Survey Of 35,000 Finds Religious Landscape Changing
February 25, 2008
The U.S. religious landscape is extremely fluid, with more people switching religious affiliation or breaking religious ties altogether, according to a new survey.
The survey released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is based on interviews with more than 35,000 American adults.
Much of the study confirms that mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing.
However, it also delves deeper into those trends.
The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates that the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.
The survey found that about 44 percent of adults have either changed affiliation, moved from a nonaffiliation status to being affiliated with a particular faith, or cut all religious ties.
One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution, the survey found.
Twelve percent of the overall population is unaffiliated, and atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population, the survey said.
Of the nearly one in three Americans raised Catholic, fewer than one in four say they're Catholic today. That means about 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics.
However, an influx of immigrant Catholics, mostly from Latin America, has kept the portion of the population that identifies as Catholic fairly stable in recent decades.
On the Protestant side, changes in affiliation are swelling the ranks of nondenominational churches, while Baptist and Methodist traditions are showing net losses.
Curious: no mention of neither the Church of Dagon nor the Church of Starry Wisdom.
ProQuad Protects Against Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Chickenpox
February 28, 2008
ATLANTA (AP) -- A new study finds children suffered higher rates of fever-related convulsions when they got a Merck combination vaccine instead of two separate shots.
The results prompted a federal advisory panel to back away from its preference for the combo vaccine ProQuad, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella as well as chickenpox.
In the study of children ages 12 months through 23 months, the rate of seizures was twice as high in toddlers who got ProQuad, compared with those who got one shot for chickenpox and one for the three other diseases.
The lead researcher of the federally funded study said the risk translates to about one extra case of convulsion for every 2,000 doses of the combo vaccine.
The study focused on children who develop fevers and then go into convulsions. It's an occurrence that frightens parents but usually has no lingering consequences. There were no deaths in the new study.
by Nick Macfie and Guo Shipeng
Feb 28, 2008
BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese-made dumplings which made 10 people sick in Japan were sabotaged, most probably in Japan, China's security and quality watchdogs said on Thursday.
No one has died from the poisoned food but the case has prompted frenetic media coverage in Japan following a series of health scares over Chinese products ranging from pet food and toys to toothpaste.
"Chinese police have come to the conclusion that it was not a food safety incident caused by pesticide residues but a special case of sabotage," Yu Xinmin, a senior official with the Ministry of Public Security, told a news conference.
"After comprehensive, careful investigation and tests, we believe there is little chance that methamidophos (a pesticide) was put into dumplings in China," said Yu, deputy director of the ministry's criminal investigation bureau.
Japanese police have said that it was highly unlikely that the sabotage happened in Japan, citing the fact that methamidophos was strictly banned there and the packages of some of the problematic dumplings remained intact.
But Yu said Chinese tests showed that the pesticide could have seeped into the dumplings from outside the package, contrary to the results from similar tests by Japanese police, and suggested that the methamidophos could have been shipped into Japan from abroad.
Police questioned 55 people at the Chinese producer in the northern province of Hebei who might have been able to taint the dumplings but they were all cleared of suspicion, Yu said.
Japanese and Chinese investigators earlier said the plant was "very clean and well-managed", finding no harmful chemicals in samples and no abnormal operations.
No problems were detected either from the factory gate to Japanese ports, Yu said, adding that he was sorry Japanese police had not given his colleagues consistent cooperation and had released inconclusive investigation results to the media.
Yu said Chinese police would continue to work with their Japanese counterparts to find out the truth.
The poisoning is a delicate matter for Sino-Japanese ties, sensitive at the best of times over Japanese wartime atrocities in China.
China had taken "resolute" actions to investigate the incident in a responsible manner, Wei Chuanzhong, vice head of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, told the same news conference.
"It's because we don't want an isolated incident to affect the overall interests of bilateral relations and hurt the friendship between the two peoples," Wei said.
"We might have become a bit hypersensitive after the dumpling incident...we should return to a rational and normal thinking and not be misled by mistaken information."
By COLLEEN BARRY
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday February 27 2008
MILAN, Italy - Masked thieves drilled a tunnel and broke into a jewelry showroom as employees were preparing for a VIP showing, making off with gold, diamonds and emeralds in a brazen daylight heist, the jeweler said.
