AFP

A top aide and ex-boyfriend of fallen Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on Thursday of defrauding investors and patients at the failed blood testing startup.

Jurors found Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani guilty on all 12 fraud counts charged by federal prosecutors, a spokesperson at the courthouse in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose told AFP.

He is to be sentenced on November 15 and faces the potential for prison time as well as cash fines. The judge set his bail at $750,000 to insure he shows up for sentencing.

Balwani was tried separately from one-time US biotech star Holmes, whose trial in the same California courtroom ended in January with guilty verdicts on four counts of tricking investors into pouring money into what she claimed was a revolutionary blood testing system.

But the jury — who had listened to weeks of sometimes complex evidence — also acquitted her on four charges and could not reach a verdict on three others.

Holmes could also be hit with prison time when she is sentenced on September 26. She has filed an appeal asking that her convictions be tossed.

During her trial, Holmes alleged that Balwani was emotionally and physically abusive during their romantic relationship — claims he has denied. She also painted Balwani as a controlling force at Theranos.

Holmes and Balwani are rare examples of tech executives facing charges over a company’s flame-out, in a sector littered with the carcasses of failed startups that once promised untold riches.

Her trial shined a spotlight on the blurred line between the hustle that characterizes the industry and outright criminal dishonesty.

US prosecutor Robert Leach told jurors in a federal courthouse in San Jose that Balwani piloted the firm alongside Holmes and that the pair were “partners in everything, including their crime.”

But 57-year-old Balwani’s attorney Stephen Cazares said his client never committed fraud, and was convinced of Theranos’s potential.

Balwani, nearly two decades Holmes’s senior, was brought in to help steer the company she had founded in 2003 at just 19 years old.

Holmes, now 38, would go on to promise self-service testing machines that could run an analytical gamut cheaply and on just a few drops of blood — a pledge shattered under fraud allegations.

Prosecutors alleged Holmes and Balwani were aware the technology did not work as advertised, but continued to promote it as revolutionary to patients and the investors who pumped money into the company.

As Theranos soared, it attracted luminaries such as Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger, but a series of reports casting doubt on the firm’s claims from Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal set the company’s collapse in motion.

Mississippi on Thursday became the latest US state to outlaw abortion after last month’s Supreme Court ruling revoking protection for the procedure, leading to 11th-hour confrontations outside a clinic in Jackson.

Alternately thrilled or furious, opponents and supporters of abortion rights gathered outside Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the facility at the heart of the United States Supreme Court’s decision stating access to pregnancy termination is not a constitutional right. 

Nicknamed the Pink House because of the building’s colorful walls, Jackson Women’s Health performed its final abortions Wednesday and saw its last consultation patients Thursday ahead of its closure.

Brandishing signs reading “Love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind,” dozens of abortion rights opponents greeted the final trickle of patients with music and shouted prayers.

On the opposite side of the gathering, abortion rights advocates answered with placards referencing the poor southern state’s high maternal death rate to ask, “Why do you care more about hypothetical lives than real ones?” and others proclaiming “Abortion is health care.”

Cheryl Hamlin, one of the doctors who had until Thursday worked at Jackson Women’s Health, vehemently took the anti-abortion protesters to task outside the pink building, accusing them of not respecting women’s rights.

In recent years, Jackson Women’s Health was the only place to offer abortion care in religiously conservative Mississippi. That status left the clinic as the logical organization to take legal action when state legislators passed a law restricting abortion in 2018.

The case eventually made its way to the nation’s high court, which on June 24 overturned its own landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion in federal law. 

Thirteen states, anticipating the seismic shift by the court, had already passed trigger laws to ban abortion, which were designed to take effect immediately after the overturning of Roe.

Approximately seven of them have so far successfully banned abortion entirely, but legal battles have delayed the end date in states such as Louisiana.

Mississippi’s 2007 law, which went into effect on Thursday, carries penalties of up to 10 years in prison for violations, and provides exceptions only in cases of danger to the life of the mother — but not for rape or incest.

Diane Derzis, the owner of Jackson Women’s Health, now plans to move to Las Cruces, New Mexico, which “for the time being is a very receptive state. We’ve been welcomed,” she told NPR public radio.

Other clinics are also in the process of relocating to New Mexico or Illinois, but, Derzis added she was concerned there would not be enough facilities to handle the influx of patients from the South crossing state lines to seek abortions.

“I’m not sure we’re ready for it,” she said.

Ultimately abortion access is expected to disappear in about half of the country’s 50 states.

Russian forces left a trail of destruction Thursday, seeking to push deeper into the eastern Donbas region as President Vladimir Putin said his military campaign was still ramping up.

