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Glen de Vries and Thomas Fischer were aboard a single-engine Cessna that went down Thursday in northern New JerseyA wealthy tech mogul who traveled to space with William Shatner last month was killed along with another person when a small plane crashed in northern New Jersey, according to state police.Glen de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, New Jersey, were aboard a single-engine Cessna 172 that went down Thursday in a wooded area of Hampton Township. Continue reading...

Some emails between ex-Barclays boss and Epstein used unexplained phrases such as ‘snow white’, FT reportsThe former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley reportedly exchanged 1,200 emails with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein over four years, some of which featured unexplained terms such as “snow white”.The report detailing the cache of emails comes less than two weeks after Staley resigned from Barclays after being shown the preliminary conclusions of a regulatory investigation over his links to Epstein. Continue reading...

Leaders support elections at Paris summit, but rights group warns conditions for fair vote are ‘sorely lacking’Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, has thrown her support behind a plan to stage risky and unprecedented parliamentary and presidential elections in Libya next month, even though human rights groups have warned the conditions for fair elections may not exist.Harris attended a conference in Paris on the future of Libya attended by more than 30 countries and hosted by the French president, Emmanuel Macron; the German chancellor, Angela Merkel; and the Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi. Continue reading...

Shake-up is the biggest in healthcare company’s 135-year history and follows similar moves by rivalsHealthcare giant Johnson & Johnson is to spin off its consumer arm, known for its Band-Aid plasters, baby shampoo and Listerine mouthwash, to focus on developing medicines and medical devices.The New Jersey-headquartered firm, which employs 136,000 people worldwide, said it would remain the world’s largest healthcare company even after the shake-up, the biggest in its 135-year history. The consumer division, which is expected to generate $15bn (£11bn) in sales this year and employs 19,000 people, will be split off in 18 to 24 months’ time, probably through a stock offering, following similar moves from rivals such as GSK. Continue reading...

Former White House chief of staff did not appear for scheduled appearance before select committee investigating Capitol attackFormer Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is facing a criminal referral to the justice department for contempt of Congress after he failed to appear for an immediate deposition on Friday morning before the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.The move to threaten criminal prosecution for Meadows amounts to an abrupt and sharp escalation for the select committee as it seeks to enforce its subpoena against one of Donald Trump’s closest aides first issued in September. Continue reading...

125 years after the landmark ruling, Plessy and Ferguson descendants and the New Orleans district attorney are seeking a posthumous pardonOn 7 June 1892, an act of bravery undertaken by a free man of color in segregated Louisiana had historic consequences.Homer Plessy, a New Orleans shoemaker of mixed heritage, purchased a first class rail ticket and boarded a train bound for Covington. He took a seat in a whites-only car and declared to the conductor that he would not move. The planned act of civil disobedience was orchestrated by a local civil rights organization to challenge the Louisiana Separate Car Act, one of a number of segregationist laws passed in the post-Reconstruction south. Continue reading...

The gymnast was waiting for an Uber in Los Angeles with friends when a car sped by and passengers yelled anti-Asian slursUS Olympic gymnast Sunisa Lee has revealed that she was pepper-sprayed in a racist drive-by attack weeks after she won gold in the Tokyo games.Lee, 18, was waiting for an Uber in Los Angeles after a night out with a group of friends, who are all of Asian descent. A car sped by and its passengers began yelling anti-Asian slurs and told Lee and her friends to “go back to where they came from”. One passenger sprayed Lee’s arm with pepper spray as the car sped off, said Lee, who became the first Hmong American Olympian and the first Asian American woman to win a gold medal in the all-around gymnastics competition this year. Continue reading...

Scottish fizzy drink already had deal shutting out rivals, but praise from Sturgeon and AOC was golden marketing momentAs Cop26 draws to a close, the climate summit’s big-name sponsors have been left scratching their heads as to how the plucky Scottish fizzy drink Irn-Bru managed to steal the limelight in the marketing ambush of the year.The status of the bright orange drink as the summit’s surprise curiosity made global headlines earlier this week when the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted an Instagram video of herself praising the beverage after having her first taste. Continue reading...

