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The future of Twinkies is virtually assured.

Hostess Brands Inc. got final approval for its wind-down plans in bankruptcy court Thursday, setting the stage for its iconic snack cakes to find a second life with new owners — even as 18,000 jobs will be wiped out.

Along with the sudden rush of winter weather and the accompanying flood of Ugg boots and North Face jackets, Baylor’s annual Christmas on 5th Street celebration will help usher in the holiday season from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m today.

Location affects advertising experience, or so one Baylor professor hopes to prove through his research.

Dr. Kirk Wakefield, professor & holder of the Edwin W. Streetman Professorship in Retail Management at Baylor, conducted a study to examine how fans attending a live event react to sports advertising. Wakefield will take the results, which he is still receiving, from the study and compare them to the national average of fans that watched the event on TV and viewed advertisements during the broadcast. The study was conducted from Nov. 16 -18, during the last NASCAR race of the season, at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla.

Young voters helped pass laws legalizing marijuana in Washington and Colorado, but many still won’t be able to light up.

Most universities have codes of conduct banning marijuana use, and they get millions of dollars in funding from the federal government, which still considers pot illegal.

Two Army veterans and their wives on Wednesday sued the railroad company whose train hit a truck carrying veterans and their spouses during a parade in Midland.

An 80-foot Norway spruce that made it through Superstorm Sandy was transformed into a beacon of shimmering glory Wednesday when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others turned its lights on at Rockefeller Center.

Despite what is portrayed on CSI shows, forensic science does not involve projected computer screens, high-tech gadgets and easy cases.

Sgt. James Huggins is a crime scene investigator and lecturer in the anthropology department.

Texas wants ownership of Warren Jeffs’ massive ranch where prosecutors say the convicted polygamist sect leader and his followers sexually assaulted dozens of children, the state attorney general’s office said Wednesday.

Mark Carlson, senior creative director of U.S. McDonald’s Marketing, will discuss the ins and outs of marketing at 2:30 p.m. Friday in Bennett Auditorium.

Carlson’s lecture will encompass a summary of McDonald’s advertising from its small beginnings to its current global reach.

“He will talk about the challenges of marketing for the world’s most iconic brand and how that brand has evolved over all these years,” Cynthia Jackson, president of the Waco chapter of the American Advertising Federation, said.

The Baylor Round Table is hosting its annual Christmas luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday in Armstrong Browning Library.

“It’s been a yearly event for as long as I can remember,” said Carol Schuetz, one of the co-chairs for the Christmas Luncheon committee of the Baylor Round Table.

U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs awarded Baylor two research grants to assist with research on Gulf War Illness.

The grants, which total nearly $1.6 million, bring the total amount Baylor has acquired for research on the illness to $2.3 million.

The illness, which affects an estimated one in four of the 700,000 military personnel who served in the Gulf War from 1990-1991, is a medical condition that seems symptom-specific to those soldiers.

Symptoms include chronic headache, widespread pain, memory and concentration difficulties and digestive abnormalities, according to an article published by Bio-Medicine.

The Department of Justice announced Tuesday the Baylor Health Care System must pay $907,355 to settle allegations of false claims for radiation oncology services.

The Baylor Health Care system is an umbrella term that encompasses the Baylor University Medical Center and the Health Texas Provider Network, two organizations mentioned in the settlement.

None of the organizations are affiliated with Baylor University.

Students at Baylor are speaking for the dead and, no, they’re not psychics.

Anthropology students at Baylor traveled with Dr. Lori Baker, associate professor of anthropology, to Del Rio over the summer as part of her Reuniting Families program.

The program identifies the bodies of deceased immigrants along the Texas-Mexico border and reunites their remains with their families.

Cultural differences won’t get in the way of celebrating the holidays.

The Baylor University Multicultural Leadership Cabinet will host “Holidays Around the World,” a free event open to all students from 7 to 9 p.m. today in the Bobo Spiritual Life Center.

Houston sophomore Margaret Odunze, the vice president of programming for the Multicultural Leadership Cabinet and the co-chair of the event, said it was created this year with the holidays in mind.

“We wanted to do something for Christmas, but not like Christmas on Fifth,” she said.

Workers have raised the first section of a colossal arch-shaped structure that eventually will cover the exploded nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station.

Project officials on Tuesday hailed the raising as a significant step in a complex effort to clean up the consequences of the 1986 explosion, the world’s worst nuclear accident. Upon completion, the shelter will be moved on tracks over the building containing the destroyed reactor, allowing work to begin on dismantling the reactor and disposing of radioactive waste.

A group of U.S. senators will ask President Barack Obama for an emergency declaration in an effort to keep barges moving on the drought-riddled Mississippi River, a spokesman for Sen. Claire McCaskill told The Associated Press Tuesday.

