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At three blocks between Broadway and Greenwich Street in TriBeCa, Park Place is a wisp of a road. But it has shown it can make big news. Many New Yorkers first heard of the spot a few years ago, because of a clash that erupted over plans to build an Islamic center at Nos. 45 to 51, in a former coat store and a Con Ed substation. Opponents were furious that the institution, called the Park51 Community Center, would be three blocks from the site where terrorists who were Muslim took down the World Trade Center. Supporters argued that the center's dedication to tolerance and education would work to help heal the wounds inflicted by the attack, and perhaps undo harmful stereotypes about Islam. Then, when plans for the full center were put off, all the hubbub went quiet. The site has been used as a prayer space for the last two years, and the developer is considering turning it into condominiums. A Four Seasons hotel condominium is being planned for a site nearby. And now a new 21 story condo, to be called Tribeca Royale, has been refocusing attention on the area. When completed in the fall of 2014, it is expected to be the first to endow Park Place with opulent finishes and envelope pushing architecture. To rise at No. 19, between Broadway and Church Street and a block from the Park51 site, the building will contain 24 apartments. About half will take up an entire floor and run through the block, meaning their back walls will be near Murray Street. The full floor versions have a bedroom and three full baths. A head turning design from the architect Ismael Leyva, this tall, skinny and shiny building may win points for boldness on a block with many brick and brownstone low rises. It could also be appreciated for making do with so little space. Tribeca Royale's lot, which is squeezed between a camping supplier called Tent Trails and an office advertising "holistic dentistry," is tiny, just 25 feet across. And it may feel even tighter, as metal braces have been inserted between the walls of the two adjacent buildings, as if to pry them apart. The space available for Tribeca Royale "was very small," Mr. Leyva said, "so we tried to make it very elegant." Even though the apartments have a railroad style layout, the generous use of glass and terraces at the ends ensures that they won't seem gloomy, he explained. Kitchen counters will be quartz, bathroom cabinets teak; windows will stretch from floor to ceiling. Terraces that will line both the front and back facades will be oval in shape, giving them the appearance of petals on a branch. The basement will have a 1,500 square foot fitness center, and part of the second floor a shared outdoor space. The building, whose foundation was being poured on a recent afternoon, is being developed by ABN Realty, whose projects in New York include the Chelsea Royale, a 20 unit condo on West 24th Street. Dr. Chun Ka Luk, a onetime medical researcher who went into real estate in the 1980s, heads the company. He said he was taking over the project from the developer Nancy Luk, his wife, who died in 2011 of a brain aneurysm. Yet Ms. Luk's presence lives on. The "N" in ABN, the company created for this project, stands for Nancy, Dr. Luk explained, adding that the "A" is for Albert, a son, and the "B" for Bernice, a daughter. Also, the second floor outdoor space in the new building will be named Nancy's Garden. With development costs of 20 million and with its loans in place, the building awaits approval of its offering plan, Dr. Luk said; marketing is to begin in a few months, though no broker has yet been chosen. Pricing is still up in the air, but Dr. Luk said units would most likely cost about 2,000 a square foot, or about 2.8 million for the 1,400 square foot full floor units. That compares favorably with about 3,500 a foot for flashy new condos nearby like 56 Leonard Street. "We are trying to be realistic; this is a neighborhood in transition," he said about an area with several vacant storefronts. Indeed, the area's many construction fences and sidewalk sheds attest to a makeover. This spring, Silverstein Properties announced that work would begin work in the fall on a Four Seasons hotel condo at 30 Park Place, across from Tribeca Royale, on a long stalled site where a foundation is in the ground. Financing is finally in place for the 930 million project, according to the developer, which is based two blocks away at Seven World Trade Center. The building, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, will probably make its own statement. It will measure 926 feet, eclipsing the nearby 792 foot Woolworth Building, which is adding condos at its crown, as well as the 870 foot New York by Gehry, a gleaming rental at 8 Spruce Street. Though Tribeca Royale clocks in at just 292 feet, Dr. Luk isn't worried about being overshadowed, by his neighbors, especially the Four Seasons project. "If anything," he said, "it will make the neighborhood classier and nicer." And, perhaps, cement a new kind of legacy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The dusky colorings of Mr. Kaufmann's voice gave his singing of this Italianate music a Germanic cast, but that quality made his Johnson seem, intriguingly, more of an outsider. He brought melting richness and dramatic nuances to his performance, supported by the sensitive conducting of Marco Armiliato. Mr. Kaufmann and Ms. Westbroek seemed to feed off each other during the crucial scene in Act II when Johnson arrives at Minnie's cabin for a humble meal. Tension stirs below the surface of the music as a blizzard builds outside and a posse of miners led by Jack Rance, the town sheriff (the husky voiced baritone Zeljko Lucic), closes in. But the real tension came from the hints of attraction and emotional need that Mr. Kaufmann and Ms. Westbroek conveyed, even while exchanging seemingly innocent phrases. Still, at a moment when Mr. Kaufmann has been taking on demanding dramatic tenor roles like Verdi's Otello and even testing the waters of Wagner's Tristan his singing seemed a little underpowered. He summoned some full voiced, exciting high notes during the opera's only real aria, when Johnson, who thinks he's about to be hanged, begs the men to tell Minnie that he has been set free to lead a better life. Yet at times his voice seemed curiously restrained. For a while, Mr. Kaufmann was hands down the most exciting tenor in opera. Now he has some younger competition, including at the Met, where the thrilling tenor Vittorio Grigolo, who stepped in when Mr. Kaufmann withdrew from a new production of Puccini's "Tosca," has become a house favorite. It is, however, without a doubt great to have the compelling Mr. Kaufmann back with the company.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Good Friday afternoon! It's Met Gala minus three. Do you know what that means? It means that across the celebrity fashion society finance axis gowns are being brushed, bodies buffed and eyebrows threaded. Personally, it means I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see how the lucky select guests (and they are select personally signed off on as part of the optimum mix by Anna Wintour a.k.a. the Met Gala supreme power) interpret the dress code, it is "Sunday Best," a reference to the exhibit that the party honors, "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination." My red carpet review will be up on Tuesday morning, so tune in then. It also means this newsletter is almost one year old. We published our first edition last year in time for the gala. Why? In part because it just gives us so doggone much to talk about, between the clothes and the costumes. (Wait is there a difference?) But while we can talk for hours about that and I'd love to hear your thoughts I'd also love to hear your thoughts on Open Thread: What do you want more of? Less of? Is there another place you'd like to continue the conversation? Is Friday afternoon a good time for this to land in your inbox or do you wish you woke up to this, say, Monday or Tuesday morning? Please tell us your opinion at openthread nytimes.com. I already get emails from some of you in response to last week's note, for example, Martha McLendon wrote to let me know about a great seersucker dress currently available at Zara . And Deborah Landis from U.C.L.A. made the very relevant point that female costume designers do not get the credit the deserve. She's right, so I am fixing that now: if "The Handmaid's Tale" affects fashion, it's down to Anne Crabtree; if "Avengers: Infinity War" does, that's thanks to Judianna Makovsky. So let's keep the back and forth going. One change I'd like to make is to highlight the most interesting and pointed responses I get to each newsletter the following week, as above. I'm sure there are more improvements you can think of, so send 'em in. In the meantime, get ready with your Met prep: no, not manicures and facials, but information gathering. We've updated our all you need to know explainer about the party of the year. Jason Horowitz, The New York Times's Rome bureau chief, got the inside scoop on how the Metropolitan Museum convinced the Vatican that a fashion exhibit was a good idea. Hint: it took a lot of work. However, if you've had it up to here with the party, spend some time remembering handbag artist Judith Leiber instead; discover why dandy Cameron Silver is selling off a lot of his clothes (and what it means for the rest of us); and find out how the sensibility of Zac Posen's artist dad helped form his son's aesthetic and where to see his work. Q: Like kudzo, viscose is everywhere. Pricey carpets made of viscose are labeled "art silk," but what about fashion? A Piazza Sempione dress I bought for mucho dinero is viscose; Akris Punto dresses are made of viscose. It looks and feels like silk but it isn't, and the high prices associated with these formerly silk dresses remain high. What's the story with viscose? Gloria, Mass. A: Well, first: like silk or pretty much any fabric, not all viscoses are created equal which makes sense when you realize the official name for viscose is viscose rayon, and it is one of the oldest man made fibers, first patented in 1884 by Hilaire de Bernigaut. Just because it is man made, however, does not mean it is synthetic (though it's not exactly all natural either): viscose is made from wood pulp that has been chemically treated. Its name comes from a viscous get it? solution used during the process. The end product can have, as you point out, the feel of silk, though it can also mimic cotton and velvet. And just because it is man made also does not mean it equates to cheap especially if a designer is involved, when what you are paying for is in part the creativity and brand attached to the garment. So toss that idea in the scrap pile. As to why designers like it, according to Joseph Altuzarra, who founded an eponymous brand that is favored by Meghan Markle: "I think viscose is misunderstood because it isn't a completely natural fiber, and natural fibers are usually thought of more highly. I find that viscose drapes really beautifully, and I like viscose's hand. It also sews and wears really nicely. In the past few years, I've noticed mills have developed a lot more interesting viscose fabrications, and pushed the limits of what you can do with it, and I have been really inspired by that." So there you go. From his email to your closet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
WASHINGTON The share of American women on birth control who use long acting reversible methods like intrauterine devices and implants has nearly doubled in recent years, the federal government reported Tuesday. The share of women on birth control who use the devices rose to 11.6 percent in the period from 2011 to 2013, up from 6 percent in 2006 to 2010, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The share is still smaller than for the pill (26 percent) or condoms (15 percent), but it is the fastest growing method. In 2002, just 2.4 percent of women on birth control in the United States used the long acting methods. Women's health advocates say long acting birth control is giving American women more say over when and with whom they have children. About half of the 6.6 million pregnancies a year in the United States are unintended, and health experts contend that broader use of long acting methods could help reduce that number, because the methods work better than other types. The methods are effective because, unlike the pill, a diaphragm or condoms, they do not require a woman to take action to work. Although an early incarnation, the Dalkon Shield, introduced in the 1970s, had disastrous results, the modern devices are safe and have been increasingly promoted by doctors. Last fall, the American Academy of Pediatrics published guidelines that for the first time singled them out as a "first line" birth control option for adolescents, citing their "efficacy, safety and ease of use."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Carnival smooching takes a back seat in "The Kissing Booth 2," a treacly Netflix sequel that finds Elle (Joey King), alongside her best pal Lee (Joel Courtney), returning for more prep school escapades. Before senior year is up, Elle must juggle college applications, a cagey beau, friendship woes and, most absurdly, a high profile dance video game competition held inside a colossal arena. The director Vince Marcello leans heavily on montage to get us through this deluge of invented drama which, mercilessly, unspools over more than two hours. Devoted fans may recall that Elle, in "The Kissing Booth," played soccer. But that sport and any trace of normal high school activity recedes here. Instead, Elle's classmates compete in an elaborate Color War and go to glam dances that look more like the Met Gala than a school function. Much gossip surrounds the cute transfer student, Marco (Taylor Zakhar Perez), who begins vying for Elle's attention. She, all the while, is pining after Noah (Jacob Elordi), her long distance boyfriend who, we're frequently reminded, attends Harvard as a freshman. His controlling bad boy vibe was the source of much tension in the first movie but here, thankfully, he seems to have toned down the aggression.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Soren Schwertfeger at ShanghaiTech University, where a sizable grant has allowed him to set up an artificial intelligence lab. HONG KONG Soren Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany, and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established. Instead, he went to China. "You couldn't have started a lab like mine elsewhere," Mr. Schwertfeger said. The balance of power in technology is shifting. China, which for years watched enviously as the West invented the software and the chips powering today's digital age, has become a major player in artificial intelligence, what some think may be the most important technology of the future. Experts widely believe China is only a step behind the United States. China's ambitions mingle the most far out sci fi ideas with the needs of an authoritarian state: Philip K. Dick meets George Orwell. There are plans to use it to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the country's ubiquitous closed circuit cameras, alleviate traffic jams, create self guided missiles and censor the internet. Beijing is backing its artificial intelligence push with vast sums of money. Having already spent billions on research programs, China is readying a new multibillion dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start ups and academic research, all with the aim of growing China's A.I. capabilities, according to two professors who consulted with the government on the plan. China's private companies are pushing deeply into the field as well, though the line between government and private in China sometimes blurs. Baidu often called the Google of China and a pioneer in artificial intelligence related fields, like speech recognition this year opened a joint company government laboratory partly run by academics who once worked on research into Chinese military robots. China is spending more just as the United States cuts back. This past week, the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have traditionally backed artificial intelligence research. "It's a race in the new generation of computing," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The difference is that China seems to think it's a race and America doesn't." "It's almost impossible for assistant professors to get this much money," he said. "The research funding is shrinking in the U.S. and Europe. But it is definitely expanding in China." Mr. Schwertfeger's lab, which is part of ShanghaiTech University, works on ways for machines, without any aid from humans, to avoid obstacles. Decked out with wheeled robots, drones and sensors, the lab works on ways for computers to make their own maps and to improve the performance of robots with tasks like finding objects specifically, people during search and rescue operations. Much of China's artificial intelligence push is similarly peaceful. Still, its prowess and dedication have set off alarms within the United States' defense establishment. The Defense Department found that Chinese money has been pouring into American artificial intelligence companies some of the same ones it had been looking to for future weapons systems. Quantifying China's spending push is difficult, because authorities there disclose little. But experts say it looks to be considerable. Numerous provinces and cities are spending billions on developing robotics, and a part of that funding is likely to go to artificial intelligence research. For example, the relatively unknown city of Xiangtan, in China's Hunan province, has pledged 2 billion toward developing robots and artificial intelligence. Other places have direct incentives for the A.I. industry. In Suzhou, leading artificial intelligence companies can get about 800,000 in subsidies for setting up shop locally, while Shenzhen, in southern China, is offering 1 million to support any A.I. project established there. On a national level, China is working on a system to predict events like terrorist attacks or labor strikes based on possible precursors like labor strife. A paper funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China showed how facial recognition software can be simplified so that it can be more easily integrated with cameras across the country. China is preparing a concerted nationwide push, according to the two professors who advised on the effort but declined to be identified, because the effort has not yet been made public. While the size wasn't clear, they said, it would most likely result in billions of dollars in spending. President Trump's proposed budget, meanwhile, would reduce the National Science Foundation's spending on so called intelligent systems by 10 percent, to about 175 million. Research and development in other areas would also be cut, though the proposed budget does call for more spending on defense research and some supercomputing. The cuts would essentially shift more research and development to private American companies like Google and Facebook. "The previous administration was preparing for a future with artificial intelligence," said Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial intelligence. "They were talking about increasing basic research for artificial intelligence. Instead of increases, we are now being significantly affected." China's money won't necessarily translate into dominance. The government's top down approach, closed mouth bureaucracy and hoarding of information can hobble research. It threw a tremendous amount of resources toward curing severe acute respiratory syndrome, the deadly virus known as SARS, when it swept through the country 15 years ago. Yet the virus was eventually sequenced and tamed by a small Canadian lab, said Clay Shirky, a professor at N.Y.U. Shanghai and a technology writer. "It wasn't that anyone was trying to stop the development of a SARS vaccine," Mr. Shirky said. "It's the habit that yes is more risky than no." Authorities in China are now bringing top down attention to fixing the problem of too much top down control. While that may not sound promising, Wang Shengjin, a professor of electronic engineering at China's Tsinghua University, said he had noticed some improvement, such as professional groups sharing information, and authorities who are rolling back limits on professors claiming ownership of their discoveries for commercial purposes. "The lack of open sources and sharing of information, this has been the reality," Mr. Wang said. "But it has started to change." At the moment, cooperation and exchanges in artificial intelligence between the United States and China are largely open, at least from the American side. Chinese and American scholars widely publish their findings in journals accessible to all, and researchers from China are major players in America's research institutions. Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Tencent and Didi Chuxing have opened artificial intelligence labs in America, as have some Chinese start ups. Over the past six years, Chinese investors helped finance 51 American artificial intelligence companies, contributing to the 700 million raised, according to the recent Pentagon report. It's unclear how long the cooperation will continue. The Pentagon report urged more controls. And while there are government and private pushes out of China, it is difficult to tell which is which, as Baidu shows. Baidu is a leader in China's artificial intelligence efforts. It is working on driverless cars. It has turned an app that started as a visual dictionary take a picture of an object, and your cellphone will tell you what it is into a site that uses facial recognition to find missing people, a major problem in a country where child kidnapping has been persistent. In one stunning example, it helped a family find a child kidnapped 27 years earlier. DNA testing confirmed the family connection. Baidu's speech recognition software which can accomplish the difficult task of hearing tonal differences in Chinese dialects is considered top of the class. When Microsoft announced last October that its speech recognition software had surpassed human level language recognition, Baidu's head of research at the time playfully reminded the American company that his team had accomplished a similar feat a year earlier. In an apparent effort to harness Baidu's breakthroughs, China said this year that it would open a lab that would cooperate with the company on A.I. research. The facility will be headed by two professors with long experience working for government programs designed to catch up to and replace foreign technology. Both professors also worked on a program called the Tsinghua Mobile Robot, according to multiple academic papers published on the topic. Research behind the robot, which in one award is described as a "military use intelligent ground robot," was sponsored by funding to improve Chinese military capabilities. Li Wei, a professor involved in the Baidu cooperative effort, spent much of his career at Beihang University, one of China's seven schools of national defense. A company spokeswoman said: "Baidu develops products and services that improve people's lives. Through its partnership with the A.I. research community, Baidu aims to make a complicated world simpler through technology." Still, there are advantages in China's developing cutting edge A.I. on its own. National efforts are aided by access to enormous amounts of data held by Chinese companies and universities, the large number of Chinese engineers being trained on either side of the Pacific and from government backing, said Mr. Wang, of Tsinghua. Driving that attention is a breakthrough from an American company largely banned in China: Google. In March 2016, a Google artificial intelligence system, AlphaGo, beat a South Korean player at the complicated strategy game Go, which originated in China. This past week, AlphaGo beat the best player in the world, a Chinese national, at a tournament in Wuzhen, China. The Google event changed the tenor of government discussions about funding, according to several Chinese professors. "After AlphaGo came out and had such a big impact on the industry," said Zha Hongbin, a professor of machine learning at Peking University, "the content of government discussions got much wider and more concrete." Shortly afterward, the government created a new project on brain inspired computing, he added.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Being able to browse and book certain experiences has plenty of benefits, especially for travelers who take only one big vacation a year and want to make sure they can camp or hike where they want to. Still think of, say, a road trip, where so much of the enjoyment comes from spur of the moment choices. During Labor Day weekend I was in Utah and wanted to visit Arches National Park. Newspapers and social media, even the park itself, warned that the lines would be outrageous. And so imagine my utter delight as we rolled into Arches, not a line in sight, right up to the ticket window where a woman said the park was unusually empty. A big part of the memory of that trip was wondering if we would get in and then driving along the empty road farther and farther, straight into the park, marveling at the red rock and our good luck. Yet parks are not the only places making reservations more prevalent. Places like movie theaters and theme parks that already offer reservations for entry are getting more granular. Last year, AMC Theatres announced that Manhattan would be the first major market where all of its theaters would have reserved seating. More than a decade ago, when the Ziegfeld Theater and Chelsea West were the first theaters in the nation to require reserved seating (you booked at the box office or by phone), New Yorkers were outraged. "It ruins the spontaneity and the pure adrenaline rush you get when you run down the aisle, seats open and ripe for the taking," one moviegoer told The New York Times. At theme parks, there are reservations for practically every experience inside the gates: rides, shows, parades, restaurants, meet and greets. Walt Disney World's FastPass feature, for example, allows visitors to reserve an arrival window for certain attractions as early as 30 days before you get there, or up to 60 days before check in if you're staying at a Walt Disney World Resort hotel. So there you are, deciding whether you want to simulate the G forces of a spacecraft launch or meet Mickey Mouse not to mention what you want to eat in between possibly months before your trip. Thinking about a vacation ahead of time has been shown to boost happiness, so Disney goers with the time and patience to create matching itineraries for the entire family may be in luck. But in the park, all those reservations (which you can skip if you're willing to spend much of your day in standby lines) can detract from, well, the fun. Those of us who for years visited pre FastPass remember getting up at the crack of dawn and the thrill of being among the first to board a barge on Pirates of the Caribbean. All you needed was will and a little luck. In post FastPass Magic Kingdom, after the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train roller coaster opened, I felt anxious. My family always had somewhere to be at an appointed hour. I nudged us along, frequently checking my watch. If I want to do that, I may as well just go to work. Waiting can be good for you. I learned patience on those lines. I experienced the joy of anticipation. I gained an appreciation for the old fashioned art of street entertainment, which Disney's cast members excelled at, while waiting. Reservations are easy and, these days, expected. But long live the lessons learned by waiting; by not knowing. There is a difference between knowing there's a possibility of seeing a princess, and knowing she's waiting for you on the other side of a door. One way offers warm assurance. The other is a roll of the die. There's the chance of disappointment, but also: the chance to find out that, sometimes, when we don't get what we want, we get something better.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Though Beyonce did not attend college, the Houston native explained that she would visit Prairie View A M University, rehearse at Texas Southern University and "always dreamed of going to an H.B.C.U." Her father, Mathew Knowles, went to Fisk University in Nashville. "I wanted it to feel the way I felt when I went to the H.B.C.U. marching band showcase Battle of the Bands," Beyonce explains of the Coachella set, "because I grew up seeing those shows and that being the highlight of my year." Her difficult 2017 pregnancy was more harrowing than we knew. Though Beyonce has talked about battling pre eclampsia while pregnant with twins Rumi and Sir Carter, she reveals that one of the babies' heartbeats "paused a few times," necessitating an emergency C section. Balancing being a mother and a superstar was not easy. Beyonce has said she was 218 pounds the day she gave birth to her twins in the summer of 2017. In the documentary, she details a pre Coachella diet that cut out bread, carbs, sugar, dairy, meat and alcohol she lets out an exhausted sigh and adds that she's hungry. "There were days that I thought, you know, I'd never be the same. I'd never be the same physically, my strength and endurance would never be the same," she says. "In the beginning it was so many muscle spasms. Just, internally, my body was not connected. My mind was not there. My mind wanted to be with my children. What people don't see is the sacrifice. I would dance, and go off to the trailer, and breast feed the babies, and the days I could, I would bring the children." If you couldn't have guessed, this is Beyonce's show. "I personally selected each dancer, every light, the material on the steps, the height of the pyramid, the shape of the pyramid," she says in the film. "Every tiny detail had an intention." (This is also what her Coachella choreographers told us.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
On the third try, the Deep Space Climate Observatory rose into the sky above Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday night atop a Falcon 9 rocket built by the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX. A launch attempt on Sunday was called off with less than three minutes left in the countdown because of a malfunction with a ground radar system for tracking the rocket's flight, and high altitude winds forced the postponement of another attempt on Tuesday. In about 110 days, the observatory, abbreviated as Dscovr and pronounced "discover," is to reach a point where the gravitational pull of the Earth and that of the sun cancel each other out and the spacecraft can easily hold its position, almost a million miles from the day side of Earth. From that location, Dscovr will be able to give 15 to 60 minutes' warning if a wave of energetic solar particles known as a coronal mass ejection is about to slam into Earth. A gigantic solar storm, while rare, could disrupt communications satellites and knock out power grids.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
HONG KONG The military authorization law signed by President Obama on Friday contains a little noticed "Buy American" provision for the Defense Department purchases of solar panels a provision that is likely to dismay Chinese officials as President Hu Jintao prepares to visit the United States next week. Although there are many big issues to discuss, including concerns about North Korea, trade and economic matters are certain to be high on the agenda. And while both sides are aiming to keep the discussion positive the United States is the world's largest importer and China the largest exporter of goods simmering resentments over trade in green energy technologies could be a distraction. China has emerged as the world's dominant producer of solar panels in the last two years. It accounted for at least half the world's production last year, and its market share is rising rapidly. The United States accounts for 1.6 billion of the world's 29 billion market for solar panels; market analyses typically have not broken out military sales separately. The perception that Beijing unfairly subsidizes the Chinese solar industry to the detriment of American companies and other foreign competitors has drawn concern in Congress. The issue of clean energy subsidies is also at the heart of a trade investigation under way by the Obama administration, which plans to bring a case against China before the World Trade Organization. The new Buy American provision, created mainly by House and Senate conferees during a flurry of activity at the end of the lame duck session of Congress, prevents the Defense Department from buying Chinese made solar panels. The American military is a rapidly growing consumer of renewable energy products, because it is extremely expensive and frequently dangerous to ship large quantities of fuel into remote areas of Iraq and Afghanistan. The solar panel provision is carefully written to help it comply with the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization, which would make it hard for China to ask a W.T.O. tribunal to overturn the provision, trade lawyers said. Chinese leaders have strongly criticized such provisions in the past, particularly one in President Obama's economic stimulus package in early 2009 that applied to government procurement of steel and construction materials. But China required in the late spring of 2009 that virtually all of its 600 billion economic stimulus be spent within China, not just for construction materials. Chinese officials in Beijing and Washington did not respond on Saturday or Sunday to requests for comment on the solar panel provision. While the United States and Europe have focused on subsidizing buyers of solar panels, China has emphasized subsidies for solar panel manufacturers. It then exports virtually all of its panels to the United States and Europe, often helped by the American and European consumer subsidies. The solar panel provision in the defense appropriations law comes as President Obama has ordered a broad investigation into whether Chinese export subsidies, local content requirements and other rules have violated W.T.O. rules. As a result of the investigation, the United States started a W.T.O. case on Dec. 22 against what it said were Chinese wind turbine manufacturing subsidies. American trade officials said then that they were still examining other Chinese clean energy subsidy policies to decide whether to file additional W.T.O. cases. The solar panel provision was part of the initial defense appropriations bill passed by the House. The House version had a simple requirement that the Defense Department buy solar panels made in the United States. The Senate, which has been more leery of interfering with free trade, had no comparable provision, however, and many people in the solar panel industry did not expect the final law to have such a provision. But the conference of House and Senate leaders ended up retaining the House provision and modifying it, by adding legal language to require that it also comply with previous American trade legislation. "We've had a lot of money taken out of this country and invested in other places around the world, particularly China, and particularly in alternative energies," he said in an interview by phone. "For them to be producing alternative energy, that's great, but we need to do it ourselves, and as much of it as possible." Mr. Hinchey said he did not think the provision would jeopardize relations with the Chinese ahead of Mr. Hu's visit. "We have provided them with a lot of economic growth there," he said. "A lot of money has gone out of this country and into China, and a lot of manufacturing operations, particularly alternative energy, has also gone into China." Mr. Hinchey had praised the Obama administration in November for starting a broad investigation into Chinese subsidies for solar and wind energy exports, saying then that these subsidies had put a company in his district, Prism Solar Technologies of Highland, N.Y., at a competitive disadvantage. Two prominent trade lawyers said in e mails over the weekend that the law's language meant that in practice, the Defense Department must buy solar panels from any country that signs the W.T.O.'s side agreement on government procurement. Earlier American trade laws require compliance with that agreement. Virtually all industrialized countries have signed the side agreement, which requires free trade in government purchases. China vowed to sign it as soon as possible when it joined the W.T.O. in November 2001, but still has not done so. The two trade lawyers said that the United States was within its rights to discriminate against Chinese solar panels in military procurement. "The W.T.O. Government Procurement Agreement allows signatory countries, including the United States in its Defense Department contracts, to favor goods from countries that have signed that agreement over countries that have not," said Carolyn B. Gleason, a partner at McDermott Will Emery in Washington who is one of the best known litigators of W.T.O. cases. Alan Wolff, a former senior American trade official who is now the chairman of the trade practice at the law firm Dewey LeBoeuf in Washington, said that it was hard to understand China's resistance to signing the agreement. "There would be a clear benefit both for it and its trading partners," he said. Solar panels are technologically complex to manufacture, and are made almost entirely in industrialized countries that have signed the W.T.O. side agreement or in China. Inland Chinese provinces and cities have strongly lobbied Beijing not to sign the agreement because they want to retain the legal right to continue steering government contracts to local companies, said a trade policy adviser to the Chinese government who insisted on anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the issue. The Buy American provision in the 2009 economic stimulus legislation also has a little known clause allowing purchases from other countries that have signed the Government Procurement Agreement, and not just from American suppliers. Ocean Yuan, the chief executive and president of Grape Solar, a company based in Eugene, Ore., that distributes mostly mainland Chinese solar panels but also American, Japanese and Taiwanese panels, said that imported panels typically cost 20 percent less than American made panels. Mr. Yuan predicted that the new legislation would have a big effect on the American solar panel market, by encouraging Chinese solar panel manufacturers to establish factories in the United States. "This policy will certainly have a negative impact on the imported solar panels from China, which have lower cost over all due to lower labor and overhead costs," he said. Grape Solar sold 500,000 worth of Chinese made solar panels to the American military shortly before Christmas, Mr. Yuan said, adding that he expected future contracts to specify American made panels. The legislative provision was welcomed by SolarWorld, a German company that is one of the biggest manufacturers of solar panels in the United States and which has not followed the example of most manufacturers in moving production to China. "As a long standing and still expanding American manufacturer of solar technology, SolarWorld is heartened that the U.S. government and military clearly grasp the critical role of domestically produced solar technology in the country's national security future," said Bob Beisner, managing director of the company's American subsidiary in Hillsboro, Ore., which is already installing American made solar panels at United States military facilities at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The defense appropriations bill has another provision related to China. It requires that the military conduct an immediate review of its needs for rare earth metals, which are mined elements increasingly crucial in sophisticated technologies. About 95 percent of the world's supply comes from China. The bill also requires the department to establish "an assured source of supply" for rare earth metals by 2015 and to consider setting up a stockpile. Rare earths are essential for a wide range of military hardware, be it missiles or sonar. The Defense Department has been studying its contractors' reliance on Chinese supplies for more than a year. A draft report shared with Congressional aides last fall had a preliminary conclusion that rare earths were very important but suggested that the department's contractors continue to be allowed to buy them from any source.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
As the summer of quarantine continues apace, the streaming services are upping their game, offering the kind of blockbuster entertainments we'd normally flock to the multiplex to consume with a box of popcorn and an ice cold drink. But they only have a handful of those in the tank, and there are still many hours in the day. So, once again, it's time to recommend a few out of the box selections from your subscription streaming services the offbeat biopics, quirky comedies, gritty dramas and cuckoo documentaries worth digging around for. Stream it on Amazon Prime and Hulu. Mister (Skylan Brooks) and Pete (Ethan Dizon) are two Brooklyn projects kids on their own, their fathers absent and mothers lost to the ravages of addiction. This tough drama from the director George Tillman Jr. ("Soul Food," "The Hate U Give") is a portrait of desperation and despair, dramatizing the kind of no romance poverty that seldom makes it to the screen intact. But if Michael Starrbury's script pulls no punches, it also finds moments of lightness and levity in their grim story. Brooks and Dizon are astonishing young actors, while Anthony Mackie and an all but unrecognizable Jennifer Hudson make maximum impact in their brief appearances. A similar story of tough times in the boroughs, as the title character (Slick Woods), just 18, struggles to keep her family together when her mother is arrested. She's got outsized dreams, imagining herself as an influencer and performer, but the direness of her situation threatens to crush her spirits, and the picture often plays as a subtle indictment of the limited options available to young Black women like her. Woods is stunning in the lead, and the writer and director Sam de Jong offsets the melancholy at the story's center with a light touch, offhand intimacy and grainy, throwback aesthetic that recalls earlier New York indies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T." and "She's Gotta Have It." 'Professor Marston and the Wonder Women' Disappointed that we're not getting the "Wonder Woman" sequel we were promised this summer? As an alternative, check out her fascinating and unexpectedly sexy origin story. The life that "Wonder Woman" creator William Marston shared with two women his wife and their lover and their mutual experimentation with bondage helped inspire the comic book character, as well as some of her more controversial early imagery. Angela Robinson, the writer and director, draws those parallels clearly and cleverly, but "Wonder Women" is most remarkable for the nuance it gives to its central relationship, treating what could've been a giggly sexcapade with genuine complexity and sensitivity. It's not just another biopic; this is a lovely story about not only finding love, but understanding and accepting it, on its own terms. Ana Asensio writes, directs and stars in this harrowing but rewarding drama as a young, struggling, undocumented Spanish immigrant in New York City who is offered an opportunity to dig out of her considerable financial hole with one night's work an offer that sounds too good to be true, and proves to be exactly that. Asensio is a powerful performer (she creates empathy from frame one, and holds it), and the real deal as a filmmaker, creating palpable, almost unbearable tension and dread throughout the film's long, scary night. When Todd (James Sweeney) and Rory (Katie Findlay) first meet, they bond over a shared love of "Gilmore Girls." The influence of that show's rat tat tat dialogue, pop culture savvy and unabashed sentimentality are all over this unconventional romantic comedy. Sweeney also wrote and directed, augmenting the normally drab rom com template with a cornucopia of quirky and unexpected visual flourishes, and his screenplay is painfully astute, displaying an enviable ear for how the affectations and witticisms of dating fall away, with the right partner, to confession and vulnerability. The story is deceptively simple: two young Williamsburg women (played with delicious smarm by Bridey Elliott and Clare McNulty) try to traverse Brooklyn for a day at the beach. But the writing and directing duo of Sarah Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers use that thin setup as a clothesline, upon which they hang scathingly satirical vignettes of borough bohemia, and the degrees to which these unapologetically self involved characters will undercut each other, and themselves. The laughs may sting a bit, depending on how closely you're situated to this world, but they land like punches in a heavyweight bout. Tommy Lee Jones and the "No Country for Old Men" author Cormac McCarthy reunited for this made for HBO effort, which the writer adapted from his 2006 play. Jones both directs and plays White, an atheist professor who has just attempted suicide. Samuel L. Jackson is the born again convict who has saved White's body, and now tries to save his soul. That's the entire premise two men in one apartment, arguing over the very nature of existence and if it sounds dull or stage bound, those concerns are quickly laid to rest by the brilliance of McCarthy's dialogue, the economy of Jones's direction, and the power of these two bravura performances. The Church of Scientology is notoriously sensitive about its media portrayals, so the British television presenter and filmmaker Louis Theroux probably didn't expect much in the way of cooperation when he ventured to Los Angeles to make a documentary about their tactics. Instead, he and the director John Dower decide to cast actors for the former Scientology executive Marty Rathbun to "direct" in dramatizations of his revelations. The ensuing exchange of threats and surveillance neatly proves the filmmakers' point, but "My Scientology Movie" isn't just a lark; it has much to say about the psychology that draws people into the organization, and how it remains with them even if they break free. Baseball fans looking to fill the summer void will enjoy this informative documentary from the directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg. Their focus is the wildly unpredictable but often effective no spin pitch of the title, practiced by only a handful of pitchers at any given time, and only two when the film was shot in the 2011 season: Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox and R.A. Dickey of the New York Mets. The storytelling is compelling and the filmmaking is sharp particularly the tight close ups and slow motion photography that capture the power of the pitch while the subjects are so charismatic and likable that the film concludes on a grace note of unexpected, genuine emotion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Growing up, Nicole Negrin spent most weekends at her family's vacation house in Cold Spring, N.Y., where she liked to hike in the hills, stroll the charming streets and take in the picturesque beauty of the Hudson River. But by the time she was in her mid 20s, Ms. Negrin, now 31, found her interests lay elsewhere. "I wanted to be closer to the beach," she said. So she took on the responsibility of creating a new family compound, with advice from her mother and grandfather, and focused her attention on the Hamptons. In 2014, Ms. Negrin toured about 40 houses before settling on one that seemed ideal, in Wainscott, a hamlet in East Hampton. She liked that the 2,600 square foot, four bedroom home was close to most of the places she wanted to be about a 10 minute drive from Sag Harbor, Bridgehampton and the center of East Hampton, with Montauk just slightly farther afield. She also found the angular structure of the house, built in 1989, strangely appealing, with its sloping ceilings, skylights and oddly shaped windows. "I was never really into modern architecture," Ms. Negrin said, but "when I saw this house, I really loved it. It's a really happy house, with amazing light." Never mind that the outdated bathrooms, shell patterned wallpaper, orangy hardwood floors and fireplace surround finished in pebbles made it feel tired. "It just needed an update," said Ms. Negrin, who had lived through several family renovations and could see through the problems to the potential. "We were more excited than stressed to take on a project." Ms. Negrin, who was then working as a lawyer at Ralph Lauren, bought the house for 1.5 million in February 2015, and rented it out that summer while she began to devise a plan for the renovation. Back in Manhattan, she looked for an interior design firm and stumbled upon one close to home. A neighbor was having his apartment renovated by the design firm Hernandez Greene and, based on his recommendation, she decided to meet with the firm's partners, Katrina Hernandez and Joshua Greene. When Ms. Negrin learned that Ms. Hernandez and Mr. Greene had also once worked at Ralph Lauren, it seemed like kismet. As Mr. Greene put it, "People who work at Ralph Lauren kind of get each other." Ms. Negrin, who has since left the company to join her family's business, American Fixture Display, began working with the designers in earnest in early 2016, with the idea of creating a bright, beachy house with a palette of soft, neutral colors. Construction started that March. "We wanted to stay with the architecture of the house: clean lines, simple, nothing too fussy," Ms. Negrin said. "It was a wannabe postmodern house," Mr. Greene said. "The living room had a ton of volume and was all very geometric and angular. We just wanted to pare everything down and make it more modern and clean, with a better choice of materials." They whitewashed the wood floors, replaced the windows and moldings, and hung solid interior doors in place of the old hollow ones. They gutted all three bathrooms, installing expanses of white marble. They resurfaced the fireplace with unfilled travertine. Because Ms. Negrin likes to entertain both family and friends, she was concerned the four bedrooms might not be enough space for guests. So Hernandez Greene designed a large built in sofa for the family room, with cushions roughly the size of twin mattresses. By day, it functions as a lounge area; at night, it can sleep up to three people. The front door was painted bright turquoise Ms. Negrin's favorite color and the plain glass sidelights that allowed passers by to see into the house were replaced with bottle glass windows that offer privacy without blocking sunlight. Finally, the designers added rugs, linen draperies and light colored furnishings upholstered in indoor outdoor fabrics for carefree living. The interior renovation was completed in June of 2016, in time for Ms. Negrin to use the house that summer. Then, in the spring of 2017, the designers tackled the front yard, eliminating part of a circular driveway to make a straight approach, replacing the front steps and adding simple grasses. In total, the changes cost about 250,000, and delivered exactly the sort of getaway Ms. Negrin wanted. "I get happy every single time I'm driving out there," she said. "I walk in, and it's just super relaxing vibes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Makers of Self Driving Cars Ask What to Do With Human Nature EVEN before Tesla revealed that a fatal accident had occurred while one of its cars was in semiautonomous driving mode, a debate was well underway between researchers and engineers: Is it possible to get a driver to safely take back control of a car once the vehicle has started driving itself? The question is relevant not only for cars of the future but also for ones already on the road. While the Tesla Model S has been getting all the attention in the last week, the fact is that many cars, including models from BMW, Mercedes Benz and Volvo, now have systems that use a combination of adaptive cruise control, lane keeping and automatic braking to enable drivers to briefly take their hands off the wheel and their eyes off the road. Some Tesla drivers have reveled in making videos of themselves using the Autopilot feature. But the more conventional automakers have designed their systems to take control of the car for only a few seconds at a time; the driver must be ready to resume command at any time. In the safety agency's taxonomy, the next step would be Level 3, which describes vehicles that can drive on their own in specific circumstances, such as on the highway, but still require a human driver to be "available for occasional control, but with sufficiently comfortable transition time." But the technology giant Google, as it continues working toward what the company hopes will one day be a commercially available autonomous vehicle, has concluded that meeting such a requirement is not possible and the only safe way to proceed is to take the driver out of the equation. Some conventional automakers are beginning to agree. Volvo, whose Level 2 cars include the 2017 S90, has decided to skip the Level 3 stage. Like Google, Volvo is pursuing Level 4 cars fully autonomous vehicles that don't require any driver input aside from setting a destination. A car changing lanes at 50 miles per hour should not expect a driver to be able to suddenly take control, said Erik Coelingh, who leads Volvo's autonomous vehicle research program, Drive Me. "Some people can take control in 10 seconds, but if someone fell asleep it could take two minutes," he said. A camera used in Volvo's project to develop a fully self driving car. "I was in a driving simulator a couple of weeks ago, and they asked me to play Dots on my phone" while the virtual car was in control, Mr. Coelingh said. "Then there was a voice asking me politely to take control, and I was like, 'Just give me a couple more seconds to beat the high score.'" Experiments conducted last year by Virginia Tech researchers and supported by the national safety administration found that it took drivers of Level 3 cars an average of 17 seconds to respond to takeover requests. In that period, a vehicle going 65 m.p.h. would have traveled 1,621 feet more than five football fields. Despite such startling findings, some automakers and researchers say it is too soon to abandon human intervention as vehicles become more autonomous. "I'm hesitant to write off Level 3," said Shane McLaughlin, the director of the Center for Automated Vehicle Systems at Virginia Tech, who thinks additional technology may yet solve the human handoff problem. "I feel like we can get the machine to give the person enough time to react," he said. Those in favor of taking a step by step transition that includes Level 3 cars point to the serious challenges still facing developers of fully autonomous Level 4 vehicles. Gill Pratt, who was recruited to lead Toyota's five year, 1 billion project in automotive artificial intelligence, gave a presentation in January highlighting the ways a completely autonomous vehicle would need to be able to handle unusual situations. A viable autonomous car would need to be able, he said, to avoid a mattress falling off a moving truck on a crowded highway, even if it had never encountered such a situation before. Erik Coelingh, who leads Volvo's autonomous vehicle research program, said a car changing lanes at 50 miles per hour should not expect a driver to be able to suddenly take control. Manuela Papadopol, the director of global marketing at Elektrobit, a technology supplier to the auto industry, advocates a gradual evolution by carmakers like Ford and General Motors that lets consumers become accustomed to the technology while automakers gather more data on the systems. Audi also supports incremental advances, rather than trying to leap ahead to fully autonomous cars. "We're making sure the conditions are right to begin Level 3," said Brad Stertz, Audi's director of government affairs. "The key part is focusing on driver availability." Mr. Stertz said that when Audi was ready to offer Level 3 features, its system would give drivers audible and visual warnings if they appeared not to be paying attention. The system, planned for an Audi A8 in model year 2018, would at first be able to drive itself only under specific circumstances, such as in stop and go traffic on the highway at 35 m.p.h. or slower.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
It just keeps getting hotter. August has tied July for the distinction of being the hottest month since record keeping began in 1880, NASA said in a news release on Monday. And there's a good chance 2016 will become the third year in a row of record heat. An increase in greenhouse gas emissions and El Nino, a weather pattern that warms parts of the Pacific Ocean, has contributed to temperature increases in 2016, scientists said earlier this year. "But we've had El Ninos before, they haven't given us the record warm temperatures like this," said Gavin Schmidt, the director for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The records being set continue to stack up. August and July are now the hottest months on record. Every month since October 2015 has set a new monthly high temperature record.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Jeff Donaldson's prescient and powerful work is among the more intriguing and vivacious additions to recent art history. Donaldson, who died in 2004 and is receiving his first solo show in New York at the Kravets Wehby Gallery, was among five Chicago artists who in 1968 founded AfriCOBRA, short for the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists. That sardonic self deprecation is reflected in his encompassing, have it all aesthetic, which stubbornly combines the political and the decorative, and more. Much of his work provides artistic affirmation of the Black Is Beautiful movement, enlarging images of black models and performers while also building on Pop Art and '60s psychedelia and presaging 1980s appropriation art, as well as the patterned collage paintings of the British artist Chris Ofili.) This show delineates an impressive multiplicity of methods and subjects. Some works seem inspired by images of gorgeous black women, possibly lifted from magazines, doubling them symmetrically to imply an American present and an African ancestry. Others are enlarged from disturbing news photographs embedded in their surfaces, like the implicitly colonial scene of a black woman in traditional garb and a white man in "Visit Azania" (an ancient word for the southeastern region of Africa that was revived by black nationalists in South Africa during apartheid). Most impressive are several works in a forceful collage style that contrasts smooth and corrugated cardboard. It is first evident here in the stippled symmetry of the masklike "Paternal Homage" of 1971 and expanded upon with the addition of language in "Soweto/So We Too," of 1979. Political posters, ancient mosaics, and indigenous textiles and fashion mingle here, fused by pride in being and joy in making. Fury, too. In his New York solo debut, "All New Women," the young German painter Leonhard Hurzlmeier explores relatively unfamiliar ground in the gap between abstraction and representation, pushing toward both illustration and pure geometry. One of his guides seems to be the elegantly abbreviated, hard edge figuration devised between the world wars by the Russian born French graphic genius known as A. M. Cassandre (1901 1968). But the images are enriched by fluency in modern art, especially Cubism and Picasso's two faced heads, curvaceous Marie Therese Walter images and monumental beached nudes. While echoing Leger's stylization, his figures fit the frame as meticulously as any Mondrian grid. Flattened yet statuesque, these agile Amazons are frequently in motion, their poses simplified by strong colors. "Bandy Mandy" shows a large woman in purple with orange hair, crouching on skates against light blue. Her white hockey stick bisects the image diagonally; nearly all else adheres to right angles, except for the curves of breasts, elbow and rump. "Leisure," which shows a woman in summer white riding a bicycle and accompanied by her dog, is divided by a series of horizontal lines and forms. And in "Rebellion," a running woman brandishes a banner of hot pink the color of the day whose curling corners echo those of her raincoat. Strength and monumentality can be scary. There is a definite dark side to the tiara topped woman of "Robber Baroness," who both wears and steals pearls, and the not so motherly prison guard of "Jailhouse Queen/The Provider," who regurgitates food to unclear purpose. Smaller works on paper, board and canvas are often as deft, and rendered more loosely. For "The Lusting Breed," at Bodega on the Lower East Side, Dena Yago colored five large sheets of store bought felt with a homemade purplish black dye. She cut and scored them with more or less recognizable shapes borrowed from two Courbet paintings one of a woman sifting wheat, another of a woman asleep at a spinning wheel and from three scenes of more contemporary labor, including one of people prospecting for vintage finds in a Salvation Army bin. She worked with an artisanal dyer to add accents of orange, green and ash gray. She asked the artist Brittany Mroczek to embroider a few yellow lines on "The Influencer." And then she pegged up the results like animal hides. Neither attacking the notion of "women's work" nor mining its craft based, collaborative potential to revitalize art practice is a new idea, though both are still needed. But what makes this work so striking is how powerfully it brings out the ambiguous violence of all image making, Ms. Yago's as much as Courbet's. The felt sheets start as rectangles, but the cutouts leave them distorted and fragile, as if the only way to mark a surface were to partly destroy it. The orange dye looks like blooms of rust, and the green like mold. And the bottom edge of "The Grain Sifters," under a long slit, hangs open like a grimacing lip. Intelligence manifests in painting in many ways. In Anoka Faruqee's work, it appears in the meticulously researched and virtuosic interaction of color and pattern. Ms. Faruqee was initially inspired by Josef Albers's "Interaction of Color" (1963) she teaches art at Yale University, as did Albers but her second show at Koenig Clinton, "Rainbows and Bruises," also draws upon the Op Art painter Bridget Riley's writings on the Post Impressionist Georges Seurat. To make her linen on panel paintings, she applies different layers of pigment, sometimes based on the CMYK model that is, the four color photographic process that incorporates cyan, magenta, yellow and black with specially fabricated steel combs, and moves the paint across the surface to create abstract circular, wave and moire patterns. She then sands the paintings to achieve a smooth, flat effect. There is a digital neatness to the works except when you look at the sides, where the paint and the clear gel filling the negative space left by the combs are allowed to ooze over the edges. Glitches, accidents and mistakes made with the combing process are preserved like fossils or amber in the carefully sanded surfaces. The final effect is disruptive and uncanny. Because of Ms. Faruqee's palette, her paintings feel weirdly spectral and photographic; because of the layered patterns, the surfaces appear to be moving at times. In the same way Seurat and Ms. Riley worked with color and pattern when the technologies of their time like electric lighting for Seurat and television for Ms. Riley were altering human vision and perception, Ms. Faruqee's work serves as an analog counterpoint to pixels and liquid crystal displays. She has created rigorous works that engage the eye, the body and the brain and make you think about how we perceive and process visual information today.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
