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Desperate to revive tourism, countries around the globe are offering incentives to visit but Americans, barred from most of these destinations, won't be able to take advantage of them. In some countries where Covid 19 cases are receding, governments are attempting to entice travelers to help save battered tourism industries with offers of discounted flights, vouchers for local attractions and free entry to tourist sites. A few are even offering to pay travelers' medical expenses if they are infected with the virus. For now, Americans living in the United States are prohibited from entering almost all of these countries because of the high level of Covid 19 cases at home. In addition, the U.S. State Department continues to advise U.S. citizens to avoid all international travel and warns that changing conditions can leave travelers stranded abroad. The International Air Transport Association's online interactive map shows most countries' travel restrictions and rules. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities is eliminating the need for a tourist visa to visit the governorates of South Sinai, Marsa Matrouh and the Red Sea until Oct. 31. Entrance fees at tourist sites in Qena, Luxor and Aswan have been lowered and aviation industry subsidies from the government are aimed at reducing airline ticket prices. U.S. residents may visit Egypt, but the State Department warns against it. Bulgaria will subsidize charter flights into the country, and recently welcomed its first, with 189 tourists from the Netherlands. The government is making admission, sun beds and umbrellas free this summer at some beaches and discounted at others. Residents of the European Union and other countries in the region specified by the government can enter as tourists, although some will need to quarantine themselves for two weeks, depending on their point of origin. U.S. tourists are prohibited from entering Bulgaria. Go here for more details. Palermo, Italy, is offering a fourth hotel night free for visitors who fly into the Palermo airport on any airline. Travelers can work with a travel agent or through the Palermo Airport website to redeem the offer. Sicily announced it would set aside money for tourist incentives, but details have not yet been posted to the official tourist website. Tourists from the United States are prohibited from entering Italy. Prague is offering vouchers to attract local Czech tourists and travelers from nearby countries to stay in Prague hotels and visit attractions as they reopen. The program, called "In Prague As At Home," gives a voucher worth 17 to each tourist for every night they stay at a hotel up to four nights, to spend on galleries, monuments, museums and the zoo. Tourists coming from the United States are prohibited from entering. Japan, where the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics had been planned for July, is now encouraging domestic tourism. Visitors to 14 prefectures in eastern Japan can save up to 5,000 yen a night (about 46) per person on lodging. U.S. citizens may not visit Japan. In Italy, low income families will receive the equivalent of about 170 in tax credits per person from the national government if they spend money on a vacation in the country. Families in the Calabria or Marche regions receive additional travel credits if they vacation in their own region. In June, Cyprus began allowing visitors from about 35 nations to come to the island. Residents from a number of those countries need to provide documentation showing a negative coronavirus test from within 72 hours of arrival. The government will cover lodging, meals, hospital treatment and medication for any tourist who becomes ill with Covid 19 while vacationing there. A 100 bed hospital and 500 bed quarantine hotel for family members is standing by. American citizens cannot enter Cyprus unless they have spent the previous 14 days in countries that are included on a list of those deemed to have an acceptable risk level by the Cyprus government based on epidemiological data. Uzbekistan, a country of 33 million that has had just a small number of Covid related deaths, wants to assure travelers they will not be infected with the coronavirus during their stay. Travelers who book their trip with a tour company in Uzbekistan will become part of the Safe Travel Guaranteed program and will receive about 3,000 to pay for expenses if they become infected with the virus. Travelers coming from the United States and other countries with a "difficult sanitary and epidemiological situation" will not be sold airline tickets unless they have spent the previous two weeks in countries with "a stable sanitary and epidemiological situation." And now for the disincentives Among the countries that are discouraging visitors is Cambodia, which has made it expensive to enter the country and has set financial penalties in the form of health and welfare costs for infected tourists. All travelers arriving in Cambodia deposit the equivalent of 3,000 with the government (credit cards accepted) and get tested for Covid 19. Those who test positive will be charged for additional tests, medical care and if they die, cremation services. All passengers on a flight with someone who tests positive will need to be quarantined for 14 days, and pay for medical, security and personal services, which is estimated to be about 1,300. Those on flights where all passengers test negative for the coronavirus will just pay for the test and hospitality services for the day, about 165 from their 3,000 deposit. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Oz like clump of high rises in downtown Stamford, about 45 miles from Manhattan, suggests that the place is urban to its core. Promoters have taken pains to play this up, emphasizing assets like gastro pubs, art house cinema and Thursday evening concerts in a park. And with hulking new buildings sprouting south of Interstate 95, as part of the huge Harbor Point development, Stamford's "little Manhattan" reputation could be cemented for good. The area around the downtown, however, is something different a patchwork of distinct neighborhoods that pride themselves on being low slung and laid back. One of these, the self contained and evolving neighborhood of Springdale, 3.5 square miles mostly terraced into hills, has modest homes with tiny, trim lawns, housing a population of about 12,000. According to residents, developers and city officials, there are a few things Springdale could learn from the more citified parts of Stamford. In particular, these critics bemoan the fact that too many stores along Hope Street, the main drag, have parking lots in front of their buildings and not behind them. If that could change, they reason, Springdale would be more welcoming. And in 2009, Hope Street was rezoned, from about Mulberry Street to Clearview Avenue, to encourage its redevelopment. That seems to be happening, at last. Developers have unveiled two projects incorporating a mix of apartments and stores. Also, Springdale's sidewalks have been undergoing a transformation, with retro lamps and historic looking bricks, and the tree count along the three blocks of Hope is poised to climb to 75 from 36. The efforts might help revitalize the business district, where the "coming soon" signs in empty storefronts have until now mostly signaled wishful thinking, said Jennifer Robertson, a San Francisco transplant who teaches at a nearby school. "This is a fun and lively little neighborhood, so I like the idea of new folks adding to it," said Ms. Robertson, who in 2005 bought a one bedroom condominium, with a balcony and a laundry room, for 227,000. From there, she strolls to her gym as well as to Olio, a year old restaurant that she describes as having a great wine selection. The attraction was similar for Lawrence Hansen, who until a few months ago was sharing a one bedroom rental in the East Village with his wife, Lauren. At 2,900 a month, it was too pricey; besides, Ms. Hansen, who is pregnant, wanted to be closer to her family in Farmington. The couple briefly considered Harbor Point's luxury rentals, but their juxtaposition with aged multifamilies in the transitioning area was a turnoff. "It reminded me of the blocks you see around the casinos in Atlantic City," Mr. Hansen said. Springdale had more cohesiveness, he said. And its midcentury houses cost about half as much as those in Darien, just across the border. In the end, they paid 462,000 for a three bedroom 1925 Tudor; its narrow garage can fit only one car, but Mr. Hansen's commute doesn't require any. To get to his job as a real estate lawyer in New York, he simply walks to the Springdale train station. And despite the slightly tiresome trek back in dress shoes at the end of the day, he said, "the convenience factor is fantastic." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Instagram is changing its algorithm to make things a little more timely. Users are now likely to see newer posts higher up, the image sharing app said in a statement on Thursday, adding that its feeds will "feel more fresh." Instagram's algorithm, in other words, won't be meddling quite as much. More images and videos will be allowed to bubble up as they come. The company also said it was testing a "New Posts" button so that users can refresh their feeds when they want to, rather than automatically being transported to the top in the middle of browsing. The changes are in response to user feedback. They appear to address some common gripes, like how certain posts can keep appearing on your screen for days and days and days, or how your feed can begin to feel skewed in favor of the same old friends you habitually double tap. "We did this via a number of changes, including an adjustment so that very old content does not get bumped up higher in feed," said Gabe Madway, Instagram's spokesman. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
France delivered mixed messages about Roman Polanski and cancel culture over the last week. His new film, "J'accuse" known in English as "An Officer and a Spy" opened days after a photographer publicly accused the director of violently raping her in 1975, which he denied. Following protests, a few screenings were nixed, promotion was curtailed, a French filmmakers guild leaned toward expelling him, and the country's culture minister said an artist's potential misdeeds were not excused by the merit of his art. The critics were in the minority. The film, which tells of the historic miscarriage of justice known as the Dreyfus affair, topped the country's box office, and, according to its sales distributor, has distribution throughout Europe, Russia and China. Even so, it still does not have a distributor in the large film markets of the United States or Britain. Two years after sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein ushered in the MeToo era, directors accused of sexual misdeeds are still experiencing fallout, but to what degree depends on how big their star was to begin with. (Mr. Weinstein, who is facing a criminal trial on charges of sexual assault and rape, has denied ever having had nonconsensual sex and pleaded not guilty.) Polanski fled America in 1978 after he pleaded guilty to statutory rape. Allen was accused by his daughter of molesting her as a child; he has denied wrongdoing. Both men faced renewed recriminations as the MeToo movement gained momentum. But thanks to their European audiences, Allen and Polanski have rosier prospects than two newer directors . Nate Parker's 2016 debut, "The Birth of a Nation," was torpedoed when years old rape allegations resurfaced ; he had been acquitted by a jury in the 1999 case. Now Parker is trying a comeback with the new movie "American Skin." The well reviewed police shooting drama premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, and in an interview, Mark Burg, a producer on that film, vigorously defended Parker, saying he was one of the most talented directors he had worked with. "If somebody's accused and found innocent why would anyone treat them as guilty?" Burg said. Burg was angry that Parker was included in this article. "I'm disappointed, but that's what everyone is doing," he said, adding that the public had "zero problem" with Parker, and that it was just the media that brought the old case up. Burg said that there had been several distribution offers for the film, and that they were in negotiations with a studio and hoped to close the deal this week. Polanski and Alle n have reoriented themselves more to European audiences in recent years, where there has been a more lax attitude to MeToo, at least on the mainland. After Amazon dropped Allen, his latest picture, "A Rainy Day in New York," premiered in Poland, and according to Box Office Mojo, it has since made 12.5 million worldwide. As with Polanski's film, "Rainy Day" does not have distribution in America or Britain. While the Spanish communications company Mediapro is producing Allen's next film, "Rifkin's Festival," the chances that it will hit American or British screens also look slim. The potential financial reward for distributing a Polanski or Allen film Stateside may just not be worth the public relations damage . Aside from an occasional breakout hit like "Blue Jasmine," from 2013, the box office returns for Allen's recent films have been middling or worse. The same goes for Polanski, whose last box office slam was "The Pianist," from 2002. In Britain, audiences also seem reluctant to embrace recent work from Allen or Polanski. Hamish Moseley, managing director for a British distribution company, said the fact that those directors' films have catered more to art house audiences in recent years made them riskier bets. "The smaller you go, the more P.R. has an impact on their commercial fortunes," he said. And while some feminists and younger people in mainland Europe have voiced opposition to Polanski and Allen the production of "Rifkin's Festival" in the Spanish city of San Sebastian was met with protesters this past summer older moviegoers there seem more accepting. The cases of Louis C.K. and Parker are different, as are the levels of their renown. According to Louis C.K.'s website, he has sold out coming shows in Italy, Israel, Switzerland, Slovakia and Hungary, as well as domestically in Detroit and Houston. Whether this is a bellwether of a comeback is another matter: a Los Angeles Times reporter recently bought a ticket to one of the comedian's sold out shows in Virginia for 4, which suggested scalpers misjudged audience appetite. Parker, on the other hand, is barely known internationally, with a directing career that was stopped short before it ever really began. "No one knows him, outside of the industry, in Germany or Switzerland," said Christoph Daniel, managing director of the Berlin based indie distribution company DCM. And, he said, promoting any American film rested heavily on how it fared domestically. "If there's no U.S. release, it's harder to release the film," Daniel said. Leonard Maltin, the longtime television critic and film historian, said there were a few precedents where a filmmaker or star was more or less canceled because of scandals , among them the silent film actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who was tried on manslaughter charges, and widely accused in newspapers of rape. Though Arbuckle was acquitted, his career never recovered. "I'm not questioning the sources of these scandals, or the misdeeds of the people who generated them," Maltin said. "I find myself asking, 'Where do we go from here?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
As the N.F.L. officially turned its calendar to the 2019 season on Wednesday, football in New York found itself dramatically revamped. Odell Beckham Jr., the outrageous wide receiver, was no longer with the Giants, and Le'Veon Bell, the ultra versatile running back, had agreed to a deal with the Jets. Those moves qualified as the headliners of the league's off season movement so far, but a number of teams have already made grand attempts to rework their rosters. Coming off a two year stretch in which the Browns went 1 31, they improved to 7 8 1 in 2018 and the team blossomed in the second half. Trying to keep that momentum, Cleveland traded for Beckham, who is arguably the league's most talented wide receiver. He and his former Lousiana State University teammate Jarvis Landry will most likely become one of the most productive wide receiver duos in the N.F.L., helping to unlock the enormous potential of quarterback Baker Mayfield in an offense designed by Freddie Kitchens, the team's first year head coach. The Browns, not content to improve just on offense, added two impressive players on the defensive line in Sheldon Richardson and Olivier Vernon. Richardson, who has reportedly agreed to a three year deal with 21.5 million in guaranteed money, will solidify the interior of the line, while Vernon, who was acquired in a trade with the Giants for guard Kevin Zeitler, will provide an edge rusher to complement Myles Garrett. Bell has a chance to be something truly special for the Jets. He is a dynamic back unlike any the team has seen since Curtis Martin, and Bell comes over on a deal that is nowhere near as rich as what the 27 year old running back had hoped for when his salary stalemate with Pittsburgh began last year. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. If the team had just added Bell and relied on improvement from quarterback Sam Darnold in his second year the Jets could have expected a bump up from last year's 4 12 record. But the Jets apparently have also traded for Kelechi Osemele, a Pro Bowl guard, and agreed to contract terms with the Pro Bowl linebacker C.J. Mosley and the reliable young receiver Jamison Crowder, who will probably play out of the slot. The transactions have been reported by multiple news outlets but not yet announced by the team. The Jets had a long way to go to get back to respectability, but their new coach, Adam Gase, is about to have a lot more talent on his roster than he did a week ago. And after gaining Bell in what should still be his prime, the Jets have an opportunity to be a contender in the near future if they keep building. Last year the Raiders repeatedly denied that they were tanking for draft position, even as they traded the outstanding Khalil Mack and Amari Cooper for draft picks. Regardless of their motivation in those moves, they are clearly trying to build now. The team fleeced Pittsburgh in a deal for Antonio Brown, the star wide receiver, in which the Raiders gave up just two mid round picks. In moves the team has yet to officially announce, they have reportedly invested a great deal of money in the free agents Trent Brown, Tyrell Williams and Lamarcus Joyner. Whether or not these other moves make the Raiders appreciably better is an open question. Trent Brown, who just won a Super Bowl with New England, is a mammoth left tackle (6 feet 8 inches, 380 pounds). He reportedly got 36.8 million in guaranteed money from Oakland, but other than last season, he had been considered mostly a disappointment. Joyner, who was reportedly guaranteed 16.7 million, blossomed under Wade Phillips's direction last year with the Rams but has had an uneven career. And Williams, who was a good vertical threat as the No. 2 wide receiver for the Chargers, will need to up his production if he wants to serve as a proper complement to Brown. The Bills did a lot. Some of the team's acquisitions are fairly minor running back Frank Gore, 36 in May and entering his 15th season, is inspiring but unlikely to cause a huge impact. But it will be worth watching how the addition of the free agent wide receivers John Brown and Cole Beasley affects second year quarterback Josh Allen. Allen, as has been well documented, loves to throw deep, and Brown, who was comically underutilized in Baltimore once Lamar Jackson took over at quarterback, is one of the fleetest vertical threats in the game. With Brown as the No. 1 receiver and Beasley in the slot, all Buffalo needs is for Zay Jones or Robert Foster to develop into a reliable No. 2 receiver and Allen, who creates more disruption with his running than some might assume, will be able to truly chuck the ball. In terrible news for the writing room of NBC's "The Good Place," Jacksonville moved on from Blake Bortles, a quarterback who occasionally shined on the team's path to the A.F.C. championship game two years ago but struggled last season. In his place, the Jaguars added the far more reliable Nick Foles, who went from contemplating retirement during the 2015 season to winning a Super Bowl two years later. Foles, whose deal includes more than 50 million in guarantees, is hardly a sure thing to live up to his contract. He has had periods of dramatic ebb and flow and has not started more than 11 games in a season at any point in his seven season career. Of more concern for Jacksonville is the loss of both Malik Jackson and Tashaun Gipson on defense. The team released both veterans for salary cap reasons, and with Foles now on the books, it is questionable if the Jaguars will be able to afford contract extensions for other defensive stars like Jalen Ramsey and Yannick Ngakoue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Meg Medina won this year's John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature for her novel "Merci Suarez Changes Gears," the story of an 11 year old girl who navigates her home life with a Cuban American extended family and her experiences as a scholarship student at a private school. Medina is the second Latinx writer to win the award Matt de la Pena won in 2016 for the picture book "Last Stop on Market Street," illustrated by Christian Robinson and the first to win for a novel. Sophie Blackall won the Randolph Caldecott Medal, which is awarded to an illustrator for the year's most distinguished American picture book, for "Hello, Lighthouse," a chronicle of working and living in a remote lighthouse that pays tribute to the difficult job lighthouse keepers performed for centuries. Blackall, who also won the award in 2016 for "Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear," becomes the ninth illustrator to win the award multiple times since it was first given in 1938. The Newbery and the Caldecott awards are the most anticipated of the annual prizes given out by the American Library Association for young adult and children's literature. They were announced Monday at the association's midwinter conference in Seattle. Considered among the most prestigious prizes given for children's literature, the awards are known to drive sales and spur librarian and teacher recommendations. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
South Park, one of Seattle's dwindling blue collar pockets, is on the rise. Yet the scruffy, geographically isolated enclave has managed to transform itself without losing its soul to gentrification, causing outsiders including other Seattleites to take notice. Situated on the western shore of the Duwamish River in a hard to reach corner of the city, South Park has turned its relative remoteness and affordability into an advantage, attracting creative entrepreneurs who otherwise might not be able to set up shop in one of the nation's fastest growing cities. (Rents are cheaper here.) A hip wine shop, a brewery and a handful of new restaurants and bars greet interlopers who cross the neighborhood's main artery to mainland Seattle, the South Park Bridge. Now, though, with the bridge's reopening in 2014, South Park has seen a revitalization that has not yet brought on full bore gentrification. Industry remains prominent in the area, protected by zoning and geographic forces, including being hemmed in by the river and a phalanx of highways. "Perhaps the upside of being located farther afield is that a close knit community's been formed that's flown relatively under the radar and thus been less susceptible to gentrifying forces," said Cynthia Brothers, the founder of Vanishing Seattle, her one woman organization that documents endangered small businesses and cultural institutions on Instagram and other mediums. "If everything is too polished and finished, it's super boring," Ms. Soerens said. South Park also appealed to Dan Slemko, who moved to the neighborhood in 1997. The 60 year old former Boeing employee owns a waterfront home on the Duwamish River, which sounds sexier than it is. Seattle is a city known for its pristine waterways, but the Duwamish was so polluted that it was declared a Superfund site in 2001 . It's a working river in a working class neighborhood. It's slowly getting cleaner, as is South Park. Shortly after Mr. Slemko got his last box unpacked, he drove to the now defunct County Line, a raucous saloon near the South Park Bridge, and promptly got his headlights smashed out. Many neighborhoods would perhaps enlist law enforcement to deal with such an establishment. But not South Park: According to Loretta's owner Scott Horrell, a group of residents instead designated a night to drink together at The County Line to meet the rabble rousers on their own turf rather than calling the authorities. "The bridge closure was terrifying, but it turned us into an island. It solidified us and our regulars. They were trapped," said Mr. Horrell, a physically imposing former trucker who became South Park's foremost beer and burger proprietor as well as a resident. Since the bridge reopened in 2014 and especially since new restaurants and watering holes opened near South Park's main intersection of 14th Ave. S. and S. Cloverdale St. Seattleites are increasingly seeking South Park out. And because of skyrocketing housing costs in Seattle, younger residents are increasingly buying homes in South Park, a genuinely diverse neighborhood with a lush community garden called Marra Farm. Campbell Scarborough and his wife, Katie Escudero, moved to Seattle from Los Angeles, and bought a modern home in South Park four years ago. South Park reminds Ms. Escudero of Los Angeles's Echo Park neighborhood, while Mr. Scarborough considered it a "no brainer" in 2017 to open Left Bank, South Park's oldest wine shop because it's the only one at the intersection of 14th and Cloverdale. The couple sells modestly priced European wines out of a space so small that "you can't really come here and have an intimate conversation," Mr. Scarborough explained. Patrons bring their own vinyl albums to spin on the shop's stereo on Tuesdays, and the owners keep Rainier beer on tap just so Mr. Slemko, a cheap beer aficionado known to locals as "River Dan," feels right at home when he swings by each night. Mr. Slemko is well known for his parties . His Fourth of July bash replete with fireworks and live music reportedly rivals the region's officially sanctioned celebrations. "I've been to enough of his parties to be immune to the noise. And if you don't like it, it'll be over in a few hours," said Dave Wilkinson, who owns a house down the street from Mr. Slemko's. One of Mr. Bennett's tenants at 14th and Cloverdale, Corina Luckenbach, operates a former ballroom and billiards parlor called South Park Hall, which is now a multiuse space that has everything from square dance potlucks and Jazzercise classes to karaoke brunches. Ms. Luckenbach said Mr. Bennett's ethos is to "rent to people who are struggling to pay the rent." Risk taking and an all in mentality ensue. "Most of the people I know who open these places use every dime they have," said Mr. Horrell, who counts himself among that flock. In June 2017, Ms. Soerens and her husband, Tim, nearly died in an automobile accident after getting struck by a drunken driver in Mexico while celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary. One year later, they opened their coffee shop, Resistencia, near the intersection of 14th and Cloverdale, and business has been brisk. The Soerenses live near the community garden, Marra Farm, and positioned a pair of hospital beds in their living room during their recovery from the crash. For three months, Ms. Soerens said neighbors brought meals, cared for the couple's sons, walked their dog, and otherwise caught up with one another. It was immensely helpful, exhausting and exhilarating and served to cement the couple's commitment to their tight knit community. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It's all about imagery: army fatigues, ink splatters and a train of fabric that stretches long or gathers in a swirl around a woman's ankles. Is it a lake or quicksand? Probably both. Jessica Lang's dances may be subdued, but they don't embrace subtlety. On Tuesday, Jessica Lang Dance returned to the Joyce Theater in celebration of its fifth anniversary. In September, the company will move into a new dance center in Long Island City, Queens, where classes will be offered at all levels. It's an impressive accomplishment. If only the same could be said of Ms. Lang's tepid choreography, which is frequently performed by ballet companies, and illustrates how quickly simplicity can slide into blandness. The Joyce program features three New York premieres, including "Solo Bach" (2008), in which Patrick Coker, upbeat and high spirited, starts out with his back to the audience. Kicking a leg forward with a jaunty hop, he faces us with upturned palms a greeting that is repeated throughout and presses ahead with fleet footwork and airy jumps. It's sweet, yet overwrought. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I first became aware of the political influence of Charles and David Koch in 2009 when I started looking into who was behind the protests at health care town halls. The Tea Party, formed after America elected its first black president, used a series of health care town halls to spur angry Republicans to oppose the Affordable Care Act as a socialist takeover of American medicine. Little matter that it was modeled on a plan devised by Mitt Romney, a Republican, when he was the governor of Massachusetts. Such false claims about the act have not aged well, as millions of Americans now depend on the law for health care coverage as the coronavirus contagion sweeps across the nation. And yet a Tea Party co founder, Mark Meckler, is using the same tactics and same phony claims to stir his followers to protest against governors seeking to mitigate the Covid 19 death toll by closing businesses and banning public gatherings. That public anger is both real and manufactured. The same was true in 2009, when the Koch fortune fueled the Tea Party's attacks on the Obama administration's health care law. Still, the legend that the Tea Party was a spontaneous uprising took hold and continues to be peddled. As we face Tea Party 2.0, let's not be fooled again. The protests playing out now have the same feel as the Tea Party protests aided by Koch financed Americans for Prosperity and others a decade ago and with good reason: Early evidence suggests they are not organic but a brush fire being stoked by some of the same people and money that built the Tea Party. Look no further than the first protest organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund whose chairman manages the vast financial investments of Dick and Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary to see that the campaign to "open" America flows from the superrich and their front groups. Stephen Moore a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Koch ally and a Trump adviser admitted as much in a video I obtained comparing these new protesters to Rosa Parks, as first reported in The Times. Others are providing legal assistance as well. The Times reports that a private Facebook group called Reopen NC has retained the legal services of Michael Best Friedrich, a Wisconsin law firm whose clients include President Trump. The firm is well known for its work with dark money groups that fought the recall of the Koch ally Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and waged war on unions. Then there's the Convention of States, established in 2015 with a big contribution from the conservative hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. The group recruits activists at gun shows to support a balanced budget amendment and is promoting the protests online via "Open the States." COS is an offshoot of Citizens for Self Governance, which Mr. Meckler co founded with a longtime Koch operative, Eric O'Keefe. To give you a flavor of what's unfolding to help orchestrate these events, this week one of Mr. Meckler's organizers told supporters via Facebook that "optics are everything" and that they should be sure to wear a mask to the protests and stand six feet apart because it will make the crowds look bigger. COS and a Koch financed public relations firm, In Pursuit Of, are also purchasing domain names tied to protests to open the states, suggesting they are investing for a long battle even as the death toll rises. The consequences are already starting. One week after a Kentucky protest, the state experienced its largest spike in coronavirus cases. Other states may soon see similar spikes. Those fanning these flames, including President Trump and Fox News hosts, are unlikely to get burned by infection themselves, though they may be goading their followers to risk their health by attending mass demonstrations. America is now facing three calamities: a deadly contagion, a capricious president and a well funded right wing infrastructure willing to devalue human life in pursuit of its political agenda. Some very rich men and women are making this medical disaster worse through their reckless bellows, inflaming people to demand that states open now no matter how many lives that costs. Lisa Graves is the executive director of True North Research and curator of KochDocs, and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice. 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 |
Andy Spade, the husband of the designer Kate Spade who died on Tuesday in New York City, addressed his wife's depression and treatment, the status of their marriage, and their lives as long time collaborators. Here is his statement in full. Kate was the most beautiful woman in the world. She was the kindest person I've ever known and my best friend for 35 years. My daughter and I are devastated by her loss, and can't even begin to fathom life without her. We are deeply heartbroken and miss her already. Kate suffered from depression and anxiety for many years. She was actively seeking help and working closely with her doctors to treat her disease, one that takes far too many lives. We were in touch with her the night before and she sounded happy. There was no indication and no warning that she would do this. It was a complete shock. And it clearly wasn't her. There were personal demons she was battling. For the past 10 months we had been living separately, but within a few blocks of each other. Bea was living with both of us and we saw each other or spoke every day. We ate many meals together as a family and continued to vacation together as a family. Our daughter was our priority. We were not legally separated, and never even discussed divorce. We were best friends trying to work through our problems in the best way we knew how. We were together for 35 years. We loved each other very much and simply needed a break. This is the truth. Anything else that is out there right now is false. She was actively seeking help for depression and anxiety over the last 5 years, seeing a doctor on a regular basis and taking medication for both depression and anxiety. There was no substance or alcohol abuse. There were no business problems. We loved creating our businesses together. We were co parenting our beautiful daughter. I have yet to see any note left behind and am appalled that a private message to my daughter has been so heartlessly shared with the media. My main concern is Bea and protecting her privacy as she deals with the unimaginable grief of losing her mother. Kate loved Bea so very much. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The seven women of LeeSaar the Company are a sleek pack. In "Grass and Jackals," which had its New York premiere on Saturday in the troupe's debut performance at the Joyce Theater, they are sheathed in black bodysuits. Under thick black slabs of painted on eyebrows, their eyes gaze out with the look of animals encountered in the wild: now sanguinely alert, now spooked. Then they smile like contestants in a beauty pageant, a different kind of watched beast. If the women sometimes move like animals, they also move like animals under fire. Suddenly, their pliant bodies are blown back, nearly blown apart, knocked out of their usual alignment into some twisted shape, with ribs way over here, and a leg way up there. They have fits of jiggling or bump into one another while doing goon walks. The choreography, by the company's Israeli born artistic directors, Lee Sher and Saar Harari, has the intense looseness of Gaga, the technique devised by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. This is all striking, especially against Avi Yona Bueno's backdrop of moire striations, which adds drama by changing hue. But the slack shape of the hourlong work, with the company periodically assembling in scattered formations, and soloists emerging for moments of emotional expressionism, quickly grows tedious. The fake smile flashing in the piece's first few minutes is immediately irritating. And then it keeps returning. Coming late in a collection of mostly ambient recordings sometimes enlivened by a beat of rubbery bass, the song "Sunshine," by CocoRosie, seems to give clues: A girlish voice invites "the girls and boys outside" to share the crazy things they have inside them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The 37 year old woman began to weep as she told her story to Dr. Michael L. Parks. Her job required her to be on her feet all day, Dr. Parks recalled, and she was in constant pain from knee arthritis. She had seen an orthopedic surgeon, hoping to discuss knee replacement, but he dismissed her complaints, telling her she was too fat and should just go on a diet. Dr. Parks, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, was prepared when he saw the woman last week. He had heard such stories over and over from heavy patients "I had a box of tissues for her," he said and he agreed to operate since she had tried all other alternatives without success. Dr. Parks, the chairman of the work group on obesity for the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, is unusual in his willingness to operate on very obese patients, said Dr. Louis J. Aronne, an obesity specialist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork Presbyterian, who refers patients to him. For too many patients with obesity, there is no Dr. Parks. What should they do when doctors cannot see past their weight, dismissing all other medical problems as simply a consequence of being so heavy? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
If there's one thing Indians know how to do, it's weddings. In Bollywood and real life, the pomp of upper class ceremonies including the age old traditions, battling egos and patriarchal powers at play has captivated audiences across the globe. And yet India, on pace to be the youngest nation in the world by population, is also grappling with feminism and freedoms of a new age. Activism has brought the MeToo movement to the subcontinent and toppled archaic colonial era laws like Section 377, an article under the Indian constitution that outlawed gay sex. It's this paradox that Amazon Prime India has taken on in its newest original series, "Made in Heaven." Centered on Karan (Arjun Mathur) and Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala), two friends who run a wedding planning business, the show takes on a wide array of issues that a burgeoning generation of South Asians is facing, including class, homophobia and sexual harassment. At the helm are three acclaimed Bollywood directors and screenwriters, who also happen to be women: Zoya Akhtar ("Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara"), Reema Kagti ("Gold"), and Alankrita Shrivastava ("Lipstick Under My Burkha"). The show, fueled by their acumen for strong storytelling and creating multidimensional characters, wrestles with its matters in a way that is sobering and despite its subjects isn't dressed up with sequins and melodrama. In one episode, a couple in their 60s marry against their children's wishes; in another, an Indian man based in America holds a pageant to find an Indian wife. The show sets up relatable pairings and attempts to underscore the country's shifting social awareness. It's this directness that makes "Made in Heaven" so appealing whereas Bollywood might gloss over these uncomfortable truths, a streaming medium, and its freedoms from a censor board and stifling box office numbers, unshackles the creators. The conflicts between tradition and cultural change also play out in the protagonists' personal lives, and the show is not afraid to make its audience uncomfortable, especially when it forces characters to toe the line between being an insider or outsider. Though aware of the need to stand up for the powerless and voiceless, Tara and Karan also end up becoming complicit in their own silencing. Tara, for instance, regularly advocates for the rights of her employees, as well as her women clients to give them the weddings they desire, even when it goes against their families' demands. Yet at home, she plays second fiddle to her husband, Adil (Jim Sarbh), a privileged, wealthy man dismissive of her middle class roots. Through their relationship, the show makes several points about classism such as the social exclusivity among elites and how other classes may perceive their lifestyle. For example, while rumors of being a golddigger trail Tara, her desire for upward mobility is neither about her husband's money nor true love. She grapples with her desire to fit in among the elite, her finishing school education and her traditional values. And in her marriage, she realizes it's not as fulfilling as she thought it would be. In Karan's journey, the creators of the show finally bring to mainstream Indian media a depiction of a cisgender gay man that isn't a bundle of stereotypes. Karan's internalized homophobia is portrayed realistically and with nuance in a flashback, he outs a fellow classmate as a teenager to keep his own truth a secret and is pushed further into the closet by his mother when she catches him getting intimate with another man and beats him. As an adult, he is outed and jailed under Section 377. The police harassment he endures while in prison forces him to reckon with his past; it gives him the strength to apologize to the classmate years later and stand up to his family. Tired of being ashamed of his identity for so long, Karan decides to file a public lawsuit against the law. Karan is then hailed as both a hero by power hungry politicians eager to use him as a pawn and a disgrace by his mother. Armed with acceptance from his father and brother, Karan begins a long awaited journey toward self acceptance and fights for others like him. This duality a sense of pride in activism alongside the fear of retribution from family and loved ones has long played out for L.G.B.T. Indians. Even while "Made in Heaven" breaks barriers for streaming originals, it also occasionally falters. The show falls into its own traps it's suggested that because Tara's marriage began as a workplace affair that her husband's current affair is justified; Karan's bullying of his gay classmate may or may not justify the egregious acts of brutality he faces from a repressed gay landlord. At times the show seems to use its main characters only to make a point about the cyclical nature of trauma and karma. Still, the series is part of a small but growing contingent of progressive and daring shows tapping into a corner of the Indian market that has largely been ignored. Many of them are from global streaming services: Netflix has committed to a wide range of original content from the subcontinent, including "Sacred Games," its first big budget, polylingual original series out of India. And Amazon announced six new originals in the pipeline from India at TCA in February. (Not all of it hits the mark: "Four More Shots," another recent series that preceded "Made in Heaven," tries, but fails, to comment smartly on feminist tropes.) Some domestic services seem to be taking note. The Indian entertainment conglomerate Hotstar (which is owned by 21st Century Fox) has pulled the plug on its on air channels (such as Star Plus) in the United States, making its on air shows from India streaming only in a prime global market. It has announced its first slate of original shows, including an adaptation of BBC's "The Office" and "Criminal Justice." Other local big name production houses, like Zee and Eros, are also stepping up their originals on their streaming platforms while Zee5 has yet to launch globally, ErosNow recently launched its own shows (such as "Metro Park," based on an Indian family living in New Jersey) in recent months to little fanfare. (They perhaps have not yet figured out how to balance a lack of production value with the ability to make the kinds of compelling stories that global audiences are finding on Netflix and Amazon.) "Made in Heaven" and its writers depict an increased consciousness of India's social dilemmas, and give us glimpses of what it might look like to face them. The response to the show in its first season, it has received critical acclaim (some reviews called it possibly the country's, or at least Amazon's, best original series ever, while fans hailed its progressive nature on Twitter) suggests that perhaps more shows like it can continue to push the boundaries even further. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Mr. Lee won his first Academy Award, as his film "BlacKkKlansman" received the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. The day that Prince died in April 2016, Spike Lee threw a celebration of his friend's life. On a brick townhouse lined street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, hundreds of people gathered in the street, as Mr. Lee blasted song after song from the steps of his building. He played deep cuts and greatest hits, as neighbors wept and sang along into the night. Nearly three years later, Mr. Lee is honoring Prince Rogers Nelson again, bringing a man he calls his brother into the spotlight as he celebrates his movie "BlacKkKlansman." On the Academy Awards red carpet, Mr. Lee wore a custom made gold, diamond and opal necklace in the form of the symbol Prince adopted as his name. It was made by the jewelry designer Amedeo Scognamiglio, and was paired with an all purple Ozwald Boateng suit and gold Jordans made by Tinker Hatfield (and commissioned for Mr. Lee by Michael Jordan himself). "I told Ozwald to make my pants high waters so they see the Jordans," Mr. Lee said in an interview a few days before the Oscars, in remarks adorned by profanity and punctuated by excited laughter. "I don't care what nobody's wearing. I win the Oscar on the red carpet. Men, women, I don't care if they're wearing 15 inch heels. They can't be messing with the Jordans I'm going to be wearing. I'm going to be as clean as the board of health. I'm going to be sharp as a razor." Mr. Scognamiglio first met Mr. Lee about a year ago and the two have become friends; the director can often be seen sporting the artisan's oversized jewelry. "My business partner and I, we like to design very chunky pieces, big looks," Mr. Scognamiglio said. "We don't do dainty." Still, when he was making Mr. Lee's necklace the outsized 18 carat gold pendant is framed in diamonds, and has a 17 carat fire opal at its center he thought it might be running too big. He called the director to ask his opinion. "Make it bigger," he said Mr. Lee said. "Make it bigger." Mr. Lee and Prince first met when the musician, impressed by the director's 1986 debut feature film, "She's Gotta Have it," flew him out to Paisley Park in Minnesota, around the time that Prince was working on the film "Graffiti Bridge." There was an immediate sense of understanding between the two men. They remained close, despite not seeing each other very often. "It might be six, eight months before we talked but when we talked it was like, we see each other," Mr. Lee said. The last time he saw his friend was after a performance of the musical "Hamilton," Mr. Lee's seventh time seeing it. After the show, Mr. Lee said he went backstage and cast members told him that they were going to an after party hosted by Prince. "It was a book party, so he invited the whole cast of 'Hamilton,'" Mr. Lee said of Prince. "So I get there and it's just him and a D.J. And Damaris Lewis, who was dancing. And that was the last time I saw him. We sat and talked like an hour and then he got up on stage and played for like another two hours and he was giving me shout outs on stage, stuff like that." Mr. Lee believes that the musician's spirit helped him to find the version of "Mary Don't You Weep," sung by Prince, that plays at the end of "BlacKkKlansman," as scenes from the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., conclude the film. (The film represents the director's first chance to win an Academy Award for either Best Picture or Best Director.) The song was recovered by Troy Carter, a friend of Mr. Lee's who is an adviser to the Prince estate (and who also used to manage Lady Gaga). Mr. Carter called Mr. Lee and told him that among the thousands of disorganized cassettes that the musician had left behind, one had been found that featured just Prince and a piano. "I said to myself, this is it," Mr. Lee said. "What could be more fitting than to have a Negro spiritual sung by Prince, just him and the piano in this movie." He does not think that finding the tape was a coincidence. "It was not a mistake," he said. "Prince wanted me to have that song in BlacKkKlansman. People can say I'm crazy, smoking crack, which I don't. Or eating the mushrooms, which I don't. I'm telling you, on my mother's grave, he wanted me to have this song." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Honda has had mixed success with hybrids, selling a fair amount of gas/electric Civics. The original Accord hybrid didn't fair as well. Appearing in 2005 and geared toward performance, it didn't move well off dealer lots and was axed a few years later. This is Honda's second swing at it, and kind of its third, since there are two models. (ON CAMERA) Accord is available as a plug in hybrid which goes about 13 miles on battery power alone. This is the standard hybrid and let's get something straight, it's much different than the systems Honda has done in the past. Different from everyone's really. There's a 2.0 liter four cylinder engine and an electric drive motor delivering 226 lb ft of instant torque. Total horsepower is 196. A second electric unit is a generator that also starts the gas engine. The transmission? I'll get to that in a second. (ON CAMERA) The battery pack is back here, hogging up the trunk. The Lithium Ion pack keeps the back seat from folding so long items won't fit. The spare tire is gone as well. Standard Accords swallow up an impressive seven packs. The hybrid is limited to four. (ON CAMERA) Okay, here's how the system generally performs. It pulls away with the electric motor on battery power. Which is nothing new, hybrids do that all the time. Then when the car needs more oomph, the gasoline engine kicks in but at this point it's not directly connected to the drivetrain, it's running a generator sending juice to the electric drive motor. The at around 44 miles an hour depending on load a clutch can engage, then the gas engine is actually driving the front wheels. It's a fixed ratio. In a sense a one speed transmission. Under light load, the gas engine can shut off so Accord runs only on electric power, even at highway speeds. Familiar hybrid things happen, the battery charges while coasting and braking plus there's some visual feedback (keep the speedometer's outer ring green for best fuel economy). Overall, I'm seeing about 44 miles to the gallon with a lighter foot. FYI, Consumer Reports averaged around 40. Neither figure is what the government rates it at but fuel economy is good considering this is no small sedan. The powertrain has a unique feel. (ON CAMERA) This system does not have the rubbery dynamic of a continuously variable transmission but the engine does rev up and down even if you're traveling at a constant speed. It's especially noticeable on hills. Accord Hybrid dominates Prius in the quarter mile, (SOUND UP) ... if that's your thing. 0 60 in about seven seconds is welcome though hard acceleration is when you'll notice the engine speed incongruity the most. Cornering and ride quality are not quite as sorted as a standard Accord but the dynamics are decent. Fairly quiet too until the engine revs up. Signal right and this camera shows what's in your blind spot. Great on the highway, possibly annoying in the city. This spacious interior looks pretty much like any Accord, other than a slightly different gauge cluster. The interface uses the familiar Honda knob and two screens, the lower one touch sensitive. Materials are good, Honda stays conservative here. (ON CAMERA) Fortunately, the battery does not mess with the back seat this is a roomy space. One reason why Accord is a family favorite. Feet and knees will not be crowded. There's room for three adults back here and some of their stuff too. No power port for electronics charging. The 9th generation Accord's design is akin to a navy blue blazer. Never a trendsetter but always in style. This top line Touring model with adaptive cruise control and collision warning retails for 35,875. Comparably equipped hybrid models are about 1,800 more than four cylinder Accords. The small trunk and engine revs out of sync may drive some buyers away but Honda's unique and efficient drivetrain is the best hybrid it's ever made. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The U.S. military has been "stuck in software in the 1980s," said Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief executive.Credit...Winni Wintermeyer/Redux The U.S. military has been "stuck in software in the 1980s," said Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief executive. In July 2016, Raymond Thomas, a four star general and head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, hosted a guest: Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google. General Thomas, who served in the 1991 gulf war and deployed many times to Afghanistan, spent the better part of a day showing Mr. Schmidt around Special Operations Command's headquarters in Tampa, Fla. They scrutinized prototypes for a robotic exoskeleton suit and joined operational briefings, which Mr. Schmidt wanted to learn more about because he had recently begun advising the military on technology. After the visit, as they rode in a Chevy Suburban toward an airport, the conversation turned to a form of artificial intelligence. "You absolutely suck at machine learning," Mr. Schmidt told General Thomas, the officer recalled. "If I got under your tent for a day, I could solve most of your problems." General Thomas said he was so offended that he wanted to throw Mr. Schmidt out of the car, but refrained. Four years later, Mr. Schmidt, 65, has channeled his blunt assessment of the military's tech failings into a personal campaign to revamp America's defense forces with more engineers, more software and more A.I. In the process, the tech billionaire, who left Google last year, has reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the national security community. Mr. Schmidt now sits on two government advisory boards aimed at jump starting technological innovation at the Defense Department. His confidants include former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and ex Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. And through his own venture capital firm and a 13 billion fortune, Mr. Schmidt has invested millions of dollars into more than half a dozen defense start ups. In an interview, Mr. Schmidt by turns thoughtful, pedagogical and hubristic said he had embarked on an effort to modernize the U.S. military because it was "stuck in software in the 1980s." He portrayed himself as a successful technologist who did not believe in retirement and who owed a debt to the country for his wealth and who now had time and insight to solve one of America's hardest problems. The goal, he said, "should be to have as many software companies to supply software of many, many different kinds: military, H.R. systems, email systems, things which involve military intelligence, weapons systems and what have you." Mr. Schmidt is pressing forward with a Silicon Valley worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue. While that philosophy has led to social networks that spread disinformation and other unintended consequences, Mr. Schmidt said he was convinced that applying new and relatively untested technology to complex situations including deadly ones would make service members more efficient and bolster the United States in its competition with China. His techno solutionism is complicated by his ties to Google. Though Mr. Schmidt left the company's board last June and has no official operating role, he holds 5.3 billion in shares of Google's parent, Alphabet. He also remains on the payroll as an adviser, earning a 1 annual salary, with two assistants stationed at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters. That has led to allegations that Mr. Schmidt is putting Google's financial interests ahead of other considerations in his defense work. Late last year, a federal court ordered a congressional advisory committee he leads to turn over records that could shed light on whether Mr. Schmidt had advocated his business interests while heading the group. Mr. Schmidt said he had followed rules to avoid conflicts. "Everybody is rule bound at the Pentagon, and we are too," he said. Google and the Defense Department declined to comment on Mr. Schmidt's work. Even without those complications, shifting the military's path is no simple task. While Mr. Schmidt has helped generate reports and recommendations about technology for the Pentagon, few have been adopted. "I'm sure he'll be frustrated," said Representative Mac Thornberry, a Republican of Texas who nominated Mr. Schmidt in 2018 to an advisory committee on A.I. "Unlike the private sector, you can't just snap your fingers and make it happen." Mr. Schmidt acknowledged that progress was slow. "I am bizarrely told by my military friends that they have moved incredibly fast, showing you the difference of time frames between the world I live in and the world they live in," he said. But he said he had little intention of backing down. "The way to understand the military is that the soldiers spend a great deal of time looking at screens. And human vision is not as good as computer vision," he said. "It's insane that you have people going to service academies, and we spend an enormous amount of training, training these people, and we put them in essentially monotonous work." Mr. Schmidt's first brush with the military came in 1976, while he was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he focused on research on distributed computing, funded by money from Darpa, a research arm of the Defense Department. The work catapulted Mr. Schmidt into his technology career. After completing his graduate studies in computer science, he worked at various tech companies for more than two decades, including the networking software maker Novell. In 2001, Google appointed him chief executive. The search engine company was then in its infancy. Its 20 something founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were fresh out of a Stanford University doctorate program and had little business experience. Mr. Schmidt was hired to help guide them, providing "adult supervision," which he did and then some. Mr. Schmidt took Google public in 2004 and built it into a behemoth, diversifying into smartphones, cloud computing and self driving cars. The success turned him into a business celebrity. In 2009, he served as a tech adviser to the Obama administration. In 2011, with Google worth nearly 400 billion, the company announced Mr. Page was ready to resume the C.E.O. reins. Mr. Schmidt became executive chairman. In that role, Mr. Schmidt took on new projects, many of which brought him to Washington. In 2012, he participated in classified briefings on cybersecurity with Pentagon officials as part of the Enduring Security Framework program. In 2015, he attended a seminar on the banks of the Potomac River, hosted by then Defense Secretary Ash Carter, on the use of technology inside the government. "It was all interesting to me," Mr. Schmidt said. "I didn't really know much about it." He also traveled to North Korea, Afghanistan and Libya while writing a book about technology and diplomacy, and dabbled in politics, lending technical support to Hillary Clinton in the run up to her 2016 presidential campaign. His venture capital fund, Innovation Endeavors, was active too. It invested in start ups like Planet Labs, which operates satellites and sells the imagery to defense and intelligence agencies, and Team8, a cybersecurity company founded by former Israeli intelligence members. At the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Carter asked Mr. Schmidt to meet. He had a proposal: Could Mr. Schmidt lead the Defense Innovation Board, a civilian advisory group tasked with bringing new technology to the Pentagon? "We were in one of these dumpy hotels, and there he is with his small entourage walking in, and he basically said to me, 'This is what I want to do. You'd be the perfect person to be chairman,'" Mr. Schmidt said. Mr. Schmidt said he turned down the role because he was busy and had no military background. But Mr. Carter argued that Mr. Schmidt's tech expertise was needed, as the U.S. military which had once been a center of innovation was falling behind companies like Google and Facebook in software and A.I. Mr. Schmidt ultimately agreed. (Mr. Carter did not respond to requests for comment.) As head of the Defense Innovation Board, Mr. Schmidt began touring military bases, aircraft carriers and plutonium strongholds. The trips, which took Mr. Schmidt to about 100 bases in places like Fayetteville, N.C., and Osan, South Korea, were a distinct break from his well heeled life in Silicon Valley. "You want to see these things," Mr. Schmidt said. "I got the nuclear missile tour. Things that are hard. I got a tour of Cheyenne Mountain so I could understand what their reality was." One of the first trips was to Tampa to visit General Thomas, who is known as Tony, where Mr. Schmidt saw maps and live video feeds displayed on massive screens. "Eric's observation was that a huge part of what the military does is it sits and watches," said Josh Marcuse, the then executive director of the Defense Innovation Board who was on the trip. The visits made tangible what Mr. Carter had told Mr. Schmidt about how the military was lagging in technology. Mr. Schmidt soon made suggestions to change that. Some of his ideas were impractical. Eric Rosenbach, then the chief of staff to Mr. Carter, recalled Mr. Schmidt once telling him that the Pentagon would be better off if it hired no one but engineers for a year. Others were useful. At an Air Force facility in Qatar in 2016, Mr. Schmidt visited officers who scheduled flight paths for the tankers that refueled planes. They used a white board and dry erase markers to set the schedule, taking eight hours to complete the task. Mr. Schmidt said he recalled thinking, "Really? This is how you run the air war?" Afterward, he and others at the Defense Department worked with the tech company Pivotal to ship software to the officers. On another trip to a military base in South Korea in 2017, an intelligence analyst complained to Mr. Schmidt that the software he used to review surveillance videos from North Korea was clunky. "Let me guess," Mr. Schmidt said, according to a Defense Department aide who traveled with him. "You don't have the flexibility to change that." At Google, Mr. Schmidt's influence waned as new leaders such as Sundar Pichai, now Alphabet's chief executive, and Ruth Porat, its chief financial officer rose. Google also faced questions when the MeToo era began in 2017 about Mr. Schmidt's conduct as C.E.O. Mr. Schmidt, who is married, had openly had extramarital relationships when he ran the company. In December 2017, Mr. Schmidt stepped down as Google's chairman but remained on the board. He said he was seeking a new chapter. "If I stayed as chairman, then next year would have been the same as the previous year, and I wanted a change of emphasis," said Mr. Schmidt. "As chairman of Google, what I did is I ran around and gave speeches, and went to Brussels and all the things that Google still does today. It's much better to work on these new things for me." Google declined to comment on Mr. Schmidt's departure as chairman. By then, Mr. Schmidt's ties to Google had caused problems in his defense work. In 2016, Roma Laster, a Defense Department employee, filed a complaint at the agency raising concerns about Mr. Schmidt and conflicts of interest, Mr. Marcuse said. In the complaint, earlier reported by ProPublica, Ms. Laster, who worked with the Defense Innovation Board, said Mr. Schmidt had asked a service member what cloud computing services their unit used and whether they had considered alternatives. She said Mr. Schmidt faced a conflict of interest because he worked for Google, which also provides cloud services. Mr. Marcuse, who now works at Google, said Mr. Schmidt was "scrupulous and diligent" in avoiding conflicts. Mr. Schmidt said he followed the rules forbidding conflicts of interest. Ms. Laster did not respond to requests for comment. Last April, Mr. Schmidt announced he planned to leave Google's board. He had helped create an A.I. center backed by the Pentagon in 2018 and had also become co chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a new group advising Congress on developing A.I. for defense. A month after leaving Google, Mr. Schmidt invested in Rebellion Defense, a software start up founded by former Defense Department employees that analyzes video gathered via drone. His venture firm later put more money into the company, and Mr. Schmidt joined its board. The investment led to more trouble. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy and civil liberties group, sued the A.I. commission last September for failing to turn over records. EPIC said the group was stacked with industry executives like Mr. Schmidt and others from Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, who could potentially sway the government in favor of their companies' interests. Mr. Schmidt was under scrutiny because of Rebellion Defense and how he could push the government to use the start up's services, EPIC said. "We don't have any public disclosure about what information Eric has provided to the commission about his business interests," said John Davisson, an attorney at EPIC. In December, a district court ruled the A.I. commission must disclose the records requested by EPIC. The commission has released hundreds of pages of documents, most of which do not involve Mr. Schmidt or his businesses. EPIC said more records are set to be released. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Kaatskeller, a new pizza joint and bar in Livingston Manor. There are too many idyllic fall foliage locations across the United States to list in one place, and while most people think of the Northeast as the best viewing region, it is certainly not the only one. Here are eight destinations spanning the continental United States that offer pretty trees and a lot more to fill up a perfect autumn weekend trip. New York's Catskill Mountains are packed with hiking trails and cover 6,000 square miles. In particular, Sullivan County, located in the western Catskills, is undergoing a transformation thanks to entrepreneurial locals and city transplants. What to Do (and Where to Stay) in the Western Catskills It's not fair to single out just one foliage location in Vermont, but consider Manchester and its relaxed and sophisticated ambience, which makes it a popular destination for all seasons. In recent years it has emerged as a popular winter getaway among Bostonians, New Yorkers and even Europeans looking to get acquainted with Vermont's unspoiled Green Mountains, while also exploring Manchester's bounty of local arts and crafts shops and artisanal restaurants. Not many other regions are crisscrossed by so many lines of music and literature, and by ellipses of deep green hills that turn a glorious red, orange and yellow come autumn. This swath of Massachusetts has seen the rise of a formidable food movement where animals graze on hillsides, and where little shoots grow up to be farmers' market peas. Mount Desert Island sits at roughly the midpoint of Maine's coast, and the park itself takes up almost all of it. But Maine is loaded with other islands more than 3,000 along its 3,500 miles of coastline. Isle au Haut, dangling way out at the edge of the Gulf of Maine, is an outlier: larger, taller and wilder than most, with half its area protected as a water bound outpost of the park. With a rich fishing, shipping and brewing past, and a still active working port, Portsmouth and its pleasures are smaller scale. It's blessed with an absurd selection of restaurants, cafes and ice cream parlors to ponder and is just one of many excellent foliage destinations in the state. There's almost nothing small about the Upper Peninsula. In square miles, it is bigger than Maryland. It borders Lake Superior, the biggest of the Great Lakes. And its Tahquamenon Falls is one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi River. So it shouldn't be a surprise that its beauty is equally impressive. 36 Hours in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Taking better care of your tech gear can help make it last longer, but sometimes you just need to upgrade. Even if your phone, tablet or computer hasn't suffered a fatal flop, you may find it doesn't fit your work from home needs, or you plan to pass it down to a family member who needs it for remote learning. Or, be honest: You really want the fall season's latest, greatest phone. Whatever the reason for the new purchase, simply tossing your old hardware in the junk drawer or trash can be bad from a privacy standpoint and for the environment. When upgrade time comes, here are some security and eco friendly tips for when your old equipment goes on without you. To get your old device ready to leave your possession, start by backing up its contents to an external drive or secure cloud server. Next, look for a program to automatically move your data from the backup or old device. Apple's support site has guides for transferring the contents of Mac computers and iOS gadgets, along with advice for giving away a Mac or one of Apple's phones or tablets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Ezra Chowaiki was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Manhattan to 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release for defrauding art dealers and collectors of millions of dollars. He was also ordered to give up his interest in more than 20 works of art involved in the fraud, including pieces by Picasso and Alexander Calder. He will have to pay restitution in an amount that will be determined in 90 days. As the owner of a now closed Manhattan art gallery, Chowaiki Co., Mr. Chowaiki made a series of fraudulent deals to buy and sell artwork from 2015 to 2017. During this period, he transferred more than 16 million of artwork under false pretenses. "He sold clients' artwork without authorization, and he took clients' money for the purchase of artwork he never purchased," Geoffrey S. Berman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement released after the sentence was passed. Judge Jed S. Rakoff presided. Mr. Chowaiki's six victims include art collectors in New York, Toronto and Pennsylvania, as well as a company managed by an art dealer who does business in Tokyo. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Trump Is the 'Gollum of Presidents,' Trevor Noah Says 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. Speculation over Rudy Giuliani's involvement with Ukraine has magnified since the arrest of two of his associates last week as they prepared to board a one way flight out of Washington. "Wow, this is crazy. Rudy Giuliani has friends? I didn't see that coming." TREVOR NOAH "Aside from being born with resting mug shot face, probably the biggest red flag with these guys was that they were buying a one way ticket out of the country, which is always suspicious, all right? The only people who buy one way tickets are criminals. And sky divers. That's it." TREVOR NOAH President Trump was evasive about Giuliani, his personal lawyer, as he spoke to the news media on Friday. The next day, he had lunch with Giuliani and called him a "great guy" in a tweet, deploring what he called "a one sided Witch Hunt going on in USA." "Donald Trump is all over the place. He's like the Gollum of presidents. imitating Gollum We haven't spoken to Rudies. We speak to Rudies all the time!" TREVOR NOAH "Is there such a thing as a two sided witch hunt? Because, I don't know was there a group of witches that hunted down regular people?" JIMMY KIMMEL "So Trump and Giuliani are still a team. Whenever Donald Trump considers getting rid of Rudy, Rudy hypnotizes him with that giant pinkie ring he wears." JIMMY KIMMEL "Today is both Indigenous Peoples and Columbus Day, depending on where you stand on slavery, I guess." JIMMY KIMMEL "It's Columbus Day on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, O.K.? Don't erase the Italians." DESUS "Columbus is basically the 1492 version of the people who write 'First!' in the YouTube comments section." JIMMY KIMMEL "Columbus missed India by 9,000 miles and still decided to call everyone he met Indians anyway." JIMMY KIMMEL "There are 100 maybe 500 more deserving Italians we could be celebrating. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Marconi, Bon Jovi. We could have Bon Jovi Day. We could be celebrating dress up as cowboys and on a steel horse we ride. Instead we honor a man whose gift to America was measles." JIMMY KIMMEL Desus and Mero watch the suspense build as a candidate for sheriff in South Carolina confesses to a few misdeeds ... and then a few more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A SIMPLE FAVOR (2018) Stream on Amazon. The director Paul Feig might be most closely associated with the rebooted "Ghostbusters" and the dirty comedy of "Bridesmaids." But he took a darker turn here, directing a mystery adapted from the novel by Darcey Bell. Anna Kendrick plays Stephanie, a widow whose mild fixation with her new friend, Emily (Blake Lively), becomes not so mild when Emily goes missing. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis called the movie "a female friendship comedy with neo noir ambitions," writing that, despite two well synchronized stars, the movie "starts stalling out as the narrative feints and dodges increase." HIGHER LEARNING (1995) 6 p.m. on BET. This third feature from the director John Singleton delves into race relations on a 1990s college campus, telling the story of three freshmen (played by Omar Epps, Michael Rapaport and Kristy Swanson) whose lives intermittently overlap as they move toward a haunting climax. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Canadian Football League has become the latest casualty of the Covid 19 pandemic. On Monday, the C.F.L. canceled its 2020 season after repeated efforts to play an abbreviated schedule fell through. The league said it was now focused on returning in 2021. "Our league governors decided today that it was in the best long term interests of the C.F.L. to concentrate on the future," Commissioner Randy Ambrosie said after the decision was made. The decision to shut down for the year comes as some college football conferences in the United States, unable to ensure the safety of their players and coaches, have canceled their calendar of games. The N.F.L. is continuing with its plans to play this season, though many teams have said fans will not be in attendance for some or all home games. With nine teams (three of them publicly owned), the C.F.L. has far fewer resources than the N.F.L. Unlike the N.F.L., which makes most of its money from national television and sponsorship contracts, the C.F.L. is more reliant on ticket sales. The league's finances were stretched thin when it became clear there would not be fans in the stands because of a ban on large gatherings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
If literature, as writes in "American Audacity," is "the one religion worth having," then Giraldi is our most tenacious revivalist preacher, his sermons galvanized by a righteous exhortative energy, a mastery of the sacred texts and unique in contemporary literary criticism an enthusiasm for moralizing in defense of high standards. "Do I really expect Americans to sit down with 'Adam Bede' or 'Clarissa' after all the professional and domestic hurly burly of their day?" he asks in an essay bemoaning "Fifty Shades of Grey." "Pardon me, but yes, I do." The only insincerity there is the request for pardon: Giraldi is defiantly, lavishly unforgiving. "American Audacity" is the rare example of a collection that coheres into a manifesto. Its essays were published during the last seven years, many in The New Republic and The Daily Beast, on topics as various as the art of hate mail, Herman Melville's life and the Boston Marathon bombing (Giraldi, the author of two novels and a memoir, teaches at Boston University and is fiction editor of the literary journal AGNI). But every piece possesses the same moral urgency, which is to say that each advances the same critical argument. A clue to Giraldi's sensibility can be found in the chapter headings. Literature's actuarial tables dictate that a younger critic will tend to review, on balance, more elders than youngers. Giraldi is 44, still rosy cheeked in critic years, but all of his subjects are older than he is, or dead. His critical criteria are timeless, which is the point; for a book to outlast its first breath, it must contend with all that has come before. This is an unequivocal truth, though it imposes a severity that would frighten most critics. Thus Giraldi measures "Eat, Pray, Love" against the standard of Saint Augustine's "Confessions," Denis Johnson against Flannery O'Connor and, more flatteringly, places the poet Christian Wiman in relation to John Donne. He champions writers of inventive prose, who possess "a cognizance of the self as an agent in history and society," who fulfill James Baldwin's definition of art: "to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion." Giraldi demands these vows of his subjects and of himself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In between making "Gilmore Girls" and its Netflix reboot, Amy Sherman Palladino made another charming show about another charming small town. Sutton Foster plays Michelle, a Vegas showgirl who finds herself teaching dance classes for teens at the studio of her mother in law (Kelly Bishop). The performances of Foster and Bishop are reason enough to watch, but there's also beautiful dancing and satisfying teen drama. Where to stream: Hulu and Freeform.com. An ex cop and his criminal friend team up as private investigators in this smart procedural. If you're looking for high jinks and heart, this could be the show for you. The pace and tone varies over the show's short run, but the seemingly deadbeat characters are always charming and three dimensional. Since its cancellation in 2003, this genre bending show has developed a devoted fan base. It's a Western, but the frontier is outer space. There are spaceships and lasers and love trysts and outlaws, as well as an eclectic cast, led by Nathan Fillion. The series was initially aired out of order, so make sure you start with the actual first episode, "Serenity." This cult favorite helped define the modern family drama. The "Life" of the title is that of Angela, a high school sophomore played by Claire Danes. Circling Angela are her crush, Jordan Catalano (a floppy haired Jared Leto); her friends Rayanne (A.J. Langer) and Rickie (Wilson Cruz); the boy who has a crush on her (Devon Gummersall); and her parents. Many scenes feature voice over, which forges a rare connection between us and Angela as she struggles through teenage drama. "I Love Dick" is based on Chris Kraus's book of the same name, and (broadly) adapted by Jill Soloway, the creator of "Transparent." Soloway teams with her frequent muse Kathryn Hahn, who plays a stymied filmmaker spending a season in Marfa, Tex., with her academic husband (Griffin Dunne), when she meets the alluring, confounding Dick (Kevin Bacon, almost comically eroticized). Soloway's loose, empathetic style and passion for slightly irritating characters are in full force. But "Dick" is less languid than "Transparent," and it has a steadier beat than her film "Afternoon Delight." If you lost track of this animated gem back last year, now's the time. The show follows Tuca and Bertie (voiced by Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong), two bird besties and former roommates who are segueing into a new phase of friendship after Bertie moves in with her boyfriend. Tuca and Bertie's world has the quirky surrealism of a beloved children's book, but the themes and ideas are quite adult. Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury) is a screwball pitcher, and she's poised to be the first woman to play Major League Baseball. The pressure is tremendous, her teammates are not all helpful, her coach is a little skeptical. Because M.L.B. is participating in the show, the footage, game play and commentary all feel realistic but none of that would matter if the show didn't have emotional resonance. Luckily, it does. Where to buy: Amazon, Google Play and iTunes. This show is set within the world of DC Comics Batman exists, although we never see him but on the regular people side of things, at an R D department. Vanessa Hudgens plays Emily, the too needy new boss, but the best part of the show is her staff, played by Danny Pudi, Ron Funches, and Jennie Pierson. "Powerless" reminds me a lot of "Better Off Ted," "No Tomorrow" (not the premise, but the characters) and "Reaper." You know, quirky shows that dozens of us enjoy. Do you ever feel as if you're being gaslit by members of the underworld? Then look no further than this demon hunting comedy on Netflix, by way of Channel 4, which offers a road map for women navigating personal, and actual, demons. In "Crazyhead," Susan Wokoma and Cara Theobold star as Raquel and Amy, two young women in Bristol who have the ability to see the malevolent, supernatural beings who walk among us. Since this isn't a common gift, they are treated as if they were unwell, resulting in their having a justified skepticism of prescription happy doctors and psychiatric institutions. This all helps to cement their friendship. Fast. In this odd couple comedy, a vain actor who starred as a lawyer on a TV drama comes home and tries to join his family's law firm. Rob Lowe plays the actor and Fred Savage his long suffering brother. "The Grinder" smartly satirizes legal dramas, as Lowe's character tries to apply to actual cases what he has learned as an actor. There are strong performances all around, from Lowe, Savage and William Devane as the family patriarch. Where to buy: Amazon Video, Google Play and Vudu. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The actor , 32, has a lot to say about grooming, diet, fitness and, most important, sleep. Mr. Criss, a San Francisco native who lives in Los Angeles, is so obsessed with sleep that he times it to REM cycles. He has also started a men's grooming site, the Motley, with the siblings Matthew and Madison Ruggieri, and has just introduced a unisex skin care line called Onekind. Here, Mr. Criss, who is in the war drama "Midway" and is filming "Hollywood," the new Ryan Murphy Netflix show scheduled for release next year, explains his personal care routine. I have a lot of cleansers, but honestly, this is the one category where I feel like you just need to get your face clean. You use a bar of soap, and as long as it does the job, it's O.K. Then I use Port Products Sol Defense SPF moisturizer. Then, morning and night, I put on Recipe for Men Under Eye Gel. For night, I'm biased toward my own products. I do the Onekind Midnight Magic serum there's retinol in there and I use that in tandem with Onekind Dream Cream. Every two days or so, I do the Urth Botanical Resurfacing Mask. I love a lot of their products. I also have the Urth Antioxidant Face Complex. It's like taking your face to the spa. I have to shave every day for "Hollywood," the show I'm on, and it's really tough on the skin. I have to pay attention to the length of my stubble and the kind of blade I use. If I have a few days' growth, I like the Executive blades from Dollar Shave Club. But if it's a day's stubble, I'm using a safety razor. That's because razor burn comes from multiple blades and multiple tiny cuts. I'm trying to minimize that by the number of the blades and also how big the blade is. I use a hot towel to warm up the stubble. I also try to use really hot water to warm up the blade. Lock Stock Barrel makes a really great shave oil. One of the most important things, though, is the Urth Post Shave Elixir. I have buckets of it. If I don't have it, I'm in a panic. I recommend it to anyone. I recommend it to my wife after she shaves her legs. I guarantee you maybe five people in the world care this much about shaving. I think it's an Eastern medicine kind of thing let's face it, they've been ahead of everything on this front for millenniums. Someone recommended it to me years ago, and then when I was doing "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" on Broadway, I was literally making out with strangers every night. I did anything I could do to clean my mouth it was more for their benefit and less for mine. I'm really militant about sleeping for certain lengths of time. I've been doing this for years and years: I make sure I sleep in increments of 90 minutes. It takes me about 10 to 15 minutes to fall asleep and then the 90 minutes to complete a good REM cycle. So, for example, I'd rather get three hours of sleep than four hours. Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. You know those days when you wake up and you feel really good even though you didn't really get a lot of sleep? That's hitting the REM cycle. Or you sleep for a long time, but you wake up in the middle of a REM cycle and your whole day feels awful? I avoid that like the plague. Of course, there are a lot of variables what you ate, how much you drank but I try to have my sleep evenly timed out. I've been into health and food ever since I was maybe 12 or 13. I was fascinated by the idea that food is fuel in this very nonintellectual way. You need carbs to do this and protein to do that. How it's translated today is that you see that the digestive system is directly related to everything else. It's not a subsidiary component. So I time the way I eat. I don't mean I'm timing while I'm eating, but you know how if you have dinner plans at 8 with friends? Well, then you don't eat as much during the day so you'll have an appetite and enjoy a meal out. I take the same approach with every activity throughout the day. If I'm working, the snacks and the doughnuts are all lying around, and I have to be careful of that. Otherwise I'll feel strung out and tired. I try not to eat three hours before bed, but if I'm hungry, I might have a low glycemic snack. I'm not going to have a carnitas burrito. Then one of my biggest life hacks: I'm a huge chia seed person. If chia seed was a brand, I'd be repping them so hard. I soak chia seeds overnight and then do chia seeds and matcha in the morning. They're the ancient form of good things. I got heavily into fitness in my late 20s. Now I'm a certifiable fitness rat. I work out like I used to play video games. It's competitive and fun. It's also meditative. For me it's really about the cardiovascular benefits and general well being. If my body is a little more toned, that's a super bonus. When I first started, that entry point was hard to find. I was completely allergic to the bro y gym culture. "Get swoll, dude!" The thing that changed my life was P90X. I've never met him, but Tony Horton is the biggest dweeb in fitness. I was too embarrassed to go to the gym, and I didn't want to work out in a public space, and here was a guy who was making the dumbest dad jokes. This guy was all right. I knew this guy from high school. I now love the social aspect of working out. I have maybe six or seven friends on rotation, and instead of going out, we do a workout class together. It might be H.I.I.T., a Pilates reformer class or yoga. I try to change it up as much as possible. I want to confuse my muscles. I also love Training Mate in Los Angeles. It's by these goofy Australians. They're super fun and funny. When I'm in New York, Refine is my jam. Fhitting Room is really great. A lot of people don't know how to keep their muscles healthy. They need to do the recovery. Physical therapy is really nice, but it's expensive. I believe in rolling out the muscles, and that just takes some time. Also, cryotherapy is incredible. You can do other things, like an Epsom salt bath, and I'm a big fan of the steam shower if you can get access to one. I do it at night too, as it helps me relax before going to sleep. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Are there poets for whom you've gained greater appreciation over time? When I first became brave enough to tell people that I wrote poems, so many people would rave to me about Edna St. Vincent Millay's work. I was embarrassed not to have read her and I think that put me off from reading her for a long time. So many of her poems are just impeccable. I love the subtlety and the tiny, yet significant, gestures driving poems like "Ebb" and "The Fitting." As poet laureate of the United States, you've been traveling across the country to meet with people in underserved communities. What books do you recommend to them? And have they in turn pointed you to any neglected or unfamiliar writers? I find myself sharing poems by other poets on these trips, which is something I didn't used to do at readings. Some of the voices I've been excited to celebrate so far are Natalie Diaz, Aracelis Girmay, John Yau, Patrick Rosal, Laura Kasischke and Chen Chen. I like that these are poets living and writing in America today, each with different thematic concerns, different approaches to language and different ideas about what it means to belong to this place made up of many places. And I feel very lucky that I get to meet other poets in my travels. In New Mexico, I met dg okpik, an Inupiaq Inuit poet whose work draws Inuit creation stories into conversation with a personal exploration of self, family and the natural world. And I read recently with Kealoha, the poet laureate of Hawaii, whose performance piece "The Story of Everything" traces the origin of the universe from the Big Bang until now. If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be? "Little Women" made me into a reader. About a decade later, I wrote one of my college admissions essays on Thoreau's "Walden." I have no memory of what I might have said then about the book, though I do remember loving its various paradoxes and the beautiful spacious sense of self, nature and possibility that the prose fostered. I was longing for the kind of largeness of spirit and rhetorical authority of a writer like Thoreau. I didn't encounter Emerson until college, but I think I was an aspiring Transcendentalist from a young age. What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I have three kids, so children's literature is a big part of my life. At one time, I thought I'd raise my kids on the classic books from my childhood: "Little House in the Big Woods," Beverly Cleary's wonderful Ramona books, "Black Beauty." It's been great to revisit some of those titles as a parent, but my children have guided me to the joys of contemporary children's literature. Jacqueline Woodson's books are such a gift to parents and children for their poignant subtlety and lyricism, and their willingness to let a reader dwell in the pangs of realization that we sometimes try to protect our children from. I'm thinking of "Each Kindness" and "The Other Side." My daughter is 8 and loves the way that private and public history intersect in "Feathers." Many picture books have fostered inroads for talking with our kids about history: Margaret H. Mason's "These Hands" tells the story of racial discrimination at the Wonder Bread factory in the 1950s and '60s. Selina Alko's "The Case for Loving" tells the story behind the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision. And then there are books that have given us a wonderfully useful vocabulary for feelings of anger or longing, like Barbara O'Connor's "Wish." I have to say that I just haven't found a way to get excited about "Harry Potter," though my daughter and husband loved the series. I loved C. S. Lewis as a kid, so I thought I'd have a toehold in that world, but invariably I'd get about two paragraphs in and fall asleep. Maybe I'll be ready to face those books in a few more years when they come around for our boys. What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves? Perhaps because I've lost both my parents, I really appreciate Elisabeth Kubler Ross's books on death and dying. What do you plan to read next? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In addition to providing a place to store files, Google Drive includes Google Docs, an online software suite for creating and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. This summer, the company announced a desktop app for Windows and Mac, called Backup and Sync, that keeps Google Photos and Google Drive files backed up online. Google Drive has been around since 2012, and some people have raised concerns about Google's scanning user content for its own purposes, like selling targeted advertising. The company's overall Terms of Service document states, "Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received and when it is stored." Google's terms are not unlike those of other companies offering similar services and can be seen as the price of "free." If they bother you, you can look for a different service with more agreeable terms or encrypt the stored data yourself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Steven Levenson's passionate and provoking "If I Forget" is a family play, a political play and a kitchen sink play. That kitchen definitely isn't kosher, even though the family that gathers around it the three adult children of an ailing father, Lou Fischer are outspoken Jewish Americans. Irritable and animated, the Fischers come vibrantly alive in this young playwright's funny, bruising, searching voice. The play, a Roundabout Theater Company production that opened on Wednesday night, begins in 2000 in an upper middle class neighborhood of Washington. The Camp David summit meeting has failed, ushering in the collapse of the Israel Palestine peace process. The renewed intifada seems removed from the day to day worries of Lou (Larry Bryggman), his children and their spouses and offspring. But world events have a funny way of inviting themselves into this two story Colonial. Rocks thrown a world away encourage deeply personal reflections of what it means to be a Jew in America at the turn of the 21st century. The younger daughter, Sharon (Maria Dizzia), a teacher, used to take Lou to temple, but her observance has dwindled since she discovered her boyfriend and the cantor entangled on her new duvet. Her great regret: "Now I have to get it dry cleaned," she tells her brother, Michael (Jeremy Shamos). The older daughter, Holly (Kate Walsh of "Private Practice"), a homemaker and design hobbyist, goes to services only on High Holy Days. Michael, a professor of Jewish studies, doesn't go at all. If Michael is the least religious character, he is also the one most consumed by questions of Jewish identity. He has just finished writing an incendiary book arguing that the persistence of the Holocaust in the minds of American Jews has hollowed out Jewish life. Michael, who hurls his words like so many Molotov cocktails, insists that the Holocaust has made contemporary Judaism "a religion and a culture of, frankly, death and death worship," and recommends forgetting it. (This point and others owe a debt to Norman G. Finkelstein's 2000 book, "The Holocaust Industry.") These claims don't sit well with Lou, a World War II veteran who helped liberate Dachau. In a late night conversation with Michael, he describes, simply and feelingly, what he saw there and why he can't and won't forget. "For you, history is an abstraction," he says. "But for us, the ones who survived this century, this long, long century, there are no abstractions anymore." This speech, poignantly delivered by Mr. Bryggman, elicited spontaneous applause. But so did the earlier and wholly contradictory tirade loosed by Mr. Shamos. No one in Mr. Levenson's play gets to make the definitive statement. Not even Mr. Levenson. Like other intellectually rigorous plays about to open J. T. Rogers's "Oslo," Paula Vogel's "Indecent" and Lynn Nottage's "Sweat" "If I Forget" speaks to both the head and the heart. No condescending sense of playwright knows best here. The problems of what we should remember and what we should forget, who we should be and how we should love seem to confuse Mr. Levenson, too. (The current renewal of anti Semitic rhetoric and the threats to Jewish spaces have only made the play's quandaries ring louder.) When it comes to big questions, and smaller ones, too, every character makes reasonable arguments even flaky Holly, even sad sack Sharon and also unreasonable ones. Sorting through that welter of competing claims is a real hassle. And a great gift. But focusing too intently on the play's stimulating politics risks scanting its humor and its family dynamics. Mr. Levenson has a longtime interest in strained relations between parents and children you can find it in his debut play, "The Language of Trees," and in his book for the hit Broadway musical "Dear Evan Hansen." Yet he has never created a clan as quick to wound and quick to reconcile as the Fischers. "If I Forget" isn't perfect. The plot, which turns on a question of real estate, takes its time arriving and mostly hangs around to facilitate debate. (And in these debates all the most penetrating arguments go to the men.) That Michael would publish his controversial book just as he's up for tenure strains credibility, and a later subplot about credit card fraud is even more unlikely. Under Daniel Sullivan's sensitive direction, the ripe interstitial music nudges emotion too obviously and the ending, which shifts the play into magical realism, makes its themes too explicit. (Mr. Levenson has never been one to wear his metaphors lightly.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
WASHINGTON Having established a fast charging foothold in California for its electric cars, Tesla Motors has brought its formula east, opening two ultrafast charging stations in December that would, in theory, allow a speedy electric car road trip between here and Boston. But as I discovered on a recent test drive of the company's high performance Model S sedan, theory can be trumped by reality, especially when Northeast temperatures plunge. Tesla, the electric car manufacturer run by Elon Musk, the billionaire behind PayPal and SpaceX, offered a high performance Model S sedan for a trip along the newly electrified stretch of Interstate 95. It seemed an ideal bookend to The Times's encouraging test drive last September on the West Coast. The new charging points, at service plazas in Newark, Del., and Milford, Conn., are some 200 miles apart. That is well within the Model S's 265 mile estimated range, as rated by the Environmental Protection Agency, for the version with an 85 kilowatt hour battery that I drove and even more comfortably within Tesla's claim of 300 miles of range under ideal conditions. Of course, mileage may vary. The 480 volt Supercharger stations deliver enough power for 150 miles of travel in 30 minutes, and a full charge in about an hour, for the 85 kilowatt hour Model S. (Adding the fast charge option to cars with the midlevel 60 kilowatt hour battery costs 2,000.) That's quite a bit longer than it takes to pump 15 gallons of gasoline, but at Supercharger stations Tesla pays for the electricity, which seems a reasonable trade for fast, silent and emissions free driving. Besides, what's Sbarro for? The car is a technological wonder, with luminous paint on aluminum bodywork, a spacious and ultrahip cabin, a 17 inch touch screen to control functions from suspension height to the Google driven navigation system. Feeding the 416 horsepower motor of the top of the line Model S Performance edition is a half ton lithium ion battery pack slung beneath the cockpit; that combination is capable of flinging this 101,000 luxury car through the quarter mile as quickly as vaunted sport sedans like the Cadillac CTS V. The Model S has won multiple car of the year awards and is, many reviews would have you believe, the coolest car on the planet. Setting out on a sunny 30 degree day two weeks ago, my trip started well enough. A Tesla agent brought the car to me in suburban Washington with a full charge, and driving at normal highway speeds I reached the Delaware charging dock with the battery still having roughly half its energy remaining. I went off for lunch at the service plaza, checking occasionally on the car's progress. After 49 minutes, the display read "charge complete," and the estimated available driving distance was 242 miles. Fat city; no attendant and no cost. As I crossed into New Jersey some 15 miles later, I noticed that the estimated range was falling faster than miles were accumulating. At 68 miles since recharging, the range had dropped by 85 miles, and a little mental math told me that reaching Milford would be a stretch. I began following Tesla's range maximization guidelines, which meant dispensing with such battery draining amenities as warming the cabin and keeping up with traffic. I turned the climate control to low the temperature was still in the 30s and planted myself in the far right lane with the cruise control set at 54 miles per hour (the speed limit is 65). Buicks and 18 wheelers flew past, their drivers staring at the nail polish red wondercar with California dealer plates. Nearing New York, I made the first of several calls to Tesla officials about my creeping range anxiety. The woman who had delivered the car told me to turn off the cruise control; company executives later told me that advice was wrong. All the while, my feet were freezing and my knuckles were turning white. After a short break in Manhattan, the range readout said 79 miles; the Milford charging station was 73 miles away. About 20 miles from Milford, less than 10 miles of range remained. I called Tesla again, and Ted Merendino, a product planner, told me that even when the display reached zero there would still be a few miles of cushion. At that point, the car informed me it was shutting off the heater, and it ordered me, in vivid red letters, to "Recharge Now." I drove into the service plaza, hooked up the Supercharger and warmed my hands on a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. If this is Tesla's vision of long distance travel in America's future, I thought, and the solution to what the company calls the "road trip problem," it needs some work. The federal government has invested in the effort to find a solution. Three years ago, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winning physicist and secretary of energy, proudly announced a 465 million loan to Tesla as part of an advanced vehicles program intended to cut fossil fuel use and address global warming. The loan to Tesla would "begin laying the foundation for American leadership in the growing electric vehicles industry," Dr. Chu said. At the time, Tesla set a target of producing 20,000 Model S cars by the end of 2013. Some 13,000 eager buyers have reserved 2013 models at prices from about 61,000 to more than 100,000. To give those cars family vacation capability, the company plans to have 90 Supercharger stations built across the country by the end of 2013. At the Washington Auto Show last month, Dr. Chu, who has since announced his plan to leave office in the next few weeks, discussed the Energy Department's goal of making electric vehicles and plug in hybrids as cheap and convenient as comparable gasoline powered cars. He continued: "We can't say this everywhere in America yet, but driving by a gasoline station and smiling is something everyone should experience." Instead, I spent nearly an hour at the Milford service plaza as the Tesla sucked electrons from the hitching post. When I continued my drive, the display read 185 miles, well beyond the distance I intended to cover before returning to the station the next morning for a recharge and returning to Manhattan. I drove, slowly, to Stonington, Conn., for dinner and spent the night in Groton, a total distance of 79 miles. When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range the electrical equivalent of someone having siphoned off more than two thirds of the fuel that was in the tank when I parked. I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to "condition" the battery pack to restore the lost energy. That meant sitting in the car for half an hour with the heat on a low setting. (There is now a mobile application for warming the battery remotely; it was not available at the time of my test drive.) After completing the battery conditioning process, the estimated range reading was 19 miles; no way would I make it back to Milford. The Tesla people found an E.V. charging facility that Norwich Public Utilities had recently installed. Norwich, an old mill town on the Thames River, was only 11 miles away, though in the opposite direction from Milford. After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch's Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. Tesla's experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford. Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch's and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away. But the Model S had other ideas. "Car is shutting down," the computer informed me. I was able to coast down an exit ramp in Branford, Conn., before the car made good on its threat. Tesla's New York service manager, Adam Williams, found a towing service in Milford that sent a skilled and very patient driver, Rick Ibsen, to rescue me with a flatbed truck. Not so quick: the car's electrically actuated parking brake would not release without battery power, and hooking the car's 12 volt charging post behind the front grille to the tow truck's portable charger would not release the brake. So he had to drag it onto the flatbed, a painstaking process that took 45 minutes. Fortunately, the cab of the tow truck was toasty. At 2:40 p.m., we pulled into the Milford rest stop, five hours after I had left Groton on a trip that should have taken less than an hour. Mr. Ibsen carefully maneuvered the flatbed close to the charging kiosk, and 25 minutes later, with the battery sufficiently charged to release the parking brake and drive off the truck, the car was back on the ground. A Model S owner who had taken delivery the previous day watched with interest. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
YOU may not recognize Wilhelm Hofmeister's name, but you've seen his kink. The Hofmeister kink, a fixture of fixed roof BMW automobiles for decades, is a distinctive treatment of the rearmost roof pillar, known in the industry as the C pillar, where it meets the side window. Hofmeister, a BMW designer, introduced the look in 1961 on the innovative 1500 model, and over the next five decades it became one of the best known (and most widely copied) automotive design cues. The Hofmeister kink proved an elegant yet jaunty way for designers to resolve the potentially problematic intersection of a car's roof and its body. The kink also became a BMW signature on par with the twin kidney grille. At the New York auto show this month, a variation of the Hofmeister kink was never far out of sight. Nearly all of the four door cars that made their debuts had rakish roof profiles requiring swept back C pillars and a sleeker adaptation of the venerable kink. Because the pillar treatment heavily influences the overall shape of a car's windows an important trait that designers call the "daylight opening" these kinks can accentuate the horizontal, making cars seem longer. And when framed in chrome, as they increasingly are, they can give a premium appearance even to workaday mass market sedans. PILLAR PUZZLER: Can you match the window detail to the car? Photos, not in order, are of 2012 Audi A7, '14 Chevy Impala, '12 Hyundai Azera, '13 Lexus ES and '13 Nissan Altima. Answers below. Benjamin Norman for The New York Times On the 2013 Ford Fusion, the rear glass and beltline meet in a little flip, like a checkmark. "We just call it a kick in the C pillar," said J Mays, Ford's vice president for design. He added, "It speeds the car up," meaning that it gives the vehicle a more dynamic appearance, especially in combination with the Fusion's rakish rear roof lines another trend. The new Nissan Altima has a bold chrome kink on its C pillar. Nissan wants to move the car up market, and Shiro Nakamura, the company's design chief, noted that the Altima would be introduced simultaneously in the United States and China, where it will be marketed to wealthy young people and must be perceived as luxurious. Mr. Nakamura also pointed to the Altima's C pillar kink as an element his designers added to make the car's height seem lower. By widening or narrowing the chrome trim of the kink like an artist changing the width of a brush stroke designers can make it into a calligraphic element, like the final flourish of a John Hancock signature. The Chevrolet Impala converts the kink into a bold parabola that mimics the shape of the body. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
State financial regulators in New York said Wednesday that they would investigate reports that gay men have been denied insurance policies covering life, disability or long term care because they were taking medication to protect themselves against H.I.V. Such denials would amount to illegal discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the companies doing so could be penalized, said Maria T. Vullo, the state's superintendent of financial services. The investigation was triggered by an article published Tuesday by The New York Times, she said. The Times reported that various insurers around the country had denied policies to gay men after learning they took Truvada, a cocktail of two anti AIDS drugs, to avoid catching H.I.V. through sex. To get insurance, some men even stopped taking the protective drugs. The practice known as "pre exposure prophylaxis," or PrEP is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Studies have shown that people who take the drug every day have nearly a zero chance of becoming infected, even if they are in a long relationship with an H.I.V. infected person or have sex with many strangers without condoms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
