Word: shams
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...student from Trinidad who recently married an American named Joannie, hoped to become a permanent U.S. resident. But first the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York City wanted him and his new wife to answer a few questions?questions carefully designed to catch foreigners who enter into sham marriages with Americans simply to gain citizenship. INS officials have been known to ask applicants about tattoos and which side of the bed someone sleeps on, then double-check the answers with their spouses. "We married for love," said Bernard. "But we had heard stories about the interview, and, well...
...some sham marriages, a love-stricken citizen is victimized by a spouse who marries only to gain permanent residency. Some American men, for example, send away for so-called mail-order brides and are given the gate soon after their wives receive permanent status. Another marriage fraud involves an alien who pays a U.S. citizen to marry him or her to circumvent INS rules. The foreigner then arranges a quick divorce. In August the INS deported the head of a West Coast ring that had arranged an estimated 70 marriages, for $3,000 to $5,000 a wedding...
...Still, about 20 of the 57 were determined to expose the sham of democracy in Qixia. They began investigating alleged corruption, assembling evidence they say proved that local money was being used to fund lavish lifestyles for the Party headmen. Shortly after, around a dozen village chiefs were savagely assaulted. Others had their homes demolished and crops destroyed...
Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios...
...Fred Goldman, Ron's father, filed a lawsuit last week against both Simpson and Lorraine Brooke Associates, described by Goldman's lawyer as a "sham entity" formed to funnel the book's proceeds to the ex-football star. Goldman hopes not only to retrieve the $880,000 he says News Corp. paid Simpson as an advance, but he also wants Murdoch's company to give him all rights to If I Did It - print, audio and other peripheral sources of income from the project. "There was originally an indication they might be open to such an idea [turning all profits...