Below the fold

A daily round up of five newsworthy stories:

• The NY Times reports, “A wave of research shows that increasing percentages of Hispanics [immigrating to the US] are abandoning church, suggesting to researchers that along with assimilation comes a measure of secularization.” Of the Hispanics who claimed no religion, 2/3 said they had once been religious.

• “Is our children learning”? According to new polling data, people are no smarter today regarding politics and current events than before the advent of 24 hour news channels. According to the poll regular viewers of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart were the most knowledgeable while regular Fox News viewers knew the least.
• A recent Associated Press article about a surge in interracial marriages grabbed significant coverage. More than 7% of America’s married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2% in 1970. But the NY Times‘ John Tierney looks at dating websites and finds preferences for the same race are still strong and deep.
• You’ve heard the phrase, “given a hundred typewriters and enough time, a hundred monkeys will write Shakespeare’s complete works.” Well, some researches decided to test the idea and “shut six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys with a computer keyboard in an enclosure at a Devon zoo for a month, and filmed what happened.”
• The NY Times has an incredible searchable database of all first quarter presidential campaign contributions. God bless the internet.