One of the defining moments in the history of breast cancer occurred in 1974 when the first lady, Betty Ford, spoke openly about her mastectomy, lifting a veil of secrecy from the disease and ushering in a new era of breast cancer awareness. Now four decades later, another leading lady the actress Angelina Jolie has focused public attention on breast cancer again, but this time with an even bolder message: A woman at genetic risk should feel empowered to remove both breasts as a way to prevent the disease. Ms. Jolie revealed on Tuesday that because she carries a cancer causing mutation, she has had a double mastectomy. "She's the biggest name of all, and I think given her prominence and her visibility not only as a famous person but also a beautiful actress, it's going to carry a lot of weight for women," said Barron H. Lerner, a medical historian and the author of "The Breast Cancer Wars." Breast cancer experts and advocates applauded the manner in which Ms. Jolie explored her options and made informed decisions, saying it might influence some women with strong family histories of breast cancer to get genetic tests. But some doctors also expressed worry that her disclosure could be misinterpreted by other women, fueling the trend toward mastectomies that are not medically necessary for many early stage breast cancers. In recent years, doctors have reported a virtual epidemic of preventive mastectomies among women who have cancer in one breast and decide to remove the healthy one as well, even though they do not have genetic mutations that increase their risk and their odds of a second breast cancer are very low. Ms. Jolie wrote on the Op Ed page of The New York Times that she had tested positive for a genetic mutation known as BRCA1, which left her with an exceedingly high risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer. Her mother died at 56 after nearly a decade with cancer, though Ms. Jolie did not specify which type. After genetic counseling, Ms. Jolie opted to have both breasts removed and to undergo reconstructive surgery. Ms. Jolie, 37, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was treated at the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills, Calif., a clinic opened in 2009 by Dr. Kristi Funk, identified on its Web site as a former director of patient education at the breast center at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Her condition is rare. Mutations in BRCA1 and another gene called BRCA2 are estimated to cause only 5 percent to 10 percent of breast cancers and 10 percent to 15 percent of ovarian cancers among white women in the United States. The mutations are found in other racial and ethnic groups as well, but it is not known how common they are. About 30 percent of women who are found to have BRCA mutations choose preventive mastectomies, said Dr. Kenneth Offit, chief of clinical genetics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Those who have seen family members die young from the disease are most likely to opt for the surgery. "It's important to make it clear that a BRCA mutation is a special, high risk situation," said Dr. Monica Morrow, chief of the breast service at Sloan Kettering. For women at very high risk, preventive mastectomy makes sense, but few women fall into that category, she said. For women's health advocates, the trend toward double mastectomies in women who do not have mutations is frustrating. Studies in the 1970s and 1980s proved that for many patients, lumpectomy was as safe as mastectomy, and the findings were seen as a victory for women. Even so, there is increasing demand for mastectomy. Dr. Morrow says that she has often tried to talk patients out of it without success. Some imagine their risk of new or recurring cancer to be far higher than it really is. Others think that their breasts will match up better if both are removed and reconstructed. "She is a special case, and you can completely understand why she did it," said Dr. Susan Love, the author of a best seller, "Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book," and a breast surgeon. "But what I hope that people realize is that we really don't have good prevention for breast cancer. When you have to cut off normal body parts to prevent a disease, that's really pretty barbaric when you think about it." Women who carry BRCA mutations have, on average, about a 65 percent risk of eventually developing breast cancer, as opposed to a risk of about 12 percent for most women. For some mutation carriers, the risk may be higher; Ms. Jolie wrote that the estimate for her was 87 percent. Because the BRCA mutations are rare and the test expensive about 3,000 it is not recommended for most women. But for women with breast cancer who do have mutations, knowing their status can help them make further treatment decisions, like whether to have an unaffected breast or their ovaries removed. Women who should consider testing are those who have breast cancer before age 50, a family history of both breast and ovarian cancer, or many close relatives with breast cancer, especially if it developed before age 50. Any woman with ovarian cancer should consider being tested, as should Ashkenazi Jewish women with breast or ovarian cancer. Men with breast cancer and their families should also ask about the possibility of a genetic predisposition to the disease. Because the cancer risks for carriers are so high, women with the mutations are often advised to have their breasts and ovaries removed as a preventive measure. It is generally considered safe to wait long enough to have children before having the ovaries removed, but the operation should be done by age 40, said Dr. Susan M. Domchek, an expert on cancer genetics at the University of Pennsylvania and the executive director of its Basser Research Center, which specializes in BRCA mutations. There is no reliable way to screen for ovarian cancer, and most cases are detected at a relatively late stage, when the disease is harder to treat and more likely to be fatal. Ms. Jolie said that she herself had a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. "I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex," she wrote. Removing the breasts is not the only option, Dr. Domchek said. Some women with BRCA mutations choose close monitoring with mammograms and M.R.I. scans once a year, staggered so that they have one scan or the other every six months. Those tests offer a chance to find cancer early. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In 'And She Could Be Next,' Women of Color Take on Politics When the directors Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia talk about their new two part documentary series, "And She Could Be Next," they compare the process of getting it greenlit to mounting a political campaign. They would know: In the series, which was executive produced by Ava DuVernay (premiering Monday on PBS and POV.org), Lee and Safinia track the actual campaigns the door knocking, signposting, rallies and forums of several women of color who ran for office in 2018. The producers originally considered telling a story about women in politics, pegged to the first female president Hillary Clinton was eying the White House at the time, and she was widely considered the favorite. But 2016 had different plans. So Lee reframed the project as something she found more enticing anyway: a documentary not only about women but more specifically about women of color and their communities, and the changes they are making in American politics. "I think that there's narratives that we hear, particularly in documentaries they define entire communities, and as we know, these narratives have far too long been told from a white male gaze," she said. Communities of color are too often relegated to victim narratives, she added, which "wasn't the story we wanted to tell." The story being told is of the women who are pushing back against institutions at all political levels, their journeys interwoven to convey the sense of a larger shift, toward what Lee and Safinia call the "new American majority." This, the series tells us, is what systemic change looks like. There's the cast of heroines: Stacey Abrams, running for governor in Georgia; Bushra Amiwala, for county commissioner in Illinois; Maria Elena Durazo, for California State Senate; Veronica Escobar, for a U.S. congressional seat in Texas; Lucy McBath, for a U.S. congressional seat in Georgia; and Rashida Tlaib, for a U.S. congressional seat in Michigan. "Episode One: Building the Movement" centers on the sprint toward the finish lines of their respective races, while "Episode Two: Claiming Power" focuses more on the end of Abrams's campaign and on the poll closures, voter purges and voter ID laws that prompted accusations of rampant voter suppression in contests throughout Georgia. The documentary spends plenty of time on the campaign trail. In California, Durazo delivers a speech in both English and Spanish while wearing a "Defeat Trump" T shirt. Amiwala, a 19 year old college student, tries to keep up with her studies when she's not shaking hands and giving speeches. More intimate moments are captured as well, particularly with Tlaib's campaign. We watch her explain the workings of Congress to her two young sons in the car (and offer her elder son a position as her policy analyst), and we follow her through the night as she and her team anxiously await the results of a neck in neck race. Lee, who had worked with Tlaib before on the PBS documentary "Makers: Women in Politics," pushed for the close quarters view. "She really wanted to know me as a woman, as a mother, as a person, as a daughter," Tlaib said in a phone interview earlier this month. In one scene, Tlaib gathers with her family to celebrate the end of Ramadan; the camera follows the family members as they break their fast and also float campaign strategies. There are also glimpses of the opposition the candidates face along the way. McBath, who campaigns for common sense gun laws because her son was killed in a senseless act of gun violence, faces backlash and personal attacks on social media. Abrams gives an unruffled response to a man in the crowd who demands to know how much money she owes to the IRS. (Abrams's opponents tried to use a 54,000 federal tax debt, which she has since repaid, as a cudgel during the campaign.) And Amiwala, while putting on makeup in her bathroom before an event, recounts how a man once criticized how much lipstick she wore in a campaign video the kind of petty microaggression female politicians routinely endure. She also recalls the time when a debate tournament judge complimented her for being an "articulate" Muslim. But this is part of what it looks like to disrupt a system in which you are "an anomaly," DuVernay said by phone. "The American political system was not built for or by us," she said. "It was actually built against us. The actual architecture of the American political system was expressly built to oppress, to subjugate and to create a whole narrative of racial bias and oppression." "And She Could Be Next" depicts not only the experiences of candidates but also what Lee and Safinia call a whole campaign "ecosystem," including activists, organizers, volunteers and other people who also soldier against the status quo but often go overlooked. Early in the series, Nse Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to getting Georgians civically engaged and registered to vote, says, "I am so sick of people with limited imaginations and small minds telling us what's possible, when I see how excited people are." Lee and Safinia say this focus on the teams behind the women is what makes the film unique. It took a team of their own, composed entirely of women of color, to pull it off. Lee and Safinia oversaw the operation while field directors and their crew followed the campaigns across the country. It was no small logistical task, but the producers believed a panoramic view was necessary to capture the scale of this political evolution. "To me, it was never a film about '18," Lee said. "It's about a movement, about women of color who have always been organizing." The word "movement" surfaces many times throughout the series, connecting the dots between these women and implying some transcendence of the immediate moment in which their races are happening. The future envisioned by "And She Could Be Next" isn't just female; it's African American, Asian American, Latino, multiracial. It looks a lot like the diverse and equally representative America the country declares itself to be. In the beginning of the second episode, in front of the podium after her congressional win, Tlaib tells a room full of women of all ages: "It's going to be this movement that is going to be in front of us, actually. You are in front of us, and we have to follow your lead." In the phone interview, Tlaib brought up a famous quote by Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to serve in Congress: "If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair." But as the country endures a pandemic, mass unemployment and widespread protests, Tlaib said, she thinks it might be time for a revision. "I don't know if it's about bringing your own chair and making the table bigger," she said. "I think it's about shaking the table and taking someone else's chair from them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
or for lease at An 831 square foot vacant ground floor retail space in white box condition, with a usable 1,320 square foot selling basement and a 456 square foot patio, is available in Ian Schrager's recently built 15 story luxury condominium overlooking the Hudson River in the West Village. The white concrete building, with diamond faceted windows and an undulating facade, was designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog de Meuron, which also designed the Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin. Apartments in the building range from about 5 million to more than 40 million. The retail space features 25 foot high ceilings and windows on three sides on the ground floor, and 10 foot, 8 inch ceilings on the lower level. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Twyla Tharp, who set Bob Dylan's music to dance in the 2006 musical "The Times They Are A Changin'," will return to the Nobel laureate's tunes for her latest work, "Dylan Love Songs," which will have its premiere in September at the Joyce Theater. Part of a program performed by Twyla Tharp Dance, "Dylan Love Songs" will open the Joyce's 2017 18 fall and winter season, which the theater announced on Wednesday. Ms. Tharp is known for using popular music and moving fluidly among the worlds of ballet, Broadway and modern dance. Her latest Joyce program (Sept. 19 through Oct. 8) will be an example: "Dylan Love Songs," followed by her 1970 "The Fugue," for three dancers, which is performed without music but takes its form from Bach's "The Musical Offering." Other season highlights include the Trisha Brown Dance Company (Dec. 12 17), performing at the Joyce for the first time since its founder, the postmodern master Ms. Brown, died in March. The MacArthur grant winning tap dancer Michelle Dorrance will also return to perform a revised and expanded version of her 2015 work "Myelination" (Dec. 19 31). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Junior office workers once had a fairly predictable set of daily tasks. Write the sales memo. Build the PowerPoint. Make the coffee. Now, many young professionals have a new mandate: Drag the boss into the 21st century. While businesses chase evanescent market trends and grapple with a fast moving future, millennial mentors, as many companies call them, have emerged as a hot accessory for executives. Young workers, some just out of college, are being pulled into formal corporate programs to give advice to the top ranks of their companies. Millennial mentorship programs represent a formalized, mildly absurdist version of the advice junior workers have been giving their older colleagues for ages. Some executives want the views of young people on catering to new markets and developing new products, while others seek glorified tech support Snapchat 101, Twitter tutorials and emoji lessons. These programs are not just a departure from the business world's traditional top down management style. They are also a sign of just how perplexed some executives are by the young people in their midst. Companies like Mastercard, Cisco Systems and Mars Inc. have experimented with these mentoring programs. Inga Beale, 54, the chief executive of the insurance marketplace Lloyd's of London, has said that her junior mentor, who is 19, has a "totally different perspective" and leaves her "inspired." Melanie Whelan, 40, the chief executive of SoulCycle, holds monthly meetings with her younger mentor, whom she has credited with helping her get "hip with what the kids are doing these days." "It's like reconnecting with your lost youth," said David Watson, 38, a managing director at Deutsche Bank who has been mentored by Fernando Hernandez, 29, an engineer in the Wall Street bank's global markets technology division. He credited Mr. Hernandez with good tips for retaining young employees, like giving them more flexible work from home arrangements, and with helping him spot trends in the financial tech industry. "It's valuable information," Mr. Watson said. "When you're making decisions about budgets, or priorities, or hiring, you can actually put into practice what you learned." Could these executives just ask their children for tech tips? Sure. But workplace programs allow executives to peer into the future of their industry and bond with a junior colleague simultaneously, with minimal embarrassment. Reverse mentoring another name companies give to younger people training older workers is not a new concept. Jack Welch, while the chief executive of General Electric in the 1990s, required 500 of his top managers to pair up with junior workers to learn how to use the internet. But executives are especially eager to learn from millennials, whose dominance in Silicon Valley has given older workers a fear of obsolescence. An entire cottage industry now peddles advice to youth obsessed executives, with books like "Understanding Millennials" and events like "Millennial Week," a two day festival meant to "promote and present ideas reflecting the impact of Generation Y on culture and society." Millennial consultants now advise companies like Oracle, Estee Lauder and HBO, charging as much as 20,000 per hour to give executives advice on marketing their products to young people. Over all, American organizations spent about 80 million on "generational consulting" last year, according to Source Global Research, a firm that studies the consulting industry. Compared with the prospect of shelling out thousands of dollars for one of those outside consultants, many executives prefer the alternative of using the young people already on their payroll. "It's a pretty smart thing for them to do," said Malcolm Harris, the author of "Kids These Days," a forthcoming book about millennials and the economy. "If you can't get a 25 year old to run your company, you can at least tell people your C.E.O. is talking to 25 year olds." Tiffany Zhong, 20, began mentoring Kara Nortman, 41, a partner at the venture capital firm Upfront Ventures, after Ms. Nortman asked her for advice on dealing with a new generation of tech entrepreneurs. "I told her, 'You can't send 10 emojis at once, that's not O.K.,' " Ms. Zhong said. For Ms. Nortman, who invests in and advises technology companies, Ms. Zhong's lessons are not just academic. "We spend a lot of time talking about the psychology of a teen," Ms. Nortman said. "It's influenced a lot of perspectives around how to manage my own time, and how to invest." These mentoring arrangements can be initially awkward for executives who are accustomed to dispensing advice, not receiving it. When Mr. Watson, the Deutsche Bank managing director, was first paired with Mr. Hernandez through his firm's millennial mentoring program, he was skeptical that useful advice could come from someone nearly a decade his junior. But the experience opened his mind. Recently, he said, he had spent two hours having an impromptu chat with some younger workers in his division. "To sit down with someone who's on the org chart six levels below me is educational," Mr. Watson said. "You learn about yourself, and how you differ from them." And the traditional mentoring benefit remains in place. "I can still learn from him, obviously," Mr. Hernandez said. "But I hope I can teach him some stuff." Many of the new reverse mentoring arrangements include lessons on new technology and emerging market trends. Gerald L. Hassell, 65, the chairman of Bank of New York Mellon, asked his millennial mentor, Darah Kirstein, a 32 year old vice president at the bank, to help him streamline the information he got from the internet. She set him up on Tweetdeck, a Twitter app that allows for custom filters, and installed Flipboard, a digital magazine app, on his iPad. Eventually, Mr. Hassell began asking Ms. Kirstein for her thoughts on the direction of the company, and she became a trusted sounding board. "I definitely get special nods here and there," Ms. Kirstein said. "The last time Gerald was here, he called me out in a town hall in front of a lot of people. That makes you feel good." Millennials, traditionally defined as those born after 1982, may not have the upper hand for long. Ms. Zhong, who started a consulting firm, Zebra Intelligence, to inform businesses about teenage attitudes, says that she's already getting inquiries from people asking to be mentored by members of Gen Z, often defined as the cohort born after 1996. She is planning to start a mutual mentorship program to connect teenagers and young 20 somethings with senior level executives, and hopefully outsource some of the work she's been doing. "I'm like an on demand Gen Z support," Ms. Zhong said. "But I can't keep all my adult friends up to date on everything." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For now we seem to have averted an all out shooting war between the United States and Iran. Yet it's not over. The world is more dangerous than it was a week ago, and President Trump's exuberance suggests that he may have learned precisely the wrong lesson from his clash with Iran. Trump and some of his supporters are crowing at the lack of American casualties Iran may have carefully aimed so as to miss people in ways that remind me of the hubris preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As there were then, there are today concerns about whether intelligence has been overstated, leaders are thumping their chests and there's too much confidence in the ability of the military toolbox to solve complex problems. Trump, who in 2012 repeatedly claimed that President Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to help win re election, is already running election ads on Facebook trumpeting his killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani and saying that this is "keeping America safe." Hmm. Look at the results so far: None Iran has cast off nuclear curbs so that it is now potentially within five months of having enough fuel for a nuclear warhead, down from almost 15 years when Trump took office. None United States forces may be pushed out of Iraq, allowing Suleimani to achieve in death one of his foremost goals in life. None American forces in Syria may be difficult to support without the military presence in Iraq, so some or all of them might pull out as well, another strategic victory for Iran. None The military campaign against ISIS is on hold, giving terrorists a chance to regroup. None Iran's regime, which had been threatened by enormous protests at home and in Iraq, has been rescued by Trump's actions. Iranians have rallied around the flag, and the Iraqi narrative has changed overnight from the bullying of Iranians to the bullying of Americans. None Instead of bringing troops home, Trump has had to deploy more to the Middle East at huge cost. We may think we can't afford universal pre K, but we don't blink at lavishing billions of dollars on these military deployments. None North Korea has gained leverage, because it knows that Trump has little appetite for two international security crises at the same time. Kim Jong un has also surely absorbed the lesson that he must never give up his nuclear warheads, as Trump will strike countries that lack nuclear weapons while schmoozing with leaders who have them. So much winning! And there will be more. It's true that Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said that Iran's response had "concluded," but Zarif is a moderate often outmaneuvered by hard liners. I know this partly because back in 2004, after Zarif approved a visa for me, I was detained in Iran by security forces looking for information that could embarrass Zarif and get him fired. My best guess is that Iran will strike back hard in a way that leaves it some plausible deniability. Perhaps it'll be a truck bomb at a diplomatic mission or Trump property, or perhaps rocket attacks on a military site by a proxy, or a cyberattack on an oil refinery or the power grid, or perhaps mines that damage oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has options, and let's not celebrate prematurely. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Al Jazeera America, the cable network that started 20 months ago to great fanfare and with big budgets, came under fire on Tuesday after the network was sued by a former employee and lost two executives. Among other allegations, Mr. Luke said he was fired after he complained to the company's human resources department about his boss, Osman Mahmud, who, Mr. Luke said, told him to exclude female employees from meetings and not involve them in projects that they had previously worked on. In the suit, Mr. Luke asserted that Mr. Mahmud mistreated female employees and exhibited anti Semitic behavior, including expressing a desire to replace an Israeli cameraman with a Palestinian. A female senior vice president who resisted fulfilling that request was later transferred to another position, the lawsuit says. The suit further claims that Mr. Mahmud said that "whoever supports Israel should die a fiery death in hell." Mr. Mahmud did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview with The Washington Post, he denied making the comment about Israel, saying, "I have never even thought of that at all." He called the accusations that he had mistreated women "a pack of lies." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The vaccine now costs 1.50 a dose when purchased for developing countries, and the price will drop to 1 or less if donors order more than 100 million doses, said Bharat's chairman, Krishna M. Ella. The vaccine has been tested and used in India since 2005. It gained approval for worldwide use after an unusual "challenge trial" that began in 2015. About 100 healthy volunteers in Oxford, England many of them students received the vaccine or a placebo, and then swallowed live Salmonella typhi. The results, published in the Lancet last year, showed the vaccine to be 87 percent effective in preventing typhoid fever. Those who did fall ill were promptly cured with antibiotics. Bharat, which makes vaccines against nine other diseases, including one approved by the W.H.O. for polio, is developing immunizations against Ebola, chikungunya, Zika and non typhoid strains of Salmonella. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Serac figures out the big twist that Charlotte is actually Dolores has he been reading Reddit threads, too? but Charlotte bot has prepared for this contingency and gases all his cronies in the boardroom. (Of course, he prepares for this contingency by being a hologram.) "Westworld" hasn't needed to spend much time on how Dolores has learned to play various humans so convincingly, presumably because she has all the personal information required. But there's a fascinating thread here about how the host and human separate from each other over time, as Dolores's conscience processes events and relationships differently than Charlotte herself would have. It's significant that the tip off for Serac was Charlotte bot's interest in her son, whom the real Charlotte would never have prioritized over running the business. One of the basic conceits of "Westworld" is that the hosts are more human than humans, and Charlotte's ex husband and son are the beneficiaries of that at least until they're blown to bits for it. With the coalescence of forces in this episode, the good news is that the Man in Black, now dressed in white, finally has an active purpose this season, in alignment with Bernard and Stubbs. The bad news is that it takes some absolutely grueling scenes to get there. After proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he's not fit for group therapy, the Man in Black gets shifted to a special "A.R. treatment" that's usually reserved for soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress. The treatment is invasive and confrontational, a virtual meet up with his childhood, young adult, and elderly selves, along with his cruel father in law. But there's been so much foul anguish whipped up around this character that the treatment feels like another form of wheel spinning. He marinates in the past without doing anything to move the larger narrative forward. The Man in Black's emergence as a self described "hero" completes all the table setting required for the homestretch, but some excitement is lost in the process. The show stages a few action sequences to try to quicken the pulse, including Maeve's Nazi punching warm up in Warworld, the activation of the riot control robots at Delos and the massive fireball that consumes Charlotte's SUV. But what's missing from the episode is a more proper follow through on the data leak that has thrown society into chaos. These are the horses Serac is trying to put back into the barns, but it's hard to get a sense of how much human life has been transformed by the leak. The one exception is the fate of the Man in Black's therapist, who learns along with her husband that she is projected to lose her medical license and get divorced because of multiple affairs with patients and an opioid addiction. For all the show's talk about the potential for free choice, this destiny is accepted as such a given that her husband already leaves with the kids and she hangs herself in her office. It never occurs to anyone that she might steer clear of popping pills and sleeping with patients now that the algorithm has detailed the consequences. For the main characters on the show, such moments of existential recognition are a catalyst for change. Others, apparently, find it impossible to break out of their loops. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Because marriage is an ever evolving experience, we constantly shift, change and, in some cases, start over. In It's No Secret, couples share thoughts about commitment and tell us what they have learned along the way. Occupations She is the founder of Nest Fragrances; he is the owner and chairman of HomeWorx. Both companies sell home fragrances and scented candles. Together they founded Next for Autism, an organization dedicated to supporting those affected by autism. They also created the NYC Autism Charter School in Harlem and Bronx, which recently opened. The couple married Sept. 17, 1992 at Temple Emanu El in New York before 70 guests. A reception at Le Cirque followed. Together they have 19 year old twins, Ali and David, who is autistic. "When I first met Harry in 1989, I was renting a house in Quogue. We were both working on Wall Street and we disliked each other," said Ms. Slatkin, who was then 29. "I didn't think much about him until a year later. A friend asked me to co chair a charity called Henry Street. She told me we needed someone else to help and mentioned Harry." At the time, both were single. They decided to meet at the Regency Hotel bar. Ms. Slatkin arrived first. "He walked in wearing a navy blue suit, a beautiful pale blue shirt and had dark hair. He looked amazing," she said. "I thought, 'I can't stand him, but if I had to pick the perfect person to marry he would look like that.'" Mr. Slatkin accepted the co chairman position, and dislike morphed into friendship. Friendship turned into being inseparable. "I developed a huge crush on him nine months into our friendship," Ms. Slatkin said. A year later when he invited her to go to Atlantic City, she assumed he would confess similar feelings. "I thought this was a date situation," she said. "I got a manicure and pedicure. I bought lingerie. Nothing happened. So I put my feelings in a safe and locked it." Months later, when he asked her to accompany him again to Atlantic City, she had no expectations. "During the evening, he put his arm around me and said, 'Want to go upstairs to get into something more comfortable?'" she said. "We lied on the beds frozen in our robes until morning, afraid of what the future held for our friendship. Both of us were afraid of taking that next step." On the way home they stopped for gas. A blind man was selling heart shaped rubber key chains that had the words "I love you" printed in red. Mr. Slatkin bought one. "When he gave it to me I knew this was real, that we'd get married," she said. "I still have it. It's in our safe." I've learned to be more positive because he is. He takes everything I want to do seriously. He makes me feel important, empowered and confident. That's changed my life and has given me the encouragement to create my own company and start our foundation for autism. To have a successful marriage you have to be flexible. I've learned to let the stupid things go and to accept him for who he is. One time we got into an argument and I got very upset. Harry told me to put everything that's good on one side of the scale, and what just happened on the other. He was right. When you look at it that way, we have so much that works, so much goodness. Doing that puts everything in perspective. I've also learned sometimes you don't have to win or make your point. My life changed when he walked into the bar that night. We're never apart. I don't go out with my girlfriends and he doesn't go out with his friends. We are very devoted to pleasing each other, that's the secret to our marriage. I'm very traditional. His opinion matters greatly. It's a way of telling him that he's important to me. Mr. Slatkin My mother gave me advice in the beginning of my relationship, "You give 110 percent and expect zero back. If you do this, you won't be disappointed." Laura doesn't give zero; she gives you everything. I'm a Leo. I'm stubborn. I have a big roar. We argue. I've tried to change and it's not going to happen. I'm neurotically neurotic about everything being in its place; Laura is not. She could talk on the phone and drive into the carwash. But we make it work. She's a good balance. I deal with her issues; she deals with mine. I've learned to be more accepting. To relax and let things go. To be more complimentary and less negative. There are things we don't agree on. I've learned to come back and listen to her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
CHARLESTON, S.C. Americans across the country this weekend began a great, if brief, migration, rushing toward a swath of territory stretching from Oregon to South Carolina for a chance to witness a total eclipse of the sun. By Sunday, roads in many states were jammed as a normally busy summer weekend was overtaken by eclipse mania. But some locations were spared along the 70 mile wide path of totality, where, weather permitting, viewers on Monday will be able to see the moon completely block the sun for a few minutes. The total eclipse will be the first to touch the mainland United States in nearly four decades. Wyoming transportation officials reported nearly 20 percent more vehicles on the roads compared with a five year average for the third weekend in August. They cautioned that the state's population of 600,000 could double with people heading for the zone of totality, which crosses the state. Next door in Colorado, where only a partial eclipse will be visible, the state transportation department warned travelers that Interstate 25 north toward Wyoming could look like "six Denver Broncos games all getting out at the same time." On Aug. 21, the moon will paint a swath of North America in darkness. On the 21st day of August, 2017, the moon will slide between the Earth and the sun, painting a swath of darkness across North America. The Great American Eclipse. An exercise in cosmic geometry. A reminder that we live on one sphere among many, all moving to the laws of Kepler, Newton and Einstein. The moon's orbit around the Earth is slightly tilted, so the shadow of the new moon usually passes above or below us. About twice a year, the three bodies briefly align, and the moon's long shadow cuts across our planet. The day dies and is reborn. The sun is replaced by an inky hole, feathered with the pale corona, a million degrees hotter than the sun itself. Staring up into the cone of blackness you can feel the cosmic gears grinding. Two minutes of beauty and terror. But while most humans will be looking up, a few will be looking down. For astronauts on the International Space Station, an eclipse is a shadowy stain on the planet. A dark blur among swirling clouds. Even farther above the Earth, weather satellites keep pace with our spinning world, watching the moon's shadow slide from sunrise to sunset. Other satellites look outward, staring up at our nearest star. Their view of fire interrupted by the passing moon. From the moon's perspective, the Earth never rises or sets. It just wobbles back and forth in the sky. From its orbit around the moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will look back at Earth to photograph our shadowed home. A million miles away, the Dscovr spacecraft faces perpetual noon. The spacecraft can watch the moon's dark face pass behind the globe or slip across it. A dull gray orb on a sphere of white and blue. From this far out, an eclipse is a passing shadow after months of brilliant sunlight. But the moon is not the only object moving between sun and Earth. Winged Mercury has no moon of its own and no eclipses. But seen from Earth it crosses the sun about 13 times a century. A tiny dot, slightly larger than our moon, backlit by fire. Transits of Venus are much rarer. These images from 1882 were the last for over a century, until Venus returned to double cross the sun in 2004 and 2012. Our descendents will not see another transit of Venus for a hundred years. The next one is in 2117. Mars has two moons. Phobos, the largest, is a potato shaped rock only 16 miles long. Martian rovers have looked up to capture Phobos passing in front of the sun. A partial eclipse seen from the dried out surface of another world. Jupiter has so many moons that the giant planet may have several eclipses at same time. Three shadows, sliding at different speeds, falling on rippled cloud. Beyond our solar system, astronomers have found thousands of planets by playing a game of shadows. Looking for slight drops in starlight when a planet moves in front of its star. Distant eclipses on alien worlds. But is anyone out there to cry or cheer or shudder? Or see the shadows cast by our own lonely planet? Or are we alone in the long night. Do the shadows and the spheres dance only for us? On Aug. 21, the moon will paint a swath of North America in darkness. Among them will be Sarah Kovac, a recent graduate of Southern Illinois University's physics department, who will operate a telescope to observe the sun's corona, the wispy shroud of super hot plasma that is usually not visible from the ground on Earth. She is one of many scientists across the country who will be studying the corona to gain more insight into its scorching mysteries. Total eclipses are visible someplace around the globe about every year and a half, and Hawaiians experienced one in 1991. But the United States has not seen such a sweeping eclipse the path of totality drapes across the country like the sash on a beauty queen, covering parts of 14 states and St. Louis, Nashville, Charleston, S.C., and other cities in nearly a century. Those who cannot make it to the path of totality will not be left out, however. Viewers in all 50 states will experience at least a partial eclipse, with the moon dancing across some of the sun's surface. In New York City, about three quarters of the sun will eventually be blocked. The total eclipse's cross country trek begins in the morning on the West Coast, when beachgoers in Oregon will be the first to experience the changes that occur as the moon begins to align between Earth and the sun. Over 75 minutes the sky will gradually darken as more and more of the sun is obscured until totality at about 10:15 local time, when it will seem that twilight has quickly descended. Some birds may become confused and start singing their end of the day songs. The temperature will quickly drop, the air will grow still and, if the sky is cloudless, Venus, Jupiter and some of the firmament's brightest stars will appear. But the moon will still be moving. On the Oregon coast, near the centerline of the eclipse track, totality will end less than two minutes after it began and the sky will begin to brighten. That gradual fading out and in of the light from partial to total eclipse and back will last for about two and a half hours in each location. Totality will continue its parade across the country until 90 minutes later, when viewers here in coastal South Carolina will be the last to experience it. On Sunday, everyone was keeping an eye on the weather. Even one cloud, poorly timed, can spoil the party, although viewers will still experience the darkening sky. There were some human caused problems too, notably a recall by Amazon of thousands of viewing glasses which the company said offered insufficient protection for eclipse watchers. Here in South Carolina, the College of Charleston planned to distribute 15,000 pairs of glasses for a campuswide viewing party. College officials said they consulted with professors in the astronomy department before ordering the glasses from an approved vendor. Proper glasses, which filter out almost all light, or filter covered binoculars, are the only ways to safely look directly at the sun during the partial portions of the eclipse. They can be removed only during totality. Veteran eclipse watchers said a perfectly fine, and inherently safe option to watch the eclipse was a simple pinhole in a thin piece of cardboard or paper plate, through which the eclipsed sun can be projected on any flat surface. Also going fast in some locations were groceries suitable for eclipse picnics, including "items that make you think moon and sun, like Moon Pies," said Melissa Eads, a marketing and public relations manager for Kroger grocery's Nashville Division in Tennessee. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WASHINGTON The Republicans described the Federal Reserve as ineffective, secretive and out of touch with the economic realities of ordinary Americans. The Democrats showered it with praise, using words like "herculean." And those were just the opening statements on Wednesday, as the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, began two days of testimony on Capitol Hill. Ms. Yellen functions as the nation's economic weather forecaster and, on Wednesday, she sounded more worried than at her last public appearance, in December. "Financial conditions in the United States have recently become less supportive of growth," she told the House Financial Services Committee. "These developments, if they prove persistent, could weigh on the outlook for economic activity." She meant that convulsions in the stock markets could harm the economy. But Ms. Yellen said it was too soon to assess any damage, and she suggested it was also too soon to say whether the Fed would raise interest rates in March. "Let's remember that the labor market is continuing to perform well," she said. "We want to be careful not to jump to a conclusion about what is in store for the economy." The Fed raised short term interest rates in December for the first time since the financial crisis. Low rates encourage borrowing and risk taking and, after a seven year stimulus campaign, the Fed said it planned to gradually curtail those incentives. It started small, raising its benchmark rate to a range from 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent, and it predicted that it would gradually increase rates by roughly an additional percentage point this year. Even those plans, however, now look ambitious. Like predicting the weather, economic forecasting is an inexact science. Around the world, equity markets have tumbled, erasing wealth and undermining confidence. And loans, already in short supply, are becoming even harder to come by. Investors are demanding higher rates from risky borrowers while pumping so much money into safe havens like government debt that governments are increasingly charging interest instead of paying it, a phenomenon known as negative interest rates. Ms. Yellen argued on Wednesday that the rest of the world was to blame. She said the crucial question confronting the Fed was whether the domestic economy is strong enough to keep growing modestly even as the global economy struggles. That disconnect has raised the value of the dollar, allowing consumers to purchase imports more cheaply, but has reduced demand for American exports. Ms. Yellen highlighted the "solid improvement" of the United States labor market. The unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent in January from 5.7 percent a year ago, while the economy added an average of 222,000 jobs a month. Wages also rose more quickly. She also suggested, ever so gently, that investors were not behaving rationally, indicating that the markets might rebound. While global economic and financial conditions have taken a turn for the worse, "we have not seen shifts that seem significant enough to have driven the sharp moves that we have seen in markets," she said. Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said during a biannual report to Congress that foreign economic developments could pose a risk to American economic growth. (SOUNDBITE) (English) U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIR JANET YELLEN SAYING: "These developments, if they prove persistent, could weigh on the outlook for economic activity and the labor market, although declines in longer term interest rates and oil prices provide some offset. Still, ongoing employment gains and faster wage growth should support the growth of real incomes and therefore consumer spending, and global economic growth should pick up over time, supported by highly accommodative monetary policies abroad. Against this backdrop, the Committee expects that with gradual adjustments in the stance of monetary policy, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace in coming years and that labor market indicators will continue to strengthen." (SOUNDBITE) (English) U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIR JANET YELLEN SAYING: "Against this backdrop, the Committee expects that with gradual adjustments in the stance of monetary policy, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace in coming years and that labor market indicators will continue to strengthen. As is always the case, the economic outlook is uncertain. Foreign economic developments, in particular, pose risks to U.S. economic growth. Most notably, although recent economic indicators do not suggest a sharp slowdown in Chinese growth, declines in the foreign exchange value of the renminbi have intensified uncertainty about China's exchange rate policy and the prospects for its economy. This uncertainty led to increased volatility in global financial markets and, against the background of persistent weakness abroad, exacerbated concerns about the outlook for global growth. These growth concerns, along with strong supply conditions and high inventories, contributed to the recent fall in the prices of oil and other commodities. In turn, low commodity prices could trigger financial stresses in commodity exporting economies, particularly in vulnerable emerging market economies, and for commodity producing firms in many countries. Should any of these downside risks materialize, foreign activity and demand for U.S. exports could weaken and financial market conditions could tighten further." Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said during a biannual report to Congress that foreign economic developments could pose a risk to American economic growth. Drew Angerer for The New York Times The Fed is not ready to raise rates at the moment but, as Ms. Yellen noted, "There are a number of weeks before we meet again in March." Members of both parties challenged Ms. Yellen's economic assessment the Fed is a popular punching bag, particularly during a presidential campaign but political imperatives muddled their arguments. Republicans said the economy was struggling and the Fed should do less; Democrats painted a sunny picture and said the Fed should do more. Several noted the high rate of unemployment among black Americans in urging the Fed to extend its campaign. Representative Maxine Waters of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, hailed the Fed's "herculean efforts" and the resulting "tremendous progress," before warning against rate increases as "a step that takes us further away from making sure that the needs of vulnerable populations are met." Ms. Waters directed attention to the small public gallery along one wall of the hearing room, filled by green shirt wearing activists from Fed Up, a coalition of community groups pressing the Fed to focus on reducing unemployment. Among them: an Atlanta child care provider, an administrative assistant from St. Louis and a fast food worker from Wichita, Kan. The Republican argument is that the Fed is making things worse. "It's really disingenuous to say to the American people that these policies have contributed toward 4.9 percent unemployment," said Representative Robert Pittenger, Republican of North Carolina. He added, referring to the activists, "I think that should be understood and absorbed by these wonderful people who have come, that the types of policies that have been enacted, been enforced, this last seven years, have worked against your interests." One sign the economy is not doing so badly is that the sharpest questions at the hearing focused mostly on other issues. Republicans once again pressed Ms. Yellen to embrace legislation increasing the transparency of the Fed's decision making, as they have done at each of her previous appearances. The legislation would require the Fed to articulate a rule for setting interest rates and explain any deviations. Proponents claim such a rule would discourage the Fed from trying to do too much. Ms. Yellen has previously described the proposal as a "grave mistake," saying it would constrain the Fed from responding appropriately to unexpected economic developments. Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, on Wednesday introduced a letter in support of the legislation that had been signed by several former Fed officials and conservative economists, including three Nobel laureates. Quoting Ms. Yellen's earlier remarks, he cautioned, "When you use such apocalyptic and hyperbolic language, you might consider whether this undercuts your credibility as Fed chair." Members of both parties also criticized a new tool the Fed is using to raise its benchmark rate. It is paying large banks billions of dollars not to make loans at rates below the benchmark. Congress created the power in 2006 without any objections, but banks are less popular now. The Fed paid banks 6.9 billion in interest in 2015, and the payments will increase as it raises the benchmark rate, prompting Ms. Waters to warn, "We're about to have some bipartisan concern on this issue." Ms. Yellen also struggled to answer questions about a growing trend among central banks around the world, which are experimenting with negative interest rates because they have exhausted their traditional tools for stimulating growth. Asked whether the Fed could impose such a policy, Ms. Yellen said she was not aware of any obstacles, but she cautioned that the Fed had not carefully explored the issues. Pressed repeatedly, she finally conceded, "It is something we will look at, we should look at, not because we think there is any reason to use it, but to know what potentially would be available." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In her works that bridge dance and visual art, Taisha Paggett has deconstructed the fitness craze Zumba, blindfolded herself while drawing on the walls of a room and performed as Fila Buster, a character inspired by the filibuster of the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854. For her latest piece, "Underwaters (we is ready, we is ready)," Ms. Paggett, shifting among four personas, holds the floor for hours on end as part of the 2014 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. On Wednesday afternoon, the sound of crashing ceramics reverberated throughout the museum's lobby. Ms. Paggett had been whipping plates against the wall of the Whitney's lobby gallery, where, by Sunday, she will have clocked in five days of performances. For her, "Underwaters" is not simply an endurance test, but a way to turn an ordinary space into a ritualistic site of magic and healing. For the plate scene, a barrier was set up at the entrance of the gallery to protect the crowd. Ms. Paggett, sitting in a chair with her back to us, marked time based on her breath, which afforded a chance to study the decor: stacks of black folding chairs, a rack of clothing, plates, bananas a dancer's sustenance or a darker reference to a racial stereotype and bottled water. The handwritten line on a piece of paper on the floor read, "Black until I am no longer." In "Underwaters," traces of the past and hints about the future coexist in real time. Eventually, Ms. Paggett, hunched over with her eyes obscured by a generous Afro (it was a wig), rose from her chair and moved through the gallery with scuffling, slow motion paces in a pair of too large black loafers. When it was time for the next transformation, she changed into a dress and white pumps and swept the broken plates into a tidy pile. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
SAN FRANCISCO European authorities took their best swing, but it appears that Google hardly felt it. Less than a week after the European Union fined Google a record 5.1 billion for abusing its dominance in the smartphone market, Google's parent company, Alphabet, said on Monday it had already absorbed the cost of the fine and still made 3.2 billion in profits in its latest quarter. Alphabet's stock rose 3.5 percent in after hours trading, and some analysts recommended the company's shares. With the regulatory issue settled, they said, Google could get back to focusing on selling ads across the internet. "It's like a delivery company having to pay for a parking ticket," Brian Wieser, a Pivotal Research analyst, said of the penalty, which Alphabet accounted for in the second quarter. "It's not a meaningful fine in the context of the size of this company." The European Union's previous record fine was also aimed at Google, a 2.7 billion levy it imposed last year for unfairly favoring its comparison shopping service in its search results. Google booked that charge in the same quarter a year ago and still posted a 3.5 billion profit. More substantive than the fine are the changes that will come to the company's Android software, which backs 80 percent of the world's smartphones. European authorities ordered Google to stop effectively requiring phone makers in Europe to install Google's search engine and Chrome internet browser on their devices in order to use the Android software. Such a change could mean fewer people using Google's search engine on their phones, which would undercut an advertising business that is fueled by users clicking on ads in mobile search results. But it is Google that is responsible for crafting a remedy, and it will have much incentive to propose one that limits the impact on its business. After Google complied with last year's European Union's charges related to its shopping service, competitors complained that its solution did little to reduce the harm to their businesses. Google is "looking forward to finding a solution above all that preserves the enormous benefits of Android to users," Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said on a call with analysts on Monday. Mr. Pichai said Google planned to appeal the charges, though it still must implement a remedy by mid October or risk more fines. (The company said it was depositing the fine payment in a holding account while the legal process unfolds.) He said last week that Android lowered prices for consumers and encouraged competition in the smartphone market by helping handset makers compete with Apple. Google has said that it provides Android for free to phone makers and it must recoup its expenses by including its services with the software. Europe's new data privacy rule, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, appeared to have had little effect on Google's bottom line. The law, which restricts how companies obtain and handle users' information, sent many businesses scrambling to comply earlier this year. But some analysts believe Google and its partner in the digital advertising duopoly, Facebook, stand to benefit from the rules because they can afford to comply while smaller competitors might not. Mr. Wieser said that after reviewing Google's earnings, the privacy rule "probably helped, at least in the European numbers." Alphabet's revenues rose 26 percent in Europe, Africa and the Middle East over the same period a year ago, though some of the increase was related to currency fluctuations. Alphabet's revenues in the quarter increased 26 percent to 32.7 billion as users clicked on more of the ads that Google serves atop its search results and before YouTube videos. Alphabet earned 11.75 a share in the quarter, excluding the fine, easily beating analysts' estimate of 9.54 a share. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
