LATEST NEWS

SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, announced on Tuesday that he and his wife would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares “during our lives” — holdings currently worth more than $45 billion — to charitable purposes.
From Our Advertisers

The pledge was made in an open letter to their newborn daughter, Max, who was born about a week ago.

Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, said they were forming a new organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to manage the money, through an unusual limited liability corporate structure. “Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities,” they wrote.


Mr. Zuckerberg’s charitable plans are the latest indication of a growing interest in philanthropy among Silicon Valley’s young billionaires, who unlike previous generations of business tycoons, appear eager to spread their wealth while they are still young. Mr. Zuckerberg is 31, and Dr. Chan is 30.

Yet they are entering largely uncharted waters with a charity effort of such scale. They have not yet detailed how the money will be spent and the pace at which the money will be given out indicates they plan to take their time.

The couple have had mixed results in earlier charitable efforts.

In 2010, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan gave $100 million to improve the public schools in Newark. The money expanded high-performing charter schools but encountered fierce resistance from many parents, community activists and unions. Mr. Zuckerberg has said he learned a lot from the experience.

Still, Larry Brilliant, who works on philanthropic issues with many Silicon Valley figures including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, and Jeff Skoll, the co-founder of eBay, said that both the scale and timing of Mr. Zuckerberg’s commitment, coming so early in his career, were rare.

“I hope this will be a model for Mark’s generation,” said Dr. Brilliant, a physician who also previously ran Google’s charitable arm, Google.org.

The Silicon Valley way of philanthropy also demands more control over where the money is spent, though it remains to be seen if this hands-on formula will be successful.

“We must build technology to make change. Many institutions invest money in these challenges, but most progress comes from productivity gains through innovation,” they wrote in the letter to their daughter. “We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates. Many institutions are unwilling to do this, but progress must be supported by movements to be sustainable.”


In a securities filing, Facebook said Mr. Zuckerberg planned “to sell or gift no more than $1 billion of Facebook stock each year for the next three years.” He intends to retain his majority voting position in the company’s stock for the foreseeable future.

This week, Mr. Zuckerberg was also one of the billionaires who signed on to the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group organized by the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to contribute toward a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund. The announcement coincided with a Paris summit meeting intended to forge a global accord to cut planet-warming emissions.

Advertisement
Continue reading the main story

Mr. Zuckerberg has referred to Mr. Gates as one of his childhood heroes for his zeal in building Microsoft into a colossus in the technology industry. Mr. Gates is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated worth of $85.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The index estimates that Mr. Zuckerberg’s total worth is $46.8 billion.

Mr. Zuckerberg has admired Mr. Gates’s philanthropic endeavors, too, becoming one of the first people to join the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Mr. Gates and Warren E. Buffett to get wealthy individuals and their families to give away more than half of their wealth to charities during their lifetimes or after. Mr. Gates has pledged to give away at least 95 percent of his wealth.

“None of this would have happened without Bill Gates,” Dr. Brilliant said.

In a statement, Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda, congratulated Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan.

“The example you’re setting today is an inspiration to us and the world,” they said. “We can be confident of this: Max and every child born today will grow up in a world that is better than the one we know now. As you say, ‘Seeds planted now will grow.’ Your work will bear fruit for many decades to come.”

Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan had previously pledged about $1.6 billion to charitable endeavors, according to a spokeswoman for the family.
Continue reading the main story
Recent Comments
mario_mic 18 minutes ago

Good for them wanting to do that but if I were them I would be a little selfish and just keep a billion to myself lol
Josh Folds 19 minutes ago

Zuckerberg giving 99% of his fortune is hardly a widow's mite. That still leaves he and his wife with more than most people will ever need...
Jack 19 minutes ago

What is common, besides being American billionaire philanthropists, among Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffet? They are much more liberal than any...

    See All Comments Write a comment

“Having this child has made us think about all of the things that should be improved in the world for her whole generation,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video. “The only way that we reach our full human potential is if we’re able to unlock the gifts of every person around the world.”

Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan have recently made visible investments and gifts in several kindergarten-through-high-school education projects.

