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WHEN IT WAS revealed that an intern was responsible for an American television station broadcasting fake racist names for the pilots of the crashed Asiana flight, the unnamed summer hire was fired, which raised the genuinely plausible question: Were they the worst intern ever?
Maybe they were, but there’s some pretty stiff competition out there.
We’ve rounded up some of the best — or worst? — examples of bad interns.
The intern who fabricated sources for her articles.
Liane Membis had a lot of things going for her. A recent Yale grad who had scored an internship with The Wall Street Journal, she made headlines in the summer of 2012 for all the wrong reasons.
Membis was fired from her internship after her editors discovered she had been fabricating sources and quotes for her stories.
(Image Credit: ConnecticutStyle/YouTube)
The intern who allegedly wrote about startups in exchange for MacBooks.
A 17-year-old TechCrunch intern was fired from the website in 2010 after it was alleged that they had asked a startup for a MacBook Air in exchange for writing a post about the company.
The company later confirmed that they had also received at least one other computer from a company he wrote about.
The intern who pooped all over NBC.
To her credit, the intern apparently showed up the next day and continued her internship.
The intern who threw glitter at Mitt Romney.
University of Colorado Denver student Peter Smith was fired from his 2012 internship with Colorado Senate Democrats after he attempted to “glitter bomb” Mitt Romney by throwing glitter at the then-presidential hopeful.
Mitt Romney glitter-bombed by gay rights activists in a separate incident. (Image Credit: Gerald Herbert/Press Association Images)
The intern who tried to sell a meeting with a senator
Jeffrey Garofano, a Middlebury College senior working on the 2010 campaign of American Senator Michael Bennet, was fired from his internship after he offered a one-on-0ne meeting with the senator for a $2,400 donation.
$5,000 would buy you a better chance of the senator actually listening.
The intern who lost more than 800,000 social security numbers
Jared Ilovar, a computer intern working for the state of Ohio, was on the receiving end of some bad luck when a sensitive data tape was stolen from his car.
The tape contained the names and Social Security numbers of more than 800,000 Ohioans, leading to Ilovar being fired and later claiming he was a "scapegoat".
The intern who confirmed fake racist names to a TV station.
After the crash of Asiana Flight 214, an intern with the National Transportation Safety Board erroneously confirmed four fake racist names of the pilots to television station KTVU, which subsequently read them live on-air.
The NTSB intern was fired for his action
The intern who was the least of Anglo's worries.
In 2007, an intern at the now defunct Anglo Irish Bank told his boss that he had to miss work because he was going home for a family emergency.
When his boss saw Facebook photos of the intern at a costume party during the time he was supposed to be at home, he sent an email to his fairy-dressed intern saying "Cool wand!," Gawker reported.
But sure, there were some more worrying goings-on at the bank around that time.
The intern who made up a drunken MySpace rant from Roseanne Barr
Although some people write this off as a cover story, in 2007 Roseanne Barr fired the intern who ran her MySpace profile after a seemingly drunken ramble appeared on her page when the comedian was vacationing in Hawaii.
The intern who got Bill Clinton impeached
Maybe the most famous intern of all time, Monica Lewinsky was a recent Lewis & Clark College graduate in 1995 who had just started an internship at the White House. Three years later, Lewinsky's sexual relationship with her boss — then President Bill Clinton — became public knowledge, and led to his impeachment by Congress.
Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky displays a copy of her book (Image Credit: Nick Ut/Press Association Images)
Peter Jacobs
Makes me realise how lucky we really are despite everything.
Oh ye! Being rules by morons is far easier than any of that! At least the morons who govern us just take our money!
Ur an awful bollox…
Why? Being ruled by idiots is heaven compared to any of that. Is it not?