People moving to Fairfield County from other regions of the country often suffer sticker shock when they begin house hunting. But that was not the case for Rebecca and Peter Cook, who relocated to Ridgefield from San Francisco two years ago for Mr. Cook's job with IBM. Coming from one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, the Cooks weren't intimidated by Ridgefield's 600,000 plus median home price. Rather, they were entranced by the three century old town's signature village center, with its broad, tree lined Main Street, grand historic homes and charming downtown storefronts. Their reaction the very first time they drove up Main Street, Ms. Cook says, was "this is what a small town in Connecticut should look like." The couple focused their search in the Main Street area and managed to claim a seven bedroom, 1890s Victorian for 1.25 million. They are most content. Downtown is only a short stroll away, very manageable with their two young children. And compared with the midcentury modern they left behind in California, the Victorian is "ridiculously huge," Ms. Cook said. On summer evenings, downtown's five acre Ballard Park fills with families in lawn chairs who picnic while taking in the free concerts. The annual Memorial Day parade is an even bigger community event "half the town marches, and half the town watches," joked Maureen Maher, a longtime resident and an agent with William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty. And a cart on Main Street serves that most American of foods, hot dogs, albeit with a French twist. A sidewalk fixture in all but the most brutal weather, Chez Lenard, run by Michael Principi, serves up such gourmet renditions as "Le hot dog Garniture Suisse," which comes with cheese fondue in white wine and kirsch. "In spring, summer and fall, I've got the best job," Mr. Principi said. "In the winter, I'm pitied out here." For all its outward tranquillity, however, Ridgefield (population, 25,000) is still feeling pangs from the recession. Financial industry layoffs drove up the town's unemployment rate from the pre 2008 level of 2 percent to nearly 6 percent, where it continues to stubbornly hover, said Rudy Marconi, who has served as Ridgefield's first selectman since 1999. And there have already been eight home foreclosures this year, with more to come. But Mr. Marconi sees signs of improvement. After all but drying up during the recession, home sales suddenly bounced back to more normal levels last summer. "It was like somebody turned a light switch on," he said. And while the recreation department's fitness center memberships and summer camp registrations dropped off when residents' disposable income dwindled, revenues are now ahead of projections. Located on the western edge of Fairfield County, Ridgefield butts up against Westchester County, where many of its residents work. Its hilly terrain covers 35 square miles, which includes several sizable lakes and some 5,000 acres of preserved open space. About 85 percent of the housing stock consists of single family homes. Colonials and Capes are predominant, though equestrian farms and estates embellish the countryside. Wendy Carlson for The New York Times Real estate offices and restaurants have come to dominate the Main Street storefronts, with independent retailers mixed among them. The commercial corridor extends beyond Main to Danbury Road, where it gives way to a more generic lineup of shopping centers and strip malls. Ridgefield's public library is nearing the end of a 20 million renovation, nearly 15 million of it funded through private contributions, according to Mary Rindfleisch, the assistant director. The renovation incorporates the historic stone front and nearly doubles the old library's size. Behind the library, a new nonprofit movie theater complex, the Prospector, is scheduled to open this summer. The three screen theater, bar and cafe will also serve as a vocational training center for developmentally disabled adults. After perking up last summer, home sales in Ridgefield "took a nice long winter nap," said Ms. Maher of William Pitt. A total of 10 homes sold in all of February. Inventory is very low, with less than 200 homes listed for sale. But Ms. Maher expects a busier spring she has at least four new listings waiting in the wings. The current median sale price for a single family home is 686,000, based on the sale of 26 homes this year, according to Ms. Maher. That's 35 percent higher than the median last year at this time, when 38 homes had sold. 163 Limestone Road A four bedroom three bath colonial with a fireplace on 1.6 acres, listed at 875,000. (203) 733 6177 Wendy Carlson for The New York Times The bulk of single family homes are priced at 500,000 to 750,000. Listings in the 1 million to 2 million range are at a surplus right now. The median sale price for condominiums is 278,000. Of the 25 condos listed in late March, prices ranged from 158,000 for a one bedroom to 835,000 for a four bedroom townhouse. Toll Brothers is seeking to build 30 age restricted condominiums on the former Schlumberger research campus, which is now owned by the town. The developer would pay the town 4 million for the property, Mr. Marconi said. The deal must be approved at a town referendum. The Ridgefield Playhouse books an impressive variety of musicians and comedians the April lineup includes Art Garfunkel, Charles Grodin, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Melissa Etheridge. The town's recreation center has a pool, exercise equipment and fitness classes. An all inclusive family membership is 85 per month. Wendy Carlson for The New York Times	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
ADDRESSING a group of 450 civic leaders at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on Oct. 3, 1968, the chairman of General Motors, James M. Roche, did something almost sacrilegious for an auto executive: he talked about a future product. Roche boldly announced that in the fall of 1970, G.M. would begin producing a small car designed for the American market and priced from 1,900 to 2,300. Developed under the code name XP 887, the subcompact would be about a foot shorter than G.M.'s smallest offering at the time, the Chevrolet Corvair. And it would, no doubt, be better than that star crossed and litigation plagued import fighter from a decade earlier. Roche's plan was largely a reaction to the commercial threat presented by import brands, which were increasingly attracting young buyers. In 1968, the domestic automakers sold nine out of 10 new cars in America. But import sales were expected to top a million in 1969 a number even Detroit couldn't ignore. But in answering that challenge, American automakers were by the end of 1970 producing three of the most notoriously awful cars ever built the American Motors Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto and opening the door for the Japanese onslaught of the 1970s and 1980s. The new models were so terrible that even 40 years later, some shoppers still won't consider Detroit's brands. Their flaws made for cars that comedians would savage, liability lawyers would chase and crestfallen owners would try to pawn off on unsuspecting victims. "Led by General Motors, the giant domestic auto industry was going to flex its muscle and swat the pesky fly of imported cars off its shoulder," John Z. DeLorean, the former Chevrolet general manager, said in J. Patrick Wright's 1979 book, "On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors." The Gremlin, Vega and Pinto were small enough to compare directly with the import standard bearer of the time, the Volkswagen Beetle. All three of the domestic entries were conventional designs shrunken versions of the era's gargantuan sedans with their engines in front driving the rear wheels. G.M.'s ambitions for the XP 887, which would become the Vega, were huge. Instead of being developed by the engineering staff of a single brand, the Vega was designed by the corporate engineering staff under the direction of Edward N. Cole, an executive vice president. It was then handed to Chevrolet's managers to sell. The Vega would be an all new car unrelated to any other in G.M.'s portfolio, using an all new engine, and it would be built at the company's newest, most automated plant, in Lordstown, Ohio. "The Vega came just as the bean counters were rising at G.M.," said John Heitmann, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, about G.M.'s changing corporate culture. "From the first day I stepped into the Chevrolet division, in 1969, it was obvious that the Vega was in real trouble," DeLorean said. "General Motors was pinning its image and prestige on this car, and there was practically no interest in it in the division." Chevrolet had proposed its own small car design and was turned down; as production approached, the Chevy staff's disdain for the corporate model heavy for its size and more costly to produce grew. Worst of all, its 4 cylinder engine was an unfortunate mix of innovation and archaic design. The cylinder head was made of cast iron, a conventional practice for the time, but a special aluminum alloy was chosen for the engine block. "What resulted," DeLorean said, "was a relatively large, noisy, top heavy combination of aluminum and iron, which cost far too much to build, looked like it had been taken off a 1920 farm tractor and weighed more than the cast iron engine Chevy had proposed, or the foreign built 4 cylinder engine the Ford Pinto was to use." The engine wasn't particularly powerful; breathing through a one barrel carburetor, it produced a piddling 90 horsepower; with a two barrel carburetor, that rose to 110. When the ratings were revised in 1972 to net power output from the gross horsepower rating used previously those figures dropped to 80 and 90 horsepower. Ford, meanwhile, rushed to ready the Pinto in light of Roche's announcement and was further pressured by the ascension of a small car advocate, Lee A. Iacocca, to the company's presidency. "The Pinto was the first real 'world car,' " Mr. Heitmann said, noting Ford's production strategy. "It was innovative in the sense that Ford set up a global assembly line with the engines and transmissions made in Europe and the car itself assembled in the United States." Like the Vega, the 1971 Pinto was engineered to a tough 2,000 price point with an equally tough 2,000 pound weight goal. The base engine was a 1.6 liter 4 cylinder rated at 75 horsepower; a 100 horsepower 2 liter 4 was optional. "The Pinto is rolling proof of an economic fact of life," a 1971 car test in The Times observed. "In building an American car for the 2,000 market something has to give. Pinto disappoints in acceleration, braking, ride quality and rear seat comfort." American Motors, though much smaller than Ford and G.M., decided that despite its scant resources it needed a small car to retain the budget minded buyers who had been loyal Rambler owners. It was forced to punt. Instead of engineering a new car, the company's design chief, Dick Teague, took the existing Hornet compact car, knocked 12 inches out of its wheelbase (down to 96 inches) and eliminated virtually all of the sheet metal beyond the rear wheels. The awkwardly proportioned result was named the Gremlin. The biggest advantage for American Motors of this simplified product development scheme was that the Gremlin reached the market in April 1970, about five months before the Vega and Pinto. Lacking the resources to develop a 4 cylinder engine, A.M.C. resorted to installing either 3.3 or 3.8 liter versions of the Rambler in line 6 in the Gremlin. Weirdly unbalanced, the nose heavy Gremlin was primitive even in the context of the early 1970s. It was noisy and handled poorly and like every A.M.C. product suffered from haphazard quality control. But it was never the disaster the Pinto and Vega would prove to be. The Vega went on sale on Sept. 10, 1970, as a 1971 model, but labor strife at the Lordstown plant initially kept the car in short supply. Even before the model year was through, reliability complaints emerged. Its major problem was an inadequate engine cooling system and the fragile marriage of an iron cylinder head with an aluminum block. The metals expanded at different rates as they heated up and the head gasket couldn't keep things sealed. Much of the time, the engines were ruined. Beyond that, by 1972 the Vega was also subject to three major safety recalls, and owners were noticing the appearance of rust in cars just a few months old. While more reliable, the Pinto, which went on sale the day after the Vega, would earn a terrifying reputation. In 1977, while the car was still in production, a scathing article by Mark Dowie in Mother Jones magazine asserted that Ford had knowingly and cynically produced a car prone to bursting into flames in rear end collisions even at low speeds. Citing an internal Ford memo he said was in his possession, Mr. Dowie claimed that Ford had put a value on each life lost in such an accident at 200,000. For that reason, he wrote, the company decided that modifications to better protect the fuel tank from rupturing and possibly prevent as many as 180 deaths a year was, at 11 a car, uneconomical. The problem wasn't that the Vega, Pinto and Gremlin didn't sell. Kept alive by their makers through the '70s fuel crises, they sold by the millions over long production lives that covered much of the '70s. The disaster was that they let down so many Americans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Bret Stephens: Just when I thought the Iowa caucus, and maybe the Democratic nomination, was in the bag for Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg pulled out what looks to be either a largely unpredicted first place finish in the Hawkeye State or at least a close second place. My faith in pollsters is kaput. But my faith in democracy and Democrats just got a boost. Your thoughts, Gail? Gail Collins: Bret, this is turning into a truly fascinating contest. Bernie Sanders, who is 78, is appealing to the youth vote. Pete Buttigieg, 38, has a very strong following among older Democrats. Joe Biden, who was the surefire winner, had an astonishingly poor showing. And Michael Bloomberg is looking like a genius for passing up all the big make or break first primaries. But before we move on with the candidates, tell me what your feelings were about Iowa. Was the first state to vote a disaster or were we just cranky from being kept up late? Bret: My feeling was, welcome to the Twilight Zone. This has already spawned some kooky conspiracy theories, but it's also going to raise serious doubts about the integrity of elections. Gail: I do like your Twilight Zone nostalgia. Who can ever forget the episode where space aliens descended on a small Midwestern state and ate all the ballots? Bret: Of course: Rod Serling's famous Hanging Chads episode. Go on .... Gail: But I have to admit, having gotten past that looong period of who won impatience, I'm feeling more sympathetic to the Iowa Democratic Party. Their priority was not making a mistake. And after all the boredom and the waiting, I'm very confident in their ability to deliver an accurate count. Not that I don't think other states should get a turn to go first. Bret: Beyond that, though, there's a larger civilizational question: Why are things that used to be relatively easy now so darn hard? Counting ballots used to be a fairly straightforward affair. In Iowa, someone had the remarkable idea that an app could make things easier, and instead it did precisely the opposite. We'll have to add this to the list of things we used to be able to do as a country but no longer can: fly to the moon; build highway intersections in under a decade; and teach long division in a comprehensible fashion. Gail: As a technological illiterate, I have long worked under the code of Beware the App. I identify with the people who were running the caucuses on the ground level, just hanging on to the paper ballots. Bret: Both of us know that you are much more technologically literate than I am. But back to Iowa. Does this mean Biden's toast? Gail: Well, he certainly looks crispy. I don't know that he's done he'll be hanging on at least to South Carolina. But so far there is absolutely nothing about the campaign that suggests he's going to go all the way. I'm wondering if the big winner is the man who decided to duck all the cute "We're first!" primaries and wait for Super Tuesday. That would be Michael Bloomberg. Any thoughts? Bret: The consistent theme of this nomination process has been inconsistency: Every candidate who was given up politically for dead, including Sanders and Buttigieg, has roared back to life. And everyone who was supposed to be a heavyweight contender, including Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, has underperformed. So I'd give both Biden and Warren at least one more chance before we write them off for the year. As for Bloomberg, I wish him well but I have my doubts. The strategy of waiting out the early states didn't work for Rudy Giuliani when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2008, skipping Iowa and New Hampshire and hoping to win big in Florida. Gail: True, but trust me he was the worst presidential candidate in the history of elections. Bret: Bloomberg's strategy is to wait until Super Tuesday, but by then it may be too late to make much of an impression, no matter how much money he spends. Politics, like skiing, has a lot to do with momentum, and the results in Iowa and New Hampshire will carry their respective winners a long way. Gail: Yeah, but I'm hoping the Iowa New Hampshire dictatorship is fading. Next time in Nebraska? Meanwhile, this Iowa meltdown really was kind of embarrassing ... Bret: Which is to say, a boon to Donald Trump, who is already gloating. "The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster," he tweeted. "Nothing works, just like they ran the Country." If we were to have something like this on Election Day in November, he'd be liable to claim victory before the results came in, or declare a stolen election in the event the Democratic nominee eventually won. Gail: I have a sinking feeling that whatever happens in November, Trump will be declaring victory. My list of election nightmares range from Russians hacking the system to a massive computer crash in some swing state, to Donald Trump simply claiming "Vote fraud!" and refusing to leave the White House if he loses. Bret: Or, alternatively, the Democratic Party nominating a candidate who can't beat him fair and square. He previewed his campaign themes in his State of the Union the first time in history a president delivered a speech to Congress while awaiting the verdict of an impeachment trial in which he will almost certainly be acquitted. My sense is that Trump has emerged from the impeachment drama no worse off, and possibly politically stronger, than he was at the beginning. Do you agree? Gail: Bret, it's sort of cruel of you to pile that on top of the Dems can't run an election theme. But yeah, you're probably right. Trump's surviving. In the long run, history will judge him as a terrible, crooked president who misused his constitutional powers to try to guarantee himself re election. And confirm that the House Democrats were right in taking a stand against him. In the short term, it looks as if he's going to avoid any punishment for his astonishingly awful misdeeds. Although I nurture hope that before the election there'll be some new evildoing uncovered that makes the sleaziness and corruption of Trump's administration clear even to his fans. Looking at you, Rudy. Bret: Imagine, Gail, if Trump turned the Oval Office into a meth lab. First, the president would call it fake news. Next, Mick Mulvaney would admit it is a meth lab, but that was O.K. because he hadn't yet cooked up any meth, that his real intention was to teach chemistry to indigent 9th graders, and that Democrats are "anti science." Finally, his lawyers would insist that it's unimpeachable because, if the president does it, it's legal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
When a recording of forgotten music on a forgotten instrument appears on the prestigious ECM label, chances are good that something ear opening has been exhumed from the graveyard of history. On his latest release for ECM's New Series, the Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov performs music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714 88) on the all but extinct Tangentenflugel (tangent piano), offering the listener a double oddity: a rarely heard composer interpreted on a rarely heard instrument. The tangent piano represents a broken branch in the genealogy of the piano. It was produced in the second half of the 18th century alongside the fortepiano, the immediate ancestor of today's pianoforte. As early as 1751, Franz Jacob Spath, a builder of clavichords, fortepianos and organs, was producing tangent pianos in Regensburg, Germany, assisted later by his son in law and partner, Christoph Friedrich Schmahl. Fewer than 20 examples, fragile and temperamental, survive. Sight unseen, the tangent piano sounds like the Middle Eastern santur, the Eastern European cimbalom or the hammered dulcimer. Visually, it could be confused with a harpsichord or Viennese fortepiano. Tonally, however, the plucking action of the harpsichord produces a "plick," and the light hammered fortepiano a "pahng," but the tangent piano a "pingk." Of course, unlike those other two early keyboard instruments, the tangent piano is as endangered as the black rhinoceros. The instrument has two knee activated levers under the keyboard, the equivalent of the foot operated damper and "una corda" pedals on pianos today. Raising the dampers allows the strings to resonate, while the "una corda" lever physically shifts the keyboard so that, of the double strings provided for each note, only single strings are struck. On the album, Mr. Lubimov uses a 2006 instrument from the Belgian workshop of Chris Maene, modeled on a 1791 original by Spath and Schmahl that's now in the collection of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, Netherlands. (Given the fragility of the originals, it was prudent of Mr. Lubimov to work on a newly made "antique.") I have examined a similar instrument, built around 1784, at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, S.D., to familiarize myself with this keyboard curiosity. Mr. Lubimov revels in the instrument's sonic inventions. A champion of contemporary music who also has considerable experience interpreting older works on historical instruments, he has chosen, as a perfect pairing to this instrument, the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Never fully embraced by modern pianists unlike his father, Johann Sebastian Bach C.P.E. Bach prospers brilliantly through this combination of performer and instrument. Rather than the elemental abstraction of his father's work, Carl Philipp Emanuel demands distinct colors and a headfirst, visceral engagement between performer and instrument. In Mr. Lubimov's interpretation, strong attacks bloom with bursts of fragrance. Soft attacks, depending on the mechanism used, ring from a distant horizon or whisper through a veil. This music at least the large scale sonatas and fantasias that begin and end the recording demand attentive listening. In a positive way, you can never get in a groove: There's no predictable next note, rhythm, chord or key. Does that unexpected silence at one point mean my headphones cut out? No, this composer wants the listener's ears to remain queued up for the next surprise. And these effects are not the performer's whim: They are exhaustively described in C.P.E. Bach's own tutorial, "Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments." Most revealing throughout this recording is what a liability for this music is the colossal resonance of the modern piano, when even a clipped staccato note can't fully decay before the next one sounds. On the tangent piano, one hears not only the beginning of every note, but the end. The instrument allows Mr. Lubimov to play with this space between notes, which he does with endless creativity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
America has been here before. At the dawn of the 20th century, the economy was already well into a fundamental transformation of the labor force, as industry replaced farming and crafts as the primary source of new jobs. The shift was painful, spawning protest movements and political forces like progressivism. But the United States emerged from the turmoil far more prosperous and powerful. Notably, the jobs of the new industrial economy were generally more productive and better paid than the jobs it left behind. The nation is well on its way through a second transition, this time to a postindustrial economy with little factory work to be had. Even as industrial production has grown, the economy has shed seven million manufacturing jobs since 1980. Manufacturing's share of employment has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs from a peak of nearly 27 percent in 1920. For politicians on the campaign trail and in Washington struggling to come up with a credible strategy to improve the fortunes of America's understandably angry working class, that shift poses an unanswered question: Where will new, better jobs come from? Epochal transformations like these are complicated. They are difficult to understand, let alone manage, and are driven not only by domestic forces but also by global dynamics over which American politicians have limited control. During much of the 19th and 20th centuries, government at multiple levels played an essential role in shaping the nation's transition from farms and small towns to cities and factories. It could do so again. What has stopped it is not the lack of practical ideas but the encrusted ideological opposition to government activism of any kind. The construction jobs once fueled by the housing bubble that burst so violently in 2008 are unlikely to return anytime soon. The jobs picking up the slack today are in retail sales or cleaning buildings, paying little more than 26,000 a year; they are cashier positions paying 21,000, or food prep jobs paying less than 20,000. Some growing occupations pay a decent wage: registered nurses earn 71,000 a year, on average. But these examples are the exception, not the norm. An observation has recently popped up in the academic debate in books such as "Concrete Economics" (Harvard Business Review Press) by J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen, and in "American Amnesia" (Simon and Schuster) by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson. They point out that for all our love of rugged individualism, government played a large and underappreciated role in reshaping the American economy before and it could do so again. Start with high tariffs against imports imposed from the time of Alexander Hamilton, to help foster America's industrial development. Then huge grants of land to build railways in the 19th century not only opened up the West, they vastly increased productivity in agriculture. From catalog retailing to centralized meatpacking, the railways enabled innovations that spawned entire industries. 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. The government also played a crucial role on the other side of this transformation: bolstering workers' human capital. From the Land Grant College Act of 1862, which created a network of public universities, to the offer in the G.I. Bill of Rights to pay for the college education of veterans returning from World War II, the federal government invested aggressively in higher education. In the early decades of the 20th century, local governments across the country poured money and resources into an impressive expansion of secondary education. Between 1910 and 1940, the high school graduation rate of American 18 year olds increased to 50 percent from 9 percent. Finally, the government directly created jobs whether in the burst of infrastructure investment in the 1930s that gave us the Hoover Dam, among other huge projects, or the tenfold increase in federal spending from 1939 to 1945 as the government built up the military industrial complex to fight Germany and Japan. Why American politics turned against this successful model of pragmatic policy making remains controversial. Perhaps it was the increasing footprint of money in politics, which has given more clout to corporate interests lobbying for smaller government and lower taxes. Maybe desegregation led to increasing distrust in government by white voters. Perhaps it was the combination of a recession and high inflation of the 1970s, which discredited interventionist government policies. In any event, there is much the government could do. Start with investment in the nation's crumbling infrastructure: Lawrence Summers, once the top economic adviser to President Obama, never tires of repeating that this not only is urgently needed but is almost guaranteed to be profitable, given rock bottom interest rates. While it might not increase employment by tens of millions, as these jobs tend to require high skills, even a relatively small number of construction jobs would provide a needed economic boost. Then there are health care and education, critical sectors that are growing as a share of the economy and will provide many of the jobs of our future. For both good and ill, they are already deeply entwined with the government. To be sure, that raises additional challenges: Republican governors refusing to expand Medicaid, for example. But it also offers an opportunity for the government to shape, through its power as a regulator and a contractor of private services, the kinds of jobs these industries will offer. Why not insist that home health aides acquire a certain set of skills and be paid accordingly? "The huge issue going forward is, are we going to care for the elderly with a bunch of minimum wage workers or people with a better certification offering better care for better pay?" asked Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard University. "There is a potential win win situation where workers and patients end up in better shape." Similarly, the government has enormous leverage to improve the quality of college education by tightening rules on for profit universities that feed from the trough of federal funds. A better path than funneling so much money to low quality for profits would probably be to help finance public universities and community colleges. Not only would that improve the skills of American workers, which are still considered among the poorest in the industrialized world, but it would also probably improve the wages and working conditions of teachers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Roger Kahn, whose 1972 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950s, "The Boys of Summer," melded reportage, sentiment and sociology in a way that stamped baseball as a subject fit for serious writers and serious readers, died on Thursday in Mamaroneck, N.Y. He was 92. His son Gordon Jacques Kahn confirmed the death, at a nursing home. Mr. Kahn had most recently resided in Stone Ridge, N.Y., in Ulster County, after living most of his life in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Mr. Kahn's 20 or so books, many about baseball, include a couple of novels, a portrait of the volatile but winning 1978 Yankees, a biography of Jack Dempsey and a collaboration with Pete Rose on Rose's own story, published in 1989, just months after he was banished from baseball. But it's fair to say that Mr. Kahn's most memorable work sprang from early in his career. In the spring of 1952, he was a 24 year old reporter for The New York Herald Tribune when he was assigned to travel with the Dodgers. It was a rich time in the game's history, especially in New York, the undisputed center of the baseball universe, home to three teams and three perfervid fan bases. For 10 seasons, from 1947 to 1956, one New York team or another the Yankees, the Giants or the Dodgers won every World Series but one. The Yankees were in the midst of their still unequaled streak of five consecutive World Series victories. Just a few months before Mr. Kahn joined the Dodgers' press entourage, the team had lost the pennant to the Giants, their crosstown National League rivals, in a three game playoff, which ended with Bobby Thomson's "shot heard 'round the world," perhaps the most famous home run ever hit. That stunning playoff loss was one of many anguishing disappointments for Dodger fans of that era. Though they loved the players among them Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and knew they were first rate, they lamented the team's seeming inability to claim a championship. (In fact, up to that time, the team never had; Brooklyn finally won the Series in 1955, beating the Yankees.) It is this fecund territory that Mr. Kahn, looking back from a distance of decades, harvested in several books, often entwining memories from his own Brooklyn boyhood and his coming of age as a journalist with tales from the clubhouse and the barroom and the diamond. Mr. Kahn's 1972 look back at the Dodgers of the 1950s is as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years. "The Boys of Summer," for which he revisited many of the old Dodgers years after their playing days, was the first and, by most estimates, the best of these as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years. "At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams," the book begins. "During the early 1950s, the Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers were outspoken, opinionated, bigoted, tolerant, black, white, open, passionate: in short, a fascinating mix of vigorous men." A handful of previous books among them "The Long Season" (1960), by Jim Brosnan, and "Ball Four" (1970), by Jim Bouton, both written by active ballplayers had sought to illuminate the game in close up, without a mythologizing sheen. Fiction by the likes of Ring Lardner, Bernard Malamud and Mark Harris had set characters redolent of America against the backdrop of the ballpark. Arnold Hano's undersung "A Day in the Bleachers" (1955) described one game of the 1954 World Series from the point of view of the man in the stands. But "The Boys of Summer" along with "The Summer Game," the first collection of Roger Angell's revelatory New Yorker pieces about baseball, also published in 1972 more or less created a new literary category: long form narrative baseball reporting. While Mr. Angell's elegant essays were contemporaneous reports on the game, Mr. Kahn seized on techniques of the so called new journalism; for one thing, he became a character in his own narrative. And with a title taken from a Dylan Thomas poem, he turned his book into a meditation on fathers and sons, the passage of time, teamwork, civil rights and the nature of men themes so seductive and enduring that in connection with baseball they ring as cliches today. Though reviews of "The Boys of Summer" were hardly uniform raves, it became one of those books routinely described as classics. In 2002, Sports Illustrated placed it second on its list of the best 100 sports books of all time, behind only A.J. Liebling's revered collection of boxing pieces, "The Sweet Science." Mr. Kahn's book, it said, "is, by turns, a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy, as the franchise's 1958 move to Los Angeles takes the soul of Brooklyn with it." "Kahn writes eloquently about the memorable games and the Dodgers' penchant for choking 'Wait Till Next Year' is their motto but the most poignant passages revisit the Boys in autumn," the article continued. "An auto accident has rendered catcher Roy Campanella a quadriplegic. Dignified trailblazer Jackie Robinson is mourning the death of his son. Sure handed third baseman Billy Cox is tending bar. No book is better at showing how sports is not just games." Roger Kahn was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 31, 1927, just a few weeks after Babe Ruth and the Yankees swept the World Series from Pittsburgh. His father, Gordon, was a history teacher and baseball fan blessed with such a memory for wide ranging trivia that he helped provide questions for the radio quiz show "Information Please." Roger's mother, Olga (Rockow) Kahn, taught English and had little tolerance for baseball but imbued her son with a love of mythology, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School and spent three years at New York University before joining The Herald Tribune as a copy boy. After his two year stint with the Dodgers, Mr. Kahn covered the Giants for The Herald Tribune in 1954. He later wrote for Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. In the 1960s he wrote two books on subjects other than sports: a consideration of his faith, "The Passionate People: What It Means to Be a Jew in America," and a report on student unrest at Columbia University, "The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel." He wrote regularly for The New York Times in the late 1970s. What has been called the golden age of baseball in New York ended when the Dodgers and Giants announced in 1957 that they would leave for California. After "The Boys of Summer," Mr. Kahn revisited those years in other books, including "Joe and Marilyn: A Memory of Love," about the ill fated marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe; "The Era, 1947 57: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World"; "Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game," and "Rickey Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball," which examined the relationship between Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, the executive who broke baseball's race barrier by bringing Robinson to the Dodgers. In other books Mr. Kahn examined the battle between the pitcher and the hitter ("The Head Game: Baseball Seen From the Pitcher's Mound") and the low minor leagues ("Good Enough to Dream"). His novels were "The Seventh Game," about a pitcher's personal travails, and "But Not to Keep," about a journalist's personal travails. His book about the 1978 Yankees, "October Men," traced a turbulent championship season. Mr. Kahn's marriages to Wendy Meeker, Alice Russell and Joan Rappaport ended in divorce. In addition to his son Gordon, from his marriage to Ms. Rappaport, he is survived by his wife, Katharine Johnson Kahn; a daughter, Alissa Kahn Keenan, from his marriage to Ms. Russell; and five grandchildren. Another daughter, Elizabeth, died within a day of her birth. And another son, Roger Laurence Kahn, who struggled with mental illness and drug addiction, took his own life in 1987. Mr. Kahn wrote about Roger in a memoir, "Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life." In the opening pages of "The Boys of Summer," one passage expressed the purpose of much of Mr. Kahn's writing: the nostalgic yearning that baseball, and Brooklyn, evoked in so many people. Far fewer readers today would recognize the details, but the longing for something gone will always be familiar. "I mean to be less concerned with the curve balls than with the lure of the team," Mr. Kahn wrote about his beloved Dodgers before invoking the image of their home ballpark. "Ebbets Field was a narrow cockpit, built of brick and iron and concrete, alongside a steep cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue. Two tiers of grandstand pressed the playing area from three sides, and in thousands of seats fans could hear a ballplayer's chatter, notice details of a ballplayer's gait and, at a time when television had not yet assaulted illusion with the Zoomar lens, you could see, you could actually see, the actual expression on the actual face of an actual major leaguer as he played. You could know what he was like!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
With his 2017 debut, "American Teen," Khalid (whose last name is Robinson) arrived as a teenager from El Paso, speaking for fellow teens, with a peer group of "young dumb broke high school kids" a little proud, a little humble and mostly just dazedly matter of fact. With his long breathed croon floating over unassuming low fi production, he sang about circumscribed but smartphone connected lives, misfiring romances and looming life choices. The immediacy of his melodies, the Everyteen sensibility of his lyrics and the direct yearning in his voice quickly found a wide audience. More than a billion streams, five Grammy nominations (though no wins) and a 2018 EP ("Suncity") later, Khalid's second full length album, "Free Spirit," grapples with a more singular, more isolated experience: coming to terms with fame, wealth, broader horizons and lingering insecurity. "Is this heaven or Armageddon?" he wonders in "Free Spirit." He has moved from "we" to "I." The music cushions his unease. It's a generous album 17 songs that rolls along smoothly for nearly an hour, one leisurely midtempo groove after another, while Khalid's voice conveys far more longing than agitation. He has upper echelon producers now (among them John Hill, Digi, Charlie Handsome and Hit Boy), and he's separating himself from the twitchy, narrow band approach of the SoundCloud rap crowd. He's also learning from R B's more distant past. On the new album, Khalid embraces a fuller sound that often harks back to the 1980s and 1990s, with pillowy synthesizers, tickling guitars and multiple layers of his own vocal harmonies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
CHICAGO The puffiness along Carol Ascher's left leg seemed like normal swelling, probably from the high dose of chemotherapy Dr. Karl Bilimoria had injected the previous day. But it could have been a blood clot. He quickly ordered an ultrasound. "We were just being abundantly cautious," he said. Such vigilance is a point of pride at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. But the hospital's tests have identified so many infections and serious blood clots that the federal government is cutting the institution's Medicare payments for a year, by about 1.6 million. Nearly half of the nation's academic medical centers are being punished similarly through one of the federal government's sternest attempts to promote patient safety. Medicare is reducing a year's worth of payments to 758 hospitals, including some of the most prestigious teaching hospitals in the country, with the highest rates of infections and other potentially avoidable complications, including blood clots after surgery, bed sores, hip fractures and sepsis. The penalties, created by the federal Affordable Care Act, have incited a vehement debate about quality at many academic medical centers often revered for cutting edge treatments and top specialists. Are these vaunted hospitals really more dangerous than local, unsung hospitals? Or, as Northwestern and some other academic medical centers argue, are these hospitals being perversely penalized because they are so aggressive in screening patients for problems? At Northwestern, the penchant for ordering lab tests is so prevalent that physicians often refer to a "culture of culturing" that they credit for helping to keep the death rate there lower than at most hospitals. "If you don't look for infections, you're never going to find them," said Dr. Gary Noskin, Northwestern's chief medical officer. Since 2008, Medicare has refused to reimburse hospitals for treating complications they created, but studies have found that the change has not resulted in substantial decreases in harm. Nationwide, infections and other avoidable hospital complications remain a threat to patients, occurring during 12 of every 100 stays, according to a federal estimate. Patients were hurt in some way more than four million times when hospitalized in 2014. The new Medicare penalties, which reduce payments by 1 percent for a year, were begun in October 2014. Last December, Medicare announced its second round of penalized facilities, which include Stanford Hospital in California, the Cleveland Clinic, and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, which trains residents from Harvard Medical School. Intermountain Medical Center in Utah and Geisinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania, both of which President Obama has singled out for excellence, also are being penalized. The average penalty is estimated at about 480,000, but most academic centers will lose more since they have higher revenues. Medicare says the punishments are effective and notes that teaching hospitals as a group are improving more rapidly than other hospitals. Dr. Kate Goodrich, Medicare's quality director, said in a statement that the "scores and penalties show an improvement among large teaching hospitals" since the first year of the fines. In some areas, including catheter associated infections, the rate of injuries at teaching hospitals decreased faster than at other hospitals, she said. "It's not only the magnitude of the penalty, but the publicity that comes out of being penalized," said Dr. Kevin Kavanagh, a patient safety advocate from Kentucky. Even hospitals that are improving can be disciplined because Congress required Medicare to fine a quarter of hospitals each year (excluding some special categories such as those serving veterans). Most teaching hospitals penalized this time, including Northwestern, were also fined the previous year. Dr. Atul Grover, chief public policy officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said the fines hurt hospitals, such as academic centers, that have the sickest patients. Medicare is "punishing hospitals for taking on cases that nobody else wants," he said. Andrea Stone, left, and Kaleigh Nolan at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. "Hand hygiene, as easy as it sounds, that takes a lot," Ms. Stone said. Joshua Lott for The New York Times The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been collecting infection reports from hospitals for decades to help experts identify problems and measure progress in combating dangerous germs. Kristen Metzger, an infection prevention specialist at Northwestern, said that since Medicare now uses the C.D.C. reports in determining penalties, physicians sometimes get into disputes with her team about whether a case meets the criteria to be reported. "Every week at our meetings it almost always turns into an argument" about what Northwestern is calling an infection, and whether the hospital is being too strict, Ms. Metzger said. Federal officials are concerned that not all facilities may be diligently reporting infections. In October, the government informed hospitals that it had heard that some employees were discouraging tests that might identify one of the infections the C.D.C. tracks. The government also said it had been told that in some places, employees unnecessarily tested patients upon admission to document infections they arrived with. While saying there was no evidence of widespread fraud, the government invited whistle blowers to report misconduct. Northwestern identifies an unusually high rate of infections around the sites of colon surgeries, about one in every 19 operations, according to Medicare's most recent public data. Its rates of blood clots after surgeries are also high. The hospital reports one urinary tract infection for every 260 days that patients in the intensive care unit had catheters in place a rate that is still higher than at most hospitals even after taking into consideration the fact that teaching hospitals tend to have patients with more infections. Medicare is expected to release updated infection rates this week, and a new round of penalties will begin in October. The most reliable way to reduce urinary infections is to avoid using catheters or to take them out as soon as possible, infection experts say. But Rob Bailey, a Northwestern nurse, said that was not possible for particularly ill patients. One of his patients, comatose and obese, arrived with bed sores that would have been aggravated by movement. "I don't think there's anything we could have done differently," Mr. Bailey said. During the first three months the patient was at Northwestern, the hospital reported three infections in that patient to the C.D.C. In some instances, Northwestern officials say, they have room for improvement. The hospital requires nursing supervisors and their teams to "audit" nurses at least 20 times each month by watching them as they insert and maintain catheters. "Hand hygiene, as easy as it sounds, that takes a lot," Andrea Stone, a nurse manager, said. "People get busy, and it's a teaching hospital, and if you're in a group and the doctor or the attending is talking with the entire team, people might not be as focused." Dr. Richard Wunderink, medical director of the intensive care unit, said Northwestern's focus on the conditions that determine Medicare penalties has detracted from more prevalent medical challenges, such as how to reduce pneumonias in patients on ventilators, he said. "There's no penalty right now for pneumonias," Dr. Wunderink said. "We are spending time on things that are maybe less important from a patient care perspective but more important from a financial perspective." Not every expert believes teaching hospitals are inherently more meticulous in screening patients. "I see transfers from community hospitals, and they tend to do just as many cultures as we do," said Dr. Jennifer Meddings, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Medical School whose research focuses on infections. Ms. Ascher, Dr. Bilimoria's patient with the swollen leg, praised Northwestern for its thoroughness. She has had four surgeries for melanoma on her left leg. During her treatment, doctors inadvertently discovered a brain aneurysm, which she said "they found only because they were so thorough because of the testing they did on me." One of the cancer surgeries led to an infection, which Dr. Bilimoria said was not unusual for the rare procedure he performed, a type that usually takes place only at academic medical centers. "It was caught soon enough that I didn't have any real problems with it," Ms. Ascher, 74, said. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm at the best hospital there is, and we have lots of hospitals to choose from in this city."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Credit...Kevin Miyazaki for The New York Times A few days after first grade ended, in June 1967, I boarded a train pulling out of Union Station in Chicago with my parents, younger brother and baby sister. My father, a University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate, had decided to bail out of academia and move to San Francisco, where he planned to devote himself to writing poetry and where, coincidentally, the Summer of Love was about to commence. The counterculture meant nothing to me then, but that summer in San Francisco was to be historic. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of young people across America left their own cities, parents and schools and hitchhiked to the area around the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets to tune into drugs and music, and tune out of "square" society. They converged there, having heard about free food and free love. In that summer of 1967, Haight Ashbury transformed into the epicenter of the counterculture movement. My parents were slightly older than the typical flower children, but they belonged to a cohort of creative people drawn to Haight Ashbury and that moment of cultural change. What they found changed the course of our family's future. But for me, oblivious to what they were seeking, the journey sparked my imagination more than any other single episode in my childhood. The year we spent living in San Francisco in a second floor apartment a few blocks from the corner of Haight and Ashbury left a few memories. But that three day trip on the passenger train called the California Zephyr was imprinted in my mind. As the train started to roll, I stuck my nose to the glass, and for three days and two nights watched half of America flicker past. The flat cornfields of Illinois and Iowa slowly graduated into the rolling hills of Nebraska. A night passed and we were glimpsing the peaks of the Rockies. For a memorable day, the train teetered along tracks perched above impossibly steep gorges, high above rushing mountain streams. Somewhere in the dark, in a place of moonlit buttes, we pulled up at a town where I thought I saw or did I dream? that men waited for disembarking passengers on horseback. I remember the blinding sunlight of station stops in Salt Lake City and Reno, and then again the mountains, the vistas of the Sierra Nevada, the silver rivulets of snowmelt twinkling far below, and finally pulling into the sunset of Sacramento and the fog of San Francisco. I was entranced. Who had built those lonely little farmhouses in Nebraska and who lived there? Was that a real cowboy on a horse in the desert? What was it like to fish with just a dog for company beside a log shack in the mountains? After our arrival, the scenes grow disjointed and few, but distinct: our apartment on Willard Street, a few blocks up a steep hill from Golden Gate Park, where on any given afternoon, bands that I now know were the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, along with many other hippie legends, made young people sway in a patchouli , pot and eucalyptus scented human zoo. Fast forward nearly five decades. I have two children of my own, one in high school, the other in middle school. Their childhoods don't much resemble mine at all. For one thing, they've lived in one city for most of their lives. They have also seen a lot more of the world than I had at age 7. But they had not yet seen what I'd seen at that age: the American continent unspooling in real time for 72 hours, not on television or in the movies, not glimpsed from 30,000 feet above, but at eye level. And I wanted that imagery etched into their memories the way it is in mine. Last summer, I reserved a sleeper car and roomette (a closet size room with two seats that fold down to beds) on Amtrak's California Zephyr. Together the berths would sleep five and set me back 2,881. We would leave Union Station on one of the last days of June, a few days after school let out, as had I. My dad, divorced, remarried and pushing 80, was hale and hearty and game enough to come along with us, a living link to an episode in the history of "Frisco" as he still calls it and the Beats and the counterculture that my children know about as a footnote in their American history books. We boarded the train on a bright, breezy Chicago day, but the weather turned and the sky bloomed a threatening purple as we pulled out of Union Station and headed south and west, into the great green sea of early summer corn. As the train rocked from side to side, we made our way through all the cars toward the rear, and the sleeper cars, narrow walkways lined with utilitarian berths with metal doors. We checked out our new digs, the closet size roomette that my son and father would share, and the bedroom with its pullout couch where my husband and I would just fit, with a pull down mini bed for our daughter. There was a comfy chair by the window, an aluminum sink, clean white towels stowed in cabinets, and a small private toilet room that doubled as a shower. Everything was shipshape, squared away and extremely tidy. Then, as a full orange moon was rising over dark fields, we retired to our berths and tucked ourselves in. All was snug and cozy, a bit like a camper. We fell asleep to the gentle rocking of the train. Dawn cracked deep in Nebraska. The new day's terrain was a subtle shift from Iowa and Illinois a bit less green, more yellow, a little more rolling and much more desolate. The occasional dirt road led to the solitary farmhouse lined with old gnarled trees that looked as if they might have been planted as a shield against the howling prairie wind. We whizzed past silos, the backs of garages, irrigation lines, the occasional horse, with hardly a human in sight. We never noticed it happening, but soon the color scheme changed from cornfields and grass to almost no grass at all, and was dotted with olive drab sagebrush guarded by prairie dogs. At Wiggins, Colo., elevation 4,500 feet, we spied our first mountaintops, almost resembling clouds on the horizon. Somewhere along this stretch of track, our little Amtrak guide to the trip told us that we had passed Hastings, Neb., the town where Kool Aid had been invented. The agrarian nation beyond the window frame ended abruptly on the outskirts of Denver, where acres of scaffolding and cranes, piles of concrete culvert piping and steel beams in rows testified to the building boom in the Mile High City. We rolled into Denver five hours late and were let out for 15 minutes. It was noon and already 100 degrees at that clear, cloudless altitude. We strolled the open air mall around the station, then reboarded. The new conductor was more of an impresario than the last one. He pronounced "Colo rrrrahdoh" dramatically, and would narrate our way over the most spectacular part of the trip, the one winding through the Rockies. The train stopped shortly after we got into the mountains because of what the conductor called a "heat slowdown," tracks so overheated they risked buckling under the train. After several hours of chugging along at less than 15 miles an hour, we finally sped on into Moffat Tunnel, the first vast tunnel hammered out of the mountains, emerging after 15 minutes, now high and deep in the Rockies alongside rushing mountain streams, banked with little shacks. Sometimes people with their dogs and fishing poles waved at us. Here, halfway across the continent, I looked at my dad and my children, playing cards, and thought about how we three generations were watching the same America pass by yet seeing, each of us, a different country. Dad grew up during World War II, and his father, a World War I veteran, was a no questions asked patriot and neighborhood safety captain during Chicago's blackout drills. His son, our father, was in open rebellion against his own parents by the 1960s over his nomadic, poetic lifestyle and opposition to the Vietnam War. I grew up in five different houses and apartments, wishing I had parents who owned a suburban split level and a station wagon like all my friends. And though I gave my children a fairly stable life, they are post 9/11 New Yorkers world weary little sophisticates. At this point, every seat in the observation car was taken. People were loathe to move, for fear of losing their optimal angle on the stunning scenery. Cameras came out, camaraderie prevailed and strangers shared stories. A medical student from Stockholm sitting beside me said she had boarded in Denver just to see this stretch of America and planned to get off the train that night. A woman from Florida was going across the country to visit her daughter in Seattle. "Of course you can fly, but when you fly you can't see anything!" she said. Another rider was an Oklahoma lawyer, a devoted train buff whose grandfather had worked on the railroads. He planned to ride all the way to San Francisco and then reboard the next day and return to Chicago a round trip he'd made many times already. Shafts of sunlight angled past the storm clouds over the Continental Divide as we approached the track's highest point, 9,239 feet elevation. The conductor occasionally took to the public address system to enthusiastically narrate what he called "our adventure." He pointed out Paul Newman's remote and gorgeous Roundup River Ranch for disadvantaged children deep in the Rockies, told us the names of tunnels and gorges, and drew our attention to "Dead Man's Curve," a strip of road perched atop a cliff, at the bottom of which were half a dozen crumpled cars. Back in our sleeping berth as the moon slowly illuminated mountains and small towns, we had arrived at our 30th hour onboard, and we were not halfway to Frisco, but we had surrendered to the pace, and the delays, and had even begun to enjoy it. The kids had now played hourslong rounds of Polish Rummy with their grandfather, bantering and showing off their snark and cleverness to an appreciative audience of one. I stared out the window at the little houses and farms, imagining the lives of those inside. Lulled by the rolling film scape out the window, I became aware of a strange sensation that I hadn't noticed at age 7, when life lay ahead, vaster than the continent. The experience of watching that much of the world go by, foot by foot, mile by mile, gives time a physical, visceral dimension. From my seat, I could feel the past being left behind. It hardly mattered whether we were going 20 miles an hour or 70. We were going somewhere, and that was all that mattered. We pulled into Sacramento and our first glorious California sunset, a sheet of horizontal oranges and reds silhouetting black water towers and high tension wires. In no time at all, we were at our final stop, bidding fond farewells to the train staff who had come to know the children by name. Around midnight, we were tooling through San Francisco in a cab toward our hotel. Any sense of excitement was dulled by the late hour and the long journey, and the kids were nodding off, but as we rode through empty downtown streets in the dark, the familiar smell of eucalyptus and the soft foggy Pacific air yanked me back 50 years. The next morning brought back a nearly forgotten memory: the ubiquitous hobos and junkies who populate San Francisco's streets, and who panhandle much more aggressively than those in New York. While we ordered at a Starbucks on Market Street, the barista caught a man filling the inner pockets of his trench coat with bottles of orange juice. We took a city bus across town to check out Haight Ashbury. The neighborhood is gentrified now in the era of Silicon Valley; expensive, chic and almost touristy. Gone are the Diggers, the street theater group that gave away food and held up large, empty frames for people to step through to change their "Frame of Reference." We passed psychedelic murals, head shops, coffee shops, tie dye and vintage emporiums and purveyors of exotic textiles from Kathmandu. But the hippie wares now come with hefty price tags. My father recognized only one store an old vinyl record shop. At the end of Haight Street, we arrived at the entrance of Golden Gate Park, and a small playground where my dad reminisced about my eighth birthday party an event I don't remember and how he realized only once he had brought 10 children to the spot that he didn't know how to keep track of us. He recalled the famous bands, including the Grateful Dead, that used to play on the grassy hill nearby. I had another olfactory moment that transported me back to second grade patchouli, incense, smoke and, again, eucalyptus wafting from an encampment of young men and women lounging on blankets in the grass, strumming guitars. Of course they asked us for money. My 11 year old daughter, weary from the long day and walk, and no stranger to the homeless in New York, could take it no longer. "I hate this city," she said. Despite San Francisco's many charms, this modern variation of the homeless flower children of the '60s was beyond annoying to my world weary traveler. Holding her hand, I recognized her unease. It was exactly what I'd felt about the hippies a half century ago, when I had wished my dad was more like the father in the Nancy Drew books I had begun to read in second grade a lawyer in the fictional small town of River Heights. As I watched my children clambering on swings, I recalled Joan Didion's horrifying scenes from San Francisco in her collection of essays, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," the drugged out hippie kids, the 5 year olds fed acid by derelict parents in what one described as "High Kindergarten." My parents didn't do drugs and I did not recognize the smell wafting in the streets until someone lit up a joint in high school. Our mother was almost in sole charge of three small children, and while a poetic spirit herself, was never overly enamored of the Beat scene. She spent the San Francisco year pushing a one year old in a stroller around spaced out hippies and up the steep hills. Eventually my parents divorced. My father now says he regrets our journey. He can't really explain why he decided to chuck it all and head west. He remembers that, at the time, it just made sense. Our trip to that revolutionary place brought back a flood of memories of a gone world. The Summer of Love aimed at nothing less than the wholesale transformation of American society. In some ways, the flower children and their fellow travelers, like my parents, succeeded in fashioning a more tolerant America. In many other ways, they failed. But for the 7 year old child on the train, the journey toward the Summer of Love, and not the destination, was what changed everything.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Sara Mearns and Caleb Teicher, two of the most important young figures in New York dance, will stage productions at the Joyce Theater next summer. Ms. Mearns, a principal New York City Ballet dancer, will perform a collaborative and eclectic program that charts her explorations outside of ballet. Mr. Teicher, a choreographer, will debut a new swing dance piece called "Swing 2020." The Joyce is producing both new shows as part of the coming season it announced on Wednesday. Aaron Mattocks, the organization's director of programming, said this week that the Joyce's role as producer stems from its interest in developing "projects that don't have a pre existing infrastructure to produce on their own." It also comes from a desire to help shape the city's dance landscape. "Sometimes what we're finding is that there are gaps in the marketplace," Mr. Mattocks said. "We want to be involved in creating shows that fill those niches." The show from Ms. Mearns, currently untitled, will include a piece by Beth Gill and a restaging of the Merce Cunningham Centennial Solos. It is slated to run July 28 to Aug. 2. "Swing 2020," set to live music by the Eyal Vilner Big Band, will follow, Aug. 4 16.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Two acclaimed novels are making the leap from page to stage in Britain: Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" and Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" will both soon have their theatrical debuts. James Dacre, the artistic director at the Royal Derngate in Northampton, England, announced Thursday that the theater, which had commissioned an adaptation of Mr. Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" by the novelist and playwright Barney Norris and Mr. Ishiguro, would begin performances of the work in February 2019. A national tour is set to follow the run. "'The Remains of the Day' is one of those stories that appear every now and again which seem, almost as soon as they're written, to belong to the world," Mr. Norris in a statement. "It has entered the bloodstream of our culture."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
