The rush-hour incident injured around 20 to 25 people, according to the Fairfield Police Department. No fatalities have been reported.

According to the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s website, service is suspended between New Haven and South Norwalk, with westbound and eastbound service between Grand Central and South Norwalk still running. According to Julien Clancy ’15, who cannot return home to Yale from Grand Central because of the service suspension, the eastbound Metro North is running trains as far as Green’s Farms in Westport, Conn. and then offering a bus service from there to New Haven.

Nick Cugini ’14, who was on an Amtrak train traveling from New York to New Haven when the crash occurred, said he was stranded on his train for over an hour before the train turned around and returned to Penn Station.

Amtrak has also indefinitely suspended its service between New York and Boston.

According to The Daily Princetonian, the decision was made on April 17 and partly in response to changes in coverage policy at many peer universities. Yale Health announced in April that gender reassignment surgery coverage would be extended to Yalies, joining Harvard, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania. The extended insurance — which was granted to faculty and staff in 2011 and to unionized workers in January — will go into effect at Yale on August 1.

“While I applaud Princeton’s decision to extend coverage to transgender employees in this manner, it is a shame that the same inclusion has not been extended to students,” Princeton Pride Alliance co-president John Parvin told the News. “Princeton is lagging behind many of its peer institutions despite having one of the largest university endowments and despite supposedly advocating for the welfare and inclusion of all its students.”

Parvin added that he believes Princeton has been looking to its peer institutions, including Yale, in deciding whether to extend this coverage.

In a Wednesday email to the Yale community, Provost Benjamin Polak announced the University’s new partnership with Coursera, an online education platform used by Princeton, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. Polak also announced the creation of a new standing committee on online education and the appointment of music professor Craig Wright to the new position of academic director of online education.

In the email, Polak stressed the importance of using online education to explore new teaching strategies that can be used in Yale classrooms.

“To build on the progress we already have made in this area, we need to take care that our online initiatives complement and enrich Yale’s traditional pedagogy,” Polak said in the email. “We are placing [importance] on web-based teaching not just as a means of global access to Yale courses, but also as a mechanism for exploring new ways to teach the classes that we offer here on campus.”

Yale’s first courses with Coursera will be available in 2014 and will be taught by political science professor Akhil Amar, psychology professor Paul Bloom, art history and classics professor Diana Kleiner and economics professor Robert Shiller.

Polak said these free, non-credit courses will “offer opportunities for individuals around the world to benefit from Yale’s excellent teaching and scholarship.”

Wright, the newly appointed academic director of online education, will work closely with the Yale Teaching Center to “shape the academic policies Yale will need to address [online education],” Polak said.

Wright previously co-chaired the faculty committee on online education and taught online courses for Yale Summer Session and for Open Yale Courses.

Polak added that Director of Digital Media and Dissemination Lucas Swineford will continue to work with the Office of General Counsel, the Office of Public Affairs and Communications and University Chief Information Officer Len Peters to develop the University’s approach to online education.

Polak will also appoint a new standing committee this summer to advise him on developing online initiatives. Chaired by Wright, the committee will be composed of faculty members, administrators and two students.

In an email to the Ezra Stiles community this afternoon, President-elect Peter Salovey and Dean of Yale College Mary Miller announced that Stephen Pitti ’91 will be re-appointed master of Stiles for a five-year term beginning July 1. The re-appointment was recommended by a committee of Stiles fellows that found “overwhelmingly positive support” for Pitti’s reappointment among students, fellows and staff in the college.

“The decision was a pretty simple one,” said Matthew Jacobson, chair of the committee. “The committee emerged from our inquiry with the distinct impression that Pitti may well be the most beloved figure at Yale.”

Pitti said he feels it is the role of the master to get to know students as “whole people,” not just in a classroom setting, in the same approach Yale College takes in the admissions process.

“I would say that I’m very honored to be invited back as master of the college, and it’s certainly been a position that has been very exciting for me and my family to spend another five years or so around some of the most interesting people in the planet,” Pitti said.

