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The National
6 days ago
- General
- The National
King Charles hails Oxford's internationally renowned Islamic centre
A pioneering centre of Islamic learning has marked its 40th anniversary in Oxford as King Charles III paid tribute to its scholarship and progress. The monarch on Thursday lauded the work of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in broadening understanding of the Islamic world in the United Kingdom. The ornate dedicated building, an affiliate of the University of Oxford, now stands as one of the architectural treasures of the so-called city of dreaming spires. King Charles said the centre "started off in little more than a hut but was now an internationally renowned institution – now housed in these spectacular surroundings – hosting a plethora of fascinating speakers over the years, creating countless opportunities for young and old alike, and forging lifelong friendships along the way". He added: "The centre's ongoing commitment to objective scholarship and international co-operation, underpinned by principles of dialogue, deep understanding and mutual respect, is more imperative than ever in today's world. "I need hardly say I am extremely heartened that the centre continues to play such a significant role in that globally critical endeavour. Indeed, the spark of ambition with which the centre was founded all those years ago remains undimmed." One of the guests at the ceremony was Prince Turki bin Faisal, the former ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the UK and the US, who paid tribute to the founders of the centre. He recalled that its first year budget was £70,000 ($94,000) donated by Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah. The guiding force behind the centre has been director Farhan Nizami, who was praised by King Charles on Thursday for his vision for the school. As patron, the then-Prince Charles gave a landmark lecture on 'Islam and the West' that set the tone for his work on how religions can thrive through mutual respect and shared concern for the challenges facing humanity. The distinguished lecture series launched on that day has since featured annual visits by heads of state, politicians and leading academics. The centre received a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth II in 2012. The 40th anniversary visit from the monarch will involved the establishment of the King Charles III wing. A new programme carrying his name will bring together a fellowship, the Young Muslim Leadership programme, as well as conferences on the environment and sustainability. Prince Turki, who is chairman of the board of trustees, said there was strong support from the region for students at the centre, including scholarships in the name of the late King Abdullah of Jordan, the late Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia, and King Salman.
Atlantic
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Should You Be Having More Babies?
Dean Spears does not want to alarm you. The co-author of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People argues that alarmist words such as crisis or urgent will just detract from the cold, hard numbers, which show that in roughly 60 years, the world population could plummet to a size not seen for centuries. Alarmism might also make people tune out, which means they won't engage with the culturally fraught project of asking people—that is, women—to have more babies. Recently, in the United States and other Western countries, having or not having children is sometimes framed as a political affiliation: You're either in league with conservative pronatalists, or you're making the ultimate personal sacrifice to reduce your carbon footprint. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Spears makes the case for more people. He discusses the population spike over human history and the coming decline, and how to gingerly move the population discussion beyond politics. The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: There are those that would have us believe that having babies—or not having babies—is a political act, something that transmits your allegiance to one cultural movement or another. On the right, J. D. Vance wants, quote, 'more babies in the United States,' while Elon Musk does his part, personally, to answer the call. Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA said this to an audience of young conservative women: Charlie Kirk: We have millions of young women that are miserable. You know, the most miserable and depressed people in America are career-driven, early-30-something women. It's not my numbers. It's the Pew Research numbers. They're most likely to say that they're upset, they're depressed, they're on antidepressants. Do you know who the happiest women in America are? Married women with lots of children, by far. [ Applause ] Rosin: On the political left and elsewhere, people agonize about whether to have children at all: for environmental reasons, or money reasons, or I just don't want to spend my time that way reasons. Woman 1: Get ready with me while I tell you all the reasons why I don't want to have kids. Woman 2: I want to spend my money on what I want to spend my money on. I don't want another human life dictating what I'm going to do. Woman 3: I think you are absolutely crazy to have a baby if you're living in America right now. Woman 4: Some of us aren't having kids, because we can't justify bringing them into this type of world. Woman 5: How are we going to have children if we can't even afford ourselves? Rosin: But if you move the discussion outside politics and into just sheer demographics—how many humans, ideally, do we want on Earth?