Latest news with #NathanFrandino
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
As demonstrators accuse Trump of undermining universities, he calls Harvard 'a disgrace'
By Nathan Frandino BERKELEY, California (Reuters) -Hundreds of students, faculty and community members on a California campus booed on Thursday as speakers accused the administration of President Donald Trump of undermining American universities, as he questioned whether Harvard and others deserve tax-exempt status. The protest on the University of California's Berkeley campus was among events dubbed "Rally for the Right to Learn!" planned across the country. The administration has rebuked American universities over their handling of pro-Palestinian student protests that roiled campuses from Columbia in New York to Berkeley last year, following the 2023 Hamas-led attack inside Israel and the subsequent Israeli attacks on Gaza. Trump has called the protests anti-American and antisemitic and accused universities of peddling Marxism and "radical left" ideology. On Thursday, he called Harvard, an institution he criticized repeatedly this week, "a disgrace," and also criticized others. Asked about reports the Internal Revenue Service was planning to remove Harvard's tax-exempt status, Trump told reporters at the White House he did not think a final ruling had been made, and indicated other schools were under scrutiny. Trump had said in a social media post on Tuesday he was mulling whether to seek to end Harvard's tax-exempt status if it continued pushing what he called "political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?'" "I'm not involved in it," he said, saying the matter was being handled by lawyers. "I read about it just like you did, but tax-exempt status, I mean, it's a privilege. It's really a privilege, and it's been abused by a lot more than Harvard." "When you take a look whether it's Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, I don't know what's going on, but when you see how badly they've acted and in other ways also. So we'll, we'll be looking at it very strongly." At Berkeley on Thursday, protesters raised signs proclaiming 'Education is a public good!' and "Hands off our free speech!" Robert Reich, a public policy professor, compared the responses of Harvard and Columbia to demands from the administration that they take such steps as ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and putting academic departments under outside control. Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter on Monday, rejected such demands as unprecedented "assertions of power, unmoored from the law" that violated constitutional free speech and the Civil Rights Act. Columbia had earlier agreed to negotiations after the Trump administration said last month it had terminated grants and contracts worth $400 million, mostly for medical and other scientific research. After reading the Harvard president's letter, Columbia's interim President Claire Shipman, said her university would continue "good faith discussions" with the administration, but "would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire." 'Columbia University tried to appease a tyrant. It didn't work," Berkeley's Reich said on the steps of Sproul Hall at the heart of the university's campus. 'After Harvard stood up to the tyrant, Columbia, who had been surrendering, stood up and said no.' After Harvard's Garber released his letter on Monday, the Trump administration said it was freezing $2.3 billion in funding to the university. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Wednesday the termination of two DHS grants totaling more than $2.7 million to Harvard and said the university would lose its ability to enroll foreign students if it does not meet demands to share information on some visa holders. In response, a Harvard spokesperson said the university stood by its earlier statement to "not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights," while saying it will comply with the law. CNN was first to report on Wednesday the IRS was making plans to rescind Harvard's tax-exempt status and that a final decision was expected soon. Harvard said there was no legal basis to rescind it, saying such an action will be unprecedented, will diminish its financial aid for students and will lead to abandonment of some critical medical research programs. Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said "any forthcoming actions by the IRS are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution's violations of their tax status were initiated prior to the President's TRUTH." Under federal law the president cannot request that the IRS, which determines whether an organization can have or maintain tax-exempt status, investigate organizations. (Nathan Frandino reported from Berkeley, California. Additional reporting from Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland in Washington and Rich McKay in Atlanta. Editing by Donna Bryson and Rod Nickel)
WIRED
28-02-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Google's Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by Light
Feb 28, 2025 10:00 AM The Alphabet 'moonshot' project is launching a new chip to deliver high-speed internet with light instead of radio waves. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:Nathan Frandino/Redux Alphabet's 'moonshot factory,' known as X, has long cultivated craziness in its edgy projects. Perhaps the most outlandish was Loon, which aimed to deliver internet via hundreds of high-flying balloons. Loon eventually 'graduated' from X as a separate Alphabet division, before its parent company determined that the business model simply didn't work. By the time that balloon popped in 2021, one of the Loon engineers had already left the project to form a team specifically working on the data transmission part of connectivity—namely, delivering high-bandwidth internet via laser beams. Think fiber optics without the cables. It's not a new idea, but over the past few years, Taara, as the X project is called, has been quietly perfecting real-world implementations. Now, Alphabet is launching a new generation of its technology—a chip—that it says will not only make Taara a viable option to deliver high-speed internet, but potentially usher in a new era where light does much of the work that radio waves do today, only faster. Taara Chip 1. Courtesy of X, the Moonshot Company. Taara chip close-up. Courtesy of Kristen Sard/ X, the Moonshot Company The former Loon engineer who leads Taara is Mahesh Krishnaswamy. Ever since he first went online as a student in his hometown of Chennai, India—he had to go to the US embassy to get access to a computer—he has been obsessed with connectivity. 