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The drummer Jerry Carrigan, standing far right, with Elvis Presley, standing center, and other musicians at a recording session in Nashville. Mr. Carrigan appeared on hundreds of hits recorded in Nashville in the 1960s and '70s. Jerry Carrigan, who played drums on landmark recordings by Southern soul singers like Arthur Alexander and Jimmy Hughes and country stars like George Jones and Dolly Parton, died on June 22 in Chattanooga, Tenn. He was 75. His death was confirmed by the record producer and bassist Norbert Putnam, a longtime friend and collaborator, who said Mr. Carrigan had been seriously ill for several years. Mr. Carrigan has been credited with infusing country music with R B grooves and helping usher in the soulful variant of the Nashville Sound associated with the term "countrypolitan." As a session drummer in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and later in Nashville, he was known for an approach that valued feeling over flash. He also had a fertile musical imagination, deploying everything from keening rimshots to dramatic shifts in dynamics and on one occasion, a George Jones Tammy Wynette session, his bare hands to galvanize recordings by everyone from Elvis Presley to Henry Mancini. "We were always looking for new ways to play a rhythm track," Mr. Putnam explained in an interview, recalling the period in the early 1960s when he, Mr. Carrigan and the pianist David Briggs served as the rhythm section at FAME, the acclaimed recording studio run by the Muscle Shoals producer Rick Hall. The three men were still teenagers when they took part in their first session for Mr. Hall, recording Mr. Alexander's brooding, Latin inflected "You Better Move On," a Top 40 pop single in 1962. "You Better Move On," which was subsequently covered by the Rolling Stones, was the first hit recorded at FAME. It became a prototype for the loose, funky style of playing known today as the Muscle Shoals sound, which helped the studio earn a reputation as a destination for singers, among them Aretha Franklin and Cher, who wanted to make records steeped in down home musical vernacular. The next year, after a financial dispute with Mr. Hall, the three men left Muscle Shoals to pursue opportunities for session work in Nashville, leaving a new group of musicians to replace them. Mr. Carrigan would appear on hundreds of hits made in Nashville over the next decade. Among his best known credits are Sammi Smith's "Help Me Make It Through the Night," Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors" and Charley Pride's "Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'," all of them No. 1 country hits that crossed over to the pop Top 40. All those recordings featured the fat snare sound for which Mr. Carrigan became known. "I started playing real loose, deep sounding snare drums on country records," Mr. Carrigan said at an event held in his honor at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2009. "Billy Sherrill loved it," he continued, referring to the celebrated Nashville producer, "so I started experimenting with different things, different kinds of drums. I bought the first set of concert tom toms that were in Nashville. I think that's one reason the producers liked my sound. I had a different approach." Jerry Kirby Carrigan was born in Florence, Ala., on Sept. 13, 1943, the only child of Larry and Elaine (Kirby) Carrigan. His father was a painting contractor, and his mother worked in a jewelry store and later owned a shoe shop. He began his recording career at age 13, playing drums on a Nashville session with the group Little Joe Allen and the Offbeats. Enthralled by the funky drumming of the New Orleans powerhouse Earl Palmer, which he heard on records by Fats Domino and Little Richard, Mr. Carrigan played in R B cover bands while in high school. After that, he, Mr. Putnam and Mr. Briggs joined the Mark Vs (later the Pallbearers), a band led by the blue eyed soul singer Dan Penn. Mr. Carrigan was elected to the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 2010. His wife, Vickie, died before him. No immediate family members survive. Mr. Carrigan remained an active session drummer until 1980, when another generation of first call studio musicians was establishing itself in Nashville. He went on to play in John Denver's touring band from 1981 to 1990. But he said he always preferred recording sessions with top professionals to playing with a road band. "Once you've played with the best," he said in his Country Music Hall of Fame interview, "you don't want to do anything else."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Lester C. Thurow, a prominent and provocative economist who earned a dedicated following through his long writing and speaking career, and who was known for his prescient warnings about the growing income gap between rich and poor Americans, died on Friday in Westport, Mass. He was 77. Mr. Thurow was a prolific author and took to television and the lecture circuit with gusto, paying special attention to the income gap and globalization, which he contended would have a deleterious impact on American labor. He also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for decades. In his writing, he tried to make the dry and difficult to grasp intricacies of the American economy accessible to a mass audience. Mr. Thurow said that he decided to devote himself to communicating about economics after he was not offered a job in President Jimmy Carter's administration, although he had been an economic adviser to Mr. Carter's campaign. "I decided that if I could not have the king's ear, I would talk to the public," he said in a 1997 interview. "That's the other way to have an impact on the economic system." He was the dean of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management from 1987 to 1993 and a founder of the Economic Policy Institute, an influential progressive research group. In his heyday, he charged speaking fees of 30,000 and was one of the most sought after economists on the lecture circuit. Mr. Thurow was often prone to sweeping declarations about the economy, using metaphors and easily digestible analyses to convey his point. That made him a target of criticism from other economists, notably Paul Krugman, who is now a New York Times columnist, who argued that much of what he said was overly simplistic. "He was prone to simplifications more than grandeur a strength as well as a weakness," said Richard Schmalensee, a colleague and professor at M.I.T. Some of Mr. Thurow's bolder predictions for example, that Japan would emerge as a titanic trading power that would not just rival but overwhelm the United States and Europe in the global economy never materialized. Still, his impact among fellow economists and his influence on how they disseminated their work were significant. "Lester used both print and TV more than anyone of his generation," said Thomas A. Kochan, a professor at M.I.T. who worked with Mr. Thurow for many years. "And he did it more skillfully than anyone else." Lester Carl Thurow was born in Livingston, Mont., on May 7, 1938, a son of Willis Carl Thurow, a Methodist minister, and Alice Thickman Thurow, a math teacher. He received a bachelor's degree in political economy from Williams College and earned a master's in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College of Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1964 and, by the time he was 30, was a professor at M.I.T. After he turned to writing books, he appeared often on PBS and wrote extensively for The New York Times and Newsweek. He wrote several books, including "The Zero Sum Society" (1980) and "The Future of Capitalism" (1996). And he tackled the income gap before it was widely discussed. "He was one of the first important economists to suggest that too much inequality is bad for society," said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "And he was writing this just as the inequality trend that is so historically high right now was taking off. While people like myself were just beginning to see it in the data, he was already warning about its implications for society." Besides his wife, Mr. Thurow is survived by two sons, Torben and Ethan; two stepchildren, Yaron and Yael; a brother, Chuck; and seven grandchildren. Mr. Thurow was also an avid mountain climber. Mr. Kochan of M.I.T. recalled that in the 1980s Mr. Thurow was determined to climb a mountain in Nepal. His colleague was skeptical about the idea: It was risky, and it would require time off from work. "I remember asking him, 'Why in the world are you doing that?'" Mr. Kochan said. "And he said, 'If I don't do it before I'm 50, I'll never be able to do it.' He worked like a devil to get himself into the shape to do it, and then he went off and did it. That was Lester. "Once he was fixed on a point, he worked his world around it. That's the way his mind worked, and the way his economic writing worked."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
"Diary of an Image by DD Dorvillier": that's the title of the four week program currently underway at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. But not all the work is by Ms. Dorvillier. On Friday and Saturday, for the second of two weekends, the choreographer invited colleagues to present solos of their own. Commonalities between the pieces appeared coincidental, except perhaps for purposeful awkwardness and a compulsion to repeat. The most carefully worked out selection came first: "The execution of an entry," by Heather Kravas. Five months pregnant, Ms. Kravas coolly suggested the experience ahead of her. At first, she did so by repeating the phrase "Does Somebody Wanna Come In?" Gradually it took on the cadence of a Lamaze exercise composed by Steve Reich, the phrase morphing as Ms. Kravas's body contracted and released and her mouth stretched and tightened; she seemed at once the mother giving birth and the petulant child to come. That effect continued as Ms. Kravas made a minimalist dance out of pregnancy exercises as her phone played a recording of white noise from a womb. Though the impact of her ideas was much diminished by her need to take us through every iteration, it was striking how her physical oscillations brought out a mechanical quality in the natural womb sound, like that of a sprinkler. Swelling in a forceful ending, the noise was like a freight train, unstoppable.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
DIVIDED WE STAND The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics By Marjorie J. Spruill Illustrated. 436 pp. Bloomsbury. 33. Among feminists, Donald Trump's election has prompted unprecedented soul searching about What Went Wrong. The revelation that a majority of white women helped put Trump over the top cut especially deep. The initial mystery how could women vote for that man? gave way to betrayal: How could they do this to other women? Then, after some Kubler Ross stages of grief, and a few million pink pussy hats, came the questions: How to harness the euphoric rage of the record breaking women's marches? How to make tangible progress, not merely prevent further losses? To answer these riddles requires understanding how we got here, and Marjorie J. Spruill's "Divided We Stand" offers a detailed if sometimes dense primer. Spruill, a professor of women's, Southern and modern American history at the University of South Carolina, convincingly traces today's schisms to events surrounding the National Women's Conference, a four day gathering in Houston in November 1977. At the time, Ms. magazine called the event a federally funded initiative to identify a national women's rights agenda "Four Days That Changed the World." So why is it that today, as Gloria Steinem recently observed, the conference "may take the prize as the most important event nobody knows about"? In Spruill's telling, the Houston conference was world changing, but not entirely for the reasons the organizers had hoped. The event drew an estimated 20,000 activists, celebrities and other luminaries for a raucous political convention cum consciousness raising session. The delegates enacted 26 policy resolutions calling not just for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (then just three states shy of the 38 needed) but a wide range of measures including accessible child care, elimination of discriminatory insurance and credit practices, reform of divorce and rape laws, federal funding for abortion and most controversially civil rights for lesbians. Those "planks" later were bundled as a National Plan of Action and presented to President Jimmy Carter, amid much fanfare, in a report entitled "The Spirit of Houston." The conference had an unintended, equally revolutionary consequence, though: the unleashing of a women led "family values" coalition that cast feminism not just as erroneous policy but as moral transgression. Led by Phyllis Schlafly, a small but savvy coalition of foot soldiers mobilized against the conference's aims. These activists found common cause in their deep religiosity and opposition to feminism's perceived diminishment of "real" womanhood. And although their leadership denied it, the group also had ties to white supremacists. "Divided We Stand" argues that the potency of these advocates and their successors reshaped not just the nation's gender politics, but the politics of the Democratic and Republican Parties as well. The Houston conference originated with a 1975 executive order issued by President Ford, charging a National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year (thereafter known as the I.W.Y. Commission) that would, as Ford put it, "infuse the Declaration of Independence with new meaning and promise for women here and around the world." Later that year, Congress tasked the commission with holding conferences in all 50 states to elect the delegates. 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 state conferences that convened in the summer of 1977 proved to be anything but unified, and documenting that turmoil takes up much of Spruill's attention. Members of the Schlafly coalition which called itself the I.W.Y. Citizens Review Committee, or C.R.C. doggedly attended each meeting, disrupting the proceedings and attempting to win inclusion among the representatives who would travel to Houston. In the end, few C.R.C. representatives were elected among the more than 2,000 racially diverse delegates who headed to the Houston Convention Center. So Schlafly and her followers took another tack: They organized a daylong Pro Life, Pro Family Rally across town at the Astro Arena. The chapters detailing these competing events are the best in "Divided We Stand." The feminists' conference was steeped in symbolism, starting with the lighting of a "torch of freedom" in Seneca Falls, N.Y. site of the 1848 women's conference marking the beginning of first wave feminism that over the next six weeks was carried to Houston by a relay of runners including icons like Billie Jean King. Speakers included three first ladies Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson as well as Coretta Scott King, the Texas representative Barbara Jordan, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and fiery political newcomers like Ann Richards and Maxine Waters. In contrast, the family values rally was as much a religious revival as a political event. A sign placed next to the podium said it all: "Women's Libbers, E.R.A. LESBIANS, REPENT. Read the BIBLE while YOUR sic ABLE." Many of the attendees who were nearly all white were men. Among them was the archconservative California representative Robert Dornan, who exhorted the audience to let their members of Congress know, as one attendee put it, that "the great silent majority is on the move to take the nation under God's guidance." After Houston, that contingent was more successful in making political inroads than its feminist counterparts. The difference, as documented by Spruill, was in its single minded pursuit of those power brokers Dornan had commended to it. Most notably, it won over the Republican Party leadership. At the time of the commission's formation, Republicans were moderate when it came to feminism; the 1976 party platform, for instance, included support for the E.R.A. But by the 1980 presidential election, that had changed; the "family values" coalition co opted the party platform, won conversions on abortion from Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and propelled them along with numerous other state and federal candidates to victory. In contrast, the Plan of Action landed with a thud on President Carter's desk. A born again Christian uneasy with alienating religious conservatives, Carter had inherited the conference initiative and never threw his full weight behind it and indeed, had rebuffed organizers' entreaties to come to Houston. Despite efforts by some White House staff members, the plan never became a legislative blueprint. With a wary White House that became outright hostile after Reagan's election, a split Congress and feminists' attention diverted to the E.R.A. ratification effort which failed when the time for approval expired in 1982 any hope of implementing the plan stalled in the 1980s. The Houston conference may have succeeded in awakening countless women to feminism, but most of its policy goals remain on the movement's to do lists. These divergent narratives from 40 years ago offer many lessons to those hoping to maintain the momentum of the Jan. 21 women's marches. Two of the most salient: Forge unity out of diversity and hold elected officials accountable. Early signs show that today's feminists are fast learners. The "unity principles" issued by national march organizers incorporated race, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, class and disability within multiple resolutions, instead of segregating them (as was the case with the Houston planks). A next step: Strengthen alliances between the majority white marchers and the women of color who mobilized against Trump (and before that, led the Black Lives Matter movement). A second day of mass action a nationwide "women's strike" on March 8 was an opportunity to show an even more united front. Meanwhile, women were vocal participants in the overflow crowds at congressional town halls held during last month's recess, women centric media are educating readers about grass roots activism and thousands of women have begun preparing to run for office. But perhaps the most auspicious sign came from the Republican representative Dave Brat of Virginia: He recently complained that "the women are in my grill no matter where I go."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Did you catch Steve Harvey's "Funderdome" on ABC? How about "The World's Best" on CBS, "The Contender" on Epix, or "World's Toughest Race: Eco Challenge" on Amazon Prime? Or the Christian themed dramas "A.D. The Bible Continues" on NBC and "Messiah" on Netflix? No? Well, you're hardly alone. And the man behind the string of flops is Mark Burnett, the legendary TV producer who shaped Donald Trump's image from "The Apprentice" through his 2017 inauguration. Like his greatest creation, Mr. Trump who sought and then lost an idiotic television ratings war on Thursday night with Joe Biden Mr. Burnett seems to be struggling to keep his grip on the cultural moment. Mr. Burnett's story has been told often, and until 2016 he was eager to help tell it how he reshaped American television with "Survivor" in 2000 and how, with the 2004 start of "The Apprentice," he "resurrected Donald Trump as an icon of American success," as The New Yorker put it. He's been in Mr. Trump's ear ever since: He held a planning meeting for the inauguration in his Ritz Carlton apartment, the event's planner, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, wrote. His associates produced the Republican National Convention this summer, Michael Grynbaum and Annie Karni reported for The New York Times. When President Trump took the presidential helicopter from the hospital to the White House this month, panicked Twitter commentators compared an official video of his triumphal return to the work of the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. But Mr. Burnett was the artiste whose influence really shined through on the video, though a spokeswoman said he did not consult on it. "The level of production coming out of the White House is something we would have appreciated having," Bill Pruitt, a producer on the "The Apprentice," said of the video's specific camera angles and its particular obsession with helicopters, a longtime favorite prop of Mr. Burnett's dating back to "Survivor." "As is customary for this, the reality TV version of a presidential campaign, it seems they're not striving as much for 'four more years' as they are 'Season 2.'" But that style may have fallen out of fashion. Mr. Burnett, 60, the defining TV impresario, salesman and deal maker of the aughts, hasn't put his stamp on a bona fide hit since the debut of "The Voice" in 2011. He shaped reality TV's bombastic, gimmicky and sometimes cruel early years. But the genre has matured and shifted in the streaming age to what are sometimes sweeter and more positive productions, like Netflix's "Floor Is Lava" and "Tidying Up With Marie Kondo." And Mr. Burnett, until 2016 one of the most prominent figures in Hollywood, has gone dark. His Trumpian gift for telling his own story about his triumphant reinvention of a once great studio, MGM, and his plan to bring Jesus Christ to entertainment has foundered on the reality of corporate infighting, creative struggles and a religious streaming network that never got off the ground. "The impact that he was going to have on the film and Christian community has kind of gone bust," said Peter Bart, who was a top executive at MGM before a long run as editor in chief of the trade newspaper Variety. "If that's your main mission and your legacy is Trump and maybe the failure of the next MGM that's not a good chapter in his life." The current chapter of Mr. Burnett's career began in earnest when Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the once great studio that had recently emerged from bankruptcy, bought out Mr. Burnett's production company in 2015 for 120 million, consummating an earlier 400 million deal. That put him in charge of the studio's television division. MGM got his stake in long running shows like "The Voice" and "Shark Tank," and the promise of more of his magic. MGM's chief executive, Gary Barber, blessed the acquisition in high corporate gobbledygook: "We believe this synergistic transaction will be very accretive," he said in a statement. But with Mr. Burnett inside, Mr. Barber now had a charismatic rival for the affection of the chairman of the company's board, Kevin Ulrich. One source of tension between Mr. Burnett and his new boss, two former executives said, was the enthusiasm of Mr. Burnett and his wife, Roma Downey, for faith based programing. The couple are outspoken Christians, and in 2013 they had produced "The Bible" for the History Channel, with Ms. Downey cast as the Virgin Mary. They then founded Lightworkers Media, which MGM now controls, and had hopes that MGM would turn it into a powerhouse. But MGM never invested enough in Lightworkers to turn it into more than some scattered programming and a little watched television channel, Light TV, showing family friendly reruns. MGM's biggest bet through Lightworkers, the 100 million 2016 film "Ben Hur," lost money. Repeated promises of a high powered streaming service never materialized. 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. Mr. Burnett's relationship with Mr. Trump has also shadowed his run at MGM. He had long been part of a kind of media industry kitchen cabinet for the developer, along with CNN's chief, Jeff Zucker, who had put "The Apprentice" on NBC, and the talent agent Ari Emmanuel. He and Ms. Downey had typically supported Democrats (Ms. Downey wrote a check to Marianne Williamson's 2014 California congressional campaign), and he said in 2016 that he wasn't actually supporting his friend's White House bid. But although Mr. Burnett promised associates that his friendship with the president would be great for business, he was also intensely sensitive to criticism of his old friend. He objected in particular, two people present at the time said, when an MGM board member, Jason Hirschhorn, began sharply criticizing Mr. Trump in his newsletter, REDEF, in 2016. Katie Martin Kelley, MGM's spokeswoman, said Mr. Hirschhorn's "public statements at the time caused friction for many people at MGM," and Mr. Hirschhorn, who left the board in 2017, declined to comment. Since the 2016 election, Mr. Burnett has gone to great lengths to keep a public distance from Mr. Trump, batting away suggestions that he helped with the Republican National Convention. "They are not in communication and he had no involvement with any of the president's public activities around his hospitalization for Covid 19," Ms. Kelley said in an email. Mr. Trump is just one thread in the internal tension at MGM involving Mr. Burnett. He's always been a difficult boss, and even before the pandemic, he was a man about town deal maker not an office bound manager. He's had so little input in the successes of the company's scripted division, including "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Fargo," that the division's leader, Steve Stark, was recently forced to clarify to The Hollywood Reporter that he still reports to Mr. Burnett. He played a role in the messy 2018 ouster of Mr. Barber, which has left the company operating without a chief executive. Now, MGM is subject to perennial acquisition rumors and dependent on factors it can't control: It is hoping theaters will be packed for the release of a new James Bond film next year and that the culture will be ready for the return of "Live PD," a Burnett acquisition that was canceled this summer amid the wave of revolt at police violence. After Mr. Barber's ouster, Mr. Burnett announced that he and Ms. Downey would raise 100 million to start a Lightworkers subscription service. But those plans, Ms. Kelley said, have been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, though "conversations have and are expected to continue." For now, Lightworkers is just producing content for MGM, and recently completed production on a feature film called "Resurrection." It also scaled back its digital presence in July, taking much of its content off the internet, including articles by Charlotte Pence Bond, the daughter of Vice President Mike Pence. (One had the headline, "Are You Narcissistic? Let's Find Out.") Mr. Burnett didn't respond to interview requests directly or through an MGM spokeswoman. After years in the headlines, he is keeping his profile low, and his name didn't even appear in a recent, gloomy Wall Street Journal assessment of MGM's finances. Some of his old partners, like Les Moonves at CBS and Paul Telegdy at NBC, have been forced out of their positions, and a new generation of network executives doesn't jump quite so quickly at his calls. But if he's not quite the producing star he once was, he's still closing deals. In 2018, Amazon Prime resurrected a show called "Eco Challenge," which Mr. Burnett started producing in the 1990s, though Amazon has dropped plans for a second season, MGM confirmed. When I asked MGM's chief communications officer, Ms. Kelley, about the perception that Mr. Burnett had lost his creative touch, she responded with a litany of his long running shows.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, the new company created from the merger of Chrysler and Fiat, has introduced a new logo made from the letters F.C.A. and rendered in light blue. A news release says the logo will be introduced gradually. The logo was designed by RobilantAssociati, a Milan firm that designs logos and branding systems. The firm has done extensive work for brands within the greater Fiat corporation, including refining the Fiat auto brand's logo, revising Alfa Romeo's and recasting the more upscale Lancia brand. The shapes of the logo have symbolic meaning, according to the news release. "The three letters in the logo are grouped in a geometric configuration inspired by the essential shapes used in automobile design: the F, derived from a square, symbolizes concreteness and solidity; the C, derived from a circle, representing wheels and movement, symbolizes harmony and continuity; and finally, the A, derived from a triangle, indicates energy and a perennial state of evolution." The cross bar of the A is removed, making it resemble an upward arrow or the Greek letter lambda, which has many meanings in science and other contexts, such as serving as an international symbol for gay rights. (For what it's worth, current Chrysler television advertising talks about "raising the bar.")	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
A few years ago, the biggest enemy of the music industry was Pandora Media. Then Spotify became the target. Now it is YouTube's turn. In recent months, the music world has been united to a rare degree in a public fight against YouTube, accusing the service of paying too little in royalties and asking for changes to the law that allows the company to operate the way it does. The battle highlights the need to capture every dollar as listeners' habits turn to streaming, as well as the industry's complicated relationship with YouTube. The dispute has played out in a drumbeat of industry reports, blog posts and opinion columns. Stars like Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams and Billy Joel have signed letters asking for changes to copyright laws. Irving Azoff, the manager of artists like the Eagles and Christina Aguilera, criticized YouTube in an interview and in a fiery speech around the Grammy Awards. Also, annual sales statistics were released showing that YouTube, despite its gigantic audience, produces less direct income for musicians than the niche market of vinyl record sales. "This is the result of an explosion of views of music videos on YouTube against a backdrop of decline in the recorded music business in general," Larry Miller, an associate professor of music business at New York University's Steinhardt School, said of the fight. With more than a billion users, including the youngest and most engaged music fans, YouTube has long been seen by the music business as a vital way to promote songs and hunt for the next star. At the same time, music executives grumble that it has never been a substantial source of revenue and is a vexing outlet for leaks and unauthorized material. It may not be a coincidence that the major record labels are also in the midst of renegotiating their licensing contracts with YouTube this year. In its newest effort, the music industry has asked the federal government to change the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying that the law, which was passed in 1998 and protects sites like YouTube that host copyrighted material posted by users, is outdated and makes removing unauthorized content too difficult. Cary Sherman, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, says that even when songs are taken down, they can easily be uploaded again. "This is a new form of piracy," he said. "You don't have to go into dark corners and sell stuff out of your car. You can do it in plain sight and rely on the D.M.C.A. to justify that what you're doing is perfectly legal." Europe's copyright protections are also under review, and last month, Andrus Ansip, the European Commission's digital chief, called on YouTube to pay more for its content. But so far, YouTube does not seem shaken. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. In an interview, Robert Kyncl, YouTube's chief business officer, said that since its inception in 2005, YouTube has paid 3 billion to the music industry around the world. (In earlier statements, YouTube has said that Google, its parent company, paid that amount across all of its sites, but Mr. Kyncl now says that YouTube alone has contributed that sum and that other Google services have added even more.) "Music matters tremendously to us," Mr. Kyncl said. "Artists matter to us. We are connecting artists and fans on our platforms." He also pointed to the site's new subscription plan, YouTube Red, and said YouTube's copyright protections were functioning as they should. Content ID, the site's proprietary system, lets copyright owners keep track of their material, and when the system detects a new video including a tracked song whether in a full music video or just the background of a user uploaded clip the owner can choose to keep the video online or take it down. According to YouTube, 98 percent of copyright claims on its system are made through Content ID, and 99.5 percent of the claims related to music are handled automatically. YouTube says about half the money it pays in music royalties is related to user generated videos that incorporate music processed through Content ID. "We are working to create what has become the most significant revenue generator in the entertainment industry," Mr. Kyncl said, "which is a dual revenue stream where you monetize all people: heavy users through subscription, and light users through advertising." But the music world argues that YouTube's financial contributions have not kept pace with the popularity of its streams. In March, the recording industry association's annual report of sales statistics, usually a dry financial summary, criticized YouTube harshly. It said that free ad supported sites like it, which let users pick specific songs on demand, paid 385 million to record labels in the United States less than the 416 million collected from the sale of just 17 million vinyl records. Spotify paid about 1.8 billion last year for music licensing and related costs, according to the company's annual returns, although the average royalty rates for its free tier are not much different from YouTube's, by some estimates. The fight over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has touched a nerve. The music industry is bracing for what may be a high wattage lobbying battle reminiscent of the one over the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that was abandoned in 2012 after opposition from technology activists and Internet giants like Google and Wikipedia. The copyright law gives "safe harbor" to Internet service providers that host third party material. While music groups criticize the law, some legal scholars and policy specialists say any change to it would need to be considered carefully, particularly to preserve protections like fair use. "Anything that rewrites the D.M.C.A. isn't just going to affect YouTube," said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Maryland. "It is going to affect blogs. It is going to affect fan sites. It is going to affect places for game creators and documentarians and all kinds of others." In December, the United States Copyright Office asked for comments about D.M.C.A. as part of a review of the law, and filings by record companies show how laborious copyright policing can be. Universal Music said that after Taylor Swift's album "1989" was released in late 2014, the company devoted a team of employees full time to search for unauthorized copies; to date, the company said, it has sent 66,000 takedown notices to various sites about "1989," in addition to 114,000 blocks on YouTube made automatically through Content ID. Maria Schneider, a Grammy winning jazz composer, said in an interview that the problem was particularly acute for independent acts like her, who do not have Content ID accounts, and that the D.M.C.A.'s takedown process discouraged lawful requests.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Watches Are Yet Another Easy Way Rich People Make Their Money Into More Money As tattooed rockers, tech bros and Instagram influencers pile into the tweedy world of watch collecting, prices for sought after classics from brands like Rolex, Omega and Patek Philippe are shooting up. In some cases, they have doubled in just a couple of years. These next generation collectors see old timepieces not just as a subtly stylish way to dress up a T shirt and jeans, but also as a hot new asset in their investment portfolios. In a market where stocks, bonds and real estate seem at an unsteady peak, do vintage watches present a Bitcoin in 2017 like growth opportunity? Or are they in a Bitcoin in 2017 like bubble? "It's much like momentum investing in stocks," he said. "People see the rise in Facebook shares, they see Mark Zuckerberg, and they want to ride it up. It is the same with the trendy watches we read about in the auctions the Paul Newman Rolex, the Omega Speedmasters, some Submariners. You see them rising and you want to jump on." "The question," Mr. Goodwin said, "is when does it stop?" That's a risk that newcomer watch geeks like Shahien Hendizadeh, a recent business school graduate in Los Angeles, are willing to take. "Buying a good vintage Rolex is just like purchasing stock in a company like Nestle or Google," Mr. Hendizadeh, 25, said. "It is the quintessential blue chip." After taking a face plant on a long shot 2,000 investment in American Apparel stock, just months before the company declared bankruptcy, he bought a 1982 Rolex Submariner for 13,000. It has appreciated perhaps 10,000 in two years, he said. And in the event of an economic downturn, fine watches may turn out to represent a safe haven asset, like metals or gems, for investors looking to diversify their portfolios. Or they may just be another of the moment asset that 1 percenters, flush with cash, have inflated to unsustainable proportions. Watch collectors hide in plain sight. John Mayer's watch collection is nearly as famous as his guitar work. His bank vault contains a vast array of collectibles, including sapphire encrusted gold Rolexes and Luftwaffe watches from World War II, that he has said is valued in the "tens of millions." Silicon Valley heavyweights like Kevin Rose, the Digg founder, and Matt Jacobson, Facebook's employee No. 8, have museum worthy Rolexes and Patek Philippes, helping to establish a head turning timepiece as a tech world style flourish to rival the hoodie. Ellen DeGeneres wore a holy grail Paul Newman model Rolex Daytona from the 1960s, now worth perhaps 250,000, while bantering with Jerry Seinfeld in an episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" last year. (Adam Levine and Ed Sheeran have been spotted wearing Paul Newmans as well. One also made a cameo on the wrist of Pierre Png's character in "Crazy Rich Asians.") In professional sports, high end timepieces have long seemed as indispensable as a shoe contract for stars with seven and eight figure incomes. Top athletes including Rafael Nadal, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James have served as celebrity ambassadors for brands like Richard Mille, Hublot and Audemars Piguet. If you're still 1 percent ish but would prefer to dabble, there's good news. The Watch Fund, run by Dominic Khoo, a shareholder and watch specialist with the auction company Antiquorum, offers people a chance to invest in rare and limited edition watches at prices that can be 50 percent or more below retail. Those who have bought in have seen at least double digit returns since the fund's inception six years ago, Mr. Khoo said. Star power and funds like Mr. Khoo's add credence to the idea that fine watches are a soybean or a copper, another investable commodity. But does that make them a good investment? What even makes a watch valuable? Consider the bezel insert from a 1957 Rolex Submariner. A bezel insert is the featherweight aluminum disk with numbers on it that surrounds the dial of a diver's watch. On Submariners made in the third quarter of 1957, the bezel insert was made with an unusual red triangle at 12 o'clock and slightly different typography on the numerals. Because it is rare, that insert is so sought after by collectors that it can fetch more than 30,000 these days, said Eric Wind, a dealer of fine vintage watches in Florida, up from maybe 10,000 just a few years ago. None of this necessarily makes sense. It's not like a vintage watch is better than a new one. In fact, it's worse in almost every way. A new Rolex Submariner, for example, is a modern update of a decades old classic that seems to be every budding watch geek's first serious timepiece. The new Sub is a marvel of mechanical engineering, with a high tech ceramic bezel that is virtually guaranteed not to fade, a solid steel bracelet as rugged as a tank tread, and a crystal made of sapphire that is all but scratch proof. It's a watch that feels indestructible enough for a pleasure dive in the Mariana Trench. No one would ever say that about its predecessor, those midcentury Submariners made famous by Sean Connery's James Bond, which are shooting up in value despite the fact that they feature an acrylic (that is, plastic) crystal prone to scratches and cracks, a hollow steel bracelet that eventually might stretch like an accordion, and a painted dial that could fade from the original black to an espresso brown (known to collectors as a "tropical" dial). Which is, naturally, why old watches are considered cool: They have patina, provenance, soul. And for a generation of men (and yes, vintage watches seem to be an obsession largely for men, with apologies to Ellen) who value the analog chic of antique mechanical watches, just like vinyl records and selvage jeans, that is key. "Vintage watches should show off their age," said Nelson Murray, a 31 year old photographer and budding collector in San Francisco. Vintage sport watches, like his Rolex GMT Master, a classic pilot's watch from 1980, "evoke a sense of adventure and a kind of dare to add more dings and scratches to them as evidence of a life lived." Prices for some Rolex GMT Master models in the proper condition, with original parts have spiked to perhaps 16,000, up from 8,000 just two or three years ago, said Paul Altieri of Bob's Watches, a prominent retailer in Newport Beach, Calif. (It routinely shows off sumptuous wrist shots of old classics for its Instagram followers.) A few years ago, Matt Hranek, a watch loving photographer who recently founded a men's style magazine called Wm Brown, flipped a 1960s Omega Speedmaster (the same model worn by the astronaut Ed White on the first American spacewalk) for five times what he paid for it, he said. That score helped him persuade his wife that a portfolio of vintage watches could serve as an alternate 401(k) for the family. "I convinced her I think that it was much more practical to invest regularly in watches that I know about rather than the stock market that I know absolutely nothing about," Mr. Hranek, 51, said. But no watch has exploded in value like the Paul Newman Daytona. It is an auto racer's chronograph that once was considered something of an afterthought in the watch world. Joanne Woodward accidentally made it iconic when she bought one for Mr. Newman, her gear head husband, in the late 1960s for about 250. Whether she noticed it or not, the specific model she selected for Mr. Newman, who could often be found circling the track when he was not making movies, was rare, featuring distinctive Art Deco inflected numerals on its three sub dials denoting seconds, minutes and hours. This only appeared on perhaps one in 20 Daytonas from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Over the years, Mr. Newman's stature as a style icon grew, and so did the mythology and value of the Rolex he flashed on magazine covers. In a 2014 post, Hodinkee scoured old auction catalogs featuring Paul Newman sales and found estimates as low as 9,257 in 1992, and as low (yes) as 66,000 in 2008. Those were the days. After Paul Newman's own Paul Newman attracted worldwide headlines by selling at auction for 17.8 million after a mere 12 minutes of bidding in 2017, every Paul Newman suddenly seems to be trading like a Picasso. A coveted version known as an Oyster Mk 1 "panda" went for more than 750,000 at a Phillips auction in Geneva this past spring, a figure that shocked Mr. Clymer, who once owned that very watch. "The Oysters are something really special, and go well beyond ticking the box for a rich guy to prove he's cool," Mr. Clymer said. "I bought this watch in the twos, sold it in the threes, and I thought I was the smartest man in the room. How could a steel Daytona break 400,000?" Already, some sure things, like certain Daytonas, are looking like slightly less than a sure thing. "The market for Daytona just got a little silly for awhile," Mr. Clymer said. "We saw references worth 20,000, 25,000 in 2011 to 2015 all of a sudden worth 50,000, then all of a sudden worth 80,000. And now those same references are worth 65,000. That's still significantly higher than they were, but they've come down from the stratosphere." During the bear market of 2008 to 2009, too, prices for some high flying vintage models, including Paul Newmans, dipped by 30 to 40 percent, said Matthew Bain, a dealer of fine watches in Miami Beach. But, like stocks, they bounced back to new highs. The rebound may seem intoxicating. But people who think of their watch collection as an alternative to an E Trade account may be in for a rude surprise when they discover that watches often come with sizable dealer fees, not to mention substantial outlays for insurance, secure storage and other hidden costs, Mr. Khoo said. "Investors are not collectors, and collectors are not investors," Mr. Khoo said. His Watch Fund has a database of "more than 9,000 watch collectors worldwide," he said, and "I have never met someone who bought hundreds of watches that he liked, and sold 100 percent of them for a net absolute gain." In other words, newcomers to the watch world may want to heed the warning attached to brokerage advertisements on television: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Or, they may just want to buy whatever looks cool and leave it at that.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Martin Sorrell Is Gone From WPP, but That Doesn't Mean He's Gone Quiet Martin Sorrell reigned as one of the most influential leaders in the advertising industry for three decades as the chief executive of the marketing colossus WPP. After he abruptly resigned in April following an investigation into alleged personal misconduct, the normally sharp tongued, frenetic 73 year old slipped unexpectedly out of sight. By the end of May, Mr. Sorrell had created a new advertising company called S4 Capital, which he pitched last month at the annual advertising bacchanal in Cannes, France. While there, he spoke at events where he defended his reputation and criticized WPP for how it had handled his departure. Then last week, Mr. Sorrell clashed more directly with his former employer, with both vying to purchase the same Dutch marketing firm. Lawyers for WPP sent a letter to Mr. Sorrell on Tuesday telling him that he was risking his future stock awards, worth millions of dollars, by aiming to buy the Dutch firm, according to a person who reviewed the letter and shared its contents on the condition of anonymity. The letter said that WPP started considering an acquisition of the firm, called MediaMonks, in November 2017. Mr. Sorrell, who was then still running the conglomerate, "was heavily engaged in this process," it said, even traveling to the Netherlands to meet with the company's management team. That would make his separate pursuit an "unlawful diversion of a maturing business opportunity from WPP," and would most likely breach his confidentiality agreement, which would threaten the stock awards, the letter said. A spokesman for Mr. Sorrell said the claims were inaccurate and represented "a weak and feeble attempt by WPP to destabilize" S4 Capital's bid for MediaMonks. The scuffle has put a spotlight on Mr. Sorrell's ambitions after WPP, which he founded in the 1980s, and his efforts to push past his unceremonious exit. "Bidding on the same thing as WPP, is that a coincidence of all the things in the world?" said Jon Bond, co chairman of the digital marketing firm Shipyard, who has co founded and led several agencies and met with Mr. Sorrell over the years. "It feels like more of an emotional reaction than a thought out calculated approach because he's on the rebound. My question is what's the strategy, and be careful, because revenge is not a strategy." Mr. Sorrell has referred to his new firm as a "peanut" compared to WPP, which owns more than 100 marketing and communications firms, including Ogilvy and Y R. He acknowledged his age while speaking at an event in Cannes, saying that he is looking at building the firm for the next five to seven years, at which point he will reassess his physical and mental health. S4 Capital plans to be publicly traded by using an existing company's listing. According to a May filing, it aims to "build a multinational communication services business, initially by acquisitions," with a focus on technology, data and content. Mr. Sorrell, who was one of the world's most highly paid executives while at WPP, contributed 40 million pounds (about 53 million) of the firm's initial equity funding and is its executive chairman. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The filing noted that institutional investors had indicated they would be willing to provide more than 200 million in additional equity funding for acquisitions. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Sorrell was seeking shareholder approval to raise up to PS1 billion for additional acquisitions. The report also noted that an information circular, published in advance of a general shareholder meeting on July 23, said talks were underway regarding multiple acquisitions. "I think WPP expected him to be perhaps toxic and therefore not able to raise capital," said Brian Wieser, a media analyst at Pivotal Research. "They maybe underestimated the degree to which he now has a massive chip on his shoulder and really wants to be able to prove himself." It remains to be seen how Mr. Sorrell's exit from WPP affects his new business ventures. In recent weeks, Mr. Sorrell has denied a report in The Wall Street Journal that his departure was preceded by a company investigation into whether he had visited a brothel and used WPP money to pay a prostitute. Separately, he denied allegations of bullying behavior detailed in The Financial Times. MediaMonks, when asked about the bids and whether it had discussed the allegations regarding Mr. Sorrell with its clients, said it did not comment on speculation. The digital production company, founded in 2001, has 11 offices globally and about 750 employees that it refers to as "monks." It has worked with companies like Lego, Google, Bose and Ikea on creative projects from gaming apps to documentaries. "I still think he will be very successful in attracting agencies," Greg Paull, a principal at R3, a consulting firm, said of Mr. Sorrell. "He's built so much good will in the business, there will be enough entrepreneurs wanting to work with him in a more hands on structure."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In a modest brick apartment house on Staten Island, the antiques collector George Way crammed British and Dutch furniture and art to the ceiling, scarcely leaving circulation routes between 17th century armchairs and old master portraits of noblewomen. Part of his collection is now going on view in the hands of new institutional owners, with wall texts paying tribute to Mr. Way, who died in June, at 69. Known among dealers as the Oak Man, Mr. Way lent his collection to museums for three decades while working at a supermarket deli. "George was in the middle of many projects" to put more works on display when he suffered a fatal stroke, said Patrick Grenier, a historian and arts administrator who has helped about 15 institutions acquire material from Mr. Way's now empty apartment. The New York State Museum in Albany will outfit its new Dutch Gallery with Mr. Way's finds, including paintings of tavern scenes, green wine goblets, brass sconces decorated with cherubs, and Delft tiles depicting children at play. Labels will note Mr. Way's role in the provenances: "He did such a remarkable job of bringing it all together," said Jennifer Lemak, the museum's chief curator of history. In Jersey City, N.J., cooking tools, furniture and needlework from Mr. Way will go into a new museum at the Van Wagenen House. Dutch immigrants started building the stone residence in the 17th century on land bought from Lenape elders. Donations from the Way estate have arrived at "a very substantive moment, at the beginning of our collection," said Gretchen Von Koenig, the museum's curator. The objects will allow for "so many ways and narratives" of explaining what life in the house was like for the original owners and their two enslaved persons, she added.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
LONDON In the streets and cafes here, there is a lot of talk about the possibility of a Brexit Britain's leaving the European Union, to be decided June 23 in a national referendum with Prime Minister David Cameron pleading to stay and the London mayor, Boris Johnson, announcing on Sunday that he's for leaving. But in the microcosm that is fashionland, it's all about the Burbexit. You know: Burberry's announcement this month that it is upending the fashion system, and that, come September, it will show season nonspecific clothes that will be immediately for sale. The two are not unrelated. After all, when the dominant topic in a country is about rejecting the rules when the world is divided into Ins and Outs it is little wonder fashion brands start taking stock and deciding it is time to turn away from ye olde group dynamic and do what works for them. So Monday saw a Burberry show in transition; some pieces can be pre ordered from the brand's website and from its Regent Street store on Tuesday. And while it felt a little nostalgic helped in part by the angsty crooning of Jake Bugg, playing live it had the effect of casting the rest of the recent shows in a somewhat different light. Just as with the stay or go referendum, the question of whether a brand should show now and sell now, or show now but sell later, is highlighting a division in fashion, between brands conceived to dress up the status quo and brands conceived to challenge it. Burberry is firmly in the first camp, as evinced by its two tone parade of "things I love," in the words of Christopher Bailey, its chief executive and chief creative officer. In practice, that meant mainly swinging '60s Lurex or lame jacquard minidresses contrasting with tough outerwear, from military greatcoats to suede peacoats to a snakeskin trench. Plus a few trousers, and a panoply of patchwork accessories. For the second, however, see J.W. Anderson. "Often, you need silhouettes and collections to marinate; you need to get used to them," said the designer the day after his show of space age tunics and trousers traced in zippers, cloudlike tiered and ruffled miniskirts, fur hoodies and stiff satin jackets with the lines of a rocket ship. "If these hit the stores tomorrow, they could sink," he said. "But I'm not interested in accessibility. I'm interested in clothes that are very good, or very bad." A lot of the collection looked outre (though dissociate those satin flocked trapeze jackets from the chamois cloud skirts they were paired with, and put them over a pair of black skinny pants, and suddenly they take on a whole new vibe), but it had its own frenetic energy. Glance again, and again, and it is easy to imagine the orbital leather trimmed skirts and the studded white shirts becoming something of a thing. More of a thing, anyway, than last season's 1980s though, case in point, that baton has now been assumed by Gareth Pugh, who went back to the decade of Mugler and Montana with an ode to the power suit, all stars and shoulders and strength through seams (Anya Hindmarch went there, too, a bit, with a Pac Man inspired show of rainbow pixelated bags and fur coats, googly eyed backpacks and video game striped suedes). Increasingly, we seem ready to reinvent that period in history. By contrast, the slouchy suiting at Paul Smith, whether covered in metallic florals or select paisleys, and the pirate maidens, all military braid capes and lacy tiers, at Temperley London, were aesthetically available simply another translation of what had come before. They were an easy ask on the part of a shopper looking for a new frock (or frock coat), but they lacked the urgency, or the danger, of the new.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Beaches across the United States have been closed to visitors for months. But that hasn't stopped out of towners from trying to use them, sometimes running afoul of the law to do so. In mid April, for example, a Miami resident named Joao Ramon Perez drove his pickup truck personal watercraft in tow through a checkpoint intended to keep nonresidents and nonessential workers out of the Florida Keys, an archipelago of islands south of Miami. According to a sheriff's office report, he was asked to turn around and go home. He responded by telling sheriff's deputies that they would have to arrest him to keep him out. He spent the night in jail. Since two Florida Keys checkpoints went up in March, authorities have turned away nearly 15,000 cars, filled with thousands of would be visitors who hoped to escape to the sand and sea. Some of them were tourists, but many were from neighboring Miami Dade and Broward counties. It's this kind of behavior that makes yearlong residents of beach towns nervous for the summer. As many reopen for Memorial Day weekend or on June 1, in the case of the Keys the communities that live there are preparing for a crush of people, some of whom feel contempt for the rules that have kept these enclaves relatively safe. The lockdown of the Florida Keys, for example, has kept reported cases of Covid 19 low, with only three deaths, according to data from the Florida Department of Health. "It's not that we don't want people here or that we hate people from Miami and other places it's that we don't have the resources to care for them if they come here and get sick," Scott Pillar, a commercial fisherman and a resident of the Keys, said over the phone. "We aren't trying to keep the beach to ourselves, we are trying to keep everyone safe. If these people coming to visit can guarantee that they aren't sick, then, sure, they can come." Rules for beach reopenings differ by state and county, and are still in discussion and prone to change, with some beaches currently banning sitting and sunbathing and allowing people to visit only if they keep moving. Almost everywhere, tourists and locals are expected to wear masks and practice social distancing, even at the beach. In the Keys, hotels will have to submit sanitation plans in order to host visitors, and can be booked at only 50 percent capacity. But some residents worry that by reopening authorities are prioritizing "money before people," one man wrote in a Facebook group for locals. In the week since the Outer Banks, a group of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, reopened, many locals have said they've noticed visitors refusing to wear masks or follow social distancing rules, making residents nervous that it's inevitable that more cases of coronavirus will reach the islands, which have largely been sheltered. "The locals, in my opinion, followed the beach rules and just used it for exercise or walking your dog," said Barbara Bell, a photographer in the Outer Banks. "When they started to let in nonresident property owners is when the beach access roads were packed." The towns had been closed to nonresidents and nonessential workers for two months, with sheriff's deputies at the entry points, but there were plenty of efforts to flout that rule. Some locals offered, on Craigslist, to sneak people onto the islands via boat, for a price. Some managers sneaked clients past the checkpoint on the bridge. Over one weekend in March, dozens of people tried to cross the Currituck Sound to reach the islands. "I understand what an amazing place this is and get that when people weren't at work they wanted to be here, but what they were missing was the fact that they were coming from areas with a surge, to an area that wouldn't be able to handle that," said Shelli Gates, a respiratory therapist and musician who has lived in the Outer Banks for about 27 years. Although local business owners were vocal about their concern that keeping tourists away would harm a community where most money is made in the summer, some residents said that authorities are rushing to reopen to appease business owners. On various Facebook posts and in interviews with The New York Times, residents of the Outer Banks towns of Kitty Hawk, Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills said they understood the difficult position of business owners who in many cases, are neighbors but that reopening seemed like a big health risk. "It would be nice if we could find some balance that will let people make their money for their year, but also know that they are safe from the contingent of visitors who won't be respectful and won't follow the rules," Ms. Gates said. "Our shelves are half empty most of the time or completely out of essentials," Jonathan Parker Hipps wrote on a post announcing that the islands would be reopening. "Locals have been struggling for toilet paper and meats. We all want to open up but we aren't ready." The Five Mile Rule and Other Measures Some beach towns have put in new rules to try to limit the number of people who can be there. At Half Moon Bay State Beach and other California beaches, people are not allowed to park anywhere near the beach, in parking lots or along the road. They have to be engaged in recreational activities, and cannot sit or sunbathe. They can't bring coolers, umbrellas or chairs. (They are also reminded to take their trash with them because there is no collection.) The request to stay away, many residents said, is a reasonable one, but tourists and people from "over the hill" haven't respected it, causing frustration and tension between neighbors. The arguments have been playing out in person and on social media. In Half Moon Bay, which is about 45 minutes south of San Francisco, "locals only" signs began to pop up in parking lots in March, as did highway signs telling people who were more than 10 miles away from their towns to turn around and go back home. (Previously, Dr. Scott Morrow, the health officer of San Mateo County, issued a rule requiring those who went outside to do recreational activities within five miles of their homes.) As of this week, people from beyond the 10 mile scope can visit beaches, but they are not allowed to do so by car between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. "It feels like people are using the pandemic as an excuse to keep people who aren't from here out," said Chris Voisard, a teacher and local in Half Moon Bay who opposed the five mile rule. "The sentiment here is very much that these are our beaches. We are lucky to live by the beach but we don't own the beach." On a Facebook group for locals, run by Ms. Voisard's sister, Cathy, hundreds of Half Moon Bay residents disagreed. Some lamented that though county measures have slowed traffic, they haven't kept out day trippers. Instead of parking where they'll be ticketed for breaking the shelter in place rules, these visitors have been parking in residential areas. Because bathrooms are closed, they are urinating in locals' yards and along the beach. And instead of taking their trash with them, they are littering around people's homes. "I am all for people's rights to visit the beach none of us own the beach but this is about respect for each other during a pandemic, a crisis, not about keeping people away from the beach," said Soula Conte, a resident of Montara, a town that is between Half Moon Bay and Pacifica, and is within the 10 mile Half Moon Bay rule. Four beaches in the area (South Edison and Ditch Plain in Montauk, and Indian Wells and Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett) will open, but only on weekends, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and only to those with permits. No daily parking passes are being sold, and East Hampton is fining people 150 if they are parked in a lot without a permit. The town is also not issuing nonresident permits. By this time of year, issuing permits is usually well underway. The reality of living in a beach town, though, is accepting that you need tourists to survive, some residents of the Outer Banks, Half Moon Bay and the Florida Keys said. There is fear but resignation and need in most beach enclaves; often, tourism is one of the only ways for locals to make money. All locals can do is hope for the best. "Carolina Beach opened yesterday, and today, though chilly, the boardwalk is full of happy visitors none wearing masks or social distancing," one Outer Banks woman, who asked not to be named, wrote on Facebook, adding that grocery store parking lots were packed with nonresident cars. "Praying for the best outcomes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
