The winners and the losers

Winner: The Downtown Alliance is reviving an old campaign urging people to donate to homeless shelters and charities instead of giving to panhandlers. About 16 years ago, Salt Lake Mayor Deedee Corradini was behind a similar campaign that had mixed results, but the idea is good. Many panhandlers beg money for a living, staking out prime territories and becoming fixtures downtown. They also make givers feel a sense of having done something to help a problem, when shelters and other charities could do much more with the spare change.

Loser: On the other hand, Salt Lake Mayor Ralph Becker's proposed anti-panhandling ordinance, which is expected to be introduced later this year, would place too many restrictions on panhandling, raising questions about basic constitutional freedoms. A draft of the ordinance shows it would seek to restrict where, when and how someone could ask for money. It also would make it illegal to falsely claim to be something, such as a veteran, while panhandling. The Constitution's free-speech guarantees give people the right to ask almost whatever they want (lewd requests or demands for money would be obvious exception). Beyond that, such an ordinance strikes us as something almost impossible to enforce fairly.

Winner: While most people will be debating President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, Utahns could take some delight this week in the Nobel Prize for chemistry, which went to biochemist Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan, who worked at the University of Utah in the late 1990s. Ramakrishnan left the school for Cambridge, but he mentioned the U. for its support of his work as he was interviewed by an Indian news agency.