Melinda French Gates on disrupting society with new philanthropic focus, finding her voice
CBSN
Melinda French Gates says her recent departure from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was an "evolution" rather than a sudden move. After years of careful planning and confidence in the foundation's leadership and its CEO, Mark Suzman, the 59-year-old philanthropist felt the institution was in a great place, allowing her to step out.
"This seems like the right time," she said.
Founded in 2000, the Gates Foundation has focused on tackling global challenges such as poverty, disease, and inequity. Her years of experience with the nonprofit showed French Gates firsthand the impact of empowering women and girls and led her to create Pivotal Ventures in Seattle in 2015.
For nearly two decades, there's been an effort to change the way the U.S. has always elected its presidents by creating a workaround to the Electoral College, the indirect popular election process that's been used in every American presidential election in history. A collection of states is now a little closer than it was four years ago to choosing a president by popular vote, after Maine signed legislation in April to join the effort.
President Biden's administration is planning to soon issue a regulation to cement the sweeping asylum restrictions it enacted at the southern border over the summer, two U.S. officials told CBS News, describing changes that would make it far less likely for the strict rules to be lifted in the near future.
Toward the end of June 2018, condemned inmates at Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama received slips of paper that gave them the choice to decide how they would prefer to die. There were two options: lethal injection, the default method, which Alabama had been accused of botching in the prison's execution chamber; and nitrogen hypoxia, an experimental alternative that the state, facing political pressure to carry out death sentences despite a tally of mistakes, had recently authorized.
Manufacturers of the most accurate home COVID-19 tests on the market say they were left out again from the Biden administration's latest round of free orders through COVIDTests.gov, which for a seventh time will rely on less sensitive "antigen" tests, which are generally the cheaper options available on drugstore shelves.