An Essex County OPP officer has been slapped with a cut in pay because of "inexplicable" investigative delays into a fatal collision, allowing the at-fault driver to "evade criminal prosecution."

Justin Young and Justine Manuel in Kamloops, B.C., shaved off their eyebrows as extra incentive to stay home and avoid socializing.

Ten properties, including homes and businesses, have already been evacuated as the community braces against rising water levels.

Human challenge studies could help researchers develop a COVID-19 vaccine faster, but the approach is incredibly risky.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced major professional sports leagues across North America to push the pause button. But even if the NHL, CFL, NBA or MLS are given the green light, many fans have reservations about returning to arenas until a vaccine for the virus is available.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says there are ways to safely host NHL games in Vancouver if the league goes ahead with resuming the season in a small number of hub cities.

Alberta's Brendan Bottcher defeated Saskatchewan's Matt Dunstone 9-4 in the 1-2 Page playoff game Saturday afternoon to earn a berth in the Tim Hortons Brier final.

Colleen Jones, Sidney Crosby among many preeminent local sports figures reacting in the aftermath of Sunday's killing rampage.

Government restrictions designed to limit the spread of COVID-19 have virtually crippled Ontario's wine-making industry, as retail and wholesale revenues dry up but the costs of producing wine remains constant.

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Advanced preliminary release for Q4 2019 quarterly data on debt service ratios (DSRs) for the private non-financial sector (PNFS) for 32 countries have been updated. DSRs for PNFS breakdown sectors, ie for households and for non-financial corporations are also available for 17 countries.

Notional amounts of OTC derivatives rose from $544 trillion at end-December 2018 to $559 trillion at end-December 2019. This, however, corresponds to a significant fall over the last six months, which could be at least partly attributed to seasonal factors. The seasonal pattern in the data, whereby end-June values tend typically to be larger than end-of-year values, appears strongest in positions vis-à-vis central counterparties. Such end-of-year contractions can occur if dealer banks and/or their clients shrink their outstanding notional derivative positions for regulatory and financial reporting purposes. Contracts denominated in non-G4 currencies (ie excluding USD, EUR, JPY and GBP) have grown in size for both interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives, even though those denominated in US dollars remain the largest segment.

The semiannual OTC derivatives statistics provide data on notional amounts outstanding and gross market values for all types of over-the-counter derivatives contracts. They are reported by large dealers in 12 countries on a worldwide consolidated basis.

Bank of Italy Working Papers by Andrea Gazzani and Alejandro Vicondoa

Bank for International Settlements BIS Working Papers by David Cook and Nikhil Patel

The Kangaroo Privacy Camera is an affordable indoor home security camera that delivers sharp daytime footage and is equipped with a built-in privacy shield, but some features require a paid subscription and its nighttime video quality could be better.

Penn State Mont Alto recognizes and honors winners during awards ceremony

Instead of every meeting attendee staring at a flat Zoom screen, Apple is looking to the future of video conferencing with Memoji-style avatars arranged in augmented reality around each meeting attendee.

Following in the footsteps of Apple Card, and in the shadow of a rumored debit card solution from Google, Samsung on Thursday announced plans to field a physical debit card product in partnership with finance company SoFi.

CNA Staff, May 7, 2020 / 11:50 am (CNA).- Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend said Thursday that the alleged visions and revelations known as “Our Lady of America” cannot be said to be of supernatural origin, and that public devotion to “Our Lady of America” is not permitted for Catholics.

Sister Mary Ephrem Neuzil of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus began having what seemed like mystical experiences, including inner locutions and visions of the spirit, around 1938. She revealed these to her confessor in 1948, and they became a devotion to Mary as “Our Lady of America” in 1954.

Sr. Neuzil said the Blessed Virgin began appearing to her in 1956 in Rome City, Ind., about 40 miles northwest of Fort Wayne.

The alleged visions and messages from Mary and from St. Joseph continued through 1959, in a number of locations. After 1959, she said Our Lady communicated with her primarily by locutions, until her death in 2000.

Bishop Rhoades agreed in 2017 to conduct an investigation into the alleged apparitions. The bishop issued to other U.S. bishops a statement May 7 on the investigation, which was obtained by CNA, along with a July 2019 decree on the matter.

In the statement, Rhoades said that Sr. Neuzil “was honest, morally upright, psychologically balanced, devoted to religious life and without guile.” He added that she had “signs of imperfection, but no evidence that she was the perpetrator of a hoax or the victim of delusion.”