In May, AltSchool, a private school start-up in San Francisco that develops personalized learning technologies, announced that it had raised $100 million from a group of investors, including a donor-advised fund financed by the Zuckerberg family at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

In September, Facebook announced that it was working with Summit Public Schools, a charter school network, to develop an online platform to help tailor education to the needs and interests of individual students.

In November, EducationSuperhighway, a nonprofit group that helps K-12 schools tap federal funds for high-speed classroom Internet connections, announced that the couple had agreed to donate $20 million to its work.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan have also given to health care causes, including a $75 million gift to San Francisco General Hospital, which was renamed in their honor.

The ultimate value of the Zuckerberg family’s charitable pledge is unknown. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan intend to gradually transfer their Facebook stock or the proceeds from stock sales to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

If Facebook shares continue to appreciate, the value of the gift could be much higher than the current estimate of $45 billion.

Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and a billionaire as well, also applauded Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcement and said he shared the Facebook executive’s interest in education and innovation.

“The only question now is: How many of his peers in Silicon Valley and beyond will join him?” Mr. Bloomberg said.

In a Facebook post to newborn child Max, the Facebook CEO says he will administer the initiative himself using 99% of shares in company’s stock.

 

The Zuckerbergs announced two births on Tuesday: a baby girl, and to one of the world’s biggest charities.

That sterling spoon you might have been considering for Mark Zuckerberg’s new baby may no longer be the most exciting gift to the Facebook billionaire’s daughter: after revealing his wife, Priscilla Chan, had given birth to their first child, Max, Zuckerberg announced the creation of a charity organization called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The couple have pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares in their lifetime, currently worth about $45bn.

The charity, which has “the mission of advancing human potential and promoting equality”, will be administered by the CEO himself and is already on track to be worth a potential $3bn by 2018.

Zuckerberg announced the move on Facebook in the form of a letter to his baby:

Dear Max,
Your mother and I don’t yet have the words to describe the hope you give us for the future. Your new life is full of promise, and we hope you will be happy and healthy so you can explore it fully. You’ve already given us a reason to reflect on the world we hope you live in.
Like all parents, we want you to grow up in a world better than ours today.
While headlines often focus on what’s wrong, in many ways the world is getting better. Health is improving. Poverty is shrinking. Knowledge is growing. People are connecting. Technological progress in every field means your life should be dramatically better than ours today.
We will do our part to make this happen, not only because we love you, but also because we have a moral responsibility to all children in the next generation.
We believe all lives have equal value, and that includes the many more people who will live in future generations than live today. Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here.

Zuckerberg plans to finance the endeavor using his stock options. Some 99% of his shares will go to the charity – the tech tycoon owns 4m shares of class A common stock and 419m shares of class B, which have the majority of voting rights.

“[D]uring his lifetime, he will gift or otherwise direct substantially all of his shares of Facebook stock, or the net after-tax proceeds from sales of such shares, to further the mission of advancing human potential and promoting equality by means of philanthropic, public advocacy, and other activities for the public good,” the company said in the filing.
Joel Fleishman, professor of law and public policy sciences at Duke University, said he believed the announcement would spur giving among the super-rich.
“I follow this pretty closely and hardly a day goes by that somebody doesn’t say he’s going to give away all his assets to charity,” Fleishman said, noting that Zuckerberg’s early-years Facebook colleague Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna said they were going to give away their fortune, which amounts to some $8bn, as well. “It does exemplify the spirit of the times.”
Fleishman observed that the project had become particularly popular among the young and extraordinarily wealthy, who prefer “giving while living” to willing their assets to charity. “I celebrate his decision to do it as I celebrate Warren Buffet’s decision to give all that money to the Gates Foundation. People who’ve made all that money are by nature competitive; someone that young giving away that much money will undoubtedly stimulate others to do likewise.”
But it’s not the executive’s first foray into charity, nor the first this week. Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and others announced an initiative to invest in new energy sources to stem the rising tide of climate change on Monday.