—a whole different conversation is beginning about a potential crisis coming that we are not paying attention to, at least by some people's accounts. I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Around the world, and in wealthy countries in particular, the birth rate is dropping. Today, the birth rate in the U.S. is 1.6 babies per woman, significantly below the required replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. We're used to hearing conservatives talk about the need for 'lots of children.' But today we are hearing from someone outside this political debate about why everyone—liberals in particular—should care about depopulation. Dean Spears: A lot of the traditionalists out there are saying, Low birth rates? Well, what we need is a return to rigid, unequal gender roles, and they want to roll things backwards and think that'll fix the birth rate. But that's the wrong response. Rosin: That is Dean Spears, an economist at UT Austin and co-author of a new book, After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. I talked to Dean about why we should care about depopulation. [ Music ] Rosin: I grew up in the shadow of the Paul Ehrlich book The Population Bomb. I was actually a high-school debater, and we were always making the argument, Oh, we're headed towards a degree of overpopulation that's going to explode the Earth. Like, that was so much in the consciousness. The idea that more people equals bad, it was just deeply ingrained, and it still kind of is for young people. So what's incorrect about that argument? Spears: So I think the most important part of that is the environment. And there's something importantly right there. We do have big environmental challenges, and people cause them. Human activity causes greenhouse-gas emissions and has other destructive consequences. And so it's really natural to think that the way to protect the environment is to have fewer humans. And maybe we would be in a different position right now with the environment if the population trajectory had been different in decades and centuries past. But that's not really the question we face right now. The question we face right now is: Given our urgent environmental problems, are fewer people the solution? And fewer people aren't the solution now. And so here's one way to think about it. Consider the story of particle air pollution in China. [ Music ] Spears: In 2013, China faced a smog crisis. Particulate air pollution from fires, coal plants, and vehicle exhaust darkened the sky. Newspapers around the world called it the airpocalypse.' The United States' embassy in Beijing rated the air pollution a reading of 755 on a scale of zero to 500. This stuff is terrible for children's health and survival, and older adult mortality too. So what happened next? In the decade that followed this airpocalypse, China grew by 50 million people. That's an addition larger than the entire population of Canada or Argentina. And so if the story is right that population growth always makes environmental problems worse, we might wonder: How much worse did the air pollution in China get? But the answer is that over that same decade, particulate air pollution in China declined by half. That was because policy changed, because the public and leaders there decided that the smog was unacceptable. There's new regulations. They shut down coal plants. They enforced new rules. And it's not just China—over the last decade, global average exposure to particulate air pollution has fallen, even as the world's population has grown by over 750 million people. And so I tell this story not because climate change is going to be as straightforward as air pollution has been—as particle air pollution has—but just to challenge the story that environmental damage has to move in tandem with population size. Every time we've made progress against environmental challenges before, it's been by changing what we do, changing policy, doing something different. So the way we responded to the hole in the ozone layer in the '80s was banning chlorofluorocarbons. The way we responded to lead in gas in the 1970s was with the Clean Air Act, and same thing for acid rain and sulfur dioxide in the 1990s. People do destructive activity, but the way we stop that is by stopping the destructive activity with better policy and better enforcement, and implementing better technologies. We've never solved a problem like that before with less people. Rosin: Let's lay some groundwork just on the numbers—like, what actually is happening with the world population. Your book is called After the Spike, which is a very dramatic phrase. Can you explain the spike? Spears: So the spike is our term for the upslope that's happened, that's brought us here. So for a very long time, the global human population was pretty small: 10,000 years ago, there were less than 5 million people. But that started to change a few hundred years ago, when we got better at keeping one another alive, and especially keeping our children alive, with interventions like sanitation and the germ theory of disease. So there were a billion of us