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The Associated Press will not predict a winner of the presidential election. It will not even name an apparent or likely winner. The A.P. will make the call only when it is certain just as it has in every U.S. election since 1848, when Zachary Taylor won the White House. "If there's no way for the trailing candidate to catch up, no legal way, no mathematical way, then the race is decided, essentially," Sally Buzbee, The A.P.'s executive editor, said in an interview. "And if there is any uncertainty, or if there are enough votes out to change the result, then we don't call the race." As The A.P. tracks the contest between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as 35 Senate, 11 gubernatorial, 435 congressional and more than 6,000 down ticket races, its determinations will not be swayed by outside forces. "Race calls made by other organizations have no bearing on when AP declares a candidate the winner," The A.P. said in an article on its website. "Our decision team does not engage in debate with any campaign or candidate." That stance may prove crucial in a turbulent election in which more than 90 million Americans cast their ballots before Election Day on Tuesday because of the coronavirus pandemic an election further complicated by widespread misinformation and Mr. Trump's false claims that the vote has been "rigged." The A.P. bases its determinations on the work of more than 4,000 freelance local reporters who collect vote counts from clerks in every county of the 50 states. Those local reporters phone the results to The A.P.'s vote entry centers, which are virtual this year because of the pandemic. More than 800 vote entry clerks assess the data, checking with the reporters about any anomalies, before entering it into the A.P. system. A race caller in each state examines the counts with an analyst at the A.P.'s politics team in Washington to determine when a winner can be declared. Two editors sign off on every call, Ms. Buzbee said. And when the time comes to name the winner of the presidential race, The A.P.'s Washington bureau chief, Julie Pace, has to sign off. With 250 bureaus in 99 nations, The A.P. provides roughly 730,000 articles, 70,000 videos and one million photographs each year to the more than 15,000 outlets and businesses that subscribe to its content. At election time, it steps into the spotlight: Major news organizations including NPR, PBS, and two large newspaper chains, Gannett and McClatchy, wait for The A.P. to call races before they report results. Other outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Fox News, will use election data from The A.P. to help them make their determinations. Google will use the The A.P.'s election reporting for real time results on its search page, as well as for a panel on YouTube. (ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC make their own calls, but will share information as members of the National Election Pool, a group that uses data from Edison Research.) 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 A.P. has a track record going back over a century of thorough, careful vote counting and cautious practices when it comes to calling races," said Arnie Seipel, NPR's supervising political editor. "They also have a decision desk with vast resources to do this kind of data collection and analysis. So by relying on The A.P., we are able to invest more of our resources into original reporting, instead of trying to replicate what they do." In the United States which, unlike many other countries, does not have a national electoral commission the news media takes the role of race caller in presidential elections. "If we want to know who the next president will be, we've got to do the math ourselves county by county, nationwide," David Scott, a deputy managing editor at The A.P., said in an article posted on its website. Ms. Buzbee, who has worked at The A.P. since 1988 and became its top editor in 2017, said the staff was well aware of its election role. "We take it enormously seriously," she said. "We know the impact we're going to have when we call the race for president. We know it's going to zip around the world." The A.P. was the first news organization to declare Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2016 election. It published a straightforward news alert at 2:29 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on the day after Election Day: "WASHINGTON (AP) Donald Trump elected president of the United States." The A.P. did not declare the victor of the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, deciding that it was too close to call. That time, the job of naming the winner fell to the Supreme Court.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When Texas lawmakers rolled out a framework for evaluating public schoolteachers more than 15 years ago, they intended to identify ways to strengthen the state's teaching corps. But the regular result of the largely subjective evaluations since then has been: no improvement needed. Less than 3 percent of educators receive scores below the "proficient" level, and the variation in scores from year to year has been so small that state officials stopped collecting the data from school districts after the 2010 11 academic year. Critics say the reviews, based on single 45 minute observations by district administrators, make it difficult to provide effective feedback, a point that education officials do not refute. A growing chorus of advocates for an education overhaul wants to tie teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests. But with the current debate in the Legislature about reducing such testing, lawmakers have not agreed on how evaluations should be conducted. Teachers themselves see shortcomings with the evaluation system, in which they are rated "exceeds expectations," "proficient," "below expectations" or "unsatisfactory" across eight areas including student participation, time management in the classroom and overall campus academic achievement but are offered little specific guidance on how to improve. Local districts determine whether those evaluations play a role in firing or salary decisions. Stacey Hodge, a second year teacher at a Dallas Independent School District middle school, recently was rated as "exceeding expectations" in four of the state's criteria, and "proficient" in the others. A space on the evaluation form for comments about "areas to address" was blank. "I can't go any higher than exceeds expectations," she said. "I think I do a really good job, but am I where I need to be?" Michele Moore, an associate commissioner at the Texas Education Agency, said the lack of feedback was a problem. At the start of the current school year, the agency quietly began testing two new evaluation programs at 83 campuses across the state that included more frequent observations. But neither of those programs included a strong emphasis on objective measures of student performance, which many advocates view as essential. And with overwhelming support among state lawmakers to scale back standardized testing in response to widespread complaints from parents, efforts in the Legislature to tie evaluations to such tests have hit a roadblock. "The objective use of student performance has been a challenging one, given the role the debate over standardized tests has played," said John Fitzpatrick, the executive director of Educate Texas, a nonprofit education advocacy group. In 2011, Mr. Fitzpatrick's organization launched the Texas Teaching Commission, which includes more than two dozen educators, to develop policy recommendations for improving teacher performance. While some of those recommendations, like strengthening requirements for educator certification programs, have gained traction, legislation emphasizing student achievement as part of teacher evaluations has stalled. The Senate recently passed a bill from Education Chairman Dan Patrick, Republican of Houston, focused on teacher appraisal and preparation. But in negotiations before the proposal came to the floor, Mr. Patrick dropped a section that would have weighted student achievement heavily in teacher evaluations, because of fears that it would use standardized test performance as a measurement. During debate on the floor, Senator Wendy Davis, Democrat of Fort Worth, expressed reservations about a test based component. Ms. Davis noted extensive testimony that lawmakers had heard about concerns with the testing system, and said that the legislation ran the risk of "placing yet higher stakes on test scores." Until lawmakers are convinced the statewide tests can accurately reflect student learning and growth, she said, they should "resist modifying the current evaluation system." A similar House proposal is still lingering in committee. Texas is not alone in debating how teachers should be evaluated, said Sandi Jacobs, the managing director for state policy at the National Council on Teacher Quality. "Our teacher evaluation systems have not been very successful," Ms. Jacobs said. "We haven't had good information to identify our superstars or our chronic underperformers." Though about 20 states have moved toward incorporating test scores in teacher evaluations in the past five years, it is too early for a consensus about the best approach, she said. Part of the challenge, Ms. Jacobs said, is identifying measures of learning that can be used for students in grades and subjects where standardized tests are not given. Florida is facing a federal lawsuit over its use of test scores in evaluations for teachers based on subjects or students they do not teach. Texas students begin taking state standardized exams in third grade. Before they reach high school, they are tested each year in reading and math, but are tested less frequently in subjects like science, writing and social studies. The Legislature is considering a proposal that would reduce the number of exams students must take in high school to 5 from the current 15. Ms. Jacobs also said a cultural change was needed to encourage school administrators to evaluate educators in more meaningful ways. Teachers' groups have opposed the use of standardized test scores in evaluations. A recommendation for a test based measure was a major sticking point for representatives from the four major state teacher associations participating in the Teaching Commission's report. They refused to sign on to the final result. Holly Eaton, a lawyer with the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, said that because of questions about the validity of evaluations based on test scores, and given problems in other states, there was no reason to overhaul the current framework. "Our members do enjoy and value input and feedback, particularly from their principal," she said. "They want their principal in their classrooms as often as possible, but that is a less formal kind of system." Though most Texas school districts use the state recommended framework, some, including the Houston district, the state's largest, have developed their own. Houston developed an incentive pay system linked to test scores in the 1990s under Superintendent Rod Paige, who later became President George W. Bush's secretary of education. Janet Gray, an American history teacher in her 18th year in the district, said that she recognized a need for objective measures to evaluate teachers. But she said that to be fair, such measures had to assess the content being taught. Because Ms. Gray teaches a subject that is not tested by the state every year, part of her evaluation is based on a formula that considers results of a seventh grade national standardized exam that does not cover state history, which Texas students learn that year, along with an eighth grade state exam after they complete her course. "I don't inherently have a problem with test scores or student achievement being a part of evaluations," she said. "There just needs to be a transparent way to figure out what that is."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
It hasn't been an easy eight months for Florida. On June 12, an attack in an Orlando nightclub killed 49 people. In July, the Zika virus surfaced in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood and eventually spread to other parts of the city, causing panic among residents and tourists. And on Jan. 6, a gunman opened fire at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport, leaving at least five people dead. But at least so far, any damage to Florida's travel market because of the events seems to be minimal, and several indicators show that tourism to the state is thriving. Florida generated 85.3 billion in spending by tourists in 2014, which made it second only to California in tourism revenue, according to the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group. Despite two cases of open fire shooting in less than a year, there's no reason for travelers to Florida to fear for their physical safety, said Mike Ackerman, the chairman of the Ackerman Group, a security consulting firm in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "It's bad luck that the shootings happened in Florida, but they were random and unrelated and could have happened anywhere," he said. Mr. Ackerman, who knows Fort Lauderdale airport well and is familiar with its security procedures, said that the Jan. 6 shooting was not the fault of the airport. "Fort Lauderdale airport is a very secure airport, and the shooting doesn't make it unsafe to fly in and out of," he said. (Gregory Meyer, a spokesman for the airport, declined to comment on how or if the airport will change its security procedures going forward.) While it's too soon to gauge any impact on tourism to Fort Lauderdale because of the shooting, statistics from STR, a data analytics company in Hendersonville, Tenn., specializing in hotels, show only slight declines in hotel occupancy in Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale following the Orlando shooting and the presence of Zika in Miami. Occupancy in Miami, a city with about 54,000 hotel rooms, was down 2.6 percent for the first 11 months of 2016 compared with the first 11 months of 2015. In Orlando, a city with about 124,000 hotel rooms, occupancy for the first 11 months was down 1.3 percent compared with the same period in 2015, and in Fort Lauderdale, a city with about 31,000 hotel rooms, occupancy through November was down 1.8 percent as opposed to the same period in 2015. But Bobby Bowers, an analyst at STR, said that while the presence of Zika and the Orlando nightclub shooting could be a factor in the downturns, the three cities have more hotel rooms than they did a year ago, so more competition may play a role in the decline. "You had years of booming growth, and all of a sudden, there was a slowdown, but that slowdown is because of a combination of reasons," he said. Hotel occupancy in these three cities aside, overall tourism to Florida grew for most of 2016. The state had more than 85 million visitors for the first three quarters of the year, an increase of 5.5 percent compared with the same period in 2015, according to Visit Florida, the state's marketing corporation. Visits should continue to rise in 2017, said Rummy Pandit, the executive director of the Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming, Hospitality Tourism at Stockton University in New Jersey. "Florida is appealing for every kind of traveler, so the long term tourism prospects are strong," Mr. Pandit said. "You have the beach, gaming, Disney World and a wide range of budget and luxury accommodation options, and while any calamity in a destination tends to have an immediate decline in visitation to that destination, the decline is usually temporary." To his point, data from STR shows that hotel occupancy in Orlando the week of June 12 to 19, following the June 12 shooting, decreased by 19 percent compared with the same week in 2015, but then increased 7.4 percent in September compared with September 2015. And in December 2016, the travel site Expedia.com had a 12 percent increase in package bookings to Orlando compared with December 2015. The jump was even bigger in Miami, with a 24 percent increase in package bookings over the same period. The next several months also show promise for Florida's travel industry. For one, Zika in Miami is far less of a threat than it was last summer, said Dr. Stephen Morse, an epidemiology professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. "There haven't been any new Zika cases reported in the city recently," he said, "and it's a pretty limited virus at this point with the chances of transmission being low." And, on some travel sites, bookings for Florida trips are on the rise. Greg Guiteras, the chief executive of whatahotel.com of Coral Gables, Fla., an online travel site specializing in luxury trips, said that trip bookings through the end of March, especially to Orlando, are strong. "Hotel rates are the same and even higher than they were pre Zika and also before the Orlando nightclub shooting, and it continues to be a robust market for us," he said. The site has more than 500 reservations for trips to Florida between January and March, he said, with the average trip costing about 2,000. On Booking.com, which claims to be the world's largest hotel booking site, bookings to Florida for the second half of 2016 were up compared with the second half of 2015, according to Leslie Cafferty, a spokeswoman for the site, which is based in Amsterdam. Also, the online travel agency Skylark.com has had several hundred queries in the last two months for vacations to Florida as well as many confirmed trips for the next several months, said Paul Tumpowsky, the company's chief executive. "Travelers generally seem more relaxed about Zika, and the popular parts of Florida like Orlando and Miami are very accessible flight wise from many cities, both around the U.S. and globally," he said, "so it's no surprise that travelers want to visit."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The world of competitive video game sports has moved to the mainstream without much help from television. More than ever, though, television wants to get into the action. On Tuesday, ELeague, a new gaming league, began pitting well known gamers against one another on Twitch, the popular online video streaming service. The game: the first person shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive. The objective: to kill the opposing team. On Friday night, this week's winning teams will go to virtual war live, but not just online also on TBS, the national cable television channel. ELeague is not the first attempt to bring e sports, as competitive video gaming is known, to TV. And, with a 10 p.m. slot in the schedule, the weekly three hour broadcasts are not getting the most prime placement this week's lead in is a syndicated rerun of "The Big Bang Theory." But if previous attempts to televise e sports, including an ill fated league founded by DirecTV, have treated the industry as small time and in need of mainstream attention, ELeague is aiming to translate the online sensibility of e sports for television. . "E sports doesn't need TV," said Joost van Dreunen, the chief executive of SuperData Research, a firm that tracks the e sports and game markets. "TV needs e sports." There are expected to be about 214 million viewers for e sports competitions globally this year, up from 188 million last year, SuperData Research estimates. About 85 percent are male and nearly half are between 18 and 25 years old, the firm says. Global revenue for the e sports market, including corporate sponsorships, prize money, ticket sales and merchandise, is expected to be about 893 million this year, up 19 percent from the year before, according to SuperData. Still, e sports and the money supporting it have not reached television audiences in the same way other sports have. And Mr. van Dreunen said that those in the largely young, male audience watching e sports competitions online when they're not playing games themselves or otherwise distracted by other digital sources of entertainment are increasingly difficult for traditional television programmers to reach. With ELeague, in other words, the e sports competitions may be used as a carrot to attract that audience to TBS. The league itself is partly a creation of Turner, which owns TBS, and of the talent agency WME IMG. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "I thinks it's a very clever way for Turner to stay relevant," Mr. van Dreunen said. "This is where the audiences are." Craig Barry, the chief content officer for Turner Sports, said the ELeague would distinguish itself with high production value and sports style narratives created around players and teams. But he acknowledged the challenge of entering a world and a fandom that is growing so quickly on its own terms. "If you don't have the community behind you, you'll fail," Mr. Barry said. "After the first 10 weeks, if we don't have acceptance of the community, then the trajectory for us, specifically in Season 2, is exponentially steeper." ELeague's initial showing, on Twitch on Tuesday, pitted well known players with handles including SPUNJ and TACO against one another. The show itself also carefully straddled two worlds. Twitch videos were accompanied by an anarchic stream of text comments from viewers. Comments about the overall production ranged from supportive to mocking especially during commercial breaks but remained focused, mostly, on the competition at hand. Viewership fluctuated between 50,000 and 100,000; before the stream ended, total viewers passed the million mark. Mr. Barry said he was cautiously encouraged. "Everyone's walking around here feeling comfortable that we have some positive feedback," he said, midbroadcast. "I feel as though we've approached it correctly." ELeague's next test comes on Friday, when the tournament hits TV. The main stream with announcers, player interviews and flashy production will broadcast exclusively to TBS viewers, who will have to turn on their TVs or log in to a TBS streaming service. A stripped down "observer" feed, which will pipe in audio commentary over gameplay, will broadcast simultaneously on Twitch. Any success may entice competitors to quickly replicate some of the Turner formula. Many big media and game companies have already increased their investments in e sports. Activision Blizzard, the games publisher behind Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, is building a media business to broadcast e sports competition that the company's chief executive, Bobby Kotick, has promised will become the "ESPN of eSports." Activision hired the former chief executive of ESPN, Steve Bornstein, to run the business, and it acquired Major League Gaming, an organizer and internet broadcaster of e sports competitions. The company believes there is an opportunity to create tournament broadcasts that are more like the slick productions for N.F.L. games. If Tuesday is any indication, the companies may find that whatever they do will generate a lot of feedback. "It's so awesome to see CS in a TV quality production!" said one commenter, referring to the game. But others criticized the broadcast's pacing, commentary and music. That led another commenter to chime in, "Be constructive with your criticism guys!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
For three weeks each summer, Lincoln Center's Midsummer Night Swing draws thousands of dancers to its outdoor dance floor at Damrosch Park. Now in its 26th season, the series attracts dancers of all stripes: young, old, amateur, professional. They tend to have one thing in common: a fussiness, or a passion, when it comes to shoes. Sometimes footwear choice is a matter of tradition. (Think of cowboy boots for Cajun or lightweight sneakers for acrobatic swing dancing.) In many cases, it's a matter of comfort, personal style or the material of the dance floor. Bill Bragin, director of public programming at Lincoln Center, had a variety of dancers test different types of shoes on different materials when Damrosch Park got a floor upgrade three years ago. Female tango dancers in stiletto pumps are "much more aware of whether there's a seam between the tiles," Mr. Bragin said. "What's that experience like? You want to maintain that sexy grace." Mr. Bragin has been struck by the variety of shoes displayed on the dance floor. "Some people dress to impress," he said. "Some people choose shoes that are going to be comfortable and perform well. The people who do it best are those who are able to do both at the same time." Celia Gianfrancesco, 67, and her husband, Jerry Feldman, 71, retirees who live in Murray Hill, have been partners for nearly 15 years, dancing swing, disco, salsa and tango. (He said he had to take lessons when they started, because she danced all the dances.) A versatile dance arsenal requires a versatile shoe collection, and Mr. Feldman rotates between a traditional men's shoe from Aris Allen, sneakers for dancing outdoors, and fancier two toned men's shoes for indoor tango. Celia Gianfrancesco and her husband, Jerry Feldman, who have a versatile arsenal of footwear. Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York Times His favorite is a comfortable pair of Aris Allens with a smooth leather sole, "which is good for turning on the dance floor." He also likes the distinctive white leather. "If I wear that, people know I'm a dancer," he said. Ms. Gianfrancesco wears low heels almost exclusively, even on a swing dance floor where many other dancers are found wearing sneakers. "I don't wear them quite as high, because I always feel like I'm going to go over," she said. "But I like a heel. I think it makes you dance better. I got so used to wearing heels that I'm very comfortable in them. Plus I'm petite, so it gives me a little height." She has about 20 pairs of dancing shoes, some of which she buys from Aerosoles, which she says are especially comfortable. From there, she'll often take a pair to the cobbler and have standard rubber soles replaced with leather, which makes for easier sliding and gliding on the dance floor. Then she often adds a personal touch: "I have lots of silk flowers, pins or clips," she said. "I manage to put them on my shoes to match the outfit that I'm wearing." Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York Times Victoria Winter, 63, from Tuckahoe, N. Y., has been dancing Zydeco, the Louisiana originated dance based on quick, precisely mirrored shuffles rather than wild hops or spins, for about a decade. In keeping with tradition, she wears cowboy boots. "Men and ladies wear jeans and boots, and you just get that feel of Southwestern Louisiana, and it's just magical," she said. The boots are also a matter of safety. "It's protective of your feet," she said. "You can get hurt, obviously, with that kind of dancing, on a very crowded dance floor." "As long as they fit right," she added, "it's not painful." Ms. Winter has accumulated a collection of a half dozen pairs, some of which she bought directly from stores in Louisiana. When she shops for boots, she hunts for distinctive ones. "They have to be kind of eye catching," she said. "I have black, brown, red. It depends on the mood." Just don't ask her to put on a pair of heels. "Absolutely not," she said. "I love my boots, and that's it." Voon Chew, 30, a legal assistant who lives in Manhattan, specializes in the Lindy hop, an acrobatic form of swing dance with roots in the Depression era ballrooms and clubs in Harlem. Because the Lindy hop often involves gravity defying moves, he said, he looks for shoes that lessen the impact on the feet and knees. He likes Aris Allen's reproductions of classic saddle shoes, which are constructed from fake leather and require less of a breaking in period for dancers than real leather, and have a cushiony foot bed. He often chooses suede soles, which he said help him "spin, slide and swivel." He also scours eBay and thrift stores for a good vintage shoe, like his two tone Florsheims from the 1940s, which have mesh ventilation. His taste in shoes matches his penchant for wearing throwback touches like flower pins in his lapels and more contemporary short pants. Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York Times Mr. Chew considers himself a scrupulous dresser but doesn't feel the need to adhere strictly to styles of the dance's heyday. "Some people don't mind looking like they're time traveling, but I prefer to embrace the old and the new," said Mr. Chew, who helped organize a fashion show for the Lindy hop pioneer Frankie Manning's 100th birthday celebration this year. "It doesn't have to look nerdy or dated," he said. "It just has to look timeless. It's a tricky balance." Almyra Ayos, a 44 year old dance teacher and choreographer from Harlem, could write a coming of age novel using the height of her dancing heels as chapter markers. When she began dancing salsa 18 years ago, she played it safe, opting for a one inch heel out of fear of toppling over. Gradually, as she became a more skilled dancer, she raised the height to three, even four inches. Almyra Ayos, who has changed the height of her heels in 18 years of salsa. Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York Times The heel, she said, helps a salsa dancer shift weight to the front of the foot for spins. "And you need good construction of the shoe," she said. "Women always complain. If they get a bad pair of shoes, they don't feel secure." She buys many of her shoes from online specialty stores like Burju Shoes, Exotic Salsa Shoes and Light in the Box. Today, she settles for a happy medium, dancing on two or three inch heels. "I'm trying to be more conservative," she said. "The most dancing I do is social, which is anywhere from two to four hours at a stretch. If I were to do that in four inch heels, I might really feel it in my legs." Ms. Ayos marvels at the footwear tendencies of younger salsa dancers. "They'll just wear their street shoes," she said. "I've seen them spinning and doing all these amazing things wearing wedge sneakers." When it comes to shoes, she added, "the longer you dance, the more picky you are."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In the anguishing wait for a new kidney, tens of thousands of patients on waiting lists may never find a match because their immune systems will reject almost any transplanted organ. Now, in a large national study that experts are calling revolutionary, researchers have found a way to get them the desperately needed procedure. In the new study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, doctors successfully altered patients' immune systems to allow them to accept kidneys from incompatible donors. Significantly more of those patients were still alive after eight years than patients who had remained on waiting lists or received a kidney transplanted from a deceased donor. The method, known as desensitization, "has the potential to save many lives," said Dr. Jeffery Berns, a kidney specialist at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine and the president of the National Kidney Foundation. It could slash the wait times for thousands of people and for some, like Clint Smith, a 56 year old lawyer in New Orleans, mean the difference between receiving a transplant and spending the rest of their lives on dialysis. The procedure, Mr. Smith said, "changed my life." Researchers estimate about half of the 100,000 people in the United States on waiting lists for a kidney transplant have antibodies that will attack a transplanted organ, and about 20 percent are so sensitive that finding a compatible organ is all but impossible. In addition, said Dr. Dorry Segev, the lead author of the new study and a transplant surgeon at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, an unknown number of people with kidney failure simply give up on the waiting lists after learning that their bodies would reject just about any organ. Instead, they resign themselves to dialysis, a difficult and draining procedure that can pretty much take over a person's life. Desensitization involves first filtering the antibodies out of a patient's blood. The patient is then given an infusion of other antibodies to provide some protection while the immune system regenerates its own antibodies. For some reason exactly why is not known the person's regenerated antibodies are less likely to attack the new organ, Dr. Segev said. But if the person's regenerated natural antibodies are still a concern, the patient is treated with drugs that destroy any white blood cells that might make antibodies that would attack the new kidney. The process is expensive, costing 30,000, and uses drugs not approved for this purpose. The transplant costs about 100,000. But kidney specialists argue that desensitization is cheaper in the long run than dialysis, which costs 70,000 a year for life. Although by far the biggest use of desensitization would be for kidney transplants, the process might be suitable for living donor transplants of livers and lungs, researchers said. The liver is less sensitive to antibodies so there is less need for desensitization, "but it's certainly possible if there are known incompatibilities," Dr. Segev said. With lungs, he said, desensitization "is theoretically possible," although he said he was not aware of anyone doing it yet. In the new study, 1,025 patients at 22 medical centers who had an incompatible donor were compared to an equal number of patients who remained on waiting lists for an organ or who had an organ from a deceased but compatible donor. After eight years, 76.5 percent of those who received an incompatible kidney were still alive, compared with 62.9 percent who remained on the waiting list or received a deceased donor kidney and 43.9 percent who remained on the waiting list but never got a transplant. The desensitization procedure takes time for some patients as long as two weeks and is performed before the transplant operation, so patients must have a living donor. It is not known how many have someone willing to donate a kidney, but doctors say they often see situations in which a relative or even a friend is willing to donate but is incompatible. "Often patients are told that their living donor is incompatible, so they are stuck on waiting lists," for a deceased donor, Dr. Segev said. In recent years, an option called a kidney exchange has helped some in this situation. Patients who have incompatible living donors can swap donors with someone whose donor may be compatible with them. Often, there are chains of patient donor pairs leading to a compatible organ swap. That process can be successful, said Dr. Krista L. Lentine, the medical director of the living donation program at the Saint Louis Center for Transplantation, but patients often still cannot find a compatible organ because they have antibodies that would reject almost every kidney. In those cases, "desensitization may be the only realistic option for receiving a transplant," said Dr. Lentine, who was not involved with the study. Dr. Jeffrey Campsen, a transplant surgeon at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center who also was not a study investigator, said his group focused on exchanges and had been fairly successful. But he also comes across patients whose donors do not want to participate. "There is a hurdle if the donor and patient have an emotional bond," he said. The new data showing the success of desensitization "lets people get behind it," Dr. Campsen said, adding, "I do think it is something we would consider." Mr. Smith, the New Orleans patient who went through desensitization, had progressive kidney disease that slowly scarred his kidneys until, in 2004, they stopped functioning. His sister in law, Allison Sutton, donated a kidney to him, and he had a transplant, but after six and a half years, it failed. He went on dialysis, spending four days a week hooked up to dialysis machines for hours. It was keeping him alive, he told his friends, but it was not a life. Then a nurse suggested that he ask Johns Hopkins about its desensitization study. "I was like, whatever I could do," he said. He discovered that he qualified for the study. But he needed a donor. One day, his wife, Sheryl Smith, was talking on the phone to a college friend, Angela Watkins, who lives in Augusta, Ga., and mentioned that Mr. Smith was praying for a donor. Mrs. Watkins's husband, David Watkins, a judge in state court, had been friends with Mr. Smith in college and the two wives, also college friends, had kept in touch over the years. Mrs. Watkins told her husband about the conversation, and they asked themselves if they should offer to donate. "We talked and researched and prayed," Judge Watkins said. Finally, he said, they came to a conclusion. "We have a moral obligation to at least see if we would qualify." And he thought that he should be the one to go first. If he did not qualify, his wife could be tested. Mr. Smith warned his old friend that donating was an enormous undertaking. "He said, 'You can't grasp what you are doing.' I heard him but it didn't register," Judge Watkins said. "I told him, 'I have something you need, so what's the big deal?' " Of course, it was a big deal. Although Judge Watkins had prepared by getting himself in top physical shape, it still took about six months to recover from the operation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
How many of you actually have enemies in school or at home? How many of you harbor hatred in your heart? So you need to have love. Then you are able to forgive. Very good. And when you forgive, you make sure you Forget. Forget. Very good. And when you forgive and forget, you will eventually find peace in your heart. Correct? Time has always been described as a natural healer. It isn't always true. I have been struggling to find the words asking for my brother's forgiveness for something I did when we were kids, something that was devastating for him and ripped our family apart. And it's time to own up. I'm back. Hi. Hey. How's everything? It's good to see you. Good to see you, too. I'm good, OK. I'm good. For the grace of God I'm good, yeah. My brother, Jeremiah. Not only is he a good cook Ready? One, two, three. Love makes the world go round. he also volunteers his time as a tutor at his local church. Our family life revolves around this dining table, and it was there I let the cat out of the bag. I was 13 when I discovered a stack of gay magazines in my brother's drawer. Jeremiah was 20. They were his magazines, but I was excited by them, too. I was like a kid in a candy store. I wished the bed could have swallowed me right then. Do you want to see this? Is that me? No. No. Yes. That's a rare photograph. Yeah. Yeah. Mom, Dad, me and Yes, yes. Jeremiah. How old were you? There is this very real relationship between me and my father, and my father God. So I really, really want to please him, because I know that he would never go wrong. That's for sure, but for human, I cannot be sure. I cannot trust my earthly father. Yeah, that much as much as I could trust my Heavenly Father. God loves everyone, and God wants everyone to recognize their sins and really repent. So how does the church view homosexuality? I was so young, and I felt scared and confused. I told our father about the magazines. I had never seen our father cry, ever. He blamed himself for letting down the family name. I was frightened. My brother stood alone in the corner, distraught. I was hoping this time alone with Jeremiah would help us bond and talk about our past. Hello. The pastor says no more filming. No more filming? Yeah, no more filming. Why? Yeah, because it's OK, why don't you come why don't you come down to where are you now? Jeremiah decides to withdraw from filming. Our sister, Elaine, mediates. I came back to Singapore to apologize, but I may have lost that opportunity now. After all that has happened, I still love and care about you, as you're my brother. I have something I need to tell you. Hope to see you tonight. I was surprised Jeremiah agreed to meet me and be filmed one last time. Hey Derek. Hey. This was the moment to say sorry, but I couldn't do it. Don't continue in your sin, brother. OK? God loves you. Thank you very much. All right? Look, life is like a vapor. You never know when you'll be gone. You never know. That's exactly right. You never know when you'll be gone. Tomorrow you could wake up with a terminal illness. You never know. That's right. In the next minute Life is so short. Right. You have to live your life to the full Don't let it to who you are. I'm Repent. I'm happy for you where you're at now, I hope you are happy for me. I am. I'm not happy for you. And that's unfortunate. And please let go of my hands. Thank you. I'll keep you in prayers, brother. All right? Know that God loves you. God loves you. Brother, you said, "Life is like a vapor." 30 years have passed since I outed you to our parents. I was young and in denial of my own sexuality. You have found your path. And I have found mine. I'm not sure if our wounds will ever heal, but you will always be my brother.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
When I think about art in Fort Lauderdale, I also include Miami because they are so near each other, and together, they are a lot more visible now in the arts world than they were several years ago. The excitement around Art Basel, the show in Miami Beach, is an example of this visibility, but some of the museums are also high caliber. The NSU Museum, for one, is in an interesting modernist building designed by the American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. I had visited the museum before and admired many of the works inside. I had also worked with the exhibit's curator, Bonnie Clearwater, in the early 2000s on an exhibition of my art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and when she approached me about this show, it was a no brainer for me to say yes because of my relationship with her and my fondness for the museum. Which cities do you think have the most exciting emerging arts scenes right now? Among the art circles, the talk is about Abu Dhabi and Doha and the museums opening there. I haven't been to either city, but for me, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Berlin, New York City, Los Angeles and Paris always showcase new artists in galleries. In Manhattan's Lower East Side, for example, there are lots of galleries showing up and comers, and the Whitney is an example of a museum that's good about showcasing works by newer artists. Do you have a favorite city to travel to for art? I find many cities in Europe compelling for art including Munich, Berlin and Madrid, but Rome truly overwhelms me. The city has great museums, including the Galleria Borghese and the Vatican Museums, but the art inside the churches the frescoes and paintings dating back to the Renaissance is stunning. I have been to at least 50 churches in Rome for the art, but I keep going back to Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, which has two great Baroque canvases by Caravaggio. You live in New York City, a destination known for its fantastic museums. Which ones do you especially enjoy visiting? The Frick Collection, on the Upper East Side, is lovable. It doesn't get a lot of crowds, but the collection of European art is fantastic, the building is beautiful, and it's small enough that you can do it all in one day. And the Brooklyn Museum does some amazing exhibitions, including the one this summer of works by Georgia O'Keeffe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Credit...Andy Haslam for The New York Times The last time I saw Bridin Concannon, she was walking toward me along the narrow road on the westernmost edge of the island of Inishmaan, off the west coast of Ireland. "Were you out at Synge's Chair?" I called out as she approached. The sun behind her hung, unmasked by clouds, low and long in the Irish early summer sky. "I was," she said. Her voice was strong, clear the way one's voice can be when exhilarated. "I'll start writing a play soon." SYNGE TOOK A STEAMER from Galway that sailed at the mercy of the tides, on the rolling sea, and transferred into a currach, a small canvas covered fishing boat, to make it to shore. These days things are slightly easier, with a daily ferry schedule as well as light aircraft service. My initial impression of the largest island of Inishmore from the ferry was not dissimilar to Synge's. "A dreary rock appeared at first sloping up from the sea and into the fog," the author wrote in "The Aran Islands," his classic account of his time here, first published in 1907. "The place looked hardly fit for habitation. There was no green to be seen, and no sign of the people ..." Part of the considerable allure of Aran lies in what it lacks. There are no movie theaters and few cars; electricity only arrived in the 1970s. Seventeen year old Thomas Kennedy summed it up for me within minutes of my arrival when he said, "There's no facilities here; you rely on the people." And while much has remained unchanged since Synge's time, society has reached the islands. Synge wasn't confronted with the dozen or so glamping structures visible on arrival, for one. And the pier side Atlantic Hotel, where Synge resided while on Inishmore, has been transformed into the Aran Sweater Market. But beside the shop, three pubs, one food shop, a restaurant and a handful of B Bs, there is little else in the way of commerce. The 12 square mile island is home to roughly 760 people, most clustered around the main settlement of Kilronan, with the vast majority of terrain given over to small parcels of grazing and farmland, delineated by Aran's most dominant feature, its dry stone walls. "You have to be O.K. within yourself to live here," Melissa Gillian told me as I stood eavesdropping on a wedding reception outside the Aran Island Hotel. A Maine native, she married a local man and has lived on Inishmore for 10 years. Ms. Gillian was one of only a handful of outsiders I met over the months, all are married to locals; her sentiment was one I heard often, on all three islands. Most visitors stay only a few hours, travel a well worn circuit and hustle back onto the boats for the comparative metropolis of Galway or the pubs of Doolin. But it is during the early morning hours, and again later in the afternoon once the last ferry of the day has gone, that the island's deeper appeal emerges. IF YOU'VE SEEN ONE IMAGE of the Aran Islands, it is likely to be an aerial shot of Inishmore's Dun Aengus, semicircular stone walls that abut a 300 foot sheer cliff above the Atlantic. The initial walls of this ring fort one of seven to be found on the islands date back to 1100 B.C., and it is next to impossible not to gravitate to the site while on Inishmore. An visit at daybreak was rewarded by absolute solitude as the wind whistled over the stones. Birds caught thermals below the cliffs. Clouds raced across the sun. Time stretched. As I was leaving, the buses began to arrive. I sat on a wall eating a Nutella crepe and watched coach after coach deposit people with fanny packs and (unneeded) sunhats. Though watching the human drama of group tourism from a slight remove has its own rewards, I had a date with a magic well. Early on during Synge's first visit to Inishmore, he met a man who told him a story. A Sligo woman, it seems, had a dream that her blind son might be made to see if she traveled to a particular well out on the Aran Islands. She did so, and upon touching the well's water to her sightless child's eye, he exclaimed, "O mother, look at the pretty flowers!" Synge would use this story and his visit to the site as the inspiration for his play, "The Well Of The Saints." My local map indicated the well as a tiny dot not far off the road, yet I'd cycled past it twice without luck. Finally I caught sight of an old sign that directed me over one stone fence and then another, through several fields, until I came upon the ruin of a tiny building, the Church of the Four Beautiful Persons. (No one I met on the island could explain the origins of the name.) I stepped over cow pies and entered. The sun emerged and the gray stones brightened. At that moment, a cow poked her head inside to see who was on her turf. Just beside the small church, I found the shallow well, still encircled by limestone, still filled with lightly running water. A tin cup had been left beside it, and someone had tossed in a small crucifix. A small pile of stones, similar to the ones that covered the well's floor, sat next to it, apparently meant to be thrown in the well. As a long ago lapsed Catholic, this ritual seemed to me somehow more pagan than Christian. I tossed a few in, thinking of my children. Back in town the crowds were converging for the afternoon ferry to the mainland. On impulse, I grabbed my bag, deciding again to follow Synge's lead this time to another of the islands. Little energy is spent looking outward exactly how the 160 inhabitants prefer things. Over my months of coming and going, I encountered many of the same people again and again on Inishmaan: Ciaran O'Ceallaigh, who was raising his son on the island because he wanted him "to grow up in a true Irish speaking environment;" Bartley Conneely, who owned 21 acres and six cows, and could easily be persuaded to give a visitor a lift to the ferry; and the pair of ladies I often saw when out walking, who cautioned me against staying too late up at the ring fort of Dun Fearbhai, lest the fairies interfere with me. Synge noted many stories he'd heard of strange happenings on the island. "These people make no distinction between the natural and the supernatural," he wrote. But he also eloquently described a people living a hardscrabble life very close to the elements: "Of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and sea." Synge encountered people who carried themselves with workaday dignity and offered a humble, sincere welcome exactly what I found on Inishmaan 120 years later. "We're ambivalent about tourists on this island," the restaurateur Ruairi de Blacam told me. "You're left to go about your business. Get a map you've got shoes and off you go." Mr. de Blacam is a local boy who made (extremely) good. In 2007 he and his wife, Marie Therese, opened Inis Meain, the singular high end restaurant and inn on the islands. "But things are moving fast; we're catching up a bit," Mr. de Blacam smiled and placed a dish of scallop ceviche with toasted almonds in front of me. "What you have to understand is that the people here live a very simple life. And we're here by choice. There's an understated pride, and the legacy of Synge is certainly a part of that." Very much so: The cottage to which the playwright returned each year a small, whitewashed, thatch roof affair has been preserved as a museum of sorts. Though it's technically open to the public, hours vary, and it took some doing to track down Ciaran O'Faherty, whose great grandparents had offered Synge a bedroom in what was then their home. Once I finally cornered him in the pub, Mr. O'Faherty was happy to oblige me with a look. On this island that insists on existing out of time, the cottage's green front door was a portal through the century; things inside remain as Synge had described: "My room is at one end of the cottage ... there is a kitchen with earth floor and open rafters ... it is full of beauty and distinction." As much as Synge relished his island home, he spent most of his days out walking the land. Over on the far western side, atop high cliffs, he found a stand of rock looking out over Galway Bay and Inishmore that he would return to again and again. "As I lay here hour after hour, I seem to enter into the wild pastimes of the cliff," he wrote. This was when I found myself headed out to Synge's Chair. The semicircle cluster of limestone created a natural barrier against the elements, cradled the visitor and invited lingering. Each of my visits was similar; time slipped the way time can when there is nowhere to go: at first excruciatingly slowly, then in a blink the day would be gone. WITH JUST THE ONE PUB FOR ACTION, nights on Inishmaan are quiet and even a loner can yearn for society. As Synge did, I made the short crossing to the smallest island of Inisheer (on two occasions I was the only ferry passenger from Inishmaan). Upon coming ashore, Synge was confronted with a man, "a drunkard and shebeener," who lived "with the restlessness of a man who has no sympathy with his companions." Upon my arrival I was met with an only slightly less distressing social challenge. As on Inishmore, the day tourist trade had taken hold. There were horse and trap rides, coffee carts and stands selling local fudge. But just beyond the flurry of town, Inisheer, with its 250 residents, is perhaps the most physically picturesque of the three Aran Islands, and its three square miles make it easy to navigate on bicycle. (Bikes were readily available directly off the ferry on both Inishmore and Inisheer. Not surprisingly, there was no bike rental on Inishmaan.) Atop the island's highest hill, beside the ruin of O'Brien's Castle, Aine O'Graiofa had put a few tables out in front of her home and called it a restaurant. I took a seat in the driveway and settled in for one of Ireland's staple country lunches ham and cheese on toasted white bread while looking down across Galway Bay to Connemara in the distance. Inisheer boasts three pubs, one shop and a single church. "The priest died four years ago and they haven't sent another," Ms. O'Graiofa told me. "We're left to our own devices." We chatted of the decline in the church's dominance over the people throughout Ireland. "Sure it's their own fault," she said. "We have the old schoolteacher who goes up and leads folks in the rosary; that's all we need." Watching a ferry cross the bay down below, I asked if it was heading for Inishmaan. "I doubt it. You go over there and you don't see a soul; they're all hiding behind the stones." We laughed, but soon enough I made my way down to the dock. BACK ON INISHMAAN I WALKED past the old graveyard from which Synge took inspiration for his play "Riders to the Sea" and continued up the hill, across from Synge's cottage and up over five stone fences and through five small fields to the ring fort of Dun Chonchuir. Synge would "often stroll up there after a dinner of eggs or salt pork, to smoke drowsily on the stones." Like Synge, I had sat on these walls and viewed the sea in nearly every direction, but on this evening, a fog rolled in. The air became moist. Summer changed to autumn in a matter of minutes. I could barely make out the far end of the small fort enclosure. With no wind, a heavy silence hung in the mist. The century that separated me from Synge seemed suddenly trivial, and a world beyond these dry stone walls didn't matter at all.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Liu Ximei , the activist at the movie's center, contracted the virus as a girl. Now in her 30s, she ran a halfway house for fellow patients. She serves as a thorn in the side of government officials who would rather wish this public health crisis away. In the tensest development she comes under the supervision of a local surveillance official, who we're told at one point is alarmed to learn that she has absconded to Geneva to talk with the Joint United Nations Program on H.I.V./AIDS. Ximei 's stealthy excursion to Switzerland is the sort of development a filmmaker usually captures only by hanging around. It is clear that Andy Cohen, who made the movie over seven years (Gaylen Ross is credited as co director, and Ai Weiwei as executive producer), took the time to get to know his subject. We learn about the time when Ximei lived in a hospital with mainly dogs and cats to keep her company, and how she reunited with her biological mother. This isn't a groundbreaking documentary, but it does pay its subjects the ultimate courtesy, treating them as officials have not: as fully rounded human beings. Not rated. In Mandarin and regional Chinese dialect, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
WASHINGTON This week, in a closed door meeting of Congressional Democrats with President Obama, Representative Ed Perlmutter of Colorado bluntly said what has been on many politicians' minds: "Larry Summers. Bad choice." Mr. Obama was visibly annoyed and mounted a defense of Mr. Summers, his former economic policy adviser who also served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. Mr. Summers, who the president said had become something of a "progressive whipping boy," appears to be a strong contender to succeed Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. With the vigorous attacks on Mr. Summers that have erupted in recent days, now his supporters are engaged in a more public campaign to smooth his knotty reputation as being not just brilliant but also bullheaded and brusque. "It's my experience, and the experience of a lot of people, that he's a great person to work with," said Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, who worked with Mr. Summers at the Treasury Department and the World Bank. Mr. Obama is now in the process of interviewing three candidates for the position at the helm of the central bank: Mr. Summers; Janet L. Yellen, the vice chairwoman at the Federal Reserve, who had generally been considered the front runner for the job; and a dark horse for the post, Donald L. Kohn, a former Fed vice chairman. In his meeting on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama stressed that he had not yet made up his mind. People close to the process said the White House is trying to tamp down on the feverish speculation that the race had come down to Mr. Summers and Ms. Yellen and deflect some of the attacks on Mr. Summers. One early candidate for Fed chairman was Timothy F. Geithner, the former Treasury secretary and Obama confidante, insiders said. The White House approached Mr. Geithner to ask if he would be considered for the job, but he declined. Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, declined to comment about the administration's personnel policy. Perhaps no economic official in recent years has a more divergent reputation within the White House and outside of it than Mr. Summers. And it is his reputation among economic policy staff members that might ultimately secure him Mr. Obama's nod. "You can't find a member of the economic team who is for anyone but Larry," said a person close to the administration who declined to talk on the record before Mr. Obama makes his decision. "That's true at Treasury, that's true at the White House. The reason is, Larry has been through this. Larry brings the right skills to bear here." By contrast, Mr. Summers's detractors have expressed abject shock that he might be considered for the position. They describe him as an abrasive interlocutor who can be dismissive of ideas, and people, he considers not up to snuff. They also note his arguments for deregulation of parts of the financial industry in the 1990s, and ties to and paychecks from Wall Street today. Sheila C. Bair, the former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, publicly argued in a recent commentary on CNN/Money that Mr. Obama should pick Ms. Yellen, because "unlike Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and other Bob Rubin minions frequently mentioned in the financial press as potential Bernanke successors, she was not part of the deregulatory cabal that got us into the 2008 financial crisis." Dozens of Democratic members of Congress have publicly thrown their weight behind Ms. Yellen, including House minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California and the Senate's second ranking Democrat, Richard Durbin of Illinois. But Mr. Summers's supporters, many of whom are in or have the ear of the White House, have pushed back on those objections. Mr. Summers has long wanted the Fed position, and smarted after being passed over in favor of Mr. Bernanke, who was renominated for a second four year term in 2009. He was also floated as a potential World Bank president in 2012, but the administration ultimately chose the physician Jim Yong Kim. Several former colleagues said they felt that Mr. Summers's reputation as being difficult to work with has been overblown. During his time in the White House, Mr. Summers openly clashed with a few colleagues, including Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, the budget director. But many officials who enjoyed working with Mr. Summers remain in prominent positions within the White House. Those include Gene Sperling, the current head of the National Economic Council, the position Mr. Summers occupied for the first years of the Obama administration; Brian Deese, deputy director of the budget office; and Jason Furman, who won Senate confirmation on Thursday to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Others agreed that Mr. Summers could at times be brusque, but that he also welcomed being challenged. "His favorite line is 'Tell me why I'm wrong,' " said Stuart E. Eizenstat, a former deputy Treasury secretary. Ms. Sandberg echoed that anecdote, recalling how Mr. Summers would ask his colleagues at Treasury to come up with the strongest argument against their own ideas. People close to White House officials said that many of them considered Mr. Summers perhaps the most brilliant economic policy mind of his generation. One former member of the White House economic team has even taken to using a certain shorthand to denote someone of truly superior intellect: "Larry smart." His deep understanding of the economy, concern with unemployment and ability to manage complexity and crisis would make him a stellar Fed chairman, they argue, also noting how much Mr. Obama likes how Mr. Summers's mind works. "There's going to be an international crisis at some point, and he's the guy you want in the room," said an economic policy expert who declined to comment on the record. Mr. Summers set himself apart as an economic thinker among Mr. Obama's advisers and staff members during the 2008 campaign, former colleagues said. "Larry had a very good way of synthesizing information, boiling it down to what it all meant and what the consequences were for the economy," said Stephanie Cutter, who worked on both Obama campaigns. "Larry was the only one who had been through a financial crisis before," she added. "He was speaking from a place of authority."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