A defense attorney in the trial over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery has caused outrage after asking the court to limit the number of Black pastors in the public gallery, claiming their presence could influence the jury. Kevin Gough said the presence of high-profile figures such as Rev Al Sharpton and Rev Jesse Jackson could be 'intimidating' for members of the almost entirely white jury. 'We don't want any more Black pastors in here,' Gough said

The US thinks it will be ‘immune’ to what is happening in Europe. That’s wishful thinkingIt’s deja vu, yet again. The pandemic first hit Europe in March 2020, and Americans were in denial, thinking it wouldn’t happen here. Then, later in the year, the Alpha variant wave took hold in the United Kingdom and the United States was unprepared. This recurred with Delta in the summer of 2021. Now, in the fall of 2021, Europe is the outlier continent on the rise with Covid, with approximately 350 cases per 100,000 people and many countries are soaring to new records. This not only involves eastern and central Europe, where there are some countries with low vaccination rates (such as Georgia, only 24% fully vaccinated) and caseloads as high as 160/100,000 (Slovenia), but also western Europe, such as Austria, Belgium, Ireland and several others. Indeed, in Germany, leading virologist Christian Drosten recently warned their death toll could be doubled if more aggressive mitigation and vaccination strategies were not quickly adopted.Why is this happening again in Europe after the Delta wave passed through and high rates of vaccination were achieved? There are a few important reasons. First, there are a large proportion of unvaccinated individuals in each country, and only countries such as Spain at 80% and Portugal at 88% that fully vaccinated their total populations have set a high bar and have thus far withstood the continental trend of rise in cases. Noteworthy is Belgium with 74% fully vaccinated and one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, now at 79/100,000, currently 10th highest caseload globally. That alone tells us 74% isn’t enough, and that prior Covid (without vaccination, what some refer to as “natural immunity”) is unreliable for representing a solid immunity wall against the Delta variant. In fact, it has been projected for Delta that any country needs to achieve 90-95% of its total population fully vaccinated (or with recent Covid) in order to have population-level immunity that covers, providing relative protection, for the others.Eric Topol is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, and executive vice-president of Scripps Research

I mean, sure, you haven’t announced it yet. But your new ‘free speech’ university will obviously welcome cancelled pro-Palestine scholars … right?To Bari Weiss and the founders of the new University of Austin,I write to you today to offer my heartfelt congratulations on inaugurating a courageous new institution of higher learning, the University of Austin in Texas (UATX). As someone who has spent his career in the gilded halls of the academe (or, in my case, the ugly two-tone hallways of peeling paint found in my public institution), I have witnessed exactly the kind of destructive groupthink that your new president, Pano Kanelos, bravely writes about in his essay announcing this new and much-needed venture. Continue reading...

Donald Trump was granted a temporary injunction over the release of documents on the US Capitol attack. Plus, how gerrymandering rigs electionsGood morning.Donald Trump has succeeded in an 11th-hour attempt to temporarily stay the release of sensitive White House records on the US Capitol attack.What is Trump doing? Delaying. The Democrat-led committee may have to finish its investigation before next year’s midterms, in which Republicans are tipped to take control of the US House.When is the hearing? The court will hear oral arguments on 30 November.Who are the judges? The DC circuit court chooses three judges at random to consider the appeal: it will be Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Ketanji Brown Jackson.How many committed to phasing out coalmining? More than 40 countries signed up to the pledge, excluding the US, China and India. The latter two combined burn about two-thirds of the world’s coal, and the US still generates about a fifth of its electricity from it.Meanwhile, delegates from countries where the climate emergency is already “an everyday reality” have spoken about how they are affected by anxiety over the looming disaster. Continue reading...

The response to our most urgent threat requires new forms of creativity and human imaginationFaced with the state of the world and the depth of denial, faced with the data that keeps falling on us, faced with the sense that we are on a ship heading towards an abyss while the party on board gets louder and louder, I have found it necessary to develop an attitude and a mode of writing that I refer to as existential creativity. This is the creativity at the end of time.It is not given to many people to sense the end of time approaching. Maybe some Atlanteans sensed it. Maybe the sages of Pompeii, if there were any, felt it in advance. Maybe those ancient civilisations whose societies were about to be wrecked by invaders from the sea felt it. But I can’t think of any who had the data that it was coming, who had the facts pouring at them every day, and yet who carried on as if everything were normal.

