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The next season of the Fox hip hop drama "Empire" will be its last, the network revealed in a surprise announcement early Monday morning. The decision comes just months after Jussie Smollett, one of the show's stars, was at the center of a national controversy over whether he staged an attack that he had described as a hate crime. Fox made the announcement as it unveiled its upcoming lineup for the 2019 20 television schedule. "Empire" is heading into its sixth season and has seen declining ratings in recent years, pushing the former hit show out of the top 10 network entertainment series. Fox executives declined to say if the decision to end "Empire" had anything to do with Smollett's recent imbroglio. "We're excited to see to this show go out with a bang," Fox Entertainment's chief executive, Charlie Collier, said in a conference call with the news media, adding that six seasons "is a pretty remarkable run for a drama series." But Smollett's status on the next season of the series had become the source of a disagreement between the stars of the show and its producers and executives. In April, much of the cast of "Empire," including its two lead actors, Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, signed a letter of support asking for Smollett to return. Producers and executives declined, saying there were "no plans" for him to come back, even as they negotiated an extension on his option, leaving the door open for a return later in the season. Within weeks, the Chicago police accused Smollett of staging the attack, in part because he was upset about his salary on the Fox drama. Prosecutors later dropped all charges against Smollett, angering both the police and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Smollett was written out of the final two episodes of the most recent "Empire" season, and producers were reluctant to commit to ever having him come back. After Smollett's option was extended, a representative for the actor said late last month that he appreciated that producers had left his "future open." Now with the show down to its final season, his possible return could represent less of a threat to the series if executives were concerned about a backlash. There were certainly other complicating factors involving the show's future. "Empire" was going to be more expensive to the Fox broadcast network this upcoming season than in years past. With the Walt Disney Company now owning most of Fox's entertainment properties, including its TV studio, the network has to pay a hefty license fee to air the show. The series has also shed viewers in recent years. In its latest season, it dropped 23 percent in the ratings and is currently in a tie for 17th place among network entertainment shows, along with the ABC drama "A Million Little Things." "Empire" came on the air in January 2015 and became an instant hit. The soapy hip hop drama gained in viewers every week in its first season, and was a source of celebration among all network executives, pointing to it as evidence that the broadcast networks were still capable of generating huge hits. (Few new shows have been able to replicate its success since, with the exception of NBC's "This Is Us," which debuted in 2016, and Fox's "The Masked Singer," which came on the air earlier this year.) As part of Monday's announcement, Fox also said that "Empire" would change time slots, moving from Wednesdays at 8 p.m. to Tuesday nights at 9. That would pit "Empire" against "This Is Us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Rolf Dieter Heuer, a crinkly eyed German with a snowy goatee, showed up at the Four Seasons, the perennial Manhattan power lunch spot, dressed like the physicist he is in a sweater and baggy jeans for the red eye to Geneva rather than the diplomat he had just been playing. The United Nations was in session, and Dr. Heuer, the director general of the European Organization of Nuclear Research, or CERN, had a featured role in events celebrating the laboratory's 60th anniversary. In 2009, when he took over, dark clouds were hanging over CERN, the world's largest physics lab. A few months before, the lab's new Large Hadron Collider, the most expensive particle accelerator ever built, had blown up, indefinitely delaying the hunt for new particles, new forces and even perhaps new dimensions of nature. Some scientists were taking their research to a competing collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States. The worldwide economy was collapsing, as if into the black hole some alarmists had predicted the collider would make. Now he looks fondly on those days. "If you start with such a low point, you can show your team was able to bring everything out of a low point up to a high point," he said. Dr. Heuer, 66, is entering the last year of his term; in 2016, Fabiola Gianotti, an Italian particle physicist, will take over as the director. Dr. Heuer will become the director of the German Physical Society. If he rode in under dark clouds, he will ride out on a white horse. It was Dr. Heuer who stood up on the morning of July 4, 2012, in front of the world's physicists and said, "I think we have it," declaring an end to the half century chase for the Higgs boson, a keystone of modern physics that explains why elementary particles have mass. CERN, formed after World War II to rekindle European science, now has 21 member states. The newest, and the only one outside Europe, is Israel. The United States, which has observer status at CERN, is not a member but played a big role in building and operating the Large Hadron Collider. In December, Dr. Heuer went to Islamabad to sign up Pakistan as an associate member. He said his long term dream was a network of international labs, "islands where people can work together independently of the political situation in their home country." Dr. Heuer, born in Bad Boll in southern Germany in 1948, has spent his career in the trenches of particle physics, in which scientists emulate 3 year olds by smashing bits of matter together to see what comes out. He has no heroes, but said he had learned the ropes from his teachers. One indelible moment came when his Ph.D. supervisor at the University of Heidelberg, Joachim Heintze, tore up the first draft of his dissertation, saying it was too detailed. "It was amazing," Dr. Heuer said. "A clear string of logic was missing. And that was the last time it was missing." He went on: "It was a memorable meeting. Since then, I propagate that message: When you have a problem, make sure you speak it out, and then it is forgotten." He had an opportunity to put that philosophy to the test early in his term at CERN, when physicists reported in a seminar there that they had measured subatomic particles known as neutrinos streaming from Geneva to their detector in Italy faster than the speed of light, contrary to the laws of physics then known. Dr. Heuer was criticized for letting CERN be used as a platform for a result everybody believed was probably wrong. (The researchers later realized they had plugged their equipment together wrong.) In the end, Dr. Heuer said, nobody was fooled and the kerfuffle was fun, an example of the scientific process. Given the choice now, he said, he would do it again. "I don't think it's up to the director general to act like a censor if the result is against what everyone believes," he said. The neutrino controversy helped set a sort of dubious stage for the main event in particle physics so far this century: the Higgs boson. "I think everybody was surprised it went so fast," Dr. Heuer said of the Higgs hunt, especially because the collider had to be operated at only half its capability to avoid straining its circuits after the 2009 explosion. It will start up again in March, running close to full strength for the first time, with proton bullets of 6.5 trillion electron volts enough energy, scientists hope, to break into new ground. The Higgs boson completed the Standard Model, a suite of equations that agrees with all the experiments that have been done on earth. But that model is not the end of physics. It does not explain dark matter or dark energy, the two major constituents of the cosmos, for example, or why the universe is made of matter instead of antimatter. For decades, theorists have flirted with a concept called supersymmetry that would address some of these issues and produce a bounty of new particles for CERN's collider. "At the beginning, everyone was assuming supersymmetry was around the corner," Dr. Heuer said, "and it would be the first thing to be detected." It was not, nor has any deviation from the Standard Model predictions for the Higgs yet been recorded, disgruntling many theorists who hoped for a clue to the next great theory. Dr. Heuer is not among them yet. "It's not up to us to be disappointed by something nature has given us," he said. "On the one hand, it is fantastic how well the Standard Model works," he said. "On the other hand, it's frustrating how it holds against all precision tests." "If nothing shows up in the next runs, then one has to scratch the head," he said. The CERN collider has years yet to run, but the world's physicists are already pondering even bigger colliders. Last summer, Chinese physicists announced a proposal to build a pair of colliders 32 miles around, twice as big as CERN's. With international support, they said, the machines could be scaled up to reach energies of 100 trillion electron volts. Not to be outdone, CERN scientists have suggested tunneling under Lake Geneva to build a supercollider. Japan is also interested in having a Higgs factory built there. It takes more than national pride and curiosity to build a multibillion dollar particle accelerator. The Large Hadron Collider, Dr. Heuer said, had a natural justification: It would be powerful enough to find the Higgs boson, or whatever else made particles have mass. "It was a no lose theorem," he said. Without a clearer theory about how nature works at higher energies, however, there is no specific prediction for bigger machines to test. The energy value of 100 trillion electron volts, he conceded, is just a nice round number. "This no lose scenario does not exist for 100 TeV," he said. To propose a new machine without such a killer app, he said, "you have to have a very good argument you can explain in a relatively clear cut way." Can that be done? Do taxpayers and everybody else have a hope of understanding what the physicists are doing? "That depends on your effort, sir," he answered. "The math behind it forget it, even for me," said Dr. Heuer, admitting that he is not fluent in quantum field theory, the body of math from which the Higgs springs. "I'm not a theorist."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
BRUSSELS In Greece, taxes are up and so is the age of retirement. In Spain, civil servants have taken pay cuts. In Britain, spending on welfare, the military and education could be chopped by a quarter. Despite mounting public protests across the Continent, an austerity drive unparalleled in modern, united Europe is building. In Brussels, meanwhile, the bureaucracy that runs the European Union is haggling over how much to increase next year's budget. In 2011, the European Union will pour billions more euros into the Continent's regions for infrastructure and other projects. Spending on justice and security is set to rise sharply, while even purely administrative costs are expected to increase by more than 4 percent. Supporters see the spending as an antidote to austerity, a way to keep a fragile economic recovery alive. Critics say it highlights the remoteness of Brussels, where pay raises are written into law, spending priorities are decided up to seven years in advance and millions are spent on questionable efforts to spread the message of a 27 nation bloc that often seems to have little decisive to say on issues that matter to voters, like immigration. National governments pay most of the bill, and some have lost patience. Vince Cable, the British business secretary, predicts a "backlash" against the bloc. "When national governments, including mine, are having to make very painful cuts in public spending," he told the European Parliament, "no one can understand why the European budget is not being subjected to the same discipline." The European Commission, the E.U. executive, is seeking a 5.9 percent increase in the bloc's 2011 budget, lifting annual spending above EUR130 billion, or nearly 180 billion about half the annual public spending of a midsize nation like the Netherlands. National governments have tried to limit spending to EUR126.5 billion, a 2.9 percent increase. But the European Parliament, which must approve the budget, sought to add or restore a host of measures in a mix of altruism, special interests and pork barrel politics familiar to anyone who tracks the U.S. Congress. Earmarks sought include EUR300 million for dairy farmers, EUR9 million for the World Special Olympics Summer Games in Greece, EUR10 million for a school fruit plan and EUR8 million for beekeeping. All told, the total would be about EUR3.5 billion more than the governments say they can afford. "You cannot do things in an ivory tower," said James Elles, a British Conservative member of the European Parliament who has been on its budget committee since 1984. "People back home do observe what's going on. They have to feel we are taking responsible decisions for 2011." Critics point to what they say are areas of fat EUR8 million for promoting awareness of the bloc's agricultural policy, for example. They also highlight the cost of E.U. administration, which the European Commission would like to increase by 4.5 percent, to EUR8.4 billion, in 2011. While some European countries are cutting the salaries of civil servants, the national governments are struggling to curb the pay of E.U. officials, who often earn significantly more than their counterparts in national capitals, while also paying income taxes at lower rates and receiving generous benefits. Indeed, overall costs of administering the European Union are rising, exacerbated by new bodies created by the Lisbon Treaty late last year. There is the new president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium, and a new foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton of Britain. There is also the European Parliament, which got an additional EUR9.4 million to exercise new powers. To run his operation, Mr. Van Rompuy got EUR25 million for 2010. Ms. Ashton's new foreign service will cost EUR476 million in 2011, the commission says, much of it met by transferring existing staff, but with EUR34.5 million needed for new posts. The other question is where to house the service, and whether to lease a new building at an estimated annual cost of EUR10 to EUR15 million. That is a tough sell when the European Union does not lack new buildings, so Ms. Ashton is now targeting one occupied by legal translators. "It's a very small bureaucracy," he said, "but it is very visible for the European taxpayer." As it has for decades, the bulk of the budget about EUR110 billion this year will go to regional or agricultural subsidies, seen by some as a counterweight to austerity. "The E.U. budget is about investment in the very things we need to take care of in these difficult economic times," said Goran Farm, a budget spokesman for the main center left group in the European Parliament. "We must fight the austerity message from ministers especially the hard line ideas of governments in the U.K., the Czech Republic and some Scandinavian countries." Many economists, though, consider agriculture subsidies an added cost to European consumers and a burden on farmers in poor countries who cannot compete on their own. Much regional spending is mandated; infrastructure projects where contracts are already signed cannot be canceled, said Patrizio Fiorilli, a budget spokesman for the European Commission. Jorge Nunez Ferrer, an associate research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies, believes that the economic backdrop will concentrate minds when the bloc begins to review longer term priorities later this year. "Austerity will have an impact on the budget," he said. "I think there is an understanding that you cannot just defend funding things for historical reasons or because it is politically convenient." Next year, for instance, E.U. officials may have their pay cut by 0.4 percent. But that modest sacrifice is unlikely to placate the protesting public. Serge Colpin, 58, from Charleroi in the depressed south of Belgium, joined demonstrations last week in Brussels. An unemployed former soldier who said he had been seeking work for eight years, Mr. Colpin is angry at bankers, politicians and people who work for the European Union. "They earn too much, they are exempt from a lot of tax, they have cars, they have drivers," he said. "And we pay."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
The mission actually contains two spacecraft that will share a ride to Mercury, but then separate to different orbits to make different observations. It will be a long wait for the main phase of the mission the spacecraft do not begin to orbit Mercury, the solar system's innermost and smallest planet, until December 2025. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Why does it take seven years to get to Mercury? It is easy to get to Mercury quickly. The hard part is stopping. Flying toward the sun is like running down a steep hill. Near the bottom of the hill, it is hard to slow down, which is essentially what BepiColombo needs to do before it can swing into orbit around Mercury, instead of just whizzing by. The first spacecraft to go to Mercury, NASA's Mariner 10 in 1974, made the trip in less than five months. But that was only a short flyby, passing within 450 miles of the surface. It made two additional flybys but never entered orbit. A rocket engine could act as a brake, but that would require far more fuel than BepiColombo would be able to carry. Why are scientists studying the planet Mercury? The four innermost planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are what scientists call terrestrial planets. Each has an iron core and an outer shell of rockier material. Mercury is the smallest of the bunch. It is barely bigger than Earth's moon, but contains a disproportionately large iron core. "Why Mercury?" Joana Oliveira, a scientist at the European Space Agency, said during a news conference in September. "That is the first question we should ask ourselves. Mercury is one little piece of the puzzle that helps understand the evolution of our solar system." Planetary scientists do not understand how Mercury's oddball makeup came to be, which means they do not fully understand how the planets formed in the solar system. Additionally, studies of how the solar wind blows into and around Mercury could provide clues about the possibilities of life around other stars. Scientists have started to study Earth size planets that orbit close to small, dim stars known as red dwarfs in recent years. Data from BepiColombo could help indicate whether these distant earths could retain an atmosphere or whether any air would be stripped away by the strong stellar winds. The numerous planets around the red dwarf Trappist 1, for instance, are much closer to that star, but in our solar system, Mercury provides the closest analog for study. "This topic will be the key step in future science, the habitability at the exoplanets," said Go Murakami, the project scientist for Japan's portion of BepiColombo. What other spacecraft have been to Mercury? In addition to Mariner 10, NASA's Messenger spacecraft launched in 2004. Like BepiColombo, it traveled for 6.5 years on a circuitous path before arriving in orbit in 2011. It spent four years in orbit before the fuel for its thrusters ran out and it crashed into the planet. What have we already learned about Mercury? Mariner 10's photographs showed a heavily cratered surface resembling Earth's moon. Messenger revealed more details about wider swaths of the surface, including a long dead volcano larger than Delaware, cracks in the outer crust as the planet cools and s hrinks and a tenuous atmosphere kicked up by the intense bombardment of the surface by energetic particles from the sun. The data from Messenger also ruled out some hypotheses about why Mercury is so rich in iron. While some scientists had suggested the planet experienced extended heating during and after its formation, Mercury still contains lighter, more volatile elements that would have boiled away in that scenario. What is aboard the BepiColombo spacecraft? The Japanese orbiter, named Mio, will focus on measuring the interaction between Mercury's weak magnetic field and the stream of charged particles emitted by the sun. The suite of instruments aboard the European Mercury Planetary Orbiter, is similar to what NASA's Messenger carried. "We have a bit of overlapping, but many of the instruments have higher resolution," said Johannes Benkhoff, the project scientist for BepiColombo at the European Space Agency. Because both orbiters carry magnetometers, they will be able to record what is happening in two places simultaneously, providing a more global picture of Mercury's magnetic field.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Credit...Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. Steven Spielberg, 71, adjusted his trifocals as I asked the question, a bead of sweat descending from my temple. We were sitting face to face in a cozy little conference room on the Universal Studios lot here. He had been fiddling with an unlit cigar (he just holds them these days) while talking about the euphoria that had greeted his new science fiction epic, "Ready Player One," at the South by Southwest Film Festival three days earlier. People were calling the big budget movie a return to "Jurassic Park" and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" glory. "Oh, my God, what a night," Mr. Spielberg said, beaming. "I felt like I was 10 years old again!" But there was no way around the buzz kill query: Had he set out to prove that he hadn't lost his touch? If people had left the "Ready Player One" premiere saying that the old Steven Spielberg magic had returned, that meant they believed that it had gone missing that his last few "fun" movies, including "The BFG" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," hadn't been so fun. I envisioned plaster falling from the walls with a low rumble and a boulder rolling toward me, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" style. Instead, Mr. Spielberg answered in a gentle, undefensive tone. "I'm really too busy, both in my private life and in my professional life, to have a lot of time to dwell on success or failure," he said. "I'm always moving really fast, and I don't look back a lot. That's why I don't sit down and look at my movies on a movie screen after I've made them. Sometimes it's years before I will even dare look at a movie again, and sometimes I'll shut it off after five minutes." He looked out the window. "I have this scary image, which haunts me, of Gloria Swanson sitting in her living room watching her glory days," he continued, referencing "Sunset Boulevard." "And I've always said to myself, 'I'll never catch myself reminiscing nostalgically.'" Unless he is making a movie that reminisces nostalgically. "Ready Player One" is an adaptation of the 2011 Ernest Cline novel, which overflows with references to pop culture of the 1980s a movie era dominated by Mr. Spielberg, both as a director and as a producer ("Back to the Future," "The Goonies," "Poltergeist"). The title "Ready Player One" comes from the words that flashed on Atari arcade games after the drop of a quarter. The screenplay, written by Zak Penn and Mr. Cline, nods to John Hughes movies and incorporates Michael Jackson's red "Thriller" outfit, Mechagodzilla and Chucky. Tunes by Twisted Sister, Van Halen and Joan Jett populate the tongue in cheek soundtrack. In the film, which Warner Bros. will release March 29, the teenage Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, best known for the indie film "Mud") lives in a filthy, severely overcrowded trailer park in Columbus, Ohio. The year is 2045, and most Americans have given up. (Upward mobility? No such thing.) People now spend all their time wearing virtual reality goggles and haptic gear, which allows them to explore a pretend 3 D world called the Oasis as if they were really there. The Oasis, created by an eccentric billionaire, is a wondrous place where you can be anything another gender, another species and the 1980s loving Wade and his crush, Samantha Cook (played by Olivia Cooke, from "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), race to solve a three part treasure hunt before an evil corporation, in both worlds, gets there first. Writing of Mr. Spielberg after the premiere, the IndieWire critic Eric Kohn tweeted, "In terms of pure spectacle, it's the most astonishing thing he's done." As a filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg has always seesawed between prestige and popcorn serving up "Schindler's List" and "Jurassic Park" in the same year, for instance, and moving directly from "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" to "The Color Purple." But lately the results have been lopsided. Mr. Spielberg's last three historical dramas ("The Post" last year, "Bridge of Spies" in 2015 and "Lincoln" in 2012) have been successes, receiving Oscar nominations for best picture and generating ample ticket sales. At the same time, his last three movies aimed at the multiplex masses have not lived up to expectations. The most recent, "The BFG," a fantasy adapted from Roald Dahl's book, was a box office bust in 2016, collecting 55.5 million in North America. "The Adventures of Tintin," based on the Belgian comics character and made with motion capture animation, lost money for Paramount in 2011. "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was a ticket selling machine in 2008, but fans generally hated the story; it came off as a cynical money grab for all involved. That leaves "War of the Worlds" as the last Spielberg blockbuster that most people view as an all around success, and it arrived in 2005 another Hollywood era entirely. "As he has grown older, he has become less interested in making audience thrill rides and more focused on experimenting," said Jeanine Basinger, founder of Wesleyan University's film studies program. "And not every artistic experiment works out. It would be unfair of us to expect otherwise." Mr. Spielberg isn't ready to go that far. (Not even remotely.) But he agreed with Ms. Basinger's thrill ride observation. "In all my early films, from 'Jaws' to 'Raiders' to 'E.T.', I was telling the story from a seat in the theater from the audience, for the audience and I haven't done that in a long time," Mr. Spielberg said. "I haven't really done that since 'Jurassic Park,' and that was in the '90s." "Because I'm older," he said, with a laugh. "Now I feel a deeper responsibility to tell stories that have some kind of social meaning." He added: "If I have a choice between a movie that is 100 percent for the audience and a movie that says something about the past that resonates for me or elevates a conversation that might have been forgotten, like with 'Munich' I will always choose history over popular culture. Even with all the popcorn in a film like 'Ready Player One,' it does still have social meaning." Acceptance of oneself and others is a big theme in "Ready Player One." Underpinning the action are classic Spielberg motifs (parental absence, the kids are smarter than the adults). But the movie also functions as a cautionary tale about virtual reality, a technology that continues to move into the mainstream, as tech companies introduce more affordably priced headsets, start ups like Dreamscape Immersive (in which Mr. Spielberg is an investor) bring walk through virtual reality experiences to movie theaters, and Hollywood studios figure out how to capitalize on the medium. "I was really interested in the technology that allows this alternate universe to exist headgear, haptic response gloves, boots, full body suits because I really believe it's going to be the superdrug of the future," Mr. Spielberg said. In one moment in "Ready Player One," a child tends a burning stove while her mother, wearing a V.R. headset nearby, is lost in another world. People become addicted to the Oasis, lying and stealing in real life to satisfy their virtual obsession. Mr. Spielberg said that with the next generation, "after five minutes of conversation, there is 20 minutes of prayer." "And the prayer is into iPhones and Samsung devices and Galaxies and iPads," he said. "It was the most ambitious project that I.L.M. has ever taken on," said Roger Guyett, a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light Magic, which worked with Mr. Spielberg and the Oscar winning production designer Adam Stockhausen ("The Grand Budapest Hotel") to bring the Oasis to life. "Ready Player One," which cost an estimated 150 million to 175 million to make, came to Mr. Spielberg by way of Donald De Line, a Warner based producer who bought the movie rights in 2010 before Mr. Cline's book was even published. After spending about five years developing the screenplay, Mr. De Line sent the book and script to Mr. Spielberg and crossed his fingers. "He's always going to be your dream director for a movie like this," Mr. De Line said. "But, realistically, what are the odds that you're actually going to get him?" During an appearance at the Comic Con International fan convention last summer, Mr. Spielberg joked, "I read the book, and I said, 'They're going to need a younger director for this.'" Last week, talking to me at his offices, Mr. Spielberg called "Ready Player One" the third hardest movie of his career. "Jaws" (1975) still ranks as the most difficult, largely because there was so much nail biting down time waiting for the ocean and mechanical shark to cooperate, he said. The second hardest was "Saving Private Ryan" (1998), with its dazzling, intricate depiction of the D Day invasion of Omaha Beach. It is impossible to know how a broad audience will react to "Ready Player One," which was co financed by Village Roadshow ("Mad Max: Fury Road"). The raucous premiere bodes well, but it was also held at the friendly, fanboy heavy South by Southwest. Perhaps reflecting the marketing challenges it faces a male heavy cast with no household names "Ready Player One" is Mr. Spielberg's first movie to arrive in the less competitive spring since "The Sugarland Express" in 1974. Regardless of the outcome, Mr. Spielberg said that "Ready Player One" had a populist impact on him as a filmmaker, making him want to make more thrill ride movies again. "The muscle memory of making those pictures," he said, "came back in my experience of directing 'Ready Player One' and reminded me about how much fun it was, when I was a younger director."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Robert F. Smith at Carnegie Hall's Opening Night Gala Dinner on Oct. 3, 2019. The chairman of the Carnegie Hall board, he has retained the support of other members after he acknowledged having evaded income taxes. When Robert F. Smith, the billionaire philanthropist, became the new chairman of Carnegie Hall in 2016, he seemed almost too good to be true. He promised to be a stabilizing presence at Carnegie after the brief, tumultuous reign of his predecessor. He was a benefactor with deep pockets and a strong interest in the hall's education efforts. He was the rare board leader of color in a field where diversity lags. And he was cheered as a national hero last year when, during his commencement address at Morehouse College, he pledged to pay off the student debt of the entire graduating class. So it came as a shock this fall when Mr. Smith, 58, admitted to having played a supporting role in what federal prosecutors called the largest tax evasion case in U.S. history acknowledging that he had "willfully failed to report" over 200 million in income and signed a nonprosecution agreement in which he agreed to pay large fines and cooperate with investigators. Mr. Smith's admission that he had failed to report a substantial amount of income to the I.R.S. made Carnegie Hall the latest in a line of major cultural institutions that have found themselves facing questions about the actions of the benefactors that they rely on for their very survival. Carnegie's leaders are standing firmly behind Mr. Smith, even as some philanthropy experts question whether he should remain in the position. "I am a huge fan," said Sanford I. Weill, a member of Carnegie's board who served as its chairman for 29 years. "He has done an outstanding job leading Carnegie Hall. He has been very philanthropic and he has helped grow our institution to reach new heights." The news could not have landed at a more difficult moment for Carnegie, the nation's premiere concert hall, with its stage silenced by the pandemic that has put the classical music industry in crisis. A poster near its locked front doors this fall riffed on the ancient joke "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice!" with a plea for "Patience, patience, patience." By way of explanation, Mr. Smith has essentially said he is human and he is sorry. "I can learn from my mistakes. And I have," Mr. Smith who declined to be interviewed told Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times during DealBook's recent Online Summit. "It's clear to me that in order for me to focus on the problems of the present, I need to resolve the issues of the past and problems of the past and the settlement offered me that ability to do so. "So I've agreed to it," Mr. Smith continued. "I'm moving forward, I've made right with the government. And now I'm absolutely committed to continuing my important work, my philanthropy." Carnegie Hall's board members seem to have accepted Mr. Smith's mea culpa and moved on. "He is beloved," said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, who is a Carnegie trustee. "I do not think we should ask for his resignation. And I don't think you will find anybody on the Carnegie Hall board who disagrees." Mr. Smith has admitted to hiding more than 200 million in income and evading millions of dollars in taxes by using an offshore trust structure and offshore bank accounts. In a letter to his investors, Mr. Smith said that he had created the structure 20 years ago "at the insistence of my only investor in my first private equity fund." The Justice Department said in a news release that Mr. Smith had used millions of dollars of the unreported income to "acquire and make improvements to real estate used for his personal benefit," including buying and renovating a vacation home in Sonoma, Calif., and buying "two ski properties and a piece of commercial property in France." Mr. Smith ultimately donated all the money in the offshore trust structure to his foundation, the Fund II Foundation, which he established in 2014, he wrote this fall to his investors. The foundation has made over 250 million dollars in contributions to a broad range of institutions, including Carnegie Hall, as well as to an array of organizations and initiatives that support vulnerable populations. As part of his agreement with prosecutors, Mr. Smith will pay 139 million in taxes and penalties, abandon a 182 million tax refund he had been seeking for charitable contributions, and cooperate with ongoing investigations. The main target of those investigations is Mr. Smith's associate and early investor, Robert T. Brockman, a Houston tech executive who has been charged with hiding 2 billion in income from the I.R.S. in what prosecutors called "the largest ever tax charge against an individual in the United States." "Since first learning about the Department of Justice's investigation, I have cooperated fully for the last four and one half years and have provided all relevant information to them," Mr. Smith said in the letter to his investors. "The decision made 20 years ago has regrettably led to this turmoil, which has put undue stress and burden on too many." Experts in philanthropy said that they believe the donations he made to Carnegie were not likely at risk of having to be returned. "He reached a plea agreement and paid penalties, so I don't think there is any exposure," said Daniel L. Kurtz, an attorney specializing in nonprofits. "It's hard to find somebody who's that wealthy who doesn't have some issue in the past I don't think we make that the measure of the value of their gifts." But some experts in philanthropy and corporate governance questioned whether he should remain chairman, including Patricia Illingworth, a professor at Northeastern University and the editor of "Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy." "Although he has practiced some thoughtful philanthropy, especially the Morehouse gift, he has also been complicit in a 15 year scheme to avoid paying his fair share of taxes, placing an unjust burden on those who are not in a position to bear it," she said. And John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in corporate governance, said that while he thinks Mr. Smith should be able to remain on Carnegie's board, he should give up the chairmanship. He said that "Carnegie is wearing a self imposed blindfold (probably in the hopes of future donations) when they ignore this." Mr. Smith took the helm of the Carnegie board after the short and stormy tenure of his predecessor, the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, who stepped down after clashing with the hall's leadership. His departure put an end to talks about a new major Perelman gift; soon after he left, he donated 75 million to build a performing arts center at the World Trade Center site. After Mr. Smith arrived, things seemed to calm down on Carnegie's board. Clive Gillinson, Carnegie's long serving executive and artistic director, said he had "absolute, complete trust" in Mr. Smith. "Everybody makes mistakes in life; what matters is how you deal with them," he said. "And he's a man of great integrity, that's everything that I see." The reluctance of Carnegie Hall's board to dethrone Mr. Smith is understandable; he is financially generous, gets high marks as a collegial steward, and named the richest Black man in America by Forbes in 2015 is the first African American to hold the Carnegie Hall post at a time when the lack of diversity at many cultural organizations has become a pressing issue. Moreover, good arts leaders are hard to find and increasingly necessary in a time when institutions are struggling through the Covid crisis. "When you have a wonderful chair who is a good leader and generous, it can be challenging to ask them to depart," said Michael M. Kaiser, chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland, who has run several major arts institutions. "Great chairs don't grow on trees." Emily K. Rafferty, the former president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who is also on the board, called Mr. Smith "an extremely effective chairman unbelievably generous, really aligned with the mission and cause of Carnegie Hall." Nevertheless, Mr. Kaiser added, Mr. Smith's conduct may give prospective donors pause, "or at least, there will always be the question about whether a new donor wants to engage with the organization and is comfortable with Mr. Smith as chairman." Mr. Smith, who has a personal love of music (he named his youngest sons, Hendrix and Legend, after Jimi Hendrix and John Legend), has also supported the Hall's National Youth Orchestra of the USA; Ensemble Connect, a fellowship program for young professional musicians; and its growing digital activities. In addition, Mr. Smith has made substantial gifts to the National Museum of African American History and Culture; helped restore African American monuments in national parks; supported the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York; and given 50 million to Cornell's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, which was renamed for him. Mr. Smith who is based in Austin, Tex., where the private equity firm he founded, Vista Equity Partners, has its headquarters grew up in Denver, graduated from Cornell and earned his M.B.A. from Columbia. During the DealBook Summit, Mr. Smith said he was "excited about the opportunity to clean up the past." Similarly, Mr. Gillinson said he was focused on the future. "Who hasn't made a mistake in their life? You deal with it in a really good way and move on," he said. "All I can say is that I'm incredibly lucky to have had him as my partner."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Staying home should be the easy part, but pandemics and snow days are not quite the same. Looking for a few hours of distraction between vigorous hand washings? Need a moment away from Twitter? These are some wonderful shows to get you through. I Want To Actually Laugh, Not Just Say 'Oh, That's Funny' If you like pop culture and satire, watch this fantastic series about a "Soul Train" esque show. "Sherman's" is part sketch series, part mockumentary, and it's one of the rare comedies capable of genuinely surprising its viewers. It's silly and easy to love, and its jokes are surgically precise. It also moves quickly enough that you will actually want to watch watch it, not half watch while playing Candy Crush or making couscous or whatever. I Want a Comedy, But Nothing Requiring Much Focus The jokes on "Mom" tend toward the banal, but the story and characters are anything but, which is why I find myself so committed to a sitcom I don't find funny. It's good in other ways! Allison Janney and Anna Faris star as Bonnie and Christy, mother and daughter, long estranged but now reconnecting because they are both, after much struggle, sober. The show evolves tremendously over its run, eventually ditching almost all of its workplace story lines and writing Christy's children off the show and instead focusing on the other women in Bonnie and Christy's AA group. The show is serious about addiction and presenting its real struggles and dangers but it's also serious about recovery, about its real work and real joy. Also the guest star roster is crazy good Patti LuPone, Ellen Burstyn, Kathleen Turner, and plenty of sitcom royalty. I think this is my favorite binge so far this year, a twisty domestic thriller based on a Harlan Coben novel. Adam, a suburban dad in a bucolic British town, is at his son's soccer tournament when a strange woman approaches and tells him that his wife faked her pregnancy and miscarriage a few years ago. It's a bizarre and jarring encounter, and one that sets off eight juicy episodes of twist after twist. The show includes death and violence, including violence against an alpaca, but this isn't a wall to wall murder show. If you like it, and blaze through it in a single sitting (as I did), follow it with "Doctor Foster," on Netflix, an addictive domestic soap about a fancy doctor who, after discovering her husband is having an affair, goes a little off the rails. This is much sudsier than "The Stranger," but a lot of dark fun. I Love True Crime, But I Don't Want To Feel Frightened in My Own Home and Please, No Dead Kids Watch 'McMillions' and 'The Most Dangerous Animal Of All,' on HBO Now and Hulu All the engrossing propulsion of your favorite crime stories, but none of the "Wait ... could this happen to me?" or "By participating in society I am complicit in this injustice, and thus I must work to rectify it." Just the wild characters of real life, some crazy stories and the opportunity to contemplate the ways in which systems of authority and systems of identity overlap in America. "McMillions" is about scamming the McDonald's Monopoly game, but it's also about wealth and vulnerability in general; "Animal" is about a man who believes his father was the Zodiac Killer, but it's also about self mythology and the quest to situate oneself within a chaotic universe. Also, both of these shows are easy to follow, so if not everyone in your household wants to devote their full attention to them, but still wants to watch them a little, that will work just fine. I Want Something Chill but With Real Human Emotions This is the pottery version of "The Great British Baking Show," but it's even more fun and relaxing not only because watching people throw pots is deeply hypnotic but also because the judging is more cheerful and the contestants somewhat less neurotic. The artistry on display is wonderful, but the best part is that one of the judges, the expert potter Keith Brymer Jones, is frequently overcome with pride and elation and cries often for and with the contestants. Watch 'Portrait Artist of the Year,' on YouTube If you just want "pleasant British people attempt things," go for "Portrait Artist of the Year," also available on YouTube. It follows more of a "Chopped" model different contestants every episode, ultimately funneling toward a championship but that's barely part of it. Mostly it's just people sitting for and painting portraits, and that's it. Honestly I Can Only Concentrate for 15 Minutes at a Time Watch 'Joe Pera Talks With You,' on Adult Swim (free; no login required) This show is already mega soothing because its protagonist is a supremely calm Michigan chorus teacher who eschews most wildness. "I like my days to go like this," he says, and then makes a straight horizontal line with his hand. That happens on the episode about packing lunches, to give you an idea about the emotional timbre of the series. That's not to say the show is boring it's tender and hilarious, both strange and wholesome. It might not entice very little kids, and there are occasional bleeped curse words, but if you're watching with a tween who likes "Parks and Recreation" or "The Office," try the Bon Appetite extended universe. My favorites are "Gourmet Makes," where an accomplished pastry chef tries to recreate junk food classics, and "It's Alive," which is all about pickling and fermentation. The shows are funny and good natured and genuinely educational, and across all the various iterations form an overarching charming workplace comedy. And there are tons and tons of videos. I made my family watch episodes of this at Christmas, and I made my friends watch episodes on vacation together. I Already Did Plenty of Crossword Puzzles If you like scavenger hunts, logic puzzles, obstacle courses, goofy feats of strength or British panel shows, this show is a total blast. Each season, a group of comedians compete in bizarre and arbitrary tasks, where cleverness winds up being more important than physical prowess, though the prowess often helps. If, as a child, you liked those minute mystery riddles where someone got stabbed with an icicle and you grew up to have a sense of humor, you will like this show.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Season 1, Episode 8: 'In the Name of the Father' Now that we are solidly in the tail end of the first season of "Trust," it was a treat to find that this week's episode was the best so far. Since its frenetic start, "Trust" has steadily grown more comfortable in its own skin, allowing itself the space to explore the personal and emotional lives of its characters. This episode was a perfect example of that kind of exploration, and it created a vivid and nuanced portrait of the Calabrian kidnappers' small mountainside village of its specific kind of poverty, of its Catholicism, of the unspoken bond among families who have lived together for generations, and of the secrets they will keep in order to coexist peacefully and in relative isolation. This is true, we find out, even when keeping those secrets means tacitly condoning the kidnapping of an American billionaire's grandson, or the murder of one of their own young men. It seems when life is stale and grim, people will forgive a lot for the sake of a little money. Or, at least, to avoid upsetting the local mafia boss. The vignette that brings us directly into the heart of this village is the Catholic confirmation ceremony of Francesco, the teenage son of Leonardo and godson to Don Salvatore. The confirmation is significant because, in this village, it is also the day Francesco officially becomes a man and starts to make his own way in the world. But because Don Salvatore has no children of his own, he puts immense pressure on his godson with regard to his future. Francesco is a smart and promising kid, and Don Salvatore clearly wants him to continue the family "business." But speaking of that business, things are not going so well. Paul II let the ransom agreement dissolve because he refused Paul Sr.'s terms for payment: A loan, taken out of the Getty Trust, that Paul II would have to pay back with a crushing 4 percent interest rate. This left Primo abandoned with little Paul, waiting for a fortune that wasn't actually coming. The humiliation pushes him to his limit: This will be the day that little Paul dies. Unfortunately for Leonardo, it is also the day of his son's confirmation. As his family and the rest of town file into the church, Primo, his negotiator cousin (known to us as Fifty) and the kidnapper henchmen all try to keep their failure to close the deal hidden from Don Salvatore. They don't want to be on the receiving end of his wrath, and they also want to save face in front of the village, which has caught wind of all the cash that's supposedly coming. Everyone is hopeful it will improve their station, and the entire village (with a few notable exceptions) is ready to celebrate. But as the confirmation mass ends, the men become increasingly less able to hide their panic, their smiles increasingly less convincing. Leonardo's wife, Regina (played beautifully by Donatella Finocchiaro), can see her husband cracking and pulls him aside. "Don't spoil today," she begs him, "Please." If Don Salvatore wants to kill everyone, he can kill them just as easily tomorrow. Today is for Francesco. The meal that ensues is the countryside Italian feast of your dreams. The whole village is invited, the wine is abundant, the tables are long and covered in white cloth, and colorful streamers hang from the trees. But it is also very tense. Leonardo, who desperately wants his son to avoid the family business, toasts Francesco by proclaiming that his son will be the first in his family to go to university: "He has to get out of here," he emphasizes. Don Salvatore, quick to correct this idea, offers a toast of his own: Today is the day Francesco becomes a man and joins their community. As a symbol of his hope, Don Salvatore gifts Francesco a dagger that was given to him by his own father, who used it in the war. Francesco is delighted by it and notes the regimental motto etched onto the blade: "I do not give a damn." It's an omen of where Francesco's future could actually be headed: Not to university, but to right where he sits at the don's right hand. As the celebration continues, the charade to keep the truth from Don Salvatore crumbles. He sniffs out the men's discomfort and gets the truth out of Fifty, who leaves a dance circle to calm his nerves. Don Salvatore loses it and shoots a gun into the air in front of everyone as a warning that the gig is up. He ushers his men aside and yells at them for answers. "You think they're all so happy because of the little runt's confirmation?" says Primo, explaining why they kept their silence in front of the village. "The word is out. They think we're rich." To regain their respect, they will have to kill the boy, they decide. And this assuredly would have come to pass (we've seen how ruthless these men can be if they so choose) if this were not the day Francesco became a man and received a very sharp family heirloom. Earlier, having put together intel from his friends and from an eavesdropped conversation between his parents, Francesco tracked Paul to a cave where "Paolo keeps his goats," as the friends described it. (It's a wonderfully specific detail for indicating just how small this village is.) Speaking to Francesco in English, Paul reflects on how much he misses his family and on the reality that he will probably be killed. His family has definitively signaled that he is worth literally nothing. Francesco listens patiently no telling if he understands any of it and takes pity on Paul. So when he overhears his uncle's plan to kill him, he races back up the mountain with his knife and a sack of food. Run, he implores Paul. But Paul understands there's nowhere left to go. He's tried running before. Luckily, Paul seems well versed in Italian kidnapping protocol, and he grasps for one final option: Cutting off his ear and dropping it in the mail. It will buy all of them time, and it will signal to the world that these Calabrian peasants mean business. Only things is, says Paul, Francesco has to be the one to do it. Paul knows by now who he's dealing with, and he knows there will be no time to talk Primo and Don Salvatore out of their murderous rage. But present them with the severed ear as a fait accompli, and he just might have a chance. Francesco, terrified, refuses at first. In the opening scene, we saw him that morning, still a boy, his father's hand guiding his as they slaughtered a lamb for the coming feast. But now he is "a man." He finds his wherewithal, and just as he was taught to do with the lamb, he places a firm grip on Paul's head and then puts the blade to bloody use, slicing through the layers of ear as Paul's eyes roll back in his head. By the time Salvatore and his men arrive, they find a fresh pool of blood where the deed was done, and they rush inside the cave to investigate. Francesco emerges from the darkness, tears streaming down his face, hands trembling as he offers up Paul's ear. He is still wearing his confirmation whites, but now they're soaked with human blood. The men pause, taken aback. Leonardo is horrified. "What have you done?" he asks. "What have you done?" Paul's ear is not the only sacrifice. Neither is the lamb. Francesco has made one of himself, as well. The future of the family business quite literally in the form of one bloody human ear seems to be in good hands. At last we meet Angelo's beloved nonna. She shows up to the Confirmation celebration demanding to know where her grandson is (dead, shot in the face by Primo, his body burned). Regina whisks her away to avoid making a scene. It's a rich and incredibly acted moment between two mothers. Regina is so sorry, she tells Angelo's nonna, men make the mess and women have to clean it up. Is there anything they can do for her? "You think you can buy me off?" Angelo's nonna retorts, indignant. "You were bought off the day you were born," Regina replies. "We all were."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
With a handful of oocytes and a collection of frozen sperm, an international team of scientists is racing against the clock to ensure that the only two northern white rhinoceroses left on the planet both females are not the last of their kind. On Sunday, scientists in Italy were able to fertilize seven of the 10 oocytes, or eggs, that had been extracted from the two rhinos last week. They used sperm that had been collected from male rhinos before they died. That outcome was better than expected, said Cesare Galli , the managing director of Avantea , the laboratory in Italy. But it is only one more step in a conservation effort that has spanned continents and lasted for years. Dr. Galli was working with scientists, veterinarians and conservationists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic, and the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. "We were really able to do something no one before has been able to do," said Jan Stejskal , the director of international projects at the Dvur Kralove Zoo. "We still don't know whether we'll have embryos, but it was successful anyway. We proved that there is a real chance for them to have offspring." Not everyone considers this a worthwhile effort; critics question whether resurrecting an animal that is functionally extinct could draw attention away from other endangered species. Northern white rhinos, a subspecies of the more populous southern white rhinos, once roamed wild in the grasslands of east and central Africa. They have hairier ears and smaller bodies than their relatives, and some researchers have argued that the northern white rhino should be considered a separate species. Human efforts to save endangered animals (often made necessary by manmade threats like environmental degradation and poaching) are usually a race against time. But in the case of the northern white rhino, the race is especially urgent. An animal can be considered critically endangered if there are dozens or hundreds of them left. But in this case, the only survivors are Najin and Fatu, a mother and daughter. And scientists discovered in 2014 that even artificial insemination using frozen sperm was unlikely to be an option for them, since neither seemed physically capable of carrying an embryo to term. Any hope of natural mating vanished entirely last year, when the only male northern white rhinoceros died. That rhino, called Sudan, had spent most of his life in the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic. He had been captured from the wild in 1975, which might have saved him. In 1960, there were about 2,000 northern white rhinos in Africa. But the population has since been decimated, in large part by habitat loss and poaching. Sudan moved to the conservatory in Kenya in 2009 and died at the old age of 45 in March 2018, leaving the two females his daughter, Najin, and his granddaughter, Fatu alone at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya's Laikipia County . "When he died, it was a sad moment for all of us," said Stephen Ngulu , the veterinarian in charge at the conservancy. "We knew that we had some sperm that had been collected from him and several other males. So we knew that the only hope for the species was to get the eggs from the female." In order to extract the eggs from the two rhinos using a probe guided by ultrasound the animals had to be put under general anesthesia. That procedure is never risk free, so the scientists and veterinarians involved knew they had to be exceedingly cautious. Dr. Frank Goritz, the head veterinarian at the Leibniz Institute in Germany, was in charge of administering the anesthesia during the operation, which was also overseen by David Ndeereh of the Kenya Wildlife Service and Thomas Hildebrandt of the Leibniz Institute. Dr. Goritz said it would be ideal to see a northern white rhino born within a few years, so that it could coexist with the two females and learn their behavior. But that will require a surrogate pregnancy. The southern white rhino might be a good candidate for that. Last month, a southern white rhino calf was born at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park using hormone induced ovulation and artificial insemination with frozen semen, San Diego Zoo Global announced. The more those techniques are perfected, the more feasible it becomes that one of these rhinoceroses could eventually carry a northern white rhino to term. But that is still many steps ahead. Dr. Galli, of Avantea, said it was unclear how many of the eggs fertilized this week would become blastocysts, the next step in embryonic development. That should become clear sometime next week and even then, perfecting a technique for transplanting an embryo into a surrogate could take years, and gestation can last for 16 months or more. But even if every egg fails, there will most likely be opportunities to extract more, Dr. Galli said, adding that egg fertilization alone was a big step forward in terms of scientific achievement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
BERLIN The last time Vogue profiled a prominent European female leader, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, she agreed to be captured by Annie Leibovitz in a rainbow array of coats and her trademark leopard print kitten heels. But for the August 2017 issue, featuring another perhaps the most powerful woman in Europe, the likeness of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was rendered not in a glossy shoot by Ms. Leibovitz, the star photographer, but in an oil painting in muted primary hues by the American artist Elizabeth Peyton. As Kati Marton lays out in her profile of the 63 year old German chancellor made available to the author for a single question Ms. Merkel is patently uninterested in the trappings of leadership in the modern, hypermedia age. She leaves tweeting to her spokesman and parcels out interviews based on her need to clarify a policy position. It was not the first time that a United States publication has turned to an artist to capture the chancellor's likeness. When Time magazine named her Person of the Year in 2015, editors there tapped the artist Colin Davidson to paint an oil portrait of Ms. Merkel that appeared on the cover.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. The otherworldly documentary "Space Dogs" begins fittingly with a story of oblivion. A narrator recounts the pioneering flight of Laika, the Muscovite street dog who orbited the Earth when the Soviets launched her into space in 1957. The camera seems to recreate her journey, floating around glowing blue. But this peacefulness derails as the narrator details Laika's cruel demise and the image begins to distort, as if the camera were making a forced re entry. It's an impossible shot, but "Space Dogs" is full of visuals that seem pulled from another planet. The filmmakers Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter twist more familiar documentary techniques as they spin a speculative legend around Laika. Starting from the conceit that her ghost has returned to earth, they follow two present day street dogs in verite style. The voice over gestures vaguely at cosmic connections between these dogs and Laika, but the images make a blunter impact. In the most nauseating sequence, the dogs kill a house cat and the camera lingers on every sickening squelch. The viciousness of this death hangs over the rest of the film and is matched by archival footage of Soviet scientists performing experiments on dogs that were also sent into space. The connection between violence of the strays and the violence of the state feels tenuous. The sheer extremity of these scenes and their agonizing duration risks turning off the audience even as they are asked to connect the filmmakers' oblique conceptual dots. But "Space Dogs" commits to its art house pretensions. The result isn't pleasant, but it does effectively provoke. Space Dogs Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
