyone?” That one’s a classic.

A quick scan of the website “Texts From Last Night” puts the invention into perspective.

It also can be a highly convenient way to check in with friends.

Even as I’m writing this column, I’ve sent and received six texts – clearly, I’m not swearing it off or committing to next year’s Lent.

But I do think we should at least give how we use texting some reflection. How much easier is life when you aren’t constantly connected to something?

The times I’ve spent without service on camping trips have been so rewarding and enjoyable. I’m not constantly

connected and it’s an incredibly freeing feeling.

Texting can take up a life of its own if we let it. Everyone uses it a bit differently and you can make it what you want, so take a step back and decide how much of your life you want devoted to it.

Try calling people to make plans or waiting to confront your roommate in person about their pile of dirty dishes. Or don’t, and make it that much more ridiculous by making a point to send cryptic messages.

Either way, taking it less seriously is a wise decision.

About 18 students and union workers decided Thursday evening to continue their hunger strike into next week, when U. California-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau will return to the campus from Europe.

After an informal discussion Thursday afternoon between five members of the “Hungry for Justice Coalition,” Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande, the strikers said that they will continue their protest until Birgeneau agrees to discuss their demands in person.

The strikers have been camped out in front of California Hall since Monday afternoon, surviving only on water laced with sugar and lemon. At the time of the discussion, the strikers had been without food for 75 hours.

After the representatives of the strikers spoke with Breslauer and Le Grande for nearly two hours, they addressed about 100 supporters outside of California Hall, saying their discussion was simply a dialogue, not a negotiation.

“We spoke mostly about the strikers’ demands,” said External Affairs Vice President-elect Ricardo Gomez, one of the five students in the meeting. “It was a good step towards moving towards what the hunger strikers want to accomplish.”

In a statement released Wednesday, Birgeneau addressed each of the demonstrators’ six demands and stated that he is “personally prepared” to speak out against the recently passed Arizona immigration law. However, he did not fully agree to the strikers’ other demands.

The demonstrators said they stand by their prior demands, asking Birgeneau to publicly denounce Arizona’s immigration law; make UC Berkeley a sanctuary campus and provide extended protections for undocumented students; drop all student conduct charges against student activists; stop cuts to low-wage employees; suspend conduct procedures and initiate a democratic, student-led process to review the code; and to commit to using nonviolent means of ensuring safety at student demonstrations in the future.

Claire Holmes, associate vice chancellor of communications and public affairs, said Birgeneau is in Europe on university affairs and will return Monday. She added that campus officials will try to reach out to strikers again Friday.

“They had a very good dialogue – we’re in the process of digesting the information and the exchange,” she said. “We’re thinking hard about what commitments we can make. We are very concerned about their health and well-being, and we want them to end the protest.”

The strikers urged the demonstrators to e-mail the administration with their personal stories of how the Arizona law affects them in order for the administration to understand how the immigration law impacts UC Berkeley students.

“To see the protesters here gives me energy,” said UC Berkeley sophomore Alejandro Jimenez while addressing the strikers. “I encourage you to stay strong, to hang in there and to know that you are inspiring a lot of people, keep it up.”

It’s plain and simple: Football teams shouldn’t be rewarded for a losing season.

Yet that is exactly what is going to happen if the NCAA doesn’t start reining in the number of postseason games.

A bowl game should be a reward for a team that excels, not a consolation prize for effort. In 1996, there were only 18 bowl games. As of now, a total of 35 games have been licensed for next year. That means that 70 of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision teams, aka Division 1, will make it to postseason play.

Last season there were eight 6-6 teams who played in bowl games. In the past three seasons, 72 of the 120 teams have finished .500 or better. But with only a margin of error of 2, it is not improbable that a team with a 5-7 record might make the cut.

In fact, it has already happened. The 2001 New Orleans Bowl featured the 6-5 Colorado State Rams playing the 5-6 North Texas Mean Green. Even with a losing record, North Texas was the Sun Belt Conference Champion and therefore given an automatic bid to a bowl game.

“I’m not one of those guys that’s like, well, that’s too many bowls,” said Tony Barnhart, college football analyst for CBS Sports. “But everything can have its excess, and to me, I think that’s kind of where we need to draw the line is having 5-7 teams playing in the bowl games.”

The Rose Bowl will also be the “granddaddy of them all,” and being invited to any of the other BCS games, such as the Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl or the National Championship Game, will always be an honor. But when close to 60 percent of teams make it to the postseason, an invitation to a second or third-tier game like the Macco Las Vegas Bowl that the Beavers played in last year starts to seem a bit anticlimactic.

