RFK Jr. Confirmed as Head of Health and Human Services
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With record levels of dry powder available for investment, find out what's in store for private markets in 2025 and beyond. Listen to Crafting Capital in partnership with UBS at partners.wsj.com slash UBS, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Here's your midday brief for Thursday, February 13th. I'm Anthony Bansi for The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary. The vote broke down mostly along party lines, with every Democrat voting against Kennedy, while Senator Mitch McConnell was the lone Republican to vote no. McConnell is a survivor of polio, and he'd criticized Kennedy's questioning of vaccines. The confirmation puts a longtime critic of vaccines and the medical establishment in charge of the nation's vast and powerful health apparatus.

According to court filings made yesterday, Elon Musk said he'd withdraw his bid for the nonprofit that controls OpenAI if the company's board stops its conversion to a for-profit company. The bid, launched Monday, was rejected by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

And Meta is rolling out a new partnership program that will let rival classified advertisement companies list ads on Facebook Marketplace in the EU. Meta says it'll let those companies pay a fee to list ads on its own popular platform on a cost-per-click basis. The new program is an effort to appease European antitrust regulators who say Meta's been violating the bloc's rules. We'll have more coverage of the day's news on the WSJ's What's News podcast.

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