By THALIA BEATY, Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) — Bill Gates says he will donate 99% of his remaining tech fortune to the Gates Foundation, which will now close in 2045, earlier than previously planned. Today, that would be worth an estimated $107 billion.

The pledge is among the largest philanthropic gifts ever – outpacing the historic contributions of industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie when adjusted for inflation. Only Berkshire Hathaway investor Warren Buffett’s pledge to donate his fortune — currently estimated by Forbes at $160 billion — may be larger depending on stock market fluctuations.

People walk by a Gates Foundation sign at the foundation’s campus Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Gates’ donation will be delivered over time and allow the foundation to spend an additional $200 billion over the next 20 years.

“It’s kind of thrilling to have that much to be able to put into these causes,” Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press.

His announcement Thursday signals both a promise of sustained support to those causes, particularly global health and education in the U.S., and an eventual end to the foundation’s immense worldwide influence. Gates says spending down his fortune will help save and improve many lives now, which will have positive ripple effects well beyond the foundation’s closure. It also makes it more likely that his intentions are honored.

“I think 20 years is the right balance between giving as much as we can to make progress on these things and giving people a lot of notice that now this money will be gone,” Gates said.

In a league of its own

The Gates Foundation has long been peerless among foundations — attracting supporters and detractors but also numerous unfounded conspiracy theories.

In addition to the $100 billion it has spent since its founding 25 years ago, it has directed scientific research, helped develop new technologies, and nurtured long-term partnerships with countries and companies.

About 41% of the foundation’s money so far has come from Warren Buffett and the rest from the fortune Gates made at Microsoft.

FILE – Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett smiles during an interview in Omaha, Neb., May 7, 2018, with Liz Claman on Fox Business Network’s “Countdown to the Closing Bell”. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)

Started by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2000, the foundation plays a significant role in shaping global health policy and has carved out a special niche by partnering with companies to drive down the cost of medical treatments so low- and middle-income countries could afford them.

“The foundation work has been way more impactful than I expected,” Gates said, calling it his second and final career.

The foundation’s influence on global health — from the World Health Organization to research agendas — is both a measure of its success and a magnet for criticism. For years, researchers have asked why a wealthy family should have so much sway over how the world improves people’s health and responds to crises.

Gates said, like any private citizen, he can choose how to spend the money he earns and has decided to do everything he can to reduce childhood deaths.

“Is that a bad thing? It’s not an important cause? People can criticize it,” he said, but the foundation will stick to its global health work.

The Associated Press receives financial support for news coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation and for news coverage of women in the workforce and statehouses from Melinda French Gates’ organization, Pivotal Ventures.

Major ambitions for the remaining 20 years

The foundation’s most prized metric is the drop in childhood deaths from preventable causes by almost half between 2000 and 2020, according to United Nations figures. The foundation’s CEO Mark Suzman is careful to say they do not take credit for this accomplishment. But he believes they had a “catalytic role” — for example, in helping deliver vaccines to children through Gavi, the vaccine alliance they helped create.

The foundation still has numerous goals — eradicating polio, controlling other deadly diseases, like malaria, and reducing malnutrition, which makes children more vulnerable to other illnesses.

Gates hopes that by spending to address these issues now, wealthy donors will be free to tackle other problems later.

The Gates Foundation had planned to wind down two decades after Gates’ death, meaning today’s announcement significantly moves up that timetable. Gates plans to stay engaged, though at 69, he acknowledged he may not have a say.

In its remaining two decades, the foundation will maintain a budget of around $9 billion a year, which represents a leveling off from its almost annual growth since 2006, when Buffett first started donating.

Suzman expects the foundation will narrow its focus to top priorities.

“Having that time horizon and the resources just puts an even greater burden on us to say, ‘Are you actually putting your resources, your thumb down, on what are going to be the biggest, most successful bets rather than scattering it too thinly?’” Suzman said, which he acknowledged was creating uncertainty even within the foundation about what programs would continue.

Gates is the only remaining founder

Major changes preceded the foundation’s 25th year.

In 2021, Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates divorced, and Buffett resigned as the foundation’s trustee. They recruited a new board of trustees to help govern the foundation, and in 2024, French Gates left to continue work at her own organization.

FILE – Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Melinda French Gates smiles as she leaves June 23, 2023 the Elysee Palace in Paris. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena, file)

French Gates said she decided to step down partly to focus on countering the rollback of women’s rights in the U.S. At the ELLE Women of Impact event in New York in April, she said she wanted to leave the foundation at a high point.

“I so trusted Mark Suzman, the current CEO,” she said. “We had a board in place that I helped put in place, and I knew their values.”

Even as the foundation’s governance stabilizes, the road ahead looks difficult. Enduring conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, global economic turmoil and cuts to foreign aid forecast fewer resources coming to global health and development.

“The greatest uncertainty for us is the generosity that will go into global health,” Gates said. “Will it continue to go down like it has the last few years or can we get it back to where it should be?”

Even facing these obstacles, Gates and the foundation speak, as they often do, with optimism, pointing to innovations they’ve funded or ways they’ve helped reduce the cost of care.

“It’s incredible to come up with these low-cost things and tragic if we can’t get them out to everyone who needs them,” Gates said. “So it’s going to require renewing that commitment of those who are well off to help those who are in the greatest need.”

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.

Both directions of Interstate 494 between Blaine Avenue and Babcock Trail in Inver Grove Heights will be closed this weekend while crews do demolition work on the U.S. 52 bridge over the freeway, according to the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

MnDOT crews will close the stretch of freeway beginning at 10 p.m. Friday with reopening of all lanes scheduled for 5 a.m. Monday. Ramp closures are also associated with the work.