I was looking forward to seeing Sam Mendes's film "1917" when it arrived in theaters in December. I have a special interest in the subject my grandfather fought in World War I, and I've done years of research on the events while writing a play about the war. I can't argue with Mr. Mendes's artistry. Visually and technically speaking, "1917," which is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, is dazzling. The filmmaking team cleverly manages to make the entire movie seem like one long, continuous take, and I, like many viewers, found myself wondering how certain scenes were shot. The director's own grandfather inspired him with stories about volunteering to run messages across open, war ravaged terrain. In an interview, Mr. Mendes said that "1917" called for "a different kind of storytelling." He described the "Great War" as "a chaos of mismanagement and human tragedy on a vast scale." If only he had told that story. Instead, "1917" left me uneasy. Mr. Mendes paints an uplifting and dangerously misleading picture of the war. The fictionalized premise is this: General Erinmore (Colin Firth) sends two British soldiers on an urgent mission. They have until dawn to deliver a vital message: The Second Battalion is about to walk into a trap, and the attack must be called off. The general warns one of the soldiers, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean Charles Chapman), "If you don't get there in time, we will lose 1,600 men your brother among them." Right away, "1917" suggests a concern for the sanctity of human life from the top down. The reality was something else: an appalling indifference as the British high command sent hundreds of thousands of their young men to die. Germany had a clear advantage in terms of training and weaponry, including the machine gun. The British infantry, still trained with rifles and bayonets, didn't stand a chance. But that didn't stop the English high command from planning deadly offensives deadly, that is, for its own men. In my research, I read chilling accounts of these attacks. In ecstatic terms, Gen. Thomas Wynford Rees of Britain described the "marvelous advance" of his infantry brigade, "dressed as if on parade," at the Battle of the Somme. Incredulous Germans watched the men walk yes, walk in long rows across open terrain then proceeded to mow them down. To General Rees, the massacre was a "magnificent display of gallantry." On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme, there were nearly 60,000 British casualties (a third of them died). Five months later, the number rose to nearly 500,000, and a British general, Douglas Haig, finally ended the attack, but not before claiming that results "fully justify" the effort. He expressed no remorse for the loss of life. In his book "The Myth of the Great War," John Mosier describes this "slaughter of the infantry" as "almost exclusively a British achievement." Years later, Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote that while General Haig "ordered many bloody battles in this war," he took part in only two. Mr. George also noted an "inexhaustible vanity that will never admit a mistake." It's no wonder that General Haig was called "the butcher." In the film, just before being assigned his mission, Lance Corporal Blake says, "Must be something big if the general's here." With that line, the film acknowledges just how improbable his appearance would have been. Top commanders often remained far from the front, out of touch with the knee deep mud and rat filled trenches that the infantry endured. Many officers, in fact, lived in beautiful chateaus. But most jarring for me was hearing the general tell Blake, "If you fail, it will be a massacre." By 1917, the loss of 1,600 men in an attack would have been a good day. Mr. Mendes doesn't ignore the horror altogether; the camera pans bodies and limbs strewn about battlefields. But photos of the maimed in World War I reveal truly grotesque wounds that are sanitized in "1917." We see soldiers with bandaged eyes, but not the dreadful blisters from mustard gas as it was absorbed by woolen uniforms. And what about shell shock? By that point in the war, the British high command was stymied by "womanish" recruits who showed signs of breakdown (hysteria, horrible tics, dreadful nightmares) despite having no physical wounds. The commanders' answer was to shame the men and order them back to the front. I don't expect Mr. Mendes to include every fact about the war. Almost by definition, historical drama is selective; we invent characters, we compress events. But we do this in the interest of creating emotional truth. Mr. Mendes does the opposite. By disguising the brutal truths of the war, he sentimentalizes and even valorizes it a war in which disregard for human life led to approximately 8.5 million military deaths around the world, and an estimated 21 million wounded. If it's chilling to read of British soldiers being sent to their deaths early in the war, equally horrifying are accounts of "needless slaughter" in the American Expeditionary Forces. The United States entered the war late, at the same time as events in "1917." (Woodrow Wilson was only re elected president after promising to keep Americans out of the conflict.) By the fall of 1918, the Germans were calling for an end to fighting. They knew the arrival of two million American soldiers, however inexperienced, meant the Allies would prevail. At dawn on Nov. 11, 1918, an Armistice ending the war was signed: no victors, no losers. But Gen. John Pershing hated the idea of letting Germany off without an unconditional surrender. And so, even though the war was effectively over (the Armistice went into effect hours later, at 11 a.m.), he had American commanders continue to send men to fight. Joseph Persico gives a gripping account of the final day of World War I in his book, "Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour." "The carnage that went on up to the final minute so perfectly captures the essential futility of the entire war," he writes. Mr. Persico estimates that another 3,000 men on all sides died in fighting after the Armistice was signed, with thousands more wounded. In writing my play about events in the United States just after World War I, I found so many disturbing parallels: partisan politics that rival today's (Republicans held hearings to smear President Wilson and to win back the White House at any cost); a deep vein of racism (back at home, black soldiers who wore their uniforms might be lynched); and a fierce nationalism heard in Henry Cabot Lodge's toxic cries of "America first!" "The winds that were blowing then are blowing now," Mr. Mendes has rightly said of the political inspiration for his film. Yet with so much at stake, his stated goal was nevertheless to make a "movie that operates more like a ticking clock thriller at times." This is a legitimate artistic choice, and he succeeded. But the problem with thrilling an audience with one physical stunt after another is that it can become numbed to the emotional horror. The illusion that the entire film was done in a single camera shot becomes a distraction. We focus on the storytelling rather than the story itself. With its relentless stunts, "1917" begins to feel like a video game. Any director faces a challenge in making a movie about war, of how to create sympathy for those who act with courage and yet avoid feeding our appetite for antiquated notions of heroism. Peter Weir does this admirably in the magnificent and deeply moving "Gallipoli," about Australian fighters in World War I. Like "1917," Mr. Weir's movie features an unlikely pair of soldiers and builds to a futile attack that must be called off. But Mr. Weir takes his time to develop the characters. We become fully invested in their humanity. Writing to his family, Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee) echoes so many young men desperate to fight: "There's a feeling that we're all somehow involved in an adventure larger than life." When Mel Gibson's character arrives seconds too late with the message to call off the slaughter, we watch in stunned disbelief. In "Gallipoli," war is anything but a game. In the words of a devastated field commander, "it's coldblooded murder." The great paradox of "1917" is that Mr. Mendes uses modern technology to produce a throwback: a redemptive war story. One of the final images is a group of soldiers singing in a grassy wood before going into battle. "1917" provides escape from the true carnage of the "Great War." Instead, it might have forced us to question the endless, inconclusive conflicts that have followed, and the butchery and sacrifice they inflict. We don't need to feel better about World War I's slaughter. We need to feel worse. In a poignant image straight out of Shakespeare, Mr. Mendes's grandfather is said to have washed his hands compulsively for the rest of his life because "he could never get clean" of the war. If we're going to avoid the stain of endless, senseless wars in the future, we have to tell stories that focus on the horror, rather than false heroics and filmmaking feats of wonder.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times The instructions were clear: Write an article calling out Sara Gideon, a Democrat running for a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat in Maine, as a hypocrite. Angela Underwood, a freelance reporter in upstate New York, took the 22 assignment over email. She contacted the spokesman for Senator Susan Collins, the Republican opponent, and wrote an article on his accusations that Ms. Gideon was two faced for criticizing shadowy political groups and then accepting their help. The short article was published on Maine Business Daily, a seemingly run of the mill news website, under the headline "Sen. Collins camp says House Speaker Gideon's actions are hypocritical." It extensively quoted Ms. Collins's spokesman but had no comment from Ms. Gideon's campaign. Then Ms. Underwood received another email: The "client" who had ordered up the article, her editor said, wanted it to add more detail. The Times uncovered details about the operation through interviews with more than 30 current and former employees and clients, as well as thousands of internal emails between reporters and editors spanning several years. Employees of the network shared emails and the editing history in the site's publishing software that revealed who requested dozens of articles and how. Mr. Timpone did not respond to repeated attempts to contact him by email and phone, or through a note left at his home in the Chicago suburbs. Many of his executives did not respond to or declined requests for comment. The network is one of a proliferation of partisan local news sites funded by political groups associated with both parties. Liberal donors have poured millions of dollars into operations like Courier, a network of eight sites that began covering local news in swing states last year. Conservative activists are running similar sites, like the Star News group in Tennessee, Virginia and Minnesota. But those operations run just several sites each, while Mr. Timpone's network has more than twice as many sites as the nation's largest newspaper chain, Gannett. And while political groups have helped finance networks like Courier, investors in news operations typically don't weigh in on specific articles. While Mr. Timpone's sites generally do not post information that is outright false, the operation is rooted in deception, eschewing hallmarks of news reporting like fairness and transparency. Only a few dozen of the sites disclose funding from advocacy groups. Traditional news organizations do not accept payment for articles; the Federal Trade Commission requires that advertising that looks like articles be clearly labeled as ads. Most of the sites declare in their "About" pages that they to aim "to provide objective, data driven information without political bias." But in April, an editor for the network reminded freelancers that "clients want a politically conservative focus on their stories, so avoid writing stories that only focus on a Democrat lawmaker, bill, etc.," according to an email viewed by The Times. Other news organizations have raised concerns about the political bent of some of the sites. But the extent of the deceit has been concealed for years with confidentiality contracts for writers and a confusing web of companies that run the papers. Those companies have received at least 1.7 million from Republican political campaigns and conservative groups, according to tax records and campaign finance reports, the only payments that could be traced in public records. Editors for Mr. Timpone's network assign work to freelancers dotted around the United States and abroad, often paying 3 to 36 per job. The assignments typically come with precise instructions on whom to interview and what to write, according to the internal correspondence. In some cases, those instructions are written by the network's clients, who are sometimes the subjects of the articles. The emails showed a salesman for Mr. Timpone's sites offering a potential client a 2,000 package that included running five articles and unlimited news releases. The salesman stressed that reporters would call the shots on some articles, while the client would have a say on others. Ian Prior, a Republican operative, was behind the articles about Ms. Gideon, the Senate candidate in Maine, as well as articles promoting Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Roy Blunt of Missouri, according to the internal records. Mr. Prior previously worked for the Senate Leadership Fund, a political action committee that has spent 9.7 million against Ms. Gideon. Juan David Leal, who has worked in the Mexico office of the Berkeley Research Group, a consulting firm, ordered up articles criticizing the Mexican government's response to the coronavirus. And employees at the Illinois Opportunity Project, a conservative advocacy group, requested dozens of articles about specific Republican politicians in Illinois. The group has paid 441,000 to Mr. Timpone's companies, according to the nonprofit's tax records. A spokeswoman for Ms. Collins, the Maine senator, said the campaign answers questions "from media outlets of all stripes and persuasions," including the Maine Beacon, a local news outlet funded by a liberal group. A personable guy and persuasive salesman, according to people who know him, Mr. Timpone then became focused on replacing the old print guard as a digital news mogul. "Big metro papers are like the fly in your house that gets slow and you just catch it with your hand," he said in a 2015 interview with Dan Proft, a conservative radio talk show host in Chicago. About a decade ago, Mr. Timpone started Journatic, a service that aimed to automate and outsource reporters' jobs, selling it to two of the nation's largest chains, Hearst and Tribune Publishing. He used rudimentary software to turn public data into snippets of news. That content still fills most of his sites. And for the articles written by humans, he simply paid reporters less, even using workers in the Philippines who wrote under fake bylines. When the radio show "This American Life" revealed his strategy in 2012, Mr. Timpone defended his approach as a way to save local news. "No one covers all these small towns," he said. "I'm not saying we're the solution, but we're certainly on the road to the solution." Around 2015, he teamed up with Mr. Proft and started a chain of websites and free newspapers focused on suburban and rural areas of Illinois. The publications looked like typical news outlets that covered their communities. But a political action committee controlled by Mr. Proft paid Mr. Timpone's companies at least 646,000 from 2016 to 2018, according to state campaign finance records, money that largely came from Dick Uihlein, a conservative megadonor and the head of the shipping supply giant Uline. After complaints, the Illinois Board of Elections ordered the newspapers to say Mr. Proft's committee funded them. A small disclaimer in their "About" pages now says the sites are funded, "in part, by advocacy groups who share our beliefs in limited government." The Illinois sites are virtually the only ones in Mr. Timpone's network with such a disclosure. But the web of companies behind the network make it more difficult to track the money behind the sites, and even Mr. Timpone's oversight of them. It is unclear whether that is intentional. Those companies include Metric Media, Locality Labs, Newsinator, Franklin Archer and Interactive Content Services. The exact ownership of the companies is also unclear. Most of the network's new sites say they are part of Metric Media. A Texas P.R. consultant named Bradley Cameron says in his online resume that he is the general manager of Metric Media and is "currently retained by private investors to develop a national media enterprise." Internal records show that the same editors run Metric Media's news operations and Mr. Timpone's other sites. In August, two local newspapers, a combined 142 years old, in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and Lake Isabella, Calif, announced to their readers that they had been purchased by Metric Media LLC. Tanner Salyers, a city councilman in Mount Vernon, population 17,000, said that when he emailed Metric Media to ask what its plans were for the town's only newspaper, Mr. Timpone called back to say that he now owned the Mount Vernon News and that he would rebuild it. Yet since the change in ownership, Mr. Salyers said, the newspaper has cut much of its staff and reduced print circulation to two days a week from six. "I'm the first person to admit that the Mount Vernon News was not Pulitzer material," Mr. Salyers said. "But nevertheless, it was local and independent. You could go to the grocery store and bump into the writers." Now, a reporter based in Atlanta has covered local happenings, he said, and not well. When a water line broke last week, forcing the town's residents to boil their water, the Mount Vernon News didn't mention it. The Times spoke with 16 reporters who have worked for Mr. Timpone. Many said they overlooked their doubts about the job because the pay was steady and journalism gigs were scarce. Pat Morris said she had begun writing for the network after being laid off from The Florham Park Eagle in northern New Jersey. Asked if she was paying for positive coverage, she replied: "Oh, no, there's none of that going on. I assure you. Oh, my gosh, no. Oh, no, not at all." Ms. Ives is listed as a "story watcher." She said she did not know why. In March, Monty Bennett, the hotel magnate, faced a crisis. The coronavirus had halted travel, and his company, Ashford, which oversees more than 100 hotels, was facing big losses. So he ordered up a news article. "I want to push our government to go after China. Why should this murderous regime be let off the hook while we suffer," said a story pitch attributed to Mr. Bennett on the publishing tool behind Mr. Timpone's sites. The pitch resulted in an article that repeated his claims on DC Business Daily, which appears to be a straightforward business and politics news outlet in Washington. "A national hotel chain executive said he is fed up with the way the United States is dealing with China in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic," the article began. There was no disclosure that Mr. Bennett had ordered it. Mr. Bennett, a major donor to President Trump, also used the sites to lobby for a stimulus bill to help his company, according to documents. Mr. Bennett posted a link to one of the articles on Twitter. Ashford received around 70 million in federal loans intended for small businesses, making the publicly traded company the single largest recipient of such loans and Mr. Bennett the subject of national anger.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Gene Luen Yang looked for key moments to draw in his book "Dragon Hoops." Here, for instance, is a critical basket by Bishop O'Dowd High School in a championship game. This month did not go as planned for Gene Luen Yang, whose first nonfiction graphic novel, "Dragon Hoops," was released on March 17. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, Lang canceled an eight city tour in support of his book about a high school basketball team's quest for a state title. Yang, 46, who once taught computer science at the school, Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, Calif., interviewed coaches and players there and attended their games. He spent five years researching basketball and the team, and became a fan of both. When the N.B.A. suspended its season after a player tested positive for the coronavirus, his reaction was maybe not the expected one. "I was shocked emotionally," he said, "but not mathematically." The book, which Yang wrote and illustrated, features him as a character. It shows him wrestling with a decision to include a coach who had the most boys' basketball coaching wins in the history of the school and, at one time, in the state. But the coach left in 2003 after being accused of molesting a child in the 1960s. The charges were later dismissed after a Supreme Court ruling on statutes of limitations. Yang recently answered questions about "Dragon Hoops" in a phone interview and in follow up emails. The exchanges have been edited and condensed. You did not have an appreciation of sports before you began this book, right? It was more like an anti appreciation. I was not an athletic kid at all. I had anti talent. Basketball was the biggest area of intimidation. I was terrible at it. I would get hurt. I would get my fingers jammed or get a ball to the side of the head. How did you come to write and draw "Dragon Hoops"? Basketball had started invading my life in different ways. One way was through a bunch of books that came out. One was "The Crossover," by Kwame Alexander. There were also some graphic novels and manga about basketball. I started reading those with my kid. He's 16 now, but when he was in fifth grade, he joined the basketball team at his school. There was also "Linsanity." As an Asian American, I was just like, "Why do I care about Jeremy Lin?" But I totally did. The biggest thing was this conversation that was happening in the hallways of the school where I was teaching. Was there a big learning curve in conveying basketball properly? Totally. I mean, I still don't totally get it. When I'm watching a game, there are still times when everything stops and something bad has happened and I don't get why. What I understand now is the thrill of the sport. And I also really understand the importance of the sport within the context of American history: Immigrant communities or communities of color that could not afford to maintain a beautiful green field would gravitate toward basketball. Was it difficult to decide which Dragons to include? Incredibly difficult. They are all so fascinating. I knew Paris Austin and Ivan Rabb were going to be in the book because they are the stars of the team. Any time I saw something that resonated between what I was reading about in basketball history and a player that was on the court, it just lit up for me and I ended up including them. Was there reluctance on anyone's part to participate? I feel like Coach Lou Richie and his staff put a lot of emphasis on character development, and it shows. So I never felt any pushback when I was talking to them about the games and the practices. But sometimes if I asked too much about their past, some of them would deflect a little bit. When they are on the court, that's their public persona. That's what they want everybody to see. But they want to keep a piece of themselves. Were you worried about being able to convey the kinetic energy of the court? Yes. I was totally freaked out about that. I didn't know the game that well, and comics are a static medium. I think that's a constant struggle for cartoonists. How do we get things that are actually still to feel like they're moving? So I read "Slam Dunk," by Takehiko Inoue, which is one of the most popular manga out there. I feel he portrays action really well. I looked at other sports comics. "Check, Please!" from First Second is a stellar example. "Fantasy Sports" is another one. Beyond that, I watched a lot of game tape. I was looking for key moments, and I would take those and exaggerate them. You struggled with whether to include Mike Phelps, a former coach, in your story. Coach Lou was the coach when I was following the team. His coach when he was in high school was a guy named Mike Phelps, who passed away last year. Mike was the winningest coach in California state history. He was forced into retirement because somebody accused him of acting inappropriately at the beginning of his career. It was a very confusing time for the community. The uncertainty and confusion continue to this day. His name kept coming up, and he had such a big influence on the program. In the end, I couldn't leave him out. Why are graphic novels beneficial to young readers? Reading fiction is a great way of building empathy. Graphic novels should be part of every reader's book diet. My hope is that a reader reads diversely, in every sense of the word "diverse." That includes reading about a diversity of characters, but also reading a diversity of publishing formats. I think graphic novels have been excluded from the American academic system for decades for not a very good reason. It all kind of stems back to the 1950s, when people thought that comic books encouraged juvenile delinquency. It's really just in the last decade or so that comics and graphic novels have been able to make their way back in. Do you have any other feelings about the N.B.A. season being suspended? One of the lessons I learned while working on "Dragon Hoops" is that sometimes we watch sports because we want a bit of that courage on the court to bleed into us. I hope the folks in the N.B.A. know the power they have in these uncertain times. I hope they find creative ways to reach out and inspire courage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'DROPPING GUMBALLS ON LUKE WILSON' at A.R.T./New York Theaters (previews start on June 11; opens on June 18). The playwright Rob Ackerman ("Tabletop") also works as a property master, and this new comedy, adapted from a true story, recalls a time on an AT T commercial when he demonstrated something less than mastery. For the Working Theater, Theresa Rebeck directs a cast that includes Ann Harada and Dean Nolen. 866 811 4111, theworkingtheater.org 'FAIRVIEW' at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (in previews; opens on June 16). Jackie Sibblies Drury's radiantly uncomfortable play, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for drama, is ready to unnerve you all over again. Ben Brantley described this piece, now at Theater for a New Audience, as "a glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake." 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING' at the Delacorte Theater (in previews; opens on June 11). Sigh no more, Shakespeare fans. Shakespeare in the Park its tickets distributed free by line and lottery returns with this sparkling comedy of sparring lovers. In postwar Messina, Beatrice (Danielle Brooks) and Benedick (Grantham Coleman) are a couple who despise each other. Until they don't. Kenny Leon directs. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LONDON When Anne Washburn started her Trump play, she didn't think it would ever see the light. After a frustrating day spent reading the news online, she would begin to write. "It was enjoyable to feel I had some measure of control over the situation," Ms. Washburn said. "It's the helplessness that makes people crazy." The result was "Shipwreck," subtitled "A History Play about 2017." It begins performances Feb. 11 at the Almeida Theater here before a likely, but as yet unannounced, run in the United States. "Shipwreck" is set in the immediate aftermath of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey's congressional testimony, when a group of white liberal friends gather in an old farmhouse in upstate New York; as snow falls and supplies run short, their conversations endlessly circle and jab at the Trump administration, and eventually each other. But the house is also haunted, theatrically, by the people who lived there before a farmer, his adopted black son lending a long view perspective that acts as a counterpoint to the chatter of the New Yorkers. Oh, and Donald J. Trump himself even puts in an appearance. "He kind of appears. He appears in a way. It would be so lonely without him," Ms. Washburn said with a degree of mischief when we met at the Almeida. She was keen not to reveal too much. Ms. Washburn was in town for rehearsals with Rupert Goold, the show's director who also runs the Almeida. It's a busy time for the American playwright in London: Her adaptation of "The Twilight Zone," seen at the Almeida last year, is about to transfer to the West End beginning March 4. Critical reactions to her work here have always been rather mixed: "Twilight Zone" was met with varying degrees of warmth, while Robert Icke's 2014 Almeida production of "Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play," Ms. Washburn's breakout, produced one of the sharpest divides among critics in the last decade. "Almost all the critics hated "Mr. Burns" , which in the States would have destroyed it, in a way that it didn't seem to here," Ms. Washburn observed. (The play's American supporters include critics for The New York Times, who named it one of the best 25 American plays of the last 25 years.) "Here people were quite invested in hating it, or championing it it kept going in a way, which is ideal from a playwright's point of view. In the States, people wouldn't even have bothered to hate it." That ferment and the Almeida's continued belief in her writing has made Ms. Washburn a significant figure on the British theatrical landscape. Add to that the box office appeal of a title like "The Twilight Zone" and Ms. Washburn can sail into the West End; by contrast, she hasn't had work on Broadway. Still, she never expected "Shipwreck" to open here. "It's a very American play," Ms. Washburn conceded, and she's had to tweak the script a little for British audiences. But she's found it resonates in a country going through its own political upheaval. "It's not like it's a covert Brexit play, obviously, but it touches on things," she said. A few lines about inaction in the face of looming disaster, although written about the United States, were added in London following Ms. Washburn's "endless discussions with agonized British people." She began "Shipwreck" on a silent writing retreat in June 2017. "I wanted to see what it would be like to write about the current time, because that was all I was thinking or talking about," she said. And it was important to her to try to understand Trump supporters, too. "Writing the play came from having a very liberal experience but it also came from going online and seeking other viewpoints, visiting websites that I don't normally hang out at." Whether art can, or should, tackle contemporary politics is among the issues chewed over by the "Shipwreck" characters. Their discussion of the controversial depiction of President Trump in the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of "Julius Caesar" is a proxy for Ms. Washburn's own wrestling with the dilemma. By the time "Shipwreck" was finished last April, she said, it was too late for 2019 programming in the United States. British theaters, however, are a little more nimble. And although she had only showed the script to a few friends, Mr. Goold had got wind, and asked if he could read it. His first reaction was simply how funny the play was. "She doesn't write a dull line," Mr. Goold said over the phone. And although he was surprised at its overtly political nature not typical of Ms. Washburn's writing addressing how theater can respond to politics was certainly appealing. Mr. Goold had some concern it would be too American. "But the inability for metropolitans to come to terms with the shamanistic power of populism is as relevant here as it is over there," he added. Ms. Washburn was surprised at his interest, but then, she initially didn't think anyone would want her Trump play. "I thought no one would ever want to spend any more time talking about it than we already do," she said. "But I did want to get into the intricate, really overheated language we were all partaking in. What is it like to put this time on paper?" Inevitably, then, "Shipwreck" is a talky, thinky piece, but Ms. Washburn's skewering of the chattering classes is as sparkling as it is spiky. (Tara Fitzgerald, Selyse Baratheon on "Game of Thrones," is best known in the cast of British theater regulars.) She's always shown forensic interest in the way we speak and the stories we tell, from making up her own language for 2006's "The Internationalist" to tracing the mutation of culture in "Mr. Burns." There's also a through line with "The Twilight Zone." The British theater and opera director Richard Jones had brought her onto that project, having been impressed by the "audacity" of "Mr. Burns." He described Ms. Washburn as "a brainiac" but a hilarious one, who is "very joyful to work with."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In which we bring you motoring news from around the Web: Andy Warhol's silk screen Mercedes Benz W196 Grand Prix Car, the racecar driven by Juan Manuel Fangio, is scheduled to go up for auction next month. Christie's, the auction house selling the work, estimated that the piece would sell for 12 million to 16 million. (Hemmings Daily) Honda has decided to settle a class action lawsuit claiming that about 1.6 million of its vehicles burn oil excessively. The action covers some vehicles equipped with Honda's 6 cylinder engine with variable engine management, including the 2008 12 Accord, the 2008 13 Odyssey, the 2009 13 Pilot, the 2010 11 Accord Crosstour and the 2012 Crosstour. Honda agreed to extend the powertrain limited warranty for up to eight years.(Tire Business) With General Motors seeking greater autonomy in its European operations and Peugeot interested in more investment by Dongfeng, a Chinese investment firm, the two companies will be scaling back plans they had made for collaboration with one another. The chief casualty appears to be a joint subcompact platform that will no longer be pursued. (Automotive News) Dolly Parton, the country singer, sent a Twitter message that she is fine after a car accident on Tuesday. She was sitting in the passenger seat of a friend's Nissan Xterra when they were hit by a Mitsubishi Diamante whose driver the police said had failed to yield. (ABC News)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Last year marked both the 80th birthday of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the centenary of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who directed her in 10 films and was her lover for a few years in the late 1960s. The anniversaries were observed in the usual ways: a celebration of Ullmann at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; a Criterion Collection boxed set of Bergman's work; tributes from colleagues, critics and Scandiphiles. Together and apart, Ullmann and Bergman (who died in 2007) represented a particular kind of late 20th century cultural charisma, an aesthetic ideal that remains seductive in its blend of high seriousness and sensuality. It's hard to know whether to count the American publication of "Unquiet," 's new novel, as a belated addition to the double birthday festivities. Ullmann, who lives in Oslo and is the author of five previous novels, is Liv Ullmann's only child and was Bergman's ninth. While neither the narrator of "Unquiet" nor her parents are named, the book feels closer to memoir than fiction, and not only because of the obvious real world parallels. "The mother" is an up and coming actress in her 20s when she gets involved with "the father," an eminent auteur more than 20 years her senior. They are together for a while (in between his fourth and fifth marriages) and after their separation "the girl" (as their daughter sometimes calls herself when she lets go of the first person) spends summers with her half siblings at her father's compound on the island of Faro. Memories of those sojourns, and of the girl's more unsettled life with her mother in Scandinavia and the United States, pass through the scrim of her adult consciousness in an order that isn't linear but doesn't feel random either. For readers anticipating a book length gossip column blind item or a score settling peek into the intimate lives of famous people "Unquiet" may be disappointing. The real life celebrity of the almost fictional characters, including herself, several of whose books have been international best sellers, is both a lure and a distraction. The temptation to check Ullmann's recollections against other sources Liv Ullmann's memoirs, "Changing" and "Choices"; the wealth of critical and biographical writing on Bergman; the television interviews scattered across YouTube may be especially strong given the elusiveness of the text. But the impulse should be resisted, as should the slightly more elevated (or at least less prurient) urge to use the book as an interpretive skeleton key to unlock the meaning of difficult films. The enigmas of "Persona" and the emotional shadings of "Scenes From a Marriage" are unlikely to be illuminated by any new revelations about their maker and star. As it happens, the frustration of precisely such a desire the unfulfilled longing for clarity and accountability from parents who are also artists is one of the book's most powerful guiding emotions. Slipping toward middle age as her father moves through his 80s, the daughter, now a successful writer, twice married with children of her own, records a series of conversations with him. The idea is that their talks will be the basis of a book, a cross generational collaboration on the subject of aging: "He said that things went missing. He said that the words disappeared. If he were younger he would have written a book about growing old. But now that he was old, he wasn't up to it. He no longer had the vigor of a younger man. This line of thinking prompted one of us, I don't remember who, to come up with the idea of writing a book together. I would ask the questions, he would answer them, I would transcribe the conversations, and finally we would sit down together and edit the material. Once the book was out, we would take the jeep and go on a book tour." The rueful humor of the last sentence is typical of Ullmann's prose, which is plain, succinct and declarative, with currents of intensity flowing beneath the placid surface. The effect, in Thilo Reinhard's graceful English translation, is almost Didionesque, as the willed, witty detachment of the narrator's voice at once conceals and emphasizes the rawness of her emotions. "Unquiet" can be read as a grief memoir in the tradition of Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," a meditation on the way loss manifests itself in the life of the bereaved. By the time the father daughter book project gets underway in earnest, it's too late. The father is slipping away, and then he's gone. "We made the recordings in May, he died at the end of July at 4 o'clock in the morning." There will be no book, no tour in the jeep, and the tapes themselves or rather the miniature recorder with its digital files will drop out of sight for seven years. Its rediscovery brings back the father's ghost, but the transcripts that Ullmann reproduces also reveal the extent to which he was already absent: "SHE: Can you tell me about Mamma? "HE: I have been thinking about Beethoven and how he goes right at you. Right at your feelings. ..." The narrator's recollections confirm the impression of a man whose commitments to art, eros and self exploration dictate a certain remoteness from his children. There were a lot of them nine in all, with six different women and he organized life on his island to defend its routines against their unruly energies. The women came and went. Which is not to say that her father was cold or cruel, but that the intimacies his daughter managed to find with him were built on a foundation of estrangement. The narrator's mother is a different story more bluntly judged by her child and also a more vivid and complex presence in the book. She leaves the girl in the care of her own mother and, later, a succession of babysitters as she pursues her stage and screen career on two continents. The girl is envious of her mother's beauty and resentful of her capriciousness, emphasizing without ever quite acknowledging the gender based double standard that colors her feelings. The father is just exercising the prerogatives granted to male artists, while the mother's creative ambitions are seen as a kind of betrayal. A father who is mostly elsewhere is a fact of life; a mother who goes away is a kind of monster. "I was his child and her child, but not their child," Ullmann writes, "it was never us three." Her novel is a collagelike group portrait of a family splintered from the start, an attempt to isolate the mother, the father and the daughter and plot their points of intersection. "Plot" may not be the right word, though the fragmentary structure generates its own kind of suspense. There is a lot of information amid the impressionistic evocations of mood and place about the narrator's marriages and love affairs (including a teenage liaison with a much older man); about the mother's love life; about the father's serial monogamy. These are not threads so much as needles, jabbing the reader to a heightened state of attention and then slipping away. Ullmann's previous novel, "The Cold Song," used similar techniques to turn a crime story into a meditation on cause, effect and responsibility. "Unquiet" is, well, quieter, and also more chaotic, finding drama and pathos in its own search for an adequate form and turning its failures into something fascinating and rich. In the process, it creates or perhaps discovers two characters who seem stranger, sadder and more real than the actress and the filmmaker we might have thought we knew: "I'm trying to understand something about love here, and about my parents, and why solitude played such a significant role in their lives, and why they, more than anything in the whole world, were so afraid of being abandoned."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Barbara Davidson, a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, was covering a protest near the Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles on Saturday when a police officer ordered her to move. She showed him her press credentials, she said in an interview. The officer said he did not care and again told her to leave the area. After saying, "Sir, I am a journalist covering this," Ms. Davidson turned to walk away, and the officer shoved her in the back, causing her to trip and hit her head against a fire hydrant, she said. She was not hurt, she added, because she was wearing a helmet she had bought while getting skateboarding equipment for a nephew. The photographer Barbara Davidson, on Saturday, while covering the protests. Many reporters, photographers and press advocates said the treatment of journalists by police officers in recent days reflected an erosion of trust in the news media that has seeped into law enforcement under President Trump, who has deemed critical coverage of his administration "fake news" and has frequently labeled some news organizations and journalists with variants of the phrase "enemies of the people." "This story, in particular, it seems journalists are really being targeted by the police," Ms. Davidson said. "That's not something I have experienced before to this degree." It is common in autocratic countries for journalists to be arrested during demonstrations and riots, but rare in the United States, where freedom of the press is guaranteed by the First Amendment. In a sign that police officers would not follow the customary hands off approach, Minnesota State Patrol officers arrested a CNN reporting team live on the air on Friday. That same day, a TV reporter in Louisville, Ky., was hit by a pepper ball by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her while she covered the protest on live television. "I've really never seen anything like this," said Ellen Shearer, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a co director of its National Security Journalism Initiative. "The president has called the news media 'the enemy of the people.' I think all of that has taken a toll." On Sunday, Mr. Trump blamed the "Lamestream Media" for the protests in a tweet, calling journalists "truly bad people with a sick agenda." The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker and a writer for the Bellingcat website have each tracked about 100 instances of reporters being harassed or injured at the protests. Many of the reporters were effectively embedded with protesters and were likely not targeted because they were journalists. But in some instances, journalists were attacked after telling officers that they were on the job. Tyler Blint Welsh, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, said he was hit multiple times by police officers while covering a protest in New York on Sunday. "I was backing away as request, with my hands up," Mr. Blint Welsh, who is black, wrote on Twitter. "My NYPD issued press badge was clearly visible." (He declined to comment for this article.) Hyoung Chang, a staff photographer for The Denver Post for 23 years, spent a few hours near the Colorado statehouse on Thursday, taking photos of demonstrators while wearing his press badge around his neck. In the evening, police officers tried to break up the crowd, and Mr. Chang heard what sounded like pepper balls being fired. "Then one police officer started pointing at me and started to shoot," he said. Mr. Chang was hit with something in his chest, and then in his elbow. Part of his press card was blown off. 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. "I was staying in the same spot," Mr. Chang said, emphasizing that he had been standing near the police for some time while holding cameras and equipment. "I think they know I'm a photographer." Carolyn Cole, a Los Angeles Times photographer, was covering a protest in Minneapolis on Saturday when the police moved to disperse a crowd, she said in a text message. A group of roughly 20 journalists standing apart from the protesters moved aside, but the police attacked them directly with pepper spray and rubber bullets, she said. A colleague, the reporter Molly Hennessy Fiske, shouted, "We're reporters!" Ms. Cole was wearing a press pass around her neck and a flak jacket with "TV" on it, she said. She was pepper sprayed in her left ear and eye, and her cornea was damaged, she said. "I've been covering conflict both nationally and internationally for many years, so I know the dangers involved in these situations, especially when you get between riot police and protesters," Ms. Cole said, "but I wasn't expecting them to attack us directly." Ed Ou, a video and photojournalist for NBC News who was next to Ms. Cole, was pepper sprayed and hit with what he believes was a baton and a projectile fired by the police, he said in an interview. Maggie Koerth, a senior science reporter for the website FiveThirtyEight, said she was covering a protest from a Minneapolis sidewalk on Saturday when a police officer drew a weapon on her and another working journalist. "We said, 'Press, press we are press,' and we held up our badges and put our hands up in the air," she said in an interview. "They kept pointing the weapon at us while we were doing that, and one of them said, 'Shut up.'" Michael Anthony Adams, a correspondent at Vice News, said he identified himself as a member of the press when police arrived on Saturday night at the Minneapolis gas station where he was conducting interviews. In a video that Mr. Adams recorded of the incident, he can be heard repeatedly identifying himself as a reporter. Mr. Adams continued to take video as he lay on the ground, holding up his press badge with one hand. Then he was sprayed with what he believes was pepper spray. The incident reminded Mr. Adams of being tackled by police officers while on assignment in Turkey this year. "That's something that I would expect in Turkey," he said of the country, where journalists have been jailed under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "But in America, I wouldn't have expected this." Journalists have also been on the receiving end of harsh treatment from protesters. Near the White House on Saturday, demonstrators chased and threw objects at the Fox News reporter Leland Vittert and members of his crew. On Friday, protesters vandalized CNN headquarters in Atlanta. "There is now a culture of impunity for attacks on the press," said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, an organization at the Columbia University School of Journalism. "It's essentially the abandonment of press freedom as an American value." Sarah Matthews, a staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said that while the First Amendment does not exempt journalists from crowd control orders, its emphasis on freedom of the press should offer some protection to those covering demonstrations. "Journalists are there as representatives of the public, and if law enforcement is attacking them, they can't do their job, and that hurts everybody," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Newly restored, Roger Corman's riotously colorful adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" (1964) and Michael Curtiz's shimmering pink and green "Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933) are as gaudy as the day they opened if not as scary. The two vintage horror films are showing as a de facto double bill on Friday and Monday as part of the Museum of Modern Art's annual festival of preservation, To Save and Project. "The Masque of the Red Death" was Corman's audacious attempt to make an art film for the drive in crowd a feast of roistering revelry with intimations of Bunuel, Fellini and Bergman. Eugene Archer, the most auteur minded of the critics at The New York Times, was enthusiastic: The movie "represents the dauntless young filmmaker at the top of his form," he wrote. Also in top form is Vincent Price as a supercilious Satanist prince who terrorizes his subjects by contriving sadistic spectacles of humiliation. His foils include Jane Asher, who wanders through the proceedings in a state of wide eyed alarm. Asher, who, as Paul McCartney's girlfriend, personified Swinging London, is one of several local elements. "Red Death" was shot in England using the sets left over from the seriously medieval Richard Burton vehicle "Becket," of which it might seem a travesty.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
They don't call it the Oscars of the East Coast for nothing. The Met Gala (sometimes also called "the party of the year") technically signals the opening of the Costume Institute's annual blockbuster show, but it also provides an opportunity to gawk at the many celebrities who ascend the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the first Monday in May.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The percussionist Candido Camero in an undated photo. His contributions to conga playing, one admirer said, "were literally game changing." "When you talk about percussion, particularly the evolution of conga playing, you're talking about two periods before Candido and after Candido," the Grammy nominated percussionist and bandleader Bobby Sanabria said on Friday, having just attended a memorial service for Candido Camero, who died on Nov 7 at 99. "His contributions were literally game changing." Mr. Camero just Candido to most fans and fellow musicians took his Afro Cuban musical influences to the United States from Cuba in the middle of the last century and brought a new dimension to both Latin music and jazz. He played multiple conga drums simultaneously, something new at the time, and introduced other innovations as he performed with top names like Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Kenton. "More than any other Latin percussionist of his generation, Candido succeeded in making the sound of the conga drum a standard coloration in straight ahead jazz rhythm sections," Raul A. Fernandez, emeritus professor of Chicano and Latin studies at the University of California, Irvine, who wrote about Mr. Camero in "From Afro Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz" (2006), said by email. Mr. Sanabria, in an email interview, rattled off Mr. Camero's list of innovations: "He developed coordinated independence as applied to the congas and bongo being able to keep a steady rhythm with one hand while soloing with the other. He was the first to develop the techniques to play multiple percussion instruments simultaneously, sounding like three or four players. He was the first to tune multiple congas to specific pitches so he could play melodies on them, and he was an inventor as well. In 1950 he created the first device for a player to be able to play a cowbell with one's foot." Candido Camero was born on April 22, 1921, in Havana to Candido Camero and Caridad Guerra. His father worked at a factory that made soda bottles, and his mother was a homemaker. He said he began drumming when he was 4, pounding on empty condensed milk cans, tutored by an uncle who played the bongos. He also learned to play the bass and the tres, a Cuban stringed instrument. By 14 he was playing professionally. In an interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program in 1999, Mr. Camero described the precautions his father had taken to keep him on the straight and narrow. "As soon as I came home, my dad would say, 'Say ha,'" he recalled. "And I said, 'Ha ha.' And then he'd say: 'Only one ha is needed. One is enough.' He wanted to smell my breath to see if I had been drinking." In the 1930s and '40s, Mr. Camero played one instrument or another in a variety of groups, performing in nightclubs and street parades and on the radio. For years he was part of the orchestra at the Tropicana nightclub in Havana. A job backing the dance duo Carmen and Rolando proved to be pivotal. He had accompanied them in performances throughout Cuba when the act was invited to the United States in 1946. In Cuba they had performed with two percussionists, one of whom played bongos while Mr. Camero played the quinto, a drum with a higher pitch than that of the standard conga. The travel budget, though, allowed for only one percussionist; they took Mr. Camero. And he introduced a new flourish. "I said, 'OK, I'm going to try something to see if you like it and if it works,'" he recalled in the oral history. "And they said, 'What is it?' I say, 'Well, I'm going to surprise you.' Then I brought the conga and a quinto. At showtime, I began to play the rhythm with my left hand on the conga and to do what the bongo player was supposed to do with my right hand on the quinto, to mark the steps when they were dancing. That was the first idea, the low drum and the quinto at the same time." By 1952 he was playing three congas at once and tuning them in such a way that he could carry a melody. When he would solo with Kenton's orchestra in the mid 1950s, he added adornments that made him a virtual one man band. "I used the conga, bass drum and hi hat to carry the rhythm by myself instead of the drum set," he explained, "accompanying myself rhythmically at the same time that I took my conga solo." He adapted these dazzling techniques to a range of bandleaders and musical styles, and he, in turn, influenced those styles. "To me," Professor Fernandez said, "his greatest contribution was establishing the conga drum as an integral, if not essential, component of the modern straight ahead jazz percussion scheme and securing a place for the 'Latin tinge' among the many rhythmic tinges available to the modern jazz drummer." "His complete list of recordings as a sideman is awesome," Professor Fernandez said. "Woody Herman, Art Blakey, Ray Charles, Kenny Burrell, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Count Basie the list is rather long." Mr. Sanabria said that Mr. Camero had more than 1,000 recording credits, including numerous albums as a leader.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
How to Make the Most of the Night Sky When you look up to the sky at night, it's hard not to feel awe. And each year, there are many reasons to do so from lunar eclipses to supermoons to meteor showers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
CHEER Stream on Netflix. In the series "Last Chance U," the director Greg Whiteley captured junior college football on and off the field, mixing sports documentary wins and defeats with personal portraits of players. In this new series, Whiteley turns his attention to cheerleading. "Cheer" focuses on the competitive squad at Navarro College in Corsicana, Tex. The season builds toward a big competition but, as with "Last Chance U," its heart is set less on the question of whether the team will win or lose and more on the players, whose personal lives and emotions rush to the surface as they chase athletic perfection. "The way that we prepare, you keep going until you get it right," the team's coach, Monica Aldama, says in the first episode. "And then you keep going until you can't get it wrong." IMMORTAL BELOVED (1994) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Beethoven. One way to celebrate could be to revisit this biographical drama, in which Gary Oldman plays that composer. The film, directed by Bernard Rose, frames its plot around attempts by one of Beethoven's early biographers, Anton Schindler (played by Jeroen Krabbe), to determine the identity of the "immortal beloved" that Beethoven once addressed a love letter to. "Think of this as an extremely ambitious classical music video, with visual ideas that merely echo the moods of the music." Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The New York Times. She also wrote that Beethoven is "dazzlingly impersonated" by Oldman.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
1. ASTON MARTIN RAPIDE The Rapide is something new from Aston, a tiny builder of British sports cars. An exquisitely executed four door, it makes the Porsche Panamera sedan look absolutely bulky in comparison. Aside from the Rapide's perfect coupelike profile, its interior is luxuriously tasteful, not techno. 2. JAGUAR XJL Given the sleek new look, it's hard to believe that the XJ rides on the underpinnings of its retro style predecessor. But Mr. Callum has reincarnated Jaguar's flagship sedan in a bold and clever way. Also, at 80,000 and up, the long wheelbase XJL is more attractively priced than its main competition. The high character interior, inspired by classic mahogany speedboats, evokes a bygone era of charismatic British luxury. 3. FORD HARLEY DAVIDSON F 150 The Harley F 150 used to be a tepid marketing tie in with the motorcycle company, but now it gets real appeal. The interior is as plush as a luxury sedan's; authentic looking touches like H D gauge faces inspire smiles; and its eye candy exterior provides high wattage curb appeal that surpasses that of any other truck from any truck maker. If only the pickup's bobtail bed could actually hold a Harley... 5. NISSAN LEAF This battery electric car may not be ready for prime time, but it is nonetheless an impressive pioneer in gasoline free transportation. More such vehicles are sure to come, and they will no doubt be improvements on the Leaf. For now, it is a welcome ambassador from an electric future. 6. SCION TC Jim Farley, the former boss at Scion (now with Ford), once said car buyers on a budget did not want to feel like losers in cheap cars. The entire Scion line comprising just three vehicles, with another on the way provides stylish, reliable, affordable and appealing transportation at economical prices. The new tC coupe, which improves significantly upon its predecessor, adds "sporty" to the mix. The Celica lives again. 7. JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE For a company that not long ago seemed down, if not out, the new Grand Cherokee signals a rejuvenation for a pioneer of the S.U.V. market and perhaps for the entire Jeep line. The Grand Cherokee retains its best in class utility while showing big improvements in comfort, style and even fuel economy. It also costs thousands less than the new (and less off road capable) Ford Explorer. 8. FORD MUSTANG It appears that in 2010, for the first time since 1985, the Mustang has been outsold by its archrival, the Chevrolet Camaro even though the Chevy comes in fewer versions. But there is something about the Mustang's enduring appeal, and Ford's careful nurturing and updating of it, that keeps it on my list for another year. 9. FORD FIESTA There once was a time, not long ago, when the best Ford products seemed to be sold overseas, not in the company's home market. That is changing under the One Ford vision of the chief executive, Alan Mulally, and with vehicles like the versatile, well executed Fiesta (and, more than likely, with the coming new Focus as well). The American market Fiesta, arriving two years behind its European counterpart, is a world class addition to the underserved subcompact market. 10. MERCURY MILAN HYBRID Mercury finally got a sedan it could be proud of a hybrid, no less just as its parent, Ford Motor, killed the brand. Oh, well, at least Mercury went out on a high note. Even though the midsize car was little more than a gussied up Fusion Hybrid, owners gave it higher marks than any other hybrid sedan. IMMOVABLE OBJECT AWARD Toyota Camry Hybrid. A leader in longevity on dealer lots, this Camry takes an average of more than 70 days to move one of these ho hum hybrids. INDUSTRY INCENTIVE AWARD When it comes to bribing consumers to buy a car, the departing Chevrolet Cobalt takes first place. Even as the industry leader in sales incentives 24 percent off the already routinely ignored sticker price Cobalt sales fell 53 percent through November 2010 from the period a year earlier (which was also a stinker of a sales year). Mercifully, the small Chevy has been euthanized. PYRRHIC VICTORY AWARD Yes, Bentley has re engineered its cars to run on some biofuels. But why? The Continental Supersports get an industry worst 10 miles per gallon on E85 ethanol. (That's combined m.p.g.; the city rating is just 8.) Running on gasoline, the car's mileage is about a third better. DOLLAR MENU AWARD In redesigning the Jetta, Volkswagen admirably cut the price along with much of the character and features of the previous version. Someone in VW's marketing department may have decided that since Americans eat junk food, they will snatch up the automotive equivalent of a value meal. More likely, the 2011 Jetta will leave them wanting more. LATERAL MOVE AWARD Stefan Jacoby, formerly chief executive of Volkswagen of America, left to become chief of Volvo just as Ford was selling Volvo to the Chinese. Why? Perhaps he saw the Americanized Jetta coming.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
In 1961, there was a widely held theory among educated Baltimore Negroes, many of whom, like my mother, were teachers or administrators themselves, that if you wanted your children to have a good public school education, you should send them to a school that was predominantly Jewish, because Jews valued learning. And so I was sent not to the brand new junior high that was built to service Negro students who were in desperate need of a better facility, but to Garrison Junior High in the Forest Park neighborhood, from which gentile whites had fled when the Jewish population moved in. I wasn't "bused," but I had to take two buses to get there. Segregated schools taught you where you did belong. Integrated schools taught, in surgical detail, where you did not belong. That is what junior high is all about. Sorting. I assessed the following as best as an 11 year old could: White Christians and Jews stayed apart. My Jewish classmates seemed to divide along lines that privileged assimilation. Two Eastern European girls, one of whom had recently arrived in the United States, played a game in which they threw knives into a circle on the ground. (Today, that would get you handcuffed and perhaps jailed.) They were ostracized. But a newly arrived Algerian Jewish girl was welcomed because she was pretty. We Negro kids divided along class lines: where we went to church, by neighborhood and by our mating habits. "Don't stare," the friend with whom I rode the bus would whisper. She looked straight ahead, keeping any possible white hostility in her peripheral vision. As much as my school day was preoccupied with watching and listening, I felt both visible and invisible. Visible because of my color. Invisible because of my color. A few years ago, I ran into a friend from those Garrison days, who had been quite visible. Ken was the only Negro in his homeroom. He was handsome and smart, and his parents were part of Baltimore Negro high society. "Garrison was an awful place," he said with a passion that awakened my muscle memory and filled me with the daily toxicity I had once experienced. I remembered him as a prince who moved through that world with a grin. But it wasn't so. His mother had had what was then labeled a "nervous breakdown." Johns Hopkins Hospital didn't accept Negroes for inpatient psychiatric treatment in the early '60s. Crownsville, where gravestones bore numbers, not names, housed Negroes, but that didn't ring a bell when we talked. Ken did not remember where his mother was treated, just that she was gone for a long time. His father, seldom home, was involved in politics. One night, alone at his dining room table, staring hopelessly at a linear equation, Ken was overwhelmed by a vision: He was on a dock. His white classmates were in a boat. If he could not solve that problem, that very night, the boat would sail off, leaving him behind. He burst into tears. Before dawn, he taught himself the logic of the equation. From then on, he was always top of his class in mathematics. He is a successful scientist now, who in addition to his professional obligations teaches astrophysics to at risk girls. Brown v. Board of Education, a recent ruling when I was at Garrison, had been received with ambivalence across the nation. In the South, private religious schools emerged so that white families could dodge sending their children to learn with blacks. At newly integrated schools, fostering collegiality and visibility among students and working toward a more inclusive future was rarely a passionately promoted agenda. You cannot get a good education if you disappear from yourself. Being visible and present is crucial to embracing knowledge. I graduated from Garrison relatively invisible. I don't even remember my junior high graduation dress. And then it was time to go to high school. Western High School was an all girls public school near Baltimore's most cherished historic buildings. When I crossed the threshold for the first time, I saw down the long hallway a petite, elegantly dressed woman with perfect posture. Her diction, as she called out directives, could have cracked crystal. Moving a few steps closer, I saw that she was a Negro and later learned that she was a vice principal. Not unusual now, very unusual then. As I walked a few steps beyond her, I heard, "Aren't you a Smith?" I turned. "You look just like your mother ... and your father." That was the legendary Essie M. Hughes. She'd been a Latin teacher and had taught generations of Negro children, including my parents and aunts and uncles, in one of the two Negro high schools during the '40s and '50s. She saw me. I saw her seeing me. Within five minutes of my entering the new school, my invisibility in education was over. Homeroom seating was alphabetical. In front of me sat a white Jewish girl whose mother was a violinist in the Baltimore Symphony. Until then, the symphony's musicians were, to me, white and black dots I'd struggled to magnify through binoculars. Yet, when my new classmate and I glanced at each other for the first time, I felt as though I'd known her for a lifetime. The girl behind me, also white (and Catholic), was hilarious. As far as I was concerned, undiscovered forms of hilarity were always welcome. I like September. Even though it required going back to school, it always filled me with optimism. And my birthday falls in that month. That first year, the violinist's daughter gave me a book of poems and a card. She signed the card "Love, Ruthie." She was the first white person in my life who used the word "love" in relation to me. We became close friends, counseling each other until our last gasps of adolescence. Unlike Garrison, Western was not toxic. I credit its leadership. A commanding triumvirate indeed: Miss Kell, the principal, was a white woman over six feet tall who looked like a mix of George Washington and a Eudora Welty character. Mr. DeWolff, the other vice principal, was a white man with a disability at a time when there were no sloping curbs or much else to aid mobility. Miss Hughes was well traveled, fluent in several languages. She'd grown up when segregation was the norm in much of Baltimore and the surrounding areas. In spite of their personal battles, or perhaps because of them, they provided contours around which dividing lines melted. I experienced the fractured and often bloody '60s in an intellectual environment where many voices were heard, many cultures seen. It wasn't just being visible to myself that made education intoxicating. It was paying attention to the world in the company of those who had different histories, and who followed different paths, that turned on the lights for me.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