At 5:15 p.m. on Monday, three apparently middle aged men one carrying a bag from a shoe shop walked into the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna and went to the second floor. There, they walked up to "Golfe, mer, falaises vertes" an 1895 painting of some green cliffs and the sea by Pierre Auguste Renoir that was to be auctioned Wednesday for an estimated 131,000 to 181,000. Then they took it out of its frame and walked out. The robbery lasted just minutes. The men made next to no effort to hide their appearance. The Vienna police were investigating, said Inspector Patrick Maierhofer, one of the force's spokesmen, who provided the above account of the suspects' actions, which were played out on closed circuit TV footage. "It was very quick," he said. "Nobody noticed."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A prominent Broadway producer and Lloyd's of London have fought in court for four years over whether Audra McDonald's 2015 pregnancy, which was cited as the cause for closing the musical she was starring in, qualified as an "accident" or "illness" for insurance purposes. In a filing last week, the parties agreed to drop the case. The production, "Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed," and Lloyd's, the insurance company, filed a one paragraph stipulation in New York State Supreme Court, declaring the case "discontinued." Neither the show's lead producer, Scott Rudin, nor Lloyd's would comment. A spokeswoman for McDonald said the actress had not been informed of the development and had nothing to say. The case began in 2016, when the production filed suit against Lloyd's, asserting that McDonald's unexpected pregnancy, at age 45, forced an "abandonment" of the musical, which closed at a loss.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. Wang Jianlin, chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, the Chinese conglomerate that is emerging controversially as a superpower in the entertainment business, sat in an opulent armchair at the Peninsula Hotel here on Sunday and discussed his business ventures with a casual efficiency. His response to criticism from a member of Congress that Wanda, after a spectacular 8 billion shopping spree in Hollywood, is a propaganda threat and should be subject to more Justice Department scrutiny? It is "not like we are invading," Mr. Wang said, contending that Wanda's goal involves "helping" American film companies "to get more market share in the emerging movies market that is China." (And, of course, making money for Wanda along the way.) Mr. Wang, visiting California to unveil sizable financial incentives aimed at wooing American productions to Wanda's new 5 billion studio complex in China, went on to call himself an "angel" investor. He noted that Wanda had purchased struggling companies like AMC Theaters and Legendary Entertainment "the best companies would not sell to us" and strengthened them. AMC's stock price, for instance, has risen 64 percent since Wanda bought it for 2.6 billion in 2012. But what about concerns that Wanda is moving aggressively in Hollywood as part of a move by the Communist Party to control the portrayal of China on screen? Mr. Wang, who noted that Wanda was focused on entertainment "profit" 14 times during a 40 minute interview, said storytelling decisions by American studios in relation to China, with or without Wanda ownership, were about maximizing returns at the fast growing Chinese box office. "More Chinese elements mean more Chinese profits," he said. Mr. Wang arrived by private jet over the weekend to wrap up Wanda's latest acquisition the company is buying Dick Clark Productions for about 1 billion and dangle an enormous carrot in front of Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Universal and Walt Disney. Wanda and the Qingdao municipal government have established a major incentive program to lure movie and TV production to the 408 acre Qingdao Movie Metropolis. Billed as an effort to "bridge the entertainment capitals of the world," the program will provide a 40 percent rebate on certain production spending in Qingdao, which is about 450 miles north of Shanghai and is the site of Wanda Studios, still under construction. Scheduled to fully open in 2018, Wanda Studios will feature 30 advanced soundstages, including the world's largest at over 107,000 square feet; an underwater stage; and a 221 acre back lot. The rebate on each film or television production will be limited to 18 million. The total amount available to disperse will be 150 million annually. There will be three classifications of rebate productions, according to Wanda, and only one of those would require Chinese cultural elements, Chinese actors and Chinese investors films classified by the Chinese government as co productions that are not subject to import limits. (Only 34 non Chinese films are allowed to play in the country annually and those must suit Chinese censors.) Applications will be evaluated by a 10 person committee of government officials and Wanda executives, a Wanda spokeswoman said. Mr. Wang, a spry former military officer who is said to be China's richest man, said he hoped that an additional 3 billion in Qingdao amenities "international hospitals, international schools, yacht clubs, hotels, shopping" would make American stars and marquee directors more willing to spend months at a time working there. "Like going on a vacation" is how he described it. He added that the incentives were not just about busying Wanda Studios and increasing the supply of movies to Wanda's theaters, both in China, where it controls 3,056 screens, and elsewhere. "Am I a fool? Of course not," he said, with a laugh, before alluding to Wanda's vast real estate division. "Because I attract so many people, that place will become very popular and famous. And the value of the land there will increase. And I can sell more houses." Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. If successful, the rebates could shift the global movie incentives game, in which Hollywood has moved production to locales like Canada, Romania and New Zealand. Legendary Entertainment has plans to film at least two movies under the program, including a sequel to "Pacific Rim." In an interview, Mary Parent, Legendary's production chief, dismissed concerns that Wanda was seeking to push a pro Chinese agenda. "There has been zero interference with storytelling," she said. Ms. Parent, an Oscar nominated producer highly regarded in Hollywood, added that Wanda had made it possible for Legendary to increase its output. "Unlike most Hollywood companies, we're not operating in a resource constrained environment, which creates tremendous opportunity," she said. Still, Mr. Wang's trip probably won't do much to ease concerns by some lawmakers, editorial writers and lobbyists about the ambition of Wanda, which has financial ties to relatives of senior Chinese Communist leaders. In an Oct. 6 letter to the Justice Department, Representative John Culberson, Republican of Texas, called for heightened oversight of Chinese moves in Hollywood. Mr. Culberson cited "serious concerns" about how Chinese media acquisitions "may be used for propaganda purposes." Mr. Wang said that Wanda intended to control 20 percent of the world's movie theater seats by 2020. It currently has about 13 percent, including those run in Europe by the Odeon and UCI Cinemas Group, which Wanda bought for 650 million. By 2020, Wanda aims to have annual revenue of 100 billion and net profits of 10 billion. With its real estate growth slowing, Wanda is also moving into sports. It recently paid 1.2 billion for Infront Sports and Media, a sports marketing company, and tourist destinations, including a 3.5 billion entertainment, shopping and hotel complex outside Paris. "Cash flow for real estate in China is not stable in the long term," he said. Wanda remains interested in buying more Hollywood companies as it seeks growth, including a major studio, he added. "If it is a very good company," he said, there will be "no ceiling" for the price offered. As Wanda pushes deeper into filmed entertainment, the company plans to build a 1.2 billion headquarters in Beverly Hills "to aid in China's entry into Hollywood's film industry and generally promote Chinese culture abroad," Wanda said in a news release. But it is clear that Mr. Wang, who spoke to The New York Times with the assistance of an interpreter, has gotten the message that a bit less bombast might help smooth Wanda's forward march. Take his approach to Disney. In the spring, as Disney was opening its first theme park resort on the Chinese mainland, the 5.5 billion Shanghai Disneyland, Mr. Wang went on the attack. "The frenzy of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the era of blindly following them have passed," Mr. Wang said on state television in May. At the time, Disney called his remarks "patently absurd." On Sunday, however, Mr. Wang struck a friendly tone. "We respect Disney," he said. "Competition is unavoidable," he added, noting that Wanda has five theme park style properties open in China and seven more under construction. "But I respect Disney very much." Mr. Wang said he had personally visited every Disney resort in the world, with the exception of the Shanghai outpost. In person, Mr. Wang came across as a disciplined executive he arrived at exactly 8:59 a.m. for a 9 a.m. appointment and stayed exactly one hour who cared only about making money and not tinkering with scripts. He said that he had not seen any video from "The Great Wall," a coming 150 million Legendary Entertainment film starring Matt Damon. He "is not quite into the technical details like that, because the entire movie sector in Wanda accounts for only one eighth or one tenth of the revenue," he said. Wanda's culture division, which includes the theme parks, domestic movie theaters and sports holdings, made a profit of 43.9 million Chinese renminbi, or 6.5 million, in the first half of 2015, against assets of about 11 billion, according to a Wanda stock prospectus. The more hands off that Mr. Wang can appear, of course, the better Wanda will fare among those calling for heightened scrutiny of its entertainment dealings. But all that matters to Hollywood is Wanda's money. The mainstream movie industry, after all, has been only too happy to self censor its scripts in an effort to appease Chinese regulators and win clearance into a fast growing market. By that measure, Qingdao applications should already be rolling in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Last month, the Crystal Mountain Resort announced it would no longer sell ski lift tickets at its windows on weekends, a startling move in an industry that has historically sought volume and the high margin returns from single day lift ticket sales. The resort, in the shadow of Washington's Mount Rainier, has been plagued this season with overfilled parking lots, long lift lines and mountain roads choked with skier vehicles. The crowds were brought on by a cycle of big storms, yes, but also the crush of skiers who hold Ikon Passes, which grant riding privileges at Crystal all season long. "It's a very imperfect science, pairing demand with snow and terrain," said Rusty Gregory, chief executive of Denver based Alterra Mountain Co., which owns Crystal. "Each resort has to do what's right for its conditions and its skiers." Crystal, which will continue honoring Ikon passes and lift tickets that have been purchased in advance, is not an outlier. The recent introduction of multi resort passes have pushed more skiers to more places, making once sleepy mountains more crowded. Resorts that are within driving distance of major metropolitan areas, in particular, are coping with powder day throngs not seen before.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
But instead of getting to know them through the traditional process of having actors inhabit their hearts and bodies, they are mostly described in screenplay style prose, often delivered by James in a flat, objective voice. When, at times, their dialogue is actually uttered, it may be in voice over or projected like subtitles or in Arabic or Spanish. When their physical presence is suggested, it may be by anyone in the five person cast, and later by anyone else. Nevertheless, as these moments accumulate, the pull of drama is so strong that you begin to feel a Cubist portrait coming to life. That feeling will pass, almost as if it's being deliberately disowned. As such, it's a kind of bravery that the director Annie Tippe, whose production of Dave Malloy's "Octet" was one of last year's highlights, sticks so loyally to the alienating concept. There is nothing literal about her staging. Though the story takes place in movie ready settings like a rooftop in Jordan, an ocean view home on the Pacific Ocean and the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City, the Bushwick Starr's tiny stage is by necessity and design kept nearly bare. The visuals are left to the audience's imagination; when the film's "credits" roll in the form of a projection on a transparent scrim, we learn that the art direction is by "Your Name Appears." All this deconstruction makes it difficult, especially at first, to sense the shape of the story, which is in any case a baggy one, mimicking the waywardness and heightened crises of international melodramas in the manner of Fassbinder and Almodovar. Eventually you grasp the idea that you're seeing a tale of second journeys: Abed, Esperanza and Frankie are migrants who, for personal instead of political reasons, are starting the process of migrating again. Tellingly, one of Esperanza's big songs is called "My Second Love," which encourages people to trade in their first. The second, she tells us, is always the true one. If only two or even three loves were enough for "The Conversationalists." Instead, it keeps layering on its pet conceits as if the idea of parting with any of them were unbearable. But if the play often seems to be privileging the passions of the creative team over those of the characters, the gambit eventually pays off. Powerful dramatic emotion may be deliberately barred by the various intellectual checkpoints the authors have erected but there's one element music that no border guard can keep out.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A year into the Trump administration, Americans have a pretty good idea what the president has been watching on TV during his time in office, largely thanks to his active Twitter feed. But if you look closely, Twitter gives us a sense of what President Trump may be reading as well. Indeed, here are the books that seem to have sat on the White House nightstand this year. Forty two days after taking office, Trump wrote his first book related tweet as president. In a 4.a.m. comment on March 3, he announced that "Green Card Warrior: My Quest for Legal Immigration in an Illegals' System," a book by Nick Adams, a conservative commentator from Australia seeking permanent resident status in the United States, was a "must read."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Thanks to the unfortunate accident of its being held only a few days before Monday evening's Met Gala, the ultimate red carpet runway, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner (or at least its image) has always suffered by comparison. But a makeover of sorts has been going on, and this year's event, the last of Barack Obama's presidency, was a pretty clear acknowledgment that appearance officially matters in Washington, and no one is apologizing, or hiding that fact, any more. From Helen Mirren in purple Dolce Gabbana (accessorized with a purple Prince temporary tattoo) to Kerry Washington in knee length ruffled Victoria Beckham and Madeleine Albright in a black dress slit to the knee, it was a night of big brands, and elegant, sometimes even edgy, dresses. This is partly because of a raised celebrity presence (Kendall Jenner, neither a famed political activist nor one who plays one on TV, attended this year's dinner), but also, and possibly more important, the Michelle Obama effect. Mrs. Obama has been a canny user of fashion since her family entered the White House, leveraging her position and her profile to promote local industry and emerging designers, engage in some subtle cross border diplomacy, and even challenge some classic assumptions about American first ladies having to wear only American designers. She has been gradually raising the glamour stakes at the Correspondents' dinner over the years going from a simple hot pink Michael Kors sheath in 2009 and a red Prabal Gurung with a draped neck in 2010 to strapless Naeem Khan in 2012; embroidered, off the shoulder Marchesa in 2014; and platinum beaded Zac Posen in 2015. This year, however, she wore a beige silk spaghetti strap dress with lace and crystal embroidery and a tulle cape on top sprinkled with Swarovski crystals by Givenchy haute couture. That's about as elite, and elaborate, as fashion gets. It's very, very French. It's very, very 1 percent. It took the old rules and tossed them out the window and dared everyone to get upset. Indeed, the Internet mostly applauded the choice, using words like "full glam" (Fashionista), "stuns" (The Huffington Post) and "glistens" (E! online) to describe the effect. Personally, I found the cape oddly matronly, but the choice, and the reaction, especially its lack of skepticism about either the origin of the dress or its cost, was notable. After eight years, Mrs. Obama has changed expectations completely about what a first lady should wear. And it has apparently changed the tenor of what everyone around her wears, too. As a result, an adult woman looking for inspiration for a black tie event could do worse than look to the Correspondents' dinner for ideas (itself an idea that would have been unimaginable at the turn of the millennium). Though black was the predominant color, on not just Mesdames Washington and Albright but also Christy Turlington Burns (who seemed to be channeling Madame X in Marc Jacobs), Rachel McAdams (a strapless column) and Jaimie Alexander (who went full fishtail in Christian Siriano), white also made a striking appearance on Karlie Kloss (in Derek Lam) and Sela Ward both of whom, like Ms. Mirren, demonstrated that impact can be achieved without too much exposure. Ditto Emma Watson, whose black cigarette pants/strapless white poppy print Osman dress combination was both cool and practical without being cloying. There were some missteps, to be sure, especially the over the top ness of a few ball gowns with trains, but that is to be expected when an event goes from frumpy to relatively fabulous. Now the question is whether this sartorial improvement trend is a permanent change in the way Washington does dressing, or an administration specific moment? We'll have to wait till next year to find out. But it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Especially when it has cast such a radical spell.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park releases his first music since Chester Bennington's death, Common teams up with Robert Glasper and Karriem Riggins, and James Blake unleashes a delightfully confounding track. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. "Don't pull up at 6 a.m. to cuddle with me," Drake cautions on "God's Plan," one of a pair of new songs he put out last weekend, his first releases in months. "God's Plan" which broke single day streaming records on both Spotify and Apple Music is an evident pregame warm up, full of ambient paranoia, modified SoundCloud rap flows and, of course, offhandedly imagistic lyrics destined to become memes: "She say, 'Do you love me?' I tell her, 'Only partly'/I only love my bed and my momma, I'm sorry." For large swaths of the last few years, Drake has been at his tensest, so it's reassuring to hear him rap with muscles and attitude relaxed. That's even more true on the better of the two songs, "Diplomatic Immunity," full of acutely singed boasts and threats delivered with the utmost casualness. A gaseous ramble, it veers from lamentations to accusations with ease. And without a chorus, it feels as if he could go on for hours, a reminder that even though Drake might disappear, he doesn't slow down. JON CARAMANICA Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park's rapper, worked through trauma after trauma in his songs with the band. Now, nine months after the 2017 suicide of Chester Bennington, the group's lead singer, Mr. Shinoda has released the three song "Post Traumatic EP," coping with the aftermath in a suite of three songs "Place to Start," "Over Again" and "Watching as I Fall" punctuated by hesitant telephone messages from friends and concluded by a warts and all monologue about going on with life. The tracks are reverberant electronic dirges; the rhymes, heading into sung choruses, testify to bewilderment, mourning, resentment, self pity and questions about what to do after a cathartic memorial concert: "I get tackled by the grief at times that I would least expect," he raps. It deliberately reveals awkwardness along with righteousness; it's also, very self consciously, the next step in a career. JON PARELES August Greene is a recently formed trio of crossover jazz evangelists: the rapper Common; the pianist Robert Glasper; and the drummer and beatsmith Karriem Riggins. The group won an Emmy last year for "Letter to the Free," a protest anthem straddling the space between dirgelike lament and proud march, and a full album is coming in March. The lead single, "Optimistic," features a guest spot from Brandy, singing of faith and self belief over a beatific bed of voices, even more sumptuous than her typical backing chorus (on standbys like "I Wanna Be Down," say, or "Almost Doesn't Count"). Mr. Riggins's snare and bass drums kick up dust on the offbeats, and Mr. Glasper first on bubbling electric keyboard, then on acoustic piano refuses to let his levitating gospel chords touch the ground. New York fans can catch August Greene on Friday evening at the Highline Ballroom. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO James Blake, 'If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead' James Blake's eerie new single, "If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead," is furtive, fragmentary and proud of its perceptual games. The undulating synthesizer bass line that runs through most of the track keeps dipping toward silence; above it is a quieter, glassy toned loop that's a constant but distant dissonance. Nearly all of the vocals are pitch shifted, chopped up or both, as if Mr. Blake isn't sure he should be undisguised for even a syllable. The refrain is nominally reassuring "You're not going backwards" but it doesn't tell you where you're going, either. J.P. New wave structure meets punk blatancy and 21st century gender fluency in this opening salvo from Dream Wife, a London art school trio with an Icelandic singer screamer, Rakel Mjoll. The three women share ooh ahs with handclaps like the Go Go's; then they blast through three chords with Ms. Mjoll almost shrieking, "Let's make out! Are we just too shy? Are you too shy?" They can play things pretty, but only as long as they wish to. J.P. Ms. Davis and Mr. Taborn are two pianists with an ear for stark clarity and unflinching abstraction. Each is the kind of player whose presence is reason enough to go see a gig: They can hold an entire band together, then throw its bone structure apart with a flick of the wrist. On Friday they released "Octopus," a collection of duets recorded on tour in 2016. The pair ventures often into free improvisations: playfully dyspeptic, scattered, opaque. But on "Love in Outer Space" a Sun Ra classic that Mr. Taborn keeps in regular circulation with his quartet the six beat, Middle Eastern plod grows only more hypnotic over the course of the nearly eight minute performance. Toward the end, a high note starts tolling in a rusty chime; that's Ms. Davis's piano, prepared with a bit of metal clipped to a high B flat string, rattling like a beacon or a tin heartbeat. G.R. The groove is a neo soul throwback, with steady piano chords, a slow creeping bass line and wah wah guitar chords nestling in the spaces. The tune is a whispery male female duet by Leven Kali (the man) and Syd (the woman), sharing a promising flirtation. The lyrics ponder the questions and choices of 21st century courtship. She wonders, "Should I be nice? Should I be rude/Do I text twice? Do I play cool?" while he makes offers both platonic and sensual. It's an update of the lesson of every rom com: Even when things are going just fine, communication can be tricky. Mr. Kali and Syd share the chorus: "Tell me what you like/I can't read your mind, bad as I want to." J.P.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
FRANKFURT The European Central Bank has succeeded at least temporarily in pushing down the effective interest rates on Spanish and Italian government debt. But analysts say the bank must still convince investors that it has the stamina to withstand what could be a long struggle against market turmoil. Spanish and Italian bond prices rose and their yields fell on Tuesday after the central bank stepped in for a second day to buy their sovereign debt, part of expanded efforts to prevent the European debt crisis from deepening in two of the largest economies in the euro currency zone. The central bank's move, much more ambitious than its previous forays into the bond market, has set off a debate about how far the bank legally can go under its charter. According to bank insiders and analysts, the answer seems to be: as far as it wants. But the bigger questions may be how much intervention the central bank's balance sheet can sustain and how much help it will get from European governments. The pan European bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, is politically loaded and months away from having new money brought to a vote by member nations in the euro area. In late trading Tuesday, the yield on Spain's benchmark 10 year government bonds was down an additional 0.1 percentage point, at 5.019 percent. It had reached a record high of 6.458 percent on Aug. 2. The yield on 10 year Italian bonds, meanwhile, fell Tuesday to a one month low of 5.143 percent. To keep Spanish and Italian bond yields at sustainable levels over the long term will be a huge challenge for the European Central Bank, as investors test the bank's resolve. "Once they have started buying it will be difficult to stop buying," said Jacques Cailloux, chief European economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland. As it has when buying Greek bonds in the past, analysts say, the central bank will probably portray its interventions as a means to maintain control over interest rates and hold down inflation not as a rescue of any particular country, which is forbidden by treaty. And analysts expect the bank to make a show of taking as much money out of circulation as it spends buying bonds, to avoid the appearance the central bank is printing money or flooding the economy with cash through so called quantitative easing of the sort the United States Federal Reserve has resorted to in recent years. On Tuesday in Washington, the Federal Reserve stopped well short of such a move, instead indicating it would keep rates low through mid 2013. But it said it might again resort to quantitative easing, if economic conditions did not improve. The European Central Bank, too, is loath to acknowledge any limitations on its monetary policy arsenal. And, in the worst case, it might even engage in quantitative easing if it saw signs of deflation. "We do what we judge necessary to be sure that we deliver price stability," Jean Claude Trichet, the president of the central bank, said last week, repeating a phrase he has used often. Confronted by a fundamental threat to the euro or to Europe's banking system, the central bank might have no choice but to take further action. "They will do whatever it takes because they will be forced to," Mr. Cailloux said. "There are no technical impediments to buying unlimited amounts" of bonds, he added. But that might require effectively printing money. Previously the central bank has intervened only in the much smaller markets for Greek, Portuguese and Irish bonds, spending 74 billion euros ( 105 billion). Some analysts say the bank may need to spend more than 10 times that to maintain control over yields on Spanish and Italian debt. If so, it might have trouble fully offsetting the purchases by paying banks interest to park money at the central bank, as it has done so far. The bank's purchases of Spanish and Italian bonds on Monday and Tuesday, reported by traders but not officially confirmed by the central bank, came amid broader market turmoil after Standard Poor's downgrading of American debt late Friday. The central bank felt forced to respond because last week the cost of borrowing for both Spain and Italy soared to record highs, with yields on their 10 year bonds topping 6 percent a level that could raise the countries' interest payments to ruinous levels and threaten to undermine the entire euro union. And despite the bank's efforts, there were growing signs on Tuesday of heightened tensions in the banking system. Money market indicators showed that European banks' reluctance to lend to one another was approaching levels not seen since the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008. The central bank has acknowledged these tensions. Last week it expanded the low cost loans it offers to banks to ensure they have enough cash to conduct operations. Mr. Trichet said last week that he wanted European governments to take over the bond buying, as they had agreed to do through the stability fund. But the fund may not have enough money to intervene successfully in the huge Italian and Spanish bond markets, and it is not clear that all 17 euro area members will provide the necessary authority. Mr. Trichet also insisted that European governments do more to reduce debt and remove regulations and bureaucracy that impede growth, particularly in countries like Italy and Greece. "The governments have to do their job," Mr. Trichet said at a news conference last week. "This is absolutely fundamental." Uri Dadush, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, argues, as do several other economists, that the financial crisis is becoming too big for any one central bank or government to manage and that they must coordinate their efforts. There are signs that leaders are poised to act if necessary.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Wrong, wrong, wrong to the very end, we got it wrong. Just a couple of weeks ago, political prognosticators in television and print media were describing Indiana as the "most important test" for Donald J. Trump and a "firewall" where Ted Cruz "should do well." It was one of those states Mr. Cruz could have used to force the likely if not "guaranteed" prospect of a contested convention in Cleveland, where, boy, were we in for a spectacular show. Still more recently as in Tuesday the data journalist Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight website, gave Hillary Clinton a 90 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders in Indiana. Mr. Sanders won by a comfortable margin of about five percentage points. You can continue to blame all the wrong calls this year on new challenges in telephone polling when so many Americans especially the young do not have landlines and are therefore hard to track down. Or you can blame the unpredictability of an angry and politically peripatetic electorate. But in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right. Every election cycle brings questionable news coverage. (Remember the potential president Herman Cain?) But this season has been truly spectacular in its failings. It has been "Dewey Defeats Truman" on a relentless, rolling basis. The mistakes piled up: the bad predictions, the overplaying of every slight development of the horse race to the point of whiplash, the lighthearted treatment of what turned out to be the most serious candidacy in the Republican field. The lessons learned did not. Since Mr. Trump emerged as the likely Republican nominee on Wednesday, there has been a steady trickle of mea culpas from those including Nate Cohn of The New York Times who had declared Mr. Trump's nomination was most likely a no go, or who had pronounced big inflection points in which the Trump candidacy would go poof, or who had played up "pivotal states" that weren't even close. The good news is that with Mr. Trump heading for the general election, news organizations will get a second chance to rethink how they approach the race still to come and see how they can avoid the problems of the primaries. Though it seems as if Mr. Trump's success came out of the blue, it didn't. The first signs that something was amiss in the coverage of the Tea Party era actually surfaced in the 2014 midterms. Oh, you broadcast network newscast viewers didn't know we had important elections with huge consequences for the governance of your country that year? You can be forgiven because the broadcast networks hardly covered them. They didn't rate. No Trump, or anyone like him. (Boring!) But here's what happened. A conservative economics professor and political neophyte named David Brat decided he would challenge the House Republican majority leader Eric Cantor for his Virginia congressional seat. There were few Republicans more powerful than Mr. Cantor, so Mr. Brat's bid seemed quixotic. Mr. Cantor's own pollster released numbers days before the election showing a 34 point lead for the congressman, and the closest public poll showed Mr. Cantor up by 13 points.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
On a typical weekend afternoon at Catbird a cozy boutique in Brooklyn's vibrant Williamsburg neighborhood the store is filled with women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, many browsing through a selection of delicate jewelry. Especially popular: 14 carat gold rings, fashioned from thin stretches of hammered metal, chain links or tiny connected balls. Although made from precious metal, each ring retails for much less than 100. And Catbird isn't alone these days in creating fine jewelry that carries a comparatively low price tag and easy to wear sensibility. A growing number of brands are finding that such pieces appeal to customers, particularly women, who are looking for an accessory that is fashionable, affordable enough to buy on impulse and more long lasting than, say, a large costume cuff or bold faux necklace. Astley Clarke, a British company sold at stores such as Neiman Marcus, Liberty and Selfridges, includes in its current offerings a 14 carat ring accentuated with a heart filled with pave diamonds, priced at slightly less than 600, and rings with a weighty, faceted lapis or milky aqua quartz, retailing for around half that price. Alison Lou, a New York City based label carried by Net a Porter and at tastemaker stores including Kirna Zabete and Matches, sells chains with dangling yellow gold pendants shaped like expressive emoticons for less than 500. Monica Vinader, also based in Britain, offers, as part of a large collection, chunky stud earrings with green onyx or moonstone for 160 a pair and a structured bracelet dipped in 18 carat yellow gold with rope details that at less than 200, is a best seller for the company worldwide. "I didn't want to have a brand where you design just for special occasions or just for people who can spend a lot of money," said Ms. Vinader, who has been creating jewelry since 2002. "My aesthetic is very much about pieces that can be worn by every woman, everyday. The fact that I, as a working woman, I can buy them for myself is really important." Jewelers like Ms. Vinader are offering the antithesis of a traditional purchase such as an engagement ring, a pricey investment reserved for a special occasion and typically paid for by a man. "Years ago, jewelry was the domain of men shopping for women, whereas now it's the reverse," explained Eleanor Robinson, the head of accessories at Selfridges. "Women are really shopping for themselves in all price brackets, but especially in this accessible price range. This is a woman who sees it, loves it, and just feels like treating herself or treating her friend to it." She added that the store's sales of precious jewelry with a retail price less than 350 pounds, or 498, has risen 34 percent in the past year. And in the United States, sales of fine jewelry retailing at less than 600 rose 4 percent last year, according to the NPD Group, which tracks the American retail market. Fashion and wearability are key focal points of these jewelry lines. "If women are buying jewelry for themselves, there are slightly different rules that have to be obeyed," said Bec Astley Clarke, the founder of Astley Clarke. "The primary thing that most men are looking for is, 'How many carats is this diamond?' Whereas, if you're buying something for yourself, you're like, 'Is this going to look great on Saturday night?' The primary thing is design." Ms. Vinader noted: "We are competing against Prada or Christian Louboutin, because the self purchasing woman has a choice of accessories, and often a piece of jewelry is competing with a pair of shoes or the latest handbag. "Often," she added, "jewelry wins out because you can wear it all the time." A gradual fashion trend toward less bold jewelry has helped fuel interest in affordably priced precious pieces, which tend to be dainty. "It used to be all about statement necklaces, or more recently, statement earrings," Ms. Robinson said. "There is a real movement towards more delicate items that you might wear every single day. Because they're smaller and you wear them every single day you want them to be perfect and beautiful; because of the size and nature of them, they can be made of gold and still be quite an affordable price." Prices of this type of jewelry are kept low in several additional ways. Monica Vinader works in gold plate, covering items that are cast in sterling silver with a layer of gold. Astley Clarke's line is also, for the most part, plated, as are pieces by other brands, including True Rocks, a British brand that creates sassy pendants with dangling safety pins, razor blades and screws. A large majority of Catbird's jewelry is made in its own Williamsburg studio, with margins and inventory kept to a minimum; wholesaling is limited to 15 percent of the business.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A duplex penthouse at the pinnacle of One57, the vitreous skyscraper with nonpareil vistas of Central Park, the Hudson and East Rivers and almost every landmark on the horizon, sold for 100,471,452.77 to a mystery buyer, shattering the record for the highest price ever paid for a single residence in New York City, and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. While the One57 duplex penthouse was the first to break the elusive 100 million barrier in New York City, it was certainly not the first in the United States. Last year, at least three estates sold for more than 100 million, including the most expensive residence in the country: an 18 acre property in East Hampton on Long Island that sold to Barry Rosenstein, a hedge fund manager, for 147 million. The monthly carrying costs for unit No. 90, on the 89th and 90th floors of the 90 story condominium at 157 West 57th Street, were estimated to be around 21,950, according to the offering plan, a discounted figure that includes a tax abatement negotiated by the sponsor, the Extell Development Company. Extell had initially marketed the 10,923 square foot apartment for 98.5 million, then upped the asking price to 115 million, according to the state attorney general's office.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Of all the ways to get dressed for work, for exercise, for relaxation, for sex, for travel, for war getting dressed whimsically is maybe the least credible. I mean, I'm sure it's a fine choice if you're a clown (literal or figurative) or if you're rooting for the home team or if you're 8 years old. But clothes generally shouldn't speak louder than you, and shouldn't speak as if coming off a pills and liquor bender. (Walter van Beirendonck gets a pass.) DSquared has been screaming for years now. Founded by the Canadian twins Dan and Dean Caten, its signature move is pairing Italian loucheness with outright visual slapstick. These are clothes that wear you, that require a neon personality for a person to even compete. That's not the whole of the company's mission, but it's a significant enough one to put the other parts in peril. But one need only step inside to get a cold burst of DSquared whimsy. Let's assume there's nothing as chic right now as a prison orange bomber jacket. The Catens have a few variations on the idea on display here, but in forms that undermine the idea. Most notable are the Frankenstein pieces, like a slightly puffy orange jacket zipped together with a liner that has a peak lapel blazer collar, and reads CATEN'S PENITENTIARY on the back in big block letters ( 2,090). (There are similar mash ups in the denim section, too.) Like mullets, these jackets send mixed messages. But items of clothing in open conflict with themselves are part of DSquared's aesthetic. That's especially true with its denim, be it the overly worked jacket with tuxedo shirt pleating ( 1,090) or the host of jeans that have been scraped, sheared, stitched and more to within a micron of their life. Even DSquared's suiting and formal wear, which is narrowly cut and a touch on the sleek side, isn't immune to this tug of war: Take the camouflage tuxedo jacket, which is deeply refined and glittery, but also knee slappingly funny ( 2,985). Sometimes the comedy arrives unperturbed, like the belt buckles and beat up ball caps with mock Caten logos that look like stylized trucker hats, or the hiking boot in Crayola primaries ( 795). The company's casual footwear is perhaps its Achilles' heel: sneakers with a graffiti ish logo sewn into the side, or lumpy ones that could easily be mistaken for the Osiris ones you might find in a Lower Broadway window or in a Flagstaff mall. When aiming for something more august, DSquared shows its refinement, like the burgundy side zip double monk ( 950) could hold its own with anything at Leffot, or the patent leather cap toe lace up sneaker ( 545), which, in DSquared's universe, counts as restraint. The store itself is gleaming, oppressively lit and drowning in a club bounce soundtrack of Jason Derulo, Meghan Trainor and anything else that bubbles giddily. The employees ooze new store smell, talking up the inspirations for the new collection and pouring out baby bottles of Evian into tumblers for customers. Unlike the clothing, their enthusiasm is literal. And it's easy to get lost here. Thanks to smart use of partitions and mirrors, this compressed and slightly odd shaped space feels anything but. A spacious fitting room hides out behind a floor to ceiling mirrored door in the middle of the store. (Upstairs is a floor devoted to women's clothing.) Most of the store is currently given over to fall winter clothing, but near the front door, there's a rack and a display case devoted to spring summer that suggests the Catens have refined their eccentricity a bit by looking at the world around them and seeking out kindred spirits. They found those partners in Pop Art. That world produced a set of megaphone loud visionaries who earned respect by tweaking art world norms with the fervor of children. Perhaps the Catens see their work as part of that tradition. In these pieces, they reference widely: an iPad case with the bold, naive graphic flair of Keith Haring; T shirts that channel Jean Michel Basquiat's earthy scribbling; a rain jacket covered in a water print borrowed from David Hockney ( 1,690). Normally the target audience for items like this is the type of person who shops for clothes at the MoMA gift shop, but to be fair, the level of maturity at work here is far higher than in the line's other pieces. That's most clear in the pieces that take this art as a distant, not direct inspiration. By far the most alluring was the calfskin varsity jacket that was pink in the body, white on the sleeves, with a baby blue ribbed suede collar: the appearance of cotton candy with the elegance of a waterfall. It verged on the sublime, announcing itself with authority but suggesting that you may still be keeping some secrets.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... an Hour, and I Need a Background Show 'While You Were Out' When to Watch: Saturday at 9 p.m., on TLC and HGTV. After the successful revival of "Trading Spaces," TLC and HGTV are collectively rebooting "While You Were Out," another early 2000s home renovation show. On "Out," homeowners send an unsuspecting spouse on a short trip and redecorate a room as a surprise. This version, hosted by Ananda Lewis ups the budget to 10,000 per room, which alters the "Hey, I could do that" vibe of the low budget original. But there are still weepy reveals and astoundingly large basements. ... Three Hours, and I Like Gentle Shows	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
In recent weeks, a new cadre of gatekeepers armed with thermometer guns has appeared at the entrances of hospitals, office buildings and manufacturing plants to screen out feverish individuals who may carry the coronavirus. Employees at some companies must report their temperature on apps to get clearance to come in. And when indoor dining resumes at restaurants in New York City later this month, temperature checks will be done at the door. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the practice of checking for fever has become more and more commonplace, causing a surge in sales of infrared contact free thermometers and body temperature scanners even as the scientific evidence indicating they are of little value has solidified. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York last week called for checking patrons' temperatures as one of several ground rules for resuming indoor dining in restaurants, along with strict limits on the number of tables and a mask mandate for diners when they are not seated. Restaurants also will be required to obtain contact information from one guest at each table. There is ample reason for concern. Coronavirus outbreaks like one in East Lansing, Mich., this summer that infected 187 people have been traced to superspreading gatherings at bars and restaurants. And a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one difference between people who contracted the virus and those who did not is that infected individuals were twice as likely to have eaten at a restaurant in the two weeks preceding their illness. The study, however, did not distinguish between outdoor dining and indoor seating, which most experts consider more hazardous. But while health officials have endorsed masks and social distancing as effective measures for curbing the spread of the coronavirus, some experts scoff at fever checks. Taking temperatures at entry points is nothing more than theater, they say, a gesture that is unlikely to screen out many infected individuals, and one that offers little more than the illusion of safety. Mr. Cuomo has allowed businesses to demand that patrons undergo temperature checks, and to deny admission to those who refuse or have a fever, and he is requiring restaurants in New York City that resume indoor dining to check customers' temperatures. The C.D.C. defines a fever as a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or higher; some reports have questioned the accuracy of thermometer guns, however. While temperature checks may identify people who are seriously ill, those are the people who probably won't be socializing much or going out for meals. And a growing body of evidence suggests that many of those who are driving transmission are so called silent carriers people who have been infected but feel fine, and don't have a fever or any other symptoms. Earlier this week, the C.D.C. which in May told employers to consider checking workers daily for symptoms like fever, but appeared to reverse itself in July said it would stop requiring airport health screenings beginning Sept. 14 for international passengers from China, Iran, Brazil and other countries because the checks can't identify silent carriers. "We now have a better understanding of Covid 19 transmission that indicates symptom based screening has limited effectiveness because people with Covid 19 may have no symptoms or fever at the time of screening, or only mild symptoms," the C.D.C. said in a statement. Temperature checks are akin to "getting the oil checked before you go on a long car trip," said Dr. David Thomas, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "It makes you feel better, but it's not going to keep you from wrecking the car or prevent the tires from falling off. It's not going to make your trip any safer." "It's something you can do, and it makes you feel like you're doing something," he said. "But it won't catch most people who are spreading Covid." Most people who spike a fever feel lousy, and presumably would cancel their dinner plans, said Dr. Thomas McGinn, Northwell Health's senior vice president and deputy physician in chief. Temperature checks might pick up a few individuals who are unaware of their fever, he said. But the absence of fever "means nothing," he said. "It's not a very sensitive test." It does, however, convey a strong public health message, serving as a reminder that people must take precautions, and that itself may be of benefit, Dr. McGinn said. "It makes people think twice, and reminds them that this is a big deal, we still need to be careful, you need someone to stand by the door to do that," he said. But here's the rub: While fever can be a symptom of Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, not everyone infected with the virus develops a fever, or many other symptoms, for that matter. Physicians writing in the New England Journal of Medicine have called the phenomenon of symptomless spread the "Achilles' heel of Covid 19 pandemic control." Evidence of asymptomatic spread dates back to early in the pandemic, but has been mounting ever since. A recent study from South Korea published in JAMA Internal Medicine in August offered even more proof, finding that infected individuals who don't feel ill may carry just as much virus in their nose, throat and lungs as those with symptoms and for almost as long. A. David Paltiel, a professor of health policy and management at Yale School of Public Health, says these individuals are the "silent spreaders" who are driving transmission and sparking superspreading events. "You are maximally infectious before you exhibit symptoms, if you exhibit any symptoms at all," Dr. Paltiel said. "You can be exposed and incubating the virus, and be beginning to shed massive amounts of transmissible virus and be a superspreader, without actually exhibiting any symptoms like a fever." Temperature checks will do nothing to stop these "ticking time bombs," he said. "It's a bad idea." Instead, he said, restaurants should push for access to rapid turnaround, point of care tests for patrons. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Interestingly, even seriously ill coronavirus patients who need medical attention don't always have a temperature. Of nearly 6,000 patients in the New York area who were so sick last spring that they were admitted to Northwell Health hospitals, only 30 percent were febrile when they came in, according to a study by Dr. McGinn that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The trend is consistent with earlier reports, including a study from China that looked at more than 1,000 patients admitted to 552 hospitals through the end of January. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported that only 44 percent of the patients had an elevated temperature when they were admitted, though most (88 percent) developed a fever during the course of their hospital stay. In July, the C.D.C. quietly updated its guidance to businesses, acknowledging that symptom and temperature checks "will not be completely effective" because asymptomatic individuals and those with vague symptoms will pass the screenings. But even as the agency warned that "health checks are not a replacement for other protective measures such as social distancing," it provided detailed guidelines for doing temperature checks, advising the use of disposable or non contact thermometers and saying screeners should change gloves in between checks. The bottom line, officials from the federal health agency said, is that screening employees for Covid 19, including using temperatures checks, before they return to work is "an optional strategy businesses can consider implementing depending on their local situation." Peter Kuhn, a professor of biological science, medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California, said his studies suggested that fever is often a first symptom of the coronavirus. And while temperature checks may be useful, he said they should be used in conjunction with a comprehensive package of safety measures that include requiring masks and social distancing, and ensuring good ventilation and access to a flow of fresh air. "Temperature checks are one part of that, but they are only one part," Dr. Kuhn said. "If anyone would argue that they can provide complete safety for indoor dining, that is completely wrong. It's not a magic bullet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A 2018 International Champions Cup match between Manchester United and Real Madrid in Miami. Similar matches have been lucrative for participating clubs, but the tournament's organizer wants it to become a more serious competition. Stephen M. Ross, the real estate developer and principal owner of the Miami Dolphins, flew to Paris this month to speak with leaders of Europe's most powerful soccer clubs, teams that have benefited from the billionaire's largess in bankrolling a summer tournament in the United States and beyond. For seven years Ross has plowed millions into the International Champions Cup, an annual showcase that has become very lucrative for the superstar laden clubs that receive a coveted spot in the competition. But for Ross and RSE Ventures the sports investment company he co founded that controls the I.C.C. the price of running the event has grown to more than 100 million, with no signs of a profit. Addressing management and owners from the likes of Manchester United, Juventus, Paris St. Germain and Liverpool, Ross and RSE executives said something had to change organizers could not keep losing money. According to multiple people familiar with the talks who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting, the clubs were told that either the event which teams treat as little more than a preseason tuneup had to become more meaningful or RSE would be forced to turn off the spigot. While the I.C.C.'s games have drawn some of the biggest crowds in soccer history 109,318 squeezed into Michigan Stadium in 2014 to watch Manchester United beat Real Madrid, 3 1 it has failed to attract the type of investment from broadcasters and commercial partners that is necessary for a profitable future. Since the event coincides with Europe's preseason, most clubs use it as an opportunity to build up players' fitness and test out new, unproven talent. Top performers and big names often play limited minutes if any to the annoyance of fans. Ross's group wants the teams to commit to a tournament with legitimate stakes, one with the kind of competitive tension seen in other events something akin to taking the Champions League, Europe's wildly popular club competition, on tour. The teams were told that, if they agreed, they could make much more money than they currently do from I.C.C. games, while Ross would finally be able to see his investment pay off. Ross's trip included a meeting with European soccer's governing body, UEFA. The I.C.C. organizers want to secure UEFA's backing for any new event by having it partner with them or allow them to use its branding to give the tournament the sheen of excellence and importance they crave. The clubs acknowledged that the tournament needed changes, but no decisions were reached in Paris. Instead, the teams agreed to set up a joint working group with Relevent to study whether another high profile event was desirable or feasible in global soccer's increasingly crowded calendar. They are expected to report back in the spring. The talks came during a critical time for global soccer, as the game's influencers are competing to shape the future of the sport and carve out their own interests. A week after the meeting in Paris, some of the same club officials traveled to Zurich for talks with Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA. Under Infantino, FIFA has created its own international club tournament, a 24 team event to be held every four years, starting in China in 2021. The fortunes of FIFA's new event depend on the complete buy in of its 12 European participants, and their meeting with FIFA concluded with the clubs asking for a seat at the decision making table and the ability to have some control over the tournament, similar to an agreement they already have with UEFA for European club tournaments. Player unions may offer resistance to the I.C.C.'s plan, as they become increasingly wary of stakeholders adding to players' workloads in pursuit of new revenue streams. Two days after the meeting in Paris, FIFPro, the main global player's union, announced it had founded a new council that includes Vincent Kompany, the Belgian star who has spoken out about the number of games players are expected to appear in. Top leagues may also be an obstacle. They have been largely opposed to suggestions for new competitions. The Champions League itself is expected to add at least four more games starting in the 2024 season, and may even overhaul the competition entirely by implementing a so called Swiss model. Under that proposal, all participants would play 10 games in a league format, with the top eight teams qualifying directly for the knockout stages, while the 16 teams below would compete in a playoff to join them. The idea of Champions League on tour, similar to what the I.C.C. would like to become, isn't a new one. In fact, UEFA was considering a something along those lines when Infantino was its chief administrator, before he was elected FIFA's president in 2016. To earn UEFA's seal, the I.C.C. would most likely have to modify its invitation only model, according to a person familiar with the talks. Clubs would have to be considered on merit, the person said, rather than factors like marketability and the size of their fan bases. If such an event came to fruition, it could compete with FIFA's competition and create another front in the often bitter relationship between soccer's two most powerful figures, Infantino and UEFA's president, Aleksander Ceferin. The two have spent much of the last two years clashing over various issues, including FIFA's World Cup. Most recently, tempers flared after details leaked from a meeting between Infantino and Florentino Perez, the Real Madrid president, over Perez's desire to create a Super League that would unmoor the biggest teams from the domestic competitions in which they have played for decades.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