'Since then, I made it my life's mission to find ways to bring people like me online,' he tells me at X's headquarters in Mountain View, California. He found his way to America and worked at Apple before joining Google in 2013. That's where he first got motivated to use light for internet connectivity—not for transmissions to ground stations, but for high-speed data transfer between balloons. Krishnaswamy left Loon in 2016 to form a team to develop that technology, called Taara. This is an essay from the latest edition of Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter. SIGN UP for Plaintext to read the whole thing, and tap Steven's unique insights and unmatched contacts for the long view on tech. My big question to Krishnaswamy was, who needs it? In the 2010s, companies like Google and Facebook made a big deal of trying to connect 'the next billion users' with wild projects like Loon and high-flying drones. (Facebook even worked on the idea that's at the core of Taara—'invisible beams of light … that transmit data 10 times faster than current versions,' as my former colleague Jessi Hempel wrote in 2016. Mark Zuckerberg quietly shut the project down in 2018.) But now, through a variety of approaches, more of the world can get connected. That's one reason X cited for ending Loon. Most conspicuously, Elon Musk's Starlink can provide internet anywhere in the world, and Amazon is planning a competitor named Kuiper. But Krishnaswamy says the global connectivity problem is far from solved. 'Today there are like 3 billion people still unconnected, and there is a dire need to bring them online,' he says. In addition, many more people, including in the US, have internet speeds that can't even support streaming. As for Starlink, he says that in denser areas, a lot of people have to share the transmission, and each of them gets less bandwidth and slower speeds. 'We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost,' he claims, though he seems to be referring to Taara's future capabilities and not its current status. Over the past few years, Taara has made advances in implementing its technology in the real world. Instead of beaming from space, Taara's 'light bridges'—which are about the size of a traffic light—are earthbound. As X's 'captain of moonshots' Astro Teller puts it, 'As long as these two boxes can see each other, you get 20 gigabits per second, the equivalent of a fiber-optic cable, without having to trench the fiber-optic cable.' Light bridges have complicated gimbals, mirrors, and lenses to zero in on the right spot to establish and hold the connection. The team has figured out how to compensate for potential line-of-sight interruptions like bird flights, rain, and wind. (Fog is the biggest impediment.) Once the high-speed transmission is completed from light bridge to light bridge, providers still have to use traditional means to get the bits from the bridge to the phone or computer. Sanam Mozaffari and Devin Brinkley in the Taara lab. Courtesy of Peter Prato/ X, the Moonshot Company Taara's unit in the field. Courtesy of X, the Moonshot Company Taara is now a commercial operation, working in more than a dozen countries. One of its successes came in crossing the Congo River. On one side was Brazzaville, which had a direct fiber connection. On the other, Kinshasa, where internet used to cost five times more. A Taara light bridge spanning the 5-kilometer waterway provided Kinshasha with nearly equally cheap internet. Taara was also used at the 2024 Coachella music festival, augmenting what would have been an overwhelmed cellular network. Google itself is using a light bridge to provide high-speed bandwidth to a building on its new Bayview campus where it would have been difficult to extend a fiber cable. Mohamed-Slim Alouini, a professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology who has worked in optics for a decade, describes Taara as 'a Ferrari' of fiber-free optical. 'It's fast and reliable but quite expensive.' He says he spent around $30,000 for the last light bridge setup he bought from Alphabet for testing. That could change with Taara's second-generation offering. Taara's engineers have used innovative light-augmenting solutions to create a silicon photonic chip that not only will shrink the gadgetry in its light bridges to the size of a fingernail—replacing the mechanical gimbals and costly mirrors with solid-state circuitry—but will eventually allow a single laser transmitter to pair with multiple receptors. Teller says that Taara's technology could trigger the same kind of transformation that we saw when data storage moved from tape drives to disk drives to our current solid-state devices. Taara lightbridge alignment. In the shorter term, Teller and Krishnaswamy hope to see Taara technology used to provide high-bandwidth internet when fiber is unavailable. One use case would be delivering elite connectivity to an island community just offshore. Or providing high-speed internet after a natural disaster. But they also have more ambitious dreams. Teller and Krishnaswamy believe that 6G might be the final iteration to use radio waves. We're hitting a wall on the electromagnetic spectrum, they say. Traditional radio frequency bands are congested and running out of available bandwidth, making it harder to meet our growing demand for fast, reliable connectivity. 'We have an enormous worldwide industry that's about to go through a very complex change,' says Teller. The answer, as he sees it, is light—which he thinks might be the key element in 7G. (You think the hype for 5G was bad? Just wait.) Professor Alouini agrees. 'Those of us who are working in the field fully believe that at some point we will need to rely on optics, because the spectrum is getting congested,' he says. Teller envisions thousands of Taara chips in mesh networks, throwing beams of light, in everything from phones to data centers to autonomous vehicles. 