By THALIA BEATY, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Billionaire author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott acknowledged another $2 billion in donations in a blog post on Wednesday, bringing the total she’s given away since 2019 to $19.2 billion.

She also revealed new information about how she was managing her wealth, saying she had directed advisors to invest her funds into “mission-aligned ventures.” Most of the grants she made in 2024, she said, went to bolstering economic security and opportunities.

“I’ve asked the investment team helping me manage the assets I’m working to give away to source funds and companies focused on for-profit solutions to these challenges,” Scott wrote. That is in contrast to “withdrawing funds from a bank account, or from a stock portfolio that increases the wealth and influence of leaders who already have it.”

Most of Scott’s wealth comes from shares of Amazon that she received when she divorced the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos. Forbes estimates her current wealth to be $31.7 billion, even after giving away her money for five years.

Gabrielle Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of The Panorama Group, has researched Scott’s giving and provided advice and support for nonprofits who have received Scott’s gifts. She said she sees a growing focus in Scott’s giving on issues of poverty.

“She is creating an amazing role model for philanthropists, although I don’t see very many that have followed her role modeling,” Fitzgerald said. “But it really shows that it’s easy to give away a lot of money to good groups.”

In announcing the gifts on her Yield Giving website, Scott mulled over the meaning of “investing,” writing that it “seems to have undergone a kind of semantic shriveling. On the list of its big, beautiful, original definitions? To devote resources for a useful purpose. To endow with rights. To clothe.”

Scott, who does not comment on her giving beyond the rare post on her website, has shaken up the nonprofit sector with her embrace of “trust-based philanthropy,” providing big grants with no strings attached to over 2,450 nonprofits.

In 2024, she also gave repeat gifts to several organizations — something of a new development in her giving, which has set a high bar for how much and how fast megadonors can give. Two organizations, CAMFED, which supports girls education in Africa, and Undue Medical Debt, which was formerly called RIP Medical Debt, both got third donations from Scott this year.

Grantees say that when Scott’s team notifies them of grants they say not to expect additional support. So it was a surprise for Shaun Donovan, CEO of the affordable housing organization Enterprise Community Partners, when he got the news of a second, major donation.

“I was taking my luggage off the security screener at LaGuardia Airport and my phone rang and I was told that MacKenzie Scott was awarding us another $65 million,” Donovan said in an interview in November.

His organization had received $50 million from Scott in 2020, making them one of the nonprofits that has received the most funding from Scott, based on grant data made public on Yield Giving. About 500 organizations have not disclosed the amount of funding they’ve received from Scott.

“We were not expecting their second gift. Every time they award this funding, they’re very clear that organizations should not expect it,” Donovan said, adding his advice is, “Really treat it that way. Don’t use it for regular operating expenses. Don’t use it for things that will create a cliff or a hole in your budget for your organization.”

This year was already a standout in Scott’s giving because it was the first time that she awarded grants through an application process. In March, she announced the recipients of an “open call” for applications from nonprofits. She surprised recipients by awarding more money to more organizations than she had initially promised, committing $640 million to more than 360 nonprofits.

In one measure of the demand for the large and unrestricted grants she makes, 6,353 nonprofits applied through the nonprofit Lever for Change, which ran the “open call” for Scott. Ultimately, 279 nonprofits were awarded $2 million, while 82 organizations received $1 million each. Previously, organizations have said they’ve responded to questions from an anonymous donor who turned out to be Scott or just received an email or cold call without any application at all.

The fact that her grants are unrestricted, meaning that nonprofits can use them however they want to further their charitable purpose, is part of what makes them so valuable, Donovan said. Five years into her philanthropic blitz, he said it’s now possible to see her impact across whole sectors.

“The scale of this giving has really not just changed individual organizations but changed entire fields like affordable housing,” he said.

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

Originally Published:

Health officials are investigating a possible norovirus outbreak after dozens of people became sick after eating raw oysters at the L.A. Times 101 Best Restaurants event.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health confirmed that more than 80 people who attended the annual event — which features some of the area’s most celebrated and popular restaurants — reported getting sick with symptoms that included diarrhea, nausea, abdominal pain and vomiting.

The illnesses appear to be linked to raw oysters provided at the Dec. 3 event that have since been recalled, according to a public health spokesperson.

The dozens of reported illnesses from the event came just days before the California Department of Public Health on Dec. 13 issued a warning not to eat raw oysters harvested from British Columbia. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has since issued a warning to restaurants and retailers not to sell the oysters on account of potential norovirus contamination. The warning affected restaurants and retailers in multiple states, and the company that supplied the oysters issued an urgent recall, warning consumers not to eat them.

The oysters were supplied by Fanny Bay Oysters, according to Hillary Manning, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Times. The oysters were sourced by Santa Monica Seafood, which was a sponsor of the event, and provided to one of the restaurants featured in the 101 Best Restaurants list, Manning said.

News of the possible outbreak was first reported by L.A. Taco.

Like previous events hosted by the Los Angeles Times, Manning said that all safety protocols were followed for the event.

“We have produced culinary events for many years and take food safety very seriously,” she wrote in an email. “As is the case with each of our events, we had protocols in place and, based on an inspection from the L.A. County Department of Public Health, we were in compliance with all relevant safety standards. We also know the care that each chef and restaurant takes in preparing and serving food to our community.”

