The week in review

Least surprising announcement, part I: Former mayor David Toscano announces his bid for Delegate Mitch Van Yahres' 57th District seat.

Least surprising announcement, part II: UVA head basketball coach Pete Gillen is out after seven years and a second losing season.

Best golden parachute: Gillen walks with a $2 million buyout.

Most high-profile poisoning involving UVA docs: Gregory Saathoff, head of the university's Critical Incident Analysis Group, led a U.S. team that secretly went to Vienna in December to assist with then-Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko's massive dioxin poisoning, the Washington Post reports. Also along on the clandestine mission: toxicologist Christopher Holstege.

Best splitting the bill: UVA coughs up seven percent of the Ivy landfill cleanup, which is estimated to cost $42 million over the next 30 years, John Yellig reports in the Progress.

Best City Council squabble: Dem Kevin Lynch and Republican Rob Schilling have to be asked to stop arguing by Mayor David Brown at a work session March 10 on the ward system, according to another Yellig story.

Least surprising sentencing: George M. Minor– already serving a life sentence for killing his girlfriend– gets 52 years March 8 for holding four people hostage in a Greene County store on March 26, 2003, David Hendrick reports in the Progress. The four hostages escaped, and then-Sheriff William Morris rushed in and knocked Minor's gun away.

Least savory sentencing: Stefan Wohl, bus driver for the Dave Matthews Band, pleads guilty to dumping his bus's septic tank contents through a bridge grating on top of tourists on a boat in the Chicago River. He's sentenced to 18 months probation, 150 hours community service, and a $10,000 fine.

Best sign Chicago isn't through with the DMB dumping: The Illinois attorney general has filed a $70,000 lawsuit against the band and Wohl, even though DMB cooperated with the investigation, donated $50,000 to the Friends of the Chicago River and $50,000 to the Chicago Park District.

Best pro bono recognition: Defense attorney Steven D. Rosenfield receives the 2005 Emily Couric Advocacy Award March 10.

Harshest slap to Rosenfield: A federal judge cuts the attorney's fees 74 percent in the Bobby Wayne Swisher death row appeals case, and Rosenfield files suit seeking $28,394 in compensation, the Progress' Liesel Nowak reports.

Most controversial sale: Orange County resident David Nicholson sells a flag that he claims flew over the Pentagon September 11, 2001, for $371,300 on eBay.

Best news for school-lovin' students: Albemarle County students will go until June 14, thanks to six snow days.

Widest career shift: Legal thriller bestseller John Grisham tells the Oklahoman that he's going to write a nonfiction book on the murder of a 21-year-old woman in 1982 and Ron Williamson, who was nearly executed for the crime before DNA evidence cleared him after 12 years in prison.

Newest poster girl for celibacy: Lauren Winner, the Orthodox Jew-turned-evangelical-Christian who teaches religion classes at UVA, has written Real Sex: the Naked Truth about Chastity and uses her own experiences with premarital sex to encourage others to abstain, the New York Times reports.

Newest antidote to celibacy: Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge celebrates Back Up Your Birth Control Day March 22, and plans to survey local pharmacies to find out who carries emergency contraception.

Best resurrection: Former publisher of the defunct Observer, Jeffrey Peyton, turns up as publisher and editor of the Columbian-Progress in Mississippi, where his picture, a Bible verse and the teaser, "God and Basketball" all appear above the paper's banner.

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