I think I echo many Americans, and people of the world in general, when I say that I'm having a hard time fully grappling with the gravity of this moment. It is still hard to absorb that a virus has reshaped world behavior, halted or altered travel, strained the economy and completely reshaped the nature of public spaces and human interaction. It is also hard to absorb that this may not be a quickly passing phase, an inconvenience for a season, but something that the world is forced to live with for years, even assuming that a vaccine is soon found. The idea that years of planning for graduations and weddings, home purchases and retirement, might all come to a screeching halt is humbling and disorienting. The confusion over how and when children can safely return to school and adults can safely return to work is frustrating because it leaves people's lives in the lurch. The idea that face coverings and elbow bumps may be the new normal is a shock to the system. It seems that on multiple levels, society is being tested, and often failing. People are rebelling against isolation, and against science and public health. They want the old world back, the pre Covid 19 world back, but it cannot be had. The virus doesn't feel frustration or react to it. It's not aware of your children or your job or your vacation plans. It's not aware of our politics. The virus is a virus, mindless, and in this case, incredibly efficient and effective. It will pass from person to person for as long as that is possible. The political debate over mask wearing is a human concern, one that works to the virus's benefit. And it is these politics, particularly as articulated by Donald Trump, that are allowing the virus to ravage this nation and steal tens of thousands of lives that should not have been stolen. It is Trump's politicization of the virus that has resulted in a new surge of cases in this country when many other developed nations have been able to shrink the number of cases among their people. It is because of Donald Trump that America has now reported 3.2 million cases and has tallied nearly 135,000 deaths. But, instead of centering on the sick, dying and dead as the true victims of his malfeasance, Trump casts himself as the victim of circumstances. As The Washington Post reported last week, Trump has adopted a woe is me attitude with visitors. As the paper put it: "Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation's turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country." How are we supposed to comprehend this idea that the president is eschewing that responsibility for political purposes, and in the process, putting untold American lives in danger and actually costing some? How did it come to such a pass that scientists and experts could be hamstrung, that governors and mayors could be bullied, that millions of Americans could risk their own well being and the well being of others to make a political point? This is the America we are all now navigating. We've witnessed scene after scene of minimum wage workers in conflict with customers many no doubt who came in search of conflict, in search of a stage on which to perform their drama of defiance who refuse to wear masks inside stores. Part of the issue is that the virus is not only being politicized, its effects are also racialized: Black and brown people are having worse outcomes. Some of the states now seeing the greatest surges in cases are those in the South and West with large Black or Hispanic populations. The effects of the disease are also ageist: Older people are more likely to die from it. Florida not only has a large Hispanic population, it also has a large population of retirees. I believe that these variances add to the political callousness America is seeing: If the disease is seen as disproportionately hurting others a Boomer killer, or a Black "Brotha" killer, or an abuela killer then some younger, healthier white people might believe that the threat to themselves is lower and the restrictions on them should be looser. We have a situation in this country where a disease is spiraling out of control, largely because of the president himself, and there is little sign or hope that it will be constrained soon. We are living in a horror film, one starring Donald Trump. 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 and Twitter ( NYTopinion), and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
It's a glimpse of the toxic birthright August is inheriting, one that ensures he will grow to be awkward (or worse) with women, and suspicious of education, big city living and colorful shirts. His mother rightly senses that a boy whose father pays him per tail to exterminate cats stands little chance of becoming the kind of man she wishes she'd married. Inspired by Jim Harrison's "Legends of the Fall" and by Brad Pitt in the film adaptation she hauls him to Montana. The Big Sky there is freeing, but the misogyny is just as insidious. Over time, August grows to suspect that all the macho posturing and bad fatherly advice aren't adding up to much besides a broken heart and some football induced headaches. A disturbing MeToo type episode underlines the stakes, but Wink's female characters are so underdeveloped that it fails to be the defining moment it was clearly intended to be. What's less clear is how we're supposed to feel about August. As a teenager, he thinks and speaks in the laconic language of a middle aged malcontent of Raymond Carver's. No time for women. No stomach for dancing. P.B.R. and pickup trucks: Those are OK. Not that there's anything wrong with tough guys, per se. The kid just isn't very likable. Wink's powers are stunning when he describes in crisp, unsentimental prose the physical world framing August's journey: the breath of cattle on a midwinter day, the taste of raw milk from a Mason jar. But as our guide to this rugged landscape, August is less a person than a caricature, pretentiously unpretentious. At root, Wink seems to want it both ways to criticize all that tough guy distancing while regularly indulging it. In several awkward passages, he sidles into complex ideas but doesn't want to own them. "In a sophomore English class he'd taken at Park High, Mrs. Defrain was always going on about the objective correlative," Wink writes, following a string of his own beautiful descriptions exemplifying just that concept. "As far as he could tell, it was just a fancy sounding name for a trick writers used to portray a mood in their characters." None of that fancy writin' stuff for August or for Wink, a former Stegner fellow at Stanford. I get it. Any well educated American man who grew up in flyover country will be familiar with the pressures, which foster a kind of bipolar intellectual insecurity. They give rise to overrated writers like Cormac McCarthy who want you to know they aren't elitists even as they drop an expensive word or idea now and then, just to make it clear they could afford it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Update: James Holzhauer's streak ended on June 3, with his 33rd game. Not only has he come to dominate the list of highest single game payouts, but Holzhauer has also become only the second contestant to earn more than 1 million in regular season play. On Monday night, he continued his streak, winning his 18th game by just 18. For some contestants, winning might usher in 15 minutes of fame and a small, unexpected windfall. But for players like Holzhauer, securing records, fame and big winnings can be transformative, creating opportunities and providing a level of financial security unthinkable to many Americans. Before he became a "Jeopardy!" legend, Ken Jennings was a 29 year old computer programmer living in Salt Lake City, wondering if there was any way out of a career in coding. "My wife says I kept talking about going to law school, that's how desperate I was," he joked. Jennings had double majored in English and computer science and always wanted to write, but after graduating and getting engaged he took a job at a tech start up to pay the bills. Then he qualified for "Jeopardy!" In 2004, Jennings won 74 games in a row, earning more than 2.5 million. No one has come close to beating his streak (the nearest challenger won 20 consecutive games), though Holzhauer is closing in. In April, Holzhauer became the only contestant to join Jennings in earning more than 1 million in regular season play. (Another contestant, Brad Rutter, has earned more than either of them, but he earned the vast majority of his winnings more than 4.5 million in arguably more difficult tournament games.) We asked James Holzhauer how he turned "Jeopardy!" into his own A.T.M. For Jennings, "Jeopardy!" significantly altered the course of his life. "It changed what I did every day," he said. After the show, Jennings decided to write a book about the history and appeal of trivia in America. In 2006, he published "Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs," which did well enough for him to keep going. "Each book sold better than the last, which is what publishers are into," he said. His books since include a trivia almanac, a debunking of myths passed down to children, and a book about how comedy has come to dominate culture. Jennings says he is now working on his 13th book, a travel guide to various depictions of the afterlife throughout human history. Read more: You Know Your History? These Podcasts Aren't So Sure More than anything, his time on "Jeopardy!" gave him precious freedom from a rigid career. For Larissa Kelly, appearing on the show in 2008 and 2009 provided a lifeline for her and her husband, who were graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, facing a job market in the throes of the Great Recession. "Having the money from 'Jeopardy!' meant that we had the freedom to think about where do we want to go, what do we want to do," said Kelly, whose appearances then and since have made her one of the highest earning contestants in the show's history, with winnings of more than 660,000. The money has allowed Kelly and her husband, Jeff Hoppes, to buy a house in Richmond, Calif., and given them the freedom to pursue jobs related to what they love. "For the last six or seven years, we've both been doing professional trivia, and it was feasible for us to do that in a way that I don't think it would have been without the cushion provided by 'Jeopardy!'," she said. Kelly now edits questions for National Academic Quiz Tournaments, which runs national quiz bowl championships at the middle school, high school and collegiate levels. Her husband is the organization's vice president for communication. Unlike other "Jeopardy!" champions, though, Kelly doesn't get much opportunity to gloat. Not only were her sister and husband on the show, but Jennings, who beat her husband, is also a colleague at National Academic Quiz Tournaments. "For a lot of people, it's likely that they might be the only person at their company who was on 'Jeopardy!'," she said. "For me, I am never going to be the premier 'Jeopardy!' player at my company." At Stanford, Thieu worked in a psychology laboratory dedicated to the research of memory. She graduated in three years as a psychology major and is now a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, where she mostly studies how people perceive emotions. Quiz: Can you answer these real "Jeopardy!" questions that feature The New York Times? The show, she said, probably enabled that career path. "If I had gone somewhere else, I might have done something else," she said. "I might have made my parents happy and been in medical school right now." Thieu appeared again on "Jeopardy!" in 2013 and for this year's "All Star Games" (in which she played on Jennings's team). Since her first appearance, though, Thieu has avoided telling people up front about her time on the show for fear that it would come to define her. "I don't want to be the 'Jeopardy!' girl," she said. "I would like to be the girl that has these other hobbies and interests." But unlike other big winners, his life did not hugely change after he appeared on the show. His sizable winnings gave him some financial freedom, but he still works in machine learning and artificial intelligence, now as a consultant, he said. And while people recognize him from the show, that recognition fades with the passage of time. Appearing on "Jeopardy!" and in subsequent interviews with journalists did, however, help strengthen Craig's public speaking abilities. "Once you've done a television show and you're up there in front of millions of people, to me, speaking in front of a few hundred or a few thousand people is not a big deal," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
PARIS There's a French term for a certain strategic approach to bilateral relations often applied with great approval to President Emmanuel Macron of France: operation seduction. It's what ("they" say) got him invited as the first guest of honor at a White House state dinner; what marked his trip to China early this year. It's an accepted political tool, a part of the patrimony. Sometimes, a newspaper headline. In fashion, however, it's the subject of some trepidation. For obvious reasons, many designers don't want to touch the issue of allure, actual or implied. Instead, we've been getting a lot of sweatshirts. Mr. Abloh contributed to that one, in any case, with a mob scene at his front door (it was so bad some attendees were terrified they were going to be crushed against a street lamp) that spoke to his current status as the Guy Most Rumored to Get a Big Job. Though the surprisingly tame horse riding tapestry separates, the spliced leather 'n' lizard dresses, molded moto breastplates and sheer ruffled nightie gowns atop buttoned up bodysuits that he put on the runway did not. It was enough to make you think: Feh with the trendy social media meta commentary! Bring back the sex problem. Which is why, when the Rick Owens show began to a medley of voices singing "Baubles, Bangles and Beads," a tune from the 1953 musical "Kismet" that has been covered by everyone from Peggy Lee to Frank Sinatra and that features a woman musing on whether her sparkly accessories will help her catch a man, it was kind of a relief. Hello there, elephant in the dressing room. "It's a very sensitive time right now, and I would not presume to know what women are feeling," he continued. "But I know what I feel is appropriate to propose to them." Which turned out to be a questioning of the old sartorial tools of seduction bustles, panniers, the classical underpinnings that transformed the body to exaggerate its sexuality for the male eye via the template of the traditional strapless dress and the idea of curves. But curves according to who? It's a good question. From there, swathes of felted camel's hair and linen in complementary shades (ivory and chocolate, dusty pink and gray) wove and curlicued around the torso and upper legs, flirting in tandem. Giant fanny pouches bumped along over one leg of cashmere running shorts and tubes of fabric stuffed with goose down swathed the shoulders and hugged the thighs. It was, on the Owens continuum, which has occasionally involved what looks like alien pregnancies, surprisingly wearable especially the jackets hung from straps that could be slung around a shoulder like a tote bag, and the tailored collarless coats with enormous patch pockets and bright turquoise satin linings. It hinted at a different kind of come hither. By contrast, you could hear Julien Dossena's Paco Rabanne from a mile away. This thanks to his embrace of seemingly every permutation of the brand's signature futuristic plastic disc and chain mail dresses. They came in a mesh of silver flowers, iridescent rectangles, bobble trimmed cilia and plastic paillettes, all of it hooked into slip dresses and skirts and T shirts that could be worn over and under and amid classic French basics (a camel turtleneck, a blue blazer, a black trouser pantsuit, a faux fur). The overlays jingled and jangled and shimmered as they came. And, if they didn't, the chain mail bedecked shower slides that went with almost every look did it for them, and had a soap bubble appeal. Maybe it's a fools game to wrestle with the big S issue right now. Even with "Tainted Love" on his soundtrack, Olivier Rousteing at Balmain seemed more interested in virtual reality escape than physical reality. He remade his signature blingtastic bandage dresses, broad shouldered martinet jackets and "I Dream of Jeannie" pants in silver foil and holographic fabrics; traced motherboard patterns in neon crystal; and otherwise bedazzled the JavaScript in a show so long that watching it was like being caught in an infinite loop.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
There's not much humor, or even sense of play, in the 15 films nominated for Oscars in three shorts categories. The documentary program is at times almost intractably grim. The best of the lot is Yi Seung Jun's "In the Absence," a terse, harrowing, infuriating account of the sinking of the South Korean ferry Sewol that took more than 300 lives in 2014. "Life Overtakes Me," directed by John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson, examines resignation syndrome among children of refugee immigrants in Sweden. The story of children who fall into almost coma like states in reaction to the prospect of deportation is fascinating and ghastly, but its telling is affected.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
That useful tension is also the result of Mr. Henderson's immense gravitas. Though only two years older than Mr. Cooper, he reads much older; the director, Sam Gold, has restaged the action to keep him stolidly seated much of the time, like a monument. In that physical contrast Ms. White is a reed you immediately understand how scary he must have seemed to the younger Nora, and why she might have felt she had no recourse but leaving. Mr. Henderson, too often confined to sidekick roles, here holds the stage completely on the strength of Torvald's bitter anger. He's superb. The changes in the play's central relationship are nicely recapitulated in Ms. Wilhelmi's performance as the daughter with a mission of her own; echoing her mother as played by Ms. White, she is more instinctive and apparently guileless in her manipulation than was Ms. Rashad, who echoed Ms. Metcalf's businesslike brutality. As for Ms. Houdyshell, she seems to have enriched both the sweet and sour of her characterization through a process of marination in the more evenly matched conflict around her. The result of all these macro and micro tunings is a production that feels even more thrillerlike in its swiftness. Though it takes on very serious themes about marriage, of course, but also about the distortions of identity that come from trying to behave honorably in a dishonorable society "A Doll's House, Part 2" remains a triumph of ambivalent feminist comedy. It's the kind of play you hope won't end: not after 90 minutes nor even after five months.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Gerard Baker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, has faced unease and frustration in his newsroom over his stewardship of the newspaper's coverage of President Trump, which some journalists there say has lacked toughness and verve. Some staff members expressed similar concerns on Wednesday after Mr. Baker, in a series of blunt late night emails, criticized his staff over their coverage of Mr. Trump's Tuesday rally in Phoenix, describing their reporting as overly opinionated. "Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting," Mr. Baker wrote at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday morning to a group of Journal reporters and editors, in response to a draft of the rally article that was intended for the newspaper's final edition. He added in a follow up, "Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In 2006, researchers there reported an alarming finding: 52 out of 53 patients with both H.I.V. and XDR TB had died, and half died within a month of getting a diagnosis. Initially, doctors thought most patients had developed XDR TB because of "treatment failure" that they had had regular TB or a slightly drug resistant version, and because they had either not been prescribed the right drugs or had not taken them all, their infections became resistant to multiple drugs. Instead, they found many patients had never been treated, implying that the deadliest strain was being transmitted between people. Now a study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine by South African and American scientists, has shown the problem there is much bigger than previously realized. The investigators looked into 404 cases of XDR TB detected over four years, interviewing patients and their relatives to see who had been treated before and who had contact with whom. The researchers also genetically typed patients' strains. Almost 80 percent of the patients also had H.I.V.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Picnic time: the designer Lirika Matoshi's strawberry dress, seen here on Isabelle Chaput, with a matching variation on Nelson Tiberghien. They are the creators behind Young Emperors. Last summer, a sacklike white dress mottled with black polka dots selling at Zara for 50 was all the rage on Instagram. But while the discomfiting qualities of 2019 may have called for something shapeless and relaxed, the sheer horror of 2020 demands an incredulous level of mythical escapism. Enter: the strawberry dress that took over TikTok. The dress is a cotton candy cloud dotted with sequined strawberry motifs by Lirika Matoshi, 24, a fashion designer in New York. With its pastel pink tulle overlay, plunging neckline, and gently puffed sleeves, it looks like something Marie Antoinette would wear if she were a modern day influencer. While the strawberry dress may not have achieved the ubiquity of its Zara counterpart just yet it costs 10 times more it is huge on the video platform, where users alternately covet, prance around in or throw shade at the flouncy frock. The common refrain is: "This dress lives rent free in my head." Alongside numerous videos of people unboxing the gossamer gown and modeling it to their followers, an entire subgenre has emerged of disappointed customers pointing out the flaws in the imitation strawberry dresses they've bought on Amazon or AliExpress. The original has inspired fan art, countless memes of Led Zeppelin, Hannibal Lecter and Gollum Photoshopped into the dress, at least one guitar accompanied ballad and a denunciation from boyfriends in Mel magazine. "I first saw the dress in early ish April and noticed it gaining traction over the last few months," said Avery Mayeur, 20, a content creator and student at Ryerson University in Toronto. "It has exploded in popularity over the last two weeks." According to Lyst, the global fashion platform, searches for the strawberry dress spiked by 103 percent since the beginning of August. Celebrities including Tess Holliday and, more recently, Busy Philipps's 12 year old daughter, Birdie, have worn it. "The second I laid my eyes on it, I immediately fell in love," said Ms. Mayeur, whose video unpackaging the strawberry dress has amassed five million views on TikTok. "It reminds me of something you would wear to go to a field with your dog or have a picnic by the lakeshore." Ms. Mayeur coveted the dress so deeply that she drew an image of an anime character she invented, Hina Tskuru (who inhabits the "My Hero Academia" universe), decked out in Lirika Matoshi duds. Her followers loved the rendering so much that they began donating to her KO Fi account in droves, and eventually she amassed enough money to buy the dress. "It was shocking that my followers cared about me so much and wanted to see me happy that they just gifted this amazing surprise of a dress to me out of the kindness of their own hearts," Ms. Mayeur said. Harley Ann Carter, 22, a recent environmental sciences graduate of George Washington University, who lives in Washington, D.C., and whose pronouns are they and them, first saw the strawberry dress when Tess Holliday, a model and actress, wore it on the Grammys red carpet in January. By May, they had saved up enough money from working at their part time job at a grocery store on a military base to splurge on the dress as a self bought birthday present: "It makes me feel like a princess." Serena Pinuelas, 22, a nonbinary ceramist from Portland, Ore., said, "The dress just really just sparks joy in people during such an unsettling time. It's kind of like a symbol of hope and empowerment, almost." Mx. Pinuelas became obsessed with the strawberry dress from the minute they first saw it on the designer's Instagram. When it arrived in the mail, "I basically had a little mini heart attack because I was so excited." The experience of wearing the dress is "probably the best I've felt in a few months," they said. Incongruously, a special occasion gown has taken off during a period in history when events have become verboten. "It looks like something you'd wear to a ball or something you'd get married in," Ms. Carter said. But maybe this is precisely the reason for the dress's popularity? "It gives off a vibe of softness and something delicate and unique in a time of trouble," Ms. Mayeur said. The garment suggests to her "fun times in the future where you can just go out and have fun and not have to worry about getting sick." The designer, Lirika Matoshi, said the dress is based on her own recollections of youth. "It reminds you of better times," she said. But Ms. Matoshi grew up in Kosovo during the war, and her childhood was hardly a frolic through a sweet smelling strawberry patch. "I grew up with horror stories of how much damage the war did to our country, how women were raped and innocent people were massacred," she said. "My only dream was that one day I will travel and I will represent my country and I will help them as much as I can." Ms. Matoshi had expected sales of her diaphanous frocks to fall because of the pandemic; instead, she said, sales have increased 1,000 percent since it went on sale in January. "My whole life is this dress," she said. Not only is the dress the stuff of saccharine dreams, it also looks good on almost every body type. "It's such a flattering silhouette. It makes anyone look like a strawberry fairy," Ms. Mayeur said. "Everyone always looks so happy when they're wearing it because it's such a treat to wear." For those with the time in quarantine, it's also readily made at home. "I'm plus size and they don't carry it in my size I'm a 22 24 so I could never own it, even if I really wanted to," said Sarah Hambly, a 26 year old content creator from Reno, Nev. (Ms. Matoshi stocks up to size 18, with some custom measurements available.) Ms. Hambly, who describes her style as "a mix of cottagecore and dark academia," sewed a strawberry dress using a free pattern from Mood Fabrics and fabric purchased from Etsy and Silk Baron, and posted the experience on TikTok. "I wanted to make a video inspired by the strawberry dress so people who can't own the original but have the skills to sew can at least have their own version of the dress," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
NISSAN entered the North American market for full size commercial vans on Thursday as it began production in Mississippi of the 2012 NV series. The boxy NV seeks to penetrate a sizable, if easily overlooked, chunk of the light vehicle market that has long been dominated by the Ford E Series and the Chevrolet Express. In recent years, Daimler has carved out a slice of this market with the Sprinter, sold under both the Mercedes Benz and Freightliner brand names. The NV is produced at the Nissan assembly plant in Canton, Miss., that also builds the Altima sedan, Titan full size pickup and Armada sport utility vehicle. The plant, which opened in 2003, has undergone a two year, 118 million expansion to accommodate production of the big van. The factory has the capacity to make a total of 400,000 vehicles a year. The rear drive NV with body on frame architecture, like most trucks is scheduled to go on sale in the spring at a base price at 25,570. Buyers can choose among three versions, two engines and two roof configurations. The basic NV1500 comes with a V 6 engine only. The NV2500 HD comes with a V 6 or V 8, and the NV3500 HD has a V 8 only.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Dan Spilo, second from left, was kicked off "Survivor" after an off camera incident. He had previously been accused of inappropriate touching by another contestant. Is "Survivor" real life or is it a show? The CBS reality competition, in which contestants vote one another off an island week by week as they fight for a million dollars, likes to see itself as both: a snow globe version of the world, a "social experiment," as the producer Mark Burnett calls it, in which human nature plays out under pressure and on camera. With the inept, shameful, evasive way it handled sexual misconduct on its set, Season 39 of "Survivor" has indeed been a microcosm of the larger world at its absolute worst. The reality that this season depicted is a depressing one: the reality of how women's complaints are downplayed and how a big money operation can fail to do the right thing even when, literally, millions of eyes are watching. Wednesday's episode abruptly ended with the cryptic announcement that a contestant, Dan Spilo, had been ejected from the show after an "incident." But regular viewers knew that this was just another twist in a story that had tarnished the season. From the beginning of the season, female contestants had complained on camera that Spilo, a Hollywood talent manager, had touched them inappropriately and the cameras caught examples of the behavior, as when viewers saw him cuddling women at night. When one contestant, Kellee Kim, raised the issue of Spilo's touching in a later episode, the producers interviewed contestants and met with him separately. But he was let off with a warning, while Kim who was in tears describing her discomfort to producers was voted out later in the episode, in machinations that included other contestants using the charges to trick her into thinking she had their support. In a statement, Kim said, "While Dan's dismissal has validated the concerns I raised from the beginning of the season, I wish that no one had been subjected to this type of behavior." The show itself has so far reacted with vague blather about "privacy" and "confidentiality." (The Times was unable to reach Spilo for comment; he has denied any misconduct.) You always have to be conscious, reality TV fans know, of the difference between what you see on the screen and what the producers aren't showing you. One also has to keep in mind that the producers have had months since the show taped to construct this story, knowing that they had a giant public relations stink bomb ready to explode on them (compounded by who knows what legal agreements or threats). But we've seen enough to know that the show screwed up. Watching "Survivor" bungle Kim's complaints, well into the MeToo era, was like watching a recurring nightmare: A woman is touched inappropriately, she speaks up about it, her concerns are minimized or paid lip service. Oh, but she'd have been treated better if only there were proof, right? Ha ha, guess again! Even when there is video documentation even on a show whose premise is constant surveillance the behavior still continues and the business that she complains to still does next to nothing. What's more, she's the one who suffers for speaking up. It felt like an old, appalling rerun. The initial lack of consequences for Spilo recalled another reality TV personality, Donald J. Trump, elected after he bragged about grabbing women by the genitals on the "Access Hollywood" tape, an appearance that was a product of his stardom on "The Apprentice" (produced by Burnett for NBC). Almost as infuriating as what "Survivor" did, or didn't do, have been its rationalizations. In interviews, the host, Jeff Probst, congratulated the show for using the incident as a teaching moment: "This is a precise microcosm of what happens in the workplace," he told Entertainment Weekly. But to The Hollywood Reporter, Probst also said, "What 'Survivor' offers that is different from the workplace is the opportunity to vote someone out." Baloney. "Survivor" is no different from "the workplace," because "Survivor," whether it wants to say so or not, is a workplace. In a workplace a morally and legally responsible one, anyway just imagine if you responded to documented misconduct by telling your employees: Well, you deal with it if you don't like it. Imagine telling them the only way for them to get rid of their inappropriate co worker was through a public vote, at risk of personal loss and possibly being voted out themselves? Then imagine putting the whole thing on broadcast TV as a lesson to America in what happens when you speak up. If a "Survivor" contestant had punched someone, does anyone think that the show wouldn't boot them immediately? Of course not. If you've watched even a single season of "Survivor," you know how cautious the show is about safety. Someone collapses from the heat, the medics come in and the producers make a decision about whether the player can continue. There's no hemming and hawing. No one takes a poll. No one pretends that a heart attack on "Survivor" is different from a heart attack in "the real world." Because that would be moronic. Sexual harassment is not just a cultural issue. It's a safety issue. You either treat it like one or you don't. If "Survivor" did, it would have never had to deal with "another incident," because it would have listened to women and done the right thing in the first place. But CBS as a culture has a record of cluelessness when it comes to doing the right thing on sexual harassment. Its chief executive, Les Moonves, was ousted, eventually, after revelations of egregious abuse over many years. Charlie Rose was swept up in the MeToo reckoning, again only after years of misconduct. And CBS has acted deaf, dumb and blind in handling cases on individual shows, keeping on Michael Weatherly, the star of "Bull," even after it paid a 9.5 million settlement to the actress Eliza Dushku, who said she was axed from the show after complaining about Weatherly's inappropriate comments. CBS fired a former showrunner of "N.C.I.S.: New Orleans," but only after a long history of inappropriate behavior allegations. The network has been accused of creating a culture in which harassers and misogynists thrived. If that's how it works on top of the CBS mountain, why would it be any different on the island? "Survivor" loves metaphors "On this island, fire represents life" and all that. It sometimes seems to view itself as a metaphor for, and thus separate from, the real world. Players regularly distinguish between "the game" and "real life." Its gameplay requires a kind of moral compartmentalization, which is relatively innocuous when it involves, say, lying to someone about your vote at a tribal council. But ultimately, "Survivor" is a real thing that exists in the world. Sexual misconduct on "Survivor" is not a metaphor for sexual misconduct. It is an actual action that happens to an actual person. "Survivor" is not a metaphor for a workplace. It is a workplace, not just for the crew and producers but for the contestants, who sign contracts, make money and contribute to the product of a multi million dollar business. For the sake of its cast and crew as well as the message it's sending to millions of men, women and kids in its audience "Survivor" needs to start acting like that. It needs to confront, in its regular post finale special, how it failed, why it was wrong and what it's going to change. "Survivor" may construct its own reality for entertainment. But this isn't a game.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The idea for Wolf Friends started with a feeling familiar to all mothers: Uh oh. In 2014, Carissa Tozzi had been told her son, Wolf, who was 4 at the time, might have "sensory issues," a catchall term that could mean anything from not liking the feeling of clothing tags to being capable of a full on freakout when the lights are too bright. Mrs. Tozzi, a brand consultant and Pinterest enthusiast, eagerly dived into the world of therapy websites to find products that might help her boy. "I was overwhelmed by this sense of doom and gloom," she said in a recent interview. The sites were a mishmash of garish colors and plastic gewgaws, and it appeared the products had been photographed with a 1976 Kodak. Children were in the photos, but sparingly, often with little connection shown between the product and the way it was to be used. Mrs. Tozzi wondered if she were the only one bothered by the cheesiness of these sites, and began talking to friends who had children with various conditions. One was Gena Mann, a fellow resident of Fairfield County, Conn., and a former magazine colleague, who had four children, including two sons with autism, one severely affected. (Her husband, the songwriter and producer Billy Mann, is a board member of Autism Speaks.) Mrs. Mann was also no stranger to sport shopping, and she also hated the sites where she was forced to buy things for her sons. Together, they realized that if you were someone who really cared about fashion and design and Mrs. Tozzi was the kind of person who, in second grade, went to the mat with her mother over the right to wear clogs these sites ratcheted up their levels of anxiety. And thus Wolf Friends was born, a lush, inspirational platform of fashion and design for children up to around the age of 10 who happen to have disabilities. "Happen to" is the operative phrase. There is nothing visually about wolfandfriends.com that makes this obvious, and that's the point. There is a very welcome sense that not typical children are not special; they're just a part of our world. The look is upscale and Real Simple like, which is not surprising considering both Mrs. Tozzi and Mrs. Mann worked in magazines. (Before having children, Mrs. Tozzi was a publicist and celebrity wrangler, and Mrs. Mann was a photo editor; they became friends while working together at Cosmo Girl.) The furnishings and toys could be appropriate for any child, but here they are explained in terms of their developmental and therapeutic functions. For example, a blog post about having a designated place for your child to do schoolwork leads to half a dozen adorable wood desks but also includes a few words from a psychologist "Neuroimaging clearly shows that individuals" with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder "have different pathways of communication in the brain when compared with 'typical' individuals" and an explication of the importance of modeling organization to children with A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. The swings on the site are just swings, but the text explains how they can calm a child who's overstimulated. And what looks like a pretty children's bedroom taken from Pinterest (it is) is broken down into its sensory friendly elements: the fabrics on the bed, a tent or bed canopy for muffling noise, and a white noise machine for muffling make that drown out everything else. (Wolf Friends does not make or sell the items featured on the site; it links to places that do.) Mrs. Mann was particularly focused on items that help her sons, particularly Jasper, now 13. "He never really plays with toys," she said, "so the most important items were active things, the swings and bean bag chairs and climbing mats." The friends of Wolf Friends have their own blog, with articles on subjects like the uses of dollhouses for socially impaired children (complete with a cute dollhouse) and articles about raising a child with Down syndrome and what it's like to be the sibling of someone who is different. That piece, titled "The Look" to describe the way other people sometimes look at her and her family when they are out in public together, was written by Mrs. Mann's 9 year old daughter, Lulu, about Jasper, who is prone to public meltdowns. It is by far the most popular page on the site. I sent some parents with special needs children to look at Wolf Friends, and there was a good deal of oohing and aahing at the concept and its aesthetics, but also more than a few protests that the site was too pricey. "Autism is expensive enough already," one friend said. I didn't really see it; I think they have a good range of prices, and maybe there are some people who want to spend 109 for a really well made British shark costume. Still, it's easy to do a little eye rolling at Wolf Friends. Oh, great, another precious curated website for children from two gorgeous, tousled blond stay at home moms. Mrs. Tozzi and Mrs. Mann do indeed look expensive and pampered, which they may be; they are also both savvy and deeply kind, with a come to the rescue mentality. When I mentioned offhandedly that my own teenage autistic son seems as if he'll never be able to tie his shoes and that he's outgrown any of the little children's Velcro models, they individually began researching cool grown up sneakers without laces, landing on the same recommendation for a pair of men's laceless Adidas. For their next step, Mrs. Mann and Mrs. Tozzi are looking for ways to incorporate children with disabilities into the wider community. This fall, they will work with Nibble Squeak, a company that takes over upscale restaurants for family friendly dining events, to host an event for special needs families. As someone whose child only recently learned not to filch the food off the plates of strangers, I know how welcome an evening like this can be. "We'll make the space sensory friendly, and we'll train the staff ahead of time," Mrs. Tozzi said. "Kids can have a bite and some activities, and parents will be in a judgment free zone where they can get an amazing meal." The women have certainly seen how inclusion works when it comes to shopping. Mrs. Tozzi uses her son, Wolf, "who has a lot of opinions, like his mama, when it comes to style," as a focus group for many of the items. And Mrs. Mann? "My 9 year old daughter has long been the beneficiary of my love of shopping," she said. "When listing the talents of everyone in the family, she says that's mine."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Humans, it turns out, can annoy more than just one another. In fact, some animal populations are escaping their Homo sapiens cohabitants by sleeping more during the day, a new study finds. Mammals across the globe are becoming increasingly nocturnal to avoid humans' expanding presence, according to the study, published Thursday in Science magazine. The findings show that humans' presence alone can cause animals across continents including coyotes, elephants and tigers to alter their sleep schedules. "We're just beginning to scratch the surface on how these behavioral changes are affecting entire ecosystems," said Kaitlyn Gaynor, an ecologist and graduate student in environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study. Previous research has found that mammals went from being noctural to being active during both day and night about 65.8 million years ago, roughly 200,000 years after most dinosaurs went extinct. "Species for millions of years have been adapting to diurnal activity, but now we're driving them back into the night and may be driving natural selection," Ms. Gaynor said in an interview.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The new Fox drama "Pitch," about the first female pitcher in Major League Baseball, proclaims that it is "a true story on the verge of happening." The heavily promoted show, which premieres Thursday, already is drawing praise for its groundbreaking premise. But it also raises questions about just how true and how on the verge the story line really is. Could a female pitcher make it into the major leagues anytime soon? And if so, why hasn't she yet? From a scientific standpoint, the answer is yes, she can. While there are some physical obstacles to a woman's pitching in the major leagues, they aren't insurmountable. The larger challenges may be social and cultural, as girls struggle to find opportunities and acceptance in a traditional boys' sport, and boys struggle with the social consequences of being struck out by a girl. "The opportunities for a girl in this country to play baseball after about age 12 are so incredibly limited," says Jennifer Ring, author of "A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball," and a professor of political science at the University of Nevada. "Guys tend to throw bats after a woman strikes them out, and their teammates tease them." Although few people are aware of it, women already do play baseball in the United States at elite levels. The United States National Women's Baseball team, which is part of USA Baseball, just returned from the Women's Baseball World Cup, held this month in South Korea. The United States women had a 6 1 record there, although for the first time in international competition, did not medal. Last year, at the Pan American Games in Toronto, where both men's and women's baseball are among the contested sports, the United States women's national baseball team won gold. Sarah Hudek first played for the United States at age 17 in the 2014 Women's Baseball World Cup. One of that team's ace pitchers, meanwhile, Sarah Hudek of Sugar Land, Tex., 18, last year became the first woman to be awarded a collegiate baseball scholarship, joining the men's varsity squad at Bossier Parish Community College in Louisiana, a program that has sent dozens of its players to professional teams. In her first season, Ms. Hudek, the daughter of the former National League reliever John Hudek, struck out many of the collegiate male hitters she faced. But to date, no female pitcher outside of scripted television has signed an M.L.B. contract. There is, however, no biological reason a woman could not pitch to major league hitters, says Glenn Fleisig, the research director for the American Sports Medicine Institute and a medical adviser to USA Baseball, who has studied the pitching mechanics of both male and female baseball pitchers. "A female pitcher will likely throw a fastball with lower velocity than a male pitcher," he says. "But that is not going to disqualify her from pitching in the majors. If you watch major league baseball, you will see that there is a wide range of fastball velocities among pitchers there. And there is no obvious correlation between those who pitch the fastest and those who are the most successful pitchers." Like professional male pitchers, female pitchers would need to perfect multiple types of pitches, he says, including a reliable curveball, changeup and knuckleball, although that last, slow, loopy pitch requires long fingers and large hands, which some women may not have. But in general, pitching like a girl is very little different from pitching like a boy, Dr. Fleisig says. In a 2009 study of the biomechanics of elite (but not professional) male and female pitchers that he conducted with colleagues, the female pitchers produced slightly less force throughout their fastball pitching motion, from the cocking of the arm behind the back, to the stride forward, and through to the release of the ball itself, than did the male pitchers. Consequently, the top velocity of the pitches by the women was a few miles per hour slower than among the men. Female pitchers might even have a slight physical advantage because their physiology may insulate them against some of the worst physical effects of high speed pitching, says Dr. Steve Jordan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, who treats many professional and amateur baseball players. "Women tend to have somewhat more laxity in their tendons than men," he says. "They are more limber." That looseness, combined with the slower overall velocity of their pitching speed, "could mean that women would be less likely" to suffer the kinds of soft tissue injuries in their shoulders and elbows, he says, that often fell male pitchers and result in season and even career ending surgeries. "If a girl here wants to play baseball, she almost has to play with the boys and the pressure to switch from baseball to softball can be overwhelming," she says. "People will tell her, you're missing out on college scholarships" and may also suggest that she is hurting both her body and possibly male opponents' egos if she sticks with hardball. Playing elite baseball also can be profoundly lonely for a woman, says Ms. Hudek, the Bossier Parish college player and one of the most successful young female pitchers of recent years. "For so long, I thought I was the only one," she says, "because I didn't know any other women" playing competitive baseball. But then a few years ago she tried out for and was accepted on to the women's national team and discovered her tribe. "It was so wonderful to suddenly be part of a team with other women," she says. "The guys I've played with have been great and really supportive," she says. But she didn't feel fully integrated into those all male squads. "I was always the different one. I was always 'the girl' and not just me," she said. Ms. Hudek had moments of success on her college baseball team she was brought in as a reliever in a game against the nation's ninth ranked team, struck out three male hitters and was credited with the win, a feat highlighted on the website of the sports network ESPN. Despite those successes she decided to play only one year with the men's team. This year, Ms. Hudek accepted a scholarship to switch from baseball and instead take up Division I softball at Texas A M University in College Station, Tex., where she will be an outfielder, not a pitcher. "I still love baseball and I plan to keep playing," she says. She hopes to pitch for the U.S. National team whenever her college schedule allows. "But for what I want out of sports right now," she says camaraderie and acceptance, and opportunities to be on the field regularly "I can find that in softball better than in baseball." But for some young women, baseball remains their sole focus, whatever the difficulties. "It's all I've ever wanted to play," says Olivia Bricker, a 16 year old left handed pitcher in Owensville, Ohio. Last year, Ms. Bricker pitched on the varsity boys' baseball team at her high school, recording a 90 percent strike rate and also hitting near the top of the team's order. Freshman Olivia Bricker of Owensville, OH takes a turn at bat on her high school's boys varsity team. Used with permission from The Cincinnati Enquirer and Cincinnati.com Her father, a pitching coach, operates a baseball academy, and when Ms. Bricker was a toddler, "I would take naps right next to the batting cage," she says. "I knew then that it was baseball for me. People keep trying to push me into softball but I just say no." Today she can throw a credible 70 plus m.p.h. fastball, as well as a changeup, curveball, and knuckleball and has plans, she says, to continue baseball pitching until she reaches the majors. "Why not?" she asks. "I may not throw a fastball as hard as some 6 foot guy." She is 5 foot 5 and 125 pounds now. "But if you can throw a breaking ball, you don't really need that much speed," she says. And her breaking ball, says Ms. Bricker, is "pretty good."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
A screenshot from Hulu's 2020 presentation for the NewFronts. Because of the pandemic, the series of events was streamed online this year. Companies like YouTube, Conde Nast and Vice addressed systemic inequality and economic uncertainty while showcasing their new offerings to advertisers. At this time of year, hordes of advertising executives are usually striking deals on yachts in the French Riviera or at meetings in Manhattan, not sitting at home worrying about their future. But the industry, hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, has watched its glamorous midyear calendar morph into a procession of video presentations recorded in bathrooms and backyard sheds. The discussions about audience metrics and targeting technologies have now expanded to include difficult reflections on systemic racism and concerns about an economy in recession. The annual Cannes Lions advertising festival, which was supposed to take place this week in the south of France, was replaced by several days of online sessions featuring companies like Unilever and guests like Chelsea Clinton. The NewFronts, a separate series of springtime events in New York intended to showcase digital platforms such as Snap, TikTok and Roku, were instead streamed online this week. (YouTube sent out thousands of pizzas to accompany personalized videos.) But many in the industry were distracted during the week by a growing boycott against Facebook, which Unilever, one of the largest advertisers in the world, joined on Friday. The effort involves dozens of advertisers, such as Honda, Verizon and Patagonia, that are displeased with the social media giant's hands off attitude toward posts from President Trump amid widespread protests against racism and police brutality. Unilever said it would not run advertising on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter in the United States for at least the rest of the year, during a "polarized election period." The company added in a statement that "continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society." Unilever spent 42.4 million advertising on Facebook in the United States last year, according to the advertising analytics platform Pathmatics. Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer of Procter Gamble, said in an online speech for Cannes Lions on Wednesday that the company would not be "advertising on or near content that we determine is hateful, denigrating or discriminatory." A spokeswoman for Procter Gamble declined to say where the company advertises. Ad agencies like IPG Mediabrands said they were working with companies that wanted to cut ties with Facebook. Coca Cola said on Friday that it would stop all paid ads on social media platforms globally for at least 30 days, but would not join the official Facebook boycott. The company's chief executive, James Quincey, said in a statement that it would use the time to re evaluate its advertising standards and would inform the platforms that "we expect greater accountability, action and transparency from them." Coca Cola spent 22.1 million on Facebook ads last year and more than 18 million on Twitter, according to Pathmatics. Facebook spends billions of dollars a year to keep its platforms safe and works with outside experts to review and update its policies, the company said in a statement on Friday. But it added that "we know we have more work to do." The worldwide uproar over race after the police killing of George Floyd last month was never far from the NewFronts and Cannes presentations this week. YouTube prefaced its session with a message from Susan Wojcicki, its chief executive, that highlighted black YouTube creators like Marques Brownlee and Greta Onieogou. Hulu kicked off its segment with the rapper RZA calling on viewers to "take action, help us fight against this systemic racism," saying "you have the platform use it." Cannes Lions released a study on bias that found that people of color represented more than 46 percent of screen time in ads last year, but were less likely than white characters to be shown working or portrayed as "smart." "As society is changing, Conde Nast is changing," he said. Many of the NewFront sessions were also shot through with anxiety about the advertising industry's health. Ad spending this year, excluding political advertising, will slump 13 percent in the United States and grow 4 percent next year, according to a forecast this month from GroupM, the media investing arm of the ad giant WPP. That estimate assumes that the reopening of the economy will continue without a resurgence of coronavirus cases pushing the country back into lockdown. "When advertisers can't predict what's going to happen in July, it's hard to make any substantial commitments for the remainder of the year," said Christian Juhl, the global chief executive of GroupM. "The underlying economic understanding just isn't in place right now for people to make a good bet." The reluctance to lock down long term contracts has already led to calls for television networks to adjust how they sell space for commercials during the broadcast year, which starts in October. This week, while previewing programs during their Newfront presentations, many digital platforms tried to address the uncertainty by promising performance guarantees and flexibility in contracts. Roku offered clients a range of options, including 14 day cancellations and the ability to quickly remove ads from areas where they are no longer relevant (for example, if local stay at home guidelines shift). "The beauty of digital has always been the flexibility and fluidity; unlike linear television, where you commit to a year and you have some limited flexibility, there is a lot more agility built into the digital ecosystem," said David Cohen, the president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group, which organizes the Newfronts. But this year, he said, "regardless of the media type, there's not going to be a wholesale appetite for committing to a long term deal without the opportunity to optimize or cancel based on business performance." The presentations also promoted technology that would allow viewers to shop directly from commercials. Using QR codes and push notifications on smartphones, Hulu said, viewers will be able to buy directly from companies like Sweetgreen and TheRealReal through ads made using its new GatewayGo format. Conde Nast's Prime Shoppable technology will be featured in online programs from Vogue and GQ. "The Drop," a show on Snapchat, will feature fashion collaborations that viewers can purchase while watching. More than 12,500 people registered for the NewFronts, which wrapped up on Friday afternoon with a plea from the event's host, the comedian Scott Rogowsky. "If you're a brand, don't be scared," he said. "Stand up this is your moment."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
MISSOULA, Mont. This past week of coronavirus chaos brought a familiar feeling: a moment of confusion and weightlessness then an immediate fall, like a cartoon character who ran out of solid road. As a single mother for 10 years, I brought in around 12,000 annually. I mainly worked as a house cleaner just north of Seattle, while I put myself through college. Financial security, even if it meant 20 left after paying bills, was out of reach. We always seemed to run out of money before we ran out of days in the month. I'm far beyond those years of domestic work, but since my memoir, "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive" was published last year, I became known for them. People often approach me with questions, and it has amazed me how many, in hushed tones, ask how much they should pay their own house cleaner. Over the last few days I've received emails and direct messages asking for my advice on how, in light of the novel coronavirus, to approach canceling their house cleaner. Should they blame social distancing and empathetically wish them the best? Absolutely not. As their private employer, pay the person who works in your home at their full, usual rate for any missed hours. If you can't get over the "no work, no pay" mind set, think of it as an accrued benefit like paid leave, sick pay, or vacation days. They are probably overdue. Most importantly, remember that the estimated 2.5 million domestic workers in this country are an invisible, undervalued population. Those who work in our homes are human beings who, in the face of Covid 19, have no child care, no income and will probably face severe housing insecurity in the months to come. Though I worked both for a cleaning company and for private clients, my job offered no benefits. If my car broke down, my back went out, my kid was too sick for day care, or if a client canceled their cleaning, I had no savings or paid leave to cover lost wages. Unexpected expenses or loss of income, even 20, all mattered. I shuffled expenses to figure out what bills could be paid and which ones could be put off. Rent for our studio apartment always went first, then the electric bill, then payments on credit cards. On the rare occasion I called off work, I did it in fear of being fired. I didn't have the ability to speak up, say no or protest for fear of losing a job that, after applying to countless diners, coffee shops and offices, was my only option. I begged both my boss and my manager to let me work more. They only considered me for extra hours if I had a near perfect record of attendance. As a low income worker, my take home pay, at best, was about 200 a week. I received assistance from the government for food, child care and utilities. They call these programs safety nets, but they're more like rickety life rafts to keep you barely afloat. For many domestic workers with children older than 6 who rely on government assistance like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps) it is vital for them to work 30 hours a week. Without meeting those hours, they risk losing that benefit for as long as three years. It's unreasonable to expect people who scrape to get by to have emergency savings. For one, if they're on SNAP or similar programs, in some states their total assets cannot be more than a few thousand dollars. Whenever I tried to save money during those years it was immediately gone, to make up for lost work hours or even to purchase something as small as a new kitchen sponge. I stopped trying and spent the extra five bucks on a treat for my kid instead: a package of raspberries or a Happy Meal. There was no investment in the future because the future was unimaginable. There is no planning in a life of fighting to keep a roof over your head. It's pure survival. Low income workers whose main job is to make our lives easier now face a life a hundred times harder without the stability of income. Losing even two weeks of work means unpaid rent, a car without gas and the type of hunger that gnaws at you more than the worst kind of stress. Social distancing is forcing us to make decisions that go against our capitalistic nature: to cut back. Remember who this affects the most the hourly wage workers who have no option to work remotely, no safety nets and, still, families to feed. We already have more than 11 million children who are food insecure, and that's about to get a lot worse. Do your part to help.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
