Their fears of emotional, financial, social and legal reprisals of divorce, according to a study.

Committed couples aren’t marrying because they fear divorce, though many other reasons for and against marriage abound in young adults from different social classes.

In the study, researchers from Cornell and the University of Central Oklahoma performed in-depth interviews with 122 people who lived with their partner in or around Columbus, Ohio, between July 2004 and June 2006.

The respondents were organized into two groups: middle-class or working-class, based on their education and annual income.

They were asked open-ended questions on several topics as a part of a larger study, and about their thoughts and plans for marriage.

Researchers found that lower-income women, were concerned about being trapped in marriage and having no way out if things went wrong. They also tended to view marriage as ‘just a piece of paper.’

Working-class women had strong doubts about marriage and fear that it might be hard to exit if things went awry.

They also had fears of extra responsibilities and the costs of exiting the relationship make them more fearful of marriage.

The middle-class women viewed living together as a natural stepping stone to tying the knot. But the social, legal, emotional and economic consequences of divorce were a big worry for the 67 percent of respondents.

Social pressures and thoughts of deeper commitment may promote wedding vows in middle-class young adults.

A study from the Pew Research Center indicates that over half of adult Americans are currently married, the lowest rate in decades.

The findings could help premarital counselors devise lessons that ease fears of divorce and address the specific concerns of various socioeconomic classes, the researchers said.

The study was published in the December issue of the journal Family Relations.

A report from an independent commission said Catholic officials had failed to tackle the widespread abuse at schools, seminaries and orphanages.

The commission, which began work in August 2010, It studied 1,800 complaints of abuse at Catholic institutions, identifying 800 alleged perpetrators, just over 100 of whom are still alive.

It also conducted a broader survey of more than 34,000 people, to gain a more comprehensive picture of the scale and nature of abuse suffered by Dutch minors.

The report estimates that 10,000-20,000 minors were abused in the care of Catholic institutions between 1945 and 1981, when the number of Church-run homes dropped. In the years between 1981 and 2011, several more thousands suffered at the hands of priests and others working for the Church.

Most of the cases involved mild to moderate abuse, such as touching, but the report estimated there were ‘several thousand’ instances of rape.

Abuse by Catholic priests, laymen and laywomen was systematically covered up by the church to protect its reputation, the commission said, adding that the church was guilty of ‘inadequate supervision’ and ‘inadequate action’.

The findings appear to paint a picture of wider abuse in the Netherlands even than in Ireland, in a scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in Europe and the United States and forced Pope Benedict xvi to apologize to victims of sexual abuse by priests.

The investigation was commissioned by the Conference of Bishops and the Dutch Religious Conference in 2010 after cases surfaced involving pedophile priests in the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Canada and the United States.

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But a new, international study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has cast doubt on the idea that the differences are biological at all.

The study used data from schools in 86 countries, it’s the first major study to include so many non-Western societies, and concluded that differences in mathematical ability were due to unequal societies, not unequal biology.

The differences in performance seemed to be caused by social factors, i.e., each society’s attitude to women.

This is not a matter of biology. We found that boys, as well as girls, tend to do better in maths when raised in countries where females have better equality,’ said the researchers.

‘We found that boys as well as girls tend to do better in maths when raised in countries where females have better equality, and that’s new and important,’ said Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

According to researchers, none of their findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance at any level.

Rather, these major international studies strongly suggest that the maths gender gap, where it occurs, is due to cultural factors that differ among countries and that these factors can be changed.

‘The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,’ says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics.

Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample unrepresentative of the whole population.

‘For these reasons, we believe it is much more reasonable to attribute differences in maths performance primarily to country, specific social factors,’ Kane says.

To measure the status of females relative to males within each country, the authors relied on a gender-gap index, which compares the genders in terms of income, education, health and political participation.

Relating these indices to math scores, they concluded that math achievement at the low, average and high end for both boys and girls tends to be higher in countries where gender equity is better.

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The study, by sociologist Brian Powell and colleagues at Indiana University, asked 815 ‘nationally representative’ Americans to explain their views on name change choices.

Not only is it becoming more popular to ditch maiden names nowadays, but half of Americans support the idea of women being legally required to do so.

Results published by Gender and Society journal in April, highlight that Americans are more traditional than others supposedly.

Two thirds of respondents said that taking a husband’s name after marriage is ‘best’ and 50 per cent said that they would support a law requiring women to take their husband’s name.

And while 50 per cent of respondents said they’d be fine with a man taking a wife’s name, their attitudes towards the idea belied their opinion.

Maintaining personal and individual identity was cited as a reason for the 30 per cent who said that keeping a maiden name is best, while convenience, tradition and children were drivers for taking a husband’s name.

In terms of religious belief, the most likely to change their names were Catholics, followed by Protestant and then Jewish women.

In the study, it was also noted that women with higher educational levels and high powered jobs who were most likely to keep their maiden names.

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And seventy percent of American recruiters report that they have rejected job candidates because of information online, he said.

Marc S. Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington D.C., said that employers were entitled to gather information to make a determination about job related expertise, but he expressed concern that “employers should not be judging what people in their private lives do away from the workplace.”

Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on search engines and career affiliations online to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.

“We are not detectives,” said Max Drucker, chief executive of the company, which is based in Santa Barbara, California. “All we assemble is what is publicly available on the internet today.”

A start up, Social Intelligence scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professionals honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and identifiable violent activity.

And what information has led to job offers being withdrawn or not made? Mr. Drucker said that one candidate was found using an advertising site to look for OxyContin, a narcotic pain reliever. A woman posing naked in photos she put up on an image sharing site didn’t get the job offer she was seeking at the hospital.

Reports removing references to a person’s religion, race, marital status, disability and other information protected under federal employment laws, which companies are not supposed to ask about during interviews.

Also, job candidates must first consent to the background check, and they are notified of any adverse information found.

Less than a third of the data surfaced by Mr. Drucker’s firm comes from such major platforms of social network. He said much of the negative information about job candidates comes from searches that find comments on blogs and posts on smaller social sites.

Mr. Drucker said his goal was to conduct screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to have consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates.

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• CHILDPHOTOS

Police recently announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

China’s state controlled media ignored or suppressed news about government sanctioned kidnappings in Longhui and other regions until this May, when Caixin, an intrepid Chinese magazine, prompted an official inquiry.

Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, he was holding his 52 day old daughter at a bus stop when a half dozen men sprang from a government van and demanded his marriage certificate.

He did not have one, he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage. Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about US$ 745 dollars, to pay the fine he said they demanded. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

“They are pirates,” he said. Nearly six years later, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter, “Please come home as soon as possible.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was the local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of US$ 1,000 dollars or more, five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay, the babies were illegally taken from their families often put up for adoption by foreigners.

At least 16 children were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, a rural area in Hunan province parents and other residents said.

The practice came to an end in 2006, parents said, only after an 8 month old boy fell from the second floor balcony of a local family planning office as officials tried to pluck him from his mother’s arms.

Reports that local government officials stole children, beat parents and forcibly sterilized mothers, sowed terror in Longhui County for years are well known. Critics say the powers handed to local officials under family planning regulations remain excessive and prone for abuse and exploitation.

But rather than helping trace and recover seized children, parents say, the authorities are punishing those who speak out.

Lillan Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Chinese children for adoption from the government run Shaoyang orphanage.

The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about US$ 5,400 dollars to the orphanage.

The scandal also has raised some questions on moral grounds and legal issues regarding foreigners adopting Chinese children who were falsely and deliberately depicted as orphaned by unscrupulous government officials.

One 2001 research paper called lead poisoning one of the most common pediatric health problems in China. A 2006 review suggested that one third of Chinese children suffer from elevated blood lead levels.

Interviews with 20 families indicate otherwise. Near Jiyuan City, in Henan Province, nearly 1,000 children from ten villages were found to be elevated blood lead levels in 2009. Government officials ordered the children treated, families relocated and the smelters clean up.

But children still playing in the shadow of a privately owned lead smelter. Their parents said that local hospitals now refuse to administer new blood lead level tests.

The industry has grown by 20 percent a year, and is expected to expand further, according to Wang Jingzhong, vice director of the China Battery Industry Association.

China now has some 2,000 factories and 1,000 battery recycling plants. Enforcement is spotty at best.

Shen Yulin, environmental protection director for Deqing County, said 65 inspectors covered a region of more than 1,000 square kilometers, with more than 2,000 plants.

In the past two and a half years, thousands of people in China have been suffering from toxic levels of lead exposure, mostly caused by pollution from battery factories and metal smelters. The cases underscore a pattern of government neglect in industry after industry as China strives for headlong growth with only embryonic safeguards.

Chasing the political dividends of economic development, local officials overlook environmental contamination, worker safety and dangers to public health.

A report by Human Rights Watch this month says some local officials have reacted to mass poisonings by limiting lead testings, withholding and possibly manipulating test results, denying treatment and trying to silence parents and activists.

High levels of lead can damage the brain, kidney, liver, nerves and stomach and can even cause death. Children are particularly susceptible because they absorb lead more easily than adults.

The state Health Ministry said in 2006, that a nationwide test for children was not needed because their blood lead levels had been falling. But the number of factories producing lead acid batteries for electric bikes, motorcycles and cars has since surged.

In June, 233 adults and 99 children were found to have concentrations of lead in their blood, up to seven times the level deemed safe by the Chinese government.

Li Ganjie, the vice minister for environmental protection’ said every suspected lead poisoning case was investigated and victims were treated.

Zhao Guogeng, vice president of Zhejiang Haijiu Battery Company, said the company is covering the medical bills of lead victims. Authorities said the factory’s legal representative has been arrested and eight officials disciplined.

To Han Zongyuan, a factory worker is no consolation, who said his three year old daughter had absorbed enough lead to irreversibly diminish her intellectual capacity and harm her nervous system.

“No blood lead level has been found to be safe for a child,”said Dr. Mary Jean Brown at the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite efforts to step up enforcement, the government’s response remains faltering.

In Georgia, it grew by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In 2000 seven million people or 2.4 percent of the population, chose more one race in the census.