The Biden administration is on solid legal ground in imposing Covid-related public health measures, scholars argueRepublican elected officials continue to challenge government mandates aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19, but legal experts predict the lawsuits and bans on mandates will largely prove fruitless because the law allows for such public safety measures.But as those legal fights play out America will probably still be riven by a dispute between mostly Democrats on one hand who argue they are trying to curb a deadly virus, and usually Republicans on the other who say the Biden administration is involved in government overreach, often using rhetoric that can veer into the conspiratorial. Continue reading...

Scroll down our visual guide to see how gerrymandering allows Republicans to virtually guarantee their re-electionIt’s the foundational concept of US democracy: voters choose the politicians they want to represent them.Yet the reality in 2021 is much more depressing. As politicians undertake the once-a-decade process of redrawing political districts across the country, they are essentially rigging the system by deciding among themselves exactly which voters in which areas they want to represent. It’s a process called gerrymandering that allows them to virtually choose their voters and guarantee their re-election. Continue reading...

The Americans have beaten El Tri twice already this year. But this time it matters with World Cup qualifying points at stakeIt began with a corner kick.

Through the years sports stars have proven especially keen to champion pseudo-science, even as the claimed benefits turn out to be junk“I’m somebody who is a critical thinker,” Aaron Rodgers said, completely without irony, during his credibility-immolating interview on The Pat McAfee Show last week after news of his Covid-positive result broke the internet. And who couldn’t take the NFL MVP at his word as he sat on this Zoom call before a shelf full of books that may or may not have featured an anthology of MLK malapropisms.What’s more, the 37-year-old confessed that his decision to bypass the Covid-19 vaccine for a homeopathy-based immunization protocol didn’t only stem from fears of an allergic reaction to the Pfizer and Moderna shots. It was also informed by medical experts he empaneled himself, and by more than 500 pages of self-guided research on the efficacy of vaccines and mask wearing – not least an Israeli study of 2.5 million people comparing natural immunity to vaccines. Never mind that Rodgers thinks he knows better than the overwhelming majority of scientists who say Covid-19 vaccines are the best way of preventing serious illness and death from the virus. Or that a recent study published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology found no evidence that polyethylene glycol, the mRNA vaccine ingredient most suspected of causing severe allergic reactions, is a threat. Or that the Israeli study that Rodgers was alluding to found the highest levels of immunity in people who had recovered from Covid after receiving at least one vaccine shot. Continue reading...

The Oklahoma City Thunder guard is making waves in his rookie NBA season, as expected according to two Australian basketball figuresDarryl McDonald has known Josh Giddey since he was a little tyke. The 57-year-old former NBL star, synonymous with the league’s glory years of the 1990s and 2000s, played against Josh’s dad, Melbourne Tigers champion Warrick.Warrick Giddey would then serve as assistant coach at the Tigers where McDonald played out his career. They coached juniors together at the Tigers and against each other in school basketball. Continue reading...

Bruce Schroeder snaps at prosecutors and queries iPad footage as defense rests case in homicide trialThe shouting that unfolded on Wednesday in Kyle Rittenhouse’s homicide trial has thrust the presiding judge, Bruce Schroeder, and his style of unusual lectures and quirky questions in court under the spotlight.Schroeder heavily admonished prosecutors in the trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin, questioned the authenticity of some pinch-to-zoom footage presented in evidence, and apparently forgot to silence his phone in court, which at one point rang with a song used at Donald Trump’s rallies. Continue reading...

The former president is asking a court to block release of material related to the House investigation into the attack on the CapitolDonald Trump, the former US president, has been scrambling this week to make a last-ditch legal bid to block the release of sensitive White House records related to the deadly 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol – and scored a victory on Thursday when a federal appeals court allowed a temporary stay on the process.The National Archives, a federal agency that holds presidential files, was poised to begin givingcongressional investigators hundreds of pages of documents and other material, such as video clips, that Trump wants to keep secret, on Friday. Continue reading...