This article contains spoilers for the Season 8 premiere of "Game of Thrones." Since last season, when he first held out his hand to pet Drogon (and didn't die), fans have been wondering if Jon would ever claim a mount of his own. The dragon Rhaegal always seemed to be the best choice for him and Kit Harington agrees. And now with both Drogon and Viserion spoken for, Rhaegal really was the only choice. Read a review of the Season 8 premiere of "Game of Thrones" But Dany may not realize the full import of going on a dragon riding date with Jon. She didn't share her dragon with him, as she did with those she rescued last season beyond the Wall. She gave it to him. And Rhaegal is now Jon's for life. Let's back up. There is actually a lot that Dany doesn't know about dragons. After all, she grew up in an era when the beasts were thought to have died out, when there were no longer experienced dragonlords to teach her how to bond, ride or battle with them, as the Targaryens and many other noble families in Valyria once did. David Benioff, one of the showrunners, said in an "Inside the Episode" segment that "only Targaryens" can ride, which is a departure from the books and the show's own history and lore segments. This could be a retroactive continuity change, or more likely, Benioff meant in the present show story line, since right before that he said, "No one's ever ridden a dragon except for Dany," and that doesn't cancel out her ancestors. Still, the idea that dragon riding is proof of a Targaryen bloodline persists, and how that plays out in "Game of Thrones" remains to be seen. Dany is lucky, though she's a natural. Jon clearly is not, probably because he hasn't had the advantage of holding Rhaegal as an egg before it hatched, or knowing it all of its life. Dany had time to acclimate, to bond. And that bond is actually a form of imprinting, which enables Drogon to sense Dany's distress in the fighting pits and come to her rescue. When Drogon is hit by a spear in the books, "Dany and Drogon screamed as one." The bond between a dragon and dragon rider runs so deep, some say, that the dragon will share its human's feelings (the dragons of one royal couple also mated) and can sense when its human dies. Dreamfyre, for example, sensed when its rider, Helaena, died, even though she was far away. Because of this bond, a dragon will accept only one rider, although it will accept a new one after the original rider dies. (None of these rules about bonding apply to Viserion, by the way, now that it's a wight.) Maegor the Cruel had to wait until his father, Aegon, died before he could hope to claim Balerion the Black Dread. The child of a rider, however, does not automatically inherit a deceased parent's dragon. It's not like borrowing the family car. Queen Rhaenyra's son Joffrey tried to ride Syrax, and although he was a familiar presence to his mother's dragon, the great beast fought to be free of him, twisting in the air until he fell off and plunged to his death. Joffrey might not have died if he had used the traditional saddle, chains or steel tipped whip, but he was in a hurry, and he didn't. That's another thing Dany didn't realize Jon might have had a slightly easier time if he had the proper tools. Or if Dany had taken him as a passenger first, letting him ride double with her before trying to ride solo on an untamed dragon. (She wouldn't have been able to break in Rhaegal herself beforehand because a dragon won't accept another dragon's rider.) It could be that being Rhaegar's son helps Jon here. But back to the "only Targaryens" can ride question, it's a little more complicated than that in the books. Not all Targaryens are able to ride. And there is precedent to suggest the mythology about the Targaryens is just that myth. (One that was advantageous for them to perpetuate, because it made them seem "closer to gods than the common run of men.") Long ago, in a time when the Targaryens had more dragons than riders, they opened up the field to anyone willing to try winning over their own dragon. One of those who succeeded was a small, brown, bastard girl named Nettles, who figured out that feeding a dragon a freshly slaughtered sheep every morning was an excellent way to win its acceptance. Some argue that Nettles must have had Targaryen blood herself. Perhaps. But her example is also useful for those who don't: If you're friendly and persistent, dragons will consider you. Tyrion himself might have had a chance of this when he unchained Viserion and Rhaegal. Alas ... As long as Dany and Jon stay on good terms, it shouldn't be a problem for her that Rhaegal and Jon have bonded. But should Dany and Jon ever fall out perhaps over an icky incest revelation? this is one thing she can't take back.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Re "Biden Vows to Guide U.S. Out of 'Darkness'" (front page, Aug. 21): Joe Biden gave one of the most powerfully delivered speeches I have witnessed in my lifetime. I could feel my blood pressure lower and my anxiety level begin to dissipate as he spoke. All I kept saying to myself was "Yes!" at each of his strong points. I experience the exact opposite feeling when I watch the current president speak. Truth over lies; science over wishful thinking; love over hate. That's the America I want to live in. I wish Election Day were tomorrow. For the first time in almost four years, I have a genuine sense of hope in the United States after watching the Democratic convention. I have watched the way the United States has been diminished in international and domestic affairs. Finally there is a prospective leader offering himself for election who speaks from the heart and acts from experience. The world is waiting for American moral and economic leadership to become a beacon for those around the globe who long for a better world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A mere five months after becoming director of the Museum of Arts and Design, is stepping down on Jan. 31, the museum announced on Thursday. Mr. Veneciano, who was hired after an extensive international search, "will shift his focus to writing and consulting at the intersection of cultural policy, immigrant rights and civic engagement," the museum said in its announcement. In an interview, the museum's chairwoman, Michele Cohen, who will serve as interim director, said: "We would have hoped it would have lasted longer. But we're respecting his decision to pursue other things. We've done this before but hopefully we don't have to do it again." At least not so soon. Mr. Veneciano, with a respected track record as an administrator and fund raiser, came to the museum in October, after just two years as director of El Museo del Barrio. He succeeded Glenn Adamson, who was hired at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2013.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Singapore is a country of countless hawker stalls and beloved mom and pop restaurants that serve up excellent renditions of local dishes. So when its notoriously discerning eaters pack into a chic hotel lobby to seek out traditional fare, take note. On a recent weeknight at Folklore, at the Destination Singapore Beach Road hotel, table after table was filled with locals tucking into dishes like pork belly braised in tamarind gravy and eggplant sambal. The cuisine here is Singapore's so called heritage food and the chef behind it, Damian D'Silva, is something of an evangelist on the matter. "Our heritage food is dead or dying a lot of the dishes that I used to eat as a kid, today, they're no longer available," said Mr. D'Silva, who learned to cook as a child by watching his grandparents whip up Peranakan (descendants of Chinese immigrants to the Malay Peninsula) and Eurasian classics at the stove. "It's very important to keep them alive." Mr. D'Silva, who ran the kitchens at various restaurants in Singapore before opening Folklore last July, has amassed a loyal following. In 2008, when he took a break from restaurants to offer Peranakan dishes and Western fare like his signature anchovy pasta in a tiny coffee shop stall, the well heeled followed, pulling up in pricey cars for takeout or sitting on a stool to sweat over a Wagyu steak. Standouts at Folklore include singgang, a Eurasian wolf herring dish, and the must try fried rice, which stars the deliciously rich chocolate like insides of buah keluak, a Southeast Asian nutlike fruit. There are also standards done well, including chap chye, a Peranakan dish of vegetables and glass noodles cooked in pork and prawn stock.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
When the Grand Am racing organization created the GX class of competition for alternative fuel cars, its official supplier, Sunoco, was not ready with a suitable diesel blend. So Mazda's motor sports managers, mindful that the 2013 season kickoff was quickly approaching, decided to try a synthetic clean diesel fuel that has powered naval vessels, aircraft, heavy trucks and has been tested in rental fleets in the United States. The new fuel is refined from fats left over from chicken, pork and beef processing. It is supplied by Dynamic Fuels, a joint venture of Tyson Foods and Syntroleum. Opened in late 2010, the company's plant in Geismar, La., can produce 5,000 barrels a day of the clear, nearly odorless fuel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you're lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. The next shower you might be able to see is known as the Quadrantids. Active between Dec. 27 and Jan. 12, the show peaks around Thursday night into Friday morning, or Jan. 3 4. Compared with most other meteor showers, the Quadrantids are unusual because they are thought to have originated from an asteroid. They tend to be fainter with fewer streaks in the sky than others you might be able to see this year. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Where meteor showers come from If you spot a meteor shower, what you're usually seeing is an icy comet's leftovers that crash into Earth's atmosphere. Comets are sort of like dirty snowballs: As they travel through the solar system, they leave behind a dusty trail of rocks and ice that lingers in space long after they leave. When Earth passes through these cascades of comet waste, the bits of debris which can be as small as grains of sand pierce the sky at such speeds that they burst, creating a celestial fireworks display.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Awards shows have also gotten increasingly political, with celebrity presenters and winners playing the role of firebrands at town hall meetings. The Grammys, which are broadcast on CBS, were no different on Sunday, with several performers bringing up immigration and the MeToo movement. U2 performed on a barge just outside the Statue of Liberty, a performance not exactly subtle in its symbolism, and Hillary Clinton showed up in a taped segment, reading about President Trump's preference for McDonald's food from Michael Wolff's best seller, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House." Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, gave voice to proponents of the "shut up and sing" side of the debate. "I have always loved the Grammys but to have artists read the Fire and Fury book killed it," Ms. Haley wrote in a tweet during the event. "Don't ruin great music with trash. Some of us love music without the politics thrown in it." TV executives have also suggested that viewership is cyclical, largely depending on whether there are blockbuster movies to promote or superstar singers set to perform. Analysts have also suggested that in the world of streaming, long telecasts packed with commercial breaks the Grammys lasted a little more than three and a half hours are a much harder sell for TV viewers these days. There are also more digital distractions than ever. HQ Trivia, the live streaming smartphone quiz app, said it had 1.6 million players on Sunday night, a record for the game, which went live about an hour and a half into the Grammys telecast. Between 2013 and 2017, the Grammys' ratings fluctuated between 26 million and 28 million viewers, good enough to make it the second most watched awards show, behind the Academy Awards.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Little researched or reported, the events related in "Tehran Children" form a highly significant chapter in the story of Jewish survival during World War II. On the one hand, this is a history of the agonizing experience of nearly 1,000 Jewish children, many of them orphans. Having suffered the profound dislocations geographical, familial, psychological, spiritual of the first stages of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, they went on to endure the horrific conditions of Soviet gulags before leaving for starving regions of Communist Uzbekistan. From there they were transferred to Iran. Ultimately, they arrived at kibbutzim in Mandatory Palestine in 1943, racked by malnutrition, typhus, dysentery, loss of family and loss of self. On the other hand, this book records Mikhal Dekel's personal journey of discovering and understanding this near incomprehensible chapter of Jewish survival in the 20th century and how it shaped her father's life. Along the way, "Tehran Children" suggests pathways for further research into a wide range of topics American Jewish leadership during World War II, the Jewish Agency in Palestine, Polish Jewish relations (then and now), American government attitudes toward saving Jews, Bukharan Jewish communities. Mainly, it raises questions about the psychology of survival. Many of these children went on to lead productive lives in Israel and elsewhere but they rarely spoke about their past or their personal traumas, which, to use Dekel's word, were largely "erased," both in Israel and elsewhere. Days after the 1939 German invasion, the author's father, Hannan, age 12, began the extraordinary 13,000 mile journey with his family from their home in Ostrow, Poland, to Mandatory Palestine. They fled first to the Soviet zone and in April 1940 were offered the choice of becoming Soviet citizens or being repatriated to Poland, now under German occupation. In Dekel's family there was "one repeated story: the tale of two brothers who had made two choices during the war. One had made the 'wrong' choice to return to Nazi controlled Poland yet survived; and the other had made the 'right' choice to remain in the Soviet Union and did not survive." The author's great uncle chose to remain and was murdered after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hating the Soviet Union, Dekel's grandfather chose to go back to Poland. Thinking he and his family had boarded a train that would take them to Warsaw, they were in fact arrested along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews and wound up in a gulag in Arkhangelsk which improbably meant survival. The story at the center of this book is the way contingency shaped so many destinies. It makes these Tehran children not simply another detail of the Holocaust but a matter of enduring existential, psychological and moral reflection.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
NOTHING IS WRONG AND HERE IS WHY Essays By Alexandra Petri We all have that one friend who has the rare ability to make us laugh, not just over cocktails or brunch, but even under the direst of circumstances. A friend whose dry wit, touching on everything from electoral politics to women's equality, is more than just banter: It also punctuates intellectual points and helps frame opinions. That's what it feels like to read Alexandra Petri's new book, "Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why." In a collection of essays, some new and some repurposed from her Washington Post column, Petri revisits and satirizes various nightmares in our country's recent sociopolitical history. Chapter titles include "How to Sleep at Night When Families Are Being Separated at the Border," "A Humanizing Profile of Your Local Neo Nazi" and "HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH?" Through this literary pasquinade, Petri skewers the status quo, asking: Who needs an iota of intellect or humanity when blind dogma and senseless injustice will do just fine? These essays remind us that, believe it or not, we are not actually living as extras in one extended "Saturday Night Live" skit. The memory of the American electorate is sometimes far too short, so it's necessary to look back on the uncomfortable storms we've weathered, as we prepare for those still to come. But don't worry, with Petri as your guide you won't be left in a straitjacket screaming, "Why, God? Why?" In her signature sarcastic style, she masterfully cloaks the absurdism of modern reality in farce "the idea that women are people is actually a relatively recent innovation," a state legislator turned anatomy teacher instructs his class, "but my extensive knowledge of science ... reveals that actually they are vessels that may potentially contain people" and makes us laugh at it. Or at least roll our eyes at it. These days it's all some of us can do to keep from crying.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. "Got porn, Madam?" That's what the high school boy known variously as Milk Carton and Egg Muffin asks a DVD store clerk after some stammering feints in the Tamil movie "Super Deluxe." And, yes, Madam has porn. But, surprise: When Egg Muffin and his pals start to watch it, one of them becomes enraged. That's his mother onscreen. This sets off a chain of mostly comic events that are, by turns, ominous, bloody and cosmic. And that's just one plot strand. In another, a married woman's ex boyfriend dies in her bed, setting off a chain of comic, ominous events. In a third, a little boy pines for his father to return, and the father does but now transformed into a woman. (Another chain ensues.) The director Thiagarajan Kumararaja, who also had a hand in the script, takes his time setting all these shaggy, laconic story lines in motion. Part of the movie's pleasure in its early going is figuring out whether and how they will all merge. Another pleasure is visual. Colors pop off Kumararaja's palette (the cinematographers are P.S. Vinod and Nirav Shah), and there's always something to look at in his Chennai. This isn't gleaming, ascendant India; it's the lived in one, crumbling around the edges, a little romanticized but recognizable in its narrow alleys and concrete stairwells and power outages. "Super Deluxe," Kumararaja's second feature, has been a while in coming after "Aaranya Kaandam" (2010), which was a critic's darling. No wonder Kumararaja's work is stylish and wry, with an indie cinephile sensibility. (It's no accident that "Kill Bill" and "Gangs of Wasseypur" posters hang on the DVD store's wall.) Part of that sensibility is a frankness about sex that's still unusual in Indian movies, especially commercial ones. Though nothing explicit is shown, all the story lines in "Super Deluxe" have a little sexual motor, and there's plenty of frank, off color language, too. Kumararaja also elicits some wonderfully deadpan performances from his actors. The teenage boys have a believably nerdy raffish rapport And Samantha Akkineni, as the cheating wife, builds a character of unexpected depths. "Super Deluxe," though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act. It includes not one, but two drawn out scenes of threatened rape. (We know the ugly outcome of one, though it happens off camera.) That these scenes, with their leering Bollywood ish villain, verge on the cartoonish doesn't save them. They're part of a tonal problem what was mostly delicate and offbeat tips into something cruder and messier. They also serve as a reminder: Cinematic sexual liberation for (and by) men can be punishing for women.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
During this fertile period the way revelers received dance music and what was considered dance music shifted as new kinds of spaces geared toward L.G.B.T.Q. participants multiplied. Constrained and faddish during the 1960s, D.J. led dance culture discovered its kinetic, kaleidoscopic potential in the space of a few transformational months in early 1970. Two key party spaces the Loft and the Sanctuary positioned New York City at the epicenter of the new phenomenon as countercultural revelers flung themselves into a dynamic, participatory and expressive ritual that made Woodstock seem conservative. The age old convention that social dance should revolve exclusively around straight couples imploded. L.G.B.T.Q. participants played a pivotal role, shaping a culture with a queer potential open to anyone who ventured into its vortex. The act of entering a darkened space, dancing to amplified music and becoming part of an undulating crowd often for hours on end, often under the influence of perception enhancing substances disturbed the everyday consciousness of participants, including those who identified as straight. Eroticism became an all body experience. The boundaries of the self loosened. When the new owners of the Sanctuary, located at 43rd Street and 9th Avenue in Manhattan, became the first to welcome L.G.B.T.Q. dancers into a discotheque in early 1970, the D.J. Francis Grasso, who held on to his position, responded by introducing a fresh set of records. One of them, the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji's "Gin Go Lo Ba (Drums of Passion)," had recently been covered as "Jingo" by the rock guitarist Santana. "You needed a crowd that was limber enough," Grasso told me in a 1997 interview. "Straight people were clumsy and had no rhythm, whereas gay men were right on. They moved their hips, their bodies, and their arms, and the faster the music got the crazier they reacted. I didn't want to play Olatunji until I had an audience for it." Eddie Kendricks, 'Girl You Need a Change of Mind' (1972) Gay male dance crowds were drawn to recordings that featured Black female vocalists, often identifying with their emotional expressiveness and strength in the face of adversity, often to the surprise of the artists, who were usually gospel trained. A pioneering representative, Gloria Gaynor was crowned the first queen of disco by gay D.J.s in a ceremony at the midtown Manhattan discotheque Le Jardin in 1975. Two years later, Donna Summer became disco's first cyborg princess when she released "I Feel Love," a Giorgio Moroder produced futuristic track that foregrounds Moog electronics alongside Summer's spaced out, wailing vocals. Articulating the otherworldly, fluctuating, polymorphous eroticism of the 1970s dance floor, the track proposed that everyone could experience a form of nighttime queerness, regardless of their day to day sexuality. The Harlem drag ball scene described by the social activist and writer Langston Hughes as "the strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem's spectacles in the 1920s" fragmented along racial lines in the early 1960s when Black queens became tired of having to "whiten up" if they wanted to have a chance of winning any in house beauty contest. By the early 1970s, Black drag houses started to multiply and soon outstripped their white counterparts in terms of glamour, style and popularity. As contests expanded, categories multiplied and competition intensified, with prizes awarded to entrants whose drag was the most believable, the most real. Released in 1978, Cheryl Lynn's feisty, upbeat disco track "Got to Be Real" became an instant ballroom classic. The Iowa raised cellist, composer and vocalist Arthur Russell was already defining a new form of genre bending musicianship before Allen Ginsberg became his first male lover. Subsequently enthralled by the energy and financial autonomy of downtown's L.G.B.T.Q. friendly private party network, Russell recorded a series of queer themed 12 inch singles that were deliberately oblique so as to conceal their illicit meanings from his somewhat conservative parents. "Is It All Over My Face?" had an explicitly sexual title, yet took on another meaning when the Paradise Garage D.J. Larry Levan introduced the zigzagging, freakish vocals of Melvina Woods cut from the "Male" original into his remix. Grace Jones, 'Pull Up to the Bumper' (1981)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Ms. Margolin, a founding member of the feminist company Split Britches and an accomplished writer and performer, especially of solo works ("8 Stops," "O Yes I Will"), has long been interested in exploring Jewish identity. It is at the center of this piece, which culminates in a scene where Galkin binds the profane Madoff's arm with tefillin (boxes containing scripture that are strapped to the arm and forehead during prayer). The conceit is that the Madoff character (Jeremiah Kissel) is recalling from prison a conversation in which Galkin (Gerry Bamman) devoted hours and generous pours of Scotch to persuading Madoff to handle his savings (he was already managing the synagogue's finances). Both men are tethered to real events, but with enough slack to let Ms. Margolin embark on flights of fancy, as when she daringly follows Galkin's reading from a biblical commentary with Madoff's memory of a rather telling episode: "I dreamed my penis was a vagina," he says, "and it was a vagina that had folds. Really, it looked like a wallet." Freud would be proud. Throughout, Ms. Margolin pits a concentration camp survivor who somehow remains almost naively hopeful against an amoral, greedy cynic with a fundamentally materialist view, and uses that contrast to explore issues of morality, trust, faith and guilt. Remorse also factors in, albeit in a way that does not let anybody off the hook. At regular intervals, for instance, the men's discussion is interrupted by a secretary (Jenny Allen), who pleads ignorance in her court testimony. "I should have known, I had no idea," she says plaintively of Madoff's colossal scam. By way of minimizing his misdeeds and, thus, her own, she points out, "It's not like he murdered people!" This Madoff is forcefully rendered by Mr. Kissel as a brash, vulgar and possibly insecure man, yet he yields little insight into why he did what he did. Fleetingly, he flirts with the idea of telling Galkin the truth, not to save him but to crush his "picture of the world as a place where some men are purely moral."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times LOS ANGELES Carli Jo Bidlingmaier was talking to a group of 20 somethings in a living room in the Bel Air neighborhood here, weeks before the wildfires. She was explaining that consuming marijuana allows a woman to awaken her "yoni," a Sanskrit term for vagina favored by Hollywood bohemians. "Everybody stand up!" she shouted. The crowd, all women seated on pillows on the floor, leapt to their feet. Ms. Bidlingmaier, a former casting producer for "The Bachelor," vigorously shook her hips. She was leading the women in a so called cannabis sensuality circle that seemed like something out of 1960s Esalen: joints, frank talk about sexuality, meditation and at the end of the night a headlong plunge into a big bowl of strawberries and dark chocolate. "It is our divine right to enjoy our pleasure," Ms. Bidlingmaier said. No one disagreed. In January, California will join the list of states where recreational marijuana is legal, among them Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Alaska. With researchers tallying California's marijuana sales at 7.7 billion last year, the so called green rush has already turned gold. Next year, the Standard hotel in Hollywood plans to open a dispensary for edibles. "It's exploding in a good way," said Emerald Castro, a brand ambassador for cannabis start ups. "There are a lot of professionals on board." Cannabis sales, currently for medicinal purposes, are primarily a cash business. (Federal laws prohibit the use of banks for illegal drugs.) And with restrictions on advertising, the industry retains something of a quaint dorm room vibe. That means parties. Lots of them. Parties to educate and inform new users. Parties to connect to friends who partake. And parties to sell, sell, sell cannabis to an unfamiliar public, most of whom still think "Girl Scout Cookies" are for eating, "Moby Dick" is a novel, and "Skywalker" is Luke's last name, rather than chic new strains. Along with the sensuality circles, there are get togethers for gamers who smoke pot, marijuana Christmas parties, classes where artists can puff and paint. There are studios where yogis smoke sensimilla with their shavasana and members' only co working spaces where entrepreneurs can enjoy a dab of hash while poring over data flow diagrams and accounting receipts. "It all comes down to not feeling like a criminal, being seen as a criminal," said Douglas Dracup, 31, whose Hitman Coffee Shop on South La Brea Avenue is one of these spaces. Parties, he said, have "set the stage for the industry to flourish." Some were friends or guests who read about the tea party, which cost 65, online. "I saw it on Instagram last month, and I thought I would come," said Bridgett Davis, in between puffs under her leopard print hat. "In December I'm going to pull out my mink. It's a different kind of crowd, not teenagers or millennials." Holden Jagger, a former executive pastry chef at the Soho House who started a cannabis cooking and cultivation business last year, prepared the meal. The table was set with place cards, gold lace paper napkins and strategically arranged ashtrays. There was no pot in the roasted corn and buttermilk scones. But there were plenty of joints, vape pens and edibles on the table. A server wearing a crimson dress and rabbit ears poured peach green tea. Tara Dawn Roseman, an eyebrow aesthetician, examined a bottle of lotion infused with medical marijuana. "My dad loves this stuff," said Roxanne Dennant, whose company, Fruit Slabs, makes cannabis infused fruit leather. "He rubs it on his hands." "My hands are always hurting," Ms. Roseman said. "Then use some!" Ms. Dennant said. "They are on the table to be used." There were a lot of products to try: cannabis infused cellulite cream, lip balm, chocolate cookies and small bottles of artisanal buds from Northern California. Ms. Roseman brought some pot from home, which she dumped on a plate so she could roll a joint. Platters of finger sandwiches were passed. "Do you find yourself with friends that want to talk about something else?" said Ms. Dennant. "We can't. We are passionate." Ms. Eriksen refrained from smoking because she was pregnant. She watched as guests eyed the buds on the table. "You get a gift bag so you don't need to pocket anything," she said. As caramel popcorn and apple pie cookies were passed, the table grew silent. A man put a zebra mask over his face and scrolled through his cellphone. "I was just staring off into the sky and thinking, 'I am sufficiently stoned,'" Ms. Dennant said. Mr. Jagger joined the table. "I had a mom give me a cookie once," he said, recalling his early 20s. "I just couldn't talk for a while. My arms were moving, but my mouth wasn't working. She put a whole plant into butter and it was pretty strong." When he was a younger man, Mr. Jagger said, he prided himself in baking potent cookies. Nowadays, cooks are better at tempering the high. "The idea that we can manage it," he said, "takes the fun out of it." Maya Cooper was dressed in raspberry tights, gold chains and a blue kufi, a tableau that looked vaguely like vintage MC Hammer. It was the day before Halloween, and Snoop Dogg was hosting his wife's birthday party, a 1980s themed bash in an industrial building near the airport. "It's my job to know everybody," said Ms. Cooper, holding court in a hazy, smoke filled lounge packed with couches and a bar crowded with jars of marijuana bud, rolling papers and smoking accessories. Ms. Cooper, 31, is the associate director of marketing for Merry Jane, a digital media company started in 2015 by Snoop Dogg to promote marijuana culture. She is better known, though, as a "budtender" to the stars. An Ohio native who once worked for Rolling Stone, she said she taught Gwyneth Paltrow how to use a vape pen. She has hosted bud bars at parties for Diplo and Calvin Harris, the music producers. Ms. Cooper has even spun cannabis infused sugar into cotton candy for Miley Cyrus at a birthday party for Ms. Cyrus's boyfriend, Liam Hemsworth. These days marijuana is marketed like coffee beans. Humboldt's Finest, a collective from Northern California, was that night's sponsor. Among the strains scrawled on a menu were Sunset Sherbet ("luscious melty treat"), Cookies ("an uplifting, potent high") and OG Kush ("for total body melt"). A guest sidled up to the bar and asked for six joints and some buds for a bong. On the dance floor, where Snoop Dogg was twirling with his wife, trays of pre rolled joints were passed by female servers. Last January Ms. Cooper teamed up with a dispensary to host a bar at the 30th birthday party for Cade Hudson, a talent agent who works for Creative Artists Agency. The party was held on the roof of an apartment complex in Beverly Hills, and about 200 people showed up. The singer Nick Jonas asked for a joint, Ms. Cooper said. Others kept their distance. "Sometimes celebrities will pass by," she said. "They aren't interested in coming to the station. So we bring the gift bag to them." Ms. Cooper said sponsors don't get paid to give away product, which makes a bar a costly proposition. The average price of a joint is about 3.50; small batch or craft cannabis costs twice that. "It's hard to regulate celebrities," she said. "They are used to having whatever they want." The music crowd is notoriously grabby. So much so, she toyed with the idea of making people who give parties pay. Ms. Cooper said they ran out of pre rolled joints halfway through the night at a Def Jam event during Grammy week. "People kept coming back to the bar," she said. "They try to pretend like they are someone else. They kept stuffing their pockets. Someone even came over to the table, but this time with his hat off. I said, 'I still recognize you.'" It was like a Tupperware party for the smoke set. Guests bought tickets for 5, which were exchanged for edibles, creams or smoke. (Gifts of cannabis are allowed, Ms. Assaf said; direct sales are not.) There were oils by Foria to enhance sexual pleasure, a powder from Mondo that could be sprinkled in food to soothe an anxious mind and Hmbldt vape pens to calm, sleep or arouse. One woman bought 105 worth of pink tickets for cannabis infused capsules with turmeric to reduce chronic inflammation. Ms. Assaf is adept at creating community among her peers, organizing weekly get togethers. "It is an important part of reaching the audience," said Derek McCarty, the chief marketing officer for Hmbldt. "People turn to their best friends for advice." Cannabis Feminist teamed with Snoop Dogg's Merry Jane to create a series, "Queens of the Stoned Age," a chat show with Ms. Assaf and guests who explore their relationship with cannabis. They hired an all female crew and Ms. Assaf committed to including more ethnically diverse smokers in coming episodes. Despite the transactional nature of the Bake Sale, there was still, as one might imagine, a relaxed vibe. Hannah Mason, a founder of Lit Yoga, set up a low slung table and pillows under a tree. She had nothing to sell; she was there to support her female mates. Ms. Mason served green tea and passed joints to passers by who joined her, something she and her students share before every yoga class. One student, Ryan Der, a maker of custom iron doors, was there. "It's cool to connect with humans," he said, packing a rolling paper. "Most of the time everyone is on their phones."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A Roof of One's Own, With or Without the Gingerbread None Brittany Greeson for The New York Times DETROIT Colorful little homes are springing up alongside an arid freeway bank in the Dexter Linwood neighborhood here, a few miles northwest of downtown. Although tourists sometimes think the buildings are playthings and knock on the doors, the site is actually intended to help solve desperate urban problems. "Every single house is different on purpose," said the Rev. Faith Fowler, the executive director of Cass Community Social Services, a nonprofit group that is building the property's two dozen homes of a few hundred square feet each. Low income adults, including people formerly homeless or incarcerated, are moving into the compound, which is surrounded by long, sad stretches of Victorian ruins. Cass's eclectic oasis is meant as the antithesis of monolithic public housing. Its builders have scattered gingerbread ornaments on exteriors made of brick, stucco, shingles, clapboards and recycled barn boards. Breezes rustling through mature trees help drown out the freeway noise, and butterflies are descending on the residents' new flower beds and vegetable patches. Gladys Ferguson, who is in her 60s and has severe arthritis, rents Cass's yellow gabled house for 350 a month. (Seven years of her accumulated rent will eventually finance her outright purchase of the property.) "It's just a gorgeous little thing," she said. When she first entered the house for a preview, shortly before she moved in a few years ago, she sneaked away for a nap in the tucked away bedroom. "That was the most serene thing you've ever seen," she said. A crew working on a new sidewalk in August on the Cass site. Brittany Greeson for The New York Times Charities nationwide are creating similar tiny house clusters for people in need. The building type, best known in recent years for starring in reality TV shows like "Tiny House, Big Living," is gaining gravitas. It can offer reassuring domestic coziness for residents, and its nonthreatening appearance also appeals to wealthier neighbors, who might have raised "not in my backyard" objections to nonprofits' proposals for more institutional designs. "It looks like their own house, but on a smaller scale," said Andrew Heben, the project director at SquareOne Villages in Eugene, Ore. At the nonprofit's enclaves of mini homes, roofs are arched, gabled or slanted and facades come in earth tones or candy colors. The cuteness factor and the quick construction turnaround time have helped persuade volunteers to raise money and provide pro bono services. Dan Bryant, SquareOne's executive director, said contractors had been known to stop by works in progress unprompted and ask, "What have you got left over to do?" The Community First! Village in Austin, Tex., is providing hundreds of tiny houses and places for their residents to work, raise produce and access medical care. "It's succeeded beyond any of our imaginations" since it opened in 2015, said Alan Graham, the organization's founder. Residents prefer the "refuge and safety" of having their own four walls, however small the enclosure many suffered trauma on the streets and ended up considered "the most despised outcasts," Mr. Graham said. A handful of longtime tenants are now working with architects and builders to customize their own new homes. "We're treating them like they're billionaires," Mr. Graham said. One proposal, he added, resembles a Japanese pagoda: "It looks, on paper, cuter than all get out." Brittany Greeson for The New York Times Brittany Greeson for The New York Times Dozens of gabled prefab homes from Champion Home Builders have been shipped to Eden Village in Springfield, Mo., as havens for homeless people with chronic disabilities. The columned front porches and exteriors are painted in beiges, mint greens and brick reds, among other hues, and solar panels are being installed on the roofs. A donor has stitched new patchwork quilts for the residents' beds. "We decided not to give them hand me downs, which they've had all their lives," said David Brown, a founder of the project and its umbrella organization, the Gathering Tree. Glossy stone columbaria have niches that residents can reserve for storing their cremated ashes someday, in hand turned wooden urns. "This is a place of permanence" for people who have long felt unrooted and not expected anyone to commemorate their lives, said Nate Schlueter, the Gathering Tree's chief operating officer. Individualized and well crafted small homes for the 99 percent have been around since at least the 19th century, when Henry David Thoreau described his ideal quarters as an "airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling god." Other proselytizers have included Gustav Stickley, who popularized oaky bungalows; Frank Lloyd Wright, who came up with relatively modest streamlined prefab homes; and Buckminster Fuller, who envisioned utopias studded with geodesic domes. New Urbanist planners have recommended incorporating petite dwellings into subdivisions, to accommodate lower income residents. But sometimes the results have turned out a little too desirable; in Seaside, Fla., for instance, adorableness can now set you back nearly 1 million. Vacationers spend about 300 a night to stay at Think Big! A Tiny House Resort, a two year old attraction in South Cairo, N.Y. (Full disclosure: This reporter hugely enjoyed an incognito stay there this summer, in a snug driftwood gray shoebox named Mocha alongside goat pastures and mossy waterfalls.) Cass's eclectic oasis is meant as the antithesis of monolithic public housing. Brittany Greeson for The New York Times Nonprofits can keep costs low for small homes, but some experts wonder whether the trend will spread widely enough to make a noticeable dent in the nation's problem with homelessness. About half a million Americans every night, after all, have nowhere safe to lay their heads. Matthew Gordon Lasner, an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in New York, said he could not quite envision diminutive dwelling compounds turning into "a scalable solution." Yet the sites do raise awareness of a critical societal need more engagingly, perhaps, than politicians' affordable housing manifestos and they attract visitors including scholars. "I love poking around them," Mr. Lasner said. Ms. Ferguson said she had lost count of how many journalists and researchers had interviewed her. She has prepared a handwritten list of talking points about the advantages of tiny house living. She explained how she carefully researched flowers to introduce in her garden, to maximize appeal to butterflies. She and her neighbors are encouraged "to feel proud of themselves," as they tend the buildings and grounds together, she said. She added, firmly, "We are a friendly community you can write that down."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Footage crying kid, joryell driving car, messing up at practical, anna's morning before lecture... Jo's classmate about nerves....classroom antics....cafeteria is closed SOT Anna's Monday Teacher POST LECTURE 5:40 So the students they're married, they're not married, they're twenty, they're thirty, I've had students in their sixties. Job change, careers, you know, divorces, all kinds of things happen. 20;30 Anna's Monday Teacher: And it's just a different path, it's just a different path Scene: Joryell's classmates practice for lab CHAPTER 1: VO WE ALL FEEL IT. THE MIDDLE CLASS IS SHRINKING. JOBS IN ONCE STABLE FIELDS LIKE MANUFACTURING, TRANSPORTATION AND CLERICAL WORK ARE DISSAPEARING. AND THEY'RE NOT COMING BACK. SOT SCENE lab 'wait what do we do here? What do we do?' SO HOW DO WE SUCCEED IN THE NEW ECONOMY. THIS IS JORY ELL MILLER. HER FRIENDS CALL HER JOJO. SHE AND HER CLASSMATES THINK THEY'VE FOUND THE ANSWER. THEY'RE WORKING ON CAREER DO OVERS AND THEY'RE ALL BETTING ON HEALTHCARE. JO JO IS AT THE TAIL END OF A TWO YEAR PROGRAM AT BROOKDALE COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN LINCROFT NEW JERSEY. IN TWO YEARS, STUDENTS HERE GO THROUGH A LOT OF LAB WORK, HOSPITAL TRAINING AND TEST PREP. IT'S A RIGOROUS PROGRAM. THERE ARE 24 STUDENTS IN JOJO'S CLASS. 4 DIDN'T MAKE IT PAST THE FIRST YEAR. JOJO SOT They flunk out or it's not for everybody, you have to want it. It's not something you're going to walk through easily. Scenes Joryell's practical, Joryell hanging at school, joryell going home and hanging with her family.... CHAPTER 2 Jojo sot WAIT FOR ME! JORYELL'S TRYING OUT HER PRACTICAL.... JORYELL IN CLASS... JORYELL LEAVES TO GO HOME JORYELL AT HOME SHE AND HER HUSBAND HAVE A FUNNY BANTER BACK AND FORTH Joryell walking home to her car.... Joryell at home joking with her family..... Sot Teacher "Someone asked me before the exam they were confused by this....you had to answer all of the question...." SOT Joryell poses a question in class 'the respiratory therapist should recommend which of the following' JOJO's Classmate "I'd actually never heard of respiratory therapy until I looked it up in the program manual for Brookdale. It's like Okay what's this? We're like the batmen of the health care system. The respiratory therapist sometimes gets lost in the mix...However, when things hit the fan, when someone stops breathing, when they go into cardiac arrest, we're one of the first people there." VO JOJO ALREADY HAS A BACHELOR'S DEGREE IN FILM. BUT WHEN THE RECESSION HIT, SHE AND HER FAMILY MOVED HERE TO NEW JERSEY. THAT DIPLOMA DIDN'T HELP MUCH WHEN SHE WAS LOOKING FOR A WELL PAYING JOB. Jo jo sot I said okay we're getting older and it's not happening the same for me and I'm going to go back into a field that's really growing that I can be helpful in. VO OVER THE NEXT SEVEN YEARS, THE LABOR DEPARTMENT SAYS THEY'LL BE 5 MILLION MORE HEALTH CARE JOBS THAN THERE ARE TODAY THAT'S 5 MILLION MORE THERAPISTS, TECHNICIANS, NURSES. BY THE WAY, THERE ARE TWICE AS MANY REGISTERED NURSES IN THE US THAN THERE WERE JUST 30 YEARS AGO. AND ALMOST 4 OUT OF 5 NURSES EARN ENOUGH MONEY ON THEIR OWN, EVEN WITHOUT A SPOUSE'S PAYCHECK, TO PUT THEIR FAMILIES IN THE AMERICAN MIDDLE. Josh "We make just as much money as nurses if not more. It's a stable career. There's always going to be sick people from old people with COPD to people with Asthma. There's always going to be people we can help. MIT: 1;40 " I think every body's well aware, we have a growth of sort of professional, technical, managerial jobs. DAVID AUTOR (OTTER) IS AN ECONOMIST AT MIT. HE SAYS THE JOBS THAT ARE GROWING ARE THE ONES THAT REQUIRE SKILLS YOU IMPROVE OVER THE LONG RUN. YOU MAY NOTICE, THEY'RE ALSO HARDER TO OUTSOURCE. MIT And those jobs in general require high levels of education, and they require a lot of cognitive flexibility and interpersonal skills, so they don't simply follow scripted procedures. They require, kind of, creativity, intuition, hypothesis formation, new ideas, but also 03:00 expertise. You can't just show up, you have to have a specific skill set. Joryell at home.....her husband is SOT JORYELL sit down interview: My husband is so supportive. // 20;36 he is really proud of me. He's a good inspiration a motivator. When I get a little down or a little stressed out because it can be a lot especially this last semester...He's very supportive and understanding. 20;58 he doesn't complain. When I get down he's like 'we're almost done' (crying....) CHAPTER 3 Quick cuts of ANNA throughout her day... In Class With her daughter, Anna with her doula patient... MORNING LECTURE... Anna's Monday Lecture... Anna's Monday lecture: Teacher 1;15;07 speak in language they can understand Don't ask a little kid for a urine speciman say can you go in the bathroom and pee in this cup? He's as happy as a clam yes I can! ANNA"s LAB Anna is in her practical VO THIS IS ANNA MARINA ACKERSON. SHE'S KIND OF GOT A LOT GOING ON. SHE'S A MOM, AND A WIFE, AND SHE'S A DOULA. THEY'RE HEALTH COACHES FOR WOMEN GIVING BIRTH. AND NOW SHE'S A NURSING STUDENT. SOT ANNA I was a property manager. I still kind of am...but I was just thinking am I happy with what I'm doing? No. Am I making a difference, no. Am I miserable? Yes. I don't want to be miserable. I want to do something that I like... Sot Classroom Professor Talk to a kid so he'll understand. Don't ask him for a urine specimen...say 'can you pee in the cup?!' VO ANNA'S GOT A COLLEGE DEGREE, TOO. BUT WHEN SHE HAD HER DAUGHTER, SHE REALIZED SHE LOVED THE IDEA OF BECOMING A MIDWIFE. THE ECONOMY MIGHT AGREE. MIDWIVES ARE NURSES WITH ADVANCED DEGREES WHO YOU'LL SEE MORE AND MORE IN DELIVERY ROOMS. FOR THAT, SHE'LL NEED A LOT MORE SCHOOLING AFTER BROOKDALE, SAME GOES FOR MOST OF HER CLASSMATES. Anna's group lab SOT "You've got to learn to trust your instinct. 'Always trust the mother's instinct' Right because if you see something that's not quite right, you have to say something' QUESTION SO TELL ME ABOUT YOUR SEMESTER.... Anna SOT This semester's been really hard for me. I lost my brother at the end of September, so that was really really difficult. So that really, you know, I just kind of normally I'm very proactive about studying and everything like that and it was just really really hard for me. And it's also like a realization that everybody's got their own thing like that going on. Another one of my classmates, her husband got diagnosed with cancer. Another one of my classmates, her husband passed away. I got actually that criticism early on from someone who, I guess was a friend, but in passing. And, you know, she was like, oh you take on this many clients and you're maarried and you do this and you do that, like something's gotta give. It's always that mentality. I'm not saying you can have it all, sort of thing, but you can do everything.. To a lot of people who probably never expected that of me, there's something honourable in that, I think. Scenes CHAPTER 4 EVERYONE'S GOT TO DO IT.... JOJO her practical.... SOT JOJO'S PRACTICAL A2: Okay. So. Hi Jojo, what I want you to do, you have a patient who's just been put on the ventilator, // you see that your patient's saturation is extremely low. What changes would you make on the ventilator to help your patient to, ah 02:3to oxygenate them? MIT DAVID AUTOR SOT The US led the world in terms of sending people to college in most of the 20th century. ///We're now 14th in the world....so there are many many countries that have surpassed the US in getting people, you know, post secondary skill sets. And I think that's unfortunate, 09:30 not just for the country as a whole, but for individuals who are, you know, don't have access to the type of employment and earnings opportunities that they would // So although we have certainly raised education levels over time, arguably we still have too few highly educated workers and too many less educated workers for the labor market that we face now. SOT Joryell I'm going to go on and get my masters after this. I love school. I think I'm addicted to school. 32;39 I see more and more older people going back to school. There was a woman in my class who was in her seventies so that's just inspiration to me SOT Great job JoJo you actually did learn something this semester!!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
One of the first things we learn in soccer is to pass the ball. If you don't, you lose it. But on that day, Maradona did the stuff of movies. He defied the odds. He charged on as an army of English players closed in on him. I was in the living room right in front of the TV, yelling, "Pass the ball!" He forged on, leaving English player after English player, and even the goalie, in his wake. He covered almost 200 feet in 10 seconds, before sending the ball to the back of the net as Argentines all burst into screams of joy and disbelief. It wasn't just a World Cup win for Argentina. When he led a coup against Margaret Thatcher's England, which killed our soldiers four years earlier in the Falklands War, he gave us the best (and probably the only) payback we could get as a nation. One hero to mend the open wound of millions. I would have been perfectly happy winning with a couple of average goals. But Maradona first gave the English a wet willy, and then he showed them the creators of modern soccer how it's done. After that game, he scored another two incredible goals against Belgium in the semifinals, and then led us to victory against West Germany in the final. It was the last time that happened. As much as our dear Lionel Messi has tried, we Argentines have not won a World Cup since '86. And boy, have we held on to that moment, to that Maradona. Holding on to the memory of a nation that was once on top of the world is such an Argentine thing to do. Angel Cappa, a well known Argentine coach, says that futbol is an excuse to be happy, to forget all our troubles, even if it's only for 90 minutes. Maradona gave us happiness for a lifetime. Of course, for people like my Venezuelan friend, he was a despicable character. But I simply saw him as human, with good and not so good qualities. Maybe my perspective is influenced by the joy he gave me. Wait, let me rephrase that: My perspective is definitely influenced by the joy he gave me. And I, quite frankly, cannot help it. As the great Argentine writer and humorist Roberto Fontanarrosa once put it, I don't care what Maradona did with his life; I thank him for what he did with mine. Last week, when none of us had the slightest clue that his death was imminent, I bought a replica of the official 1986 World Cup ball online, which I had owned as a kid and cherished as a souvenir of one of the happiest moments of my childhood. About 10 minutes after I heard the sad news, I received a package the 1986 World Cup ball. That it would arrive on the same day he died was an eerie coincidence, but one day I'm going to tell my daughter that was Maradona still working his magic with the ball. Juan Manuel Rotulo ( Rotulin) is a head of music editorial for Latin America at Spotify. 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
Carlos Beltran was the only player named in Major League Baseball's report on its investigation into illicit sign stealing by the Houston Astros in 2017, and that was for a reason. The report, which was released on Monday and has led to the firing of three people, indicated that virtually all of the Astros' players were involved in, or at least aware of, the scheme to tell batters which pitches would be coming from opponents. But according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation who requested anonymity to discuss details that had not been made public, Beltran was named because he was a central figure at the outset of the operation, in which electronic equipment was used illegally to steal the opposing catchers' signs. A.J. Hinch, the Astros' manager, Jeff Luhnow, Houston's general manager, and Alex Cora, the Boston Red Sox manager who was a bench coach for the Astros in 2017, all lost their jobs as a result. Cora was let go by the Red Sox on Tuesday night, one day after the Astros owner Jim Crane fired Hinch and Luhnow. Beltran's case is different, but still presents a thorny situation for the Mets, who hired him on Nov. 1 to be their next manager. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Even though the investigation found that Beltran was intimately involved in the sign stealing scheme, he will not face any penalty from M.L.B. because he was a player on the 2017 Astros. Rob Manfred, the M.L.B. commissioner, elected not to punish him or any of the other players in return for their cooperation in the investigation. Beltran was said to have been forthright with investigators, according to the person with knowledge of the inquiry. M.L.B. also said in its statement that it would have been "both difficult and impractical" to punish the players because they were not in official leadership roles at the time, unlike Hinch, Luhnow and Cora. The report cited a 2017 memo in which Manfred warned teams that managers and general managers would be held accountable for any electronic sign stealing. The Mets declined to comment to The New York Times, and Beltran also did not respond to a request for comment. Therefore Beltran, even though he is a manager now, could slip through unscathed by league punishment. The Mets, however, could still decide to impose some form of punishment of their own. Pressure to do so could mount in the coming days based on how the Astros and the Red Sox responded to the suspensions of their managers. It could be awkward to have Beltran managing the Mets without consequence when Cora and Hinch who was far less involved in the scheme than Beltran was have both been suspended and fired. The Mets have another, more basic issue their own decision making. After Beltran was hired, the Mets announced a plan to transfer the ownership of the team from their three primary executives Fred Wilpon, Saul Katz and Jeff Wilpon to Steve Cohen in a process that is supposed to be completed in no more than five years. It is not known when Cohen will move into a more prominent role in the decision making process, or what his feelings on Beltran are. In November, Beltran told The New York Post that he had not been involved in the Astros' scheme. That has now been contradicted by M.L.B.'s findings. The league's report said that Beltran, who was in his final year as a player in 2017, was at least a consultant in the affair. "Approximately two months into the 2017 season, a group of players, including Carlos Beltran, discussed that the team could improve on decoding opposing teams' signs and communicating the signs to the batter," the report said. But Beltran was more than just a typical player. He turned 40 that year, and was in his final season of a 20 year career worthy of Hall of Fame consideration when he is eligible in 2022. He was an influential and respected leader on the 2017 Astros and, according to the person with knowledge of the investigation, he was closely involved, along with Cora, in the initial setup of the scheme. It is not clear whether he was a part of the day to day execution of the plan. Beltran, who spent the 2019 season as a special adviser with the Yankees, is also known as an expert at stealing signs through the more traditional, and legal, methods without the assistance of electronics. Those include spying on catchers while on the basepaths and then relaying their signals to the batter with subtle gestures. M.L.B. officials felt some level of understanding for younger players who may have been coerced into participating or did not understand the implications of the scheme, and thus they decided against naming them. But that sympathy did not apply to a veteran like Beltran who helped orchestrate the plan. Still, Beltran was technically a player, and for that reason he escaped league sanctions. Anything more is up to the Mets.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
