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The Vatican is this morning facing a further crisis after routine DNA tests revealed that the communion wafers used in Sunday mass contain 0% of the body and blood of Christ.

[..]

Catholic Simon Williams told us, “So what have I been eating all these years? It’s not bloody horse is it?”

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As he toured a J.C. Penney store before undertaking one of retailing’s most ambitious overhauls, Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson bristled when a colleague suggested that he test his new no-discounts strategy at a few stores before rolling it out at all 1,100.

“We didn’t test at Apple, ” the executive recalled Mr. Johnson, hired away from the gadget maker, saying.

Seven months later, sales at the new Penney had dropped by double-digits.

Well, yeah. Apple doesn’t discount because they sell stuff that people really, really want and that they can’t get anywhere else. And they don’t test because Steve Jobs refused to.

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This paper explains why some Muslim clerics adopt the ideology of militant Jihad while others do not.

I argue that clerics strategically adopt or reject Jihadi ideology because of career incentives generated by the structure of cleric educational networks. Well-connected clerics enjoy substantial success at pursuing comfortable careers within state-run religious institutions and they reject Jihadi ideology in exchange for continued material support from the state.

Clerics with poor educational networks cannot rely on connections to advance through the state-run institutions, so many pursue careers outside of the system by appealing directly to lay audiences for support. These clerics are more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology because it helps them demonstrate to potential supporters that they have not been theologically coopted by political elites.

I provide evidence of these dynamics by collecting and analyzing 29,430 fatwas, articles, and books written by 91 contemporary clerics. Using statistical natural language processing, I measure the extent to which each cleric adopts Jihadi ideology in their writing. I combine this with biographical and network information about each cleric to trace the process by which poorly-connected clerics become more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology.

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Police also said they found other paraphernalia associated with marijuana throughout the house including pipes, scales, books about growing marijuana and two pictures of the late reggae musician Bob Marley, a marijuana user.

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Representative Ed Orcutt (R – Kalama) does not think bicycling is environmentally friendly because the activity causes cyclists to have “an increased heart rate and respiration.”

This is according to comments he made in an email to a constituent who questioned the wisdom of a new bike tax the legislature is considering as part of a large transportation package.

We spoke with Rep. Orcutt to confirm the email’s authenticity and to get further clarification.

“You would be giving off more CO2 if you are riding a bike than driving in a car,” he said. However, he said he had not “done any analysis” of the difference in CO2 from a person on a bike compared to the engine of a car (others have).

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“You are not a money manager; you are an asset gatherer.”

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A 7-year-old Maryland boy was suspended from school for two days for shaping a breakfast pastry into what his teacher thought looked like a gun, according to his father.

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Prosecutors are investigating around 200 German egg farmers suspected of falsely labelling their produce as organic or free-range, in what has been described as fraud on a massive scale.

[..]

“The suspicion is that this is a case of systematic fraud. It is no minor matter – it would be deception of consumers,” said Christian Mayer, the new Lower Saxony agriculture minister.

They probably sold horse eggs…