As this year’s graduates are celebrating their hard-earned degrees, the New York Times has exposed a massive faux diploma scam shipping pseudo-sheepskins to slackers worldwide. 

“Newford University” presents itself to the internet as an institution of higher learning, but closer examination reveals it to be an educational Potemkin Village, a front for academic fraud:

Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation. [NYT]

A Pakistani software firm called Axact is raking in tens of millions of dollars for bogus degrees. For a price, the customer can even get a degree “authenticated” by a fake U.S. official, even an ersatz Secretary of State. 

The Best of the Week’s News

• Sarah Maslin Nir explores the exploitative and dangerous work of New York’s manicurists.

• How the USDA ignored salmonella outbreaks linked to Foster Farms chicken.

• Huffington Post launches a new long-form project with a story about a budding track star with Tourette’s Syndrome.

• The Workers Unite Film Festival is on–now through May 27–in New York City.

• Watch Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative deliver his unforgettable acceptance speech for the inaugural George “Citizen” Barrett Award for Public Interest Law.

• Watch Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker accept his Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism.

• All the speeches from Tuesday’s Hillman Prize ceremony will be available soon on this site. You can also subscribe to Hillman’s YouTube Channel to keep up with all our video programming. 

On Tuesday night, the Sidney Hillman Foundation will present the first annual George “Citizen” Barrett Award for Public Service Law to Bryan Stevenson for his tireless efforts to secure justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. 

The award is named after George Barrett, a crusading Nashville civil rights attorney, who died last year at the age of 86. As we prepare to honor his legacy, let’s look back an an obituary written by Hedy Weinberg, the executive director of the ACLU of Tennessee. She describes Barrett’s contributions to civil rights law, his dogged committment to the First Amendment, and his infectious joy in public service. 

The Children’s Place, a retailer whose goods were being made in the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh at the time of its 2013 collapse, has agreed to pay $2 million to a fund to help survivors of the catastrophe. The deal was brokered by Workers United SEIU.

The labor organization Workers United SEIU reached an agreement with The Children’s Place last Thursday, the day before the second anniversary of the disaster that killed more than 1,100 garment workers in the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. As a result of that agreement, protests planned at Children’s Place stores for last Friday were canceled. The activist groups plan to continue to press other U.S. retailers, including J.C. Penney and Wal-Mart, for contributions.

Activists hope to raise a total of $30 million for the survivors fund.