A decade after George Lucas said “Star Wars” was finished on the big screen, a new trilogy is destined for theaters as The Walt Disney Co. announced Tuesday that it was buying Lucasfilm Ltd. for $4.05 billion.

The seventh movie, with a working title of “Episode 7,” is set for release in 2015. Episodes 8 and 9 will follow. The new trilogy will carry the story of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia beyond “Return of the Jedi,” the third film released and the sixth in the saga. After that, Disney plans a new “Star Wars” movie every two or three years. Lucas will serve as creative consultant in the new movies.

The No. 1 Baylor Lady Bears picked up where they left off, defeating the Oklahoma City University Stars 91-42 Monday evening in Waco.

“I got to play some combinations and situations,” head coach Kim Mulkey said. “I expected everything that I saw but it was just good to have it in a game setting. I thought first of all, the freshmen did fine. I think conditioning for several of them is obvious. They’ve got to learn to play longer stretches, but that’s being a freshman and having to play at an intense level at both ends of the floor.”

The Baylor volleyball team is 16-9 with a 3-7 Big 12 Conference record. With six conference games remaining, the Bears are looking to play their best volleyball down the stretch in the second half of the season. Every game is crucial at this juncture in the season. With the first half of Big 12 play behind them, the Bears believe they are poised to make a positive run.

“I feel like since the first half is over, we’ve hopefully learned all of our lessons from the first half,” senior right side hitter Alyssa Dibbern said. “We can use those lessons to show teams that we are a second-half team and they didn’t know what they were getting into the first time they played us.”

The Big 12 tournament has not treated the Baylor women’s soccer team well in the recent past. Last year, the team lost to a Missouri team in penalty kicks that it had beaten 3-0 earlier in the season. But this is a new year, and the No. 14 Bears will look to reach further and win the Big 12 tournament in San Antonio.

The No. 1 Baylor Lady Bears picked up where they left off, defeating Oklahoma City University 91-42.

“I got to play some combinations and situations,” head coach Kim Mulkey said. “I expected everything that I saw but it was just good to have it in a game setting. I thought first of all, the freshmen did fine. I think conditioning for several of them is obviously they’ve got to learn to play longer stretches but that’s being a freshman and having to play at an intense level at both ends of the floor.

From the tip, Baylor was defending both its title and the floor, beginning the game forcing four turnovers.

In the 17th-annual Big 12 Cross-Country Championships at the Jimmy Clay Golf Course in Austin, the Baylor men’s and women’s teams placed seventh and eighth respectively.

The men’s team earned its highest finish this weekend since 2004. Junior Brad Miles led the Baylor team with a 44th-place finish, covering the 8,000-meter course in 25:24.1.

The women’s race was highlighted by sophomore Rachel Johnson’s All-Big 12 finish. Johnson had Baylor’s 19th All-Big 12 performance in the 17-year history of the event.

I am writing in response James Herd’s Oct. 24 article, “PETA Video Games Detract From Others’ Fight for Animal Rights.”

The game’s main message is that animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or abuse in any other way.

There are a lot of similarities between how Pokémon are used in the game series and how animals are abused in real life. The difference between real life and this fictional world full of organized animal fighting is that Pokémon games paint a rosy picture of things that are actually cruel.

Both Republican challenger Mitt Romney and incumbent president Barack Obama agree the deficit needs to be addressed, but it is Romney and not Obama who has repeatedly failed to prove himself as someone who is serious about tackling the issue.

Some facets of Romney’s tax reformation plan include cutting taxes by 20 percent across the board, considerably reducing marginal tax rates, repealing the inheritance tax, and reaffirming the low tax rates on capital gains.

According to the Tax Policy Center, Romney’s plan would cost $4.8 trillion over ten years.

There are plenty of places in the world where people are oppressed and don’t get any say in their own government. To a much lesser extent, one of these places is the United States of America. In America each person gets one vote for each political position in their district. That means that the people they vote for should reflect the will of the majority, but that vote gets watered down by a system of electors, representatives and gerrymandering and eventually dumped in a big tub with all the other votes. This means that each individual vote means a lot less than the aggregate.

Baylor’s Chapter of the International Justice Mission and the Baylor University Wells Project will sponsor an event that will bring famed international organization Invisible Children to campus.

The suspect, described as a slender, 5 foot 4 inch tall black man wearing a lettered blue and white jacket, was last seen running west on Bagby Ave away from campus.
According to the alert sent to students, a female victim was approached by the suspect holding a handgun near the intersection of 8th street and Bagby. A spokesperson for the Baylor Police department said that the incident had no direct connection to Baylor, other than proximity.

Student Activities presents the first showing of the annual Pigskin Review from 5 to 9:30 p.m. Thursday in Waco Hall.…

All first-year students are invited to gather for the annual Freshman Mass Meeting to honor the Immortal Ten and help…

Hurricane Sandy has taken the country by storm, affecting an estimated 50 million people, including Baylor alumni and current students in the storm’s path.