It was a typical night in Staci Burns's house outside Fort Wayne, Ind. She was cooking dinner while her 3 year old son, Isaac, watched videos on the YouTube Kids app on an iPad. Suddenly he cried out, "Mommy, the monster scares me!" When Ms. Burns walked over, Isaac was watching a video featuring crude renderings of the characters from "PAW Patrol," a Nickelodeon show that is popular among preschoolers, screaming in a car. The vehicle hurtled into a light pole and burst into flames. The 10 minute clip, "PAW Patrol Babies Pretend to Die Suicide by Annabelle Hypnotized," was a nightmarish imitation of an animated series in which a boy and a pack of rescue dogs protect their community from troubles like runaway kittens and rock slides. In the video Isaac watched, some characters died and one walked off a roof after being hypnotized by a likeness of a doll possessed by a demon. Parents and children have flocked to Google owned YouTube Kids since it was introduced in early 2015. The app's more than 11 million weekly viewers are drawn in by its seemingly infinite supply of clips, including those from popular shows by Disney and Nickelodeon, and the knowledge that the app is supposed to contain only child friendly content that has been automatically filtered from the main YouTube site. But the app contains dark corners, too, as videos that are disturbing for children slip past its filters, either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms. In recent months, parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes. Many have taken to Facebook to warn others, and share video screenshots showing moments ranging from a Claymation Spider Man urinating on Elsa of "Frozen" to Nick Jr. characters in a strip club. Malik Ducard, YouTube's global head of family and learning content, said that the inappropriate videos were "the extreme needle in the haystack," but that "making the app family friendly is of the utmost importance to us." While the offending videos are a tiny fraction of YouTube Kids' universe, they are another example of the potential for abuse on digital media platforms that rely on computer algorithms, rather than humans, to police the content that appears in front of people in this case, very young people. And they show, at a time when Congress is closely scrutinizing technology giants, how rules that govern at least some of the content on children's television fail to extend to the digital world. When videos are uploaded to YouTube, algorithms determine whether or not they are appropriate for YouTube Kids. The videos are continually monitored after that, Mr. Ducard said, a process that is "multilayered and uses a lot of machine learning." Several parents said they expected the app to be safer because it asked during setup whether their child was in preschool or older. Mr. Ducard said that while YouTube Kids may highlight some content, like Halloween videos in October, "it isn't a curated experience." Instead, "parents are in the driver's seat," he said, pointing to the ability to block channels, set usage timers and disable search results. Parents are also encouraged to report inappropriate videos, which someone at YouTube then manually reviews, he said. He noted that in the past 30 days, "less than .005 percent" of the millions of videos viewed in the app were removed for being inappropriate. "We strive," he added, "to make that fraction even lower." Holly Hart of Gray, Tenn., said she was recently reading while her 3 year old daughter was in the room when she noticed that Disney Junior characters in the video her daughter was watching started "turning into monsters and trying to feed each other to alligators." An image previewing a recommended video showed the characters in a provocative pose. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. "It was an eye opener for me," said Ms. Hart, who had downloaded the app because it was being used at the local elementary school. Not all of the inappropriate videos feature cartoons. Alisa Clark Wilcken of Vernal, Utah, said her 4 year old son had recently seen a video of a family playing roughly with a young girl, including a scene in which her forehead is shaved, causing her to wail and appear to bleed. Most of the videos flagged by parents were uploaded to YouTube in recent months by anonymous users with names like Kids Channel TV and Super Moon TV. The videos' titles and descriptions feature popular character names and terms like "education" and "learn colors." They are independently animated, presumably to avoid copyright violations and detection. Some clips uploaded as recently as August have millions of views on the main YouTube site and run automatically placed ads, suggesting they are financially lucrative for the makers as well as YouTube, which shares in ad revenue. It is not clear how many of those views came on YouTube Kids. One video on YouTube Kids from the account Subin TV shows the "PAW Patrol" characters in a strip club. One of them then visits a doctor and asks for her cartoon legs to be replaced with long, provocative human legs in stilettos. The account's description says, "Video created with the purpose of learning and development of children!" The account that posted the video seen by Ms. Burns's son is named Super Ares TV and has a Facebook page called PAW Patrol Awesome TV. Questions sent there were mostly ignored, though the account did reply: "That's a Cute character and video is a funny story, take it easy, that's it." The Super Ares TV account seems to be linked to a number of other channels targeting children with cartoon imitations, based on their similar channel fonts, animation style and Greek mythology inspired names, from Super Hermes TV and Super Apollo TV to Super Hera TV. A Super Zeus TV account included a link to a shopping site called SuperKidsShop.com, which is registered in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. A call to the phone number listed in that site's registration records was answered by a man who declined to identify himself. He said that his partners were responsible for the videos and that a team of about 100 people worked on them. He said he would forward email requests for comment to them. Those emails went unanswered. Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health, said such videos brought up a host of issues for children. "It's just made that much more upsetting by the fact that characters they thought they knew and trusted are behaving in these ways," he said. "Nickelodeon creates its characters and shows to entertain kids, so we share the same concern as parents about the unsuitable nature of some of the videos being served to them," said David Bittler, a spokesman for the Viacom owned network. A Disney spokesman said YouTube Kids had assured the company that it was "working on ways to more effectively and proactively prevent this type of situation from occurring." Some parents have taken to deleting the app. Others, like Ms. Burns, still allow its use, just on a more limited, supervised basis. "This is a children's application it's targeted to children," said Crissi Gilreath, a mother of two in Oklahoma, "and I just can't believe that with such a big company they don't have people whose job it is to filter and flag."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Investors and clients of the facial recognition start up freely used the app on dates and at parties and to spy on the public. Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, was having dinner at Cipriani, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, when his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn't recognize. After the couple sat down at another table, Mr. Catsimatidis asked a waiter to go over and take a photo. Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter's date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco. "I wanted to make sure he wasn't a charlatan," said Mr. Catsimatidis, who then texted the man's bio to his daughter. Ms. Catsimatidis said she and her date had no idea how her father had identified him so quickly. "I expect my dad to be able to do crazy things. He's very technologically savvy," Ms. Catsimatidis said. "My date was very surprised." Clearview was unknown to the general public until this January, when The New York Times reported that the secretive start up had developed a breakthrough facial recognition system that was in use by hundreds of law enforcement agencies. The company quickly faced a backlash on multiple fronts. Facebook, Google and other tech giants sent cease and desist letters. Lawsuits were filed in Illinois and Virginia, and the attorney general of New Jersey issued a moratorium against the app in that state. In response to the criticism, Clearview published a "code of conduct," emphasizing in a blog post that its technology was "available only for law enforcement agencies and select security professionals to use as an investigative tool." The post added: "We recognize that powerful tools always have the potential to be abused, regardless of who is using them, and we take the threat very seriously. Accordingly, the Clearview app has built in safeguards to ensure these trained professionals only use it for its intended purpose: to help identify the perpetrators and victims of crimes." The Times, however, has identified multiple individuals with active access to Clearview's technology who are not law enforcement officials. And for more than a year before the company became the subject of public scrutiny, the app had been freely used in the wild by the company's investors, clients and friends. Those with Clearview logins used facial recognition at parties, on dates and at business gatherings, giving demonstrations of its power for fun or using it to identify people whose names they didn't know or couldn't recall. "As part of the ordinary course of due diligence, we provided trial accounts to potential and current investors, and other strategic partners, so they could test the technology," said Hoan Ton That, the company's co founder. Mr. Catsimatidis first heard about Clearview from his friend Richard Schwartz, another founder of the company, who served as an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when Mr. Giuliani was mayor of New York. Last summer, Mr. Catsimatidis ran a trial project with Clearview at an East Side Gristedes market. The company used the system to identify known "shoplifters or people who had held up other stores," Mr. Catsimatidis said. "People were stealing our Haagen Dazs. It was a big problem," he said. He described Clearview as a "good system" that helped security personnel identify problem shoppers. BuzzFeed News has reported that two other entities, a labor union and a real estate firm, also ran trials with a surveillance system developed by Clearview to flag individuals they deemed risky. The publication also reported that Clearview's software has been used by Best Buy, Macy's, Kohl's, the National Basketball Association and numerous other organizations. When Clearview first developed its facial recognition service in 2017, Mr. Ton That and Mr. Schwartz were uncertain about who might pay for it, and they courted a range of clients including real estate firms, banks and retailers. At the same time, Clearview was seeking outside investment. Many of the individuals the company approached got personal logins to the app. "I have the app," Mr. Lambert said in an interview. "I've used it to talk about what we're doing in the space. I show it to friends of mine, potential investors. "They thought it was amazing," he added. "They say, 'How do I get that?' And I say, 'You can't.'" Mr. Scalzo, the founder of the investment firm Kirenaga Partners, said in an interview that his school aged daughters enjoyed playing with the app. "They like to use it on themselves and their friends to see who they look like in the world," he said. "It's kind of fun for people." A spokesman for Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. When Clearview was seeking its Series A round of funding, which was completed in 2019, the start up contacted a number of venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. Access to the app was offered as a perk, according to people familiar with the company's fund raising attempts. Doug Leone, a billionaire partner at Sequoia, was given a login, according to three people with knowledge of Clearview's operations. But his account was revoked when Sequoia declined to invest. A spokeswoman for Sequoia declined to comment. In September, Ashton Kutcher, the actor turned venture capitalist, described an app much like Clearview during a YouTube series called "Hot Ones," in which guests are interviewed while eating spicy chicken wings. "I have an app in my phone in my pocket right now. It's like a beta app," Mr. Kutcher said. "It's a facial recognition app. I can hold it up to anybody's face here and, like, find exactly who you are, what internet accounts you're on, what they look like. It's terrifying." Mr. Ton That contends that Clearview is doing nothing wrong that his app simply replicates what other search engines do. Instead of allowing internet users to search for people's public images by name, as one can do on Google, he said, Clearview allows them to do the search by uploading a face. For now, it's a power that Clearview controls and can give out as it pleases. In October, Clearview asked Nicholas Cassimatis, an expert on artificial intelligence, to help conduct an internal accuracy test. He did the work for free, he said, because he knew Mr. Ton That socially. The test consisted of submitting the faces of 834 federal and state legislators. Clearview's algorithms accurately identified every one of the politicians. After the test was complete, Mr. Cassimatis was allowed to keep Clearview's app on his phone. He said he had since run dozens of searches. "I tested it in surprising places: smoky bars, dark places. And it worked every time," Mr. Cassimatis said. "It's road testing. I do it as a hobby. I ask people for permission. It's like a parlor trick. People like it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Big, puffy and comfortable, the Avalon has served Toyota like a trusty Barcalounger. Since 1995 it's been a staid sedan, in a staid full size class, from a staid company. Because the Avalon has been so comfortable in its skin, I've always respected it. But Toyota, spurred by its racecar driving president, Akio Toyoda, is tired of being a synonym for beige and boring. So the 2013 Avalon finds itself the unlikely avatar of a purportedly new more adventurous and design driven Toyota. By auto industry standards, the resulting Avalon is hardly revolutionary. But by Toyota standards, the latest Avalon does represent an advance on modern territory, a dowager edging onto the electronica dance floor. This more Americanized Avalon was conceived in Toyota's Calty design studios in Newport Beach, Calif., and Ann Arbor, Mich., and engineered at the company's Michigan technical center. There's just one issue. If you're ready to splurge on a roomier, deluxe alternative to a Camry, Toyota's mainstream family car, you may as well splurge decisively for the 40 m.p.g. Avalon Hybrid or the higher end Touring or Limited models. Those versions start around 36,000, with the Hybrid's base price ranging from 36,350 to 42,195. These smartly decked out models can cost roughly as much as the Lexus ES 350 from Toyota's luxury division, which starts at 37,265; both cars share the latest Camry platform and the gas version's optional 3.5 liter V 6. But the Avalon actually handles better than the Lexus. In contrast, the Avalon XLE Premium I drove, which starts at 33,990, left something of a cheap taste in my mouth. (The base XLE is priced at 31,785, about 2,000 less than last year's entry model.) Those versions may interest people who want to maximize interior acreage without spending a fortune and are willing to forgo features like a standard navigation system, a powerful audio system, a driver's memory seat or rain sensing wipers. In fact, for this type of large and unhurried sedan and specifically a Toyota the Hybrid seems the smarter play. The first ever Avalon Hybrid adopts the Camry Hybrid's 2.5 liter 4 cylinder engine and two electric motor generators; one is driven by the gas engine to produce electricity and charge the 245 volt battery, and the second, independent motor helps propel the car. With the 156 horsepower piston engine, this latest Hybrid Synergy Drive system quieter and smoother than before produces a combined 200 horses. At 40 m.p.g. in town and 39 on the highway, the Hybrid's federal ratings swamp the 21/31 m.p.g. tally of gas only models. In real world testing, and despite slogs through Manhattan traffic, the Hybrid showed me 36 m.p.g. over all, a remarkable 50 percent gain over the 24 m.p.g. of the standard gas version. At today's gasoline prices, the Avalon Hybrid will save 15,000 mile a year drivers 950 a year in fuel costs compared with the gas only model, paying back the 1,750 option cost in less than two years. That's a shorter payback period than any hybrid I've tested. Drive this Hybrid 90,000 miles and the savings will total about 4,000. Because of the placement of its nickel metal hydride battery, the Hybrid loses two cubic feet of trunk space compared with the gas only Avalon, but at 14 cubic feet the hold is still roomy enough for family duties. Its 0 60 m.p.h. acceleration time of roughly 8 seconds is about 1.5 seconds slower than the 268 horsepower V 6 model, but more than adequate for big sedan duty. Pressed by refined, handsome rivals like the front drive Buick LaCrosse and Hyundai Azera or the rear drive Chrysler 300 and Hyundai Genesis, the Avalon finally flashes some style and finesse of its own. The Avalon's visual streamlining seems inspired by Buick and Hyundai, with more than a touch of Lexus. Whatever the source, the Avalon steps out of its no risk persona of previous generations. There's a trendy downsloping roof, slimmer rear roof pillars and shorter body overhangs. A wide span grille is book ended by spiffy square element headlamps, and Limited models get LED daytime running lights. While the interior of the lower grade Avalon Premium left me unimpressed the asymmetric dashboard, padded in faux leather, initially reminded me of a ski boat console the Hybrid Limited altered my perception. The seats were trimmed in Lexus level perforated leather, and that top shelf Avalon also included an intuitive navigation system with a reconfigurable thin film touch screen, JBL audio, three zone climate control, blind spot monitor and heated seats front and rear. Ambient lighting spills from the dashboard, mimicking Mercedes and other luxury brands. Legroom in the rear is down by 1.7 inches, to 39.2 inches, though the back seat remains roomy enough for three passengers. The trunk swallows 16 cubic feet of gear, and there's a pass through for skis or long cargo. Recent new models like the Ford Fusion, Chevrolet Volt and Cadillac ATS have all failed to make flush mounted controls with no moving buttons, but rather flat surfaces that respond to touch work as intended. But the Avalon's flush controls worked flawlessly, neither ignoring commands nor responding accidentally when barely brushed. Those controls include a pleasing fan speed controller that adjusts with the slide of a finger. Unlike previous Avalons, the new model doesn't simply float down the road like an inner tube on a lazy river. The structure and suspension are stiffened. A console button offers Sport and gas saving Eco settings, with the Hybrid adding an E.V. mode for brief electric only operation. Compared with its numb predecessors, the 2013 Avalons actually transmit some road sensations to the driver's fingertips. The Avalon walks a solid straight line path, the steering isn't excessively light and the body motions are better controlled. The downside of improved chassis control is a slight loss of ride comfort, a departure for a company that for years has taken the path of least resistance, settling for smoothness above all. And the Toyota's underdamped suspension does allow some disconcerting crash through over nasty pavement. Big boned sedans have been losing popularity for years, with the Avalon lately falling below 30,000 annual sales from a peak of 104,000 in 2000 as Americans shifted to S.U.V.'s and crossovers for family duties. Yet automakers have kept the faith and the competition is surprisingly keen, with appealing entries from Chrysler, Hyundai, Buick and now Toyota. The Chrysler 300, with its unmistakable style, available Hemi V 8 and the performance advantage of rear wheel drive, remains the class's most dynamic presence. But the Chrysler is also a bit of an outlier in this category. The Avalon has kept to the quiter end of the street. The 2013 model keeps the good bits spaciousness, a quiet interior and, quite likely, top reliability and modernizes the rest. The Avalon, Toyota hopes, should extend its appeal beyond those who have become full time shuffleboard and Bingo players. And for the Avalon Hybrid especially, even whippersnappers in their 40s or 50s might appreciate a full size sedan that returns better overall mileage than most budget compacts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
To know Alexandre Arnault, you first have to find Alexandre Arnault. And because Mr. Arnault, 26, is (despite being 26) the president and chief executive of a luggage company with nearly half a billion euros in annual revenue, he may be in Cologne, Germany, where that luggage is made and where he briefly relocated, or in his hometown, Paris, where he has returned and opened an international sales and marketing office, or in London, where he often has business to attend to, or New York, where he recently hosted a dinner for 120 to celebrate the new look of said luggage, or in Los Angeles, where friends like Evan Spiegel, the 28 year old chief executive of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, are based. So to cross his path requires a fair amount of commitment, not to mention a travel stipend. He is well positioned to observe what he calls "airport market share," which a layman might call hanging out by the baggage carousel, just watching the wheels go 'round and 'round. "If you follow me on Instagram, you see that," he said last week. "Just a lot of stories of suitcases everywhere." Mr. Arnault, whose fairly moderate youthful rebellion had included buying a Rimowa suitcase, to his father's consternation "It wasn't Vuitton and we didn't own it" had come full circle. Rimowa has "everything we seek for in brands," he said. "Craftsmanship, quality, DNA, design, creativity, everything." Suddenly, the turn of the century suitcase company was collaborating with the New York skate label Supreme on two instantly sold out suitcases, and with Fendi, a fellow LVMH brand, on leather trimmed ones. The French streetwear label Nasaseasons was making Rimowa caps. Virgil Abloh, a friend of Mr. Arnault's, had clear Rimowa cases made that then were worn as backpacks at his Off White men's show during Paris Fashion Week in June. Mr. Arnault loped backstage to have a closer look and Mr. Abloh, who also is the men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton, broke through a crowd to say hello. "We're changing the game," he said to Mr. Arnault. "Day by day." Eighteen months into the job, Mr. Arnault, with his chief brand officer, Hector Muelas, has overseen a rebrand and a redesign of Rimowa's logo (while keeping, of course, its famous ridged suitcase design), introduced a new website, brought on the likes of Roger Federer and the top model Adwoa Aboah as brand spokesmodels and so far succeeded in making the unsexy category of luggage into something that seems very nearly hip. Tall, trim and rangy, Mr. Arnault has a shy, serious way about him, and his demeanor leans more toward the efficient management consultant that he recently was than, say, that of his older half brother Antoine, who has a supermodel partner, Natalia Vodianova, and a slightly roguish air. His hobbies include running and listening to tech geek podcasts. He isn't particularly interested in being hip personally. "Takes too much time," he said. "You can't work if you do that." He was sitting, as he said so, in view of his baby grand, in his palatial apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, expansive enough to have views of both the Grand Palais and Invalides. The family, and the group, are evident everywhere: In the piles of LVMH coffee table books and in photos all around, staged and candid (here on a shelf is Mr. Arnault at 13 with his brother Frederic at their half sister Delphine's wedding in 2005; except in this case, the wedding photographer was Karl Lagerfeld). He has lived here, off and on, since his college days, before which the apartment was his brother Antoine's. It is not the typical college apartment, of course, but then again, the three framed Basquiats above the piano are only posters "Can't afford Basquiat yet" and well, yes, that is a Lichtenstein in the other room, but only a lithograph. "I'm only 26, you know," he said. "I just sell a few suitcases. So you have to start somewhere." Mr. Arnault graduated from Telecom ParisTech, moved on to Ecole Polytechnique, his father's alma mater, for a master's, and to internships in business before joining Groupe Arnault, the family holding company. He was seen as a digital reformer, someone in touch with a younger generation naturally enough, being part of it. So it was that he became the third (and not last) of Mr. Arnault's children to join the family company, one whose reach is enormous and whose success makes its scions nearly royals in contemporary France. (Arnault pere, 69, is the country's richest man.) Delphine, 43, is the executive vice president of Louis Vuitton; Antoine, 41, is the group's head of communications and image as well as chairman of Loro Piana and chief executive of Berluti. Another Arnault steps up at LVMH, but this time it's at TAG Heuer "I was obviously raised to be in the group," Alexandre Arnault said, meaning LVMH. He is careful to note that it was his choice, not a requirement he turned down offers from McKinsey, the consulting group, and KKR, the investment firm, where he interned but it had an air of dynastic inevitability. That can't be said for following in the footsteps of his mother, Helene Mercier Arnault, as a concert pianist, even though he, like his two younger brothers, Frederic, 23, and Jean, 19, is an accomplished musician. "She always told us if we wanted to become musicians she would support us," he said. "I'll never know if my dad would have been happy with it. But he loves the piano." If Rimowa is to be Mr. Arnault's proving ground, he will have to show that, at his age, he is capable of running a company as well as his fellow group executives, many of whom have known him since childhood. He is closest to his brothers and a few friends from school, most of whom, understandably, don't entirely relate to his responsibilities, and it has brought him closer to the friends, like Mr. Spiegel of Snapchat, who do. "It was kind of refreshing to go on walks with someone who's my age and tackling similar problems," Mr. Spiegel said. "He's a really creative guy. He's constantly thinking about the brand and how to express that." Mr. Arnault is running Rimowa in a more start up spirit than many of the company's longer ensconced maisons, with a nimble agility, an all hands on deck ethos and a Supreme pinball machine. If his approach is successful, he hopes to extrapolate the lessons for the group at large. He is emerging from the privileged obscurity of his pre C.E.O. life and meeting regularly with executives throughout the organization. "I've been in the business for, like I say, 26 years already so I try to help as much as I can everywhere," he said. So far, Mr. Arnault's approach appears to be working. Rimowa is on an expansionist path, opening three more stores in the United States before the end of the year (one in Miami, two in Las Vegas), and increasing its presence in Berlin, Tokyo and Hong Kong. After beginning as co chief executive, he has quietly taken over as sole president and C.E.O., and he is bullish on its future, which he says need not rest exclusively on suitcases. "One very frustrating thing for us was that the interaction between Rimowa and the customer is always on the unenjoyable part of the travel," he said: home to airport, airport to hotel. He aims to have Rimowa more present in customers' everyday lives. That might mean other bags; it might, one day, mean things you can wear on your travels. Mr. Arnault appeared at the Kith show during New York Fashion Week with a little Rimowa pochette, a kind of clutch with the brand's trademark ridges. (His was an amenity kit that came with the Off White cases, but similar ones have been given as occasional customer gifts.) "I think I can double the business in a few years," he said. "We can easily go above a billion. The potential is enormous." If realized, that would handily add him to the ranks of potential successors to the LVMH throne when, one day, the elder Arnault steps down, joining a family scrabble that includes (at least as far as industry gossip has it) his two elder siblings. In September, his younger brother Frederic was promoted to a more public, prominent role at TAG Heuer, the LVMH owned Swiss watch brand. Mr. Arnault declined to go into LVMH Kremlinology, preferring to focus on his present role at Rimowa. "I've only been there 18 months," he said. "We've built this team, we have a pretty impressive plan and I just want to make sure that I stay there and I see all the changes that I'm implementing to the end. It's my first real professional experience." He also said: "I'll have a life beyond it. I don't think I'll die as head of Rimowa, but so far I've tried not to think about it too much."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A 10 year lease is available in the second quarter of next year for a two story corner retail space, with 5,790 square feet on the ground floor and 5,283 on the lower one, in this eight story building opposite the Museum of Natural History. The two spaces can be divided. The space offers over 100 feet of wraparound frontage and is the former site of three restaurants: Ocean Grill and Gazala's on the ground floor, and 78 Below on the lower level.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
With acting cabinet secretaries everywhere, the Departments of Homeland Security and State hollowed out, and the recent departure of high profile, nonpolitical appointees on the National Security Council staff (the Vindman brothers and Victoria Coates), the judgment and experience about who wants to attack us and where is basically gone. This creates an enormous risk to our country. While our intelligence community is the most impressive in the world, we can't see and know everything. No nation can. So we rely on other intelligence services. And not just the ones of Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand that, along with the United States, make up the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance. We also need allies with eyes and ears in places we just can't go, like North Korea and China. A purge of our best and brightest intelligence officers will signal to them that new management is coming, and current relationships aren't useful any longer. Allied services also won't trust us if our own officers face constant pressure to politicize intelligence. That means reporting streams will dry up, we won't get early warning on planned attacks and we will lose critical knowledge about the decisions adversaries are making that may not have consequences today, but could have huge ones in the next decade. It's impossible to know how many clues we will miss if our intelligence community is isolated from the world and the president's daily brief only reinforces what the administration wants to hear. A so called house clearing could damage our intelligence abilities for at least a generation. Recruitment and retention will of course plummet, and those officers and analysts left won't have the mentorship or the experience to ensure our assessments are based on truth. For the sake of our country, I hope Mr. Grenell makes a careful assessment of the intelligence community's capacities and impressive work force before making further changes. How dangerous it would be if we lose the tip of the spear against those who would destroy us. Jane Harman, a Democrat, represented California in the House from 1993 to 1999 and from 2001 to 2013. 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
ATLANTA Allison Glock and T Cooper live behind a white picket fence, an enclosure so tidy and welcoming that it seems to grin at passers by. Its cheer is a match for their house, warmed on the inside by an upright piano, a plump sofa facing the weathered wood fireplace, and family portraits lining the walls. This is home, you may imagine, to the quintessential American family, living contentedly behind its clapboard facade. And you would be right, to a point. "We are a family of difference not that we make a big deal of it," Ms. Glock said as she set out platters of biscuits for her husband; her teenage daughters, Dixie and Matilda; and a guest. And not that it shows at a glance. To meet them, Mr. Cooper lean and bearded in a chambray work shirt, Ms. Glock showing off a russet bob that complemented her gray speckled top, you would be hard pressed to say just what sets them apart. Still, differences announced themselves the other week as the family settled at the kitchen refectory table to talk, the conversation punctuated by the sounds of their pit bulls, Milton and Elvis, noisily lapping from a water bowl nearby. Ms. Glock, 48, a poet, memoirist, screenwriter and a senior staff writer for ESPN, is the daughter of a stoutly conservative Southern family. Mr. Cooper, 44, a novelist, television writer and documentary filmmaker, is a transplanted New Yorker descended from Russian Jewish immigrants. He is also transgender. Those distinctions, which bind but by no means define them, lie at the heart of their recent work. They are the married authors of "Changers," a well received series of young adult novels, each a nervy exploration of what it may be like for an adolescent to swap identities at the start of every school year. "As an L.G.B.T. family, we are writing content for the kids we used to be," said Ms. Glock, who signs the series as Allison Glock Cooper. "Our main characters are diverse in every way: race, body type, gender, sexual orientation." She was describing in rough outlines the members of an ancient, enigmatic fictional race called Changers, teenagers required to spend each of their four years of high school outwardly transformed, having assumed a radically new identity. In "Book One: Drew," readers become briefly acquainted with 13 year old Ethan, who has just moved from New York to Tennessee and wakes up on the first day of his freshman year in the alien body of a girl (the title character): a pretty, athletic blond cheerleader he may have lusted after in his former life. Ethan now Drew must navigate the shoals of freshman year and find her place in the knotty high school hierarchy. In "Book Two," Drew becomes Oryon, an African American boy negotiating a truce between his former selves and his latest incarnation. He experiences not just thinly veiled racism, but also, like Drew before him, the uneasy sensation one familiar to transgender and gender fluid young people of being in the wrong body. By the start of "Book Three" he has morphed into the overweight, hence overlooked, thornily rebellious Kim. Each character is given the task of chronicling his or her experiences before moving on to the next identity, and they are expected to settle by the end of four years on one of those identities, without the option of returning to the person they were at the start. Bummer? Not really. "Choosing who you want to be that's the ultimate choice," Ms. Glock said. "For most people that's mind blowing." "There was a moment in publishing where transgender literature went from being published quietly, almost like samizdat, to being pushed to the front of the bookstore," said Todd Shuster, a literary agent in New York. Its appeal, like that of portrayals of other outsider groups, is becoming mainstream, Mr. Shuster suggested. "As transgender and gender fluid people have become comfortable in accepting themselves, publishing has embraced that," he said. "And Hollywood has embraced it too, to the point where it may be seen as an advantage to have that kind of character front and center in the action." Ms. Glock said the books were not written with marketability in mind. "We honestly just set out to write books for kids we knew, kids we love and the kids we were," she said. In the Trump era, a period of escalating racial, ethnic and sexual strains, that objective is timely. "Those tensions didn't seem unmanageable until recently," Ms. Glock said. "The weeks leading up to and after the election have created an environment that has given people permission to be more hostile." A national survey of over 10,000 educators last fall by the Southern Poverty Law Center seems to reinforce that point. Ninety percent of respondents maintained that the election had a negative impact on their schools, and 40 percent had witnessed episodes in which minorities and other marginalized students were targeted, intimidated or harassed. All the more reason, the Glock Coopers say, to get on with their work. "Book Four," in progress, examines the life of a Changer who misuses his power. And though the Glock Coopers are reluctant to reveal much about it just yet, a Changers television series is in development. "These stories give readers permission to think about what it would be like to wake up as another gender or another race," Mr. Cooper said. The work is a plea for empathy, he added, "an investigation of what it might mean literally to step into the shoes of another." One may learn, as Drew does, that being pretty and popular is no shield against the envy or predations of her nastier peers. One may encounter, with Oryon, the reserves of fear and bias that are only partly concealed by a veil of civility. Oryon is compelled to sit in the school lunchroom exclusively with other black students and endure racial profiling at the hands of the local police; he is roughed up by members of a faction known as the Abiders, self appointed keepers of the status quo. "If you learn anything as a Changer," he observes in "Book Two," "it's that all the supposedly bygone stereotypes and prejudices are far from bygone." For Mr. Cooper, the book provides an opportunity as well to sort out and clear up misconceptions about what it is to be transgender. "That doesn't entail just a change of name or surgery or clothes or haircut," he said. "For so many people it is hard to understand that a man can be attracted to women but then also feel like a woman. Once he transitions into a female, that doesn't mean he suddenly wants to be with men." That observation is reflected throughout the series. "Somebody who has to live through four different iterations," Mr. Cooper said, "learns that gender doesn't really affect what or whom he's drawn to." Each book is a probe into effects of gender, race and body image on the formation of identity. Those externals, along with the experiences accrued in a lifetime, do little to alter that immutable bedrock known as character, the authors argue. "Each of the books is a meditation on the essentialness of humans," Mr. Cooper said. The rest, they maintain, is performance, the trying on and the subsequent discarding of masks, a process scarcely more affecting or permanent than experimenting with a new hairstyle, a pair of shredded jeans or, for that matter, a Snapchat persona. "We as humans are all in transition all of the time," Mr. Cooper said. It is a process familiar to perpetually shape shifting teenagers, including the Coopers' daughters. "I'm still trying to find myself, to figure out who I am," Dixie, 16, said. "But I also feel that through different experiences, and even the wearing of different clothes, I'm essentially the same person that there is a difference between who you are and how you choose to present yourself." Raking her fingers through her mink and ermine tinted hair, Matilda, 15, seemed less certain. "The way you present yourself changes the way people treat you," she said, adding with mounting conviction, "The way people treat you changes who you are." Conversations with and about their daughters set the series in motion. "As they grew, it seemed like the girls woke up with different personalities day to day, minute to minute," Mr. Cooper said. "We wondered, if you were entirely transforming for every year of school what that would do to a soul." They took a page as well from the playbook of their own lives, the series providing the Coopers a chance to exhume and examine a shared past. They were introduced, indirectly, by a New York Times book critic, who asked them to contribute to a writer's playlist. "When I saw T's list I thought, 'Well, look there,'" Ms. Glock recalled. "There were a lot of artists on it that I love." Ms. Glock said, "We find that diversity very comforting." There have nonetheless been hurdles. "This is still Georgia," she said. "Atlanta doesn't have its race problems figured out by any means." There is also the matter of an occasionally chilly reception to those perceived as different. "We've experienced anger," Ms. Glock said. "It could be anything from the well intentioned friend who, when we first got together, told me, 'I'm worried about the kids,' to being threatened in the subway. You find that kind of thing across the board." "It's scary," she added, "but we don't want to be afraid, we don't want to be ashamed. At the same time it's hard to know what to do." The books may well provide a template, not just for their readers but also for the authors. "I just wish I'd had them when I was growing up," Mr. Cooper said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
I left Manhattan in 1988, the morning after marrying a peripatetic advertising executive whose career would take us to six different cities over the course of 26 years. On the ascent out of LaGuardia, I turned my head to the clouds and cried. Following stints in the Midwest, the Mid Atlantic and New England, I eventually arrived in Texas with two babies, two dogs and the aforementioned husband. Last August, after delivering the younger daughter to college and graduating, myself, from the residential restriction in a divorce decree, I returned home. I was just one person, this moving day, one person and a new canine charge, Charles. Mr. Kurtz remembered the city fondly from his days as a dark haired, bearded music student. Some people flee New York without reservation, while others depart uneasily, but certain that one day, they will make it back. The re entry is inspired, typically, by the universal tug of home and family, along with the draw of the city's singular street life, culture and sensibility. The notion of change is inherent in any return, though, since the city will have evolved in your absence and you, too, may be different from who you were when you left. "Moving back was in my head, and my friends will say that I've been talking about it forever," said David Kurtz, 58, a film and television composer who lived in Los Angeles for 35 years. "I am very grateful for L.A., but this was always home, whatever all that means." The emotional bond with a place, of course, does not develop simply because you may have emerged from a delivery room within its ZIP code. Native New Yorkers are not the only ones who may feel like expatriates anywhere else. Mr. Kurtz grew up in Sayville, N.Y., on Long Island, but he formed a connection to Manhattan when he was a child. "My grandmother worked in Columbus Circle at the Diners Club. She loved to take me to Radio City for movies. And my grandfather worked the counter at Katz's Deli." During high school, Mr. Kurtz took the train to Penn Station almost every Saturday for class in the Juilliard School Pre College Division, and he credits his time there for solidifying his New York City identity. "It was more than a great musical experience," he said. "It was my literal salvation. I blossomed in this city." While at the Manhattan School of Music in 1974, he lived on West 89th Street in the home of Isidore Cohen, then the violinist with the Beaux Arts Trio. "They rehearsed there all the time. Heaven!" The neighborhood, because of its proximity to Lincoln Center and its "European feeling," was his first choice when he returned from California a year and a half ago. He had sold his Malibu house and bought an apartment on West 76th Street, off Central Park. "My L.A. friends say, 'How are you going to live in that?' and my New York friends say, 'How did you find that?' " In March, he and Candace Bowes, a freelance advertising producer who spends weeks at a time working in Los Angeles, were married in the Ladies Pavilion in Central Park, down the street from their new home. "It was an iconic New York thing to do," said Mr. Kurtz, who credits a confluence of events for his return, including his children leaving home, aging parents, immediate family who live here and a shift from composing for television programs to writing a screenplay. Like others who depart New York for places with more serenity and a quieter pace, Mr. Kurtz found he needed to create his own stimulation in California rather than find it in his surroundings. "The ocean, the environment, it became continuous and I lost the fascination," he said. "Here, I'm in awe every day. I walk out the door, and the city is performance art." What a New York re entry will feel like depends on how long the person has been away and what his life was like at the time he left, said Christine Haney, the executive vice president of global relocation for Douglas Elliman Real Estate. "They come here because they have always loved the city," she said. There is a certain age when people are unafraid to make changes and move anywhere, she added, but after they've gone down that path, "they want to come back and just enjoy." Once back in town, where they choose to rent or buy an apartment is often determined by how they will now spend their days, in addition to their budgets. "I had a client who said to me, 'I am ready to go to Lincoln Center. I want to live facing the steps,' " said Annie Cion Gruenberger, an associate broker with Warburg Realty. "We went out and bought an apartment facing the steps." Susan Adler Funk, 56, loves seeing plays. She has at least six subscriptions to Off and Off Off Broadway theaters and attends between 50 and 60 performances a year. This past September, she and her husband, Allen Funk, 55, rented a two bedroom on Columbus Avenue and West 96th Street after selling a house in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., where they had lived for three years following 18 years in and around Seattle and six in Washington, D.C. Also, the couple recently purchased a home in Flemington, N.J., where they intend to grow and sell grapes, "a retirement plan," Ms. Funk said. "Every book that I own doesn't have to be in this apartment. I am spoiled that way." When the grapes are in their infancy, the Funks will spend more time in New Jersey and keep their apartment as a pied a terre. Ms. Funk views herself as a Manhattan expatriate, despite a Rockland County, N.Y., upbringing, attributing that status to the years she lived here during her formative 20s. After college, she rented two apartments, first on Sutton Place and then on West 82nd Street. Following Harvard Business School, where she met Mr. Funk, a Los Angeles native and former newspaper publisher, she rented a walk up on West 77th Street. Now, as a self described "fully formed" adult, she has returned to the city and, specifically, to the Upper West Side, for its energy and its closeness to the stage. "Theater is the reason I'm here," she said. "I don't know how the passion began, but I remember going to Playwrights Horizons when I first lived here and was poor and didn't see much." Nostalgia is not part of the re entry for Ms. Funk, who, while in Seattle, started and ran a think tank focused on diversity issues in the technology industry and now is studying to become an accredited executive coach. "I actually tried to find where I used to live, but I couldn't figure it out," she said. Sometimes, though, returning to a place where childhoods happened, first jobs were held and mates were met can evoke strong sentiments about the passing of time and life choices. When people haven't regularly seen the spots where seminal experiences occurred both good and bad they can feel walloped, emotionally. Across the street from the hospital where I was born is the hospital where my father died; I have to bolster myself before walking by or choose a different route. "You have to be part psychologist," said Ms. Haney of helping people relocate. "You have to be very sympathetic, very understanding of what they're going through." In 1993, after six years of city life, Randy Gilman agreed to leave York Avenue and East 79th Street for Livingston, N.J., when her husband, Zvi Bolimovsky, expressed a desire to raise children outside Manhattan. "From Day 1, when I was pregnant, I was on a countdown to come back once my kids finished high school," said Ms. Gilman, 63, who was born on Long Island and grew up near Hartford, Conn. While leaving New Jersey stirred little emotion, sharing space with her mother, who has her own suite, has prompted Ms. Gilman to reminisce. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. "I feel sentimental about living with the beautiful art and artifacts that she accumulated on her many trips with my father," Ms. Gilman said. "Living here also helps remind me about when I was a child and my parents took my sister and me to museums, theater and dance performances." When Charles and I landed in New York, there was no party, no ticker tape. The confetti was in my mind, raining down feelings of finish lines, relief, exhilaration, promise. People here ask where I lived before, and when I mention my 17 years in Texas, they seem uniformly horrified. They crinkle up their faces and ask, "Did you like it?" expecting a certain response. I would have provided that reply, at first. Now, I feel that I should defend the place that I desperately did not like, and that I would want to do this surprises me a little, but makes me feel encouraged about my time there. I tell the people about the efficient air conditioning and the civility of the children who shake hands when they are in preschool. I tell them that I raised two daughters there, two daughters who speak softly, saying y'all and ma'am and sir. I feel good about the place, standing in Carl Schurz Park on the East River, with Charles on a lead. I do, really, I do. This realization has played emotional tricks with my return, which, for years, I viewed as a simple construct, an escape from exile. Here, whatever was missing would suddenly exist, and I would feel energized, nurtured and safe. I would feel like me. I must say that this has happened, and in a magnified way my old friends are more wonderful, the ballet more breathtaking, the brownstone facades more stunning. But is it home? Does it feel like home? I do not know. Sometimes, the transition is not what people envision it will be. After 40 years, Howard Bloomberg, 70, chose to return to Manhattan and his family's Upper West Side neighborhood not because he was nostalgic necessarily, but for its prewar architecture and residential ambience. "In 1976, I escaped. There was crime, filth, graffiti; on the subway, you couldn't see out the windows," said Mr. Bloomberg, a retired investment banker who has lived in London, Boston and, most recently, New Hampshire. "But then, New York became a fabulous city, and it more closely resembled the time when I grew up." But Mr. Bloomberg is not one to act rashly. He started his hunt in 2001, but it wasn't until 2010 that he settled on Riverside Drive, across the street from Joan of Arc Park, where he used to play football. The 2,175 square foot apartment in a 1902 building designed by Ralph S. Townsend overlooks the Hudson, has 11 foot ceilings and the details that Mr. Bloomberg was looking for. "I am very particular. It took three years to renovate. It didn't even need a renovation," he said. It took another two years to sell his house on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, delaying his return to the city until this spring. Mr. Bloomberg was ready to make the transition, to be less sedentary and more engaged in city life. "Over the decades, I've lost touch with just about everybody," he said before he arrived in early May. "I look forward to having a big dinner party with them in my new apartment. It will be great fun, though we are no longer young men." Upon moving in, however, the anticipation turned rapidly to upset. Mr. Bloomberg walked into and out of five supermarkets, unable to navigate the narrow aisles. His phone wouldn't work. His television and computer wouldn't turn on. He was dismayed to see litter. After four days in the city, he thought to himself: "I can no longer cope. I don't think I can possibly live here again." Now, some weeks later, Mr. Bloomberg is still here, though still out of sorts. He contemplated selling the apartment and leaving where to, he was not sure but the expense of such a turnaround dissuaded him. He did secure a New York City phone number. Adaptation, could it be? Expectations vary, according to Jeff Feuer, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate and Mr. Bloomberg's real estate agent for 10 years. Typically, he said, the adjustment is a lot more difficult if you are leaving New York than if you are returning. "I have a house in Woodstock, and I love it," he said, "but even after a couple of days, I just want to come back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
