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An Assamese girl from Assam, 21-year-old Arani S Hazarika, has become the first Assamese to graduate in Sanskrit and Classical Hindi from Oxford University. She graduated on August 9 with a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford's ceremonial auditorium.Hazarika studied at Balliol College under the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

Arani's program combined Sanskrit with Classical Hindi, with touches on language structure, literature, and historical texts. University records, according to her family, also indicate she is the first Assamese student to graduate from Oxford with a BA in Sanskrit. Her father, Partha Pratim Hazarika, an old journalist from Guwahati, confirmed the distinction. "As per available records, this is for the first time an Assamese has graduated in Sanskrit from Oxford," he said.

Arani reached Oxford soon after her Class 12 board exams.

She was awarded a place on the university's BA Sanskrit course and received the Simon and June Li Undergraduate Scholarship for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. She began the course in October 2022.

For her PhD, Hazarika focused her thesis on the standardization of a 15th-century Sanchi manuscript of the Dakshinpat Satra in Majuli, which is one of the main Vaishnavite monasteries of Assam.

The assignment involved rigorous examination of the language features, writing style, and problems of preservation of the manuscript.

Her own academic success has earned her an invitation to remain at Oxford for a Master's degree in the same field. She has decided to enroll for her MA from Balliol College under the same department at the end of 2025. 

Arani's achievement is an exception of global recognition for regional origin. Sanskrit, though an ancient language, continues to be taught at foreign universities as part of general courses in linguistics, philosophy, and ancient literature.

The Oxford Sanskrit programme has trained scholars from around the world, but Hazarika's admission and graduation position Assam among them.

For the scholarly sphere of Assam, the milestone will surely encourage more students to turn to specialized subjects and pursue them at the world's best institutes. It also points a finger towards the possibility of Assamese literary and cultural history research in international forums.

Hazarika's transition from undergraduate to postgraduate studies at Oxford is another part of the story. Until now, her graduation provides a benchmark for other state and Northeast students aspiring to combine indigenous scholarship with global platforms.

Few tales move quicker in Silicon Valley than the one about a billionaire offer and someone who is silly enough to say no. Such is what went down when Andrew Tulloch, a humble but highly rated Australian computer scientist, rejected an offer from Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company, an offer of as much as $1.5 billion over six years, reports the Wall Street Journal.

But Tulloch's choice was not surprising. It was bolstered by a career of intellectual scholarship, globally leading research, and an education that is the model for AI supremacy. From charting Australia's best school marks to leading the leaderboards at Cambridge, Tulloch's career is one of sustained excellence and deliberate decision. 

By this point, Tulloch had established himself as one of Australia's finest young minds.

Making maths master at Cambridge

Incentivized by a thirst for greater theoretical learning, Tulloch traveled around the world to attend Cambridge University, applying to the extremely competitive Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, commonly accepted as the toughest global postgraduate mathematics course.

At Trinity College, Tulloch received his Master of Mathematical Statistics in statistics and machine learning. 

This blend of natural intelligence, mathematical accuracy, and global training were the precursors to his next AI contribution.

Beyond the written word: Goldman Sachs to OpenAI

Tulloch's career followed as neatly as his studies: driven, goal-focused, and aimed. After a brief stint as a strategist at Goldman Sachs, where he employed quantitative modelling to simulate financial markets, he joined employee ranks at Meta (then Facebook) in 2012.

There, over a period of more than a decade, Tulloch helped build the AI foundations that support Meta's products with key contributions to PyTorch, now one of the most widely used machine learning frameworks globally.

In 2023, Tulloch joined OpenAI, where he contributed to the creation of GPT‑4, GPT‑4o, and other forward-looking reason systems. A year or so down the line, in 2025, he co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati: a firm that aims to create transparent, customisable, and secure AI at scale.

When $1.5 billion isn't enough

It wasn't long before Thinking Machines Lab opened that Meta came knocking—in this case, in the form of a aggressive effort to hire Tulloch and his team. WSJ reports that Tulloch was offered an incentive package worth potentially as much as $1.5 billion over six years. That included stock options, bonuses, and long-term incentives.

But Tulloch did not accept. In fact, none of his team members agreed to work at Meta.