About 6,000 years ago, St. Paul Island, a tiny spot of land in the middle of the Bering Sea, must have been a strange place. Hundreds of miles away from the mainland, it was uninhabited except for a few species of small mammals, like arctic foxes, and one big one: woolly mammoths. This population of woolly mammoths, one of the world's last, had been comfortably living there for a few thousand years they had no predators (humans didn't arrive until the 18th century), a good amount of fresh water and plenty of food. But environmental changes, strikingly similar to those in our time, caused the mammoth population on this island to die out. At the time, a changing climate caused sea levels to rise, shrinking both the island's size and the mammoth herd. A drier climate meant less rainfall and lower lake levels, and the lack of freshwater may have been a driver of the mammoth's extinction, according to a new study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors argue that this extinction offers important lessons about freshwater availability and island populations in a changing climate. For the first time, scientists have been able to pinpoint the date and likely cause of the extinction of woolly mammoths on this Alaskan island, once a part of the Bering Land Bridge that connected North America to Asia, but made an island when sea levels rose and glaciers disappeared around 14,000 years ago. The study, led by scientists from Pennsylvania State University along with scientists from elsewhere in the United States and Canada, analyzed a variety of indicators to show that these woolly mammoths became extinct about 5,600 years ago. According to Russell W. Graham, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State and the study's lead author, this may be the most precisely dated prehistoric extinction. The authors of the study found that rising seas, which shrank the island's size, were not enough to cause extinction, but may have indirectly caused the extinction event: The swelling seas reduced available habitat and freshwater sources, making life difficult for the giant animals. The scientists analyzed four proxies for megafaunal presence (in this case, mammoths): sedimentary ancient DNA and three fungal spore types from near a lake, a key source of freshwater on the island. They also were able to get a sense of the vegetation on the island at the time, using several proxies from sediment cores. These cores showed that the area around the lake was likely stripped of vegetation by the mammoths, which might have sped up the lake's erosion, causing it to fill in and worsening its quality. Dr. Graham said that this study has profound implications for both island and low lying populations today. Changes in sea levels that would have been relatively inconsequential for continents were magnified on tiny St. Paul Island. What happened on the remote Alaskan island is a scenario that could be faced by small, low lying islands globally, especially in the South Pacific, he said. As sea levels rose around the island, the salt water pushed inland and displaced some of the freshwater, so the mammoths had less to drink. This happens all over the world now, in large part because of groundwater extraction, and can contaminate drinking water wells. Dr. Graham said that he and his fellow scientists were surprised that the availability of water was such a powerful limiting factor for the woolly mammoths, and that it has often been overlooked in the study of prehistoric extinctions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In 2001, when I was still attending college, David Brooks wrote an essay for The Atlantic called "The Organization Kid," in which he spent a lot of time with young Ivy Leaguers and came away struck by their basic existential contentment. Instead of campus rebels, they were resume builders and accomplishment collectors and apple polishers, distinguished by their serenity, their faux adult professionalism, their politesse. I thought at the time that Brooks made my cohort out to be more decent than we really were, mistaking the mask we wore for encounters with, say, an Atlantic journalist for our truer, darker, more ambitious selves. But he was entirely correct that most of my peers believed that meritocracy was fair and just and worked because after all it seemed to work for us. I graduated the year after "The Organization Kid" ran, wrote a lot about college in my 20s, and then drifted to other interests and obsessions. To the extent that I followed the college admissions racket thereafter, it seemed to become more competitive, more ruthless, more itself and to extend its rigors ever earlier into childhood. But a few years ago we moved back to the college town where I grew up, which gave me a close vantage point on young meritocratic life again. Some of the striving culture that Brooks described remains very much in place. But talking to students and professors, the most striking difference is the disappearance of serenity, the evaporation of contentment, the spread of anxiety and mental illness with the reputed scale of antidepressant use a particular stark marker of this change. I don't think this alteration just reflects a darkening vision of the wider world, a fear of climate change or Donald Trump. It also reflects a transformation within the meritocracy itself a sense in which, since 2001, the system has consistently been asking more of ladder climbers and delivering less as its reward. The scholar Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut, whose work on the cycles of American history may have predicted this year's unrest, has a phrase that describes part of this dynamic: the "overproduction of elites." In the context of college admissions that means exactly what it sounds like: We've had a surplus of smart young Americans pursuing admission to a narrow list of elite colleges whose enrollment doesn't expand with population, even as foreign students increasingly compete for the same stagnant share of slots. Then, having run this gantlet, our meritocrats graduate into a big city ecosystem where the price of adult goods like schools and housing has been bid up dramatically, while important cultural industries especially academia and journalism supply fewer jobs even in good economic times. And they live half in these crowded, over competitive worlds and half on the internet, which has extended the competition for status almost infinitely and weakened some of the normal ways that local prestige might compensate for disappointing income. These stresses have exposed the thinness of meritocracy as a culture, a Hogwarts with SATs instead of magic, a secular substitute for older forms of community, tradition or religion. For instance, it was the frequent boast of Obama era liberalism that it had restored certain bourgeois virtues delayed childbearing, stable marriages without requiring anything so anachronistic as Christianity or courtship rituals. But if your bourgeois order is built on a cycle of competition and reward, and the competition gets fiercer while the rewards diminish, then instead of young people hooking up safely on the way to a lucrative job and a dual income marriage with 2.1 kids, you'll get young people set adrift, unable to pair off, postponing marriage permanently while they wait for a stability that never comes. Which brings us to the subject invoked in this column's title the increasing appeal, to these unhappy young people and to their parents and educators as well, of an emergent ideology that accuses many of them of embodying white privilege, and of being "fragile," in the words of the now famous anti racism consultant Robin DiAngelo, if they object or disagree. Part of this ideology's appeal is clearly about meaning and morality: The new anti racism has a confessional, religious energy that the secular meritocracy has always lacked. But there is also something important about its more radical and even ridiculous elements like the weird business that increasingly shows up in official documents, from the New York Public Schools or the Smithsonian, describing things like "perfectionism" or "worship of the written word" or "emphasis on the scientific method" or "delayed gratification" as features of a toxic whiteness. Imagine yourself as a relatively privileged white person exhausted by meritocracy an overworked student or a fretful parent or a school administrator constantly besieged by both. (Given the demographics of this paper's readership, this may not require much imagination.) Wouldn't it come as a relief, in some way, if it turned out that the whole "exhausting 'Alice in Wonderland' Red Queen Race of full time meritocratic achievement," in the words of a pseudonymous critic, was nothing more than a manifestation of the very white supremacy that you, as a good liberal, are obliged to dismantle and oppose? If all the testing, all the "delayed gratification" and "perfectionism," was, after all, just itself a form of racism, and in easing up, chilling out, just relaxing a little bit, you can improve your life and your kid's life and, happily, strike an anti racist blow as well? And wouldn't it be especially appealing if and here I'm afraid I'm going to be very cynical in the course of relaxing the demands of whiteness you could, just coincidentally, make your own family's position a little bit more secure? For instance: Once you dismiss the SAT as just a tool of white supremacy, then it gets easier for elite schools to justify excluding the Asian American students whose standardized test scores keep climbing while white scores stay relatively flat. Or again: If you induce inner city charter schools to disavow their previous stress on hard work and discipline and meritocratic ambition, because those are racist, too well, then their minority graduates might become less competitive with your own kids in the college admissions race as well. Not that anyone is consciously thinking like this. What I'm describing is a subtle and subconscious current, deep down in the progressive stream. But deep currents can run strong. And if the avowed intention of the moment is to challenge "white fragility" and yet lots of white people seem strangely enthusiastic about the challenge, it's worth considering that maybe a different kind of fragility is in play: The stress and unhappiness felt by meritocracy's strivers, who may be open to a revolution that seems to promise more stability and less exhaustion, and asks them only to denounce the "whiteness" of a system that's made even its most successful participants feel fragile and existentially depressed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
"This is the revenge of the viruses," said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "I've made their lives difficult. Now they're trying to get me." Dr. Piot, 71 years old, is a legend in the battles against Ebola and AIDS. But Covid 19 almost killed him. "A week ago, I couldn't have done this interview," he said, speaking recently by Skype from his London dining room, a painting of calla lilies behind him. "I was still short of breath after 10 minutes." Looking back, ruefully, on being brought down by a virus after a life as a virus hunter, Dr. Piot said he had misjudged his prey and had become the hunted. "I underestimated this one how fast it would spread. My mistake was to think it was like SARS, which was pretty limited in scope. Or that it was like influenza. But it's neither." In 1976, as a graduate student in virology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Piot was part of the international team that investigated a mysterious viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. To avoid stigmatizing the town, team members named the virus "Ebola" after a nearby river. Later, in the 1980s, he was one of the scientists who proved that the wasting disease known as "slim" in Africa was caused by the same virus that was killing young gay men elsewhere. From 1991 to 1994, he was president of the International AIDS Society, and then the first director of U.N.AIDS, the United Nations' anti H.I.V. program. "We started banning handshaking from our behavior. We went out to eat because we like good food, but we started giving the 'Ebola elbow.'" In early March, he went to Boston with Dr. Larson, who heads the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She gave a TedMed talk about rumors that damage vaccination campaigns, and he was asked 100 questions about the virus. No. 79: "Should I be worried that I'm going to get Covid 19? How worried are you, Peter?" He advised: "I would do everything I can to avoid becoming infected as you don't know individual outcomes." He became a living illustration of that. Although medical conferences in the Boston area that week were turning into super spreader events, Dr. Piot almost undoubtedly did not get infected there. Back home in London, he spoke to audiences of 30 to 250, attended a 50 person birthday party and had dinner or drinks in five restaurants in London or Cambridge. "My usual modus operandi," he said. Aside from avoiding hand shakes, he took no particular precautions. "I really don't know where I was infected." Although there were then already many confirmed cases, Britain did not officially go into lockdown until March 23, when there were 335 confirmed deaths. Dr. Piot and his wife, by contrast, began working from home on the 16th. The evening of March 19 he began feeling feverish and developed a headache. "My immediate thought was, 'Oh, I hope it's not Covid.'" Each day he felt more tired, his fever hovering at about 100 degrees. "It hit me like a bus. Extreme exhaustion, like every cell in your body is tired. And my scalp was very sensitive it hurt if Heidi touched it. That's a neurological symptom." It was a new feeling. Despite all the time he has spent in mosquito riddled climes, "I'd never been seriously ill in my life," he said. A regular jogger and apparently healthy he joked, "This is the first time in my adult life I didn't drink wine for a month." At the time, it was almost impossible to get tested; the few kits available were reserved for hospitals. On March 26, he finally found one through a private doctor. It was positive, and his fever kept rising. On March 31, it hit 104 degrees and he began feeling confused. He and his wife went to the emergency room of the Royal London Hospital. Although he did not feel short of breath, his oxygen saturation was only 84 percent, dangerously low. An X ray showed fluid in both lungs in a pattern that suggested bacterial pneumonia. His blood tests "were really bad," he said. His levels of C reactive protein, which indicate inflammation, and of D Dimer, which indicate blood clots forming, were both very high. "I instantly changed from doctor to patient," he said. He was put on oxygen and sent upstairs on a gurney. "That was when it hit me in the stomach," Dr. Larson said. She had been allowed to stay while he was assessed but could not venture upstairs. Normally Britain's National Health Service hospitals "are as crowded as Indian buses," Dr. Larson said. "But they had a campaign saying, 'Don't come to the hospital unless you're in the 11th hour,' so it was almost empty." "But when I saw Peter go through the double doors on that cart I had the same feeling as the Ebola families we knew in Sierra Leone: They were hiding their relatives because they didn't want to be separated from them emotionally, knowing they might never see them again." At first, Dr. Piot said, he was so exhausted he was apathetic. He asked for a single room, but was told they were reserved for people who had not tested positive, for their protection. He was put in a 20 by 22 foot room, one bathroom, with three other men. "They call the N.H.S. 'the great equalizer,'" he said. "The food was bangers and mash awful. And my roommates snored a lot." "All you can do is lie there thinking, 'I hope it's not going to get worse.'" He got intravenous antibiotics and high flow oxygen, and was roused every two hours for checks on his a blood pressure and other vital signs. "I was particularly anxious that I not be put on a ventilator," he said. "Ventilators can save lives, but they can also do a lot of harm. Once you're on one, your chances of surviving are the same as of surviving Ebola about one third." Every day, he talked to Dr. Larson or his grown children. He did get to watch episodes of a new BBC series about a Sicilian detective, "Inspector Montalbano," that his wife recommended. "If this had happened before cellphones, can you imagine the loneliness?" he said. "It's like being in prison. Look, I know I'm privileged, and I know I'm not going to be stuck here for 27 years like Nelson Mandela. But the world shrinks to the essentials. All you can think is: 'How is my breathing going?'" Finally, Dr. Piot said, his oxygen saturation came up to 92 percent. He was discharged on April 8. "They wanted to call me a taxi, but I said no, I wanted to breathe the now non polluted air in London." "It was a shock, like Stockholm syndrome," he said of his survival. "When I got home, frankly, I started crying. It was so emotional." But his body wasn't through with the disease. Before the hospital released him, he had tested negative for the virus. But now something else was going on a delayed immune reaction. "Gradually, I became short of breath," he said. "We live in an old Georgian house, with three floors, and I had a hard time getting upstairs." She recently tested positive for antibodies to the virus herself, although her illness was so mild that she's not sure when it peaked. She had two bouts of bad headaches, the first in late March and the second in mid April. The second time, she also had itchy red eyes, which are a rare but recognized symptom and may indicate infection through the eyes. On April 15, Dr. Piot's heart started to race to 165 beats a minute. The percentage of his blood oxygen dropped to the mid 80s again. He and Dr. Larson went to the University College Hospital where he had a chest X ray. This time, instead of distinct bacterial masses on each side, "my lungs were full of infiltrates, and they were a real mess. It's called 'organizing pneumonia.'" The tiny sacs that grow like bunches of grapes throughout the lungs, he explained, were oozing signaling proteins he was having a "cytokine storm." Those drew voracious white blood cells into the spaces between the air sacs so they threatened to block the paths oxygen normally takes to his red blood cells. His doctors thought about rehospitalizing him an outcome he dreaded. "My grandfather fought in the trenches in World War I in those poppy fields in Flanders," Dr. Piot said. "He said the worst part was going home on leave and then realizing what you had to go back to." But hospitalizing him on oxygen might have been fruitless his lungs were "stiffening" and perhaps unable to absorb it. He may have to take anticoagulants for the rest of his life, he said, and parts of his lungs may permanently be scarred. "But you can live with that," he added, shrugging. "If you get this cytokine storm while you're acutely ill, you're finished," he said. "But I had three stages first fever, then needing oxygen, and now the storm." "People think that, with Covid 19, 1 percent die and the rest just have flu. It's not that simple there's this whole thing in the middle." His doctors have not let him go back to work yet, he said. "All they say is, 'Rest! Rest! Rest!' That's not my forte. Pushing me to sit on the beach is punishment." "But I'm doing a little. I'm working with CEPI on vaccines," he added, referring to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an alliance formed in 2017 to create vaccines against new and even future diseases that traditional vaccine companies don't invest in. "I've faced death," he said. "In 1976, when we were drawing blood from patients, protective gear was a joke. And I escaped a helicopter accident. But this was different. I think facing death and surviving it is a good thing it forces you to think about what is essential, who is essential." "I'm now in Flemish what we call an 'ervaringsdeskundige' an 'experience expert.' Someone who is put on an advisory panel not because you've studied a disease, but because you've lived it. That's me. And now I'm thinking about what to do with the rest of my life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
America Is Still No. 1. Here's How It Can Stay There. A renowned scholar of American diplomacy once slapped his 4 year old in a fit. Coolly, she responded, "You shouldn't do this." "You don't have that many friends." That's the best take on President Trump's foreign policy, especially when it comes to America's oldest friends. Mr. Trump's favorite target is Angela Merkel, Germany's eternal chancellor. But he is an equal opportunity ruffian, who has bullied the leaders of Britain, France and more. He has routinely clobbered them with threats of tariffs and sanctions. As if running a protection racket, he has told "obsolete" NATO: Pay up, or we pull out. Now he is withdrawing 9,500 American troops from Germany, the linchpin of the American built European order. Possibly next in line is South Korea, where the United States expended over 36,000 lives to repel Mao Zedong's armies. In his latest assault on Europe, Mr. Trump is going after Russian gas and Chinese mobile technology. To be fair, he has a point. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, slated to pump around two trillion cubic feet annually into Germany, will ensure Russian energy dominance for decades. And Huawei's bargain priced 5G equipment might well be a Trojan horse that could enable the Chinese state to extract vital intelligence and intellectual property. Nor is Mr. Trump the first Europe basher. All American presidents have tried to strong arm the Europeans over trade and defense. And after the Cold War, Europeans have been much better at slashing military spending than boosting it to counter Russian rearmament. President Barack Obama also inveighed against "free riders." But there is a blatant difference between now and then. Before, there was never any doubt that the United States and its friends would hang together. Now this historic relationship is at a tipping point. For all of Europe's backsliding, the main blame must lie with Mr. Trump. The United States now finds itself on a treacherous new stage: Call it the "two and a half power world." America it is still on top. But China, the No. 2 power, is arming and extending its reach around the globe to try to dethrone the United States. An economic waif, nuclear Russia is only a semi great. Still, President Vladimir Putin is superbly playing a weak hand in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. America should get with the program. To stay No. 1, it should follow four rules. Rule 1: Keep your friends and recruit more. They may be free riders, as smaller players always are, but they add muscle, influence and cachet. "America First" does not. Bullies steal your lunch; they are never elected class president. Mr. Trump confuses coercion with clout. For him, "Make America Great Again" does not mean leading, but exploiting the show. It isn't "win win," but "I win if you lose." Europeans want Nord Stream 2? Then forget about doing business in America. If Berlin goes with Huawei, say goodbye to the U.S. intelligence sharing that has foiled many a terror plot in Germany. This is not smart diplomacy. Rule 2: Keep and increase authority by providing essential services like common security, free trade and navigation and by upholding a rules based order that favors mutually beneficial cooperation. "America First" means sacrificing the future for short term gain. The history of sanctions, Mr. Trump's favorite sport after golf, offers a nasty lesson. Victims may buckle, but they will soon sever the tie that binds. Sanctions devalue themselves by forcing nations into self sufficiency. Ciao, America. Rule 3: Promote your own interests by taking care of others'. What's good for them is good for America because a supply side foreign policy legitimizes U.S. leadership. Yet Mr. Trump sees multilateralism as a plot against America. "America Alone" is worse. Though hungry for gas and 5G, the Europeans are a second order headache compared with Chinese and Russian expansionism. In this two and a half power world, plus lesser upstarts like Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey and Kim Jong un's North Korea, America needs more, not fewer, friends. Finally, rule 4: Always harness the largest possible coalition. Coax, don't compel. Return to the diplomacy America has so wisely practiced in the past. Remind Ms. Merkel that European 5G suppliers Nokia and Ericsson can also deliver. The somewhat higher price will be mitigated by the gain in common security. And if Ms. Merkel panics over losing the lucrative Chinese market to Beijing's retaliation? Then assure her that America is not out to destroy Euro Chinese trade as such but to keep strategic industries out of President Xi Jinping's hands. America's allies will nod in assent. So, what are the chances? "Europe should view Trump as an anomaly," John Bolton, Mr. Trump's defrocked national security adviser, told the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "It is not going to be that hard to get back to normal." Amen. "Home alone" has not been the American way, certainly not since 1945, when the United States took on responsibility for the liberal world order. Even Mr. Trump's base would rather be at the helm than hunker down in the hold. Josef Joffe is a member of the editorial council of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit and a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. 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
Pentagon, With an Eye on China, Pushes for Help From American Tech SAN FRANCISCO Pentagon officials have been holding private discussions with tech industry executives to wrestle with a key question: how to ensure future supplies of the advanced computer chips needed to retain America's military edge. The talks, some of which predate the Trump administration, recently took on an increased urgency, according to people who were involved or briefed on the discussions. Pentagon officials encouraged chip executives to consider new production lines for semiconductors in the United States, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks were confidential. The discussions are being driven by the Pentagon's increased dependence on chips made abroad, especially in Taiwan, as well as recent tensions with China, these people said. One chip maker, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC , plays a particularly crucial role producing commercial chips that also have applications for aircraft, satellites, drones and wireless communications. And because of unrest over the past few months in the semiautonomous Chinese territory of Hong Kong, some Pentagon officials and chip executives have wondered about situations that could force suppliers in Taiwan to limit or cut off silicon shipments, the people said. Mark Liu, the chairman of TSMC, said he had recently discussed options for a new factory in the United States with the Commerce Department. The stumbling block was money; major subsidies would be required, he said, as it is more expensive to operate in America than Taiwan. "It is all up to when we can close the cost gap," he said in an interview. The conversations are a sign of how federal agencies are grappling with a deep rooted technology conundrum. The United States has long fielded the most advanced weaponry by exploiting electronic components once exclusively produced in the country. Chips help tanks, aircraft, rockets and ships navigate, communicate with one another and engage enemy targets. But domestic production lines of many chips have long since moved overseas, raising questions about supply interruptions in the event of political or military crises abroad. Those fears have been exacerbated by the increasing importance of particular components such as programmable chips that figure prominently in the F 35 fighter jet, which are designed by the Silicon Valley company Xilinx and mainly fabricated in Taiwan. Some chips, such as the wireless baseband processors needed for new 5G communications abilities that Pentagon officials covet, require advanced manufacturing technology that has become a key selling point of TSMC. "We in the Defense Department cannot afford to be shut out of all of those capabilities," said Lisa Porter, deputy under secretary for research and engineering, in remarks at an event in July that were later widely circulated among chip makers. In another sign of action, Skywater Technology, a Minnesota chip manufacturing service, said this week that the Defense Department would invest up to 170 million to increase its production and enhance technologies, such as the ability to produce chips that can withstand radiation in space. The Skywater investment illustrates how the Pentagon is also wrestling with how to upgrade aging technology at domestic companies that make small volumes of classified chips tailored for the military. Such "trusted" factories, as they are called, operate under Pentagon rules aimed at preventing sabotage or data theft. Dr. Porter and other Pentagon officials have pushed for new technical safeguards besides guards and employee background checks to keep sensitive chip designs secure, a strategy that would help the Defense Department use more advanced commercial factories. She called the idea a "zero trust" philosophy. TSMC, which dominates the build to order services called foundries, recently took the lead from Intel in shrinking chip circuitry to give chips greater capability. Its production edge is one reason the company has continued to win business from big American chip designers such as Apple, Qualcomm and Nvidia, whose chips have become increasingly important for defense as well as civilian applications. The United States remains the leading supplier and innovator in most chip technologies, including the processors that Intel sells for nearly all personal computers and server systems. But the Pentagon's research arm DARPA , for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been trying since 2017 to spur chip innovations under a 1.5 billion Electronics Resurgence Initiative. Its goals include finding alternatives to silicon for manufacturing and packaging small "chiplets" together instead of making big monolithic chips. "We have vulnerabilities we really need to address, but we are still the dominant producer of electronics in the world," said Mark Rosker, the director of DARPA's microsystems technology office. He said questions about the American semiconductor industry called for "a graceful and considered kind of panic." Much of the recent urgency stems from China's growing stature as a chip innovator. Designers there have developed chips for sensitive applications such as supercomputers. Many of the designers including Huawei, a key target of the Trump administration in the trade war also rely on TSMC for manufacturing. Another impetus for action stems from a recent pullback by GlobalFoundries. The chip maker, owned by investors in Abu Dhabi, has spent around 12 billion on a sophisticated factory in Malta, N.Y. But it announced last year that it would stop trying to create smaller circuitry than that on its existing production processes. GlobalFoundries now produces classified chips under the trusted foundry rules in two former IBM factories it took over in 2015. Company executives believe the technology in its Malta facility remains advanced enough to also serve military needs for years, and it is negotiating with officials to handle future classified work through proposed modifications to the government's trusted foundry regulations. It recently filed a lawsuit accusing TSMC of patent infringement, an action that it said was aimed partly at protecting the American manufacturing base. The company, which announced plans for a 10 billion factory in China in 2017, is also rethinking that project as the promised demand from customers there now seems uncertain, said Thomas Caufield, the chief executive of GlobalFoundries. Influencing the chip industry used to be easier when the Defense Department accounted for a major portion of chip sales. Now defense applications are dwarfed by civilian uses, such as smartphones and personal computers. More of the Pentagon's budget now goes to chips like memory and processors whose designs are shaped by commercial needs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
With a collection of 30 vintage automobiles, including the Rolls Royce used in the 1960s television detective series "Burke's Law," Jim Inglis can be reasonably sure he won't see another car like his when he drives from his home in Palm Beach, Fla., to the nearby Breakers resort. That wasn't the case one summer day four years ago when a Fiat 600 Jolly identical to his 1961 model down to its coral paint color pulled in behind him. It was an improbable encounter, given that fewer than 700 of the little runabouts were ever made and perhaps 100 of the originals remain anywhere in the world. The Jolly was a tiny buggy built under contract by Ghia, the Italian design studio and coachbuilder, in 1958 66. With its bulbous shape, doorless sides, removable surrey top, wicker seats and pastel color palette, the Jolly looks more like an amusement park ride than a road legal car. But collectors are taking "beach cars" like the Jolly seriously indeed, as demonstrated by the 110,000 paid for a 1958 model at an RM Auctions sale in March at Amelia Island, Fla. Informally defined as small, open vehicles with jaunty styling and a laid back attitude, beach cars are the auto world's head turning, sun loving equivalent of a two piece bathing suit or a skimpy Speedo. Among these, the Fiat Jolly commands the most attention and the highest prices, owing to its low production, designer pedigree and colorful history. A Renault version based on the 4CV economy car, also converted by Ghia, is highly collectible as well only 50 were made. Aside from vintage car auctions or concours events, an upscale seaside enclave offers the best opportunity to see a Jolly or other beach car in its element. The people who own them tend to drive them. Wayne Carini, the host of "Chasing Classic Cars" on the Velocity Channel, has owned five Jollys, always keeping one at his beach house in Old Lyme, Conn. Mr. Carini, who also runs an auto restoration shop in Portland, Conn., says one of his customers keeps two Jollys at a house in Hilton Head, S.C. Like other owners, Mr. Carini takes pleasure in recounting how the Jolly came to be, "a very cool story," in his words. Ghia created the car at the request of Gianni Agnelli, the grandson of Fiat's founder, Giovanni Agnelli, as a custom land tender for his yacht. Agnelli was a jet setter before there were jets he was called "the Rake of the Riviera" and a style setter who influenced men's fashions. Ferrari, which Fiat would acquire years later, built custom models for Mr. Agnelli in the 1950s. But it was the cheeky Fiat that his fellow yacht owners coveted when they saw him driving it in Monaco and Cannes, prompting Ghia to make copies. Mr. Agnelli took the reins of Fiat in 1966. The Jolly came in two main versions. One, based on the tiny Fiat 500 economy car, had a 13 horsepower air cooled 2 cylinder engine. More desirable to buyers at the time and to today's collectors as well was a model built on the slightly larger Fiat 600. Mr. Inglis described that car as much nicer to drive, with a water cooled 4 cylinder engine making 28 horsepower. (VW Beetles of the time made 40 horses.) In the United States, the price in 1960 for a 600 Jolly 1,905 would have bought a compact sedan like a Ford Falcon or Plymouth Valiant. Some Jollys were also made from the Fiat 600 Multipla, a kind of mini minivan; these had a rear facing third seat that was also made of wicker. Turning a Fiat 500 or 600 into a Jolly required quite a bit of hand fabrication by Ghia's craftsmen, who cut away the roof and installed an intricate web of steel tubing to reinforce the topless body, leaving some of it exposed as decorative trim. Seams were filled with lead, adding weight to cars that were already underpowered. Facts and folklore about the Jolly and other beach cars have been gathered on a Web site, coolbeachcars.com, by Don Rich, a collector and Jolly enthusiast in Nellysford, Va. Not all Jollys stayed by the seashore. President Lyndon B. Johnson had one at his Texas ranch. And on Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, a small fleet of Jollys served as taxis into the early 1960s. Some of those cars eventually landed in Newport Beach and on islands in the area. "Some residents on Balboa and Lido wanted something more fun than the golf carts people use to get around," said Theo Sahli, whose restoration shop in nearby Costa Mesa specializes in classic exotics like Ferraris and microcars like the Jolly. "You can't look at a Jolly and not smile," Mr. Sahli said. "We've restored 17, including Renaults." For many years, a group of Jollys drove in the annual Balboa Island parade, but the man who used to round them up, Scott Sarkisian, said many of his fellow owners ended up selling their cars, succumbing to the temptation of high dollar offers. The Jolly inspired imitators, including the Shellette, created in the late 1960s by Giovanni Michelotti, an Italian designer who also styled Triumph sports cars. Based on parts from Fiat's rear engine 850 coupe and Spider models, the Shellette was also an open car without doors, and with wicker seats and a canvas top. The Shellette lacked the Jolly's cheerful character, however, and of the 80 built only a handful are believed to still exist. Some beach cars trace their roots to the military. Catering to a niche market for island resort rental fleets, in 1959 Jeep introduced an export model called the Gala. Based on the 2 wheel drive Jeep DJ 3, the Gala came in pastel shades of pink, blue or green with matching candy stripe upholstery and a fringed surrey top. A resort in Acapulco, Mexico, Las Brisas, used a fleet of the cheery Jeeps to carry guests. Jeep also marketed the vehicle with a new name, the Surrey, to retail customers in the United States. It cost 1,700 in 1960 and, looking like a car for Malibu Barbie, seems the antithesis of the macho off road image that the brand cultivates today. In 1964, a little buggy concocted by the British Motor Corporation as a light reconnaissance vehicle for the British military, but rejected for that role, went into production as the civilian Mini Moke. The company, which built the Austin Mini, used that car's 850 cubic centimeter 4 cylinder engine, 10 inch wheels and other drivetrain parts in a sparse body devoid of doors, with two or four seats and a canvas top. Most of the 14,000 Mokes built in England through 1967 were exported, and they were popular at island resorts. The sun baked singer Jimmy Buffett referenced the Moke in "Autour du Rocher," his ode to partying on St. Bart's. The Moke's tooling was sent to Australia, where production of a reinforced version continued until 1981, and then to Portugal, where the buggies were made until 1993. British Mokes, as well as some from Australia, were sold into the 1970s in the United States. About 10 years ago, Andrew O'Rourke of Bronxville, N.Y., bought a 1967 Moke from the family of a Jaguar dealer. Having been driven just 15 miles, it was essentially new. Mr. O'Rourke, a former television reporter and the son of a prominent New York State politician, had previously bought a Moke from Alistair Cooke, the "Masterpiece Theater" host, who had a home near Mr. O'Rourke's summer place in Sag Harbor on Long Island. "He kept the Moke on his 50 foot sloop," said Mr. O'Rourke, who also had a Jolly until he sold it 10 years ago. Similar in concept to the Mini Moke, but lacking its charm, the Citroen Mehari was a plastic bodied utilitarian buckboard. This French model, too, was based on the components of a humble economy car, with a 2 cylinder air cooled engine to propel its slight 1,300 pounds. The Mehari was imported to the United States for only one year, in 1970. Only about 200 were originally sold here, so they're fairly rare. Americans are more likely to remember a rust prone four door convertible truckette from Volkswagen called the Thing, offered in 1973 74. The Thing began as a military vehicle known as the Type 181, which VW supplied to NATO forces in Europe. In Mexico, where VW also built the vehicle and called it the Safari, Las Brisas found it an ideal replacement for its aging fleet of Jeep Galas. The resort had the VWs painted in a blue and white theme with a surrey top and striped upholstery. VW offered a run of 200 similar Things in the United States that it called the Acapulco Edition. Mr. O'Rourke owns two of these, which were used for many years at the Portland Open golf tournament in Oregon. "I have photos of Pat Summerall driving Lee Trevino and Jack Nicklaus in them," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
After nine and a half years and three billion miles, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was on course to take the first close up look at Pluto on Tuesday morning. "Fasten your seatbelts," S. Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator, said Monday at a news conference here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is operating the mission. "New Horizons is arriving at the Pluto system." Among the science findings so far: a precise measurement of Pluto's diameter; greater than expected amounts of nitrogen leaking from the atmosphere into space; confirmation of nitrogen and methane ices at the polar region; and images that show strange, and different, landscapes on Pluto and Charon, its largest moon. "Pluto has not disappointed," Dr. Stern said. He described the data so far as "mouthwatering," but said it was still too early to answer some of the mysteries, like the strange features of Pluto and Charon. Pluto and Charon coalesced out of the same material after two large objects in the Kuiper belt the ring of icy debris beyond the orbit of Neptune collided early in the history of the solar system. But the two look very different, according to fuzzy images that New Horizons took from millions of miles away. The north pole of Charon is unexpectedly dark, while Pluto's is bright with ice. By contrast, Pluto has a belt of dark regions around its equator. With much better data arriving soon, the scientists were reluctant to speculate. "We don't know," Dr. Schenk said several times. New Horizons, launched in 2006 aboard the biggest Atlas 5 rocket available, left Earth's vicinity at the highest speeds ever. The compact spacecraft, about the size of a grand piano, runs on just 200 watts of power, generated from the heat of 24 pounds of radioactive plutonium dioxide. On Monday morning, New Horizons was still 650,000 miles from Pluto. Its closest approach to the former ninth planet, about 7,800 miles above the surface, was scheduled to occur Tuesday around 7:50 a.m. Eastern time. Dr. Stern said the resolution of the images would jump by more than a factor of 100, from 15 kilometers per pixel to less than 100 meters per pixel. The photos so far have been sharp enough to give a better determination of Pluto's girth 1,472 miles, give or take six miles which restores Pluto as the undisputed giant of the Kuiper belt. The discovery in 2005 of Eris, a more distant Kuiper belt object, set off the events that led to Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet, a new category. Eris was so bright that it seemed certain to be bigger than Pluto, and initial measurements appeared to confirm that. But later, astronomers were able to make a more precise measurement when a star passed behind Eris. Eris turned out to be 1,453 miles in diameter. Similar measurements had been made for Pluto, but the uncertainties were greater earlier estimates of the diameter ranged from 1,428 miles to 1,490 miles because Pluto has an atmosphere that bends starlight. Pluto and Eris appeared almost identical in size. With New Horizons weighing in, "that settles the debate about the largest object in the Kuiper belt," Dr. Stern said. The larger diameter means that Pluto is less dense than had been thought, and that in turn means a greater proportion of ice and less rock in its composition. While Pluto is now the biggest in the Kuiper belt, Eris remains the heavyweight 27 percent more massive than Pluto. Scientists had expected to find that the atmosphere on Pluto was escaping into space, but New Horizons detected the charged nitrogen atoms last week, "much farther from Pluto than we anticipated," Dr. Stern said. He said that could mean that the flow of nitrogen off Pluto is greater than had been thought or that the flow of charged nitrogen atoms happened to be concentrated in the region that New Horizons is traveling. Mission managers said New Horizons was operating perfectly, and they passed on their last opportunities to refine the trajectory or computer commands. "We are good to go this last bit of this trip," said Glen Fountain, the project manager. At 11:17 p.m. Monday, the spacecraft, by design, was to stop talking to Earth and start almost 22 hours of programmed choreography, repeatedly firing its thrusters to pivot among Pluto, Charon and four smaller moons, taking a multitude of measurements. After the closest approach to Pluto, the trajectory is to pass through the shadows of both Pluto and Charon, which will enable additional measurements. A 70 meter radio dish in California will send a powerful signal toward Pluto. The signal will bend around Pluto, and then Charon, to the receiver on the spacecraft, providing information about Pluto's atmosphere.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When Fred Goldring began thinking of his oldest daughter's wedding day, he knew a simple gift wouldn't do. Mr. Goldring, who is a former entertainment lawyer and musician in Pacific Palisades, Calif., had always dreamed of performing a song on his daughter's wedding day. While his daughter Jenna Goldring, 28, was planning her dream wedding to Nikola Lahcanski on Sept. 15 at the Hotel Bel Air in Los Angeles, he was writing a song that he planned to perform as a surprise on her wedding day. "I had always dreamed of performing a song for both of my daughters at their weddings, but I had never really thought about what song that would be," Mr. Goldring said. Shortly after his daughter's engagement, Mr. Goldring began to think of how he would make that dream a reality. He spent weeks searching online for "songs that dads sing to their daughters at their wedding," but none captured what he really felt in his heart. A couple days later he picked up his guitar and in an hour he had written, "On Your Wedding Day." He still had one critic to win over: his wife. "When I told my wife that I wanted to play an original song at Jenna's wedding, she wasn't exactly enthused," Mr. Goldring said. "Then I played her the song and she quickly changed her mind while crying like a baby."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
WASHINGTON One of the biggest questions surrounding the government's efforts to help businesses struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic is whether the programs are constructed in a way that will prevent a wave of bankruptcies, keeping a short term shock from turning into drawn out economic pain. A new analysis from a group of Harvard University researchers suggests that the answer, should markets turn ugly again, might be no. Highly indebted public companies that employ millions of people are largely left out of the major direct relief options that Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have devised to help companies make it through the pandemic. Much of that is by design. Policymakers have prioritized getting help to businesses that came into the coronavirus crisis in good health, lowering the chances that taxpayers will wind up bailing out big companies that loaded up on risky debt. It could also help officials avoid the kind of angry criticism that surrounded 2008 bank and auto company rescues. But it leaves a slice of America's companies fending for themselves amid the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression, putting them at greater risk of bankruptcy and their workers at greater risk of job loss. Publicly traded firms that employ about 8.1 million people roughly 26 percent of all employment at tracked publicly traded companies are all or mostly excluded from direct government relief, based on an analysis by Samuel Hanson, Jeremy Stein and Adi Sunderam of Harvard, along with Eric Zwick of the University of Chicago. Not all of those companies are likely to run into trouble, some have deep pocketed investors behind them and others made poor financial choices that left them vulnerable to shock. But excluding a broad swath of employers could affect how successful the government is at preventing wide scale bankruptcies if virus related economic pain lingers, the researchers warned. "We're trying to flatten the bankruptcy curve, or flatten the financial distress curve," said Mr. Hanson, who refined the analysis for The New York Times. If a large number of companies are left out of support programs and go out of business, "it's likely to be very costly and leave permanent scarring to our productive capacity." Their analysis is only a starting point. Many private companies are also excluded, but information about those firms is harder to come by, so the authors do not account for them. "This is almost like the tip of the iceberg," Mr. Hanson said. After the pandemic forced states to go into varying degrees of lockdown in March, tanking revenues and freezing the financial markets that companies tap to raise cash, the government announced a suite of programs to help corporations make it through. The Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses created and funded by Congress and operated by the Treasury and the Small Business Administration extends loans to companies employing up to 500 people, with some exceptions. The loans are forgivable as long as those businesses meet program criteria, which require them to hang onto workers. To help bigger companies, Congress turned to the Fed, which can set up emergency lending programs in times of economic trouble. Lawmakers gave Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin 454 billion to back up such efforts. Some of the firms that those direct government programs miss think the Gap, Dell Technologies and Kraft Heinz are household names with huge work forces. If such companies were to run into problems gaining access to cash, it could precipitate job cuts, the researchers said. But there is a reason the business relief programs have avoided directly betting on more debt laden big companies. Including shakier businesses in the Main Street facilities or the corporate bond program would increase the risk that companies would fail to pay the Fed and the Treasury back, ramping up the chances that the lending programs would lose money and ultimately cost taxpayers. Adding in risky companies could also expose the Fed and the Treasury to accusations that they bailed out companies that private equity firms had loaded with debt to maximize profits. And Democratic lawmakers have specifically warned against helping companies that were struggling heading into the crisis. The Fed should "refrain" from using the Main Street program "to help companies paper over existing problems arising from excessive leverage, international price competition and concerns about long term viability," Senator Sherrod Brown, the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, wrote in a letter to the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, and Mr. Mnuchin on May 18. The Fed has helped risky companies less directly. One of its corporate bond programs will buy a limited amount of junk bond exchange traded funds, which trade like stocks but track a broad basket of corporate debt. That, along with the mere signal that investment grade bond purchases are coming, has breathed life back into choked bond markets, including for junk debt. But the fact that a group of companies has little to no access to direct assistance essentially leaving those firms at the mercy of market conditions could come at a cost if things worsen again, in which case borrowing is likely to become more difficult for high yield companies that do not actually have Fed support to back them. "You have to be a little careful about assuming you can just do things with magic," said Mr. Stein, the analysis co author who is a former Fed governor. While markets might assume the central bank will step in to help the market, if they don't when push comes to shove, conditions could deteriorate sharply. Groups focused on workers point out that the Fed lending programs lack toothy employment requirements, so it is possible that even if the central bank could find a way to support such companies, it would help shareholders without leading to worker retention. "You don't want to pay off owners of zombie companies, or people who took big risks on oil and gas corporations and they didn't pan out," said Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial Reform.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
SEATTLE A federal judge ruled on Friday that Amazon did not unduly influence the shape of one of the largest technology contracts in the Pentagon's history, setting the stage for the Department of Defense to choose between Amazon and Microsoft for the 10 billion project. Oracle had alleged that Amazon and the Defense Department biased the contract, known as the joint enterprise defense infrastructure, or JEDI, in Amazon's favor because of conflicts of interest with past employees. The Pentagon's internal reviews previously dismissed the claims, as did the Government Accountability Office. On Friday, Judge Eric Bruggink of the United States Court of Federal Claims found that those previous findings "were not arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law." There are no obvious remaining paths for Oracle to challenge the Department of Defense's approach before the contract is awarded, which will probably happen in late August. Doug Stone, an Amazon spokesman, said in a statement that the company "stands ready to support and serve what's most important the D.O.D.'s mission of protecting the security of our country."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Lindsay D'Addato for The New York Times As obstetrician gynecologists, we believe that it is our duty to serve and respect our patients. As physicians, we are dedicated to caring for women. As medical educators, we teach and model professionalism to our learners. At our academic medical center, Yale New Haven Hospital, we have worked to educate faculty and trainees to ensure that patients are counseled about the care they receive and the team involved. We have established a process to guide physicians to obtain specific informed consent from a patient that discusses the role of learners. Additionally, the consent process involves an explanation of the components of each procedure, including the role of pelvic examination under anesthesia (E.U.A.) as related to gynecological care. Consequently, the pelvic E.U.A. and its consent process educate students how transparent communication illustrates the respect and shared decision making critical for the patient physician relationship. We are concerned that legislation under discussion in Connecticut regarding pelvic E.U.A. is an example of interference with the patient physician relationship, and may stigmatize the female anatomy. Our professional responsibility should equally address informed consent of all procedures, not simply those affecting one particular group or body part. This is an area of medical practice and ethics best addressed by the medical community through clear statements of principles and policies. Institutions should clarify and improve existing consent processes to ensure that patients possess adequate, accurate information. But lawmakers should not specifically "exceptionalize" exams for women. We caution against legislating the patient physician relationship. As physicians, we take an oath to care for our patients; as medical educators, we commit to training the next generation of physicians. These are not competing obligations, but are synergistic to ensure that best practices are continued. Julia Cron Shefali Pathy New Haven, Conn. The writers' views are their own and do not necessarily represent those of Yale New Haven Hospital and the Yale School of Medicine. Let's remember that the internet was built by companies with the vision and resources to innovate. Indeed, .org was previously operated, successfully, by a for profit company. Ethos Capital's acquisition of Public Interest Registry, which runs .org, from the Internet Society means that the registry can invest more in its own operations and help more nonprofits be online. The Internet Society, which relies substantially on the registry's surplus income, will now have a predictable endowment of more than 1 billion to support its global efforts to make the internet more accessible and secure. Ethos never said "it will continue to raise prices." It actually agreed to adhere to historical pricing policies lifted months before its offer and limit any increase to no more than 10 percent a year on average, which today equates to about 1, to keep .org affordable. The registry does not "suspend domain names" under pressure from foreign governments; its anti abuse policies focus on malware/spam or egregiously abusive content, like child sexual abuse. The registry's commitment to free speech will continue unabated. Ethos is making these and other commitments legally binding and enforceable. Ensuring the security, reliability and stability of .org is not the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' "reasoning" but rather the legal standard under which it reviews changes of indirect control. ICANN cannot expand its limited mandate reflected in its bylaws and developed through a multi stakeholder process because of external pressure. The registry will remain as secure as it is today. Ethos's investment serves the public interest by strengthening .org for the future; hyperbole and hysteria do not. Erik Brooks Boston The writer is the founder and chief executive of Ethos Capital.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
MANCHESTER, N.H. Chad Diaz began using heroin when he was 12. Now 36 and newly covered by Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, he is on Suboxone, a substitute opioid that eases withdrawal symptoms and cravings, and he is slowly pulling himself together. "This is the best my life has gone in many, many years," Mr. Diaz, a big man wearing camouflage, said as he sat in a community health center here. If Congress and President Trump succeed in dismantling the Affordable Care Act, he will have no insurance to pay for his medication or counseling, and he fears he will slide back to heroin. "If this gets taken from me, it's right back to Square 1," he said. "And that's not a good place. I'm scary when I'm using. I don't care who I hurt." As the debate over the fate of the health law intensifies, proponents have focused on the lifesaving care it has brought to people with cancer, diabetes and other physical illnesses. But the law has also had a profound, though perhaps less heralded, effect on mental health and addiction treatment, vastly expanding access to those services by designating them as "essential benefits" that must be covered through the A.C.A. marketplaces and expanded Medicaid. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left leaning research group, calculates that 2.8 million people with substance use disorders, including 220,000 with opioid disorders, have coverage under the A.C.A. As the opioid epidemic continues to devastate communities nationwide, public health officials say the law has begun to make a critical difference in their ability to treat and rehabilitate people. "Of all the illnesses, this is one where we've seen very dramatic changes and where we stand to lose the most ground if we lose the A.C.A.," said Linda Rosenberg, president and chief executive of the National Council for Behavioral Health, adding that treatment programs have begun to be integrated into primary care clinics and health care systems nationwide. During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump pledged to rid the country of Obamacare but also to address the opioid epidemic and expand access to drug treatment. Many of the states hardest hit by opioids including Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky voted for Mr. Trump, but some Republican governors have expressed concern about what might happen to people being treated for addiction if their party repeals or scales back the health law. John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, where the Medicaid expansion has covered 700,000 people, has been particularly outspoken about its success in his state. "Thank God we expanded Medicaid because that Medicaid money is helping to rehab people," Mr. Kasich said during a bill signing in January. There is still a long way to go. Waiting lists for treatment persist, and many people still lack access, particularly in the 19 states that have opted not to expand Medicaid. Nationwide, 78 people die every day from opioid overdoses, according to the surgeon general, and the number is still rising. And paradoxically, even as the number of opioid prescriptions in the United States has finally started falling, expanded health coverage has probably made it easier for some people to obtain the drugs. "There's no doubt in my mind that improving access to health care during an era in which opioids are being overprescribed would lead to more addiction," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing and an addiction specialist. While 23 million Americans suffer from a substance use disorder, the surgeon general said in a report last year that only one in 10 was receiving treatment as of 2014, the first year people got coverage through the health law. "Now what we're doing is playing catch up," said Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy during the last two years of the Obama administration. In the past, a third of private insurance plans sold on the individual market did not cover addiction treatment, according to federal health officials, and those that did imposed strict limits. Medicaid covered little besides inpatient detox. Now, more health care providers are offering and getting reimbursed for outpatient counseling and medications like Suboxone and Vivitrol, which have been shown to reduce the potential for relapse. This is a big improvement from the days when treatment typically was offered through scattered, poorly funded stand alone clinics that did not necessarily provide evidence based treatment and had long waiting lists, said Richard Frank, a professor of health economics at Harvard Medical School. "The whole system is being pushed more toward looking like modern health care," said Dr. Frank, who worked at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration. The 21st Century Cures Act, which Congress passed in December with strong bipartisan support, could build on the progress by providing 1 billion nationwide over the next two years to expand drug treatment around the country, with an emphasis on medication assisted treatment. The federal government will soon begin distributing the money to states, which will allot it to treatment programs, particularly in high need areas. But if people lose their insurance, Dr. Frank said, they may well lose access to these new options. In Kentucky about 11,000 people were receiving addiction treatment through Medicaid by mid 2016, up sharply from 1,500 people in early 2014, according to the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, a health policy research group. In West Virginia, Ms. Rosenberg of the National Council for Behavioral Health said, her group's member organizations nonprofit providers of mental health and addiction treatment are now treating 30,000 people a year, up from 9,000 before the health law. Here in New Hampshire which Mr. Trump won resoundingly in the Republican primary and lost by a hair in November more than 10,000 people have received addiction treatment after gaining coverage through the Medicaid expansion, said Michele Merritt, senior vice president and policy director at New Futures, a nonprofit advocacy group. Small treatment centers throughout the state that had never been able to bill insurance before have started doing so, she said, allowing them to hire more counselors and accept more patients. "We're just beginning to implement these exchanges in a way that people know about them," said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, referring to the exchanges created under the health law. Getting rid of them, she said, "makes no sense." In Pennsylvania, where 124,000 people have received addiction treatment under the Medicaid expansion, health officials were disturbed by early data showing that two thirds of those who went to detox got no other treatment services. So Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, is designating 45 "Centers of Excellence" primary care clinics where people can also get addiction and mental health treatment, with frequent follow up and a team of providers closely tracking their progress. The new model is in use here at the Manchester Community Health Center, where Mr. Diaz receives treatment. The center had offered minimal services for substance abuse before the health law. Now, three years later, it has undergone substantial changes. More than 40 percent of its patients had been uninsured; today, only 20 percent are. The center used to have one building, a staff of 55 and 7,500 patients; today, it has clinics in four locations, a staff of 230 and more than 16,000 patients, about 800 of whom have substance abuse issues. It has two providers who are licensed to prescribe medication assisted treatment, which it is expanding to 60 patients, including pregnant women, the center's priority. "The number may sound low as far as how many we're treating," said Julie Hazell Felch, director of behavioral health at the center. "But it's a multitude of services they're receiving and they're in here weekly," she said, seeing nurses, a behavioral health clinician and a medical provider, and giving urine samples and receiving their medications. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, the center stands to lose more than 6 million in funding, mostly Medicaid revenue, about a third of its 18 million annual budget. "We would not be able to keep all four sites open," said Kris McCracken, president and chief executive of the health center. She added: "There are only two avenues to go: You either prevent and treat, or you street. That's what will happen. People will end up back on the street."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