A few years ago, Anna Wintour, David Remnick and Graydon Carter went to see S. I. Newhouse Jr., the man who turned Conde Nast into a gilded publishing empire and who handpicked them to lead its flagship magazines. The economy had crashed. The publishing industry was fighting a financial crisis that amounted to an existential threat. Mr. Newhouse, in his 80s, was approaching the end of his career. They were concerned, they told him at his apartment, decorated with selections from a postwar American art collection, about Conde Nast's future. To succeed, they said, Conde Nast needed strong creative leadership across its portfolio of disparate magazines, the kind of leadership that Mr. Newhouse himself and his longtime artistic director Alexander Liberman had provided for decades. It was Ms. Wintour herself, the longtime editor of Vogue and one of the most powerful figures in fashion and publishing, who was eventually appointed as Mr. Liberman's heir artistic director of Conde Nast, overseeing its portfolio. She and Bob Sauerberg, Conde Nast's chief executive, have introduced a rash of changes, both cultural and structural, that have left some in the company reeling. "Those who want things always to stay the same are not living in the real world," Ms. Wintour said in a recent interview at her office overlooking the Hudson River at Conde Nast's new headquarters, One World Trade Center. "It's like perfection. Doesn't exist." New editors have been appointed at Allure, Conde Nast Traveler, Architectural Digest and Self. And in recent months, a round of layoffs struck GQ, Teen Vogue, Glamour, Self and Allure. Details, the men's lifestyle magazine, was shuttered entirely after 33 years. In a separate interview, Mr. Sauerberg confirmed that Conde Nast took in over 1 billion in revenue in 2015. The company said that while its print business, spread across nearly 20 magazines, remained profitable, revenue there had been flat since 2012. Its digital business is up nearly 70 percent over the same period but that component, as with virtually every other legacy media company, represents a much smaller percentage of overall revenue, which has declined in recent years. Mr. Sauerberg's plan focuses on maintaining print share, and increasing digital revenues through a focus on video and selling some publications to advertisers as a bundle, for example, and by increasing web traffic. Shortfalls in the meantime mean cutting costs, as Conde Nast is required by its parent company, Advance Publications, to show a profit. In interviews, nearly a dozen current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters, lamented a focus on the bottom line and a relentless pursuit of web traffic. Many acknowledged that the era of lavish spending at Conde Nast, with clothing allowances and town cars idling outside the headquarters, waiting to whisk employees to appointments, was not sustainable. But they suggested that financial survival and journalistic swagger the kind that made Conde Nast an emblem of the golden age of publishing need not be mutually exclusive. Mr. Sauerberg defended the recent upheaval as vital restructuring. His aim, he says, is to ensure that his company continues to influence the world. "I am the top of the list," he said. "I am incredibly competitive. I want to win. I want to be the best." Cathy Horyn, a critic at large for New York magazine and a former fashion critic for The New York Times, says that Conde Nast is "a delicate organism, and historically that company has proven that it gets along better with an artistic director." Ms. Wintour, she says, "brings the most institutional knowledge, but the big question is that the outside world has changed so much and can Anna play catch up?" The decisions made in recent months have been Mr. Sauerberg's. But for those who work at Conde Nast, or follow the company, it is Ms. Wintour, or at least the myth that surrounds her, that looms behind every change. In addition to editing Vogue, she oversees magazines as varied as Brides and Golf Digest (Mr. Remnick, at The New Yorker, and Mr. Carter, at Vanity Fair, are largely left to their own devices). She has also grown increasingly influential in Democratic politics. And she has been involved with the recently named Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the annual Costume Institute Benefit at the Met. It is easy to forget that she has been making magazines for decades. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Half a dozen current and former Conde Nast employees described working with Ms. Wintour as a privilege in some ways she has access to improved budgets, the best photographers, and celebrities and socialites to fill pages and a fraught experience in others. She gravitates toward her own distinctive visual style and can be dismissive when displeased, some staff members said. When asked about those accounts, Ms. Wintour stared stonily and asked whether The New York Times was a tabloid newspaper. "Come on," she said. "I am decisive, you know. I don't believe in wasting anybody's time. I like to be honest. I like to be clear. In my own personal career, I have felt almost the most difficult thing to deal with is someone who doesn't tell you what they are thinking." She agreed, when asked, that there was an element of sexism in the way she is viewed. "But I decided long ago that I can't let any of that bother me," she said. "If my style is too direct for some, maybe they should toughen up a bit." In some ways, Ms. Wintour and Mr. Sauerberg make an unlikely pair. He is quiet and studied, and speaks with pride about the technical aspects of the business that he has worked on for some years, including a new content management system, growth on the digital side of the business and improved offerings for advertisers. He is an avid golfer who studied finance at the University of Arkansas. At Conde Nast, he oversaw consumer marketing then served as president before formally taking over as chief executive this month. He does not believe in motivating his staff, he said. "I believe in hiring motivated people and giving them the rein and the authority to do great work." When asked about a view among some of his staff that he is more of a business figure than a creative leader, he conceded that his career had drawn him in that direction, but that he was looking forward to showing more. "You can make the statement that the guy came up this way," Mr. Sauerberg said, referring to his background, "and it is my job to show them that it's not this way." In recent emails to the staff, he drew attention to companywide internal awards as well as National Magazine Award nominations, and pointed to a social media advertising campaign based on a series of videos Conde Nast had put together about its creativity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
ENCINITAS, Calif. You'd be hard pressed to find a more quintessential California surf town than Encinitas, a sun drenched pocket of coastal North County San Diego where wet suits hang like flags from bungalow porches and taco shops promise "No shirt, no shoes, no problem." But when Morgan and Trevor Gates moved back to the area in 2018 after spending a year in Boulder, Colo., it wasn't so much Encinitas's beachy energy that convinced them to buy a home in the neighborhood of Cardiff by the Sea, with its dramatic bluffs and cluster of oceanfront restaurants. It was its elementary schools. "We liked the vibe, the landscape and the downtown that feels like a small town," Ms. Gates said of Encinitas, a 20 square mile city with about 60,000 residents. "But first and foremost, it was the school district." They rented at first, spending nine months combing real estate listings and visiting properties to buy. Their budget ranged up to 1.3 million, and they still owned their home in Boulder, a 1970s A frame cabin on 17 acres. But as in all of Encinitas, homes prices in Cardiff are high and creeping higher, and it soon became clear that they needed to rethink their plan. "We were hoping we could keep and carry our Colorado home," said Ms. Gates. "But once we were in the market, we started considering homes up to the 1.5 million range. We realized that would probably be pushing it on both ends." In early 2019, the couple sold the Boulder house for 1.1 million, then closed a few months later on a three bedroom, two bath, single story, 1966 house in Encinitas with an ocean view. The asking price was 1.5 million, but it needed work inspections uncovered termites and rodents. They settled on a price of 1.34 million, then spent another 100,000 on renovations, including ripping out all the floors and bathrooms, and replacing the kitchen. The headaches were worth it, Ms. Gates said. Her husband, an avid surfer, can get to the beach in 10 minutes. And their three children love the many street fairs, workshops and farmer's markets that Encinitas offers. "Encinitas, and Cardiff especially, has so many random and kitschy events," Ms. Gates said. "I love its crazy, funky vibe." Bil Zelman, 47, didn't start surfing until after he moved to Encinitas with his wife, Megan Power, 41, in 2014. The couple had been living in South Park, a trendy neighborhood close to downtown San Diego, in a 1915 Spanish revival cottage. The architecture was beautiful; the street noise not so much. "In my younger years, living next to a bar was awesome, but as you get older, it changes," said Mr. Zelman, a photographer and director originally from upstate New York. "We sold our house and had a little bit of money so we bought a house up here two blocks from the beach. And we fell in love with how quiet it was." They also loved how quickly home prices were rising. They bought their four bedroom, three and a half bath beach home in the neighborhood of Leucadia for 1.4 million and realized four years later that they had made a smart investment they were able to sell it for more than 2 million. Their next move? Building a custom home on 2.5 acres in Olivenhain, Encinitas's easternmost neighborhood, where dusty equestrian trails roll through winding hills. Streetlights and light pollution are restricted under Olivenhain's Dark Skies policy, which gives it the feel of a rural country outpost despite being 10 minutes from the Pacific Ocean. "Megan has always said, I want to be able to walk out my door and be in nature. This is a budding nature preserve, there's nothing else around," Mr. Zelman said. "And we're still only 20 minutes from the airport." Encinitas, about 25 miles up the coast from San Diego, is sandwiched between two lagoons: San Elijo Lagoon to the south, and Batiquitos Lagoon to the north. U.S. Highway 101, which runs along its western border, is its lifeblood, dotted with restaurants, coffee shops and surfboard stores. 1965 AVENIDA LA POSTA A four bedroom, three bath house built in 1985 on 0.16 acres, listed for 995,000. 858 215 4001. Larger lots and older, more affordable homes can be found in the Olivenhain and Village Park neighborhoods, which sit east of Interstate 5, and both classic beach cottages and sprawling new mansions are on offer in the oceanfront communities of Leucadia and Cardiff. New Encinitas is more suburban, with popular big box retailers like Target and Home Depot and plenty of tract homes, while Old Encinitas, home to the city's downtown and its most beloved beaches, retains its classic beach community feel. The more affordable townhomes and apartment complexes sprinkled around the city, many of them close to the coast along Highway 101, attract younger renters. Prices in Encinitas are climbing and affordable housing is generally scarce a trend that hasn't gone unnoticed by the state government. In 2019, there were 430 single family homes on the market, at a median sales price of 1.4 million. In 2018 there were 417 such homes on the market at a median price of 1.28 million, and in 2017 there were 446 homes at a median price of 1.2 million, according to data from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service. 940 VIA DI FELICITA A five bedroom, five bath house built in 2004 on half an acre, listed for 1.875 million. 858 210 0509 Studios in Encinitas rent for as little as 1,400 a month, with two bedroom apartments going for around 2,500. Renters looking for luxury apartments or ocean views should expect to pay more than 4,000 a month. In 2019, Encinitas was one of more than 40 California cities singled out by Gov. Gavin Newsom for failing to comply with state affordable housing mandates. A new plan to facilitate the development of such housing was approved by the state a few months later, though not without a fight from many Encinitas residents. Earlier this month, the city opened an overnight parking facility for homeless residents living in their cars on the grounds of Leichtag Commons, a property of the Leichtag Foundation, a Jewish nonprofit organization. The Safe Parking Program, led by the city of Encinitas, hosted by the Leichtag Foundation and operated by the Jewish Family Service of San Diego, is the first of its kind in North County San Diego. This initiative also faced pushback in the community. Charlene Seidle, the executive vice president of the Leichtag Foundation, said that nearly all those who utilize the lot either live or work in Encinitas. "This is a community that should be acting to make a difference and not just talking about it," she said. 858 NOLBEY STREET A four bedroom, two bath house built in 1979 on 0.17 acres, listed for 1.349 million. 760 840 9381. "When I was in high school, downtown Encinitas had a laundromat, a movie theater, a couple diners, and a couple funky little beach shops. Now it's where I go on date night," said Dane Soderberg, 41, a real estate agent who grew up in Encinitas. Mr. Soderberg's father, the surfer and filmmaker Steve Soderberg, still lives in town. "Encinitas has maintained its surf culture and laid back heritage while its real estate market and retail space has showed gentrification." Encinitas has seen significant development over the last two decades, including the creation of the Encinitas Ranch planned community of 500 homes, as well as big box shopping and chain dining nearby. (Its only movie theater, the La Paloma theater, is nearly 100 years old.) Peter Caspersen, 39, moved to Encinitas with his wife, Chelsea, in 2009, just before the couple married. Children were already on their mind, and Encinitas with its good schools and great beaches felt like the right choice. (The couple now have two sons, ages 5 and 7). "I don't think you can do better than Encinitas," said Mr. Caspersen, a real estate agent who specializes in San Diego's coastal communities. "My wife would have been happy in a shoe box as close to the beach as possible. And I love the beach myself, and the coastal life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
In Philanthropy, Race Is Still a Factor in Who Gets What, Study Shows Philanthropy often sets out to mitigate inequality. But a research report set to be released next week by two leading philanthropic organizations shows that race remains a defining factor when looking at which organizations get funded and how much they receive. Nonprofit organizations led by black and Latino executive directors lag behind peer organizations with white leaders, according to the report from Echoing Green, an early stage funder in social innovation, and the Bridgespan Group, a philanthropic consultancy. Among organizations focused on improving the outcomes of black boys, for example, groups with black leaders had 45 percent less revenue, and unrestricted assets that were 91 percent lower, than their counterparts with white leaders. The data is being released to show the philanthropic community how entrenched and persistent unequal funding is, said Cheryl L. Dorsey, president of Echoing Green. "It's even worse because it's philanthropy, and we're supposed to be changing the world," she said. The timing is relevant because the coronavirus crisis is a crossroads for foundations: Either they will return to the status quo or they will use this moment to evaluate different ways to fund groups in need. "Pandemics are a reflection of any society's vulnerability," Ms. Dorsey said. She noted that African Americans, just 13 percent of the population, accounted for a third of the cases of Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Ms. Dorsey said she feared that the post pandemic recovery would be even more skewed against people of color unless the conclusions in the report advanced the conversation on structural inequities. "Is this a moment to not just talk about the data but to do something about it?" she asked. "I'm hopeful now that people are attuned to it that we can make some progress." The report, "Racial Equity and Philanthropy: Disparities in Funding for Leaders of Color Leave Impact on the Table," identified three main barriers for minority led nonprofit organizations that seek funding from foundations. The first is establishing connections to a funding organization. The study noted that 92 percent of foundation presidents and 83 percent of full time staff members are white. In general three quarters of white people have entirely white social networks, the report found. "How do you get connected to the decision makers?" asked a co author of the report, Peter Kim, who is Bridgespan's chief learning and innovation officer and co leader of racial equity strategy. "Those peer networks are largely white. If you're not in those networks, how do you get in?" The second is building rapport, which can be more difficult when the funder and recipient do not have common experiences, creating unconscious bias. "'Thank you for coming in' is different than saying, 'I have to reach out to that person we both know,'" Mr. Kim said. The third barrier is creating the measurement reports and statistics that funders seek. Studies that measure a program's impact over time, for instance, can be costly and time consuming. Such requirements also call into question whether the funder trusts the recipient. The data came from Echoing Green, which has been collecting racial and ethnic statistics on applicants to its fellowship program for decades. The fellowships are considered one of the most competitive social entrepreneur programs about 1 percent of the 3,000 applicants are accepted and serve as a respected credential afterward. The report's analysis tracked the efforts of fellowship finalists and semifinalists to get funding. It found that minority fellows lagged behind their white peers. "Folks who are left standing are the best in class," said Ms. Dorsey, a former fellow. "Despite that, these leaders of color are still struggling to gain funding." She said Echoing Green wanted its data analyzed to drive a conversation based on statistically significant findings, not feelings. "We're trying to drive social change, and we just kept hitting the same wall," she said. "We had enough brand equity to say, 'You have to be part of a larger collective response.'" That organizations with white leaders were funded differently from those with black leaders was no surprise to some. Kingmakers of Oakland is a Bay Area organization that works with schools to improve educational and life outcomes for black male students. Its founder and chief executive, Chris Chatmon, said he had to learn early on what he called the language of philanthropy. "I've had experiences with some of the largest philanthropic organizations in America, and just to get there is a blessing," he said. "I just want to be there. I don't want to be too honest and they say I'm an angry black man. I don't want to get purged." But Mr. Chatmon said he had not seen the inequity until he was exposed to similar organizations. At the time, Kingmakers was receiving support from the NewSchools Venture Fund, which backs public school innovation. "I realized white leaders would ask for far more without the same amount of experience," Mr. Chatmon said, referring to the funding that the groups had raised before coming into the NewSchools program. "Folks of color, we would ask for far less even though we had a proven track record." Some leaders of nonprofit groups said part of the problem was a lack of understanding about their communities. Edgar Villanueva, a Native American philanthropist, activist and author, said he often had to spend the first 20 minutes of a 30 minute meeting educating funders about the Native American community. When he worked for foundations making grants, he said, he became aware of what he called coded language of racism that was used to decline organizations led by nonwhite executive directors. Examples included replies that an organization did not have the capacity, or that it felt like a risk, or that its budget was not big enough. "I call them false barriers," Mr. Villanueva said. "Some people in philanthropy are lazy and don't want to do the extra work to reach beyond someone in our network." The pool of applicants can also be limited by a closed process, which is generally set up to make the number of applications manageable. "You have to be in those circles to apply," said Aaron Walker, the founder and chief executive of Camelback Ventures, which aims to promote early stage entrepreneurs. The report does not accuse foundations of intentional discrimination; instead, it points out that many of the funding systems that are in place were created without insight from communities that seek funding. "I don't think people come to a nonprofit and say, 'I can't wait to not fund a black organization today,'" Mr. Villanueva said. "People are people, and they go with what they know." Some changes will come slowly, but others can be put into place quickly. Changing the application process might take some time, but adding site visits would be an immediate shift. Mr. Chatmon said one of his best relationships was with a family foundation that sent the founding couple to a school to see what his program did. "They were coming to classes of all black boys, and it was humbling and beautiful," he said. "You could see the process of learning, and sometimes it was uncomfortable." The composition of a foundation's board is a driver of what gets funded, but board changes can come quickly with the addition of new members, said Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation (and no relation to Aaron Walker). "Foundations will never change until foundation boards internalize diversity and inclusion," he said. "Efforts targeted at staff diversity will go nowhere because the power and authority to determine the future of these organizations rests with our boards." Mr. Walker said he had shifted the Ford Foundation's focus to fight inequality, and it has been asking recipients to report on metrics that signal how committed they are to social change. Another tactic is asking funders to end their practice of being colorblind in their giving, said Fred Blackwell, chief executive of the San Francisco Foundation. The practice was well intentioned but has excluded racial factors that are important to making funding decisions, he said. "Just to say that 'We don't see it' doesn't produce the outcome you're looking for," he said. "It's important to see it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Much pleasure in life can be derived from the simple act of discovery: finding a good band, an exciting restaurant or a secluded park. Frequent travelers live to unearth those gems, too. Sometimes, though, travel is as much about shared experiences as it is about striking out on one's own. To wit: When in Southeast England, depriving yourself of a chance to see Dover's famous white cliffs would be a big mistake. And so the towering chalk cliffs, a marvel of the country's natural landscape (and a stark reminder that it is, after all, an island) were on my agenda when I embarked on a brief driving tour of the coast. I was able to thoroughly enjoy the region's rolling, campestral beauty in a three town tour. Better still, I did so while leaving the modest stack of pounds sterling in my pocket intact. Mostly intact, I should say. While I was able to keep lodging costs down by staying in cheap hotels and Airbnbs, I miscalculated on what ended up being the most expensive aspect of the entire trip: the rental car. As fans of this column will note, I've had misadventures with rentals. While my experience in England wasn't nearly as disastrous as the one in Hawaii that involved two flat tires, it yielded an important lesson. But I couldn't get the hang of it. The car I was driving in Portugal a friend's well worn but trusty Skoda had a forgiving clutch. The new, shiny S.U.V. I was given at Heathrow (a common "free" upgrade from a standard car that's sometimes not worth it, especially if you're looking to save money on gas) had a clutch that I couldn't get comfortable with. Within a mile or two, a faint burning smell had me heading back, alarmed, to the airport. Ten minutes later, the manager met me at the desk. "Well, I just drove the car around, and it's perfectly fine," she said. She eyed me carefully. "Are you sure ... you wouldn't feel more comfortable with an automatic?" I protested briefly, but caved, humbly taking the automatic which cost an additional PS30 per day, nearly doubling what I'd expected to pay. After that one hiccup, things went smoothly on my two hour drive down to Eastbourne, a seaside town roughly 20 miles east of Brighton, its more popular resort cousin. But Eastbourne's Grand Parade, the main avenue along the coast, can stand toe to toe with any splendorous thoroughfare. Handsome 19th century buildings watch over the English Channel, a wide pebble beach and Eastbourne Pier, a lovely Victorian relic. Better still, going during shoulder season (I went in April) allowed me to score a cheap room at the Cavendish Hotel, its imposing white facade taking up the length of an entire block. The room was worn but acceptable decidedly less grand than its outside indicated but at only PS44, I wasn't going to complain. I used the RingGo mobile app when paid street parking was necessary. It's cashless and fairly convenient; for a 40 pence charge, you can add additional parking time from any location via the app. Across the street, I exchanged dollars for pounds at a pawnshop called Cashbrokers. The dollar sign that replaced the first "S" in the sign nearly kept me away, but the promise of a commission free exchange made me try my luck. It ended up being a good experience, and I received a better rate than expected. Better still, I consulted with a woman behind the counter about things to do in town. "Well, there's some nice walks up Beachy Head," she said with a raspy chuckle. "But that's if you like walking." Luckily, I do. I made the brief drive from Eastbourne to see the famous lighthouse and headland, which has its own vertiginously high chalk sea cliff, the tallest in England. I parked along Beachy Head Road near a worn wooden sign that said, "cliff edge," and showed a cartoon man falling off a ledge. I plodded through the grass and wildflowers, smelling the sea air and taking in the bright, clear day; the weather throughout my visit was wonderful. Despite the signage, the cliff very nearly sneaked up on me. One minute, I was enjoying the bucolic scenery; the next, I was faced with a sheer wall of off white plunging hundreds of feet to the rocks and sea. It felt awe inspiring and a little dangerous (just ask the guy on that sign). Standing in the distance on the beach, like a barbershop pole, was the red and white lighthouse. While there were a few other people milling about, I had this impressive scene nearly all to myself: green grass giving way to a rampart of white chalk, and the sea swallowing the entire tableau. The scenery on the drive to my next destination, the ancient town of Rye, was nearly as enjoyable. Fields of green, cattle grazing and sheep lazily milling about, and vast, shockingly bright swaths of yellow rapeseed flowers marked the countryside. I approached the tiny town, historically the first layer of defense against many a European intruder, from the south on New Winchelsea Road, passing Camber Castle. (The fort, built by Henry VIII, gives infrequent tours, around one a month.) Carefully maneuvering my car along the narrowing streets, I arrived at my 65 Airbnb at the bottom of Mermaid Street and lucked into a free spot in the nearby lot. A relaxed walk up Mermaid to West Street, and I was quickly in the England of my dreams: tiny houses crumbling under the weight of their own history; tile roofs and cobblestone streets; lanterns hanging off ivy covered walls. I passed under a large gate built in the 1300s by Edward III and quickly had covered most of the town; it's small and extremely manageable by foot. After a quick dinner at Webbe's at the Fish Cafe, an elegant but approachable spot in an old teddy bear factory (I had a garlicky pan fried gurnard fillet for PS13), I walked over to Cafe Zara for a coffee and a sweet, nutty piece of baklava (PS4.50). While I was slightly disappointed in the lack of accessibility to some local businesses (a bookstore was unexpectedly closed; a place for afternoon tea I found online seemed to have disappeared entirely), finding good food was never a problem. The Standard Inn, a small hotel and pub established in the 1400s, for example, serves a mean pot of buttery, smoked local mackerel (PS5.95). I spent part of a morning in the Church of St. Mary, the nave of which dates back to 1180. I paid the PS3.50 fee to climb the bell tower, which provides excellent sweeping views of Rye and its countryside. (The climb up is not for the claustrophobic.) There's also a considerable amount of antiquing to be done, if you're so inclined: I scored a beautiful old French coffee pot at Crock Cosy for PS30, talking the shopkeeper into giving me a PS5 discount, and got lost in Quay Antiques and Collectables among a seemingly bottomless pile of bric a brac: toy soldiers, war memorabilia, lamps, teaspoons and backgammon boards. And, seemingly as soon as I had arrived, it was off to see Dover's famous cliffs, a quick and pleasant hourlong drive from Rye. The calcium carbonate cliffs, which are centered on the town of Dover itself but stretch for about eight miles along the coastline, are instantly recognizable to Britons and deeply meaningful to many. A mere 21 miles from France, they played a significant role in both world wars and, in some ways, are literally the face of the nation. From the village of St. Margaret's at Cliffe, where I'd found a cozy Airbnb just a few miles outside Dover proper, I set out on a walk down to the sea. Descending a tricky to find set of stairs, I soon found myself on the beach at St. Margaret's Bay, gazing up at the milky white, ancient cliffs that took eons to form. Completely alone, I walked northeast up the beach as the sun was setting, across what truly struck me as an alien landscape. Stones of pure white and others of onyx black littered the shore. Slick moss and mud plus a light rain made the footing tricky, but I pressed on until I'd reached a slightly elevated vantage point and could take in the breathtaking panorama: the lush greenness of this "sceptered isle," as Shakespeare once wrote, broken by alabaster bluffs against a blue backdrop of sea and sky. It was truly everything I wanted in a trip to England.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Imports from China by Walmart, the nation's largest retailer and biggest importer, eliminated or displaced over 400,000 jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group that has long targeted Walmart's policies. The jobs, mostly in manufacturing, represent about 13 percent of the 3.2 million jobs displaced over those same years that the study attributes to the United States' goods trade deficit with China. Over all, the United States' trade deficit with China hit 324 billion that year. "Walmart is one of the major forces pulling imports into the United States," said Robert E. Scott, an economist at the institute and the study's author. "And the jobs we're losing are good paying manufacturing jobs, which pay higher wages and provide better benefits." Walmart disputed the conclusions of the study, which is an update of estimates that the institute released in 2007. For one, many of the numbers used in the study rely on guesswork, because retailers do not generally release a breakdown of their imports. Some economists also point out that studies like these do not properly account for the jobs that imports can create in industries like transportation, wholesale and retail. "We are very proud of our U.S. manufacturing initiative, and the results speak for themselves. By investing in products that support American jobs, we are able to bring new products to our shelves while bringing new jobs to local communities in Ohio, Tennessee, California and many others," Lorenzo Lopez, a Walmart spokesman, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, this is an old report with flawed economic analysis that assumes that imports equal job losses and does not take into consideration that countless jobs are added through the global supply chain, distribution and logistics, among other areas of the business," Mr. Lopez added. Walmart has long been the subject of criticism from groups like the Economic Policy Institute over its role in flooding the United States with cheap imports. Under pressure, Walmart in 2013 announced that it would increase its sourcing of American made products by 50 billion over the next 10 years. The retailer said at the time that it would buy more goods already produced in the United States, like games and paper, and help vendors in areas like furniture and textiles return production that had moved overseas. But critics quickly rebuffed the initiative as a public relations stunt, pointing out that the 50 billion made up just a fraction of the sales growth Walmart which has annual sales of almost 500 billion was likely to log over the next decade. Harold L. Sirkin, a senior partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, said that America's trade deficit with China had indeed led to net job losses. But as labor costs soared in China, that situation was reversing and Walmart's move was significant. "What we're seeing now is that more things are coming back to the U.S.," Mr. Sirkin said. The cost to retailers of sourcing furniture and appliances in the United States, for example, was becoming comparable to the costs of importing those products from China, he said. "Walmart's buying American not just for the sake of America," he said. "They're buying American because of economics." The institute's study estimated the direct and indirect labor requirements of production in 195 industries, of which 77 were in manufacturing. It estimated the labor that would be required to produce a given volume of exports, and the labor displaced when those imports replace domestic output.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Ray Jenkins, the city editor of The Alabama Journal, was eating a bologna sandwich at his desk on April 5, 1960, and thumbing through a week old copy of The New York Times when a full page ad caught his eye. Prominent liberals, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Robinson, were appealing for money for a legal defense fund for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was facing a trial in Alabama on perjury charges a good local angle for The Journal. The ad, titled "Heed Their Rising Voices," castigated Alabama officials for what it called "an unprecedented wave of terror" against leaders of the civil rights movement. Within minutes, Mr. Jenkins tapped out 13 paragraphs about the ad; his article appeared in the paper that afternoon. Apparently no one else had noticed the ad until then The Times sold 394 papers a day in Alabama in 1960. And so Alabama officials were startled and enraged after reading Mr. Jenkins's report, which pointed out that the ad contained some factual errors. They filed a libel suit against The Times, which ended four years later in a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the paper's favor. The case, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, made it harder for public officials to sue for defamation and remains a bedrock legal principle upholding freedom of the press. Mr. Jenkins died on Oct. 24 at his home in Baltimore. He was 89. His wife, Bettina Jenkins, said the cause was congestive heart failure. Mr. Jenkins always expressed amazement that his short, routine article about the Times ad the piece didn't even carry his byline would prove so important. When he retired in 1991 from journalism after a distinguished 40 year career, he said it was "the most significant story I ever wrote." By then he had already won a Pulitzer Prize as a young journalist in the South, served as editorial page editor of The Baltimore Evening Sun, been named a Nieman fellow at Harvard and worked for two years as a press aide to President Jimmy Carter. While living in Montgomery, Ala., where The Journal was based, Mr. Jenkins covered the civil rights movement and developed a close relationship with Dr. King, then pastor of the city's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Nancy Jenkins Chafin, Mr. Jenkins's daughter, said in a phone interview that the two had spoken regularly in the church's basement and that Mr. Jenkins had written often about Dr. King's vision and mission. "My father's coverage may have helped to change hearts and minds of Southerners who had been living for generations in a deeply segregated society," she said. In one of their discussions, recalled by Mr. Jenkins in a column he wrote years later, Dr. King marveled that he, a descendant of slaves, was sitting and talking with Mr. Jenkins, a descendant of slave owners. Mr. Jenkins asked Dr. King if he might include that thought in a speech some day. Dr. King did, in his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington in 1963. "I have a dream," Dr. King said from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, "that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." Carrell Ray Jenkins was born on Sept. 25, 1930, in Sylvester, Ga., about 200 miles south of Atlanta. His mother, Eunice (Thornton) Jenkins, was a homemaker, and his father, Herbert, sold tractors for International Harvester while also farming cotton, corn and tobacco. Ray was the first in his family to go to college, receiving a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Georgia in 1951. He began his career at The Columbus Ledger in Columbus, Ga., on the border of Alabama, and was a member of a team that won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for public service for exposing political corruption in neighboring Phenix City, Ala. While living in Columbus, he met Bettina Cirsovius, who had immigrated from Germany in 1952. They were married in 1956. In addition to her and their daughter, Mr. Jenkins is survived by their sons, Sam and Mark, and four grandchildren. Mr. Jenkins was named city editor of The Alabama Journal in 1959 and spent the next two decades covering the civil rights movement. But of all the articles he wrote and edited, the one he dashed off about the Times advertisement would prove to be one of the most consequential. The ad never named any of the officials that it was taking to task, and the newspaper publicly apologized for the factual errors. Still, several Alabama officials, including L.B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner, who supervised the police, contended that they had been defamed by inference and filed suit against The Times. "If the officials could win, they would almost certainly silence the civil rights movement in Alabama as well as the newspaper that consistently covered it," Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in "The Race Beat," which chronicled the news coverage of the civil rights era and won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in history. "Silence, not money, was the goal." For a time, the lawsuits had their intended effect. Lawyers for The Times told the paper to keep its reporters out of Alabama while the matter was in litigation. The Times lost in the lower courts. But on appeal to the Supreme Court, the newspaper prevailed. In a unanimous 1964 ruling, the court held that the First Amendment protects newspapers even when they print a false statement, unless a complainant can prove that the newspaper had made the statement with "'actual malice' that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." Mr. Jenkins was not involved in the case but was interested in the law. He took night classes and in 1977 received his law degree from the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, now part of Faulkner University in Montgomery. He became managing editor of The Journal, then editorial page editor and in 1978 was named executive editor of both The Journal and The Montgomery Advertiser, sister papers owned by the same company. When the papers were sold soon thereafter, Jody Powell, President Carter's press secretary, offered Mr. Jenkins a job at the White House. Mr. Jenkins worked in the press office until Mr. Carter lost his re election bid in 1980. (The Journal closed in 1993.) He joined The Baltimore Evening Sun in 1981, becoming a columnist and editor of the editorial page. Over the years he also wrote frequently for The Times. After his retirement he continued to write columns and essays, often about civil rights. He also wrote "Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders" (1997), about mail bombs sent in 1989 that killed a federal judge in Alabama and a civil rights lawyer in Georgia. In a tribute to Mr. Jenkins in The Sun, Ernest F. Imhoff, a retired editor of the newspaper, said, "Ray was a fine Southern gentleman who offered us a bit of guidance and wisdom from another time that helped us as Northerners understand that part of the country a lot better."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Over the past decade, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has developed a reputation for its powerhouse dancing and glamorous repertory, which skews toward the work of high profile European choreographers. Its 10th anniversary brings a couple of firsts: first appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and first season under both a new artistic director, Alexandra Damiani, and new associate choreographer, Crystal Pite, who will create two new pieces for the troupe over the next three years. Ms. Pite's fans are eager to see what this daredevil artist, who also directs her own ensemble in Vancouver, British Columbia, will conjure up. But for now, the company takes a look back, reviving some of its greatest hits. Its three programs include works by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Hofesh Shechter, Alexander Ekman, Jo Stromgren and Ms. Pite, who has devised a new ending for her stormy "Grace Engine" from 2012.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., were concerned when a young man contacted their department last year complaining of a heart pounding, hallucinogenic high he had neither expected nor wanted to have. The team, led by the forensic toxicologist Michelle R. Peace, had published a study about mysterious ingredients in vaping liquids. That's how the man, a graduate student Dr. Peace declined to name, knew to tell it about his experience. He said he had vaped a liquid, from a company called Diamond CBD, that contained CBD, or cannabidiol. A compound reputed to have soothing properties, CBD has been marketed by the fast growing cannabis industry as an ingredient in sleeping masks, kombucha, Carl's Jr. burgers and Martha Stewart backed dog treats. It is not supposed to cause a psychoactive experience. Dr. Peace decided to run some tests of Diamond CBD vaping liquids, some from the graduate student and some bought from the manufacturer. In four of nine samples, all marketed on the company's website as 100 percent natural, her lab discovered a synthetic compound, 5F ADB. That ingredient has been linked by the Drug Enforcement Administration to anxiety, convulsions, psychosis, hospitalization and death. Diamond CBD has often promoted its products as health aids meant to "help your body to heal and recover" and "to make you feel the best version of yourself." The company's parent, PotNetwork Holdings, said in a statement that independent tests did not show "any unnatural or improper derivative." The company said it planned to run more tests on its products and materials and would issue a recall if it found any problems. The efforts of cannabis companies to go mainstream could be hampered by CBD advertising that depends on misleading or unproven claims, entrepreneurs and researchers said. Dr. Peace compared the marketing efforts of some companies to snake oil scams in the 1800s, "when guys in wagons were selling sham tinctures in glass bottles." "People are taking these products in good faith, because they believe somebody is overseeing the quality of these products," Dr. Peace said. "But there's basically nobody." Hemp and marijuana are different varieties of the cannabis plant. Both produce chemicals known as cannabinoids, including CBD and tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a psychoactive compound associated with a high. CBD products derived from hemp are legal to possess under a new federal law, as long as they contain 0.3 percent THC or less. In marijuana, which is not legal in many states, the amount of THC tends to be greater. Many companies are careful not to make unproven claims. But rules about marketing CBD and marijuana which vary from state to state based on what the products contain and how they are used are often confusing and difficult to enforce. Companies claiming to have a miracle elixir may face warnings but few serious repercussions. "There are already 500 different products, and 5,000 around the corner, and we're doing nothing," said John Ayers, a computational epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego. Mr. Ayers and two colleagues published a report this year accusing companies like MedMen of modeling their marketing campaigns after strategies used by the tobacco industry in the 1950s, including questionable health claims and techniques geared toward young consumers. The researchers cited MedMen billboards with the slogan "Heal, it's legal," podcast advertisements promoting unnamed wellness treatments and a note on the company's website that it "cannot guarantee the accuracy of any marijuana information provided." MedMen's products included a high school varsity jacket emblazoned with a marijuana leaf, according to the report. MedMen declined to comment for this article. As of July, more than 30 states allow medical marijuana, while more than 10 have legalized recreational marijuana. But the D.E.A. still considers it to be a Schedule 1 drug, in the same camp as heroin, ecstasy and LSD, and marijuana advertising is restricted. The rules for CBD are different. Legislation passed last year removed some hemp derived CBD from the federal government's list of controlled substances. But while the Food and Drug Administration warns that it remains illegal to market CBD as a dietary supplement or an ingredient in food and beverages, the agency has barely enforced the ban. The agency is "using all available resources to monitor the marketplace" for deceptive advertising and is "working quickly to continue to clarify our regulatory authority" over cannabis products, said Amy Abernethy, the F.D.A.'s principal deputy commissioner, in a statement on Monday to The Times. Since 2017, the F.D.A. has filed only nine warning letters against CBD companies. The agency "does not have the resources to go after all of the products," said Lisa M. Dwyer, a lawyer for the King Spalding firm, who previously held advisory roles at the F.D.A. Cannabis marketing has limited reach, at least for now. ABC declined to broadcast an ad from Lowell Herb Company, featuring the actress Bella Thorne, during the Oscars this year, the marijuana and hemp company said. The marijuana retailer Acreage offered to spend 5 million on a 60 second advocacy message during the Super Bowl, but CBS rejected the pitch, said Joen Choe, the company's vice president of marketing. Paid advertising on Facebook and Google is also restricted, but many cannabis companies have still managed to promote themselves on social media. After Kim Kardashian threw a CBD themed baby shower in April, her posts about the party most likely reached 12.3 million people, according to Captiv8, which connects brands with paid influencers. "It's not always clear what the line is," said Taylor West, who handles cannabis clients for the communications firm Heart Mind Media. Some brands are going a different way, with ads critical of the hype. In July, CBDistillery unveiled seven billboards in Times Square that blasted brands trying to capitalize on the craze with products like CBD toilet paper and CBD condoms. The market is like the "Wild West," said Chris Van Dusen, the company's chief marketing officer. "With the industry being so new, and there being so much confusion from the consumer side, companies selling gimmicky products aren't helping the industry's cause," he said. At the same time, some CBD consumers continue to experience unexpected side effects. Dr. Peace, the toxicologist in Virginia, said that in recent months she had received dozens of messages, many of them "terrifying," from people worried that they had ingested adulterated CBD products. "These aren't necessarily products being marketed and sold in sketchy shops," she said. "I've heard from, literally, little old ladies who walked in to their local pharmacy to purchase CBD products recommended to them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"If I can lend a voice and a platform to issues that I believe in, I'm happy to do it," said the actress Phillipa Soo. The actress Phillipa Soo, who played Eliza in the Broadway smash "Hamilton," has always considered herself politically minded. But it wasn't until the 2016 election that she became active in political causes. "I think I had a new perspective of what it means to be an American," she said. "If I can lend a voice and a platform to issues that I believe in, I'm happy to do it." And with Broadway theaters on pause at least through May 30, Soo has been singing her support for political campaigns and arts organizations in fund raising videos sometimes taping three a week. She has also been promoting her latest character, Chang'e, whom she voices in the animated musical film "Over the Moon." An immortal Chinese goddess separated from her soul mate, she takes up residence on the moon, where she mourns lost love, turns darkness into light and belts out "Ultraluminary," an empowerment anthem. "It was a great way to feel connected to my own culture and heritage," said Soo, whose father is Chinese American. "At the same time, this is such a modern version of the moon goddess. She's what we think of as the goddess now: amazing female figures who are singer songwriter performers, just larger than life characters." Calling from Brooklyn, Soo talked about how she and her husband, the actor Steven Pasquale, have kept busy during the pandemic and the ache of trading the stage for the small screen. "Honestly, I'm glad that there's a want and an outlet," she said about her online performances. "But it's not live, it's not theater, and you really can't replace that, which is hard at a time when you just need it." "So I get a little bit heartbroken when I'm making these videos," she admitted. "Because as much as I love it, I do think that there's an importance in being in a live audience and sharing an experience with a room full of strangers. There's something powerful about that." These are edited excerpts from our conversation. I made a "Broadway for Biden" video for a Zoom fund raiser. A bunch of us got together and sang part of a song in our own houses or wherever we are quarantining. I took a virtual Pilates class with Georgia Gavran. She opened a new studio called Wick Pilates right as everything shut down. She has been teaching me on a pretty consistent basis through Zoom and it has been awesome. Then I binged the last three episodes of "I May Destroy You." Michaela Coel is a genius. I was drawn to the fact that she's able to tell this horrifying experience in a way where she finds her humility and her humor. She displayed all of the colors of what something so tragic can do to your life, and how it can close some doors but open new doors. If you'd go to where it says "Recently Watched," I'd say 60 percent of our queue are documentaries. Educating ourselves feels like the least we can do. We watched "Agents of Chaos," which was great to watch after "The Comey Rule." (I'm very proud of my husband's work in "The Comey Rule" playing Peter Strzok.) What I loved about "Agents of Chaos" was that it was essentially playing out all the things that were happening in the scripted version. We've been immersed in these facts for a very long time, and it's important to see it laid out because it gives you an understanding of what is happening and how technology has played a huge part. Our new puppy, Billie, has completely recovered from surgery and doesn't have to wear her cone of shame anymore. We rescued her in May, and it just happened to align with my birthday. It was the best thing to happen in Covid times. Animals are so good for the heart and soul. It was a low key day because we had to monitor her, so I read some of "Number One Chinese Restaurant" by Lillian Li. I recently had to name some of my favorite books, and I found that they were all written by women, and most were written by Asian women. It's been such a wonderful journey getting to immerse myself in stories that I didn't read growing up. I didn't realize until I was older how much not reading stories and seeing movies about Asian characters really affected me. I'm just so eager to consume it all. I ended the day with a little Zoom hang with Leslie Odom Jr. and Nicolette Robinson, which was fun. Then we ended the night by watching an episode of "The West Wing." My husband has watched it four times, but this is my first time through even after being in "Hamilton." Lin Manuel Miranda is obsessed with "The West Wing," and there are many little Easter egg references throughout "Hamilton." We are on Season 6. It's a nice palate cleanser for the times. I had press days for "Over the Moon," but during a four hour break on Thursday, I shot a video for Jon Ossoff's fund raiser a version of "Nature Boy" with Steven. Jon the Democratic Senate candidate from Georgia was one of the first people that I feel were inspired by the outcome of the election to really get involved. Both press days were long, and I fell right into bed. We end the days now without our phones in the bedroom. ("The Social Dilemma" is one of those documentaries we've been watching and it definitely scared me. My husband and I looked at each other and said, "Why don't we make an effort to leave our phones downstairs when we go up to bed?") My sleep is so much better and the mornings are peaceful, catching up on news before we take out the dog.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
It is a truth universally acknowledged or at least, much discussed on social media that a woman who works in an office is in want of a sweater. Office air conditioning is often set at a temperature that women find chilly; the resulting water cooler debate has been called the "battle of the thermostat." One study even suggested that because women have slower metabolic rates, the formula used to set temperatures in workplaces, which was developed decades ago based on the comfort of men, may overestimate women's body heat production by 35 percent. A question that hasn't been asked much, however, is whether temperature affects the productivity of men and women differently. In a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, researchers reported that at colder temperatures, men scored higher than women on verbal and math tests. But as a room grew warmer, women's scores rose significantly. The findings require further confirmation under an assortment of conditions. But they add to a scientific rethinking of the spaces where we work and study, which sometimes have been devised with a limited set of physical requirements in mind. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The researchers asked more than 500 college students to take tests for an hour in rooms with temperatures between 61 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The students performed as many simple math problems (without the help of a calculator) as possible, and rearranged a set of letters into as many words as they could, within a time limit. They also were asked to solve a series of tricky logic problems.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
