Free Republic

Soon No More Eucharist! Dear friends, Things are beginning to accelerate and to precipitate rather quickly now! As I wrote in my article, “Satan Apes Christ” (http://spir-food.blogspot.it/2016/09/satan-apes-christ.html): “There are various indications that the peace promised by Our Lady of Fatima will be fulfilled on the CENTENARY OF THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE GREAT MIRACLE OF THE SUN, October 13, 1917 at Fatima, Portugal, which will be October 13, 2017!” Three weeks before this date, on September 23, 2017, we will see “the woman clothed with the sun” (Rev 12:1-2) in the heavens (“Signs of God vs. Signs of Satan”; http://spir-food.blogspot.it/2016/12/signs-god-vs-satan.html). “The...

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed the U.S. government’s securities fraud lawsuit against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who still faces criminal charges of duping wealthy investors. But the ruling by U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant is a significant victory for Paxton, who is scheduled to stand trial in May on felony securities fraud charges. He has pleaded not guilty and faces five to 99 years in prison if convicted. The lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was nearly identical to the case brought by criminal prosecutors. Both allege that Paxton of misled investors in a...

December 3, 2016 7:57 PM Associated Press ATLANTA — Alabama showed off all its weapons in the Southeastern Conference championship game. Now, the Crimson Tide can expect a return trip to Atlanta for the College Football Playoff. The nation's No. 1 team scored off a blocked punt and an interception return Saturday before wearing down No. 15 Florida in the second half with a dominant running game. The result was a 54-16 rout that positioned Alabama to go for its second straight national title and its fifth crown in the last nine years under coach Nick Saban. Next up: a...

<p>Theranos, the biotech company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, has another hurdle to cross in its whole "we're totally a legit blood-testing company" campaign. This time, it turns out that tens of thousands of blood tests were voided, making them totally invalid. Whoops!</p>

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

NEW YORK – Mary Jo White announced plans on Monday to step down as chair of the powerful Securities and Exchange Commission before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. White’s term at the helm of the SEC hadn’t been scheduled to expire until June 2019. Trump has promised to roll back the sweeping regulation of Wall Street that White has spent nearly four years trying to install. In fact, implementing Dodd-Frank rules and other financial reforms had been one of the biggest challenges during White’s tenure at the SEC.

Bama Players including Jalen Hurts taking a knee before the Miss State Game: Alabama quarterback Jalen Hurts (2) kneels in prayer with his teammates before Alabama's SEC football game with Mississippi State, Saturday, Nov. 12, 2016, at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Vasha Hunt/vhunt@al.com

His bronchitis is acting up. You won’t know it come kickoff 34 hours from now at Tiger Stadium because that voice is going to deliver as it has for six decades. But on Friday morning over eggs and bacon at his hotel in Baton Rouge, Verne Lundquist is feeling it in his lungs. The CBS broadcaster was a three-packs-a-day Marlboro man from 1956 to ‘92 before a doctor told him he had to quit. Hardest thing he’s ever had to do, Lundquist will tell you. Acupuncture and hypnosis failed but the nicotine gum finally stuck. Of course you can never...

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...

Theranos, the embattled blood-testing laboratory, said on Monday that federal officials were conducting a criminal investigation into the company, adding to a series of questions from officials about its inner workings. In a note to outside partners, the company said that the Justice Department had requested documents and that the investigation was active. The note also said that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the company.

The internet was aflame last night with many people upset over a piece in the Huffington Post from contributor Rebecca Walden. Walden penned a piece titled, “Young ladies of the SEC, cover it up!” and boy was it just awful. Now, it turns out that the Huffington Post wants this all to go away and so they deleted it. Not a good look HuffPost and not very journalistically sound either. But have no fear, below you can read the piece as it look on the HuffPost website before it was deleted: Dear young ladies of the SEC, can you do...

Would corporations operate better if their board members were chosen so as to ensure that women and major racial/ethnic groups were all appropriately represented? Many social activists believe so and their thinking has penetrated into the federal regulatory agency that oversees our stock exchanges – the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Back in 2009, the SEC instituted a requirement that publicly traded companies disclose plans they might have regarding the diversity of their boards of directors. That is to say, the racial, ethnic and gender characteristics of board members – as if those attributes were the essential, defining attributes of...

The University of Missouri’s (MU) flagship Columbia campus has officially lost a staggering 23 percent of its freshman class this year, an even worse figure than administrators initially predicted in the wake of major racial strife.

Washington D.C., June 23, 2016 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Merrill Lynch has agreed to pay $415 million and admit wrongdoing to settle charges that it misused customer cash to generate profits for the firm and failed to safeguard customer securities from the claims of its creditors.

The SEC showed its true colors yet again at a panel at Stanford Law School at the end of March, although not as dramatically as last year. In last spring’s SEC panel at Stanford, the then head of examinations, Andrew Bowden, made such fawning remarks about private equity, including repeatedly saying he’d really like his son to work in the industry, that he resigned three weeks after we publicized the segment. Nevertheless, this conference was another demonstration of depth of regulatory capture at the agency. As before, the real action came in when the audience members asked questions. They were...

Late in July 2012, Phil Mickelson, one of the world's most famous golfers, received a phone call from a well-known professional sports gambler, William "Billy" Walters. At the time, U.S. authorities say, Mickelson owed Walters a gambling debt, and Walters had a hot stock tip: buy shares in the food company Dean Foods Co. Four days later, Mickelson owned $2.4 million worth of Dean Foods shares, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A few weeks after that, he reaped a $931,000 profit when the company announced a spinoff that sent its share price soaring. Mickelson then paid off...