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One of the most memorable sections of Dean Moss's "johnbrown," at the Kitchen, involves two reflective boards: white on one side, Mylar on the other. Mr. Moss and the dancer Kacie Chang are each responsible for one. With magicianlike swiftness, they display the boards this way and that, rotate and swivel them, roll and leap over them. Sometimes, the Mylar, as if opposing our gaze, blinds us with a sudden glare. Are they shields or weapons, these two sided props? Ms. Chang, left alone onstage, ultimately rips hers to shreds and storms away. This segment, "irregularities," is one of seven in the elegantly and rowdily episodic "johnbrown," which examines the legacies of John Brown, the 19th century white abolitionist who led an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Va. (The sections are named for articles in Brown's Provisional Constitution of 1858.) Far from re enacting history, Mr. Moss layers national narratives and personal narratives, moving bodies and moving images, haunting songs and heated conversations in ways that leave us contemplating the future by way of the past. This owes much to a cohort of teenage production assistants, five young women who, while seemingly peripheral to the six excellent performers, really aren't at all. We don't meet them until after the first section ("vacancies"), a riveting solo for Cassie Mey, who is already sitting onstage when we arrive. In utter silence, she stands up and faces the back wall, rises slowly onto releve and bourrees backward, her arms wafting behind her. Through simple, sustained, vigilant poses extending one leg to the side, drawing it back in she conjures an effect of growing and shrinking, of gaining and losing courage, as sounds of war shatter the silence. Then come the assistants, equipped with an artificial grass rug and a tiny stool, the set for "treaties of peace," in which Mr. Moss, who is black, and Julia Cumming, who is white and, at 18, about 40 years his junior recite a scene from "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Mr. Moss, seated below her, wears nothing but a leafy garland and a black thong, which is not the only time he puts himself in a compromised position. In the longest, harshest scene, as violence escalates, he is the one most brutally attacked with mirrors, miniature versions of the ones we've seen, though Asher Woodworth, the most John Brown like figure, also takes a heavy beating. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
People with fatal diseases may be willing to try risky treatments that have a chance of saving their lives. But when is the risk too high? That question was at the heart of a decision announced Thursday by the Food and Drug Administration to suspend sales of a leukemia drug, Iclusig, that was keeping patients alive but also significantly raising their odds of heart attacks, strokes, blindness, death and amputations. Despite the potential consequences, several doctors who treat people with the disease, chronic myeloid leukemia, said there were patients for whom nothing else works, and whose lives depend on the drug. "My concern is that I have patients right now who are benefiting from this medication with very few side effects, and if they're on the end of a one month prescription, what's going to happen when their medication runs out?" said Dr. Brian Druker, the director of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. "Without this medication, they won't have long to live. My patients are panicked." The drug agency has said that patients who need the drug will still be able to obtain it, but that doctors will have to file applications for each patient, a process that some say is cumbersome and might leave patients tangled up in red tape, with no pills. Dr. Michael Mauro, a leukemia specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said that 23 leukemia specialists and three patient advocacy groups had sent the drug agency a letter saying they were concerned that the sudden withdrawal of the drug would interrupt treatment for patients with no other good options. Iclusig, also called ponatinib, was approved in December 2012 to treat patients who had chronic myeloid leukemia that did not respond to other drugs. The disease is a relatively uncommon form of leukemia, with about 5,000 cases a year and 600 deaths in the United States. The wholesale price of the drug was 115,000 a year. Critics might say Iclusig's approval is a sign that accelerated approval can allow dangerous drugs on the market. But supporters of the program say the fact that marketing of Iclusig is being suspended is a sign that the system is working as intended. Iclusig is part of a new generation of "targeted" drugs that act against specific biochemical defects that fuel the explosive growth of certain types of cancer. The first of these drugs for chronic myeloid leukemia was Gleevec. (Dr. Druker was one of its developers.) It revolutionized the treatment of the illness and transformed it from a death sentence into a chronic disease that people could live with for many years. Iclusig is one of several drugs developed for patients who did not respond to Gleevec, or who became resistant to it. But even though these powerful new drugs are specifically designed to fight cancer cells, they also find their way to other targets, including the cardiovascular system. In a bulletin on Thursday, the drug agency said that 24 percent of patients taking Iclusig who were studied for a median of 1.3 years, and 48 percent studied for a median of 2.7 years, had suffered "serious adverse vascular events." Those figures are unusually high, and higher than what was reported from the initial studies done before the drug was approved. The events included blockages in blood vessels that led to heart attacks, strokes, blindness and lack of blood flow to the extremities. Some of the patients were young, in their 20s, and some had no risk factors for heart or artery disease. A spokeswoman for the drug agency, Stephanie Yao, said that in studies of the drug to date, which involved 530 patients, at least 14 had died from cardiovascular problems. In an article published Friday by The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard researchers said that the reports of cardiovascular problems linked to ponatinib and other newer drugs (not Gleevec) lacked the kind of details that doctors need to figure out whether side effects could be prevented. One of the authors, Dr. Javid Moslehi, a co director of the cardio oncology program at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said in an interview that if, for instance, the problems were known to occur because of excessive blood clotting from a cancer drug, then patients could also be given another medication to prevent clots. Or, if the cancer drug were causing plaque to build up in the arteries, patients might be given a statin to try to prevent it. "What we don't want to have happen is for a good drug, ponatinib, to be killed and not given to patients," Dr. Moslehi said. The setbacks for the drug have also shaken its maker. Ariad's stock has lost about 85 percent of its value since Oct. 9, when it first announced that the drug agency had halted further enrollment in clinical trials of Iclusig because of the safety concerns. On Oct. 18, it canceled a clinical trial aimed at winning approval for the drug as an initial treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, rather than as a treatment used only after other drugs have failed. Such an approval could have greatly expanded sales of the drug. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
It's the late '90s. You make some dumb choices. You get charged with robbing a Subway. You spend four years in prison. It's 1995. Your friends rob a KFC. You drive the getaway car. Four years in jail. That was then. Now you're a pastor at a church. Today, you run a successful flooring business. You've paid your dues. You've made amends. Now you want to have a voice in the world. But, you live in Florida. The Sunshine State is one of only four states that permanently bars felons from casting a ballot. And there are 1.7 estimated million people there who are disenfranchised due to a prior felony conviction. Over 10% of adults in the state cannot vote. Nearly one in four black adults is disenfranchised. The law does provide one way for former felons to get their voting rights back. But don't get your hopes up. Then you have to wait another 10, 12 years. Why? Because there is a backlog of about 10,000 cases. Finally, as many as 20 years later, you get your big day in court. If your hearing was in front of Gov. Rick Scott, you almost certainly heard this: "I deny restoration of civil rights. I deny restoration of civil rights. At this point, I'm going to deny restoration of civil rights. I deny restoration of civil rights. I deny restoration of civil rights. So it's all denied. Well, first off, thanks for your work for the state." "Thank you." "At this point, I don't feel comfortable giving your restoration of civil rights. But congratulations on your work, and congratulations on your daughter." "Thank you." The law gives the governor and his cabinet members the power to decide our fate. And there's no rules or guidelines. "There is no right to clemency. There's no standards. The governor goes first. If I deny, then it's over." The governor can turn you away for any reason no matter how petty. "Just don't get traffic tickets all the time. I mean, I mean it just says something. It says you don't care about the law." And it's not just me. Governor Scott has denied way more people than his predecessors. In the last eight years, the number of disenfranchised citizens in Florida has increased by nearly 200,000 people. But wait, how did we even get here? The law is 150 years old and was designed to keep people that looked like me from voting. When the Civil War ended, freed slaves represented almost half of Florida's population. The state's all white lawmakers came up with a racist plan to prevent blacks from gaining power. They created Black Codes, not so subtly named laws that subjected black people to harsh sentences for minor offenses. They then barred anyone with a conviction from voting. They didn't even try to hide it. For the next 150 years, no one questioned the law. And now, here we are. "Florida voters will