When Marie and her Prince visit the Land of Sweets in Act II of "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" the New York City Ballet holiday tradition that begins its annual run at Lincoln Center on Nov. 23 they encounter the Sugarplum Fairy and Candy Canes, as well as Hot Chocolate from Spain, Coffee from Arabia and Chinese Tea. In an era of increasing sensitivity to cultural stereotypes, the Chinese Tea segment with its pointy finger movements, rice paddy hats and a Fu Manchu type mustache for the male dancer had begun to seem offensive to audiences, as well as to some members of City Ballet. "I struggled internally with being cast in Tea as a person with Asian heritage," said Georgina Pazcoguin, a City Ballet soloist who is part Filipino. Because it's a featured role in a marquee ballet, Ms. Pazcoguin said she was excited to have the exposure but "never felt quite comfortable with the depiction of the culture." "There is a different sensibility with regard to these issues, so we wanted to respond," said Ellen Sorrin, the Trust's director. "We are not demanding that companies do this; we're making them aware that these are concerns." These adjustments are part of a broader effort to re examine how people of color are portrayed in the performing arts and how classics with potentially troubling aspects can be made acceptable to modern audiences. In 2015, the Metropolitan Opera eliminated blackface from its "Otello." The Bolshoi has toned down a segment of its "La Bayadere" featuring white children in blackface, but it has been criticized for not going far enough. And more recent fare has also been revised: The musical "Cats" dropped a song in which characters sang in Asian accents. "I see what's happening at the Balanchine Trust as part of a larger movement in the arts to address entrenched cultural narratives that undermine tolerance, fairness and inclusion," said Lane Harwell, a program officer at the Ford Foundation, who previously served as the founding executive director of Dance/NYC, a service organization. "Any resistance is just because change is hard, but performing arts are not a static form, and continual interrogation and reinterpretation keeps historical work relevant." There has been some pushback from purists who argue against altering a work of art in response to changing times and there is particular sensitivity surrounding Balanchine, whose "Nutcracker" is a widely cherished tradition. But, for the most part, ballet companies around the world seem to be on board. Several have signed a "Final Bow for Yellowface" pledge, created by Ms. Pazcoguin and Phil Chan, an arts administrator and former dancer. The pledge is a commitment by the dance world "to eliminating outdated and offensive stereotypes of Asians (Yellowface) on our stages." Signers include companies that dance other versions of "The Nutcracker" like the Royal Ballet in London, the Washington Ballet, the Louisville Ballet and Ballet West. "Diversity onstage is paramount these days," said Adam Sklute, the artistic director of Ballet West. "I want to populate my stage with the kind of world I want to live in, which is culturally diverse." When Mr. Sklute took over Ballet West about a decade ago, he was immediately troubled by the "Tea" section in the company's "Nutcracker," one of the oldest full productions in America, choreographed by Willam Christensen. "There was a lot of head bobbing and parasol swirling, smiley faced action," he said. "This was something that in 1944 would not have been considered inappropriate, but when I looked at it in 2007, I thought this isn't right." He went to the Christensen family, which owns the rights, and asked to borrow from the San Francisco Ballet's version, which features a Chinese warrior fighting a Chinese dragon. "I felt like it was much more a celebration of the culture versus a mockery of the culture," Mr. Sklute said. "I have not received a single complaint." Similarly, in October, the Boston Ballet announced that its artistic director, Mikko Nissinen, would "refresh" the choreography for his "Nutcracker," which opens Nov. 29. And the Miami City Ballet will change "Tea" in its "Nutcracker," which opens Dec. 7. As American Ballet Theater prepares to start rehearsals for its "Nutcracker," by Alexei Ratmansky, opening on Dec. 14 in Costa Mesa, Calif., Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director said he was "considering" possible changes. "Clearly this is an issue we have to have on our radar," Mr. McKenzie said. "The Nutcracker" is not the only ballet that is ripe for revision, though others may be more challenging to address with only nips and tucks, like "Le Corsaire," which features caricatured depictions of people from the Middle East, and "La Bayadere," which suggests that Indian dancing girls become white ballerinas when they go to heaven. But the changes to City Ballet's production are sending an important signal. "Here's this institution, 'The Nutcracker,' and we've just made a positive step to bring it into the 21st century," Mr. Chan said. "This is something that has felt so immovable so untouchable and ingrained in our culture it feels like changing the plie." A torrent of hate and violence against people of Asian descent around the United States began last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. None Background: Community leaders say the bigotry was fueled by President Donald J. Trump, who frequently used racist language like "Chinese virus" to refer to the coronavirus. Data: The New York Times, using media reports from across the country to capture a sense of the rising tide of anti Asian bias, found more than 110 episodes since March 2020 in which there was clear evidence of race based hate. Underreported Hate Crimes: The tally may be only a sliver of the violence and harassment given the general undercounting of hate crimes, but the broad survey captures the episodes of violence across the country that grew in number amid Mr. Trump's comments. In New York: A wave of xenophobia and violence has been compounded by the economic fallout of the pandemic, which has dealt a severe blow to New York's Asian American communities. Many community leaders say racist assaults are being overlooked by the authorities. What Happened in Atlanta: Eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed in shootings at massage parlors in Atlanta on March 16. A Georgia prosecutor said that the Atlanta area spa shootings were hate crimes, and that she would pursue the death penalty against the suspect, who has been charged with murder. Having received some complaints from audience members about "Tea," Peter Martins, then ballet master in chief, met with Mr. Chan before last year's "Nutcracker." Mr. Chan, who is part Chinese, said he talked about watching a revival of Mr. Martins's "Magic Flute" as a young boy, which features an Asian servant who is the butt of jokes and "feeling like everyone was laughing at me." "I couldn't bring myself to go back to City Ballet for a few years after that," he said. "Which is not fair, because Balanchine belongs to me, too, and I felt like I wasn't welcome." City Ballet's changes to "Nutcracker" included omitting the mustache and the wide hat; toning down the eye makeup on the man; replacing the geisha wigs with a headpiece on the two women; and modifying the shuffling and bowing choreography, with more generic hand gestures in place of the pointy fingers. "It was looking like a caricature and enforcing some negative stereotypes," said Jonathan Stafford, the leader of City Ballet's interim artistic team. "We're kind of in the middle of an evolution right now, a new cultural awareness.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
For four years, Chrissy Hunt lived in a third floor walk up in Chelsea, first with her sister, then with a roommate and then with her boyfriend, Sean Oliver. The two bedroom apartment was spacious but had a few idiosyncrasies. The management company seemed lackadaisical about repairs. The nails in the floorboards erupted often. "I ripped every pair of socks I owned," said Ms. Hunt, who, like Mr. Oliver, is in her mid 20s. The couple were ready for a change. "I had watched friends move around and explore new neighborhoods and I wanted to do the same," Ms. Hunt said. She and Mr. Oliver, who had previously lived in a Midtown East four bedroom with roommates, wanted a place that felt less like hers and more like theirs. Their Chelsea rent was a little under 2,900 a month; their new budget was up to 3,500. Last spring, they checked out several new high rises in West Chelsea, where prices seemed more reasonable than in some other parts of Manhattan. The AVA High Line on West 28th Street was their favorite. Some studios there were spacious, with more than 600 square feet; rent was around 3,200 a month. The cheapest one bedrooms, however, were smaller and had rents of more than 3,600. Each apartment was equipped with a dishwasher, a washer dryer and an in sink garbage disposal. But the couple didn't like the "sliding barn door" bathroom door, which "didn't seem it would close super tight or be super private," Ms. Hunt said. They were also deterred by the amenity fee of 100 a month. "We noticed where everything was an add on," Mr. Oliver said. "They were definitely upfront about it." So the couple cast an eye toward Downtown Brooklyn, with its abundance of new residential high rises. Friends had started to migrate there. One apartment, in a converted office building, had a massive bathroom. But they didn't want a soaking tub and a stall shower at the expense of living space. At the Addison on Schermerhorn Street, one bedrooms were within their budget, with rents in the low 3,000s, but they were studio size, only around 600 square feet. The amenity fee was 250 per person per year. The units they saw had no washer dryers, which they knew they could find elsewhere. The building was only three years old, but the competition was even newer. "For paying that type of money, we really decided we had to do something new," Mr. Oliver said. Some new buildings, however, had insufficient closet and storage space, and few kitchen cabinets. Ms. Hunt counted the number of cabinets they had in Chelsea. "We needed to get rid of a lot of kitchen stuff or find a place with more cabinets," she concluded. Another Brooklyn option was 66 Rockwell, with one bedroom apartments in the low 3,000s. The couple weren't convinced there was enough storage space, and not every unit had a washer dryer. Amenities were 60 a month per person or, if you paid all at once, 600 a year. They weren't quite sold on the building. But they recommended it to Ms. Hunt's sister, who needed a part time place in the city. She ended up taking a studio there. Some friends mentioned 388 Bridge, also in Brooklyn, a glassy tower with rentals on the lower floors and condominiums above. Construction wasn't quite finished. There, the couple found walk in closets and washer dryers, though no garbage disposals. "There were aspects of all the other places we had seen that we liked," Ms. Hunt said. And no amenity fee. They were willing to overlook the black bathroom floor, which seemed odd. The couple chose a one bedroom with a breakfast bar, but it was rented by the time they were ready to sign the lease, so they took one with a kitchen open to the living room. They arrived last summer, paying 3,305 a month for a year's lease, with a free 13th month. Despite their 750 square feet, Mr. Oliver said, "we definitely had to downsize, just going from a two bedroom where there was a guest room situation, and even when we got here we had too much stuff."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Bret Stephens writes in "The Story of Remdesivir" (column, April 18) about the promise for an early effective drug treatment based on Gilead's antiviral remdesivir. He says "it seems perverse not to root for Gilead's success" and "just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there should be no big pharma haters in pandemics." Those of us who monitor drug companies at the forefront of potential Covid 19 treatments and vaccines are not big pharma haters but simply trying to make sure that the drug companies do not manipulate loopholes in existing laws to earn monopoly profits on their discoveries. The Food and Drug Administration approved Gilead's "orphan" application for remdesivir on March 23, only hours after Gilead had announced that "overwhelming demand" forced it to stop supplying the drug for "compassionate use." And while the size of a patient population cannot be larger than 200,000 for an "orphan" drug, Gilead knew that it would soon be in the millions. After five days of protest, Gilead announced that it had rescinded the F.D.A.'s orphan designation and "is waiving all benefits that accompany that designation."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was really saddened by the death of Jerry Stiller last week, who I'll always think of as Frank Costanza from "Seinfeld." It got me to thinking about how far we've come from the 1990s, mostly for the worse. Gail Collins: I can tell this is going to be fun. I love picking best and worst decades. Bret: In the 1990s, our political problems revolved around presidential infidelity. Now they revolve around presidential insanity. In the 1990s, U.S. foreign policy was about stitching together a once divided world. Now it's about shutting down all the things that used to connect us. In the 1990s people wrote books about "the millionaire next door." Now it's more likely to be the foreclosure next door. In the 1990s, scientists were in a race to unlock the human genome. Now they wonder how long we need to lock down the human race. Where did it all go wrong, Gail? Gail: Bret, a long time ago my husband and I wrote a book about the approach of the new millennium in 2000. Just picked it up and realized we began: "Pity the 1990s, when they end, nobody will even notice." Gail: It turned out to be way truer than we appreciated. The whole decade faded in the shadow of our introduction to a whole new world of global terrorism in 2001. Without disrespecting the entire 10 years, I've always regarded the 1990s as kind of shallow. It was indeed a time when we celebrated a new generation of entrepreneurs. But it was also the era we wrung our hands about the young slackers and their work avoidance. Bret: Who can forget Winona Ryder hamming it up to "My Sharona" in "Reality Bites," the '90s slacker classic? A touchstone of my 20s. Gail: The thing that makes everything seem so sour now is the internet. The many, many Americans who were steaming in silence back in the day now get to howl their outrage to the world on Facebook and Twitter. Bret: Agree totally. My view of most social media, Twitter especially, is that it's the digital equivalent of cocaine. People first do it because everyone else does. Then it makes them feel witty, confident and popular. Over time, it turns them into obnoxious creeps. In the end, it leaves them out of a job and feeling very sorry about all the people they've hurt. Gail: By the way, my all time favorite TV series, "The Wire," started in 2002. And I never had another experience with TV comedy as exciting as watching the debut year for "Saturday Night Live" in the 1970s. And for sheer variety and quality there's never been a TV era that approaches our current one. Cannot imagine the country shut in for months on end with nothing but 1990s TV for distraction. Bret: I don't watch nearly as much TV as I should. But my wife keeps telling me I have to watch the new season of "Fauda," and a friend of mine raves about a German production called "Weissensee." It's a reminder of how much we benefit from quality products made abroad, which is why I wish we had a political party that still stood for free trade, the way Republicans and Democrats did back in the '90s. Not to yank us back into politics, Gail, but any thoughts on the Mike Flynn controversy? Gail: This is a guy who was fired from an important intelligence agency job by Barack Obama. Despite Obama's warning, Trump hired him as national security adviser, which was insane. Bret: Will definitely grant you that. Gail: This is a guy who had totally inappropriate one on one negotiations with the Russian ambassador on a phone he must have known was tapped. Who lied to Mike Pence, got fired by Trump after three weeks, and then turned on the Trump team to try to get a better deal on a prison sentence. And now he's a right wing hero, protected by the Justice Department and celebrated by the president, who claims Flynn was persecuted by the Obamaites. There's got to be a Netflix series in there somewhere. Starring Steve Buscemi as Flynn and of course Alec Baldwin as Trump. Bret: Somehow I don't picture Buscemi as Flynn. Maybe a slimmed down Will Ferrell? Gail: Sounds good. Amazing how often we agree. Bret: To be candid, I feel very unsettled by the Flynn case. Late last year the Justice Department's independent inspector general revealed that the F.B.I. had misled the FISA court in ways that did serious injustice to Carter Page. I had previously written some nasty things about Page, mainly based on invidious reporting about him, for which I apologized in my column. Reputational murder by media smear is not a pleasant experience. Gail: Kudos to you for apologizing. Bret: I supported the Mueller investigation when it was under attack by a lot of my friends on the right. But as some of the details of the case come to light, it strikes me as being another case of prosecutorial abuse and trial by media, with the F.B.I. more or less manufacturing a criminal act, based on the slender reed of a scarcely used 1799 law, for the sake of investigating a collusion conspiracy that it could never prove. I don't like Flynn's politics or his client list. I don't think he should have been named national security adviser. And he deserved to be fired for lying to Mike Pence. But I don't see the crime in an incoming national security adviser having an informal discussion with Russia's ambassador in pursuit of exactly the same kind of "reset" policy President Obama adopted when he first came to office. And using the full power of the Justice Department to criminalize the behavior of people with whom they have personal or political differences is a danger to civil liberties. Gail: Just don't think Flynn can make the grade as a victim. But we'll see. By the way, I wanted to ask you what do you think Congress should be doing about the economy now? Are you freaked out by the deficit? I'm a congenital worrier, but I must say never in my life has the federal deficit made it into my top 20 list. Bret: I've never been a deficit hawk, but neither am I a member of the "deficits don't matter" school of Cheneynomics. The important question is whether the money is being spent on an essential purpose. Winning World War II or the Cold War were worth big deficits. So is keeping the economy afloat in an unprecedented global emergency. Gail: I hear the siren call of an infrastructure bill ... Bret: That said, I don't think we can keep this up much longer. People keep pointing to the flaws with the Swedish model, but surely it matters that they've managed to keep fatality rates below that of many other European countries that had lockdowns, without completely cratering their economy in the process. Gail: Bret, you'd reject the Swedish model of everything involving spending and taxes. You can't only think the Swedes are smart when it comes to pandemics. Bret: I'm also fond of Ikea, Saab cars, aquavit and Lingonberry jam. Gail: I'm rooting for a version of the Democratic agenda. Massive domestic spending that will juice the economy and improve our society as well. Like early childhood education. That's one issue many Republicans like, at least in theory. And it's investing in the future. But I have to admit that short of tax breaks for the rich, I could probably be enticed by almost any spending plan. Bret: Oh, good, because I have several new aircraft carriers and a trillion dollar nuclear modernization program I'd like to sign you up for .... Bret: But back to political reality. We're going to have to find our way to a new normal, one that allows schools and businesses to operate again while trying to mitigate risks to a semi tolerable level. Gail: Yeah, that's true. But I'm much more of a fan of shelter in place than you are. It's obviously got to be adjusted to get people back to work. But the spirit of the thing that we modify our behavior until the crisis has finally passed is critical. Bret: It would be great to have some fresher thinking on this. There's a lot of political virtue signaling on both ends of the spectrum, but I'd love to see someone step forward and give us an idea of how we balance risks, and how we move forward if, say, we have to live with Covid 19 for another decade. Gail: You're right that we do need a leader who can think outside the box. Or one who even understands where the box is. Bret: Come to think of it, we really could use a president who says that all we have to fear is fear itself. Or maybe just someone to tell us, "Serenity Now!" Gail: That's Jerry Stiller's motto from Seinfeld, right? I think the time has come. 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Man, "Star Trek: Picard" is dark. That is the thought that kept running through my head during this week's episode. There have been other dark moments throughout the series but this is the episode when the darkness really stood out. From the start of the episode when several Romulans stand in a circle, go insane and commit suicide to Admiral Clancy's randomly telling Picard to shut up with an unnecessary expletive, I kept thinking that this is a grim world Picard inhabits and a much different one than the franchise creator, Gene Roddenberry, had in mind decades ago. But we are what is in front of us. And when Soji meets Rios for the first time, he has a moment of confusion and seemingly, panic. We finally get a bit of Rios's back story and his history with a former captain, Alonzo Vandermeer a father figure in his life. And filed under "What an Incredible Coincidence": In a past life, Rios and Vandermeer picked up "a diplomatic mission out of nowhere" with two passengers. Vandermeer eventually murdered these two based on a directive from Starfleet and then killed himself, an incident that Rios covered up. Remarkable, the two ended up being synths. Thank goodness that Rios happened to be hired as the pilot for a synth related mission for Picard! The uniting characteristic of the La Sirena crew is that all of them withdraw in times of deep discomfort, except, perhaps, for Picard. They are also all fundamentally broken human beings, as the episode's title suggests. But in this showing, the members make an effort to look after one another: Raffi shows a compassionate side in dealing with Rios's heartbreak (just as he did with her when she was rejected by her son). Soji is sympathetic toward Jurati, even though Jurati has orders to kill her and previously murdered her father. The crew recognizes that they are kindred spirits, having started off as distrusting strangers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
North Korea Will Have the Skills to Make a Nuclear Warhead by 2020, Experts Say North Korea's fifth nuclear test is ominous not only because the country is slowly mastering atomic weaponry, but because it is making headway in developing missiles that could hurl nuclear warheads halfway around the globe, threatening Washington and New York City. The reclusive, hostile nation has been rushing to perfect missiles that are small, fast, light and surprisingly advanced, according to analysts and military officials. This spring and summer, Pyongyang successfully tested some of these missiles, while earlier efforts had fizzled or failed. "They've greatly increased the tempo of their testing in a way, showing off their capabilities, showing us images of ground tests they could have kept hidden," John Schilling, an aerospace engineer and expert on North Korea's missile program, said in an interview on Friday. "This isn't something that can be ignored anymore. It's going to be a high priority for the next president." Military experts say that by 2020, Pyongyang will most likely have the skills to make a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile topped by a nuclear warhead. They also expect that by then North Korea may have accumulated enough nuclear material to build up to 100 warheads. Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who has traveled to North Korea and who formerly directed the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, said North Korea's progress in missile and nuclear development signals that it has gone from seeing unconventional weapons as bargaining chips to "deciding they need a nuclear weapons fighting force." The Pentagon warned Congress in a report earlier this year that one of Pyongyang's latest missiles, if perfected, "would be capable of reaching much of the continental United States." In congressional testimony, American officials have provided more details. Intelligence analysts, they say, now judge that North Korea can miniaturize a nuclear weapon, place it atop a missile and fire it at the United States though the odds of a successful nuclear strike are seen as low. Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, head of the Pacific Command, last year summed up the deep concern. "All the indications are that we have to be prepared to defend the homeland," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. North Korea's own claims about its nuclear capacities are generally viewed with extreme skepticism. The state, led by an erratic, young leader, Kim Jong un, is notorious for blustering propaganda, fake photos and outright lies. So private analysts and United States intelligence officials have in recent years tracked the country's progress by studying carefully vetted imagery from satellites, and from North Korea itself, of the growing number of missile firings and engine tests. The experts track how far and fast the missiles travel, and the color of their plumes. Recently, one set of plumes became much cleaner, indicating the successful use of advanced propellants, analysts reported. North Korea is an impoverished nation whose sophisticated missile program has been built with Cold War era Russian technology as well as the expertise of Russian engineers who moved there in the early 1990s looking for lucrative work after the Soviet Union fell apart, rocket experts and intelligence analysts say. The Soviet Union, if poor in consumer goods, inaugurated the space age in dazzling firsts. Eventually, the United States caught up and won the race, landing astronauts on the moon. As it turns out, Russia's rocket engines were far more innovative than those the Americans used. Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea specialist at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, in California, recently noted the grim implications of a test firing on land that featured the debut of a powerful new engine. "That means that, rather than simply hitting the West Coast, an operational North Korean ICBM could probably reach targets throughout the United States, including Washington, D.C.," he wrote in a blog. Pyongyang obtained its first wave of Russian rocket technology in the 1980s, giving it an ability to make Scuds, short range missiles with engines that burn kerosene and emit smoky exhaust. Soon, the collapse of the Soviet rocket industry brought North Korea a second wave of far more potent technology. The collapse began late in the Cold War as arms agreements led to deep cuts in both Soviet and American nuclear forces. It accelerated when Russia was unable to create a private industry for putting commercial satellites into orbit. Soon, impoverished rocket designers were fleeing Russia. In one incident in late 1992, officials at a Moscow airport blocked a group of nearly two dozen missile experts, along with their wives and children, from traveling to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. "I have always believed that our work is the most important," Yuri Bessarabov, one of the rocket scientists, told Moscow News. "But it has turned out that we are unnecessary." By the time President Obama took office, in January 2009, Pyongyang had deployed hundreds of short and medium range missiles that used motors of Russian design, and had exported hundreds of the weapons armed with conventional warheads to countries including Egypt, Iran and Syria. Typically, the countries bought Scuds. At this time, North Korea was also developing the new generation of missiles powered by a much more advanced engine. Western intelligence analysts were alarmed to discover that the new engine derived from the R 27, a compact missile made for Soviet submarines that had carried a nuclear warhead. Its creator was the Makeyev Design Bureau, an industrial complex in the Ural Mountains whose rogue experts had been detained at the Moscow airport. The engine jacked up heat, thrust and range, outpacing the Scud motor. And its propellants were more energetic than the old kerosene fuels. They were hypergolic. That meant the ingredients, when mixed, ignited spontaneously in powerful blasts. They made the smoky kerosene look archaic. The engine was being developed to power a new missile known as the Musudan, named after Pyongyang's main launching site. The greater thrust of its single engine translated into greater range. Analysts warned that the missile's warhead might fly for up to 2,400 miles far enough to hit the American base at Guam but shy of the minimum intercontinental range of 3,400 miles. At a military parade in late 2010, Pyongyang unveiled its R 27 spinoff, giving substance to years of American intelligence warnings. The Musudan turned out to be 5 feet wide and 40 feet long remarkably small compared to North Korea's large missiles, which military analysis saw as sitting ducks. The smaller missiles displayed that day were transported on trucks and could be hauled on country roads through forested regions or kept in tunnels, making them easy to hide and, as a target, difficult to find and destroy. Pyongyang also used the R 27 engine design as a building block to make compact missiles that could fire warheads between continents. The KN 08 missile (Korea North military type 8) was powered by two of the advanced motors. Analysts said its range was intercontinental and might send a warhead plummeting down on the West Coast. The KN 14, a longer version of the KN 08, appeared able, in theory, to send one of Pyongyang's nuclear warheads crashing down on Washington, D.C. Today, the KN 08 and the KN 14 are widely seen as the most threatening missiles in North Korea's developing arsenal, especially given the land test in April of the potent engine that apparently powers them. Still, experts note that North Korea is years away from deploying a reliable long range missile. For instance, it has yet to master the complex technology needed to protect a nuclear warhead from the searing heat generated as it plunges from outer space to a fiery re entry. Experts also do not see North Korea as being capable anytime soon of building a much more destructive hydrogen warhead, capable of destroying large cities. Still, military officials worry about a day of reckoning. "The intel community assesses North Korea's ability to successfully shoot an ICBM with a nuclear weapon and reach the homeland as low," William E. Gortney, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command, told a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee in April. Eventually, he added, "we assess that this low probability will increase," and the United States will need to invest in better defenses. Making sure Pyongyang has serious doubts about whether a nuclear strike would ever succeed, Commander Gortney added, "is absolutely critical."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The name Editta Sherman may not ring a bell, but she was the blithe spirit who flitted through "Bill Cunningham New York," about the New York Times's street fashion photographer, who died in 2016. Sherman (1913 2013) was Cunningham's muse, erstwhile collaborator and longtime neighbor in the fabled studios above Carnegie Hall. But she was a photographer in her own right, imbuing portraits of actors, writers and musicians with an unusual combination of glamour and intimacy. Sherman was a rarity in the male dominated portrait photography profession, and some of her best subjects were women: the country singer June Carter Cash in her gawky, beautiful youth; an aging Gertrude Lawrence, famous as the first Anna in "The King and I"; and Pearl Buck, looking typically formidable. Their portraits will join around 60 others in "The Duchess of Carnegie Hall: Photographs by Editta Sherman," opening Friday, Aug. 18 at the New York Historical Society Museum Library. (Through Oct. 15, nyhistory.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
It's a sure sign that you've entered the playwriting pantheon when your plots, characters and overall outlook are still being rubbed like relics and scavenged for scraps decades after your death. Another sign: becoming an adjective. Chekhov passes both tests. The Chekhovian style a smoothie of sympathy, misanthropy, hopelessness and bemusement is highly prized today. Playwrights try to acquire it the way grave robbers tried to acquire saints' fingers: by theft. At least the theft is generally acknowledged, as if to say: We're stealing from the best. Post Chekhov plays like "Minor Character," "Life Sucks," "Drowning Crow," "Stupid Bird" and "The Wisteria Trees," among many others, do not hide their debt to "Uncle Vanya," "The Seagull" and "The Cherry Orchard" they advertise it. Likewise, Halley Feiffer's "Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow," which opened on Thursday at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space in Hell's Kitchen, states up front that it is an adaptation of Chekhov's "Three Sisters." And yet that's a dodge. This amusing stunt of a play, commissioned by the Williamstown Theater Festival and directed by Trip Cullman, isn't so much adapted as lifted intact, then sliced, colorized and confettied. It's Chekhov's skeleton given a "Mean Girls" makeover. That skeleton is almost exactly what it was when "Three Sisters" debuted in 1901. Olga, Masha and Irina Prozorov, though raised in Moscow, have landed in a provincial Russian backwater where nothing much happens except heartbreak. At 28, the hard as nails Olga (Rebecca Henderson) already fears becoming a spinster; at 25, the dramatic Masha (Chris Perfetti) feels trapped in a dead end marriage; and though just turning 20 as the play begins, the dewy Irina (Tavi Gevinson) worries that she is incapable of love. Time and a series of challenges will prove them all sadly right. But even within the familiar (if aggressively trimmed) story, Ms. Feiffer manages a major transformation. Turning the sisters inside out, she skins them of the social graces that make them sympathetic in the original. They are no longer young women of culture and refinement struggling to resist despair but premature harridans unable to shut up about it, in language too coarse for company. "I can't even masturbate anymore," Olga tells her sisters, not so Chekhovianly. The disjuncture is of course deliberate; Ms. Feiffer has said she wrote the play thinking it would be "fun and funny" to translate Chekhov into "millennial speak." Olga, reminding Irina that her birthday is also the anniversary of their father's death, commiserates insincerely by speaking in emoticons. ("Sad face," she says, barely bothering to make one.) When their brother, Andrey, asks the social climbing neighbor Natasha to marry him, she answers with snark and upspeak, "Obvi." This is funny, yes, at least in small doses; Ms. Feiffer has a joke plugger's ear for deflation and wordplay. Irina, rhapsodizing that she feels like a boat "the sky above me, the sea below" is quickly cut down by Olga, who says, "Yeah, we know how boats work." Andrey (Greg Hildreth) isn't just bored and lonely, he's "blonely." But the absurdity and sarcasm quickly pall; Ms. Feiffer evidently wants the audience to experience the household's emotional depletion firsthand. (She says she sextupled the title for maximum annoyance.) Seated on two sides of a narrow platform cluttered with detritus from various decades between 1900 and now, theatergoers can't help but feel they are trapped along with the Prozorovs in an eternal (or at least a 95 minute) headache. Anachronism and anomie are the keynotes of Mr. Cullman's inventive production. That platform set, by Mark Wendland, is lit by Ben Stanton with soft Chinese lanterns and harsh fluorescents; the costumes, by Paloma Young, are winkingly contemporary, with lacy yoga pants for the arriviste Natasha (Sas Goldberg) and Playbill pajamas for Masha's apparently closeted husband, Kulygin (Ryan Spahn). The soundscape samples Whitney Houston, Russian rap and "Into the Woods." This aesthetic discipline supports Ms. Feiffer's tone at every turn. Mr. Cullman makes even the scene changes comply, so that the fire occurring during what was once the break between Act 2 and Act 3 is now a staged "fire," all garish red lights and choreographed chaos. With most of the play's events in quotation marks, you'd think there would be nothing left for the characters to do but mouth their lines. Yet Ms. Feiffer, here as in "The Pain of My Belligerence" and "I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard," manages to leave room for piquant acting within her overwrought concepts. In "Moscow," which is gorgeously and nontraditionally cast, real feeling does push through the sarcasm from time to time. Masha's desperate passion for the soldier Vershinin (Alfredo Narciso) is made in no way ridiculous by the fact that Mr. Perfetti is plainly a man in a dress . The paternal love that the doctor, Chebutykin, feels for Irina is no less touching now that the text spells out what used to be subtext; Ray Anthony Thomas nails it beautifully anyway. I was especially taken by the way Ms. Goldberg as Natasha and Matthew Jeffers as the "freak" soldier Solyony do justice to their characters' repellency while also suggesting its causes. Mr. Jeffers especially shows us, in a kind of preview of incel culture, that the moral idleness and emotional obtuseness of the highborn Prozorovs reverberates disastrously beyond their privileged household. But all of this real feeling is Chekhov's; the cast might just as creditably have performed the original "Three Sisters." Despite her skill and wit, I'm not sure what Ms. Feiffer has added to it, even as it's clear what she has subtracted. Masha, the idlest sister, encapsulates the nihilism of the adaptation's ethos when she says, "That's what life is, I think? Just doing horrible things? And complaining about them?" As a dramatist, Chekhov wasn't nihilistic. For him, the struggle against despair was endlessly engaging even though despair itself was not. Despite a tacked on semi happy ending, "Moscow" flips those polarities, reveling in hatefulness and hopelessness. That may be timely but, as Chekhov never said, it's also a bit too obvi. Tickets Through Aug. 3 at the Susan and Ronald Frankel Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, Manhattan; 646 506 9393, mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes .	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The video, posted on the internet last summer, wasn't supposed to be the coming out story of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It opens with the voice of a man wryly narrating a fictional encounter in which he is asked to leave an airplane for "speaking Arabian." The words "Queer Muslim Proud" appear on the screen, followed by an introduction to the subject, in neon letters. As audience members in a dimly lit club cheer, Mr. Bhutto appears in a silky dress, dancing to the 1980s hit, "Disco Deewane," by the Pakistani singer Nazia Hassan. He shimmies and sways, a pink scarf pinned to his hair, light blue eye shadow reaching up to his eyebrows. South Asian viewers might not have recognized Mr. Bhutto's face but they certainly knew his name. In his native Pakistan, the news media voraciously covered the short film. The reaction focused, in a negative way, on him being a queer Muslim man. Mr. Bhutto is a visual and performance artist who lives in San Francisco, and the video about him was created by filmmakers as part of "The Turmeric Project," a series highlighting L.G.B.T.Q. South Asians living in America. Much of his work, including a recent show at the city's SOMArts Cultural Center, explores the intersection of Islam, sexuality and masculinity. But the reason viewers across the world clamored about the video, and why it continues to stir controversy, was because Mr. Bhutto is the grandson and namesake of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party (P.P.P.), a left wing political party that held power in Pakistan on and off since 1967. (The current governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz, is a center right conservative group.) After leading the country for much of the 1970s, the elder Zulfikar Bhutto was overthrown in a military coup and executed in 1979. Three of his children who went into politics, most prominently the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, later suffered similarly violent ends. Mr. Bhutto was 6 years old when his father, Murtaza, was killed in a chaotic gunfight with the police outside the family home in Karachi; the exact circumstances of his death remain mysterious. Although Mr. Bhutto said that his immediate family has never pushed him to enter politics, he is considered by many Pakistanis to be the successor to the family's turbulent dynasty. "Bhutto Jr steps into art world, raises hopes," a headline in Dawn, one of Pakistan's leading English language newspapers, said. In a Facebook comment, one user pleaded to Bhutto, "You are doing nice job but please take lead party of your grand papa we all missing you." Equally impassioned but hostile reactions from overseas South Asians to the video centered on Mr. Bhutto's sexuality, especially on the 10 second long scene capturing his joyful drag performance. In Pakistan, same sex sexual acts are prohibited by law, and there are no anti discrimination laws to protect L.G.B.T.Q. citizens, although the Senate recently approved amendments to a bill that allows trans people to choose their gender without needing to appear before a medical board. News reports of ostracism, legal threats and attacks against gay Pakistanis, or against those perceived to be gay, are not uncommon; in one highly publicized case, a transgender activist died from gunshot wounds after delays in her medical care. Homophobic comments on Mr. Bhutto's video, both from media sources and social media users, employed derogatory terms and curses to condemn him and his art. "There was so much negativity when it came out, and the focus was on the drag part of it," Mr. Bhutto said. Drag is not openly accepted in Pakistan. The closest thing may be the performances by hijras transgender or intersex people who were categorized as males at birth but who do not conform to traditional ideas of masculinity. While they do not fit the Western definition of drag queens, they dance and sing at public ceremonies while wearing women's clothing. At first, Mr. Bhutto was reluctant to discuss his own use of cross dressing. "But now the cat's out of the bag," he said. "Drag is an integral part of my practice; what point is there being shy and tiptoeing around it anymore?" Mr. Bhutto, 27, began using visual and performance works to explore Islamic identity after coming to the United States, in 2014, to pursue his M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute. Newly arrived in the city, he was shocked by a notorious series of anti Muslim ads on city buses, paid for by Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative. "It made me want to hide who I was," he said; at the same time, he added, the explicit Islamophobia "energized me in a way I wasn't in Pakistan." Alongside the Iranian artist Minoosh Zomorodinia, he began exploring acts that emphasized and embraced his status as a Muslim in America: together, the two developed "prayformances," in which they completed the Muslim ritual of praying in public spaces. It was another act of hatred that spurred Mr. Bhutto to also weave his identity as a gay person into his art. On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, an American Muslim man, killed 49 people at a popular Orlando gay club. The tragedy, and unsubstantiated rumors that Mr. Mateen may have been a closeted gay man, opened up a rare mainstream discourse, both in United States and in the Muslim world, on queerness in Islam. It became clear to Mr. Bhutto that "people think you're either queer or you're Muslim, and that somehow those two things are in opposition to one another." During that period, Mr. Bhutto attended his first drag show. "If you aren't used to it, it's very impactful: the makeup, the costume, the performance, the songs," he said. He first tried his hand at drag a few months later, at a local bar. Over time, he began building his performances around music and spoken word sections that address his religion and cultural background "which can be surprisingly jarring and political to the audience," he said. In the same vein, his mixed media series "Mussalmaan Musclemen" aims for "interesting confusion for the viewer," this time through the layering of cheap fabrics from Pakistan over beefcake photos from an Urdu translation of an exercise manual supposedly originally written by Arnold Schwarzenegger. "There are some misguided ideas about what Islam represents and the threat that Muslim men pose," Mr. Bhutto explained. By combining homoerotic images of musclebound men with embroidered sections of flowery cloth, and by emphasizing the calligraphic Arabic script, he seeks to challenge assumptions about Muslim masculinity. Last fall, "Mussalmaan Musclemen" was included in the Karachi Biennale. Though it was the first time that Mr. Bhutto had been home since the "Turmeric Project" video caused an uproar, he said that he wasn't nervous he has always made sure to maintain a low profile when he travels to Pakistan. But it would be more difficult to stay incognito if he were openly practicing his art there, which, he said, is why he's not interested in moving back to the country.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder gave his trove of Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013 one of the most significant gifts in its history the Met knew it would have to provide galleries of a quality commensurate with that of the collection. As a result, hanging over the Met's decision this year to postpone its new 600 million wing for Modern and contemporary art as well as the museum's recent management turmoil have been nagging questions: Is Mr. Lauder's gift, valued at more than 1 billion four years ago, now at risk? If the Met takes too long to resurrect the project or ultimately scales it back, might Mr. Lauder take his collection elsewhere? Mr. Lauder, who agreed to answer these questions only through email, made clear that his initial donation of 78 works of art was never contingent on the Met's construction of a new wing, nor was its future now in jeopardy. "There is no issue with my gift," he said. "We are aligned and I am confident that the Met will present the collection in a manner that is consistent with the excellence for which it is known." Mr. Lauder has conveyed this message to Daniel Brodsky, the Met's chairman, and to Daniel H. Weiss, who recently ascended to the top job at the Met, becoming chief executive as well as president. "Leonard has assured us he wants this gift to come to the Met," Mr. Weiss said, adding, "We made commitments to him about how we would honor and store and exhibit this collection and he's open to hearing modifications of this vision." Just what precisely those "commitments" are is unclear; the contractual terms of the gift are confidential. But The New York Times has learned that under the agreement, the Met has until 2025 to create a suitable home for the Lauder material. Originally, the new wing was to be completed by 2020 in time for the Met's 150th birthday and be designed by David Chipperfield. But the Met had difficulty securing lead donors for the project and then confronted a looming budget deficit. These possibilities included the conservative activist and philanthropist David H. Koch, a Met trustee emeritus who funded the 65 million refurbishment of the museum's plaza and the renovation of New York City Ballet's Lincoln Center home, both of which bear his name. Also asked was the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, who gave 150 million to create a cultural center at Yale University in 2015 and 100 million to the New York Public Library in 2008, both of which are named after him. It can't be easy for the Met to see the Museum of Modern Art win two major gifts for its renovation and expansion: 100 million from the media mogul David Geffen last year and 50 million from the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen last week (even after MoMA announced it had completed fund raising for its 400 million construction costs and is now raising money for its endowment). Part of the motivation for the Met's new wing was to demonstrably increase its commitment to contemporary art, while attracting collectors' dollars and art donations. Mr. Lauder, chairman emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, could have provided a lead financial gift for the Met addition. But he had made clear that he did not want his name on the wing (nor on the Whitney's new home in the meatpacking district, though that museum ultimately did call it the Leonard A. Lauder Building). He is also known to believe that with his Cubist collection he has given enough to the Met. Asked about this, Mr. Lauder, 84, said, "I have been actively supporting the Met through acquisitions and exhibitions, and will continue to support the museum in ways that help advance its mission." The Cubist collection which has Picassos, Braques, Legers and works by Gris catapulted the Met forward, given its weakness in Modern and contemporary art. (Mr. Lauder has added works in the years since.) The collection could also conceivably end up in the Met Breuer, but the museum has leased that building for eight years until 2023 after which its future is uncertain. While the Met Breuer program has received some critical acclaim, it is a drain on the Met's resources because it costs 17 million a year to run and can siphon donor support from the Fifth Avenue flagship. Should the Whitney decide to expand, it could take the Breuer building back, although that museum is more likely to add a city owned site to the north of its current location. There is general agreement that the Met's current home for Modern and contemporary art the 1987 Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the main building needs an overhaul. The original architect, Kevin Roche, told The Times in 2014, "I was never very happy with what happened." The recently scuttled redesign originally called for the construction of a new wing, an expansion of the roof garden and, possibly, even a new entrance to the museum from Central Park.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Virtual Reality on the Cheap? Try These Apps on Your Phone AT last week's annual International CES, one of the largest technology conventions, virtual reality goggles were hyped as a way to get a taste of the immersive 3 D technology. Yet many people may be able to sample virtual reality just by using their phones with the right apps. Start with the Within app, which is a free iOS and Android download. It uses so called 360 degree video technology, which is similar to virtual reality and lets you look at a video in every direction and to interact with and explore a movie scene. Within works like this: Imagine you are watching a regular film on your phone with a point of view decided by where the filmmaker was pointing a camera. In the app, you can move your phone around in the air, looking all around and up and down, as you slide your viewpoint all around the scene, seeing the actors and the set wrapping all around you. Within has access to a short list of 360 degree videos, including a music video made by U2 and a specially filmed short episode of the hit TV series "Mr. Robot." You simply choose one of the videos, hit play and decide either to download the film for later viewing or to stream it. To watch the Within clips another way, use a Google Cardboard device (usually around 20). This simple hardware converts your phone into a full virtual reality goggle system, so you will see the clips in 3 D. This is even more of a taste of the future. The app has a slightly longer list of films available, and in many ways it's an excellent peer to Within. But the video quality seemed lower, and the menu system is a little more clunky. Nevertheless, it's a free iOS and Android download, so you may as well try it out. Google also has a free iOS and Android app to accompany its Cardboard product. It's simple, but it does help you set up Cardboard and acts as a portal to some virtual reality experiences. On Android, there's an even more interesting free Google app called Cardboard Camera. This app guides you in making 360 degree circular panorama photos, making you spin around with your phone held out to capture a scene. You can then view your creations later in the Cardboard app. Not quite as impressive as an immersive 360 degree video, but still fun. There are also some virtual reality gaming apps worth trying, like the Cardboard compatible InMind 2 game. You move through the play area by solving puzzles (mainly by looking at a target until it is selected). Along the way, some information will pop up that teaches you how human brains work. The graphics are smoothly animated and surreal and may remind you of the psychedelic scenes from the film "2001: A Space Odyssey." The 3 D effect as you look around is impressive and amusing, though not particularly high resolution. InMind 2 is a free iOS and Android download, which gives you a good start in the game. It costs 3 to download more levels. For a more exciting game, check out End Space VR. This is a space shooter game where enemies can fly at you from all angles, including above and behind you. It works both with Cardboard like devices and in non 3 D mode, where you wave your phone around. The graphics are fun, and the gameplay is simple but has enough to keep you interested. End Space is a 1 iOS download. On Android, the game is called Minos Starfighter, also for 1. Enjoy these samples of virtual reality and play safely. Try not to fall over in real life as you wiggle your head around in virtual space. The Happiness Planner is a different type of calendar app. Instead of merely helping organize to do lists and events, the app has a focus on raising your happiness levels. It encourages you to think positively and practice self reflection by setting regular goals. Attractively designed, this iOS app is free to use for 14 days and then costs 3 a month for access to all features.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
MUMBAI, India The Supreme Court of India issued a rebuke to the government Thursday by canceling 122 telecommunications licenses that were sold at below market prices in 2008 amid a corruption scandal. The action comes after several years of litigation in what has become known in India as the "2G scam." The controversy involved wireless phone licenses awarded at a price set in 2001 in a process that favored certain companies. It became the rallying cry for a large anticorruption movement that dominated public debate in the country last year. The scandal also implicated senior leaders for either supporting the tainted licensing or doing nothing to stop it. One government auditor estimated in 2010 that the government had lost as much as 1.8 trillion rupees, or 35 billion at current exchange rates, by not using an auction to sell the licenses. Senior policy makers have struggled to explain their decisions on the licenses. At times, they have justified the sale at old prices by saying it was intended to help keep the costs of phone calls low. At other times they have blamed previous governments for setting the precedent of a fixed price regime. The minister overseeing telecommunications at the time of the sale, Andimuthu Raja, is in jail awaiting trial on charges of corruption. Several corporate executives and other government officials are also awaiting trial, though many of them are free on bail. Mr. Raja and the others accused have denied any wrongdoing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
WASHINGTON The 900 billion stimulus bill that President Trump finally signed into law on Sunday evening goes well beyond providing the 600 checks that became a huge sticking point in getting the legislation across the finish line. The relief package casts a wide net with a variety of measures aimed at addressing the needs of millions of Americans, including those who have lost their jobs, as well as small businesses, nursing homes, colleges, universities and K 12 schools. The package extends some provisions of the original stimulus package that was passed in the spring, while adding new measures to help working families who have continued to suffer amid the pandemic. The full text of the bill ran almost 5,600 pages. Here's a look at what's included. Among the most anticipated components of the legislation is the direct payment, with 600 going to individual adults with an adjusted gross income of up to 75,000 a year based on 2019 earnings. Heads of households who earn up to 112,500 and a couple (or someone whose spouse died in 2020) who make up to 150,000 a year would get twice that amount. Eligible families with dependent children would receive an additional 600 per child. In a change from the last round, payments will not be denied to citizens married to someone without a social security number, allowing some spouses of undocumented immigrants to claim the benefit this time around. On Tuesday night, President Trump threatened to veto the bill because he said the payments were too low. He is advocating payments of 2,000. House Democrats planned to bring up an amendment to the bill on Thursday, an aide who was familiar with the proposal said. It is not clear how the House and Senate will act. With millions of Americans still unemployed, Congress acted to extend multiple programs to help those out of work, albeit at less generous levels than in the spring. The agreement would revive enhanced federal jobless benefits for 11 weeks, providing a lifeline for hard hit workers until March 14. The new benefit, up to 300 per week, is half the amount provided by the original stimulus bill in the spring. The legislation also extends Pandemic Unemployment Assistance a program aimed at a broad set of freelancers and independent contractors for the same period, providing an additional 100 per week. School budgets have been severely crippled by the pandemic and left some of the most vulnerable students in dire academic and financial straits. The bill provides 82 billion for education, including about 54 billion for K 12 schools and 23 billion for colleges and universities. While the package provides far more money for K 12 schools than the first stimulus bill in March, the funds still fall short of what both sectors say they need to blunt the effect of the pandemic. Many school districts that transitioned to remote learning this year were forced to make expensive adjustments to accommodate students while often shedding staff to balance their budgets. Colleges and universities are also facing financial constraints amid rising expenses and falling revenue. 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. "The money provided in this bill will provide some limited relief, which is welcome news to struggling students and institutions. But it is not going to be nearly enough in the long run or even the medium term," Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement. The legislation includes 7 billion for expanding access to high speed internet connections, nearly half of which will go toward helping cover the cost of monthly internet bills by providing up to 50 per month to low income families. The deal also sets aside 300 million for building out infrastructure in underserved rural areas and 1 billion in grants for tribal broadband programs. The agreement sets aside 285 billion for additional loans to small businesses under the Paycheck Protection Program, renewing the program created under the initial stimulus legislation. The latest version includes stricter terms that appear intended to correct some of the unpopular elements of the original program. It caps loans at 2 million and makes them available only to borrowers with fewer than 300 employees that experienced at least a 25 percent drop in sales from a year earlier in at least one quarter. The agreement also sets aside 12 billion specifically for minority owned businesses. And publicly traded companies will be ineligible to apply this time around. The legislation sets aside nearly 70 billion for a range of public health measures, including 20 billion for the purchase of vaccines, 8 billion for vaccine distribution and an additional 20 billion to help states continue their test and trace programs. The bill also allows a federal program that insures mortgages for nursing homes to dole out emergency loans aimed at helping hard hit elder care centers. The bill provides 10 billion for the child care industry, with those funds intended to help providers struggling with reduced enrollment or closures stay open and continue paying their staffs. The funds are also supposed to help families struggling with tuition payments. In an unusual rebuke of the Trump administration's climate policy, the deal includes new legislation to regulate hydrofluorocarbons, the powerful greenhouse gases common in air conditioners and refrigerators. It also allocates 35 billion to fund wind, solar and other clean energy projects. The package will also help millions of Americans avoid unexpected and often exorbitant medical bills that can result from visits to hospitals. The bill makes it illegal for hospitals to charge patients for services like emergency treatment by out of network doctors or transport in air ambulances, which patients often have no say about. The compromise would protect tenants struggling with rent by extending a moratorium on evictions for another month, through Jan. 31. The Department of Housing and Urban Development separately issued a similar moratorium on Monday that protects homeowners against foreclosures on mortgages backed by the Federal Home Administration. It runs until Feb. 28.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Ann Reinking as a character based on herself in Bob Fosse's autobiographical 1979 movie. "All That Jazz." "I think I came off as a good person," she said, "and as someone who meant something to him." Ann Reinking, a dancer, actor and Tony Award winning choreographer who performed for three decades on Broadway, where she was known for her long association with Bob Fosse and his work, died on Saturday in Woodinville, Wash., near Seattle. She was 71. Ms. Reinking had been visiting her older brother when she died in her sleep in a hotel room, said Dahrla King, her sister in law. The cause was not yet known. As a performer, Ms. Reinking was perhaps best known for playing Roxie Hart in the hit John Kander Fred Ebb musical "Chicago." She stepped into the role in 1977, at 27, and it helped make her a star. In 1996, when she was in her 40s, she returned to the role triumphantly for a hugely successful Broadway revival, which she also choreographed. Her success onstage in the original production fascinated audiences in part because of a romantic subplot playing out offstage. When Ms. Reinking, an ingenue, took on the role of Roxie, she was romantically involved with Fosse, the show's director and choreographer. And the star she was replacing was Gwen Verdon, who had been married to Fosse and who had separated from him several years earlier. ("Annie taking over had extraordinary symmetry," Ms. Verdon later recalled. "Pieces simply fell into place.") By the time Ms. Reinking returned to the role two decades later, she had become a formidable choreographer herself. She won the Tony Award for best choreography for the "Chicago" revival, which continued its run into this year. She imagined her dance movements as an updated tribute to Fosse's earlier choreography. (Fosse died of a heart attack in 1987 at 60.) "Ms. Reinking, a former dancer for Fosse (and, for a time, his companion), has brought her own light handed sparkle in evoking the Fosse spirit," Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The New York Times, "and the corps de ballet couldn't be better, physically capturing the wry, knowing pastiche of some of Kander and Ebb's best songs." She continued to keep the Fosse flame burning in 1999 by co directing and co choreographing the Broadway musical "Fosse," a revue of his work, which won the Tony for best musical.(She briefly returned to the stage for a few performances of "Fosse" in 2001.) "He lived to wake people up, to make them really live," she said of Fosse in 1996. "He taught me how hard you have to work to do that." Ms. Reinking described Fosse's work as having "influenced a generation," but she said her own choreographic style was different more balletic and quirky. In 1979, she played a character based on herself in Fosse's fantasy filled but frankly autobiographical film, "All That Jazz," with Roy Scheider as an intense Fosse like director and choreographer. "It was me, and it wasn't me," she said of her character, the director's girlfriend, in an interview with The Times in 1980. "Basically I was very flattered. I think I came off as a good person and as someone who meant something to him." Ann Reinking was born on Nov. 10, 1949, in Seattle to Walter and Frances Reinking. Her father was a hydraulics engineer and salesman; her mother was a homemaker. Ann started ballet classes when she was 8, her mother told The Seattle Times. She was a teenager when she appeared in her first professional show, "Bye Bye Birdie," at the Seattle Opera House, in 1965. In New York, Ms. Reinking was a member of the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall. Her first Broadway role was in the ensemble of "Cabaret" in 1969. She went on to appear in "Coco," which starred Katharine Hepburn as Coco Chanel, and "Pippin," which Fosse choreographed. Ms. Reinking starred as Joan of Arc, opposite Joel Grey, in the short lived 1975 musical "Goodtime Charley." The next year, she joined the cast of the smash hit "A Chorus Line," then went on to appear in "Dancin'," a musical revue directed and choreographed by Fosse, starting in 1978. When "Dancin'" opened, The Times's dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote that Ms. Reinking had successfully made the leap from the chorus line to leading roles. "There could be no doubt that Miss Reinking had joined the ranks of Broadway's brightest stars," Ms. Dunning wrote. "With her long legs, mane of silky, flying hair and feline intensity, Ms. Reinking is a standout in some very fast company." In 1986, Ms. Reinking starred in a revival of "Sweet Charity," a production that also featured Bebe Neuwirth, who went on to perform opposite Ms. Reinking as Velma Kelly in the "Chicago" revival. Before the "Chicago" revival, Ms. Reinking, by then in her 40s, had never expected to dance onstage again, she said. Indeed, at first she turned down the offer to play Roxie again. But the director, Walter Bobbie, persisted, and she relented.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
