For generations, driver’s licenses have been tickets to freedom for America’s 16-year-olds, prompting many to line up at motor vehicle offices the day they were eligible to apply.

No longer. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift from school-run driver education to expensive private driving academies.

To that mix, experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers.

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Another day, another mini-dustup between the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns.

Regardless of how “honored” she felt late last week about sharing a debate stage with Obama, Clinton spent the weekend expressing both anger and ridicule toward him, as The Times’ Michael Finnegan and Mark Barabak detailed here. Today, there surfaced a more indirect effort to undermine Obama, apparently emanating from the Clinton team.

Throughgout much of the day, the lead item on the influential Drudge Report has been a photo of Obama dressed in native garb as he visited Kenya two years ago — a picture that, according to the post, was circulated by “stressed Clinton staffers.”

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America remains an overwhelmingly Christian country, but the nation’s religious life also shows great fluidity, with many adults switching religious affiliations or abandoning ties to organized denominations altogether, according to a new survey released today.

The study also suggests that, in the near future, Protestants may no longer make up a majority of Americans.

Barely 51% of Americans are Protestants, and among people between the ages of 18 and 29, just 43% identify with this branch of Christianity, according to the study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

More than four in 10 adults, or 44%, have switched religious affiliations, moved from being unaffiliated with any faith tradition to affiliated, or abandoned any ties to a specific religion altogether, according to the study. But the study also found that Americans who identify themselves as Christians has remained constant — nearly 8 in 10.

Today’s 148-page study, made public at a teleconference from Washington, D.C., is the first report of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, a project in the works for more than a year. The interviews were conducted from May 8 to Aug. 13 in 2007. The study was based on interviews in English and Spanish with a representative sample of more than 35,000 adults.

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“I am very struck by our inability to communicate.”

–Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori toward the very end of the session today with active clergy of the diocese of South Carolina

The National Association of Realtors said Monday that sales of single-family homes and condominiums dropped by 0.4 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.89 million units. That was the slowest sales pace, going back to 1999, and was seen as evidence that the steepest slump in housing in a quarter-century has yet to hit bottom.

The median price of a home sold in January slid to $201,100, a drop of 4.6 percent from a year ago. Particularly alarming, analysts said, was the fact that the inventory of unsold homes jumped to a 10.3 months’ supply, meaning it would take that long to sell the 4.19 million homes on the market at the January sales pace.

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There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?

In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.”

Yet worry they do, with the spring of 1968 seared into their memories, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated in a span of two months.

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The active clergy of the diocese of South Carolina are meeting with the Presiding Bishop in Mount Pleasant this morning. Thank you for your prayers.

Almighty God, who in the place of Judas chose your faithful servant Matthias to be numbered among the Twelve: Grant that your Church, being delivered from false apostles, may always be guided and governed by faithful and true pastors; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

For her entire life, Phyllis Wilson has worshipped in the Anglican Church’s Niagara diocese, but on Sunday she voted to break away from the pack.

“It’s been coming for a long time,” the 84-year-old said after the congregation at Church of Good Shepherd in St. Catharines overwhelmingly voted to leave the diocese.

Instead, church members will align with the more conservative Anglican Network in Canada.

“It’s wonderful,” Wilson said. “The main thing is to stick to the New Testament and the teaching of Jesus.”

With a show of hands, members voted 82-4 to split in a closed-door meeting, before breaking into Hymn No. 275, How Firm a Foundation.

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The cracks in the Anglican Church of Canada are widening over the issue of blessing same-sex marriages, with three more congregations voting to split with the national organization over the weekend – and the two sides headed to court on Friday.

So far, the legal battle is limited to the diocese of Niagara in Ontario, where two congregations voted to break away last week and a third, the Church of the Good Shepherd in St. Catharines, followed suit yesterday. Two congregations in the diocese of New Westminster in B.C. – Church of the Good Shepherd, and St. Matthias and St. Luke, both of Vancouver – also voted to break away, bringing the total of dissident churches to 15. They have all put themselves under the authority of the Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Province of the Southern Cone in South America.

That traditional branch of the Anglican church does not recognize same-sex marriages.

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Check it out and see what you make of the analysis.

JUST when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did. The Federal Reserve Board’s economists revised their growth estimate down, and their inflation forecast up. The dreaded word “stagflation” has begun to make its appearance, reminding those Wall Street analysts old enough to remember that in the 1970s the economy experienced 15% inflation, 9% unemployment and three recessions.

