Free Republic

Twelve years after finishing Harvard’s graduate theater program, Katierose Donohue still pays almost as much in student loans each month — about $650 — as for her share of the rent in Los Angeles. She recently stopped hosting her monthly sketch comedy show, “Ma’am,” because she didn’t always break even on her $200 budget. She’s now working side jobs as a dog walker and a social media copywriter, after past gigs serving at Starbucks and handing out free cigarettes for Camel. She’s never missed a loan payment, but there’s no end in sight: She borrowed nearly $75,000 to attend the...

One of the UK’s biggest graduate recruiters is to remove degree classification from the entry criteria for its hiring programmes, having found “no evidence” that success at university was correlated with achievement in professional qualifications. Accountancy firm Ernst and Young, known as EY, will no longer require students to have a 2:1 degree and the equivalent of three B grades at A level to be considered for its graduate programmes.

<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...

An influential seminary affiliated with The Episcopal Church has announced that it will no longer issue degrees starting next year, and is reporting a net loss of $7.9 million in assets since last year. The Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced in July that they will stop granting degrees at the end of the 2016-2017 academic year. Last week, the divinity school sent out an update to supporters and members of its campus community wherein they noted that the net assets of the seminary had declined rapidly over the past couple of years. "At our meeting, we also accepted...

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,...

California Gov. Jerry Brown denied parole for the youngest follower of murderous cult leader Charles Manson who is serving a life sentence for killing a wealthy grocer and his wife more than 40 years ago. Brown overturned the recommendation of a parole board on Friday that found Leslie Van Houten was no-longer the violent young woman who committed a gruesome murder and was now fit for release. She has completed college degrees and been a model inmate. The Democratic governor acknowledged her success in prison and her youth at the time of the murders. However, he wrote in his decision...

A man who acknowledged killing three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic is mentally incompetent to continue with his criminal case, a judge ruled Wednesday. ADVERTISEMENT The decision by Judge Gilbert Martinez puts the case against Robert Dear, 57, on hold until his mental competency can be restored through treatment. He will be sent to the state psychiatric hospital, and his mental health will be reviewed in August. As he was led out of the courtroom, Dear yelled at the judge: "That's called prejudiced, filthy animal!" The case will resume when Dear is found to be mentally capable of...

**SNIP** The talks have featured a high-profile negotiation over whether the goal should remain 2 degrees, or lowered to 1.5 degrees - the target favored by a string of island nations afraid of being swallowed whole by rising seas. It's looking increasingly likely that the final deal will have at least a nod to a 1.5 degree ceiling. The latest draft accord circulating in Paris late Thursday calls for "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C, recognizing that this would significantly...

A die-hard Hillary Clinton supporter – a young, female Millennial – recently applied to be a fellow with the campaign and was accepted. However, she was asked to move out of state and work for free. It was hard not to laugh at her over-the-top, entitled millennial reaction published in USA Today: “Finding out that Hillary perpetuates the exploitation known as unpaid internships was like discovering that Santa wasn't real.” Poor baby. Millennials are in a tough position right now. They are hard pressed to find work, with 14% of them unemployed, others barely able to make it on a...

A Washington state senator has survived a campaign by Western Washington University students who demanded their school revoke his master’s degree because he’s not radical enough on global warming. Doug Ericksen, a Republican and chair of Washington’s Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee, has blocked efforts to force businesses and residents to go green, but he supports voluntary compliance. He opposes mandated cap-and-trade programs and low-carbon fuel standards. But the effort to yank Ericksen’s degree — he earned his MA in political science and environmental policy at WWU — met with a stiff rebuke last week from the university’s president....

Media and potential opponents are scandalized that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is considering a run for president even though he didn’t graduate from college. But if Walker (who dropped out of Marquette University in his senior year) won in 2016, he would be joining an exalted group that includes the two presidents most frequently named as the favorites of the American people. Eleven presidents — exactly 25 percent — were not college graduates. Most prominent on that list are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who make up half of Mt. Rushmore’s foursome and are in the top three or top...

Were he to become president,” Howard Dean jeered this morning on MSNBC,Wisconsin’s Scott Walker “would be the first president in many generations that did not have a college degree.” This, Dean concluded was a disgrace. “He’s never finished,”he spluttered,and “the issue here is not just an issue of dancing around the question of evolution for political reasons,the issue is how well educated is this guy? And that’s a problem.”Thus was one of the most successful politicians of recent years condemned for lack of a certificate............Sorry, Mr. Walker,you have the wrong colored dot on your forehead to run for higher office........This...

As head of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano followed the U.S. government’s official practice of refusing to negotiate with hostage-takers. As head of the University of California system, she has become the hostage-taker. Napolitano is demanding that the cash-strapped state of California pony up an additional $100 million for the UC system, and she threatens to inflict a 5 percent tuition hike on students for each of the next five years in retaliation if Sacramento does not comply. This puts her on the wrong side of Governor Jerry Brown, who by being eternally fixed in anno Domini 1978...

"In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore -- equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird -- Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening's dinner, they walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth." Those are two "hipsters", and the punchline is that they pay for their foodie porn with foodie stamps, which sounds like it should be a terrible thing, except it's in Salon.com, which means they're going to try and tell you how it's a good...

A job posting for a McDonald’s franchise cashier opening in Massachusetts that required a college degree caused a stir among the media today, with much hand-wringing about job prospects in America, but it was all in error. Tony Cesolini, assistant manager at McDonald’s of Winchendon, a town on the border with New Hampshire, said the educational requirement was an error in the job posting. “We’re still trying to figure out how that happened,” Cesolini told ABC News. “At this time, it’s misreported information from an independent job offering website.” News outlets including the New York Daily News reported about the...

...as a cashier. In Massachusetts. Thanks, Democrats. Nice country you’ve developed here. CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO