The Guardian’s Margaret Yau sat down with Chancellor-Designate Pradeep Khosla for an exclusive one-on-one interview on May 17.

In light of his recent support for gay marriage, President Barack Obama has been called a flip-flopper, an evolver, a hesitator. Newsweek is honoring Obama’s statements on its cover, featuring a dramatic picture of the president with a rainbow halo around his head and the statement “Our First Gay President.” And because of the historical nature of Obama’s decision to (finally) back gay marriage, political pundits from both the right and left are stepping up on their soapboxes to shine a light on Obama’s decision. Seasoned political reporters from the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Christian Science Monitor have all weighed in — and so has Bristol Palin.

Some may remember Bristol Palin from her momma’s disastrous first stint with big girl politics, when she single-handedly helped John McCain lose the 2008 election. Others may remember her through Levi Johnston, her baby daddy who, despite impregnating Palin and tattooing her name on his ring finger, ditched her to become a model and an actor in Hollywood. 

In any case, Palin responded to Obama’s decision to change his stance of same sex marriage on the religious blog Patheos.com, stating that in general, children grow up better in a household with both a mother and a father. Of course, the first response to this frankly narrow-minded statement is that Bristol Palin is a gigantic hypocrite. A single mother at 17, abandoned by her douchey baby daddy — what gives her the right to open her big Alaskan mouth and say these things? And people, from the thousands of comments that her blog post has already garnered, to JWOWW, the perennially orange one from the cast of Jersey Shore, have all responded in kind. 

But the thing is, Palin has responded to these comments about her hypocrisy. 

And dare I say it — she makes a good point:

 “I find it strange that the culture rightfully applauds former drug addicts who warn children of the dangers of drug use. They are happy to listen to former alcoholics talk about how they finally are living a clean life. But when it comes to me talking about waiting until marriage for sex, it’s almost like people want me to slink away in shame…unable to show my face in public again because of my past mistakes.”

I may not agree with Palin’s view on mixed-sex marriage or her mother’s views on, well, anything. But she’s right — blindly attacking Palin for being a hypocrite is like criticizing a smoker turned lung cancer patient for talking about the dangers of smoking. Perhaps we were the hypocrites after all.

That being said, Obama’s support of gay marriage, though a bit late and could only have happened with Biden’s prior statements, was a huge and historic event. I support it.

A curious case has recently come out of our very own San Diego county in the past week. Daniel Chong, a 24-year-old engineering student from UCSD has stepped forward, alleging that he was locked in cramped Drug Enforcement Agency cell after a drug bust. For five straight days, Chong was given no food or water, and was forced to, in his own words to the San Diego Union-Tribune, “recycle his own urine.” 

Arizona lawmakers, in an effort to promote their pro-right agenda, have created a provision to their new anti-abortion bill that would make any parent’s heart stop in their throat. Pregnancy is now calculated from the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period — two weeks before actual conception. Yes, you read that correctly. In Arizona, you can be technically pregnant before ever engaging in sexual intercourse. 

Ali Athar may be the odd man out — literally — in this year’s A.S. presidential race, but what this chemical engineering major is bringing to the table are fresh and, to quote his party’s slate, innovative.

With no previous A.S. experience under his belt, the fourth year Sixth College student is this year’s obligatory “maverick”; while he’s tried to apply for A.S. multiple times before, he’s never been able to win the bid.  But Athar, the only male candidate, is an entrepreneur at heart, with start-up companies that would seemingly back up his campaign promises of “honing leadership on campus and innovating successful student-operated businesses.”

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke at UCSD as part of an annual lecture series presented by the UCSD Center of Global Justice, the Helen Edison Lecture Series and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. Brown conducted a free lecture at the Estancia Hotel and Spa about “Meeting Millennium Development Goals” on Tuesday, April 3. Around 450 people attended the lecture, which hit maximum capacity.

Four seasons is enough to dub “Breaking Bad” one of the best television dramas out there. It’s the show that has been called “Weeds” on meth, the show that single-handedly changed everyone’s perception of Hal from “Malcolm in the Middle” and the show that taught fans to “respect the chemistry.” Season four ended with a bang, literally. Arguably one of the best season finales ever produced, the show made us question, again, the morality of Bryan Cranston’s evil protagonist. We want to know more.