TOP 5 STOCKS TO WATCHOUT:-
1.APPLE: -Apple Inc said Thursday it will give $5 million to four historically Black universities to help expand their engineering programs for designing the chips that power electronic devices.
Apple said the $5 million will be spread across Alabama A&M University, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., Morgan State University, in Baltimore, and Prairie View A&M University, in Texas, over three years. The money comes from Apple’s broader racial justice initiative, which it announced last year with $100 million in initial funding.
The grants will support each school’s engineering departments and seek to focus expanding course work in fields like computing architecture and designing chips. The money will also support fellowships and internships in hardware technologies, Apple said.
Apple custom designs many of the chips in its flagship devices, including central processors in its Mac computers and iPhones and special chips in its AirPods headphones that help them work smoothly with other Apple devices.
“We know many jobs of the future will be in innovative areas like silicon engineering and we want to help ensure the leaders of tomorrow have access to transformational learning opportunities,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, said in a statement.
2.GOOGLE:- The U.S. House Judiciary Committee will vote on Wednesday on a package of six antitrust bills, including several targeting the market power of Big Tech, the panel said on Thursday.
The bills will be marked up in committee to consider changes and then voted on by the panel to decide whether the full House of Representatives should vote on the measures.
Two of the bills address the issue of giant companies, such as Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google, creating a platform for other businesses and then competing against those same businesses.
These bills – one of which would force companies to sell businesses – have attracted the most opposition. Some pro-tech groups have said they could mean the end of popular promotions like Amazon Prime free shipping and iMessage in iPhones.
In addition to the two bills aimed at conflict of interest in platforms’ businesses, a third bill would require a platform to refrain from any merger unless it can show the acquired company does not compete with any product or service the platform is in. A fourth would require platforms to allow users to transfer their data elsewhere, including to a competing business.
The House members also introduced a fifth bill, a companion to a measure that has already passed the Senate and would increase the budgets of antitrust enforcers and make companies planning the biggest mergers pay more.
3.JP MORGAN:- JPMorgan Chase & Co will give its U.S. employees one floating day off for the newly implemented Juneteenth federal holiday, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
While the holiday falls on a weekend, employees can coordinate with managers for a paid day off between July 1 and Dec. 31, the memo from Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and global head of diversity and inclusion Brian Lamb said.
Wealth manager UBS also unveiled similar plans for its U.S. employees, an internal memo showed.
Wells Fargo & Co will provide an additional personal holiday in 2021 to all eligible U.S. based employees to commemorate Juneteenth, a company spokesperson said.
President Joe Biden signed a bill on Thursday to recognize June 19, or “Juneteenth”, a federal holiday marking the end of legal enslavement of Black Americans.
It marks the day in 1865 when a Union general informed a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas that they had been made free two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.
Juneteenth is the first new federal holiday created in nearly four decades. Texas officially declared Juneteenth a state holiday in 1980 and since then the holiday has been officially recognized in most U.S. states.
4.TOSHIBA:-Harvard University’s endowment fund thanked a Japanese government adviser for advice, the industry minister said on Friday, in response to a probe that found a government adviser was involved in putting pressure on the fund.
The comments from Hiroshi Kajiyama come as the industry ministry has been under scrutiny about the pressure put on foreign shareholders of Toshiba Corp, and the role of a former adviser, Hiromichi Mizuno.
5.TESLA –U.S. auto safety regulators said on Thursday they have opened 30 investigations into Tesla crashes involving 10 deaths since 2016 where advanced driver assistance systems were suspected of use.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a list offering details about crashes under review by its Special Crash Investigations programs.
The agency had already confirmed some specific Tesla crash investigations but had not previously released to Reuters a full accounting of all Tesla crashes investigated where Tesla’s Autopilot system was suspected of being involved.
Of the 30 Tesla crashes, NHTSA has ruled out Tesla’s Autopilot in three and published reports on two of the crashes.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reuters first sought a full list from NHTSA more than a year ago under a public records request. The list only includes the state and month the crashes occurred.
Previously, NHTSA said it had opened 28 special crash investigations into Tesla crashes, with 24 pending. The spreadsheet shows a February 2019 crash where Autopilot use was undetermined.