It's been tough to watch movies in 2020 and not project our frustrations and anxieties onto the screen. Maybe the extravagant wedding sequence in "The Godfather" suddenly felt garish compared to all of this year's Zoom "I Dos." Or maybe you put on "Elf" to pass some quarantine time, and the crowded mall scenes launched you into a cold sweat, because everyone is inside and no one is wearing a mask. When I watched the classic "A Christmas Story" recently for the 20th time (at least), my pandemic weary brain zeroed in on something I'd never really noticed. I looked past the cute kids and the leg lamp and the famous tongue stuck on the pole scene, and became laser focused on the mom. One look at her disheveled hair and shabby robe and exasperated stare and I thought: This woman is a damn hero. "A Christmas Story," which TBS has played on a loop every holiday season for over a decade, takes place in early 1940s Indiana, and follows a young boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) who desperately wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, even though his mom (Melinda Dillon, referred to as "Mother" in the credits), says his dream gift is too dangerous. That's pretty much the plot, but the director Bob Clark and the writer Jean Shepherd somehow created an oddball, timeless Christmas movie that manages to be both darkly comic and sweet. Every year I've watched this movie assuming Ralphie is the protagonist. Now I'm not so sure. Normally I wouldn't find her plight so enthralling, but on this viewing, as soon as her husband and kids left for the day, I desperately wanted to know what this woman did with her alone time. She wasn't juggling home school and work during a global crisis, so did she just keep on cleaning? Maybe she mixed herself a clandestine Tom Collins and took a bubble bath. Where were the scenes of her celebrating her freedom by dancing through an empty house, like Jill Clayburgh in "An Unmarried Woman"? Was I projecting? Something tells me she was not sipping cocktails and pirouetting from room to room. Instead, we see Mother serving up cabbage and meatloaf, which practically makes her a saint in my book. I've occasionally handed my toddler son Goldfish and some grapes for dinner over the past year (toddlers are picky!), so at least her uninspired meals are home cooked. We also see her washing Ralphie's mouth out with a huge bar of red soap after he says "the queen mother of dirty words." My son said his first curse word this year also, only he's 3 years old instead of 9 like Ralphie. Rather than stuffing soap in his mouth, I looked away to hide my laughter and to avoid giving the word any attention. Mother didn't have the luxury of reading fancy books by child psychologists instructing her about what to do when kids curse. What she did have was a big bar of soap. Mother might not get treated like a superstar, but Dillon received top billing in "A Christmas Story." She came to the film with a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," plus two Academy Award nominations, for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Absence of Malice." Dillon started out as the first coat check girl at the improv theater The Second City in Chicago, but when her career quickly took off, she was overwhelmed by the prospect of fame. She turned her energy away from acting and toward marriage and kids. The role of real life suburban mom quickly lost its allure, though. "I got buried alive," Ms. Dillon said of her stay at home stint in a 1976 interview with The Times. She went back to work. Reading that, it's hard not to imagine that Ms. Dillon brought some of those feelings to the role of a woman who, as Ralphie says early on in the movie, "hadn't had a hot meal for herself in 15 years." She's not just a meatloaf baking pushover, though. Mother has mastered the art of outsmarting her husband. She uses stealth tactics to convince him not to turn on the hideous leg lamp he won in a contest, like suggesting he keep it off so they don't waste electricity (this qualifies as a stealth tactic in my eyes). She later not so subtly asserts her authority by destroying the leg lamp in a fit of rage. I cheered her on with every off camera smash. Deprived of hot meals and cooped up at home, she needs this. At the end of "A Christmas Story," Ralphie and Randy tear open their many presents, and The Old Man opens a gift from Mother, a shiny blue bowling ball. As I watched her observe her husband and sons' delight around the Christmas tree, I noticed that she was holding something that could either be a gold spatula or a fly swatter. I hoped that whatever her gift was, it was not either of those things. Suddenly, on the umpteenth viewing of this movie, I needed to know if this woman, the saint of the film, got a Christmas present. Frantic Google searches combining "mother" "Christmas Story" "gift" and "spatula" yielded nothing, so I emailed A Christmas Story House Museum in Cleveland, the site of the actual house from the movie, hoping for answers. "Who cares what the mom gets for Christmas," replied the museum's owner Brian Jones. Turns out he was joking, but still. "No one has ever asked me that in nearly two decades in the business," he wrote. According to Jones, Mother is indeed holding a fly swatter. If she gets any presents, we never see them. Is her Christmas gift the fact that her husband and sons are all happy and fulfilled? Where is her reward for multitasking and keeping everyone fed and clothed and protected from blizzards, all while sacrificing her own time and energy to make yet another cabbage stew? They could have at least given her a card! From now on, when I watch the end of "A Christmas Story," I won't be focused on Ralphie's BB gun or Old Man Parker's bowling ball. I'll be rooting for the mom, and imagining a deleted scene where she kicks up her feet, has that Tom Collins and gets a quiet moment all to herself. Dina Gachman is an Austin based writer and the author of "Brokenomics."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A field team from EcoHealth Alliance, Columbia, and the Saudi Health Ministry examined a room taken over by bats in an abandoned village. They took samples for testing for the coronavirus causing Middle East respiratory syndrome. As the scientists peered into the darkness, their headlamps revealed an eerie sight. Hundreds of eyes glinted back at them from the walls and ceiling. They had discovered, in a crumbling, long abandoned village half buried in sand near a remote town in southwestern Saudi Arabia, a roosting spot for bats. It was an ideal place to set up traps. The search for bats is part of an investigation into a deadly new viral disease that has drawn scientists from around the world to Saudi Arabia. The virus, first detected there last year, is known to have infected at least 77 people, killing 40 of them, in eight countries. The illness, called MERS, for Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, is caused by a coronavirus, a relative of the virus that caused SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which originated in China and caused an international outbreak in 2003 that infected at least 8,000 people and killed nearly 800. As the case count climbs, critical questions about MERS remain unanswered. Scientists do not know where it came from, where the virus exists in nature, why it has appeared now, how people are being exposed to it, or whether it is becoming more contagious and could erupt into a much larger outbreak, as SARS did. The disease almost certainly originated with one or more people contracting the virus from animals probably bats but scientists do not know how many times that kind of spillover to humans has occurred, or how likely it is to keep happening. There is urgency to the hunt for answers. Half the known cases have been fatal, though the real death rate is probably lower, because there almost certainly have been mild cases that have gone undetected. But the virus still worries health experts, because it can cause such severe disease and has shown an alarming ability to spread among patients in a hospital. It causes flulike symptoms that can progress to severe pneumonia. The disease is a chilling example of what health experts call emerging infections, caused by viruses or other organisms that suddenly find their way into humans. Many of those diseases are "zoonotic," meaning they are normally harbored by animals but somehow manage to jump species. "As the population continues to grow, we're bumping up against wildlife, and they happen to carry some nasty viruses we've never seen before," said Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a scientific group that studies links between human health, the health of wild and domestic animals, and the environment. Saudi Arabia has had the most patients so far (62), but cases have also originated in Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Travelers from the Arabian peninsula have taken the disease to Britain, France, Italy and Tunisia, and have infected a few people in those countries. Health experts are also worried about the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage that will draw millions of visitors to Saudi Arabia in October. MERS has not reached the United States, but health officials have told doctors to be on the lookout for patients who get sick soon after visiting the Middle East. So far, more than 40 people in 20 states have been tested, all with negative results, according to Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of the National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Regardless of where they emerge, new illnesses are just "a plane ride away," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the C.D.C. And while MERS is not highly contagious like the flu, he said, "the likelihood of spread is not small." In May, Saudi health officials asked an international team of doctors to help investigate the hospital cluster. One concern was that a number of cases were in patients at a dialysis clinic, and doctors feared that dialysis machines or solutions might be spreading the disease. "It was pretty easy to figure out that couldn't have been the case," said a member of the team, Dr. Connie S. Price, the chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health Medical Center. The patients' records did not point to dialysis as the culprit, she said, and there were clear cases of transmission in other parts of the hospital that had no connection to dialysis. Why, then, the outbreak among dialysis patients? The answer seems to be that they were older, chronically ill and often diabetic; diabetes can suppress the immune system's ability to fight off infections. So, when one dialysis patient contracted MERS, others who happened to be in the clinic at the same were easy targets for the virus. "Introducing it into a dialysis center gives it the perfect environment to spread among vulnerable patients sitting in open bays for many hours," Dr. Price said. Some health experts have suggested that MERS, like SARS, may fade away. The SARS outbreak erupted in early 2003, but ended by that summer. Much of the success was attributed to infection control in hospitals and also to eliminating animals like civet cats, which were thought to have caught the virus from bats and to be infecting people in markets where the civets were being sold live to be killed and eaten. But Dr. Allison McGeer, a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto who is also part of the team that studied the Saudi hospital outbreak, said there were no signs that MERS was going away. "Absolutely not," she said. "There are ongoing cases of disease acquired in the community. The first we know about is April 2012 in Jordan. There has been a steady and continuing number of cases." The fact that the disease has apparently emerged in geographically disparate places, with widely scattered cases in four Middle Eastern countries, also makes Dr. McGeer doubt that it is simply going to fizzle out. Finding out where in the environment the disease is coming from might make it possible to tell people how to avoid it. Bats are the leading suspect, because they are a reservoir of SARS and carry other coronaviruses with genetic similarities to the MERS virus. Bats could be transmitting the disease directly to people, or they might be spreading it to some other animal that then infects humans. But what kind of bat? There are 1,200 species; 20 to 30 have been identified in Saudi Arabia. Last October, to test the theory, a team of scientists from the Saudi Ministry of Health, Columbia University and EcoHealth Alliance began scouring Saudi towns near where cases of MERS had been reported, showing people pictures of bats and asking if they had seen any. They struck pay dirt when one man led them to an abandoned village in the southwest, said to be hundreds of years old. It was there, in the inky darkness, that they found a small room that had become the roost of about 500 bats. The scientists set up nets to catch them when they flew out at dusk to hunt insects, then spent the night testing them for the MERS virus. The bats were let go after the testing. The animals can weigh as little as four grams (one seventh of an ounce), and a bat that size may have an eight inch wingspan. "They're mostly wing," said Kevin J. Olival, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance. "They're little flying fur balls." It takes about 15 minutes to process a bat to weigh and measure it, swab it for saliva and feces samples, and collect some blood and a tiny plug of skin from a wing for DNA testing to confirm its species. The specimens were then frozen and sent to the laboratory of Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a leading expert on viruses at Columbia. Bats do not much appreciate all this medical attention. They bite, and in addition to potentially carrying MERS, they may harbor rabies and other viruses. "You're wearing coveralls that cover everything hoods, gloves, respirators, booties," Dr. Lipkin said. "You're all dressed, so you don't have any contact with the animals. It's night, but still very hot." The team has also tested camels, goats, sheep and cats, which might act as intermediate hosts, picking up the virus from bats and then infecting people. One reason for suspecting camels is that a MERS patient from the United Arab Emirates had been around a sick camel shortly before falling ill. But that animal was not tested. "If animals are acting as a reservoir, getting people sick, how would this happen?" asked Dr. Jonathan H. Epstein, a veterinary epidemiologist with EcoHealth Alliance. If animals harbor the virus, does it make them ill? Do they infect people by coughing? Or do they pass the virus in urine or feces, and infect people who clean their stalls? The answers do not come easily. "Camels are tough, let me tell you," said Dr. Epstein. "They're ornery. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to wrangle a camel. They're strong, they're fast, they bite really hard." The trick, he said, is to get the camel into a position that veterinarians call "ventral recumbency," or lying on its belly. A very feisty camel may also have its legs tied together so it cannot run away or kick anybody. Then someone steadies its head, maybe with a harness, and holds its jaws open so a vet can reach in and out quickly with a cotton swab.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Bruce Kurland (1938 2013) made diminutive still life paintings that were bought by an enthusiastic cadre of collectors. He remained largely under the art world radar and might have stayed there, were it not for his daughter Justine Kurland, a well known photographer who shares the walls with him in "Airless Spaces," at Higher Pictures. Ms. Kurland's black and white contact prints of domestic scenes are an interesting supplement to her better known color portraits. But the real draw here is Mr. Kurland's paintings. Mr. Kurland's aesthetic is consciously anachronistic. Drab browns and overworked surfaces create backdrops for dead trout and other animals that Mr. Kurland caught or shot, as well as vegetables and crockery. He borrowed heavily from 17th century Dutch still life painters like Vermeer and Carel Fabritius; French artists like Jean Simeon Chardin, Claude Manet and Henri Fantin Latour; and the American still life painter John Frederick Peto. To this tradition Mr. Kurland added contemporary elements. Asparagus stalks rest on a Budweiser can; steaks wrapped in plastic foam are propped on the rim of a beige ceramic bowl; flaccid strips of bacon hang over an apple twig in a Coke bottle; graffiti created by his granddaughter forms a backdrop for one painting. The combination of new and antiquated could descend into gimmickry, but Mr. Kurland's approach feels like a deadpan update of the classic memento mori, in which perishable items serve as reminders of human transience. What you can ultimately see in "Airless Spaces" is that the eye for the poetic and the uncanny that gained Ms. Kurland fame in the '90s runs in the family. It's manifested beautifully, but differently, in her father's paintings. MARTHA SCHWENDENER Jonas Mekas arrived in New York City in 1949 after World War II drove him from his native Lithuania. He wrote poetry, helped found what became Anthology Film Archives and filmed himself and the world, beginning his movie work with a Bolex he bought two months after settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When, on a rainy December day in 1990, he picked up a video camera and set out to document an intentionally aimless walk, he discovered that the city itself was a memory palace. The tree on Wooster Street where he starts was one that he and George Maciunas, a founder of the art movement Fluxus, planted illegally in 1967. As he moves through SoHo, accompanying himself with an improvised monologue of parables, observations and associations, Mr. Mekas describes the rootlessness he still felt after four decades in New York. When I walked into the James Fuentes Gallery on Delancey Street, where "A Walk" is the centerpiece of a show called "Notes From Downtown," Mr. Mekas in the video had just reached the very same block. In this work, the passing cars are boxier, and the buildings, with less street level retail, look more distinctly gray and brown. The camera often pauses to register the pattern of drops falling into a puddle, and, at one point, the lens fogs up completely. But the location is unmistakable. It was a curious coincidence. But the buoyant, slightly bitter self consciousness it made me feel, the mingled wonder and dread over the passage of time, are exactly the states of mind evoked by Mr. Mekas's monologue, which winds up at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. His refuge from rootlessness wasn't so much the city of New York as the very process of making self reflective art about his condition. Along with the video, the exhibition includes excerpts from other films Mr. Mekas shot in Williamsburg, as well as homey Polaroid portraits of Mr. Mekas, Maciunas and others, taken by John Lennon. WILL HEINRICH In 2010, the Museum at Eldridge Street put in place the final piece of its refurbishment: a large, circular stained glass window designed by the artist Kiki Smith and the architect Deborah Gans. A field of some 1,200 overlapping pieces dotted with stars and swirling around a Star of David, the window infuses the space, a 19th century synagogue, with contemporary energy. Now the museum has invited Ms. Smith back for its first building wide exhibition of contemporary art, "Below the Horizon: Kiki Smith at Eldridge." The artist has chosen 50 works to be shown throughout the museum's three floors, with mixed results. The small basement galleries set the stage with a handful of nature themed wall works and a display of photographs documenting the making of the window. The exhibition necessarily becomes more creative in the sanctuary, where display cases filled with hand painted plywood sculptures sit atop pews. The artworks' colors nicely echo those in the original stained glass windows above them, but the subjects of the flat, paper doll like sculptures, including a variety of cats, don't always resonate. A notable exception is a series of hands with birds resting on them, which suggest Noah releasing a dove from the ark after the flood. The most affecting installation appears upstairs, in what was once the women's gallery, which, when the synagogue fell into disrepair, became a home for stray animals. There, Ms. Smith has installed three aluminum sculptures of gold leaf covered birds perched on chairs; one work hangs from the ceiling, its fused seats dangling upside down as two birds appear poised to fly away. These sculptures feel perfectly in tune with their site. They gracefully incorporate a rocky piece of the museum's past into its reinvigorated present. JILLIAN STEINHAUER	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
John Velazquez climbed aboard Authentic on Saturday afternoon with confidence as well as determination to make a vision come true. His mother in law told him she had a good feeling about the 6 million Breeders' Cup Classic. He and his colt, she told him, were going to win a race that had eluded him 19 times before. Velazquez is a Hall of Famer. In September, he won his third Kentucky Derby with Authentic. And sure, he wanted to add America's richest race and the marquee event of horse racing's season ending championships to his resume. But that is not what took his breath away after he crossed the finish line nearly three lengths ahead of Improbable. Instead, he was thinking about Joan O'Brien, the mother of his wife, Leona. The O'Briens are racetrackers Leo O'Brien was a longtime trainer on the New York circuit and know their horses. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Joan O'Brien has been grinding through chemotherapy to treat cancer and keeping up both a smile and her hopes. "She told me she had a feeling," Velazquez said. "She has a great attitude. She inspired me to do this. With everything that has gone on and the problems with the family, getting to ride a horse like this is a gift from God."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
In his absorbing new book, "A Higher Loyalty," the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey calls the Trump presidency a "forest fire" that is doing serious damage to the country's norms and traditions. "This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values," Comey writes. "His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty." Decades before he led the F.B.I.'s investigation into whether members of Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, Comey was a career prosecutor who helped dismantle the Gambino crime family; and he doesn't hesitate in these pages to draw a direct analogy between the Mafia bosses he helped pack off to prison years ago and the current occupant of the Oval Office. A February 2017 meeting in the White House with Trump and then chief of staff Reince Priebus left Comey recalling his days as a federal prosecutor facing off against the Mob: "The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us versus them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth." An earlier visit to Trump Tower in January made Comey think about the New York Mafia social clubs he knew as a Manhattan prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s "The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Cafe Giardino." The central themes that Comey returns to throughout this impassioned book are the toxic consequences of lying; and the corrosive effects of choosing loyalty to an individual over truth and the rule of law. Dishonesty, he writes, was central "to the entire enterprise of organized crime on both sides of the Atlantic," and so, too, were bullying, peer pressure and groupthink repellent traits shared by Trump and company, he suggests, and now infecting our culture. ALSO READ: James B. Comey: By the Book "We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country," Comey writes, "with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized and unethical behavior is ignored, excused or rewarded." "A Higher Loyalty" is the first big memoir by a key player in the alarming melodrama that is the Trump administration. Comey, who was abruptly fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017, has worked in three administrations, and his book underscores just how outside presidential norms Trump's behavior has been how ignorant he is about his basic duties as president, and how willfully he has flouted the checks and balances that safeguard our democracy, including the essential independence of the judiciary and law enforcement. Comey's book fleshes out the testimony he gave before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017 with considerable emotional detail, and it showcases its author's gift for narrative a skill he clearly honed during his days as United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. The volume offers little in the way of hard news revelations about investigations by the F.B.I. or the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (not unexpectedly, given that such investigations are ongoing and involve classified material), and it lacks the rigorous legal analysis that made Jack Goldsmith's 2007 book "The Terror Presidency" so incisive about larger dynamics within the Bush administration. What "A Higher Loyalty" does give readers are some near cinematic accounts of what Comey was thinking when, as he's previously said, Trump demanded loyalty from him during a one on one dinner at the White House; when Trump pressured him to let go of the investigation into his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn; and when the president asked what Comey could do to "lift the cloud" of the Russia investigation. There are some methodical explanations in these pages of the reasoning behind the momentous decisions Comey made regarding Hillary Clinton's emails during the 2016 campaign explanations that attest to his nonpartisan and well intentioned efforts to protect the independence of the F.B.I., but that will leave at least some readers still questioning the judgment calls he made, including the different approaches he took in handling the bureau's investigation into Clinton (which was made public) and its investigation into the Trump campaign (which was handled with traditional F.B.I. secrecy). 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. "A Higher Loyalty" also provides sharp sketches of key players in three presidential administrations. Comey draws a scathing portrait of Vice President Dick Cheney's legal adviser David S. Addington, who spearheaded the arguments of many hard liners in the George W. Bush White House; Comey describes their point of view: "The war on terrorism justified stretching, if not breaking, the written law." He depicts Bush national security adviser and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as uninterested in having a detailed policy discussion of interrogation policy and the question of torture. He takes Barack Obama's attorney general Loretta Lynch to task for asking him to refer to the Clinton email case as a "matter," not an "investigation." (Comey tartly notes that "the F.B.I. didn't do 'matters.'") And he compares Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to Alberto R. Gonzales, who served in the same position under Bush, writing that both were "overwhelmed and overmatched by the job," but "Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated." Comey is what Saul Bellow called a "first class noticer." He notices, for instance, "the soft white pouches under" Trump's "expressionless blue eyes"; coyly observes that the president's hands are smaller than his own "but did not seem unusually so"; and points out that he never saw Trump laugh a sign, Comey suspects, of his "deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president." During his Senate testimony last June, Comey was boy scout polite ("Lordy, I hope there are tapes") and somewhat elliptical in explaining why he decided to write detailed memos after each of his encounters with Trump (something he did not do with Presidents Obama or Bush), talking gingerly about "the nature of the person I was interacting with." Here, however, Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing Trump's demand for loyalty over dinner to "Sammy the Bull's Cosa Nostra induction ceremony with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a 'made man.'" Throughout his tenure in the Bush and Obama administrations (he served as deputy attorney general under Bush, and was selected to lead the F.B.I. by Obama in 2013), Comey was known for his fierce, go it alone independence, and Trump's behavior catalyzed his worst fears that the president symbolically wanted the leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to come "forward and kiss the great man's ring." Comey was feeling unnerved from the moment he met Trump. In his recent book "Fire and Fury," Michael Wolff wrote that Trump "invariably thought people found him irresistible," and felt sure, early on, that "he could woo and flatter the F.B.I. director into positive feeling for him, if not outright submission" (in what the reader takes as yet another instance of the president's inability to process reality or step beyond his own narcissistic delusions). After he failed to get that submission and the Russia cloud continued to hover, Trump fired Comey; the following day he told Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office that firing the F.B.I. director whom he called "a real nut job" relieved "great pressure" on him. A week later, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. During Comey's testimony, one senator observed that the often contradictory accounts that the president and former F.B.I. director gave of their one on one interactions came down to "Who should we believe?" As a prosecutor, Comey replied, he used to tell juries trying to evaluate a witness that "you can't cherry pick" "You can't say, 'I like these things he said, but on this, he's a dirty, rotten liar.' You got to take it all together." Put the two men's records, their reputations, even their respective books, side by side, and it's hard to imagine two more polar opposites than Trump and Comey: They are as antipodean as the untethered, sybaritic Al Capone and the square, diligent G man Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma's 1987 movie "The Untouchables"; or the vengeful outlaw Frank Miller and Gary Cooper's stoic, duty driven marshal Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann's 1952 classic "High Noon." One is an avatar of chaos with autocratic instincts and a resentment of the so called "deep state" who has waged an assault on the institutions that uphold the Constitution. ALSO READ: Comey's Memoir Offers Visceral Details on a President 'Untethered to Truth' The other is a straight arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the rule of law, whose reputation as a defender of the Constitution was indelibly shaped by his decision, one night in 2004, to rush to the hospital room of his boss, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, to prevent Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice Department believed violated the law. One uses language incoherently on Twitter and in person, emitting a relentless stream of lies, insults, boasts, dog whistles, divisive appeals to anger and fear, and attacks on institutions, individuals, companies, religions, countries, continents. One is an impulsive, utterly transactional narcissist who, so far in office, The Washington Post calculated, has made an average of six false or misleading claims a day; a winner take all bully with a nihilistic view of the world. "Be paranoid," he advises in one of his own books. In another: "When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades." The other wrote his college thesis on religion and politics, embracing Reinhold Niebuhr's argument that "the Christian must enter the political realm in some way" in order to pursue justice, which keeps "the strong from consuming the weak." Until his cover was blown, Comey shared nature photographs on Twitter using the name "Reinhold Niebuhr," and both his 1982 thesis and this memoir highlight how much Niebuhr's work resonated with him. They also attest to how a harrowing experience he had as a high school senior when he and his brother were held captive, in their parents' New Jersey home, by an armed gunman must have left him with a lasting awareness of justice and mortality. Long passages in Comey's thesis are also devoted to explicating the various sorts of pride that Niebuhr argued could afflict human beings most notably, moral pride and spiritual pride, which can lead to the sin of self righteousness. And in "A Higher Loyalty," Comey provides an inventory of his own flaws, writing that he can be "stubborn, prideful, overconfident and driven by ego." Those characteristics can sometimes be seen in Comey's account of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, wherein he seems to have felt a moral imperative to address, in a July 2016 press conference, what he described as her "extremely careless" handling of "very sensitive, highly classified information," even though he went on to conclude that the bureau recommend no charges be filed against her. His announcement marked a departure from precedent in that it was done without coordination with Department of Justice leadership and offered more detail about the bureau's evaluation of the case than usual. As for his controversial disclosure on Oct. 28, 2016, 11 days before the election, that the F.B.I. was reviewing more Clinton emails that might be pertinent to its earlier investigation, Comey notes here that he had assumed from media polling that Clinton was going to win. He has repeatedly asked himself, he writes, whether he was influenced by that assumption: "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the restarted investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in all polls. But I don't know." He adds that he hopes "very much that what we did what I did wasn't a deciding factor in the election." In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 3, 2017, Comey stated that the very idea that his decisions might have had an impact on the outcome of the presidential race left him feeling "mildly nauseous" or, as one of his grammatically minded daughters corrected him, "nauseated."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The 92 year old media mogul Sumner M. Redstone received 1.8 million in total pay from CBS Corporation in 2015, a period when his ailing health and limited involvement at the company became the subject of a court battle and the target of intense scrutiny on Wall Street. The figure represents a steep decline from previous years, when Mr. Redstone ranked as one of the highest paid executive chairmen of companies on the Standard Poor's 500 stock index. Mr. Redstone's total pay from CBS was 10.8 million in 2014 and 57.2 million in 2013. The disclosure was made in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, as settlement talks continued in a lawsuit brought by a former companion who is challenging Mr. Redstone's mental capacity. In February, Mr. Redstone ceded his positions as executive chairman of the media companies CBS and Viacom in the face of pressure from shareholders.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Joining a community garden or growing herbs on your kitchen windowsill are two tried and true methods for New York apartment dwellers to keep their green thumbs active. Now some new developments are offering residents space in on site gardens, and at least one has created a farm on the building's property. At Hunters Point South, an affordable housing complex in Long Island City, Queens, a garden club with about 100 members helps tend a 2,300 square foot communal garden on the 14th floor of one of two buildings. More than 300 people applied for garden club membership last year, according to Joanna Rose, a spokeswoman for the Related Companies, one of the development partners. Those not chosen in a lottery have been placed on a waiting list. The garden is run by GrowNYC, a nonprofit organization that builds and supports community and school gardens, among other programs. The garden is governed like many others in the city: Members must volunteer a certain number of hours per season and attend workshops in order to maintain membership and receive permission to work in the garden. So far this summer, there has been a bountiful harvest of strawberries, string beans, Swiss chard and arugula, according to Gerard Lordahl, a director of GrowNYC who has helped shape the garden club. "I wouldn't be surprised if we get over 1,000 pounds of produce by the end of the season," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
For years, Lenny Hanson has watched in alarm as the price of a drug she takes has ticked steadily upward, doubling in the past five years to more than 200 a month today. The product, Vagifem, is one form of a drug, estradiol, that is used to improve women's sex lives by treating a painful, often unspoken condition experienced by older women: a dry vagina, which can cause uncomfortable intercourse and complications like urinary tract infections. Estradiol has been around for decades, but the price of the various creams, vaginal rings and tablets that contain the drug has climbed steadily in recent years, according to an analysis by the consumer website GoodRx. And insurance coverage is spotty many plans refuse to cover some products or require that patients pay high out of pocket costs. While women privately fume about the costs, drug makers have been able to raise their prices without a public outcry in part because the topic women's sex lives and their vaginas is still pretty much taboo. "Unlike EpiPen, women are not going to be rising up and saying, 'My vagina is dry and I don't want to pay 2,000 to 3,000 dollars a year,'" said Dr. Lauren Streicher, the medical director of the Northwestern Medicine Center for Sexual Medicine and Menopause. This week, the F.D.A. approved a new estradiol product, Imvexxy, a development that in any other market may have offered hope for some price relief. But in the upside down world of prescription drugs, that isn't happening. Imvexxy's manufacturer, TherapeuticsMD, said that its new product would be sold at "parity" with others on the market, and did not elaborate. The story of estradiol products echoes others in the prescription drug market, where older medicines like insulin or multiple sclerosis drugs have become more expensive, even when rivals are introduced and should make prices competitive. The increases often result from secret, back channel deals: Drug companies, pharmacy benefit managers and insurers all play a part, profiting along the way. Drug makers set higher prices because of the way they sell their product to insurers and employers. Insurers, on the other hand, say drug companies keep raising prices to make more money. Health insurance has traditionally covered the bulk of patients' drug costs, so until recently, prices weren't on people's radars drugs weren't seen as a consumer product like, say, breakfast cereal. But as manufacturers have raised prices, insurers have passed a larger share of the costs to patients in the form of high deductibles or co payments. Drugs to treat sexual health, like the estradiol products, are frequently placed on a higher formulary tier, meaning some patients have to pay as much as half of the list price, said Adam J. Fein, chief executive of the Drug Channels Institute, which studies the industry. "Although it is technically covered by the insurance company, your insurer is paying very little for the drug," Mr. Fein said. The prices for estradiol products for vaginal use have risen significantly over the past five years. The price of a tube of Estrace cream has more than doubled, to a pharmacy cash price of 372.17 in May of this year, from 183.98 in January 2013, according to GoodRx. The Estring, a ring that is inserted in the vagina for three months, cost 520.66 in May, compared to 284.11 in January 2013. Representatives for drug manufacturers said their products were generally covered by insurance and that they offered assistance to patients who could not afford them. "These are medications that many women have to take for several years," said Thomas Goetz, chief of research at GoodRx. For those with poor insurance coverage or none at all, "people are being exposed to what can be profound increases in price." Ms. Hanson, 71, of San Francisco, has resorted to ordering her drug from overseas at a cost of about 80 for a three month supply. "It's absurd," she said. The newcomer, Imvexxy, has a few features that its manufacturer hopes will distinguish it. It comes in a lower, 4 microgram dose (the lowest Vagifem dose is 10 micrograms). The soft gel capsule in pink, naturally is manually placed in the vagina, compared to Vagifem, which is used with a disposable plastic applicator. In 2017, TherapeuticsMD announced that the F.D.A. had turned down its application for approval because there was no long term safety data beyond 12 weeks of use. The company later submitted a review of safety data on existing estradiol products to demonstrate that, like the others, its own product did not pose a risk. The company has said 32 million women suffer from the condition that their drug addresses, but only about 7 percent or 2.3 million receive treatment. Sales for menopause related treatments totaled nearly 3 billion in 2017, according to IQVIA, which tracks drug sales. Some said Imvexxy had a role to play. Many women are worried about taking estrogen because of earlier studies that showed taking oral hormones carried serious risks. The lower dose may allay those concerns, although other vaginal estradiol products have also shown that they do not significantly increase estrogen levels throughout the body. All of the products, including Imvexxy, carry an F.D.A. warning that they can increase the chance of developing cancer and other serious disorders. But several women's health experts said those risks have never been substantiated and they have been lobbying the F.D.A. to remove it. "Hopefully this will be a solution for the woman with breast cancer who is going without," Dr. Streicher said. TherapeuticsMD paid her to lead one focus group for women that discussed sexual health and did not mention Imvexxy, she said. "If we were having this conversation in the context of drug prices being reasonable across the board hey, good news," said Cynthia Pearson, the executive director of the National Women's Health Network, a consumer group. "It's just infuriating that the price has gone up and up and up for no good reason." She said the issue has not gotten more attention because "how many people will say 'vagina' in a public setting?" Some companies are using a playful marketing approach, signaling the issue is not as taboo as it once was. The website of Imvexxy which rhymes with sexy features an image of a ripe, juicy peach, boasting the product is "distinctly designed for sweet relief." A similar product, Intrarosa, which does not contain estradiol, features a photo of a nude older woman, her head thrown back in pleasure. Some of these products may soon come down in price. In October 2016, a generic of Vagifem, called Yuvafem, entered the market at a slightly reduced list price. Then, in July of last year, Teva Pharmaceuticals began selling a second generic at an even cheaper price. But the pharmacy cash price for Teva's product 163.91 for a month's supply of eight tablets in May is still higher than what Vagifem cost in 2015, according to the GoodRx analysis. If more generic manufacturers enter the market, the price could tumble more and Vagifem could become an inexpensive drug like many cholesterol or blood pressure medicines. The same could become true for Estrace cream, which lost its patent protection at the end of last year and now has several generic competitors. With two generics for Vagifem now available, the drug companies are most likely negotiating big discounts with insurers, meaning patients with coverage may see their costs drop. Elizabeth Traynor, an illustrator in Guntersville, Alabama, had tried virtually every estradiol product and balked at the prices, frequently doing without. But she recently called her insurer, the Government Employees Health Association, and learned she would have to pay 20 for a three month supply of Yuvafem. "It's about time," she said. "Hooray!" Estradiol has been around for so long that it has survived several rounds of debate over high prices. In 1959, a Senate inquiry found that the drug maker Schering, now part of Merck, had marked up estradiol which comes in many forms by more than 7,000 percent over the cost of materials. In an echo of modern day industry talking points, a Schering executive was quoted in an article in The New York Times, saying the high prices were necessary to finance new medical research. "The consumers of today must contribute to the benefits which the future will bring," the drug executive said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The chasm that opened beneath the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., in February swallowing eight of its prized cars has at last been emptied of all of its valuable contents. A few of the cars pulled from the sinkhole were in decent condition and others were in worse, albeit salvageable shape. Then there was the 2001 Mallett Hammer Corvette Z06 or what was left of it removed from the hole on Wednesday. "It looks like the worst one; a lot of parts and pieces," Mike Murphy, head of the construction company in charge of removing the cars, said in a statement on the museum's blog. "It took a lot of punishment from a lot of big rocks."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Sitting around an outdoor table at the Red Crab, a restaurant on the tropical island of Grenada festooned with palm trees and fiery bougainvillea, a dozen aspiring doctors bashfully conceded that they had been, at best, near misses when it came to getting into medical school in the United States. Many of them had not earned A's in college physics and organic chemistry. Many had tried other careers first among them were a talent scout, a ballerina, a pianist and an engineer. And some had come tantalizingly close to the prize. The dancer, Corinne Vidulich, described the agony of being on the waiting list at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx for nine months. "They let me know the week before the term started that I didn't get in," said Ms. Vidulich, wearing the telltale all black of a New Yorker. "It was crushing." Now they were all students at St. George's University School of Medicine, one of dozens of medical schools that have sprung up in the Caribbean over the last four decades to catch the overflow of Americans who cannot find a medical school in their home country willing to take them, who for years have contended with the stigma of not being good enough. St. George's is their second chance. Stephen Franco's lax study habits had earned him C's in freshman biology and chemistry at Binghamton University, not good enough for the medical schools he applied to in the United States. St. George's offered him conditional admission, a four month preview of courses, money back guaranteed if he didn't pass. He passed. But in his first semester, he regularly woke his mother late at night to tell her he was terrified and might have to drop out. "If you want to be a science teacher, that's O.K., too," she would say to console him. Now 24 and entering his third year as an honors student, he is hoping to take over his father's internal medicine practice in Brooklyn. Ms. Vidulich is more than 10 years older than Mr. Franco. Her dancer's frame is growing soft around the edges she hasn't performed for a decade but she speaks as if projecting to the back row. As a teenager, she studied on scholarship at the Joffrey Ballet School, but a foot injury sidelined her to dancing "The Nutcracker" with provincial companies. Realizing she would never fulfill her dream to join American Ballet Theater, she stopped at age 25. But she had another interest. An uncle dying of AIDS spent his last days living with her family, "so I had a very early obsession with viruses." She enrolled at Hunter College, majored in biology and tied with two other students as valedictorian of the class of 2009, with a 3.98 grade point average. "I thought I was a rock star," she said. She applied to about 25 medical schools, and "basically I was wait listed everywhere." She blames her age, 33 at the time, and her abysmal score on the verbal section of the entrance exam. "The interviewer at Einstein asked me, 'Are you a native English speaker?' because my score was so low." From the beginning, her Hunter pre med adviser had told students to apply to Caribbean safety schools. "I refused because I was too cool," Ms. Vidulich said. "It was kind of like with American Ballet Theater. I didn't want to leave New York. I felt like I deserved the best. I was humbled." One evening, a customer came into the Brooklyn bar where Ms. Vidulich worked holding a newspaper clipping describing a scholarship program between St. George's and the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs 11 public hospitals. Ms. Vidulich won a full scholarship in return for agreeing to work for four years in a city hospital serving the poor. Ms. Vidulich is about to return home for her rotations. She no longer scoffs at Caribbean schools. "Now I am truly proud of it," she said. "We wanted it more than anything." For decades, American medical schools have vilified their Caribbean counterparts for providing a substandard education for students who were weak to begin with. But some schools may be proving the medical establishment wrong. Thousands of Caribbean graduates roughly 7,700 from St. George's alone are licensed to practice in the United States. They have seeded hospitals and physician practices across the country and are in a position to be mentors to the next generation of Caribbean attendees. "I have sons and daughters of graduates coming down now," said Charles R. Modica, St. George's chancellor. There are more than 70 medical schools across the Caribbean, about half of them catering to Americans. A handful including St. George's, Saba University, Ross University in Dominica and American University of the Caribbean in St. Maarten, all of which are for profit have qualified for federal financial aid programs by demonstrating that their standards are comparable to those in the United States. And they report that high numbers of their test takers 95 percent or more pass the United States Medical Licensing Exam Step 1, a basic science test. But quality is all over the map in the Caribbean. A 2008 study in the journal Academic Medicine looked at 14 schools and found that the first time pass rate on the exam ranged from 19 percent to 84 percent. Countries whose schools performed lowest were the Cayman Islands, Haiti, Cuba, Aruba, Dominican Republic, Antigua and Barbuda and, the lowest, St. Lucia, which hosted four medical schools at the time. High performers were in Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica and, the highest, Grenada. Still, the ultimate test is whether students meet the criteria to be eligible for residencies back home, the ticket to becoming a practicing physician. Between 1980 and 2000 at the 12 biggest Caribbean schools, the percentage of graduates who fulfilled basic requirements ranged from 28 percent to 86 percent, according to another study. This year only 53 percent of United States citizens who attended foreign medical schools (most of them in the Caribbean) were placed through the National Resident Matching Program, compared with 94 percent of students from U.S. schools. Many students in the Caribbean did not get into U.S. medical schools. Corinne Vidulich was on the waiting list at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx for nine months. "It was crushing," she said. Luvnish Karnani for The New York Times The schools say that the match rate does not tell the full story, that many of their students find residencies outside the process, by going to hospitals directly. John R. Boulet, a co author of both studies and a researcher at the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research, said that more than 90 percent of American graduates of foreign medical schools who have passed the requisite tests find a residency position. "Through persistence they eventually get in," he said. Like St. George's, Ross and American University have leveraged residencies by paying hospitals to accept their students for clinical clerkships in their third and fourth years of medical school. Those students get to know the residency directors, who may then favor them for residency positions. At St. George's, which has the largest network of clerkships, only 43 of its 672 American students applying for a residency last year did not receive one within a year. Students from foreign medical schools, however, are less likely to receive the most prestigious residencies, and many end up in rural or poor urban hospitals, and in less lucrative primary care specialties. For those who do not obtain residencies, the economic consequences can be devastating. Caribbean students are typically saddled with higher debt than medical students in the United States, in part because tuition is generally higher. Tuition and fees at St. George's come to 246,400 for four years, compared with 190,500 at Albert Einstein, the highly selective school Ms. Vidulich had hoped to attend. Average federal loan debt in 2012 was 220,000 for St. George's students, 191,500 for Ross's and 234,600 for American University's, according to the Education Department. But their federal loan default rates 1 percent or less are about the same as for graduates in the United States, whose debt was closer to 170,000. "Most of the kids that don't get in are pretty darn good, too," Ms. Chanatry said, "and that's why we have those schools in the Caribbean that say, 'Hey, these kids are still good doctors.' " St. George's University School of Medicine is a sprawling collection of peach colored neocolonial buildings with orange tiled roofs perched on a hill. Fishing boats bob in a small turquoise cove below the administrative buildings. In a historical footnote, it is here that, in 1983, the United States led an invasion after a military coup ousted government leaders, setting the nation's eyes on the evacuation of St. George's students. Today, young people stroll the grounds in shorts and backpacks, play basketball and do homework at picnic tables.The campus is so self sufficient that it has its own water desalinization plant. And the facilities are "state of the art," or so Dr. Eric Manheimer, an emissary from New York's public hospital system, reported back to his bosses after visiting in 2007. The campus may be grand, but the opportunities to practice medicine in Grenada are, at best, old fashioned, at worst, primitive. Near the end of their second year, students go once a week for 10 weeks to Grenada General Hospital, 200 beds housed in a small cluster of yellow buildings just below a stone fort. The hospital is as quaint as a picture postcard. The wards are segregated by sex. Inside the entrance, a sign reads "Female Medical." Metal frame beds are separated by flowered cloth curtains. Ceiling fans spin languidly overhead, and a cool breeze wafts in from Carenage harbor below. The sheets are mismatched some patients have brought theirs from home. Most striking, though, is the tranquillity. The ubiquitous monitors, the beeping and blinking lights of American hospitals, are not there. But there is an in house neurosurgeon for head injuries, said Dr. Dolland Noel, an associate dean, adding with a sly smile: "We are the only trauma center. We are the Level 1, 2 and 3." "There may not be enough insulin bags, but it's very patient oriented," Ervand Kristosturyan, a pianist from Washington, D.C., said. He recalled seeing a woman who had been losing weight and feeling weak. When she was found to have metastatic cancer, he realized that she was a textbook case. "I thought, God, this is what cancer looks like." Chelsey Burke, who rejected her family's dry cleaning business in favor of St. George's, thinks the simplicity has its benefits. "The patients, they're so patient with us," she said. "They let us examine them and ask them questions for, like, two hours." Clinical skills are a big part of the curriculum. The department chairman, Dr. Winston Mitchell, is a retired surgeon from SUNY Downstate Medical Center in New York. A slim bantam of a man with white hair and walnut skin, he returned to his homeland to cultivate organic cherry, passion fruit, mango and lime trees. But after Hurricane Ivan decimated his farm in 2004, he turned to teaching. In one lesson, he taught a small group of students how to conduct a chest examination, a skill they will need to demonstrate on their licensing exam. As he watched, a student playing the doctor asked the student pretending to be the patient to whisper "99," and listened to the vibration in his chest. "This is what you need to practice when you go to the middle of Timbuktu and you don't have an X ray," Dr. Mitchell told them. The largest academic department, with 80 staff and faculty members, is anatomical sciences, headed by Dr. Marios Loukas, a Greek national who trained in Poland and taught anatomy at Harvard Medical School. Wearing Hawaiian print scrubs, he hovered protectively over a female cadaver as students teased out the sciatic nerve. Dr. Loukas tries to keep them from becoming inured to death by holding a ceremony of prayer, poetry and music at the end of the course, to honor the people who have donated their bodies. He finds that St. George's students feel less entitled than others he has taught. "We don't see attitude," Dr. Loukas said. Some would say their mood reflects their circumstances, but he disagrees. "It's very hard to change the character of someone." Chancellor Modica, who founded the university with three investors, understands his students' predicament firsthand. He wanted to be a doctor but was forced to attend medical school in Spain when the home schools he applied to rejected him. He dropped out after a year, and published a slender guide to getting into foreign medical schools. It sold for 8.95, and helped pay his way through law school. When he hawked the book, the most common question was how to find a foreign medical school in an English speaking country. The price of services is posted at Grenada General (in local currency). Luvnish Karnani for The New York Times Sensing an opportunity, Mr. Modica sent proposals to "every English speaking country in the world." Grenada bit, he says, in the euphoria of having just attained its independence from Britain. St. George's, named for the capital city, opened nearly three years later, in 1977. One of his first hires was C.V. Rao, a Ph.D. who is now dean of students, through a classified ad for an anatomy teacher. They met in New York. "He offered me the job on the spot," Dr. Rao recalled. "He had a contract and an airplane ticket. He was very upfront about it. He said, 'If you don't like it, I have a return ticket.' He didn't paint a rosy picture of this place." When Dr. Rao interviews prospective students, he tries to make sure they will not have a chip on their shoulder. "I ask them, 'How will you take it when somebody says you are one of the Caribbean medical school students?' Most of them say, 'I want to be as good or better than them.' That's the spirit." Dr. Rao, a dapper man with a droopy mustache, keeps thumb shots of all the students tacked to a wall in his office. "These are mug shots," he said in all seriousness. If a student shows disrespect to a worker or groundskeeper or maid, the student can be identified. It's a sign of the social divide here. Pretty houses on stilts decorate the hillsides, and luxury hotels in groomed gardens flank white sand beaches. The university dominates the island, and is deeply entwined in the local economy, vying with tourism and remittances from Grenadians working abroad as a leading source of gross domestic product. But the campus is a gated community. A short stroll outside the automatic gates finds children in raggedy clothing and, on one evening, a little girl squatting to urinate in a drainage ditch. Students have been warned not to walk alone at night because of the danger of being mugged at machete point, or worse. Shuttle buses take students to off campus housing and to the supermarket. The IGA market that caters to foreigners is overpriced and sometimes runs out of milk and vegetables. "Tomatoes are more expensive than beer," Iana Gueorguieva, an Ohioan who just finished her first year, said disgustedly. "Cigarettes are cheap," said her friend, Rachel Lewis, from Colorado. "Rum is cheaper than cereal," Ms. Gueorguieva said. "You have to have a burning, unending desire, to put yourself through something like this," says Rachel Lewis, an Amherst graduate attending St. George's. Luvnish Karnani for The New York Times Rent near campus is high; Ms. Lewis pays 950 for a studio. But those who live farther away, in the same buildings as the locals, pay less. Mr. Franco's rent is 300 a month, including 18 a week for mandatory maid service, which apartments routinely come with because labor is so cheap. The culture shock can be hard. "You kind of have to survive," Ms. Vidulich said. "You're so far from everyone and you're dealing with a lot of island antics." For instance, the Internet goes down when demand is high, typically during finals week. "Our first term, we didn't have anatomy books for a while. They were lost on a boat in St. Lucia. They gave us PDFs. It was kind of a weird adjustment." That first year was an academic hazing. By her third term, Ms. Vidulich said, her ability to master the material had grown so much that it seemed like "a joke" by comparison. Many students hole up in the library and never explore the island. Some find more balance. Ms. Gueorguieva dashes around on a blue Hussar scooter, and proudly wears a scar from a fall. She parties at Bananas, a bar that lives up to its name. She is proud of having eaten iguana at a local restaurant, though once was enough. She has rented a catamaran and hiked to the Seven Sisters falls. She is active in the Women in Medicine club, performing community service like helping pregnant girls continue their education. They are here, the students say, because American medical schools do not see beyond G.P.A.s and test scores to underlying attributes like intellectual curiosity. To get into one, they say, it is better to go to an easy college and not risk mistakes. Ms. Lewis, poised, athletic and casual in a "Love" pendant and flip flops, graduated from Amherst College as a political science major. Sipping Stag beer one evening with two friends at Options, an outdoor food court near campus, she said that she originally resisted going into medicine, like her father, and wanted to be a lawyer, like her mother. But she changed her mind after working as a paralegal after college. To meet the science requirements, she took a premedical post baccalaureate program at New York University, where she was a B student, and then at the University of Colorado, Denver, where she got straight A's. She applied to more than a dozen medical schools. None of the admissions officers seemed to care very much that she had gone to a highly selective college, she said, or had been captain of the lacrosse team or had worked at a clinic for homeless families. She was invited for only two interviews, at George Washington University and St. George's, which she applied to after noticing an ad on the New York City subway. St. George's was her only acceptance. "If you get B's in half your coursework, like me, that's an easy way for them to cut out all those people," she said. "There's just not enough spots." Now 29, she has finished her first semester and is "incredibly grateful" for the chance to become a doctor. "You have to have a burning, unending desire, to put yourself through something like this," she said. Ms. Lewis would like to be an eye surgeon like her father, but her ambition is tempered by the reality that the most competitive specialties are often closed to Caribbean graduates. Still, she believes that once she has clawed her way through and is a full fledged doctor, no one will care where she went to medical school. It will have been just one step along the road. She will hang her diploma next to her residency, perhaps a fellowship and board certification. But, she says, she will not hide it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Ebola Likely to Spread From Congo to Uganda, W.H.O. Says None The risk of Ebola escaping from the Democratic Republic of Congo is now "very high," and the outbreak already is nearing Uganda, the World Health Organization said on Thursday. The W.H.O. raised its official alert level because of violence by local militias, which has slowed efforts to contain the outbreak, and population movements in eastern Congo, where the latest outbreak erupted in August. But the risk of Ebola spreading globally remains low, the agency said. Since 2000, Uganda has had three Ebola outbreaks, with a total of about 600 cases. Although it is a poor country, its health care system is relatively well organized, and its health ministry said it would start a vaccination campaign if it detected cases there. Inside Congo, the response to the outbreak has been hampered by fighting and by small numbers of victims leaving or refusing to go to treatment centers, spreading the virus to new areas. Also, local politicians exploiting the fear and confusion ahead of December elections were encouraging people to distrust the national government's efforts, Dr. Peter Salama, the W.H.O.'s head of emergency response, said at a news conference in Geneva, Reuters reported. In the coming weeks, problems like those could "create a potential perfect storm," Dr. Salama said. As of Friday, there have been 155 confirmed or probable cases in the Ebola outbreak. Some 102 patients have died, and 45 cured patients have been released. In a video statement, Congo's health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga, said the outbreak was now three times the size of the one this summer in the central Equateur Province. He blamed several factors. More people live in the affected area, and they are more mobile because they are mostly traders rather than farmers. The region has better roads and water connections, but is more dangerous because many militias operate in it. Nearly 12,000 health workers and contacts of known victims have been vaccinated. Although cases of Ebola continued to decline and only about 10 new ones are detected each week, the W.H.O. expressed alarm that one had turned up for the first time in Tshomia, a fishing town across Lake Albert from Uganda. Refugees often flee across the lake; just this year, 75,000 Congolese crossed it into Uganda to escape fighting in Ituri province, of which Tshomia is a part, according to a report from the European Commission's humanitarian aid organization. Officials in Ituri said the case was a woman who had attended the funeral of an early Ebola victim in Beni, where the current outbreak began. She was being followed as a case contact, but she refused to be vaccinated, slipped away in between visits from medical workers, and traveled about 75 miles north before falling ill. She visited a traditional healer and a rural clinic before ultimately dying in the Tshomia regional hospital on Sept. 20. More than 100 people in contact with her are now being vaccinated, and the mud walled local clinic she visited had to be decontaminated. Although health workers have not been targeted, 21 people were killed last week in Beni. An Islamic fundamentalist militia known as the Allied Democratic Forces was blamed. The group has a history of cross border fighting with the Ugandan army, attacks on United Nations peacekeepers and massacres of civilians. After the killings, medical staff were told to stop working for 48 hours; their subsequent efforts were hampered by a four day mourning period declared by local officials, the W.H.O. said. Many rumors about Ebola are circulating and must be debunked, according to the health ministry's Twitter feed. They include reports that prisoners with Ebola had escaped from the Beni prison, that children were being vaccinated without their parents' consent, and that schoolgirls who had their menstrual periods were being forced into treatment centers. Four Ebola treatment centers have now been built, and a treatment team has arrived in Tshomia.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Maggie Flannery and both her parents fell ill with Covid 19 symptoms in March, when testing was still scarce. Months later, she's had to limit her activities and has trouble concentrating. In early March, when coronavirus testing was still scarce, Maggie Flannery, a Manhattan sixth grader, and both her parents fell ill with the symptoms of Covid 19. After three weeks, her parents recovered. Maggie also seemed to get better, but only briefly before suffering a relapse that left her debilitated. "It felt like an elephant sitting on my chest," Maggie said. "It was hard to take a deep breath, I was nauseous all the time, I didn't want to eat, I was very light headed when I stood up or even just lying down." She also experienced joint pain and severe fatigue. At first, specialists suggested Maggie's symptoms might be psychological, in part because she showed no sign of heart or lung damage. She also tested negative for both the coronavirus itself and for antibodies to it. But viral tests taken long after the initial infection are generally negative, and antibody tests are frequently inaccurate. "They didn't know anything about 'long Covid' at that point," said Amy Wilson, Maggie's mother. "They said it was anxiety. I was pretty sure that wasn't true." Maggie's pediatrician, Dr. Amy DeMattia, has since confirmed the Covid 19 diagnosis, based on the child's clinical history and the fact that both her parents tested positive for coronavirus antibodies. More than seven months into the coronavirus pandemic, it has become increasingly apparent that many patients with both severe and mild illness do not fully recover. Weeks and months after exposure, these Covid "long haulers," as they have been called, continue experiencing a range of symptoms, including exhaustion, dizziness, shortness of breath and cognitive impairments. Children are generally at significantly less risk than older people for serious complications and death from Covid 19, but the long term impacts of infection on them, if any, have been especially unclear. Although doctors recognize that a small number of children have suffered a rare inflammatory syndrome shortly after infection, there is little reliable information about how many who get Covid 19 have prolonged complaints like Maggie Flannery. That could change as the proportion of children who are infected rises. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children represented 10.9 percent of reported cases nationwide as of mid October, up from just 2.2 percent in April. Dr. Richard Besser, a pediatrician and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which focuses on health policy, said parents can be reassured by the data on children's reduced overall risk. But he noted that much remains unknown about coronavirus infection and its medical consequences, including among children, and that continued vigilance is warranted. "With schools reopening, we're likely to see more infections in children," he said. "We need to make sure we're doing the studies to understand the short, medium and long term effects." To manage her condition, Maggie, who is 12, must limit her activities. Although she has been able to attend socially distanced in person classes at her small private school on the Upper West Side, she no longer walks the 15 blocks there and back. She has trouble concentrating, so homework takes a lot longer. She has stopped attending online ballet classes. Before the pandemic, she went to four ballet classes a week. "Some days are a lot better than others," said Maggie. "If I do too much on the good days, I feel a lot worse on the next day or next couple of days, and some days I can't do anything if it's a bad day." She has felt a slight improvement over time, she said. As with Maggie, 19 year old Chris Wilhelm and his parents got sick around the same time. In their case, it was in June, when viral tests were more available. All three of them tested positive. Only Chris, a rising sophomore at Johns Hopkins and a member of the cross country and track and field teams, did not get better. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Since he did not initially know about the possibility of chronic symptoms, Chris said, he was "confused" and "shocked" about his condition. The first doctors he consulted told him the symptoms would fade, he said. "For a while it was just, 'We need to wait a bit longer, it will just get better with time,'" he said. "Everyone was giving me this magic number, like the 12 week mark is when all your respiratory issues are supposed to go away. We hit that weeks ago, and there's really not any improvement." Chris recently consulted with Dr. Peter Rowe, a professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins who specializes in chronic and debilitating conditions like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, which is often triggered by a viral illness and has no approved drug treatments. Dr. Rowe determined that Chris has the heart racing condition known as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, which can occur after viral infections and limits the ability to carry out day to day activities. "He had been capable of training 60 and 70 miles a week as a runner," said Dr. Rowe, adding that some of the symptoms and the "really severe impairment" that Chris and many other long haulers suffer from are characteristic of ME/CFS. Under Dr. Rowe's direction, Chris has been trying different medications in an effort to alleviate the symptoms. In Baltimore, the Kennedy Krieger Institute, a treatment facility for children with neurological and other chronic disabilities, is offering multidisciplinary services for those under 21 who continue to experience challenges after Covid 19. So far the institute has seen only one patient, said Dr. Melissa Trovato, the institute's interim medical director of rehabilitation. With infections on the rise, Dr. Trovato said she thought it was "quite possible" the clinic will see more patients with persistent symptoms in the coming months. Because of the perception that Covid 19 is rare in kids, she said, parents might not associate a mild illness and subsequent effects, like a loss of energy, with the coronavirus. "It might take more time for family to pick up on it," she said. "From a pediatric perspective there probably is more that we're going to find out, as more children" with "prolonged symptoms come forward and get seen." Ziah McKinney Taylor, a dancer and birth doula in Atlanta, never doubted that her 14 year old daughter, Ava, was suffering from the lingering effects of Covid 19, even though she tested negative for both the virus and antibodies. Before Ava got sick in March, said Ms. McKinney Taylor, she was a "super energetic kid" who took dancing and aikido lessons five days a week. That has changed. "She has never really gotten her energy back, she is always sleeping and napping," she said. Ava herself rejected as "ridiculous" the suggestion from some doctors that her exhaustion might be related to the stresses of life under quarantine. "Like, 'You're just not getting to do your normal activities,'" she said. "I'm a very active person, this couldn't just be, 'Oh, I'm sad that my friends are gone.'" Like other families confronting similar uncertainties, Ms. McKinney Taylor and her daughter are feeling their way forward amid the unknowns of the disease. "It is very scary as a parent to not know how to prepare yourself and protect your child, other than read lots of articles and be on a Slack group," she said, referring to the Body Politic Covid 19 online support community. Under the circumstances, Ava said it can be tough to maintain her spirits. "It's a little hard to have hope right now," she said. "We don't know if this will be a lifelong thing, if this will last a year, or two years or five years. So the future is not looking too bright for me personally."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
