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Happy birthday Vijay Deverakonda: Tollywood's 'Dear Comrade' who auctioned his first Filmfare Award for charity  The New Indian Express

Teenager Theland Kicknosway's annual run for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is being turned into a virtual event this year, and he's calling on people from across North America to join him.

More than 1,000 people looking for work in the tech industry are signed up for a virtual job fair on Thursday afternoon.

As part of the province's approach to curbing the COVID-19 pandemic, there are a number of rules in place that people have to follow. Kitchener and Waterloo bylaw officials offer some insight on what's allowed and what's not.

With proms cancelled across Canada, an online resource for kids called the Student Life Network has organized a national virtual prom.

Carving out a section of low-hanging basement ceiling was a small price to pay to give Travis Bondy the space he needed to play in the Isolation Dart League.

The NHL is hoping to convince teams the league should move the 2020 draft to early June and hold it virtually, according to a report.

McMaster University is planning for fewer international students, more deferred acceptance offers and online teaching for the thousands who are attending as the start of a new school year looms in the near future and in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2020 Special Olympics Summer Games, slated for June 11 to 13, are being canceled due to concerns related to coronavirus. The games will shift to virtual events, with details to be announced in the near future.

Denver Newsroom, May 8, 2020 / 05:29 pm (CNA).- Mother’s Day is going to look different for most families this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For Catholics, some churches are in the process of slowly re-opening public Masses, but the dispensation from the Sunday obligation continues to stand, as the virus has not gone away and a cure or vaccine has yet to be found.

While most Catholics are eager to return to Mass, a small group of Catholics are relieved that they will not be sitting in a public pew this Mother’s Day.

“We actually heard from one woman who said, ‘I kind of feel badly about saying this, but I'm sort of glad that we won't be in the pews this year for Mother's Day,’” Ann Koshute, founder of Springs in the Desert Catholic ministry, told CNA.


“That's something that we hear and that everybody I think on the team has experienced at one point in this journey,” she said - the desire to avoid Mass on Mother’s Day. That’s because Koshute, along with other members of her ministry, have had painful experiences with infertility, and the customary Mother’s Day blessing given to mothers at many parishes that day can bring their grief and sense of loss poignantly to the fore.


“I think that so often people in our own families, our friends, and even our pastors don't really understand the full extent of the pain and the grief or even the full extent of the issue of infertility, of how many couples are really dealing with it,” she said.


The pain of infertility, and the lack of resources available to Catholics on the subject, was why Koshute and her friend, Kimberly Henkel, founded Springs in the Desert, a Catholic ministry to spiritually and emotionally support women and couples experiencing infertility and infant loss. Originally, Henkel and Koshute, who have both experienced infertility, thought they might write a book. But they decided to start with a ministry website and a blog that could bring people together and allow for other women and couples to share their experiences. The group is relatively new, and held its first retreat in Philadelphia in December. They were set to hold a second one this weekend - Mother’s Day weekend - in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, when, well, the pandemic hit.

Now, they’ve moved the retreat online and opened it up to Catholics across the country - and they’ve been overwhelmed by the response.

“We thought that we would be really excited if maybe a couple dozen people found out about it and came. We are over 100 participants now. And it's free and it's going to be available all weekend,” Koshute said. The retreat is trying to address the emotional and spiritual experience of infertility and loss for a broad range of people, Henkel said - from mothers who have miscarried, to women who are past child-bearing years and still grieving the loss of infertility, to women “who feel like their biological clocks are ticking and just haven’t met the right guy.” But now that it's a virtual, pre-recorded, watch-at-your-leisure retreat, it also has the potential to reach a population that is often more reluctant to gather in groups and talk about their experiences of infertility: men. “It's mostly women who are emailing us (about the retreat), although we know that many of their husbands will watch with them. But we've also had a few men email us,” Koshute said.