In the hills and dales of Pradagonia a terrain of the mind rather than the land, an urban aspiration for an out of reach wilderness the fleece reigns supreme. Fashion in recent years has been captured by a wild yearning, if not to visit the great outdoors, at least to dress for it. The chunkier the sneaker, the fatter the price tag. The tougher the puffer, the closer to God. But in at least some corners of this movement soi disant "Gorpcore, " as in the hiker's snack there is no piece like the fleece, and no fleece like Sandy Liang's. Ms. Liang is a New York women's wear designer, city born and reared, the country at a comfortable remove. But a few years ago, drawing inspiration from the hand me downs of her youth, she tried to make her own version of a garment she had hated having foisted on her as a child : the nubby winter layer well known to anyone who has stopped by a Patagonia shop. The fleeces were not an immediate hit. "Not too many stores ordered them," Ms. Liang said in an interview, but those that did generally sold well. Her version, which might incorporate flashes of neon lining, or bold patches of leopard print gave a staple new life. She continued tweaking the designs and kept them in her collections, and demand only continued to rise.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Morgan Dixon, the show's chief manicurist , talks about her inspirations for the best dressed hands on TV. The aesthetic direction of "Claws," a show starring Niecy Nash and Karrueche Tran, is a lesson in maximalism. An example in just one outfit: In episode two, Desna Simms, played by Ms. Nash, wears a yellow and black cheetah print dress, thigh high boots covered in black tassels and a cheetah print purse (which does not technically match the other cheetah print) all paired with electric blue French tip nails. The show, which returned to TNT on June 9, is about five South Florida manicurists who are introduced to the drug trade when Ms. Simms, the owner of the nail salon, decides to launder money for a nearby "pill mill," a pharmacy that sells too much painkiller and is located in the same strip mall. The manicurists in her salon follow suit. Behind all the acrylics and gel and press on and polish is Morgan Dixon, 28, who started as a nail technician on the first season and now runs the show's nail department. She and three other artists make all costume decisions relating to fingers and toes ostensibly the main characters' stock in trade. She works with Dolores Ybarra, the show's costume designer, to create each look and they only abide by one rule: nails should rarely, if ever, match the outfits. Why? Ms. Dixon want to make sure their hands stand out. She has multiple Pinterest folders stuffed with digital inspirations for the nail art for each of the different characters. Ms. Dixon spent part of her adolescence growing up in Jacksonville, Fla ., studying art history and international relations at the local University of North Florida. But she said she gets much of her inspiration for the "Claws" looks outside the classroom and through observing everyday life in Jacksonville: "The retirement community, the palm trees, the hood, crab trays, the beach, airbrush tees," she said. That said, she still sees the manicure as a distinct form of artistry, one that is not so different from what she studied in school. The look: A twist on the French manicure "O.G. nail appreciators know the French mani was a real bossy look," said Ms. Dixon about the main character's manicure. Her nails, electric blue tips and gold accents, like Desna Simms herself, are extreme, bold and authoritative to be respected. At the beginning of season one, Desna desperately works to get her girls and herself out of "the game." In season two, she reverses and goes all in on the drug trade: "I made a choice, we all did," she says. And because the character has embraced her boss status in crime (and at a casino), her hands must reflect that. "She wants people to recognize her nails," Ms. Dixon said. The look: Crystals and jewel tone stones that pop behind a hot magenta set "Virginia is all about being boughetto," said Ms. Dixon, mixing the words "bourgeoisie" and "ghetto." Whether the character is working as an exotic dancer at She She's or riding in the passenger seat of Densa's Maserati, she is never without hair knockers, bamboo earrings and sky high heels. And her nails are always done. After Virginia was shot in the last scene of the season two finale, viewers were left wondering if she'd survive. And several months before season three, a clue was revealed on her character's Instagram account. A photo was posted of Ms. Tran, dressed as Virginia, in a frosty, baby blue faux fur coat with a Ring Pop on her finger, her nails a transparent yellow with "coffin shaped" tips outlined in rhinestones. The look: Old town Tampa, Fla. "No matter how crazy her pattern combinations from head to toe, they always go together perfectly," Ms. Dixon said of the character Polly Marks, another manicurist on the show. But that doesn't mean those patterns match. Polly wears prints on print on prints: striped multicolored tops, a poodle skirt with cartoonish Dalmation dogs all over, a patterned scarf around her neck. Her nails are always complementary to the look, but completely distinct. (One particular inspiration for Polly's nails were the Spanish tiles in Tampa's old town district.) "I make sure that whatever they're wearing on their bodies, their nails are going to be an opposite color of the pattern or color scheme," Ms. Dixon said of the "Claws" characters. "In my mind, I'm trying to make these nails stand out as much as possible." The look: Lots of animal prints, flowers and butterflies "Jenn will throw anything on her nails and wants to grab your attention," said Ms. Dixon. Her character, Jennifer Husser, is a southern belle raising two young girls who is currently trying to keep her marriage from ending after her husband found out she cheated . In one scene in season two, the viewer sees a rare moment of Jennifer without her nails done, showing just how bad things had gotten. Ms. Dixon pulls inspiration for Jenn's nails from nature; elaborate butterfly extensions are pasted on the tips. Her nails must "grab the viewers eyes from afar," Ms. Dixon said. The look: Just one long pinkie nail Uncle Daddy , a local crime lord and sometime nemesis to Ms. Nash's character on the show, rocks a single, manicured pinkie nail. One of the most memorable was a wooden nail, complete with a gold framed photo of his wife (who was shot): the ultimate tribute. Offscreen and backstage, his look seems to have sparked a trend. "I had more men asking me if we could make them a pinkie nail than I had a lady crew asking for a full set,' Ms. Dixon said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Watching is the TV and film recommendation website of The New York Times. Sign up for our twice weekly newsletter here. March doesn't just bring madness it also brings new streaming selections. Below are the most interesting of what we've found among the new TV series and movies coming to the major streaming services this month, along with roundups of the best new titles in all genres. (Streaming services occasionally change schedules without notice.) Ricky Gervais's new series, which he also wrote and directed, isn't quite a comedy. Over the course of six half hour episodes his character Tony, a widower who has recently lost his wife to breast cancer, abuses everyone he encounters in his small fictional English town. Tony no longer sees a need to pretend to be friendly to anyone or feign interest in anything, and while his insults and put downs are amusing, his regular threats of suicide are less so. He's a man who has given up on life, but life keeps drawing him back in. (A local widow played by Penelope Wilton sees behind his veneer of misery.) The show is a tough watch at times but Gervais holds our attention throughout. Surprised to learn that the actor Idris Elba is playing this year's Coachella lineup? Don't be: Elba moonlights as a DJ, and has played festivals and clubs around the world. And now he's playing one on TV, in this new half hour series about a washed up DJ named Charlie who is striving for a comeback. Charlie gets a career boost when his more successful best friend requests help with looking after his precocious tweenage daughter Gabby (an adorable Frankie Hervey). The gig has some major perks, chief among them access to his friend's in home recording studio. Elba and Hervey have great freewheeling chemistry, and their affectionate bond is the show's sweet, gooey heart. Bonus attraction: watching Elba show off his skills behind the DJ decks. Amy Schumer recently had to cancel the remaining dates of her latest comedy tour because of pregnancy complications, and anyone wanting to know more about that can now hear in considerable detail. In her latest stand up special, Schumer explains all about hyperemesis gravidarum, a knockout punch of extreme nausea and vomiting that's had her against the ropes for months. ("I throw up an 'Exorcist' amount every day," she says.) The silver uterine lining of it all is her maternal trials have given her some great new material to work with: stories about how her husband, who is on the autism spectrum, has dealt with her multiple hospitalizations and why she was arrested while protesting Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court. And you should really hear her solution to the problem of unsolicited sexting it's pretty certain to shut that nonsense down. Also arriving: "Apollo 13" (March 1), "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" (March 1), "A Clockwork Orange" (March 1), "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (March 1), "Emma" (March 1), "The Hurt Locker" (March 1), "Junebug" (March 1), "Music and Lyrics" (March 1), "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" (March 1), "The Notebook" (March 1), "Stuart Little" (March 1), "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" (March 1), "Wet Hot American Summer" (March 1), "Winter's Bone" (March 1), "Doubt" (March 7), "Blue Jasmine" (March 8), "Juanita" (March 8), "A Separation" (March 15), "Arrested Development" Season 5B (March 15), "Girl" (March 15), "Love, Death Robots" Season 1 (March 15), "Queer Eye" Season 3 (March 15), "The Lives of Others" (March 15), "The Dirt" (March 22), "The OA" Part 2 (March 22), "Santa Clarita Diet" Season 3 (March 29) and "How to Get Away with Murder" Season 5 (March 30). "Catastrophe" began with Sharon and Rob (played by the show's creators Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney) in a panicked state over an accidental pregnancy following a brief fling. As the show has progressed, the couple has grown into their relationship (more or less) and they are now the parents of two kids. They still experience moments of insecurity about the state of their union, and occasionally find themselves on the verge of ending it. (At one point Sharon asks Rob, "Were you unhappy the whole time?") But in the show's final season, this unlikely alliance enters a new, bittersweet phase, one in which we see that love and resentment can coexist, and hope and despair, too. The closing moment is as perfect (and perfectly ambiguous) as a series finale can get. The Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's Oscar nominated film is an enchanting black and white drama about a tempestuous love affair set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a pianist and composer, and Zula (Joanna Kulig), a singer, begin a romance as they tour Poland performing folk songs in service of communist propaganda; they are eventually separated, but over the course of a decade they continue to find a way back to one another, only to lose touch again. This is a haunting story in which silence does much of the speaking. "If anyone asks, that girl does not exist," says the federal agent Marissa (Mireille Enos), trying to preclude public awareness of this show's titular teenage assassin. Based on Joe Wright's 2011 film of the same name, this "Hanna" shares the same writer (David Farr, here the showrunner) and features the newcomer Esme Creed Miles in the role originated by Saoirse Ronan and Joel Kinnaman as Hanna's guardian/trainer. It's nice to see Kinnaman and Enos together again (they co starred in the AMC series "The Killing") and to find that the show wisely swaps out some of the movie's curious aesthetic choices (like the ethereal fairy tale motifs) in order to spend more time on character development, world building and breathtaking action sequences. Also arriving: "The American" (March 1), "Boston Legal" Seasons 1 5 (March 1), "The Widow" Season 1 (March 1), "American Beauty" (March 1), "Big Night" (March 1), "The Chumscrubber" (March 1), "Deep Red" ("Profondo rosso") (March 1), "Little House on the Prairie" Seasons 1 9 (March 1), "Nacho Libre" (March 1), "The Practice" Seasons 1 9 (March 1), "The Unit" Seasons 1 4 (March 1), "Tin Star" Season 2 (March 8) and "Colette" (March 12). It's hard to say what is the most devastating thing about this four hour documentary. It might be the graphic, horrifying allegations of child sexual abuse made by two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, against Michael Jackson. Or it could be the fact that Robson and Safechuck were still unable to emotionally process what they say occurred and speak out as young adults during the singer's 2004 2005 criminal trial, when justice might have been meted out and other children protected. Just as with the "Surviving R. Kelly" series on Lifetime, the accusations themselves furiously contested by Jackson's estate are not new. But the impact of survivors on camera sharing their painful recollections is. The difference now, perhaps, is that the public seems ready to listen. 'The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley' Starts streaming: March 18 "I don't have many secrets," Elizabeth Holmes claims near the start of Alex Gibney's latest documentary. But that's a lie, as was the entire basis for her now defunct health care start up Theranos, which claimed to offer a revolutionary approach to medical blood tests with an all in one testing device that supposedly required only a single drop of blood. Theranos was the Fyre Festival of Silicon Valley an exercise in branding that promised the impossible and duped a lot of famous and influential people. But Gibney has no interest in laughing at the people who fell for the fraud; instead, the filmmaker seeks to dissect the conditions that made the scandal possible. Where was the due diligence? Why wasn't patient safety the foremost concern? This is a cautionary tale with implications beyond the health care industry, and it's necessary viewing. Also arriving: "Angela's Ashes" (March 1), "The Client" (March 1), "Courage Under Fire" (March 1), "Date Night" (March 1), "The Devil Wears Prada" (March 1), "Despicable Me" (March 1), "Drugstore Cowboy" (March 1), "Green Zone" (March 1), "The Grudge" (March 1), "Love Other Drugs" (March 1), "Paper Heart" (March 1), "Taps" (March 1), "Weekend at Bernie's" (March 1), "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" (March 9), "The Case Against Adnan Syed" (March 10), "One Nation Under Stress" (March 25), "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" (March 30), "Barry" Season 2 Premiere (March 31) and "Veep" Season 7 Premiere (March 31). Sign up for our "Game of Thrones" newsletter for a rewatch guide for the first seven seasons. "Hello, I'm Fat," writes the plus size protagonist Annie in the headline of her online essay for a fictional Portland newspaper. Played with one of a kind warmth by Aidy Bryant, Annie is a woman who has always felt compelled to apologize for her overweight existence, responding to casual body shaming with timid smiles and promises to do better. It's a delight to watch as she comes to realize that life doesn't have to be that way anyone who wishes "Dietland" were still around should try this. Also arriving: "American Beauty" (March 1), "Batman Begins" (March 1), "Bruce Almighty" (March 1), "The Chumscrubber" (March 1), "The Cider House Rules" (March 1), "The Crying Game" (March 1), "The Dark Knight" (March 1), "Easy Rider" (March 1), "Edward Scissorhands" (March 1), "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (March 1), "He Named Me Malala" (March 1), "The Ice Storm" (March 1), "Ironweed" (March 1), "JFK" (March 1), "Nacho Libre" (March 1), "Office Space" (March 1), "The Piano" (March 1), "The Pope of Greenwich Village" (March 1), "River's Edge" (March 1), "Saved!" (March 1), "Toys" (March 1), "Witness" (March 1), "Suburbia" (March 7), "Shoplifters" (March 14), "Like Water for Chocolate" (March 15), "Wings of the Dove" (March 15), "Assassination Nation" (March 18) and "Girl Most Likely" (March 20).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Beyond the obvious that liberals need some way to respond to President Trump as he moves to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg what does it mean that mainstream Democrats are considering once unthinkable ideas like adding seats to the court? Perhaps, as some conservatives argue, it's evidence that Democrats aren't as committed to the norms of American democracy as they claim to be. Perhaps, as some hopeful liberals believe, it's evidence that Democrats are finally beginning to buck the timid institutionalism that so often shapes their politics. I take a different perspective. If Democrats are willing to treat a Republican dominated Supreme Court as a partisan and ideological foe, if they're willing to change or transform it rather than accede to its view of the Constitution two very big ifs then they're one important step along the path to challenging judicial supremacy, the idea that the courts, and the courts alone, determine constitutional meaning. The Supreme Court has the power to interpret the Constitution and establish its meaning for federal, state and local government alike. But this power wasn't enumerated in the Constitution and isn't inherent in the court as an institution. Instead, the court's power to interpret and bind others to that interpretation was constructed over time by political and legal actors throughout the system, from presidents and lawmakers to the judges and justices themselves. If judicial supremacy was constructed, then it was also contested, and that contestation is a recurring part of American political life. "The judiciary is not the sole guardian of our constitutional inheritance and interpretive authority under the Constitution has varied over time," the legal scholar Keith E. Whittington writes in "Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History." 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." Fights over the power and authority of the judiciary have been especially fierce at those points in American history when an ambitious president atop a rising coalition has tried to remake the political order according to that coalition's understanding of the Constitution. These presidents, Whittington argues, "achieve 'greatness' through their ability to tear down the inherited but discredited regime and raise up a new one in their own image. They 'reconstruct' the nation by reinterpreting its fundamental commitments." Two instances come to mind. The first dates to the very beginning of the 19th century. In a desperate bid to secure its ideological goals and establish a beachhead against Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans, the Federalist Party under President John Adams fought to consolidate federal judicial authority over state law. Adams lost the election of 1800 to Jefferson, but the lame duck Federalist controlled Congress passed a new judiciary act meant to bind the incoming administration. The act, the historian Gordon S. Wood explains in "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789 1815," eliminated circuit court duty for the justices of the Supreme Court by creating six new circuit courts with sixteen new judges. It broadened the original jurisdiction of the circuit courts, especially in cases involving land titles, and provided for the easier removal of litigation from state to federal courts. The act also removed a justice from the Supreme Court, shrinking it from six members to five. Then Adams, still as the outgoing president, appointed a host of new Federalist judges, including his last secretary of state, John Marshall, as chief justice. Facing this as president elect, Jefferson complained that the Federalists had "retired into the judiciary as a stronghold" from which "all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased." "By a fraudulent use of the Constitution which has made judges irremovable," he added, "they have multiplied useless judges merely to strengthen their phalanx." Rather than let the Federalist Party's rear guard action stand, Jefferson and his allies reversed it following a bitter debate in Congress. They destroyed the newly created circuit courts, revoked tenure from the relevant federal judges and restored the sixth seat to the Supreme Court. Crucially, Jefferson refused to recognize judicial commissions delivered after Adams left office. This led to Marshall's famous decision in Marbury v. Madison, where he reserved for the "judicial department" the right "to say what the law is," which Jefferson later condemned as that which "would make the judiciary a despotic branch." Fifty years later, at midcentury, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and William Seward fought a similar battle against a Supreme Court beholden to the "slave power" that was dominated by Democratic appointees, including Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the Court's infamous majority opinion in the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford. In Dred Scott, the Court ruled that Black Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." It held that Congress could not ban slavery in federal territories, and it struck down the 1820 Missouri Compromise as an unconstitutional limitation on the rights of slaveholders. Backed by much of the Democratic Party, including President James Buchanan, the court effectively outlawed the Republican Party's antislavery platform. The response, as the historian Matt Karp details in a recent essay for Jacobin magazine, was "political war on the idea of an all powerful judiciary." From 1857 through the 1860 election, Republicans attacked the court for, in their view, overstepping its constitutional bounds. They condemned justices as mere political appointees and challenged the court's claim to judicial supremacy, distinguishing its right to decide individual cases from any greater authority to decide the meaning of the Constitution. Lincoln himself made this point to the country at large in his first inaugural address: The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Speaking to the assertion by Southern slaveholders that their interests ought to dictate the fate of an entire nation, Lincoln also said that a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. "Whoever rejects it," he continued, "does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism." President Trump will make a nomination to the Supreme Court and Senate Republicans are very likely to confirm her, whoever she turns out to be. Irrespective of norms or promises, the rules of American politics say that Republicans can take this step, even if it throws the legitimacy of Republican rule which rests on control of an interlocking set of counter majoritarian institutions into sharp relief. But that standard also frees Democrats to act, should they have the opportunity. Democrats are not yet united on court reform far from it. But the skeptical should know that if they do not act, they will not govern. At no point in the last 20 years have the majority of Americans voted to give conservative jurists unchecked power to interpret the Constitution. But those jurists have it, and that gives them the power to unravel the federal government as Americans have known it since Franklin Roosevelt took aim at the Depression. If Democrats win in 2020 and want to deliver on their promises, they will have to do something about the courts. There is no choice other than impotence in the face of a conservative judicial redoubt. The United States may not be a "pure democracy," but it's not a judgeocracy either, and if protecting the right of the people to govern for themselves means curbing judicial power and the Supreme Court's claim to judicial supremacy, then Democrats should act without hesitation. If anything, they'll be in good historical company. 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
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday announced a series of restrictions aimed at combating a growing public health menace flavored e cigarettes and tobacco products that have lured young people into vaping and smoking. And in a bold regulatory move, the agency said it would move to outlaw two traditional tobacco products that disproportionately harm African Americans: menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. The proposed menthol ban would be the most aggressive action the F.D.A. has taken against the tobacco industry in nearly a decade, and it was notable given the Trump administration's business friendly approach to regulatory issues. But the proposal is likely to face a protracted legal battle, so it could be years in the making. The effort to cut off access to flavored e cigarettes stopped short of a ban that the F.D.A. had threatened in recent months as it sought to persuade e cigarette makers like Juul Labs to drop marketing strategies that might appeal to minors. The agency said it would allow stores to continue selling such flavored products, but only from closed off areas that would be inaccessible to teenagers. Some 3.6 million people under 18 reported using e cigarettes, the agency said. "Almost all adult smokers started smoking when they were kids," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency's commissioner, said in a statement. "Today, we significantly advance our efforts to combat youth access and appeal with proposals that firmly and directly address the core of the epidemic: flavors." Still, the plan to sequester flavored e cigarettes in stores, rather than ban selling them, was surprising to many people since details of a stronger proposal leaked out widely from the agency over the past week. Members of Congress sent out news releases, praising the agency for a ban that did not materialize. Federal law already prohibits the sale of cigarettes and e cigarettes to anyone under 18. But lawyers said the agency did not have the legal authority to impose such a ban without going through a long, complicated process that would have inevitably ended up in court. In trying to navigate between public health concerns about nicotine addiction among teenagers and a reluctance to heavily restrict e cigarettes that can help adult smokers quit, Dr. Gottlieb urged manufacturers to police themselves. "We hope that in the next 90 days, manufacturers choose to remove flavored ENDS products" referring to the devices "where kids can access them and from online sites that do not have sufficiently robust age verification procedures," he said in the statement. The mere threat of a ban, which he suggested two months ago, led e cigarette makers in recent days to announced plans of their own that go beyond what the F.D.A. laid out on Thursday. Juul Labs, which is by far the largest e cigarette seller, said the agency's plans would not change its decision, announced this week, to suspend store sales of its flavored pods, except for mint, menthol and tobacco, and to shut down its social media promotions. In addition, the company said it would toughen its online age verification requirements. But it left the door open to resume sales at thousands of convenience stores, gas stations and other outlets across the country, if the retailers use age verification technology, including scanning customer IDs. Public health advocates said they were disappointed with the F.D.A.'s new vaping measures. "Does this mean a simple curtain with a sign like we used to see at the entrance to the pornography section of video stores?" asked Matt Myers, president of Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids. Azim Chowdhury, a lawyer who represents vape manufacturers and vape shops, said that one way for the shops to continue to sell all flavors without walling off displays was to restrict entire stores to consumers 18 and older, a policy that many of his clients were already following. "The F.D.A. seems to be recognizing the value that these products have for adults," he said. "My clients don't want kids to use them either. But adults enjoy flavors, too." Dr. Gottlieb insisted that the restrictions were akin to a ban. "This policy will make sure the fruity flavors are no longer accessible to kids in retail sites, plain and simple," he said. "That's where they're getting access to the e cigs and we intend to end those sales." When asked whether a fair interpretation of the new rules might be that convenience stores could sell flavored e cigarettes as long as the products are under the counter, out of sight and inaccessible to minors, Lyle Beckwith, a spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, a trade group, said that he had no comment on that possibility. The F.D.A. said it would provide more detail on how to restrict access at a later date. But Dr. Gottlieb said putting the vaping products under counters would not be sufficient. "What we are envisioning is a separate room or a walled off area," he said. "It needs to be a complete separate structure. A curtain won't cut it." Industry lawyers challenged the commissioner's authority to impose such requirements. "The Tobacco Control Act is clear that the F.D.A. can't discriminate against one type of retail outlet and that's what they're trying to do here," said Doug Kantor, counsel to the National Association of Convenience Stores. "There is a very good chance this will end up in litigation and lawyers are looking at that right now." Critics said that exempting menthol and mint e cigarettes from the restriction was misguided, because of the large number of youth vapers who buy them. But Mr. Chowdhury considered Juul's pre emptive move to limit visible flavors to mint, menthol and tobacco shrewd. If indeed a ban on menthol cigarettes is enacted, he said, "Juul is in a good position to offer an alternative product for smokers who are used to their menthol flavor. Because Juul has market dominance, they stand to benefit from an ultimate ban." But a prohibition against menthol cigarettes would have to clear the usual federal regulatory hurdles, a process that could take at least two years. If successful, the menthol ban could make a significant dent in cigarette sales. Menthol cigarettes account for about 35 percent of cigarette sales in the United States. Answers to common questions about the health effects of e cigarettes and teenage vaping Murray Garnick, the general counsel for Altria Group, which sells vaping products like MarkTen Elite and Apex through its Nu Mark subsidiary, said in an email that the tobacco giant welcomed the F.D.A.'s new e cigarette policies. But, he predicted a lengthy debate over the proposed prohibition on menthol cigarettes: "We continue to believe that a total ban on menthol cigarettes or flavored cigars would be an extreme measure not supported by the science and evidence." Kenneth Warner, a public health professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, and longtime tobacco expert, disagreed emphatically with the argument that there isn't enough evidence to rid the market of menthol. "The science is very strong," Dr. Warner said. "This is what the tobacco industry was saying a couple of decades ago about lung cancer the science wasn't strong enough." Menthol, he said, does not cause disease but it does lure more people to smoking and make it more difficult to quit. "If you would remove it," he said, "you would avoid many smoking caused deaths." While smoking rates among adults have reached record lows in the United States, about 34 million people still smoke and about 480,000 die each year from cigarette related deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Several of the major tobacco companies have developed alternatives to traditional cigarettes as the smoking rates declined and e cigarettes became popular. Bonnie Herzog, a Wells Fargo analyst, said tobacco sales for the past year amounted to about 60 billion, with the burgeoning market for e cigarettes, vaping devices and related products reaching about 6.6 billion. Ms. Herzog, a tobacco analyst for Wells Fargo, said it was unlikely that the F.D.A. would succeed in getting menthol cigarettes banned, saying the agency would encounter political opposition as well as industry resistance. The industry contends that restricting sales of flavored e cigarettes will make it harder for adults to reduce their health risks by substituting them for traditional, combustible cigarettes. "Flavors are important for switching," said Dr. Moira Gilchrist, a scientist with Philip Morris International, which wants to sell its IQOS heat not burn device in the United States in tobacco and menthol flavors, during a visit to Washington last month for an F.D.A. public meeting. She added: "The focus should be on what is the right thing to do for the 40 million men and women in the United States would otherwise continue to smoke cigarettes." The tobacco industry has fought to protect menthol for many years, to the frustration of public health activists, especially in the African American community. Menthol is particularly popular among black smokers, and black leaders have accused the tobacco industry of targeting African American communities in marketing campaigns. In a statement circulated upon news of the ban, the NAACP, National Urban League, the National Medical Association, and the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council said a menthol ban is long overdue. "While we're saddened by the number of lives lost and new smokers addicted over the past decade, we're pleased that the F.D.A. is moving in this direction," said Delmonte Jefferson, executive director of the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network. The group also praised the agency for taking on flavored cigars. "Little cigars like Black Milds and Swisher Sweets are heavily marketed to African Americans and are often cheaper in our neighborhoods," said LaTroya Hester, a spokesman for the network. "A lot of young, black kids don't know that cigarillos are just as dangerous, so hopefully this will send that message. This is a huge step in protecting their health it's about time our young people are prioritized."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Opportunity, the longest lived roving robot ever sent to another planet, explored the red plains of Mars for more than 14 years, snapping photos and revealing astonishing glimpses into its distant past. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead. "It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, said at a news conference. See pictures from the Opportunity rover's journey across Mars. The golf cart size rover was designed to last only three months, but proved itself to be an unexpected endurance athlete. It traveled more than the distance of a marathon when less than half a mile would have counted as success. As it moved across the surface, Opportunity provided an up close view of Mars that scientists had never seen: fine layers of rock that preserved ripples of flowing water, a prerequisite for life, from several billion years ago. On Tuesday night, NASA made one last call to Opportunity, which was silenced last summer by a giant dust storm. There was no reply. "It was an incredibly somber moment," said Tanya Harrison, a member of the mission's science team who was present in Pasadena, Calif., at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the final attempt to reach the rover. "Just waiting for the inevitable, basically." The rover has been quiet since June. During the dust storm, Opportunity's solar panels could not generate enough power to keep the spacecraft awake. NASA had hoped that once the skies cleared, the rover would revive and continue its work. Last fall, the space agency announced it would spend just a month trying to reconnect with Opportunity. "There were some that were willing to give up quite quickly, but there was a huge backlash," Dr. Harrison said. "We didn't feel like the rover was being given a fair chance." NASA relented, but as time passed, the odds grew that the mission was finally over. Perhaps the solar panels became encrusted in a thick layer of dust, or some crucial electronic component broke down in the extremes of Martian weather. Unless astronauts on Mars one day can take a look at Opportunity, what dealt the lethal blow will likely remain a mystery. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 24, 2004, three weeks after its twin, Spirit, which set down on the opposite side of the planet. NASA was looking to rebound from two embarrassing failures in 1999. A mix up between English and metric units caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to be ripped apart in the atmosphere. Three months later, the Mars Polar Lander vanished during its landing. An investigation found that the spacecraft likely had shut off its engines too early and plummeted to its destruction. Steven W. Squyres, a Cornell astronomer who serves as the mission's principal investigator, had been selected to oversee the scientific instruments for an Opportunity like rover that was to launch in 2001. Because of NASA budget limits, the rover was changed to a stationary lander. After the 1999 failures, the Mars lander mission that was to launch in 2001 was canceled. The question became what to do in 2003, the next time that Earth and Mars would be close enough to send another spacecraft. One option was to put Dr. Squyres's instruments back on a rover, a scaled up version of the successful Pathfinder mission in 1997. Daniel S. Goldin, the NASA administrator, was initially skeptical, but agreed. Then he asked: Why not two rovers? A pair would provide redundancy, and allow exploration of two different regions of Mars. Three days before Opportunity's landing, the entire mission appeared to be in jeopardy. Although it landed successfully a couple of weeks earlier, Spirit suddenly stopped talking. Engineers scrambled to figure out what had gone wrong and whether Opportunity was susceptible to the same flaw. "There was a period of time when everyone was concerned that we were at risk," said Peter C. Theisinger, who was then project manager. The engineers figured out the problem and started nursing Spirit back to health. Opportunity then landed perfectly and hit a scientific jackpot immediately, ending up in a small crater with exposed bedrock. The bedrock was made of finely layered sedimentary rocks that formed in water several billion years ago, but these waters were highly salty and acidic. "In reality, we were mostly talking about sulfuric acid on Mars," recalled Dr. Squyres. "Habitable, yes, but it was no evolutionary paradise." Over the years, Opportunity explored a series of larger and larger craters. At the rim of the biggest, the 14 mile wide Endeavour Crater, the rover discovered bedrock that was older than the crater, lifted upward but not broken apart by the impact that had formed the cavity. The rock contained clays, which would have formed in waters that were pH neutral or slightly alkaline. "This was water you could drink," Dr. Squyres said. That environment might have been habitable for microbes, had any been on Mars long ago. However, the rover was not carrying instruments to search for molecules that might have hinted at ancient life. Still, the evidence offered a picture of early Mars: a once habitable environment that became harsh, as volcanic eruptions turned the waters acidic and the entire planet dried out. At the beginning, the mission was a dash, with the scientists trying to squeeze out as much data as they could before Spirit and Opportunity died. The designers of the vehicles expected that dust settling from the Martian air would pile up on the solar panels, and eventually the rovers would fail from lack of power. Unexpectedly, gusts of Martian winds repeatedly acted as cleaning events, wiping the dust away. NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, continues to explore another part of Mars, a crater that was once filled with water. In addition to NASA, China and a joint European Russian collaboration are also planning to send rovers to Mars in 2020. A generation of planetary scientists grew up with Opportunity. In 2004, Abigail A. Fraeman was a junior in high school who was selected by the Planetary Society to go to Pasadena and take part in the rover mission. She was with the scientists on the night of Opportunity's landing. "It was the coolest night ever," Dr. Fraeman said, and it inspired her to choose this as her career. She has been the deputy project scientist for Opportunity since 2016. Dr. Harrison was a college student when the mission started and that she knew she wanted to work on a rover like Opportunity. "I never knew I would get to work on Opportunity 15 years later," she said. She said that at the end of the night on Tuesday Dr. Callas phoned operators of a radio dish in Australia, part of the network that NASA uses to communicate with its interplanetary voyagers. He thanked them for 15 years of work with Spirit and Opportunity, and said he was now signing off. "There had been a lot of talking and laughing and whatnot between crying and hugging," Dr. Harrison said. "As soon as that moment happened, it just went silent."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Before seeing the new dance play "Pearl," the chief questions in my head were: "Why tell the life of the writer Pearl S. Buck in dance? And how?" But this production at the David H. Koch Theater, directed and choreographed by Daniel Ezralow, answers those quickly, repeatedly and variously. Pearl Buck's life was one of cultural dualism, combining East and West, principally in China and America, and she was an observer. So the stage, which has a curving channel of water across it, like the U bends of a meandering river, repeatedly gives us two different realms, as well as more than one Pearl (the viewer, the writer, the rememberer). Something immediately appealing is the sheer multiplicity of stage action: We're shown a China in which three or more different things (often forms of agricultural work) are happening at the same time, with separate yet harmonious dance rhythms. When we first see and hear American rhythm ragtime, when Pearl goes to college in the States its cuteness comes as a shock. Since Pearl becomes a prizewinning Western writer whose best seller "The Good Earth" is adapted into a Hollywood movie, the staging's cultural variety keeps up. Pearl is always set somewhat apart from whatever world she inhabits. She does have one marriage, but leaves it; she later forms a more important relationship with her publisher, and their independence from the brouhaha that surrounds her work is touchingly established. There are all kinds of theatrical effects: typography as she writes, newsprint as she becomes famous. Her final life the publisher, after marrying her, dies is one of peopled solitude. She is set apart from China, but yearns for it. The stage around her has individuals and multitudes. In one scene, she sees a series of individuals die; in another a coup de theatre people rise out of the river, as if summoned by her thoughts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
NICOSIA, Cyprus Europe's surprising decision early Saturday to force bank depositors in Cyprus to share in the cost of the latest euro zone bailout set off increasing outrage and turmoil in Cyprus on Sunday and fueled fears that the trouble will spread to countries like Spain and Italy. Facing eroding support, the new president, Nicos Anastasiades, asked Parliament to postpone until Monday an emergency vote on a measure to approve the bailout terms, amid doubt that it would pass. The euro fell sharply against major currencies ahead of the action, as investors around the world absorbed the implications of Europe's move. In an address to the nation, Mr. Anastasiades painted an apocalyptic picture of what would happen if Cyprus did not approve the strict terms: a "complete collapse of the banking sector"; major losses for depositors and businesses; and a possible exit of Cyprus from the euro zone, the 17 countries that use the euro as their currency. He said he was working to persuade European Union leaders to modify their demands for a 6.75 percent tax on deposits of up to 100,000 euros, a move that would hit ordinary savers. "I understand fully the shock of this painful decision," he said, speaking with a grim look on his face as he stood between the Cypriot and European Union flags in the presidential palace. "That is why I continue to fight so that the decisions of the Eurogroup will be modified in the coming hours." The Eurogroup is made up of the 17 euro zone finance ministers. By size, Cyprus's economy represents not even half a percent of the combined output of the 17 euro zone countries. Yet the impact of this weekend's decision by European leaders to impose across the board losses on bank depositors from the richest Russian oligarchs, who have increasingly deposited their money in Cyprus's banks, to the poorest Cypriot pensioners in return for 10 billion euros, or 13 billion, in bailout money could not be more far reaching. After five years of bailouts financed largely by European taxpayers, wealthy European nations have decreed that when a bank or country goes broke, bond investors and perhaps even bank depositors will pay a significant portion of the bill. The change is driven in no small part by the growing reluctance by residents of nations like Germany whose chancellor, Angela Merkel, faces an election this year to continue to finance bailouts of troubled neighbors like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and now Cyprus. The resulting turmoil could create a wave of investor contagion that will challenge Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, to make good on his promise to do whatever it takes to protect the euro. On Sunday, it was clear that a majority of Cyprus's 56 lawmakers would not approve the terms of the bailout, which would lead to a likely loss of the rescue money that Cyprus so desperately needs. The government extended a bank holiday it had imposed over the weekend, meaning banks will not open Tuesday as planned. There was talk that they might not open Wednesday, either. In response, the European Central Bank applied more pressure to have the deal approved, sending two representatives to Cyprus on Saturday night to assure Cypriot banks that the central bank was "here for them as long as the bill goes through Sunday or Monday morning before financial markets in Europe open," said Aliki Stylianou, a press officer for the central bank of Cyprus. Mr. Anastasiades's cabinet gathered early Sunday with the heads of the central bank and the finance ministry to discuss how to carry out the levy, should it pass. But some analysts expressed skepticism about the measure's long term effects even if Cyprus approves it. "Whether the Parliament approves the measure or not, the effect will be the same," said Stelios Platis, the managing director of MAP S.Platis, a financial services firm, and a former economic adviser to Mr. Anastasiades. "As soon as banks in Cyprus reopen, people will rush to take all their money out" because they do not believe it will not happen again. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. To some degree, this policy shift was foreshadowed last month when Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the finance minister for the Netherlands who was recently tapped to lead the Eurogroup, forced investors of a failing Dutch bank to pay their share by writing down 1.8 billion euros' worth of high risk bonds to zero. This is the first time depositors have taken a loss in a euro zone rescue, said Adam Lerrick, a sovereign debt expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who has long argued that debt heavy countries in Europe must make private investors, including bank depositors if need be, share the cost of bank bailouts. "It prevented the insolvency from being transferred from the banking system to the government," he said. While such a notion may please the financial hard liners, it carries significant financial risks. Indeed, as many stunned Cypriots rushed to A.T.M.'s to remove their savings, Europe had to confront the prospect that savers in Spain and particularly in Italy where cash poor banks have been hit hard by loan losses would do the same. Public officials in Spain and Italy did their best over the weekend to say that the situation in Cyprus was unique and that deposits in those countries especially Spain, which experienced a period of deposit flight last year remained safe. Also Sunday, George Osborne, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, said that Britain would compensate British government and military personnel based in Cyprus whose finances would be affected by the levy. About 3,500 British troops are based on the island. The tax on deposits is sure to make small banks with bad loan problems in other countries seem all the more risky to depositors as well as to investors holding the banks' bonds. Economists warn that the psychological consequence of such a shock could lead not only to a bank run but a devastating economic collapse and plunge in gross domestic product similar to what happened in Greece. "There has been a huge shock, and fall in G.D.P. will be very large just as it was in Greece," said Alexandros Apostolides, an economist based in Nicosia. "Why would someone keep their deposits in a bank here if he cannot be assured that there will not be another bailout?" Indeed, throughout the weekend many Cypriots were withdrawing as much as they could from their bank accounts. "Why should I leave my money in Cyprus?" said an investment banker who for the past two days had been withdrawing the maximum 2,000 euros he was allowed from his foreign bank account in Nicosia. "I have already instructed my bank to send my entire savings to London when the banks open on Tuesday. A precedent has been set what is to stop them from doing this again?" The contentious talks over how to rescue Cyprus have continued for more than six months and only accelerated in the wake of an election last month that brought into power a new government that promised to impose the austerity measures required by Europe. But when it came to losses for depositors, the government had assured the public as late as this past Friday that this was a red line that would not be crossed. In the capital, Nicosia, the long lines at cash machines Saturday disappeared temporarily mainly because A.T.M.'s had been drained of cash. But on Sunday, at a main branch of Laiki Bank one of Cyprus's two major financial institutions employees were seen inside the darkened building hovering over computers and filling machines with bills. As word got out, groups of people arrived in a steady stream to withdraw money, but not before expressing anxiety over what they said were decrees from Brussels and Berlin that would have implications far beyond Cyprus's shores. The general feeling was that European leaders were using Cyprus to test whether confiscating deposits would work, before possibly applying it more widely. "They are trying to make an experiment with a small country," said Stefan Kourbelis, a manager at the Centrum Hotel in Nicosia's main square, echoing a widely held view. "If it works, the next one could be Spain, Italy and others. If things go badly, they can just say, who cares about Cyprus?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
WHEN Kirsten Sharett met her husband to be, he was living in an industrial area in Long Island City, near a raw and rat infested waterfront. "He worked at the United Nations, so it was really convenient," Ms. Sharett recalled. "But I just thought it was desolate and miserable." That was almost 17 years ago, and never in her wildest dreams did Ms. Sharett conjure up a future in which she would be living with her husband and 3 year old daughter in a sleek rental building on that same waterfront. "I never even considered Long Island City," she said. "It was like, why? It was never even in my frame of mind." A significant reason why, of course, is that That convenience has drawn Manhattanites seeking cheaper rents. Ms. Sharett, who recently moved into a two bedroom apartment at 47 20 Center Boulevard, said that now that she had made the mental shift, she realized she was in the perfect neighborhood. Particularly down by the waterfront, with new restaurants and shops moving in, Ms. Sharett said, she has everything she needs within walking distance. "They've built a compound here, where my daughter's preschool, the drugstore, the grocery, the park are all one block away, and the soccer field is right in front of us," she said. "We could not live like this in Manhattan." It was in 1997, when the Citylights co op was built, that Long Island City's waterfront began the long hike from neglected industrial wasteland to serene residential area. Until 2003, when the Avalon Riverview opened, Citylights was the lone tower taking advantage of breathtaking Manhattan views. Since the early 2000s, a half a dozen more towers have been built, primarily by TF Cornerstone, adding both condominiums and rentals. Christine Ezeogu, a United Nations employee, has lived in a one bedroom in Avalon Riverview North for almost five years. She said that she had thought the global financial recession would lead to a lowering of rental prices, but that except for a renegotiation in 2009, it hadn't. Since then her rent has gone up by about 20 percent. "I haven't seen the prices go down in the neighborhood," she said. "In fact, they seem to be going up." One of several factors in the strength of rental values could be the transformation of the waterfront 12 acres of it so far into Gantry Plaza State Park, which has four piers, garden, a mist fountain, and several playgrounds and ball courts. Part of the project has involved restoring Long Island City's signature gantries, which once loaded barges and rail car floats. The park is still being expanded, in both directions. And more development is planned. Besides two towers it is currently renting out, TF Cornerstone is building an 820 unit rental tower at 45 45 Center Boulevard and plans a 586 unit rental tower at 46 10 Center. The area, called East Coast, is clustered around the giant Pepsi advertisement that has long been a signature element of Long Island City's skyline. Just to the south, at Hunters Point South, the city is planning 5,000 housing units, 60 percent of them affordable to middle income families. The first phase of construction there should finish in 2014. Residential development is also moving inland, brokers said. That includes the Queens Plaza area, as well as the Court Square section around the 50 story Citigroup tower. One of the area's largest projects is under construction in the latter area: LINC LIC, being built by Rockrose Development, has a 709 unit rental tower that is almost complete. Boundaries are often subject to disagreement, but those generally accepted for Long Island City stretch from the waterfront north to 36th Avenue and east to Northern Boulevard, down to Queens Boulevard and Van Dam Street. There are two main residential sections: one sometimes called Dutch Kills, north of Queens Plaza and merging with Astoria; the other, Hunters Point, south of the plaza. Predominant housing has historically been two family homes wood frame or brick which began appearing around 1910. In the more recent developments, the one kind of housing in short supply is the three bedroom, according to brokers. Despite the groups from Astoria, including mothers and children, commuting into Long Island City, some of them daily, to take advantage of the waterfront park, said Eric Benaim, a resident who heads a brokerage called Modern Spaces, his developer clients still consider three bedroom apartments a bit of a risk. Mr. Benaim says he is advising developers to lay out their apartment buildings so that two smaller units can be easily combined. "At the Industry, a building we're representing that's over 90 percent sold now in the Court Square area," he said, "we just sold two five bedroom apartments, where each buyer combined two smaller apartments. One recently closed for about 2.3 million." But the area hasn't yet reached such price heights that no artist can afford to live in it. For many years, artists priced out elsewhere have moved here, though the art scene has never quite coalesced into a bohemia of the likes of, say, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Still, there are galleries and museums. And the Museum of Modern Art has a branch called MoMA PS 1, which throws summertime Saturday parties for thousands. Residents also cite the theater scene. The Creek and the Cave, a bar, restaurant and performance space that has hosted the comedians Louis C. K. and Colin Quinn, has been joined by a comedy club, Laughing Devil. A third comedy club is to open in the Court Square area, said Adrian Lupu, a senior vice president of NestSeekers Real Estate. And there are spaces like the Chocolate Factory and the Secret Theater. New construction studios, which are hard to find, rent for about 2,100 a month; one bedrooms for about 2,500; and two bedrooms for 3,100 or more, Mr. Lupu said. Condos typically range in price from about 400,000, for a studio; to about 550,000 for a one bedroom; and about 870,000 for a two bedroom, Mr. Benaim said. There are a few three bedrooms, in particular at the View on the waterfront, that have been achieving and even surpassing 1 million. As Mr. Benaim put it, "A lot of million plus buyers are coming out now, which we never really saw before." The more reasonably priced apartments, naturally, tend to be in older two family homes, agents said. There are a dozen subway stations in Long Island City; about five of the stations are just a stop away from Midtown. They serve the 7, E, M, R, N and Q trains, among others. Arriving in Midtown can take as little as five minutes, and motorists to and from Manhattan have a choice of the Queensboro Bridge and the Queens Midtown Tunnel. There are also a handful of bus lines, including the 103, 102, 69, 100 and 39. Many residents commute on the NY Waterway ferry from the Hunters Point South/Long Island City stop. From there it is five minutes to the East Side, 25 minutes to the financial district. The Long Island Rail Road also has two stops in Long Island City. Besides the expanding waterfront park, residents like to brag about the trendy new restaurants. A couple of Manhattan spots, Spice and Corner Bistro, recently opened satellites along a block of Vernon Boulevard, the area's commercial strip. Nearby is a new Elliman branch, as well as another pioneer from Manhattan, the medical group Tribeca Pediatrics. "On that block, it's just boom, boom, boom, you see four Manhattan businesses," Mr. Rosa said. "It really gives people that confidence that things are changing here." For the more sports minded, the Long Island City Community Boat House offers free kayaking. In the Queens Plaza area, the city recently completed a 44 million face lift, adding a bikeway, a pedestrian walk and a 1.5 acre space called Dutch Kills Green. Some schools are overcrowded, particularly near the waterfront, but new facilities are going up. A 662 seat school for kindergarten through Grade 8 is under construction at 46 15 Center. There is also a 1,200 seat intermediate and high school under way in Hunters Point South, where a 22,000 square foot library is scheduled to open in 2013. Expecting further growth, public and private schools are expanding. Public School 78Q, which covers kindergarten through Grade 5, has plans for a new facility. Les Enfants Montessori School has expanded to accommodate 100 more students. The area has a handful of middle and high schools, including Long Island City High School at Broadway and 21st, where SAT averages in 2011 were 412 in reading, 433 in math and 410 in writing, versus 436, 460 and 431 citywide. Colonized by the Dutch in the early 17th century, the area remained rural until the mid 1800s, when it was linked to Manhattan by rail and ferry. By 1898, the villages of Hunters Point, Dutch Kills, Astoria and Ravenswood, which had recently joined to form Long Island City, became part of New York City.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Syria's Secret Library Reading and Redemption in a Town Under Siege By Mike Thomson In a region that sways "on the palm of a genie," as the Arabic saying goes, where bullets and explosions are more familiar than bread, you would not expect people to read, let alone to risk their lives for the sake of books. Yet in 2013 a group of enthusiastic readers in Daraya, five miles southwest of Damascus, salvaged thousands of books from ruined homes, wrapping them in blankets just as they would victims of the war raging around them. They brought the books into the basement of a building whose upper floors had been wrecked by bombs and set up a library. As Mike Thomson recounts this unlikely story in "Syria's Secret Library," this underground book collection surrounded by sandbags functioned, as one user put it, as an "oasis of normality in this sea of destruction." There, the self appointed chief librarian, a 14 year old named Amjad, would write down in a large file the names of people who borrowed the books, and then return to his seat to continue reading. He had all the books he could ever want, apart from ones on high shelves that he couldn't reach. He told his friends: "You don't have TV now anyway, so why not come here and educate yourself? It's fun." The library hosted a weekly book club, as well as classes on English, math and world history, and debates over literature and religion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Claire Siebers, right, with Quincy Dunn Baker in "Georgia Mertching Is Dead." The play's three female protagonists become friends while kicking their narcotics habits. Addiction Is the Stuff of High Drama. In These Plays, So Is Sobriety. You can barely swing an empty bottle in an American theater without hitting a classic tale of the perils of tippling and other bad habits. There's Mary Tyrone padding the floors in a morphine haze in "Long Day's Journey into Night"; George and Martha, battling over the baby and over drinks in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf;" and the Skid Row denizens of "The Iceman Cometh," always promising to sober up just not today. A far rarer sight, however, is what happens after the party is over. But with overdoses at troubling heights and recovery no longer a sotto voce secret, a new wave of plays dealing with the realities of rehab and the challenges of sobriety have started to emerge, often created by playwrights who have dealt with such problems themselves. McMullen is the author of "Georgia Mertching Is Dead," which opened last week at the Ensemble Studio Theater and whose three female, 30 something protagonists all became friends while kicking their habits as teenagers, a story that mirrors McMullen's life . In Sean Daniels's autobiographical "The White Chip," the playwright's problem is alcohol, something that cost him the top job at the Actors Theater of Louisville in 2011 after he showed up drunk to several events, including a board meeting to consider him for artistic director. Daniels said he wrote the play's first monologue as he shook and sweated his way through the earliest days of rehab. "I was just trying to process what was happening with me, just as an exercise to get it out," said Daniels, 46, who has been sober for eight years. But, he said, the broader motivation for writing "The White Chip," which opened Oct. 10 at 59E59 Theaters, was also to fill a void. "When I started out, I said, 'I'm going to read all the great books and all the great plays about recovery and all the movies,'" Daniels said, "and there's really not." He added that he also felt that for many working in theater a "very wet industry," as he called it it could be a difficult place to admit you have a problem. "I really thought I was the only person in our industry who couldn't hold their liquor," he said. "And then once I got sober, like every fourth person came up to me and said, 'I'm so glad you're sober, I've been sober for 11 years.' And part of me was like, 'Listen, I'm so happy for you, but where were you two years ago when I was struggling?' Why is it such a top notch secret thing when it would have been great if that had just been part of the conversation?" Drugs and alcohol aren't the only addictions being plumbed for dramatic effect. "Octet," a well received a cappella musical by Dave Malloy that opened at the Signature Theater Company last spring, is set in a 12 step program for internet addicts. It's a topic Malloy found himself writing about after noticing his own increasing time online. "I tend to make work on things that I'm obsessed with," he said. Although he isn't in recovery, Malloy said he visited a variety of addiction groups for research, including those dealing with sex and love, which commonly overlap with people who are addicted to pornography. "What I was most moved by in going to recovery meetings was just the empathy in the room, the way that people listened to each other," Malloy said. "Just the process of seeing yourself in all these stories was pretty powerful." An internet based recovery group was featured in Quiara Alegria Hudes's "Water by the Spoonful," which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2012. As his title suggests, the playwright Adam Bock said he decided to set his recovery play, "Before the Meeting," outside the actual 12 step process, though the central character an older woman working hard to keep sober delivers a 25 minute monologue to what seems like a group of fellow drinkers. "I was interested in writing about what happens after you stop drinking," Bock said. "I am interested in how you live that way." (He wouldn't say whether his own experiences shaped his play, which appeared at the Williamstown Theater Festival in August, but did say , "I don't drink, and I know a lot of people who don't.") Both McMullen and Daniels said that they had written their plays to humanize the people suffering from addiction. McMullen noted that in auditions for "Georgia Mertching," many actors immediately lapsed into heavily rural accents. "There's this immediate assumption of class because they were addicts," she said. McMullen's play is a bawdy comedy set on a road trip to the funeral of another former addict, but it still touches on the challenges of staying straight. ("I'm exhausted by the amount of work it takes for me to be a normal person every day," says one character, herself dealing with a new addiction to sex.) Daniels said he wanted to encourage "a shame free conversation about where we are" in terms of national problems with opiates, alcohol and other substances. "Everybody who comes to it has an uncle, a brother, a cousin, a father," Daniels said. "Everybody is touched by it, and yet we don't talk about it." Daniels, who crashed a car while drunk and destroyed his marriage but rebounded to land the artistic director's job at the Arizona Theater Company, even included a list of possible warning signs about drinking at the back of his manuscript, which he said some audience members have asked for "because they have someone they want to read it." ("Laundry is a several day process" is one such sign of trouble, as well as this: "You use a Brita filter to make your cheap vodka healthier.") The playwrights' good intentions notwithstanding, the topic of recovery brings some specific dramatic challenges. Sobriety is an ongoing effort that often lacks a clear victory. "The conventional form of Western stories beginning, middle, end doesn't do addiction stories terribly well because recovery, in particular, doesn't have a concrete end point," said Duncan Macmillan, the author of the 2015 play "People, Places Things," a harrowing story of a young actress trying to shake off a range of addictions. "Its just something you live with and do every day, every hour, for the rest of your life." Macmillan, who declined to say whether he himself was in recovery, added that "addicts and people in recovery have been really badly served in film, TV and theater" because "a protagonist in a story who is battling with addiction, you need them to either be definitely fixed, which isn't particularly accurate, in terms of the experience of living with addiction, or they just die." "Or," he added, "they become a kind of a running joke: someone always drunk showing up somewhere." (The movie "Arthur" jumps to mind.) The title "People, Places Things" comes from the three elements that are said to often trigger relapse. Macmillan's play features plenty of the jargon familiar to those in treatment, including a scene in which Emma, the actress careering through a breakdown losing the plot while performing "The Seagull" before seeking help. It is not a clean break; her first interaction with an addiction doctor is less than cooperative. "Drugs and alcohol have never let me down," Emma says. "They have always loved me. There are substances I can put into my bloodstream that make the world perfect. That is the only absolute truth in the universe. I'm being difficult because you want to take it away from me." Still, Macmillan said that audiences particularly in the United States, where the production played at St. Ann's Warehouse rooted for the character's recovery . He said his lead actress, Denise Gough, who played Emma, recounted to him that she had been approached by shaken people saying they had quit drinking after seeing the show . The cast also discussed the show in recovery centers and performed it for addicts and therapists during its development and production in London, an experience he called "incredibly humbling and instructive." The unspoken dramatic question hanging over many of these plays is simple: Will the addict overcome the addiction? In most recovery plays, they do, though the looming danger of relapse was part of Craig Lucas's "I Was Most Alive With You," at Playwrights Horizons last year. The play's characters include a father and son, both in recovery. Lucas, 68, has been sober for a decade and a half, and agreed that the disastrous drunk or drug user can be a compelling character. "People behaving badly is fun, fun, fun, fun, fun," Lucas said, singling out Mary Tyrone's troubles in Eugene O'Neill's classic. "'Long Day's Journey' isn't any good if Mom doesn't show up going, 'I was so happy for a time,'" he said. "If she doesn't come in looking like Ophelia on crack, there's no play." But he quickly added that sober life and theater has much to offer, too. Indeed, like many alcoholics, he said, the characters in "I Was Most Alive" are dealing with powerlessness, and "learning to live gracefully with what life presents you." "Whatever the boulder in the road is," he said, "you wrap your arms around it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
