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But Democrats see a changed landscape. The ProPublica report added fodder. But even before the pandemic recession, corporate tax receipts had plunged 40 percent after the Trump tax cuts. Though the 2017 tax law ostensibly lowered the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, the effective business rate has fallen to 8 percent, said Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas, a senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee.

Theres been a big change in voter attitudes on taxes, Mr. Wyden said. In the last 10 years, Republicans always want to talk about taxes, nail those Democrats on taxes, tax-and-spend and all the rest. Now, the American people are sympathetic with our point, which is that everybody ought to pay their fair share.

Democrats are divided about how far to go. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressed Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen last week on Ms. Warrens proposed wealth tax, which would impose a 2 percent surtax on the value of assets owned by people worth more than $50 million and raise at least $3 trillion.

This is about choices, she told a reluctant Ms. Yellen. We can fund universal child care, or we can hand Jeff Bezos enough tax savings to build a superyacht.

Other Democrats, even liberals, are not so sure.

The whole term of a wealth tax scares an awful lot of people who are hoping to achieve some wealth, Mr. Doggett said. We dont want to discourage economic success. We just want to level the playing field.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, is stuck in the middle. As a pro-business Democrat, he was tapped by Mr. Wyden to hash out a corporate tax package with Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a pro-labor Democrat. But he is also a member of the group negotiating the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

He said he was confident there would be unanimous support among Democrats to include the international tax framework in a reconciliation bill that followed a narrower infrastructure compromise, because its just so darned complicated.

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Infrastructure Bill Talks Collide With Democrats Goal to Tax the Rich - The New York Times

Her selection was foreshadowed weeks ago, after the website IrishCentral reported she was set to soon be revealed as Bidens choice, fueling speculation about her future. At the time, two people with knowledge of the process told the Globe that the five-term lawmaker from Easton was being vetted by the Biden administration.

I am deeply honored to be nominated by President Biden for ambassador to Ireland, especially given the Presidents and my own Irish roots, Cronin said in a statement released by the White House Wednesday. If confirmed, I look forward to serving as ambassador and working with our partners in Ireland on both the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.

Her selection could remix House Speaker Ronald Marianos relatively new leadership team. As the Houses majority leader, Cronin was the first woman to be named the chambers number two Democrat, and she has been viewed in the State House as a potential successor to Mariano.

Cronin previously chaired the Legislatures judiciary committee, where she helped usher a sweeping criminal justice overhaul into law in 2018, and last year she was among the Houses chief negotiators on a high-profile police accountability bill.

Elected to the House in 2012, Cronin is also a lawyer and served as an arbitrator in a landmark Catholic clergy sexual-abuse settlement.

Cronin has been among a few people viewed as potential nominees for the post in Ireland, including former US senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Anne Finucane of Bank of America. If confirmed, she would live at an estate in Dublins Phoenix Park, surrounded by 62 acres of lawn and gardens. The property was once described by The New York Times as one of Dublins most spectacular houses.

She is among a second slate of ambassador nominees announced by the Biden administration, which last week unveiled picks for a series of sensitive posts in Mexico and Israel and at NATO.

Cronin is set to join a long list of former Massachusetts elected officials nominated to be diplomats.

Former governor Paul Cellucci left the State House to serve as President George W. Bushs ambassador to Canada, just a few years after his predecessor, former governor Bill Weld, resigned after he was nominated by President Clinton to be ambassador to Mexico. (Weld ultimately withdrew after he was blocked from having a hearing by conservative Republicans in the US Senate.)

Former US senator Scott Brown served as ambassador to New Zealand in the Trump administration; former Boston mayor Ray Flynn was ambassador to the Holy See under Clinton; and former congressman and onetime gubernatorial candidate Brian Donnelly was named ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, also under Clinton.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this story misstated Cronins role in a landmark Catholic clergy sexual abuse settlement. She was an arbitrator. The Globe regrets the error.

Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mattpstout.

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Claire Cronin, Mass. Houses number two Democrat, will be nominated as ambassador to Ireland - The Boston Globe

To the Editor:

As a former staff lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union who, as a civil rights lawyer since then, has concentrated on First Amendment cases, I do not take threats to free speech lightly. But restrictions on speech raise issues that are more complicated than your article implies.