Those who want to update their financial vocabularies further should also take note of the new buzz word, “contagion”, used to describe the fact that sub-prime problems are spreading to other parts of the closely interlinked credit market, such as credit cards and non-sub-prime mortgages.

Add “decoupling” to your lexicon and you will be au courant: analysts who confidently predicted America’s problems would not spread, are now less certain that the US economy is decoupled from the rest of the world. That’s why BNP Paribas economist Ken Wattret said that “all the reliable leading indicators of eurozone economic growth point to even worse news ahead”.

And why Mario Draghi, governor of the Bank of Italy and head of the Financial Stability Forum, said of write-downs by Europe’s banks, “it’s not over yet”.

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The first flight by a commercial airline to be powered partly by biofuel has taken place. A Virgin Atlantic jumbo jet has flown between London’s Heathrow and Amsterdam using fuel derived from a mixture of Brazilian babassu nuts and coconuts.

Environmentalists have branded the flight a publicity stunt and claim biofuel cultivation is not sustainable.

Earlier this month, Airbus tested another alternative fuel – a synthetic mix of gas-to-liquid.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson said the flight marked a “vital breakthrough” for the entire airline industry.

“This pioneering flight will enable those of us who are serious about reducing our carbon emissions to go on developing the fuels of the future,” he said.

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Iran said Sunday that it has started using new centrifuges that can churn out enriched uranium at more than double the rate of the machines that now form the backbone of the Islamic nation’s nuclear program.

The announcement was the first official confirmation by Tehran after diplomats with the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog reported earlier this month that Iran was using 10 of the new IR-2 centrifuges.

“We are (now) running a new generation of centrifuges,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Javad Vaidi, deputy of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, as saying. No futher details were provided.

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Adamant that Canadian views on same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed to define American law, a New York county is appealing a recent landmark U.S. court ruling that forces the border state to fully recognize gay couples wed in Canada.

In a unanimous Feb. 1 decision that drew attention across the U.S. for its precedent-setting potential, a New York appeals court ordered the Monroe County Community College in Rochester to grant full spousal benefits to two women legally married in Canada in 2004.

The victory for college employee Patricia Martinez and her partner Lisa Golden was hailed by gay-rights advocates as a major breakthrough in the fight for marriage equality. But it has sharply divided Republicans and Democrats in New York and beyond, fuelling a nationwide debate over same-sex marriage heading into this year’s presidential election campaign.

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It is a central claim of these organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response uses the 20% to 25% statistic. Websites at New York University, Syracuse University, Penn State and the University of Virginia, among many other places, use the figures as well.

And who will be the assailants of these women? Not terrifying strangers who will grab them in dark alleys, but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants — a rate of 2.4%.

Such a crime wave — in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience — would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course — because the crisis doesn’t exist.

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I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

A controversial Canadian woman is tipped to be Christchurch’s next Anglican bishop.

Church sources confirmed to The Press yesterday that Bishop Victoria Matthews was two-thirds of the way through the ratification process.

The paper said the former bishop of Edmonton, Canada, had signalled support for blessing gay marriages, but was not expected to break with tradition.

News of her election was leaked by London’s The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

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Last week, an intriguing proposition was mooted by Government minister Dawn Primarolo.

Teenage girls, she said, could be steered towards what is described as “long-term contraception”.

This is now possible thanks to the development of contraceptive jabs and implants which can last up to five years.

In other words, there is a way of effectively sterilising girls for a lengthy period of time.

At what age? Well, doesn’t 12 until 17 sound rather sensible?

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Here is one:

Re “Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers” (front page, Feb. 19):

As we try to understand the increase of suicide in this age group, one of the most descriptive phrases in the article is “inexplicable gloom.”

As a rabbi in one congregation for 25 years and as a professor of a course on death for the last 30 years, I have observed this gloom (or sadness, ennui, feeling of emptiness) in this age group.

It is not so much the means as it is the psychosocial and spiritual condition of boomers ”” what Émile Durkheim described in his 1897 pioneering book on suicide as anomie, referring to a lack of regulation or a breakdown of norms.

To quote one statement from his writings, “Man is the more vulnerable to self-destruction the more he is detached from any collectivity.”