In 1996, with only 36 teams making it to the postseason, I can guarantee you it was more exciting to make it to a bowl. These days, if you have a halfway decent team, it is expected. These days, a team doesn’t even have to break top-50 rankings.

And it is only going to get worse. It isn’t as if the NCAA is suddenly going to stop licensing bowl games from this day forward. At some point, there will be a threshold where adding more games will no longer be profitable, but by squeezing out each and every possible dollar, they have cheapened the experience of playing in a bowl.

According to the NCAA, last season’s bowl games generated more than $237 million and garnered nearly 1.59 million fans.

I get it; money is important. There are a lot of teams who have come to depend on the end-of-the-year bonuses that bowl games pay out. Last year, the Ducks made $17 million by just showing up in Pasadena on New Year’s Day. Even for going to a non-BCS bowl, Macco wrote a check to Oregon State for a cool million.

A million dollars doesn’t go quite as far as it used to, but money earned from bowl games is what makes sports like rowing and gymnastics at state schools possible.

At the end of the day, the decision to add bowl games year after year is a monetary one. Bowls make money for the game sponsor, they make money for the network and they make money for the teams who play in them.

Would it be a bigger deal to make it to a bowl game if the NCAA returned to a postseason schedule with only 18 games? Yes. Would people be really upset about it? Undoubtedly yes.

I am not advocating that long-standing bowl games be done away with, but rather that the powers acknowledge the dangerous territory they are now entering.

The idea that bigger is better is not unique to college football; the NCAA recently expanded basketball’s March Madness from 6e teams to 68. The silver lining in this cloud is that although the increase was done for monetary reasons, the NCAA was pragmatic enough to realize that the original plan to increase the field to 96 teams would do little more than water down one of college’s biggest sporting events.

This is only the second time March Madness has expanded since changing to the 64-team format in 1986.

Luckily, the NCAA was able to realize that not everyone is good enough to make it to The Dance, and hopefully, they will have enough foresight to see that in football, not everyone is good enough to go bowling.

Adding more bowl games year after year also brings up the debate about whether or not a postseason with bowl games is even a good idea. Many argue that the best way to end the season is with a playoff system similar to March Madness.

Football is currently the only NCAA Division 1 sport that ends with individual games rather than a championship tournament.

Changing to a playoff system would allow for a less-disputed National Champion, but is it realistic to assume that players would be able to stay healthy that long? Unfortunately, there is really no clear-cut answer to solve the current issues facing college football.

Bowl games generate much-needed revenue for university athletic departments, but with all things in life, there is a time when enough is enough, and allowing too many bowl games has the potential to sour the sport.

For now, the NCAA might be able to slide by and cross their fingers that next year is a good year for football and that no 5-7 teams make it to a bowl. But if the trend of adding bowls each year continues, no amount of finger-crossing (or even toe-crossing, for that matter) is going to keep teams with losing records out of the postseason.

As much as football fans love bowl season, no one is going to want to see a game where the winner just happens to be the slightly less terrible team.

“All of that is taking the pure game of college football in a direction that scares me,” said former Notre Dame offensive tackle Aaron Taylor. “Do I understand it? Yes. Do I like it? No.”

During a press conference Wednesday evening, U. Virginia President John T. Casteen, III said he was unaware of the 2008 arrest of former men’s lacrosse player George Huguely, who was charged with first degree murder Monday in relation to the death of Yeardley Love, who played for the women’s team.

Huguely was charged with swearing in public, public intoxication and resisting arrest Nov. 14 in Lexington, Va. and reportedly threatened a police officer’s life. Casteen expressed frustration with the lack of communication between police jurisdictions, adding that neither Charlottesville Police nor the University was ever informed of the incident.

“Strikes me as odd,” Casteen said, “that the law does not require that kind of notification.”

Thursday, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Casteen and University officials plan to meet with Gov. Bob McDonnell to discuss the possibility of passing a state law that would require police departments to notify universities when a student is arrested.

Dean of Students Allen Groves added that he was first informed of the arrest when he read about it in the media in the days following Love’s death.

“As things surface, as things like this 2008 arrest are brought to light, I find myself saying, ‘I wish we had known that,’” Groves said.

Athletic Director Craig Littlepage explained that University policy requires a student involved in an alcohol incident to undergo counseling. In the case of an athlete, the student would be suspended from team-related activities until he was cleared by the counselor, Littlepage said. Thereafter, the athlete would meet with his coach, who could potentially take further disciplinary action.