When Porsche added the Cayenne SUV to it's lineup, loyalists reacted is if Beelzebub himself would ride in on the first one to usher in doomsday. Funny if it didn't become the best selling vehicle the company makes. So the smaller Macan makes perfect sense. (ON CAMERA) Curious about the name Macan? Porsche says it's the Indonesian word for tiger, which is more exotic than the German word for tiger, which is tiger. Audi Q5 and Macan share an architecture, but consider this There are no common body panels. The front and rear subframes are different, as is the engine cradle. About the only thing carried over from the suspension are the control arms. The stuff not seen (SOUND UP) is definitely felt, putting the sport in sport utility vehicle. It is a Porsche after all (ON CAMERA) Macans driving dynamic feels like you're driving a rear wheel drive car. Easy to forget you're driving a crossover. (SOUND UP CAR GOING BY) What makes it go? Well, in the S model it's a 3 liter twin turbocharged V6 with 340 horsepower and 339 pound feet of torque. (ON CAMERA) Porsche ignition's famously on the left side. I've been reaching to the right all this week. (SOUND UP START AND REV) Dampers, throttle, and transmission response can be fine tuned. There are 7 speeds at your disposal, the legendary PDK dual clutch gearbox is smart, quick, and decisive. We should all be that, huh? All wheel drive is standard. (ON CAMERA) All right, for maximum thrill ride experience, put it into sport mode, foot on the brake, foot on the throttle, and release (SOUND UP) it's just that easy. And lots of fun. It takes five seconds flat to hit 60 miles an hour (ON CAMERA) That's pretty darn quick but the Turbo is faster... uh, this is a turbo engine but there is a Turbo model. More petite than Cayenne, Macan is chuckable fun. The lofty capabilities that keep drivers out of trouble are the same ones that lure them into it. It's very easy to find yourself north of the speed limit... officer. Braking is quite capable (SOUND UP) I'll say it again, it's easy (SOUND UP) to forget this is a useful vehicle. (ON CAMERA) I love the PDK gearbox, listen to the shifts (SOUND UP) lightning quick.. (or very quick this is about perfect) The torque split gauge is a fun distraction. I pushed Macan hard and saw about 17 miles to the gallon on specified premium fuel. Porsche claims, with the right tires, moderate off roading is no sweat. If you like fighter jet cockpits, you'll find this space mighty appealing. A bonus, Macan is much easier to valet park than an F15. Suffer from Koumpounophobia? The fear of buttons? This is not your ride. Perhaps they are compensating for the smaller aging touch screen interface. All body types should find a supportive position in the very adjustable thrones. Switchgear and trim pieces feel as solid and expensive as they look. (ON CAMERA) I am an average 5'9" and would call the space "tailored". It is comfortable but if you want loads of stretch out room in your Porsche SUV, go with Cayenne. It is well appointed back here including side thorax airbags. Tush toasters too. The phrase "two's company, three's a crowd" applies here. Especially with the driveshaft bulge. (ON CAMERA) I pride myself on knowing the basic operation of cars, without consulting the owner's manual but have to admit, the tailgate had me stumped. The release is very stealthy. There's extra storage, I've picked up some ingredients for Melissa Clark. Optional air suspension, makes loading heavy stuff easier, all the good practical stuff is here to make life easier. Well almost everything, it stops at six packs of the two ply, a bundle or two shy of average. Base Macans with a turbo four cylinder start at 48,550. Smothered in options, this V6 S model is closing in on 71 grand. Selling a bunch of them generates profits that make better Boxters, Caymans, and 911s. Contrary to the world ending (SOUND UP) SUVs with Porsche DNA make the world a better place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Some beaches in New York City were formed by glaciers. Others, by Robert Moses. The sparkling sands of and the Rockaways predated him, but much of the way we experience the city's beaches today is a result of Mr. Moses's four decade reign p residing over the New York park system. It started with Jones Beach, his first public work, which was born of a personal obsession and virtually dredged into existence out of a bunch of marshy sandbars. In the spring of 1927, Mr. Moses ordered the largest floating dredges in the United States to be brought to New York City; crews worked for months pulling up sand and piling it into dunes over 10 feet high. The workers tried to break for the winter, when ice began to set in, but Mr. Moses insisted they press on. He made them set up camp on the dredges to keep the pumps running. The solution, landscape architects soon found, was beach grass, which has roots that spread vertically, holding sand in place. The catch: It had to be planted by hand, and there would need to be a lot of it. Thus, hundreds of workers spent the summer of 1928 hunched over, planting Jones Beach. When the park opened in 1929 complete with two bathhouses and a nautical themed boardwalk the crowds far exceeded expectations, and Mr. Moses was praised everywhere he went. The success of Jones Beach won him the credibility he needed to keep carving out state parks, many of them sandy. The paradox of Mr. Moses's beaches was the contempt he had for the people who would enjoy them. He opened up the coastline, but he also worked hard to block access to black and low income families, often in violation of the law. In Robert Caro's 1975 biography of Mr. Moses, "The Power Broker," there is an anecdote about Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, realizing with "shock" the extent of Mr. Moses's disdain for the very people he served. "To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach," she said. But anyone who has passed a summer afternoon on New York's shores knows that to love the beach is to love, or at least tolerate, the people the sprawling families with tents and coolers, the old guys in Speedos, the entrepreneurial types selling homemade cocktails, the kids jumbled up in the surf. Because on a sunny weekend day, the beaches of New York are packed. At the most popular spots, virtually every inch of sand is occupied. It's not a public you can experience at any sort of remove. The first time I went to the beach in New York City, in 2011, I took the subway out to the Rockaways from my apartment in the East Village, riding the L train to Broadway Junction and transferring to the A. I got off at Beach 90 after an hour and 30 minutes in transit and followed my fellow travelers to the sand. I grew up going to the beach in Virginia, a trip that always meant at least a four hour car ride with my family. So there was something delightfully novel for me about the fact that at the other end of the subway system that delivered New Yorkers into the heart of Manhattan each day, there was sea and sand. And more people than I had ever seen on a beach. I'm not sure what I expected. An empty vista? Leisurely shell gathering? I definitely hadn't accounted for the fact that my idea of an escape from the city was the same as everyone else's. I found myself a small patch of sand and settled in, realizing, slowly, that despite the overwhelming numbers, the large mass of people wasn't self consciously a crowd. Sure, people were sprawled out as if they were in their living rooms, nearly naked, practically on top of each other. But most of them seemed to be in their own little worlds. There's an unspoken code of conduct: Give each other space, if not physically then psychically. Everyone deserves a breather everyone needs to soak up some vitamin D, swim in the salt water and let their kids tire themselves out . It may be a little odd that we have to do it crammed together under the blazing sun, but it is what it is. Every one of these excursions is an education in How to Beach. You learn which snacks best serve your dehydrated body. (Watermelon is good. Chocolate bars melt. Salami is ... a choice.) You discover that things like hats and extra clothes and coolers improve the experience significantly. The journey back home is always longer than you remember, so bring a change of underwear. This summer, I took a Monday off work and made another solo pilgrimage to the Rockaways on the A train. I wandered down the coast until the crowds began to thin out only a person or two every couple of yards and spread out my towel. I had a book to read, a granola bar to sustain me and container of cubed watermelon. My phone was tucked away in my bag. I felt, for the first time in weeks, pleasantly alone but also together with the many strangers who had chosen the same day to take a break. In the moments when I needed to feel alone alone, I stared at the horizon. Because out there, at the end of the sightline, there isn't anybody at all.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
WASHINGTON College students, freshly relieved of pressure from term papers and final exams, served as a backdrop for President Obama on Friday as he warned of another impending fiscal deadline: student loan interest rates are set to double in 30 days under current law. "That means that the average student with those loans will rack up an additional 1,000 in debt," Mr. Obama said at an event in the White House Rose Garden. "That's like a 1,000 tax hike." Both Democrats and Republicans say they want to head off an increase in the interest rate for federally subsidized student loans to 6.8 percent as scheduled on July 1, but they disagree about how best to manage the rates' trajectory. Senate Democrats plan to vote to extend the government subsidized rate 3.4 percent for the 7.4 million students with Stafford loans for another two years, while House Republicans approved a measure last week that would make the rate variable, tied to prevailing market trends. "I'm glad the House is paying attention to it, but they didn't do it in the right way," Mr. Obama said. "It fails to lock in low rates for students next year. That's not smart. It eliminates safeguards for lower income families. That's not fair." Republicans, eager to avoid liability for burdening the nation's youngest voters with a big increase in debt, accused the president of "petty partisanship" and blamed the Democratic controlled Senate for inaction. "The differences between the House plan and the president's are small, and there's no reason they cannot be overcome quickly," Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement. "But today, rather than working to resolve the issue, the president resorted to a campaign stunt to try to score political points." The House measure would allow the Stafford rate for undergraduates to reset each year based on the cost of a 10 year Treasury note, plus 2.5 percent, but it would ultimately cap the rate at 8.5 percent. For graduate student loans, known as PLUS loans, the rate would be the Treasury note plus 4.5 percent, capped at 10.5 percent. Mr. Obama said the Republican proposal "could actually cost a freshman starting school this fall more over the next four years than if we did nothing at all and let the interest rates double on July 1." The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Republican plan would put the Stafford rate at 5 percent in 2014 and 7.7 percent in 2018. Like the Republican measure, the plan Mr. Obama proposed in his budget would tie the rate to Treasury notes. But rather than changing each year, an individual student's rate would be fixed for the life of the loan. The Senate will vote on a more straightforward, two year extension of the current 3.4 percent rate next week, according to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. In a statement, he called the House bill a "nonstarter." The Senate bill is "something we would support," said Josh Earnest, a White House spokesman, during a briefing on Friday afternoon. In his own remarks, Mr. Obama essentially called for a repeat of what happened last year when Congress, facing a similar deadline, passed a one year extension of the current rate with bipartisan support. "So this year, if it looks like your representatives have changed their minds, you're going to have to call them up again or e mail them again or tweet them again and ask them: 'What happened? What changed?' " Mr. Obama said. Democrats set the rate at 3.4 percent for four years in 2007, when they controlled the House of Representatives. Republicans said they agreed to the one year extension last year only to make time for a more permanent, budget friendly solution. Mr. Obama called it "deja vu all over again."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
After a period of turmoil and tragedy, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has tapped a new director: Deborah Cullen. A Bronx resident, she is currently the director of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Ms. Cullen, 53, will succeed Holly Block, who served as director at the Bronx Museum for 11 years and died of breast cancer last fall at 58. During her tenure, the museum saw a sizable increase in attendance and made a splash on the international stage, sponsoring the exhibition that represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. "Holly took the Bronx Museum through a period of significant growth and positive change," Joseph Mizzi, the chairman of the museum's board of trustees, said in a phone interview. "Those are big shoes to fill." "That was two years ago and really hasn't played any role whatsoever," Mr. Mizzi said. "It's been a strong, unified board." As the director of the Wallach Gallery, Ms. Cullen oversaw the opening of a new gallery space in West Harlem and was known for championing art from Latin America, the Caribbean and the African diaspora. In 2017 she founded "Uptown," a triennial of contemporary art that showcased artists from in northern Manhattan. "This show hits high, especially when it offers a view of the vibrancy of uptown," Jason Farago wrote in his Times review. The Wallach Gallery estimates it had seven times more visitors last year than in 2012, when Ms. Cullen took over. Before then, Ms. Cullen served as the director of curatorial programs at El Museo del Barrio. In a phone interview, Ms. Cullen did not put forth any specific goals for the Bronx Museum, saying she wanted to get to know the staff and board before making any decisions. She acknowledged the importance of completing the museum's 25 million capital campaign and balancing its communal and global aims. "My history has always been forging collaborations and building connections," she said. "I think that needs to happen both locally within the Bronx and on a more national or even international stage." Ms. Cullen will assume her post in July at a museum that is stable financially. Mr. Mizzi said the museum increased its reserve fund by 200,000 in 2017 and has boosted its operating budget by 10 percent this fiscal year to pay for initiatives including a downtown studio space at 80 White Street. "We'd like to increase the number of people we reach and we'd like to expand our programs," Mr. Mizzi said. Programming is already set through early spring, so it may take a while before Ms. Cullen's ideas are seen in the galleries. Next up at the museum is an exhibition showcasing the sculptures of the Syrian born artist Diana Al Hadid.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
If tourism boards made dances instead of posters, "Club Havana," by the Cuban American choreographer Pedro Ruiz, would be a winning campaign. When Mr. Ruiz created this cheerful work in 2000 for Ballet Hispanico, his alma mater, few Americans had the opportunity to experience the city firsthand. A dance party with splashes of conga, rumba, mambo and cha cha, "Club Havana" is the Technicolor version of Cuba flouncy skirts in rainbow hues, swiveling hips and sly smiles that beckon audiences to visit, which might be possible soon. And now "Club Havana" returns to the Joyce for Ballet Hispanico's spring season (Tuesday, April 5, through April 10). Filling out the program are Gustavo Ramirez Sansano's boisterous "Flabbergast" and Ramon Oller's "Bury Me Standing," a meditation on Gypsy life and culture set to traditional Eastern European and Spanish popular music. Saturday's family matinee program offers a sampling of additional repertory from this charismatic company, now marking its 45th anniversary. (joyce.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Now That Coronavirus Tests Are Free, Some Insurers Are Waiving Costs for Treatment This article was updated to reflect changes in government and insurers' policies. Policies regarding your out of pocket costs for coronavirus testing and treatment are changing rapidly. State insurance regulators are taking steps to limit how much you might eventually owe, and insurance companies and employers have also changed the rules for most plans to eliminate deductibles or co payments for testing. Now insurers are starting to waive out of pocket costs if you need to go to the hospital, and that could reduce your bills. But it's still unclear how much you'll wind up paying, leaving public health experts worried that people who are sick may hesitate to get medical care because of concerns over bills. But insurers and employers are taking steps to limit what you might owe. "Almost every relevant person or entity has said something about holding consumers harmless," said Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. With the caveat that things are shifting, here's what you should know. Is the test for the coronavirus free? I have health insurance, but my plan has a high deductible. Under the legislation just passed by Congress, testing for the coronavirus is free, as are the cost of a doctor's visit or trip to the emergency room to get the test. Worried that residents might hesitate because of the potential bills, many states, including California, New York and Washington, had already required the insurance companies they regulate to cover the cost of a test, according to a recent analysis from Georgetown University. Private insurance companies had also generally volunteered to waive any costs their members might face for the actual test. Employers who offer plans and are self insured followed suit. The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Federal Employee Program, which covers nearly six million federal employees, retirees and their families, previously said it would waive co payments and deductibles for medically necessary treatment. Different Blue Cross plans have different policies, and the situation is fluid, according to the B. But a lot of fine print remains: Some of the insurers have waived cost sharing for the next two months, while others are eliminating out of pocket expenses only for hospital stays. Many require people to go to hospitals and doctors within their plans. Another big caveat: The companies' decisions also do not apply to the health plans they administer for employers that self insure. Each of those companies will have to decide whether they will follow the insurers' lead. A majority of workers with job based coverage, 61 percent, are in self funded plans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That amounts to roughly 100 million people. The federal government has also made it easier for people who have certain high deductible plans. The Internal Revenue Service recently allowed people in those plans to have coronavirus testing and treatment covered by the plan before they meet their deductibles. It's hard to estimate how much you could owe if you don't get a waiver, but the Kaiser Family Foundation provided some ballpark estimates for a pneumonia hospitalization and concluded that the total cost could be over 20,000 with an individual's out of pocket costs running around 1,300. All of those figures depend on what plan you have, where you get care and how serious a case you have. No one knows whether employers, insurers or the federal government will eventually decide to completely cover these costs, although Joseph R. Biden Jr., the leading Democratic contender for president, has suggested providing emergency funds to cover treatment. And some hospital systems are putting a pause on collections. CommonSpirit Health, a Catholic chain of hospitals and clinics, says it is suspending patient billing for coronavirus testing and treatment as it sorts out how the various parties will handle patients' out of pocket costs. You may be at risk if you get care from someone, like an emergency room doctor or anesthesiologist, who is out of your plan's network, even if the hospital is in your network. When Kaiser did its analysis, it found that nearly one in five patients admitted to the hospital with a serious case of pneumonia faced out of network bills. Should I worry about my health insurer's ability to pay for the costs? Probably not. Even if they don't like them, "insurers are used to surprises," said Gregory Fann, an actuary at Axene Health Partners in Temecula, Calif. "That's what they are there for." Most insurers have plenty of capital, and state regulators also keep an eye on them to make sure the companies can pay their medical claims. And your premiums won't go up during the current year insurers set their prices for a whole year so you don't have to worry about any immediate jumps in costs. But there are some predictions that next year's premiums could soar if the pandemic adds tens of billions of dollars in costs that insurers and employers must pay. Should I worry about my employer coverage? It's difficult to predict what will happen to businesses, which are under a lot of strain right now, and their ability to cover your medical claims. Companies that experience a surge in health care costs just as sales are plummeting could face a financial crisis that makes them unable to pay medical claims. What if I don't have insurance? You should be able to get covered. If you lose your job, you may qualify for Medicaid or be able to sign up for a health plan under the Affordable Care Act. A growing number of states are also creating a special enrollment period for residents who want to sign up, and there is even some talk of the federal government making a similar decision for the marketplaces they operate. There's also talk of using the Medicaid program much more broadly to cover the uninsured. What if I end up with a big bill? "Don't whip out your checkbook," said Ms. Fish Parcham, but she also warned that you shouldn't ignore any medical bills. Contact your insurer as well as the hospital or doctor to find out if you really owe what they say you owe. Be sure to check with your state insurance department as well. You may have been billed in error.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Because marriage is an ever evolving experience, we constantly shift, change and, in some cases, start over. In It's No Secret, couples share thoughts about commitment and tell us what they have learned, revealing their secret to making it work. (Answers are edited for context and space.) Occupations She is an independent artist and stationer. He is a partner in the New Orleans law firm Jones Walker. The couple met in New Orleans in October 1997 at the wedding of Mr. Levine's mother. "I got off the elevator and saw him kiss his mother's forehead while he was holding her hand," said Ms. Pulitzer, who was then 26. They spoke briefly. At the time, Mr. Levine, who was 20, had a girlfriend and was attending N.Y.U. Still, Ms. Pulitzer was charmed and called him a week later. "I told him I was coming to New York, did he want to have dinner at Il Buco," she said. "I brought a friend so he wouldn't feel uncomfortable. We had incredible conversation." A second date followed a month later. Ms. Pulitzer had called his mother, who was her client, to ask a decorating question. Mr. Levine happened to be home from New York for Christmas break and answered the phone. She asked him out, again. He accepted and joined her and a group of friends the following night at Commander's Palace in New Orleans. Afterward, he took her to Preservation Hall in the French Quarter and they danced until 3 a.m. Over the next six weeks the two saw each other every night in New Orleans until Mr. Levine moved to the Netherlands in early 1998 for six months to attend an international law program through N.Y.U.'s business school. The two corresponded by letters at least twice a week, and fell in love. That fall, after graduating, Mr. Levine returned to New Orleans to attend Tulane Law School and moved in with Ms. Pulitzer. On Sept. 10, 2003, Mr. Levine proposed. "He told me he left his wallet upstairs, would I get it for him," she said. "On our bed was a red box that contained a diamond ring and a letter on heavy red cardstock. He had handwritten his vows. It was very romantic." Like so many roommates, partners, spouses and families, the couple and their children have been staying at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Levine I've been home since March 17 as opposed to being gone from 7 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m. everyday. Aside from a zombie apocalyptic fight about what we are going to eat out of the fridge first, it's been really nice. It's making me realize the time that's allocated to work rather than family should change. This has been a good pause and opportunity to reflect and remember what's important. Katrina was different because we were displaced and unraveling, but it ended. The coronavirus is a time bomb waiting to go off. I'm super grateful for my space and my home and my family. Ms. Pulitzer We are not used to being around each other all the time, but we are finding time to bond together. We are trying to evolve with this and be positive and try not to bring pressure or friction into the household. We are talking through what needs to be done and figuring it out together. When we lived through Hurricane Katrina together, we were away for six months. That was a reaffirmation of our successful relationship. We've already been through a catastrophe together, so we already know how to do this. Because we have lived through unknowns, we know we will get through this, too. And we know how to communicate, and that's everything. I have to trust my gut, and his. All four of us are keeping journals about this experience because we think it will be a growing and healing experience for all of us. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Ms. Pulitzer When I was 3, my parents had a bitter divorce that lasted for years. It traumatized me. I didn't want to get married. I was afraid to have children and get divorced. I was afraid if I got married I wouldn't continue to evolve as a human and still find a way to connect with that person I was with 30 or 40 years down the road. Both of us are extremely independent. We've grown, but we've grown together. I'm an energetic machine. Seth is laid back. I'm direct, open and honest. He's more controlled about what comes out of his mouth. I'm great at details, logistics and operations. He's good at making people feel comfortable and important. He's extremely sound, rational and generous. He's an old soul in a young man's body. Our relationship is healthy because of our ability to communicate and because we're conscious of our flaws. I've taught him older women are better, and about traveling, art and music. He's taught me in a very kind way about my flaws and fears; to focus on myself, instead of on everyone else; that I have power. He got me through my fear of being married. He made me see I would be a good mother, that I can have fears and move through them. I've learned with the right person you don't have to change anything about yourself; that the person you're in love with can make you feel special; that a relationship should be easy, but not effortless because you want to put effort into something that's important to you; that sex is important, as is intimacy. It's the one connection that connects you and your spouse differently from you and your friends. When we went though Hurricane Katrina, I was pregnant and we were alone. We had a realization that we don't need a lot in life. We just needed each other. Marrying Seth and having children was the best thing I've ever done. Mr. Levine She said she didn't want to get married and have kids. I always wanted a family. She moved herself into parenthood and marriage not wanting either one, and I gave her the time and confidence to do that, which means I did something right. She's a force. When she wants something, it happens. She doesn't deviate the course. I'm more flexible. She's a shoot first, ask later. She's got great intuition, energy and she's beautiful. I'm more thoughtful and deliberate. She's an artist and a creative. I am not. We both have similar passion for New Orleans and trying to live each day to the fullest. We both love art and music and travel. We've normalized our extraordinary life together. She's made me more expressive and communicative. I've learned elegance and how to be a life partner; that it's OK to ask for what you want; that it's OK to take care of myself so I can be better with her and my family. And to never try to shut her down or crush her. Marriage taught me it's really important to listen objectively and not personalize what someone is saying first, without being reactive or defensive. It's really easy to talk past or at each other. I've learned to step back and listen without reacting, which is helpful. I've learned to see the negative patterns I do and try to break them. Our marriage is easy. It works well. We try to understand and adjust to each other's needs. We give each other a lot of space and freedom, but we always come together. That's a key to our relationship. Giving each other independence preserves yourself and your spirit. I don't ever feel alone or left out. That's a great feeling. We've both seen failed relationships. My parents are divorced. I never trusted anyone enough to be a life partner and to have a family with until Alexa. She trusted me to do something she was opposed to her whole life. I wouldn't have this feeling of love and family without her. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
You know things are going pretty well when the big family argument is over whether to splash in the rain forest waterfall or loll around on the white sand beach. You know things are even better when you realize you can do both in a single day and not tax the patience or interest of three children. From our weeklong base at a rental condo in Rio Grande there are plenty of them on sites like Airbnb we had such debates, the kind of decision making that vacations should be about. It was winter break for our three, ages 11 to 15, and having not traveled far since a move from Mexico nearly two years ago, they pushed for someplace warm off the mainland. We settled on Puerto Rico, where we had always wanted to go and which, while a commonwealth, is far enough off the mainland (just under four hours from Kennedy Airport), and culturally apart, too, to count in their reckoning. Having lived in warm climates for several years, we found that even this relatively mild winter in New York was grinding on us, so almost any natural sunlamp would do. Rio Grande, a coastal and jungle resort town about 20 miles east of the capital, San Juan, could not have been more perfect, given that almost every attraction could be reached in 30 minutes or less. Our debates evolved into which day trip was more satisfying. Although Puerto Rico tends to conjure images of palms and beaches, the rain forest just down the road beckoned, as something a little different. You could do worse than start with the rain forest. The El Yunque National Forest, a verdant expanse the size of San Francisco and the only tropical rain forest in the United States forest system, has trails that are clean, well maintained and well marked from the roads cutting through it. They funnel you through a rain forest canopy, ringing with the chirps, croaks and shrieks of birds, frogs and other animals, to enticing swimming holes and waterfalls with enough chill in the water to refresh from the near 90 degree heat but not enough to keep you out. La Coca Trail, for instance, rises and falls on its meandering path to the big payoff: a roaring waterfall and pool that beckon you for a dip and, if you can tolerate the pelting, a shower. A hike a little downstream offers more private relaxing. Angelito Trail nearby provides an easier walk and more mellow bathing in a large stream, though locals told us it can get brisk after heavy rains. One natural pool there was deep enough for our two boys to jump from a rope swing. Tropical rain forest. You may be thinking about bugs, particularly mosquitoes, given the Zika outbreak that occurred in Puerto Rico and elsewhere last year. But, visiting in February, we discovered there were not legions of them, and hearty, cool sea breezes helped keep them at bay and the climate quite pleasant. Zika cases are on the wane, Puerto Rican health officials have said, and the virus, which can cause birth defects, is primarily of concern to pregnant women and couples who are trying to become pregnant. Places with Zika outbreaks are safe for the average traveler, though we did follow the precaution of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to generously apply repellent with DEET, as we normally do when visiting the tropics. Really, our biggest anxiety had to do with giving the kids enough of the beach time they demanded. A nameless beach a few minutes down the road from our apartment complex, and accessible via a path of wooden planks, offered fierce waves, which delighted the children as they twisted in the curling break, but kept me on guard. The sand and grass beach was narrow and scattered with seaweed, the kind of relatively isolated place you might crave for an only the locals experience, but it might disappoint if you expect comfort and, maybe, an umbrella. Puerto Rico guarantees public access to beaches, even at resorts. Those beaches, of course, tend to be well maintained and near amenities like a bar. It can be tricky getting to them, though. Our apartment complex was around the bend from the Wyndham Grand Rio Mar Beach Resort and Spa, with its manicured grounds, restaurants, casinos, golf course and well appointed rooms. Ask at the security gate where the beach is, and you are directed down the road to a place that is not the resort. But if you say you would like to pay for a day pass to the hotel or to visit the casino or restaurants, you are waved in and can park in the garage, which charges by the hour and is a short walk down a path to the beach. It looks like the ones that you see when you Google "Puerto Rico beach." Clean sand, invitingly clear water ... and populated by a good number of tourists. We had more fun, however, at a public beach called Playa Luquillo 10 minutes down the road. For 5.50, we parked, set up our chairs (you can rent them, and umbrellas, too) and joined local families and fellow bargain hunters. There are concession stands, and the beach abuts a line of food and souvenir kiosks. Vendors come by hawking fresh seafood from coolers. We tried the shrimp and grilled octopus in homemade mojo sauce and ran after the vendor for more. But the best beach by far, and one of the most spectacular we have seen in our years of travel in Mexico and the Caribbean, was Culebra Island. It requires about a 15 mile drive east from Rio Grande to a ferry at the seaside village of Fajardo; it's a good idea to get there an hour or more before the scheduled time to ensure a seat. After a ferry trip of an hour to 90 minutes, depending on how long it takes to board everyone, you arrive at a funky beach town with taxi buses ready to whisk you to beaches, snorkeling, Jet Skis and other activities minutes away. With our children growing anxious, we opted for the closest beach, Playa Flamenco, and were enthralled. A wide, powdery white sand beach awaited. Swimming pool clear water extended yards out, waist deep, and even deeper water was the blue of a dusky sky. Gentle but persistent waves playfully banged around the young (and older) daredevils. The presence of a coral reef just offshore seemed an impossibly over the top perk, but it had enough fish lots of blue tang for "Finding Dory" fans poking around to lure us, some of them zooming off to the shoreline. Culebra now ranks in our household among our top three beaches. Almost everything we did after that teetered on letdown. A popular attraction is nighttime kayaking in a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo. With a guide leading the way, you paddle for a half hour through a dark mangrove, knocking trees and other boats along the way as novices get used to navigating, into a large bay where luminescent bubbles from micro organisms trail your hand as you pass it through the water (swimming is no longer permitted). It was a workout for me as my companion, my 11 year old son, comfy in his backrest equipped spot, grew tired of paddling and drifted off to sleep at one point. And overall I guess I was expecting science fiction level luminescence, but the eerie course through the mangrove, with fish darting and splashing to the surface, passed for adventure. Long days usually meant quick meals at the apartment, with a couple of supermarkets 10 minutes away good for stocking up on snacks and whatever cooking we were motivated to do. But plenty of restaurants and shops are worth checking out. The fresh offerings at La Familia Bakery 2, including mouthwatering sweet bread, are a must, and it's just off Highway 3 in Rio Grande near a large supermarket. Lluvia, a modern breakfast and lunch cafe you'll pass on the road to El Yunque, offers rich Puerto Rico grown coffee and dishes like waffles with bacon cooked in them and a breakfast "cup" overflowing with egg, cheese, pesto sauce and home fries. But El Verde BBQ, a roadside stand along Highway 186 (a major thoroughfare to the airport) with its Puerto Rican street food, is the one we would go back to in a heartbeat, though the tasty fare is artery clogging. Fried plantain, barbecue ribs, empanadas and the Puerto Rican staple mofongo, a fried and mashed plantain dish. Prepare for a long nap afterward. The Wyndham and some of the restaurants offer live music on many nights, but traveling with children left us mostly exhausted by the time such things got going. The one cultural stop we will remember is a bit off the beaten path, in Loiza, a small city that is the heart of Afro Puerto Rican culture. There, the Afro Puerto Rican artist Samuel Lind has a rambling gallery and workshop where he sells paintings and prints. His works depict everyday scenes and folklore of African descendants who make up a significant part of the island's population. He is also a generous host, offering soothing tea and the stories behind his works. We were entranced at the large print of a "bomba" dancer, so he walked us across the street to meet Raquel Ayala, the subject and part of a large family of dancers. She has the original painting on a wall. The visit reminded us of the charm of this corner of Puerto Rico, a casual place with rich rewards in easy reach.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
It's an Alfred Hitchcock moment on a Frank Capra kind of a night. You are standing on a downtown Manhattan street corner, not knowing where to go, when a gesturing hand steers your eyes upward. Your gaze is directed to a window, which frames a man and a woman in bed. They appear to be making love, but you sense a restless discontent. This being New York City, some passers by on this breezy evening simply pass by, minds buried in thoughts or cellphones. This being New York City, others stop and stare along with you. They all move on, though. You stay right there, transfixed in voyeurism, until the woman in the window leaves the bed. A voice tells you to shift your attention to the man in the fedora who has materialized beside you. Evidently, he will take you where you need to be. It is, at this point, about an hour into "Behind the City," the latest immersive theater piece from the industriously inventive Third Rail Projects. Or maybe it's half an hour, or an hour and a half. Conventional clocks have a way of melting in this combination walking tour and voyage into the past. The history being investigated is both that of a city and of yourself along with that of your date. It is highly advisable that you bring someone you like, if not love, along with you. Sentimental journeys are a specialty of Third Rail Projects, whose other site specific works include "Then She Fell," a re creation for grown ups of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," and "Ghost Light," a seance with phantoms of a Lincoln Center theater. But its latest venture, directed and designed by Zach Morris, would appear to be the most willfully nostalgic of all, asking you to ponder the streets not taken in a town with a cruel habit of erasing its past. Subsidized by the Macallan brand of Scotch whiskey, whose product may be imbibed via Technicolor drinks served during the evening, "Behind the City" is both one of the sweetest and most sophisticated date nights on offer in these early days of summer. Running during the two weekends between June 22 and July 1, the production is free, but with limited tickets available (at themacallanbehindthecity.com). Admission is for two. And the friendship, or partnership, between you and your companion will serve as the emotional foundation for everything that follows. In this sense, "Behind the City" differs from other, urban themed environmental pieces I have known in London and New York, which were conceived as group tours or solo excursions. What this latest work shares with its predecessors is an insistence that you look really look at what's around you, and realize afresh how all the city's a stage. In this case, that stage extends from the basement of a restaurant where audience members are issued passports and a survival kit to a series of carefully accessorized rooms in TriBeCa and open air avenues and byways. By the end, especially if you've consumed those pretty cocktails, you will have trouble distinguishing fictive play from bona fide place. The view changes, I gather, according to the time at which you arrive. But the themes of might have been life stories, of places and people lost and found remain the same. They are conveyed via maps, letters and postcards; moody recitations heard through headphones and cellphones; several lovely interior landscapes; and some close encounters with willfully eccentric types, who include a team of fantastical telegraph operators and a heartbreakingly hopeful young man awaiting an assignation in a hotel room. Just so you know, this company's performers have always been adept at assessing just how far they can push the boundaries between you and them. You will, though, be asked to provide a certain amount of personal information in the early stages of your journey. And that information will be used, most cleverly, as the evening proceeds. Is some of what happens a shade too precious for the more hard bitten New Yorker? Possibly. But "Behind the City" is exceptionally ingenious in finding the symmetry within urban flux. I found myself smiling as I entered a grimy but handsome old building the same one where I'd glimpsed that pair of lovers in the window when I heard A ha's irresistibly hooky pop hit "Take On Me" bubbling away. "Is that too obvious a choice?" I thought to myself. It turned out not to be part of the production, just some music drifting into earshot from a passing car. New York City, after all, can be a most obliging co star to its population of unwitting actors, who are always putting on a show.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Taylor loved to cite Duke Ellington. And in a spirited rush of poetic text that accompanied "Unit Structures," his watershed 1966 album for the Blue Note label, he signaled a key break with mainstream classical tradition, courtesy of lines like: "Western notation blocks total absorption in the 'action' playing." Yet by the time reports of his death began to circulate on Thursday evening, and as former collaborators started dedicating performances to his memory, it had long been apparent that Taylor's dynamism had helped to shape the contemporary classical sphere. Exponents of the "New Complexity" school, like Michael Finnissy, were directly inspired by Taylor's torrents of sound. And his influence is also there in the work of Tyshawn Sorey. Unfortunately, Taylor's pieces for improvising orchestra have not been recorded or distributed nearly as often as his piano solos and small group performances. But the artifacts we do have are potent. In the early going of this clip, from a 2000 gig with the Italian Instabile Orchestra, it's fascinating to hear how comfortable this most powerful of players is within a large ensemble's sound. Even as increasingly complex actions flower from his piano, nearly a minute into the second movement his is still one voice within a blended (if riotous) entity. The way the entire group manages to dance through some of Mr. Taylor's dense compositional designs is a wonder and may yet prove an influence on more generations of experimenters, in multiple genres. SETH COLTER WALLS The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir was reluctant to answer when I asked her to choose her favorite page from "Metacosmos," her new work that had its premiere on Wednesday with the New York Philharmonic. But she settled on a handful of measures that capture the spirit of the piece, which she described as inspired by "the ultimate power struggle" of passing through a black hole into the unknown. This moment comes early in the work, but listen for the friction already in play between the scale like runs in the winds and the ebb and flow of glissando slides and tremolos in the strings. Chaos is brewing; Ms. Thorvaldsdottir has managed to create narrative tension in plotless abstraction. JOSHUA BARONE At 25, the British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor has already won attention, and a Decca recording contract, for his brilliant technique and scintillating style. On Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, Mr. Grosvenor displayed a musicianly side of his virtuosity, giving a crisp, lithe and bracing account of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto with Esa Pekka Salonen and the New York Philharmonic. But here he is back in 2011, the summer he turned 19, showing off with a dazzling performance of some beefed up arrangement of Brahms's Hungarian Dance No. 5. Catch the passage a couple minutes in when he dispatches fleet passagework and head spinning runs with utter ease and uncanny clarity. It's such lot of fun, and yet he looks so serious. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Opera fans are eagerly awaiting the Boston Symphony Orchestra's concert at Carnegie Hall this coming Thursday, when the tenor Jonas Kaufmann, an elusive presence in New York in recent years, takes part in a concert performance of Act II from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." Will Mr. Kaufmann be the Tristan the opera world has been waiting for? This is a trial run. But the program is also notable for the chance to hear the impressive Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund as Isolde. Though this exceptional artist has yet to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, she enjoys a major career in Europe. Here she is in 2015 performing "Im Abendrot," the final of Strauss's "Four Last Songs" with the Berlin Philharmonic. Alas, the fine video includes only a long excerpt from this world weary song. Listen to the way Ms. Nylund's warm, radiant voice gently breaks through the plush strings with her first poignant entrance. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Read our interview with Mr. Kaufmann, Ms. Nylund and Andris Nelsons about the "Tristan" love duet. The weekend after seeing some high production value events surrounding the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Luther Adams, I was in the mood for something a little less outwardly extravagant but no less imaginative. A 16 minute performance by the sound artist and instrument maker John Driscoll fit the bill. His quartet's presentation of an installation piece, "Speaking in Tongues," was presented on Saturday, during a series that brought the Composers Inside Electronics collective back to The Kitchen (where its members also appeared in 1977). At first Mr. Driscoll's homemade electronic instruments, outfitted with reflective foil, reminded me of the toylike implements used by the Fluxus art movement. But they soon revealed their unique character. The composer describes the act of playing these instruments as "a kind of sonic puppetry using ultrasonic feedback that is disturbed by small amounts of physical movement." On Saturday, a dreamy sequence incorporated wobbly vibrato tones, whispery percussive flurries, and, eventually, some oscillating scales. It was difficult to tell which performer was producing which effect, but that was part of the gentle mystery. SETH COLTER WALLS In a New York springtime, you can typically hear several top flight performances of Bach Passions, more often the "St. Matthew" than the "St. John." Last year was oddly unbalanced, with five major presentations of the "St. John" and none of the "St. Matthew." This spring has been even more unusual, with just a couple of middling outings of the "St. Matthew." Here is the crowning moment of the most memorable "St. John" of last year, by the vocal group Tenet and the period instrument ensemble the Sebastians: the final chorus (before the concluding chorale), "Ruht wohl" ("Rest well"), a somber lullaby in Bach's most touching consolatory manner. And take heart; Tenet and the Sebastians promise to return next March with the "St. Matthew." JAMES R. OESTREICH "Giovanna d'Arco" (1845) is no one's favorite Verdi opera; it might not even rank on anyone's top 10 list. So it was a case of bad opera performed well in Boston this week, when the ambitious company Odyssey Opera staged this early Verdi dud to conclude its season of Joan of Arc theme works, including Norman Dello Joio's "The Trial at Rouen" and Honegger's "Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher." One chorus, though "V'ha dunque un loco simile," in the prologue caught my attention because I suddenly felt like I was hearing "Macbeth," a far superior opera that came only two years after "Giovanna." For a brief allegro passage, the sotto voce chorus and trilling woodwinds are as spooky and evocative as the witches torment Macbeth. It made me wish I were hearing these engaging performers in that opera instead. JOSHUA BARONE Steven Fox and his excellent Clarion Choir will perform Palestrina's vaunted "Missa Papae Marcelli" on Friday evening in the Medieval Sculpture Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That would ordinarily be the end of the story, since the music is a cappella, but Mr. Fox has decided, according to advance publicity, to add a consort of sackbuts and cornetto, "as may have been done in the Renaissance" when the work was performed outside a church. Here, to give something of a glimpse of that side of the coin, is audio of an arrangement of the Kyrie from that Mass for modern brass instruments, performed by the Philharmonic Brass Zurich. JAMES R. OESTREICH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
THE LIFE OF SAUL BELLOW Love and Strife, 1965 2005 By Zachary Leader Illustrated. 767 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. 40. This is a superb biography. Yet it begins in the most inauspicious place. It is 1964, and Saul Bellow has just become absurdly rich and famous. His struggle, doubt, grit, immigrant story, artistic dreams all were told in Volume 1 of Zachary Leader's biography, "To Fame and Fortune." Here in Volume 2, "Love and Strife," the novel "Herzog" is published on the very first page and reaches "No. 1 on the best seller list, supplanting John le Carre's 'The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.'" Never again would Bellow, about to turn 50 years old, lack for wealth, power, awards or flunkies to stand by him, ready to take his coat and do his bidding. The temptation for someone in his position was to become an insufferable, spoiled monster. And Bellow quickly gave in to temptation. "Bellow's bad temper in the late '60s was by no means directed exclusively at would be biographers, radical students and aggrieved wives," Leader begins a sentence, apologetically, on just Page 65. Bellow had so many targets to attack, whether insulting them face to face or in blistering letters or put downs circulated through intermediaries. One of his favorite one liners ran: "Let's you and him fight." The most salient recipients of Bellow's bad temper in this biography were his three sons, each from a different mother the oldest 21 when this volume starts, the youngest just 1 year old and about to be abandoned after yet another divorce. As previous biographers have discovered, it's difficult to write an endearing biography of Bellow. "Was I a man or was I a jerk?" Bellow inquired on his deathbed. Leader put the question on the first page of Volume 1, and it bookends this two volume opus. Nevertheless, he has managed to write a sympathetic, judicious, 700 page second volume here, which one can recommend on its own merits. I even came to admire Bellow more at the end than the beginning. How on earth did Leader do it? One means is those sons. I found myself reading for the reappearances of Gregory Bellow, Adam Bellow and Daniel Bellow, who are richly realized as characters and emerge as thoughtful commenters on their father's life. The sons' humiliations climax with the oldest, Gregory's, tumultuous speech at a luncheon after Bellow accepted the Nobel Prize. He announced, generously, that he finally realized his father loved him after all, but his father's way of loving was to work so hard and single mindedly. Bellow, rather than embrace his firstborn, walked in front of the crowd to his middle son, Adam, shook his hand, and said: "'Thanks, kid, for not saying anything.' And off he went, in a stretch limo, entourage at his side." 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. Equally vibrant are the characterizations of the adult women who intersected with Bellow. Two of his five wives, Alexandra Tulcea and Janis Freedman, sat for wide ranging interviews and come through admirably. So do many women Bellow dated in the 1960s and 1970s. The celebrated writer kept romances alive in different cities, two or three at any given time with students and faculty divorcees at the University of Chicago, assistants at The New Yorker, even his housecleaner. Half a century later, women like Maggie Staats and Arlette Landes are affectionate but frank in remembering the half liberated '60s milieu, and make the otherwise dreary train of affairs surprisingly captivating. The same incidents come to us through different eyes, immediately and in retrospect. From Bellow's archives, Leader might quote a letter in which Bellow described the frenetic writing of "Mosby's Memoirs" while on vacation in Oaxaca in 1969: "I was in a state of all but intolerable excitement, or was, as the young now say, 'turned on.' A young and charming friend typed the manuscript for me." But then he can give us the benefit of that friend's memories, too: As Staats describes it, "Mosby's Memoirs" is about "the humor that can be derived" from screwing someone over, "and the consequences of doing so." (Leader adds: "When asked what Bellow's attitude was to such behavior, she replied 'mixed.'") This is a social or "crowd" biography of a quietly provocative kind. It is brilliantly calibrated to explore Bellow's own central theme as a novelist: the conflict between solitary genius and the constraints of community. The latter, Bellow ambivalently portrayed in his novels as the "potato love" of the family, the "humanity bath" of the streets, and the rough edged, criminal temptations of the 20th century city. The vein that successfully keeps one focused on Bellow, and enchanted, is the novelist's excerpted prose. It knocks you back on your heels. Not just in the novels and stories, but in letters to every sort of addressee, from intimates, to fans, to politicians, Bellow's prose is electric. I have always found Bellow's artfulness to cloy over the length of his longest novels. He made himself a fiction writer by force of mind, hard work and sheer will, plus study of the greats. He remained a lifelong student of the highest caliber: co teaching with philosophers, metabolizing esoteric doctrines, even directing the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. (By all accounts he was an elegant, sensible, fair administrator and exceptionally respectful boss to all employees and subordinates.) The level of planning and strain in his greatness, especially once the Bellow "voice" is set (by "Herzog," surely), can be fatiguing. Leader finds Bellow out in his letters, unpublished manuscripts and published books, and pulls gems into the light. The surprise and treat of this book is how much Bellow stayed a master, sentence by sentence, every time he picked up a pen. The biography also reveals the full extent of the autobiographical dimension in his method of composing. Bellow didn't just model some main characters on famous friends. We've long known about that. It seems that if he wanted to realize any side character, too one who wasn't working well as the transcription of one real person he knew Bellow would try the character again, substituting a different acquaintance. He kept reworking an unpublished book in the 1990s: In one version, "the model for Hilbert Faucil was no longer Nathan Tarcov. Now it was Philip Roth"; "Roth hadn't worked out as a starting point for Hilbert; now he was considering Arthur Lidov"; "Four months later ... the model for Hilbert has become Lou Sidran, Bellow's friend from high school." Leader goes back to investigate the truth of each influence, with eye popping results. He digs up the reality behind the vile young radical who taunts the professor hero in "Mr. Sammler's Planet" and the racially charged Chicago murder case in "The Dean's December," and sits down to interview the source originals for minor characters. It is given to Bellow's granddaughter Juliet to put her finger on the element in his psychology that seems to have dominated Bellow's character and complicated so many friendships and relations. "He was in many ways a very thoughtful and kind person, but I think his need to be the top dog, the best, was very deep." The energy of one upping his close friends, surviving them only to write affectionately about them in novels, let Bellow continue to produce new masterpieces despite the cosseting upholstery of his fame and fortune, all the way from "Humboldt's Gift" (1975), about dead Delmore Schwartz, to "Ravelstein" (2000), about dead Allan Bloom, published when Bellow was 85. This in the end is what wins one over to Bellow, in Leader's portrayal, despite his tyrannies and impressive capacity for giving offense: how many individuals he held together (even when pushing them away), how much sociability he ruminated for art. The iron in Bellow's soul was that he craved love and experience, and learned to view them coldly, clinically. The writer Amos Oz recalled most vividly from his friendship with Bellow an exchange that they shared privately about death. "I said I was hoping to die in my sleep, but Saul responded by saying that, on the contrary, he would like to die wide awake and fully conscious, because death is such a crucial experience he wouldn't want to miss it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