ZARAGOZA, SPAIN In 2001, an agricultural co op here was supplying truckloads of wheat to an Italian pasta maker. At first, no one at the Spanish co op, Arento, was much alarmed when the pasta factory in Milan fell behind in its payments. The co op did not cut off the credit until the pasta company owed EUR1 million, or more than 1.4 million today, never realizing how hard it might be to collect a debt in another country in the European Union. But now, a decade later, having spent years in the courts and tens of thousands of euros on legal bills, Arento has recovered only half of what was owed. "We came face to face with the Italian legal system," said Luis Navarro Olivares, Arento's director general. "The trips to Milan were Kafkaesque. Really, Italy is too far away on a cultural level, a legal level and an administrative level." In theory, the European Union is one gigantic economic zone of about 500 million consumers all integrated into the world's biggest trading bloc. But the ideal is still far ahead of the reality, particularly for businesses that end up trying to collect debts across the Union's many borders. There are still 27 different national legal systems at work in the bloc, each with its own procedures for handling claims, property attachment and bankruptcies. European officials say at least EUR55 billion a year in debt is simply being written off, much of it because businesses find it too daunting to press expensive, confusing lawsuits in foreign countries. Officials and business leaders say they believe that debt collection problems are a profound deterrent to commerce within the European Union and one of the reasons that job creation and wealth generation falls consistently behind the United States, where pursuing debts across state lines is a comparatively easy task. With much of Europe still caught in an economic slump and several countries weighing down the bloc's growth prospects because of huge sovereign debt problems of their own, E.U. officials are starting to circulate proposals for fixing this comparatively simple problem, in hopes of yielding a quick, cost free stimulus to Europe's financial health. Debt collection is just one example of the shortcomings of a market which, for legal, linguistic and cultural issues, rarely functions as a single space. Professional qualifications in one country often are not recognized in another, for example, and local business regulations frequently make it hard for Europeans to set up shop in another E.U. country. A more effective single market, the Union officials say, could generate EUR60 billion to EUR140 billion in additional trade the equivalent of an additional 0.6 percent to 1.5 percent of the bloc's gross domestic product. But individual E.U. countries still jealously guard the right to control many regulations covering business, and to operate independent civil and commercial legal systems. Valle Garcia de Novales, a lawyer here in Zaragoza who specializes in international commerce, tells her clients that any debt of less than EUR100,000 is not even worth pursuing in court. "You let it go because it is just too costly," she said. What is worse, many companies have been so discouraged that they have given up on doing business across borders. Meanwhile, fewer than 10 percent of European consumers buy anything from a Web site outside their home country. In an effort to improve the situation, the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm in Brussels, is working on a series of proposals to improve the single market. They include 12 priority changes to help reinvigorate the single market, from an agreement to recognize one another's educational qualifications to an E.U. wide system for registering patents. This year, it is expected to propose a standardized Europe wide system to freeze the amount of money owed to a company in the debtor's bank account. That would prevent it from being moved to another country often as easy as a mouse click while providing an incentive to settle the claim quickly. "I want to ensure that companies feel confident when they do business outside their home markets," said Viviane Reding, the E.U. commissioner for justice. "Trust is the currency of our single market. Businesses have to know that they can get their money back." Fewer than 3 in 10 companies in the European Union now do business across national borders, according to one E.U. survey. And just 8 percent of Europe's smaller companies do business outside their home country, according to another E.U. report. "It's a huge impediment," said Tina Sommer, president of the European Small Business Alliance, which claims about a million members. "People are afraid. They don't know how to go about this in terms of debt recovery or contract law." At Arento, Mr. Navarro became director general a decade ago, just as the farm co op was to make a claim in an unfamiliar legal system, in a language he did not understand. He soon concluded that the co op's business strategies had to change. Ten years ago, the co op exported 50 percent of its goods. Today, all its sales are within Spain's borders. "The debt endangered the survival of our company," Mr. Navarro said. "We didn't get any money for three years." Companies doing business across borders have several safety mechanisms to employ. They can get insurance, a letter of credit or simply demand cash upfront. But each is costly, in its own way. And slip ups are easy. Mr. Navarro's co op, for instance, did not inform the insurance company fast enough to make a claim, partly because it did not understand the terms of the policy. Experts point out, too, that there are huge differences among E.U. countries. Pressing a claim in German courts is a far cry from trying to get satisfaction in Bulgaria or Romania, a notion that made several Spanish lawyers roll their eyes. Lourdes Lebrero, the financial director of Matilsa, a small family owned company that makes aerial work platforms here, insisted on a cash deposit when an order came in from Romania. But the letter sent as proof of transfer turned out to be a forgery. A friend of a friend who was making a trip to Romania tried to look into collecting the debt, but came back convinced it was hopeless. Indeed, many business leaders remain skeptical that the European Union can end debt collection problems, let alone open up a new world of cross border trade.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Big Break On Nov. 2, 2015, Mr. Daillance woke up at 6 a.m. to find his Instagram feed filled with photos of Rihanna wearing one of his caps and tagged with his handle, millinsky. "I was like, 'Oh my God, that's my hat!'" Mr. Daillance said. The first thing he did was email his parents (he was 18 at the time). "They didn't really know who Rihanna was, but they were still happy for me." Latest Project NasaSeasons released a collection of T shirts ( 80 to 90) last December bearing punchy and Instagrammable phrases like "Love Will Tear Us Apart," "I Kill Romance" and "Less Heartbroken." "I really wanted the brand to be genuine and funny at the same time," Mr. Daillance said. "Nowadays, with social media, we want to express ourselves through words. But, like, really short words." Next Thing Although only a sophomore in college, majoring in American and modern European history, Mr. Daillance is starting a consulting firm, Lawrence Parker, that helps brands speak and sell to his social media generation. He already has six clients, including the streetwear companies Sampaix and The Hood Lab. "I want to become the link between Gen Z and brands," he said. Google It Being inexperienced and young doesn't seem to faze Mr. Daillance. "With the internet, it's so easy to basically type 'factory, L.A., hat,'" he said. "I actually got emailed by some friends of friends who were like, 'But how can you contact factories when you're so young?'" he said. "And I was like, 'I don't really understand that question because, now, factories don't really care about your age. They just want to get paid.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Government officials, researchers and advertising executives have warned that microtargeting tools, like the kind Facebook offers, can be exploited to polarize and manipulate voters. Facebook has made a mint by enabling advertisers to identify and reach the very people most likely to react to their messages. Ad buyers can select audiences based on details like a user's location, political leanings and interests as specific as the Museum of the Confederacy or online gambling. And they can aim their ads at as few as 20 of the 1.5 billion daily users of the social network. Brands love it. So do political campaigns, like those for President Trump and former President Barack Obama, which tailored their messages to narrow subsets of voters. But microtargeting, as the technique is called, is coming under increased scrutiny in the United States and Europe. Some government officials, researchers and advertising executives warn that it can be exploited to polarize and manipulate voters. And they are calling for restrictions on its use in politics, even after Facebook, in response to criticism, recently limited some of the targeting categories available to advertisers. "It has essentially weaponized ad technology designed for consumer products and services," said Sarah Golding, the president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, an industry organization in Britain. Her group recently called for a moratorium on political microtargeting. "There is a danger that every single person can get their own concerns played back to them," she said. Facebook is just one player among tech giants like Google and Twitter that also offer data mining services to try to influence consumer and voter behavior. But Facebook's gargantuan reach, vast holdings of user data and easy to use self service advertising system have made it a lightning rod for political microtargeting. Much of the new attention being paid to microtargeted advertising has emerged from investigations into how Russian groups interfered in elections and how the voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica harvested the data of millions of Facebook users. Microtargeting, they have found, was a central tool for foreign groups trying to interfere in elections. In Britain, a report in July on political campaigning from the Information Commissioner's Office, the government data protection authority, called for an "ethical pause" on the use of personal information in political microtargeting so that regulators and companies could consider the technology's implications. "These techniques raise fundamental questions about the relationship between privacy and democracy, as concerns about voter surveillance could lead to disengagement with the political process," Elizabeth Denham, the British information commissioner, wrote in the report. Last month, a report from a British Parliament committee investigating fraudulent news criticized the "relentless targeting of hyper partisan views, which play to the fears and prejudices of people, in order to influence their voting plans and their behavior." It also called for curbs on some microtargeting. A week before the election, for instance, the Russian group paid Facebook to aim an ad at users interested in African American history, the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X with a seemingly benign post. The ad included a photo of Beyonce's backup dancers. "Black girl magic!" the ad said, according to Facebook ads recently released by federal lawmakers. Then on Election Day, the same Russian group sent the same Facebook user demographic an ad urging them to boycott the presidential election. "No one represents Black people. Don't go to vote," the ad said. "Russian groups appeared to identify and target nonwhite voters months before the election with benign messages promoting racial identity," Professor Kim, who studies online political ads, wrote in the report. By singling out the same individuals on Facebook, she added, "these groups later appeared to interfere in the elections with voter suppression messages." In the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Facebook has made major changes to try to deter subversive groups from exploiting its system. In May, Facebook said it had removed almost one third of the ad targeting categories used by the Russian voter interference group. Those included segments like "Young, Black and Professional," "Indigenous People of the Americas" and "Help Disabled Veterans." In addition, Facebook has removed the option for advertisers to exclude users in certain sensitive categories like race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion from seeing ads. Those changes were made after articles by ProPublica, the investigative news organization, criticized Facebook's ad system. But there remain many categories available to political and other advertisers, including selecting audiences by their ZIP code, education level, brand of smartphone, and whether they are politically moderate, very conservative or very liberal. Facebook has also said that it would require anyone seeking to run a political campaign or political issue ad to confirm their identity and location as well as disclose who paid for the ad. In May, Facebook introduced an archive containing political ads shown on Facebook and Instagram. It includes information on the ad costs, viewership and certain demographics of the ad audience. "This is by far the best transparency effort that any of the social media platforms have given us," said Laura Edelson, a doctoral student at New York University who researches political ads on social media. Rob Leathern, director of product management at Facebook, said the archive and other changes would "help prevent the abuse" of the company's advertising tools. "It's no longer possible to advertise in obscurity on Facebook," Mr. Leathern said in a statement. But critics, including some civil rights experts and researchers, say that Facebook's recent efforts have done little to disable microtargeting as an engine of voter manipulation. The company's new political ad archive, for instance, does not include details on the criteria used to target voters. In the United States, a bill introduced in the Senate, called the Honest Ads Act, would require online services to provide descriptions of each audience targeted by a political ad. The bill, introduced by Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, both Democrats, as well as Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, is still in committee. Some experts warn that curbing microtargeting too much could have negative consequences. They say it could limit the political information received by first time voters or new immigrants, who are already low priorities for many campaigns. "If we overcorrect too much and we take away the ability to reach people who might be less intrinsically engaged in politics, then we also lose the capacity to try to make them excited about participating in politics," said Daniel Kreiss, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies political microtargeting. The problem, critics of microtargeting say, is that even a small amount of money could potentially have large negative effects. To stoke anxiety among Latinos last year, for instance, the Internet Research Agency used Facebook to aim an ad at users interested in Mexico, Latin hip hop and the Chicano Movement. The ad showed a cartoon of immigrants standing in front of a barbed wire border with a "No Trespassing" sign. "We didn't come to steal your jobs," it said, "we came to make a living." The Russian group paid 10.6 rubles about 16 cents for the Facebook ad, which was seen 283 times. But the targeting was so successful that the selected group spread the ad, which eventually racked up 16,000 reactions and 95,000 shares.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The writer Walker Percy's foreword to "A Confederacy of Dunces" is only a couple of pages long, but in it he gets across the dramatic essentials of the novel's tortuous path to publication: that the much rejected manuscript was orphaned when its author, John Kennedy Toole, killed himself in 1969; that Toole's mother, Thelma, was tenacious in pressing Percy to read it; that when at last he did, he discovered a "gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy" that he helped usher into the wider world. Because the book, a New Orleans picaresque, became a Pulitzer Prize winning classic, the play "Mr. Toole" a fictionalized recollection of the novelist written by Vivian Neuwirth, a student of his in the 1960s elicits a glimmer of curiosity based on its concept alone. Casting the Off Broadway stalwart Ryan Spahn in the title role, opposite Linda Purl as Thelma, amps the allure. Yet, as admirably as they acquit themselves in Cat Parker's Articulate Theater Company production at 59E59 Theaters, there is the dispiriting sense of watching talented actors trapped in a show that they cannot save. Ostensibly, "Mr. Toole" is a memory play. Its narrator, Lisette (Julia Randall), is an undergraduate in a poetry class that Toole teaches in New Orleans. She has a raging crush on him, which might be why, after his memorial service, she goes to his parents' house and tells a devastated Thelma that she wants her paper on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot, back. Priorities, right?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Fredrick Redd and Allegra Cummings like telling the story of how their lives have unfolded since their April 21, 2007, wedding in East Hampton, N.Y., announced in The New York Times the following day. But getting the couple in the same room to tell it can be tricky. On a recent Saturday morning, for instance, Mr. Redd, 56, was at home in the two bedroom condominium he and Dr. Cummings, an obstetrician and gynecologist, bought in Harlem in 2008 and share with their 9 year old daughter, Autumn, and Dr. Cummings's mother, Lynne Barry Cummings. Dr. Cummings, 45, was at work at Mount Sinai, where she practices medicine and is an assistant professor of reproductive science. "I'm in the barrel today, which is what we call it when it's my turn to come to work and take care of patients," Dr. Cummings said during a break, via conference call. Mr. Redd had planned the day around what he called "daddy daughter time." But not the entire day. He also had some singing and some Ironman training to do. Rivaling a doctor who delivers babies for long and unpredictable work hours is difficult, but not for Mr. Redd. In addition to running Assai Management Consulting, a company he started in 2013 after leaving his job as director of the project management office at the Port Authority, he is a professional opera singer, currently preparing to play the lead baritone in Puccini's "Turandot" at New Jersey's Bergen Performing Arts Center. In his spare time, he is preparing for his second Ironman triathlon. The couple's joint refusal to hit the brakes on their careers or their hobbies Dr. Cummings finds a few hours each week to dance Masala Bhangra with the Alvin Ailey Extension program, and has performed with the company has been by design. "Fred is happiest when everything's going 80 miles per hour," Dr. Cummings said. "And if I were doing just one thing instead of several, I would lose interest." Mr. Redd said productiveness accounts at least partly for their compatibility. "I think we're stretching ourselves in terms of what we do with our lives because it's who we are, and because it provides an example for our daughter," he said. "That's what life is all about, constantly growing and challenging yourself." Some challenges Dr. Cummings and Mr. Redd have confronted since their wedding have not been of their own choosing. When Autumn was born in June 2008, Dr. Cummings spent more than a month in the hospital. "I had an infection related to the delivery that got me very ill," she said. "It was a tough year, and you never expect something like that early on in your marriage. We had kind of a bumpy start." Those bumps put an end to what she had long envisioned as a two child household. "After that, we said, 'Let's be thankful for what we've got.'" Mr. Redd's 2011 diabetes diagnosis also came as a surprise, though it prompted him to lose 55 pounds and set him on his course to becoming an Ironman competitor. Which was another adjustment for the family. "Anytime anyone you love tells you, 'O.K., I'm going to go exercise for 14 hours, you've got to be a little wary,'" Dr. Cummings said. But Dr. Cummings and Autumn were there to watch Mr. Redd cross the Ironman finish line last year in Cozumel, Mexico, coming in 35th place in his age group. Mr. Redd's strict diet and exercise regimen has allowed him to quit taking diabetes medications. The family's health issues haven't ended there, though. Mr. Redd travels to Texas to help his mother as frequently as possible. And Lynne Barry Cummings has been living with the couple since Superstorm Sandy displaced her from her home in Montauk, N.Y. Ms. Cummings was at first able to help with child care, picking up Autumn from school and babysitting so the couple could plan date nights. Last year she had a health setback. "I have to give my husband very big props for living with his mother in law since 2013," Dr. Cummings said. On the other hand, both Dr. Cummings and Mr. Redd give Ms. Cummings props for indirectly bringing them together. Ms. Cummings is a former opera singer; Dr. Cummings's familiarity with the music drew her to Mr. Redd. One of their first dates, in 2005, was when Mr. Redd, a baritone, was playing the lead in Verdi's "Giovanni D'Arco" at Carnegie Hall. "I'm what I call a professional music fan," Dr. Cummings said. "That was part of the connection for me." Part of the connection for Mr. Redd is his wife's scientific side. He is a trained engineer; Assai specializes in consulting transportation, technology, energy and construction businesses. "I'm proud of Allegra for being a doctor, but also for her varied interests, and that she's so much bigger than her job," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Summer is coming. And for the New Yorkers who live in buildings with gyms, roof decks, pools and playrooms, reopening these spaces could mean the difference between a grueling summer and a bearable one. In some buildings, it's already happening. Last week, a financial district condo reopened one of its roof decks, making the space available in hourlong shifts with no more than six people outside at a time wearing masks and gloves. At a rental building in New Jersey, tenants with gardening plots can start planting their victory gardens now. And a large Riverdale co op is working out a plan to open its pool this summer. While state mandated social distancing measures are still in place, a new future is taking shape in luxury buildings, one where tenants may regain access to some coveted amenities. A handful of outdoor spaces, like a roof deck, could open now if social distancing could be enforced. As for the rest, management companies are drawing up guidelines, laying the groundwork for a different kind of normal that could unfold once stay at home orders are relaxed or lifted. The roof deck may open, but without any seating or barbecues. Residents may be assigned specific days to use the pool, and have to stand or sit in spots marked out on the deck at safe distances. Gyms may be reconfigured to increase the space between workout equipment and stagger workout times. At Harrison Urby, a rental building in Harrison, N.J., the gym, yoga studio and tasting kitchen are closed, but tenants who signed up to use the 29 garden plots still have access. Management held a lottery for the plots in early March and received so many applications that they asked tenants to share. Once the governor enacted stay at home and social distancing orders in mid March, "we did a lot of research to find out: can we open the garden?" said the Urby brand director, Jo Rausch. The answer was yes, with modifications. Tenants with shared plots need to coordinate with each other to garden at separate times. And the annual kickoff orientation event with a gardener was replaced with a video demonstration. Kelly Ghahramani, 28, a sales representative who lives in a studio apartment in the building with her husband, plans to garden every day this spring and summer. She's already growing new celery stalks from food scraps, and stocking up on lavender, tomatoes, eggplant, parsley and rosemary starter plants. "I feel extremely fortunate that I have the opportunity to be outside and plant things," she said. "It's peaceful and calming and relaxing and takes your mind off things." Of all the amenities, gyms are the ones tenants seem to miss the most. In some condos and co ops, residents have asked to take weights and other equipment up to their apartments. Mr. Wolfe received one request to borrow a Peloton bike (the answer was no). "I used the gym every day. I had a meltdown when it was closing," said Ann Wehren, 37, who lives in a luxury rental in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, and was recently laid off from her job as a buying director for a luxury retail store. Ms. Wehren asked unsuccessfully for a rent reduction to compensate for the days the amenities have been closed. Other New Yorkers have been asking for discounts or credits too. In some cases, residents pay a separate amenity fee, but often the cost is wrapped into the rent or maintenance charges. While a few developers, like RXR Realty, are waiving amenity fees, most buildings are not. "Right now we're not thinking about it, because our priority is to find a way to reopen them as soon as we can," said Dan Wurtzel, the president of FirstService Residential New York, which manages rentals, condos and co ops in the city. Even a tenant like Ms. Wehren, who has a rent stabilized lease, could have a hard time proving a claim for a rent abatement since amenities are generally not required services for individual apartments, according to John T. Maher, a lawyer who represents tenants. The gym may be the most beloved amenity, but it will also likely be the hardest to reopen. Equipment is close together, and by nature, gyms are sweaty spaces. "Some of the weight equipment may be six feet apart, certainly the cardio equipment isn't and what do you do with that?" said John R. Janangelo, an executive managing director of Douglas Elliman Property Management. Equipment needs to be wiped down between each use. But apartment gyms are rarely staffed, so buildings would have to trust residents to properly clean the equipment. Playrooms may face a similar challenge. Aside from making sure little children practice social distancing, someone would also have to check that an indoor jungle gym was wiped down between each use. While buildings work out the logistics, some are offering virtual alternatives. At 196 Orchard, a condo on the Lower East Side, residents get a free one year subscription to CARAVAN Wellness, normally a 99 package, where they can take online classes on subjects like meditation, hair care and Pilates. Alessia Roitman, 45, an interior designer who has lived at 100 Barclay, a condo in TriBeCa, for four years, has been using the service five times a week because the gym is closed. "I'm thrilled that ownership introduced me to this program," she said. Other buildings are simply trying to keep their residents entertained. Herald Towers, a 26 story luxury rental at the corner of Broadway and 34th Street, organizes virtual happy hours. Participants receive a kit with ingredients for a signature cocktail, and then a mixologist from a city bar like The Wayland or Goodnight Sonny demonstrates how to make it on Zoom.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Daniel Dae Kim was wide awake and scrolling through Twitter at 4 a.m. when he realized "The Good Doctor" was going to be a hit. It was a Tuesday in September, and Mr. Kim, a 49 year old actor known for his work on "Hawaii Five 0" and "Lost," found himself in bed in western Bulgaria not far from the set of "Hellboy," a movie he was filming for release next year. He had a special interest in "The Good Doctor," because it represented his first outing in a new role: executive producer. And so, although he had to go to work in just a few hours, he could not keep himself from checking the effusive social media reaction to the show's premiere episode on ABC. When Mr. Kim stumbled onto the "Hellboy" set in the morning, he felt just fine. "I've lived with this project since 2013, so one night of lost sleep wasn't going to make a difference," he said, laughing. The tweets Mr. Kim scrolled through that night would soon give way to hard data: ABC's "The Good Doctor" is the most watched drama on network television. With roughly 17 million viewers for each episode, according to the Nielsen ratings, it draws a bigger audience than the CBS crime show "NCIS" and NBC's weepy "This is Us." The surprise hit has been a boon to ABC, which has been stuck in last place among the big four networks. It also came as sweet relief to Mr. Kim, who had spent three years developing this adaptation of a South Korean show through his 3AD production company. "The Good Doctor" is a big hearted medical drama with a twist: The lead character, a brilliant resident played by Freddie Highmore, is autistic. In addition to learning how to become a skilled surgeon, he must figure out how to communicate with skeptical colleagues and confused patients. "What's the point of sarcasm?" he asks in an early episode. "This could have been terrible in the wrong hands, or lesser hands," said David Shore, an executive producer on the series, of Mr. Highmore. "He brings a humanity to this character that isn't necessarily on the page." On Dec. 4, the show will wrap the first half of its improbably successful debut season. For every medical genre hit like the NBC juggernaut "ER" or the ABC stalwart "Grey's Anatomy," there are scores that never make it past season one (Remember "Heartbeat," "Trauma" or "Mercy?" No one else does, either.) Mr. Kim took notice of the original version of "The Good Doctor," an award winning 20 episode series in South Korea, not long after it started airing in 2013. He scooped up the rights for his new production company and got to work adapting it. Because he was a star of the CBS show "Hawaii Five 0" at the time, he developed it for his home network, which ordered up a script. After taking a look, however, CBS decided against commissioning a pilot. That is usually the stage when all parties agree to leave a project behind, but Mr. Kim, who was born in South Korea and grew up in Bethlehem, Pa., bought back the rights from CBS. He felt that strongly about it. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. He eventually teamed up with Sony's television arm, which brought in Mr. Shore, the creator of the successful Fox medical drama "House." Mr. Shore's version began to attract network interest although not from CBS. "CBS actually passed on it twice," Mr. Kim said. "That was really unfortunate to me, because they were my home studio. I really wanted to bring something home to them." Earlier this year, along with his Asian American co star, Grace Park, Mr. Kim left "Hawaii Five 0" after he suggested that they had not been not offered salaries commensurate with those of their white co stars. "The path to equality is never easy," Mr. Kim wrote in a Facebook post at the time. In the end, CBS lost a prime time actor and ABC gained an executive producer who brought it an unexpected hit. The network needed it. For the last two years ABC has been in last place among the four broadcast networks in the 18 to 49 year old demographic that is important to advertisers. To make matters worse, Shonda Rhimes, the showrunner behind the ABC hits "Scandal" and "Grey's Anatomy," decided to make Netflix her home for all future projects. Robert Iger, the chief executive of Disney, ABC's parent company, did not mince words when he described his disappointment with the network earlier this month, saying, "Some improvement from a quality aspect would be helpful." The show is partly the result of a programming strategy that ABC hit upon last year, after heartland voters had a strong hand in the election of President Trump a strategy focused on "not just appealing to both coasts," said Ben Sherwood, the president of the Disney and ABC television group. "Roseanne," the ABC comedy about a working class family that lit up the Nielsen ratings during its nine season run? Reboot it! "American Idol," a politics free singing contest that lasted 14 years on Fox before going off the air in 2016? Revive it! As for other programming, the network decided on a new game plan. "One of our goals was to move away from cable fare, or living in that dark world of antiheroes," said Channing Dungey, the president of ABC Entertainment who started last year. "What people are looking for in broadcast is brighter, lighter, more hopeful." Indeed, ABC executives and producers for the show are convinced that Dr. Shaun Murphy, the main character of "The Good Doctor," plays to a wide audience because he is innocent and never meanspirited. While the median age of the show's viewers is 58, according to Nielsen, it is also popular among teenage girls. "He's a hero we haven't really seen lately," Mr. Shore said of Dr. Murphy. "He's overcoming things he was born with. He's not a drinker. He's not a womanizer. He's not an antihero." Mr. Kim said it was perhaps a "blessing in disguise" that "The Good Doctor" did not get picked up in, say, 2014, when it may have fallen flat. "There a lot of shows that have a deeply cynical take on the world," Mr. Kim said. "This is not one of them. Given what I was reading every day in newspapers or seeing on my TV, I felt it was very much needed counterprogramming to reality."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Then came the four men wearing red Greek dresses, sleeveless and sheer, with nothing on underneath. To a recording of Tammy Wynette singing "Help Me Make It Through the Night," they danced like followers of Isadora Duncan, languid and graceful (especially Austin Selden) in ways traditionally considered feminine. This challenge to rigid gender roles was gentle, not insistent. The wanness set up a contrast with the final part's force. Bare breasted in her parachute, Ms. Hansen was a figurehead on the prow of a ship, with great waves of fabric billowing around her. Back and forth she walked into those waves, bravely greeting them as she might greet a lover. She seemed at once in control of her dress and trapped by it, enlarged by it and exhausted by it. This was potent theater. One more dancer, Belinda He, remained obscured by what she wore. Throughout the work, she slowly inched across the space, spreading the fabric that enshrouded her. She seemed a reminder of something, and Ms. Hansen's rocking in the parachute recalled her earlier rocking, one a premonition or memory of the other. But what stays in a viewer's memory is the image of Ms. Hansen in that dress.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The southern coast of Athens, a 35 mile stretch of pine speckled beachfront, is gaining in popularity for travelers keen on exploring the ruins in the city's historic center, and then ditching the urban sprawl (it's a mere 25 minute drive from the Acropolis) for the charms of the Aegean Sea. The ambience of this coastal hideaway, known unofficially as the Athens Riviera, veers more remote Greek island than urban adjacent beach town. In the know Greeks and their celebrity friends have long decamped to its sandy shores on the coastline of Attica, a triangular peninsula jutting into the sea. Rustic boites like Limanakia Beach Bar, tucked into a craggy inlet and where sun bronzed Greeks leap from the surrounding cliffs into the turquoise sea), Blue Flag beaches (a premium designation for water purity) equipped with curtained sun beds, waiter service and access to secluded swimming coves, plus a cool kid cocktail scene, lend glamour to this pocket of suburban Athens. The sunset view is the draw at this time worn, naval themed boite in Alimos Marina. Kick back with a Mythos beer and just caught calamari in the company of stylish island hoppers and fisherman fresh from the surrounding boats.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
WASHINGTON Just a few months after announcing a campaign to reduce unemployment, Federal Reserve officials are already debating how soon to stop it, reflecting persistent internal divisions about the effort's value. At a meeting in December, several members of the Fed's policy making committee argued that purchases of Treasury securities and mortgage backed securities should be reduced or ended "well before the end of 2013," according to an account of the meeting the Fed published Thursday after a customary three week delay. The Fed announced after the meeting that it would keep buying assets until the pace of job creation improved substantially, part of an effort to increase the impact of its policies by announcing economic objectives rather than end dates. But the account shows that many members of the 12 person committee continue to think in terms of end dates, partly because they are worried about the potential costs. The concerns include the potential disruption of financial markets and the delicate balance between encouraging private borrowing and unleashing speculation. Fed officials professed less concern that the purchases could loosen the Fed's grip on inflation. They noted that inflation remained low, and that they expected it to stay under control. "While almost all members thought that the asset purchase program begun in September had been effective and supportive of growth, they also generally saw that the benefits of ongoing purchases were uncertain and that the potential costs could rise as the size of the balance sheet increased," the meeting account said. The stock market declined after the Fed released the account of its deliberations, suggesting some investors were surprised by the cautious tone, but the drop was modest. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index lost 0.21 percent of its value at the close of trading. Joseph LaVorgna, an economist at Deutsche Bank, said investors had expected the Fed to keep buying "through much, if not all, of this year." He said investors would now need to watch more closely for evidence that the recovery was gaining strength, which could lead the Fed to curtail its purchases. "This should significantly amplify the financial market's sensitivity to upcoming economic data," Mr. LaVorgna wrote in a note to clients Thursday. The central bank announced after the December meeting that it planned to hold short term interest rates near zero at least until the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent, provided inflation remained under control, and it estimated that the rate would cross that threshold no sooner than mid 2015. The Fed also plans to maintain for the foreseeable future the vast portfolio of Treasury securities and mortgage backed securities it has acquired since 2008 to further reduce borrowing costs for businesses and consumers. And Ms. Swonk said she saw nothing in the account to alter her conviction that the Fed intended to keep adding to that stockpile through the coming year. She said the reservations of some officials had not prevented the new campaign, and would not force an early conclusion, because the basic argument for the purchases remained compelling: the economy is not growing fast enough, too many people remain unemployed, and the rest of government is not helping. "I think that they would love to be able to stop," Ms. Swonk said, but given the condition of the economy, "I think there's still a huge bias toward buying." She said that four of the 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee would be replaced in January, and that two new arrivals Charles L. Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston had been outspoken supporters of asset purchases. The Fed's current program of asset purchases began in September with the announcement that it would buy 40 billion in mortgage bonds each month until the outlook for the labor market "improved substantially." In December, the Fed said it would also expand its holdings of Treasuries by 45 billion each month, replacing a program in which it acquired that amount of long term Treasuries each month by selling the same amount of short term Treasuries, so that the total size of its portfolio remained unchanged. The account said that a few officials predicted the purchases would need to continue through the end of the year, and a few said it was too soon to make a judgment. "Several others thought that it would probably be appropriate to slow or to stop purchases well before the end of 2013, citing concerns about financial stability or the size of the balance sheet," the account continued, before concluding, "One member viewed any additional purchases as unwarranted."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Credit...Shane Lavalette for The New York Times BUFFALO The Scajaquada Corridor is a city dweller's dreamland, a culture vulture Valhalla. Within two miles there is a restored Frank Lloyd Wright house you can visit, an art museum with Picassos and Gauguins, three college campuses, a zoo and a history museum in a majestic Greek Revival building from the 1901 Pan Am Exposition listed on the National Historic Register. All of it borders a 356 acre park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. There is just one problem: An expressway runs through it. The Scajaquada Expressway, or Route 198, is a 3.2 mile tear in the urban fabric. Built in the early 1960s, it slices Delaware Park in half, isolates north Buffalo from destinations south, makes walking or bicycling in the area a death courting activity and creates the strange optical illusions common to freewayscapes. The Albright Knox Art Gallery and the Buffalo History Museum are less than half a mile apart, on opposite sides of the Scajaquada. Looking across the expanse of pavement and speeding traffic, however, the distance seems insurmountable. "People don't cross the Scajaquada," said Alison Merner, the communications coordinator for GObike Buffalo, who grew up in a neighborhood that borders the expressway. "If I were going to go for a run or a short bike ride, I would always stay on my side. You were kind of on an island." The Scajaquada is not just a local barrier but also a poster road for a growing movement being championed by progressives in the urban planning community. They want to tear down some highways in cities and replace all that elevated and barricaded pavement with lower speed streets that favor pedestrians and bicyclists and foster greater connectivity among neighborhoods and residents. One of the groups leading the new charge is Congress for the New Urbanism. Since 2008, it has published a biennial list called "Freeways Without Futures," which names highways whose elimination would, according to its website, "remove a blight" from their cities. The 2017 edition includes Route 710 in Pasadena, Calif., Interstate 70 in Denver, Interstate 375 in Detroit and, paved enemy No. 1, the Scajaquada Expressway. Lynn Richards, the president and chief executive officer of C.N.U., said that removing a highway is "a somewhat radical idea." "There's a lot of analysis that needs to go into it about where the traffic is going to go," she said. But already, several cities have removed or decommissioned existing highways, including Paris; Seoul, South Korea; Boston; and Portland, Ore. Last year, Rochester buried a portion of a downtown expressway known as the Inner Loop, a stretch of sunken highway the city's mayor likened to a "moat." It is being replaced with a boulevard on the same grade as the rest of the streetscape. And because of a confluence of factors, including the embrace of ride hailing services like Uber and the rebirth of cities as places to live, work, raise families and retire to, advocates like Ms. Richards see an "incredible opportunity" to remove even more pavement. "When we put out a call last summer for freeways without a future, we got almost 75 recommendations," she said. "This can kick start a conversation about the best way to spend infrastructure dollars." Many in city highways were built during the post World War II boom years with easy money from the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act. They hail from an age when the automobile was ascendant and were built to quickly move commuters in and out of urban centers; many of these highways were used by white suburbanites and built in low income minority neighborhoods ("white men's roads through black men's homes," went a saying in Washington). Perhaps the greatest argument that removal advocates have is that so much of this infrastructure is nearing the end of its life span. In this era of tight budgets and political gridlock, it may be cheaper for local and state governments to remove a freeway rather than repair or build a new one. If it sounds counterintuitive, if not crazy, to tear down a highway that still carries thousands of cars and trucks each day, there are a number of case studies to point to. One of the earliest and, to advocates, most successful, was San Francisco's double decker Embarcadero Freeway. It skirted the city's waterfront and was demolished instead of rebuilt after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. "The Embarcadero came out of the waterfront, and now the waterfront real estate is seeing tremendous value," said Peter Park, a city planner in favor of removing highways in cities where neighborhoods have been "significantly disconnected." Not only in San Francisco but also in every case where a highway has been removed, Mr. Park argues, "the city has improved." Mr. Park was the planning director for Milwaukee when the city decommissioned the Park East Freeway spur in 2002. Less than a mile long, the highway hosted traffic snarls each day, but it had its supporters, especially among suburban commuters and truck drivers, and there was concern about what would happen if it was removed. "The basic argument for it was, people will never get to the city without it," said John Norquist, Milwaukee's mayor at the time, who spearheaded the removal campaign. "Well, how do they get to Paris? The arguments were left over from this glorious age of motoring after World War II." The bill to demolish the Park East and restore the street grid was around 30 million, significantly less than the 80 to 100 million estimated cost to rebuild the 40 year old freeway, Mr. Norquist said. He pointed to the rising land values and the slow but steady development along the 26 acre corridor in the years since and the lack of a traffic apocalypse as signs of success. Mr. Norquist, who went on to run Congress for the New Urbanism for a decade and is now a semiretired consultant, said removing a highway is not just about addressing local residents' concerns. "We had to make the big argument, the Jane Jacobs argument, that the freeway was harmful to the whole city," he said. "What we envision going to would be more of an urban boulevard that allows all modes of transportation pedestrians, bicyclists and cars to use that facility," said Angelo Trichilo, deputy chief engineer for the New York State Transportation Department. Still, some argue that the department's current plan, which eliminates features like merged lanes and uses seven new traffic lights and a raised median with curbs to slow cars, doesn't go far enough to reduce the expressway's impact or image and fails to look at the redesign in an innovative way. "It's like lipstick on a pig," said Stephanie Crockatt, executive director of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy. "They have a lot of pretty drawings, but they're not fixing anything. The road will be just as wide. There will still be a slab of pavement. We're still not seeing the connectivity and sensitivity." In the conservancy's office cottage inside Delaware Park, Ms. Crockatt and her colleagues showed a color rendering of their own "vision for the new Buffalo." Most notably, their plan calls for an Olmsted designed stone arch bridge, presently used by cars and as retained in the state's proposal, to be returned to its pedestrians and bicyclist origin in essence, to replace pavement with grass and knit back together the park's two halves in a way that visually reduces car traffic. They also want to remove the median and scale back the footprint of eight lane intersections. In response, Mr. Trichilo said the agency has held "over 50 meetings" with stakeholders and the public "to build consensus that we can all agree to" though opinions diverge widely from keeping the expressway to downsizing to a two lane road. The Transportation Department considered the conservancy's plan to eliminate traffic on the stone bridge. But based on its study, a new intersection would be required, and that intersection "just could not handle the traffic," Mr. Trichilo said, adding that the Federal Highway Administration has concurred. For supporters of the conservancy's plan, including Justin Booth, the executive director of GObike Buffalo, the makeover of the Scajaquada offers a once in a lifetime opportunity to "restore Olmsted's original vision," as Mr. Booth put it. He was referring to the network of graceful boulevards the landscape architect designed to connect Buffalo's parks, many of which have since been converted to freeways. Buffalo could become a leader in forward thinking urban design and a cultural tourist destination, advocates say. And the Scajaquada Corridor redesign could serve as a model for how to approach other highway tear downs, including the plan to demolish the Robert Moses built Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx. "That's why it's so important to get it right now, and not finance a mistake into perpetuity," Mr. Booth said. But even at a time when cities are embracing bike sharing programs and mass transit; even when the end of the car (or the human driver anyway) is speculated; even when waterfronts and industrial and low income areas where in city highways were built are being reclaimed through gentrification it's not easy to tear down a hunk of concrete in place for generations.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Marina Abramovic Just Wants Conspiracy Theorists to Let Her Be On April 10, Microsoft uploaded a film to its YouTube account about Marina Abramovic, the Serbian performance artist known for pushing her body to the limit. Ms. Abramovic's work can be violent, sometimes bloody, but the Microsoft video was more innocuous: It was focused on "The Life," in which museumgoers wear special headsets so that Ms. Abramovic seems to appear before them. The video was essentially some P.R. fluff for the tech company's role in the artwork, which is scheduled to be auctioned by Christie's in October. But in one corner of the internet, it was seen as something else entirely: evidence of a Satanist conspiracy. Soon after the film appeared, it was being discussed in those terms on Reddit and other social media platforms. An article on the conspiracy theory website Infowars accused Microsoft of working with a "witch," a "black magic performer" and a "Luciferian individual." As the online clamor escalated, the YouTube clip racked up more than 24,000 dislikes. Microsoft took it down on April 14. "We recognize that our association with this project served as a catalyst for online attacks," a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an email. Ms. Abramovic said in a telephone interview that she was not consulted before Microsoft took the video down, adding that she had rarely spoken about her treatment by conspiracy theorists because she did not want to encourage them. She is breaking that silence now, she said, because she is fed up. "I need to open my heart," Ms. Abramovic said. "I really want to ask these people, 'Can you stop with this? Can you stop harassing me? Can't you see that this is just the art I've been doing for 50 years of my life?'" Ms. Abramovic said she was most hurt by how the conspiracy theorists took images from her work and twisted the meaning to bolster their case. Among those images, she said, was a picture of her sitting on a pile of bloody cow bones. The image was from "Balkan Baroque," a work that Ms. Abramovic performed at the 1997 Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for Best Artist. In that piece, she spent five days in a sweltering Venice basement, trying in vain to scrub the bones clean. It was a comment on the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Ms. Abramovic said, and how, once blood is spilled, you can't wash it off your hands. "How can this be satanic?" she said. "Tell me!" Another image used repeatedly shows Ms. Abramovic holding a bloody ram's head: This photograph was taken from a 2014 photo shoot for Vogue magazine's Ukraine edition, and was intended as a comment on that country's war, she said. (This one did "look like something out of a satanic movie," she said with a laugh, but that was clearly not the intention.) The online harassment hadn't impacted her professionally, Ms. Abramovic said, since "the people who really have common sense in this business see this as nonsense." But the threats have taken a toll on her private life. "I am personally afraid that any kind of lunatic with a gun will come and shoot me, because they think I'm a Satanist," she said. Last year, religious protesters picketed the opening of a retrospective of Ms. Abramovic's work in Poland. And, in 2018, an artist smashed a painting over her head at an exhibition opening in Florence, Italy, though this appeared to be unrelated to any conspiracy theories. (Ms. Abramovic's attacker told her it was a piece of performance art.) Ms. Abramovic said she had considered taking defensive measures: She said she consulted lawyers on April 17 about suing Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, over articles about her on the site. "He's making money from hurting innocent people," she said. But she ultimately decided any action would be too expensive and take years. "All I want to know is how I can overcome this and have a positive outcome," she said. "Fear is the worst human emotion."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The United States' nearly seven year streak of job growth came to an end in September, as employers cut 33,000 jobs. But don't read too much into that decline Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which ravaged Texas and Florida, wreaked havoc on employment. How do we know that the storms played a role? Workers said so themselves. The monthly jobs report is based in part on a survey of roughly 60,000 American households. One question on that survey asks whether people who normally have jobs were not at work because of bad weather. In a typical September, around 30,000 workers fall into that category; this year, that number was 1.5 million. Another nearly 3 million people reported working part time because of the weather. Teasing out the exact impact of the storms is tricky. The Bureau of Labor Statistics acknowledged that the storms reduced total employment but didn't estimate the size of the effect. The government won't release state specific data for another two weeks, and even then it will be hard to distinguish weather related effects from other forces. (The monthly jobs numbers do not cover Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria.) Still, it is nearly certain that, had it not been for the hurricanes, job growth would have been positive for a record 84th consecutive month. Jonathan Wright, an economist affiliated with the Brookings Institution, estimated that Friday's report would have shown a 67,000 increase in jobs had it not been for the effect of the hurricanes. The storms did not affect all industries or workers equally. It was the first net loss of jobs in the industry since 2012, according to the government data. Low wage, hourly workers in other industries may also have been disproportionately affected by the storm. That pattern may help explain one of the pieces of good news in Friday's report: the unusually big, 12 cent jump in average hourly earnings. The presumably temporary disappearance of thousands of low wage jobs probably skewed the overall average, making wage gains look bigger than they really were. The good news is that the storm effects are likely temporary. Most of the workers kept home by the storms are back on the job now, or will be by the time October's jobs numbers come out next month. The storms will probably even bolster employment temporarily, at least in the affected states, as the recovery effort creates jobs for insurance adjusters, construction workers and others. That means next month's jobs report will likely show big gains and should be viewed with the same skepticism as this month's.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