Littlepage said neither men’s team coach Dom Starsia nor Huguely’s teammates came forth with any information regarding the 2008 incident. Littlepage did address the potential gap of communication separating players and coaches that has become a nationwide issue.

“Understand the dynamics of a team: The last thing you want to do as a teammate, as a roommate, as a friend is to tell something that might have you fall out of favor with somebody that you’re very close with,” Littlepage said. “There’s a unique element of trust within a team, and we’re struggling with a mechanism by which student-athletes can feel comfortable having either a mechanism or a person who they can go and speak with.”

The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has reopened the debate about the best way to extract energy in an environmentally responsible manner. However, the response to this spill has reinforced a regrettable, yet pervasive, myth. The climate-change debate is often portrayed as a battle between man and nature, in which only one side can come out ahead. But an examination of the technological options for energy production tells us that this is not the case.

Ideally, the clean-energy debate would be a purely scientific one—the science of the atmosphere and of energy production is one that can be quantified and studied dispassionately and objectively. Unfortunately, the science tends to get lost in the political noise. In general, Republicans tend to dismiss the effects of climate change or at least believe they are less important than the enormous economic costs of changing energy sources; Democrats tend to put a huge emphasis on stemming climate-change effects, up to and including making sometimes questionable technological decisions.

In fact, there is one win-win solution for everyone, a way to mass produce clean electricity, continue to grow our economy, and sharply reduce greenhouse emissions all at the same time, and it may surprise you: nuclear energy.

Nuclear power is a tailor-made solution to the climate change and energy problems. It is extremely clean, produces enormous amounts of electricity in a very small footprint, and is economically competitive with other forms of electricity. Additionally, uranium resources are abundant compared with other fuels (it could be mined from seawater, for example).

It is very hard to peg the exact costs of any given form of electricity due to the difficulty of estimating the environmental costs of carbon emissions, but depending on how one tabulates carbon-emission costs and subsidies for solar and wind, nuclear energy is either about equivalent in cost or significantly cheaper than any other form of energy.

Furthermore, nuclear energy is immeasurably cleaner than burning coal, oil, or natural gas; the carbon emissions from the entire nuclear-energy cycle about equal that of a wind or hydroelectric plant. Nuclear plants even emit less radioactivity than coal plants, since there are natural radioactive materials mixed in with the coal, which are vented into the air. The footprint of a nuclear plant is miniscule compared to the hundreds of windmills required to generate the electrical output of a single reactor. Nuclear plants also avoid the highly toxic chemicals used in solar-panel production, and again, a single reactor can generate more electricity than many square miles of solar panels exposed to constant sunlight. And the nuclear plant can do this in any weather and around the clock.

It is sometimes said by nuclear’s opponents that the “nuclear waste” problem makes nuclear energy dangerous even today, but this is simply untrue. There is no “nuclear-waste problem.” “Nuclear waste” is an ideological bogeyman, a catch-all phrase used to justify technical rejection of nuclear energy on grounds that are, in fact, purely political. As far as the technology goes, the United States Navy, France, Japan, and others have been safely storing and reprocessing nuclear waste for over half a century. It cannot harm people without passing through a series of steps that can be shown quantitatively to be essentially impossible. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has made this situation more complicated by closing, for entirely political reasons, a planned nuclear-waste repository on which billions have been spent.

For historical reasons, opinion on nuclear energy has become divided along party lines, an unnecessary political judgment on what should be a simple and clear technical question. There is no real ideological reason for this; nuclear energy is not innately conservative or liberal. It is merely a tool that has gained a very unfortunate political labeling. Fortunately, the global-warming crisis has started to remove some of the more emotional opposition to nuclear power, and the question has become somewhat less partisan over the last several years.

A careful combination of nuclear energy for so-called “base load” electricity, plus wind and solar for “peak” generation, would allow an infrastructure that combines nearly zero greenhouse emissions and zero limits on available energy.  And if there is no environmental harm, then energy, in itself, is extraordinarily good. It is directly and very closely correlated with growth in gross domestic product, life expectancy, and quality-of-life measures. It is desirable and essential to human progress; it is what separates us from the Middle Ages.

Nuclear electricity offers both the prospect of using existing and well-understood technology to allow a halt to environmental damage caused by dirty carbon fuels and the prospect of a future of more energy, opportunity, technology, economic growth, and scientific progress. The benefits of clean energy are thus too great to ignore.

– Daniel A. Handlin is a Harvard U. junior.