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The Instructional Development Support Center, nestled into a corner room off a narrow hallway in the basement of Smith Memorial Student Union, is a quiet and small space with less than 20 workstations. Sharing the space with the Office of Information Technology help desk, the lab caters specifically to Portland State graduate students, faculty and staff. And this summer, the entire lab will be moved to The Broadway, combining with the existing computer lab on the second floor.

Three years from now, Portlanders can expect to be riding around town on almost 200 new buses. With 55 of the 193 coming sometime this summer, TriMet enacted the reinstatement of its annual bus purchase program, which will gradually add new buses to its fleet. About 40 buses per year would roll in over three years, lowering the average age of the fleet to eight years by 2020 and making it entirely composed of low-floor buses by 2017.

While the new editors of Portland State’s seven student publications differ in their respective backgrounds and philosophies, they all share a couple of key similarities. Each gives credit to the power of the team that surrounds him or her, and each has a distinct vision for the year ahead.

Mike Burton, ex-vice provost of Portland State’s School of Extended Studies, was recently sentenced to 18 months of probation for official misconduct regarding traveling expenses he claimed on university expense reports. His actions, and the fallout from them, have caused university policy changes.

Recent budget cuts within Portland State Facilities and Planning have changed recycling and composting services at the university, triggering concern that these changes are inconsistent with PSU’s status as a leader in sustainable practices.

First Stop Portland, a project of Portland State’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies and College of Urban and Public Affairs, recently hosted leaders from South Korea’s new city, Sejong. The high-level delegation from Sejong, an area of farmland south of Seoul, aims for the city to be one of the greenest in the world.

The fate of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 might be decided this week as the bill makes its rounds through the Senate. The bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, April 26, is meant “to provide for the sharing of certain cyber intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cyber security entities, and for other purposes,” according to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence website.

A spring primary with no contest in either party’s nomination for president, no governor’s race or high profile legislature race, wasn’t expected to yield many surprises. However, Tuesday, May 15 saw unexpected results in the Portland mayoral race, and a neck-and-neck run off for the last contested seat on the city council, both of which yielded considerable surprises in the usual business of Portland politics.