If the corporate bluster of the past week around diversity sounds familiar, it's probably because you've been hearing it for years. Fortune 500 firms have used the protests since George Floyd was killed as an opportunity to boast about their commitments to diversity. Corporations have shared messages on social media condemning racism and announced their one time donations to advocacy groups like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Equal Justice Initiative. Those funds totaling nearly half a billion will certainly help, but they also conveniently transfer responsibility for tackling the challenge of racial inequality away from some of the world's most powerful companies. Virtually absent from the myriad Black Lives Matter pledges are firm industrywide assurances to bolster the hiring of black employees at the corporate or board levels, let alone among the rank and file. For years, corporations have made vague promises about improving inclusivity and hiring more black workers. But the ranks of black employees in the boardroom and c suite remain unacceptably low. In the boardroom, just 4.1 percent of directors were black as of last June, merely half a percentage point above the 2008 level, according to an Institutional Shareholder Services analysis of the Russell 3000. Black employees represented just 3 percent of chief executive and 1 percent of chief financial officer positions, according to a Stanford business school study titled "Diversity in the C Suite: The Dismal State of Diversity Among Fortune 100 Companies." One in four companies in the group still have an all white executive suite, the study found. In many places, like Wall Street, diversity figures are a closely guarded secret, so it's helpful to look at tech firms, some of which provide publicly available annual diversity reports. However, despite opening themselves up to that scrutiny, the mix of workers at companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon has remained stubbornly consistent. Since 2014, when many of the largest technology firms began disclosing diversity data, black representation in technical roles rose by only about 1 percentage point at Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook. Facebook trails with just a 1.5 percent black tech force, compared with Apple at 6 percent. Amazon doesn't break out its work force by function, but in managerial jobs the retail giant counted 8.3 percent black workers last year. Snapchat's parent company won't release any diversity figures publicly reportedly because the numbers would, in the words of Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel, reinforce "the perception that tech is not a place for underrepresented groups." It's been years since businesses started adding a chief diversity officer role to the top ranks, but the effort has clearly not been a success. Recognizing the problem is far easier than solving it. "We have more work to do" as the refrain goes in diversity report after diversity report after diversity report. Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, who is black, said she has heard that repeatedly in meetings she has held with tech leaders from her district in Oakland and nearby Silicon Valley in her efforts to improve equity in their ranks. But, she said, their promises have been mostly hollow. "They've been saying they are going to improve things for years, but look at the numbers; there are virtually no African Americans in leadership roles," she said. "It's nice that they are giving some money away, I am glad, but it's peanuts compared to what these companies are making in profits every day." Ms. Lee suggested that companies create more inclusive internship programs and focus on retention, not just recruiting. As well, she said, investing in start ups with black founders would elevate new ideas and empower aspiring entrepreneurs to start their own companies. "Giving money away is definitely much easier than addressing these issues internally," said Jamillah Bowman Williams, an associate professor at Georgetown Law, who has argued that more companies should disclose their diversity data. "It's corporate P.R., because it transfers the responsibility of solving the problem to outside organizations." "If they are generally opposed to racism, they should hold up the mirror to themselves to see what they can do to improve their hiring," said Professor Williams. Employees have also held up a mirror to their employers, highlighting what they say are hypocritical Black Lives Matter tweets from companies such as Adidas and Estee Lauder. Starbucks tweeted its solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, but it wouldn't let workers wear pins or shirts favoring the movement a policy the company reversed following a social media backlash. The media have pointed out that some companies provide technology or other support for the police or for government programs that have historically targeted black people, including facial recognition software. Amazon's Ring smart doorbell division, for example, has partnerships with at least 1,300 law enforcement agencies, an arrangement the Electronic Frontier Foundation said leads to "police harassment of Black Americans." And Amazon planned to smear a black employee it fired from its Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse as "not smart or articulate" after he raised coronavirus safety concerns. If corporate America truly wants to empower the black community and improve diversity, this is the opportunity to make real and lasting commitments to improving hiring practices and the pipeline of talent through corporate initiatives. There are other steps companies should take, including credit guarantees to black owned businesses to help them secure bank loans. Such businesses are twice as likely to be denied loans as white owned ones, Federal Reserve data show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
On Tuesday, the day after the slightly surreal public tussle between Ivana and Melania Trump over who actually was first lady (Mrs. Trump 1 joked it was she; the current occupant of the White House was not amused), the official first lady made a visit to an opioid clinic in West Virginia, signaling that the drug epidemic would be a focus for the East Wing. It was a classic first lady moment, and it's clearly an important cause (less controversial, perhaps, than the cyberbullying idea), but also classic was Mrs. Trump's choice of dress for the occasion: a green shirtdress from Cefinn, the brand created by Samantha Cameron. Yes, that Samantha Cameron: the former first lady of Britain. Or the equivalent; there is no formal first lady title there. Still, it was, in effect, an appearance that quietly doubled down on the first lady messaging. Earlier this year Ms. Cameron introduced Cefinn the name derives from a combination of her children's initials some months after her husband, David, resigned as prime minister after the country voted to leave the European Union. The moderately priced and easy to wear collection is sold on Net a Porter, among other retailers, and the particular dress that Mrs. Trump wore, a belted muslin number, is available for 450 (Mrs. Trump changed the belt). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
THIS is a time of year when solicitations for donations are coming at you from every direction, and for good reason: the end of the year is when people make most of their gifts to charity. But these requests for money, from the checkout line to the mailbox, can pull well intentioned people in too many directions and turn an act of generosity that should lift the spirits of the donor and help a worthy cause into another stressful obligation. This onslaught and a story I was told this week more about that later got me thinking about the argument for focused giving, for picking an area that you care about and putting most of your philanthropic dollars into it. This is something my wife and I have done for many years and have found very rewarding: it has made us more knowledgeable, passionate and involved in the area we support. Patrick Rooney, associate dean for academic affairs and research at Indiana University's School of Philanthropy, said he did not want to deter people from giving away their money however they wanted. But he added, "You're better off to target three, four or five charities and give larger gifts to a small number of charities as opposed to giving a large number of small checks." Part of the reason is that a single larger gift could do more good. But that was not the only benefit. "From the recipient organization's perspective, having a gift from 1, 100, 1,000, to 100 million, there are some transaction costs," Mr. Rooney said. "You've got to book it, deposit it, acknowledge the donor and cultivate the donor for future gifts. If you have a lot of checks for 5 and 10, you have a lot of transaction costs for a relatively small gift." The other side of this debate is equally valid: it's your money, and if you want to give a little bit to 27 different groups, that's your choice. As Melissa Berman, president and chief executive of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, told me: "Philanthropy is voluntary. When someone tells you how your money is supposed to be used and in what proportion, that's called a tax." I can appreciate both sides. But I spent this week talking to a group of people focused on one cause breast cancer research. Their desire to support this cause, which has had great success, made an interesting argument for being more selective with donations. Here's the story. THE LUNCH Addressing about two dozen women over lunch in late November, Leonard A. Lauder, chairman emeritus of Estee Lauder, told how he had bought his wife, Evelyn, a piece of jewelry every time she finished a round of chemotherapy and they thought she was better. Mrs. Lauder, who learned she had breast cancer in 1987 and survived it, started the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in 1993, with the goal of raising funds for research that would eradicate the disease. Last year, she died of ovarian cancer. A few weeks before she died, Mr. Lauder said, he found her standing in their kitchen one night wearing a ring he had bought her. "She said, 'I'll never have a chance to wear this ring. so I'm wearing it tonight,' " Mr. Lauder told me. "When she died, I had all this jewelry. I didn't feel right giving it to someone. I thought, 'What should I do with the jewelry?' " He decided to auction it off and give all the money to the foundation. He said he got Sotheby's to waive the commission it charges sellers so that any money raised would go to a new fund at the foundation to focus on the genetic links between different types of cancers. Among those in the audience of prospective bidders that day was Cindy Citrone. Mrs. Citrone's mother and father died of cancer, and she is active in various cancer charities in Connecticut, where she lives. She also sits on the board of visitors of M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Cancer charities are something she and her husband, Rob, who runs a hedge fund, support in many different ways. She was moved by Mr. Lauder's account of how he wanted his gifts to his wife to be passed on as part of a continuing contribution to the fight against cancer. "After hearing him tell this story of love and the legacy of joy," she said, "I came home and wanted to be part of it." But until that day, she had not been involved with the foundation. She had learned about the lunch only a day earlier from Meredith Israel, who in 2009, at age 35, received a diagnosis of breast cancer that had spread throughout her body. Ms. Israel became a tireless advocate for breast cancer research, and the two women became friends after meeting at a fund raiser three years ago. Recently, Ms. Israel stopped her own treatment, resigned to the progression of her illness. "Meredith has always talked a lot about this foundation," Mrs. Citrone told me. "This is her favorite foundation. She liked that 91 cents of every dollar goes to research." THE AUCTION A week after that lunch, in the first week of December, Mrs. Citrone registered for what she said was her first auction. She ended up buying two pieces a small, pink diamond ring and diamond bracelet that had the word "love" written on it in rubies. Sotheby's said the two pieces cost 425,000. "We're very blessed that we can purchase jewelry like this," she said. "At some point, we want to auction it back off so it continues to serve the cause." The auction of Mrs. Lauder's jewelry raised 19.1 million, all of which will go into a fund in her name that will expand the foundation's mission into longer term research. The foundation, committed to giving away as much as it takes in, has no endowment. It makes about 40 million in grants each year and has supported the research of 197 scientists in 13 countries. Myra Biblowit, its president, said the foundation was dependent on donors who gave regularly and generously. She said that without such focused donors, the foundation would not have been able to raise annual donations to 53 million this year, from 8 million when she joined 12 years ago. Mr. Lauder, well known as a patron of the arts and a past chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, has concentrated on a few charities for many years. He said his focus had shifted to two charities the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, which he said was doing similar advanced research on drugs to prevent, treat and cure that disease, and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. "I'm focused on making sure her mission goes on and is accomplished," said Mr. Lauder, who stepped in as interim chairman when his wife died. "I didn't want to leave it undone. I wanted to focus on helping her mission go on." THE IMPACT While I found this story touching, I had to ask the question: was there a way to measure the impact of so much concentrated giving to this charity? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Odell Beckham Jr. Responds to the Lena Dunham Dust Up: 'I Have to Learn More About the Situation' When Odell Beckham Jr., the balletic wide receiver with the action hero charisma, was drafted by the New York Giants two years ago, he embarked on a life as a star athlete in New York that comes with two inevitabilities: limitless branding opportunities and unavoidable tabloid dust ups. Ask Joe Namath. Ask Derek Jeter. This past week, he got a crash course in both, as the dapper flanker found himself dragged into a media scuffle with Lena Dunham just days before he introduced his clothing line during New York Fashion Week. The tussle (which in reality was as one sided as a mugging) erupted last weekend. In Ms. Dunham's interview with Amy Schumer in Lenny Letter, Ms. Dunham's online feminist newsletter, the "Girls" creator recounted her experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Gala this last spring, at which she wore a black tie pantsuit and owlish black frame eyeglasses. "I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards," Ms. Dunham said in the interview, which was posted last Friday. "He was like: 'That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog.' It wasn't mean. He just seemed confused." In Ms. Dunham's imagination, the grid star's "vibe" seemed to suggest he was thinking, "Do I want to have sex with it?" (she used an earthier term for "sex," and yes, she said "it"). Explosive stuff. The only problem was that Mr. Beckham had not, in fact, said any of it, nor had he even spoken to Ms. Dunham at the gala, as Ms. Dunham quickly clarified, explaining the comments as a failed attempt at humor. In the estimation of social media and the press, it scarcely mattered: Dunham vs. Beckham was suddenly the hottest bout since Mayweather vs. Pacquiao. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. What Will the Giants Do With Daniel Jones? The team must evaluate the quarterback ahead of a contract decision. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "Maybe Odell Beckham Jr had watched an episode of Girls and assumed Lena Dunham doesn't talk to black people," wrote jneslo in a typical tweet. The news media soon picked up Ms. Dunham's fumble and ran with it. "The Way Lena Dunham Talks About Black Men is Peak White Entitlement," read one Huffington Post headline. Forbes took it further, asserting that "Lena Dunham is a Monster of Our Own Creation." The meta analyses kept coming, despite Ms. Dunham's lengthy apology posted on Instagram Friday evening. "Despite my moments of bravado, I struggle at industry events (and in life) with the sense that I don't rep a certain standard of beauty and so when I show up to the Met Ball surrounded by models and swan like actresses it's hard not to feel like a sack of flaming garbage," she wrote. "This felt especially intense with a handsome athlete as my dinner companion." The 30 year old writer and actress added, "most importantly, I would never intentionally contribute to a long and often violent history of the over sexualization of black male bodies as well as false accusations by white women toward black men." Still, one large question remained: What did Mr. Beckham think of all this? Did he even know who she was? The question remained largely unanswered Tuesday evening at the debut of the 13 x twenty collection, a limited edition collaboration between the 23 year old Pro Bowl player and the New York designer David Helwani of the brand Twenty tees. The preview took place at a cocktail party, hosted by GQ magazine and Bloomingdale's, at the Gent, GQ's speakeasy like event space in a penthouse on Broad Street, high above the financial district. As young GQ staffers in trim blue suits and narrow ties sipped OBJ cocktails (orange juice, bourbon, honey and lemon bitters) among the pool tables and leather club chairs, models standing on a brick riser showed off the signature pieces, most of which are available in runs of 250 or fewer pieces, exclusively at Bloomingdale's: punkish distressed hoodies, tapered heathered fleece jogging pants and a black on black varsity jacket featuring an embroidered image of Mr. Beckham's head on the back. Around 8:45 p.m., the Giant whom GQ called "one of the most stylish men alive right now" (he was featured in a July fashion spread in the magazine) strolled in, his trademark bleached blond, mushroom cloud hairdo hidden under an olive hoodie of his own design. "I'm trying to do big things, it doesn't matter whether it's on the field or off the field," Mr. Beckham said of his fashion ambitions, his diamond encrusted dog tag necklace glittering with each camera flash. "It's a look that's in. People are able to dress it up or dress it down." Mr. Beckham, who has been spotted in the front row at fashion shows alongside Anna Wintour, said he was not thinking of a second career as a designer. But, he said: "I've always liked to dress up, I've always liked to look good. You look good, you feel good, you play good." "You know, basketball players aren't always the best dressers," he added. With his rising profile off the field, however, he becomes a target for the gossip sites (he recently found himself batting away reports of a romance with Khloe Kardashian), and apparently, for tuxedo clad HBO stars at A list galas. Asked if Ms. Dunham's comments struck a nerve, he seemed confused. "Honestly, man, I didn't. ..." A publicist by his side attempted to intercept the question: "He came here to talk about fashion or football." But the receiver at least made a grab for it: "It's life. There are so many things that go on, you catch some of them, you don't catch some of them, you just I don't know man, I don't have much to say about that. I have to learn more about the situation." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Ernest White II grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., dreaming of a job that would propel him around the world. He taught English in Colombia, Brazil and Miami, and worked as a freelance journalist in Berlin, South Africa and the Dominican Republic. Now he's added "travel TV show host" to his resume. "Fly Brother With Ernest White II," which began airing last week on various PBS stations, is an entertaining and educational voyage around the globe, taking viewers to both familiar and less trammeled places. In a recent interview, Mr. White, who is 42, reveals how his background and view of the world have informed his style and philosophy of travel. His responses have been edited and condensed for clarity. Your show begins during a pandemic. What's it like to have a captive audience, yet one that can't really travel? Humans need other humans. They, we, need to travel to each other. That is the mission behind "Fly Brother" human connection no matter when or how people connect with each other. People still need to know that connection is possible, is essential, and that's why this is the right time for this travel series to debut. Many are critical of travel's impact on destinations and the environment. Do you think we'll learn any lessons on how to travel after the pandemic? We're learning so much about ourselves, about the Earth right now. There was already a movement to make sustainable travel simply "travel," but now that we're seeing cleaner air and water and the indomitable spirit of the planet starting to bounce back, we definitely have to consider how we engage with our home going forward. I do believe in travel, but I believe more in deep connections and intimate experiences that require slower, more intentional movements. Now is the time for destinations, governments, businesses, societies to get ahead of the tidal wave of mass tourism and establish frameworks for sustainable travel, and it's the duty of those of us in the media to raise awareness about traveling sustainably. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
JUGGERNAUT: Prices at 15 Central Park West have gone nowhere but up since it opened in 2008. THE residents of Manhattan's most expensive luxury building 15 Central Park West include celebrities like Denzel Washington and Sting, not to mention financiers from hedge funds and Wall Street firms. But fewer people know the name of Barbara Bradley Baekgaard, a co founder of Vera Bradley, a billion dollar apparel company based in Fort Wayne, Ind., famous for its colorful handbags. Last November, the unassuming Ms. Baekgaard, 73, moved into her 17 million corner apartment in "the house," the smaller of two buildings at 15 Central Park West. Four months later, she remains in awe of the Robert A.M. Stern designed building and its service staff, even as she cringes at what people back in Fort Wayne must think of the apartment's price tag. "When you say 17 million to someone in Fort Wayne, Indiana, they think you have bought the Empire State building," Ms. Baekgaard said recently, looking out from her apartment at the crowds in the park. All those millions bought her a three bedroom home with a low floor view of Central Park. But she is hardly complaining. "I love it here," she said. "You feel like you are in the middle of the action. Yet it's so quiet, you don't hear anything." Actually, at times she hears "a little rumble of the subway" under the floor in her master bedroom, she said. "I thought it was thunder when I first moved in," she said, "but it's not annoying or anything." Mr. Stern's homage to old fashioned luxury Manhattan buildings has been a roaring success since it opened in 2008 with more than 2 billion in sales. The sale prices of individual apartments have been the highest in the history of New York City. As Vanity Fair put it, 15 Central Park West is the architectural equivalent of "the highest grossing movie in history." Last December, one month after Ms. Baekgaard moved in, a Russian billionaire bought a full floor penthouse apartment in the building for 88 million from the former Citigroup chairman Sanford I. Weill. It was the highest recorded sale of a New York apartment. That sale has allowed developers and brokers to raise prices of apartments at a handful of other buildings considered worthy of mentioning in the same breath as 15 Central Park West including One57 at 157 West 57th Street, which is under construction and where the developer Gary Barnett has raised the asking price for the six bedroom penthouse to 115 million from just under 100 million. "There is pent up demand for the best of the best," said Kelly Mack, the president of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. Ms. Baekgaard jokes that she "got a deal" for 17 million on her apartment, which was originally offered at about 20 million by the previous owner. A native of Miami, she moved with her first husband to the Chicago area, where for several years she lived in Lincolnshire, Ill., the same small suburb where I grew up. She later moved to Fort Wayne, Ind. At age 42, she and a neighbor, Patricia Miller, were inspired to make luggage to send to Ms. Baekgaard's daughters at college. With a 500 investment between them, they set to work in Ms. Baekgaard's basement. The result was Vera Bradley, named after Ms. Baekgaard's mother. Today, the company employs 2,100 people. It went public in 2010 and is valued at more than 1 billion. Success did not agree with her first marriage, she said. She found love again with Peer Baekgaard, a Danish importer of men's gifts and accessories who lived in Chicago. As a teenager Mr. Baekgaard had been part of the Danish underground battling the Nazis and was in a prison camp in Germany awaiting execution when the war ended, Ms. Baekgaard said. In its aftermath, Hollywood tried to cast him as Tarzan, she said. The Baekgaards bought an apartment at 25 Central Park West in 2002. They watched from their balcony as construction began on 15 Central Park West on a full block facing the park between 61st and 62nd Streets. "We watched every stone go up," she said. When she found out that Mr. Stern was the architect she was a great fan she became intrigued. After Mr. Baekgaard died in 2007, she toured apartments at 15 Central Park West. She considered one on the 28th floor that was listed for about 28 million but liked the lower floor view of the bustle in the park and on the streets. One of her sons in law teased her when she called him, excited to learn that the unit would have central air and a washer and dryer. At 25 Central Park West, an older building, she had had a window air unit and had to share a laundry room. Since moving in, Ms. Baekgaard has set about decorating her apartment in Vera Bradley style. There is a lot of patterned wallpaper and an eclectic mix of furniture, including a silver dining room table and bistro chairs from Paris she has lined up in front of a kitchen window. A Steinway player piano in the living room plays Bach and Broadway tunes controlled from an iPad. It feels as homey as a home can feel. After descending to the lobby on a recent Saturday, we walked past three gas burning fireplaces on the way to the library, which had dozens of books and several comfy chairs. The dining room was closed (it isn't open on weekends), but Ms. Baekgaard assured me that "it is the best place to eat in the city." There is no dress code; some residents wear shorts to lunch, she said. In between the 19 story "house" and the "tower," which is about twice as high, is the health spa, including a state of the art gym and the 75 foot pool with a glass roof. Ms. Baekgaard said her children had spotted several famous people at the pool, including Mr. Washington. Residents can request any kind of special workout, including Pilates. "It is truly assisted living, I like to say," she said. We made our way up the tower. On the sixth floor there is a billiard room, a 20 seat screening room (where her visiting children and grandchildren have watched movies and the Super Bowl), a conference room and a mammoth deck. On Thanksgiving Day, some 2,000 residents and their families and friends gathered for a lunch, she said, and there are wine tastings and other social events. During our tour, Ms. Baekgaard marveled at the attentiveness of the staff. "If they see me coming in with a little bag of groceries they will rush out to help," she said. One day she ordered a sandwich from the dining room in the building and forgot about it. Less than an hour later a staff member called to inquire if she had received her sandwich. She hadn't. Within minutes they sent up the sandwich, along with a bottle of wine and dessert on the house. "They were so embarrassed," she said. While fellow residents are not overly social, she said, they are friendly. They will say hello in the dining room. When someone is using the theater they will say, "Come on in," she said. But without the help of her children, Ms. Baekgaard, said she is a little hopeless at identifying the richer and more famous than she. She has seen Bob Costas, the sportscaster. But, she admitted, "I probably wouldn't know if Sting were in the elevator." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Long before the English speaking pop mainstream took real notice, BTS were already global pop stars. The successes the K pop outfit have had in this country happened largely without worrying about how it might or might not fit in. On its new release, "Map of the Soul: Persona," it showcases its highest profile collaborations to date in a way that preserves its core strengths. The shimmering "Boy With Luv" features Halsey but more importantly, it features Halsey singing in Korean, exactly the sort of bilingual exchange that's all too rare. And "Make It Right" is in part written by Ed Sheeran. It has some of his signature soft soul gestures, but BTS renders them with complexity. The least comfortable collaborations are the ones in which the balance of power is wildly uneven, where one party badly needs something from the other. But all you hear on these songs is mutual respect. JON CARAMANICA The first new song in two years from Steve Lacy who plays in the space soul outfit the Internet and has collaborated with Blood Orange, Vampire Weekend and others is a narcotically mellow inversion of casually strutting 1970s R B. On the one hand, it's about yearning, with Lacy's vocals aquatically damp; but on the other, Lacy is far too at ease far too chill to really break a sweat. CARAMANICA "So Good" is elegantly rendered, built by hand disco from Omar Apollo, one of several strong songs from his impressive new EP, "Friends." For the last two years, he's been releasing songs that were sharp but felt tentative, as if he was worried about overstepping boundaries. But on "Friends," he moves toward the upbeat and joyful, and sounds more free than ever. CARAMANICA Lead singers with Sounds of Blackness Ann Nesby, Big Jim Wright and Lauren Evans spill over one another with overlapping gospel praise in "Til I Found You," the first single from a new collection by the producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis with various collaborators. The track is built on an easygoing beat and rippling guitar lines, but the singers turn it into an urgent competition to extol the comforts of faith. JON PARELES Yeasayer, 'Let Me Listen in on You' "I can make your dreams come true/if you let me listen in on you," Yeasayer's Anand Wilder sings, as if he's Alexa or Siri or some present or near future authoritarian state. That's the sweet chorus; the verses are far more paranoid, with no more comfort to offer than, "Don't look so guilty, you've got nothing to hide." In a lilt with an electronic pulse glancing back at the Cars Yeasayer pinpoints where the promise of convenience meets the threat of constant surveillance. PARELES This exuberant romp about the upsides of getting rich quick is effective and fun, but it's more intriguing for the performers it brings together, a union of singer rappers of North African heritage: Geko, born in Manchester, England, is of Libyan and Algerian descent; Ay Em, from London, of Egyptian and Moroccan heritage; and French Montana, who grew up in the Bronx but was born in Morocco. Each has a particular take on the blurry line between rapping and melody. To be fair, French Montana mostly phones in his mumbles, but Geko and Ay Em make for a winning tag team. Geko, a strong rapper, sings with a light touch, and Ay Em provides aural and spiritual ballast: "I just did my prayer, then you know it's back to business." CARAMANICA In Courtney Barnett's latest two chord stomp well, three in the chorus she's even blunter than usual about self doubt and alienation: "I feel stupid, I feel useless, I feel insane," she begins. But as she finds a defensive posture "We're gonna tell everyone it's O.K.," she sings with a laugh the band cranks up, organ and tambourine pile on and voices join her for a rowdy singalong. She may be insecure and alienated, but she's far from alone. PARELES The guitarist Bill Frisell and the bassist Thomas Morgan released their first duets album two years ago, a collection of performances that smoldered like warm coals and bespoke an easygoing, simpatico new partnership. Now they're back with "Epistrophy," an entire album of covers. It closes with this rendition of "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," honoring the old Sinatra ballad's melancholy theme but still animated by Frisell's ebullient warmth. And all the while there is Morgan's virtuoso flexibility; he's as responsive as he is grounded and firm. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO With Abrams, a veteran bassist affiliated with Chicago's broad minded experimental jazz community, it makes less sense to speak of tracks than to talk about stories. Each of the four lengthy performances on his new album with Natural Information Society unfolds slowly and consequentially, with a sense of abstract narrative. On the nearly 24 minute "In Memory's Prism," Abrams keeps the underlying bass line played on the guembri, and indebted to North African music almost unchanged while the harmony and instrumentation slowly shift above. (At various times, there's harmonium and trumpet and autoharp and bass clarinet in there, to name a few.) It all has the implacable momentum of migration, or the feeling of a big new idea just coming into being. At the very least, it will put your mind in a place of peaceful wandering; by the end, you're likely to wind up deep in your own imagination, remembering or inventing a story of your own. RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
As we have seen in the last year, the internet services we take for granted are not built upon an unbreakable foundation. In October, a so called distributed denial of service attack targeted an obscure New Hampshire company called Dyn, whose servers monitor and reroute internet traffic. The attack, which swamped Dyn's servers with more traffic than they could handle, lasted for about a day, causing widespread disruption to websites throughout the United States. But at least it wasn't caused by a typo. Intel buys Mobileye. The 15.3 billion deal speaks volumes about Intel's determination to make sure it can provide the computing power needed for autonomous vehicles. Waymo asks court to block Uber's self driving car project. Waymo, the self driving car business spun out of Google's parent company, sued Uber last month, accusing it of colluding with a former Google employee to steal crucial parts of Waymo's technology to accelerate its development of autonomous vehicles. America's most wanted cybercriminal might have helped Russia spy. While Evgeniy M. Bogachev was draining bank accounts, it appears that the Russian authorities were looking over his shoulder, grafting an intelligence operation onto a far reaching cybercriminal scheme. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The 2019 PEN America Literary Service Award will be given to Bob Woodward, The Washington Post editor known most recently for "Fear: Trump in the White House," one of the biggest political books of 2018 with nearly two million copies sold. "Woodward has set the standard for dogged and objective reporting and gripping storytelling," said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive officer of PEN America, in a statement. "His work has helped fortify American democracy for decades." Woodward played a central role in bringing to light Richard Nixon's role during the Watergate scandal through his reporting for The Washington Post and wrote a number of books on the subject, including "All the President's Men," written with Carl Bernstein. He pioneered in the use of anonymous sources, which allowed him to report on details that might not otherwise have become public. He has also tackled a number of other presidents including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The PEN America Literary Gala, which will be held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on May 21, will also recognize Scholastic chief executive officer Richard Robinson, who has led the company for more than 40 years. "Scholastic has informed the next generation and inspired them to be empathetic, engaged citizens," read PEN America's statement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Q. Why did you make this dance? A. I'm on a farm, and it's all of this greatness of nature, and I'm going, oh my goodness, what depth of creativity is going on here? Of course, it's God's handiwork, but never mind. I say, I only wish I could do something. You can, you can! You can do 100 11 second segments of movement and put them up simultaneously, and you will have something massively complex and rich. A. Two dancers, myself and Big Rose Rose Marie Wright , rehearse this thing for three months and we get really good. Then five come in. They were all good dancers, and if they'd had a ton of rehearsals like Rose and I had, they could have been excellent. But they'd been given a limited amount of time. It's intact, but it's not the tour de force that the original two do. Then you have 100 people who are just people off the streets. "The One Hundreds" as performed in 1970. A. It's going to have declined, its edges are going to have eroded and isn't that interesting? If you happen to be a person with an acute eye, you can see the same 100 done in three different kinds of conditions. The idea that you could have this kind of spectrum in the same piece was not really something that was prevalent then nor now. It's called a kind of equality, it's called a kind of democracy. That's what the initial impetus really was. That and the game of baseball. A. I figure out, O.K., I'll bet you that a perfect game is 100 pitches, more or less, and that by the time the pitcher gives his signals to the catcher, he winds up, he releases, he falls off his mound and he returns back, it's about 11 seconds. Q. That was the structure? A. It's an adaptation of a real world condition to an abstract form, so called dance. Something else was important in this piece: Dance is not just an event and an activity. Dance is an object. It has its own objective existence and these one hundreds can be looked at like a netsuke ivory and wood carvings . Each netsuke is a singular, small masterpiece; they were miniature sculptures and each one could be taken out and examined. That's how I think of "The One Hundreds." Q. Why is it so beautiful when everyone rushes out? A. It's a willingness to gather. They give each other courage. It creates out of 100 strangers a community. It's one of those things that represents much more than meets the eye: about where art comes from, how it works, what it stands for, why it resonates with people. Monday and Wednesday at 7 p.m. and Tuesday at 4 p.m. Ms. Otake, the Japanese dance artist who usually performs with Koma, continues her solo exploration in "A Body in a Station," the latest iteration of works that have taken her to abandoned train stations in Fukushima, Japan, and the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. At Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan, she continues her juxtaposition of a fragile body, full of memories, in a public space. A. I will carry the outside to inside. I think if I'm already there, I belong to the building, but this way I can carry the location rather than just the building. I'm not there just to adore the new building. A. No. I can't decorate anyway. Laughs But I realize the complexity. I was talking to an M.T.A. person who was there on 9/11. We bear that weight even though we don't talk about it every day. My body has my memory, and as human beings we all carry some kind of a memory and tragedy. Many of us have sickness and wounds; we're not new beauty. We survived, and we are with a sense of shadows and rustiness in our bodies. At the same time, I want to dance. I want to have that fragile dance. Q. In Philadelphia, you performed in three hour segments. Why is this just one hour? A. I have done the marathon. Now I want to do a medium length. Here I'm dealing with place, and it's Lower Manhattan, Fulton Street, Broadway it's my subway line, and this is my town. River to River is our festival. In the summer, people who are very rich or have very rich friends go somewhere else. We are pretty much leftovers, but still committed to be here. This is a good project for a 63 year old. A. I'm seasoned, wrinkled. Because if I'm 35, I all of a sudden look like a picture of a woman in different places in a travel magazine. And I'm not 98. I'm kind of between grandma and auntie, right? It's a strange thing to say, but it's the right age to be in the station. Michelle Dorrance adapted "The Blues Project" for the Lincoln Center Out of Doors summer series. Michelle Dorrance, that superb tomboy of tap, presents this version of her evening length production "The Blues Project," seen this spring at the Joyce Theater. With live music by Toshi Reagon and her BIGLovely quintet, the work is a merging of forms: music envelops the dancing, and the dancing seeps through to the last chord. There are also solos by Derick K. Grant, Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards and Ms. Dorrance, who sums it up: "It's like a rock band and tap dancing." Q. Have you added new material to "The Blues Project" for Lincoln Center? A. Yes, but honestly, the show changes every time. Toshi surprises me with a different song in every solo. I am going to tweak a little bit. A. What's most interesting to us is playing around with what's happening rhythmically. The music is such a powerful collaborator. There is a new tune. There are five or six songs that Toshi wrote for the show that did not get used. Q. Why did you exclude them? A. My least favorite thing is a show going on too long. So we're using one of those tunes, and it is unlike any other piece of music in the show. Q. How do you feel about performing outside? A. I'm really excited. It's something I used to do a ton when I was a kid. We used to dance on a moving truck in the Christmas parade in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. All I want to do is dance outside, and this is my plan for next February: To go to Brazil or Cuba and find a space that has a beautiful wood floor and just dance outside in the heat for all of February. Q. What does it mean to be a woman in the world of tap? A. I don't think about it very often. When I create choreography, I know what I want that aesthetic to be, and I like that it's feminine on some people and masculine on others. But I also love a neutral ground. And that's not to say that I don't ever want to be a girl or a woman. There are times when I'll definitely choose to, and to not be part of that showing femininity , in part because of the culture I grew up in and the freedom that we had with Savion Glover . He's someone I have to cite. A. Every once in a while, he'd really have the ladies be the ladies, but he never asked me to look more like a woman. I feel a great freedom as a woman inside of my art form, and I also feel that's why it's my art form. That's really empowering. There are a lot of people who didn't get to explore their own voice as early as some of us tap dancers did. Q. How old were you when you started? A. Four or five. Gene Medler was my mentor from North Carolina, and I probably started studying with him around 7 or 8. He's the one who tells me what happened in my early days of tap dancing. When you're that young, there are so many things you forget. He said that when I auditioned for the company North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble , I improvised. Q. Isn't it great to know that you and tap dance are such a natural fit? A. For sure. I absolutely loved it every day of my life. I wasn't one of those kids who didn't want to do it at some point. That's the thing about teaching kids these days who want to videotape at the end of class. It's the way people remember things now. It's a skill learning from a video , but I so don't believe in it at all, and I don't believe in taking videos. The reason people like me were good when we were teenagers or remember things we learned with Savion when we were 13 is because we were so obsessed with it that we did it over and over again. You have to do that. I miss that part of the culture. "People are still like, 'What is it?' " said Monique Martin, SummerStage's programming director. " 'Will there be elephants?' " She laughed. "There are no animals." In honoring the link between circus and dance, this season features the hip hop dancer Ephrat Asherie in a circus inspired piece at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem (on Aug. 15 and 16 at 7 p.m.). The Hybrid Movement Company of Brooklyn, which specializes in aerial work, shares a program in Crotona Park in the Bronx (next Friday at 7 p.m.) with the Incredible Incredible, a clown and acrobat duo from Washington, making its festival debut. In "Palindrome," Matthew McCorkle and Justin Therrien of the Incredible Incredible portray characters who are each other's imaginary friend. "We're wearing the same clothes, and we have the same hats and suitcases, and we find each other in this world," Mr. Therrien said. "We're characters who don't conform to normal rules. It's a show about their interactions." Francoise Nadia Voranger, an artistic director of Hybrid, said her company drew inspiration from its music. The work it is presenting at SummerStage, "Momentum," features classical music, including works by Brahms and Chopin, as well as hip hop. "What we do is sculpted from the grinding and blending of a variety of disciplines like contemporary ballet, break dance, martial arts, gymnastics, circus arts," she said. "We match that with music." While Magmanus is a Swedish circus company specializing in acrobatics and juggling, Ms. Martin, in organizing this area of SummerStage, had a mission not to veer too far afield. "There's so much fantastic art and companies from abroad, but I did not want our festival to feel like an import festival like everything's really fabulous in France or Stockholm," she said. "The companies from North America are from the soil: They breathe the air." The Swedes will perform in Brooklyn Bridge Park on June 27 and 28 at 4 and 7 p.m. The Best of the Rest LEESAAR THE COMPANY, OHAD NAHARIN AND GUEST DANCERS FROM BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY Gaga the dance language originated by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin gets its due in a program featuring "Grass and Jackals," by Lee Sher and Saar Harari, along with a duet by Mr. Naharin performed by Batsheva dancers. Wednesday at 6 p.m., Thursday at 9:30 p.m. and next Friday at 8:30 p.m., Cannon's Walk at South Street Seaport, Manhattan EMMANUELLE HUYNH/COMPANY MUA This French choreographer offers a new iteration of her site specific work, inspired by Iannis Xenakis's "Persephassa." In "Cribles/Wild Governors," dancers enact a maypole dance to reveal the relationship between individuals and a group. Next Friday at 3 p.m., June 27 and June 28 at 3:30 p.m., Governors Island Parade Ground 'HIP HOP DANCE: FROM THE STREET TO THE STAGE' SummerStage and Dancing in the Streets present Full Circle Souljahs, Float Master John, Buddha Stretch and others. 'THE WIZ: A CELEBRATION IN DANCE AND MUSIC' In honor of the 40th anniversary of "The Wiz," the Tony winning choreographer George Faison presents some of that show's original dances and songs. Aug. 12 at 8 p.m., Central Park; also Aug. 13 14 at 7 p.m., Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem 'ALT MODE': A COLLABORATION BETWEEN RYAT AND KATE WATSON WALLACEThis shared program includes a presentation outside of the box: "Alt Mode" features music by Ryat (the Los Angeles composer Christina McGeehan), reconstructed into a performance of dance, electronic music and video mapping by Ms. Watson Wallace. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
