Free Republic

Theranos Inc. allegedly voided 11.3% of all blood-test reports that the Silicon Valley laboratory firm provided to customers of Walgreens stores through a yearslong partnership between the two companies, according to legal papers the drugstore chain filed Tuesday. Theranos, whose main lab failed an inspection by U.S. regulators earlier this year, told Walgreens in June that it subsequently voided 31,000 test reports provided to the chain’s customers, Walgreens said in the public version of a sealed lawsuit.

Liberal ideologues who hate America continue their frustrated teeth gnashing. The current CNN Money headline actually reads: “The Trump market rally: Too far, too fast”

SAN FRANCISCO – Walgreens has filed a $140 million breach of contract suit against Theranos Inc., compounding the woes of the Silicon Valley-based medical device startup. The suit was filed under seal in Delaware federal court on Tuesday. It's not clear what exactly the Illinois-headquartered pharmacy chain is alleging, but the docket describes the case as a breach of contract suit with a demand of $140 million.

Prematurely accelerating the implementation of fully autonomous trucking (no driver in the cab) seems like an idea that could be fraught with risk. While driverless long-haul trucks have the potential to increase economic productivity by enabling more cost-effective transport of goods, the technology is not yet ready for prime time. There is growing pressure, however, to make it a reality sooner rather than later – particularly as long-distance trucking faces a worsening driver shortage. At the same time, highway infrastructure in many parts of the country is clearly inadequate even for today’s traffic, let alone a mixed bag of driven...

After the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981, the U.S. Economy experienced one of its greatest booms in history. The growth rate averaged nearly 4 percent for seven years 1982–89. And the stock market rose from less than 1,000 on the Dow to more than 10,000 over the next two decades. This was a period of wealth and job creation that the nation and middle class had seldom seen before. All the liberal critics wrongly said it could not and would not happen. Now the question is: Could it happen again in this era of massive government debt, meager growth,...

Did anyone here on FR forgo going to college and university and end up all the better for it? I dropped out of college in 2006 right before I had my nervous breakdwon and after ten years of working on my business and other interests, I'm thinking of seeking out private tutoring instead of going back to a really expensive mainstream education system.

Lawmakers hear odd arguments when attempting to reform the state’s underfunded pension system. The latest argument is that converting Michigan’s school employee pension program to a defined-contribution system will tarnish the state’s credit rating. For evidence that this is unlikely, Michigan can look to its own history, which shows that offering new workers defined-contribution retirement benefits instead of defined-benefit pensions can improve a state’s credit rating. Michigan closed its state employee defined-benefit system in 1997, meaning all employees hired after that date would receive 401(k)-style retirement benefits instead of defined-benefit pensions. In 1998 the state’s credit rating was upgraded. Credit...

SAN FRANCISCO — Embattled biotech startup Theranos Inc. has promoted senior litigation counsel David Taylor to acting general counsel. Taylor's already got a full plate. "He's got a mess on his hands," said Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro partner Robert Carey in Phoenix, one of many lawyers suing the blood diagnostics company for alleged consumer fraud. Carey's suit is one of six similar, separate suits consolidated in the Northern District of California. Aside from that litigation surplus, Theranos is being investigated for investor and consumer fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, respectively. The...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said at a conference this year in North Dakota that he'd end U.S. oil imports from OPEC if elected in November.

In an article titled “John Podesta and the Russians,” WSJ’s James Freeman writes that the question “When did Clinton’s top aide stop doing business with Moscow?” is not an easy one to answer, given the latest information we have from Wikileaks. From the Wall Street Journal: Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta has responded to the WikiLeaks publication of his private emails by suggesting they were stolen by the Russians to elect Donald Trump. What he doesn’t like to talk about is the business he’s done with a Kremlin-backed investment firm and the lengths he’s gone to avoid scrutiny of this relationship. …...