Dr. Joseph Kickasola, director of the Baylor Communication in New York program, said the Baylor students in New York are very prepared for the storm. Fifteen of the 17 students enrolled in the program remain in New York, while two students returned home over the weekend in response to Sandy.

Superstorm Sandy slammed into the New Jersey coastline with 80 mph winds Monday night and hurled an unprecedented 13-foot surge of seawater at New York City, flooding its subways and the electrical system that powers Wall Street. At least 10 U.S. deaths were blamed on the storm, which brought the presidential campaign to a halt a week before Election Day.

For New York City at least, Sandy was not the dayslong onslaught many had feared, and the wind and rain that sent water sloshing into Manhattan from three sides began dying down within hours.

After four Big 12 contests, the Baylor Bears are still winless in the conference after Iowa State defeated the Bears 35-21 on Saturday. Now is the time for Baylor football to either sink or swim.

Seven games into the season, with a 3-4 record, some trends have become disturbing with this Baylor team. In all four of Baylor’s losses, the Bears are a combined minus-11 in turnover ratio. Aside from just the turnover ratio, the Bears have also failed to capitalize on golden opportunities and make the crucial plays down the stretch that generate victories.

Dr. Kenneth L. Hall, former president emeritus of Buckner International, has been named the new senior vice president for university development and strategic initiatives.

Hall’s new position will entail working with the President Ken Starr’s leadership team on strategic initiatives, such as Pro Futuris, and other university developments, such as new university projects on campus. Hall will begin his new duties on Jan. 1.

As far as exhibition games go, whether a team wins or loses, the result is not included in the season’s win or loss column. Technically, the season for the defending national champion Baylor Lady Bears doesn’t start until Nov. 9, but they see this game as the start to their season.

“We get to get away from playing each other,” junior guard Odyssey Sims said. “We always make each other better: going against each other we compete, but at the end of the day we’ve got to leave it on the court. Just to know that we play Tuesday, it’s really exciting.”

Kung Fu Panda, The Freak, The Beard and all their seed-throwing buddies are on top of baseball — again.

They may be under the radar, unappreciated and unexpected. But they’re unassailable, the winner of two World Series titles in the last three years.

Their sweep of the Detroit Tigers, completed Sunday night with a 4-3, 10-inning win, was simply historic.

No National League team had swept a World Series since the 1990 Cincinnati Reds.

The NBA season starts tonight, and fans in two cities can hardly control their excitement. I’m talking, of course, about Los Angeles and Miami.

If you look back just a year to when the league suffered a lockout, it seemed like the league was going to be shaken up. When the new NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement was ratified on Dec. 8, 2011, it put in place a framework that would prevent “super teams” from forming.

The full-band stylings of Lomelda echoed through the auditorium of University Baptist Church on Friday, with front-woman Hannah Read delivering a solid performance, according to those in attendance.

Lomelda, which started as a solo project by Read, has expanded to a huge local following over the past five years. Their music, which could be called a mellow, harmonic sound, had the audience in awe at the CD release show.

“I thought it was a really cool experience to have such an intimate show with all the instruments put together,” said Corpus Christi freshman Jeaneva Alvarez, who attended the show.

Wednesday’s annual Halloween organ concert will be a different way to spend the holiday and is likely to change some people’s perceptions of the instrument.

“When people think of organ they think of two things: They think of church music and they think of scary spooky,” said Isabelle Demers, assistant professor of organ at Baylor.

Demers, who has only taught at Baylor since the beginning of the year, said she thinks the spooky organ sounds people are used to hearing, such as in film scores, are often synthesized and usually don’t do the real thing justice. She said the organ should be experienced in a hall.

When a 14-year-old girl received a Facebook friend request from an older man she didn’t know, she accepted it out of curiosity. It’s a click she will forever regret, leading to a brutal story that has repeated itself as sexual predators find new ways to exploit Indonesia’s growing obsession with social media.

The junior high student was quickly smitten by the man’s smooth online flattery. They exchanged phone numbers, and his attention increased with rapid-fire texts. He convinced her to meet in a mall, and she found him just as charming in person.

President Barack Obama’s decision to help America’s automakers could end up being what helps drive him back into the White House.

Some 850,000 jobs in this critical battleground state are tied to autos and Obama’s campaign constantly reminds voters they’d be jobless if not for the decision to inject taxpayer dollars into General Motors and Chrysler.

Just 10 when he was arrested for killing his neo-Nazi father, the small, blond child told police he pulled the gun from a low-lying closet shelf and aimed it at the man’s ear while he slept in the family’s California home.

Everyone wants to be right.

As Election Day draws nearer, political campaigns and commentators begin talking more and more about recent poll data, attempting to interpret the results to indicate their candidate is winning. As a result, favorable poll numbers are often exaggerated and unfavorable results are “explained away”.

On average, a person spends up to eight hours a month on Facebook, whether it’s connecting with old friends, feeding your chickens on Farmville or — let’s be real — Facebook stalking.

If you haven’t already noticed, your timelines on Facebook are beginning to appear like MySpace back in the day or the silly emails that were forwarded to your Hotmail account with lEtTeRs ThAt LoOkEd LiKe ThIs.