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Arizona, where I was born, in July became the first state to cut poor families' access to welfare assistance to a maximum of 12 months over a lifetime. That's a fifth of the time allowed under federal law, and means that 5,000 more people will lose their benefits by next June. This is only the latest tightening of the screws in Arizona. Last year, about 29,000 poor families received benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, 16,000 fewer than in 2005. In 2009, in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, benefits were cut by 20 percent. And if Paul Ryan, the Republican lawmaker from Wisconsin who is expected to become speaker of the House, has his way, poor people in many other states can expect similar treatment in the years ahead. A bit of history is necessary to understand how we reached this point. Two decades ago, when the Clinton administration agreed with a Republican controlled Congress to "end welfare as we know it," Washington replaced the poor's entitlement to aid from the federal government with a fixed block grant to states. The states were given great flexibility about how to spend the money and a powerful incentive not to give it to the needy. And for all the initial enthusiasm for the idea, welfare reform has fallen far short of the claims of its supporters. Nonetheless, the block grant approach has emerged as the central plank of the Republican strategy to confront America's intractable poverty. The party's main presidential candidates have woven poverty and inequality into their campaign speeches. Nearly all of them are expected to show up in January at the Republican poverty summit meeting in Columbia, S.C., organized by Mr. Ryan, who has laid out detailed plans to overhaul what remains of the American social safety net. Mr. Ryan has proposed to turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states. Last year, he put forth an "opportunity grant," a block grant to replace just about everything else the federal government provides lower income people not just the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, known as TANF, but also food stamps, housing assistance and energy aid into one dollop of money. The main exceptions would be Social Security and the earned income tax credit. For all the talk about creating opportunity for the poor, and how ill served they are by the current mix of government programs, it's hard to view these plans as anything but a bald effort to save money. But don't just take my word for it. Take it instead from Peter Germanis, one of the White House advisers who help write President Ronald Reagan's welfare reform proposal of 1986, called "Up From Dependency." He has been affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, both conservative advocacy and research organizations in Washington. Over the summer, Mr. Germanis published a startling confession. Writing "as a citizen and in my capacity as a conservative welfare expert," he apologized for whatever role he may have had in the welfare reform enacted in 1996. 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. "To the extent that anything I ever wrote contributed to the creation of TANF or any block grant, I am sorry," he wrote. "As I hope to demonstrate in this paper, a block grant for a safety net program is bad public policy." And he does. Among the easier charges to make against the Needy Families block grant is that it was not meant to adjust for inflation. It was 16.5 billion two decades ago; it is 16.5 billion today. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, it has lost more than a third of its buying power. What's more, states were given both incentives and tools to redeploy the money to other priorities. Notably, they could get around the requirement to meet job participation benchmarks simply by reducing the caseloads of beneficiaries almost a direct instruction to bump people off. "States did not uphold their end of the bargain," said Ron Haskins, an expert on welfare who worked for more than a decade for House Republicans. "So why do something like this again?" Arizona is a prime example of what has happened in states where Republicans rule. By now, only about nine out of every 100 poor families benefit from the cash welfare program, down from 55 percent two decades ago. This has nothing to do with the program's objective of helping poor adults with children escape the stigma of welfare and get a job, still the best antipoverty tool there is. Arizona simply needed the money for something else. Specifically, as noted in a report by researchers at Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy, the state, facing a huge jump in the number of neglected children put in foster care, needed more money to "plug state budget gaps and to fund child protection, foster care and adoption services." Rather than ask state taxpayers to help fill the gap, lawmakers took it from the pockets of poor people. On average, states use only about a half of their funds under the TANF program to fund its core objectives: Provide the poor with cash aid or child care, or help connect them to jobs. Ending the poor's entitlement to government aid is counted as a success because it has reduced the rolls of people on welfare. But that is not the same as helping the poor get a job, overcome dependency and climb out of poverty. Welfare was essentially made irrelevant to the lives of the poor. It is meager yet increasingly difficult to get. Today only 26 percent of families with children in poverty receive welfare cash assistance. This is down from 68 percent two decades ago. And it's not as though there are no more poor people in America. In 2012, one out of five households receiving food stamps reported no other source of income. Millions more scrape by on modest assistance and low paying jobs. But by making the poor almost exclusively the responsibility of the states, our national politicians can claim the problem has been solved. This is what's most worrying about the block grant strategy to address the bane of poverty: It allows the assistance to wither while poverty survives. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times The artist Julie Mehretu has been flying awfully close to the sun. Soaring midair on a mobile platform inside an unused Harlem church, she has been working and reworking two towering paintings taking shape on opposite walls, a monumental commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For the last 14 months the vaulted neo Gothic nave has served as Ms. Mehretu's temporary studio as she executes the most physically demanding, politically charged and collaborative work of her career. Later this month, her paintings will be installed in the museum's atrium, where they will remain on view for more than three years. "These are my most American paintings," said Ms. Mehretu, 46, running her hand through her crop of dark curls as she contemplated the two radiant and complex canvases, each stretching 27 feet by 32 feet. Ms. Mehretu made her first marks on the canvases in the days right after the November election. It was her shock that moved her to rapid action and she said the current "miasma" informed her improvisational language of roiling calligraphic brush strokes and erasures. She is interested in what "gestural abstraction" her intuitive and personal expression "can conjure in this political moment," she said, adding that the works "are trying to make sense of where we are in our country right now." Ms. Mehretu won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award at the young age of 34 for her sprawling abstract paintings that reflect the velocity and fragmentation of contemporary life. With her auction record of 4.6 million and transcontinental biography born in Ethiopia and raised in Michigan she is one of the top selling living female artists and bona fide stars in the art world that prizes multiculturalism. Her 2009 commission for the lobby of the financial behemoth Goldman Sachs could have been viewed as cozying up to the one percent. She chose the opportunity to work at a scale unprecedented for her and on a wall visible to a broad public, including service workers in the building. Measuring 23 feet by 80 feet, "Mural" maps the whirl of global trade and communications and was deemed "the most ambitious painting I've seen in a dozen years" by Calvin Tomkins of The New Yorker. All of that is a lot to live up to as Ms. Mehretu faces her new commission. While the history of art is punctuated with epic painting projects by men from Giotto to Michelangelo to Diego Rivera the director of SFMoMA, Neal Benezra, said he was "hard pressed to think of another woman painter working at this scale in a public place." At regular intervals during the completion of these new paintings, the jazz composer Jason Moran, Ms. Mehretu's friend and Harlem neighbor, set up camp on the balcony of the church. He made the formerly sacred space reverberate with compositions spun off his electronic piano while she painted. "Jazz has always been the form of music that marks these temperature changes in America," said Mr. Moran, who will perform the result of their collaboration this fall in Performa 17, a visual art and performance biennial in New York. "It's turbulent now, as America has always been. Julie and I are making this response in concert with each other." Mr. Moran, who is the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington, riffed directly off the markings in her paintings as though he were reading a score. Ms. Mehretu searched throughout New York for a space big enough to make these paintings before striking a deal with real estate developers to use the church, just down the street from where she lives with her spouse, Jessica Rankin, and their 12 and 6 year old sons. Being able to duck out for lunch at home or parent teacher conferences has made her grueling work schedule more manageable. Graceful and coolheaded, the artist is prone to speaking in elliptical phrases that build on one another, in a way that echoes her artwork. Ms. Mehretu, who received her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, has always layered her canvases with diagrams and information as a starting point: architectural plans of arenas or fortified cities underpin her small dashes and shapes that move in swarms across her early paintings. In 2004, her works were prominently featured in the Whitney Biennial, the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, the Sao Paulo Biennial and the Museum of Modern Art, spurring collector and institutional demand. In 2019, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is scheduled to give her a retrospective. As a departure point for her SFMoMA commission, Ms. Mehretu turned to 19th century paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, layered with recent photos of civil unrest in cities including Ferguson and Baltimore. "I was attracted to these landscape paintings that were trying to describe a really intense moment historically, of what this country was becoming, on all these different levels," Ms. Mehretu said. On the computer in Photoshop, she merged two majestic landscapes by Bierstadt and another by Church with blurred news images of riots and protests in the wake of fatal shootings of black men. These composites were inkjet printed onto the bare canvases, then stretched on the walls of the church and encased in 20 layers of clear acrylic to create the hard surfaces on which she would paint. Ms. Mehretu spent much of last October just staring at the panels, trying to determine how to begin. "This scale is no joke," she said. Her brush strokes, in ink, are now much looser than in previous works and evoke scrawled graffiti. "It's exhilarating when you make a mark that crosses 10 or 12 feet and get it right," said Ms. Mehretu, who moved with growing agility on a manually operated scissor lift. She showed off her huge archive of brushes, many of which she's modified with extended handles. When she's made a line that suggested figuration, she's intuitively pushed it further, a development that first surfaced in her exhibition last fall at the Marian Goodman gallery. Pelvises, limbs, a tongue seem to emerge from the morass and then break apart again. Ms. Rankin, who is also an artist, on a recent visit to the studio perceived an Atlas figure in the sinuous contour of a sloped back and leg "carrying the burden of it all." "Eighty percent of the marks I put down I wipe or sand away," said Ms. Mehretu, explaining why she builds the surface up so much. Only the golden haze from Bierstadt's Lake Tahoe, for instance, or the greens, yellows and reds of sirens, fires and traffic lights in the nighttime riot scenes are still visible through Ms. Mehretu's dense accumulation of strokes. Across the surface, she has silk screened hundreds of details from the computer composites enlarged into patterns of colored, pixelated squares. The embedded references "make these canvases extremely rich to look at," Mr. Benezra said. For Ms. Mehretu, sharing her creative zone with another artist was initially a challenge. (RoseLee Goldberg, Performa's director and founder, called Ms. Mehretu's suggestion of a collaboration with Mr. Moran "a gorgeous idea.") During the biennial in November, Mr. Moran on piano, accompanied by musicians on drums and cornet against a video backdrop of her art, will perform his joyously mournful score. When they both were working fully in the flow, Ms. Mehretu described the sensation of "actually hearing your drawing somehow, the mixture of the hand, eye and ear at the same time." Mr. Moran, who has followed Ms. Mehretu's work for years, said it took a lot of courage for her to flirt with disaster at such a large scale. Ms. Mehretu took a big risk late in the game, after she had ostensibly finished one canvas. She had the idea to airbrush three sides of a huge diamond shape in flaming orange across her vortex of dark marks that seem to ascend upward. "I drew it into the computer and thought, nah, that's crazy," she said. Her 12 year old son cheered her on to do "the rainbow thingy," as he called it. "It's like a crescendo," she said. Does the giant form suggest a rainbow emerging from the political chaos she sees embroiling the country or a conflagration threatening to destroy all progress toward equality? The installation artist Sarah Sze dropped by for a visit and was dumbfounded by the addition, calling the canvas an "Icarus painting." "I couldn't have made these 10 or 15 years ago," Ms. Mehretu said. "I feel much freer in my approach to painting right now," she continued. "I'm excited about being open to intuition and influence, trying to keep pushing without falling on my face or maybe allowing myself to fall on my face." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Organizers of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the giant pop festival in the picturesque desert of Southern California, have delayed next month's event to October over concerns about the coronavirus, the festival announced on Tuesday after days of speculation. The festival, which had been planned in two weekend installments, April 10 to 12 and April 17 to 19, will now take place six months later, from Oct. 9 to 11 and Oct. 16 to 18. In a brief statement, the festival made no comment about the lineup. But the original event was to feature Travis Scott, Frank Ocean and a reunion of Rage Against the Machine, along with dozens of other acts, and Goldenvoice, the festival's promoter, has scrambled with talent agents in recent days in an attempt to preserve as much of the original lineup as possible. Also postponed is Stagecoach, a country music festival also from Goldenvoice, which will now take place from Oct. 23 to 25. Both events are held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif. "This decision was not taken lightly or without consideration of many factors," Dr. Kaiser said. "No doubt it will impact many people, but my top priority is to protect the health of the entire community." In its statement announcing the festivals' delay, Goldenvoice said, "While this decision comes at a time of universal uncertainty, we take the safety and health of our guests, staff and community very seriously." Even rescheduled, the postponement of Coachella could pose a significant disruption to the annual concert season. The event, founded in 1999, draws up to 125,000 people a day and has come to be a bellwether for the multibillion dollar touring business. In just the past week, the music industry has hunkered down in expectation of changes to come with the spread of the coronavirus. Executives at the major promotion companies and talent agencies among them Live Nation, AEG, WME, Creative Artists Agency and Paradigm have formed a task force to share information and to establish practices for dealing with virus related problems and delays. Also this week, Neil Young said he was considering postponing his own tour, and Pearl Jam announced the postponement of its North American tour. "We've worked hard with all our management and business associates to find other solutions or options," Pearl Jam wrote on its website, "but the levels of risk to our audience and their communities is simply too high for our comfort level." On Friday, the 34th annual South by Southwest festival a 10 day smorgasbord of music, film and technology, in Austin, Texas was abruptly canceled by city and county health officials, only two days after they had said that pulling the plug would not make the community safer. Festival organizers have since said that they do not have insurance to cover cancellation by pandemics or communicable disease, and that they will be laying off a third of their full time staff. Riverside County declared a public health emergency on Sunday, after the discovery of the first locally acquired case of coronavirus there, and the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament in nearby Indian Wells was canceled. In its statement on Tuesday, county officials said they had reported six coronavirus cases, including four in the Coachella Valley. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Savage and somber, "Sweet Country" is, on its face, the story of a manhunt. Set in Alice Springs, Australia, in 1929, the movie tracks the fate of Sam (a fine Hamilton Morris), an Aboriginal stockman forced to flee after killing a white farmer in self defense. Around this spare story, though, the director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness. The opening shot might be a metaphorical mallet a cauldron of water slowly coming to the boil while a violent, slur slathered argument plays out offscreen but the coarseness is in keeping with the movie's pointed, symbolic style. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention on Monday evening may have had a striking similarity to some parts of Michelle Obama's address at the 2008 Democratic convention, but in one aspect, at least, her appearance was original: her clothes. In normal circumstances, this probably would have been a big deal; there is a reason that Mrs. Obama, who has done more to break the rules about first ladies wearing only American designers than any other president's spouse, wore Maria Pinto (2008) and Tracy Reese (2012) for her convention speeches, and that Cindy McCain wore Oscar de la Renta in 2008, as did Ann Romney in 2012. It somewhat undermines a message about renewing the American economy and supporting local industry, after all, when you do not put your money where your husband's platform is. However, the dress debate (and some people had already started to complain on Twitter) got overshadowed immediately by the speech controversy. Still, it's worth revisiting, because Ms. Trump has been such a cipher on the campaign trail so far, and her choice of convention garb was an interesting one because it suggested strategic planning. Especially given that Ms. Trump bought it herself on Netaporter.com, a campaign spokeswoman told WWD, where it sells for 2,190. Ms. Ilincic's story parallels Ms. Trump's nicely: She was born in Serbia, which, like Ms. Trump's native Slovenia, was part of Yugoslavia at the time; and like Ms. Trump, she found her way out via a career in fashion. It shadows Ms. Trump's own American fairy tale. Ms. Ilincic has also become a go to name for a number of women in the political and global spotlight, including the wife of former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, Samantha, who wore Roksanda when she and her family left 10 Downing Street last week; the Duchess of Cambridge, who wore Roksanda to Wimbledon; and even Mrs. Obama, who has worn Roksanda numerous times, including on the Asian tour for her Let Girls Learn initiative (though she never wore the label to a convention). The implicit association is notable. And Ms. Trump's choice of a white dress, as opposed to the color blocked styles that have become Roksanda's signature, sent all sorts of interesting subliminal signals, given that Ms. Trump has rarely spoken on the campaign trail, including that this was effectively her political baptism. Plus, of course, when you are insisting on the purity of your spouse's motives, it underscores the message. As for the frock itself, it was conservative long sleeved, round necked with a hint of grandeur (those fluted sleeves) and a slight twist (a full length zipper up the back), descriptions that have a certain resonance with Donald J. Trump's agenda. That may be reading too much into the dress, but then, Ms. Trump was a model, and she understands the power of the visual cue. Indeed, most of her communication has been through appearance, rather than words. I'd give her the benefit of the doubt on this one, and pay attention to what comes next. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SAN FRANCISCO Peter Thiel is a billionaire, the biggest Donald J. Trump supporter in Trump hating Silicon Valley and, above all, someone who prides himself on doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. So it makes perfect sense that right after President Trump proclaimed in his inaugural address that "the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America," Mr. Thiel was revealed to be a citizen of a country on the other side of the world: New Zealand. In these uncertain times, it is undoubtedly smart to have a backup country. But the news that one of the richest citizens of New Zealand is a naturalized American who was born in Germany set off an immediate furor in the island nation. One question being asked was why Mr. Thiel became a New Zealander in 2011. Close behind that was how it happened. If you like New Zealand enough to want to become a citizen, the country's Internal Affairs Department noted on Wednesday, one requirement is "to have been physically in New Zealand for a minimum of 1,350 days in the five years preceding the citizenship application." Another requirement is that you "continue to reside" there after becoming a citizen. Mr. Thiel, 49, does not appear to have done either. The investor, who retains his American citizenship, was a founder of the online payments site PayPal and the data company Palantir. He secretly funded the lawsuit that killed off Gawker Media, the network of gossip sites that outed him as gay. When Mr. Trump won, Mr. Thiel emerged as a key adviser. He has spent much of the time since the election in New York as part of the transition team. People from Mr. Thiel's network are under consideration for significant jobs in Trump's cabinet. As a byproduct of his singular support for Mr. Trump in Silicon Valley, Mr. Thiel has become famous, a fate many of his peers go out of their way to avoid. He has been reported as a possible Supreme Court justice, as a potential Republican candidate for governor of California, and most recently, as President Trump's potential ambassador to Germany. (He denied the first, and the others appear unlikely.) Mr. Thiel's admiration for New Zealand is longstanding. "Utopia," he once called it. He has an investment firm in the country that has put millions into local start ups. He also owns lavish properties there, which his Silicon Valley friends hope to fly to in the event of a worldwide pandemic. But actually going so far as to become a citizen? That was a surprise, and it makes for an odd juxtaposition with President Trump, who has chastised companies for investing in other countries, and who said on Friday, "From this moment on, it's going to be America first." A spokesman for Mr. Thiel declined to comment. A White House spokeswoman did not return a message seeking comment. Mr. Thiel's citizenship came to light when Matt Nippert, an investigative reporter for The New Zealand Herald, was looking into a lakefront estate that Mr. Thiel bought in the country in 2015 for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million. Since it was farmland, the 477 acre South Island property appeared to come under the Overseas Investment Act's definition of "sensitive land." The law requires foreigners to seek official permission. But Mr. Thiel did not need permission, the reporter found, because he was a New Zealand citizen. Joanna Carr, a spokeswoman for the Overseas Investment Office, confirmed on Wednesday that Mr. Thiel had presented the required documentation. "We learned of Mr. Thiel's citizenship last year," Ms. Carr said in a statement. New Zealand's typical process for citizenship has numerous conditions, including residency and "good character," which is actively confirmed. "It just seems very, very unlikely that Mr. Thiel lived in New Zealand for the majority of his time for the five years preceding 2011 and went unnoticed," Iain Lees Galloway, a spokesman for the Labour Party, said in an interview. "We're a small country; he's a very wealthy man; he's a man who is prominent in the business world. I think he would have stood out in New Zealand." If Mr. Thiel was not a resident in New Zealand for the necessary amount of time, an exception must have been made. The government has not responded to questions about whether that happened and, if so, what the reason was. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
'HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE' at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism's holiest genesis tale that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906 7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org 'BLUE PRINTS: THE PIONEERING WORK OF ANNA ATKINS' at New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (through Feb. 17). An intimate, exquisite show of a pioneer of photography and natural science. In the early 1840s, Atkins, a seaweed loving Englishwoman, began documenting aquatic plants through the new technique of cyanotype (or blueprint, as architects would later call it), and sewed her spectral images into the very first books of "photographical impressions" albeit ones made without a camera. Atkins, perhaps assisted by servants, placed hundreds of specimens of seaweed or algae on coated paper, left them in the sun, and then washed the exposed sheet to produce white shadows of the plants against rich Prussian blue backgrounds. Each one is a little miracle, with neuronlike roots winding across the page, the leaves revealing every branching vein. (Jason Farago) 917 275 6975, nypl.org 'CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876 1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum's own collection. But these days, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi's little known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost living things into the world, and they convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'EMPRESSES OF CHINA'S FORBIDDEN CITY' at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (through Feb. 10). Every emperor of the Qing dynasty had dozens of wives, concubines and serving girls, but only one of them could hold the title of empress. The lives of women at the late imperial court is the subject of this lavish and learned exhibition, which plots the fortunes of these consorts through their bogglingly intricate silk gowns, hairpins detailed with peacock feathers, and killer platform boots. (The Qing elite were Manchus; women did not bind their feet.) Many empresses' lives are lost to history; some, like the Dowager Empress Cixi, became icons in their own right. Most of the 200 odd dresses, jewels, religious artifacts and scroll paintings here are on rare loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing you will not have a chance to see these again without a trip to the People's Republic. (Farago) 978 745 9500, pem.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 LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art. 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 Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'BRUCE NAUMAN: DISAPPEARING ACTS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18) and MoMA PS1 (through Feb. 25). If art isn't basically about life and death, and the emotions and ethics they inspire, what is it about? Style? Taste? Auction results? The most interesting artists go right for the big, uncool existential stuff, which is what Bruce Nauman does in a transfixing half century retrospective that fills the entire sixth floor of MoMA and much of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. The MoMA installation is tightly paced and high decibel; the one at PS1, which includes a trove of works on paper, is comparatively mellow and mournful. Each location offers a rough chronological overview of his career, but catching both parts of the show is imperative. Nauman has changed the way we define what art is and what is art, and made work prescient of the morally wrenching American moment we're in. He deserves to be seen in full. (Holland Cotter) 212 708 9400, moma.org 718 784 2084, momaps1.org 'PAA JOE: GATES OF NO RETURN' at the American Folk Art Museum (through Feb. 24). Joseph Tetteh Ashong, better known as Paa Joe, is Ghana's pre eminent funerary carpenter, turning out thousands of brightly colored lions, soda bottles and automobiles for people to be buried in. Most of his exuberant pieces enjoy the light of day for only a few hours before they disappear into the ground. But in 2004, Paa Joe was commissioned by the art dealer and gallerist Claude Simard to make casket size hardwood models of 13 former Gold Coast slave forts, and seven of them are now at AFAM. Thanks to Paa Joe's gift for transmuting even the most complex and brutal material into a cheerful expression of his own artistic temperament, the works' undeniable conceptual weight doesn't hamper the overwhelming visual pleasure. (Will Heinrich) 212 595 9533, folkartmuseum.org 'POSING MODERNITY: THE BLACK MODEL FROM MANET AND MATISSE TO TODAY' at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (through Feb. 10). This landmark show uses a new lens on 19th century French art history. Progressiveness both artistic and social is measured by the way black women are depicted in the paintings of the period; this yardstick is also applied to subsequent generations of European, American and African artists. A revelatory thesis, brilliantly executed. (Smith) 212 854 6800, wallach.columbia.edu 'BETYE SAAR: KEEPIN' IT CLEAN' at the New York Historical Society (through May 27). Saar has been making important and influential work for nearly 60 years. Yet no big New York museum has given her a full retrospective, or even a significant one person show, since a 1975 solo at the Whitney Museum of American Art. As this exhibition demonstrates, the institutional oversight is baffling, as her primary themes racial justice and feminism (her 1972 breakthrough piece, "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," merges the two by transforming the racist stereotype of the smiling black mammy into an armed freedom fighter) are exactly attuned to the present. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'STERLING RUBY: CERAMICS' at the Museum of Art and Design (through March 17). Adept at most art mediums, this artist is at his best in ceramics, especially in the outsize, awkwardly hand built, resplendently glazed baskets, ashtrays and plates and the objects that verge on sculpture in this show. These works actively incorporate accident and aspects of the ready made, have precedents in the large scale ceramics of Peter Voulkos and Viola Frey, but may be closest in spirit to the Neo Expressionism of Julian Schnabel rehabilitated, of course. (Smith) 212 299 7777, madmuseum.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 dilettantish. 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 'ANDY WARHOL FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 31). Although this is the artist's first full American retrospective in 31 years, he's been so much with us in museums, galleries, auctions as to make him, like wallpaper, like the atmosphere, only half noticed. The Whitney show restores him to a full, commanding view, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way, with an emphasis on very early and late work. Despite the show's monumentalizing size, it's a human scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet of our market addled present. What we have instead is Warhol for whom art, whatever else it was, was an expression of personal hopes and fears. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'LILIANA PORTER: OTHER SITUATIONS' at El Museo del Barrio (through Jan. 27). This exquisite survey of 35 objects, installations and video by this Argentinian born American artist covers nearly half a century, but feels unanchored by time and gravity. In pieces from the early 1970s, Porter adds spare pencil lines to a photographs of her own face as if to challenge optical perception: Which is more real, the artist or the artist's mark? Later, she began assembling and photographing groups of toys and figurines found in flea markets and antiques shops to tease out political puzzles. And despite a witty use of miniaturist scale, cruelty and loss run through the work. In the 2009 video "Matinee," tabletop statuettes live tragic lives: A ceramic child is suddenly beheaded by a hammer. (Cotter) 212 831 7272, elmuseo.org 'RUBBISH AND DREAMS: THE GENDERQUEER PERFORMANCE ART OF STEPHEN VARBLE' at Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (through Jan. 27). The 1970s, when New York City's budget tanked and trash piled up in the streets, was a golden age of downtown performance art. And no artist shone brighter, or better commanded the street as a stage, or made more transformative use of trash, than Varble (1946 84), whose elaborately costumed guerrilla appearances in galleries, museums and luxury boutiques took aim at an early version of the gentrifying, monetizing art industry we know today. Then, within a few years, he was gone from the scene and erased from the historical record, to which he has now been, at long last, restored by this archival show. (Cotter) 212 431 2609, leslielohman.org 'SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day's not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history that won't go away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter) 718 638 8000, brooklynmuseum.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Romance is a malleable concept. For some, it's rose petals strewed on the bed. For others, it's the awe of the great wide open. With that in mind, here are some new and improved hotels and resorts to woo many ages and stages of love, from platonic crushes to wedded commitment. The French Caribbean island synonymous with wealth and style, St. Barts, as it is called, is known as a place for pampering. Its new 46 room Le Barthelemy hotel is on one of the island's most exclusive beaches, Grand Cul de Sac, which is also part of a nature preserve. Garden and ocean facing rooms all have a terrace with a dining table ideal for room service breakfasts. With an infinity pool, stand up paddleboards and a restaurant from the Michelin starred chef Guy Martin, guests may feel little impulse to leave, though if they do, the resort will arrange a Mini Moke, the island's signature car, and a picnic basket filled with roast chicken and rose. The new Collector Luxury Inn Gardens encompasses nine historic buildings dating back to 1790 that formerly comprised the Dow Museum of Historic Houses. Guests can book 30 rooms in seven of these Spain meets the South homes built with ocean harvested limestone bearing the imprint of shells. Guest rooms and suites include kitchenettes, and several have balconies, porches and fireplaces. The villagelike setting occupies an entire city block with walled gardens, a courtyard and pool, along with a guests only bar in an early 20th century garage. Travelers commune with nature, and each other, by camping with the comfort of real beds and a staff to do the hunting, gathering and cocktail shaking at the Resort at Paws Up in western Montana. Just 30 deluxe tents, spread over five riverside camps, each with its own chef, and an additional 28 luxury vacation homes share 37,000 acres of wilderness. The resort offers guided river rafting, horseback riding and massages. In June, Paws Up will introduce its sixth tented compound, the six unit North Bank Camp, with two and three bedroom tents big enough for an entire wedding party. Whichever half of a couple books the new Germantown Inn in Nashville's hip, bungalow lined neighborhood gets bragging rights for style and location. Each of the six bedrooms in the 1865 home is named after a president, whose collaged portrait within encapsulates the history with a wink decor. Broadway's honky tonks and the state capital are a walk away, but the acclaimed restaurants of historic Germantown are even closer. Downy beds and local Steadfast Coffee and pastries served in the courtyard encourage lazy mornings. Wine country meets the coast at bluff top Timber Cove in Sonoma County. Built in 1963, the property closed for eight months last year for renovation and expansion, updating the knotty pine paneled rooms and the wood and stone Great Room and adding eight ocean facing suites with decks and a new farm to table restaurant. Redwoods dot the property's 23 acres and line hiking trails close by. Guests can explore area wineries and return to nightly campfires. The owners of the hip Palm Springs hideaway Sparrows Lodge strike again with Holiday House, their newest desert retreat. Opening in May, the 28 room downtown hotel revives the original, built in 1951, with a Pop Art inspired color scheme and prints by David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and the street artist Mr. Brainwash scattered throughout. The courtyard contains a pool, bar and restaurant serving light fare, but one distinct advantage Holiday House has is its location, which is walking distance to downtown shops, bars and restaurants. Lovers of nature and night life can find both, and much more, on Key West. Lodging that everyone can afford on the island can be a challenge, but NYAH Not Your Average Hotel serves groups of friends ranging from two to six in flexible rooms where bunk beds can convert to doubles and couches to beds. That may sound like a dormitory, but guests will be pleasantly surprised to find classic Key West architecture with shady porches and several pools in the courtyard. A new bar adds to the social character of the Old Town property located in easy walking or cycling distance of most island attractions. Rooms from 150 for up to six beds; nyahotels.com. Adventure loving besties can split their time between the wilds of Wyoming and the friendly confines of Jackson at the revived Anvil Hotel. Originally opened in the 1950s, the Anvil has been renovated in thoroughly frontier style with a wood stove in the general mercantile shop that acts as a lobby. Its 49 rooms contain an iron frame bed or two. By day, nearby Grand Teton National Park beckons hikers, and the Snake River calls to anglers. By night, the pedestrian friendly town offers plenty of diversions, from galleries and boutiques to a cowboy bar and restaurants, including the hotel's own Italian trattoria, Glorietta. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Anne Nguyen is a French b girl and choreographer. In her home country, she's gained a reputation for rethinking the conventions of hip hop dance and how the form might best be transferred from street to stage. She's hardly the first choreographer to address these issues, but over the past two weeks, the Crossing the Line Festival offered New Yorkers their first chance to see what new ideas Ms. Nguyen might have both on the street and on the stage. First came the street test in the Bronx, no less. Next to the construction site for the future Roberto Clemente Plaza, on a Friday afternoon, some 20 hip hop dancers assembled on the asphalt. They arranged themselves into the circles that they call cyphers and took turns in the middle, showing off specialty moves or playfully responding to another dancer's challenge. Every once in a while, they all synced up into a short shared routine, but even those moments could have been spontaneous outbreaks at a block party. Except that this wasn't quite a block party. It was a kind of performance, called "Graphic Cyphers," presented in collaboration with the Bronx organization Dancing in the Streets. Ms. Nguyen's idea was to open the cypher. Normally, if you're not part of a cypher, you're closed off from the action, outside the circle. But here, during the periodic routines, the dancers turned outward, addressing the crowd with gestures of welcome. They invited the public into the center, to dance or watch or take photos with their phones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Pitcher Liam Hendriks, right, with Sean Murphy, who had hit a home run in the fourth inning, after the Oakland A's beat the Chicago White Sox, 6 4, on Thursday to advance. No team knows the agony of instant elimination like the Oakland Athletics. In the eight seasons of the Major League Baseball wild card game, only the A's found a way to lose it three times: to Kansas City in 2014, the Yankees in 2018 and Tampa Bay last October. So when the A's dropped their playoff opener to the Chicago White Sox on Tuesday at the Oakland Coliseum, they were hard wired for how to respond. Gloom filled the clubhouse. "You get in the clubhouse, no one's saying anything, it's just quiet," infielder Chad Pinder said on Thursday. "It's almost like everybody at the same time was like: 'Wait, we're not packing up. We don't have to catch a flight. We're going back to the hotel and we're coming right back here to play.'" Indeed, baseball's new, expanded playoff format gave Oakland another chance: The first round is now a best of three series, not a one game showdown. The A's took advantage by surviving on Wednesday and then advancing with a 6 4 victory on Thursday, setting up a best of five division series in Los Angeles next week against their nemesis: the Houston Astros. You know the back story by now. Oakland pitcher Mike Fiers, a former Astro, told The Athletic last November that Houston had illegally stolen signs on its way to a World Series title in 2017. An M.L.B. investigation confirmed the allegations, but as part of their agreement to cooperate, no Houston players were disciplined. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. The scandal and the lack of punishment roiled players around the league, and the A's kept Fiers away from the Astros; he started none of Oakland's 10 games against Houston in this abbreviated regular season. The teams brawled in August when Oakland's Ramon Laureano charged the Houston dugout after a coach, Alex Cintron, insulted him. But mostly the A's got revenge by playing better. Oakland went 7 3 against Houston this season and won the division by seven games, stopping the Astros' string of three American League West titles. Oakland closer Liam Hendriks said the A's were eager to build off that success next week. "But it's also not being petty and letting our emotions get the better of us by trying to be over the top and vengeful and everything like this," he said. "We've played them enough times this year. We had a good record against them; they know that, we know that. And now we're going to go into a series and hopefully take care of business early." He added: "I believe in this team, and we're going to try to stick it to 'em as much as we can and prove that we're the best team in the A.L. West now." Hendriks threw 49 pitches on Wednesday but could not get the final out, turning that over to Jake Diekman. But he came back Thursday with an overpowering ninth, striking out the side after a leadoff single. Hendriks was Oakland's seventh reliever on Thursday, rewarding Manager Bob Melvin's faith in a bullpen with the majors' best earned run average this season, at 2.72. "This is what we're going to do," Hendriks said. "We're going to ride our 'pen as hard as we can." The A's made several stellar defensive plays on Thursday, including a juggling, over the shoulder catch by second baseman Tommy La Stella to preserve a tie and end the fifth inning. The A's were tied for the fourth best defense in the majors this season, according to Fangraphs, after ranking first last year and third in 2018. "That's our trademark, really," Melvin said. "We miss Matt Chapman, obviously; he's a double platinum award winner. But defense has really been our consistent strength for three years." Chapman, a sublime defender and slugger at third base, is out for the season after hip surgery last month. But the versatile La Stella, an All Star last season who was acquired from the Angels in an August trade, has helped cover the loss. La Stella had just five homers this season, but fanned only 12 times and had a .370 on base percentage. "We haven't been the power hitting team here for the last month or whatever," Melvin said. "Tommy's kind of been the guy everybody looks to in playing a little differently, getting on base more, putting the barrel on the ball and handing it off to the next guy." To get La Stella, the A's traded infielder Franklin Barreto, who was considered the prize of the trade package they got from Toronto for Josh Donaldson after the 2014 season. Donaldson had just led Oakland to its third playoff appearance in a row, but the A's had not advanced and while Barreto faded as a prospect, the A's quickly built their way back into contention. Until Thursday, though, they had not moved on in the playoffs since a 2006 division series victory over Minnesota. Before that, they had lost four first round series in a row in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003 and they have not won the World Series in 31 years. The Astros did not exactly cheat them out of a title in 2017; the A's finished in last place that season. The Astros became the bullies of the division, but the A's have finally chased them down and now comes a chance to knock them out. "When we came into spring training this year, we expected to be in this spot, and that's part of the battle," Melvin said. "It's not easy to do what comes first, the confidence or the success? You have to have a little confidence to have success. That's what built up the last couple of years, and it finally broke through to this point." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Lecy Goranson and John Goodman in the new season of "The Conners," which begins Wednesday and will grapple directly with the pandemic. When "The Conners" returned to set in mid August after a lengthy pandemic delay, John Goodman had no doubt that every safety precaution had been taken. But his heart still fluttered a bit when it came time to finally get to work. "That moment before the first mask came off, I held my breath," said the 68 year old actor, who plays patriarch Dan Conner in the ABC sitcom. Sara Gilbert, who stars as Dan's daughter Darlene was also anxious, even though, as an executive producer, she was well aware of the measures the show takes to keep everyone safe. The Los Angeles set is patrolled by two Covid compliance supervisors and the actors are tested five times per week, with everyone else getting tests at least three times a week. Even so, "when they say 'Rolling,' I wait until after the sound cue," Gilbert said. "And then at the very last second my mask comes off." When the coronavirus pandemic intensified in March, it forced Hollywood to shut down production for months. Most shows interrupted by the pandemic were back on set, with coronavirus protocols, by September, though some didn't survive the break series including ABC'S "Stumptown," Netflix's "GLOW" and Showtime's "On Becoming a God in Central Florida," which all had new seasons planned or in the works, were canceled by their networks. Those that did return to production had a choice to make: Should they pick up where they left off and resume pandemic free storytelling? Or should they deal with the coronavirus and its disruptions within their narratives? "Life and death stories are familiar territory for us," she added. (The show's original matriarch, Roseanne Conner, was killed off via an opioid overdose after Roseanne Barr was fired for comparing a former Obama adviser to an ape on Twitter. The show title was subsequently changed from "Roseanne" to "The Conners.") When the series returns on Wednesday for its third season, viewers will watch the family grapple with the same issues as the rest of the country: Dan is on the verge of losing the family home. His sister in law, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), is trying to keep the family restaurant alive by making deliveries on her bike (complete with a blinding neon yellow helmet, gloves and face mask). Darlene and her boyfriend, Ben (Jay R. Ferguson), are wondering whether to shutter their start up magazine. Dan's oldest daughter, Becky (Lecy Goranson), is navigating the return of her undocumented husband, Emilio (Rene Rosado), who is caring for her baby while hiding from immigration authorities. Of course, it's hard to avoid incorporating the pandemic when it seeps into every aspect of life on set. Like every other returning series, "The Conners," led by the showrunner, Bruce Helford, and executive producers Dave Caplan and Bruce Rasmussen, has had to radically reconfigure nearly every element of its production for pandemic safety. Before the cast and crew set foot onstage, they have passed two temperature checks, filled out a symptoms questionnaire and passed a Covid test within, at minimum, the last two days. Hair and makeup are done with masks and visors Gilbert said she finishes the area around her mouth herself. Props are sanitized between each take., and the show is filmed without an audience and with a limited crew. And enforcement, Gilbert said, is rigorous. "You can't eat or drink onstage," she said. "Not even water. You have to go up to your dressing room." But processing the approximately 350 weekly tests and installing upgrades like sanitizer stations and HEPA filters does not come cheap, Helford said. "It's well into the six figures, additional, to do this," he said. "We had to cut holes in the wall for better ventilation and refit all the AC systems, plus the constant cleaning." More than two months into shooting, the show has yet to see a positive test. Gilbert said the most difficult on set restriction to remember is the six foot rule. "The writers tend to just walk over and run an idea by one another," she said. "But now we have to be reminded 'SIX FEET!'" Helford said they try to set a good example for viewers watching at home. "Characters can pull their masks down if it's a scene with someone they live with," he said. "But if they're out in the workplace and around people, they keep their face shields on." Gilbert said the series will not dwell on the darkest parts of the pandemic "People get that on the news every day," she said but that the show, which is set in the current moment, will reflect real world events. The second episode of the season airs Oct. 28, six nights before Election Day and three nights before Halloween. She said the Conners will celebrate their favorite holiday with some in home trick or treating and that politics may come up. "But it's not through the lens of 'I'm for this guy!,'" she said. "It's 'How does what's going on affect my family economically?'" The writers also drew on their personal experiences in penning the new season, Caplan said. He, Helford and Rasmussen all "come from low to middle income working class families," Caplan said. "So even if the stories aren't exactly ours all the time, they're emotional and honest." Helford said they wanted to spotlight the struggles of small business owners through Jackie's battle to save her restaurant, the Lanford Lunch Box, as well as address the increased anxiety the pandemic has created among kids. "Mark, the youngest boy, is definitely bothered by this the worst," he said, referring to Darlene's son (Ames McNamara). "He's the one standing outside the door checking everyone's temperatures, making everyone crazy." "The most notable thing about most of them is that they were done at all," James Poniewozik, the chief TV critic for The New York Times, wrote in a recent appraisal of pandemic shows. "But none of them had to sustain the approach for a full season." But Gilbert thinks "The Conners" can serve as counterprogramming to a news cycle that highlights rising case counts and political posturing. "There's so much fear and anxiety," she said. "But we're looking at how the pandemic is affecting this family, and humor is definitely a part of that." Some of the moments that resonated with the actors were unexpected. Goranson, who has been living alone in Los Angeles since March, said a scene in the third episode proved surprisingly emotional. "Becky is quarantining with her family, and I was not able to," she said. "But in the scene, she says something about being alone, and it was almost confessional because it was so true to what I had experienced." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Theo Epstein, the baseball executive and architect of two of the most remarkable championships in sports history, announced on Tuesday that he would step down from his post as president of baseball operations for the Chicago Cubs, saying the time was right to hand the reins to Jed Hoyer, the Cubs' general manager, and move on to another venture. For an instant, Epstein became the most highly prized baseball executive available, but soon said in a news conference that he did not envision working for a team in 2021. He outlined plans to serve the game in a general capacity and said that he plans to lead another club someday, perhaps even as part of an ownership group. He also noted that he wanted to spend more time with his wife and two sons. But Epstein did not unequivocally rule out joining another team for the 2021 season, saying he would answer his phone if any team were to call. Jed Hoyer will take over Chicago's baseball operations. He has worked with Epstein for 17 of the last 19 seasons, and he also served two years as the general manager of the San Diego Padres. Epstein, 46, said he planned to buy season tickets to the Cubs and also discussed areas where he could help build the game as a whole, perhaps in a role with the commissioner's office. An early devotee of data analysis, he took some responsibility for problems with the game due to the expanded reliance on advanced statistics, which he believes has made the game less entertaining. Epstein had one year remaining on a five year, 40 million contract extension he signed with the Cubs in 2016. But he has long held to a belief, which he credits to the former San Francisco 49ers Coach Bill Walsh, that 10 years are the optimal period of time to remain in one venture. Epstein said his real skill was building teams into champions. "Maintaining" them, he said, is not as much of a strength for him. "In the first six years or so, we did some pretty epic things," he said. "And the last couple years weren't as impressive." Tom Ricketts, the chairman of the Cubs, has stated that baseball is facing significant financial stress because of the coronavirus pandemic, and Epstein, presumably referring to the cost of his contract, said that the projected rebuild of the team would be "easier" without him there. He said his departure would allow Hoyer, who spent two years as general manager of the San Diego Padres, to make long term decisions about the Cubs' current roster. When Epstein took over the Cubs after the 2011 season, the team went through a painful rebuild in which it finished fifth in its division three years in a row, and he felt the burden of trying to end the longest championship drought in the sport. But through a combination of astute draft picks, trades and signings, he built a team that won a seven game World Series against the Cleveland Indians, who have not won the Series since 1948. During those early years in Chicago, Epstein said, he often dreamed that the Cubs had won the title, only to wake up and realize they were still in fifth place. Then, after they beat the Indians, he returned home from a night of celebration in Cleveland only to wake up later with that same feeling. For an instant, Epstein wondered if it had all been that same tantalizing dream. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
'Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Girls': Idaho Is First State to Bar Some Transgender Athletes Idaho has become the first state in the United States to bar transgender girls from participating in girls' and women's sports and to legalize the practice of asking girls and women to undergo sex testing in order to compete. The house bill, known as the Fairness in Women's Sports Act, was signed by Gov. Brad Little on Monday. Governor Little also signed a bill that prohibits transgender people from changing their birth certificates to match their gender identities. While many states have introduced bills to restrict the participation of transgender athletes, Idaho is the first state to have passed such legislation into law. Despite a movement in broader society toward endorsing transgender rights, supporters of the Idaho laws said they did not accept people identifying as anything but what was written on their birth certificates. They said the laws were aimed primarily at athletes who were identified as boys on their birth certificates but now identify as female and wish to compete as such. The Idaho legislation points to an emerging conflict over whether or how to regulate transgender athletes. The debate has become a wedge issue especially among conservatives trying to rally support for President Trump. Those who want to limit the participation of transgender athletes have argued that transgender women have a competitive advantage because of their testosterone levels, though those levels can change in hormone treatment. Athletes like the Olympic marathon runner Paula Radcliffe and the tennis star Martina Navratilova have contended that athletes with higher natural levels of testosterone are able to outperform their competitors, especially in some track and field events and in weight lifting competitions. Navratilova later backed away from that view. Caster Semenya, a two time Olympic gold medal runner from South Africa, is the highest profile athlete to have faced a barrage of criticism, tests and, most recently, restrictions over her sex. She has identified as female since birth and has naturally occurring elevated levels of testosterone. Last July, she lost her challenge of a policy enacted by track and field's governing body that barred her from some events unless she underwent hormone therapy. But the science on the subject remains highly debated and inconclusive. A high natural testosterone level is not a one step advantage in and of itself. Many have questioned why one physical trait testosterone level is thought to be an unfair advantage, when many of the world's best athletes possess others Michael Phelps's flipper size feet, for example that propel them to unthinkable world records. The Idaho High School Activities Association has a policy in place on the inclusion of transgender athletes that mirrors that of the N.C.A.A. and the International Olympic Committee. The N.C.A.A. recommends that schools require transgender athletes to complete one year of hormone treatment before competing on a female team. Similarly, the I.O.C. guidelines require transgender athletes competing on a female team to demonstrate testosterone levels below 10 nanomoles per liter for one year. Idaho's law, however, is a blanket ban on the participation of transgender girls in sports. The law includes a provision that allows for anyone to file a claim questioning the sex of an athlete. The adjudication process could lead to sex testing that would allow for genital exams, genetic testing and hormone testing. "They can have a DNA test to determine chromosomes, and those tests are as cheap as 50," Representative Ehardt said. "And again, if there are questions beyond that, there are hormone, urine and blood tests that are much more common." Intersex athletes, individuals born with a range of sex characteristics, would also be subject to added scrutiny. "If there was a situation such as that, that person's doctor would no doubt already be familiar and already be in a position to solve and indicate if the DNA was not a female," Representative Ehardt continued. She called such a hypothetical situation a "rare, rare, rare case." Studies have suggested that 1.7 percent of the population has intersex traits. There have been a record number of bills placing restrictions on transgender people nationwide since the beginning of the year. A bill similar to Idaho's was introduced in Arizona, only to see a genital testing provision dropped before the bill was passed in the Arizona House in early March. The practice of gender verification testing has been banned by the International Olympic Committee since 1999. Kathy Griesmyer, a policy strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union's Idaho chapter, said the testing provision not only discriminated against transgender youth, but also opened the door for widespread abuse. "There is now a law you can use to attack any successful female athlete," she said, noting that exact guidelines of these processes are not yet clear. "And to think this is about helping girls, when we know it's subjecting girls to an invasive examination of their bodies at a vulnerable time of their development." Lindsay Hecox, a first year student at Boise State University and a former high school track and cross country runner, said the bill further "others," or marginalizes, transgender athletes like herself. "I'm just a simple college student who just wants to run and doesn't want to have my rights taken away," she said, adding that she is taking the year off from competitive running to focus on transitioning. "Being trans shouldn't make me a big news story, it shouldn't make a spectacle. I'm just a normal person." A recent survey found that 12 percent of transgender girls and 14 percent of transgender boys play team sports compared with the national average of 68 percent of all youth. When states enact policies that create barriers for transgender athletes, the number of all L.G.B.T.Q. athletes in youth sports further declines. "We don't want to have any advantage," Ms. Hecox said on Tuesday. "All I want to do is run, have a team, have friends on the team, and all try together. There's no vindictiveness here of me trying to take away a girl's scholarship or trophy or places." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A pandemic is frightening, and isolating. It is psychically frustrating: We need other people now more than ever. At the same time, other people have never been more dangerous to our health. The choice to go outside, even to help others, means assuming risk for yourself, loved ones and strangers. It's easy to feel powerless and alone. But you're not powerless. And you're most certainly not alone. Best of all, there's something you can do, right now, from your couch or smartphone. You can join or help create a mutual aid network and start helping people in your community. It takes seconds and it can make a huge difference. When it became clear that the coronavirus pandemic was grinding life in the Boston area to a halt, Hannah Freedman, 25, a community organizer, and her three friends, Sophia Grogan, 24, Miriam Priven, 24, and Anna Kaplan, 25, decided to take action. How could they help college students suddenly asked to leave their dorms, perhaps with no way to get home? What about their elderly neighbors for whom getting groceries is dangerous? From their self imposed quarantines, the four people opened up a Google document and started brainstorming. They put information from the local health department and city government in one central document. Then, they began to build the network out by (safely) going out into their neighborhoods and collecting phone numbers. They used the numbers to create neighborhood pods, which include group text chains and links to the online resources. The organizers then made a form for people to list their needs and a spreadsheet to collect offerings from people who wanted to donate. They also set up a Gmail address for general questions and a hotline for those who wanted to speak to somebody in person with urgent needs or concerns. Just one week later, more than 700 people have posted donations and there are 83 active neighborhood pods. Over 120 people signed up as neighborhood leaders, canvassing their streets and creating WhatsApp text chains. While they're not certain on numbers, the project has connected thousands in Medford and Somerville, north of Boston. "The whole point of this is accessibility," Ms. Freedman told me on the phone this week. "It needs to be really simple and really replicable, neighborhood by neighborhood." Mutual aid networks have long been used by community organizers, especially during emergency situations like natural disasters. Over the last two weeks, though, hundreds of networks like Ms. Freedman's have popped up all over the country in response to the coronavirus pandemic. I found hers through a friend who had a note slipped under his door last week, asking him to join a text chain "to stay in touch, pool resources and support each other with needs that might come up." I opened up the Medford "needs list" spreadsheet and was blown away by the dozens of rows of requests for banal household items, out of stock medical supplies and even cash donations. Next to each one was a contact number and next to that, an offer of help from another community member. Of course, none of these networks is an adequate replacement for swift and urgent government action to provide a safety net to corporations, small businesses and vulnerable workers. But amid the national chaos surrounding the virus, the spreadsheet was a spiritual balm an uplifting, real time document of people helping people. "I am incredibly grateful for all you have done for me during this turbulent time! It is unreal ... to see how much this community has banded together!" read one message in the spreadsheet from a person who'd received a Venmo donation to help pay next month's rent. The successes might sound small but, in a crisis, they're life changing. In one instance, neighbors donated a corned beef meal to an elderly woman who couldn't go to the store to help maintain a decades long St. Patrick's Day tradition. One man living out of state asked if somebody could go grocery shopping for his 83 year old mother. Within 15 minutes, the network had somebody at the store for her. It's facilitated dozens of prescription pickups. And then there's old fashioned cash donations. In one week, the network has redistributed more than 12,690. Still, Ms. Freedman told me the first week has been difficult. "We're building the plane as we fly," she said. Among the group's worries is making sure the network is reaching the most vulnerable members of its coverage area and crossing language barriers. "Translation is a big need," she said, noting that while the network is working on Haitian Creole and Nepali translations of their resource documents, it's still looking for multilingual staff for hotlines. In the coming weeks, she says, she and counterparts in the area are hoping to continue to connect their neighborhood networks so they can share resources and redistribute money further to those in need. Thanks to the template system the group set up, replicating the process neighborhood by neighborhood is relatively easy. Anyone with a Google account can look at the documents via the cloud. There are simple instructions on how to copy the forms for a new network or neighborhood pod. "I think that crises are such a powerful time to crack open some of these myths we've been told about individualism," Ms. Freedman told me. "This is about doing something to counteract the physical distance the virus forces and finding a new way to live in your community. We can't be together but we have to come together because we're only going to be safe when we help each other." There's also a selfish component to joining a mutual aid network: In a moment of deep uncertainty and anxiety, helping those in need is one of the few pure pleasures one can still partake in while social distancing. If you're feeling powerless these days and have the means, look up your local mutual aid network. Plug into the organizing that's happening. If you don't have the means to donate, share the resource documents or email or donation address with your neighbors. 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
"I just want to be like a good example to somebody in the future," said Megan Thee Stallion, a 24 year old rapper from Houston, who hosted a beauty pageant that awarded the winner 2,500 in college tuition money. The 24 year old rapper hosted a kinder beauty pageant, with scholarship money as the prize because "tuition ain't no joke." Last Thursday, at Nightingale Plaza, a trendy club in West Hollywood, fans of Megan Thee Stallion wore sashes bearing the phrase "Cognac Queen" (the title of one of her songs) and waited for the rapper to arrive for the night's event: a pageant of sorts. Though rap may be a male dominated arena where women are pitted against each other for an imaginary single top stop, tonight was all about showing fierce support. "I want to show other girls how happy I am and how confident I am, how I still want to go to school and I still want to rap," the 24 year old artist said earlier that night in a hotel suite, where her makeup artist and hair stylist were getting her ready for the event. "I just want to be like a good example to somebody in the future." In ninth grade, when she was better known by her given name, Megan Pete, the rapper was crowned Miss Pearland, after the small city south of Houston where she went to high school. It was her first and last time competing for a crown. "It wasn't something my heart was in," she said. That night, the rapper who now takes online courses at Texas Southern University, since her travel schedule doesn't allow her to be on campus any longer would award a 2,500 scholarship to the winning contestant. "I just thought it would have been a good thing to do because I know that tuition ain't no joke," she said. "So if I could do something to help somebody else, then I thought that would be nice." When she was growing up, Megan Thee Stallion watched her mother pursue a rap career under the name Holly Wood. It wasn't until she was in college that she disclosed her own desire to rap. (In March, her mother died after a brain tumor was discovered.) She rose to local fame through a series of cyphers, or freestyle rap battles, while attending college. Her video "STALLI FREESTYLE" is often cited as the song that introduced her to the rest of the world. This year, she appears on the cover of XXL's annual Freshman Class issue, a stamp of approval in the music industry, alongside DaBaby, Rico Nasty, Tierra Whack and Blueface. Being from the South, Megan Thee Stallion is often mentioned in the context of the "yee haw agenda" encapsulated in images of black cowboys and cowgirls. She grew up going to rodeos, where leather chaps and fringe jackets were part of the culture. "The first time I ever put on a cowboy hat for a video a lot of people on my team was like, 'Are you sure? You know, we don't want people we think we country,'" she said. "I'm like, 'It's cute! I don't care what people think,'" she continued. "Now look at everybody." In early June, hundreds of people showed up to the Santa Monica Pier for a "hottie beach cleanup" that she organized. The rapper said the idea was prompted by a question about climate change on Twitter. Asked whether she considers herself an activist, she said, "I don't want to put no title on nothing, I just live like this." The idea for the pageant came about during a discussion with Rayna Bass, the senior vice president of marketing at 300 Entertainment, one of the record labels with which Megan Thee Stallion has signed. Ms. Bass asked her if she was going to throw another "hottie party" in the lead up to the BET Awards. Instead, she threw a different kind of celebration. At midnight, Megan Thee Stallion, who developed her stage presence at a young age on hip hop, jazz and ballet teams, finally appeared. Over the span of three days, more than 2,000 people submitted a form on the rapper's site asking them to explain why they're a "Cognac Queen." The rapper said all genders applied. "I was trying to get a hot boy in there, but I don't think he responded in time," she said. The pageant started with each contestant explaining their submission. "A cognac queen means you turn up. That goes for your community. That goes for your school," said Rayna McClintock, 21, an undergraduate studying communications at Texas Southern University. "Not only do I represent perseverance and standing up for myself, but I can turn up, whenever," said Tiera Holmes, 23, who is pursuing a master's in psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Annjanae Gonzales, 27, who is pursuing a master's of public health at California State University in Los Angeles, was the last to walk onstage. The rapper passed a bottle of D'Usse to the two remaining contestants Ms. Holmes and Ms. McClintock and helped them "drive the boat," which in this case meant tipping their heads back and pouring alcohol into their mouths. The audience helped choose the winner through cheers and applause, the loudest applause came for Ms. Holmes. "I dropped everything that I was doing," said Ms. Holmes, the winner, who had never left the South before. "This is my first time getting on an airplane. I was scared, but I did it, and I won, and I'm so excited." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Twitter was founded in 2006. Fourteen years later, and perhaps thanks to the influential example of President Trump, the masters of the universe have apparently learned to post to it. This week alone, a plethora of influential politicians and business leaders have at least attempted to use the social media platform with the same air of casual authenticity coupled with severity that characterizes many of Mr. Trump's tweets. On Thursday, Mike Bloomberg responded to a taunting tweet from Mr. Trump pitting him against his rival for the Democratic candidacy, Senator Bernie Sanders by telling Mr. Trump that their mutual connections had nothing but contempt for him. "We know many of the same people in NY. Behind your back they laugh at you call you a carnival barking clown," he said. "They know you inherited a fortune squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence." Mr. Bloomberg is, among other things, competing with Mr. Trump on his own terms on social media and has spent no shortage of money in doing so. But he was not alone last week in bluntly expressing himself on social media. Lloyd Blankfein, the senior chairman of Goldman Sachs who is 65 and very, very rich, tweeted late on Tuesday about the possibility of Senator Sanders becoming the Democratic nominee for president. "If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he'll ruin our economy and doesn't care about our military. If I'm Russian, I go with Sanders this time around," Mr. Blankfein tweeted. Historically, Goldman Sachs and Amazon are known for extremely careful and policed corporate messaging. But in 2020, the example of the tweeter in chief (and, clearly, the specter of Senator Sanders competing in the general election) seems to have loosened their Twitter fingers. Elon Musk, another rich and powerful man, has long been known for boisterous online behavior in 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged with him with securities fraud for what it called "a series of false and misleading tweets about a potential transaction to take Tesla private." But even he made a minor stir this month when he released a song called "Don't Doubt ur Vibe," and then highlighted that it had become the eighth most popular song on SoundCloud. (Early Wednesday morning, Mr. Musk also tweeted about Mr. Sanders.) Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, said that the business leaders of the United States have long taken cues about how to behave in public from the staging of the presidency. At shareholder events, for example, he said, everything from the podium to the branded backdrop is often staged to look "like a place where a president of the United States could plausibly give a talk." "Prior to Trump there was a visual vernacular of dignity and gravitas that corporate America borrowed from the presidency," Mr. Meacham said. "And now, as the president has become a Hobbesian bully online, they're borrowing that. Because at least in their minds, that's where people are at." This week's tweets are meant to influence voters, and Mr. Trump has modeled a singular method of influence in that regard. Rebecca Katz, who has worked as a communications adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Cynthia Nixon, attributed this week's tweets to the increasingly blurry lines between politics, business, media and celebrity. "While few business leaders would probably admit it, Trump's rise has made them think that they can do what he's done," Ms. Katz said. "Trump's shown them that the way to make news and command attention isn't by being respected. It's by being outrageous." Jack Grieve, a fellow at the University of Birmingham and one of the authors of a paper about linguistic variation on Mr. Trump's Twitter account, said in an interview that the style of the president's posts was not arbitrary. "The stylistic variation you see on Trump's twitter account is far from some random dumpster fire," he said. "It's very systematic." For instance, he said, Mr. Trump's Twitter language became notably more formal once he became the Republican nominee for president in 2016. But it then reverted to informality after the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape. Since the president was inaugurated, Mr. Grieve said, the informality of his language had crept up again. (Mr. Grieve's analysis spanned from 2009 to early 2018 and did not include the impeachment process.) That informality was characterized by short sentences, an abundance of pronouns, contractions, questions and direct interactions with other users on the site, Mr. Grieve said. "The fact that people are imitating him is further evidence that it's not just random," Mr. Grieve said. "It's been appreciated by people who aren't just political pundits or who aren't just journalists but who are really in there trying to do this. They've appreciated that there's an art to what he's doing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Wednesday through June 21) The company opens its Lincoln Center engagement on Wednesday with the Ailey Spirit Gala, featuring young dancers from Ailey II, the Ailey School and AileyCamp. On Thursday, the hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris unveils his new "Exodus," a darkness to light journey set to house and gospel music, alongside a new production of Talley Beatty's 1960 "Toccata," Christopher Wheeldon's "After the Rain" pas de deux and Alvin Ailey's "Revelations." To ring in Mr. Harris's premiere, Thursday's events begin outdoors at 6 p.m. with a house dance class taught by Eddie Stockton. Wednesday at 7 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., next Friday at 8 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, ailey.org. (Siobhan Burke) American Ballet Theater (through July 4) The company's 75th anniversary continues with performances of "La Bayadere" through Saturday. Monday brings the season's most anticipated offering, Alexei Ratmansky's new production of "The Sleeping Beauty" (through June 13), a meticulous reconstruction of Marius Petipa's 1890 original. The sets and costumes derive from a later period, modeled after Leon Bakst's 1921 designs for the Ballets Russes. Mondays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m., Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 212 362 6000, abt.org (Burke) Ballet Tech Kids Dance (Thursday through June 14) For almost 20 years, Eliot Feld's Ballet Tech Foundation has partnered with the New York City Department of Education to merge public school education with rigorous dance training. Students from the school, grades 4 through 8, return to the Joyce Theater with a program including last year's popular "Kydzny," danced to a mix of jazz and Balkan folk music, and other boisterous selections. Thursday and next Friday at 7 p.m., June 13 at 2 and 7 p.m., June 14 at 2 p.m., 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org (Burke) Sidra Bell (through Sunday) Sidra Bell considers the body a theater and is interested in the drama within. "Unidentifiable; Bodies" is the third work in a trilogy dealing with a whole host of existential ideas. Ms. Bell gives her four dancers Jonathan Campbell, Austin Diaz, Alexandra Johnson and Rebecca Margolick a tenacious physical vocabulary to work with, but also offers them space for improvisation, allowing the work to shift at each performance. Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Baruch Performing Arts Center, Nagelberg Theater, 55 Lexington Avenue, at 25th Street, 646 312 5073, sidrabelldanceny.org. (Brian Schaefer) Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet (Friday and Saturday) The company that seemed to have it all announced its closing in March, to everyone's surprise. Cedar Lake's final performances offer a sampling of what it does best: the physically explosive, with a polished sheen. Two programs feature the work of Jiri Kylian, Johan Inger and Jo Stromgren, with a sharp, moody company staple by Crystal Pite. There is also a premiere by Richard Siegal the first and last time you'll see it done by these rock star dancers. At 7:30 p.m., Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Schaefer) Amy Chavasse (Saturday and Sunday) The Williamsburg performance space Triskelion Arts recently moved to Greenpoint, and Ms. Chavasse is among the first to dance at the new site. A faculty member at the University of Michigan, Ms. Chavasse visits Brooklyn with three works: "Hunger for the Longing (a biased history of seduction)," which takes a critical look at misguided patriotism; "Conspiracy Going (Amy needs a lot of empathy)," a solo for herself; and "deux dogtooth," a new improvisational duet. At 8 p.m., Muriel Schulman Theater, 106 Calyer Street, near Franklin Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 718 389 3473, triskelionarts.org. (Burke) Dances for a Variable Population (Thursday through June 13) Naomi Goldberg Haas directs this company of dancers ages 25 to 85, who bring a range of experiences and abilities to her site specific work. In the new "10027," a cast of West Harlem residents and illustrious guest artists, including Gus Solomons Jr. and Loretta Abbott, roam between three locales in the titular zipcode: a garden, a basketball court and a public housing project. For audience members who prefer a more stationary experience, excerpts from all three sections will be presented in one place on June 13. Thursday and next Friday at 6 p.m., starting at Morningside Gardens, 100 La Salle Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam; June 13 at 5 p.m., Old Broadway between 125th and 126th Streets; dvpnyc.org. (Burke) La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival (through June 21) This East Village festival is entering its 10th year of supporting adventurous dance, with a busy lineup of local and international artists. Yoshiko Chuma's new work continues through Sunday, drawing unlikely connections between five cities Fukushima, Kabul, Amman, Ramallah and Berlin in an exploration of aesthetic and geographic borders. Beginning on Thursday, Alexandra Beller presents "milkdreams," attempting to strip away the learned behavior of dance training and generate movement from a joyous source. At 74A East Fourth Street, East Village, 212 475 7710. The full schedule is at lamama.org. (Schaefer and Burke) Pontus Lidberg (Saturday and Sunday) See photo highlight. Mr. Lidberg, who hails from Sweden, is known equally for his choreography onstage and onscreen. In "Snow," making its New York premiere, he explores another element puppetry as his dancers interact with a Japanese Bunraku style puppet in the midst of a wintry storm. The program also includes his lyrical "Written on Water." Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org (Burke) New York City Ballet (through Sunday) The spring season concludes with standard early summer fare: Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The run ends with some new beginnings on Sunday as the apprentice Miriam Miller and the soloist Anthony Huxley make their debuts in the roles of Titania and Oberon. Friday at 8 p.m. Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. Sunday at 3 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, nycballet.com (Burke) Performance Mix Festival (through Tuesday) This extensive buffet of dance, in its 29th year, aims to challenge and innovate and, according to Here, "sets out in new or not fashionable directions." Each evening for six days, four or five artists take you for a stroll down their personal paths. In total, the festival comprises 32 unique performances, produced by the New Dance Alliance. They hail from New York, elsewhere in the United States and overseas. Show up on Friday at 10:30 a.m. for a free breakfast, a performance and a conversation about creating work outside defined disciplines. (An email R.S.V.P. to info newdancealliance.org is requested for the breakfast.) At 8:30 p.m., Here, 145 Avenue of the Americas, at Dominick Street, South Village, 212 352 3101, here.org. (Schaefer) Will Rawls (Saturday and Sunday) The Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center, a wing of the 122 year old Henry Street Settlement, turns 100 this year, and it holds a rich history of artistic experimentation. In his new work, "Settlement House," Mr. Rawls mines the building's past over the course of two four hour performances, creating a series of site specific "interventions" that invoke daylong pageants from an earlier era. Audience members, free to roam, can come and go as they please. From 5 to 9 p.m., Abrons Arts Center, Playhouse Theater, 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side, 866 811 4111, abronsartscenter.org. (Burke) Anna Sperber (Friday, Saturday and Wednesday, through June 13) Last year, Gibney Dance took over the former Dance New Amsterdam space near City Hall. A new studio theater there inspired the Brooklyn based choreographer Anna Sperber to create "Ruptured Horizon," part of the company's spring season, called Making Space. Ms. Sperber uses the studio as a blank canvas, which she paints with the dancers Michael Ingle, Rebecca Warner, Omagbitse Omagbemi and Alice MacDonald. Architecture and light are her muses. At 7:30 p.m., Gibney Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Schaefer) Wildcat! (Thursday through June 14) This interdisciplinary collective made up of the performers Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste, Eleni Zaharopoulos and Andre M. Zachery presents two programs billed jointly as "Assembly," voicing a call to action around issues of gender, racial and economic inequality. The first, "I Do Mind Dying: Danse Precarite" (Thursday and June 13) takes inspiration from the Detroit blues singer Joe L. Carter. The second, "3 Meaningful Meditations" (next Friday and June 14), comprises solo works by each memberof the collective. These are the culminating events of Jack's season long "Forward Ferguson" series. At 8 p.m.; June 14 at 3 p.m., Jack, 505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, near Fulton Street, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, jackny.org (Burke) Kota Yamazaki (Friday and Saturday) The title of Mr. Yamazaki's new work, "OQ," (say the two letters out loud) is, phonetically, the Japanese word for "palace." For two nights, his own palace, designed with the architectural firm SO IL, will occupy the stage at the Japan Society. Imperial rituals of poetry reading and writing from 12th century Japan come into play, as do a range of dance forms, including hip hop, Western contemporary and Mr. Yamazaki's own area of expertise, butoh. At 7:30 p.m., 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan, 212 715 1258, japansociety.org (Burke) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The natural history of the postwar New York art world is usually understood according to a fairly simple geography. Abstract Expressionism, America's entry into the major leagues, was shown uptown, by tony dealers like Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis and Eleanor Ward. By the time Pop and Minimalism had taken over in the late 1960s, the center of gravity shifted downtown, to SoHo, where pioneers like Paula Cooper and uptowners like Leo Castelli followed clairvoyant artists into cheap industrial lofts. And finally, after retailers and real estate agents realized that those lofts were gorgeous, galleries were pushed west, to the warehouses of Chelsea, where their greatest concentration remains today. But something happened along the way, in the 1950s and early 1960s, that has never been fully accounted for, a kind of foreshock of the earthquake that propelled the cutting edge of the art world south. "Inventing Downtown," an art packed historical deep dive at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, tells the story of that lost chapter, the upstart gallery scene that flourished for more than a decade in the East Village, bequeathing a body of work that considerably scrambles not only the map but also the lock step narrative of 20th century art movements. It was a diverse scene that held out a hint of utopian promise at a time when Abstract Expressionism was waning and new categories had not yet hardened: It included many more women than the uptown art world; it was not completely white; abstraction and figuration jostled side by side (if not always comfortably), along with genre bending sculpture; and the gloriously messy birth of modern performance art took place in the midst of it all. Pieces of the history have been gathered before, most notably in Joellen Bard's "Tenth Street Days: The Co ops of the 50's," a small 1977 book about the formation of the D.I.Y and at times gonzo gallery district near Cooper Union largely built by artists banding together against commercial and critical indifference. But the book quickly went out of print. Even artists from the scene who went on to long and celebrated careers, like Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd and Lucas Samaras, describe having lived through a kind of historical lacuna, one that ended abruptly with the Pop revolution started by artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. "Pop Art just killed it," said Mr. Samaras, 80, the sculptor and photographer, who performed in Allan Kaprow's "18 Happenings in 6 Parts," a performance art landmark in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery on lower Fourth Avenue; it was one of the artist run galleries that made up the downtown milieu. "It was as if there wasn't enough time to write about what went on in those years," Mr. Samaras said. "There wasn't enough information available. And then suddenly it was gone." But over the past six years, Melissa Rachleff, a clinical associate professor at New York University's Steinhardt School, has almost single handedly recaptured the grain of those years, for the exhibition and a comprehensive catalog that focuses on 14 artist run galleries from 1952 to 1965. She interviewed surviving participants, sifted through archives at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere, and gathered works by aging artists that were all but lost to history, along with pieces by downtown luminaries like Robert Rauschenberg, Yayoi Kusama and the sculptor Mark di Suvero, who encouraged her to pursue the project. "I had some artists just hand me their work from their closets, and say: 'Here. I might not be alive by the time this show happens, but I want you to have this,'" Ms. Rachleff said, strolling the once seedy blocks where the galleries stood, principally East 10th Street between Fourth and Third Avenues, near where many young artists in the 1950s lived in cheap cold water apartments. "This was my parents' generation I was born in 1963," she continued. "And I really thought I had no interest in what happened in those years, especially because it was a time of white male privilege and exclusion and all of that. Yet here I am, and what I found here just knocked me out. I was like, 'Mom, Dad, why didn't you tell me?'" The exhibition comes on the heels of a new book by the photographer and musician John Cohen, "Cheap Rents ... and de Kooning," published by Steidl, documenting Mr. Cohen's personal travels through the East Village scene, along with a show of his photographs from those years on view through Feb. 11 at L. Parker Stephenson Photographs on the Upper East Side. The figurative painter Lois Dodd, the last living founder of the Tanager Gallery (1952 1962), the most influential of the artist run galleries that clustered on East 10th Street, said it was difficult for people in today's supercharged contemporary art world to imagine how profoundly uninterested collectors and dealers were in the 1950s in most art being made at the time. "Most uptown galleries, with a few notable exceptions, were showing stuff that still looked like Impressionism," said Ms. Dodd, 89, in an interview in the rough hewn walk up loft on East Second Street where she has worked since the late 1950s. "We didn't have any illusions that we were going to be selling anything. In fact, we were kind of torn at the beginning about whether we should open a cafe or a gallery. We just wanted a place to see our friends and show each other our work." The Tanager was founded on East Fourth Street in a former barbershop, then relocated in 1953 to 90 East 10th, a cheaper, narrow, four story building upstairs from a gin joint. That building now houses a defunct real estate office where the gallery used to be. Next door at No. 88, now an architect's office, was the studio of Willem de Kooning, a hallowed place for most of the young artist gallerists who lived near it. ("It was like this giant living next door," Ms. Dodd said. "He was a little older than we were, and he was really revered that way. I remember when he made his first big sale, the word went up and down the street like wildfire: 'Bill sold a painting! Bill sold a painting!'") The art historian and critic Irving Sandler was hired as the gallery manager (the sole employee) of the Tanager in the mid 1950s, when he was a graduate student at Columbia University. He said in a recent interview that in his three years running the gallery "I sold a sum total of one piece." Though that abstract sculpture, by a now forgotten artist named Joe Messina, sold for 125 to the collector and heiress Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny, who told Mr. Sandler to deliver the piece directly to the Museum of Modern Art, to which she donated. (In his 2003 memoir, "A Sweeper Up After Artists," he noted mordantly that when she gave him her name, he asked, in all sincerity: "How do you spell that?") Mr. Sandler, now 91, said that when the East Village galleries all coordinated their openings to Friday nights, "the streets around them would be just packed, the way streets in Chelsea are now." "It was really a rich communal life that didn't depend on money," he said. "Everybody was poor. There weren't really any winners or losers yet. It was a pretty glorious place to be." Across from the Tanager was the Brata Gallery, probably the most racially diverse of all the neighborhood's galleries. It showed the work of the African American painter Ed Clark and the Japanese American artists Robert Kobayashi and Nanae Momiyama, as well as Ms. Kusama, whose 1959 solo show of "Infinity Net" paintings set her on the road to becoming the star she is today. The building that housed the Brata, along with those of the Camino Gallery, the Area Gallery and the final location of the Club, the renowned salon where the battle for the soul of Abstraction Expressionism was waged, are gone now, replaced by apartment buildings or stores or construction sites. The East Village scene more than the art world of SoHo, where a few remnants remain of the history that coursed through the streets disappeared virtually without a trace. By the time it ran out of steam in the early 1960s, many of the women who showed there, including Ms. Dodd, were struggling to attract the kind of attention that their male counterparts were getting. Many women either stopped making art or stopped showing commercially. "I was too stupid to realize that women weren't going to have the same opportunities," Ms. Dodd said. "But you have your friends, who keep encouraging you, so you don't stop." When Ms. Rachleff and I recently went unannounced into the architecture office in the building where de Kooning's studio had been, a man came out and said that once in a great while, art aficionados like us stopped by and he let them stand around and use their imaginations. Around the corner, at the building that once housed the Reuben Gallery a game changing crucible of performance art that the critic Lawrence Alloway once described as "anti ceremonious, anti formal, untidy" and "highly physical (but not highly permanent)" we rang the doorbell of what now seemed to be a mime troupe, but no one answered. "I think the main reason this history is so little known is that it just didn't fit any of the paradigms it confused people," Ms. Rachleff said. "My major revelation in doing this work is that if you follow what artists tell you, you quickly start to see that categories never really work the way historians would have you believe. This neighborhood was living proof." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
On a recent afternoon at Soho Rep, a welder sent sparks arcing past a dressing room strewn with metal bars and twin vises holding lengths of steam pipe. Lumber and sprinkler system components packed the upstairs hallway; in the theater itself, a lighting team wearing cloth masks crowded around a table. It was good to be home. In September of 2016, Soho Rep, a downtown company with audacious taste in plays, announced that it would immediately vacate its 73 seat theater at 46 Walker Street, which it had rented for 25 years. A round of lease negotiations had revealed building regulations at variance with the company's use of the space, resulting in what Sarah Benson, Soho Rep's artistic director since 2007, described as a moral obligation to leave. Maybe a legal obligation, too. As Cynthia Flowers, Soho Rep's executive director explained, "If something, God forbid, were to happen, there could potentially be huge ramifications." But after nearly a year and a half in exile, Soho Rep has returned to Walker Street, and is kicking off its 43rd season with a typically startling play, Aleshea Harris's "Is God Is," which begins previews Feb. 6. "It was inconceivable that we would ever find our way back into the space," Ms. Benson said. But here they are. Ms. Benson and Ms. Flowers were sitting in a bakery around the corner from the theater, drinking tea and nibbling vegan treats. (Power tools and particulate matter made an on site conversation tough.) The weather was wintry and the pressure to complete renovations in time for the final rehearsals for "Is God Is," must have been intense. But having survived a season away, the company leaders were very nearly giddy. "It's a whopping relief," Ms. Benson said. The Soho Repertory Theater was founded in 1975 by Jerry Engelbach and Marlene Swartz. Its first home: a warehouse space on Mercer Street. (That explains the Soho Rep name, at odds with the TriBeCa locale.) Established as a repertory company devoted to neglected classics, it evolved into a forum for new plays, with programming that became increasingly nervy. It has launched writers including Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, Melissa James Gibson, Richard Maxwell, Young Jean Lee, Branden Jacobs Jenkins and Lucas Hnath, while also providing a home for innovative designers and directors. By many measures, the space at 46 Walker Street has never been ideal. It's small. There's no proper lobby. The shabby bathrooms are down a steep flight of stairs. Apartments above mean that musicals have to be produced elsewhere. As for fly space and wing space you're kidding, right? But to do theater Off and Off Off Broadway is to compromise with the columns, the must and the size. For all its faults, 46 Walker Street is a venue in a hip, easily accessible neighborhood with under market rent. "That it's been an affordable space that we've had access to for the last 25 years is a huge factor in Soho Rep's existence," said Ms. Flowers. The scruffiness and the strange proportions have encouraged gutsy schemes by directors and designers. Compactness is a kind of virtue, too. The small space prompts intimacy and with limited seats available, there's no pressure to program box office hits even the runaway successes don't break even so chances can be taken. "The projects that no one else wants to touch with a barge pole are often the ones we're most excited about," Ms. Benson said. Over the years designers have cut a hole in the floor ("Blasted"), covered the place in carpet (Annie Baker's "Uncle Vanya"), sent cotton balls winging through the air ("An Octoroon") and packed the floor with 20,000 pounds of dirt ("Generations"). In the fall of 2016, gathering what she thought was routine paperwork for a lease renewal, Ms. Flowers went to the Department of Buildings website and learned that the theater had only ever been approved for a maximum occupancy of 70 people a number that includes cast, crew and box office, as well as audience. Worse still, no scenery was permitted. Panic hit. "It was just horrible," Ms. Benson said. They talked to lawyers and real estate consultants who advised them that the Department of Buildings would be unlikely to investigate, but Ms. Benson and Ms. Flowers didn't feel that they could risk the potential liability. A rental production, "My Name is Gideon," was already in tech. They met with its producers that night and told them they would need to leave. Their own fall production, a musical called "Duat," already had a berth at the Connelly Theater. They scrambled for a venue that could house the spring show, Richard Maxwell's "Samara," which they eventually placed at the A.R.T./New York Theaters. But a nomadic life was unsustainable. The company, which has an annual operating budget of 1.6 million, can't realistically continue without cheap rent. "We're doing work that nobody else would produce, by writers people don't know yet, trying to charge reasonable prices," Ms. Flowers said. "The economics of that do not make sense." Luckily, Ms. Flowers and Ms. Benson weren't alone in their distress. Julie Menin, the commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, read about their departure in The New York Times. A longtime champion of the theater, she called Rick Chandler, the commissioner of the Department of Buildings, so that he could walk through the space and suggest solutions. After working with what Ms. Menin described as "an alphabet soup of different agencies," she was able to coordinate an agreement that amended the certificate of occupancy in return for increased safety measures fireproof walls dividing the theater and box office, a new sprinkler system, improved ventilation and an enclosed staircase at the back. Soho Rep's board unanimously approved the plan and contributed 180,000. The rest of the money for the 300,000 renovation came from longtime donors, the company's annual gala and a matching grant from the Tow Foundation. The renovations haven't made the place luxurious. "It is very basic, functional, fast and dirty," Ms. Benson said of the repair. Even with the emendations, fewer seats will be available for each production. But it enables the company to keep going at least until 2022 when the current lease expires in a space that invites experiment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
VICTORIANS UNDONE Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum By Kathryn Hughes Illustrated. 414 pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. 29.95. The average biographer peers into a Great Man's mind. Kathryn Hughes's "Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum," in contrast, narrates the lives of five body parts: the stomach of one of Queen Victoria's ladies in waiting, "suspected of expecting"; Charles Darwin's unfashionable beard, which turns out to provide a key to his theory of sexual selection; George Eliot's right hand, larger than her left thanks to a youth spent milking cows; the "bee stung" lips of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's mistress; and the dismembered corpse of a working class girl onto whose severed foot a late 19th century shoemaker stumbled in a Hampshire hop garden. While microhistorians have long zoomed in on individual case studies, Hughes pinpoints her subjects even more narrowly. Her method is laparoscopic, sectioning off bits of bodies as ruthlessly as did the Hampshire murderer. Her ultimate question, though, is a broad one: How did the Victorians understand the interplay between mind and body? Consider Darwin's beard or, more precisely, beards, since Darwin's progress through decades and hemispheres was marked by growing, grooming and shaving off a series of different styles. Mustachioed hipsters may be happy to learn that facial hair spent the first half of the 19th century as the marker of rabble rousers, artists and derelicts. It was only when Crimean War veterans set the fashion that experts began recommending beards to ward off frostbite, sunburn and air pollution, not to mention mumps and toothache. A beard could also hide a man's unmanly expressions of emotion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Sublime skiing, snowboarding and "snow surfing" are only part of the story in this Japanese resort. Culinary adventures abound, local whiskey flows and hot springs are the perfect apres ski option. Niseko where the powder is voluminous, apres ski happens in onsens (hot springs), and culinary adventures abound is a popular destination for international travelers. Japow, the nickname for the average 600 inches of powder that arrives from Siberia each winter, is what puts the resort so firmly on the map with skiers and snowboarders. On the north island of Hokkaido, Niseko includes four main separate, but linked, resorts (collectively called Niseko United). Beyond the slopes, the island is renowned for world class seafood, produce and beef as well as beer, whiskey and even some sake. Its excellent restaurants, from simple noodle bars and laid back izakayas (Japanese pubs) to fine dining at the Michelin starred Kamimura, spotlight the island's bounty. Though often called the Aspen of Asia and, indeed, Niseko is undergoing a similar luxury building boom this Japanese resort is forging its own identity, from design to food to culture and wellness scenes. Perched on the side of a cliff in the Hanazono area, Somoza, a serene gallery and artful restaurant, is housed in a renovated wood kominka (historic farmhouse). A typical thatched roof has been replaced with steel, but its traditional shape still evokes a samurai helmet. Head downstairs to its main gallery where an ongoing exhibition, "Hokkaido Through the Ages," presents a history lesson while showcasing artifacts from the founder and designer Shouya Grigg's personal collection. There's pottery from the island's ancient Jomon period (from about 10,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.); and a carved kabuto sword stand with deer antlers and other works by the Ainu, people only recently recognized by the government as Japan's indigenous inhabitants. On the main level are handmade ceramics from Japanese artisans and Mr. Grigg's minimalist black and white photographs of snow, trees, mountains and abstract patterns inspired by nature. (Somoza will open an additional adjacent art gallery this spring.) West of downtown Hirafu village is Gentemstick, the groovy shop of the local legend Taro Tamai, the father of Japanese "snow surfing." This Zen like approach brings snowboarding back to its roots, with the rider using body movements and techniques from surfing to follow the terrain of the mountain. Lining the walls like sculptures are colorful surf boards from Mr. Tamai's personal collection, and handcrafted snowboards made with bamboo and other woods (88,000 to 162,000 yen). With good surf breaks a short drive away, some locals even ski in the morning, then surf in the afternoon. Purchase a beanie or T shirt, then head upstairs to the shop's cozy cafe, art gallery and yoga studio. Yakitori meat, seafood or vegetables on skewers is popular throughout Japan, and Bang Bang is a Niseko institution. Reserve bar seats and watch chefs grill over a special charcoal called binchotan, made from oak and valued for its high, clean heat that enhances textures and flavors. From gizzards and heart to neck and feet, almost every part of the chicken's here, with crispy skin a standout. So are Hokkaido Wagyu beef skewers, Hokkaido crabs and Akkeshi Kakiemon oysters (about 10,000 yen). If you can't get a reservation, Bang 2 next door, its more casual eatery now offers the same menu. Down a dimly lit Hirafu side street, people stand in line to pass through an old fashioned red refrigerator door (an Instagram favorite) plastered with stickers. Dubbed The Fridge, Bar Gyu , with its cozy speakeasy ambience and candlelit wooden tables, is famous for its old and rare Japanese single malts, a selection that changes every season. Ask what's behind the bar for off the menu pourings of sought after whiskeys like Karuizawa or Hanyu, and expect to pay almost 22,000 yen ( 201) for some shots. Sip as a D.J. spins vinyl, mostly jazz tunes. Still want to dance? A short walk away is the fun new Powder Room, an upscale club with quality wines and cocktails that feels more Hong Kong than Niseko. In central Hirafu, Green Farm Deli Cafe roasts its own coffee beans. Fuel up for the slopes over hearty pork hash with poached eggs, or an egg wrap, all from local ingredients, alongside your latte or cappuccino. Breakfast, about 2,000 yen. One pass offers access to Annupuri, Niseko Village, Grand Hirafu and Hanazono; one day costs 8,000 yen if bought online. (Niseko also participates in the global Mountain Collective and Ikon Pass, season long lift passes to top worldwide resorts, including Niseko United.) Venture out with an instructor to guide you around the mountains for an overview, or to get tips for powder. Niseko's slopes offer lots of variety, from beginners to advanced, with the highest elevation only 3,937 feet. Intrepid skiers can go from one resort to the next, beginning at Hanazono and ending at Annupuri. (A free bus can also take you to each base.) At the top of the Niseko gondola, ski to the sleek wooden Lookout Cafe and tuck into a bowl of simple seafood ramen (about 2,000 yen). Trekking up and skiing down the crater of Mount Yotei a volcano, resembling a smaller Mount Fuji, that looms over Niseko belongs on your adrenaline bucket list (guide required; contact Rising Sun Guides). With Japan's volcanic landscape, there are ample onsens (geothermal hot springs) in Niseko; taking to the waters at a public bathhouse is both an essential ritual of Japanese culture and part of the ski experience. Join the locals at Yugokorotei, in a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) in Annupuri. Know the Japanese etiquette, such as bringing your own little "modesty towel" and soap to cleanse thoroughly before dipping, naked (no bathing suits allowed), into a communal outdoor pool. Like most onsen, this one is separated by gender. The outdoor pool, under a wood pergola and surrounded by snow and boulders, features mineral water pumped from the base of Mount Annupuri. It may be cold outside, but you're relaxing your body and soul in about 130 degree Fahrenheit, mineral rich bubbling water. Folding and placing the towel on your head is a custom. Cost: 1,000 yen. Begin at Karabina, an izakaya occupying a small wooden hut at Annupuri's base (note: this is the last season the restaurant will be open at this location). Shoes off, walk up a few steps to a cozy alcove, sit around a wood burning stove and sip a local sake. Then walk a stone's throw away down a pathway to another rustic wood dwelling, Rakuichi. Helmed by Tatsuru Rai, known for his artisan, local buckwheat noodles, this soba master was celebrated on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations," and ever since it's been a hard reservation to get. His wife, Midori, greets diners as they don slippers and sit at a no frills, 12 seat wooden counter with views of the master at work on a ball of dough. Dinner comes kaiseki style, a Japanese haute cuisine tasting menu that changes with the seasons. Nine simple dishes with bright flavors are presented on pretty Japanese ceramic plates and lacquer bowls. Order a Hokkaido sake to accompany, for instance, sashimi of sea urchin, toro tuna, smoked scallop and Mr. Rai's hand cut soba noodles. Select either cold with tempura vegetables, or hot with duck (an additional 800 yen). Finish with dessert. (Dinner is about 12,000 yen.) Stop at Toshiro's for a cocktail created by its bespectacled namesake proprietor and mixologist, celebrated for concoctions like Penicillin, a mix of whiskey, ginger and citrus, with a smoky spin (1,600 yen). Or try a ginger gimlet and a smoked old fashioned with local whiskey. More than 400 bottles sit behind the bar; select a tasting flight, from 3,600 to 45,000 yen. Grab a coffee at the Mountain Kiosk Coffee stand or one of the trucks in Hirafu and head to the non touristy town of Kutchan (about six miles from Hirafu and 20 minutes by cab) where you'll find the Daibutsuji Buddhist temple, featuring a prayer room with a gold painted ceiling depicting a dragon shielding a Buddhist elder from a tiger (no charge, book in advance). Be mindful that temples and shrines are places of worship for local residents, as well as places to protect sacred objects. Other area shrines: Kutchan jinja, where red, green and yellow flags line the simple wood interior; and in Niseko Town stands the small Kaributo jinja. Hokkaido, Japan's top dairy producing region, is recognized for offering the best milk in the country. Milk Kobo, next to the Takahashi working dairy farm in Niseko Village, is noted for hand milking its cows, and its popular cafe and shop makes desserts and cheeses from the milk. Knock back a banana yogurt drink, which is packaged in a cute little bottle with cows on its label. Don't miss the cheese tarts and cream puffs. At the nine room boutique Kimamaya in Hirafu, European alpine design meets Japanese aesthetics. Feel at home sitting around the living room fireplace, sipping a glass of Burgundy from the owner's private vineyard. An adjacent restaurant, The Barn, inspired by Hokkaido farm architecture, serves Western and Japanese breakfasts, and for dinner, French Japanese food using local ingredients; it's worth eating here even if staying elsewhere. There's a small spa and two stone soaking tubs. Rates: 22,400 to 55,440 yen for doubles; lofts are 41,440 to 94,080 yen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