After months of speculation, Burberry has named Riccardo Tisci as its new chief creative officer. He will be responsible for all of the men's and women's wear collections and accessories as the brand looks for a turnaround in fortunes after several years of stagnant sales. Mr. Tisci, who was creative director at Givenchy from 2005 to 2017, will replace Christopher Bailey, who ended 17 years at Burberry's creative helm with a final runway collection during London Fashion Week last month. Mr. Tisci, 43, a graduate of Central St. Martins in London, will start in the role March 12 and be based at the Burberry headquarters in London. Other names that had been touted for the position one of the most powerful in British fashion included John Galliano, creative director at Maison Margiela; Kim Jones, former men's creative director at Louis Vuitton; Phoebe Philo, former artistic director at Celine, and Stuart Vevers, creative director at Coach. "I am delighted that Riccardo is joining Burberry. He is one of the most talented designers of our time," Marco Gobbetti, Burberry's chief executive, said in a statement following the appointment. "His designs have an elegance that is contemporary and his skill in blending streetwear with high fashion is highly relevant to today's luxury consumer. Riccardo's creative vision will reinforce the ambitions we have for Burberry and position the brand firmly in luxury." Mr. Gobbetti and Mr. Tisci both Italians had worked together at Givenchy, where Mr. Gobbetti was the French brand's chief executive and hired Mr. Tisci in 2005. Mr. Tisci was responsible for transforming the brand from a house defined largely by the relationship between Hubert de Givenchy, the founder, and Audrey Hepburn, his greatest muse, to a house beloved by 21st century celebrities such as the Kardashians and a social media force. "Marco and Riccardo built a strong story together at Givenchy," said Jeffrey Kalinsky, director of designer fashion at Nordstrom. "They are a great partnership and I am very hopeful they will do the same at Burberry." Burberry, Britain's largest luxury brand by sales, now is a house looking for a creative transformation. Following Mr. Bailey's decision last fall to step down, after years of flatlining sales and a failed experiment that saw him take on a dual role as both chief creative and chief executive, the brand unveiled a turnaround strategy at the end of last year. Mr. Gobbetti intends to take the brand more upmarket to the realm of rivals like Gucci or Dior, with higher prices and profit margins to match. But sales thus far have continued to miss analyst forecasts, and the industry had been waiting to see who would be appointed to lead the creative aspects of Burberry into the next era. Now, with most editors and buyers in Paris for fashion week, they have their answer. And most seemed impressed if somewhat surprised by the decision. "I love the idea. It's an unexpected choice, but that's what makes it so exciting," said Jim Gold, president and chief merchandising officer of Neiman Marcus. "We believe Riccardo is one of the great designers working today. We love that he's tapped into what is happening on the street, but also has a real understanding of luxury and quality." Glenda Bailey, editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar in the United States, added: "You have to remember that Riccardo trained at Central St. Martins and has always had something of a British love affair. He really relishes that eclectic spirit." Luca Solca, head of luxury for Exane BNP Paribas, called the appointment "an incremental positive, given Mr. Tisci's strong track record and high profile," in a note to investors. He cautioned, however, that any improvement in Burberry's fortunes could take some time, with Gucci taking 18 months to show positive organic growth after the appointment of Alessandro Michele. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WASHINGTON From tax cuts to relaxed regulations to tariffs, each of President Trump's economic initiatives is based on a promise: to set off a wave of investment and bring back jobs that the president says the United States has lost to foreign countries. "We have the greatest companies anywhere in the world," Mr. Trump said at the White House recently. "They're all coming back now. They're coming back to the United States." Mr. Trump's tax cuts unquestionably stimulated the American economy in 2018, helping to push economic growth to 2.5 percent for the year and fueling an increase in manufacturing jobs. But statistics from the government and other sources do not support Mr. Trump's claim about his policies' effectiveness in drawing investment and jobs from abroad. Foreign investment in the United States grew at a slower annual pace in the first two years of Mr. Trump's tenure than during Barack Obama's presidency, according to Commerce Department data released in July. Growth in business investment from all sources, foreign and domestic, accelerated briefly after Mr. Trump signed a 1.5 trillion tax cut package in late 2017 but then slowed. Investment growth turned negative this spring, providing a drag on economic output. In Mr. Trump's first two years in office, companies announced plans to relocate just under 145,000 factory jobs to the United States, according to data and modeling by the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit group. That is a record high in the group's data, which dates back to the late 1980s, but it adds up to less than one month of average job gains in the United States in its decade long expansion. More than half of those jobs about 82,000 were announced in 2017, before Mr. Trump's tax cuts took effect. Moreover, the Reshoring Initiative data show fewer than 30,000 jobs that companies say they will relocate to the United States because of Mr. Trump's tariffs on imported steel, aluminum, solar panels, washing machines and a variety of Chinese goods. Researchers at A. T. Kearney said last month that Mr. Trump's trade policies, including tariffs, had pushed factory activity not to the United States but to low cost Asian countries other than China, like Vietnam. On Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump declared that his tariffs had turned things around for the domestic steel industry and that "now your business is thriving." But manufacturers of primary metals, which include steel and aluminum, have added fewer than 15,000 jobs since Mr. Trump took office, with more than half of those gains coming before he imposed tariffs on foreign made metals last year. Now manufacturing is struggling amid a global slowdown and fallout from the trade war, which Mr. Trump has escalated by imposing additional tariffs on Chinese goods and by labeling China a "currency manipulator." The administration on Tuesday narrowed the list of Chinese products that are targets of new tariffs on Sept. 1 to spare holiday shoppers from higher prices. Mr. Trump won office by tapping into frustration among working class voters in traditional manufacturing states where economists say up to 2.5 million jobs were lost to Chinese competition in the century's first decade. And administration officials assert that tariffs are helping to create jobs. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told a conference in Washington last month that the positive effects of Mr. Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs "can be measured on the factory floor." Jim Lentz, who oversees North American operations for the Japanese automaker Toyota, has cited the company's plans to invest 13 billion in American operations over the next several years. "Thank you, Mr. President, for having such a strong economy for allowing us to be able to do that," Mr. Lentz said at the White House last month. At a summit meeting in June, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan handed Mr. Trump a chart showing Japanese investments in the United States that would yield just under 22,000 new jobs. While Mr. Trump hailed the figures, Commerce Department data show that the rate of Japanese investment growth in the United States has slowed under Mr. Trump, compared with Mr. Obama's second term. And companies like Toyota have warned that the president's determination that foreign autos pose a national security threat and may be subjected to tariffs could discourage additional investment. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. On another front, administration officials point to companies like Mylan and Allergan which had moved their corporate addresses overseas in a process known as inversion but recently said they would return to the United States as a sign of success for the tax law. Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, said last week that "you're seeing American firms move back." When a CNBC interviewer said the Mylan and Allergan moves would not bring back manufacturing jobs, Mr. Kudlow agreed. But he said, "You're also going to have factories moving back in from other places around the world, including China." Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who tracks international investment flows, said it was notable that relatively few pharmaceutical companies were moving plants and activity back to the United States from countries like Ireland or Switzerland. Pharmaceutical imports from those countries actually rose in 2018, he noted. And a May report by researchers at the International Monetary Fund concluded that the investment impact of the tax bill "has been smaller than would have been predicted based on the effects of previous U.S. tax cut episodes" and that the strongest effects on investment were likely to have shown up in the first year after the law was enacted. Morgan Stanley's Business Conditions Index shows that companies' plans for new investment plummeted this summer. The tax law reduced the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent from a top rate of 35 percent, and it overhauled the way the United States taxes multinational companies. Data show those changes have encouraged multinational companies to shift hundreds of billions of dollars in profits to their American operations, essentially for accounting purposes, through a process known as repatriation. Mr. Trump often cites repatriation figures as if they reflected direct investment in the United States. That's wrong, Mr. Setser said. Commerce Department statistics show that the repatriated funds came mainly from low tax countries like Ireland and Bermuda, where companies had booked profits to minimize tax liability, and not from China or other economic competitors like Japan. That flow of money "doesn't mean all that much," Mr. Setser said. "You're not in any way seeing a shift in real activity back to the United States." Researchers from Wall Street financial firms and the Federal Reserve have concluded that companies used repatriated funds mostly to buy back stock. Administration officials contend that those selling shares will soon invest their proceeds from the buybacks into start ups, business expansions or other forms of economic activity. Harry Moser, the founder and president of the Reshoring Initiative, praised Mr. Trump's efforts to bring jobs and investment back to the United States, but said the president's trade fights appeared to have undercut those efforts last year. "We are pleased with the over 50 percent surge in reshoring jobs announced in 2017 and the record number of companies announcing reshoring jobs in 2018," said Mr. Moser, whose group advocates measures to bring back five million factory jobs. But he said efforts to draw investment and jobs to the United States were less successful in 2018 than in 2017 because of a stronger dollar, which makes American products more expensive in foreign markets, as well as "uncertainty from the tariffs, dysfunction in Washington and the increasing skilled work force shortage." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Q. If I wanted to cut the cord and switch to a streaming service, would I be able to watch live sports? What's the cheapest option? A. "Cutting the cord" canceling a cable (or satellite) subscription in favor of streaming video over a broadband internet connection is gaining ground, and several services offer a variety of live television channels. Most major streaming television providers include sports in their monthly subscriptions, but the precise set of sports channels you receive depends on the service. Some offer different packages with emphasis on certain subjects like sports or children's programming, or let you tack on additional channels for a small fee. Before switching, make a list of all the networks you currently use to watch sports, including channels that show special events like the N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments and the Olympics or the coming FIFA World Cup, which is scheduled to be shown on both Fox and cable channels. Use this list to match up your viewing requirements with a particular service and the channels it carries. Keep in mind that some events may have web streams anyway, and that some specialized sports networks may be hard to find. Popular streaming television services (and their monthly starting prices) include DirecTV Now ( 35), Hulu Live TV ( 40), Sling TV ( 20) and YouTube TV ( 40). PlayStation Vue ( 40) is another provider with a lot of sports programming, and contrary to what the name may imply, you do not need a Sony PlayStation game console to use the service. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
SAN FRANCISCO One of the biggest selling points of Facebook's ambitious plans for its new cryptocurrency, Libra, was that the social media company had 27 partners, including prominent outfits like Visa, Mastercard and Uber, helping out on the project. But some of those partners are approaching Libra warily. They signed nonbinding agreements to join the effort partly because they knew they weren't obliged to use or promote the digital token and could easily back out if they didn't like where it was going, said executives at seven of those companies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. The doubts among Facebook's partners add to a growing list of challenges for Libra, a new digital token that Facebook executives hope will one day become the foundation for a new kind of online financial industry. Though it was announced just a week ago, the Libra effort has already drawn scrutiny in Washington. Maxine Waters, the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee and a Democrat from California, quickly scheduled hearings to examine Libra and told Facebook to stop development of the project until big questions are answered. The House hearing is set for July 17. The Senate is expected to hold a hearing on the same issue the day before. Jerome H. Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said on Tuesday that the central bank would be looking at Libra "very carefully" given its potential scale. "I think that our expectations from a consumer protection standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, are going to be very, very high," Mr. Powell said at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. European regulators have also asked for more details about the project. Facebook said the 27 partners that it announced last week were giving at least 10 million and joining an association that would govern the Libra cryptocurrency, which is set to be introduced next year. But no money has changed hands so far. A number of partners said they would decide whether to join the association and make the payment after there is more clarity on how Libra will work, the executives from the seven companies said. A Facebook spokeswoman, Elka Looks, said in a statement that the company plans "to engage in healthy dialogue and debate with our fellow founding members, and to welcoming additional members over the coming months." "We know this will take time and it won't be easy, but together we will be able to make the Libra mission a reality," Ms. Looks said. A spokesman for the Libra Association, Dante Disparte, said that since the announcement last week, the association has heard from a flood of companies interested in being members. He said the association, which will manage Libra, will most likely have a waiting list for those wanting to be among the 100 initial members it hopes to start with next year. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Facebook had hoped its partners could help Libra handle some of the critics and give the project some distance from the social networking giant and its recent legal problems. But even before the project began, potential partners had their own concerns. Facebook approached a number of big financial companies, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Fidelity, about participating in the project, according to two people briefed on the discussions. The financial companies declined to join, in part because of regulatory questions about cryptocurrencies, the people said. Press officers for the banks all declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Fidelity said the company was continuing to monitor the project. Facebook did manage to sign up two big credit card companies, Visa and Mastercard, as partners. But Mastercard was one of the last companies to commit, according to documents shared with other partners that were described to The New York Times. When Libra was announced, Mastercard released a statement from one of its executives expressing support for the initiative. But the statement did not mention Libra by name, and it described the effort as one of many partnerships that Mastercard has joined. "By activating partnerships to explore, cocreate, and test new ideas, we can cultivate ideas to make inclusion a reality sooner than some may think," said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard's executive vice president for digital solutions, in the statement. Mastercard was one of several partners that avoided voicing full throated support for Libra after it was unveiled. Some other partners declined Facebook's requests to put out news releases and speak with media outlets about their support for Libra, four people briefed on the negotiations said. If Libra succeeds at one of its goals reducing the cost of making digital payments it could pose a challenge to partners like Mastercard, Visa, Stripe and PayPal. But executives at the payment companies said that rather than staying away from Libra, they wanted to have a role in its creation. Partners like Uber or Spotify, which could benefit from lower credit card fees, were more enthusiastic. The largest American cryptocurrency company, Coinbase, was one of Libra's 27 initial partners. But when the partnership was announced internally, several Coinbase employees expressed concern about their company joining forces with a giant company like Facebook with a spotty record on issues that matter to cryptocurrency fans, like privacy, according to two company employees. Joe Lallouz, the chief executive of Bison Trails, another cryptocurrency company that joined Libra as a partner, said he was also skeptical when Facebook approached him. "My initial reaction was: 'You don't have the best track record from a data privacy perspective,'" Mr. Lallouz said in an interview after the announcement. "Facebook's reputation around data privacy and being trustworthy is against the crypto ethos." But Mr. Lallouz said Facebook had shown that it was serious about protecting the privacy of its users, in part by ensuring that it does not have too much control over the project. Facebook executives said the design of Libra was inspired by the decentralized structure of Bitcoin, with governance given over to the association, in which Facebook will only have one vote out of a potential 100 partners. "Already, they are relinquishing control and ownership over this, which is huge," said Mr. Lallouz. The partners are expected to meet in the coming months to write a charter that will govern the association. Facebook's history with partners has added to their caution. The game maker Zynga, for example, faced a dramatic loss of revenue after Facebook backed away from a close relationship with the company. Facebook also strained relationships with many publishers last year when it changed the algorithms behind its news feed to de emphasize news stories. "This is a huge opportunity, but there are a lot of details that still need to be worked out," Mr. Lallouz said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Thomas P. Campbell resigned under pressure on Tuesday as the director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after months of growing concerns among staff members and some trustees about its financial health and his capacity to lead the largest museum in the country. Met officials said that Mr. Campbell would stay on until June, the end of the fiscal year, but that Daniel H. Weiss, the Met's president and chief operating officer, would be simultaneously serving as interim chief executive. Mr. Weiss will work with Mr. Campbell and the museum's leadership on a transition plan while the Met seeks a new director, one of the most powerful in the art world. "We are not looking to appoint a new director immediately," said Daniel Brodsky, the museum's chairman, in a letter to board and staff members, "but instead will take some time to consider the leadership needs of the museum in a thoughtful and deliberative way." The Met said that Mr. Campbell, 54, had made the decision to leave the job he had held for eight years. But the circumstances surrounding his departure point to his being forced out. As The New York Times reported extensively in an article in early February, Mr. Campbell's financial decisions and expansion plans had been criticized by some trustees, curators and other staff members. During the last couple of years, despite the museum's record attendance, much of his original agenda was rolled back because of the museum's economic difficulties, including a soaring deficit. The sudden end to Mr. Campbell's tenure came in recent days after key board members including Hamilton E. James, who leads the Met's finance committee insisted it was time for him to go, according to people inside the Met who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential conversations and personnel decisions. It was Mr. James, the president and chief operating officer of the Blackstone Group investment firm, who by many accounts first sounded the alarm about the Met's financial condition after joining the board in 2010. Mr. James declined on Tuesday to be interviewed. The full board was not informed of Mr. Campbell's resignation until Tuesday afternoon, having been summoned to a conference call only an hour before. According to one trustee who spoke on condition of anonymity having been instructed by the board chairman not to speak to the news media Mr. Brodsky started the call by introducing Mr. Campbell, who then read his full statement in what the trustee called a "trembling voice." No mention of a search committee was made on the call. This was a distinct change from the departure of Mr. Campbell's predecessor, Philippe de Montebello, when Annette de la Renta and S. Parker Gilbert, then both vice chairs of the Met board, were simultaneously announced as the chairwoman and vice chairman of the search committee. In response to Mr. Campbell's exit, Mr. de Montebello said in a telephone interview: "I wish him well in his new endeavors. The Met is a great institution and I'm sure it will thrive in the future under new leadership." Mr. Campbell, in his letter to staff and trustees on Tuesday, wrote that he had decided to step down "in order to pursue the next phase of my career." "I couldn't be more proud of The Met's accomplishments during my tenure," he wrote. Just how an institution as august and professional as the Met found itself in a financial emergency during a strong economy became the subject of public consternation, and some of the blame fell on Mr. Campbell as its chief executive. There were buyouts and layoffs; the digital staff he built up had to be pared down. His plan to construct a 600 million wing for Modern and contemporary art, for the museum's 150th anniversary in 2020, was postponed indefinitely. Several of his key hires were let go. In 2015 Mr. Weiss, formerly president of Haverford College, was hired, a move viewed by many inside the Met as a way to bring in an experienced administrator to compensate for Mr. Campbell's managerial inexperience. But many inside and outside the Met have also questioned the role of the board in the Met's difficulties. The board, after all, backed Mr. Campbell's decision to take on a temporary expansion into the Met Breuer. (The Met Breuer building cost about 15 million to refurbish after the Whitney Museum of American Art left, and it costs 17 million a year to run.) The board also approved Mr. Campbell's efforts to bulk up the museum's digital staff. The board initially promoted Mr. Campbell with a mandate to strengthen the museum's Modern and contemporary art activities. Without that commitment, the understanding goes, the Met would not have secured Leonard A. Lauder's game changing gift of Cubist artworks, valued at more than 1 billion, which require a worthy exhibition space. The degree to which Mr. Campbell lost ground with curators was striking, given that he came from their ranks, having spent 15 years at the museum as a tapestry specialist before becoming director in January 2009. But the Met also has had critical and popular success under Mr. Campbell, seeing its attendance rise to about seven million visitors a year (including the Cloisters). And the Met Breuer, which opened in March, has drawn 557,000 visitors more than projected exceeding the Whitney's annual attendance in that building. Moreover, the Met has had many acclaimed exhibitions under Mr. Campbell, including "Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World" last year, and its recent Kerry James Marshall survey at the Met Breuer was considered groundbreaking. Mr. Campbell will have to give up his Met apartment across from the museum at 993 Fifth Avenue. It is worth millions of dollars, part of his hefty compensation package, which was about 1.4 million in 2015, according to the most recently available tax forms. While many in the art world have speculated about who might replace Mr. Campbell, no clear leading candidates have surfaced. Among the names often floated are Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art; both are engaged in their own major building projects. But they specialize in Modern and contemporary art, and the Met seems ambivalent about how much to commit to that area. Others have wondered whether Mr. Weiss, 59, might succeed Mr. Campbell since he has proved proficient as a financial steward and steadying force and is liked by the staff. In addition to an M.B.A., Mr. Weiss has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in Western medieval and Byzantine art. According to a senior executive in the art world with knowledge of the board's thinking on the succession plan, who refused to be identified because of the sensitive situation, the trustees intend to use the next few months to see if Mr. Weiss is up to the job. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Now lives: In a two bedroom apartment in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Claim to fame: Mr. Bembury is a cult designer of opulent fashion sneakers, first at Yeezy, where he designed combat and lace up boots for Seasons 3 and 4, and now at Versace, where his futuristic, almost Japanime inspired designs have earned praise from tastemakers, art stars and sneakerheads. Sneakers Magazine recently called him "one of the most ambitious creatives in the footwear industry." Big break: Before his street style following, Mr. Bembury designed shoes at Cole Haan and Payless ShoeSource. Wait, what was that last one? "In retrospect, it was highly informative because Payless makes every type of shoe imaginable at an inexpensive cost," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In 1985, the pollster Stanley Greenberg went to Macomb County, Mich., to figure out how a traditionally Democratic suburban area could have delivered a landslide for Ronald Reagan. Last year, he was back with a similar question: How could voters in a county that turned out twice for Barack Obama have defected in such large numbers that they arguably delivered Michigan to Donald Trump? The research zeroed in on white Trump voters without a bachelor's degree who were either Democrats or independents and had voted for Mr. Obama at least once. Focus groups detected the same underlying theme that had motivated the Reagan Democrats more than 30 years before: a view of America as divided between "us" white, struggling and aggrieved and a nonwhite "them." In 1985, "them" meant blacks across Eight Mile Road in Detroit. Last year, they were mostly immigrants, according to a study of the results by Democracy Corps, a nonprofit that Mr. Greenberg co founded. Among whites, they both inspired a sense of betrayal and more than a little dread. In a place that is more than 80 percent white, Mr. Trump's Democrats share "pretty powerful feelings about race, foreignness and Islam that lead them to see white people as victims in a country feeling increasingly foreign to many of them," the study noted. This persistent sense of threatened white identity raises a prickly question about the country's direction. Mr. Trump's rise to the presidency prompted widespread efforts to understand the motivations of the white working class voters who propelled him into the White House. It fueled scorching debates over the role that racism played in the presidential election. Economists proposed that workers in distress because of trade and technological shocks would embrace more nativist politicians. In one study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with several other researchers, concluded that counties whose workers were more exposed to Chinese imports have shifted notably toward the right in presidential and congressional elections since the turn of the century. And yet some political scientists do not entirely buy the arguments. Diana C. Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania rejects the "economic hardship" idea to explain the 2016 election, proposing instead something called "status shock." White voters fell for Mr. Trump, she argued, because they felt threatened by increasing numbers of minorities and the sense that the United States was losing its global dominance. Whether Mr. Trump's proposed barriers against imports and immigrants found support because of a sense of racial threat or out of distress over the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, ethnic unease is clearly shaping American politics and policy. The share of America defined as white and non Hispanic is shrinking. The United States is expected to reach "minority majority" status in the early 2040s. A Cornell University sociologist, Daniel T. Lichter, suggests that if the demographic profile of poverty remains constant, by 2050 over 70 percent of America's poor will be from today's minority groups. As the American demographic profile continues to shift, pitting a shrinking population of older, non Hispanic whites against growing cohorts of younger and poorer minorities, will many whites continue to support a liberal America comfortable with globalization, open to trade and immigration? Or will they deploy their considerable political power to stop it? "No other factor predicted changes in white partisanship during Obama's presidency as powerfully and as consistently as racial attitudes," noted John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. Even those most opposed to liberal trade, he said, were hardly more likely to vote for Mr. Trump than they were four years earlier to vote for the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, a free trade advocate. Voters with the most negative feelings about blacks, Muslims and immigrants, by contrast, shifted their vote toward the Republican candidate. Shahrzad Sabet, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, notes that people who are reminded of the demographic shift tend to support more conservative positions even on race neutral issues such as oil drilling and funding for the military. Over the long term, diversity may increase the political support for globalization. Demographic change does not threaten minorities as it does white Americans. They never held whites' position of power. For Hispanics and Asian Americans, specifically, demographic change translates as more clout. Research by Ms. Mutz finds that minorities view trade and international outsourcing much more favorably than white Americans do. Andrew J. Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that demographic change will most likely relax racial and ethnic divisions. Not only is intermarriage rising, but current racial definitions are also unlikely to hold. The question is what is going to happen between now and then. "There might be a period coming up where some whites resist the expansion of the concept of majority," Mr. Cherlin acknowledged. Ms. Mutz detects an increase in white Americans' sense of threat between 2012 and 2016, probably linked to the presence of a black president. Benjamin Enke, an economist at Harvard University who studies the evolution of cultural biases, also suggests that feelings of "us" versus "them" may be on the rise. Politicians' appeals to voters' communal morality characterized by their sense of group loyalty rather than support for universal values have been rising in this century, he reports. And this tribal ethic also seems to be rising in the general population. Mr. Enke notes that communal morality has been gaining ground since 2010 among conservatives responding to an online questionnaire about moral foundations. To what extent could policy break down the barriers of ethnic hostility and mistrust? A good economy would help. Racial differences rise to the top of voters' minds when the economy falters, heating up both the competition for jobs and the debate over the use of tax dollars. By contrast, economists suggest, racial attitudes take a back seat in better economic times. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
This volcanic actor's entrance in the lopsided new revival of Lanford Wilson's "Burn This," which opened on Tuesday at the Hudson Theater, is prefaced by a fanfare of violent pounding. It is 5 a.m., in a loft in Lower Manhattan. And it sounds as if the Incredible Hulk, feeling very impatient, is in the hallway or maybe a runaway cyclone. When the door opens, what is revealed behind it does not disappoint. With long, flailing limbs and a face molten with anguish, Mr. Driver explodes into view with an outsize fury that makes everyone and everything around him seem Lilliputian. And a production that has so far felt pleasant and prosaic is flooded with the anarchy of life in extremis. The last time I can recall such an impressively violent Broadway entrance was more than 30 years ago, when a rising actor named John Malkovich appeared in the same part. Playing a coked to the gills restaurant manager named Pale, Mr. Malkovich seemed to morph overnight from quirky character actor into a leading man of dangerous sex appeal. Theater lovers still talk about the excitement of that performance. And I would wager that decades from now, people will be speaking with the same gratified wonder of Mr. Driver's very different but equally compelling Pale. That unleashed force is plied most artfully here to create a portrait of how grief unhinges, disarranges and heightens everyday life. Set in the late 1980s, "Burn This" assesses the impact of the death of a young dancer named Robbie, Pale's brother, in a boating accident. The tragedy brings Robbie's roommates, Anna (Ms. Russell, in the part for which Joan Allen won a Tony in 1988) and Larry (Brandon Uranowitz), as well Anna's boyfriend, Burton (David Furr), into contact with someone they might otherwise never have met. That's Pale, a product of working class New Jersey who has had little recent contact with the much younger, artistic minded and gay Robbie. Adam Driver and Keri Russell on the appeal of 'Burn This.' The play begins shortly after Robbie's funeral. Anna, who has recently made the transition from dancing to choreography, has returned to their apartment, a loft space as open as a dance studio and as lonely as a desert. (Derek McLane designed the set, lighted with a brooding clarity by Natasha Katz.) Having just met Robbie's family for the first time, she's marveling at how she could have known so little about someone she thought she knew so well. The opacity of people even to themselves is a leitmotif in "Burn This." So is the hunger to reach beyond the ordinary, to see and feel on an epic scale. Burton, a rich boy screenwriter, and Anna speak of creating work that wrests them from the rut of what they've always done. They need, in Burton's words, "to reach for the sun." As embodied by Mr. Driver, Pale isn't reaching for the sun; he's a solar entity unto himself. You believe him when he says his normal body temperature is about 110 degrees and that "I got like a toaster oven that I carry around in my belly someplace." Addled with drug and drink, rabid with grief and guilt, Pale arrives in the play's second scene, to collect his brother's belongings as a flesh and blood example of life lived large. He's an alien in the civilized Bohemia of the others. He's even an alien to himself, wrestling in exasperation with his own body, which registers emotions as physical pain, and the Armani style duds he always wears. (Clint Ramos did the era appropriate costumes.) Even more than Mr. Malkovich did, Mr. Driver makes us aware that real grandeur doesn't always come in the expected, esthetically pleasing packages. If Mr. Driver bestrides "Burn This" like a colossus could he really be only 6 foot 2, as Wikipedia has it? everyone else seems to shrink beneath his shadow when he's onstage. You could argue that this is appropriate. But earlier productions including the 2002 Signature Theater revival, which starred Edward Norton and Catherine Keener made it clear that this drama is indeed a "pas de quatre," to use the language of dance, about the distance among people. In Mr. Mayer's version, the play might be titled "Waiting for Pale." This is partly because Ms. Russell, a first rate television actress ("The Americans"), never seems in any way undone not by sorrow, not by creative frustration and not by her character's gravitational attraction to Pale, with whom she falls into bed almost immediately. She tells Pale that he scares her. Yet despite her physical daintiness in comparison to Mr. Driver's looming heft, her Anna always seems in charge, like a nanny with an unruly, overgrown toddler. To borrow from Lady Gaga, Ms. Russell's performance remains comfortably "in the shallow," instead of in the deep end into which Anna is plunged. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter When she deftly swaps chummy barbs with Mr. Uranowitz who ably fills the now shopworn role of the sardonic but ultimately wise and caring gay confidant "Burn This" can feel like a dry run for the long lived TV series "Will and Grace." And the most intriguing erotic chemistry here isn't between Pale and Anna, but between Larry and Mr. Furr's straight (and very good) Burton. I hasten to add that Mr. Driver isn't grandstanding at the expense of the rest of the cast. Part of the pleasure of watching him comes from seeing how this overwrought lug relates so awkwardly and unnaturally to others. When he kisses Anna goodbye, it's with the stiffness of a little boy unaccustomed to displays of affection. But this "Burn This," which is steeped in the rich compassion for the lonely and lost that is the hallmark of works by Mr. Wilson (1937 2011), only rarely stirs the heart. In the ideal production, it creates the sense of fire meeting fire in a folie a deux between two ill matched yet inexorably bound lovers. What we have in this case is a one man conflagration. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
MANCHESTER, England For a moment, it looked as if Jurgen Klopp was taking issue with Pep Guardiola. Klopp, the Liverpool manager, had sought out Guardiola, his Manchester City counterpart, as soon as the final whistle had blown on their teams' draw on Sunday. Klopp pulled Guardiola in close, and then swept his arm out across the field, gesticulating at two sets of players heaving with exhaustion, his face serious and his brow furrowed. The rivalry between these clubs is a curious one. Their prominence and potency should, strictly speaking, make it as compelling as defining feuds of the Premier League's history: Alex Ferguson's Manchester United against Arsene Wenger's Arsenal, Jose Mourinho's Chelsea against both of those teams and also pretty much everyone else. Liverpool and City are, after all, the two dominant forces of their era. And yet, even as the teams have traded blows and broken records, the rivalry has always fallen somehow short: a little too petty to feel serious, a little too manufactured to seem authentic. The greatest rivalries are underpinned by a contempt rooted in familiarity; they are arguments conducted in a common language over common ground. Liverpool and Manchester City, with their utterly contrasting priorities and identities, do not have that. Too often, their rivalry feels like little more than shouting. Except, of course, when it comes to Klopp and Guardiola. Their relationship has always been more than cordial. It would be too far to suggest they are friends; watching them in close quarters, away from the field, it is possible to observe just how different they are as characters. The competition between them, certainly, is intense. But the respect and admiration goes beyond mere news conference sound bite; the paeans of praise that flow between them over the course of a season are not, as they are often presented, salvos in some ongoing psychological war. Each holds the other in high esteem. Each regards the other as an equal, or at least something close to it. And so, as Klopp pulled Guardiola in close on Sunday evening, he was not remonstrating or complaining or picking over some old scar. He was, instead, recruiting him to his cause. He was, as it turned out, preaching to the converted. "We are going to fight, him and myself," Guardiola said, a few minutes later. Then both Klopp and Guardiola, again and again, turned their fire on the Premier League's decision to plow on through this cramped and compacted season with each team allowed only three substitutions in each game. Every other major league, as well as the Champions League, has accepted a temporary change to permit five subs, a nod to how intense the schedule has to be to get everything finished in time for the European Championship next summer. The Premier League stands alone in its reverence for tradition. "This country likes to be a little bit special," Guardiola said, a withering assessment that applies to Britain in ways far beyond how many players there are in a match day squad. Klopp accused the Premier League of a "lack of leadership." He said the decision had forced clubs to endure an "October that was like a December, a November that is like a December, and a December that is still like a December," in reference to the frantic scheduling of games around Christmas that traditionally defines an English season. Guardiola called the decision to revert to three substitutes incomprehensible. The players, he said, were being given "no break, no rest." Both demanded that the discussion be held again. The timing was no accident. Liverpool's visit to the Etihad a game that ended in a 1 1 draw, and left Liverpool third and Manchester City 11th in the still young Premier League table had been dressed up as the title race's key early turning point, despite the overwhelming evidence that this season will be decided not by elite showdowns but by a long, attritional slog. For 45 minutes, it lived up to its ambitious billing, the sort of game one would expect between the two best teams in the country. Liverpool tore at City and City tore at Liverpool as, in the background, the strategies kept shifting and the chess pieces kept moving and the ideas kept whirring. That was what brought Klopp and Guardiola together: the sense of a showpiece only half fulfilled, of a mission that could not be willing. It is something that both fear the Premier League will have to get used to. These opening weeks of the season, as Klopp alluded to, have been the easy bit. What comes next is much worse. There are two threads to the argument against implementing the five substitutes rule. One is that a raft of changes in the second half of a game interrupts its flow as often happens amid the inconsequential vapidity of international exhibition games and ruins its spectacle. The second is that such a shift gives yet another advantage to the elite teams, the ones that can afford to assemble deeper squads. True, they must deal with the demands of playing in European competition, too, but perhaps that just levels the playing field a little? It is a good thing, surely, that quarter of the way through the season, the top four in the Premier League reads Leicester City, Tottenham, Liverpool, Southampton? The former is easy to contradict: what happened in the second half of Manchester City's game with Liverpool stands as powerful testimony that there is more than one way to spoil a spectacle. The latter has more merit. The elite have enough advantages; they do not need another. Five substitutions just means five more international class players to bring on. The richest teams would, without question, benefit disproportionately from a change. (Though, as a glance at the league tables in Spain and Italy would suggest, perhaps not by that much.) But that rather ignores what concerns Klopp and Guardiola. Before the end of the year, almost every Premier League team will face the sort of burden that ordinarily is borne only by teams in the Champions League and Europa League: a game every three days, a relentless, unyielding schedule that tests players to the limits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Morton Bahr, a national labor leader who helped his fellow communication workers survive threats to their jobs posed by digital technology and corporate revamping, died on July 30 at his home in Washington. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his son, Daniel. From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Bahr was also the president of the Jewish Labor Committee, a national advocacy group, which said the cause of death was pancreatic cancer. Mr. Bahr, who began his career as a telegraph operator, was president of the Communications Workers of America from 1985 to 2005, running a union that today represents about 700,000 public and private sector employees in technology, media, airlines and law enforcement. He presided during the convulsive breakup of AT T's Bell System as a telephone service monopoly, as mandated by a 1982 consent decree. Bell had employed a half million union workers. After the government filed suit for antitrust law violations, AT T continued to provide long distance service while giving up control of local telephone business to what would become independent regional Bell operating companies. Mr. Bahr devised two strategies that enabled the union to successfully navigate the consolidation in the industry and the automation wrought by the introduction of cellphones and other digital devices. These advances had sharply reduced the need for installers, repairmen and other communication workers. By forming partnerships with educational institutions and negotiating with management, Mr. Bahr started job retraining programs. He also secured child care benefits and flexible schedules to give employees more latitude for work, study and family. "A commitment to lifelong learning requires a change in lifestyle and values," he said repeatedly. "Instead of going out for a beer with your co workers at the end of the shift, you might have to go to the library. Education has to become a major part of your life." In 2001, the Morton Bahr Distance Learning Scholarship was established in his honor at SUNY Empire State College to help adult workers with full time jobs pursue college studies. He also expanded his base by recruiting members from beyond the volatile telecommunication industry, incorporating the Association of Flight Attendants, the International Typographical Union, the International Union of Electrical Workers, the Newspaper Guild and the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians. "Morty understood that the C.W.A.'s power depended on economic leverage," Prof. Harry Charles Katz, director of the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution at Cornell University, said in an email, "and he cleverly found ways to counteract the loss in traditional sources of union power that occurred when telecommunications technology made switchboard operators obsolete, and when microelectronics altered the work of telecom network technicians." His successor as union president, Chris Shelton, said in a statement, "Morty was comfortable whether he was in the company of presidents of the United States, in the halls of Congress, or on a picket line." Morton Bahr was born on July 18, 1926, in Brooklyn to Morton and Elizabeth (Kleinick) Bahr, Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was raised in the Brownsville section. His father worked in the silk business. But his education was curtailed by World War II. (He would eventually receive a bachelor of science degree in 1983, from the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies of Empire State College.) Enlisting as a merchant seaman, he served as a radio operator. He was the last surviving member of the A.F.L. C.I.O.'s executive council to have served in World War II, said Michael Sacco, president of the Seafarers International Union. Mr. Bahr married his girlfriend, Florence Slobodow, during a shore leave in 1945. After returning to sea, he received a message in October 1946 that his wife had given birth to a son. In a memoir, "From the Telegraph to the Internet" (1998), he wrote that when he finally returned home, he told her that he wanted to make one more voyage. "Go ahead," she replied, "but the baby and I won't be here when you return." Instead, given his shipboard experience, she referred him to a newspaper advertisement for a job opening at the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company in New York, where he became a telegraph operator. After a strike there in 1951 crippled the American Communications Association, a loose federation of unions, Mr. Bahr joined the newly constituted Communication Workers. He became an organizer at McKay, which became American Cable Radio, and in 1954 was elected to lead Local 1172 in New York. He later organized about 24,000 workers of New York Telephone (now Verizon). As vice president of the union's regional New York New Jersey district, he led a 218 day strike against New York Telephone in 1971. That walkout empowered the union in negotiations with AT T three years later. After he retired in 2005, Mr. Bahr was on the board of the Elderly Housing Development Operations Corporation. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife; his daughter, Janice Bahr; four grandchildren; and eight great grandchildren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The people behind a nonprofit that helps workers at the famed Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville, Ky., had spotted a great opportunity. With the city's schools closed because of the coronavirus, some of the workers at the racetrack needed fast internet access for their children. And Charter, an internet provider in the area, was offering two free months of service to any household with a student or a teacher. One by one, the nonprofit helped sign up families more than 30 in total. Then the bills started showing up. One family that had signed up got a notice in the mail that it owed 120. Another saw a debt appear in its account on the Charter website. Another family got a notice that it owed roughly 75, including for phone service it didn't get. "This is a fear for our families," said Isai Sanchez, 22, the youth program coordinator at the nonprofit, the Backside Learning Center. "Like, 'How am I supposed to pay 120 right now for a service that I can't afford?'" One of Mr. Sanchez's colleagues called Charter, which provides service under the Spectrum brand name, to ask about some of the surprise charges. The company eventually cleared some of the bills, blaming a miscommunication. Internet providers like Charter and Comcast have introduced offers of free and low cost internet with great fanfare in the last several weeks. The companies have said they want to help connect poor Americans during a pandemic that has shifted much of life online. Schools and community organizations have aggressively promoted the offers. Scores of customers have tried to sign up. But people signing up for the programs have encountered unexpected difficulties and roadblocks, according to interviews with people who have tried to sign up or who have helped them. Their stories highlight the way that the pandemic has stretched the gap between Americans who have easy access to the internet and those who do not, cutting the latter group off from venues for learning, work and play. The benefits and rules of the offers vary widely, so a customer may not qualify for free service while someone in identical circumstances elsewhere in the country can sign up. Sometimes, people must endure hourslong waits on the phone to sign up, which can lead some to give up before they ever talk to a customer service agent. Others have been deterred by language barriers or are wary of requests for identification. Several large broadband companies, including Comcast, Charter and Altice, which operates Suddenlink and Optimum, initially said a household could not sign up if it had an unpaid bill for earlier service. They pulled back that requirement when reporters and politicians questioned it. "We need a more stable solution that doesn't have all the gaps in eligibility and delivery that these free and reduced offers provide us," said Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. Ms. Siefer supports a federal subsidy that would go directly to consumers to pay for home broadband. Rich Ruggiero, a Charter spokesman, said the company had moved quickly to offer solid connectivity to Americans who did not have it. In March, 119,000 households signed up for its offer of 60 days of free service to teachers and students, the company reported. Mr. Ruggiero said the company expected as many as 400,000 new families to sign up by the end of June. Charter has worked around the clock to handle the interest in new and discounted services, Mr. Ruggiero said, "as a way to help connect these families quickly and safely during this challenging time." He said he couldn't speculate about the situation in Louisville. A Comcast spokesman, Charlie Douglas, said the company had "the nation's largest and most comprehensive broadband adoption program for low income Americans." "We've been working on the challenge of tackling the digital divide" for nearly a decade, he said. In addition, the companies do not serve all parts of the country. Leah Christen of Fayette, Maine, near Augusta, heard that a cousin who lives an hour away had gotten a deal on internet service from Charter. She started making calls to find out if she could, too. Last year, Ms. Christen, 36, broke a disc in her back, which made it impossible to go back to her job as a technician in a nursing home. With an infant daughter at home, she started to take classes at a community college to become a certified medical assistant. Ms. Christen's training and study groups were being held online, but she had no internet connection at home. Charter said its service did not reach her home. Then she tried AT T, which was offering two months of free service during the pandemic. An agent asked for her address, put her on hold for 15 minutes and returned to say the company's service couldn't reach her, either. (AT T does not offer home internet service in Maine.) "I'm not in the middle of nowhere," Ms. Christen said. "I'm a half hour from our capital, and I can't get service." Some customers have found that no one from the internet providers can speak with them in their primary language. The companies generally offer information about the programs in English and Spanish, posing a problem in places with large immigrant populations, said officials in school districts around the country that have encouraged families to sign up for the deals. Mr. Douglas, the Comcast spokesman, said information about its coronavirus response was available in 27 languages. The company's call centers can use an on demand translation company to speak to customers, he said. But getting through to a person can also be a problem. In Louisville, Mr. Sanchez said he had waited on hold for six hours when trying to sign up one family. Marlon Styles, the superintendent of the Middletown City School District near Dayton, Ohio, said demand for the free service was "significantly higher than the capacity of our providers." What happens after a free service offer ends can be another source of confusion. Kimberlyn Barton, a part time student at the University of Texas in Austin whose classes moved online, spent a recent week looking for affordable broadband service before she moves into a new apartment. Ms. Barton, 36, is eligible for a federal broadband subsidy for low income people and received emergency funding from the university to help pay for internet. When she called Charter, which services her new apartment, an agent told her about the company's offer for students. But then the agent said the monthly cost would be 49 for the nine months after the offer ended and eventually go as high as 69, more than Ms. Barton was able to pay. Mr. Ruggiero, the Charter spokesman, said that in addition to its internet service that starts at 49.99 a month, Charter offered a low cost plan to people on certain forms of public assistance. Ms. Barton expected to go with a cheaper AT T plan. When customers do get service, it can change the way they are able to work and their children are able to learn during the pandemic. With that in mind, Mr. Sanchez, the youth mentor in Louisville, has spent recent weeks teaching himself to refurbish old laptops and distribute them to the children of workers. Some of the families the center has signed up for internet service have used it to fill out their census forms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Sean Spicer tried to dance. He wore a floofy neon top. And for eight weeks, he withstood the mockery on social media and the icy commentary from unimpressed judges on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars." Finally, on Monday, not even President Trump's support could save Mr. Spicer, and the president deleted a tweet that had asked TV voters to stave off the inevitable: The former White House press secretary was eliminated from the reality show, ending what somehow counts as a chapter in American politics. "I've loved being on this show, thank you for making me part of it," Mr. Spicer said after being eliminated. "An untruthful dancer": Read our dance critic's review of Sean Spicer's run on the show. He clearly had a lot of fans, as evidenced by his remaining on the show into the final six contestants. But from the day he was announced as a contestant in August to his elimination on Monday, Mr. Spicer's presence on the show grated on two groups of viewers: those unforgiving of his stint as a White House spokesman, and those who like to watch good dancing. On the dancing front, he won over few admirers. The judges routinely criticized his performances and seemed to lose patience with fans voting to keep him around over more qualified contestants. His time on the show may be remembered mostly for the jet engine loud lime green shirt that he wore during the season premiere in September. "He's as stiff and two dimensional as a sheet of cardboard, with feet that move as if stuck in slabs of cement and arms that look like they're still gripping the lectern," Gia Kourlas, the dance critic for The New York Times, wrote last week. After a night that included an Argentine tango to "Bills, Bills, Bills" by Destiny's Child and a foxtrot to "Story of My Life" by One Direction, Mr. Spicer's time came to an end. He was among the bottom two contestants in votes from viewers, and the judges sent him home. "I really thank you," said Bruno Tonioli, one of the judges. "You've been such a good sport, you've been really entertaining." Mr. Spicer told People magazine that he was both "relieved in a way" and "somewhat disappointed." He also thanked his fans and Mr. Trump, saying that the president's support "means a lot." In August 2016, the swimmer Ryan Lochte set off a controversy after he reported being robbed at gunpoint during the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, only for his story to turn out to be fake. Mr. Lochte apologized and lost the support of several of his sponsors. He was also suspended for 10 months from domestic and international swimming competition. "I've been in the media for the wrong reasons," Mr. Lochte said during the preamble to his first appearance on "Dancing With the Stars," which aired in mid September. "This is my second chance and I don't want to blow it." Then he performed the foxtrot with Cheryl Burke to "Call Me Irresponsible," wearing perhaps the most clothing he had ever worn in competition. As the judges were handing out their verdicts, protesters shouted "Liar!" and at least one rushed the stage. Mr. Lochte was not physically harmed, but the swimmer said his feelings were "a little hurt." In the eighth week of the show, after rumba ing, cha cha ing and quickstepping, Mr. Lochte was given the boot, despite receiving that night's highest score. The former House majority leader Tom DeLay, who resigned from Congress after being indicted on charges of money laundering and violating campaign finance laws, became the show's first professional politician (if you don't count the former Cincinnati mayor turned talk show host Jerry Springer). The show's executive producer at the time, Conrad Green, said Mr. DeLay did not require convincing to join the show in 2009. "Within 10 minutes, we were done," Mr. Green said. Mr. DeLay said he was worried about "embarrassing" himself. Nevertheless, he donned a brown suit trimmed with sequins, lip synced to "Wild Thing" and slid across the stage on his knees. One judge, Mr. Tonioli, said Mr. DeLay was "crazier than Sarah Palin." "I got bigger critics than those judges," Mr. DeLay quipped. In their prime time cha cha, Ms. Grinenko ripped the bow tie from the neck of his white dress shirt at the beginning of the act (Mr. Carlson has not been spotted with one since), but the judges said that was the best part of the performance. "What an awful mess," Mr. Tonioli said. "It looked like you were sitting on a toilet." Mr. Carlson was the first contestant to go. About seven years later, Mr. Carlson told Slate that the show "allows celebrities to say, 'I understand I've been knocked off my perch.'" The show's producers "are able to ensure that you may look slightly silly, but you'll never really humiliate yourself," he added. "It's a Nerf environment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Alexandra Elizabeth Utsey and Christopher Edward Jones were married April 8 at the French Huguenot Church in Charleston, S.C. The Rev. Wendell Thomas Guerry, an associate pastor at the church, performed the ceremony. The bride, who is 30 and will be taking her husband's name, is an Asia Pacific adviser in the office of the defense secretary in Arlington, Va. She graduated summa cum laude from Washington and Lee University, and received a master's in public affairs from Princeton. She is the daughter of Pamela Wannamaker Utsey and Robert L. Utsey Jr. of Orangeburg, S.C. The bride's father owns a financial advisory firm in Orangeburg that bears his name. The groom, also 30, works in Washington as the legislative director for Representative Rick Crawford, Republican of Arkansas. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and received a law degree from George Mason University. He is a son of Ann Arey Jones and Edward Lee Jones III of Danville, Va. The groom's mother is an independent manufacturer's representative specializing in women's resort apparel, based in Danville. His father is the director of communications and public relations for Salem Academy and College in Winston Salem, N.C. Ms. Utsey and Mr. Jones met in January 2010 at a bar in Georgetown, shortly after interviewing for the same staff job in Congress; it went to the groom. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Although using a smartphone while driving is illegal in many states, a California court ruled on Thursday that using a phone's map function behind the wheel was legal. But texting while driving is still against the law in California and 40 other states. (The Wire) Bob King, president of the United Auto Workers, said this week that the union would continue trying to organize workers at the Tesla Motors plant in Fremont, Calif. Mr. King said he had met with Elon R. Musk, chief executive of Tesla, but did not say when or whether he had made any headway at the meeting. Tesla workers currently do not have union representation. (The San Francisco Chronicle) IHS Automotive, a research firm, predicts that annual automotive sales around the world will peak at 100 million vehicles over the next decade. This phenomenon, which IHS calls "Peak Car," does not conform with plans by automakers to expand annual global production from last year's 82 million to more than 120 million over the next two years. The IHS model points out that extreme gridlock in modern megacities could cause consumers to reconsider using cars as a primary mode of transportation. (Bloomberg) A turn signal designed to blink three times and shut off automatically is at the center of a lawsuit between Ford Motor and the engineer who designed it, Richard Poziani. He is suing Ford in federal court for patent infringement on the design, which is used in the Ford Taurus, Fusion, Edge and F Series pickup trucks. (Automotive News) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times Credit... 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times Edward Dolman, chief executive of Phillips, in front of a series of screen prints of Andy Warhol's "Flowers" (1970). Under his leadership, the auction house is on track to reach its target of 1 billion a year in sales. Yes, he's the chief executive of Phillips auction house, which is often mentioned as an afterthought in light of the heavyweights Christie's and Sotheby's; it rarely achieves the jaw dropping prices that make headlines. But Mr. Dolman, 58, doesn't have anything to prove, partly because he has already led one of the two big houses: He was chief executive of Christie's for 11 years, until 2010. "I feel blessed to have been released from the pressure of these high profile sales at auction that are so full of risk and so damaging to the shareholder value if they go wrong," Mr. Dolman, who is British, said in a recent interview in his Park Avenue office. "I'm very pleased with the progress." Indeed, after four years with Mr. Dolman at the helm, Phillips's total auction and private sales are on track to reach 1 billion this year, a target he set when he started. Phillips's watch business has managed to capture 45 percent of the market since it was established less than three years ago. And Phillips recently opened an office in Hong Kong, responding to the growth of collecting in Asia. Given Phillips's lower prices, it is unclear whether Mr. Dolman will be able to continue to afford and retain high end talent without gaining more of the big ticket contemporary art market. Mr. Dolman's peers in the field attribute much of his recent success to the executives he has attracted, who include Christie's alumni like Jean Paul Engelen and Robert Manley, and the former Sotheby's experts Cheyenne Westphal, Scott Nussbaum and Jonathan Crockett. "His credibility was a game changer," said Brett Gorvy, a dealer and former Christie's executive. "It gave him the platform to be able to get the people who now work for Phillips. Without his presence there, they wouldn't have the team they have they came basically for Ed." "She was able to use her authority and credibility in the market to bring some of the biggest clients in to believe in her vision," Mr. Dolman said, "to believe in those works of art." Having come to Phillips from Sotheby's last year and been named chairwoman Ms. Westphal said that Mr. Dolman was the "deciding factor" in her career move and that he had led Phillips on a rapid upward climb. "When I was at Sotheby's, we did not take Phillips seriously," she said. "But that is changing. "We've brought the quality of the auctions up season by season," she added, mentioning, for example, the Basquiat Foundation's decision to sell "Flexible," a 1984 painting on wood, with Phillips last May. (It went for 45 million.) "We're building our reputation very quickly, and it feels like we are genuinely a viable third option for a lot of people." Rather than try to go after the biggest trophy works where supply is thin Phillips has instead focused on lots priced from 5 million to 10 million, and puts muscle behind even lower end pieces that might otherwise end up in a day sale at one of the two big houses. "We can give much them a much higher profile than anybody else," Mr. Dolman said. In the London day sales this month, Phillips earned a total of 15 million, compared with Sotheby's 18 million and Christie's 27 million. "If you'd have told me we'd be as close to them in day sales it's mind boggling," Mr. Dolman said, adding that the day sale material is the great "sweet spot of the market" because the margins are still reasonable and there is a big depth in collecting, meaning ample buyers. He said he took pride in the fact that Phillips was now "involved in many more conversations about works of art for sale." "We want to compete and we want to do good deals; we want to do better deals if we can than Christie's or Sotheby's," he said. "We are definitely engaging in the conversation." He mentioned as an example Phillips's 57.8 million sale of Picasso's "La Dormeuse" last March. "But we are not going to do crazy." "Sometimes the risk in these high profile sales is absurd beyond absurd," he added. "No rational person would want to do it it's mad." Mr. Dolman can also rely on the security of Phillips's owner, the Russian luxury goods company Mercury Group, which has been known to bid on works of art at its own auction house sometimes rescuing lots that might not have otherwise found buyers. (Mr. Dolman said that Leonid Friedland, one of Mercury's owners, "is a collector, and he does, as any third party, back some of our deals.") | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Palantir's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Its flagship software technology, Gotham, was built with an eye toward use inside the C.I.A. About a month before he became president, Donald J. Trump met with the leaders of the country's top technology companies at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The meeting included the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other household names like Tesla and Oracle. And then there was Alex Karp, chief executive of a company, called Palantir Technologies, that few outside Silicon Valley and government circles had heard of. Palantir, the only privately held company represented in the room, had become a major player among government contractors. And, indicative of its growing prominence, one of its founders, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, had supported Mr. Trump during the 2016 election and had helped set up the meeting. Now, as Palantir prepares to go public in what could be the largest stock market listing of a tech start up since Uber last year, many are wondering: What exactly does this influential but little known company do? Offering software and, crucially, teams of engineers that customize the software Palantir helps organizations make sense of vast amounts of data. It helps gather information from various sources like internet traffic and cellphone records and analyzes that information. It puts those disparate pieces together into something that makes sense to its users, like a visual display. But it can take plenty of engineers and plenty of time to make Palantir's technology work the way customers need it to. And that mix of technology and human muscle may lead to some confusion on Wall Street about how to value the company. Is Palantir a software company, which is traditionally a very profitable business, or is it a less profitable consulting firm? Or is it both? "For investors, it is a bit of a Rubik's Cube," said Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. Palantir, which was founded in 2003, has long described its technology as ideal for tracking terrorists, often embracing an unconfirmed rumor that it helped locate Osama bin Laden. The name Palantir is a nod to spherical objects used in the "Lord of the Rings" books to see other parts of fictional Middle earth. Palantir's technologies can also help track the spread of the coronavirus, as it is now doing for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And they can help find undocumented immigrants, which is how Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under orders from the White House, is using these technologies, according to recently released federal documents. The company is deeply wedded to its work inside the government. Though some Palantir employees have protested its work with ICE and other parts of the government, it has not backed off. In a letter to potential investors, included in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, Mr. Karp pointedly jabbed at fellow Silicon Valley companies and said he was proud of Palantir's work with federal agencies. "Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments," he wrote. He added that "software projects with our nation's defense and intelligence agencies, whose missions are to keep us safe, have become controversial, while companies built on advertising dollars are commonplace." In recent years, Palantir has tried to expand its work in the private sector, serving big name businesses like JPMorgan Chase, Airbus and Ferrari and offering new software tools that businesses can use on their own. A little more than half of Palantir's revenue comes from commercial businesses, according to the S.E.C. filing. The 2,500 employee company holds about a 3 percent share of what has become a 25 billion "data analytics" market, according to PitchBook, a firm that tracks the performance of private companies. "That is a small but significant share," said a PitchBook analyst, Brendan Burke. Palantir has raised more than 3 billion in funding and is valued by private market investors at 20 billion, but it has not turned a profit since it was founded in 2003. In 2019, Palantir's revenues topped 742.5 million, a nearly 25 percent increase over the previous year. But it lost more than 579 million, about the same as it lost in 2018, according to the financial documents made public on Tuesday. The company recently announced that it was moving its headquarters to Denver, which could cut expenses. A Palantir spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Though the company has won an impressive array of federal contracts in the last four years, it landed at least 741 million in guaranteed money and potentially as much as 2.9 billion, according to the documents it has also stoked controversy among competitors and federal employees. In 2016, the company sued the Army over the procurement process for a new version of an intelligence analysis system, claiming the process was unlawful and wasteful. Palantir ended up winning the contract, which accounts for 1.7 billion of the 2.9 billion in potential federal contract money it has won since 2016. In April, an anonymous government official sent a lengthy memo to Joseph D. Kernan, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, describing the inner workings of a flagship Pentagon operation, Project Maven. An effort to remake American military technology through artificial intelligence, Project Maven has drawn on the expertise of more than 20 American companies, including Palantir. The project points to how Palantir works with customers. It often deploys specialists, called "forward deployed engineers," who spend weeks, months or years customizing and expanding its software for the task at hand. The company builds whatever data software that needs building databases and software connections and on screen visual displays that help people get their work done. The details of Palantir projects can vary. It usually connects different sources of data and provides a way for everyday employees to search through it. But in Project Maven, it is offering tools that help seasoned, artificial intelligence specialists build complex mathematical systems, called deep neural networks, that can recognize objects in images. Inside Project Maven, Palantir provides software that holds enormous amounts of video footage captured by flying drones operated by the Army and the Air Force. A.I. specialists then use this software to build systems that can automatically identify buildings, vehicles and people in the footage. The memo, obtained by The New York Times, said that although Palantir had come late to Maven, the company had grown to "touch almost every aspect" of the project through contracts worth about 40 million a year. The document accused Maven leadership of skirting Pentagon rules and ethics in giving preferential treatment to the start up, whose employees had developed unusually close relationships with their partners inside the military. The memo and related emails showed the company's considerable influence inside the government. Among other complaints, the memo to Mr. Kernan claimed that a Palantir employee had sat in on a meeting where government officials some of whom did not know the Palantir employee was in the room discussed future contracts and their dollar amounts, which could give the company an "astounding" advantage when bidding for new work. After the memo, the Defense Department began a formal inquiry into Project Maven, according to two people familiar with the matter, who were not allowed to speak about it publicly. The outcome is not yet known. A Defense Department spokesman for Project Maven declined to comment. VMware Pivotal Labs, a division of Dell, has adopted a similar model to Palantir's, saying it helps customers produce software that actually does what it is supposed to do. This unusual business model has led to complaints, including in the memo to Mr. Kernan, that Palantir locks customers into its technology. Though the company is in ways building custom software, that software is still owned by Palantir because it is sold under a commercial software license. That means Palantir can sell that customized software to other clients. All this hangs over the company as it prepares to go public. If Palantir stumbles, many competitors are poised to build similar technology for the government, including traditional government contractors like Oracle as well as Amazon, Microsoft and a growing number of other tech companies. "There has been an assumption that Palantir is the only major player in this space," said Jack Poulson, executive director of Tech Inquiry, which tracks the government work of tech companies. "But it is clear that is not the case." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A movie theater in Bronxville, N.Y. "Yesterday" was the sleeper hit of the summer, costing about 26 million to make and collecting 135 million worldwide. LOS ANGELES This was supposed to be the summer when Hollywood blew the doors off theaters. Stay home and stream? Not with Simba, Spider Man, John Wick, Snowball, Buzz Lightyear, Aladdin, the X Men and Godzilla on the way. Instead, the film business finds itself lagging last year's surge and facing questions about why. Some box office analysts point to 20th Century Fox, which imploded in Rupert Murdoch's handoff to Disney and delivered three bombs in a row. Others say moviegoing has become too expensive concessions, tickets, babysitters especially given the growing array of low priced at home entertainment options that are often already part of a household's budget. Or is something bigger going on? "It is another sign that the broader economy is in a fragile place," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, noting that some other leisure businesses Disney theme parks, Major League Baseball games also had a soft summer. From the first weekend in May to Labor Day, a period that can account for as much as 40 percent of annual movie ticket sales, box office revenue in the United States and Canada is expected to total about 4.32 billion, a 2 percent decline from the same period last year, according to Comscore. For the year, revenue from ticket sales is down 6.3 percent, which roughly translates to a 5 percent decline in attendance. That is despite the runaway success of "Avengers: Endgame," the Disney Marvel superhero movie that arrived in late April and collected a record breaking 2.8 billion worldwide, nearly 860 million of that in North America. The specialty box office has been in particularly rough shape. Between January and Aug. 25, combined ticket sales for the 20 largest art film distributors (Fox Searchlight, Magnolia and the like) fell 45 percent from the same period last year, according to Box Office Mojo data. The movie business ebbs and flows depending on factors that vary from reviews to the weather. Ticket sales soared 15 percent last summer in part because of pent up demand; the "Incredibles" series from Pixar returned after a 14 year hiatus, and "Crazy Rich Asians" was the first studio movie in 25 years to tell a contemporary Asian story. The art house sector is extra dependent on quality, and distributors say gems have been in short supply lately, in part because Netflix has snapped up so many of them (for premium prices). But box office experts say the theatrical landscape has shifted, possibly permanently. Before it drowned in red ink, MoviePass, the cut rate ticket subscription service, trained fans (especially younger ones) to expect deep discounts. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have also proliferated, offering huge catalogs of movies and shows for a comparatively low price. At this point, many living rooms are equipped with large flat screen televisions. Netflix charges 13 a month for its standard plan. Disney Plus, a service dedicated to everything Disney, Pixar, "Star Wars," National Geographic and Marvel, will arrive in homes on Nov. 12 and cost 7 a month. For a comparison, standard movie tickets cost 16 to 18 in New York and Los Angeles; IMAX screenings run about 22. "Pricing was never an impediment to going to the movies, and it is now," said Chris Aronson, a former distribution chief for 20th Century Fox who now runs his own consultancy. "Streaming services have come along with such attractively priced entertainment that theaters can't compete, except on a handful of event movies that people absolutely must see." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Out of home entertainment had a down summer in general. Attendance at Major League Baseball games is expected to fall for the fourth consecutive season, according to Two Circles, a sports marketing agency. Broadway attendance has declined 2.6 percent from a year earlier, according to the Broadway League. Full data was not yet available for concerts, but early numbers suggest a decline, according to statistics from Pollstar, a trade publication. "Recreation is, of course, a discretionary purchase, and that it has gone soft reflects greater caution by consumers," Mr. Zandi said. On a studio by studio basis, Hollywood's summer was severely lopsided. The top 10 movies generated 2.57 billion in domestic ticket sales, and Disney commanded 51 percent of that total with just three films: "The Lion King," "Toy Story 4" and "Aladdin." The No. 1 movie of the summer was "The Lion King," a remake that took in 523.5 million in North America and 1 billion overseas (and is still playing). Disney was humbled, however, by the performance of its newly acquired 20th Century Fox division, which delivered a hall of fame bomb: "Dark Phoenix," an X Men movie, cost an estimated 350 million to make and market and collected 252 million worldwide, roughly half of which goes to theater owners. Two other Fox movies, "Stuber" and "The Art of Racing in the Rain," also fizzled at the box office. All were well in the works before the Disney deal. Sony Pictures Entertainment accomplished a unique feat, releasing a juggernaut superhero sequel, "Spider Man: Far From Home," and a completely original blockbuster, "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood." No other studio showed that range. "We believe in balance, and you can see this exact strategy in the rest of our year," said Thomas E. Rothman, Sony's movie chief, noting the "Jumanji" sequel and an original drama, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," which stars Tom Hanks as the television personality Fred Rogers. "As strong as the audience is for superheroes and sequels, we limit ourselves to serving that audience at our peril," Mr. Rothman said. "It will ultimately narrow the business. We have to think about every audience." "Sequels and remakes that do not bring something different, original and outstanding are going to lose their audience fast," said David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy. Otherwise, Universal mostly succeeded. A high stakes "Fast and Furious" spinoff, "Hobbs Shaw," has chugged away in theaters since arriving in early August, taking in roughly 700 million worldwide. Comedies, which have struggled in theaters in the streaming age, also came through for Universal, in particular the Beatles themed "Yesterday." It was the sleeper hit of the summer, costing about 26 million to make and collecting 135 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
MY older son asked for an iPhone for his bar mitzvah. My younger son, Gabriel, will be celebrating his in about a month and wants a Tempur Pedic mattress. This may not be as odd as it sounds. Gabriel has been interested in mattresses for a long time, and we bought him a new one a few years ago when he complained his old one was lumpy and he couldn't sleep. But somehow, it wasn't enough. Although to me he seems to sleep just fine, he is convinced that the perfect mattress will make his nights blissful. In this, he is not alone. Judging just by the many commercials and advertisements, there are a lot of Americans out there looking to buy a great night's sleep. Companies offer a heady array of mattresses, sleeping pills and even soothing noise machines to usher us into the land of nod. But is this a case, like losing weight, where the quick and easy (if not necessarily cheap) option is not a solution? According to James Wyatt, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Rush University Medical Center, people who have sleep problems actually need to be divided into two broad categories those who have sleep disorders and those who don't sleep enough. "There are over 70 different types of sleep disorders," Mr. Wyatt said, including problems with breathing, like sleep apnea, insomnia, sleep terrors and nightmares and sleepwalking. For those kinds of disorders, it can be helpful to go to a sleep disorders clinic and unlearn patterns and behavior that may be causing these problems, Mr. Wyatt said. What about, to go back to my original question, a new mattress? Can that help? "There's not a lot of science in the mattress area," Mr. Wyatt said. "I've treated people for insomnia for 20 years and if a patient asks me what mattress he should buy, I can't tell him. If you spend 20,000 on a mattress, it's not necessarily better than a 500 mattress." While few sleep experts will recommend a particular mattress brand, Howard Levy, an assistant professor at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, said the best mattress for people suffering from lower back pain was a mattress with a soft pillow top and a firm mattress underneath. "You want something on top that doesn't put a lot of pressure on the shoulders and sacrum," Dr. Levy said. But you don't want a mattress too soft, he added, "where your shoulders fold up like a pretzel." It's hard to test a bed in a store. After all, how many of us lie down fully clothed in front of passing strangers when we go to bed? So if you feel you need a new mattress, try one overnight. Helene A. Emsellem, a clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University and director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Md., said many hotels advertised what types of mattresses they offered. "Check in for one night," she said. "It's cheaper than investing in a mattress." "I get a lot of patients who are miserable, but fine when they travel," he said. "I tell them to check out the mattress in the hotel." There are plenty of testimonials out there from people who swear that high priced mattresses have changed their lives and maybe they have. Or maybe they need to justify the expense, which can work just as well. "I'm all for a robust placebo effect," Mr. Wyatt said. "If they convince themselves that by buying a mattress, they sleep better, fine." You don't need to invest in a whole new mattress, however. Dr. Emsellem suggested just buying a topper filled with memory or latex foam, feather or wool to put over the existing mattress. "Even for a king size bed, it's not going to bankrupt you," she said. One sleep aid I did buy years ago is a white noise machine, and I've found it invaluable. I purchased it when we lived in London and our apartment shared a wall with a noisy neighbor. The machine is straightforward it has two settings, so basically it sounds either like a quiet vacuum cleaner or a slightly noisier one. "The brain is always monitoring even while we sleep," Mr. Wyatt said. "A car alarm, a dog barking, traffic, will disrupt sleep. If that's the case, it may be a good time to make a modest investment in a noise generator. You don't need eight different sounds with a rainforest, whales and waterfalls." Is it ever a good idea to resort to a sleeping pill? "For short term insomnia, such as one to two weeks, it's perfectly appropriate to consider sleeping pills," he said. But if insomnia is going on for months, you need to look deeper, he added. All this advice is helpful for people who sleep poorly. The real problem, however, for most of us, is not that we can't sleep, but we don't. Despite tales of high powered executives who sleep only four hours a night, most adults need seven to nine hours, Dr. Emsellem said. "Clinically, we see very few who sleep eight and a half to nine, but we do see an enormous number of exhausted people who sleep six hours or less," she said. "Most of the things we can do to improve our sleep take time," she said. "But they tend to be more productive than spending a lot of money on the adventure." If sleeping more catches on, my husband, and I, for once, will be on the cutting edge of a trend. For years we sheepishly admitted and only to close family and friends that we loved sleeping. While friends were out exercising early Sunday mornings, we were snoozing away. It's now nice to know it's not that we're lazy. We're just healthy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
FRANKFURT For European carmakers, the day of reckoning may finally be at hand. The most dreadful year for car sales in more than a decade may require the industry to deal with the overstaffed, underused factories that have been undermining earnings for years. As the region's weak economies keep many European car buyers away from showrooms, analysts say the unprofitable automakers have no choice but to start closing production lines and cutting payrolls. For the weakest, like General Motors' Opel unit and PSA Peugeot Citroen, their survival may depend on it. The question is whether any of the companies can do it fast enough or at all in the face of restrictive European labor laws and stubborn political resistance to cutbacks. "I've never seen it this bad," Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of both Chrysler and the Italian automaker Fiat, said during an interview. "All the unresolved issues that have been plaguing the industry for a number of years have all come forward." Fresh evidence came Wednesday in quarterly earnings from Ford and Peugeot, which both reported huge losses and are each on track to lose more than 1 billion in Europe this year. Later in the day, the ratings agencies Fitch and Standard Poor's both lowered Peugeot's debt by a notch, placing it deeper into "junk" territory. Huge overcapacity, some auto executives say, has spawned a crisis similar to the one the U.S. industry barely survived just a few years ago. In fact, the downturn in Europe threatens the remarkably rapid recoveries that Ford and General Motors were able to make after Detroit's moment of truth in 2009. Underused plants are ruinous for car companies, which must continue to pay upkeep costs and make payroll even as revenue plunges. By some estimates, the European industry as a whole is operating at only about 60 percent to 65 percent of capacity. As a general rule, plants must operate at about 75 percent or 80 percent to be profitable, analysts say. The figures may be much worse for some factories, including Fiat plants in Italy, analysts said. At the same time, German luxury carmakers like BMW and Mercedes continue to thrive and are operating at or near capacity. Few business undertakings are more tortuous than closing a European car factory. Peugeot braved howls from unions and the new Socialist government of Francois Hollande this month when it said that it would close a plant in Aulnay, outside Paris, in hopes of stemming losses that reached EUR819 million, or 993 million, in the first half of this year. But such measures add to the cost at a time when Peugeot is hemorrhaging money. And the compromises have not prevented political leaders from pushing the company to scale back plans to cut a total of 8,000 jobs in France, or dissuaded workers from protesting outside the company's Paris headquarters on Wednesday. Even after four years of catastrophic sales, only a few of Europe's 100 or so auto plants have shut down. The closures include an Opel factory in Antwerp and a Fiat plant in Sicily. "It's a question of who has the stomach for the fight," said Tim Urquhart, an analyst at IHS Automotive. But with the European car industry on track to suffer its worst year since 1996, more closings seem unavoidable. About 12.4 million vehicles will be sold in the European Union this year, according to industry estimates. That is 3 million less than in 2007. The car industry provides one of the most vivid examples of how the euro zone debt crisis is infecting companies outside the financial industry. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. There are some disturbing parallels. In both cases, the pain falls disproportionately on Southern Europe, while Germany seems immune. Car sales actually rose slightly in Germany during the first six months of the year. They plunged more than 14 percent in France and almost 20 percent in Italy, which is in recession. In Portugal and Greece, which have both required European bailouts and are enduring severe economic downturns, car sales fell more than 40 percent through June, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association. There are also unfortunate parallels in policy makers' response to the problem. When the financial crisis caused a recession in 2009, France and other European countries spent billions of euros to bail out their car companies. But instead of using that money to ease painful downsizing of plants and payrolls, governments provided financial incentives for people to trade in older models for new ones, or subsidized worker salaries to dissuade companies from cutting jobs. That approach foreshadowed Europe's reaction to the euro crisis stopgap measures that postpone the hard decisions. But now that muddling through is no longer an option, European governments are financially ill equipped to respond. Mr. Marchionne, of Chrysler and Fiat, has repeatedly called for the European Commission in Brussels to step in. "What they should do is coordinate a rationalization of the industry across the producing companies," he said in an interview on Tuesday. "The ones that really have not acted on this are the French and the Germans, who have not taken out any capacity at all," he said. "Everybody should take haircuts." Mr. Marchionne and other auto executives also complain that European leaders have undermined their sales through a free trade agreement with South Korea that has allowed Hyundai and Kia to gain significant market share. In this crisis, as in the euro currency debacle, the problems lie largely outside Germany. BMW and Daimler remain profitable in part because they are taking market share from the other manufacturers by offering luxury at a middle class price. Daimler, based in Stuttgart, on Wednesday reported a profit of EUR1.5 billion for the second quarter. That was down from EUR1.7 billion a year earlier. But sales of its Mercedes cars rose 4 percent, with the growth coming mostly from the United States and Asia. If anything, some German carmakers have too little production capacity, an indication that the problem for some companies is inferior cars, rather than simply a declining market. Daimler said Tuesday that it would farm out some production of its newly redesigned Mercedes A Class to Valmet Automotive, a Finnish company, to meet strong demand. The A Class, a sporty compact, starts at about EUR24,000 in Germany. That is about EUR7,000 more than an entry level Ford Focus, but many buyers are willing to pay the premium for the prestige of a Mercedes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
MIDDLESBROUGH, England It is by far the largest employer in town, accounting for one out of every two jobs. Its workers are teachers, doctors, museum curators and social workers whose salaries range from PS21,000 to PS210,000 a year. The employer is the government, and the responsibility of its 17,000 employees here has been to work the levers of Britain's expansive welfare state. Now, for the first time in a generation, this public colossus is shrinking threatened by rising levels of government debt and the political bent of the Conservative Party government and many of the jobs are being cut. Throughout Britain, austerity will result in many thousands of lost public jobs, compounding the blow from reduced entitlements. But the cuts will be most keenly felt across the iron and steel belt of this country's depressed northeast, in places like Middlesbrough, which in many ways is a British version of Detroit. This faded industrial town of 134,000 long ago became dependent on government largess as factories closed, and some of the now unemployed government workers are in a state of shock. Michael Carter of Middlesbrough, 49, was laid off last November after 25 years in the public sector from his job as an accountant in Britain's mammoth National Health Service. As he exited the town's bustling unemployment office recently, he worried that the shrinking of the welfare state meant he, too, would join the swelling ranks of long term jobless. "You just have to keep looking but it's hard," he said. "There are just so few public sector jobs out there right now." And private sector employment, in Mr. Carter's view, isn't even worth mentioning, given that Britain's wobbly economy is creating few jobs, especially outside London. Many European countries and American states face similar issues, but large areas of Britain are finding the cuts especially painful. Public employment has grown persistently since the end of World War II as the infrastructure of Europe's first welfare state was put in place and grew under Conservative and Labour Party governments alike. Now plagued by one of the highest budget deficits in Europe only Greece and Ireland are expected to surpass Britain's deficit of 7.9 percent of G.D.P. this year the Conservative led government has said that many of these jobs must go and has cut spending for local governments throughout the country. According to a recent report by Reform, a right leaning research organization based in London, two thirds of the cost of Britain's substantial public services bill is to be found in its work force a six million strong army that runs the gamut from low paid midwives in country villages to higher education officials in London who are paid like corporate executives. In some cases the hand can be generous: Ian Parker, the chief executive of Middlesbrough's town council and the man responsible for managing its PS136 million budget, made PS155,644 (about 250,000) last year more than Prime Minister David Cameron. In other cases, less so: Ian Campbell is struggling to support his family of four on the PS21,000 (slightly less than 34,000) a year he is paid by the council to manage one of its parks. But, for better or for worse, starting April 1, Middlesbrough's town council which not only pays for projects that tackle ills like teenage pregnancy and chronic unemployment but also sponsors classes that teach parents how to play outdoors with their children must start telling its 7,000 employees that the jobs they once thought were for life are no longer secure. "These cuts are too deep, too soon and too savage," said Ray Mallon, the town's independent mayor, who has cultivated a national reputation by lashing out at what he calls the heartlessness of the government's austerity program one that he says in the end will simply add to the government's social burden. "Sixteen out of our 23 boroughs are already socially deprived. Now we are going to have to lose another 500 people in the coming four years, which will just increase the size of the welfare state." With his perfectly coiffed hair, slick suit and suspenders and his media savvy ways, Mr. Mallon brings a dash of razzle dazzle to the generally colorless routine of municipal life in postindustrial Middlesbrough, with its abandoned steel mills and hollowed out town center. A recent day filled with discussions of what to cut, and when, illustrated what Mr. Mallon views as the human cost of the cuts. In one meeting, a local homeless charity heavily dependent on public money told the mayor that its operations would be severely constrained with reduced funding. At another, Mr. Mallon gave an emotional farewell to the woman who had brewed tea for the council. She was accepting an offer to take early retirement. "All good things must come to an end," he said to a packed room of council workers and the tearful employee. "Some of you may want to go, some of you may not want to go but I am afraid that many of you will have to go." The British recovery has been fragile, with growth declining 0.6 percent last quarter. Mr. Mallon, the opposition Labour Party and some economists say that the cuts run the risk of plunging the economy back into recession. The Conservative led government sharply disputes that contention. It argues that a boom in government spending over the last decade produced not just a wave of overpaid local government officials but also a culture of wasteful spending that is ripe for the pruning. Indeed, for all the hue and cry, the Middlesbrough council is expected to shed not too much more than 5 percent of its work force. In particular, public scrutiny has focused on administrators at the councils who in some cases earn salaries in excess of PS200,000. According to the TaxPayers' Alliance, a public sector watchdog, the pay of Middlesbrough's chief executive, PS155,644, exceeds the average pay of PS147,000 for council heads nationwide, even though his council is one of Britain's poorest. "I agree my C.E.O.'s pay is too much," said Mr. Mallon. But he argues that in light of the savings of PS50 million that Middlesbrough must produce in the coming four years, taking a 10 percent bite out of Mr. Parker's paycheck would hardly make a difference. That may be so, but it is small comfort to Mr. Campbell, the parks worker, who has had no pay increase to speak of over the last two years even as inflation pushes above 5 percent. "I am getting hammered," said Mr. Campbell, who has two children and a wife who works as well. "All of a sudden you start to notice the small things. We used to order Indian takeaway every few weeks. Now we have stopped that." Social workers here say that even though the bulk of the job losses have not yet hit, the unease compounded by the sharp increase in the cost of living is spreading. Homelessness has already increased, as have reports of people rifling through trash bins for food. Mr. Campbell, who has never worked in the private sector, is not sure whether his position will survive the coming cuts, but he is certain of one thing: if he does lose his job, there is little hope of him getting a private sector position in the area. Some think, though, that a bit of tough love is just what Middlesbrough needs to wean it from decades of embracing public jobs and benefits. "We are very consumerist in how we see care, education all aspects of the welfare state here," said Tracey Brittain, a probation worker who also runs a volunteer organization that helps people find their way home at night after they drink too much. "It's as if we have a right to all that. What we really need is for people to take more responsibility." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The space agency announced the decision on Friday to add a small helicopter about four pounds with a fuselage the size of a softball and blades that span just over three and a half feet, tip to tip to its Mars 2020 mission, which is to launch in July 2020 and arrive at Mars the following February. "We're very excited about this and the potential it has for opening up a whole new paradigm for how to explore Mars," said David Lavery, the program executive for solar system exploration at NASA headquarters. He likened it to Sojourner, NASA's first Mars rover, which was about the size of a microwave oven and trundled around Mars in 1997. "That said, 'Hey, mobile exploration on another planet is not only possible, but adds a lot of value to how you do things,'" Mr. Lavery said. For its trip to Mars, the helicopter will be packed on the underside of the rover. After the rover lands, the helicopter will be placed on the ground. The rover will then drive 50 to 100 yards away close enough to stay in radio contact, far enough to not be endangered by any mishaps. The helicopter is to make five short flights over 30 days. The first will go up about 10 feet and hover for 30 seconds. Later flights will be more ambitious, up to 90 seconds, and cover a few hundred yards. The helicopter will carry two cameras, one looking down and one pointed ahead. Between flights, a solar panel will recharge its batteries. Flying on the red planet is not easy. The thin air at the surface of Mars is the equivalent of being 100,000 feet above Earth well beyond the limits of terrestrial helicopters although the weaker gravity helps. Two pairs of rotor blades will spin in opposite directions at nearly 50 revolutions per second. A prototype has been tested in a chamber that mimics the Martian atmosphere at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We've been able to develop it to the point that we're able to make the case that we can actually test at Mars in the Martian environment," Mr. Lavery said. The 55 million project is not part of the main Mars 2020 mission, which is to look for signs of past ancient life in the rocks of Mars. "It'll be interesting to see what it is actually capable of doing," Kenneth Farley, the mission's project scientist, said of the helicopter. After the 30 days of testing are over, the helicopter will be left behind, and the rover will move on. On future missions, a helicopter could act as a scout to help a rover navigate or even bring samples. The Mars copter is not the only such proposal NASA has considered. A candidate in NASA's New Frontiers competition would send a robotic drone to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The quadcopter would be able to perform detailed explorations of the moon's various terrains, including its seas of hydrocarbons. If NASA selects the mission over another finalist next year, it could possibly launch as soon as 2025. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
He is no match for "The Young and the Restless." But he is beating "The Bold and the Beautiful." Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary whose early tenure has prompted political fireworks and late night parodies, may be struggling to settle in behind the lectern. On the airwaves, however, he is daytime television's new big hit. Mr. Spicer's briefings, carried live by the major cable news networks, are pulling in an average of 4.3 million viewers, according to data from Nielsen. Audiences across Fox News, MSNBC and CNN grow by an average of 10 percent when Mr. Spicer comes onscreen to discuss the latest news on President Trump, statistics show. The soap opera at the White House is outscoring actual soaps like "General Hospital" and "The Bold and the Beautiful," which typically air around the same time. Mr. Spicer's ratings are on par with prime time entertainment like "MasterChef Junior" on Fox and the ABC sitcom "Dr. Ken," which draw around four million viewers each. The big ratings offer a quantifiable measure for what has become a truism in Washington: Three weeks into the Trump administration, Mr. Spicer's daily joust with reporters peppered with fiery exchanges, memorable malapropisms and some much discussed dissembling are now must see TV for the political class. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
What she's serious about, it slowly comes to seem, is her own life and how to live it. She doesn't like it when a financial adviser tells her that her investments should be "aggressive," though she listens to him, wondering "silently if I might actually be buying other people's futures." Biss may not be able to pin down capitalism, but she knows what she wants: as much of what she wants as is ethically possible. Within the theoretical murk of the middle class, clarity comes in the form of desires for more time to write, the ability to quit her mildly demeaning day job, white paint that costs 110 per gallon. Professional artists who are paid completely arbitrary but potentially significant sums to do the thing they most want to do, by entities that range from nefarious to worthy are in some ways well situated to examine the contradictions of class. In other ways, though, people "compelled" to make art (as Biss says she is) don't know much about reality at all; they are the rare, lucky individuals whose professional lives approach the ideal that my cafe tablemate had in mind. "That's all I want out of my work," Biss writes at one point, reflecting on a consensual master/slave relationship that has been in the news: "To be tied up the way I want to be tied up." "Having and Being Had" is meant to be the kind of book most authors have dreamed of: one that does not sacrifice any of the writer's egalitarian, socialist principles while nevertheless earning her a hierarchical, capitalist income, which can then let her produce more books. "I will sell a book this book to buy myself time," Biss writes near the end. "My time, already spent on writing, will pay for itself." Following this conclusion comes a section titled "Notes," which outlines Biss's goals for the book and establishes the "rules" she set for herself. These include that "every piece had to include an exchange with another person" and that her research had to arise from suggestions from friends. These rules were "an opportunity for me to think about the intersection between my social capital and my cultural capital" and an attempt to resist "the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people" that Biss elsewhere associates with the upper classes. This might be called transparency, but it seems cheap. Opposing ideas unified in a tense symbiosis double meanings, awkward reversals appear often throughout the book. The idea is that "Having and Being Had" is hip enough to critique the conditions of its own creation. But how impressive is that, really, if Biss has set the conditions of its creation precisely to critique them? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LONDON "I have power and you have none." So says Man to Woman in the opening lines of "When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other," Martin Crimp's sold out, much maligned play at the National Theater here. But does this deluded guy know who he's talking to? Woman (and, yes, that is her character's name) is portrayed by Cate Blanchett in this laboriously wordy production, which has theatergoers both queuing up for returned tickets and walking out mid play. And woe unto any Man, even one with a capital M, who thinks he can outpower Ms. Blanchett. Pinned and spread eagled in a wedding dress against an Audi's shiny black hood by Stephen Dillane as Man, it's clear that Ms. Blanchett's Woman still has the upper hand or even, as things turn out, the upper phallus. For one thing, she's Cate Blanchett, the two time Oscar winner and fearless stage star on whom I'd put my money in any Olympics of acting. But her character's ascendancy here is also a matter of her simply being Woman. That means she's capable of out imagining, out empathizing and ultimately outwitting anyone with a Y chromosome. Having been subjected to years of assumptions about her gender's weakness and subservience, she's acquired a mental and emotional agility that no patriarch could possibly rival. I caught Ms. Blanchett at the National on Friday, and her performance turned out to be the perfect curtain raiser for a weekend of watching gifted actresses in plays that explored the feminine capacity for survival. On Saturday afternoon, there was Laura Wade's "Home, I'm Darling," at the Duke of York's Theater, in which Katherine Parkinson plays a 21st century woman who has elected to live like a doting, house proud housewife of the 1950s. And that night, across the Thames at the Bridge Theater, I found Laura Linney radiating shadow streaked sunlight as the title character and sole performer in "My Name Is Lucy Barton." That's Rona Munro's crystalline adaptation of Elizabeth Strout's best selling novel about a writer's escape from a grim middle American childhood. Of the three, "Lucy Barton" is the least overtly political and, on its own terms, the most artistically satisfying. But seeing these productions back to back had me thinking about acting not only as a delicate and commanding art but also as an existential condition, in which gender is always partly a matter of performance. In it, the title character, a comely 15 year old serving girl, is pursued by her rich roue of a master, who lays siege to her maidenhood. Mr. Crimp transposes the novel's archetypes of unworldly, vulnerable woman and controlling, predatory man into a shifting, contemporary, aged up key. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter. Be warned: If you like to do full homework before seeing a play, you should look into not only Richardson's novel but such theorists of sexuality as Freud and Foucault and the latter day feminist philosophers Amia Srinivasan, Ellen Willis and Jacqueline Rose. They're all quoted in the program. If you choose to read none of the above, you will not be entirely lost watching "Tortured." You may, however, be bored, despite the simulated sex and violence that abound on stage. These acts occur in what appears to be a suburban garage (Vicki Mortimer is the set designer), wherein Man and Woman woo, imprison and abuse each other, while taking turns being on top, literally and otherwise. They are assisted in these activities by four other performers who embody different erotic fantasies (rough trade, schoolgirl on schoolgirl action, etc.). They also help Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Dillane in and out of Sussie Juhlin Wallen's costumes, which include classic maid's uniforms and men's business suits, worn by both actors, with identical black lingerie underneath. Their assorted poses are matched and mismatched by dialogue that encompasses what feels like far more than a dozen variations on archetypal gender baiting and switching. Mr. Dillane, an excellent actor who won a Tony for the 2000 Broadway revival of "The Real Thing," is the less mutable of the two and by the end seems understandably depleted. But what a piece of work is Ms. Blanchett. Her Woman and her Man, too are evoked via a head spinning range of vocal ranges and personae, picked up and discarded as effortlessly as if they were Kleenexes. She's so convincing in each fleeting identity that you do indeed start to realize how much of what has traditionally been regarded as manly or womanly is, well, just acting. (Blanchett fans might recall her working in a similar vein as Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There.") Judy, the heroine of the ingeniously titled "Home, I'm Darling," would no doubt be appalled by such shenanigans. Though this former business executive turned industrious housewife (Ms. Parkinson, looking like a cross between Lucille Ball and Maya Rudolph) is a resident of 21st century Britain, she and her husband, Johnny (Richard Harrington), pretend they're living in the supposedly brighter and simpler world of the 1950s. Anna Fleischle's set and costumes are a retro stylist's delight. And much of the fun of the show, snappily directed by Tamara Harvey, comes from seeing how Judy and Johnny are liberated and, ultimately, imprisoned by these period accouterments. Ms. Wade, best known for the boy's club eviscerating play "Posh," knows her craft. She turns her "Home" inside out with a plot borrowed from Ibsen's "A Doll's House," refracted through the gaze of a woman who actually wants to be a doll. This reworked story is ultimately stretched too thin to sustain much tension. But Ms. Parkinson (of AMC's "Humans" and a fabulous Masha in the Royal Court "Seagull" in 2007) inflects Judy's willful domestic blissfulness with a subconscious note of squeaky dissonance. The way Judy walks (and dances and cleans house) with heavy tread in high heels is one of the best arguments ever made for the absurdity of such footwear. "Lucy Barton," a 100 minute monologue directed with penetrating calm by Richard Eyre, is about a different kind of search for selfhood. Lucy, a fiction writer, remembers being bed bound in a hospital in New York City, where she is visited by her mother, whom she hadn't seen in many years. (Tellingly, her husband, with whom she has two young daughters, is afraid of hospitals, and is seldom there.) The encounter inspires recollections of a dirt poor, love starved childhood in rural Illinois, where Lucy experienced abuse that almost resists description. One of the most unaffected and transparent of contemporary actresses, Ms. Linney is the perfect conduit for Ms. Strout's lucid, direct prose. As she assumes both parts in Lucy's dialogue with her austere, judgmental mother, you may at first feel like you're eavesdropping on a rather mundane conversation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