The bags of jewels stolen Sunday from Damiani - maker of the diamond bracelet that graced Oscar winner Tilda Swinton's wrist - included gold, platinum, diamonds and emeralds, though apparently no pearls.
The losses are being inventoried and Damiani is not issuing estimates, but the jeweler's chief executive dismissed a $7.52 million figure cited by the Italian media.
The safe normally would have had even more valuable, one-of-a-kind pieces - but a "significant number" were on loan to stars attending the Oscars, including Swinton, or in Tokyo for the opening of a new boutique, Guido Damiani said Wednesday.
"Luckily, many of these pieces were not in the safe," he said in a telephone interview.
The family-run business established 85 years ago by Damiani's grandfather calls itself the jeweler of the stars, with Hollywood stars Isabella Rosellini, Brad Pitt, Gwyenth Paltrow and Sharon Stone among its celebrity promoters.
For the last several years, Damiani has been bejeweling stars for Oscar night, including Sunday.
Employees in the central Milan showroom were preparing for a VIP showing when the thieves entered at around 10 a.m. Sunday, Damiani said.
The thieves, wearing face masks and dark glasses, forced four showroom employees, a caterer and a cleaning woman into a room, where they were bound. One of the Damiani employees was forced to open the safe, but bound with the others during the theft.
No one was harmed and no clients had yet arrived, Damiani said.
"The timing was planned. They knew that there would be people in the building - otherwise they would not have been able to get into the safe - but that it would not be full," Damiani said. "They were in the right place at the right moment. ... But I am confident that they will be found."
Damiani said they had drilled into the basement from a neighboring building with nearly 4-foot-thick walls - so sturdy the cellar had been designated a bomb shelter - gaining cover from renovation work in the adjacent structure. It was unclear how long they had been working.
"We've heard an account from one woman who heard noise in the early mornings, and had even complained to police. It was probably them," Damiani said.
Because they entered from inside the building, the thieves did not pass armed guards posted at the entrance. Newspapers have reported four thieves, but Damiani said the number was still unclear.
"A guard could have gone up at any minute, and one did go up by chance - but seconds after they left," Damiani said. "It could have been a drama, so all the better that no one walked in."
The whole operation took about half an hour. A neighbor who grew suspicious after seeing men load bags - presumably full of jewels - into a van notified police, Damiani said.
No one saw weapons, but Damiani presumes they were present. The jewels are insured by Allianz and Lloyds of London, he said.
The company, which is quoted on the Milan Stock exchange, has seen its shares rise since news of the theft broke. Since opening Monday at $2.80, the stock has risen as high as $3.13.
Raffles lives!
February 27, 2008
PARMA, Ohio (AP) -- A kindergarten student with a freshly spiked Mohawk has been suspended from school.
Michelle Barile, the mother of 6-year-old Bryan Ruda, said nothing in the Parma Community School handbook prohibits the haircut, characterized by closely shaved sides with a strip of prominent hair on top. The school said the hair was a distraction for other students.
"I understand they have a dress code. I understand he has a uniform. But this is total discrimination," she said. "They can't tell me how I can cut his hair."
An administrator at the suburban Cleveland charter school first warned Barile last fall that the haircut wasn't acceptable. The school later sent another warning to her reiterating the ban.
Mohawks violate the school's policy on being properly groomed, school Principal Linda Geyer said. Also, the school district's dress code allows school officials to forbid anything that interferes with the conduct of education.
Ruda's hair became a disruption last week when Ruda arrived freshly shorn, Geyer said. Administrators called Barile on Friday telling her to pick Ruda up from school.
"This was his third infraction," Geyer said Tuesday. "We felt that we were being extremely patient."
Rather than request a hearing to appeal the suspension, Barile said she'll enroll him at another school. Changing the hairstyle is not an option, she said.
"It's something that he really likes," Barile said. "When people hear Mohawk, they think it's long, it's spiked, it's crazy looking, and it's really not."
Punk's not dead.
PARMA!
By MARK JEWELL
The Associated Press
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The organizer of a federal hearing at Harvard Law School on Comcast Corp.'s treatment of subscriber Internet traffic on Wednesday said "seat-warmers" apparently hired by the company prevented other attendees from getting in.