MOSCOW , the dancer released from prison after being convicted of engineering an acid attack that exposed the hidden intrigues of the Bolshoi Ballet, asked to meet outside the theater where he had so spectacularly fallen from grace, and where he already envisions his return. With the famous facade glowing pink in the soft light of a summer evening, Mr. Dmitrichenko looked around and pronounced himself entirely at home. "I always forget the bad things," he said at the start of a two hour interview recently, his first since being released. "It seems like I was working here just yesterday. Those years passed as a single bad dream." In December 2013, Mr. Dmitrichenko was sentenced to six years in prison for plotting an attack on Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi's artistic director, in January of that year. Last month he was released early for good behavior. The dancer, 32, with green eyes and an unruly shock of dishwater blond hair, looked fit if somewhat chunkier than in his halcyon days as a Bolshoi soloist. He gained fame for playing villains including Ivan the Terrible in the ballet of the same name and Von Rothbart in "Swan Lake." He said he was drawn to the type. "Those roles were very strong in terms of drama and interesting to play," he said. "You also have to demonstrate your power, your energy and your character. It is very different from playing just some prince." Ivan the Terrible, he added, gets a bad rap, anyway. To hear Mr. Dmitrichenko tell it, so did he when he was cast as the evil mastermind of one of the biggest scandals in the 240 years of Bolshoi history. "I don't admit my guilt," he said. "I didn't during the court proceedings, and I still don't." Prosecutors painted Mr. Dmitrichenko as upset that Mr. Filin had denied important roles to Anzhelina Vorontsova, his girlfriend. Mr. Dmitrichenko had also expressed public frustration over the low pay and poor treatment of dancers under Mr. Filin. During the trial, he and his lawyer tried to depict the attack as a simple warning run amok. Mr. Dmitrichenko told the court that he had asked Yuri Zarutsky, an acquaintance and a former convict, to "knock around" Mr. Filin, but maintained that Mr. Zarutsky took it upon himself to embellish the assault by dousing Mr. Filin's face with acid. Mr. Zarutsky was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring to cause bodily harm. Mr. Dmitrichenko now labels the whole affair pure fiction. It was all a plot, he said, by Mr. Filin and his allies in the Bolshoi to remove him from the scene because he was vocal about their corrupt practices and would not be intimidated. The revisions spill out in dizzying, not to say implausible, succession: He never spoke to Mr. Zarutsky about Mr. Filin. He denied that he admitted as much in court. Ms. Vorontsova was not his girlfriend. He even raises doubts that there was any acid attack since Mr. Filin has little noticeable scaring and can drive, despite the seeming lack of an iris in one eye that he keeps hidden behind sunglasses. "That story is entirely invented" by enemies, he said. "The whole story is about a battle for power; something done from fear that I had uncovered their illegal activities. My mistake was making a public statement about this." He does not want to dissect the details, preferring to concentrate on his hopes to return to the stage, preferably at the Bolshoi. There was no barre behind bars, but he tried to stay in shape. His first cell was so constricted that he was limited to a few calisthenics like leg lifts and situps, he said. He did not go outside for an entire year. For the rest of the time things were better. He had a narrow space of about 10 square meters (about 108 square feet) where he could run back and forth. Pirouettes were out of the question. Instead he pumped iron. Being a ballet star did not earn him distinct treatment from the guards or fellow inmates. Mr. Dmitrichenko said he was locked up with a varied cast of characters including businessmen, actors and even a circus performer. He started to rehearse again almost as soon as he was released. The first 30 minutes felt a little odd, he said, but then the training that started when he was 6 (he is the son of two dancers) kicked in and everything felt normal. Vladimir Urin, the new director of the Bolshoi, appointed in the wake of the scandal, told the Russian media that Mr. Dmitrichenko could audition like anybody else if he wanted to return to the company. The theater is evidently trying put the scandal in the past. The Bolshoi held a news conference in March to unveil a sweeping history of the institution in Russian and English commissioned from the New York based writer Solomon Volkov to mark its 240th anniversary. The documentary "Bolshoi Babylon" was released in December. The scandal inevitably prompted questions. Reporters asked Mr. Urin if he had commissioned the book and approved the film in an attempt at distraction from the scandal. "It is not true that the sly director made such cunning plans," he said, while stressing that he wanted to make the cultural powerhouse more open. It is not clear, though, that the two main characters have entirely left the stage. Awkwardly, Mr. Dmitrichenko and Mr. Filin still live in the same Moscow apartment building where the attack occurred. But Mr. Dmitrichenko said they had not encountered each other. Mr. Filin was dismissed as artistic director earlier this year, then given a position as head of a Bolshoi workshop fostering young choreographers. In an interview in May, he said he would be concerned for his safety if Mr. Dmitrichenko were freed. His lawyer went to court to try to have the release rescinded. Other dancers and the film portray Mr. Filin as a slippery character, while Mr. Dmitrichenko was sometimes described as overly emotional. Both men appear resigned to the idea that they might work under the same roof again. Mr. Dmitrichenko said the main point was that he emerged from prison with his dignity intact and hoped that the whole episode would just burnish his audience appeal. "I think people will want to see someone who dances again after living in such circumstances," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
K'Andre Miller, a top prospect for the Rangers, was repeatedly subjected to a racial slur when a team sponsored online video chat was hacked on Friday. Miller, who is African American, appeared on the videoconferencing app Zoom, which allowed questions from fans. The N.H.L. has been shut down since March 12 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Miller, 20, was chosen 22nd over all by the Rangers in the 2018 draft, and he has played the past two seasons for the University of Wisconsin. The 6 foot 4 defenseman, a native of St. Paul, Minn., signed an entry level contract with the Rangers last month.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Two Twisting Towers Come to the Far West Side Standing on the High Line last week while surveying the twisted concrete structure rising out of the ground for his latest building, the XI, the architect Bjarke Ingels said, "It's a lot more dramatic in real life, huh?" His client Ziel Feldman, the chairman and founder of HFZ Capital Group, said with a smile, "You're not changing your mind, are you?" Mr. Feldman knew it was already too late for major changes. Construction is well underway on the XI (the Eleventh), a mixed use development at 76 11th Avenue that is transforming a full city block between 10th and 11th Avenues, and West 17th and West 18th Streets, directly south of the Frank Gehry designed IAC Building. With Bjarke Ingels Group, HFZ is developing a project that aims to establish its own micro neighborhood. On the large, western portion of the site, there will be two travertine clad towers, which twist and shift proportions as they rise, along with a lower building on the southwest corner connected by an enclosed glass bridge. The westernmost tower, rising 36 floors and about 400 feet, will have 149 condos with interiors designed by the New York firm Gabellini Sheppard. The east tower will rise 26 floors and about 300 feet and contain a Six Senses hotel on the lower floors and 87 condos from the 11th floor up, all designed by the Paris firm Gilles Boissier. The lower building will serve as a yet to be determined art space and Six Senses spa and club facilities. At the center will be a porte cochere and courtyard with plantings, designed by the Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea. "Our whole idea is to create a resort environment in an urban setting," said Mr. Feldman. "We have all the natural resources the water, the park, the High Line." Mr. Ingels said he designed twisted towers in order to maximize desirable views for residents inside, by allowing the buildings to peek around each other and neighboring structures. "We minimized the width of the tower on the river, on the lower levels," said Mr. Ingels, describing the west tower, which has a narrower base than top when seen from 11th Avenue. "But then as it rises, it expands, and at the top, it occupies the full western facade." The eastern tower twists in the opposite way, he added, maximizing lower floor views east and west, to the High Line and Hudson River, but then prioritizing views north and south over the city at the top. Inside the west tower apartments, "There's a real emphasis on natural materials, to reflect natural elements embedded throughout the building," said Kimberly Sheppard, a partner at Gabellini Sheppard. The materials include wide plank oak floors, gray larch wood Bulthaup kitchen cabinets with White Princess quartzite counters, and master bathrooms with eucalyptus wood vanities and walls clad in Taj Mahal quartzite with a leather textured finish. In the east tower, Gilles Boissier will extend the atmosphere of the Six Senses hotel it is designing into the residential apartments. Dorothee Boissier said her firm sought to mix polished and textured finishes to play up the natural character of materials, much like Gabellini Sheppard. However, the end result has more contrast. The Molteni kitchens have smooth lacquer doors installed near others with a pronounced, brushed wood grain, and a mix of white Calacatta Gold and black Grigio Carnico marble. Master bathrooms have herringbone floors of light Arabescato Vagli Oro marble set off by a border of dark Saint Laurent marble. "If you have a diamond among diamonds, you don't see it as beautiful," said Ms. Boissier, explaining her firm's decision to use a high contrast material palette. "But if you have a diamond surrounded by simple rocks, you really see the diamond. We think it's the same in design." The amenity package includes a 4,000 square foot fitness center with a 75 foot long pool, a lounge and gallery in the glass bridge, a wine tasting room, a social lounge with billiards tables, a teen room and a children's playroom, in addition to priority access to Six Senses. Sales are scheduled to begin on May 7, with the launch of a sales gallery with an immersive installation by the designer Es Devlin at 25 Little West 12th Street. One bedrooms will start at 2.8 million, two bedrooms at 3.9 million, three bedrooms at 6.5 million, four bedrooms at 9 million and half floor penthouses at 25 million. The target completion date, said Mr. Feldman, is the last quarter of 2019.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
What's the story behind the Rauschenberg? It's a "Shiner," which is what a group of his works are called. The Shiners all reflect back the people who are looking at the painting; the surface constantly changes. It's painted on aluminum. See? You and I are now in the painting. This painting is practically a dance. How did you put this room together? It's been this way since the '80s. I think we started with the Rauschenberg and then we moved onto the Judd a horizontal wall work with a reflective back, not shown . I loved the dance that Trisha Brown made called "Newark," and I thought that his collaboration with her on it was one of the finest that she ever did. The Judd deals with interior space. When I look at it, I always think about how Trisha might have moved through it. The Lichtenstein came later. I am particularly interested in the pop artists. The '60s were the decade that I really grew up in, but the market for those artists is way beyond me at this point, so now I don't even look. How would you describe your taste? Primarily abstract, primarily American and primarily artists from the '50s and '60s. I like very elegant work. And because I spend so much time looking at modern dance, I think I have grown to love abstract art: It all just looks like dance. Laughs When I started looking at Merce's work in the late '60s and early '70s, it was just like: "Oh! This is my taste."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (through July 6). Kenneth MacMillan's "Manon" is a deliciously dark and melodramatic take on the well known tragic 18th century tale, and performances continue through Saturday. Beginning on Monday, Ballet Theater embarks on its annual pilgrimage to the lake "Swan Lake" for which the company's top ballerinas offer individual interpretations of the double role of Odette/Odile. Some excel at evoking the poignant longing of the former, while others take great pleasure in depicting the devilishness of the latter. Year after year, it's a joy to see fine artists grow and experiment in these roles. 212 362 6000, abt.org RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE at Herbert Von King Park (June 21, 7 p.m.). This treasured troupe makes an appearance in Brooklyn as part of the SummerStage lineup of free performances at parks around the city. Following a brief, open to all dance lesson onstage featuring Brown's signature blend of African and contemporary dance, the company will perform three works: "New Conversations," from 2018; "For You," from 2003; and "Four Corners," a powerful, pulsating work about the presence of angels around us, originally made for the Alvin Ailey company in 2013. cityparksfoundation.org/summerstage BRYANT PARK CONTEMPORARY DANCE SERIES (June 21, 6 p.m.). Grab a blanket, prepare a picnic and enjoy some al fresco dance at this annual summer series that brings together an array of local dance troupes. Each contributes a short work often earnest and energetic to the eclectic program. This week's participants include Buglisi Dance Theater, a longtime member of the city's modern dance scene; Von Howard Project, the company started by Christian von Howard; Beatrice Capote, a teacher and choreographer; and the LaGuardia Dance Ensemble, comprising students from New York's famed performing arts high school. bryantpark.org/programs/contemporary dance	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Last year, the composer and conductor Esa Pekka Salonen took part in a discussion about the future of classical music at New York University. He found it interesting, he said in a recent interview, but also exasperating. "The gentleman doing the introduction was actually from the philosophy department," said Mr. Salonen, who conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra of London at Lincoln Center on Sunday and Monday. "Painting the customary doom and gloom picture, with less money, audiences aging." "It's actually dangerous to equate the health of some institutions with the health of the art form," Mr. Salonen, 60, added. Music is doing fine, he said "it's just that some institutions are having trouble. Those are completely different things." Mr. Salonen who seemed for a time happy to float in that just fine realm of pure music, writing his own works and conducting selectively is now diving back into those troubled institutions. The San Francisco Symphony recently made the surprise announcement that in 2020, when Michael Tilson Thomas steps aside after 25 years as its music director, Mr. Salonen will be his replacement. Read about Mr. Salonen's new position in San Francisco. Since the late 1960s, when the fiery young Pierre Boulez said that the only solution to the entrenched conservatism of classical music was to blow up the opera houses and destroy all the art of the past, there have been calls for systemic change. Yet Boulez mellowed over time, and became a revered figure at leading opera houses and orchestras, working within the system to improve it rather than exploding it. And Mr. Salonen, who came to attention as a flinty Finnish modernist composer, has taken a similar course. Yes, he wants to shake things up, but from the inside. In taking on another orchestra directorship, a decade after leaving a landmark tenure at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he hopes to find the sweet spot between gutting the system and maintaining what works. "The infrastructure of what we call classical music is going to evolve into something else," Mr. Salonen said, though "we don't quite know what it is." But there is no reason to panic, he emphasized. "Obviously, it's in no one's interest to blow up the existing structure and start all over. It would be counterproductive." Mr. Salonen will arrive in San Francisco with something of a head start: Mr. Thomas has fostered a climate of experimentation. And Mr. Salonen certainly proved himself a model of fresh thinking during his 17 year tenure as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has more recently refreshed the Philharmonia Orchestra as its principal conductor including, in recent years, explorations of digital technology and virtual reality projects. Read our review of Mr. Salonen's most recent concert in San Francisco. He comes at his new position, moreover, as a working composer. He suggested that, by "doing something as strange as writing new art music, you send out a very optimistic signal that I actually believe in this. And I believe in the longevity of the art form, and also believe there is a lot to be said still. When we talk about the masters, the underlying message is that the best has happened already. I don't think so." But, he made clear, "I don't want to mess with the physiology of the orchestra." So what is he willing to mess with? The weekly subscription series programming format "the grid," as Mr. Salonen called it increasingly seems an impediment to artistic vitality. "We are presented with a grid," he explained, "and then you kind of fill it with content, and the content can be interesting, good and imaginative, but it still has to fit into the grid." Most people today, especially younger listeners, don't like to commit themselves months in advance, let alone to a series of concerts. Mr. Salonen envisions breaking up the season into blocks, maybe three or four, each with a thematic hook. With the culture increasingly diverse and fragmented, Mr. Salonen said, the "mainstream idea has all but disappeared." Symphony orchestras and opera companies must accept that there is no musical mainstream, either, so institutions should try to reach "as many people as possible by catering to different tastes," he said. That means not just unusual ventures of the kind he oversaw in Los Angeles the Minimalist Jukebox series; festivals of film music; "The Tristan Project," a performance of Wagner's opera that employed as backdrops videos by Bill Viola but also now and then a concert or mini festival devoted to Brahms or Sibelius, for those who want an immersion in a single composer. Who will help him conceive these programming blocks? Though he doesn't know yet what to call them, Mr. Salonen has recruited a roster of mostly younger, visionary artists to advise him and create their own programs a kind of "brain trust," he said. This diverse creative team includes: the pianist and film composer Nicholas Britell; the soprano Julia Bullock; the flutist, educator and champion of new music Claire Chase; the violinist Pekka Kuusisto; the composer and guitarist Bryce Dessner; the composer Nico Muhly; the jazz bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding; and the artificial intelligence entrepreneur Carol Reiley. The "grid" will have to be loosened to allow these artists creative leeway, Mr. Salonen said. He says he'll make it happen. Mr. Salonen has more problems with the promotion of classical music than with its substance. The message he said is often conveyed "come and hear an immortal masterpiece performed by Maestro So and So and a great symphony orchestra" is actually off putting. "Lots of concert halls look like shrines or temples, like a Parthenon," he added. "You climb up to make yourself worthy" and "walk out a better person." "The good thing," he said, "is that the actual material we are dealing with on a daily basis is fantastic" some of "the best things humankind has ever produced." He remains convinced that the ideal way to engage new listeners and give meaningful performances of those masterpieces is to present them alongside comparably ambitious modern and contemporary works. Mr. Salonen said that classical music is bungling what could be a selling point of orchestras. A Beyonce concert might have a band of 20 on stage and 20,000 people in the audience, he said. That ratio is very different from what people get at the symphony, with roughly 100 players and 2,000 people. As a result, an orchestral concert becomes an event of "human energy, human expression and people react strongly to that." Despite his fascination with digital music resources and virtual reality, Mr. Salonen fretted that "90 percent of social media is about nothing." "In my opinion," he said, "when politicians say the reason for the fragmentation of culture is immigration, it's absolutely not true." The reason, he insisted, "is the media, which is usually not in the hands of immigrants. I think a lot of social media is trying to create some kind of belonging, some type of cultural connection."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
OUR MEN IN HAVANA: Buildings by New York architects in Havana include the central station by Kenneth Murchison, shown in 1913. EVEN in Cuba they know it's a waiting game, waiting for the Castros to exit the stage, and for Cuba to open up. When Americans finally do arrive in quantity, New Yorkers will notice something familiar about Havana, for a string of New York architects found it fertile ground a century ago. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Cuban capital was spectacularly rich, Newport rich, with a large cadre of highly trained local designers. In 1902 The Real Estate Record and Guide gave some idea of the sophisticated level of regulation; cornices, balconies, ornament and even colors required approval, and the architect had to present an elevation drawing of the entire block, to make sure the house was aesthetically agreeable. One of the earliest buildings by a New York architect was Bertram Goodhue's Episcopal cathedral, designed in 1905 and architecturally optimistic on a very Roman Catholic island. Goodhue, a recognized master of ecclesiastical architecture, was firmly a Gothicist, but for Havana developed a Churrigueresque design, a flowery version of the Spanish colonial. Where it stood is unclear, but it is gone now. The oldest section of the city, Old Havana, fronts on the Bay of Havana, with narrow, almost medieval streets. But in the early 20th century the section around Obispo and O'Reilly Streets was home to so much bank construction it was nicknamed "little Wall Street." In 1913, Arthur Lobo, born in the West Indies and trained at Columbia, worked out a lush neo Classical facade for the Bank of Nova Scotia at O'Reilly and Cuba Streets. Shoehorned into a tight intersection, Lobo's bank rounds the corner, making a sheltered half circle vestibule of double height. At O'Reilly and Compostela Streets, the architects Walker Gillette, famous for the Fuller Building at Madison and 57th, designed an impressive branch for New York's National City Bank. Built in 1925 from coquina, the romantically rough, shell studded rock, the bank has a grand, airy hall, with breezes giving it the air of a tropical airport. In 1919 The New York Times reported that the trains to the Key West Havana ferry were "crowded with Americans going to gauge the chances of fortune." One of these was the hotelier Joseph Bowman, who in 1924 put up a 10 story annex to a hotel on the Prado, a boulevard often considered the Fifth Avenue of Havana. Schultze Weaver, hotel specialists who did the Waldorf Astoria, gave the hotel, the Sevilla Biltmore, a grand dining room on the 10th floor, with views over what is mostly a five story city. However, Bowman had New York's sharp elbows, and left the side walls of his structure bare and stark. New Yorkers don't think twice about that, but it provoked a stir in Havana. South of the city center, the 1912 Spanish Baroque rail station has great twin towers, terra cotta medallions and a broad waiting room. That's good, because train service is infrequent, even erratic, and the 50 or so people I saw sitting there might just as well have been waiting for a weekly steamer. It was designed by the debonair critic/architect Kenneth Murchison, who did the Erie Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, and various buildings around the New York. West of Old Havana is the Vedado, a section built up in the 1910s and 1920s with comfortable suburban residences. Many rise to the sumptuous, like the 1914 house of the Marqueses de Aviles, on 17th Street. Designed by Carrere Hastings, the interior is much richer than that of their comparable Frick Mansion in New York, basically French neo Classic but with Spanish Renaissance touches. Another house nearby, even more lush, is that of the banker Pablo Gonzalez de Mendoza, famous for its 1918 pool house addition, for which the New York architect John H. Duncan was brought in. He developed a long room with a central pool; French doors opened to the breezes on three sides under a stenciled trussed ceiling. Hermes Mallea, the author of "Great Houses of Havana," says it was called the "Roman bath of the Mendozas." Farther west, in the Playa section, Schultze Weaver did a series of beach clubs, the most elaborate of which was the fanciful La Concha, with a single tower of rich decoration, something like McKim, Mead White's tower on the old Madison Square Garden in New York. All in all, there are more than two dozen buildings by New York architects in Havana. The structure that tourists probably know best is the 1930 Hotel Nacional, designed by McKim, Mead White on a rise of land overlooking the Malecon and the Maine Monument. It has a Spanish Renaissance feel, but is really just a big, standard hotel of the period. Nearby is a sharp thorn in the side of the Cuban government, the hulking, brutalist United States Embassy office building of 1953. Designed by Harrison Abramovitz, it's in that safe, orthodox modernism that wouldn't get anyone fired. In 1963, after the United States severed ties with Cuba, Fidel Castro ordered the confiscation of the building, but it remains in American hands, although the subject of occasional dust ups between the countries. At the moment it is wait and watch, but when Cuba opens up, there may again be opportunities for New York designers; communism has robbed island architects of half a century of experience.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Tracee Ellis Ross may be working 14 hours a day in Los Angeles on her hit TV show, "black ish." "But when Elizabeth Warren says she'll have dinner with you," Ms. Ross said, walking into a suite at the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington, "you get on a plane. I have a million questions for her." And from the moment Senator Warren entered the lobby, friendly to all but racewalking toward the elevator, she was happy to offer answers: breaking down complex problems into plain spoken choices, engaging everyone in sight. When a woman on the elevator said, "You look familiar," Ms. Warren introduced herself, shook her hand and asked how her evening was going. Of course, Ms. Warren, 67, comes by teaching naturally. A law professor for over 30 years, most recently at Harvard, she specialized in bankruptcy and commercial law. A strong advocate of consumer protection, she conceived and fought for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Dodd Frank Act of 2010. Two years later, the political novice was elected a United States senator from Massachusetts. Ms. Warren has since emerged as a very popular figure in the Democratic Party and a fierce advocate for the middle class. In June, she endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and has gone toe to toe with Donald J. Trump in a series of fiery Twitter exchanges. Tracee Ellis Ross: It's hard to answer about myself, but there's a "we" in the way the senator speaks. She's right there with us. That's something "black ish" does, too. We're not looking, objectifyingly, at this family. We're on the inside with them. Maybe that's why everybody likes you. Elizabeth Warren: Trust me, they don't. I was thinking of how your character on "black ish" gets to an essential truth. She's this enormously well put together woman, right? She's a doctor; she saves lives. And she's not taking flak from anyone. Except when one of her children makes her think she's not a good mother. Vulnerability underlies everything we care about. We put so much effort into being strong and independent, but at heart, we're all just working to keep it together. And I don't just mean the working mom thing. EW: That's the part of my job that scares me the most: that I'll miss an opportunity to make a change that would have helped. It's not whether I win or lose. It's knowing how much people out there are smashed up against the windshield. So, can we find a place to put a little more security in the system, to help folks be less likely to get cheated? PG: It sounds like a lot of pressure. EW: No, I wake up most mornings, and in that instant before you open your eyes, I think: What do I get to do today? Who do I get to push? PG: One reason you're both such powerful advocates for the middle class, for self esteem is that you've fused who you are with the issues you care about. EW: Well, I know who I am, and I know what I fight for. Whether we're talking about making college a little more affordable or health care or social security I want to be as sharp as I can be because I know how tough things are. That's my opportunity now. PG: It reminds me of your great line: "I was brought up on the ragged edge of the middle class." What made it "ragged"? EW: Because it was so hard to hold on to. My mother clung to it "We are middle class" because our grasp was so tenuous. There were times we were and times we weren't. TER: I feel like I'm on the inside for the first time. Inside the castle. I have an Emmy nomination! And I've been in this career a long time. I'm 43, not some ingenue who just stumbled into this. Much of my role has been as an advocate for self esteem and humanity. The beauty of my work is that I get to unzip something that people are afraid to touch. To make them more comfortable in their own skin. PG: It's funny. When people hear you're Diana Ross's daughter, they probably start fantasizing about living in castles with Michael Jackson on speed dial. But when you were born, your mom was probably just 10 years from the ragged edge herself. TER: They have fantasies about what's happening in our world right now. But my mother is an international treasure, and royalty in the black community, because she did something that didn't exist at a time when it didn't happen. She paved her own road. And being her daughter, people loved me just because I was part of her. But from a very young age, I wanted to fill that space with something that was worthy of being looked at. EW: I love that. You saw you had opportunity, but rather than just saying "Lucky me," you said, "What can I do with it that expands opportunity for others?" TER: That was the deal for me. PG: Was the tenuousness of your lives as girls, whether material or emotional, what sent you into the world with such gusto? Go get it! EW: No, no, no. It's the other way around. It's fragile. Security is something you can work for, but in our family, it was elusive. So the way I internalized it as a child was to see that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There were times Daddy had a salary, and we were O.K. And then Daddy had a heart attack, and it all turned upside down: no money coming in, the bills stacking up, we lose the family car. EW: I was 12. I remember my mother and my Aunt Bee going to look at rent houses because we were going to lose our home. I'd hear my mother crying at night, and I noticed my parents started sleeping in separate rooms. PG: I thought only gay kids were so vigilant, reading every little sign. But you did, too. TER: And so did I. But I didn't have your childhood or yours, either. EW: But this is what art does. It's what you do, Tracee. You help us hear and understand our own human stories. And this ties straight into politics. Go listen to these guys on the floor of the Senate talking about people who are losing their homes, describing them like you'd talk about furniture that should be tossed out. It's a "they" that's so far away. TER: But it's not just in politics. It's everywhere. This "otherness" that's all of a sudden part of our culture. People grabbing on to what's theirs out of fear it might be taken away. EW: I think it's deliberately political. People across America now understand there's a lot that's broken. People feel like I did when I was 12 years old: "I'm about to lose the whole thing." And they feel that way because it's true. Millions of people were turned upside down in the financial crash, and they can't get a foothold. Young people with college debt are starting out 10 yards behind the starting line. And this is the Donald Trump moment. He says, "Blame the immigrants, blame women, blame people who have different religious beliefs than you, blame people who aren't the same color as you." Because if everyone turns on each other EW: It's a zero sum game. There's one piece of bread here. And if you've got more, I've got less. But there's no more bread. That was not America. We were building an America that said, "If we educate all our kids, we'll actually make more." TER: There's enough sun for everyone. EW: We went from a world that said, "We can increase opportunity for everyone," not that we were trying to. Go back to the '30s and '40s, with gays deeply in the closet, and African Americans with fewer opportunities than whites and Latinos and women getting shut out of lots of things. But we embraced the idea that we could all pitch in, through government, and expand opportunity. And when the civil rights movement kicks in, we're expanding to more and more people. We're not perfect, but we're on the right road. Then starting in the Reagan years, we see a different description of America: Only invest in those at the top, and let trickle down economics take care of everyone else. PG: But we've had 30 years of proof that trickle down economics doesn't work. Why does the G.O.P. still push it? Why do working class voters still go for it? EW: I blame Democrats big time. I don't think we've offered a clear alternative story of how we build a future together. I believe in the competition of ideas. Let's get out there and explain, at a human level, what it means if America becomes a zero sum world. It's not enough to say, "stupid wall, stupid wall." O.K., we get "stupid wall." So what's the plan? And if the answer is, "blah, blah, blah," then shame on us. TER: But there are way too many people who aren't connected. They're so connected to Instagram or EW: Oh, wait! Where's my phone? I Snapchat with my granddaughters. Can I take a picture with you? They'll love it. And I'll forget unless we do it while I'm thinking of it. They take a selfie on the senator's phone. PG: Your stock is going through the roof, Granny Warren! EW: It's why it's so much fun to do this with someone whose show reaches millions of people across this country. TER: The fact that you even knew my name kind of blew me away. EW: Now is a moment for change in this country, and when I watch a show like "black ish," I'm even more optimistic. It tells me we're pushing the conversation in a warm and human direction that really is about expanding our view of who we can be and who are friends are. PG: Senator, you've endorsed Hillary Clinton. But there's a lot of resistance to her, especially among young voters. What do you make of that? EW: It's not about a single person. We are not going to make change by finding one person with the magic insight. TER: Change comes by galvanizing lots of connections. EW: When many, many of us say, "We're not going to do it like that anymore." I'm from Massachusetts. Ten years ago in Massachusetts, there was no marriage equality law. Then the Supreme Court of Massachusetts said: Equal marriage. You can marry whoever you love. And all around the country whoa! state legislatures said, "We're going to shut that down." But 10 years later, we live in a country where people can marry who they love in every state. Have we won every battle? No, but we made change against great resistance. It wasn't because it was gravity's time. It happened because we found something essential in our humanity. When our brothers and sisters came out of the closet, we weren't talking about "they." We were talking about "us." These are our hearts; this is our love. PG: Like your Twitter feed, senator, which is outrageously good. PG: And sometimes very mean, especially about Donald Trump. You've called him a "thin skinned bully" and said he's freaked out because he's losing to a girl. EW: But it's never gratuitously mean. It's just deserts. I'm on fire when it's time to be on fire. We can't change this world with, "It will all work out in the end." TER: Do you ever struggle with it, personally, when it's time to be mean? EW: No, I wake up sometimes, in the night, and think, I should also have said. ..." TER: That's hilarious! Have you always been that way? EW: Let me put it this way: What I thought I could do has changed over time. When I was 12 and we needed money, I started sewing. I put an ad in the papers. I babysat. I raised dogs and sold puppies. I've always been willing to do what needs to be done. TER: You're like my mom. She was always, "What's your plan?" PG: Let's end with something Tracee mentioned earlier. How do we energize demoralized voters in either party? The ones who say: "It's all too broken. I give up." EW: Discouragement is the most powerful voter suppression tool in America today. TER: A friend told me, "I'm just not voting." I thought, "We need to have a conversation, maybe several." But these are divisive times, and maybe it's too much to	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Netflix subscribers like being able to glide through entire seasons of "Stranger Things" and "The Crown" without sitting through commercials for insurance and S.U.V.s with bows on the hood. Subscriptions, rather than advertising, drive its nearly 16 billion in annual revenue, and being commercial free "remains a deep part of our brand proposition," Netflix said in a statement. While it is the dominant streaming platform, with 158 million global subscribers, Netflix also has a 12 billion pile of debt. And it is facing competition from deep pocketed streaming newcomers like the Walt Disney Company and Apple. The research firm eMarketer said this month that Netflix's "days at the top may be numbered," and many analysts and executives wonder if, in order to keep its revenue strong, it will have to embrace ads. "I don't know why they wouldn't," said Peter Naylor, the head of advertising sales for the streaming platform Hulu. Even as Netflix resists commercials, it is finding ways to work with brands. Last month, Netflix worked with the sandwich chain Subway to start offering a Green Eggs and Ham Sub (spinach dyed eggs, sliced ham, guacamole, cheese) tied to the new Netflix series "Green Eggs and Ham," based on the Dr. Seuss book. The sandwich generated a lot of publicity for Netflix in the lifestyle press while also putting the Netflix name in front of the millions of people who buy a Subway sandwich each day. "We believe we will have a more valuable business in the long term," Netflix said, "by staying out of competing for ad revenue and instead entirely focusing on competing for viewer satisfaction." In another recent cross promotion, Netflix charged the clothing company Diesel a license fee to make outfits inspired by "La Casa de Papel," one of Netflix's most popular shows. Online ads from Diesel hammered home the connection by showing the Netflix name, mentioning "La Casa de Papel" and featuring characters in the distinctive red jumpsuits worn by the show's protagonists. Netflix is "actively beefing up its marketing team," according to the research firm Forrester. "They're being more flexible in the types of partnerships they can offer," said Ellie Bamford, an executive at the marketing agency R/GA. When Netflix worked with Samsung and Aviation American Gin on a commercial last month featuring the actor Ryan Reynolds and his new Netflix film "6 Underground," no money changed hands. For Netflix, such deals are mostly about keeping people aware of the Netflix brand. But companies have long been eager to go into business with Netflix, even before it scored 34 Golden Globe nominations this month. The platform has something brands crave: a young audience. Its average viewer is 31, part of a group highly sought by companies as younger people avoid broadcast and cable television and are known to hate ads. "Brands want to be in front of this audience," Ms. Bamford said. "Reaching these unreachables, these cord cutters who don't want to be fed an ad, is a huge concern." Major companies flirt with Netflix on social media, and Netflix is flirting back. This month, the company's Twitter account, with seven million followers, participated in a saucy meme about things people say during sex, trading quips about it with the Wendy's Twitter account (3.4 million followers) and Penguin Random House (1.3 million followers). Last spring, Netflix posted a tweet that included a photo of nine cast members from one of its original shows, "Sense8," as they appeared to be celebrating in an Audi convertible, and then had a joking exchange about it with the Audi account (two million followers). Netflix is careful to guard its reputation, asking some of the companies it has worked with to avoid putting its logo on dart boards, paper napkins and doormats. But marketing executives said Netflix was increasingly open to lending its name to outside projects, including joint marketing campaigns and products based on its shows. With so much content, Netflix has had trouble sustaining attention for some shows, which can come and go in a weekend of binge watching, never to be mentioned again. The arrangements with the brands are one way it can keep attention focused on a given program. This month, Netflix posted a job listing for someone who would develop products, games and events to "drive meaningful show awareness" and make them "part of the zeitgeist for longer periods of time." Netflix has a brand partnerships group, led by the executive Barry Smyth, which works with companies to use Netflix's name in promotional campaigns and has recently hired people away from Fox, Lionsgate and other media companies. In a recent job listing for a position in Europe, Netflix said it wanted to "amplify the scope and impact of our marketing campaigns when we work with other brands." This summer, Netflix's biggest series, "Stranger Things," a supernatural sci fi show set in the 1980s, struck deals with 75 companies. In one, Netflix teamed up with Baskin Robbins on new ice cream flavors like the chocolate icing topped Eleven's Heaven, named after the character Eleven, and Upside Down Pralines, a reference to the alternate dimension in the show, the Upside Down. In another deal, Coca Cola briefly revived the failed 1985 beverage New Coke, which appeared in "Stranger Things" episodes, adding to its retro atmosphere. The brands did not pay to appear on the show, but Netflix took a licensing fee for a "Stranger Things" promotion in London designed by the immersive theater company Secret Cinema, which recreated a mall from the series that sold special cosmetics from Mac and products from Coach. The pop up mall opened in November, four months after Netflix made the show's third season available to subscribers. The platform does not need to make money from major companies to benefit from working with them. The idea is to fuel subscriptions by drumming up interest in its shows through alliances with "brands where we feel like their audience will love our content as much as our audience does," Netflix said in a statement. The same logic may extend to product placements. Netflix has typically left such decisions up to individual producers, saying in a statement that "most of the brands that appear in shows and movies are added by creators who believe they add to the authenticity of the story." Netflix added that "instances where those placements are paid are rare and not a business focus for us." That is a contrast with many of Netflix's rivals, which have actively courted companies with offers to display their products onscreen even introducing them to showrunners and providing them with script drafts. Hulu, for instance, has a team dedicated to working brands into its shows, with the number of paid arrangements increasing 200 percent from 2018 to 2019, it said. Netflix does not have an equivalent team. Still, products have appeared in Netflix shows for years (In 2013, a blogger posted a slide show of at least 57 corporate mentions on "House of Cards.") Research last year suggested that more brand name products appeared on shows tagged as Netflix Originals compared with the ones it streams from other studios. In the recent post apocalyptic series "Daybreak," characters comment on the array of products stockpiled in an apartment: Red Bull energy drinks, Settlers of Catan board games, Tide Pods and more. None of the companies paid to be included. But such product placements can be a boon to producers who are looking to have realistic props in a scene without having to pay for them. In the new Netflix holiday movie "The Knight Before Christmas," a character spends nearly three minutes exploring a Sony television and Amazon's Echo smart speaker. Both products were included free, but their presence set off a flurry of news articles and discussions on social media. Although much of the commentary was mocking, it drew attention to an otherwise standard seasonal film.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Three of the stars of the sitcom "Saved by the Bell," which Sam Bobrick created. From left, Mario Lopez, Dustin Diamond and Mark Paul Gosselaar. Sam Bobrick, who created the enduring NBC high school sitcom "Saved by the Bell," and whose play "Norman, Is That You?" reached audiences around the world after it fizzled on Broadway in 1970, died on Oct. 11 in Los Angeles. He was 87. His wife, Julie Bobrick, said he died in a hospital two days after having a stroke. Mr. Bobrick was already a television stalwart, having written for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Get Smart," when, in 1988, he created and wrote the pilot for "Good Morning, Miss Bliss," a Disney Channel show about a teacher in Indianapolis, played by Hayley Mills, and some of her students. After "Miss Bliss" was canceled a year later, NBC picked up the show, retained some of the cast (but not Ms. Mills), renamed it "Saved by the Bell" and moved its setting to California. New episodes of "Saved by the Bell" aired on Saturday mornings until 1992, and the show was widely syndicated after that. It inspired two spinoff shows, two TV movies, an Off Broadway musical and a pop up restaurant in West Hollywood. A new "Saved by the Bell" series, starring Mr. Lopez and Ms. Berkley as adult versions of their characters, is slated to appear next year on Peacock, NBC's new streaming service. Mr. Bobrick parted ways with "Saved by the Bell" early on to work with the producer Grant Tinker on "The Van Dyke Show," a sitcom that starred Dick Van Dyke and his son Barry. It was canceled after one season. "In two years Grant Tinker is out of business," Mr. Bobrick told The Kansas City Star in 2000. "Nothing worked for him, whatever the reasons. And 'Saved by the Bell' ran 10 years and created an empire. It's in every country. "So you know nothing. You never know what the right move is." That sentiment applied to the plays Mr. Bobrick wrote with Ron Clark, whom he had worked with on the Smothers Brothers show. Their first Broadway collaboration was the 1970 comedy "Norman, Is That You?" "Norman, Is That You?," which was directed by George Abbott and starred Lou Jacobi, Maureen Stapleton and Martin Huston, followed a Midwestern dry cleaner who visits his son in New York after his wife leaves him, and discovers that his son is gay and living with a boyfriend. "It seems to be one of those nasty, smug little plays smirking continually at recognition of their own cleverness, as if they had an in built air of self satisfaction engulfing them," Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. "Norman" closed on Broadway after just 12 performances, but its run was far from over. It became a favorite in regional theaters in the United States, with productions that starred Milton Berle, Harvey Korman and Hans Conried, among others; ran for years in Paris and traveled to Spain, Scandinavia, Poland, Germany and Yugoslavia; and became the first feature film directed by George Schlatter, the producer of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh In." The movie, starring Redd Foxx, Pearl Bailey and Michael Warren, was released in 1976. The Times reported in 1977 that "Clark and Bobrick have earned about 500,000 each from 'Norman' and no Broadway soothsayer ever thought that would happen." "You never know what the right move is," Mr. Bobrick said of his show business career. But he made more than a few over the years. Samuel Bobrick was born in Chicago on July 24, 1932, to Jack and Minnette (Marcus) Bobrick. His father owned an Army surplus store, and his mother was a postal worker. The Bobricks were Jewish, and after an anti Semitic attack on him in his Chicago school, his family said, he moved to stay with grandparents in Benton Harbor, Mich., where he graduated from high school in 1950. He served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955, editing the newspaper at a base in Wilmington, Ohio. In 1956 he completed a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After graduating, Mr. Bobrick moved to New York, where he became a songwriter. His most successful song was "The Girl of My Best Friend," which he wrote with Beverly Ross and which Elvis Presley recorded in 1960. He began writing for radio and television and in 1962 moved to Los Angeles, where he worked on shows like "Captain Kangaroo," "The Flintstones" and "Bewitched." Despite his long career in television, Mr. Bobrick considered himself primarily a playwright, and he continued writing plays until his death. In 2011 the Mystery Writers of America honored him with an Edgar Award for best play for "The Psychic," about a struggling writer who poses as a psychic and becomes embroiled in a murder mystery. The play, with comedic touches, was performed at the Falcon Theater (now the Garry Marshall Theater) in Burbank, Calif., in 2010. Mr. Bobrick married Jeanne Johnson in 1963. They divorced in 1990, and in 2000 he married Julie Stein. In addition to his wife, with whom he lived in Los Angeles, he is survived by two daughters, Lori Donner and Stefanie Bobrick Owen; a son, Joey; a brother, Edward; a sister, Carole Swerdlove; and two grandchildren.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Credit...Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times One afternoon in June, the artist Sanford Biggers, having returned to the city after a stretch bunkered out of town with his wife and young daughter to avoid the pandemic, opened up his expansive basement studio in Harlem for a socially distanced visit. Mr. Biggers is a specialist in many styles, and several were in evidence. A shimmering silhouette made entirely of black sequins, for instance, towered along one wall; it depicted a Black Power protester drawn from a late 1960s photograph. There were African statuettes that Mr. Biggers purchases in markets, then dips in wax and modifies at the shooting range a wrenching sculpture by gunfire that he has exhibited as multichannel videos. There were also busts from a series he is making in bronze and another in marble, with artisans in Italy. They merge Masai, Luba, and other African sculptural traits with ones from the Greco Roman tradition. Most of all, there were quilts stretched against the wall, piled onto pallets, in scraps on the cutting table. For over a decade, Mr. Biggers has been working with antique quilts alongside his other media. He disrupts these heirlooms with bold paint strokes, adorns them with imagery, cuts into them to inspect the void. The quilt, vernacular object par excellence, proved to be rich terrain for what Mr. Biggers calls "material storytelling." As the full scope of his quilt work comes into view, it sheds new light on his long held concerns with the Black experience, American violence, Buddhism and art history and reveals interior dimensions of his personal journey. Mr. Biggers made his first two quilt works in 2009, installing them at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. One of the vintage quilts had a flower pattern; the other was plaid. On each, he transposed from a historical map the locations of the church and safe houses from the Underground Railroad, marked them like stars in a constellation, and connected them with charcoal and oil stick. The reference was to a theory that holds that people along the Underground Railroad shared crucial information in code through quilts hanging at safe houses and other way points. Scholars have found little validating evidence, but for Mr. Biggers, the fact of folk knowledge, even when it's apocryphal, has worth in itself. "It's more important that the story endures," he said. This fall, an exhibition of nearly 60 of Mr. Biggers's quilt based pieces, titled "Codeswitch," will open at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, before traveling in 2021 to Los Angeles where the artist grew up and New Orleans. A separate fall show planned at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Manhattan, titled "Soft Truths," will present new quilt works juxtaposed with his Afro European marbles. Sparked by his interest in hidden codes, Mr. Biggers's quilts in turn reveal hidden connections amid his eclectic oeuvre. "It's this series of works that has allowed me to read his other work well, and really come to terms with what it might be up to," said Andrea Andersson, the director of the Rivers Institute in New Orleans, who curated "Codeswitch" with Antonio Sergio Bessa of the Bronx Museum. Mr. Biggers, who turns 50 this year, is perhaps best known for his conceptual installations mingling pathos and dark humor. In "Blossom," first shown in 2007 at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Mo., and later acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, an artificial tree bursts through a baby grand that he has converted to a player piano; it plays his arrangement of "Strange Fruit," the haunting anti lynching lament. "Laocoon," involving a massive, inflatable vinyl Fat Albert character prone on the floor, seemingly struggling to breathe based on the Iliad character, depicted in Renaissance sculpture as an icon of suffering caused some unease when it was shown at David Castillo Gallery in Miami in 2015 and the next year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit for its apparent allusions to police killings of Black men and to the cartoon's originator, Bill Cosby. These works mobilized popular imagery and challenged viewers. When Mr. Biggers works on quilts, the approach is different: The concept is not in the final shape, but in the process. The work is improvisational, meditative, private. "I don't have a vision of what I want to put on the quilt and then hammer it in," he said. "I sit with these quilts for months or years before I can make a single mark. And then it's led by what the material is going to give back." Mr. Biggers has chafed against the art world's category silos, even while working his way through some of its prestigious precincts. He earned his master's degree in the late 1990s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in painting, but set that practice aside once he arrived in New York in 1999, as an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In "Freestyle," the museum's influential 2001 exhibition of new Black artists, he showed a collaboration with Jennifer Zackin, "A Small World." A side by side montage of home movies from each artist's childhood, it pointed to uncanny similarities between life in Black middle class Los Angeles families and New York Jewish families, while underscoring the absurdity of enduring social barriers. The work was reprised in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Meanwhile, Mr. Biggers was making work with a ritual charge. Multiple projects invoked mandalas, circles bearing geometries sacred in Eastern religions. Some were joyous and participatory, for instance, the patterned linoleum dance floors that he set up at break dancing competitions around New York, inviting contestants, welcoming the scuffing. Their title, "Mandala for the B Bodhisattva," marked the B boy, or break dancer, as a kind of enlightened being. The concept enfolded influences from Mr. Biggers's youth in the Los Angeles hip hop scene (he rapped, DJ ed, danced, and wrote graffiti), and his three years teaching English in Japan, where he got into religion and aesthetics and frequented monasteries. The mandala turned mournful in "Lotus," a suspended disc of etched glass with an intricate petal pattern, first shown in 2007. Up close, the petals turned out to repeat an 18th century diagram of a slave ship hold. The image is one of various symbols the tree, the piano, the clenched fist, the Cheshire Cat smile that he carries across formats, including quilts. "I'm riffing on them like a jazz musician would riff on a song standard," he said. Mr. Biggers's syncretism is its own method, with its formal fluidity, its propensity toward everyday materials and a certain dance away from fixed meanings. The painter Julie Mehretu, his close friend for over 20 years, described him as both an explorer and an instigator, inviting the viewer's inquiry while already slipping to the next idea. "There's always this embedded, implicit sociality in the material he uses, and in what he's investigating," Ms. Mehretu said. In "South of Pico," a study of Black art in Los Angeles, the scholar Kellie Jones called him an heir to the great multidisciplinary artists David Hammons and Senga Nengudi, their "peripatetic postminimalist aesthetic" and "relentless expression as performance." She went on: "Biggers deflects. He becomes a facilitator. It is a way of escaping categorization." On his return from Japan, he said, it was elder Los Angeles artists such as Varnette Honeywood and Samella Lewis who took him under their wing and pointed him to art school. He would drive to the desert to visit Noah Purifoy in his found object sculpture garden. "It felt like going to see the oracle," he said. "It gave me the inspiration to see that you don't have to follow the norms." Like many with Southern roots, Mr. Biggers had some quilters in the family. His epiphany, however, came with the landmark "Quilts of Gee's Bend" show at the Whitney Museum in 2002. In the magisterial work of the Alabama quilters, he said, he saw all the possibilities of painting, and more. "There was color, modulation, rhythm, and all these compositional things," he said. "But seeing them in these beautiful textile works made by a woman's hands, it was touching on sculpture, touching on the body, touching on politics." In the studio, Mr. Biggers showed a few quilt pieces in progress one, with light purple and green squares, that he was turning into a landscape with boughs and yellow blossoms; another, mostly orange and gray, onto which he added gold strips to complicate the lattice motif. Lurking on one quilt was a QR code; once scanned, it opened an audio track by Moon Medicin. Mr. Biggers's quilt work has grown in the same years that the Black Lives Matter movement has intensified, parallel to his own increasingly furious sculptures addressing violence and responding to the cascade of mass circulated videos of Black deaths. His "BAM" series of gunshot statuettes, which he began in 2015 in a rage, are dedicated to victims of police killings whom we have come to know by their first names: "BAM (for Sandra), "BAM (for Philando)," and so on. They are not depicted directly, but symbolically, by means of an African figurative sculpture dipped in wax and taken to a shooting range; the damaged but heroic effigy is then recast in bronze. When Mr. Biggers showed "BAM (for Michael)" in St. Louis in 2018, he met first with Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and received her blessing. He likened the works to power figures, like the Congolese nkisi: "The action of shooting them, dipping them in wax, the whole protracted process, is a way of giving them power charging them," he said. Both the method and the naming draw occasional pushback from visitors to his exhibitions, but, he said, "the only way to communicate this type of pain is to do something like this, that will make people get pissed off at you." When the Legacy Museum at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Ala., acquired "BAM (For Michael)," he felt validated. It's his own exhaustion that has caused him to pause the "BAM" series, and he is no longer watching the death videos, for now. "I can't deal with that today. It's overload," he said. "There's a point where there's no longer any detachment from these things happening." The quilts, however, continue. Their softness is their strength. Their transmittal attests to survival; whether they broadcast freedom codes during the Underground Railroad or not, an artist can inscribe them now with salutary information for today. On the studio floor, Mr. Biggers spread two untouched vintage quilts, both red, white and blue, but in clashing patterns one a grid of small squares split in triangles, the other building out from the center like a kaleidoscope image. He described a possible tall piece combining the two, with a totemic feel. Lately, he said, has been working mostly by subtraction, cutting sections from quilts. "To create two things with red, white and blue, and then take something from it, is the gesture," he said. "Working through the idea of the demise of our democracy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