get to decide on a ballot referendum that would restore voting rights to felons who have done their time." "Murderers and sex offenders are excluded." "To pass Amendment 4, voters would need 60% or more in November." Vote "Yes" in November to restore voting rights. Be our voice today so everyone invested in the future of Florida can help shape that future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Phil May, the lead singer of the Pretty Things, a 1960s British rock band whose members played faster, louder and with more unbridled energy than their contemporaries, died on May 15 in Norfolk, England. He was 75. An announcement on the band's website said he died in a hospital from complications following hip surgery. The Pretty Things took their name from a Bo Diddley song, but they were far less in thrall to their influences than most of the elders of the English rhythm and blues scene. They didn't go for faithful re creation; they roughed up the music, playing with a speed and rawness that foreshadowed punk rock. Joey Ramone called the Pretty Things "the biggest influence" on the Ramones and said they "invented garage bands." The band's debut single, "Rosalyn," released in 1964, contained the main ingredients: spiky guitars, manic drumming and Mr. May's hoarse vocals, snarlingly delivered. Other early singles included "Don't Bring Me Down," a Top 10 hit in Britain, and "Midnight to Six Man," a celebration of night prowling. Speaking to the rock historian Richie Unterberger for his book "Urban Spacemen and Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators and Eccentric Visionaries of '60s Rock" (2000), Mr. May summed up the band's approach to rock 'n' roll: "We just took what we wanted and made it our own." Mr. May's rebelliousness was evident onstage and off. He performed in a style that Mr. Unterberger, in an interview, described as "almost prowling the stage like a wild man." And Mr. May, who was bisexual, wore his brown hair down to his shoulders, longer even than other rock musicians at the time, even though such androgyny could and did provoke public abuse and fistfights. Mr. May co wrote one of rock's most blatant odes to acid, "PS.s.d," and, along with his bandmates, boasted of the group's many arrests for offenses like assault with a deadly weapon and setting fire to an airplane. (That stunt was said to have gotten the group banned for life from New Zealand.) But while the Stones went on to have worldwide hits and play to sold out stadiums, the Pretty Things remained largely a cult band. They influenced other musicians David Bowie covered two Pretty Things songs on his 1973 album "Pin Ups" but they were not widely known to casual listeners, especially in the United States. Perhaps because they were one of the few British groups not to tour America in the '60s, the Pretty Things never had a hit or received much airplay in the U.S., and their recordings were hard to find. In 1968, the Pretty Things, who by then had transitioned from hard blues to folky psychedelia, released the album "S.F. Sorrow." Based on a short story by Mr. May about a tragic figure named Sebastian F. Sorrow, it is widely regarded as the first full length rock opera; the Who's "Tommy" was released the next year. Writing in The New York Times in 1998, Neil Strauss called "S.F. Sorrow" "among the most interesting and ambitious albums of the '60s," but lamented that it had "remained unjustly obscure," one of those albums passed down by in the know record store clerks and music geeks. Decades later, it remains so. But from the start, Mr. May valued musical and personal expression over commercial success, and he wasn't inclined to look back on the band's career with any regrets. As he told Mojo magazine in 2018, "All our defeats were victories." Philip Dennis Arthur Wadey was born on Nov. 9, 1944, in Dartford, Kent, near London. For much of his childhood he was raised by his mother's half sister and her husband, Flo and Charlie May, and lived under the assumption that they were his parents an illusion that was shattered, he said, in his early teens, when his biological mother and stepfather came to collect him. (Another British rock star, Eric Clapton, had a similar story.) Years later, Mr. May said that the experience had made him an isolated youth living in a world of his own imagination. Mr. May went to art school in the early '60s intending to be a painter, but he soon met Mr. Taylor and Mr. Richards and began singing along with their blues guitar playing. The Pretty Things were formed in 1963. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
There'll Be a Theater Season. But How and Where and When? In April and May, as reliably as cherry blossoms flower and songbirds lay over in Central Park, the season announcements appear. To announce a theatrical season, which runs from September through May, give or take, is to broadcast values, bolster a brand, woo a subscription base. Each poised message operates as an advertisement, a promise, a reiteration of artistic and commercial creeds. But this spring, pretty much no one hit send. Because how can you build a season when you don't know when your theater can reopen, or how many employees you can afford to pay, or why anyone would want to see Beckett when you have existential anguish happening everywhere for free? And then, just a few months later, with lockdowns still unlifted and unions leery of in person performances, theaters, with buoyancy and anxiety, fear and ingenuity, revealed their upcoming projects for 2020 2021. The bloodiest announcement? Probably Hartford Stage's, which announced no new shows through June 2021 and directed patrons to its Raise the Curtain fund raising campaign in an effort to save next year's programming. A close second, Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, which pushed its season off to April 2021 and then announced a raft of cancellations and shortened runs. The most optimistic? Let's go with Providence's Trinity Rep, which sounded a concise note of caution, solicited donations, then listed nine in person shows, beginning as soon as November. The most varied? Atlanta's Alliance Theater, which proposed a mix of drive in, indoor and streaming shows. Though public health conditions remain in flux, and city, state and union mandates change as often as light cues, all but the most conservative announcements assume that union actors and union crew members will be allowed to work, and that audiences will want to buy tickets let alone subscriptions to these seasons. "There's so much I don't know," Adam Greenfield, the incoming artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, said recently. "Whenever I try to chart a course for the future, it feels like it's a game of Sudoku and the starting clues keep changing squares on me." In July, Playwrights Horizons announced a shortened season of four plays, two of them rescheduled from the spring, plus several initiatives that don't depend on in person performance. Some announcements describe typical seasons, merely pushed back to January or March or June. Others offer truncated ones. San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater extended its 2020 2021 season into spring 2022. Several detail a shift to live remote performance. Still others emphasize hybridity, pledging a mix of online and in person shows, with reconfigured subscription packages to match. The Workshop's release promises "a front row seat to the unfolding of this experiment," acknowledging that no one really knows what front row means right now. "Half the time I'm in terror, and half the time I'm excited," Jim Nicola, the Workshop's artistic director, said. Many of New York's major nonprofits, including the Public Theater, have yet to announce any season at all. The Public's artistic director, Oskar Eustis, hospitalized in the spring for complications likely related to Covid 19, explained the delay this way: "I have had to break more commitments than I ever have in my life because of Covid," he said. "When we announce stuff, it's going to be stuff we're going to do." He plans to lay out a season later this month. That announcement, when it comes and whatever it describes, will be a commitment to a future at a moment when the future of live performance remains opaque. But remaining silent leaves artists, audiences and potential donors in the dark. So do theaters wait until they can announce with more assurance, or do they go forward, fingers crossed? "I don't have a crystal ball," said Maria Manuela Goyanes, the artistic director of the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. But the Woolly news releaseannounced, "with deep humility and cautious optimism," several commissions for remote work and a robust slate of seven shows, from small footprint solo productions to genre bending musicals like Michael R. Jackson's "A Strange Loop" and Toshi Reagon's adaptation of the Afro futurist classic "Parable of the Sower." Whether those shows will be presented online or in person is left necessarily ambiguous. "The ground is continually shifting and changing underneath us," Goyanes said. Like Goyanes, Stephanie Ybarra, the artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage, has tried to fashion a season both ambitious and pragmatic. "It's not like we took a leap without a net," she said. "Our contingency plans have contingency plans." In late June, the theater announced four main stage shows. Ybarra said that she trusts the associated artists to meet the moment, even if they have to meet it online. To absorb a few dozen of these announcements hopeful ones, panicked ones is also to wonder why we need seasons at all. After all, theater isn't as star driven as opera, say, where sought after performers must be booked years in advance. And programming only a few shows at a time would leave theaters more nimble and better able to respond, in real time, to the world beyond the lobby. But theaters define themselves not by any individual show, but by ampler bodies of work. And that's how they sell subscriptions, an essential funding component of many nonprofits. A considered season can showcase an institution's diversity and abundance, encouraging conversation among included works. Then again, many seasons feel less like a conversation and more like a list of ticked boxes the musical, the holiday show, the celebrity led revival. And for too many years, too many theaters have relegated playwrights of color and women playwrights to only a slot or two, biases that appear more stark when seen in the context of other programming. Which means that when live performance returns, theaters will have work to do in thinking through what a season is and can be and how best to deliver its shows to a varied and hopefully vaccinated audience. That might mean several mini seasons or more formal hybridity or moving toward practices that make theaters more just, accessible and equitable. "There's no way forward that doesn't include every assumption and every tradition and every status quo practice being on the table," Baltimore Center Stage's Ybarra said. "The constraints of calendar years, fiscal years, traditional seasons, that does feel like it's up for grabs, too." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Arizona has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 24 years, and the state has not been represented by two Democratic senators in over 65 years. So we find ourselves in a historically strange place: Joe Biden holds a small but consistent edge over the president, and Mark Kelly, the Democratic Senate candidate, holds a lead in his race against his Republican opponent, Martha McSally. The answer is frequently attributed to changes in the demographics of our electorate. It is true that Arizona's population is increasingly urban, college educated and Latino trends that favor the Democratic Party. But this influx of Democratic leaning groups doesn't explain the change. After all, the proportions of registered Republicans and Democrats in Arizona have remained remarkably stable: Registered Republicans solidly outnumber registered Democrats. What has changed is that more Republicans aren't voting for the party's candidate in elections for national office. That gets to the heart of why Arizona has become a swing state. What partisans want is no longer necessarily reflected in what their parties have to offer Arizonans, often moderate Democrats and Republicans, have been left up for grabs in the middle while major party candidates have often moved to opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." And that is an overlooked but essential factor to explain our swinging state: The Arizona Democratic Party is more effectively targeting its messages to align with the moderate voters of the state. That is what we found when in recent weeks and in collaboration with the Arizona Policy Lab, we asked over 1,100 Arizonans about their views toward the candidates, parties and key issues. Arizona Democrats are disproportionately moderate, as are self identified independents. Even nearly two thirds of Republicans, typically the most ideological group in the state, describe themselves as either moderate or just leaning conservative. We asked Arizonans to rate the state parties relative to the national parties on an ideological scale. Large proportions of both Democrats and Republicans view their own party in Arizona as more moderate than what they see in Washington. In other words, there is bipartisan agreement among Arizonans: Washington elites are farther out on the ideological extremes than the people who live here in our state. Arizonans' moderate perceptions are largely backed up by what they say about the issues. A fifth of Arizona Democrats, for example, support the construction of a border wall, which Mr. Biden has pledged to immediately halt. A majority of Republicans in Arizona support a pathway toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children a program that President Trump has repeatedly tried to eliminate. Over a third of Republicans say that immigrants help Arizona's culture, and 42 percent say that immigrants help our state economy. When it comes to the coronavirus, over 80 percent of Republicans in Arizona report that they are often wearing a mask, and a majority support a mask mandate something that Mr. Trump has refused to endorse. Scholars have found that Americans generally misperceive members of the opposing party to be more ideologically extreme than they truly are. But remarkably, more than a fifth of Republicans say that Arizona Democrats are more conservative than the national Democratic Party. State level Republicans, on the other hand, are seen as ideologically extreme, with 43 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of Republicans viewing state level Republicans as more conservative than the national party. The campaigns provide examples. Ms. McSally's campaign is persistently trying to cast Mr. Kelly as a radical leftist: In the race's only senatorial debate, Ms. McSally repeatedly referred to her opponent as "Counterfeit Kelly," as she tried to portray him as a covert radical leftist. But Ms. McSally herself has struggled to convey a moderate stance: When asked during the debate, she would not say whether she was "proud" of her support for the president. Mr. Kelly is actually running a centrist campaign as he tries to appeal to Arizona's moderate mind set just as Kyrsten Sinema did successfully against Ms. McSally in 2018. We find that both Mr. Biden and Mr. Kelly are especially popular among those who rate Democrats in Arizona as more conservative than the national party. A recent Arizona Daily Star report suggests that nearly a fifth of Republicans in deep blue Pima County are supporting Mr. Biden. Our statewide analysis shows 10 percent of Republicans supporting Mr. Biden which, in a neck and neck contest, could make a lot of difference. Demographic trends suggest that Arizona is moving to the left ideologically. But a better explanation might be that the state is moving toward the ideological center and that's where winning candidates place themselves. Samara Klar and Christopher Weber are associate professors at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy and co coordinators of the Arizona Policy Lab. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
At least one million children and adults in the United States are allergic to sesame, an ingredient used in everything from hummus to snack bars, researchers reported on Friday. The finding indicates that sesame allergy is more prevalent than previously known, although still far less common than peanut allergy. But sesame is not among the allergens that the Food and Drug Administration requires manufacturers to list on food labels. "Sesame allergy is becoming a common allergy in the U.S.," said Dr. Ruchi S. Gupta, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago and senior author of the study, which was published in the journal JAMA Network Open. "The impact on over a million people in the U.S. is significant." The study relied on online and phone survey responses from 40,453 adults and 38,408 children. People who have had at least one symptom of sesame allergy made up an estimated 0.23 percent of the population, Dr. Gupta and her colleagues found. Those who have been diagnosed with the allergy but have never experienced a symptom accounted for an estimated 0.11 percent of the population. "That's about 1.1 million people in the U.S. who currently probably have a sesame allergy and therefore are avoiding sesame in their daily lives," said Christopher M. Warren, an epidemiologist at the Northwestern Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research and lead author of the study. Exposure to a food allergen like sesame can lead to an anaphylactic reaction, including throat swelling and a drop in blood pressure. Severe reactions can be fatal. Among people with a sesame allergy, 62 percent said they had a prescription for epinephrine, the injected medicine used to ease an allergic reaction. Of those with an epinephrine prescription, about one third said they had used the medication at some point. Many people in the survey reported symptoms of sesame allergy but were never actually diagnosed, Dr. Gupta noted. "If you eat a food and have a reaction, it is important to get it diagnosed, because you want to make sure it really is an allergy to that food before you spend your life avoiding that food," she said. Currently, the federal government requires manufacturers to tell consumers when a product was made using any of eight allergens: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and tree nuts. Consumers can find those allergens printed in the ingredients list or in a special warning. But sesame, which Dr. Gupta referred to as "the ninth most common allergen," wasn't part of the 2004 law that mandated the labeling. Consumers cannot know for certain whether food at the grocery store has sesame in it. Even if sesame were used as an ingredient, it might be described as "natural flavors" or "spices." Lisa G. Gable, chief executive of Food Allergy Research Education, a nonprofit organization in McLean, Va., hopes that this latest study convinces the F.D.A. to make a change. "It elevates, with great specificity, the data related to the impact of sesame on the lives of individuals who have to basically avoid that food," Ms. Gable said. The F.D.A. is considering adding sesame which is already regulated in the European Union, Canada and Australia to the list. In 2018, the agency issued a request for information to "learn more about the prevalence and severity of sesame allergies in the U.S." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Jessie McCormick had to quit her job to afford health care. Ms. McCormick, 27, who has a heart condition, had an opportunity to move from part time to full time in her job at a small nonprofit in Washington. Working full time would qualify her for the firm's health plan. But she calculated that her out of pocket costs would be at least 1,200 per month, about double the money she had left after paying her rent and utilities. Instead, she quit her job last summer so her income would be low enough to enroll in Medicaid, which will cover all her medical expenses. "I'm trying to do some side jobs," she said. Employers remain the main source of health insurance in the United States, covering about 153 million people. But premiums and deductibles are pushing employer based coverage increasingly out of reach, according to a new analysis released Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which conducts a survey of employers every year. The new data on employer coverage come as the Democratic presidential candidates debate sweeping reforms to diminish the role of private insurance in the American health system, including expanding the federal Medicare program to everyone or giving people the option to enroll in a government run plan. Many of the arguments for both systems center on expanding health insurance to more of the estimated 27 million people who lack it. But millions of people who already have coverage are deeply dissatisfied with the current system as well. "For some reason, we like to focus on coverage when the issue for workers, people and the public generally is cost," said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the foundation. About 2,000 small and large businesses responded in detail to the survey. Small employers in particular, and their workers, are struggling. "Health insurance in the United States is incredibly prohibitive for small businesses," said Shalin Madan, the founder of a small investment advisory firm in Florida. He is not required to provide health insurance to his workers, because his business is too small and he outsources much of the work. A policy for his own family, he said, runs about 2,000 a month ( 24,000 per year), with a 13,000 deductible. "I'm out 37,000 before I see a return on investment, if you will," Mr. Madan said. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that a majority of registered voters, 56 percent, are opposed to the idea of a government run system like Medicare for all that would replace private insurance. But Mr. Madan said the current system results in a schism between those who have good employer coverage and those who do not. "I had phenomenal health insurance being employed," said Mr. Madan of his time working for a larger corporation. One of Senator Elizabeth Warren's applause lines on the Democratic presidential campaign trail is that no one likes their insurance company. But employer coverage "isn't monolithic," said Mr. Altman. While some people, usually higher paid professionals or union members, enjoy generous coverage from their job, people making 25,000 or less about 36 million Americans are the most likely to be priced out of coverage, he said. People who work at companies where a large share of the employees are low wage workers pay an average of 7,000 annually for a family plan, according to the survey, about 1,000 more than those working at companies made up of better paid workers. Only one in three of these workers is enrolled in an employer's plan, about half the rate at better paying companies. "This is a group that really deserves a lot more attention," Mr. Altman said. While some low wage workers may qualify for Medicaid in states that expanded it under the Affordable Care Act, those with private insurance who are not eligible for government help are having a more difficult time affording care, said Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a health economist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "The arc of the A.C.A. really tried, and largely succeeded, in leaving the employer market as is," he said. For many businesses, it's a Sophie's choice between raising an employee's share of premiums or increasing the size of the deductible. "I try to keep the benefits pretty much the same," said Joel Sturm, chief operating officer of the New York College of Podiatric Medicine. The majority of workers are in a plan that comes with a deductible of 1,000 for an individual and asks them to pay about 10 percent of their medical bills. "It doesn't kill them if they go," Mr. Sturm said. But the employees must pay a hefty share of the overall premiums, about 950 a month for a couple. Some employees have quit as a result of having so much taken out of their paycheck and still having to cover some out of pocket costs, Mr. Sturm said. "They'd rather be unemployed than have very little take home pay," he said, adding that Medicaid can seem like a more attractive option. But some of his clients who once embraced high deductibles have changed their minds, worried their workers can't afford to go to the doctor. Some large employers are adjusting the premiums and deductibles based on an employee's income. JPMorgan Chase pays 80 percent of the premiums for workers making under 60,000, and the company lowered the annual deductible by 750 to 2,000 or less, depending on the plan they choose. H.A. Cover Son Lumber, in Thayer, Mo., has decided to pay the bulk of premiums for workers, but the plans come with a deductible of 2,500 for an individual and 5,000 for a family. The company is paying about 16,000 a month to cover the 11 people enrolled in the plan. The deductible "is higher than we wanted to go," said Marion Cowen, who oversees benefits for the business, but the cost for more comprehensive coverage was prohibitive. "We don't know what we're going to do if it goes up much more," she said. She is intrigued by the idea of being allowed to buy into a government plan, like Medicaid or Medicare, that is being floated by some of the candidates. "We would consider it, yes, we would," she said, if the option saved money and provided employees with high quality coverage. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that about two thirds of voters supported the idea of allowing people to buy into Medicare. "Some states are looking at a public option," said David Chase, who leads the national outreach efforts for Small Business Majority, an advocacy group that supported the Affordable Care Act. He said the group is talking to various states about allowing small businesses the option of buying into a government program. "There are a lot of hypothetical proposals out there," said Neil Trautwein, vice president of health care policy at the National Retail Federation, who said his members are increasingly concerned about rising health care costs. Companies are not as keen on offering less generous plans, he said, but would be open to other alternatives. At Bagel Grove in Utica, N.Y., most of the 20 employees are now covered by Medicaid, said Anne Wadsworth, one of the owners. She took advantage of the tax credits available to small businesses that helped pay for the cost of coverage under the Affordable Care Act, but the credits ran out. While she still covers 45 percent of the premiums, all but one of her employees, herself included, have found better plans on their own. "I was all on board for Obamacare," she said, but it proved not to be "a long term solution. It doesn't lower the costs for people." Ms. Wadsworth is wary of the sweeping plans now proposed by the Democratic presidential candidates, which she worries will become a political football, like the Affordable Care Act, and fail to address the underlying issues. "I just think health care costs need to go down," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Q. Is it possible to donate e books to a library's digital collection? A. Check with your local library, as policies may vary from institution to institution and some may have their own electronic book donation solutions. In general, though, donating your finished e books to libraries does not work in the same way that donating printed books and other materials does. According to the American Library Association website, "E books cannot be donated because their use is governed by contract rather than the copyright law." Under the "first sale doctrine" of United States copyright law, if you legally acquire a book, you have the right to sell or share that specific copy of it however you wish which means you can keep the book for yourself, give it as a gift, sell it at a stoop sale or donate it to your local library. And when a library buys or acquires a book for its collection, it can lend the book out to library card holders. When you get an e book from an online bookstore and agree to the store's "terms of use" document, you are buying a nonnegotiable license for the work and operating under contract law instead of copyright law. For an example of this distinction, check out Amazon's Kindle Store Terms of Use or Barnes Noble's Nook Store Terms of Service documents. Although some e book providers allow you to digitally loan e books to friends for a brief period, the license agreement typically requires that you use the book in a personal, noncommercial way (even after you die). A copyrighted e book typically includes restrictions that prevent duplication or unauthorized users from opening the file which make electronic donations to libraries problematic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
CONAN 11 p.m. on TBS. The late night host Conan O'Brien unveils his show's new look and 30 minute format with Tom Hanks as guest star. The revamp will give "Conan" a more casual feel: O'Brien will be wearing fewer suits and will do away with the desk, bringing the audience closer to the action. "If I hadn't changed this up, I can't say how many more years I could have done it the same way, every night," he said in a recent interview with The New York Times. Among the guest stars on this week's episodes: Bill Hader, Tig Notaro and the cast of "The Good Place." THE CONNERS 8 p.m. on ABC. The first season of this third "Roseanne" incarnation brought about by the thorny end to the revival that debuted last spring wraps up with a momentous offer for Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and worrisome news for Becky (Lecy Goranson). In his review for The Times, James Poniewozik called the show "unsettling and raw and fitfully funny," and said it feels more like the original "Roseanne" than the reboot did. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It helps to be young, or at least youthful in body, to perform the work of Ohad Naharin, the Israeli choreographer and artistic director of Batsheva Dance Company. His oozy style, grounded in Gaga, his trademarked and globally disseminated movement method, calls for a special litheness and resilience, the kind that facilitates, say, a precipitous backbend and its swift reversal, or a knock kneed crumpling to the floor, or a deliberately high impact collision with a partner. Watching Batsheva's junior branch, the Young Ensemble, which began a weeklong run at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, is hardly a downgrade from seeing the main company. Many of the dancers, ages 18 to 26, are as superhumanly spry as their counterparts in the main troupe, if not more so, though some are still outgrowing a teenage gawkiness. They're less mature as actors, though dramatic persuasiveness can be lacking in the senior company, too. Suspicion and rage flow close to the surface in much of Mr. Naharin's work, but their motivation often remains obscure. The ensemble's Joyce program is the mix and match "Decadance," in which Mr. Naharin assembles excerpts from the Batsheva repertory, swapping in new ones as desired. The samples in this 80 minute rendition date from 1990 ("Kyr") to 2011 ("Sadeh21"), ending with the explosive "Secus," a 30 minute chunk of "Three" (2005) for the whole teeming group. The show reads like a catalog of Batsheva hallmarks: the pack formations, the vocal eruptions ("Hey! Ho!," the dancers shout in one section), the hyper articulate convulsions, the cacophony snapping into unison and splintering back out, the defensive stance toward the audience. The dancers periodically stand still, dispersed across the stage or lined up at the front, staring at us with a cool but untrusting alertness. It's like encountering animals in the wild: They could flee or charge, or just walk away, another Naharanian maneuver. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. NATURAL TRANSGRESSIONS: THE FILMS OF CARLOS REYGADAS at the Museum of the Moving Image (June 8 13). After attracting attention for the heavy handed allegory and explicit sexuality of "Japon" and "Battle in Heaven" (both showing on Saturday), this Mexican provocateur moved into an unexpectedly serene direction with "Silent Light" (on Sunday), a contemplative tale of extramarital longing in a Mennonite community, and the enigmatically structured, synopsis resistant "Post Tenebras Lux" (also on Sunday) all the while never abandoning his magnificent eye for landscapes or offhand surreality. The museum's retrospective is designed as a lead in to his latest movie, "Our Time" (on June 13), which stars Reygadas and his wife, the film editor Natalia Lopez, as a couple whose open marriage comes under strain. 718 784 0077, movingimage.us OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA at Film at Lincoln Center (through June 12). Anyone familiar with the grandiosity and broad comic stylings of Paolo Sorrentino ("The Great Beauty," "The Young Pope") knows that "Loro" (on Saturday and Tuesday), his satirical take on the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (played by Toni Servillo), won't be anything like a sober minded expose. That's just one of the notable titles in this week of movies from Italy. In "The Disappearance of My Mother" (on Monday), Beniamino Barrese creates a layered portrait of his mother, Benedetta Barzini, a former Italian supermodel. "A feminist and Marxist who now also teaches, Barzini is a severe, unsparing critic of the commodification and exploitation of the female body by men, which greatly complicates her son's insistent, at times intrusive gaze," Manohla Dargis wrote after the film played at Sundance. The series also pays tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci with a screening of his debut feature, "La Commare Secca," also known as "The Grim Reaper," on Tuesday. 212 875 5601, filmlinc.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Covid 19 patients who are 80 or older are hundreds of times more likely to die than those under 40. That's partly because they are more likely to have underlying conditions like diabetes and lung disease that seem to make the body more vulnerable to Covid 19. But some scientists suggest another likely, if underappreciated, driver of this increased risk: the aging immune system. The changes that ripple through our network of immune cells as the decades pass are complex, resulting in an overreaction here, a delayed response there and over all, a strangely altered landscape of immunity. Scientists who study the aging immune system say that understanding it may lead not only to a clearer sense of how age is connected to disease vulnerability, but to better strategies for vaccines and treatments for Covid 19. "I felt like I was shouting at people, 'This is what's going on!' but no one was listening," said Arne Akbar, a professor of immunology at University College London who recently published an article in the journal Science explaining the state of research on the aging immune system. When a virus infiltrates the body, cells in the first line of defense act swiftly and violently sending out alerts and instructions to other cells, and provoking inflammation to start knocking down the virus. The "innate" immune system, as it's called, also happens to be responsible for cleaning up damaged cells, misfolded proteins and other detritus in the body, even when there's no infection to fight. In older people, such waste seems to outrun the immune system's ability to clear it, however, said Dr. Eric Verdin, the chief executive of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif. The innate immune system grows overwhelmed, and slides into a constant state of alert and inflammation. At the same time, elderly cells in tissues throughout the body are thought to change with age, releasing inflammatory substances of their own. And it also means that fighting off pathogens becomes more complicated: All of this baseline inflammatory chaos in an aging body makes it harder for the messages sent out by the innate immune system to reach their targets. On top of that, there's the added danger that the innate immune system may overreact. "We think that this is one of the reasons older individuals respond poorly to Covid 19," said Dr. Verdin. Austria braces for violence at mass protests over Covid measures. In Europe, again the pandemic's epicenter, new restrictions provoke resistance. The dance floor is packed, but New York City clubs are still in debt. Dr. Verdin and other experts said the aging immune system might be linked to reports of severe Covid 19 culminating in a cytokine storm, a reaction that causes high numbers of immune messengers to flood the body and can lead to organ failure. This inflammation may also be part of why vaccines, whose effectiveness relies on a robust reaction from the immune system, don't work as well in older people an effect that's likely to extend to Covid 19 vaccines. Dr. Akbar and his colleagues have found that people with high levels of inflammation tended to have weaker immune responses to pieces of the chickenpox virus, for example. And when they took an anti inflammatory drug for four days before being injected, their immune responses improved. Several days after the innate immune response begins, the body begins a second wave of attacks against the viral invader. This adaptive immune system response is more targeted than the first, methodically destroying cells infected by this specific virus. But in older bodies, the adaptive response not only takes longer to get into gear, it arrives to find a scene of inflammatory pandemonium, said Amber Mueller, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School who co authored a paper published in May about Covid 19 and aging. Think of firefighters coming to put out a house fire, she said. "You have a whole neighborhood of pedestrians or bystanders that are just hanging around, screaming their heads off, causing chaos," she said. "To the point that it makes it harder for the firefighters to find the fire to find the infection and then put it out effectively." These delays mean that the pathogen has already made many copies of itself by the time the adaptive immune system gets to work and gains a foothold that might not have been available in a younger person. Additionally, older people have fewer fresh T cells, important players in the adaptive response that are trained to hunt down cells infected with a specific pathogen. When everything is working correctly, successful T cells make copies of themselves so that at the height of the infection, the body is swarming with them. Afterward, a few remain to prime us against return attacks from the same virus. The supply of T cells that hasn't already been assigned a pathogen dwindles over the decades. Those that remain may not be as good at copying themselves as the cells in younger people. And they may have trouble making the transition to patrolling the body against future attacks, said Dr. Shabnam Salimi, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who wrote a recent paper about the interaction between aging and Covid 19. "All these together make the immune system less functional during aging," Dr. Salimi said. Research investigating Covid 19 treatments will have to take into account the specific cells and substances that go awry when the immune system ages, and drugs under investigation for fighting aging may be useful against the coronavirus, write Dr. Salimi and her colleague John Hamlyn in their article. So far, little has been straightforward when it comes to treatments for Covid 19. Since it became clear that the virus sometimes provokes an out of control immune response, researchers have been testing whether reducing inflammation might help. Drugs that tamp down the levels of cytokines, like those used for treating rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, have not shown success in fighting the virus. What's more, chloroquine, which can help inhibit the aging of cells, caused increased mortality in Covid 19 clinical trials. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Marie Kondo the tidying guru, publishing juggernaut and former Shinto shrine maiden had opened an online store. The response, predictably, has been a collective: "Wait, what?" On Twitter , some users were in baffled awe of the downsizing expert's pivot to consumption. Others wondered whether Ms. Kondo was being held somewhere against her will by the Goop team. "Good thing I've decluttered my house Marie Kondo style, because now I can take advantage of her online shop and fill it up with needed things like 4kHz Chakra tuning forks and computer brushes," wrote one mystified man in Australia. There was a sense that it was the height of cynicism for a woman who has made a career of gently exhorting the clutter addled to pare their belongings down to the bare minimum, to purge everything except that which all together now sparks joy, to turn around and try to sell them more stuff. Use what you have has long been the Kondo way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