“What she communicated about her alleged experiences, she believed to be true, and her communication of those experiences are filled with humility and forthrightness,” he added.

The bishop noted there are numerous reports of conversions, spiritual refreshments and consolations, and even some physical healings related to the alleged apparition. He added, though, that “we cannot conclude that any of these events are conclusive enough to warrant certification as miracles. It seems likely that in such personal contexts of faith and prayer, God's graces were received.”

While “much of what is expressed” in the alleged revelations “does not contain any doctrinal error,” Bishop Rhoades wrote that there is a claim of St. Joseph as “'co-redeemer' with Christ for the salvation of the world … which has never been expressed as Catholic doctrine and must be seen as an error.”

He reported that Sr. Neuzil's spiritual director, Archbishop Paul Leibold, wrote in 1970 that he was unable to make a judgement on the supernatural nature of her visions, and that while he had helped her in promoting them as a “private devotion,” he had never acted “to promote her devotion publicly.”

“Looking at the nature and quality of the experiences themselves, we find that they are more to be described as subjective inner religious experiences rather than objective external visions and revelations,” Bishop Rhoades wrote.

“Thus, while it may be said that there is possibly an authenticity to Sister Neuzil's subjective religious experience, we do not find evidence pointing to her experience as being in the category of objective private revelation.”

The bishop and his investigatory commission found that “her experiences were of a type where her own imagination and intellect were involved in the formation of the events. It seems that these were authentically graced moments, even perhaps of a spiritual quality beyond what most people experience, but subjective ones in which her own imagination and intellect were constitutively engaged, putting form to inner spiritual movements. However, we do not find evidence that these were objective visions and revelations of the type seen at Guadalupe, Fatima and Lourdes.”

Bishop Rhoades' judgement was issued in the July 29, 2019 decree, which was signed also by Fr. Mark Gurtner, then-chancellor of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend.

The five other bishops where the purported visions were said to have occurred – Archbishop Dennis Schnurr of Cincinnati, Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit, Bishop Timothy Doherty of Lafayette in Indiana, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix, and Bishop Daneil Thomas of Toledo in Ohio – each concur with Bishop Rhoades' findings and conclusions.

The six bishops had in 2017 asked the US bishops' conference to investigate the alleged apparitions, considering that inquiries were being received about the alleged apparition and its purported request for a procession of the nation's bishops and that a statue of Our Lady of America be placed in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith advised that it be conducted by one of the bishops, and Bishop Rhoades agreed to do so.

He received documentation of Sr. Neuzil's correspondence the following year, and he conducted the evaluation with a commission of theological and canonical experts. They also gathered personal interviews with witnesses who knew Sr. Neuzil.

The procedure for the investigation was carried out in accordance with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's 1978 "Norms regarding the manner of proceeding in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations."

Some bishops have permitted the public display of statues of Our Lady of America, and then-Msgr. Liebold had given an imprimatur to a prayer attached to the devotion in 1963.

The six bishops wrote May 7 that “given this history of prayers and religious articles being given approval by competent ecclesiastical authority, the use of such prayers religious articles may continue as a matter of private devotion, but not as a public devotion of the Church.”

“Indeed, such private devotion would be consistent with the history of the United States of America being dedicated to Our Lady,” they added.

However, “such private devotion should in no way imply approval or acceptance of purported revelations, visions, or locutions attributed to Sister Mary Ephrem (Mildred) Neuzil other than as her own subjective inner religious experiences.”

A spokesperson for the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend told CNA that “the conclusion of Bishop Rhoades and the other five bishops pertains to the entire Church. The same would have been true if the decision were in the affirmative.”

 

Denver Newsroom, May 7, 2020 / 05:29 pm (CNA).- A Notre Dame sociologist is using data to challenge a Harvard Law professor’s assertions that homeschooling is “dangerous”, and detrimental to society.

The controversy stems from a recent paper by professor Elizabeth Bartholet in which she calls for a presumptive ban on homeschooling in the United States.

Bartholet, as quoted in a Harvard Magazine piece based on her paper, points to unspecified “surveys of homeschoolers” to assert that “up to 90 percent” of homeschooling families are “driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.”

“Some” homeschooling parents are “‘extreme religious ideologues’ who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy,” she writes.

David Sikkink, associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, analyzed surveys of homeschooling families— including a 2016 government survey—  and found that these families are not overwhelmingly Christian nor religious, and are not as universally closed-off to the outside world as Bartholet asserts.