Senators from Mississippi River states are seeking an emergency directive that would increase the flow of water from an upper Missouri River dam and expedite removal of rock formations in the middle Mississippi River that impede barge traffic during periods of low water. McCaskill spokesman Drew Pusateri did not yet have a complete list of senators involved in the request.

Shakespeare’s Globe, the open-air London playhouse that helped win modern audiences over to all-weather outdoor theatergoing, is embracing the great indoors.

The Globe on Tuesday unveiled details of a new indoor venue that will sit alongside the O-shaped Elizabethan-style theater on the banks of the River Thames. Built from 17th-century plans, it will allow audiences to remain warm and dry as they watch candlelit performances of plays by the Bard and his successors — and, its creators hope, cast those classic plays in a new light.

The Baylor volleyball team’s season is officially over after a regular season in which the Bears earned 20 wins and just 12 losses.

This season is just the sixth time in program history that the Bears reached the 20-win mark.

It is the second time that the team has won at least 20 matches under head coach Jim Barnes.

Texas lawmakers are considering possible changes to the Texas Public Information Act, including how to reduce frivolous requests and whether or not the act hurts government contractors.

Texas has one of the best open records laws in the country, but Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst asked the Senate Open Government Committee to take a look at possible changes when the Legislature meets next year. Needless to say, changing the law that requires the government to make its records public always makes open government advocates, such as journalists, a little nervous.

Baylor and “Beauty and the Beast” have a history, but not in the way many have heard.

A 1979 Baylor alum, Jim Hillin, who was the Computer Generated Imagery Supervisor of the 1991 animated feature, helped design the famous ballroom scene of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.”

“I was looking for a new gig,” he said. “I got a call from Disney, from producer Don Hahn.”

Students at Baylor have all walked by the Sadie Jo Black Gardens located on Founders Mall and noticed vibrant plants and flowers that add a hint of aesthetic beauty amid the hustle and bustle of undergraduates scrambling to class.

With the university’s newest award, it seems there are others who have taken note as well.

The Professional Grounds Management Society awarded the University the 2012 Green Star Award last month.

States will receive more than $9 in federal money for every $1 they spend to cover low-income residents under President Barack Obama’s health care law, according to a nonpartisan analysis released Monday.

Expanding Medicaid to cover about 20 million more low-income people will cost more than $1 trillion nationally from 2013 to 2022, said the joint report from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Urban Institute. But the analysis found that states will pay just $76 billion of that, a combined share of roughly 7 percent. The feds will pay the other $952 billion.

Republican governors have resisted the Medicaid expansion, saying it adds an unacceptable burden to already strained budgets. And the Supreme Court handed the governors a victory this summer, ruling that states are free to reject the Medicaid deal.

Americans clicked away on their computers and smartphones for deals on Cyber Monday, which is expected to be the biggest online shopping day in history.

Shoppers are expected to spend $1.5 billion on Cyber Monday, up 20 percent from last year, according to research firm comScore. That would not only make it the biggest online shopping day of the year, but the biggest since comScore started tracking shoppers’ online buying habits in 2001.

More than 100 domain names were seized in an international crackdown on websites that sell counterfeit merchandise, federal authorities said Monday, just in time for the biggest online shopping day of the year.

It was the third consecutive Cyber Monday that websites selling knockoff sports jerseys, DVDs, cologne and other goods were blocked from doing business. This year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations coordinated the 132-site effort with Europol and police in Belgium, Denmark, France, Romania and the United Kingdom.

This year marks the third year modern foreign language students at Baylor will practice for and perform in a concert during Baylor’s annual Christmas on Fifth Street event.

Students studying various foreign languages, including Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese, French, Arabic and Chinese, will sing carols in their language of study from 6 to 7 p.m. Thursday in the Bill Daniel Student Center Bowl.

He’s the greatest philosopher in the world, according to some.

Dr. Charles Taylor, professor of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, will speak at 7:30 p.m. today in the Meditation Room in the Armstrong Browning Library as part of the Roy B. Albaugh Lecture series sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa.

A former Baylor basketball player has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for trying to extort $1 million from Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III.

With Baylor’s stunning 52-24 display of dominance over No. 1 Kansas State, one position group stands out from among the rest: the offensive line.

Every game of football is won at the line of scrimmage.

To put it lightly, Baylor dominated the trenches against Kansas State.

Baylor rocked college football and stunned the nation with its 52-24 demolition of the No. 1 team in the nation Saturday evening. The Bears, however, weren’t all that surprised.

“All week we believed we were going to beat them, and we weren’t going to be surprised when it happened,” senior quarterback Nick Florence said.

Belief was the key word for Baylor under the lights, filling the gaps for a football team that has been lack luster all season.