By Jacey Fortin @ NYTimes.com Business Day, June 10

A bidder on eBay offered nearly $2.7 million to have lunch with the billionaire investor Warren Buffett, as part of an annual auction to benefit a nonprofit organization in San Francisco.

The winner, who was not named, offered $2,679,001 just minutes before the five-day auction closed on Friday. He or she, along with up to seven friends, will share a lunch with Mr. Buffett at Smith & Wollensky in Manhattan [....]

Mr. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, has been participating in this event since 2000. The money raised goes to support Glide, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that provides a variety of services for poor and marginalized people including food — almost 800,000 meals per year — shelter and child care.

Glide has an annual budget of $18 million, Janice Mirikitani and Reverend Cecil Williams, the organization’s founders, said in a telephone interview [....]

This year’s bid was not the highest ever. In 2012 and 2016, Reuters reported, anonymous bidders offered $3,456,789 to dine with Mr. Buffett. A total of 41 people bid for the lunch.

One of the top bidders of years past, Ted Weschler, a hedge fund manager from Virginia, won in 2010 and again 2011. That was how he first met Mr. Buffett, and he so impressed the billionaire that he was hired as a top money manager at Berkshire Hathaway in 2011 [....] 

Guest op-ed by Geoffrey Kabaservice @ NYTimes.com, June 9

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.”

[.....] As a political historian who writes mainly about the Republican Party, I’ve often puzzled over why far-right groups during the 1950s and ’60s had such an appetite for obvious falsehoods. Robert Welch Jr., a founder of the John Birch Society, famously maintained that President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Other extremist groups charged that a committee of University of Chicago eggheads was rewriting the Constitution to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property, and that the United Nations was training barefoot African cannibals in Georgia for an armed takeover of the United States. Did the people who read those made-up stories actually believe them?

In the 1960s, Republican Party officials and conservative leaders like William F. Buckley Jr. were able to marginalize the John Birch Society and related groups. Today, it’s the conservative establishment that has been marginalized by right-wing media and President Trump’s populist movement. Birch-style fake news stories once circulated only among small audiences. Today, thanks to the internet, they reach millions of Americans who make up a big chunk of the Republican Party’s base [.....]

By Alexander Bolton @ TheHill.com, June 8

The Senate parliamentarian has warned Republicans that a provision in their healthcare reform bill related to abortion is unlikely to be allowed, raising a serious threat to the legislation.

The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has flagged language that would bar people from using new refundable tax credits for private insurance plans that cover abortion, according to Senate sources.  

If Republicans are forced to strip the so-called Hyde Amendment language from the legislation, which essentially bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortions except to save the life of a mother or in cases of rape and incest, it may doom the bill [.....]

@ BBC News, June 8

Despacito has become the longest-running foreign language number one in UK chart history. And it's been viewed more than a billion times on YouTube. What makes this song such a giant hit in places as far away as Arkansas and Berlin? Singer Luis Fonsi tells us why. Video by Paul Blake.

It's gone up to 1.85 billion views now. Who wrote that study about Millenials not being that interested in sex?

Along with targeting civilians in a city long considered to be safe from terrorism, the Islamic State’s first attack in Iran seemed designed to further aggravate tensions in the Persian Gulf region.

By Shaun Walker in Moscow for TheGuardian.com, June 7

Claim made in interview with film-maker Oliver Stone, who was granted rare access to Russian president over two years

Vladimir Putin does not have bad days because he is “not a woman”, and would rather not shower next to a gay man because he wouldn’t want to “provoke him”, he has revealed in a documentary by the film-maker Oliver Stone.

The Russian president’s comments came in series of interviews with Stone on topics ranging from geopolitics to gay rights and Edward Snowden [....]

By Elise Viebeck and Ben Terris @ WashingtonPost.com, June 7

Amid a deluge of Trump-related drama and sensational hearings, reporters on Capitol Hill have gone from an endangered species to something more like an invasive one, covering the halls of power in greater numbers than seen in decades.