When you arrive at the tiny glass encapsulated Better Luck Tomorrow in Houston's hip Heights neighborhood, you're asked to join the bar's "club," which requires a signature before you've even looked at the menu. It's the bar's coy way of working around local restrictions that prohibit the sale of alcohol unless the establishment is a private club. But over the short time it has been open, you could say Better Luck Tomorrow has become one of the hottest clubs in Houston, winning accolades galore. Eater Houston ranked it the best bar in Houston when it opened in 2017, and Food Wine magazine flagged it as one of the country's top 10 restaurants of 2018. Awards for both restaurant and bar is the result of the mind meld of the city's two dining wunderkinds. Better Luck Tomorrow's food menu is designed by Justin Yu, the James Beard award winning chef known for his popular Houston restaurants Oxheart (closed in 2017) and Theodore Rex. The bar's cocktail menu is the work of Bobby Heugel, the man who has virtually remade Houston's drinking scene through innovative concoctions at his bars Anvil and The Pastry War. The two chose the name, the title of a film considered a prequel to the "Fast and Furious" franchise, because it seemed fitting for a bar. "Bars are generally happy places with a bit of melancholy," Mr. Yu said. The bar is open nightly but does not take reservations. As a result, its small interior can get cramped quickly with millennials on dates or groups of foodies on the hunt, as it did on the rainy night I visited. With outdoor seating on either side of the bar, and in light of its popularity, the space is best calibrated for either sunny weekend brunch or boozy post dinner drinks and nosh. The dress code is come as you are, or rather, come as you would like to be seen in a tight, flirty space.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The United States is experiencing the worst measles outbreak in decades. Federal health officials said on Thursday that 971 individual cases have been confirmed in 26 states so far in 2019, surpassing the total recorded in 1992, when the last large epidemic occurred. The disease was declared eliminated in the country in 2000. But if the outbreaks in New York City and suburban Rockland County, N.Y., continue through the summer and fall, health officials said, the United States may again be a country where measles is endemic. Before measles vaccination became common, there were up to 4 million cases of measles each year nationwide. The growing number of cases now reflects the rise of misinformation spread by opponents of vaccination in the United States, as well as an increase in international outbreaks that have infected American travelers. New York has been particularly hard hit, with outbreaks centered in suburban Rockland County and in Brooklyn. But measles continues to spread in at least eight other communities in states like California, Washington and Pennsylvania. Here's what you need to know about the disease and the risk of getting it. Measles is an extremely contagious virus. It can cause serious respiratory symptoms, fever and rash. In some cases, especially in babies and young children, the consequences can be severe. Measles killed 110,000 people globally in 2017, mostly children under 5. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 10 children with measles gets an ear infection, which can lead to permanent deafness. One in 20 children with measles develops pneumonia and one in 1,000 develops encephalitis (brain swelling that can cause brain damage). Pregnant women with measles are at greater risk of having premature or low birth weight babies. One or two in 1,000 children who contract measles will die. In countries where measles vaccination is not routine, it is a significant cause of death, according to the World Health Organization. Here's our full coverage of the measles outbreak. Measles is transmitted by droplets from an infected person's nose or mouth. If you're in a room with someone infected with measles, you can inhale their virus when they cough, sneeze or even talk. Infected people can transmit the measles virus starting four days before they develop a rash, so they may be contagious before they realize they have the disease. They remain able to spread the virus for about four days after the rash appears. The virus can also live on surfaces for several hours, and is so contagious that, according to the C.D.C., "you can catch measles just by being in a room where a person with measles has been, up to two hours after that person is gone." Is there a cure for measles? No. The vast majority of people who contract measles haven't been vaccinated, and giving them the measles vaccine within 72 hours of being exposed to the virus might help at least by reducing the severity and duration of the symptoms. The Mayo Clinic says that pregnant women, babies and people with weak immune systems can receive an injection of antibodies called immune serum globulin within six days of being exposed to measles, which might prevent or lessen the symptoms. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. How safe and effective is the measles vaccine? Extremely safe and effective. The measles mumps rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine, which was first licensed in 1963, causes no side effects in most children. Small numbers may get a mild fever, rash, soreness or swelling, the C.D.C. says. Adults or teenagers may feel temporary soreness or stiffness at the injection site. Rarely, the vaccine might cause a high fever that could lead to a seizure, according to the C.D.C. Contrary to misinformation that some anti vaccine activists continue to repeat, the vaccine does not cause autism. One dose of the vaccine is about 93 percent effective; two doses boost that number to 97 percent, the C.D.C. says. People who don't get the vaccine are at very high risk for contracting measles. "Almost everyone who has not had the MMR shot will get measles if they are exposed to the measles virus," the C.D.C. says. A live, weakened form of the measles virus is inside the vaccine. The virus is then grown in a culture of salt, vitamins, amino acids and serum from a calf fetus. An extracted serum from human blood plasma called albumin, and an antibiotic, neomycin, along with sugars get added. Gelatin helps stabilize this lab built version of the natural measles virus that does not act in the same way when a person gets an injection. When should children be vaccinated? Children should receive two doses of the vaccine: the first when they are 12 to 15 months old; the second when they are between 4 and 6 years old. If infants who are between 6 and 11 months old are about to travel from the United States to another country, the C.D.C. recommends they receive one dose of the vaccine beforehand. It's never too late. In fact, if measles is occurring in your community, it's a good idea to get vaccinated unless you are sure you have previously received two shots of the M.M.R. vaccine; or you've had all three of the diseases the vaccine protects against (which gives you lifelong immunity, and no booster dose is ever needed); or you were born before 1957. (The vaccine was made available in 1963 and in the decade before that, virtually every child got measles by age 15, so the C.D.C. considers people born before 1957 likely to have had measles as children.) But people who received the vaccine in the 1960s should consider getting immunized again. One of two vaccines available from 1963 67 was ineffective, the C.D.C. says. The effective vaccine during those years was the "live" vaccine; the ineffective one was the inactivated or "killed" vaccine. If you're not sure, consult with your doctor. You cannot get measles twice. Before 1963, nearly all children developed an immunity simply by contracting and recovering from the disease. If most people are getting vaccinated, why does it matter if I don't vaccinate my child? You are probably thinking of the concept of herd immunity, which means that if a large number of people are protected from a disease by a vaccine, the disease will be less likely to circulate, diminishing the risk for people who are unvaccinated. The threshold for herd immunity varies by disease for a highly contagious disease, a very high percentage of people need to be vaccinated to meet that threshold. In a hypothetical community where nobody has immunity from the measles virus, one infected person might infect 12 to 18 people, who might each infect another 12 to 18 people. At this rate, a small outbreak would quickly grow out of control. Every person who is successfully vaccinated reduces the potential sources of infection, thus reducing the risk to unvaccinated people. This reduction in risk is sometimes called the herd effect. The presence of vaccinated people helps slow the spread of the virus. For an outbreak to end quickly, each infected person must infect, on average, fewer than one other person. In this example, at least 17 of every 18 people (more than 94 percent) would need immunity. This threshold is sometimes called the herd immunity threshold. In a hypothetical community where nobody has immunity from the measles virus, one infected person might infect 12 to 18 people, who might each infect another 12 to 18 people. At this rate, a small outbreak would quickly grow out of control. Every person who is successfully vaccinated reduces the potential sources of infection, thus reducing the risk to unvaccinated people. This reduction in risk is sometimes called the herd effect. The presence of vaccinated people helps slow the spread of the virus. For an outbreak to end quickly, each infected person must infect, on average, fewer than one other person. In this example, at least 17 of every 18 people (more than 94 percent) would need immunity. This threshold is sometimes called the herd immunity threshold. In a hypothetical community where nobody has immunity from the measles virus, one infected person might infect 12 to 18 people, who might each infect another 12 to 18 people. At this rate, a small outbreak would quickly grow out of control. Every person who is successfully vaccinated reduces the potential sources of infection, thus reducing the risk to unvaccinated people. This reduction in risk is sometimes called the herd effect. The presence of vaccinated people helps slow the spread of the virus. For an outbreak to end quickly, each infected person must infect, on average, fewer than one other person. In this example, at least 17 of every 18 people (more than 94 percent) would need immunity. This threshold is sometimes called the herd immunity threshold. In a hypothetical community where nobody has immunity from the measles virus, one infected person might infect 12 to 18 people, who might each infect another 12 to 18 people. At this rate, a small outbreak would quickly grow out of control. Every person who is successfully vaccinated reduces the potential sources of infection, thus reducing the risk to unvaccinated people. This reduction in risk is sometimes called the herd effect. The presence of vaccinated people helps slow the spread of the virus. For an outbreak to end quickly, each infected person must infect, on average, fewer than one other person. In this example, at least 17 of every 18 people (more than 94 percent) would need immunity. This threshold is sometimes called the herd immunity threshold. During the Disneyland outbreak in 2015, a 9 month old child whose parents were planning to immunize contracted measles from an older child who hadn't been vaccinated, said Dr. Annabelle De St. Maurice, an expert on infectious diseases at U.C.L.A. So vaccinating your child not only protects your child, it helps protect others in your community. In 2000, measles was declared eliminated from the United States because the country had gone for more than 12 months without any "continuous disease transmission" within its borders. "Eliminated" doesn't mean the disease was completely eradicated; it means the United States no longer had any places where the disease was endemic or homegrown. There have been a small number of measles cases in the United States since then, ranging from 37 in 2004 to 667 in 2014, largely among people who were not vaccinated. Most of the American cases since 2000 have been the result of people traveling to or from countries where measles is endemic because there is little vaccination. How many people haven't been vaccinated? A small number in scattered pockets. Measles immunization in the United States is stable and high more than 90 percent according to C.D.C. tracking. Who are the people not getting vaccinated? One way to measure is by looking at the annual assessment of kindergarten vaccinations. It shows only Colorado, the District of Columbia, Idaho and Kansas dipping below the national 90 percent vaccination rate, though in certain communities the rate can be lower. Does this mean mumps and rubella cases are re emerging, too? The M.M.R. vaccine has also greatly reduced the threat of mumps and rubella in the United States. It is not quite as effective against mumps, with 88 percent effectiveness, according to the C.D.C., and cases have increased in recent years, from 229 in 2012 to 6,366 in 2016. Rubella used to cause millions of infections in the United States. According to the C.D.C., 12.5 million people got rubella in an epidemic from 1964 to 1965, and the disease caused 11,000 women to lose their pregnancies, 2,100 newborns to die and 20,000 babies to be born with congenital rubella syndrome, which can cause brain damage and other serious problems. Rubella was declared eliminated in the United States in 2004, and the C.D.C. says that fewer than 10 cases are reported each year. But, as with measles and mumps, there are still many countries where it persists because of lack of vaccination, and every case since 2012 has been traced to people infected while traveling or living in another country.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
By the time Gary Kuchta moved to New York two years ago for a new job, he had owned three houses two in Chicago, his hometown, and one in Los Angeles. "I kind of just believe in owning," he said. "For me, owning a home has always been the one thing that has connected me most to a city and gives me a sense of investment in a city," he said. "I feel like I am putting roots down and not just visiting." He rented in Chelsea in order to get his bearings, and then began the hunt for a place to buy. Mr. Kuchta, 50, who works in marketing for Pfizer consumer health care, commutes to his office in Madison, N.J., which takes more than an hour each way. He didn't want to deal with the subway along with the commuter train. So he needed a place within walking distance of Penn Station "one less machine I have to rely on," he said. He wanted two bedrooms, along with a second bathroom for guests and a washer dryer. For an apartment in move in condition, his budget topped out at 1.5 million. But for that price, it had to be "done nicely where I could see myself living in it," he said. For a place needing renovations, he was willing to pay as much as 1.2 million. "I like projects," he said, "and I knew it was more likely I was going to get a place I wanted to renovate." A friend referred him to Will Rogers of Fenwick Keats Real Estate. Mr. Kuchta was soon drawn to a sunny two bedroom in Chelsea Gardens, a six story 1940 building on West 23rd Street. The apartment had a long foyer and a sunken living room. Its location at the end of a hall meant the bedrooms weren't adjacent to a neighbor's walls. The co op had a grassy courtyard. But the place lacked a second bathroom and a washer dryer. "Two of the priority things he wanted were not available in this apartment," Mr. Rogers said. "He thought something bigger and better would come along." And, at 1.285 million, it seemed expensive. Maintenance was almost 1,300 a month. Mr. Rogers thought the price might drop. At a nice loft in a co op building on West 28th Street, the price was right 840,000, with monthly maintenance around 1,500. The men studied the place. "We spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how to reconfigure the layout," Mr. Rogers said. "With loft apartments, all the light is in the front." A partition that incorporated closets did let some light through. But the block, which had several hotels, seemed transient. Mr. Kuchta decided against the place. It later sold for 845,000. On another block of West 23rd Street, at Chelsea Mews, a 1910 loft building, a one bedroom co op was available for 950,000; monthly maintenance was around 2,175. A wall in what had been a second bedroom had been removed, creating a large living room, and the place could easily be converted back. There was a washer dryer on the floor. Mr. Kuchta liked the big windows and the classic view of water towers. He offered the asking price. But the seller's new place wasn't ready, so Mr. Kuchta agreed to wait to close. In the end, negotiations went nowhere, and the unit is now off the market. At an open house for a two bedroom at an 11 story 1925 building on West 55th Street, there was such a crowd that people had to wait in line. The apartment had two full bathrooms, a washer dryer and a large south facing terrace. The price was 999,999, and the monthly maintenance almost 1,900. The place had some quirks a tiny sink in the second bathroom, a narrow hallway where a row of closets had been added, and weird angles in the second bedroom, more suitable for a crib than a queen size bed. Several offers came in, but Mr. Kuchta liked it so much he offered 1.25 million, a full 25 percent above the asking price. "This is where my emotion got the best of me," he said. "Will is, like, 'Are you sure you want to do this?' " "And they suddenly were super interested," Mr. Kuchta said, "which made me feel I'd gone way over. So that's where I got cold feet." "Gary felt it was a quick and rash decision in the heat of the market," Mr. Rogers said. The apartment quickly sold for 1.2 million. Some places had seemed underpriced, others overpriced. "I saw a lot of what I would call space price mismatches," Mr. Kuchta said. Meanwhile, the price of the Chelsea Gardens apartment had dropped, as Mr. Rogers had suspected it would. It was now 1.175 million. Mr. Kuchta went back. "There wasn't a whole lot more on the market he liked as much," Mr. Rogers said. So Mr. Kuchta bought the apartment last summer for 1.15 million. Now he is renovating, with a budget of up to 200,000. What with plans, permits and approvals, progress has been slow. He is redoing the kitchen and the bathroom, and relocating some walls. "They had some weird misuses of space in there," he said. He is stealing from the hallway and closets to enlarge some rooms. When he left his 3,000 square foot three bedroom house in California, he downsized too much, so he plans to acquire some new furniture. "I still wish I had a second bathroom," he said. But, having discovered he can drop off his laundry an amenity uncommon in his previous cities he wonders, "Did I need a washer dryer in the first place?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
This interview includes spoilers for Season 3 of "Stranger Things." When Billy Hargrove landed in Hawkins, Ind., in Season 2 of Netflix's "Stranger Things," it felt like a major moment in the show. But then he didn't have much to do in Season 2 beyond flirting with Mike's mom. Turns out that was all setup for his significant, series changing role in Season 3, in which he became a human conduit for the evil Mind Flayer's plan to destroy the world. The Australian actor Dacre Montgomery gives a daring performance as Billy throughout Season 3, from his possession at the beginning to his sacrificial act at the end , when he saves El at the Starcourt Mall. In a recent interview, Montgomery discussed Billy's two season run, working with Millie Bobby Brown and how he "kills Wednesday." Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. How bittersweet is it to get such a career changing part but also to have it end so soon? We constructed it this way from the beginning. I knew coming in that this was going to be the outcome. And I don't think I would have been given the season that Billy had if I wasn't dying I think because I was on my way out, I was given an amazing opportunity to do a wide array of things. I'm very grateful. What was it like to embody this complex character in what he's going through physically? For "Flayed Billy," I did a lot of research on bipolar disorder and split personalities, and how one personality controls the other personalities. This season, Billy is like a rubber band that keeps getting tauter, and I tried to convey that in my physicality. But if you look at my eyes, that's non Flayed Billy trying to come through. The whole season I felt like my eyes were bleeding because I was trying to push out this emotion to play as a counter to my physicality. I wanted to treat it more like a real world experience. I think that's why the show is so successful it's tethered to a science fiction element, but it's anchored very strongly in humanity. As an actor, how do you convey an emotion that runs counter to your physicality? I don't want to get too meta, but I think people put on a mask when they leave the house. There's a "Public Brian" and a "Private Brian." We all put on masks, even if just to mask our insecurities. When you're listening to someone and trying to mask feelings like lack of confidence, or if you're being antagonized or bullied, trying to be strong in my eyes, it's still Dacre. He's so taut. I needed to think of him as a rubber band pulled from the top and bottom. How difficult was it to film the climax? We filmed that over three days, and both Millie and I lost our voices every day because right up until the camera would roll, we would run through the mall and land on our mark and scream at each other until we both cried and cried. She has such an emotional maturity. I like to give 150 percent every time I'm on set, and she's the same way. We just scream at each other and cry and talk about things. It was warm and collaborative, and I was lucky that I had an actor who could provide all that emotion. When she's talking about my mother, it's painful, and we had to keep having our eyes wiped down, for continuity, because of crying. How much detail did you and the Duffer brothers discuss regarding Billy's past in order to make that final moment with El so powerful? Two to three months before the Duffers started writing, they rang me and they asked me what I wanted in this season. And I said I wanted to hear about Billy's biological mother. Of course, I didn't know it was going to come to fruition in the way that it did, but that's just their collaborative nature. I had written this whole crazy back story based on this story about a woman who was a 35 year old virgin who had been artificially inseminated. I wanted to explore the biblical connotation of being born to a virgin and how that son would grow up, how it enhanced his God Complex. It's ridiculous, looking back on it, but what I'm getting at is I will bring 10 crazy ideas to the set, and what's great about the Duffers is that they will always take one. They may go, "Dude, you're expletive crazy, and the other nine are ridiculous." But I always bring that. How much back story do you do as a performer? I do a lot of work in the emotional space of my character, but I want my life experiences to be a part of the character as well. For example, I was bullied in school. So with Billy, I wanted to flip the lens and examine the insecurities of the kids who were bullying me. What do we have in common? So now that Billy is gone, how do you intend to take advantage of the exposure "Stranger Things" has given you? Be really particular about what's next. I've done three auditions in the last two years. I'm doing this Black List screenplay called "Broken Heart Gallery," which is a romantic comedy. I'm doing it for two reasons: One, comedy is a very different heartbeat to drama. It scares me, and I also feel like it's a good ego stripping exercise I can't take myself too seriously. I think that's an important next step. On the flip side of that, I've been doing a podcast for the last two and a half years. It's kind of an amalgamation of beat poetry that I've been writing for a long time, and I collated into six distinct tracks. Eight months ago, I started approaching musicians around the world to help me compose scores that I could narrate my beat poetry too. We wrapped production about four days ago. That's been a very cathartic experience. Are there role models whom you look at and think, "That's the way to build a career"? I like different actors for different reasons. There are people like Tom Cruise, who have continued to stay on top of their game, and Hugh Jackman, for being one of the hardest working people in Hollywood. And there are people like Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson who have incredible entrepreneurial capacity as producers and businessmen outside of their acting career. There are people who aren't constantly available on social media, like Leonardo DiCaprio, so the illusion is still there when you go to the cinema. I think there's a combination of those people; I respect different aspects of their careers. It's hard to pick. I don't like to replicate. I like to draw stuff from my own life or from my career or as a fan. I'm a total cinephile. I try to watch everything I can. Is it important to you to have a wide range of interests instead of focusing on just acting? Acting is my interest, but it opens up avenues. I finished an interior design internship a year and a half ago. I love food, and my girlfriend comes from an architecture background, so we might open up a restaurant. As an actor, the best thing I ever heard was from a writer I live with when I'm in L.A. He says, "As a freelancer, you've got to learn how to kill Wednesday." You have a meeting on Monday, and then they'll touch base on Friday. You have to learn how to kill time in between. I'm lucky that I'm really passionate and I care about all this stuff. But a lot of it is also killing Wednesday. I'm lucky I can do so with all of these amazing things.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Harold Kroto, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a new arrangement of carbon known as the buckyball, died on Saturday in East Sussex, England. He was 76. The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig's disease, his wife, Margaret, said. As a spectroscopic chemist, Dr. Kroto used electromagnetic radiation to reveal the structures of molecules. His Nobel Prize winning discovery, which he shared with Richard E. Smalley and Robert F. Curl Jr. of Rice University in Houston, was the Buckminsterfullerene molecule, a cage of 60 carbon atoms made of interlocking pentagons and hexagons. Dr. Kroto, who had a passion for art, named it after Buckminster Fuller, the visionary architect whose geodesic dome shaped buildings closely resemble the fullerene sphere. "Nobody had ever thought of a molecule that could be that symmetrical and only consist of one element that is carbon," said Naresh Dalal, a chemistry professor at Florida State University, where Dr. Kroto worked for nearly a decade before returning to England in the fall of 2015. The buckyball was the third form of carbon to be found after diamonds and graphite. Dr. Kroto often likened the molecule to a soccer ball (or a "football" when speaking to audiences outside of the United States) with a cavity in the middle that could carry smaller molecules. "Unlike most discoveries in chemistry, it was very accessible," said Graham Farmelo, a science writer who worked with Dr. Kroto at the Science Museum in London. "You could explain it to a child." The fullerene discovery opened a new field of nanotechnology that at one point was the subject of more than 1,000 published papers a year. The molecule has potential applications in drug delivery, computing and high speed transportation, Dr. Dalal said. Harold Krotoschiner was born in Wisbech, England, on Oct. 7, 1939, soon after the outset of World War II. The son of refugees from Berlin, he was moved to the town of Bolton with his mother, Edith, a year later while his father, Heinz, was interned on the Isle of Man as an "enemy alien." After the war, his father became an apprentice engineer and in 1955 opened a factory to make balloons and print faces on them. Around that time, he changed the family name, which is of Silesian origin, to Kroto. As a boy, Dr. Kroto often worked with his father in the factory. He credited the experience, along with his days playing with a Meccano engineering set, with giving him the problem solving skills needed to be a research scientist. He attended the Bolton School, where he became fascinated by chemistry and art. He studied chemistry at the University of Sheffield, earning his undergraduate degree in 1961, and completed his Ph.D there in 1964 with a focus on spectroscopy. As a student, he divided his time between conducting experiments, playing tennis and designing covers for the student magazine, Arrows. Dr. Kroto completed postdoctoral work in the United States and Canada for three years before returning to England to accept a teaching position at the University of Sussex in 1967. He began collaborating with Dr. Curl and Dr. Smalley at Rice in the fall of 1985. In their experiments, they blasted graphite with lasers to recreate the plasma conditions found in stars and investigate carbon clusters. The discovery of the 60 carbon molecule came out of these tests. Mr. Kroto was knighted in 1996. He left Sussex in 2004 for Florida State University, where he taught and conducted research. In addition to his wife of 53 years, Margaret, he is survived by two sons, Stephen and David. Dr. Kroto was passionate about mentoring young scientists. He created educational videos through the Vega Science Trust and Florida State's Geoset, which are online repositories of short science presentations. He also presented his buckyball workshops in Sweden, Malaysia, India, China and Japan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The City Center revival of this satire on the haves and have nots features book and lyrics by Maria Irene Fornes and a score by Al Carmines. Grasping for a plot will not help you, because there isn't much of one. And for all their fabulous looks, the characters don't exactly have three dimensions. "Promenade," the bizarre and sneakily thrilling 1960s musical with a book and lyrics by the then fledgling playwright Maria Irene Fornes, is by no means a conventional piece of theater. Emerging Wednesday night from New York City Center, where the show's splendidly cast, two performance run is part of the Encores! Off Center summer season, was like waking refreshed from a glittering, nearly sung through fever dream something about two comical, dewy eyed prisoners on the lam, searching Manhattan for "the appearance of sin" and hanging out with a bunch of swells. A piece of experimental theater that started as a one act at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village in 1965, then expanded to become an unlikely Off Broadway hit in 1969, "Promenade" is zany. It is lump y. It is also gorgeous. Directed at City Center by Laurie Woolery, it's an episodic satire of haves and have nots that achieves an ingenious sleight of hand. Occupying us with comedy, vocal splendor and more than a little bafflement, it builds stealthily through more than 30 musical numbers toward a surprisingly moving finish. With that vast, stylistically voracious score by Al Carmines, an ordained minister and a composer with magpie instincts who ran the influential avant garde Judson Poets' Theater, "Promenade" is as comfortable with old school show tunes as it is with operetta and even opera. For performers, Carmines's music presents challenges of a technical complexity that we're not used to seeing in the theater. That makes it all the more exciting to watch the actors here dispatch their songs with serious chops, navigating lyrics, too, that can change tone with lightning speed. (Music direction is by Greg Jarrett.) When the prisoners, known only as 105 (James T. Lane) and 106 (Kent Overshown), first tunnel their way to freedom, they turn up at a soiree where guest after guest grabs a few minutes in the spotlight. The bad news about a show built to let all 15 cast members shine is that it ends up tantalizing us. One of the swells, Mr. S (J.D. Webster), is so shamelessly chipper in articulating the unbreachable social divide between his kind and the lower classes, in "Isn't That Clear," that I instantly wanted to see more of him. Ditto Carmen Ruby Floyd, as Miss I, who unleashes an astonishing voice in "A Flower," and Marcy Harriell , as Miss U, who demolishes the furious torch song "Capricious and Fickle." Soara Joye Ross, as Miss O, is all quicksilver dexterity in "The Moment Has Passed," which begins as a fond remembrance of a lover: "He said he would kill for me. And I said, 'Like, for instance who?' And he said, 'Like, for instance you.'" We laugh right until the moment when it sets off our alarms. As the Servant (the role Madeline Kahn played in 1969), Bryonha Marie Parham holds back more on the humor than she might, so the force of her satire in "Crown Me" comes as a welcome surprise. So does the tenderness of the bond that the Mother (Saundra Santiago), a plaintive figure, forges with 105 and 106. Carmines died in 2005, Fornes in 2018, and their show feels very much of its time. It seems significant that Marc Blitzstein's Depression era, pro labor musical "The Cradle Will Rock " got a lauded revival shortly before "Promenade" was born. But "Promenade" also deals in universals, some of which are especially resonant: the petulant dimwit of a Mayor (Becca Blackwell), for example, who threatens his guests with jail if they don't admire him. As he examines them for submissiveness in "The Laughing Song," their chorus of forced jollity sounds like a human calliope. It's the prisoners, though, who get the last word in "Promenade," with the ravishing mournfulness of "All Is Well in the City." All is not well, of course. They huddle together, 105 and 106, and you can see in their somber eyes that they're not dreaming anymore. Through July 11 at New York City Center, Manhattan; 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Over the last seven months, American life has cautiously adjusted to the strictures of quarantine. We eat in the street, pull up to drive in theaters and watch live music via our laptops. Best intentions aside, the tactile experience of a concert the sweat, the volume, the beer that guy just spilled on you can't be replaced by anything but the real thing, which may remain impossible until well into 2021. So it's with some wistful irony that the writer and photographer Pat Blashill released "Texas Is the Reason," a photo book telling the story of the 1980s Austin, Texas, punk rock scene, in February, less than a month before the country locked down. In over 200 pages of black and white photography, Blashill vividly captures the wild fury of native bands like the Butthole Surfers, Poison 13, Scratch Acid, the Dicks and many more who made their state an unexpected stronghold of the American independent underground. Beyond the music, he lavishes just as much attention on the patrons and locations who made up the scene, presenting them as though they were stars, too. "That's what I miss the life onstage and offstage, the moment when people show themselves, and maybe it means a lot because you've had a beer or smoked a joint," he said in a Zoom interview. An Austin native, Blashill fell into the scene after his friend Steve Collier invited him to see his band, Kaye Mart and the Shoppers, who eventually became Big Boys. Punk rock was just a few years old, and the genre's anarchic spirit inspired listeners to mimic the energy they saw onstage. "There was no barrier between you and the band, and that was really impressive," Blashill said. "Texas Is the Reason" was culled from roughly 20,000 photos he shot between 1979 and 1987, before he moved to New York City to become a more traditional music writer. Part of the scene's vibrancy stemmed from its roots in Texas, which by the 1980s had only further consolidated its national reputation as a conservative stronghold. Hemmed in by heavily entrenched social pressures, young Texan weirdos couldn't help but rebel. The bands and their fans were bullish, but fiercely supportive of each other. "As long as it was kind of extreme, you could do whatever you wanted to," Blashill said. "But people also carried with them some sort of ideas about how to behave. Even if they looked really scary doing insane performances involving dildos or pieces of meat and stuff they were still kind of sweet." Blashill moved to Vienna with his family in 2005, where he currently teaches high school. Last fall, before the book came out, he flew to Austin to showcase the photos for many of the people who appear in them. "It was an overwhelming event," he said, of catching up with so many friends at once. Eventually, our stages and pits will be filled again too. The ideological gap between the scene's characters and their conservative state was apparent during the 1984 Republican National Convention, which took place in Dallas and attracted nightly protests and shows where regional bands were all too happy to air out their grievances. By day, Blashill worked at the convention as a runner for The Associated Press, where he caught these young women intently displaying American flags. Blashill said that King Coffey from the Butthole Surfers tells stories "about walking into Burger King in some small town where a cowboy would walk in, look at him, say 'I don't like it,' and just cold cock him. There was that resistance to the resistance." When the Bay Area hardcore bang Fang showed up to Liberty Lunch, Blashill wasn't expecting anything in particular. "I showed up because it was another show, but everybody was just crazy, off the hook," he said. Even by raucous local standards, the energy between the band and the audience was ferocious, with the crowd spilling onto the stage. Fang would go on hiatus in 1989 when the singer Sam McBride was charged with voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to prison for killing his girlfriend. McBride served six years of his 11 year sentence before he was released and has recently operated a sober living house in addition to performing and recording with a reconstituted Fang. "He took a picture of himself holding the book and saying that he really liked it," Blashill said. Mikey Milligan on a Frat Car on the Drag (Spring 1985) The Drag is a stretch of Austin that runs along the University of Texas campus and was originally home to dozens of local businesses. Blashill was walking it with some friends one day when Mikey Milligan, a skateboarder he casually knew, told him to take a look at the trick he was about to perform. When Blashill resurfaced the photo while putting together his book, he realized Milligan was flipping off a car belonging to a member of U.T. Austin's Greek community. "Frats and punks were perennial enemies," he said. (The tension is rendered somewhat lovingly in the 2016 Richard Linklater film "Everybody Wants Some!!") "The frat boys were constantly hunting punk rockers, sometimes hurting us. The punks would sometimes get some revenge by setting a dumpster on fire, and shoving it into a frat party or something." If Big Boys were the scene's heart and soul, the Dicks were its clenched fist. Fronted by the openly gay singer Gary Floyd, they brought an ardently political edge with anti police anthems like "Dicks Hate Police" and "Pigs Run Wild," and cultivated an inclusive crowd that transcended the macho energy punk often attracted. "What I like about those pictures is you can see lots of women up front," Blashill said. "That's always a good sign if women aren't scared some big beefy guy's going to knock them over, and some of them are really kind of communing with Gary." Blashill said he was scared of Floyd, and didn't talk to him until years later when he was putting the book together. "David Yow will say that was the first band he saw that it was good if the band scared the audience. He thought they were terrifying, which is saying something coming from David Yow."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
WASHINGTON The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would open an investigation into taxes on digital commerce that have been adopted or proposed in nine countries and the European Union, escalating a global battle that will affect where big American tech companies like Facebook and Amazon pay taxes. The administration's move could ultimately lead to American tariffs on imports from Brazil, Britain, India and a host of other countries, heightening the chances of another global trade dispute that results in retaliatory taxes on U.S. goods. The investigation, which will be conducted by the United States Trade Representative, could also complicate global negotiations that have been underway for more than a year and are aimed at reaching a multinational consensus on how to tax internet commerce that crosses borders. At issue are efforts spreading across Europe and beyond to impose so called digital services taxes on economic activity generated online. Those taxes deviate from many traditional international tax regimes by affecting revenues earned by a company where they are generated regardless of whether the company has a physical presence there. For example, India imposed a 2 percent tax in April on online sales of goods and services to people in India by large foreign firms. The European Union has revived its push for a similar tax as a way to help fund response measures to the coronavirus. Those moves follow similar efforts by France, which introduced a tax on digital revenues last year, prompting the Trump administration to authorize tariffs on French wine, cheese and other products. Officials in both countries agreed to put their levies on hold with French officials saying they would not collect revenues from their tax this year while negotiators with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tried to broker a multilateral agreement on digital taxation. Myron Brilliant, the executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, criticized the digital tax proposals that some countries are considering as "discriminatory and burdensome to the economy," but urged for a multilateral solution through the OECD. "We urge all parties to double down on those negotiations and avoid unilateral, discriminatory taxes," he said. Jason Oxman, the chief executive of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group, said that the organization was in favor of ongoing multilateral discussions, but that it also supported the U.S. government's new investigations. "While we hoped to avoid further escalation of tensions, increasingly expansive unilateral tax measures have necessitated a stronger response," Mr. Oxman said. The investigations are being carried out under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which gives the government broad authority to respond to unfair practices that negatively affect U.S. commerce. The administration has used the same legal provision to initiate a trade war with China, which resulted in tariffs on roughly 360 billion of Chinese products. In addition to India, Brazil, Britain and the European Union, the Office of the United States Trade Representative said it would investigate taxes in Austria, the Czech Republic, Indonesia, Italy, Spain and Turkey. 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. "President Trump is concerned that many of our trading partners are adopting tax schemes designed to unfairly target our companies," Robert E. Lighthizer, the trade representative, said in a statement. "We are prepared to take all appropriate action to defend our businesses and workers against any such discrimination." While the U.S. has been part of the multinational digital tax discussions, negotiations ran into trouble this year, shortly before the spread of the coronavirus plunged countries around the world into lockdowns. The Trump administration had been pushing for a provision that would effectively allow some American companies to choose whether to be governed by any new tax system created by a global agreement. The companies that are most likely to be affected by many countries' digital taxes are American technology giants, including eBay and Google, but some proposals could apply to any large companies that do business online, not just tech firms. Jordan Haas, the director of trade policy for the Internet Association, whose members include Facebook, Google and Amazon, said in a statement that the group appreciated the trade representative's ongoing work pushing back on the taxes. "The U.S. must continue sending a strong message to trading partners that targeted discriminatory taxes against U.S. firms are not an appropriate solution," he said. A spokesman for Google, Jose Castaneda, reiterated that the company supported efforts to reach an international agreement on digital taxes. In a rare show of bipartisan support, Republican Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said the administration's investigation was warranted given the proliferation of digital taxes around the world. "As we have previously stated, these digital services taxes unfairly target and discriminate against U.S. companies," the senators said. Trade experts have speculated in recent months about whether the Trump administration could try to use its 301 provision as a source of leverage in its efforts to convince other countries, including India, to change their trade practices. The administration tried and failed this year to announce a limited trade deal with India. The United States has also been negotiating trade deals with the United Kingdom, Brazil and the European Union. In a statement, a spokesperson for the British government said that the digital services tax "ensures that digital businesses pay tax in the U.K. that reflects the value they derive from U.K. users." "We have always been clear that our preference is for a global solution to the tax challenges posed by digitalization, and we'll continue to work with the U.S. and other international partners to achieve that objective," the statement said. Mr. Trump spoke with Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, on Tuesday and a statement from the White House said both leaders agreed "that the free flow of commerce between the United States and Brazil is an economic priority for both countries."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Nearly a Third of Teens Use One or More Tobacco Products While e cigarettes are still the most popular, teenagers are also smoking other items like cigarillos another worrisome sign for nicotine addiction, the C.D.C. says. None Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Nearly one in three high school students has reported using a tobacco product recently, according to a new federal survey released on Thursday, evidence that concerns over nicotine addiction among teenagers are not limited to e cigarettes. "The data released today on youth tobacco product use are deeply troubling and indicate that past progress in reducing youth use of these products has been erased," said Brian King, the deputy director of the Office on Smoking and Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "These troubling rates of use are being driven by e cigarettes, which have no redeeming aspects among youth." For the sixth year in a row, e cigarettes dominated the students' choice. Public health officials were concerned that despite wide scale publicity intended to deter vaping, especially in the wake of recent vaping related illnesses and even deaths, not only did the practice continue to surge, but students also did not seem to be particularly alarmed about e cigarettes. And while e cigarettes were by far the most popular product, researchers noted that one in three users, or an estimated 2.1 million middle and high school students, also used an additional tobacco product, such as cigars and cigarettes. Those students reported more symptoms of nicotine addiction than those who used one tobacco product. Indeed, such indications of nicotine dependence were worrisome, researchers said. Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the C.D.C., noted that nicotine could harm the developing brain. "Youth use of any tobacco product, including e cigarettes, is unsafe," he said in a statement. "It is incumbent upon public health and health care professionals to educate Americans about the risks resulting from this epidemic among our youth." The percentage of middle and high school students who recently used each product. The year over year increases in teenage vaping as well as the vaping related illnesses and deaths have intensified calls for a ban on flavored e cigarette products that have been extremely popular among teenagers. On Thursday, the C.D.C. released its most recent numbers on the illnesses, saying that 48 deaths and 2,291 vaping related hospital cases had been reported across the country. (The agency said it was now limiting its tabulation of cases to patients who needed to be hospitalized.) Most of the illnesses have been attributed to vaping THC products, not e cigarettes alone. But an imminent ban seems unlikely. President Trump, who said in September that restrictions on flavors, including mint and menthol, would be imposed, has since backed away from that option. Late last month, he held a round table with vaping industry and public health advocates and warned that a ban would spawn counterfeit products. But according to an analysis of the data published last month in JAMA, high school students who use only e cigarettes are increasingly turning to menthol or mint flavored products. In 2016, 16 percent reported using those flavors, but in the latest survey, 57 percent said they used them. In contrast, sweet, candy like flavors were becoming less popular, dropping to nearly 35 percent in 2019 from 54 percent in 2016. At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Mitch Zeller, head of the tobacco control unit of the Food and Drug Administration, noted that new information from a separate federal survey should be considered when weighing which flavors should be removed from the market. That survey, by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, found that far more youths who used Juul flavor pods preferred mint than menthol. The most frequently used e cigarette flavors among 12th grade students. Compared to the use of e cigarettes, the use of traditional cigarettes or cigars by teenagers remains relatively modest. But this was the first year that cigars were second in popularity behind e cigarettes. More high school students reported smoking cigars, particularly cigarillos and also little, flavored cigars, than traditional cigarettes, 7.6 percent compared to 5.8 percent. Many students said they did not consider intermittent smoking of any product to be harmful. The National Youth Tobacco Survey found that despite widespread public health efforts to deter students from vaping or turning to any tobacco product, students still reported being steeped in environments that promote tobacco as alluring. Some nine out of 10 students said they were routinely exposed to tobacco advertising or promotion. And their interest is being piqued: Even among students who never used e cigarettes, 39 percent said they were curious about using e cigarettes and 37 percent were curious about traditional cigarettes. Students reported struggling to stop vaping or smoking: Nearly 58 percent reported having given serious thought to quitting, while nearly as many said they managed to do so for at least a day. The survey was administered by the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration from February through May of this year to 10,097 high school students and 8,837 middle school students, grades six through 12, which is considered a large representative national sample. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Week in Tech: What Not to Expect From Big Tech's Antitrust Showdown 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, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news: Big tech is about to face a reckoning. Probably. The federal government is reportedly considering antitrust inquiries into Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. The Justice Department will handle Apple and Google; the Federal Trade Commission takes Facebook and Amazon. The House Judiciary's subcommittee on antitrust also plans to investigate possible anticompetitive behavior and decide whether current antitrust laws need to be updated. This is what vocal critics, as varied as a Facebook co founder and Senator Elizabeth Warren, have been waiting for: the chance to hold these companies to account and use antitrust law to break them up. But how far will the new wave of investigations go? Don't expect this to be quick. When the government went after Microsoft in the 1990s (the last major United States tech antitrust case) it took 12 years, from the first F.T.C. investigation to a court approved settlement. The work now may be more substantial: Harry First, an antitrust law professor at New York University, said that the agencies taking on these four companies were "clearly ambitious." Forget wholesale change. All the companies have multiple fronts on which antitrust battles could be waged: Google could be pursued for dominance in ad tech, search, Android or something else. "You can't do everything," Mr. First said. "They will have to find a focus, quickly." So the agencies will chase specific problems. Legal action isn't guaranteed. The agencies usually take to court only the cases they're confident they can win, so many investigations fizzle well before that point. And big tech has huge legal and lobbying teams, so the bar for a government slam dunk is high. Punishments may disappoint. Remedies to antitrust violations must be tailored to the harm. If WhatsApp and Instagram were the root of anticompetitive behavior by Facebook, then, sure, force a spinoff. But the remedy is dictated by the (very specific) violation, not vice versa, and it may be that limits on business practices are more relevant. All of which is to say: The antitrust showdown will be long, difficult, uncertain and, for some, potentially disappointing. That doesn't make it a bad idea. Even abandoned investigations can yield some change: Google made voluntary business changes after the F.T.C. dropped a 2011 antitrust investigation into it. And the point isn't just fixing the current problem: It's also about deterring future bad conduct. In 2003, Apple made a masterstroke: Its music software, iTunes, was released for Windows as well as MacOS. ITunes became a Trojan horse, putting Apple products in the hands of non Apple users and democratizing the iPod, which exploded in popularity. Fast forward to this past week, when Apple killed iTunes. Yes, the software was bloated and slow. But it was also a hangover of an older Apple built on the success of the iPod, then the iPhone. Now, Apple's iPhone sales have plateaued, and the company is having to find new ways to grow, said Roberta Cozza, a senior research director at Gartner. Its strategy for that was on display in announcements at its developer conference. ITunes is being split into Music, Podcast and TV apps, the latest part of Apple's push to compete on services with the likes of Spotify and Netflix. Its Watch will get a dedicated App Store, so people won't need an iPhone to use one. And a new universal authentication tool promises more secure logins, not limited to Apple platforms. Together, those announcements show Apple experimenting again with how to put its products in the hands of more people. ITunes is dead; long live iTunes. Rules can be useful. If we all follow them, they help us coexist in harmony. But sometimes new things happen and rules don't change. Then things go wrong, people get upset (or worse), and it's time to invent new rules. That's also good! YouTube announced on Wednesday new rules that mean "videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion" will be banned. So will those denying violent events, like the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. A three strike rule will apply to users sporadically uploading such content, and those who repeatedly come close to violation won't be able to profit from YouTube ads. Sounds positive. Only, YouTube also showed this past week that it struggles to live by its rules. It came to light that Steven Crowder, a popular conservative commentator on YouTube, had repeatedly insulted Carlos Maza, a journalist from Vox, using racial and sexual slurs. Initially YouTube said Mr. Crowder's comments did not break its rules. Later, after an outcry, it appeared to backtrack and said he couldn't earn ad revenue on his channel unless he changed some practices. So, rules. Great if you enforce them effectively. But ... kind of pointless if you can't? Imagine you run a company and need money. One idea: Promise a thing to people, take some money and send the thing later. That's O.K. It's crowdfunding. What if, instead of offering a thing, you offer a cryptographic token to exchange for a thing in the future? That may be less O.K. On Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Kik Interactive, a Canadian social media company, over this. In 2017, Kik sold 100 million worth of digital "coins" called Kin that would be used to buy and sell digital services. This is an initial coin offering, a practice with a bad rap thanks to some less than scrupulous companies. Kik isn't accused of fraud; it's accused of not properly registering the offering with the S.E.C. This rests on what, exactly, Kik was offering. The S.E.C. says Kin counted as a security, like stocks, because it couldn't be used to buy anything when it was launched. The S.E.C. also claims Kik said Kin investors could "make a ton of money" from appreciation, as with securities. Kik says that Kin is now a proper medium of exchange and that investors didn't expect to profit, so it's not a security and didn't need to be registered. Well, it either is or isn't, and now a court will decide. The distinction will be important: It will shape the S.E.C.'s ability to regulate the industry, and help the crypto world understand what it can, and can't, do. YouTube is a safe haven for pedophiles. Its recommendation system created a vast video catalog of children for them. Silicon Valley was seen as an untainted source of political funding. Now, that's changing. Minority Facebook investors want less Mark Zuckerberg. Almost 70 percent voted to appoint an independent chairman, but Mr. Zuckerberg's voting control blocked it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Jonathan Elliott officiated at several weddings as a Universal Life minister, but stopped marrying couples after he started working for the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey. Jonathan Elliott had zero experience and credentials obtained in three minutes online when he performed his first wedding in 2011 in Princeton, N.J. But he didn't make rookie mistakes, like asking guests to be seated halfway through the ceremony, or as was the case with one bumbling officiant, fumbling the pass off of the rings and dropping them into a lake. Instead, he was so magnetic a speaker and so conscientious a master of ceremonies for Sarah Gosnell and Jed Peterson, the couple he married, that several other friends asked him to lead their wedding ceremonies. By November 2016, he had put his online certification to use 20 times. Then he started a job as communications director for the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, and his days of marrying friends were over. "I was so impressed by the depth and intensity of thought put into every ceremony by clergy that I decided to stop marrying people out of respect, even though I loved doing it," said Mr. Elliott, who is from Hamilton, N.J. The training his Episcopalian colleagues brought to weddings, he said, made the power given him by the Universal Life Church, the most popular site for becoming a minister online, feel misplaced. "It seemed like an encouraged abuse of power," he said. Mr. Elliott's opinions are not widely shared. In fact, according to the wedding industry data tracking company the Wedding Report, 25.7 percent of couples were married by a friend or family member in 2017, up from 16.4 percent in 2010. And according to Dusty Hoesly, a doctoral candidate in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara who wrote his dissertation on the Universal Life Church's role in contemporary weddings, the trend is likely to continue apace. Why? Because "the ULC and its ministers are at the forefront of religious freedom, marriage equality and nuptial creativity," Mr. Hoesly said. As people under 30, the demographic most apt to marry, become increasingly nonreligious, their weddings will follow suit, he said, adding that there are now 23 million ULC ministers. Ms. Cannon, the senior minister at SOUL Community Church in Columbia, Md., co founded the International Association of Professional Wedding Officiants in 2015 to unite her colleagues and educate the public about the risks of enlisting amateur officiants. A handful of states do not recognize marriages performed by Universal Life ministers, including several counties in New York, and some divorces have been complicated by questions over their validity, said the Rev. Cannon, the senior minister at Soul Community Church, a Universalist congregation in Columbia, Md. More frequently, novice officiants bungle the paperwork needed to solemnize a union. "You want your wedding to be legal," she said. "Otherwise, it's just an expensive party. Just because your family member can use a camera doesn't mean you'd hire him to be your photographer. People in our organization understand marriage laws." A celebrant performs alternative ceremonies, including same sex and nonreligious weddings. Ms. Blum became one in 2009, eight months after enrolling in an online course at the Celebrant Foundation and Institute. "The reason I chose the institute instead of getting ordained online was I wanted strong knowledge of how to perform ceremonies," Ms. Blum said. "I've had people come to me and say, 'I'd really like you to officiate, but if you can't do it I'm just going to get my florist to do it.' You have to spend a lot of time getting to know a couple if you want to make it special. People don't understand how much work goes into it." The Justice of the Peace Ms. Antonecchia, the owner of the wedding planning service Creative Concepts by Lisa, became a Connecticut justice of the peace in case of emergencies the kind she said she is seeing more of as couples increasingly rely on one off officiants. In 2013, a wedding she planned on the Connecticut shoreline was nearly derailed by a newly minted officiant stuck in traffic. "He finally made it, but from that point on, I knew I wanted to be able to offer the service myself," she said. Which is why she recommends professionals. "We make sure everything is buttoned up and done. Your Uncle George may be a great guy. But what if his flight gets delayed and he misses the wedding?" Ms. Ballard specializes in weddings that have at least one Jewish partner. "Couples who use friends and family members to marry them often want to dip into the religious aspect very lightly with one or two rituals, like the breaking of the glass," she said. "But that's not what makes a Jewish wedding a Jewish wedding." In addition to upholding religious standards, "I'm going to see that the day is seamless and easy for the bride and groom. If your sister is marrying you, she's so nervous about her performance she's only thinking about herself. It's not going to be a well facilitated and organized experience." Mr. Bloom became a ULC minister in 2013 to orchestrate a wedding for a fan of his standup comedy routine. Now marrying strangers, which he does about 150 times a year, is his primary source of income. Friends and families generally don't charge for their services, but he said his typical fee of 600 steeper than the 214 the Wedding Report tallied as the average officiant expenditure in 2017 is money well spent. "I think most people think of the ceremony as something they have to get through to get to the party," he said. "I thought that way myself before I started doing weddings." Now he knows better. "If a kid starts losing it during the procession, I know how to deal with it. If the best man forgets the ring, I'll lighten the mood with a joke. I can make the ceremony the highlight of your wedding. That's probably what you want on the most important day of your life." Mr. Berk, the interior design guru from Netflix's "Queer Eye," married three couples in June at the New York City Pride Parade. He was ordained a ULC minister for the event and has since been flooded with pleas, via social media, to do more. "I've already got a couple thousand requests just on Twitter," he said. If he could marry every couple who asked, he would. "I never thought I'd be crying on a parade float, but there I was. It was such an honor." Mr. Berk knows firsthand that the chances of uncrossed t's and undotted i's increase when a professional is not presiding. A friend who officiated his own wedding, in 2012, forgot to file documents to legalize the union. "He never sent in the correct paperwork," he said. "We found out at the end of the year when we were like, 'Why did we never receive our marriage certificate?'" Mr. Berk and his husband were remarried at the New York City Courthouse at the end of the year so they could file their taxes jointly. But he didn't mind. "You used to have to get married in a courthouse or a church. Now it's more personal. It's way more special," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam Dinh Thien Thien's barbecue business bloomed just as Vietnam's property market wilted. It was not a coincidence. In 2010, Mr. Thien said he rented an empty lot downtown here, where construction had largely stopped, and installed a grill. He added some homemade wooden furniture intended to conjure the image of a saloon a motif inspired by his love of American westerns. Word of his movable feasts began to spread on Facebook, and within months he was renting 15 lots for the equivalent of 1,000 to 5,000 a month. But as construction picks up again, Mr. Thien, 32, is down to five locations. Some of his former grill sites are dotted with cranes or cement mixers, and he predicts that in three years he will be forced to pursue an entirely new line of work. Vietnam's beleaguered property market is bottoming out just as macroeconomic indicators stabilize and the ruling Communist Party makes new pledges to reform a struggling and corruption riddled banking sector, say developers and businessmen here, the country's commercial capital. And if Vietnam signs onto the Trans Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade agreement that involves a dozen countries, including the United States, it may bolster the Vietnamese economy and speed a real estate recovery. Yet although lending rates have fallen to 12.8 percent, from 20.3 percent in 2011, no one in Vietnam knows whether the market can rebound to the peaks it hit before 2008, much less whether the government's statistics or commitments to banking reform are reliable. For the moment, the mid to high end apartment markets remain oversupplied in this city and in the capital, Hanoi. "It's going to be another year before things get more clear it's rather opaque at this point," said Trinh Bao Quoc, chief executive at Son Kim Land Corporation, a local developer. "But if you talk to foreign investors, a lot of them who are here in Vietnam know that this is a good time to buy." In this city, asking rates for office rentals, now at about 20 to 30 per square meter, or about 10 square feet, began to rise in late 2012 for the first time since 2007, according to the Los Angeles based real estate company CBRE. And in recent months, average selling prices for low end residential properties in Hanoi have held steady around 800 per square meter after falling precipitously for two years. Some foreign investors have bought real estate here this year, in what brokers suggest is a sign of rising liquidity and investor confidence. And a few major construction projects are in the pipeline, including a tower that will include Vietnam's first Ritz Carlton. And in July, Vingroup, a real estate developer in Vietnam, opened the country's largest shopping mall, which has a gross floor area of more than 200,000 square meters, or 2.1 million square feet. A company spokesman said 53 percent of the 4,518 units at a new apartment complex nearby had already been sold, and 29 percent of them were leased for 50 years. "We believe the real estate market is recovering well now and is expecting a positive turnaround by the end of this year or early next year," said Le Thi Thu Thuy, chief executive of Vingroup. But Vietnam's economy has underperformed relative to predictions that accompanied its 2007 entry to the World Trade Organization, and its current annual growth rate of about 5.3 percent is the slowest in more than a decade. A central obstacle to economic recovery is that local banks are saddled with bad debts linked to speculative property investments. Credit has tightened in the years since the market began to sour in 2008, and in July the government created an asset management firm tasked with buying bad debts in the banking sector. In September, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung also pledged to raise the cap on foreign ownership in local banks to 49 percent from 30 percent. But analysts say many of the bad debts are still linked to real estate. "There are early indicators that the market is beginning to move," said Stephen Wyatt, the Vietnam country director at Jones Lang LaSalle. "It doesn't take away the fact that the banking sector still has to work itself out." Vietnamese lawmakers have debated draft laws aimed at allowing foreigners to buy more than one apartment unit, secure apartment leasehold rights longer than the current limit of 50 years and buy land, David Lim, a Ho Chi Minh City lawyer who is advising the government on land reform, said last month. Mr. Lim said the draft laws were codifying years of piecemeal reforms and clearing up legal gray areas. They are likely to help the country compete with its Southeast Asian neighbors for foreign investment, he added. And some local developers are changing their habit of building high rise apartment towers with only wealthy consumers in mind, according to real estate brokers. Mr. Wyatt of Jones Lang LaSalle said low end buyers dominated residential sales in this city, and a typical case is a 50 to 70 square meter, or 540 to 750 square foot, apartment that sells for the equivalent of about 30,000. Don Lam, chief executive of the fund manager VinaCapital, said that many middle class Vietnamese couples were more interested in townhouses than high rise apartments, and that his company was focusing on a potential new growth area: American style gated communities on the city's outer fringes, with three bedroom units priced at the equivalent of about 200,000. Mr. Lam added that although banking and political reform was sorely needed in Vietnam, the property market would rebound with or without the government's help. "Buyers and sellers are not waiting," he said in a 17th floor office with panoramic views of the city's skyline. "Transactions are happening." The American private equity firm Warburg Pincus led a consortium that in May pledged to invest 200 million to acquire about 20 percent equity interest in Vincom Retail, a subsidiary of Vingroup. A few brokers and fund managers in Vietnam say, without offering specifics, that the deal is likely to be the first in a series here by international investors. Other businessmen counter that although Vietnamese developers have emerged relatively unscathed from previous real estate slumps, their current debts are larger, and the overall banking crisis may be more severe than the government has acknowledged. ABB Merchant Banking, an investment bank based in Hanoi, recently analyzed 61 Vietnamese construction and real estate companies on Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange and found they were trading at up to 30 percent below their book value. And Frederick Burke, managing partner at the Vietnam office of Baker McKenzie, an American law firm, said that although there was a perception among Vietnamese developers that the country's property market was bottoming out, the logistics of real estate development in Vietnam were mired in tedious bureaucracy that would inhibit a swift rebound. A typical development project in this city officially takes a minimum of 580 days from start to finish, he added, and often far longer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Credit...Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times LOS ANGELES It was the spring of 2015 in Oakland, Calif., and Ottessa Moshfegh was all alone. She had published some short stories and a novella, but it would be months before her first novel, "Eileen," would earn her a living, a place on the Booker Prize shortlist, a name. After completing an M.F.A. at Brown and a fellowship at Stanford (where she never felt she belonged), the native New Englander was now living friendless across the bay from San Francisco, and on the cusp of completing a story collection, "Homesick for Another World." Letting go of it, though, she was afflicted by a grief so intense she could only overcome it through more writing. "It was almost like someone had died when I finished that book," Moshfegh, 38, said in early February, over lunch at her favorite hole in the wall Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, where she now lives. "My future was so terrifying," she said, "I needed to write something to get me onto the other side of an experience." So she forced her mind into the present using a strict regimen: She'd get down 1,000 words a day, without looking back, "until I'd reached the conclusion of something." Once she had, she immediately abandoned it in a drawer, only to rediscover it four years and three books later. That manuscript will be published later this year as her third novel, "Death in Her Hands." An eerie tour through an aging woman's psyche as it loosens its grip on reality, the book reads as a noir, a riff on the tropes of detective fiction. But for Moshfegh, it's simpler than that, and more personal. "I wrote it for myself," she said. "It's a loneliness story." "I hope that when people read this book," Moshfegh said of "Death in Her Hands," which will be published later this year, "they're not like, 'Oh God, it's another Ottessa book about this woman in isolation.'" The book was originally scheduled to come out this month, followed by an international publicity tour. In a cruel irony, the reason all that's been postponed the social distancing required to contain the coronavirus is the very reason readers might find this "loneliness story" more relatable than ever. Moshfegh's publisher, Penguin Press, has not yet specified the new publication date, but it will likely be later this summer. "I hope that when people read this book," Moshfegh said over the phone in late March, after the change in plans, "they're not like, 'Oh God, it's another Ottessa book about this woman in isolation.'" It's a fair concern. Six years into the game, Moshfegh knows you might already have an opinion about her. She's built her reputation on characters who exist on the margins of society. They are murderers, substance abusers, deadbeats, pervs. She reveals them at their least refined: They fantasize about being raped, or are themselves violent; they vomit, they release "torrential, oceanic" excrement. Moshfegh has been called "superabundantly talented" (by Dwight Garner, in this paper) and "easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible" (by The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino). To others, like the critic Sam Sacks, her writing is "dead eyed and apathetic," her crudeness a "dubious trademark," amounting only to "hokum." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. But perhaps no one puts it more directly than the author herself, in pithy quotes of offhand self congratulation that are like catnip for her interviewers: "I don't know anyone like me." If you are put off by her candor, by the impression she gives of being sure of her own skill, oh well. Modesty is a luxury Moshfegh can't afford life is too short. She knows when she's going to die (she won't say, too private), so until then she's going to focus on accessing the spiritual corners of her being through narrative, and not on whether or not you like her. "Are people reading because they don't have friends?" she asked between mouthfuls of duck soup, sounding genuinely puzzled. She hopes "Death in Her Hands" won't inspire the conversations about attractiveness and geniality that have surrounded her previous work. "People don't want to talk about how they relate to a character's more unsavory qualities," she said, "so they're like, 'God, she was really gross.' Everybody's so obsessed with being liked." Not Moshfegh's protagonists. McGlue, the title character of her 2014 novella, is a drunk sailor, imprisoned for killing his best friend. Eileen is a solipsistic, laxative addicted prison clerk turned accessory to murder, who enables her father's alcoholism as much as she suffers from it. Frustrated with readers' fixation on Eileen's ugliness, Moshfegh gave the self harming, unnamed heroine of her next novel, "My Year of Rest and Relaxation," the looks of a supermodel. "It required me to imagine what it's like to not be an outsider," she said. Here instead was "an insider who wants out": a beautiful, tormented 20 something trying, with the help of prescription narcotics, to black out of life altogether. Vesta knows paranoia all too well. The novel opens with a cryptic letter, which she discovers while walking her dog in the woods: "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no body, no evidence at all that any of this is real. Yet Vesta proceeds to spin an entire life for Magda in her mind, itself unraveling. This amateur criminal investigation becomes so absurd it verges on comedy. ("'Is Magda dead?' I Asked Jeeves. ... Well, that didn't help me.") But Moshfegh doesn't find it funny at all. "What kills me about Vesta, she's really trying so hard," she said. "She's done everything her whole life just to keep it together and do the right thing, and then she can't hold it together anymore." The death in Vesta's hands is not just Magda's, or even Walter's, but the prospect of her own. Her insanity like the narrator's chemically induced "hibernation" in "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" is not a surrender, but a means of survival. As unreliable as Moshfegh's narrators are, as unstable, insecure and full of hate, they are also hellbent on pulling themselves out of their wretchedness, on saving themselves. What makes Moshfegh's characters most human is that they don't give up. Sound familiar? On that February afternoon, Moshfegh, a self described workaholic, reported she was already halfway through her next novel, about a woman who emigrates from China to San Francisco in the early 1900s. And she's come up with a concept for the novel after that, which she plans to write in "several years." In the meantime, there are multiple film projects she can't yet speak about. (Is she adapting one of her novels for the screen? "I might be doing that," she replied coyly. "I might be doing a lot of that.") So is she as self assured in person as she comes off in print? Yes, but "if there was anything that I would want to correct for the record," she emphasized, "it would be that I never said it was easy." It takes hard work, she said, to find "that deeper connection to myself and to the greater power out there." Quarantined or not, that need "makes my work really specific. Like, I'm not finger painting with my eyes closed." Her editor, Scott Moyers, says it's this "control" that sets Moshfegh apart. Other authors will "turn in something not feeling themselves as if it's quite fully cooked," he said. "That's not Ottessa." Moshfegh's intense concentration requires a degree of insulation. "All the work that I do is a performance," she said, a deliberate distancing intended "to preserve who I am." As her friend the writer Patty Yumi Cottrell put it, Moshfegh "doesn't participate in the literary machinery," declining to write reviews or blurbs, or to engage on social media. Those who know her say her aloofness is a reflection of sensitivity, not egotism. For all this guardedness, and all the "aloneness" she poured into "Death in Her Hands," Moshfegh isn't alone anymore. In December 2018, she married the writer and editor Luke Goebel. "The ritual of making your marital vows is really powerful," she recalled while driving east on the Ventura Freeway from Hollywood to Pasadena, where she and Goebel purchased and are now fixing up a house. "You kind of surrender to your commitment." A 1945 stone retreat built in the foothills by an eccentric, wandering painter, the "Casa de Pajaros" is as much a work of art as a home. Even before they were stuck there, Goebel compared the space to "an artist's residency," the couple working (and sleeping) in separate quarters, but making time to "come together and cross pollinate and feed each other, and then go back and work again." Where in this domestic idyll was the Moshfegh who not long ago swore she'd be "celibate the rest of my life"? Despite earlier attempts to deny that mortality, Moshfegh, now sober and approaching her 40s, feels "more embodied than I expected to be," she said. "Fantasies often have this tinge of mystical disembodiment for me. And I'm like, OK, well, that didn't happen. I'm still human." When she was writing "Death in Her Hands," five years ago, from a different kind of seclusion, Moshfegh couldn't have predicted the resonance the story would have in 2020. She herself is seeing it through a new lens. "It isn't so much that Vesta was alone and she went insane," she said, in what sounded like a defense not just of a character, but of a condition. "This is a woman who chose to live in isolation to find peace toward the end of her life and, in the process, encountered her imagination." Correction: April 16, 2020 An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of Ottessa Moshfegh's editor. He is Scott Moyers, not Moyer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Few Fantasies, but a Traffic Jam in the Middle of the Road AS an occasion known for hosting the arrival of truly benchmark cars, this New York auto show will not touch the 1954 edition, where the Mercedes Benz 300SL Gullwing made its debut. Nor will it compare with the unveiling of the Ford Mustang at the World's Fair in Queens in 1964, which set off a Beatles scale national mania for the phenomenon that became the pony car. With the auto industry and the economy each getting its second wind, this year's show is notable not for singular superstars but for a committee approach: there are a lot of team playing sedans and crossovers, as daring as Dockers on casual Friday, all putting their conformist heads together to put "mass" in the market. Aside from the rebirth of the vaunted Viper sports car and six figure baubles like the Mercedes SL65 AMG roadster, the show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is notably light on fantasies destined to be enshrined on posters in teenagers' bedrooms. Instead, during media previews, one industry executive after another extolled the dynamic, groundbreaking status of some new but decidedly mainstream sedan freighted with obligatory LED headlamps, blind spot detectors and Bluetooth connections. The disconnect between description and sheet metal left many in the journalistic scrum scratching their heads. In fairness, an industry now feeling confident of topping 14 million sales in 2012 must focus on mass market appeal rather than flashy niche models if it is to have any chance of returning to the days of 16 million annual sales. As ever, the show's models reveal automakers' struggles to balance the quest for a breakout hit like the slinky Hyundai Sonata with a recognition that safe and boring may actually be better for the bottom line. A prime example, or offender, is the 2013 Nissan Altima. Today's Altima rose steadily to become America's second best selling car in 2012 (after the Toyota Camry), and the redesigned Altima that made its debut in New York seemed to have been created expressly to defend that position rather than to seize the high ground. Despite new features and re engineering, the Nissan looks as cautious as a first time parent, and just as likely to induce sleep among the young. Nissan did hone its cutting edge with the Infiniti LE concept, a glittering electric sedan based on the Nissan Leaf that the company's chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, promised would reach showrooms within 24 months. Other companies proved willing to experiment with sedans, sometimes out of necessity. Toyota, stung by endless charges of stodginess and complacency, unveiled a remade Avalon sedan that seeks to banish that model's geriatric image. Lincoln, a luxury brand on life support, offered a fresh MKZ midsize sedan whose sophisticated lines were roundly praised. At the gutsiest end of the spectrum, Mazda, looking to reverse a devastating financial slide, showed its Takeri design study. By fall, the muscular, snaking concept sedan will evolve into the next Mazda 6. Many of those at Javits last week were crossing their fingers that the concept's bravura styling would remain intact. As for snakes, the Viper no longer a Dodge, but carrying Chrysler's high performance SRT banner restored the show's roar with its 640 horsepower V 10 and bone crunching style. Here are some highlights of the show: ACURA The sinking RL flagship will soon be scuttled and replaced by the RLX, which appears mildly more interesting. On sale early next year, the RLX will feature a V 6 and a hybrid system with more than 370 horsepower and a 30 m.p.g. target in overall driving. BMW Will Americans spend 40,000 or much more on a teensy crossover S.U.V., even one wearing a BMW badge? We'll find out in September, when the breadbox size X1 arrives in America. The sDrive 28i model with a terrific new 245 horsepower turbocharged 4 cylinder engine starts at 31,545, rising to 39,345 for the 306 horsepower xDrive 35i with an in line turbo 6. In time for summer, BMW fans with 114,000 to spend can snap up an M6 Convertible and snap necks with its 560 horsepower, 4.4 liter twin turbo V 8. FISKER Henrik Fisker says his second plug in hybrid model, the Atlantic, which went on hiatus when the company missed targets for an Energy Department loan, has enough private financing to go into production. A BMW turbo 4 would team with a lithium ion battery pack to operate in either electric or gasoline range extending modes. HONDA The Crosstour, no longer carrying the Accord nameplate, gets a freshening that includes a visible skid plate, two tone side cladding and a bit more ground clearance. Honda calls it a concept, but the version that goes on sale this fall will not be much different from what was shown here. HYUNDAI Another handsome Hyundai, the remade Santa Fe midsize crossover includes a long wheelbase version with a 290 horsepower V 6 and three rows of seats. On sale this summer, the Santa Fe will offer two powertrains for the short wheelbase model, a 190 horsepower 4 cylinder model and a 2 liter turbo with 264 horses. INFINITI On sale by 2014, the all electric LE sedan shares its bones with the Nissan Leaf, but fortunately not the Leaf's eco nerd styling. Longer and lower than the Nissan, the seductive Infiniti packs a 34 kilowatt hour battery pack under its floor, offering the usual E.V. range of roughly 100 miles. A wireless inductive charging system, in which the LE parks over a charging pad embedded in a garage floor, may be offered. LEXUS With a confident profile and the polarizing "spindle grille" already seen on the GS sport sedan, the latest ES goes on sale this summer. The ES 350 operates with a 3.5 liter V 6; the 300h hybrid aims for a combined 40 m.p.g. in city and highway driving from its battery pack and a 2.5 liter gas engine. LINCOLN One of the consensus favorites among new sedans on the show floor, the MKZ drapes a winged grille and a lovely, dramatic Kamm tail over the chassis of the new Ford Fusion. Among three powertrain choices, a 4 cylinder hybrid system adapted from the Fusion promises roughly 40 combined m.p.g. The MKZ goes on sale this fall. MERCEDES BENZ More luxury and a double dose of turbocharging is the news for the full size GL Class S.U.V. A new bi turbo 4.6 liter V 8 with 406 horses powers the GL450. The GL550 has 429 horses; the GL350 Bluetec gets a frugal 240 horsepower diesel. With more torque than even the Viper a staggering 738 pound feet the SL65 AMG convertible goes on sale in November. Lofty numbers include 621 horsepower from a bi turbo 6 liter V 12 and a price around 200,000. NISSAN If so so looks don't win you over, perhaps agile handling and leading fuel economy will. Nissan expects the new 4 cylinder Altima to achieve about 27/38 city/highway mileage, or 22/30 with a 270 horsepower V 6. The Altima reaches showrooms in the fall, priced from 22,280. PORSCHE On the heels of a hybrid version, the Cayenne S.U.V. will offer Porsche's first diesel engine in America, starting in September at a base price of 56,725. RAM With a chain link maw, intimidating looks and more frugal V 6 and V 8 engines including a 5.7 liter Hemi making 395 horses the bad boy Ram pickup goes on sale this fall. SRT Despite its vaguely Italian snout and carbon fiber and aluminum body, the Viper remains an American superpower. The 8.4 liter V 10 makes 640 horsepower and 600 pound feet of torque. After years of celebrating the Viper's lack of a safety net, Chrysler adds traction and stability control. SUBARU The high heeled Birkenstock of Subarus, the XV Crosstrek is an Impreza based rival to the quirky Nissan Juke. The tall hatchback arrives this fall with a 148 horsepower 2 liter flat 4. TOYOTA It has been nine years since the Avalon's last makeover, but a redesigned sedan arrives by year end. Inside and out, the big Toyota is sleeker and more appealing than its dowdy predecessor. It's powered by a carryover version of the 3.5 liter V 6. This is the first Toyota created entirely in North America, styled in Calfornia and engineered in Ann Arbor, Mich. The New York International Auto Show runs through Sunday, April 15, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on 11th Avenue near 34th Street. Hours are 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Sundays. Tickets are 15 for adults, 5 for children under 13. Further information is available at autoshowny.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Most of Santopietro's work is given over to that movie so much so that I began to wonder if this book was intended to be a cultural history of the adaptation alone. Santopietro has previously written books about other beloved film adaptations, including "The Sound of Music" and "The Godfather"; here, he details everything from the producers, the screenwriter, the cast and the set decorators to how the film was received by the critics, the public and Lee herself. He is passionate about Gregory Peck as just the right kind of leading man to step into the role of Atticus, and shares a great deal about the process of selecting the child actors to play Scout; her brother, Jem; and their friend Dill. Santopietro goes so far as to elaborate on the lives of everyone involved in the film for years after its release. All of this material is vaguely interesting, but the author fails to explain how it supports his argument that "To Kill a Mockingbird" matters. On top of that, the book's structure is strange. There are all kinds of digressions in each chapter, some of which feel more like information dumps than components of a cohesive narrative. Nor is there a clear progression between them: The 11th chapter is about the merits of the movie as an adaptation, and the 13th is about Harper Lee's private nature, but the 12th asks the question: "Is 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Racist?" (My answer to that question is yes.) These organizational choices and the one or two jarring Stephen Sondheim quotations he cites are bewildering. As much as I admire the exhaustive research, not a lot of care seems to have been put into how it is conveyed. Not until the last few chapters does Santopietro finally try to make a definitive case for the importance of this seminal American novel. He offers statistics about the book's commercial success: "Translated into 40 languages, the novel sells approximately 750,000 copies every year," he writes. "In total, some 40 million copies have been sold worldwide since 1960, and at the time of Harper Lee's death in 2016, her annual royalties remained in excess of three million dollars." Few other books have sold so robustly for so long. "Mockingbird" is also required reading "in over 70 percent of American high schools." These numbers are impressive indeed, but ubiquity and quality are not the same thing (and neither one is necessarily the same thing as importance). Santopietro also notes that we're still living in a world where ethnic prejudice abounds, not just toward black people but Mexicans, Syrian refugees and others. The author is not ignorant of the racial zeitgeist, but it is odd that he thinks Lee's novel speaks to it adequately. He boldly claims, "'Mockingbird' succeeds in a basic task of literature: the expansion of worldviews by means of exposure to differing communities and cultures." In that it tells the story of a wrongfully accused incarcerated black man, he is correct, but it is important to question just what kind of exposure the text offers. Given the shallowness of the black characters how they are vehicles for Scout's story instead of their own we as readers should raise the bar higher than mere "exposure." Santopietro saves his keenest observation for the final pages of "Why 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Matters," in which he acknowledges the power of nostalgia: "The continued heartfelt response to 'Mockingbird' now seems inextricably tied up in Harper Lee's ability to underscore a sense of community sorely lacking today." He goes on to discuss how people spend too much time in isolation with their electronic devices, as neighborhoods, communities and communication disintegrate. He acknowledges how much the culture has changed since the book's publication in 1960, but laments the proliferation of "dark and damaged characters"on television and in film. What he conveys most powerfully is a yearning for a simpler time a uniquely white yearning, because it is white people to whom history has been kindest. It is white people who seem to long for the safety of cloistered communities where everyone knows one another, where people know their place and are assured of what their lives may hold. Clearly, Santopietro identifies more with Scout, Jem and Dill than with, say, Boo Radley, the town recluse who probably wouldn't yearn for that simpler time when the townspeople regarded him with open distance and mistrust. And then the author illustrates why it is hard to take this book seriously: "The United States found in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was unquestionably a more racist, oppressive America, deaf to the desires and hopes of women, homosexuals, minorities and nearly anyone who did not fit the prevailing definition of 'normal.'" This statement is technically true, but it overlooks the serious racial tensions our nation still faces. Santopietro does make brief mentions of President Trump and his lack of leadership during the Charlottesville riots, as well as of the responses (or lack thereof) of black people to "Mockingbird," but these asides feel tacked on and unexplored. The groundwork for "Why 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Matters" is astute, but the intellectual analyses are not, and the book suffers for it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
PHILADELPHIA Like many public schools here, University City High School is underused, underfinanced and underperforming. Nearly 80 percent of its 11th grade students read below grade level in statewide tests this year, while 85 percent failed to make the grade in math. Last year, about only a quarter of its students participated in precollege testing like the SAT. Largely because of the lure of local charter schools, the school is one quarter full, with fewer than 600 students for its nearly 2,200 seats. It needs major work on its infrastructure, including lighting and heating systems, that would cost an estimated 30 million. Now, facing deep financial problems, the Philadelphia School District has proposed an unprecedented downsizing that would close 37 campuses by June roughly one out of six public schools, including University City. If the sweeping plan is approved, the district says it will improve academic standards by diverting money used for maintaining crumbling buildings to hire teachers and improve classroom equipment. The 237 school district faces a cumulative budget deficit of 1.1 billion over the next five years, after 419 million in state cuts to educational financing this year. The district's problems are compounded by the end of federal stimulus money and rising pension costs. Even after borrowing 300 million to pay the bills for this academic year, the district faces a deficit of 27.6 million, a figure that officials say will rise sharply in coming years. Its problems are worsened by having to maintain buildings that are drastically underused. Among 195,000 student "seats," 53,000 are empty, according to the district's new superintendent, William R. Hite Jr., who argues that the solution is to close the schools, sell their buildings and transfer students into those that remain open. Some middle schools would be converted to elementary schools, and vice versa, and many students would be moved to different schools, sometimes in different neighborhoods. In all, 17,000 students and more than 1,100 teachers would be affected by closings, program changes and new grade configurations. Schools that would be closed were selected on the basis of their physical condition, usage, academic record and cost per student. "We run the risk of talking about a district that is no longer financially able to operate," Dr. Hite told a noisy meeting of about 450 parents, students and teachers at Martin Luther King High School in the Germantown neighborhood on Dec. 19, at which district officials were trying to sell their plan. Although the district has been able to borrow enough to operate this year, it has reached its credit limit, Dr. Hite said. "We no longer have the ability to borrow that kind of money going forward," he said. Other large cities, including Chicago, Detroit and Washington, are also considering school closings because of declining enrollment, competition from charter schools and overcapacity, said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools. But Philadelphia has been hit hard by state education financing that has been among the lowest per student of any major city, Mr. Casserly said. "The state's historical lack of spending has had an eroding effect on the district," he said. The proposed cuts which are scheduled to be voted on in March by the School Reform Commission, a state organization that oversees the district have ignited angry protests from teachers, students and parents. They argue that children, particularly in their elementary years, should not be forced to attend school outside their neighborhoods; that academic improvements would be disrupted; and that students attending new schools would be victimized because of longstanding inter neighborhood rivalries.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The development puts in jeopardy Mr. Dauman's position as chief executive of Viacom and is viewed as a major coup by Shari E. Redstone, Mr. Redstone's daughter, who is the vice chairwoman of Viacom and CBS as well as a member of the trust. Long ostracized by her father, Ms. Redstone has said recently that the two have patched up their relationship. Ms. Redstone does not to see eye to eye with Mr. Dauman or approve of his stewardship of Viacom, which has suffered a 40 percent plunge in the stock price in the last year. In February, Ms. Redstone voted against Mr. Dauman's ascent to the chairman position of Viacom. Shortly after news of Mr. Redstone's decision emerged first reported by Fortune Mr. Dauman issued a statement of denunciation. "They are a shameful effort by Shari Redstone to seize control by unlawfully using her ailing father Sumner Redstone's name and signature," Lex Suvanto, a spokesman for Mr. Dauman, said in a statement. "As she knows, and as court proceedings and other facts have demonstrated, Sumner Redstone now lacks the capacity to have taken these steps," Mr. Suvanto said. "Sumner Redstone would never have summarily dismissed Philippe Dauman and George Abrams, his trusted friends and advisers for decades." In the statement on behalf of Mr. Redstone, Mr. Tu said: "The public statement made on Mr. Dauman's behalf attacking Mr. Redstone's capacity is disappointing and incorrect, as reflected by Mr. Dauman's own testimony given under oath less than six months ago that Mr. Redstone is as 'engaged, attentive and as opinionated as ever.' That is exactly the Sumner Redstone who made these decisions today." Ms. Redstone could not be reached for comment. The development comes a little more than a week after a trial over his mental competency was dismissed in a California court. The judge overseeing the case sided with Mr. Redstone, but made clear that he had not made a decision about whether or not Mr. Redstone was mentally competent. The judge said that a videotaped testimony of the media mogul showed that it was "not in dispute that Redstone suffers from either mild or moderate dementia."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
There is no question that Donna Lou Rayhons had severe Alzheimer's. In the days before being placed in a nursing home in Garner, Iowa, last year, Mrs. Rayhons, 78, could not recall her daughters' names or how to eat a hamburger. One day, she tried to wash her hands in the toilet of a restaurant bathroom. But another question has become the crux of an extraordinary criminal case unfolding this week in an Iowa courtroom: Was Mrs. Rayhons able to consent to sex with her husband? Henry Rayhons, 78, has been charged with third degree felony sexual abuse, accused of having sex with his wife in a nursing home on May 23, 2014, eight days after staff members there told him they believed she was mentally unable to agree to sex. It is rare, possibly unprecedented, for such circumstances to prompt criminal charges. Mr. Rayhons, a nine term Republican state legislator, decided not to seek another term after his arrest. There is no allegation that Mrs. Rayhons resisted or showed signs of abuse. And it is widely agreed that the Rayhonses had a loving, affectionate relationship, having married in 2007 after each had been widowed. They met while singing in a church choir. The case pivots on longstanding medical and ethical concerns that will become only more pressing as the population ages and rates of dementia rise. How can anyone determine whether a person with dementia can say yes to sex? Who has the right to decide? "It really is a huge issue, and somewhere down the line we're going to have to confront it," said Derek Beeston, a social work professor at Staffordshire University in England who has studied sex and dementia. Mrs. Rayhons, who died in August, was placed in the Concord Care Center in March 2014, soon after one of her daughters, Linda Dunshee, was called to pick her up at the Iowa State Capitol, where Mr. Rayhons was working. Ms. Dunshee found her mother wearing lingerie and unzipped pants under her coat. Details about the case come from interviews, court records and news media reports. At the care center, Mr. Rayhons, a corn and soybean farmer, visited his wife morning and evening, sometimes praying the rosary by her bed. But documents and interviews suggest he opposed some staff recommendations, including limiting outside trips, like attending a friend's funeral at an unfamiliar church. Michelle Dornbier, a social worker at the center, and Dr. John Boedeker, Mrs. Rayhons's family doctor, testified on Friday about her scores on a test to assess memory and orientation. In May 2014, she scored zero, unable to recall the words "sock," "bed" and "blue." But Ms. Dornbier acknowledged that Mrs. Rayhons "was always pleased to see Henry." And Dr. Boedeker acknowledged that "intimacy is beneficial for dementia patients." Ms. Dornbier testified that the Concord Care Center allows consensual sex between residents. But she said that on May 15, 2014, family members including Mr. Rayhons were given a "care plan" establishing simple routines for Mrs. Rayhons, including limiting outings with Mr. Rayhons mostly to church on Sunday. Ms. Dornbier, prompted by what she called concerns from Mrs. Rayhons's daughter Suzan Brunes, that Mr. Rayhons was engaging in inappropriate sexual contact, wrote at the bottom of the plan: "Given Donna's cognitive state, do you feel she is able to give consent for any sexual activity?" Soon after, Ms. Brunes successfully petitioned for guardianship of her mother. The petition did not mention sexual activity, but said that Mr. Rayhons disregarded staff members' recommendations, including that he not visit his wife's room because of "conflicts with her roommate." In an interview with a state investigator, Mr. Rayhons said that his wife still enjoyed and occasionally asked for sex, but he did not remember having sex in the shared room that night. The investigator implied, apparently erroneously, to Mr. Rayhons that cameras had recorded sexual activity, which seemed to persuade him to acknowledge having had relations. Mrs. Rayhons was moved to another facility run by the same company, which has a special dementia unit. Her daughter limited Mr. Rayhons's visits. He was arrested soon after she died. The case is being tried by the Iowa attorney general's office because of Mr. Rayhons's prominence in the county. The attorney general's office, the Concord Care Home, Mrs. Rayhons's daughters and their lawyer declined to comment while the case is pending. Sex is one of the most ambiguous areas in the scientific understanding of Alzheimer's. While there are established methods of measuring memory, reasoning and the ability to dress, bathe and balance checkbooks, no widely used method exists for assessing the ability to consent to intimate relations. One obstacle: Dementia's symptoms fluctuate. Patients may be relatively lucid in the morning and significantly impaired in the afternoon. "What may be appropriate on one day may not be appropriate the next week, or at a different point that same day," said Ann Christine Frankowski, associate director of the Center for Aging Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Yet desire may survive long after names and faces are forgotten. Physical intimacy can benefit dementia patients, experts say, calming agitation, easing loneliness and possibly aiding physical health. "Touch is one of the last pleasures we lose," said Daniel Reingold, chief executive of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, in the Bronx, which pioneered a "sexual rights policy" for residents in 1995. "So much of aging and so much of being in a long term care facility is about loss, loss of independence, loss of friends, loss of ability to use your body. Why would we want to diminish that?" Several experts described intimacy as an almost primal instinct, like eating. "Wanting to have sex is a bit like being hungry or being thirsty," Dr. Beeston said. Unless people are in a "vegetative" state, said Patricia M. Speck, a forensic nurse at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing, "there's a lot of things they might not be able to do like money and time and recognition of children, but they have the capacity for self determination and intimate relationships." Gayle Doll, director of the Center on Aging at Kansas State University, said a person with dementia might not assent with words, but with body language or facial expression. Dr. Doll trains facilities in practices like knocking before entering residents' rooms. One home even put mattresses on the floor to provide a safe place for residents who might otherwise fall out of bed. Aging baby boomers "are going to want to have sex, and they don't want to play bingo," Dr. Frankowski said. Yet many nursing homes have no sexual intimacy policy. "Most of them are embarrassed by sex," Dr. Speck said. "Older persons are not considered to be sexual." An exception is the Hebrew Home, where staff members are asked to assess consent with nonverbal cues, to note a resident's mood after sex, and to pose questions like: "Do you enjoy sexual contact?," "Do you know what it means to have sex?," and "What would you do if you wanted it to stop?" "I've definitely had family members who have gotten very aggressive opposing our position in encouraging intimacy," Mr. Reingold said. But staff members will tell family members, "Look, Dad is happy. Why would you want to deprive him of this?" In other facilities, though, Dr. Frankowski said: "I find staff members saying 'It's wrong. Old people don't do this, they had spouses in the past, they have family member that would be concerned.' " "Sometimes they will say to the resident, 'Do you really want your daughter to know about this?' And the staff members do really and truly believe they are doing the right thing." Dementia can cause some people to become sexually disinhibited, so facilities like Hebrew Home monitor patients to prevent situations that threaten or make other patients uncomfortable, such as patients masturbating in public rooms. Experts say adult children whose parents are in second or third marriages may have more difficulty condoning sexual activity with the newer spouse, something that may have played a role in Iowa, where Mrs. Rayhons's daughters and husband disagreed about her care. During opening arguments last Thursday, the prosecutor, Tyler Buller, said, "On May 23 of last year, Donna Rayhons couldn't make her own decisions." He also said seminal fluid corresponding to Mr. Rayhons's DNA was found on sheets, a quilt and Mrs. Rayhons's panties. The defense lawyer, Joel Yunek, said a rape kit found no semen in Mrs. Rayhons's vagina or signs of tearing. He said Mr. Rayhons had had sex with his wife at the nursing home, but not on May 23. On Monday, Mr. Yunek asked Dr. Brady if "Donna is happy to see Henry hugs, smiles, they hold hands, they talk would that indicate that she is in fact capable at that point of understanding the affection with Henry?" Dr. Brady said no, calling that a "primal response" not indicative of the ability to make informed decisions. Dr. Alireza Yarahmadi, a neurologist testifying for the prosecution, also disagreed with Mr. Yunek's contention, saying, "They do have feelings, but they don't have good judgment." Mr. Rayhons may testify this week. His lawyer and his son, Dale, declined to comment, but soon after the arrest, his family issued a statement saying in part: "Accusing a spouse of a crime for continuing a relationship with his spouse in a nursing home seems to us to be incredibly illogical and unnatural, as well as incredibly hurtful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The former Auburn assistant basketball coach Chuck Person pleaded guilty on Tuesday to accepting nearly 100,000 to steer his players toward agents and advisers who had bribed him. Person was fired after the initial revelation of the charges in September 2017. He became the fourth assistant coach to plead guilty to charges that stemmed from cases alleging widespread corruption in college basketball recruiting. His bribery trial had been set to begin later this year. "As he has now admitted, Chuck Person abused his position as a coach and mentor to student athletes in exchange for personal gain," Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. "In taking tens of thousands of dollars in cash bribes, Person not only placed personal financial gain above his obligations to his employer and the student athletes he coached, but he broke the law." Person starred at Auburn before a successful N.B.A. career in the 1980s and 1990s.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The Hendrik, a new condominium under construction in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, aims to blend the space and character of the neighborhood's coveted townhouses with the amenities of a new residential tower. "The townhouse market is restrictive they're expensive and there are not a lot of them," said Jeffrey Gershon, a principal of Hopestreet, the developer of the six story building. For families who are outgrowing their current apartments and want to be in Boerum Hill, he added, the Hendrik is envisioned as "somewhere to live when they're shut out of the townhouse market." As such, none of the building's 33 units will be studios or one bedrooms, and all apartments will have relatively large footprints. Sales began on May 31, with two bedrooms starting at 1.625 million and ranging from about 1,200 square feet to 1,500 square feet. Three bedrooms start at 2.5 million and range from about 1,600 square feet to more than 2,000 square feet. Four bedrooms, starting at 2.9 million, range from about 1,850 square feet to more than 2,500 square feet. All will have 10 foot high ceilings, and eight foot tall doors and windows. With Barclays Center to the east, and a proliferation of new stores and restaurants, Boerum Hill is increasingly attractive to buyers, "but slightly underdeveloped on the residential side," said Stephen G. Kliegerman, the president of Halstead Property Development Marketing, which is marketing the building. "It has opportunities for development, because there are underutilized parcels of land."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
This one acre property with two Balinese style cottages is in the art centric town of Todos Santos, Mexico, on the southwestern coast of the Baja California Peninsula, near the Pacific Ocean. Shaded by royal palms and fruit trees in a bucolic pocket of a residential neighborhood, the estate, called Casa Huerta, "exudes calmness and serenity," said Alec Quevedo, an agent with Ricardo Amigo Real Estate, which has the listing. The two one bedroom concrete houses, built in 2004, stand about 80 feet apart at the center of the rectangular lot, each with an outdoor parking area. The 900 square foot main house, painted reddish ocher, has an A frame veranda with a dining table and lounge furniture. Inside is an open plan living room with concrete floors, built in concrete bookshelves and sofas, and double height palm thatch ceilings. The kitchen, which looks out on the veranda, has poured concrete counters and shelves. The houses are connected by a stone walkway. Four sliding hardwood pocket doors open to the 700 square foot guesthouse, which has a living room with an open kitchen, vaulted ceilings, built in sofas and Mexican parota wood cabinets. The bedroom, up two steps, has a half bathroom. A Balinese style free standing bathhouse with a full bathroom is across a private courtyard. A second sleeping area, in a loft above the kitchen, can be reached by an exterior staircase. The property is being sold partially furnished. The coastal town of Todos Santos, with about 6,500 residents, has long attracted artists with its artisanal shops and galleries. It is also popular with surfers, who ride the breaks at Playa Cerritos, about 20 minutes south of town. The Playa La Cachora beach is an eight minute drive. Los Cabos, a world renowned vacation destination with its 20 mile Resort Corridor, is 50 miles south. Los Cabos International Airport is about 75 minutes away. While Todos Santos is less than an hour from Los Cabos, but it can feel a world away, agents said. Los Cabos, a region that includes the beach cities of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, tends toward volume in resorts, cruise ships, entertainment, golf while Todos Santos, designated a Pueblo Magico, or magical town, by Mexico's Secretariat of Tourism, gets a trickle of day trippers. "Todos Santos is more of a quaint village, with more of an authentic Mexican flavor to it," said Bernardo Mucino Koenig, the managing director of the Agency Los Cabos. But he and other agents said the vibe has been shifting in recent years, with new hotels and residential developments setting the local housing market on a new course. "The last years have been really busy," Mr. Quevedo said. "We've kind of had a little bit of an explosion it's a small town, so I use the word 'explosion' lightly, of course." Condos are under construction, he said, but most of the offerings are "quirky, artistic homes." Nick Fong, the broker at Los Cabos Agent, compared Todos Santos to Cabo San Lucas 30 years ago, when the Mexican government began promoting the once rural area as a global hot spot. "Lot prices are going up; things are doubling in price," he said, noting that in Todos Santos and "fringe" areas east of Los Cabos, prices for vacant lots have increased from 20,000 for an ocean view quarter acre in 2018 to 40,000 or 50,000 in early 2020. But the market has stalled since the Covid 19 pandemic led to the closure of the U.S. Mexico border for nonessential travel, Mr. Fong said. In late March, his agency was getting two offers a week, down from the usual five or six, and he expects that number to keep falling. "We'll be lucky to see even one" a week, he said. Properties in the area usually sell for about 10 percent below their asking price, he said, "mainly due to the fact that we are a second home market." But that discount will likely deepen given the recent drop in tourism, which drives home sales, he added: "Any sales that will happen in the next few months will probably have a 10 to 20 percent less sale price than it would do in a let's call it a normal market, a pre corona market." In Todos Santos, the most common residence is a "middle income, single standing home" that sells for 300,000 to 500,000, Mr. Koenig said, adding that more expensive hacienda style properties with olive groves and farms are available, but are not the norm. In Los Cabos, high end options abound. Luxury condos sell for 1 million to 3.5 million, he said. Ultraluxury communities like El Dorado Golf Beach Club and Maravilla Los Cabos offer condos and lots for custom homes; a beachfront property there could top 15 million, he said. Blake Harrington, the managing partner of REmexico Real Estate, a Cabo San Lucas based agency, said Los Cabos also has more affordable properties, including ocean view condos for around 400,000, as well as "some great options at or around 250,000 that give you the right location to enjoy Cabo, or San Jose del Cabo, without breaking the bank." Mr. Fong said three quarters of his buyers are from the United States, and many of the rest are from Canada. Other agencies, he said, have had a few buyers from China, England and Spain. Recently, more foreigners have been moving to the region full time rather than buying second homes there, he said. Mr. Koenig said about 70 to 80 percent of his agency's clients are from the United States, and the rest are from Canada. Three quarters of the buyers at Mr. Harrington's agency are from the United States, he said, and many of the others are from Canada and Mexico. With the increase in short term rentals in the region, he added, the share of buyers who rent out their properties has grown.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. FX is getting into the ad free premium game. The cable network has struck a deal with Comcast to offer a commercial free experience for its currently airing shows, and some older ones, through a service, called FX , that will start in September. For 5.99 a month, about 17 million Comcast subscribers will be eligible to watch current seasons of shows like "The Americans," "Atlanta" and "American Horror Story" without ads. They will also get access to a library of older shows, including "Louie" and "Nip/Tuck." FX's move is a baby step toward competing directly with rivals like Netflix and HBO, which offer current and past seasons of a legion of popular shows. But the agreement with Comcast is nevertheless significant, and another sign that a subscription based business model has become more important as ratings have fallen throughout the television industry. Both the premium cable channel Showtime and the broadcast network CBS also have stand alone apps.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
PARIS Ireland, one of the first countries to receive an international bailout during Europe's sovereign debt crisis, will suffer a sharp slowdown in growth this year as an austerity program that helped reduce the country's deficit enters its second year, according to a progress report Thursday from international lenders. Ireland cut its deficit to about 10 percent of gross domestic product in 2011 from 32 percent in 2010, the year that a government plan to bail out six of the country's largest banks inflated the deficit, according to the report by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The Irish economy will grow only about 0.5 percent this year, down from a forecast of 1.1 percent just two months ago, as the country's troubles keep unemployment high and prompt Irish consumers to tighten their purse strings, the report said. But the reduction in the deficit is striking, and Irish officials hope it will persuade investors that Ireland is once again becoming creditworthy enough to borrow in financial markets as soon as next year at interest rates the country can afford.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