In the analysis Sikkink conducted, just 16% of homeschooling parents said they were homeschooling primarily for religious reasons. The number one reason homeschooling parents cited was a concern about school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.

Eleven percent of parents reported homeschooling because their child has special needs.

While approximately half of the homeschooling parents surveyed mentioned religion as a factor in their decision to homeschool, Sikkink notes that the parents who cited religion as a reason were, on the whole, more highly educated than those parents who did not.

In terms of Bartholet’s assertion that some homeschooling parents “believe that women should be totally subservient to men and educated in ways that promote such subservience,” Sikkink’s analysis did not find evidence that religious households oppose higher education for girls.

Among the homeschooling families in the survey who use a religious curriculum, there was no difference in their self-reported educational expectations— i.e., what education level they expected their children to reach—  for their male children vs. their female children.

Several past studies have shown that homeschool students typically outperform their public and private school counterparts on things like standardized tests and college performance. A 2016 study from the National Council on Measurement in Education showed that, when adjusted for demographic factors, homeschool students were on par academically with their demographically-similar peers.

Moreover, the data Sikkink analyzed suggests that after family background and demographic controls are accounted for, about 64% of homeschoolers “completely agree” that they have much in life to be thankful for, compared to 53% of public schoolers.

On feelings of helplessness, or lack or goals or direction in life, homeschoolers do not substantially differ from their public school counterparts, the analysis suggests.

In the Arizona Law Review, Bartholet argues that while homeschool children may perform as well as their peers on standardized tests or in college, they are also often isolated from their peers and denied experiences and exposures that would make them more productive citizens.

Bartholet claims in her article that “a very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.”

“Isolated families,” she asserts, “constitute a significant part of the homeschooling world.”

In contrast, Sikkink’s analysis found that among the schooling groups surveyed, homeschooling families had the highest level of “community involvement” of all school sectors.

“Community involvement” activities included attending sporting events, attending concerts, going to the zoo or aquarium, going to a museum, going to a library, visiting a bookstore, or attending an event sponsored by a community, religious, or ethnic group.

Homeschooling graduates are almost identical to their public school counterparts in likelihood to vote in federal and local elections, Sikkink found.

Furthermore, the total number of volunteer and community service hours for homeschooling graduates is very similar to or slightly higher than public school graduates, the analysis found.

Bartholet asserts that some homeschoolers “engage in homeschooling to promote racist ideologies and avoid racial intermingling.”

In contrast: “The reality is that about 41% of homeschooled children are racial and ethnic minorities,” Sikkink writes.

“When asked about four closest friends, about 37% of young adult homeschoolers...mention someone of a different race or ethnicity—exactly the same as public schoolers.”

This diversity also extends to schooling practices— increasingly, Sikkink says, homeschooling adopts new forms, including “hybrids” that combine the benefits of home and institutional schooling.

“About 57 percent of homeschoolers are using some form of instruction outside the family,” Sikkink told CNA in an email.

“That includes using tutors, private or public schools, colleges or universities, or homeschooling coops. That percentage would be higher if we included those who reported obtaining curriculum from formal institutions, such as public schools.”

Moreover, about a third of homeschooling parents obtain their curriculum or books from a public school or school district.

“Altogether, 46% of homeschoolers have some pedagogical relationship with public schools,” Sikkink asserts.

Bartholet argues that homeschooling puts children at risk of abuse by their parents, while if children were in public schools, they would be among teachers who are mandatory reporters of any suspected abuse that may be taking place.

“The issue is, do we think that parents should have 24/7, essentially authoritarian control over their children from ages zero to 18? I think that’s dangerous,” Bartholet asserts in the Harvard Magazine piece.

“I think it’s always dangerous to put powerful people in charge of the powerless, and to give the powerful ones total authority.”

Sikkink says Bartholet’s image of a child confined to the home “24/7...from ages zero to 18” is not consistent with the data.

“When we look at the use of homeschooling for each year of the child's upbringing, we only find a small percentage that report that the child was homeschooled for all their years of schooling,” Sikkink told CNA in an email.

Many of these students are part-time public schoolers— about 25% of homeschoolers receive some instruction in public schools during their school-age careers, he wrote.

Homeschooling regulations vary widely by state. Sikkink told CNA he hopes future studies will examine the effects of state-level variation in regulation on homeschooling quality.

“The question of schooling oversight remains, of course, but it would be short-sighted not to keep homeschooling and other creative schooling options in the mix, including the hybrid models that cross sector boundaries,” Sikkink concludes.