Without specific testing, there is no way for a vendor or restaurant to detect norovirus because it does not affect the taste, smell or appearance of oysters.

The Los Angeles Times first became aware that some people from the event became sick on Dec. 11. Officials at the company, who were unaware of the cause, referred people to the L.A. County Department of Public Health. On Dec. 12, the public health department contacted The Times about a group of people who had reported getting sick.

There were people who attended the event who reported not seeing any kind of notice or alert from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Jamie Clegg, who bought two tickets to the event, said he never saw a notice in his email.

“I didn’t get anything, unless it inadvertently went to spam,” he said.

He went to the event with a friend who is employed by the L.A. Times, he said, and that person did get an email from county health officials notifying them about the illness cluster and asking them to answer an anonymous questionnaire.

The oysters served on Dec. 3 were part of a batch of recalled Fanny Bay Select and Fanny Bay XS oysters from Pacific Northwest Shellfish Co., which were packed on Nov. 25, the county public health spokesperson said.

The outbreak is still under investigation.

Someone infected by the virus could experience symptoms for 12 to 48 hours, according to the FDA.

from the phishy-business dept

There are lots of ways for an individual person or entity to err when it comes to intellectual property enforcement such that it negatively impacts a website or business. But if you want to get really frustrated, what you need is several entities demonstrating complete incompetence in how they do business and making a victim out of an innocent website. That’s how you get a situation where Itch.io, famed indie video game platform, was taken down for several hours.

This story starts, as all good stories do, with a pop-culture collectables company utilizing an AI-driven brand-protection partner that managed to send a takedown report to a registrar accusing the site of the wrong infraction. Funko, the makers of those cutesy figurines from all corners of nerd culture, partnered with BrandShield. BrandShield’s AI-powered web-crawler took note of a fan page on Itch.io for Funko Fusion, a very real game from Funko. The page even linked back to the game’s official website and included some screenshots of the game.

Now, while that seems quite unworthy of any sort of takedown notice whatsoever, BrandShield managed to somehow report that page for “fraud and phishing” for reasons I can neither get out of any of the reporting nor speculate using my own wetware. Itch.io took down the supposedly offending page quickly in any case, and notified its registrar it had done so, but that notification appears to have gone entirely ignored. And, either because the offense listed was “fraud and phishing,” or because the registrar is plainly incompetent, that registrar disabled the domain entirely instead of taking action against the singular page.

In a Hacker News comment, Itch.io founder Leaf “Leafo” Cohran said that the BrandShield complaint seems to have originated from a single itch.io user who “made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game.” That led to independent reports to Itch’s host and registrar of “fraud and phishing” a few days ago.

While Cochran says the offending page was taken down immediately after the complaints were filed, he suspects the initial complaint meant “our registrar’s automated system likely kicked to disable the domain since no one read our confirmation of removal.”

The itch.io domain was back up and running by 7 am Eastern, according to media reports, “after the registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate action to resolve the issue.” Users could access the site throughout if they typed the itch.io IP address into their web browser directly.

Now, Funko reached out quickly to Itch.io wanting to work with them to get this corrected. It also commented that BrandShield didn’t request the entire domain be taken down, only the offending page. But that doesn’t offer any insight as to why the request cited “fraud and phishing” as the offense here. Neither appear to be applicable in any way. And perhaps that contributed to the registrar taking the entire domain down. BrandShield attempted to do some damage control on ExTwitter after all of this, but the community notes appended to its tweets are damning.

As for that registrar, iwantmyname, the simple fact is that the domain was taken down despite Itch.io taking the action requested in the notice. And that’s despite the notion that the page may not have been problematic in any actual way. So, to summarize, Funko’s partner BrandShield sent in a request to takedown an Itch.io page to the Registrar, iwantmyname, but marked it as being used for “fraud and phishing” rather than for copyright or trademark infringement, Itch.io fully and quickly complied with the request to remove the page, and the registrar took down the entire domain anyway. The incompetence alongside the purity of Itch.io’s victimhood in all of this is so stunning it’s nearly dizzying.

But, and I cannot believe I’m saying this, there’s the potential that this might get even more crazy.

Then, the story gets even more ridiculous. In another post that has yet to reveal itself as a silly gag, Itch.io claims that someone at Funko called their mother.

“This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom,” states the Itch.io X account. What follows is a mobile phone screenshot of a text message. “Got a strange call from a company about accusatory statements on your social media account. Call me.”

Just like the writer over at Vice, I keep going back to Itch.io’s Twitter account expecting to see that this was just a joke. But that admission still hasn’t come. Nor has any denial come from Funko itself and there is absolutely zero chance the company isn’t aware of the accusation.

While attempting to extinguish concerns over the Itch.io takedown, Funko did not address the suspicious tattletale who seemingly called the Itch.io representative’s mother. Until specified otherwise, I just have to believe it’s true.

I guess the only remaining question is, now that the site is back up, how will Funko, BrandShield, or iwantmyname victimize the site next? Is a call to the dean’s office warranted? Maybe something on the permanent record?

Or will this trifecta of asininity simply ask Itch.io to go to bed without its cookies and chocolates?

Filed Under: brand protection, domain takedowns, takedowns
Companies: brandshield, funko, itch.io