Diplomatic tensions meanwhile mounted between Ankara and Kyiv, with Ukraine accusing Turkey of ignoring calls to seize Ukrainian grain being transported by a Russian ship.

A Russian air strike in the eastern Ukrainian industrial city of Kramatorsk left at least one dead and several others wounded earlier in the day, as Russian troops fight for full control of the surrounding Donbas.

The explosion left a gaping crater next to a hotel and residential buildings and several cars were on fire, AFP journalists said, as emergency services arrived on the scene.

It came ahead of a speech by Putin to lawmakers in which he said “everyone should know that we have not started in earnest yet.”

He also sounded a note of menace towards the West, telling the alliance that has coalesced against his invasion of Ukraine that if they wanted to defeat Russia on the battlefield “let them try”.

The head of Ukraine’s battled-scarred Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, announced before the strike on Kramatorsk that Russian bombardments had killed at least seven people over the past 24 hours.

The fatalities came after Ukrainian officials again called for civilians in the region to flee, as Russian forces turn their sights on the city of Sloviansk.

– Battle for cities –

Russian troops captured cities in the Lugansk region after long battles, consolidating their hold in the east after failing at the start of the February invasion to take the capital Kyiv and Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv.

Despite the raging conflict, Kyiv took time to hail outgoing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of Ukraine’s keenest allies throughout the war.

Johnson said that even though he was leaving office, Britain would continue supporting Ukraine for “as long as it takes”. 

“We all welcome this news with sadness. Not only me, but also all of Ukrainian society,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said, after Johnson resigned as leader of Britain’s Conservative party, paving the way for the selection of a new prime minister.

“We don’t doubt that Great Britain’s support will continue, but your personal leadership and your charisma made it special,” he said.

In the diplomatic clash between Ukraine and Turkey, Kyiv says that a 7,000-tonne vessel set off from Ukraine’s Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk after picking up wheat.

The marinetraffic.com website on Thursday showed the vessel moving away from Turkey’s Black Sea port of Karasu before apparently switching off its transponder and disappearing from view.

Ukraine said it was “deeply disappointed” that Turkey had not seized the ship.

– Control over Snake Island –

Zelensky in his evening address again called for more arms from international allies.

“The bigger defense support to Ukraine will be now, the quicker the war will end with our victory and the lesser will be losses of all countries in the world,” he said.

Ukraine this week also said it had regained control of Snake Island in the Black Sea, raising its flag there following the withdrawal of Russian forces.

“I want to thank for the final stage of the fight for Snake Island.  Our national flag was erected there. This operations lasted for two months,” Zelensky said.

“Let now every Russian captain of a ship or a plane see the Ukrainian flag at Zmeiny and know that our country cannot be broken.”

Russia said it pulled back from the symbolic island in a gesture of “good will”, but has since continued targeting positions there.

The Russian defence ministry said it had carried out “precision” missile strikes on the island early Thursday, killing Ukrainian soldiers.

Finland meanwhile passed legislation to build stronger fences on its border with Russia, as the country seeks to join NATO following the invasion.

Finland reversed decades of military non-alignment by seeking membership in the military alliance in May, formally starting the process to join this week.

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Disgraced former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell has appealed her conviction and 20-year sentence for helping late financier Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse girls, a court filing showed Thursday.

Her lawyer Bobbi Sternheim filed the appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last week, the docket showed.

The document did not detail Maxwell’s arguments for throwing out the conviction, but her attorneys have previously claimed that a juror biased the verdict.

Her legal team have also argued that some of the victims were above the age of consent in certain states where the abuse occurred. 

The Oxford-educated daughter of the late British press baron Robert Maxwell was found guilty on five of six counts, the most serious for sex trafficking minors, late last year.

The charges stemmed from crimes committed against four women between 1994 and 2004.

Prosecutors successfully proved that she was “the key” to Epstein’s scheme of enticing young girls to give him massages, during which he would sexually abuse them.

New York judge Alison Nathan described Maxwell’s crimes as “heinous and predatory” when she sentenced the 60-year-old last week.

Maxwell’s lawyers unsuccessfully argued during her high-profile trial that their client had been pursued by prosecutors only because Epstein had evaded justice.

The money manager hanged himself in jail in 2019 aged 66 while awaiting his own sex crimes trial in New York.

In April, Nathan rejected Maxwell’s claim that she should receive a new trial because a juror had boasted of convincing fellow panelists to convict by recalling his own experiences as a sex abuse victim.

Maxwell’s circle once included Britain’s Prince Andrew, former US president and real estate baron Donald Trump and the Clinton family.