Friday evening, the President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai and his security motorcade descended upon Georgetown for a talk on the future of Afghan-U.S. relations. Key Bridge closed down temporarily due to the arrival of Karzai, who also met earlier that day with President Barack Obama to enter into a bilateral security agreement and plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next years.

His arrival was heavily anticipated and met with a round of applause from the students and dignitaries at the event. Over 550 students waited in line for only 400 available student seats. As Karzai stepped to the podium, he mentioned the honorary degree Georgetown bestowed upon him in September 2006. He expressed hope that his son might also get the opportunity to attend Georgetown in the future.

The speech, characterized by moments of laughter and stern reflection, kept the audience enraptured for the entire hour. He reflected, initially, on the unpleasant realities of the ongoing war on terror. “It has been costly to you in America, so many of your men and women in uniform and civilians have lost lives. It has been costly to our other allies. It has also been costly, massively, to the Afghan people,” he said. “We have lost in the past 10 years tens of thousands of civilians to violence.”

Karzai lauded the progress has made Afghanistan in the past twenty years with the help of the U.S. government in providing education to women.

He also added criticism that the U.S. media presents a biased view on Afghanistan. “If I watched television in the United States or Europe and judged Afghanistan … I would lose all hope,” he said.

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Georgetown students gathered to perform and listen to music in the Walsh Black Box Theater last Friday. Guild of Bands is a one-credit course with an end of the semester performance as the final exam. About 100 people filed in by the end of the night to watch bands perform.

Photos: Tiffany Lachhonna

 A spork at Leo’s

Eating at Georgetown is something we all do. Three times a day if we’re feeling healthy. Perhaps a Chicken Madness from Wisey’s, or ladies lunch at Pie Sisters. Leo O’Donovan Dining Hall, however, is the mecca that every student at Georgetown must commit to for two years, unless you’re lucky to live in an apartment your sophomore year.

Okay, lucky is a stretch. Some people stick with their meal plans till the end of their four years at school. Seniors Eating at Leo’s (SEALs) are growing every year, despite the general complaints from the student body that Leo’s does not have what it used to once. Students hailing from as far as Glover Park make their treks to Leo’s with backpacks and Tupperware ® for the treats they will hide in their pockets to bring home some banana chowder.

Some seniors did leave their meal plans due to the totalitarian nature of the establishment. Eliminating the Make Your Own Pizza stand was a huge hit for most students.

“Why would you get rid of the one thing that makes Leo’s tolerable? You’re out in the frontier making your pizza pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s freedom. That’s all I have to say,” Mark Waterman (SFS ’13) whispered under his breath. But that wasn’t allll he had to say. “The idea of separating the worker from the product of its labor, me being the worker and the pizza being the product of my labor.”

Without the make your own pizza stand, some students feel they’ve been reduced to childlike standards.

“I like making my own pizza,” Bruce Thomas (SFS ’13) shouted across a rowdy Leo’s table. “I feel powerless, impotent. Like some small child. And it really does taste like heated up Lunchables instead of like actual tasty pizza.”

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As we gear up for the finals countdown, the Daily Beast published a list of the top 25 most stressful schools in the country, ranking Georgetown eighth.

Washington University in St. Louis came in first place, followed by University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Harvard, Northwestern, Brown, and Wesleyan.

The gallery also included crime rankings for each school, from data provided by the Department of Education. Georgetown ranks 21st among the top 25 for its crime rates. Wesleyan University ranked first for its crime rates.

Moral of the story? You may be stressed about losing your laptop, but the folks over at Wesleyan are more likely to have theirs stolen.

This week, the Voice‘s satirical Page 13 cartoon, editors Cannon Warren and Christy Geaney illustrate a move that would bring Georgetown’s basketball team to the national championship.

Update: Georgetown Love Professions launched today. “Send your professions of love through the wonderful world of Facebook and let your special someone know that they’re loved!”

Apparently, Georgetown students are more likely to compliment than insult each other, at least publicly. In the past week, two anonymous Facebook pages started, “Georgetown Compliments” and “Georgetown Insults.” The students behind these Facebook accounts will not reveal their identities, but will repost any compliment, or insult, about another student, campus organization, or group, on their respective pages.

Since Monday, Georgetown Compliments has reached 1,085 friends and continues to grow. In the past 24 hours there were approximately 60 “compliments” to various students. Both Compliments and Insults post any message sent to their account, without revealing the identity of the student who sent in the compliment or insult.

Compliments were, naturally, pretty tame. “Fakher Elfayez is the coolest freshmen on campus and I’m so glad to have gotten to know her :),” one comment read.

Georgetown Insults started in reaction to Compliments, but still only has 400 friends. The idea behind “Insults” is to let out any frustration on about campus organizations or groups. When asked about how “Insults” began, the owner of the account wrote in a Facebook message to Vox that the page was created to “troll” Compliments.