in 1800, doubling to 2 billion 100 years later, and quadrupling since then. So that upslope to today is what we call the 'spike.' But all along, while the population has been growing, birth rates have been falling. So falling birth rates is nothing new, which is something you might miss in this new discourse around it. Birth rates have been falling for decades or centuries. The only reason the population's been growing has been because mortality rates, especially child-mortality rates, have been falling. So eventually, we'll get to a year when there are more deaths than births. The UN projects that'll be in the 2080s, and then the size of the world population will peak and begin to decline. Rosin: That population decline that comes after the spike? It's unprecedented, a freefall, looking over the edge of the cliff. That, for Spears, is the unnerving part. After the population peaks in about 60 years, it's not expected to then plateau or stabilize. If birth rates stay the same, it will continue to drop without end, bringing the global population back down to a size not seen for centuries, possibly eventually all the way down to zero. [ Music ] Rosin: But I'm still trying to understand why. Why are birth rates dropping in the first place? Spears: This is something where everybody has a theory, and everybody's theory is different if you ask different professors. And, you know, I think none of them really explained the bigness of falling birth rates, the fact that low and falling birth rates are found around the world in societies that are really different from one another. And the trend's been going down for a long time. So you might hear social conservatives talk about—'the problem,' in their mind, would be the retreat from marriage or retreat from religiosity or just feminism itself. But let's look at the facts. Latin America is a place where about 90 percent of people tell Pew surveyors that they're Christian, and it has a birth rate of 1.8. India, for almost everybody, religion is a part of their lives, and the birth rate is below 2.0. Also, when you think about marriage, India is a place where almost everybody gets married, more often than not an arranged marriage, so a fairly traditionalist one. South Korea—you know, for the sort of theory that would blame the gender revolution or feminism, look at South Korea. That's a very unequal society—the worst gender-wage gap in the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]—nobody's idea of a feminist place, and it has the lowest birth rate of all. Rosin: Okay. So far people listening to this could be like, Great numbers, whatever. Like, we were above 2.0. Now we're below 2.0. And yet, this is something that's alarming to you, which is really important to understand because it is very not intuitive. I feel like many people alive now, they're very conscious of what they think of as their carbon footprint and what they can do to reduce it—you know, drive less, fly less—and then the agonizing discussion very alive among the younger generations about not having kids. So let's really understand why it's a problem. Like, is that not a valid concern, the concern that a lot of people have in their heads? Spears: Okay, so a few things to touch on there. One is exactly this difference between, you're saying, 1.8 and 2.2 or something. We might not even see it, walking around in society. But that's what would make the difference between population growth and population decline. Now, I don't want to—you said—see this as alarming. I think it's important to be careful around that sort of language. We're talking about a change that's coming decades from now. The UN puts it in the 2080s, and I don't think it helps anything to overstate the crisis or overstate the urgency. I think this is important to be talking about now because it's going to be a big change and because nobody has all the answers yet. But I don't want to, you know, call it a crisis in the way that people do when they say we shouldn't be careful. I think just the opposite: What we need to do is be having a careful and thoughtful conversation about it. But yes, having said that, I do think that we should be asking whether this future of depopulation, which is now the most likely future, is one that we should welcome or we should want something else instead. Rosin: So you're making the argument that we're taking for granted that it's fine, or we're just walking blindly into a certain future, but we should actually think about it because this other future could be much better. Spears: That's right. That's right. Yeah. Rosin: So why? Because, I mean, we'll get to this in a moment, but I think you're really going to have to convince people, and particularly women, for a lot of different reasons that we'll get into. So what's the strongest case for why this is a better future to have more people on Earth or a stable number of people on Earth? Spears: Exactly. So is depopulation the best future? Depopulation, you know, generation after generation for the long-term future? The first thing to say is that the alternative to that doesn't have to be unending population growth forever. You know, another alternative that we often overlook is population stabilization. And it could be stabilization at a level lower than today's. So probably, no matter what we do now, the size of the world population is going to peak and begin to decline. The question is whether we