BAYREUTH, Germany In the 142 years since Richard Wagner made front page news in New York with the first Bayreuth Festival, Americans have sung here, conducted here, made countless pilgrimages up a little green hill to sit, sweltering, in the temple that the composer built to his own art. But until now, no American had been entrusted with a production. Yuval Sharon, 39, changed that brilliantly on Wednesday, opening this year's festival with a "Lohengrin" that overcomes conceptual troubles with breathtaking visuals and enthralling musicality, under the guidance of the conductor Christian Thielemann. Not, however, that this "Lohengrin" is entirely Mr. Sharon's own. By the time he replaced Alvis Hermanis as the director, in 2016, the husband and wife artists Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy had been at work on the sets and costumes for several years. As an avowedly collaborative director, Mr. Sharon kept what he could. What the artists had imagined was a production with "no modern escapades," as Mr. Rauch put it to the local press; this would be an attempt to re enchant what so many have tried to deconstruct. Except for Lohengrin's. The grail knight is seen here as an electrician who provides the spark in a land that has lost its power. He lands in a neo Romanesque transformer station; his swan is an abstract flash of white; his sword is a lightning bolt. Although dressed in blue, the color he is associated with is a charged orange, too bright to be true. And so these New Leipzig School artists, as they often do, pose the old, the new, the supernatural and the modern in productive, ambivalent, veiling tension. This does not really sound like the work of Mr. Sharon. He is the closest thing that American opera has to a genuine avant gardist. His "Hopscotch" drove audiences around Los Angeles in limousines, to scenes on top of a building or in a parking lot. His "Invisible Cities" mingled commuters with performers and listeners at Union Station. His "War of the Worlds" set an alien landing in and around Walt Disney Concert Hall. He has produced John Adams, Peter Eotvos and even Wagner in Europe, but he has never directed at a major American opera house. Instead, he formed his own, collaborative company, the Industry, and has worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra. All this, in a genuinely Wagnerian spirit, is an effort to find a 21st century meaning for the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk the total work of art. True to form, Mr. Sharon's ideas seem to be different from those of Mr. Rauch and Ms. Loy: more political, reading Wagner closely and against the grain. This is a story, in the director's mind, not about Elsa's tragic failure to keep her faith, but about Lohengrin's unreasonable demands, about the hypocrisy of his and, therefore, modernity's inability to live up to his own vision for society. And who will make that hypocrisy clear, challenge it, overcome it? The women. Mr. Sharon's Elsa, then, liberates herself from bondage: first from imprisonment, with Lohengrin's help, then from the impossible marriage he imprisons her in. She is tied up, arms outstretched and crossed, when we first see her, about to be burned at the stake for her faith in her electrical hero; she crosses her arms again in her bridal procession; in her bridal chamber, she wants to read the Bible, but Lohengrin, that charismatic, handsome, political figure, wants sex, and he'll tie her up to get it by force. Only by following the lead of Ortrud here no wicked witch but a freethinking freedom fighter, as Mr. Sharon calls her will Elsa free herself, by asking a question that the patriarchy bans. So Elsa does, and when the opera ends, she does not die but instead walks off into an unknown future, toting an orange backpack that Lohengrin has given her. As that tiny touch suggests, Mr. Sharon seems to understand that feminist takes on Wagner often undercut their own message. Any attempt to make genuine feminists out of his heroines struggles, because they all, ultimately, serve Wagner's own visions of femininity. As "Lohengrin" teaches us, no star should be followed without skepticism, Wagner himself above all. Elsa still needs Lohengrin to set her free. Unfortunately, the political message is much too hidden to make its impact, so much so that the production's Telramund, Tomasz Konieczny, publicly praised its outright conservatism in the press. Until Act III, the feminist critique remains subtle in the extreme; when it finally makes itself obvious, it creates not satisfaction but confusion, as two different artistic visions meet. Our Elsa is Anja Harteros, who warmed up to make an impressive Bayreuth debut, but who remains an altogether too ethereal presence to make the message clear. Lohengrin, the outstanding Piotr Beczala, has little ethereal about him; his evocation of the Holy Grail, "In fernem Land," fittingly comes off as a spiteful rant, especially as it is sung more choppily than one often hears it. Ortrud, played with dominant presence by the incomparable Waltraud Meier, in her first appearance here in 18 years, is nearly burned at the stake, too, for her lack of faith in Lohengrin. But she also acquires freedom of a sort, inheriting the lands she has always coveted, albeit a Brabant in which everyone appears to have died. Gottfried, who usually inherits the kingdom, appears only as a man covered in green fur, to accompany Elsa on her journey.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Citing the toll of the coronavirus pandemic in South Florida, the organizers of the Art Basel Miami Beach fair which each year attracts the global stars of the art world said on Wednesday that they were canceling this year's event, which had been scheduled for December. Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach said he was "disappointed, but not shocked" by the cancellation of the event, which would have been the 19th edition. Mr. Gelber said that after months of discussions with the fair's staff, the event had been put off until December 2021. The fair's organizers, based in Switzerland, said in a statement that conditions in South Florida, as well as international travel restrictions and quarantine regulations, had left them "no other option." It was hard to argue with the decision. The city owned Miami Beach Convention Center, home to the art fair and the more than 250 galleries that participate, is currently being used as a reserve field hospital and a drive through coronavirus testing site. Mr. Gelber said that in light of Art Basel's much publicized financial difficulties after the cancellations of its fairs in Hong Kong and Switzerland, he had offered to waive the rental fee for the center, which the city recently remodeled at the fair's insistence, at a cost of 615 million. Yet the local Covid 19 numbers seemed to speak loudest of all. "We had 39 deaths reported today in Miami Dade County," Mr. Gelber said. "It's hard to fathom." Within the county, which includes Miami Beach as well as the city of Miami and its suburbs, the daily Covid 19 death toll remains between 20 and 50. The New York art world may be tentatively emerging from its enforced hibernation, but the situation in Miami remains grim, despite some improvement since the height of the summer. Even as some local officials call for an end to a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew and further reopening of businesses, there were more than 5,200 new cases of the coronavirus and more than 200 deaths during the past week in Miami Dade County. "I have always believed that we're not going to get our economy back including our cultural economy until we get the virus under control," Mr. Gelber said, adding that otherwise, "members of the public won't have confidence in group events and traveling." Noah Horowitz, Art Basel's director for the Americas, said that artists' production schedules and global shipping deadlines nearly half of the fair's participating galleries are based overseas meant that organizers had needed to make a decision by early September on staging the fair. While he hesitated to single out a tipping point, he pointed to a county order indefinitely shuttering all convention halls, even as casinos were recently allowed to reopen. Planning to open the fair as scheduled seemed impossible, Mr. Horowitz said. "It really made it feel along with a whole host of other factors on the operational and logistical side like a step too far," he said. Instead, the fair will feature its participating galleries in a series of "online viewing rooms." Several satellite fairs set to run concurrently with Art Basel Miami Beach, including NADA and Art Miami, also announced a similar pivot online. The immediate economic impact of the cancellation is grist for debate. A 2014 New York Times study estimated that the fair brought an injection of nearly 13 million in spending in Miami, while local boosters often insist that the figure is 10 times that amount. What's indisputable is the transformative effect Art Basel's spotlight has had on the way Miami is seen not only by the art world at large but also by Miamians themselves. A city once derided as a cultural backwater is now championed as a serious arts player by locals and visitors alike. Mr. Gelber, a Miami Beach native, recalled working during his teenage years in the late 1970s as an usher at the convention center. Showcasing the cream of contemporary art wasn't on the center's agenda at that time. In a dark blue polyester suit and matching cap, he instead staffed a steady diet of boxing and wrestling matches. "That was the cultural fare of the city then," he said. On rare occasions, he would be called in to work a traveling Broadway show "I saw 'Pippin' 23 times" but that was as highbrow as local fare rose. Art Basel changed everything, he said, adding, "It made us the center of the art world for a week, and we were able to grow so that we would have a profile all year long." "I'm the mayor of what is essentially a crowd based economy," Mr. Gelber said, adding, "We typically promote the opposite of social distancing." Mr. Gelber's current strategy is damage control, in the form of 1 million in emergency grants to a dozen of Miami Beach's leading arts organizations. "Our hope is that we can limp through this period so we can emerge and resume where we were," he said. And if that stage is far smaller than at any time before, with masking and strict distancing measures? All the better, he said. "Instead of going to a big opening with 100 people and not having the opportunity to walk up to a painting and really stare at it for 20 minutes, suddenly that's all that you can do," Mr. Snitzer said. "The ability to commune with the work, perhaps talk to the artist or the dealer, that's what the art world used to be. For me, that's a huge plus."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Frank Jones, who was born in Clarksville, Texas, in 1900, spent much of his life in and out of that state's prisons, possibly for crimes he did not commit, and died in one in 1969. During his last decade, Jones made around 500 drawings, usually on found paper, signed with his name and inmate number, 114591. He worked with the stubs of colored pencils discarded by the prison's accountants. He was partial to red and blue, but also used combinations of purple, orange and green. Jones's fanciful images conjure a world rich in suggestion, association and decorative invention. He started with a loosely subdivided architectural scaffolding, often with a peaked roof or a pediment; houses, circus wagons, Mardi Gras floats and prisons come to mind. Each subdivision usually contains a splendid creature of some sort a plumed demon or insect, or flying fish that are all ecstatically bug eyed and grinning. Occasionally a more human presence is limned, intimating an elaborately costumed Mardi Gras celebrant. Every level of every structure is lavishly festooned, mostly with alternating sharp and rounded shapes. The sharp ones are especially versatile, conjuring leaves, feathers, fins, teeth, little banners and maybe ribbon barbed wire; they also serve the creatures as horns, wings, feet or antennae. Sometimes the repeating shapes of the borders are solidly colored, emphasizing their architectural character. Sometimes they are sparsely striped, especially with red and blue, for a more transparent profusion that resembles lace, quilts or embroidery. Jones was born with a caul over his eye, which is often seen as indicating the gift of second sight. This belief can be self fulfilling: He claimed to see spirits. But his influences were probably many, ranging for example from prison life to southern textile traditions. And as is often the case with self taught artists, Jones's work also offers proof of the collective unconscious, as evidenced by its striking affinities with various motifs in the art of Bill Traylor, Martin Ramirez and Adolf Wolfli. Although going by this, his second solo in New York, Jones was a genius in his own right. ROBERTA SMITH "Iowa Dreams," the title of Serena Stevens's New York gallery debut, combines Midwestern plainness with a slightly forlorn reverie. Her paintings follow suit, haunting everyday, mostly domestic, people free scenes with strangeness largely through her attention to light, paint texture and scale. Ms. Stevens is in the process of mastering a loose, somewhat photographic realism that may reflect an admiration for the paintings of Edward Hopper and Eric Fischl. In "Rocking Chair," the subject is spare in design, made of dark wood and seen from the back. It is caught in the coffin like shaft of light from a tall, narrow window that counters the rocker's foreshortened form with an elongated, tower like shadow. Both are suspended in a brushy grayness that resembles mist. "Light Inside" might almost portray a disembodied vision, except it has just enough details to identify its central glow as that of a bathroom window filtered through a white shower curtain. The haunting is most palpable in the nocturnal "Intersection," in which a beam of light intersects with a traffic sign to form a kind of off kilter cross. The scene is witnessed by an invisible a stop sign whose shadow appears on a plane of gray brown that gradually defines itself as the broad trunk of a tree. The shadow is apparently cast by the traffic sign, but they don't seem to match. Two dozen mostly young artists, along with a few well established ones like Rebecca Horn and Mira Schor, appear in "I Want to Feel Alive Again," the striking inaugural group show at Lyles King's new gallery space near Chatham Square. The work, in a variety of mediums, is all figurative, or at least evokes figuration. Nearly all the bodies are somehow altered, mutilated or constrained. But they're not necessarily suffering. A man with a see through heart, in a painting by Phumelele Tshabalala, is distinctly self possessed, as is Aleksandra Waliszewska's girl with a flayed face. And the mood in Jessie Makinson's imposing diptych "Skin Spy," which shows a kind of elfin garden party, is only slightly tense. Bright colors abound, and so does sex, most notably in Gavin Kenyon's sculpture "A Scar Is Not a Wound," whose three bulbous concrete pillars are as phallic as they are figurative, and the 21 ink soaked plaster tongues of Bhasha Chakrabarti's installation "Kali." For me, though, the linchpin is Sara Rahbar's "Separation (Confessions)," a pair of cast bronze hands her own hanging against the gallery wall on two adjacent chains. Are they trophies or tools? Emblems of the artist's power to impress her shape into the world, or tokens of her brutal commodification? A call to unity or relics of dismemberment? It's all of them. WILL HEINRICH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
It took 26 albums, but Andrea Bocelli, the Italian tenor who has embodied the popular side of classical music and opera for two decades, has finally reached the top of the all genre Billboard 200 chart. Bocelli's "Si" (Sugar/Decca Records/Verve), which includes collaborations with Ed Sheeran, Josh Groban and the singer's son Matteo, among tracks in Italian and Spanish, debuts at No. 1 this week with 126,000 album equivalent units, according to Nielsen Music. That includes 123,000 old school sales (physical and digital) and 2 million streams (a tiny total for this era of music consumption). The new album is Bocelli's 16th studio effort and 26th overall to chart since "Romanza" made it to Billboard in 1997. The totals for "Si" were bolstered by the now common tactic of pairing new albums with concert tickets, meaning every fan who purchased a seat at an upcoming Bocelli show was given the opportunity to redeem a copy of the LP for no additional cost. The ticket bundle, as it is known in the industry, was enough to push the album past the soundtrack for "A Star Is Born," featuring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, which had held the top Billboard spot for three weeks as the film cleans up at the box office. In its fourth week on the chart, "A Star Is Born" (Interscope) is No. 2, with another 93,000 units including 36 million streams falling below a six figure total for the first time.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE (2019) 9 p.m. on CNN. "If I were going to choose something to do, it would not be to stand up in front of a lot of people," the singer Linda Ronstadt says in this documentary. "But I love to sing, I love to sing, I love music. So at some point, you do whatever you have to do to do music." That's not exactly a stereotypical rock star outlook, but Ronstadt didn't have the typical rock star's career: After reaching arena level success in rock in the 1970s, she moved across genres, releasing albums of pop standards and Mariachi songs. ("People would think that I was trying to reinvent myself," she says in the documentary, "but I never invented myself to start with.") Her varied career is the focus here; it's discussed by both Ronstadt and by interviewees like Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, Cameron Crowe, Jackson Browne and Dolly Parton. "The political intelligence and matter of fact feminism that emerge in this portrait are among its most intriguing aspects," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. He wrote that Ronstadt's "cleareyed, down to earth thoughts on her profession, her family and American culture (musical and otherwise) make her someone you want to know better." DOCTOR WHO 8 p.m. on BBC America. Jodie Whittaker begins her second season as the Doctor in this first chapter of a two part season opener, cheekily titled "Spyfall." As ever, few details have been released, though it has been announced that Stephen Fry and the British comedian Lenny Henry will appear. Also in the season: fictionalized versions of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, played by the actors Robert Glenister and Goran Visnjic. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) 10 p.m. on TNT. The cinematographer Roger Deakins is back in the Oscar race this year with "1917," a World War I movie directed by Sam Mendes that has inserted itself into awards season conversations. In the 1990s, Deakins received his first Academy Award nomination for filming this classic Stephen King adaptation, about the camaraderie of two men (played by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman) at a fictional state prison in Maine. SPINNING OUT Stream on Netflix. Ice and melodrama coalesce in this soapy new Netflix series, which follows a professional figure skater (Kaya Scodelario) ready to call it quits after sustaining a serious injury in the rink. She returns to the ice after getting paired with a new partner (Evan Roderick); drama follows both on the ice and away from it. MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) Stream on Netflix; rent on Amazon and iTunes. The British humorist and musician Neil Innes died on Sunday. See him pester Eric Idle as an inappropriately cheery balladeer in this Monty Python comedy, which turns 45 years old in a few months. Other highlights include the terrifying "killer bunny," the "holy hand grenade" and a very dour set of chanting monks (Innes plays one of them, too).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"I've gone full Victorian," said Rhian Rees, 34, of flower pressing, a childhood hobby she's rediscovered in quarantine. "It feels like we're back in the old days when life felt more fragile." On a recent hike in Santa Clarita, Calif., Ms. Rees, an actor originally from England and now living in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, brought home an assortment of seedlings and delicate, small blossoms and leaves. Some she dried out in silica gel and later set inside blocks of polyester resin, while others were placed inside an old fashioned flower press that had been gathering dust on her bookshelf, and others in between the pages of a book on 19th century Shaker style homes and interiors. The dried and flattened flowers were later affixed to notepaper that Ms. Rees used to write physical letters to family members and friends sequestered elsewhere. (Some of those letters were to offer condolence. Ms. Rees has lost an uncle to Covid 19, as well as her husband's godfather.) But others are cutting down on screen time by pursuing old timey crafts of a bygone era: namely the Victorian times of 19th century England, when greater wealth and industrialization afforded the privileged upper class more idle time to hang out at home. The new leisure class filled their down time with activities like fern collecting, flower pressing, scrapbooking, board games and playing chamber music on their own instruments. Ms. Rees said her landlord has let the grass in their shared garden grow wild. "There's lots of little clovers out there," she said. "So I have been trying to find some four leaf clovers." She is using her free time to pursue her own favorite Victorian era pastime: collage. Unlike the goal oriented activity of creating a vision board to manifest one's heart's desire, collage has no purpose other than creative release. At the moment, Ms. O'Farrelly is growing tomatoes and cucumbers from seed. She plans to preserve their leaves in her mother's vintage flower press and use them in the pages of a new collage book given to her by her best friend, jumbled artfully together with magazine clippings, decorative paper scraps, dried rosebuds and lines of original poetry. "You're just sticking stuff down and whatever happens, happens. It's relaxing," she said. "We're sort of going back in time a bit. I'm definitely here for it." In the 19th century, intellectuals like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and others started to expand on the positive psychological benefits associated with a concept now known as mastery: practicing an activity at which you have no previous level of expertise, and experiencing gradual improvement over time. "During the Second World War, when people were in concentration camps, many prisoners developed impressive skills at mental multiplication," he said. "They were in such an aversive environment, pushing themselves to solve problems felt like an escape, when they had no resources." Even in less extreme situations, it can be empowering to experience improvement, in any small or large area of life, especially in a period when many are feeling stuck both physically and emotionally. "Once you acquire a skill, there are activities you can do that are much more enjoyable," Mr. Ericsson said, referring to the delayed and deeper gratification that comes from meeting resistance and overcoming obstacles, versus the more passive rewards of activities requiring minimal effort or discomfort, such as Netflix. "Once you experience what changes you can accomplish, that changes your perception of what's possible, it changes your mind about what's possible." In Brooklyn, Tom CJ Brown, 35 and also originally from England, had dreamed of playing "Clair de Lune" on the harp, but didn't own the string instrument, which was popularized in its modern form by a Chicago shop in 1889 but not exactly easy to acquire on Craigslist. Mr. Brown, an animator and filmmaker, hasn't worked since mid March. Despite seeing an initial bump in demand for animated advertisements after Hollywood shut down live action productions, he said that jobs have dried up in recent weeks, and he's had to find novel ways to fill his idle time indoors. YouTube tutorials on harp playing abound, and a local woman in his neighborhood was even offering classes on Zoom. But first he'd need the instrument. Daunted by even secondhand prices, Mr. Brown decided he would build the harp himself. On Etsy, he found the 159 Fireside Folk Harp kit, a 22 string instrument with a cardboard soundbox and many slow steps toward assembly. "It just felt like an opportunity to see incremental progress," said Mr. Brown, who documented the project on Instagram. "Putting layers of paint on a piece of wood. Literally watching paint dry: this is the perfect thing." Mr. Brown placed the order for his Fireside Folk Harp, which was shipped from Hamden, Conn., on March 23. It arrived a week later, and he completed the project on April 16. "It looks like I built it in 12 days. It's not 12 hours, but I'm not Windmaster5000," he said, referring to a faster harp builder on YouTube. While he's not yet mastered "Clair de Lune," Mr. Brown has already learned to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb," to the delight of his 2 year old nephew. "It is something I've wanted to try for probably 10 years, and I never had the time," said Mrs. Urso Deutsch. "Most of our dyes used to be botanically based made from fruits, flowers, roots and such. So it's really a return to a lost art." Mrs. Urso Deutsch's Easter eggs were a success, and so she was inspired to advance to a more ambitious project of dyeing old textiles, including a set of stained linen napkins passed down through her family. The napkins were given a new life after soaking in batches of boiled purple cabbage water creating a violet blue color, as well as the turmeric and a batch of rust colored dye made from red onion skins. From there, she dyed lace curtains and doilies, a knitted dress, a crocheted vest, an old apron and yarn for knitting, all in a rainbow of pinks and purples and goldenrod. "I know that when this ends, I'm going to feel good about the way I've used my time," she said. "We can only control what we can control, and right now that's our own selves."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A major wave of new leaders is taking over regional theaters across the United States, and many of them promise changes in programming and personal style. This led us to put the question to New York Times reading audience members: What do you want your local theater to be? Their edited responses dotted with praise for theaters they believe are doing things just right follow. I want ideas. I want debates, opinions. I want words that move us forward, using phenomenal storytelling, and engaged, committed professionals with a variety of voices. I want it all, and I intend to have it. CHRIS CASSADY, Houston New Work, New Work, New Work. I don't want local productions of Broadway or Off Broadway hits. I'll go to Broadway, or I'll see the touring company. I want to see new work, fully supported with solid direction and great acting. That's it. The End. KELLY LAWRENCE, San Francisco When I go to my local theater, I'm looking for inspiration in three ways: quality, intimacy and creativity. Quality is not about a proscenium arch, clear acoustics or high technology although those of course are welcome. For me, quality means talent. Local does not equal amateur. Intimacy means that artists don't want or need to protect themselves from the public. We can see them, hear them, meet them and talk with them. Together we make the theater as important in our community as the schools, hospital, library, ballpark or gym. JACK FRACASSO, Brewster, Mass. What do I want from my local theater? I am so jazzed by what they are doing that I just want them to continue. Most recently a friend and I attended a performance of Anna Deavere Smith's "Notes From the Field" at the Zach Theater. Superb. Thought provoking. Performances were professional and moving. I feel good whenever I walk in the door. Very proud of the community outreach and the many seats that go to deserving groups who otherwise would not attend. M. DIANE DWIGHT, Spicewood, Tex. I live in Williamstown, Mass., home to the Williamstown Theater Festival, and I'm seeing there what I'm seeing in a lot of theaters: lack of musical theater. There's not a single musical at the festival this year, and, in my opinion, musicals shouldn't be treated as a "lesser" form. SAM TUCKER SMITH, Williamstown, Mass. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter Local theater should bring classics and new works to its audience, and provide a stage for new talent and creative ensembles. Combine traditionalism and innovation in staid and shocking balance. Not serve as a mirror but an anvil. Build community and awareness. Reflect its community in race, gender and sexual orientation. Be afraid of nothing. Celebrate life, and decry tyranny. MARGOT MAILLIARD RAWLINS, Yorkville, Calif. I want to see productions where race, gender, creed or sexual orientation is not a disadvantage for the central character to overcome. To be even more specific, I want to see stories of people from these groups on hero's journeys. STACEY RANSOM, San Francisco What do I want? Pretty much what the Pittsburgh Public Theater provides: classics, moderns, musicals, Shakespeare and one person shows; a certain intimacy (not too big); an annual Shakespeare monologue contest for middle through high school students; periodic mailings and emails with information on what's coming, casting notes and behind the scenes tidbits; easy, reasonably priced parking right next door; Sunday night showtimes that get you home just a little earlier than on other nights. And oh how I will miss former artistic director Ted Pappas playing frequent doorman, welcoming patrons! LISA PAWELSKI, Pittsburgh I want to see theater reassume its place as a community good. The past few seasons of programming at Lake Dillon Theater Company, in Summit County, Colo., have included such plays as "Building the Wall," "Ugly Lies the Bone," "Topdog/Underdog" and "The Cake": works concerning the treatment of immigrants, veterans' trauma and their reintegration to our society, the manifestations of institutional oppression and the conversation around equal marriage rights for all couples. In the face of outspoken distaste, outrage and even severance of donor relationships, the theater continues to prioritize works that promote conversations our community needs to have. ALEXANDRA POOL, Fort Collins, Colo. I want a community that puts new work at the forefront. A community that embraces and demands theaters use their spaces to push boundaries and test the limits of the medium. That uses the black box to gather community and dream the culture forward. If you create solid, well made plays, that is great, but I want a community that lets go of that as the standard. I want messy plays, plays that are too short and too long. Plays that end and you think: Wait, was that a play? I want theater made with an open heart. GEO DECAS O'DONNELL, Philadelphia Change is good. Bring it on. MARK J. POWERS, San Ramon, Calif.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
DETROIT Young, educated and upwardly mobile, Kristin Winn represents the ideal target for automakers trying to reach young buyers. Ms. Winn, a 24 year old technician for an ophthalmologist, says she plans to replace her nine year old Chevrolet Cobalt this year. She says that she would like to buy a new car that has the latest technologies, like hands free calling, but that it's not likely to happen considering the cost. "I'll probably buy used," said Ms. Winn, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., as she admired the Mercedes and Cadillac exhibits at the North American International Auto Show last week. "I plan to go back to school, so I have to keep that in mind." Automakers have been in a race in recent years to woo the most coveted, if elusive, sector of the car market: younger buyers. They have restyled cars, creating sportier versions that are more environmentally friendly, and loaded them with the latest dashboard technology. But despite these efforts, young buyers like Ms. Winn still say that price and fuel economy are the most important factors in deciding what to purchase. Since 2009, the percentage of new cars registered to buyers age 18 to 34 has remained flat, hovering between 10 percent and 13 percent, according to an IHS Automotive analysis of Polk data. And in a recent survey of buyers born between 1977 and 1994 conducted by the global consulting firm Deloitte, four out of five respondents said cost was the main barrier to owning or leasing a vehicle, even though they were attracted by the new features. When the transmission on Adrian Jauregui's 1994 Toyota Corolla died at an intersection in El Paso this month, he quickly found himself among the legions of younger buyers in the market for a car. But, like most younger buyers, he is limited by how much he can afford. "I'm not so sure I'd get approved for financing" before starting a new job at a nursing home for veterans this month, said Mr. Jauregui, who is 20 and a nursing school graduate. He settled on a 2005 Honda Civic. Karl Brauer, a senior analyst with Kelley Blue Book, said it was no surprise why cost remained paramount for younger buyers. "The economy still isn't supporting employment as well as it should, and this is particularly true for young people," he said. "It's possible that, as the economy improves, parents could play a larger role in helping get young buyers into cars." Still, the allure of younger buyers remains for automakers, who see an opportunity to replace the aging baby boom generation with a new group of loyal customers. The Deloitte survey found that three out of five young consumers expected to buy or lease a car, new or used, within the next three years, and nearly a quarter of them said they planned to make the purchase in the next 12 months. But figuring out what they want is a challenge, said James E. Lentz, chief executive of Toyota North America. "I think they want everything," he said, adding that young buyers "are so used to trying new and different things, it's really difficult to forecast what they want." The long lead times for product development in the automotive industry further complicate the task of deciding what younger buyers are looking for in a car. "I've got to guess today what you'll want in a car 10 years from now," Mr. Lentz said. "Today I've got to decide what is going in a car in 2018, and that model will likely be sold until 2024." What they want, according to the Deloitte survey, is technology that serves a variety of purposes to recognize the presence of other vehicles, alert drivers when they have surpassed the speed limit, entertain passengers and connect their smartphones to their vehicle's dashboard interface. But buyers say that a vehicle's cost takes precedence over bells and whistles. Dashboard technology "is not something I'd look for specifically," David Campanella, a 24 year old architect from Washington, said after stepping out of Cadillac's new ATS coupe on display at the Detroit auto show on Saturday. "I have so many gadgets," he said. "Do I need another one in my car? No. Would it be nice to have? Yes." Younger buyers like Mr. Campanella are showing a more pragmatic streak. Last year, he bought a 2010 Volkswagen Tiguan sport utility vehicle because he liked its 2.0 liter turbo engine and its storage space. Fuel economy is critical, Josh Pettrey said, as he browsed Ford's display of Fiesta subcompacts at the show. Mr. Pettrey, a 26 year old HVAC technician from Bedford, Mich., said that his 2005 Ford 500 sedan gets 23 to 28 miles to the gallon but that he would prefer something closer to 30. "Gas prices are up and down," Mr. Pettrey said, "and I don't have a ton of money that I can throw out on gas." For luxury brands, the task for automakers is to convince younger buyers with more disposable income that there is value in an upscale trim line at an entry level price. From the new BMW 4 series and the Mercedes CLA sedan to Audi's coming A3 sedan and Q3 compact crossover, some automakers are banking on smaller luxury models that will convert young buyers into lifetime customers. "I think we've got to do it all," said David Caldwell, a spokesman for Cadillac, which introduced its ATS coupe at the auto show. "I think it's wrong to assume that the younger buyer, by definition, is a whole lot different in what they want in a car."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Mr. Rosenberg, 59, is founder and chief executive of Greystone, a financial services and development company based in New York. Greystone's recent projects include the Printhouse Lofts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and 79 Horatio in the West Village. The company also recently broke ground on Waterbridge 47 in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, and On the Sound on City Island. Mr. Rosenberg started the company in 1988. Q. Tell me a little more about your company. A. It's a business that I started with absolutely zero capital in the back of my friend's music store on two rusty filing cabinets in Atlanta. I was consulting for just one type of transaction, which was workouts of defaulted apartment buildings. Twenty six years later we've still never raised any capital, ever. And here we are 6,500 strong. We do lending, developing, and owning and managing as well as trading. Q. Is there one area that you do more of? A. In terms of the revenue generated, the lending side. This year we'll probably do about 4 billion in loans; last year we were a little under 4 billion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Major League Soccer reduced its work force by about 20 percent on Thursday through a combination of layoffs and the elimination of open positions, yet another sign of the punishing financial effect the coronavirus pandemic is having on professional sports. Most of the league's employees, besides those in entry level jobs, had their salaries reduced in April. Those reductions will continue for the roughly 270 that remain, according to a person with knowledge of the league's plans. Most departments were affected, and the layoffs included a number of high ranking executives. The N.B.A. laid off around 100 employees in June, and the N.F.L. has reduced salaries and furloughed some employees. Some individual M.L.S. teams already have instituted pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs of their own, as have a number of teams in other sports. M.L.S., like all sports leagues, has been hit hard by the coronavirus. Its regular season had just begun in March, with only two weeks of games completed, when the season was postponed. M.L.S. eventually completed a monthlong tournament in Orlando over the summer, and then completed an abbreviated three month regular season in certain home markets. But the combined effects of canceled games, empty stadiums and significant costs for the testing that allowed it to return to the field have continued to mount.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
In the closing sentence of "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin marvels at the process of evolution, observing how "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Few people would describe bedbugs as most beautiful or most wonderful. Yet this blood feeding pest may represent an exceptional chance to observe the emergence of Darwin's "endless forms": "For something that is so hated by so many people, it might just be a perfect model organism for evolutionary questions," said Warren Booth, a biologist at the University of Tulsa and a co author of the new study, published in Molecular Ecology. Scientists have been very slow to appreciate the biology of bedbugs despite the fact that the insects have infiltrated human shelters for thousands of years. That's because the insects practically vanished at the dawn of modern biology in the 1940s, thanks to the widespread use of DDT. Bedbugs have returned with a vengeance in recent years, partly because they have evolved resistance to pesticides, and scientists are struggling to learn more about these pests. It's a much bigger challenge than examining, say, monarch butterflies. "It's very hard to study in them in the wild, because often people don't want you to use their house as a laboratory," said Toby Fountain, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. "They just want to get rid of them as quickly as possible." Dr. Fountain, Dr. Booth and other bedbug experts study the insects by collaborating with exterminators, who preserve some specimens in alcohol and ship them to the scientists. The researchers extract the DNA, finding clues to the bedbug's natural history. Variations in their genes reveal a lot about how the insects move around the world. As it turns out, their DNA even offers clues as to how bedbugs became such annoyances in the first place. For the new research, Dr. Booth collaborated with Ondrej Balvin, a bedbug researcher at Charles University in Prague who collected bedbugs from across Central Europe with his Czech colleagues. The common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, feeds not only on humans but on other animals, especially bats. So as well as collecting human feeders, the researchers gathered bedbugs from bat roosts in houses, churches and castles. Little was known about the bugs that depend on bats for their meals. "The big thing that this paper adds is the bat side," said Dr. Fountain, who was not involved in the new study. Dr. Booth compared DNA sequences from 214 bedbugs. Those that live with bats, he found, were genetically quite distinct from those living with humans. "The pattern was so stark, I'd never seen anything like it," Dr. Booth said. The results support a hypothesis that Dr. Balvin and other researchers have put forward to explain how bedbugs started making life unpleasant for humans. They argue that Cimex lectularius started out living in caves, feeding on bats. When early humans showed up in the caves, some of the bedbugs turned their attention to their new hosts. "This paper shows that that is true," Dr. Booth said. When humans left caves and began building dwellings, they brought their new admirers along. But humans represented a new challenge for the insects, requiring new adaptations. For one thing, we sleep at night, not in the daytime, which meant that the bedbugs had to shift their schedule. Dr. Balvin and his colleagues also have found that bedbugs that feed on humans have longer, thinner legs than those on bats, perhaps because bedbugs that feed on people no longer need to cling to bats hanging from cave roofs. The insects also evolved adaptations for feeding on human blood. Researchers at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic have found that bedbugs adapted to feeding on humans have a shorter life span if they drink only bat blood. Once humans started putting up buildings, bats began building roosts in them. Dr. Booth's new results suggest that the bats brought their own bedbugs, too. Yet for thousands of years, the two populations of bedbugs have shared the homes but haven't interbred although they can, for now. Bedbugs that feed on humans still belong to Cimex lectularius, Dr. Fountain said. But the two populations are diverging. For instance, many bedbugs that feed on humans carry a genetic variation that makes them resistant to pesticides, Dr. Booth found. The bedbugs on bats still carry a version of the gene susceptible to pesticides. Dr. Fountain said that the scenario laid out by Dr. Booth and his colleagues is consistent with their evidence, but that it needed to be confirmed with a bigger survey of bedbugs from around the world. "The cool thing is we have the tools to be able to do it, which we didn't have two or three years ago," Dr. Fountain said. If bedbugs continue to infest our buildings, they will diverge even further from their bat feeding cousins. At some point, they will become a species of their own, adding one more branch to Darwin's tree of life. "It's right on the cusp," Dr. Booth said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Why would a playwright design a play so that the most moving thing in it is the audience? You have the rare opportunity to contemplate that question and embody it, too at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where "Fefu and Her Friends" opened on Sunday. The opportunity is rare because this 1977 play by Maria Irene Fornes, though considered a key work of the American avant garde, is more often read and studied than seen. The reverent Theater for a New Audience production, directed by Lileana Blain Cruz, is the first major revival to appear here since 1978. And a good revival it is I think; it seems well acted and designed. If I hedge it's only because Fornes, in writing a play that deliberately challenges the usual values of coherence and engagement, also challenges the usual value of criticism. What makes sense to any one audience member may not make sense to another, and indeed what each of us sees will literally be different. That's because the play's abstract style (there's no plot in the usual sense) and its multiple perspective construction turn it into an almost Cubist experience. Not that it seems so strange immediately; the first of its three parts takes place, like many period stage works, in a deluxe drawing room. In this one on the ground floor of a New England country house, circa 1935 Fefu (Amelia Workman) gathers seven other women to discuss a charity event they are planning. In classic style, the play introduces each as she arrives, spouting a bright, brittle aphorism or offering a capsule preview of her character. But within this conventional, almost cinematic shell, Fornes inserts a nearly hourlong nugget of what we now call immersive or promenade theater. After the introductory scene, the audience, wearing colored wristbands that divide it into four tribes of up to 60 people each, is herded to one of four playing areas representing other rooms in Fefu's house. As a member of the purple clan, I first saw the scene in which Julia (Brittany Bradford), who uses a wheelchair, is discovered in bed, hallucinating scenes of disfigurement and death. Dire though the images are, the emotion they produce remains remote; in Adam Rigg's ingenious set design, Julia is entombed beneath the stage, made visible to us through a Plexiglas floor and audible through wireless headphones. (The sound design is by Palmer Hefferan.) Next, we purples saw Christina (Juliana Canfield) and Cindy (Jennifer Lim) in the study: one practicing French and the other trying out jokes from a magazine. The underlying subject of this scene, with its repeated punch line about a husband who's a "cheetah," seems to be the impossibility of marriage a theme picked up next in the kitchen, where Paula (Lindsay Rico) is sharing with Sue (Ronete Levenson) the results of her calculations on the duration of love. (It lasts seven years and three months.) Paula seems to know this from experience, not just math; this scene comes as close as "Fefu" gets to conventional naturalism when Cecilia (Carmen Zilles) enters the room and it becomes clear that she and Paula are ex lovers. By the time I reached the last of the four 10 minute episodes a croquet match between Fefu and Emma (Helen Cespedes) I was already familiar with some of its dialogue because sounds from the simultaneous scenes had been leaking into one another throughout. Often this produced an odd feeling of envy, as when bursts of laughter from the lawn made me feel, while stuck in the study, like I was at a party at which anyone else's conversation was more glittering. Presumably the reds, blues and greens felt the same, which turned us, though separated, into a kind of community. At the same time, the extraordinary effort involved in realizing the effect which depends on perfect timing by the actors and some genius stage management during the five minutes allotted to move between scenes cannot help but disperse whatever continuity of thought or feeling might otherwise accumulate. The cumbersomeness but also the self consciousness of the gimmick makes this part of the play feel clever but mechanical, a round robin of lesbian Clue. The third part of the play makes use of just such whodunit energy as the characters return to the living room and we to our original seats. Will a romance be rekindled? Did we just see a lie revealed? A shotgun that went off in the first scene as part of a game Fefu plays with her unseen husband seems destined to go off again, but who will be the victim? To the extent the play provides answers, it is only as a side effect. Fornes's surrealistic style, like Beckett's or Ionesco's, favors quips and epigrams. Fefu's first line "My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are" is not meant to be interpreted, it's meant to shock, and start a conversation. The flow of dialogue is all; no wonder that in directing the original production, Fornes told the cast to act as if they were in a film. Blain Cruz follows suit, encouraging her cast to find in each character the snap and shine of a movie goddess. (Workman's Fefu is the most obviously beguiling, though everyone is given a dose of '30s glamour by Montana Levi Blanco's supremely witty costumes.) Still, in 2019, the production can't help highlighting the feminism implicit in a play that spends little time talking about men, except as targets. Even Fefu, who is not notably sanguine about women, says of them: "If they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart." In the context of a work that mostly traffics in the bonkers idiosyncrasy of its characters, the idea of community is surprisingly powerful. Perhaps that's finally why Fornes, who died last year, sends the audience trooping around the theater together: to experience, without distraction from pesky things like sentiment and story, how individuals make a group but also how a group makes individuals. That's moving at least as long as you are, too. Tickets Through Dec. 8 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; 866 811 4111, tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours .	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The government can't prevent the coronavirus from damaging the U.S. economy. The usual tools that economic policymakers rely on, like tax cuts and stimulus spending, won't restore canceled conferences, unclog supply chains or persuade wary consumers to go out to bars and restaurants. Even if such policies would help, they conflict with the advice of health officials who are urging "social distancing" to slow the spread of the virus. But that doesn't mean policymakers are powerless. Economists say well designed programs could limit the damage and help ensure a quick rebound. President Trump said Monday that he would meet with congressional leaders to discuss a "very substantial" payroll tax cut and other measures. Many economists are skeptical of that approach, arguing that a payroll tax cut would be too small and too poorly targeted to be of much help. Instead, they recommended a variety of other steps, some narrowly aimed at addressing the outbreak and some intended to bolster the broader economy. One lesson from the last recession is that the government has to move quickly. "You've got to go big, and you've got to go fast," said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve staff member who is now director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a left leaning research organization. "If you don't go fast, you're not going to short circuit it." Here are some forms that such intervention could take. The surest way to limit the economic damage, of course, is to limit the spread of the disease itself. That is mostly the responsibility of health officials. But policymakers can take steps to make the job easier, said Jay Shambaugh, director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy arm of the Brookings Institution. The federal government, for example, could offer to cover some of the Medicaid costs that states usually bear. That would make it easier for states which, unlike the federal government, generally must balance their budgets each year to respond forcefully to the virus. It would also make it less likely that states would have to raise taxes or cut programs to pay for coronavirus spending, which could further damage the economy. More generally, Mr. Shambaugh and others said, the federal government should spend whatever it takes to address the outbreak. Yields on government bonds have fallen to record lows in recent days, meaning the government can borrow money at little cost. The early stages of the coronavirus outbreak have had an acute impact on a relatively narrow set of industries and places. Airlines are warning of huge losses. Cruise operators are reeling. Restaurants are losing business in cities with substantial outbreaks, or where large events have been called off. There are clear humanitarian reasons for helping the people who will lose jobs or income because of the outbreak. But there are also economic reasons. The clearest way for the virus to cause a recession is for the impact to spread beyond directly affected sectors, as people who lose jobs are forced to cut spending, leading to further job losses. Government programs could help prevent that. "What a fiscal stimulus can do is try to erect firewalls as much as possible and try to make sure it doesn't ripple out and affect the rest of the economy," said Josh Bivens, director of research for the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Those programs could take various forms. Mr. Trump on Monday floated the idea of offering loans through the Small Business Administration to affected businesses, something that economists said could help minimize layoffs and keep companies from going out of business. The Federal Reserve on Monday also indicated it would allow banks to be flexible with customers if they fell behind on loan payments because of virus related disruptions. Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, likened the situation to the financial freeze up after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Back then, the Fed provided liquidity so that financial institutions could ride out the crisis. The federal government could play a similar role now. 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. "You got a bunch of people, small businesses particularly in retail, transportation, hospitality, tourism that are going to be temporarily disrupted and might go out of business and shed jobs, but that's only because of this one time shock," Mr. Posen said. "So fiscal policy should be the bridge to get them over that shock." Other programs could focus on individuals. The unemployment insurance system, for example, generally requires people to be actively searching for work to receive benefits, something that could be difficult if they are quarantined or are avoiding in person interactions. Food stamps and other anti poverty programs have work requirements, meaning people can lose benefits if they don't work enough hours. Waiving or changing those rules could help people affected by the virus, and support efforts to contain the outbreak by making it easier for people exposed to the virus to stay home from work. The trouble with carefully tailored stimulus efforts is that they could take time to design and carry out, and might not reach all the affected people and industries. Airlines and cruise operators are easy to identify, but it is harder to identify the Uber driver in Austin, Texas, who lost out on business when the South by Southwest conference was canceled, or the coffee cart owner in Midtown Manhattan who is suffering because people are working from home. "Lots of people will be affected in lots of ways, and you can't find them quite as perfectly as you'd like," said Jason Furman, who led the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. Mr. Furman, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last week, proposed an immediate, one time payment of 1,000 to every adult, plus 500 for every child. For families hurt by the virus, such payments would provide a cash infusion to help cover rent, food and other costs, without having to determine exactly who those people are. That kind of broad based program would also serve as a stimulus, helping to kick start the economy once the outbreak passed. Targeted programs aren't big enough to affect the overall economy, but a program like the one Mr. Furman is proposing he estimated the cost of it and some other stimulus proposals at 350 billion would be. Stimulus efforts like Mr. Furman's are an established part of economic firefighting. President George W. Bush tried a similar, albeit somewhat smaller, cash rebate program in 2008. But not all economists are convinced that such a program makes sense when the damage is still unclear. Despite the turmoil in financial markets, there has been almost no hard data suggesting an economic collapse. Michael R. Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said Congress could pass a stimulus now that would take effect only if economic indicators showed signs of trouble. "We don't know what the impact of this is," Mr. Strain said. "We don't know what the impact is going to be. And we aren't in a situation where our only choice is to act today or not to act at all. That's just not the choice." Glenn Hubbard, a Columbia University economist who led the Council of Economic Advisers under Mr. Bush, said the biggest economic damage so far had been to confidence. The best remedy for that, he said, would be for the government to make clear that it was ready to act to support the economy if necessary. He suggested a long term infrastructure program, something that both parties have supported in the past and that would be comparatively inexpensive given low interest rates. "You want to persuade businesspeople that demand isn't going to go off a cliff," Mr. Hubbard said. "You need to make a commitment that demand will be there and will continue to be there." In his comments to reporters on Monday, Mr. Trump highlighted a different way to put cash in consumers' pockets: a payroll tax cut. That approach has been tried in the past, including under Mr. Obama. Studies conducted since the financial crisis, however, have found that small, gradual tax cuts were less effective at stimulating the economy than larger lump sum payments. Consumers are more likely to spend a one time windfall, these studies have found. And crucially for forestalling a recession, they are more likely to spend it right away, when the economy needs the boost. "Whatever they're going to spend out of the 1,000, you want them to spend it now," said Ms. Sahm of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. The most imminent threat to the economy, she said, is that people start to worry they will lose their jobs and pull back on spending as a result. A few extra dollars in each paycheck won't change that calculus. A larger lump sum might. "That would be the bigger problem right now, is people just stop buying cars and washing machines," she said. "You give them money, and they will spend it." There are other potential downsides to a payroll tax cut as well. Because the payroll tax is calculated as a percentage of earnings, the biggest tax cuts would go to people who need the money the least. And people who lose their jobs or whose hours are cut to zero wouldn't get any benefit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