A booster shot is being offered to those age 18 and older to combat the surge as hospitals are expecting a shortage of ICU bedsThe Delta variant is driving up Covid-19 hospitalizations in the US’ mountain west, in a worrisome sign of what could be ahead this winter across the country.Colorado on Wednesday reactivated crisis guidelines for staffing at healthcare systems across the state as Covid hospitalizations and infections in the state continue to rise. Continue reading...

Bharti Shahani, 22, was studying electronics systems engineering at Texas A&M University and was set to graduate next springA 22-year-old college senior who was critically injured at the Astroworld festival in Houston has died, the family’s lawyer said on Thursday, taking the death toll to nine.Bharti Shahani died on Wednesday, attorney James Lassiter said during a news conference. Continue reading...

While some residents welcomed the $626m payout, others are dismayed at an outcome they see as wholly inadequateSharply mixed reactions have greeted the award by a federal judge of a $626m settlement for residents affected by the lead water crisis that engulfed the city of Flint, Michigan, more than six years ago.While some residents and officials welcomed the payout resulting from lawsuits filed over the crisis, which was particularly damaging to many of the city’s children, others were dismayed at an outcome they saw as wholly inadequate. Continue reading...

Like all elite athletes, Julia “Hurricane” Hawkins has a ruthless streak. So, despite setting a 100m world record on Sunday at the Louisiana Senior Games, she still wants to go faster. She recorded a time of 1:02:95, a record for women in the 105+ age category.'It was wonderful to see so many family members and friends. But I wanted to do it in less than a minute,' the 105-year-old said after the race. She took up sprinting on turning 100. In 2017, she set the 100m world record for women aged over 100 with a time of 39:62.

It’s easy to say reform is failing. But from officials in Virginia, Ohio and Michigan, I heard a much more nuanced storyHello, and happy Thursday,As states undertake the high-stakes, once-a-decade redistricting process, several places are testing new ways to prevent partisans from rigging the maps. The news does not sound good.Two ballot measures to expand voting access failed in New York last week, stunning voting rights advocates. I reported on how that happened.I interviewed Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, about his efforts to push back against Donald Trump. Continue reading...

Corporate giants are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. How can this be? Because of their unchecked powerOn Wednesday, the US labor department announced that the consumer price index – a basket of products ranging from gasoline and health care to groceries and rents – rose 6.2% from a year ago. That’s the nation’s highest annual inflation rate since November 1990.Republicans are hammering Biden and Democratic lawmakers over inflation – and attacking his economic stimulus plans as wrongheaded. “This will be a winter of high gas prices, shortages and inflation because far left lunatics control our government,” Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida posted on Twitter Thursday. Continue reading...

Diverse participation leads to more robust solutions, but Cop26 shows we are still failing to include marginalised voicesIn a stirring speech at the opening of the Cop26 world leaders summit, Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, asked: “When will leaders lead?” The problem she identified is that “both ambition and needed faces are not present in Glasgow”. The over-representation of white men in climate change decision-making processes is stifling for both the imagination and the implementation of transformative solutions. Globally, only 26 women serve as heads of government and state. At the last Cop summit, held in 2019, approximately 80% or 155 of the 196 heads of delegation were men. Progress has been made to increase women’s participation in Cop events, but gender parity in climate leadership is estimated to be achieved only in 2068.The global climate change agenda has met with not only political inaction, but resistance in the form of populist denialism that threatens to derail or undo existing efforts. For example, studies on “conservative white males” in the US and Norway have highlighted the connections between climate change denialism, patriarchal beliefs and rightwing nationalism.Dr Maria Tanyag is a research fellow and lecturer in international relations at the Australian National University Continue reading...

Black service members who fought in second world war prevented from taking full advantage of benefits when they came homeFor Veterans Day, a group of Democratic lawmakers is reviving an effort to pay the families of Black service members who fought on behalf of the nation during the second world war for benefits they were denied or prevented from taking full advantage of when they returned home from war.The new legislative effort would benefit surviving spouses and all living descendants of Black war veterans whose families were denied the opportunity to build wealth with housing and education benefits through the GI bill. Continue reading...