would someday want that decline to stop, you know, maybe at 4 billion, maybe at 3 billion—I don't know—maybe at 2 billion. If we want any of those things, then in that future, we would need birth rates to rise back up to 2.0, and nobody really knows how to achieve that. [ Music ] Spears: Here's one reason why depopulation matters and why we might want to avoid it and have stabilization instead: because we're all made better off by sharing the world with more other people—other people alive alongside us and alive before us. One reason is that other people make the discoveries and have the ideas that improve our lives. Other people are where science and knowledge comes from. Think about the world today compared to the world 50 years ago. Life expectancy is greater today in every country. Global poverty has declined by so much that the number of poor people have been falling, even as the size of populations has been growing. And all of these things have happened. We have more to eat. We have antibiotics. We have glasses to correct our vision, shorter workdays, better homes, more medicines and vaccines. We know how to farm more efficiently. We know how to organize a kindergarten, a cancer-drug trial, a parliamentary democracy. And humanity learned all of these things because of the people who came before us. One reason that a stabilized future would be better than depopulation is that there's still more progress to be done. Progress doesn't happen automatically. We need people to get us there. And if we don't have one another, if there's not as many of us contributing and learning by doing, then we won't make as fast progress in accumulating those things that could continue to make lives better, continue the fight against poverty, continue to figure out how to cure cancers that we can't now cure. Rosin: This is actually a quite beautiful notion of humanity or vision of humanity, just this idea that collective knowledge is a good; more of it is better. I think I've come to associate, particularly at this moment in time, you know, collective action as oppressive or—at least, I have a lot of examples of it now in my world, where masses of people getting together can also cause disinformation and push us backwards. And maybe that is just very present in our minds right now. Spears: Yeah, I mean, it's not the whole story. It's not just about innovation. I think that there are other ways that strangers' lives are not only good for them, but good for you. So, you know, here's another way of looking at it: We're used to thinking of other people as, potentially, rivals that consume the resources that we want, and part of what I'm trying to say is that we should think of other people as win-win. Just like we reject that sort of zero-sum thinking in other ways and in international trade or immigration, all of us who are able to see other people as win-win in those ways should see other people as win-win here—because when other people want and need things that you want and need, they make it more likely that you're going to get it. So, I mean, where are you going to find a well-functioning public-transportation system—where there are more people, or where there are fewer people? Where are you going to find the special medical care that you might need for you or a loved one? How are we going to build a green-energy infrastructure? You are more likely to find it in a place where other people want and need the same thing. [ Music ] Rosin: After the break: an impossible dilemma for some women, and what men can do about it. [ Break ] Rosin: Now I'd like to talk about the mechanics, like the on-the-ground mechanics: how you would do it, what the discussion would look like in its details. So if we start with the U.S., which we are the most familiar with, the drive for kids here is strongly, particularly now, associated with conservative politics nudging women into more traditional gender roles. What do you do about that? Like, having children's been politicized the way so many things have been politicized in the U.S. Spears: I think the first thing to do is to stand up and say, 'That's wrong.' It's not surprising to hear that conservatives want to return to unequal gender roles or roll back the gender revolution. But I think it's important for liberals not to accept that logic, the logic that halting or reversing the fertility decline has to make things worse for women, because what they're doing is: They're making an assumption there that raising the next generation is solely women's responsibility—and it's everybody's responsibility. And I think that gender inequality is what helped get us into this situation; it's not going to be what gets us out. If more people all along had recognized that raising the next generation is something that all of us should do, that we shouldn't have this wall between care work and 'important work,' but in fact, we all have an interest in the next generation, that it's not just women's responsibility, I think—I'm not saying that everything would be perfect, but I think that we might not be in such a big problem. So let's be a little bit more precise. What about men, right? I mean, no doubt, the biology of human life is unequal, and the economics and culture of parenting are unequal. And, you know, reproduction will burden women in ways that it will not burden men, but that's not the end of the sentence, because it takes more than nine months to