LONDON Once again, Ireland's banking mess seems to be sending a message that Europe does not want to hear: only by dealing with stricken banks can the Continent expect to end its debt crisis soon. Just months after a banking collapse forced an 85 billion euro ( 120 billion) rescue package for the country, the Irish central bank is expected to announce on Thursday that the latest round of stress testing shows that the nation's banks may need 13 billion euros to cover bad real estate debt. On top of the 10 billion euros already granted by Europe and the International Monetary Fund for the banks, that would bring the total bill for Ireland's banking bust to about 70 billion euros, or more than 98 billion. Some specialists say the final tally could be closer to 140 billion, an extraordinary amount for a country whose annual output is 241 billion. Trading in shares of Irish Life and Permanent, the only domestic bank to have avoided a state bailout, was suspended Wednesday after reports that it might have to seek government aid as well. Dermot O'Leary, chief economist for Goodbody Stockbrokers in Dublin, says that Ireland can no longer afford to shoulder the still growing burden of its banks. The nation's interest payments are set to rise to 13 percent of government revenue by 2012 a figure that trails only Greece's 18 percent, Mr. O'Leary wrote in perhaps the most definitive report to date on Ireland's financial ills. "The Irish stress tests will be an important call to arms that shows that it cannot keep putting up the cost for recapitalizing its banks," he said. "You need burden sharing with the bondholders. Without that, the debt becomes unsustainable." Many proposals have been put forward to deal with the issue, including requiring bondholders to share in losses, as Mr. O'Leary and the new Irish government suggest, and a United States style stress test with teeth, which would name and shame front line banks and require them to raise capital. But European governments have stuck to their position that such measures would further fuel investor fears, rather than calm them. The second stress test of European banks now under way is beginning to be regarded as too weak, much as the first one was. In the meantime, the condition of the banks is worsening. In Spain, which is having a brutal housing bust like Ireland's, fresh data shows that problem loans are growing at their fastest level in a year. And Portuguese and Greek banks, with their Irish counterparts, have become dependent on short term financing from the European Central Bank for their survival as their economies deteriorate and doubts increase about their ability to repay their debts. "Europe hesitates to deal with the banking problem for two reasons," said Daniel Gros, the director for the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. "Our policy makers saw Lehman and want to avoid a repeat of the experience at any cost," he said, referring to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. "And the weak banks in Germany and elsewhere are too politically connected to fail." Irish taxpayers have been left responsible since the government guaranteed all the liabilities of its banks two years ago. The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have refused to accept the notion that investors who bought the bonds of Irish banks, in effect financing their reckless lending, should share the pain with some loss on their holdings. But a newly elected government has become more vocal in arguing that 29 billion in unsecured senior debt which is not tied to an asset and as a result is deemed riskier from the start is ripe for restructuring because the banks that issued it, like Anglo Irish, have essentially failed and been taken over by the government. So the government should not be obligated to keep paying interest. It is not clear who owns the senior Irish debt; analysts guess it is a mix of European banks and bargain hunting hedge funds. What is clear is Europe's opposition to imposing reductions in the value of these bonds, often called haircuts. That view was reaffirmed this week when a central bank board member, Jurgen Stark of Germany, described such a move as populist and one that could feed a wider investor panic. Should investors respond by driving down the value of government bonds from the weaker euro zone economies, the pain would most likely be felt by all. The Continent's big banks in particular would suffer because many have large piles of sovereign debt, which has yet to be marked down to its market value. According to Goldman Sachs, European banks hold 270 billion in Greek, Irish and Portuguese bonds. Greek banks are the most exposed, with 87 billion, mostly in Greek debt, but German banks hold 62 billion in total and French banks 26 billion. Hypo Real Estate, a commercial lender now wholly owned by the German government, is the largest holder of Irish sovereign debt, with 14.5 billion. With bank lending growth negligible and capital levels thin, especially in the weaker euro zone economies, a fresh round of write offs is the last thing governments want. The problem is compounded because banks account for a much larger share of national economies in Europe than they do in the United States. In Ireland, bank assets are 2.5 times the size of its economy. A recent review of the European banking sector by Morgan Stanley shows that the rest of Europe is also heavily reliant on the health of its banks. The five largest banks in Britain are 3.5 times the size of the country's economy, 4.4 times in the Netherlands, 3.25 times in France and two times in Spain. In Germany, the figure is 1.5 times gross domestic product, but that excludes the biggest, Deutsche Bank, which is mainly an investment bank. (The comparable figure for the United States is 60 percent of economic output.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York said on Friday that it did not plan to accept future gifts from the family of Mortimer D. Sackler, a philanthropist and former board member whose money has been met with growing unease in the art world as his family's pharmaceutical interests have been linked to the opioid crisis. The Guggenheim's decision was announced one day after Tate, which runs some of the most important art museums in Britain, announced a similar move, saying that "in the present circumstances we do not think it right to seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers." Earlier this week, Britain's National Portrait Gallery also spurned the Sackler family, saying it would not accept a long discussed 1.3 million donation from one of the family's foundations, the London based Sackler Trust. The Guggenheim announced its decision on Friday in a brief statement that did not mention the opioid crisis or Mr. Sackler's past on the museum's board. A museum spokeswoman declined on Friday night to explain its rationale for the move or its decision making process. In the statement, the museum said members of the family had donated 9 million to the Guggenheim between 1995 and 2015, including 7 million to establish and support the Sackler Center for Arts Education. The spokeswoman said the center's name was contractual and the museum had no plans to change it. "No contributions from the Sackler family have been received since 2015," the statement said. "No additional gifts are planned, and the Guggenheim does not plan to accept any gifts." Representatives for the Sackler family were initially unaware on Friday of the Guggenheim's decision, which was earlier reported by the website HyperAllergic. A spokeswoman for Mortimer D. Sackler said in a statement that the family's commitment to philanthropy had not wavered. "It has been a privilege for Mortimer Sackler to serve on the Guggenheim's board of trustees for nearly 20 years and to support the vital work of the museum," the statement said. Mr. Sackler's spokeswoman said he stepped down from the Guggenheim board last year because he was "overextended." A spokeswoman for the Guggenheim said the museum did not comment on matters of board governance. The decision by a series of leading institutions to spurn gifts by the Sacklers, major donors on both sides of the Atlantic, is a potent sign of the deepening disquiet within the art world over the family's connection to the opioid crisis. Members of the Sackler family own Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, a powerful and enormously profitable painkiller whose aggressive marketing in the 1990s is widely seen as a root cause of the opioid crisis. In 2007, Purdue's parent company pleaded guilty to a federal felony charge of misbranding OxyContin with the intent to defraud or mislead. The company currently faces hundreds of lawsuits over its links to the opioid crisis, and a smaller number of lawsuits has been filed against individual members of the Sackler family. More than 200,000 people have died in the United States over the last two decades from overdoses of prescription opioids. The Sacklers have donated substantial sums of money to cultural institutions in Europe and the United States through five foundations that have been run by family members, including Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, brothers who served as co chief executives of Purdue. Members of the family have donated millions of dollars to cultural institutions since the 1970s, and their generous giving continued after OxyContin hit the market in 1996. In some years, the Mortimer D. Sackler Foundation has listed Purdue Pharma as one of its sources of money. Last month, Daniel Weiss, the president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said in a statement that it valued its longstanding relationship with the Sackler family, whose name is on the wing housing the museum's showpiece Temple of Dendur. But he said the museum was "currently engaging in a further review of our detailed gift acceptance policies, and we will have more to report in due course." "The Sackler family has been connected with the Met for more than a half century," Mr. Weiss's statement said. "The family is a large extended group and their support of The Met began decades before the opioid crisis." A spokesman for the Met said on Friday that it had nothing to add to Mr. Weiss's statement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When I read the preface to 's new memoir, I was annoyed/hurt (you decide) that my own works went unmentioned while those of so many others (Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford) were, but after the introduction, as White writes about his heart attack, subsequent surgery and the days of hallucinations that followed, my attitude softened. Finally, well into his memories of Marilyn Schaefer, a good friend and Iowa girl, he writes that her journals "were disappointingly absent of comments about me." So O.K., it happens to the best of us. White has written 27 previous books, both fiction and nonfiction. His first, "Forgetting Elena," published in 1973, was described in The New York Times as "obsessively fussy and yet uncannily beautiful." His most famous, perhaps, is "A Boy's Own Story," a brisk, mostly autobiographical evocation of how it felt to grow up in the 1950s, edging toward an understanding that he was gay, and what that meant. White has written biographies of Proust, Rimbaud and Genet. "The Unpunished Vice" pulls together his lived life and his reading life; what he cares about is giving the reader a sense of some of the authors he has enjoyed the most, and from whom he has learned the most. For whatever reason, Ed at 14 was not struck, as I was, by books assigned at school, like "David Copperfield." Instead, on a summer trip to a lake in northern Michigan, he lost himself for days in "Death in Venice," "stared at accusingly by the knotty pine eyes on the planks lining the walls." Here he found the essence reading was a transgression against the norm, to be pursued in private, to be enjoyed for the pleasure of the story and the guilt of reading it. White's favorite authors continued to be transgressors: Jean Giono, Ronald Firbank, Jean Cocteau. He goes back and forth between authors he has met (he's definitely in the loop) and those whose writing has influenced his.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. Paul G. Vallas, a leader in the effort to shake up American education, has wrestled with unions in Chicago, taken on hurricane ravaged schools in New Orleans and confronted a crumbling educational system in Haiti. Now he faces what may be his most vexing challenge yet: Fending off a small but spirited crowd of advocates working to unseat him as superintendent of one of Connecticut's lowest performing and highest poverty school districts. Bridgeport, a relatively small urban school district with just 21,000 students, is at the center of one of the most contentious educational disputes in the country as Mr. Vallas seeks to salvage his hard charging agenda amid complaints that he is unqualified for the job. Parents are upset over his plans to increase the use of student testing. Union officials have denounced his insistence that administrators frequently visit classrooms to evaluate teachers, as well as his history of enthusiastic support for charter schools. And community activists argue that he consistently shuts out dissenting voices. "We thought we had a good guy," said Tammy Boyle, a parent leader and mother of two children. "But at each and every turn, he has ignored the wishes and the voices of the people of Bridgeport." But Mr. Vallas has his admirers. Leon Woods, 51, an unemployed carpenter, credited a program for struggling students started by Mr. Vallas with helping put his son on track to graduation. "I've seen the difference," Mr. Woods said. "I've seen the change." Mr. Vallas, who has moved to impose a standardized curriculum and to reorganize central offices in Bridgeport, said he was dismayed by the vitriol. On blogs, which he calls "electronic graffiti," his critics have called him a racist and compared him to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The school district's student population is 49 percent Hispanic and 39 percent black. "There are some gigantic egos in this town," Mr. Vallas said in an interview. "No good deed goes unpunished." Mr. Vallas, who makes 234,000 a year, arrived in Bridgeport less than two years ago with a mandate to rattle the status quo in one of Connecticut's poorest cities. He was appointed by a state controlled panel, but a court ruling early in his tenure left him reporting to a locally elected school board, with several of its members calling for his ouster. Now Mr. Vallas, a veteran of big city education battles, faces the once unimaginable prospect that he will be driven out of town by summer's end. A retired judge filed a lawsuit arguing that his lack of an education degree makes him unfit for the office, despite his years of experience running other school districts. Last month, a superior court judge agreed, and now Mr. Vallas has appealed the case to the Connecticut Supreme Court. The battle in Bridgeport highlights the divisiveness of change in American education. Critics of the existing system are pushing centralized control, weaker teacher tenure protections and expanded charter schools, and some have made installing superintendents with backgrounds outside of education a priority, causing rifts in many districts. Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, said the opposition to Mr. Vallas was "beyond ludicrous." He said too many school districts were afraid of innovation, clinging to "archaic ideas." "This, to me, is just another painfully obvious, crystal clear example of people caught in an old paradigm," Mr. Duncan said in an interview. "This is the tip of the iceberg." Mr. Vallas was hired in late 2011 to much fanfare: a nationally known advocate of change in education, with stints in Philadelphia, Chicago and New Orleans on his resume, coming to the aid of a modest school district mired in budget cuts. But almost immediately, his support began to erode. The state of Connecticut had been overseeing the Bridgeport district, responding to a dire fiscal situation, but two months into Mr. Vallas's tenure, the Connecticut Supreme Court ordered the return of an elected school board. Parents and community advocates who had long opposed the state's intervention rejoiced. And the Working Families Party, a liberal coalition based in New York City with outposts in Connecticut, made removing Mr. Vallas its mission. A memo circulated recently by the Working Families Party criticized Mr. Vallas's hiring of outside consultants, suggesting he was working to privatize the system. "He abuses local school districts to create profits for his business allies, and implements extreme policies that exacerbate racial and economic inequality in the schools," the memo stated. Mr. Vallas's opponents said they worried he would move, as he had in other cities, to demand concessions from teachers in contract negotiations, and to expand charter schools, which the opponents believe would drain money from other public schools. Mr. Vallas had a vulnerability: despite his decades of experience in schools and a master's degree in political science, he lacked a degree in education, as required by Connecticut law. The state allowed for an exemption, but Mr. Vallas was required to complete a condensed version of the traditional 13 month certification program over the course of several months. "I didn't view it cynically and I didn't complain," Mr. Vallas said. But in public, he seemed skeptical of the requirement, at one point arguing, "That is like saying Michael Jordan can't coach basketball because he doesn't have teacher certification." His detractors were outraged by the remark, saying it illustrated his arrogant approach to leadership. Mr. Vallas completed the course, which involved speaking with a professor a few times and writing six papers. But Carmen L. Lopez, a retired judge and education activist, filed a challenge in April contending that Mr. Vallas's course work was a sham. "Bridgeport was viewed as so second class that it could have an unqualified school superintendent," Ms. Lopez said in an interview. "They don't do this in the suburbs." The legal case has reignited tensions in Bridgeport. Three Working Families Party members have joined a Democrat on the school board in calling for the city to stop paying Mr. Vallas's legal fees; a five member majority, led by the board's chairman, Kenneth H. Moales Jr., has resisted those demands. "I don't participate in coups," said Mr. Moales, a defender of Mr. Vallas. Last week, parents gathered before a school board meeting to hang posters denouncing Mr. Vallas; as the meeting got under way, board members shouted at and interrupted one another.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
As Kids, They Starred in Holiday Hits . They Moved On. Can We? There are child actors, and then there are Christmas movie child actors. A seasonal subset known for their twinkly eyed, scene stealing work, they occupy a perennially nostalgic place in cinema history. But what happens when they grow up? A fan once asked Ian Petrella, who played Ralphie's snowsuit clad little brother, Randy, in "A Christmas Story" (1983), to do the "I can't put my arms down" line. Only it was when Petrella's voice was changing. "I did it, and there was a horrified look on their face, like, 'Oh my God, why did I ask him to do that?'" he said. "I don't do it anymore." Now 44, Petrella has forged a new career as a puppeteer, and others who started their careers as he did have followed similarly disparate paths. Here, five former child actors from beloved holiday movies reveal what it's like to be part of your annual living room obsessions. The character Susan was originally written as a boy named Jonathan in the 1994 remake of the tale of a department store Santa who claims to be the real deal. But the filmmakers changed the role for Mara Wilson, who had charmed the previous year in "Mrs. Doubtfire." "My mom told me it was about a little girl who didn't believe in Santa Claus, and I said, 'Oh, is she Jewish like us?'" Wilson recalled. Even at 7, Wilson wasn't sold on Hollywood's obsession with making kids adorable and resented changes to the John Hughes script that she believed dumbed down her role. "I didn't feel like my cuteness was my defining aspect," she said. "And then it's even harder once you go through puberty and suddenly people are like, 'You're not as cute anymore, therefore, you are useless.'" Now 32 and a writer and voice artist for audiobooks and shows like "Big Hero 6: The Series," Wilson fondly remembers shooting "Miracle" in the sweltering Chicago summer with her co star Elizabeth Perkins. "It was 100 degrees out, and we were in layers of corduroy and wool," she said. "There were all these flies on set, and Elizabeth smashed one against a wall and then walked away, looking gorgeous and elegant, with a smashed fly on her palm. It was so gross, but it's those weird, funny memories that stick with you." At 13, Ratray found himself on the director Chris Columbus's "chaotic" Chicago set, where the most famous actor to him was Big Bob, a tarantula that had starred in "Arachnophobia." Ratray returned for "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" two years later and filmed Michael Jackson on his video camera when the singer visited Macaulay Culkin on set. "Catherine O'Hara opened the door for Michael Jackson to walk into the 'Home Alone' house," Ratray said. "That's a moment that will never happen again." Now 42, he continues to act, recently in "Hustlers" and "The Tick," and he's finally come to terms with his place in Christmas lore. "Being associated with one job is not the way I want my career to go, but I have realized that 'Home Alone' has become bigger than my ego," he said. "It is this iconic experience and it's more about the people who watch it than the people who are in it." Living in an idyllic, Nancy Meyers approved house in "The Holiday" (2006) was a far cry from Miffy Englefield's working class, occasionally homeless childhood in Hampshire, England. While shooting in Los Angeles and Britain, the then 6 year old and her onscreen little sister, Emma Pritchard, helped make the stars that hung in their characters' bedroom tent and improvised "Mr. Napkin Head" lines with their movie dad, Jude Law. At the end of filming, Law and Cameron Diaz, who played his love interest in the story of two women swapping homes at the holidays , gave the girls denim jackets customized with their names. "They made all this time for these two little kids running around," Englefield, now 20, recalled. After the shoot, the transition back to British public housing was difficult, and it was nearly impossible for Englefield's single dad to keep driving her to auditions while also taking care of her siblings. By 12, she'd taken solace in the local punk scene. "At school, people were a bit funny about the fact that I used to be an actress, but I could go to these gigs and be around people who didn't care," she said. Englefield now works as a barista and performs regionally as a singer songwriter. She's also game for a sequel to "The Holiday." "My character, Sophie, could be some really cool, artsy girl now," she said. "I think a lot of the cast would probably get a shock at my tattoos and piercings, but it would be lovely." When 8 year old Eric Lloyd arrived on "The Santa Clause" set in 1994, he knew Tim Allen, only as "the guy my dad likes from that show he watches." Allen was at the height of his "Home Improvement" fame when he took the role of a regular dad forced into sleigh duty on the big guy's most important night. But Lloyd, who played Allen's movie son, Charlie, was preoccupied with the toys filling the massive Santa's workshop set in Toronto and the disappointing reality that brown paint was used for onscreen hot cocoa. On a day off, Lloyd fell and hit his mouth on a rock, knocking out two of his teeth. "I woke up to the producers and director above my bed being like, 'How bad is this? Can we fix this?'" he said. They created fake teeth and, in the immediate aftermath, Charlie's dialogue was rearranged to hide the injury. "When Tim is talking to Bernard the Elf in the workshop, you see me on a train smiling and waving with my mouth closed strangely," Lloyd said, "because the inside was all swollen." Olivia Olson belted out Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" as Joanna in "Love Actually," the 2003 British comedy of holiday vignettes, but her 10 year old voice was so powerful, producers feared it would be unbelievable to audiences. "I recorded it and they were like, 'O.K., that was great, but can you just maybe do it not so great?'" she said. "I was very confused by that." Now 27, the Los Angeles native who had a crush on the actor who played her onscreen love interest, Thomas Brodie Sangster, during filming and learned how to cry on cue from another co star, Emma Thompson is back in London after appearing on "The X Factor: Celebrity." "Everyone's always asking me, 'Why haven't you done anything since 'Love Actually'?' And I'm like, 'I have.'" That would include a decade of voice over work on shows like "Phineas and Ferb" and "Adventure Time," as well as releasing her debut solo album in 2018.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Credit...Gabby Jones for The New York Times Even as vaccines are hailed as our best hope against the coronavirus, dozens of scientific groups are working on an alternate defense: monoclonal antibodies. These therapies shot to prominence just this month after President Trump got an infusion of an antibody cocktail made by Regeneron and credited it for his apparent recovery, even calling it a "cure." Monoclonal antibodies are distilled from the blood of patients who have recovered from the virus. Ideally, antibodies infused early in the course of infection or even before exposure, as a preventive may provide swift immunity. An enthusiastic Mr. Trump has promised to distribute these experimental drugs free to anyone who needs them. But they are difficult and expensive to produce. At the moment, Regeneron has enough to treat only 50,000 patients; the supply is unlikely to exceed a few million doses in the foreseeable future. "A single dose goes a long way, meaning we can treat more people," said Kartik Chandran, a virologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the group's leader. In mice and laboratory tests, Prometheus's antibody protects against not just the coronavirus, but also the SARS virus and similar bat viruses suggesting that the treatment may protect against any coronaviruses emerging in the future. A study published last year recorded about 400 strains of bat origin coronaviruses in China, some of which had already spilled over into people. Among scientists, Dr. Chandran and Prometheus are famous for careful and clever work that has unearthed critical insights into deadly pathogens. While working on Ebola, for example, the team discovered a new entryway into human cells used by the virus, and used that information to design an antibody combination that works against all major strains of Ebola. "They do very innovative stuff," said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. "If they find something cool, they dig deep." Antibodies are as variable as the people who produce them. Some antibodies are weaker than others; some target a different part of the coronavirus than others; and some are powerful protectors, while a small number may even turn against the body, as they do in autoimmune diseases. Monoclonal antibodies are artificially synthesized copies of the most effective antibodies produced naturally by patients. In late February, AbCellera fished out an apparent winner from among 550 antibodies drawn from the blood of an infected patient. Barely three months later, partner Eli Lilly began the first trial of a synthesized version in patients. In March, Dr. McLellan was the first to publish the structure of the new coronavirus in the journal Science. He supplied Adimab, Prometheus's commercial arm, with the pathogen's "spike protein," a protrusion on its surface that latches on to human cells and breaks in. Using the protein as a lure, Adimab snared 200 antibodies from the patient sample. Dr. Chandran screened those antibodies against a proxy for the coronavirus, and Dr. Dye against the live virus in a high safety laboratory. Together, they refined the list to seven antibodies that recognized both SARS and the new coronavirus. Scientists at Adimab then enhanced the neutralizing power of one antibody by about 100 fold, yet retaining its effectiveness against all SARS family coronaviruses. "The goal was to do what we did with Ebola find an antibody that not only works against the current virus, but also past viruses that might re emerge, like SARS, and future viruses that exist already in the bat reservoir," said Laura Walker, an immunologist and a director at Adimab. "If you had something on Day 1 to prevent all of this from happening in the first place, that would be a very good thing." Monoclonal antibodies can rapidly prevent the virus from taking hold in the body say, in the residents of a nursing home with one confirmed case of infection. Vaccines, which require weeks to unspool an immune response, are useless in such a scenario. But limited production capacity is likely to keep monoclonal antibodies out of reach for most people. Regeneron expects to have enough of its cocktail to treat 300,000 patients within the next few months. The company may eventually produce about two million doses annually worldwide in partnership with Roche. Eli Lilly hopes to have 100,000 doses available later this month. Even dozens of companies manufacturing antibodies could not produce the billions of doses required for the world or just the minimum estimate of 25 million doses needed for Covid 19 patients and high risk people in the United States alone. And it's not clear how quickly manufacturing capacity could be scaled up. For one, the treatments are made in specialized facilities with ingredients sterile vials, protein resins, culture media needed to make other antibodies and vaccines, as well. "It's a finite capacity, and there are only so many things you can do to try to increase that capacity," said John Kokai Kun, the director of external scientific collaboration at U.S. Pharmacopeia, an organization that monitors manufacturing quality. The antibodies are also expensive to produce. Some cost up to 200,000 even the cheapest cost about 15,000 per year of treatment, making them unattainable for all but the richest of countries, according to a report released in August. "I don't see monoclonal antibodies being at large scale use in the public," Dr. Kokai Kun said. "They're just too complicated to make and too expensive to really be effective in that regard." Dozens more companies, and scores of academic groups including many in China are in the hunt for antibodies against the coronavirus. Given the urgent need, some may combine their resources as some did at the height of the AIDS pandemic to keep prices affordable for low and middle income countries. In July, six companies, including Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca, successfully appealed to the Department of Justice to allow them to share information about manufacturing facilities, raw materials and supplies without violating antitrust laws. Using a single antibody, as Lilly does, poses some risk of the virus mutating to escape it. Prometheus is testing its first antibody in isolation, but plans to create a cocktail with a second antibody that is specific to the new coronavirus. The two antibodies have to be chosen carefully to complement each other or, at the very least, to not hinder each other, because they bind within the same small piece of the virus. But each additional antibody requires more manufacturing capacity, increasing time and cost. For now, the first priority is a single powerhouse antibody that broadly protects against bat origin coronaviruses, Dr. Chandran said. "We believe it's a matter of when, and not if, the next coronavirus spillover happens."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Some tennis matches are tragedies. Some are comedies. Some are farces. And the outfits are pretty nifty, too. With the sport's mix of grace and ferocity, brains and brute force, tennis has thwacked its way into plenty of plays, from Shakespeare's "Henry V" to Amanda Peet's forthcoming "Our Very Own Carlin McCullough." Here's a sampling of recent stage upsets and smashes. The disgraced tennis great Bill Tilden swung again in A.R. Gurney's biographical drama, which was staged at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in 2004 and starred John Michael Higgins in the title role. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley wrote that the play, about a gentlemanly athlete and dogged sexual predator, "diffuses its potential impact by assembling notebooks' worth of research and then laying it out in the manner of a conscientious student's term paper." In adapting Witold Gombrowicz's "Possessed," the physical theater troupe Pig Iron and the playwright Adriano Shaplin made a Gothic murder mystery a lot sportier. As intrigue swirls in a Polish country home, characters volleyed balls and accusations. The Times critic described the 2004 production as "a Tilt a Whirl of a show that leaves you dizzy and means to." Terrence McNally's 2007 play is best remembered for its ace cast, Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes. They played the members of a long estranged women's doubles team, finally reunited at the United States Open. Ben Brantley characterized the drama's central conflict as a "fight between two valiant, vibrant actresses against a swamp of a play that keeps trying to suck the life out of them. " Andy Bragen's 2016 four hander with an unpublishable title premiered at 59E59 Theaters last year. Mr. Bragen's heated outburst during an ostensibly friendly match was its inspiration. As two men relive the match and the ensuing tirade, their girlfriends provide color commentary. 'Scenes From Court Life, or the whipping boy and his prince' In Sarah Ruhl's intricate political drama, directed by Mark Wing Davey at the Yale Repertory Theater last year, siblings Jeb and George W. Bush vie for dominance on the tennis court and off it, too. They're joined in competition by the Stuart monarchs Charles I and Charles II.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"I am, and we are, the new law that has not been written," Chesney Snow proclaims at the conclusion of his autobiographical mixed media stage show, "The Unwritten Law," at Dixon Place. It's a broad, vague political declaration, delivered at the end of a monologue that covers, in a scant few minutes, the black experience in America from slavery to mass incarceration, name dropping Talib Kweli and Martin Luther King Jr. along the way. Talk of systemic racism is necessary food for thought in this America, but it's abruptly and awkwardly incorporated into the production, whose primary focus is the story of Mr. Snow's life from childhood to the Broadway stage, conveyed through spoken word, live music and dance. Beginning with an anecdote about his mother getting attacked on the street before he was born, then transitioning to the story of an ancestor's lynching in 1919, before fast forwarding back to his own timeline in the 1980s, Mr. Snow risks muddling his narrative in an attempt to give his story historical heft. Featuring poverty, physical and sexual abuse, and addiction, this stage memoir includes more than its fair share of misfortune, but it's undone by the gaps in its telling: Too often characters or situations are introduced and then forgotten, leaving behind, say, a suddenly imprisoned father or a missing child.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LOS ANGELES For weeks, "Roma," the Netflix movie directed by Alfonso Cuaron, has occupied an odd position in Hollywood: both omnipresent and mysterious. The combination of Mr. Cuaron's powerful filmmaking and Netflix's marketing muscle has pushed the drama about Mexico City life in the 1970s to the front of the Oscar race. Everywhere you turn in the movie capital, or so it seems, people are discussing the merits of "Roma" or gazing at a Netflix ad playing up the film's 10 Oscar nominations. Yet the unique way "Roma" was released a three week exclusive run in theaters before arriving online, with Netflix refusing to disclose ticket sales has left Mr. Cuaron's film encircled in questions. Just who is watching it? And where? For the first time, Netflix is offering bits of information about the "Roma" audience and big screen rollout, putting to bed the notion asserted by rival studios that the film received only a token release in theaters. "The theatrical release has been way beyond even my highest expectations," Mr. Cuaron said. "I thought we might be limited to the cosmopolitan centers. We're now in Waco, Texas. We're in Boise, Idaho!" The director said Netflix had initially committed to theatrical release in about seven countries. "Roma" has now played in 41. In total, "Roma" has appeared in 1,100 theaters around the world since it was released on Nov. 21, according to Netflix. About 250 of those locations have been in the United States, where the film continues to run despite its availability in living rooms and on smartphones. Netflix released "Roma" on its global streaming platform (190 countries) on Dec. 14. In some cases, Netflix has paid theaters to show the film in a contentious practice that is the equivalent of self publishing in cinema. Last weekend, "Roma" played in 100 theaters in the United States; 45 of those were new, including locations in Wisconsin, Maine and Pennsylvania, according to Netflix. Theaters in 12 cities have played the movie in 70 millimeter format, a premium film format associated with Hollywood spectacles of the 1950s and 1960s. "Roma" may be playing in more theaters than expected, but streaming remains its primary home. Netflix declined to say how "Roma" has performed online in the United States, but said it had caught fire in Mexico: Mr. Cuaron's film has been viewed on 50 percent of Netflix's Mexico accounts, or nearly four million, ranking as the service's second most popular original movie ever in the country, behind "Bird Box." To count as a "view," at least 70 percent of the movie must be streamed, Netflix said. Netflix's lack of transparency about viewer information has been met by howls of protest by competitors, who say there is no credibility to the data that does seep out, because there is no independent verification or context. In particular, Netflix has enraged art film distributors by keeping box office figures for "Roma" under wraps: Why should we have to withstand public scrutiny when they don't have to? 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. One person who has been publicly critical of Netflix is John Fithian, the president of the National Association of Theater Owners, who has contended that the company is only giving "Roma" a theatrical run as part of disingenuous effort to court Oscar voters and make Mr. Cuaron happy. "In its pursuit of prestige films and filmmakers, Netflix has had to turn to the theatrical space that it has too often denigrated," he wrote in a recent column in Variety. The theatrical footprint for "Roma" is tiny by blockbuster standards. "Bohemian Rhapsody," the Queen biopic, rolled out on 4,000 screens in North America in November and has played more than 10,000 locations worldwide over the course of its run. But "Roma" is not a Hollywood movie. It is an unhurried black and white film with characters who speak Spanish and Mixtec. By foreign language film standards, its theatrical release has been respectable. The Polish period romance "Cold War," for instance, has played in 217 theaters in the United States since arriving on Dec. 21, generating 2.1 million in ticket sales. The film will expand to roughly 275 locations on Friday. ("Cold War," nominated for three Oscars, comes from Amazon Studios, which adheres to traditional Hollywood release patterns; it will not be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video until March 22.) Netflix cobbled together a theatrical run for "Roma" despite opposition from the biggest theater owners, including AMC Theaters and Regal Cinemas. Most movies still arrive in the same way they have for decades: first in theaters for an exclusive run (about 90 days) and then in homes. AMC, Regal and other theater companies worry that shortening that period will hurt their already fragile business. Why trek to theaters and buy tickets if the same film will be available at home (or in your pocket) just a few weeks (or days) later? Mr. Cuaron, who has become something of a Netflix evangelist, said "Roma" had proved that kind of thinking wrong. "I'm always going to defend and fight for the theatrical experience," he said. "But they are completely compatible," he continued, referring to streaming and theatrical exhibition. "And in many ways one informs the other." On Saturday night, Valerie Navarrete and her mother, Martha, drove through a downpour to catch a 7 p.m. screening of "Roma" at the Regency 14 multiplex in Commerce, south of Los Angeles. Yes, they subscribe to Netflix and could have watched the film at home, Valerie Navarrete acknowledged. "But my mom really wanted to see it on the big screen," she said. The screening attracted 26 people. The theater had about 100 seats. Tickets cost 10. Ms. Navarrete said in a text message the next day, "My mom loved seeing a movie that actually captures where we are from in Mexico. There are not many Hispanic figures like this in movies. It gave her pleasure to share the experience with other people."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Stephen K. Bannon has always been more comfortable when he was trying to tear down institutions not work inside them. With his return to Breitbart News, Mr. Bannon will be free to lead the kind of ferocious assault on the political establishment that he relishes, even if sometimes that means turning his wrath on the White House itself. Hours after his ouster from the West Wing, he was named to his former position of executive chairman at the hard charging right wing website and led its evening editorial meeting. And Mr. Bannon appeared eager to move onto his next fight. "In many ways, I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on," he said Friday. "And anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with." "The president was buoyed to election by capturing the hearts and minds of a populist, nationalist movement," Alex Marlow, Breitbart's editor in chief, said Friday evening. "A lot of it was anti Wall Street, anti corporatist, anti establishment. And now we're seeing that a lot of these guys remaining inside the White House are exactly the opposite of what we told you you were going to get." Mr. Bannon's long enemies list will include anyone he deems hostile to the nationalist, conservative agenda that he viewed himself as the guardian of in the White House. And his most personal causes will involve some the biggest fights that lie ahead between President Trump and Congress. Most immediately, he has told associates that he wants to ensure that any spending resolution approved next month by Congress includes money to begin construction on the wall that Mr. Trump has promised to build on the southern border. If Congress balks, Mr. Bannon has advised the president to issue a veto, which would trigger a government shutdown. "You can't play by the Marquess Queensberry's rules," he often tells colleagues, using a characteristically colorful historical analogy, in this case to the 19th century code of conduct for boxing. Whether he punches hard is not in doubt. The question that he and other like minded conservatives see as fundamental for their cause is whether their efforts will have any effect on a White House that they fear is now dominated by people whose worldview is decidedly more moderate than Mr. Bannon's. Mr. Kushner; Ms. Trump; Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser; and Mr. Cohn have all been the target of unrelenting attacks by Breitbart and others on the right for their efforts to draw Mr. Trump to the political center. The site has routinely dismissed Mr. Cohn as a "globalist" and a "swamp creature"; in headlines, his name would sometimes appear bracketed by globe emojis, to underscore the point also an allusion to the triple parentheses that anti Semites on social media use to denote Jewish names. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Breitbart has mocked Ms. Powell and Mr. Kushner for partying together in the Hamptons with members of the "fake news" media and Democratic politicians. "We're going to have a keen eye to see if Trump is able to continue connecting with his base, as the numbers just become more overwhelmingly globalist, centrist, establishment Democrat, all of those in the mix, and a lot less populist nationalists," Mr. Marlow said. Now the scenario that many conservatives long feared is reality: The centrist aides are going to be largely unchecked. "With Bannon gone, who is left to help the president shepherd his agenda through the establishment morass that wants to sink it?" said Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio host and author, who is among the most vocal proponents of the tighter immigration and trade policies the president campaigned on. "Conventional Wall Street Republicans didn't elect Donald Trump, and they won't save him. A laser beam focus on advancing his policies on trade, tax reform, immigration and infrastructure will." The veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie questioned on Friday whether Mr. Bannon's ouster was part of a looming "purge of conservatives on the White House staff." With Mr. Bannon no longer under any obligation to feign interest in working with Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell whom he privately denigrated to Mr. Trump as backstabbers who would inevitably sell him out the likelihood of a deepening and potentially paralyzing rift between the Republican Party's hard line conservatives and its leadership has only grown. Congressional Republicans have never been very enthusiastic about the pieces of Mr. Trump's agenda that most animated his core supporters. The president's proposal to cut legal immigration by half over the next 10 years fell flat on Capitol Hill. He is still waiting for approval of funding to build the border wall perhaps the central promise of his campaign. And talks to move forward with a major infrastructure improvement package have stalled. In one bit of parting advice to the president, Mr. Bannon urged Mr. Trump not to sign any government funding agreement that does not contain funding for the wall. But others in the White House have counseled the president not to pick that fight, which would lead to a government shutdown that could have disastrous political consequences. Republicans, in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, would have no one to blame but themselves. Breitbart is expected to be unsparing in its coverage of the issue. And Mr. Marlow said the absence of conservatives like Mr. Bannon was not a good sign. "At Breitbart, our thoughts are that the president can certainly do a great job despite that, but we don't think that is working for him all that well at the moment," Mr. Marlow said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
For No. 2 at Fed, White House Favors Central Banker in the Bernanke Mold WASHINGTON Stanley Fischer, the former governor of the Bank of Israel and a mentor to the Federal Reserve's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, is the leading candidate to become vice chairman of the Fed, according to former and current administration officials. If nominated, and then confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Fischer, 70, would succeed Janet L. Yellen, whom President Obama nominated to succeed Mr. Bernanke as the Fed's leader when his term ends in January. Mr. Fischer is at once a surprising choice and a popular pick among economists and investors. He is a highly regarded economist with significant policy making experience, yet many had considered his selection improbable because of his recent service in a foreign government. News about Mr. Fischer's possible nomination was reported on Israeli television. That experience could become a concern if he is nominated, as could his experience at Citigroup, where he was vice chairman between 2002 and 2005. The company's expansion during that period eventually ended in a federal bailout. As the Fed's vice chairman, Mr. Fischer would most likely exert a moderating influence on Ms. Yellen, echoing, in a way, her intellectual partnership with Mr. Bernanke. Ms. Yellen is a forceful advocate for the Fed's efforts to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. Mr. Fischer has been generally supportive of those efforts, but has raised questions about the particulars. He offered measured support at a conference last month for the Fed's bond buying campaign, describing it as "dangerous" but "necessary." At the same time, he has expressed greater skepticism about the companion effort to hold down borrowing costs by declaring that short term interest rates will remain low, describing such forward guidance as potentially confusing. "You can't expect the Fed to spell out what it's going to do. Why? Because it doesn't know," he said at a conference in September, according to The Wall Street Journal. "It's a mistake to try and get too precise." Mr. Fischer's experience on Wall Street, while potentially a political liability, could prove valuable for the Fed, which lacks officials with experience in the financial markets that it must manage and regulate. Mr. Fischer "has unrivaled international expertise and is a seasoned crisis manager complementing Yellen, who has much less experience in these areas," Krishna Guha, head of central bank strategy at the financial services firm International Strategy and Investment, wrote in a client note. Mr. Fischer stepped down in June after eight years as the leader of Israel's central bank. He drew wide praise for helping to shelter the Israeli economy from the global financial crisis, in part by moving quickly to cut interest rates. The Israeli economy grew during each of Mr. Fischer's eight years as the bank's governor, even as most developed economies collapsed into deep recessions. When Israel's strength attracted a surge of foreign investment, Mr. Fischer was again quick to respond, building up foreign reserves to limit the rise of the shekel and protect Israeli exporters. He also shepherded passage of a law that limited his own power by creating a six person committee to manage monetary policy. Mr. Fischer may be better known for the students he taught as a professor of economics at M.I.T. beginning in the late 1970s. In addition to Mr. Bernanke, the list includes Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank; N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush; and Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Students say Mr. Fischer was a formative influence who inculcated the pragmatic view that government had some power to improve economic outcomes a middle ground between the academic orthodoxies of the era. He was a pioneering figure in the effort to formalize this middle ground, helping to forge the approach now known as New Keynesianism. He then set an example for his students by entering public service in the late 1980s, working first at the World Bank and then at the I.M.F. before joining Citigroup. Mr. Bernanke cited Mr. Fischer as one of his most important mentors last month, saying that he "demonstrated that he lived what he taught." Mr. Fischer was born in what is today Zambia. He came to the United States as a graduate student and became an American citizen in 1976. When he became governor of the Bank of Israel he also accepted Israeli citizenship. Mr. Fischer has the self deprecating manner of many central bankers, but he is funnier than many of his peers. In an interview with The Washington Post, he described his first encounter with one of the seminal works of economics, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," by John Maynard Keynes. "I was immensely impressed," he said, "not because I understood it but by the quality of the English." In selecting Mr. Fischer, the White House would continue a recent pattern of reinforcing the Fed's existing direction. The White House did not comment on Mr. Fischer's possible nomination. President Obama had the unusual opportunity to replace as many as five of the seven members of the Fed's board of governors next year. Instead, he plans to replace only those who insisted on departing, retaining Ms. Yellen and Jerome H. Powell, a Republican financier. Lael Brainard, formerly the Treasury under secretary for international affairs, is a front runner to fill one of the remaining vacancies, according to people familiar with the matter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
How do you know when you are in love? No 1 800 line psychic will tell you. No notice will be sent by registered mail. Not even a ping from your iPhone. But there are a million ways of figuring it out, and we've asked some people when they knew. Here is one way: When you make a fool of yourself for her. Even three decades later. Dr. Mehmet Oz and his wife, Lisa, have been together for more than 30 years and they're still in love. Their secret? "You have to allow your spouse to reinvent themselves every seven years," the host of "The Dr. Oz Show:" said. "In some ways, I've been married to four different wives." First, she was the woman he met, then she became interested in theater, and they focused on child rearing, and more than 21 years later, she has moved from acting to production. "She's taught me different things as her interests changed," he said, which he deemed critical to staying in love. "You have to find different parts of each other to connect to." A couple of years ago, Ms. Oz, who is editor at large of the Dr. Oz the Good Life magazine, told him she didn't want material gifts anymore. She wanted him to make her stuff on Christmas, her birthday, Valentine's Day. "Anything," she said. At first, he got stressed; it's much easier to pick out something in a store. Instead, he started writing her poetry, not an easy feat, he said, when you are not a natural poet. Sometimes they rhyme. Sometimes they don't. He isn't sure how good they are. But he does it for her. Dr. Oz, 56, loves to watch her reaction as she reads them, so much so that she started reading them privately, because he studies her facial expressions so closely. "It makes her so happy," he said, "and it reminded me that she wanted me, and nothing else."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Vaccine research at the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow. Russia's vaccine is being rushed to production even though the institute hasn't completed Phase 3 trials. Vaccines are among the safest medical products in the world but only because of the intense rigor of the clinical trials that test their safety and effectiveness. When Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday that Russia had approved a coronavirus vaccine with no evidence from large scale clinical trials vaccine experts were worried. "I think it's really scary. It's really risky," said Daniel Salmon, the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Salmon and other experts said that Russia is taking a dangerous step by jumping ahead of so called Phase 3 trials, which can determine that the vaccine works better than a placebo and doesn't cause harm to some people who get it. Unlike experimental drugs given to the sick, vaccines are intended to be given to masses of healthy people. So they must clear a high bar of safety standards. If hundreds of millions of people get a vaccine, even a rare side effect could crop up in thousands of people. Over the course of the past century, researchers have developed increasingly powerful ways to test vaccines for safety and effectiveness. Some of those lessons were learned the hard way, when a new vaccine caused some harm. But vaccines are now among the safest medical products in the world thanks to the intense rigor of the clinical trials tracking their safety and effectiveness. This testing typically begins before a single person has received a new vaccine, when researchers inject it into mice or monkeys to see how they respond. If those animal studies turn out well, researchers then enlist a few dozen volunteers for a Phase 1 trial, in which all volunteers get the experimental vaccine. Doctors typically keep these volunteers under observation to make sure they don't have any immediate negative reactions, and to see whether they make antibodies against a pathogen. It's not uncommon for people to feel achiness in their muscles or even a mild fever, but these mild symptoms typically don't last long. If Phase 1 trials do not turn up serious safety problems, then researchers usually move to a Phase 2 trial, in which they inject hundreds of people and make more detailed observations. But no matter how promising these early results, Phase 3 trials can fail. The timing of Russia's announcement makes it "very unlikely that they have sufficient data about the efficacy of the product," said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician and infectious disease expert at the University of Florida who has warned against rushing the vaccine approval process. Dr. Dean noted that even vaccines that have produced promising data from early trials in humans have flopped at later stages. In a large, randomized control trial, researchers give the vaccine or a placebo to tens of thousands of people, and wait for them to encounter the virus in the real world. "Then you wait to see, do they get sick or not. Do they die or not?" said Dr. Steven Black, a vaccine expert with the Task Force for Global Health. If a vaccine is effective, fewer vaccinated volunteers will get sick than the ones who received the placebo. The Russian researchers have not yet begun that crucial test. In June, the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology at the Health Ministry of the Russian Federation registered a combined Phase 1 and 2 trial on a vaccine called Gam COVID Vac Lyo. The researchers planned to test it on 38 volunteers. They said that the vaccine was made from an adenovirus a harmless cold virus carrying a coronavirus gene, similar to what AstraZeneca and Johnson Johnson are using in their vaccines. The technology is still relatively new: The first adenovirus vaccine for any disease was approved for Ebola in June. Since then, Russian officials have claimed that they would be moving the vaccine quickly into manufacturing. Mr. Putin's announcement on Tuesday made it official. Yet the institute has never published its Phase 1 and 2 trial data. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. At Mr. Putin's announcement, Russia's Minister of Health, Mikhail Murashko, declared that "all the volunteers developed high titers of antibodies to COVID 19. At the same time, none of them had serious complications of immunization." That is the sort of result you'd expect from a Phase 1 trial. It doesn't tell you if the vaccine actually works. "This is all beyond stupid," said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. "Putin doesn't have a vaccine, he's just making a political statement." Dr. Nicole Lurie, a former assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and currently an adviser at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said the lesson that the U.S. government should draw from Mr. Putin's announcement is clear. "This is exactly the situation that Americans expect our government to avoid," she said. Along with determining whether the vaccine protects people, Phase 3 trials can reveal uncommon side effects that may not have shown up in the comparatively small number of volunteers who enrolled in the earlier phases. Just because someone gets sick or dies after getting a vaccine, however, doesn't necessarily show that the vaccine was the culprit. By comparing large groups of people who received the vaccine versus the placebo, researchers can identify unusual clusters of cases in the vaccinated participants. Along the way, vaccine developers share these results in reports to government regulators and in peer reviewed papers for scientific journals. Outside experts then evaluate the data from Phase 3 trials and give their recommendation to the F.D.A., which then decides whether to approve a vaccine for widespread use. "It's not enough for me to say I have a great product," said Dr. Salmon. "Before you use it, you need other people to really look at the data and be convinced that the benefits outweigh the risks." And even after a vaccine is licensed, researchers still keep an eye on it to make sure it's safe. As millions of people get a vaccine, even rarer side effects may emerge over time. It's also possible that certain groups of people, such as children or the elderly, turn out to face risks from a vaccine that weren't immediately clear from the Phase 3 trials. Regulators can then make adjustments to the vaccine changing the dose, for example to make it safer. The researchers have come up with a set of potential medical complications that vaccine trials should pay particular attention to. They have addressed the possibility that the vaccine could actually make people prone to worse cases of Covid 19, for example. Fortunately, the research so far shows no sign that this is happening. CEPI is coordinating the sharing of data among vaccine developers. By pooling the safety data from different vaccine developers, Dr. Black said, CEPI will be able to detect rare side effects that they might not have even considered as possible risks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
As the Creator in Justin Peck's latest work, "The Most Incredible Thing," the New York City Ballet soloist invents a clock, which is smashed by a Destroyer but magically comes back to life. Eventually, the Creator brings peace to the kingdom and wins the hand of the Princess. The elegant Mr. Stanley, 24, has been instilling a sense of peace into City Ballet ever since he joined as an apprentice in 2009. He has found much success in exploring choreographers' visions. Along with Troy Schumacher, he has worked frequently with Mr. Peck, who has featured him in all of his works for the company and has called him "one of the purest interpreters of movement that I've come across." Mr. Stanley started studying ballet at 3 in West Chester, Pa., where he trained at the Rock School for Dance Education and also studied tap and jazz. He has always picked up movement quickly, he said; even as a child, he could instantly mimic what he had just seen onstage. "Maybe that's part of my hard wiring," he said. "But I could write you a list of things I'm not fast in to make up for it." During an interview at the David H. Koch Theater, City Ballet's home, the regal Mr. Stanley at times, unnervingly calm said he was never sure how to respond to compliments on his dancing because, as he put it, "Moving is like taking a vitamin; it's my means of survival." These are edited excerpts from the conversation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
