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By a strange coincidence, two leading medical journals on Thursday published case studies of the same arcane medical mystery. In one, doctors solved the riddle only after the patient, a middle aged woman, got so sick she had to have a heart transplant. But in the other, a physician who teaches at the University of Marburg in Germany found the clues in Season 7, Episode 11, of the Fox television show "House." It turned out that Dr. Gregory House, the cantankerous, fictional diagnostician modeled on Sherlock Holmes, had used his powers of deduction to diagnose the very same ailment in a woman played by the actress Candice Bergen on an episode that first aired in 2011. In this case of life imitating art or at least television a paper in The Lancet, a London based medical publication, described how an ailing man in Germany had gone from doctor to doctor, seeking a diagnosis as his condition worsened. His problems began about three years ago. He had low thyroid hormone levels, inflammation of his esophagus and fever of unknown origin. His loss of vision was so profound he was almost blind, and his loss of hearing so severe he was almost deaf. Most perilous of all, his heart had weakened so much it could not pump hard enough to supply blood to his body. Heart failure usually follows coronary artery disease, but this man's arteries were fine. Doctor after doctor was stumped. Finally, in May 2012, the man, then 55, arrived at a University of Marburg clinic run by Dr. Juergen R. Schaefer, who specializes in puzzling cases and happens to be a major fan of "House." In fact, Dr. Schaefer uses "House" in teaching medicine, and he realized his patient's symptoms were eerily similar to those of Ms. Bergen's character on the show. In that episode, she, too, had heart failure. Dr. House's diagnosis: cobalt poisoning from her artificial metal hip. Dr. Schaefer's patient had had an artificial ceramic hip that failed, and it was replaced with a metal one in November 2010, shortly before his symptoms began. So Dr. Schaefer tested the man's cobalt level and discovered it was a thousand times the level considered normal. A scan showed the metal in his hip was eroded. The reason, Dr. Schaefer speculated, was that when the man's doctor removed the broken ceramic hip, he inadvertently left behind tiny particles of ceramic. Those particles, Dr. Schaefer said, acted like sandpaper: "You destroy the metal part with each movement." The man had his metal hip replaced with another ceramic one, after which his cobalt level plunged. His heart function improved, but he still needed a defibrillator implanted. His fever and esophagus problems went away. But his hearing and eyesight barely got any better. The patient, a woman in Denver who asked not to be named to protect her privacy, said she began feeling ill on a vacation in Hawaii a few years ago. "I was tired all the time," she said. When she returned from her travels, she discovered she had gained 10 pounds on her 4 foot 10, 95 pound frame, for no apparent reason. Her abdomen was swollen, as were her arms and legs. Her doctor ordered a CT scan, which showed fluid accumulating around her heart. He drained the fluid, but she still felt ill. Normally, someone with such a condition, cardiomyopathy, has an enlarged heart, but hers was a normal size. "It was kind of a puzzle to my first cardiologist," she said. By 2011, her heart was failing. She went to the Anschutz Medical Campus of the University of Colorado, Denver, where her doctor, Larry A. Allen, a heart failure and transplant specialist, confessed he was baffled. "We did a work up looking at possible causes and even rare causes," he said. "Nothing showed up." Sometime later, the orthopedist who had replaced her hips with metal implants took some routine blood tests and found something curious. Her cobalt level was more than 300 times normal. Cobalt poisoning can seriously damage organs, particularly the heart. The cause of her problems was suddenly clear. About a year after her heart transplant, she had both artificial hips replaced with ones that had a polyethylene liner. Her postoperative course was rocky, but her cobalt level declined. "I have much of my old energy back," she said in an interview. In their article describing the case, Dr. Allen and his colleagues wrote that cobalt poisoning was first described in the 1960s in people who had been drinking beer that had foam stabilizers that contained cobalt. But its link to metal on metal hip implants leaves questions, they said. Their patient had nothing obviously wrong with her prosthetic hips. And, Dr. Allen said, "literally tens of thousands of people had these hips without her problems." But Dr. Allen said the patient's case was a good reminder. However rare cobalt poisoning might be, it is something to consider when people with metal on metal hip implants have symptoms suggestive of it. And, yes, he said, maybe if he had just seen Dr. House in action he would have considered it. "Unfortunately," he said, "I have seen about two half episodes of 'House.' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Late night celebrated one month of Covid 19 quarantining by riffing on demonstrations this week in Ohio, Michigan and other states where locals protested state based shutdowns. One protester in Michigan misspelled "governor" on her sign, which Jimmy Kimmel said "showed us how important it is that we do get schools open ASAP."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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"Bookstores Grapple With Making Aisles Safe to Browse" (Business, May 14) mentions one difficulty of allowing shoppers to wander and pick up books that catch their eye. Having been touched, books that they do not buy have to be placed on designated carts, then quarantined for five days before being put out again for sale. Suggestion: Let the browsing customers wear disposable gloves, freshly issued by the shop at the entrance. The woman in the photo published with the article is wearing a mask but not gloves. But why not? No more quarantined books. Other customers who pre order specific books can still be served by outdoor pickup, with no gloves required. Face coverings would continue for staff and inside customers. Employee Beware! Using Virus as a Cover for Unlawful Firings In these uncharted waters known as the coronavirus, it can be daunting for an employee to figure out the real reason for his or her termination. Is the employer exploiting the coronavirus to cover up what otherwise would be discriminatory or retaliatory motives or simply making difficult but necessary decisions to protect its long term viability?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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LONDON What kind of story ballet can be created in the 21st century? The narrative genre, exemplified by "Swan Lake," "Giselle" and other 19th century works, remains enduringly popular, its legacy extending to 20th century ballets like Frederick Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee" and Kenneth MacMillan's "Manon." Despite the influence of George Balanchine's often plotless, neo Classical works on late 20th century ballet, audiences still seem hungry for stories. Arguably, ballet directors are even hungrier, constantly on the hunt for a new, lush narrative that they hope will draw audiences. Enter "Victoria," a new work by Cathy Marston for the Northern Ballet, based in Leeds. Ms. Marston, a British choreographer, has had a solid career since the late 1990s, but shot into prominence this year. She showed a liking for narrative work early on. Her first full length ballet was based on Ibsen's "Ghosts" (2005); her "Jane Eyre" (2016), also for Northern Ballet, will be performed by American Ballet Theater in June. Unlike these pieces, "Victoria," which opened at Sadler's Wells on Tuesday, is based on historical accounts rather than a literary narrative, but Ms. Marston hasn't found a convincing way to pull us in and make us care about the fate of its characters. Its structure is episodic, recounting parts of the life of Queen Victoria (Abigail Prudames) through the eyes and memories of her youngest daughter, Beatrice (Pippa Moore), who was entrusted with transcribing and editing the 122 volumes of her mother's diaries after the queen's death. "Victoria" is carefully wrought, well danced and cleverly designed, with a serviceable cinematic score by Philip Feeney. It achieves a nice balance between period historicity and a contemporary perspective; Ms. Marston, and her dramaturge Uzma Hameed, never let us forget that we are looking at the past by providing an abstract, simply dressed chorus embodying the court and the populace.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The Ford GT40 meets all the requirements for a platinum grade collectible: It's gorgeous, it has great bloodlines as one of the most successful endurance racing cars of the 1960s and it's rare (with just over 100 built). Public sales of authentic GT40s are few and far between, so the consignment of GT/108, an open roof prototype of the series, to the RM Auctions sale in Monterey, Calif., this August is stirring speculation over the chance that price records for the model will be eclipsed yet again. Yet it may be the back story of the GT40 one of the best in the auto industry, steeped in intrigue and driven by outsize egos that provides a basis for its un Fordlike potential price. The car is, more or less, a four wheel act of retribution. The desire to inflict payback has produced many great stories, but the automotive world has seldom been the breeding ground for such bitter rivalries at least until two industry titans, Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari, tried to do business. The GT40 was the reaction to a failed deal in which Ford Motor tried to buy Ferrari from its charismatic, but mercurial, founder in the early 1960s, only to have it all fall apart at the last minute. An article in the October 1966 issue of Road Track gave one of the first accounts of the affair: "The talks ended abruptly on a Saturday morning after 10 days of negotiations. Ford VP Donald Frey received a phone call from one of Ferrari's lawyers informing him that there would be no further discussion." As Road Track explained: "When talks got down to brass tacks about racing who ran what, who got the publicity and so on, Ferrari began to have doubts about the whole thing." In any event, history shows that the reason was nowhere near as impactful as the reaction. Mr. Ford was furious over being spurned and vowed to humiliate Ferrari by any means, including building a car that would win outright at the race that meant the most to Ferrari, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The budget did not matter, but time did, and in any case, vengeance is most satisfying when delivered swiftly. Enter Lola Cars, a British racecar builder with a new GT that, it was thought, might serve as the basis for a Le Mans contender when powered by Ford's V8s. Ford immediately turned to Carroll Shelby to make the car into a winner all the more fitting as Shelby and Enzo Ferrari strongly disliked each other. Shelby had been Ferrari's bete noire for some years, beating its entries at Le Mans in 1959 as a driver with Aston Martin and causing more trouble as the maker of the Cobra. According to Road Track, Enzo Ferrari disliked Shelby so much that he insisted in the negotiations that Ford sever ties with Shelby. With Shelby came the Englishman John Wyer, who had managed Aston Martin during Shelby's championship season there. Wyer helped set up Ford Advanced Vehicles in Slough, just west of London, where the Lola GT became the Ford GT40, the numerals denoting the car's height in inches. A number of talented development drivers, including Bruce McLaren, Walt Hansgen and Ken Miles the latter two losing their lives in testing were critical in shepherding the car through a protracted development process. While far from an instant success, in the end the GT40 did what Henry Ford II set out to do, punishing Enzo Ferrari by denying him success at Le Mans in 1966 69 with a humiliating 1 2 3 finish happening in 1966 with Ford in attendance. The car consigned to RM's sale is a particularly rare roadster version of the GT40. One of just four so configured, it is, according to RM, the only one still in its as built form. Among the GT40s that have sold publicly in the last two years, one, auctioned in August 2012, was famous for its achievements at Le Mans not in competition but in cinematography. Used by Steve McQueen in shooting the 1971 racing epic "Le Mans," it brought 11 million. Mecum Auctions of Walworth, Wis., sold another early GT40 prototype at a Houston auction in April for more than 7 million. Gary Bartlett, a collector and GT40 owner based in Indiana, said that GT/108 had the potential to bring a higher price than even the car with Hollywood provenance. "The car previously sold by RM for 11 million can be explained by the McQueen factor anything he ever touched, including his sunglasses, seems to go crazy." The GT/108 car doesn't have much on track history either. While it was driven by some famous racers, including Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles, it was used as a demonstrator.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Keith Rivers in his Beverly Hills home with, from left, "Untitled" (2017), by Arjan Martins; "Untitled (You drive a hard bargain)" (2011), by Barbara Kruger; and "Raised Eyebrows and Furrowed Foreheads" (2008), by John Baldessari. "Art gave me something to segue into," said Keith Rivers, a former N.F.L. linebacker, at his art filled house in Beverly Hills. "I've really gotten serious as far as studying, going to shows, going to all the museums I can." Mr. Rivers, who is 32, is throwing himself into art and culture in a way few people can. He plans to move to Paris this summer and use it as a base of operations for an immersive year of learning that will include studying French and trying to visit every art museum in Europe. "That will be my art history," he said. In the meantime, for research, he has a tall stack of old art magazines and catalogs flagged with Post its that he referred to frequently during a recent conversation about his collection. During his rookie season with the Cincinnati Bengals in 2009, Mr. Rivers bought his first piece an Andy Warhol Electric Chair print after a trip to the Museum of Modern Art with a woman he had been interested in when he was studying at the University of Southern California. "She was an art history major and explained Oldenburg to me," he said. "I got curious." She married someone else, but the curiosity remained. Since he retired from football in 2015, after also having played for the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills, Mr. Rivers has deepened his pursuit of contemporary art and owns work by Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Tony Lewis, Sonia Gomes and Arjan Martins, among others. Works with strong graphic punch dominate his walls. Raised eyebrows and furrowed foreheads peer from a large piece by John Baldessari. A text based canvas by Barbara Kruger proclaims, "You drive a hard bargain." Glenn Ligon's hot pink and yellow lettering on a red canvas spells out a Richard Pryor joke. In a Cyprien Gaillard piece, the cartoon face of Chief Wahoo the logo of the Cleveland Indians is superimposed on a pristine American landscape. "So many guys get done with football, and they have nothing; that became their sole identity," he said. Art has "given me a whole new structure." These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Why did you give up football? I'd been injured a lot. My interest was shifting toward things like art. If you're not fully into football, it's not the sport to play because you can really get hurt. How did you initially get interested in art? In high school, a girlfriend of mine was in a photography class. She'd pull me out of class sometimes to go take photos. In 2017, I was walking in Amsterdam with that same friend, who lives there, and she reminded me of that fact. I almost cried. I said, "Oh my God, you planted a seed for this passion." How would you define the focus of your collection? At the moment I'm drawn toward art that has political meaning because of the times that we're in. Issues of identity and language are highly important to me. There's an element of race in the collection. John Edmonds does this "Hoods" series, which I just had to have. I grew up about 5 to 10 minutes away from Trayvon Martin's murder. You can't see anybody's face in these photographs. With a hood, you don't know who anyone could be from the back. Do you do a lot of research before you buy, or do you go with your gut? A little bit of both, depending on the price. Like the Glenn Ligon, I did extensive research for the best work that I could obtain. This is Lubaina Himid, the first black woman and the oldest person to win the Turner Prize. I had read about her in The New York Times, and then when I was at Basel the art fair this year, a friend came up and said, "You've got to come see this artist." I was able to buy it quickly because something clicked. Are you involved with museums in any formal role? I'm on the executive committee for the Young Patrons Group at the Hammer Museum. It's an opportunity to get people who are interested in art but may be intimidated. This is a great group to tear down some of those walls.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Shirt I wear button downs on occasion to show off my recent gym activities, but for the most part I wear T shirts. I wear Polo tees all the time. I run through those every week either all black or all white. They're very subtle, very plain. I also wear the Polo tank tops as well. Those are my go tos, whether I'm kicking it on a laid back day or if I want a T shirt to complement my jewelry. Pants Recently I've been wearing a lot of Gucci jogging pants, but I'm usually in jeans. I wear Amiri jeans or En Noir jeans. They fit me. I'm 6 foot 5. I have to find a jean to complement my height, and they seem to do that. I like them fitted but not too tight. Jeans are an expression of your mood or how you feel. I have a lot of moods and a lot of different jeans that I go to. Suit I like the way my Margiela suits fit. I also like the way my Grammy suit fits. I met the guy who makes the most expensive suits in New York for my GQ show David Lance. He was making me this suit literally for three years. He is someone that really believes in getting every detail to the tee. It was crazy. I was frustrated. But it was worth the wait. It's in a dark blue. I can wear it again. It's very mature. But I'm old enough for it. Shoes It's too tough to pick my favorite. I have thousands of pairs of shoes. But these ones I'm wearing are dope completely red Louboutins. They're so fresh. And fashion is about being confident. It's about taking chances.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Trajal Harrell can turn a stage into a living, breathing painting, just once removed from a runway show. Like a garment, his latest work, "Caen Amour," is two sided: visible from the front and the back. As performers glide past silkily, awkwardly or fiercely all the while teetering on their toes as if they were in heels in a fashion show they wear and carry costumes, from ordinary scraps of fabric draped to couture perfection to a fantastically voluminous black ruffled dress by the Japanese label Comme des Garcons. Costumes are integral to Mr. Harrell's work: They become frames for his dancers and, by extension, for the dance itself. His past work includes a glittering series looking at the relationship between Harlem vogue balls and postmodern dance. Now, in "Caen Amour," performed Tuesday at the Kitchen a presentation with the Crossing the Line Festival he takes another dive into what he refers to as "the historical imagination" to explore the connection between hoochie coochie shows and early modern dance. He was inspired, he says in press notes, by the Middle Eastern belly dancer Little Egypt at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Mr. Harrell investigates the cultural appropriation and Orientalism that an early modern choreographer like Ruth St. Denis embraced and marketed throughout the world. Where did hoochie coochie stop and modern dance begin? You get the sense that Mr. Harrell wants to expose modern dance's dirtiest secret. And if this sounds like a lot to unpack, "Caen Amour" is too theatrical to be stalled by its themes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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For many years, smoking and drinking were considered the dominant risk factors for cancers of the throat. But on Monday, The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that the actor Michael Douglas believed that his throat cancer was caused by an infection acquired during oral sex, highlighting a trend that has alarmed many scientists. Mr. Douglas, 68, had previously speculated that years of smoking and drinking played a role in his disease, and his spokesman later said that although the actor had discussed oral sex's link to cancer, he did not say it was the cause of his own cancer. But The Guardian quoted Mr. Douglas as saying, "Without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV, which actually comes from cunnilingus." Indeed, in recent years scientists have documented a steep rise in throat cancers caused by a strain of HPV that can be transmitted through oral sex. The virus, human papillomavirus Type 16, also causes many cases of cervical cancer in women. In the 1980s, only a small number of throat cancers were linked to HPV infection. Historically, patients who developed the disease were in their 70s and were heavy smokers and drinkers. Now, about 70 percent of all throat cancers are caused by HPV, up from roughly 15 percent three decades ago. Patients are now more frequently middle aged husbands and fathers who are economically well off, nonsmokers and not particularly heavy drinkers. Men are three times more likely to be diagnosed than women with HPV related throat cancer. There are many strains of HPV, and the virus is so common that at some point most sexually active adults are exposed to it. A majority of people fight off the infection and do not develop symptoms. But in a very small number of people chronic infection causes oropharyngeal cancers near the base of the tongue and the area just behind the mouth. Throat cancers caused by HPV are easier to treat than those caused by tobacco, doctors say. Rates of these cancers are increasing but are still fairly uncommon, striking about 3 in 100,000 people. Studies have not proved that vaccines against HPV prevent throat cancers, but many doctors believe they will. The cancers typically occur decades after initial infection with HPV, and the diagnosis can raise delicate questions for spouses who wonder how partners were infected and worry that they, too, may contract the virus. "It is a sexually transmitted virus, so that by itself obviously creates uncomfortable discussions between my patients and their partners," said Dr. Robert I. Haddad, the disease center leader of the head and neck oncology program at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. In 2009, Tony Simotes, 62, learned that he had a tumor in his throat, which was diagnosed as Stage 3 oropharyngeal cancer. Mr. Simotes had never been a smoker or a drinker. He and his wife, Lucy, were relieved at first to learn the cancer was HPV related, because that raised the odds that he could be cured. "But then I started going through all the motions of what does that mean for me, too?" said Ms. Simotes, 50. "Because this cancer came from a virus, and I may or may not have it." She said she had a Pap test that came back negative. Because both partners had been previously married, they were comfortable discussing the cancer and its cause, said Mr. Simotes, the artistic director and president of Shakespeare Company in Lenox, Mass. "We know that we've lived pretty full lives until we met each other," he said. "The reality is that a lot of times people carry the virus and it doesn't affect them." Mr. Simotes underwent chemotherapy and radiation, and his cancer is in remission. In a study presented last weekend at a conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Haddad and other researchers showed for the first time that the partners of people with throat cancers caused by HPV were not at greater risk of developing oral HPV infections themselves. The study involved more than 200 people followed for about a year. Dr. Haddad said the findings suggest that spouses and longtime partners do not need to take special precautions or change their sexual behavior.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The night Millicent Cooley celebrated her 58th birthday and Anthony Duncan dropped to one knee and pulled out a small box from his pocket, party guests held their breath. "This was in May 2013, and Tony and I had only been dating six months," said Ms. Cooley, who was living in Morristown, N.J., at the time. "I remember thinking, he couldn't be proposing. Why is he holding this little box out in front of my friends and parents and neighbors? "Then he said, 'Millicent, if you accept this gift from me, you'll make me the happiest man in the world.'" Mr. Duncan's E ZPass gag was meant to reinforce his commitment to driving four hours from his home in Brattleboro, Vt., each week to see her in New Jersey. (He had E ZPass; she didn't.) Mr. Duncan, 60, is a professional juggler and circus arts teacher. In addition to coordinating seven balls in the air while walking a tightrope, he can juggle flaming torches blindfolded, and sometimes juggles a knife with piece of cheese on the end while being held in the air by six people (called "the dinner of death," the stunt involves him eating the cheese off the knife). Before he started juggling in the late 1970s he studied astrophysics at the University of Rochester and evolutionary biology at George Washington University. Though he never earned a degree, science and books have been lifelong passions, along with politics. Mr. Duncan's father, Richard Lee Duncan, was a career diplomat for the State Department who worked in developing nations including Pakistan and Cuba, where Mr. Duncan was born. His mother, Eleanor Shultz Duncan, was a stay at home parent. The two met in 2012 on Election Day. They had gathered in the Manhattan living room of Ms. Wartik and her husband, Dennis Overbye (both reporters at The New York Times), to watch the presidential election returns. "I was one of the vocal people in the room, giving my opinion of what was going on," Mr. Duncan said. While watching the televised results, he was also stealing glances at Ms. Cooley, who was less vocal, though equally hopeful President Obama would serve another term. "I was on the hunt for a girlfriend," said Mr. Duncan, who was married from 1994 to 2016 to Jaki Reiss, with whom he had no children. "I was separated and single and interested in the possibility of relationships." The prospect of romance never entered Ms. Cooley's mind that evening. For one thing, "I was jet lagged," Ms. Cooley said. "I had just come off the plane from London." Ms. Cooley, now 65, designs websites, software and apps, and was working for The Economist magazine at the time and traveling regularly. Another reason she didn't consider flirting with Mr. Duncan at the election party was simply because she was out of practice. "It had been several years since I had dated anybody," she said. "As I got older, I found it harder to meet men, and I began to lose confidence." There was also a third reason: Mr. Duncan had arrived with a date or so she thought. "Tony was with this young, beautiful woman," she said. The woman, Kelsey Strauch, was a former juggling student and performing partner who had moved to New York. "I wanted to introduce her to people outside the juggling community," Mr. Duncan said. By the time they left that night, Ms. Cooley was sure Mr. Duncan was someone she wanted to get to know better. "I thought, 'Oh, he's really interesting,'" she said. "I never knew a juggler before." The next day, Ms. Cooley emailed her friend Debora Munczek, who had invited Mr. Duncan to the party. "I said, kind of trying to feel her out, that I thought he and his woman friend would both make interesting friends, just as people. I didn't know if he was available." Ms. Munczek forwarded Mr. Duncan that email, hoping to connect the two, and minutes later he composed his own email to Ms. Cooley. By then, Ms. Cooley had figured out that Mr. Duncan might want to be more than friends. "At some point he had sent me this picture of himself juggling as a young man with long hair, cutoff jeans and rippling abs," she said. "I was like, I think this guy is flirting with me." On Dec. 1, 2012, Mr. Duncan started giving his E ZPass the workout it would become accustomed to. He and Ms. Reiss still owned a house together in Brattleboro, though they were separated and in the process of divorcing. Ms. Cooley was splitting her time between her home in New Jersey and a family apartment in Manhattan's Tudor City. Their date started in Tudor City. From there, they walked to a restaurant for lunch. "We talked, and we talked some more, and then we came back and we were still talking, and I think we both never wanted it to end," Ms. Cooley said. But she wasn't sure what to expect once they said goodbye. But Mr. Duncan "began driving back and forth between Vermont and New Jersey, usually weekly, in order spend time with me," she said. He got to know her family, including her late father, Kenneth Cooley, and her stepmother, Foy Cooley. Ms. Cooley and Mr. Duncan were in New York together, attended juggling conventions, like an early one in Austin, Tex., where she remembers being awe struck by a roomful of 100 jugglers riding on unicycles or balancing on 10 foot balls. They also traveled to far flung places like Cambodia and the Costa Rican jungle. Mr. Duncan started dropping hints about getting married. But Ms. Cooley, used to being single, wasn't sure. Living together seemed a safer next step, so in 2017, they moved together to Saugerties, N.Y., about halfway between New Jersey and Vermont. "We were getting to the point where we wanted to spend as much time together as possible," Ms. Cooley said. But even in Saugerties, they were constantly on the road. Mr. Duncan was commuting to Vermont for work, and Ms. Cooley was regularly visiting her father, who was ill, in New Jersey. When he died in May 2018, she felt less tethered geographically and open to substantial life changes. (Ms. Cooley's mother, Martha Curtis Cooley, is also deceased.) She decided she had been a web designer long enough. "I had been doing that work for 20 years, and I wanted to turn a new page in my life," she said. She left a job at Merck Company and started consulting while exploring new career paths and relocating. In December 2018, Ms. Cooley and Mr. Duncan bought a contemporary, all electric house in Brattleboro on three acres of forested land two miles from the New England Center for Circus Arts. "I've owned a condo before, but never owned land, and I've totally thrown myself into the life here," said Ms. Cooley, who has welcomed magazine photographers onto the property, and has already built a fire pit and designed a woodland garden there. Even before the move her attitude about marriage was slowly changing. "One night Millicent and I were in bed, and she turned to me and said, 'You know, I've been thinking about what it would be like to be married,'" Mr. Duncan said. "I had been picturing myself," Ms. Cooley said. "Would I be happy? Is this something I would like? Tony and I talk about everything, so I decided to just say it." Mr. Duncan convinced her she would, in fact, like it. "We sort of just slid into engagement," he said. But it wasn't necessarily in a carefree way, because he was still sorting the details of his divorce from Ms. Reiss. They waited until Mr. Duncan's 60th birthday party, at circus center in September, to share the news. Weeks later, they were planning a wedding at the Ashokan Center in Olivebridge, N.Y., where clown shoes might not seem out of place. Ms. Cooley and Mr. Duncan have been making a summer stop at Ashokan since 2013, when Mr. Duncan started performing there as part of the Summer Hoot Music Festival. In its inaugural year, Mr. Duncan performed backstage for the folk singer Pete Seeger, months before he died. On July 6, Mr. Duncan and Ms. Cooley, wearing matching ring finger tattoos, welcomed 120 guests to the 385 acre wooded property for an afternoon wedding. Mr. Overbye was ordained by the Universal Life Church to officiate. A few minutes into a short outdoor ceremony held near a gazebo, Mr. Overbye had to surrender his microphone to audio problems. Then rain started falling. Guests, seated on long pine benches, huddled under umbrellas as vows were read by the couple. She wore a long white dress and shiny flip flops and was attended by her sister, Eileen Cooley; the groom, in a light gray suit and sneakers, stood with his nephew Eric Dimick Eastman by his side. The rain did not dilute the potency of their sentiments. "I promise to listen deeply and often to what you say," Ms. Cooley said. "I promise to keep trying to make you laugh when it will help, and to help you cry when you need to," Mr. Duncan said through tears. Before they were pronounced married, Mr. Duncan sang Ms. Cooley a song, Joni Mitchell's "All I Want," with slightly altered lyrics. "I want to make you feel free," went the closing line. Step Right Up Just after Ms. Cooley and Mr. Duncan had their first kiss as a married couple, seven of Mr. Duncan's juggler friends hopped from their seats to perform a short "21 club salute" juggling routine. Shelter From the Drizzle After the ceremony, guests ducked into the Ashokan Center's great room for a cocktail hour, followed by a buffet dinner of flank steak and salmon with mango sauce. Amicable to the End Mr. Duncan's ex wife, Jaki Reiss, attended the wedding. During a speech, his sister, Laurie Dreamspinner, praised Ms. Reiss for preparing her brother to be a good husband to Ms. Cooley. "Call me, Millicent," Ms. Reiss shouted good naturedly during Ms. Dreamspinner's remarks. Late Show Near the end of the reception, Mr. Duncan and several friends performed an impromptu juggling show using LED clubs. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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BERLIN "Touch Me Not" by the Romanian director Adina Pintilie won the Golden Bear for best feature film, the top prize at the 68th annual Berlin Film Festival. The announcement on Saturday came as a surprise: Ms. Pintilie's formally experimental feature was one of the festival's more divisive entries, partly because of the frankness of some of its sex scenes and was not considered a front runner. It tells the story of three people including a fiftysomething woman who recoils at being touched and a man crippled by spinal muscular atrophy struggling with issues of intimacy. It also won the award for best first feature film. This was a particularly strong year for German films at the festival, with several homegrown entries, including Christian Petzold's "Transit," considered favorites for the major awards. Ultimately, however, they went home empty handed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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On first glimpse, the scene at Phebe's, a burger and beer place on the Bowery in Manhattan, had all the usual elements of Monday night revelry. A dense crowd of men and women packed around the bar to eat wings, sip from bottles and watch the New York Giants take on the Indianapolis Colts on the overhead televisions. But that was in the front of the bar. In the back, the ambience was entirely different. A group of 10 women sat quietly, hunched over a line of tables and wielded wooden tools to scratch neon designs into black coasters. They had each paid 40 to Bars Crafts, a company that sponsors events that bring together two great American pastimes: making crafts and drinking. (There was a guy there, too. His fiancee brought him.) Bars Crafts was founded by Alissa Kombert, 26. Last year, she had wanted to celebrate her birthday with her mother and her sister by making an art project together. "All I found were places for kids," she said. She realized she could cater to creatively inclined grown ups. "There should be a place for adults where you can booze and do art." The enthusiasm of the do it yourself movement has been well established by the popularity and growth of websites like Etsy, Pinterest and Craftsy. These Internet platforms bring together like minded artistic types, but only virtually. For many, a downside to craftsmaking is that it is most often a solitary hobby. Color Me Mine TriBeCa now offers a weekly bring your own cocktails ladies' night. Corinna Mantlo, an event organizer in Brooklyn, oversees occasional knitting sessions at Lady Jay's, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At Brooklyn Bead Box, Erin Comyns serves free wine as part of the store's weekly beading sessions. People enjoy companionship as they exercise their artistic impulses, she said. Also, she added, "People like wine." While alcohol can help stoke the flow of creative juices, the event planners try to help as well. For the recent Bars Crafts coaster making class, Ms. Kombert provided a list of quotes that could be inscribed: "Enjoy life sip by sip," was one. "Keep calm, tea is on," was another. Most participants channeled their own inspiration. One woman made a figure eight infinity sign and etched the words "Live. Laugh. Love." Another wrote, "Be in love with your life." He wrote "beer" and "wine" on his coasters. "Even my stick figures are pretty bad," Dr. Gonzalez, 33, said of his abilities as an artist. But alcohol helps. "It forces it out of me," he said. Aristotle Poulakos, a longtime night life promoter in New York, is always looking for leisure pursuits that can be paired with cocktails. In August, he founded Tipsy Crafts, a company that unites art classes and drinks. It hosts four or more events a month, as well as private parties and corporate events. As with most craft related companies, Tipsy Crafts has a core demographic of women. The men who attend these events generally do so at the behest of their girlfriends or wives. Last weekend, 16 women paid 60 each to attend a Tipsy Crafts jewelry making session at Masq Bar in Midtown Manhattan. As they fumbled with long red beads, they chatted, sipped sangria and made jokes at the expense of "Stan" and "Patrick" the names the women gave to the pliers they used to bend the metal chains. Some people who attend these crafts classes are novices, looking for a different sort of night out. Sitting at a bar with friends helps lubricate the creativity of those who might not otherwise make trinkets. "It takes away a lot of the stigma and nervousness associated with arts and crafts," Mr. Poulakos said. For other people, these companies provide a more interactive and social way to do what they already enjoy doing in their spare time. Liz Kubert, 23, and Emily Kissenberth, 24, went to the Masq Bar jewelry session for Ms. Kissenberth's birthday. Ms. Kubert simply told her friend to get dressed up for a surprise celebration. "It was something we got to do, and we got to leave with something, which was cool," Ms. Kissenberth said. "We used to make crafts when we were younger, and we like to relive it." Both Bars Crafts and Tipsy Crafts organize private events for a range of clients including finance companies, law firms and brides to be. The law firm Kelley Drye Warren hired Bars Crafts to put together an evening for its first year associates. "It's nice to be able to occasionally let their creative juices flow," said Cali Mazzarella, a personnel manager for the firm. "We don't always give them the opportunity to do that. We want them to use their creative energy to come up with creative legal arguments."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Early in this century, the documentary director Olivier Meyrou , at the invitation of Pierre Berge , spent two and a half years filming the couturier Yves Saint Laurent and his employees and associates. Berge, of course, was one of them: Saint Laurent's longtime business manager, hard nosed where Saint Laurent was dreamy, is a central figure in "Celebration," which chronicles the creation of what would be Saint Laurent's final collection. After a version of the film screened at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival , Berge took action to block its release. His move could be understood as protective. Saint Laurent, never the most robust of individuals, looks alarmingly frail in most of the footage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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"We strongly oppose any legislation that would allow employers to inquire about employees' private genetic information or medical information unrelated to their ability to do their jobs, and to impose draconian penalties on employees who choose to keep that information private," a group of advocates, including AARP, the American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Epilepsy Foundation, the March of Dimes and others wrote in a letter this week to Ms. Foxx. As wellness programs proliferate across the corporate landscape, workers are increasingly being asked by their companies to undergo health screenings and medical assessments. Employees can opt out of these programs, and personal information specific to a worker is not supposed to be shared directly with the company. The prohibition is aimed at preventing someone from being fired or otherwise discriminated against because of a serious medical condition. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has vigorously pursued legal action against some employers it claimed went too far and used these programs inappropriately, but the courts have largely been sympathetic to the employers' arguments. Companies also complained that the regulations were confusing, and the commission issued final rules in May aimed at addressing some of their concerns. Companies defend the wellness programs, saying they keep workers healthier and help reduce insurance costs. But some studies have questioned the effectiveness of these initiatives. Critics argue that workers are essentially being coerced into giving up private medical information, such as their weight, their blood pressure and whether they are at particular risk for cancer. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers can entice a worker by offering as much as a 30 percent reduction in insurance payments. Although the financial incentives offered have typically been lower, an employee who refused to participate could lose as much as thousands of dollars in savings.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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For decades, East Houston Street was more a place to cross and quickly, to avoid speeding cars than a destination. Residential developers, too, seemed to shun it, wary of its commercial character and odd shaped scraps of lots. That was then. In the last few years, a spate of rental and condominium projects have appeared up and down the once ignored street, which runs for about two dozen blocks between Broadway and the East River, and divides the Lower East Side and the East Village. "It's not something I would have ever envisioned happening," said Henry Hershkowitz, an associate broker with Core who went to school at nearby New York University in the late 1980s and lives in the East Village today. "I just always thought of it as just a thoroughfare." The latest major project to be unveiled is 287 East Houston Street, an 11 story, 28 unit condominium planned for a site near Clinton Street that is being jointly developed by Hogg Holdings and Vinci Partners USA, a firm with a Brazilian parent company that is undertaking its first American project. The developers bought the building site, a narrow midblock lot, in November 2014 for 15.2 million.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Kenny Scharf is one of the artists whose early work is being featured in "Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978 1983," at the Museum of Modern Art. It hardly looked like hallowed cultural ground, let alone the heart of the 1980s East Village art scene. Even Kenny Scharf, who practically lived out of this spot, seemed unsure on a recent afternoon whether 57 Saint Marks Place was truly the former location of Club 57, the basement bar that served as the louche headquarters for a now legendary art movement and its foremost triad of art stars, the painters (and sometimes friendly rivals) Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Mr. Scharf. Staring at the sign of the building's current tenant the St. Marks Place Institute for Mental Health Mr. Scharf, 59, finally cracked a smile. "This must be the right place, it sounds like the name of a great party we threw here once," he quipped. Perhaps it's the all glass balconies on the remodeled tenement house across the street that were throwing off Mr. Scharf's memories just one clue that monthly rents have jumped far beyond the 150 that the average Club 57 goer would have paid for a neighborhood apartment in 1980 (still the equivalent of less than 500). "I really feel for artists starting out today," Mr. Scharf said, recalling his own arrival from California to attend the School of Visual Arts. "When I got to New York in 1978 you could work a couple of nights a week to pay your bills, and the rest of the time you were free. That's how cheap it was." This tension provides the backdrop for a Museum of Modern Art exhibition opening Tuesday, "Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978 1983," focusing on the barely five year existence of Club 57 and the close knit coterie of artists who called it home. The curatorial mix doesn't stint on the boldface names: paintings and a walk in Day Glo "Cosmic Closet" installation by Mr. Scharf, early drawings by both Basquiat and Haring (who served as Club 57's exhibitions manager), as well as videos of gleefully unhinged performance art by Ann Magnuson, the venue's day to day manager and chief ringleader. But they also share space with works by a roster of lesser known but still impressive talents: inventive portraiture by the brothers Adolfo and Oliver Sanchez, as well as by Stephen Tashjian; silk screens by John Sex; photographs by Katherine Dumas, Joseph Szkodzinski, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Ande Whyland; videos of the singer Klaus Nomi; 8 millimeter films by Lisa Baumgardner; and perhaps most evocative of the period, the hand designed and photocopied fliers advertising the artists' shows many of them pieces of art in their own right. Much of this work, Mr. Scharf explained, was a reaction to the prevailing downtown New York spirit, one in which the dominant aesthetics revolved around an austere minimalism and theory laden conceptualism. "No color, no representational figures, no fun at all," Mr. Scharf groused of the classroom ethos at the School of Visual Arts. "We were taught that art is supposed to be serious and something you suffer for. I was melting plastic dinosaurs over TV sets and laughing while I was doing it the ultimate crime." Neither his professors nor his fellow students were amused. In February of 1978 he rechristened the still largely empty basement bar as Club 57. Its pianist and disco D.J. were out, replaced by concerts with the Fleshtones, the Zantees, and the Misfits, as well as a revival of Sam Shepard's play, "Cowboy Mouth." That November, Mr. Strychacki fell in love with a series of "New Wave Vaudeville" revues held at Irving Plaza each a mash up of a Dada cabaret and a Little Rascals style production. He invited the organizers Ms. Magnuson, Susan Hannaford, and Tom Scully to take over Club 57. By May of 1979, all three were programming events there on a regular basis. "At any given time, the club was a dance hall, a screening room, a watering hole, a theater lab, an art gallery, or a self styled 'let it all hang out' encounter group," Ann Magnuson writes in MoMA's "Club 57" exhibition catalog. "Sometimes it was all those things at once." That interdisciplinary spirit had painters making music, musicians making sculptures, sculptors acting in plays, and actors tossing their scripts in favor of improvised performances, or as Keith Haring called the evenings he organized, "Acts of Live Art." Case in point: Min Thometz, a freshly arrived graduate of a high school in Minnesota, who began bartending at Club 57 when she wasn't also stepping out mid shift to act in a play or perform in Pulsallama, an all female 13 member percussion ensemble. "We were all about being very silly at Club 57," she said in a recent phone interview, which made for a purposely stark contrast with the similarly artist heavy crowd at TriBeCa's Mudd Club, "which was more about fashion, about being 'cool.' We were about wearing costumes and having theme parties." Indeed, her own "Bongo Voodoo" party ended with dead chickens being flung around, a raging bonfire in the middle of the club's floor, and her future husband Oliver Sanchez passing out on her turntables as she was D.J. ing, a novel twist on a meet cute story. Yet indoor fires and flying poultry were the least of the worries for a club that never had a liquor license. Letters from Mr. Strychacki's archives show the Holy Cross parish's bishop, John Jakubik, tirelessly intervening on Club 57's behalf with a string of judges and government agencies. In 1981, when frustrated neighbors finally hired a lawyer to help shut down the club after repeated police summons for noise violations, Bishop Jakubik patiently informed him that "Club 57 is the youth circle of our church ... Please try to understand that the East Village is not the best of areas and our parish hall is the only place where our youth can socialize under supervision." "I'll never forget what Jean Michel said to me one night," Mr. Sanchez said, recalling a walk home from the club. "'I'll learn to draw later. First I want to get famous.' His work was already good, but he was so astute in his strategy. His plan was to charm his way into the right circles. And it absolutely worked!" "There was this mad rush to cash in," Mr. Scharf said. "It stopped being as fun as people became competitive with each other." He includes himself. "For the 1983 Whitney Biennial, Keith and Jean Michel were in it, and I wasn't. Which freaked me out!" Part of his solution was a pre internet social media campaign: "I started spray painting my Hanna Barbera post nuclear holocaust mutant characters like Wilma Flintstone with a snake body all up and down the East Side, from the 59th Street Bridge to the East Village. I had no idea who the curators for the 1985 Whitney Biennial were, but I figured they would at least know my work." Whether through ubiquity or talent, his gambit succeeded. In 1984 the Whitney bought a massive 10 by 17 foot long painting of his. In 1985 they tapped him to create a sprawling installation for the Biennial. Still, the victory was bittersweet. The AIDS crisis was in full bloom. "People would go fast," Mr. Scharf said. "One minute they were a beautiful 20 year old, the next you could see the look of death in their face." Yet AIDS was only one of the plagues ravaging the art world. In his 2012 memoir, "Life as Art," Mr. Strychacki despaired over the wave of heroin flooding the East Village in the early '80s, an epidemic that also overtook Club 57. Following Ann Magnuson's departure in 1981 to focus on her acting career, Mr. Strychacki writes of having to dismiss a string of staff members who ran the club's finances into the ground as they became drug addicts: "What did I accomplish, besides providing a shooting gallery?" Feeling personally betrayed and burned out, he closed Club 57 in early 1983. Decades later, Mr. Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose in 1988, continues to break auction records with sales prices of his paintings reaching nine figures. And the work of Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990, and Mr. Scharf has been showcased in the same School of Visual Arts classrooms they once mocked. It's enough to make one wonder if the original Club 57 gang isn't the new art establishment. Mr. Scharf's eyes narrow at that suggestion, as he points out that MoMA's "Club 57" exhibition isn't being held in one of the museum's main galleries. Rather, it's in the bowels of the building near the lesser trafficked screening rooms. "We're not getting the upstairs space," Mr. Scharf said pointedly. "It feels very appropriate that we were the kids in the basement back then, and we're still in the basement."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Two films one on the violent antidrug campaign in the Philippines, another on refugees from Myanmar screen together. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Two short documentaries from National Geographic will screen together this week at the Metrograph. Both involve international human rights issues, but the films aren't especially complementary. The longer and more substantial of the pair is "The Nightcrawlers," a ground level look at the violent antidrug campaign waged by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Human rights groups estimate that police and vigilantes have killed thousands accused of dealing or using drugs. The director Alexander A. Mora crosscuts between two groups: photojournalists who have brought images of the brutality to a global public, and anonymous or pseudonymous vigilantes. Ignoring due process does not seem to trouble the second group. "If the police cannot touch you, we are the ones sent to kill you," one says. A man presented as a vigilante commander says that he also earns money taking tourists around an island. Another man identified as a vigilante claims that police helped cover up a mistaken hit by his outfit. Mora might have provided more information on how he secured his eyebrow raising access. And much of what we see is presented with frustratingly little context. Near the end, Mora cuts to black as shots ring out. We're left wondering whether anyone was killed. "Lost and Found" is a profile of Kamal Hussein , who works at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh to reunite children with their parents. The director, Orlando von Einsiedel, who won an Oscar for "The White Helmets" in 2017, emphasizes the nobility of Hussein's calling but offers little else. The credits cite the involvement of the Nobel Prize organization in the movie's production, but Von Einsiedel's sentimental purview and manipulative scoring suggest his main goal is winning another Oscar. Not rated. In Bengali, with subtitles. Running time: 23 minutes. Not rated. In Tagalog and English, with subtitles. Running time: 41 minutes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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From the outside, the facade of Destination (a prominent Beijing venue that expressly welcomes gay people) is downright drab. But inside this four story cultural center on the east side of the city, the works in the nonprofit art gallery can push boundaries. This is no easy feat as censorship restrictions have been tightening in China under President Xi Jinping. And, although same sex relations were decriminalized in 1997, gay Beijingers say they continue to face discrimination. They look longingly to Taiwan, where a recent decision to legalize same sex marriage on the self ruled island of 24 million is being celebrated throughout the world. Taiwan has long been the heart of gay Asia. In mainland China, acceptance of same sex couples has progressed at a glacial rate. Many gay Chinese will never come out to their family, and there are still gay conversion centers around the country. However, there is a quietly present gay community in Beijing. Destination, which opened 15 years ago as a nightclub and has since expanded to become a cultural center, is one of the few places where gay men can be open about their sexual orientation, according to observers. Since the center's opening, its clientele has remained mostly gay men, but it's more than just a place to find a date. The center provides anonymous H.I.V. testing, practice rooms for a men's choir, yoga and dance classes. And on the third floor, the art gallery, ART. Des, provides a window into the current state of gay art in Beijing. On a recent visit to ART. Des, the center of the gallery was dominated by a bronze sculpture of a dozen sinuous men, clean shaven and nude, beating drums. On the wall hung a mural depicting a group of male companions, casually dressed in boxer shorts; in the lower corner was an image of one hand gently grasping another. Another work depicted a deeper level of intimacy. As two toned torsos lean into each other, both clad in only white briefs, one man cups the weight of the other's groin. The curator of ART. Des is Pierre Alivon, a French photographer who has lived in Beijing for four years. The gallery, like other cultural organizations in Beijing, may receive directives from the local cultural bureau, one of many government entities that can influence, or sometimes even dictate, what kind of artwork should not be shown. All galleries must operate within Chinese law. This includes adhering to censorship guidelines. For example, nudity is generally not allowed. While censorship in China dates to long before Mr. Xi, it has ramped up under his rule. In 2014, Mr. Xi gave a now well circulated speech warning that salacious art results in "cultural garbage." Now, whenever Mr. Xi reiterates that art should "serve the people" and be rooted in a Marxist consciousness, there have been recurring crackdowns on content across all mediums. However, the boundaries of censorship are difficult to define. Particularly with visual works, deciding whether a work is salacious or vulgar can be subjective, leaving gray areas for artists to work in. Case in point: a large watercolor piece on display at ART. Des (which secured all necessary approvals for its exhibit) is a figure drawing of a young man who is nude save for a well placed leaf. In theory, given the censorship, this painting typically would not be allowed at any gallery. Yet this same watercolor was shown at the Beijing International Art Biennale, organized by the capital's municipal government. All artwork for the event had government approval. Despite this, he pointed out that "one can still be a great artist," even if artwork is not displayed at galleries in line with the government's stance. "To me, that shows there is freedom, despite what outsiders imagine," he said. But what about limiting the subject matter that art can address? He cast a long gaze, and said, "Yes, perhaps it's not as free as the West; but it's not as closed as people think, either. We're not North Korea." Mr. Gao, the young sculptor, sees things differently. He says artists do not feel free to create works that reflect gay subject matter, because of the pressures of "widespread misunderstanding and disapproval." Indeed, most gay artists create works without being open about their homosexuality. A study jointly conducted by the United Nations Development Programme, Peking University and the Beijing L.G.B.T. Center found that only five percent of "sexual and gender minority people" are "willing to live their diversity openly" in China. The more politically aware will use their art to "fight for social equity, reduce misunderstanding and discrimination," Mr. Gao said. There have been a few openly gay artists in China, including the photographer Ren Hang, who rose to international fame with provocative work that was sexually explicit. Even so, Mr. Alivon has heard of gay artists having difficulty in selling their artwork, not because of the work's aesthetics, but because the artist is known to be gay.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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has cited "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" as one of her favorite books, so it's fitting that her new novel, "Transcription," has its own version of the White Rabbit. He appears relatively early in Atkinson's story: only one jump back in time after a brief 1981 sequence in which the heroine, Juliet Armstrong, is hit by a car. Let it be said again that the endlessly devious Atkinson ("Life After Life," "Case Histories") knows how to start a book with a bang. Very quickly we are in 1950, reading a chapter titled "Mr. Toby! Mr. Toby!" after the rabbit a man Juliet spots on a London street. She knew him extremely well during the war, from his work habits to the freesia scented soap at his home to the ever wondered about question of whether there was a Mrs. Toby. (Juliet had been asked by her co workers to find out). Yet the man in the present day says: "I think you have confused me with someone else. Good day to you." And away he goes, leaving a special sort of London fog in his wake. In "Transcription," 1950 is a time for resolving all that was unleashed in 1940, when Juliet, 18, was recruited into the world of espionage. Atkinson beautifully conjures London under siege, with the blackout and the bombing and the "ack ack guns being assembled" in Hyde Park. Juliet is a young typist, plucked out of virtually nowhere and taken under the wing of Peregrine Gibbons ("Do call me Perry") to work in Dolphin Square, right near the place the fascist politician Oswald Mosley calls home. Juliet was not raised by patricians, but she has a certain flair for passing among them. Part of her job will eventually entail mixing socially with the fiercely pro Nazi, anti Semitic Mrs. So and Sos who gather to discuss what a nuisance the Jews are. But the heart of the operation is bringing British informants to MI5's fully bugged apartment, so comfortingly close to Mosley's, for meetings with Mr. Toby, who poses as a Gestapo officer and elicits everything they've picked up. Juliet's annotated transcripts of the talks make up snippets of the book. They let Atkinson explore the tapings from a heretofore unexamined point of view.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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For two years, the Rosetta spacecraft has been playing around with a comet shaped like a rubber ducky. When the spacecraft makes a gentle belly flop onto the comet on Friday, it will bring to an end to the most ambitious mission ever for the European Space Agency. Since its arrival in August 2014 at Comet 67P/Churyumov Gerasimenko, Rosetta has been sending reams of data and exquisite photographs of the comet, providing insights and surprises about one of the fragments left over from the formation of the solar system four and a half billion years ago. On impact, Rosetta will switch off its radio transmitter, leaving silence at the end of its 12 year journey. "As soon as we lose contact with the spacecraft, that's the end of Rosetta," said Matt Taylor, the mission's project scientist. "It's a nice appropriate line to be drawn, I think." Back in November 2014, Rosetta dispatched a small lander, Philae, to the surface of Comet 67P. Soon after arriving at Comet 67P, Rosetta took a "selfie" that captures the side of the spacecraft, one of its solar panels and the comet in the background, about 10 miles away. And as the comet has been moving away from the sun, Rosetta's solar panels were becoming less and less able to generate enough energy to power the spacecraft, and the amount of data the spacecraft could send back has been dropping. While it was possible to shift Rosetta into a hibernating phase, mission managers calculated that the odds were slim that Rosetta could revive when Comet 67P approached the sun again, about four years from now. Instead, they decided to undertake some truly close up observations as Rosetta began falling into the comet. Shutting off the transmitter avoids any possibility of Rosetta's interfering with the deep space communications of other spacecraft. And even if the transmitter were kept on, the antenna would almost certainly be jostled away from Earth by the impact of the landing. "We will not be able to communicate in any case," said Patrick Martin, the mission manager. Then everyone working on the mission will have some time to relax. "I'm going to put my feet up," Dr. Taylor said. "We have free time, as it were." There is still much work to do. Archiving all of the data will take three years, Dr. Martin said. "Not as intense as missions operations," he said. The scientists will also finally have time to analyze what they have collected. "We've only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of digging through the data," said Joel Parker, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and deputy principal investigator for an ultraviolet spectrograph on Rosetta. "It's been so busy doing operations that a lot of us haven't even had a chance to dig into our own instrument data as much as we would like." Here is some of what has already come out of Rosetta. Exposed plateaus on the surface provide an important clue that Comet 67P was originally two comets. "It's akin to looking at the skin of an onion," Dr. Taylor said. "Looking at the orientation of these layers, it's clear this has to be two objects that have collided." That in turn has additional implications on how the interior is packed together and how much it could have heated. Rosetta's cameras have also captured what scientists called "goose bumps," objects about a yard wide that are the building blocks of the comet. "This is one of the major things that came out of Rosetta, this aspect of how the comet was put together," Dr. Taylor said. "It means comets are much more puzzling that we expected." In Rosetta's early observations, Rosetta scientists were puzzled by the lack of much ice on the comet's surface. After all, comets have long been known as "dirty ice balls." Comet 67P is not a particularly bright comet. Even when it reached its closest proximity to the sun, in August last year, it was not visible to the naked eye by people on Earth. But as expected, the comet became much more active. As the comet spun around once every 12 hours, frost formed and disappeared on parts of the comet. Periodically, jets of gas and dust erupted. Dr. Taylor said that it appeared that dust on the surface acted as insulation, holding onto the heat during the day that warms ice below, producing gases that rise to the cold surface, freezing again as frost. The jets appear to be the consequence of cliff walls crumbling, exposing ice that then quickly vaporized. The bursts released so much dust that Rosetta's star trackers, cameras that keep track of the spacecraft's position by looking at the background of stars, were confused. After that, the mission managers moved Rosetta farther away from the comet. "We had to change the way we ran the mission," Dr. Martin said. "This was my main challenge." Dr. Parker said that not all dust from Comet 67P was the same. Some particles are fluffy and fragile, and others are more solid pieces. "These different kinds of dust seem to come from different processes," he said. The fluffy dust comes from all over the comet, he said, while the consolidated particles seem to come from specific regions. With the comet now much quieter, Rosetta has moved closer, within 1.2 miles of the surface. "Everything is going well in this final phase of Rosetta," Dr. Martin said. "The spacecraft hardware is in rather good condition." Water Not Like the Oceans Where did the water in Earth's oceans came from? No one knows. But scientists now know for sure that it did not come from comets like Comet 67P. Rosetta measured the fraction of deuterium a heavy form of hydrogen in the stream of water molecules coming off, and it was much higher than that found in Earth's water. The current six and a half year orbit of Comet 67P takes it as far out as Jupiter and even at its closest approach to the sun, it is still outside Earth's orbit. Planetary scientists are sure Comet 67P originated much farther away, beyond Neptune's orbit, in what is known as the Kuiper belt, and was nudged into the inner solar system, probably by a collision or close gravitational interaction with another object. In the final days, Rosetta is being moved into orbits that are more elliptical. One final maneuver will put it on a collision course with Comet 67P, the minuscule gravity pulling the spacecraft for a final embrace. The landing site is on the head portion of the comet, near some intriguing pits. The aim is not to land in one of the pits, just to pass over them, but it is possible that Rosetta will end up in one of them. Dr. Martin said he was ambivalent as Rosetta approached its end. "I'll be very sad, of course," he said. "We will celebrate the achievement of such an exciting mission." Dr. Parker said the scientists got what they came for. "We had high hopes, and it went even higher than that," he said. "It's been a wild ride."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Investigations by two law firms have determined that the leaders of Essence Communications, including its owner, Richelieu Dennis, did not engage in behavior that contributed to a toxic workplace. Essence commissioned the investigations in July after an anonymous essay published on Medium accused executives at the groundbreaking Black media brand that includes Essence magazine of creating an "abusive work culture" in which bullying, discrimination and sexual harassment were common. The essay, "The Truth About Essence," was signed by Black Female Anonymous, which presented itself as a group of Essence employees. It said Black women at the company were "systematically suppressed by pay inequity, sexual harassment, corporate bullying, intimidation, colorism and classism," and it demanded the resignations of Mr. Dennis and other leaders. Black Female Anonymous also collected more than 4,500 signatures on a Change.org petition asking for the resignations. Morgan, Lewis Bockius conducted a review of the workplace issues raised in the Medium post. Proskauer Rose investigated allegations of sexual harassment made in the essay against Mr. Dennis, the owner and chairman of Essence Ventures, the parent company of the magazine and Essence Communications. The company shared the firms' reports with The New York Times and said neither firm had "prior or current relationships with the company, outside of the independent investigations." Morgan Lewis said it had interviewed 24 current and former Essence employees during a six week review. Its report said it "did not find any evidence of conduct that would amount to unlawful discrimination, harassment or retaliation." Proskauer Rose interviewed 17 people with knowledge of Mr. Dennis, who bought Essence Communications from Time Inc. in 2018, in an investigation that started on July 2 and ended on Aug. 11. The firm's investigators found that the allegations against him were not substantiated. (The Proskauer Rose findings were reported earlier by The Grio.) Proskauer Rose added that its investigators had not heard from anyone affiliated with the Black Female Anonymous essay after reaching out to the group through its Instagram account and asking Essence employees to contact the investigators by email. "I appreciate that these independent reviews clear my name, though the most important focus for me is the future of Essence," Mr. Dennis said in a statement on Tuesday. "The reason I insisted that two of the most respected firms conduct reviews in response to anonymous allegations is that I wanted to make this a moment to accelerate the transformation of this iconic and important 50 year old enterprise." Shortly after the June 28 publication of the Black Female Anonymous essay, Mr. Dennis stepped away from his daily leadership role at the company. Caroline A. Wanga, a former Target executive who was serving as Essence's chief growth officer, was named interim chief executive, a role she still holds, the company said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Ms. Wanga said in a statement that the company had handled the allegations appropriately. "When faced with anonymous allegations, unlike leaders who would have tried to keep it as private as possible out of concern it would diminish the company, Richelieu boldly called for a full review of all allegations, because he knows that the cultural investment made in this iconic brand would transcend the untruths being spread in an attempt to diminish it and his leadership," she said. Essence magazine, the pre eminent lifestyle publication for Black women, celebrated its 50th anniversary with its May issue, which featured the model Naomi Campbell on the cover. The magazine has a circulation of more than one million, and its website attracts nearly seven million visitors each month. "Essence holds a special place in the heart of a lot of Black women," said Yanick Rice Lamb, a professor of journalism at Howard University, who has been a contributor to the magazine. "Many Black women grew up on Essence, and when it was started, there weren't that many publications for us." Many Essence readers were pleased that the company returned to Black ownership when it was bought by Mr. Dennis. He is the Liberian born founder of Sundial Brands, the parent company of the Black, woman centric beauty lines SheaMoisture and Nubian Heritage. The report from Morgan Lewis was not all sunshine, however. Investigators noted "a widely shared sentiment that employees feel overworked and unappreciated." "Several witnesses stated that they feel pressured to work incredibly hard without recognition or reward and there are no boundaries or work life balance," the report said. "According to a number of employees, much of this work is generated by poor planning and a lack of communication from certain members of management. Based on our interviews, there also is a lack of transparency with respect to pay and promotions."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Which Tech Company Is Uber Most Like? Its Answer May Surprise You SAN FRANCISCO Pop quiz: Which technology company does Uber, the ride hailing giant on the cusp of an initial public offering, consider itself to be the most like? Is it Lyft, its rival North American ride hailing firm? Nope. How about Didi Chuxing, Uber's equivalent in China? Nah. On the surface, the two companies have little in common. Amazon sells books, toilet paper, toys pretty much everything, really and it provides cloud computing services and makes artificially intelligent speakers. In contrast, Uber lets people hail rides through a mobile app. But just as Amazon began as a modest online bookseller before growing into a digital retailing behemoth, Uber wants people to believe its ride sharing business is the foundation for a larger "platform" spanning multiple transportation industries. Like Amazon, Uber is no stranger to taking on competitors across many areas to accelerate its growth. And also like Amazon, Uber is willing to lose geysers of cash to achieve its aims. This Uber is like Amazon argument will grow louder starting on Monday, when the ride hailing firm's top executives begin meeting investors on a so called roadshow ahead of its I.P.O. next month. As part of its pitch, two people close to the company said, Uber plans to say that it is O.K. for it to lose money right now because just like Amazon, which was unprofitable for years it needs to burn cash to build out its business for the future. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive, has not been shy about the Amazon analogy. "Cars are to us what books were to Amazon," he said at a Fortune tech conference in July. "Just like Amazon was able to build this extraordinary infrastructure on the back of books and go into additional categories, you are going to see the same from Uber." As it goes into its roadshow, Uber faces two main issues. One is that it needs to tell Wall Street a growth story something to convince investors that its best and most lucrative days are still ahead of it. For years as a private company, that growth came easily as it expanded its service into more and more places across the world. But nearly a decade later, that growth has slowed. In an amended offering prospectus on Friday, Uber said revenue growth in the first quarter was roughly 20 percent, less than half of what it was a year ago. As ride hailing has evolved from a luxury business to a mass market service, competitors have multiplied and the number of people using the service may be starting to max out as Uber finds fewer new locations to expand into. Uber's other issue is its lack of profit. The company lost 1.8 billion last year excluding onetime gains; it lost 1 billion or so in the first quarter of this year alone. Because ride hailing is expensive to operate Uber continually needs to spend to lure riders and bring on new drivers some critics have wondered if it will ever be able to make money. All of this explains why citing Amazon is so useful. The Seattle based retailer has always cared more about customers than Wall Street, which meant it was willing to spend aggressively to get ahead of competitors and create new businesses even if investors carped. Then just as Wall Street patience wore thin, Amazon produced profits that underlined the innovation machine that Jeff Bezos, its chief executive, had built over many years. In 2014, for example, Amazon was hit hard by investors amid slowing sales growth and the introduction of the Fire Phone, a smartphone that landed with a thud. Then a year later, Amazon disclosed how large and profitable its cloud computing business had become. For almost a decade, Amazon had plowed money into building data centers and an army of engineers and sales people. When it finally broke out the details of the cloud business, it turned out that Amazon Web Services had 5 billion a year in sales and was growing almost 50 percent a year, with fat margins. Now all of Amazon's investments over time have made it seemingly impregnable in numerous areas, from logistics and delivery to cloud computing. Wall Street is not complaining about Amazon anymore, and it has become one of the world's most valuable public companies with a market capitalization of about 960 billion. "Uber, like Amazon, operates with an obsession on customer value over anything else," said Mitchell Green, a venture capitalist at Lead Edge Capital, which invested in Uber. Amazon's experience is meaningful for Uber as it also expands into new businesses to set the stage for future growth. Those include Uber Eats, its restaurant delivery service. Started in 2014 as an experiment, it became part of a line of thinking that Uber could one day deliver anything and everything to people whenever they wanted it, at the touch of a button. Internally, that idea was called Uber Everything. While Uber Everything stalled, Uber Eats boomed. The division is on track to book more than 10 billion in deliveries in 2019, up from 6 billion in 2018. It is also projected to take a 27 percent share of the food delivery market by the end of 2019, up from 3 percent in 2016, according to Wedbush Securities. Uber is also building Uber Freight, a service that matches local truck drivers with shippers in the United States and the European Union. It has contracted with more than 36,000 carriers serving more than 1,000 companies, according to filings, and the business generated more than 125 million in revenue in the final quarter of 2018. In addition, Uber acquired Jump, an e bike and scooter company, last year and is working on autonomous vehicles. Mr. Khosrowshahi has said he plans to make Uber the hub for many modes of transportation, from cars to bikes to scooters to cities' public buses, trains and subway systems. On Friday, the company also said in its filing that it was working on its payments infrastructure, which is used by more than 91 million people to pay for rides and by the company to instantly pay its drivers. While it invests in its future, Uber will continue to lose money. So the company needs Wall Street to put up with its spending on these initiatives before they potentially pay off with profit. And it needs investors to be patient as it also works to turn its core ride hailing business into a moneymaker. That leads back to the Amazon comparison. If Amazon can pull it off, so the thinking goes, then Uber can, too. "Just like Amazon sells third party goods, we are going to also offer third party transportation services," Mr. Khosrowshahi said in an interview with Recode last year. "We want to kind of be the Amazon for transportation."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Hip hop has long been about superheroes, and there are few things more jarring than watching a superhero's powers begin to fade. The superstars of earlier hip hop generations typically lived their post peak careers just out of the limelight. If they were grappling with diminished influence it rarely showed or shaped their public narrative. They disappeared into the executive suite (Dr. Dre), or they became actors (LL Cool J, Ice T), or they settled in to a comfortable late career plateau that mostly sated old fans while not really striving for new ones (Snoop Dogg). But then hip hop started growing exponentially: It minted more durable, truly multigenerational stars with greater staying power at the same time it was revving up the engine on the lower end, welcoming more and more young artists into the fold. That meant that while the market expanded, more artists were competing for prime share, forcing those on top to learn how to navigate new territory as still popular, almost dominant performers who are staring down their role as elders. Now these post prime stars or those on the verge of reaching their tipping point are working out their post prime issues in public, on record, for all to hear. Over the past three months, four superstars have released albums that assess, from different angles, what a genre dominating rapper does when the genre is beginning to move on: Kanye West's "Ye" (as well as his collaborations with others); Drake's "Scorpion"; J. Cole's "KOD"; and Jay Z's "Everything Is Love," which he and his wife, Beyonce, put out as the Carters. Their reckonings take many forms. For Mr. West, it's the acknowledgment of the frailty of his mental health. For Mr. Cole, it's a finger wagging semi scolding of the younger generation. For Jay Z, it's a calm acceptance of his diminished public stature. And for Drake who now feels like the youngest member of this older umbrella generation, but until recently was the oldest member of the younger upstarts it's navigating the tension inherent in moving from student to teacher, and realizing your teachers were no better than you all along. Of these, Mr. West's path is the most radical in terms of how it engages with the specter of obsolescence. On "What Would Meek Do?" from Pusha T's "Daytona," Mr. West raps about how he's viewed by skeptics: "You see, he been out of touch, he cannot relate/His hallway too long, bitch too bad." But Mr. West's flaws are real, too, and he now publicly discusses his health struggles. "Hospital band a hundred bands," he raps on "Yikes," referring to his hospitalization in late 2016 for exhaustion. "You know I'm sensitive, I got a gentle mental/Every time something happen they want me sent to mental," he bemoans on "Wouldn't Leave." Here is the hero heading toward twilight, or perhaps reframing what it means to be a public hero at all. "That's my superpower!" Mr. West barks at the end of "Yikes," speaking about his bipolar disorder diagnosis. "Ain't no disability!" For Jay Z, the acceptance of his recession from his peak began with last year's "4:44," a moody, raw album from an artist who'd long been self examining, but rarely made it central to his public persona. But marital strife has a way of undoing hubris, and Jay Z's public arc has lately been defined by a kind of deflation. When he's performed alongside his wife, as during her acclaimed Coachella set, he's seemed small. He's been the subject of several needling memes, the internet's tool of casual disrespect, making him an avatar of befuddlement or physical awkwardness. He knows what the kids are saying about him: "Online they call me 'dad' kiddingly," he raps on "Heard About Us." Throughout "Everything Is Love," he is the less present force the less present rapper, even. It is charming, as ever, to hear him rap about being in awe of his wife, especially when addressing his own shortcomings: "My first time in the ocean went exactly as you'd expect/Meanwhile you going hard, jumping off the top deck/A leap of faith, I knew I was up next." A decade ago, a rap superstar would have been unlikely to rap about perceived weaknesses of any kind, certainly of the sort that come with age. (Eminem is, in this way, an outlier, much as he is in a outlier in many others; weakness has been his gasoline since the beginning of his career.) But as life has thrust him away from rap's center, Jay Z is provocatively reimagining the genre's boundaries and expiration date. Learning that your emperor has no clothes is an emotionally taxing experience, so it's unsurprising that Drake has delved into that territory so effectively. On "Emotionless," he raps, "Meeting all my heroes like seeing how magic works/The people I looked up to are going from bad to worse/Their actions out of character even when they rehearse." By contrast, Mr. Cole focuses his gaze downward, aiming a been there rapped that talking to at the SoundCloud rap generation that made a sport of mocking him. On "1985 (Intro to 'The Fall Off')," he addresses them from the perspective of a big brother who's seen it all: Congrats 'cause you made it out your mama's house I hope you make enough to buy your mom a house I see your watch icy and your whip foreign I got some good advice, never quit touring Collectively these artists represent three generations of hip hop superstardom, and there are significant familial bonds among them Mr. West was signed to Jay Z's old label, Roc A Fella; Mr. Cole is signed to Jay Z's Roc Nation imprint; Drake has collaborated with Mr. West and Jay Z; Mr. Cole has toured with Drake; and so on. Though all of them engage with fatherhood in their music, what truly marks this phase of their careers is the way they interact with the generations above and below them. Sometimes these intergenerational tensions are expressed through music, not words. Drake's "8 Out of 10" sounds like a musical slight toward Mr. West, invoking Mr. West's horn thick early production. (And "Talk Up," his collaboration with Jay Z, feels pointed as well.) On the title track from "KOD," Mr. Cole who also took on Mr. West a couple of years ago, on "False Prophets" embraces the opposite approach, rapping in terse SoundCloud rap patterns, as if to prove a point. And sometimes the parent spanks the child with words. On "No Mistakes," Mr. West seemingly aims some shots at Drake, an inheritor who is now a peer: "Too close to snipe you/truth told, I like you." On "Boss," Jay Z an owner of his own streaming service and management company laments those who would "rather work for the man than to work with me." On "Brackets," Mr. Cole is mindful of the younger artists "hating on me, I ain't used to that/Know a couple people wanna shoot for that/I say 'No, no, no, chill, it ain't no need for that.'" Of the four artists, Mr. Cole has been the most thoughtful in how he wields his power. Following his album's release, he wrangled the 17 year old rising star Lil Pump one of the rapscallions who made Mr. Cole's name a punch line for an hourlong video interview.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Pulling off as many as 13 perfect pirouettes on pointe is astonishingly hard, but was simply a matter of course for Carmelita Maracci. Still, the day she did 17, students in the ballet class she was teaching in Los Angeles hoisted her aloft and ran triumphantly down Hollywood Boulevard. Or so the story goes. There are lots of stories about Ms. Maracci, who died in 1987, at 79. Eccentric and enigmatic, she was lauded as a sublime soloist and a future star only to recede into obscurity, or as she called it, "unplanned oblivion." Writing about her in The New York Times in 1937, the dance critic John Martin said she was sure to rank "among the great dancers of our time." But Ms. Maracci rejected the ballet establishment as commercial, and regarded its dancers as too preoccupied with ballet to broaden their horizons. She never joined a major company, and told admirers she "wouldn't be caught dead" dancing "Giselle." Instead, she preferred to create her own small pieces, blending ballet and Spanish dancing, which she choreographed for herself and her small troupe of four or five. But her appearances, from the mid 1930s through the mid 1950s, were infrequent. She struggled to deal with the business pressures of a performing career and was said to direct tirades at people in positions to help her. (In Agnes de Mille's book "Portrait Gallery," Ms. de Mille, a former student, called her "a fugue of neuroses.") Today, if Ms. Maracci is remembered at all, it is mostly as a superb teacher of ballet and Spanish dancing who was a major influence on her students. The list of luminaries she taught is long and, in addition to Ms. de Mille, includes Cynthia Gregory, Robert Joffrey, Allegra Kent, Bella Lewitsky, Jerome Robbins and Donald Saddler. Ms. Maracci's teachings will be celebrated on Monday, when a group of her former students holds a panel discussion honoring the 80th anniversary of her New York debut, at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at N.Y.U. Panelists include Carmen de Lavallade, Ms. Kent and Naomi Sorkin, who will speak about how Ms. Maracci was critical to their development as dancers. As a teacher Ms. Maracci worked hard to bring out each student's individuality. Ms. Kent, 79, a ballerina with the New York City Ballet for 30 years, said that, in taking class with Ms. Maracci, she had developed "a sense of mild rebellion I became an original dance creature." It was because of Ms. Maracci's virtuoso technique, rigorous classes and passion to inspire students' creativity that New York City Ballet and Ballet Theater (later American Ballet Theater) dancers headed to her studio when in Los Angeles. That lure reached beyond the ballet world: Charlie Chaplin, with whom Ms. Maracci would work on "Limelight," insisted his daughters Geraldine and Josephine study with her. Standing a shade over five feet, Ms. Maracci was outspoken and gruff, with a booming voice. When she taught, she combined technical training with a steady stream of commentary that touched on art, literature and politics. She railed against the Spanish dictator Franco; later, the Vietnam War. In 1972 she gave classes while listening to the Watergate hearings on a small television beside her. Sometimes, it is said, she would teach in a swimsuit and high heels while smoking cigarettes. Ms. Maracci had a style that was a distinctive melding of ballet and Spanish dance. (In her most noted work, "The Nightingale and the Maiden," fluttering castanets represent bird song. At the panel on Monday, a recording of Ms. Maracci playing castanets and doing Spanish heel work will be played.) Ms. Maracci was raised in California and was partly of Spanish descent. Her parents told her she was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and her dancer bios said the same. Later she learned her true birthplace: Goldfield, Nev. Two incidents helped put an end to Ms. Maracci's performing career. The first was in 1946 in St. Paul, dancing under the management of the impresario Sol Hurok. An audience member heckled her group in the middle of an anti Franco piece; enraged, she demanded that the curtain be pulled down. Ms. Maracci and Hurok parted ways after that. The second came in 1951, at Ms. Maracci's debut with Ballet Theater in New York. She danced the lead in her own work "Circo de Espana" made for Ballet Theater at Ms. de Mille's suggestion. But when the piece met with a cool reception from the audience, Ms. de Mille reported, Ms. Maracci collapsed in her dressing room and cut short the rest of the tour. ("Circo de Espana" remained in the company's repertory for a time; Alicia Alonso danced the Maracci role.) After that, Ms. Maracci performed sporadically. During her last years, as she coped with arthritis, she conducted classes seated in a chair.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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A weekend in the country. Two couples Sarah and Matthew, Kiki and Arman reconnect after years of estrangement in a quaint upstate farmhouse. The majority of "St. Ivo," Joanna Hershon's fifth novel, spans only a single weekend. Bookended by a series of jarring events near Sarah's home in Brooklyn, the trip takes on a sinister tension as both couples suppress life altering secrets. Hershon ("A Dual Inheritance," "The German Bride") maintains a quiet terror throughout this slim, eccentric novel. Though it moves at a harrowing pace, this is not a traditional thriller. The perspective focuses narrowly on Sarah's interior, giving us intimate access to her paralyzing social anxieties and complicated marriage to Matthew. The friction resides, innovatively, in the agony of interpersonal misunderstandings, the awkwardness of old friends now strangers trapped together for a period of days. What to reveal, and what to gloss over? How much to admit about how their lives have changed, and about who is missing? Hershon writes of Sarah: "Soon enough she would lie in a strange bed, consumed with anxiety, made worse by the lie she'd just told and the many more she was sure to tell now that the first lie was out there. Soon enough she'd be nothing but a feeble cage for her thundering heart." The novel is steeped in this hushed paranoia: the jumpy fear that permeates contemporary life, as its characters simultaneously long for connection and refuse to let themselves be seen.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Can Was 40 Years Ahead of Its Time. A New Book Helps Us Catch Up. "I thought it was like a living organism, Can: it had a beginning, it had a youth, it had a time getting old and a time to die." That statement by Holger Czukay, one of the founders of the experimental German rock band Can, is quoted by the music journalist Rob Young in the prologue to "All Gates Open," his expansive new biography of the group. The book, out Tuesday in the United States, feels as though it arrives just in time. In one sense Can has come and gone: The band split up in 1978 after operating since the late 1960s, and Mr. Czukay and another core member, the metronomic drummer Jaki Liebezeit, died in 2017. (Another, the guitarist Michael Karoli, died in 2001.) "All Gates Open" was written by the music journalist Rob Young and the band's keyboardist, Mr. Schmidt. But the sounds Can made, mixing the primitive with the avant garde and total freedom with rigid, funky grooves, continue to send out ripples of influence in underground rock, electronic music, film soundtracks and beyond. And through interviews with all of the band's key members the fourth is the keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, who collaborated on the book as well as the group's singers and friends, Mr. Young, a former editor of the British music magazine The Wire, brings the "organism" of Can back to vivid life. If there is one current running through "All Gates Open," it's the idea that Can's songs weren't written, but tapped into as a primal force. "Instant composition," Mr. Czukay said. "Like a football team. You know the goal, but you don't know at any moment where the ball is going." Words like "telepathic" are thrown around. Band members describe playing the studio like an instrument, with microphones always live and tape constantly running. (Its first outpost was in a renovated castle, Schloss Norvenich, on the outskirts of Cologne; the group later moved into an abandoned movie theater.) On the day the band recorded the 1973 track "Future Days," the mics captured the Japanese singer Damo Suzuki and the rustle of a bean bag chair. Sometimes inspiration all but walked in off the street. Malcolm Mooney, an American who preceded Mr. Suzuki as the band's vocalist, met Mr. Schmidt, who asked, "Can you sing?" His tryout "that day or that afternoon or the next day," Mr. Mooney recalled went directly onto tape in one take and became "Father Cannot Yell," the opening song on Can's 1969 debut, "Monster Movie." Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Its concerts could stretch up to six hours. As described by Mr. Young, Can's live appearances could swing between transcendence and nihilism. A proto punk, pranksterish streak, inherited from Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Czukay's avant garde roots with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, resulted in some intentionally destructive performances, and sometimes the improvisations just didn't fly. Even at its tightest, in an 84 minute set taped for the German broadcaster WDR in 1970, Can could perplex an audience: "The crowd, mostly students and teenagers, stand stock still or sit cross legged for the most part," Mr. Young wrote, "occasionally clapping and shaking heads in rhythm." At a Berlin university in 1972, though, the band tested the endurance of its hippy and radical following for a more practical reason: "Outside it was incredibly cold, at least minus 10 at night, and the police were not allowed on campus that was German law," Mr. Schmidt said. Outside the concert hall, he said, "hundreds of police were standing out there just waiting for something to really happen inside." "Ege Bamyasi" (1972), Can's fourth album, contains one of its best known songs: "Vitamin C," whose deathless groove has caught the ears of everyone from break dancers in the New York City subway to the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who used it in "Inherent Vice." (Even Raury and Jaden Smith gave it a spin on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's Netflix hip hop series, "The Get Down.") Less well known is that the can of okra pictured on the album's sleeve wasn't a piece of art the band commissioned it was simply found, as is, in a Turkish restaurant in Cologne and photographed. "Ege bamyasi" is Turkish for Aegean okra, known in German as "okraschoten," and the Can logo "was part of the found object's design: the brand name," Mr. Young wrote. John Lydon wanted to be its singer. One of Can's many unusual traits was its lack of a frontman, and after the departures of Mr. Mooney and Mr. Suzuki, the band never really found a replacement. The American folk singer Tim Hardin nearly joined up at one point. But the most intriguing pairing that never happened might have been with John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten when he was singing for the Sex Pistols. As that punk band was imploding in the late 1970s and before he formed Public Image Ltd., whose bass player Jah Wobble would later connect with Mr. Czukay, The Edge and Arthur Russell Mr. Lydon picked up the phone to see if Can still needed a vocalist. The group's 1970 LP "Soundtracks" consisted of seven tracks written for films named on the album's front cover. And in one of the book's best deep dives, Mr. Young has tracked down and watched them (some "almost impossible to find, even in the web's darkest corners") and placed the songs back in their original contexts. Several of the films seem best left in the late 1960s and early '70s. "Madchen ... nur mit Gewalt," released internationally as "The Brutes" or "Cry Rape," tries to explore a woman's despair after a violent sexual attack, but "can't avoid a sense of voyeuristic pleasure" in charting her torment, Mr. Young wrote. That imagery lends a new dimension of horror to Can's "Soul Desert," which the book also identifies as the troubled Mr. Mooney's final appearance with the band: "He delivers the whole song in a desperately constricted death rattle. It's the sound of a man, eyes pecked out, stumbling towards the end of his rope." By contrast, the film associated with "She Brings the Rain" one of Can's prettiest and most straightforward ballads sounds as if it needs a Criterion style restoration as soon as possible. Mr. Young's plot description for Thomas Schamoni's "Ein Grosser Graublauer Vogel" ("A Big Grey Blue Bird," listed as "Bottom" on the LP) is mind bending: Scientists who have cracked the space time continuum are being held hostage, and gangsters, hippies and others are trying to find them. "Its running theme is electronic eavesdropping, surveillance and the relationship of electronic media to perceptions of space and time," he wrote.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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In honor of Halloween, let's take a moment to appreciate fangs and other sharp, pointed weapons animals use to capture, bite, hold, injure and paralyze their dinner guests and rivals. Fanged snakes can strike their prey to inject venom at speeds of about 7 miles per hour. Some mantis shrimp spear their victims with harpoon like spines on the ends of their limbs up to 16 m.p.h. And a trap jaw ant can slam its spring loaded mouth shut over its target at speeds of more than 130 m.p.h. There's even a snail that shoots out a venomous tooth to stun fish. Many creatures monkeys, bats, jellyfish and if vampires were real, those too carry specialized weapon systems that allow them to survive by puncturing other animals. But how? To find out, Philip Anderson, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, started at the most basic level: physical mechanics. He knew the shape and function of teeth mattered for how well an animal could pierce another, but he wondered: "Are there ground rules that all of these animals had to follow in different ways to deal with these common challenges?" In a series of experiments published in the journal Interface Focus in April, he used a crossbow to shoot weighted arrows at a four inch cube of ballistics gelatin the wobbly stuff you see on television shows like "Mythbusters" or "CSI" to mimic human flesh. He found that kinetic energy a combination of mass and speed was the best predictor of how efficiently an arrow penetrated the gel. In other words, the smaller the arrow, the faster he had to shoot it. He concluded that in nature, perhaps smaller animals developed bodies that allow them to strike quicker than larger animals, to make up for the size of their penetrating apparatus whether it was a claw, a fang or a harpoon like cell stored in a tentacle. In many animals, he said, this theory plays out. You can see just how the arrow punctures the gel in this backlit video shot at 20,000 frames per second. The key to cracking into it is the same for breaking anything, really: Just cram a bunch of energy into a small point. This is why sharp, pointed objects cut better than blunt ones and why the arrows with more energy were better at breaking the gel. In this video, the arrow hits around 27 m.p.h. Its impact produces stress waves that, without enough energy, would travel to the edges of the cube and allow the elastic material to distort, bulge and reject the arrow. But the arrow's impact allows it to embed itself in the gel before the stress waves reach the sides. At this point, Dr. Anderson's experiments better illustrate a general weapon than an actual animal part. The shape and function of an animal's fangs, claws or tentacles as well as the composition of its target also influence how it penetrates. Consider fangs. "The form of all these teeth really depends on what the animal wants to do," said Peter Lucas, an anthropologist who specializes in dental function and morphology who is now at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Some male primates, for example, use long canine teeth that resemble fangs to intimidate and fight other males. And because their purpose is to cause the most damage, they are sharp on the tip and back. But a vampire bat, in contrast, wants to sustain its victim for future snacks, so it causes little damage. Its pointy incisors, or front teeth (not necessarily their side fangs as you see in the humanlike vampire), break the skin just enough to damage blood vessels that ooze out blood that they can then lick up, not suck. To do any of these things, the whole body must adapt: fangy male primates, for example, can open their mouths wider than females can; and the trap jaw ant actually deforms its whole head to get enough force to snap down as it does. So what about humanoid vampires? It's not about force, but delicacy. You wouldn't want to have to get a new victim every time. "If you're going to copy a vampire bat, you actually don't want to make a deep gouging mark in the neck," Dr. Lucas said. "I'm not sure pointed teeth, the kind that appear in Halloween costumes, would be the perfect thing to use."