Comcast has acknowledged that it hired an unspecified number of people to fill seats, but said the seat-warmers gave up their spots when Boston area Comcast employees who were advised about the hearing arrived.
But Catherine Bracy, the administrative manager at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said most of the three dozen seat-warmers who arrived hours before the Federal Communications Commission hearing's start on Monday remained during the event's opening hours, as many other members of the public were turned away.
Bracy said she saw a couple of the hired people dozing in the front row during opening remarks.
"I think it's disingenuous to say they were holding spots for Comcast employees," Bracy told The Associated Press, a day after advocacy groups that filed an FCC complaint over Comcast's network management accused the firm of trying to stifle debate at the hearing.
Bracy said when she arrived at 7:15 a.m. as doors opened for the 11 a.m. hearing, none of the 35 to 40 people waiting to get in appeared to know what the hearing's subject matter would be.
"No employees came in to take those seats when the event started," Bracy said.
Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said it hired seat-holders only after an advocacy group called Free Press urged its backers to attend.
"For the past week, the Free Press has engaged in a much more extensive campaign to lobby people to attend the hearing on its behalf," Philadelphia-based Comcast said in a statement.
Fitzmaurice declined to comment further Wednesday in response to Bracy's statements.
The event featured hearty applause - some in response to comments from a Comcast executive who testified before the FCC's five commissioners, and some in response to Comcast critics' testimony.
The practice of hiring people to fill seats in advance of public hearings isn't unknown in Congress and other forums, but Comcast critics said this case was unique.
"First, Comcast was caught blocking the Internet. Now it has been caught blocking the public from the debate," said Timothy Karr, director of an advocacy campaign backed by a coalition including Free Press. "The only people cheering Comcast are those paid to do so."
FCC spokesman Robert Kenny declined to comment.
The hearing came in response to complaints before the FCC that Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, hampered file-sharing traffic on its cable-modem service. The company has repeatedly said that its traffic management practices are necessary to keep other Internet traffic, like Web content, flowing smoothly.
During the hearing, FCC commissioners signaled that they were looking for greater openness from Internet providers about their traffic management practices, and were ready to step in to enforce the agency's "open Internet" policies.
In addition to serving as the event host, Harvard's Berkman Center has another tie to the controversy. A codirector at the center, Charles Nesson, is among the parties that signed a petition along with Free Press asking the FCC to find that such practices violate agency policies.
By ANICK JESDANUN
27 Feb 2008
NEW YORK (AP) — A whistle-blower credited with providing key documents in a lawsuit over the Bush administration's secretive domestic wiretapping program is one of three recipients of the "Pioneer Awards" from a civil-rights group that brought the challenge.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued AT&T Inc., accusing it of colluding with the National Security Agency to make communications on AT&T networks available to the spy agency without warrants.
As part of its case, the EFF said it obtained documents from Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician who said the documents detail secret NSA spying rooms and electronic surveillance equipment in AT&T facilities.
The EFF will give Klein a Pioneer Award at a ceremony in San Diego on Tuesday. The award does not carry a cash prize.
Also receiving the 17th annual awards is Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor whom the EFF credited with helping to stop a Canadian copyright proposal that it said would have hurt consumer rights.
A third prize goes jointly to the Mozilla Foundation and its chairwoman, Mitchell Baker. The foundation is the organization that oversees the open-source Firefox browser, a strong alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s market-dominant, proprietary Internet Explorer. The EFF credited Mozilla with promoting openness and innovation on the Internet.
By AOIFE WHITE
27 Feb 2008
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — The European Union's longest-running fight with Microsoft Corp. neared an end Wednesday as regulators imposed a record $1.3 billion fine on the world's largest software company for failing to fully comply with a 2004 antitrust order.
Microsoft has not decided whether to appeal the penalty, which amounts to a fraction of the $14.07 billion it earned in fiscal 2007. In all, the company has been fined just under $2.4 billion by European antitrust regulators over the years.
Barring an appeal, the fine shuts the door on an investigation into Microsoft's behavior that was triggered by a 1998 complaint by Sun Microsystems Inc. It alleged Microsoft was refusing to supply information that servers need to work with its market-dominating Windows operating system.