WASHINGTON Google's chief executive, in perhaps the most public display of lawmakers' unease with his company's influence, was grilled on Tuesday about everything from search result bias and the data Google collects about its users to plans for a censored service in China. Republicans expressed concerns about unfair treatment of conservatives, and lawmakers in both parties zeroed in on privacy issues. While Google had been under scrutiny before, particularly in Europe, where regulators have fined it, it had not had to address such an array of issues in one go and in such an open forum. "Mr. Pichai, it was necessary to convene this hearing because of the widening gap of distrust between Silicon Valley and the American people," said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican House majority leader. He is not a member of the Judiciary Committee but made a point of attending the hearing. It was the latest in a series of congressional hearings that have made clear lawmakers' concerns about the power of big internet companies. Mr. Pichai fielded questions alone, after rejecting a request to testify with executives from Facebook and Twitter three months ago. Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans see Silicon Valley as the home of hugely influential companies with liberal executives and work forces that intentionally or unintentionally are allowing their biases to taint how people receive information on the internet. For Google, that means claims that its search results are skewed against conservatives, though academics and industry insiders largely dismiss those concerns. A video showing Google executives bemoaning President Trump's election victory in 2016 provided further evidence for Republicans when it was leaked this year. Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, asked if Google's employees had made decisions to filter search results contrary to the company's claims of political neutrality. "This committee is very interested in what justifies filtering," Mr. Goodlatte said. "Given the revelation that top executives at Google have discussed how the results of the 2016 elections do not comply with Google's values, these questions have become all the more important." Without offering evidence, Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, said Google's antipathy toward conservatives gave Hillary Clinton a lift in the 2016 presidential election. He pushed Mr. Pichai to allow outside investigators to audit Google's search technology for indications of bias. "Google could well elect the next president," Mr. Smith warned. But the company's search algorithms do not take political sentiment into account, Mr. Pichai said. Results are determined by about 200 factors, including relevance, freshness and the popularity of queries. "Our algorithms have no notion of political sentiment," he said. The session offered a hint that when Democrats become the House majority in January, data privacy issues will become a priority. "There are legitimate questions regarding the company's policies and practices, including with respect to content moderation and the protection of user data privacy," said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York. Republican and Democratic lawmakers focused on whether Google tracks a user's location without obtaining consent. Some cited an article by The New York Times, published on Monday, that showed how easily supposedly anonymous information can be linked to a person. The sharpest exchange involved Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, who held up his smartphone and asked Mr. Pichai whether Google was tracking his whereabouts if he walked to the other side of the room. "Not by default," Mr. Pichai said, meaning it depended on the settings on the apps that Mr. Poe had installed on the phone. When Mr. Pichai wouldn't respond with a definitive yes or no, Mr. Poe raised his voice and interrupted. "You make 100 million a year. You should be able to answer that question," he said. "I'm shocked you don't know. I think Google obviously does." Mr. Pichai said Google offered users controls for limiting the collection of location data and did not sell user data, though he avoided saying whether the company uses location data when it sells advertising. Google and other internet companies have lobbied for a federal privacy law through their trade groups and have hastened to support a national law that would nullify state privacy laws, such as the one California passed this year. Repeating earlier statements, Mr. Pichai said Google had no current plans to re enter the Chinese market with a search engine that censored information banned by the government. He characterized the initiative, Project Dragonfly, as an "internal effort." He said the company had not discussed its plans with Chinese government officials. Mr. Pichai would not commit to scrapping the initiative, however, and said it was "our duty to explore possibilities to give users access to information." Like other Capitol Hill hearings on tech companies this year, the session on Tuesday offered as much theater as policy discussion. Seated a few rows behind Mr. Pichai in sight of television cameras was a person sporting a top hat, a fake giant mustache and a monocle like the Rich Uncle Pennybags character from the board game Monopoly. At one point, the session was interrupted by a protester holding a sign that read "Google" across a Chinese flag. Outside the hearing room, Alex Jones, the founder of the conspiracy news site Infowars, yelled "Google is evil!" until a police officer told him to quiet down. Mr. Jones has been barred from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which is owned by Google. He was accompanied by Roger J. Stone Jr., the Republican political operative and a longtime acquaintance of President Trump who has drawn attention from the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, for his potential role in Russian election meddling. Mr. Stone, who was also barred by Twitter, complained that big internet companies were "monopolistic."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Long after most nations urged their citizens to wear masks, and after months of hand wringing about the quality of the evidence available, the World Health Organization on Friday endorsed the use of face masks by the public to reduce transmission of the coronavirus. Since the beginning of the pandemic, surprisingly, the W.H.O. had refused to endorse masks. The announcement was long overdue, critics said, as masks are an easy and inexpensive preventive measure. Even in its latest guidance, the W.H.O. made its reluctance abundantly clear, saying the usefulness of face masks is "not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence," but that governments should encourage mask wearing because of "a growing compendium of observational evidence."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Burdened by debt and a devastating real estate crash, Dubai is doing what it does best: doubling down. Just one month after a close brush with bankruptcy, Dubai celebrated the opening of the world's tallest building on Monday a rocket shaped edifice that soars 2,717 feet and has views that reach 60 miles. The glittering celebration may have been an attempt by Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, to shift the focus from Dubai's current economic troubles to a future filled with more promise. All the same, the tower's success by no means signals a recovery in Dubai's beaten down real estate market, where prices have collapsed by as much as 50 percent and many developers are having trouble finding occupants for their buildings. With its mix of nightclubs, mosques, luxury suites and boardrooms, the Burj is an almost perfect representation of Dubai's own complexities and contradictions. It will have the world's first Armani hotel; the world's highest swimming pool, on the 76th floor; the highest observation deck, on the 124th floor; and the highest mosque, on the 158th floor. But in deciding to change the tower's name from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa, in honor of the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, Dubai revealed a rare streak of humility consistent with its diminished economic condition. Once the most proudly autonomous of Arab Emirates, Dubai has found that its financial troubles have made it more dependent on Abu Dhabi and more likely to be drawn closer into the federation. "Dubai not only has the world's tallest building, but has also made what looks like the most expensive naming rights deal in history," said Jim Krane, the author of "City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism." "Renaming the Burj Dubai after Sheik Khalifa of Abu Dhabi if not an explicit quid pro quo is a down payment on Dubai's gratitude for its neighbor's 10 billion bailout last month." The opening festivities had the feel of a national holiday, with fireworks, parachute jumps and shooting streams of water from the world's tallest fountain. At a cost estimated at 1.5 billion, the Burj took five years to build, is more than 160 floors high and has comfortably surpassed the previous record holder in Taiwan, the Taipei 101. More than 12,000 people will occupy its six million square feet, zooming up and down in 54 elevators that can reach speeds of 40 miles an hour. It was designed by Skidmore, Owings Merrill in Chicago. At a time when several of Dubai's newly built office towers stand empty, it is 90 percent sold, according to the building's developer, Emaar Properties. To be sure, some have questioned the utility of such a towering project. At least three foreign workers died during the construction. And at a time of increasing concerns over global terrorism, such a building could pose an inviting target. The Burj Khalifa was named in honor of the president of Abu Dhabi. But to Dubai, which from its very beginning has taken pleasure in proving its doubters wrong, the Burj is evidence that if you build it big and brash enough the people will come, from near and far. With its strong government backing and unquestioned prestige, the Burj was a project that was destined to succeed and its developer, Emaar, had little difficulty in attracting residents particularly since much of the space was sold several years ago in the middle of Dubai's real estate frenzy. Other projects, however, have not been so lucky. One is the Omniyat Bayswater, a 24 story office building that stands less than half a mile from the Burj. It opened six months ago and remains more than 50 percent vacant. Aimed to be the flagship structure of an ambitious development project in an area by the sea called Business Bay, Omniyat Bayswater has been unable to attract tenants as a consequence of the current real estate crisis. But its struggle speaks to a larger truth behind the Dubai real estate bubble which, despite the excitement over the Burj, could well forestall a meaningful recovery. Like many office projects developed four or five years ago, the peak years of Dubai's expansion, the Omniyat Bayswater is plagued by splintered ownership. It is estimated to have more than 50 landlords more than two per floor with some trying to lease office suites as small as 1,000 square feet. A spokesman for Omniyat said that the developer recognized the problem of multiple owners, and had taken steps to address it and expected to see whole floors leased by the second quarter of this year. At a time when selling real estate was like handing out candy to children, the development model of selling to many owners, known as strata title, became a quick and easy way to finance building projects. Speculators from around the world were clamoring for the smallest slice of Dubai property. But with the crash, the building's ownership structure has made it extremely difficult to sell or lease a floor or two to foreign companies seeking to expand. "There has been a difficulty in creating a collective of owners," said Nick Maclean of the real estate firm CB Richard Ellis in Dubai. "The majority of the building is empty."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
EVERY saleswoman will tell you that the customer is always transparent. Maybe not entirely, completely, but compared with the poker face a buyer thinks that he or she is wearing, there are always expressions and signals that are obvious to the practiced observer. When I first started out in Manhattan real estate sales, my boss shrugged and shared one of his favorites with me. "People with clipboards," he said, "never buy." Whenever I tell that anecdote, I get resistance from someone who claims to have been carrying a clipboard right before buying a kazillion dollar apartment in One57, and if I weren't so quick to jump to conclusions, why then I'd have my own yacht. But in my experience, it is true that buyers and sellers of real estate send readable signals the equivalent of poker "tells." While every sale is different, there are also discernible stages that a customer goes through on the way to a transaction. A check with real estate brokers around the country indicates that many experienced ones "read the minds" of their customers and can use their knowledge of consumer behavior to steer a market participant toward (or away from) a sale. "Here's a tell," said Jim Foote, who has been in real estate for 38 years and is broker owner of Greenwich Custom Real Estate Services in Old Greenwich, Conn. "If they linger for a long time in any one room, that's telling you that there is something about this room that's especially interesting to them." Conversely, a speed through is often a sign of lack of interest. Mr. Foote has a current listing of a four bedroom ranch house in Old Greenwich, on the market for 1.625 million. "If the progress from the hall through the living room, where the first fireplace is, through the dining room to the kitchen, through the family room where the second fireplace is if that circuit takes two to three minutes, that's pretty good," Mr. Foote said. "If it takes 30 or 45 seconds, that's not so good." Of course, agents who admit to "reading" their clients insist their pattern recognition is in service of the greater good. Even (or especially) in these days of consumer online access, some of an agent's value lies in her being able to offer a buyer a choice different from his preconception. "Often people don't know what they want," said Fritzi Barbour, vice president and broker in charge of Coldwell Banker Caine in Greenville, S.C. "They don't know what their options are, they don't know the neighborhoods. The ability to know those other options is the value that an agent brings. You may think you want X, but if you're shown Y, you may love Y better than you ever loved X." Which leads to one of the common broker routines: juggling the order of properties in a day of showing. Ms. Barbour, who has 30 years' experience, and others interviewed agreed that they often placed their recommended properties at the beginning and the end of a day's schedule. Lisa Ritter, who is the owner of Re/Max Results, based in Omaha, said: "I don't think of it as a psychological game. If I think a home is a good value and a nice fit, I'm just placing it where it will stand out." According to Dr. Sheena Iyengar, a professor of management and director of the global leadership program at Columbia and the author of "The Art of Choosing" (Twelve, 2010), to show one's favorites first and last is to call up the "primary and recency effects." The first property, she says, serves as a mental benchmark everything seen subsequently is compared with it while the last property, having just been viewed, is easier to recall. Yet agents insist that they are not being tricky, for two reasons. First, a home is a well considered long term purchase, and with prices so high, buyers are more thoughtful than ever. "You can't just manipulate a buyer into buying something that you want them to buy if it doesn't meet their needs," Ms. Barbour said. Second, real estate agents are different from other salespeople in that the veterans have their eye on two transactions: the purchase and the resale. When you try on unflattering pants in a department store, the salesman can be enthusiastic because he's not thinking about having to sell the bell bottoms again a few years later. In contrast, Ms. Barbour said, "your agent is trying to find you what you like, but also what will be a good investment, because they have their mind on what will happen when they get the call about being able to resell it 5, 10, 15 years later. What's this neighborhood going to be like? What's the market going to be like?" In order to perform that job, which Mrs. Ritter said she considers "a very high calling, because we're helping out with someone's new direction," agents also often analyze customer personality types. "An amiable buyer or seller is more emotionally driven," said Thai Klam, the broker owner of Re/Max 360 in the Greater Houston area. "Can I hold social events here? Can I see my family being happy? They want to know how other people felt. An analytical customer wants the past five years' historical price appreciations. We just try to relate to them on their personality type to build rapport." That language, though, can include misdirects that the speaker isn't necessarily aware of. Mrs. Ritter, who has 12 years of experience in real estate, said that whatever a customer tells an agent in terms of a time frame, "you have to cut it in half." If people call her and say that they're three or four months out from a purchase decision, "what they're really saying is: 'I need you to be patient with me. I am cautious, and I am afraid of being ripped off.' " What may surprise participants in the real estate market is that their agents often empathize with them. "When I go to buy a new car, I go into it with a bitter mind set, since I don't trust car salesmen," Mrs. Ritter said. "So it offers me a healthy perspective on how my customers feel. I don't take it personally when they don't trust me right off the bat." In fact, sometimes agents recognize that not everyone has their same experience at reading signals. Roger Dawson, author of "Secrets of Power Negotiating" (Career Press, 1996) and a former real estate executive, said he would often tell clients, "Let me just take this phone call," as an excuse to give them a moment alone. "I have found it helpful to let the husband and wife have a little time together to discuss things," Mr. Dawson said. "Often they're not reading each other very well."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
SEDUCED BY MRS. ROBINSON How 'The Graduate' Became the Touchstone of a Generation By Beverly Gray Illustrated. 282 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 24.95. Aside from the joyfully cocky title of a classic 1965 song by the Who, the phrase "my generation" is not generally used by anyone of my generation or anyone else either. While those living it make their own discoveries, mistakes and art, generational descriptions are almost always the work of elders ("the younger generation"), youngers ("our parents' generation") or marketers (Silent, Greatest, Boomer, Pepsi) attempting to commodify the unstoppable cultural changes that accompany the forward movement of time. But here comes "Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How 'The Graduate' Became the Touchstone of a Generation," in which the Santa Monica based entertainment writer Beverly Gray doubles down on the declaration embedded in her book's subtitle by inserting herself throughout the pages as a leading touchstone toucher: By "a generation," she really means "my generation." And to prove it, the author, who has previously published books about the filmmakers Roger Corman and Ron Howard, pops up in first person throughout an otherwise average recounting of the making of "The Graduate" and its reception to say, "I was there." A publicity still for the film, also used on the cover of the original soundtrack album. At first, I couldn't figure out why Gray kept chiming in. ("How well I remember!" she volunteers, describing thoroughly well documented changes in the 1960s California educational system.) After all, last month marked the 50th anniversary of the movie's release, and that is reason enough to throw "The Graduate" a poolside cocktail party on its own merits. Why strain so hard to lay a personal generational narrative on a Hollywood history far more interesting than Gray or me or you or most any individual reader who was or wasn't around in 1967 to help make the movie the surprise hit it was? A half century has passed since the bewildered college graduate Benjamin Braddock, played with star making originality by a then largely unknown Dustin Hoffman, floated, directionless, in his parents' glassy Beverly Hills pool, and was told (by someone of his Parents' Generation) that the future lay in "plastics." It has been a half century since Anne Bancroft smoldered as the seductive Mrs. Robinson, an unhappy woman who was the opposite of bewildered an adult mature enough to know she was trapped in the hell of plastic marital conventions. It has been 50 years since Hoffman, Bancroft and the incandescently creative team of the director Mike Nichols and the screenwriter Buck Henry took Charles Webb's small 1963 novel of domestic discontents and turned it into a movie that epitomized huge shifts in both popular culture and Hollywood commerce. Then again, all this has been recounted before, with nuanced and perceptive synthesis, by Mark Harris in his popular 2008 history, "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood," now a classic of cultural reporting and analysis. (Gray refers to Harris, a friend of mine, more than once.) And, for a fine magazine length version, a reader can call up Sam Kashner's 2008 Vanity Fair piece "Here's to You, Mr. Nichols: The Making of 'The Graduate.'" "Seduced by Mrs. Robinson" is a puzzling project. It is also a compilation of an awful lot of distracting cliches. The famous camera shot of Hoffman framed by the crook of Bancroft's stockinged leg is a moment "that lives on in film history." The voices of the movie's fans "still echo through the years." Gray cites notebook entries the producer Lawrence Turman made "when the project was merely a gleam in his eye." She explains that "The Graduate" appealed to "high spirited young rebels who delighted in thumbing their noses at the status quo." She interviews Hoffman "at a film industry gathering, held at an upscale Beverly Hills Mexican eatery," where "he proved surprisingly approachable, despite the throngs of fans waiting their chance to schmooze with the star." Recent allegations of sexual harassment by Hoffman may dim a reader's envy at the opportunity for schmoozing. Do not take this as a nose thumb so much as a brow furrow. The author's interview with Hoffman took place in 2008 and here we come to a clue to understanding the book's tortured structure, its pained search for an angle: Most of the research seems to have taken place a decade ago. The majority of Gray's direct reporting comes from two long interviews with Turman, now 91, who, as a Hollywood novice, was canny enough to obtain the rights to Webb's novel. The first of those interviews took place in 2007. Turman published his own book, "So You Want to Be a Producer," in 2005. (The second Turman interview took place in 2015.) Gray says in her acknowledgments that her book "rose like a phoenix from the ashes of a previous project." Was it shelved after "Pictures at a Revolution" and the Vanity Fair history of "The Graduate" came out in 2008, making her version a making of too many? Is it out now by the luck of a marketed golden anniversary? This formerly youthful moviegoer would like to know. In the meantime, she recommends looking up the provocative re review written by Roger Ebert in 1997 to mark the movie's 30th anniversary. The movie critic, who died in 2013, was in his youthful enough 20s in 1967 when he declared "The Graduate" "the funniest American comedy of the year." Three decades later, he saw that Hoffman's Benjamin was an "insufferable creep," and that Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson "sardonic, satirical and articulate" was "the only person in the movie you would want to have a conversation with."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In previous years, journalists have responded to the heat in Hollywood by asking celebrities about AskHerMore, the initiative to query actresses about more substantive things than their outfits; OscarsSoWhite, which highlighted the dearth of diverse nominees; and, more recently, the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Women attending the Globes have been asked to wear black gowns to show solidarity with victims of sexual misconduct. The plan was initially dismissed as a toothless gimmick, one that would do little to advance the MeToo movement. But the call to wear black gowns turned out to be part of a sweeping and ambitious initiative, called Time's Up, created by some 300 prominent actresses and female agents, writers, directors and entertainment executives to fight sexual misconduct across the country. Time's Up boasts a 14 million legal defense fund for less privileged victims, and has already secured pledges from talent agencies to achieve gender parity in their corner offices by 2020. The black gowns aren't meant to just call attention to the problem, or mourn the industry's old guard; they are pointing to solutions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Re "Where Is the Outrage?," by Charles M. Blow (column, July 20): My outrage is silent and seething. But do not mistake it for acceptance and inaction. I believe there are millions of us, quietly at home or under a mask, buying only necessary groceries, keeping safe and asking how anyone could think of forcing the public schools to open when the contagion is worse now than when they were closed. I will carry on quietly and express my outrage on the third day in November. Where is the outrage? It is here. In white upper middle class Seattle. We have marched, we wear masks, we support police reform. Yet we know that as long as the fountain of hate spews from the Twitter account of the White House, we are really powerless to make positive change. We have so much rage that sometimes we can't converse trying to avoid the subject of the Trump administration. It's right there under the surface of every conversation. I am so angry that I find myself shaking if I hear the voice of the president. That person has done nothing but things that are wrong in his 3.5 years in office. He suffers no consequences, and seemingly there is no elected official who is willing or able to stop him (why is that?!). It is all so unreal now that we, the outraged, don't know what to do. I write letters to my elected officials. I send letters to The New York Times. I vote. I donate to Democratic candidates all over the country. I volunteer. But, beyond that, please, Mr. Blow, tell me what I can do.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Joyce Gordon in a commercial for salad dressing. She became known as "The Girl With the Glasses." During the germinal days of television, just by being herself, the actress Joyce Gordon made a gender stereotype anachronistic. "I'm not a glamour girl most women aren't," she volunteered in a 1961 interview. "I'm an attractive, up to date young woman glasses and all." Confident and, clinically, farsighted, Ms. Gordon, who died at 90 on Feb. 28, became famous as "The Girl With the Glasses," for un self consciously wearing her signature eyeglasses on camera as she delivered live, on air advertising pitches for products like Crisco and Duncan Hines cake mixes. For all the headlines that her eyewear inspired, though, Ms. Gordon was also known for her voice. She reached radio listeners and television viewers through commercials and promotional announcements. Moviegoers heard her in dubbed foreign films as a stand in, for example, for Claudia Cardinale in Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West," released in the United States in 1969. And, her agent said, she was the voice in the ubiquitous recording that advised telephone callers in the 1980s and '90s that "the number you have reached is no longer in service." Ms. Gordon was credited with blazing other trails professionally. According to the Screen Actors Guild, she broke ground in 1966 as the first woman to head a local unit of the union when she was elected president of the New York branch in 1966. She was the first woman to serve as an announcer on a network TV broadcast of a national political convention, in 1980 on ABC, and the first to do on air promotions for a network, plugging news and sports programs on NBC for four decades. "Her stature as a pitchwoman and voice over talent was indispensable in convincing the advertising industry to take seriously the concerns of commercial performers in the early days of that contract," said Gabrielle Carteris, the president of the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Ms. Gordon pitched many household goods and personal products on television, but, as one interviewer wrote, she "has probably done more for the eyesight of the American woman than all the professionals and their lectures." Her glasses were not a prop. She had been squinting into the camera while rehearsing a commercial when an advertising agency representative, observing her in the studio, suggested that she wear her glasses on air. He assured her that he would persuade the sponsor to agree to what would be a radical departure from convention at a time when society still subscribed to Dorothy Parker's acerbic aphorism "Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses." "Gradually, I realized what he was driving at," Ms. Gordon said of the agency man. "The glasses give me identity and authority." Moreover, she said, "people tend to feel that I'm natural." She went on to be profiled in Broadcasting magazine in 1960 under the headline "The TV Girl Who Wears Glasses." TV Guide put her on the cover as the first woman to wear glasses while appearing under her own name as a "TV hostess." ("I enjoy being myself instead of playing a part," she was quoted as saying.) Ms. Gordon said she had felt awkward on dinner dates because she had had trouble reading menus, but added: "Now I wear my glasses, and it doesn't seem to make any difference to the fellows." Joyce Gordon was born on March 25, 1929, in Des Moines, Iowa, to Jule and Diana (Cohn) Gordon. Her father, a cosmetics and hair care industry executive, founded the National Barber and Beauty Manufacturers Association. Reared in Chicago, Ms. Gordon attended the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. She moved to New York City when she was 19, to pursue a career in entertainment. She landed parts on radio and live television programs, including "Studio One" and "Robert Montgomery Presents." She began doing mostly commercials in the mid 1950s.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The day in 2015 that C Pam Zhang was laid off from her first job out of college, she celebrated with friends at the park, then promptly made plans to move to Bangkok. She had been working at a tech start up in San Francisco for several years, she said, "kind of stress testing this question of whether I could be happy doing something that was not writing." But the layoff felt liberating, so she decided to live off savings for a while and give writing a real shot. "I was like, I'm giving myself a year," Zhang said in an interview last month. "I've been complaining all this time about not having the time to write. Will I actually write when I have the time, or am I just a big fake?" Over seven months in Thailand, she wrote more than a dozen short stories, in the process landing on the sort of work she wanted to do: speculative fiction that dealt with themes like death, migration and loneliness. It is inspired by the emotional currents of Zhang's upbringing, particularly the loneliness and insecurity of a childhood spent moving around. It also reckons with grief, something she experienced after losing her father when she was 22. 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. "The death of a parent has this really strange gravity, no matter how many years you get away from it," Zhang, now 30, said. "It warps everything else around it." In "How Much of These Hills Is Gold," the siblings, Lucy and Sam, go into survival mode after their father dies and they are left penniless in a hostile town. "One thing I wanted to reflect on in the book was how when you mourn in a way that is repressed, it will haunt you," Zhang said. "You can't get away from it." C Pam Zhang's "How Much of These Hills Is Gold" comes out April 7. Born in Beijing (the C in her name is short for Chenji), she moved to the United States, where her parents were already living, when she was 4. She had 10 different addresses by the time she was 18, as her parents sought out better job opportunities or school systems for her and her younger sister. But one move stands out. When Zhang was 8, the family packed up their car and drove from Lexington, Ky., to Salinas, Calif. "I was so struck by the landscape of America," she said, recalling areas where they were pounded by torrential rain or in the plains of Oklahoma, where she could see weather patterns from miles away. "It's really beautiful but also, in many parts of the country, extremely bleak and kind of scary." Those lasting impressions informed her reading habits. A fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder and John Steinbeck, she said, "Eventually I realized that the people in these books that I loved were always white. I wanted to write a great American epic in which I saw myself reflected." Sarah McGrath, who edited the book, said that reading it reminded her of Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad" or Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West," which "help me understand our culture and our history in a new way, not by telling it directly, but by showing it through emotion and relationships and its art." "How Much of These Hills Is Gold" is one of several new or forthcoming books by Asian American writers set in 1800s America. There is "The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu" by Tom Lin, forthcoming from Little, Brown, which is set 150 years ago and follows a Chinese American assassin seeking revenge after his wife is abducted. "Prairie Lotus," published last month, is a book for young readers that its author, the Korean American writer Linda Sue Park, describes as a "painful reconciliation" of her youthful love of Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" books with the sometimes racist views they espoused. "Prairie Lotus," by Linda Sue Park, came out in March. "I would lie in bed and imagine that I was Laura's best friend and make up adventures that we would have together," Park said. But she realized that, not only were people who looked like her not visible in the story, "but that even if I had been, Laura's mother, in particular, would probably have never even let her get close to me." This time period the Gold Rush and its aftermath and Chinese Americans' role in it is ripe for re examination. Until recently, the roughly 15,000 Chinese American laborers who worked on the first Transcontinental Railroad, built in the 1860s, were all but erased from the historical record and later barred from obtaining citizenship by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A well known photograph from the inauguration of the Transcontinental Railroad inspired a moment in Zhang's book. Lucy, one of the main characters, "hears the cheer that goes through the city the day the last railroad tile is hammered. A golden spike holds track to earth," Zhang writes. "A picture is drawn for the history books, a picture that shows none of the people who look like her, who built it." "How Much of These Hills Is Gold" is not meant to encapsulate the Chinese American experience of that time, but rather to portray "the loneliness of being an immigrant and not being allowed to stake a claim to the place that you live in," Zhang said. In light of the discrimination Asian Americans are facing as the coronavirus has disrupted life, however, she feels her book is more relevant than ever. When she began writing it, "I actually worried that the book's depictions of naked racism and violence would seem too extreme, too maudlin," she said. "Now I'm reminded that these ugly attitudes toward Asian presenting people have always lain just under the veneer of the country, and that they are erupting now." After growing up moving from place to place, Zhang has settled in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner and their cat and dog. She works part time as a creative director for a skin care start up, and though she sometimes struggles with the stillness of domesticity, she values financial security, having grown up in a family in which money was sometimes tenuous. "We don't talk enough about how, especially for people who come from immigrant backgrounds, from poor backgrounds, from impoverished families, that money is a source of emotional comfort," she said. "It's not just money."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Lining up for a job fair in Manhattan in February 2009, when the nation's unemployment rate surpassed 8 percent. It peaked later that year at 10 percent. What will President Trump's first recession look like? The question is not that far fetched. The current economic expansion is already the third longest since the middle of the 19th century, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. If it makes it past June of next year it will be the longest on record. While the economy is hardly booming, trundling along at an annual growth rate of about 2.5 percent, investors are getting jittery. The stock market tumble after the government reported an uptick in wages last month suggests just how worried investors on Wall Street are that the Federal Reserve might start increasing interest rates more aggressively to forestall inflation. And the tax cuts and spending increases pumped into an expanding economy since December shorten the odds that the Fed will step in forcefully in the not too distant future to bring an overheated expansion to an end. It is hardly premature to ask, in this light, how the Trump administration might manage the fallout from the economic downturn that everybody knows will happen. Unfortunately, the United States could hardly be less prepared. Not only does the government have precious few tools at its disposal to combat a downturn. By slashing taxes while increasing spending, President Trump and his allies in Congress have further boxed the economy into a corner, reducing the space for emergency government action were it to be needed. The federal debt burden is now the heaviest it has been in 70 years. And it is expected to get progressively heavier, as the budget deficit swells. To top it off, a Republican president and a Republican Congress seem set on completing the longstanding Republican project to gut the safety net built by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, which they blame for encouraging sloth, and replace it with a leaner welfare regime that closely ties government benefits to hard work. The economists Hilary Hoynes of the University of California, Berkeley, and Marianne Bitler of the University of California, Davis, pointed out in a recent paper that "the safety net for low income families with children has transformed from one subsidizing out of work families into one subsidizing in work families." And yet, as many unemployed Americans discovered the last time recession hit, government benefits that require recipients to hold a job become worthless when there is no work to be had. 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. Consider what happened the last time around, when the bursting of the housing bubble pushed millions of workers out of their jobs. The Fed quickly slashed interest rates to zero. Months later it started buying billions of dollars' worth of bonds from financial institutions to lower long term interest rates and encourage borrowing. The Obama administration hurried to cobble together an economic stimulus package of more than 1 trillion to get money to families that needed it most. It expanded the eligibility for unemployment insurance to its longest duration ever, 99 weeks. It raised the earned income tax credit for low wage workers. It more than doubled the budget for food stamps the poor's last line of defense. The economy failed to snap back as the administration hoped. Unemployment remained at 9 percent or more for over two years. But the administration's intervention to bolster the nation's welfare programs made a decisive difference for millions who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks of the nation's threadbare safety net. Using a broad definition of income and poverty that includes the effects of the complete array of government tools to support low income families, Professors Hoynes and Bitler concluded that food stamps were critical to stem poverty. Had food stamps not been available, they estimated, the share of Americans under 65 living below the poverty line would have exceeded 11 percent in 2010, almost 1.5 percentage points more than was the case. The share of Americans in extreme poverty with less than half the resources of the simply poor would have exceeded 4 percent, about a third more than it turned out to be. Unemployment insurance had a roughly similar impact on poverty levels. What is critical to note is that each of the two programs did more to relieve extreme poverty during the depths of the Great Recession than even the earned income tax credit, the main source of government support for low income Americans. Indeed, expenditures per capita from the earned income tax credit increased only modestly after the recession hit. And spending by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the patchwork of state run programs that emerged from welfare reform in 1996 to replace the poor's entitlement to federal cash assistance, did not respond to the recession at all. This is a problem for vulnerable Americans bracing for the next economic shock, because if Mr. Trump and his colleagues in Congress have their way, the only surviving bit of the social safety net when the next recession hits will probably require beneficiaries to work. The earned income tax credit is likely to survive unscathed. Food stamps are not. Assiduously looking for places to cut spending to temper a growing budget deficit, the White House seems more than willing to pare the safety net. The budget it unveiled this month called for a 27 percent cut to the food stamp budget and a 20 percent cut to Section 8 housing assistance by 2028. The administration already allows states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries to shave the program's costs. And the latest White House budget requested a 22.5 percent cut to Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies by 2028 by repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. While the Trump administration is unlikely to end unemployment insurance, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program expired at the end of 2013. In some states, benefits expire in as little as 12 weeks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
THE RADIO CITY ROCKETTES at Radio City Music Hall (through Jan. 1 at various times). Is there a dance move that captures the holidays in New York more than the Rockettes's razor sharp kick line? That signature militaristic move for an army of beaming beauties in candy cane colors is a centerpiece of the annual "Christmas Spectacular," a tradition going back decades. The grand 90 minute production, technologically freshened up this year, features eight dance numbers that includes some tap dancing, frolicking on a double decker site seeing bus and other merry scenes of impressive, highly synchronized prancing. NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center (through Dec. 31 at various times). There's a reason George Balanchine, City Ballet's legendary founder, gets title billing in this version of the holiday tradition: It very much bears his unique blend of sophistication and joy. Of the many productions of this tale in town, "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" is most likely to satisfy adults with its visual splendor and breathtaking dance. The children, of course, will cheer the lively characters, colorful costumes and that gargantuan magical tree. This week, 10 stellar ballerinas trade off in the showcase role of the Sugarplum, from elegant, established principles like Sterling Hyltin (Dec. 23 evening) and Sara Mearns (Dec. 26 evening) to exciting new soloists like Unity Phelan (Dec. 22 evening, Dec. 27 matinee) and Emilie Gerrity (Dec. 26 matinee). 212 496 0600, nycballet.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
It's easy to fall in love with a neighborhood in New York. And given the high cost of housing, it's common to realize that you can't afford the home you want in the neighborhood you love. So, what to do? Your first instinct may be to look a few stops away on the same subway line, trading Williamsburg for Bushwick, for instance. Or you might choose a neighboring area, moving to Yorkville, say, instead of the Upper East Side. Sometimes that works, but other times it only lands you in an inconvenient neighborhood with little resemblance to the area you had in mind. It can help to allow your imagination to range farther afield, maybe even across a river. Instead of proximity to your heart's desire, consider places with similarities, like housing stock, nightlife and dining, the typical resident and the overall feel. Following are five pairs of neighborhoods: a popular, expensive area, and a cheaper option, perhaps less well known. Of course there will be tradeoffs. But you might enjoy the alternative even more than the original. THE charms of the Upper West Side are so well known they scarcely bear repeating. Ornate prewar co op buildings and brownstone row houses line the neighborhood's tree canopied streets. Two of Manhattan's great parks, Riverside and Central, delineate its boundaries. The schools are among the best in the city. It is home to the American Museum of Natural History, Lincoln Center and other world class cultural institutions. But to live among all of that is quite expensive. The few brownstones that come on the market can top 10 million. Two bedroom co ops regularly sell for more than 1 million. At 136 West 75th Street, a two bedroom two bath co op is listed for sale for 1.195 million by Halstead Property. The median price per square foot in 2011 was 896, said Jonathan J. Miller of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Park Slope, Brooklyn, has often been an option for those priced out of the Upper West Side, but with prices rising there, prospective buyers might consider its neighbor on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, Prospect Heights. There, the median per square foot price, 446, is half that of the Upper West Side, Mr. Miller said. The neighborhood borders its own great green space, Prospect Park, as well as the broad Eastern Parkway and Grand Army Plaza. The Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are just across the parkway. "The late 19th century apartment buildings on Eastern Parkway and the row houses on the mid blocks it's the same style of architecture you find on the Upper West Side," said Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, a citywide preservation group. Much of the southern end of the neighborhood is under landmark protection, including stretches of St. Mark's Avenue, Prospect Place and Park Place. To the north are smaller brick row houses and the construction site of the arena for the vast Atlantic Yards development. The large houses of Prospect Heights have drawn families to the area. Joyce Szuflita, the founder of NYC School Help, which helps families find schools in Brooklyn, said parents had put a lot of energy into improving Public School 9. Mr. Veconi of the development council said Prospect Heights' new appeal was not surprising. "The allure here was that this was an undervalued neighborhood," he said. "I felt like people were going to get this sooner or later." Over the last two decades the Lower East Side has become a microcosm of everything New York is known for. Its short, intimate blocks harbor innovative restaurants, boutiques, galleries and clubs. Its history as an immigrant enclave is celebrated at the Tenement Museum, and its Jewish past persists at the venerable Eldridge Street Synagogue and the lox purveyors Russ Daughters on East Houston Street. And as the neighborhood changed, the price of housing soared. New condos sell for a median of 1,020 per square foot, according to Mr. Miller, who said asking prices over 1 million were not uncommon. In the new building at 60 Orchard Street, Stribling Associates is listing a two bedroom two bath condo for 1.35 million. But prospective buyers would do well to look across the East River at Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which has a vibrant ethnic history as well as lively shopping and dining and much lower housing prices. The median condo price per square foot in Greenpoint is 563, Mr. Miller said. At 149 Huron Street, two blocks from the subway, Apartments and Lofts has an accepted offer on a two bedroom condo listed for 513,000. Greenpoint is not as convenient as its better known neighbor to the south, Williamsburg, because it is on the G subway line and Manhattan is not a straight shot. The housing is a mix of new condos, small apartment buildings, brownstones, brick town houses, conversions, a few loft spaces and wooden row houses, many covered in vinyl siding. For many decades Greenpoint was a Polish enclave, and Manhattan Avenue is crowded with bakeries, butcher shops displaying kielbasa, and inexpensive Polish restaurants. But now, wedged in among Polish businesses, the avenue also has an artisanal ice cream parlor that serves Earl Grey cones, an infants' clothing and toy store, and coffee shops. The area around Franklin Street, once a desolate strip, has restaurants, bars, shops and condos, and is part of a small historic district. Families have been attracted to the neighborhood because they can get more space without sacrificing the quality of their schools. P. S. 31, for example, gets high scores: 90 percent of students meet state standards for reading and 97 percent for math. "Greenpoint is a great Brooklyn neighborhood," said David Maundrell, the founder of Apartments and Lofts, which markets many condos in the area. "There are different ethnic backgrounds, the Polish and Irish and the new people moving in over the last 10 years. You have amazing retail and services. It is a well rounded neighborhood." Inside Vinny's of Carroll Gardens on Smith Street, firefighters sit alongside locals in their 70s out for a meal with their grandchildren. Waitresses sit down at your table to take your order. The food is old school Italian red sauce and eggplant parm heroes. Next door to Vinny's is Persons of Interest, a new old school barbershop where the "combo platter" a shave and a haircut costs 75. It is that congenial mix of the traditional and the retro modern that has drawn well heeled newcomers, many with families, to the deep yarded brownstones that are Carroll Gardens' signature. Asking prices for these houses, many built in around the time of the Civil War, can easily top 2 million; the median price was 602 per square foot last year, according to Mr. Miller. "This was the luxury housing of its day," said Simeon Bankoff, the director of the Historic Districts Council. "There are some drop dead gorgeous buildings there." Today Crown Heights North has a large historic district. St. Marks Avenue, Dean Street and multiple blocks of Prospect Place have some very ornate houses. These sell for over 1 million when they become available, said Barbara Brown Allen, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman. Other houses, depending on the work required to bring them up to snuff, go for 700,000 to 900,000. Many are quite large, often 20 feet wide by 50 feet deep and four stories tall. At 1174 Dean Street, Prudential Douglas Elliman is listing a town house for 1.195 million. The 2, 3, 4 and 5 trains run through the neighborhood, and the A and C are not far away, in Bedford Stuyvesant. Franklin Avenue, the main commercial strip, is about a mile from Prospect Park. A number of the stores cater to West Indian and Panamanian residents. Nick Juravich, who blogs about the neighborhood at I Love Franklin Avenue, said that since he moved here in 2008, more than 30 businesses had opened, including Mexican, Indian and Thai restaurants. "We have a sleek new wine bar that would fit right in on Smith Street," he said, meaning the main drag in Carroll Gardens. Hell's Kitchen, as is obvious from its name, wasn't always the most desirable place to live. But that has changed, at first slowly and then more quickly. Restaurants, bars, coffee shops and other businesses have settled in along Ninth Avenue, and a few are opening farther west on 10th Avenue. Much of Hell's Kitchen has been protected from high rise development, so that on the cross streets, low rise town houses, brownstones and historic churches remain. In the northern part of the neighborhood, Prudential Douglas Elliman is listing a two bedroom two bath condo at 426 West 58th Street for 1.749 million. Development has been pushed to the neighborhood's edges, toward the Hudson River and along 42nd Street, where high rises, mostly rentals, have sprouted in the last few years. Two bedrooms at the new MiMA tower on 42nd Street rent for about 6,500 a month; the most expensive three bedroom there is 16,250 a month. Mr. Miller said the median price per square foot in Hell's Kitchen in 2011 was 854 a bargain compared with costs in some other Manhattan neighborhoods. But that figure is still 35 percent more expensive than the median of 555 in Long Island City, Queens, which is growing its own forest of handsomely appointed residential towers. Large condo projects are rising throughout the neighborhood, overshadowing brick town houses, as well as garages and other businesses. It's easy to see why developers are drawn to its East River shoreline. High rise towers are under construction alongside a riverfront park with views to the west of the United Nations and Midtown just a few minutes away on half a dozen subway lines. Restaurants, supermarkets, preschools and dog day care centers are popping up. The neighborhood has a mix of old and new on Vernon Avenue, the commercial strip closest to the water. There's a strong arts community and even some remaining manufacturing. Unlike the industrial buildings of SoHo, the stores along the Ladies' Mile were ornate, many built in the Beaux Arts style. Some have mansard roofs. The former Hugh O'Neill store has large gold domes. As in SoHo, artists found their way to the upper floors of these large buildings. So many photographers worked here that it was called the photo district, said Jack Taylor, the president of the Drive to Protect the Ladies' Mile District. However, it differed from SoHo in that galleries, restaurants and retail were slow to follow. The historic district was approved in 1989. About a decade ago, big box stores moved in. Today the area has a TJ Maxx, a Best Buy, a Home Depot and a Trader Joe's. There are new restaurants; on a recent Sunday, the line at the brunch spot tbsp on 20th Street was nearly out the door. Some of the old department stores are being converted into condos, including the O'Neill Building and the Cammeyer, a former shoe emporium at 650 Sixth Avenue, where CORE is marketing a unit for 2.85 million. The units are not the same raw and massive spaces one finds in SoHo. "It feels more like a residential neighborhood," Mr. Taylor said. "Ladies' Mile used to be like Siberia, but now it can be pretty hard to bear in terms of noise and crowds. There is no denying it is populated."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Netflix Is Getting Huge. But Can It Get Great? Ryan Murphy, welcome to the Upside Down. On Tuesday, the streaming giant Netflix announced that Mr. Murphy the producer of "Glee" and "American Crime Story" and much, much more had left 21st Century Fox to join its ranks, in a deal said to be valued at up to 300 million. That's a lot of money, but it's not mine, and ordinarily, I don't much care how an entertainment Croesus moves around its ducats. TV outlets make big deals all the time. The reason that this one like Netflix's poaching of Shonda Rhimes from ABC last year has the feeling of a turning point is that, as with all things Netflix, there is a definitional question involved. Netflix, both artistically and as a business, is something different. But what? Is it most similar to an online video platform, like YouTube? A network, like NBC? A channel, like HBO? (These questions apply as well to other streamers, like Hulu and Amazon Prime, but to Netflix above all.) The Murphy and Rhimes deals suggest something else: It's an entire parallel TV universe, and it's still expanding. Think of Netflix as the Upside Down in its sci fi series "Stranger Things." By this I don't mean that it's a nefarious or dangerous force. But it is a kind of alternative TV dimension, overlaying and replicating the known world of traditional television, that tries to acquire one of everything that exists in the universe of TV. Initially, the company did this through literal acquisition: buying streaming rights to hit TV series. Then it did it through imitation: reviving Fox's "Arrested Development" and creating originals, like "House of Cards," in the mold of premium cable. Now it's imitating through acquisition, spiriting away the likes of Mr. Murphy and Ms. Rhimes to its well remunerated plane. The history of TV is one of upstarts and competitors, and my first instinct was to liken Netflix to something like cable, which rose as a serious competitor to broadcast TV in the 1980s. A cable brand might evolve Bravo went from an arts channel to the "Real Housewives" channel but the idea was to offer a specific aesthetic to a specific audience. Netflix doesn't have that; in fact, it is specifically anti that. Its brand is "stuff that you like to watch on TV." It developed a vast library of reruns, and with that, a proprietary trove of data on who likes to watch what and how much. Then it made more of that, or bought it. If you liked "30 Rock," here's "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." If you liked "Damages," here's "Bloodline." Look at just the past few months of Netflix programming. There's "The Crown," a BBC style historical drama. "Wormwood," an Errol Morris docudrama. "One Day at a Time," a 21st century reboot of a 1970s network TV multicamera sitcom. "Dirty Money," a "Frontline" esque documentary anthology. "She's Gotta Have It," a risque romantic comedy. "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction," a David Letterman interview series. Oh, and why not let's throw in a "Cloverfield" sequel and a Will Smith movie. Something for everyone that was the ethos of broadcast TV in the old three network era. The obvious analogy, then, is that Netflix isn't cable at all; it's a broadcaster, pitching a big tent. But, as I've written before, there's one very important difference. Broadcasters, whose advertising model required millions of eyeballs on every individual show, had to make sure that everything they aired appealed to a broad range of people. That business imperative had aesthetic results: It gave us family sitcoms and comfort food cop dramas. It's less true today, in the era of smaller audiences but it's still much more true of NBC than, say, of IFC. Netflix, on the other hand, is breathtakingly broad and microscopically niche at the same time. It's selling a platform to everyone, but by providing products for very specific tastes. Netflix assumes a future in which we're watching our faves on our own screens, rather than gathering around an electronic fireplace and as long as the monthly payment clears, it's all the same to the company. It's less a big tent than a Dothraki tent city, to borrow a metaphor from "Game of Thrones." What does this mean for Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes? Maybe not much at all. They were both powerful producers with a lot of freedom who will now have a lot of freedom and more money. What Ms. Rhimes does at Netflix will be interesting. She's the consummate network TV producer, having essentially defined the current voice of ABC with "Grey's Anatomy" and "Scandal." She might do something very different with the license of streaming but if she doesn't, that will fit in all the same at Netflix, which resurrected the broadcast favorite "Gilmore Girls" with much the same tone, give or take a few curse words. One curious thing about Netflix is that every sensibility niche and mass, G rated and NSFW exists on the same platform and the same plane. Is all the deal making worth it? Whether Netflix is emptying its deep pockets wisely by making itself into a Hall of Fame for established stars (see also Dave Chappelle) isn't my concern as a TV critic. What I do care about is whether Netflix can nurture original, distinctive art, especially if it continues growing into a huge, all encompassing alterna TV. And I worry whether it can do that when derivation is the business strategy itself: selling people new versions of things they already like. It's fine that Netflix can toss around enough money to reactivate David Letterman. But does it have the kind of culture that could discover a new David Letterman? In its short life as an original programmer. Netflix has made a few series I'd consider legitimately great. But most of them have involved making deals with creators with limited track records ("BoJack Horseman," "American Vandal") or talented artists relatively new to creating series ("Master of None," "Lady Dynamite"). (As I've also written before, these shows tend to be comedies, which may translate more directly and easily to the streaming format.