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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WASHINGTON The decision by Federal Reserve officials last month to continue the stimulus campaign came down to this: their anxiety that the economy might falter outweighed their anxiety that waiting to pull back would surprise and confuse investors. The mounting fiscal crisis in Washington suggests that some months will pass before the Fed will have cause to reconsider. The Fed came close to sounding a retreat in September, according to an official account of its meeting published Wednesday. Officials were united that the bond buying campaign begun last year had produced the desired improvement in job growth. Most officials also agreed that the Fed should start pulling back by the end of 2013. But during an unusually fractious meeting, some officials worried that the gains might not be sustainable and argued that it was "prudent" to postpone retreat, according to the account. A number of officials, "pointed to heightened uncertainty about the course of federal fiscal policy over coming months, including the potential for a government shutdown or strains related to the debt ceiling debate," the account said. Any differences were papered over in a 9 to 1 vote to keep adding 85 billion a month to the Fed's holdings of Treasury securities and mortgage backed securities, with the goal of reducing borrowing costs for businesses and consumers. Three weeks later, it seems even less likely that the Fed is on the verge of retreat. The government has shut down partly, depriving the Fed of fresh economic data, among other consequences, and the fight over the debt ceiling is intensifying. The Fed's leadership also is in transition. President Obama announced the nomination Wednesday of Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's vice chairwoman and a leading proponent of the stimulus, to succeed Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman, when he departs in January. Vincent R. Reinhart, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley, wrote that the outcome of the September meeting already reflected Ms. Yellen's growing influence and focus on reducing unemployment, as well as Mr. Bernanke's impending departure. "Bernanke had already left the building," he wrote, "in spirit if not in body." The diversity of perspectives in the account of the September meeting, and in recent speeches by Fed officials, has produced a wide range of predictions from analysts about the most likely timing for the Fed to begin its retreat, from December to spring 2014. Michael Feroli, chief United States economist for JPMorgan Chase, wrote in a note to clients that he did not expect Ms. Yellen's nomination to affect the trajectory of the Fed's decision making, because her views already are represented in that process and because Fed officials seem determined to retreat as soon as it can be justified. He dismissed theories that Mr. Bernanke wants the retreat to begin before he leaves, or that Ms. Yellen would prefer to begin it on her watch to demonstrate her commitment to controlling inflation. "The current fiscal morass was already increasing the odds that the decision is made sometime in early 2014," Mr. Feroli wrote. "Getting the macro right is hard enough without all these second order considerations. If payrolls are humming along by then, the decision would likely be made in January, if not, then it would come later." Other uncertainties were manifest at the meeting. The committee debated but did not resolve whether to retreat by reducing only purchases of Treasuries which may be less effective in stimulating the economy or also of mortgage bonds. Officials also considered whether to strengthen the Fed's declaration of intent to hold down short term interest rates. The Fed said last December that it planned to keep rates near zero at least as long as the unemployment rate remained above 6.5 percent, provided that inflation did not climb too high. Mr. Bernanke and other officials have emphasized in recent months that rates could stay low well after that threshold is crossed. At the September meeting, Fed officials discussed bolstering that statement. They considered adding that the central bank would keep rates near zero as long as inflation remained below an acceptable threshold, or providing additional information about the likely path of short term rates after unemployment falls below 6.5 percent. For the first time, Fed officials also acknowledged that the leadership transition was complicating these decisions because investors may doubt the Fed's declarations will hold in coming years. As many as four of the seven members of the Fed's board, and two presidents of regional reserve banks, may be replaced in the next year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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PARIS Under the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower at dusk, below a row of 10 towering white palm trees reflected in the black mirror of an infinity pool, in front of rows of gawking onlookers gathered on the steps up to the Trocadero, the first model of the Saint Laurent show appeared and began to walk on water. Or, to be fair, to walk through it, but since it was only an inch or so deep, and she was wearing towering platform heels, it looked as if she was walking on it. In a man's black trouser suit, a white shirt undone practically to her navel. Welcome to the second coming of sex. It's been out of fashion for awhile now, but Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent's creative director, is on what seems like a mission to bring it back. He did it with big heeled cowboy boots, those platforms and micro shorts in leather, denim and satin. A lot of micro shorts. He did it with playsuits and plunging maillots. He did it with feather pasties. He did it, in other words, with lots of nods to the history of YSL in the 1960s, '70s and '80s "different eras and timeless icons," as he said in a news release. Those eras were, of course, the time of the Sexual Revolution, when women claimed their own carnality and reveled in it. This is a different time, and a different kind of revolution. There was no way for YSL to know, weeks ago when this all came together, that the show would be held in the midst of the debate over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, just after BelieveSurvivors Monday, on the day Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison for sexual assault. And it is possible to see these clothes as a line in the sand that says women are allowed to wear whatever they want to celebrate their own bodies. As they darn well should be. One thing we know now is the "she was asking for it" argument will never fly again. But sitting beside that watery runway, watching the models teeter by in what were effectively diaper bathing suits, it was hard not to think that as women have moved on, so should the clothes that allow them to express their physicality. That showing the most leg, the most cleavage, the most sheer, made for a revolutionary statement back in the 20th century, but not a particularly nuanced or relevant one in the 21st. It's why Mr. Vaccarello's tailoring has power, but his silly pasties just seem old fashioned. He should think a little harder about what YSL means now, as opposed to then. Or, as the actress Sasha Lane said in one of six videos with the hashtag mymutiny (after a new perfume) aired before the terrific Maison Margiela show: "Don't just be better; be different." And so it was. Since his first collection for Margiela in 2015, Mr. Galliano has been effectively making it his own, abstracting the deconstruction that is part of the brand's history into a riotous statement about second chances and the reconstruction of self. He loves nothing more than throwing restraint to the winds, and this was, by those standards, a somber parade; revelation by a thousand cuts.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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A private investor has bought this four story corner 1931 building, with 4,359 square feet in air rights, and two parking spots in the rear. The building has three three bedroom floor through apartments, which are market rate. The new owner plans to upgrade the apartments, as well as the ground floor retail space, a tire shop with another year left on its lease. The 4,356 square foot building offers a cap rate of 3.13 percent, and sold for 25 times the rent roll. These three contiguous five story mixed use walk ups in Little Italy, with two additional four story buildings behind Nos. 185 and 187, total 25,700 square feet and form a 75 by 100 foot irregular lot. Puglia, an Italian restaurant, occupies one of the four retail spaces, and six of the 33 apartments are vacant. The brick buildings, family owned since the mid 1960s, also offer a total of 34,892 buildable square feet. Colors of the Italian flag bands of red, white and green are painted across the facades facing the street. 10 West 33rd Street (between Fifth Avenue and Broadway) A women's hosiery and footwear manufacturer has signed a five year lease for 5,305 square feet on the sixth and 12th floors of this 12 story fashion accessory center in the garment district. The building, built in 1914, has new elevators and windows.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Now lives: In a three bedroom apartment in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, with a roommate. Claim to fame: Ms. Fumudoh is a saucy and sarcastic comedian known for her barbed satire of race, politics and the pitfalls of young adulthood. (Forbes recently said she possessed "the confidence of an old comedy pro.") Examples of her elastic oeuvre include "Ponderosa With Omarosa," a hip hop jam about Omarosa Manigault Newman (sample lyric: "Drinking dark and Stormy Daniels, watching Oval Office scandals"), and "Baited With Ziwe," a YouTube series in which she tricks her white friends into blurting out racial faux pas. "I'm a little bit of an antagonist who likes to push people's buttons," Ms. Fumudoh said. "I like to laugh at things that are really sad because it makes me feel better."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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The kids are all right. But the parents? Since 2016, adults have grown much more concerned about the time they spend on mobile devices even as their teenage children have grown far less worried about their own use, according to a new report from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit children's advocacy and media ratings organization. "If you're concerned about your own device use, which an increasing number of parents are, then you ought to be able to impart that wisdom to your kids," said James P. Steyer, the organization's chief executive. "That's your job." The report, released on Wednesday and based on surveys of 500 pairs of parents and teenagers, found that both groups have a complicated relationship with the devices and, of course, with each other. Most parents worry that their kids are addicted to the devices, but about four in 10 teenagers have the same concern about their parents. Here are a few of the report's key findings: Bleary eyed moms, dads and teenagers are everywhere. The findings that Mr. Steyer and the report's author, Michael Robb, said were most worrying related to how parents and teenagers allow mobile devices to interfere with sleep. "That's important because we know that healthy sleep is associated with a range of positive outcomes and poor sleep is related to a range of negative outcomes," said Mr. Robb, the senior director of research for Common Sense Media. According to the survey, conducted online and by phone in February and March, 26 percent of parents said they used a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet, within five minutes of going to sleep. The same share acknowledged waking up to check the device at least once during the night, while a slightly smaller share, 23 percent, said they used a device within five minutes of waking up. The rates were higher among teenagers: 40 percent said they used a device within five minutes of going to sleep; 36 percent admitted to waking up to check a device; and 32 percent said they used a device within five minutes of waking up. "It's a huge wake up call," said Mr. Steyer, who, along with his wife and four children, sleeps with his phone in a separate room. Teenagers were more than twice as likely as adults to sleep with a phone in bed, the study found, with 29 percent of teenagers and 12 percent of adults admitting to the practice. The survey findings were adjusted to mirror the demographics of the actual population of parents with teenagers. The margin of error was about 4.4 percent. But their worries are different. Curiously, Common Sense Media found that while parents feel increasingly glued to their phones, attitudes among teenagers moved in the opposite direction. This year, for example, 52 percent of parents said they spent too much time on mobile devices, nearly twice as many as in 2016. Among teenagers, only 39 percent said they spent too much time on the devices, a steep decline from 61 percent. The share of parents who felt "addicted" to their devices rose to 45 percent from 27 percent, while the share of teenagers who said the same fell to 39 percent from 50 percent. It wasn't clear why attitudes among parents and teenagers diverged, but Mr. Robb offered some theories. Parents, he said, may be internalizing widespread news coverage of the repercussions of smartphone use. Children, on the other hand, may be suffering from normalization as fewer and fewer teenagers remember a time before such devices were ubiquitous. When it comes to actual use, though, both groups seem to have converged: Among parents, 42 percent said they checked their devices a few times an hour, while 43 percent of teens said the same. Everyone is arguing less. (After all, there are more Facebook and TikTok posts to scroll through.) One of the strangest findings of the survey, according to Mr. Robb, was that parents and teenagers were more worried about each other's use, yet arguing about it less. Today, about four in 10 teenagers believe their parents are addicted to or spend too much time on their mobile devices, the survey found. Among parents, six in 10 worry about their children being addicted to their phones and seven in 10 say their children spend too much time on the devices. For both groups, though, the share who reported arguing daily over how the other uses mobile devices fell from about a third to about a fifth. "Both kids and parents are arguing less, but at the same time they are feeling that the other is more distracted," Mr. Robb said. "It's a really weird finding." It isn't clear why families are arguing less about device use, but Mr. Robb and Mr. Steyer said it might be caused by apathy or resignation over the hold mobile devices have. There is some hope, though: About two thirds of parents said they had family rules governing the use of mobile devices, according to the survey findings. "We've been saying for years at Common Sense that you need to have 'sacred spaces,'" Mr. Steyer said. "There are times and places where phones, in particular, but all digital platforms should not be there. The bedroom is the obvious one."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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ARLINGTON, Tex. With less than three minutes remaining in a tight N.F.L. playoff matchup with the Seattle Seahawks on Saturday night, Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott made the most memorable play of his three year career. It couldn't have come at a better time for the Cowboys. With his team leading by 3 points and looking to put the game out of reach, Prescott took the snap on third down at the Seattle 16 yard line, 14 yards from a first down. Settling for a field goal would give the Seahawks a chance to win. Dallas needed that first down. Seattle's defense was set up for a pass, so Prescott took a few steps back, then charged forward. He found the seam and scooted past the first down marker. He was tripped up around the 3 yard line, did a somersault and landed just short of the goal line. Two plays later, he again ran the ball, this time for a touchdown that gave his team a 10 point cushion just enough for the Cowboys to hold on for a 24 22 victory. It was the first playoff win for Prescott and the Cowboys' first postseason victory in four years. Jones, Prescott and the Cowboys will face the Rams in Los Angeles next weekend in the divisional round of the playoffs. It won't be easy. The Rams are even more dominant at home than they are on the road. Everything seems to be bigger in Texas, including expectations for the Cowboys. In football mad Texas, Cowboys fans, rightly or wrongly, view anything but a championship as a lost season. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. The only problem is the Cowboys haven't won a Super Bowl since 1996. Fans in places like Cleveland and Minnesota would love to have this problem. But Cowboys fans know that their team's win on Saturday was just its fourth playoff victory since Jones collected his last Vince Lombardi trophy. Over that time, quarterbacks like Chad Hutchinson, Quincy Carter and Jon Kitna have failed to lead the team back to the promised land. Tony Romo, who lasted a decade, led the Cowboys to the postseason, where his teams flamed out. Enter Prescott. Jones, who is famously involved in player personnel decisions, signed off on choosing Prescott in the fourth round of the 2016 draft. Jared Goff (Rams), Carson Wentz (Eagles), Paxton Lynch (Broncos) and several other quarterbacks were drafted ahead of Prescott. Thus far, Prescott, 25, might be the best of the bunch. Goff has gaudier passing statistics, but Prescott has been clutch, with 15 game winning drives, tied with Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson for most in a quarterback's first three seasons. Like Wilson, Prescott can run the ball. He scored six rushing touchdowns in each of his three seasons. Of course, a big part of Prescott's success depends on running back Ezekiel Elliott, who has led the league in rushing two of his three first seasons. On Saturday, Elliott ran for 137 yards and a touchdown and caught four passes for 32 yards. Prescott was solid, completing 22 of 33 passes for 226 yards and a touchdown. After three quiet games, wide receiver Amari Cooper came alive with 106 receiving yards. Wide receiver Tavon Austin played a key role, setting up one score with a 51 yard punt return. But Cowboys fans will remember Prescott's run up the middle. Elliott called his performance "legendary," which even by Texas standards seemed to be a stretch. "I'm three years in," Prescott said sheepishly. "For him to say that, I'll have to tell him not to say that again, or wait until later."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Even when bad things happen to the Kardashians, they still make money. In February, rumors surfaced that the reality star Khloe Kardashian's boyfriend, the N.B.A. player Tristan Thompson, had cheated on her again, this time with her half sister's best friend, Jordyn Woods. Jordyn was so close to Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian Jenner sisters, that they lived together, and Kylie, who has her own makeup empire, had named several product lines in Jordyn's honor. That included the Jordy Lip Kit, a matching set of velvety lip gloss and liner in raspberry red. A fter days of speculation about the affair, Kardashian devotees noticed the price of the Jordy Lip Kit on the Kylie Cosmetics website had been slashed from 27 to 13.50. Customer reviews of the product began to take an angry tone: "This shade smells like betrayal" and "Be mindful of the shade as wearing it may lead to biting the hand that feeds you." But it also sold out, almost immediately. And there was a big spike in sales of other Kylie Cosmetics merchandise too. Khloe's relationship problems and Kylie and Jordyn's rift like every other chapter in the life of this family that has come of age in public promise to be drawn out in excruciating detail on the 16th season of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," which premieres on Sunday on E! Even if you've never seen a single episode of their show, chances are that you've bought a Kardashian fronted or backed something (Pepsi? Calvin Klein? Proactiv?). The sisters are a media company if it swallowed a makeup conglomerate, mated with a fashion line and birthed athleisure babies . (Their only brother, Rob, 32, has even backed a few ventures, including a line of novelty socks.) In 2007, Kris pitched the producer Ryan Seacrest a reality TV series that would follow her three high maintenance oldest daughters, Kourtney, Kim and Khloe , as they clawed their way to A list from D list. Sign up for Wait our newsletter that brings you news of social unrest, rich people and murder! "She said, 'We will be vulnerable at all points of impact no matter what presents itself and that struck me,'" Seacrest said in an interview. His production company was so fledgling that he had to send an employee to Best Buy to buy a video camera to record a Kardashian pool party that became part of the sizzle reel to pitch E! The cable channel initially passed, but Seacrest convinced executives. At the time, the family wasn't well known but Kim was friends with Paris Hilton, at least, and had a sex tape. Kris billed the show as a "modern day 'Brady Bunch.'" (That is, if Jan had a sex tape.) Kylie and Kendall, now idols to a younger fan base, were just 9 and 11 when the show started. "Kylie and I for a really long time wanted no part of it, we just wanted to go to our rooms and iChat with our friends," Kendall said. The grandchildren are characters on the show, paparazzi targets, stars of their parents' social media streams and cherished by fans in the 160 countries who have watched them grow up. "Everybody always says how I pulled Mason out of me!" Kourtney said. "Even if fans see Mason, they say I can't believe it was that long ago ." Well after Kim has aged out of tube tops, it seems this "Truman Show" of the one percent will live on. And an expanding menu of Kardashians offers something for everyone. Is body positivity your thing? Try Khloe's Good American jeans. ("I never knew I was considered chubby until I became famous," Khloe told me.) Want "working mom" lifestyle products? On April 2, Kourtney will debut Poosh, a beauty and wellness website named after her daughter, Penelope. Or perhaps you're into oversize camouflage jackets and wedge booties? Kendall Kylie is there for you. Most of these labels are sold almost exclusively online and with virtually no marketing budget, thanks to the women's massive presence on social media. In the first five minutes of Kim introducing her KKW Beauty line in 2017, she sold an estimated 14.4 million worth of product (or about 300,000 items). Last year, Kendall, who has become the world's highest paid model, made 26.5 million for just 53 sponsored Instagram posts, according to Captiv8, a marketing firm that connects brands to influencers. Kylie was 15 when Kris took her to trademark her idea to sell matching lip gloss and liner together. In March, Forbes named Kylie the youngest "self made billionaire ever," causing heated debate about the definition of self made. " I can't say I've done it by myself," Kylie told me, driving to an airport in Los Angeles. "If they're just talking finances, technically, yes, I don't have any inherited money. But I have had a lot of help and a huge platform." Still, people tend to talk dismissively about the Kardashians as "famous for being famous," rather than as entrepreneurs with an influence and reach perhaps second only to the reality TV star in the Oval Office. Maybe that's because they are so unabashedly materialistic (Khloe recently posted an Instagram photo of her 10 month old daughter, True, in a 160,000 pile of multicolored Birkin bags). Or maybe it's because they are empowered women who also care deeply about achieving the perfect smoky eye? Whatever the reason, those perceptions might be changing. "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" started as a way for the family to get famous. With their glammed up mix of high low culture (i.e. driving a Bentley but eating Chipotle), it has since become a kind of infomercial for the Kardashian Industrial Complex. And, regardless of what you think of what the Kardashians are selling, their never ending hustle is an undeniable lesson in female entrepreneurship. In the first episode of the new season, Kim and Kylie discuss the packaging for Kylie Cosmetics. Later this season , we'll see Khloe balancing new motherhood with her work with Good American (co founded with Emma Grede) and Kourtney putting the finishing touches on Poosh. "I could've created anything, but if they don't show up, or you've got a couple weak links, it could've been a disaster," Kris said of her children by phone from Los Angeles, on her way to a photo shoot for Kylie. She had just come from a meeting with Kourtney and attended three other meetings before that. It was 10:30 a.m. "It's definitely a grind and isn't for the weary." At this point, 12 television crew members already shooting the 17th season were pointing cameras at Kris through the car window, waiting for her to hang up with me and get out of the vehicle. "People don't know how much work goes into it," she said. Kanye West was dropping his daughter North off at school when Kim Kardashian West sneaked into her home office, upstairs, to take my call. The couple's two younger children, Saint and Chicago, played downstairs. In May, they will have a fourth baby, a son via a surrogate but if you have a pulse and an Instagram account, you already knew that. "I'm frantically trying to get the room ready," Kim told me. "It's madness, but the best madness." "I think in the beginning of our careers we got really excited like 'OMG, a brand wants me!' and sometimes it might not be an alignment with things you believe in," Khloe told me. "You step into this whirlwind and this whole life and for the past five, six years, at least, we've been very particular about what we do and very authentic I know that word is so overused." And yet Khloe and her sisters still post sponsored ads for HiSmile teeth whitening kits and Flat Tummy teas and appetite suppressing lollipops. After one recent post by Khloe, in which she hawks medically dubious meal replacement shakes wearing a pink bra and showing off chiseled abs, the actress Jameela Jamil, a frequent Kardashian critic, fired off an angry comment. "If you're too irresponsible to: a) own up to the fact that you have a personal trainer, nutritionist, probable chef and a surgeon to achieve your aesthetic, rather than this laxative product ... And b) tell them the side effects," she wrote, listing the side effects, "then I guess I have to." Kris is sanguine about such criticism. "I don't live in that negative energy space," she said "Ninety percent of people will be really excited about the family and the journey and who we are." Khloe, fresh from a workout, said that she's never had a chef and that she posts all of her personal training sessions on Snapchat, well aware that not everyone can afford such a luxury. "Well, listen, I am showing you what to do, silly person, 15 repetitions, three times, here's the move ..." she explained. Kim defended her family's product endorsements. Teeth whitening? "I don't have veneers. People really think that!" Waist trainers? "I got them for my friends after they had babies!" Kendall's Proactiv deal, widely mocked after Kris teased it on Twitter as a "brave and vulnerable" move? "She never thought she'd ever be able to be a model because of her acne," Kim said. Kim also said she turns down more offers than she accepts. When a fast fashion line offered her 1 million for a single Instagram post, Kanye urged her not to do it, saying, "These companies knock off my stuff." So Kim turned it down. As a thank you, on Mother's Day, Kanye gave her 1 million himself. "He wrote me a check for that amount and said 'Thank you so much for always being supportive and not posting,'" she said. She was also unapologetic about maximizing her family's income. "If there is work that is really easy that doesn't take away from our kids, that's like a huge priority, if someone was faced with the same job opportunities, I think they would maybe consider," she said. "You're going to get backlash for almost everything so as long as you like it or believe in it or it's worth it financially, whatever your decision may be, as long as you're O.K. with that." Would a man have to apologize for making easy money? But Jamil has called them "double agents for the patriarchy" who are "selling us self consciousness." And all of the women have been accused of selling deceptive products ( including a short lived credit card, which was criticized for high fees and promptly pulled off the market) and of exploitation . Kylie and Kendall recently had to apologize and pull 125 T shirts featuring the hip hop artist Tupac Shakur, and Kim defended herself against "some people online saying I was doing blackface" in a promotional post for her makeup. She also fixed the photo. Pepsi scrapped its ad that starred Kendall and borrowed imagery of the Black Lives Matter movement. Not long after that, Kendall was scrutinized for her involvement in promoting the ill fated Fyre Festival. "Girl, you better show up and hand a pepsi to everyone scammed by the fyre fest quick," read one tweet. On a break from a photo shoot in New York, Kendall addressed the controversy for the first time. She said she wasn't a part of the music event and didn't know much about it when she was reportedly paid 250,000 for a promotional post. But she said she had learned from the experience. The new season of "KUWTK," as "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" is so often abbreviated, will prominently feature Kanye, who will be regularly (and novelly) interviewed for into the camera confessionals. He and Kim married in 2014 and ever since he has exerted his vision on the show and the family's related businesses. He's not just another character coming and going like many of the other men, but a major force behind all of it. If Kris is the founder and chief executive of Kardashian Inc., Kanye has become the creative director. He frequently texts with the producers, offering input on the opening images which initially had a 1970s sitcom feel and now feature the women in nude tones and sleek, silvery poses. And he shared his thoughts on the backdrop of the confessionals, which now bathe the women in amber light. "He's a real creative force, clearly, and had thoughts on marketing, thoughts on presentation of the show, on the opening title sequence," said Adam Stotsky, the president of E! I told Kim that Kanye's involvement reminded me of an episode of the show from when they were first dating. In it, she cries as he throws out her clothes during a closet makeover with his stylist . "So, it's basically like that but for business," Kim said. "He'll have a room full of a dozen people or sometimes three of us and we go over packaging and colors and the photo shoot." The day I talked to Kris, Kanye had just come over. (They live across the street from each other in the same gated community in Calabasas, Calif.) He pointed to a new piece of furniture. "He said, 'I really think that little entry table would look better over there. So what did I do? I moved the entry table," Kris said. "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" could've been a gigantic hit and still faded like "The Osbournes," another reality show that put celebrity family dynamics on display. Even "The Apprentice," which attracted 20 million viewers in its first season, had fizzled by the time Trump ran for president, 14 seasons later. "There is no one who can sit here and say they saw or expected this," Seacrest said. But Kris insisted that by the second season, she could tell that the show and her family had staying power. "I knew we had something, and Kim and I really sat down and made a list of our goals," she said. Asked if the sisters had lived up to their mother's expectations, Kim didn't hesitate. "Everything she wanted happened," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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" It's crazy to think how obsessed I was," said Zachary Levi. "At one point in my life this was everything." Mr. Levi, who is 6 foot 4 and newly buff, was on the first floor of Midtown Comics, just south of Times Square, gazing up at shelves crammed with new releases. A former comics head and self described nerd, Mr. Levi likes to browse whenever he's in the neighborhood. He is starring in the second season of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," as Benjamin, the grumpy doctor who romances the title character, played by Rachel Brosnahan. And while "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" hasn't announced a comics tie in yet, Benjamin fast talking, freethinking, enigmatic is arguably a hero and his chemistry with Midge could explode a lab. Benjamin's superpower? "Logic," Mr. Levi, 38, said. Is that enough to withstand the force of nature that is Midge? That's a question for the third season. Benjamin is only one of Mr. Levi's identities, secret and otherwise. He played Chuck Bartowski, the tech geek who became an accidental superspy in the TV comedy "Chuck." And he was the voice of Flynn Rider, the thief with questionable intentions and great hair who rescued Rapunzel in the Disney movie "Tangled." He is also a Broadway star ("First Date," "She Loves Me"). And in case you thought the musical comedy triple threat was his own personal superpower, he is pretty sure it's empathy. "I've always had a really gnarly heart," Mr. Levi said. Next year, he'll finally join the superhero cape brigade, in "Shazam!" Mr. Levi plays the title character, a muscular incarnation of a teenage boy suddenly granted the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. "Also I can shoot lightning out of my hands," he said proudly. "The wish fulfillment is very ridiculous." This made him minor royalty at Midtown Comics, though that morning he was assuming a lower, less electric profile. Just another fanboy. Only taller. He wore green pants and a black Under Armour puffer that concealed his physique. Even incognito, it was clear that a hero had entered the building. Staff members trailed him as he browsed the narrow aisles, and other customers snapped surreptitious smartphone pics. The store is large and brightly lit, but so overstuffed with comics and merchandise (Mr. Levi was especially tempted by a Captain America gelatin mold) that it looks a lot smaller. After noting a "Shazam!" collection on the sale shelf, he paged through a "Bloom County" book and a Legend of Zelda encyclopedia shaped like an old Nintendo cartridge. "This is giving me the most unbelievable flashbacks," he said. "I keep thinking about slapping the cartridges and blowing into them just so they would work." "Life was so much simpler in the '80s," he said. That was when he first fell in love with comics, mostly "X Men" and its offshoots. "The idea of waking up one day and being able to teleport or fly or transform or be superstrong or whatever the child in every single one of us is secretly hoping for that all the time," he said. A Go Bots comic caught his eye and then an issue of "The Avengers" that showed Jimmy Kimmel on the cover. "That's when you know you've made it," Mr. Levi said. Mr. Levi also admired a "Star Wars" comic that styles Leia and Han like the farmers of "American Gothic." "Tell me that's not clever!" he said. He wanted to see the toys and collectibles. "How do you go upstairs?" he said to a pair of boyish Midtown Comics employees. Then he answered his own question: "Oh. Where the stairs are." He ascended them with a speed that wasn't quite Mercury's, eating a meal replacement bar on the way. "Every two hours I have another meal," he said. Mr. Levi made a beeline toward a wall of X Men figurines. "Gambit was my favorite," he said, pointing to one figurine. "Because he was a total ladies man and spoke with that Cajun accent." He went hunting for a Shazam figure in the DC Comics section, and Henry Varona, a baby faced staffer, had to break the news to him that he wouldn't find it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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In the last two decades, Las Vegas has become synonymous with colossal hotels where checking out can take longer than a leisurely lunch. But a new lodging prototype is coming to town: the branded boutique hotel, which is typically small and intimate, offering patrons more personalized service. The first of these brands appeared in February in an updated tower in Caesars Palace: the 181 room Nobu Hotel, which has the world's largest Nobu Restaurant and Lounge and was created by the chef Nobu Matsuhisa and Nobu Hospitality, with Caesars Entertainment. Caesars is also working with the Gansevoort Hotel Group to update another older property. Bill's Gamblin' Hall and Saloon, in the heart of the Strip, will be transformed into the 188 room Gansevoort Las Vegas, with clubs run by the club owner Victor Drai and a small 40,000 square foot casino. The hotel is expected to open in early 2014. Two other Las Vegas hotels will open under well known boutique brands, although they will have thousands of rooms in more typical Vegas fashion. MGM Resorts International and Morgans Hotel Group will open the Delano Las Vegas late this year in an existing property owned by MGM: THEhotel at the Mandalay Bay resort. And in 2014, under its SLS brand, the hospitality company SBE will open a mixed use resort and casino at the former Sahara Hotel and Casino on the northern end of the Strip. Developers have turned their sights toward boutique hotels for several reasons. At the same time, the changing demographics of visitors to Las Vegas have made fine dining a crucial component in most boutique hotels a more important part of the Las Vegas travel experience. Las Vegas visitors seem to have taken well to the boutique aesthetic. At Nobu, rates start at 249 a night, though they fluctuate depending on hotel occupancy. Occupancy has been in the low to mid 90 percent level since its soft opening in February, said Gary Selesner, a regional president for Caesars Palace. In general in Las Vegas, which has added about 17,500 hotel rooms since the financial crisis of 2008, citywide occupancy has dropped to 84 percent, while rates have plunged even further, from 132.09 a night at their height in 2007 to 108.08 a night in 2012. Several branded boutique hotels were planned even before the recession, though those projects succumbed to the economic malaise and were stalled, said Thomas P. McConnell, an executive managing director of the global hospitality group at Cushman Wakefield Equity, Debt and Structured Finance. Elsewhere in the country, boutique hotels have been opening in the central business districts of larger cities, but Las Vegas may be particularly ripe for them as food and beverages have become more important to the way visitors especially younger visitors experience the city. "Going back 20 years, for a long time, Vegas was all about the gaming floor," said Scott Berman, the United States hospitality and leisure practice leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "The majority of revenues came from the gaming floor, but over time, you've seen retail, and food and beverage, and obviously hotels become more important to the overall economic equation." With megaclubs like Hakkasan Las Vegas and Light opening this month, the city's club scene has also grown exponentially. And boutique hotels are part and parcel of that type of social scene, Mr. Selesner said. "The demographics in Las Vegas continue to change," he said. "There are more younger people coming for other than the traditional reason to come to Las Vegas, which used to be gambling. They're coming for nightclubs, restaurants, and bar and pool experiences, and when they travel, they tend to stay in these boutique hotels." The two boutique hotels created by Caesars, the Nobu and the Gansevoort, are quite a different product from the Delano and the SLS, said Rick Mazer, a regional president for Caesars Entertainment. While the Nobu and Gansevoort are closer to the traditional 50 to 75 room boutique size, the Delano and the SLS will have many more rooms. The SLS, which will have more than 1,600 rooms, and the 1,100 room Delano "are trying to move into the resort world," he said. "When you get into the hundreds let alone thousands of rooms, it's really tough to create a boutique hotel experience." In fact, the Delano will not be managed by Morgans at all, but by MGM, and is really a boutique rebranding of a large hotel, Mr. McConnell, of Cushman Wakefield, said. Chuck Bowling, the president and chief operating officer of Mandalay Bay, the resort offering the Delano, said the hotel would try to strike a balance between attracting trendy leisure travelers, particularly those from South America, and continuing to attract the conventioneers. "We wanted to make sure we protect the existing experience, so not make it so trendy and boutique that people wouldn't enjoy it from a professional experience," Mr. Bowling said. Though boutique hotel operators might not agree, it is possible to expand a successful boutique hotel without losing its character, Mr. Berman, of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said. "That's about facility planning and layout," he said. "Once you've got the formula, it's pretty easy to replicate." The location of the SLS at the former Sahara, which is far north of the Strip proper, necessitates the creation of a self sufficient resort, Mr. McConnell said. "You have to create something unto itself, and you don't rely on the Strip as much," he said. "So the economics and real estate are a little different, but it's still a recognizable lifestyle brand that has certain touch points." Mr. McConnell said that the state of the economy might explain why none of the new boutique hotels were being built from the ground up. "They're recycling these buildings instead of knocking them down," he said. "If it were a more robust market, a lot of these boutique hotels would still be happening, but you'd see more rebuilds." Smaller hotels within larger hotels are not new in Las Vegas, where places like Sky Suites at Aria and Sky Lofts at MGM Grand are unbranded attempts at boutique hotels. What is new is the use of established boutique brands to revive older properties, Mr. McConnell said. Michael Achenbaum, co founder and president of the Gansevoort Hotel Group, said that the unbranded boutique hotels might not compete very directly with the new branded boutiques. The unbranded hotels enable the casinos to attract high level gamers who have very little brand loyalty, he said. "Those Sky Suites just are not readily available" to conventional tourists, he said. "There are times when it doesn't matter what you'll pay, if you're not a gambler, you're not getting them."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Following last week's argument in a Louisiana abortion case, the consensus among attentive Supreme Court watchers is that the outcome depends on Chief Justice John Roberts, who seemed not to share Justice Samuel Alito's visceral dislike of abortion clinics and his deep suspicion of doctors who work in them. I agree. Further, many of these close observers came away believing that even if the justices rule for Louisiana, they will take neither of the two drastic steps being pressed on the court by the state and its White House ally: to reject four decades of settled law under which doctors can challenge abortion restrictions on their patients' behalf, or to overturn the 2016 decision that struck down the same admitting privileges requirement in Texas that Louisiana is now defending. I agree with that prediction as well. The chief justice seemed to be probing for ways within the framework of the 2016 decision that Louisiana might be different from Texas, either because of a more persuasive rationale for requiring clinic doctors in Louisiana to have hospital admitting privileges or because the requirement imposes a lesser obstacle to abortion access in Louisiana than it did in Texas. So why do I think that anyone who cares about preserving women's access to abortion should be seriously worried? Wouldn't a state specific win for Louisiana, one that left existing precedents on the books, represent a reprieve from looming disaster, a moderate place for this conservative court to land, however tentatively or temporarily? The answer to that question is an emphatic "no." When it comes to the abortion landscape, there is no distinction that matters between Texas and Louisiana. There is not the shadow of a doubt that these laws were enacted not to protect women's health, but to destroy the medical infrastructure that enables women to exercise their constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. When the Texas bill passed in 2013, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst exultantly tweeted a map showing how many abortion clinics would have to close because of the inability of doctors to get the necessary admitting privileges. The next year, when the Louisiana Legislature passed its copycat bill, the Unsafe Abortion Protection Act, Gov. Bobby Jindal declared it part of his effort "to make Louisiana the most pro life state in the nation." (And, indeed, the state was deemed so the following year by Americans United for Life, the organization that has promoted the admitting privileges idea along with other measures aimed at abortion providers. It won the title again in 2019.) At the same time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Louisiana had the highest maternal death rate among the 47 states that provided data from 2012 to 2016. As a brief filed by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School points out, "Louisiana is not a 'pro life' state; it is merely an anti abortion one." Justice Stephen Breyer's majority opinion in the 2016 case, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, invoked national data showing the admitting privileges requirement not only offers no medical benefit to women, but actually threatens women's health by shrinking the number of providers, increasing waiting times for appointments and making abortion less accessible. Applying the court's "undue burden" test for an abortion regulation's constitutionality, Justice Breyer said the burden imposed by the Texas law so far outweighed any benefit that it failed the test and was therefore unconstitutional. The vote in Whole Woman's Health was 5 to 3. Justice Antonin Scalia had died several months earlier; had he been on the court, or had his successor, Neil Gorsuch, been seated in time, the vote would surely have been 5 to 4. Justice Anthony Kennedy voted with the majority. Now, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sits in Justice Kennedy's all important seat. During last week's argument in June Medical Services v. Russo, Louisiana's solicitor general, Elizabeth Murrill, argued that her state was "demonstrably different" from Texas in both its need for additional regulation and the opportunity its hospitals offer for receiving admitting privileges if only doctors would try harder. The facts, as laid out by a federal district judge, John deGravelles, after a six day trial, are completely different however. At the time he ruled in 2017, only four patients of the Shreveport based Hope Clinic, which brought the case on behalf of its doctors and patients, had needed hospitalization during the 23 years the clinic had been providing some 3,000 abortions a year. The judge wrote that one doctor's effort to get admitting privileges "reads like a chapter in Franz Kafka's 'The Trial.' " He said, moreover, that if the law takes effect, there will be one or at most two doctors performing abortions in Louisiana. (In overturning the District Court decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit substituted its own factual findings for those of Judge deGravelles, a remarkably aggressive move for an appellate court ordinarily bound to accept the trial court's findings of fact unless they are "clearly erroneous.") A Supreme Court decision that buys the state's argument, that treats its 2016 decision as anything other than completely binding on Louisiana, will be nothing but a smoke screen. A cynic might call it an election year ploy designed to make an indefensible outcome look moderate. It doesn't take a cynic to understand that there is no middle ground here. Back in 2016, that was immediately clear to Alabama's attorney general, Luther Strange, a Republican, who was in the midst of appealing a ruling by a federal district judge, Myron Thompson, that the state's admitting privileges law was unconstitutional. Recognizing that the Supreme Court's ruling necessarily applied to his state's law as well, Mr. Strange announced, "Accordingly, my office will dismiss our appeal of a 2014 federal court ruling declaring Alabama's abortion clinic law unconstitutional." Nearly four years later, that action by a Deep South attorney general appears even more remarkable than it did at the time: an elected politician acted like a lawyer. My fear now is two pronged: that the lawyers on the Supreme Court will behave like politicians and that too many of us will be too snowed by their seeming moderation to call them out on it. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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This is the year to be a woman in the Stephen Petronio Company. Who wouldn't want the chance to be a slippery, flitting postmodern sylph? In "Glacial Decoy," Trisha Brown's superb 1979 work featuring sets, costumes and visual direction by Robert Rauschenberg, five dancers wearing diaphanous shoulder baring dresses glide forward and back in front of Rauschenberg's shifting backdrop of photographs capturing black and white slices of Americana. There's a string tied around a tree, a bike seat, the front door of a house. The work was performed Tuesday as part of Mr. Petronio's "Bloodlines" project, which focuses on his influences; he danced in Ms. Brown's company from 1979 to 1986. "Glacial Decoy" was Ms. Brown's first piece for the proscenium, and it was wittily designed so that its dancers feed in from the wings to blur the stage's borders. The movement, supple and free, creates a sensual bounce as the women unfurl their limbs like ribbons strewn by a fan. They're in a continual state of rebound: After a kick with a flexed foot, they curve around an invisible bend. "Glacial Decoy" is worth seeing under any circumstance, but Mr. Petronio's dancers are better at being emphatic than loose. Often they hold their arms too rigidly, overriding the choreography's exquisite elasticity. Cori Kresge and Emily Stone, settling into an internal shared rhythm in the center duet, come closest to conveying the dance's brush stroke delicacy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Louvre Reopens, but the Crowd Will Have to Control Itself None PARIS The line of around 600 people outside the Louvre on Wednesday was a swirl of rumor, with people wondering if the world's most visited museum would open after a three day closure. Since Sunday, the Louvre's staff had been refusing to work, fearful they might catch the coronavirus from someone among the museum's more than 30,000 daily visitors. "Nobody says anything," said Satu Fontanili, 34, from Finland, who was in line with her husband and toddler. "Everything looks normal, but the doors remain closed." "I don't think that we're going to stand still here in the cold for another one or two hours," she added. Around midday, the museum's doors opened without fanfare, and the crowd started shuffling in. Louvre employees voted on Sunday to stop work over safety fears, a move allowed under French law. The museum stayed closed on Monday, and does not open on Tuesdays. The museum's management, its doctor and staff representatives met throughout Tuesday to consider measures to protect workers from the virus, and employees voted Wednesday morning to accept them, Andre Sacristin, a Louvre employee and union representative, said in a telephone interview. The unions representing employees asked for visitor numbers to be halved, but that request was rejected, Mr. Sacristin added. Workers also asked to be provided with face masks and gloves; the museum agreed to a small bottle of hand sanitizer instead, Mr. Sacristin said. The museum also agreed that ticket purchases would now occur largely via self service machines. Staff members will operate two ticket kiosks, but would do so from behind a glass barrier to prevent direct contact with visitors. They will not handle cash, only credit cards. Sophie Grange, deputy head of communication for the Louvre, said Wednesday morning that about 3,500 tickets had been purchased online for that day. Such sales usually represent about 50 percent of total visitors, she said. Once visitors have bought their tickets, most want to see one thing: the Mona Lisa, which hangs in the Salle des Etats. Christian Galani, a Louvre employee and union representative, said in a telephone interview that it had been agreed that guards would no longer have to move among the crowds in the room to stop people from dawdling in front of the Mona Lisa and to break up large groups that could cause bottlenecks. Around 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, the Salle des Etats had only a few dozen visitors, cellphones aloft, taking selfies with the Mona Lisa. Usually, hundreds of people wait in line to catch a glimpse of the masterpiece, but uncertainty about whether the museum would open on Wednesday kept many away. One guard, Quentin Osle Rudler, stood six feet from the painting, keeping watch. He said he was unsure about the new directive not to move around the room. "People are going to wait around in front of the painting," he added. "It will be messy." He said he was concerned that the Salle des Etats would become too full as the crowds returned to the museum, increasing the risk of transmission for the virus. Mr. Galani, the union representative, said further measures would be needed. "The problem is that once the room is full of people, I don't see how agents could not be exposed to the virus," he said. "At some point we will probably have to regulate the number of visitors in the room." Over recent days, the Louvre has been turned into a test case for how large museums should respond to the coronavirus outbreak. France has over 200 confirmed cases, with several deaths. On Saturday, the French government banned all indoor events of more than 5,000 people, including arena concerts. The popular rapper and singer Maitre Gims was one of several artists who postponed a planned tour. The French culture minister, Franck Riester, said the ban did not apply to the Louvre because visitors were dispersed throughout many rooms of the museum. But the Louvre's employees were not convinced, and voted to close on Sunday. "Our agents are aware of the potential danger," Mr. Sacristin said. "They think they don't have enough training and protection, and that their health could be endangered." Other cultural sites in Europe have taken measures to protect workers and visitors from the virus. Museums in northern Italy reopened on Tuesday after a government ordered closure, but with a requirement that visitors keep at least one meter, about three feet, apart at all times. Other Italian museums remain closed. Mr. Osle Rudler, the guard at the Louvre, said he did not think that the Louvre measures went far enough, and that employees could vote to stop working again if they felt unsafe. "We're not happy to close the museum," Mr. Osle Rudler said. "But this is for our security and for the security of the visitors." Constant Meheut reported from Paris, and Alex Marshall from London. Elian Peltier contributed reporting from London.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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DENISE COBB, a former CNN anchor, and her husband, Brian, a media executive, have had some great chefs in their kitchen over the years. Thomas Keller, the owner of the French Laundry in Napa Valley and Per Se in New York, has cooked there three times. Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin in New York, has been there, too. This weekend, Brian Boitano, the Olympic gold medal figure skater who is also a television chef, is cooking in their South Florida home albeit for 32 people whom the Cobbs don't know all that well. It's all for charity, in this case the 16th Naples Winter Wine Festival, a stop on the small but rarefied world of charity wine auctions. This weekend, 17 dinners, including the one hosted by the Cobbs, will be held in some of the largest and nicest homes in Naples, Fla., a seaside town known for its vast wealth. No dinner will be larger than 40 people, and each one will feature top chefs and vintners. At the Cobbs' house, the winemakers Barbara Banke of Verite and John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Pixar who also owns Lasseter Famliy Wineries, were invited. Ms. Banke agreed to pour five of her wines that have received top 100 point scores from the wine critic Robert Parker. Unlike many charity auctions, which are fixtures in affluent communities, the price of entry for wine auctions in places like Napa Valley and Naples would constitute a large charitable gift in itself. In Naples, couples paid 10,000 to be part of the weekend or 25,000 for two couples who sought to be seated at the same private dinner on Friday. The entry price includes the auction on Saturday and a farewell brunch on Sunday. At Auction Napa Valley, the oldest charity wine auction in the United States, dating to 1981, the cost ranges from 550 to attend the Napa Valley Barrel Auction, where people bid to buy cases of wine after tasting the wine right out of the barrel, to 4,000 for full access to the auction and events over four days in June. While these auctions are private affairs, they serve a public need helping the poorer residents in otherwise wealthy communities. And they've been successful enough that the format of drinking, dining and bidding has been copied. "One of the beautiful things about our auction is it has helped to spur other charity wine auctions around the U.S.," said Linda Reiff, president and chief executive of Auction Napa Valley. "We've had vintners who have helped create them in Naples, Sonoma County, the central coast, even your small elementary school P.T.A." The wine auctions, if they're to be successful, are complicated affairs. They start with the auction lots. In Naples, this will be the third time that a Rolls Royce has been auctioned. Ms. Cobb said the first time the organizers struggled to persuade Rolls Royce to donate a car to raffle off. "They were worried in the beginning that it wouldn't raise enough money," she said. "When they saw the amount of money people would bid for things, they changed their mind." The second Rolls Royce, a Phantom Coupe, could have been bought for 500,000, but went for 2 million at auction in 2007. It came with a custom wine cellar in the trunk. Yet not everyone is into cars or, for that matter, has the desire or ability to pay four times what something is worth, even for charity. So, Ms. Cobb said, the quest is for a mix of experiences and rarities to make up the 64 lots of the live auction. One package is four tickets to the Masters golf tournament, including a private dinner with the golf legend Gary Player and private jet travel to and from Augusta, Ga. Another is a 14 day trip around Europe on a private jet that holds 15 people. Then, there is the opportunity to watch a Dallas Cowboys football game with the owner, Jerry Jones. The novelty of the lots is important to bringing people back year after year, festival trustees said. After all, there are only so many people in the country who have the time or money to spend 10 days flying from Napa to London to Paris with the chief executive of Opus One winery. Or if they do, once is probably enough. However unique the lots are, what someone is willing to pay still depends, as in most auctions, on the mood in the room that day. Ms. Reiff said a 12 liter bottle of Screaming Eagle, the largest size made of the cult, limited production cabernet sauvignon, sold for 500,000 at the Napa auction last year. But, she said, there have been times when bidders have been so moved by stories they've heard that they donate without getting anything but good feelings in return. "Our top auction lot is Fund a Need, which benefits our children's health and education program," she said. "You can have someone really moved, and they could raise their paddle and put up 500,000 alone." As in Napa, the focus in Naples is on charities to help children and women in the community. "The one thing that was important was to make a profound difference in the lives of the children in Collier County," said Valerie Gargiulo, a trustee of the wine festival and vice chairwoman of the grant committee at the Naples Children and Education Foundation, which distributes all the money raised. "The wine auction became our vehicle. We knew that if we had the wine and the great chefs coming, we could attract people." Since the first auction in 2001, the Naples Winter Wine Festival has given 135 million to charities in Collier County. Last year, the festival raised 12.3 million. Ms. Gargiulo said the money raised was given to programs focused on mental health, vision and dental care and early child care. The aim is to make up for a lack of tax dollars being spent by the county, she said. Sandi Moran, another trustee and the vice chairwoman of last year's festival, said that festival trustees and grant committee members had worked over the last 16 years to prevent overlap in the services offered in the poorer areas of Collier County. "We asked the charities not to duplicate services so they'd work together," she said. "We asked them to do more for the children." Money raised also pays for periodic studies into what is needed in the area. That was how the foundation arm of the festival came to pay for a mobile dental clinic that treats children at their schools, and was also to start a program to give eyeglasses to any child who needed them. As to replicating the success of these auctions, Ms. Reiff of Napa Valley suggested a cautious approach. Putting on a good charity wine auction is going to take much more time than people expect, she said. "My advice would be to start small and stay focused," she said. "Don't try to be all things to all people, have clear and understandable causes that you're raising money for and have a great committee." As the Naples festival was about to get underway, Ms. Moran did not stress the work that went into it every trustee commits to hosting and paying for the dinner but the uses of the money raised. "People sometimes don't understand that the festival is not just a big party," she said. "We have a reason for it. We have the Naples Children and Education Foundation and the Naples Winter Wine Festival is how we raise money each year. There is a reason for this great party." The hope is that many well heeled people will drink to that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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George Balanchine's choreography advertises dancers, glorifies dancers, gives dancers both their toughest assignments and their ultimate release. Balanchine (1904 83) was New York City Ballet's founding ballet master, in 1948; when it dances his ballets, the most irresistible response is to talk about the dancers. It's also the most superficial, but let's attend to this surface level first. On Tuesday night, the company opened its six week spring season at Lincoln Center with a program of three Balanchine ballets: Many dancers at all levels were like greyhounds unleashed. Nothing was more sensational than Tiler Peck's performance in the opener, "Allegro Brillante" (1956). This ballet has been a first rate vehicle for this intensely musical virtuoso for some years, but on Tuesday she broke through to a new fire and wind level of fervor; her brilliance was fueled by both abandon and vehemence. The performances of Sara Mearns (Sanguinic) and Teresa Reichlen (Choleric) in "The Four Temperaments" (1946) were quite as vivid. Ms. Mearns, pouncing breezily through the knottily rapid fire steps, devoured space elsewhere with Amazonian boldness. Ms. Reichlen, coolly explosive, was rage and fate combined. These women were already exceptional: What ever has got into them now? Beside her was Harrison Ball, a soloist replacing Anthony Huxley at short notice, elegant and notably buoyant. Even after all these and the redoubtable but relentlessly pert Ashley Bouder (first movement), Brittany Pollack in the fourth movement set sparkling standards of top speed precision. It's always tempting to keep the talk on dancers; their performances change from one day to the next, and seasons contain alternative casts. But deeper than dancers are the ballets themselves. Most Balanchine ballets are like a demonstration of Plato's theory of forms: They draw us into pure essence in a way that's phenomenal by the standards of any art. And the skill of their construction is such that you keep finding new facets in them. I began watching "The Four Temperaments" 40 years ago, but only now am I struck by how the image of physical slumping the torso falling forward heavily, the knees buckling, the arms hanging loose occurs at least once for the lead dancer of each temperament (Melancholic, Sanguinic, Phlegmatic, Choleric). It's an image of dejection, torpor; it seems anti ballet, and especially alien to the outgoing luster of Balanchine ballet. Yet it occurs in a few other Balanchine works, notably the early, seminal "Apollo" (1928); I would guess that for this choreographer it's a portrait of the artist's exhaustion. And it's always temporary. Each of the lead dancers of "The Four Temperaments" has a collapse of this kind artists drained of inspiration which then adds drama to their recovery. Each in a singular way shows the rebirth of inspiration. No such slumps occur in "Allegro Brillante" or "Symphony in C." Balanchine called "Allegro Brillante" "everything I know about classical ballet in 13 minutes." You could pack a book with a close analysis of its expertise about the management of centrifugal stage space, gender, exuberant energy, numbers (just 10 dancers, but how many combinations?) and inflamed classicism. Yet "Symphony in C" grander, more formally hierarchical, in four marvelously contrasting movements shows how much else about classical ballet Balanchine already understood. Central to the construction of every Balanchine ballet is its intimate dialogue between dance and music, sometimes like question and answer, sometimes like spirit and flesh, sometimes like a pianist's right and left hands. This isn't the only way in which Balanchine makes ballet a revelation of pure form these ballets have no scenery, and their costumes (even the shining white tutus of "Symphony in C") are subordinate to their physicality but it's the foundation of the Balanchine experience. "Temperaments" is to a score Balanchine commissioned from Paul Hindemith; "Symphony in C" is to a score by the young Bizet that was rediscovered only 12 years before Balanchine choreographed to it; "Allegro Brillante" is to one movement of an otherwise unfinished piano concerto by Tchaikovsky. I have heard musicians argue about just how good each of these scores really is (the Tchaikovsky is the thinnest), but the choreography Balanchine gives them makes the best case for their excellence. To mix metaphors, he leads you deep into their workings while putting wind in their sails. Andrew Litton, Tuesday's conductor and the company's music director, isn't invariably a natural accompanist. When I think of his most celebrated predecessor, Robert Irving, I see Irving's face, so often upturned to the dancers. But Mr. Litton keeps raising the City Ballet's orchestral playing. Dance and music meet as shining equals.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for September. Hilary Swank is a stressed out astronaut in "Away," a science fiction drama about the potentially catastrophic complications that threaten to scuttle a mission to Mars. The show is focused more on human relationships than on fantasy adventure: Swank plays a commander, Emma Green, who's dealing with the wonky technical issues that arise during any scientifically challenging endeavor, while at the same time handling her international crew's skepticism and her worries about a family crisis back on Earth. Writer director Charlie Kaufman, known for his mind bending films "Synecdoche, New York" and "Anomalisa," here adapts Iain Reid's experimental thriller novel "I'm Thinking of Ending Things." Though the central situation in the movie is very down to Earth following a young woman as she meets the parents of the boyfriend she may want to dump Kaufman follows Reid's metafictional cues, turning the story into an intricately layered study of identity and desire. The cast (including Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons as the couple and Toni Collette and David Thewlis as the parents) gives every odd detour some human grounding, but this is ultimately a challenging film made for thoughtful and adventurous audiences. Acclaimed at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, the French drama "Cuties" (titled "Mignonnes" in its original language) is about an 11 year old Senegalese immigrant named Amy, who tries to fit in with her Parisian peers by joining a dance troupe even though the other girls' clothing and moves are outside of her cultural experience. The original Netflix marketing for the movie caused critics to conclude that "Cuties" was sexualizing preteens rather than commenting on the pressures of adolescence. Lost in the resulting outcry were the subtleties of the approach that writer director Maimouna Doucoure takes with this material. Even if you're the type who's extra cautious about your online behavior, you may be shocked by what you learn from Jeff Orlowski's documentary "The Social Dilemma." In alarming interviews, a handful of Silicon Valley veterans describe the subtle methods that big tech companies like Google and Facebook use to track users' data, in order to steer them toward specific content and advertising. In between that commentary Orlowski inserts clever dramatizations, with actors playing a family whose lives are now stealthily governed by what they see on their phones. In the raunchy British sitcom "The Duchess," the stand up comedian Katherine Ryan plays a Canadian single mother, living in London and trying to manage a lifestyle about evenly split between libertinism and alpha mom parenting. The series follows her attempts to give her brilliant daughter the gift she most wants a younger sibling even if that means coaxing the child's own wastrel father into donating his sperm. The show is reminiscent of "Fleabag" and "Catastrophe," but filtered through the sensibility of Ryan a comic with material that draws heavily on sex and self care in the 2020s. From the mind of J.G. Quintel the creator of the oddball, all ages cartoon "Regular Show" the adult oriented animated series "Close Enough" offers a weird and whimsical take on marriage and parenthood. Quintel voices Josh, who alongside his wife Emily (Gabrielle Walsh) is raising a young child in Los Angeles, as both parents desperately cling to their hip and relevant self image. This premise wouldn't be out of place on a run of the mill live action sitcom, but the format allows Quintel to fill "Close Enough" with fantastical digressions and broad caricature. An outstanding lineup of movie stars and character actors help the writer director Antonio Campos bring energy and color to his adaptation of Donald Ray Pollock's grim Southern Gothic novel "The Devil All the Time." Set in Ohio coal country in the 1950s and '60s, the film stars Bill Skarsgard and Tom Holland as a father and son who each have their own way of fighting for what's right in a rural community populated by bullies, crooked lawmen, opportunistic preachers and psychotic criminals. Robert Pattinson, Riley Keough, Sebastian Stan, Jason Clarke and Mia Wasikowska round out the primary cast. Even viewers who didn't grow up in the 1990s love "Friends," although it's a sitcom that is very much of its era from the clothes and the hairstyles to the way that its cast of kooky young New Yorkers seem untroubled by sociopolitical or economic reality. Give credit to the likable cast, whose crack comic timing and quirky personalities helped inspire the show's writers to craft snappy, binge worthy story arcs, about young adults coping with career and romantic troubles that remain relatable across the decades. Based on Nancy Springer's series of young adult novels, the upbeat and visually snazzy teen detective movie "Enola Holmes" has "Stranger Things" breakout star Millie Bobby Brown playing the underestimated kid sister of the master sleuth Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill). The plot concerns Enola's attempts to elude her other brother, the snippy Myrcoft (Sam Claflin), as she ventures into London to find their missing mother Eudoria (Helena Bonham Carter). But the premise is really just an excuse to drop the charismatic Brown into a variety of situations where she gets to show off Enola's smarts and courage. Also arriving: "Felipe Esparza: Bad Decisions (Felipe Esparza: Malas Decisiones)" (September 1), "Bad Boy Billionaires: India" (September 2), "Chef's Table: BBQ" (September 2), "Love, Guaranteed" (September 3), "Young Wallander" (September 3), "Record of Youth" (September 7), "Get Organized with The Home Edit" (September 9), "La Linea: Shadow of Narco" (September 9), "The Babysitter: Killer Queen" (September 10), "The Gift" Season 2 (September 10), "The Idhun Chronicles" (September 10), "Julie and the Phantoms" (September 10), "Family Business" Season 2 (September 11), "Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice" (September 15), "Baby" Season 3 (September 16), "Criminal: UK" Season 2 (September 16), "Sing On!" (September 16), "The Last Word" (September 17), "American Barbecue Showdown" (September 18), "Ratched" (September 18), "The Chef Show" September 2 (September 24), "Romance on the Menu" (September 24), "Country ish" (September 25), "A Perfect Crime" (September 25), "Michelle Buteau: Welcome to Buteaupia" (September 29), "American Murder: The Family Next Door" (September 30), "The Boys in the Band (September 30). The actor Glenn Howerton has honed a sharp comic persona during his decade plus in the cast of "Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia," where he's mastered playing a short tempered egomaniac determined to live a life of maximum ease. In "A.P. Bio," Howerton plays a former Harvard professor whose career craters so badly that he's forced to teach high school in a small middle American city. Through two very funny seasons and now starting a third "A.P. Bio" has generated some good, stinging comedy out of the way this terrible teacher exploits his gifted students, forcing them to be his minions as he plots a mission of revenge against his academic enemies. Perhaps the most influential American sitcom of the 1980s, "Cheers" is set in a Boston bar where different social classes spend their days and nights swapping jokes and arguing amiably. The cast shifted a bit between the first few seasons and the later years, but the show was anchored throughout by the poised, funny Ted Danson, playing a former professional baseball pitcher and incorrigible flirt named Sam Malone. The "hang out" vibe of "Cheers" along with Sam's many romantic subplots became a model for how to make an engaging ensemble comedy. It's remarkable how much the "Pen15" co creators and co stars Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle remember about what it was like to be a 13 year old girl in the year 2000. In season two of their funny and often painfully honest sitcom, Erskine and Konkle (along with their chief collaborator Sam Zvibleman) continue telling detailed stories about the highs and many lows of adolescence, drawn partly from their own experiences. They have a keen understanding of those awkward transitional years when some kids are having furtive sexual experiences while others are still watching cartoons. The title of the two part mini series "The Comey Rule" refers to James Comey, the former FBI director, played here by Jeff Daniels. Written and directed by Billy Ray (a veteran of ripped from the headlines stories, best known for writing "Captain Phillips" and writing and directing "Shattered Glass"), the drama details the lawman's adversarial relationship with President Donald Trump (Brendan Gleeson), as information about possible Russian interference in American elections comes to light. An astonishingly accomplished supporting cast includes Peter Coyote, Holly Hunter, T.R. Knight, William Sadler and Oona Chaplin, all playing bureaucrats and politicians who never meant to become front page news.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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LONDON And so to Monday, the fourth day of the London schedule, which begins with shows from two outsiders who have managed to make the city and its fashion scene their own. The Serbian born Roksanda Ilincic shows her Roksanda collection at 10 a.m., followed an hour later by the Canadian designer Erdem Moralioglu, whose Erdem brand is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. A stalwart of British fashion, Pringle of Scotland, shows its latest knitted offerings at noon, and then the eyes of the industry turn to Burberry at 1 p.m. This will be Christopher Bailey's first collection since his announcement that the brand will be switching to a see now, buy now approach that mixes men's and women's clothes in twice yearly collections. No doubt the ever dependable front row circus of Brit models, singers and social media stars from far flung locations chosen with emerging luxury market potential, of course will be in place. The industry darling Christopher Kane will show at 3 p.m. and Peter Pilotto at 5. Then, at 7 p.m., Giles Deacon concludes the day with his final ready to wear show before packing for Paris to join the couture schedule in July. For those in the mood, Erdem and Selfridges will be hosting an after party at the Old Selfridges Hotel. But most showgoers likely will head home to recover from a big weekend of parties and rest up for a final day before the fashion circus decamps to Milan.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Is it really possible to find healthy food at an airport? When it comes to airports in the United States, at least, the answer is yes, increasingly so. In recent years, airports around the country have amped up their availability of healthy snacks, meals and drinks to cater travelers who want to follow a balanced diet when they are away from home. "Health conscious travel has become a fast emerging movement in the airport environment," said Scott R. Elmore, the vice president of marketing and communications for Airports Council International, a nonprofit organization that represents the world's airports. "Healthy food options are part of this effort." Much of the push is coming from the concession companies that operate restaurants and food markets in airports. HMSHost, for example, which has a presence in more than 120 airports globally, launched an initiative earlier this year titled "Eat Well. Travel Further." at 11 United States airports including Newark Liberty International Airport, Nashville International Airport and Seattle Tacoma International Airport. The program, created in collaboration with a team of nutritionists, has three components. There are five bento boxes, each under 500 calories, such as a vegan box with a lentil and chickpea salad and veggie chips, and a box geared for children with diced chicken breast, cubed Cheddar cheese and chocolate covered raisins, as well as snacks (think kale chips, roasted chickpeas and hummus with crudites), and 30 different drinks including several kinds of green juices. The program will roll out to more airports in the coming months. According to Atousa Ghoreichi, the company's vice president of marketing and communications, the products contain no artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners and hydrogenated fats or high fructose corn syrup. They're sold at HMSHost food markets and stands throughout the airports and are each labeled with an "Eat Well. Travel Further." sticker. Fliers seem to be appreciating the new offerings. The paleo bento box, for one, which has a salad of julienne squash, zucchini and red peppers topped with grilled chicken, a packet of almonds and a cup of berries, fast became a best seller, even compared with the company's offerings that don't fall under the program; around 7,000 paleo boxes sell every week across the locations that carry them. OTG, an airport restaurant company that has a presence in nine locations in the country including John F. Kennedy International Airport, is also bumping up its healthy food and drink choices. Nate Appleman, the company's vice president of culinary, said part of the reason is requests by fliers. "All diners in our restaurants can leave instant feedback on an iPad about what they want dining wise, and they were increasingly telling us that healthy but tasty food was a priority," he said. OTG's Cibo Express Gourmet Market, at all the airports where the company operates, carries its own line of cold pressed juices and sandwiches that are made with gluten free bread, or are vegan or low sodium. Cibo also sells more than 20 brands of health bars such as Kind and Larabar, as well as apples and bananas. The company also has new restaurants that emphasize clean eating: Gavi, its Italian restaurant at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, has a menu of grain bowls including one made of black, white and red quinoa, chickpeas, cauliflower, almonds and a grilled chicken skewer. At Newark Airport, fliers can order sashimi that's flown in from Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market at Tsukiji Fishroom or head to Supreme Bowl for a bowl of hot steel cut oats topped with their favorite nuts and fresh fruits. And in September at Newark, OTG will open a juice bar called World Nectar, which will offer green juices and smoothies. Individual airports are also putting balanced eating at the forefront. In 2010, Dallas/ Fort Worth International Airport, home to 110 food outlets, required that all must offer at least one vegan, low sodium or low calorie meal or snack. "Healthy eating is very important to us, and it's an idea that we have pursued for the past decade," said Zenola Campbell, the airport's vice president of concessions. Ms. Campbell said the efforts were backed up by a 2016 survey by the airport's marketing department that asked fliers what they wanted most from their airport experience. "The No. 1 thing was healthy food," she said. Many restaurants at Dallas/Fort Worth have multiple options for the wellness minded traveler. Most dishes at UFood Grill are well under 700 calories, including a grilled sirloin burger with a spring lettuce mix on a whole wheat bun, and a curry masala bowl with brown rice, red quinoa, broccoli, carrots and grilled chicken. At Artisan Market, travelers can pick vegan and vegetarian salads, sandwiches and soups that use produce from local farmers. In Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, at least 21 restaurants have opened in recent years that have a large variety of low calorie, gluten free and vegan dishes, according to Karen E. Pride, the airport's director of media relations. The airport even has an aeroponic garden that grows vegetables and herbs used in many of these dishes. At Harstfield Jackson Atlanta Airport, the world's busiest for passenger traffic, the concessions director, Chilly Ewing, said that when he is vetting proposals from food outlets, he's more interested in those that have at least a few healthy food choices. Nature's Best Market, for example, has a large choice of salads, whole fruit and fruit cups. Now that healthy dining at airports isn't nearly as challenging as it used to be, fliers have no excuse not to eat well before they're airborne, according to Keri Glassman, a registered dietitian in New York City. "The old mentality used to be and rightly so that you could only get junk food at an airport, but the choices of unprocessed and healthy foods today are overwhelming," she said. Brian Sumers, the aviation business editor for the travel research company Skift, is based in Los Angeles and said that he even looks forward to the healthy dining at Los Angeles International Airport on his frequent cross country trips. His favorite spot is the fast casual eatery Lemonade, which serves seasonally driven dishes, including the pineapple chicken with green beans and toasted coconut that he usually orders. "So many of the places at the airport have delicious dishes with fresh produce and don't weigh you down," he said. "It's easy to make the decision to eat well."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Elias Burstein, a pioneering physicist whose research helped pave the way for the development of silicon semiconductors, died on June 17 at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 99. Professor Burstein worked for more than seven decades in his field, much of the time as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the first scientists to use lasers to do research on semiconductors and insulators. And he held patents for a method to introduce impurities into the otherwise stable element silicon, increasing its semiconducting capacity. The process, called doping, allows the crystal lattice of silicon to carry more charges, making silicon a much more useful and efficient semiconductor. Doping also reduces the amount of energy needed to change electron states from active to inactive, and back. Professor Burstein also helped discover the mechanisms underlying inelastic light scattering, in which photons (about one in every 10 million) are occasionally produced from a molecule or an atom at a frequency different from the ones used to incite them. The process, also known as Raman scattering, often occurs when molecules are in transition to another energy level. Observations of the process make it helpful in analyzing the composition of materials, whether they are gases, liquids or solids. Professor Burstein published more than 200 scientific papers. A great deal of his work was in studying such crystalline structures as rock salt and zincblende, an ore from which zinc is extracted. He edited or helped edit many books, including "Contemporary Concepts of Condensed Matter Science," a series published by Elsevier. He was a founder of Solid State Communications, a peer reviewed scientific journal on solid state physics, and was its first editor in chief, from 1963 to 1992. In 1961, at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Burstein, along with Robert Hughes, a professor of chemistry, and Robert Madden, a member of the metallurgy department, founded the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter. He was born on Sept. 30, 1917, in Brooklyn to Samuel Burstein and Sara Plotkin. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Brooklyn College in 1938 and a master's in chemistry from the University of Kansas in 1941. From 1941 to 1943, he studied chemistry and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working toward a doctorate. But World War II intervened, and he went to work at the Naval Research Laboratory, in the physics section of its crystal branch division. In three years he was promoted to head the division, and 10 years later he was named to lead the laboratory's section for semiconductor research. He joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty as a professor of physics soon afterward. In 1982, he succeeded John Robert Schrieffer, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, in the Mary Amanda Wood endowed chair in physics at the university. He retired from the full time faculty in 1988, but continued as an emeritus professor, often working in the lab with students. He is survived by his wife, the former Rena Benson; three daughters, Joanna Mitro, Sara Donna and Mimi Burstein; and two grandchildren. Professor Burstein frequently held visiting professorships, among them at Hebrew University in Israel in 1974, Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1981, and the University of California, Berkeley, in 1996. He was elected in 1979 to the National Academy of Sciences and received the Frank Isakson Prize of the American Physical Society in 1986. The Isakson Prize citation referred to "his pioneering work on the optical properties of semiconductors and insulators" as well as his studies of Raman scattering. But while Mr. Burstein received four honorary doctorates one, in technology, from Chalmers and three, in science, from Brooklyn College, Emory University and Ohio State University he never formally completed his Ph.D. He never found the time, he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Obesity is linked to prostate cancer, scientists know, but it's not clear why. On Monday, researchers reported a surprising connection. When prostate cancers lose a particular gene, they become tiny fat factories, a team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston reported in a paper published in Nature Genetics. Then the cancers spread from the prostate, often with deadly effect. Prostate cancers that have not lost that gene also can spread, or metastasize in mice, at least but only if they have a ready source of fat from the diet. That finding suggests that dietary fat can substitute for the loss of the gene, fueling prostate cancer. Moreover, the investigators found, an obesity drug that blocks fat production can make metastatic prostate cancers regress in mice and prevent them from spreading. "What this paper suggests is that fat or high fat diets promote more aggressive prostate cancer," said Cory Abate Shen, interim director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University, who was not involved with the research. Now the scientists are planning a clinical trial in men with prostate cancer to see if the obesity drug may be an effective treatment for this cancer. "That's really important," Dr. Abate Shen said. "Aggressive prostate cancer is lethal, and there are no curative drugs right now." The American Cancer Society estimates that prostate cancer will be diagnosed in about 165,000 American men this year, making it the second most common cancer in American men, behind only skin cancer. The tumors often remain in the prostate and do not kill, but when the cancer spreads, it is lethal. About 29,500 men die of prostate cancer each year. Researchers have been struggling to find new ways to help men with metastatic cancer. Geneticists knew prostate cancers often start when a protective gene, PTEN, shuts down. But the tumors in men that lose only PTEN tend to languish, rarely spreading beyond the prostate and rarely becoming lethal. The cancers change, though, if a second gene, called PML, also shuts down. Suddenly, indolent cells become cancers that spread and kill. But why? In the new study, researchers found that when PML was lost, cancerous cells in petri dishes and in mice started churning out fat, which may protect the cells from certain toxic molecules. But the fat also may help the cancers spread, the researchers suggested. PML is also lost in human metastatic prostate cancer, but it has never been clear what the consequences might be. "This is all cool molecular genetics," said Dr. Pier Paolo Pandolfi, director of the Cancer Center and Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess and lead author of the new study. Dr. Pandolfi has long tried to study prostate cancer spread in mice, but the rodents were not much help. Few genetic manipulations made prostate cancers spread in the animals as they do in humans. Then one day, at a meeting with colleagues, Dr. Pandolfi had an idea: "What are the mice eating?" he asked. It was mouse chow, his co workers said a low fat, vegetarian concoction. "Why don't we try a simple experiment?" Dr. Pandolfi recalled asking. "Why don't we put our mice on a high fat Western diet?" It was the missing link. Mice with prostate cancers that had lost PTEN and that were fed a high fat diet quickly developed tumors that grew rapidly and spread. It was as though fat in the diet had an effect similar to the loss of PML, the protective gene. Then the group asked a bigger question: Could they could protect mice from metastatic cancer by blocking fat production? That led to the experiment with a new obesity drug, fatostatin. It not only halted the cancer's spread in the animals, but made it regress. The work leaves plenty of questions for future studies, Dr. Abate Shen said. High sugar diets also cause obesity. Are the prostate tumors in men who became fat by eating high sugar diets equally susceptible to metastasis? If they are, what is the mechanism? And, she and others noted, the studies so far involved human cells in petri dishes and cancers in mice. It remains to be seen if the provocative findings hold for humans. Dr. Pandolfi and his colleagues are planning a clinical trial with fatostatin to treat prostate cancer in humans. They also wonder if low fat diets might help these patients, and what kinds of dietary fat might fuel prostate cancers. "You cannot just say, 'Don't eat fat,'" Dr. Pandolfi said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Broadway above West 135th Street is a tepid stretch of modest five and six story apartment houses, but one bright spot, at 146th Street, is the 1913 Hamilton Theater, one of the theater architect Thomas Lamb's trademark gleaming terra cotta designs. It's been bedraggled for years, the cornice sheared off, the window frames rusting, the auditorium a crumbling time warp. Now some of the excitement may be coming back, as a developer seems to be moving toward a fix up, perhaps a full blown restoration. In 1912 Lamb designed four theaters on Broadway, including the Audubon at 165th Street, built for William Fox, whose company became 20th Century Fox. On the Hamilton, Lamb was working for Fox's onetime associate Benjamin S. Moss, who was then collaborating with Solomon Brill. The Hamilton's 2,500 seat auditorium was actually on 146th Street, but patrons entered through one of Lamb's most ebullient facades, a three story high structure on Broadway. It had a frothy cornice topped with masks, two story high arch topped windows to light assembly and dance hall spaces, and a glass and copper marquee projecting far over the sidewalk. For Fox, Lamb used cunning little fox heads on the exterior, but an emblem for Messrs. Moss and Brill was harder to come up with, and the most distinctive element of the Hamilton are the 18 cast iron caryatids, standing female figures. The most famous caryatids in Western art are those on the Acropolis on the Porch of the Maidens, who are demurely draped in Greek style. For the Hamilton, either architect or owner chose similar figures but with torsos startlingly undraped more Hooters style than classical Greek. The Hamilton opened in January 1913. It began as a regular vaudeville house with short films, which were then beginning to steal the scene from live entertainment. In April 1913 The New York Clipper reported that although some theaters were converting to pictures only, the Hamilton was "holding its own" with the combined shows. Variety gave an account in 1920 of a Hamilton vaudeville routine, using typical Variety speak. It puffed Tom Patricola, a soft shoe dancer and "corking good eccentric comedian in the bargain" who, closing the show, "cleaned off the bases." The Yip Yip Yaphankers were another act on the bill of eight, and "tore off large returns with the soldier acrobatics and hokum"; their name evoked that of a World War I training base. If a moving picture was screened, Variety didn't mention it. The journal Dramatic Mirror and Theatre World reported in 1921 that vaudeville was healthy, with more houses, actors and patrons than ever before. Brill split off from Moss, and when Moss retired in 1928, he sold the theater to RKO Radio Pictures, newly organized to promote movies with sound. The next year Rudy Vallee's hit picture "Vagabond Lover" played at the Hamilton and, simultaneously, seven other RKO theaters. Ominously, one had switched to motion pictures exclusively. Billboard magazine noted the conflict between the standards of motion pictures, which could be quite suggestive, and vaudeville, which was always striving to distance itself from "low class" entertainment. The magazine, observing that a sign backstage at the Hamilton directed the performers to "Please Eliminate All Suggestive Remarks, Damns and Hells From Your Act," noted that the companion movie, "The Barker," had "the choicest carnival invectives." Billboard called these hybrid houses "vaudefilmers." Film continued to displace live entertainment, although vaudeville was sometimes on the bill at the Hamilton up to the 1940s; the theater closed in 1958. The auditorium has been sitting empty for at least a decade, and to judge from the pictures posted by the blogger Matt Lambros (afterthefinalcurtain.net), it is one of the most spectacular wrecks in New York City. The box seats are covered with graffiti; the great arching ceiling still has a sky blue dome, but paint peels in cascades everywhere else. The orchestra seats have been torn out, but the balcony seats, tattered and dusty, are rowed up as if on a ghost ship. The audience seems to have stood up and left a few centuries ago. The theater has lost its cornice, and its mix of decay and titillation has caught my eye for decades. The Landmarks Preservation Commission made the exterior a landmark in 2000, and the theater is now owned by the Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation, an investment firm. Ben Ashkenazy, the chief executive officer, did not return calls or emails, but the company has filed plans with the commission to reconnect the auditorium and the lobby, severed long ago. That would be key to restoring the auditorium to theater use, although the need for 2,500 seat theaters has been softening since the Hoover administration. It might become a big box store or a ... well, it is hard to imagine what might pay the taxes, let alone the rent. Then there are the air rights, about 119,941 square feet, according to showcase.com. As with many ruins, the Hamilton will probably never look better than it does now.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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BETH GILL at Abrons Arts Center (Sept. 28 30, 8 p.m.; Oct. 1, 2 p.m.). Ms. Gill, a much admired New York choreographer, creates work that meticulously examines ideas around perception: How do we see what we see? For her latest, "Brand New Sidewalk," she collaborates with the composer Jon Moniaci, the lighting designer Thomas Dunn and the costume designer Baille Younkman to create a triptych that explores abstraction alongside more emotional themes of alienation, erasure and transformation. 212 352 3101, abronsartscenter.org JOHN HEGINBOTHAM/MAIRA KALMAN at BAM Fisher (Sept. 27 29, 7:30 p.m.; Sept. 30, 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.) For a year Ms. Kalman, the writer and illustrator, created "The Principles of Uncertainty," an online graphic diary that began as a New York Times column and dealt with, among other topics, the passage of time. In this dance theater work, Mr. Heginbotham choreographs his response in a series of vignettes that come to life through dance, text, projected images and a score composed, arranged and curated by Brooklyn Rider and the Silk Road Ensemble's Colin Jacobsen. A "Cake Coffee Conversation" discussion featuring Ms. Kalman and Mr. Heginbotham will be held Sept. 24 at 2 p.m. (Sold out; standby tickets only.) 718 636 4100, bam.org INVOCATION PROCLAMATION MANIFESTO at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center (Sept. 21 Oct. 7). For this three week festival, Gibney Dance presents a series of mixed bills that highlight works exploring the idea, as press materials convey, "of being a body at risk." Showing short works the first weekend are Elena Rose Light, Jess Pretty and the duo of Miriam Gabriel and Carlo Antonio Villanueva. Performances take place in an environment designed by the visual artist Diego Montoya; future installments will include pieces by Alexandra Tatarsky (who once posed as Andy Kaufman's daughter as part of a performance project), Angie Pittman and Ashley R. T. Yergens. 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org FAUSTIN LINYEKULA at N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (Sept. 22 23, 7:30 p.m.); Roberto Clemente Plaza, South Bronx (Sept. 23, 3 p.m.); Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn (Sept. 24, 3 p.m.). Crossing the Line, a festival created by the French Institute Alliance Francaise, continues with two more presentations by this Congolese choreographer. At N.Y.U. Skirball, Mr. Linyekula will present his company, Studios Kabako, in the United States premiere of "In Search of Dinozord," which explores the fraught history of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Concurrently, his "Festival of Dreams" a work featuring 23 dancers from It's Showtime NYC!, a program that gives street dancers an alternative to performing in subway cars will be performed in the Bronx and in Brooklyn. 800 982 2787, crossingtheline.org SARAH MICHELSON at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College (Sept. 22 24, 6 p.m.). The residency and commissioning program Live Arts Bard presents the premiere of Ms. Michelson's "September2017/ ," a work featuring four Bard students from the class of 2017. Ms. Michelson worked with them throughout their college career; they are joined by her current dancers, Rachel Berman, Jennifer Lafferty and Madeline Wilcox. But even better? The unparalleled Ms. Michelson, who likes to keep a tight lid tight on her choreographic ideas, is dancing, too. 845 758 7900, fishercenter.bard.edu NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater (through Oct. 15) As City Ballet continues its fall season with Peter Martins's production of "Swan Lake," there are some casting surprises: On Sept. 26, Megan Fairchild and Gonzalo Garcia make their debuts as Odette/Odile and Prince Siegfried. On Sept. 27, the honors go to Tiler Peck and Chase Finlay. And on Sept. 28, the Fall Fashion Gala, now in its sixth year and spearheaded by Sarah Jessica Parker, pairs choreographers with designers. This season collaborators are Lauren Lovette with Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim of Monse; Justin Peck with Tsumori Chisato; Gianna Reisen with Virgil Abloh of Off White; and Troy Schumacher with Jonathan Saunders. 212 496 0600, nycballet.com ALESSANDRO SCIARRONI at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theater (Sept. 28 30, 8 p.m.). In "UNTITLED I will be there when you die," four jugglers start out simply as they toss their pins into the air. But as the repetitive choreography continues, Mr. Sciarroni reveals how exhaustion and physical limitations can create a world of fear and vulnerability. The work is the second in the choreographer's trilogy, "Will you still love me tomorrow?," and is part of the festival Crossing the Line. 800 982 2787, crossingtheline.org ANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER AND SALVA SANCHIS at New York Live Arts (Sept. 27 30, 7:30 p.m.). In "A Love Supreme," a collaboration between the Belgian choreographer Ms. De Keersmaeker and the Spanish choreographer Mr. Sanchis, the pair takes inspiration from John Coltrane's classic 1965 album to create a quartet for four young male dancers. A reworking of their 2005 production, they regard it as a search for happiness, in which mysticism and sensuality live alongside moments of improvisation and set material. (Sold out.) 212 691 6500; newyorklivearts.org ANDRE M. ZACHERY/RENEGADE PERFORMANCE GROUP at Danspace (Sept. 28 30, 8 p.m.). Mr. Zachery and his group, dedicated to exploring the black artistic aesthetic, excavates his roots in "Untamed Space" by looking at his lineage in the Southern United States and Haiti as well as his upbringing on Chicago's South Side. For this interdisciplinary performance, he focuses on maroon colonies, which were made up of Africans who escaped captivity in the Americas to settle in the hills and mountains. He's interested, as he states in press materials, in "how the creation of these impassible spaces has influenced contemporary identities of African blooded people in the Americas." Before each show, at 7 p.m., he will hold a 30 minute discussion. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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In the end, Jimmy went with the bowling balls. They were a fine choice, it turned out. If you're trying to smash up a guy's Jaguar by tossing something hard over a high gate, you might need three attempts. Having three objects that are the same weight and size well, it's just smart planning. The act of vandalism itself, on the other hand, seems juvenile. It was triggered by Howard's lunchtime invitation to Jimmy to join Hamlin, Hamlin McGill, the law firm Howard runs and which was co founded by Chuck's (not so) dearly departed brother. The offer is preceded by an apology, wherein Howard confesses that he should have hired Jimmy years ago. This overture won't surprise longtime viewers. The more we have learned about Howard, the more we've realized that the worst thing about him is his shirt collars. If Jimmy truly thought the bad blood between him and Howard was "ancient history," a "no thank you" would have sufficed. Apparently, that history isn't ancient to Jimmy, and the question is, why? Jimmy says he's happy to have a new name and a new career, and he has a stirring, succinct answer when Howard asks him to explain who Saul Goodman is. It's an answer that is filled with nonsense. Saul's clients aren't "the little guy" getting "sold down the river." They're degenerate criminals, like the bargain hunting miscreants we meet early in the episode. Jimmy has the soul of a con artist, and it's already thriving in ways it never would at a corporate firm. So, what's with the bowling balls? My sense is that it stems from the lingering rage that Jimmy feels about his brother and the way HH M mistreated and underestimated him. And a lot of Howard's humanity toward Chuck, in particular is unknown to Jimmy. We never have seen Gus Fring in recruiting mode, but we know this much: When he's angry, he's a highly exacting boss. He drives a Los Pollos Hermanos employee to a fryolator cleaning frenzy as he awaits word of whether the feds will seize 700,000 of his drug money, as he and his underlings have planned. Poor Lyle. There probably wasn't a speck of grease on that machine. But Gus was fuming that Lalo Salamanca had cunningly forced him to surrender a huge chunk of cash and had put his men at risk. The man was in no mood for compliments. Let's compare Gus's approach to disappointment to Hank's. Our favorite D.E.A. agent is disappointed that his team netted little more than that 700,000 and three low level drug runners when it staked out the dead drops mapped by Krazy 8. ("Booby prize," Hank mutters.) The bust didn't yield any clues about where that money came from, which is what he really wants. Does Hank stare balefully at the loot and get all passive aggressive with his team? No. He manufactures some bonhomie and announces to the assembled officers and agents that the first round is on him. Raise your hand if you'd rather work for Hank. When this episode isn't comparing management techniques, it is a look at the galvanizing power of guilt. Kim feels guilty about the imminent eviction of crusty ol' Everett Acker, who owns a home on land that Kim's biggest client, Mesa Verde, has set aside for a call center. She tries, and fails, to persuade the bank to build that center elsewhere. Then she enlists Jimmy to sign up Mr. Acker as a client, which he does using nothing more than his foot, his silver tongue and a bit of bestiality lifted from the Internet. Once again, cranky Mr. Acker gets one of the episode's best lines, this time by succinctly, and graphically, describing the image. So let's game this out. Jimmy is about to take some kind of legal action against Mesa Verde on Acker's behalf. Jimmy is well known to Richard Schweikart, a named partner at Kim's firm, which represents Mesa Verde. So she'll instantly be in the middle of a brawl, representing a company being sued by her boyfriend. This stratagem would seem berserk if it weren't Kim's idea. Back to guilt. Mike is feeling overwhelmed by it, having been reminded of his role in the death of his son during a tense, driveway conversation with his daughter in law. He later slow walks by the scrum of young thugs who attacked him in last week's episode, in an apparent attempt at suicide by gang. It nearly works. In fact, it's hard to fathom how Mike survives the ensuing assault. Or how he wakes up in a bed in an adobe courtyard, in a bucolic convalescent ward of some kind, empty but for grazing goats. One guess: Fring had Mike surveilled, and his men stepped in to stop his imminent murder, then found him a doctor and an adobe. It makes a certain sense. Fring either keeps an eye on or eliminates people who know his secrets. He would have wanted to know what Mike was up to given that Mike left his post at the nascent Fring Inc. in a snit over having had to kill a lovelorn German engineer another source of guilt. None The writers of this show have a real challenge before them. They have set up a cat and mouse plot between Hank and Gus, but we know from "Breaking Bad" that this mouse is never captured by the D.E.A. Generating narrative suspense in these circumstances will not be easy. None Maybe the erotic heat between Jimmy and Kim is supposed to be conveyed metaphorically, through morning tooth brushing. They do a lot more of that than smooching, though in this episode we do learn they sleep together in the buff. None Three of Gus's men have been arrested. Any thoughts about what happens to them? It is possible that they are part of the imprisoned group receiving "hazard pay" in "Breaking Bad." (Those outlays sparked an argument between Walter White and Mike that ended with Mike's death.) Regardless, Fring is the most careful drug lord in television history. He has a plan. Either those men are going to be cared for, sprung or killed. None As many viewers noted in the comments section last week, the reason Mike was so irate at the sight of the Sydney Opera House, a photo of which was pinned to a wall in a bar where he was drinking, was because of Werner Ziegler, the engineer he had to kill. Ziegler had told Mike that his father had a hand in building it. None Anyone else find that bowling ball prank a tad on the contrived side? And it seems out of character for a guy whose specialty is messing with minds, no? Lesson: Read the comments. Leave some, too. And remember, escape to where the puck's going to be.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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You're Not Getting Much Taller, America. But You Are Getting Bigger. None Meet the average American man. He weighs 198 pounds and stands 5 feet 9 inches tall. He has a 40 inch waist, and his body mass index is 29 , at the high end of the "overweight" category. The picture for the average woman? She is roughly 5 feet 4 inches tall, and weighs 171 pounds, with a 39 inch waist. Her B.M.I. is close to 30. That's a not at all how Americans used to look. New data show that both men and women gained a whopping 24 pounds on average from 1960 to 2002; through 2016, men gained an additional eight pounds, and women another seven pounds. The new report, published by the National Center for Health Statistics, contains some remarkable insights into changes in the American body in recent decades. In 1999, white men averaged 192 pounds, and black men, 189 pounds. By 2016, the average white man weighed 202 pounds, and the average black man, 198 pounds. (These are rounded numbers.) Average waist size among white men increased to 40 inches in 2016 from 39 inches in 1999, and among black men to 39 inches from 38 inches. An average woman in 1999 weighed 164 pounds and had a 36 inch waist. Black women averaged 186 pounds in 2016, almost unchanged since 1999. But the average white woman weighed 162 pounds in 1999 and 171 pounds in 2016. Average waist size among black women in 2016 rose to 40 inches from 39 inches in 2016, and among white women to 38 inches from 36 inches. The C.D.C. has data on Hispanics beginning only in 2007, when Hispanic men weighed on average 184 pounds. By 2016, the figure was 191 pounds. The average Hispanic woman in 2016 weighed 169 pounds, compared with 161 pounds in 2007. Among all men, age adjusted mean height increased to 69.4 inches (about 5 feet 9 inches) in 2005 from 69.2 inches in 1999, and then decreased to 69.1 inches by 2016. The decrease may result from an increasing population of Mexican American men, whose average height in 2016 was 66.5 inches. Black men's average height decreased to 69.1 inches in 2016 from 69.3 in 2005. Women's average height did not change significantly over the period. "People tend to overreport their height and underreport their weight," said the senior author, Cynthia L. Ogden, an epidemiologist at the C.D.C. The new figures, she noted, are the result of actual measurements.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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With a new album scheduled for release this fall and a tour with Snoop Dogg kicking off July 20, Wiz Khalifa has a lot going on. The heavily tattooed rapper, who was raised in Pittsburgh and lives in Los Angeles, is also a burgeoning style star. A year and a half ago, he started working with a stylist, Lauren Matos, to update his look into something more tailored and mature. Jeans You can always catch me in a pair of Saint Laurent jeans. It's more than a trendy thing for me. I'm not wearing them just to the club. I'm wearing them as regular jeans because of how they fit and how they look. They're long enough and they're skinny enough. They're hard to get out of, though it's the small ankle. I don't want them to change it. It just comes with the game. The black ones right now are my favorite, but I love white, too. I like to wear all white: white shirt, white hat, white jeans. It just looks awesome. I look like a little scoop of ice cream. Shirt I have a favorite style: I call them my party shirts. Nice button ups, real silky, with crazy prints. I get them from all over. This look also started a year and a half ago, when I met Lauren. Before, I was more into streetwear, like a lot of Supreme and Palace when it was first dropping. Lauren really put me onto more high end designers who can still get that streetwear look. I don't want to look like a mannequin. I feel like when people start getting money, they start dressing weird. But I also want to graduate my style. I'm 28 years old, so you can't dress like no little kid anymore.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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"Can I touch you?" he asks, and an agonizing eternity of indecision fills the gap before she answers, "Yes." She is Kelechi, who left her native Nigeria for the United States at 15 and has only just returned, at 30, to visit her ailing father. In between she wrote a best selling novel that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is Obina, a successful London trained banker who was once her family's houseboy. The scene in which an ambitious woman finally melts for a steady man who has always loved her is a staple of romantic comedy, if not so much of real life. But as refracted through the lens of the African diaspora in Ngozi Anyanwu's "The Homecoming Queen," which opened on Monday at the Atlantic Theater Company's Stage 2, it becomes something fresh and complex. Like the play, this scene wrings all the pleasure possible out of its familiar tropes even as it revamps their meaning entirely. That they have returned makes "The Homecoming Queen" appear, at first, to be a comedy of deracination. Kelechi is so thoroughly Americanized that when she arrives at her family's compound she barely recognizes the folkways or even the Igbo words of her youth. A mouthy "rough gal" as her father, Godwin, calls her she can't help shooing away the interfering aunties who descend upon her to paw through her luggage any more than she can help mocking her father's grandiosity. ("Seriously, Dad, is the 'Coming to America' chair necessary?") Cultural appropriation, it seems, is a two way street. You may think from this opening that you know how the rest of the story will go: Kelechi's alienation will gradually be replaced by a sense of belonging. But the expected trajectory is not the path "The Homecoming Queen" takes. For one thing, as we learn, Kelechi was not very happy even in the States. Love affairs failed, and the success of her novel, "De Panta, De Tiger and De Bird," created too much expectation for a follow up hit. Her trip home, intended in part to inspire her writing, derails her further. Only with the help of her "anxious pills" (as Beatrice, her father's young housegirl, calls them) does she stave off a breakdown, and then only temporarily. I don't want to spoil the surprise of how these four main characters Kelechi (Mfoniso Udofia), Obina (Segun Akande), Godwin (Oberon K. A. Adjepong) and Beatrice (Mirirai Sithole) are connected beneath the play's surface. But if the plot is compelling, in some ways echoing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel "Americanah," it is also sometimes murky; you have to listen hard for the clues to what has happened and also be patient with unmarked detours into flashbacks and fictions. In contrast, too many of the conventionally narrative scenes, especially between Kelechi and Godwin, repeat the same arc, moving predictably from pleasantry to snark to umbrage to apology. They deliver no new emotional information even if they do deliver delight. The staging by Awoye Timpo, on a set by Yu Hsuan Chen that surrounds the audience, could do a better job of ameliorating that problem by differentiating and contouring the material. On the other hand, Ms. Timpo's work with the principals (who are accompanied by a delightful four woman chorus playing those gossipy aunties and hymn singing elders) is exemplary. As Beatrice, Ms. Sithole amply fulfills Kelechi's description of her as one of those people who, though quiet, "think loud"; it's hard not to watch her constantly watching. I appreciated, too, that the characters' emotions are not rushed into place as if on a conveyor belt, which often happens in shortish plays. (This one is an hour and 45 minutes.) Though the scene in which Obina asks if he can touch Kelechi appears in the script with no stage direction, the director has encouraged Ms. Udofia and Mr. Akande to take all the time they need. The result is a marvelous three act opera in the blank space between question and answer. Ms. Sithole and Ms. Udofia, who is also a playwright, are becoming familiar figures in the recent flowering of diasporic African plays in New York, most of them written by women. Last year, Ms. Sithole appeared in Jocelyn Bioh's hilarious "School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play" (set in Ghana); Ms. Udofia's powerful dramas "Sojourners" and "Her Portmanteau" (about Nigerians living in Texas and New York) ran in repertory at New York Theater Workshop. Danai Gurira's "Eclipsed" (which takes place in Liberia during its civil wars) and "Familiar" (a comedy about Zimbabwean immigrants in Minnesota) were both seen here in 2016. Not much unites these plays; it's a large continent. But all of them more or less touch on the way American influence is perceived and absorbed by Africans. (Even in "Eclipsed," the enslaved "wives" of the Liberian warlords read a biography of Bill Clinton as a romance novel.) If "The Homecoming Queen" is ultimately less political, and more personal, than the others, it is not less funny than the comedies nor less despairing than the dramas. "I wanted to write about culpability and revenge," Ms. Anyanwu explains in a preface to the text, "but this came instead." In its happy but deliberately unreal ending, her play suggests that for some traumatized people there's no place like home not even home itself.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Re "Goodbye to the Way We Used to Shop," by Sarah M. Seltzer (Sunday Review, Sept. 6): One of the great ladies of retail is departing. Five generations of my family have looked to Lord Taylor as their mainstay, their "go to" store. My nana (receipts starting in 1905), mother and I shopped and lunched amid live parakeets and visited the real Santa there. In the dressing room mirrors, I journeyed from young girl to old woman. I became the grandmother watching my daughters and granddaughters discover the delights of the store. "Nanny, look at my shoes. The ones I got for prom." "Where did you get them?" Somehow the answer didn't surprise me. Yes, a lovely reminiscence about Lord Taylor, an eternal place of comfort and familiarity. This was a go to place for my mom in the 1940s. She would grab my hand and say, "Come on, dear, we're heading uptown to shop at L. T."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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You might guess that a surefire way to make a hit video on YouTube would be to gather a bunch of YouTube megastars, film them riffing on some of the year's most popular YouTube themes and release it as a year in review spectacular. YouTube tested that theory this week, releasing its annual "YouTube Rewind" year end retrospective. The eight minute video was a jam packed montage of YouTube meta humor, featuring a who's who of YouTube stars (Ninja! The Try Guys! Bongo Cat!) along with conventional celebrities (Will Smith! Trevor Noah! John Oliver!). The video was slickly produced and wholesome, with lots of references to the popular video game Fortnite, shout outs to popular video formats, and earnest paeans to YouTube's diversity and inclusiveness. It was meant to be a feel good celebration of a year's worth of YouTube creativity, but the video started a firestorm, and led to a mass downvoting campaign that became a meme of its own. Within 48 hours, the video had been "disliked" more than four million times. On Thursday, it became the most disliked video in the history of the website, gathering more than 10 million dislikes and beating out the previous record holder, the music video for Justin Bieber's "Baby." The issue that upset so many YouTube fans, it turns out, was what the Rewind video did not show. Many of the most notable YouTube moments of the year such as the August boxing match between KSI and Logan Paul, two YouTube stars who fought in a highly publicized spectacle watched by millions went unmentioned. And some prominent YouTubers were absent, including Felix Kjellberg, a.k.a. "PewDiePie," one of the most popular creators in YouTube's history, who had appeared in the Rewind videos as recently as 2016. "It's so disconnected with the community and its creators," said Mr. Kjellberg, who called the Rewind compilation a "train wreck of a video" in a video he posted. Ethan Klein, another popular YouTuber, posted his own video, "It's Time to Stop YouTube Rewind." Marques Brownlee, a YouTube creator who was featured in the Rewind video and subsequently made his own video called "The Problem With YouTube Rewind," explained more calmly that the video's primary issue was that it was trying to please two disparate audiences creators, who want to see the breadth of YouTube's output reflected back at them, and advertisers, who need to be reassured that the platform is a safe place to spend their money. A YouTube spokeswoman, Andrea Faville, said in a statement that "dethroning 'Baby' in dislikes wasn't exactly our goal this year." She added: "Honest feedback can suck, but we are listening and we appreciate how much people care. Trying to capture the magic of YouTube in one single video is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. We also learned that creating content can be really hard and this underscores our respect and admiration for YouTube creators doing it every day." YouTube's decision to keep things G rated is understandable. Advertisers have been jittery about the platform since revelations last year that YouTube's algorithms placed some ads next to extremist, racist content and hate speech. That led several large advertisers to pull their ads from YouTube. YouTube then tightened its monetization rules, limiting which videos could earn money through advertising and prompting another conflict with creators, who called it "the adpocalypse." It's also natural that YouTube would avoid promoting some of its more controversial creators. Mr. Paul, who has 18 million subscribers and is one of the best known personalities on YouTube, spent much of the year making amends for an ill advised stunt in which he filmed a dead body hanging from a tree in a Japanese "suicide forest." Mr. Kjellberg, who has more than 76 million subscribers, has repeatedly been criticized for his on camera behavior, including making Nazi jokes and praising anti Semitic YouTube channels. Drama between YouTube and its creators is nothing new. But the Rewind controversy is indicative of a larger issue at YouTube, which is trying to promote itself as a bastion of cool, inclusive creativity while being accused of radicalizing a generation of young people by pushing them toward increasingly extreme content, and allowing reactionary cranks and conspiracy theorists to dominate its platform. YouTube's efforts are complicated by the fact that it does, in fact, have many diverse and interesting creators making compelling videos. But those voices have struggled, at times, to be heard above the roar of the site's most incendiary figures. There is no mention in YouTube Rewind of Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy theory site Infowars, who built a YouTube empire with millions of subscribers and generated more than 1.6 billion views. There was no mention of the group of political YouTubers who make up what Rebecca Lewis at the Data Society Research Institute has called YouTube's "alternative influence network," an influential cohort of video creators who have used their platforms to promote ideas from the right wing fringes. YouTube has taken admirable steps in the past year to clean up its platform. This summer, it barred Alex Jones and Infowars for hate speech, and it has tried to keep conspiracy theory videos out of searches for "trending" videos after breaking news events. But people like Mr. Kjellberg and Mr. Paul stars who rose to prominence through YouTube, and still garner tens of millions of views every month remain in a kind of dysfunctional relationship with the platform. YouTube doesn't want to endorse their behavior in its official promotions, but it doesn't want to alienate their large, passionate audiences, either. And since no other platform can rival the large audiences and earning potential YouTube gives these creators, they are stuck in a kind of unhappy purgatory making aggrieved videos about how badly YouTube has wronged them, while also tiptoeing to avoid crossing any lines that might get them barred, or prevent them from making money from their videos. This tension between YouTube's self image as an empowering, tolerant space and the people behind much of the platform's most popular content is at the heart of the controversy over YouTube Rewind. If YouTube had been trying to create an accurate picture of its platform's most visible faces, it would need to include bigots, reactionaries and juvenile shock jocks. A YouTube recap that includes only displays of tolerance and pluralism is a little like a Weather Channel highlight reel featuring only footage of sunny days it might be more pleasant to look at, but it doesn't reflect the actual weather. There's nothing wrong with YouTube's using its year end video to show off the good work being done on its platform. But it's unfortunate that, in order to do that, the platform needs to write much of its recent history out of the script. Perhaps, instead of an attempt to make everyone happy with its video next year, the answer lies in taking steps to make YouTube more like the version of itself depicted in this year's Rewind, the platform it clearly wishes it was.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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In my 10 years in Iran researching the Revolutionary Guards and their depiction in Iranian media, one of my key observations was that wherever they operate, in Iran or on foreign battlefields, they function with that same ad hoc leadership: Decisions and actions don't just come from one man or even a small group of men; many within the organization have experience building relationships, creating strategies and making decisions. This contrasts with General Suleimani's public image, both at home and abroad, which, since 2013, has been propped up by a vast media campaign. I followed some of his media team during my research and saw how they produced films, documentaries and even music videos, in both Persian and Arabic, lionizing his feats against the Islamic State. Inside Iran, he consistently polled as one of the most popular figures in the regime. The fact that most of his activities took place outside Iran helped preserve his reputation in the often fractious politics of the Islamic Republic. It is likewise hard to overstate the symbolic power of General Suleimani in the region, particularly among Arab Shiite groups in Iraq and Lebanon. He was the face of Iranian power from Lebanon to Yemen, a face that brought money, weapons and advisers. Yet he wasn't the only person in the Revolutionary Guards who built such personal relationships, as the Western news media tends to depict. Far from it. Thanks to the guards' ad hoc structure, the relationship between the Revolutionary Guards and Iraqi and Lebanese Shiite armed groups is a long and deep one. During my time in Lebanon and Iran, I met foreign militants who spent long stretches in Iran, for both work and pleasure. They spoke fluent Persian and fully understood the Revolutionary Guards ethos. The ties that bind many of these groups together include generations of marriage, commerce, history and culture. General Suleimani, as important as he was, was not singular. Iran and its populations have thousands of years of history in the region. That doesn't get "rooted out" with assassinations and missile strikes. These relationships among Revolutionary Guards cadres and between the guards and their allies abroad are deep, and they do not rely on one figure. In fact, Iran has already named General Suleimani's longtime deputy, Ismail Qaani, as his successor.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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"Kuchyn is a place where people choose with their eyes first and then their nose," Marek Janouch said. Mr. Janouch is head chef at the latest Prague venture from Ambiente, the group behind Michelin star red La Degustation Boheme Bourgeoise and a host of other restaurants around the city that have been elevating Prague's food scene. He isn't speaking metaphorically: (The name, appropriately, means kitchen.) Housed inside the 1811 Salm Palace ( now part of the National Gallery) on Hradcanske Square, the roughly 70 seat restaurant sits just beside the main entrance to Prague Castle and looks out to one of the views that bring millions of visitors to the city every year. It's this exceptional location that inspired the concept. "Everything pointed to the possibility that a kitchen may have been located right in the spot that we were meant to transform into a restaurant," said Tomas Karpisek, Ambiente's founder. Like Lokal, the group's network of neighborhood pubs , the focus is on traditional Czech cuisine, but with earlier inspirations specifically, the kitchens of 16th century aristocrats. (A book titled "The Art of Old Czech Cuisine" was particularly helpful, Mr. Janouch said.) Drink options include Czech tank beers, wine and liqueurs.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Though the show went on, illness delivered a one two punch to the Metropolitan Opera's revival of Gounod's "Romeo et Juliette," which opened on Monday. Five days earlier, the Met had announced that Bryan Hymel, the star tenor slated to sing Romeo, was sick and would be replaced by Charles Castronovo for all six performances. Then, early on Monday, the news came that Mr. Castronovo was also ill; Andrea Shin, who had been Mr. Hymel's cover and sang the dress rehearsal, would step in and make his company debut in the role. While Mr. Shin saved the day, his performance was uneven. At his best, he brought a beefy voice, valiant high notes and earnestness to the part. And his singing gained fervor during action scenes, especially when the incensed Romeo kills Tybalt (Bogdan Volkov), Juliette's hotheaded cousin, in a duel. But during crucial duets with Juliette (Ailyn Perez), especially their love at first sight meeting, Mr. Shin was curiously bland. Ms. Perez, too, had a variable night as Juliette. This gifted artist has had a busy Met season so far, appearing in the title role of Massenet's "Thais" and as the Countess in Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro." With her vibrant stage presence and fresh loveliness, she is a natural for Juliette, and mostly sang with bright, youthful sound, capped by radiant high notes. But during the music's tender, softer passages, her voice, especially in its midrange, sometimes sounded shaky and pale, with occasional pitch problems. The baritone Joshua Hopkins was a standout as the impetuous Mercutio.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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When "Bloodlines," the Stephen Petronio Company's series that revives works of American postmodern dance, returns for its fifth season in spring, the troupe will add a third Merce Cunningham work to its repertory: "Tread" (1970). Cunningham's company was dissolved, by design, in 2011; his centennial is being celebrated around the world this season. With the performance of "Tread" at "Bloodlines," scheduled to run April 11 13 at the Skirball Center of New York University, the Petronio troupe will have the most Cunningham dances in its repertory of any American company. Including the work in "Bloodlines" signals "our commitment to history," Mr. Petronio said in a statement. "Tread," with music by Christian Wolff and decor by Bruce Nauman (the subject of a sprawling retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art in October), is considered one of Cunningham's lighter works, with farcical movement and entanglements. Last season, the Petronio dancers performed another playful Cunningham piece from 1970, "Signals"; previously, "Bloodlines" had featured his 1968 "RainForest." Joining "Tread" next spring will be the 1970 work "Coverage," by Rudy Perez, a student of Cunningham's and an often overlooked artist of the Judson Dance Theater movement (the subject of another exhibition at MoMA, opening on Sept. 16, where the Petronio company will perform in December).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The notifications on Facebook come as unwelcome reminders of personal loss: While Facebook has emerged as a remarkable tool to preserve cherished memories of departed friends and family, it has also served up these and other troubling and often unexpected notifications. On Tuesday, Facebook announced several changes aimed at easing users' grief. The social media company is using artificial intelligence "to minimize experiences that might be painful," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said in a statement posted to the company's website. "We use AI to help keep it from showing up in places that might cause distress, like recommending that person be invited to events or sending a birthday reminder to their friends," Ms. Sandberg said. "We're working to get better and faster at this." The announcement came as Facebook has faced scrutiny over the spread of white nationalism on its platforms, not properly protecting its users' data and allowing foreign meddling in elections. Facebook's push to better manage notifications about dead people may seem like a common sense move. But it is not a trivial exercise for the company, which has for years grappled with so called digital afterlife. A number of users have reported that profiles of dead friends or family have been hacked or used to share spam. In 2014, the company apologized after a "Year in Review" post featured the face of a man's dead daughter, The Washington Post reported at the time. "The phenomena here is where life is transient, Facebook is not," said Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, a California based nonprofit. After someone dies, a friend or family member can request that the person's profile be deactivated or "memorialized" if that person had not already requested that the account be permanently deleted upon their death. A memorialized account turns the profile into a special account where people can post tributes or see posts from when that person was still alive. "We've heard from people that memorializing a profile can feel like a big step that not everyone is immediately ready to take," Ms. Sandberg said in her post. That means that many dead people have profiles that have not been flagged to Facebook. These accounts will prompt notifications on other people's pages for birthday reminders or suggestions that they be invited to events. Facebook has for years tried to automate ways to identify those profiles so they don't send possibly painful notifications to users. Ms. Sandberg did not specify how the new artificial intelligence technology announced Tuesday would do this better than the company's previous efforts. Facebook would not provide further details other than to say in an emailed statement, "We look at a variety of signals that may indicate the person is deceased." Ms. Rutledge said the announcement was the latest in Facebook's continuing evolution. The company introduced memorialized profiles in 2007. In 2015, the company added the concept of a "legacy contact" the prearranged appointment of a friend or family member to run the memorialized account. "This isn't something where we should say, 'Oh, bad Facebook because they didn't think of this,'" she said. "I think they're stumbling along like everyone else trying to learn how to live in this world." In Tuesday's announcement, Ms. Sandberg also announced a new "tributes" section on memorialized profiles, giving friends and family a new place where they can post messages. The company is also giving legacy contacts more control of those profiles by moderating what is posted on the new tributes section, Ms. Sandberg said. Ms. Rutledge said several months ago that Facebook reminded her to wish happy birthday to her father, who died more than two years ago at the age of 91. She said her family had not memorialized her father's account but not for any particular reason. "If Facebook isn't sort of one of your primary mechanisms for connecting with the world, it would be pretty easy to not think to do that," Ms. Rutledge said. Jocelyn DeGroot, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville who has studied how people handle death on Facebook, said the reminders also did not bother everyone. Some like to be reminded of those who have died. "Whatever triggers somebody might not trigger somebody else," she said. "People like to be reminded of the deceased, but sort of on their own terms."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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On the last Sunday in May, Jeremy Lee Quinn, a furloughed photographer in Santa Monica, Calif., was snapping photos of suburban moms kneeling at a Black Lives Matter protest when a friend alerted him to a more dramatic subject: looting at a shoe store about a mile away. He arrived to find young people pouring out of the store, shoeboxes under their arms. But there was something odd about the scene. A group of men, dressed entirely in black, milled around nearby, like supervisors. One wore a creepy rubber Halloween mask. The next day, Mr. Quinn took pictures of another store being looted. Again, he noticed something strange. A white man, clad in black, had broken the window with a crowbar, but walked away without taking a thing. Mr. Quinn began studying footage of looting from around the country and saw the same black outfits and, in some cases, the same masks. He decided to go to a protest dressed like that himself, to figure out what was really going on. He expected to find white supremacists who wanted to help re elect President Trump by stoking fear of Black people. What he discovered instead were true believers in "insurrectionary anarchism." To better understand them, Mr. Quinn, a 40 something theater student who worked at Univision until the pandemic, has spent the past four months marching with "black bloc" anarchists in half a dozen cities across the country, chronicling the experience on his website, Public Report. He says he respects the idealistic goal of a hierarchy free society that anarchists embrace, but grew increasingly uncomfortable with the tactics used by some anarchists, which he feared would set off a backlash that could help get President Trump re elected. In Portland, Ore., he marched with people who shot fireworks at the federal court building. In Washington, he marched with protesters who harassed diners. Mr. Quinn discovered a thorny truth about the mayhem that unfolded in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. It wasn't mayhem at all. While talking heads on television routinely described it as a spontaneous eruption of anger at racial injustice, it was strategically planned, facilitated and advertised on social media by anarchists who believed that their actions advanced the cause of racial justice. In some cities, they were a fringe element, quickly expelled by peaceful organizers. But in Washington, Portland and Seattle they have attracted a "cultlike energy," Mr. Quinn told me. Don't take just Mr. Quinn's word for it. Take the word of the anarchists themselves, who lay out the strategy in Crimethinc, an anarchist publication: Black clad figures break windows, set fires, vandalize police cars, then melt back into the crowd of peaceful protesters. When the police respond by brutalizing innocent demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets and rough arrests, the public's disdain for law enforcement grows. It's Asymmetric Warfare 101. An anarchist podcast called "The Ex Worker" explains that while some anarchists believe in pacifist civil disobedience inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, others advocate using crimes like arson and shoplifting to wear down the capitalist system. According to "The Ex Worker," the term "insurrectionary anarchist" dates back at least to the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, when opponents of the fascist leader Francisco Franco took "direct action" against his regime, including assassinating policemen and robbing banks. If that is not enough to convince you that there's a method to the madness, check out the new report by Rutgers researchers that documents the "systematic, online mobilization of violence that was planned, coordinated (in real time) and celebrated by explicitly violent anarcho socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peaceful protest," according to its co author Pamela Paresky. She said some anarchist social media accounts had grown 300 fold since May, to hundreds of thousands of followers. "The ability to continue to spread and to eventually bring more violence, including a violent insurgency, relies on the ability to hide in plain sight to be confused with legitimate protests, and for media and the public to minimize the threat," Dr. Paresky told me. Her report will almost certainly catch the attention of conservative media and William Barr's Department of Justice, which recently declared New York, Portland and Seattle "anarchist jurisdictions," a widely mocked designation accompanied by the threat of withholding federal funds. There's an even thornier truth that few people seem to want to talk about: Anarchy got results. Don't get me wrong. My heart broke for the people in Minneapolis who lost buildings to arson and looting. Migizi, a Native American nonprofit in Minneapolis, raised more than 1 million to buy and renovate a place where Native American teenagers could learn about their culture only to watch it go up in flames, alongside dozens of others, including a police station. It can take years to build a building and only one night to burn it down. And yet, I had to admit that the scale of destruction caught the media's attention in a way that peaceful protests hadn't. How many articles would I have written about a peaceful march? How many months would Mr. Quinn have spent investigating suburban moms kneeling? That's on us. While I feared that the looting and arson would derail the urgent demands for racial justice and bring condemnation, I was wrong, at least in the short term. Support for Black Lives Matter soared. Corporations opened their wallets. It was as if the nation rallied behind peaceful Black organizers after it saw the alternative, like whites who flocked to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after they got a glimpse of Malcolm X. But as the protests continue, support has flagged. The percentage of people who say they support the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped from 67 percent in June to 55 percent, according to a recent Pew poll. "Insurrectionary anarchy" brings diminishing returns, especially as anarchists complicate life for those working within the system to halt police violence. In Louisville, Ky., Attica Scott, a Black state representative who sponsored a police reform bill, was arrested last week and charged with felony rioting after someone threw a road flare inside a library. In Portland, Jo Ann Hardesty, an activist turned city councilor, has pushed for the creation of a pilot program of unarmed street responders to handle mental illness and homelessness, a practical step to help protect populations that experience violence at the hands of police. Yet Ms. Hardesty is shouted down at protests by anarchists who want to abolish the police, not merely reform or defund them. "As a Black woman who has been working on this for 30 years, to have young white activists who have just discovered that Black lives matter yelling at me that I'm not doing enough for Black people it's kind of ironic, is what it is," Ms. Hardesty told me. In Seattle, Andre Taylor, a Black man who lost his brother to police violence in 2016, helped change state law that made it nearly impossible to prosecute officers for killing civilians. But he has been branded a "pig cop" by young anarchists because his nonprofit organization receives funds from the city, and because he cooperates with the police. "When they say, 'You are working with the police,' I say, 'I have worked with police and I will continue to work for reform,'" Mr. Taylor told me. "Remember, I lost a brother."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (Jan. 3 4, 8 p.m.; Jan. 7, 7:30 p.m.). Jeffrey Kahane leads the first subscription program of the new year, through Tuesday, conducting Haydn's Symphony No. 96, Respighi's "Trittico botticelliano" and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22, in which Kahane is also the soloist. Later in the coming week, from Jan. 9 to 11, Daniel Harding returns to the podium for the first time since 2011, conducting Strauss's "Eine Alpensinfonie" and Grieg's Piano Concerto, with Paul Lewis at the keyboard. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. PARKER QUARTET AND ANTHONY MCGILL at Advent Lutheran Church (Jan. 6, 7:30 p.m.). Part of the free Music Monday series, this concert pairs Harvard's quartet in residence with McGill, the principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic, for Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. Then the quartet will perform Esa Pekka Salonen's "Homunculus" and Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 9. musicmondays.org 'PORGY AND BESS' at the Metropolitan Opera (Jan. 8, 7:30 p.m.; through Feb. 15). James Robinson's sell out production of Gershwin's classic has proved so popular that the Met has added three performances to this second run of the season. Much of the same cast returns from the premiere, albeit with one or two substitutions on certain dates. Kevin Short is Porgy (Eric Owens resumes the role starting on Jan. 15), with Angel Blue as Bess, Janai Brugger as Clara, Latonia Moore as Serena, Denyce Graves as Maria, Frederick Ballentine as Sportin' Life, Alfred Walker as Crown and Donovan Singletary as Jake. David Robertson conducts. 212 362 6000, metopera.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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ANAHEIM, Calif. The sweat had not yet dried on the brows of Gonzaga's basketball players after they dispatched Baylor last weekend, but their gaze turned quickly to what lay ahead a chance to rewrite last season's ending. It was clear that they had checked carefully when the N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament brackets were announced, and knew they could again be facing Florida State in the same round (a West Region semifinal) and amid the same freeway system (Greater Los Angeles) where their season ended a year ago. "We can't wait to get revenge," forward Corey Kispert said, expressing a sentiment that was present up and down the roster. The Zags may have been bullied and not quite at full strength last season, but they stood firm enough on Thursday night, turning back the rugged, determined Seminoles, 72 58, to advance to the West Region final on Saturday against third seeded Texas Tech, which dominated second seeded Michigan, 63 44. It is hard to imagine that game being more taxing for the No. 1 seeded Zags than the one against fourth seeded Florida State. Though the Seminoles, who had lost only to North Carolina and Duke over the last two months, were short handed, climbing uphill and fighting foul trouble all night, they persisted nevertheless. The physical play appeared to grind the Zags down, as they seemed less interested in moving their feet and began reaching more on defense, and their offensive diversity and ball movement were reduced to seeking out their N.B.A. prospects: Rui Hachimura and Brandon Clarke. "It's March, and we knew adversity would hit," Gonzaga's Josh Perkins said. "It didn't happen early, but it happened." As much of a slog as it was for Gonzaga, its victory was a masterpiece compared with the game that followed here in Anaheim. Perhaps this was to be expected with the nation's two most efficient defensive teams, but still: Fourteen minutes into the game, Texas Tech led Michigan by 11 8. And while the Red Raiders eventually found some rhythm, particularly Jarrett Culver (22 points) and Davide Moretti (15 points), the Wolverines' shooting never progressed beyond abysmal. Michigan, which went to the title game last year and lost to Villanova, missed its first 18 3 point attempts and did not make a jump shot until 10:03 remained. Shortly after, Matt Mooney took a pass from Culver and sank a 3 pointer, extending the Red Raiders' lead to 25 points and ensuring there would be no late drama. In the earlier game, as a 13 point Gonzaga lead was sliced to 60 56 with 4 minutes 11 seconds left, the Zags steadied themselves on a sequence at each end of the court. Killian Tillie, who was injured when these teams met a year ago, harassed the Seminoles' Devin Vassell on a drive to the basket and Zach Norvell Jr. came up with a 3 pointer to push the Zags' margin to 7. Florida State never challenged again. "He hit a big shot," Florida State's Mfiondu Kabengele said of Norvell. "You've got to give him credit." Hachimura scored 17 points and Clarke added 15 points, 12 rebounds and 5 blocks for Gonzaga, which also got four 3 pointers from Norvell. Trent Forrest led Florida State with 20 points. It had been a whirlwind week for the Seminoles, who were without a senior leader, Phil Cofer, whose father died a week ago. Cofer, who had injured his foot in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament, learned of his father's death when he returned to the locker room after the Seminoles' first round N.C.A.A. win against Vermont. His teammates found out when he broke down in tears. Coach Leonard Hamilton was summoned from the interview room, and the news media was cleared from the locker room. Cofer returned home and has been with his family since. Though it was unclear if he would be able to return from the injury, he told his teammates that he would be with them if they reached the Final Four. That became a clarion call for the Seminoles. "When we saw Phil hurting, it hurt us," P J Savoy, a fellow senior, said on Wednesday. "Just knowing that he's not going to be here this week gives us that extra purpose of what we're playing for. So I just feel like we've got to go out and win for him." Being without Cofer one of the team's leaders was not the only shortcoming the Seminoles faced on Thursday. Their spindly 7 foot 4 center, Christ Koumadje, was in foul trouble all night. He played less than three minutes in the first half before picking up two quick fouls, With him out, Gonzaga took an 11 point halftime lead. He got his third less than three minutes into the second half and with the Seminoles trailing by 42 33, Hamilton had no choice but to leave him in. But Koumadje could be only so careful. When Hachimura made three pump fakes, Koumadje bit on the final one and was whistled for his fourth foul with 14:19 to play. A minute later, Savoy went to the bench with what looked like a severe shoulder injury, though he returned in the final minutes. But no one not Savoy, Koumadje or Terance Mann (who had 18 points against the Zags last year but was 1 for 8 on Thursday) could carry the Seminoles all the way back.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Even at a time of year when movie companies typically unload their dross, the sheer awfulness of Dito Montiel's "The Clapper" stands out. Adapting his second book ("Eddie Krumble Is the Clapper"), Mr. Montiel a former punk musician whose memoir, "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," was filmed in 2006 fails completely to transform sad sack characters into interesting ones. Instead, he presents them as borderline dolts, barely functioning adults defined by behavioral quirks and psychological soft spots. Eddie (Ed Helms) and his buddy Chris (an unusually restrained, possibly mortified Tracy Morgan) are bottom feeding actors in Hollywood whose specialty is playing audience members on low budget television shows. Clapping and hollering on cue and sometimes, if they're lucky, asking a prearranged question they survive with minimal income and even less ambition. Theirs is a livelihood that depends on blending into the crowd. So when Eddie's ubiquity is spotted and exposed by a late night television host (Russell Peters), he becomes a running joke and essentially unemployable. The notoriety also threatens to derail his painfully dimwitted pursuit of Judy (Amanda Seyfried), a sweetly simple gas station cashier with a fondness for weird humans and wounded animals. Mashing limp romance and artless satire into a ludicrously contrived plot, "The Clapper" lurches from one mirthlessly eccentric scene to another.