In "Bratva," a new crime novel by Christopher Golden, a grizzled motorcycle gang vice president named Jax Teller and his loyal sidekicks Opie and Chibs take on Russian mobsters to rescue Jax's half sister. Some 200 pages of gun battles, fistfights and mayhem follow. Those characters will be familiar to fans of "Sons of Anarchy," a popular motorcycle gang drama on the FX network. They were lifted wholesale from the show, which recently concluded its seventh and final season. The novel was commissioned by the show's creator, Kurt Sutter, to keep fans engaged with the characters and with the show's lucrative line of clothing, jewelry, action figures and other merchandise after the finale. "With the show ending, how do we continue to keep the world in the consciousness of fans?" Mr. Sutter said. "It's always a mix of art and commerce." "Bratva" is one of the latest entries to a flourishing but often unappreciated pocket of the publishing world: tie in novels. Writers have produced novels based on the terrorism drama "Homeland," the British crime series "Broadchurch" and J.J. Abrams's sci fi series "Fringe," and more titles are coming soon. Novels are also providing life support for characters from popular, long defunct series, like "Veronica Mars," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Murder, She Wrote." (The 43rd and 44th "Murder, She Wrote" novels will come out this year, almost 20 years after the series went off the air.) Studios and producers have long used novelizations as a way to capture fans' attention between television seasons, or installments of blockbuster film franchises. For publishers, tie in books have become cash cows that offer instant brand recognition and access to huge fan bases for vastly larger media. One of the longest running, most successful tie in series, the "Star Wars" novels, dates to 1976 and now has more than 125 million copies in print. Writers and publishers of these books usually estimate that 1 or 2 percent of the total audience will buy the book, so a show that draws two million viewers might sell 20,000 paperback copies. "Having that built in audience, you don't know that everyone's going to show up, but you know that a certain fan will show up," said Michael Homler, an editor at St. Martin's Press who acquired the "Sons of Anarchy" novel. Still, in literary circles, these books have often been ignored or sneered at as mere merchandise rather than art. "They're treated like the lunch box or the action figure," said Max Allan Collins, who has written dozens of novelizations of shows and films, including "Saving Private Ryan," "American Gangster" and "CSI." Lately, however, this long maligned subgenre has taken on a patina of respectability. New writers are flocking to the form as television, in its new golden age, becomes an increasingly significant cultural medium. Rather than summarizing familiar stories, many tie ins deliver original plot lines and subtle character development that go beyond what fans already know. Established novelists are dabbling in the genre. Steven Charles Gould, an award winning science fiction writer, signed on to write novels inspired by James Cameron's blockbuster "Avatar." A few months ago, Dennis Lehane published "The Drop," a novelization based on a gangster movie he wrote, which Kirkus Reviews praised as "a sleight of hand novel" that's "richer than a mere re creation of a movie." "With the quality of some of these shows, I don't know if it's fair to call them literary, but there's a little more depth to some of them," Mr. Homler said. "The storytelling is beyond anything that's been done before, and because of that, it lends itself well to these novelizations." Novelizations emerged in the silent film era, and grew popular in the 1930s. Before there were video rental chains or movies on demand, reverse adaptations offered a way for moviegoers to relive the experience of a film. They continued to flourish decades later, and exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, when seemingly every blockbuster movie got the novel treatment. Some live on as dependable and lucrative publishing franchises. Other one offs based on "Howard the Duck," "Gremlins" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" were quickly forgotten. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. In recent years, with the abundance of high quality television and fans' bottomless appetite for bonus content about their favorite shows, tie in books are evolving to keep pace. "We're getting more original novels based on existing franchises," said Lee Goldberg, a novelist and co founder of the International Association of Media Tie In Writers, a professional organization with around 250 members. "Novelizations of the films are often loved more than the films," he added. Andrew Martin, the publisher of Minotaur Books, said he was skeptical at first when the reverse adaptation of "Broadchurch," written by Erin Kelly, was submitted. "We just don't do those kinds of books," he said. But he knew Ms. Kelly's reputation as a top notch suspense writer and felt the book offered a different, internal perspective on the investigation of a boy's murder. "I wasn't at all shy about making changes," Ms. Kelly said. "I decided that was the only way to make this work." In his three adaptations of the moody Danish police procedural "The Killing," the British novelist David Hewson made major changes to the show's sometimes controversial plot twists and cliffhangers. "I took the attitude that I was employed to write a good book. I wasn't doing a souvenir brochure for fans of the TV show," he said. The job still has its drawbacks. The writers often labor under impossible deadlines; the pay is modest; and writers typically have no claim to the intellectual property rights. When Mr. Golden was approached by Mr. Sutter and FX to write the first novel based on "Sons of Anarchy," a show he loves, he couldn't resist. He said he makes more money on his original novels than on tie in books, which typically bring in a five figure advance, but nevertheless finds it hard to turn them down because "the 15 year old me would be furious if I said no." He has published about 30 tie ins, including novels based on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "X Men" and "Alien." Mr. Sutter shaped the novel at every stage, and isn't shy about taking credit. He helped determine when the story would take place (Mr. Golden initially proposed a prequel, but Mr. Sutter rejected that idea), approved the plot outline and adjusted some scenes. A member of Mr. Sutter's writing team proofread the novel to make sure all the details, like the length of the protagonist Jax's hair, matched up with the show. St. Martin's gave the novel a big push, with an announced first printing of 100,000 copies and a social media campaign targeting the show's eight million plus Facebook fans and its more than 660,000 Twitter followers. "Sometimes I meet writers who are like, 'Why are you doing this?' but I would be betraying who I am if I said I'm never going to do this again because it's beneath me as an artist," Mr. Golden said. "I combat the idea that these can't be good novels."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Antibiotics Weren't Used to Cure These Patients. Fecal Bacteria Were. The bacteria can take over a person's intestines and be difficult to eradicate. The infection causes fever, vomiting, cramps and diarrhea so severe that it kills 14,000 people a year in the United States alone. The first line of treatment for the attacking microbes, called Clostridium difficile, is antibiotics. But a group of Norwegian researchers asked if something more unusual an enema containing a stew of bacteria from feces of healthy people might work just as well. The answer, according to a report today in the New England Journal of Medicine, is yes. Until now, there has never been a clinical trial conducted in more than one medical center that has investigated so called fecal transplants as a first therapy for C. difficile infections, said Dr. Michael Bretthauer, a gastroenterologist at the University of Oslo and lead author of the new study. The Food and Drug Administration permits fecal transplants and professional societies endorse them, but only a last resort for treating C. difficile infections after antibiotics have failed, said Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota. "The F.D.A. and all the professional societies are in full agreement on this point," he said. Several small clinical trials and doctors' clinical experience have shown that a fecal transplant can help in that desperate situation. "It's definitely a paradigm shift to use it earlier rather than later," Dr. Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The study, conducted in Norway, was small just 20 patients randomly assigned to get the fecal bacteria or antibiotics. That's not enough to determine whether transplants are better than antibiotics. Instead, the research was intended to show that treatment with fecal bacteria is no worse. Five out of nine patients who received fecal bacteria were cured immediately of their infections, compared to five of 11 in the group getting antibiotics. Three of the four remaining patients who got fecal bacteria then got antibiotics; two were cured within days. None of the antibiotic patients whose symptoms persisted after their first round of treatment were cured with a second round of the drugs. Although the results seem to favor treatment with fecal bacteria, the difference was not large enough to say fecal transplants were actually superior to the drugs. The researchers are planning to start a more definitive study with 200 patients this summer. The idea behind fecal transplants is to provide a dose of healthy gut bacteria that multiply and crowd out the dangerous germs making patients ill. The bacteria can be extracted from feces and supplied as an enema or in a capsule that patients swallow. A small company also grows fecal bacteria in a lab and freezes them for transplants. The Norwegian study relied on that company to supply fecal bacteria, but the investigators say the company had no other role in the study. Researchers are exploring the use of fecal transplants for a variety of conditions, Dr. Bretthauer said, ranging from bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis "to more far fetched things, such as multiple sclerosis." So far, he added, the most promising evidence for the fecal transplant's effectiveness is in ulcerative colitis. One problem with using fecal transplants as a treatment of last resort for C. difficile infections, Dr. Khoruts said, is that it can be a long time before it's clear that drugs have failed. On average, he said, these patients struggle through ten months of futile antibiotic treatments before they try a fecal transplant. Still, some patients newly diagnosed with C. difficile ask Dr. Khoruts why can't they just get a fecal transplant right away. Their reasoning makes sense, he added. Antibiotics that destroy the normal bacteria that protect against C. difficile are the main reason patients developed the infection in the first place. Transplants, Dr. Khoruts said, "are trying to repair what was broken in the first place, rather than perpetuate the damage." But when Dr. Bretthauer and his colleagues proposed a study testing fecal transplants compared to antibiotics in newly diagnosed patients, other doctors were not enthusiastic. "Using feces is a little taboo," Dr. Bretthauer said. "If you are putting someone else's feces into a patient, there has to be a good reason." And, he said, antibiotics are an approved treatment. Doctors are familiar with the drugs. The ethics board that had to approve the clinical trial suggested a small pilot study instead. The trial was difficult to set up. The challenge was to get to patients before they were given antibiotics. "We made friends with the hospital lab which did the C. difficile fecal testing," Dr. Bretthauer said. The laboratory technicians agreed to alert the researchers to new C. difficile cases. The researchers then rushed to the doctors and asked them to delay giving antibiotics until the patients were asked to enter the study.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A 10 foot tall inflatable red lota, a wall covered with balloons resembling bags of Maggi noodles, and a painting of an angry bindi wearing woman declaring "Mera jism, mera hathyar!" These works of art at Maria Qamar's exhibition, "Fraaaandship!," at Richard Taittinger Gallery feel like her colorful, politically engaged Instagram feed brought to life. Her Pop art paintings purple skinned women, jet black manes, yellow or red backgrounds nod to Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. But the text emblazoned on the works in comic style thought bubbles are intended to be inside jokes about her experiences as a South Asian millennial, contemplating immigration, misogyny, gender stereotypes and more. "I love that she doesn't translate her work," said Jenna Ferrey, the gallery's researcher and business development strategist, who helped bring Ms. Qamar into its roster of artists. "It comes very much from her point of view, her perspective, and unapologetically so." For the record, a lota is a water vessel used as a bidet in many Asian households; Maggi is a brand of instant noodles and seasonings that remains popular in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; and "mera jism, mera hathyar!" translates to the battle cry "my body, my weapon!" Ms. Qamar's solo show is her first in New York City after signing with Richard Taittinger. At 29, she is the gallery's youngest artist, and its first to have initially found fame on Instagram, where she has more than 170,000 followers. ( She has said that her account handle, hatecopy, refers to her time working as a copywriter.) Ms. Ferrey said she pitched representing her, partly as a way to help the gallery draw in a younger, more diverse crowd. Ms. Qamar, a Pakistan born Canadian, started her artistic career about four years ago after she was fired from a corporate job and decided to share some of her doodles on Instagram. Her first was of a sobbing woman distressed by the fact that she "burnt the rotis," with the caption "what if Lichtenstein parodied Indian soap operas." For much of her audience, Ms. Qamar's appeal is not just in the familiarity of her work the Hinglish (a mix of Hindi and English) they grew up using or the presence of brands and accessories they know but also in its powerful themes. She has collaborated with Nike and the Asian music streaming app Saavn, and her work has appeared in Mindy Kaling's "The Mindy Project." She has also written a book, "Trust No Aunty," and designed a set of plates. These are edited excerpts from a conversation about her childhood in Canada, Indian soap operas and art as therapy. What themes were you trying to explore with this solo exhibition? I'm still dealing with comments like: "You can't do that because that's our tradition." "We don't wear that." "We don't talk like that." "We don't look like that." What part of our South Asian tradition is tradition and what part of our tradition is just patriarchy disguised as tradition? Why can't we just take this time now to ditch some of these traditions that are just used to police women and used to convince women to police each other. I want us to exhaust some of these topics I want us to talk about them so much that we're tired of talking about them. That's how I want us to progress. If we can't learn to love ourselves, in the wise words of RuPaul, "How the hell you gonna love anybody else?" What drives you and where do you get your inspiration from? We moved to Canada in 2000, a year before 9/11. Being called a terrorist, a Paki direct racism and the violence that stems from it was a huge surprise for me. I grew up feeling like I did something wrong. The documentation of what was going on started when I was experiencing real trauma, real pain, which for a kid is a lot to deal with. And how do you express that? I had art. Why don't you translate your art? I want to normalize what I was made to feel ashamed of. I want to continue talking about the things that I never got to talk about. By doing this I've found a community and I've found men and women just like me we've all had the same experiences yet we felt so isolated. We weren't talking to each other about these kinds of experiences. As public as it all is now, everything is still personal, all the work is personal. A lot of people don't know that I paint and draw, physically, pen to paper. I actually had to teach myself Photoshop and Illustrator in order to make things for the digital space because painting takes a long time. Your paintings look a lot like stills from Indian soap operas. Is that deliberate? The reason I made "I burnt the rotis" in the first place was because I realized that if you take a still from an Indian soap opera when it's zoomed in on somebody's face and you take a Roy Lichtenstein piece and you put them side by side, it's the exact same expression but it's coming from two opposite ends of the planet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Fans of Paulette Jiles's "News of the World" will be delighted and perhaps a little disappointed by the author's seventh book, "Simon the Fiddler." With her previous novel, Jiles delivered a near perfect historical novel of compressed lyricism and masterly storytelling about the itinerant adventures of the septuagenarian widower Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd and 10 year old Johanna, who loses her language among many other things when the Kiowa kidnap her and kill her family during a raid four years earlier. From beginning to end, the spare, poetic narrative casts a hypnotic spell as it skillfully chronicles the transformative and tender relationship between the elderly soldier and his young charge. Very few words pass between the two, but a great deal changes. It's a breathtaking book. With "Simon the Fiddler," Jiles taps a secondary character, the redheaded Simon Boudlin from "News of the World," and opens up the narrative folds of his personal saga, jumping back a few years in time. It's March 1865, and Simon, a Kentucky orphan raised by his great uncle, has finally been conscripted into the Confederate Army along with his prized possession, a Markneukirche fiddle. When the war ends, Simon is with his regiment in Texas, which soon boils into turmoil. Land is up for grabs, the Comanches are attacking, the government and economy are in flux. As with her other novels, Jiles is in command of this historical milieu, evoking her scenes and characters with precision and detail. Amid the roiling chaos of Reconstruction, Simon puts together a "scratch band" with the guitarist Doroteo Navarro, the whistle player Damon Lessing and Patrick O'Hehir, who plays the bodhran and bones; each one of these characters is dogged and distinct in his own way. For example, Damon has a proclivity for quoting the prose of Edgar Allan Poe. Much like Captain Kidd and Johanna, the quartet moves from place to place, navigating saloons, dance halls, public houses and other places trying to string together a meager wage. Their music provides a kind of true north for them all, particularly Simon. Jiles writes: "He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody, peculiar intervals, unheard notes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
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. 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. It's not that Chance the Rapper has never been irked before, never made aggrievance the center of his music. "You don't want no problem, want no problem with me," he croaked on "No Problem," a nevertheless cheerful song from his last album, "Coloring Book." But after years of exultant cheer and joyful praise shouting, it's jarring to hear Chance the Rapper finally seethe. That's unmistakably what's happening on "I Might Need Security," one of four new songs, which captures the moment when the scrutiny that comes with fame curdles into something more unbearable, and when the weight of responsibility begins to be a bit too heavy to bear. There are glimmers of Chance's inventiveness here. "I mean I'm only 25 but I'm 'Motown 25'/Bet I get a statue in my hometown when I die," he raps, boastful but just a touch indignant. He bemoans the way he's been covered in the media, and urges Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, to resign. He also announces in the song that he bought the local news website Chicagoist. News is an impartial business it is not about grudges. And celebrity requires a thick skin. In moments in recent years, Chance has been someone who has been tender to the touch, whether in responding to a Twitter user who critiqued his wedding proposal, or in leveraging his power to pressure MTV News to remove a post that was critical of him. "I'm not no nice guy, I'm just a good guy," he raps here. But part of being the good guy is accepting that you can't please all of the people all of the time. JON CARAMANICA The master pianist Erroll Garner was known for his plush, fluent harmonies and his lilting fluidity. But he could be an unselfconsciously emotional player, too, often clawing at the boundaries of his own style. In live performances especially, Garner was liable to toss unsuspecting listeners about, making you grab for balance before settling back onto the tracks. On this version of "Night and Day," from the newly unearthed 1964 live recording "Nightconcert," he starts with punches of rough, elliptical blues playing, his hands tangling with each other. Then he barrels into the song's theme, keeping a stubbornly syncopated pattern going in the left hand. As the performance continues, he often ups the momentum by interrupting it; there is some latent tension underneath all that gentility. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Freak folk songs often lean toward pastorale and nostalgia, but not "Cell Games and Beyond" by the Cradle, centered on the songwriter Paco Cathcart. Acoustic guitar picking and unassuming vocals turn into a confession of jealousy and an indictment of virtual life. "Your baby is a cyber pirate, he's wedded to the grid," he complains to someone he longs for. "And though he may love you he will never let you in." The singer admits he's not geared for cyberspace: "Things are hard enough just living in one time and place." And while women's voices and woodwind ensembles suddenly materialize from online? he makes his big pitch: "He can just give you his body/I'll give you my mind." J.P. On "Full Circle," out Friday, the 81 year old Eddie Palmieri revisits classics from throughout his storied career with help from a fierce, fine tuned salsa orchestra. Mr. Palmieri's 12 piece group is at its core a dance band, but it's also an improviser's paradise expert at cutting open swaths of terrain in support of brilliant, idiosyncratic soloists, like the bandleader himself. On "Azucar," his dance floor smash from the mid 1960s, the orchestra's horns dish out Mr. Palmieri's signature devices sharp upward runs; coiled, key climbing arpeggios with added power. When he sets in to solo, he feeds directly off their energy, grunting and singing aloud as he unfurls a seditious flow. G.R. A misapprehension about the generation of rappers currently thriving on SoundCloud is that they're not interested in lyricism, but the YBN crew has been quietly dismantling that idea one vivid song at a time. First, last year, YBN Nahmir showed casual dexterity on "Rubbin Off the Paint." And now YBN Cordae has emerged as one of the most promising young lyricists in hip hop, thoughtful and crafty. His gifts were clear on his response to J. Cole a couple of months ago, and last week he released a blistering new song, "Kung Fu," in which he shows off his flexibility with a flow that bends and turns in unexpected ways. "My future's a tad bright," he raps, before lamenting the first hints of fame's tax: "When they rent is due, and your Benz is new/And your old friends be resenting you." J.C.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Suspense, done well, captures the attention so there's no time to notice plot holes or preposterous coincidences. Only when the story ends do you realize that you've been bamboozled; Lee Child's best selling Jack Reacher series, for example, brilliantly distracts readers from realizing the novels totally rely on absurd happenstance. Unfortunately, Matt Williams's slack psychological thriller, "Fear," offers plenty of opportunities not just to ponder inconsistencies and contrived plot twists, but also to sneak glances at your watch. The problems start almost as soon as the play does. Phil (Enrico Colantoni of "Veronica Mars"), a grizzled middle aged man, enters a large abandoned shed Andrew Boyce's oversize set is lavishly detailed, if an abandoned shed can be said to be lavish dragging in a teenage boy. This looks pretty ominous for the captive, Jamie (Alexander Garfin), whom Phil subjects to hostile questioning and then ties to a chair. A local 8 year old girl has gone missing and Phil, unmoved by his prisoner's rosy cheeks, angelic curls and general air of offended surprise, is convinced that Jamie is involved.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
BOWLING GREEN, Ky. When Gary A. Ransdell, the president of Western Kentucky University, invites alumni to view this city's redeveloping downtown from his university's hilltop campus, the response is almost always exclamations of surprise. Just below Cherry Hall, one of the 108 year old university's grandest buildings, sits nearly 200,000 square feet of new student housing, built at a cost of 24 million. There is also a 30,000 square foot, 10 million alumni center, and a 72,500 square foot, 14.5 million Hyatt Place hotel scheduled to open in 2015. Next door to the Hyatt site, a 28 million mixed use development is under construction. One building will house 240 more students on one side of College Street, and another will have small businesses, restaurants and a rooftop pool. There are also four new fraternity houses built at a cost of 3 million, and a 450 space parking deck flanked by 30,000 square feet of retail businesses and restaurants that are expected to open next year. Mr. Ransdell, Western Kentucky's president since 1997, described the projects as the latest additions to 262 million in downtown construction since 2008 that is rehabilitating Bowling Green's central business district. All of the new structures replace deteriorated homes and ragged retail businesses that for decades formed a barrier between the university and city center. Much of the student housing has been on the south side of campus, away from downtown. With the new construction, "there's been a shift in student density at the north end of our campus," Mr. Ransdell said. "With each new project that density increases." "We're all a bunch of bulldogs in this community," he added. "We haven't seen a deal that we didn't like. We want to close them all." Luke Sharrett for The New York Times Judging from the scope of the projects and the progress made over the last six years, it appears that deal making has become a choice skill in this city of 61,000 residents, Kentucky's third largest, after Louisville and Lexington. Arguably the most important pact was the one that the city and Warren County reached with the state to establish a 383 acre, 52 block special development and tax district in 2007. The district pays local governments 80 percent of the increases in payroll, property, sales and other tax revenue generated by new development within the district. Revenue is devoted to retiring construction bonds, building infrastructure and assisting developers, including the university. This year the development district, formally called the WKU Gateway to Downtown Bowling Green, will return to the city and county over 2 million in revenue. Over its 30 year life, ending in 2037, the tax district is expected to deliver 200 million to the two governments, said Doug Gorman, a downtown business owner and chairman of the Warren County Downtown Economic Development Authority, which oversees the Gateway project. "The whole point of what we're trying to do is to get more people to enjoy our downtown, to live here and work here," he said. "If you look around now, it's pretty clear that people get the point." Until the Gateway project began to unfold, Bowling Green was largely known for its university, the third largest in Kentucky, after the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. Its other claim to fame is the General Motors assembly plant not far away, where Corvettes have been built since 1981. This year a sinkhole opened in a wing of the privately managed National Corvette Museum near the plant, swallowing eight sports cars that were on display and prompting significant increases in attendance. Some of the museum's visitors wander into Bowling Green's evolving downtown. During a tour, Mr. Gorman identifies the steadily expanding galaxy of arts, entertainment, office and housing projects, big and small, that have quickly risen from blocks that just a few years ago were underused or blighted. Development is focused in three distinct hubs. The university, and its 21,000 student market, is heavily influencing construction at the bottom of the Cherry Hall hill, in the southern section of downtown. One effect of the Gateway development is to increase land values there, said Michael L. Simpson, the owner and president of Chandler Property Management, a real estate development firm based here. "Things are certainly more costly than they were seven or eight years ago," Mr. Simpson said. "Before the Gateway project, a typical lot sold for 60,000. Today they bring 90,000 to 100,000." A Hyatt Place hotel is to open next year near Western Kentucky University. Luke Sharrett for The New York Times Near the center of the Gateway project are four square blocks along East Seventh Avenue and State and College Streets that form a new entertainment and office district. In 2009, the city completed the 4,559 seat Bowling Green Ballpark, home of the Hot Rods, a Class A minor league baseball affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays. The stadium was constructed at a total cost of 30 million, according to city records, and is joined to Hitcents Park Plaza, a 25 million, 106,000 square foot mixed use office building with restaurants and shops along a street level piazza. The Hitcents building, which opened last year, is named for a growing local digital mobile games and applications company. Its headquarters are on the top floor, where 60 of the 15 year old company's 80 employees work. The building wraps around the north and west sides of an 800 space parking deck. Mr. Gorman and city leaders await the start of a 48 unit housing development that is planned for the deck's east side. Across Seventh Avenue and along College Street, the county completed the 28.5 million, 1,800 seat Southern Kentucky Performing Arts Center, known here as SKyPAC. A 2 million park between College and State Streets serves as the center's grand entrance. And on the corner of Seventh and College, the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce is housed in a 4 million, 17,000 square foot office building it completed in 2007. The north end of the development district is dominated by the Medical Center, a regional hospital and health care provider. Western Kentucky University constructed a 73,000 square foot, 20 million Health Sciences Complex to house its nursing and physical therapy school. The city's special development district has also assisted in the planning and construction of a 10 million medical office building, a 3.1 million clinic, the 2.5 million Hospitality House for ill children and their families, and 22 million in Medical Center expansion and modernization projects. The city built a 2.5 million fire station and encouraged the 3.5 million restoration and renovation of an old school for housing. In all, 28 projects have been completed or are under construction in the Gateway district. The big investment in the Gateway project, which continued through the recession, and its results have impressed residents and the elected leaders who negotiated the contracts and shaped the development strategy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The Astros are the fifth team that Dusty Baker has led to the postseason, but he has never won a championship as a manager. Soon after the Houston Astros completed a two game sweep of the Minnesota Twins in their first round playoff series last week, Dusty Baker's phone went into overdrive: Scores of congratulatory texts, emails and calls came pouring in from friends, family and many others around baseball. "It was like Father's Day and my birthday all rolled into one," said Baker, the Astros manager. It was no surprise. For as much as the baseball world despises the Houston Astros, and wishes epochs of misfortune upon them for their sign stealing caper in 2017, who could muster that kind of animosity toward Baker, one of the most popular figures in the game? For five decades Baker made his debut in 1968 as an outfielder for the Atlanta Braves he has spread good will across Major League Baseball and engendered undying loyalty by dint of a magnetic personality, a wisdom borne of deep experience, a splash of spirituality and an unyielding sense of honor. In return, he has earned the near unanimous admiration of former players, coaches, fans and fellow managers. "It's a very egotistical, very selfish world, but not when you talk to this man," Chicago White Sox Manager Rick Renteria said. "He's timeless. Everybody changes, but everybody loves him." That is part of the reason Jim Crane, the Astros owner, hired Baker in January. The Astros were facing a crisis of credibility after they were found to have illegally stolen opposing teams' signs during their 2017 championship season, and Crane immediately fired the team's manager, A.J. Hinch, then hired Baker and picked up his option for 2021. There is also his long track record on the field. He has 1,892 regular season wins over 23 seasons as a manager. That's an average of 86 wins in each of 21 full length seasons. (The average does not include this year or the strike shortened 1994 season.) This month, Baker suddenly has one more chance at the only thing that has eluded him as a manager: a championship. "It's a piece of something that is missing," he said over the weekend. "You hate to go through life missing anything." In a mad scramble, Baker took over as Astros skipper two weeks before spring training and began cramming for what was bound to be one of the most unusual experiences of his career even before the pandemic. He was 70 at the time and had thought he would never get another chance to manage after the Washington Nationals fired him in 2017 following a first round exit in the playoffs. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "I just came from Washington after winning two years in a row," he said, "and I didn't get even a phone call for two years. There was no way I envisioned this." The season has been bumpy, to be sure. Take the fallout of the cheating scandal, add a series of injuries and slumps, and the Astros finished two games under .500. But with the expanded playoff format (16 teams made the postseason this year instead of the usual 10), the Astros qualified. Baker is now the first manager to lead five teams to the postseason (the Giants, Cubs, Reds, Nationals and Astros). And despite going only 9 23 on the road in the 60 game regular season, the Astros swept the Twins in Minneapolis in the first round. "Everywhere he's gone, he's won," Astros third baseman Alex Bregman said. "He's a winner and it's fun to play for him." Bregman and the Astros have taken a two games to one lead against the Oakland Athletics in their division series, perhaps fittingly at Dodger Stadium, where Baker was a champion and an All Star outfielder for the Dodgers. A win in Game 4 on Thursday would get Baker back to a league championship series for the first time since 2003, when he managed the Cubs. It's a long way from the first several weeks of this season, when Baker said he felt like a substitute teacher struggling to connect to his students. This was a particularly serious obstacle for Baker, whose primary strength is his ability to forge deep personal connections with his players. The bonds are carefully constructed over time, in conversations in his office, at the back of airplanes during team flights, in bars and taverns on the road, or even on the mound in the middle of a game. "A lot of tough love," said Shawn Estes, the former pitcher who played seven of his 13 seasons under Baker on both the Giants and Cubs. Now an analyst on Giants' television broadcasts, Estes said Baker always knew the right moment to spew hot rivets at a player and when to offer a verbal hug. Sometimes both were wrapped in the same sentence. "He'd come to the mound with his toothpick in his mouth, his shades and batting gloves, look me in the eye and say, 'No one is better at getting into trouble than you, and no one is better at getting out of it,'" Estes recalled. "He'd tell me to put my big boy pants on, but he left me in the game. He showed faith in you when you deserved it. Players love that." Estes said Baker came as close as a manager could get to being a player while still maintaining command of the team, and conversations with him could sometimes take a spiritual turn, too. "He believes in energy and the universe, and he is such a great communicator," Estes added. "He knew the right buttons to push with every guy. He'd give out books, too. We'd talk, and ultimately I'd end up with a book." Baker once handed Estes "The Art of War," by Sun Tzu, and another time it was a book by Phil Jackson, the Hall of Fame N.B.A. coach. But Baker's book club did not extend to every player because, as Baker noted, people are different. "No sense giving a book to someone you know isn't going to read it," Baker said. "Estes was an intellectual guy who would appreciate it. Other guys, you have to find different ways to reach them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
This year, Passover falls at the beginning of April smack in the middle of what some experts estimate will be the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in America. It's not just the timing of the holiday built around a retelling of the Jews' exodus from slavery in Egypt that feels off. It's that every aspect of its story and rituals now seems almost cruelly ironic. The Passover Seder centers on the experience of being thrust out of our homes, but these days we feel trapped inside of them. The story involves miraculous plagues that saved us; today we pray for the end of one. There's the commandment to clean our homes of all non Passover food, which we just spent innumerable hours and dollars hoarding. Then there's the real heartbreaker: The Seder is when we traditionally gather with family, friends and even strangers. "Let all who are hungry come and eat," we say. These days, many of us can't even be in the same house as our own parents or children. We don't come within six feet of strangers. And yet, there will still be Passover. Indeed, I've come to think of Passover as the stem cell of the Jewish people, a reserve of core source material with the proven ability to generate new meaning and solace in circumstances even more extreme than what we are living through now. Perhaps you're disappointed because you can't celebrate the way we're used to. But do you also remember matzo, the unleavened cracker we eat because Jews rushed out of their homes before their bread could rise? The entire holiday is rooted in glorifying a moment when life unfolded in very unexpected ways and human beings found meaning, even liberation, in it. The Bible includes various relevant mentions of Passover: One, in Exodus, of the Feast of the Passover, and several others (in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy) of the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. Historians believe these were originally maintained by two distinct segments of Israelite society, for whom spring meant slightly different things. For the seminomadic part of the community, it was a signal that it was time to start moving again; but before doing so they would sacrifice a lamb to ward off evil spirits that might block their path. For the settled folks, it was an agricultural holiday, a joyful welcoming of the incoming spring harvest. Most scholars believe the two holidays were eventually combined in 622 B.C.E. when, on the orders of Josiah, the king of Judah, a national celebration emerged, which had at its heart a pilgrimage to the Temple and the killing of a Paschal lamb. Intended or not, the process looks poetic in hindsight: Elements were taken from each of the previous commemorations the sacrifice from the former, the joy from the latter and a Jewish future was made. It didn't last. Or rather, the Temple didn't, but Passover certainly did. After Jerusalem was sacked in 586 B.C.E., the Jews were forced out of Judea into what became known as the Babylonian Exile, taking with them this powerful reminder that a people who had been brought out of exile to freedom might once again retrace that journey. More than 2,500 years later, the Passover Seder has not simply survived. It is now, by a long shot, the most popular Jewish religious observance. And what it is, essentially, is an agglomeration of a long and global inheritance. The basic order of the evening stretches back to the third or fourth century; we end the night with a set of group songs from the 15th century; some of us whip one another with scallions during the song "Dayenu," a tradition designed by Persian Jews; and we all make different kinds of charoset, the sweet paste meant to signify the mortar used by the Jewish slaves. Italian Jews use eggs. Gibraltan Jews make theirs with the dust of ground bricks. And African American Jews incorporate sugar cane, and cocoa powder, the crops of American slavery. Rabbis, scholars and communal leaders differ on exactly why Passover maintains this enduring power. Some argue that it is simply central to the religion one of the three times a year when the ancient Israelites would make that pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem. Others point to the accessibility of the Seder ritual itself, which allows people of varying levels of knowledge and experience, including non Jews, to participate. Part of the credit, I believe, goes to the Haggadah, the text at the heart of the ritual. Less a prayer book than a step by step guide, the Haggadah sets out the order of how one is to fulfill the commandment of telling one's children about the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt through a set of now iconic blessings, parables, symbolic foods and songs, and with the specific encouragement for participants to question and challenge the script. Ten Plagues! Four Sons! Bitter herbs! Why Is This Night Different From All Others? There is in this one evening the roots of so much of what reads as Jewish, to us and others: the drama, the humor, the contrariness, the chosenness, the enough already ness. Unlike the Torah or Talmud, which are considered inviolate, the Haggadah developed as a kind of semi codified artifact, customized by individual Jewish communities throughout history. Recently, some of my colleagues and I set out to create an American Haggadah one that included the entirety of the traditional text along with elements that speak to the particular history and experience of Jews in this time and place, like entries not just on the Four Sons but also the Four Daughters; essays on food waste; cocktails based on the Ten Plagues; and more. While putting it together, I was struck by something I hadn't ever fully explored that of all the things included in the universe of Haggadahs, one thing is conspicuously missing from them all: the story of the exodus itself. "The Haggadah is like the theater sets and costumes and reviews of a play, without the actual play," Rabbi Noa Kushner of San Francisco told me recently, about a month before the coronavirus began derailing everyone's Passover plans. All of a sudden the quixotic words of my high school rabbi came back to me: "Reading the exodus is for the already free." Most Jews throughout history have not been free, whether from murderous regimes or famines or pandemics. What we have been is devoted to the idea that we deserve to be. "The Haggadah's purpose is not, in fact, to present a narrative," Rabbi Mendel Herson, associate dean of the Rabbinical College of America, explained to me. "It's a how to guide to finding our own personal liberation." The text of the Haggadah is not a retelling of the liberation story itself but a record of agreements and disagreements among its interpreters, because it is not the God driven part of the story that we should be focused on but the human driven one. God will come to help when God comes to help; the question is what we do between now and then. This is why Jews observed Passover in the basement "cantinas" of righteous friends during the Inquisition; they kept it during the Crusades, even as evil people around them used it to manufacture the deadly, and enduring, libel about matzo baked with the blood of Christian children; and they kept it throughout the Holocaust in ghettos and concentration camps and forests. As I write this, I am looking at a heart stopping picture of five people baking matzo in 1943, in a secret oven they built beneath the Lodz ghetto. These were Jews made slaves again in modern times, insisting on celebrating their God given right to freedom even as they were being denied their earthly equivalent. But what I really can't get over is the smile on the face of one of the women. There it is, again, still: the joy and the sacrifice. It is the smile of someone who knows she is doing something miraculous by making Passover her own. Our circumstances are much less dire than hers, but our task this year is the same. Last week, a group of major Orthodox rabbis in Israel announced that they would permit people to use Zoom videoconferencing for their Seders a previously unimaginable accommodation to stringent Jewish law. But that's the point. We may be away from loved ones, or shut out of communal spaces. We may not be preparing with the same vigor, or shopping with the same zeal. But we will do what millions of Jews have done before us: manifest our hope for liberation. That is our obligation, and our privilege. All the more so in moments when the taste of freedom from oppression, from want, from disease is not yet ours. Alana Newhouse is the editor in chief of Tablet magazine, which just published "The Passover Haggadah: An Ancient Story for Modern Times." 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
Q. Can I edit RAW image files from my D.S.L.R. on an iPad Pro? If so, is it possible to save the edited images back to the computer later so I don't have to take a laptop with me on my trip? A. If your camera uses a RAW format supported by Apple's iOS system on the iPad and you have a photo editing app that works with RAW files, you should be able to import, edit and save your photos as you go. When you are done, you can transfer the edited images to the computer back home in a few different ways. (For those unfamiliar with the file type, RAW photos are uncompressed image files that retain much more visual data in the picture than do files saved in the compressed JPG format. RAW files give photographers more to edit.) When you are ready to edit photos, you first need to get the picture files from the camera to the tablet. You can do this in a few ways, including using one of Apple's camera card adapters plugged into the iPad to download the original RAW files, or beaming the photos wirelessly from camera to tablet with a camera memory card enabled for Wi Fi. Once you have imported the images to the iPad's camera roll, you can pull them into an app that supports RAW editing and make your adjustments. The 20 Affinity for iPad, the freemium RAW Power and the older (but free) Snapseed are among the apps that can edit RAW files on the tablet. The free Adobe Lightroom CC for iOS added RAW editing in 2016 and can sync edited files back to the companion Adobe Lightroom CC app on a Mac or Windows PC with a paid subscription.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
What Is a Constant Cycle of Violent News Doing to Us? It has been a rough year. By now, our violence is down to a pattern, and there is a choreography to our reactions. A killer seeks out a nightclub, a church, an airport, a courthouse, a protest. Someone is shot on video, sometimes by the police, and marchers fill the streets. An attack is carried out in France, America, Turkey, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Tunisia, Nigeria, and then claimed and celebrated by a radical terror group. Our phones vibrate with news alerts. The talking heads fill air over cable news captions that shout "breaking news" in red. Rumors and misinformation abound. The comments erupt on Twitter, Facebook and news sites. So, what is this doing to us? It depends on the individual, but living in a digitally linked world where broadcasts of violence are instantaneous and almost commonplace means that many of us are becoming desensitized, Anita Gadhia Smith, a psychologist in Washington, said Friday. "With the frequency of shootings and terror attacks there is a sense of anxiety that's building in people," she said, "a sense of vulnerability and powerlessness." Dr. Smith added: "There is a heightened alarm, but there can also be some desensitization that's happening." The constant stream of news on social media can also be traumatic. A team of researchers at the University of Bradford in England told a British psychology conference last year that exposure to violent imagery on social media can cause symptoms that are similar to post traumatic stress disorder, defined as a persistent emotional reaction to a traumatic event that severely impairs one's life. In an analysis conducted by the Bradford researchers, 189 participants were shown images and provided with stories of violent events, including the Sept. 11 attacks, school shootings and suicide bombings. The researchers' analysis showed that 22 percent of those who participated were significantly affected by what they saw. The study also found that people who view violent events more often were more affected than people who saw them less frequently, and that people who described themselves as extroverts with outgoing personalities were at a higher risk to be disturbed by the images. The self care advice hasn't changed. It is natural to want to follow along with incremental updates on social media and in the news. But it's important to know that this can heighten your anxiety. Anne Marie Albano, a clinical psychologist and the director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, said in an interview after the 2015 Paris attacks that it might be a good idea to limit your exposure to social media. Designating times to plug into the news checking Twitter in the morning over coffee, but not listening to the radio while driving your kids to school, for instance can help you manage anxiety if you are feeling stressed. "This will help you balance a realistic and credible threat with information that is sensationalized," Dr. Albano said, "or a rush to report something or talk about something that doesn't have the impact that you would think it has." If you're feeling anxiety about a possible attack, compare your fear with the facts. When you fear the worst, it's hard to remember that, say, a flight or a train ride has extraordinarily high odds of being safe. But you have to try. Humans are bad at assessing risk, Martin Seif, a psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety disorders and the fear of flying, said in an interview late last year. "Every single anxiety management technique is based on the premise that your reaction is out of proportion" to the likelihood of danger, Dr. Seif said. Also, remember to take a breath. A guide to dealing with terrorism released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation encourages closing your eyes and taking deep breaths to feel calmer. Taking a walk or talking to a close friend can also help. The guide also recommends avoiding alcohol and drugs, exercising regularly and eating healthy foods basic self care guidelines that help reduce stress. Make sure you have a plan to contact your family if something happens, especially if cellular networks are overloaded or transportation is disrupted, but remember that you most likely will not need it, experts say. If you have children, the American Psychological Association recommends asking them how they are feeling about the news. Keep in mind that it is possible for children to be influenced by news reports and the adult conversations around them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Memory has a tendency to smooth over the edges, to conceal the blemishes, to dust over the pockmarks. Hindsight can be distorted, and history with it: Knowing how something ended creates the illusion it was always going to end that way, a narrative reverse engineered from the bare facts, happenstance prettified to look like destiny. And so Real Madrid the Real Madrid of Cristiano Ronaldo and Luka Modric, of Zinedine Zidane and Florentino Perez will be immortalized as the team that was champion of Europe for more than a thousand days, the first team since 1990 to repeat as European champions, the first since 1976 to win the European Cup three times in a row, the winner of four of the last five editions of club soccer's most prestigious tournament. It will be remembered as a team that built an empire and defined an era, a team that swept all before it right up until the point that a vibrant, fearless Ajax Amsterdam arrived at the Santiago Bernabeu and brought it all crashing down in one night, the Dutch team's 4 1 victory in the last 16 on Tuesday sending Real Madrid out and shock waves around Europe. Real Madrid's dominance of the Champions League has been more fragile than the trophy cabinet and history books make it look. Lifting the club's 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th European Cups was not an inevitability, the manifest destiny of a club that thinks of itself as the king of Europe. The best example is the first: Real Madrid was a few seconds from losing that final, against Atletico Madrid in Lisbon; only a 93rd minute equalizer from Sergio Ramos took the game to extra time, and gave Real Madrid a reprieve. But there are more, far more. In 2016, just a few months into Zidane's tenure as coach, Real traveled to Wolfsburg for a quarterfinal. It seemed a favorable draw, as close to a gimme as the Champions League offers at that stage. Real Madrid was down, 2 0, within 25 minutes, and secured a place in the semifinals only in the 77th minute of the second leg, with Ronaldo striking a pose as he celebrated his hat trick. Real would win the tournament that year, beating Atletico again in the final in Milan, this time on penalty kicks. The next year, its progress to the final in Cardiff was stately, serene, but that final hurdle was anything but. Real eventually beat Juventus, 4 1, but if that implies an overwhelming superiority, it did not feel like that inside the Principality Stadium. Indeed, for a time, after Mario Mandzukic had drawn Juventus even in the first half, Real Madrid seemed to be swaying. Its players would later admit that they needed to regroup at halftime. And then last year, when Real almost conspired to throw away a three goal lead against Juventus in their quarterfinal, edged past Bayern Munich in the semifinals thanks to a momentary lapse in concentration and ability from the stand in goalkeeper Sven Ulreich, and then overcame Liverpool and the even more hapless Loris Karius in the final in Kiev. None of that, of course, is to suggest that Real has ridden its luck, or to lessen the significance or glory of its triumphs, or to claim that what happened against Ajax on Tuesday, as the Bernabeu bypassed the rage it usually reserves for defeats and fell straight into grief, was only a matter of time. Real Madrid deserves its place in history, and its most recent generation merits its reputation as a dynasty team, one perfectly calibrated in talent and temperament to excel on soccer's most exalted stage. But that history does not need to be airbrushed, to have all trace of blemish surgically removed. It has been tempting, these last few years, to see all of Real Madrid's close shaves, its flirtations with disaster, as proof of inherent greatness: a team that knows exactly what to do to win, that always finds something more when it is required, a group of players whose gifts can guide them out of any situation. That is true, too, though it is not the whole truth. What Wolfsburg and Juventus and Ulreich and the rest prove is that Real Madrid's grip on the competition was not as viselike as it seemed. It was, at times, only the bounce of a ball away from being loosened entirely. What Ajax did on Tuesday Juventus might have achieved a year ago, but for one moment, one slip, one whistle. Those blemishes matter, not because they can be deployed as false harbingers of what was to come against Ajax, or because they serve to diminish Real Madrid's status, but because they act as proof that all those trophies were achieved not because of destiny but because of the players, and coaches, involved. Real Madrid does not have a divine right to win the Champions League. It was not carried to Lisbon and Milan and Cardiff and Kiev, and to constant glory, by its reputation or its aura or its history. It was carried by Ronaldo, his significance only highlighted by his absence, and his own refusal to countenance defeat, his desperate quest for greatness; and by Zidane; and before him by Carlo Ancelotti, and his subtle, shrewd, unspoken ability to elicit the best from the best. Real Madrid could easily not have won four of the last five Champions Leagues. At times, it has been hard to explain particularly in an age when soccer is enthralled by complexity, by philosophies and systems quite how it has done so. Perhaps that is why it has been so easy to revert to thoughts of a special bond between this club and this competition, to start to believe in destiny. How easily it might all have come apart was illustrated perfectly on Tuesday, how fragile even the supreme can be. That it did not, for so long, is what this team will be remembered for; the picture will not be complete, though, without the pockmarks, the blemishes, the edges, ragged and rough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Everyone involved in the nine part documentary series "The Vow," which chronicles the twisted saga of Nxivm, seems pretty media savvy. They know how easily complicated stories can get condensed into the shorthand of headlines. If you've heard only one thing about Nxivm, which billed itself as a self help organization but led many participants down dark and damaging paths, it's probably that its leader, Keith Raniere, coerced women in the group to have sex with him most coverage of the group has referred to it as a "sex cult." If you've heard two things, the other fact is likely that some women were put through a terrifying ceremony in which Raniere's initials were branded onto their bodies. At one point in the eighth episode, a former Nxivm member, Sarah Edmondson, jokes that a scar healing cream should give her a sponsorship deal. By then, after the series had offered ample evidence of the rampant misogyny and corrosive narcissism Edmondson and other Raniere followers experienced, she had more than earned that brief display of levity. Debuting Sunday on HBO, "The Vow" doesn't stint on the jaw dropping details. But it also makes clear that the story of Nxivm (pronounced "NEX ee um") is more complex and much more chilling than the reductive "sex cult" label would indicate. As dangerous conspiracy theories rise to shocking prominence in American life, "The Vow" examines why people are so primed to fall for the kind of tempting but perilous psychological traps that skilled manipulators use to lure and catch their idealistic prey. Nxivm, which was based in a group of unexceptional houses and offices in and around Albany, N.Y., but had chapters all over North and South America, promised to free participants, many of them articulate and energetic women, from insecurities, negative emotions and destructive patterns. Raniere, a floppy haired former businessman who insisted that people call him "Vanguard," told seminar attendees that through "data and facts," he and his instructors could help them push past the fears and limitations holding them back. Instead, trial testimony and court rulings have revealed, Raniere weaponized people's secrets and insecurities so that he could exploit them emotionally and financially. According to a lawsuit filed by former followers, Nxivm was also an enormous pyramid scheme that bilked its members out of millions of dollars. There had been negative coverage of Nxivm in the past, but everything began to go awry for the group in 2017, when The New York Times reported on the branding ceremonies and other disturbing allegations about Raniere and his most loyal acolytes. Last year, Raniere was convicted of multiple felonies including racketeering and sex trafficking. (In Raniere's trial, his attorneys said his sexual encounters with his followers were consensual.) Some top level adherents, including Allison Mack, the former "Smallville" actress, and Clare Bronfman, an heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune, have struck plea deals and await sentencing. "The Vow" creative team, led by the directors Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, had plenty of raw material to work with. Members of the group appear to have documented nearly every conversation they had with each other and with Raniere during the past two decades, and many Nxivm seminars were also recorded. We don't have to rely on the commentary from former members to see what Raniere was selling, and how much others helped him promulgate sexist mind sets and increasingly deranged formulations of abuse as love. The early episodes focus on how adherents were drawn in by Nxivm's superficial resemblance to other self help philosophies, then the documentary evolves into something of a slow burn thriller. The viewer becomes a fly on the wall as the filmmakers follow a group of anti Nxivm campaigners, including Edmondson, Vicente and the actresses Catherine Oxenberg and Bonnie Piesse, who implore the authorities and the media including The Times to do something about Raniere and his secretive inner circle. (Oxenberg's daughter India was deeply involved in Nxivm the group attracted quite a few Hollywood folks and Catherine's pain and relentless energy are affecting.) For survivors of Raniere's alleged patterns of financial and emotional abuse which reach back at least three decades the path toward healing and potential redemption often involves trying to undo the work they did for "Vanguard" and his lieutenants. There's a lot of talk these days about the concept of restorative justice as a means of atoning for damage done, and the ex Nxivm folks at the core of "The Vow" show what that idea looks like in action. Even as they bravely fight for justice for Raniere's victims, they struggle with a painful array of things they wish they'd done differently. What is the path back for those who participate in or look away from abuse? Where's the line between coercion and independence? What consequences is society willing to dish out when a storyteller with a committed following in politics, in the arts, in self help realms or anywhere else is revealed to be a charismatic predator or canny charlatan? Those are the deeper questions that animate "The Vow" and help make it not just engrossing but extraordinarily relevant. It occasionally also feels like a juicy soap opera, with glimpses into the lives of wealthy heiresses and the haunting rituals of a secret society. Though Mack is not interviewed, her adoration for Raniere can be seen in excerpts from glossy Nxivm promotional videos, and her descent into abject, destructive devotion is both tragic and fascinating. In one of the series's most chilling moments, we see Raniere and Mack chatting at one of the group's late night volleyball games. Raniere deftly manipulates her deepest vulnerabilities they involve art, repression and emotion and it's as if the rabbit hole she is about to fall down takes shape before our eyes. "The Vow" isn't flawless. Early episodes can feel a little padded, with repetitive shots of people staring at computer screens or restating the initial attractions of the group. (Its most reasonable teachings, at first glance, have an appealing TED Talk earnestness.) But as the personalities of the series's key participants come into focus, the narrative momentum becomes irresistible. Ultimately, "The Vow" is an impressive and even transfixing achievement. It uses the viewer's curiosity about branding and sex cults to tell a valuable and engrossing tale about gullibility, trust and the human desire to put one's faith in a leader who promises the real Answer. You know, the one that powerful forces are keeping secret from you. But there is no secret, of course, and as is so often the case, the man behind the curtain is a petty, angry, manipulative mess. "I wanted to believe that he was good," a former Nxivm adherent called Jane (a pseudonym) tells the filmmakers. Unfortunately for Jane (and the rest of us), life tends to resist universal moral formulations, let alone the "scientific" answers Raniere sold. So buy self help books if you'd like; some of the best are genuinely useful. But before you hand over your credit card or life to someone peddling a very expensive solution to life's difficulties, think twice. And watch "The Vow."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Swiss watchmakers are nostalgic by nature. How else to explain their constant reference to a golden era of timekeeping, more than 200 years ago, when masters such as Abraham Louis Breguet devised the world's first complicated timepieces? At the same time, however, a growing cohort of forward thinking watchmakers is embracing the possibilities of virtual reality, or simply V.R. The immersive technology, designed to simulate a user's presence in a real or imaginary environment using a special headset, is being hyped as the biggest thing to happen to the luxury industry since e commerce. "The key word for V.R. is experience," said Tom Emrich, the Toronto based co producer of Augmented World Expo, a conference dedicated to augmented and virtual reality. "Luxury brands are taking it a step further: Instead of watching the experience, the end user is actually in the experience." While there is some disagreement as to what qualifies as virtual reality some believe that 360 degree video, or videos that capture images in every direction simultaneously, should be distinguished from V.R. because it doesn't provide the same level of immersion watchmakers aren't fazed by these distinctions. Here are the stories of four watch brands pioneering the use of these mediums in an effort to educate, entertain and, ultimately, lure customers. Clients were "able to travel inside like a roller coaster, into the movement," said Dorothee Henrio, the company's global marketing director. It wasn't the first time that Roger Dubuis had relied on Oculus to tell its story. In 2015 the brand produced, with a French agency, a two and a half minute virtual reality film to acquaint attendees at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva with its newest collection of skeleton timepieces. "The client is buying a timepiece, but we really want to offer him an experience," Ms. Henrio said. "That's what the ultrarich are looking for. They could have bought a piece of art or a Lamborghini but instead they bought a Roger Dubuis." Polo may be the sport of kings, but Piaget has made sure that anyone with an internet connection can feel what it's like to ride amid the swinging mallets and pounding hooves of a polo match. Filmed in Chantilly, France, the Swiss brand's two minute plus "Polo Experience" available in both V.R. and 360 degree video formats debuted in mid July at an event in Brooklyn to coincide with the unveiling of the Piaget Polo S, a steel timepiece aimed at younger buyers. "It was very important for us to digitize our launch and be in tune with the younger generation," said the brand's global communications director, Valerie Nowak. Ms. Nowak also referred to a promotion the brand staged in 1985, when a team of polo players on horses paraded along Fifth Avenue to draw attention to Piaget's then 6 year old Polo model. "We wanted to again show that polo could be played in a different way but in 2016, with this virtual reality experience," she said. Working with Unit9, a London based production company, Piaget also created a video depicting its newest ambassador, Ryan Reynolds, in a lushly rendered polo fantasy set on the rooftop of a Manhattan apartment building. "It's all about being game changers," Ms. Nowak said, "and renewing the way we consider high watchmaking and, in parallel, the way we see polo." TAG Heuer, whose motto is "Swiss Avant Garde Since 1860," went all in with virtual reality a year ago in a partnership with 909c, a Paris based digital marketing agency, to create a racecar centered V.R. experience to highlight the brand's iconic Carrera collection of automotive inspired chronographs. The two minute video, "Crafting a Legend: Ride with TAG Heuer," sought to teach viewers about the complexity of the watch brand's movements first, by placing them inside a sports car racing around a circuit and then by catapulting them into space, where viewers could explore the inner workings of a Carrera wristwatch. It took about three months to make, said Jean Robert Bellanger, the company's digital marketing director, as well as some additional time to create adaptations in different languages and for different devices before its premier at the Baselworld luxury watch fair in March. "Today it's very difficult to let people know what's inside a watch," Mr. Bellanger said. "We thought virtual reality would be a very good experience, but also very entertaining." He wouldn't specify the video's cost, other than to say the brand's good contact at the production company had kept it in the five digit range and adding that such videos can cost much more. The video is available on a dedicated app that has been installed on about 60 TAG Heuer devices that travel to the brand's global events. It was also posted on The New York Times website earlier this year, thanks to a paid content collaboration. The video may one day be experienced on a TAG Heuer branded headset, Mr. Bellanger added. "V.R. is a tomorrow technology," he said. "In five years, there won't be any more mobile phones. It'll just be ear plugs and virtual reality glasses." The actor Luke Wilson is a charming, albeit clumsy, guide to Shinola's factory in the lifestyle brand's latest promotional video. It employs 360 degree video technology to introduce viewers to the heart and soul of the enterprise: the 250 employees who work at the historic Argonaut Building in Detroit. Unveiled in September, the four and a half minute clip, "A 360 Tour of the Shinola Detroit Factory with Luke Wilson," was produced by Reel FX, which is, like Shinola, owned by Bedrock Brands, based in Dallas. Jacques Panis, Shinola's president, said Mr. Wilson and his brother, Andrew Wilson, who directed the film, had been a natural choice to lead the production. "When we were thinking about how to make this more interesting than a stale factory tour, we thought they'd bring a certain levity to it," Mr. Panis said. "We want people to really understand what's going on behind the scenes so they get a sense of the authenticity, the work going into it, the people behind the products," Mr. Panis added. "It's all such a critical piece of the puzzle."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Bill Cosby performed for the first time in public since multiple women came forward in 2015 to accuse him of sexual assault, telling stories and jokes in front of a supportive crowd on Monday evening in Philadelphia. Mr. Cosby, clutching a cane and wearing a gray sweatshirt that read, "Hello Friend," took the stage at the LaRose Jazz Club around 7 p.m., his first performance since his comedy tour came to a halt in May 2015 amid mounting allegations of sexual misconduct. Mr. Cosby sat on a stool surrounded by a group of roughly 50 admiring fans and friends, who snapped photos throughout the performance. His appearance, which was part of a show honoring the jazz drummer Tony Williams, was open to the public but Mr. Cosby's spokesman announced it only about two hours before it started.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
