The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds – USATODAY.com.

While women are increasingly reaching key positions in the world of European politics and business, they are still massively underrepresented and facing an uphill battle for recognition and equal pay.

“Still today in governments and parliaments, less than a quarter of members are women,” said Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish vice-president of the European Commission ahead of International Women’s Day on Sunday, March 8.

“There is no lack of female candidates,” she added. “The reality is men tend to choose men.”

“One half of the population is seriously underrepresented” and, this being the case, “the policy agenda will be set by men,” Wallstrom said during an EU parliamentary debate this week.

Deep-seated prejudices

Despite a rise in the number of women candidates, male politicians stand a better chance of getting elected due to deep-seated prejudices and habits, a study by the European Commission found.

According to data extrapolated from across the continent, an election with an equal number of male and female candidates would still result in a parliament with just 39 percent women representatives.

In other words, it would take 63 percent women candidates to achieve gender equilibrium in the final assembly.

“It’s wrong to blame women voters,” said Drude Dahlerup, a professor in the department of political science at Stockholm University. “The main problem is that male voters vote for male candidates.”

Read More..

Equal Rights Still Elusive for European Women | Europe | Deutsche Welle | 08.03.2009.

In a timed exposure, spectators watch from Cocoa Beach as the Kepler satellite launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. March 6.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday on a three-year mission to find Earth’s twin, a Goldilocks planet where it’s neither too hot nor too cold, but just right for life to take hold.

The Delta II rocket, carrying the widest-field telescope ever put in space, lifted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral at 10:49 p.m. Eastern time.

The $590-million Kepler mission is jointly managed by JPL and NASA’s Ames Research Center in the Bay Area. The spacecraft carries a 15-foot-long telescope with a 55-inch mirror that can scrutinize a wide star field for the telltale dimming of starlight that occurs when a planet crosses in front of it, known as a transit.

Over the last decade, scientists have employed the same technique with ground-based telescopes to discover 340 planets circling other stars. But because the optics of ground-based instruments are compromised by atmospheric interference, most of the planets found so far are Jupiter-like gas giants that orbit so close to their parent stars that any life forms would be incinerated.

The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, whose optics are not hampered by Earth’s atmosphere, was designed to see deeply but very narrowly.

Kepler’s field of view is 33,000 times wider than Hubble’s, or about the size of a human hand held up to the sky. The Cygnus-Lyra region near the plane of the Milky Way encompasses about 4.5 million stars. But most of those are too big or hot to allow a habitable zone close enough to the star for Kepler to see a transit.

The science team has selected about 150,000 sun-like stars for Kepler to analyze. Over time, Fanson said, the number will be winnowed down to about 100,000 in three classes: G-type stars, which are similar in size and age to the sun; K- and M-type stars, which are slightly smaller and cooler; and A- and F-class stars, which are somewhat bigger.

Earth is in the center of the habitable zone around the sun, but with stars of other classes, that zone would be closer to the star or farther out.

Kepler’s telescope is outfitted with a sophisticated camera that will stare unblinkingly at the star field. The whole area will be imaged every six seconds, then stored in 30-minute chunks.

Once a month, Kepler will do a pirouette in space to download its stored data, Fanson said.

Full Article…

Kepler blasts off in search of Earth-like planets – Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON: Not quite seven weeks into Barack Obama’s presidency, the capital’s leading thinkers seem to agree that the era of postpartisanship is over.

Obama’s team made little secret of their intention to win broad support for his stimulus plan – an effort that yielded three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House of Representatives. The president’s pick for the Commerce Department, Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire, turned down the job, citing his personal opposition to the bill.

According to E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post, Obama himself, speaking to a group of columnists aboard Air Force One, suggested that, in the future, he would approach Republicans with more wariness. “You know, I am an eternal optimist,” the president said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”

Such talk acted like a shot of adrenaline to the stilled hearts of liberal bloggers and columnists who had feared that Obama might squander a chance to stomp on his bewildered opposition. So much energy has been spent berating the idea of bipartisanship, in fact, that no one has stopped to ask what Obama means by it.

As the political scientist James Morone recently pointed out on The New York Times’s Op-Ed page, legislative bipartisanship, in the sense of two-party unity behind a single agenda, has never really existed.

The presidents we tend to immortalize hardly managed to transcend party politics; their greatness grew from their willingness to articulate arguments that were calibrated to be divisive. Franklin Roosevelt infuriated generations of conservatives who reviled his concept of expansive government. Ronald Reagan’s passionate counterargument made him an enduring enemy to the left.

This doesn’t mean, however, that our politics have not fundamentally changed over the last few decades. Roosevelt and his Republican critics had profound disagreements, but both sides understood that their dispute was ideological rather than personal, the clash of opposing theories in a common pursuit.

Read Complete Article Here…

Wary of Republicans, but not walking away – International Herald Tribune.