IT ALL began with the best, if exceedingly ambitious, of intentions – to develop a machine that by a simple pinprick on a patient’s finger could detect any disease known to man. But it ended in the most tragic of circumstances, with the firm behind the invention crashing and a British scientist who had devoted himself to the project taking his own life. Now his widow has spoken out about the treatment he suffered before and after his death at the age of 67, accusing his employers of heartlessness.

After seven years of anemic economic growth, Americans are facing limited job opportunities, stagnant wages, a diminishing middle class and dismal economic prospects for our youth. A recent Pew Research study found young adults more likely to be living in their parents' homes than at any time since 1940 — Hillary Clinton refers to them as Bernie Sanders basement dwellers. According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly one in six young men is either jobless or incarcerated, up from about one in 10 in 1980, when the economy was in recession. Gross Domestic Product should be averaging an annual growth...

Hidden among all the recent great news affecting Birmingham’s amazing rebirth is the story of the long-awaited opening of I-22, or Corridor X. That’s a shame, because no single success in our recent past may prove to be more important and have greater long-term favorable impact on this region than today’s ribbon cutting. Since the days of the Roman Empire and the famous Appian Way, roads (and particularly crossroads) have always played a critically important role in the economic growth and prosperity of cities. In the earliest days of our country, waterway intersections were the places where communities grew into...

For those who ever find themselves questioning the good of free trade, arguably the best cure for such a lapse of reason is a quick read of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson. In it Hazlitt wrote that “What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful or disastrous to the collection of individuals that make up a nation.” Hazlitt’s powerful quote will cure Keynesians of just about everything they believe, including the horrid idea that war is good for the economy. As for conservatives who occasionally find themselves swimming in a protectionist direction, the Hazlitt quote...

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) has postponed funding a busway in the heavily congested Interstate 270 corridor for at least six years, significantly delaying a transit project that Montgomery County is relying on to develop the upcounty without making traffic worse. Hogan’s proposed six-year transportation budget includes no money for the Corridor Cities Transitway, which has been planned since at least 2000 to connect the Shady Grove Metro station at the end of the Red Line with the upcounty. The first nine-mile segment would run between Shady Grove and the Metropolitan Branch MARC commuter rail station in Gaithersburg. Delaying the...

There’s a famous old fable known as “Belling the Cat.” For those who haven’t heard it, it goes like this: A bunch of mice are threatened by a vicious cat, and they call a council to figure out how to solve the problem. One mouse proposes that they place a bell around the cat’s neck. That way, they’ll hear the cat approaching and have plenty of time to run and hide. The mice applaud the plan. They love the plan. It’s a great plan. One mouse asks who’s going to volunteer to place the bell around the cat’s neck. Suddenly,...

In a new segment for his weekly series with The Player's Tribune, Seahawks' cornerback Richard Sherman appears in a four-minute video on how the NFL treats its players. He says that the league sees them like race cars, doing just enough to keep them in good shape to perform, then dropping them once they're no longer on a roster.

Palantir Technologies has discriminated systematically against Asian job applicants since at least January 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor said in a lawsuit filed Monday.

Well, you've no doubt heard the arguments made by socialists against private property, against corporations and the profit motive. We are taught that profit is a form of theft from the workers rather than being positive influx of cash resources payment of wages, dividends and investments in expansion. The concept of owning property is also in of itself theft to socialists, for the earth belongs to us and everything belongs to everybody. Profit and property has another meaning, it is what sends signals to our economy on where resources and assets must be placed in order to achieve further productivity...

Hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets Saturday, in protest of pending trade deals with the United States and Canada. The deals in question are the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the U.S. and the European Union and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) for the Canadian-EU relationship. Neither free trade agreement has been ratified yet, but popular outcry has been growing for the last few years. The demonstrations took place in seven cities throughout Germany: Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne, Leipzig, Munich and Stuttgart. Organizers told CNBC that the official estimate is 320,000 demonstrators across...