make a new person. It takes many years of parenting and housework and effort of every kind. There's plenty of time over the years and long nights for men to even things out, and we shouldn't pretend that's not possible or that we're helpless against the status quo of inequality. Rosin: Why has that been so stubborn to change? I mean, that's a million-dollar question. I mean, I actually did some research in South Korea, and in gender equality in South Korea. I wrote a chapter of my own book about this, and it was no mystery to me what was happening in South Korea, because the culture had not changed one bit in terms of expectations on women, in terms of what they have to put in for their children, put in for their in-laws, put in for the family, the sort of traditional gender expectations—while women had en masse entered the workforce and were working very long hours. And it truly, of all countries I've ever been to, just seemed impossible. Like, it seemed an impossible dilemma for women. Spears: Right. Like, who's surprised that women are looking at that and saying, 'No, thank you'? We all have an interest in what sort of society we have and what sort of population we have, and if we're heaping all of the burden on just some of us, then yeah—let's not be surprised when they say, 'No, thank you.' Rosin: So what do you do then about the example of the Scandinavian countries, which do have quite a bit of gender equality, at least compared to the United States, which doesn't even have, you know, mandated paid-family leave. And even in countries like that, they haven't managed with all the policies and all the generous maternity leaves, and even piling on paternity leaves have not really managed to nudge that number up. Spears: So I think there are a few things to think about there. One is that I bet if we went and we asked women in Sweden, they would tell us that there are still some notable imperfections there. Two is that even if, just as a weird thought experiment, humans had been asexual, like a starfish or something, all along, and there just weren't such things as men and women, we might still be facing a future of low birth rates because, you know, so much is changing. There are so many other opportunities for work, for education, for leisure that fewer people still might be choosing to have children. So I don't think there is one silver bullet for this whole explanation. I think it's an important part of it and an important first step. But I think the third and the most important thing is that it's not a short path out of this situation. [ Music ] Spears: It's going to be something that happens over generations. I mean, right now, even in whatever you might consider to be the society that's closest to what we would call ideal—and no one's there yet—you still have people who are, you know, young people today in their 20s who grew up 10, 15, 20 years ago seeing their parents struggle to combine parenting with all of the other things they value, whatever that is for them, and go into adulthood with the expectation that Yeah, society isn't going to support me. There are hard trade-offs here. And so it's an intergenerational thing, where maybe if we have a few generations of people growing up and seeing a society where parenting is fairer, parenting is more supported, you know, we make it easier for people to combine choosing parenting with choosing other things—whether for some people that's work, for some people that's friendship, for some people that's rest, or whatever it is that matters to you. Maybe we get a generation that sees that they talk to their kids differently. Their kids talk to their kids differently. And maybe on that time scale, we start to see people having a different idea of what might be possible for their lives, because we've proven it to them. But I think there's some time; there's some work to do proving it to people, and we're nowhere near that yet. Rosin: I mean, as you're talking, I'm remembering that when I had my first child and I was a full-time working person, I did have this profound sense, Oh, I'm alone here. I'm an inconvenience. There isn't a system or a structure. Nobody's gonna figure out anything for me. There's no established pattern that I can walk into. This is all, like, an individual operation. And that's very daunting. Spears: I don't know how old your kids are, but what if one day you tell that to them, right? And then they're making their family decisions, having seen or heard about you going through that experience. Right? That's why I think this is something that's gonna have a long tail over time. Rosin: Right. So what you're trying to do is just (1) start the conversation and (2) not let the right hijack the conversation, which is very strongly what's happening right now. Spears: Right. And part of the problem is pretending that it's a short-term policy solution, that we could pass a piece of legislation. I mean, I could tell you about pieces of legislation that I would like, and they're not the ones that are getting passed, but that's not the timescale we're operating on. I mean, if Kamala Harris had defeated Donald Trump, instead of the other way around, a lot would be better, you know, including, close to my heart, foreign aid. But I don't think the birth rate is going to be any different at the end of four years, because it's just not the sort of thing that, for all of the talk, short-term legislation