Discrimination

After a Lutheran school expelled two 16-year-old girls for having "a bond of intimacy" that was "characteristic of a lesbian relationship," the girls sued, contending the school had violated a state anti-discrimination law. In response to that suit, an appeals court decided this week that the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating.

In three years of teaching English in South Korea, Tony Hellmann says he's seen discrimination both in and out of the classroom. He knows teachers, he says, who are harassed for having Korean girlfriends. He's met only three black instructors in his time. And he's been denied service in Korean bars. "I've been told to leave because I'm a foreigner," the 33-year-old Seattle native said.

For two months, Orange County's gay community turned out in force to the Lucky Strike bowling alley for Spin Tuesdays, a nightclub-style event with DJs spinning pop, dance and '80s music, and a velvet-rope entrance for as many as 1,000 bowlers, pool players and dancers.

The NAACP sued subsidiaries of two major banks Friday for allegedly steering African American borrowers unfairly into costly subprime mortgages. The suits -- against Wells Fargo Bank and Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Inc., owned by Wells Fargo & Co., and against HSBC Mortgage Corp. (USA) and HSBC Bank USA, owned by HSBC Holdings -- arrive at a time when the housing crisis and soaring unemployment already are causing disproportionate harm in black neighborhoods, leaders of the rights group said.

Every night without fail, Jim Turner is there at the far corner of the bar, chain-smoking his Marlboros and sipping ice-cold San Miguel from the bottle, watching over the Little Ones. He considers them family, but they're not his children. They're the dwarfs and other little people the 70-year-old Iowa native has rescued from the heartless streets of this capital city to offer them friendship and honest work. For 35 years, the former Peace Corps volunteer has operated the Hobbit House, a bar themed on J.R.R.

An independent examination of how the Los Angeles Police Department investigates officers accused of profiling people based on race, gender or sexual orientation found serious problems with a third of the sampled investigations, the inspector general for the L.A. Police Commission reported Tuesday. In six of 20 LAPD investigations into allegations of "biased policing" -- the department's new name for what has traditionally been termed racial profiling -- police failed to interview witnesses, did not ask important questions or made similar mistakes, concluded Andre Birotte, the inspector general, in the 41-page report.

Saying they suffered injustices under the Defense of Marriage Act, a dozen legally married same-sex spouses filed suit against the federal government Tuesday, alleging that the 1996 law deprives them of a range of benefits accorded other couples. The suit filed in Boston by the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD, challenges a section of the federal law denying gay couples access to more than 1,000 federal programs and legal protections in which marriage is a factor.

Federal regulators said Monday that they were prepared to discipline Internet service providers that secretly favored certain types of data traffic, like Web surfing, over others, like file sharing. At a hearing over allegations of traffic discrimination by Comcast Corp., the Federal Communications Commission chairman said the complaints underscored the need to enforce the FCC's current broad principles intended to promote so-called net neutrality.

State Senate leaders chastised UC Berkeley administrators Tuesday for trampling on the civil rights of Native Americans by not returning the remains of thousands of their ancestors held in storage at a campus museum. Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the incoming Senate leader, accused the university of discriminating against Native Americans by keeping the bones and artifacts at the Phoebe A.

A Los Angeles Fire Department unit formed to better investigate employee discrimination lawsuits is getting its budget cut, raising questions about whether officials will be able to counter a wave of payouts that have cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The city had earmarked $360,000 for the Professional Standard Division, but $241,000 will now be used to help offset a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall, officials said Tuesday.