The Rider will provide coverage for non-emergent illness and chronic care.

“The motivation [for the update] was to make it possible for these students to get health insurance coverage for routine care if they are far away for a semester or a year,” said Paul Genecin, director of University Health Services. “There was already a good option for students abroad, but we needed one for this country as well.”

Students must enroll in the supplemental coverage for the fall term between June 1 and June 30 at a price of $250 per semester. Genecin said the service is likely to be used by graduate and professional students more than undergraduates, particularly in terms of conducting academic research in other parts of the country.

Without purchasing the additional coverage, students are covered by Yale Health Hospitalization/Specialty Coverage for emergency care, acute care and pre-authorized short-term follow-up care.

The announcement of the Rider supplement follows multiple changes to the Yale Health plan made at the end of April. Those updates include the extension of sex-reassignment coverage, the combination of Hospitalization/Specialty Coverage with Prescription Coverage, and two revisions to mental health policies.

The 2012-’13 report aims to examine how well the campus community understands Yale’s existing sexual misconduct resources and to engage members of the University in a broad discussion of campus sexual climate. It follows a 2011 assessment — conducted by a committee chaired by Margaret Marshall LAW ’76 — that was designed to advise administrators on how to improve Yale’s sexual climate.

“While we were encouraged that the community members who participated in this initiative demonstrated a broad general knowledge of the University’s policies, procedures and resources, we also identified a number of opportunities to address points of uncertainty, to simplify processes, and to communicate in ways that are clearer and more meaningful,” the report states.

The overwhelming conclusion regarding student awareness of sexual misconduct policies was “positive,” according to the report, and almost all participants were confident they could access sexual misconduct resources at the University if necessary. Undergraduates almost universally cited the Sexual Harassment and Assault Response & Education Center, or SHARE, as a resource from which they would seek help following an instance of sexual misconduct, and many students were able to name at least one other key sexual misconduct response mechanism at Yale, such as Title IX Coordinators, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct or the Yale Police Department.

Many students observed that the University has been more open and transparent in its efforts to foster a healthy campus sexual environment. Students who participated in orientation programs over the last two years, which included revised events regarding sexual misconduct resources, demonstrated a greater knowledge of sexual misconduct definitions and procedures.

But the report also found that confusion exists in distinctions between various misconduct reporting processes and in the exact types of support offered by Title IX Coordinators. One suggestion made by students to address this confusion is to provide example scenarios of the outcomes of various complaint processes. The report recommended increased training for University staff and administrators to whom students often turn for support following incidents of sexual misconduct, such as masters, deans and academic advisors.

The assessment was conducted primarily through more than 30 focus group discussions held from November to December. Roughly one third of individuals who provided feedback for the report contacted Title IX coordinators on their own initiative after an October message to the Yale community encouraged input through email, anonymous online comment or one-on-one meetings.

Previously, border agents at the airport could not access the Homeland Security Department’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, to view visa information on international students. A student’s data would only be looked up in SEVIS if border agents noticed some indication of a national security threat and referred the student to secondary inspection. Under the new procedure, which came into effect on May 2, all border agents will have access to SEVIS.

Azamat Tazhayakov, a University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth student from Kazakhstan who has been arrested on charges of obstruction of justice for helping to dispose a backpack with fireworks linked to the Boston bombing suspects, returned to the U.S. in January with an invalid student visa, according to the Associated Press. His visa had been terminated earlier that month after he was dismissed from the school for academic reasons.

The new Homeland Security policy may cause delays in travel because international students will have to go through secondary inspection at ports of entry, said Ann Kuhlman, director of Yale’s Office of International Students and Scholars.

“The couple [of international students] I’ve heard from that have been sent to secondary inspection said it has been fairly quick,” Kuhlman said. “It all depends on what port you enter and how many others are in line. If the lines get longer, you might have to wait an hour or two and longer.”