With each passing day it becomes more obvious how unlucky we are that one of the worst crises in American history coincides with Donald Trump's presidency. To get out of this crisis with the least loss of life and least damage to our economy, we need a president who can steer a science based, nonpartisan debate through the hellish ethical, economic and environmental trade offs we have to make. We need a president who is a cross between F.D.R., Justice Brandeis and Jonas Salk. We got a president who is a cross between Dr. Phil, Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Seuss. Sure, Trump isn't the only one sowing division in our society, but as president he has a megaphone like no one else, so when he spews his politics of division, and suggests disinfectants as cures, he is not only eroding our society's physical immunity to the coronavirus but also eroding what futurist Marina Gorbis calls our "cognitive immunity" our ability to filter out science from quackery and facts from fabrications. As a result, the Trump daily briefing has itself become a public health hazard. If we don't have a president who can harmonize our need to protect ourselves from the coronavirus and our need to get back to work as well as harmonize our need to protect the planet's ecosystems and our need for economic growth we are doomed. Because this virus was actually triggered by our polarization from the natural world. And it will destroy us physically and economically if we stay locked in a polarized, binary argument about lives versus livelihoods. Here is why: When you listen to Trump, one of his consistent themes is that everything was just "perfect" with our economy until out of nowhere this black swan, called Covid 19, showed up from China and wrecked it all. It's true, this virus did come out of Wuhan, China, but it was anything but a black swan that no one could have expected. It was actually "a black elephant." The term "black elephant" was coined by environmentalist Adam Sweidan. It's a cross between "a black swan" an unlikely, unexpected event with enormous ramifications and the "elephant in the room" a looming disaster that is visible to everyone, yet no one wants to address. Covid 19 was a black elephant. It is the logical outcome of our increasingly destructive wars against nature. As Johan Rockstrom, chief scientist at Conservation International, explains: "When you simultaneously hunt for wildlife and push development into natural ecosystems destroying natural habitats the natural balance of species collapses due to loss of top predators and other iconic species, leading to an abundance of more generalized species adapted to live in human dominated habitats. These are rats, bats and some primates which together host 75 percent of all known zoonotic viruses to date, and who can survive and multiply in destroyed human dominated habitats." As we humans have become more numerous and concentrated in cities, and as deforestation has brought these generalized species closer to us and as countries like China, Vietnam and others in central Africa tolerated wet markets where these virus laden species were mixed with domesticated meats we're seeing ever more zoonotic diseases spreading from animals to people. Their names are SARS, MERS, Ebola, bird flu, and swine flu and Covid 19. China, in particular, has a lot to answer for. It banned wet markets in one province after SARS in 2003, but then allowed them to reopen after SARS passed and that apparently brought us Covid 19 out of Wuhan. (Shamefully, China reportedly still has not shut down wet markets selling wildlife.) Add globalization to this and you have the perfect ingredients for more pandemics. We need to find a much more harmonious balance between economic growth and our ecosystems. The same kind of harmonic approach has to be brought to our current debate about reopening the economy. One way to get there was proposed by Graham Allison, a national security expert at Harvard. Allison wrote that we're having this important debate about our health and economic future in an incredibly uncoordinated way. Instead, we should have federal government experts on one team offering their approach and a Team B of independent medical, economic, public health, data and strategic analysts offering an alternative approach. And then go for the best synthesis. For instance, Allison observed: "If we concluded that an identified group of a quarter of the population face an unacceptable risk of death from coronavirus, but that for the other 75 percent, with appropriate precautions like social distancing and masks, face no greater risk than other risks of death we accepted before coronavirus, would it be possible to design a response that protected the most vulnerable while simultaneously reopening most of the economy for others?" As an example of Team B thinking, Graham cited the work of Dr. David Katz, a public health expert who helped kick off the debate about how to harmonize protecting the most vulnerable and opening the economy to those least at risk in an essay he wrote in The New York Times on March 20 and in a follow up interview we did together. Five weeks later and fresh off three days as a volunteer emergency room doctor in the Bronx Katz still believes that is possible. He explained to me why, starting with what he found in the emergency ward. "You might think that health professionals are at one extreme of opinion, concerned only about the virus and favoring locking everything down, but that was not the view I encountered," said Katz. "The view was far more centrist: respect for the infection, but equal respect for the high cost of closing down everything to their patients, of course, but also to themselves and their families. Many were acutely concerned about layoffs, unemployment, and real desperation affecting siblings or close friends." That is why, Katz insists, we have to avoid minimizing the degree to which mass unemployment, poverty, hunger and despair will devastate people if the economy remains virtually shut down. At the same time, we can't just submit to protesters demanding their governors open everything back up indiscriminately, without data or a comprehensive health strategy, "The moment you stop respecting this virus, it will kill someone you love," he said. The best strategy, argues Katz, starts with what the numbers are telling us: "More and more data are telling us that Covid 19 is two completely different diseases in different populations. It is severe and potentially lethal to the old, the chronically ill and those with pre existing conditions. It is, however, rarely life threatening, often mild and often even asymptomatic among those under 50 or 60 in generally good health." We still don't yet have a perfect understanding of how the virus works for instance, if you get it, whether you are immune from getting it again. So, we need to corroborate the patterns we're seeing through more random sampling of the U.S. population both for infection and immunity. But if these patterns are confirmed, then the proper strategy, argued Katz, is one of "total harm minimization" that saves the most lives and health through "vertical interdiction." "That means sheltering the vulnerable, while allowing those who can return to the world most safely to do so thereby restoring the economy, supply chains, and services, while cultivating the collective protection of herd immunity that leads to the 'all clear,'" said Katz. "That's how we get our lives back without waiting on the long and uncertain timeline of vaccine development." Of course, we'll need an army of public health workers to keep doing testing and contact tracing so we can adapt to new data, limit breakouts and protect those most likely to die or be badly harmed from Covid 19. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
What books are on your nightstand? I go through things in batches, and recently I've been trying to read more about movies. The top book on the nightstand is Owen Gleiberman's "Movie Freak," which is about his love of movies and his life as a movie lover. Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today? I don't read as much fiction. I'm not a fiction person. I tend to go for biographies and oral histories and books about art of all kinds. I was gifted copies of Ishmael Reed novels like "The Free Lance Pallbearers" and "Mumbo Jumbo," and those were really eye opening. What book, if any, most influenced your decision to become a musician or contributed to your artistic development? In terms of becoming a musician, I was influenced most by my family my dad was a musician, and he had a singing group with my mom, and my sister and I toured around with them. When I read about musicians at that time, it tended to be in magazines, which were still healthy. Rolling Stone had a huge impact on me. There were some books that nudged me in the same direction, though. Because Dad was mentioned in David Ritz's "Divided Soul," I read that, and I also read Nelson George's "The Michael Jackson Story." Who are your favorite musician writers? Your favorite memoir by a musician? There are some usual suspects: Miles Davis's book with Quincy Troupe, Charles Mingus's "Beneath the Underdog." One of my favorites is a fairly recent book, "Root for the Villain," by J Zone. It's by a rapper, about his inability to make it. It's a brilliant book, and it scared the crap out of me I have never seen someone revel in his failure quite the way he does. When I wrote "Something to Food About," I looked at so many books and cookbooks by chefs like Dominique Crenn, Massimo Bottura, Michael Solomonov, Ferran Adria and others. I also got into "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking," written by a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, and I haven't gotten out yet it's a giant multivolume project that's impossible to finish. They have a new book out about bread and I got to see part of the process of making that book when I visited Nathan's Willy Wonka laboratory. Apart from the books I read to write "Something to Food About," there's a book called "Vegan Soul Kitchen," by Bryant Terry, that was very important to me. It has recipes in it, but it also talks about the social and racial history of soul food. It inspired my 200 day run with vegetarianism. "The Cooking Gene," by Michael W. Twitty, is also a must read. 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. What books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves? I read lots of self help books. Therapists are big on seeing you in person and on a consistent basis, so finding one who is willing to video chat at odd hours is rare. Also, I'm usually at my lowest when I'm about to make a record, which is when I have the least time to go and see someone. For that reason, when I need to reframe my way of thinking and be clear about the ways I might be sabotaging a process, I consult self help books. Two recent ones I read were "Battlefield of the Mind," by Joyce Meyer, and "Confidence: Overcoming Low Self Esteem, Insecurity, and Self Doubt," by Tomas Chamorro Premuzic. Look, his name is literally pre music. What are the best books about music you've read? It's hard to pick just one or even just five or 10. I get different things from each book. Sometimes I'm looking for out of the way stories. Sometimes I'm looking for practical advice. Greg Tate made me want to be a writer. I was amazed that a musician was so fluid and had enough knowledge to describe and analyze other people's music so well. I read him in The Village Voice, but his work was collected in books like "Flyboy in the Buttermilk." What's the last book you read that made you laugh? Jenifer Lewis's memoir, "The Mother of Black Hollywood." She's an actress who has worked in television and film for decades. She played Tupac's mother in "Poetic Justice" and Tina Turner's mother in "What's Love Got to Do With It?" Now she's in "Black ish." Her book was hilarious. I listened to the audiobook, and it was so good that it made me step up my audiobook game for "Creative Quest." The last book you read that made you cry? After Prince died, a wave of books came out: Duane Tudahl's book on the "Purple Rain" studio sessions, Ben Greenman's "Dig if You Will the Picture" and Mayte Garcia's "The Most Beautiful." I wrote forewords for some of them. To see Prince humanized, to see his effect on other writers and thinkers, made it all that much harder to reconcile with the fact that he was gone. The last book you read that made you furious? "Fire and Fury," and not for the reasons you would think. I mainly thought about how the president would drop his guard for this guy. I don't feel bad for him; you get what you have coming to you. But when I researched the author and started to understand how he must have portrayed himself to get access, what does that say about the president's judgment, or self awareness, or even self protection? I had to set the book aside at some point pretty early on. What kind of reader were you as a child? Your favorite book? Most beloved character? When my family and I drove to shows, not only was I my dad's GPS, but I was also his human audiobook. He would make me read to him, hours at a time, from the novelizations of whatever movies were current: "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Jaws," whatever. At the time it seemed like father son bonding. Now I think maybe he was tricking me. My favorite children's book was Dr. Seuss' "My Book About Me," which is a kind of guided workbook that lets you write your own autobiography. I carried it around as if I wrote it, which I guess I did. I was so proud. To this day, I love that book I probably have 50 blank copies of it in storage. I was also obsessed with a series called "The Happy Hollisters." It's about a family of younger kids (the oldest are tweens) who go on adventures, not ghosts and goblins, but more realistic ones, like Hardy Boys type mysteries. I really got into them. Those were a big deal for me. If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be? "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" changed my life. I read it when I was 15, and that along with discovering Public Enemy and Afrocentric hip hop kind of went hand in hand as a consciousness builder and creator. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? "Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!" You're hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited? Alex Haley, because of Malcolm X. Do they have to be living? Let me start over. I would say two women whom I have met in real life and hung out with: bell hooks and Fran Lebowitz. For the third, let's say Quincy Jones. I know he isn't thought of mainly as an author, but he has written books, and if I am hosting a dinner party, I'll be damned if he's not there. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? I'm kind of obsessive about finishing books, even if it takes me a while. I don't want to single out any books now that I know how hard they are to write, I don't like saying that books are disappointing just because they didn't get through to me in the right way but if I had to pick one, I would pick my own book on "Soul Train." I want to take another shot at it. When I did that book, I had to break my thinking into separate themed essays. I want to redo it as a definitive project. What's the one book you wish someone else would write? I have a very specific idea. I'm obsessed with the real conditions that afflicted working musicians, and I have an idea that looks at race and music in the middle of the 20th century. I don't want to tip my hand. Maybe I'll end up being the someone else who writes it. Who would you want to write your life story? Well, I already wrote my life story, "Mo' Meta Blues," but my thinking about how to redo it has more to do with genres. I've been really into audiobooks lately. When I get around to doing the audio version of that book the way I want, I think it would be great to hear my life reflected through voices that aren't me. So maybe it's not about writing my life story so much as re presenting it as a communal kind of radio play. What books do you find yourself returning to again and again? Every woman I have ever dated, with the exception of my current (and hopefully final) girlfriend, made it a deal breaker that I go through the whole "Harry Potter" series. It hasn't worked, but I have acquired at least six or seven sets of Potters. What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? I read "The Great Gatsby" in high school, though I think maybe at the last minute I ended up Cliffs Noting part of it. (Still got a B!) I want to sit down and read it again, fo real, with a group. What do you plan to read next? I'm excited for Michelle Obama's book, "Becoming." I can't wait to see her take on life in the White House. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Applying inexpensive petroleum jelly to a new baby daily for the first six months of life may reduce the risk that the infant will develop eczema, which can be a lifelong torment, according to a new analysis. Two studies done in newborns with relatives suffering from atopic dermatitis, the most common form of eczema, showed that rubbing moisturizer into their skin daily lowered their risk of developing the itchy, dry, scaly patches on their heads, arms and legs that characterize the disease. Scientists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine looked at seven common moisturizers and decided that petroleum jelly was the cheapest effective one; sunflower oil came in second. Eczema affects over 10 percent of American children, and is more common in those with dark brown skin. Its prevalence in Africa is unknown, but anecdotally it is thought to be increasing there too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
American democracy is alive and well, or at least functioning, in "Boys State," a happy pill of a documentary. Each year, thousands of high school boys congregate in their home states for some intense governance cosplay sponsored by the American Legion. In a single whirlwind week, participants are embedded in opposing parties like Federalists and Nationalists decide platforms and run for office, including governor. The movie focuses on the 2018 edition of Texas Boys State, when some 1,000 teens embraced ideals and engaged in a lot of hoo ha togetherness. After some bare minimum background images of Boys State alums like Dick Cheney and Cory Booker are mixed into the opening credits the directors, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, jump right into the fray. This shrewdly puts viewers on more or less the same newbie level as the subjects, including Ben Feinstein. A "politics junkie" and double amputee from San Antonio, Ben owns a Ronald Reagan doll and announces his personal platform when he explains to his family that it's bad for America to focus on "race or gender or disability" rather than "individual failings." Steven Garza, Ben's political opposite, enters soon after. A thoughtful, open faced striver from Houston, Steven calls himself a progressive, admires Bernie Sanders (and Napoleon) and arrives at Texas Boys State in a Beto O'Rourke T shirt. Ben and Steven don't interact much at first because they're in opposing parties. Ben is thrown in with the Federalists, where he secures the position of party chairman. Steven is placed in the Nationalists with the two other main figures: Robert MacDougall, an Austin smiler in cowboy boots who summons up visions of George W. Bush; and the sharp witted, razor tongued Rene Otero, a transplant from Chicago. With a lot of access, multiple cameras and great narrative flow, the filmmakers track these four political tyros as they navigate the days, nights and many, many meetings of their Boys State encounter. Despite all the yammering, the tone remains briskly energetic (the editor is Jeff Gilbert), and the boys appealing, or mostly. Although the week's activities vary (and include a talent show), the focus remains on process. Each party selects its reps and spends time drawing up a platform, with suggestions that range from the frivolous to the deadly serious. Gun rights are a big deal, and more than one boy declares his opposition to abortion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Even before a pandemic caused this endless ache for the community of the outside world; before the puddles on my city block no longer reflected the buzzy lights from open shops at night; and before I spoke to everyone I loved through a parade of various screens ("Zooms," "Hangouts," "FaceTimes"), I had gotten in the habit of watching old concert videos in the mornings. It began sometime late last year, with my desire to see aging artists as they once were the ones who could no longer dance or slide across a stage as they could in their younger days. As both a celebration of timeless human brilliance and a reminder of its limits, our fascinating mortality. Bill Withers, a three time Grammy Award winning artist, died Monday at the age of 81, and I wanted to see him alive again. So I did, pulling up a YouTube video of him playing live in concert for the BBC in 1973. There are undoubtedly better, more sprawling and inclusive performances from Withers during this era: His famed concert at Carnegie Hall, for instance, covers more ground, and is more elaborate. Because this performance took place in a cozy setting, in front of an intimate audience, its magic is not only in the songs themselves, but also in the way Withers fills the silence before each song. Sometimes shyly rambling. Sometimes stumbling over his words a bit on the path to saying to something heartwarming, or brilliant. In one of those heartwarming bits of insight, he humbly talks to the audience about how it's "fun to be traveling from one large city to another large city all over the world." But that for a small town West Virginian like him, "When you first come to a very large place you feel a little odd." Before finding out that knowing all "800 people" in your town leaves you, "maybe," much better off than being in a place with "eight million people and you didn't really know anybody." Then, after a half pause, he starts up "Lonely Town Lonely Street." These parts glow because of how comfortable Withers grows with speaking as the show goes on with a voice that sounds, even back then, like a patient and anxious but wise elder you or I have known. By the time he plays "Grandma's Hands," the plodding of his guitar becomes a transportation device, and viewers in that audience in '73 or watching from home now are in church with clapping grandmothers. An audience to the joyful slapping of tambourines and the maternal, stern warnings evoked in the song all at once. In the smoothest transition of the performance, Withers takes a breath after ending "Grandma's Hands." Looking down for a second, before devilishly looking back up with a half grin and saying, "Usually after that point in your life, the ladies that you meet might have a whole other kind of use for you;" launching into the slithering funk of "Use Me." What I have always lamented about Bill Withers is that he often isn't included in the mainstream pantheon of the Great Black Soul Singers. Perhaps that's because of his unconventional path to musical success. He began adulthood in the military, joining in 1956 at age 17, before moving to Los Angeles in 1967. While trying to get his music career off the ground, he worked in various factories, doing assembly work, saving money to record his own demo tapes. He refused to quit his job at Weber Aircraft, even after he got signed to Sussex Records in 1970. Withers kept working, installing toilet seats for commercial airplanes. His debut album "Just As I Am," was released that next year, and on its cover, there is Withers, 32, leaning on a wall outside Weber Aircraft, lunchbox in hand. In this story, there is no romantic mythology of a childhood prodigy, or someone who blew the roof off a church in a small town before being driven off in a Cadillac to go make hit records. If there is a mythology of Withers it is one of the working everyday man. He was the first man in his family to not work in the coal mines of West Virginia. And he had enough of a life before music to know how to walk away from it when he'd had enough. In 1985, he became fed up with white record executives trying to tell him how and what to sing, or how to promote his album. He didn't release any new music for the last 35 years of his life. Withers, in both formal interviews and informally recorded banter, could sometimes be crass, even abrasive, but rarely was he oversentimental. For this, the sentimental moments within his music feel more vulnerable and float above the emptiness of the feel good machinery within so much of the celebrity media industrial complex the mutually assured sanitized reproduction of life. Near the end of the 1973 BBC concert, Withers shifts from his guitar over to a piano to play a singular rendition of "Lean On Me," his ode to the selfless and shared duty of friendship, written after he moved to Los Angeles and longed for everyone he loved back in West Virginia. This version has always been the version I return to. The version that sends me running to my phone to call someone I miss, just to hear their voice. And it's the version that sits with an exceptionally heavy weight on me now, because Bill Withers is gone. And because even my friends who aren't miles away feel miles away. Today, in hearing Bill Withers sing "If there is a load you have to bear / That you can't carry / I'm right up the road / I'll share your load," it feels like an entire universe of grief is colliding. There's a healthy chance you too will find yourself nodding along or whispering the signature, circular moan of "I know, I know, I know" employed in "Ain't No Sunshine." A moment which, to me, has never sounded like anguish, but what comes after anguish the understanding that this heartbreak is just one in an ever growing tapestry of them. The singer is resigned, having endured enough to know that endurance is often rewarded with fresh upsets to endure. At least in this song, Withers was a cynic, as I am sometimes. Life as a marathon of losses, loves that might never return. What a gift, to be able to put it so magically, and so memorably. I know I'll miss Bill Withers, even though I know I'd been missing him for most of my life. I know when that BBC camera zooms in on Withers while he sings "Lean On Me," it looks, briefly, like he's crossed over from pain to gratitude. I know it has rained so much this spring that I couldn't go outside most days even if I wanted to. I know there is more than enough grief in today's world to fill all of our glasses today, tomorrow and the next day. And yet, with the loss of Withers, I'm grieving anew. I notice how at the end of the BBC performance, seconds after Withers flicks the final note on "Harlem," the set's closing song, he barely waits for the audience to clap. He hops out of his chair and walks into the all consuming darkness offstage, as if despite the applause and newfound fame he couldn't wait to get gone. Hanif Abdurraqib ( NifMuhammad) is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. His latest book is "A Fortune For Your Disaster." 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Amazon Users in India Will Get Less Choice and Pay More Under New Selling Rules NEW DELHI On Friday, Indian consumers will wake up to an emptier, more expensive version of Amazon's shopping service. Gone will be iPhones and cheap jumbo packs of Pampers diapers. Fewer varieties of Maybelline cosmetics will be available, and Amazon's own Echo smart speakers will vanish entirely. In all, more than 400,000 items that account for nearly a third of Amazon's estimated 6 billion in annual sales in India will probably disappear at least temporarily from the local version of the company's service, as Amazon tries to comply with new e commerce rules imposed by the Indian government. Amazon, which had structured its operations carefully to adhere to a 2016 revision to the country's e commerce rules, said it had asked the Indian government to clarify the new policy and give it an additional four months to comply. "We remain committed to be compliant to all local laws, rules and regulations," Amazon said in a statement. Barring a last minute reprieve, Amazon's leading rival in India, Flipkart, which effectively became a Walmart subsidiary last year, will also be forced to remove thousands of products from its service, particularly in the apparel category, where it sells many clothing items made by affiliated companies. Flipkart could lose as much as a quarter of its sales in the short term, according to Technopak, an Indian consulting firm. A spokesman for Walmart, which spent 16 billion for its controlling stake in Flipkart, declined to comment on the new policy or its potential effects. The change underscores the risks American companies face in India, which ranked No. 77 globally in the World Bank's most recent survey on ease of doing business. With 1.3 billion residents, the country would appear to be an attractive market. But it poses many challenges, including bad roads, low per capita incomes, a cacophony of languages, and a consumer economy that runs largely on cash. The country's millions of shopkeepers and small traders wield tremendous power in votes and campaign donations. And its large corporations, many of them closely tied to the government, are eager to wrest Indian consumers from the embrace of foreign companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google. Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Silicon Valley in 2015 to urge tech companies to invest in India. But with national elections looming in May and growing disenchantment with Mr. Modi's policies, his government has recently championed a vigorous economic nationalism, passing or proposing policies to rein in the power of foreign financial firms like Visa and Mastercard and tech companies like Facebook and Google. Just after Christmas, it was the retailers' turn. Mr. Modi's administration announced that, effective Feb. 1, foreign owned e commerce services like Amazon and Flipkart could not sell goods through affiliated companies. Direct sales to consumers had been banned earlier, but each of the two companies had set up a complex array of related companies to indirectly offer popular products at low prices with fast delivery. To continue operating, Amazon and Walmart will now have to turn their sites in India into digital bazaars for independent merchants, becoming more like eBay, which charges for certain services but sells nothing itself. "People have started to buy China's viewpoint: We need to build domestic assets and domestic companies," said Ankur Bisen, an analyst who leads the retail division at Technopak. "We have to have a more nuanced approach to the onslaught of global corporations." Ashwani Mahajan, a leader of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an economic self reliance organization affiliated with Mr. Modi's political party, praised the new policy, saying it was essential to help small shopkeepers survive against the economic might of global companies that can afford to offer deep discounts. "I know my next door shopkeeper," Mr. Mahajan said, echoing arguments heard in the United States when Walmart was battling Main Street retailers. "I know his family. I don't know who is Amazon, who is Flipkart. For the survival of these two entities, I can't put the livelihood of my country at risk." Snapdeal, an Indian online marketplace that was hurt by earlier price wars with Amazon and Flipkart, also cheered the policy changes while urging the government not to grant the companies more time to comply. Indian consumers may pay a price for such protectionism. A survey of common products currently available on Amazon's Indian site suggests that after sales by its affiliated companies are banned, many products will disappear and others will become more expensive because they will only be sold by small merchants who lack the clout to negotiate low wholesale prices from manufacturers. The policy changes prompted complaints from American business groups and diplomats, but the government has shown no sign of relenting. Senior officials of the commerce ministry, which issued the new rules, did not respond to several requests for comment. In recent days, they have been bombarded with thousands of emails and, in some cases, videos from small merchants urging them to take a tough line with the foreign companies. In a letter sent on Wednesday, the main traders' organization threatened the government with political repercussions if it backtracked on the policy and urged officials to investigate the past two years' of transactions made by Amazon and Flipkart. Mr. Bisen of Technopak predicted that the government would not enforce the rules aggressively for a few months, giving Amazon and Walmart time to figure out how to work within the new system. Instead of selling products, he said, they could charge fees for listing items, storing goods and delivering them. "This entire arrangement will force these guys to be service providers," Mr. Bisen said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A new public service announcement makes a point that federal leaders have largely overlooked: Asian Americans are facing a surge of harassment linked to fears about the coronavirus pandemic. The spot, which debuted on Tuesday, includes testimonials from a firefighter, a nurse, a driver, an artist, the celebrity chef Melissa King and others, who describe being told to "go back to China" or having people spit in their direction. The somber ad, produced by the nonprofit Advertising Council with help from the Emmy winning writer Alan Yang, ends with a request: "Fight the virus. Fight the bias." Anxiety about the novel respiratory virus, which was first detected in Wuhan, China, has fueled xenophobia and bigotry toward people of Asian descent. A coalition of civil rights groups recorded more than 2,100 incidents in 15 weeks; the New York City Commission on Human Rights recently described a "sharp increase in instances of hostility and harassment." A list of recent cases compiled by the Anti Defamation League chronicles "surging reports of xenophobic and racist incidents," including Asian owned stores defaced with racist graffiti, video chats disrupted by anti Asian comments and people being beaten or denied entry to businesses. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The last two thirds of the book are a compendium of rants on topics that both fascinate and confound the author. Brutalist architecture is lauded. Andy Warhol is paid homage to and parodied at the same time. Chimpanzee art is used as a means to illuminate the insanity of the contemporary art market. The music of Waters's youth is delved into at length and with tender detail, and yet another life lesson is imparted: He contends that we all need to have good taste in music, and I concur. For isn't taste merely having opinions and being willing to defend them? In this current environment that constantly encourages us to stay afloat on the winds of influencers and trending, how refreshing and necessary to hear that sticking to your guns is the essential route to a healthy psyche. If you consider Waters's psyche to be healthy, as I indubitably do. He also dismisses protesting ("Don't act up, ACT BAD!"), fantasizes about a culinary version of his aesthetic in a restaurant named Gristle and makes observations about travel ("Why is everybody ugly in first class?"). Though here, again, a revealing and inspiring detail is slipped into the bountiful list of Waters wisdom: "'The day you stop touring, your career is over,' Elton John once told me, and he's right." Please note the extensive schedule of public events and appearances that now fill this auteur's calendar. He intends to be with us for quite a while. Waters understands that we need some real filth from him, and so there is an unashamedly sensationalist chapter on sex, with some classic, hilarious zingers: "Militant rimmers are the Jehovah's Witnesses of anilingus. Always knocking on the door ... but accepting if turned away." And while we're on the subject of the anus, here for me came the book's biggest shock, a rectum related remark that genuinely made me gasp and wonder if, in the same way people's voting habits have a tendency to conservatize with age, Waters's views on sex have been primped and neutered. Are you ready, readers? Here it comes: John Waters does not believe in penetrative anal sex! But then I read on, and when I got to the bit where he states that peeing on a man in the bathroom of a sex club broadened him intellectually I realized that, of course, conventional old anal sex would be likely to be pooh poohed by this scribe. In the final third of the book, Waters lets slip that it was sold to his publisher partly on the idea that, at 70, he would take LSD again and write about it. Here, if anywhere in this great, rambling literary shrine to the author's idiosyncrasies, we learn the very essence of John Waters. He begins with a sensational idea, he arrests us, but then the actual execution of it is marred with anxiety and doubt much like the experiences he relates from his filmmaking days. When the moment finally arrives and he drops the drug with two friends, the shocking truth emerges that they all just had a really lovely time. When it's over he texts his assistants, his boyfriend, even his drug dealer, to tell them he's fine. And life goes on. It wasn't that big a deal. But that's what I loved about this book: its honesty, even in its flaws. As the man himself says, and this is a mantra I think every artist who feels the pressure to keep delivering should heed and pass on (I know I will): "Learn to milk whatever success you've had. You can keep doing the same thing over and over as long as you have a sense of humor about not having a new idea." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The Week in Tech: Are Lawmakers Too Eager to Weaken Big Tech's Legal Shield? Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at this past week's tech news: Some lawmakers are scrambling to rethink a law that enabled the internet as we know, love and hate it. The other week, my colleague Daisuke Wakabayashi explained Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: "The First Amendment protects free speech, including hate speech, but Section 230 shields websites from liability for content created by their users. It permits internet companies to moderate their sites without being on the hook legally for everything they host." Dai also wrote that lawmakers from both parties were going after it, for different reasons. Some Democrats say it gives social media platforms an excuse to leave up problematic content; some Republicans argue it enables companies to censor conservative voices. It's hard to reconcile those viewpoints. So is the case closed? Nope. If lawmakers can't agree, the president may step in. Politico reported that the White House was drafting an executive order to deal with alleged anticonservative bias. CNN later claimed to have seen a version of the order, which it said would mandate that the Federal Communications Commission restrict how far the immunity of Section 230 was extended. The proposal as described by CNN could face problems, according to John Bergmayer, a senior staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group. It could face statutory and administrative hurdles; it may even run up against free speech rights by forcing neutrality. Regardless, if it exists, it would make clear that there was desire, and urgency, to change Section 230. Since the law was signed, in 1996, the tasks of online moderation, and the influence of the internet companies that the law helped become behemoths, have changed drastically. It may well be time for a rethink. But "we still haven't defined the problems, let alone the solutions," with Section 230, said Jeff Kosseff, the author of a book about the law, "The Twenty Six Words That Created the Internet." He added, "I think we need to slow down a little." Is suppression of right wing views online real? There's little quantitative evidence to support the claim. And while it's difficult to argue that social media platforms are good at removing problematic content, the opacity of their moderation makes it difficult to know how hard they're working. Clearer insight would be good if Section 230 reform demanded stronger moderation. It's important to get it right: Limiting or removing Section 230 immunity could have profound and hard to predict effects. Platforms may moderate less if they fear that exercising editorial control opens them up to loss of free speech protections. Or they could moderate more, to avoid publication of troublesome content. Some might ditch user generated content altogether. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Kevin Hart shut the door on hosting the Oscars in an interview on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday. "I'm not hosting the Oscars this year," Hart told Michael Strahan, one of the morning show's hosts, citing the lack of preparation time for the Feb. 24 ceremony and the shoot schedule for his next film, a sequel to "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle." He added: "If I do something, I want to be able to give it my all and make sure that the production is a great representation of me and my talent. I can't do that right now." Talk of Hart's being reinstated as host of the Academy Awards was ignited after he made an appearance on Ellen DeGeneres's talk show last week. DeGeneres implored him to reconsider his withdrawal and said that she had called someone at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vouch for him. It is unclear whom she spoke to and the Academy never confirmed the call. At the time, Hart said he was re evaluating the decision to withdraw as host. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
All this is parsed in great detail by "Seurat's Circus Sideshow," an enthralling exhibition opening on Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Centered on two paintings and 16 drawings by Seurat, the show is a superb feat of contextualizing. It surrounds "Circus Sideshow" with scores of sideshow paintings by other artists, both famous and completely unknown. There are newspaper engravings, ephemera, illustrated journals, books, postcards and even vintage musical instruments. The circus posters include several for the Corvi Circus, the subject of Seurat's painting. Also here: Rembrandt's 1655 drypoint, "Christ Presented to the People," interjecting its own raised stage, rectilinear backdrop and monumental gravity. Honore Daumier plays a supporting role, and cameos are made by Paul Signac, Seurat's sidekick in color theory, and the talented Louis Hayet, who was either at their heels or just ahead of them in inventing Pointillism. An impressive cast of younger artists influenced by Seurat arrive, some taking up his style: Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Lucien Pissarro and the American Maurice Prendergast. By focusing on well edited ancillary material, the exhibition makes you see in genuinely new depth the greatness of Seurat's "Sideshow" which has been in the Met's collection since 1960 as well as the richness of the soil that nourished it, a bustling urban society on the cusp of change, including the increasingly fertile friction between high and low culture. "Circus Sideshow" is one of six large paintings Seurat completed before his death in 1891, at 31, and the only one to take place outdoors at night. It depicts the street side ritual known as a "parade" (pa ROD), for which the English word sideshow is only an approximate translation. These were short performances with which centuries of troupes and circuses traveling around France had attracted paying customers. The parade was a free sample. In "Sideshow," we see five musicians, a young, preening buffoon or jester and their suave, watchful barker ringmaster (a fair likeness of Ferdinand Corvi, the owner, himself). They occupy a raised, narrow stage outside their circus tent. These "saltimbanques," as they were called, are drumming up business for the show inside. The heads and shoulders of curious passers by just visible at the painting's bottom edge attests to their success. With great subtlety, Seurat unmistakably indicates class differences as well as a range of intimacies, creating one of the painting's most naturalistic moments. "Circus Sideshow" has hung at the Met for more than 50 years, but it can still stop you in your tracks. Among the colorful, freely painted works of Post Impressionists like Gauguin and van Gogh, Seurat's dark, mysterious canvas is a decidedly alien presence. Closer analogies of its still, orderly volumes include Egyptian reliefs and the statuary like figures of Piero della Francesca's Renaissance frescos. At odds with the painting's noisy, often sordid subject this mood was attained. Seurat attained it by reducing the figures to elegant, repeating silhouettes and their backdrop to a series of echoing rectangles and ovals. Illumination from two rows of gaslights is carefully calibrated and distributed. And all are immersed in the granular, silencing atmosphere of Seurat's painstaking, if not obsessive, Pointillist technique. The additional Seurats include the three surviving studies for "Sideshow" and a suite of five exquisite drawings of cafe singers, works that have hardly seen one another since 1888. The other Seurat painting in the show is the small version of "Models (Poseuses)" of 1887 88, in which Seurat does everything he doesn't do in "Circus Sideshow" paints daylight, flesh and a moment of relaxation. The larger version (hostage in the Barnes Collection) debuted with "Circus Sideshow" in the 1888 Salon des Independants and was much better received. The most spectacular together again moment comes with Fernand Pelez's stupefyingly naturalistic "Grimaces and Misery The Saltimbanques," on public view in the official 1888 Salon while "Circus Sideshow" was displayed at the Independants. Measuring 20 feet across with 11 life size figures, it is the anti Seurat: Its art all but disappears into reportage. Its aura of overdone is redolent of Norman Rockwell or even Maxfield Parrish. Still, the disturbed faces of the three girls are poignantly convincing. The best example of naturalism may be a small rediscovered gem, Octave Penguilly L'Haridon's 1846 "Sideshow (Parade): Pierrot Presents his Companions Harlequin and Polichinelle to the Crowd." The sweet Pierrot winks as he gestures toward the exaggeratedly sinister pair. But the painted landscape backdrop tied to a thick birch and the light falling on the worn wood stage is one of the sweetest moments in the show. In her catalog essay, Ms. Stein examines the American context of "Circus Sideshow." It arrived here in 1929, purchased by Knoedler Inc. As a photograph reveals, the painting was just in time to assume pride of place in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, which presented Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne and the precursors of modernism. The Modern's founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., tried and failed twice to raise the money to meet the painting's 100,000 price. Imagine his chagrin when shortly thereafter, Stephen C. Clark, chairman of the Modern's board, negotiated the price down, ultimately buying it for himself for 47,000. In 1943 Clark would dismiss Barr from the director's job and would eventually become less engaged with the museum. Which may be one reason Seurat's "Circus Sideshow," a masterpiece made to be contextualized, ended up at the Met. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Anton Rubinstein's 1871 opera, "Demon," is a tried and true 19th century plot with a religious twist: A fallen angel seeks redemption through a woman's love. In Russia, it was the most popular opera of its day. Then it disappeared. "Rubinstein became a footnote in Russian history in a way that is ill deserved," said Leon Botstein, who will conduct a rare production of "Demon" that runs from July 27 to Aug. 5 in Annandale on Hudson, N.Y., as part of the SummerScape festival at Bard College. Rubinstein (1829 94) was a pivotal figure in Russian music. The founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and Tchaikovsky's composition teacher, he was an early advocate of academic training in the country. His symphonies the Second and Fifth are exceptional were among the first by a Russian composer. An internationally famous pianist, he toured the world giving concerts, including an American tour in the 1870s that stretched from Kalamazoo to Mobile. It's no surprise that when asked to describe Rubinstein's style, musicologists often reach outside Russian borders. "You can compare him with Schumann, for example: sometimes very unusual harmony," said Marina Frolova Walker, a professor of music history at Cambridge University and the scholar in residence at Bard this summer. The Demon's music "doesn't have a real sense of place," Richard Taruskin, an emeritus professor and expert on Russian music at the University of California at Berkeley, said. "And why should it, in a certain sense, because the Demon doesn't come from any country. He doesn't even come from Earth." Mr. Taruskin described some of the score as similar to a contemporary work, Bizet's "Carmen." And therein lies the seed of Rubinstein's, and his opera's, excision from music history: He did not think "Demon" was obliged to sound Russian. "His melodic and harmonic practices were from a Western point of view," Mr. Botstein said. "He didn't particularly believe in folk melody or folk rhythm as an inspiration. Rubinstein would have been more attracted to an international language of culture and audience that wasn't simply an instrument of national assertion." But the generation of Russian composers that followed him, particularly the group known as the Five, or Mighty Handful (including Rimsky Korsakov as well as Mussorgsky and Borodin), favored aggressively nationalistic music, grounded in folk inspiration. What to Rubinstein had been the professionalization of composition was for this group unwelcome Westernization. They and their propagandist, the critic Vladimir Stasov, condemned Rubinstein in print. Cesar Cui, another member of the Five (along with Mily Balakirev), would credit Rimsky Korsakov with the first Russian symphony, even though Rubinstein had completed his first more than a decade earlier. Unlike his younger competitors, Rubinstein "didn't sport an eastward looking definition of the Russian sensibility," Mr. Botstein said. "He was a patriot, but he was not an ethnic nationalist." That national flavor is what the Five, who were all self taught, wanted, and to some extent we still approach Russian music on their terms. Germans and other Western Europeans are often said to write music that's generic in the best way and universally accessible, while we evaluate Russian music based on its Russianness; it is inextricably marked by its creators' nationality. (In the 20th century, Stravinsky spent decades trying to shed the label of "Russian composer.") Rubinstein therefore doesn't fit into the way we often discuss his country's repertory. "Rubinstein is a composer we usually forget about," Ms. Frolova Walker said. "He actually preceded the Five, but because of bad publicity, he was kind of demoted in historiography. But musically 'Demon' is one of the most popular Russian operas." Compared to the Five's preference for declamation over melody, Rubinstein's conservative taste for tunes, ensembles, dances and identifiable arias makes "Demon" highly accessible. Particularly interesting is the final act, which largely consists of a long duet for the Demon and Tamara, in which her prized virtue is pitted against his salvation. They speak in long alternating speeches, an unusual form that inspired the final scene of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin." (Rubinstein's melodic style was also an inspiration for that masterpiece by his student.) The duet is a striking back and forth between the leading characters, even if the focus on feminine virtue is not the opera's most novel element. "In some sense it is part of a very longstanding tradition of a kind of moral panic about women being visited by someone where they might have an erotic experience," Ms. Frolova Walker said. "We see it as a psychological accessing of the feelings as opposed to a straightforward narrative," he said. He described the exotic beginning of the opera as a "fairy tale," which is then taken over by something more internal as we travel inside Tamara's mind. Demons, in Mr. Strassberger's vision, are our own creations. "They exist as stand ins for an internal monologue you have with yourself," he said. Tamara, he suggested, is not happy about her coming (and likely arranged) marriage, and the Demon is her psyche's way of dealing with the situation. Mr. Taruskin somewhat disagreed. "In real supernatural drama, the supernatural characters really exist," he said. Russian audiences in the 19th century, at least, would have thought the Demon was absolutely real. Mr. Strassberger has it both ways: The characters believe in the Demon, while we in the audience can maintain our distance through the psychological frame. This approach also centers the story not on the title character but on Tamara; the Demon is less important than her crisis. The final scene is not the usual operatic struggle for a woman's chastity against a seducer so much as a depiction of an internal struggle, an intriguing move for opera, which tends to place strict limits on women's subjectivity. The production's challenge is to evoke, through a psychological lens that's closer to listeners today, the titillation of the theological content, which was part of what made Rubinstein's opera so popular in its day. (The source material, a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, was banned for a time as blasphemous.) "Demon" moved swiftly from celebrated blasphemy to forgotten curiosity. But in Rubinstein's melodic, accessible music, we can hear some of the threads left out of music history because they haven't fit prevailing narratives. "There's so much great underperformed opera," Mr. Botstein said. "We are a rare art form; if we're in a museum we have a whole basement of works which we never show. Our whole point is that the audience and support and interest in it is doomed if we permit its real history to be erased." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Looking at television this past year, I sobbed at the sight of Nazis on the streets of Charlottesville. I don't remember crying over the terrible cancer diagnosis back in 2008. Living with the disease for almost a decade has made me more susceptible to the sorrow and the pity of unrelated but potentially horrific suffering. Oh, I realize, I am still learning from my deceased parents. At the time of my ovarian cancer diagnosis, I was numb, a wooden automaton. Mechanically wading into treatment as into a limitless ocean, I submitted to what the doctors decreed. The pounding whitecaps followed surgeries, chemotherapies, radiological drains, reoperations before researchers plucked me up and pitched me into a haven, where I slowly caught my breath. The miraculous efficacy of a drug in a clinical trial continues to extend my existence. I have always shunned the identity "cancer survivor." Wary of language that obscures the ongoing threat of a mortal disease, I know that I may not survive cancer; at any moment, it might recur and kill me. Nor can I take credit for my ongoing life. But now I find myself alarmed ... less about an always possible recurrence and more about our country being overtaken by hateful forces. I am frightened about the fragility of the rule of law, of the institutions and agencies upon which we rely, scared about the most endangered members of our society: racial and ethnic and religious minorities, the disabled, immigrants, gay people, and children as well as adults coping with ruinous diseases precisely the groups targeted by Hitler. Undoubtedly, some of the mounting anxiety derives from my family history. On the day after Kristallnacht, Nov. 11, 1938, my maternal grandparents escaped from Germany to Palestine. They evaded an arrest by the Gestapo when my grandfather displayed his uniform, revolver and medals: He had served as a medical officer in the German army during the Great War. My mother and my brother (then a baby) fled from Hamburg to New York City, also in 1938. My father managed to bolt later; however, his mother and father did not. In my paternal grandmother's last letter, she wrote to her children, "May fate save you from such raw brutality." My parents schooled me, their only American born child, to avoid the pitfalls of positing analogies to the Holocaust, although it was impossible not to observe that at my lowest point in chemotherapy I resembled a prisoner in Auschwitz. I also try to follow the instructions of Susan Sontag to suspect metaphors of illness. And yet it seems to me that fascism acts like cancer in the body politic. Fascism, like cancer, sets up far flung colonies, establishes blood lines, engorges itself, and destroys its host in cannibalistic orgies of nihilism. "Cancer is not a concentration camp," Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee cautions, "but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself; it subsumes all living." Those who survived the Third Reich could not or would not recount the terrors they had witnessed ... in part to save their offspring pain. In my family, they were mute. They had beheld the unimaginable which erupted and obliterated normal narrative logic. How to explain evils that cannot be understood? A niece's rape, cousins gone up in smoke through the chimneys. Pervasive silence meant breathing bruised air. My numb relatives were wooden automatons. America became their haven, where they would not forget, but could not remember. The lethal hatred of the so called master race and survivors' guilt took a toll in the aftermath. Too many of the survivors in my family did not survive. They committed suicide. My mother was the exception; her memory has become a blessing. After the period of silence in the '50s and '60s, Holocaust survivors began to speak out. Like Elie Wiesel, they did so for the future of Jewish people, but also for the liberty and dignity of other persecuted groups. Joining countless civil rights activists, Holocaust survivors stood up against the racial prejudice and profiling that can generate genocide. What can we learn from this now dead or dying generation? Those of us who have outlasted appalling private injuries have a role to play in collective conversations about public cataclysms, it seems to me. Whether caused by a diseased body or a diseased body politic, the belated reverberations of trauma lay bare our common humanity: in particular, our individual and yet shared defenselessness. Men and women who cope with cancer realize that all people are created equal in their vulnerability to the dreadful conditions with which we contend. Cancer makes us experts on dependency: we depend on nurses, aides, technicians, researchers, physicians, therapists, drug and instrument manufacturers, insurance providers, hospital receptionists and cleaners and parking attendants, caregivers, support groups, neighbors who bring over meals and friends who ferry us to and from treatment. We should use our awareness of our vulnerability and dependency to strengthen the social fabric for those exposed to the depredations of cancer and of malignant nativism. I am chastened by the realization that preventing fascism may be as difficult as preventing cancer in this beloved country which has served so many of us as a refuge. To mark the current Thanksgiving holiday, I'm adding my voice to those contesting white supremacists. If cancer survivors can help keep alive the significance of the Holocaust survivors' message, count me as one of them: Never again. Not here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