is going to do anything about. Rosin: Right. So let's talk about what you've seen in doing this research. Have you ever seen any experiment anywhere in any country that was actually successful in increasing the birth rate? Spears: I wish I could tell you something more optimistic, but no, at least not in the sort of long-term, sustained way that would bring it to the level that would stabilize the population. The Human Fertility Database records something called 'completed cohort fertility,' which is how many children people have over the course of a lifetime. And that's the sort of thing that matters here. You know, since 1950, in these data, there have been 26 countries where this lifetime average birth rate has fallen below 1.9, and in none of them has it ever gone back up to 2.0. And that includes many countries where, you know, politicians will tell you that there are pronatalist programs in place to raise the birth rate. So there's no evidence that anything like that will bring it back up. Whatever's going to get us there is going to have to be something much newer. I mean, I'm making the case, and in this book we're making the case, that a stabilized future population would be better than global depopulation. And we also think that a stabilized population is compatible with commitments to environmental stewardship, reproductive freedom, and progressive priorities. And so what we're asking for right now is for other people to think so, to be part of this conversation, to be able to have people standing up and saying, Look—if somebody chooses to have no children or a few children, it's not for anyone else to say whether they're making a mistake, but all of us together are making a mistake when we make it hard for people to choose larger families or to have children. [ Music ] Spears: It's not surprising that the right thinks that the solution here is traditionalism. But for too long, the left has sort of granted them that premise and said that there has to be a firewall between, on the one hand, caring about the future of the population and birth rates, or, on the other hand, being committed to reproductive freedom and the right to abortion and contraception and gender equity. And what we are here to say is that we care about both of these things, and we need to reject that split. I think society is at the beginning of facing up to this challenge. It's been happening for a long time, but we've only been talking about it recently. And so most people haven't yet come to terms with what we're facing. Now, we wouldn't have written this book calling to avoid depopulation if we didn't think it were possible to change course. You know, we think it's possible. But, you know, right now, jumping to a policy solution is probably the wrong move, and that's what we hear people talking about. This isn't something that's going to be turned around in one presidential term. I think the next step is for more people to share a belief that we should want something to change, that that's a necessary precursor, but there are a lot of minds to change first. Rosin: Well, Dean, thank you so much for laying out the argument for us. Spears: Thank you so much for having me. [ Music ] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and Kevin Townsend. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Luis Parrales. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
USA Today
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Michelle Obama says she feels 'completely free' for the first time
Michelle Obama made a surprising admission on her "IMO" podcast July 9. The former first lady, more outspoken than ever in recent months, took to her hit show to discuss her friendships and this season of change in her life. "This stage in life for me," Obama said during the episode, "is the first time that I have been completely free." Obama cohosts "IMO" with brother Craig Robinson (no relation to the actor/comedian), and in the candid episode she explained that she is at a point "where every choice that I make in my life is not about my husband (former President Barack Obama), not about his career, not about what my kids need or where they're going — it's totally about me." The episode's guest Julia Louis-Dreyfus ("Veep") responded that this stage of Obama's life must be "a real release." The Obamas shared two daughters, 26-year-old filmmaker Malia Ann − who recently changed her professional name − and University of Southern California alum Sasha Obama, 24. During an April episode of her podcast, Obama addressed her choice to skip President Donald Trump's second inauguration ceremony. "My decision to skip the inauguration – or my decision to make choices at the beginning of this year that suited me – were met with such ridicule and criticism," Obama explained. "People couldn't believe that I was saying no for any other reason. They had to assume that my marriage was falling apart." That same month, she previously dismissed rumors that she and the former president are headed toward divorce. While speaking on the "Work in Progress" podcast with "One Tree Hill" star Sophia Bush, Obama discussed having the freedom to pursue and decline different opportunities since leaving the White House. She said whenever she makes "a choice for myself," people are quick to assume her marriage is over. "We as women, I think we struggle with disappointing people," she told Bush. "They couldn't even fathom that I was making a choice for myself. That they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing. That this couldn't be a grown woman just making a set of decisions herself. But that's what that's what society does to us." Contributing: Anthony Robledo