It was the temple of commerce, the symbol of New York's status as the nation's and for many decades, the world's financial center. Today the New York Stock Exchange building at Broad and Wall Streets in Lower Manhattan is not much more than a television studio. Soon it seems likely that it will not even be owned by a New York company. The owner of the exchange, NYSE Euronext, agreed on Thursday to be acquired by IntercontinentalExchange, an Atlanta based upstart that has prospered by trading derivatives over the Internet, for 8.2 billion in cash and stock. The transformation of the New York Stock Exchange from its position at the apex of the world financial system to an asset to be bought and sold like any other and one that is not deemed to be worth as much as it would be if it traded more modern derivative securities rather than old fashioned stocks has been going on for decades, but has accelerated in recent years. An institution that began as an attempt to limit competition prospered most when it was able to exert monopoly control. Its power and authority withered as regulators and changing technology forced it to compete. The exchange traces its history to the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792 an agreement that was nothing more than an effort to fix the commissions that brokers charged their customers at a quarter of 1 percent, or 2.50 on a 1,000 bond. In the beginning, there was just one stock, the Bank of New York, and a handful of bonds that were traded. The buttonwood tree actually a sycamore under which the agreement was signed lasted until 1865, long after the exchange moved indoors. By the 20th century, the exchange had established its pre eminent role. There were exchanges in other cities, but important companies were listed in, and traded in, New York. The brokers who were "members" of the exchange agreed they would not trade any stock listed on the Big Board anywhere except on that exchange. In practice, that meant there was no competition. If you wanted to buy or sell shares in AT T or General Motors, the trade would take place at 18 Broad Street, in the 1903 edifice designed by George B. Post. The huge sculptures on the pediment were titled "Integrity Protecting the Works of Man." Commissions were fixed, just as they had been in 1792. The exchange was virtually unregulated until the 1930s, and for decades after that it was a "self regulatory" organization that monitored and supervised its own trading under the sometimes cursory supervision of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Big Board cultivated a high class image, in which only the best companies were allowed listings. The reality did not always match the image, but a N.Y.S.E. listing became a symbol of quality that reassured investors around the world. The monopoly began to break down in the 1960s, as brokers who were not members of the exchange found ways to use computers to trade shares listed on the exchange for less than the Big Board charged. A pioneer in that business was Bernard L. Madoff, who would go on to infamy many years later as the creator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Then the government banned fixed commissions, and the exchange was forced to allow its members to trade N.Y.S.E. listed securities anywhere. It lost market share, but remained the dominant marketplace, the one that set the price of any security it traded. If the N.Y.S.E. halted trading in a stock, so did every other exchange. Without price discovery within the walls of 18 Broad Street, no one could be sure what market prices were. But the financial world was changing, and the Big Board was not keeping up. Options on stocks began trading in the early 1970s. The Big Board could have dominated that market, but instead it sniffed at it and the market became centered in Chicago, where commodity exchanges had long existed, trading wheat and corn contracts. As financial futures were created, on things like currency values and interest rates, they too were traded in Chicago. Within the world of stocks, more and more exchanges moved to computers. The N.Y.S.E. moved as well, but it tried to maintain the dominance of its members, particularly the specialists who were required to always be ready to buy or sell any stock listed on the exchange. It found it hard to keep up with competitors in speed or cost. Competitors did not have to finance their own regulatory apparatus, and the Big Board decided to follow, merging N.Y.S.E. Regulation into Nasdaq's operation to create Finra, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The Big Board became less distinctive. In 2006, the exchange stopped being owned by its members and went public. It acquired exchanges in Europe and renamed itself NYSE Euronext. It acquired a computerized market. The N.Y.S.E. shares were hot for a time, but the reality of competition eventually took a toll. Under the new agreement, the IntercontinentalExchange will pay 33.12 in cash and stock for Big Board shares that traded as high as 90 in 2006. The company says it will have headquarters in both Atlanta and New York, but there seems to be little doubt that the power will be in Atlanta. ICE represents everything the Big Board used to resent. Its history goes back to 2000, not 1792, and it does its trading via the Internet, focusing on derivatives that the stock exchange once scorned. It advertises "sub one millisecond trade execution times." There is still stock trading at 18 Broad Street, and that seems likely to continue even though most of the action long ago moved off the floor. The crowds of traders, which seemed overwhelming a generation ago, are now thin, but there are still plenty of television reporters. The decline of the exchange can be seen by glances at three stock market trading disasters, and the differing role it played. During the 1987 crash, the Big Board was the center of the action. Stock index futures had become important, and other stock markets could and did trade every security listed on the N.Y.S.E. But they all looked to the New York floor to learn what the market price was at any given moment. When the panic was at its worst, and the exchange began to halt trading in important stocks because of a lack of buy orders, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange threatened to halt trading in stock index futures. Without New York prices, the Chicago market could not operate. During the 2010 "flash crash," when errant computers sent prices plunging, other markets could and did continue trading after the New York exchange halted trading, and some of those markets were indignant that the Big Board had slowed things down. The result was that customers whose orders had been sent to the New York Stock Exchange did not end up selling 30 stocks for 1. The Big Board's people had applied common sense and at least on that market halted the craziness. During this summer's Knight Capital debacle, when errant computers again caused prices to go haywire, the New York Stock Exchange did nothing different from its competitors. Its customers were victimized, just like everyone else's. It could be seen as a final indication that what made the New York Stock Exchange special had gone away. Five months later, the Big Board is set to disappear as an independent enterprise.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
As the engine of its plot starts revving up, the movie takes in some of the realities of American life with matter of fact weariness. The scars of Katrina and of the neglect and corruption that followed are still evident, and the alienation of poor, black citizens is painful and profound. Alicia wants to believe something else is possible, that common ground exists, that people don't have to be classified as "allies or enemies," but this modest idealism only emphasizes her isolation. Rhetoric that once sounded hopeful and inspiring now sounds naive. She's hardly foolish or starry eyed, but her desire not to succumb completely to cynicism means that no one else trusts her. It also endangers her life. How that comes about isn't something I'm inclined to spoil, though it isn't hard to figure out what's going on or what's coming next. Alicia stumbles on a bunch of dirty cops, led by a narcotics detective who goes by Malone (Frank Grillo), doing some terrible things, which happen to be captured by her body camera. Malone and his crew are mixed up with a drug gang (its leader is played by Mike Colter), and before long both groups are chasing her through alleys and housing projects. Rather than dress up its action with tricky, too clever plot twists, "Black and Blue" respects both Alicia's and the viewer's intelligence. It doesn't take too long to figure out who the bad guys are, or to see where the next bit of treachery will come from. Alicia and the reluctant Mouse are caught up in a conspiracy so vast and deeply rooted that it seems like part of the city's infrastructure. That's a depressing thought, and Alicia is an apt heroine for a time of dread, disappointment and diminished expectations. I don't mean to make the movie sound altogether grim. Taylor is good at choreographing violence and orchestrating suspense, and also at finding the grain of humor in each performance. He showed all of these skills earlier this year in "The Intruder," a real estate thriller that flirted with some of the social implications that "Black and Blue" commits to without reservation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"TO compare is to despair," the saying goes, and I've generally found it to be true. If I try hard enough (and sometimes even if I don't) I can usually find someone who performs better or has more. And I can feel bad about it. I objectively know that my own life is pretty good, but this upward comparison, as economists and psychologists call it, can somehow dim my own accomplishments. "Comparison is rife with danger, but it's understandable why we do it," said Heidi Grant Halvorson, a social psychologist. "We're human beings and we naturally seek information." One way to get information, Ms. Halvorson said, is to turn to experts. Another way is to look at those around us. And often what we see in our neighborhood or community is more important, in our minds, than anything else. Economic studies have shown, for example, that once they make a certain amount of money to cover basics, most people care more about relative, rather than absolute, income. That is, most of us feel better if we make, say, 100,000 if the majority of our neighbors make 75,000 than if we earn 150,000 when most of our friends bring in 200,000. One such study, "Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well Being," published in 2005 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that "higher earnings of neighbors were associated with lower levels of self reported happiness." The paper cites the oft quoted saying by the economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill: "Men do not desire to be rich, but to be richer than other men." Erzo F. P. Luttmer, the author of the study and an associate professor of economics at Dartmouth College, said in a telephone interview that neighbors "influence what you think is a normal lifestyle, and you struggle to keep up." Ms. Halvorson, who is also author of the book "Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals" (Hudson Street Press, 2010), said we needed to think about why we were seeking the information. "Upward comparison can be punishing and make you feel terrible," she said. "But you can also look upward to learn." If we feel bad, for example, about how well we just played in a game of tennis, we can check out those who play worse to make ourselves feel better, and avoid watching the semi pros on the other court. Or, if we believe that we can improve and learn by looking at others and not just feel inferior about playing worse then we can watch the better players. There are also pros and cons to comparing ourselves with people worse off than ourselves. It's not good if we're just trying to gain a sense of superiority or avoiding challenging ourselves to do better. But such downward comparisons can remind us of our own fortune. They can also help us when we think about the things we regret but we cannot change. As part of a study co written by Isabelle Bauer, a clinical psychologist in Toronto, 104 people of various ages were asked to complete a survey about their greatest misgivings choosing the wrong career path, or failing to make amends to someone who passed away or marrying the wrong person. The study found that those who felt that other people had regrets that were "more" or "much more" severe reported an increase in positive emotions when reassessed four months later compared with those who said that other people's regrets were "less" or "much less" severe. "If you can't change what you did, then downward social comparison helps us gain perspective," Ms. Bauer said. "And those people are able to move on and re engage in other goals. If you compare upward about things you can't change, then you seem to just feel stuck." But those who compared themselves downward and had the opportunity to do something about their regrets didn't feel any more positive over time, she said. Comparisons can also serve as a reality check, particularly when speaking about money. My colleague Ron Lieber, for example, wrote about NetworthIQ, a site that allows people to anonymously post their own net worth. Would we be happier and healthier, he asked readers, if we knew the net worth of our friends, colleagues and neighbors? The overwhelming response was no. As one commenter put it: "I am sickened by the idea of calculating one's 'net worth' in terms of money. It's good to have savings and it's good to have a nest in which one can nestle when one exceeds productive years. However, to express your worth in terms of the 'how much?' question is one more step toward dehumanization. I'd rather figure out my net worth in terms of how much I am worth to the world in which I live." Not everyone feels that way, of course, and plenty of people have posted their profiles on NetworthIQ.com. ING Retirement, a United States based division of the Dutch financial services group, a few years ago introduced INGCompareME.com, which allows you to anonymously type in your profile your age, income, gender and marital status. Then you answer some personal finance questions, like the amount of money you've put aside for retirement, your mortgage payments, what you think you'll need to save to retire comfortably and so on. You are then instantly compared with your peers. I answered some of the questions and seemed pretty average. I guess I was pleased our retirement savings were slightly higher than those of the other 1,071 people who answered the question with a similar profile, but I also wasn't sure if I should be. Might it just mean that all of us are saving too little? Was I getting a false sense of security? Not at all, said Denis Martin Monty, vice president of emerging product development at ING Retirement. Rather, it is a useful tool to get us to think about things we often don't want to like how much (or little) we've put away for retirement. The site was initially tested among 28,000 employees of ING's larger clients. When asked at the end of the survey, 64 percent of those who measured themselves chose to take some sort of positive action, like enroll in a retirement plan or increase their savings rate. Mr. Monty also pointed out that studies show that most of us think we're above average, what he called the Lake Wobegon effect. "We tend to overestimate where we stand in comparison to other people," he said. So people aren't necessarily looking at how much more they're actually saving than other people, he said, but how much more they thought they were saving. The site recently hit the million user mark, Mr. Monty said. David Laibson, a professor of economics at Harvard University, who has looked at the impact of providing peer information on retirement savings decisions (it can be helpful, but not always) agreed that such comparisons can serve a purpose "Comparisons to large groups of peers are often useful," he said. "It's never the final word on what I should do, but it does give me food for thought." I doubt most of us are ever going to stop comparing ourselves with others. The most important point to keep in mind, however, is as Ms. Halvorson said: "There's a lot of imperfect comparison going on. We never see the whole picture."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? A. O. Scott, a chief film critic of The Times, discussed the tech he's using. How have tech and online publishing changed the way you review movies? When The Times started reviewing movies regularly back in the 1930s, long before I was hired the film critics emulated the theater critics. They went to see the movie on opening night, then raced back to the newsroom to file copy for the next day's paper. (The review would always name the local theaters where the movie was playing.) By the time I got here, almost 20 years ago, some things had changed. Critics would see the film at a press screening a few days before release, and the review would appear in the paper on the first day usually Friday that readers could go see it. These days, the review is published online first, sometimes a week (or more) before the theatrical opening. It's not enough for subscribers or newsstand buyers to get the reviews along with the rest of the news in the Friday issue of The Times. Being first didn't use to matter, but now that we are competing for traffic with everyone else, it often does. Perhaps because reviews land so much earlier in the cycle of public attention, there seems to be a lot more spoiler sensitivity. People are eager to find out about movies, but they don't want to learn too much too soon. I still go to screenings! We never review from links, and only rarely, when there's no other option, from DVDs. It still matters to my colleagues and me that we experience a film in aesthetically optimal conditions projected on a big screen in a dark room with no distractions even if many of our readers will end up watching at home. Some movies don't even release in theaters they release on streaming services like Netflix. What does your setup look like at home to review those kinds of movies? I have a big LED television with a Blu ray player. I recently gave up cable, but I subscribe to most of the streaming services and some cable channels so I can keep up with things. But I have to admit that I'm also fond of watching certain movies on my laptop with a headset I like the coziness and intimacy, which even may enhance the experience of some quiet, smaller scaled movies. Tech has profoundly changed the way movies are made. What are your favorite uses of tech in movie production, and what are your least favorite? I often think computer generated special effects are used as a crutch rather than a creative tool so many digitally enhanced action sequences strike me as unimaginative and phoned in. On the other hand, the field of animation has opened up in some pretty amazing ways. Some of my favorite movies in my tenure at The Times have been Pixar features. But I also like the ways that digital technology has democratized film production. One of my favorite movies from a few years back was Sean Baker's "Tangerine," a feature shot on an iPhone that had a distinctive visual texture.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
On Thursday, the designer outlet Saks Off 5th will open its first New York City location. It will include a Gilt shop in shop (after the acquisition of the luxury flash sale site by Saks Fifth Avenue's parent organization, Hudson Bay Company) that will feature weekly flash sales, starting with Zadig Voltaire. Snag pieces like a faux fur hooded jacket ( 298, originally 650) for up to 70 percent off while you can. At 125 East 57th Street. Agnes b. is providing support to the "EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film" series showcasing films about or with soundtracks by French D.J.s and musicians at the French Institute Alliance Francaise. "Grand Central," a Lea Seydoux film scored by the French artist Rob, is showing on Tuesday. Tickets are 3 for institute members (free at the door) and 14 for nonmembers at fiaf.org. At 22 East 60th Street. The French theme continues on Wednesday when Pierre Henri Mattout, founder of the PHM Peres concept store in the St. Germain neighborhood of Paris, will appear at a new pop up shop at Bloomingdale's 59th Street at 5:30 p.m. Stop by to meet the man and check out his curated selection of streetwear brands, including Spalwart and Hender Scheme, performance gear like an Arc'teryx Veilance cotton blend hooded jacket ( 450) and designer fashion. See now, buy now is the new reality. Four looks from the Paco Rabanne fall collection, including a knit turtleneck ( 1,650) and a padded nylon wrap skirt ( 1,050), will be available to order on barneys.com on Thursday (for delivery this month) a day after they walk down the runway.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"Marnie," my new opera, which has its American premiere on Friday at the Metropolitan Opera, is about a woman who lies, steals, gets caught and is forced to marry a man who sexually assaults her. It's delicate material to say the least and deeply plot driven, and the dramatic structure has to be airtight to allow room for expressive musicality. The director, Michael Mayer, called me with the idea for a "Marnie" opera five years ago. The story is most famous from the Hitchcock film, but we found that the 1961 Winston Graham novel on which it's based was a far richer source of psychological tension and freed us from any visual or musical entanglements with the movie. That first notion blossomed into a wonderful libretto by Nicholas Wright, which then turned into a giant stack of manuscript. Now, in the days before opening, among the orchestra, the chorus, the principal singers, the stage crew, spot ops, dressers, wig makers, etc., there are hundreds of people reacting to this document; it's a huge, thrilling, anxiety producing setup. But when Michael was staging the scenes that precede and follow this moment, it immediately became clear that the entire dramatic beat was unnecessary: We were "telling, not showing," the classic drama school no no, and the aria took what should have felt like a satisfying gravitational pull toward the final scene and stalled it midair. (I was reminded of Boris Johnson's humiliating zip line ride, where he got stuck in the middle of it, bobbing helplessly over the park.) What if we just cut it? I rushed over to the full score, figured out a way to make the snip work musically scooch the oboe's entrance over a bar; get rid of some vestigial gongs and we tried it out: It was so much better. It felt like we'd obeyed Coco Chanel's advice: "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off." The conductor, Robert Spano, and I mourned the musical loss over a negroni but toasted to how much more successful the last 30 (now 26) minutes of the show would be without it. With a piece of concert music, I can tell, more or less, if the structure holds together just by looking through the manuscript in my studio. With a piece of theater, however, I find that on paper and even in rehearsals, the overall soundness of the structure is always just slightly out of view. It's when you see an opera on stage for the first time with an audience that it feels like shining a black light on a crime scene: Even if you thought you'd carefully wiped clean all of the strange incisions and seams of the compositional process, you've still missed a spot. None of this sort of work is, for me, fully possible to execute if I'm sitting at my desk at home. It requires being in the room with Michael; with Nick; with Isabel Leonard, who plays Marnie; with Paul Cremo, the Met's dramaturg; and seeing the scenes unfold in real time. I want to know what Isabel thinks about a given transition: She is the one who has to communicate what I wrote, and if there's anything I can do to help her do that with grace and power, I feel that's my job as a composer. If I can change an E flat to an F to make the text clearer, I will do it; if we need a better word, Nick will come over, and we'll confer about how to make it all sync up. When I write a piece of orchestral music, I can be as controlling as I want, but with a piece this big, I try to be the opposite of precious. The practical process of mounting an opera is much more crabwise than one might suspect. For the first three weeks, the cast works in a subterranean rehearsal room with the actual floor of the set recreated; some of the real furniture and props are there, but, for example, the tall sliding panels in our full design are represented by shorter, temporary ones. There is a tag team of brilliant rehearsal pianists, the conductor, two assistant conductors, the director, two assistant directors, the stage manager, an assistant stage manager, the dramaturg and me, in the corner with piles of scores and laptops and iPads and snacks. The chorus, which has been rehearsing and memorizing this work since the summer, comes half a dozen times, but not necessarily to work in any particular order; we might find ourselves staging the ending with the chorus before staging the beginning with the cast. We see the orchestra, which is equally busy, in its rehearsal room once or twice without the singers, then twice with the singers but never with the chorus. Two weeks before we open, we start spending the mornings on the main stage with only the pianists. Visual elements creep in: lighting, projections, costumes, with all their attendant joys and problems. (The tracks in the floor seem to be of a thickness precisely designed to entrap the elegant high heels most of the women in this production wear.) The week before we open, we have a morning per act with everything (chorus, orchestra, heels), a complete run through with piano, a complete final dress rehearsal with everything then opening. The wildest thing about this schedule is that it means that before opening night, there is only one opportunity to see the whole show as a complete piece of theater, which is oftentimes when some of the more deeply hidden knots reveal themselves. On opening night of "Dark Sisters," in 2011, I felt a small amount of air leave the theater when I suddenly realized that I'd boxed the show in with a clumsy transition between an indoor space and an abstract outdoor space; I hadn't perceived this until then. My inbox is, as I write this, filling up with requests to come to the dress rehearsal; in London, where "Marnie" had its premiere last year, it seems like a blood sport to go to the dress rather than to a show, and then make subdued but icy declarations of the opera's wretchedness to anybody who will listen. I always liken the dress rehearsal to that moment in cooking for a group when the stew looks like grave slime (it needs that final 20 minutes to reduce), there are cardoons everywhere, and I'm in a sarong singing along to "Graceland." It's not ready yet! Go wait at a bar somewhere! I've learned, after three operas, what sorts of things require my intervention and what will get better on their own. My role, as I understand it now, is to be an editor and custodian of the document Nick and I created, and to guide but not prescribe the various options the singers and musicians have in expounding it. Obviously, it's anxiety provoking, but as it's not going to be me onstage in a negligee singing a high B flat, or in the pit playing an exposed oboe solo after hundreds of bars' rest, I figure it's only fair of me to be flexible, and to allow the thousands of hours of experience and diligent preparation to let the piece live on its own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
While drawing up an itinerary for my trip to Cincinnati, I came across cincygram, an Instagram account with over 33,000 followers curated by a native, Dave Schmidt. I admired his shots of the city, many of which were taken late at night or early in the morning (Mr. Schmidt has a family and works full time as a retail store manager). Once I had arrived, we sat down one morning for a late breakfast at the downtown outpost of the cafe chain First Watch and I asked him how he started his account. "I didn't have any photography experience," he said. "I used to run all the time but then I hurt my knee. But I still liked to be outside, so one day I went out and took my iPhone with me and just started taking pictures." I had a good start on an agenda for the "Queen City," but I got a couple of great suggestions from Mr. Schmidt that helped complete a picture of a former boomtown that was once called the "Paris of America" because of its inspired architecture and ambitious engineering projects. I discovered that Cincinnati has a complicated and fascinating history that bridges (quite literally) the Northern and Southern United States. There are, of course, great opportunities for the budget conscious traveler: gorgeous buildings, interesting museums, open air markets and good food, including Cincinnati's famous chili. I did, however, have a problem finding cheap, centrally located lodging for the time I was there. I ended up paying 91 per night at a satisfactory Quality Inn north of the University of Cincinnati. When I picked up my rental car from the airport ( 23 a day from Enterprise), the guy at the counter seemed concerned: "Well gosh ... who the heck put you up there?" he asked. The neighborhood wasn't great akin to a highway off ramp but it was only a 10 minute drive to downtown. I had to hit a ballgame, of course Cincinnati is fiercely proud of its two pro sports teams, the Reds and the Bengals. I picked up a cheap upper deck ticket at the Great American Ball Park for 14 (take that, Yankees fans!) and grabbed a "hot mett" a spicy smoked sausage for 5.75. I struck up a conversation with a young man named BJ Dabbain, who works in Lexington, Ky. His girlfriend couldn't make the game and he very generously offered me her ticket a 55 seat on the infield. I bought him a beer ( 9.25) and we watched the Reds lose to the Mariners. Near the ballpark is one of Mr. Schmidt's favorite Cincinnati sights: the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, which leads into Smale Riverfront Park. The bridge, which was completed in 1866, served as a prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge, which Roebling would also design. The Roebling bridge was, for a time, the world's longest suspension bridge, spanning the Ohio River and connecting Cincinnati with Covington, Ky. Mr. Schmidt told me his favorite way to enjoy Cincinnati's most iconic structure: "Drive over to the Kentucky side at night and park under the bridge," he said. "Then walk across it. You get this beautiful view of Smale Park." I parked under the bridge in Kentucky, making the roughly five minute walk across the gently lapping Ohio, and was met by the colorful neon lights of Smale Park, which hugs the foundation of the bridge and runs along the river. Combined with traffic whizzing by on the old iron and sandstone bridge, it was a perfect urban greeting. I visited a couple of Mr. Schmidt's other suggestions, including Spring Grove Cemetery. On a muggy spring day, I walked around the spacious, beautiful grounds of the second largest cemetery in the United States, which is notably the final resting place of 41 Civil War generals. I also visited the Cincinnati Museum Center, a beautiful old Art Deco train terminal ("We locals just call it Union Terminal," Mr. Schmidt said) that was refashioned into a museum center. The building is worth checking out but being renovated, meaning many activities are canceled for the next two years. Just as well my own cultural priorities hewed more toward the culinary. Near the top of the list was to try that Cincinnati chili, a concoction frequently served on spaghetti or hot dogs ("Coneys") and smothered in various toppings like diced onion and Cheddar cheese ("ways"). I went to three specialists: Skyline Chili, Camp Washington Chili and Gold Star Chili. Skyline, a popular chain, is synonymous with Cincinnati chili. I grabbed a stool at the counter at Skyline on Ludlow Avenue in the Clifton neighborhood and ordered a 3 way and a cheese Coney. The 3 way was a dish of spaghetti covered in chili and a mountain of bright orange cheese. The chili is more of a thin, meaty paste with a texture like a mushy soup flavored with cinnamon and allspice. Beans or onions can be added to make it a 4 or 5 way. I liked, but didn't quite love, it. It could have been a bit hotter, both in temperature (my spaghetti was a little tepid) and spice level. But it's certainly idiosyncratic and fiercely defended by Cincinnatians, and visitors should try it. Gold Star was not substantially different from Skyline, but has a slightly more fast food atmosphere to it. I actually liked the chili at Camp Washington a bit more than the others, finding it not quite as sweet. I am willing, though, to give a couple of other spots a full throated endorsement. After drinking a 4 pale ale in the outdoor courtyard of Neons Unplugged, a laid back, pet friendly drinking establishment with a giant Jenga set, I walked down the street to Cincy by the Slice, a casual dive pizzeria. I occasionally encounter food items I've never tried before but somehow seem so familiar that I wonder how I ever lived without them. "Pickleroni" pizza is one of those things. The conceit is so simple: sliced dill pickles and pepperoni as pizza toppings. The tartness and acid of the sour pickles are the perfect foil to greasy cheese and processed meat. If you like pickles and pepperoni, it might blow your mind a little bit. The other thing I loved was a simple malt from United Dairy Farmers, a local convenience store chain that looks a bit like a 7 Eleven but has particularly good ice cream. For 3.59 I got a thick, perfectly creamy chocolate malt in a pink and red paper cup. Outside the main confines, I wandered into Daisy Mae's Market, which has a vast selection of Amish jams and jellies. The owner was offering a free bunch of grapes with any 10 purchase. I did a couple of loops around the market, finally settling on a croissant ( 3) from Blue Oven Bakery and a macchiato ( 3) from Urbana Cafe, where Daniel Noguera slings espresso from a cute Ape car. My walk from downtown to Findlay Market was notable for the sudden flashes of gentrification every couple of streets. Walking up Vine, one block would have upscale shops and bougie brew pubs and on the next, nothing but bleak, abandoned buildings. An Uber driver I spoke to later, Colleen, confirmed the changes that were happening in the neighborhood. "They're moving all the Section 8 out," she said, referring to the low income housing program. "That building was particularly hard," she said as we passed the corner of 13th and Walnut. "Had at least 75 families in there." The displacement of lower income residents in the Over the Rhine neighborhood, many of whom are black, is a sensitive subject. Cincinnati's location, on the border of Ohio and Kentucky (historically, Ohio was a free state, Kentucky a slave state) gave it a prominent role in the nation's complicated, painful history with race. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American abolitionist and author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," lived in Cincinnati when she was just Harriet Beecher. Her former house, now a museum, can be visited but has irregular hours. Ohio was also a crucial state in the Underground Railroad, the secret network that led to the freedom of tens of thousands of slaves in the 19th century. The Ohio River, on which Cincinnati sits, was a meaningful border for many slaves looking for freedom. I visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center ( 15 admission), a museum that takes an unflinching look at the history of slavery and its abolition. Other exhibits, like "Invisible: Slavery Today," explore modern day human trafficking.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The arrival of tapas on a weekday afternoon last April at Tinta Fina, a restaurant in the heart of Granada, Spain, happened leisurely. A heaping plate of cuttlefish fritters, glistening with oil, arrived with the first glass of wine, a Spanish rose. With the second glass, this time a crisp white from the country's Galicia region, the bartender presented cubes of manchego cheese and a pile of anchovies marinated in a peppery olive oil. Another drink and, an hour later, we were onto meaty rings of fried calamari and hunks of crispy dogfish. We hadn't ordered any of these tapas, but in Granada, locals rarely do. In a culture almost unique to the city, situated in the province of Andalusia in southern Spain, bars and eateries around town serve tapas to patrons at no cost, whenever they order a drink. With every drink comes a different tapa, often more substantial than the one before, and several rounds of drinks means a full meal can be had, the only cost being the couple of euros paid for every glass of wine. "And since the food is high quality and comes in good portions," he added, "these tapas are a substitute for lunch or dinner." Granada's main attraction is undoubtedly the Alhambra, the stunning hilltop Moorish fortress that was home to the emirs who ruled the area in the 13th and 14th centuries. And while the majestic, ochre structure, a Unesco World Heritage site, is what mostly draws visitors here, there is perhaps no better way to unwind than to savor tapas gratis. Few travelers are privy to the tradition, but now, stylish newer spots like Tinta Fina, a sleek space with dark wood finishes, are bringing attention to the custom by sticking with it instead of following the latest food trends. A few streets away, Sibarius, another newer establishment, is also adhering to convention. The bi level contemporary boite has a menu of Spanish, Asian and Peruvian dishes, but a glass of wine, a brandy or even a sparkling water means a hearty tapa is in store. The options change often, but a recent first round, referred to as una primera, was a bowl of steak like tuna chunks in a pool of locally produced olive oil and garnished with orange zest and whole peppercorns. One of the newest eateries to bow to this beloved culinary pastime is Filigrana Delicatessen. The airy space has been a popular hangout for locals since it opened last year, and pleasing this crowd is a top priority, said Alvaro Huertas, an energetic owner. "Free tapas are a way of life in Granada," he said through an interpreter. "It's what locals are accustomed to, and if I don't follow this way, they won't come." More recent eateries like Filigrana Delicatessen are reviving the enthusiasm among locals in long established joints in town and helping to attract tourists. Opened in 1942, Bar Los Diamantes, is one such example. The classic tapas bar, operating in five locations in and near Granada, has a no frills decor; the stellar small plates of seafood are lure enough. There are about eight options, said Miguel Arias, an owner at Bar Los Diamantes, and the average bill with two or three glasses of Spanish wine is about 10 euros a person.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics "who've been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days." Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, "91,373 mass attending Catholics are not even registered to vote!" CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this large, untapped reservoir Republican leaning white Catholics who could bolster Trump's numbers in a battleground state. Burch, whose organization opposes abortion and gay marriage, made his plans clear: We are already building the largest Catholic voter mobilization program ever. And no, that's not an exaggeration. Our plan spans at least 7 states (and growing), and includes millions of Catholic voters. How did Catholic Vote come up with these particular church attendance numbers for 199,241 Catholics? With geofencing, a technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area a church, for example, or a stadium, a school or an entire town. Geofencing is just one of the new tools of digital campaigning, a largely unregulated field of political combat in which voters have little or no idea of how they are being manipulated, in which traditional disclosure requirements are inoperative and key actors are anonymous. It is a weapon of choice. Once an area is geofenced, commercial data companies can acquire the mobile phone ID numbers of those within the boundary. This is how the National Catholic Reporter described the process in an article earlier this month: Politically minded geofencers capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices. That data can be matched against other easily obtained databases, including voter profiles, which give marketers identifying information such as names, addresses and voter registration status. Such information can be a gold mine. Burch described what CatholicVote.org initiated in the 2018 election. "We created ad campaigns targeted to mobile devices that have been inside of Catholic churches," Burch explained. What's more, We told Catholics in Missouri the truth about then Senator Claire McCaskill that she was pro abortion, was unwilling to protect the Little Sisters of the Poor, and opposed Catholic judicial nominees because of their religious beliefs. And she lost. If you attend an evangelical or a Catholic Church, a women's rights march or a political rally of any kind, especially in a seriously contested state, the odds are that your cellphone ID number, home address, partisan affiliation and the identifying information of the people around you will be provided by geofencing marketers to campaigns, lobbyists and other interest groups. With increasing speed, digital technology is transforming politics, constantly providing novel ways to target specific individuals, to get the unregistered registered, to turn out marginal voters, to persuade the undecided and to suppress support for the opposition. Democrats and Republicans agree that the Trump campaign is far ahead of the Democratic Party in the use of this technology, capitalizing on its substantial investment during the 2016 election and benefiting from an uninterrupted high tech drive since then. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Republicans "have a big advantage this time," Ben Nuckels, a Democratic media consultant said in a phone interview. "They not only have all the data from 2016 but they have been building this operation into a nonstop juggernaut." The new technology, Nuckels continued, allows campaigns to "deliver a broader narrative over the top" on television and other media, while "underneath in digital you are delivering ads that are tailored to those voters that you need to influence and persuade the most." Now, political operatives are exploiting commercial techniques to correlate microtargeting data with the identification numbers of cellphones. This allows campaigns to mobilize, persuade and turn out or to suppress turnout among key voters. In 2016, Trump spent far more than Hillary Clinton on digital campaigning, and since then his campaign, under the direction of Brad Parscale, has continued far outpace its Democratic rivals. In a paper published this month, "The digital commercialization of US politics 2020 and beyond," Kathryn Montgomery, a professor of communications at American University, and Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, described the differences between the 2016 Trump and Clinton campaigns: Whereas 31 percent of Donald Trump's total campaign expenditures were for digital media, only 6 percent of Hillary Clinton's expenditures were for digital. Moreover, whereas almost 50 percent of Mr. Trump's media expenditures were for digital, only 8 percent of Secretary Clinton's media expenditures were for digital. So although Secretary Clinton outspent Mr. Trump by 75 million on media, it is quite possible that Mr. Trump's heavy reliance on digital media allowed for a more efficient and targeted ad campaign that escaped the eye. Parscale, who is now managing Trump's 2020 campaign, claimed in a 2018 tweet that the Trump campaign tech operation was "100 times to 200 times" more effective than the Clinton campaign's, adding " realDonaldTrump was a perfect candidate for Facebook." On Monday, Parscale boasted on the conservative website Townhall that Trump rallies are providing a gold mine of data for the 2020 election: Out of more than 20,000 identified voters who came to a recent Trump rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 57.9 percent did not have a history of voting for Republicans. Remarkably, 4,413 attendees didn't even vote in the last election a clear indication that President Trump is energizing Americans who were previously not engaged in politics. Similar findings are coming out of other rallies, according to Parscale: Nearly 22 percent of identified supporters at President Trump's rally in Toledo, Ohio, were Democrats, and another 21 percent were independents. An astounding 15 percent of identified voters who saw the president speak in Battle Creek, Michigan, has not voted in any of the last four elections. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, just over 20 percent of identified voters at the rally were Democrats, and 18 percent were nonwhite. In the current election cycle, Montgomery and Chester write, further growth and expansion of the big data digital marketplace is reshaping electoral politics in the US, introducing both candidate and issue campaigns to a system of sophisticated software applications and data targeting tools that are rooted in the goals, values, and strategies for influencing consumer behaviors. Technologies used for "identity resolution," they write, enable marketers and political groups to target and 'reach real people' with greater precision than ever before. Marketers are helping perfect a system that leverages and integrates, increasingly in real time, consumer profile data with online behaviors to capture more granular profiles of individuals, including where they go, and what they do. The authors go on to warn that "all of these developments are taking place, moreover, within a regulatory structure that is weak and largely ineffectual." Tara McGowan, executive director of the recently created pro Democratic group Acronym, which plans to spend 75 million on digital and other media, replied to my questions by email: There's no digital dark magic being deployed by Brad Parscale and the Trump campaign. They just have near unlimited resources and are spending them wisely to reach their voters where they are online, and especially on platforms like Facebook. the Trump campaign has over Democrats heading into 2020 is time. Democrats may not settle on a general election nominee until late spring or summer. That gives the Trump campaign much more time to talk to voters and define the Democrats in places where it counts. In addition to ACRONYM, pro Democratic groups like Priorities USA, American Bridge, America Votes and a host of others are working together, prepared to spend more than 300 million to counter the Trump efforts. In addition, the campaigns of Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer are all spending huge amounts of money on digital strategies focused on Facebook, Google and other social media. Still, there are concerns that much of the Democratic spending will have limited value in the general election, insofar as it is going toward states that will not be 2020 battlegrounds, including, for example, Alabama, Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and Vermont on Tuesday March 3, better known as Super Tuesday. In addition, whoever becomes the Democratic nominee will not be able to share his or her data with the independent pro Democratic groups, according to federal regulation. Apple, Google and most other major internet players have adopted privacy policies that would appear to significantly constrain the ability of data management firms to obtain detailed household information, consumer spending and partisan leanings of smartphone users. But it turns out that there are ways to get around the rules. Serge Egelman, a research director at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute and a co author of the paper "50 Ways to Leak Your Data: An Exploration of Apps' Circumvention of the Android Permissions System," replied to my email: Most users are likely of the impression that apps will only collect the personal data that they're asked about in the 'permissions dialogues' that they encounter (i.e., pop up notifications asking if it's O.K. for an app to access certain data, such as location, address book contacts, photos, etc.). We discovered that there are "back channels" through which the same data is available without having to present the user with a permission dialogue. What does this mean for politics? We know that many of these entities are data brokers and analytics companies that are in the business of using this type of data to profile mobile device users, and then selling these profiles to various entities, including political campaigns. generally provides information about individual users' day to day activities and preferences: Where they shop; What they do for fun; What other apps they use, for how long, and what they do in those apps; Where they live; Where they work; With whom they associate. This data, he added, enables campaigns to list "individual attendees at political rallies;" to identify "political leanings based on online and offline preferences (where you live, work, shop, play, etc.); and to segment "ads based on inferred psychographic traits (i.e., exactly what Cambridge Analytica did, but instead of personalized political ads on Facebook, users get personalized ads in potentially all of their mobile apps)." Egelman noted that "from the user's perspective, there's literally no way of preventing it from happening or even knowing when it's happening." The expectation "that app users should be able to figure this all out and manage it is absolutely ludicrous." A pro Democratic strategist who is helping coordinate the independent effort to defeat Trump and who insisted on anonymity to protect his job described what he believes is the current state of play in the role of digital technology in larger, overall strategy: There's no question that as a technical matter, the Republicans and the Kochs are spending much more and have better data than Democrats/progressives. But they also have a much more difficult product to sell: Trump. If Marco Rubio were president in this thriving economy, he continued, "2020 would not be a competitive election, and the Democrats might not have claimed the House in 2018." Trump has two relevant advantages deriving from the asymmetry between the flow of Republican and Democratic information. First, when Trump says something, Fox repeats it. When a Democrat says something, The New York Times and the rest of the MSM knock it down if it's false or debatable. In other words, a huge swath of Trump supportive media does not perform fact based journalism. In addition, the Democratic strategist said, Trump benefits enormously because of the Right's aligned network of media properties (i.e., Sinclair), Facebook properties, YouTube influencers and bots/sock puppets. This kind of amplification network barely exists for Democrats/progressives. While studies show that "digital ads have at most a slight persuasive effect," he noted, the real goal of paid advertising is for the content to become organic social media. For example, a Trump ad saying that he's brought back manufacturing jobs would persuade almost no one. But, when local news or your neighbor starts repeating that, it becomes more credible and persuasive. That's what they're after. To sum up, their content is advantaged because it reaches their target audiences, without friction, from the media that audience trusts, and is quickly and reliably repeated by other voices they trust in their world. Finally, there's the question of the size of the value of Trump's data/digital advantage. Big enough to enable him to win the popular vote? Almost certainly not. Big enough to win Wisconsin? Frighteningly so.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The choreographer Mark Morris's much lauded musicality often overshadows another important current in his work: the way it connects the individual and the universal. For Mr. Morris, love and universality are inextricable, and universal love is the ultimate good. Couples dances are rare in his work, and usually occur within the context of the larger group. Harmony is greater than romance. There is no truer example of this than his staging of the Azerbaijani opera "Layla and Majnun" for his dancers and the musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble, coming to the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center this week. The opera, by the early 20th century Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli, is based on a story as widely known in the Middle East as "Romeo and Juliet" is in the West. Like Shakespeare's tragedy, it tells of an impossible young love that leads to the lovers' untimely deaths. But Layla and Majnun's longing is never consummated. They pine for each other, over many years and long distances. Majnun becomes a hermit, composes poetry and goes mad; Layla is married off to someone else, but dreams only of Majnun. It's only after death that they are able to come together. "It's not about sex," Mr. Morris said on a recent afternoon in his office at his company's headquarters in Brooklyn. "In 'Romeo and Juliet,' the lovers have one night of fabulous teenage sex, and then they die, and that's perfect. But this is beyond that. And that's because God eludes them. In the end they drop their bodies and become pure spirit. It's about infinity." In its many forms, the story, whose origins lie in pre Islamic folklore, has spread across the Arab world, as well as to Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan and India. Over the centuries it has inspired innumerable works of art: epic poems (by the 12th century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi and 16th century Azerbaijani poet Fuzuli); paintings (there are a few at the Metropolitan Museum); songs; movies; a ballet and even Eric Clapton's anthemic "Layla." Hajibeyli's opera, the basis of Mr. Morris's staging, is considered the first opera of the Middle Eastern world, and is a product of the internationalism of its time. "Hajibeyli had this mega project in mind, to integrate his nation into the rest of the world while keeping its heritage," Aida Huseynova, a musicologist involved in the Silk Road adaptation of the work, explained via Skype. You could see it as an early example of multiculturalism. It was composed in Baku the capital of Azerbaijan, then under Russian control in 1908, a time of prosperity and foreign influence, the result of an oil rush. And it quickly became a classic to this day it is performed yearly at the Baku opera house. The composition is a highly original hybrid of the usual operatic elements (orchestral passages, choruses and recitatives) with a native Azerbaijani style of sung storytelling, known as mugham, characterized by long passages of structured improvisation and ornamentation. The orchestration uses Western instruments alongside local ones like the tar (a plucked stringed instrument) and the kamancheh (a bowed one). For his staging, Mr. Morris drew upon a 2007 adaptation of the work created for the Silk Road Ensemble, which reduced the opera to less than an hour from three, distilling the story to its essence and shrinking the musical ensemble from several dozen to 10. In Mr. Morris's version, which had its premiere at Cal Performances in Berkeley, Calif., last fall, the two singers sit on cushions on a platform at the center of the stage while the musicians surround them in a semicircle. "This is how court poetry was performed in the 12th century," explained Fatemeh Shams, a University of Pennsylvania professor and specialist in Persian poetry, "with minstrels and poets performing together." The singers don't move or act, they just sing but their voices are at the heart of the performance. Alim Qasimov, who interprets Majnun, is a silver voiced powerhouse and a riveting performer. "He's a giant star!" exclaimed Mr. Morris. "People at the airport in Baku push Yo Yo Ma out of the way to get to him." Layla is sung by the equally distinguished Fargana Qasimova, his daughter. While they sing, the dancers interpret the story through movement. Four pairs represent the lovers at different stages. (This choice further depersonalizes their love. They represent Layla and Majnun and all lovers and beyond that, love itself.) Behind them rises a striking backdrop of red and green brush strokes, an enlarged version of a painting by Howard Hodgkin entitled "Love and Death." They dance, in red and blue Azerbajani inspired costumes, on the floor in front of the singers and along platforms lining three sides of the stage. Because the singers are improvising (within limits), the dancers have learned to follow the Azerbaijani text and inflections of the voice so that they can adapt to the length of each mugham "aria" on any particular night; the singers and dancers take cues from each other. Some of the dancing is more abstract, others clearly gestural, meant to evoke specific situations (and even small details like a description of a flickering flame). Mr. Morris incorporated elements of Azerbaijani dance into his personal dance vocabulary, things like strong, rhythmic footwork and a very specific way of holding the hands, different for men and women. But the dancing also reflects more general Middle Eastern motifs like Sufi whirling. More than anything, Mr. Morris's concept highlights the ecstatic and improvisatory style of the music. "That kind of singing is about what's being spun out at that moment," he said, "and with people who are great at that, like South Indian musicians and great jazz players and these great mugham singers, there's nothing like it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Common vampire bats are social creatures, calling out to one another when they're far from their group. Vampire bats, those bloodsucking, flying critters with razor sharp teeth, are rather social beings. They love grooming one another and sharing food supplies, which consists of regurgitated blood from some other unfortunate mammal. These bats also call out to one another when they're apart from their group. But when they're ill, they call out less frequently and have fewer interactions with family and friends, new research suggests. In 2020, such behavior sounds a lot like social distancing. But the scientists do not think the bats' self isolation is intentional. Publishing their findings last week in Biology Letters, the researchers believe that when bats are ill, they just have trouble mustering up the energy to call out. "It's like us," said Sebastian Stockmaier, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas, Austin, who led the study. "When they are sick and feeling bad, they are not interested in social interactions." Mr. Stockmaier and his fellow researchers say it is much like that miserable lethargy you feel when an illness settles in and all you want to do is lie in bed. The researchers found that on average, when vampire bats are feeling sick, they call out 30 percent less frequently than when they are healthy. And whether intentional or not, it should have a beneficial side effect of limiting the spread of whatever pathogen is afflicting them. "If they are sick, they groom others less," Mr. Stockmaier said, "and that will theoretically reduce disease transmission." To measure this, the scientists went to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where vampire bats abound. They are generally found in Central and South America and feed off the blood of mammals, like cattle and horses. While many people might recoil from the sight of a vampire bat especially the terrifying close ups of their bared teeth Mr. Stockmaier calls them "cute." Finding, catching and keeping them in captivity is not hard, Mr. Stockmaier said, "if you know where to get blood." (His team gets all it needs from local slaughterhouses.) For the experiment, the scientists injected 18 female bats once with lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a compound that induces an immune response similar to a bacterial infection, without actually causing the illness or threat of infection in the bat. It usually lasts between 24 and 48 hours. Females were used because they are more social than males, engaging more often in grooming and communal feeding and maintaining bonds with their offspring for long periods. The researchers later injected the same group of female bats with saline solution as a control. In both cases, they removed the bats from the larger group but within hearing distance and recorded and measured their calls. They found that, on average, the bats made 30 percent fewer calls, with 15 of 18 recording fewer calls compared with the control group. In another study, Mr. Stockmaier said, the researchers discovered that bats injected with LPS produced symptoms of illness, slept more, moved around less and performed less social grooming. He also noted that previous studies have shown that many similar animals require eight times more energy to call out than not to call out. So, they concluded that it is more likely that the bats are just feeling too lousy to call out, rather than intentionally stifling themselves as a naturally selected, personal sacrifice to prevent pathogen transmission to the group at large. Mr. Stockmaier laments that "bats are getting a lot of bad press right now," mainly because it is widely believed that the new coronavirus, which causes Covid 19, originally jumped from horseshoe bats. He is quick to point out that is a different species from vampire bats, and that all of them offer something unique to study. "I love bats," he said. "I think they are fascinating animals."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science

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