Microsoft eventually made the information available to rivals, but the EU said it charged "unreasonable prices" until last October.
EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said Microsoft now appears to have finally complied with the 2004 EU antitrust order. But she warned that the company was not yet in the clear because the EU last month launched new probes into its Office software and Windows' Internet browser.
She also was skeptical over Microsoft's announcement last week that it was further expanding its efforts to make its software work better with rival technologies. A news release, she said, "does not necessarily equal a change in business practice."
"Talk is cheap. Flouting the rules is expensive," she said.
Wednesday's penalty far outweighs the next biggest fine — $613 million imposed on Microsoft for using its role as the world's leading supplier of desktop software to elbow into new markets for workgroup servers and media players.
Fines — which can hit as much as 10 percent of company's global yearly revenue — are paid into the EU budget which pays out farm subsidies and research grants. The European Commission claims antitrust fines ultimately help reduce the financial burden on European taxpayers.
Microsoft earned $14.07 billion on $51.12 billion in worldwide sales during its last fiscal year that ended June 30.
"We could have gone as high as €1.5 billion," Kroes said, referring to an amount equal to about $2.2 billion. "The maximum amount is higher than what we did at the end of the day."
Microsoft's actions stifled innovation, hurting millions of people who use computers in offices around the world, she said, calling the fine "a reasonable response to a series of quite unreasonable actions."
The software titan fought hard against the EU's 2004 decision that ordered it to share interoperability information with rivals and sell a version of Windows without media software, taking an appeal to an EU court that it lost last September.
It was fined again in July 2006 — $357 million — for failing to obey that order.
The EU alleged that Microsoft withheld crucial interoperability information to squeeze into a new market and damage rivals that make programs for workgroup servers that help office computers connect to each other and to printers and faxes.
The company delayed complying with the EU order for three years, the EU said, only making changes on Oct. 22 to the patent licenses it charges companies that need data to help them make software that works with Microsoft.
Microsoft had initially set a royalty rate of 3.87 percent of a licensee's product revenues for patents and demanded that companies looking for communication information — which it said was highly secret — pay 2.98 percent of their products' revenues.
The EU complained last March that these rates were unfair. Under threat of fines, Microsoft two months later reduced the patent rate to 0.7 percent and the information license to 0.5 percent — but only in Europe, leaving the worldwide rates unchanged.
The EU's Court of First Instance ruling that upheld regulators' views changed the company's mind again in October when it offered a new license for interoperability information for a flat fee of $14,900 and an optional worldwide patent license for a reduced royalty of 0.4 percent.
by Melanie Lee
Mon Feb 25, 2008
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A Singaporean professor who nicked bras and panties has pleaded guilty to stealing women's underwear from a university dormitory, a local newspaper reported on Saturday.
The 39-year old man -- an associate professor in a Chinese university -- was charged for taking women's underwear from a university hostel's clothes-line last December, the Straits Times reported.
The Singaporean professor, who teaches in China, was in the city-state for his leave when he committed the crime. He was caught by a dormitory security guard who found female undergarments in his haversack.
"I have heard stories before about underwear being stolen, but I never thought it would happen to me," a victim, who was not named, was quoted as saying.
A lawyer for the professor was reported as saying his client suffers from a psychiatric disorder and has been taking women's underwear since he was 14.
The lawyer also said that his client was an honourable and kind person who had no intention of causing annoyance to the underwear owners.
That's right: He only wanted them to feel creeped out and kinda violated.
by Jeremy Lovell
Mon Feb 25, 2008
LONDON (Reuters) - A man celebrated his 60th birthday in unexpected style at the weekend when a 50 pence bet on the horses turned him into an instant millionaire.
Fred Craggs, from Yorkshire, was not even aware of his win when he walked into a branch of the William Hill betting agency to see how he had done with his accumulator bet.
When he was informed of his good fortune he was said to have turned rather pale and muttered that he had better go home to tell his wife.
His coup was selecting eight winners running at various courses around the country -- starting with one called "Isn't That Lucky" and finishing with "A Dream Come True" -- at odds of 2,000,000 to one.
"This is the most amazing bet ever placed since betting shops were made legal in 1961," William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said on Monday.