Yes, hate speech is generally protected by the Constitution, but so is equality, and hate speech can often make a mockery of equal rights. What the critics call an abandonment of A.C.L.U.s principles reflects, in fact, a growing awareness of many within the A.C.L.U. that speech and equality are sometimes in conflict, and that context matters.

The point is illustrated by the recent controversy over attempts by college students to block Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopolis and Charles Murray from speaking on their campuses. While the administrators who ran the college bemoaned threats to academic freedom, and liberal critics charged the students with censorship of views they didnt like, the students recognized what it meant to vulnerable students whose lives on predominantly white, elite campuses were often a daily struggle to be targeted by such unrestrained bigotry. They understood as well that even in a place devoted to the free exchange of ideas, little was lost by not hearing Ann Coulter once again say of Muslims, We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.

What students and, now, many within the A.C.L.U. have recognized is that, whether or not speech is protected by the First Amendment, there are some times and some places where it should not be heard.

Alan LevineMiami Beach

To the Editor:

The conflicts within the A.C.L.U. may help us clarify what free speech requires in the 21st century. The A.C.L.U. has supported the First Amendment rights of some very bad people for years, but it is a guardian of free speech, not a law enforcement agency. It fought for the right of far-right groups to parade in downtown Charlottesville, Va., but deserves no blame for the failure of the F.B.I. and the local Virginia authorities to stop the violence.

Still, the A.C.L.U. is and was far from perfect. Neither your news story nor Michelle Goldbergs column (The A.C.L.U. Must Defend Awful Speech, June 8) mention the organizations most egregious failures. In the name of national security, it hesitated to defend Japanese Americans during World War II and all too often refused to take cases of Communists and other controversial figures during the McCarthy era. Did its delinquency contribute to the most serious episodes of political repression in American history? Perhaps.

Its current confusion simply illustrates how complicated protecting our freedom can be. This is all the more the case in a Twitter-sphere, where nuanced arguments cannot be made. I plan to renew my membership right now.

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Opinion | Conflicts Within the A.C.L.U. Over Free Speech and Racial Justice - The New York Times

A tunable coupler can switch the qubit-qubit interaction on and off. Unwanted, residual (ZZ) interaction between the two qubits is eliminated by harnessing higher energy levels of the coupler. Credit: Krantz Nanoart

MIT researchers demonstrate a way to sharply reduce errors in two-qubit gates, a significant advance toward fully realizing quantum computation.

MIT researchers have made a significant advance on the road toward the full realization of quantum computation, demonstrating a technique that eliminates common errors in the most essential operation of quantum algorithms, the two-qubit operation or gate.

Despite tremendous progress toward being able to perform computations with low error rates with superconducting quantum bits (qubits), errors in two-qubit gates, one of the building blocks of quantum computation, persist, says Youngkyu Sung, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who is the lead author of a paper on this topicpublished on June 16, 2021, in Physical Review X. We have demonstrated a way to sharply reduce those errors.

In quantum computers, the processing of information is an extremely delicate process performed by the fragile qubits, which are highly susceptible to decoherence, the loss of their quantum mechanical behavior. In previous research conducted by Sung and the research group he works with, MIT Engineering Quantum Systems, tunable couplers were proposed, allowing researchers to turn two-qubit interactions on and off to control their operations while preserving the fragile qubits. The tunable coupler idea represented a significant advance and was cited, for example, by Google as being key to their recent demonstration of the advantage that quantum computing holds over classical computing.

Still, addressing error mechanisms is like peeling an onion: Peeling one layer reveals the next. In this case, even when using tunable couplers, the two-qubit gates were still prone to errors that resulted from residual unwanted interactions between the two qubits and between the qubits and the coupler. Such unwanted interactions were generally ignored prior to tunable couplers, as they did not stand out but now they do. And, because such residual errors increase with the number of qubits and gates, they stand in the way of building larger-scale quantum processors. ThePhysical Review Xpaper provides a new approach to reduce such errors.