WASHINGTON With little fanfare, China's currency has appreciated significantly in the last year and a half, leading many economists to question whether the exchange rate is still the most important economic issue for the United States to press with China's leaders. The rise of the renminbi up 12 percent since June 2010 on an inflation adjusted basis and 40 percent since 2005 has helped American companies by effectively reducing the cost of their products in China. In the last two years, American exports to China have risen sharply. The renminbi remains undervalued, relative to all other currencies, by 5 to 20 percent, according to various estimates. But many business executives and economists say that other issues, like intellectual property theft and barriers to entering Chinese markets, are now a bigger drag on the American economy. In his Oval Office meeting on Tuesday with Xi Jinping, China's vice president and likely next leader, President Obama discussed the currency as one of the trade practices that concerned the United States. That meeting and tough public comments by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. continued a three year campaign by the administration to convince Chinese leaders that a stronger currency is in their interest. "We are making progress, but it's not sufficient," Lael Brainard, the Treasury Department's under secretary for international affairs, said in an interview, "and we will keep on pushing." Administration officials and members of Congress have chosen not to emphasize the appreciation publicly, partly to keep pressure on China. Widespread discussion of the change could reduce support in Congress for a bill that would impose sanctions on Chinese imports to the United States and that Beijing strongly opposes. Similarly, the notion that the exchange rate was no longer as serious a problem as it had been could complicate American efforts to rally international pressure, from Brazil and other countries hurt by the renminbi's value. Politicians are also wary of seeming soft on China, given that polls show many Americans blame China to some degree for this country's economic problems. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has argued for taking stronger measures against China than Mr. Obama has. But the fact that policy makers often continue to talk about the renminbi as if the situation had not changed brings its own risks. "People on the Hill are talking the same way they were a few years ago," said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "We should be acknowledging that they've made very substantial progress. I think that would give us more credibility." Eswar S. Prasad, a Cornell and Brookings Institution economist, added, "It's hard to make the case the renminbi is very undervalued on a multilateral basis." Other analysts say that an undervaluation of 10 percent of more remains significant. Some Chinese officials have bristled recently over the lack of credit they have received for their movement. "Perceptions about the renminbi exchange rate in the international community are absolutely groundless," Li Daokui, a member of the central bank's monetary policy committee, recently said. The renminbi, he added, was "probably the only emerging economy's currency that has been rising against the U.S. dollar" since last August. China's economic rise has depended on a growing factory sector that benefits from a cheap renminbi. But the currency value's has both benefits and drawbacks for the country, say economists, both in China and beyond. An inexpensive currency effectively subsidizes companies that export goods and their workers at the expense of most Chinese households, whose buying power is diminished. A more expensive renminbi gives Chinese households more buying power, by reducing the cost of imports to China. It also puts pressure on Chinese companies to develop more innovative products that bring higher paying jobs, rather than competing mostly on price. As a result, the debate over the renminbi in China often resembles a struggle between interest groups. Officials from the United States, Brazil, Europe and elsewhere have tried to strengthen the forces seeking a stronger renminbi by explaining how that will lead to more balanced, sustainable growth for the whole world. Starting in June 2010, with the worst of the global recession fading and political frustration with China rising across much of the world, American officials and others began to have more success. The renminbi has risen 8.5 percent against the dollar since June 2010, with the pace having slowed in the last six months. Taking into account the different inflation rates in the two counties, the effective increase is closer to 12 percent. The rise has helped sharply reduce China's current account surplus a measure based largely on the difference between a country's exports and imports. In 2007, the surplus equaled more than 10 percent of China's gross domestic product, a level widely seen as unsustainable. Last year, the surplus fell below 3 percent. The renminbi also rose substantially from 2005 to 2008, under pressure from President George W. Bush's administration and other governments, before holding steady from mid 2008 until mid 2010. The rise in the renminbi is not the only reason many economists think other issues, like the theft of patented technology, are more important to the American economy. Because many items are assembled in China, with parts made in other countries, a stronger renminbi affects only a small portion of the cost of many products officially made in China. Less than 4 percent of the value of an iPhone, for example, comes from Chinese labor and parts, one academic study found.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Avengers, assemble and break a leg! Marvel's mighty heroes are the stars of a new series of educational one act stage plays intended for a high school audience. Called Marvel Spotlight, the plays focus on such themes as responsibility, self image and reacting to change. Thor, Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel will be at the forefront of the inaugural set of plays , which will be offered for licensed performances and whose scripts will be available for retail purchase . "Hammered: A Thor Loki Play," by Christian Borle, depicts the squabbling brothers the Norse gods of thunder and mischief competing to impress their parents. "Squirrel Girl Goes to College: A Squirrel Girl Play," by Karen Zacarias, has the title heroine, who has all the powers of a squirrel and a girl, trying to reinvent herself at a new school. "Mirror of Most Value: A Ms. Marvel Play," by Masi Asare, is about accepting one's imperfections. Ms. Marvel is secretly Kamala Khan, a teenage Muslim girl living in Jersey City who often struggles with assimilation, her tradition bound parents, completing homework and fighting for justice. "When I began working on the play, I had only a little knowledge about Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel," Asare wrote in an email. "I loved the idea of a superhero who is a brown girl from an immigrant background (like me), someone who wants to do good in the world, but isn't always sure how to do it. So she's kind of awkward and not smooth and has her share of mishaps, but she still persists," she said. Asare said her own roots helped her relate to the hero. Her father's side of the family is from Ghana, while her mother comes from a white, working class background and grew up in California. "It's so exciting to see more and more of these kinds of stories show up in popular culture and on the stage, because when I was growing up they were few and hard to find," she said. One of the challenges of writing Ms. Marvel for the stage was thinking about how to convey her power to change her shape and shrink and grow. "In the pilot productions, the staging was really inventive in how different groups chose to show Kamala's stretchy super powers: all kinds of things from shadow puppetry to inflatable boxing gloves, clown shoes and ribbon or fabric for long arms and legs," Asare wrote. "That stuff is fun and hopefully provides opportunities for theatrical magic but what people are responding to the most is Kamala's journey as a character in the play." Marvel Spotlight is a partnership between Marvel Entertainment and Samuel French, a publisher of American and British play scripts that was acquired last year by Concord Music to move into the theater business. The Marvel Spotlight plays were created with a focus on educational institutions and are priced accordingly: license fees are 75 per performance for one play or 125 per performance for two or more. Copies of the plays, with covers by Erica Henderson, will be available for 9.95 each.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
ITHACA, N.Y. Most nursing homes had fewer nurses and caretaking staff than they had reported to the government for years, according to new federal data, bolstering the long held suspicions of many families that staffing levels were often inadequate. The records for the first time reveal frequent and significant fluctuations in day to day staffing, with particularly large shortfalls on weekends. On the worst staffed days at an average facility, the new data show, on duty personnel cared for nearly twice as many residents as they did when the staffing roster was fullest. The data, analyzed by Kaiser Health News, come from daily payroll records Medicare only recently began gathering and publishing from more than 14,000 nursing homes, as required by the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Medicare previously had been rating each facility's staffing levels based on the homes' own unverified reports, making it possible to game the system. The payroll records provide the strongest evidence that over the last decade, the government's five star rating system for nursing homes often exaggerated staffing levels and rarely identified the periods of thin staffing that were common. Medicare is now relying on the new data to evaluate staffing, but the revamped star ratings still mask the erratic levels of people working from day to day. At the Beechtree Center for Rehabilitation Nursing here, Jay Vandemark, 47, who had a stroke last year, said he often roams the halls looking for an aide not already swamped with work when he needs help putting on his shirt. Especially on weekends, he said, "It's almost like a ghost town." Nearly 1.4 million people are cared for in skilled nursing facilities in the United States. When nursing homes are short of staff, nurses and aides scramble to deliver meals, ferry bedbound residents to the bathroom and answer calls for pain medication. Essential medical tasks such as repositioning a patient to avert bedsores can be overlooked when workers are overburdened, sometimes leading to avoidable hospitalizations. "Volatility means there are gaps in care," said David Stevenson, an associate professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn. "It's not like the day to day life of nursing home residents and their needs vary substantially on a weekend and a weekday. They need to get dressed, to bathe and to eat every single day." David Gifford, a senior vice president at the American Health Care Association, a nursing home trade group, disagreed, saying there are legitimate reasons staffing varies. On weekends, for instance, there are fewer activities for residents and more family members around, he said. "While staffing is important, what really matters is what the overall outcomes are," he said. While Medicare does not set a minimum resident to staff ratio, it does require the presence of a registered nurse for eight hours a day and a licensed nurse at all times. The payroll records show that even facilities that Medicare rated positively for staffing levels on its Nursing Home Compare website, including Beechtree, were short nurses and aides on some days. On its best staffed days, Beechtree had one aide for every eight residents, while on its lowest staffed days, there was only one aide for 18 residents. Nursing levels also varied. The Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees nursing home inspections, said in a statement that it "is concerned and taking steps to address fluctuations in staffing levels" that have emerged from the new data. This month, it said it would lower ratings for nursing homes that had gone seven or more days without a registered nurse. Beechtree's payroll records showed similar staffing levels to those it had reported before. David Camerota, chief operating officer of Upstate Services Group, the for profit chain that owns Beechtree, said in a statement that the facility has enough nurses and aides to properly care for its 120 residents. But, he said, like other nursing homes, Beechtree is in "a constant battle" to recruit and retain employees even as it has increased pay to be more competitive. Mr. Camerota wrote that weekend staffing is a special challenge as employees are guaranteed every other weekend off. "This impacts our ability to have as many staff as we would really like to have," he wrote. New rating method is still flawed In April, the government started using daily payroll reports to calculate average staffing ratings, replacing the old method, which relied on homes to report staffing for the two weeks before an inspection. The homes sometimes anticipated when an inspection would happen and could staff up before it. The new records show that on at least one day during the last three months of 2017 the most recent period for which data were available a quarter of facilities reported no registered nurses at work. The Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services discouraged comparison of staffing under the two methods and said no one should expect them to "exactly match." The agency said the methods measure different time periods and have different criteria for how to record hours that nurses worked. The nursing home industry also objected, with Mr. Gifford saying it was like comparing Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures. But several prominent researchers said the contrast was not only fair but also warranted, since Medicare is using the new data for the same purpose as the old: to rate nursing homes on its website. "It's a worthwhile comparison," said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. Of the more than 14,000 nursing homes submitting payroll records, seven in 10 had lower staffing using the new method, with a 12 percent average decrease, the data show. And as numerous studies have found, homes with lower staffing tended to have more health code violations another crucial measure of quality. Even with more reliable data, Medicare's five star rating system still has shortcomings. Medicare still assigns stars by comparing a home to other facilities, essentially grading on a curve. As a result, many homes have kept their rating even though their payroll records showed lower staffing than before. Also, Medicare did not rate more than 1,000 facilities, either because of data anomalies or because they were too new to have a staffing history. There is no consensus on optimal staffing levels. Medicare has rebuffed requests to set specific minimums, declaring in 2016 that it preferred that facilities "make thoughtful, informed staffing plans" based on the needs of residents. Still, since 2014, health inspectors have cited one of every eight nursing homes for having too few nurses, federal records show. "They get burned out and they quit," said Adam Chandler, whose mother lived at Beachtree until her death earlier this year. "It's been constant turmoil, and it never ends." Medicare's payroll records for the nursing homes showed that there were, on average, 11 percent fewer nurses providing direct care on weekends and 8 percent fewer aides. Staffing levels fluctuated substantially during the week as well, when an aide at a typical home might have to care for as few as nine residents or as many as 14. Beechtree actually gets its best Medicare rating in the category of staffing, with four stars. (Its inspection citations and the frequency of declines in residents' health dragged its overall star rating down to two of five.) To Stan Hugo, a retired math teacher whose wife, Donna, 80, lives at Beechtree, staffing levels have long seemed inadequate. In 2017, he and a handful of other residents and family members became so dissatisfied that they formed a council to scrutinize the home's operation. Medicare requires nursing home administrators to listen to such councils' grievances and recommendations. Sandy Ferreira, who makes health care decisions for Effie Hamilton, a blind resident, said Ms. Hamilton broke her arm falling out of bed and has been hospitalized for dehydration and septic shock. "Almost every problem we've had on the floor is one that could have been alleviated with enough and well trained staff," Mrs. Ferreira said. Beechtree declined to discuss individual residents, but said it had investigated these complaints and did not find inadequate staffing on those days. Mr. Camerota also said that Medicare does not count assistants it hires to handle the simplest duties like making beds. In recent months, Mr. Camerota said, Beechtree "has made major strides in listening to and addressing concerns related to staffing at the facility." Mr. Hugo agreed that Beechtree has increased daytime staffing during the week under the prodding of his council. On nights and weekends, he said, it still remained too low. His wife has Alzheimer's, uses a wheelchair and no longer talks. She enjoys music, and Mr. Hugo placed earphones on her head so she could listen to her favorite singers as he spoon fed her lunch in the dining room on a recent Sunday. As he does each day he visits, he counted each nursing assistant he saw tending residents, took a photograph of the official staffing log in the lobby and compared it to what he had observed. While he fed his wife, he noted two aides for the 40 residents on the floor half what Medicare says is average at Beechtree. "Weekends are terrible," he said. While he's regularly there overseeing his wife's care, he wondered: "What about all these other residents? They don't have people who come in."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Dr. Barber and Dr. Theoharis are co chairs of the Poor People's Campaign. Dr. Tyson is a senior research scholar at Duke University. Dr. West is a professor at Harvard University. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Since the casual killing of George Floyd on camera, unprecedented protests not policy papers have radically shifted public opinion in support of the battle against systemic racism. The new nation being born in our streets may yet blossom into Langston Hughes's "land that never has been yet / and yet must be" but only if this movement refuses to let its truths be marched into the narrow cul de sac of "police reform." Yes, years of police killings of unarmed African Americans had stacked up like dry tinder. True, George Floyd's public murder furnished the spark. But freedom's forge must finish its work while the coals are hot. This is the hour to reimagine what America could become if "We the People" meant all of us. America needs what this movement intends to do: change history, after which police training manuals will follow. We have witnessed a multicolored and intergenerational uprising whose power grows more poised and peaceful by the day, winning support that reveals a newly mobilized majority in our midst. Let no one mistake peace for quiet, however, nor mistake the rage over police violence as ignoring the roots of policy violence and poverty violence. The ruthless indifference of our governments to the poor was clear well before Covid 19 laid it bare. Cries of "I can't breathe" call out in compelling shorthand America's enduring racial chasm in every measure of well being: health care and infant mortality, wages and wealth, unemployment, education, housing, policing and criminal justice, water quality and environmental safety. The bills that bustle through our legislatures offer narrow reforms of police procedures and bypass the fullness of what the protesters are saying: The children of privilege are protected not by a higher grade of policing but by deeper layers of resources and that is what ought to protect all of our children. That so many Indigenous nations have joined the protests should surprise no one. The challenges that confront African Americans are endemic to these peoples as well. Their unique, continuing struggle to exercise their sovereignty against a continuing conquest reminds us of how deep and various are our struggles against white supremacy. Their own modern Selma water cannons used on peaceful protesters on a 23 degree winter night happened near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in November 2016. The marching feet say what the Congress cannot yet hear: Our national history and character carved these scars into our body politic. Policy tinkering will not heal them. If we are to understand the pressing need for radical reconstruction of our nation in this moment, we must look back to see how 400 years of compromises with white supremacy brought us to this place. The American Revolution's dreams deferred now call us to a brighter common future. To hear that call, we might turn to Monticello, where an enslaved woman fetched future President Thomas Jefferson the lamp by which he framed God's unalienable human rights, and to Constitution Hall, where the founders secured "the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity" by compromising with racial tyranny. It is crucial to remember that many patriots of that Revolution found slavery incompatible with its meaning. Mr. Jefferson's 1774 "A Summary of the Rights of British America" claimed, "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies." That he wrote this while holding a deed to a baby girl who would one day bear him six children only marks the human paradox of chattel slavery in a democratic republic. At the Constitutional Convention, Southern delegates required that the document bow to slavery. Fearful of the North's larger electorate, the planters nixed direct national elections and created the Electoral College to constrain the popular will. They demanded their property in dark flesh be counted as three fifths of a person for purposes of white representation in Congress. Such measures gave the Southern planters power beyond their numbers; for 32 of our first 36 years, presidents hailed from Virginia and enslaved other Americans. More from "The America We Need" Jefferson knew America had gained a nation at great cost to its soul. Slavery, he predicted, was "the speck in our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later." That "tornado" roared in 1861 as the nation plunged into Civil War. Nearly 200,000 black soldiers battled for the Union. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant reported that their valor constituted "the heaviest blow yet to the Confederacy." After the victory, African American families gathered in Freedmen's Conventions across the South. These men and women sought schools for their children, protection from Ku Klux Klan terror and full citizenship. The interracial Reconstruction governments created the South's first public schools and eased restrictions on voting for poor whites as well as freed people. Black citizenship so offended Southern conservatives, however, that by the mid 1870s they turned to unspeakable violence to crush all dreams of a nonracial "We the People." Between Emancipation and the turn of the 20th century, interracial "fusion" political alliances, mostly between poor farmers, black and white, emerged in states of the former Confederacy. Most were surprisingly robust and persistent. In three states of the Upper South, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, these "fusion" movements actually took state power. These hopeful democratic experiments ended by blood, not ballots. Tyrants dubbing themselves "Redeemers" stole "We the People" from us and built the Jim Crow South on white supremacy, ending hopes for democracy until the 1960s. Even now, the ancient lie of white supremacy remains lethal. It has left millions of African American children impoverished in resegregated and deindustrialized cities. It embraces high poverty, racially isolated schools that imperil our children and our future. It shoots first and dodges questions later. "Not everything that is faced can be changed," James Baldwin instructs, "but nothing can be changed until it is faced." Change requires an honest confrontation with our history and what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the strength to love." These new American revolutionaries speak their love and strength in language less about right and left than right and wrong. They demand a genuine democracy and are skeptical of democratic braying from a Congress that watched the U.S. Supreme Court wipe its feet on the Voting Rights Act. Nobody in these protests intends to accept a democracy that consistently fails to ensure that all Americans, including people of color, women, immigrants, the elderly and students, have easy and equal access to the ballot. They consider it common sense that democracy will not survive without high quality, well funded and diverse schools.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
"Saturday Night Live" is set to return this fall with its first new live episode since the coronavirus pandemic started. NBC said on Thursday that the long running sketch comedy series would begin its 46th season on Oct. 3, but the network did not immediately announce a host or musical guest performer. In March, "S.N.L." had just aired a new live episode featuring the James Bond star Daniel Craig and was preparing for a new show to be hosted by the "Office" alumnus John Krasinski when the pandemic forced the suspension of the show's production. Even as other late night comedy shows found ways to return to TV in reduced, remotely produced formats, "S.N.L." seemed to have come to the abrupt end of its year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
SAN FRANCISCO When Drew Houston played computer games like Starcraft in high school, he made some changes so the games ran more smoothly on his friends' computers. "He created this one little application, and it would basically display everybody's shared files, and then if you clicked on a file, it would go ahead and ask everyone else on the network if they wanted to download it as well," said Andrew Croswell, a friend of Mr. Houston's from Acton Boxborough Regional High School in Acton, Mass. Mr. Houston, now 35, has since taken a version of that same concept and turned it into Dropbox, an online file storage and collaboration company that has grown rapidly since its founding in 2007. Last month, Dropbox filed to go public, and when it does Mr. Houston will become the newest member of a small club of tech founders who steered a start up all the way to Wall Street. (The company is expected to set a price range for its offering as soon as this coming week and trade on the stock market by the end of the month.) In the process, Mr. Houston is also set to become the next bona fide tech billionaire. According to Dropbox's initial public offering filing, he owns 25 percent of the company, making him its single largest shareholder. Dropbox was last privately valued at about 10 billion, meaning Mr. Houston's stake was worth about 2.5 billion on paper. Whether Mr. Houston successfully takes Dropbox public will be closely watched, with other privately held tech companies like Uber and Airbnb also edging toward an I.P.O. Dropbox, which is based in San Francisco, is unprofitable, and Mr. Houston now has to navigate through a challenging time, both guiding his company around the tech giants that are squeezing into its space and adapting his frat guy persona to a changing culture. "He's maybe one of the last ones of a very un C.E.O. like C.E.O.," said Jeffrey Mann, a vice president at research firm Gartner, who follows the file sharing and collaboration industry. "He was technical. He started out by coding. Most start ups now when they get to that size, founders like him get pushed aside for someone with a finance or management background. But he managed to stay there." Dropbox said Mr. Houston was unavailable for comment, citing the quiet period before an I.P.O. But according to interviews with more than a dozen people, Mr. Houston a private man with a love of 1990s rock and business books built his company with an easygoing management style and a dry sense of humor, which helped him deal with the bumps along the way. Mr. Houston grew up in Acton, a suburb outside Boston, the oldest of three children. His father, an engineer, and his mother, a librarian, noticed early on that Mr. Houston was precocious and encouraged him to explore his interest in computers, but did not want him skipping grades. At M.I.T., he joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, which he has said helped him learn how to build a corporate culture. "My first management experience was being rush chairman for my fraternity, and I learned a bunch of things," Mr. Houston said in a New York Times interview in 2016. "You deal with a lot of the same broad questions who do we want to be as an organization, what kind of culture do we want, what kind of people are we looking for? that you do when you're starting a company." After his sophomore year, he took a year off and started an SAT prep company called Accolade with one of his former high school teachers, Andrew Crick. Upon returning to M.I.T., Mr. Houston decided to learn as much about business as he could, plowing through business books from a chair he set up on the roof of his fraternity, he has said. A Pearl Jam fan, Mr. Houston in 2005 formed a 1990s cover band called Angry Flannel, which played at venues around Boston. On a bus one day from Boston to New York, Mr. Houston forgot his USB flash stick. Frustrated, he started coding what would be the foundation of Dropbox. He became less interested in Accolade, which closed. "He was really interested in entrepreneurship, which was not a common trajectory for M.I.T. students," said Kyle Vogt, 32, chief executive of the self driving car company Cruise Automation, who met Mr. Houston at an M.I.T. entrepreneurship club event. "The default back then was to stay in Boston or go to New York and work for a hedge fund." In 2007, Mr. Houston entered Dropbox into the Boston program of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start up incubator. Paul Graham, who was running Y Combinator, said Mr. Houston needed a co founder fast. Mr. Vogt referred Mr. Houston to Arash Ferdowsi, an M.I.T. student. Within two weeks, Mr. Ferdowsi became Dropbox's co founder; he owns a 10 percent stake of the company. The duo worked in Cambridge, Mass., but struggled to land more funding. In August 2007, Mr. Houston and Mr. Ferdowsi moved to San Francisco to get closer to the start up scene. A month later, they raised 1.2 million from investors including Sequoia Capital. Mr. Houston and Mr. Ferdowsi moved into an apartment building in the city's North Beach neighborhood. It was known as the Y Scraper because of how many Y Combinator company founders lived and worked there. Mr. Houston and Mr. Vogt later became roommates. "To this day, he still likes to have people over to his apartment and do jam sessions," Mr. Vogt said. Mr. Houston also became close to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. In 2013, Mr. Houston joined Mr. Zuckerberg as a co founder of FWD.us, a group that mobilizes the tech industry for immigration reform. Then hurdles sprang up. In 2011, a security researcher complained to the Federal Trade Commission about the way Dropbox encrypted files. Mr. Houston called dealing with the criticism "a rite of passage." Dropbox also developed a reputation as an unwelcoming workplace for women. "Some of the things they've been struggling with are how to balance Dropbox being a fun place to work with accusations of having a frat boy atmosphere," Mr. Mann said. Dropbox's business evolved in 2014 after Mr. Houston hired Dennis Woodside, a former Google executive, as chief operating officer. Now its products are primarily used for work, with businesses paying a subscription fee for the platform. A rival company, Box, which was aimed at businesses, went public in 2015. "From Day One, Dropbox has been an incredibly user friendly product which is a big reason why it spread virally but it also took the company too long to realize the money was in being a business focused company, not a consumer focused one," said Ben Thompson, the analyst behind the influential tech newsletter Stratechery. In 2015, investors began questioning whether high priced start ups were living up to their skyrocketing valuations. Dropbox, already privately valued at 10 billion, was marked down in value by some large institutional investors.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
For years, maternal health experts have worried about a troubling statistic: More than half of all pregnant women in America are overweight or obese when they conceive, putting them and their children at a higher risk of developing diabetes and other health problems. So about a decade ago, the federal government launched a multimillion dollar trial to see whether diet and exercise could help overweight women maintain a healthy weight during their pregnancies and potentially reduce their rate of complications. On Thursday , the findings were announced, and the results were mixed: Starting a diet and exercise program around the beginning of their second trimesters helped many women avoid excess weight gain during their pregnancies. But it did not lower their rate of gestational diabetes, hypertension and other adverse outcomes. Experts said the research was both encouraging and sobering. It confirmed that overweight and obese women can safely limit their pregnancy weight gain with lifestyle interventions. But it also suggests that to improve obstetric outcomes and the health of their babies, women who are carrying extra weight may need to make significant lifestyle changes before they conceive, said Dr. Alan Peaceman, the chief of maternal fetal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the lead investigator of the study, which was published in Obesity . "This is a problem that is more important now than it's ever been, and it needs to be addressed," he added. "We are going to have to start talking to women who are overweight or obese even before pregnancy and explain to them the risk of that weight on a potential pregnancy." Listen to Dr. Peaceman's podcast on high B.M.I. and pregnancy weight gain. The new research comes at a critical time. Decades ago, health authorities routinely urged pregnant women to put on enough weight to lower their odds of having underweight babies. But when the obesity epidemic took off in the 1980s and '90s, it spared almost no population, including pregnant women. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the prevalence of obesity among pregnant women climbed by 69 percent from 1993 to 2003. Today about 26 percent of women are overweight when they enter pregnancy and 25.6 percent are obese, according to the latest C.D.C. data. Women in those groups are more likely to exceed the recommended amount of weight gain during pregnancy and to retain that weight postpartum. Among the complications they are more likely to experience are longer labors, abnormally large babies, hypertension and cesarean deliveries. Obese women also have higher rates of gestational diabetes, miscarriages and preterm births. And a number of studies show that their children have increased rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. In 2009, the Institute of Medicine issued a report outlining the amount of weight that women should gain during their pregnancies based on their body mass index. Women in the normal weight category should gain between 25 and 35 pounds, the guidelines state, while those who are overweight should add 15 to 25 pounds. Obese women are encouraged to gain no more than 20 pounds during pregnancy. Over the years, a number of studies looked at whether lifestyle changes could improve health outcomes for expectant mothers with high B.M.I.s. But many of the studies were small, not very rigorous or of poor quality, so the National Institutes of Health set out to fund a large and definitive study in a diverse group of women. The resulting study recruited 1,150 overweight and obese women at seven clinics across the country and randomly assigned them to a control group or an intervention group that followed a variety of diet and exercise strategies. The women were all between nine and 15 weeks pregnant when they joined the study. The subjects included women like Heather Kinion, 39, who lives in Chicago and works for a quilting magazine. Ms. Kinion was slightly overweight when she got pregnant in the fall of 2015. She joined the study at Northwestern in her first trimester and was assigned to work with a nutrition coach who instructed her to track her food intake with a smartphone app. Ms. Kinion ate no more than 2,300 calories per day, replaced soft drinks with tea, and cut back on sugary treats like ice cream, cinnamon rolls and milk shakes. She added more fruits and vegetables to her diet and tried to exercise and walk more. Ms. Kinion gained about 20 pounds during her pregnancy which was in the recommended range of weight gain and delivered a healthy baby, named Julia, in 2016. "It was super effective," she said of the program. "Within two weeks of my daughter being born I was down to a weight that I think was 10 pounds lower than pre pregnancy." Ultimately, the researchers found that the women in the diet and exercise arm of the study gained on average four pounds fewer than those in the control group. They were 48 percent less likely to exceed the Institute of Medicine's recommended amount of pregnancy weight gain. Yet for most women, the intervention did not work. About 68.6 percent of women in the diet and exercise group exceeded the recommended amount of weight gain, compared to 85 percent of women in the control arm. At the end of the study, their rate of major pregnancy complications did not differ. "One of our prevailing suspicions is that when we started with the intervention at the beginning of the second trimester it was already too late," Dr. Peaceman said. "It's possible the adverse outcomes were already influenced by weight gain before that time." Dr. Emily Oken, a maternal health expert at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research, said that future studies could look at the impact of assigning overweight women to make lifestyle changes before they get pregnant. She also speculated that the average reductions in weight gain that occurred in the new study might not be large enough to have any real impact for many women.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
"Every aspect of our mission is being challenged." Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN America, the literary and human rights organization, was speaking onstage at Cooper Union on Wednesday night. PEN's annual general meeting featured a distinguished panel, moderated by Ms. Nossel, of five writers talking about the role of journalism and literature under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. The conversation ranged over subjects from dissecting the American electorate to the outbreak of so called fake news to the issue of free speech on college campuses. The panelists spoke for about 30 minutes before opening the floor to questions and comments from PEN members in attendance. Mona Eltahawy, a contributor to The New York Times opinion pages and the author of "Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution," said: "I think it's really important right now to not be polite." True to her word, Ms. Eltahawy, who lives in Cairo and New York City, was eloquently impolite all night, especially when talk turned to the idea of what we owe those on the opposite side of political battles. In the wake of Mr. Trump's largely unpredicted election, there has been much hand wringing in the media about doing a better job of understanding and empathizing with some of his voters. "I can't afford empathy," Eltahawy said, "because I'm Egyptian. I'm Muslim. I'm a woman. I don't have time to try to persuade or to negotiate for my humanity." Of Trump voters and supporters, she said: "I owe them nothing. And I will not exhaust myself trying to persuade them." 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 novelist Daniel Alarcon, seated just next to Ms. Eltahawy onstage, said with sincerity: "I'm glad Mona brought her flamethrower." But he went on to describe what he called the "valuable exercise" of attempting to see differing perspectives, difficult as that can be. The novelist Dinaw Mengestu said, "I don't think how you voted is the totality of who you are." Andrew Solomon, the author of "Far From the Tree" and other books, as well as the current president of PEN America, outlined two pragmatic objectives for the left to win back those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then Mr. Trump in 2016, and to "energize the people who are on our side." He emphasized that the rhetoric for each of those tasks is not always the same, and that winning converts is a delicate mission. "Most people don't tend to vote for you because you made them feel like they lost the argument," he said, though he also noted that politics at this particular moment can feel "like something out of 'Paradise Lost,'" in which some people on one side do seem to "represent evil." Mr. Solomon argued that individual stories are better than statistics about injustice and inequality in getting people to change their perspectives. Ms. Eltahawy responded: "I'm becoming the resident angry person on this panel, and I'm glad to play that role." She said focus on individual stories often means identifying a "good Muslim" as someone with an extraordinary back story that permits them to then be granted their humanity. Masha Gessen, the Russian American author of several books and a contributor to The New York Times opinion pages, spoke of "a full out attack on the public sphere" that "constantly puts us in a position where facts are a matter for debate." Though she has often written about Russia, she called obsession with that country's role in the 2016 election as a distraction from what is happening "out in the open to democratic institutions in this country." Ms. Gessen got a big laugh when she described some of the reaction to Mr. Trump's address to Congress on Feb. 28. "Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that he could read," she said. She expressed particular disappointment in the CNN commentator Van Jones, and his comments that Mr. Trump was "presidential" that night, especially when he acknowledged the widow of a member of the Navy SEALs. Ms. Gessen said Mr. Jones's reaction was just one example of "how difficult it is . . . to produce more and more articulated outrage." Ms. Eltahawy expressed exasperation at the end over the number of people during the event, most of them white, who made claims of exhaustion and asked the panelists for advice on how to keep up unflagging opposition. Ms. Eltahawy suggested in the firm tone that she used all night that those people realize how privileged they have been to have not felt besieged by politics before now. She left them with two words of advice: "Fight harder."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
After years of frustrating fits and starts in the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, the United States economy finally appears to be generating jobs at a healthier, more sustainable pace that many analysts now think will continue into 2014. The official unemployment rate fell in November to its lowest level since 2008. Employers have hired at least 200,000 workers in three of the last four months, including 203,000 in November. By contrast, as recently as July, when the economy seemed stuck in yet another summer swoon, only 89,000 new jobs were created. The better than expected data from the Labor Department on Friday follows other hopeful economic indicators this week, including an upward revision for economic growth in the third quarter on Thursday and an uptick in manufacturing reported on Monday. The 7 percent unemployment rate last month down from its most recent peak of 10 percent in October 2009 is the best reading since President Obama took office, providing one bright spot for a White House beleaguered on many other fronts. The unemployment rate was 7.3 percent in December 2008, the month before Mr. Obama was inaugurated. "The headwinds are fading and the tailwinds are gaining strength," said Michael Hanson, senior United States economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, ticking off sources of growth like pent up demand for automobiles, a rebounding housing sector and the surging stock market. The stock market rose by more than 1 percent after the jobs report, as traders concluded that the prospect of higher employment and faster economic growth outweighed the increased likelihood that the Federal Reserve would soon begin easing back on its stimulus efforts. While there is a chance that policy makers will act when they meet later this month, most experts say they believe that Fed officials want to see a little more consistency to the data before they begin tapering, probably early in 2014. "We consider it a strong report but it's not something that would cause the Fed to move," said Michael Gapen, senior United States economist at Barclays. "Our scenario is still March." One reason for remaining cautious is that there have been several false dawns before in the current recovery, including in early 2011 and again in early 2012, when encouraging monthly hiring gains quickly petered out. And some economists warned on Friday that it was too soon to conclude the labor market had turned a corner. "We still need more evidence that the economy is picking up momentum before we ring the victory bell," said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas. While the unemployment rate, which counts only people actively looking for work, has fallen to 7 percent, from 7.8 percent a year ago, she said that was largely because of people dropping out of the work force. Moreover, the current level is well above the 5 percent rate that economists consider closer to full employment. At the current rate of job creation, unemployment would fall to 6.4 percent by the end of 2014, and still be around 5.7 percent in late 2015. Despite the overall improvement in the employment picture, the situation remains desperate for many American workers and those seeking jobs. For people with less than a high school diploma, for example, the jobless rate last month stood at 10.8 percent. For African Americans, it was 12.5 percent, or nearly twice what it was for whites. No improvement was seen in the fate of the long term unemployed, either, with the ranks of people who have been seeking jobs for more than 27 weeks actually rising slightly in November to 4.06 million. Employers remain wary of workers with long gaps in their resumes, and skills erode the longer people are out of a job. "We still have a crisis in terms of long term unemployment," said Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low wage and unemployed workers. "We need solutions like extending support while also encouraging policies that will promote re employment," she added, citing potential programs like tax breaks for firms that hire the long term jobless. Still, unlike some other months that presented decidedly contradictory signals, many of the underlying factors identified by government statisticians at least pointed in the right direction. Hourly earnings, as well as the length of the typical workweek, both increased. The overall labor participation rate, while still low by historical standards, rose two tenths of a percentage point to 63 percent. At the same time, jobs were added to a broad range of sectors, rather than restricted to a few, lower paying areas. Manufacturing, closely watched because its ups and downs serve as a bellwether of the overall economy, added 27,000 workers. Besides that jump, Mr. Gapen of Barclays said he was also glad to see that the construction sector gained jobs for the third month in a row, indicating that housing continues to rebound. For economists, one mystery to ponder, or at least one assumption to question in retrospect, will be why the government shutdown and debt default standoff in October did not hurt the economy as much as feared. The return of government workers after the shutdown may have exaggerated the fall in the unemployment rate, which is based on a separate survey from the one that calculates payroll gains, but private employers do not appear to have taken much notice of the shenanigans in the nation's capital. "It seems like the market and businesses thought a deal would get done at the last minute," Mr. Gapen said. "The default scenario wasn't a credible threat." Wall Street has rallied since legislators veered away from the precipice in October, and that trend continued on Friday. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index surged 20.06 points, or 1.1 percent, to 1,805.09, its biggest increase in four weeks. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 198.69 points, or 1.3 percent, to finish the week at 16,020.20, while the Nasdaq composite climbed 29.36 points, or 0.7 percent, to 4,062.52. In the market for government bonds, the price of the benchmark 10 year Treasury note rose 5/32 to 99 3/32, and its yield dipped to 2.86 percent from 2.87 late Thursday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
This theater, for this city. New York City Center Theater celebrated its 75th anniversary last week. That milestone neatly coincided with the annual five week Christmas season of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the theater's first resident modern dance company, itself celebrating an anniversary this year: its 60th. Now, as ever, the Ailey company is facing in multiple directions: reviving home repertory, acquiring works from elsewhere, commissioning new pieces. On Dec. 7, it presented the American premiere of "Kairos" (2014), by the British choreographer Wayne McGregor; and on Wednesday it presented a new "Timeless Ailey" retrospective (which is to tour 21 American cities), with excerpts from 14 works that Ailey made from 1958 to '88. For City Center's anniversary on Tuesday, the company showed a triple bill of works by great American choreographers: Ailey's own classic "Revelations" was preceded by Paul Taylor's "Piazzolla Caldera" (1997) and Twyla Tharp's "The Golden Section" (1983). Taylor Tharp Ailey: a world conquering trio. Read our critics on the best dance moments of 2018. The Taylor "Caldera" first acquired by the Ailey company in 2015 is always a big hit, but I confess to having an allergy to it. I don't enjoy its sexed up treatment of tango, with women flaunting their underwear and dancers of both sexes steamily stroking their thighs. On Tuesday, though, I was struck by Taylor's sheer brilliance in construction. He usually combines men and women in uneven numbers, in continual suspense; and his mastery of changing geometries is another way in which he keeps surprising you. He was, like most of his generation, reluctant to present same sex couples; but here he does, as if acknowledging the claim that tango began as a same sex genre in the brothels of Buenos Aires. And he happily departs from tango vocabulary on occasion: There's a thunderous sequence in which the dancers in two concentric circles, one moving clockwise, the other counterclockwise do fabulously weighted but fast jumps. Some of the Ailey dancers could probably dance this as guests with the Taylor troupe: They have the combination of rich texture and speed. "The Golden Section" was originally the finale of Ms. Tharp's full length creation "The Catherine Wheel" (1980), to a superb commissioned score by David Byrne. The earlier sections of that work filmed for TV in 1982 were an astonishingly dark narrative in which a nuclear family showed all the frustrated, negative, often hostile energies of an implosive society, a feminist demonstration of everything that's misdirected about modern American life. When "The Golden Section" arrived, it came simply as an alternative world, a sustained, explosive outpouring of human energies flowing in entirely positive ways. The dancers of "The Golden Section" are heroic but not unreal. Their vocabulary, a truly Tharpian synthesis, includes disco routines and jogging as well as the jumps and turns of ballet and shimmies. I love its frequent use of peripheral space, with dancers jumping or being thrown in and out of the wings as if this stage realm were just an interrupted view of something far larger. And there are marvelous moments of sheer calm emptiness, with the stage unoccupied in between the dance torrents. Gender is and isn't an issue: There are male sections, female sections, but also passages when women support men, exuberantly. The Byrne score, taped, is as wonderful as the choreography: Its overlapping dance rhythms and occasional use of celestial high notes are part of the same multilevel view of human potential. The "Timeless Ailey" program shows just how many different kinds of dance Ailey could make, and how well. Even though "Night Creature" (1974, to Duke Ellington) is an old friend, it always takes me by surprise when it introduces Cuban hip motion a joy, since the Ailey dancers are masters in the powerfully lateral use of the pelvis, now moving in figures of eight, now in snakier undulations. The sheer lyrical bliss of "The Lark Ascending" (1972, to Vaughan Williams) is another unlooked for feat. As you'd hope, the Ailey dancers look wholly at home in every part. The more I hear Max Richter's music and his rearrangements of music by other people, the more all of it sounds to me like Muzak pop atmospherics. Mr. McGregor's "Kairos" is set to some of Mr. Richter's version of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons"; I wonder why. Mr. McGregor is one of the world's most in demand choreographers. His vocabulary combines ballet, modern and various aspects of modern social dance in a clever fusion; his structures, like those of "The Catherine Wheel," suggest a positively alternative society. In very few cases, this succeeds. But I seldom find Mr. McGregor uses music to good effect. "Kairos," made for Ballett Zurich (with a greater proportion of strict ballet vocabulary than most of his works), is blessedly free of his fondness for head jutting movements and beyond 180 degree hyperextension. Nonetheless, it's relentlessly large scale: Small steps are delivered like emphatic statements, while most moves are high and big. All three of these Ailey programs ended with "Revelations." This is always hugely popular; the dancers know how to put everything across. Akua Nona Parker, perfectly partnered by Michael Jackson Jr., brings a beautifully vulnerable purity to "Fix Me, Jesus." But most of the cast look as if they've been performing it too often to the same taped version of the music. Clifton Brown, a strong technician of long experience, dances "I Wanna Be Ready" with a knowing overlay of artfulness; Vernard J. Gilmore, one of the company's most appealing long term performers, occasionally lip syncs in the "Rocka My Soul" finale. Even so, Ailey's mastery of multiple styles "Revelations" is not one kind of dance theater but several keeps this classic alive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
'TARSILA DO AMARAL: INVENTING MODERN ART IN BRAZIL' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 3). The subtitle is no overstatement: In the early 1920s, first in Paris and then back home in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this painter really did lay the groundwork for the coming of modernism in Latin America's most populous nation. Tired of the European pretenders in Brazil's art academies, Tarsila (who was always called by her first name) began to intermingle Western, African and indigenous motifs into flowing, biomorphic paintings, and to theorize a new national culture fueled by the principle of antropofagia, or "cannibalism." Along with spare, assured drawings of Rio and the Brazilian countryside, this belated but very welcome show assembles Tarsila's three most important paintings, including the classic "Abaporu" (1928): a semi human nude with a spindly nose and a comically swollen foot. (Jason Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'HUMA BHABHA: WE COME IN PEACE' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 28). This spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission includes two figures: one that is somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious mask face and that visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline behind it, and another bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny, black drapery. The title is a variant on the line an alien uttered to an anxious crowd in the 1951 science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. The installation also feels like an extension of the complex, cross cultural conversation going on downstairs, inside a museum packed with 5,000 years of art history. (Martha Schwendener) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE FACE OF DYNASTY: ROYAL CRESTS FROM WESTERN CAMEROON' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 3). In the African wing, a show of just four commanding wooden crowns constitutes a blockbuster in its own right. These massive wooden crests in the form of stylized human faces with vast vertical brows served as markers of royal power among the Bamileke peoples of the Cameroonian grasslands, and the Met's recent acquisition of an 18th century specimen is joined here by three later examples, each featuring sharply protruding cheeks, broadly smiling mouths and brows incised with involute geometric patterns. Ritual objects like these were decisive for the development of Western modernist painting, and a Cameroonian crest was even shown at MoMA in the 1930s, as a "sculpture" divorced from ethnography. But these crests had legal and diplomatic significance as well as aesthetic appeal, and their anonymous African creators had a political understanding of art not so far from our own. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (through Oct. 8). Let us pray. After last year's stark exhibition of Rei Kawakubo's irregular apparel, the Met Costume Institute is back in blockbuster mode with this three part blowout on the influence of Catholicism on haute couture of the last century. The trinity of fashion begins downstairs at the Met with the exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican; upstairs are gowns fit for angels in heaven (by Lanvin, Thierry Mugler, Rodarte) or angels fallen to earth (such as slinky Versace sheaths garlanded with crosses). The scenography at the Met is willfully operatic spotlights, choir music which militates against serious thinking about fashion and religion, but up at the Cloisters, by far the strongest third of the show, you can commune more peacefully with an immaculate Balenciaga wedding gown or a divine Valentino gown embroidered with Cranac's Adam and Eve. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'THE INCOMPLETE ARAKI' at the Museum of Sex (through Aug. 31). It remains a bit of a tourist trap, but the for profit Museum of Sex is making its most serious bid yet for artistic credibility with a two floor exhibition of Japan's most prominent and controversial photographer. Nobuyoshi Araki has spent decades shooting Tokyo streetscapes, blossoming flowers and, notably, women trussed up in the baroque rope bondage technique known as kinbaku bi, or "the beauty of tight binding." Given the venue, it's natural that this show concentrates on the erotic side of his art, but less lustful visitors can discover an ambitious cross section of Mr. Araki's omnivorous photography, including his lastingly moving "Sentimental Journey," picturing his beloved wife, Yoko, from honeymoon to funeral. (Farago) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'ZOE LEONARD: SURVEY' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). Some shows cast a spell. Zoe Leonard's reverberant retrospective does. Physically ultra austere, all white walls with a fiercely edited selection of objects photographs of clouds taken from airplane windows; a mural collaged from vintage postcards; a scattering of empty fruit skins, each stitched closed with needle and thread it's an extended essay about travel, time passing, political passion and the ineffable daily beauty of the world. (Holland Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'LIKE LIFE: SCULPTURE, COLOR AND THE BODY (1300 TO NOW)' at the Met Breuer (through July 22). Taking a second run at the splashy theme show extravaganza, the Met Breuer has greater success. This one is certainly more coherent since it centers entirely on the body and its role in art, science, religion and entertainment. It gathers together some 120 sculptures, dolls, artist's dummies, effigies, crucifixes and automatons. Many are rarely lent and may not return anytime soon. (Roberta Smith) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE METROPOLIS IN LATIN AMERICA, 1830 1930' at Americas Society (through June 30). Fans of Latin American architecture are overly besotted with the modernist era: Luis Barragan's color saturated houses in Mexico City, Oscar Niemeyer's cutting edge presidential palace in Brasilia. But this eye opening exhibition turns the clock back 100 years and shows how six cities Buenos Aires; Havana; Lima, Peru; Mexico City; Rio de Janeiro; and Santiago, Chile used architecture and urban design to express new national ambitions. Vintage photographs disclose how in Mexico's sprawling capital its new republican government erected statues of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, while Argentina plowed out lordly avenues in imitation of Haussmann era Paris. All these cities had keen architectural ambitions, though if you have to pick the most sophisticated, it's Rio in a landslide. Stare at Marc Ferrez's jaw dropping 1895 panoramic photograph of the erstwhile Brazilian capital, with Sugarloaf Mountain looming over Botafogo and Flamengo, and book the next flight. (Farago) 212 249 8950, as coa.org 'MILLENNIUM: LOWER MANHATTAN IN THE 1990S' at the Skyscraper Museum (through June 24). This plucky Battery Park institution transports us back to the years of Rudy Giuliani, Lauryn Hill and 128 kilobit modems to reveal the enduring urban legacy of a decade bookended by recession and terror. In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, landlords in the financial district rezoned their old skyscrapers for residential occupancy, and more than 20 towers were declared landmarks, including the ornate Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway and the home of Delmonico's at 56 Beaver Street. Battery Park City flowered; yuppies priced out of TriBeCa came down to Wall Street; a new Guggenheim, designed by a fresh from Bilbao Frank Gehry, nearly arose by South Street Seaport. From this distance, the 1990s can seem almost like a golden age, not least given that, more than 16 years after Sept. 11, construction at the underwhelming new World Trade Center is still not finished. (Farago) skyscraper.org 'ALBERTO SAVINIO' at the Center for Italian Modern Art (through June 23). The paintings of this Italian polymath have long been overshadowed by the brilliant work of his older brother, Giorgio de Chirico. This show of more than 20 canvases from the late 1920s to the mid 30s may not change that, but the mix of landscapes with bright patterns and several eerie portraits based on family photographs are surprisingly of the moment. (Smith) 646 370 3596, italianmodernart.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilletantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'THE SENSES: DESIGN BEYOND VISION' at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Oct. 28). There's a serious, timely big idea at this exhibition: As social media, smartphones and virtual reality make us ever more "ocularcentric," we have taken leave of our nonvisual senses and need to get back in touch, literally. Thus "The Senses" features multisensory adventures such as a portable speaker size contraption that emits odors, with titles like "Surfside" and "Einstein," in timed combinations; hand painted scratch and sniff wallpaper (think Warhol's patterned cows but with cherries cherry scented, naturally); and a device that projects ultrasonic waves to simulate the touch and feel of virtual objects. The show also presents commissions, videos, products and prototypes from more than 65 designers and teams, some of which address sensory disabilities like blindness and deafness, including Vibeat, which can be worn as a bracelet, brooch or necklace and translates music into vibrations. And if you bring the kids, they will likely bliss out stroking a wavy, fur lined installation that makes music as you rub it. (Michael Kimmelman) 212 849 8400, cooperhewitt.org 'GRANT WOOD: AMERICAN GOTHIC AND OTHER FABLES' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). This well done survey begins with the American Regionalist's little known efforts as an Arts and Crafts designer and touches just about every base. It includes his mural studies, book illustrations and most of his best known paintings including "American Gothic" and "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." Best of all are Wood's smooth undulant landscapes with their plowmen and spongy trees and infectious serenity. (Smith) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'BEFORE THE FALL: GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN ART OF THE 1930S' at Neue Galerie (through May 28). An exhibition in the form of a chokehold, the third of the Neue Galerie's recent shows on art and German politics pushes into the years of dictatorship, with paintings, drawings and photographs by artists deemed "degenerate" by the Nazis as well as by those who joined the party or who thought they could shut out the catastrophe. (You will know the dissidents, like Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka; the fascists and sellouts are less known.) Gazing at macabre still lifes of dolls and dead flowers, or dreamy landscapes in imitation of an earlier German Romanticism, you may ask to what degree artists are responsible for the times in which they work. But then you see "Self Portrait in the Camp," by the Jewish German painter Felix Nussbaum made between his escape from a French internment camp and his deportation to Auschwitz and you know that there can be no pardon. (Farago) 212 628 6200, neuegalerie.org 'DIAMOND MOUNTAINS: TRAVEL AND NOSTALGIA IN KOREAN ART' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 20). Mount Kumgang, or the "Diamond Mountain," lies about 90 miles from Pyeongchang's Olympic Stadium, but it's a world away: The august, multipeaked range lies in North Korea and has been impossible to visit for most of the past seven decades. Featuring stunning loans from the National Museum of Korea and other institutions in Seoul, South Korea, this melancholy beauty of a show assembles three centuries' worth of paintings of the Diamond Mountain range, and explores how landscapes intermingle nostalgia, nationalism, legend and regret. The unmissable prizes here are the painstaking paintings of Jeong Seon, the 18th century artist who is perhaps the greatest of all Korean painters. And later impressions of the mountains, including a blotchy vision from the Paris based modernist Lee Ungno, give a deeper historical weight to very live geopolitics. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'GOLDEN KINGDOMS: LUXURY AND LEGACY IN THE ANCIENT AMERICAS' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 28). With its cheerfully crowd seeking title, the Met's exhibition of pre Columbian art promises an unabashed celebration of splendor. Offering some 300 objects spanning more than 2,500 years, and representing cultures from the Moche, Wari and Inca to the Olmec, Maya and Aztec, it delivers in full. Among the standouts are an "Octopus Frontlet" (A.D. 300 600), a gold body ornament made by the Peruvian Moche; "earflares" big as bangles, the oldest of which date to 800 500 B.C.; a wonderfully vivid, graceful Mayan relief from 736 A.D. that depicts a bejeweled King Pakal I; and shockingly vibrant panels made with tens of thousands of blue and gold macaw feathers by the Wari of Peru in A.D. 600 900, their function unknown. (Nancy Princenthal) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'PETER HUJAR: SPEED OF LIFE' at the Morgan Library and Museum (through May 20). It's hard to say which is more surprising: that Peter Hujar's photographs of underground life in New York in the 1970s and '80s have found their way to the Morgan Library and Museum, or that the classically minded institution has become unbuttoned enough to exhibit them in this heartbreaker of a show. Hujar (1934 87) lived most of his professional life in the East Village and, through studio portraits and cityscapes, captured a downtown that has since been all but erased by time, gentrification and AIDS. Although he was little known by the mainstream art world in his lifetime, this show, startlingly tender, reveals him to be one of the major American photographers of the late 20th century. (Cotter) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org 'SALLY MANN: A THOUSAND CROSSINGS' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (through May 28). All of this photographer's strengths are on view in this deftly chosen and admirably displayed exhibition that covers most of her 40 plus year career. The 108 images here (47 of which have never been exhibited before) provide a provocative tour through Ms. Mann's accomplishments and serve as a record of exploration into the past, into this country's and photography's history, stamped with a powerful vision. (Vicki Goldberg) 202 737 4215, nga.gov 'REBEL SPIRITS: ROBERT F. KENNEDY AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.' at the New York Historical Society (through May 20). Featuring stark black and white photographs of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as faded ephemera that memorialized them, this exhibition reveals the various ways in which the lives of these two influential figures were juxtaposed. It also traces the circuitous routes that belatedly pointed Kennedy toward the more incendiary goals King set first regarding civil rights, poverty and the Vietnam War. (Sam Roberts) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'STEPHEN SHORE' at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 28). Not staged, not lit, not cropped, not retouched, the color photographs of this American master are feats of dispassionate representation. This must see retrospective curated with real wit by Quentin Bajac, MoMA's photo chief opens with Mr. Shore's teenage snaps at Andy Warhol's Factory. Then it turns to the road trip imagery of "American Surfaces" and the steely precision of "Uncommon Places" landmarks in photographic history that scandalized an establishment convinced the camera could find beauty solely in black and white. Mr. Shore is revealed not only as a peripatetic explorer but also a restless experimenter with new photographic technologies, from stereoscopic slide shows to print on demand books. The only flaw is his recent embrace of Instagram, allowing museumgoers to lazily flick through images on MoMA's smudged iPads. New technologies are great, but not at the expense of concentration. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org '2018 TRIENNIAL: SONGS FOR SABOTAGE' at the New Museum (through May 27). This Bowery museum's fourth triennial exhibition, "Songs for Sabotage," is the smallest, tightest edition of the show so far. Immaculately installed, it's also the best looking. There's a lot of good work, which is global in scope and not by a list of prevetted up and comers. (Zhenya Machneva, Dalton Paula and Daniela Ortiz are artists to look for.) Less admirably, it's a safe and unchallenging show. Despite a politically demanding time, it acts as if ambiguity and discretion were automatically virtues. In an era when the market rules, it puts its money on the kind of art easily tradable, displayable, palette tickling objects that art fairs suck up. (Cotter) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Joe Biden has the Democratic nomination nearly locked up. Progressives are sorely disappointed, and it's easy to sympathize. Mr. Biden is an old hand of the party's old guard, cozy with big finance and spellbound by a bygone era of bipartisan amity. A man in denial about the depth of polarization and systemic corruption can't begin to fix what's wrong with the country or the Democratic Party. Progressives need to understand that Bernie Sanders was never the answer. Support for "democratic socialism" may be on the rise, but it's not nearly enough to underwrite a governing majority. Jitters about electability aren't the only thing doing Mr. Sanders in, though. Democrats are hungry for reform, not revolution. To oust Mr. Trump and especially to govern effectively, Democrats need a fighting creed that avoids both Mr. Biden's blinkered complacency and Mr. Sanders's quixotic hand waving. She may be gone from the race, but Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that. Democrats should pick up the fallen flag of Warren ism and run. America is embroiled in a crisis of deepening corruption. A self reinforcing spiral of regulatory capture, self dealing and influence peddling has led to intensely concentrated power that is at once economic and political. That concentrated power has rigged the rules that define the structure of America's democracy and economy to the advantage of the powerful at the expense of ordinary Americans. This has deprived us of our most vital means of collective self defense: meaningful democratic control over the institutions that shape our lives. Unless we fight to unrig the system, millions of us will continue to live and die on the terms of unaccountable power. Let's be frank: "Big structural change" is a dreadful political slogan. Yet it's exactly what America needs. At its heart, Warrenism is a program to establish genuine popular sovereignty over our polity and economy. In the context of a corrupted system of organized clout, this seems radical. A reform agenda focused on rooting out graft and cultivating real democracy poses a threat to many of America's most powerfully entrenched interests. 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." Although Warrenism may be less "revolutionary" than Mr. Sanders's socialism, it's also more threatening to concentrated power. That's because it's learned and realistic about the ways in which rules structure the political and economic incentives that ultimately determine who gets how much of what. Warrenism is jealous of the political rights of citizens and therefore hostile to electoral practices like gerrymandering, voter ID laws and felon disenfranchisement that deprive vulnerable citizens of equal representation. That extends to Senate rules, like the filibuster, that stymie majority rule in an already anti majoritarian system. It sees shell companies, lax tax enforcement, revolving doors between regulators and the corporations they regulate and hidden conflicts between the private holdings of public officials and the public interest as rich soil for the cultivation of systemic corruption and organized venality. Warrenism's obsession with policy detail sometimes smacks of managerial paternalism, but it aims at building and streamlining the capacity of government to reliably deliver the high quality public goods citizens demand in a way that relieves them of the burdens of confusing paperwork and Kafkaesque administrative complexity. Warrenism grasps what many other Democrats (like Mr. Biden) don't: Liberalism is on the ropes because it became complacent about power. We liberals got ahead of ourselves and began to take the institutions of inclusive, liberal democratic capitalism for granted despite the fact that our first serious strides toward full democratic equality were taken well within living memory. The collapse of Communism made us think we'd won for good, and we became fixated on tweaks to liberal institutions to enhance economic efficiency or make them better conform to academic ideals of distributive justice rather than tackling their deep seated structural and procedural flaws. Mr. Trump and his minions have taught us a lesson about power. For better or worse, the heart of politics is distributive conflict, and the most fundamental fight is over the distribution of power over which groups will become more or less protected, and more and less bound, by the law. Mr. Trump has made clear which people and groups are favored under his leadership. He is at the top of a relatively small elite that monopolizes the power to set and enforce rules that allow the ruling class to enrich itself and reinforce its rule through domination and exploitation. Groups that have been losing power through democratization and the equalization of rights including the Trumpist Republican Party's aggrieved base as well as incumbent economic interests are keenly aware of the nature and value of power. The closer they get to losing it, the more avidly they marshal every form of heft, pull, propaganda, coercion and extortion at hand to prevent America's political economy from locking into an equilibrium of fully inclusive democratic equality. Yet sleepwalking liberals can't seem to snap out of it. That's why Warrenism's tough minded agenda for returning control to the democratic citizenry is so important. We argue among ourselves about whether the rise of populist nationalism reflects economic or racial anxieties (or both). We debate whether these anxieties would be best assuaged by a universal basic income, an expansion of the earned income tax credit, or by getting the fine print of Medicare for All exactly right. What we haven't been doing is rallying for a dogfight. This is one reason that Sanders style socialism picked up steam. Socialists may be in the grip of unworkable, harebrained dogma, but they see power and are ready to fight for it. They grasp that regaining democratic authority over economic power, both inside and outside the political system, is urgently necessary. And that makes socialists like Mr. Sanders better defenders of liberal democracy than many Biden loving liberals. I'll be sorry to see Bernie Sanders go, but he was never going to win. Mr. Biden can beat Donald Trump. The trouble is that he can't seem to grasp our deeper problems, so he's counting on a de polarizing Republican epiphany rather than preparing for a fight. That's why Mr. Biden, and the entire Democratic Party, needs a stiff dose of Warrenism, and quick.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Recently discovered artifacts of colonial America's artisanal history will be unveiled to the public on Thursday at the New York Ceramics and Glass Fair. After being found buried in a privy shaft in the Old City district of Philadelphia, over 10 pieces of slipware pottery from the 18th century will displayed in a show called "Buried Treasure: New Discoveries in Philadelphia Slipware from the Collection of the Museum of the American Revolution." The ceramics were uncovered during an excavation of the grounds of the new Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Archaeologists from the Commonwealth Heritage Group recovered almost 85,000 artifacts from the site between 2014 and 2016.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Madison Avenue exists to persuade. (Check out how stylish this car looks! Doesn't everyone seem to be having a great time while drinking this beer?) In a perilous political climate, however, some advertising agencies have decided to use their marketing acumen in service of advancing cultural and political causes, rather than selling products. It is not unusual for agencies to work with nonprofit groups or create public service announcements, pro bono, but this new activism entails a deeper level of involvement. For instance, an ad agency in Austin, Tex., recently teamed up with a community health organization, the American Civil Liberties Union and the director Richard Linklater to produce an online video, released last month, opposing a state bill that would require transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding with the gender on their birth certificates in public schools and government funded buildings. The bill is reminiscent of a law passed last year in North Carolina that drew heavy criticism from prominent business leaders and calls by sports leagues and entertainers to temporarily boycott the state. "Our goal with this, ultimately, is to get people to reach out to their legislators," said Duff Stewart, the chief executive of the agency, GSD M, which is spearheading the campaign. "We believe it's an important issue for Texas." Pointing to North Carolina as an example, he said: "It's also an economic impact issue. It's going to have a detrimental effect to the economy in the state of Texas, and the ability to recruit and maintain talent." For the agency, though, the impetus to get involved goes beyond that. "From a cultural perspective, being open and kind and accepting of our fellow human beings is, I think, what we're about," Mr. Stewart said. Other advertising professionals who have taken on more issue or cause related projects also see the work as a kind of affirmation of their principles and beliefs in the Trump era. "You sort of have this feeling of being helpless when something goes off the tracks in the country, so it's nice to be able to do something," said Neil Kraft, president and creative director of KraftWorks, which last year developed a platform to support female entrepreneurs in collaboration with Women's Entrepreneurship Day. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. KraftWorks created the concept for choosewomen.org, which helps impoverished women finance business ventures, and recruited corporate partners, like Sephora and Lilly Pulitzer, willing to donate a portion of sales made through the site. "It was a deeper involvement, and it was more personal," Mr. Kraft said. "Through communication, you can change the way people think, the way people feel," said Kirsten Flanik, president of BBDO New York. Her agency developed a campaign aimed at raising the visibility of women by highlighting the dearth of monuments, buildings and streets named for women and pushing for companies, cities and other entities to change that. The campaign, "Put Her on the Map," came out of the agency's sponsorship of the Makers Conference, an annual event that highlights "trailblazing" women in the professional world. The agency debuted the campaign there last month. Its cornerstone is a short video of girls listing things that have been named for women: They mention superficial items like Shirley Temples and Bloody Marys, and the short shorts known as Daisy Dukes. "We're storytellers, so if we're going to create a movement, we're going to do it through stories," Ms. Flanik said. These kinds of forays into social issues do carry some risk. "I don't know how many people would make their decision about an ad firm based on this one way or another, but some people who are more involved in politics might be upset," said William Benoit, professor of communication studies at Ohio University. In today's social media driven culture, anything that carries even a whiff of political opinion carries the potential for opposition, he said, pointing to the ire that Nordstrom department stores faced over curtailing sales of Ivanka Trump clothing and accessories. The flip side, though, could be an increase in business from clients whose viewpoint aligns with that of the agency. "I think there are some risks in the sense of potentially alienating a client or a potential client if the agency has decided to put a stake in the ground," said Jeremy Rosenberg, a managing director at the public relations firm Allison Partners. He added that an ancillary risk could be alienating employees opposed to a particular cause. "I think agency principals would have a good pulse on their employee base, but I think that is a potential concern as well." Agencies that have allocated resources to social projects say, however, that their employees are eager to participate. Mr. Kraft said his millennial employees were especially enthusiastic. "They're in a lot of ways more idealistic than I am and really like this and working on stuff like this," he said. "I think it helps everyone feel good about selling other stuff all the time." Ultimately, though, advertising executives say, the motivation is more about feeling compelled to use their industry's skills to draw attention to issues that matter in a divided culture. "If we don't speak up, somebody else will," Mr. Stewart said. "This last election is evidence that we cannot be complacent. We have to talk about and stand up for our beliefs. If you're not speaking up, you're not going to be heard."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Big changes are coming to the quiet block in Corona, Queens, where Louis Armstrong spent his last three decades. And a new artist and curator has arrived to help guide those changes. Kenyon Victor Adams will take over as director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, effective immediately, the museum announced on Tuesday. Mr. Adams, 40, steps in as the museum works to finish construction on a 14,000 square foot education and performance center in a lot across the street from the home, where Armstrong lived until his death in 1971. The museum also received a 1.9 million grant from New York City last year to renovate the house next door, known as Selma's House, which will provide office and storage space for the organization. And the museum recently completed a monumental, nearly 3 million digitization process of its entire archive, making thousands of items available for listening and viewing online. That collection has long been housed at nearby Queens College, but it will move to the museum's expanded campus in Corona when construction is completed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Doing More, Not Less, to Save Retirees From Financial Ruin Just over 10 years ago, researchers at the University of Michigan added three questions to their Health and Retirement Study, a biennial survey of Americans over 50: If 100 earns 2 percent per year, in five years will you have more than 102, less than 102 or 102? If the interest rate on your savings is 1 percent per year and annual inflation 2 percent, could you buy more, less or the same with your money in a year's time? Is it true or false that buying a single company stock usually provides a safer return than the stock of a mutual fund? Researchers aimed to gain some sense of the financial literacy of older Americans, a matter of vital importance as the defined benefit pensions that had been managed for decades by employers for their workers were giving way to defined contribution plans like I.R.A.s and 401(k)'s, for which workers had to make their own savings and investment decisions. The results were not encouraging: Only one third of respondents answered all three questions right. These were adults who had been making financial decisions most of their lives. They had experienced high inflation, not once, but twice. And yet only about half correctly answered both the question about inflation and the one on compound interest. Financial illiteracy is not limited to the 50 plus set. And it has not improved much over the last decade. It underscores just how much the political debate over how to prepare for the aging of the population has misunderstood what is at stake. Consumed in political argument over the demographic pressure on Social Security, we have bypassed a much more consequential threat: For the first time in generations, a large number of older Americans can expect to suffer a sharp drop in living standards in retirement. In this light, the standard conservative prescription to address the stress on Social Security taking it off the government's books and handing control to individual workers would only compound the problem for most retirees. Preventing a demographic catastrophe may require, instead, taking more of the decisions out of workers' hands. That might require enhancing Social Security rather than limiting it. Or it might require employers to take back more of the responsibility for employee's retirement savings. Consider the following calculation by James Poterba, a professor of economics at M.I.T. If inflation adjusted investment returns averaged 2 percent a year not an unreasonable assumption given low interest rates and a stock market likely to deliver subpar returns over the next decade or so a worker would have to save almost 15 percent of each paycheck for 40 years to get an annuity stream equal to half of final earnings at retirement, assuming a 2 percent risk free rate of return. A late starter who saved for only 20 years would need to set aside a full third of earnings. Matters would be easier if investments yielded 4 percent: With a 4 percent risk free rate, affording an annuity equal to half the last paycheck upon retirement would require saving less than 10 percent for 40 years, or just over 25 percent for 20. How does that compare with what workers actually save? From 1990 to 2010, the typical contribution to 401(k) accounts ranged from 4.7 to 5.2 percent of earnings. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The typical savings rate of the thriftiest cohort aged 65 to 69 topped out at 7.5 percent in 2005. Even adding an employer top up worth half of workers' contributions wouldn't get them anywhere near where they must be. Low savings rates aren't the only problem. Another is early withdrawals from retirement savings accounts which often happen when workers change jobs and must roll their old retirement plan into something else. Another are the large fees eating away at savers' returns. The most urgent question seems to be, How can workers and their employers be convinced, cajoled or compelled to consistently save more? John N. Friedman, an economist at Brown University, has two suggestions: First, assign every worker a single lifetime retirement savings account, into which each successive employer will deposit retirement savings. Second, instead of just offering tax breaks to encourage workers to save more, why not offer incentives to their employers too? In a study for the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, scheduled to be presented next week, Professor Friedman proposes that the government cap the tax deductibility on workers' retirement savings which are relatively inefficient at mobilizing additional saving and use the money saved to provide tax credits for employers that increase their workers' pension contributions. Employers are more financially sophisticated. Giving them money to ensure that their workers build up an adequate nest egg is not an unreasonable choice. "Tax credits would directly link worker savings to the company bottom line," he writes, "increasing firms' interest in getting their employees to save." Under not unreasonable assumptions, Mr. Friedman estimates his proposal could increase the share of private sector workers with retirement savings to at least 65 percent, from 41 percent, mostly among the middle class. By retirement day, a typical working household would have 400,000 in savings, compared to 100,000 today. That might be enough to buy an annuity of 35,000 a year, which, combined with 25,000 from Social Security, could come close to covering the median household income for a couple. The additional cost to the government, in Mr. Friedman's analysis, would be slight. And government subsidies, today tilted sharply toward affluent workers, would shift toward lower income workers. "People who are now coming in with nothing would come in with enough to make a difference in retirement readiness," Professor Freidman said. Prodding workers to save more when real wages have not increased in a quarter century is not a particularly promising avenue. Conscripting companies to raise workers' savings may help, but it could well fall short.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
How Long to Find the One? Five Minutes on a Dating Site Brian Rosenberg hadn't exactly planned on proposing to Jen Bilik behind the Hitching Post, a restaurant in Santa Barbara, Calif. (In retrospect, it was an amusing coincidence.) He also hadn't planned on doing it in his car after dinner, which was parked in front of a sun bleached turquoise Dumpster. And, moments after accepting, Ms. Bilik hadn't planned on dropping the ring into a void from which personal effects are seldom recovered: the gap between the passenger seat and the center console. Despite the parking lot and the Dumpster and the missing diamond which was eventually located thanks to some desperate rummaging and an iPhone flashlight the couple emerged newly engaged. The next day, they shot a re enactment video for posterity. "We're going to have a great life together!" Mr. Rosenberg says to the camera, throwing in a seven letter adjective for emphasis. "We sure are!" Ms. Bilik responds from behind the lens, adding the same word. Ms. Bilik and Mr. Rosenberg, both 47, often wonder if they would have ended up together had they met 20, 10, even five years earlier, before either had found self contentment. Ms. Bilik was raised in Berkeley, Calif., and when she was 21, she lost her mother to breast cancer. "My mother was a quilter," Ms. Bilik said. "I grew up quilting and sewing and making with her that's a large part of my identity and a lot of what Knock Knock grew out of." Mr. Rosenberg and his sister, Julie, were raised by their mother in Los Angeles. A little more than a month before Ms. Bilik and Mr. Rosenberg's wedding, Julie died at age 43. "We were like twins," Mr. Rosenberg said. "It was always just the two of us." Ms. Bilik's 30s were consumed by 90 hour workweeks, which left little time for courtships. With the big 4 0 looming and no promising life partners in sight, she began in vitro fertilization. "I actually thought life might not be worth living if I didn't have children," she said. "That's what told me, 'I think I'm going to be O.K. not having kids,'" she said. "Since I was 25, I had been dating to find my baby daddy. But I had done therapy and other kinds of personal work. I finally accepted that my mother had died, that my family wasn't what I wanted it to be, that I wasn't a skinny model. And I started to have fun. It was a new thing for me, not feeling like each person was my last best hope, but rather there's more where that came from." At the same time, Mr. Rosenberg was on his own journey of self discovery. "I'd considered myself relationship phobic," he said. "I was ready to become a monk. My whole thing is not being able to trust I can't take it if I go into something and give it my all and it doesn't work out. After a lot of work, I got to a point where I was ready to open up. That's where Jen came into my life." They met on OkCupid on Dec. 29, 2015. While Ms. Bilik (alias: WittyWarmWise) had been online dating on and off since the early aughts, Mr. Rosenberg (alias: drschauffhausen) only had to dip a toe into the quagmire before meeting his future wife. In fact, he received a message from Ms. Bilik five minutes after joining the site. "I got lucky," he said with a smile. At the time, Ms. Bilik had been sidelined by shoulder surgery, for a torn rotator cuff, and by a lumpectomy, to remove a cancerous mass from her breast. "I had this medical two months because my mother died of breast cancer," she said. "I had to get tested for the BRCA gene mutation, and they thought they saw something in the other breast, but it turned out to be very early, low grade, all fine." To pass her recovery time, she put her shoulder the good one, at least into playing the field. And so she fired off the first missive to Mr. Rosenberg. "I didn't think he'd write back to me," she said. She was wrong. The two set a date for Jan. 8, 2016, but on New Year's Day, Ms. Bilik invited Mr. Rosenberg for a walk at Venice Beach with her golden retriever, Paco. "She said, 'I'm in a sling, I'm wearing sweats, and I'm not wearing makeup,'" Mr. Rosenberg remembered. "And I was like: Yeah right, this is L.A. They always say that, and then they're all done up. But she was in sweats, a sling, no makeup." ("I hadn't showered," Ms. Bilik added for accuracy.) Mr. Rosenberg was immediately stung. "When Jen is excited and happy, she looks like a 17 year old girl," he said. "I felt like I was 17 again when I met her." By Week 3, they had a woman named Candi Cane Cooper in their corner, who is not, as you might have reasonably assumed, a stripper by trade. Rather she is Ms. Bilik's animal psychic. "When my dog Maisie was dying, Candi came to see her," Ms. Bilik said. On a visit with Paco, Ms. Bilik asked Ms. Cooper to channel Maisie. "Candi said, 'Let me see if I can get her,'" Ms. Bilik recalled. And then: "'I've got Maisie.'" "The only question I had was, 'Are Brian and I going to fall in love?'" Ms. Bilik said. Maisie said yes. "In fact," Ms. Cooper said, "Maisie says Brian has already picked out the engagement ring, one that belonged either to his mother or an ex girlfriend, and it has a black pearl in it." Ms. Bilik wasn't convinced. But that night, she regaled Mr. Rosenberg with the story. He was stunned. "Don't take this the wrong way," he told her, "but this afternoon I was thinking: 'What if, after all this time, Jen is actually the One? I'm going to need to get an engagement ring.'" His mother's favorite gemstone? Black pearls. Point for Candi Cane. A touching and humorous ceremony acknowledged the couple's present joy and honored their past sorrows. One emotion could not diminish the other, and their coexistence was a reminder of what Ms. Bilik and Mr. Rosenberg may face in years to come. "You quoted to me once that it's the partner who's good in the emergency room and the bedroom who's the real prize," Ms. Bilik said to Mr. Rosenberg in her vows. "Which means I've won the lottery." "I regret not finding you when I was younger," Mr. Rosenberg said. "You are the best chance I ever took on love. You're the one thing I ever did right." Rabbi Zoe Klein took Ms. Bilik and Mr. Rosenberg through their I Dos. Afterward she alluded, in a somewhat sanitized way, to the proposal re enactment the couple had posted online, asking them, "Are you effing sure?" The bride and groom, both radiant, vigorously nodded their heads.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Austerity measures have been bad for Greeks, but good for tourism, which shot up 28.8 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2014. Another beneficiary? Artists. Rent for studio space is significantly cheaper than in other European capitals, and the political and economic turmoil have provided plenty of artistic fodder not to mention a frustrated, attentive audience. In the wake of these woes, artists, curators, critics and nonprofits are finding that contemporary art is having its moment in a city best known as the epicenter of the ancient world. Iliana Fokianaki, an Athens based curator and art critic, was considering a move to Paris in 2011 when businesses were shuttering, friends were losing their jobs and thousands took to the streets in protest. But rather than motivate her to head out of the country, this had the opposite effect. She stayed. "I realized it would be much more useful to have an artistic platform in a city like Athens than another European city," said Ms. Fokianaki, who in 2013 inaugurated State of Concept, a Greek nonprofit gallery that has a twofold mission to showcase artists through solo exhibitions and provide young graduates with free consultations. "The crisis kind of boosted our energy to do more things, rather than flee the country."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Nikolai Fadeyechev, one of the Bolshoi Ballet's greatest dancers, who was hailed for his distinctively noble style and his chivalry as a partner to the company's leading ballerinas from the 1950s to the '70s, died on June 23 in Moscow. He was 87. His death, from heart failure, was announced by the Bolshoi Theater. Mr. Fadeyechev was one of a kind as an artist. In a Russian company acclaimed for its athletic male dancers, he chose to be an elegant and eloquent presence. When audiences were introduced to the Bolshoi in London in 1956 and New York in 1959, both the public and critics were stunned by the bravura of the male dancers and the virtuosity and emotional depth of ballerinas like Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya. Mr. Fadeyechev was favored as a partner by both, in no small part because he showed off his ballerinas and did not compete with them. In 1968, Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Fadeyechev's manner was "essentially self deprecating," but that this made his work, "for the connoisseurs, all the more effective."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Genesis P Orridge Has Always Been a Provocateur of the Body. Now She's at Its Mercy. Neil Andrew Megson discovered Max Ernst when he was 15 years old, and it set a course for his life. The book was called "The Hundred Headless Woman," surrealistic collages of human and animal forms. It presented the body as fluid and mutable, and the self as open to negotiation. It was the mid 1960s, and to a British schoolboy who felt he didn't fit in into his school, his gender, his body this was freedom. In the half century since, Megson better known as the musician and visual artist Genesis Breyer P Orridge has steadily probed at the boundaries of the body, both literally and figuratively, evolving from art provocateur to founder of the influential British bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV to semi established fine artist with archives at the Tate Britain. As P Orridge now considers retiring from live music, Throbbing Gristle's albums from the 1970s and early 1980s are newly available in deluxe reissues on Mute. At 68, P Orridge lives on the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in a body racked by chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. Genesis Breyer P Orridge has died at 70. Read the NYT obituary here. "I'm stable right now, my blood counts are close to normal," P Orridge said on a recent afternoon at home, flanked by a snoring Pekingese named Musty Dagger. "But at some point it will finally flare up and become terminal, and there's no way to know when that might be. Optimistically, two years. Less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I'm on the downward slope to death." The artist at home: working class English accent, Rogaine in the bathroom, black T shirt reading "Thank God for Abortion." Breast implants and a mouth full of metal teeth, an idea P Orridge got from watching the movie "Belle de Jour" on LSD. Shelves full of books and artwork, mostly by P Orridge, including various fetish objects and a wooden rabbit dotted in blood, the residue of hundreds of ketamine injections. Since a series of operations with Jacqueline Breyer P Orridge, P Orridge's wife, who died in 2007, P Orridge prefers genderless pronouns, usually first person plural, but is O.K. with female pronouns. Her life, she said, was an experiment that was still playing out. "We know that Neil Andrew Megson decided to create an artist, Genesis P Orridge, and insert it into the culture," she said. "Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art. So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up? We don't know the answer. But thank you, Neil." It has been a provocative run. P Orridge first came into being with a Dadaist performance collective called COUM Transmissions, whose shows included whipping, masturbation and live sex; "Prostitution," their 1976 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, included nudity and bloody tampons and scandalized the British public. "In terms of being shocking, punk was pretty tame in comparison," said Simon Reynolds, the author of "Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978 1984." "They were writing songs about serial killers and cutting themselves onstage." In 1981, P Orridge reversed course in the gently trippy Psychic TV, whose danceable songs echoed the occult writings of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and included a tribute to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones called "Godstar." P Orridge imagined the band as the center of a global consciousness raising, and recruited fans to join Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a cross between a fan club and a cult, whose members donned paramilitary gear and submitted bodily fluids as part of their initiation. In 1995, after a recording session with the band Love and Rockets in the Los Angeles home of the producer Rick Rubin, P Orridge woke up to a massive electrical fire there and jumped from a second story window, shattering her arm and suffering post traumatic stress disorder. Psychic TV went on hiatus, but returned in the late '90s and again with a new lineup in 2003. But all the time she was making collages and other visual art, including a solo show at the Rubin Museum of Art that made The New York Times's roundup of the Best Art of 2016. And she was writing books, including, most recently, "His Name Was Master," a collection of interviews with Brion Gysin, whose "Cut Up" literary experiments with William S. Burroughs splicing and recombining texts to unlock meanings have been a driving aesthetic in P Orridge's work and life. It takes a moment in the apartment to realize that the two naked blondes in a wall sized photograph, identical of breast and chin, are P Orridge and Lady Jaye, Jacqueline's nickname. In the bedroom are photos of their California wedding, June 1995, Friday the 13th. Genesis was the bride. Lady Jaye wore a mustache, tight leather pants and a leather vest, nothing underneath. Their marriage they met at an S M dungeon in New York, where Lady Jaye worked began a new creative phase, this one a partnership, in which their main medium was their bodies. Lady Jaye was both a registered nurse and a dominatrix, a delightful combination. P Orridge sometimes worked with her at the dungeon, as the domineering Lady Sarah. The pay wasn't bad maybe 200 an hour for what was called a "tribute" but the work wasn't steady, she said. They had money from a lawsuit after the fire, and an idea: What if they altered their bodies to become a third entity, neither male nor female, but free from the binary framework that they saw as destructive? They called their project the pandrogyne, the fusing of two persons into a third that only existed when they were together. P Orridge had been an early proponent of piercing and ritual cutting or scarring. The pandrogyne was their way of applying Burroughs's and Gysin's "Cut Up" technique to their own flesh. P Orridge, the father of two daughters from a previous marriage she attended PTA meetings in a miniskirt and thigh high boots remembered calling up her daughter Genesse, saying, "'There's something you ought to know. Lady Jaye and myself, we got matching breast implants last week.' And Genesse just said, 'What? You got breast implants when you could have bought me a new car?' That was 2003. She was about 19." "My daughters adore me still, despite everything that's been unorthodox," she added. "They don't bat an eye. They call me Papa Gen Gen." Lady Jaye had surgery on her chin and nose to match her mate's. The couple took hormones but didn't like them; they took ketamine, daily, and liked it so much that they often went to sleep with full syringes on their night stands, so that whoever woke up first could inject the other partner in mid slumber. The French filmmaker Marie Losier documented their relationship in the 2012 documentary "The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye," which ran at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month. The writer Douglas Rushkoff, who briefly played in Psychic TV, recalled nights in the city with Gen and Jackie, as he called the Breyer P Orridges (like other old friends, Rushkoff refers to P Orridge by masculine pronouns). "He and Jackie were our most normal friends," he said. "We'd just go to the Indian restaurant. He had weird teeth or took weird drugs or had weird art, but we would talk about what to do with savings, or how to deal with air conditioning. Just normal, mundane stuff." Then in 2007, Lady Jaye died of an acute heart arrhythmia. Her death left P Orridge alone, one half of an art project that no longer had a second half. "It became really tricky," Rushkoff said. "To make that level of commitment, not just in marriage and love, but to do this thing to your body that doesn't quite make sense anymore without the other half, that's rough." When P Orridge developed leukemia, Rushkoff organized a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign that has raised almost 55,000 for her medical bills. "We realized for the first time in a tangible way how much people care for me," P Orridge said. "That was really beautiful to discover. See, I'm getting teary already. That's a good feeling, that that many people want you to stay." The prankishness of P Orridge's work sometimes distracts people from the art itself, said Jarrett Earnest, 31, an art critic and curator who met her at a performance piece by Leigha Mason called "Spit Banquet," in which people sat at a table and spat into empty vessels. "What she's done as a thinker and as a maker, this has not been understood in the wider art world," Earnest said. "People in the music world know her in a specific way. But her writing and her ideas about culture and the relationship of life to art are so profound." "When you've got a terminal illness, you think about what your legacy might be," she said. "My only answer is, we would hope that it would inspire people to see that they can do a life totally as they would like it to unfold. Live your life every day like a page in your book of life, and make that page as interesting as you can. Whenever you have a choice, say: Which is the better page in my book?" She said she was not afraid of death. "I'd like to stay, because it's fascinating here," she said. "But as far as we can tell, having a physical body is a luxury we don't often get, and too many people squander that luxury." She smiled, a mouthful of gleaming metal. "We've not squandered it," she said. "We've utilized it to the maximum we could."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
W ill Jon and Dany have their happily ever after? Don't count on it. In the Season 8 premiere the new couple, last seen entwined in their love boat, arrives at Winterfell (as seen in the trailer). And who else is at Winterfell? Bran, who knows Jon is Dany's nephew, and Samwell Tarly, who knows that this gives Jon a better claim on the Iron Throne than Dany. It's enough to complicate any new romance. Another thing about Sam: His best friend Jon is now dating the same woman who torched his father and brother last season. So that should be fun. Want exclusive "Game of Thrones" interviews and news, as well as the internet's best articles on that week's episode? Sign up for our Season 8 newsletter here. Dany tells everyone that she is not like her father, the Mad King. But she's largely defined by her messianic streak, a quality that in its most extreme form can much like Targaryens, we're repeatedly reminded go either way. And while she has shown plenty of compassion (freeing slaves, forgiving Jorah), she responds to slights with often shocking cruelty (crucifying masters in Meereen, locking her handmaiden Doreah in the vault, torching the Tarlys). So considering the revelations awaiting her in Winterfell, this thing could be a powder keg. Which big battle will happen first? The one for the Iron Throne or the one for the fate of humanity? Now that the Night King and friends have breached the Wall, they would seem to be the more pressing concern. Jon, at least, is focused on the White Walkers and seems to have convinced Dany's camp and Sansa to go along with this plan. Jaime seems to be on board, too. Also, all we've heard in the run up to the final season is about the 55 nights of shooting and the unprecedented scale of the White Walker clash, and according to HBO, the longest episode of the season is actually the third one. (One hour, 22 minutes!) So maybe Night King first, then Cersei. Of course, a persistent theory has the Night King being the one to win the whole thing, which is technically possible but seems too cynical for a story that, while dark and full of terrors, seems to be generally about moving into the light. If a living fire dragon and a zombie ice dragon blast each other, who wins? I believe it was the maester Cleatus the Melancholy who first postulated in "Ice Magick and Dragon Fyre" that the heat generated by an adult dragon is honestly who in the seven hells could possibly know? The clash should be fun to watch, at any rate, until dragons start dying (or re dying, in Viserion's case). And then it will be sad, because the beasts didn't ask to be born into this cruel and stupid world. Will anyone actually win the Game of Thrones? It's right there in the title: This show is about a pan global contest to win ultimate power. But is it really though? Hasn't everything we've learned over the past seven seasons as this fevered pursuit has inspired all manner of butchery and abuse, and destroyed families and relationships, and empowered sadists, and turned the most magnificent creatures in the land into nuclear weapons and led at least one formerly decent man to literally burn his daughter alive (I'll never forgive you HBO) suggested that this contest is, in fact, irredeemably toxic? Vegas will give you odds on the various contenders (we had our own fun with this). But are we really supposed to root for one of this story's heroes to eventually sit upon the symbol of all that is terrible? Given this show's defining knack for upending expectations, the long promised battle for control of the kingdom seems sure to veer from the usual "good guys meet bad guys, blow stuff up, suffer losses but prevail in the end" script. Wouldn't the ultimate swerve for "Game of Thrones" be to blow up the throne itself? Maybe. Or maybe Jon and Dany will be the beloved king and queen, and Tyrion, Jaime and Arya will all get flowers and medals as in the ends of "Star Wars" or "Lord of the Rings" or any number of more conventional fantasy tales. Either way, game on.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The Lower East Side, whose tenements teemed with immigrants for generations beginning in the 19th century, has in recent years become known north of Delancey Street for crowds of a different sort: the whooping revelers who stream down its streets and cascade from its scores of bars, restaurants and falafel shops on weekends. Indeed, the density of raucous nightspots has earned the nickname Hell Square for the area between East Houston and Delancey from Allen Street east to the Delancey, a club near Clinton Street. Below Delancey, however, a quieter, more residential atmosphere prevails. "When you cross south over Delancey you feel your blood pressure go down," said Para Rajparia, a psychologist, who moved into a three bedroom Grand Street co op in 2010 with her young family, joining the many other young professionals who have recently put down roots in the area. "I have a sense of safety and comfort." Although new night life attractions have begun pushing south down Ludlow Street from Delancey, they do not for the most part extend below Grand, leaving intact, at least for now, a certain low key authenticity that many residents say they prize. "The old world is still there," said Glenn E. Schiller, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group, even as art galleries and artisanal food shops pop up among old school Jewish fabric and menswear stores. On Broome Street, sharing the block with a Chinese laundry, is a strip of specialty newcomers: the Ten Bells, an organic wine bar; Babycakes NYC, a vegan bakery; Tache, an artisanal chocolate shop; and the Earnest Sewn, a bespoke jeans store. Around the corner on Orchard, across from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, is Top Hops, a "tasting bar and culture center for craft and import beers." The combination of old and new was one of the main draws for Julie Peacock, a yoga instructor, who since 2006 has lived in the Seward Park Cooperative, one of four Grand Street co ops built with labor backing from the 1930s to 1960. Although uncharmed by the boxy modern architecture of Seward Park's four brick high rises, Ms. Peacock found its multigenerational mix appealing on her very first visit. "There were young moms walking with babies, and young families," she said, "but older people walking on the street, too, so it felt like a real neighborhood. And I was amazed at how quiet it was after living in the East Village." The deal was clinched when she found the old and new bakeries on Grand Street: Kossar's Bialys, which has had a following for over 65 years, and Doughnut Plant, a 2000 transplant from a Lower East Side tenement. So in 2006 Ms. Peacock, seven months pregnant, moved into a 2,650 a month two bedroom with her husband, Rusty, an emergency room physician. Three years later, expecting their third child, they were struck by how much more space their money could buy in Seward Park than in brownstone Brooklyn. In 2009 they paid 810,000 for a 20th story three bedroom co op with views of both New Jersey and Brooklyn. For another 85,000, they knocked out walls to open up the unit. "The cool thing about these buildings," Ms. Peacock said, "is that on the inside they're really these blank white boxes with great light and good bones."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Pullman Rail Journeys, noted for refurbishing historic train cars and returning them to service, recently announced pilot summer departures between Chicago and Denver over four weekends. Four round trip journeys, from July through September, depart on Thursday afternoons for the overnight trip and arrive in Denver Friday mornings. After a two night stay, during which passengers can independently explore the area, the train returns that Sunday, arriving back in Chicago on Monday. The updated cars were originally built between the 1920s and 1950s and offer overnight accommodations ranging from private bedrooms with en suite bathrooms to bunk bed like berths with privacy curtains. Trips include meal service and drinks and start at 1,466 one way, for a double cabin. The company also plans a one time train trip between Chicago and Albuquerque this October coinciding with the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A man returns to his apartment after a hard day. He slumps into a chair by a table and turns on a hanging lamp. After a while, the light flickers and the man looks startled. Was that a ghost he just saw? Or was it merely his reflection in the mirrored wall behind him? Such was the scene at the Apollo Theater over the weekend, as Ballet Hispanico presented the premiere of Fernando Melo's "If Walls Could Speak." The mirrored wall onstage (set design by Elle Kunnos de Voss) is constructed so that, with a shift in the deft lighting (by Joshua Preston), the space behind it becomes visible: a parallel realm that is often furnished the same but populated differently. Are the people on the other side spirits? Fantasies? Memories? The folks in the neighboring apartment? Any or every answer might be correct. Lasting 90 minutes without an intermission, "If Walls Could Speak" is long and frustrating, a collection of initially impressive effects that eventually pall. Mr. Melo is a Brazilian born choreographer whose career has transpired in Europe. This is the first work of his to appear in New York.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"I like the piece," Mark Morris said of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" a few weeks back as he sat in his papaya green office at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn. "But I'm tired of the mythology, that runic Madame Blavatsky kind of stuff. I'm not interested in a virgin dancing herself to death, you know?" Mr. Morris's reimagined "Rite," which had its premiere at the Ojai North festival in 2013, is emphatically not a tale of sacrificial maidens, though it retains more than a whiff of the pagan. It is coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of a five night run by the Mark Morris Dance Group, April 22 26, its first season at the house since 2012. All but two of the works on the programs date from the last three years. One dance, "Whelm," is brand new. Another, "Pacific," is 20 years old but has never been performed by the company. (It was created for the San Francisco Ballet.) As is often the case with Mr. Morris, his take on "Rite" is both personal and universal. Pre Christian ritual flower garlands, Grecian style tunics by Elizabeth Kurtzman meets the exuberant Americana of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," which provided the title: "Spring, Spring, Spring." In the movie, this cheery tune sets the stage for a loopy celebration of the new season, filled with baby goats, suckling calves and smiling couples holding hands. Mr. Morris's dancers, divided into three groups women, men, couples lope and tilt, crawl like beasts, and form daisy chains that trace precise, winding patterns across the stage. But the real content of the dance is its response to Stravinsky's music, specifically the interplay of rhythms, dissonances and folk melodies. To distill these elements, Mr. Morris used the Bad Plus's reorchestration for jazz trio, with Ethan Iverson on piano, Reid Anderson on bass and David King on percussion. (They will be playing in the pit.) In their interpretation, Stravinsky's music is both familiar the melodies and jagged subdivisions are clearly stated and surprisingly new sounding. "The biggest challenge was for Dave," Mr. Iverson said recently by phone, "because he had to compose a part that didn't exist in the original. But we found that Stravinsky's rhythmic language suits the drum set. Actually, it sounds like a lot of modern jazz."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
ALTOFTS, England A proposed high speed railroad known as HS2 is Britain's biggest and most controversial transportation plan, a Continental style "grand projet" meant to ease crowded trains and congested tracks, reduce automobile traffic and generate economic growth. Supported by the three main political parties, High Speed 2 is also supposed to help rebalance Britain's lopsided economy, spreading wealth from the affluent southeast to the scrabbling, post industrial north. Yet as cost estimates have risen the budget now stands at PS42.6 billion, or 65.8 billion so has opposition to the project. And some of the strongest resistance comes from the very parts of the north that HS2 is supposed to help. Few dispute that Britain's creaking rail network needs an update. A report commissioned by a British trade union last year said the country's railways compared poorly in terms of affordability, comfort and speed with those of Germany, France, Spain and Italy. David Higgins, head of Network Rail, which oversees Britain's tracks and stations, has said that 30 years of continuous investment would be necessary to bring the quality of the British railroad system up to the level of the best networks on the Continent. But a popular rebellion against HS2, which began in scenic and affluent areas along the first section of the planned line, between London and Birmingham, has spread northward. "We do need investment in the north, we do need a rebalanced economy and we do need better transport infrastructure," said Peter Box, leader of Wakefield Council, a municipality of 326,000 people in an area once dominated by a coal mining industry that is now moribund. "At the moment, we are not convinced the economic case has been made." Civic leaders in nearby Leeds, where the high speed trains would stop, favor the project. But in Wakefield, where few jobs would be created or benefits derived, skepticism prevails. Currently, trains from Wakefield station can reach London in 1 hour and 55 minutes. Traveling from Leeds to London on HS2 would take just 82 minutes, an hour less than currently. But for residents of Wakefield, getting to Leeds to catch one of the high speed trains would offset much of the time saved. Stephen Abson of nearby Altofts says he dreads imagining the noise here if the rail link goes ahead as planned, with trains zipping by at 225 miles per hour, or about 360 kilometers per hour, only a few hundred yards from his home. The owner of a real estate business, Mr. Abson says the project is already depressing house prices in the area a full two decades before the line would open. And a speedier Leeds to London ride would not help Mr. Abson and his neighbors, because the high speed trains will bypass Wakefield, their local station. "I think we can get enough people on board to realize that this is one big white elephant," said Mr. Abson. Mr. Box, of Wakefield Council, argues that highway repairs and upgraded regional rail links should be higher priorities than HS2, which he worries may mainly benefit the south. Instead of attracting investment and talent to the northern regions, he said, HS2 may simply funnel more people and prosperity into London. Some critics agree, noting that when Japan and South Korea built their high speed rail systems, the economic gap between those countries' capitals and outlying cities widened. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Britain has just one high speed rail line, HS1, connecting London to Continental Europe via the Channel Tunnel. HS2 would extend that line northward. These plans have provoked fierce opposition along parts of HS2's proposed route, especially in a scenic, hilly region known as the Chilterns, where many parliamentary seats are held by the dominant Conservative Party. Under phase two, for which an additional PS21.2 billion has been budgeted, HS2 would split into two branches, with one branch going northwest to Manchester. Trips there from London would take just 68 minutes. The other branch would run directly north to Leeds, with service starting in 2033. Supporters say HS2 makes sense because Britain needs new track to deal with growing demand, and the extra cost of high speed rail provides good value. As well as hastening journeys, HS2 would free up crowded freight routes and ease congestion on regional passenger trains, the government says, while supporting the creation of 100,000 new jobs. But in a recent report, the National Audit Office, an impartial watchdog, questioned some government calculations and said that it was too early to conclude "whether the program is likely to deliver value for money." The Department for Transport "has poorly articulated the strategic need for a transformation in rail capacity and how High Speed 2 will help rebalance economic growth," the audit office added. Peter Mandelson, a cabinet member in the previous government that approved HS2, now says that the economic case "needs to be gone into with more thoroughness than we did at the time." Mr. Mandelson said he was worried that "the effort, energy and resources for HS2 in the north will be at the expense of the rest of the rail network outside London." But Simon Burns, the minister responsible for rail, argues that without modernization, capacity on the main line that serves the west of England will be exhausted sometime between 2020 and 2024. "If you do nothing there will be full capacity on the west coast main line in the next 10 years," he said, "and then you'll have complaints that we have not reacted to meet the ever increasing number of people using the railways." "There were people who argued against the building of the motorways in the late 1950s and early 1960s," Mr. Burns said. "But very few people now would suggest that that was the wrong decision." His arguments are unlikely to convince campaigners like Paul Dainton, a mainstay in a group in Yorkshire called Altofts and Kirkthorpe Against HS2. "People have put their life savings into houses and property." Mr. Dainton said, "But I don't think it's just that. It's the upheaval, and the destruction of their environment." At the village of Kirkthorpe, John Tod, who works for a bank, said he was horrified to discover that the train's proposed route passed close to his home.