Notes Today:

• Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc BRK announced Monday that it has increased its stakes in Japan's top five trading houses. This move is believed to have contributed to the robust momentum driving the nation's stock market to reach multiyear highs.
• The company holds stakes in Itochu Corp. ITOCF, Marubeni corp. MARUF, Mitsubishi Corp. MSBHF, Mitsui & Co. Ltd MITSY, and Sumitomo Corp. SSUMF. Berkshire said its stakes in these companies now average more than 8.5%.

• Intel will spend more than $33 billion to develop two chip-making plants in Magdeburg as part of its expansion push in Europe, a deal Chancellor Olaf Scholz hailed as Germany's biggest ever foreign investment 

• At least 9 dead, dozens injured from mass shootings and violence across the US this weekend. 

• An extreme, prolonged heat wave from Texas to Louisiana is helping fuel deadly southern storms that have resulted in the deaths of at least six people and left hundreds of thousands without power.
• Cities across parts of northern China are bracing for further hot weather this weekend as high-pressure ridges persist across a swathe of the country.The heatwave has engulfed much of the north this week, sending temperatures soaring in an area stretching from Inner Mongolia, across northern Hebei province to western Liaoning.
• India’s government issued several severe heat advisories on Sunday, as many states continue to grapple with sweltering heat and high humidity. On Saturday, temperatures reached 45.4-degrees C (113.72 degrees F) in the Indian state of Odisha, and temperatures hovered around 42 and 44 degrees C (107.6 and 111.2 degrees F) in other states.  
• With five months completed, 2023 is on pace to challenge for the warmest year ever directly measured.
  
  
  
  
  
• YouTube says it has removed a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking with podcast host Jordan Peterson for spreading what the company says is vaccine misinformation.👍

Problem with these notes: some tend to run up against a deeply rooted feature of human cognition - the desire not to think about anything unpleasant…Sorry about that.