Hans India
02-07-2025
- General
- Hans India
‘Mega PTM 2.0' to be held across state on July 10
Vijayawada: The department of school education on Tuesday issued orders to conduct the 'Mega PTM 2.0' programme across all government, private aided, unaided schools and junior colleges in the state on July 10. As per the directions, necessary preparatory steps should be taken to ensure the success of this program. Samagra Shiksha state project director B Srinivasa Rao, issued operational guidelines to additional district project coordinators of Samagra Shiksha, district education officers, regional joint directors and district collectors regarding the implementation of the programme. He requested RJDs to coordinate with DEOs, APCs, and mandal educational officers (MEOs) within their jurisdiction and ensure close monitoring. He clarified that the Mega PTM, earlier scheduled for July 5, will now be conducted on July 10. On this occasion, director of school education Vijay Rama Raju V and Samagra Shiksha SPD B Srinivasa Rao, addressed RJDs, DEOs, APCs and other officers via video conference and gave necessary instructions. They said the Parent-Teacher Meeting (PTM) serves as a key platform to strengthen the bond between parents, teachers, and schools and PTMs help parents understand their child's academic progress, behavior, and social challenges, while also allowing teachers to seek their cooperation for the child's benefit. As per the orders, the Mega PTM 2.0 will be held in 61,135 educational institutions, with an expected participation of 2,28,21,454 people, including 74,96,228 students, 3,32,770 teachers and 1,49,92,456 parents, donors and others. Teachers will provide Holistic Progress Cards to parents, helping them understand their child's academic development. Under the supervision of the headmaster, an open meeting will be conducted to present school performance, infrastructure gaps and future action plans.
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Progress Software Acquires Nuclia, an Innovator in Agentic RAG AI Technology
Company adds easy-to-use agentic RAG-as-a-service product for organizations to automate and retrieve verifiable, high-quality AI search and generative answers BURLINGTON, Mass., June 30, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Progress Software (Nasdaq: PRGS), the trusted provider of AI-powered digital experience and infrastructure software, today announced the acquisition of Nuclia, an innovator in agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI solutions. Nuclia provides a unique agentic RAG-as-a-service product enabling organizations to automatically leverage their own proprietary business information to retrieve verifiable, accurate answers using GenAI. 'Nuclia's easy-to-use, self-service SaaS product democratizes the use of trustworthy and verifiable GenAI,' said Yogesh Gupta, CEO of Progress Software. 'Small to mid-sized businesses, as well as large global corporations, can quickly and easily reap the benefits of sophisticated agentic RAG capabilities using Nuclia SaaS without the need for significant upfront investment.' 'The rapid evolution of AI has transformed how organizations interact with information, creating new possibilities for more accurate, dynamic, and context-aware systems,' said Eudald Camprubí, CEO and Co-founder at Nuclia. 'Agentic RAG is a cutting-edge approach that combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with business' own proprietary data to provide accurate and trustworthy answers. Our team at Nuclia is proud of what we have built, and we are excited to join Progress to continue to advance this important technology.' Nuclia will extend the end-to-end value of the Progress Data Platform while creating opportunities to reach a broader market of organizations looking to easily leverage the value of agentic RAG technology. The acquisition was signed and closed today and is immaterial to Progress' financials. To learn more about Nuclia, go to About Progress SoftwareProgress Software (Nasdaq: PRGS) empowers organizations to achieve transformational success in the face of disruptive change. Our software enables our customers to develop, deploy and manage responsible AI-powered applications and digital experiences with agility and ease. Customers get a trusted provider in Progress, with the products, expertise and vision they need to succeed. Over 4 million developers and technologists at hundreds of thousands of enterprises depend on Progress. Learn more at About NucliaNuclia, the RAG-as-a-Service company, is revolutionizing data-driven systems and processes to deliver previously unimaginable business value. Organizations across all sectors grapple with a common challenge: how to extract answers and unlock value from their internal data, both tacit and explicit. Nuclia uniquely solves this problem by converting this extensive and valuable repository of data into actionable, accessible knowledge. Learn more at Progress and Nuclia are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Press Contact:Kim BakerProgress Software+1-800-477-6473pr@ in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