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Facing abuse and anger over its decision to ban Manchester City, the English soccer champion, from its competitions, European soccer's governing body this week took the unusual step of ordering its staff members not to wear branded clothing when they travel to matches involving the team, or even to games played in Manchester. The warnings from the body, UEFA, included the Europa League match on Thursday between Manchester United and Club Brugge of Belgium. Manchester City fans have fumed for years about what they consider the mistreatment of their club by UEFA. But that anger has increased since Feb. 14, when UEFA issued Manchester City a two season ban from the Champions League, starting next season, and a fine of 30 million euros ( 27 million) after an investigation into accusations that City had violated UEFA's cost control regulations. The club's response throughout the process has been a full throated denial, and accusations that UEFA's process has been biased and prejudicial. It filed its official appeal of the punishment on Wednesday at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland. But fan vitriol taking aim not only at UEFA and its executives, but also at news media outlets that have reporters on the case and individual journalists has continued to appear on social media and fan message boards and even inside City's stadium, where last week fans displayed signs that called UEFA a "mafia" and a "cartel." Manchester City, which has never won the Champions League, moved a step closer to the quarterfinals of this year's competition on Wednesday with a dramatic 2 1 victory at Real Madrid. The victory came hours after news that City had filed its appeal at CAS. But the UEFA officials traveling to the game at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in Madrid wore plainclothes, said two people familiar with the contents of an internal memo that was sent to staff members. UEFA will take the same precautions when the two teams meet for the deciding game in Manchester on March 17. A spokesman for UEFA declined to comment on the memo, saying the organization does not discuss the safety guidance it gives to its employees. Manchester City fans' antipathy toward UEFA predates the European ban. Spectators have long jeered the Champions League anthem when it is played before matches in the competition, amid a festering sense that the team which was lifted out of decades of mediocrity by the riches of its Gulf ownership group is treated unfairly because it is not a part of soccer's established elite. Shortly after Manchester City's ban was announced, the club issued a statement in which it decried a "prejudicial process" that was "initiated by UEFA, prosecuted by UEFA and judged by UEFA." "Ultimately," the team's chief executive, Ferran Soriano, said in an interview with the club's website, "this seems to be less about justice and more about politics." Still, the scale and the tone of fan frustration have led UEFA to take no chances. And it is not the only group facing a backlash. At last year's F.A. Cup final, which City won to complete a sweep of English titles in one season, a fan stormed into the press seating area at Wembley Stadium and profanely berated members of the news media over what he called bias toward City's title rival Liverpool. Paul McCarthy, an official with the Football Writers' Association, an organization that represents soccer journalists, told The New York Times that he had been in communication with Manchester City about the hostile messages, which have included not only personal abuse but also threats of violence and the publication of personal information. One popular unofficial fan forum has in recent days taken down some of the offending material. "The forum in question, which is independent of Manchester City F.C., is responsibly managed and has been since its inception," a City representative said. "Manchester City F.C. has always been impressed with its ability to both present a platform for open debate whilst robustly policing antisocial or offensive posts. The small number of messages which appear to have breached the self imposed strict rules of the forum were swiftly removed by the moderators themselves prior to any concern being raised by the club, the NYT or indeed any third party."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Have you ever noticed that the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the Guggenheim Museum looks like a '60s sci fi spaceship or, alternatively, a European parliamentary room? That's how the artist Ryan McNamara (accurately) characterized it at the premiere of his "Battleground" on Monday night, while smartly shaking up the format of the Guggenheim's Works Process series and redefining the term "dance battle." "Frank Lloyd Wright did a great job designing my set," he said during a midshow conversation with Nancy Spector, a former chief curator at the museum, as though the architect had envisioned it, back in 1959, with this very occasion in mind. But it was hard to focus on what Mr. McNamara was saying. On the beige carpeted embankment to his right, five dancers in blue and green unitards, each silk screened with an image of the dancer's own face, had formed a slowly rotating circle. On the stage, where only a small fraction of the evening's action took place, three dancers in red versions of the same outfits (selfie suits?) appeared with a harness of stuffed arms binding them together. Each seemed to have sprouted an extra pair of hands. (Sam Roeck designed the body duplicating costumes.) By this point in the program, the divisions among the battling teams the blues, the greens, the reds were starting to erode. Mr. McNamara, a visual artist and self described dance fan ("I don't know if I'd call myself a choreographer," he told Ms. Spector), had established those squads at the start, giving each its own domain: blues on the stage, greens in the balcony, reds in the choir loft.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Q. I used Google Hangouts for the first time in Berlin. Now, if I enter a new contact into Google Contacts, it assumes the phone number is German and I have to manually change it each time. Is there a way to change the default country? A. If your Google account seems to think you are still in Germany, one place to check for a "default country" designation is in the settings for the Gmail account that is associated with your Google Hangouts calls. In a web browser, log into that Gmail account and click the gear shaped Settings icon in the upper right corner of the Gmail window.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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When Angela Durden found out that she had tested positive for the breast cancer gene mutation, she decided to share the information with her daughter, Alexis, who was 14 at the time. That meant telling the teenager about her own future risk that she had a 50 percent chance of carrying a mutation that had already riddled their extended family both male and female with the disease. Alexis's first concern was that her mother might get sick or maybe die. But Ms. Durden was less prepared for what Alexis said next. The teenager wanted to be tested, too. "I was totally shocked," said Ms. Durden, a small business owner in San Diego. "She said she would get tested as soon as she could and if she was positive, she was going to have a double mastectomy." As genetic testing has given women and men a trove of information about their health and risk for disease, it has also created a new challenge for parents and medical experts: when to share information with children who may inherit a genetic risk. In genetic medicine, minors typically are not tested for BRCA mutations, which increase the risk of adult onset breast and ovarian cancers. The worry is that children often lack the maturity to fully understand the implications of a genetic risk, and that they shouldn't be burdened with the knowledge until they are adults who can participate in the decision to be tested or not. Many experts recommend waiting to test until 25, the age at which screenings such as M.R.I.s and mammograms are encouraged for high risk women. A 2015 study of more than 200 girls ages 11 to 19 found that while adolescent girls from families that carry BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations worry more about the risk of breast cancer, they have similar levels of psychosocial adjustment, and in fact have higher self esteem, compared to their average risk peers. "We aren't seeing huge red flags about negative outcomes for them," says Dr. Angela Bradbury, lead author of the study and an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "Whether to tell children and when and how to tell them is one of the most common reasons people seek support in the process of genetic testing," said Karen Hurley, a clinical psychologist specializing in hereditary cancer risk. But some developmental specialists suggest that adolescents may benefit from learning that a mutation runs in their family because the potential threat is distant, giving them time to develop coping strategies and resilience if they test positive as adults. Anabel Getz, a 19 year old freshman at Georgetown University learned at 15 that the faulty BRCA gene in her family could impact her life. "I have so much time to make peace with what might happen and make decisions if I test positive," said Ms. Getz, who has not been tested. And finding out about the potential risk so early gave her a sense of control, she said. "It forces me to think about the kind of things I want later in life. I have a fear that I'll get cancer before I have a family and establish a career so I want to do those things at a young age." But not everyone agrees. Dr. Ruth Oratz, a medical oncologist and breast cancer specialist at NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center, worries that parents who inform their children about a potential genetic risk do not alleviate anxiety but instead hamper their teenager's ability to live freely. "Every time someone touches her breast or every time she takes her bra off, you think she's not thinking about it?" Dr. Jill Stoller, a pediatrician in New Jersey who carries a BRCA mutation, decided to tell her daughter, Jenna, then an eighth grader, about the family risk while planning for surgery after a breast cancer diagnosis. "I felt I had to give her context for the major surgery I was having." In the ensuing years they didn't talk much about genetic status but a week before her 18th birthday, Jenna asked to be tested and learned that she also had the mutation. "She told me that the stress of not knowing was worse than knowing," Dr. Stoller said. Some women feel that the burden of knowledge is too big for adolescents. In 2009, when Ann Little, a special education teacher from Boxborough, Mass., learned that she carried the BRCA gene, she told her three older children but chose not to tell her youngest daughter, who was 13 at the time. "I hated the idea that just as she was starting to develop breasts, she would have to think about losing them," Ms. Little said. "It would be a huge, dark cloud hanging over her. The worst part of the mutation," she said, "is that you burden your kids with this." There can be a tremendous sense of guilt about the possibility of passing along a harmful gene. "It's a primal instinct to protect your child. The randomness of inherited mutations can leave parents feeling very helpless," said Dr. Hurley. Dr. Stoller describes finding out that Jenna tested positive as one of the hardest days of her life. "I understood how my father felt when he found out that he had passed the gene on to me. He said, 'This is not the legacy I wanted to leave my family.'" Dr. Hurley reminds parents that what they pass on to their children is far greater than one gene alone. "You can show them how you cope when life gets hard and what you do in times of uncertainty," Dr. Hurley said. "You have control about what kind of parent you want to be." How the risk is communicated also matters. "Daughters are more likely to be anxious if mothers are anxious," Dr. Bradbury said. She suggested that adults get the support they need first by talking to genetic counselors or a therapist. Experts recommend using your child's age, personality and maturity as a guide. Be straightforward and honest but don't use confusing euphemisms or dump everything on your child at once. Keep an open door policy about questions, share your feelings and know that it's O.K. to say, "I don't know."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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When Beau Phillips checked into a hotel near Toledo recently, a table in front of the counter barricaded him from getting too close to the clerk, who wore a mask and stood behind a plastic window. "The key is gently tossed at you from three feet away," said Mr. Phillips, a public affairs executive who was staying at a Radisson Country Inn Suites while visiting family. The hotel's breakfast buffet was gone, the fitness center closed, elevators limited to two riders. And to reduce the risk of an in person visit, after Mr. Phillips left his room each day, no housekeeper came in to make the bed. The pandemic has plunged the hotel industry into a historic downturn. Average hotel occupancy dipped as low as 22 percent in late March, and had risen to a still miserable 48.1 percent the week ending July 25, according to STR, a market research firm. So hotels nationwide have embarked on a transformation of the most basic ways they run their business, aimed at showing would be travelers they understand where they're at: terrified. Wyndham Hotels Resorts, in its new "Count on Us" pandemic marketing campaign, heralds the use of "hospital grade" cleaning products. It is putting on overt shows of sanitation: Housekeepers now linger and clean around the lobby, conspicuously wiping down public areas, luggage carts, door knobs, and the counter. "In the past, we may have cleaned hotels in the overnight because you didn't necessarily want to see people cleaning," said Lisa Checchio, the chief marketing officer of Wyndham, the franchise parent of Wyndham, Days Inn, Super 8, La Quinta and more than a dozen other major brands among its 6,000 domestic hotels. Hilton new program (marketing name: "CleanStay") includes a partnership to use Lysol cleaning products that requires individual hotels to use the company's products and display the Lysol logo "prominently." Room cleanings include extra time spent on "high touch areas" that included light and climate control switches, handles and knobs, telephones and clocks. And, or course, the remote control "which has one of the highest ick factors or perceived ick factors," said Phil Cordell, Hilton's global head of new brand development. He recalled that one guest had wrapped the plastic lining from the ice bucket around the remote control before using it. "People are understandably freaked out or hyper aware," Mr. Cordell said. The new research looked at the virus residue left by two "pre symptomatic" patients there who were quarantined in China in March students who had returned from overseas and were placed in hotels during a mandatory waiting period. Their rooms were swabbed for evidence that the virus lingered after the students had been there 24 hours, but before the rooms were cleaned. The researchers said the study shows that hotel rooms must be rigorously cleaned between guest stays and done so with an eye to how the virus spreads. "To minimize the possibility of dispersing virus through the air, we recommend that used linens not be shaken upon removal," the study said, "and that laundered items be thoroughly cleaned and dried to prevent additional spread. To show they are, indeed, rigorous in their cleaning, several chains are heralding the consulting they are getting from big name medical institutions. Four Seasons said it signed a consulting agreement with Johns Hopkins Medical International as part of an effort "to inform health and safety decisions based on the latest scientific knowledge," while Hilton retained counsel from the Mayo Clinic to develop "enhanced cleaning standards." All the attention to sanitation has created other issues. Since the masks employees are required to wear shroud smiles, Hilton, which has hotels throughout the world, has been experimenting with hand gestures to express warmth and welcome. "One is a very simple wave. In some cultures, it could be a bow," Mr. Cordell said. "It could be hats off but with no hat but that could look kind of weird or a hand over heart." Given the industry's dire economic crisis, some of the changes it's adopting cost little, or even save money, said Bjorn Hanson, former dean of hospitality at New York University who has also spent years working inside the industry. For instance, he said, hotels can save money on housekeeping by not cleaning rooms every night, or by promising not to put guests in adjoining rooms, as some hotels have done (in reality, there's not enough occupancy to have high density anyway). "Safety doesn't necessarily cost money," he said. "It could be an excuse for saving money," Some would be travelers say they're just not ready to return, no matter the assurances. "I've stayed at nice hotels in the past and found something sticky. If I found something sticky and smudgy now, it would send me to the moon," said Kevin Mercuri, chief executive of a New York public relations firm. He and colleagues recently decided against visiting a client in Georgia partly to avoid hotels. His concern about hotels, in a nutshell: "Fear of infection." The C.D.C. has recommended that people who stay at hotels check in online, choose properties where staff wear masks and that regularly clean or remove shared touch items, like pens or phones, and disinfect doorknobs, ice and vending machines, among other things. Charles Gerba, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies hotel cleanliness, said hotels do not pose significant risk of transmission of Covid 19 so long as they clean with products known to kill the virus. "If a product is EPA approved and you're not using it right, it isn't doing me any good," he said, meaning that cleaning must be thorough and not taken lightly. He said he'd feel comfortable staying at a hotel, but would decline daily maid service, and bring his own hand sanitizer and wipes. Other public health researchers said that the risk of a hotel stay depended heavily on an the customer's own commitment to wearing a mask or remaining socially distant. "You need to an make informed decision to maintain your space," said Eyal Oren, an associate professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Bioinformatics at the San Diego State University School of Public Health. He said hotels do offer the prospect of such distancing, "which I'd distinguish from an airplane." For people who choose to travel, one perk comes at the expense of the hotels: the price. STR, the market research firm, projects the average cost of a nightly stay in 2020 will wind up at 103, down from 131 a year ago. (In July, the average rate was 97). There are other savings too. Mr. Phillips always leaves a tip for the cleaning crew and did so again during his recent stay at the Country Inn Suites outside of Toledo.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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IN a beloved cliche of any time machine movie, the intrepid traveler goofs up the controls and emerges in a cosmically awful predicament in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition, say, or at the molten core of the earth. For Mercedes Benz, the two seat time capsule is the new SLS AMG. This sports car's quest takes buyers back to the 1950s, by evoking the classic 300SL coupe, including its space age gullwing doors. But the SLS's greatest misfortune aside from its uninspired rear end styling is to have landed plop into the still sour economy of 2010. Any megaplex denizen could have told Mercedes that a 200,000 sports car should have set course for, oh, the dot com bubble of 1999. On that time bending subject, I've had the nostalgic fortune not only to have driven a vintage Gullwing, but to have ridden shotgun with a racing legend, Stirling Moss, a few years back as he steered his 300SLR racer around Virginia International Raceway. That SLR, a priceless street going version of the company's Formula One racers, took Moss and his navigator, Denis Jenkinson, to a record win in the 1955 Mille Miglia, Italy's classic death defying road race. I remember asking Moss still a capable pilot in his mid 70s where the seat belts were hidden. "There's no bloody seat belt!" the leprechaunlike Moss said with the hint of a smile at my obvious discomfort. He explained that racers of his era feared fire more than collisions, and would rather be thrown from a wreck, or crawl out of one, than perish in a burning car. Morbid thoughts did occur to me that day when I drove the SLS's predecessor, the now departed Mercedes SLR McLaren. While I was a big Moss fan, I never warmed to the SLR, a 617 horsepower favorite of celebrities who, to put it politely, often seemed unqualified to drive the beast. NOSE HEAVY Styling puts the emphasis on the front end. A tucked in spoiler rises from the rear deck above 75 m.p.h. The SLR's spookily numb controls made it one of the least approachable supercars I've tested: its mile long hood struck me as a blank gravestone, awaiting the last words of an overconfident owner holy something, most likely. And that's what's great about the 2011 SLS. As the first car created entirely by the company's AMG performance division (rather than adapted from a civilian Mercedes), the SLS can't match the visual fantasia of the scissor doored SLR, or that car's terminal speed of 207 miles per hour. (A mere 197 m.p.h. must suffice.) Yet I had more fun driving the SLS because I felt much more confident in it, my mind focused on the next curve and not on indemnity clauses. Since various SLR McLarens were priced between 450,000 and roughly 1 million the latter for the Stirling Moss Roadster edition Mercedes might argue that a supercar replacement that starts at 185,750 is, by comparison, a recession priced Kia. As it stands, Mercedes will be satisfied if roughly 300 Americans ante up for an SLS in its first year. Those buyers will get an appealing 563 horsepower mix of ferocity and luxury, with a decidedly Germanic style that is very different from the usual Italian supercar. Whereas many Ferraris or Lamborghinis mount their engines behind the driver, the Mercedes takes the approach of front engine, long snout classics like the Jaguar E Type. But another front engine monster, the Dodge Viper, came to mind when I stared down the SLS's mammoth hood: it's like a Stonehenge monolith tipped on its side. That hood is something to behold, along with those sky walking doors. Wherever I swung them open, a crowd magically appeared to gawk and snap photos. The price for this instant conversation starter is clumsy entry and exit over bench size door sills, and the odd whack of the noggin against the raised portals. Once seated, shorter occupants stretch and strain to reach the raised door handles, though Mercedes plans to offer helpful grab straps at an unspecified date. The other con is the thick front roof pillars that block too much of the view. As for safety, if the SLS should ever land on its roof, pyrotechnic charges blow out the doors' hinge bolts, allowing occupants or rescuers to free the doors. The SLS looks so bodacious from the front that you almost wish Mercedes had grafted the hood onto the back, so you could enjoy the view in stereo. But after the magnificence of that six foot long proboscis, the rear is a bland vestigial tail, with a tucked in spoiler that rises above 75 m.p.h. The jut jawed proportions, along with the hefty 6.2 liter V 8, made me picture a car so nose heavy that its rear wheels would be levered off the ground. But throw open the Mercedes's hood and you're surprised to find all eight cylinders wedged behind the front axle line. The engine's dry sump lubrication allows it to nestle especially low to the ground. The result is balanced handling with outstanding 47:53 weight distribution front to rear. The SLS's chassis and body are entirely aluminum, aside from a composite decklid. Other fat trimmers include a carbon fiber driveshaft that weighs a mere 9 pounds, and optional ceramic composite brakes. At 3,573 pounds, the Mercedes weighs about 300 less than the largely carbon fiber SLR McLaren, and a remarkable 700 less than the SL63 roadster. The SLS's power to weight ratio tops the Aston Martin DBS and Porsche 911 Turbo (though the Porsche's all wheel drive makes it faster), and it's within sight of the Ferrari 599 GTB. However you do the math, the SLS is a screamer: 3.5 seconds from 0 to 60 miles per hour, according to Car and Driver magazine, and 11.6 seconds in the quarter mile. And then there is the sound: a guttural, murderous outburst, complete with exploding popcorn backfires when you downshift or get off the throttle. You can't believe that any Mercedes could make such a racket. The company has been cranking out some brilliant transmissions, and the SLS's 7 speed dual clutch automated manual is the latest. Driven in Comfort mode, the transmission can smooth out gear changes a bit too much for the impatient driver, especially while trundling in traffic. The Sport Sharp or Manual settings take care of that, snapping off shifts in less than 100 milliseconds. There's also a welcome Sport setting for the stability control system, which shows off both the SLS's surprisingly high limits and smooth recovery when the tires do break loose. The Mercedes still can't match the steering feedback of a typical Porsche, or the hard core purity of exotics like a midengine Ferrari. That judgment was reinforced when I happened to hop from the Mercedes into the new Porsche Boxster Spyder. There's still a bit of the old grand touring Gullwing in this Mercedes's blood, a recognition that the SLS will spend more time at fancy hotels than in racetrack paddocks. That message is evident inside: the SLS is rich, bedecked in soft leather, aluminum and optional carbon fiber. But aside from some details including aircraft style aluminum vents the mature cabin assures a Mercedes Benz buyer that he hasn't gone crazy from a midlife crisis. One wild touch is Alubeam paint, a 12,500 option that wheels your SLS to a separate German factory for a hand applied paint that looks like liquid chrome.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Two takes on the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III (a story that's more than four decades old), both involving major directors and both starring exceptional actors, are arriving within a few months of each other. Coincidence? Schadenfreude? An insatiable appetite for true crime dramas? Whatever the reason, "All the Money in the World" the Ridley Scott film starring Christopher Plummer, released in late December and "Trust," the new FX series (beginning Sunday) partly directed by Danny Boyle and starring Donald Sutherland, are different enough that watching both doesn't feel excessively repetitive. If you see "All the Money" first, though, "Trust" will feel a little anticlimactic. The film was terrific and Mr. Plummer (who replaced Kevin Spacey) was magnificent as J. Paul Getty, the filthy rich industrialist grandfather of the victim. Based on three of 10 episodes, the series is flashy, intermittently entertaining and ephemeral a ghastly event turned into a jazzy satire. And Mr. Sutherland, in the early going, doesn't make the impression you'd hope for, mainly because the script by Simon Beaufoy, Mr. Boyle's collaborator on "Slumdog Millionaire" doesn't seem to have much of a handle on the senior Getty. The character seesaws from cruel to avuncular to pervy, but we don't see the connections. He appears to have been conceived as a comic monster (as opposed to the tragic monster Mr. Plummer played), and scene by scene Mr. Sutherland gets all the mileage he can out of that. But it's more about technique than feeling. That's not necessarily surprising when you consider that Mr. Boyle, in films like "Slumdog," "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later," achieves his effects through breakneck speed and a relentless pictorial inventiveness. When he has a solid story to work with as in "Slumdog," adapted by Mr. Beaufoy from a novel by Vikas Swarup, and "Trainspotting," based on a novel by Irvine Welsh the results can be spectacular. In "Trust," where he's working, if very loosely, from real life and needs to stretch the narrative out to 10 hours, the results are less compelling. The quest to paint a broad portrait of an era comes at the cost of individual emotion and psychological depth. The surface gloss is definitely there, though. Perhaps as a strategy to deal with the expanded length of the TV series and to keep himself interested Mr. Boyle, who directed the first three episodes, adopts a different style in each one. The opener, in which we're introduced to the extended Getty family and to life at Sutton Place, J. Paul Getty's English country home, is British crazy aristocracy comedy. A foursome of jealous, bored girlfriends serves as a chorus commenting on events as Getty frets about who will succeed him in the family oil business, humiliates various offspring and plays the aging satyr, receiving an injection for erectile dysfunction while complaining about his son's and grandson's drug use. The second week, in which the investigation begins of the kidnapping of the grandson, known as Paul (Harris Dickinson), switches to a style reminiscent of a late '60s early '70s caper film. The colors brighten with the move to Rome, the screen frequently splits into three or more sections (shades of "The Thomas Crown Affair") and the focus shifts to a private investigator played by Brendan Fraser, a big talking Texan in a 10 gallon white hat. You know things have morphed right away when Mr. Fraser opens the episode by narrating straight into the camera. And Week 3? It's titled "La Dolce Vita," and sure enough there's some Fellini style light surrealism and some vivid Bertolucci style youthful abandon. If anything ties together the experience of watching "Trust," it's this expectation of visual and stylistic novelty from Mr. Boyle. You can track how the soundtrack shifts along with the narrative the Rolling Stones and David Bowie for British debauchery, spaghetti western instrumentals for Italian cool. Allusions to English literature "Lear," "Tom Jones" give way to a shot of the mouse puppet Topo Gigio on Italian TV. The tone and substance toggle abruptly among satire, melodrama and morality play. How this fragmented approach will play out over the full season and beyond that, across three seasons of what's planned as an anthology series about the Getty family is anyone's guess. It might be worth hanging around to see whether Mr. Sutherland, Mr. Fraser and Hilary Swank, as Paul's mother, are able to build up their portrayals. And Mr. Dickinson is touchingly callow as Paul (though he registers as significantly older than 16, the age Mr. Getty was when he was kidnapped). But the show's appealing performers and catchy look don't yet outweigh its lack of cohesion and its readiness to fall back on platitudes about the corrosive effects of wealth. "All the Money in the World" was a character study, but so far "Trust" is more of a caricature.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Last weekend, as jubilant Democrats danced in the streets to celebrate the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the country's 46th president, QAnon believers were on their computers trying to make sense of it all. "Biden will NEVER be president," wrote one QAnon believer, still firmly stuck in the denial stage of grief. "Trump knows what he is doing," wrote a member of a QAnon forum, well on his way to bargaining. "He is letting the Dems, technocrats and media publicly hang themselves." Some QAnon believers, however, were already inching toward acceptance. "We're losing," one tweeted. "Not sure I trust the plan anymore. Not sure there even is a plan." These are trying times for believers in QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory that falsely claims the existence of a satanic pedophile cult run by top Democrats. For years, they had been assured that Mr. Trump would win re election in a landslide and spend his second term vanquishing the deep state and bringing the cabal's leaders to justice. Q, the pseudonymous message board user whose cryptic posts have fueled the movement for more than three years, told them to "trust the plan." But since Mr. Trump's defeat, Q has gone dark. No posts from the account bearing Q's tripcode, or digital user name, have appeared on 8kun, the website where all of Q's posts appear. And overall QAnon related activity on the site has slowed to a trickle. (On a recent day, there were fewer new posts on one of 8kun's QAnon boards than on its board for adult diaper fetishists.) There are also signs of infighting among QAnon's inner circle. Ron Watkins, an 8kun administrator who some believed was Q himself, announced on Election Day that he was stepping down from the site, citing "extensive battles" over censorship and the site's future. His father, Jim Watkins, a professed QAnon believer who owns 8kun, has been singing hymns on his livestream and posting debunked claims about voter fraud, but has not given any indication of when Q might return. Q's sudden disappearance has been jarring for QAnon believers, who have come to depend on the account's posts, or "drops," for updates and reassurance. "They feel really defeated by the deep state, even if they're not admitting it in public," said Fredrick Brennan, the founder of 8chan, 8kun's predecessor site. Mr. Brennan, who has left the site and become a vocal critic of Mr. Watkins, said QAnon believers had bought into the idea that Mr. Trump was fully in control, even as the polls showed he had a slim chance of winning. "They were not expecting him to lose, and they were not expecting Fox News to call it," he said. "It was really psychologically damaging." Over the last few months, QAnon followers have been barred from most major social media platforms, deflating the movement's momentum and depriving it of its most effective organizing tools. Large Facebook groups and YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers disappeared overnight, and some of QAnon's most prominent promoters have been reduced to peddling conspiracy theories on fringe websites. The crackdowns have hurt QAnon's grifter class the self appointed leaders who make a living selling Q merchandise, writing QAnon themed books and organizing offline Q events. But they also disconnected rank and file believers from the communities where they gathered to discuss the news, decode the latest drops and plan for the future. "QAnon believers were hoping for direction if Trump lost, and not only are they unable to hook into Q, there have also been moves by platform companies to remove other sources of entertainment and leadership," said Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center. Election Day was not a total loss for QAnon. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, two Republicans who have praised the conspiracy theory, won their House elections and will be sworn in next year. But Mr. Trump, the central heroic figure in QAnon's fantasy, will not. And without an enabler in the White House, it remains to be seen whether the movement's days are numbered.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Even if you love this early repertory, you couldn't shake the sense that you were clicking through the ballet channel. Scenes from Robbins's "Les Noces" (either do the whole thing or not) and Jiri Kylian's "Sinfonietta" (why bother?) were filler, along with an Act IV excerpt from "Swan Lake" for Misty Copeland and James Whiteside. It wasn't enough to measure Ms. Copeland's potential in this ballet; her New York debut in the full work comes later this season. Also underwhelming was an excerpt from Tudor's "The Leaves Are Fading," in which the romantic duet, danced by Mr. Stearns and Hee Seo, lacked seamlessness. "Etudes," by Harald Lander, showed the scrupulous brio of Joseph Gorak, who later returned, fresh and polished, for Balanchine's "Theme and Variations" with Sarah Lane. Still, "Etudes" was part of the evening's strangest invention: a series of quick hits, starting with a "Giselle" snippet featuring Maria Kochetkova. The perimeter of the stage was filled with notables from previous ballets who watched Paloma Herrera gliding effervescently through a section of Balanchine's "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux," and Mr. Stearns and Isabella Boylston, who faltered uncharacteristically in her fouette turns, in "Don Quixote." Bows brought former company members to the stage, but two of the gala's most enduring moments were in the dancing, notably the fourth movement of Twyla Tharp's "Push Comes to Shove" with Mr. Cornejo in Mikhail Baryshnikov's role. Along with a section from Mr. Ratmansky's "Piano Concerto 1," this transported the company to a place where it could revel in movement. As bowler hats flew in "Push," Mr. Cornejo, both virtuosic and loose, was an auspicious ringleader. The painful part? Getting only a glimpse of this rarely performed 1976 work. The other high point was Julie Kent, opposite Mr. Gomes, in the Act I pas de deux of Kenneth MacMillan's "Manon." For Ms. Kent, who retires from the company in June, it was a last crack at a cherished role, and she took it on with more brazenness than ever arching deeper, spinning faster and skimming across the floor on point with extraordinary speed. It's not as if she hasn't done this sort of thing before turned a role inside out with unself conscious exquisiteness but knowing that it was the last time gave way to a realization: American or not, a real ballerina is born, not made.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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On Monday, Mr. Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, called it something else: biased. "Bloomberg News has declared that they won't investigate their boss or his Democrat competitors, many of whom are current holders of high office, but will continue critical reporting on President Trump," Mr. Parscale wrote in a statement, calling the decision "troubling and wrong." "Since they have declared their bias openly, the Trump campaign will no longer credential representatives of Bloomberg News for rallies or other campaign events," Mr. Parscale wrote. The campaign said it would decide "on a case by case basis" whether to respond to inquiries from individual reporters on stories. The editor in chief of Bloomberg News, John Micklethwait, quickly fired back. "The accusation of bias couldn't be further from the truth," Mr. Micklethwait wrote in a statement. "We have covered Donald Trump fairly and in an unbiased way since he became a candidate in 2015 and will continue to do so despite the restrictions imposed by the Trump campaign." Howard Wolfson, a top campaign adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, also weighed in, pithily. "One week in and Mike is already under Trump's skin," Mr. Wolfson wrote on Twitter. Mr. Trump and his senior aides routinely disparage individual reporters and entire news organizations for coverage they deem unfavorable. Press advocacy groups say the president's attacks have contributed to one of the more hostile domestic environments for journalists in recent memory.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Kim Jong un, North Korea's leader, in a photo released by the government on April 11. He has made strikingly few public appearances in the past three months. Three generations of totalitarian misrule have left North Korea woefully incapable of containing, or even suppressing, a coronavirus epidemic. The same intelligent (and malevolent) design that has turned the country into the world's most exquisitely oppressive police state has also inadvertently converted it into a prospective infection deathtrap. North Korea's notorious gulag camps and prisons, as well as its military barracks, are petri dishes in waiting for communicable disease. The government's worst in class transparency practices ensure that it will automatically censor information (bad news in particular) that might help identify the coronavirus and limit its spread. Longstanding economic failure means that much of the population is poorly nourished and vulnerable to infection. North Korea ranked 193rd out of 195 countries in Johns Hopkins University's 2019 survey of global health security. Decades of ruthless control on foreign travel and contact with outsiders mean that many of its people may also be unusually "immunologically naive" (yes: this is an actual epidemiological term of art). The country experienced a horrific famine in the 1990s. The leadership in Pyongyang weathered it, but hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people perished. The government's playbook back then included doubling down on "military first politics" and a murderous triage according to its "songbun" social caste system, protecting groups seen as loyal while sacrificing classes deemed "wavering" or "hostile." It is possible that the North Korean authorities have been able to confine Covid 19 to a few military bases and prison camps. But even that would have come at a terrible cost: The national lockdown is a near complete economic self embargo more stringent still than the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign of sanctions. Smuggling is largely on hold. Commercial shipments have been deferred. Illicit overseas revenues from North Korea's partners in crime presumably have slumped (Iran has its own woes). The lockdown has disrupted informal markets, a nutritional lifeline for many people. Economic disaster is looming once again possibly not that far in the future. Stunningly, during one of his rare recent appearances at a groundbreaking ceremony in mid March for a new elite hospital in Pyongyang Mr. Kim said he was "feeling miserably self critical of the fact that there is no perfect and modern medical service establishment even in the capital city." During the Supreme People's Assembly session that he skipped, a report from the cabinet was disclosed admitting unspecified "serious mistakes" in 2019; another report acknowledged "some drawbacks in executing the state budget." In other words: Economic performance was already terrible before the coronavirus shutdown. The leadership's economic plans have been uncharacteristically modest recently. On April 11, the Politburo discussed "stabilizing the people's livelihood" this year, somehow. The official newspaper previously had urged "belt tightening." At the hospital groundbreaking ceremony, Mr. Kim said he hoped the massive project would be completed, as planned, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Workers' Party in October, but that "the present conditions for this construction are not so favorable." The government might try to buy time by expropriating the "donju," or "masters of money," well connected entrepreneurs operating in still officially illegal markets. It might also requisition goods or foodstuffs from petty traders. There were signs before the epidemic that Mr. Kim could be about to turn on his marketeers, overhaul the entire "songbun" caste system and launch an anti corruption campaign. The current economic tailspin could add urgency to any confiscation agenda. But if Mr. Kim decides to take their assets away from the "donju," arguably the most powerful group after the government, he might find out just how influential they really are. Interfering with local markets risks destroying the population's last backstop against famine: Perhaps Mr. Kim regards a food crisis as preferable to a pandemic breakout, but by inviting the first he could get the second in the bargain, too. Mr. Kim might continue to test new weaponry designed for offensive combat in the Korean Peninsula: Epidemic or not, North Korea fired a series of short range ballistic missiles in March. And if he still has the resources, he might push ahead with his plan to threaten the United States mainland with nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. But if Mr. Kim and his entourage cannot manage North Korea's coronavirus crisis, they might have even more trouble on their hands than they realize. A generation of nuclear brinkmanship has not yet provoked outside intervention, but stepping in to stop a pandemic is a scenario that China and South Korea just might consider. Nicholas Eberstadt is a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute and a founding director of the United States Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Since his political commentary was published in The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, David Horsey says he has heard from a number of angry people. They have chastised Mr. Horsey, a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, mostly for describing President Trump's press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as a "slightly chunky soccer mom" in The Times. And on Saturday, he heard from another critic he acknowledged had a particular right to be offended: Ms. Sanders's mother. "She was mad," Mr. Horsey said in a telephone interview on Saturday night. "But she was good about it," he added. "It wasn't anything like the really nasty stuff." He said he replied to her email and told her, "I know I was wrong, and I sincerely apologize." Mr. Horsey sent his individualized note of regret a day after issuing a much broader mea culpa that The Times affixed to the top of his commentary. Mr. Horsey had opened by writing that Ms. Sanders "does not look like the kind of woman Donald Trump would choose as his chief spokesperson." He went on to say that "the president has generally exhibited a preference for sleek beauties with long legs and stiletto heels to represent his interests and act as his arm candy." He continued: "Trump's daughter Ivanka and wife Melania are the apotheosis of this type. By comparison, Sanders looks more like a slightly chunky soccer mom who organizes snacks for the kids' games." The Times added a note at the top of the column with Mr. Horsey's apology, which said the description was "insensitive and failed to meet the standards of our newspaper." Almost all of the first two paragraphs of the column were removed and a "For the Record" was added reiterating that the language was not up to The Times's standards. An email to the White House press office and to Ms. Sanders seeking comment on Saturday night was not returned. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Mr. Horsey has been drawing political cartoons and accompanying them with short commentary at The Times since 2012. His "Top of the Ticket" feature is syndicated and appears three times a week. Mr. Horsey said that "because of timing," his story had been edited only by the newsroom's copy desk. That work flow is "something that's clearly going to be assessed," he said. Asked if he had been disciplined, Mr. Horsey said, "Not that I know of," adding, "Obviously there's a lot of concern." A spokeswoman for The Times did not respond to an email seeking comment late on Saturday. It was not clear who exactly oversees Mr. Horsey. In emails, top Times editors said he did not report to and was not edited by the newspaper's national desk or Washington bureau. The editors also said he did not report to Juliet Lapidos, the editor of the op ed page and the Sunday opinion section; that desk does not edit him either, they said. Mr. Horsey said he became aware of the criticism of his story when a colleague called his attention to an article on the right wing site Breitbart News and when Ms. Lapidos called him. Mr. Horsey said the offending paragraphs had been his attempt to find a "light way to ease into" the broader topic of the commentary, which he said was about Ms. Sanders's truthfulness. "She's a mom," he said. "She's someone you can kind of identify with. That's what I had in my head." He continued: "When I read over how I wrote it, it can be taken as a much nastier shot, and believe it or not, I didn't mean it that way. The paragraphs looking back were incredibly foolish and obtuse. I just failed to see how those words were going to be received." Still, he said he believed the response to his column was "so beyond the offense" that it felt to him like an "attack from the outrage machine."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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A new documentary offers a behind the scenes look at the comic Garry Shandling, who died in 2016. And AMC dramatizes a doomed 19th century expedition in "The Terror." THE ZEN DIARIES OF GARRY SHANDLING 8 p.m. on HBO; also on HBO streaming platforms. The filmmaker and producer Judd Apatow pays tribute to his longtime mentor, the comedian Garry Shandling, in this two part documentary. Mr. Shandling made a name for himself in the stand up world as a guest host of "The Tonight Show" before starring in "It's Garry Shandling's Show" and "The Larry Sanders Show." The first part of this portrait chronicles Mr. Shandling's upbringing in Tucson, the near death experience that motivated him to keep introspective journals and the early stages of his relationship with the actress Linda Doucett. "I wanted to do right by Garry," Mr. Apatow said in an interview with The New York Times. "But right by Garry doesn't mean making Garry look great. It means getting to the truth, because that's all he ever cared about." Part 2 is on Tuesday at 8 p.m. TEYANA IMAN 9 p.m. on VH1. This new reality show stars the newlyweds Teyana Taylor, the singer, rapper and dancer, and Iman Shumpert, the shooting guard for the Sacramento Kings, as they adjust to married life with their toddler, Junie.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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WASHINGTON With little fanfare, the Obama administration has been pursuing an aggressive campaign to restore protections for workers that have been eroded by business activism, conservative governance and the evolution of the economy in recent decades. In the last two months alone, the administration has introduced a series of regulatory changes. Among them: a rule that would make millions more Americans eligible for extra overtime pay, and guidelines suggesting that many employers are misclassifying workers as contractors and therefore depriving them of basic workplace protections. That is an issue central to the growth of so called gig economy companies like Uber. A little more than a week ago, a federal appeals panel affirmed an earlier regulation granting nearly two million previously exempted home care workers minimum wage and overtime protections. And on Thursday, President Obama's appointees to the National Labor Relations Board pushed through an important ruling that makes it easier for employees of contractors and franchises to bargain collectively with the corporations that have sway over their operations. "These moves constitute the most impressive and, in my view, laudable attempt to update labor and employment law in many decades," said Benjamin I. Sachs, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former assistant general counsel for the Service Employees International Union. The goal, he said, is to "keep pace with changes in the structure of the labor market and the way work is organized." In one sense, Mr. Obama foreshadowed these efforts as a candidate in 2008, when he suggested that, if elected, he would aim to be a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan. "Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," he told a newspaper editorial board in Nevada. "He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it." Once in office, Mr. Obama delivered on that implied promise in a few critical ways, particularly his signature health care legislation. But throughout much of his first term, he disappointed supporters with his inability to pursue a larger progressive agenda and with what they saw as an insufficient focus on the balance of power between workers and their employers. Labor unions complained that he failed to throw his energy behind a measure that would have made it easier for workers to organize by requiring employers to recognize a union once a majority of workers had signed cards, rather than allowing employers to insist on a secret ballot election. Liberals criticized the pace at which Mr. Obama put judges on the federal bench, including the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has enormous influence over federal regulations. And they complained that he failed to move quickly in placing appointees at agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, which went without two of its three Democratic members until well into the second year of his presidency. "They were very weak on getting people into their positions in the first term," said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left leaning research and advocacy group. "They lost many years of potential fruitful activity." (The White House says that the president was prompt in naming appointees, whose nominations then became bogged down in the Senate.) After spending several months in 2011 on a failed effort to negotiate a deficit cutting "grand bargain" with the new House Republican majority, however, Mr. Obama did an apparent about face, deciding that he would use every tool available to enact what he considered to be a bold pro worker agenda on his own. "Perhaps the most substantively important speech of the Obama presidency was the Osawatomie speech in 2011," said Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director and senior adviser to the president, referring to a speech that December in Kansas. "It was a set of marching orders to the entire government that increasing income inequality and declining economic mobility are the key challenge of our time. Given the congressional gridlock, the president pushed us very hard to pull every lever possible." Since he has not been able to advance legislation through the Republican controlled Congress, Mr. Obama has failed to achieve a number of important goals, most notably raising the federal minimum wage. And many of the recent actions could be undone by a future administration. At the same time, the economic and political forces pushing in the other direction have proved extremely difficult to overcome. From 1979 until 2009, the hourly wage for the typical worker grew about 10 percent after adjusting for inflation, falling far behind the increase in productivity, a measure that wages once closely tracked. After the Great Recession, the median wage fell for a few years and then made up little ground through 2014. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Meanwhile, critics abound across the ideological spectrum. Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who served as Mitt Romney's domestic policy director in 2011 and 2012, said that calling the Obama economic agenda pro worker "misses the forest for the trees or perhaps, more precisely, misses the trees for a few stray weeds." In an email, Mr. Cass said that "increasingly onerous employment regulation is driving employers to avoid employment relationships altogether, which benefits no one." Liberals and union supporters, while applauding Mr. Obama's record in the narrow realm of labor rights, complain that he has undercut workers with his efforts to promote global trade agreements and balanced budgets. "As long as the budget deal the administration negotiated continues to restrict domestic discretionary spending," the Department of Labor's ability to enforce the laws guaranteeing workers a minimum wage and overtime pay "and fight misclassification will be severely limited," Ross Eisenbrey, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute who was one of the architects of the overtime regulation, said in an email. Still, there is little doubt that the Obama administration has become more ambitious in pursuing worker rights during the president's second term. Consider the home health care decision. The Labor Department wrote the original rule exempting home care professionals employed by staffing agencies from minimum wage and overtime protections in 1975, back when very few home care workers of that sort existed. In recent decades, however, the field has exploded, turning what was once a small exemption into a yawning regulatory gap at the heart of the service economy. The Clinton administration proposed closing the exemption three times, but the proposals were never made final. Mr. Obama's Labor Department pushed through new rules in 2013, but they stuck only after a protracted legal fight. After the home care industry challenged the rule and a Federal District Court struck it down, it took a three judge panel on the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to revive it. Obama helped make that decision possible back in 2013, when he appointed two of the three judges. In many cases, the administration and its appointees have understood themselves to be not merely updating laws and regulations to reflect current economic realities, but also explicitly undoing what they considered to be efforts of Republican administrations to put workers at a disadvantage. "The overtime provision was intended in no small measure to correct a regulation from the Bush era that took leverage from workers and gave it to employers by design," said Labor Secretary Thomas E. Perez. "We were restoring what was a time honored economic and social compact, which is that as we have productivity and profitability in this country, that is shared between business and workers." Last week's ruling by the labor board, which changed the standard for when a corporation may be designated a joint employer of workers hired by its contractors and franchisees, followed a similar logic. For decades before the mid 1980s, the N.L.R.B. considered a corporation to be a joint employer, and therefore liable for violations of workers' rights, as long as it enjoyed a fair amount of control over working conditions at facilities run or staffed by a contractor or franchisee. It didn't really matter whether the control was hands on or arm's length. In 1984, the Reagan era N.L.R.B. began to sharply tighten the standard. On Thursday, voting 3 to 2 along partisan lines, the board tossed out the Reagan era rule, arguing that it was essentially returning to what had existed before. Taken together with other key regulatory actions and executive orders an N.L.R.B. rule that effectively sped up the process for holding elections on whether to form a union and Mr. Obama's order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to 10.10 the effect has been to significantly alter the tilt of federal law. "We're really digging out of a 40 year hole," Mr. Mishel said. "The Clinton years were ones where they more triangulated between business and workers rather than weigh in on the side of workers." Mr. Obama has long seen himself as working to empower the economically marginal, as steadfast in his commitment to labor protections as President Reagan was in rolling them back. That self image dates all the way back to one of his first jobs after college, as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. "Those are the folks he worked with," said Gerald Kellman, the organizer and labor activist who hired him back then. "He feels strongly about this stuff."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Kanye West is coming back with a vengeance and two new albums. The rapper, who had been largely quiet in public since a dramatic spiral near the end of 2016 during which he canceled a major tour, was hospitalized for a "psychiatric emergency" and angered some fans by meeting with then President elect Donald J. Trump before going dark re emerged recently on Twitter and in photos with his most frequent musical collaborators, stoking anticipation for a new release. On Thursday, Mr. West, 40, confirmed the whispers in his trademark off the cuff fashion, posting on Twitter, "my album is 7 songs," followed two minutes later by a date: June 1. That was not all. Mr. West also announced a second album in collaboration with his on again, off again associate Kid Cudi due out June 8, according to his tweets: "it's called Kids See Ghost," Mr. West wrote. "That's the name of our group."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The actor Sebastian Stan sat at a window table in the Sea Grill restaurant on a recent Tuesday afternoon, overlooking the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. "We used to come into the city a lot when I was a kid," said Mr. Stan, 35, recalling the years when he lived with his mother and stepfather in Nyack, N.Y., and was a student at Rockland Country Day School. "Especially around the holidays, this was the best place to come." As he spoke and glanced quickly at the lunch menu, deciding on salmon tartare and sparkling water, a steady stream of nervous looking skaters passed by, several tumbling to the ice. At one point, a young girl, swaddled in a bright pink winter coat, stopped in front of the restaurant window, tightly gripped the railing and burst into tears as her mother gently and unsuccessfully tried to lure her back to the ice Mr. Stan was asked if he had skated here. "I've never been ice skating, ever," he said. "I'm traumatized by the idea of it. Look, see those kids out there, falling. I keep thinking that I'm going to fall, and then someone is going to come by and slash my wrists off with one of their blades. So I'm much happier on the sidelines, as a spectator." It's a surprising admission from someone whose new film, "I, Tonya," opening later this month, is all about the world of ice skating in particular, the 1994 Winter Olympics, the toxic rivalry between Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, and the famous kneecapping incident that sent Ms. Kerrigan to the floor, screaming, "Why, why, why?" Mr. Stan, perhaps best known to film audiences as Bucky Barnes (a.k.a. the Winter Soldier) in Marvel's "Captain America" films and the coming "Avengers: Infinity War," plays Jeff Gillooly, Ms. Harding's husband at the time and one of the bumbling accomplices in the tabloid ready crime. (In 1994, Mr. Gillooly was sentenced to two years in jail and fined 100,000 for his role in that incident; he was released in 1995. Ms. Harding was put on probation for three years and banned for life by the United States Skating Association.) It is not a particularly sympathetic role. In fact, Mr. Stan, in character as Mr. Gillooly, is introduced to the film's viewers in an early scene in which he looks directly into the camera and says: "At 27 I was the most hated man in America. Maybe the world with a mustache I still can't apologize enough for. My name was a verb. Like, if you bash someone in the kneecap, you 'Gillooly' them." (Margot Robbie plays Tonya in the Oscar buzzy movie, which was directed by Craig Gillespie.) Was there any trepidation about taking on the role of this somewhat unsavory character, one who is not only a comically inept criminal but is also part of a mutually abusive relationship that the film portrays unflinchingly? "I've gotten really good at not judging characters," Mr. Stan said. "You have that fear of 'God, I don't know if I can do this.' But the script was intriguing. And regardless of what I thought happened, and what judgments I had about all that, I just had to let it go, and trust the script. My job as an actor is to just tell the story as best I can, from my character's point of view, and let the audience decide." There was, however, one person who was puzzled that Mr. Stan had taken this role: Mr. Gillooly. Shortly before filming began earlier this year, the two met at a restaurant in Portland, Ore., where Mr. Gillooly and Ms. Harding first met and where Mr. Gillooly still lives. As Mr. Stan recalled, "The first thing Jeff said to me, when I sat down, was, 'Why would anyone want to do this? Who would want to see this thing?'" "I told him it was a really great script." Mr. Stan had spent the previous couple of months obsessively researching Mr. Gillooly, finding on YouTube a television interview that Mr. Gillooly had given several years ago, and also listening to the audiotape of a three hour interview Mr. Gillooly had given to Steven Rogers, the film's screenwriter. "Steve sent me that tape and I walked around the city over the holidays, listening to Jeff's voice over and over and over again," he said. When the two finally met, Mr. Stan wasn't particularly interested in probing for more details about the Kerrigan incident, or hearing Mr. Gillooly's side of the story. Instead, he was looking for biographical details that would help him find his character. "There was an earlier Jeff in the script that I couldn't find anything on," Mr. Stan said. "How was he when he was in high school? Who was he back then? What did he want to be? How did he smile? When he got excited, how did he move his hands?" But he said the face to face meeting was a bit unnerving: "I had spent so much time listening to him, and watching him, and now here he was in person. It's almost like you are doing a double take." Next up for Mr. Stan is "Destroyer," by the director Karyn Kusama, also starring Nicole Kidman and Tatiana Maslany, which he begins filming in January. He has also become something of a fashion world favorite (perhaps a result of him having played a memorably shirtless drifter in the 2013 Broadway revival of "Picnic"). He has been invited to the Public School shows, accompanied Todd Snyder to the CFDA Awards and was profiled in a GQ Style fashion shoot. On this afternoon, he was wearing a black IRO coat, a dark green Theory T shirt, black A Gold E jeans and weathered Frye boots that he said were taken from the set of the "Avengers" movie. Though born in Romania and raised by a single mother in Vienna before she married an American and the family moved to Rockland County, N.Y., Mr. Stan considers himself a New Yorker. His first apartment after graduating from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2005 was a two bedroom on a grim stretch of West 42nd Street opposite the Port Authority. ("My share was just 800 a month!" he said, almost in wonder.) And he has never left the city since, moving to several different neighborhoods before settling down in his current apartment in SoHo. He was headed there after the lunch at the Sea Grill, and as he began to gather up his things, he looked out one last time at the rink. At that moment, a middle aged man in a Canada Goose parka came whizzing by, a look of panic on his face, and then crashed, spread eagled. Said Mr. Stan: "That's exactly why I am not on the ice today."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Polly Noonan doesn't seem like the kind of character who would send you out of the theater emotionally rattled. A brash, foul mouthed force of nature, she's a tenacious Democratic dealmaker with a nerve as mighty as her passion, and if the spirit moves her to berate someone in service of the party, she absolutely will. So why was I reeling down 42nd Street in a daze after seeing Edie Falco play her, ferociously and with extraordinary suppleness, in Sharr White's "The True," at the New Group? I'd been blindsided, really led to expect a drama about politics in 1977 Albany, only to discover that the play's deeper, more aching subject is something else entirely: a woman of talent and ambition, stymied by the norms of her time. Right now, when the limitations on acceptable modes of expression for women are so flagrantly apparent, that period piece doesn't feel very far removed. If, like me, you read a recent New York Times headline "Show How You Feel, Kavanaugh Was Told, and a Nomination Was Saved" and instantly thought, "A woman would never be given that advice or get that result," then you know what I mean. It's a rich time for such resonances on New York stages. Like Sarah Bernhardt in Theresa Rebeck's Broadway play "Bernhardt/Hamlet," and Heidi Schreck in her autobiographical "What the Constitution Means to Me," at New York Theater Workshop, Polly is a woman bucking up against social constraints that make no sense to her, because they're based not in reason but in an entrenched double standard. Accused of being aggressive, which she is, she wonders why that should count against her when it's only because she's invested in the work, just like the guys are. No one monitors how aggressive they are. "You care the same way I care," she tells the mayor, Erastus Corning 2nd (Michael McKean), who is her dearest friend and most cherished political cause. The difference, Polly adds coarsely, is that she has breasts, "so you don't know what to (expletive) do with me." At a moment when the culture is at long last talking about the power of women's anger (see, for example, the new nonfiction books "Good and Mad," by Rebecca Traister, and "Rage Becomes Her," by Soraya Chemaly), the hot tempered Polly is a case study in letting it fly. That's transgressive and she knows it, and so is her four decades of closeness to the mayor a relationship so tight, and so unconventional, that gossips assume it's sexual: that the children she has with her genial husband, Peter (Peter Scolari), are actually the mayor's. Polly's life (the character's, that is, though Mr. White based his play on the story of the real Mayor Corning and his adviser Dorothea "Polly" Noonan, who was a young secretary in the State Senate when they met) has no respect for boundaries. She knows too well the divide between conventionally feminine behavior (sewing culottes for her granddaughter, or cooking a pot of Irish stew) and what lies temptingly, and often punishingly, on the other side. In Ms. Rebeck's "Bernhardt/Hamlet," even international fame can't neutralize sexism for Sarah Bernhardt (Janet McTeer) in 1897 Paris. A legendary actress with her own theater, she is accustomed to having her way. But when she decides, in midlife, to play Hamlet, men who swooned at her dying Camille, worshiping her as an embodiment of romantic femininity, are repelled by the notion of her playing a man. "It's a disgusting idea and you know it," a critic says. As much a play of argument and ideas as anything that Shaw ever wrote, "Bernhardt/Hamlet" is a feminist excoriation of those who pretend to honor women by keeping them on a pedestal, where the range of motion is limited: One false move and you've fallen right off. The show's incandescent moment of drama and heartbreak arrives toward the end, when Sarah's lover, Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner), writes a play for her. (Mentioning its title would be a slight spoiler.) He means well, yet her role in it is largely silent and unseen, while the male actors get smart lines and plentiful stage time. A similarly querying awareness of second class status pervades Ms. Schreck's brilliantly digressive, insistently personal "What the Constitution Means to Me," a play that is both winsome love letter to and worried critique of one of the nation's founding documents. It argues that women's equality is a bloody, frustrating work in progress that, yes, things have gotten better since the 1870s, when Ms. Schreck's great great grandfather paid 75 to order her great great grandmother from a catalog, but that legal rights to abortion and birth control are relatively recent, and violence against women remains widespread. As she notes, women's "bodies had been left out of the Constitution from the beginning." Set partly in 1989, where Ms. Schreck plays herself as a high schooler competing for scholarship money in debates about the Constitution, and partly in the present, the show has a warm and friendly tone. The chipper delivery is in deliberate contrast to the darkness of much of what Ms. Schreck says in the guise of her young self, addressing an all male audience at an American Legion hall. "Looking at all of you reminds me of a fantasy I used to have as a little girl," she says. "About being attacked by a rapist or murderer. A rapist or murderer who is a man. Like all of you. In my fantasy, I am able to convince the murderer and rapist (you) not to murder me because I make you see that just like you I am a human being." Elemental information, that, but central to her point. The stories she goes on to tell intimate, harrowing, instructive are not unlike what you might overhear as a child listening to the women in the family talk around the kitchen table. Except that her tales all relate to the legal evolution of this country, demonstrating her and her female relatives' sometimes mortal stake in that through the years. We, of course, then sense our own, particularly as Ms. Schreck outlines the role that individual Supreme Court justices have played in interpreting the Constitution, establishing or eliminating rights in the process.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Like health care workers and emergency medical workers, America's farmworkers, like these in Oxnard, Calif., are putting themselves in harm's way for the rest of us. A century ago in "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair wrote about how the teeming tenements and meatpacking houses where workers lived and labored were perfect breeding grounds for tuberculosis as it swept the country. Now there is a new pathogenic threat and the workers who feed us are once again in grave danger. America's 2.5 million farmworkers are among the groups most at risk of contracting the coronavirus. And if they are at risk, our food supply may be too. Picture yourself waking up in a decrepit, single wide trailer packed with a dozen strangers, four of you to every room, all using the same cramped bathroom and kitchen before heading to work. You ride to and from the fields in the back of a hot, repurposed school bus, shoulder to shoulder with 40 more strangers, and when the workday is done, you wait for your turn to shower and cook before you can lay your head down to sleep. That is life for far too many farmworkers in our country today. Those conditions, the result of generations of grinding poverty and neglect, will act like a superconductor for the transmission of the coronavirus. And if something isn't done now to address their unique vulnerability, the men and women who plant, cultivate and harvest our food will face a decimating wave of contagion and misery in a matter of weeks, if not days. Their dilemma is painfully simple: The two most promising measures for protecting ourselves from the virus and preventing its spread social distancing and self isolation are effectively impossible in farmworker communities. There are no seats in the bus that will provide the six feet of separation necessary to ward off the killer virus. There are no empty rooms in the trailer available for a sick worker to recover in while his or her meals are left outside the door. And all the remaining preventive measures in the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention playbook hand washing, elbow coughing can only slow the virus, they can't stop it. For farmworkers, like the 25,000 in Immokalee, Fla., where I helped found the Coalition of Immokalee Workers nearly three decades ago, the curve of contagion will be particularly steep. Once one worker in a house, or on a crew, gets sick, it's only a matter of time before his or her housemates and co workers do, too. And then the virus is off, racing across the community from crew to crew, from trailer to trailer. To make matters worse, farmworkers have never had adequate access to health care. Even before Covid 19, there were no hospital beds here in Immokalee: no ventilators, no intensive care units, no medical professionals trained to staff them. No access to transportation, private or public, to the nearest hospital. And hospitals in the nearest large town, Naples, will quickly be overrun when the virus spikes, leaving people from Immokalee with nowhere to turn for urgent medical help. The final ingredient in this recipe for an uncontrollable outbreak? Farmworkers have been designated essential workers no food workers, no food. This puts farmworkers in an awful bind: They can't afford to get sick by going to work, and they can't afford to lose their jobs by not working. And so they toil, protected by little more than hope. The message to our country's farmworkers is unmistakable: While your labor is essential, you are expendable. That is wrong, both morally and for our nation's food security. We can't treat the people who harvest our food as expendable. Like health care workers and emergency medical workers, they are putting themselves in harm's way for the rest of us. We need to take steps now, ahead of the surge of cases, to erect fully staffed field hospitals like those being established in many urban communities with both advanced lifesaving medical resources for those fighting for their lives and beds for those with more minor symptoms but no means to self isolate at home in communities like Immokalee. Preparations must start today if they are to be effective. Despite this dire picture, however, farmworkers and growers alike are stepping up to stave off the virus for as long as possible. Here in Immokalee, farmworker leaders with our organization are creating and safely distributing multilingual educational materials, while many growers who participate in our Fair Food Program are taking significant measures to keep workers safe from buying groceries for their crews to help blunt the economic impact of the pandemic and avoid countless individual trips to the store, to donating hand washing stations to be placed in strategic locations around the community. But it's not enough. The threat to farmworkers is a threat to us all not only because, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we are all "tied up in a single garment of destiny." but also because farmworkers feed us all. No food workers, no food. It's that simple. Greg Asbed, a founder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2017 for his role in developing the Fair Food Program to protect farm workers' human rights. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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For the role of Odette Odile in "Swan Lake" a dancer must achieve one of ballet's most extreme transformations: from fragile and distant as the swan queen, Odette, to devilish and seductive as the antiheroine, Odile. On Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House, where American Ballet Theater began its weeklong run of the ballet, that metamorphosis was interrupted by a more real world kind of fragility. An announcement at intermission informed us that because of an injury, Gillian Murphy, our leading lady thus far, would not complete the performance; Hee Seo would take her place, swooping in for the Black Swan pas de deux and Odette's final lakeside moments. So began a very human, illusion dispelling subplot within the evening's supernatural proceedings. There's nothing like a compromised ankle to remind you: these are actual people with actual bodies, not princes, sorcerers and swans. When Marcelo Gomes plunged down onto one knee, pressing Ms. Seo's hand to his cheek, was his palpable joy Prince Siegfried's, at having found a potential bride in Odile, or his own, at discovering such a valiant last minute partner in Ms. Seo? If the mishap spoke to a dancer's humanness, it also revealed just how superhuman a ballerina can be. Ms. Seo is scheduled to dance Odette Odile on Saturday, but how did she deliver such a commanding performance on such short notice? And having danced the role with Mr. Gomes only once before? As Odile, she eluded Siegfried with wide eyes, a bewitching smile and swift, acute shifts of direction. As Odette, she melted into him with almost tangible sadness. It was as if she had been waiting backstage for just this occasion. A line from Jennifer Homans's history of ballet, "Apollo's Angels," came to mind: "when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones." Ms. Murphy's Odette had been a different creature: more inward, more strident. If she wavered at all, I didn't notice. The etched angularity of her raised arm, when she encountered Siegfried for the first time, expressed both suspicion and curiosity. That articulation remained even when she beat her wings, as they were, with thunderous force, gliding off into the forest. The night's unplanned drama was unfortunately its most engrossing. This production, staged by Kevin McKenzie in 2000, lumbers along, padded with rituals that feel more obligatory than necessary, particularly in Act I, Siegfried's birthday party. Garlands are bestowed, chalices raised and chalices raised again. At times the music felt too slow, the dancers eager to race ahead of it. But as always, select performers transcended those structural issues. As Benno, Joseph Gorak was good natured and technically impeccable, establishing a cheerful camaraderie with Sarah Lane and the breezy Yuriko Kajiya in Act I. Jared Matthews, as von Rothbart in Act III, blazed through the court with predatory malice. It almost goes without saying that Mr. Gomes was perfectly princely, never faltering even as his character swayed between troubled adolescent and passionate suitor. But on this particular night, Ms. Seo was the savior.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Is it wrong to want to see the actress Dianne Wiest encased to her waist in earth, totally unable to budge? Nothing personal, of course. With that famously fluttery manner that can mask a flintiness underneath, she just seems an irresistibly ideal Winnie, the chattering central character of Samuel Beckett's bleakly sun bleached existential comedy "Happy Days." Opening on Thursday, May 4, at Theater for a New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, James Bundy's Yale Repertory Theater production stars Ms. Wiest as the beleaguered but unbowed Winnie, opposite Jarlath Conroy as her moldering husband, Willie. An Oscar winner for a pair of Woody Allen films, "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Bullets Over Broadway," Ms. Wiest earned admiring reviews when she undertook the formidable Beckett role last spring in New Haven. "Another heavenly day," the immobilized Winnie says as the play begins. For audiences, this may be true indeed. (tfana.org)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi, we're Pui Wing Tam and Jim Kerstetter, tech editors filling in for Jamie Condliffe while he's on vacation. Here's a look at the week's tech news: Facebook has connected the world, which brings many benefits for communication and the dissemination of information. But there's a downside that hasn't gotten much attention until recently: the love scams that proliferate on the social network. In these scams, some Facebook users often young men in Nigeria steal the digital photos and identities of Americans in the Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force. Posing as the service members, the scammers sweet talk vulnerable and lonely women, forming an emotional connection and eventually asking for their money. Our colleague Jack Nicas followed one military love hoax. He found Renee Holland, who had an online friendship with a person she thought was an American soldier named Michael Chris. She sent Mr. Chris 26,000 to 30,000, much of the life savings that she and her husband had socked away. But Mr. Chris was not a real person. The photo that Ms. Holland saw was of Sgt. Daniel Anonsen of the Marine Corps and he was contending with dozens of impostor Facebook and Instagram accounts, and had no idea who Ms. Holland was. In December, Ms. Holland's husband, Mark Holland, killed her and her father before turning the gun on himself. Mr. Holland did not leave any indication of a motive. The New York Times published her story last weekend and aired it in an episode of our television show, "The Weekly." "In some of her final conversations with me, Ms. Holland expressed how thrilled she was that we were covering her story," Jack said of the tragedy. "She said she wanted to raise awareness about the issue and prevent future scams." The story caught the attention of Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois. Mr. Kinzinger, a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, is one of the many American service members who have been ensnared in these scams. For years, Mr. Kinzinger said, impostors have been posing as him or using his image to trick people out of money. As much as he has complained, the problem has persisted. On Wednesday, he sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, requesting more information on what the company is doing to prevent such fraud on its sites. "There needs to be accountability for this issue that can, quite frankly, destroy lives," he wrote to Mr. Zuckerberg. "Facebook has an immensely significant role to play in getting this situation under control." Mr. Kinzinger said he was also in the early stages of preparing legislation to address the issue. The inevitability of the banking hack For financial institutions, it has become a way of life: fending off endless hacking attempts. Hundreds of thousands a day in some cases. But sometimes they get through, and the apologies begin. On Monday, the federal law enforcement authorities said a Seattle woman who used to be an engineer at Amazon had hacked into Capital One's computer systems and obtained the personal data of tens of millions of customers. It appears that the bank made a fairly simple mistake that allowed the hacker to break in: a "misconfiguration" in a firewall. A firewall, one of the oldest digital security tools, acts like a gate on a network, keeping most traffic out and a few things in. It is usually up to network administrators to decide what should be allowed in, and the authorities said the hacker had been able to take advantage of a mistake the administrators had made. No doubt, it was embarrassing for the bank. But successful hacking attempts are shockingly common. Already this year, there have been 3,494 successful cyberattacks against financial institutions, according to reports filed with the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, our colleagues Stacy Cowley and Nicole Perlroth reported. Another big number to keep in mind: Mastercard, for example, combats some 460,000 intrusion attempts in a typical day, up 70 percent from a year ago. Successful banking hacks? Be surprised it doesn't happen more often. It appears that iPhone sales are still slowing. On Tuesday, Apple said that its net income had fallen 13 percent and that its revenue had risen 1 percent in the latest quarter, with iPhone sales continuing to decline. But there were gains in the company's services and wearables business. Imagine a bicycle built for none. A team of researchers in China is rethinking autonomous transportation with a souped up bicycle that can navigate on its own. The demonstration is really a way to show how a new computer chip tailored for artificial intelligence can work. EBay accused three Amazon managers of illegally conspiring to poach its sellers in a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday. EBay first raised concerns that Amazon was approaching its sellers last fall in another lawsuit that has since moved to arbitration. Children as young as 11 have been added to a facial recognition database maintained by the New York Police Department. Elected officials and civil rights groups say the police have been doing this with little public scrutiny, and they worry about the frequency of false positives in young faces. Uber is laying off about 400 people, or a third of its marketing department, as it tries to whittle down costs. Many observers were stunned that the ride hailing company actually had 1,200 people on its marketing team. Jamie Condliffe will be back to write the newsletter next Friday.
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What to Know About the Landmark Opioid Trial Starting Monday CLEVELAND Two decades after the onset of an opioid epidemic that led to the deaths of 400,000 Americans, the first landmark federal opioid trial is set to begin Monday, after furious, last minute settlement talks between two powerful groups of plaintiffs and five drug industry defendants faltered. The weekend impasse highlighted the tensions over money, control and optics between the states that, through their attorneys general, filed opioid lawsuits in state courts and the counties, cities and tribes nationwide whose thousands of cases are assembled before a federal judge in Cleveland. This jury trial, brought by two Ohio counties, is the local governments' turn to show their hand and throw down their best evidence, witnesses and lawyers. It's considered a litmus trial, in which the plaintiffs want to tell a national story so stark, and land a verdict so whopping, that these pharmaceutical defendants and others will settle. But if the posture taken during 10 hours of talks on Friday in courthouse caucus rooms filled with their chief executives is any indication, the companies believe they have a viable defense. The defendants include three major drug distributors, McKesson, Cardinal Health and Amerisour ceB ergen; Walgreens; and Teva, an Israeli drug manufacturer. Five drug makers, including Purdue Pharma and Johnson Johnson, already settled with the two counties, as did a small distributor over the weekend. Monday is the day that the judge, Dan A. Polster of the Northern District of Ohio, said he wished would never come. Most opioid cases nationwide were transferred to Judge Polster by a judicial panel. When he first addressed lawyers for what was then several hundred lawsuits now more than 2,300 he said he wanted to avoid protracted wrangling and settle within a year, to get emergency relief to hurting communities. That was nearly two years ago. Hundreds of depositions and many millions of discovery documents later, the national federal opioid litigation is being called the most complex in American legal history. Here is a guide to issues in the trial, which, if the cases are not settled, could last about two months. Why the Ohio counties first? Efficiency. Judge Polster's court is in Cleveland, the seat for Cuyahoga County, one of two counties suing. (The other is Summit, which includes Akron.) In 2017, Ohio had the second highest rate of opioid related overdose deaths in the country. Because of his familiarity with the issues, Judge Polster will oversee these cases, combined into one trial. Prescriptions for opioids are dropping. Isn't the problem easing? Not if you ask Laura Beal, a nurse practitioner at MetroHealth Medical Center in a battered neighborhood on Cleveland's west side. The area right around the county hospital has the highest overdose rate in the city; in 18 months, the MetroHealth police intervened in 46 overdoses just on the health system's properties. On Saturday, as settlement negotiations continued, Ms. Beal was at the hospital's Office of Opioid Safety. There, she identifies patients in the emergency department who might be willing to detox and try rehab, including taking Suboxone, the maintenance medication she can prescribe before they leave the hospital. MetroHealth contracts with a peer support team that will transport patients directly to treatment, and follow up after discharge. That team may see up to 70 new patients in the hospital weekly and regularly visits the troubled county jail. Ms. Beal estimates that two thirds of her heroin addicted patients began their descent with prescription opioids. Her office educates doctors about tapering pain patients off opioids, and she gives patients who leave with an opioid prescription a treated bag that dissolves leftover pills. After overdose patients recover, Ms. Beal supplies them with Narcan, the overdose reversal drug, to carry with them and a test strip for fentanyl so they can at least make sure their street drugs are free of the deadly substance. One of the most significant changes she has seen doing this work? A four milligram dose of Narcan can reverse an overdose, Ms. Beal said, "but on some patients now, we have to use 20 milligrams." The only manufacturer is Teva. Last year, these five companies had combined total revenues of more than half a trillion dollars. What will the plaintiffs try to prove? Seeking 8 billion, the plaintiffs claim the distributors conspired to flout the federal law that requires them to monitor sales and report outliers. They say they will argue that the distributors lobbied members of Congress for favorable legislation and not only cast a blind eye on supersize orders but rewarded sales teams that brought them in. They also intend to show the devastation that unfolded from the yearslong pill dump: how addiction ate into every sector of county life, crippling budgets for law enforcement, foster care and first responder squads. Expect testimony from addiction medicine specialists as well as testimony from people who have struggled with opioids. What will the defendants argue? Causation is a critical question. The distributors are expected to say they were simply delivering medication made by the drug manufacturers, approved by the government and prescribed by doctors. Their defense may include a recent report from a federal watchdog that accuses the Drug Enforcement Administration of lax oversight of opioids. The defense also intends to describe a shifting medical culture: In the late '90s, when OxyContin first appeared, prescribers were urged to focus on undertreated pain with new, supposedly nonaddictive drugs. The prescribing of opioids changed from using them for end stage cancer to making them the go to drug for acute and chronic pain. For the plaintiffs: Mark Lanier, long recognized as one of the country's best tort trial lawyers. With his native Texas drawl, the boyish energy of a man who built and runs a train on his 40 acre estate, and a preacher's conviction, Mr. Lanier has exacted giant killer jury verdicts from Johnson Johnson and Merck. On Sunday, Mr. Lanier turned 59 and, as he usually does when working out of town, flew back to Houston on his private plane to deliver his Sunday Bible study lecture, typically attended by hundreds. His firm has just taken on Juul, on behalf of a New Jersey teenager. The attorney general of Ohio fought to block it. The defense sought to disqualify him, accusing him of bias because he had mused publicly about settling the case. Appellate judges did urge Judge Polster to be more circumspect but sided with him, noting that settlement is a traditional judicial goal. "Publicly acknowledging this human toll does not suggest I am biased," he wrote. "It shows that I am human." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.
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What Will Endurance Races Look Like When They Come Back? That's the date Joe De Sena has circled on his calendar. It's when the chief executive of Spartan, the endurance and obstacle race company, believes he will again be gathering thousands of people to crawl under barbed wire, scale hills of mud, swim through icy water and jump over fire. "We are tribal creatures," De Sena said from his farm in central Vermont, where he has been sheltering in place with 20 family members for the past month. "We're not going to live our lives hiding from each other behind our couches." In the endurance sports world, De Sena may be the biggest optimist out there, because at this moment, even with disease curves flattening, it can be hard to imagine thousands of people massing together on a start line, drinking from communal fluid stations and huffing through a grueling racecourse. In March, De Sena furloughed 75 percent of his staff of about 400 and cut the pay of those who remained, to help ease the pain of losing 9 million in profits. Now, he and other race organizers are starting to imagine life on the other side of Covid 19, becoming some of the first people in sports to actively plan for the next normal. "Once we get out of this, what is the product going to look like?" said Dave McGillivray, the race director for the Boston Marathon, which was supposed to take place Monday, and dozens of other races organized by his company. "Is it going to change temporarily or forever?" Some 5,000 road races, roughly 775 cycling events and more than 250 multisport events (triathlons and duathlons) will not happen this spring. Athletes have cabin fever, and racing directors and event companies are juggling a series of bad alternatives that are producing financial losses and angry customers in the short term, and that could cannibalize the industry come fall. "I don't think events like ours will go back anytime soon," said Carrie Panek, an owner of Koz Events, which owns and manages 15 races in the San Diego area. Koz Events which Panek runs with her husband, Tobias recently laid off all five employees, including the Paneks so they could collect unemployment. New race registrations and revenue have gone to zero. Rescheduling for later in the year has its own problems. There is already an endurance event scheduled for nearly every weekend in San Diego County, but Carrie Panek is determined to find a way to hold races that meet health guidelines. The events may be smaller, and not have the same thrill of a crushing horde on the start line, but she insists they are going to happen. "We're going to figure out a way to survive," she said. The economics of the endurance event business make a pandemic particularly problematic. Registration fees produce as much as 80 percent of revenues, and 80 to 90 percent of that money is spent on expenses weeks and months in advance of race day, including purchases of medals, T shirts and permits. A canceled race owned by a mom and pop business that has to issue refunds or deferrals can sink the event or the business, said Rich Harshbarger, the chief executive at Running U.S.A., an industry trade group. Ironman, the world's best known triathlon series, is transferring competitors from canceled or postponed events to races later in the year or in 2021, rather than giving refunds. Not everyone is happy about that. Barbara Marinoni, who lives in suburban Toronto, spent more than 1,000 to register for a half Ironman in Muskoka, Ontario, in July, which may be canceled, given Canada's approach to dealing with Covid 19 so far, and for a full Ironman in August in Mont Tremblant in Quebec, which probably will be, since Quebec's provincial government has canceled all sports and cultural events until Aug. 31. "I would rather have the money refunded, or I think at least there should be some portion refunded," said Marinoni, a supply chain executive who isn't ready to commit to races that won't happen for another 16 months. Andrew Messick, chief executive of Ironman, said the company chose a policy of race substitutions instead of refunds because most athletes he heard from were not interested in getting money back. They just want to race and to know when they can. "The training and the races provide a structure to their lives that they find really valuable," Messick said. Most race operators are far smaller than Ironman and may have less flexibility. "If the summer gets wiped out, we will have to get very creative," said Stephen Del Monte, owner of DelMoSports, which owns and operates a half dozen races in Philadelphia and South Jersey. Del Monte and other race directors are planning to create virtual options, in which people time themselves and set their own courses, and more space for participants in real life events. In the short term, swimming may be eliminated from some triathlons, since there are very few pools open where people can train. Transition areas for triathletes the places where athletes shift from the swim to the bike and the bike to the run will have to be larger. Also, for every kind of event, instead of a designated start time, athletes might be told to start whenever they want within a window of an hour or two. Dennis Wilson, 64, of Anaheim, Calif., has been running road races for 40 years, and he said he would feel comfortable in a corral wearing a mask, "but I don't want to get into a corral until I see the numbers flattening." "We're going to have to get some new ideas for the corrals," said Jack Staph, the owner and race director of the Cleveland Marathon, referring to the typically cramped starting areas. Staph had expected 13,000 runners for the various races of the marathon weekend, May 16 and 17. He had an insurance policy, but cancellation because of a pandemic was not covered. Nearly 80 percent of his budget had already been spent. Now everyone who was registered can either do the race virtually or defer for up to two years. "I think we're going to come back, maybe slowly, but I expect the virtual race will be a part of every event going forward," Staph said. Last month, Jeff Simecek had to cancel the race he organizes, the Statesman Capitol a 10 kilometer race in Austin, Texas, for 25,000 runners that had been scheduled for April 5. His insurance policy included pandemic coverage, and he reached out to the city of Austin to try to find an alternative date. But there were no options.
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El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ?Lo mejor? It'll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tia, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone). As a music writer, I've witnessed with exhaustion the revisionist retellings of Latinx music history that have emerged over the years, most recently in headlines announcing a never before seen "boom" or "explosion" in Spanish language music, as if the chart topping Bad Bunny or J. Balvin hits from recent years were born from the head of Zeus. But those of us who have spent our lives immersed in the world of Latinx music know that despite the Anglo press's cultural amnesia surrounding Latinx artists, they don't exist in the shadows; they were and are creating, evolving and recording countless hits for millions of listeners across the world. Latinx music has a rich and propulsive history, and a new, independent exhibition, "Sabor y Ritmo Antillano: N.Y.C. Latin Music Concert Posters of the 1970s 1980s," is attempting to unravel a slice of it. The exhibition, which features more than 25 posters from the holdings of the collector Henry Herrera, was co curated by two Dominican New Yorkers, Jhensen Ortiz and Wilton Salazar. Ortiz, a librarian who specializes in the preservation of cultural heritage materials, first discovered the posters on eBay. In their curation process, Salazar and Ortiz set out to capture a wealth of genres from Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic charanga, salsa, merengue and to foreground the posters' distinctive typography and illustration styles. (Salazar is a graphic designer, and the two have known each other since they were undergraduates at the City College of New York.) The resulting exhibition harnesses the energy of 1970s and '80s New York City night life. The posters advertise large scale festivals and local events alike, including performances by La Lupe, Wilfrido Vargas, Johnny Ventura, El Gran Combo, Milly Quezada and dozens more, including a concert featuring the bachata artist Eladio Romero Santos in 1979, before the genre's commercial ascent. The artists would often perform together, so attendees could "get music from all three islands in one night, in a lineup of six, seven bands," said Ortiz. "It wasn't just record labels. It was the record shops where you could go get the tickets, the disc jockeys announcing where you could see them in person and not just listen to them on the radio," Ortiz said, stressing the importance of calling attention to this "collaborative effort," which he says is not represented in Latinx music scholarship. In recent years, the Museum of the City of New York and the Bronx Music Heritage Center Lab have also hosted exhibitions on the history of New York's Latinx music scene centered on memorabilia and archival materials. "Sabor y Ritmo Antillano" is unique in its commitment to bringing this history back to the community that birthed it. The pair opted to host the exhibition outside of an academic or museum context, and instead display it at an uptown art gallery. Ortiz wanted to return "control of the narrative" to the public. Latinx music history, he said, has typically been shaped and passed down through oral histories, focusing on the most commercially successful artists "the Johnny Pachecos, the Eddie Palmieris, the Hector Lavoes, the Willie Colons, the Ruben Bladeses." "But there were many artists who contributed to the scene in the city who are being reflected in these concert posters," he said. "Unless you're a record collector and you know about these artists and their recordings, you're not really going to see them presented anywhere else." The opening reception for "Sabor y Ritmo Antillano: N.Y.C. Latin Music Concert Posters of the 1970s 1980s" takes place on August 9, at Rio II Gallery on 583 Riverside Drive, 7th Floor, from 6 9 p.m., with a D.J. set from Discolai's Max "Drlaxcos" Cueto. The exhibition closes at the end of August.