We have now taken the tunable coupler concept further and demonstrated near 99.9 percent fidelity for the two major types of two-qubit gates, known as Controlled-Z gates and iSWAP gates, says William D. Oliver, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, MIT Lincoln Laboratory fellow, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, home of the Engineering Quantum Systems group. Higher-fidelity gates increase the number of operations one can perform, and more operations translates to implementing more sophisticated algorithms at larger scales.

To eliminate the error-provoking qubit-qubit interactions, the researchers harnessed higher energy levels of the coupler to cancel out the problematic interactions. In previous work, such energy levels of the coupler were ignored, although they induced non-negligible two-qubit interactions.

Better control and design of the coupler is a key to tailoring the qubit-qubit interaction as we desire. This can be realized by engineering the multilevel dynamics that exist, Sung says.

The next generation of quantum computers will be error-corrected, meaning that additional qubits will be added to improve the robustness of quantum computation.

Qubit errors can be actively addressed by adding redundancy, says Oliver, pointing out, however, that such a process only works if the gates are sufficiently good above a certain fidelity threshold that depends on the error correction protocol. The most lenient thresholds today are around 99 percent. However, in practice, one seeks gate fidelities that are much higher than this threshold to live with reasonable levels of hardware redundancy.

The devices used in the research, made at MITs Lincoln Laboratory, were fundamental to achieving the demonstrated gains in fidelity in the two-qubit operations, Oliver says.

Fabricating high-coherence devices is step one to implementing high-fidelity control, he says.

Sung says high rates of error in two-qubit gates significantly limit the capability of quantum hardware to run quantum applications that are typically hard to solve with classical computers, such as quantum chemistry simulation and solving optimization problems.

Up to this point, only small molecules have been simulated on quantum computers, simulations that can easily be performed on classical computers.

In this sense, our new approach to reduce the two-qubit gate errors is timely in the field of quantum computation and helps address one of the most critical quantum hardware issues today, he says.

Reference: Realization of High-Fidelity CZ and ZZ-Free iSWAP Gates with a Tunable Coupler by Youngkyu Sung, Leon Ding, Jochen Braumller, Antti Vepslinen, Bharath Kannan, Morten Kjaergaard, Ami Greene, Gabriel O. Samach, Chris McNally, David Kim, Alexander Melville, Bethany M. Niedzielski, Mollie E. Schwartz, Jonilyn L. Yoder, Terry P. Orlando, Simon Gustavsson and William D. Oliver, 16 June 2021, Physical Review X.DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.11.021058

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MIT Makes a Significant Advance Toward the Full Realization of Quantum Computation - SciTechDaily

"IEEE is now at the center of a global conversation to understand the power and promise of quantum computing." Travis Humble, Oak Ridge National Labs

Also known as IEEE Quantum Week, QCE21 is unique by integrating dimensions from academic and business conferences and will reveal cutting edgeresearch and developments featuring quantum research, practice, applications, education, and training.

QCE21's Keynote Speakersinclude the following quantum groundbreakers and leaders:

Throughparticipation from the international quantum community,QCE21 has developed an extensive conference program withworld-class keynote speakers, technical paper presentations,innovative posters, excitingexhibits, technical briefings, workforce-building tutorials, community-building workshops,stimulating panels,and Birds-of-Feather sessions.

Papers accepted by QCE21 will be submitted to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, and the best papers will be invited to the journalsIEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering(TQE)andACM Transactions on Quantum Computing(TQC).

QCE21 is co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Council of Superconductivity, IEEE Future Directions Committee, IEEE Photonics Society, IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society, IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, IEEE Signal Processing Society (SP), and IEEE Electron Device Society (EDS).

The inaugural 2020 IEEE Quantum Week built a solid foundation and was highly successful over 800 people from 45 countries and 225 companies attended the premier event that delivered 270+ hours of programming on quantum computing and engineering.

The second annual 2021 Quantum Week will virtually connect a wide range of leading quantum professionals, researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, champions, and enthusiasts to exchange and share their experiences, challenges, research results, innovations, applications, and enthusiasm, on all aspects of quantum computing, engineering and technologies. The IEEE Quantum Week schedule will take place during Mountain Daylight Time (MDT).