TIMMY FAILURE: MISTAKES WERE MADE (2020) Stream on Disney Plus. The filmmaker Tom McCarthy's 2015 investigative journalism nail biter, "Spotlight," won an Academy Award for best picture. "Timmy Failure," his first movie since, is also about professional investigators. One of them is an 11 year old. The other is a polar bear. Based on a series of children's books by Stephan Pastis (who wrote the screenplay with McCarthy), "Timmy Failure" centers on a boy (Winslow Fegley) who runs a detective business in Portland, Ore., with the help of a big, hairy Arctic escapee. While the movie is skipping theaters in favor of being released directly on Disney's streaming service, "it owes more to independent cinema than anything," McCarthy told The New York Times last year. It is both family oriented and proudly weird. HONEY BOY (2019) Stream on Amazon. Shia LaBeouf plays a version of his own father in this intense drama, which was written by LaBeouf and directed by Alma Har'el. Telling a fictionalized account of LaBeouf's early stardom, more recent erratic behavior and rehabilitation, "Honey Boy" splits its story between two time periods: The 1990s, where it focuses on a young child actor, Otis (Noah Jupe), being bullied by his father (LaBeouf), and the 2000s, where it turns to an older Otis (Lucas Hedges), a blockbuster star with an explosive offscreen life. LaBeouf's "drawling evocation of his own father is a bravura incarnation of resentment," Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. But the film at large, Kenny wrote, is "a flex: an assertion of the clout LaBeouf claims, in interviews, to no longer have." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The pianist McCoy Tyner's impact on music is usually explained through his relationship to John Coltrane, a childhood friend who became his boss in one of the most significant ensembles in American history. But the story of Mr. Tyner, who died on Friday, is also the story of a bandleader and composer whose granite style remained intact even as he tracked the music's developments, from bebop into free jazz. By the time he left Coltrane's group in 1965, Mr. Tyner's piano had become one of the distinctive forces in jazz: His pot stirring left hand pounded heavy bass notes, then topped them off with roving stacks of harmony. His right hand's brisk, zipping phrases made it just as recognizable as the left, if not quite as iconic. The Coltrane quartet modeled a new kind of ancient thinking about music: as a collective ritual, one that lived by a pledge of mutual independence as well as support. "It is all a matter of giving the soloist more freedom to explore harmonically," Mr. Tyner said in 1963, when the quartet was in its prime. "Nevertheless, there is a foundation and a point of return. We all know where we are working from." From the early 1960s forward, Mr. Tyner also was one of jazz's most respected bandleaders. He led groups large and small, and penned enough memorable tunes to fill more than one songbook. His influence is written deeply into the generations that have followed him, and into the language of pianists from Mulgrew Miller to Geri Allen. But let's start with Mr. Tyner's own output. Below are 11 memorable recordings, from his work as an accompanist and a bandleader. At age 21, Mr. Tyner joined the quartet of his longtime friend John Coltrane, a kind of elder brother figure from his adolescent years in Philadelphia. Coltrane by then had nearly exhausted his fascination with corkscrewing harmonic changes, and the group found its identity in a more rooted, incantatory sound, influenced by music traditions from across the globe. With "My Favorite Things," it also found itself a hit. All of a sudden, Mr. Tyner's piano was on airwaves across the world, sparring with the drums of Elvin Jones to conjure the special locomotive power that would eventually define the band. Mr. Tyner's playing on this track is disciplined and neatly contained, but you can easily spot the signature shadings of his harmonies and his trilling ostinatos. This Tyner original comes from his debut album, "Inception," released on the then new Impulse! label, which would become a clearinghouse for the musicians in Coltrane's orbit. On "Effendi," named for the noblemen of the Ottoman Empire, Mr. Tyner tags back and forth between a pattern of dancing chords in the right hand and a series of responding melodies in the left, played in unison with Art Davis's bass. It's in tune with the hard bop that was lush on the vine in New York then, played by pianists like Elmo Hope and Sonny Clark. But there is a seriousness and a minor key harmonic language that belong specifically to Mr. Tyner. From the time he hit the scene alongside Coltrane, Mr. Tyner was sought by some of the finest young bandleaders, particularly on the Blue Note Records roster. The saxophonist Wayne Shorter was himself a Coltrane acolyte, and he didn't shy from that affiliation when he made back to back albums with Coltrane's own side musicians. Of course, Mr. Shorter was possessed of his own voice, and on "Juju" his saxophone cast a different shadow on the polyrhythmic structures built by Mr. Tyner and Jones. On "A Love Supreme," Coltrane's magnum opus, the quartet drives its modal approach to a devotional extreme. In the left hand, Mr. Tyner stacked intervals of harmonic fourths, creating the feeling of openness he talked about in that 1963 interview. But in his right hand he worked with a sharp incisor, sculpting shapely phrases with a harmonic specificity of their own. As the musician Sami Linna has pointed out, Mr. Tyner's right hand clusters allowed him to imply the harmonic clarity that his left hand eschewed. Rather than unfurling long, droning phrases or centrifugal eruptions, as Coltrane often did, he insisted on compact and lyrical melodies, articulated with a crystalline touch. Throughout the 1970s Mr. Tyner continued to expand his ambitions as a composer, while his piano playing made more room for the influence of the avant garde. On the lengthy live album "Enlightenment," a highlight from his fruitful years on the Milestone label, his familiar air of focus and intention is preserved but it's pervaded by a sense of mutiny and discontent, one that's reflective of the age. There's more than one breath stopping moment on "Presence," which Mr. Tyner begins and ends with passages of startling polyphony, freely improvising in gusts and riptides, flinging out lines at hyperspeed with only a distant correspondence to one another. "Asante" is among both the most traditional and the most experimental albums of Mr. Tyner's career. With an expanded ensemble percussion, guitar, bass, reeds and voice he summons a dreamy but vigilant journey. Sometimes he sinks into the kind of syncopated six beat groove that he and Jones had made into an idiom of its own with the Coltrane quartet. Elsewhere he sticks to a simpler, hypnotic cadence. Throughout, the point is to achieve a full spectrum of sound: This seven piece band has all the richness and variety of a natural habitat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
How will children make sense of the times we are living through? How can parents help them form and understand the narrative, even when they themselves feel worried, overwhelmed and unsure? I went back to several of the pediatricians I've consulted about different aspects of the coronavirus and asked: How are you telling your children the story of the pandemic? Dr. Gail Shust, an associate professor in the division of pediatric infectious diseases at New York University School of Medicine, has said to her children, aged 13 and 15: "If you ever have kids, someday you're going to tell them about this time when we all stayed inside for months, and everybody wore masks." Dr. Adam Ratner, the director of pediatric infectious diseases at New York University School of Medicine and Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at N.Y.U. Langone Health, said, "I don't even know how to tell myself the story about what's going on right now." He wrote in an email, "For me, some days feel like a great story of grit and hope, and some feel like we're just standing on (or stepping off) a precipice." His daughter is in college, he said, "and I can talk to her like I can talk to a grown up, she loves public health stuff." Because she is interested in medicine, he said, "I wanted to model that good doctor behavior where you sometimes have to do things that are frightening or where you don't have 100 percent of the information." The narratives vary depending on children's ages, but all children need narratives. Dr. Grace Black, a pediatrician on the faculty of the University of Rochester, has three young children, the oldest of whom was in kindergarten when lockdown interrupted their lives. For her 3 and a half year old, she said, who wanted to go out and go places, "I said, we can't go because there's a virus that's making people sick so we can't go, we don't want to get sick." Her son said OK, she said, and three days later, he said, "We didn't get sick so can we go now?" "We want to tell a story to our kids about what this time is going to mean, but are we going to be able to?" said Dr. Jenny Radesky, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Michigan Medicine C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Ann Arbor. "Sometimes when you're in a state of high stress, it's hard to take a step back and do that bigger picture reflection." In an email, she wrote, "I think meaning making usually involves achieving a sense of central coherence that a lot of U.S. parents don't have right now." An expert on children and digital media, Dr. Radesky said one reason it can be hard to tell that larger story may be because parents are "dealing with little bits of information coming at us, tailored feeds on the internet, doomscrolling, trying to make sense of it, feeding on all the information about the Covid numbers." And it's harder to make meaning, she wrote, "when your brain is feeling scattered, traumatized and isolated: We usually need other people and our collective cultures to help make meaning out of experiences." Sign up for the Well Family newsletter Reading other narratives can help children think about their stories, and writing things down is powerful. Dr. Amy Shriver, a general pediatrician in Des Moines, Iowa, has daughters who are 9 and 12. Her older daughter is reading Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl," she said, and talked about feeling trapped. Since I was asking these questions around the July 4 holiday, "Hamilton," which premiered in film form over that weekend, was a reference point for a number of children. Dr. Radesky said it had helped her family through what would otherwise have been a difficult holiday, and Dr. Shriver's 12 year old, a fan, said to her, "Mom, this is what it's like when the world turns upside down." Dr. Shriver said in an email, "I'm encouraging my kids to journal every night about life during the pandemic. I'm telling them how incredible it is that everyone in the world is experiencing the same stress and worries at the same time. Even though we are physically distanced, we all feel closer to one another due to this shared experience." Dr. Ken Haller, a professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University, said in an email that he has been asking parents versions of this question since 2014, when many of his patients were affected by the Ferguson uprising after Michael Brown was killed. "I was especially asking parents of babies and very young children what they would tell their children in 10 or 15 years about what life was like during the protests." At that time, he said, most parents would say they hadn't had time to think about it, but when he asks the question now, parents are interested in keeping track writing in a diary, saving social media posts, maybe even making videos talking to their children when they're older. "As pediatricians and people who care for children, it's been a fascinating time in our history," said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a professor of pediatrics and the director of the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research at Northwestern and Lurie Children's Hospital. "How can one virus stop the world?" She wanted her children to tell me their own stories of this time. There were disappointments: Her 18 year old son missed out on his senior year festivities and his in person graduation, her 14 year old daughter on her eighth grade graduation after spending 11 years in the same school. But her son, Rohan Jain, talked about how important it's been "to write every day about what's going on in the world and what my thoughts are." It was important to him to march for racial justice, he said. His sister, Riya Jain, wrote a book explaining Covid to kids. "I had so many questions, so kids younger than me would have the same questions if not more." And she has been making a video journal. "I hope in 20 years I can show that to my kids to help them understand what the year 2020 was like," she said. Citing the protests and the chance to make changes in the world, she added: "It's not all sitting at home sad." Dr. Haller has been asking kids what it's been like not to be in school, and one 6 year old answered, "I hate it." His mother responded, "He used to always say he hated school.'" Dr. Haller wrote, "He looked at her and said, 'No, I didn't.' She returned his look, with a raised eyebrow. He sighed and looked at the floor again. 'I miss my friends. I wanna go back.'" So the pediatrician asked the child, "Twenty years from now, you may have a kid of your own. What are you going to tell him about what it was like to be around in 2020?" The boy answered, "I'll tell him it was real bad." He thought briefly and then added, "And I'll tell him that I really liked school." Dr. Haller wrote, "His mom smiled. I looked at her and nodded. 'I'll tell him we were just tired all the time,' she said, looking at her son, 'but somehow we all got through it.'" Dr. Perri Klass is the author of the forthcoming book "A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future," on how our world has been transformed by the radical decline of infant and child mortality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
It was a bright, seasonably cool Sunday afternoon, and as the light poured in through the windows of Sarah Jessica Parker's newly opened shoe boutique at the South Street Seaport, so did the crowds. They were drawn to the candy colored stilettos on display, and then found themselves in utter rapture upon seeing the star herself. "I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to take pictures," said Ms. Parker, her forehead crinkled in an expression of regret as a trio of late teens aimed their iPhones in her direction. "I'm so sorry." There were no pictures allowed because Ms. Parker was working not on a set, but rather on the floor, crouched frog like, fitting a pair of size 38 sparkly ankle boots onto a middle aged woman visiting from Canada. "They're handmade in Italy, and the interior is nappa, which is really soft, so they'll stretch," she informed her customer, whose flushed cheeks matched the velvet poppy ottoman on which she was sitting. "Take a spin in them." Ms. Parker was wearing a different pair of disco ball boots, hers a knee high version called Studio that slouched around her skinny gray jeans. With her eyes encircled in shimmery green eye shadow she had applied herself that morning, she appeared luminous. Like a Disney princess, for adults. "This is amazing! I love you!" squealed a willowy woman in spandex, dragging her slightly embarrassed, but no less delighted, husband behind her. "I just finished a 5K run. My feet are swollen, but I'm buying shoes!" "That's actually the best time to buy shoes your feet are at their most honest," Ms. Parker noted. "Oh, and you're good at sales, too!" the runner exclaimed. Ms. Parker, who had no previous shopgirl experience, is what is known in the industry as a "shoe dog." When her schedule permits, she hops on the subway and heads, unannounced, to one of her two New York stores the other is a "temporarily permanent" space on 52nd Street or a retail partner like Bloomingdale's to peddle her wares for hours on end. Or until her kids come home from school. "I don't know how to be involved in another way," Ms. Parker said. "I'm like that with my fragrances, with producing, with my children. To have one foot in the door, just checking in ... That would feel fraudulent." Along with her business partner George Malkemus, who doubles as president and chief executive of Manolo Blahnik USA, Ms. Parker designs every uber girlie pair herself, from the satin bow tie mules to the rubber soled T strap sandals she calls a "sneaker ," posts every Instagram pic, and chooses every piece of flower hued furniture for the stores. She even created the house soundtrack, which is filled with feel good tunes like Whitney Houston's version of "I'm Every Woman." She hummed along while stuffing blush colored tissue paper into a shopping bag. The one aspect of the business she shies away from: closing the deal. "I'm not good at it, and I don't want to be," Ms. Parker said. "These are costly items," she said (prices range from 250 to 600). "I don't want anyone to feel like they were forced to buy them." No one had to nudge a woman from New Jersey to kick off her crystal encrusted flip flops and try on a pair of equally bedazzled ballet flats. "I'm so extra," she said, adding that it was her birthday, as well as her 10 year anniversary of being cancer free. She was celebrating by having a "Sex and the City" themed weekend, complete with dinner at Buddakan and a trip to Ms. Parker's shop. Meeting "Carrie" was the cherry on top. Ms. Parker, head bowed, demurred. Later, after she had bade the birthday girl to wear the shoes in good health, she made it clear to a reporter that all the fuss and effusive praise was not so much for her, as for the lovable character she played on TV for six years. "I'd be delusional to think it's for me," she said. "I got to be a part of something that was meaningful to a lot of people and it's that which allowed me to do this. Nobody would have otherwise said to me, 'Do you want to be in the shoe business?'" Her M.O., she said, is to meet the demands and dreams of those 10 million people who invited Carrie into their homes each week. Clearly she had done so for a young woman in head to toe black, who had just purchased a pair of red satin pumps, and grown faint from all the excitement. "I need to go eat carbs!" she confessed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This three bedroom vacation home sits in the heart of Croatia's mountainous Gorski Kotar region, a northwestern pocket of the country known as the "green lungs" of Croatia that stretches down to the Adriatic Sea. Completed in 2019, the three story house sits on a sloped quarter acre lot and features the traditional wood construction often found in Gorski Kotar, which is known for its woodworking. The primary materials are locally sourced Siberian larch and iron, in keeping with the owner's wish that the 2,368 square foot house be constructed with sustainable materials by local laborers. Even the furniture and shelving were made by local craftsmen from solid wood. The exterior cladding is meant to shield the home from harsh Croatian winters. "My guiding idea was longevity and resistance to the extreme weather conditions, because it's Gorski Kotar after all," said the owner, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons. "But I wanted it to be as natural as possible, with as few chemicals as possible, so that it blends into the pristine nature of the area." Entering through the lower level two car garage, the basement has an entertainment lounge, sauna, bathroom and a wine cellar designed in the style of a Croatian tavern, Ms. Micetic said. A pathway ascends from the driveway past a landscaped garden to the main entrance. On the ground floor, an iron fireplace separates the kitchen from the living room, which has wall to wall windows and a door that opens to the platform deck, heated pool and spa. The kitchen, also accessible through glass doors on the side of the house, has a table that seats 10. The second floor, which cantilevers slightly over the deck, has three bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, the largest of which looks out to the forest through a wall of windows. A fire pit, barbecue, open dining area and garden are in the backyard. The property is in the village of Ravna Gora, which sits between the larger towns of Delnice and Vrbovsko. Risnjak National Park is about 30 minutes away; Plitvice Lakes National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a popular hiking destination, is within an hour and half. Rijeka, a port city about 45 minutes west, is a melting pot of European influences with a growing tourism scene and an international airport. Zagreb, the Croatian capital, is about an hour northeast. Croatia was one of a few European countries to react quickly to the coronavirus, ordering a full quarantine in mid March that successfully tamped down the spread of the virus. The lockdown was lifted in May, and in June a flood of tourists and buyers poured into the country, setting off a second wave of infections that has continued into the fall. As of Oct. 13, Croatia had reported 20,993 Covid 19 cases and 330 deaths, according to the New York Times's coronavirus map. Through it all, the country's real estate industry which had enjoyed several years of steady growth has managed to remain upright. "The market never actually died," Ms. Micetic said. "My feeling is that it was pushed back by two to three months." She said she conducted virtual showings with potential buyers throughout the lockdown, while those who were planning to come in the spring rescheduled for July, August and September. Elena Nevskaya, a lead consultant with Adrionika Consultancy and Coordination, said that tourism most often generates requests for properties along Croatia's Adriatic coastline. There were twice as many requests from foreign nationals in May and June compared with the same period in 2019, according to a report from Adrionika. Many were for stand alone villas with pools on the Istrian Peninsula for about 300,000 to 350,000 euros ( 355,000 to 415,000), and seafront villas in Dalmatia for about 1.5 million to 2 million euros ( 1.8 million to 2.4 million). (Croatia operates on the kuna, though many transactions are conducted in euros.) Ms. Nevskaya said that the onset of the pandemic, along with the effects of an earthquake that struck Zagreb on March 22, caused a dip in prices nationwide, helped along by low home loan interest rates, now at around 2.5 percent. But the latest quarterly report from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics found that home prices increased by 8 percent compared with the second quarter of 2019, including a 9 percent increase in Zagreb. The earthquake, which damaged many homes in the city center, reduced inventory and shifted the focus for some prospective buyers. "We've noticed a spike in the number of people looking for houses and building plots compared to flats," said Boro Vujovic, director of Zagreb based agency Opereta and vice president of the Real Estate Brokerage Business Association in the Croatian Chamber of Commerce. "Both the coronavirus and the earthquake made it so that people feel better on the ground level, with a piece of their own land." In the luxury market, Ms. Micetic said Sotheby's has seen a slight dip in foreign interest over the past seven months, since people couldn't visit homes in the spring. But there's a niche clientele that never dries up. From January to September of this year, the company listed 69 properties and 11 sold, up from 61 properties listed and eight sales during the same period in 2019. The rural Gorski Kotar region, like other less densely populated areas in Croatia, doesn't attract huge swaths of interest from foreigners, but interest is slowly growing, brokers said. Mr. Vujovic said the pandemic has boosted activity for vacation homes and agricultural land in the region, with clients seeking its clean air and water, as well as its proximity to Zagreb and the coast. "After the pandemic," he said, "the value of isolation, nature and peace has grown considerably." According to a Sotheby's report, foreign buyers make up roughly 15 percent of the real estate transactions in normal years, with Slovenians usually topping the list, given the shared border with Croatia. Ms. Micetic said this year she's seen requests from Austrian, Slovenian and German buyers. So has Peter Ellis, the director of Croatian Property Services, who saw increased attention from Germans on the Istrian Peninsula, where buyers may be looking for second homes by the sea. These days, new buyers tend to come from within driving distance of Croatia, Mr. Ellis said, especially Western Europe, and often inquire about second homes or investment properties. Croatia, which joined the European Union in 2013, gives European citizens easier access to its real estate through a reciprocity law allowing Europeans to buy property without restrictions as long as Croatians have the same right in the buyer's home country. More than half of the states in the U.S. have reciprocity with Croatia as well, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and California. Non European citizens must gain approval from the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Croatia in order to purchase property. From there, a buyer will want to find a Croatian lawyer usually in house at the brokerage to conduct the closing. Once an offer has been accepted, buyers will pay around 7 percent of the home's total cost in taxes and fees, which include what's owed to the broker and legal counsel, as well as the property transfer tax. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The moon is drifting away. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses. For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked. These results were published this month in the journal Earth, Planets and Space. Of all the stuff humans have left on the moon, the five retroreflectors, which were delivered by Apollo astronauts and two Soviet robotic rovers, are among the most scientifically important. They're akin to really long yardsticks: By precisely timing how long it takes laser light to travel to the moon, bounce off a retroreflector and return to Earth (roughly 2.5 seconds, give or take), scientists can calculate the distance between the moon and Earth. Arrays of glass corner cube prisms make this cosmic ricochet possible. These optical devices reflect incoming light back to exactly where it came from, ensuring that retroreflectors send photons on a tight, neat flip turn. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
AS hot, wind fed wildfires swirled around her town in early September, Darlene Simmons, 76, was busy cooking spaghetti in her kitchen. As a resident of Middletown, a small town in Northern California, she had been through wildfires before. But her home, where she had lived for 45 years, had never been harmed. So Ms. Simmons was staying put until a police officer knocked on the door. He told her that she must leave immediately. She grabbed her medications and an address book, but was forced, reluctantly, to leave everything else behind, including her cane and family photos. "I'm glad that I was forced to leave," said Ms. Simmons, who was near tears as she recalled the day. "I could hear propane tanks exploding as I drove away." That night, Ms. Simmons's house burned down. The wildfire, one of the worst in California history, bent her refrigerator in half and melted metal. Her entire block was reduced to ashes. Natural disasters, which appear to be on the rise in part because of climate change, are especially hard for older adults. They are particularly vulnerable because many have chronic illnesses that are worsened during the heat of a fire or the high water of a flood. And many are understandably reluctant to leave homes that hold so much history. Studies show that over half the people who died in Katrina, the hurricane that hit New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast 10 years ago, were 65 or older. Many were trapped in their homes; some died of health complications caused by flooding. Older adults also died in the Middletown fire, including one 72 year old woman who had advanced multiple sclerosis. "They can't get out of harm's way fast enough," said Jenny Campbell, a nonprofit consultant in the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore who deals with age related issues. "And sometimes they may not even have a way to flee. Or they may lack a larger social system, and so they may not be warned in time." But thorough disaster preparation can, literally, save lives. Since Katrina, more tools have emerged to help. The Red Cross offers emergency preparation plans for older people on its website, including a checklist for creating a disaster supply kit that includes a seven day medication supply, flashlights, emergency contacts and vital records. They can be stored in a duffel bag or backpack. Communities are also forming coalitions to help. After devastating floods hit Colorado in 2013, shelters didn't have oxygen tanks for older adults who landed there. So the state set up the Home Health Emergency Preparedness Committee to strengthen preparations. "As more disasters occur, seniors will want to build emergency preparedness," said Tiffany Turner, owner of Nurse Next Door in Fort Collins, Colo. "But seniors think they can take care of themselves." Having a strong social network is imperative, said experts, who encourage older people to notify family members, neighbors and caregivers in advance that they might need help in emergencies. Think about "who will come get you," said Sharon Roth Maguire, chief clinical quality officer for BrightStar Care, a senior home care franchise. "Who knows you're here? Even if you have a checklist, you may not be known." Signing up for local special needs registries, which help locate and evacuate people, is also useful. These registries must be regularly updated, said Ms. Campbell, the Pennsylvania consultant, along with any disaster plans. Older adults should also notify sheriffs, police departments and neighborhood emergency teams. Gary Lospaluto, 60, also from the Middletown, Calif., area, was heading to his volunteer work when he saw cars streaming down the mountain away from the fires. He credits a friend's smartphone app, which can turn into a radio scanner and tap into emergency messages, with keeping him updated during the crisis. "People weren't warned about the fire," said Mr. Lospaluto, who currently lives in his van after being in an evacuation center. "It was by word of mouth. But access to accurate information is the most critical thing you need." Health insurance cards, medical records, living wills or medical powers of attorneys should be kept in waterproof files, Ms. Maguire said. The free kit Vial of Life lets people store vital information in a baggie that can be attached to the refrigerator door or put in the freezer. "If you're sheltering in place, you should have a kit," she said. Documents can also be put in a safe deposit box or stored electronically in the cloud. Ms. Campbell recommends that older people send themselves emails with all their documents, including medical records, attached. During Katrina, she said, patients were frequently transferred to nursing homes that had no medical records for them. People with dementia, who can become disoriented during disasters, should also have special identity tags, Ms. Maguire said. GPS enabled devices can be put in a shoe, she said, or people can wear a medical alert necklace. "But there also needs to be a backup plan." Caregivers can offer valuable help for handicapped people. Lenny Verkhoglaz, chief executive of Executive Care, a home health care franchise, uses the company's four wheel drive vehicles to pick up caregivers and transport them to homes during disasters. Helene Dressendofer, 82, wishes she had been better prepared for Hurricane Sandy, which hit the East Coast in 2012. Ms. Dressendofer's waterfront home in Point Pleasant, N.J., was flooded when a wave washed over it. "Nothing in the house was salvageable," said Ms. Dressendofer, who now lives in an apartment and is still waiting for insurance reimbursements for her ruined home. Her documents, which were stored in cardboard folders, were destroyed. "Don't do it that way," she said. Instead, she recommends putting documents in "nicely sealed plastic boxes and scanning photos." Also, log everything that you own, she added, and put the logs in a secure place. Then there are the invisible scars. After a disaster, older adults may be even more prone than younger people to suffer from depression, sleeplessness and confusion. Ms. Dressendofer said she still had nightmares about the hurricane's effects. "You lose the past," she said. "And it's hard to rebuild your life. It hurts and will hurt for many years." Most older people soldier on, which can prolong psychological trauma, said Gregory Hall, associate professor of psychology at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass. Talking and writing about the trauma can speed healing, he said. And even being in an evacuation center can make communicating feelings easier because older people are around other survivors. "Get back into a routine," Mr. Hall advised. "Establish normal eating and sleeping patterns. And begin looking forward and creating new memories." Easier said than done. Ms. Simmons, the wildfire victim, said she coped by reminding herself that change was part of life. She already has plans to put a manufactured home on the burned out lot where her house once stood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Carrying forward a family tradition of summering at the shore with a new chapter and a new house in Montauk, N.Y. Growing up near Buffalo, N.Y., Jonathan Yellen cherished his family's annual pilgrimage to the beach. "We'd throw everybody into the station wagon, drive out to Cape Cod, stay in a little two or three bedroom cottage a block from the beach, have a phenomenal time and come back sunburned a couple weeks later," he said. "That's a really resonant memory for me." It was a tradition that Mr. Yellen who is now 51 and lives in Dallas with his wife, Marianna, 42, and daughters Olivia, 13, and Natalie, 11 was intent on continuing. "When Marianna and I got together, one of our early conversations about hopes and dreams was about being able to have something like that for our kids," he said. "It's important to me, and she totally got it." As a successful lawyer, he had the resources to go one step further and build his own beach house. The question was where. So every summer for several years, the family went on what Mr. Yellen called "an annual shopping spree" renting in various places to audition different beaches. "We did Cape Cod, Kiawah, Nantucket, La Jolla and East Hampton," he said. It was Montauk that won them over. "I don't think there's a nicer beach in the United States," he said, adding that they were also taken with the easygoing vibe. "Montauk is very real." During a visit in 2015, they bought a termite ravaged 1960s cottage a block from the beach for 975,000, with plans to tear it down and build anew. Then Mr. Yellen contacted Katherine Chia, a schoolmate from Amherst College who had become an architect and co founded the New York firm Desai Chia Architecture. Although he and Ms. Chia hadn't spoken in decades, Mr. Yellen had seen her work online and was impressed. The Yellens drew up a long list of things they wanted in their house: low maintenance materials, privacy from the street, separate studies, an oversized kitchen where they could entertain without bumping into guests, a shading strategy to reduce sudden changes in light (Ms. Yellen has a sensitivity that can cause headaches), a space the children could call their own, and an overall sense of peace. The architects came back with a proposal that satisfied those requests in part by taking inspiration from the artists James Turrell, Ellsworth Kelly and Louise Nevelson. "The James Turrell references were really about Marianna's sensitivity to light, and thinking about how to modulate the light," Ms. Chia said. "With Ellsworth Kelly and Louise Nevelson, it was about chiaroscuro, and this back and forth in the facade, with dense areas versus airy moments." Mr. Yellen was delighted by the conceptual approach. "They kept us from getting overly suburban or conventional," he said. The final design was for a four bedroom, two and a half bathroom house built to the maximum size allowed on the lot 2,950 square feet with outdoor living space on patios and decks that would make it feel larger. The lower level of the house, which is cast concrete, has three bedrooms and a family room that are largely the domain of the children. The upper level is clad in shou sugi ban boards, inside and out, for the look of wood that has weathered with age. Tough, end grain wood floors and Caesarstone counters in the kitchen are intended to be worry free, no matter how much sand is dragged inside or tomato sauce is spilled. Upstairs, the master suite and studies are in the back of the house, with the living room, dining area and kitchen at the front, looking out over wetlands through floor to ceiling, sliding glass doors that open onto a covered deck. "It's almost like a treehouse experience, where you're up in the branches," Ms. Chia said. To save energy, windows and a central stairwell were designed to take advantage of natural ventilation, and the roof is equipped with a solar array large enough to power the house. Aran Construction began building the house in January 2017 and finished last October, at a cost of about 2.5 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. On Wednesday, President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would lead the government's response to the coronavirus. "In other words, it's been nice knowing you," Conan O'Brien said on Thursday. "This is the greatest crisis of Trump's presidency, and his first response is, 'Mike, you're up. You take it.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "But the vice president does have experience with outbreaks specifically, making them worse. Because when he was the governor of Indiana, Pence's refusal to implement a needle exchange program led to the worst H.I.V. outbreak in the state's history. But you know what they say: If at first you don't succeed, welcome to the Trump administration." STEPHEN COLBERT "It's true President Trump has put Mike Pence in charge of combating the coronavirus. That is the big story. Which is why today, Pence announced the coronavirus can be cured by heterosexual marriage." CONAN O'BRIEN "So Pence actually has an interesting plan to fight the coronavirus. He's going to send the virus to a conversion camp where it can pray itself into the common cold." JIMMY FALLON "From now on, Mike Pence will control all coronavirus messaging from health officials. Yes, and his first order is renaming the National Institutes of Health, 'Pray Away the Plague.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "It's interesting, though, that he picked Pence to handle this, especially because in 2014, Donald Trump tweeted: 'Obama just appointed an Ebola czar with zero experience in the medical area and zero experience in infectious disease control. A total joke!' He really does have a there's a tweet for everything. It's almost like Donald Trump from the past is trying to stop Donald Trump in the future and it's just not working." JIMMY KIMMEL "Trump said he chose Pence because he has a certain talent for this, and that talent is always looking like a guy who is holding his breath, apparently." JIMMY FALLON "I'm not really sure why Pence is handling this instead of Trump. This feels like if Trump and Pence were husband and wife, Trump would hear a strange noise in the house and say, 'Mike, go check it out.'" JIMMY FALLON "What medical experience does Mike Pence have? At best, he looks like a CPR doll that won't let you do mouth to mouth on it." SETH MEYERS "Although I guess it makes sense he's in charge of diseases now, because he always has an expression that looks like No. 6 on the pain chart." SETH MEYERS "But while most people have avoided the virus, there's been one major victim close to Trump's heart: the stock market." TREVOR NOAH "The stock market is down and the coronavirus is up. This planet is going to Purell in a handbasket." JIMMY KIMMEL "President Trump is concerned, not necessarily for health reasons, but because the Dow was down almost 1,200 points today. It was the worst one day drop ever in the history of the stock market. And a soft economy could hurt his chances for re election. It's virus versus virus right now." JIMMY KIMMEL "Yes, the stock market is tanking right now, except for stocks like Peloton and Netflix, because those companies win when people don't leave their houses. Yeah, but I still think these companies need to innovate to keep up with the virus, you know? Like usually, if you've been bingeing 'Love Is Blind' for 10 hours, a screen pops up and asks, 'Are you still watching?' Yeah, but going forward, it should probably say 'Are you still alive?' And the answer is probably 'No, because Cameron and Lauren's romance destroyed me!'" TREVOR NOAH "But I don't get why Peloton is blowing up. There's no point in exercising during the apocalypse. Yeah, because when you finally go outside, you have a six pack but no one there to appreciate it." TREVOR NOAH "That's the only thing Trump cares about, the stock market. For one thing, it's very easy to understand, there's no reading involved. All you have to do is look at the little arrow on the bottom of the TV and find out whether it's red or green." SETH MEYERS "The Daily Show" compiled a montage of clips wherein Chris Matthews gets creepy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
While Dr. Lange saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some faculty members worried that the long term effect might be for the university to offer fewer courses and hire fewer professors. Others said there had been inadequate consultation with the faculty. When 2U, the online education platform that would host the classes, announced Semester Online last year, it named 10 participants, including Duke, the University of Rochester, Vanderbilt and Wake Forest none of which will be offering courses this fall. "Schools had to go through their processes to determine how they were going to participate," said Chance Patterson, a 2U spokesman, "and some decided to wait or go in another direction." Semester Online courses will cost 4,200 each. For students at the consortium schools, that tuition would typically be covered by the regular tuition at their home school, Mr. Patterson said, while students from other universities would generally have to pay the difference between their own institution's tuition and the 4,200. Despite leaving Semester Online, Duke remains actively involved in online classes, offering nearly two dozen courses through Coursera, a venture that provides free online courses, but not for credit. "The difference here is that Semester Online is for credit, and it would have an impact on campus," Dr. Lange said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Credit...Kristin Bogadottir for The New York Times It's a gorgeous August day in a Reykjavik park, and Ragnar Kjartansson is Zooming with me by phone. Aside from frozen fish, Mr. Kjartansson is one of Iceland's most notable exports, feeding weirdly compelling performances to the global art world. Pointing his phone's lens at a nearby Roman Catholic church, he shares an oddball biographical detail: Despite being raised Lutheran, he was an altar boy in that building, for the sake of the wages but also for the ritual, he explains. There's a point to his factoid. Our pandemic has brought him to church once again. On Sept. 22, in an old Catholic space in Milan, Mr. Kjartansson plans to unveil a performance called "The Sky in a Room." The title is taken from a popular tune, "Il Cielo in Una Stanza," from postwar Italy "it's almost the national love song," he said and he's hired singers to repeat it hour after hour, day after day, for a month, accompanying themselves on the organ. The song, written by Gino Paoli in 1960, is about a man so transformed by love that the walls around him seem to give way to a glimpse of the universe beyond. "It's about this kind of transformation that can happen in isolation," Mr. Kjartansson said. He feels that this speaks to our pandemic era: "It's the song of people who are elderly, today, who have been dying alone in their little, confined rooms." Mr. Kjartansson, 44, has built his reputation around similar endurance works, at once ridiculous and moving. For the 2013 Venice Biennale, he filled a boat with a brass band that played the same plangent notes for all six months of the show. The following year, New Yorkers fell in love with a piece of his called "A Lot of Sorrow," in which the rock group the National repeated one sad sack song for six hours straight: You had to decide if this absurd perseverance magnified or erased the tune's emotions. When "The Sky in a Room" was first commissioned for a museum in Cardiff, in 2018, it too seemed to be about turning legible music into elusive art: Mr. Kjartansson dreamed up the piece after spotting the museum's Rococo organ and imagining Paoli's much later tune drifting from it. But with its performance in Milan, Mr. Kjartansson said, his piece will achieve a new gravitas. Alessandra Bordiga, a Milanese singer now rehearsing the piece, has known the song since childhood; the pandemic renewed her connection to it. Last spring, when a Covid stricken friend was locked in a hospital room, Ms. Bordiga decided to record a tune to send in to him, and Paoli's song about isolation and escape seemed the obvious choice. Her friend survived, and repeating that same song for Mr. Kjartansson, now, feels like "a kind of mantra like a prayer," she said. This isn't her city's first disease crisis. The church where Ms. Bordiga will be performing, called San Carlo al Lazzaretto, was built to fend off the plague as it struck northern Italy in the decades around 1600. The octagonal building began life surrounded by a vast corral the lazaretto filled with thousands of quarantined victims; at first the church had no walls, so that the ill could preserve social distance as they watched from all sides as Mass was said. Just about all Italians know the story of San Carlo, since it's told in "The Betrothed," a novel they read in high school the way Americans read "To Kill a Mockingbird." In Milan, when Mr. Kjartansson's piece marries an iconic Italian song with an iconic Italian place, it will have a special resonance. At least that's the hope of Massimiliano Gioni, who leads the curatorial team at the New Museum in New York and also organizes a yearly project or two for the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan, a city not far from his hometown. The foundation places art in underused spaces, explained Mr. Gioni, speaking by phone from a borrowed pandemic home in Connecticut. Hunting for a site and an idea for the Trussardi's post lockdown show, he came across San Carlo, remembered it as the plague church from his high school novel, then thought of how perfectly it would suit Mr. Kjartansson's piece. San Carlo could turn the performance into a sort of requiem for northern Italy's latest plague, which Mr. Gioni shuddered at from afar. For more than 100 days, he got reports of a virus so rampant that his parents could not step foot from their apartment. That same virus forced all planning for Mr. Kjartansson's Milan performance to happen remotely. As a New York curator for an Italian foundation, Mr. Gioni didn't find much new in that. Mr. Kjartansson, who conducts an international career from a converted fish shed in Iceland, feels much the same. The pair auditioned musicians by Zoom then rehearsed them the same way, with the artist "joining" his performers in church via laptop. "It's really a luxurious time to be dealing with a plague, when we have all this technology to actually connect us," he said. Mr. Kjartansson recalls that priests will say Mass even in an empty church (he has helped them) so why should his work not persevere the same way? "I like this idea of something happening in a space," he said, "and it just is there, and you know that it's there, but you cannot see it." He recounted how a performance that almost no one saw kick started his global career: For a month in the spring of 2005, he sat alone in an empty dance hall in far southern Iceland, endlessly strumming the blues; not witnessing his performance didn't stop the art world from talking and caring about it. A resurgence of Covid 19 would bring his career full circle, adding heft to his latest unobserved gesture. "Everything is amplified by our times, now," he said. "We are living in these super interesting times, so everything we do is turned up to 11." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Reports of crisis in the Swiss luxury watch industry have come thick and fast this year, with the independent Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry announcing that exports fell 10.2 percent by value in the nine months to the end of September, compared with the same period in the previous year. But not every Swiss watch brand is reporting that trend. TAG Heuer says that in the same nine months, its watch sales were up 18 percent year over year. So, how? "We have done three things," said Jean Claude Biver, TAG Heuer's chief executive and president of the watch division at its parent company, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. "We worked on innovation, on affordable luxury and on perceived value. What do people want when there is a crisis? They want perceived value that is higher than the price." Since Mr. Biver took the TAG Heuer reins in late 2014, the company has introduced its first smartwatch, the Connected (60,000 have sold this year, he said) and a number of in house movements. After his arrival, the brand also ended its unsuccessful attempt to move upmarket and reduced its average price to position the brand as a consumer's "first luxury watch." But it was a sweeping array of new marketing initiatives intended to activate what Mr. Biver calls his "zero separation concept," meaning that his brand must be "wherever my customer is" that have dramatically altered TAG Heuer's profile, and with it, the sales results. So there have been deals with the Premier League, England's top soccer league; the supermodel Cara Delevingne; and the "Avenger" movies' Thor, Chris Hemsworth, all intended to put the brand in the youthful mainstream. TAG Heuer also has rekindled partnerships with sports such as Formula 1 (with Red Bull), cycling and, most recently, boxing. At an event in October at the historic Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn that was attended by the boxing legends Evander Holyfield and Roberto Duran, TAG Heuer donated the proceeds from the auction of a commemorative gold timepiece to the Muhammad Ali Center. And it debuted a steel Carrera Ring Master Calibre 5 "Tribute to Muhammad Ali" watch, which Mr. Biver said should sell 30,000 to 50,000 pieces at 3,000 each. "It's the reconnection of TAG Heuer into boxing, not the start," he said. But the new partnerships aren't all "in the brand's D.N.A.", as Mr. Biver described it. Until recently, TAG Heuer had never so much as hummed a note with the music industry. But this year it was the official watch of the annual Coachella music festival in California and it has deals with the musician David Guetta and the pop rock band OneRepublic. "Where we are innovating is in music," Mr. Biver said. "Music and football are two universal languages that young people speak and understand. If you are not in music and only in sport, you don't have zero separation." Despite its apparent success, Mr. Biver is confident that other Swiss brands won't try to duplicate his zero separation concept. "They don't know what it means," he said. And he confirmed that the company had no plans to extend its marketing portfolio and would not go into tennis or golf. "I would never go into a sport where you have a leader like Rolex," he said. "In tennis, Rolex has the tournaments and the best players, so what are you going to do? You are going to be No. 2." At its headquarters in Switzerland, TAG Heuer is investing in infrastructure. Mr. Biver said that after laying off 49 staff members in 2014 as part of a restructuring plan, the company has added more than 100 people in the past 12 months. It has also begun work on a factory that will cover almost four acres in La Chaux de Fonds and is due to open in 2019. (Currently, the company rents its factory.) Although he declined to say how many watches the brand would make this year or next, Mr. Biver said he intended to increase the production of movements from 85,000 this year to 150,000 in 2017, and to 200,000 by 2021. The current rate of sales growth is unlikely to continue, Mr. Biver conceded. "I do not believe we will be able to do plus 18 next year, because the crisis will not last," he said. "But that doesn't mean that we won't outperform the industry. I don't look at how much we do; I look at how much we do better than the others." At 68, Mr. Biver is an industry veteran, responsible for reviving Blancpain in the 1980s, putting Omega on the wrists of James Bond and Cindy Crawford in the 1990s and turning Hublot into a global phenomenon in the 2000s. He has said he intends to keep working until he is 75. His methods, although sometimes unconventional, are widely considered to have played a significant role in the industry's revival over the past 30 years. Among them is his ability to inspire confidence. For example, he allows TAG Heuer's international sales teams to travel first class, while other brands are cutting costs by flying economy. "How much is a first class ticket for a big company?" he said. "Nothing. These are little psychological things that you should do in a crisis. You must be contrarian that's the best way to make money in business." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Fossils discovered in Morocco are the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens, scientists reported on Wednesday, a finding that rewrites the story of mankind's origins and suggests that our species evolved in multiple locations across the African continent. "We did not evolve from a single 'cradle of mankind' somewhere in East Africa," said Philipp Gunz, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a co author of two new studies on the fossils, published in the journal Nature. "We evolved on the African continent." Until now, the oldest known fossils of our species dated back just 195,000 years. The Moroccan fossils, by contrast, are roughly 300,000 years old. Remarkably, they indicate that early Homo sapiens had faces much like our own, although their brains differed in fundamental ways. Today, the closest living relatives to Homo sapiens are chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share a common ancestor that lived over six million years ago. After the split from this ancestor, our ancient forebears evolved into many different species, known as hominins. For millions of years, hominins remained very apelike. They were short, had small brains and could fashion only crude stone tools. A composite reconstruction of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco based on micro computed tomographic scans of multiple original fossils. Until now, the oldest fossils that clearly belonged to Homo sapiens were discovered in Ethiopia. In 2003, researchers working at a site called Herto discovered a skull estimated to be between 160,000 and 154,000 years old. A pair of partial skulls from another site, Omo Kibish, dated to around 195,000 years of age, at the time making these the oldest fossils of our species. Findings such as these suggested that our species evolved in a small region perhaps in Ethiopia, or nearby in East Africa. After Homo sapiens arose, researchers believed, the species spread out across the continent. Only much later roughly 70,000 years ago did a small group of Africans make their way to other continents. Yet paleoanthropologists were aware of mysterious hominin fossils discovered in other parts of Africa that did not seem to fit the narrative. In 1961, miners in Morocco dug up a few pieces of a skull at a site called Jebel Irhoud. Later digs revealed a few more bones, along with flint blades. Using crude techniques, researchers estimated the remains to be 40,000 years old. In the 1980s, however, a paleoanthropologist named Jean Jacques Hublin took a closer look at one jawbone. The teeth bore some resemblance to those of living humans, but the shape seemed strangely primitive. "It did not make sense," Dr. Hublin, now at the Max Planck Institute, recalled in an interview. Since 2004, Dr. Hublin and his colleagues have been working through layers of rocks on a desert hillside at Jebel Irhoud. They have found a wealth of fossils, including skull bones from five individuals who all died around the same time. Just as important, the scientists discovered flint blades in the same sedimentary layer as the skulls. The people of Jebel Irhoud most likely made them for many purposes, putting some on wooden handles to fashion spears. Many of the flint blades showed signs of having been burned. The people at Jebel Irhoud probably lit fires to cook food, heating discarded blades buried in the ground below. This accident of history made it possible to use the flints as historical clocks. Dr. Hublin and his colleagues used a method called thermoluminescence to calculate how much time had passed since the blades were burned. They estimated that the blades were roughly 300,000 years old. The skulls, discovered in the same rock layer, must have been the same age. Despite the age of the teeth and jaws, anatomical details showed they nevertheless belonged to Homo sapiens, not to another hominin group, such as the Neanderthals. Resetting the clock on mankind's debut would be achievement enough. But the new research is also notable for the discovery of several early humans rather than just one, as so often happens, said Marta Mirazon Lahr, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the new study. "We have no other place like it, so it's a fabulous finding," she said. The people at Jebel Irhoud shared a general resemblance to one another and to living humans. Their brows were heavy, their chins small, their faces flat and wide. But all in all, they were not so different from people today. "The face is that of somebody you could come across in the Metro," Dr. Hublin said. The flattened faces of early Homo sapiens may have something to do with the advent of speech, speculated Christopher Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. "We really are at very early stages of trying to explain these things," Dr. Stringer said. The brains of the inhabitants of Jebel Irhoud, on the other hand, were less like our own. Although they were as big as modern human brains, they did not yet have its distinctively round shape. They were long and low, like those of earlier hominins. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Rajendra Pachauri speaking to reporters in Geneva in 2008. As chairman of the United Nations' climate science panel, he worked to make the risks of global warning known. Rajendra K. Pachauri, a charismatic voice on the risks of global warming who led the United Nations' climate science agency when it won the Nobel Peace Prize, but whose career ended amid accusations of sexual harassment, died on Thursday at his home in New Delhi. He was 79. His death was announced by the Energy and Resources Institute in India, the influential policy organization he had headed for 34 years until being replaced in 2015 under the cloud of the harassment accusations, which also led to his departure from the U.N. agency. No cause of death was given, but he had recently undergone surgery for "a prolonged cardiac ailment," according to India Today, a major news outlet. The institute's chairman, Nitin Desai, said in a statement that Dr. Pachauri's leadership of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "laid the ground for climate change conversations today." Dr. Pachauri was chairman of the panel from 2002 to 2015. In 2007, the Norwegian Nobel Committee jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the group and former Vice President Al Gore "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man made climate change." The panel's reports have detailed the overwhelming scientific evidence in support of climate change. In a statement, the panel noted that a report, known as the Fifth Assessment and published in 2014 under Dr. Pachauri's leadership, provided "the scientific foundation of the Paris Agreement," the 2015 deal among nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agreement was hailed as a landmark in international cooperation on climate issues, but President Trump is withdrawing the United States from it. Dr. Pachauri stepped down as chairman of the U.N. panel in 2015, when a researcher at the Indian energy institute, a 29 year old woman, said he had made lewd advances and sent graphic emails and text messages to her. Dr. Pachauri denied the accusations, saying he had been hacked. But at least one other employee made similar accusations against him. A case based on the allegations remained unresolved at his death. The U.N. group said at the time that the decision to replace Dr. Pachauri would "ensure that the I.P.C.C.'s mission to assess climate change continues without interruption." In a letter to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki moon, Dr. Pachauri wrote, "For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems, is more than a mission" it was "my religion and my dharma," or duty, he said. Like many other prominent figures in climate science, Dr. Pachauri faced criticism from climate change denial groups and their allies. Even within the scientific community he was sometimes criticized as having a tendency to combine science and advocacy. A 2010 review of the U.N. panel's procedures warned that "straying into advocacy can only hurt I.P.C.C.'s credibility." However, many well regarded climate scientists argue that advocacy is an essential part of raising alarms about the threat of climate change. The researcher who led the 2010 review, Robbert Dijkgraaf, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said that the I.P.C.C. "was very open to suggestions to strengthen the organization" and that he "was impressed with Chairman Pachauri's emphasis on scientific rigor and careful processes." A former colleague offered a mixed portrait of Dr. Pachauri. Jean Pascal van Ypersele of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, a former vice president of the I.P.C.C., praised him in a statement on Twitter for having "put the climate change challenge and the science behind it on top of the international agenda." But be added that Dr. Pachauri "was sometimes overconfident, as when he refused to quickly acknowledge and correct" an erroneous estimate in the panel's 2007 report, known as the Fourth Assessment, saying it was "very likely" that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 if current warming trends continued. "This led to escalated and undue criticism of the organization he chaired," Dr. van Ypersele wrote. Through a spokesman, Mr. Gore said Dr. Pachauri's "dedication to advance the science and raise global awareness of the climate crisis will endure." Rajendra Kumar Pachauri was born on Aug. 20, 1940, in Nainital, a hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas. He said that the stunning setting there had given him a deep affection for nature and made him sensitive to the fragility of the natural world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