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WASHINGTON A deal intended to address the Trump administration's concerns about TikTok's ties to China was complicated on Monday by a disagreement over whether a U.S. company would control the social media app and the president's threat to block any agreement that leaves the service in the hands of a Chinese company. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said he had given his "blessing" to a transaction that he said would result in non Chinese investors, including Oracle and Walmart, owning TikTok. But ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, threw cold water on that structure on Sunday, disputing both Oracle's and Mr. Trump's characterization of the deal. ByteDance said it would hold a majority share of the new company until it went public within the next year. Oracle said on Monday that as soon as the new company, TikTok Global, was created, ByteDance would lose its ownership stake in the service. Asked during a television appearance on "Fox Friends" on Monday about the potential that ByteDance would still own 80 percent of the service, Mr. Trump said that the Chinese firm would "have nothing to do with it, and if they do, we just won't make the deal." Mr. Trump said Oracle would have control over TikTok, adding, "If we find that they don't have total control, then we're not going to approve the deal." The back and forth underscores how fluid the transaction remains and the risk that TikTok could still fail to satisfy the government's national security concerns. On Saturday, the Commerce Department delayed for one week a plan to ban TikTok from U.S. app stores while the government reviewed the transaction. If the deal doesn't satisfy Mr. Trump's concerns, new downloads of TikTok could essentially be banned in the United States. China could also scuttle the deal, which has become the latest front in a larger battle over whether the United States or China will control the internet. A spokesman for TikTok said on Sunday that ByteDance would hold 80 percent of the new company until a planned public offering for the service took place on the U.S. stock market in about a year. Oracle and Walmart would hold a 20 percent stake, the spokesman said. ByteDance echoed that characterization in a statement posted online in China on Sunday, where it said that the deal did not involve a transfer of TikTok's valuable algorithm a detail that is likely to fuel the administration's national security concerns. Oracle disputed part of TikTok's description of the deal. On Monday, Ken Glueck, an executive at the company, said in a statement that upon "creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global." Under the terms of the proposed deal, ByteDance's stake in the newly created TikTok Global would be handed out to the company's current backers which includes prominent American investors. As a result, the transaction would eventually lead to the app becoming majority owned by American investors, according to a person with knowledge of the talks. Zhang Yiming, ByteDance's founder and a major shareholder in his company, would retain a significant stake in TikTok. That shift in ownership would be completed by the time of TikTok's planned listing on an American stock exchange, meant to take place within 12 months. The parties have tried to mollify concerns about control by telling Trump administration officials that the changeover would happen eventually, said a person with knowledge of the talks. The new deal could also run afoul of Chinese officials, who have expressed concerns about handing over to the United States one of their most successful technology exports. On Monday, Hu Xijin, the editor of Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Communist Party, posted on Twitter that the deal could face opposition from Beijing. "Based on what I know, Beijing won't approve current agreement between ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, and Oracle, Walmart, because the agreement would endanger China's national security, interests and dignity," Mr. Hu wrote.
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"The Kiss" landed in 1997, an early example of the dark cornered memoirs that would dominate publishing for the next two decades, paving the way for the gimlet eyed investigations of Rachel Cusk and the wincing beauty of Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels. At the time, there was much hand wringing over the suggestion that the price of entry into this new/old publishing niche wasn't writerly chops but childhood abuse. It's also hard to fathom, in these MeToo days, how much opprobrium was hurled at Harrison, in particular, for publicly unfurling her gnarled history, as if she were complicit in her father's crime. But with detachment and grace, Harrison, along with Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, her literary compadres from that era, more than earned her right to revisit that territory. And so to "On Sunset," which describes not just a place (a house built on a precarious site) but the period into which Harrison was born. Her grandparents met late in life, and a daughter and granddaughter were "the not unhappy surprises," as her grandfather tells Harrison, of that autumn union. Her grandfather was 50 and a traveling salesman. Her grandmother was 41 and had bucketed around the world the last stops before Los Angeles were London and the French Riviera as her family's fortunes waxed and waned, pursued by fortune hunters and energized by her passion for, among other things, fast cars. (Settling in Los Angeles, she brought her flair for speed and disregard for speed limits with her. "What tosh," she exclaimed with typical insouciance when she failed a written driving test.) She was a Sassoon, a member of an enormous merchant family from Baghdad known as the Rothschilds of the East. By the late 19th century, Harrison writes, they were responsible for 70 percent of the world's opium trade. Florid eccentricity was a family trait. Harrison's great aunt Cecily was a lesbian who lived with not one but two lovers, all three in one bed. A visit from Cecily, accompanied by one of her inamoratas, riveted Harrison: The couple dressed alike in black, shared a single seat at the dinner table and ate from a single plate. Cousin George lived at the Plaza Athenee in Paris with his mother and at midcentury socialized with otherworldly characters like Gore Vidal, Jean Genet and David Niven. At 80, George is "your fairy godmother, sweetie pie," he tells Harrison, and gives her a photograph of himself sporting angel wings and nothing else. Harrison's grandfather came from humbler stock his mother ran a boardinghouse after her fishmonger husband died of consumption, and he was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker at 14 but he was as happily afflicted with wanderlust as her grandmother. As a child, Harrison delighted in naming the many New World cities, from Quebec City to Juneau, that he stopped to work in as an engineer or a timekeeper or an accountant. At home on Sunset Boulevard, he wore dress suits and white shirts when gardening. (He never bought new clothes, having a full wardrobe left over from the sample cases of his life as a traveling salesman.) He was gentle, handy and resourceful, tending a vegetable garden, planting succulents to shore up the eroding cliffside property, building a chair high in a tree so Harrison could read "Alice in Wonderland" among the branches.
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The Seine has many charms, but heavy surf is not among them. So with surfing coming to the Olympics in 2020, and the Olympics heading to Paris in 2024, organizers had to look elsewhere to hold a world class surf competition in the summer months. They found a spot. The drawback? It's almost 10,000 miles away: Teahupo'o, Tahiti, home to one of the most iconic and dangerous waves in the world. Just how dangerous? Teahupo'o roughly translates to "wall of skulls." Tahiti which is part of French Polynesia, an overseas collective of France beat out four other possible locations for the 2024 surfing competition: Biarritz, Lacanau, Les Landes, and La Torche. All of those are in France, where the rest of the Olympics is taking place. Organizers of the 2024 Games confirmed the decision this week. That should not be an issue in Teahupo'o, which has its strongest swells between April and October. It has long been a summer stop on the men's World Surf League championship tour, and was briefly on the women's championship tour in the early 2000s. The 2024 Olympics would be the first time since then that both men and women will compete at Teahupo'o. Surfers that come through the barrel of a powerful wave, like those at Teahupo'o, can experience one of the greatest highs, and high scores, of their lives. But one wrong move and they could quickly find themselves in serious danger of banging into the sharp corral reef that looms just below the water's surface. Keala Kennelly is deeply familiar with that concept. A professional surfer from Hawaii, Kennelly has been called the Queen of Teahupo'o, and she is considered one of the hardest charging athletes to surf the wave. In 2011, she needed 40 stitches in her face and skull after enduring a wipeout there. When she returned two years later, she said, she caught what she called one of the best barrels of her life. The waves in Tahiti will be in dramatic contrast to what is expected at this summer's Tokyo Games, where surfing will take place at Shidashita Beach. The waves at Shidashita, on the Chiba coastline east of Tokyo, are significantly smaller and more inconsistent than those in Tahiti, so surfers with strong aerial skills will have the upper hand. "Tokyo will have performance waves," Cruse said. "It will allow the surfers to display their acrobatics, surfing above the lip." Surfers accustomed to charging heavy waves will have the advantage in 2024, when survival not aerials may be on top of their minds. "Tahiti is a whole different animal," Cruse said. "It's all about getting barreled, getting into the wave. The consequences of mistiming is that you get thrown onto a coral reef with tons of water dragging you across it." "It's going to look like a completely different sport," Kennelly said, comparing Chiba to Tahiti. "I don't think people will recognize it. Four years later, they are going to see a completely different scenario. They are going to question whether it's the same sport." The decision to move the competition to the other side of the world in search of better surf came despite an alternative that has recently become available. Rapid advances in technology now can bring top class surfing to a desert, a suburban parking lot or even the Place de la Concorde. Kelly Slater, the accomplished surfer, and others have built wave machines that now can create a surfing experience not far removed from some top beaches. A wave machine was considered for Tokyo at one point, in fact, but organizers were eager to promote Japan's beaches and insisted on surfing in the ocean. Still, artificial waves may be a possibility for Los Angeles 2028, despite several well known local breaks nearby. It's not the first time circumstances have led an event to be held far away from an Olympic host city. In 1956, strict quarantine regulations in Australia prevented the equestrian events from being held at the Melbourne Games, so they were shifted to Stockholm. Cruse said he was not worried about having a competition in Tahiti while the rest of the Olympics takes place 10,000 miles away. He noted that the event would be held at the start of the Games and he predicted that surfers "would relish surfing an event in Tahiti and then enjoying the Olympic experience afterward." The 41 year old Kennelly, the queen of the "wall of skulls," is already trying to figure out how to make her way onto an Olympic team to take a new title at Teahupo'o. "I'd be the person to beat," she said. "And that'd be a great way to wrap up an enormous career. With a gold medal at age 44 or 45? That would be icing on the cake."
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If You Can Get Killed Doing It, Fashion Wants It It's a mighty long way from El Capitan to the Louis Vuitton flagship on the Champs Elysees, but don't mention that to Virgil Abloh. For his fall 2019 collection, Mr. Abloh, the creative director for men's wear at Vuitton, introduced a chalk bag not unlike the kind climbers like the free soloist Alex Honnold use to attack rock walls with little more than their limbs and their nerve. Traditional outfitters like Marmot, North Face and Black Diamond make versions of the bucket shaped carryall for holding the chalk crucial to keeping climbers' hands dry as they scale crags and mark ticks on rock faces. Most sell for around 20. The Vuitton Chalk Nano costs 1,590 (or 3,000 in backpack size), its added value, in corporate speak, being the "understated Louis Vuitton aesthetic coded into the allover LV monogram." Fashion has had a long love affair with sports of all kinds, and it is easy enough to trace an arc from the genteel sports of the leisured classes of the 19th century to the more crazily individualistic ones of today. Since the 1990s, at least, extreme and adventure sports have excited designers, who imported to their runways superficial elements of gear created for street lugers, off piste snowboarders, arctic surfers and, lately, those who push the outer limits of athletic pursuit. Consider the new fall men's wear collection from Prada, a label that has probably done more than most to advance the blending of adventure sports and fashion, exploiting technical fabrics and sporting motifs for collections that ready men for every conceivable style or climate challenge on, say, Fifth Avenue. Its designs have varied widely through the years, and yet the visual vocabulary of extreme and adventure sports is an aesthetic constant. "With time, the aesthetic could and has changed," Miuccia Prada wrote recently in an email. "But the technical and performing element, therefore research, remains at the core of the collection." She was referring to a group of fall clothes conceptually inspired, in part, by team wear for the Luna Rossa Challenge, the Prada Pirelli challenger for the America's Cup. On the other hand, the multicolored paneled, cinched, zippered, hooded Windbreakers and parkas and backpacks and scoop neck pullovers Prada showed in Milan in June came festooned with so many bellows pockets and utility compartments that a wearer would need a route map just to find his car keys. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. IT WAS PROBABLY INEVITABLE that, as tech advances propelled sports culture further away from the contractually dictated sameness of numbered team uniforms and closer to the individualistic and highly Instagrammable realms of death courting pursuits like free soloing and wing suit flight, fashion would follow. In a certain sense, it had no choice. The street wear that has for so long stoked fashion's edge eventually stalled, and as hoodies and saggers became a form of urban normcore, they yielded to the embrace by fashion forward types like the rapper ASAP Rocky of zip fleece parkas from labels like North Face, Columbia and Arc'teryx "gorpcore" as it was christened by The Cut. Even Alessandro Michele, the Gucci panjandrum, went around looking like a base camp groupie. "I believe that the street wear and sportswear influences we have seen lately in fashion are mostly aesthetic," Ms. Prada wrote. "It is solely a fashion statement." Yet for many of the labels represented in a crammed adventure sports pavilion at the recent Pitti Uomo, world's largest trade show dedicated to men's wear and held twice yearly in Florence, Italy, the get ups of the ornamental dandies for which the fair has become famous seemed as if designed for inhabitants of a distant universe. At brands like Woolrich, Raeburn, Mountain Research, And Wander and others, it was adventure sports that drove the aesthetics of clothes better suited to the Iditarod than the cobbled streets of Florence. "This is not really about the usual cycles of fashion, with trends like logo mania coming back every decade," said Andrea Cane, the creative director of Woolrich, the 189 year old American label now owned by an Italian and Japanese partnership. "We're seeing something we haven't seen before." Mr. Cane was referring to the adrenaline rush niche or "whiz" sports, whose amateur stars have substantial followings on social media. Think Marshall Miller, the base jumper, sky diver and wing suit flyer whose death defying antics make individualist renegades of just a generation ago seem quaint. THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE at work, Mr. Cane suggested, in the push toward the outer limits of athletic adventure: environmental panic. "We increasingly need to find tools to be protected, clothes that can adapt to rapid changes of temperature, keep out the elements," he said. "It doesn't matter if you're a climber or a guy in the city psychologically you're wearing your house on your back." Or else perhaps you are clad in a Chinese military parachute upcycled into a smart suit like those at the British label Raeburn, which fold down to roughly the size of a bandanna. The label, barely a decade old, was founded by Christopher Raeburn, a designer whose stated goal is producing fashion almost exclusively from remade and recycled materials. Recently Mr. Raeburn named his brother Graeme as performance director for Raeburn, the significance of the pairing less nepotistic than directional. At his previous job, Graeme drove the growth of the cycling lifestyle brand Rapha, possibly best known for its mobile pop up clubs and the fact that its majority investors include Steuart and Tom Walton, grandsons of the founder of Walmart. Or you are wearing a World War II E 1 radioman's vest, open at the back for easy access to communication equipment (ready for end of days transmissions?) and reproduced as part of a line of clothing from Mountain Research. This niche label from Tokyo, known as General Research when it was founded in 1993 by Setsumasa Kobayashi, was renamed in 2006 to reflect the designer's predilection for stuff like zippered cotton nylon snow pants resembling something an early mountaineer might have worn to traverse the Khumbu Icefall. Mr. Kobayashi was just one of many designers at Pitti Uomo producing garments suited for the kinds of adventure where survival is not necessarily a given. And, eerily, his designs embodied a low grade environmental anxiety that hummed beneath the surface of the trade fair, as if the adventure sports trend in fashion had existential underpinnings. FOR JOSH PESKOWITZ, the men's fashion director for the luxury e commerce retailer Moda Operandi, performance can be interpreted any way you like. Sure, Mr. Kobayashi may be a purist who lives two hours outside Tokyo in a specially designed green structure set deep in a forest, may haul his own wood and sleep in a loft bed he clambers into by way of a wall studded with rock climbing holds. Yet, as Mr. Peskowitz pointed out, for many fans of extreme sports fashion, the spirit of adventure rarely takes them beyond the neighborhood. Stroll through popular fashion destinations like the Omotesando neighborhood of Tokyo, Mr. Peskowitz noted, and it is not rare to encounter guys outfitted as if they were headed to base camp on Mount Everest. "I've seen men walking around with tent frames on their backs and Wigwam boots pulled to their knees, and they're literally going for coffee," he said. "They like the look." In a sense, this evolution was an inevitable one. More than six decades ago, Sports Illustrated canvassed a group of what would now be termed influencers about the effects of sportswear on fashion. One of them was Edward S. Marcus, a merchant who built a family specialty store in Dallas into the retailing behemoth Neiman Marcus. "Increasing leisure and interest in sports have led people into avocational habits that influence fashion," Mr. Marcus told Sports Illustrated in January 1956, noting that popular interest in active sports fashion had made it acceptable to wear knit shirts, bright colors and shorts off the tennis court. "What I find interesting about the extreme sports influence, which speaks to this very '90s moment we're living in and some of the ideas Prada and Helmut Lang first introduced, is the extension of it to all aspects of the wardrobe," said Ken Downing, a former Neiman Marcus executive who is now the creative director of the Triple Five Group, the Canadian developers of retail and entertainment centers like the Mall of America. "It's a continuation of where casualization is heading beyond the sweatshirt." "If you think about it," he added, "it's even begun to find its way into tailored clothing. Functionality is the new decoration, in a way."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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A drive in screening of "Concrete Cowboy" in Los Angeles on Thursday, three days before it will be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. LOS ANGELES Some 70 cars crammed into a downtown Los Angeles parking lot surrounded by high rises and a smattering of food trucks on Thursday night to watch "Concrete Cowboy," a father son film starring Idris Elba and set in North Philadelphia's Black cowboy community. In terms of movie premieres, it was unorthodox. "It is a dream come true," Ricky Staub, the 37 year old white filmmaker making his directorial debut, said with a big grin while standing in front of a huge screen. "I don't know when you dream of releasing your movie it's at a drive in. But I never dreamed that my first movie would be an all black western set in Philly." Mr. Staub had ambitious plans when "Concrete Cowboy" landed coveted spots in the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. He envisioned his cast of real cowboys descending onto Telluride's red carpet in Colorado on horseback this month before flying north to be regaled in Toronto's 2,500 seat Roy Thomson Hall theater a choice venue for garnering all important buzz in front of a packed crowd of industry luminaries and eager moviegoers. That all changed when Telluride was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic and Toronto opted for a hybrid model that features in person screenings for Canadian audiences and a virtual version for everyone else. The loss of traditional film festivals means more than missing out on cocktail parties and the red carpet, however. For small indie films like "Concrete Cowboy," which cost under 10 million to make and is still seeking a distributor, not having a chance to build word of mouth momentum at the festivals could be the difference between becoming an unlikely Oscar darling or another also ran in the video on demand market. At the Venice Film Festival, held in person with certain safety restrictions and concluding this week, "One Night in Miami" the directorial debut of the Oscar winning actress Regina King has already generated early awards chatter. Amazon recently bought it in a bidding war. "The eventized nature of what festivals are and what they do, from building momentum around a film and often a filmmaker, make what we do possible," said Tom Quinn, the chief executive of Neon, which distributed "Parasite." That film first caught audiences' attention at the Cannes Film Festival last year before making its unlikely march to the Oscar stage, where it was named best picture. Toronto is trying to create that enthusiasm in the virtual world. Between a select number of online question and answer sessions with filmmakers, and both drive in showings and 50 person theater screenings in Toronto, the event will showcase 50 films instead of the 333 it programmed in 2019. "Concrete Cowboy" will be shown at the festival Sunday though the filmmakers won't be there and online on Monday. Cameron Bailey, artistic director and co head of the festival, admits that it's "strange," especially without the usual throngs crowding the streets during the 10 day international event. But he said the festival was still able to propel new filmmakers and films, even in a virtual world. "A festival's primary currency is intangible it's buzz," Mr. Bailey said. "Buzz is not a physical thing. It doesn't have to happen in a particular place, at a particular time. It can happen in all different ways, as we know from the internet on a daily basis." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Film festivals have long been incubators of talented filmmakers. Steven Soderbergh pioneered the modern indie film movement when his first feature, "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," debuted in 1989 at what is now the Sundance Film Festival, and Barry Jenkins and "Moonlight" began their march to the Oscars in Telluride in 2016. Lee Daniels, a producer of "Concrete Cowboy," saw his own career take off after debuting the second feature he directed, "Precious," at Sundance in 2009. That early screening helped propel his movie to two Academy Awards, including one for Geoffrey Fletcher, who became the first Black screenwriter to win an Oscar. "These festivals give birth to young voices, and they celebrate them," Mr. Daniels said. "They nurture you." "Concrete Cowboy" takes place among Black cowboys trying to preserve the last urban horse stable in an area that was once filled with them. It tells the story of Cole (Caleb McLaughlin from "Stranger Things"), a troubled 15 year old sent to live with his estranged father (Mr. Elba), a subdued horseman more comfortable with his animals than with other people. The producers are hopeful that with so much production still paused and content companies, especially streamers, eager for more, the movie will find a buyer. (On Friday, Netflix bought Halle Berry's directorial debut, "Bruised," which is premiering in Toronto as a work in progress, for 19 million.) Also, the Oscars have been pushed back to April, meaning an award campaign could be started if the film receives positive critical response. Even buyers like Neon, which prefers to have films play in theaters first, are planning on opening their wallets if they find a movie worth purchasing. "We are coming to Toronto to buy, definitely," Mr. Quinn said. "Nothing has changed." In 2017, he bought "I, Tonya" after seeing it at Toronto. That film generated 54 million at the worldwide box office and earned Allison Janney an Oscar for best supporting actress. Mr. Elba, who is also a producer of "Concrete Cowboy," acknowledged that the conditions for the film weren't ideal, but he still embraced the thought of being involved with the festival. "It's a very special film during a very special time," he said in a recorded video message that played ahead of the Los Angeles drive in event, which was hosted by the film's sales agent, Endeavor Content. "It's a shame we are not there, but sometimes you've just got to shape shift and move and that's what we did," Mr. Elba said in a phone interview from New Mexico, where he is about to resume shooting on a Netflix movie that was postponed this year when he was infected by the coronavirus. "We, as a group, are thankful we get the opportunity to put it out there even if it isn't with the bells and whistles we would like."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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We know that a bad economy tends to hurt the electoral prospects of incumbent presidential candidates. But what about a crisis of national security or American safety? Although the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented in most ways, as is the Trump presidency itself, there may be historical lessons from other situations. I'm thinking of one in particular: The American experience in Iraq leading up to the face off of 2004 between George W. Bush and John Kerry. It provides a cautionary note for those who assume that because President Trump has made numerous mistakes during the coronavirus crisis, he will be the underdog come the fall. In spring 2004, it looked like a tight race, and the challenger led the incumbent in some early polls. Yet Mr. Bush ultimately won the fall election by some three million popular votes and by an Electoral College tally of 286 to 251. The economy was not in collapse at that time, as it is today. But the nation's top national safety and security problem the Iraq war was in a bad state and getting worse. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in early April 2003 and Mr. Bush's infamous "mission accomplished" speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on May 1, Iraq spiraled consistently downward over the months leading up to Election Day. By the summer of 2003, it was becoming apparent that resistance forces in Iraq were not just what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called "dead enders" leftovers from the Hussein inner circle who would soon be rounded up. The first big car bombings took place in August, taking the lives of a top Iraqi cleric and the United Nations' special representative to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. U.S. fatality rates remained stubbornly in the range of about 30 to 40 troops a month. Earlier predictions by Bush administration officials that most American forces would soon be home were recognized as fantasies. As the year ended, U.S. monthly troop fatality rates climbed into the 40s, even after Mr. Hussein was captured.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. The story surrounding Robert Kraft's sex solicitation trial just keeps getting more salacious. Late last week, The Miami Herald reported that Li Yang the owner of the massage parlor where Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, is accused of paying for sexual acts had partied with President Trump and even helped Chinese donors gain access to the president. Stephen Colbert couldn't pass up the opportunity to make a few lowbrow puns based on the reported crimes. (Actually, more than a few: By the end of the segment, he boasted of telling nine straight massage parlor jokes. ) "Kraft has pleaded not guilty, and Saturday we learned that he has assembled a legal dream team consisting of multiple high profile Florida criminal defense attorneys. Multiple? How many people does he need to get him off?" STEPHEN COLBERT
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Television
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Now Lives In a brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Claim to Fame Mr. Sylvester is a professional BMX biker who made his name not through competitions, as most bikers do, but on YouTube and Instagram ( nigelsylvester), where he has more than 150,000 followers. Sports Illustrated called him "one of the most naturally gifted athletes in the sport" in 2015. One image, posted last fall on Instagram, shows him levitating above his handlebars as he rides up First Avenue in the East Village. "I dared to dream and decided to chase it," he wrote in the caption, "rather than listen to them tell me no and embrace it." Big Break In 2006, Mr. Sylvester was featured in a BMX DVD called "Flipside," which paired four amateur riders with four professionals, one of whom was Dave Mirra, one of the biggest names in BMX bikes. Mr. Mirra (who died in February of an apparent suicide) signed Mr. Sylvester to his company, Mirraco, at 18. "What Michael Jordan is to basketball, Dave Mirra is to BMX," Mr. Sylvester said. "I got one of the best co signs in BMX history, a kid coming from New York City." Nike, which was starting up its BMX program, signed Mr. Sylvester after Mr. Mirra did. Latest Project He recently started a new video series called "Go!," with a Sony camera that captures the action from his point of view. "I want to do this video," he said, "where people can understand what I feel, what I see, what I hear and who I interact with on a normal day." The first installation shows him flying through the streets of New York, meeting up with friends like Victor Cruz, the New York Giants wide receiver; ASAP Ferg, the rapper; and Mr. Flawless, the jewelry designer. The video had more than 1.9 million views on YouTube in a recent count.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Elina Svitolina, left, defeated Caroline Garcia in the fourth round of the French Open. Svitolina is the highest seeded player remaining in the women's singles draw. How to watch: 6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on the Tennis Channel; streaming on the Tennis Channel app. Of the nine women left in the singles draw, only two have played in a Grand Slam final, and neither will be featured in today's matches. The guarantee of a new finalist is exciting, especially with two qualifiers, Nadia Podoroska and Martina Trevisan, reaching their first Grand Slam quarterfinals. The men's side features a few more established names but has plenty of uncertainty around who can advance through the difficult draw. Here are some matches to keep an eye on. Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are at best a guess and are certain to fluctuate based on the times at which earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern. Nadal, a 12 time French Open champion, is excellent on clay. Through the first four rounds, he has dropped only 23 games, bulldozing young prospects out of his path. With his topspin heavy groundstrokes, Nadal drives his opponents into the corners, far behind the baseline. If they somehow manage to stay in the point, Nadal comes in slightly shorter and hits a drop shot that is all but impossible to chase down, even if the opponent were to get a head start. Though Nadal lost to Diego Schwartzman in the quarterfinals of the Italian Open on clay a few weeks ago, it seems that no one can challenge Nadal much now that he's back at Roland Garros. It's surprising to watch such a young player dominate points, particularly on clay, where defensive players generally have an advantage. But, in a match against Nadal, it's unlikely that Sinner will have the freedom to control many points. How he deals with that pressure will be the greatest indicator of his future successes on the tour. Svitolina, the highest ranked player left in the women's draw as the third seed, reached the semifinals at Wimbledon and the United States Open in 2019, but hasn't been past the quarterfinals at the French Open in her career. Although Svitolina seemed to struggle to find her pace in the first two rounds, she sailed past Ekaterina Alexandrova, the 27th seed, and Caroline Garcia in the third and fourth rounds. Svitolina's powerful baseline game is not usually suited to clay courts, but the surface at the French Open seems to be playing a bit flatter than in previous years, much to her advantage. While Svitolina will be the overwhelming favorite, Podoroska may have less pressure. That may allow her to play easily and freely and to press Svitolina to draw out unforced errors from the heavy hitter. Thiem, the third seed, is among the favorites to win the French Open. Having lost to Nadal in the French final in both 2018 and 2019, Thiem finally won his first Grand Slam title at the 2020 U.S. Open. With that added confidence, he skated through the first three rounds in Paris, but then needed five sets to push past Hugo Gaston, a wild card. Thiem did not play any tournaments on clay before the French Open, and it's possible that now, faced with more clay court specialists late in the tournament, his lack of warm up events could cause some problems. Schwartzman, standing 5 feet 7 inches, is one of the shortest men on tour, and by that virtue is a perennial underdog. But his reading of the game and opponents is world class. Through to his fourth Grand Slam quarterfinal, Schwartzman has yet to drop a set at this year's French Open, a difficult accomplishment for any major tournament that uses the five set format, especially on a surface that can let players dig into defensive positions and wear down opponents. With Schwartzman's confidence high after an upset of Nadal and a finals appearance at the Italian Open, he could have the self belief to beat the high flying Thiem for his first semifinals appearance. Swiatek, 19, played a near perfect match to upset the top seed, Simona Halep, in just 68 minutes in the round of 16. Her win came one year after Halep had dispatched Swiatek at the same stage of the French Open in less than an hour, a stunning reversal, especially considering how dominant Halep had looked in the past few weeks. Swiatek, in her first Grand Slam quarterfinal, has the eyes of the tennis world well on her. With powerful groundstrokes and a tendency to chase down even the lightest drop shots, Swiatek, when she is on her game, seems nearly impossible to beat.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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The first thing Alison Roman does when she arrives at work is switch on the computer and check her email. But that's where the similarities with many Manhattan office workers end. After a few minutes at her desk, Ms. Roman clomps downstairs in her kitchen clogs and heads to her workstation. There, she puts on an apron, spreads her recipe on the white Calacatta marble countertop and begins slicing a tomato. Instead of asking colleagues where the stapler is, she searches for the microplane. "We are obsessed with this," she said, grabbing the rectangular metal tool and bowing her head over a lemon. "You can use it to zest, to shave Parmesan, you name it." Ms. Roman is the senior food editor at Bon Appetit, the glossy food magazine owned by Conde Nast. Late last year, the company began relocating some brands to 1 World Trade Center from 4 Times Square, a move that garnered attention, not least because some of the new offices reportedly suffered from an invasion of rodents. Bon Appetit, which moved in this year, is safely in its new space no rats in sight and the employees are excited. "I used to overlook a three story LED Walgreen sign, so this is a lot nicer," said Carla Lalli Music, Bon Appetit's food director, as she looked out the floor to ceiling windows that lined one wall of the test kitchen. From the 35th floor of 1 World Trade Center, the sprawling cityscape views encompass Santiago Calatrava's futuristic Oculus and the elaborate Woolworth Building. "There is so much natural light here, which makes it great for photographing the food," Ms. Music said. "In our old offices, there was so much reflection from the fluorescent lights in Times Square that we always needed lighting." Conde Nast leases 1.2 million square feet at 1 World Trade Center. The skyscraper, built at the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has three million square feet, and leasing the building has been slow. Some tenants, like the first private sector company to sign on, the China Center, have reduced their original space commitments. The building is still just about 62 percent leased. Citing tepid demand, the Durst Organization, which owns 1 World Trade Center with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and is overseeing leasing, reduced rents last year by around 10 percent on lower floors. For example, the owners are seeking 69 a square foot for rents below the 64th floor, 80 to 100 a square foot for floors 65 90 and 75 for the prebuilt floors 45, 46 and 47. In Bon Appetit's commercial kitchen, spanning 2,126 square feet, there are four islands, with settings for two people each. There are eight Wolf gas ranges, each with six burners; four Elkay faucets; two Traulsen refrigerators and two Traulsen freezers and an Imperial Brown walk in stacked with fresh food. The piece de resistance is the Kold Draft icemaker with its deep hopper filled with 1 and 1 1/4 inch cubes. There is just one traditional work area with a computer, belonging to Brad Leone, the kitchen's manager. Mr. Leone is responsible for overseeing the pantry and ordering kitchen staples, typically from FreshDirect. On a monthly basis, he orders up to eight gallons of milk, 48 dozen eggs, 48 pounds of butter and as many as 100 onions. He also scours the city's green markets for fresh vegetables and meat, and ethnic neighborhoods for specialty foods. While many magazines have daily news meetings, Bon Appetit has a daily tasting. At 3 p.m. each day, the magazine's senior staff gathers at the 515 square foot tasting room, sitting on Minotti chairs, silverware and cloth napkins set out along a custom built walnut dining table. A midcentury modern credenza by BDDW, Steampunk style hanging bulbs and white subway tiles add to the clean aesthetic. The tasting room in the old building featured folding chairs and an Ikea table. "There was so little room that in order to walk past someone, they had to get out of their chair and move," Ms. Music said. On this day, Ms. Roman was testing recipes for a feature to run in the July issue. The story line was a 1970s pool party. "Think Anjelica Huston in a caftan," she said. "We want something easy that you can prepare beforehand and then serve poolside." The starting point was a retro Chinese chicken salad, but that soon took on a Greek vibe. Substituting for the chicken salad was grilled chicken with green olives, lemon zest and spices with sliced tomatoes. A dish of poached shrimp with fennel, shallots and cucumber and an orzo salad with grilled halloumi cheese and walnuts was added. "I would eat this in a bikini," said Christine Muhlke, the executive editor, as she took a bite. The dishes' visual merits were discussed, including whether couscous might photograph better than orzo, a suggestion that was dismissed because of couscous's "slimy" texture. The benefits of raw versus poached shrimp were debated, and several minutes were spent discussing the shape of the cheese. Most of the staff there are six in the food department have spent time cooking in professional kitchens. Dawn Perry is the digital food editor, and even though it was barely past breakfast time, she was deep into a baked ziti dish. It was for a collection of recipes called "BA's Best" that highlights classic dishes. This was the fifth time Ms. Perry had made the recipe, and she decided to forgo the classic ricotta because it dried and separated, replacing it with a creamy Parmesan bechamel. Repeating a recipe five times was nothing. Ms. Perry recently made a meatloaf dish, "BA's Best Beef and Bacon Meatloaf," 11 times before she was satisfied. "It became almost a metaphysical discussion what really is meatloaf? What does it represent?" The test kitchen is not so different from the one that Good Housekeeping has at the Hearst building, said Mark Morton, a principal at the firm Gensler who oversaw the design for both magazines. "This isn't that different in terms of equipment or scale, but because it is the World Trade Center, there was a lot of scrutiny," he said. As for cost, the company declined to give any specifics, although Mr. Morton said it was typical for a test kitchen of its size. "The quality of what we are able to put out is the same, but this environment is far better," Ms. Music said. "This new space gives us an advantage, from creating the recipes to cooking to shooting the food."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine did not prevent Covid 19 in a rigorous study of 821 people who had been exposed to patients infected with the virus, researchers from the University of Minnesota and Canada are reporting on Wednesday. The study was the first large controlled clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that President Trump has repeatedly promoted and recently taken himself. Conducted in the United States and Canada, this trial was also the first to test whether the drug could prevent illness in people who have been exposed to the coronavirus. This type of study, in which patients are picked at random to receive either an experimental treatment or a placebo, is considered the most reliable way to measure the safety and effectiveness of a drug. The participants were health care workers and people who had been exposed at home to ill spouses, partners or parents. "The take home message for the general public is that if you're exposed to someone with Covid 19, hydroxychloroquine is not an effective post exposure preventive therapy," the lead author of the study, Dr. David R. Boulware, from the University of Minnesota, said in an interview. The results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine. "If we could find something that would ameliorate infection, block it or make it milder after a solid exposure, that would be quite wonderful," said Dr. Judith Feinberg, the vice chairwoman for research in medicine at West Virginia University. "What we want to do is limit the number of cases. There was great hope riding on this." The president's promotion of the drug, and the backlash against it, have politicized medical questions that would normally have been left to researchers to answer objectively. Trump supporters and opponents have accused one another of twisting facts about the drug to make the president look either right or wrong. Regardless, Mr. Trump has not stopped touting the drug's potential benefits. On Sunday, his administration announced that it was sending 2 million doses of the drug to Brazil, to treat patients and help prevent infection in health care workers. A White House official said the two countries would collaborate on research into its use. Early in the pandemic, the drug's use was spurred by anecdotal reports from China and France of patients who seemed to improve and laboratory findings of a possible antiviral effect. With no proven treatment for Covid 19, doctors have been desperate to give severely ill patients some kind of therapy. But several studies on sick patients, without control groups, have found no benefit and even possible harm from the drug. A recent Lancet study reported increased risks of heart problems and death. Shortly after it was published, the World Health Organization suspended trials of the drug. But the Lancet data has been called into question. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said it would resume the trials it had suspended. Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the deputy director of the W.H.O., said, "As of now, there is no evidence that any drug actually reduces the mortality in patients who have Covid 19, and in fact it is an urgent priority for all of us to do the needed studies, to do the randomized clinical trials in order to get that evidence as quickly as possible." Interest in the drug surged after Mr. Trump began advocating it. It is approved to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, as well as malaria, and is considered safe for those patients as long as they do not have underlying abnormalities in their heart rhythm. Studies in very ill coronavirus patients have linked the drug especially when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin to dangerous heart rhythm disorders, and both the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have warned that it should not be used outside of clinical trials or carefully monitored conditions in a hospital. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Some researchers say that safety concerns about the drug have been overblown, alarming the public and making it difficult to recruit participants for the studies needed to determine whether the drug has any value for treatment or prevention. The new study included 821 people from across the United States and parts of Canada who had a either a high risk or moderate risk exposure to a person who had tested positive and was ill from the coronavirus. None of the participants had symptoms themselves. High risk exposure meant they were less than six feet from a patient for more than ten minutes, with neither a mask nor a face shield. Moderate risk meant they wore a mask, but no face shield. The participants, recruited online, ranged in age from 33 to 50, with a median age of 40. About half were women, and 66 percent of the total were health care workers. They were healthy and had no underlying health problems that would have made hydroxychloroquine dangerous for them. Most of the rest had been exposed at home, to an infected spouse, partner or parent. Within four days of exposure, the participants were picked at random to receive either hydroxychloroquine or a placebo, and then followed to determine whether they had either laboratory confirmed Covid 19, or an illness consistent with the virus, during the next 14 days. The drug or placebos were mailed to them, and they then reported their symptoms online to the researchers, who did not examine them. Not all the participants could be tested for the virus, because when the study was being conducted, there was still a shortage of test kits. There was no meaningful difference between the placebo group and those who took the drug. Among those taking hydroxychloroquine, 49 of 414, or 11.8 percent, became ill. In the placebo group, 58 or 407, or 14.3 percent, became ill. Analyzed statistically, the difference between those rates was not significant. The drug also did not make the illness any less severe. Side effects like nausea from hydroxychloroquine were more common than from placebos, 40.1 percent compared with 16.8 percent, but there were no problems with heart rhythm or any other serious adverse effects. Infectious disease experts who were not part of the study said it was well done and answered an important question, though the results were disappointing. "The F.D.A., in my view, bowed to the pressure and issued what's called an 'emergency use authorization' for the drug," said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which sponsored the hearing. "Doing so threw open the door to tens of millions of pills, including some, directly related to this hearing, manufactured inside facilities in Pakistan and India that have either failed F.D.A.'s inspection or never been inspected by the F.D.A. at all." Jeremy Kahn, an F.D.A. spokesman, said the agency has done nine "mission critical" drug facility inspections, including overseas and domestic, since March. But he did not say whether they involved hydroxychloroquine. He also said the agency would not resume regular overseas inspections until the State Department has given the go ahead for travel.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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In the past decade or so, Israel has emerged as an exciting hub of contemporary dance with a physical style of extreme precision, palpable tension and sexy aggression. But Yasmeen Godder has embraced the awkward and the grotesque instead, becoming one of the country's most important, and polarizing, choreographers. While other artists exert control, she celebrates chaos: To watch one of her shows is to watch a world slide into anarchy. Ms. Godder was immersed in the experimental dance scene in New York for years before returning to her native Israel. She's back with the three hour "Climax," which stitches together moments and ideas from her 15 year career in performances at Gibney Dance. The intimate, immersive work isn't for shy audiences. At times, her feral dancers slither right up, ensnaring viewers in human chains and making Gibney's studios feel like rooms in an erratic asylum. Ms. Godder's world is unsettling, but worth a visit. (October 20 22., gibneydance.org.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Just before the spacecraft Juno finishes a five year trip to Jupiter on Monday, NASA has decided to extend the missions of nine older robotic explorers that have lived beyond original expectations. The agency announced the decision on Friday, saying the nine are still producing bounties of observations for scientists. Most of the extensions were expected. The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto last year, had already been steered toward a new target, known as 2014 MU69, one of the small icy objects in the ring of debris beyond Neptune. But one of NASA's decisions, about the Dawn spacecraft orbiting Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, was somewhat of a surprise as well as a disappointment to some working on the mission. The Dawn spacecraft was designed to use four spinning wheels to pivot in different directions. But at its previous destination, the asteroid Vesta, two of the four wheels overheated and failed. At Ceres, the wheels stayed off, and the spacecraft used its thrusters instead to pivot. In December, Dawn reached its lowest orbit, just 240 miles above Ceres. Dr. Rayman said he and his team had expected Dawn to exhaust its remaining propellant by March. But they spun up the wheels again. That succeeded, cutting the use of the thrusters. "It all worked out beautifully," Dr. Rayman said. That left enough fuel to contemplate doing something more. On Thursday, Dr. Rayman's blog made a stunning announcement: Dawn would leave Ceres and head toward a flyby of a third asteroid, Adeona, in 2019. The posting was yanked. A member of Dawn's social media team had mistakenly published an unfinished draft that Dr. Rayman had started writing in case NASA selected that course. On Friday, around noon, Dr. Rayman received word from officials at NASA headquarters that they had decided on the other option proffered by the Dawn team: Dawn will stay where it is, continuing observations of Ceres. Dr. Rayman said Dawn could continue until next spring, as long as the spinning wheels kept working. "The long term monitoring of Ceres, particularly as it gets closer to perihelion the part of its orbit with the shortest distance to the sun has the potential to provide more significant science discoveries than a flyby of Adeona," James L. Green, NASA's director of planetary science, said in a statement. Dr. Rayman said he did not have a preference. But the mission's principal investigator, Christopher T. Russell, said he was disappointed. "Almost every time when you are doing exploration, a new path is going to provide more return on your investment (time or money) than continuing to repeat the old well worn path," Dr. Russell, a professor of geophysics and space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an email. "Nevertheless, given that we were told to stay at Ceres, we will continue our exploration of Ceres and do our best possible work in the time we have remaining," he said. "There is still science that can be done here." The other missions receiving extensions are the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and a flotilla of spacecraft at Mars: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, the Mars Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, the Mars Odyssey orbiter, and NASA's support for the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission. NASA officials periodically ask managers of the long lived missions to justify the cost of their continued operations. Final decisions depend on whether NASA has enough money in its budget for all of them. On Monday, Juno will be on NASA's center stage as it begins 20 months of orbiting Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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