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LOS ANGELES In Hollywood, the run up to the 90th Academy Awards, which will be held on March 4, has been dominated by the discussion about sexual misconduct and abuse of power. The Golden Globe Awards became a de facto rally for the Time's Up movement, with actresses wearing black to protest sexual harassment and Oprah Winfrey delivering a scorching speech. The Screen Actors Guild Awards, which had a female only lineup of presenters, were focused on gender inequality and other social ills. At the Baftas, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, domestic violence activists, inspired by the Time's Up campaign, swarmed the red carpet. But in this MeToo era the people behind the Oscar telecast have a message: Our show will be focused on films, not the cultural moment around them. "We want to make it as entertaining as possible reverential and respectful but also fun and emotional," said Jennifer Todd, one of the lead producers of the Academy Awards, which will be hosted for the second year in a row by Jimmy Kimmel. "The Oscars should be a spectacle. Fun and funny and great performances." "It should also be a giant commercial for the movie business, which we all need to keep going," Ms. Todd said, noting that the show would emphasize the 90th anniversary milestone. Channing Dungey, president of entertainment at ABC, which will broadcast the ceremony live, echoed Ms. Todd in a separate interview. "We certainly want to honor and respect Time's Up and allow that message to be heard," Ms. Dungey said. "But we're trying to make it more planned than spur of the moment it has its moment and then doesn't feel like it overshadows the artists and films being honored." Ms. Dungey added of Time's Up, "I would love for every award recipient to not feel like they have to acknowledge it independently." The campaign has also decided, these people said, not to ask stars to wear black although a Time's Up label pin would be appreciated and that there was no coordinated effort for actresses to bring activists as guests, as there was at the Golden Globes. Some celebrity supporters will probably use red carpet interviews to raise awareness for the Time's Up legal defense fund. About 21 million has been raised so far. At the same time, the red carpet preshows are tacking back toward their sweet spots. Jennifer Neal, an E! executive vice president, said in an email that "viewers enjoyed hearing more about the MeToo and TimesUp movements" at the Golden Globes, "but they also expressed wanting to hear about other subjects as well, including fashion and entertainment, so we're looking to balance this out in our live coverage" at the Oscars. Attempts to keep the Oscars on the sunnier side reflect ratings concern inside ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Most people watch award shows for the glamour. Whenever stars use the platform to support progressive causes and make political statements, large numbers of viewers turn the channel, according to academy insiders, who cite minute by minute Nielsen data for past shows. Live television viewing has been waning for years, but ratings have lately tumbled for award shows as they have tested the public's tolerance for mixing serious causes with frothy self celebration. Despite intense media attention on the black attire of attendees, ratings for the 75th Golden Globes in January dipped 5 percent compared with last year's telecast. Viewership for the Screen Actors Guild Awards plummeted 30 percent, hurt in part by competition from football, while the Grammy Awards, which included a high profile sketch skewering President Trump, plunged 24 percent. Last year's Academy Awards ceremony drew 32.9 million viewers, the second lowest total since Nielsen started tracking viewership in 1974. A Grammys level drop would be a disaster. The Oscar telecast is a big business, generating roughly 80 percent of the academy's 136.3 million in annual revenue. Rita Ferro, president of ad sales for the Disney ABC Television Group, declined to discuss pricing, but said that inventory for the telecast was sold out. "People are excited to be part of what tends to be an always positive and uplifting show," Ms. Ferro said, adding that the telecast would feature 12 custom made ads focused on female empowerment and diversity. The tone of the Oscars telecast has been the subject of Hollywood speculation for months, ever since The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed decades of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, sparking the MeToo conversation. Some envisioned an Oscars stage draped in black to honor victims and atone as an industry for turning a blind eye to men like Mr. Weinstein. Others argued that the academy did its part ousting Mr. Weinstein, implementing a code of conduct for members and should hold its party as usual. ABC has left little mystery about what kind of show it would like to see. One promo emphasizes blockbusters like "Wonder Woman" the opposite of the current best picture contenders, which are mostly art films and plays up stage extravaganzas mounted at Oscars past. The word "sizzle" takes over the screen at one point. Efforts to tilt the telecast away from politics and causes may prove futile, of course. "Who am I to say what they should and should not get to say?" Ms. Todd said of the winners. "As a producer of the show, your only hope is that the speeches are emotional and really excite the room and aren't read off a piece of paper."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Stanford University abruptly dropped out of the intense international competition to build an innovative science graduate school in New York City, releasing its decision on Friday afternoon. A short time later, its main rival in the contest, Cornell, announced a 350 million gift the largest in its history to underwrite its bid. The twin announcements threw a sharp curve into the contest, leaving Cornell's 2 billion proposal for Roosevelt Island as the clear front runner for what is seen as a prime opportunity to help reinvent higher education. The city is expected to select among the four remaining applicants in January, and bestow up to 400 million in land and infrastructure improvements. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed the competition last year to replicate the experience of Stanford or M.I.T. a top notch engineering and computer science school whose graduates could seed the region with new high tech businesses and with M.I.T. opting not to participate, Stanford was at first seen as the one to beat. But being a continent away in Palo Alto, Calif., took its toll on Stanford, according to people briefed on the process, who insisted on anonymity to discuss matters they were not authorized to make public. The university, with no experience building in New York, recoiled at meeting terms laid down by the city after its proposal was submitted, while Cornell, with extensive experience in the city its medical school is in Manhattan expected such negotiations. And even before the 350 million gift, Cornell, with far more alumni rooted in New York, was more aggressive about generating enthusiasm and financial pledges. (Mayoral aides told reporters that Mr. Bloomberg was not the donor.) In fact, all sides said that Cornell, which bluntly called the project crucial to the Ithaca based university's future, simply behaved as if it needed and wanted the prize more. Cornell was more willing to accommodate the city's demands and got an earlier start raising money, and while John L. Hennessy, Stanford's president, was personally engaged, city officials said they never had the sense that he had behind him the kind of united front presented by Dr. David J. Skorton, Cornell's president, and its trustees, deans, faculty members and alumni. "Stanford could not or would not keep up," said a city official who was involved. Stanford's decision to bow out, made Friday morning by Mr. Hennessy and his board of trustees, surprised city officials and those at competing colleges. A university spokeswoman, Lisa Lapin, said Stanford's negotiating team was still in talks with the city on Thursday, and was still in New York on Friday, when Mr. Hennessy called Mr. Bloomberg and his deputy for economic development, Robert K. Steel, to call it quits. "We were looking forward to an innovative partnership with the city of New York, and we are sorry that together we could not find a way to realize our mutual goals," Mr. Hennessy said in a statement sent to reporters and Stanford alumni about 2 p.m. Friday. Seven institutions applied by the October deadline, and the city said no thanks to two. Besides Cornell, the three remaining contenders are Columbia University, which has declined the city's offer of free land and instead wants to devote part of its West Harlem expansion to an applied sciences school; Carnegie Mellon University, whose proposal is for a parcel the city offered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; and a consortium led by New York University and focused on real estate the city had not offered, a building in Downtown Brooklyn. Mr. Bloomberg has said he could choose two schools rather than one. But the city has made clear that it favors more prestigious schools and more ambitious proposals. Officials would not release the actual proposals, but Cornell, which would run its school in partnership with Technion Israel Institute of Technology, has plans for about two million square feet, roughly double the size of Columbia's, which is in turn much larger than the others'. Julie Wood, deputy press secretary for the mayor, said in an e mail that each remaining contender "has a game changing project queued up." Reacting to the news, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin and Assemblyman Micah Kellner, who represent Roosevelt Island, called on the city to choose Cornell. Cornell officials declined to respond directly to Stanford's withdrawal. Instead, it dropped its own bombshell with the record gift, with Dr. Skorton saying in a statement that "our entire community has come together, in a way that happens only so often in an institution's history, with winning ideas, energy and the creativity that the mayor's challenge deserves." Several people involved in the process said Stanford had been surprised by the way the city handled it. It is standard practice in New York that once proposals are submitted for a building project, officials negotiate with the bidders in hopes of sweetening their offers before selecting one. So, for example, the city asked the schools to commit to a set of construction milestones, with financial penalties for failure to meet the deadlines. Stanford, unfamiliar with the approval and construction process in New York, objected to what it called a potentially expensive loss of flexibility. Cornell was less daunted by the prospect and more eager to please the city. City officials said that the first phase of Cornell's project would accommodate more students than Stanford's, yet seemed more feasible, and that Stanford balked at matching some of what Cornell had proposed. In its request for proposals, the city said it would judge universities' plans based in part on their expertise and realism in taking on a huge urban project, a factor that all along looked like a potential weakness for Stanford. "We listed that as a criterion and we meant it," a city official said Friday. And while Stanford's ability to bankroll the project was not seriously in question the university routinely leads the nation in fund raising Cornell's early start in gathering alumni pledges made an impression, as did the partnership with Technion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Over the last two decades, scientists in China have paraded one surprising dinosaur discovery after another, enough to rewrite textbooks and even impress dinophile first graders. Some of the smaller newfound creatures, it turns out, had feathers, which shifted expert thinking to the dinosaurian origin of birds. Now a discovery of 160 million year old fossils in northeastern China, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, calls attention to a dinosaur species that may have tried to take to the air on featherless wings. It was one of presumably many experiments in early flight that failed the test of time and was eventually abandoned. Scientists are not even sure how it was supposed to work. After studying findings by a Chinese led team of paleontologists, Kevin Padian, an American dinosaur authority, said he could only think that the attempted flight innovations "have just gone from the strange to the bizarre." The fossil remains belonged to a previously unknown species of an obscure group of small dinosaurs, related to primitive birds such as the famous Archaeopteryx. It had feathers, but they seemed too insubstantial to be useful in flight. Then the scientists said they recognized the unusually long rodlike bone extending from each of the two wrists: curving structures possibly supporting an aerodynamic membrane.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Lock your doors, bolt your windows and gather your children close. It won't do any good. The message being sent by some of the most promising plays opening in New York this season is that the walls of the traditional homestead have never been more permeable. For much of the 20th century, a majority of domestic dramas seemed to take place within the equivalents of sealed rooms, no exit environments in which clans fought, fell apart and reconstituted themselves in what felt like a cyclical eternity. Think of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" or Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie," or even Sam Shepard's "Buried Child." True, these plays often reflected, in concentrated form, political and economic tensions in the contemporary world beyond. But the field of battle was usually confined to one set of living quarters and propelled by psychological warfare among people who knew one another better than anyone else possibly could. More recently, though, the domestic drama's dominant lens has widened to accommodate a much longer view, a perspective on abundant display this fall. The families portrayed in many of this season's works often seem swept away on a heaving tide of current events, groping for anchors in a universe that no longer feels safe or familiar. Never miss a show again. Add this fall's most anticipated cultural events directly to your calendar. Whether the setting is rural Northern Ireland in the early 1980s ("The Ferryman"), Alabama in the age of Jim Crow ("Fireflies"), a Florida police station ("American Son") or Seoul in the shadow of the recent North Korean missile tests ("Wild Goose Dreams"), the characters in these plays suffer from an increasing awareness that home is a tenuous place. And there's an abiding sense that even the most tightly knit families can be unraveled by outside forces. The names of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Michael Brown surface, menacingly and inevitably, as the young man's parents argue, blame and discover that what separates them is as much political as it is personal. Directed by Kenny Leon (a Tony Award winner for the 2014 revival of "A Raisin in the Sun"), the show auspiciously stars Kerry Washington (late of the hit series "Scandal") and Steven Pasquale ("The Bridges of Madison County" on Broadway). The production is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 6 at the Booth Theater. "The Ferryman," a London import that picked up most best play awards on offer there, is largely set in a cozy Irish farmhouse overflowing with a multigenerational abundance of family. (The cast numbers more than 20, not counting livestock.) But since its author is the perpetually surprising Jez Butterworth ("Jerusalem"), whose plays are never what they initially seem, a mortal chill is soon felt amid the hearthside warmth. The discovery of a corpse links the head of the household to his past life as a member of the Irish Republican Army, and the arrival of highly unwelcome, quite possibly homicidal visitors is imminent. Staged by Sam Mendes, this production pulsed so vigorously with plot, suspense and life itself that when I saw it in London last year, its more than three hours seemed to pass in one deep gulp of a breath. Featuring its excellent original stars, Laura Donnelly (whose family's history partly inspired the plot) and Paddy Considine, "The Ferryman" begins previews on Oct. 2 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. The upper middle class African American family of Patricia Ione Lloyd's "Eve's Song," which begins previews on Oct. 21 at the Public Theater, finds that affluence offers no insulation against the violence regularly perpetrated in this country against women of color, especially those who are transgender or lesbian. The ghosts of the victims of such crimes creep into the house of the newly divorced Deborah, whose daughter has recently come out. Jo Bonney ("Mlima's Tale") directs this serious comedy, which Ms. Lloyd has tantalizingly described as "a queer female version of 'Get Out.'" Two parents from different sides of a historical geographic divide are each separated from their families in Hansol Jung's "Wild Goose Dreams," also at the Public, starting on Oct. 30. A North Korean woman, a defector now living in Seoul, and a man whose wife and children have moved to the United States examine the possibilities for connection in their newly solitary lives. The internet plays a significant role in their quests; it becomes, in fact, a living character, embodied by cast members. Leigh Silverman ("Well," "Violet") directs. A great American atrocity the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four little girls is a catalyst in the fission of the family at the center of Donja R. Love's "Fireflies," which begins performances on Sept. 26 at the Linda Gross Theater. That event puts new pressure on the marriage of a religious leader in the civil rights movement and his wife, a writer who thinks it may be time to move elsewhere. An Atlantic Theater Company production, directed by Saheem Ali, "Fireflies" is the second part of a projected trilogy about African American and queer history by Mr. Love, which begins with "Sugar in Our Wounds," set in the antebellum South and staged at the Manhattan Theater Club earlier this year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Head south: past the gas station, the chicken shop and the bodybuilder gym, through a thicket of enormous public housing estates, constructed in varying shades of beige and beiger and brown. It's quiet on this stretch of Vallance Road in London's East End, a concrete artery connecting disparate neighborhoods. A short walk northwest brings you to Bethnal Green Academy, from which three British schoolgirls fled to Syria to join the Islamic State last year. An equal distance southwest lands you at Fournier Street: home to a different kind of enfant terrible the British artist Tracey Emin, whose most famous work, "My Bed" (1999), featured Ms. Emin's own authentically unmade bed, strewn with cigarettes and used condoms. And yet here's your destination: an unremarkable brown brick building, affixed with a circular, cobalt blue plaque: "Mary Hughes, 1860 1941 / Friend of All in Need / lived and worked here 1926 1941." Was there ever such a lovely descriptor? Mary Hughes was once a stalwart champion of East London's poor. She bought the Vallance Road building in 1926, and quickly converted it into a center for education, Christian Socialism and trade unionism. There, she passed many productive years. But her final days were spent as an invalid, after she was injured by a tram while marching on behalf of the unemployed. This year, London celebrates 150 years of Blue Plaques: these tiny, ceramic homages to London's greatest and most eccentric and on rare occasion, most achingly virtuous city dwellers. The capital boasts over 900 official plaques, nodding to notable figures and important historical sites. There are plaques at the home of the World War II code breaker Alan Turing; the house where John Lennon wrote his songs in 1968; the home of Sir Winston Churchill; the home of Churchill's father, Lord Randolph Churchill; the former hayloft where, in 1820, conspirators plotted to assassinate the prime minister, Robert Banks Jenkinson, the earl of Liverpool, and his entire cabinet. (They failed.) The Blue Plaques offer the historically inclined London wanderer a useful means of navigating the sprawling city and its layered history. To mark the 150th anniversary year, the English Heritage trust, a registered charity that manages the country's historic buildings and monuments, unveiled a Blue Plaques app (free for download) that locates nearby markers and offers historical context. For locals, the plaques function as collective memory prompts boldly insisting, in all their blue shininess, that great people did great things here, even if that particular "here" has long since lost its significance. At 7 Bruce Grove, in the Tottenham neighborhood of North London, a plaque marks where "Luke Howard, 1772 1864 / Namer of Clouds" lived and died. Howard, the son of a Quaker businessman, earned his pennies as a pharmacist, but his passion was the skies and he soon became an accomplished amateur meteorologist. In 1802, he wrote a modest 32 page pamphlet that proposed a classification system for clouds: cumulus, stratus and cirrus. The paper was eventually published in an academic journal, and he was catapulted to scientific fame. His many admirers included Goethe, who went so far as to send Howard gushing fan mail. English Heritage continues to accept nominations for plaques. This year, the playwright Samuel Beckett got his due as did Fred Bulsara, a.k.a. the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, whose family moved to west London in 1967 after leaving Zanzibar. A blue plaque now marks the home where a young Mercury reportedly spent hours in the bathroom styling his hair. Since 1984, the plaques themselves have been made by the ceramists Frank and Sue Ashworth, who kiln fire and glaze each nameplate 19.5 inches in diameter, 2 inches in thickness, using a base blend of ball clays, feldspar, sand and grog in a studio in Cornwall, where they replicate the original lettering used by long ago plaque designers. In this physical process, tradition trumps novelty. But in other ways, the plaque program is bending to the times. This year, it was revealed that only 4 percent of London's Blue Plaques commemorate black or Asian individuals, and just 13 percent are dedicated to women. In an era of contested memory and memorials, critics have accused Blue Plaque commissioners of doling out posthumous pats on the back to Great British Men. In response, English Heritage has acknowledged its "historic blindness" and called on the public to nominate more diverse candidates so that future London walkers can ramble through a more inclusive, cobalt blue laid nostalgia.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A 17th century palace in the heart of St. Remy de Provence (formerly the Hotel d'Almeran) has been beautifully and conscientiously renovated as a boutique hotel with seven custom designed suites, each featuring handcrafted furniture. Opened in May 2015, the property has a design aesthetic that tends toward minimalist white and sand colored hues to showcase the original architecture (including elements like 16th century sandstone floor tiles in the foyer), but the furnishings tend toward the soft and cozy, with colorful chairs by Eileen Gray and tables by Konstantin Grcic. Pale, wide plank parquet floors and muted, lush linens and natural fabrics are features of each room. One room, Numero Deux, with its original marble fireplace, is the palais's former salon, where, according to the hotel, Gounod's opera "Mireille" is said to have premiered in 1863. The most stunning feature is the hotel's central staircase, with high sandstone arches. It's hard to imagine a more central location, amid the winding alleyways that make up the charming old city. The sandstone roof terrace, which has an outdoor pool with waterfall and wave features, offers views of the Alpilles, the foothills of the Alps. As one of the less trendy, touristed towns of Provence, St. Remy still has the easy feel of a somewhat undiscovered destination, with a mixture of upscale boutiques and restaurants and many more basic shops and cafes for a quick bite. Local points of interest include the St. Paul de Mausole hospital grounds, or the "asylum" where Vincent van Gogh was treated, and where he painted many of his famous works (a 15 minute stroll outside the city center), as well as the Roman ruins at Glanum, a fortified city dating to the sixth century B.C. My junior suite was one of the smaller ones at 323 square feet but left me feeling in no way shortchanged. It was tastefully, minimally designed with two modern aquamarine lounge chairs, a circular glass table and a side table that converted into a desk. Its flat screen television miraculously became no more than a white framed mirror when it was turned off. I was most charmed by the king size bed with a perfectly weighted duvet cover of natural fabrics, which provided me with what was probably the most restful sleep I've had in years. The only problematic feature was a digitalized system to control the lighting and air conditioning, which I couldn't figure out how to use properly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Watch These Captivating Salsa Dancers, and Try Not to Break a Sweat Hidden from the world four floors below, a sweaty sea of partygoers all twisting, turning and swiveling transform the Dancesport ballroom studio into one of the city's largest salsa parties. Walk along 34th Street on a Sunday evening and you may catch a hint of the dueling trumpets and insistent rhythms swirling in the air. This is Las Chicas Locas (the Crazy Girls), a weekly salsa party that takes over the ballroom late each Sunday afternoon and doesn't end until early Monday morning, when most New Yorkers are fast asleep. Around 300 to 400 dancers descend on the darkened space set aglow by a mix of multicolored and Christmas lights for the party that inherited its name from a now shuttered restaurant in Chelsea where it began. There are also smaller classrooms for other Latin and African dances (like bachata and kizomba), but most of the party stays out front, where the room's temperature rises as the bodies multiply. New York style salsa, in which couples start their count on the two, is mostly what you'll see on the dance floor at Las Chicas Locas. (Some dancers visiting from other cities may sneak in on the one count, and occasionally the music switches up for a bachata break.) Ms. Burns explained that the sense of controlled movements in New York style salsa sets it apart from other types. "It doesn't spread out," she said. "It's linear, super tight, a little faster." She added, "Each dancer has their own styles and shines that's when you break away from your partner and mess around with the rhythm on your own. You get to play with them for a second before they pick you back up." "I know so many people by their hands, bodies or physicality, but I can't tell you their name," she said. The D.J. will keep playing as long as dancers are twirling. But around 11 p.m., the D.J. stops the music and tells everyone to clear the floor. The dancers are now audience members; cheering, screaming and whistling as professionals or students emerge from backstage for their performances. The performers vary each week, and performances range in styles and levels. Some dancers are champions showing off award winning routines, but most of them come in from local dance schools in the five boroughs and surrounding states. All of them are greeted enthusiastically by the crowd. "There's a very liberating feeling you get when dancing salsa," Meagan Larkin, 33, said. As someone who wasn't raised with Latin dance in their home, it was really exciting to embrace it and learn how to feel confident with the movement." "Salsa is really freeing for your soul," Talia Berger said. "I become my true self with it." Weekend after weekend, Xiomaris Cotto Rios, who works with the party's organizer, Alejandro Bouza, remains one of the friendly faces at Las Chicas Locas. "It's very different from what I do at my regular day job," she said, referring to her work as a scientific researcher. "Sometimes you need your brain to reset. For me, this is my refresh."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
BERKELEY, Calif. "My soul is on fire because we are apart. My only wish is to perish in the world of love. My true love knows every sliver of sorrow in my heart." "Dear God, let me feel even more despair for my love." "The true purpose of love is sacrificing oneself." These lines, capturing various archetypal facets of Romantic love and anguish, come from the libretto of "Layla and Majnun." The story, known from the fifth century onward in oral versions, reached its first definitive form in the Persian romance of Nezami Ganjawi (1141 1209). This classic, which has long pervaded Arabic, Persian, Azerbaijani and Indian culture, has now become a transcultural dance drama that had its premiere on Friday night at Zellerbach Hall here. Mark Morris, who has employed several ethnic styles over the decades, choreographs and directs, in collaboration with the Silk Road Ensemble and the painter Howard Hodgkin. The production was presented here by Cal Performances, its lead commissioner, and will now tour the United States. Mr. Morris does not so much tell the Layla Majnun story as refract it, ritualize it, multiply it. The emphasis is all on emotion. Sometimes one couple from the group represents the hero and heroine; sometimes we see four Laylas and four Majnuns; sometimes one couple is offset by an ensemble that also at times suggests society, the lovers' parents, the male and female hearts. The staging about 65 minutes including a long musical overture is visually beautiful. An abstract backdrop painting by Mr. Hodgkin (realized as decor by Johan Henckens) shows a selection of intense colors, juxtaposing yellow, green and red, so that we feel them as warring but adjacent emotions. Identical costumes Hodgkin's designs have been realized by Maile Okamura for women (full length orange) and men (blue jackets over white trousers, help to suggest a multiplicity of Laylas and Majnuns. When particular Laylas and Majnuns are featured, the Laylas wear flame colored scarves, the Majnuns white ones. The beauty is even greater for the ears than for the eyes. Mr. Morris's music is the "Layla and Majnun" opera composed in 1908 by Uzeyir Hajibeyli (1885 1948). This score, often known as the first opera of the Middle East, had its premiere in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan. Mr. Hajibeyli's score is a central work of Azerbaijani culture; Mr. Morris uses a condensed arrangement of it by Alim Qasimov, Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen. The words are printed in the program; the general topic appears in supertitles. The outstanding feature of this Azerbaijani music is its vocal lines, all of which feature complex melismas: a single syllable is decorated with rapid flourishes, slow trills and firm downward slurs. The basic vocal sound (the mouth is never opened wide) is related to that used in flamenco, but softer, sweeter, more inward. The stage is gently tiered. The musicians always occupy center stage, seated. Two young singers and two instrumentalists play the long "Bayati Shiraz" overture, which is undanced. It proves a perfect introduction to the sound world of the opera. The two wonderful vocalists, Kamila Nabiyeva and Miralam Miralamov, wearing white shirts, cast a spell as they embroider the expression of amorous obsession. Two mature singers, 10 instrumentalists and 16 dancers (seven women, nine men) then perform the opera. The singers, Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova, seated at the center of the other musicians, sing the roles of Majnun and Layla. Ms. Qasimova's voice glows gorgeously. The dancers occupy the peripheries of the stage front, back, and sides. We never see more than 12 of them at a time: The number matches that of the musicians. At times the dance idiom is based on that of Asian dervishes, with the arms and upper body holding a formal, side tilting position while the dancer revolves on the spot now slowly, now fast, though never for a long time. Elsewhere, intense through the body gestures tip the torso powerfully from side to side (the dancers stand with legs parted and knees bent), suggesting a maelstrom of emotion. A few of the steps come from ballet. (One Majnun slowly retreats from his Layla while extending a leg behind him into high arabesque; that Layla replies with a matching arabesque but folds the leg inward, inverting his phrase.) There are jumping steps, fitted with folk like inflections to the music. Although there are lifts amid the ensemble, the various Laylas and Majnuns address each other across space; the distance is crucial to the drama. The words and music sometimes suggest depths that the dance does not match. The Layla Majnun romance is contemporaneous with the tales of courtly but adulterous love (Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Yseult, Troilus and Criseyde) that pervaded the culture of Western Europe during the age of chivalry. Like them it connects love and death, flesh and spirit; it expresses desires for both consummation and transcendence. Having watched two performances with pleasure, I long now to renew my acquaintance with Azerbaijani music in general and Hajibeyli's opera in particular. Mr. Morris's choreography deconstructs and distills the poetic legend with charm and taste.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
COLUMBIA, Mo. When Allison Frisch goes shopping this summer for furnishings to decorate her freshman dorm room at Stephens College, she will be looking for a comforter for herself and a matching doggie bed for her roommate. That is because Ms. Frisch will be sharing her room with Taffy, her 10 year old Shetland sheepdog. And Stephens, a women's college founded here in 1833, says it is glad to have them both. Ms. Frisch is one of 30 incoming freshmen at Stephens who have asked to bring a family pet to campus when they arrive this fall. That represents an increase of 20 over last year's freshman class so many that the college is renovating a dormitory for the students and their companions, most of them dogs and cats. The dorm, dubbed Pet Central, will have a makeshift kennel on the first floor, staffed by work study students who will offer temporary boarding and perhaps a bath. With these efforts, Stephens is hoping to smooth the transition of some students who may be so anxious about leaving home or adjusting to college life that a stuffed animal will not be of sufficient comfort. They want the real thing. Stephens joins a growing number of colleges putting out a welcome mat for pets. They include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the State University of New York at Canton, which allow cats in some dorm rooms; and Eckerd College in South Florida and Washington Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, which set aside rooms for students with dogs or cats and others who love animals so much they just want to live near them. "I recognize this as being a trend that is tied directly to the whole notion of helicopter parenting," said Dianne Lynch, who became president of Stephens last year and who is herself the owner of two dogs and two cats. "It's harder and harder for students to leave home. Bringing this particular piece of home with them may make that separation easier." While about a dozen colleges have explicit policies permitting pets of some kind Eckerd even allows snakes, provided they are "less than six feet long and nonvenomous" Ms. Lynch predicts that that figure will soon rise. AND YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO Allison Frisch said that the acceptance by Stephens of her dog, Taffy, was almost as exciting as her own into the theater program. Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times "Colleges will begin to recognize that this is important to students," she said, adding that in an increasingly competitive recruiting market for top students, becoming known as pet friendly is another way for a college to differentiate itself. Stephens, which began allowing dogs and cats in designated dormitory wings in 2003, said their owners tended to be especially organized and responsible and do well academically. While acknowledging that a pet can provide a teenager relief from stress, as well as unconditional love, Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, a psychiatrist specializing in children and adolescents, said he worried that taking a pet to college could slow the transition for some students. "By having your pet there," said Dr. Koplewicz, who is also president of the Child Mind Institute, "you could have an excuse not to go out and talk to people." Moreover, Dr. Koplewicz said he worried that allowing a student to have a pet might merely serve as a Band Aid on what could be a more serious mental health problem, like depression. "You can understand that a college might make this accommodation," he said. "That doesn't necessarily address the issue that these are risky years." But Elena Christian, a dance major who is entering her senior year, said that being able to raise her 18 month old Chihuahua in her dorm room had only served to enhance her social and academic experience at Stephens. "She really keeps me calm," Ms. Christian, 20, said as the dog, Annabelle, who weighs less than seven pounds, tugged on a red leash on the grass outside her dorm on a recent morning. "Sometimes during finals week, I get stressed out. She always does something that makes me laugh." Ms. Christian said that not long after she got Annabelle from a breeder, the dog provided her with perhaps the best lesson she had learned in college: that being responsible for the well being of another requires constant vigilance. Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times That hard lesson came after she inadvertently left Annabelle alone in a pen in her 13 foot by 15 foot dorm room without ensuring that the gate to the pen was closed securely. While Ms. Christian was in class, the dog scampered out and gorged on a nearby stash of beef jerky and chocolate. Her owner skipped her next class to rush Annabelle to the veterinarian, who administered Ipecac. But man's (or student's) best friend may not make the best dormmate. And so Stephens, following the lead of Eckerd and Washington Jefferson, has established a Pet Council made up of students and faculty members that enforces a lengthy list of strict guidelines. (One example: a dog is never allowed to roam free in a dormitory room while its owner is in class.) A repeat violation by Ms. Christian could result in Annabelle being removed from her care; indeed, two students lost their dog privileges last year after the Pet Council ruled that they were not taking appropriate care. The college also takes noise complaints seriously; after a three week grace period at the beginning of a semester, a yappy or barking dog can also be barred. And to respect the wishes of students who may not be so pet friendly as well as those with allergies dogs and cats are not welcome in classrooms or in common areas like lounges. Though in years past Stephens has barred pets weighing more than 40 pounds, that rule is being relaxed, with the belief that some of the biggest dogs are often the most docile. Unlike their owners, dogs and cats are not subjected to preadmission interviews, but proof of vaccinations is required. For Ms. Frisch, 18, who starts at Stephens in the fall, Taffy's acceptance was almost as exciting as her own into the college's theater program. Indeed, Ms. Frisch enjoys being around her dog so much that when she was cast in a community production of "The Wizard of Oz" as the Wicked Witch, she arranged for Taffy to play the role of Toto. (She said her father never shared her passion for Taffy, relegating the pooch to the basement.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
LONDON "I wanted to sit between Mrs. May and Mr. Macron," said the contemporary art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, recalling the seating arrangements at a brunch he hosted last month in his gallery in Salzburg, Austria, for the leaders of the 28 countries of the European Union. The visit to the gallery took place during a two day summit meeting to discuss Britain's departure from the European Union, the process known as Brexit. During the late morning break on the first day, Mr. Ropac, an Austrian who also runs high end galleries in London and Paris, talked to Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain about how the London art market could suffer if tariffs were imposed after Britain's withdrawal. He told Mrs. May that the London art market was more than twice the size of that of the rest of the European Union put together, he said. And Mrs. May's response to his concern? "She said she was aware of it," Mr. Ropac said. The worries about Britain's exit are coming into sharper focus for the art world. Last year, Britain accounted for 62 percent of the European Union's art sales by value, according to a report by Art Basel and UBS. London's status as a powerhouse of the market was obvious during the week of Frieze, with the city teeming with foreign visitors, drawn by the surfeit of high quality fairs, dealer exhibitions and auctions. "It's an excuse to come to London," said Patricia Cronin, a New York based artist who currently has an exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art. "Galleries put on their best shows. There's so much to see, and it's so international." Mr. Ropac, for his part, was showing more than 70 paintings, sculptures and drawings by Georg Baselitz from the 1980s, regarded as one of the most influential periods of the German artist's career. Though most of the works on view were on loan for the exhibition, seven paintings were available for purchase. The typically expressionistic 1988 oil on canvas, "Image mit Haus" ("Image With House"), was among the early sales, priced at 1.4 million euros, or about 1.6 million. Over in the neighborhood of Islington, the Victoria Miro Gallery was exhibiting new works by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, including a freshly fabricated "Infinity Mirrored Room." Ms. Kusama's magical and eminently Instagram friendly installations are hugely popular, and all viewing slots have been booked. Her last show at the London dealership, in 2016, attracted 80,000 visitors, according to the gallery's co director Glenn Scott Wright. Works by the venerated Ms. Kusama (who is the subject of a recent documentary movie) also attract lengthy lines of buyers. According to Mr. Scott Wright, Victoria Miro is currently negotiating a museum sale of this latest "Infinity Room," priced 1 million to 2 million. The gallery has also sold three new pumpkin sculptures, for 1.5 million each, and five large scale paintings from the artist's "My Eternal Soul" series, for 850,000 each. And there was plenty going on at Frieze itself. This year's 16th edition of the main contemporary art fair, which was held in Regent's Park, featured about 160 international galleries. Pre 21st century pieces were on show at a further 130 booths at its nearby sister fair, Frieze Masters, now in its seventh edition. Both events previewed on Wednesday. According to the organizers, the two fairs attract some 60,000 visitors, but the crowds were conspicuously denser at the contemporary art fair, where the work on display is younger and the price points generally lower. Night Gallery, based in Los Angeles, was participating for a fourth year in the section of Frieze devoted to emerging dealerships. The financial challenges facing smaller galleries at fairs have become a hot button issue in the art world. "For the first time, we've just about covered our costs. I can exhale," Davida Nemeroff, the founder of Night Gallery, said at the Wednesday preview, having sold five works from her stable of artists for a total of 110,000. Ms. Nemeroff said that half that amount had gone to the gallery, which had to pay 14,500 for its booth, , including lights and fittings, plus at least 40,000 in further expenses such as freight and accommodation. The growing reputations and prices of her artists helped. On Wednesday, "Toxic," a triangular canvas from 2018 by the New York based painter Mira Dancy sold for 36,000. Four years ago, a similar work by Ms. Dancy would have sold for 6,000, according to Ms. Nemeroff. Frieze no longer has quite the same degree of cool it had in the mid 2000s, when the groundbreaking Young British Artists, like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, topped international collectors' shopping lists. But the event still generates plenty of sales, albeit at a slower pace. Two 20 inch abstracted heads by the Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie, for example, sold for about 200,000 each, one from the Pace Gallery and one from Mr. Ropac's booth. (The head in the Ropac sale bore an unmistakable resemblance to President Trump.) Increasingly, seasoned collectors avoid the first crush of Frieze and opt instead for the more sedate rhythms of Frieze Masters, where the art ranges from the ancient to the modern. "The key is to mix it up," said Marco Voena, partner at the international dealership Robilant and Voena, who sold an Antonio Canova plaster bust from about 1813 of Caroline Murat, Napoleon's sister, to a South Korean collector of modern art for about 1 million at the Wednesday preview. He also sold a blue Lucio Fontana single cut "concetto spaziale" abstract from 1964 to a European collector for 500,000, he said. Out and out masterpieces are hard to find even at Frieze Masters, but for many, the gem of the fair was a 12 inch brown and yellow "Study to Homage to the Square," from 1954, by the American artist Josef Albers. The many "Homage" abstracts that Mr. Albers made from 1950 76 can be a little repetitive, but this example, offered by the San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier, was fresh from the collection of the artist's studio assistant and was distinguished by its early date, untouched condition and rare original frame. It quickly found a buyer, priced at 625,000. Despite busily trying to do business, British based dealers said that Brexit remained a concern. A weaker pound after the withdrawal could encourage buyers, but would owners want to sell their art here? That question loomed again on Thursday, when a trophy work by Jeff Koons, "Cracked Egg, (Blue)," valued at 10 million pounds, or about 13 million, failed to sell at Christie's. "Ultimately, the effects will be decided by whatever the tax benefits and special encouragements are to do business in Britain," said Brett Gorvy, co founder of the dealership Levy Gorvy, which has spaces in London and New York. On Wednesday at Frieze Masters, the gallery sold a 1963 neon installation by the pioneering French conceptual artist Francois Morellet for about EUR1 million to an unnamed buyer. "Europe just hasn't got the art market centers that can compete with London," Mr. Gorvy added. "Could Paris take over the art world again? I don't think so."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When scientists reported in 2009 that a little known mouse retrovirus was present in a large number of people with chronic fatigue syndrome, suggesting a possible cause of the condition, the news made international headlines. For patients desperate for answers, many of them severely disabled for years, the finding from an obscure research center, the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro Immune Disease in Reno, Nev., seemed a godsend. "I remember reading it and going, 'Bingo, this is it!' " said Heidi Bauer, 42, a mother of triplets in Huntington, Md., who has had chronic fatigue syndrome since her 20s. "I thought it was going to mean treatment, that I was going to be able to play with my kids and be the kind of mom I wanted to be." Patients showered praise on the lead researcher, Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute. They sent donations large and small to the institute, founded by Harvey and Annette Whittemore, a wealthy and politically well connected Nevada couple seeking to help their daughter, who had the illness. In hopes of treating their condition, some patients even began taking antiretroviral drugs used to treat H.I.V., a retrovirus related to the murine leukemia viruses suddenly suspected of involvement in chronic fatigue syndrome. More recently, however, the hopes of these patients have suffered an extraordinary battering. In a scientific reversal as dramatic and strange as any in recent memory, the finding has been officially discredited; a string of subsequent studies failed to confirm it, and most scientists have attributed the initial results to laboratory contamination. In late December, the original paper, published in the journal Science, and one other study that appeared to support it were retracted within days of each other. As the published evidence for the hypothesis fell apart, a legal melodrama erupted, dismaying and demoralizing patients and many members of the scientific community. Dr. Mikovits was even briefly jailed in California on charges of theft made by the institute. "I'm stunned that it's come to this point," said Fred Friedberg, a professor at Stony Brook University Medical Center and president of the International Association for C.F.S./M.E., a scientific organization. "This is a really sad unraveling of something that was perhaps going to generate a whole new direction in this illness." Despite the controversy, Dr. Mikovits is now supervising some lab work as part of a large government sponsored study being spearheaded by Dr. Ian Lipkin, a leading Columbia University virologist. The study was established before the two retractions to examine the possible link between chronic fatigue syndrome and mouse retroviruses. Dr. Mikovits still hopes to replicate her original results, and many patients continue to believe fervently in her hypothesis; study results are expected early this year. She did not respond to requests for comment. An estimated one million people in the United States suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, which is characterized by profound exhaustion, a prolonged loss of energy following minimal exertion, swollen lymph nodes, sore throat, cognitive dysfunction and other symptoms. Experts now generally believe that one or more infectious agents, or perhaps exposure to toxins, set off a persistent, hyperactive immune response the likely cause of many of the symptoms. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first investigated the illness in the mid 1980s, the agency has not been able to find a cause, identify any biomarkers or diagnostic tests, or develop effective treatments. Patients have long accused the mainstream medical and scientific community of neglect and abandonment. Many say that the C.D.C. has largely treated their disease as a psychological or stress related condition. A 2010 paper from the agency, for example, galled patients with the conclusion that they suffer disproportionately from "paranoid, schizoid, avoidant, obsessive compulsive and depressive personality disorders." Dr. Mikovits's research, done with collaborators from such prestigious organizations as the National Cancer Institute and the Cleveland Clinic, seemed to vindicate the concerns of many with the condition. The scientists said they had found that 67 percent of patients sampled were infected with a mouse virus called XMRV, compared with 4 percent of the controls. "If for years you've been told that your illness is all in your head and then you're being told, 'Look, we found something concrete and very substantial,' then of course there will be rallying behind that," said Rivka Solomon, 49, a Massachusetts playwright who has been largely homebound with the syndrome for more than 20 years. The publication of Dr. Mikovits's work brought immediate attention, much of it unflattering. Other scientists soon published studies challenging the findings, and Science issued first a statement of concern and then a partial retraction of the original study. Even as her work was publicly debated, the blunt and feisty Dr. Mikovits raised eyebrows among other scientists for stating at conferences that murine leukemia viruses could be related to autism. Perhaps more disconcerting, a commercial lab associated with the Whittemore Peterson Institute began marketing screening tests for XMRV, the hypothesized cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, costing hundreds of dollars. The business enraged many patients once they realized the results might be meaningless. Amid mounting concerns, Dr. Mikovits left her position as research director at the institute in a dispute over management practices and control over research materials. The institute sued her, accusing her of stealing notebooks and other proprietary items. Dr. Mikovits was arrested in Southern California, where she lives, and jailed for several days, charged with being a fugitive from justice. After her split with the institute, Dr. Mikovits denied having the missing laboratory materials. But a lab employee, Max Pfost, said in an affidavit that he took items at her request, stashing notebooks in his mother's garage in Sparks, Nev., before turning them over to Dr. Mikovits. At one point, "Mikovits informed me that she was hiding out on a boat to avoid being served with papers from W.P.I.," Mr. Pfost said in the affidavit. Some lab items have since been returned. In December, a judge ruled against her in the civil case. The criminal case is pending; another hearing in the civil case is in late February. But in late January, the Whittemores were themselves accused of embezzling millions of dollars in a lawsuit filed by partners in Mr. Whittemore's real estate business. The Whittemores, who have countersued, maintain their innocence of the embezzling charges, and Annette Whittemore stated in an e mail that institute research continues. The events of the past couple of years, though disheartening to chronic fatigue syndrome patients, may have a silver lining: Research into the disease, much of it privately financed, is ratcheting up. A new research and treatment center has been created at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The Hutchins Family Foundation is investing 10 million in the Chronic Fatigue Initiative, an effort to find causes and treatments that has recruited top researchers from Columbia, Harvard, Duke and other institutions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