THE shape that would eventually find expression in the design of the 2010 Acura ZDX was drawn by Michelle Christensen some four years ago, when she was still a student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. Was it, back then, just a seductive form? Or did she see it as a vehicle? "Yes, I saw it as a vehicle, a driver's car," said Ms. Christensen, 29, the first woman designer at Acura's styling studio here. "I saw it very much as a road trip car." While Acura sells the ZDX as a "passionate getaway" for well heeled couples, Ms. Christensen sees the car, which made its debut as a design study at the New York auto show last year, as more of an urban escape pod. She envisions it going from Los Angeles to Lake Tahoe or farther, to the rugged mountains of Utah. Dozens of buttons and controls on the instrument panel may overwhelm owners. That's the route I decided to take for a test drive. The notion of panoramic views is an important attribute of the ZDX's design. The designers tried to convey this with expansive windows, a glass covered roof and a see through rear hatch. Sitting inside, I was reminded of the City of Los Angeles Domeliner cars used a half century ago by the Union Pacific Railroad. The glass swathed Domeliners once covered the route from Southern California to Salt Lake City and continued east, giving passengers picture window views of landmarks that included the Hollywood sign in the hills above Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, Utah's red rock Dixie region and the Wasatch mountain range. The sleek Domeliners are only memories now, but Interstate 15 more or less retraces their route. The ZDX proved to be something of modern day Domeliner on my drive along this scenic Interstate, but, I found, the sloping roofline and coupelike profile of this 5 passenger crossover had created some unwanted design compromises. Its high haunches partly block the view in the outside mirrors. There's no wiper to clean the broad span of glass on the rear hatch; Acura says a rear wiper would have compromised visibility. (And rain, ice and snow wouldn't?) A wiper also would have interfered with air flow over the roof to the rear spoiler. Michelle Christensen, the exterior designer of the ZDX. The sunroof opens a mere 10 inches, because of the roof's significant slope. The glass panel over the rear seats doesn't open at all. "The curvature of the roof dictated how far the sunroof could slide," an Acura spokeswoman, Jessica Fini, said. "We didn't want to put the sunroof as an inner sliding sunroof because that would compromise headroom." Rear passenger headroom, like the rear legroom and the cargo capacity, is already cozy enough. That's a result of the ZDX's tapered tail, created by a roof that plunges toward the rear bumper in a fashion increasingly evident in models from makers like Audi, BMW, Jaguar and Mercedes Benz. The design also inhibits entry and exit through the rear doors. But I liked the cleverly disguised rear door handles, which are positioned to the rear of the window glass. Still, the trade off of rear seat roominess for widescreen vistas seemed worth it as I drove through the pine forests and over towering mountain passes worth it for those sitting in the front seat, at least. On those mountains roads in Utah, I appreciated the ZDX's well sorted handling and standard all wheel drive, especially when snow started to fall. The 19 inch Michelin all season tires were not the optimum solution for snow or for maximum cornering performance on dry pavement, but their relatively low rolling resistance helped me to achieve the promised 23 m.p.g. federal rating on the highway, even while averaging nearly 80 m.p.h. on a three hour highway stint. (Speeding? No, some sections of Utah Interstates have 80 m.p.h. limits.) The rating in town is a mediocre 16 m.p.g. EVOLVED The production ZDX is faithful to the original concept. There's certainly too much sport utility vehicle in this 4,462 pound crossover for it to be considered a sporty four door coupe, as Acura would like shoppers to see it. But even with 58 percent of its weight over the front wheels the ZDX's cornering seemed surprisingly neutral. The electronics of the all wheel drive system can shift up to 70 percent of the engine's torque to the rear wheels when needed; combined with nearly eight inches of ground clearance, the ZDX can tackle some light off roading. In most important details, the ZDX is essentially a stylish version of the MDX, Acura's seven passenger crossover. The two share a unibody chassis, with a MacPherson strut front suspension and a multilink independent design at the rear. They also share powertrains: a 300 horsepower 3.7 liter V 6 hooked to a 6 speed automatic transmission. The transmission can be shifted manually with steering wheel paddles; left in Drive, it shifts intuitively and is well matched to the engine. The ZDX interior is as high style as its exterior, although the number and complexity of its dashboard and steering wheel controls are sometimes daunting. The car comes in three trim levels, starting with the nicely equipped 46,805 base model. I drove both a ZDX with the Technology package, which starts at 50,805, and one with the top end Advance option, which had a 56,855 window sticker. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
With a new production of "Akhnaten," a classic trilogy by Philip Glass has finally been surveyed at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Eva O'Leary for The New York Times With a new production of "Akhnaten," a classic trilogy by Philip Glass has finally been surveyed at the Metropolitan Opera. STANFORD, Calif. A Joan Mitchell painting looms at the top of the grand staircase at the Anderson Collection, Stanford University's modern art museum here. It's a sweaty, emotive work, bright colors moodily smeared across a huge canvas. On a recent Monday evening, Philip Glass sat at a piano placed between the painting and a few dozen potential donors to the Days and Nights Festival, his annual works in progress showcase south of Stanford. Mr. Glass, the master of musical Minimalism, is known for the precision of his endlessly undulating arpeggios. When he plays his own pieces, though, they tend to blur and smear, like Mitchell's brush strokes. Rhythms that in other hands are almost clinical in their regularity begin to smudge, the music newly volatile and feeling. "This is called 'Opening,'" he told the audience, by way of introducing a piece from his 1981 collection "Glassworks." "It's sometimes called 'Closing,' if we do it at the end," he added, a little sheepishly to laughter that was perhaps inspired by Mr. Glass's notorious willingness to repurpose his music. "I feel surprise," he said a few weeks after the museum event, when asked whether he felt pride or even vindication at the belated milestone. "Really, truly surprise. I have a whole string of operas after that, some more successful, some less. I've certainly written a lot of them. I haven't looked back that much. I've just kept going." At 82, Mr. Glass does remarkably little dwelling on the past. In fact, he is in the process of curtailing his busy touring schedule, so that he can focus on what is already a prodigious rate of composition a level of productivity that has made him, depending on whom you ask, either the wonder or the punch line of modern music. But the short term result of announcing that you're no longer concertizing is that everyone wants to book you so Mr. Glass is, for the moment, traveling nearly as much as ever. "I think people are saying, 'Oh, 82: Better get that in,'" said Richard Guerin, who as director of Mr. Glass's record label, Orange Mountain Music, helps oversee the dissemination and therefore the future of the torrent of Glassism. "It's like a rocket, a creative rocket hurling out of control," he said. "It's this never ending cyclone of creativity. We're not trying to shape it; we're trying to wrangle it." "I'm pragmatic," Mr. Glass said. "I don't know what's going to happen in 10 years. We don't even get to know what's going to happen after someone dies. We need to wait until everyone who knew them is dead, too." If that's true, it won't be until nearly 2100 when a full measure of Mr. Glass's footprint will be possible. But some weighing can start now. The most instantly recognizable voice in contemporary music, he opened a new chapter in operatic history, pushing the bounds of duration and abstraction. At a time when the most lauded composers disdained overproduction, Mr. Glass wrote unashamedly for everyone and everything and all stubbornly in the distinctive style he created, establishing a model for serious artists moving from the opera house to the concert hall to the film studio, garnering both Met commissions and Academy Award nominations. But if the question is whether, a century from now, his operas will get new productions, his symphonies will circulate more frequently, or pianists will take on his etudes, Mr. Glass couldn't care less. "I won't be around for all that," he said. "It doesn't matter." MR. GLASS WAS BORN, almost literally, into music: His father owned a record store in Baltimore, where the composer to be absorbed Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok, Shostakovich and Stravinsky and, perhaps, an intrinsic connection between art and commerce. Over a few years in Paris, Nadia Boulanger was his composition teacher as he was exposed to the jittery fly modernism of Boulez and Stockhausen. He didn't hate them, but he didn't want to compose like them, either. Those pieces culminated in "Einstein on the Beach," a dreamlike meditation on scientific discovery, human relations and nuclear apocalypse that progressed in enigmatic episodes, austerely designed and directed by Robert Wilson and with swirling choreography by Andrew de Groat, the dancers representing atomic particles in ceaseless motion. "When 'Einstein' opened," Mr. Glass said, "we had never performed it straight through without stopping. We didn't know how long it was. It turned out to be five and a half hours." Mr. Glass became a maestro of excruciatingly delayed gratification. "I have no idea what Philip was thinking when he wrote 'Satyagraha,'" Mr. Guerin said of that 1980 opera, a highly stylized but (compared with "Einstein") more traditionally plotted story about Gandhi's early ventures into nonviolent protest in South Africa. "The third act is 45 minutes long, and