After ten months in Beirut, Lebanon, College senior Sara Barclay saw her study-abroad experience come to a sudden and surreal end aboard an evacuation helicopter on July 23. "It was really a strange, bizarre thing to see Lebanon in this state," Barclay said.

Philadelphia's political atmosphere may achieve a combustible level by the November 7 elections, but political analysts and campaign representatives say the city is just warming up. Two critical races - one for a U.S. Senate seat and one for governor - have little more than two months to go, and the campaigns are well under way.

Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro feasts on fresh handpicked grass everyday while he recovers at Penn's large animal hospital, but whether the recuperation time will lead to a full recovery remains unclear. Barbaro - a colt who fractured his leg severely during the Preakness in May - has been kept under close watch by animal surgeon Dean Richardson, who performed the surgery immediately after Barbaro's injury.

The next generation of Penn students will walk straight from Locust Walk to Center City, play frisbee near the Schuylkill River and live in a new college house. Penn's getting bigger. The University's ambitious eastward expansion and campus redevelopment - complete with a decades-long timetable and billion-dollar budget - has officials preparing for years of demolition, extensive fundraising and community cooperation.

Members of the Class of 2010 will be scattered throughout all of Penn's college houses this year. That may not be the case for next year's freshmen, however. Starting in September of 2007, freshmen are expected to be grouped in "clusters" even in college houses where they do not make up the majority of occupants.

Proposed guidelines from the Department of Education will allow the University to report the number of multi-racial students for the first time. Existing regulations force multi-racial and multi-ethnic students to select only one racial or ethnic category on registration forms that Penn uses to compile its full enrollment data.

From the Art Museum to the poker table, photos from around New Student Orientation

The last time high-rise apartments looked this good, Penn students grooved to disco music and Richard Nixon was still president. For the first time since Harnwell College House was built in the early 1970s, it's gotten a renovation. New appliances and surfaces, tiled floors and efficient storage space will greet students moving in this fall to the top 10 floors.

The prospect of never having to take the SAT is no longer confined to high school students' wildest dreams. Schools across the country are re-examining their admissions policies, and several have announced they will no longer require standardized-test scores from applicants.

A clinical gene vaccine to combat a severe respiratory disease has been developed in a cooperation between Penn and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. The vaccine, the first gene vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome, is expected to be launched pending additional testing.

City Council passed this summer a bill that bans smoking in all public places in the city - most notably in restaurants and bars. Former Councilman Michael Nutter, who resigned his seat to join the 2007 mayoral race, was the main sponsor of the ban, a project he has been pushing for years.

Seeing Dave Matthews live has never been so charitable. The king of jam-band ethos will take the stage alongside Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson on Sept. 30 for the annual Farm Aid concert, to be held at the Tweeter Center at the Waterfront in Camden, N.

Students at Penn can exhale - it does not look like standardized testing is going to make it to the University's agenda. Even though a report released by the Department of Education in August has generated renewed conversation about the prospect of collegiate standardized testing, University administrators say that there is no need for such testing at Penn.

Potential fraternity brothers could have one more option this year - Zeta Beta Tau is looking to come back to campus. The fraternity will try to re-establish its presence after having been expelled from Penn two years ago. The expulsion occurred after participants at an unofficial pledge event in 2004 were sent to the emergency room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where they were treated for alcohol poisoning and bodily injuries.

Despite several shootings on campus this year, officials at Security on Campus think Penn hasn't dropped the ball on safety. In fact, SOC, a national non-profit organization dedicated to preventing violence on college campuses, selected the University to host its kick-off to the second annual National Campus Safety Awareness Month, held yesterday.

All charges have been dropped against College senior Bryan Warner, who was charged with attempted murder earlier this year. The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office dropped the case after the complainant failed to report to court on three separate occasions.