The U.S. Attorney's Office dropped charges on Tuesday against Philip Cooney (MSB ’10), who was accused seven months ago of an alleged hate crime against a gay student, after deciding there was insufficient evidence against him.

Wearing masks, sunglasses, hooded sweatshirts and bandanas, protestors rallied for the third time in three months outside the Church of Scientology in Dupont Circle on Saturday to raise awareness of the church’s practices.

After serving nine years as director of the Department of Public Safety, Darryl Harrison announced that he will retire from his post on May 31.

Harrison said he had been anticipating his retirement for a while.

A fire broke out in the Davis Performing Arts Center yesterday morning when a welding gun inadvertently sent sparks into a garbage can containing used scenery.

The university violated its own recommendations when it failed to encrypt a hard drive that was stolen from an office earlier this month in one of the dozens of incidents in the past year involving compromised data at a U.S. university.

A fire raged in a Wisconsin Avenue nightclub early Tuesday morning, causing serious damage to both the club and a neighboring building, although no injuries or deaths were reported.

The Metropolitan Police Department boosted patrols on campus and university administrators sent a campus-wide warning e-mail last week after a city office received a call from an unidentified caller threatening mass murder on campus.

The call came at 8:28 a.m. on May 7, in the middle of finals, and was directed to the city’s Office of Unified Communications, also know as the D.C. 911 Call Center. MPD Second District Officer Quintin Peterson said that the call came from a payphone in northwest D.C. and that the caller sounded male.

“He stated that he was going to commit a mass murder at the ICC building at Georgetown University,” Peterson said. “He said to take him seriously.”

The university and a local citizens’ group decided in a meeting on March 31 that they will most likely extend a plan for off-duty police officers to patrol local streets on weekend nights despite seeing limited success since launching the program on a trial basis in January.

Two Metropolitan Police Department officers will almost certainly continue patrolling the residential areas between Georgetown University and Rock Creek Park between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays at least until the end of 2007, said Luca Pivato, co-chair of the public safety committee for the Citizens Association of Georgetown. The plan has been in place since January after CAG and the university, which co-sponsor the initiative, approved funding for a 13-week trial period.

The three students, who were all female, had left a Cold War Kids concert at the 9:30 Club on V Street, NW, and were walking to the nearby Metro station at approximately 11:25 p.m. when they heard someone approaching them from behind at the corner of Vermont and V Streets, according to Erica Slates (SFS ’10), one of the students.

Slates said that between six and eight female assailants then pepper-sprayed and physically attacked her and her two companions, Heather Brock (COL ’10) and Kayla Fossen (COL ’10), and that one of the assailants pulled her hair and kicked her. When Slates turned around, she saw three assailants kicking and punching Brock, who was on the ground.