Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, speaks to the press as he arrives at the 2019 annual shareholders meeting in Omaha. (Photo by JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
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• The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration today will announce a strategy to reduce gun violence and other violent crime, including addressing the flow of firearms used to commit crimes, the White House said. The plan will help state, local, territorial and tribal governments use funding from the Covid-19 relief law to hire more police officers for community policing. It would also fund community violence intervention programs, summer employment and other efforts to reduce crime, and programs to help formerly incarcerated people successfully reenter their communities. The White House cited efforts by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to stem the flow of firearms used in crimes, and start firearms tracking strike forces to stop illegal gun trafficking. It said violent crime has risen in the past year and a half, including a 30% increase in homicides and an 8% increase in gun assaults in large cities last year.
• Warren Buffett will donate $4.1 billion of Berkshire Hathaway shares to five foundations and is resigning from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, NBC News reported. “In 2006, I pledged to distribute all of my Berkshire Hathaway shares—more than 99 percent of my net worth—to philanthropy,” Buffett, 90, said in a statement on Wednesday. “With today’s $4.1 billion distribution, I’m halfway there.” The billionaire investor, who owned 474,998 Berkshire A shares then, now owns 238,624 shares, worth about $100 billion. The five organizations are: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, Sherwood Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation and NoVo Foundation. Buffett, who said he has been an inactive trustee of the Gates Foundation, is resigning as he has other boards except for Berkshire’s. The charitable organization’s two founders are divorcing. Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, and his wife, Melinda French Gates, a philanthropist and former general manager at Microsoft, together with Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a program that requires participants to give away more than half of their wealth.
• A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel is meeting today to discuss incidents of rare heart inflammation in 16- to 24-year-olds after their second dose of Covid-19 vaccines, CNBC reported. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices said it had seen higher-than-expected reports of nearly 800 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis in people in that age group after their second shot of Pfizer -BioNTech’s or Moderna’s vaccines. Myocarditis is the inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis is the inflammation of the membrane surrounding the heart. The CDC said two-thirds of the cases were among young males with a median age of 30, with symptoms including chest pains and shortness of breath emerging within days of receiving their vaccines. The cases may not be related to the shots, but the number of incidents is concerning, the CDC said. Pfizer said in a statement that it supports the CDC’s request for “careful assessment of suspected myocarditis and pericarditis cases,” and Moderna has said it hasn’t found a link between its vaccine and the rare heart inflammation some young adults have reported.
• More than 150 employees of the Houston Methodist Hospital system have quit or were fired from their jobs on Tuesday for refusing to get a Covid-19 vaccine, after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit workers had filed challenging the requirement, The Wall Street Journal reported. U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes ruled on June 12 that lead plaintiff Jennifer Bridges’ claims that the vaccines are “experimental and dangerous” were false and otherwise irrelevant. He also called her comparison of the vaccination requirement to the Nazis’ forced medical experimentation on concentration camp captives “reprehensible.” He said workers who didn’t like the requirement could work somewhere else. The 117 workers who filed the lawsuit have appealed the ruling to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Corrections & Amplifications: Warren Buffett is giving $4 billion to five foundations. An earlier version of this article misspelled his surname.
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