“One in particular, it just really touched my heart. And he said that he was searching the web for help for his wife on Mother's Day. And I was just so filled with praise and thanksgiving to God for that, for a husband to see that hurt in his wife and to want to find a way to help her,” she added. Men and women typically experience the grief of infertility quite differently, Koshute noted. “For us women, it's so visceral because life is conceived within us and we carry that life. But for a man, it's so different,” she said.

“(Men are) kind of distant from that experience until the child is actually born. And so I think many times men, the grief and the burden that they carry is their wife's. They really carry her sadness and I think feel at a loss because they want to make everything right. They want to fix this, and they want to make her whole. And the mystery of infertility is that it's not that simple. And that's one of the things that makes it so difficult,” she said. Henkel said she experienced her own difficulties in trying to discuss infertility with her husband. Now that they’ve experienced the joy of growing their family through adoption, she said, he is much more open to inviting other men to share their experiences. Henkel said she is hoping that an additional benefit of this retreat being online is that it will facilitate discussions between couples watching the videos together. Both Henkel and Koshute said that while the experience of infertility and loss is painful, and they want to help couples acknowledge and accept that pain, they also want Springs in the Desert to be a positive and supportive experience for couples and women, where they can find hope and redemption even in their suffering. One of the topics they focus on is how all women are called to motherhood in their lives, whether it is spiritual or biological.

“My experience has shown me that my motherhood is really engaged in so many ways that I never considered before,” Koshute said.

“Not just with my godson or with other children in my family, but with women who are older than I who are friends and who might come to me with a difficulty or problem and I can help them,” or by helping family members in need or through charitable works, she added. “That's one of the messages that we try to get across to women and to couples as well, that those kinds of things, what we would maybe refer to as spiritual motherhood, is not illegitimate,” she said.

“It's not second-place. It's a real way of engaging and living out our motherhood. It's also not a replacement for a baby. So it's not as if you go out and volunteer in your community and now you won't have this longing for a child anymore. But we've really found through our own experience and through talking with other women that the more we kind of put ourselves out there and give ourselves to others, the more that we can begin to see that motherhood enacted in us.”

Henkel said she also likes to encourage couples to look at the ways God is calling them to be fruitful in their marriages outside of biological children.

“We really encourage these couples that they are not forgotten, they're not being punished. That God loves them so much and that he has something amazing for them. He's using this to draw them near to him and to allow them to cry out to him and ask for him to guide them, to lead them, to give them his love and show them what fruitfulness he has for them, what place in ministry and mission he has for them.” Henkel and her husband in particular like to share with couples their experience of foster care as one example of where God might be calling them to be fruitful. After a frustrating and expensive experience with some adoption agencies, Henkel and her husband decided to look into giving a home to children through foster care.

“Here is a situation where these children really need families,” she said. “It's hard because there's no guarantee you're going to get to keep this child, so there's a sense of this new greater level of having to learn how to trust God.” “I think that with a couple discerning that fruitfulness, it's also discerning - where is God really calling you? There's so much need in this world. And he wants to use us.”

Couples interested in the Springs in the Desert Mother’s Day weekend retreat can sign up for free online at the Springs in the Desert website. Content will be uploaded and available for anyone who registers, Henkel said, even if they register late. The retreat team will also be hosting a live talk on Sunday, May 10 at 2 p.m. Eastern on the ministry’s Facebook page.

“There's a place for you in Springs of the Desert,” Henkel added. “There's so many women who have reached out to us in Philly. We added several more women to our group, to our team, our official team, women who came to the retreat. One woman had come there and she said she had had a miscarriage, and neither one of us has experienced that. So we said, please join us. We want your voice.”

“We're trying to really bring the voices of many different women to our team so that people will feel there is somebody that is talking they can really relate to. Because there are all of these different situations, but they've got obviously a very similar undercurrent.”