Anomie as a cause of suicide is rare when human beings share their lives in intimate connection with others, when there is a sense of mutual interdependence in the human community.

The breakdown of personal relationships has been a major cause of depression and anomie among boomers. With the impermanence of friendships, unremitting mobility, job insecurities and the breakdown of the family structure, it should not be surprising that the suicide rate in this age group has increased.

Jack D. Spiro
Richmond, Va.

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[KIM] LAWTON: In Los Angeles, Jonathan Bock runs a company called Grace Hill Media, which he says tries to bridge the gap between Hollywood and the religious community. Formerly with Warner Brothers, Bock now promotes big-budget films to churches and Christian leaders.

Mr. BOCK: We have a database of about 75,000 pastors that we regularly invite to screenings. We don’t want to be in a position of just telling them this is good for you, so there you go. We want them to find out for themselves.

LAWTON: Last year, in a promotional gimmick, Bock’s company convinced the evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today to run a mock-cover featuring the film “Evan Almighty.” He says the studios’ willingness to commit such big ad money shows Hollywood’s growing respect for the religious audience.

Mr. BOCK: They knew this audience was out there. They really thought, you know, that this film would resonate with Christian families.

LAWTON: But “Evan Almighty” wasn’t a box office hit. Neither were two other movies targeted to Christians, “The Nativity Story” released in 2006 and “Amazing Grace” in early 2007, although all did better in video sales and rentals.

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Same-sex marriage blessings are the “flashpoint” but not the main reason a St. Catharines Anglican church is voting on whether to break from the national body, a spokesperson said.

Members of the Church of the Good Shepherd on Grantham Avenue will make their decision Sunday in a meeting after the morning service.

It’s a move that could see them booted from the church building if they vote to separate.

“It comes down to the fact that as long as the Anglican Church has been established, it has based its beliefs on the reliability and authority of scripture,” said Pat Decker, the church’s treasurer and people’s warden. “We have seen in the last 20 years, a major drift by the hierarchy of the church.”

In November 2007, lay and clergy members of the Anglican Diocese of Niagara voted to allow reverends to bless same-sex unions. At that time, the Good Shepherd’s Rev. Gerry Brodie voted against the blessing, saying his congregation didn’t support it.

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Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham, whose New Westminster diocese sparked a still-boiling controversy when it approved the blessing of same-sex unions several years ago, issued an ultimatum to clergy members Friday.

Ingham wants eight clergymen to declare whether they are in or out of the Anglican Church of Canada.

He sent rectors and clergy working in the St. Matthew’s Abbotsford and St. John’s Shaughnessy parishes “notice of abandonment of the exercise of ministry.”

The letter asks them to tell Ingham whether they have left the ministry of the Anglican Church of Canada, and whether they intend to join another Anglican ministry in another part of the world.

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The Anglican Diocese of British Columbia has temporarily softened its position against a pair of priests who have been suspended for leading a congregation of breakaways.

Diocesan Archdeacon Bruce Bryant-Scott wrote in an e-mail to parishioners on Thursday that he has agreed to a 12-day grace period, during which no disciplinary action will be taken against the Venerable Sharon Hayton, the rector, and Rev. Andrew Hewlett, the assistant priest, of St. Mary’s of the Incarnation in the Victoria suburb of Metchosin.

Ms. Hayton and Mr. Hewlett were told a week ago to stop performing their duties “as an ordained priest.”

“You will recall that the inhibition required that they not contact members of the parish, but during this period I will not take notice if they do,” Mr. Bryant-Scott wrote after a meeting with the two and their lawyers on Wednesday.

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The article was notable for what it did not say: It did not say what convinced the advisers that there was a romance. It did not make clear what McCain was admitting when he acknowledged behaving inappropriately ”” an affair or just an association with a lobbyist that could look bad. And it did not say whether Weaver, the only on-the-record source, believed there was a romance. The Times did not offer independent proof, like the text messages between Detroit’s mayor and a female aide that The Detroit Free Press disclosed recently, or the photograph of Donna Rice sitting on Gary Hart’s lap.

It was not for want of trying. Four highly respected reporters in the Washington bureau worked for months on the story and were pressed repeatedly to get sources on the record and to find documentary evidence like e-mail. If McCain had been having an affair with a lobbyist seeking his help on public policy issues, and The Times had proved it, it would have been a story of unquestionable importance.