SAN FRANCISCO When Logan Green, chief executive of the ride hailing service Lyft, was asked which tech leaders he admired, he pointed to three men who had built their companies ruthlessly: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. "A lot of other Silicon Valley companies are very scared to get their hands dirty with operations," Mr. Green said in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, adding that he wanted to emulate the take no prisoners methods of Mr. Musk, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Bezos. The problem for Mr. Green is that Lyft seems very nice. Its app is pink. Its cars were once adorned with fuzzy bubblegum colored mustaches. Its drivers have a reputation for being friendly. And while Lyft has racked up more than one billion rides and become a strong No. 2 to Uber in the United States and Canada, it has not shaken off its cuddly image. Now Mr. Green, 35, must show that Lyft can be as assertive as an Amazon or a Facebook. He and Uber are locked in a race to take their companies public: Both filed papers in December to list on the stock market in the coming months. The offerings the first for any ride hailing firm are likely to create a bonanza of riches in Silicon Valley and set the stage for listings of other highly valued tech start ups, including Slack and Pinterest. The pressure is on Mr. Green to get the jump on Uber. (Both offerings have been stalled because the government shutdown, which ended Friday, prevented the Securities and Exchange Commission from reviewing their filings.) Lyft, which was last privately valued at 15.1 billion, is tiny compared with its rival and could be overshadowed if Uber debuts first. Uber could go public at a 120 billion valuation. For Mr. Green, this means he may have to give up some up his reserve and step into a more public role. While Lyft's more gregarious president, John Zimmer, his No. 2 for the last 12 years, has frequently handled the public facing side of the business, Mr. Green would rather speak at staff meetings than at tech conferences. Colleagues describe him as reserved. In a 2017 interview, Mr. Zimmer said Mr. Green was often misunderstood because of his quiet demeanor. "He is, like, extremely competitive," Mr. Zimmer, now 34, said. "He has been an activist." Lyft declined to make Mr. Green or Mr. Zimmer available for new interviews, citing the quiet period before an initial public offering. In a statement, the chief operating officer, Jon McNeill, described them as "cutthroat missionaries in service of creating positive change." One of the tech leaders Mr. Green cited as inspiration, Mr. Musk, recommended against taking Lyft public. "The current system makes long term value creation and product innovation difficult," Mr. Musk, chief executive of Tesla, wrote in an email last week. "It insists on quarter by quarter results or punishes companies severely. This is particularly bad for companies that are high growth and are valued on potential, like Lyft (or Tesla)." (The S.E.C. fined Mr. Musk last year for a tweet about taking Tesla private.) Mr. Green, who was born and raised in Culver City, Calif., graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2006 with a degree in business economics. He then worked as the university's sustainability coordinator, poring over alternatives to the gas guzzling one car per owner model. He was also on the board of the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District, a position that gave him insight into municipal transportation. While visiting Zimbabwe on vacation during his 20s, Mr. Green said in the 2017 interview, he was inspired by Zimbabweans who had created makeshift services to fill every seat in car pools, saving passengers money and taking cars off the road. So in 2007, Mr. Green started Zimride in Santa Barbara, Calif., to provide long distance car pool rides to college students by matching them with other students who were driving. Mr. Zimmer, then working at Lehman Brothers, noticed posts about the start up on Facebook from John Siegel, whom he had met while studying abroad and who had attended middle school with Mr. Green. Mr. Green and Mr. Zimmer, who remained in New York, embarked on what Mr. Zimmer called a "long distance relationship," working together over Skype. In 2008, they moved to a two bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, Calif. Neither drew a salary in the first three years of building Zimride, and each contract they sold to a college was celebrated with a trip to Ikea for Swedish meatballs, Mr. Zimmer said. In 2011, Zimride raised 6 million. But as a web service, it was caught flat footed by the rise of smartphones and mobile apps. In 2012, Mr. Green decided to spin out of Zimride a mobile, peer to peer ride hailing service, calling it Lyft. Instead of just pairing students for long distance rides, Lyft would put drivers together with riders on public streets, in real time. Mr. Zimmer came up with the idea to emblazon the cars with pink mustaches; Mr. Green encouraged passengers to greet their drivers with a fist bump, to keep the community feeling of Zimride. At the time, ride hailing wasn't legal, and only licensed drivers could pick up passengers on public streets. Ann Miura Ko, a partner at the venture capital firm Floodgate, who had invested in Zimride and sits on Lyft's board, recalled that some board members had been doubtful about the change but that Mr. Green had been confident. "Someone asked, 'Will this really work?' And he wasn't just sure, he was positive," she said. But Mr. Green didn't reckon with one issue: Uber. At the time, Uber, run by Travis Kalanick, had positioned itself as a luxury service for the wealthy that used only licensed drivers, unlike Lyft's lower cost service. In 2013, Uber published a white paper outlining the risks of peer to peer ride hailing, a way to elbow Lyft out of the market. "They were trying to get the whole category shut down behind the scenes," Mr. Green said. "They didn't want competition." Uber officials met with California regulators about the matter. As for Mr. Green, several current and former regulators and lawmakers who oversee ride sharing in California said they had never worked with him, because Mr. Zimmer was often the one who communicated with officials. "Truth be told, I've never heard of him," said Aaron Peskin, a San Francisco supervisor who called for crackdowns on Uber and Lyft in their early years and negotiated a new per ride tax with Uber and Lyft last summer. Mr. Kalanick eventually moved Uber into non luxury ride sharing with no licensed drivers, the same as Lyft. He and Mr. Green quickly became bitter rivals. When Mr. Green was set to introduce Lyft's car pooling product in 2014, Uber announced the same service first. That same year, Uber considered buying Lyft. Over dinner at Mr. Kalanick's home in San Francisco, the Uber chief laughed at Mr. Zimmer's high asking price. No deal was struck. An Uber spokesman declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Kalanick didn't return a request for comment. While Mr. Kalanick went on to raise billions of dollars in funding for Uber, Mr. Green relied on Mr. Zimmer's Wall Street knowledge and showman personality to garner investments from venture capitalists and others. In total, Lyft has raised close to 5.1 billion, compared with Uber's roughly 14 billion in equity. In 2017, Mr. Kalanick was ousted from Uber after a series of scandals. Mr. Green seized the moment, billing Lyft as a kinder, gentler network. Ridership surged, with Lyft taking a share of up to 35 percent in some American cities. More recently, Lyft has ventured into self driving cars, offering autonomous rides in Las Vegas. It also acquired Motivate, the largest bike share operator in the United States, giving Lyft a dominant position in an emerging transportation market. In the 2017 interview, Mr. Green said he was far from done. "As an entrepreneur, you always kind of want what you're pitching to sound somewhat off the wall," he said. "You're trying to pitch the future that doesn't exist, and you want it to be it needs to be a little bit of a stretch." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
On Sunday and Monday, those in the Western Hemisphere with clear skies were fortunate enough to see the last total lunar eclipse of the decade. As the moon took on a distinctly redder shade just before midnight Eastern Time, livestreams of the phenomenon showed a flash of light suddenly and briefly emanating from the lunar surface. Anthony Cook, an astronomical observer at Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory which streamed the eclipse, thought it could have just been the camera's random electronic noise. Then astronomers and citizen scientists started to share their detection of the flash on Reddit and Twitter. The only explanation was that something slammed into the lunar surface and obliterated itself. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The moon is a multi billion year old library of impact events, with fresh collisions still taking place frequently today. Capturing a lunar impact on video is rare enough, but this event a collision during a total lunar eclipse may be a first. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
new video loaded: 52 Places to Go: Madagascar | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It's impossible to hear about the way parties, day camps and church services have led to outbreaks this summer without worrying about what will happen if kids and adults gather in the fall. It scares me to think of how many more lives will be lost. It terrifies me that I could be among those who lose their lives. I completely understand why parents and administrators want kids to return to school. When we first started online learning in March, it was miserable pointless, even. Eventually, we established parameters, and I figured out how to teach kids across the northwest corner of Washington State virtually. During summer school, I've live streamed my lectures into campgrounds, living rooms and bedrooms decorated with twinkly lights or festooned with posters. My virtual classroom includes pets and younger siblings. Yes, it has been hard. Yesterday, as several really adorable teenage faces laughed through the computer screen at my use of a Tyrannosaurus Rex to explain the sympathetic nervous system and the feeling of impending doom it can cause, I thought, "I miss them." I wished I was standing in my favorite place in the world, my classroom because, frankly, that T Rex analogy is much better when accompanied by my dino walk. But it amazes me how fast students adapted to remote learning. I teach a particularly hands on class. This summer, I've managed to teach them to type blood, to suture wounds and how the sensory system works. I've taught them all about infection control and epidemiology they can not only tell you that you should wear a mask, but they can show you how to do it correctly. I used to put my hand over students' hands to guide them through certain lessons. Now I use a GoPro camera. It's hard, but they are learning. Most important, we students and teacher are safe. If I'm asked to return to the classroom as the pandemic rages, I will have to walk away. As deeply as I love teaching, I will not risk spreading this virus in a way that could hurt a child or a family member of a child. While children make up a small proportion of U.S. coronavirus cases and they are less likely to become seriously ill than adults, the virus might be linked to "multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children." Plus, many of my students struggle with poverty or are from multigenerational households. I will not risk passing a virus to them that they might pass to their vulnerable loved ones. I won't do it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
FRANKFURT Luigi Colani, a German designer known for applying sensuous shapes from nature to high tech objects like supersonic jets and super sports cars, died on Monday in Karlsruhe, Germany. He was 91. His death was confirmed by Albrecht Bangert, who wrote the 2004 book "The Art of Shaping the Future" with Mr. Colani. He did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Colani had been severely ill. Many of Mr. Colani's best known designs were considered too far out for mass production. One, for example, was for a long haul truck in which the driver sat inside what looked like a plexiglass flying saucer. Some members of the German design establishment said his work was overdone, utopian or simply impractical. Yet others considered him a visionary in an unimaginative world: His fanciful work was displayed at major museums like the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2007 the Design Museum in London staged an exhibition of his work. Mr. Colani also designed everyday objects, among them the Canon T90 camera, introduced in 1986, which was praised for its rounded, ergonomic design. His headphones for Sony in the 1990s anticipated the earbuds of today. And his "Drop" tea service, a collection he designed for the German porcelain maker Rosenthal in the early 1970s, complete with a teapot, cups and vessels to pour milk, is considered a classic by many. The British designer Ross Lovegrove once said that Mr. Colani's work managed to be both ancient and contemporary. His designs for space shuttles or 1,000 passenger jumbo jets incorporated timeless forms from nature. Rejecting the austere angles and straight lines favored by many German designers, Mr. Colani preferred curves and bulges, which were often unapologetically erotic, or which referenced creatures like sharks, manta rays and birds of prey. He described his work as "biodesign." Mr. Colani, whose long hair, bushy mustache and ever present cigar made him instantly recognizable, became wealthy enough from corporate commissions to operate his studio for a time from a moated castle in western Germany. But he spent much of his money on projects that corporate clients would not finance. "He thought about how the world would look in 50 years and 100 years," his son Solon Luigi Colani said. But, he said, no car company was interested in producing his father's designs, and "it disturbed him there was so little interest." Luigi Colani sometimes hurt his own case by refusing to compromise. He was known to insult executives who failed to grasp his concepts. "That made his life difficult in big firms," Solon Colani said. "But it was also his character not to tell such people, 'O.K., you're right, my fault.' " Lutz Colani was born in Berlin on Aug. 2, 1928. His father, who was originally from the Italian speaking region of southern Switzerland, was an architect for film studios the equivalent of an art director today. His mother worked as a prompter in theaters, occupying a nook underneath the stage and whispering dialogue to actors who forgot their lines. As a boy growing up in Nazi Germany, Mr. Colani recalled in a 2007 interview with The New York Times, he loved to visit an airport and a racetrack in Berlin, and he developed a lifelong fascination with fast planes and cars. In the mid 1950s he made his way to Paris and worked on designs for the French carmakers Simca and Citroen. Fascinated with the new materials becoming available, he designed a streamlined fiberglass car body that could be purchased as a kit and installed on the chassis of a Volkswagen Beetle. His expertise in working with plastic led to lucrative commissions from German furniture makers. Mr. Colani's eclectic output also included toilet seats, desktop computers and uniforms for Hamburg police officers and Swissair flight crews. Despite his fascination with technology, he preferred to work with pencil, paper and clay rather than design software. Mr. Colani displayed a knack for self promotion. He changed his first name to Luigi in the 1960s because, he concluded, all the famous designers were Italian. Mr. Colani later shifted his focus to Asia; until recently he maintained studios in Shanghai as well as Karlsruhe. He continued to sketch new ideas until his final days, Mr. Bangert said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times Credit... The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times A sweeping retrospective shows a personal side of the Pop master his hopes, fears, faith and reasserts his power for a new generation, Holland Cotter writes in his review. Mr. Paradox, who never left, is back. Although, technically, "Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again" at the Whitney Museum of American Art is the artist's first full American retrospective in 31 years, over that span he's been so much with us in museums, in galleries, on auction blocks, on Calvin Klein poplin shirts as to make a survey seem almost redundant. At the same time, his ever presence has made him, like wallpaper, like atmosphere, only half noticed. He's there, but do we care? We can't not. He's the most important American artist of the second half of the 20th century. The Whitney show vividly restores him to full, commanding view, and reasserts his importance for a new generation, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way. Despite the show's monumentalizing size some 350 works spread throughout the museum and an off site display by Dia of the enormous multi panel painting called "Shadows" it's a human scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet (malign or otherwise) of our market addled present: the creator and promoter of Business Art, a venture in corporate Conceptualism that, in the 1980s, brought Warhol into the orbit of Donald Trump, who delighted in quoting the B.A. credo: "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." This is not to say that this new old version of the artist is so different that we don't recognize him when we arrive on the Whitney's fifth floor show. Ms. De Salvo has made sure that we do. Right at the start we find a lineup of his Pop classics: Brillo Box sculptures, paintings of Campbell Soup cans, Coca Cola bottles, camouflage patterns, and a whole gallery filled with silk screened flowers and electric pink cows. It's as if the curator wanted to ground us in the familiar, in order to move us on. Moving on, in this case, means going backward in time, to when the artist was young, and still living at home in Pittsburgh, and still named Andrew Warhola. It could not have been easy to grow up, as he did, a sickly femme kid with bad skin and big ambitions in a Pennsylvania industrial town during the Depression. Almost inevitably, because he was gay and the child of immigrant parents, he stood at once outside and inside mainstream American culture. (He said that his mother, Julia Warhola, spoke English with such a heavy Slovak accent that he had trouble understanding her.) His aesthetic sense developed from this dual culture positioning too. On the one hand, he was entranced by American pop culture: newspapers, advertising, product design, Hollywood fanzines. At the same time, he was deeply influenced by the religious art he saw gold painted icons of saints, Crucifixions, Last Judgments in the Byzantine Catholic church he devoutly attended, and by the ornamental embroideries and drawings made by his mother at home. Although there's only one piece by Julia Warhola in the show a charming ink drawing of a cat lying on a bed of handwritten "purrs" her filigreed linear style turns up in the early graphic work produced after Warhol moved to New York City in 1949 to start a career in commercial design. There, after doing freelance illustrations for magazines and record albums covers there are examples in the show he landed a choice steady gig drawing newspaper ads for I. Miller shoes. Julia was part of all this. By the early 1950s she was living with Warhol as muse and collaborator. Because he loved her calligraphic script, he had her sign his commercial work. But not all his output was produced for advertising. Some shoe drawings, encrusted with gold leaf and foil, were stand alone pieces and intended as portraits of celebrities Warhol admired: Elvis Presley, Truman Capote, the transgender pioneer Christine Jorgenson. And he was drawing, often in ballpoint pen, soft core homoerotic images and sketches of cross dressed male friends. These pictures, well represented here, have only fairly recently been admitted into the standard record of his career. And they're important additions. They make his identity as a gay man, which he was on and off cautious about broadcasting, a concrete part of his story. And knowledge of it opens a path to consider how and to what degree his art queered to use a term from academic theory received versions of American culture: questioned their validity, revealed their contradictions, turned them inside out. Each of these extraordinary paintings was conceived as part of a series of closely related works which differed in color and format. Warhol was an artist designer of tremendous virtuosity, and the temptation to demonstrate this by putting comparative works side by side must be hard to resist. But Ms. De Salvo has chosen to display just one example from each series, and that's a good idea. A single, small, tondo shaped gold Marilyn, isolated on a gallery wall, tells you everything you need to know, emotionally, devotionally, about that picture and what it meant to that artist. In 1965, Warhol "retired" from painting and spent the next decade multitasking like mad. He organized collaborative multimedia events like the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a sensory overload of dance and superstarness delivered by the Velvet Underground and Nico. He published a magazine (Interview), and turned out hundreds of films. (Several short ones play in the galleries, and the museum has organized a program of individual screenings for the run of the show.) This was also when he put the Business Art concept into effect, which primarily meant lining up endless lucrative portrait commissions from the global rich and famous of the day. (Dozens of such products line the walls of the Whitney's lobby gallery.) Was Warhol the outsider striving to get inside at last? And what kind of inside was this that had him courting Imelda Marcos, painting the Shah of Iran, and trying to swing a portrait deal with Mr. Trump? A serious chunk of the art world wasn't amused. It started to call him washed up. He wasn't washed up, though. Good work still came, including, in 1975, the sparkling, self commissioned portrait series called "Ladies and Gentlemen," its sitters all black and Latino cross dressers recruited from Manhattan drag bars. But in the decade leading up to his sudden death in 1987, at 58, Warhol's art gradually changed in tone, grew darker, fatalistic. Long underrated, even critically disparaged, this work still awaits careful study, and Ms. De Salvo devotes fully a third of this brilliantly conceived show to it. With the advent of AIDS, and the loss of partners and friends to it in the early 1980s, Warhol swung between self protective denial and outright fear, which intensified his religious faith. The show captures his mood of free floating anxiety in an extraordinary salon style installation of two dozen small 1980s silk screen paintings, most in black and white, several quoting from tabloids ads and Apocalypse minded religious fliers ("Stress!," "Are You 'Different?'," "Mark of the Beast," a "Heaven and Hell Are Just One Breath Away!") interspersed with paintings of dollar signs and dire news headlines ("Marine Death Toll Hits 172"). Intimations of mortality had always coursed through Warhol's art and the 1970s brought new ones in eerie pictures of skulls, and, by implication, in "Shadows," a 100 plus panel abstract tour de force in which darkness has no source and no end: It's just there, foreboding, miasmic, waiting. The artist specified that this wraparound painting, on loan from Dia Art Foundation, could be edited to fit differently sized spaces. In the version now on view at Calvin Klein headquarters at 205 West 39th Street, it's reduced to 48 panels and has its sightlines interrupted by the space's thick columns. Even with handicaps, though, it's a stunner, and Dia gets full credit for the presentation. And, strange as it seems for an artist so absorbed in worldly matters, images of spiritual transcendence were a staple of his work too, from the "Marilyn" paintings onward. And Ms. De Salvo has given his retrospective a celestial conclusion. There are only four works in the large rectangular final gallery. At either end hang two giant examples of his abstract "Rorschach" paintings, one gold, one black. With their curves and flanges they could be giant examples of Julia's rococo designs. On a long wall hangs a 25 foot long silk screen painting of Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," its sacred narrative of dread and redemption half buried in camouflage patterning. And facing it is an even longer picture called "Sixty Three White Mona Lisas," in which repeat images of the most famous celebrity sitter of all are dimly visible under washes of semi translucent white paint. The work is both a nod to an old, fixed art history (Leonardo, Duchamp) and the statement of a new, open ended one of simultaneous erasure and proliferation. And seen at the conclusion of Ms. De Salvo's show the painting suggests a further reading: the image of a host of spirits benign? threatening? neutral? stirring behind a drifting bank of clouds. I never thought I'd use the word exalted for Warhol, or transcendent, or sublime. And he probably never thought to use them either. But that's what's here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA Only a few years ago, Bine Kordez was feted as Slovenia's star entrepreneur. After transforming a home improvement chain, Merkur, into a regional giant, he drew on easy credit from state run banks to help orchestrate a EUR400 million management buyout of the company, the largest in the country's history. The rewards of success included an imposing mountainside retreat and frequent mention of his name as a possible future finance minister of this small, idyllic Alpine country. Now, though, Mr. Kordez stands convicted of forgery and abuse of office for financial dealings as Merkur struggled under a mountain of debt. "My mistake and the mistake of the banks was to vastly underestimate the risk," Mr. Kordez, 56, said in a recent interview at his home near the picturesque town of Bled, with a view of Slovenia's highest peak. He awaits a decision later this month on an appeal of his conviction, which could send him to prison for five years. As fears grow that Slovenia could follow Cyprus and become the sixth euro zone country to seek a bailout, his rise and fall have come to symbolize the way easy and cheap credit, combined with Balkan style crony capitalism and corporate mismanagement, fueled a banking crisis that has unhinged a country previously praised as a regional model of peaceful prosperity. The recent bailout of Cyprus at a cost of EUR10 billion, or 13 billion, which included stringent conditions forcing losses on bank depositors, has focused minds in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital. Slovenia's struggling banking sector is saddled with about EUR6.8 billion worth of nonperforming loans, about one fifth of the national economy. Slovenia is now in recession, and the gloom across the euro zone shows little sign of abating. A European Commission forecast released Friday said that France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands four of the five largest euro zone economies will be in recession through 2013. Last Thursday, Slovenia bought time by borrowing 3.5 billion on international markets. That was two days after Moody's Investors Service cut the country's credit rating to junk status, citing the banking turmoil and a deteriorating national balance sheet. Analysts said the bond sale would probably enable the government of the new prime minister, Alenka Bratusek, to stay afloat at least through the end of the year. The Cypriot debacle has shown how bailing out even a small country can damage the credibility of the euro currency union. But Slovenia, with two million people, insists that it is not Cyprus and will not seek emergency aid. "For the time being, I have a sound sleep," Ms. Bratusek, the 42 year old prime minister, said in a recent interview. This week, on Thursday, Ms. Bratusek, only a little more than a month in office, is expected to present a financial turnaround plan to the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union. She said that privatizing Slovenia's largely state owned banking sector was a priority, along with creating a "bad bank" to take over nonperforming loans. Her government, she said, will also unveil plans by July to sell the country's second largest bank, Nova Kreditna Banka Maribor, along with two large state companies that she declined to specify. The sales could raise up to EUR2 billion, she said. Ms. Bratusek, who once headed the state budget office at the Finance Ministry, said Slovenia's government debt, which analysts say rose from about 54 percent of gross domestic product to around 64 percent with last week's bond sale, still ranked at the lower end of that scale in the euro area. But the 6 percent interest rate Slovenia offered on the 10 year bonds in last week's debt sale, at a time when some euro zone countries are enjoying historically low borrowing costs Germany's equivalent bond is trading below 1.2 percent might only add to the country's financial problems. Mujtaba Rahman, director of Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, said the new financing could backfire if it lulled the government into laxity about making vital structural changes. "The new financing was not a vote of confidence in the Slovenian government or in the economy, but rather reflects investors attracted by high bond yields," Mr. Rahman said. "A bailout could still prove inevitable." When Slovenia was admitted to the euro club in 2007, the single currency helped fuel easy credit and a construction boom. It was the same sort of heady access to cheap money that led to economic disasters in Ireland and Spain. But economists say the Slovenian variety of euro euphoria hangover can be traced to a failed transition from communism to a fully functional market economy. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. After gaining independence in 1991, Slovenia conditioned by centuries of foreign subjugation was determined to retain local control of its prized assets. It embarked on a spree of management buyouts of partially state owned companies, overseen by executives who in many cases were uncomfortably close to people running the government and the state banks. "After the transition in Slovenia, the state retained a stranglehold over the economy," Mr. Rahman said, "and the country today is suffering the consequences." Bine Kordez at Merkur was not the only head of big Slovenian company whose involvement in a bank aided management buyout ended badly, or whose access to easy credit backfired. Two of Slovenia's biggest construction companies, Vegrad and SCT, are now in bankruptcy proceedings. Istrabenz Holding, a sprawling food, tourism and energy conglomerate that once owned a vast swath of Slovenia's economy, is undergoing a court mandated debt restructuring. Igor Bavcar, Istrabenz's former chief executive, was charged with money laundering, and Bosko Srot, former chief of the big brewing company Pivovarna Lasko, with abuse of authority, in connection with a 2007 deal. Prosecutors say Mr. Bavcar attempted to buy a stake in Istrabenz from Lasko through a series of shady intermediaries. Both deny any wrongdoing. A big provider of buyout loans was Slovenia's largest state owned financial institution, Nova Ljubljanska Banka, or N.L.B. The government installed new management late last year, as the bank's lending portfolio turned increasingly sour. Janko Medja, N.L.B.'s new chief executive, said that the rush to privatize Slovenian state controlled companies, combined with the money coursing through Europe before the 2008 financial collapse, had prompted banks like N.L.B. to practically give money away "for free." In the case of Merkur, which Mr. Kordez joined as finance director in 1988, the advent of the euro sent the home improvement company's profit soaring, as newly prosperous Slovenians rushed to renovate their apartments and houses. By 2008, the once modest group of neighborhood hardware stores had EUR1.3 billion in annual revenue, and the number of employees had more than doubled to 5,000. Mr. Kordez decided to consolidate his grip. He recounted recently how he convinced a group of 10 banks, including 4 foreign ones and N.L.B., to lend him more than EUR350 million. "I had no real collateral for a deal of that size," he said. "Just my house , a few hundred thousand euros, a smart business plan and my reputation." So he offered as collateral the assets of Merkur, a company he did not yet own. The trouble intensified in 2009 when, with the global economic downdraft in full force, Slovenia's construction bubble burst. As home improvement projects fell idle, Merkur sales dropped by about 20 percent. Mr. Kordez described taking out fresh loans to repay the outstanding ones, even as Merkur paid dividends to Mr. Kordez's investment vehicle, Merfin, which he then used to help pay off spiraling debts. "In some countries this could be called a Ponzi scheme," said Primoz Cirman, a leading economic writer for Dnevnik, a Slovenian newspaper. "But here it was called financial engineering." By 2010, the banks had lost patience and Mr. Kordez was pushed out. An audit later revealed that the buyout had destroyed EUR200 million of Merkur's value. The company is now majority owned by the banks and undergoing a court mandated debt restructuring. In 2011, prosecutors accused Mr. Kordez of embezzling EUR9 million from Merkur in 2008 through a byzantine deal in which his investment firm, Merfin, bought a shopping center with an improper EUR10 million loan from Merkur. A few days later, Merfin sold the property to a construction company for EUR21 million, an artificially high price. Merfin, prosecutors said, then used the profits to help pay back its soaring loan costs. Last September Mr. Kordez was found guilty of forgery and abuse of office. He said he was trying to save the company and had not broken any laws. Prosecutors counter that he abused his position to save himself from financial ruin. As he awaits a ruling on his appeal, Mr. Kordez has been riding his mountain bike throughout the country, and he says he refuses even to contemplate a possible prison term that he compares to a diagnosis of cancer. He would leave behind his wife, and an adult daughter and son. The country's financial disease, he said, is hardly his fault. "Someone needed to be blamed for this mess," he said, "And I have become the sacrificial lamb." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
When photos began circulating of migrant children separated from their parents and placed in what looked like giant cages in detention centers, the young adult novelists Melissa de la Cruz and Margaret Stohl had an immediate response. After texting nine author friends asking what they could collectively do, Ms. de la Cruz and Ms. Stohl drafted a statement of protest called "Kidlit Says No Kids in Cages," denouncing "practices that should be restricted to the pages of dystopian novels." Within minutes, they had 94 signatures from "our fellow kidlit authors and supporters," Ms. de la Cruz said. A day later the statement was posted on Twitter with over 4,000 signatures. The group has now raised nearly 240,000 for legal services for the migrant families. They also expanded fund raising to include online raffles and auctions for such services as manuscript evaluations by best selling children's authors and "character naming," with the winning donor's name to appear in an as yet to be written novel. Another group of kidlit authors, agents and publishers made an online clearinghouse of original posters designed by prominent children's book illustrators to protest family separation, all available for free download. Children's book creators similarly coordinated a response after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, Fla., in January. The graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier and the YA novelist Jenny Han set up a group called Kidlit Marches for Kids, rallying colleagues to join the March 24 gun control protest spearheaded by the Parkland students, and designing a protest sign for marchers. Children's books have always been political, of course that's why they are fixtures on lists of banned or censored books. And the welfare of children has long been at the forefront for authors who write for them. But current children's book creators are finding new outlets for their concerns, often banding together, with the support of social media, to increase their impact. If the old image of a writer for children was a wise child genius in the mold of Maurice Sendak one who spoke up for kids and when necessary challenged the political powers that be, but indirectly these days, children's authors might not only hold signs at protest marches, they may also volunteer to strategize for a State Assembly race, or even run for office. 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. While conservatives like Bill O'Reilly have had a strong presence in the children's books landscape, with best sellers like the young readers' editions of his Killing series about notorious assassinations and battles, the kidlit community skews to the political left, and no similar movement has emerged among conservative children's books authors or publishers. For Neal Porter, vice president and publisher of Neal Porter Books at the children's publisher Holiday House, the policy of separating families at the border marked a turning point. "Our life and work revolves around children, so it's been a galvanizing force in our industry," he said. This month, Mr. Porter released "Dreamers," written and illustrated by the Mexican American author Yuyi Morales, which recounts her journey with her infant son to the United States. Ms. Morales finished the book earlier this year, but it became especially timely as its publication date approached. When she appeared at a June meeting of the American Booksellers' Association, several attendees burst into tears when they saw her. "We're getting tons of proposals and manuscripts for both fiction and nonfiction with political themes immigration, internment, refugees, police brutality and sexual harassment," said Megan Tingley, executive vice president and publisher of Little, Brown Kids. She added that children's books on activism and social justice topics often beautifully designed are increasingly considered "retail friendly. They're not homework, people want them in their homes." Over a dozen new children's books on the theme of resistance are in bookstores now, such as "We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices," a collection of poems, essays and art by children's authors including Jason Reynolds and Jacqueline Woodson, and "Steal This Country: A Handbook for Resistance, Persistence, and Fixing (Almost) Everything," by Alexandra Styron. "We Say NeverAgain: Reporting by the Parkland Student Journalists" comes out next month. Young adult fiction with themes of political activism has found a receptive teenage audience, most prominently with Angie Thomas's Black Lives Matter inspired novel "The Hate U Give," now in its second year on the Times best seller list, and soon to be released as a movie, about a 16 year old girl who sees her childhood friend killed by a police officer. The NeverAgain movement for gun reform will take a turn in the fiction spotlight this fall when the best selling novelist Ellen Hopkins's "People Kill People" a novel in verse with a spectral narrator called Violence who weaves together the stories of six people and a gun is published. YA readers in particular want authors to do more than just create stories they are expected to be visible as advocates for issues that affect teenagers. "I don't know that a person can write the kind of book I write and not get involved somehow," said Nic Stone, whose debut novel, "Dear Martin," included the story of a black teenager killed by a white police officer and another teen who composes letters to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to try to come to terms with contemporary racism. "With the way social media functions, people have access to me as an author, which means it's no longer acceptable for me to just sit behind my computer," Ms. Stone said. At a recent workshop Ms. Stone organized at Charlottesville High School in Virginia to teach students about activism, she pointed out that "Dr. King's first major act was writing a letter to the editor." A social media presence linked to activism can also present knotty challenges to YA authors. "I'm careful that what I'm saying on social media is sensitive to the full range of my readers, and is aimed at creating a positive force in the world," said Ms. Han. "I don't want to make teenagers who have conservative parents feel embarrassed about their families." For Ms. de la Cruz, the label "political" applied to her writing makes her uncomfortable. "I get a little shy about saying my books are political because I don't like didactic books and don't intend to write one. I want to tell stories and if they enlighten, great," she said. "After the 2016 election I was trying to finish my middle grade novel, but I felt like as I was typing there was a house on fire next to me and I needed to pick up a hose," said Melissa Walker, who has written 10 novels for young readers. She and other children's book authors, agents and publishers started a Super PAC dedicated to supporting Democratic candidates in state and local races around the country, raising over 400,000. They have since become part of another PAC with a similar mission, called Future Now Fund. Walker advises Future Now Fund's "giving circles," in which people pool their money and donate to help influence local races, "adopting" states where fund raising is more difficult. "I've found the transition from children's writer to this to be seamless," she said. "Something really important in politics is storytelling, and it's missing sometimes. I can go into these circles and say, 'this action is important,' and I can tell stories about why." L.A. Campbell, who writes middle grade novels, coordinates a Future Now Fund giving circle called Propeller, which focuses on state political races, with a particular interest in Maine. The nature of children's literature, she noted, lends itself to the notion of an uphill struggle, so a daunting political cause feels like familiar ground. "The main character of a children's book is going to have to solve a huge problem, and no one is coming to help. The adults aren't coming. His best friend isn't coming," Ms. Campbell said. Then there are those authors who go all the way with their activism, running for office themselves. In January, when Saira Rao, a political unknown, decided to challenge an 11 term Democratic incumbent in a Congressional primary in Colorado, her campaign material mentioned her career as a lawyer briefly. More important, in her view, was her role as an author and children's book producer: Ms. Rao co founded In This Together Media, which specializes in children's and young adult books by diverse authors and with diverse protagonists. Congress, she said, "looks an awful lot like the characters in kids' books: overwhelmingly white and male," and she was out to change that. Ms. Rao lost the race, but she did get 1 in 3 votes in her district against an incumbent candidate with millions in corporate PAC money, while accepting no corporate money herself. "We are delighted by the strong showing," Ms. Rao said, adding that she plans to start a PAC "to support black and brown women candidates all over the country." In Texas, Laura Moser, a journalist who has written about education and a co author of a YA series that included "The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber," ran a spirited campaign but ultimately lost in a two person runoff for the Democratic Congressional primary for Houston's seventh district. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SEATTLE If you're one of the millions of people without a smart speaker in your home, Amazon wants to talk to you. On Thursday, the company announced not one, not six, but more than a dozen devices for its Alexa voice assistant all meant to solve problems in your life that you may not have even known you had. "If you have ever tried to defrost peas, it's a number of clicks," said Dave Limp, Amazon's senior vice president for devices and services. Mr. Limp said the 59.99 microwave, made by AmazonBasics, the company's house brand, was a way for Amazon to try out the smart home tools it is building out. The company wants the devices to be easier to set up out of the box and for other companies that make kitchen appliances from rice makers to ovens to tap into the Alexa platform. "When we imagine a future with thousands of devices like this, this is going to become essential," Mr. Limp said. The microwave was perhaps the cheekiest in a blizzard of announcements at the event inside Amazon's headquarters. "We took advantage of the hands free moments," Tom Taylor, senior vice president of Alexa, said in an interview. "How do we continue to expand? Where else are those opportunities?" So far, Amazon's answer appears to be "everywhere." The company has a long history of introducing products and services at a rapid clip, in sharp contrast to competitors like Apple, which focuses on a few very refined releases at a time. Some of Amazon's ideas work, like its Kindle e reader, and the company keeps building on them. But many of them fail, like its Fire smartphone, and the company quickly drops them. On Thursday, Mr. Limp also introduced an Echo Auto that plugs into cars; Fire TV Recast, a DVR recording device that lets users record live TV and watch on a variety of devices; and an analog wall clock with a voice controlled timer. Another suite of devices announced on Thursday is aimed to appeal to audiophiles. Echo devices can now be used for individual left and right channels, meaning a pair can create stereo sound. And the new Echo Sub provides rich bass sounds, which Mr. Limp showed by booming Lorde's "Royals." The new Echo Input is the first Echo device without a speaker so users can connect their speakers to the brain of the Alexa. Since it introduced its Alexa smart assistant four years ago, the company has not shied from trying out new forms and uses. First it had an Echo speaker, a tall cylinder, then an Echo Dot, a version the size of a hockey puck. Then it added a screen, too, with the Echo Show. At the same time, developers wrote thousands of apps or skills for the devices. There are now more than 50,000 skills. The strategy helped Amazon quickly take the lead in the voice controlled device market a market it practically created. But it now has some stiff competition. A device from Google, the Home Mini, is now the top selling smart speaker worldwide, Strategy Analytics, a research firm, wrote in a report this week. Google offers fewer types of devices, but has an advantage because millions of customers already have access to its voice assistant through the smartphones that use its Android operating system. Apple has also introduced its own high priced voice controlled speaker, focused on pristine audio quality, which Amazon looks to now be challenging head on. The announcements Thursday show Amazon trying to flood the field, not just with its own devices but with products intended to model a way for outside manufacturers to build off Alexa's interface. "It's overwhelming that's the risk for the consumer," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with Creative Strategies. "They have been so early in the market that they need to make sure the geeks that jump into the smart home early have something, but at the same time, they need to make it really simple for people who haven't yet." Not all of the announcements were products. Amazon introduced new ways Alexa will try to anticipate the needs of users, not just respond to questions. The Alexa Hunches function, which will be public later this year, tries to provide suggestions; for instance, if a user says good night to Alexa, the voice assistant might note that a porch light is on and offer to turn it off. And users can turn on Alexa Guard when they leave their home, and the device will notify them if it detects a smoke alarm alert or the sound of a burglar smashing a window. Amazon also said users would no longer need to sign up individual skills to use them. Instead, they will be able to speak to Alexa, which will automatically pick the best skill. "That was a big barrier, you learning how to talk to Alexa versus Alexa learning how you speak, which is how it should be," Ms. Milanesi said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
I WAS flying down a steep hillside when I glanced at the instruments and realized what I had achieved: a new personal best in a Porsche. But this wasn't the usual Porsche milestone, of some heroic track speed. Instead, I'd reached a more nerdy goal, recording a 30 miles per gallon highway average. What's more, that notable mileage was reached by a charging rhino S.U.V., the Cayenne, that usually ranks among the most greedily consumptive Porsches. Not so, however, with the new Cayenne S Hybrid. In redesigning its Cayenne lineup for 2011, Porsche has tackled seemingly every shortcoming of an S.U.V. that mortified many of the company's loyalists when it arrived in 2001. As with many S.U.V.'s born in that era of hyper masculine S.U.V.'s, the Porsche was burdened with macho off road hardware that few owners used. With pavement focused crossovers in their infancy, Porsche was also among companies that seemed unsure of what one was supposed to look like, and seemed unable to abandon truckish design tropes. The first Cayenne was also stingy on luxury, with a flat buckboard of a back seat that seemed at odds with prices that could top 100,000. Yet between its class busting performance, and the Porsche crest on the hood, the Cayenne became Porsche's best selling model around the world and a profit generator that helped to sustain the company. This Cayenne's styling changes are subtle, but they work. The car looks more like a tall, focused European sport wagon than a hodgepodge melding of a family hauler and a 911 sports car. At first glance, you'd swear the Porsche had been downsized, though it's two inches longer and rides on a wheelbase 1.6 inches longer. What's not an illusion is the Porsche's sudden weight loss and its salutary effects on performance and fuel economy. The Cayenne is about 400 pounds lighter than the last model, as big a drop as I've seen of late on an automobile. Porsche saved 73 pounds by omitting the low range gearbox (handy for off road use but superfluous elsewhere), lightened the chassis and the body panels, and relied more on aluminum and plastic composites. The front seats are faultless for either aggressive driving or family trips. And the rear seats have much better shape and definition, allowing drivers to whip around turns without treating rear occupants like human hockey pucks. Those seats now slide about six inches forward and back, and can recline up to 6 degrees. The makers of first generation touch screens rarely get everything right especially if German engineers are involved and the Porsche is no exception. In functional terms, the system will get you home, but negotiating the onscreen menus results in too many operational wrong turns and dead ends. And though the console itself looks like something out of the Starship Enterprise, you might want Sulu riding shotgun to deal with all of its tiny buttons. The Cayenne's newfound advantages are largely and smartly confined to the street. I tested two of the four Cayenne models: the S, which starts at 64,675 with a 400 horsepower 4.8 liter V 8, and the Hybrid, which starts at 68,675 and produces 380 horsepower by joining an Audi based supercharged V 6, electric motor and nickel metal hydride batteries. That hybrid system, and the Cayenne's platform, is shared with the new Volkswagen Touareg Hybrid. If Porsche buyers don't lose sleep over having an Audi engine, they'll enjoy the rare hybrid that smoothly juggles performance and economy. Most high performance hybrids, including BMW's competing ActiveHybrid X6, have seemed like green window dressing. Adding a hybrid system sends the price shooting up while mileage and performance barely budge. The Porsche is different. Squeeze the gas, and at just 1,000 r.p.m. barely above idle the 47 horse electric motor and 333 horse engine serve up a monumental 428 pound feet of peak torque. Within 6.1 seconds, you've breached the 60 m.p.h. barrier, 1.3 seconds quicker than the new Cayenne V 6, and just a half second behind the V 8. The Hybrid, paradoxically, adds back the fat that was trimmed from the lineup at large. With its battery nestled below the cargo floor, where the spare tire fits in other models, the Hybrid weighs 4,938 pounds, about 400 more than the V 8. Although the V 8 version is more nimble, the Hybrid is remarkably fluent in Porsche's language, which instantly translates as "faster, please." As ever, the biggest worry, despite Samson strong brakes, is leaving enough room to rein in this monster when it lulls you into driving it like any Porsche. As with its rival BMW X5 and X6, the Porsche adopts a rear torque vectoring system. Using an electronically controlled differential, the optional unit can send extra power to the outside rear wheel while using brakes to slow the inner rear wheel, helping to hustle the Cayenne around corners. The optional Porsche Active Suspension Management further heightens control with variable shock absorbers and settings for Comfort, Normal and Sport driving. But the awkward steering wheel shift buttons need a re do. The Cayennes feel especially sophisticated around town as well. I preferred their light, luxurious steering to the too taxing effort of, say, the Audi Q5. Every Cayenne benefits from a new 8 speed automatic transmission it includes two thrifty overdrive gears and an especially seamless stop start function that shuts the engine down when it's not needed. Interestingly, the V 8 Cayenne's federal rating of 16 m.p.g. in town and 22 on the highway is almost identical to the V 6 model (at 16/23) that has 100 fewer ponies. But it's the Hybrid that really brings the Cayenne into the millennium. And based on my testing, the government's rating of 21/25 m.p.g. does no justice to what this Porsche can do in the real world. Most notably, an ingenious "sailing" mode can shut down the engine and decouple it from the wheels, allowing the Cayenne to coast free of mechanical drag. Gravity becomes your friend: coast down any hill, as I did on long grades on New York's Taconic Parkway, and your mileage soars. Porsche says the Cayenne can "sail" at speeds up to 97 m.p.h., though I couldn't get it to work at anything above 75. Yet that's still generous enough to put the Porsche above 30 highway m.p.g. when driven gently, 5 m.p.g. better than its rating. Even when cruising 75 to 80 m.p.h., my Cayenne Hybrid test vehicle returned 27 m.p.g. In the city, the Cayenne Hybrid can cover short distances I managed roughly a mile in heavy Manhattan traffic on electricity alone. The regenerative brakes felt touchy at times, but they helped the tested Hybrid deliver 22 m.p.g. in city and suburban driving. All told, I achieved 24 m.p.g. over a week in the Hybrid, 25 percent better mileage than I got with the V 8. In other words, the mileage was in line with a Honda CR V or other scrawny 4 cylinder crossover remarkable for this 2.5 ton speed demon S.U.V. Porsche has even addressed the Cayenne's elites only pricing. The new 300 horsepower V 6 model is priced at 47,675. Even allowing for Porsche's notoriously pricey and imaginative options list, that is less than half the price of the Turbo version. Thanks to this engineering three way among Porsche, VW and Audi, the Cayenne Hybrid crushes the idea that hybrids can never be fun and that diesels are the only means of fun with frugality. City or highway, the Porsche beats the mileage of competing diesels from Audi, BMW and Mercedes, yet the Porsche is a full second quicker to 60 m.p.h. than the diesel BMW X5 35d, and it's higher revving, sweeter sounding and more fun to drive. Of course, making that point will cost you: the Cayenne Hybrid can soar past 80,000 with a smattering of options. But with everyone from Porsche and Ferrari to Mercedes and Jaguar developing hybrid or electric sports cars there's not a diesel in the bunch consider the Cayenne an advance guard with a message from the future: hybrids aren't for nerds alone. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
