Four children who survived weeks alone in Colombia's Amazon jungle have been reunited with relatives as they recover in hospital. The siblings, aged 13, nine, five and one, are "very weak" but "happy to see their family", said their grandfather, Fidencio Valencia.
SEATTLE, May 4: Bill and Melinda Gates said Monday that they are divorcing but would keep working together at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the world.
In identical tweets, the Microsoft co-founder and his wife said they had made the decision to end their marriage of 27 years.
“We have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives,” they said in a statement. “We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”
Bill Gates was formerly the world’s richest person and his fortune is estimated at well over $100 billion. How the couple end up settling their estate and any impact on the foundation will be closely watched, especially after another high-profile Seattle-area billionaire couple recently ended their marriage.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos finalized their divorce in 2019. MacKenzie Scott has since remarried and now focuses on her own philanthropy after receiving a 4% stake in Amazon, worth more than $36 billion.
The Gateses were married in 1994 in Hawaii. They met after she began working at Microsoft as a product manager in 1987.
In her 2019 memoir, “The Moment of Lift,” Melinda Gates wrote about her childhood, life and private struggles as the wife of a public icon and stay-at-home mom with three kids. She won Bill Gates’ heart after meeting at a work dinner, sharing a mutual love of puzzles and beating him at a math game.
She also detailed the ways they navigated imbalances in their marriage and parenting
journey and noted how working together at the foundation made their relationship better.
“Bill and I are equal partners,” Melinda Gates said in a 2019 interview with The Associated Press. “Men and women should be equal at work.”
The Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the most influential private foundation in the world, with an endowment worth nearly $50 billion. It has focused on global health and development and U.S. education issues since incorporating in 2000.
While both are global figures, Melinda Gates has increasingly built her profile as a champion of women and girls. The former tech business executive launched her private Pivotal Ventures investment and incubation company in 2015 and recently partnered with Scott for a newly announced equity challenge.
David Callahan, founder of the Insider Philanthropy website and author of “The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age” says it’s too early to know how the divorce will affect the Gates foundation and the wider philanthropic community.
Although the couple say they will continue to work together at their foundation, Callahan suggests Melinda Gates could still pursue her own philanthropic work.
“You can imagine two separate tracks where they’re both working together at the foundation, and each is pursuing their own independent philanthropy outside the foundation,” Callahan said.
He said the possibility of Melinda Gates opening another philanthropic foundation would have a dramatic impact.
“Nobody knows what the terms are of their divorce agreement. But if Melinda Gates ends up with just some portion of that wealth and turns to creating her own foundation, it would be among one of the biggest foundations probably in America,” Callahan said.
As the public face of the foundation’s COVID-19 grants and advocacy work, Bill Gates has come under fire for being a staunch supporter of intellectual property rights for vaccine makers. While the tech icon says protecting the shots’ recipes will ensure incentives for research and development, critics claim that mentality hampers supply in favor of drug company profits.
Last year, Bill Gates said he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board to focus on philanthropy.
He was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000 and since then has gradually scaled back his involvement in the company he started with Paul Allen in 1975. He transitioned out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008 and served as chairman of the board until 2014.
HONG KONG, April 27: European and Asian markets were mixed on Tuesday ahead of a big week of key events including the Federal Reserve's latest policy meeting, Joe Biden's State of the Union address and earnings from tech titans.
While trading floors are geared up for a rocket-fuelled surge in economic activity in the second half of the year and into the next thanks to vaccinations and the easing of lockdowns, investors are in wait-and-see mode for now.
The Fed's gathering, which concludes Wednesday, is broadly expected to see it reassert its pledge to maintain ultra-loose policy until its goals on unemployment and inflation are met, though its statement will be parsed for an idea about the state of the US
economy.
The central bank's meetings are a crucial focus of investor interest as they continue to fret that the expected strong recovery will send prices soaring and force policymakers to raise the record low interest rates that have been a pillar of the global rally.
"From what I can tell, the Fed is very close to meeting its objectives, but remains committed to keeping key short-term interest rates at or near zero through 2023," said markets strategist Louis Navellier.
"The truth of the matter is the Fed can never raise key short-term interest rates much, otherwise it risks blowing up the federal government's budget deficit, which is expected to cross above $30 trillion soon. So we will likely remain in an ultralow interest rate environment for the rest of our lifetimes!" Hilary Kramer, of Kramer Capital Research, was also upbeat.