When I was a girl, my friends and I clung to each other and even to our teachers during the June goodbyes. Nonetheless, we chanted with glee, "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks!" We conjured lazy days unfettered from loudspeaker announcements, bells and evaluation by report card. Recalling such moments, one might be forgiven for appreciating summer children's books that demand very little the counterparts of popsicles, inflated pool toys and hypnotic screen time. Yet deeper summertime literary pleasures, too, are one of life's great joys. These three books for young readers all set after school's out contain education and entertainment, nuanced instruction and unalloyed amusement. Summer books for children can and should include both. SECRET SISTERS OF THE SALTY SEA (Greenwillow, 232 pp., 16.99; ages 8 to 12), the Newbery medalist Lynne Rae Perkins's exquisite new book that includes her own pencil illustrations, offers limpid observation, deft dialogue, delicate touches of humor and a sensibility that brings to mind Emily's famous line from Thornton Wilder's "Our Town": "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you." Perkins is a poetic sorceress whose authorial wand wafts over the pages of her book and gently probes the depths of children's souls. Her story starts with a sense of wonder: "The bottom of the sky glowed deep electric blue. ... Overhead it was still velvety black, prickled with stars." Two sisters, burrowing under an unzippered sleeping bag in the back seat of their family car, are speeding off at night on a long drive to their first ocean vacation, one week long. Later in the book, Perkins builds up to an image that stops the heart. After many adventures from which both girls learn about tides and conservation, about the ebb and flow of desire, about the fact that small things compel intense interest if you pay them mind, and about how a younger sister's spunk can evoke admiration in her more accomplished sibling, the family bikes to a wildlife refuge, where injured birds of prey are healed. When a stunned peregrine falcon is brought in, Sara, the keeper, wraps the bird in a blanket "as if it were a baby" and asks Alix, the younger sister, if she would like to hold it. The little girl feels the bird's warm heart racing against her body and speaks softly to it. On the last day of their ocean stay, Alix returns with her mother to the center and learns that the bird she held in her arms is not badly injured and can now be released into the wild. Sara asks Alix if she would like to do it. Bravely, Alix dons heavy, over the elbow leather gloves and takes the rapier clawed bird, suddenly alert and eager to escape. Alix fears she cannot hold on. At the keeper's countdown and "release!," Alix raises her arms. Perkins writes: "She let go with her hands. The weight of the falcon lifted. The falcon realized he was free and raised his magnificent wings." As the child bids him goodbye, the bird of prey soars into the sky and disappears over the treetops. 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. I see in it a stirring metaphor. Summertime, after all, bespeaks freedom. Children, liberated from classrooms and homework, are released outdoors and nourished by fresh air and sunshine. They shoot out tendrils in new directions. Summertime is when children sprout up in inches as well as in psychic dimensions for which we have no measure. The release of the falcon, previously wrapped like a baby, evokes the moment when, suddenly, a child grasps that she is growing toward freedom. Alix lets go, and the creature sails off, leaving protection and care behind, venturing forth into the unknown. Likewise, Perkins's lovely book inspires young people to do what they must do, namely, grow up. ALL SUMMER LONG (Farrar, Straus Giroux, 172 pp., 12.99; ages 10 to 12), a two tone graphic novel by Hope Larson, spins the dial from girlhood toward adolescence. Many women can think back and recall a summer when things changed forever, a bit like that dramatic switch in Dorothy Gale's life from black and white to color; and here we have it. Bina, a tall, talented, music loving, guitar playing black haired girl of 13, has a longtime best friend, short, blond, unmusical Austin, who is off to soccer camp for a month, leaving Bina at loose ends because in past summers they always played a special game together. Whereas in early childhood friendships take shape by reason of proximity, later they alter as interests diverge and new bonds form, and Larson's story tracks this painful, exhilarating process. Austin not only withdraws from Bina, he informs her toward the end of the story that he has a girlfriend from soccer camp who is "cute and awesome. And short!" But mild mannered Bina, who has put up with the highhandedness of Austin's older sister (to whom she turns for companionship in Austin's absence), shows little jealousy. When school starts in the fall, she adaptively moves on, taking steps to create her own band. Other aspects of her life are changing as well: Bina's gay older brother, Johnny, and his husband, Deon, adopt a baby. Before she feels she's ready, Bina herself is thrust into the role of babysitter for a little boy in the neighborhood. Earlier, in my favorite moment in the novel, we see a nod toward Bina's constructive response to losing Austin in an interaction between Bina and another of her older brothers, edgy Davey, who drops in on the family unexpectedly after working as an adventure guide. He tells Bina she is lucky because "you already found your thing" music. We understand that while friendships may change or fade, Bina, like so many young people, has the chance to stay on track during adolescence by pursuing a strong interest. This moment of fraternal wisdom illuminates Larson's novel, and her images of the siblings' affectionate embraces are among the most memorable. THE CARDBOARD KINGDOM (Knopf, 281 pp., 20.99; ages 7 to 10), also a graphic novel, reminds us that children's summer reading can be sheer entertainment. The highly saturated full colored pages by Chad Sell, with help from several other cartoonists, including Jay Fuller, Katie Schenkel and Manuel Betancourt, present a gang of diverse neighborhood kids who, in a series of loosely connected fast paced plots, create fantasies together. They construct sets and assume roles like Banshee, Sorceress, Gargoyle, Bully and Beast, with costumes derived from fairy tale villains and monsters, among other sources. There is plenty of excitement, aggression, competition and gender bending. Horror vacui might seem an apt term for these frenetic pages. (Think of speech bubbles like: "GRRAR," "EEEEEEE!!!" "AWOOOOO!") Some children may delight in the action packed episodes, even if others, who gravitate toward quieter pleasures, may feel bombarded. Still, children's tastes are in evolution, forming day by day, open to novelty. The unstructured summer months ahead are an especially good time to offer them a smorgasbord of reading options.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
"Mosul" dramatizes a 2017 story in The New Yorker that chronicled a self directed Iraqi SWAT team's efforts to fight the Islamic State. Counting both Conde Nast and the "Avengers: Endgame" directors Anthony and Joe Russo among its producers, this Netflix movie balances admirable ambition (it's an American film, but the characters speak Arabic) with the cruder goosing strategies and red meat dialogue of a revenge picture. The film, the directing debut of the screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (Peter Berg's "The Kingdom"), begins mid shootout. Kawa (Adam Bessa), a newly minted Iraqi police officer, is nearby when his uncle is killed by Islamic State fighters. The Nineveh SWAT team, headed by Major Jasem (Suhail Dabbach), shows up and kills them, then, after a tense interrogation, extends Kawa an offer to join. The team only takes men who have been wounded by the Islamic State or lost family to them, and Kawa now qualifies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Nevertheless, there's little doubt governors feel life or death pressure to flatter the president. "Several governors made clear they fear inadvertently harming their own citizens if they are too strident in demands for desperately needed medical supplies, or if they clash too publicly with Trump over pandemic policy as the contagion spreads," reported The Los Angeles Times. A New York official told The Post that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others in the state are "working under the assumption they will not get much help from the federal government, but that criticizing Trump could jeopardize any help they could receive." Trump isn't just trying to feed his ego by coercing blue state governors into pretending that he's doing a good job. He's getting help with the November election. His campaign just rolled out a new ad, titled "Hope," featuring appreciative quotes from Cuomo and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. With the lives of their constituents at stake, they've given him the made for TV sound bites he was never able to extract from Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky. For the many New Yorkers who loathe this president, it's hard to imagine a more profound insult. Due in part to Trump's failures, the United States has the world's worst coronavirus outbreak, and New York State is its biggest hot spot, with over 1,200 deaths as of Monday afternoon. There are ventilator shortages and makeshift morgues. A little more than three years ago, Democrats gathered in Javits Center in Manhattan thinking they were going to celebrate Hillary Clinton's election. Now it's a temporary hospital. And in order to secure lifesaving assistance, our leaders have to grovel to the man who has helped create our tragedy. Besides Ukraine, there is another precedent for Trump's behavior: Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria, Trump grew incensed when the female mayor of San Juan called out the administration's inadequate response, and he's been punishing the island ever since, slowing the release of aid and slashing its Medicaid funding. No doubt, Trump's racism and Puerto Rico's lack of national political representation exacerbated his mistreatment of that beleaguered territory. But it was a preview of how he'd use his power. "I don't think anyone was that surprised when he was as vindictive as he was after the trial in firing people and having them marched out of the White House, and I don't think anybody can be all that surprised now," Schiff said of Trump. "Dismayed, horrified, appalled, yes. Their worst fears realized once again, yes. Surprised, probably not." Republican senators knew who Trump was and they refused to remove him. Now we're all, as the president said of the former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, going to go through some things.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Andy Murray Gave His All. Which Is Why This Ending Hurts. Andy Murray is not the youngest of the tennis supergroup known as the Big Four. Novak Djokovic was born a week later than Murray was. But it is still quite an unpleasant surprise to realize that Murray, 31, very likely will be the first of the remarkable quartet to retire. Roger Federer is somehow still gliding at 37. Rafael Nadal is somehow still persevering at 32. But Murray has been in too much pain for too long with no relief in view, and on Friday in Melbourne, Australia, all of those who have followed his career from up close or a great distance could share some of his pain, too. It was not what he said. It was what he couldn't say. Murray, like all tennis stars of his stature, has spent as much time in news conferences as most of us have spent at the coffee shop. They are an artificial construct that has become a natural habitat for Murray, a droll, strong minded Scotsman with the voice that sounds like a low flying drone a voice he once called "my least favorite thing about me." But as he sat down behind the table on Friday, his cap pulled low and his lips pursed, reporters placed digital recorders on the table in front him to capture the words. There was soon nothing to capture. Asked how he and his ailing hip were feeling, he answered, "Yeah, not, not great." He then sighed, averted his glance, dropped his chin, touched the bill of his cap and his face, fought for composure and was unable to utter another word for nearly a minute before finally grabbing his credential off the desk and leaving the room. Murray plans to play on, hopefully until Wimbledon this summer, although there are no guarantees. He acknowledged that this Australian Open, which begins Monday, could be the finish line, and surely the poignancy of making such an announcement in Melbourne was not lost on him. Update: Andy Murray loses in his first round match at the Australian Open. Sir Andrew Barron Murray has had many triumphs in his 31 years: back to back Olympic gold medals and three Grand Slam titles, none more resonant than his winning Wimbledon in 2013 to end a 77 year drought for British men in singles. Many other worthies, including Bunny Austin and Tim Henman, had embarked on the same quest and faltered. But Australia is where Murray has had to face his own tennis limitations. He broke down in tears during the awards ceremony after losing the final to Federer in 2010, but though he has, in his own words, "kept it together" since then in Melbourne, 2010 was only the beginning of the disappointment. He lost the final again in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2016. No other man has gone 0 5 in singles finals at the same major tournament, and he shares the blame with Djokovic, his one time doubles partner, who has beaten Murray in the last four of those finals. So close in age and skill sets, they first played as 13 year olds at Les Petits As junior tournament in France. Murray won in a hurry, but they have played 36 times as professionals, more than enough to make it clear that Djokovic is the greater player. He leads their series by 25 11 and has 14 Grand Slam singles titles (and counting). For many, the Big Four has become the Big Three. And doesn't Stan Wawrinka have like Murray three major titles of his own? Such arguments have merit: Federer and Nadal also have winning records against Murray, and there is no doubt now that in the final analysis of this golden tennis era, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic will be the central figures and the statistical leaders. But Murray earned his place in tennis's great modern foursome, with his week to week consistency, his resilience, his all surface brilliance and his ability to excel at Wimbledon with the equivalent of the Centre Court roof on his shoulders. "Never motivated by money, only by his rivals; he didn't need people's respect, but he earned it," Mark Petchey, Murray's former coach, said in the wake of Murray's announcement. Murray might not have been here at all. He and his older brother, Jamie, were young students at Dunblane Primary School in their Scottish town in 1996 when a local resident entered the grounds and murdered 16 of their schoolmates and a teacher before shooting himself. The Murray brothers survived, though not without invisible scars, and they both grew up to become No. 1 in the world: Andy in singles, Jamie in doubles. That is a tribute to their childhood sibling rivalry, their talent and their work ethic, and also to their formidable tennis mother, Judy, a former Scottish professional player who has been a driving force with her intuition, her ambition, her sharp wit and her informed passion for the game. "He was a kaleidoscope of talent, of emotion, of movement, spirit and authenticity," said Petchey, a former British player who introduced Murray to Kim Sears, who would become Murray's wife. "He was a winner, but he became a champion. A champion not just on the court but a champion of causes off it. He leaves as he arrived. Tennis never changed him, but he changed tennis." Murray, in part (but only in part) because of his mother's impact on his career, has been the rare men's No. 1 to speak out frequently in support of gender equality and women's tennis, whose results he actually seems to follow. He has also walked the walk, hiring a woman as a coach: Amelie Mauresmo. That has endeared him to a wider audience and only underscored the gulf between on court Murray and off court Murray. Under pressure and between the lines, he has often been far from endearing: barking at his entourage, using language better suited to the Glasgow docks, and muttering, muttering, muttering as he chased perfection in a sport that refused to cooperate. Watching him at work, it all has often seemed more a burden than a pleasure. His service motion resembles heavy lifting, and long before his hip problems became career threatening, his walk between points looked closer to a hobble. But that was before he sensed an opportunity and sprang into action: a short ball he could pounce on for a winner, a wide ball he could chase down that hardly anyone else in the game could have reached. Murray in his prime was above all a supreme athlete, possessed of quickness, coordination, feathery touch and selective striking power. As recently as 2016, he had his finest season, winning nine titles and reaching No. 1 for the first time. It still seems premature to believe that he is just about done. After all, retirement in tennis has long been a euphemism for a sabbatical, and one of Murray's peers who has dealt with pain offered words of encouragement on Friday. "Please don't stop trying," Juan Martin del Potro wrote on Twitter. "Keep fighting. I can imagine your pain and sadness. I hope you can overcome this. You deserve to retire on your own terms, whenever that happens." Del Potro speaks from experience; multiple wrist operations nearly snuffed out his career. His is a voice to be heeded. But unfortunately so is Murray's, especially when the emotions are so powerful that the words just won't come.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
It was July 12, 2013, and Mr. Jacobs had just found out that a crucial deal the independent media company's proposed purchase of Hulu, in partnership with AT T had collapsed. Hulu's owners had decided not to sell after all. "It was like Lucy pulling up the football from Charlie Brown at the last second," Mr. Jacobs said. Still convinced that streaming services like Hulu were Hollywood's future, Mr. Jacobs and his boss, the longtime media executive Peter Chernin, started acquisition talks the next day with Crunchyroll, a little known streamer of anime videos. They bought it for 75 million, nurtured it, added other new media start ups around it in a holding company called Otter Media and sold the collection to AT T on Tuesday. Analysts valued the deal, which had long been expected, at more than 1 billion. With the purchase, Otter Media ranks as one of the most valuable media upstarts of the last decade, said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates, a firm that focuses on emerging consumer technology. Others include Twitch, which streams video game sessions and was sold to Amazon for 970 million in 2014. "Otter is certainly a win," Mr. Sappington said, noting that other new media companies have imploded the most recent being AwesomenessTV, which was valued at 650 million in 2016 and sold to Viacom last month for about 50 million. "The challenge ahead for Otter is staying hot," he added. "It's not easy, as we just saw with Awesomeness." Mr. Chernin predicted that AT T would accelerate Otter's growth by combining it with its new entertainment empire. In June, AT T completed its 85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner, which includes HBO, Warner Bros. and the Turner cable networks. John Stankey, chief executive of WarnerMedia, as Time Warner has been renamed, will oversee Otter. Mr. Stankey said in a statement that AT T planned to "harness Otter's expertise" to strengthen its own digital assets. He did not say which ones, but Warner Bros. owns niche video companies like Machinima, which focuses on gamers, and Boomerang, which offers episodes of classic cartoons like "The Flintstones" and "Scooby Doo." In addition to Crunchyroll, Otter owns Fullscreen, a studio and advertising agency for YouTube stars, or "online creators," as Otter calls them; and Rooster Teeth, which makes video aimed at gamers, operates a streaming channel and has a growing events business. VRV, pronounced "verve," is another Otter owned video service. It bundles and delivers 11 niche online channels, including Cartoon Hangover and DramaFever, which focuses on Korean soap operas. Otter's streaming services have more than two million paying subscribers in total, on par with CBS All Access. But the Chernin Group had a theory. "With every new wave of technology, great new brands emerge, and we wanted to own those brands," Mr. Jacobs said. "They certainly weren't going to be incubated inside the large media companies," where they would have to compete for resources. The men focused on niches with hyper passionate fan bases. "Fans willing to pay for video, buy merchandise, buy tickets to live events, engage with advertisers associated with the brand," Mr. Jacobs said. About 100,000 people paid to attend Rooster Teeth fan conventions last year, for instance. Rooster Teeth branded merchandise (hats, shirts, socks, beer mugs) generated millions of dollars in sales. Not every bet has paid off. Otter bought Creativebug, a maker of arts and crafts videos, in 2014 for about 10 million. Creativebug's fan base never solidified, and Otter sold it for a loss last year. An effort to develop a site called Soompi into a destination for fans of Korean entertainment failed. Otter also had a setback with Fullscreen, which introduced and then shut down a subscription on demand platform. For Mr. Chernin, the Otter sale raises the question of what he will do next. There has been speculation in Hollywood that he is planning to raise at least 500 million to invest in a new generation of media start ups. Mr. Chernin declined to comment on the speculation. He said, however, "I think we will continue to do a version of what we do, which is make movies and television shows, and we will look to continue to invest in consumer technology brands." The Chernin Group owns other digital businesses, including Barstool Sports, whose reputation is so toxic that ESPN canceled a partnership with it after 10 day. The company also owns a minority stake in Headspace, which sells meditation via an app. Mr. Chernin, who previously ran Rupert Murdoch's entertainment empire, also has a movie division hits include the "Planet of the Apes" series that supplies 20th Century Fox. About six years remain on that deal, Mr. Chernin said. Asked what would happen when Disney completes its 71.3 billion acquisition of the studio, he said, "I'm going to be a proud member of the Disney family."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
On Friday from 4 to 7 p.m., meet the designer Jonathan Simkhai at the East Hampton pop up of Tenet, the Southampton boutique known for its cool mix of up and coming labels like Ellery, Lisa Marie Fernandez and Soludos. Mr. Simkhai, a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winner, will show pieces from his pre fall collection, like a neon pink bubble dress in artfully embroidered organza ( 845). At 51 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, N.Y. The next day, head around the corner to Figue East Hampton, where, from 4 to 7 p.m., the local jewelry designer Susan Nieland will show her designs inspired by the light and beauty of the East End, like a double stone lariat with a small black freshwater pearl found on the beach in Sagaponack ( 525). At 55 Main Street, East Hampton. On Tuesday, Westfield will celebrate the grand opening of its World Trade Center mall with a family day from noon to 6 p.m. There will be hourly stage performances in the Oculus, including the Harlem Gospel Choir and the "School of Rock" cast, hands on workshops at Eataly's newest marketplace and, of course, shopping. You'll find goods from more than 100 fashion, beauty, lifestyle and technology labels. At 85 Greenwich Street. Missed the annual Piaget Hamptons Cup benefiting the Robin Hood Foundation? Through the end of the month, Piaget will make a 1,000 donation from each sale of its new Piaget Polo S 42 mm timepiece ( 9,350) to New York's largest poverty fighting organization. At 730 Fifth Avenue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"Think of this story as a wheel," David Maraniss writes in an author's note at the beginning of his new book, "A Good American Family." "The hearing in Room 740 is the hub where all the spokes connect." Room 740 in Detroit's Federal Building was where Maraniss's father, Elliott, was summoned to appear before the notorious House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC) one day in 1952, to answer charges that he was a member of the Communist Party. Simply being subpoenaed to appear had already cost Elliott his job, and his refusal to cooperate with the committee's questions would force him into years of desperate struggle to keep his family afloat. Elliott Maraniss was no atomic spy or government mole. He was a rewrite man at The Detroit Times, a World War II vet with a wife and three kids. HUAC had come to Detroit hoping to find communists in the United Auto Workers, a powerful liberal institution; people such as Elliott and his wife's brother, Bob Cummins, were just "collateral damage," expected to make "a few acts of repentance and contrition" bow their heads and name names of old friends and comrades in the ongoing theater of the Red scare. If they didn't, they were dismissed after a brief interrogation with their lives in tatters. Elliott was not even permitted to read a prepared statement, though he was allowed to file it with the committee. Now, David Maraniss, in his "long overdue attempt to understand what had happened to my father and our family and the country during what has come to be known as the McCarthy era," has unearthed that statement, and that moment. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and one of our most talented biographers and historians, Maraniss has used his prodigious research skills to produce a story that leaves one aching with its poignancy, its finely wrought sense of what was lost, both in his home and in our nation. It is at the same time a book that, like his family, never gives in to self pity but remains remarkably balanced, forthright and unwavering in its search for the truth. David's father was "a liberal but undogmatic optimist," whose mantra was "It could be worse." He loved baseball and literature and funny songs; he once wrote a column under the moniker "the Ol' Railbird"; and he had an abiding passion for nearly everything to do with the American heartland. He was, his son tells us, a brilliant newspaperman but also a constant "force for good ... not only in my life and those of my siblings," but also in the lives of everyone he knew. 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. So how does such a man end up writing Soviet propaganda under a fake name for The Michigan Worker? "I can appreciate his motivations, but I am confounded by his reasoning and his choices," Maraniss confesses. Elliott was the son of Jewish immigrants from Odessa and Latvia, a Boy Scout who grew up in Coney Island, an outstanding student and editor of the school paper at Abraham Lincoln High School a place almost painful to behold in its glowing idealism and dedication to learning, even in the midst of the Depression. A fellow student was Arthur Miller, whose own encounters with communism and the Red scare are another "spoke" connected to Room 740. Like Miller, Elliott went on to the University of Michigan, then "in one of its own golden periods" of scholarship, where he discovered his great love for the Midwest. He also encountered a key influence on his political development: 17 year old Mary Cummins, a wisp of a girl with strawberry blond hair and deeply held radical convictions. The Cumminses were another remarkable American family, originally dirt poor Kansas homesteaders living in a one room dugout cut out of a hillside. Mary's father was a civil engineer who couldn't afford to finish his degree, but made enough money to drive a Cadillac and send his five children to college. The courtship of Elliott and Mary included strolls through Ann Arbor to gaze at a "little blue house on Stadium Boulevard" they dreamed of owning one day. Throughout their long marriage Mary insisted on buying the homes the family lived in strange behavior for an avowed communist. By 1939, as editorial director of The Michigan Daily, Elliott was defending the monstrous Stalin Hitler pact that triggered World War II a stance that outraged and mystified many of his readers and friends, as well as his son, who calls it one of Elliott's "indefensible positions." When the war reached the United States, Stalin was back on the side of the Allies and both Maranisses threw themselves into the struggle. Elliott enlisted, while Mary helped build B 17s, and advocated for civil rights at her plant. Rising to the rank of captain, Elliott was put in charge of a black salvage and repair company in the still segregated Army, arriving in Okinawa in July 1945, just after the terrible battle there. He excelled in his position, and the experience seemed to fill him with patriotic ardor. He wrote passionately to his wife about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, General MacArthur and especially Dwight Eisenhower, whom he would later admit to having voted for in 1952. He always harbored, it seemed, a desire to belong to a wider America, even as he saw its shortcomings. Unbeknown to Elliott, though, his assignment to command black troops was the end result of a desire by military intelligence, wary of his "communistic" tendencies, to exclude him from sensitive work while in the Army. Before his file was finally sealed, some 14 F.B.I. agents would interview 39 "confidential informants" about him. Their investigation would culminate in Room 740, but it would not end there. Even after HUAC had finished with him, the F.B.I. sent agents to interview Elliott's employers whenever he got a job, knowing it would likely cost him the position. The consequence was a series of agonizing sojourns back and forth across the country, as Elliott sought to find and keep gainful employment, badly straining his family and his nerves. "A Good American Family" is intercut with Maraniss's deep dives into the lives and backgrounds of all those other "spokes," before, during and after the hearing in Room 740 an effort to explore one congressman's amazement that even some communists hailed from "good American families." Here are his father's radical friends who went to fight (and die) in Spain, along with his lawyer, fellow witnesses, the professional informer a five foot grandmother and high school dropout who had ratted out Elliott, along with the prosecutor and leading inquisitors on the committee. Maraniss is able to spare some sympathy for the corrupt, drunken Democratic chairman of HUAC at the time, Representative John Stephens Wood, an inveterate racist with an appalling secret in his past whose society wife would have little to do with him after she discovered his Cherokee ancestry. This is, in the end, a fascinating confluence of America, and if the story drags in places we don't really need to know that there were 17,000 varieties of American apple by 1905 more often one is bowled over by the vibrancy of that vanished nation. It's a world where David's sister listens to a new song called "Shake, Rattle and Roll," and the family watches mesmerized as exquisite lines of Detroit cars appear every summer. Elliott's wanderings take him to an Iowa newspaper that grew out of a strike by union typographers. Later, he sees his revered new publisher, William T. Evjue of The Capital Times, in Madison, talking and laughing in his office with Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright. Did we ever live in such an America? Did we just dream it? After a long travail, Elliott and Mary Maraniss and their children would come through, buoyed by their unflagging optimism and faith. (Remarkably, the book's cover photo, of the Maranisses posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, was taken after Elliott's ordeal in Room 740.) For all of Maraniss's research, a mystery remains at the heart of "A Good American Family": Just what were his parents, and especially his father, doing in the Communist Party in the first place? This is a question Maraniss cannot answer, because his parents, for one reason or another shame? embarrassment? an effort to spare their children? rarely spoke of it. About the furthest his father would go was to admit that he had been "stubborn in his ignorance about the horrors of the Soviet Union." But this gives us little insight into how this great American spirit ended up stuffing himself into a closet of dreary Russian dogma. In the end, even in the best of families, some things remain secret.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Like moths to a flame, 800 of the most powerful people in fashion are expected swarm to a former gin distillery on the southern fringes of Milan on Wednesday afternoon . They will bat their wings at the doors of the Fondazione Prada, the contemporary arts complex masterminded by Miuccia Prada and the regular runway venue for the brand powerhouse that bears her last name. The likely reception for her spring 2020 collection? Rapturous applause. One of the most anticipated events on the fashion week calendar, the Prada show has been hailed among the top 10 of the season by American Vogue for as long as the magazine has run such rankings. In 2013, the British critic Alexander Fury said Mrs. Prada's ugly chic frocks "have influenced the way entire generations of designers create clothing." For years, the entire front row would tote matching Prada bags, seeded among them by the brand, underscoring Mrs. Prada's status as one of the most powerful and admired women in the fashion business. And yet, in late 2013, after almost three decades of commercial growth and despite glowing reviews about "glamour that got under your skin" (The New York Times) and "resounding repudiations of milquetoast fashion" (Financial Times), financial cracks began to show. Last year there was another lackluster set of full year results, although it posted its first annual increase in revenue in five years. That led to the Hong Kong listed Prada losing 864 million in market value on a single day in March after investors were rattled by slowing Chinese demand. What exactly has been going on? Is Prada destined to become a brand where business woes eventually all but eclipse a powerful creative ability to foretell the Next Big Thing in fashion? After all, in 2017 Mrs. Prada herself announced: "I don't want to be judged by sales. My life is so much more important than sales. We're not really a commercially driven company." Nevertheless, Prada has been trying to reverse its slide almost since the downturn began and recently there have been signs of a comeback. Succession questions, which have worried investors given that Mrs. Prada, 71 , and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli , 73 , the chief executive, own 80 percent of the company, have been quieted with the arrival of Lorenzo Bertelli , their 31 year old son, who has traded racecar driving for a post as head of marketing and communications. There are also strong signs that Prada's sales appeal has improved across generations and geographies. The online luxury outlet Matchesfashion.com said Prada was consistently in its top 10 brands when stocking women's wear and men's wear, with customers' appetites growing in recent seasons. According to its fashion buying director Natalie Kingham : "Prada has always been very covetable. Now there are a new generation of fans in addition to the longstanding fans of Mrs. Prada and the brand." The e commerce aggregator Lyst said that online searches for Prada had increased by 156 percent this year. And the luxury consignment company the RealReal said Prada was the fourth most searched brand on its platform. Still, the jury is still out on whether the turnaround can work. "I believe Prada is doing a lot to improve and at one point, the results may come. But growth continues to be a challenge," said Luca Solca , a luxury analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein . "It is a beautiful brand run in a rather idiosyncratic way, though that was the case even when things were booming." Mr. Solca added that the share price had continued to "yo yo up and down but mostly down," as investors dithered on whether they believed the turnaround was gaining traction, especially given that a weakened renminbi and social unrest in Hong Kong led to jittery demand from China, where Prada was still improving its retail operations and product assortment. "Of course investors want to believe in Prada it is one of the most iconic names in the business," said Mario Ortelli, managing partner of the luxury consultancy Ortelli Co. "But in the short term they can be nervous when its performance is so volatile and offset by the booming success of rivals like Gucci and Louis Vuitton." In a world where luxury brands have been corporatized and structured, Prada has long had some unusual business practices. The senior Mr. Bertelli met his wife in the late 1970s when she was determined to take her family business's products into the modern age, and Mrs. Prada has always said it was he who pushed the group's ambitions forward. In the 1990s, as it entered new markets and product lines, Mr. Bertelli exasperated rivals by making inexplicable business decisions that somehow worked out. The volcanic relationship between the husband and wife duo and their shouting matches also became legendary. Mrs. Prada is "all intellect and ideas," while Mr. Bertelli "brings it all down to earth," a New Yorker profile noted in 2004. Despite growing scrutiny recently around the company performance, Mr. Bertelli has continued to make heavy investments in areas like manufacturing (a new 90,000 square meter , or almost 970,000 square foot, factory in Tuscany opened in 2015) and in Prada suppliers to secure control of the group's supply chain. When asked why the company had stumbled, however, he kept his thoughts close to his chest. "I would not say we made oversights. Rather there was an underestimation of the speed at which the market was asking us to make some changes," the senior Mr. Bertelli wrote last week in an email, acknowledging the company's foot dragging when it came to the digital space. "For instance digital transformation. Once we became aware of the need to promptly react, we stepped up our pace, rapidly caught up and bridged the gap." Sales today, he continued, were up across all geographies with the exception of Hong Kong reflecting a renewed focus on product and merchandising. Looking back to past hits appears to have been key to Prada reclaiming relevance. Alongside new wins like the 2,500 sellout Sidonie shoulder bag, several Prada signatures like Hitchcock style knee grazing skirts, chunky shoes and jersey T shirt dresses with a contemporary twist have returned to the catwalk. Last year also saw the relaunch of Linea Rossa, the sports line known in the 1990s for its high tech nylon materials and accessible prices. The updated iteration has proved very popular, Mr. Bertelli said, matching the wider trend toward sports and streetwear (and the related and increasingly important millennial consumer). The company's digital shake up is being spearheaded by Lorenzo Bertelli , who joined the family business 18 months ago, and was also behind the initiative to replace the nylon in its supply chain with a sustainable version by 2021. The younger Mr. Bertelli conceded in a telephone interview that Prada had not been quick enough to see how the internet would upend the industry. But he said he was optimistic about the company's future, and he stressed that much of the hard work had already been done. His biggest challenge, he said, had been in getting to know the company culture. "It took months and months," he said. "We had to show some employees how to use smartphones. We had to train people on how data could be used to improve our business. But they love Prada and want it to thrive and now have an understanding of what we have to do. I am young and I am positive: if I wasn't, I wouldn't be able to do this job." Then there are the complexities of working with parents. "Sometimes it can be a bit strange or harder, but generally it has been wonderful and it makes me happy to be doing it," he said. As for his mother, in the days before her spring 2020 ready to wear show in Milan, Mrs. Prada a woman who made her fortune on looking forward and challenging the norms of fashion sounded sanguine. "What could be new? What is not obvious? That has always been an obsession, since I was young. You progress and learn more by going against what you know, which is why when I do a show I don't take the idea of failure into consideration," she said, citing women and their differences, both internal and among one another, as another core inspiration. "Of course, I am interested in why people buy things, but I can only listen so much to the consumer because we have so many different types who like our company so you cannot listen to everyone," she said. " People always say : 'Why did you want to become big?' I never wanted to become big. I want to be in touch and curious about people, politics, cultures, countries. If I do that, then I think I am doing my job right."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
ANDREW MELLEN had a housing situation so enviable that everyone told him he was crazy to give it up. When Mr. Mellen moved to Manhattan in 1996, a chain of friends led him to a rent stabilized one bedroom in the East 80s. It had only about 325 square feet, and was on the sixth floor of a walk up. The landlord rented it to him in "as is" condition for around 500 a month. Over time, the rent rose to 840. The low rent enabled him, a few years later, to buy a second home in Milford, Pa., in the Poconos. A three bedroom, two story lakeside house, it cost 227,000. Mr. Mellen, a native of Detroit and a graduate of Northern Michigan University, began his career in the theater, acting, directing and working in arts management. He was asked to organize a photo collection, which led to a referral to an accountant, who told him about disorganized potential clients, some of whom showed up at tax time with duffel bags stuffed with receipts. Every job led to more. "It was coming at me so powerfully," Mr. Mellen said. So he became a professional organizer. Two years ago, his book, "Unstuff Your Life: Kick the Clutter Habit and Completely Organize Your Life for Good" (Penguin Group), was published. That "prompted a lot of shifts in my life," Mr. Mellen said. He began traveling often, to speak and lead workshops. He said he loved "getting to see the transformation in people's lives." But he felt encumbered by his apartment. His tiny one bedroom was like "a ship's cabin," he said. The light was good in the morning but waned by late afternoon. The ceiling leaked for more than a year before the management company did repairs. The windows, which led to a fire escape, were gated. "I was living behind bars," Mr. Mellen said. As for that second home? Soon after he bought it, he found structural defects that resulted in a lawsuit, then a gut renovation. Friends said, " 'You put your blood and soul into your house, how could you let it go?' " Mr. Mellen recalled. He loved the house, but with his new travel schedule, he was rarely there. He practices what he preaches or, as he says, he walks the talk. So, despite others' opinions that he was crazy to do so, he decided to relinquish the rental, sell the house and rent a bigger apartment, where he would camp out for a while to see how his new schedule took shape. He sold the house for 380,000. With the cost of repairs and renovation, he estimates he broke even. He sold or donated much of his furniture and took a sun filled one bedroom for 1,600 in a new building in Harlem. Then, last year, he began the search to buy a co op. For no more than 400,000, he hoped for a bright one bedroom facing south. Mr. Mellen enlisted the help of Mark Weitzman of Prudential Douglas Elliman, after inquiring about one of his listings. "He is the most organized guy I've ever met," Mr. Weitzman said. On Broome Street on the Lower East Side, Mr. Mellen saw a nice renovation at an income restricted co op. The price was 375,000, with monthly maintenance of almost 500. But the neighborhood was desolate, and Mr. Mellen knew he would find walking to and from the apartment depressing. The price is now 329,000. One place in Chelsea had a problematic railroad layout; one in Kips Bay had a loft too low ceilinged for standing. An estate sale on the top floor of a charming building on East 17th Street needed a gut renovation. The price was 350,000, with maintenance in the 700s. "That little part of me that loves a project was completely engaged," Mr. Mellen said. "I was seeing my new stackable Miele washer dryer in the corner and thinking the sky's the limit and I will turn this into a minipalace for myself." His bubble burst when his offer of 335,000 was declined. That apartment is now in contract for the asking price. His friends also told him that they would be reluctant to visit if he moved to another sixth floor walk up. He realized the lack of an elevator was a deal breaker, as was the lack of a doorman. If a package arrived while he was away, he said, "I don't want to come home to a bunch of yellow slips stuck to my door." Mr. Mellen hunted throughout Manhattan, driven primarily by price. "I thought he was looking at a little too much and might be able to narrow it down," Mr. Weitzman said. So the focus for Mr. Mellen became a neighborhood below 34th Street and west of Second Avenue, where he had many clients and friends, and where he could walk or bike most places. He didn't want a studio "until I saw the horror shows that are called one bedrooms," he said. "Aside from being very organized," Mr. Weitzman said, "Andrew has a very Zen mentality and is able to make do with less. He didn't need a one bedroom just to have stuff in it." So, when they came to Victoria House on East 27th Street, off Third Avenue in Kips Bay, Mr. Mellen was captivated by an alcove studio with bright southern light. The sponsor unit was listed at 399,000, with maintenance in the mid 800s. He first offered 370,000, and ended up buying the place for 382,500. "There's that horrifying math: a three bedroom three bath house on a lake is equivalent to an alcove studio with a doorman," he said. "Only in Manhattan could that be real, but it is." Mr. Mellen moved in the spring. He especially appreciates the elevator and the doorman when he returns from a trip. "It's nice to come home to a helpful, friendly face," he said. He fits easily into his studio. "I am fond of shelving systems," he said. He is judicious about every purchase. "I make choices all the time when I bring things in where is this going to live?" He plans to install a Murphy bed. "Function wins," he said. "I have made choices to live with less. I am fortunate that in my life I don't have a lot of things that are not important to me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Lionel Messi is still angry with Barcelona. He is still frustrated with Barcelona. But, in a sudden and dramatic reversal, he said Friday that he is not prepared to go to war with Barcelona and, so, will stay after all. In a decision confirmed by the club via Twitter, Messi withdrew a letter announcing his intention to leave Barcelona and will stay with the soccer club that he has called home for his entire professional career. The decision is an abrupt about face for Messi, who on Aug. 25 informed the club in writing that he would exercise a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave the club unilaterally. It also spares the team the embarrassment of losing its most beloved, and most valuable, asset without receiving a transfer fee. But it may do little to resolve months of turmoil at Barcelona, a downward spiral that has involved coaching changes, boardroom intrigue and public bickering. The club reached a nadir with a humbling 8 2 defeat at the hands of the German champion Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals of the Champions League last month. The announcement that he would stay, which was initially reported in an interview with the website Goal, came hours after Messi's father and agent, Jorge, had appeared to double down on the player's stated intention to leave, and after the Spanish league had declared a EUR700 million release clause in Messi's contract was valid. That set the stage for an ugly legal fight between the player and the club, and Messi, in his interview with Goal, appeared to back away rather than face Barcelona in court. "I would never go to war against the club of my life," Messi said. But the manner of Messi's decision and the contentious language he used even as he confirmed his decision to stay at Barcelona piles yet more pressure on the club's embattled president Josep Maria Bartomeu. Messi said Bartomeu, already under pressure because of a spate of ugly boardroom dramas, reneged on a promise to let him leave at the end of last season. "I wasn't happy and I wanted to leave," Messi said in the Goal interview. "I have not been allowed this in any way and I will stay at the club so as not to get into a legal dispute. The management of the club led by Bartomeu is a disaster." He added: "I thought and was sure that I was free to leave; the president always said that at the end of the season I could decide if I stayed or not. Now they cling to the fact that I did not say it before June 10, when it turns out that on June 10 we were competing for La Liga in the middle of this awful coronavirus and this disease altered all the season." It is not the first time Messi has reversed course. The forward caused hysteria in his homeland in 2016 when he quit the national team, citing his frustration with the federation. But less than two months later, amid pleas from teammates, fans and even the country's president, Messi changed his mind. In the current situation, Barcelona and Messi had agreed upon a clause that would allow him to walk away without commanding a transfer fee as long as he communicated his desire to leave before the end of the season. But the havoc wrought on the soccer schedule by the pandemic meant the Spanish season did not finish until months after the date stipulated in the agreement. Messi complained that Bartomeu did not keep to the spirit of the accord and insisted Messi stay unless suitors pay the full buyout clause, which Messi called "impossible." Messi said that given his relationship with the club and its supporters he could not countenance the idea of pursuing a damaging lawsuit to force his way out of the club. Instead, he will remain to help pick up the pieces as Barcelona prepares to rebuild itself after a catastrophic year on and off the field. A new coach, Ronald Koeman, has already been hired and several senior players, including Messi's close friend Luis Suarez, have been told they have no future at the Camp Nou. Koeman, appointed in the wake of the humbling against Bayern, had spoken to Messi shortly before the player stunned the club by announcing his intention to leave. News reports in Spain at the time suggested that the new Dutch coach, a former player with Barcelona, had warned Messi that he would no longer receive special treatment a threat, it was suggested, that made Messi more determined to leave. Instead the two will have to form an uneasy alliance for at least a year and try to shake Barcelona out of a slump that had been building in recent seasons. The surrender to the German champion came after similar capitulations in the Champions League against Roma and Liverpool in recent seasons. Messi said those failures drove his decision to seek a new challenge in the final years of his career. Messi was 28 when the team won its last European Cup. "I looked further afield and I want to compete at the highest level, win titles, compete in the Champions League. You can win or lose in it, because it is very difficult, but you have to compete," he said. There was growing speculation that Messi would be joining Manchester City, backed by the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the English team managed by Messi's old mentor, Pep Guardiola is one of few in world soccer that could both afford to hire Messi and provide him with the platform for the success he still craves. But for all the talk of an exit, Messi's inextricable link to Barcelona meant a departure, whatever the circumstances, would have been shocking. Messi has been with the team for 20 years, since he moved there as a 13 year old from Argentina. His rise, in that time, has mirrored that of his club. Messi's list of honors extends to 10 Spanish championships, four Champions League trophies and six world player of the year awards. His tally of individual records, if anything, is more remarkable. He has scored more goals than anyone else in La Liga history, and holds the assist record, too. He has won more Ballons d'Or the trophy awarded annually to the world's best player than anyone else, played in more victories than any other Barcelona player, scored more hat tricks and doubles than anyone else. As Messi developed first into the best player of his generation and then, possibly, into the best in history, so Barcelona was transformed into arguably the most popular sports team in the world. For almost a decade, the club represented soccer's gold standard. But as many of the stars such as Xavi, Iniesta and Puyol that lined up alongside Messi during that glorious run started to age and eventually moved on or retired, the club made a series of errors, seemingly spending more and more money on talent while getting weaker season upon season. The club is now left counting the cost of those errors, and in Messi has a star player who is a prisoner of his gilded contract.