 

Subsequent to the publication of this story, Sikkink told CNA he had revised his assessment of the percentage of homeschoolers using instruction outside the family, from 64% to 57%. The story has been updated to reflect that assessment.

This SOLIDWORKS tutorial is for a Wooden Canvas Teepee, the tutorial focuses on the use of Circular Patterns of part bodies and the use of 3D sketch for extrusions between guide points, and profile sweeps along a path. This is a fun tutorial that if you follow, you can create you own Teepee model, and apply a range of designs to with decals. The decal swatches seen in the video are available to download in the description below.

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This is the first blog post regarding the SOLIDWORKS activation error message. I will briefly try to go through the four most common activation error messages when using a standalone license. I will in a later blog post cover the

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Working with SOLIDWORKS on an SNL server, you can sometimes experience an Activation error message. Often these messages are not the same as the activation error messages you recieve when performing standalone activation What is SNL? SNL is short for

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Everyone knows SOLIDWORKS is very flexible and user friendly to execute the commands to complete any 3D design easily. When it comes to handling Complex assemblies (Increased in number of components) many of us will search for special tools to

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CNA Staff, Apr 30, 2020 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- As the Chinese government makes progress containing the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities have resumed action to remove crosses from buildings and crackdown on religious practice.

The latest round of enforcement actions have included the removal of crosses from buildings belonging to the state-run churches. According to a report from UCA News, priests say they are cooperating in the removal of exterior crosses in hopes that entire church buildings will not be demolished or converted into a building for secular use.  

According to a parishioner in the Chinese province of Anhui named John, Chinese officials cut down the cross from the top of Our Lady of the Rosary Church on April 18. Our Lady of the Rosary belongs to the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA, the Catholic Church officially sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party and operating both in communion with Rome and under state control. 

The bishops of the CPCA, who were in many cases illicitly consecrated and under official excommunication, were received into full communion with Rome as part of the Vatican’s 2018 provisional agreement with China. The full terms of the China deal were not released to the public but have been reported to include the right of state authorities to propose and veto candidates for the episcopacy in China. 

John, speaking to UCA News, explained that on April 13, the leaders of Our Lady of the Rosary--which does not have a member of the clergy assigned to it, and all religious activities are organized by the laity--asked the city authorities about making repairs to the church building. Three days later, the community director of the city requested keys and access to the church, in order to remove its cross. 

Concerned parishioners went to Bishop Joseph Liux Xinhong of the Diocese of Anhui, who told them to request more information from the local CPCA office. The local CPCA office said they did not know of any plan to remove the cross from the building. 

Xinhong was one of the bishops who had his excommunication lifted and his position recognized by the Vatican following the 2018 provisional deal. 

On April 17, the parish community leader said that he had been given “directions from superiors” regarding removing the cross. The following day, said John, the cross was removed by a “team of young people.”

Elsewhere in the province of Anhui, on April 19 a cross was removed from a church in Suzhou City during pre-dawn hours, presumably to avoid the chance of a crowd protesting its removal. A man from the diocese named Paul told UCA News that the removal had previously been scheduled for the afternoon. 

Paul said that police officers blocked people from entering the church or taking pictures of the removal, and that a cell phone had been confiscated after it captured a picture of the cross coming down. 

In Hefei City, which is also located in the Anhui province, authorities on April 27 took a cross off a building for a Protestant church. 

A priest from the Diocese of Anhui, identified only as “Father Chen,” told UCA News that these sorts of activities are “happening all over the mainland” and are not limited to one diocese or province. 

 “If the churches don’t unite to resist, many more crosses will be removed,” he said.

In September 2017, China enacted strict new regulations concerning religion. Since then, authorities have been vigilant in enforcing permitting requirements. Churches that are not found to be in compliance are destroyed. 

Allegations about Valeant’s practices and its own disclosures while under pressure cause one to wonder.

God carries missionary friends through ‘a dark night of the soul’ in Hungary.

Latest SOLIDWORKS press releases, news, technical alerts and announcements. These feeds are seen on...

Latest SOLIDWORKS press releases, news, technical alerts and announcements. These feeds are seen on...

Latest SOLIDWORKS press releases, news, technical alerts and announcements. These feeds are seen on...

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The 2013 Hope of Israel team shows motivation and unity during a month of intense ministry.

OM Guatemala visits primary and secondary schools in the country to teach children values and bring them the good news.

A team in Hong Kong reach out to Indonesian domestic workers with Christ's love

Workers encourage new believers to persevere in their faith despite facing persecution from their families.

