Trump signs order on black colleges
President WASHINGTON — Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday aimed at signaling his commitment to historically black colleges and universities, saying the schools will be “an absolute priority for this White House.”
HBCU presidents are hoping Congress will bolster Trump’s actions to strengthen the schools with dramatically increased funding in the upcoming federal budget. They are calling for $25 billion for infrastructure, college readiness, financial aid and other priorities. Under President Barack Obama’s administration, historically black colleges and universities received $4 billion over seven years.
“The next step is the budget. You cannot have mission without money,” Thurgood Marshall College Fund President Johnny Taylor told reporters outside the White House after the signing ceremony.
Many of the college presidents also went to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to lobby Congress for more funding. Taylor said the $25 billion is needed to make up for years of underfunding and would cover the country’s more than 100 HBCUs.
Several presidents and HBCU advocacy organizations echoed Taylor.
“This is a great day for my membership and a great day for America,” said Lezli Baskerville, head of the National Association For Equal Opportunity in Education, an umbrella group for public, private and landgrant HBCUs.
GOP lawmakers said there were currently no concrete plans for increased funding. Several of them attended meetings Tuesday that Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., arranged with HBCU presidents, GOP officials and business leaders.
Scott said he and Walker planto personally push for more money for black colleges, and “hopefully we will be more successful than they have been in the last few years.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, a member of the House Budget Committee, was more skeptical.
“There is no substance at this point,” she said Monday, adding that she was waiting to see the contents of Trump’s executive order and what Congress does during the budget process.
Trump’s order moves the Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the Department of Education into the executive office of the White House. It directs the initiative to work with the private sector to strengthen the fiscal stability of HBCUS, make infrastructure improvements, provide job opportunities for students, work with secondary schools to create a college pipeline and increase access and opportunity for federal grants and contracts.
It does not specify how much federal money the colleges should receive.
The moves are among the actions some college presidents said they would like to see from the new administration. Some of them decided to come to Washington over the objections of students and alumni, saying they can ill afford to play politics while Trump moves quickly to set priorities.
Larry Robinson, interim president of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, said he felt it was incumbent upon black college leaders to engage federal officials, “regardless of who’s sitting in the White House, or what their political affiliations are.”
Usually people NEW YORK — don’t notice the “cloud”
— unless it turns into a massive storm. Which was the case Tuesday when Amazon’s huge cloud-computing service suffered a major outage.
Amazon Web Services, by far the world’s largest provider of internet-based computing services, suffered an unspecified breakdown in its eastern U.S. region starting about midday Tuesday. The result: unprecedented and widespread performance problems for thousands of websites and apps.
While few services went down completely, thousands of companies had trouble with functions ranging from file sharing to webfeeds to loading any type of data stored on Amazon’s “simple storage service,” known as S3. Amazon services began returning around 4 p.m. EST, and an hour later the company noted on its service site that S3 was recovered and “operating normally.”
The breakdown shows the risks of depending heavily on a few big companies for cloud computing. Amazon’s service is significantly larger by revenue than any of its nearest rivals: Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s Cloud Platform and IBM, according to Forrester Research.
With so few large providers, any outage can have a disproportionate effect. But some analysts argue that the Amazon outage doesn’t prove there’s a problem with cloud computing — it just highlights how reliable the cloud normally is.
Amazon’s problems began when one S3 region based in Virginia began to experience what the company called “increased error rates.”
Amazon S3 stores files and data for companies on remote servers. Amazon started offering it in 2006, and it’s used for everything from building websites and apps to storing images, customer data and customer transactions — “anything you can think about storing in the most cost-effective way possible,” is how Rich Mogull, CEO of data security firm Securosis, puts it.
Since Amazon hasn’t said exactly what happened, it’s hard to know just how serious the outage was.
“We do know it’s bad,” Mogull said. “We just don’t know how bad.”
For S3 customers, the problem affected both “frontend” operations — meaning the websites and apps that users see — and backend data processing that takes place out of sight. Some smaller online services, such as Trello, Scribd and IFTTT, appeared to be down for a while, although all have since recovered.
The corporate message service Slack, by contrast, stayed up, although it reported “degraded service “for some features. Users reported that file sharing in particular appeared to freeze up. Major cloud-computing outages don’t occur very often — perhaps every year or two — but they do happen. In 2015, Amazon’s DynamoDB service, a cloudbased database, had problems that affected companies like Netflix and Medium. But usually providers have workarounds that can get things working again quickly.
“What’s really surprising to me is that there’s no fallback — usually there is some sort of backup plan to move data over, and it will be made available within a few minutes,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.Forrester’s Bartoletti said the problems Tuesday could lead to some Amazon customers storing their data on Amazon’s servers in more than one location, or even shifting to other providers.
“A lot more large companies could look at their application architecture and ask, ‘how could we have insulated ourselves a little bit more?’ “he said. But he added, “I don’t think it fundamentally changes how incredibly reliable the S3 service has been.”