"I am a bull," she told Bloomberg TV. Fed boss Jerome Powell "is going to make sure he keeps rates low, he's going to lag behind rather than trying to get ahead of inflation".
The release of earnings from Wall Street giants including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google-parent Alphabet will be closely watched, with forecasts on the strong side.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both ended Monday at record highs. But Asia struggled to follow suit with most markets swinging in and out of positive territory. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Seoul, Jakarta and Manila were all in the red but Singapore, Taipei, Mumbai and Bangkok edged up. Shanghai was marginally higher.
London rose soon after the open but Paris and Frankfurt dipped. Oil prices rose after taking a hefty hit in recent days on worries about the impact on demand from the frightening spread of the coronavirus in major consumer India, with a meeting of OPEC and other major producers also in focus.
Wednesday also sees Biden make his first State of the Union address to Congress, during which he could unveil a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan that would provide national child care, paid family leave and free community college, paid for with higher taxes on the rich.
WASHINGTON, April 21: More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of American remain jobless, but even as the economy reopens some employers are finding hiring an unexpected challenge.
From fears of being infected with the coronavirus to trouble finding childcare to the lure of generous unemployment benefits, some jobless Americans are holding off on re-entering the workforce.
"It's a paradox for the Covid crisis," said Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics. "We have, and risk having over the coming months, an imbalance between job openings and demand."
The US economy has begun to recover as Covid-19 vaccines allow businesses to return to normal, and companies are starting to recruit to meet growing demand.
But not all unemployed workers are ready to return to their jobs, analysts say.
"The main issue is we still have a pandemic, and there is huge concern among job seekers about workplace health and safety," said Julia Pollak, an economist for job search website ZipRecruiter.
A quarter of the US population is fully vaccinated, well ahead of Europe and many other major economies, but three-quarters of the country nonetheless remains at risk of contracting Covid-19.
And childcare is another challenge for working parents, since only a little more than half of the nation's schools are back to full-time classes after the pandemic forced them to close or modify operations, according to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University.
- Search for 'better conditions' -
The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed 22 million jobs in the world's largest economy, of which more than half, 14 million, have been restored.
However, nearly 17 million people are still receiving government unemployment aid, including self-employed workers, and many are working part-time because they cannot find full-time work.
But Daco said worker shortages are being seen across multiple sectors, including some of those hardest hit by the waves of layoffs, like retail, food service, hospitality and entertainment.
In a survey of US businesses conducted between late February and early April, the Federal Reserve noted "hiring remained a widespread challenge, particularly for low-wage or hourly workers, restraining job growth in some cases."
A hotelier surveyed by the Federal Reserve bank in Richmond, Virginia reported that "they were able to hire some front desk workers but had unfilled cleaning staff positions and little interest from workers in those jobs."
The central bank's Chicago branch reported a number of factors keeping unemployed workers at home, including "financial support from the government," like the extra $300 weekly benefit jobless employees will receive through August.
The Chicago Fed cited other complications in the hiring process including finding childcare, concerns about the virus, difficulty obtaining public transportation and "job search fatigue."
ZipRecruiter's Pollak said some workers also are fearful that if they take a job, they will simply be let go again.
"Many people experienced getting laid off as a really hard blow," she said, comparing the situation to people "who got divorced now being scared to go back into the dating market and get married again."
"They're not in a rush to put themselves back in a vulnerable position, especially since the extended and expanded benefits are giving them a little bit of time," Pollak said.
- Coaxing workers -
Some Americans have taken to working from home, which makes it easier to combine work with family life and not spend time commuting.
"Many people are not prepared to go back old jobs they had," Pollak said, and are instead holding out for remote work opportunities.
This trend has hit the restaurant industry in particular, which is hoping to see a rebound in the spring and summer after the pandemic forced many to close starting in March 2020.
"As the weather improves and more state restrictions are lifted, restaurant traffic will increase and that will create a greater need for employees," Hudson Riehle, who heads research for the National Restaurant Association, told AFP.
"With fewer people in the workforce, the stimulus supports still in place, worker safety concerns and much greater competition with other industries for workers," Riehle predicted some eateries may offer higher pay or additional benefits and opportunities to coax workers.
Amazon, Costco, Target and Walmart -- which run some of the largest distribution firms in the United States -- already announced pay increases.
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