Some were called out for their political views:

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After 40 years of work with culinary unions, Donald Taylor (SFS ’80) will be the next president of UNITE HERE!, the union that represents Georgetown’s dining service workers. Taylor, currently the head of the Las Vegas Culinary Union Local 226, will now lead a union that represents almost a quarter of a million workers across the nation.

Taylor, known as D., will replace former UNITE HERE! president John Wilhelm. UNITE HERE! was not available for comment on Taylor’s new position.

Back in 2009, In Business Las Vegas spoke with Taylor about members of Culinary and how the recession has hurt workers in Las Vegas. “I think it’s brought a fair amount of anxiety and insecurity that Las Vegas had not seen at least for 20 years,” he said to the LA Times. 

At Georgetown, Taylor was the son of a single mother and waited tables to get through school in six years. The year following his graduation, Taylor was hired by Culinary. Since 1980, the union has gone from 18,000 to 60,000 members.

One of Taylor’s primary goals is to increase the number of Hispanic and African-American organizers and labor leaders in America. “The U.S. military is the best institution in America for developing African-American leadership. We should follow that example,” he said to the LA Times.

Taylor has become an extremely well known figure in labor politics. Last year, he was arrested alongside 100 Culinary members during a demonstration against Station Casinos, a Las Vegas company that Culinary was trying to unionize.

Read more about Taylor’s career and experience here. Via LA Times, Photo from UNITE HERE website

In Copley Hall around 3 p.m. today, students reported that laptops and cell phones were stolen from their dorm rooms. The students left their room temporarily and returned to a room devoid of electronic equipment.

In the past month, the Department of Public Safety Chief Jay Gruber began promoting a software called LoJack that can track the location of a stolen laptop. DPS launched a campaign, setting up in the front entrance to Lauinger Library, to educate students on the best ways to prevent laptop theft in the library or in residence halls given the frequency of these burglaries.

In the month of October, there were 35 crimes reported to DPS, six of which were laptop thefts. LoJack and the University are partnering to decrease the cost of the tracking software from $40 to $13.95 per year. Then of course there are cheaper options, like gluing your laptop to the table. Though perhaps not as effective.

Mayor Vincent Gray is working with real estate and developing company Wilkes Co. to draft a proposal for a 600,000-square-foot university village at 300 M Street Northeast for Georgetown and other D.C. universities to lease. This proposal comes in light of the Mayor’s five-year plan for economic growth.

Gray envisions this academic village as one that includes student and faculty housing, lecture and seminar halls, as well as gymnasiums and cafeterias. The village would be accessible by the NoMa-Galludet U Metro Station.

“This has the potential to be an absolutely ground-breaking and world-class opportunity,” Company Chairman Sandy Wilkes said to the Washington Business Journal. 

The University has not expressed explicit formal support or consideration of the proposal. GW’s business dean Doug Guthrie publicly supported the concept of the proposal.

“Participating in an academic village would certainly be one of the ideas we would consider as we actively look for new opportunities around the District and the region where we can expand and grow our academic programs,” University spokeswoman Stacy Kerr wrote in an email to Vox. 

The dean of the McDonough School of Business is currently communicating with Wilkes and the dean from GW’s business school to see if this project is viable.

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In the past couple weeks, two new stores opened on M Street: the well-known resale chain Buffalo Exchange and American East Coast clothing line GANT. Buffalo Exchange replaces what was formerly Annie Creamcheese at 3279 M Street, which recently closed and moved to Los Angeles. Vox was not able to get a comment from Annie Creamcheese on their decision to leave the Georgetown market.

GANT, on the other hand, occupies the space that was held by the jazz bar Saloun at 3239 M Street, which closed last October. According to the D.C. blog Guest of a Guest, Saloun owners who were there for over two decades left to “move on to new projects.” GANT has kept exposed brick with names of Saloun patrons to preserve the historical character of the bar. The tradition was that your name would be written on a brick of the bar if you donated money to build new schools.

The Georgetown Patch reported that in a press release last Monday the CEO of GANT USA David Arbuthnot explained the very logical expansion to the Georgetown area. “Expanding into Georgetown was a natural step as GANT’s aesthetic is grounded in our authentic American East Coast heritage,” he said in the press release.

GANT’s style is self-described as traditionally American with a European flair. Their clothing line is often catered to Ivy League students, and a video on their website features profiles of students from Yale University talking about their studies and wearing GANT clothing. The company started out in Connecticut with a huge base of customers from Yale.

Buffalo Exchange Associate Manager and Marketing Leader Selena Baker said Black Friday was the second highest grossing day since its opening. She added that despite Georgetown’s upscale market, consumers are still interested in vintage resale clothing.

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