Why? To Tulloch, it was always about more than money. The opportunity to create something with meaning, something that he believed would help him achieve his vision of responsible AI, was more important than a billion-dollar check.

Lessons from a billion-dollar rejection

Andrew Tulloch's academic life, ranging from a flawless TER score to leading Cambridge's most rigorous program of mathematics, is not one of prodigal genius. It is one of discipline, curiosity, and looking to the long term.

In a time that is so cut-obsessed, Tulloch's story teaches us that solid foundations in education still count more than ever before. He reminds us that sometimes it is not the largest thing that determines your destiny, but the largest purpose.

In a milestone for American students' learning, the US Department of Education released new rules on schools implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in the classroom to further enhance student progress. The guide establishes how federal grant funding can be used to fund AI-tutoring, college and career advising, and customized instruction content if done ethically with human oversight in the foreground.

What it means for students

The legislation is not requiring the use of AI but nominally permits schools and grantees to spend money on AI technology that will be helpful to teachers, tutors, and academic advisors. On the side of the students, it would mean in the future more customized learning spaces where content might be modified in real time according to learning needs.

Mass high-impact tutoring facilitated by AI would be accessible to those who need it, and web counseling systems would desilo course enrollment, financial planning, and work-to-post-secondary transitions.

More generally, the Department is challenging schools to harness AI to enhance, not supplant, existing teachers in the classroom. Maximum access, equity, and student success are the Department's top concerns.

Three ways schools can use AI today

Schools can use federal funds to

Enhance instruction: This entails developing or obtaining AI-based tools that adapt content to student performance and give real-time feedback.

 AI-based tutoring systems may supplement human tutors, offering ongoing academic support and matching students to services based on their individual knowledge gaps. AI technologies will allow students to discover potential careers, academic preparedness, and web counseling sites that facilitate postsecondary readiness.

Five departmental guiding principles

The Department of Education announced that the implementation of AI in education will have to adhere to five principles:

It should be teacher-driven and augment, and never displace, human professionals.

It should be ethical, i.e., how it educates K-12 students to use AI ethically

It should be readable and accessible to students and digitally empowered families

It should be readable and understandable, with infrastructure that parents and teachers can understand

It has to comply in its entirety with all of the data privacy statutes, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)

Why this matters now

The guidance is coming as American schools look for new means to tailor learning and close knowledge gaps following the pandemic. The Department is making opportunity and caution clear by moving to officially sanction using artificial intelligence through the use of federal funding channels: opportunity and caution. The Department is calling on the schools to collaborate with researchers and communities and apply AI in a manner that will help students and befit.

To students, particularly those underachieving in school or wondering what to do with their life after school, AI is going to become a part of their reality that operates behind the scenes to help them in good time and provide more precise instructions.

The official order came out from the US Department of Education on July 22, 2025.

The announcement was made at the first session of the Akhil Bhartiya Shiksha Samagam 2025, which was organized on the fifth anniversary of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 on Tuesday.

Four additional leading foreign universities, such as Australia's Victoria University and the UK's University of Bristol, will open campuses in India. At the first meeting of the Akhil Bhartiya Shiksha Samagam 2025, which was held on Tuesday to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, letters of intent to that effect were given to the institutions.  Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan was the primary guest.

 Which four universities are to open campuses in India soon?

The four institutions are Western Sydney University and Victoria University, which will open campuses in Greater Noida and Noida, respectively. Likewise, Australia's La Trobe University will have its presence in Bengaluru. The University of Bristol, from the United Kingdom, will have a Mumbai campus. The initiative follows a University Grants Commission (UGC) provision notified in 2023, under which foreign universities with global rankings among the top 500 can establish campuses independently in India.

Details of partnership with the universities

The news brings to 13 the number of foreign universities that have opened or plan to open campuses in India. Western Sydney University, one of the top public research universities, will provide undergraduate degrees in business marketing and business analytics as well as postgraduate MBAs in innovation & entrepreneurship and in logistics & supply chain management.

It is already associated with Indian organisations such as IISc, ICAR, AIIA and Jal Shakti Ministry. Victoria University, with its strong foothold in vocational and tertiary education in Australia and internationally, will be providing undergraduate courses in business, data science, and cybersecurity, in addition to postgraduate studies in IT and management.