Workers for the largest meal-kit delivery service in the world say attempts to unionize have been met with retaliation and bullyingWorkers at HelloFresh, the largest meal-kit delivery service in the world, say they are facing an aggressive anti-union campaign led by the company after they tried to organize amid claims of safety issues and poor treatment of workers.HelloFresh has operations in 14 other countries including the US, UK and Australia and employs over 11,800 people worldwide preparing ingredients for delivery for home cooked meals including brown sugar bourbon apple pork chops and kale, cranberry and walnut stuffed squash. Continue reading...

When Black jurors are eliminated from the jury pool, justice suffersJury service cannot only be for the white, the lucky, and the obstinately stoic in the face of racial injustice. The jury seated in the Ahmaud Arbery trial – a Black man who was shot and killed by three white men in Glynn county, Georgia – makes a mockery of the need for a randomly selected jury. Of the 12 person jury, 11 are white and just one is Black, in a county where more than 25% of the residents are Black.That Black jurors were dismissed because of the way they answered a series of questions about their life experiences and perceptions of racism seems particularly ironic given that only one question was asked of Ahmaud Arbery (“What were you doing back there?”) before he was pursued by three men with guns.Sonali Chakravarti is a professor of government at Wesleyan University. She works on questions of emotions, the law and democratic institutions. She is the author of Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence Continue reading...

The hoopla about CRT and the like is a Republican game serious leaders would not play. But Democrats don’t have serious leadersI do not know if I can survive three more years of Democrats stumbling over themselves to disavow the Democratic platform in a doomed attempt to win bad-faith culture wars. It is too painful, like watching ruthless hunters herding panicked animals over the side of a cliff. The poor, dumb beasts inevitably go extinct if they are not able to outthink such a rudimentary strategy.Walk around your town. Explore a major American city. Drive across the country. What are the most important problems you see? There is poverty. Homelessness. A lack of affordable housing. Vast and jaw-dropping economic and racial inequality. There is a lack of public transportation, a broken healthcare system, environmental degradation, and a climate crisis that threatens to upend our way of life. These are real problems. These are the things that we need our government to fix. These are what we need to hear politicians talk about. These are what we must debate and focus on, if we are really concerned about human rights and our children’s future and all the other big things we claim to value. Continue reading...

Trial judge accuses prosecutor of improper line of questioning. Plus, how climate change denialism has been pushed to the fringeGood morning.The murder case against Kyle Rittenhouse was thrown into jeopardy Wednesday when his lawyers asked for a mistrial over what appeared to be out-of-bounds questions asked of Rittenhouse by the chief prosecutor.What did the defense ask for? A mistrial with prejudice, meaning that if one is granted, Rittenhouse cannot be retried over the shootings.Will there be a mistrial? The judge did not immediately rule on the request and is allowing the trial to continue.What did Binger say? He told the judge he had been acting in good faith, but the judge replied: “I don’t believe that.”Was the move welcomed? It was broadly welcomed by global leaders and climate experts, with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, calling the move “an important step in the right direction”.Is this the first pact between US-China on climate? No, there was a bilateral agreement in 2014 which gave momentum to the historic Paris accord the following year, but that cooperation stopped with the Trump administration. Continue reading...

Former soldiers and football players can develop a sense of disconnection when their chosen careers end. One non-profit seeks to help their transitionRelief washed over Jay Glazer when he saw two fighter jets whiz by overhead on 11 September 2001. The future Fox Sports reporter was out in the New York City streets and, like most people that morning, his eyes were fixed upward to the two burning towers ripped open by hijacked passenger planes. The country was under attack, but the presence of those jets gave many, including Glazer, a sense of security. In that moment, Glazer became an active supporter of the US military.Fourteen years later, Glazer and Nate Boyer, a former member of the special forces who briefly played for the Seattle Seahawks, launched Merging Vets and Players (MVP), a non-profit that brings military veterans and retiring professional athletes together in the gym. MVP is an amalgamation of Glazer’s journey through sports, but not the public one that took off when he became the Fox’s NFL Insider in 2004 and was suddenly thrusted into millions of homes every Sunday. Continue reading...

According to recent research, two-thirds of US workers are being denied adjustments on account of their pregnancyJennifer, a family nurse practitioner in Texas, told her employer a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic that she was pregnant and requested changes to her work to limit her exposure to Covid-19.But it didn’t work. Continue reading...