VisitIEEE QCE21for all event news including sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities.

QCE21 Registration PackageprovidesVirtual Accessto IEEE Quantum Week Oct 18-22, 2021 as well asOn-Demand Accessto all recorded events until the end of December 2021 featuringover 270 hours of programming in the realm of quantum computing and engineering.

Register hereto be a part of IEEE Quantum Week 2021.

About the IEEE Computer SocietyTheIEEE Computer Societyis the world's home for computer science, engineering, and technology. A global leader in providing access to computer science research, analysis, and information, the IEEE Computer Society offers a comprehensive array of unmatched products, services, and opportunities for individuals at all stages of their professional career. Known as the premier organization that empowers the people who drive technology, the IEEE Computer Society offers international conferences, peer-reviewed publications, a unique digital library, and training programs.

About the IEEE Communications SocietyTheIEEE Communications Societypromotes technological innovation and fosters creation and sharing of information among the global technical community. The Society provides services to members for their technical and professional advancement and forums for technical exchanges among professionals in academia, industry, and public institutions.

About the IEEE Council on SuperconductivityTheIEEE Council on Superconductivityand its activities and programs cover the science and technology of superconductors and their applications, including materials and their applications for electronics, magnetics, and power systems, where the superconductor properties are central to the application.

IEEE Electron Device Society (EDS)The IEEE Electron Device Societyfosters professional growth of its members by satisfying their needs for easy access to and exchange of technical information, publishing, education, and technical recognition and enhancing public visibility in the field of Electron Devices. The IEEE EDS promotes excellence in the field of electron devices for the benefit of humanity The EDS field-of-interest includes all electron and ion based devices, in their classical or quantum states, using environments and materials in their lowest to highest conducting phase, in simple or engineered assembly, interacting with and delivering photo-electronic, electro-magnetic, electromechanical, electro-thermal, and bio-electronic signals.

About the IEEE Electronics Packaging SocietyTheIEEE Electronics Packaging Societyis the leading international forum for scientists and engineers engaged in the research, design, and development of revolutionary advances in microsystems packaging and manufacturing.

About the IEEE Future Directions Quantum InitiativeIEEE Quantumis an IEEE Future Directions initiative launched in 2019 that serves as IEEE's leading community for all projects and activities on quantum technologies. IEEE Quantum is supported by leadership and representation across IEEE Societies and OUs. The initiative addresses the current landscape of quantum technologies, identifies challenges and opportunities, leverages, and collaborates with existing initiatives, and engages the quantum community at large.

About the IEEE Photonics SocietyTheIEEE Photonics Societyforms the hub of a vibrant technical community of more than 100,000 professionals dedicated to transforming breakthroughs in quantum physics into the devices, systems, and products to revolutionize our daily lives. From ubiquitous and inexpensive global communications via fiber optics, to lasers for medical and other applications, to flat-screen displays, to photovoltaic devices for solar energy, to LEDs for energy-efficient illumination, there are myriad examples of the Society's impact on the world around us.

IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS)The IEEE Signal Processing Societyis an international organization whose purpose is to: advance and disseminate state-of-the-art scientific information and resources; educate the signal processing community; and provide a venue for people to interact and exchange ideas. The Signal Processing Society is a dynamic organization that is the preeminent source of signal processing information and resources to a global community. We do this by: being a one-stop source of signal processing resources; providing a variety of high-quality resources to a variety of users in formats customized to their interests; adapting to a rapidly changing technical community; and being intimately involved in the education of signal processing professionals at all levels.

About the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management SocietyIEEE TEMSencompasses the management sciences and practices required for defining, implementing, and managing engineering and technology. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to: technology policy development, assessment, and transfer; research; product design and development; manufacturing operations; innovation and entrepreneurship; program and project management; strategy; education and training; organizational development and human behavior; transitioning to management; and the socioeconomic impact of engineering and technology management.

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Keynotes Announced for IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE21) - PRNewswire