For generations in the deepest South, particularly Mississippi, there had been great taboo, publicly crossing the color line for love. Less than 45 years ago, marriage between blacks and whites was illegal, and it has been frowned on much of the time since.

Sonia Cherail Peeples, who is black and her husband, Michael Peeples, who is white, met as students at the university in 2003. His family was ‘old Mississippi.’ Sonia Peeples’s ancestors were too, but they were sharecroppers.

They have 2 boys: Riley, 3, Gannon, 5, who Mrs. Peeples likes to say are “black, white and just right!”

Jeffrey Norwood, a black college basketball coach, had reservations about taking a job in Mississippi. He was in serious relationship with a woman who was white and Asian.

His father, recalling when a black man could face death being seen with a woman of another race asked, “Are you sure?”

But on visits to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the younger Norwood liked what he saw, growing diversity. So he moved, married and, with his wife, had a baby, who was counted on the last census as black, white and Asian.

She is one of thousands of mixed race children in this state, one of the nations most rapidly expanding multiracial populations, up 70 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

Mississippi led the nation in the growth of mixed marriages for most of the last decade, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a public policy organization in Washington, D.C.

Still, multiracial people are a tiny percentage of the state’s population: 34,000, about 1.1 percent. And many here see enduring racial inequities.

And unlike in many states, Mississippi’s population has not grown much over the last decade, suggesting that any change in culture is happening not primarily as a result of newcomers.

Mixed marriages are also part of Mississippi’s coastal culture, which has historically been more liberal than the rest of the state.

Much of the growth in the mixed race group can be explain by recent births. But in Mississippi and in other states, some growth may also be a result of older Americans who once identified themselves as black or some other single race expanding how they think about their identity.

Attitudes are changing toward interracial marriages like that of the two couples, Sonia Cherail – Michael Peeples & Jeffry – Patty Norwood who both live in Mississippi, where such unions were once illegal.

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Some blame it on oil, and the byzantine state bureaucracy that coalesced to manage petroleum revenues.

Others, as is customary in some circles here, lay the blame on President Hugo Chavez. The president as the argument goes, has put Venezuela’s bureaucracy on steroids, nationalizing dozens of private companies and increasing the number of ministries to 27 from 14 when he rose to power in 1999.

In front of government offices, banks, bus stops, cinemas, hospitals, hair salons and grocery stores, there they are: lines spilling out onto sidewalks. Lines stretched out like an octopus limbs in various directions from government offices, including the Social Security Institute, Supreme Court and the Foreign Relations Ministry.

At one tower, housing the National Assembly and various courts, 117 people transacting government services stood in one slow moving line. In such a scenario, there are opportunities for some enterprising people. There is, the professional expediter who confronts Venezuela’s churlish bureaucracy on behalf of clients for a hefty fee.

Lowlier trades persist around Venezuela’s longer queue, too. There are those who simply stand in a line for a price, holding the space for someone else. Then there are entrepreneurs who work each morning at 4:00 a.m., renting plastic chairs for about US$ 2 dollars each.

Jorge Sayegh, a columnist for newspaper El Universal, in a sarcastic tone about Venezuelan’s acceptance and fondness for the long queue has this to say, “We’re attracted to lines like flies to honey, we actually love them. Lines for us are like a spouse from time immemorial whom we cannot stand, but without whom we cannot exist.”

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In one kitchen, stacks of pictures showing a mother holding her days old baby sat next to several cans of formula. In another, boxes of prenatal vitamins were tucked into rice cookers.

Several bedroom doors had numbers on them. Some rooms were rather luxurious with a large walk in closet, a whirlpool and a small refrigerator.

For months, officials say, the house was home to ‘maternity tourists.’ In this case, pregnant Chinese women who had paid tens of thousands of dollars to deliver their babies in the United States, making the infants automatic American citizens.

Officials shut down the home, sending the ten mothers who had been living there with their babies to nearby motels.

San Gabriel, about 30 kilometers east of Los Angeles, has grown rapidly in recent years and is now a hub of businesses catering to Asian immigrants, tea shops fill the strip malls and for sale signs in Chinese and Vietnamese are planted in front of several homes.

City officials ask basic questions to the women they found in the maternity house: how they get here and who paid for them to come? The answers: on a tourist visa and our family paid. The house’s owner, Dwight Chang, was fined US$ 800 dollars for code violations.

The building inspectors and police officers walked into the small row of connected town houses here knowing something was amiss.

Neighbors had complained about noise and a lot of pregnant women coming and going. And when they went into a kitchen they saw a row of bassinets holding several infants, with a woman acting as a nurse hovering over them.

Immigration experts say they can only guess why well to do Chinese women are so eager to get United States passports for their babies, but they suspect it is largely as a kind of insurance policy should they need to move.

The children once they turn 21, would also be able to petition the United States government to grant their parents permanent residence status.

The Center for Health Care Statistics estimates that there were 7,462 births to foreign residents in the United States in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That is a small fraction of the roughly 4.3 million total births that year.

Yolanda Alvarez, who walks her dog past the tow houses twice each day, said neighbors had complained among themselves for nearly a year, noticing “many many young women going in and out of the house.”

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