The Covid vaccine is free, but some people have tried to illegally obtain fake vaccine cards only to get scammed, by other criminalsFor $350, a Telegram user called NoVac Team offered to sell a Guardian reporter a fake vaccine card. The price, they said, would include having the reporter’s vaccinated status registered in the Center for Disease Control (CDC) database which is connected to their health records.The CDC does not in fact maintain any vaccination records, nor does it provide a CDC-labeled vaccination record card for people. NoVac Team is a scammer, one of many on the messaging service Telegram who are offering fake vaccine cards to anti-vaxxers and then taking their money. Continue reading...

Georgia’s top election official was pressured by Trump to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory. What does he think about it now?Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official, was sitting at his kitchen counter with his wife Tricia in early January, his cell phone on a metal stand so he could take notes. On the other line was Donald Trump, who had lost Georgia to Joe Biden in November, a result confirmed by multiple recounts.The president had a blunt and unimaginable request for Raffensperger: find enough votes to flip the results of the election in Georgia. Continue reading...

The San Diego State junior can boom kicks more than 80 yards and seems to set a new record every week. The NFL has duly taken noticePunting is one of those things non-punters rarely think about. It’s like the post office. It’s there. It does a job. But it’s rarely important unless someone makes a mistake.There has never been a rockstar of the profession. Punting is punting, its own individual craft, left to the side, away from the real players. Pat McAfee has morphed into the sport’s most popular, mainstream entertainer post-career. Marquette King gave it a good go for a while with the Raiders, before his flamboyance saw him exiled from the starchy world of the professional game. Continue reading...

Serge Svetnoy alleges negligence over bullet that narrowly missed him and killed friend Halyna HutchinsThe head of lighting on the film Rust has filed a lawsuit over Alec Baldwin’s fatal shooting of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of the western, alleging negligence that caused him “severe emotional distress” that will haunt him for ever.Serge Svetnoy said the bullet that killed his close friend Hutchins, narrowly missed him, and he held her head as she died. Continue reading...

A doctor in the south of the country says people are eating cactus leaves and ashes as the rains become more erraticThere’s nothing to harvest any more, nothing that can be taken from the land, that’s why people are starving in Madagascar.The rainy season was always special, an important time when everyone planted food – key crops such as cassava. But for the past three years we’ve had very little rain. The climate has changed in Madagascar, maybe because of the global climate crisis. We used to have distinct seasons but no more, it has been a bit troubled. The landscape looks really dry, the trees have no more leaves. It is hard to find green areas, most have turned arid and grey. Continue reading...

Jake Sullivan says ‘there’s no point in revisiting how we got to where we are’A top adviser to Joe Biden has refused to say whether the US is comfortable with the way the Australian government handled talks with France ahead of the unveiling of the new Aukus submarines deal.Jake Sullivan, the US president’s national security adviser, said there was no point dwelling on the “challenges” surrounding the announcement of the new security partnership between the US, the UK and Australia, saying that “will be interesting for the historians to do at some point”. Continue reading...

It’s a vision that unites the left, from Joe Biden to John McDonnell. The trouble is, it’s completely unworkableQ: What binds together such disparate souls as Noam Chomsky and Keir Starmer, Yanis Varoufakis and Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Caroline Lucas?A: They all want a green new deal.Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

The United States and China, the world's two largest emitters of carbon dioxide, unveiled a deal to ramp up cooperation tackling the climate crisis. US climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua announced the framework agreement at the UN climate conference in Scotland. Both billed it as way to tip the summit toward success. 'In the area of climate change', Xie Zhenhua said. 'There is more agreement between China and the US than divergence, making it an area with huge potential for cooperation'.

A San Francisco Bay Area man was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for an ‘egregious’ racket that even scammed Berkshire HathawayA San Francisco Bay Area man has been sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for running an audacious solar energy Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of $1bn, the biggest criminal fraud scheme in the district’s history.Jeff Carpoff, the 50-year-old owner of the solar energy company DC Solar, was sentenced on Tuesday. His wife, Paulette Carpoff, 47, faces up to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty at the same time to money laundering and conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States. Continue reading...