Great moments in racism

It happens all the time. You agree to meet with someone at a coffee shop but for some reason you arrive early or the other person is late. You think it would be rude to order before the other person arrives because that might look like a rebuke for lateness so you wait, perhaps for some time. While waiting, you may use the bathroom. Then the person arrives and life goes on. One thing that you probably don’t worry about is that the police are going to be called by the store manager and have you arrested for not ordering something.
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People are willing to pay higher prices for restaurant food

The wait staff at restaurants have much lower mandated minimum wages than other workers, based on the argument that tips supplement their income. Whenever the issue of raising their wages comes up, the argument frequently given by the restaurant industry is that doing so would increase prices and drive customers away and thus actually harm the workers, though it is clear that the real reason is that it might affect profits.
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The domino effect for evangelicals

As a lapsed religious believer, I find interesting the stories of how other people lost their faith. I was a very devout Christian, an ordained lay preacher in the Methodist Church back in Sri Lanka, but it was a progressive liberal church and by no means fundamentalist. It went a long way to accommodating scientific beliefs, which is perhaps why it took me so long to give up belief in the idea of gods.
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You can’t repair churches with public funds in New Jersey

We have become used to religious institutions finding ways to get public funding for their purposes, the main one being tax exemptions for their income and property but also in other ways such as setting up charter schools that can get taxpayer money. Politicians know that there is little to lose in pandering to religion and one of the ways is to siphon money in their direction. But some churches in New Jersey went as far as to use public funds to repair their churches. What was astonishing was that a lower court had allowed the practice. But today the New Jersey supreme court ruled unanimously that such spending was unconstitutional.
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Framed for murder by your own DNA

DNA has become the gold standard for evidence in criminal cases. It has a high reputation for accurately identifying people who had some contact with the scene of a crime and results in many convictions since jurors give great weight to DNA evidence. According to Katie Worth, a “2008 series of studies by researchers at the University of Nevada, Yale and Claremont McKenna College found that jurors rated DNA evidence as 95 percent accurate and 94 percent persuasive of a suspect’s guilt.”
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Does the GOP have room for anyone not totally loyal to Trump?

The answer to that question may be revealed on May 8th in North Carolina. Lee Fang writes about an interesting Republican primary race in a congressional district where Walter Jones, the Republican incumbent who has bucked his party and Donald Trump on several issues, is being challenged by a lobbyist who accuses him of being disloyal to Trump.
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The strange saga of the Rajneeshees

India seems to breed a constant stream of so-called ‘holy men’. These are people who preach some kind of religious mish-mash that followers find appealing enough to give them lots of money. They are not unlike the pastors of the megachurches in the US in fleecing the believers. The main difference is that these Indian mystics tend to run residential programs at places called ashrams where people live 24/7 while the megachurch followers live in their own homes.
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