'So to the extent that you buy this, it's going to be a very big deal,' he says. If Teller's predictions of ubiquitous light come to pass, Taara will be in a very good place to capitalize on the explosion. But it won't happen within X, or even Alphabet. When I pressed Krishnaswamy, he acknowledged that Taara will 'graduate' from X 'very soon.' It will not become a separate 'bet' within Alphabet like former X grad Waymo. Instead, it will be funded by outsiders, with Alphabet retaining a significant stake. I've covered a number of projects at X, and I have learned that ecstatic noises about a product's potential in one moment can be followed by a quiet shutdown several years hence. That's part of the X business model, which has failure built into its calculations. But with Taara, and especially its second-generation product, Teller says success is the floor, while the ceiling is higher than one of those now-discarded Loon balloons. 'There's a ton of unknowns, but I would be flabbergasted if it doesn't become a successful business,' he says. The only question, he says, is how big it could be. Spoken like a true moonshot captain. Don't miss future subscriber-only editions of this column. Subscribe to WIRED (50% off for Plaintext readers) today.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Yahoo
Super Bowl parade a reminder 'New Orleans is still in business'
By Amy Tennery and Nathan Frandino NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Mardi Gras floats with bead-tossing revelers cruised through New Orleans on Saturday as the city celebrated its record-tying 11th Super Bowl hosting gig with a stout security presence after a New Year's Day attack. Reminders of the attack were omnipresent around the "Big Easy" this week, where tourists paused to take in a Bourbon Street memorial to the 14 killed and a law enforcement presence of astonishing proportions stood watch. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. But the city known for its good cheer kept the party rolling at a first-of-its kind Super Bowl parade ahead of Sunday's showdown between the reigning Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. "I like to see people smile and have a good time and let 'em know that hey, New Orleans is still in business. We still in business, baby," said Buddy Laster, 64, decked out in gear from his New Orleans Saints. Dozens of law enforcement officers lined the route from the French Quarter to the Central Business District, and revelers threw beads at Homeland Security agents that stood atop an armored truck while police motorcycles wove past the crowd. Melissa Fuller, attending the parade with her husband and two young children, said seeing throngs of excited visitors reminded her why she loves living in the city. "We know that's kind of what makes our city unique," said Fuller, 39, as her five-year-old daughter Charlotte held her hands aloft to catch bead necklaces from passing floats. "It makes you really appreciate it when you see other people seeing your city for the first time." 'WE'RE RESILIENT' Alwyn Payadue, 35, who lives a few blocks from the parade route, said the event that featured marching bands and even an appearance from the famed Budweiser Clydesdale horses was an important opportunity for the community. "That was such a tragedy what happened and it just shows how strong our city is," said Payadue, who brought his nephew to the parade. "We're resilient through it all." Tourists said they shelled out top dollar for a seat at Sunday's game at the Superdome, where the city recently completed a $560 million renovation, and thrilled at the chance to take in the city's unique culture. Lifelong Eagles fan Lori Miele spent $22,000 on four tickets for the game and ducked flying plastic beads alongside her husband along the bustling parade route. "I was going to catch a couple beads and - whack! - I get smacked right in the face," said Miele. "But it's a lot of fun, it's worth it."
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Super Bowl parade a reminder 'New Orleans is still in business'
By Amy Tennery and Nathan Frandino NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Mardi Gras floats with bead-tossing revelers cruised through New Orleans on Saturday as the city celebrated its record-tying 11th Super Bowl hosting gig with a stout security presence after a New Year's Day attack. Reminders of the attack were omnipresent around the "Big Easy" this week, where tourists paused to take in a Bourbon Street memorial to the 14 killed and a law enforcement presence of astonishing proportions stood watch. But the city known for its good cheer kept the party rolling at a first-of-its kind Super Bowl parade ahead of Sunday's showdown between the reigning Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. "I like to see people smile and have a good time and let 'em know that hey, New Orleans is still in business. We still in business, baby," said Buddy Laster, 64, decked out in gear from his New Orleans Saints. Dozens of law enforcement officers lined the route from the French Quarter to the Central Business District, and revelers threw beads at Homeland Security agents that stood atop an armored truck while police motorcycles wove past the crowd. Melissa Fuller, attending the parade with her husband and two young children, said seeing throngs of excited visitors reminded her why she loves living in the city. "We know that's kind of what makes our city unique," said Fuller, 39, as her five-year-old daughter Charlotte held her hands aloft to catch bead necklaces from passing floats. "It makes you really appreciate it when you see other people seeing your city for the first time." 'WE'RE RESILIENT' Alwyn Payadue, 35, who lives a few blocks from the parade route, said the event that featured marching bands and even an appearance from the famed Budweiser Clydesdale horses was an important opportunity for the community. "That was such a tragedy what happened and it just shows how strong our city is," said Payadue, who brought his nephew to the parade. "We're resilient through it all." Tourists said they shelled out top dollar for a seat at Sunday's game at the Superdome, where the city recently completed a $560 million renovation, and thrilled at the chance to take in the city's unique culture. Lifelong Eagles fan Lori Miele spent $22,000 on four tickets for the game and ducked flying plastic beads alongside her husband along the bustling parade route. "I was going to catch a couple beads and - whack! - I get smacked right in the face," said Miele. "But it's a lot of fun, it's worth it."