German translation of the Annual Economic Report 2018 of the BIS, June 2018 - Die politischen Entscheidungsträger können dem gegenwärtigen Wirtschaftsaufschwung eine nachhaltige Basis verleihen, schreibt die BIZ in ihrem Wirtschaftsbericht. Dazu sollten sie strukturpolitische Maßnahmen ergreifen, mit Blick auf künftige Risiken wieder für größeren Handlungsspielraum in der Geld- und Fiskalpolitik sorgen und die Umsetzung der Regulierungsreformen vorantreiben. ...

German translation of the BIS press release on the presentation of the Annual Economic Report 2019, 30 June 2019.

Denver Newsroom, May 8, 2020 / 05:29 pm (CNA).- Mother’s Day is going to look different for most families this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For Catholics, some churches are in the process of slowly re-opening public Masses, but the dispensation from the Sunday obligation continues to stand, as the virus has not gone away and a cure or vaccine has yet to be found.

While most Catholics are eager to return to Mass, a small group of Catholics are relieved that they will not be sitting in a public pew this Mother’s Day.

“We actually heard from one woman who said, ‘I kind of feel badly about saying this, but I'm sort of glad that we won't be in the pews this year for Mother's Day,’” Ann Koshute, founder of Springs in the Desert Catholic ministry, told CNA.


“That's something that we hear and that everybody I think on the team has experienced at one point in this journey,” she said - the desire to avoid Mass on Mother’s Day. That’s because Koshute, along with other members of her ministry, have had painful experiences with infertility, and the customary Mother’s Day blessing given to mothers at many parishes that day can bring their grief and sense of loss poignantly to the fore.


“I think that so often people in our own families, our friends, and even our pastors don't really understand the full extent of the pain and the grief or even the full extent of the issue of infertility, of how many couples are really dealing with it,” she said.


The pain of infertility, and the lack of resources available to Catholics on the subject, was why Koshute and her friend, Kimberly Henkel, founded Springs in the Desert, a Catholic ministry to spiritually and emotionally support women and couples experiencing infertility and infant loss. Originally, Henkel and Koshute, who have both experienced infertility, thought they might write a book. But they decided to start with a ministry website and a blog that could bring people together and allow for other women and couples to share their experiences. The group is relatively new, and held its first retreat in Philadelphia in December. They were set to hold a second one this weekend - Mother’s Day weekend - in the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, when, well, the pandemic hit.

Now, they’ve moved the retreat online and opened it up to Catholics across the country - and they’ve been overwhelmed by the response.

“We thought that we would be really excited if maybe a couple dozen people found out about it and came. We are over 100 participants now. And it's free and it's going to be available all weekend,” Koshute said. The retreat is trying to address the emotional and spiritual experience of infertility and loss for a broad range of people, Henkel said - from mothers who have miscarried, to women who are past child-bearing years and still grieving the loss of infertility, to women “who feel like their biological clocks are ticking and just haven’t met the right guy.” But now that it's a virtual, pre-recorded, watch-at-your-leisure retreat, it also has the potential to reach a population that is often more reluctant to gather in groups and talk about their experiences of infertility: men. “It's mostly women who are emailing us (about the retreat), although we know that many of their husbands will watch with them. But we've also had a few men email us,” Koshute said.


“One in particular, it just really touched my heart. And he said that he was searching the web for help for his wife on Mother's Day. And I was just so filled with praise and thanksgiving to God for that, for a husband to see that hurt in his wife and to want to find a way to help her,” she added. Men and women typically experience the grief of infertility quite differently, Koshute noted. “For us women, it's so visceral because life is conceived within us and we carry that life. But for a man, it's so different,” she said.

“(Men are) kind of distant from that experience until the child is actually born. And so I think many times men, the grief and the burden that they carry is their wife's. They really carry her sadness and I think feel at a loss because they want to make everything right. They want to fix this, and they want to make her whole. And the mystery of infertility is that it's not that simple. And that's one of the things that makes it so difficult,” she said. Henkel said she experienced her own difficulties in trying to discuss infertility with her husband. Now that they’ve experienced the joy of growing their family through adoption, she said, he is much more open to inviting other men to share their experiences. Henkel said she is hoping that an additional benefit of this retreat being online is that it will facilitate discussions between couples watching the videos together. Both Henkel and Koshute said that while the experience of infertility and loss is painful, and they want to help couples acknowledge and accept that pain, they also want Springs in the Desert to be a positive and supportive experience for couples and women, where they can find hope and redemption even in their suffering. One of the topics they focus on is how all women are called to motherhood in their lives, whether it is spiritual or biological.