What does "Saturday Night Live" look like without professionally crafted costumes, sets or hair and makeup? Without a studio audience or the ability of its cast members to be in the same place at the same time? This weekend, for the first time in the show's 45 year history, audiences got the chance to find out. Beginning with this week's opening sketch, which showed all 17 cast members joining in a video call from their home quarantines and ended with Kate McKinnon exclaiming, "Live from Zoom, it's sometime between March and August!," it was clear this would not be your customary episode. Still, the show did all it could to keep things familiar, bringing in Tom Hanks as a guest host and Chris Martin as a musical performer and drawing upon its roster of famous alumni and celebrity pals. It was a little over a month ago March 7, to be exact that "S.N.L." broadcast its most recent live episode from its usual home at Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center. Daniel Craig (whose new James Bond movie, "No Time to Die," had been postponed four days earlier) was the host; the Weeknd was the musical guest; and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had just dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, made a surprise appearance in the show's cold open. There were even a couple of sketches that joked about how the spread of coronavirus could have unexpected effects on our lives. We laughed at the time. But within days, the late night talk shows announced that they were suspending their programs. "S.N.L." which has halted its season only a few times, usually because of writers' strikes soon followed suit. Even as the talk shows returned a short time after, in minimalist formats optimized for home sheltering, it seemed hard to imagine how "S.N.L.", with its sizable cast and substantial productions, could do the same. Nonetheless, "S.N.L." returned with a full complement of sketches that let us see directly into the homes of its performers. (We'll be thinking about the prominently placed acoustic guitar in Colin Jost's apartment for a long time.) Sure, sometimes the audio was garbled or the lighting was off, and the whole thing had a distinctly YouTube circa 2009 aesthetic. But the familiar wing and a prayer spirit of "S.N.L." let's just put this out there and see what sticks was there, too, and a lot of it stuck. Hanks, who has been a frequent "S.N.L" host, dating back to the mid 80s, appeared in a segment recorded at his home, where he poked fun at his own status as one of the first celebrities to disclose that he had tested positive for coronavirus. (He and his wife, Rita Wilson, were both in Australia in March when learned they had the virus, and they were treated at a hospital there before being released a few days later.) "Ever since being diagnosed, I have been more like America's dad than ever before," Hanks said. "Since no one wants to be around me very long and I make people uncomfortable." He said he had been treated well in Australia, adding: "They use Celsius instead of Fahrenheit when they take your temperature. So when I come in and they say, 'You're 36,' which seemed very bad to me, it turns out 36 is fine 38 is bad. So basically it's how Hollywood treats female actors." Before offering his gratitude to hospital staff, emergency medical workers and other helpers, Hanks told viewers that this "S.N.L." broadcast might be unusual. "Is it going to look a little different than what you're used to?" he asked. "Yes. Will it be weird to see sketches without big sets and costumes? Sure. But will it make you laugh? Eh. It's 'S.N.L.' There'll be some good stuff, maybe one or two stinkers. You know the drill." The lack of costumes and prosthetics didn't stop the performers from reprising some of their best known impersonations of political figures. Wearing a pair of granny glasses and a shirt that read "SUPER DIVA!", Kate McKinnon played the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the host of her own home workout program. Standing in front of hand drawn posters that were taped to her walls, McKinnon exercised by lifting Q tips, punching tea bags and dropping some of the personal insults that she calls Ginsburns: "Mitch McConnell said that the administration didn't focus on the virus because they were too distracted by impeachment," she said. "I mean, are you in Congress or Parliament? Because your timeline is funkadelic." He said he was sufficiently stocked up on toilet paper: "Please, I'm a 78 year old man living in Vermont," he said. "I have a whole room full of toilet paper. And by the way, not the good stuff. Single ply. I'm talking prison T.P." And, in spite of everything, David as Sanders said he was happy to be no longer pursuing the Democratic nomination: "I finally have the time to relax and finish that heart attack from October," he said. "But my immediate plan is to do anything I can to beat Donald Trump. That's why I'm voting for Joe Biden as enthusiastically as Joe voted for the Iraq War." Sketches You Might Have Seen on a Traditional 'S.N.L.' Broadcast of the Week "Telling jokes with nobody just looks like hostage footage," Che said. "Doing comedy with no audience, it kind of feels like when you're in a long distance relationship and your girl's like, 'We can't have sex but we can FaceTime.' And you're like, 'Ugh, I'd rather just cheat on you.'" Bernie Sanders has dropped out of the race. Which means that Joe Biden is now the presumptive nominee for 2020. I just want to say on behalf of all comedians, thank you. I'm so excited because it's either Trump or Biden, which means that we have comedy gold for the next four years. Potentially with Biden, the next eight years, and I just want to say, can you imagine the things Biden's going to be saying eight years from now? This is bittersweet because I actually like Bernie Sanders, but him losing and making all those liberal white kids on Twitter sad is the only thing getting me through this really rough week. Boy, whenever I feel down, I just go online and listen to Bernie supporters try really, really hard to not blame this loss on black people. I liked him but I knew he wasn't getting the black vote because he kept bringing up health care. We don't go to the doctor, man. The "Weekend Update" segment also featured a phoned in appearance by Alec Baldwin in his recurring role as President Trump. "I'm happy to report, Colin, that America is now No. 1 in the world for coronavirus," he boasted, later adding: "I've always said it was a giant hoax that we should take very seriously. Even though it was invented by the Democrats. Impeachment, Part 2. So everyone needs to wash their hands. Or not."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Deborah Fuller's daughter, Sarah, needed pain medication after two car accidents and a fibromyalgia diagnosis. She was given a powerful opioid intended for cancer patients and died months later with extremely high blood levels of fentanyl. WASHINGTON A fast acting class of fentanyl drugs approved only for cancer patients with high opioid tolerance has been prescribed frequently to patients with back pain and migraines, putting them at high risk of accidental overdose and death, according to documents collected by the Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. established a distribution oversight program in 2011 to curb inappropriate use of the dangerous medications, but entrusted enforcement to a group of pharmaceutical companies that make and sell the drugs. Some of the companies have been sued for illegally promoting other uses for the medications and in one case even bribing doctors to prescribe higher doses. About 5,000 pages of documents, obtained by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health through the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The New York Times, show that the F.D.A. had data showing that so called off label prescribing was widespread. But officials did little to intervene. "If any opioids were going to be tightly regulated, it would be these," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, an opioid policy researcher at Brandeis University, who was not involved in the investigation. "They had the fox guarding the henhouse, people were getting hurt and the F.D.A. sat by and watched this happen." Officials at the F.D.A. said they had reviewed evidence indicating that many patients without cancer were given the drugs. But they said that piecemeal data from various stakeholders prescriber surveys, insurance claims and industry reports made it difficult for the agency to measure potential harm to patients. "The information we have isn't very good, but it seems to indicate people who aren't cancer patients are getting this and people who aren't opioid tolerant are getting this," Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said in an interview. "There has been a tremendous back and forth with companies on how to get better information." The F.D.A. began approving the drugs outside of hospital settings in 1998 to treat cancer patients with "breakthrough" pain sudden, sharp rushes of pain that overwhelm even a round the clock regimen of other opioids. But for people taking the drugs, maintaining a round the clock regimen is vital: Without it, patients' tolerance to them decreases, and they are at risk for accidental overdose, respiratory depression and death. To restrict the dangerous drugs only to "opioid tolerant" cancer patients, the F.D.A. in December 2011 established a safety program, called a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy, for a consortium of T.I.R.F. manufacturers. The program required doctors to undergo training for prescribing T.I.R.F.s and to sign a form saying they understood that prescribing to other patients can be dangerous. To administer the program, the consortium hired McKesson, a large national distributor that supplies drugs, including T.I.R.F.s, to pharmaceutical retailers. In a statement, McKesson said it was doing its job as a third party administrator of the program and noted that its requirements were "developed jointly by the manufacturers and the F.D.A. with ultimate approval resting with the F.D.A. McKesson administers the program according to these F.D.A. requirements." The safety program will be discussed in a meeting of an F.D.A. advisory committee on Friday, and the Johns Hopkins researchers have submitted written testimony. In a statement, Insys Therapeutics said it looked forward to the session and to "continuing to work with the F.D.A. to strengthen the program to ensure that only opioid tolerant adult cancer patients with breakthrough cancer pain who are indicated for this special and highly regulated class of medications receive them." T.I.R.F. sales are lucrative: One prescription for a month's worth can cost more than 30,000. Dr. Woodcock said a stricter oversight program would be "extremely onerous" and that the harm caused by the drugs is difficult to measure, since "all drugs have risks and cause harm." With chronic back pain from two car accidents and a fibromyalgia diagnosis, Sarah Fuller, 31, needed pain medication. She scheduled her medical appointment for a Monday in January 2015, a day her father took off from his job as a baker to accompany her. They met with a doctor and, unexpectedly, a sales representative from Insys, maker of Subsys, an under the tongue narcotic spray. "At no time were we told this drug was for terminally ill cancer patients," said her mother, Deborah Fuller. "She had complete trust in doctors. I don't know how they put their heads on their pillows at night." The fentanyl in her blood was between 15 and 20 times the appropriate level, according to a toxicology report. The F.D.A. documents obtained by researchers included a survey by the industry group in 2013 in which nearly 40 percent of T.I.R.F. prescribers said they had used the drug to treat chronic pain in patients who did not have cancer, like Ms. Fuller. In the survey, 42 percent of pharmacists stated that the drugs were appropriate for those ailments. In another survey three years later, in February 2017, almost one in five T.I.R.F. prescribers (18 percent) and almost one in two patients (48 percent) said they believed, wrongly, that the medications were formally approved by the F.D.A. to treat illnesses other than cancer. Just over half of patients prescribed the drugs were not already taking a round the clock opioid regimen, and therefore were susceptible to an accidental overdose, according to an analysis of commercial health plan claims for more than 25,000 patients by the industry group in 2016. A follow up analysis had a similar result. In fact, in an effort to address "concern regarding patient access," the industry group in 2013 had taken steps to make it easier to prescribe to patients without opioid tolerance.The group removed protective language from a mandatory patient prescriber agreement form attesting that the "patient is opioid tolerant," and instead required a prescriber only to indicate that "I understand" the meaning of opioid tolerance. The form was also altered to omit a clause that had required patients to affirm that they were already using a round the clock opioid regimen. "It is not open for debate that the risk of these drugs among patients who lack tolerance is unacceptably high. It's quite clear cut," said Dr. Caleb Alexander, a physician who co directs the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins and led the research on the documents. According to an internal F.D.A. memo, the agency and the industry group held several teleconferences in 2017 to discuss plans to study adverse events in patients who were not opioid tolerant, as well as accidental poisonings of children. With companies "actively subverting" the oversight and safety program, the F.D.A. had authority to mandate a substantial reformation of it, said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a former principal deputy commissioner of the agency now at Johns Hopkins, who reviewed the documents. The agency could have sharpened prescriber training programs and agreement forms, he said, or investigated prescribers. At the least, he and other researchers said, the agency could have made the data from the program public. "With poor transparency and accountability, policymakers and patients are left guessing," Dr. Alexander said. "This could have all come out years ago." Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the F.D.A., said in a statement: "We're taking the issue of how we manage the safe use of these products to our advisory committee, to bring transparency to what we know about how well these post market safety programs are working and to get their advice on how we could strengthen these restrictions to better protect patients." The F.D.A. has taken a hands off approach in the past. The agency tasked Purdue Pharma in the early 2000s with leading a risk management program for OxyContin, its own product. In 2007, the company pleaded guilty and paid more than 600 million in fines related to misleading marketing. When the narcotic pain reliever tramadol was approved by the F.D.A. in 1995, it allowed Ortho McNeil of Johnson Johnson to fund a steering committee to monitor drug abuse instead of classifying the drug as a controlled substance. After two decades of mounting abuse, tramadol was reclassified as a controlled substance in 2014. In recent years, drug companies have faced legal action for falsely advertising T.I.R.F.s. Cephalon paid over 400 million in fines for false marketing of its products, including its T.I.R.F. lollipops, called Actiq, to treat migraines. The owner of Insys Therapeutics, which makes Subsys and five prescribing doctors were charged in a bribery scheme to boost off label prescribing. McKesson, the distributor, paid a 150 million settlement for failing to report suspicious opioid orders. Carolyn Markland of Jacksonville, Fla., wanted to be able to lift her grandchildren despite a degenerative spinal disease. Her doctor prescribed a dose of Subsys to her in July 2014. Ms. Markland suffered respiratory distress the following morning and died of drug toxicity, according to court documents. Joey Caltagirone of Philadelphia was prescribed his first of almost 6,000 Actiq lollipops for migraines in 2005, when he was 30. He developed a lasting addiction, was prescribed methadone to curtail it, and died of methadone toxicity in 2014, according to court records. Deborah Fuller, Sarah's mother, is still struggling with the loss of her daughter. "If she had died from disease, I wouldn't be as angry," she said. "But knowing how she died and the manipulation that went on I get angry. I just don't know what to do with all that anger."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Workers removing fuel rods from one of the reactors at the Daiichi plant in Fukushima, Japan, site of a nuclear accident in 2011. Japan's announcement last week that it would not meet its promise to sharply reduce its carbon emissions met a chorus of disapproval from around the world. Delegates at the international climate talks in Warsaw, which end Friday, lamented Japan's move as a blow to worldwide efforts to slow global warming. In the Philippines, which is still collecting the dead from Typhoon Hayan, it served as yet another example of the indifference of the rich world to the plight of the world's poorest nations on the front lines of climate change. But Japan's about face on its climate promises which followed the government's decision to shut down its nuclear power generators after the meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear plant in Fukushima is also an opportunity for a reality check in the debate over how to slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases warming the atmosphere. It brings into sharp focus the most urgent challenge: How will the world replace fossil fuels? Can it be done fast enough, cheaply enough and on a sufficient scale without nuclear energy? For all the optimism about the prospects of wind, sun and tides to power our future, the evidence suggests the answer is no. Scrambling to find an alternative fuel to generate some 30 percent of its power, Japan had no choice but to turn to coal and gas. A few years ago, it promised that in 2020 it would produce 25 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than in 1990; last week it said it would, instead, produce 3 percent more. Japan is unlikely to be the only country to miss its targets. In response to the Fukushima disaster, Germany shut down eight nuclear reactors and said it would close the remaining nine by 2022. Everybody is promising to fill the gap with renewables. So far, however, coal and natural gas have won out. CO2 emissions in Germany actually increased 1 percent last year, even as they declined in the United States and most of Western Europe. Between 2010 and 2012, worldwide consumption of nuclear energy shrank 7 percent. Over the same period, the consumption of coal, the dirtiest fuel and the worst global warming offender, rose 4.5 percent. Data released on Tuesday by the Global Carbon Project confirmed that coal accounted for over half the growth in fossil fuel emissions in 2012. With energy consumption expected to grow by more than half over the next 30 years, the odds seem low that the world can avoid catastrophic warming without carbon free nuclear power. Opponents of nuclear energy say the case for nuclear power underestimates its costs and unique risks, including the fact that no other energy source can produce the sudden devastation of a nuclear meltdown. And they say that nuclear proponents overstate the challenge that renewable energy faces in replacing fossil fuels. But while investment in renewable sources is crucially important to meet new energy needs, nuclear power remains the cheapest and most readily scalable of the alternative energy sources. Difficult as it may be to reduce dependence on coal, nuclear power is probably the world's best shot. Take the Energy Information Agency's estimate of the cost of generating power. The agency's number crunchers include everything from the initial investment to the cost of fuel and the expense to operate, maintain and decommission old plants. Its latest estimate, published earlier this year, suggests that power generated by a new generation nuclear plant that entered service in 2018 would be 108.40 per megawatt hour. (A megawatt hour is enough to supply an hour's worth of electricity to about 1,000 American homes.) This is not cheap. Even if the government were to impose a carbon tax of 15 per metric ton of CO2, a coal fired plant would generate power at 100.10 to 135.50 per MWh, depending on the technology. Plants using natural gas could produce electricity for as little as 65.60 per MWh, even after paying the carbon tax. Still, nuclear power is likely to be cheaper than most power made with renewables. Land based wind farms could generate power at a relatively low cost of 86.60 per MWh, but acceptable locations are growing increasingly scarce. Solar costs 144.30 per MWh, the agency estimates. A megawatt hour of power fueled by an offshore wind farm costs a whopping 221.50. Even these comparisons underestimate the challenges faced in developing wind and solar power on a large scale. They might be clean and plentiful sources, but they require expensive transmission lines from where the sun shines and the wind blows to where the power is needed. Moreover, the sun doesn't shine at least half the time. The wind doesn't always blow. And we don't yet know how to store electricity generated on hot summer days to use on cold winter nights. The sun has provided half of Germany's power on some days. On others it has provided next to nothing. It's not easy to build a power network, let alone an economy, on the basis of such an unreliable energy source. Perhaps the most levelheaded estimate of the relative cost of alternative fuels comes from the British government, which earlier this year published the price it was prepared to guarantee power generators as an incentive to develop renewable sources. The exercise underscored just how uncompetitive alternative sources of energy are, compared with coal and gas. It also revealed that nuclear power generated at a new plant in Somerset was expected to be significantly cheaper. The British government offered to guarantee a price of PS92.50 per MWh of power generated at the Somerset plant. For offshore wind, the guarantees ranged from PS155 per MWh at plants starting next year to PS135 per MWh for those starting in 2018. What about the danger of nuclear power? What about the fish swimming in cesium laced waters off the coast of Japan or the tens of thousands of evacuees fleeing radioactive fallout? In 2007 The Lancet medical journal published a study comparing deaths and illnesses associated with different sources of electricity both from environmental pollution and accidents. Nuclear energy, it found, was about the safest around. Nuclear energy was responsible for 0.003 accidental deaths per terawatt hour generated. Coal fired electricity accounted for 15 times as many. "More than 10 years of operations would be needed before a single occupational death could be attributed to the plant" at a new French reactor, wrote the authors, Anil Markandya from the University of Bath and Paul Wilkinson from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, produced 50 additional deaths from cancer in 20 years, according to a study by 100 scientists from eight United Nations agencies. Of 800,000 people exposed to its radiation, a maximum of 4,000 may eventually die from cancer, according to the World Health Organization.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
PHILADELPHIA The news arrived Monday morning via a cellphone application used for internal communication: The game scheduled hours later between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Yankees is off, nobody can go to Citizens Bank Park, and stand by for further updates. Concerned Yankees players knew exactly why. The Phillies had just completed a three game series at home against the Miami Marlins, which had 14 members of their traveling party test positive for the coronavirus. While Phillies players and employees were tested on Monday and the stadium was disinfected, the Yankees were instructed to sequester in their hotel in Philadelphia as they awaited confirmation that they would play Tuesday as originally planned. After breakfast, Yankees players met around noon to discuss the situation and reiterate the fragility of the season and the need to strictly follow health and safety protocols. Some plotted ways to work out or play catch inside the hotel. This is the downtime of Major League Baseball amid a pandemic, as its teams with growing worry from baseball officials and health experts attempt to play a 60 game season in 30 stadiums across the country. "You try to do your absolute best on an individual level to follow the rules to a T," Yankees relief pitcher Adam Ottavino said Monday. "But it's just a skating on thin ice situation and I think it will be no matter what." While there were relatively few cases as each team had three weeks of preseason workouts at their home stadiums, this was always going to be a hard part for M.L.B.: teams traveling for games and entering hot spots like Florida, Georgia and Texas. The Marlins played two exhibition games in Atlanta before their three game set in Philadelphia. It is unclear when and how the Marlins got infected, given the virus's incubation period of at least a few days. But the episode further drove home the message to the Yankees that reducing their exposure to the virus requires a large dose of individual commitment on the circumstances players can control. 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. "We've all got a responsibility to stay as safe as possible during these times," Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner said last week, "and what one or two of us do can affect the whole team or the whole league." To help prevent infections among players, coaches and key staff, the league with input from the players' union instituted a 113 page operations manual for the season which includes details on how teams should behave while traveling. Among the many regulations: no eating at public restaurants, a preference for private airports, an empty seat next to each person on the team bus, and a private entrance, check in area and floors at each hotel. Members of a team's traveling party should "avoid leaving" the hotel for "non essential purposes," according to the M.L.B. manual. As far as visitors at the hotel, the manual said that apart from "immediate family," members of a team's traveling party are discouraged from socializing with other family and friends while on the road. If they choose to do so, they "must adhere to strict physical distancing protocols, and wear proper face coverings and gloves," the manual continued. Instead of arriving at the stadium many hours before a road game like usual, the Yankees (2 1) are doing so much later now and readying for a game at the hotel. Players said the Yankees provided rooms at their hotel in Washington and Philadelphia where they could pore over advance scouting reports, and get a massage or treatment after making an appointment with their training staff before arriving at the stadium. And, as allowed by M.L.B.'s rules, they had exclusive use of the hotel gym to work out. "Being able to prepare and getting treatment at the hotel, it's actually been great," Yankees relief pitcher Zack Britton said over the weekend. Instead of spending a day off doing whatever they wanted, like sightseeing or grabbing a meal or drinks, Yankees players said Gerrit Cole, the team's new 324 million pitcher, and Gardner, the longest tenured Yankee, organized a steak dinner inside a banquet hall of the team's hotel during their day off in Washington on Friday. Players said they sat at a distance and watched other baseball games on television. "I'm not sure how it's going to look going forward, but the biggest thing we're doing is we're trying to stay in the hotel and be safe and be healthy," Britton said. Yankees starter J.A. Happ, who was originally scheduled to start Monday against the Phillies, said on Sunday that the team was already falling into a pattern of good habits, including keeping their distance and wearing masks away from the field. But this is an imperfect science. So much has to go right. Some players still high five and spit, which are banned this season. Teams are charged with policing themselves. Players not only have to worry about their own behavior but that of the loved ones around them. In the N.B.A., a few players have already been asked to seclude themselves after breaking the rules of its so called bubble outside Orlando, Fla. The Yankees have already had one positive case emerge since the team reunited in early July: All Star closer Aroldis Chapman. Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman said recently that 15 people who were around Chapman underwent daily testing for a week but no other positive cases emerged. Ottavino said that proved why the protocols beyond the testing are so important. "But now this shows you how easy it is to spread," he said, referring to the Marlins' outbreak. "The real issue is it's just so hard to know." Ottavino said the results of the Phillies' testing will be telling. Two of their players catcher J.T. Realmuto and first baseman Rhys Hoskins were in the closest contact with the Marlins on the field given their positions. The Yankees were also tested on Monday, but at their hotel as part of their regularly scheduled every other day testing. Until the Phillies' results arrive and the Yankees learn what they will be doing on Tuesday, they planned to stay indoors and wait.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Pinterest Is a Unicorn. It Just Doesn't Act Like One. SAN FRANCISCO Ben Silbermann does not enjoy being interviewed. He isn't a fan of speaking at tech industry conferences. Nor does he like sitting for glossy magazine portraits. He doesn't think he should have to explain Pinterest, the web service that allows people to save images to virtual pinboards, to anyone other than those who want to use it. That is the case even in the last couple of years, when Pinterest and Mr. Silbermann, its co founder and chief executive, could have been shouting the company's virtues from the rooftops. Its peers, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have been drowning in toxic harassment, fake news and Russian disinformation campaigns. Critics have denounced social media induced anxiety and addiction. Pinterest, by Mr. Silbermann's design, is the opposite: the web's last bastion of quaint innocence. Having de emphasized its social media elements years ago, Pinterest aims to be a safe and happy place for inspiration, self improvement and salted caramel cookie recipes. It also rejects Silicon Valley's typical unicorn formula of moving fast, breaking things, chasing growth at all costs and bragging about every victory. But the reserved, slow and steady approach has long frustrated some investors and employees, who believe that it has neutered growth, according to interviews with more than a dozen people who have worked with or for the company. Many of those people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the company's private affairs. Matt Novak, a partner at All Blue Capital, said his firm was trying to sell its stake in Pinterest, which the firm acquired on the secondary market, because it had not lived up to its potential. "If they don't keep up, they very quickly become prehistoric," said Mr. Novak, who would not disclose the size of his firm's stake in Pinterest. And yet despite Mr. Silbermann's approach or maybe because of it the company is worth 12.3 billion and growth is accelerating. In the past week, the company crossed a new milestone 250 million monthly active users. Those users have pinned 175 billion items on 3 billion virtual pinboards. The company is on track to top 700 million in revenue this year, a 50 percent increase over last year, according to a person familiar with the company. There is wide speculation that it will go public next year. If Pinterest continues its trajectory, it could change the narrative of what it takes to build a successful company in Silicon Valley, a meaningful feat at a time that the start up world is seeking new templates for leaders. If it doesn't, it'll serve as another example of wasted potential, or worse, a cautionary tale. "I tell them, 'You have to tell your story, especially now," said Scott Belsky, an entrepreneur who was an early investor in Pinterest. Mr. Belsky said, "He is so comfortable being misunderstood and underestimated." When Mr. Silberman was asked about his limited public profile in a recent interview, he noted with a hint of exasperation that he was right there, talking to me for this article. Tech companies usually reflect the personalities of their founders. Mark Zuckerberg infused Facebook with a "move fast and break things" hacker mentality. Uber's founder, Travis Kalanick, pushed a "toe steppin'" and "hustling" culture at Uber. Mr. Silbermann, 36, grew up in Des Moines in a family of doctors and assumed he'd also go to medical school. But his first encounter with high speed internet, at Yale in 1999, changed his mind. "You could find your people there and really explore inside yourself," he said. He has tried to instill that same thinking at the company. Pinterest values "knitting," a term its employees use to describe collaboration among groups. "We believe innovation happens when disciplines knit," the company's website says. In the beginning, when Pinterest was desperate to hire engineers as quickly as possible, Mr. Silbermann screened potential hires for their values before even considering their technical skills. Mr. Silbermann is someone who "measures twice, cuts once," said Rick Heitzmann, a managing director at FirstMark Capital and early investor in Pinterest. "Perfectionist doesn't overstate it," said Jeff Jordan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a Pinterest board member. Pinterest's offices in San Francisco display the sort of cutesy, self referential bric a brac that's common at start ups a giant statue of a pushpin made of Legos, a Pinterest surfboard. But Mr. Silbermann's demeanor is serious and reserved. In conversation, he listens carefully and responds with earnest sincerity, qualifying statements as his own opinion, rather than declaring them as facts. He also doesn't focus on Pinterest's image in the business world. Instead, he dedicates an outsize amount of time to meeting with Pinterest users, going on six tours a year and holding weekly lunches at Pinterest's offices. That's a meaningful time commitment for the chief executive of a 1,500 person organization. The company's growth exploded by 2011, just a year after its service went live, spawning countless copycats for families, for music, for pornography, for Lady Gaga fans and clones in every major country. It seemed possible that Pinterest could be as successful as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube maybe even Google. The market for social media advertising was still young and up for grabs. A Forbes cover story about Pinterest declared, "Move over, Zuck." The business case was simple and powerful: It was a shopping mall disguised as a mood board that held its users' aspirations, unearthing pure and unfiltered commercial desire. "You can draw a direct line from those interests to a commercial opportunity or retail category," said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at eMarketer. But just as the company began selling ads in 2014, user growth stalled and it wasn't clear why, according to multiple people familiar with the company. The company disagreed that growth had stalled, arguing that it had "slightly slowed." Executives on Pinterest's "growth" team proposed spending 50 million a year to acquire users through marketing, a common tactic for web companies. Other executives argued that the company should court celebrities and pay influencers to share content on Pinterest, similar to YouTube's premium content program. Mr. Silbermann opposed both, according to people familiar with the decision. He preferred what he called "quality growth." "There's a natural rate at which you can scale a company that's healthy," Mr. Silbermann said. So Pinterest stuck to its knitting. Not everyone was sold on the message. Even by the standards of start ups, where employee turnover is common, the number of executives leaving Pinterest has been notable in recent years. Since 2015, the company lost people who ran media partnerships, operations, finance, growth, engineering, brand, product, tech partnerships, marketing, corporate development, communications and customer strategy, along with its general counsel and president. Jamie Favazza, a Pinterest spokeswoman, said, "Turnover is natural at high growth start ups, but we've built a strong team of leaders for the long term." The company has accelerated growth in users, up 27 percent over last year. More than half of all users now come from international markets. That change happened after the company realized it needed to promote local content, not what was popular in the United States, to new users in each region. (British users did not respond to American Crock Pot recipes, it turns out.) Revenue growth is also picking up, which Mr. Kaplan attributed to having the right measurement data to show brands that ads on Pinterest are effective. The company has hired more salespeople, introduced more ad options and refocused on small and medium size advertisers. It is preparing to start selling ads in non English speaking countries, starting with France. The company is even trying to raise its profile a little bit, hiring a new chief marketing officer and coming up with a new marketing plan to emphasize the service's benefits. Ms. Brougher said she, like Mr. Silbermann, prefers to under promise and over deliver. "But that doesn't always work well in the tech world," she said. Mr. Silbermann said, "In technology, people are very, very fast to declare something a winner or loser, like, 'That'll never work,' or 'That'll take over the world.' The truth is always somewhere in between."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
If the show manages to maneuver through its self planted minefield fairly nimbly, and maintain a moderate but comfortable level of amusement, much of the credit goes to the perfectly cast Morris, best known for his seven seasons on "New Girl." He's an expert at projecting an affable complacency that comes out of good naturedness rather than entitlement, and his wounded, crotchety reactions as Keef's world turns upside down keep us invested even when the situations and jokes get wheezy. The writing is sharpest in the pilot episode, credited to the show's creators, the cartoonist Keith Knight the show is "inspired by" his life and work and the screenwriter Marshall Todd ("Barbershop"). It introduces Keef's roommates, Gunther (Blake Anderson of "Workaholics"), whose idea for a start up is selling "Peruvian coca" as a dietary supplement, and Clovis (T. Murph), a sunnily cynical player; like many elements of the show, they're familiar types given just enough of a spin to feel fresh, if not exactly distinctive. Clovis, who in T. Murph's hands is the most consistently funny aspect of the show, provides a counterpoint to the hectoring voices of Keef's new consciousness. As Keef begins to act out, blowing his syndication deal by going off script at a launch event, Clovis pushes him to keep money top of mind. Clovis has his own opposite number, Ayana (Sasheer Zamata), an alternative press journalist who gives Keef a place to publish while pushing him to stay on his new track. Keef's journey in which he has to wake up not just to racism and the specific dangers of police violence but also to standard sitcom verities about love and friendship proceeds in a loose, fluid, slightly melancholy style that's easy to sit through (helped by episode lengths as short as 21 minutes). Six of the episodes were directed by Maurice Marable, who was the primary director on the estimable "Brockmire." There's a disconnect, though, between the facility of the filmmaking and the originality and force of the storytelling as the season progresses. In an episode in which San Francisco shuts down because of an escaped koala, the satire of privileged Bay Area sensibilities is directly on the nose. Subplots involving black market sneakers and the indignities of the gig economy echo innumerable sitcoms at this point. ("The Last O.G." and "Insecure," to name two.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
C.D.C. and W.H.O. Offers to Help China Have Been Ignored for Weeks For more than a month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been offering to send a team of experts to China to observe its coronavirus outbreak and help if it can. Normally, teams from the agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service can be in the air within 24 hours. But no invitation has come and no one can publicly explain why. The World Health Organization, which made a similar offer about two weeks ago, appears to be facing the same cold shoulder, though a spokeswoman said it is just "sorting out arrangements." Current and former public health officials and diplomats, speaking anonymously for fear of upsetting diplomatic relations, said they believe the reluctance comes from China's top leaders, who do not want the world to think they need outside help. In 2003, China was badly stung by criticism of its response to SARS, another coronavirus epidemic; it has also been embroiled in a trade war with the United States for more than a year. Some experts also say that outsiders could discover aspects of the outbreak that are embarrassing to China: for example, the country has not revealed how many of its doctors and nurses have died fighting the disease. But China does need help, experts argue. In private phone calls and texts, some Chinese colleagues have indicated that they are overwhelmed and would welcome not just extra hands, but specialized expertise in a couple of fields. Also, C.D.C. officials have said that they hope to learn more about the new coronavirus from their Chinese counterparts to improve the American response if the virus starts to spread widely here. On Friday, Alex M. Azar II, secretary of health and human services, said at a news briefing that he had recently reiterated the offer of a team to his Chinese counterpart, Dr. Ma Xiaowei. Asked what the holdup was, he answered: "It's up to the Chinese. We continue to expect fully that President Xi will accept our offer. We're ready and willing and able to go." On Jan. 29, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.'s director general, returned from a brief trip to China full of praise for President Xi Jinping and the country's extraordinarily aggressive response, which has nearly walled off Hubei Province from the rest of the country and the world. China had "agreed to a mission of international experts" to better understand disease transmission and clinical severity, Dr. Michael Ryan, the W.H.O's emergency response chief, said at the time. Asked if that team would include American experts, Dr. Tedros replied that "best would be a bilateral arrangement." On Thursday, a W.H.O. spokeswoman said that there was no delay in the organization's own mission to China. "Our understanding is that the mission is on," Marcia Poole, the spokeswoman, said. But she could not say when the team would leave or who would be on it. The United States has offered Dr. Tedros 13 specialists who are ready to go, Mr. Azar said. The two fields in which China appears to need outside help, experts said, are molecular virology and epidemiology. The first involves sequencing the virus's genome and manipulating it to refine diagnostic tests, treatments and vaccine candidates. The second involves figuring out basic questions like who gets infected and who does not, how long the incubation period is, why some victims die, how many other people each victim infects and how commonly hospital outbreaks are occurring. "This isn't rocket science, it's basic stuff but it's been five weeks and we still don't know the answers," one expert said. It would be very useful, for example, to have a blood test for antibodies. That would make it possible to see how many infected people had recovered, which would make it clearer as to how lethal the virus is and how widespread. A major epidemiological failure by China is that the Wuhan authorities appear to have closed and disinfected the seafood market that was the outbreak's early focus without swabbing individual animals and their cages and without drawing blood from everyone working there. That would have provided a wealth of information about which animal might have been the source of the coronavirus and which people had become infected but survived.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
In the shadows outside the house , the two men watch and wait. Through the windows, a snug domestic scene unfolds: a mother, a father and three young children enjoying an ordinary evening. The instant the men deliver their news, that peace will be shattered forever. Thus they stand in the yard, hesitating. "They have no idea what is happening to them," one of the lurking men says. The Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 1949) isn't exactly a regular on New York stages, so it's a surprise to see him pop up at the Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters, where Nick Payne's adaptation of Maeterlinck's 1895 play "Interior" kicks off Program A. Directed by Rory McGregor, it's a moody, voyeuristic piece, so descriptive and densely atmospheric (lighting is by Greg MacPherson, sound by Nick T. Moore, projected paintings by Sharon Holiner) that it could be an audio play. But if it were, we wouldn't get to see the lined and shadowed face of the Old Man (Bill Buell) contort into an exquisite mask of sorrow when he at last delivers his terrible tidings. Like Mr. Payne's monologue "A Life," currently on Broadway on a double bill with Simon Stephens's "Sea Wall," "Interior" is about how the death of a loved one permanently alters the people left behind. It is also about possible suicide, an element that runs through the three short plays of Program A this, too, is unconventional material for a summer festival lineup.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The Federal Communications Commission has approved a proposal to fine T Mobile, AT T and two other cellphone carriers more than 200 million for selling customers' location data to companies that allowed it to be misused by rogue law enforcement officers and others. The proposed fines, announced on Friday, are among the largest the F.C.C. has sought in years, representing a major action by an agency whose chairman has pushed for a lighter touch to industry regulation under President Trump. It has taken the commission nearly two years since the first complaint about the practice to get to this point. The agency is making the move after repeated public reports about data abuse and after several companies continued to sell access to troves of personal information for months despite saying they were sharply limiting the practice. In notices sent to the carriers, the F.C.C. said it would seek more than 91 million from T Mobile, 57 million from AT T, 48 million from Verizon and 12 million from Sprint. The agency found the carriers had violated a section of the Telecommunications Act requiring them to protect the confidentiality of customers' call information. The penalties reflect the length of time the carriers failed to safeguard the data and the number of companies with which they shared it. T Mobile's fine is highest in part because it shared with over 80 entities, according to the documents. Sprint, by contrast, shared with fewer than a dozen. Ajit Pai, the F.C.C. chairman, said the move demonstrated that the agency was serious about privacy. "We took decisive action to protect American consumers, and we are confident in the balance that we struck," he said at a news conference on Friday. Three of the five commissioners at the agency, all Republicans, approved the measure. One Democratic commissioner dissented, and another approved partially. Both Democrats objected to the amount of time that passed before the F.C.C. acted, among other things. "We took nearly two years to even propose a fine," Jessica Rosenworcel, the dissenting Democratic commissioner, said in an interview. "That's not acting with urgency, and that's not understanding the scope of the risk to the public." The F.C.C.'s proposal is not the final word on how much the companies will pay. A T Mobile spokeswoman said the company intended "to dispute the conclusions" of the F.C.C. investigation, including the fine. The other companies, which will also have the chance to contest the findings, did not respond to requests for comment. The carriers already have argued against the finding that they broke the law, contending that the rules apply only when a phone is making a call, not when it's communicating with a network for purposes like sending data, according to the documents. Michael O'Rielly, a Republican commissioner, said in a statement that he found the argument persuasive and was approving the measure with "serious reservations." The sale of location data has become a hot business as smartphones have proliferated and technology for gleaning their whereabouts has become more precise. The information is valuable to marketers, police departments and even investment firms because it can provide revealing details about people's daily lives, such as where they live, what shops they frequent and what doctors they visit. The trade in location data is largely unregulated. The F.C.C.'s action is possible only because the telecommunications industry is subject to more stringent regulations than technology companies are. Firms ranging from small app makers to tech giants like Google collect massive amounts of the data from GPS, Wi Fi and other signals, without specific laws addressing what they can do with it. Cellphone carriers aimed to get a chunk of the business through deals with so called location aggregators, middleman companies that provided the information to other businesses. Cellular network data is often less precise than information from apps, but it covers the vast majority of the population and is almost always available. To protect privacy, the carriers relied on a system of contracts that required location companies to seek customers' consent by responding to a text message, for example, or pressing a button on an app. But the carriers failed to catch multiple companies and people following customers without their permission. The F.C.C. said it began its investigation immediately after an article in The New York Times showed how the system had led to privacy breaches. The Times in 2018 reported that the data was eventually making its way to law enforcement, including to a former sheriff who used it to track people without a warrant. He gained access by uploading documents he falsely claimed were legal orders including his car and health insurance policies and work training manuals, according to local news reports of his prosecution. Securus Technologies, the company that offered the data to law enforcement, is better known for providing telephone services to inmates. Mr. Pai, the F.C.C. chairman, represented Securus while working at a law firm in 2011; he also worked as a lawyer for Verizon. After the Securus episode, the companies said they would sharply limit the practice. But in early 2019, the technology website Motherboard showed that carriers were still selling data, and that it was ending up in the hands of bounty hunters. Later that year, the companies said in response to questions from an F.C.C. commissioner that they had stopped selling the information. The F.C.C. said that the initial Times report "exposed serious inadequacies with the safeguards" the companies were using to protect their data. Because the carriers did not address the problem in a timely manner, the agency said, they "failed to take reasonable measures" as required under the law. Privacy hawks at the agency and on Capitol Hill have objected to the fines, saying they were too late and too small. Despite being an unusually large penalty by F.C.C. standards, the proposed judgment is modest compared with the companies' revenue, which totaled more than 350 billion last year. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who first raised concerns about the data sharing, said in a statement that the amount was "comically inadequate" to deter future violations. He added that other technology companies had been willing to accept fines as part of the cost of doing business. "The only way to truly protect Americans' personal information is to pass strong privacy legislation," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
When couples like Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng divorce, as they did in 2013, one issue that often arises is how an inheritance will be split among all children. Ms. Deng had two children with Mr. Murdoch, who had four children from two previous marriages. All six received equal economic interests in a family trust that held most of his wealth. CHILDREN crave equal attention from their parents. So when it comes to inheritance, which can seem like a final accounting of that love, anything but an equal split can be tough to grasp. But is there ever a time when inheritance should be uneven? And if so, can uneven still be fair? The answer to both questions is yes. But how parents leave inheritances that are unequal but fair, or at least understandable, to their children and how those children deal with it can be challenging and may require some difficult and open conversations. "When you think about how parents treat children, they don't treat each child equally," said Suzanne L. Shier, chief wealth planning and tax strategist at Northern Trust. "They try to treat them fairly and equitably." But, "unequal can be hard and challenging," she said. "It has to be thoughtful." Consider this situation, from a reader who asked that her name be withheld to preserve family harmony. She's the middle of three children, with over 15 years separating the oldest and the youngest. She said she worried that decisions she made in life might end up getting her disinherited or at least receiving an inheritance radically unequal from her siblings'. What did she do? She got a good job at a technology company, met a man who had worked there longer, married him and had a baby. Through marriage, her financial life has improved markedly, even though she signed a prenuptial agreement that separated the assets her husband had before they married. But her family doesn't know about the agreement. They just see their multimillion dollar home and think she's secure for life. "My mom made some comment to me that we need to know what your financial situation is so we can make a decision to divide the estate," she said. "I said I didn't think it should matter. Then, I went to my dad and said, 'Mom has given me indication that she's going to divvy things up differently.' Then, the whole thing dropped." More recently, her older sibling said she should prepare herself to receive less since she and her husband were so much better off. "Just because I married someone with money doesn't mean I should get cut out," the reader said. "My husband's money isn't my money. I can't spend it the way an inheritance could be spent." And while she is doing particularly well, both of her siblings live comfortably. Jonathan S. Forster, a partner at the law firm Weinstock Manion in Los Angeles, said the reader's feelings were not uncommon. But neither is the way her mother has thought through the situation. He recently suggested a client talk to her two children about her plan to leave everything to her daughter, a teacher, and nothing to her son, a successful doctor. While she loved both children equally, she told him, she reasoned that her daughter needed the money more. "She came back two weeks later very upset," Mr. Forster said. "Her son said, 'I've done everything you told me to do. I got into a good school, became a doctor and now you've disinherited me?' She ended up not disinheriting her son but left more to her daughter." More important, she talked to them about the situation. "The schoolteacher was grateful because she was getting a greater share and she needs it," he said. "But she doesn't want this to impact her relationship with her brother." Lawyers and advisers said that in most cases where no malice or lack of love is intended, a conversation can solve a lot of the problems. But there are plenty of instances when uneven inheritance happens by accident or on purpose and nothing has been said ahead of time. Parents, for example, could name a child the beneficiary of a retirement account or insurance policy or have a bank account set up so it would be payable on death to a child. Even if the will said that all assets should be split evenly among their children, the retirement account, insurance policy and bank account would pass directly to whoever was named and not be considered part of the estate being divided up. "When you explain it to them, they'll say, 'That's not how I thought it would go,'" she said. And if the mistaken planning isn't caught ahead of time, fixing it afterward depends on good will among the children and, even then, requires planning. If the child who received more gave a portion of the inheritance to siblings, that could incur a gift tax. A better way, Ms. Johannes said, would be for the child with the greater share to disclaim part of it to make the inheritance equal for his or her siblings. But that child would be under no obligation to do that. Leaving money unequally on purpose requires more foresight. A usual case where siblings agree is if one child has special needs, whether physical or mental, that require continuous funding. Another instance is when there is a family business, and one child is working in or running that business. There are ways to protect the other children, though. Ms. Johannes said she worked with a family that had a business deemed to be potentially worth 6 million. One child was running it, so the parents bought an insurance policy to leave an equivalent amount to their other two children. In other cases, not all children are good with financial decision making, so their share might be left in trust. While those children still get an equal amount, they just don't get it outright. "It's logical but difficult emotionally for children to be treated differently in inheritances," Ms. Shier said. Then there are the instances of children from multiple marriages. More money, for example, might be left to the younger children to get them to where the older ones are in life. "It's rough justice," said William D. Zabel, a founding partner of the law firm Schulte Roth Zabel. "The 30 year old child went to Harvard and Yale Law School. Then they have a 10 year old. How much do they favor him?" In divorces, he said, the wife from the earlier marriage "wants to make sure that her child isn't mistreated by later children." And if the last spouse is similar in age or younger than the oldest children, a poorly drafted estate plan could end up disinheriting the older children if the current spouse gets all the money and outlives them. All these problems can be minimized, if not fixed, with a conversation. "My rule is the sooner the better and tell them as much as they need to understand what the family wealth is about," Mr. Zabel said. The downsides of not getting this right are huge. "Our litigation group is thriving because kids are feeling more and more entitled," Mr. Forster said. "There are horror stories of the parents sliding down the scale of incapacity and the child takes them into the lawyer to have their trust or will revised. There is this significant question of undue influence." For the most part, though, parents can't go wrong with treating their children equally, though Ms. Shier says she makes sure parents understand what that means. "When parents say, 'We want to treat our children equally,' we say, 'Do you want to treat them equally or fairly?'" she said. "It's not a cop out to leave it equally. That's a logical approach." As for the reader who raised the question, she has started to imagine how she would feel if the family murmurings of an uneven split prove true. "It would just seem so unfair on the face of it," she said. "If you think of how children feel over the course of a lifetime, there are so many thing that kids keep score on. Who got this quality time? This car trip? There are so many imbalances. You think it would just get divided equally in the end." Fair point but, of course, the choice to be even or not on inheritances is entirely up to parents who won't be around to deal with the consequences of what was left unsaid.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The Trump administration has issued new rules for funding programs to prevent teenage pregnancy, favoring those that promote abstinence and not requiring as rigorous evidence of effectiveness. While the funding announcement, issued Friday by the Department of Health and Human Services, does not exclude programs that provide information about contraception and protected sex, it explicitly encouraged programs that emphasize abstinence or "sexual risk avoidance." Other programs that promote "sexual risk reduction" will be considered, the announcement said, though for those, too, it mentioned an "emphasis on cessation support," a phrase many involved in teen pregnancy programs interpreted as urging sexually active teenagers to stop having sex. "What's noticeably absent in those things you must talk about is that if the young person continues having sex, here is the information you must have about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases," said Andrea Kane, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships for Power to Decide, a national group working to prevent unplanned pregnancies. "They talk about skills to avoid sex and return to not having sex. It doesn't really leave any opening for those young people who continue having sex and how we help them prepare for their futures." The Health and Human Services Department declined an interview request to discuss the announcement. Groups that have been receiving federal money had been bracing for a change in the rules since last year, when Valerie Huber, a leader of an abstinence education advocacy organization, was named chief of staff to the Department of Health and Human Services official who oversees adolescent health. Shortly before she was appointed, Ms. Huber wrote in an opinion piece that the best message for young people was "to avoid the risks of teen sex, not merely reduce them." She described the Obama administration's approach as one that "normalizes teen sex." The new rules also move away from a requirement that most organizations receiving federal money choose from a list of approaches that have been shown in at least one rigorous evaluation to be effective at changing some sexual behavior, such as reducing pregnancy rates or rates of sexual activity. Under Obama administration guidelines, organizations awarded most of the grants had to use curriculums that were on an evidence supported list. Under the new guidelines, they simply have to comply with more general requirements like "support personal attitudes and beliefs that value sexual risk avoidance." Jon Baron, vice president of evidence based policy at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, a nonpartisan foundation, said the new approach is like "starting from ground zero as if nothing has been learned. Until you have an evaluation of an actual program that people are showing up for and an actual curriculum and actual people teaching it, you really don't have reliable evidence." Abstinence programs have often failed to change teenage sexual behavior. A 2007 study of four such federally funded programs, for example, found "not even a hint of an effect on sexual activity, pregnancy or anything," Mr. Baron said. Still, the Obama administration's menu of "evidence based programs" included three abstinence programs. Last summer, the Health and Human Services Department told the 81 organizations that were receiving a total of 89 million a year from the agency that their five year pregnancy prevention grants would end in June 2018, two years early. Several of the organizations sued to keep their funding, and last week, the first judge to rule on any of the cases decided that the South Carolina Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy was entitled to receive the rest of its five year grant. Projects sponsored by the South Carolina organization, like most of those begun under the Obama administration's Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, teach about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases in addition to abstinence, and at least one of the South Carolina programs received federal permission to supply condoms in places like a bowling alley and barbershops. On Monday, Beth De Santis, chief executive of the South Carolina Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said she hopes the new rules will allow for the types of comprehensive sex education programs that her organization has found effective. Federal officials are now "very much into avoiding sex altogether," Ms. De Santis said. "That is something that has been very clear from this administration and they're not making a secret of that." But, she continued, she hopes her organization's programs will comply with the new administration's definition of "sexual risk reduction." "Our next step will be to work with them on whether or not they agree that some of the programs that we already have can be approved," she said. "I do think they have given us an opportunity to find a way to continue to do the work we do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
It's almost a cliche to say that a ballerina's arms suggest wings the technique of ballet itself lends itself to metaphors of lightness and flight. Its repertory is filled with creatures of the air: melancholy swans, magical firebirds, charming bluebirds, even butterflies. This season, American Ballet Theater introduces yet another feathered creature to its menagerie, the gold plumed rooster in Alexei Ratmansky's "The Golden Cockerel." "The Golden Cockerel" opens midway through a season in which Mr. Ratmansky's works dominate the repertory. By July, eight of his ballets will have been performed on the Met stage. But, as the recent revival of his 2012 "Firebird" underscored, his idea of birdlike movement doesn't necessarily coincide with the familiar 19th century image of fluid arms, delicate necks and fluttering feet. This is even more true of his "Golden Cockerel." "The movement is almost mechanical," Mr. Ratmansky said recently at the company's studios, "very strong, brilliant and sharp, with fast changes of focus." In a rehearsal, Skylar Brandt, one of four dancers performing the title role, slid forward several feet on her pointes, then folded her arms back at her sides and flickered her elbows quickly, almost like mechanical winglets, and finally bent forward at a right angle, jerkily, like a marionette. Later she skittered across the studio in a series of blisteringly fast backward traveling leaps; again, the impression was both brilliant and almost frighteningly inhuman. Mr. Ratmansky's golden bird has a long history, onstage and in the literary imagination. He (a cockerel is a young rooster, though he's danced here by a woman) is merely the most recent incarnation of a character that first appeared in a folk tale by Alexander Pushkin. (Another rooster plays a bit part in Frederick Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee," which just ended its run.) Pushkin began jotting down his old nursemaid's stories in the 1820s while in internal exile at the family estate. (He was being punished for his support of the Decembrist revolt against Czar Nicholas I.) Pushkin's tales, or skazki, are familiar to most Russian children, as they were to the young Mr. Ratmansky. (There is even a Soviet cartoon version, from 1967.) It's a strange story, in which the cockerel plays only a small but crucial part. A doddering old czar (Dodon) wants only to sleep. ("It is the Russian dream to do nothing and to sleep all the time!" Mr. Ratmansky said. "Don't forget, the winters in Russia are long.") His kingdom is attacked from all sides. An astrologer offers a solution: a golden cockerel who will crow whenever danger is nigh. After repeated warnings, Dodon marches off to battle a kingdom to the east, where he encounters a beautiful princess. He falls madly in love and decides to make her his wife. When the astrologer demands the princess as his prize, Dodon kills him. Then, in a magical reversal, the cockerel springs to life and kills the czar. In Mr. Ratmansky's version, she lands on the czar's shoulders and pecks him to death. (No, she's not your usual bashful swan.) "It's really fun to kill someone onstage," Cassandra Trenary, one of the dancers performing the role, said after rehearsal. The moral is hard to unravel. What does it mean? In part, Pushkin's tale was meant to poke fun at the folly of kings, a perennial Russian subject. But, contrary to appearances, "The Golden Cockerel" didn't start as a Russian story. Rather, it's an adaptation of a tale by Washington Irving from his "Tales of the Alhambra" (1832). It is both a satire and, like the Irving version, an exotic fable in which magic plays a big part. "There is this interesting relationship between the astrologer and the queen," Mr. Ratmansky explained. "They are both magicians; they come from the same dimension somehow." The story's political undercurrent lingered in the 1907 opera it inspired. Composed by Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov, it is a cartoonish political satire dressed up as a fairy tale, in which he pushed his usual musical language highly colored instrumentation, sinuous melodies, folk motifs to a parodic extreme. "The Russia depicted in this opera is a caricature," the Princeton musicologist Simon Morrison said in a phone interview, adding that the composer "contrasts this with a fantasy space of the exotic east." In other words, nothing in "Golden Cockerel" feels remotely real. Still, the content was troubling enough to alarm the censors and delay its premiere. The opera opened in Moscow in 1909, after Rimsky Korsakov's death and was picked up a few years later by the Ballets Russes. In that version, from 1914, staged by Michel Fokine, the story was acted out by dancers while the singers and chorus sat in tiers on either side of the stage. The separation of the voice from the body made the similarity to puppet theater even more apparent. Fokine's take was also less political, not "a satire on royalty," he wrote in his memoirs, "but on human frailty and weakness in general." His characters were puppetlike, in the style of Russian folk art, echoed by the production's spectacular designs, by the avant garde painter Natalya Goncharova: brilliantly colored, vehemently two dimensional, almost childlike. Richard Hudson's designs for the current production are based on Goncharova's, though not as exuberant. "I simplified some of the backcloths," he explained in an email from London, "to achieve a clear, sharp, coherent stage picture." In 1937, Fokine created a new, one act, pure dance version, without singers. (The designs, again, were by Goncharova.) The cockerel, which had been represented by a prop bird, was now a ballerina on pointe. Extended excerpts were captured on film. (You can see them at the Public Library for the Performing Arts.) Fast forward to 2012, when the Royal Danish Ballet asked Mr. Ratmansky to create a new work for the company. He was intrigued by the lore surrounding the Fokine staging. "The first knock on the door for me was that Fokine said it's his best ballet," said Mr. Ratmansky, who expresses a great love of ballet history. "I thought, it must be a very special thing." He went back to watch the footage from the 1930s production and was persuaded to give it a try. His own version quotes just a few of Fokine's movements, particularly in the sharp, jerky choreography for the cockerel. They are like a salute to the ballet's past. Mr. Ratmansky's two act ballet opened to mixed reviews in Copenhagen in 2012; critics lauded the designs and the characterizations, but some complained that there wasn't enough dancing. For American Ballet Theater, Mr. Ratmansky has added more. Even so, there is more mime than most contemporary audiences are accustomed to, all in the interest of conveying the fantastical story. The political subtext is not emphasized. "I mean, what do I do, put Putin makeup on the king?" Mr. Ratmansky asked, with a wry laugh. "I wish I could be more daring in that sense, but I don't see how I can translate that. For me, it's about the music and visuals and characters."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance

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