DALLAS The din begins around 5 o'clock at the Katy Trail Ice House, as predominantly millennial age beer drinkers grasping 18 ounce schooners spill out of the metal framed bar and onto an oak shaded patio in the booming Uptown neighborhood. Located where a swingers club used to be, it has become one of the highest revenue bars in Dallas since it opened three years ago. Its success is attributed to its location: It abuts the Katy Trail, a 3.5 mile concrete path atop an old railroad bed. As many as 15,000 dog walkers, joggers and other users frequent the lineal park on a weekend day, according to an oversight group, Friends of the Katy Trail. "We're doing three times the business we thought we would, and it started on Day 1," said George Cramer, a partner in the Katy Trail Ice House. "It has all been word of mouth by people just walking along the trail." The bar exemplifies the flush times in Uptown, a 570 acre neighborhood near downtown, the Dallas Arts District and the American Airlines Center in Victory Park. Along with a 21 year old public improvement district and zoning that encouraged residential development, the trail's construction and improvements over nearly two decades have helped transform Uptown from a blighted empty expanse into what many consider to be the only true "live, work, play" urban neighborhood in a city known for suburban sprawl. Apartment developers have added roughly 8,000 units to the district over the last several years, according to Uptown Dallas, the group that manages the improvement district's 1.5 million budget. Gables Residential, Forest City Enterprises, JLB Partners and Alamo Manhattan are building 1,100 more units. The landlords are primarily targeting young people flocking to the Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan region, which added 95,900 jobs last year, the third highest number among major metro areas after the New York and Los Angeles areas, according to the Labor Department. Uptown Dallas pegs the population there at around 15,000, more than double the number in 2000, and nearly half are 25 to 34. Restaurants and bars complemented by trolley service along Uptown's McKinney Avenue spine have fostered an entertainment district. John Walker, a longtime real estate broker known as Newt, has assembled properties in Uptown for 35 years. He remembers how people avoided the run down neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, and talks about Uptown's progress like a father who has watched his daughter come of age. "You can't say that there has been just one catalyst," said Mr. Walker, who has offices in a refurbished early 1900s Victorian home in the State Thomas Historic District in Uptown. "But the Katy came along, and demand for apartments grew." That demand has not slowed. Apartment occupancy in the district is around 95 percent, and average rent for newer units tops 2 a square foot, 1.14 higher than the average in all of Dallas Fort Worth, according to Todd Franks, a managing director with Sperry Van Ness, a commercial real estate brokerage firm. Monthly rents average 1,463 for a one bedroom and 2,141 for a two bedroom. In all, some 1.2 billion in projects are under construction or are about to begin, including a growing list of office plans as companies move closer to the employee base. Frost Bank will consolidate its north Dallas workers in 50,000 square feet of a new 167,000 square foot building this year. In early 2015, the Richards Group advertising firm will move down North Central Expressway into its new 250,000 square foot headquarters. Since 2006, property value in Uptown has climbed nearly 80 percent to 3.4 billion, based on the improvement district's assessment income. In the early 1990s, it wallowed around 500 million, said Joseph F. Pitchford, senior vice president for development at Crescent Real Estate Equities, based in Dallas. Crescent will begin building a 225 million, 20 story tower this summer that the law firm Gardere Wynne Sewell will anchor. "If someone could show me an urban district that has grown at a faster, more successful clip over that period of time," he challenged, "I'd like to see it." Crescent Real Estate was an early believer. Founders of the company in 1993 acquired the Crescent, a massive office, retail and hotel complex ensconced in Indiana limestone in the district. An oil heiress, Caroline Rose Hunt, and her family built the project in 1986, and it dominated the near barren surroundings for years. It also buttressed Uptown's fledgling redevelopment. The Katy Trail originated with a decision by Union Pacific Railroad in the 1990s to abandon a stretch of track from the old Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad, or Katy line, on the neighborhood's western boundary. Local neighborhood groups formed Friends of the Katy Trail and enlisted an architecture firm, SWA Group, to design a master plan. The Katy Trail group raised 10 million in private funds matching 10 million in government funds to build the trail and add amenities such as granite quarter mile distance markers, expansive overlooks, landscaping and lighting, said Philip Henderson, a founder and former president of the group. Around the same time, Uptown's improvement district was taking root. It used a 4.5 cent assessment on every 100 of property value to fund security, landscaping, a trolley and other improvements. The parallel efforts began to attract investors, but it took time, said Chuck McDaniel, managing principal with SWA. "We would schlep the trail's master plan around to developers to see if they would provide seed money, but initially they were unbelievers," he said. "But the more people that we could connect to the trail in a friendly way, the more they used it. Perceptions changed just as the real estate was changing." Uptown faces some growing pains, however. Fewer parcels are left for development, which will raise the cost of new projects by forcing developers to pay for income producing properties. Uptown's old, narrow streets complicate efforts to add bike lanes, an addition that Mr. Pitchford of Crescent Real Estate and others believe would enhance the district's urban character. The district's promoters also would like to see more retail development in the area. In addition, the recession blunted fund raising efforts to pay for more entrances and other enhancements to the trail, Mr. Henderson said. It already costs 700,000 annually, largely raised by Friends of the Katy Trail, to pay for electricity, water, security and maintenance, added a spokeswoman with the group. Yet none of those challenges have diminished the park's pull. Among other properties in the area, Gables Residential, based in Atlanta, has developed six apartment projects in Uptown totaling around 1,600 units, including a 334 unit project next to the Katy Trail Ice House that opened in 2012. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Finland has long produced a disproportionate number of world class conductors. Just look at the New York Philharmonic this month: Esa Pekka Salonen, born in Helsinki, ended a guest stint with the orchestra on Tuesday. And just two days later, Santtu Matias Rouvali born 60 miles north, in Lahti made an auspicious Philharmonic debut. At 34, the fast rising Mr. Rouvali serves as chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony in Sweden. In 2021, he will become the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London succeeding, as it happens, Mr. Salonen. Beginning a debut program at David Geffen Hall with Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" Overture Fantasy was actually a little risky: It's hard to make this staple seem fresh. Mr. Rouvali did so not through any unusual interpretive approach, but simply by conducting a probing, clear and somberly dramatic account. On the podium this wiry, mop haired conductor makes sweeping gestures with his long arms. But every gesture expressed some element of the music, and the Philharmonic responded with warm and articulate playing. Beginning with the Tchaikovsky gave context to the main work on the program: Sibelius's First Symphony. At the time he composed that piece, the young Sibelius was obsessed with Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony. He had also been floored by a performance of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." The drama and fantastical colorings of Berlioz's music were in his head. Instead of including Berlioz, Mr. Rouvali led the New York premiere of another fantastical piece, written recently: Bryce Dessner's "Wires." Mr. Dessner is best known as the guitarist of the rock band the National, and also for his film scores. Though not a concerto, the 14 minute, single movement "Wires" featured Mr. Dessner playing an electric guitar part that was sometimes integrated into the orchestra textures; other times staking out on its own; and now and then nudging the other instruments into unexpected directions. You hear echoes of diverse styles hazy spectral music, Steve Reich like rhythmic repetitions, bursts of grungy rock, pointillist atonal riffs in Mr. Dessner's musical language. Though I grew impatient with the shaggy structure of the piece, moment to moment I was absorbed in the music. Mr. Rouvali has recorded Sibelius's First with the Gothenburg Symphony on the Alpha label, the first installment in a planned survey of this composer's symphonies. In a recent video interview, he sounded almost irreverent about his homeland's towering composer especially about the notion, still widely held, that the symphonies are evocative of Finnish folk music and depictions of nature. Sibelius was really "a dandy, a fashion guy," Mr. Rouvali said; the idea that he was merely a "nature guy" is just "a good story." Mr. Rouvali, for his part, loves the First Symphony for the "messy things" in it. Mr. Rouvali did embrace the messy elements of the music in the inspired performance he led, and made the work's constant, episodic shifts seem purposeful. The symphony came across as the brashly original work of an ambitious, if still evolving, young composer conducted here by a young but already compelling artist. This program continues through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center; 212 875 5656, nyphil.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Renan Lodi's play in his first year at Atletico Madrid has quickly justified his multimillion dollar transfer fee.Credit.../EPA, via Shutterstock Renan Lodi's arrival at Atletico Madrid has fulfilled his dream of playing in the Champions League, but it also produced a long awaited payday for the scouting business that discovered him. Renan Lodi's play in his first year at Atletico Madrid has quickly justified his multimillion dollar transfer fee. CURITIBA, Brazil In many ways, there is nothing extraordinary about Renan Lodi. A defender at the Spanish soccer club Atletico Madrid, Lodi is among the hundreds of Brazilian players who have crossed the Atlantic to play for European clubs in elite competitions like the Champions League. More than 50 Brazilians, in fact, have played in the final. Lodi, 22, hopes to join that group later this month, when Atletico Madrid and seven other top teams gather in Portugal for the pandemic delayed completion of this year's tournament. But while Lodi is still three wins from lifting the trophy, his European odyssey has already proven profitable for the company that discovered him at an out of the way soccer school when he was 13. It has also validated a curious business project built around early investments in a precious, and plentiful, Brazilian export: soccer talent. Since the 1970s, the Stival family has run a successful food supply business, one of the biggest of its kind in southern Brazil, from the southern city Curitiba. About 15 years ago, the family turned its attention to soccer. Like millions of Brazilian families, the Stivals are passionate fans of the game. But they could not help but notice how soccer players had increasingly become commodities, bought and sold for millions of dollars, just like the tons of beans, rice and grains that the Stivals traded every week. "The idea was to invest in this business because Brazil always makes money in this business," Rafael Stival said in an interview last year, four months before Lodi joined the exodus of more than 300 soccer players who swapped Brazil for overseas leagues in 2019. Sitting in his office at Trieste Futebol Clube the amateur team in Curitiba that serves as the base for his soccer interests Stival, a burly man with dark hair and a rich baritone voice, described how after early hiccups and countless errors he had fashioned a business out of scouring Brazil for the youngest talents, nurturing them briefly at Trieste and then getting them signed by the country's elite professional clubs at the earliest opportunity. To Stival, who runs the family's soccer operation, investing in young players is a long term bet, a process he likened to planting seeds that will one day grow into fruit bearing trees. And Lodi is his biggest success to date. Last summer, at 21, he made the move to Europe, in a deal that was notable for its size (16 million euros, or just over 18.8 million) but also for its destination, Atletico Madrid, one of the continent's best clubs. In an interview from Spain in August, Lodi said he remembered those early days in Trieste well: the loneliness, the fear, the nightly calls with his father during which he would beg to come home. But he also remembered how he ate better at Trieste and, later, Paranaense than he ever had at home, and also how his soccer skills were always about more than a professional career. His feet would determine the future for an entire family mired in poverty, something that even a 13 year old could understand. "I always put that goal in my head, you know?" he said after a recent training session. "I said to myself: 'I'm going to be the father of the family. I'm going to chase my dreams, and I'm going to try to give them a better condition ahead in the future.'" Last year's transfer fulfilled that dream, but it also finally produced a major payday for Stival, who got a 30 percent cut (about 4.8 million euros, or about 5.6 million) of the transfer fee. Payments like that are the key to Stival's soccer ambitions, and the reason he signs dozens of young players and then quickly moves them on to one of the bigger clubs with which he has had development agreements: the more seeds he plants, the better his chances of seeing one bear fruit. Lodi's transfer to Madrid represented only the second transaction of a player discovered by the Stival operation since it started in 2005. But in that one deal, Rafael Stival said, the family recouped more than half of its total investment. In an interview earlier this summer, Stival said he expected the rate of sales to grow now that dozens of his recruits had moved up the soccer food chain. More than 100 players who were once on Trieste's books are now registered with professional teams, with most at Athletico Paranaense or the Rio de Janeiro giant Flamengo. Both clubs have had partnership agreements that gave them the first right of refusal on Trieste players. Stival has a separate agreement with Trieste, a successful amateur team set up by Italian immigrants in 1937. In exchange for investing a considerable sum in its facilities, his family has the right to use the club as a base for his soccer business for 20 years, a contract that expires in 2025. That investment also allows Stival to get a cut of the transfer fees because, under international transfer regulations, only teams can profit from player sales. Still, there has been a learning curve. Stival's initial business plan focused on older boys, those who needed just a little extra focus to get them ready for professional contracts. It did not take long for Stival to realize the plan's biggest flaw. "They would go missing at night," he said, letting out a deep breath. "A total mess. We had to learn." His revised plan turning his focus from 18 and 19 year olds to boys as young as 11 or 12 would require more patience. "When we entered we thought we would make money within two years," Stival said. "Now it's 14 years and we haven't recovered our expenses yet." Sitting beneath seven large maps of Brazilian states, Stival explained how the players are discovered. About half a dozen scouts including Stival go on monthslong missions deep into Brazil's interior and watch hundreds of players at a time. Tips about local prodigies come from a network of local coaches, schoolteachers and others, a grapevine that has led Stival to some of the most remote parts of the country, including, on at least one occasion, an Indigenous reserve. The best players are invited to Trieste for a trial that can last as long as two weeks. Local laws and age restrictions designed to prevent the trafficking of children mean the majority of the players cannot stay on the club's campus, so families immediately face difficult decisions. Some move hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to accompany a child, lured by the hope of the life changing opportunities that could follow if the trial is a success. But the plan, at least from Stival's side, is always for a short stay. "Our idea is to discover talent," Stival said. "We don't want to keep a player from 10 to 20. We want to get him into a club and continue. A kid who is 10, 11, 12, 13 who has conditions to live close we will take. For five years, Trieste had an exclusive agreement with Athletico Paranaense, one of two top professional teams in Curitiba, a city of 1.8 million. More than 60 players, including Lodi, had moved through Trieste to the Athletico facilities, now among the best in Brazil, before the contract was abruptly ended in 2018. Athletico Paranaense, its president said in a WhatsApp message, had simply decided to bring the bulk of its scouting and youth development in house. Stival's disappointment was short lived. Less than 24 hours later, he said, officials from Flamengo arrived in his office to talk terms. A deal was signed, and now Trieste's best prospects flow to Rio instead. Last year, however, disaster struck. A fire ripped through a temporary dormitory at Flamengo's training facility that housed a clutch of young hopefuls, killing 10, including three boys who had come through Trieste. The deaths brought a belated focus on how Brazil, the world's biggest exporter of soccer talent, cares for the thousands of boys and young men who enter the soccer pipeline hoping to overcome the odds. Disturbing examples quickly emerged at other clubs cramped dormitories, dangerous conditions, poor supervision and the authorities closed down the worst offenders and promised more oversight. In Trieste, though, something strange happened. Hopeful parents, now aware of the club's link to Flamengo's youth academy, began to get in touch. Could the club, they asked, run the ruler over their sons, too? Stival could only shake his head at the time. A year later, with the income from Lodi banked, Trieste's operations continue to expand. Flamengo has recruited more than 30 of Stival's players to its youth ranks in the last 18 months, and those who can't find a place there are sent elsewhere. His investments, he hopes, may yet produce another big payday. On a recent afternoon, Stival switched on his television and came upon a broadcast of Atletico Madrid playing a Spanish league game. Working up and down the left flank was Lodi, now a rising star, living the dream of countless Brazilian teenagers. For the Stival family, he represented something else: proof of concept a successful business plan in the form of a rampaging left back. Should Lodi and Atletico make a deep run in the Champions League this month, Stival may see another return on his investment. As part of Lodi's sale last year, Athletico Paranaense negotiated a bonus payment of 3 million euros (about 3.5 million) based on his performances in Spain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
An eagle population in South Africa is thriving despite its situation in an agricultural landscape, according to a new paper in The Condor: Ornithological Applications. The birds are Verreaux's eagles, predators in decline in southern Africa. Surprisingly, a community in the heavily farmed Sandveld region is healthier than one in the nearby, less developed Cederberg Mountains. The researchers speculate that the agricultural terrain may be easier for eagles to navigate and that their prey may be more diverse. The researchers said that potential threats, like the development of wind turbines, should be monitored. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Crossing the Line, a playful and probing interdisciplinary festival now in its eighth year, hosts an array of artists who refuse to be bottled up and labeled. The pickings are eclectic, from the debut of the Argentine director and visual artist Fernando Rubio, who places seven actresses in white beds in Hudson River Park in 10 minute cycles, they whisper memories to audience members to Xavier Le Roy's sophisticated yet accessible exhibition of movement and conversation, "Retrospective," at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. In other words, Crossing the Line, which runs from Sept. 8 through Oct. 20 at various New York locations and is presented by the French Institute Alliance Francaise, is nothing if not an adventure. Of the 15 offerings chosen by the festival organizers Lili Chopra, Simon Dove and Gideon Lester, Mr. Le Roy's "Retrospective" is one of the most alluring events. This French choreographer takes a decade's worth of solo work and recycles it through a group of local performers who dance and subsequently tell personal stories about their own careers. Another European artist, Ivana Muller, also challenges the audience performer experience in "We Are Still Watching" at New York Live Arts, in which spectators are given a script to read and subsequently form a mini society. Can bad theater evolve into something real? She also presents "Partituur," a participatory work for children. In "Quantum," the Swiss choreographer Gilles Jobin and the German visual artist Julius von Bismarck explore the quark, or small particles that make up matter, as six dancers swirl, spread and re collect under industrial lamps designed to respond to movement. Conceived while in residence at CERN, a particle physics lab in Geneva, "Quantum," performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fisher Building, is a merging of science and dance. Finally, the American choreographer Trajal Harrell presents his entire "Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church" opus, in which he explores the vogueing ballroom scene in Harlem and Judson Church's postmodern dance movement in six works. In each, he seductively studies the evolution of dance and theater, ranging from intimate "(S)," a runway solo showcase, to the boisterous "(M)imosa," created by Mr. Harrell, Cecilia Bengolea, Francois Chaignaud and Marlene Monteiro Freitas, who battle it out. Just who is the real Mimosa? You never really know. But for a week, the Kitchen will be known as the House of Harrell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The N.F.L. team in Washington has hired the law firm Wilkinson Walsh to review the claims of 15 women who, in an article published by The Washington Post on Thursday, said they were sexually harassed while employed by the team. The article detailed numerous allegations of sexual harassment, misconduct and abusive behavior by several team executives and football personnel over more than a dozen years. Male executives, the women said, commented repeatedly on their looks, sent them inappropriate text messages and pursued unwanted relationships. After The Post contacted the team with the allegations, according to the article, its longtime play by play announcer, Larry Michael, retired, while Alex Santos, the director of pro personnel, and Richard Mann II, the assistant director of pro personnel, were both fired. All three were accused of sexual harassment by former team employees, according to the article. Michael declined to comment about the reason for his departure before The Post's article was published. He did not return a call for comment after the allegations against him were made public. Santos and Mann could not be reached for comment. Dennis Greene, the team's former head of business operations, was accused of sexually harassing women on the staff when he encouraged them to wear tight skirts and low cut shirts, and asked them to flirt with people who own luxury boxes at FedEx Field, the team's stadium in Landover, Md. Greene, who resigned under pressure in 2018 after 17 years with the team, had been in charge of selling luxury suites and oversaw a program involving cheerleaders called ambassadors, who had been hired not to cheer, but solely for their attractiveness. He left the team in May that year, the day The New York Times published an investigation into the program. That report described him as examining each ambassador from head to toe as the group stood in an inspection line for him on game days. Greene also oversaw a 2013 cheerleader calendar photo shoot in Costa Rica. The team collected the women's passports at the start of that trip, depriving the women of their official identification. Several cheerleaders who were there told The Times that they were forced to act as escorts for male corporate sponsors and luxury box owners invited on the trip. Those sponsors and well heeled supporters watched as some cheerleaders posed topless for the calendar shoot. Beth Wilkinson, a founding partner of Wilkinson Walsh, confirmed in an email that her firm would conduct "an independent review of the team's culture, policies and allegations of workplace misconduct." "These matters as reported are serious, disturbing and contrary to the N.F.L.'s values," the league said in a statement on Friday. "We will meet with the attorneys upon the conclusion of their investigation and take any action based on their findings." The team owner, Daniel Snyder, said in a statement Friday that he was committed to changing the team's culture, adding that after the Wilkinson Walsh investigation is completed the team would, "institute new policies and procedures and strengthen our human resources infrastructure to not only avoid these issues in the future but most importantly create a team culture that is respectful and inclusive of all." The decision to begin an internal investigation comes at a turbulent time for the franchise, which has been embroiled in a public controversy over the team's name and has had numerous staff members depart over the past year. Under pressure from several of its largest corporate sponsors, the team said Monday that it would drop its logo and the name "Redskins," an about face by Snyder, who for decades said he would never change the name, which has long been considered a racial slur by many. Fred Smith, the chairman of FedEx and a minority shareholder of the football team, and two other shareholders have been trying to sell their stakes in the team, which amount to about 40 percent, for months. The team is in the process of choosing a new name and logo. Several front office executives have left or been dismissed from the team in the past year, some of whom were not accused of harassment in the article. In October, the team fired Jay Gruden, the head coach who had a losing record since he took over in 2014. Gruden's team had lost its first five games of the 2019 season. Bruce Allen, who was hired as general manager in 2010 and made team president in 2017, was fired in December. Larry Hess, the team's trainer for 17 years, was fired in late December. In January, the team let go of Eric Schaffer, its vice president for football operations and general counsel, after 17 years with the club. Santos and Mann also left last week. When the team's 2019 season ended, Snyder hired Ron Rivera, the longtime coach of the Carolina Panthers. "He is widely respected around the league as a man of great integrity and has proven to be one of the finest coaches in the country," Snyder said in a statement. Rivera has brought in new coaches and other front office personnel involved in evaluating players, a step common for incoming head coaches. But Rivera has had to make several key hires and sign free agents and rookies at a time when players and personnel have been unable to travel as usual because of the coronavirus pandemic. Eric Stokes, who ran college scouting for the Panthers when Rivera coached there, was recruited to replace Santos, and Jeff Scott, an assistant under Mann, was promoted. Rivera also brought in Rob Rogers, who spent 25 years working on salary cap related issues and contracts with the Panthers organization, to replace Schaffer. Snyder has not hired a new team president or general manager. It is unclear how long the law firm's investigation will take.Wilkinson Walsh has represented the N.F.L. in a lawsuit brought by DirecTV Sunday Ticket subscribers, and before founding the firm, Beth Wilkinson represented the league in the extensive concussion lawsuit. ESPN first reported that Washington's N.F.L. team had hired the firm. In response to The Times's report on the cheerleaders, the Washington team denied any wrongdoing, but still conducted a three month investigation into its cheerleading program after Greene resigned. A team spokesman said substantial changes to the program followed, including the organization no longer inviting sponsors on calendar shoots, and cheerleaders no longer being assigned to work at private events. The last team to confirm it was undergoing a major internal review was the Carolina Panthers. In 2017, when allegations of sexual harassment were made against Jerry Richardson, the club's founding owner, the team hired Erskine Bowles, a former White House chief of staff and one of the team's minority shareholders, to lead an investigation into the claims. The league stepped in and hired a different law firm to take over, and Richardson sold the team the next year. Last month the Panthers took down a statue of Richardson that was outside its stadium, saying they were worried protesters against racism and police brutality would try to topple it. Former Washington players were not eager to talk about the culture of the club. Josh Norman, a cornerback now with the Buffalo Bills after spending the past four seasons in Washington, sent a cryptic message on Twitter on Thursday that seemed to reference the events surrounding his old team. "Look Don't ask me NO QUESTIONS!" Norman wrote. "But I will say this, what goes around comes around. What's done in the dark will surely come to the Light!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
WASHINGTON After a bruising week before lawmakers, big internet companies including Facebook and Google relented to pressure in Washington on Friday and agreed to support a sex trafficking bill they had vehemently opposed for months. The bill would allow victims to sue websites that knowingly support and assist sex trafficking on their site. State attorneys general would also be able to go after the websites that support sex trafficking content. The companies had argued that they had worked hard to combat sex trafficking on their services, but that the bill would jeopardize a free and open internet, as well as subject them to many potential lawsuits for the actions of users. But companies have come under increasingly harsh scrutiny in recent weeks, particularly for their role helping to spread Russia propaganda during the 2016 presidential election. This week, executives at Facebook, Twitter and Google faced tough questions from lawmakers in three congressional hearings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Africa's elephants are widely loved and widely endangered. Poachers killed off nearly 30 percent of the continent's savanna elephants from 2007 to 2014, according to a survey published this week. Their populations are now declining at a rate of nearly 8 percent a year. But there are actually two species of African elephants. Savanna elephants roam grasslands in east and southern Africa. The more diminutive forest elephants, only recently recognized as a distinct species, live in dense central and western jungles. The new survey, called the Great Elephant Census, did not attempt to track forest elephants, mostly because they cannot been seen from the air. But other research shows their plight to be as desperate as that of their savanna cousins. Illegal killings of forest elephants for their tusks drove a 62 percent decline in their numbers from 2002 to 2013, according to one estimate. Unfortunately, the species will not be rebounding any time soon. As reported in The Journal of Applied Ecology, forest elephants turn out to be one of the slowest reproducing mammals on Earth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Hotels, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, media interviews. In recent months, this has been the daily ordeal of my brother, Jacob Blake Sr. or as we call him in our family, "Big Jake." He regularly visited the hospital bedside in Milwaukee where his son, my nephew, lay partly paralyzed for over a month before being transferred to a spinal rehabilitation facility in Chicago. At first, Jacob Blake Jr. "Li'l Jake" was semiconscious. Bullets had ripped through his slim body when a police officer shot him seven times in the back outside an apartment complex in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23. Our family was preparing for painful news about the prognosis. But one day, as his father held his hand, Li'l Jake opened his eyes and said the words every father wants to hear: "Daddy, is that really you? I love you." To my brother and our entire family, this was a deliverance. Li'l Jake was alive. Our story is different from those of many families whose lives have been devastated by police brutality our Li'l Jake survived. But in mostly every other way, the experience is similar. When the cameras stop rolling, the lights fade and public attention turns away, we're left with our pain and we return to the battle against racism and for justice and reform. My brother, who has recently spent six to eight hours a day with Li'l Jake at his rehabilitation facility, is a massive man. He was once a defensive tackle at Winston Salem State University in North Carolina. He also has diabetes, heart disease and chronic neuropathy. The shooting of his son has forced him to put himself at further risk during a pandemic that disproportionately affects Black men and others in our community. The toll on my brother has gone largely unnoticed except, of course, by members of our family. One night, he sat in the dark on a rock next to the hotel where he was staying, so sick and tired he couldn't move, his hand swollen to the size of a catcher's mitt from gout. By chance, the director of the hospital where Li'l Jake was being treated found him and he was taken to the emergency room for treatment. Despite this kind of setback, my brother knows he must keep going on, willing his big body to take the next step each day. For his son. For his family. For justice. "If I have to sacrifice myself for my son and my family, so be it," he has told me. After Big Jake was released from the hospital the morning after being admitted, he began convulsing and vomited several times in his hotel room. Still sick, my brother forced himself to an airport conference room for a meeting scheduled with Senator Kamala Harris. Before she arrived, he had to go outside. He did not want to throw up in front of her. Ms. Harris proceeded to the meeting room not knowing that he was sick. But once she found out, she behaved like a family member. "Jacob," Ms. Harris said, "you need to get better for yourself and because your voice is very important." As he prepared to go to the hospital yet again, he gave a thumbs up and wearily pushed on. For Li'l Jake and for justice, not only for his family, but for so many other families as well. This has been a grueling family ordeal for the two Jakes. But not only for them. My brother's three adult children, Jakorey, Letetra and Zietha, have wearily traveled with their dad from events like August's March on Washington to hospital waiting rooms. Li'l Jake's 20 year old brother was taken to a hospital in Illinois and treated for depression. That facility is about 100 miles from Wisconsin. Yet my brother knew he had to be there, even if it meant turning around again after just a few hours to be with Li'l Jake. This exhausting journey has become familiar to our family. This kind of sacrifice is not new. Generations of our family have risen above their tribulations. My father, the Rev. Jacob S. Blake, marched with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery and fought for fair housing in Illinois. My uncle, Rev. Eustace L. Blake, led a protest against police brutality in Newark, N.J., in 1964. He urged his parishioners at the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church to actively participate in African American organizations like the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee. "The price of freedom is not cheap," he told them. Other family members helped found community service organizations and were steel and hospital workers union members. Still others pushed the ideals of this nation forward by working to end segregation in New York City public schools and in other places around the nation. These generations connect this family at this moment of truth. The truth that we, too, are human beings. The truth that the late sage John Lewis said is the "foundation of all things." The truth that cannot be denied, tarnished or whitewashed. Yes, we are weary. We as an African American community are weary. We are tired of this fight to "prove" the value of our humanity a truth that should be self evident. But justice in this country is still for some and not for others. That there are still two systems, one for the privileged and one for the rest of us. Some of us know the truth: that oppression of a people cannot be justified in any way or in any era. With exhausted bodies and voices, we continue to pay a high price. But as tired as we may be, we, like my brother, keep putting one foot in front of the other for our survival and for justice in this nation. Apparently we still have miles to go. Rick Blake is the uncle of Jacob Blake. 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Megan Ramey's first bike related vacation with her husband and their daughter, now 5, helped inspire her to start Bikabout, an online travel resource for everything bicycling, with information on bike friendly lodging, traveling with bikes, renting them and where to ride them around town, along with tips on culture, etiquette and safety. The site, which began last year, recently introduced guides to Washington and New York City, soon to be followed by Atlanta, Milwaukee, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, adding to the 13 cities already available. The downloadable local rides, with some of the routes provided by Bikabout volunteers, have proved to be the most popular part of the service, she said. For example, the seven mile East Van Brewery Tour in Vancouver, British Columbia, visits six craft breweries, while the 13 mile Charleston Coastal See Food Tour in South Carolina includes dining spots and expansive water views. Ms. Ramey has also partnered with several Kimpton Hotels, and will supply them with themed routes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In "Black Box," it's bad enough for Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) that, half a year after losing his wife in an automobile accident that also put him into a temporary coma, he's still suffering from amnesia. But what's worse are his dreams, which are increasingly becoming nightmares. And the fact that one morning he wakes up and sees a hole in a wall that he's told he punched. Except he's not a violent person, or even a temperamental one. "I couldn't even get you to watch boxing, let alone do it," Nolan's best friend Gary (Tosin Morohunfola) tells him when speaking of these disturbing circumstances. Gary, who's a physician, recommends that Nolan visit Lillian, the department head at a medical college, who's a leader in experimental treatments for neurological dysfunction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
This article is part of a series aimed at helping you navigate life's opportunities and challenges. What else should we write about? Contact us: smarterliving nytimes.com. Justine Griffin was 25 when she submitted an application to donate her eggs to a fertility clinic in Florida, detailing everything about herself from her appearance to her SAT scores. An infertile couple liked what they saw on paper and Ms. Griffin was notified that they wanted to buy her eggs. That was the easy part. For three weeks in 2013, Ms. Griffin underwent physical and psychological tests, injected herself with hormones to stimulate her egg production and then had five eggs harvested through a surgical procedure. She was paid 5,000 for her eggs. Ms. Griffin, then a reporter for The Sarasota Herald Tribune, chronicled the experience for the newspaper in a series called "The Cost of Life." While both men and women in their 20s may be tempted to sell or donate their genetic material to make money or simply for altruistic reasons, the decision is not merely a financial transaction. For both sexes there are ethical factors. But for a woman the stakes are higher because a decision to sell her eggs may pose both short and long term health risks. Ms. Griffin knew the short term risks of egg donation when she underwent the procedure: The hormone treatments could cause hot flashes, vaginal dryness, fatigue, sleep problems, body aches, mood swings, breast tenderness, headaches or vision problems, according to the New York State Department of Health, which addresses at length questions about being an egg donor on its website. Raquel Cool, co founder of We Are Egg Donors, a space for past and current egg donors to connect, recently started the site Is Egg Donation For Me to help potential egg donors through the procedure. She said she wanted to provide resources to egg donors that she did not get when she donated her eggs in 2011 at the age of 26. She was paid 7,000 for her eggs, but she developed ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, a consequence of the hormone treatments, which causes fluid retention and the swelling of the ovaries. Mrs. Cool said she had nine pounds of fluid which was extremely painful. According to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome is "relatively common." The invasive procedure to extract the eggs is called transvaginal ovarian aspiration and there are risks, such as bleeding and although rare, damage or puncture of the bowel, bladder and nearby blood vessels from the needle attached to the ultrasound probe that is inserted into a woman's vagina. There are no good statistics on how long it takes a woman to recover from the egg donation procedure but in most cases, donors are scheduled for a post op checkup a week after the process. Ms. Griffin said a few weeks after her eggs were harvested a cyst burst on one of her ovaries, sending her to an emergency room. Her gynecologist told her the cyst most likely formed during the time she was taking the hormone treatments. What was less certain were the potential long term consequences of egg donation. By putting egg maturation into overdrive, was she putting her long term fertility at risk? But few studies have been done on the long term impact donating eggs has on a woman's fertility and overall health. Ms. Griffin, now a business reporter with The Tampa Bay Times, wonders if being an egg donor jeopardized her health in the long run. "I don't know if one day, if I want to have a family, my egg donation will have an effect on that," she said. Women are born with one million to two million eggs, but by puberty girls are down to about 300,000 eggs, said Nancy Kenney, an associate professor of gender, women and sexuality studies and of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. "A typical woman uses about 400 eggs throughout her life span for ovulation, so having several eggs harvested for egg donation will not deplete your supply," Dr. Kenney said. "But I don't think the question is whether there are enough eggs. I think the question is whether the effects of the hormone treatments is contributing to the dying off of the eggs. We don't know whether the treatments mean eggs are dying off more rapidly than if you weren't on hormones." "It is so frustrating that there is such little research on the long term effects of egg donation and if my granddaughter came and told me she wanted to donate eggs, I would talk her out of it," Dr. Kenney said. "We don't know the risks, and to risk my granddaughter's life or her fertility is not worth it." Dr. Kenney was a co author of a 2010 study published in Fertility and Sterility that surveyed 80 egg donors on their experiences following their donations. "In our study some of the former donors were struggling with infertility, which they blamed on the procedure, but they really had no way of knowing the cause of their problems," Dr. Kenney said. The study also found that the women were evenly split on their physical reactions upon donating their eggs, with 40 women saying it was positive and 37 saying it was negative (three did not answer). This is a growing issue: a 2013 report by Emory University, using data representing 93 percent of all United States fertility centers, found that the number of eggs used for in vitro fertilization procedures increased from 10,801 in 2000 to 18,306 in 2010. Being an egg donor was never about the money for Ms. Griffin, who declined to donate a second time, despite an offer of 7,500. She had wanted to be an egg donor after seeing the mother of a deceased childhood friend struggle to get pregnant after her daughter's death. Ms. Griffin said her mother was concerned enough to offer her 10,000 to walk away and said several times that she would never know her first grandchild. "That still kind of bothers my mother and I think it always will, but she was very supportive of my decision and I was grateful for that," Ms. Griffin said. In the case of Mrs. Cool, a writer from Santa Cruz, Calif., who has a 1 year old son, her parents reacted differently to her decision to donate her eggs, with her father supportive but her mother against it. She said she wanted to help a couple conceive a child but the financial aspect was also an incentive. Elizabeth Yuko, a bioethicist at Fordham University, said women should not be criticized for being paid to donate their eggs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The federal government's multibillion dollar aid program to help small businesses hurt by the pandemic prompted outrage after billions went to public companies while mom and pop businesses were sidelined. Now, another group of recipients is being scrutinized for taking the money: independent wealth management firms, some of which manage billions of dollars on behalf of affluent Americans. Their fees, which are typically 1 percent, can bring in tens of million annually regardless of market fluctuations. The initial 349 billion allocated in April for the Paycheck Protection Program went quickly, prompting Congress to approve an additional 310 billion. But some business owners found the guidelines for accepting the money confusing or too restrictive. Now, a divide is growing between advisory firms that took the money and those that declined because of ethical concerns. The issue is more than a tempest in a teapot. Some firms could lose millions in fees if their clients start pulling their wealth out. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has oversight of these advisory firms, has recommended that they disclose receiving the loans as a material event that their clients need to know about. Some critics say that the firms should go further and discuss with their clients why they took the relief money, and that clients should be pushing for more transparency. Two matters are under scrutiny. The first is a firm's solvency, because the recipient had to attest to needing the money to survive the pandemic. If a firm is not well run, clients should be aware, because their wealth is at stake. The second are the ethics of the principals of any firm that might have applied for a loan the firm did not need. "We didn't think it was very credible that these firms actually needed the money," said Gary Ribe, the chief investment officer of Accretive Wealth Partners, which manages 130 million and did not apply a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program. "Getting it out of an abundance of caution that didn't seem credible, either." But advisory firms that took the money have been pushing back, saying that the action was legal and that there was enough money to go around, although many of them received the money in the first wave of bailout loans, when many of the neediest and smallest businesses were shut out. "We expected there to be a little pushback when we applied for this, but when we were having the discussion in March, our thinking was, 'We have no idea what is happening,'" said Barry Ritholtz, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, which oversees 1.3 billion. Mr. Ritholtz, a financial commentator on Bloomberg Television, would not discuss the size of the loan. He said the firm had applied for it only to cover the salaries of about half of its 32 employees who served in support roles. Dynasty Financial Partners, which has more than 40 billion under management, oversees a network of 46 affiliated advisory firms that maintain their own businesses and S.E.C. registrations. At least 11 of those firms applied for relief under the Paycheck Protection Program, said Jonathan Morris, the firm's chief legal and governance officer. "They're all small businesses," Mr. Morris said. "We don't own them. They make their own individual decisions." Dynasty did offer to connect its network of affiliated firms with a bank it uses in St. Petersburg, Fla., where it is based, but Mr. Morris said the company had also helped about 100 clients apply for the paycheck loans. The program was created as part of the CARES Act when the economic impact of the coronavirus was first becoming apparent. It was meant to provide quick support to businesses to help maintain their payrolls. In the initial rush, larger firms with more resources were able to get first in line for the loans, squeezing out smaller business. Large chains like Shake Shack and Ruth's Hospitality were taken to task for requesting money that some felt should have gone to local restaurants. After a public outcry, those companies and dozens of others returned the money. Unlike restaurants and shops, or even small professional services firms like law offices and consultants, wealth managers did not have an interruption in their revenue. They deduct their fees quarterly from their clients' accounts regardless of whether the market is up or down. This discrepancy has been at the heart of the debate, particularly when firms have been slow to disclose receiving a loan or have changed their reasons. But pressure has mounted for wealth management firms to disclose whether they received aid, said Amit Singh, a corporate securities partner at Stradling, a law firm. "Disclosing the loan doesn't necessarily say your business was terrible," he said. "Even if it may not be a legal obligation to disclose what you might ultimately need it for, it will be bad politically not to." Mr. Ritholtz said his firm had a solid reason for taking the loan. Revenue was down about 12 percent in the first quarter, but he had been thinking longer term when he applied. "It wasn't about the revenue drop in the April billing cycle," he said. "It was about how bad does this get in the fourth quarter and in 2021." Brian Hamburger, a lawyer who represents independent investment advisers, said he had warned firms applying for paycheck loans to expect blowback, which came more quickly than he had expected. "I think a lot of the criticism was brought on by the firms themselves who took the money," Mr. Hamburger said. "A lot of those firms leading into the pandemic talked about their economic might and that they were running such a great business. They've opened themselves up to a lot of criticism." Citywire, a publication that covers the advisory industry, has been publishing almost daily updates on the firms that have disclosed that they received a loan or quietly filed amendments to their regulatory statements. Advisory firms that took a loan are faced with what to do with the money now that most of the market losses from March have been erased. They have three choices: Ask for the loan to be forgiven, if they used the money for payroll, health care and other related business expenses; pay it back at a low 1 percent interest rate; or return it. Dynasty is not mandating how its advisers handle the money. "It's going to be up to the individual firms," Mr. Morris said. "We don't dictate what they do." But many firms that did not apply for the money or pulled their applications once the market began to improve said clients ought to ask advisers for more disclosure around taking the money. They argue that a fee based advisory firm should not have needed the money unless it was just starting out. Mr. Ritholtz said he along with his firm and its chief executive, Joshua M. Brown, who writes in a blog called The Reformed Broker, were well enough known that their clients had heard their rationale already through tweets, blog posts and television appearances. At Dynasty, each firm maintains its own regulatory filings, so it's up to those advisers to make note of the loan. "The S.E.C. has provided guidance, but it's not mandated," Mr. Morris said. "The S.E.C. said where you needed the money to continue to employ portfolio managers, you'd want to disclose it, but where you were using it for administrative personnel, you may not need to disclose it." That, though, is the kind of logic that critics say investors need to push back on. "Some firms are going to dance on a pin and say it was for support staff, not investment staff, but money is fungible," Mr. Ribe said. Whatever their initial rationale for applying for the government aid, firms need to stick with it, Mr. Hamburger said, or their clients might have reason to worry about their sincerity. "If a firm is going to take that money, there should be no shame in taking it, but they've got to own it," he said. "They can't sit there and posture and change that characterization of that benefit." Returns always fluctuate, but trust, after all, should be the reason someone picks an adviser. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Price's synthesis is less successful, as at times the external world disappears into the textures of his protagonist's consciousness. The novel could have gone into greater depth in its consideration of the complex figure of the Leopard (more than once distantly referred to as an "astronomer great grandfather"), and characters in "Lampedusa" that match those in "The Leopard" could have been further developed especially Mirella (the love interest of Lampedusa's adopted son, Gioacchino), who lacks the dimension and verve of her analogue, the unforgettable Angelica of "The Leopard." I also hungered for more on the eventual publication of "The Leopard" in 1958, after Lampedusa's death and at the behest of Giorgio Bassani, the acclaimed author who championed the unabashedly old school narrative against the opposition of many left wing Italian intellectuals. Yet Price's novel excels where it counts most: inside Lampedusa's head. The prose is superbly controlled, richly textured, brimming with wise and lyrical insights that make it a worthy heir to its mighty predecessor. As Lampedusa's condition worsens and death approaches, he thinks not of his ravaged family, his destroyed palazzo or his unpublished book. Rather, he recalls what Emily Dickinson once described as a certain slant of light: the memory of a "shaded greenlit garden" from when he was 9, dressed in a sailor's outfit and clutching a leatherbound book from his grandfather's library. He opens the volume and repeats its words, feeling "something come over him, a kind of intoxication, a silent companionship that was the language itself, he felt its rhythms move inside him." Lampedusa's ancestor, the Leopard, strode across history's stage in the long, proud bounds of the majestic beast he resembled. His quieter, gentler scion, a creature of words to the last, was only ever truly at home in books. For him to have ventured forth late in life from his literary safe haven to write "The Leopard" is a story as improbable and at times fascinating as the historical paradoxes of his masterpiece. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LONDON Allied Irish Banks, the lender that is being bailed out by the government, has decided not to award senior staff about 40 million euros ( 53 million) in bonuses for 2008 after the country's finance ministry intervened late Monday. Ireland's finance minister, Brian Lenihan, told RTE radio on Tuesday that it was "galling to think" that at a time when taxpayers were investing in the bank, 36 million to 40 million euros "would be paid out of that bank to employees in respect to bonuses during a period that the bank got itself into the difficulties it is now in." The bank has already received 3.5 billion euros in government aid. The ministry acted after months of public outrage over the bonuses to be paid to 2,400 senior bank managers at a time when Ireland was seeking an international bailout of 85 billion euros, largely because of weaknesses in its banking sector. In a letter Monday to the Allied Irish board, Mr. Lenihan said that further cash injections by the government which the bank desperately needs were dependent on the condition that no bonuses be paid. "The provision of further state funding to A.I.B. will be conditional, inter alia, on the nonpayment of any bonuses, no matter when they may have been earned," Mr. Lenihan wrote. He told the cabinet at a meeting Tuesday that the provision on the bonuses would be added to a bank restructuring bill being discussed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The abstract artist Sean Scully has striped his canvases in yellows from palest omelet to warning flare. His choices have been uncontroversial his paintings have sold for more than 1 million each until last summer, when he went a shade too far on one of his own homes. Mr. Scully, 73, specified Gold Zinger paint (from Valspar) for his turreted house built in the 1980s in Snedens Landing, an enclave in the hamlet of Palisades, N.Y., on the Hudson River's western shore about 20 miles north of Manhattan. In an oversight, his team did not file for paint color approval permits required by the local government's Historical Areas Board of Review. At the board's December meeting, some emotions ran high as the public debated whether Gold Zinger should be allowed to remain on the house. Opponents deemed the color "over the top and jarring." Mr. Scully's team defended it as "bold, beautiful and uplifting," suited to a woodsy neighborhood known as "eclectic, unique, artsy and individualistic." (Celebrity inhabitants have included Orson Welles and Scarlett Johansson.) The board nonetheless concluded that Gold Zinger had to go. This spring, it will yield to Semolina, a creamier yellow from Benjamin Moore. Mr. Scully, in a recent interview, fumed over what he called "Pottery Barn" tastes among the locals who spurned Gold Zinger. Thomas Jefferson had applied a similar shade in Monticello's dining room, he said, and it brought a cheerful note to his wintry leafless property. But he accepted Semolina as a compromise: "I don't want war." Color battles like these have grown common. Historic district administrators and other neighborhood design watchdogs have gained power over growing urban and suburban territories. Homeowners in aging subdivisions brave disapproval as they try to update association covenants, to brighten obsolete dark palettes while maintaining visual cohesiveness. Blog posts have drawn attention to extreme colors and suggested boundaries of good taste, while social media has made for open season on people's house paint choices. Tantrums, lawsuits and nit picking have ensued. Regulations in Palm Coast, Fla., forbid "fluorescent, loud, clashing or garish colors or ANY SHADE of purple, fuchsia, magenta and orange that does not meet the pastel requirement." In Wellington, Fla., homeowners have struggled to persuade authorities to add mouthwatering paint colors called oregano spice and cocoa berry to the official rosters of permitted hues. In Gaithersburg, Md., homeowners have landed in court for using excessively pale trim in a predominantly earth tone subdivision the house that generated the controversy is on Happy Choice Lane. In Cody, Wyo., rule breaking owners have spewed expletives while painting their home's exterior in bands of "cafe gray, maroon rust, walnut bark and cinnabark," the Powell Tribune reported. There are reports of a Louisiana resident's yellow house being painted gray by neighborhood objectors while the owner was out of town. People have ranted online against the subjective judgments and excessive power of the "color police." A petition arose to abolish homeowner associations, partly because of the threat of color dictatorship. John Hammersmith, a community associations expert who owns Hammersmith Management in Colorado, said that board discussions of paint choices had been known to devolve into "yelling, screaming, almost fisticuffs." He quoted a common saying in real estate: "You just don't want to live next to a pink house." Pink walls, however, do sometimes win hearts. In Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood, there is nostalgia for a Victorian rowhouse formerly known as Pinkstone, at 233 Garfield Place. An owner had kept it coated pink for decades. Solange Knowles posed on its steps in a music video. Subsequent buyers have returned it to its original brown. (In Pinkstone's memory, the Brooklyn based accessories maker Dear Martian offers a "pepto pink cotton" bow tie named 233 Garfield.) In East Harlem, the designer Karim Rashid's team has slathered a bubble gum shade across cantilevered concrete terraces on a new apartment house at 329 Pleasant Avenue. Mr. Rashid's original proposal had called for incorporating turquoise bands into the mix, but that high contrast idea ended up shelved amid neighborhood outcry. In a recent interview, Mr. Rashid lamented widespread fear of brightly colored buildings. When we see unexpected shades, he said, "That's when we feel alive." The original design for this East Harlem building by Karim Rashid included much brighter terraces, with bands of turquoise. After opposition from neighbors, the colors are more muted. Mr. Scully and his wife, the artist Liliane Tomasko, have recently expanded their real estate portfolio with a sprawling 1920s house called Shadowcliff in Upper Nyack, N.Y. Its three story wood and brick shell, trimmed in white neoclassical details, contains 37 rooms. Walter Aurell, an architect who has worked on several projects for the couple (including the Snedens Landing house), said that renovations at Shadowcliff were expected to begin in early summer. Discussions about the selections of exterior paint, he said, are ongoing. Mr. Rashid says he foresees his afterlife in a place where palettes are infinitely expansive and gray walls very rare. "There's a planet out there, I believe, that's all so colorful," he said, "and that's where I'm going when I die." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"It's literally the most insane fashion week ever," said Sara Moonves, standing outside her Chinatown apartment one evening during New York Fashion Week waiting for an Uber. Complaints about shuttling from shows in abandoned subway stations on the Lower East Side and former weapons facilities on Park Avenue is basically a prerequisite for working in fashion (particularly when having a town car driver is no longer standard operating procedure). But in Ms. Moonves's case, there was justification. On June 25, Conde Nast sold W magazine to Future Media Group, the publisher of Surface, an independent fashion magazine, for less than 10 million. Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W for the last 9 years , was fired, and Ms. Moonves, its style director since 2017, ascended to the top role. It so happens that Ms. Moonves didn't sound whiny talking about the insanity presently surrounding her. It was more gee golly wow. She was closing her first issue, wooing advertisers, flying to Los Angeles for a cover shoot, and then heading straight to London, Milan and Paris for three more weeks of fashion shows. Although she is the daughter of Les Moonves the former head of CBS who was forced out after allegations of sexual harassment, about whom she has nothing to say besides "I love my dad" a woman who spent her childhood surrounded by celebrities, there is nothing jaded about her. The shoots Ms. Moonves does with photographers like Tim Walker have an Alice in Wonderland without the hangover quality. "Epic" and "amazing" are her two favorite adjectives. Ms. Moonves, 34, also has a pack of best friends second only to Derek Blasberg, along with a can do attitude that helps explain how she managed to become the youngest editor in chief of a major American fashion magazine by about a decade . Still, this might not have happened but for the fact that things went terribly wrong between Marc Lotenberg, who bought the magazine, and its former editor, Mr. Tonchi. The story, according to two sources briefed on the sale process, is that in the fall of 2018, when Conde Nast decided to sell the magazine, Mr. Tonchi was given a role in helping to find a buyer, for which he was paid a fee on top of his salary. This was an unusual arrangement. (Among those who were interested in acquiring the title was Mr. Moonves, according to an article in WWD, though a spokesman for Mr. Moonves told WWD that he "did not at any time make an offer to buy or invest in W.") On Friday, June 21, as a lawyer worked on Ms. Moonves's deal, she flew to London for a scheduled cover shoot the following Monday with the singer Frank Ocean. Then came a wrench. Frank Ocean behaved like Frank Ocean and ran several hours late for the shoot. Ms. Moonves was torn. If she stayed on set, she would miss her flight back and the Tuesday announcement of her promotion. She wanted the chance to talk to staff members whom she valued and wanted to retain. If she told people at the magazine that she couldn't stay in London, they would be suspicious. Returning to New York seemed like the better option. The same day, Mr. Tonchi received a phone call from Conde Nast, asking him to come to a meeting at its World Trade Center headquarters . He realized he was going to be fired. At 8 a.m. on Tuesday, June 25, he sat in an office with Anna Wintour, the company's artistic director, and a member of the human resources department, who proceeded to do just that. On Wednesday, June 26, he sued Advance, the parent company of Conde Nast, for breach of contract, and people at W went back to work. "IT HAPPENED VERY QUICKLY," was all Ms. Moonves cared to say about her hiring as she stepped into a black Escalade bound for a Chelsea gallery, site of the spring Proenza Schouler show. She had on black pants from the Row, which is designed by two of her best friends, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. On top she wore a leopardy, zebra ish coat designed by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler, who are also two of her "best friends." "Proenza for the Proenza show," Ms. Moonves said. When the car arrived at the gallery, Ms. Moonves walked into the fashion equivalent of a college reunion, chatting with the model Karen Elson, the British Vogue editor Edward Enninful and the photographer Theo Wenner (all of whom she has worked with). Ms. Moonves was seated in the front row next to W's editor at large, Lynn Hirschberg, who books the magazine's covers and is something of a legend in the business. Ms. Hirschberg started at Rolling Stone, after which she did long stints at Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine, where she wrote big stories about the business of Hollywood and wrangled celebrities for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. (Mr. Tonchi was the editor of T from 2004 to 2010.) She left The Times in 2010 to go to W with Mr. Tonchi, but she grew increasingly exasperated with his behavior during the sale. So when Mr. Tonchi walked into the Proenza show and took his seat across the room, Ms. Hirschberg floated the idea of going over to let him have it. This was sometimes puzzling to Jonah Hill, the actor, who grew up with her. "The only things I knew about were skateboarding and hip hop," he said . (He also called Ms. Moonves his "best friend.") But she knew where she was headed. In college, at New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she majored in journalism and photography, she interned at Vogue with Sally Singer, the magazine's features czar. After college, she went to Vogue as the assistant to Phyllis Posnick (who styled Irving Penn shoots). When Ms. Singer left the magazine in 2010 to become the editor of T, Ms. Moonves went with her and began styling her own shoots. In 2013, when Ms. Singer returned to Vogue, Ms. Moonves followed and became a contributing fashion editor, working with photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Anton Corbijn and Inez van Lamsweerde. Like many people with famous parents, the attendant connections accelerated her ascent. She also would not have gotten where she did had she not been able to do the job, particularly at Vogue. When she complained to her father about her editor's exacting standards, he said, "Well, they did make a movie about this." Anyway, Ms. Moonves mostly loved Vogue, and Vogue mostly loved her back. "They're like my family," she said. In 2017, Mr. Enninful, the fashion director of W, was hired by British Vogue, and Ms. Moonves became W's style director. One of the photographers she worked with most frequently was Tim Walker, who brings a quirky, Wes Anderson like sensibility to fashion photography. In an interview, he said that Ms. Moonves's skills as a stylist include personableness and an understanding that fashion exists in a larger cultural context. "She doesn't have a pretentious bone in her body," he said. "She's very easy with people who are extraordinarily famous, but she's the same with my photo assistant as she is with Margot Robbie, although she did have a crush on Timothee Chalamet." Ms. Moonves even helps call in clothes for civilians who need something great to wear on a big night. "My mom!" Mr. Hill said. "I was taking her to the Oscars. Sara didn't even tell me." In one nod to the magazine's past, Ms. Moonves removed the Tonchi era W logo and replaced it with what she called a "new version of the old W," the one run until 2010 by Patrick McCarthy and Dennis Freedman. Their W, she said "was epic." Of course, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Freedman's magazine benefited greatly from Conde Nast's lucrative arrangements with top photographers who could shoot their more commercial work for Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour while using W for provocative fashion spreads (Think: Brad Pitt facedown on the floor, butt exposed, and Tom Ford playing with sex toys.) Ms. Moonves isn't sure whether she will retain access to all of them, but she professed not to be worried about how the magazine will fare under a new owner whose main experience in publishing is an independent magazine with shoestring budgets and a faulty credit history. A group of editors walked in to go over final proofs of the issue and a reporter raised an eyebrow about the likelihood that the meeting had been staged for a newspaper article. "This is very much a real meeting!" Ms. Moonves said. "Really not fake!" But it didn't last long. She was "literally" about to jump into a car and head to the airport. While she was away, I called Ms. Hirschberg, who told a story about how she had trailed Mr. Moonves to the network upfronts in 1995 for a New York Magazine article she wrote about him. Backstage, she spotted a 10 year old girl running around talking to everyone. "'That's Sara,'" Ms. Hirschberg recalled Mr. Moonves saying. "'One day, we'll all be working for her.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
It's common while traveling to be approached by locals trying to make a few a bucks by offering to show you around. I typically respond with a polite "no," but on this particular morning in Kandy, a small city in the center of Sri Lanka, I was looking for someone to take me on a tour of the sights. Santha, a small, middle aged man with a big smile, must have sensed it, because he made a beeline for me as I approached the small park near the Kandy Municipal Market on Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe Mawatha Street in the center of town. After a quick negotiation we were off, crammed into the back of a blue tuk tuk, zooming down streets slick from the morning's rain and smelling of wet leaves. Santha yelled to me over the loud buzz of the auto rickshaw's engine: "I was born in Kandy, raised in Kandy and married in Kandy." He added, "And I will die in Kandy!" I could easily have spent months in Sri Lanka, the small island nation off the southern tip of India. Full of fantastic food, kind people and astonishing natural wonder, Sri Lanka is a place best seen slowly, even if you only have four days on the ground like I did. The train was my preferred means of transport (when I wasn't in a tuk tuk), winding from Colombo to Kandy, in the middle of the country, before taking another train down to Ella, on what was one of the most beautiful and scenic train rides I've ever experienced. And as far as cost goes, I was able to keep my expenses comfortably under control. First, some logistics: A train trip in Sri Lanka requires planning. Many popular routes, including the one from Kandy to Ella, can sell out reserved seats weeks in advance. The Sri Lanka Railways website isn't going to be much help here: you can only reserve tickets in person or through your local mobile phone. I consulted the website The Man in Seat 61 and eventually decided to place my trust in Visit Sri Lanka Tours to make my bookings. My ticket in the observation car from Colombo to Kandy, with comfortable seats and a big picture window at the front of the compartment, cost 11 British pounds, or about 14 for the two and a half hour ride. (The agency is U.K. based and charges in pounds, payable through PayPal.) I snagged the last reserved second class seat on the Kandy to Ella route this is with booking 20 days in advance and paid 13 pounds for the more ponderous, nearly seven hour jaunt through the green hills and tea plantations of central Sri Lanka. The Airtel SIM card I purchased in India didn't work when I landed at Bandaranaike International Airport on my SriLankan Airlines flight (about 180 for a one way flight from Chennai, India). Luckily, I had bought an AIS travel SIM card for about 18 ahead of time, which is good for eight consecutive days of travel in over a dozen Asian countries, including Sri Lanka. I can't speak for service in the other countries on the list, but I had no trouble plugging it into my unlocked iPhone and using it over the next several days in Sri Lanka. The lovely Gamage family (pronounced GAH mah gay), consisting of parents, children and extended family all under one roof, put me up for two nights in their home for about 10 per night, booked through the site Hotels.com. My room was basic but comfortable, and came with an outstanding breakfast spread every morning: curried mango, daal, beans, beets, rice, eggs and tea. Mrs. Gamage told me I could easily find someone in a tuk tuk to show me around town. When I found Santha the next day near the park (or rather, he found me), we quickly agreed on a price for a tour of the city: 2,000 rupees (a little more than 11). "We have very good history here," he said to me as the tuk tuk labored uphill toward Sri Mahabodhi Maha Viharaya Buddhist temple, a little over a mile from the town center. Sri Lanka is a majority Buddhist nation, and many of the culturally and historically significant places of worship are Buddhist. After spending some time admiring the giant statue of Buddha that the temple is famous for (and paying the 250 rupee entrance fee), Santha, our driver and I made a few more stops in the area. Some were clearly an attempt to get me to buy something, but I didn't mind: At the Pilimathalawa Tea Factory, for example, a quick and interesting tour of the grounds was followed by an elaborate tasting and sales pitch to try to get me to buy tea. When I bought a package of broken orange pekoe tea for 1,200 rupees which I was going to buy anyway the salesman immediately said that if I bought a second one, I'd get the third for free. He balked when I suggested he give me one package for 800 rupees, however, and I walked out with my single package of tasty, locally grown tea. After a visit to a government run medicinal garden and a stop for a quick beer (100 rupees buys you a local Anchor beer from the supermarket), we zoomed back toward town, Santha narrating as we went along. "Very dirty right now," he said as we crossed a muddy looking Mahaweli River. Why would I choose to visit Sri Lanka now, during rainy season? he asked me. I didn't have a good answer. The Royal Botanic Gardens was the final stop on our tour. Despite the relatively hefty entrance fee (1,500 rupees for foreigners, 60 for locals), I found the gardens a lovely respite from the traffic and hubbub of the area. They seem more like an arboretum than anything else, and I admired mazelike java fig trees, a towering smooth barked kauri and a fascinating cannonball tree, which holds dozens of large, spherical fruits. The food is wonderful in Sri Lanka; bright flavors, sharp spices and complex curries usually eaten with rice as the centerpiece. I thoroughly enjoyed the Flavors of Sri Lanka cooking class I booked as an Airbnb experience ( 22), with the friendly Chitra taking the lead and her daughter Hasara assisting. Learning about the different spices and produce was a delicious and elucidating education, like gotu kola, an herb, and goraka, a small, sharply acidic fruit that's commonly dried and used to flavor meat and fish. A 400 rupee tuk tuk ride from Chitra's house on the western side of town took me to Sri Dalada Maligawa, or Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic (1,500 rupees admission) just in time for the 6:30 p.m. puja, or worship ceremony. Hundreds of people packed into the temple, fragrant with flowers and ringing with the rhythm of drums beaten by men in traditional dress. After the puja, I wandered north along a narrow moat until I came to a man standing in front of an old, regal looking building. He introduced himself as Vipula, and we chatted about the building, which was the residence of Kandy's king until the British seized the kingdom in 1815. The king, Vipula said sadly, was betrayed by his own people. After an early breakfast the next morning, I boarded a bright blue train to Ella, a small town southeast of Kandy. Traveling by train is one of my favorite ways to get to know a place: While allowing one to truly have a sense of moving from one place to another, it also creates a sense of community and shared experience with others aboard. From my second class seat (about 16.50, again booked through Visit Sri Lanka Tours), I could enjoy the percussive clacking of the train as it wound through the intensely lush, hilly terrain, with row after row of perfectly manicured tea plants dotting every slope. With tourists and locals hanging out of the doors and windows some to get a good selfie, others to get some air we pulled into Ella station. I made the short walk to the Sunnyside Holiday Bungalow, where I had booked a room for just under 30 per night. The owners are kind and the property, with gardens and a big shaded porch, is beautiful. The one downside is that there seems to be a trash processing facility across the road, which can be slightly irksome when the wind blows the wrong way. Ella's downtown is geared to tourists and backpackers think Western style coffee shops, bars and souvenir stores so I didn't spend much time there. My first morning in Ella, I set out to find the Nine Arch Bridge, a gorgeous old colonial era railway bridge that has, as you might expect, nine big arches. I was fortunate to arrive just as a big red and green engine with a few cars behind it came barreling around the bend. After a morning of walking around, it started to pour. I ducked into the restaurant at the 98 Acres Resort Spa, which sits atop a hill and provides an awesome view of the surrounding countryside, even in the rain. I sipped a cappuccino (400 rupees) and lamented the weather. But an hour or so later, I had my chance. The downpour had eased to a light smattering, and I set out to hike Little Adam's Peak, a slightly rigorous but very doable trek to the south. It was a bit more difficult after the rain, but the trade off is that I had it all to myself; I didn't meet a soul on the way up. Nor was there anyone at the summit. I approached a small shrine that had a covered golden Buddha statue and multicolored prayer flags fluttering lightly, and admired the vista of low lying clouds resting gently on what seemed like an endless series of rolling, green hills. Even through the rain, it was a spectacular sight. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
This is an article from Turning Points, a special section that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. On the pandemic and finding solace in art The thing I missed the most while in lockdown were the museums, the art galleries and the theater they are the high point of existence. Last winter, I went on a special visit to Vienna and saw three art exhibitions, showcasing works by three great masters: Jan van Eyck, Caravaggio and Albrecht Durer. With each and every painting, I felt the shock that I had never seen anything like it before. Caravaggio's 1607 painting of David holding out Goliath's head: the spontaneity, the life force. From the Durer exhibition, black ink on green paper: the German painter's "Self Portrait in the Nude," nude as he saw himself in the mirror the naked truth! Van Eyck's "Madonna at the Fountain," the Virgin's infant son pressed to her cheek, his arms laid out across her collarbone, causing little baby wrinkles in his back. I think of that painting sometimes when I go to sleep; it's absolute peace on earth. I define a politician under capitalism as a person who has the power to ignore suffering. Corruption is global, and capitalism is as corrupt as a rotten apple, years past its sell by date. There's only one way out of the destruction: Substitute it with a fair distribution of wealth. Governments must be custodians of land; land should not be privately owned. And custodianship must be managed by the maxim, "What's good for the planet is good for the economy." The narrative changes only when the world changes. The back of Vivienne Westwood's Pack of Cards. Since the early days of punk in the 1970s, I have been an activist against war and for human rights. I want everyone to know that capitalism and cruelty are connected. I'm doing this through my Climate Revolution website. On social media, I'm dressing up every week for my Friday speeches, using my fashion to get people involved in politics. If people aren't aware, how are we going to save the world from corruption and climate change? We are looking through the lens of a changing world. If the human race does not turn the telescope around, we face mass extinction. Climate change will reach a tipping point. This is why I formed Climate Revolution: to save the environment through work with nonprofits. Our target is to speak with one voice. As an activist I have created many graphics promoting political and environmental issues, which I reimagined in the design of a pack of playing cards. Lo and behold! In the cards lies the answer a complete strategy to save the world: Buy less, stop subsidies to industrial fishing, educate children, and so on. We even have a manifesto, detailing our need to move away from capitalism toward what I call "No Man's Land" a vision for the world based on the principle that no one should be allowed to own land. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is not enough to slow down climate change, but by reducing and reusing we can have real impact. One of the most important things I have probably ever said is: Buy less, choose well, make it last. It's all about quality, not quantity. Popular clothes are now reduced to a quantity of machine made sportswear and cheap rags constructed in places like Indonesian and Chinese sweatshops. We need to go back to producing high quality garments instead. Our choices as consumers can have an enormous effect on the fashion industry. My glory is reading. Aristotle defines happiness as living up to one's potential. In doing so we become who we are just like an acorn becomes an oak. That is what reading is to me: You find yourself because you forget yourself and put yourself in somebody else's shoes. It's the most concentrated way for a person to engage with the world and discover human nature. You get out what you put in. I formed a book club called Intellectuals Unite to promote reading. It's one thing to read the newspapers to keep up with the times, but we need the past, too. Great literature is timeless. I recommend the classics because they have stood the test of time, and they give an overview of the age in which they lived. We are the past; we cannot understand the world unless we know what has happened before us. Dame Vivienne Westwood is a designer and activist. She is the creator of Climate Revolution, a website that raises awareness about environmental and political issues. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Need a translation app for your vacation but don't want to get slammed with a big data bill? New updates to Google Translate, including the addition of another major language and a pop up translation feature, can help. Google said today that its translation app which can translate in a number of ways including hearing someone speak or by reading what they write can now be used in offline mode with no data or Wi Fi connection on both iOS and Android (it previously wasn't available on iOS), potentially eliminating the high price of data for travelers with iPhones. Some 52 languages, including French, German, Russian and, most recently, Filipino, can be translated offline. A complete list is here. Additionally, the app now offers both simplified and traditional Chinese through its Word Lens feature: Users can hold their smartphone camera over a word, sign, menu or photo in 29 languages and instantly see a translation. This is the latest addition to a list that includes Arabic, Italian, Thai and Spanish. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times Hollywood's Premier Fashion Camp, for Ages 6 and Up Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times Credit... Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times LOS ANGELES It's never too early to start working on your brand. This dictum, at the heart of so much young entrepreneurship, is the guiding principle of the Unincorporated Life, a high end fashion camp for kids, in Hollywood. Over the course of a week , students aged 6 to 18 learn how to build and brand a clothing line from scratch: They design and sew outfits; make logos; form a customer profile for their target demographic; and market their wares (mostly to their parents). The program ends with a glamorous, highly produced runway show, in which children model their outfits for a rapturous crowd of mothers and fathers, grandparents and siblings and often, a few celebrities. Kanye and Kim Kardashian West and the graffiti artist Shepard Fairey are among the parents who have sent their children here. On a recent Thursday afternoon, Karina, 15, showed off the progress she was making on a tan wool blend coat, inspired, she said, by vintage Coco Chanel and current trends in Milan. The clothing was designed with a "fun girl" in mind, she added, someone who is "ready to grind, get some work done. The everyday girl that's just cool, super chill, vibin', unique individual." (A capsule collection she created earlier this year was inspired by vegetables.) Another campgoer, Parker, 9, said her "Dark Soul" label was inspired by "dark colors and horror movies." She had spent her week designing an all black outfit a crop top and ripped jeans for a potential client who might like to be scared. "My customer will wear my garment to a Halloween party and they will feel like they're in a horror movie," she said, from the runway. While most of the young designers make clothing, other students at the Unincorporated Life, where prices start at 850 for a week, take classes on makeup design, personal branding and D.J.ing. Those who attend the "Young Hustlers" program create products to sell alongside the runway show and work with the staff to learn how to price their products. The makeup students learn about application and experimentation, and create personalized palettes. The D.J.s perform before and after the runway show, working with instructors on their sets. The lead up to the show was a flurry of activity, with kids and instructors putting the finishing touches on their looks and practicing vision board presentations one last time. One girl dispensed advice to a friend on calming her nerves (deep breathes and circular arm movements). Once the doors opened, the crowd was treated to performances from DJ Rose, 6, who started off with "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls, and DJ Clawz, also known as Joshua, 7, who said his target audience would feel "creative" after hearing him perform at an electronic music festival like Tomorrowland. Joshua's father, the actor James Van Der Beek, watched proudly from the crowd. His daughter Olivia, 8, was also enrolled in the program. She later walked the runway in a gray gown inspired by "Beauty and the Beast." The Unincorporated Life started in 2007 as a skate, surf and snowboarding brand founded by two siblings, Shane and Summer Salazar. It slowly morphed into a "luxury entrepreneurial education" experience for children. The goal of the program is to offer children a mature creative outlet. "I, for sure, didn't want to have like small kid chairs and bright colors, that sort of kid company," Mr. Salazar said. "I wanted to make sure we were high fashion, that whatever we taught and whatever we did, it was always like, let's blow it out of proportion, let's take it to the next level." Mr. Salazar and his sister employ a team of instructors who help the students every step of the way. While the kids design outfits and choose their fabrics, the staff teach them how to sew and cut patterns. Richard Sun, the creative director of the Unincorporated Life, said: "When you've never worked with kids, you don't really know how kids really think. But then being around and working with so many kids, it always surprises me, their limit of not having a limit." He added: "They're always the first ones to create something new and innovative." And no experience of Hollywood would be complete without some glamour. Earlier in the week, Mr. Sun, the creative director, had taught students to model, telling them to "hold your poses and make it a show." The advice clearly stuck. Throughout the afternoon, young designers, D.J.s, makeup students and entrepreneurs alike strutted down the runway and struck several poses. Some kids blew kisses or flashed peace signs. Most of the boys dabbed. Priscilla, 6, who had paired a long, billowing red gown with sneakers, said that her dress didn't turn out exactly as she imagined but "it just ended like this and I really liked it." The mix of high and low fashion, she said from the stage, was inspired by Valentino couture. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When John Elder Robison was teaching his young son, Cubby, the finer points of etiquette almost two decades ago, he noted that in addition to "please" and "thank you," it's nice to include a salutation while making a request. "For example," he said, "if you wanted me to get you milk, you could say: 'Please, wondrous Dada, may I have some milk?' " The salutation never caught with Cubby. But by the last page of Mr. Robison's engaging new memoir, readers may have no problem hailing the author that way. Part parenting guide, part courtroom drama, part catalog of the travails and surprising joys of life with the high functioning form of autism called Asperger's syndrome, this memoir will offer all parents but particularly fathers a lot to think about. That its author was almost 40 when he learned he had Asperger's (a discovery he described in his first memoir, "Look Me in the Eye"), and that he eventually learned his son had the condition as well, make their story more remarkable, but do nothing to diminish its relevance even for readers with no personal experience of autism. Indeed, it can be hard to pinpoint what in the Robisons' relationship is shaped by Asperger's and what stems from their own idiosyncratic personalities. Cubby's name, for instance: Mr. Robison tells us that when his wife (now ex) was pregnant, "I sensed that the best names were not in books at all. For example, if we ended up with a girl, I favored naming her Thugwena, because I knew a girl named Thugwena would be tough and not hassled by bullies." For boys he liked Thugwald, or else "functional choices" like Kid or Boy. Is this an example of his deadpan humor, in evidence throughout, or is it his Asperger's blinding him to how others might perceive his actions? Just when you conclude that his tongue is firmly in his cheek, he drops a passing reference to the family cat, Small Animal. In the end, the boy was named Jack but Mr. Robison almost immediately rechristened him Cubby, short for Bear Cub, and the name stuck. During Cubby's childhood, his father spun tall tales for him seemingly without effort; their version of Santa operated out of Boston Harbor, and his elves delivered toys from unmarked vans. Father and son also explored the wonders of civil engineering, buying small amounts of stock in railroads and utilities before arranging "owners' " tours of train yards and power plants in a vintage Rolls Royce that Mr. Robison had restored at his luxury auto business. "I always hoped our adventures made Cubby a little smarter," he writes. "I also hoped he'd see something that caught his interest." Recognizing his son's mechanical aptitude, he figured he could guide him toward an engineering career, a plan he soon recognized was futile: "I could not make him want something just because I thought it was neat; he was manifestly different from me. The realization that he was not simply a newer version of me came to me over and over, and it was a surprise every time." In these passages and elsewhere, Mr. Robison seems a bit like the hip sea turtle in "Finding Nemo," letting his son range freely to discover his passions Cubby eventually becomes a gifted amateur chemist while keeping one alert eye on him. Yet as charming and wise as it is, the account too often reads like an extended Christmas letter, larded with proud anecdotes and written in prose like undersalted mashed potatoes: lumpy, comforting and bland. Where the book really takes off is in Cubby's surly adolescence, when he rejects his father's counsel and refuses to bend to authority. "He was so difficult," Mr. Robison writes, "he actually reminded me of myself." Every teenager (like every book reviewer) can appear autistic at times: the social awkwardness, the monomania, the solipsistic self regard. But when the teenager in question actually does turn out to have Asperger's, and when both parents do too the condition often runs in families those challenges can look insurmountable. It took Mr. Robison a surprisingly long time to catch on. "When I look back on those years, I'm shocked I didn't see it sooner," he writes. "I guess the adage 'It takes one to know one' isn't always true after all." Last year, in his excellent book "Far From the Tree," Andrew Solomon wrote about the difficulties facing families where one child has a "horizontal identity" an identity somehow foreign to that of his parents. But the Robisons' experience suggests that autism is in some ways even harder when it's vertical, since the parents in that case are subject to its limitations too. When Cubby starts dating, for instance, his father fails to recognize the clues. "It's also possible I didn't think to ask," he concedes, "because I'm autistic, and I often miss stuff like that." (The New York Times profiled Cubby now known as Jack and his girlfriend in a 2011 article about navigating love with Asperger's.) "Raising Cubby" becomes dire in its last few chapters, as the young man's increasingly sophisticated experiments with explosives finally lead him afoul of the law. After federal agents raid his basement laboratory, the district attorney files four felony charges, and the narrative settles into a gripping courtroom drama made more fraught by the confirmation of the defendant's Asperger's. "Cubby's obliviousness to what others might think had placed his liberty at risk," Mr. Robison writes. "If you are blind to certain signals from other people, it's not easy to create emotional insight where there is none. It's a problem I have wrestled with for years." On the evidence of this touching, sympathetic and often insightful book, he is doing better than he knows. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It's hard to imagine a time when Mahler's music was obscure. His Fifth Symphony alone keeps popping up. Jaap van Zweden chose it to make a statement last season, when he was the New York Philharmonic's music director designate. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has played it twice this year. And on Monday evening it showed up at Carnegie Hall, in a concert by the visiting Boston Symphony Orchestra. In a crowded field of Mahler, what do the Bostonians and their music director, Andris Nelsons, have to offer? The answer, at Carnegie at least: nothing more than the most by the book reading possible. To some degree, this should be expected of the Boston Symphony, an orchestra that is skilled but not showy. Throughout the Mahler, the brasses were in excellent form, and the strings never gave into hysteria. But Mr. Nelsons's measured account of this frenzied work which typically runs about 70 minutes but approached 80 on Monday often came off as timid, even ponderous. This respectable inoffensiveness might have been more satisfying had I not heard Susanna Malkki lead a mind opening performance of Mahler's Fifth with the Los Angeles Philharmonic earlier this month. The symphony is episodic; hearing it is like binge watching an entire season of a TV melodrama. But under Ms. Malkki's baton it had the cohesion of a novel. The Philharmonic musicians followed her faithfully, adding insight after insight to an overplayed work. And she brought out inner voices that retreated back into anonymity in Mr. Nelsons's interpretation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
In the turmoil of this spring's quarantine learning, one thing Pamela Ononiwu, of Fairfax County, Va., did not expect was that her three elementary school age children might actually be happier learning at home. Yet outside the academic pressures and social agonies of the daily school grind, they thrived so much so that she's planning to home school them full time this fall. "One child was experiencing headaches every day, and ever since being home, those tension headaches are nonexistent," she said. "That child is very happy." While some parents are counting down the days till they can get their kids back into the classroom, a growing number of families are thinking about home schooling this fall. For some, it seems like the most reasonable option during a pandemic. For others, it's because they've seen the advantages firsthand. Sign up for the Well Family newsletter About 1.69 million school age students are already home schooled in the United States, according to a 2016 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the last year available. Recently, however, home school organizations are seeing a surge of interest from parents. At the Denver based National Home School Association, inquiries during the first month after schools closed were primarily from parents who "were just lost and confused and wanted any sort of guidance they could get," said J. Allen Weston, the association's executive director. Now, Mr. Weston said he can't keep up with an onslaught of email and phone messages. "Interest has exploded," he said. Parents need to be aware that there is a difference between online learning at home, led by a teacher from the child's school, and home schooling, during which the parent becomes the educator. And parents must comply with the rules of the school district where they live. In New York City, for instance, parents must send a letter of intent to the school district, a home instruction plan and quarterly reports. But other states have fewer rules for home schooling. In Texas, only five subjects are required math, reading, spelling, grammar and good citizenship. Science and history are not mandatory, but are recommended for college bound students. To start, parents may need to officially withdraw a child from school to avoid truancy charges. In addition to following state education rules, parents need to choose a curriculum to be taught at home. Home schooling doesn't have to mean that the parent becomes an expert in every subject; if you dreaded chemistry, you can lean on online resources to teach it to your child. Many home school organizations are faith based or critical of the public school system in general, so parents need to vet the curriculum to make sure it's consistent with their educational goals and values for their children. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a nonprofit group that is pushing for more accountability in home schooling, is a useful resource for parents. Advocates of full time home schooling say it bears little resemblance to the online schooling that many students and families experienced as states locked down this spring as a result of the coronavirus crisis. With home schooling, students aren't tied to classroom deadlines to complete a math worksheet or history essay, and parents don't have to scramble to find art supplies to complete an assignment. Children can sleep as late as they need, and parents can assist with school work on their own terms and schedules. Home schooling doesn't even require all hands on deck supervision, the way crisis schooling sometimes did. "That's a common misperception, that when we're home schooling we're sitting all day at the table with our kids," said Zara Fagen, the Chicago based author of "Minimalist Homeschooling." A typical day for Ms. Fagen's family usually starts at the kitchen table around 10 a.m., where she might help the 4 year old with handwriting and ABCs, the 7 year old with phonics, and the 10 and 12 year olds with Japanese and math. Over lunch she reads a history book aloud, then segues into a group science experiment after lunch. (She has a Ph.D. in neurobiology, so that's a favorite.) By 2 p.m., though, the kids are all playing or working independently, and Ms. Fagen is focused on managing the wholesale flooring business she co owns with her husband. (She also squeezes in work early in the morning or late at night.) Even in regular school, students "don't get 100 percent of the teacher's attention 100 percent of the time," Ms. Fagen pointed out. In home school, she might help her 10 year old son find instructional YouTube videos about baseball catching techniques a subject he's passionate about then leave him to do the research himself. Maintaining time for her writing was one of the reasons Cindy Baldwin of Portland, Ore., a children's book author, initially balked at pulling her 7 year old daughter out of school for Covid 19, even though Ms. Baldwin has cystic fibrosis, which would make her particularly vulnerable. But for Ms. Baldwin, who was home schooled herself as a child, once schools shut down, it turned out that there were moments of delight in devising home school activities to augment virtual second grade, like hands on art projects and trips to a local nature park to learn about birds and their habitats. They have made the idea of home schooling full time this fall a bit more palatable. For parents like Ms. Baldwin, the interest in home schooling is mostly driven by a fear of sending their kids to schools that tend to be germ factories under the best of circumstances. "Is there really any way for schools to mitigate risk enough for a child of an extremely high risk person?" she asked. Complex guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommending, for instance, that schoolchildren wear masks and avoid sharing supplies, have provided little comfort. "You're not going to tell me that kids are going to follow those rules," said Crystal Beesley, of Taylor, Mich., who's planning to home school her two younger sons this fall. "The fact that they even want to suggest putting our kids back into schools with masks tells me it's not safe." But some parents, Mr. Weston said, say "that they will not send their kids back if they are made to wear masks." Whatever the motive for considering home schooling, here's how to make the decision. Ask yourself if you're ready How do your children learn best? What setting will give them the best possible education? Those questions are key, but so are slightly more practical considerations like: How will home schooling affect your family dynamic? How will it fit around your work? Can your family embrace a philosophy of all day education? As Amy Zimmel, of Simsbury, Conn., pondered keeping her 7 year old twins out of public school this fall, she messaged a home schooling acquaintance for help. "She's been super open with, 'Ask me any questions you have, this is what we tried, this is what worked, this is what didn't work.'" Ms. Zimmel has also tracked down online home schooling groups for her geographic area and for educational styles she's curious about. You can go religious or secular, buy scripted plug and play lesson plans, cobble together hands on projects, or join a home school co op to share teaching duties. Some school districts offer hybrid options that bring students into regular classrooms for part of the day. Virtual learning options have surged, as well, with choices as varied as Stanford's selective online high school or one off lessons from Khan Academy or Outschool. "Each scenario has pros and cons," Ms. Fagen said. "The question is, which pros and which cons are most valuable to us as a family?" When friends ask Rick Clark, the undergraduate admissions director at Georgia Tech and co author of "The Truth about College Admission," whether home schooled kids can get into good colleges, he says yes; in fact, he and his wife are considering home schooling their 12 and 9 year olds this fall. But he said that for home schooled teenagers to have the best shot at selective universities, they should either enroll in an accredited online high school, like the Keystone School or the University of Texas at Austin High School, or plan to take AP tests or SAT subject tests that demonstrate their competency. Know what success looks like In some states, home schooled children take regular standardized tests to make sure they're on track. But home schooling metrics can be a lot more personalized, like watching a first grader solo read a "Magic Tree House" book, or being trounced by your teenager in a debate about election year politics. As tricky and momentous as the decision to home school feels right now, "you're not joining the Army," said Brett Kennedy, an independent college counselor in Atlanta whose two children are home schooled. "You can home school for a little while and try it, and if it doesn't work, put them back in the public schools when this is over." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The price of gold rose above 1,500 an ounce on Wednesday for the first time, pushed higher by investor concerns about global inflation, government debt and turmoil in the Arab world. The prices of other precious metals, like silver and platinum, have also surged recently on what analysts call a flight to quality, when uncertainty about the economic and political outlook sends investors into assets that are perceived to be safest. "We're seeing a perfect storm for gold and silver prices," said Robin Bhar, a senior metals analyst in London for the French bank Credit Agricole. The list of factors that have supported the price of precious metals in recent weeks is long. It includes worries about the sustainability of European debt levels and whether countries like Greece will soon default; the weaker dollar; rising inflation in many parts of the world; continued unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, which has also pushed up oil prices; and concern over the United States budget, which also stirred fear in world stock markets earlier in the week. Stocks recovered somewhat Wednesday after strong earnings reports restored investor confidence, analysts said. Other factors that are helping precious metals include the buildup to the early autumn wedding season in India, during which families lavish gifts of gold on brides; the longstanding shortage of skilled labor and equipment at certain mines; and the increase in the number of mutual funds investing in gold. The recent popularity of gold based exchange traded funds has also propelled prices of the underlying metal by making it easier for more investors to trade in gold. Each share in a gold exchange traded fund represents part of an ounce of bullion, but it comes without the inconvenience of holding the metal or the risk of buying futures and options. Before such funds became popular in the middle of the last decade, individuals who wanted to invest in gold had to buy gold jewelry, coins or bullion and pay the high security and transaction costs. They could also invest in the shares of gold mining companies more of an arm's length exercise although the cost of investing in those companies has also risen recently. In addition to benefiting from increased demand for the underlying metal, gold and silver futures contracts are seen as attractive substitutes for paper investments, given that they can be redeemed for a physical commodity. "Gold is sometimes a currency, sometimes a commodity and sometimes a store of value," analysts at Merrill Lynch wrote recently. Gold for June delivery rose as high as 1,506.50 a troy ounce during trading in New York on Wednesday before settling at 1,498.90, a gain of 3.80 on the day. It was the first time that gold had breached the 1,500 level. While that represented the highest level in nominal terms, the inflation adjusted price was higher during the early 1980s, when it was well above 2,000 in current dollars. Silver prices also climbed on Wednesday. Silver for May delivery climbed 1.2 percent, to 44.46 a troy ounce in New York, after rising as high as 45.40, the highest price since 1980. A troy ounce is 31.1 grams, or 1.1 ounces. Although gold prices are likely to remain volatile and are vulnerable to retreat as investors take profits on their gains, few analysts are willing to bet on a sharp reversal in the near term. "As the purchasing power of workers in emerging markets increases, we see demand for gold as a commodity increasing over the next few years," the Merrill Lynch report said. In a research note published Friday, Goldman Sachs forecast a gold futures price of 1,690 an ounce in 12 months' time, driven primarily by the assumption that the Federal Reserve's continued stimulus policy, known as quantitative easing, would keep interest rates low in the United States, bolstering demand for the metal as an investment. The market for silver, which Mr. Bhar of Credit Agricole described as a "poor man's gold," is far more illiquid than gold. Mr. Bhar said several hedge funds appeared to have been "bullying" the price higher in recent sessions. Prices of palladium and platinum have also climbed. Less valuable base metals like copper, tin, aluminum and zinc, which are used in large quantities in construction and heavy industries, have also climbed since last year, after plummeting during the financial crisis. But among these commodities, there have been more divergences, according to Jim Lennon, head of commodity research in London for Macquarie Securities. Markets for commodities like coking coal, used to make steel, iron ore and copper have been tight, he said, driven by inventory accumulation from producers and concerns about output bottlenecks at mines in Africa, Australia, Brazil, Chile and China. For other base metals like aluminum, zinc and nickel, supply and demand appear better matched, he added. Overhanging many of these markets remained the question of China, and whether its roaring economy might soon cool down. Many metals' traders and analysts have had to become China watchers, poring over the economic data issued by that country and studying accumulations of stocks in Chinese warehouses. During the first quarter, China's economy expanded 9.7 percent from a year earlier. Investment and consumer spending in China have remained robust despite the government's effort to temper growth through interest rate increases and curbs on bank lending. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Aretha Franklin, who passed away on Thursday, sang with a quality that has proved irresistible to filmmakers and TV showrunners: intensity. It doesn't matter if the song is up tempo or a ballad the range and depth of her catalog makes it a rich resource for directors. To invoke one of her beloved hits for a scene the soft passion of "I Say a Little Prayer," the aching heartbreak of "Ain't No Way" or the thundering spirit of "Respect," just to name a few is to call upon the Queen to carry the weight of the moment. And there have been many onscreen moments heightened by her singular voice. In "Moonlight," Barry Jenkins's Oscar winning drama, "One Step Ahead" appears twice as Mr. Jenkins himself has noted, it's the only song repeated and the stirring melancholy of the track fits both scenes beautifully. The first time, it's heard when Little (Alex Hibbert), a young boy, returns home to his neglectful mother, who is entertaining a man. The lyrics "I'm only one step ahead of heartbreak" underlie the isolation Little feels as his mother and the man barely acknowledge him, leaving him alone in the living room. When the song returns in the film's third act, that sad solitude, now embodied in Black (Trevante Rhodes), the adult version of Little, is accompanied with a small bit of hope the possibility that Black might reconnect with a significant figure from his past. "One Step Ahead" cues up as soon as Black enters the diner where Kevin (Andre Holland) works, and lingers as he makes his way to his seat. "Your warm breath on my shoulder/Keeps reminding me that it's too soon to forget you," Ms. Franklin sings, just as the camera cuts to a close up of Kevin recognizing his old friend sitting right in front of him. It's a powerful moment that encapsulates the film's themes of memory, longing and regret. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Those emotions were often present in Ms. Franklin's work, and she was a master at evoking them. In the 1995 film "Waiting to Exhale," her wail washes over a scene between Bernadine (Angela Bassett) and James (Wesley Snipes), two strangers who have a deeply intimate connection but are hindered from pursuing a relationship. (She's reeling from a painful divorce; he is trying to cope with losing his terminally ill wife.) Ms. Franklin's vocals on "It Hurts Like Hell" which convey the pain of being unable to admit when a relationship isn't working soundtrack a heartbreaking scene of James and Bernadine spooning in bed together, fully clothed. The first time a track by Ms. Franklin appears in Shonda Rhimes's "Scandal," the scene is bleak. Ms. Rhimes lets the singer's cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" play out as Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and her team mourn the death of one of their colleagues. There's little dialogue laid over the song, as the characters' sense of loss mirrors the enormity of Ms. Franklin's vocals: "Sail on, silver girl/Sail on by/Your time has come to shine." Martin Scorsese has used the power of Ms. Franklin's voice in more sinister contexts. In "Goodfellas," he turned to "Baby I Love You," a mid tempo declaration of affection, for a montage in which Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) details his relationship with his mistress, Janice (Gina Mastrogiacomo). As the camera follows Janice around the chic penthouse Henry is paying for, the song's funky groove complements their flirtations and sexual tension. Yet in the middle of this sequence is a cut to Henry and his pals viciously beating Janice's boss for disciplining her at work. "Baby I Love You" chugs along, and the juxtaposition of the violent imagery and the soulful music is jarring. Even more unsettling is hearing "Do Right Woman Do Right Man" in Mr. Scorsese's remake of the thriller "Cape Fear." In one scene, the sadistic criminal Max Cady (Robert De Niro), calls the teenage Danielle (Juliette Lewis), pretending to be her new teacher. Max hangs upside down, batlike, and gains her trust by promising to serve as her confidant through the pangs of adolescence. "You can use all those fears to draw upon and learn," he says, before playing her the chorus of Ms. Franklin's anthem about men being respectful in their relationships with women. It's a weird scene used to reinforce just how twisted and dangerous Max is. Ms. Franklin's music doesn't always accompany gloomy or ominous moments, however. Her soulful rendition of the theme song to "A Different World" played for four seasons of the 1990s sitcom, her booming voice forever connected to the images of Whitley Gilbert, Dwayne Wayne and the show's other colorful characters. One could probably compose a lengthy montage made up entirely of (mostly) white film and TV characters singing and dancing exuberantly to hits like "Chain of Fools." And the notable fictional superfan Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) found comfort in "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" no less than three times during the original run of the sitcom. Yet when it comes to Ms. Franklin's legacy onscreen, her turn in "Blues Brothers" may loom the largest. That movie, a "Saturday Night Live" sketch turned feature length musical starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, features uncomfortable exchanges between its white stars and the black artists they encounter; musicians like Cab Calloway, Ray Charles and James Brown exist only to perform a hit and then disappear once the (thin) plot resumes. Ms. Franklin's performance of "Think" is the best of them: towering and exhilarating. Flanked by background dancers, she confronts with gusto her man, who plans to desert her and the diner she owns to join the Blues Brothers. It doesn't matter that she isn't singing the song live the soulful intensity still shines through, brightly. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Thursday's game between the Denver Broncos and the Jets was close right up until the end. It had some huge plays. It had an exciting finish. But to say the game a 37 28 victory that gave the Broncos (1 3) their first win and has the Jets a quarter of the way to 0 16 was a good start to Week 4 would be to ignore the quality of the competition, and all of the sloppy play that happened between the various highlights. With that in mind, here is the game condensed into the parts of it that were truly worth watching. You can watch them all, including replays, in about 2 minutes 51 seconds, with some commentary mixed in from LeBron James and Patrick Mahomes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In the 1980s, doctors began seeing former polio patients complaining of extreme fatigue, muscle weakness, debilitating joint pain, breathing difficulty and intolerance of cold. Dr. Perry was a leader in tracing the symptoms to the overuse of muscles and nerves in combating and recovering from polio. The condition became known as post polio syndrome. "The people just push themselves more than most of us," she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1985. "They've put up with signs of strain to live a normal life. I always say people who had polio are overachievers, because so many of them are out to prove they can do just as well as those who didn't have it. But now, the strain has accumulated, and tissues are aging prematurely." She traveled the world speaking about the syndrome, offering a simple remedy: rest. Jacquelin Perry was born on May 31, 1918, in Denver and was raised in Los Angeles. "I knew at about age 10 I wanted to be a doctor," she said in a speech in 2000. "I read every medical book in the Los Angeles library." She earned a bachelor's degree in physical education from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1940 and then joined the Army and trained to be a physical therapist. The Army assigned her to a hospital in Hot Springs, Ark., where polio patients were treated. She earned a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1950, as one of seven women in her class of 76. After completing her residency in San Francisco, she was recruited by the Rancho rehabilitation center to start its physical therapy program for patients with polio and other diseases. Dr. Perry was an active surgeon until a brain artery blockage forced her to stop operating. She then devoted much of her time to studying the biomechanics of walking. As part of her research, she investigated how muscles and joints behave when spinal cord injury patients propel themselves in wheelchairs, and how below the knee amputees are able to walk with prosthetic feet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Hungry to Return to the Rhythms of New York City Back in 1983, Deborah Prymas and her then husband bought a two bedroom, two bathroom co op in a prime location on West End Avenue in the 70s. It cost them 170,000. Two decades later, her husband left. Ms. Prymas, now 66, remained in the co op with the couple's daughter, whose school and friends were nearby. Their apartment, which included a terrace and a panoramic Hudson River view, had structural issues that needed to be fixed before it could be sold. Two years ago, with repairs finally complete, they sold it for 2.5 million to a buyer who combined it with the unit next door. By the time taxes were paid, her share was "not as much as it seems," said Ms. Prymas, who grew up in the Pigtown neighborhood of Baltimore and originally came to New York to attend the Pratt Institute. Her apartment was far too big. She disliked its wall to wall carpeting and detested the suburban lifestyle. "Having to get in a car to do anything was making me crazy," she said. "Having that mechanical cocoon is really alarming to me. I don't like driving. There were tons of SUVs and trucks." She couldn't wait to return to New York. A good friend lived in Washington Heights, but Ms. Prymas, a retired art director, found that area too far north. And "it is so hilly up there it is exhausting to walk," she said. She could no longer afford the Upper West Side and was happy to try a new neighborhood. She aimed for a dog friendly Upper East Side apartment for up to 2,300. (Her elderly poodle, Belle de Jour, is named for the Catherine Deneuve movie.) In Frederick, "I felt so disassociated and isolated," Ms. Prymas said. "I really wanted a busy street." She contacted an office of Halstead Property, which referred her to Rodica L. Balan, a licensed agent there. "She was not an easy case because she had no job and no income," Ms. Balan said. Ms. Balan targeted rentals available in condo and co op buildings. "I was looking specifically for absentee landlords and investment units," she said, since such apartments were more likely to have flexible financial requirements. Because of the need for board approval, they did not require immediate occupancy, which was a plus. "She wanted to make sure she had something in New York before she gave notice in Maryland," Ms. Balan said. "She was very nervous. She heard stories about scams and was convinced that something was going to go wrong." In a large 1911 rental building in the low 80s, a studio with high ceilings had two windows that faced a brick wall. The bathroom was luxurious its big window was frosted but the kitchen was no more than a nook with a refrigerator, a sink and a stove. "She was intimidated by the building a little bit," Ms. Balan said. "It was too grand." The studio was also, at 2,300, at the top of her price range. Ms. Prymas liked a 2,200 studio at Salem House, a 1964 condo building in the low 80s near East End Avenue. Ms. Balan was familiar with the building and thought Ms. Prymas would easily qualify. But at about 400 square feet, the studio was too small, though she saw others that were even smaller. "It drives me crazy to have someone do nothing but open the door all day," she said. "People don't even realize there's a human being. It's better to have a doorman better utilized, busy with packages or taking care of mail and problems in the building." The apartment had two big windows, a small but functional kitchen and an unfortunately blue tiled bathroom, which she called "Tiffany blue." She could section off the sleeping alcove with a curtain. The street was sufficiently busy with plenty of construction outside but the apartment faced a quiet garden in back. The approval process with the board was grueling. "She did have the liquid assets, but there was no history of rental, no job, no guarantor," Ms. Balan said. The building required plenty of documentation, including vaccination records for the dog, who also needed a New York dog license. The broker fee was 15 percent of a year's rent, or a little less than 4,000. Ms. Prymas arrived in the summer, thrilled to be back. Her old neighborhood on the Upper West Side now feels like the country to her, she said, with more trees and a wider river. "I love talking to people in New York," she said. "All the people are so interesting here. They bring so much to my life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In the aftermath of Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, analysts fiercely debated the role of the approximately six million voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but shifted their support to Mr. Trump in 2016. Democratic strategists also had to worry about their future behavior: Was 2016 a temporary blip or were these voters gone forever? With newly available data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study survey, the largest publicly available election survey, we can now analyze what happened with these Obama Trump voters in 2018 and what that might portend for Mr. Trump's re election campaign. To understand the potential ramifications of Obama Trump voters in 2020, it's worth understanding how they voted in 2018. Among those who voted, three quarters stuck with the Republican Party. But Democrats did win back about one fifth of the Obama Trump group in 2018, which would amount to a net swing of about 1.5 million votes. While the idiosyncratic governing style of Mr. Trump may have been one key factor in bringing Obama Trump voters back into the Democratic fold, it wasn't the only reason. It's true that most Obama Trump voters who stuck with the Republican Party in 2018 strongly approved of the job Mr. Trump was doing as president, but interestingly even half of those who flipped back to the Democratic side at least somewhat approved of Mr. Trump. Democrats won back a significant share of Obama Trump voters not because those voters disliked Mr. Trump, but in spite of the fact that many actually approved of him. Instead, these voters appeared to be drawn back toward the Democrats by some of the party's bread and butter issues, and in spite of others. On issues like gun control, health care and the environment, these voters look remarkably like the Democratic Party's base those who voted for Obama in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a Democratic House candidate in 2018. Eighty four percent of Obama Trump voters who voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018 want to ban assault rifles, compared to 92 percent of the Democratic base. By contrast, 57 percent of Obama Trump voters who stayed with Republicans in 2018 support an assault weapons ban (which has far less support among the Republican base). Medicare for all is surprisingly popular among all Obama Trump voters, but especially those who voted for Democrats in 2018. Eighty three percent of those who switched back to the Democratic Party in 2018 support Medicare for all, nearly as high as the 93 percent support the policy achieves among the most solidly blue Democratic voting bloc. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Christmas dance entertainment in New York is always dominated by two companies: New York City Ballet in "The Nutcracker," which opened Friday at the David H. Koch Theater, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at City Center, which begins Wednesday. Both seasons run through Jan. 3. There is an impressive number of world premieres at Ailey this season. Wednesday's gala begins with "Open Door," a new creation by Ronald K. Brown; Thursday's program opens with Rennie Harris's new "Exodus"; Friday's ends with "Awakening," the first new work made for the company by the artistic director Robert Battle since he took the helm in 2011. Other premieres follow in later weeks. Mr. Battle surely seeks to put his own stamp on a company that is older than he is; and he must hope that the devoted Ailey audience (a conservative one in its way, never long happy without a fix of good old "Revelations") will enlarge its tastes. I find myself hopeful. Maybe this 2015 16 season will enrich the Ailey recipe. The choreographer Tere O'Connor is a downtown guru to some, a loudly opinionated troublemaker to others. What matters is that, working in pure movement, sometimes he makes dances of rare subtlety, and helps skilled performers to reveal further facets of themselves. His new work for 12 dancers opens Wednesday at the Kitchen and runs through Dec. 12; it's called "The Goodbye Studies." The new score is by James Baker, Mr. O'Connor's collaborator for 30 years. Five other choreographers, all from different backgrounds, are showing work in New York this week. The Brooklyn Academy of Music will be the scene of two new works: The Berlin based Sasha Waltz presents "Continu," opening on Friday at the Howard Gilman Opera House, and on Wednesday, at Fisher Hall in the Fishman Space, Souleymane Badolo (born in Burkina Faso, based in Brooklyn) introduces "Yimbegre," with Burkinabe drumming by Mamoudou Konate. Andrea Miller's Gallim Dance (for the first time accompanied by live music) presents a world premiere at the Joyce from Thursday to Sunday ("Program contains nudity" the theater's website notes.); Pavel Zustiak and his Palissimo Company perform his new "Custodians of Beauty" at New York Live Arts on the same dates. And Anneke Hansen presents the world premiere of her full length "hymn" from Wednesday to Saturday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Gateway Movies offers ways to begin exploring directors, genres and topics in film by examining a few streaming movies. Last month, I found myself a dissenting voice on one of the summer's most acclaimed films, "Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets." At first glance, the movie appears to be a documentary about the final day of a Las Vegas area dive bar called Roaring '20s. But the directors, the brothers Bill and Turner Ross, never reveal that this setup was contrived. Although the bar's patrons are real people, hanging out without a script, they were in effect cast by the directors, with the expectation (implicit or explicit) that they would behave as they would in that real situation. The actual Roaring '20s bar, which wasn't closing, was near New Orleans. To the movie's fans, the deception is forgivable. "Reviews hung up on documentary veracity are missing the point," tweeted my friend Scott Tobias, who also contributes to The New York Times, adding, "Authenticity and artifice coexist all the time in movies, and this film proves something special can come out of deliberately mingling the two." I don't disagree. In a sense, nearly all films balance competing factors: the camera's lens, which carries at least the promise of capturing unmitigated reality; the situations, real or manufactured, that take place while that camera is rolling; the decidedly nonobjective people controlling what is shot; and additional manipulations of editing, effects and music that occur after shooting. Critics tend to hand wave deceptions when they like the results and to count them against a film if they don't. (I plead guilty.) Debates about the virtues of fakery have raged as long as cinema has existed, and it's worth taking a look at two ostensibly nonfiction films to understand the issues at play. "Man of Aran": Stream it on the Criterion Channel; rent or buy it on Amazon. "F for Fake": Stream it on the Criterion Channel, HBO Max and Kanopy; rent or buy it on Amazon and iTunes. Robert J. Flaherty remains best known for "Nanook of the North" (1922), a pioneering work both of cinematic ethnography and of suspect nonfiction filmmaking an ostensible introduction to the lives of Indigenous inhabitants of Northern Canada for which Flaherty's Inuit collaborators helped stage scenes. Flaherty's later "Man of Aran" (1934), a portrait of life on the Aran Islands off Ireland's western coast, is worthy of similar skepticism. Still, its goals are more poetic than expository: Real or staged, "Man of Aran" is simply one of the medium's most dazzling pictorial experiences, and confronted with the extraordinary contrast of its black and white photography as waves pound the rocky coast in the violent weather of the finale it is simply difficult to care about how the film was planned. Those are real people in a real boat, about to be swallowed by cresting waters or crashed against the cliffs. Besides, at least compared with "Nanook," "Man of Aran" is upfront about its liberties. It opens with a cast list ("a man of Aran," "his wife," "their son") an implicit acknowledgment that this purported chronicle of a family living away from modern comforts is, strictly speaking, a portrait of people playing a family. Documentaries would have to wait for a later era for equipment that could truly capture sound on the fly, and the Flaherty biographer Paul Rotha notes that the "snatches of speech and the general sound effects" in "Man of Aran" were supplemental, created at Gainsborough Studios in England. The dialogue incidental brogue heavy back and forths isn't really meant to be understood, and close scrutiny of the images will reveal that the words aren't synchronized with lips. Even the gentle noise of lapping waves is a sort of illusion. A frequent point of contention with the film is that Flaherty depicts the hunting of basking sharks an activity that Graham Greene, among others, wrote that the subjects had to be taught. Here, though, is another case where close attention to Flaherty's editing reveals his sleights of hand. To amplify the suspense of a hunting sequence, he presents rapid fire cuts of unspooling rope, creating what is probably an artificial sense of speed. But does it help if, unlike in "Man of Aran" (or "Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets"), a film ultimately levels with you and pulls back the curtain on its methods? A natural test case would be Orson Welles's "F for Fake" (first shown in 1973). To avoid spoilers, you might want to watch it before reading further. A deathtrap of an essay film in which you can never truly trust what you see, "F for Fake" dispenses information in a disorienting flurry. On the surface, the movie's main subjects are originality in art, the fallibility of experts and the pointlessness of assessing authorship, at least when confronted with a masterpiece. (As many have noted of the film, it may have been Welles's oblique response to Pauline Kael, who in 1971 challenged his contributions to "Citizen Kane," offering Herman J. Mankiewicz, the other screenwriter on the film with Welles, as its true auteur.) Other than Welles, the two principal figures in "F for Fake," fittingly, are professional charlatans. One is Elmyr de Hory, regarded as one of the most convincing art forgers ever. The other is Clifford Irving, de Hory's biographer and a fabulist in his own right: He gained international infamy for publishing a book on Howard Hughes based on encounters that never happened. "F for Fake" opens with Welles performing magic tricks a more or less open acknowledgment that he plans to make the audience his mark. This is a "film about trickery," he explains, and even confronts viewers with their own potential to be misdirected in a sequence that shows the actress Oja Kodar, his partner in later years, turning heads as she walks the city streets. Welles can make you look this way and that way, too even if you should be looking elsewhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Waffling between anger and pathos, dry humor and dead eyed violence, "Fatman" feels tonally befuddled. As fans of HBO's "Vice Principals" will attest, Goggins can dance on this sort of knife edge with ease, but the script (by the directors) isn't sharp enough to support his or Gibson's efforts or even smoothly incorporate its theme of reverberating childhood trauma. A more substantive and enjoyable critique is found among the elves, a multiethnic crew known only by numbers and fed solely on carbs and sugar. Awed by their efficiency and voluntary sleep deprivation, a military captain can only gaze approvingly on what seems less like Santa's workshop than his very own sweatshop. Fatman Rated R for guns, drugs and an unhealthy supply of cookies. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It is encouraging to see the gun owning community confront the extreme danger of a firearm in the hands of a person at risk of suicide. The article explores a range of strategies for gun dealers and owners to keep guns away from those who might do harm to themselves, and mentions an effective solution when voluntary measures fail: extreme risk protection orders, commonly known as "red flag" laws. These laws provide a means of last resort for removing guns from an individual who is at risk of imminent harm to himself or others. Connecticut was the first state to pass an extreme risk law, in 1999. In Connecticut, a study found that for every 10 to 20 protection orders issued, one suicide was averted. Because suicide can be impulsive and guns are far more lethal than other means, these laws lower death by suicide over all, not just by guns. Extreme risk protection laws include due process protections that protect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners. No court has struck down one of these laws, despite opposition by the National Rifle Association. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Harris County has enlisted the help of the community to drop off dead birds for testing. Houston Braces for Another Brush With the Peril of Zika HOUSTON With 4.5 million people in a hot, muggy metropolis built atop a bayou, America's fourth largest city, Houston, is a perfect target for the mosquito borne Zika virus. But it may be better prepared than any other urban center to stop an outbreak. The city last year increased its mosquito control budget by 33 percent. Officials are testing new high tech traps and have plans to release genetically modified mosquitoes that produce short lived offspring, reducing the population. Should the virus start spreading here, officials are prepared to follow Miami's example, beginning aerial spraying and house to house inspections to clear standing water in which mosquitoes breed. "We're much better prepared this year than we were last year," said Mustapha Debboun, mosquito control director of Harris County, which includes Houston. Almost everywhere, Year 2 of Zika is looking much less threatening than Year 1. But the risk posed by this virus is far from gone. According to the Pan American Health Organization, the number of infections has declined precipitously in the Americas, except for Peru, Ecuador and Argentina. Zika infections are down by more than 90 percent in the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico. Cases of Guillain Barre syndrome paralysis, linked to infection with the virus, are also down to pre epidemic levels. Fewer infections overseas should mean fewer travelers returning to the United States with live virus in their blood, reducing the likelihood of an outbreak here. Dr. Scott C. Weaver, a Zika expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in nearby Galveston, described himself as "cautiously optimistic" that the epidemic was fading out. Still, he warned, "it's premature to conclude that the danger is over." Data is limited on infections just over the border in Mexico, and the rainy season prime time for mosquito breeding has just begun in Central America and the Caribbean. Still, it's a far cry from the situation last year, when a surge of babies born with abnormally small heads in Brazil sowed an international panic. The birth defects were shown to be linked to infection with the Zika virus, transmitted to pregnant women by common household mosquitoes. As the epidemic crept northward with warming weather, drug companies began testing more than 20 vaccines. The Obama White House fought a bitter battle with congressional Republicans over emergency funding, and the Gulf Coast, where similar mosquitoes had previously caused outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya, braced for the worst. Ultimately, the country recorded about 5,100 cases, of which about 4,800 were acquired by travelers overseas. Florida reported 218 cases of locally acquired Zika infection, however, mostly in Miami. Texas recorded only six, all in the Brownsville area, abutting Mexico. Thus far, 216 babies with severe Zika related birth defects have been born or have died in the womb, 88 of them in the United States and 128 in its territories, mostly in Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As winter returned, the disease receded from the headlines. This summer, there is no panic in cities like Houston, only uncertainty. Some pregnant women here are nervous; others are not, despite the city's efforts to sound the alarm with posters, movie theater ads and other public messages. Jessenia Rocha, 31, a behavioral health representative at Legacy Community Health, is pregnant with her fifth child. Recently she drove 13 hours to San Luis Potosi, Mexico, for her great grandmother's funeral. "My doctor said, 'Don't go,' but I had to be there," she said. "So my doctor said, 'O.K., then wear long sleeves and use repellent.'" Ms. Rocha stayed only two hours, then drove straight back. Krystle McConico, 31, a gospel singer expecting her first baby, worries not at all. "Two of my close friends are also pregnant, and we haven't had one conversation about Zika," she said. "My physician didn't mention it at my first appointment." Her job has taken her to Africa and Asia without problems. Some of her fearlessness may stem from her belief that God will protect her, she said. "Also," she added, "mosquitoes just don't like me. I can sit on the porch with my mother and father, and they get bitten all over and I get nothing." Every day at dawn, workers hoist nearly invisible nets in local parks to capture birds for blood sampling. (West Nile and several other dangerous viruses are found in birds, although Zika is not.) More than 400 mosquito traps are scattered around the county. Some are baited with dry ice, which emits carbon dioxide, the element of human breath that draws mosquitoes. Some traps exude the lactic acid ammonia mix of human sweat, while still others use water to attract egg laying females. Officials are also testing high tech experimental traps made by Microsoft that can tell mosquito species apart. The county has its own virology laboratory, including a 300,000 P.C.R. machine acquired specifically for Zika testing. The biggest weakness in the county's defenses is that officials still do "passive surveillance" for cases of Zika infection meaning they must wait for doctors to report them. Not every doctor who sees a rash and red eyes thinks of Zika. Test results can take weeks, and doctors often fail to alert the health department to new cases, even though they are legally required to do so. Months could elapse before the city realizes the virus has appeared. A recent paper in Nature concluded that Zika actually arrived in Miami in March or April, but was not detected until July. Dr. David E. Persse, Houston's chief medical officer, said he would prefer to do "active surveillance" by, for example, testing all blood specimens taken in local hospitals. "But there's no money for it," he said. More than 60 percent of the counties on the Gulf Coast and Mexican border, the areas likeliest to see a Zika outbreak, are rated "in need of improvement" for mosquito control, said Dr. Oscar Alleyne, public health adviser to the National Association of County and City Health Officials. The 1.1 billion in Zika funding that Congress passed last year runs out in September. The Trump administration seeks to cut the C.D.C. budget by 1.2 billion, to what the agency had 20 years ago. Many county health departments depend on C.D.C. grants, and they have already been "eviscerated," said Claude Jacob, president of the health officials' association. Some 43,000 public health jobs were cut over the last decade. Money is not the only obstacle to turning back the virus. If there is no intense epidemic somewhere in the Western Hemisphere this summer, it will be hard to test any candidate Zika vaccine, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. For a valid study, between 2,500 and 5,000 people ideally in several locations must get either a vaccine or a placebo. "If we get a big, big outbreak, we can get an answer about the vaccine's efficacy by mid 2018," he said. "If we don't, it may take till 2020 or 2021." With fewer infections, it may take years to evaluate a Zika vaccine; experts fear that drug makers will lose interest, as they did in producing a vaccine against West Nile. (Although there are no human West Nile vaccines, three are licensed for horses.) The virus is a great threat to pregnant women, however, and Dr. Fauci said he hoped there would be enough potential customers in middle income countries like Brazil and Mexico, along with wealthy American tourists and business travelers, to keep vaccine research going. At least one concern is gone: It now seems clear that the Zika virus will not sweep through Africa or Asia, damaging tens of thousands of babies, as had been feared. Since Zika was found in Africa in 1947 and detected in spots in Asia in the 1950s, scientists suspect it has circulated silently on those continents for decades, probably misdiagnosed as mild dengue or other rash causing fevers. If so, most girls may get it in childhood and become immune before entering their childbearing years. If the Zika virus does reach Houston, it may not spread rapidly for another reason: Though huge, the city is not dense. Real estate is so cheap that even the poorest neighborhoods, like East Aldine and the Fifth Ward, have some grass around each house. Population density is far lower than in the slums of Brazil or Mexico, where a mosquito can find many victims living almost on top of one another. Officials do what they can to keep Houstonians on guard. The county's "Skeeter School Bus" visits schools and playgrounds to enlist children in the cause, since they are effective at nagging their parents to empty birdbaths and clean gutters, said Dr. Umair A. Shah, public health director of Harris County. But a sense of fatigue is pervasive. "Last year, as soon as you turned on TV Zika! As soon as you got to work Zika!" Ms. Rocha said. "This year, I haven't seen anything." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The documentary "On the President's Orders" opens with a clip of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines saying in 2016 that he would be "happy to slaughter" the country's drug addicts. He approvingly compares taking that action to Hitler's genocide of Jews. A title card tells us that a year later, Duterte, bowing to outside pressure, promised to cut down on extrajudicial killings of suspected drug users, actions that human rights groups have attributed to police and vigilantes. Enter Jemar Modequillo , a new police chief said to have been brought in to change the situation in Caloocan , a district of Manila that the film identifies as the epicenter of violence. His goal, a captain in his unit tells us, is to decrease killings and increase arrests. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
With a trunk that produces 110 decibel blasts that can be heard for miles, elephants are well equipped for long distance communication. But it turns out they may be letting their feet do some of the talking, too. Using tools designed for detecting earthquakes, researchers found that different elephant activities walking, running, snorting, grunting create distinct "seismic signatures" in the ground. In some cases, according to a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology, these vibrations travel farther through the ground than they could through the air, giving the animals a variety of powerful methods for long distance communication. "It's not surprising that walking affects their vibrations, but they're so big that their snorts and grunts also generate very low frequency vibrations," said Beth Mortimer, a biologist at both the Universities of Oxford and Bristol and lead author of the study. "And by monitoring the vibrations through the ground, we could determine what the elephants were doing." Earlier studies have shown that elephants may be monitoring ground vibrations through their bodies, a trait more commonly associated with small creatures like scorpions and insects. For example, elephants have been observed fleeing for higher ground in the moments before distant tsunamis, and a mother elephant who feels threatened will stomp on the ground to warn others away. By suggesting that elephants not only cause distinct vibrations with different activities, but can perceive the difference from great distances, the research expands the possibilities of what the animals may be communicating. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
President Obama is proposing a financial aid overhaul that for the first time would tie colleges' eligibility for campus based aid programs Perkins loans, work study jobs and supplemental grants for low income students to the institutions' success in improving affordability and value for students, administration officials said. Under the plan, which the president outlined on Friday morning in a speech at the University of Michigan, the amount available for Perkins loans would grow to 8 billion, from the current 1 billion. The president also wants to create a 1 billion grant competition, along the lines of the Race for the Top program for elementary and secondary education, to reward states that take action to keep college costs down, and a separate 55 million competition for individual colleges to increase their value and efficiency. The administration also wants to give families clearer information about costs and quality, by requiring colleges and universities to offer a "shopping sheet" that makes it easier to compare financial aid packages and for the first time compiling post graduate earning and employment information to give students a better sense of what awaits them. These proposed changes would all require Congressional approval. With student loan debt now outpacing credit card debt and becoming a rallying point in the Occupy movement the administration has for some time promised to address the issue, knowing its potency with voters in an election year. The president met privately with a group of college presidents in December, and has been collecting examples of colleges that have kept their costs from spiraling upward. In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Mr. Obama turned up the heat, alluding to the plan without fleshing out details. "Let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down," he said. Even without specifics, that raised hackles in higher education circles. "When we hear things like a shift in federal aid, it causes our antennas to go straight up," said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education. "Anything that smacks of price controls is of great concern on many levels, especially at a time when states are cutting their budgets and if the effect of this is to limit tuition, what else would you call it but price controls?" Ms. Broad said that she and university presidents across the nation shared the president's commitment to affordable higher education, but that it was not so easy to keep tuition down at a time when institutions must also absorb state budget cuts, increase enrollment and bolster financial aid for the growing number of families who need it. The administration officials who spoke about the proposals did so on the condition of anonymity, and on the condition that details not be shared until publication. They stressed that expanding the pool of money for Perkins loans would not require new tax dollars, since those loans are repaid with interest. And even without new money, they said, it would be possible to change the formulas under which colleges receive funds for work study jobs and Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants at nearly 1 billion, the second largest federal grant program for low income students, after Pell grants. While Pell grants and Stafford loans are larger programs than the ones the administration wants to change, they are federally administered and can be used by students at any college. In contrast, the campus based programs the administration is proposing to change are administered by individual schools, whose financial aid offices have substantial discretion. About 1,700 colleges and universities now offer Perkins loans, a number that would increase to more than 4,000 in the new proposal. While administration officials said the Perkins changes would have no impact on the federal budget, other parts of the plan like doubling the number of work study jobs, and keeping the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans at the current 3.4 percent would be expensive. The officials said the current financial aid system rewards colleges for longevity in the program, and provides perverse incentives for keeping college costs high. Under their new proposal, they said, colleges would instead be rewarded for lower net tuition prices; restrained tuition growth; enrolling and graduating low income students; and providing education and training that help graduates get jobs and repay their loans. Some education experts, however, worry that by tying aid to costs, changes like those proposed might instead lead to lower quality college education, with larger class sizes and greater use of adjuncts. Furthermore, they worry that public institutions suffering the most from declines in state support and therefore under the most pressure to raise tuition could be further hurt by losing access to some federal aid. As with the original Race to the Top grants, in which the Obama administration used federal money to leverage its education agenda, the White House hopes to use the new college competition to spur systemic state reform that would reduce costs and encourage college completion. To win money, officials said, states would have to maintain their funding levels for higher education and align their entry and exit standards with secondary education and community colleges to help promote graduation on time. The competition for individual institutions would reward colleges or nonprofit organizations that boost productivity through such approaches as course redesign that exploits new technology; early college preparation that reduces the need for remedial work; and competency based approaches to college credit that replace the traditional model of rewarding hours spent in class. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
"If you wait long enough, what is admired will be relegated to history's dustbin," wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, "and if you wait even longer, it will be rescued and restored." That cycle has repeated more than once for Paul Rudolph (1918 1997), one of the most celebrated architects of the 1960s, whose reputation keeps oscillating between fame and neglect. His hulking Yale Art and Architecture Building in New Haven, Conn., completed in 1963, put Brutalism on the map in the United States; his houses, with boggling layouts, were the height of Johnson era chic. Then his star fell, and clients and critics dismissed his hard edge slabs for postmodern wackiness. By this century, his buildings were most often in the news when facing the wrecking ball. But time is the best critic. Brutalism is back in vogue, and Rudolph, born a hundred years ago in October, is back in the matte Lucite frame. A pair of exhibitions now on view in Manhattan offers a lesson in the vagaries of architectural taste and a reintroduction to a master of solid and light. The show "Paul Rudolph: The Personal Laboratory," through Dec. 30, concentrates on the architect's residences, which is fitting given the location: the top floors of the Modulightor Building, a townhouse he built toward the end of his life on East 58th Street, which houses a light fixtures firm he co founded. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Some two decades ago, New York City began a huge cleanup of its downtrodden theater district, vastly improving the fortunes of the pedestrian clogged Times Square neighborhood. In recent months, that progress has gone into high gear, with rents reaching new highs and several redevelopment projects proceeding. Reflecting rising demand, asking retail rents topped 2,400 a square foot in the fourth quarter of 2012, a jump of nearly 42 percent from a year earlier and second only to rents on Fifth Avenue, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate brokerage. Ground is scheduled to be broken this year on an 800 million, 39 story hotel and retail complex at 701 Seventh Avenue, at the northern edge of Times Square, and plans for a 140 million renovation of the retail beneath the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square are also under way. Each day 370,000 pedestrians traipse through the Times Square bow tie, where Broadway and Seventh Avenue intersect, and each year shoppers spend 6.5 billion in the area's stores, according to the Times Square Alliance. That spending has contributed to the skyrocketing retail rents. "Rents in the area are approaching Fifth Avenue levels, and while a lot of this is due to the cleanup that began in the 1990s, even more is due to the massive influx of tourists over the last few years," said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of the retail group at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. "We expect more than 54 million this year." In the wake of such demand, developers are snatching up properties and repositioning buildings to create additional supply. One of the largest projects is at 701 Seventh Avenue, at 47th Street, where a building will be razed and replaced by 85,000 square feet of retail space and a 500 room Marriott Edition boutique hotel. The retail space, which will feature 25 foot glass storefronts, will be spread across the first four floors and two basement levels, and 40,000 square feet on the seventh and eighth floors will be set aside for an event space, club, several restaurants and 6,000 square feet of terraces. The building will have a 20,000 square foot LED sign on its facade. "There were plenty of people who were trying to buy this site, but they wanted to break ground immediately to capture the white hot retail market," said Steven C. Witkoff, whose firm, the Witkoff Group, is a partner in the project with Howard M. Lorber's New Valley L.L.C., and the investors Winthrop Realty Trust and Maefield Development. "In our case, we felt this was a mixed use project, and we went out and landed a hotel deal." It also plans a 140 million redevelopment of the retail space across the street at 1535 Broadway, underneath the New York Marriott Marquis Times Square. The project, which would include closing the arcade that runs under the hotel, is in the planning stages. Ground is expected to be broken late this year or early next. As part of the redevelopment, Vornado plans to create a glass facade for the stores, which will include 20,000 square feet on the ground floor and 25,000 square feet below ground, and reposition them to face Broadway. Vornado is also installing a 25,000 square foot, 80 foot high LED sign that will cover the Broadway face of the hotel and wrap 50 feet around each side of the building. Vornado declined to comment. Activity also is occurring along side streets. At the former headquarters of The New York Times, at 229 West 43rd Street, the landlord Africa Israel is increasing marketing efforts for the last two available retail spaces at the building. Last December, it paid 250,000 to JEMB Realty Corporation and Aurora Capital Associates to buy the lease for the former Daffy's store. JEMB and Aurora acquired a number of Daffy's leases after the discount retailer filed for bankruptcy last year. The 28,000 square foot space opens onto West 44th Street. The landlord is asking 2.2 million a year for the space, which includes 1,000 square feet on the ground floor, with the rest below ground, and has a marquee and conspicuous signs. The asking rent is nearly three times the 800,000 Daffy's paid when it signed its lease in 2009. "We have tremendous interest from entertainment venues for the space but nothing is signed," said Gary Trock, a senior vice president at CBRE who is marketing the space with Lon Rubackin, also a senior vice president. A second retail space on the West 43rd Street side of the building that is vacant consists of 17,000 square feet on the ground floor and 21,000 square feet on the second floor. The landlord is considering several options for the space, including a food market similar to Eataly, Mario Batali's Italian food emporium on West 23rd Street. "We are waiting to see how quickly Blackstone will lease the office space above us, since obviously we want them to lease it up, as that will help us get better terms on the retail," said Tamir Kazaz, chief executive of Africa Israel USA. "Probably in the next two to three months we will know how to proceed, whether we want one or two destination restaurants or whether the high end food market makes more sense," Mr. Kazaz said. New retail development is also under way at the former Roxy Deli site at 1565 Broadway, at 47th Street. The landlord Jeff Sutton, who already owns properties in the neighborhood, acquired the two story building recently for 30 million. He is planning to refurbish or possibly demolish the building and replace it, and will expand the current two story sign into a large 14 story LED sign. Mr. Sutton's Wharton Properties is also combining three buildings it owns at 1552 Broadway, 1560 Broadway and 155 West 46th Street in a 250 million deal that will create a sky lobby and additional ground floor retail. Mr. Sutton declined to comment. With so much potential for retail, James B. Buslik, a principal at Adams Company, began converting many retail tenants to month to month leases rather than signing long term agreements. "Two years ago I would make 10 year leases, but now I am letting my store tenants do short term deals to give myself the option to create something interesting when the time arises," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
It was a case of spies watching spies watching spies: Israeli intelligence officers looked on in real time as Russian government hackers searched computers around the world for the code names of American intelligence programs. What gave the Russian hacking, detected more than two years ago, such global reach was its improvised search tool antivirus software made by a Russian company, Kaspersky Lab, that is used by 400 million people worldwide, including by officials at some two dozen American government agencies. The Israeli officials who had hacked into Kaspersky's own network alerted the United States to the broad Russian intrusion, which has not been previously reported, leading to a decision just last month to order Kaspersky software removed from government computers. The Russian operation, described by multiple people who have been briefed on the matter, is known to have stolen classified documents from a National Security Agency employee who had improperly stored them on his home computer, on which Kaspersky's antivirus software was installed. What additional American secrets the Russian hackers may have gleaned from multiple agencies, by turning the Kaspersky software into a sort of Google search for sensitive information, is not yet publicly known. The current and former government officials who described the episode spoke about it on condition of anonymity because of classification rules. Like most security software, Its popular antivirus software scans for signatures of malicious software, or malware, then removes or neuters it before sending a report back to Kaspersky. That procedure, routine for such software, provided a perfect tool for Russian intelligence to exploit to survey the contents of computers and retrieve whatever they found of interest. The National Security Agency and the White House declined to comment for this article. The Israeli Embassy declined to comment, and the Russian Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Russian hackers had stolen classified N.S.A. materials from a contractor using the Kaspersky software on his home computer. But the role of Israeli intelligence in uncovering that breach and the Russian hackers' use of Kaspersky software in the broader search for American secrets have not previously been disclosed. Kaspersky Lab denied any knowledge of, or involvement in, the Russian hacking. "Kaspersky Lab has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyberespionage efforts," the company said in a statement Tuesday afternoon. Kaspersky Lab also said it "respectfully requests any relevant, verifiable information that would enable the company to begin an investigation at the earliest opportunity." The Kaspersky related breach is only the latest bad news for the security of American intelligence secrets. It does not appear to be related to a devastating leak of N.S.A. hacking tools last year to a group, still unidentified, calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which has placed many of them online. Nor is it evidently connected to a parallel leak of hacking data from the C.I.A. to WikiLeaks, which has posted classified C.I.A. documents regularly under the name Vault7. For years, there has been speculation that Kaspersky's popular antivirus software might provide a back door for Russian intelligence. More than 60 percent, or 374 million, of the company's 633 million in annual sales come from customers in the United States and Western Europe. Among them have been nearly two dozen American government agencies including the State Department, the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Justice Department, Treasury Department and the Army, Navy and Air Force. The N.S.A. bans its analysts from using Kaspersky antivirus at the agency, in large part because the agency has exploited antivirus software for its own foreign hacking operations and knows the same technique is used by its adversaries. "Antivirus is the ultimate back door," Blake Darche, a former N.S.A. operator and co founder of Area 1 Security. "It provides consistent, reliable and remote access that can be used for any purpose, from launching a destructive attack to conducting espionage on thousands or even millions of users." On Sept. 13, the Department of Homeland Security ordered all federal executive branch agencies to stop using Kaspersky products, giving agencies 90 days to remove the software. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Elaine C. Duke cited the "information security risks" presented by Kaspersky and said the company's antivirus and other software "provide broad access to files" and "can be exploited by malicious cyber actors to compromise" federal computer systems. That directive, which some officials thought was long overdue, was based, in large part, on intelligence gleaned from Israel's 2014 intrusion into Kaspersky's corporate systems. It followed months of discussions among intelligence officials, which included a study of how Kaspersky's software works and the company's suspected ties with the Kremlin. "The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky," D.H.S. said in its statement, "could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security." Kaspersky Lab did not discover the Israeli intrusion into its systems until mid 2015, when a Kaspersky engineer testing a new detection tool noticed unusual activity in the company's network. The company investigated and detailed its findings in June 2015 in a public report. The report did not name Israel as the intruder but noted that the breach bore striking similarities to a previous attack, known as "Duqu," which researchers had attributed to the same nation states responsible for the infamous Stuxnet cyberweapon. Stuxnet was a joint American Israeli operation that successfully infiltrated Iran's Natanz nuclear facility, and used malicious code to destroy a fifth of Iran's uranium centrifuges in 2010. Kaspersky reported that its attackers had used the same algorithm and some of the same code as Duqu, but noted that in many ways it was even more sophisticated. So the company researchers named the new attack Duqu 2.0, noting that other victims of the attack were prime Israeli targets. Among the targets Kaspersky uncovered were hotels and conference venues used for closed door meetings by members of the United Nations Security Council to negotiate the terms of the Iran nuclear deal negotiations from which Israel was excluded. Several targets were in the United States, which suggested that the operation was Israel's alone, not a joint American Israeli operation like Stuxnet. Kaspersky's researchers noted that attackers had managed to burrow deep into the company's computers and evade detection for months. Investigators later discovered that the Israeli hackers had implanted multiple back doors into Kaspersky's systems, employing sophisticated tools to steal passwords, take screenshots, and vacuum up emails and documents. In its June 2015 report, Kaspersky noted that its attackers seemed primarily interested in the company's work on nation state attacks, particularly Kaspersky's work on the "Equation Group" its private industry term for the N.S.A. and the "Regin" campaign, another industry term for a hacking unit inside the United Kingdom's intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Israeli intelligence officers informed the N.S.A. that in the course of their Kaspersky hack, they uncovered evidence that Russian government hackers were using Kaspersky's access to aggressively scan for American government classified programs, and pulling any findings back to Russian intelligence systems. They provided their N.S.A. counterparts with solid evidence of the Kremlin campaign in the form of screenshots and other documentation, according to the people briefed on the events. It is not clear whether, or to what degree, Eugene V. Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab, and other company employees have been complicit in the hacking using their products. Technical experts say that at least in theory, Russian intelligence hackers could have exploited Kaspersky's worldwide deployment of software and sensors without the company's cooperation or knowledge. Another possibility is that Russian intelligence officers might have infiltrated the company without the knowledge of its executives. But experts on Russia say that under President Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, businesses asked for assistance by Russian spy agencies may feel they have no choice but to give it. To refuse might well invite hostile action from the government against the business or its leaders. Mr. Kaspersky, who attended an intelligence institute and served in Russia's Ministry of Defense, would have few illusions about the cost of refusing a Kremlin request. Steven L. Hall, a former chief of Russian operations at the C.I.A., said his former agency never used Kaspersky software, but other federal agencies did. By 2013, he said, Kaspersky officials were "trying to do damage control and convince the U.S. government that it was just another security company." He didn't buy it, Mr. Hall said. "I had the gravest concerns about Kaspersky, and anyone who worked on Russia or in counterintelligence shared those concerns," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Pablo Picasso probably wasn't thinking about macular degeneration when he remarked: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as we grow up." But the statement has more than a grain of truth in it for Serge Hollerbach, 94, a Russian born artist in Manhattan. Mr. Hollerbach painted throughout every aspect of his vision loss caused by macular degeneration, a disease that affects 10 million Americans, often in their twilight years typically depleting their central vision and leaving most legally blind, but with some remnant of sight. Can they stay creative? As Mr. Hollerbach's vision began deteriorating in 1994, his work shifted from realism with a dose of expressionism to something more abstract. Defined shapes made way for something looser. Colors shifted gear from muted to bright. Mr. Hollerbach's rigid perfectionism also dropped off as his sight blurred, "like water in the eyes after taking a swim," he said. The pre and post macular degeneration works of eight artists, including Mr. Hollerbach, Lennart Anderson and Hedda Sterne, are the focus of "The Persistence of Vision," a new exhibition at the University of Cincinnati. It explores the versatility of artists shown in early and late works as they adapted their styles to vision loss and, in cases like Mr. Hollerbach's, experienced a personal renaissance. "The late works are gorgeous," said Brian Schumacher, a curator of the show at the Philip M. Meyers Jr. Memorial Gallery within the university, where Mr. Schumacher is an assistant professor of design. "They stand on their own as viable and legitimate and beautiful works of visual art." Mr. Hollerbach's response to his disease was a turn toward playfulness perhaps a reflection of a relentless optimism that had helped him survive Nazi labor camps, where he was confined as a teenager during World War II. His work continues to reflect a bend toward social justice and his fascination with everyday life through crowded New York street scenes, including the city's homeless. On a Sunday afternoon in his studio, Mr. Hollerbach held a plastic cup up to within an inch of his face. "That's blue isn't it?" he asked himself. Yes it was, and he would go on to create water in a crowded beach scene. It was a back and forth process as he placed the canvas on a flat table to apply the acrylic paint so it wouldn't run. "I can't really see what I am doing," he admitted, adding, "I will look at it later." He placed the canvas back on the easel and took a long squint at it. Mr. Hollerbach didn't seem overly impressed. "But that's the freedom of it," he said, as he continued painting. Among the show's other artists is David Levine, whose "The Last Battle" is an incomplete work that followed his vision loss. Instead of detailed faces like those in earlier depictions Coney Island beach scenes, he stuck to silhouettes and skipped the details on clothing. Charcoal lines were drawn and redrawn as the artist struggled with his new limitations, his son, Matthew, said. He watched the piece take shape around 2004 as his father's vision retreated. "He became more and more obsessed with trying to draw those figures and less and less happy in his ability to use line." The exhibition is an extension of the larger Vision and Art Project, a research and curatorial project funded by the American Macular Degeneration Foundation. "It is good for other artists to know that there are these resources available so you don't feel isolated," said A'Dora Phillips, the director of the project and the show's other curator. Although the project celebrates the early and late works of artists, some painting through their macular degeneration diagnosis declined to be involved. Often those artists are fearful that publicly discussing their condition will negatively impact the value of their career and work, Ms. Phillips said. But "The Persistence of Vision" stands as a material record that vision loss need not end an artist's work, regardless of whether it is a profession or a hobby. Here are some selections from the exhibition. Sterne, a prominent Abstract Expressionist who died in 2011, seemed to have a premonition of her late in life blindness. In the 1960s, she worked on a drawing series of lettuces. "She wanted to come from the perspective of a worm," said Lawrence Rinder, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, who knew Sterne in her last decade. "They are sensing a form around them, but they are not actually seeing it." (Most worms don't have eyes). In 1998, she gave up painting because of her vision loss, instead drawing on paper with graphite and pastel while using a powerful magnifying glass. "We only see a tiny fraction of what is before us," said Mr. Rinder. She was exploring the unseen world, he added, "and doing it really successfully." When Thon became legally blind in 1991, he had painted so many boats, birds and trees he could continue to do it all "by touch and by instinct," said Carl Little, an art critic and author who watched him paint in 1997. (During a failed treasure hunt on a 60 foot schooner in 1933, he returned with sketches that would inspire later work.) Instead of brushes, he used his fingers to feel as he created, and simplified his palette to black and white, creating remarkable gradations in gray. "It was like watching the creation of the world," Mr. Little said. Along with a career as a professional illustrator, Mr. Parker explored a variety of artistic mediums: etching, watercolor, sculpture, even children's books. With the onset of macular degeneration in 2000, he could no longer read. However, he still paints almost daily in his Connecticut studio, and the effects on his work a less defined line or a foggier horizon are only slightly visible. "Parker's loose, energetic approach achieves maximum effects with minimal amounts of detail," Michael Dooley, a contributing editor to Print Magazine, wrote about a retrospective of the artist's works in 2013. Even later in his career, with eyesight faded, the Mr. Parker could still "pack a visual wallop." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
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