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Some authors consider writer's block a myth, one that romanticizes the creative process, but Faulkner said he does think that "writers can be shut down by trauma or depression or horrible experiences." It can also result from a lack of practice. Anna Borges, who has been participating on and off since high school and now works as an editor and writer, said she had a hard time coming up with a new project this year. "It's the first time in a while that I've worked on something that's so completely new, which I think is just asking for writer's block to take over," she said. Borges is revising a young adult novel she wrote a few years ago and has another book, "The More or Less Definitive Guide to Self Care," out this month, but took up a new project for NaNoWriMo this month. "Part of still doing NaNoWriMo is just constantly trying to tap back into how much joy I got out of writing as a kid before it was my day job," she said, "coming up with stories just to see what would happen." And it helps that the draft is "allowed to suck," she said. Clear said the best way to approach NaNoWriMo is to make writing a habit. "The real goal is not to write a book," he said, "it's to become a writer." Faulkner agreed that the word goal isn't the most salient part of the experience. (Only about 15 percent of participants end up writing 50,000 words.) Instead, he said, it's a way of " training people to show up ," making them feel their stories are valid and providing encouragement through community . "I like to think that we are part of a movement that is making writing and publishing less exclusionary, that is opening it up to diverse voices," he said. Guillory said when she was doing the challenge, she was excited to come home every day to get to work. Now she does mini NaNoWriMos on her own throughout the year when she wants to immerse herself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times 'They Want to Kill Me': Many Covid Patients Have Terrifying Delirium Kim Victory was paralyzed on a bed and being burned alive. Just in time, someone rescued her, but suddenly, she was turned into an ice sculpture on a fancy cruise ship buffet. Next, she was a subject of an experiment in a lab in Japan. Then she was being attacked by cats. Nightmarish visions like these plagued Ms. Victory during her hospitalization this spring for severe respiratory failure caused by the coronavirus. They made her so agitated that one night, she pulled out her ventilator breathing tube; another time, she fell off a chair and landed on the floor of the intensive care unit. "It was so real, and I was so scared," said Ms. Victory, 31, now back home in Franklin, Tenn. To a startling degree, many coronavirus patients are reporting similar experiences. Called hospital delirium, the phenomenon has previously been seen mostly in a subset of older patients, some of whom already had dementia, and in recent years, hospitals adopted measures to reduce it. "All of that has been erased by Covid," said Dr. E. Wesley Ely, co director of the Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship Center at Vanderbilt University and the Nashville Veteran's Administration Hospital, whose team developed guidelines for hospitals to minimize delirium. Now, the condition is bedeviling coronavirus patients of all ages with no previous cognitive impairment. Reports from hospitals and researchers suggest that about two thirds to three quarters of coronavirus patients in I.C.U.'s have experienced it in various ways. Some have "hyperactive delirium," paranoid hallucinations and agitation; some have "hypoactive delirium," internalized visions and confusion that cause patients to become withdrawn and incommunicative; and some have both. The experiences aren't just terrifying and disorienting. Delirium can have detrimental consequences long after it lifts, extending hospital stays, slowing recovery and increasing people's risk of developing depression or post traumatic stress. Previously healthy older patients with delirium can develop dementia sooner than they otherwise would have and can die earlier, researchers have found. "There's increased risk for temporary or even permanent cognitive deficits," said Dr. Lawrence Kaplan, director of consultation liaison psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. "It is actually more devastating than people realize." The ingredients for delirium are pervasive during the pandemic. They include long stints on ventilators, heavy sedatives and poor sleep. Other factors: patients are mostly immobile, occasionally restrained to keep them from accidentally disconnecting tubes, and receive minimal social interaction because families can't visit and medical providers wear face obscuring protective gear and spend limited time in patients' rooms. "It's like the perfect storm to generate delirium, it really, really is," said Dr. Sharon Inouye, a leading delirium expert who founded the Hospital Elder Life Program, guidelines that have helped to significantly decrease delirium among older patients. Both her program and Dr. Ely's have devised recommendations for reducing delirium during the pandemic. "AK 47," Ron Temko wrote in shaky handwriting from his hospital bed. Then he pointed at his neck to show where the assault rifle should aim. Mr. Temko, a 69 year old mortgage company executive, couldn't speak because of the breathing tube in his mouth he'd been on a ventilator at U.C.S.F. Medical Center for about three weeks by then. So, on a Zoom call nurses arranged with his family, he wrote on paper attached to a clipboard. "He wants us to kill him,'" his son gasped, according to Mr. Temko and his wife, Linda. "No, honey," Linda implored, "you're going to be OK." At home now in San Francisco after a 60 day hospitalization, Mr. Temko said his suggestion that his family shoot him stemmed from a delirium fueled delusion that he'd been abducted. "I was in a paranoiac phase where I thought there was some sort of conspiracy against me," he said. When he was first placed on the ventilator, doctors used a lighter sedative, propofol, and dialed it down for hours so he could be awake and know where he was a "regimen to try to avoid delirium," said Dr. Daniel Burkhardt, an anesthesiologist and intensivist who treated him. But then Mr. Temko's respiratory failure worsened. His blood pressure plummeted, a condition propofol intensifies. To allow the ventilator to completely breathe for him, doctors had him chemically paralyzed, which required heavier sedatives to prevent the trauma of being conscious while unable to move. So Mr. Temko's sedation was switched to midazolam, a benzodiazepine, and fentanyl, an opioid drugs that exacerbate delirium. "We had no choice," Dr. Burkhardt said. "If you're very sick and very unstable, basically what happens is we conclude you have bigger problems. You know, I have to get you to live through it first." After about two weeks, the sedative weaning process began, but other delirium related quandaries emerged. Mr. Temko began experiencing pain and anxiety, compelling doctors to balance treating those conditions with using medications that can worsen delirium, they said. At home, his wife kept her phone by her pillow so she could hear him via a nurse's tablet. "He would wake up and was confused and anxious and he'd start getting all worked up to where the ventilator couldn't work," said Mrs. Temko, who would reassure him, "It's OK, breathe." His hallucinations included a rotating human head. "Every time it came around, someone put a nail in it, and I could see that the person was still alive," he said. He imagined that his wristwatch (which was actually at home) was stolen by a man who turned it into a catheter. The man played a recording of Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair, and told Mr. Temko that because he recognized the name, "'You know too much, you're not leaving the hospital.'" When Mr. Bloomer asked "Do you feel safe?," Mr. Temko shook his head no and mouthed around his breathing tube: "'Help me.'" Later, he became despairing. "I did not know if I wanted to live or die," he said. He met with Dr. Kaplan, the psychiatrist, who recognized his symptoms as delirium, partly because Mr. Temko bungled tests like naming the months backward and counting down from 100 by sevens. "He could only get from 100 to 93," Dr. Kaplan said, adding, "The cardinal sin of delirium is always impaired attention." Dr. Kaplan prescribed Seroquel, which he said helps with perceptual disturbances and anxiety. Mr. Temko said another turning point came when Mr. Bloomer said that with months of hard work, recovery was likely. An optimistic cognitive sign, said Dr. Kaplan, is that Mr. Temko can now describe his delirium in much more detail than he could several weeks ago. Some coronavirus patients develop delirium even after relatively short I.C.U. stints. Anatolio Jose Rios, 57, was intubated for just four days at Massachusetts General Hospital and didn't receive highly delirium inducing sedatives. Still, as sedation was lifted, he heard booms, and saw flashes of light and people praying for him. "Oh my God, that was scary," he said. "And when I opened my eyes, I saw the same doctors, the same nurses who were praying for me in my dream." After the ventilator was disconnected, Mr. Rios, a normally gregarious man who hosts a radio show, only responded with one or two word answers, said Dr. Peggy Lai, who treated him. "I saw people lying on the floor like they were dead in the I.C.U.," he said. He imagined a vampire like woman in his room. He was convinced people in the hall outside were armed with guns, threatening him. "'Doctor, do you see that?'" he recalled saying. "'They want to kill me." He asked if the door was bulletproof and, to calm him, the doctor said yes. Like many delirious patients, Mr. Rios warped typical hospital activities into paranoid imaginings. Watching a hospital employee hanging a piece of paper, he said, he thought he saw a noose and feared he would be hanged. His delusions were not helped by one of many seemingly small delirium fueling factors: his eyeglasses had not yet been returned to him. Two months after returning home from her three week hospitalization, Ms. Victory said she's been experiencing troubling emotional and psychological symptoms, including depression and insomnia. She has been noticing the smell of cigarettes or wood burning, a figment of her imagination. "I feel like I'm going down a rabbit hole, and I don't know when I will be back to myself," she said. Dr. Kevin Hageman, one of her physicians at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said she "was pretty profoundly delirious." Ms. Victory, a Vietnamese immigrant and previously healthy community college student majoring in biochemistry, said she didn't remember yanking out her breathing tube, which was reinserted. But she recalled visions blending horror with absurdity. One moment, scientists in Japan were testing chemicals on her; the next she was telling them, "'I am an American and I have a right to eat a cheeseburger and drink Coca Cola,'" she recalled, adding: "I don't even like cheeseburgers." Along with this agitated hyperactive delirium, she experienced internalized hypoactive delirium. In a recovery room after leaving the I.C.U., she'd stare for 10 to 20 seconds when asked basic questions, said Dr. Hageman, adding, "Nothing was quite processing." Ms. Victory managed to take a picture of herself with nasal oxygen tubes and a forehead scar, post it on Facebook and write "I'm alive" in Vietnamese so her parents in Vietnam would know she'd survived. But another day, she called her husband, Wess Victory, 15 or 20 times, repeatedly saying, "I give you two hours to come pick me up." "It was heartbreaking," said Mr. Victory, who patiently told her she couldn't be released yet. "For four or five days, she still couldn't remember what year it was, who the president was." Now, to help overcome the fallout from the experience, she's started taking an antidepressant her doctor prescribed and recently saw a psychologist. "People think when the patient got well and out of the hospital, it will be OK, it's over," Ms. Victory said. "I worry if the virus didn't kill me back then, would that have affected my body enough to kill me now?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first two months of the year are desolate times for movie lovers who prefer to gorge on new releases. Once the holiday season's tidal wave of blockbusters and prestige pictures has receded there's not much action beyond the awards season itself. Releasing only chaff during the first two months of the year has been a studio tradition so longstanding that nobody seems to remember the rationale. But even for awards mavens, now is a good time to catch up and explore. During the last week of 2017 I was out of New York, visiting relatives, and one evening circumstances left me alone in their house with a few hours to kill. I ended up using my phone to watch "Serie Noire," a grimy 1979 French crime thriller that I saw maybe 20 years ago, via a pretty grimy in itself 16 millimeter print, and had no expectation to see again. Directed by Alain Corneau, the movie is an adaptation of the novel "A Hell of a Woman," by the American genre writer Jim Thompson. (Mr. Corneau wrote the screenplay with Georges Perec, the French literary genius who wrote "Life: A User's Manual.") The story line of "Serie Noire" is jaw droppingly squalid less than 10 minutes into the movie an abusive aunt is pimping her young niece (Marie Trintignant) to a feckless traveling salesman (Patrick Dewaere) and the movie's setting, an impoverished Paris suburb in the depths of a drippy winter, is depicted with such rigor that you suspect the film stock itself of carrying mold. Not everyone's cup of tea, obviously, and not to make light of trigger warnings, but this movie could conceivably be eligible for at least a dozen of them. But I've long found it unnerving and fascinating, and when a friend on social media mentioned that it was available on FilmStruck, I was genuinely surprised. See the best 100 movies currently on Netflix. One comes to expect at least a certain amount of the unexpected on a carefully curated site like FilmStruck. That's less true of Netflix. Still, I've always thought the commonly propagated complaint about the dearth of "classic" films on Netflix something of a straw man. The streaming service has never advertised itself as a curated haven of greatness. People perhaps confuse Netflix's DVD rental service, which offers a wide variety of older and critically elevated films, with the streaming service, on which you cannot watch "Citizen Kane" or "Casablanca."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Welcome, Democrats, to Wherever It Is That We Are Bret Stephens: Gail, last week I argued that what the Republicans need this November is "the political equivalent of an unsedated colonoscopy." Several readers, including a couple of medical professionals, wrote in to say that unsedated colonoscopies actually aren't all that bad. (I'll take their word for it.) We'll have to come up with some other unpleasant procedure. Gail Collins: I just found a description of transurethral microwave therapy (TUMT). It's a little ... personal for conversation purposes, but I'm just putting it out there. Give the Republican Party a TUMT! ... OK, let's just go for unsedated lobotomy. Bret: Unsedated lobotomy seems to assume the presence of a brain, which is a lot to ask of the G.O.P. these days. So here's hoping Kamala Harris can deliver the political equivalent of an unsedated TUMT to Mike Pence when they debate this fall. How are you feeling about the race now? Gail: I was kind of surprised by how absolutely blissful Democrats seem to be feeling. But the choice says a lot that's good about Biden. He picked someone who's young, attractive, with a strong personality. He seemed to have no fear that she might pull the spotlight away from him. You could imagine a presidential candidate wanting a boring, uncharismatic veep who would never grab any attention. Not that I have anyone particular in mind. Bret: You mean a certain somebody with the facial expression of a rock, the emotional texture of gravel and the moral weight of a pebble? Whoever could you have in mind? Bret: As you know, I was hoping that Joe would choose Val Demings, especially because she could help win Florida while neutralizing the Trumpian argument that Democrats are against the police. But now that the choice is made, I'm perfectly happy with Harris. Biden showed maturity by refusing to hold a grudge against a primary foe. And there's something deeply inspiring about a candidate who's the daughter of two remarkable immigrants and whose life story is a reminder that the term "only in America" can still mean something wholly unexpected and hopeful. The fact that Donald Trump has gone full Birther on Harris is proof that he's worried. 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." Gail: He came into national politics claiming a Black candidate wasn't actually an American. Seems right he should go out on the same rail. Bret: My concern with the California senator is what our friend Frank Bruni articulated so beautifully in his latest column: that, in the primaries at least, "the experience of Harris didn't live up to the idea of Harris." Does that primary record make you at all nervous? Gail: We're talking about a Donald Trump second term everything makes me nervous. And Frank rules when it comes to political commentary. But a lot of Harris's problems had to do with her inability to organize a campaign. Others will take care of that this time. Let's hope the Biden team can also help her put together some speeches that bring out the best in her biography and personality. We'll get a good idea of how that's going on Wednesday when she addresses what would have been the Democratic national convention. Bret: There ought to be a support group. Knucklegnawers Anonymous. Gail: All this, of course, presumes we have an election. Trump is basically threatening to destroy the postal system to keep mail ballots from being counted. Are you worried? Bret: You know, I really am. Obviously there are longstanding issues with the Postal Service business model. And there are legitimate concerns about voting by mail, both in terms of potential fraud and the timeliness of results. But in any normal administration, the president would be making every effort to ensure the system is insulated from abuse, people can vote in safety, ballots are secure and there's confidence in the result. Trump's purpose is the opposite: to undermine the system and delegitimize the result that is, assuming he loses. Bret: There's really no way to describe this other than as a demagogic assault on democracy. Notice that Trump has also been dropping big hints that he wants to fire Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, because the man refused to support his effort to call out troops. I feel like we are living in an episode of "House of Cards." Gail: And Esper's managed to stay in the job for over a year. That's a heck of a lot longer than a lot of cabinet members with a far more toadying temperament. Maybe we can get him a special medal. Now if you were a Friend of Esper (a FOE?) would you hope he doesn't get canned? Or would you feel pretty certain that history will find the people Trump ticked off to be the heroes of the administration? Gail: That reminds me of the theory that there's a cadre of good men and women at the highest ranks in government and the military who will step up if Trump tries to cancel the election or reject the results. Bret: In the armed services, definitely. It's one of those unthinking liberal biases to assume that the upper reaches of the armed forces are one uniform bloc of Trump voters. Most general officers I know are pretty moderate in their views and deeply committed to the idea of a depoliticized military and civilian control. I'm also guessing they weren't exactly impressed by the bone spurs deferments. Gail: It's been ages since I thought about those bone spurs ... Bret: As for Trump's inner circle, isn't the lesson of all these years that those who have seen him up close also hate him most? I mean, "Anonymous," Steve Bannon, John Bolton, Michael Cohen, Gary Cohn, Fiona Hill, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Reince Priebus, Richard Spencer (the former Navy Secretary, not the white nationalist), Rex Tillerson, Mary Trump, Alexander Vindman I'm just going in alphabetical order here. Bret: I've got to assume a lot of the people who are still in the administration feel pretty much the same way, but just haven't gotten around to saying so. That being said, if there is an attempted coup or a civil war this fall, what's your game plan? Amtrak to Alberta? Or Barricades on Broadway? Bret: Yes, but only on Zoom. By the way, are you sorry you won't be attending the party conventions this year? I have to admit, if Covid puts an end to these political circuses, I won't be entirely sorry. How about you?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Stephanie Grimes Cornman coveted the designer wedding dress she had ogled in fashion spreads. But the price kept it out of reach that is, until she embraced the idea that a dress, unlike a spouse, is not to have and to hold forever. Ms. Cornman rented her gown, making it the "something borrowed" she wore down the aisle for her December wedding. She rented a Jenny Packham silk sheath with elaborate beadwork from a website called Borrowing Magnolia for 1,800, or 30 percent of the 6,000 for which it typically sells. The site is one of several businesses that rent wedding gowns, facilitating the practical one time wearing of an ornate dress and making high cost fashions accessible to women unable or unwilling to pay full price. Ms. Cornman, a funeral director from Oklahoma City, searched the approximately 400 dresses listed on Borrowing Magnolia's site, brands that include Monique Lhuillier, Nicole Miller and Vera Wang. For 14 day rentals, the dresses cost from 375 to 2,000, up to 85 percent off their retail prices. For 99, she had three dresses mailed to her home; once she decided on the Jenny Packham, that 99 went toward the cost of the rental. The site hemmed the dress for her, per measurements she sent in. Ms. Cornman said that renting the designer gown helped make it possible for her to afford it. "My husband had called a magazine to find out who made this dress I'd fallen in love with, but then we found out how expensive it was," she said. "I was so glad to get it for a reasonable price, and I don't know what I would've done with it again, anyway." To ensure that gowns like the one Ms. Cornman wore are in good condition, Borrowing Magnolia limits each dress to three rentals annually and five total, according to Ashley Steele, a founder. Sizes range from 0 to 24; alterations are permitted but must be reversible. Some brick and mortar bridal boutiques have similar policies. Among them, Get the Gown, with locations in Houston and Miami, and One Night Affair in Los Angeles cater to women seeking to borrow. Stephanie Grimes Cornman in the Jenny Packham dress she rented from a website. "Men have been able to rent a tux, from Armani to Versace, for years," said Jessica Berriman, a founder of Get the Gown, which opened last September and rents out, for an average 1,000 a week, dresses that typically cost 5,000 to 13,000. Among the labels on offer are Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta and Vera Wang. Late returns cost 50 a day. Her customers "don't want to buy gowns they're going to wear once," Ms. Berriman said. "But they're still very particular about what they want." With such discerning tastes driving them, some rentals may not sound like stand alone bargains. But several shops emphasized that they catered just as much to trend consciousness as practicality. One Night Affair carries a mix of bridal fashions, from unlabeled samples to Badgley Mischka and Galia Lahav gowns. The dresses cost from 100 to 1,000 for five days, plus in house tailoring costs. The shop also rents out custom made dresses, starting at 299. Sharon Gilchrist opened the store 29 years ago and ran it with her husband, Geoff Gates, until they sold it last fall. It continues to operate under the same name in the Culver City neighborhood of Los Angeles. "Renting wedding gowns was put down back in 1986," Ms. Gilchrist said. "People didn't want to rent, but that's changed now." She attributed increased interest to the downturn in the economy and, even more, to the Internet, for widely showcasing the latest fashions and easily connecting owners and renters. Besides renting, various options exist for women who aren't in need of a keepsake, including reselling their dress. Nearly Newlywed sells designer bridal gowns some pre owned and some samples, all "nearly new" with the promise of helping the bride clean and resell them after her wedding day. The company has a relationship with Kleinfeld, the New York boutique featured on TLC's "Say Yes to the Dress," through which it carries some samples at steep reductions. Kleinfeld refers brides interested in selling their dresses to the site. Natalie May, married in September, bought an Oscar de la Renta sample runway gown, typically 10,000, its tags still intact, from Nearly Newlywed for 2,850. She paid 850 to have it altered. She is now selling her gown through the site. After the 25 listing fee, 200 cleaning fee and 25 percent commission Nearly Newlywed keeps, she expects to recapture about half of what she paid. "I began to realize how wasteful weddings typically are," said Ms. May, an architect. "I didn't like the thought of buying an expensive gown that would be worn once and then sit in my closet for the rest of my life." While parting with a wedding dress may be novel to many Western brides, renting is the norm in some Asian cultures. In Koreatown in Los Angeles, shops like Bella Wedding Bridal and Shin Bu Bridal cater to such customers. Shin Bu makes custom made gowns and then rents them starting at 1,800. (Those dresses, once returned, may be rented by other customers for lower, off the rack prices.) Ho Seok Seo, who owns Shin Bu, said that while most of his clients are Korean, more Americans from within Los Angeles and beyond are renting from him. Ashley Holm of Los Angeles visited Shin Bu in 2012 in anticipation of her wedding on the shore of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. "I'm not Korean and I'm not a size 0," she said, noting how happily surprised she was customizing a lace gown and renting it for about 2,100. "Renting was practical, and I still ended up with the exact dress I wanted." In New York, shops like Unique Bridal in Forest Hills, Queens, do the same, fashioning made to order gowns for rent, varying in price depending on beadwork and materials.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Tardigrades, eight legged microscopic animals that resemble obese caterpillars, can survive temperatures close to absolute zero and live after being baked at 300 degrees. They can go without food or water for as long as 30 years, yet live to reproduce again. They have even survived in the vacuum of outer space. As far as is known, they cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound. But now Japanese researchers have found a unique protein in tardigrade cells that confers an ability to tolerate doses of radiation that would kill most other animals.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
What Travelers Need to Know About Zika and Dengue Outbreaks of the mosquito borne diseases Zika and dengue aren't slowing down: The Zika virus continues to spread throughout the Caribbean and Brazil, and the mayor of Hawaii County, Billy Kenoi, declared a state of emergency on the Big Island on Monday in response to the increasing number of dengue cases there. Here is what you need to know if you are contemplating or already have plans to travel to a destination affected by either disease. Is it safe to travel to a destination affected by Zika or dengue? Dr. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiology professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, says that traveling to a Zika infected destination is safe for the average traveler. Pregnant women, however, should avoid such travel; also, they shouldn't have unprotected sex for the duration of their pregnancy with men who have traveled to Zika infected areas because of the potential risk of brain damage to their unborn babies that may be transmitted through sperm. Dengue, on the other hand, can affect any traveler, but that doesn't mean that it is unsafe to travel to a destination where it is present. Are there any vaccines you can take to protect yourself if you are traveling to places where there have been cases of these diseases? Dr. Lipkin says that there are no vaccines you can take to protect yourself from dengue or Zika. "There are vaccinations that are in the process of being developed but nothing out yet," he said. I have a trip booked to a Zika or dengue affected destination and want to cancel my plans. How flexible are hotels being with their cancellation policies in light of the disease? Hilton Worldwide is now waiving cancellation fees for guest reservations in areas with active mosquito borne transmission of Zika virus as identified by the World Health Organization, according to spokesman Chris Brooks. Other brands like Hyatt hotels, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Starwood Hotels Resorts and the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company don't have any official cancellation policies and are reviewing requests for cancellations on a case by case basis. Jack Ezon, the president of the New York travel company Ovation Vacations who has had more than 80 trip cancellations because of Zika, says that hotels in Zika affected areas are starting to become more amenable to refunds or giving guests credit for a future stay as the virus continues to spread. The stickiness, he says, comes in areas that don't have reported cases of Zika but are near a region that does. One example: Anguilla and St. Bart's don't have any reported Zika cases yet, but getting to either island usually requires connecting through St. Martin or San Juan, Puerto Rico, both of which are Zika affected destinations. "If you have to travel through an affected destination to get to one that isn't, the hotels in the latter aren't as forgiving about refunds or credits," Mr. Ezon said. Domestic airlines have introduced policies when it comes to refunds, and almost all address Zika affected destinations. Delta Air Lines said that travelers with tickets to Zika affected areas may qualify for a change to alternative destinations, travel dates or a refund. Also, they may make fee waived changes to future reservations/tickets, but these changes need to be made by Feb. 29. United Airlines said that customers who hold tickets to regions that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says are affected by the virus can postpone their trips or receive full refunds. American Airlines said that pregnant travelers, along with their companions, who are concerned about traveling to a destination outside the United States that is affected by Zika, can request a refund. In order to receive a refund, they must provide a doctor's note confirming their pregnancy, and stating that they are unable to travel because of the virus. JetBlue will allow customers who have concerns about traveling to Zika affected areas a refund or rebooking, a spokeswoman said. Virgin America will let travelers who have tickets to any Mexican destinations Cancun, Puerto Vallarta and Los Cabos get a refund or change their flight free of charge, a spokesman said. What's the best way to protect yourself from taking a financial hit if you want to change your travel plans because of Zika or dengue? Buy travel insurance, but the right kind. Stan Sandberg, a founder of TravelInsurance.com, says that travelers heading to a Zika or dengue affected area should purchase a plan with a Cancel for Any Reason (CFAR) option; RoamRight and Travel Insured International are two companies that offer such plans. What can we do to minimize the chance of contracting Zika or dengue? The single best way to protect yourself is to use mosquito repellent. Each brand has different directions for frequency of application, but Dr. Lipkin says to use double of that recommendation. If your bottle suggests reapplying every four hours, for example, you should reapply every two hours. "If you're outside in a warm climate, the repellent will evaporate faster because you're likely perspiring," he said. Also, if you're in a room that doesn't have air conditioning, he says that using a window, standing or table fan keeps mosquitoes at bay because the insects don't have wings strong enough to fly against the current of the fan. How would you know if you've contracted either Zika or dengue? With both, you may have a rash, mild flu like symptoms, a fever, a headache or severe joint pain. These usually appear within a week or ten days of having been bitten by a mosquito carrying either virus. Only about 20% of people infected with the Zika virus become ill, according to the CDC.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
How much money does Arkansas save by offering stingier Medicaid than Vermont? It looks like a straightforward calculation. Arkansas makes it tougher for children to qualify for Medicaid than Vermont does, and it spends much less on each beneficiary. Even though Arkansas's poverty rate is double Vermont's, Medicaid's costs in Arkansas in 2012, the most recent year for which figures are available, were 600 less per resident than in Vermont. But there is a price to pay for such parsimony. Children in Arkansas get fewer regular checkups at the doctor and dentist. More adults forgo care because of the expense. More Arkansans are overweight and have diabetes. More are disabled. They die younger. This is not to pick specifically on Arkansas or to extol the virtues of Vermont. The contrast between these two disparate states frames a broader debate about the purpose of the American government. With a new Republican majority in Congress looking to further the cause of low taxes and less spending, it is easy to forget that tightfisted government imposes very real costs. That we can't easily measure them doesn't mean they don't exist. Over the last couple of years, voters have been spared the bitter partisan brawl over taxes and spending that scarred President Obama's first term in office. Having gained hefty spending cuts notably through the process known as sequestration Republicans concentrated on other goals, like sinking the Affordable Care Act. Content to have raised some taxes on the wealthiest Americans, the president, too, turned his attention elsewhere. But the fundamental partisan conflict never went away. When the new session of Congress opened last week, Republicans put the fight squarely back on the table. First they got rid of Douglas Elmendorf a well respected economist who, though a Democratic appointee, was widely considered a nonideological shooter as the head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Next they proposed changing the rules governing how the budget office conducts its economic analysis of legislation in a fashion that many experts believe could ease the way for Republicans' ambitious tax cutting agenda. Republicans' underlying assumption is that tax cuts amount to a tonic for economic growth, encouraging investment and toil. Many analyses by the budget office, they argue, misjudge the effect of tax cuts on the budget by underestimating their role as economic stimulus. They are not entirely wrong. Most economists agree that cutting taxes is likely to deliver some increase to growth. But it is substantially weaker than what Republicans often claim. At the same time, the implicit proposition underlying the Republican case is that public spending amounts at best to money down the drain and, more often, to an albatross around the economy's neck, discouraging work among beneficiaries of government largess. The evidence for that is even weaker. Under such assumptions, the return to Vermont's additional Medicaid spending would shrivel to nothing. That is, pretty much, how the budget office scores Medicaid spending today. That truly misjudges the role of government in the long term health of the American economy. "Of course there are positive returns to spending on health, education, nutrition," said William Gale, a tax expert at the Brookings Institution. "They are saving a lot of money and generating revenues. The macro effects are big relative to the expenditures." What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. A study published this week about the long term impact of changes in Medicaid eligibility, by Amanda Kowalski of Yale University, and David Brown and Ithai Z. Lurie from the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Analysis, underscores just how costly scrimping on Medicaid can be. They also found, however, that easier access to Medicaid translated into more payroll and income taxes when the children grew up. By the time Vermont's children are 60, Professor Kowalski and her colleagues estimated, they will have repaid 56 cents of each additional Medicaid dollar spent on them when young. There's more. Healthier children are more likely to become more productive adults who need less government assistance. Children with behavioral problems who receive counseling are less likely to end up in prison a big expense line on state budgets. In his recent book "We Are Better Than This," Edward D. Kleinbard, former chief of staff of Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation, now at the University of Southern California, put it cleanly: "Healthy and adequately nourished citizens are more productive, and will contribute more to the prosperity of society, than will sick and emaciated ones." Not least, they will probably lead healthier, more satisfying lives. "One reason for the increased tax payments is that the children survived to pay them," Professor Kowalski told me. Government spending is not always written off as a waste. In recent years, some of the Congressional Budget Office's analyses have assumed a positive rate of return to the government's civilian investment. That investment totaled 318 billion in 2012, or roughly 9 percent of total government spending. The estimate, however, is not quite hard science. The government invests in all sorts of things bridges to nowhere, college education and vital research. Systematically evaluating the long term return of these endeavors is daunting. Few economists have even tried. So the budget office uses a sort of rule of thumb: It assumes the rate of return to public investment will generally range from zero to the rate of return to private investment, averaging half the private return. This still often undervalues the productivity of what the government does. Some economists argue that public investment is often more productive than private investment. Even the International Monetary Fund, long an exponent of fiscal rectitude, argues that public infrastructure investment largely pays for itself, especially in periods of repressed economic activity and low interest rates like today. Consider early childhood education. James Heckman of the University of Chicago has estimated that early investment in poor children's development yields an enormous a rate of return for society at large from things like higher productivity and less crime. Most glaringly, government spending not classified as investment like Medicaid or food stamps is assumed to deliver no economic return at all. Republicans' attempts to recast budget rules might be portrayed as a political tactic of little consequence an assertion of power with no economic or budgetary substance. The stakes are high, though. Under current laws, the C.B.O. has projected that civilian government investment will shrink to roughly 1.3 percent of the nation's gross domestic product by 2020. That is the smallest share since the government started keeping track in 1962. Federal income support programs like food stamps and the earned income tax credit are also projected to shrink over the coming decade. And Republicans are unlikely to abandon their long held plans to cut Medicaid and gut the Affordable Care Act. It's one thing to shrink a government that is believed to do no good. It would be more difficult if voters understood how much bang they get for the government's buck.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Who now remembers the name of Henry Gurdon Marquand, the financier who was one of the great art collectors of the 19th century? In the 1880s he put up one of the most opulent of the Fifth Avenue style mansions but he built it on Madison Avenue. It vanished a century ago, leaving only a monogram, but now the Marquand name is back. By the early 1880s Madison Avenue near Central Park was lined by comfortable brownstone row houses, almost all developer built, but top notch. Although Fifth Avenue was the default address for millionaires, half a dozen chose to locate on Madison, perhaps with thrift rather than prestige in mind. Marquand was one of these. He hired Richard Morris Hunt to give him a stocky, stolid mansion of red brick and limestone at the 68th Street corner. He also commissioned two separate but related houses facing Madison Avenue, apparently for family members. The entire assemblage had the scale of a French palace, albeit one with streetcar tracks in the front yard. Marquand furnished his house sumptuously, with decorations by John La Farge, Samuel Colman and the English painter Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, who designed for him one of the most remarkable pianos in New York, finished in ebony, sandalwood, mother of pearl, ivory and coral. But after Marquand's death in 1902 the house sat empty. It was sold in 1912. In 1913 a group including the architect Herbert Lucas demolished the mansion for a distinctive light brick apartment house with a heavy rusticated base, its 11 story facade marked by rising oriel windows along both street fronts. Lucas cut a large light court deep into the 68th Street facade, bringing illumination far into the structure. Whether out of whimsy or respect, Lucas put escutcheons with the letter "M" on the third floor, and advertisements for "Marquand House" evoked the fame of the vanished mansion. But traffic and shop fronts had already invaded Madison Avenue, robbing it of much of its Marquand era gilded edge. Marquand House was one of the last apartment buildings on Madison to have a purely residential ground floor. Although the apartments on the first several floors of the Marquand were standard, those on the upper five floors were quite large, covering half a floor apiece. The 10th floor apartment on the Madison Avenue side had four bedrooms and a vast entertaining suite where the rooms could be joined, together creating a space roughly 40 by 45 feet. The original rental brochure called attention to the servants' dining room. However, the servant's bedrooms had no closets and were of the usual 7 by 11 foot variety, about the size of the largest bathroom in the apartment. The servants shared a single bathroom, with the dreaded half tub. There were also 20 servant's rooms on the roof. The original tenants were people like W. Albert Pease Jr., a founder of the real estate firm Pease Elliman. In 1914 his wife, Martha, treated 100 guests to a costume supper, referred to by The New York Sun as a "bal poudre," at which the women wore powdered wigs. The New York Tribune described the doormen as "clad in yards of gold lace." Also resident in the building was the Cuban born doctor Enrique Aglamonte, with his family of six and an Irish housekeeper. On the top floor was an apartment of unusual design: a 30 foot square with a bedroom, a sitting room and a "casting room" marked on the original plans. That was for Evelyn Longman, an Ohio born sculptor who during her first years at 11 East 68th worked on a winged figure holding a clutch of bolts of electricity that was bound for the crown of what was long known as the AT T building, at Broadway and Fulton Street. She was the first female sculptor admitted to the National Academy of Design. The Marquand or rather 11 East 68th Street soldiered on as Madison Avenue became ever more commercialized, and stores were cut into the ground floor in the 1920s. Now the building, long a rental, is being converted to condominiums by HFZ Capital; the apartment on the Madison side of the 10th floor is offered for 22 million. Gone is the servants' dining room, and now there is only one servant's room. It has a private bath, with an almost full size tub, although smaller than those in the rest of the apartment. The large entertaining space has been divided into four areas, mostly separated by walls, including a family room open to the kitchen. The possibility of a bal poudre with dancing for 100 seems limited. But the exterior has been nicely cleaned, and what was once a ragged canopy and court improved. And, on the facade, the M remains, and the building is once again called the Marquand.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Let's get that absolutely atrocious exchange out of the way now, because it was one of the few bum moments in this week's episode, the best of the season so far. "Westworld" had spent much of the past few hours teasing out the idea that ordinary people are like hosts in their own world, tethered to a sophisticated algorithm that not only predicts their fate but also goes a long way toward engineering it. The reality, man, is the chaos that inevitably erupts after humans have been freed from their own loops and allowed to make real choices, rather than submit to a numbing illusion of having them. The third season has been unfolding like a mirror version of the first, only now it's the humans who are unknowingly locked into an automated and carefully managed routine. And much as with Dolores and other key hosts in the first season, change starts to happen the moment they achieve self awareness. Companies like Incite have an interest in controlling the masses with the private information they've stolen from them, which is the natural endgame to what Delos intended with the Forge. The more a corporation could anticipate and, better still, dictate consumer behavior, the more it could manipulate mankind to serve whatever ambitions it might have. There's a lot of talk about how the system in 2020 serves the billionaire class; in the future, with men like Engerraund Serac pulling the strings, its serves the trillionaire class. Yet the situation isn't so cut and dried. It's easy enough to decry a system in which people are at the mercy of a deathless algorithm. But this episode begins with a young Serac and his brother witnessing the leveling of Paris and everyone they knew and loved. "Humankind was hurtling toward extinction," explains Serac, so whether God existed or not, He wasn't doing enough to keep oblivion at bay. Another omniscient being would have to be created to replace God, and the Serac brothers make it their life's work to get it done. Serac may be the villain of the season, corrupted by monstrous hubris, but his starting point was the basic survival of the species. That's an idealistic goal if there ever was one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
A few years ago, I set out to research my grandmother's early childhood in Philadelphia, looking for clues about what the world was like in the first precarious years of her life. I knew that she was born in October 1917, that she had lived through the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 as a baby, but I was unprepared for the harrowing details I uncovered in my search. Reading about the fall of 1918 left me grappling with a series of images of the outbreak as it was experienced locally: hushed streets, shut doors, bodies piled up in basements and on porches because the morgues had run out of coffins. Businesses and public spaces citywide were shuttered, including churches, schools and theaters. In a single day, on Oct. 16, more than 700 people in Philadelphia died from influenza. But as I read the first alarming headlines about the coronavirus in January, what came to mind from my family research was one particular document, an oral history published in 1919 by the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia to preserve living memories of the Spanish flu. "Facts unrecorded are quickly lost in the new interests of changing time," its author began; here, he meant to "gather information for the future." Within these unassuming pages, I found the story of an extraordinary act of generosity and compassion, carried out at the height of a pandemic. Titled "Work of the Sisters During the Epidemic of Influenza, October 1918," within this document was evidence of the enormous human capacity for personal sacrifice in the name of public good. In early October, the Red Cross warned that Philadelphia did not have enough nurses to treat and minister to the sick, whose numbers were growing rapidly. "The nursing forces of the city have been depleted by the war. There was a serious shortage in many of the hospitals before the epidemic broke upon us," an official cautioned. "Now it is a matter of life and death." It was in this tense atmosphere that the archbishop of Philadelphia called on nuns in his diocese to leave their convents and take up posts caring for the sick and dying across the city. Although most of the nuns had little experience of the outside world and no medical training, 2,000 sisters answered the archbishop's call. They signed on for 12 hour shifts, navigating the unfamiliar streetcar system through a city made still with fear. Dressed in white gowns and gauze masks, the sisters treated patients who represented a cross section of Philadelphia: immigrants from Italy, Ukraine, Poland and China; black families, Jewish families, and the city's poorest, its orphans, its homeless and destitute, all in need of care. They tended to stricken men, crammed 30 to a ward, with the dirt from their factory jobs still smeared on their faces and hands. Hallucinating patients tried to climb out of windows, tore at the bedsheets, threw glass tumblers at their nurses and begged God for mercy. In private homes, the sisters found parents dead in their beds while their hungry children cried in the next room. "The windows were closed tightly, and we felt we could taste the fever," one nun recalled later. They washed linens, served hot soup and mixed medicine. They brought water, ice, blankets and comfort. "The call 'Sister' could be heard every minute during the night," one remembered of her hectic shifts. Another spoke about her initial trepidation on her first day: "I was struck, at first, with a fearful dread, for I never came in close contact with death but once in my life. But realizing what must be done, I quickly put on my gown and mask, and being assigned to the women's ward, I began my duties." My grandmother and her family survived, huddled inside, as the flu roared through the city. They were lucky: By the epidemic's end, 23 of the sisters had died from the flu, joining the more than 12,000 Philadelphians who were killed in the six short weeks of the outbreak's peak. In November 1918, the commissioner of health in Pennsylvania recognized the sisters' work. "Without the services rendered by these good women many additional lives would have been sacrificed," he wrote, noting his "sincere appreciation." In December, the mayor of Philadelphia thanked the sisters for their help during the flu's worst season. "I have never seen a greater demonstration of real charity or self sacrifice than has been given by the sisters in their nursing of the sick," he said, "irrespective of the creed or color of the victims, wherever the nuns were sent." Plagues of every kind make people mistrustful of one another; we turn inward, suspicious of strangers. Along with illness, pandemics spread self preservation, panic and xenophobia. I think this is why this collective act of service in the face of such risk has stayed with me, and why I'm reminded of it now, as I read stories about heroic health care workers battling the coronavirus in Italy, China and the United States. While most people have no reason to fear the coronavirus, we have a responsibility as a society to protect and care for those who do have reason to fear it. The sisters' quiet, determined selflessness is what is needed now, and what we will need more of in the weeks and months to come, not only from doctors and nurses but also from ordinary people, who will be asked to alter their daily lives in ways both large and small, giving up comfortable routine for the sake of the vulnerable, and helping to patch over the constellation of individual holes in our ragged social safety net. One hundred years on, the work of the sisters provides us a model to follow and aspire to in this uncommon time: one that presses us to look for ways to support our neighbors rather than shrinking from them, to acknowledge our fears but to find courage in the strength of our communities, and ultimately to put others before self. 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
Two former N.F.L. players have sued the league, the players' union and the medical board those institutions jointly control for agreeing to reduce the disability payments they received for life by tens of thousands of dollars a year. The complaint, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Friday, stems from a provision in the 10 year collective bargaining agreement that the league and union ratified in March. In the deal, both sides agreed to cut disability payments to 400 or so former players whose doctors have determined they are unable to work. The players now receive up to 138,000 a year. That amount will be reduced by the value of their Social Security disability benefits, which amounts to 2,000 or more per month, starting in January. The decision to cut payments to some of the league's most vulnerable former players has elicited outrage. Wives caring for former players on disability have criticized the N.F.L. on social media. Some members of the union's executive committee said they did not fully recognize the implications of what they agreed to in the new labor deal. Active players have spoken up, too, most notably Eric Reid, a free agent safety who said the union turned its back on the former players, a decision he called "disgraceful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SAN FRANCISCO Apple and Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, sparred in federal court on Monday over whether to reinstate the popular game in Apple's App Store, raising antitrust arguments that may reshape a key part of the internet economy and the way people use smartphones. In a three hour videoconference hearing in the Northern District of California, Epic laid out its allegations that Apple had abused its power. Their fight began last month when Epic tried collecting its own payments for Fortnite without going through the App Store, breaking Apple's rules. Apple then booted Fortnite from the App Store; Epic responded by suing Apple, accusing it of violating antitrust laws. On Monday, Epic said Apple's unwillingness to let it use its own payment system was anticompetitive and monopolistic. Apple countered that Epic had created a "self inflicted wound" by not complying with its payment policy. Apple also said Epic had plenty of alternative ways to distribute its games. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers concluded the hearing by recommending a jury trial in the case in July. In the coming days, she is expected to rule on whether Apple must allow Fortnite back into its App Store and support Unreal Engine, Epic's software development tools, in the interim. The battle is playing out as scrutiny of the power of the tech giants ramps up. Lawmakers, regulators, academics and activists are increasingly taking issue with the reach of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google in people's lives. For months, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and House lawmakers have investigated the clout of the companies and whether they stifle competition and harm consumers. Those inquiries are set to come to a head soon. The Justice Department is poised to sue Google on claims of anticompetitive search practices, while Congress is expected to release a report of a yearlong antitrust investigation into the big technology platforms. Much of the scrutiny of Apple has centered on the power it holds over developers in its App Store. Apple and Google control access to apps on virtually all of the world's smartphones through their iOS and Android operating systems. The companies charge a 30 percent fee for purchases made inside apps in their app stores. And they make their own apps that compete with those of independent developers. Apple has long said that all app developers are subject to the same rules, and that its commission is fair. But Epic has said Apple's power creates an unlevel playing field and is unfair. Apple's 30 percent cut of fees, for instance, is too high a tax on commerce, the games maker has said. It is seeking the option to use its own payment method and publish its own app store within Apple's and Google's systems. Last week, Epic joined with Spotify, Match Group and other independent developers to form a nonprofit coalition to push for changes in the app stores and to "protect the app economy." But by taking on Apple so directly and publicly, Epic a 29 year old privately held company worth 17.3 billion and based in Cary, N.C. may be in for the fight of its life. Apple has a market capitalization of nearly 2 trillion and almost unlimited resources. Last month, it cut off its support for Epic's Unreal Engine, a software development tool that thousands of developers use. That took the smaller company by surprise. "We recognized the theoretical possibility in advance, but thought it would be so foolish of" Apple to cut off Unreal Engine, Tim Sweeney, Epic's founder and chief executive, said in an interview last week. In court on Monday, Judge Gonzalez Rogers sharply criticized Epic's decision last month to break with Apple's payment rules. "There are plenty of people in the public who consider you guys heroes for what you did, but it's still not honest," she said. Epic argued that Fortnite's removal from the App Store had caused it irreparable harm. But Judge Gonzales Rogers noted that Epic's publicity campaign around the fight, including a parody video of Apple's famous "1984" ad and a hashtag, FreeFortnite, had probably increased good will toward the company. Epic's attorney, Katherine B. Forrest, a partner at Cravath, Swaine Moore, defended the publicity campaign. "When you are taking on the biggest company in the world and you know it's going to retaliate, you don't lie down in the street and die," she said. "You plan very carefully." Apple said it would reinstate Fortnite to its App Store only if Epic complied with its rules. "They don't need this court's emergency help they have the keys to free Fortnite right there in their pocket," said Apple's attorney, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a partner at Gibson Dunn.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology

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