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Ten years have passed since my book, "The New Jim Crow," was published. I wrote it to challenge our nation to reckon with the recurring cycles of racial reform, retrenchment and rebirth of caste like systems that have defined our racial history since slavery. It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed. When I was researching and writing the book, Barack Obama had not yet been elected president of the United States. I was in disbelief that our country would actually elect a black man to be the leader of the so called free world. As the election approached, I felt an odd sense of hope and dread. I hoped against all reason that we would actually do it. But I also knew that, if we did, there would be a price to pay. Everything I knew through experience and study told me that we as a nation did not fully understand the nature of the moment we were in. We had recently birthed another caste system a system of mass incarceration that locked millions of poor people and people of color in literal and virtual cages. Our nation's prison and jail population had quintupled in 30 years, leaving us with the highest incarceration rate in the world. A third of black men had felony records due in large part to a racially biased, brutal drug war and were relegated to a permanent second class status. Tens of millions of people in the United States had been stripped of basic civil and human rights, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, education and basic public benefits. White nationalism has been emboldened by our president, who routinely unleashes hostile tirades against black and brown people calling Mexican migrants criminals, "rapists" and "bad people," referring to developing African nations as "shithole countries" and smearing a district of the majority black city of Baltimore as a "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess." Millions of Americans are cheering, or at least tolerating, these racial hostilities. Contrary to what many people would have us believe, what our nation is experiencing is not an "aberration." The politics of "Trumpism" and "fake news" are not new; they are as old as the nation itself. The very same playbook has been used over and over in this country by those who seek to preserve racial hierarchy, or to exploit racial resentments and anxieties for political gain, each time with similar results. Back in the 1980s and '90s, Democratic and Republican politicians leaned heavily on the racial stereotypes of "crack heads," "crack babies," "superpredators" and "welfare queens" to mobilize public support for the War on Drugs, a get tough movement and a prison building boom a political strategy that was traceable in large part to the desire to appeal to poor and working class white voters who had defected from the Democratic Party in the wake of the civil rights movement. Today, the rhetoric has changed, but the game remains the same. Public enemy No. 1 in the 2016 election was a brown skinned immigrant, an "illegal," a "terrorist" or an influx of people who want to take your job or rape your daughter. As Trump put it: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems. ... They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." The fact that Trump's claims were demonstrably false did not impede his rise, just as facts were largely irrelevant at the outset of the War on Drugs. It didn't matter back then that studies consistently found that whites were equally likely, if not more likely, than people of color to use and sell illegal drugs. Black people were still labeled the enemy. Nor did it matter, when the drug war was taking off, that nearly all of the sensationalized claims that crack cocaine was some kind of "demon drug," drastically more harmful than powder cocaine, were false or misleading. Black people charged with possession of crack in inner cities were still punished far more harshly than white people in possession of powder cocaine in the suburbs. And it didn't matter that African Americans weren't actually taking white people's jobs or college educations in significant numbers through affirmative action programs. Getting tough on "them" the racially defined "others" who could easily be used as scapegoats and cast as the enemy was all that mattered. Facts were treated as largely irrelevant then. As they are now. Fortunately, a growing number of scholars and activists have begun to connect the dots between mass incarceration and mass deportation in our nation's history and current politics. The historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, in her essay "Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement," chronicles how these systems have emerged as interlocking forms of social control that relegate "aliens" and "felons" to a racialized caste of outsiders. In recent decades, the system of mass incarceration has stripped away from millions of U.S. citizens basic civil and human rights until their status mirrors (or dips below) that of noncitizen immigrants within the United States. This development has coincided with the criminalization of immigration in the United States, resulting in a new class of "illegal immigrants" and "aliens" who are viewed and treated like "felons" or "criminals." Immigration violations that were once treated as minor civil infractions are now crimes. And minor legal infractions, ranging from shoplifting to marijuana possession to traffic violations, now routinely prompt one of the nation's most devastating sanctions deportation. The story of how our "nation of immigrants" came to deport and incarcerate so many for so little, Hernandez explains, is a story of race and unfreedom reaching back to the era of emancipation. If we fail to understand the historical relationship between these systems, especially the racial politics that enabled them, we will be unable to build a truly united front that will prevent the continual re formation of systems of racial and social control. In my experience, those who argue that the systems of mass incarceration and mass deportation simply reflect sincere (but misguided) efforts to address the real harms caused by crime, or the real challenges created by surges in immigration, tend to underestimate the corrupting influence of white supremacy whenever black and brown people are perceived to be the problem. "Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question," W.E.B. Du Bois famously said back in 1897: "How does it feel to be a problem?" White people are generally allowed to have problems, and they've historically been granted the power to define and respond to them. But people of color in this "land of the free" forged through slavery and genocide are regularly viewed and treated as the problem. White nationalism, at its core, reflects a belief that our nation's problems would be solved if only people of color could somehow be gotten rid of, or at least better controlled. In short, mass incarceration and mass deportation have less to do with crime and immigration than the ways we've chosen to respond to those issues when black and brown people are framed as the problem. As Khalil Gibran Muhammad points out in "The Condemnation of Blackness," throughout our nation's history, when crime and immigration have been perceived as white, our nation's response has been radically different from when those phenomena have been defined as black or brown. The systems of mass incarceration and mass deportation may seem entirely unrelated at first glance, but they are both deeply rooted in our racial history, and they both have expanded in part because of the enormous profits to be made in controlling, exploiting and eliminating vulnerable human beings. It is tempting to imagine that electing a Democratic president or more Democratic politicians will fix the crises in our justice systems and our democracy. To be clear, removing Trump from office is necessary and urgent; but simply electing more Democrats to office is no guarantee that our nation will break its habit of birthing enormous systems of racial and social control. Indeed, one of the lessons of recent decades is these systems can grow and thrive even when our elected leaders claim to be progressive and espouse the rhetoric of equality, inclusion and civil rights. President Bill Clinton, who publicly aligned himself with the black community and black leaders, escalated a racially discriminatory drug war in part to avoid being cast by conservatives as "soft on crime." Similarly, President Obama publicly preached values of inclusion and compassion toward immigrants, yet he escalated the mass detention and deportation of noncitizens. Obama claimed that his administration was focused on deporting: "Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who's working hard to provide for her kids." However, reports by The New York Times and the Marshall Project revealed that, despite Obama's rhetoric, a clear majority of immigrants detained and deported during his administration had no criminal records, except minor infractions, including traffic violations, and posed no threat. Equally important is the reality that "felons" have families. And "criminals" are often children or teenagers. The notion that, if you've ever committed a crime, you're permanently disposable is the very idea that has rationalized mass incarceration in the United States. None of this is to minimize the real progress that has occurred on many issues of race and criminal justice during the past decade. Today, there is bipartisan support for some prison downsizing, and hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars have begun to flow toward criminal justice reform. A vibrant movement led by formerly incarcerated and convicted people is on the rise a movement that has challenged or repealed disenfranchisement laws in several states, mobilized support of sentencing reform and successfully organized to "ban the box" on employment applications that discriminate against those with criminal records by asking the dreaded question: "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" Activism challenging police violence has swept the nation inspired by the courageous uprisings in Ferguson, Mo., the viral videos of police killings of unarmed black people, and BlackLivesMatter. Promising movements for restorative and transformative justice have taken hold in numerous cities. Campaigns against cash bail have gained steam. Marijuana legalization has sped across the nation, with more than 25 states having partly or fully decriminalized cannabis since 2012. And "The New Jim Crow," which some predicted would never get an audience, wound up spending nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and has been used widely by faith groups, activists, educators and people directly affected by mass incarceration inside and outside prisons. Over the past 10 years, I've received thousands of letters and tens of thousands of emails from people in all walks of life who have written to share how the book changed their lives or how they have used it to support consciousness raising or activism in countless ways. Everything has changed. And yet nothing has. The politics of white supremacy, which defined our original constitution, have continued unabated repeatedly and predictably engendering new systems of racial and social control. Just a few decades ago, politicians vowed to build more prison walls. Today, they promise border walls. The political strategy of divide, demonize and conquer has worked for centuries in the United States since the days of slavery to keep poor and working people angry at (and fearful of) one another rather than uniting to challenge unjust political and economic systems. At times, the tactics of white supremacy have led to open warfare. Other times, the divisions and conflicts are less visible, lurking beneath the surface. The stakes now are as high as they've ever been. Nearly everyone seems aware that our democracy is in crisis, yet few seem prepared to reckon with the reality that removing Trump from office will not rid our nation of the social and political dynamics that made his election possible. No issue has proved more vexing to this nation than the issue of race, and yet no question is more pressing than how to overcome the politics of white supremacy a form of politics that not only led to an actual civil war but that threatens our ability ever to create a truly fair, just and inclusive democracy. We find ourselves in this dangerous place not because something radically different has occurred in our nation's politics, but because so much has remained the same. The inconvenient truth is that racial progress in this country is always more complex and frequently more illusory than it appears at first glance. The past 10 years has been a case in point. Our nation has swung sharply from what Marc Mauer memorably termed "a race to incarcerate" propelled by bipartisan wars on "drugs" and "crime" to a bipartisan commitment to criminal justice reform, particularly in the area of drug policy. And yet, it must be acknowledged that much of the progress occurred not because of newfound concern for people of color who have been the primary targets of the drug war, but because drug addiction, due to the opioid crisis, became perceived as a white problem, and wealthy white investors became interested in profiting from the emerging legal cannabis industry. Some of the reversals in political opinion have been striking. For example, John Boehner, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, stated in 2011 that he was "unalterably opposed to decriminalizing marijuana," but by the spring of 2018 he had joined the board of a cannabis company. Growing sympathy for illegal drug users among whites and conservatives, and concern regarding the expense of mass imprisonment, helped to make possible a bipartisan consensus in support of the Trump administration's First Step Act leading to the early release of more than 3,000 people from federal prisons for drug offenses. This development, which benefits people of color subject to harsh and biased drug sentencing laws, is difficult to characterize as major progress toward ending mass incarceration, given that Trump continued to unleash racially hostile tirades against communities of color and his administration vowed to reinstate the federal death penalty. He also rescinded a number of significant reforms adopted by Obama and expanded the use of private prisons. The reality is that, during both the Obama and Clinton years, highly racialized and punitive systems thrived under liberal presidents who were given the benefit of the doubt by those who might otherwise have been critics. Obama and Clinton's public displays of affection for communities of color, the egalitarian values they preached and their liberal or progressive stances on other issues helped to shield these vast systems of control from close scrutiny. Many of us saw these presidents as "good people" with our best interests at heart, doing what they could to navigate a political environment in which only limited justice is possible. All of these factors played a role, but one was key: These systems grew with relatively little political resistance because people of all colors were willing to tolerate the disposal of millions of individuals once they had been labeled criminals in the media and political discourse. This painful reality suggests that ending our nation's habit of creating enormous systems of racial and social control requires us to expand our sphere of moral concern so widely that none of us, not even those branded criminals, can be viewed or treated as disposable. If there is any silver lining to be found in the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, it is that millions of people have been inspired to demonstrate solidarity on a large scale across the lines of gender, race, religion and class in defense of those who have been demonized and targeted for elimination. Trump's blatant racial demagogy has awakened many from their "colorblind" slumber and spurred collective action to oppose the Muslim ban and the border wall, and to create sanctuaries for immigrants in their places of worship and local communities. Many who are engaged in this work are also deeply involved in, or supportive of, movements to end police violence and mass incarceration. Growing numbers of people are beginning to see how the politics of white supremacy have resurfaced again and again, leading to the creation and maintenance of new systems of racial and social control. A politics of deep solidarity is beginning to emerge the only form of politics that holds any hope for our collective liberation. The centuries long struggle to birth a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy a nation in which every voice and every life truly matters did not begin with us, and it will not end with us. The struggle is as old as the nation itself and the birth process has been painful, to say the least. My greatest hope and prayer is that we will serve as faithful midwives in our lifetimes and do what we can to make America, finally, what it must become. Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of the 10th anniversary edition of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," from which this essay is adapted. 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
Violet Pietrok was born with a Tessier Cleft, a rare defect that left a fissure in her skull. Surgeons at Boston Children's Hospital, aided by 3 D prints of her skull, hope to repair the damage. BOSTON The surgeon held a translucent white plastic eye socket in each hand. Gently moving them away from each other, Dr. John Meara showed the distance between Violet Pietrok's eyes at birth. He slid the sockets closer to demonstrate their positions 19 months later, after he had operated on her. Violet, now nearly 2, was born with a rare defect called a Tessier facial cleft. Her dark brown eyes were set so far apart, her mother says, that her vision was more like a bird of prey's than a person's. A large growth bloomed over her left eye. She had no cartilage in her nose. The bones that normally join to form the fetal face had not fused properly. Her parents, Alicia Taylor and Matt Pietrok, sought out Dr. Meara at Boston Children's Hospital, thousands of miles from their home in Oregon, because the plastic surgeon had performed four similar operations in the previous three years. Before he operated on Violet, Dr. Meara wanted a more precise understanding of her bone structure than he could get from an image on a screen. So he asked his colleague Dr. Peter Weinstock to print him a three dimensional model of Violet's skull, based on magnetic resonance imaging pictures. That first model helped him to decide what might need to be done and to discuss his treatment plan with her family. Three more 3 D printouts closer to the operation allowed Dr. Meara to rotate the model skull in directions he could not manage with a picture and would not attempt with a patient on the operating table. Then he was able to cut and manipulate the plastic model to determine the best way to push her eye sockets more than an inch closer together. Such 3 D printed models are transforming medical care, giving surgeons new perspectives and opportunities to practice, and patients and their families a deeper understanding of complex procedures. Hospitals are also printing training tools and personalized surgical equipment. Someday, doctors hope to print replacement body parts. "There's no doubt that 3 D printing is going to be disruptive medicine," said Dr. Frank J. Rybicki, chief of medical imaging at the Ottawa Hospital and chairman and professor of radiology at the University of Ottawa. He is the former director of the applied imaging science lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a few blocks from Boston Children's. For now, the printer extrudes a layer of liquid plastic instead of ink. It adds a second layer, and then another, and a skull or rib cage or whatever the surgeon dials up slowly emerges. The same process can also print layers of human cells. So far, researchers have also printed blood vessels, simple organs and bits of bone. A Utah boy's life was saved last year by a 3 D printed plastic splint that propped open his windpipe. Dr. Weinstock, the director of the Pediatric Simulator Program at Boston Children's, sees 3 D models as part of a larger program to improve surgical craft. At Children's and a dozen other pediatric centers around the world, he says, the surgical simulation program he developed improves team communication and trust, and lifts confidence before extremely complex operations. He believes it also shortens patients' time under anesthesia. If the nearly two year old program has prevented even one major medical error and Dr. Weinstock is convinced it has prevented many it has paid for itself and its 400,000 3 D printer, running nearly full time in the hospital's basement. The models of Violet's unusual skull allowed Dr. Meara to anticipate exactly what he would find underneath the face that stopped strangers on the street. Dr. Meara had received printed models of other patients' skulls before, but only after waiting weeks or months for a single replica, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Dr. Weinstock's printer generated four identical copies in a few days, each costing about 1,200 and accurate to within a hair's width. "The ability to physically move those segments is huge," Dr. Meara said. "Otherwise, you're doing it for the first time in the operating room." On Violet's surgery day in early October, Dr. Meara consulted a model a few times in the operating theater. The surgery went as planned. At Brigham and Women's Hospital, an even more sophisticated 3 D printer replicates flesh as well as bone, and even prints the tools he will use to make the cuts. "When it comes time to operate, you don't need to fiddle around, it's all there," Dr. Rybicki said. "You have unprecedented surgical planning, and you have unprecedented accuracy." Comparing models from before and after surgery also offers clues to why some tissue grafts take hold and some are rejected, Dr. Rybicki said. As 3 D printers improve, so will surgical outcomes, Dr. Rybicki said. Soon, doctors will thread catheters through replica blood vessels, map out how to bypass aneurysms, and feel the tactile difference between tumors and healthy tissue, for instance. Dr. Weinstock's mock surgical suite on the hospital's third floor looks, sounds and smells just like the adjacent real one down to the surgical tools, beeping monitors and oozing red liquid. He has hired a puppeteer and a former film engineer to make the practice sessions feel more real. Noah Schulz, a mechanical engineer who recently joined the hospital's staff after a career in the entertainment industry, uses his theatrical savvy in making 3 D printouts of anatomically precise surgical dummies. Dr. Weinstock says that neurosurgeons, cardiologists and orthopedic surgeons, among others, regularly used the simulation suite to "keep up their batting practice." Although there has been little research so far into the benefits of 3 D printing or surgical simulations, Department of Veterans Affairs researchers have shown that teamwork exercises in operating rooms reduced patient deaths or injuries by as much as 18 percent. "Solve one problem, remove one error, identify one latent safety threat, save one life," and it will reduce both personal and financial costs, Dr. Weinstock said. The benefits of practicing for routine procedures, for which doctors and nurses can become complacent, are as great as in unusual ones like Violet's, he said. Violet's parents, who live near Salem, Ore., and have five other children, including Violet's healthy twin, Cora, said they felt comforted by Dr. Meara's extensive preparations. On the day of the operation, when the surgeon came out to speak with the family, "he was smiles from ear to ear," Ms. Taylor said. "He said it went perfect." Knowing every move he'd make, she added, was hugely different "from busting her open and saying, 'How do we fix this?' " Still, Violet's recovery has been challenging. The skin on her scalp was not strong enough to hold the stitches. Her whole scar threatened to unzip, from the top of her head to the front of her face, and still has not healed three months later. A second operation, to form functional eyelids, was only a partial fix. More surgery will be needed to bring her eyes still closer together and to add nasal cartilage. It will be a long time before Violet's face no longer stops people on the street some kind and curious, some ready with insults for a little girl who looks different. But Violet seems not to notice. She plays peekaboo with strangers. She pushes a pink walking toy sometimes by the handle, sometimes in less conventional ways regaining the steadiness she had lost as her eyesight shifted. She throws her head back and giggles uncontrollably when her mother tickles her. "There's just something about her that's amazing, that shines," Ms. Taylor said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
WASHINGTON The tougher approach to financial regulation that President Obama outlined on Thursday reflected a changed political climate, the rebound in big banks' fortunes after their taxpayer bailout and a shift in power within the administration away from those who had been seen as most sympathetic to Wall Street. In calling for new limits on the size of big banks and their ability to make risky bets, Mr. Obama was throwing a public punch at Wall Street for the third time in a week, underscoring the imperative for him and his party to strike a more populist tone, especially after the Republican victory Tuesday in the Massachusetts Senate race. In announcing his proposals Thursday at the White House, Mr. Obama said if the financial industry wanted a fight over new restrictions, it was a fight he was ready to have. The new approach was welcomed by the White House political team and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and delivered by a less enthusiastic economic team on orders last month from Mr. Obama. It was also a victory for Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman and outside adviser to Mr. Obama. Until Thursday, when he stood beside the president at the White House announcement of the new policy, Mr. Volcker truly had been on the outside of administration decision making. And, in frustration, he had been increasingly vocal about the need for the administration to clamp down on what he described as the casinolike operations at the big banks that nearly destroyed the financial system in the first place. In adopting the tougher line, Mr. Obama set aside a more limited approach to regulation that had been championed since last year by his economic team, led by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. Yet even Mr. Geithner of late has been moving toward a tougher stance on Wall Street, in part out of anger that big banks, having ridden a taxpayer bailout back to comfortable profitability, are now rewarding themselves with big bonuses and fighting harder in Congress against the administration's initiative to tighten regulation of the financial system. The issue reignited speculation, common in the administration's early months, that Mr. Geithner and perhaps Lawrence H. Summers, the senior White House economic adviser, were not long for the Obama world given broad public perceptions that they remained too close to the financial industry. But numerous administration officials said that both men had earned the trust and confidence of Mr. Obama, who believed they had not received credit for stabilizing a financial system that by all accounts was on the verge of collapse when the president took office. His pique on that score came through in his televised interview with ABC News on Wednesday, after the loss in Massachusetts, even as Mr. Obama empathized with Americans' anger about the bailout effort, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, that he inherited from George W. Bush. "Now if I tell them, 'Well, it turns out that we will actually have gotten TARP paid back and that we're going to make sure that a fee's imposed on the big banks so that this thing will cost the taxpayers not a dime,' that's helpful," Mr. Obama said. "But it doesn't eliminate the sense that their voices aren't heard and that institutions are betraying them." To change that, he added, "We're about to get into a big fight with the banks." That fight is sure to continue testing Mr. Geithner, as well as Mr. Summers and lesser known members of the economic team who are seen by others in the West Wing as politically tone deaf. Yet Mr. Geithner, in an interview, said he foresaw no problems. "Just because things seem populist doesn't mean they're not the right thing to do," he said. The administration's new tack suggests just how much big banks have miscalculated Americans' intensified resentment against the bailout anger stoked by persistent high unemployment, banks' stinginess in lending to small business and the revival of Wall Street's bonus culture. They have become the perfect foil for the White House as it tries to lead the Democratic Party out of its post Massachusetts morass and to change the channel from the seemingly unending debate over health insurance. As the White House hopes to define the fight, the enemy is not big government but big money. One problem for the Obama team, as some Congressional Democrats lament, is that its moves of late look poll driven and overly reactive to the Democrats' implosion in the Bay State race. To be sure, worse for the White House than Scott Brown's win is the fact that the Republican won as an agent of change just as Mr. Obama did in 2008 only this time, of course, the change was not from Bush administration policies but from Mr. Obama's. Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, had urged the president to restrict behavior at banks that led to the crisis. Despite the timing, however, all three of Mr. Obama's recent policy stands have been in the works for some time. That is not to say they were not politically motivated; for some months, the administration has been concerned about Mr. Obama's slipping support in the polls and many Americans' perception of his administration as too cozy with Wall Street. The president's proposal last week for a tax on about 50 of the nation's biggest banks to recoup any losses from the bailout began taking shape at the Treasury last August for inclusion in the budget that Mr. Obama will send to Congress in February, administration officials said. Aside from its value as a way to raise 90 billion over 10 years, a time frame in which Mr. Obama is eager to cut deficits, the bank tax helped mute long running criticism of Mr. Geithner for his opposition last summer to European leaders' calls for taxing bank bonuses and transactions. Earlier this week, with action heating up in the Senate over legislation for regulating banks, administration officials spread the word that Mr. Obama's proposal to create an independent consumer protection agency was "non negotiable." Industry lobbyists have made killing the agency a priority, while liberal groups have made its creation a test of Mr. Obama's leadership. Mr. Obama personally weighed in with a lengthy meeting at the White House on Tuesday with the panel's chairman, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Ms. Stribling Kivlan, 34, is the new president of Stribling Associates, a residential real estate brokerage firm based in New York. The company was founded in 1981 by her mother, Elizabeth F. Stribling, formerly the president and now the chairwoman. Ms. Stribling Kivlan began working in sales at Stribling in 2003, and three years later joined Stribling's management team. She became president in January. Q. How do you and your mother divide responsibilities for the firm? A. My mother and I have worked side by side for many years, and we also have a management team of seven other people. There's no unilateral decisions made we really work as a round table and as a team. The nice thing about having a chairman and a president is we can be in two places. We can focus on our brokers or developers or buyer/sellers, whatever it might be. The only constant in my day is where I get my coffee in the morning. Lib and I pretty much run the company together. Q. What do you see as your main strengths? A. I love the financial side of the company: the overall budgeting of the company, the marketing. I love Fridays when I sit down with the controller and look at what's coming in and out of the company every week, what are some cost saving measures and where can we advertise more. I love the operational side. A. Lib is good at everything. A. Libba. We all have a variety of nicknames and three generations of Elizabeths. Mine is Biff, although I don't tend to go by that at work. And my grandmother went by Billie. If I ever had a daughter I'd name her Elizabeth. Q. Have you made any changes since becoming the president? A. The big thing we've done is the new Brooklyn office, in Boerum Hill. It was exciting to see that come to fruition. That's a project I've been incredibly involved in and it's near and dear to my heart. And we're also renovating our Chelsea office. I love the size we are, and I don't want to be too big, because I can interact with my brokers on a daily basis, but I'm excited to see the company grow a little bit in size. A. Well, there's an incredible frenzy in this market. It's not 100 percent across the board. But look at the Brooklyn housing market it's insanity. When you have 100 people at an open house, what do you do? The two and three bedroom market in Manhattan is doing incredibly well, and I think the real amazing thing is Brooklyn. It's just so hard to get into that market, whether it be Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Bed Stuy or Bushwick. Q. Are you worried about another real estate bubble looming? A. I'm not worried. I think the level of inventory will remain quite low in New York. Q. Do you see any laggards in the market? A. I think one of the greatest deals in New York is the Far East Side, especially with the Second Avenue subway coming. I think there are some really good opportunities. Q. Do you have sales and transaction numbers to share? A. We don't publish our numbers; 2012 started in a somewhat normal level, but by the end of the year it was crazy with all the changes in capital gains taxes. There were a record number of closings across the board in the city. And I think that 2013, if it continues in this manner, will be a very, very good year. Q. Let's talk about some of the new developments you're representing. A. We did 200 East 79th Street, which came on earlier this year, and sold that in record time. It was about 37 units. And that was sort of an indicator for us that the market was changing. We had great success with the Philip House, at 141 East 88th Street. Around 25 have sold. We have a project in Chelsea on 24th Street, by Cary Tamarkin; it's right up against the High Line. There had been such a lull in construction permits in the city. We now have an incredible amount of projects coming in the next couple of years. And it's exciting to see them come on in Brooklyn, SoHo, Upper West Side and Upper East Side. Q. How many of those new projects would Stribling be representing? A. In the next calendar year we'll probably see about 10. We have some exciting things coming up in Cobble Hill and SoHo and one on Sixth Avenue. I can't publicly talk about them. Q. Was your mother your mentor? A. Yes, 100 percent. I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where I knew a woman can do anything. She taught me to work hard and be honest. But the greatest lesson I learned is to say, "I don't know but I'll find out." There's no shame in not knowing the answer. Q. Were you always interested in real estate? A. No. I studied theology and I have a degree in world religion; I focused on Hinduism. For many years I thought I'd be in education. I also had a little stint, which I didn't complete, in culinary school. I thought I'd go the food writing route. I think when you grow up in a house with an incredibly successful parent, you want to create your own identity and you want to create your own life. But culinary school didn't work out. I went to work at a real estate brokerage in San Francisco, and the day I walked in there I realized there's no fighting it: this is what I want to do. The famous story is my mother got a call from someone wanting to put a bid on an apartment, and she said, "Great! I'm on my way to the hospital to have my child." So my mother sold an apartment on the way to have me at New York Hospital 34 years ago. So I think it was destined that I go into real estate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Pilsen, about a dozen blocks south of downtown Chicago, got its name from 19th century Czech settlers who long ago gave way to more recent waves of Mexican immigrants. The enclave's reputation seemed to bottom out in 2005, when the doll company American Girl introduced Marisol Luna, whose family leaves gritty Pilsen for the suburbs. But even then, a mix of Latino cafes and attractions including the National Museum of Mexican Art was drawing visitors and artists. Now new breweries, restaurants and the relocation of the popular Redmoon Theater have rooted Pilsen on Chicago's tourism map. Peruse Pilsen for superior vintage clothing stores including Revival A Go Go (shown), which deals in retro wear like styles of the '60s, and midcentury furnishings and housewares. The beautifully displayed Market Supply Co. sells men's and women's apparel and accessories from the '20s to the '70s. Offering roadhouse appeal, this Western themed saloon serves homey barbecue and live music most nights. Performances cover the range of American music, from stride piano and jazz standards to ragtime string duos, Patsy Cline cover bands, early jazz ensembles and, of course, honky tonk country.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
An officer and a killer play cat and mouse in "Killing Eve." And the limited series "Howards End" arrives on Starz. KILLING EVE 8 p.m. on BBC America. This new eight part thriller series stars Sandra Oh as Eve, a restless MI5 security officer who craves more action than her desk job demands. When a Russian politician is slain in Vienna, Eve must keep a witness under her watch as the killer remains on the lam. A few clues soon lead Eve to her suspect, Villanelle (Jodie Comer), a formidable assassin who traverses the globe assigned to take down one hopeless victim at a time, all while Eve studies her every move. This suspense drama, based on the novellas by Luke Jennings, has already been approved for a second season. AERIAL CITIES 8 p.m. on Smithsonian. The documentary series "Aerial America" has presented bird's eye views of the 50 states and their notable landmarks. This spinoff series borrows that approach, focusing on six metropolises with landscapes and skyscrapers best seen from above, beginning with Las Vegas. The premiere of a third spinoff series "AERIAL AFRICA" follows at 9.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Alexa Ray Joel in her bedroom with a painting her grandmother gave her shortly before she died. "I have this hanging right over my head," Ms. Joel said, "because I want her with me always." Alexa Ray Joel was apologizing. She just had her apartment floors done, and was asking her guests to take off their shoes. There was not a hint of the entitlement one might expect from someone who has been famous all her life. Over the mantelpiece in Alexa Ray Joel's living room, for example, is a beautifully carved name plaque from a very famous boat bearing her name. Billy Joel, her father, immortalized it in his song, "The Downeaster 'Alexa.'" On a quiet street in downtown Manhattan's NoLIta neighborhood, Ms. Joel's apartment is casually strewn with family heirlooms from her famous parents. Antique horse paintings are from her mother, the apparently ageless supermodel Christie Brinkley. A music room has a beautiful Steinway piano from her father covered with a red and gold embroidered shawl he brought her from Italy. The room's decor red walls and curtains is all her own. "It is the grandmother's apartment in the movie 'Gigi.' It took a second to get the red right," Ms. Joel explained. "I wanted everything scarlet red for passion." Ms. Joel, 32, wearing leather pants, spike heels and a high collared white lace blouse, is a mix of rock 'n' roll modern and ethereal Romanticism. A singer songwriter, she has performed cabaret at the Cafe Carlyle, with an eclectic repertoire from "Bye Bye Birdie" to "A Whiter Shade of Pale." She is writing a new song, "The Real Thing," inspired by her recent engagement to the downtown restaurateur Ryan J. Gleason. "It's like early Mariah Carey, a sweet pop ballad," she said. Last year, Ms. Joel did something she had never envisioned herself doing: She appeared in Sports Illustrated's "swimsuit" issue. It was a family project; she posed with her mother and sister Sailor Brinkley Cook. "It was liberating, almost like me coming out saying, "This is me, I celebrate myself and my body just for who I am, like every other woman should," Ms. Joel said. These are edited excerpts from a conversation with Ms. Joel on a sunny winter day with jazzy music playing in the background. Every piece in your apartment has a family connection or memory. Tell me about the painting over the bed of a woman looking out the window to the water. It reminds me of Matisse, my favorite artist. I'm not sure who the painter is. It was given to me my grandmother, Marge Marjorie Marie Brinkley. My mom's mom. It's a bittersweet story. When my grandmother I was really close to her was sick and not feeling well, before she passed, she said, "I want you to have this because it reminds me of you." I have this hanging right over my head, because I want her with me always. You seem to like art where the viewer is invited to supply the context, or story, of what's going in the picture. I do. I do. It's because I like to personalize things. In this one, I always see a "Pride and Prejudice" Jane Austen character. She's dreaming and she's looking out. And that's kind of me. My head is always in the clouds. This shadow box a framed dollhouse room with a woman, red curtains and a fortuneteller's globe is so eerie and mysterious. It looks Victorian. Where is it from? No one knows too much about it. My mom got this for me from an old flea market in the Hamptons when I was 16 years old. I was in a phase when I was obsessed I still am with fortunetellers and psychics. The piece has a fortuneteller and haunted, ghostlike reflection hanging on the wall. I always imagine this woman as living in New Orleans. And around the same time, my father was in New Orleans and got me the crystal ball on the shelf below. Everyone knew I was on this psychic kick and my parents are so thoughtful. The lamp in the room fell just few years ago, but I see it as being a part of the story: The piece is haunted, and the magical spells were so powerful that it caused a ruckus. I'm very kooky with this stuff. My mother teases me, "You are more polished, but you are like 20 steps from a 'Grey Gardens' moment." It's true.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Before each tournament, Sam Crichton, a senior on the Wake Forest debate team, meticulously stocks a half dozen Rubbermaid tubs with computer printouts. Each sheet of paper perhaps 5,000 total summarizes the argument in, say, a presidential speech or op ed piece. These "cards" have been sorted into manila files, grouped into brown accordion folders, stacked into the tubs and labeled by argument type: affirmatives, disadvantages, counterplans, critiques, case arguments/negatives, backfiles. There are 50 tubs for the entire Wake Forest team a traveling library of debate research. With the aid of all those pages of argumentation, debaters can summon up well reasoned, highly specific points about nuclear disarmament, this year's topic for college policy debaters. What if an affirmative team contends that nuclear armament has hurt Africa? What if a negative team cites Heidegger to bolster its response? "There's a strange comfort in reading off a sheet of paper," Mr. Crichton says. "Having all of this paper may seem like a form of chaos, but to me it actually seems more organized." Yet this tradition of organizing "cards" as many as 100,000 pages a team, aided by several printers brought to each tournament is proving unsustainable both financially and environmentally. That's the argument made by Jim Hanson, coach at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. In 2008, his debaters became the first top tier team to switch entirely to electronic documents; they file research, construct arguments and read speeches in tournaments off of laptops. "No More Tubs," exclaimed a news release, which called the Whitman debating program "the greenest in the country." "We had a paper throwing out party," Mr. Hanson says. The students dumped hundreds of thousands of pages of research into recycling bins. Other teams have followed Whitman's lead. About 25 percent have gone paperless this academic year, according to the Cross Examination Debate Association, which sanctions debates around the country. Debaters at the University of California, Berkeley, will switch in the fall. Emory, which has one of the largest debate programs in the nation, went paperless last fall with its younger debaters. Emory was spending 10,000 a year on printing and related costs and 50 for every paper filled tub flown to a tournament. As the dissenting argument goes, college is too late to introduce such a sweeping change. Most college debaters have been using the paper system since middle school. "We don't think it's a great idea to switch when they're competing for the most important tournaments of their careers," says Luke Hill, a coach for the Northwestern University program, which uses discarded banana boxes instead of tubs. He is adamant that Northwestern will not be changing anytime soon. THE NEW WAY Ryan Bass of Liberty University reads from his laptop as his teammate, Amanda Atkins, helps prepare evidence. Christopher Berkey for The New York Times While he concedes that paperless debating will eventually catch hold computers have too many advantages in search and storage for now, he says, the most competitive teams generally consider it more important to maintain continuity. At a recent round robin tournament in Kentucky, eight of nine teams continued to use paper. And there is little sign of change among the next generation; the paper system still thrives among middle and high school teams, where debate is more pastime than passion. Switching to laptops isn't as easy as it sounds for example, organizing thousands of files to adjust strategy midspeech can take some getting used to, despite new software. And then there is the sheer volume of backfiles that would need to be digitized. Also, the transition means rule changes, as well as the obligation of familiarizing judges and opponents with your computer system so they can do the requisite examination of (now digital) evidence for credibility and accuracy. Can there be fair competition with such radically different levels of technology used by competitors? "Many people in the community think paperless wastes time, delays debates and gives an unfair advantage to the paperless team," according to the Georgia Debate Union at the University of Georgia, whose Web site offers "Strategies for Success Against Paperless Teams." Debaters, says Edward M. Panetta, a coach at the University of Georgia, "are creatures of habit." "Their evidence is like a security blanket to them." And, he worries, "What happens if the file crashes?" In the hyperprepared world of debate, no team wants to risk the possibility of technological failure. Ryan Bass, a junior from Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., recalls how he encountered the risks of paperless debating at a tournament in September. In the middle of a critical argument, his partner's laptop flashed what he calls "the blue screen of death" and lost power. By the time it rebooted, Liberty's carefully assembled argument had vanished. "It was the worst thing that could ever happen in a debate," he says. Worse even "than if the room had caught fire." But as judges waited, Mr. Bass and his partner pulled together a revised argument based on recovered notes on the laptop. When the debate finished, the judge announced an unexpected verdict: Liberty had won. Paperless debate is not the end of the technological evolution. In February of last year, debaters from the University of Vermont and, nearly 350 miles away, St. John's University in Queens plugged in microphones and connected to an online forum for what organizers believe was the world's first virtual college debate. St. John's owns an imaginary island in the online world of Second Life. Team members debated via avatars. The debate was not judged, but spectators typed feedback in a chat window. PAPER TRAIL Sam Crichton says he's more comfortable with paper. He travels with his personal research library. Christopher Berkey for The New York Times The goal was not experimentation for its own sake. Stephen M. Llano, the St. John's coach, says the Internet could be a leveling force that improves access to debate at poorer and foreign colleges. "Until now, the biggest barrier to debate competition hasn't been skill," he says. "It's been money. A lot of people would debate, but the extreme cost of travel is holding them back." After the debate, Mr. Llano received a 2,000 grant from St. John's to expand debating within Second Life. He says he hopes to build an online debate academy on the island that would offer workshops and host tournaments. "Online, the cost to the attendee and the limit on the number of attendees basically disappears," he says. Next fall, Gordon Stables, the coach at the University of Southern California, plans to host what he says will be the first tournament via video. Teams will be invited to record their speeches and rebuttals, then post them on a Web site he'll call VBate. "This is just the beginning of what we can do with debate on social media," he says. Mr. Stables also teaches a class at U.S.C. called "Argumentation and Debate," in which students debate topics like terrorism, the Los Angeles budget and education policy. But this year, for the first time, those arguments will take place on Twitter in 140 character soundbites. Paper and paperless debaters squared off in a tournament at Vanderbilt University earlier this school year. Mr. Crichton, the Wake Forest senior, ended up in a round against Mr. Bass from Liberty. Like all policy debaters, the students sounded like auctioneers, indecipherable to the untrained ear, as they tried to squeeze as many arguments as possible into about two hours. Sides were chosen randomly. Mr. Crichton spoke against nuclear disarmament, arguing that reducing the number of warheads in the United States would necessitate making extraordinary concessions to pro military Republicans. Mr. Bass countered that the country's practice of aiming nuclear weapons at other countries' stockpiles only makes a nuclear accident more probable. There were no snafus. The judge and Wake Forest team members seemed comfortable with reading the Liberty team's arguments on its computer. In the end, the judge sided with Wake Forest, the team that used paper. And indeed, the most successful teams tend to be the most experienced ones, and they usually use paper. Such was the case last month at the prestigious National Debate Tournament, won by Michigan State University. The team, however, intends to go paperless in the fall. While acknowledging technology's march, that tournament's chairman, Timothy O'Donnell, says he doubts it will ever eliminate the desire for debating face to face. "You lose a lot of fidelity when you're not in the room with your opponent or your judge," he says. "Debate is a human activity. People will always come together for it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The most ferocious sound in the room at the David H. Koch Theater was coming from an 85 year old man in a wheelchair. But the years melted away as that man Donald McKayle, the modern dance and Broadway choreographer known for exploring African American themes in his work watched a recent rehearsal of "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," his 1959 masterwork about life on a chain gang, with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. As his long fingers rested on his knees and his shoulders leaned forward slightly, he scrutinized a moment in which seven men, holding hands as if bound by chains, twisted to one side and snapped their necks back before curving in the other direction in a deep, rounded contraction. For one thing, the neck movement needed more sharpness. But that wasn't all. "Although it's the same movement, this is something that you have to do individually," he explained in a voice that could trail off quietly he is still recovering from surgery for a brain tumor in 2014 but that during the rehearsal grew steadier and stronger. "And you can't do it as though this is the first part of the day. This is like a whole day, and you're finally given a rest. You're tired, very tired. And you're angry. But you know better than to say anything. And you can't take it anymore." Performances this week of "Rainbow," beginning on Tuesday, are part of Paul Taylor's American Modern Dance season at the Koch. As part of the Taylor organization's recent initiative to present works by choreographers other than its founder and, in certain cases to be performed by outside companies, "Rainbow" will be danced by Dayton Contemporary, which first performed it in 1987 and most recently in 2010.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
George Balanchine once said: "Put 16 women on the stage, and it's everybody it's the world. Put 16 men on, and it's always nobody." His 1972 Stravinsky "Symphony in Three Movements" begins with 16 women, and his 1934 Tchaikovsky "Serenade" with 17 women. When we watch those ballets, we can still believe him. ("Symphony in Three" was danced early in the New York City Ballet season that ends this weekend. It and "Serenade" return to repertory next May.) But Justin Peck's "Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes" new this February, back in repertory this May and set to return in October begins with 15 men. And, with all due respect, Mr. B., it's just not nobody it's really not. What's more, as if to counterbalance "Serenade," these men are all we see for the ballet's first episode. They come and go; as in the start of "Serenade," it's as if we were watching a kaleidoscope. Just as Balanchine plays all kinds of number games with his women (we see four quartets, three rows of five, and more), so does Mr. Peck with his men. And, as in "Serenade," there are fleeting incidents in which we get to know individual dancers. "Serenade" is famous as the first ballet Balanchine made in America; it's often hailed as the first in which Balanchine evoked the huge sweep of American space. Now "Rodeo," created less than three years into Mr. Peck's career as a choreographer, is performed to a score by that essentially American composer, Aaron Copland, whose music often conjures American space. The second movement of Mr. Peck's ballet is a male quintet just as the third movement of "Serenade" starts with a female quintet. And as the men, sometimes clustering together, take arabesques of different heights, it's easy to feel a hint of the famous fantail arabesque of Balanchine's "Apollo." (Mr. Peck wouldn't be the first to attempt this: an all male version of the triple fantail occurred in the central movement of Richard Alston's 1981 "Apollo Distraught," a marvelous work that was admired in New York in 1982.) The quintet, which is where Mr. Peck best catches the spaciousness of Copland's music, also contains images of mutual supportiveness (men partnering and lifting men). This kind of thing brought out the homophobe in Balanchine, who showed distaste for comparable features in the ballets of Jerome Robbins. This second "Rodeo" dance episode, with the men's separate voices working together like a quintet in music, goes beyond anything similar in Robbins, and it has virtually no precedent in Mr. Peck's own work. I don't mean that "Rodeo" matches "Apollo" or "Serenade," or that it implies any criticism of Balanchine's idiom by Mr. Peck. But it does suggest that in Mr. Peck, as in Alexei Ratmansky, the world now has two choreographers who aren't infantilized by the ethical force of Balanchine's decrees. Joaquin De Luz and Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet in Balanchine's "Sonatine" (1975) at the David H. Koch Theater. Lincoln Kirstein, who, with Balanchine, was City Ballet's co founder, loved to refer to T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," with its lines: "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists." And then: "The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it." This applies to City Ballet's Balanchine repertory as we watch "Rodeo"; you can feel it in the warmth of the audience's applause. Balanchine is not diminished; it was exciting last week to see Mr. Peck and Troy Schumacher, another of the company's young choreographers, in Balanchine's two act "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (a ballet in which he absorbed, revised and reacted against Shakespeare). Mr. Peck, tall and authoritatively self effacing, is admirable as Titania's anonymous cavalier. Mr. Schumacher musical, twinkling and summoning up the elements with wordless calls is the best of the company's current Pucks. New Peck and Schumacher ballets have their premieres on Sept. 30. Along with the revival of "Rodeo," the 2015 16 season will bring three other Peck ballets and another premiere. Last month, however, the most striking comparison was between Mr. Peck's "Rodeo," at City Ballet, and Agnes de Mille's 1942 original ballet of Copland's complete score, as danced by American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House. Remarkably, the ballets were danced the same week (May 11 through 16). It's good to see the de Mille again, and yet Mr. Peck makes far more of its music. Balletgoers spend most of their time admiring superior works of past centuries; that was a week in which you could feel proud to be sharing the same moment as a new creation. Yet there are still too many times despite City Ballet's overall improvement in recent years when its Balanchine repertory is diminished by the company's artistic management. It was marvelous to have Balanchine's Ravel pas de deux "Sonatine" (1975) briefly back in repertory, but it was bizarre to hear that its original dancers Violette Verdy and Jean Pierre Bonnefoux had played no part in its revival. They had visited New York in February to record an extended coaching session (with City Ballet's Ashley Laracey and Chase Finlay) for the Balanchine Foundation, and Ms. Verdy was back in town, receiving an honor, the week of its revival. Tiler Peck (not related to Mr. Peck), whose subtle musicality is always at its finest in roles created for Ms. Verdy, nonetheless did well; when she makes something of her own from a part, it usually seems as if Balanchine would have encouraged her. The second cast Ashley Bouder, however, just used the role for one of her coarsely roguish acts. "La Valse," whose heroine is forever associated with its creator, Tanaquil Le Clercq, was again performed in May. Nobody wants its current interpreters, Sterling Hyltin and Sara Mearns (glorious in other roles), to deliver clone performances, but neither they nor those mounting the ballet show any interest in Le Clercq's nuances. A complete silent film of the original cast is in the Dance Division of the New York Public Library (with multiple takes from successive performances). No more riveting record of Le Clercq exists. At the dramatically crucial moment of plunging one hand and arm into Death's black glove, then the other into the other, she first looks fixedly into the glove, then throws back her head, as if in glory. You see nothing like that onstage at City Ballet today. Who on its staff even consults the Balanchine Foundation's library of master class coaching sessions? Why this indifference to the historical record?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The hardest part of getting to Mars is sticking the landing. On the 26th of November, 2018, NASA's InSight spacecraft will plunge into the thin Martian atmosphere at over 14,000 miles an hour. An alien fireball over the red plains. InSIght will pop a supersonic parachute, drop its heat shield and prepare to touch down. In the past, Martian rovers have bounced and rolled to a stop inside huge airbags, or floated to the surface hanging from an elaborate sky crane. But InSIght will touch down on rockets, "Just the way God intended," in the words of the mission's lead scientist. If all goes well, and it arrives in one piece, the lander will unfurl its solar panels and get to work. InSIght won't send back any dramatic images. Its mission is to look down, into the geological heart of the planet. A seismometer will listen for vibrations and rumbles, marsquakes and meteorite impacts. This detector is so sensitive it can sense movements smaller than the width of an atom, or feel the faint tidal groundswell from the gravity of the tiny moon Phobos. A second device with a pointed spike will hammer itself 15 feet into the ground, to measure heat flowing up from the planet's core. Mars today is a craggy, frigid desert, but once it was wet and warm. What InSight learns could give us hints about the structure of other rocky planets: scarred Mercury, clouded Venus, and our own dynamic Earth, which is too large and too active to have kept the traces of its early formation. And perhaps it will even tell us about the billions of rocky worlds orbiting other stars. Over the past two decades, three generations of rovers have toured Mars. They have scraped and poked, scooped and sampled, dusted and drilled into Mars's surface. InSight will stay in one place, but dig deeper and listen longer. It may provide clues to why Mars was once habitable, why and how it changed, and what that might mean for Earth. For our old sibling Mars, Earth represents the road not taken. The road to life, blue water and green mountains. Home to a species now curious enough to send machines to investigate and interrogate nature's choices. To understand how we got lucky with a garden world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
TAIPEI Jason Chen knows what it feels like for globalization to threaten his family business. In 1992, he went to mainland China to find inexpensive raw materials for his garment and blanket business in Taiwan, following his competitors in the textile industry as they rushed to the mainland for free land, inexpensive labor and loose environmental regulations. But when a shipment of cloth he bought proved defective, his client rejected his garments, and he lost about 100,000. It was enough to push him to take matters into his own hands, and he founded Singtex Industrial to focus on developing higher value, waterproof synthetic cloth. "When you go cheap, you have no good quality control," he said. "Many of us went to China for a new, sweet beginning but tasted only bitterness in the end." Singtex's story parallels the transformation of the textile industry in Taiwan over the last two decades. Once the main pillar of Taiwan's economic development, textiles have given way to high technology gadgets and components. Fabric mills and garment factories moved offshore during the last 20 years to focus on lower costs and higher volumes. Yet the industry has re emerged over the past 15 years, with companies spinning out a plethora of high technology fabrics that are being snapped up by European and North American brands. Those materials are used in products like ski jackets, sports jerseys, outdoor furniture and firefighters' protective gear. "These fabrics have special production, coating and lamination processes, and we want to keep those patents here," said Robert Jou, a director at the state funded Taiwan Textile Research Institute. Data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange for 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available, show the average net margin at textile companies was 12.7 percent, compared with 7.6 percent for companies producing electronic products like semiconductors, computers and communication components. Singtex owns 34 patents, including one for S.Cafe, a polyester cloth with coffee grounds mixed into it. The coffee grounds, recycled from local 7 Eleven convenience stores and Starbucks cafes, absorb odors, giving the fabric added value for athletic clothing. Singtex counts the Timberland and Hugo Boss brands as its customers, and has even landed a deal to supply fabric for the Liverpool soccer club's uniforms. There were 7,752 textile companies in 1997, but by 2010, only 4,299 were left, according to the textile institute's data. "The ones that survived focused on innovative products to serve higher value demand in Europe and United States," said Chen Lee in, a senior economist at the state funded Chung Hua Institute for Economic Research. "It really turned the notion that textiles was a low tech industry on its head." This new business environment spawned companies like Hyperbola Textile, whose 24 employees work in a chic loft office in Neihu, a high technology hub in Taipei. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Hyperbola found its niche in designing high performance outdoor clothing, like ski jackets and raincoats, and supplies brands like Canada Goose, Lululemon and Patagonia. It also produces fade resistant outdoor cushions. The company has no factory. Instead, it finds mills in Taiwan to make the fabrics. Tina Wang, Hyperbola's founder, said that although her clients made smaller orders in Taiwan than they would in China, they needed fabrics that could withstand harsh weather conditions and demanding environments, which Chinese mills often lack the technology to produce. In 2011, Ms. Wang's company and its partner mills produced 350 types of fabrics to satisfy that demand. "We chose to stay here because we saw that Taiwan still had very innovative mills," she said. "But their marketing was very weak. We provide the design and marketing platform so that they can grab a share of the global market." Nimble companies like Singtex and Hyperbola have powered the textile sector's resurrection. Exports for the entire industry, at 12.7 billion in 2011, have climbed to 24 percent below the 1997 peak. But another measure of value, the unit price of fabrics, has risen by 41 percent since 1999 to 5.20 per kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, an indication that the industry has shifted to higher value products. For those who made the shift to more expensive cloth, profits have surged. Singtex's revenue increased by 35 percent in 2011 from 2010 and its gross margin sales revenue minus the cost of the goods rose to more than 25 percent in 2011, according to Mr. Chen of Singtex. He plans to take his company public in 2013, and declined to disclose more figures. Ms. Wang also declined to disclose Hyperbola's financial performance, but said, "Let's just say, it's way better than most of Taiwan's tech companies." Yet the good times might have a short shelf life. Chinese textile mills are learning and adopting production technologies that were first brought to the mainland by investors from Taiwan. Ms. Chen, the economist, estimated that China was 5 to 10 years behind Taiwan technologically, which keeps the pressure on companies in Taiwan to keep innovating. "Our companies took a few pages to the mainland, but they avoided bringing the whole manual," Ms. Chen said. "Technologies like ultrathin, waterproof, breathable fabrics, we still own. In the future, we may need to build spacesuits to stay ahead." Peter Huang, the chairman of Kingwhale Industries, a thermal fleece supplier, said his clients came to his company only after failing to find mainland factories that could meet their needs. "They literally see our product, tell us it's nice, then fly to Shanghai or Guangzhou with our sample the next day," Mr. Huang said. "Then we get an awkward request from a Chinese factory asking us to teach them how to set up the production process." Kingwhale is looking to become partners with American fabric labs to keep its edge. Mr. Huang is planning a trip to North Carolina State University this month to buy a patent, and will also check on the price of land nearby for a possible factory to supply fabric directly to the U.S. market. He aims to find a new fabric and turn it into a brand that can be as recognizable as Gore Tex, the breathable, waterproof fabric. Another company, Lealea Group, is taking a similar approach by building its own clothing brand. The company, a major global nylon supplier, spent a year designing about 150 pieces for a new clothing line called FN Ice and opened its first store in Taipei in September. FN Ice's creative director, Zoe Chen, said Taiwan would eventually lose its technological edge, and when that happens, the "only way to add value will be through promoting brands and lifestyle." She said the textile industry constantly had to adapt to the harsh reality that there would always be a country that could make what you were making at a fraction of the price. "The Chinese are smart," she said of the mainland companies. "They will catch up. So I'm always thinking of new ways to push this fabric forward to become something more."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
FLORENCE, Italy "Fifteen minutes ago, I may not have been about to say that," the multidisciplinary art star Sterling Ruby said backstage just after the stellar debut of his fashion label S.R. Studio. L.A. CA. He was referring to the prospects of adding "designer" to the list of occupations on his already jam packed resume. "But I really enjoyed it," Mr. Ruby said of the pressure to produce, after a yearlong gestation, a first collection that was so dense with ideas it felt like several collections mashed up on a single runway. Mr. Ruby was the special guest designer at Pitti Uomo, the big men's wear trade fair, a distinction previously experienced by Virgil Abloh, now the men's wear director at Louis Vuitton. This time Mr. Abloh had flown from his label's headquarters in Paris to join a front row studded with heavy hitting art collectors, some of whom had also jetted in, on private aircraft, from Switzerland where they had been attending that other giant trade fair, Art Basel. It was heady stuff for a first time designer. And yet, notwithstanding his impressive client base and apex predator status in the art world, Mr. Ruby spent the moments before the show fussing backstage with the drape of a bulky sweater that looked as if it had been knitted by a Cyclops and also wielding a lint roller. "I'm a little manic," said the artist, whose practice has encompassed not only the post apocalyptic ceramic vessels on which he made his reputation, but soft sculptures, design collaborations with Raf Simons (the two are close friends) at Dior and Calvin Klein and a photographic series documenting maximum security prisons across the United States from the air. The scale of his studio in the gritty industrial bowels of Los Angeles gives some sense of the scope of Mr. Ruby's ambition. It covers 120,000 square feet spread across nearly four acres. Born on a United States military base in Bitburg, Germany, Mr. Ruby, now 47, moved in his youth to Baltimore and then to rural New Freedom, Pa., in those days at the heart of Amish country. He was a diffident student, an outsider in a place he has often referred to as the middle of nowhere. He worked in construction and harvested tomatoes before entering art school his design portfolio included drawings of cats and fruit bowls. All along Mr. Ruby has customized his own clothing, at first with patches representing Black Flag and other punk bands he was following, and then, in recent years, with leftover fabrics systematically saved from his art productions. "My mother sewed, my grandmother sewed, my aunts sewed," Mr. Ruby has said. It was his Dutch born mother who had taught him the craft on a bulky metal Singer machine that he still owns. The autobiographical elements that vascularize nearly all of Mr. Ruby's artwork were so forcefully present on his runway that they obliged a viewer to consider how often fashion shows are about little more than the fact of their own occurrence. It was not necessary (although it helped) to know about the artist's reverence for craft, his appreciation for the accidental in art or his upbringing in a place where the neighbors quilted and drove to town in horse drawn carriages. That all came through in the clothes. There were acid washed blue coveralls, spaghetti strap sheaths (worn by women; although the show was held during a men's wear week, Mr. Ruby offered designs that were largely gender neutral) worn atop trousers with vast bag legs reminiscent of Rick Owens. There was spatter dyed work wear resembling the items Mr. Ruby installed in a vitrine for a 2016 show at the Sprueth Magers gallery in London. There were stiffened ponchos that could have been uniforms for members of some survivalist cult. There were dresses photo printed with burning candles and weed strewn lots, photographed by Mr. Ruby's wife, Melanie Schiff. There were images of fruit and tools collaged onto pants and left afloat on a ground of denim. There were "Kimmy Schmidt" style chastity dresses, a quilted middy and, on one model, a vinyl tabard printed with the cover work from "Hex," a 1972 book about murder among the Pennsylvania Dutch. It feels dated now to talk about the sniffy attitude the art world traditionally took about fashion. Plenty of other artists have expressed a love of clothes and the fashion world in their work. What sets Mr. Ruby apart is his refusal to draw distinctions between one form of creative practice and another. "Outside of the logistics of putting together the collection and the garments in the kind of production of it I don't see it as any different to making a sculpture or a painting," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style

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