Free Republic

How would you reform the university system? How would you find a way to lower tuition and raise standards?

I'm interested in debating if whether or not Judas and Pontius Pilate ended up in Hell. Despite being considered the most evil men in hisotry, since they were doing God's will in causing Christ to be crucified, surely they would in fact be looked on with favor by God and not condemned to Hell for eternity.

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.

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...

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign brushed off a high-profile supporter’s warnings against doing campaign events with a Silicon Valley CEO whose company has since imploded under the weight of layoffs, a federal criminal investigation, and rebukes from top regulators. Campaign staff circulated an internal schedule of fundraising events in March that included a “Conversation with Chelsea” event at the Palo Alto offices of biotech startup Theranos that featured the company’s chief executive Elizabeth Holmes.

When she grows up, Lynlee Boemer should demand to celebrate two birthdays a year. For she is the baby who was born twice. Her proper entry into the world came 12 weeks after she was temporarily taken out of her mother’s womb for a life-saving operation. Doctors discovered a tumour in the tailbone of Margaret Boemer’s unborn baby when the mother-to-be went for a routine ultrasound just 16 weeks into her pregnancy. Her only hope was a medical procedure that required surgeons to open up the womb and take the 1 lb, 3 oz foetus out for 20 minutes for...

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.

The widow of a scientist who killed himself in fear he was about to lose his job at troubled bio-tech start-up Theranos has told of the company's paranoid culture. Ian Gibbons, the head scientist at the blood test company, died after taking an overdose of painkillers in May 2013 within hours of being summoned for a meeting. According to his widow, Rochelle, he had found faults in machines the company claimed would 'change the world' by being able to diagnose diseases from a single pinprick of a patient's blood. Having recently been diagnosed with cancer, he stopped going to work...

Well! I look back and I realize that last month, I passed an 'abstinent anniversary" making this my twelve year of being chaste since breaking up with my boyfriend at age 21. I decided then and there to abstain from sex until marriage and I have faithfully kept that vow. It's been twelve years of major changes and my remaining non-sexually active has been a mainstay throughout those changes.

The southern US state of Georgia was preparing Wednesday to execute a man convicted of killing a police officer, after the state parole board denied a request for clemency. Gregory Lawler, 63, was set to die by lethal injection at 7 pm (2300 GMT) at a prison in Jackson, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) outside Atlanta, prison authorities said. According to court documents, Lawler during a domestic dispute in 1997 opened fire with an AR-15 rifle on two officers at his home, killing one and seriously wounding the other.

“Turki Bin Saud Bin Turki Bin Saud Al Kabir, a Saudi national, had shot Adel Bin Sulaiman Bin Abdul Kareem Al Muhaimeed, also a Saudi national, following a group dispute,” the Interior Ministry said.

Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej, a revered and unifying figure who embodied the nation in his 70-year reign, has died aged 88. Here's the latest: • Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn is the king's appointed successor • Thousands gathered at the hospital, shouting "Long live the king!" • Civil servants are ordered to wear black clothes for one year in mourning from Friday • US President Obama described the king as a man of "grace and warmth" The announcement came in a statement from the Royal Palace read on state TV Thursday, and followed a days-long outpouring of support since the king...

Theranos, a onetime star Silicon Valley startup focused on health technology, is closing its consumer blood-testing facilities amid its struggles with US regulators. The company, which has been seeking to disrupt the medical testing sector with new technology, said the closings will mean cutting some 340 jobs. "After many months spent assessing our strengths and addressing our weaknesses, we have moved to structure our company around the model best aligned with our core values and mission," company founder Elizabeth Holmes said in an open letter.

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. secretly arrested a National Security Agency contractor in recent weeks and is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer codes developed to hack into the networks of foreign governments, according to several senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. The theft raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, an insider has managed to steal highly damaging secret information from the N.S.A. In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, who was also a contractor for the agency, took a vast trove of documents that were later passed to journalists, exposing N.S.A. surveillance programs...

Islamic State forces have fired crude chemical weapons at US troops in Iraq, the Pentagon has confirmed, a startling disclosure that US officials promptly downplayed as resulting in no deaths or injuries. The attack came from a powdered mustard agent delivered in a mortar or rocket shell and fired on US forces on Tuesday at the Qayyarah West air base near Mosul. The air base, recaptured from Isis in July, is a pivotal staging ground for a highly anticipated attack on Mosul, Isis’s capital in Iraq approximately 40 miles (65km) to the north. Related: The harrowing story of the woman...

BERLIN – Edward Snowden is increasingly unhappy with the situation in Russia, where he has lived for more than three years. President Vladimir Putin once welcomed the National Security Agency contractor for his propaganda value, but he may be wondering if it’s all been worth it. Snowden arrived in Moscow in June 2013. That was almost a year before the Crimea annexation, and Russia could still try to sell itself to radical leftists who admired Snowden as the lesser evil, compared with the Big Brother United States. Putin talked a lot about Snowden, showing obvious delight for thumbing his nose...

New videos have surfaced of a Yale professor being protested and yelled at by students for sending an email telling them to ignore people dressed in offensive or racist Halloween costumes. The fallout of the email saw Nicholas Christakis, the master of Silliman College at Yale, and his wife Erika, a faculty member, resign from their positions at the university. The new videos, which appeared on The Federalist, give a greater insight into what the students were demanding from Christakis, and his defense that cultural appropriation on Halloween is permissible. Many students in the mob of almost 100 can be...

Scholars of pre-Columbian history have been trying to decipher something called the Grolier Codex ever since it was discovered by looters in a cave in Chiapas, Mexico back in the '60s.

VIENTIANE, Laos (AP) — President Barack Obama called off a planned meeting Tuesday with new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, seeking distance from a U.S. ally's leader during a diplomatic tour that's put Obama in close quarters with a cast of contentious world figures. It's unusual for one president to tell another what to say or not say, and much rarer to call the other a "son of a bitch." Duterte managed to do both just before flying to Laos for a regional summit, warning Obama not to challenge him over extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. "Clearly, he's a colorful guy,"...

A skyrocketing number of students are seeking crisis counseling at Eastern Carolina University, prompting the school to make sure it educates pupils not just on academics but also on how to cope with life's challenges. ECU reported a 16 percent increase in student counseling appointments in the past two years. Those involving a crisis were up 52 percent, according to a July report that shocked officials on the Greenville, North Carolina, campus. "It wasn't just the numbers, it was the intensity and severity," said ECU Director of Counseling Valerie Kisler-van Reede. "It felt like something very different was going on...