First impressions might suggest otherwise. But Lucas Hnath's "Dana H.," a one woman drama that explodes expectations at every turn, is one of the richest, most complete works of theater to come along in many seasons. And by its end, you realize that its singular power could be achieved only in real time, on a stage, with a live audience as its witness. Watching the early moments of this production, which opened on Tuesday night at the Vineyard Theater, you may wonder, a bit impatiently, why its account of a violent kidnapping is being told in the way it is. "Dana H" is not a conventionally scripted or acted drama. It is, or at first appears to be, a rather basic documentary work, which consists almost entirely of a recorded interview with the title character. (In some ways, it is a perfect companion piece to the uncanny documentary play "Is This A Room," recently staged at the Vineyard.) The subject is Dana Higginbotham, a Florida hospice chaplain and the playwright's mother who was held hostage for five months by a psychotic client, and who is indeed telling her own story. But while it is Higginbotham's voice we hear, she is not the woman who appears onstage. We see instead the wonderful actress Deirdre O'Connell, who mouths, with near perfect specificity, what is said on the recording. It is, in other words, a deliberately limited performance, stripped of a whole layer of interpretation that O'Connell might bring to the part if she were allowed to speak it herself. Yet that implicit distance between performer and character winds up bringing us closer to both. As directed with virtuosic pace and shading by Les Waters, this first person account of a season in hell becomes an ever deepening exercise in concentrated listening and a journey into an empathy so intimate that it melts the boundaries of your own sense of a solid self. At the center of "Dana H.," a coproduction of Vineyard, Center Theater Group and the Goodman Theater, is a tale about an unspeakable violation of autonomous self, one so upsetting it perhaps can be approached only by the staggered degrees that give this work its form. Higginbotham says in the recording that this is the first time she has ever talked this explicitly about what happened to her during those five months in 1998. "I can't be who I am with people," she says. "I can't tell people about this." She had certainly never spoken about it in such terms to her son, Hnath, a dramatist of quicksilver intellect and probing compassion who was a college student in New York at the time of his mother's abduction. Hnath, whose earlier works include "A Doll's House, Part 2" and "Hillary and Clinton," did not conduct the interviews that make up "Dana H." The other voice we hear in the recording belongs to Hnath's friend, the writer and director Steve Cosson, who conducted the sessions nearly two decades after the events took place. Those sessions occurred over several days and have been pieced together into a production that is said to last 75 minutes, though what you experience eludes any usual measurement of time. No one here is pretending that what occurs onstage is a facsimile of the interviews. The tapes include the distortions of a do it yourself recording project, with its prickly static and wandering amplification. (Mikhail Fiksel did the crucial sound design.) We periodically hear metallic beeps, to indicate editing and elisions. Supertitles are projected, dividing the show into self contained segments ("A Patient Named Jim," "The Next Five Months," "The Bridge"). Well, sort of, since what is being discussed here renders all dividing lines arbitrary and inadequate. And of course from the beginning, we know that O'Connell is not Higginbotham. We watch the actress being fitted with the earpieces that will pour her character's voice into her head, allowing her to concentrate fully on the arduous task of precisely lip syncing every word she hears. We are thus deliberately made aware of the conscious exertion required for this process. But there's a point, maybe five or ten minutes into the show, in which O'Connell's effort to become another person melt into Higginbotham's struggle to describe a chapter in her life that still feels, in many ways, beyond imagining. (She occasionally consults a well worn manuscript she has written, like a talisman that might bring order to chaos.) As Higginbotham's voice stumbles, stutters and trails into silence while O'Connell's face subtly registers the ache and exasperation of words failing their speaker a part of us can't help leaning in, silently and forcefully willing her to continue. What follows may be deeply upsetting to hear, but there's a sense that it has to be given voice. It says much about this show's power that I have had to rise from my desk and pace before even trying to summarize the events at the heart of "Dana H." The play's catalyst is Jim, a former convict and member of the Aryan Brotherhood, whom Higginbotham mentored at a psychiatric ward after he tried to kill himself. He became increasingly reliant on her. And one night, when she wouldn't open the door of her Florida house to him, he broke in through the bathroom window. He hit her with the home alarm system he had ripped off the wall, knocking her unconscious. "That was the beginning of the end," Higginbotham says. "That was the beginning of the next five months." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... a Half Hour, and I Want a Tween Show 'Diary of a Future President' When to watch: Starting Friday, on Disney Plus. This wholesome coming of age story is told mostly in flashback; a few decades from now, the American president (Gina Rodriguez) rediscovers her childhood diary, and whoosh! we're seeing her as a 12 year old in the present day, navigating the political minefield of middle school. Tess Romero stars as the young Elena, neither a queen bee nor a social outcast; she's a thoughtful kid, but unlike, say, "The Politician," this isn't about a shark eyed striver gunning for the Oval Office since birth. Instead, think "Girl Meets World" or "Andi Mack" or even "Blossom," with a healthy dose of "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." thrown in. If you miss "Catastrophe," watch this new stand up special from the writer and comedian Rob Delaney, which is full of feelings and filth. Delaney covers parenthood, the differences between the American and British health care systems, the dumb documentaries we all wind up watching and the apparent joys of tending to a bearded dragon. Delaney's sunny shamelessness makes even the dirtiest parts of his act feel somehow wholesome, and suddenly masturbating in rehab with two broken arms is a triumph of hearty determination, an ode to a can do spirit. ... Many Hours, and I Want a Binge Timothy Olyphant, left, and Patton Oswalt in a scene from "Justified." 'Justified' When to watch: Now, on Amazon; on Hulu starting Sunday. "Justified" has an A pilot, and the show's second season is one of my favorite seasons of TV in the last 20 years. And everything else about the series, which ran on FX from 2010 2015, is pretty darn good, too. Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan Givens, a United States marshal in Kentucky who wears a cowboy hat and does a lot of things his way. There are so many exhaustingly predictable cop shows, but "Justified" is textured, surprising and packed with fascinating performances. If you want a big drama that you can treasure without feeling terrible, watch this. Especially if you're a mega fan of "The Good Place" and want to appreciate those characters' recent enthusiasm for this show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Alfa Romeo's ever shifting plans for a return to the North American market, which it left in 1995 after decades of pitiful sales, poor reliability and strained dealer relations, form a boulevard of broken dreams. The latest blueprint for Alfa's American resurrection calls for sales of the coming 4C sports coupe, a 2014 model, to begin here in the fall. Distribution plans, dealerships and personnel have not been disclosed. Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of Alfa's parent, the Fiat Group, said recently at the Detroit auto show that customers could pre order the car starting this spring. But he did not say who would take the orders or what the car would cost. The world will get a preview of the production version of the sporty 4C in March, when the car is officially unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show. But there are no plans to present the 4C subsequently to an American audience at the New York auto show in late March, Richard Gadeselli, a Fiat spokesman, said in an e mail on Wednesday. Production of the 4C is to begin in May at a Maserati plant in Modena, Italy. The Alfa 8C Competizione, a 265,000 limited edition sports car, and the 8C Spider, a convertible version with a 240,000 price tag, were made in batches of 500 each in 2007 10 at that plant. A few dozen 8C models were sold to Americans by special order. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Wednesday publicly addressed for the first time the misuse of data belonging to 50 million users of the social network and described the steps the company would take to safeguard the information of its more than two billion monthly users. Although his statement addressing a chorus of criticism fell short of a full throated apology, Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook would contact users whose data had been harvested through a personality quiz app and passed along to the political data firm Cambridge Analytica. "We have a responsibility to protect your data," Mr. Zuckerberg said Wednesday in a Facebook post, "and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you." Mr. Zuckerberg, 33, was trying to quell the crisis over the disclosure last weekend that Cambridge Analytica had used data that had been improperly obtained from Facebook as the firm worked on behalf of Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign. "Are there other Cambridge Analyticas out there?" Mr. Zuckerberg said later in an interview with The New York Times. He added, "Were there apps which could have gotten access to more information and potentially sold it without us knowing or done something that violated people's trust? We also need to make sure we get that under control." Mr. Zuckerberg said the company would investigate apps like the third party quiz app that had previously obtained access to "large amounts of information" from the social network. He also said the company would restrict third party developers' access. Why Leaving Facebook Doesn't Always Mean Quitting In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from over 50 million Facebook profiles was secretly scraped and mined for voter insights, many Facebook users have decided to delete their accounts but untangling yourself from a site like Facebook is not as easy as pressing "delete." If you look at the delete Facebook hashtag, people are really angry. And I think they're sort of becoming aware of the extent to which they're being watched and tracked. This feels like it's a turning point for many of the people who use Facebook and aren't happy about how their data is being used. And the more they find out, the less happy they are. I think people underestimate how hard it is to untangle ourselves from a social network like Facebook. So before you delete your Facebook account, just remember that it's not just Facebook that you'll be losing access to. It's also all of the third party apps that you use Facebook to log in to or that are connected or plugged into your Facebook account. So it's important before you make this choice to go through those apps, see which ones you still need access to, and if there are any, to switch your login from Facebook to something else. So you can still access it even after you've deleted your Facebook account. And there are just some apps that you won't have access to if you delete your Facebook account. Facebook has a lot of ways to track your activity even if you're not logged in or if you delete your account entirely, and it uses what it calls the social graph to track the activity of people across the internet beyond just Facebook.com. This accounts for everyone who uses the internet, and you don't have to have a Facebook profile to be tracked by Facebook. For example, if your friends have Facebook accounts or Facebook Messenger accounts and if they've uploaded their contacts to Facebook and if you're one of their contacts, then Facebook knows your name and your phone number and can track you. When you deactivate or delete your Facebook profile, your profile disappears and people can't see what you posted or search for you. But all of the data that you gave over to third party app developers is still out there. And those developers are not required to delete it or do anything with it. They can use it however they want. For as long as they want. There's a whole list of ways that Facebook will track you outside of Facebook.com. To do the full cleanse, you would have to actually manually block a list of URLs that they use to track you. These are the lengths you'd have to go to if you truly wanted to get off of Facebook's grid. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from over 50 million Facebook profiles was secretly scraped and mined for voter insights, many Facebook users have decided to delete their accounts but untangling yourself from a site like Facebook is not as easy as pressing "delete." "We also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he wrote in his Facebook statement. The Cambridge Analytica revelations added to the questions that have been raised about Facebook's handling of user data and security. Those questions have only intensified as the company has faced criticism over the role its platform played in Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election and the way it has been used to spread misinformation on the internet. The resulting backlash is Facebook's worst crisis since it was founded by Mr. Zuckerberg and others in 2004. The information, photos and other content that users post and their frequent engagement with the platform is crucial to the social network, and to the company's profitability. Questions about user privacy and security threaten the company's standing at a time when people are already uneasy about whether the use of technology can bring good or ill. Last Friday, after The New York Times, The Observer of London and Channel 4 in Britain told Facebook that Cambridge Analytica had not deleted all of the data it had obtained, the social network banned the political consulting firm and Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher who created the personality quiz app that was used to harvest user data. "This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday. "But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it." Facebook representatives confirmed that Cambridge Analytica representatives met with Facebook on Tuesday to discuss lifting the ban. Mr. Zuckerberg told The Times he did not rule out allowing Cambridge Analytica back, saying Facebook must first conduct a "full forensic audit of the firm" and "have full confirmation that there's no wrongdoing here." The reaction to the Cambridge Analytica disclosure has been severe. Politicians in the United States and Britain have called for Mr. Zuckerberg to explain how his company handles user data, and state attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York have begun investigating Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. A DeleteFacebook movement calling on people to close their accounts has also gathered steam. Lawmakers who have demanded that Mr. Zuckerberg testify before Congress about Facebook's relationship with Cambridge Analytica were not appeased by his statement. "You need to come to Congress and testify to this under oath," Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, tweeted in response to Mr. Zuckerberg's post. Independent researchers who have used data from Facebook said that Mr. Zuckerberg's statement did not acknowledge how the gathering of user data was fundamental to the company's operations. "He avoided the big issue, which is that for many years, Facebook was basically giving away user data like it was handing out candy," said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. "There is no question that handing out that data made Facebook the success it is as a company. This has to be recognized as part of their business model and not just a one off problem." In his statement, Mr. Zuckerberg laid out a timeline of Facebook's dealings with Cambridge Analytica. He traced the information sharing issue to 2007, when Facebook decided to become an open platform enabling people to use Facebook to log into other apps and share detailed personal information about themselves and their friends. In 2013, Mr. Kogan, the Cambridge researcher, created a personality quiz app that about 300,000 people installed, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. Because Facebook was an open platform, Mr. Kogan was able to collect data on tens of millions of friends of those users who had installed the personality quiz app. A year later, Mr. Zuckerberg said, Facebook changed its policy to limit how much data third party apps could access. "These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today," he wrote. By 2015, Mr. Kogan had shared his data and findings with Cambridge Analytica, which later used the material to single out American voters. Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook had banned Mr. Kogan's app and demanded that the researcher and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that the data had been deleted. He did not address in his post why Facebook had not already disclosed those activities to its users whose data had been harvested by Mr. Kogan and Cambridge Analytica. "Whenever there's an issue where someone's data gets passed to someone who the rules of the system shouldn't have allowed it to, that's rightfully a big issue and deserves to be a big uproar," Mr. Zuckerberg said in the interview. For Mr. Zuckerberg, the outcry over Cambridge Analytica has been personally damaging. Inside Facebook, even his staunch supporters have described a tense atmosphere. Some employees have sought to transfer to other divisions, such as the messaging app WhatsApp and the photo sharing platform Instagram, calling their work on Facebook's main product "demoralizing." Mr. Zuckerberg spent part of the past week hunkered down with a small group of engineers to discuss how to make information on Facebook's users more secure, and to potentially give them more control of their data, according to two Facebook employees who declined to be named because the proceedings were confidential. His silence on the matter has prompted mounting criticism in the past few days. Facebook held a staff meeting on Tuesday to answer questions about Cambridge Analytica and the surrounding outcry, but Mr. Zuckerberg did not appear at the event. He was scheduled to appear at a staff meeting that was set for Friday. In his interview with The Times, Mr. Zuckerberg said that the company's efforts to safeguard its platform from bad behavior which includes preparing for possible interference attempts in the 2018 midterm elections were an important part of a larger transformation at the company, which has had to adjust from its roots as a social network for college students into a powerful global information hub. "If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things I'd need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each other's elections, there's no way I thought that's what I'd be doing if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room," Mr. Zuckerberg said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Practitioners of Indian classical dance are rightly proud of the ancient heritage they embody. As devoted as they are to gurus and lineage and tradition, though, they are also artists of the present, and many of them, especially the young, long to be innovative, up to date, relevant. Whether updating is more positive or more perilous was a live question during this year's Erasing Borders Festival of Indian Dance. As in recent years, the festival's two evenings had contrasting settings. The first, on Saturday, was in the air conditioned ordinariness of the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. The second, which was also part of the free Battery Dance Festival, transpired early Monday evening in the heat and humidity of Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, against the spectacular backdrop of New York Harbor. The outdoor experience felt like sitting in an oven while someone shines a flashlight in your face, but that pain had a payoff when a glorious sunset arrived with cool, crepuscular breezes. Indoors on Saturday, the discomfort had more artistic causes. In her contemporary solo "rapture/rupture," Cynthia Ling Lee, who is Chinese American, gradually exchanged her costume, one suitable to the Kathak dance genre, for jeans and a blouse, while a recorded voice presented her outsider's discontent with Kathak in its traditional frame of the lover separated from the beloved. Technically weak, the theory addled piece came off as whiny. When the Japanese born ballerina Eriko Sugimura used the same frame to express her out of placeness, the overwrought emotions weren't as off putting, but the mix of barefoot ballet with Indian gestures (with choreography by Shreenath Muthyala) failed to yield expressive benefits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Julie Ann Nagle's "Slumber Underground: Interspecies Burrow" was inspired by a groundhog's habitat on her parents' rural property. It is one of the contemporary artworks young visitors are free to touch and explore in the show "Inside Art" at the Children's Museum of Manhattan. On a recent visit to an exhibition, I broke what is usually a museum's most immutable rule. I touched the art. No shocked guards stopped me or shooed away the many smaller patrons who were doing the same. Granted, this was the Children's Museum of Manhattan. But unlike many displays for the young, this one, "Inside Art," features work by 11 adults whose resumes include the Jewish Museum, El Museo del Barrio and the Whitney. The show lets visitors encounter art "not as a child sort of pretending to be an adult," said Leslie Bushara, the museum's deputy director of education and exhibitions, but "running around like a child." Run around they do. Joiri Minaya's "Spandex Installation 6 (Labyrinth)" invites the curious into a vibrantly printed fabric maze. "Up Around," a cluster of large cylinders suspended vertically by the duo Yeju Chat, beckons museumgoers to stand inside each tube and experience bursts of color and pattern. Adrienne Elise Tarver's "Fera Septa" is a beguiling mesh canopy resembling tropical leaves. The new exhibition expands on a museum tradition begun in 2002, when "Art Inside Out" featured the work of the artists Elizabeth Murray, Fred Wilson and William Wegman. Children played with models of that art but not the art itself. In 2018, "Art, Artists You" allowed them to work with resident artists, but not to handle the pieces in the show. "We knew this next exhibit needed to be something kids could physically engage with and aesthetically engage with," said David Rios, the museum's director of public programs and curator of "Inside Art." "I wanted to make a piece about empathy with nature," said Ms. Nagle, whose installation includes a video of the groundhog's habitat. (You even glimpse the furry critter.) Tamara Kostianovsky contributed a hands on version of one of her signature tree stump sculptures of recycled fabric. Carlos Jesus Martinez Dominguez did a graffiti mural in which kids can search for all seven variations of his name. Only two works are under glass: Leah Tinari's "Limitless," a series of portraits of extraordinary American women, from Sojourner Truth to Abby Wambach, and Roberto Visani's "Rainbow Assembly," a sculpture of laser cut acrylic that could injure little hands. (The show offers a cardboard version for visitors to assemble.) The work gets "well loved," Ms. Bushara said, which means that its creators have to live near enough to repair damage. But the museum also chose local artists so they could lead public programs. A multicultural group, they have been charged with forming a neighborhood within the museum, not just as demographers would define it, but as Mister Rogers would have, too. That means "not just artwork you can crawl through," Mr. Rios said, "but you're making art in the same space, we're having dialogue in the same space, and eventually we'll start to have performances." Borinquen Gallo's "Be(e) Sanctuary," an artificial hive built of plastic debris, is itself a neighborhood project, made with fellow Bronx residents. Visitors to "Inside Art" have stations to make their own work and can collaborate with three other artists who have studios within the space. Dionis Ortiz, who describes his work as centered on "light and how we create it," will enlist families in an installation that includes light bulbs they paint to express their identities. Nancy Saleme and Patricia Cazorla, an aunt and niece team, will work with children on "The Shape of My Food," a sculptural installation connected not only to the joy of eating but also, Ms. Cazorla said, to subjects like land use and migrants' rights. Mr. Rios wanted children to be exposed to the participating artists' philosophies and activism. For the exhibition labels, the artists "were challenged to write about their work as if they were explaining it to a 5 year old," he said. The museum added questions: "When have you felt left out?" "What do you find beautiful?" The description of Damien Davis's "Little Penny Collector," a huge, seemingly abstract wooden jigsaw puzzle, does not tell all. The label does note that the work was inspired by a 5 year old boy "who would walk around his neighborhood looking for pennies." What it does not say is that the child is George Monroe, a survivor of the brutal 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Okla., where white mobs, some with aerial bombs, murdered hundreds of black residents. Visitors encounter the work as an innocuous looking brain teaser whose cutouts evoke coins and an airplane. But if "Inside Art" serves its purpose, the show will start children on an evolving journey. "Maybe 10 years later," Mr. Davis said, "they'll see other work of mine and be tempted to dig deeper." Inside Art In an open ended run at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, 212 West 83rd Street; 212 721 1223, cmom.org. 8 More Things to Do During School Break Celebrate Black History: Rooted in Plants at the New York Botanical Garden (through March 1). This African journey begins in the Bronx, where visitors to the Everett Children's Adventure Garden can investigate the continent's plants, practice a Nigerian dyeing technique and make a botanical journal like George Washington Carver's. 718 817 8700, nybg.org Father Daughter West African Dance at the Joan Weill Center for Dance (Feb. 15, 5 6:30 p.m.). What better way to follow Valentine's Day than by dancing with Dad? Imani Faye will lead this Ailey Extension workshop, open to girls 8 and older. 212 405 9000, aileyextension.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
LONDON "Death is here, knock, knock, knock!" Monica Mason called out cheerily as two dancers circled the Royal Opera House studio here. Another dancer lay prone in the center, and Ms. Mason moved among the Royal Ballet principals, calling out counts, stretching her arms as she echoed their movements and reminding them of accents or nuances. It was late April, and Ms. Mason, who directed the Royal from 2002 to 2012, was rehearsing the final section of Kenneth MacMillan's "Song of the Earth," which the company is bringing to the David H. Koch Theater beginning Tuesday, in its first visit to New York since 2004. It's the final stop on a North American tour that includes Washington and Chicago, where the company performed Carlos Acosta's recent version of "Don Quixote." For New York, though, Kevin O'Hare, the company's artistic director, said he felt it was important to show repertory: "Both heritage and the new." The sense of heritage and tradition is strong at the Royal Ballet. Ms. Mason was one of the early interpreters of the principal female role in "Song" (created for Marcia Haydee at the Stuttgart Ballet, where the ballet had its premiere in 1965). Frederick Ashton's "The Dream," paired with "Song" on the first program in New York, is coached by Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, who danced Oberon and Titania in the ballet's original 1964 cast. Mr. O'Hare, who succeeded Ms. Mason as director, worked with both Ashton and MacMillan during his years as a dancer with the Royal's sister company, the Birmingham Royal Ballet. The new is represented by Wayne McGregor's "Infra" (2008), Liam Scarlett's "The Age of Anxiety" (2014) and a number of short pieces under the rubric of "Divertissements," including the central pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon's "Aeternum" (2013) originally planned to be seen in its entirety. (Its scenery is too large for the Koch Theater stage.) All three men are British; all are major figures on the contemporary international ballet scene. They suggest that Ninette de Valois, the founder of the Royal Ballet, was right when she insisted that the company's most valuable achievement was its choreographers. (She was moved enough by "Song of the Earth," set to Mahler, to write a poem about it.) Mr. Wheeldon, who trained at the Royal Ballet School and danced with the company before moving to the New York City Ballet at 19, is an artistic associate at the Royal Ballet and has created some of his best recent work for the company. Mr. McGregor, from a contemporary dance background, has been the company's resident choreographer since 2006; and Mr. Scarlett, who burst on to the scene at 24 with his first piece for the Royal Opera House stage, "Asphodel Meadows" (2010), has had a meteoric career. Growing up with the Royal Ballet's varied repertory created a very free environment for a young choreographer, said Mr. Wheeldon in a telephone interview last week from Amsterdam, where he was choreographing a piece for the Dutch National Ballet. "Somewhere like City Ballet, there is a singular vision, and Balanchine really dominated stylistically," he said. "At the Royal we had the classics, we grew up with the work of Ashton and MacMillan and we also had a strong focus on new work, with perhaps more influences around." In the postwar years, the Royal Ballet toured a great deal in America. Mr. Dowell, in an interview at the Royal Opera House, pointed out that the company once regarded New York as its second home, with annual or biennial visits that began in 1949, when the company (then called the Sadler's Wells Ballet) made a triumphant debut at the Metropolitan Opera House, establishing Margot Fonteyn as an international star. Now, the Royal travels far less frequently to the United States, and New York has been off the roster for more than a decade because of the cost of taking performances to the city. When Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce Theater, heard that the company was planning a tour to Washington and Chicago, she decided that the Joyce would present a New York run. "It's the biggest thing we've done," Ms. Shelton said in a telephone interview. "All in all, the costs are around 2 million. But we think it will be well worth the risk." Whether the Royal Ballet can keep a distinctive identity in an era when dancers come from all over the world, and repertory including works by Mr. Wheeldon, Mr. McGregor and Mr. Scarlett is shared by international companies, is an issue for the company. "I think since I left in 2001, the workload has doubled for the dancers," said Mr. Dowell, who directed the company from 1986 to 2001, and whose dancing became a byword for beauty of line, grace and nobility during an illustrious career that spanned a stint with American Ballet Theater from 1979 to 1981. "People are rushing from one rehearsal to the next and having to change stylistically in a dramatic way. Wayne McGregor's language is very different to Petipa, and it's in danger of being too much. I look at what they do now, and I'm amazed." Mr. Dowell added that however diverse the dancers (only three of 16 principal dancers on the current roster are British) or the repertory, he thought the company would retain "an identity of style" while original cast members were still around. "For good or bad, it's an understated style," he said. "Nothing is forced, it's not showy, there is a purity of line, I think. Those were the basic things one learned from Fred and Kenneth, how to bring things alive somehow and make everything look natural." In rehearsal, Ms. Mason peppered her corrections with humorous asides to the dancers ("I know, everything about it is agony!") as well memories of working with MacMillan. "There is an intense feeling of 'Where is he?' " Ms. Mason told the dancers, referring to the messenger of death, a central figure in "Song of the Earth." "Kenneth used to say that your face must be alive, reflect your thoughts, otherwise it's merely a position." Afterward, she said she felt the Royal Ballet still succeeded in maintaining the essential qualities of each ballet. "The works must look different," she said. "The contrast between 'The Dream' and 'Song' speaks volumes about what the Royal Ballet is." She paused, then continued: "When Kenneth died, Anthony Dowell said to me, 'Now we're going to discover what other companies feel like, without a major choreographic force to lead them.' But we have been very lucky. I can't help but think Kenneth and Fred would have been thrilled to see this new flowering." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The death on Sunday of S. I. Newhouse Jr. prompted tributes from his colleagues in the magazine industry and admirers outside of it. Here are some. 'A one off in an age of carbon copies' In statements on Sunday, many of Mr. Newhouse's employees, now executives themselves, emphasized his commitment to quality "You get what you pay for," he once told a subordinate who cut costs and his personal passion for his work. "Si Newhouse wasn't incidentally in the magazine business," David Remnick, editor in chief of The New Yorker, said. "He loved magazines, he loved everything about them from the conception of new publications to the beauty and rigor of the latest issue and that passion, that commitment to excellence, free expression and imagination, radiated in every direction." He was, said Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair, "a one off in an age of carbon copies." "With Si's passing, the big chapters in the history of magazines as written by men like Si and Henry Luce will have come to an end," Mr. Carter said. "Si's vision, and the soft manner in which he executed it, will be long remembered in these hallways and on newsstands around the world." "Wherever he led, we followed, unquestioningly, simply because he put the most incredible faith in us," Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue and artistic director at Conde Nast, said of Mr. Newhouse. "S. I. never looked at data, or statistics, but went with his instincts, and expected us to do the same. He was quick to encourage us to take risks, and effusive in his praise when they paid off." She added: "There was nothing showy about the way S. I. led, though. This humble, thoughtful, idiosyncratic man, possibly the least judgmental person I have ever known, preferred family, friends, art, movies and his beloved pugs over the flashiness of the New York media world, and his personality shaped the entire company. It might have been a huge global entity, yet one felt a deep, personal connection to it, all because of him." Cindi Leive, editor in chief of Glamour, said on Twitter that Mr. Newhouse "believed in creativity and instinct." Bob Sauerberg, president and chief executive of Conde Nast, said of the magazine industry, "Today, we lost a giant." Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. "Si embodied creativity, curiosity and a commitment to excellence unlike any other, and he will forever be remembered as the man who built the most influential media empire in the world," Mr. Sauerberg said. Mr. Sauerberg was joined by Mr. Newhouse's family in vowing to honor his legacy by continuing his work. "Si took great satisfaction in Conde Nast's business success, and he believed, as we do, that its best days lie ahead," said a statement from Mr. Newhouse's brother, Donald, a co owner of Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast; nephew Steve, an executive at Advance Publications; and cousin Jonathan, chief executive of Conde Nast International. "For Conde Nast, perhaps the best way to honor Si's memory is to sustain and advance his vision of excellence in every photograph, video, design, post and story and to continue to inspire readers and audiences around the world," the statement said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Alicia Graf Mack, an educator and former performer with Dance Theater of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, will become the director of the dance division at Juilliard, the school announced on Tuesday. She will begin in July, when Damian Woetzel, the former New York City Ballet principal, takes over as Juilliard's president. "Juilliard trains students to be dancers of the moment," Mr. Woetzel said in an interview, "and Alicia has embodied that in her own work as a dancer and as a teacher." Ms. Graf Mack, 39, has straddled the worlds of ballet and modern dance throughout her career. Under Arthur Mitchell at Dance Theater of Harlem, she performed the role of the Siren in George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son"; later, she took on Ailey's diverse repertory under Judith Jamison. But she has also made guest appearances with other companies, and danced for pop stars like Beyonce, John Legend and Alicia Keys. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Seth MacFarlane, the creator of "Family Guy," said he was "embarrassed" to work at 21st Century Fox after the Fox News host Tucker Carlson told viewers not to trust other news networks. For years, the Murdoch family has been able to maintain a separation between its Fox News network and its sprawling entertainment empire. But that corporate buffer seems to be disintegrating, with several prominent creators of hit TV shows expressing disgust in recent days with the 24 hour news channel's coverage of the Trump administration's border security policy. Steve Levitan, the creator of "Modern Family," which airs on ABC but is produced by Fox's television studio, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that he was "disgusted to work at a company that has anything whatsoever to do with FoxNews." The film director Paul Feig echoed those sentiments, writing that he had made two films for the 20th Century Fox movie studio but "cannot condone the support their news division promotes toward the immoral and abusive policies and actions taken by this current administration toward immigrant children." Those tweets came several days after Seth MacFarlane, the creator of "Family Guy," said he was "embarrassed" to work at 21st Century Fox after the Fox News host Tucker Carlson told viewers not to trust other news networks. The criticism has erupted as the future of 21st Century Fox remains in limbo. Both The Walt Disney Company and Comcast are bidding tens of billions of dollars for control of most of the entertainment assets owned by Rupert Murdoch. Fox News would not be part of either sale, and would remain under Murdoch control. But with the Fox entertainment empire on the brink of being severed from the Murdochs, there appeared to be a newfound willingness to take on Fox News, an enormously profitable arm of 21st Century Fox. The Murdoch owned company has varied offerings, ranging from its Hollywood based television and movie studios, the cable channels FX, FS1 and National Geographic, and the TV operator Star India. Whether this was a temporary show of unrest or it signaled a more prolonged period of intra company squabbling remained to be seen, but any sale of Fox's entertainment assets to either Disney or Comcast could take at least a year to be completed. In recent days, several Fox News commentators defended the zero tolerance immigration policy that has resulted in more than 2,300 children being taken from their parents after crossing the border. On Monday, Laura Ingraham, on her show "The Ingraham Angle," described the centers where the children were being held as "essentially summer camps." "Since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps, or, as The San Diego Union Tribune described them today, as looking like basically boarding schools," she said, pointing to an article about one site in Southern California. Ms. Ingraham then said that "liberals have seized on the 'separated children'" putting the term in air quotes "and turned the entire image into a political weapon, attempting to emotionally manipulate the public perception of immigration enforcement." Later in her show, Ms. Ingraham noted that there were "a lot of people very upset" about her "summer camps" comments. She then again referenced The San Diego Union Tribune article and said, "I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools." She also called for looser rules to allow Americans to adopt children from Central America. Fox News declined to comment on the outcry from entertainers, but the news network did defend Ms. Ingraham from the call for an advertiser boycott by David Hogg, a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "Fox News will never tolerate or give in to attempts to silence diverse viewpoints by agenda driven intimidation efforts," the network said in a statement. Twenty First Century Fox declined to comment. "This is one of those moments that tells you everything about our ruling class," he said. "They care far more about foreigners than about their own people." A day earlier, the conservative commentator Ann Coulter was a guest on the Fox News show "The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton," where she referred to migrant children who had been seen in widely circulated footage as "these child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now." Turning to face the camera, she asked President Trump to "not fall for it." As Mr. Hilton began to interject, Ms. Coulter described "how these kids are being coached, they're given scripts to read by liberals," citing a story published nearly seven years ago in The New Yorker magazine, which she later posted on Twitter. Mr. Hilton said in a statement that he did not endorse Ms. Coulter's comments "or anything else said by anyone other than myself." Suketu Mehta, who wrote the article in 2011 about an immigrant from Africa, said in an email that Ms. Coulter "grossly misrepresents my writing" and that his article "substantiates none of her despicable stances on Trump's child hostages." "My article illustrates the complexities of the asylum system," Mr. Mehta wrote, "and how even those with a legitimate claim to asylum are forced to create or embellish narratives that will satisfy the whims of a broken system." On Tuesday, the filmmaker Judd Apatow implored those working for Fox's entertainment companies to condemn Fox News for how it was handling the border debate. "If EVERY Fox Star and show runner said this policy was evil and protested to the Murdoch family it would make a huge difference in this national debate," he tweeted. Mr. MacFarlane weighed in soon thereafter, criticizing Mr. Carlson. Adam Scott, the star of the Fox comedy "Ghosted," said he was "disgusted by FoxNews and their support for blatant lying about state sponsored child abuse." Mr. Levitan, the "Modern Family" creator, said there were many people at the TV studio who shared his concerns with Fox News "but aren't in the position to speak out." He said he had "no problem" with The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch owned property, but added that " FoxNew's 23 hour a day support of the NRA, conspiracy theories and Trump's lies gets harder to swallow every day as I drive onto that lot to make a show about inclusion." Mr. Levitan then said he would leave Fox's TV studio; he later clarified that he would "take some time" to decide whether to stay. The brewing enmity between Fox's generally left leaning entertainment talent and Fox News could create even further fallout during what is already an uncertain time at the studio. Ryan Murphy left Fox earlier this year for a 300 million contract with Netflix, in part because of the uncertainty created by the 21st Century Fox sale. The future of the company's top executives is also in some doubt. Fox's TV studio heads, Dana Walden and Gary Newman, both have agreed to stay at the company in the short term but it is not certain whether either would continue to work at the studio under new ownership. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
For a longish stretch, fans of the Pulitzer winning playwright Paula Vogel had cause for selfish worry. Season after season in the American theater brought plays by the extraordinary talents she nurtured as a teacher, first at Brown and later at Yale Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Martyna Majok, and the list goes on. But Ms. Vogel's new work was scarce, seemingly back burnered by her devotion to younger generations. Her Broadway debut at 65 with "Indecent" is that much sweeter, then. Directed by Rebecca Taichman and opening Tuesday, April 18, at the Cort Theater, it retells the story of Sholem Asch's Yiddish classic "The God of Vengeance," which in 1923 featured the first Broadway stage kiss ever between two women. The company was indicted on an indecency charge. Ms. Vogel, who has spoken of the homophobia that met her early plays, resurrects Asch's actors in "Indecent." So consider her their avenging angel, and her own. (indecentbroadway.com) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The fashion designer Virgil Abloh is the subject of a career spanning exhibit, "Figures of Speech," that opens June 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His blue hoodie was made by his now defunct company, Pyrex Vision, and has a screen printed image of Caravaggio's "The Deposition."Credit...David Kasnic for The New York Times The fashion designer Virgil Abloh is the subject of a career spanning exhibit, "Figures of Speech," that opens June 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His blue hoodie was made by his now defunct company, Pyrex Vision, and has a screen printed image of Caravaggio's "The Deposition." CHICAGO One morning last month, still reeling from a weekend stuffed with international traveling on a private jet and a D.J. gig at Coachella, the fashion designer Virgil Abloh strode into the whirring basement workshop here at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). A team of collaborators quickly surrounded him on all sides, each with a notebook or laptop, as he investigated a metallic clothing rack with equal parts curiosity and skepticism. "I'd say this is a good start," Mr. Abloh, the artistic director of men's wear for Louis Vuitton and creator of the popular streetwear label Off White, said while surveying the custom numbered and monogrammed prototype. It was an object he had workshopped with the museum group over months: Eight racks would display clothing he'd designed over his career, and thread together the narrative for "Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech," the 38 year old designer's retrospective, which opens on June 10. Long believing his talent lies not in creating something wildly original but in altering an existing item by roughly 3 percent to make it new, Mr. Abloh felt the clothing rack needed his personal touch. "It's adjusting the world to leave my signature, and it has to be exact," he'll tell me later, explaining his precise design strategy. For now, he's spotted an item to complete the rack: a canary yellow safety manual encased in a matching metal cage. Stripping it from the wall, Mr. Abloh a trained architect, graphic designer and artisan held the cage up to the rack and rubbed his faint beard as he assessed its worth for inclusion. Lately, as he's prepared for his exhibition, Mr. Abloh has been fixated not only on documenting his life and career but also assessing where, if at all, a self described "nontraditional" artist like himself fits into the modern art museum landscape. His Milan based Off White fashion label, during the fourth quarter of 2018, trailed only Gucci as the "hottest" fashion brand, according to the Lyst Index, which converts sales and "sentiment analysis" into rankings, but he still considers himself an art world outsider. He never expected the art world to validate his practice, and in many ways he still feels museums remain noninclusive and even hostile territory for new age creators like himself, the sort who wear baby blue screen printed hoodies and orange Nike Dunks to meetings instead of black turtlenecks and small round glasses. And yet, Mr. Abloh will tell you, he's long been concerned with legacy. Museums, for all his issues with whom they choose to exalt, still exist in his mind as "the vault to record what's happened and to represent it for a lifetime." "I hope this work is revered and remembered," Mr. Abloh recalled thinking back during his teenage years, when he first began maintaining the meticulous archive of his creations that he and Michael Darling, his MCA curator, have scoured for this exhibition. It's a diverse and dense multidisciplinary collection that encompasses more than 15 years in the fields of fashion, music and all matters of design. Mr. Abloh said he senses that some in the art world might know him only from his recent work with Louis Vuitton but, specifically intent on showcasing an artistic throughline to his content namely the dissonance between what an item is traditionally labeled and the infinite possibilities of what it could be Mr. Abloh was intent on stuffing as much as possible into this show. "I need this to jell together the kid that knows every Tumblr post that I ever made to someone who doesn't even know of Off White but just knows my name keeps popping up," Mr. Abloh said. He will repeatedly tell you that there's an "air of impossibility" to his journey from Rockford, Ill., skate punk to architecture student; from fashion world self starter and associate of the rapper Kanye West to the first African American man appointed to head a French luxury fashion house. Like its creator, the show is varied in its artistic disciplines: There's jewelry and chairs and luggage and dresses and turntables and a five foot plexiglass recreation of the rapper's 2013 "Yeezus" album cover that Mr. Abloh designed while serving as Mr. West's creative director. If it's all a bit overwhelming, well, there's a low set skateboarding ramp in the galleries that doubles as a bench. Over the past three years, as Mr. Abloh prepared for the exhibition, he's come to see his formal recognition by a museum as a positive moment, not just for a self described "commercial designer" who has collaborated with Ikea and Evian water, but for art museums on the whole a mark of their cultural progress. "It's a sign that the system was out of date," Mr. Abloh said one evening at Soho House Chicago, the members' club. His archetypical fan and buyer is often derided as a "hypebeast," a stereotype of a street wear obsessed millennial male with disposable income. Mr. Abloh views this person not as a burden on his artistic credibility but rather an opportunity: If they visit the MCA for the first time to view his exhibition, that's a win for his generation. "It shows that the kids knew better than the establishment," he said. Bess Williamson, a professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said Mr. Abloh's showing at the MCA is not so much a risk as an evenhanded credibility exchange between artist and venue. "I would fit this into the idea of co branding," she offered. Mr. Abloh receives the art world's stamp of approval; the MCA gets a "cool" bump. Of course, there's also much money to be made: a custom Virgil Abloh store with exclusive merchandise will live in the MCA over the course of the exhibit. And a pop up Nike store curated and designed by Mr. Abloh is set to open on nearby Michigan Avenue. Ms. Williamson noted the inherent paradox of a museum showcasing a designer affiliated with a luxury brand like Louis Vuitton. "There's a sense of democratizing the museum by having popular work fashion, music, things that are more inviting and less intimidating for a broader audience but at the same time it's the most elite version of that," she said. One morning last month, perched on a park bench near the museum, and steps from his idling Mercedes G Wagon, Mr. Abloh admitted that he's been reassessing where his narrative intersects with that of contemporary art. "For so long I didn't see artists or designers that looked like me in spheres of high art or high fashion so I believed I couldn't do that," he said. "But now, in this moment, in a way, I've become part of the establishment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Gun control has been an important issue for The News since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and the paper, which has long identified itself as the voice of New York City's working class, has a rich history of championing particular causes. But even by tabloid standards, this was unusually pointed rhetoric. Predictably, the News was denounced on the right and celebrated on the left for the way it chose to frame the story. But whatever one made of the paper's San Bernardino covers, they demonstrated that the front page headline "the wood," in tab speak can still pack a punch, even if most readers are encountering it on their smartphones. Like popular video clips from Jimmy Fallon or John Oliver, The News's covers are finding a new set of viewers on a different platform. The art of tabloid headline writing may yet outlive the tabloid. ("How The New York Daily News Became Twitter's Tabloid," read a recent headline in New York magazine.) "As someone who's been at this in one form or another for quite a while, it's surreal to think that 99 percent of the millions of people who will look at our Page 1 on a given day will actually never hold the paper in their hands," said Mr. Rich. The news has cooperated with The News's efforts to attract notice. A vocal champion of immigrants' rights, the paper has had a field day with Mr. Trump "he makes it easy," said Mr. Rich as well as Ted Cruz, who committed the unpardonable sin of criticizing the city. The candidate's attack on Mr. Trump's "New York values" produced the headline "DROP DEAD, TED," alongside an image of the Statue of Liberty raising a middle finger to Mr. Cruz. Even Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The News's bitter tabloid rival, The New York Post, provided good fodder with his recent engagement to the former supermodel Jerry Hall. "BEAUTY AND THE BEAST," blared the next day's front page, with a photo of the couple. ("Low hanging fruit," Mr. Rich said of the Murdoch cover.) These covers can now reach more people than they ever did on the newsstand. The problem is that readers don't have to pay to see them. For all of the attention The News's recent front pages have drawn, it's unlikely that they or perhaps anything can rescue the paper from its precarious financial position. It's a familiar story. The News's circulation has been plummeting for years; it sits at about 241,000 on weekdays. It seems far fetched to imagine that the paper will ever capture enough digital advertising to offset the declining revenue from its shrinking print base. The News, which was founded nearly 100 years ago, loses millions of dollars a year. When its owner, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, tried to sell the paper early last year, interest was light. One of the small handful of prospective buyers was John A. Catsimatidis, a supermarket billionaire who spent 11 million in a long shot mayoral campaign two years ago. Six rumor soaked months after putting the paper on the market, Mr. Zuckerman took it off. The layoffs, which claimed dozens of reporters, came soon after in September. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"Most people don't know where I'm from or that I'm black when I pick up the phone," Janina Edwards said, yet much of her audiobook work has been narrating "quote unquote black books." When the actor and audiobook narrator Cary Hite learned he had been cast to read a novella for a sci fi anthology, he was ecstatic and not just because he loved the genre. Until that point, Hite, who is African American, was mainly hired to narrate urban lit, from classics like Iceberg Slim's "Pimp" to Wahida Clark's best selling "Honor Thy Thug." "I was being pigeonholed," the New York native said. He remembered wondering, "Will I ever get a shot to read something like 'Catcher in the Rye' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird'?" The sci fi project, which he landed in 2017, helped him break out. His resounding voice has since chronicled a wider range of stories, including "Spider Man: Into the Spider Verse," a children's audiobook based on the animated film. "Ultimately, the color of the person behind the microphone doesn't matter if it's not the key point of the story," she said. "It's just about telling that story well." Spurred by the advent of smartphones and digital downloads, audiobooks have been booming for years. According to the audio association, American publishers generated 940 million in audiobook sales and produced more than 44,000 titles in 2018, the most recent year for which the trade group had complete data. Before 2010, only about 100 to 200 people made a living from narrating audiobooks, Cobb said. "The books were less diverse, and the call for narrators was a bit less diverse as well." As the market has grown, so have opportunities for actors who, like Hite, are passionate about books and have the stamina to enact them. Now the need to make the field more diverse for narrators of color has become a central issue for publishers. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. But the particular demands of the job, compared with film and stage acting, make this tricky. What does representation mean when actors can only be heard and not seen? What constitutes a black, Latino or Asian voice? And to complicate matters, in most audiobooks a single narrator voices multiple characters, who may have a variety of ethnicities and accents. "It's our job as producers to be respectful and sensitive to those voices and characters," said Dan Zitt, the senior vice president of content production at Penguin Random House Audio. His team of 15 producers is on track to release more than 1,700 audiobooks this year. But finding the right voice talent isn't always easy. To cast the two lead narrators of "When Stars Are Scattered," a graphic memoir about Somali boys growing up in a refugee camp in Kenya, Zitt's team members looked beyond Los Angeles and New York, where their recording studios are. They found Somali actors in Minnesota, who recorded there while being directed remotely via Skype. Zitt also said he's been challenging the way casting decisions are being made. That includes promoting colorblind casting, especially when a story doesn't specify the main character's race. "It's not just: 'An older white man wrote this book, an older white man has to read it,'" he said. Take "The Last Human," for instance, a space opera published in March about the galactic journey of an orphaned girl, described only as a human living among aliens. To narrate this debut novel by Zack Jordan, who is white, Zitt enlisted the actor and award winning narrator Bahni Turpin, who is black. But her acting range she has a knack for children's voices and recently narrated the part of the barn spider in an audio production of "Charlotte's Web" has also landed her books with no characters of color. "I sound like someone's stereotypical idea of an educated, upper middle class, white woman from Connecticut because that's what I grew up around," LaVoy said. "There's no such thing as what a white woman from Connecticut sounds like that's not a thing. There's no such thing. But in people's minds, there are categories." Janina Edwards, an African American narrator based in Atlanta who recorded her first audiobooks in the late 1980s for the American Foundation for the Blind, said that actors with cultural ties to a book improve the listeners' experience. "If you didn't know anything about black or Southern culture, you'd probably read 'chitterlings,'" she said of the soul food dish. "It's pronounced 'chitlins.'" A Chicago native who graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Edwards said she loves narrating African American women's voices. Her resume includes titles like Jasmine Guillory's romance "The Wedding Date." But even though her accent would be hard to place "Most people don't know where I'm from or that I'm black when I pick up the phone" she has mainly been hired to narrate "quote unquote black books," she said. In Edwards's experience, traditional publishers are still very much stuck on traditional casting. And while she appreciates all the work she's received, this has also cut her off from other opportunities. "It's not even a glass ceiling, it's like a glass box that can develop around you," she said. Hellegers tries to approach each role with respect by doing research, discussing with the writer and sharpening his voice skills, he said. "It's often bad technique that leads to cultural and racial stereotypes." The field has become increasingly mindful of how narration choices can come across, he said. On professional Facebook groups, for example, narrators are often seeking advice on whether they should accept books whose main characters are from a different ethnicity than theirs, Hellegers said. "There absolutely needs to be appropriate casting for minority representation." Jayme Mattler, the director producer who cast Hite on the sci fi anthology, first met him at a recording studio in Queens, but she already knew of him because of his good reputation. "The thing about audiobooks is that it's a pretty small community," she said. Mattler then checked out some of Hite's samples. The fact that he had done urban fiction did not lead her to think he could do only that. She simply liked his work. "I didn't cast him in stories of black characters in sci fi," Mattler said. "I just cast him in a sci fi book." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