In the 1980s, two babies were named after OM’s second ship. Both young men are now living out the ethos of the ministry, as servants of Christ.

Vatican City, May 5, 2020 / 08:10 am (CNA).- The Vatican’s migrant and refugee office has released a booklet with guidance on how the Church might respond to the problem of people internally displaced within their own countries due to conflict or disaster.

Many people might be unaware of the existence of internally displaced people, or IDPs, Cardinal Michael Czerny, under-secretary of the migrants and refugees section, said May 5.

Speaking during a livestreamed press conference, he noted that internal displacement “is a current, contemporary reality in a surprising number of countries.”

Internally displaced persons are defined as those who have had to flee their home or residence due to violence, conflict, disaster, or development projects to find refuge in another part of the country. Since IDPs have not crossed international borders, they do not have the legal status of refugee or migrant and do not receive the legal protections those categories can give.

Czerny’s office, which is a part of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Development, published a booklet May 5 called “Pastoral Orientations on Internally Displaced People.”

The document is directed primarily at dioceses, parishes, Catholic NGOs, and other Catholic organizations. It has short paragraphs on key issues related to the welcome, protection, promotion, and integration of IDPs, interspersed with quotes from relevant Church documents and speeches by Pope Francis.

The importance of spiritual care for Catholics who are internally displaced in their countries is one of the topics addressed. Cardinal Czerny said Tuesday he would like to highlight the response an average Catholic parish might give when it “discovers IDPs in its midst and learns how to reach out to them.”

“To me, this is a great sign of hope,” he said.

“When the Holy Father asks us to go to the peripheries, we might think of going to a faraway foreign land where we will do exotic things,” the cardinal said. “But the real peripheries which hurt are the ones that are very near at hand, the ones where people among us are invisible, are set aside, are discarded, are overlooked.”

According to data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), at the end of 2019, 45.7 million people were living internally displaced from their homes worldwide for reasons of conflict. Including other causes of displacement, the number of IDPs is more than 50 million.

The IDMC reported that the countries with the highest numbers of internally displaced people are Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Colombia, though nearly every country in the world has IDPs.

In the United States, the IDMC says there were 916,000 people newly displaced internally due to disaster in 2019. The majority of these new displacements were caused by Hurricane Dorian and the California wildfires.

The Church can do something so that “those among us who have been forced to flee and find themselves among us will receive Christian welcome and the response the Body of Christ wants to give them,” Czerny explained.

He said the aim of “Pastoral Orientations” is for the more than 50 million IDPs “to be recognized and supported, promoted and eventually reintegrated, so that they can play an active, constructive role in their country even if powerful causes, both natural and unjust human causes, have forced them to flee from home and take refuge somewhere.”

“In the post-COVID-19 world that is emerging, their contribution will be very much needed,” the cardinal added.

He explained that publishing the document on internal displacement is “not a lessening on the priority of refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking,” but a matter of “continuing to respond to the full range of people’s needs and vulnerabilities,” even in the midst of a global pandemic.

“There are very many needs which didn’t go away just because we were focused on other things in the past weeks,” he underlined. “It’s not a question of COVID-19 displacing priorities. It’s a question of both/and…”

Problems such as internal displacement were already there, “and, on top of it all we also have the challenge as a human family of resisting and overcoming this pandemic.”

The Church, he said, is able “to take on a new challenge without jettisoning other problems as if they suddenly became irrelevant.”

Vatican City, May 7, 2020 / 08:00 am (CNA).- It is important for Catholics to remember the whole of salvation history, and our belonging to the people of God’s covenant with Abraham, Pope Francis said at Mass Thursday.

During daily Mass in the chapel of his Vatican residence, the Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis reflected on an aspect of the day’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, when St. Paul is invited to speak in the synagogue in Antioch.

Instead of speaking directly about Jesus, the apostle begins by telling the history of salvation, the pope noted May 7.

“What is behind Jesus? There is a story. A story of grace, a story of election, a story of promise. The Lord chose Abraham and went with his people,” he said.

“There is a story of God with his people. And for this reason, when Paul is asked to explain the reason for faith in Jesus Christ, he does not start from Jesus Christ: he begins from history.”

The pope pointed to the first part of the entrance antiphon recited at the start of that Mass: “O God, when you went forth before your people, marching with them and living among them...”

He urged Catholics to remember to “pass down the history of our salvation,” and to ask the Lord to help them have the awareness of being children of Abraham, as the Virgin Mary says in the Magnificat and Zechariah in his Benedictus, canticles which are recited or sung in the Liturgy of the Hours.

Christianity, the pope said, is belonging to the people with whom the Lord made his covenant.

Pope Francis also spoke in his homily about what he thinks Christianity is not.

“Christianity is a doctrine, yes, but not only,” he stated. “Christianity is not just an ethic. Yes, indeed, it has moral principles,” but it is not just having an ethical viewpoint.

Francis went on to say that Christianity is also more than an exclusionary vision of an “‘elite’ of people chosen for the truth.” He criticized when this attitude comes into the Church as a belief in the damnation of others.

It is good to be a moral people, he said, but “Christianity is belonging to a people, to a people freely chosen by God.”

“If we do not have this awareness of belonging to a people we would be ideological Christians,” he said.

The pope explained that this is why, in order to speak about Jesus, St. Paul starts by explaining “from the beginning, from belonging to a people.”

He warned that when Christians lose the sense of belonging to the people of God’s covenant, they often fall into “partialities,” whether dogmatic, moral, or elitist.

Francis called this “the most dangerous deviation” Christians can fall into today.

Before Mass, Pope Francis noted that he had received a letter from a group of artists, thanking him for remembering them in prayer in April.

He added that he “would like to ask the Lord to bless them because artists make us understand what beauty is and without beauty the Gospel cannot be understood.”

“Let’s pray for artists again,” he urged.

After Mass, the pope concluded the livestream with Eucharistic adoration, benediction, and the Marian antiphon “Regina coeli.”

An adolescent girl with a history of frequent electronic cigarette use of nicotine was hospitalized with severe necrotizing pneumonia. Blood cultures obtained before the administration of empirical broad-spectrum intravenous antibiotics had positive results for the growth of Fusobacterium necrophorum. The pathogen is an uncommon but well-known cause of anaerobic pneumonia with unique features that are collectively referred to as Lemierre syndrome or postanginal sepsis. The syndrome begins as a pharyngeal infection. Untreated, the infection progresses to involve the ipsilateral internal jugular vein, resulting in septic thrombophlebitis with direct spread from the neck to the lungs causing multifocal necrotizing pneumonia. The teenager we present in this report had neither a preceding pharyngeal infection nor Doppler ultrasonographic evidence for the presence of deep neck vein thrombi, leading us to explore alternative mechanisms for her pneumonia. We propose the possibility that her behavior of frequent vaping led to sufficient pharyngeal irritation such that F necrophorum colonizing her oropharynx was inhaled directly into her lungs during electronic cigarette use. Preexisting, but not yet recognized, vaping-related lung injury may have also contributed to her risk of developing the infection. The patient was hospitalized for 10 days. At follow-up one month later, she still became short of breath with minimal exertion.

Idiopathic acute eosinophilic pneumonia is a rare and potentially life-threatening condition that is defined by bilateral pulmonary infiltrates and fever in the presence of pulmonary eosinophilia. It often presents acutely in previously healthy individuals and can be difficult to distinguish from infectious pneumonia. Although the exact etiology of idiopathic acute eosinophilic pneumonia remains unknown, an acute hypersensitivity reaction to an inhaled antigen is suggested, which is further supported by recent public health risks of vaping (electronic cigarette) use and the development of lung disease. In this case, a patient with a year-long history of vaping in conjunction with tetrahydrocannabinol cartridge use who was diagnosed with idiopathic acute eosinophilic pneumonia with associated bilateral hilar lymphadenopathy is described.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common female reproductive disorder that often manifests during adolescence and is associated with disruptions in health-related quality of life. Prompt evaluation and clinical support after diagnosis may prevent associated complications and optimize overall health management. This article incorporates the most recent evidence and consensus guidelines to provide an updated review of the pathogenesis, clinical presentation, diagnostic evaluation, and management strategies for adolescents with this complex condition. We will review the recent international guidelines on PCOS; because the diagnosis of PCOS remains controversial, management of this condition is inconsistent. In 2019, PCOS remains a common, yet neglected, condition, in part, because of the lack of agreement around both diagnosis and management.

St. Patrick's Day celebrates the patron saint of Ireland known for bringing Christianity to Ireland. Hundreds of years later, OM Ireland brings the same message.

“Looking around that pub at the various people enjoying their tea, I started really thinking about what he’d said,” Hannah remembers. “Praying for revival…In a country that many have come to learn is spiritually dark, have we given up on praying for the people? Has the belief in revival died, or are we still trusting that God can move in a mighty way?”

Compiled by: Antigoni Markitani