Jesus, some of these pictures are harrowing and the stories behind them, even worse! It really makes you think about our own, ‘first world’ problems…
Puts things into context compared to the whining gimp patrol on here moaning that they cant afford skinny lattes and holidays because of the mortgage on their massive house
Thatcher was a great friend of Augusto Pinochet during and after his brutal reign. At the same time she was denouncing Nelson Mandela as a terrorist
I teach history and when it comes to the holocaust or the famine the kids always ask, how did people let that happen? Whats crazy is that we are still letting it happen!
You only have to look at the treatment of travellers to realise ‘hate’ is alive and well in Ireland.
Yeah it’s so shocking and depressing to see what people do to each other. Governments dont give a toss unless it’s worth something to them. Thousands being killed in Syria and all they’re doing is political posturing.
Those pictures of the North Korean kids goes to show the world what a “Socialist Paradise” really looks like.
And now the madness of NK has declared war on S Korea. Utter madness. What is going on within their heads?
As for the morons that say we are having it bad. Move to North Korea please.
I think your the only person describes it as a socialist paradise
Daniel I was being sarcastic using the usual leftie description of a socialist country.
My family affected in 2004 tsunami…still hav nightmares.
Nobody should be afraid to give to charity or to fill their Trocaire box….
There is always someone always worse off than us…
Not a cent would I give to Trocaire… I dont really care about the third world
Thousands of people were killed or ‘disappeared’ during the regime led by General Augusto Pinochet until 1988….
Two point nine thousand to be precise in 8 years. An hours work for Chairman Mao or Comrade Tito, both still very much beloved………
Seriously, it’s an insult to include Pinochet and not include the Balkans war. Pinochet’s only sin was to align his economic policy with the liberal Chicago school and produce a relative success of a country (in contrast to an array of Latin American lefties who screwed up their countries). On the other hand, the massacre in Srebrenica for example (for which the armed ‘forces’ of an EU country take the blame) resulted in three times more dead in only half a day. Your criteria, dear Journal, is rid of logic.
Chile was the world’s biggest producer of tin but it was being exported to America, especially to the Coca-Cola Co., for extremely low prices. When Allende came to power he wanted to nationalise the industry. This would have cost Coca-Cola millions as the tin for their cans and bottle tops all came from Chile. They put pressure on Henry Kissinger to do something about this. He in turn tasked the CIA to overthrow the government and replace it with one favourable to America’s needs. That’s where Pinochet came in. Thousands were murdered just so he could line his pockets, and America, a country that prides itself for its democracy, destroyed this fledgling democracy for purely monetary reasons. Pinochet didn’t create the Chilean economy. In fact, he set it back years.
Ah yes, the nationalization of various industries would have been another Latin American socialist success just like that of Argentina where Peron’s (national)socialists policies brought the country to a permanent state of disrepair. Argentina is a unique case in the economic history insofar that it was the only country in the World that managed to drop off the top-20 richest countries list (it was replaced by Japan) in the past 100 years. Even the BBC had this to say about Chile:
“The economy of Chile is ranked as an upper-middle income economy by the World Bank,[9] and is one of South America’s most stable and prosperous nations”
If it was down to Allende’s chest-thumping, this would have ended in IMF bail-outs and plundering of pension funds just like it did in Argentina (presumably also the fault of those goddamn Americans).
Bleeding-heart students don’t mind wearing badges with romantic images of that serial murderer CheGuevara for the same reason. So much about principles. Leftists generally like guys in uniforms who murder opposition and rule by decree but only if they align with socialist policies. Pinochet could have had his restaurants in Dublin like Mao only if he had read Marx a bit more and did not use leftist methods to deal with leftist thugs.
The story of Allende and Chile is what cemented me as a socialist. The likely election of a left govt in Greece, Syriza next time around could see a IMF/EU technocratic coup to ensure the austerity agenda is not interrupted in Europe. It’s very scary considering the openly fascist right wing that already has support in Greece.
You could have looked closer to home at Russia and Eastern Europe for how this whole socialism thing works out.
Look even closer to home, maybe the q for food parcels at the cappuchin friary to see how capitalism has worked out….
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