But in the absence of a smoking gun, I asked Keller why he decided to run what he had.

“If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,” he replied. “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did.

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Calling Washington, D.C., “corporate-occupied territory,” consumer advocate Ralph Nader launched his fifth campaign for the presidency Sunday.

“I’m running for president,” said Nader in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Nader downplayed the impact he might have on the ultimate outcome of the race, saying “if Democrats can’t landslide the Republicans this year, they ought to just wrap up, close down, emerge in a different form.”

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More importantly, for Toplady’s verses, the water flowing from the rock was a type or foreshadowing of the water that flowed, together with blood, from the side of Christ when he was pierced by a spear as he hung on the cross.

Toplady and his congregation were equally aware of the water that flowed from the right side of the temple in the vision of Ezekiel (47:1). That verse is sung round the world at Eastertide (and has been set by great composers such as Victoria) during the Asperges, the ritual sprinkling of the people at the beginning of Mass. That is not a practice of which Toplady would have approved, although the biblical reference is the same.

And this is what is so strange about Toplady’s devotion to the wounds of Christ, the real subject of his hymn. They (standing for Christ’s one sacrifice in his suffering and death) have saving power. The hymn writer wants to “hide himself” in them – at face value a grisly desire. Yet it is one that medieval mystics expressed too – Julian of Norwich springs to mind.

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Tippett uses her pulpit””both in print and broadcast””to preach the healing power of conversation. “Something magical happens in a real conversation,” she writes, “where people bring the clearest words they can muster, and the most natural, to matter and meaning. Paradoxically, what is most personal also lands in other ears as most universal.” She says she no longer looks for solutions, systems and overarching themes that “apply to all people and all places.” Instead, honoring the humanity of “different others” is her task. Her goal is not to champion a particular worldview, but to “keep sense and virtue and the possibility of healing alive in the middle of the world’s complexity.”

A commitment to finding the truth in all religious traditions may keep the conversation going, but it can avoid facing the unbridgeable abyss that exists between many religious traditions. The tension for Christians, of course, is that personal experience is not the bedrock of faith, and a focus on first-person narratives may only contribute to the “Sheilaism” or intensive privatization of faith that Robert Bellah warned of back in the ’80s. Enamored of mystery, nuance, and questioning even as she finds herself delving into faith systems that are built on certainties and absolutes, Tippett may have chosen a stance that keeps her in a sort of spiritual limbo, where she is ever encouraging of others’ accounts of their faith but is left standing on the sidelines of religious experience herself.

Tippett says she has opted for a “clear-eyed faith” that asks her to confront both her own failings and the world’s horrors. For her, the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, to repair the world, is one that holds special resonance. Clearly, listening to others has become a way for Tippett to repair if not save the world””one conversation at a time.

Read it all. I really like Ms. Tippett and her program.

Duct tape is used to seal the mouths of unruly children on a Ware Shoals school bus.

Two 16-year-old boys sexually assault a 14-year-old girl on a Berkeley County school bus after paying the driver $10 to look the other way.

A once-beloved Gilbert school-bus driver sits in prison after confessing to sexually abusing girls as young as 7 on his bus.

Such stories grab the headlines and paint a grim picture of the trek that more than 300,000 S.C. children take twice a day on a school bus.

But the reality is the vast majority of them arrive at school and back home again safe and sound.

Ugh. Read it all.

Over the last two decades, few industries have lobbied more ferociously or effectively than banks to get the government out of its business and to obtain freer rein for “financial innovation.”

But as losses from bad mortgages and mortgage-backed securities climb past $200 billion, talk among banking executives for an epic government rescue plan is suddenly coming into fashion.

A confidential proposal that Bank of America circulated to members of Congress this month provides a stunning glimpse of how quickly the industry has reversed its laissez-faire disdain for second-guessing by the government ”” now that it is in trouble.

The proposal warns that up to $739 billion in mortgages are at “moderate to high risk” of defaulting over the next five years and that millions of families could lose their homes.

To prevent that, Bank of America suggested creating a Federal Homeowner Preservation Corporation that would buy up billions of dollars in troubled mortgages at a deep discount, forgive debt above the current market value of the homes and use federal loan guarantees to refinance the borrowers at lower rates.

“We believe that any intervention by the federal government will be acceptable only if it is not perceived as a bailout of the bond market,” the financial institution noted.

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