While students might feel minor annoyance at the new system, it remains to be seen how severely travel times will be impacted, Kuhlman added. An email sent to members of the OISS community last week warned students that the policy could impact arrangements for ground transportation and connecting flights.

The decision came after months in which the 28-person task force considered 40 different sites on which to build a school, settling on the original site both for its convenient location and for the symbolic triumph over tragedy it provides. The new school will cost between $42 million and $47 million to construct, a cost that the state and federal governments are expected to pick up.

Though everyone who testified in Friday’s meeting spoke in favor of the final recommendations, some parents expressed discomfort at the idea of building a new school where the old one once stood.

“To me, that is always going to be a site where 26 people were murdered,”one panel member, Laura Roche, told The New York Times.

But Roche voted on Friday in favor of building on the original site as the best option available to the taskforce.

The recommendation would preclude the possibility of converting the old elementary school into a memorial site, as in several previous instances. At Columbine High School, where two teenagers gunned down 12 students in 1999 and injured 24 others, the library – where most of the victims had been slaughtered – was converted into an atrium. At Virginia Tech, the classroom building where a gunman killed 32 people in 2007 was converted into a peace studies and violence prevention center.

The taskforce’s recommendation will now go to the local school board and will need to earn the support of local residents, who will vote on the proposal in a referendum.

Ogletree, a member of the United Methodist Church, is facing a possible canonical trial for officiating at his son’s wedding, which took place last October at the Yale Club of New York. After the wedding announcement in The New York Times, several conservative Methodist ministers filed a complaint against Ogletree, claiming that he violated the church’s Book of Discipline. The book states that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Ogletree told The New York Times that though his reasons for performing the ceremony were “personal,” the overwhelming public response to his actions has allowed him to leave his mark on an important issue.

In January, Ogletree met with Rev. Randall Paige, pastor of Christ Church in Port Jefferson Station, NY — one of the ministers condemning Ogletree — in an effort to resolve the problem outside the courtroom. Ogletree told The Times that Paige asked him to apologize for his conduct and promise not to perform a same-sex ceremony again, which Ogletree refused to do.

Yale Divinity School Dean Gregory Sterling issued a statement Thursday in support of Ogletree.

“Some have seized upon the gracious response of a father to a son’s request and made an ecclesiastical case out of it,” Sterling said. “Efforts to turn the act of a loving father into an act of ecclesiastical disobedience only make Christianity appear to be loveless.”

A church committee is deciding whether to conduct a trial or dismiss the matter. If the case goes to trial, Ogletree may be stripped of his credentials.

Despite scoring first just three minutes into the contest, the Nittany Lions jumped up to an impressive 5–1 lead at halftime. Second quarter scoring was dominated by Penn State, shutting out Yale 3–0.

The tides began to turn, however, when Yale was given a man-up opportunity and attackman JW McGovern ’16 put a shot past goaltender Austin Kaut two minutes into the third quarter. Shortly thereafter, attackman Conrad Oberbeck ’15 brought the game within reach, making the score 5–3.

The Nittany Lions tried to fight back, widening the gap back to three goals, but the Elis had just caught their stride.

The next seven goals all came from the Bulldogs and were not answered until Penn State slipped one past Eric Natale ’15 with a minute left to play.

Midfielder Colin Flaherty ’14 pumped two goals past Kaut just a minute apart before the third quarter came to a close.

Yale carried its momentum into the final quarter of action and quickly tied the game at six apiece just two minutes into the fourth quarter. Kirby Zdrill ’13, Brandon Mangan ’14, Oberbeck, and Flaherty all added goals to close out the scoring for Yale.

The Nittany Lions tried to make a last stitch effort with one more goal, making the game 10–7, but it was not enough to catch up with the Bulldogs momentous lead.

The Elis will next play the winner of the No. 1 seed Syracuse vs. Bryant matchup in the NCAA quarterfinals in College Park, Maryland on May 18.

The winner of that game will head to the semifinals in Philadelphia, PA.