“My experience has shown me that my motherhood is really engaged in so many ways that I never considered before,” Koshute said.

“Not just with my godson or with other children in my family, but with women who are older than I who are friends and who might come to me with a difficulty or problem and I can help them,” or by helping family members in need or through charitable works, she added. “That's one of the messages that we try to get across to women and to couples as well, that those kinds of things, what we would maybe refer to as spiritual motherhood, is not illegitimate,” she said.

“It's not second-place. It's a real way of engaging and living out our motherhood. It's also not a replacement for a baby. So it's not as if you go out and volunteer in your community and now you won't have this longing for a child anymore. But we've really found through our own experience and through talking with other women that the more we kind of put ourselves out there and give ourselves to others, the more that we can begin to see that motherhood enacted in us.”

Henkel said she also likes to encourage couples to look at the ways God is calling them to be fruitful in their marriages outside of biological children.

“We really encourage these couples that they are not forgotten, they're not being punished. That God loves them so much and that he has something amazing for them. He's using this to draw them near to him and to allow them to cry out to him and ask for him to guide them, to lead them, to give them his love and show them what fruitfulness he has for them, what place in ministry and mission he has for them.” Henkel and her husband in particular like to share with couples their experience of foster care as one example of where God might be calling them to be fruitful. After a frustrating and expensive experience with some adoption agencies, Henkel and her husband decided to look into giving a home to children through foster care.

“Here is a situation where these children really need families,” she said. “It's hard because there's no guarantee you're going to get to keep this child, so there's a sense of this new greater level of having to learn how to trust God.” “I think that with a couple discerning that fruitfulness, it's also discerning - where is God really calling you? There's so much need in this world. And he wants to use us.”

Couples interested in the Springs in the Desert Mother’s Day weekend retreat can sign up for free online at the Springs in the Desert website. Content will be uploaded and available for anyone who registers, Henkel said, even if they register late. The retreat team will also be hosting a live talk on Sunday, May 10 at 2 p.m. Eastern on the ministry’s Facebook page.

“There's a place for you in Springs of the Desert,” Henkel added. “There's so many women who have reached out to us in Philly. We added several more women to our group, to our team, our official team, women who came to the retreat. One woman had come there and she said she had had a miscarriage, and neither one of us has experienced that. So we said, please join us. We want your voice.”

“We're trying to really bring the voices of many different women to our team so that people will feel there is somebody that is talking they can really relate to. Because there are all of these different situations, but they've got obviously a very similar undercurrent.”

After recognising that no training was available for lay leaders, particularly those in house churches, workers planed the launch of a Bible school.

ANDY MURRAY will swap a tennis racket for a games controller when he takes part in a virtual Madrid Open later this month.

If you're yearning for all the gardening shows that have been cancelled, you can still be inspired by exploring gorgeous virtual gardens now and throughout the summer, from the comfort of your armchair.

Following the University-wide commencement ceremony on May 9, Penn State Shenango will host a virtual celebration for the Class of 2020.

The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill got the Royal Assent this week. It was then solemnly signed, sealed and ratified by Ursula von der Leyen, the new President of the European Commission. We’re finally out.

I’m not sure it was wise for Nicola Sturgeon to invoke Nelson Mandela in her speech on the next steps (sic) to independence. He was a revolutionary who pursued a campaign of non-violent direct action, including strikes, boycotts and other acts of civil disobedience. That’s what many ardent Yessers were hoping against hope she might authorise.

