Honors Student

CHRIS RILEY has already accomplished the neat feat of coaching Northeast High to its first Public League football championship (in 2010) since it triumphed (in 1983) during his playing career. For his next trick, can he lead the Vikings to their first back-to-backs since 1942-43? The odds might be short. Thirty-two of last year's 42 varsity players are back. Among them are three quarterbacks (Harold Alexander, Marc Prompt, David Pulliam) who won three games apiece, in case the injury bug remains hungry, and two linemen, Joshua Wallace (majors)

ALLENTOWN - Muhlenberg College has so many trees, the cicadas sound like a symphony. At this moment, however, Patrick Molloy hears only static. "Those trees are blocking my GPS," he frets. "I can't get a signal. " The signal matters, since Molloy, 18, has just a few weeks left to map and memorize the 82-acre campus before settling in as Muhlenberg's first blind student in decades. "It's not so much about counting steps as it is estimating distance," he explains as we hoof it to Walz Hall.

The detailed description of a toddler kneeling near his deceased mother's head and stroking her hair sent a jolt through a Camden County courtroom Wednesday afternoon. After a brief pause, Assistant Prosecutor Sally Smith went on to describe how, when police found him, the boy, three months shy of his third birthday, had been at his mother's side, a butcher knife nearby. John Whye's father, Troy, 39, is on trial in the murder of his girlfriend, Krystal Skinner, 23, who was killed March 26, 2008, in the couple's Lindenwold apartment in front of their son. During her opening statement, Smith described young John next to his mother, causing Skinner's relatives to burst into tears and rush out of the courtroom.

NEWARK, N.J. - A man charged with the fatal shooting of a Seton Hall University student at a party over the weekend is due in court. Prosecutors say Nicholas Welch will make his first court appearance Wednesday morning in Newark. Welch was arrested Monday night at his house in East Orange, on the same street where Friday's party was held. Police say Welch was refused admittance to the party and returned with a gun and started shooting. Jessica Moore, 19, an honors student, was killed and four people were injured.

The fourth person killed in Saturday's double-decker Megabus crash near Syracuse, N.Y., was identified Sunday as 18-year-old Deanna Armstrong of Voorhees. According to the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper, Armstrong had been a student at West Genesee High School in Upstate New York until recently; her family moved to New Jersey within the last several months. She left the school in her junior year and was returning to the area to visit friends. The bus trip she took originated at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia on Friday night and ended in a crash early Saturday when the driver took the wrong road off an exit ramp and piloted the 13-foot-high bus into a CSX railroad bridge only 10 feet, 9 inches above the road.

Sergey Bubka sprints along the runway, pole held upright in both hands, plants, and vaults over the bar, clearing 19 feet, 81/2 inches. Almost every night at bedtime, the last thing Mike Maira sees before closing his eyes is Bubka clearing that bar. A Ukrainian, Bubka was 33 years old in that YouTube video from the 1997 world championships, when he won his sixth world title in a career in which he broke the world record 35 times, going as high...

Wei Chen, the senior who demanded accountability from school officials when Asian students were attacked at South Philadelphia High, has been awarded the Princeton Prize in Race Relations from Princeton University. Chen, 18, was awarded the prize for "exceptional and sustained leadership" that encouraged ethnic understanding and explored solutions to tensions within the school, officials said in a statement. As president of the Chinese-American Student Association, "he worked to bring media attention to issues of student violence in general and against Asian immigrant students in particular.

One was an honors student, another a 15-year-old father whom police found carrying 12 bags of marijuana. One was an athlete looking forward to a big game this weekend, another a 16-year-old girl who admitted kicking a fellow teenager in the head as he lay on the ground, unconscious and bleeding. Those teenagers and 27 others appeared in Family Court yesterday to face charges of rioting and other offenses stemming from two recent melees that briefly threw separate Center City neighborhoods into chaos and led police to assign more officers to the areas permanently.

On stage, Samia Merritt is all poise and presence - a diminutive dynamo with a lilting voice and a commanding air, delivering a monologue you can't look away from. In class at Philadelphia's High School for Creative and Performing Arts, she's bright and bubbly - just another young woman in a pink American Eagle T-shirt, pink hair bow, and mismatched pink and black socks, poring over her precalculus homework. But sometimes Merritt, 18, turns reflective, and you get a glimpse of just how far she's come.

Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned inx school with that learned from life. The pupil in question is Jenny, a 16-year-old honors student circa 1961 at a girls' prep school in Twickenham, a middle-class London suburb, who is destined for Oxford. One rainy afternoon, a stranger named David offers to give her a ride home in his shiny sports car. After Jenny is introduced to material pleasures, Oxford looks less like a destination than a dead end. As played by the criminally adorable Carey Mulligan - a winsome actress with Audrey Hepburn eyes, Jean Simmons dimples, an Ellen Page mouth, and her own unforced mirth - Jenny is a book-smart girl hungering for life lessons.