Detours will be posted.

The closure will allow crews to rebuild the bridge deck and repave the ramps.

The project is slated to be completed by November. For more information about this project or to sign up for email updates visit the project website.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Denmark says it will summon the top U.S. diplomat in the country for an explanation following a Wall Street Journal report about the United States stepping up intelligence gathering on Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory coveted by President Donald Trump.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told broadcaster DR outside a meeting Wednesday with colleagues in Poland that Denmark would summon the U.S. chargé d’affaires to seek a “rebuttal” or other explanation following the report.

The Journal, citing two people familiar with the U.S. effort that it did not identify, reported that several high-ranking officials under the U.S. director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had directed intelligence agency heads to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and sentiment about U.S. resource extraction there.

The U.S. Embassy did not immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press on Thursday seeking comment on whether the U.S. diplomat in Copenhagen, Jennifer Hall Godfrey, had received a summons. The Danish Foreign Ministry, in an email, did not comment beyond referring to Rasmussen’s remarks.

Rasmussen, who has previously scolded the Trump administration over its criticism of NATO ally Denmark and Greenland, said the information in the report was “very worrying” and “we don’t spy between friends.”

“We are looking at this with quite a lot of seriousness,” he added.

Greenland’s prime minister said last month that U.S. statements about the mineral-rich Arctic island have been disrespectful and it “will never, ever be a piece of property that can be bought by just anyone.”

In a visit to the island last month, Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said, addressing the United States during a visit to Greenland that “you cannot annex another country,” even with the argument made by U.S. officials that international security is at stake.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Washington will respect Greenland’s self-determination and alleged that Greenlanders “don’t want to be a part of Denmark.”

By RAF CASERT and DANICA KIRKA, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Even if the end of World War II in Europe spawned one of the most joyous days the continent ever lived, Thursday’s 80th anniversary of V-E Day is haunted as much by the specter of current-day conflict as it celebrates the defeat of ultimate evil.

Hitler’s Nazi Germany had finally surrendered after a half-decade of invading other European powers and propagating racial hatred that led to genocide, the Holocaust and the murdering of millions.

That surrender and the explosion of hope for a better life is being celebrated with parades in London and Paris and towns across Europe while even the leaders of erstwhile mortal enemies France and Germany are bonding again.

Germany’s new foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, paid tribute to “the enormous sacrifices of the Allies” in helping his country win its freedom from the Nazis and said that millions of people were “disenfranchised and tormented by the Nazi regime.”

“Hardly any day has shaped our history as much as May 8, 1945,” he said in a statement. “Our historical responsibility for this breach of civilization and the commemoration of the millions of victims of the Second World War unleashed by Nazi Germany gives us a mandate to resolutely defend peace and freedom in Europe today.”

Gloomy outlook

His comments underscore that former European enemies may thrive — to the extent that the 27-nation European Union even won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize — but that the outlook has turned gloomy over the past year.

Bodies continue to pile up in Ukraine, where Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion started the worst war on the continent since 1945. The rise of the hard right in several EU member states is putting the founding democratic principles of the bloc under increasing pressure.

“The time of Europe’s carefree comfort, joyous unconcern is over. Today is the time of European mobilization around our fundamental values and our security,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a Dutch memorial event in the lead-up to the celebrations.

It makes this unlikely stretch of peace in Europe anything but a given.

And even NATO, that trans-Atlantic military alliance that assured peace in Europe under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and its military clout, is under internal strain rarely seen since its inception.

U.S. contributions to the war effort

The United States was instrumental in turning the tide of the war in Europe, invading along with Allies the D-Day beaches in France’s Normandy on June 6, 1944 in what proved to be the tipping point of the war in Europe that inexorably led to the invasion of Germany and the defeat of Hitler.

On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump proclaimed Thursday as a day for the United States to celebrate victory in World War II, insisting the country should better recognize its essential role in the war.

“We are going to start celebrating our victories again!” he said.

The war did drag on beyond Europe especially in the Pacific against Japan, but even Taiwan joined in marking the day for the first time — and highlighting current-day threats. Instead of Russia, it was centering on China, its immediate rival. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory to be annexed by force if necessary.

“Military aggression against another country is an unjust crime that is bound to fail,” Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said.

He added that both Taiwan and Europe were “now facing the threat of a new authoritarian bloc.”

European celebrations

Commemorations have been going all week through Europe, and Britain has taken a lead. Here too, the current-day plight of Ukraine in its fight against Russia took center stage.

“The idea that this was all just history and it doesn’t matter now somehow, is completely wrong,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. “Those values of freedom and democracy matter today.”

In London later Thursday, a service will be held in Westminster Abbey and a concert, for 10,000 members of the public, at Horse Guards Parade. In Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to oversee a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe.

Images are projected onto the Queen Elizabeth Tower, in the Houses of Parliament, including the British World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose statue is in the foreground, during the V-E Day 80th anniversary events in London, Tuesday, May 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

And in Berlin, Chancellor Friedrich Merz will again highlight how Germany has remodeled itself into a beacon of European democracy by laying a wreath at the central memorial for the victims of war and tyranny.

And, symbolically, Russia and President Vladimir Putin will be totally out of lockstep with the rest of Europe, celebrating its Victory Day one day later with a huge military parade on Red Square in central Moscow to mark the massive Soviet contribution to defeat Nazi Germany.

Raf Casert reported from Brussels. Mike Corder in Wageningen, Netherlands, and Jamey Keaten in Geneva, contributed to this report.