It was a normal Friday night in the Red Lion pub in Whitehall, where journalists gather to gossip about the week. Charlie Whelan, former chancellor Gordon Brown’s personal spin doctor, was holding court as usual, white wine spritzer in hand.

Mardi Gras in New Orleans has always had a gothic element. The voodoo culture dates from the African American diaspora, though it’s now mostly for tourists. But this year there was an authentically macabre dimension to Fat Tuesday.

The Scottish political world is holding its breath this weekend.

The Meadowbank Stadium was one of the shabbier landmarks in east Edinburgh until it was knocked down last year. A new one is rising from the ashes, looking like one of those massive cruise liners that appear in the Forth.

Writers have been ransacking the Brainy Quotes website looking for inspiration for their coronavirus think pieces. But there is really only one that matters: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Franklin D Roosevelt’s epigram is appropriate because it is as disingenuous as it is paradoxical.

Next week, Nicola Sturgeon is promising to outline her proposals for lifting the lockdown. Good luck with that. She is unlikely to open the schools because she can't rely on parents to send their children.

Nicola Sturgeon won plaudits from some unlikely quarters this week for her “grown-up conversation” on lifting the lockdown.

“It's not the end; it's not even the beginning of the end; but it is perhaps the end of the beginning”. Churchill's famous wartime speech after the battle of El Alamein in November 1942 was an ambiguous rallying cry. After all, by saying it was only the beginning, he was suggesting that there could be worse to come.

K-12 teachers are faced with a question many likely thought they'd never have to ask: How often during the school day do my students need to see me and when?

AN SNP MP has been accused of capitalising on the virus crisis to undermine Nicola Sturgeon and boost their own profile following a series of remarks made in an online party meeting.

Leaders in some districts say remote teaching will now be a skill they will build even more in their existing teacher corps. Others are more skeptical.

Every teacher wants his/her students to be successful and chances are, each teacher is doing so much already with the information he or she has to make that happen. As team leaders, we want to help our teachers leverage the information they have to create the most targeted and effective instruction

STRANGE things you never thought would come to pass. Queueing to enter a supermarket. Being thrilled by the sight of the bin lorry arriving. Making your own surgical mask. These days. But the oddest thing of all? Being glad to see politicians.

Lorraine Wilson

It is not known whether birth at a pediatric cardiac specialty center or at a hospital with a higher neonatal level of care affects mortality for infants with ductal-dependent congenital heart disease.

For infants with ductal-dependent congenital heart disease, there is no difference in 90-day mortality for those born at specialty centers versus other centers in the state of Washington. (Read the full article)

There have been no previous large studies of congenital heart disease in very low birth weight infants.

This study characterized the frequency, mortality rate, and lesion distribution of serious congenital heart disease in very low birth weight infants by using a large international multicenter database. (Read the full article)

Autism has been associated with pregnancy and birth complications that may indicate a suboptimal prenatal environment. Although the interpregnancy interval (IPI) may affect the prenatal environment, the association between the IPI and risk for autism is not known.

Using full-sibling pairs from a large population, the authors examined the association between autism and IPIs. Second-born children conceived after an IPI of <12 months had more than threefold increased odds of autism relative to those with IPIs of ≥36 months. (Read the full article)

Adults born at very low birth weight (VLBW) (<1.5 kg) have higher blood pressure and higher fasting insulin levels than their peers born at term. However, they show no signs of endothelial dysfunction in childhood and in adolescence.

Adults born at a VLBW showed no endothelial dysfunction compared with term adults. They had, however, a thicker intima-media layer in relation to lumen size. More rapid growth during their first weeks of life was associated with better endothelial function. (Read the full article)

For mothers of children with chronic medical conditions or disabilities, such as epilepsy or cerebral palsy, a history of maternal unresolved grief regarding the child's diagnosis has been associated with insecure infant-mother attachment.