Results of his previous philanthropic efforts have been mixed: In 2010, Zuckerberg partnered with then-mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker (who has since become the state’s junior senator) to improve the notoriously poor-quality schools in the city with a donation of $100m. The endeavor was widely criticized for the percentage of the gift that went to pay consultants, among other problems.

FWD.us, a political advocacy group started by Zuckerberg and Gates, has also stalled after its efforts to lobby for immigration reform failed, despite some $50m in backing from big-name tech personalities.

Jayapura (Indonesia): A search team has spotted the wreckage of an Indonesian passenger plane that went missing with 54 people on board, rescue officials said on Monday.

There was no immediate word if there were any survivors from the crash, which happened in bad weather yesterday in Indonesia's mountainous easternmost province of Papua.

The Trigana Air Service plane was flying from Papua's provincial capital, Jayapura, to the Papua city of Oksibil when it lost contact with Oksibil's airport.

Transportation Ministry spokesman Julius Barata said there was no indication that the pilot had made a distress call.

Officials said the wreckage was spotted about 12 kilometers (7 miles) from Oksibil, and Henry Bambang Soelistyo, the chief of the National Search and Rescue Agency, said search and rescue teams were preparing to try to reach the crash site by air and foot.

The ATR42-300 twin turboprop plane was carrying 49 passengers and five crew members on a scheduled 42-minute journey, Barata said. Five children, including two infants, were among the passengers.

Search planes went into the air early today after residents of a village not far from Oksibil told local police that they saw a plane flying low before crashing into a mountain, said Ludiyanto, who heads the search and rescue operation from Jayapura.
Ludiyanto, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said that rugged, forested terrain and bad weather were hindering the search.

Local media reports said all the passengers are Indonesians. The airline has not released a passenger manifest.

Oksibil, which is 280 kilometers (175 miles) south of Jayapura, was experiencing heavy rain, strong winds and fog when the plane lost contact with the airport minutes before it was scheduled to land, said Susanto, the head of Papua's search and rescue agency.

Much of Papua is covered with impenetrable jungles and mountains. Some planes that have crashed in the past have never been found. Dudi Sudibyo, an aviation analyst, said that Papua is a particularly dangerous place to fly because of its mountainous
terrain and rapidly changing weather patterns. "I can say that a pilot who is capable of flying there will be able to fly an
aircraft in any part of the world," he said.
European plane maker ATR said in a statement yesterday that it "acknowledges the reported loss of contact" with the Trigana flight "and is standing by to support the relevant aviation authorities."

ATR, based in Toulouse, France, makes regional planes with 90 seats or less.

According to Chinese media, the blast occurred in a warehouse containing “dangerous chemical goods”. There was an initial blast that immediately sent the place to flames and then it instigated a massive one later on that rocked the locality for miles. It is rare that an explosion of this magnitude (apart from nuclear tests) is caught on camera, and it created mass-level panic and destruction in the surroundings.

Horrendous pictures of the disaster have since surfaced the internet that have shown the level of damage faced by the port city. Such was the blast that the fire was spread by a large radius and efforts to contain them may have lost more lives than ones lost in the immediate aftermath. The potential damage from this catastrophe is believed to be in hundreds of millions of dollars. This shows a dark aspect of the lax safety regulations in the world’s most heavily industrialized nation. The explosive might have been TNT itself, but there are no confirmed reports.






















Experts believe that the blast’s intensity indicated that the first explosion was worth around 2 tonnes of explosive while the second mega blast will be close to 21 tonnes (BBC). Such was the enormity of the explosions that they were observable from the space stations too. See more these images and let’s try to learn what happens if engineering safety procedures aren’t applied rigorously.

 

 

 More than a hundred fire engines have reached the place yet it still has some fires raging on. As a result of the blast, the buildings shook furiously, and many residents are now afraid to go back due to the large cracks that have appeared in their walls and roofs. Tianjin is a big city home to more than 15 million people. It is a major port and industrial area of China, and now a large percentage of the population is now affected by the deadly blasts.

India's top telecom service provider Bharti Airtel on Thursday said it has commercially launched its fourth generation (4G) communications services in 296 towns across the country.