There will be no problem keeping people off the grass at English stadiums. Left, the U.S. women's soccer team. Enjoying this newsletter every week? Send it to a friend, or six, or 10, and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. All of a sudden, in the course of 72 hours or so, what had been a steady stream a postponement here, a ban on fans there, a piecemeal response to an all consuming crisis transformed into a flood. Italy suspended the Serie A season. Spain did the same with La Liga. On Thursday, a host of leagues across Europe followed suit. On Friday morning the Premier League finally decided to diverge from the stance of the British government and announce a hiatus, too. Then it was Benjamin Mendy, of Manchester City, going into self isolation; then it was Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, and the Chelsea forward Callum Hudson Odoi testing positive; then it was Leicester and Watford fearing that its players and staff members had been exposed to the virus. Soccer has held out for as long as it could, for far longer than it should. It was only, really, over those 72 hours once teams were in quarantine and players were ill that it realized it could not muddle on through. It could not carry on as normal. The sport's leadership could not keep hoping that things would all blow over, or play that trusty card it reserves for these situations: self identifying as a "distraction" in troubled times, believing in some way that grants it immunity. UEFA, on Thursday, called a video conference of all of its constituent members, as well as FIFPro, the players' union, and the body that governs all of Europe's major leagues. They will speak on Tuesday, to try to find a solution. Every option will be considered: Nothing, those familiar with the negotiations say, will be off the table. Finally, because the clubs have been doing all they can for some time. At least one Premier League team has been holding daily summits for its executives, ensuring they are aware of the latest medical and governmental advice, combing through its policies from health and safety to refunding season tickets to make sure they are robust and fair. Most have had a blanket ban on all nonessential visitors to first team areas for weeks. Some have separated their youth and women's teams from their senior sides in an effort to reduce the risk of contagion. Others have had their training facilities fully disinfected, banned travel to and from high risk areas, encouraged people to work from home whenever possible. At another Premier League club, staff members have been advised to wash their hands upon entering and leaving every single room. Medical departments have been slowly ramping up hygiene measures as the crisis deepens. But while they were doing what little they could, the clubs were also waiting for leadership. It was not for individual clubs to make broad decisions that could affect whole competitions, entire seasons. They required someone above them to take the reins. And until this week, it simply had not happened. Soccer's response to coronavirus has proved two things. One is quite how fractured the game's structure has become, how unable it is to speak with one voice, even on an issue as pressing as its role in mitigating a public health emergency. Each authority has been unable to look beyond its own responsibility, to imagine itself as part of a greater whole. That has always been the case, of course; it is what lies at the heart of the ongoing conversations about the global calendar, the endless struggle to fold the ambitions and the greed of Europe's aristocratic clubs into some broader structure. But it has been laid bare in the last few weeks just how rife the game is with self interest, how little care there is for the sport as a whole, and how vulnerable that makes everything. The crisis has revealed how reluctant organizing bodies are to inconvenience themselves and how navel gazing club officials can be, wondering whether their players will be overloaded by makeup games when there is a possibility the season itself might have to be canceled. The second is not unrelated. Nobody doubts that soccer as a sport is by its very nature a nonessential activity. It does not matter, not like guaranteeing that children have access to education or that an economy can continue functioning or that people have enough to eat. It is in the front rank of things that should be considered optional, easily sacrificed for the greater good. But that is not how soccer the business sees it. Action would certainly have been taken sooner if there were not quite so much money riding on the sport. Every available solution would seem much more feasible if there were not quite so many financial and legal factors to be considered. If broadcasters did not view soccer less as a game but more as content that has cost millions of dollars to acquire (each Premier League game broadcast in Britain cost its host domestic network 16 million), then perhaps the season could be canceled, or ended prematurely. If UEFA did not have to factor in its sponsorship deals, shifting this summer's European Championships back a year would be far simpler. If FIFA were not determined to muscle in on the riches available in the club game with its revamped, expanded Club World Cup in 2021, there would be more slack and more good will for what seems, at this point, the most obvious initial measure. And if teams were not, at heart, businesses reliant on prize money, perhaps the consequences of annulling the season would not be quite so stark. Much of the focus, naturally, would be on which teams would win each national title Liverpool, waiting three decades to be crowned champion, only to be denied when that is in its grasp but the real complications would be lower down. Who would qualify for the Champions League, and its lucrative prize pot? Who would be promoted and relegated, and how could that be organized without legal challenge? That is the problem that UEFA, and all of those bodies invited to dial in on Tuesday to try to draw up a road map out of this crisis, will try to untangle. Soccer, in the face of a pandemic that could cost hundreds of thousands of lives, clearly does not matter, not in any real sense. Postpone it, cancel it, whatever. There are more important things to think about. It is a sport, after all. But it is not only a sport; it is also a business. And that business, worryingly, may not be able to afford to stop, may not be prepared to countenance the idea that it should, no matter how close the waters are lapping at its feet, no matter how great the flood. Kylian Mbappe Should Know Better Quite what Haaland had done wrong is anybody's guess. The Norwegian striker is, of course, not exactly shy and retiring, either on the field or off it. His performances this season, suggest it is fair to say he is unlikely to be troubled during his career by a lack of confidence in his ability. But that is, ordinarily, the sort of thing his peers understand. Much of the time, they understand all too well where that sort of self belief comes from, and how necessary it is. It seemed a little low for Mbappe and the rest of P.S.G.'s players to personalize their celebrations like that, as though they were taking as much pleasure in an opponent's disappointment as their own success. Still, such things usually end just one way. Soccer has a way of exacting karmic retribution somewhere along the way. This column has noted previously its astonishment from an ocean away at the remarkable, and entirely avoidable, disconnect between U.S. Soccer and its standard bearing women's team, but even by those standards, the language of the legal filings submitted by the governing body this week as part of the ongoing equal pay dispute is quite astonishing. That is in part, of course, because of how ridiculous the whole situation is. The U.S. women's team is one of the most recognizable in the world, one of those gold standard teams that has the universal admiration if, perhaps, not always affection, as the World Cup proved last year of the sport as a whole. It is also an unquestioned success story for the sport in the United States. Why in the name of all that is good would you be so happy to alienate them? I'm especially glad that Brandon Kim got in touch, bringing up a subject that is dear to my heart. "If I have a suggestion for you, it would be to start calling 'soccer' football," he wrote. "Even as someone who grew up in the U.S., I never understood why Americans call football 'soccer.' Considering the majority of your readers are football fans, I think they would come to assume you are not talking about the N.F.L." This is normally an accusation you hear from the other side English people getting frothingly angry at an unwelcome, intrusive Americanism but it's one, I confess, I don't have much time for, unfortunately. "Soccer" is as British as it is American: We read World Soccer magazine, we watch Soccer Saturday on TV, we play Pro Evolution Soccer on our consoles. (Well, we did until we had kids.) Having done a bit of research in that area, I'd say that until the 1980s, "soccer" and "football" were basically interchangeable in Britain. It changed at some point after that, and not saying "soccer" became some sort of badge of identity, though I couldn't really tell you what, precisely, it is meant to signify. So as far as I can see, if it saves on potential confusion for even one reader, soccer is fine by me. Doug Williams, meanwhile, expresses (I think) admiration for a very modern phenomenon: the "low ticket prices, standing sections and being able to smoke and drink in the stadium, along with cheap airfares" attracting English fans to German fixtures. Dortmund, he points out, has always been especially popular. "They can do all this and still spend less than a Premier League outing." It is true, and it is also pretty damning for English soccer/football. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
These characters find reasons to carry on in the face of hardship or crisis examples that can help in our own difficult time. As endings go, the one invented by the Swedish director Lukas Moodysson for his gentle, unassuming comedy "Together" (2001) is just about perfect. It's not a spoiler to share it: Already, the members of a 1975 commune have squabbled over everything from eating meat to owning a TV and the need for wearing underwear in the kitchen. Their children, often the most mature people in the room, look on, mortified. One morning after the worst of the infighting has ended, everybody heads outside for a sloppy, impromptu soccer match under a light snowfall adults and kids, women and men, socialists and materialists. In the chaos of the game, all is forgiven. As if this scene weren't sweet enough, Moodysson adds a little ABBA, the period specific hit "SOS," using its minor key piano riff and lyrics as a counterpoint to the euphoria: "Where are those happy days? They seem so hard to find." Neither Moodysson nor his producers could predict how this climax would play for audiences during the film's American release 10 days after Sept. 11. Arriving in theaters during that terrible moment, "Together" felt like a gift, a reminder of something precious. Movies have an alchemical way of resonating with real world traumas. The better ones somehow intuit an audience's discomfort, absorbing the anxiety and replacing it with cool reserves of dignity. During the coronavirus quarantine, we can cram our viewing binge lists with distractions (I certainly have): escapist rom coms, violent Scorsese beatdowns, even a post apocalyptic nightmare or two. But thinking about Moodysson's "Together" made me yearn for tales of resilience, for characters who have been where we are or somewhere similar and made their way through a crisis, not only surviving it but arriving at a kind of grace. "Mrs. Miniver" will wreck you, incrementally, with every subtle expression of worry flicking across the face of the matriarch, Kay Miniver (Greer Garson, in one of the most psychologically acute performances of the 1940s). At the beginning of the film, Kay seems almost distracted she's got her mind on buying that fancy hat in the city, which she does. But watch how Wyler lingers on that frilly extravagance, now propped on her bedpost. With the sound of bombers getting closer every day, will there be time for hats, time for gardening contests and prizewinning roses? Will Kay be left with anything at all? Sacrifices big and small make up the film's progression to a larger sense of commonality. "Cleo From 5 to 7" (1962), the effervescent French Left Bank classic by Agnes Varda, follows a similar trajectory, even if it begins in a more lovably neurotic, self absorbed place. The glamorous title character (Corinne Marchand) a Parisian singer with a cool loft, a team of songwriters and several rambunctious kittens is consumed with foreboding, nervously awaiting the results of a cancer test. None of it helps, until magically, a shift happens. It's the first day of summer, a good listener tells her in the park. (He's also very handsome.) What begins as a distraction becomes something deeper. Varda's masterpiece is often viewed through a feminist prism, Cleo evolving out of a coquettish, male imposed persona to a more grounded conception of self. But in her awakening, we're also watching the ultimate film about coping. "Today, everything amazes me," she says, reborn, eyes shining. How we carry on is just as important as carrying on itself, maybe even more so. For surviving in style, you can't beat the impossibly suave Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), concierge of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" (2014). A dazzling breakthrough for Anderson, his most politically charged film is set at a pink hued historical crossroads: an elegant 1932 Europe of confectionary treats, secret camaraderie and poetry citing pleasures, all of it increasingly under siege from the clownish forces of fascism. (It's a Europe that's only slightly fantasized.) The core battle, however, is a defense of what Gustave, doused in cologne and charming fastidiousness, calls the "faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity." (Anderson loves the line so much, he deploys it twice.) This is a film expressly about preservation: of hospitality, manners, pride in a job well done. If "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is laced with sadness, it's because Gustave's delicate world is already disappearing before he even realizes it. Take it as a warning. It's not too soon to consider what kind of "new normal" we'd like to emerge into, post pandemic. In his scrappy "Shoplifters" (2018), informed by real life accounts of Japan's recession woes, the director Hirokazu Kore eda shows us, with shattering clarity, how quickly an abandoned child or wounded laborer can slip through the social safety net and become disposable. The movie's central clan, squatters unrelated by blood, are a makeshift family, gaming the system where they can. Existence is dicey for them. Still, the film is valuable as a window onto resourcefulness and compassion even joy, the right of every human being. ABBA wouldn't be entirely out of place: "Where are those happy days? They seem so hard to find." They'll be back, as will the movies. Let's hope they rise to the occasion. "Together" is available to rent or buy on Amazon. "Mrs. Miniver" is available to stream on Indie Flix, or rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube, among other major services. "Cleo From 5 to 7" is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" is available to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. "Shoplifters" is available to stream on Hulu or Hoopla, or to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
WASHINGTON The Food and Drug Administration halted the sale of four types of R. J. Reynolds cigarettes on Tuesday, saying the company failed to prove that they were not more harmful than products already on the market. The agency ordered retailers who sell any of the cigarettes to stop immediately and to dispose of them within 30 days or face financial penalties or criminal prosecution. Under a 2009 federal law, the F.D.A. can reject cigarettes and other tobacco products that its scientists believe pose greater public health risks than comparable products on the market, a sharp departure from previous practice, when tobacco companies could change existing products and introduce new ones at will. The four cigarettes the agency ordered removed on Tuesday Camel Crush Bold, Pall Mall Deep Set Recessed Filter, Pall Mall Deep Set Recessed Filter Menthol and Vantage Tech 13 were introduced during a grace period set up by the law that ended in 2011. R. J. Reynolds applied for so called substantial equivalence status at that time. To be considered substantially equivalent, tobacco products must be shown to have the same characteristics as a product already on the market or, if different, raise no new questions for public health. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Les Iles a Port Villez," by Claude Monet, was sold without incident at Sotheby's on Wednesday as part of a deaccessioning of art from the Brooklyn Museum's collection. Two Museums Tried to Sell Art. Only One Caught Grief About it. Two museums planned to sell works from their collections at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday night. One moved forward seamlessly, with the Brooklyn Museum reaping almost 20 million for seven works by artists including Henri Matisse, Joan Miro and Claude Monet. The other, the Baltimore Museum of Art, decided to pull its paintings by Clyfford Still and Brice Marden two hours before the heavily criticized sale after discussions with the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization advancing best practices in the field. If the disparate reactions to the two sales are a bit bewildering, welcome to the world of deaccessioning, the often byzantine process by which museums get rid of items that no longer serve their long term interests, whether by sale or donation. It's common practice for museums to sell second tier or redundant works languishing in storage rooms to generate funds for new acquisitions. But museums can run afoul of ethical standards set by the association and risk being publicly slapped with sanctions that prohibit loans from member museums when deaccessioning funds are put toward operating expenses. But the association relaxed its rules in April as it recognized the extraordinary financial pressures that the pandemic had placed on museums. It said that for two years, museums would be able to use deaccession funds not only to pay for acquisitions but also to underwrite the direct care of their collections. And, significantly, the organization offered leeway in how each institution defined such care internally. Brooklyn and Baltimore were quick to take advantage. For Brooklyn, which has laid off 7 percent of its staff since the start of the pandemic, the need was acute. Its director, Anne Pasternak, said the institution was "extremely conservative" in its selection of objects. A Carlo Mollino table, fetching 6.2 million at Sotheby's, had been considered for deaccession for decades, given the museum's stronger holdings of the artist's work. "The Monet happens to be lovely but is not one of his great works nor close to the best in our collection," Ms. Pasternak said. Likewise, the museum has been cautious in how the money would be allocated in its collection's care fund. "We didn't just say, 'Here's all the salaries for the conservators'; we estimated the time they would actually spend caring for an object," she said. Baltimore, however, had a balanced budget and no layoffs or furloughs. Rather, its director, Christopher Bedford, who in 2018 deaccessioned seven blue chip paintings to buy works by women and artists of color, seized on the opportunity to raise funds for more equity based initiatives at his museum in a city with a 68 percent Black population. With his curators and board, he designated the Still and the Marden, as well as a monumental canvas from Andy Warhol's "Last Supper" series, which together were expected to yield 65 million. The museum said the sale proceeds would be used to acquire more work by underrepresented artists and to create an endowment for collection care that would free up about 2.5 million in the budget for staff wide pay increases and other equity oriented measures. Given the deep holdings of late Warhol, works on paper by Marden and the Abstract Expressionist movement as a whole, the leadership felt they could still richly narrate those histories without the works to be deaccessioned. "This is done specifically in recognition of the protest being led by museum staff to be paid an equitable living wage to perform core work for an institution with a social justice mission," Mr. Bedford said early in October, after a summer of protests when museums across the country were addressing internal complaints of structural inequities and racism within the workplace. The museum directors' association expressed no concerns at first. "They are in line with how A.A.M.D. has defined this resolution for this period of time," its executive director, Christine Anagnos, said at the time of the announcement. But the blowback was swift from art critics, historians and museum professionals. The paintings to be sold were hardly second tier, said Arnold Lehman, a former director of both the Baltimore (1979 97) and Brooklyn (1997 2015) museums. "I'm not at all opposed to deaccessioning," Mr. Lehman said, "but Baltimore was selling masterpieces as good as you're going to get of late Warhol, as good as you're going to get of Marden and a fabulous Still." He was personally involved in acquiring the Warhol and Marden. The Still, a gift of the artist who lived in Maryland late in his life, is also the only work of his in the collection. Baltimore's current board chair, Clair Zamoiski Segal, fought back. "To suggest that the absence of these three works breaks the public trust omits the reality of the many individuals whose trust we have not yet won," she said in a statement. Prominent donors said they had rescinded pledges. "I certainly do not believe that one sells masterpieces to fund diversity," Charles Newhall III, a former chairman of the board, wrote in his resignation letter as honorary trustee on Oct. 15. "In my mind Chris Bedford is stacking the board with artists that he promotes, and the B.M.A. has bought paintings from." Two acclaimed Black artists on the board, Amy Sherald and Adam Pendleton, then stepped down, without weighing in directly on the deaccessioning imbroglio. But Ms. Sherald, who spent her formative years as a young artist in Baltimore and is best known for painting Michelle Obama's portrait, took umbrage at Mr. Newhall's assertion. "This is a high mark of audacity to assume that I was nominated only to be used as a pawn for Christopher Bedford's gain," she wrote in her public statement. In an interview this week, Mr. Eisenstein said the critics of the sale agree with promoting diversity and pay equity but are opposed to "taking what seems to be a shortcut approach to monetize the art instead of doing the more difficult work of fund raising and development." Lori Johnson, a professor of art history at Morgan State University in Baltimore, said the attitude expressed by critics just maintains the status quo. "Saying we could raise funds through traditional means is basically how we've arrived at the place we are now we still have underrepresentation and still have people waiting to have the careers they deserve," she said. "There's more at stake than these three works." Rev. Dr. Alvin C. Hathaway Sr., of the Union Baptist Church in Baltimore, said he hopes the dispute prompts a healthy conversation in America around structural impediments to equality. "Is the value in the art or is the value in the accessibility of others to have access to the art and to have their art valued as well," he posed. State officials never publicly intervened in the matter, but the association clarified its position this week in a statement from its president, Brent Benjamin. The funds for "long term needs or ambitious goals," he wrote, "must not come from the sale of deaccessioned art." Then, 14 current and former museum directors signed a letter to Baltimore's board chair asking the museum to reconsider the sale. The museum ultimately decided to "pause" its plan to sell the works after a phone call Wednesday afternoon between association leaders and Mr. Bedford and Ms. Zamoiski Segal. But Mr. Bedford made plain in an interview on Thursday that the bigger conversation is not over. "As an institution, we value the perspectives of colleagues and understand the importance of adhering to the professional guidelines that govern our field," Mr. Bedford said. "I do believe, though, that the moment has come to more deeply consider the standards by which museums operate. The turmoil we are experiencing is not simply financial; it is the result of entrenched systems that cannot sustain the moment or the future. Our communities are calling us to action, to move beyond words and symbols." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It is a little unsettling that the intellectual underpinning of tax policy in the United States today was jotted down on a napkin at the Two Continents Restaurant in Washington in December 1974. That was when, legend has it, Arthur Laffer, a young economist at the University of Chicago, deployed the sketch over dinner to convince Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, aides to President Gerald R. Ford, that raising tax rates would reduce tax revenue by hampering growth. It was another economy. The top marginal income tax rate was 70 percent then. For three decades, just over 10 percent of the nation's income had gone to the 1 percent earning the most. Economists believed Simon Kuznets' proposition that though market forces would widen inequality at early stages of growth, further economic development would ultimately lead it to narrow. The paramount policy challenge of the day was how to raise productivity. To many economists, Mr. Laffer's basic argument that high taxes would at some point discourage effort and reduce growth made sense: Why work or invest more if the government will keep almost all the fruits of your troubles? Even Arthur M. Okun, who had been President Lyndon B. Johnson's chief economic adviser, was writing about leaky buckets to illustrate a trade off between efficiency and equity: Taxing the rich to pay for programs for the poor could slow growth down, in part by reducing the incentive of the rich to earn more. It is unclear whether reality ever followed Mr. Laffer's prescription. "In 1986 we dropped the top income tax rate from 50 to 28 percent and the corporate tax rate from 46 to 34 percent," said Bruce Bartlett, a policy adviser in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. "It's hard to imagine a bigger increase in incentives than that, and I can't remember any big boost to growth." Nonetheless, tax policy today is still being driven by his decades old argument, devised in an economy that looks nothing like today's. Today, 1 percent of the population is taking in more than 20 percent of the nation's income, twice as much as when the fateful dinner took place. Today's top marginal tax rate, 39.6 percent, is a little over half what it was then. Critically, how the pie is sliced has become as important as how to raise productivity further. Indeed, the questions are intertwined. Compelling new economic research suggests that in the economy in which we live, cutting taxes on the rich further won't just fail to foster growth, it could even make the economic pie smaller. The direct case against lower taxes on the rich was made most clearly a few years ago by the French economist Thomas Piketty noted for his analysis of inequality trends over the centuries and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. Looking at a set of industrialized countries from the 1970s until the years preceding the financial crisis, the economists found no meaningful correlation between cuts in top tax rates and economic growth. Big tax cutters like the United States did not grow faster than countries like Denmark, which kept taxes high. What did respond to lower taxes was inequality: The income share of the top 1 percent grew much more sharply among big tax cutters like the United States than in countries like France or Germany, where top tax rates changed little. The findings contradicted the basic proposition on Mr. Laffer's napkin. Indeed, they suggested an entirely different dynamic: Lower taxes did encourage executives and other top earners to raise their incomes, but not in ways that benefited the entire economy, like working and investing more. Instead, they were encouraged to manipulate the system in ways that, in fact, reduced the pie for everybody else, putting every decision at the service of increasing their pay. Think about tax avoidance or outright evasion which simply hides money from the Treasury, reducing the government's ability to fund often critical programs, at no gain to the economy. But executives have been known to use other tricks say, options backdating or earnings manipulation, or simply lobbying the compensation committee of their company's board, or putting corporate strategy at the service of the current quarter's earnings to give the share price a bump. Taking into account all the ways top earners respond to taxation, Mr. Piketty and colleagues suggested that the optimal top tax rate on the Americans with the highest incomes the rate raising the most money for the government could exceed 80 percent with no harm to growth. Loopholes would have to be closed to prevent avoidance, but only the mega rich would lose out. From an economic perspective, soaking the rich would, in fact, do good. The argument that inequality matters little and redistribution mars economic success has always been suspect. In more unequal societies, the disadvantaged will have less access to many of the things that improve productivity, like education, health and the internet. Rising inequality can hamper consumption by weighing on the income of the middle class. Douglas W. Elmendorf, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and now dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, once said that to assess the macroeconomic impact of cutting taxes and spending, it is indispensable to assess which taxes are cut and what spending is affected. "Major changes to benefits for lower income people could have notable effects on the economy by altering labor supply, and those effects could be an important criterion in evaluating such changes," he argued. In more unequal societies, the rich have more power to distort policy making to channel more of the fruits of growth in their direction by, say, cutting taxes and government spending that might improve productivity and growth. Politics becomes more polarized. And it becomes more difficult to recover from economic shocks: Citizens in unequal societies are less likely to buy government promises that sacrifice today will lead to gains tomorrow. "We have not paid enough attention to macro distributional linkages," said Jonathan D. Ostry, deputy head of research at the International Monetary Fund, who has published groundbreaking research linking inequality and growth. "Even if you are only interested in the aggregate gains, you are forced to think about equity, because equity matters for the aggregate. The distribution might come back to bite you." Mr. Laffer may still be calling to cut tax rates, to provide an incentive for executives to earn even more. But tax policy today calls for a new napkin, one with a place for equity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A leading AIDS researcher and proponent of medication assisted therapy for addiction was appointed Wednesday to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alex M. Azar II, secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, announced that the agency's new director would be Dr. Robert R. Redfield, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and co founder of the Institute for Human Virology. "Dr. Redfield has dedicated his entire life to promoting public health and providing compassionate care to his patients," Mr. Azar said. "We are proud to welcome him as director of the world's premier epidemiological agency." Dr. Redfield, 66, will replace Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, who resigned in January after just six months on the job. Dr. Fitzgerald left amid criticism of her investments with her husband in tobacco and health care companies that posed potential conflicts of interest. Dr. Redfield oversees clinical care and research at the virology institute, which provides H.I.V. treatment to more than 6,000 patients in the Baltimore Washington area and more than 1 million people in Africa and the Caribbean. The institute, with an annual budget of more than 105 million, also studies other chronic viral illnesses and cancer. In his statement, Dr. Azar called Dr. Redfield's decades of science and clinical work especially in the field of H.I.V./AIDS "peerless." He added that the treatment network Dr. Redfield operates in Baltimore for patients with H.I.V. and hepatitis C would help him "hit the ground running" on a top priority, "combating the opioid epidemic." News of Dr. Redfield's appointment has revived criticisms about some of his policy stances and research practices that date back to an earlier period in the AIDS epidemic. He came under fire for advocating broad AIDS testing and the screening of military personnel for the virus. In addition, his research into a potential treatment vaccine led to allegations of data distortion and a military investigation; no evidence of misconduct was found. His record has prompted Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the health committee, to oppose his appointment, although some advocates for AIDS patients now say they support him for the job. A graduate of Georgetown University and its School of Medicine, Dr. Redfield did his residency at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, then stayed on as a researcher in the military, focusing on AIDS. In 1996, he launched the virology institute with Dr. Robert C. Gallo, who developed the blood test for H.I.V., the human immunodeficiency virus. Dr. Redfield, 66, has longstanding ties to various government agencies. He served on two advisory panels for the National Institutes of Health from 2002 to 2006, when Mr. Azar was general counsel and then deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human services. Dr. Redfield's high profile on AIDS research and policy matters has made him a perennial candidate for the C.D.C. job. He has been a small donor to Republican Party committees, giving about 2,000 in total. In 2016, the institute was awarded more than 138 million in five year grants from the C.D.C. to combat H.I.V./AIDS and other health problems in Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia. It also has a substantial portfolio of corporate sponsored research, whose underwriters have included Aventis, Gilead, Human Genome Sciences, Merck and Schering. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a Democrat and former lieutenant governor of Maryland, praised Dr. Redfield. "He has a wonderful bedside manner and is loving and devoted to his patients," said Ms. Townsend, who served on the institute's board. Terry Lierman, chairman of the institute's Board of Advisors, said Dr. Redfield's work treating H.I.V. patients who were also addicts made him a great choice for the job. "In particular, Dr. Redfield has much experience in treating addiction as a co morbidity to H.I.V. and incorporating addiction treatment into a patient's overall primary care," Mr. Lierman said. "This appointment is refreshingly not about politics, but about quality, competence and compassion.'' Medical careers run in Dr. Redfield's family. Both his parents worked at the National Institutes of Health, and two of his children are doctors. His wife, Joy, is a nurse whom he met while they were delivering babies together. As the nation's public health agency, the C.D.C. is charged with controlling disease outbreaks, ensuring the safety of food and water, and helping reduce the leading causes of death, among them heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes. The agency has a budget of more than 7.2 billion, and a staff of more than 12,000 employees working in the United States and around the world. The C.D.C. was recently in the spotlight when Mr. Azar said he believed the agency should resume research on gun violence, which it drastically cut more than 20 years ago. Dr. Redfield's views on gun violence research and other contentious issues such as access to abortion and sexual health education are not yet known. His work in AIDS research and policy has generated concern over the years, in particular for his call in the mid 1980s to late 1980s for widespread AIDS testing and screening of military recruits for H.I.V. While pushing for broader AIDS testing during routine exams as a means to contain the epidemic, Dr. Redfield also called for reducing the stigma associated with the disease. At a congressional hearing in August 1987, Dr. Redfield recommended regular testing, at doctor's appointments and hospitalizations, as well as for marriage license applicants, and incorporating the test into the practice of medicine, according to news reports. But he also said, "We have to tell people it's anti American to discriminate against people who have the AIDS virus." In the early 1990s, Dr. Redfield was the subject of a military investigation after colleagues suspected that he overstated the therapeutic effects of an experimental AIDS vaccine at presentations and in a report. The investigation led to a correction in some published data, according to documents. Several high level colleagues, however, felt the military should have been tougher on Dr. Redfield, who they felt raised false hopes about the efficacy of a treatment vaccine he was developing. At the time, Public Citizen's Health Research Group sued to gain the records, and made them public. In a 1992 letter to Col. Donald Burke, the director of the division of retrovirology, Major Craig W. Hendrix, director of the Air Force HIV program, wrote that the credibility of the military's efforts on retroviral research was at risk and under scrutiny. "Severe, painful steps must be taken less we dishonor the honest labors of so many colleagues and patients within our research consortium. We cannot continue to deceive." In an interview Tuesday, Dr. Hendrix, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, recalled the incident, which he now uses as a case study in ethics. "The facts didn't line up," Dr. Hendrix said. "I can't know if it was intentional, but I think every scientist has to be the most skeptical of their own data, and the most careful, because nobody else will have all the raw data." In the letter Senator Murray wrote to President Trump, she mentioned the Army investigation, which criticized Dr. Redfield for a faulty analysis of vaccine trial data, and premature presentation of the information. "This pattern of ethically and morally questionable behavior leads me to seriously question whether Dr. Redfield is qualified to be the federal government's chief advocate and spokesperson for public health," Senator Murray wrote. But Gregg Gonsalves, an AIDS activist and assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said he was optimistic about Dr. Redfield's appointment, noting that many people's views on AIDS and other public health issues have evolved over the years, along with the science. "We don't have to be defined by our pasts, but Dr. Redfield has to clarify where he stands now on key issues and place himself firmly in the mainstream of evidence based public health," Mr. Gonsalves said. Jesse Milan Jr., president and chief executive of AIDS United, said that Dr. Redfield called on Tuesday to convey that he would embrace the group's goals. Those include supporting needle exchanges for drug users, to prevent the spread of H.I.V. through dirty needles, and pre exposure prophylaxis, the use of an anti H.I.V. medication to prevent getting the virus. "I heard him commit to our entire H.I.V. prevention toolbox and to supporting health equity for the entire spectrum of marginalized and stigmatized people," Mr. Milan said. "If he's appointed, I can assure you we will hold him to it." Dr. Redfield did not respond to requests for comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LAST month, I upgraded my son's cellphone something he had looked forward to with breathless anticipation ever since his last cellphone drowned in a California pool over the summer. He paid 150 of his hard earned money for his choice model. But I couldn't help feeling annoyed and slightly ripped off, as the salesman asked us to pay a 35 upgrade fee, made sure we understood that we would have to put up additional money for the new phone until the rebate came through and then tried to sell us things like cases and new data plans. But I also felt that I had no other option than to pay all the costs and sign up for another two year contract. When I got home, though, I decided to investigate. And it turns out, a lot of people are checking out how they can get cellphone convenience without cellphone contracts. According to figures from Sprint about wireless use across all carriers, the number of no contract cellphone customers is expected to rise to 30 percent of the share of total wireless customers in 2015, from 18 percent in 2008. It is already about 28 percent. "People are fed up," said Logan Abbott, president of MyRatePlan.com, a comparison shopping engine primarily for cellphones. The site receives a commission when someone purchases a phone, a contract plan or a prepaid plan, but does not have exclusive deals with any providers or manufacturers to promote their products or services. No contract phones or prepaid, which is essentially the same thing have been around for quite some time, but most consumers thought they were "for people who couldn't afford a better phone or couldn't pass a credit check," said Jayne Wallace, a spokeswoman for the Sprint Prepaid Group, which was formed in 2010. Sprint owns Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile, both of which offer no contract phones. The Great Recession shook things up, though, as people started looking at where they could cut back on monthly bills and began to investigate new cellphone options. At the same time, good phones were getting cheaper. "It used to be you were stuck with a plastic flip phone," Mr. Abbott said. Now almost every major carrier offers no contract phones, as do smaller companies that specialize in them, including Straight Talk, which sells primarily through Walmart and Cricket. And customers can get a top of the line smartphone or fairly close to one with or without a contract. In addition, unlike in the past, many prepaid phones come with data plans that allow Web surfing and e mail access. And if you are unhappy with your service, you can easily move to another carrier rather than waiting up to two years, or paying as much as 350 to break your contract. So what is the downside? The main one is that you have to pay for your phone upfront, because you are not subsidizing it through a two year contract. But that doesn't mean you are paying more in the long run. A Consumer Reports article in January on cellphones compared the two year cost under various plans of an iPhone 5 with 16 gigabytes. Straight Talk came out the cheapest, even though the upfront cost for the phone, 650, was the highest. With a monthly cost of 45 for unlimited data (read further down for more on what unlimited really means), the total came to 1,730 after two years. At Verizon, the cost of the same iPhone was 200, but a similar monthly plan with a data allowance of two gigabytes was 100 a month, bringing the cost up to 2,600 for two years. AT T was even more expensive although it offered a data plan of four gigabytes at 2,840. You don't necessarily have to buy a new phone, even if you are moving from a contract to no contract. If you are still happy with your phone after your existing contract has ended, you can usually switch to a no contract plan, even if it is on another network. And various plans are available, from a monthly flat fee to a pay as you go plan, in which you keep a prepaid account and every call is debited from the account. This kind of plan is good if you don't use your phone a lot. But there are things to watch out for. If you are not buying from one of the big carriers like Verizon or T Mobile, make sure you know which network the phone you are buying operates on. Virgin Mobile, for instance, operates on the Sprint network. Is that a good option for you? And it is not always clear which phone company works from what network, so it is best to ask when considering purchasing the phone, Sascha Segan, lead analyst for PCMag Mobile, said. If it is a service none of your friends use and you have never heard of, you would be wise to be wary, he added. He also suggested reading the fine print, or at least going online to see if other consumers have had problems with a certain plan. For example, he said, "Some prepaid phones have really high international calling rates and some have really low rates unless you pay a flat monthly fee." Also, make sure you know what you are paying for. That unlimited data I referred to earlier? There have been many complaints, Mr. Segan said, that after using about two gigabytes a month (which is plenty for most people, unless you're streaming lots of videos or music or playing games all the time) Straight Talk starts throttling, or slowing down the service considerably. In a statement, Straight Talk has denied such practices, saying it cuts off users only after warnings, or those who are abusing the data system. Over all, however, Mr. Segan said, no contract phones "often look like a great deal and often are a great deal." When aren't they? If you have complicated multidevice family plans, you will almost certainly get a better deal with a two year family plan contract. It can be helpful to go on Web sites like billshrink.com, which has a tool to analyze how you use your cellphone and whether there may be a better plan at a better price. MyRatePlan.com also offers similar help. Since we have lost and waterlogged a few phones (and thanks in advance, but putting the wet phones in a bowl of uncooked rice never worked for us), I am a little worried about insurance. First of all, Michael Gikas, senior editor for Consumer Reports, said that a very small percentage of people actually lose phones, so insurance isn't that great a deal. The best idea is to keep an old phone around, so if you do need one, you have a free one ready to activate. But, since younger users, in particular, tend to play rougher with their phones, most no contract plans do offer insurance. Ms. Wallace of Sprint said that Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile offered insurance of 5 a month for a lost, stolen or damaged phone, with a deductible of 25 to 100 depending on the phone. What about customer service? Some experts, like Mr. Abbott, argue that the lack of a contract makes you more valuable as a customer since you can switch at any time and therefore should ensure better customer service. Nonetheless, there are plenty of gripes all over the blogosphere about poor customer service for many prepaid phone services. That said, the same is largely true for most wireless carriers, in general. There is no perfect option. But I feel better now, knowing that there are cellphone choices out there that don't require me to make a long term commitment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
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