Unresolved grief related to a preterm birth is associated with the development of insecure infantmother attachment. Mothers with resolved grief after preterm birth are 2.9 times as likely to have securely attached infants, compared with mothers with unresolved grief. (Read the full article)

Two UK models predict the risk of mortality in very preterm Western infants (1) alive at onset of labor and (2) admitted for neonatal intensive care. Prognostic models need temporal and geographic validation to evaluate their performance.

The 2 models showed very good performance in a recent large cohort of very preterm infants born in another Western country. The accurate performance of both models suggests application in clinical practice (Read the full article)

Blood pressure and heart rate are altered by sleep state and postnatal age in healthy term and preterm infants. Preterm infants have altered blood pressure responses to head-up tilting during sleep.

Preterm birth has marked effects on the maturation of baroreflex sensitivity during sleep, which may contribute to the greater vulnerability of preterm infants to sudden infant death syndrome. (Read the full article)

Lactoferrin is a glycoprotein with anti-infective activities being part of the innate defensive network. Bovine and human lactoferrin share high homology. Bovine lactoferrin can prevent late-onset sepsis in preterm very low birth weight neonates.

In preterm very low birth weight infants, bovine lactoferrin is able to prevent not only late-onset sepsis but also systemic fungal infections. This protection is achieved independently from their colonization status. (Read the full article)

Human rhinovirus infections are common in children. Although historically associated with upper respiratory tract illness, rhinoviruses are increasingly recognized for their role in the exacerbation of asthma. Their role in bronchiolitis and severe lung disease in premature infants is unclear.

The authors of this study prospectively explore the role of rhinoviruses in premature infants using molecular techniques and identify these agents as the most frequent cause of hospitalization in this population. (Read the full article)

Asthma is a common obstructive pulmonary disease experienced during pregnancy. Clinical guidelines recommend women with asthma maintain asthma medication use during pregnancy. Epidemiologic studies suggest an association between several types of defects and asthma or asthma medication use during pregnancy.

Data from a large, population-based, multicenter, case-control study was used. This provides the opportunity to study specific birth defects with minimal heterogeneity in case groups, as well as control for a variety of potential confounders. (Read the full article)

Pulmonary hypertension is associated with bronchopulmonary dysplasia in extremely low birth weight infants and contributes to morbidity and mortality.

Pulmonary hypertension affects at least 1 in 6 extremely low birth weight infants and persists to discharge in most survivors. Routine screening of these infants with echocardiography at 4 weeks of age identifies only one-third of those affected. (Read the full article)

The demographics of trials that use antenatal consent may not be representative of the populations that they are intended to study.

This study analyzes the difference in clinical outcomes between the enrolled and eligible but not enrolled populations of a trial that required antenatal consent. (Read the full article)

Very preterm children are at risk for developmental problems and, therefore, a systematic follow-up is important. However, the relevance of early follow-up of cognitive development has been questioned because of the divergent data on the prognostic value of early measures.

Good stability of cognitive development was found between the ages of 2 and 5 years. Well-conducted assessment of cognitive development in infancy is both reliable to anticipate later development and clinically valuable to identify those children who need developmental support. (Read the full article)

Preterm infants are at increased risk of behavioral problems, which has been associated with maternal distress. Paternal psychological well-being is less studied. Parents’ concerns may affect their perceptions or attitudes and have negative effects on the behavior of the child.

Parents report more behavior problems in VLBW children at age 3 if they themselves have had symptoms of depression, parenting stress, or weak sense of coherence. Also, the paternal psychological well-being contributes to the behavioral development of a preterm child. (Read the full article)

The presumed causes of neonatal deaths globally have remained unchanged over the past decade and include infections (~30%), prematurity (~30%), and asphyxia (~25%). Great uncertainty surrounds these estimates and, in addition, cases are likely misclassified as stillbirths.

These observational findings indicate that asphyxia accounts for a much higher percentage (60% of early deaths). Prematurity (18%), low birth weight (8%), and overt infection are much less common. The 5-minute Apgar score is an unreliable indicator of birth asphyxia. (Read the full article)