La Trobe is also a partner university of the India-Australia Sports Partnership and collaborates with AVENU Learning on Indian student diploma streams. La Trobe University, which has a reputation for research in smart cities, molecular sciences, and biotechnology, will be providing business, computer science, and public health undergraduate courses from its Bengaluru campus.

It operates a Joint PhD Academy with IIT Kanpur and is a member of the ASCRIN network along with IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani, and TISS.

Germany is famously known for providing free education to international as well as domestic students. Several German universities provide Master of Science (MSc) programs - most of them completely in English - for winter and summer semesters, which usually start in September and April, respectively.

Following are the full details of the best German universities with free Master's in biomedical and medical sciences:

1. Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg

Otto von Guericke University provides MSc in Biochemical Engineering free of charge. The program is available in English language alone and hence no German language is needed. It aims to build up scientific excellence alongside analytical ability to research intricate biomedical and technical interactions based on elementary principles of science.

2. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen

RWTH Aachen offers MSc in Biomedical Engineering, all English-medium with internship and master thesis. It is for international students as well as home students and is of four semesters' duration. Application for Winter 2025 programme is still open until October.

3. Hamburg University of Applied Sciences

MSc in Biomedical Engineering for three semesters and is conducted entirely in English. Application can be made for the summer semester (April 2026) from December 1, 2025 to January 15, 2026 on the official DAAD website.

4. Technische Hochschule Lubeck

TH Lubeck provides a four-semester Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering at all levels of academic background. The programme is primarily in English but German language versions are also provided as an option. It is designed specifically for students who wish to enter careers in research, industry or the academy. Application for winter intake for non-EU students now closes, but information on next year's summer intake will be on the university site in due course.

5. Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Rheinbach

The school has a four-semesters MSc Biomedical Sciences that provides theory and practice so that the students are well equipped for useful professional careers in the medical sciences.

The courses are funded by the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), or the German Academic Exchange Service, that spon

The Department of Education on Monday said it is opening an investigation into Duke University and Duke Law Journal over reported racial discrimination in choosing new editors.

The Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education (OCR) cited a report that the Law Journal distributed a packet to school "affinity groups" in 2024 concerning the application process for entering the Journal next year. All applicants were required to submit a 12-page memo critiquing an appellate court ruling as well as a 500-word personal statement which would be graded on a point system and their first-year GPA.

But applicants from these "affinity groups" were allegedly offered the chance to earn extra points if their statements mentioned their "race or ethnicity" and as many as 10 points for explaining how their "membership in an underrepresented group" fostered "diverse voices."

The OCR suspects that this practice might be an enforceable violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"If Duke gives preferential treatment to law journal or medical school applicants who are illegal if it's on the basis of those students' immutable characteristics, that is not only an insult to civil rights law, but to the meritocratic nature of academic achievement," Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote in a statement. "Blatantly discriminatory practices prohibited by the Constitution, antidiscrimination law, and Supreme Court precedent have become all too commonplace in our schools. The Trump Administration will no longer stand for it."

McMahon, in a joint letter to Duke University with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., asked the university to "review all policies and practices at Duke Health for the illegal use of race preferences, take immediate steps to reform all those that illegally consider race or ethnicity to confer benefits or advantages, and give clear and verifiable assurances to the government that Duke's new policies will be executed faithfully in the future—by making all organizational, leadership, and personnel adjustments necessary to make sure that the necessary reforms will be lasting."

The department is also asking Duke University establish a "Merit and Civil Rights Committee" to aid in the resolution of additional civil rights abuses.

Fox News Digital contacted Duke University and Duke Law Journal for comment but did not immediately hear back.

Duke University has been criticized several times for racial preferences and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) pushback in the last year.

Earlier, Fox News Digital has covered a 2021 plan named "Dismantling Racism and Advancing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Medicine" for Duke Medical School. The handbook referenced standards like dress codes, punctuality and self-reliance as examples of "White supremacy culture."

Dr. Kendall Conger also informed Fox News Digital in 2024 that he was discharged from Duke University's health system after he spoke out against the university's promise not to engage in racism, which framed racism as a "public health crisis."

"It was not so much a commitment to improved medicine, as a commitment to left-wing ideology. And I felt that if I didn't speak up, I was abiding by imprimatur," Conger said back then.