has just two harmonies. But when it explodes into pure Phrygian scale in the final aria, it's, like, oh, this totally makes sense." When it came to "Satyagraha" and "Akhnaten" (1983), Mr. Glass said, "many people were waiting for the son of 'Einstein.' They liked that experience of that throbbing, relentless ensemble playing that we did. Of course I wasn't going to do that. Why would I do that? I had just done it. So I did something completely different, and it was much too lyrical for some people." The bronzed character of the "Akhnaten" score emerged through necessity. The company in Stuttgart, Germany, that commissioned the work was renovating its theater, so the performances took place in a space with a much smaller pit. With the violas now taking the place of the violins, the sound shifted down an octave, its burnished sheen given body with brasses and punctuated by sometimes raucous percussion. As for the title character, the Egyptian pharaoh who is said to have pioneered monotheism and to have had all traces of him erased for that blasphemy Mr. Glass put him onstage from almost the beginning, but tantalizingly delayed his first musical entrance. "How do I introduce him to the audience so that the first time they hear him, they understand he is a completely radical, unforgivable event in the Egyptians' history, and they have to destroy him?" Mr. Glass recalled asking himself. "I'll make him a countertenor, to sound not unnatural, but radical. Radical can be natural. He just was who he was." Mr. Glass, too, stayed what he was, though his style grew lusher, toggling between brooding melancholy and triumphal achievement for an overall impression of persevered through struggle. His energetic rhythms made him a favorite of dance troupes; his scores for films like "The Truman Show" (1998), "The Hours" (2002) and "Notes on a Scandal" (2006) made him omnipresent. "The world had caught up with his music," Mr. Guerin said. "The Philip Glass sound became digestible to mass audiences. If you had told the people in New York that the composer of 'Music in Twelve Parts' would be able to maintain his musical language and score major Hollywood pictures, they wouldn't have believed you. But he got to be himself." His eventual reputation may well, in the end, be founded on his early works for his ensemble their intensity an unlikely, still bracing mixture of gaudy and spartan, bare yet glowing and the early operas. Nearly 30 operas followed the initial trilogy, depending on how you count. It's a horde, naturally with ups and downs; the highlights like the somber "Kepler" (2009) and the sardonic "The Perfect American" (2013), a vivisection of the Walt Disney legend balance soggier efforts like "Appomattox" (2007). This year's Days and Nights Festival, last month, brought the premiere of a darkly comic, slyly poignant short opera for just three singers, keyboard and harp to the text of an absurdist play by Maria Irene Fornes. Mr. Glass's solo piano music shows perhaps the most staying power, popping up on recitals and recordings. His first piano sonata, written for Maki Namekawa, premiered in July. "We have talked about it being in the tradition of Joseph Haydn's monumental E flat Major sonata," Ms. Namekawa wrote in an email, "written late in his life, after he had abandoned the symphony." Mr. Glass's famous name and recognizable style, though, may eventually lead to more converts, as the New York Philharmonic's late embrace demonstrates. He has an unmistakable personal brand, in a culture that values that ever more dearly. And he has retained ownership of almost all his intellectual property, putting no middlemen between him and the potential profits. "I was writing pieces ahead of their time, in the sense that audiences and boards of directors and conductors weren't ready," Mr. Glass said. " But it's changing. I can tell from the ASCAP and BMI" the major music licensing agencies "I can tell from what happens, you can just pardon me, but you can just look at the money." Mr. Guerin and the rest of Mr. Glass's team is focused on putting out as much of the music on record as possible, sending it into the cultural bloodstream. They are also trying to subtly influence its reception and programming. (If an orchestra is playing Beethoven's Third Symphony the "Eroica" they might suggest pairing it with Mr. Glass's Fourth, subtitled "Heroes," after Bowie.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Dr. Hirad recently received an M.D. and Ph.D. in the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Around the beginning of the pandemic, I started receiving WhatsApp messages from fellow Somalis instructing me to drink warm water, eat garlic and apply black seed oil every day to prevent Covid 19. These are homeopathy remedies familiar to most Somalis. So while the claims were untrue and could provide a false sense of invincibility to those who followed them, they were otherwise benign and I was not alarmed. I told my mother that these claims have no scientific basis. I admonished my 21 year old cousin, a medical student in the autonomous region of Somaliland, to stop using this message as his WhatsApp profile picture. The broader impact of claims like this soon became clear. My Somali friends and family, here and abroad, had stocked up on garlic, reported drinking more water and procured black seed oil. There were even reports of shortages of garlic in Somali markets. People who said these potions had suppressed their Covid 19 symptoms widely shared their views on social media. But I became more alarmed late last month when I began receiving dubious advice about treating people seriously ill with Covid 19. These assertions came from a North Carolina osteopath who questioned whether the coronavirus even had anything to do with the disease that was sending people to intensive care units. The claims he made like if you had the "flu shot, you will test positive for Covid 19" would fail the slightest expert review. Nonetheless, he asserts his points with such passion, with an aura of claimed expertise, that his influence among Somalis was causing harm. In early April, a nurse who is friend of mine, her father, mother, brother, sister, and nephew (14 months old) all tested positive for the coronavirus. Her father was hospitalized for three days. Her mother was admitted to an intensive care unit and remained intubated for over five weeks. Families going through a trying experience like this can find reasons to blame each other or feel guilt. Into such a reservoir of recrimination, poured the osteopath's message, casting doubt on every decision the family made. After reading his claims, family members asked whether the mother needed to be hospitalized at all. If she did, they asked, did she need to be intubated and should she remain in the hospital. The onus of this inquest fell on my friend, because she is the one who made the decision to take her mother to the hospital. On April 20, my friend texted me a 47 minute YouTube video from Dr. Buttar and inquired whether I "have seen this." I examined what "this" was and sent back a pithy verdict: He was full of it. She responded with a polite, "LOL" and continued to ask, "You think so"? as if she wanted me to contribute to her growing sense of guilt. I would not. "Of course," I wrote back, "both your mom and dad got sick. Was that made up"? At the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, where I recently graduated with dual degrees in medicine and translation biomedical science, we are taught that doctors need to consider a patient's social, psychological, as well as biological, context. So I called my friend and I asked her to remember her training and to demand an apology from her sibling who blamed her for their mother's ailment. (Family wounds now seem to be healing as the matriarch is out of the Covid 19 unit and seems to be improving.) Disinformation has metastasized among Somalis in the United States and abroad. The latest iteration is a video, with Somali subtitles, in which a white American man in his 60s, asserts that Bill Gates who is funding coronavirus vaccine research is planning to "track every human who has been vaccinated with a coronavirus vaccine ... with a nano size microchip." He labels Mr. Gates "an enemy of the human race," "an enemy of almighty God" and an "evil man." The accompanying Somali text implores the recipient to "please, listen to the end" and exclaims, "Scary!" Indeed, it is scary that these messages are being used to terrorize vulnerable populations already struggling with the enormous disruptions of a pandemic. How, when, where and why these messages spread through a network of Somalis inside and outside the United States remains a question. Does each ethnic community have its own special network of disinformation? Anti vaccine advocates were already preying on the doubts some Somali Americans were grappling with because Somali children in the West are reported to have higher autism rates compared with other black children. As a consequence, in 2017, there was a measles outbreak in the Somali community in Minnesota, where measles vaccination rates among Somali American children stood at 42 percent, compared to 91 percent among non Somali children. Thankfully, the numbers are improving again, but remain much below the 95 percent coverage needed to achieve heard immunity for measles. A vaccine is likely to be the only hope we have of eradicating the coronavirus. If too many Americans continue to doubt the value of vaccines, coverage will be low and success could be elusive. In the developing world, particularly Africa, misinformation compounds the mistrust of Western endorsed public health campaigns that have been a remnant of colonialism and a result of such Western backed fiascos as the American government's use of polio vaccination as a cover to find Osama bin Laden. We have seen the catastrophic effect of that mistrust in South Africa's early denial of the AIDS epidemic. In Tanzania, the president, despite the deaths of several members of Parliament from Covid 19, has adopted a dangerous mix of denialism and miracle cure mongering to address the epidemic in his nation. It is also problematic when misinformation can be tied to the White House or when a prominent French doctor suggested that vaccine trials should be conducted on Africans, "a bit like it is done for some studies on AIDS," on prostitutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Re "Trump Threatens to Use Force in Major Cities" (front page, July 21): What goes into the formula that President Trump used to send federal forces to Portland, Ore.? Portland has a Democratic mayor. The governor is a Democrat, as are the two senators. Any objections by these Democratic officials will fall on deaf ears in Mr. Trump's America. The president says "New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore" could be next because they are "all run by liberal Democrats." The president does not treat the coronavirus as the enemy. He does not treat Russians who may have paid bounties for the lives of American soldiers as the enemy. The enemy is the Democratic Party, and the only war that moves him is the election. There is only one way this war against our citizens can end. Republicans must speak out now. You have the only voices the president can hear. Your silence is deafening. In a different era, President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect protesters after John Lewis and others were savaged by the police. Over the objections of state and city officials, Mr. Trump has decided that his election fortunes may improve if he foments violence by federal officers in Portland. He threatened to do so in Chicago and elsewhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Lilly Leas was raised in Palm Beach, Fla., surrounded by the sea, bright tropical colors and a loving family with a strong work ethic. This was enthusiastically demonstrated by her grandmother Lilly Pulitzer, who designed a namesake collection of preppy pink, green and orange fashion frocks, which she originally sold at a small juice stand. Like her grandmother, Ms. Leas, 28, is smart, funny, down to earth and unafraid of challenges. "Mom and Lilly are similar in that they each loved working," said Minnie Pulitzer McCluskey, Ms. Leas's mother, adding: "Mom had tons of energy and a huge desire to create. Lilly is exactly the same." After founding a South Florida public relations firm and running it for two years, Lilly Leas quit to attend the University of Florida, where last month she received an M.B.A. Beginning in July, she will be in business management and corporate development at NextEra Energy, a nuclear electric power company in Juno Beach, Fla. They didn't get close until late 2008, when Mr. Ferreira, in his senior year, persuaded Ms. Leas to take a money and banking class with him. "I'm a morning person, so it took some convincing for me to agree to a three hour Monday night class," she said. After the course ended, they talked on the phone, texted and often played tennis, but there was no romance. "We were both focused on ourselves," Ms. Leas said. "I was studying finance, and Sean was working hard to find the right career after he got his business degree. It was almost like we both needed to find our own paths before we could join each other's." In late spring 2010, the night before Mr. Ferreira was departing for a monthlong international trip, he and Ms. Leas attended a party in West Palm Beach with 10 other friends. She realized there was something more to their connection. It was time to make a move. "Sean and I were friends for so long," she said. "But he gave me butterflies and I said to myself, 'It's now or never.' So I pulled him aside." Once they made eye contact, Ms. Leas had no doubt passion was in the room, but unfortunately so were their friends. "We were staring at each other, and we both knew," Ms. Leas said. "We tried to talk but kept getting yanked away and ended up going home separately." During the time he was gone they had no contact. But on the day he returned to Palm Beach, he called Ms. Leas. Their first date was a tennis match followed by sharing a pizza from the trunk of his vehicle. "We had a great time just being together," she said. They dated every weekend leading up to her 21st birthday party in late September, which was when Ms. Leas's family got a whiff of their romance. "There was real energy between us," Mr. Ferreira said. Mrs. McCluskey said: "Lilly had great high school boyfriends, but it was different with Sean from the very beginning. There was a spark, a twinkle in their eyes. We knew something special was happening even back then." Two months later, Ms. Leas and Mr. Ferreira took their first vacation together, a spontaneous Christmas holiday break in Montreal. "We had so much fun that I decided to invite Sean on a 10 day family trip to the Bahamas," she said. But these trips are not for the faint of heart. Twenty or more members of the Pulitzer clan rent a house to snorkel, spearfish, swim, picnic and trawl with their boat. They also host competitive talent shows, which Ms. Leas often wins with her musical parodies of the family's vacations in the Bahamas. "Sean fit in with our family so well on that first trip," Mrs. McCluskey said. "He has this huge, amazing heart, and I have to admit that it was really fun to see how he loves to fish, dive, surf, travel and work like a fiend." In April 2013, when Lilly Pulitzer died, Mr. Ferreira further bonded with the family, cutting short a California work trip. "Sean was there for me and my family like he always had been," Ms. Leas said. "Granny was always full of life, and I like to remember Sean's time with her." Not long after, the couple learned Mr. Ferreira was offered a job with Vans that would take him across five states to visit clients. "I was excited yet worried," Mr. Ferreira said of being away so often. "But Lilly encouraged me to do this. I learned a lot from her about never settling and always challenging myself." Mr. Ferreira's father, David Ferreira, said it was just another indication of the couple's drive to succeed and their love for each other. "They feel comfortable with whatever they are doing together," he said. "But they are not on top of the other, they have always given each other space." In 2014, Ms. Leas left a fund raising job to start a public relations business, but this didn't keep the couple from running marathons together and traveling. Ms. Leas said both her family and Mr. Ferreira's instilled the idea that travel is an essential part of life. "So we've always prioritized experiences over things," she said. "With no debt, good jobs and no kids, we've been able to save a good amount and spend when we can on travel. We stay focused on earning, saving and planning the next adventure." That fall, they flew to Japan, landed in Shinjuku and arrived at their hotel around 2 a.m., starving. "We had no plan but found a hole in the wall down a dark alley and ordered six unknown items that looked gross, but we ate them all," she said with a laugh. But by 2016, as their romance was blazing and their careers booming, Ms. Leas announced she wanted to sell her business, follow her heart and study for an M.B.A., which would take her out of town and away from Mr. Ferreira. They discussed every aspect of such a major decision, such as the finances, how they would see each other and who would care for Conch, a rescue dog they adopted three years earlier. They decided Mr. Ferreira would keep the dog and send her regular photos. Ms. Leas was accepted to the University of Florida's accelerated program in Gainesville. While there, they talked constantly and saw each other frequently; Mr. Ferreira traveled to cities near Gainesville for work, and Ms. Leas went home many weekends. They even managed a long February weekend in Iceland where they dived in freezing water to touch two continental plates at the same time. They also survived a blizzard on a lonely road while there. "I was so scared, but Sean stayed cool," Ms. Leas said. "We laughed and got through it. That moment is when I knew I wanted to look at Sean's smile for the rest of my life." On July 1, during another Pulitzer family vacation in the Bahamas, Ms. Leas and Mr. Ferreira were gazing at shooting stars over the ocean aboard the Sea Hunter, the Pulitzer family boat. An engagement ring, with a conch pearl cleverly hidden under a diamond, was in Mr. Ferreira's pocket when he proposed, blurting out: "I can't wait to spend the rest of our lives together." They were married May 20 on a picture perfect evening at the Sailfish Club of Florida near their childhood homes. Before about 40 close friends and relatives, Ken Mahanes, an ordained Southern Baptist Minister, officiated the short nondenominational ceremony written mostly by Ms. Leas. Dr. Mahanes told the guests: "Lilly loves Sean's passion and drive, and Sean loves every part of Lilly, who views life as an adventure." Dr. Mahanes then turned to Ms. Leas, who was wearing an ivory Hayley Paige A line gown with a beaded bodice, flowing chiffon skirt and T strap back, and continued: "Sean admires your courage. Every day he falls more in love with you." Guests clapped and cheered as the couple enjoyed a lingering kiss. "Lilly has the best heart and is so smart," said Ms. Helander, a bridesmaid. "Sean's heart is on his sleeve, and he is always in a good mood. They are not interested in material things, each loves life experiences. They are the luckiest humans on earth because they met each other." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
With the ailing 92 year old Sumner M. Redstone in his final act as a media titan, the two rivals jousting over the future of his 40 billion entertainment empire repeatedly crisscrossed the country in the last several months to visit his mansion in a gated Beverly Hills enclave. Shari Redstone, the ostracized daughter who had been restricted from visiting until mid October, celebrated the holidays with her father, played games and discussed the media business. Mr. Redstone's grandchildren and two small great grandchildren also visited. When not together, the father and daughter communicated via FaceTime, sometimes several times a day. Philippe P. Dauman, the chief executive of Viacom who formed a close bond with Mr. Redstone decades ago when he was a young corporate lawyer, also frequented the estate. The two discussed business, watched basketball and talked about films Mr. Redstone had recently screened. The backdrop to those visits was an epic fight for money, power and love from Mr. Redstone, the controlling shareholder in Viacom and CBS. It was a story line that some Hollywood executives deemed too implausible for a movie or television series. On Thursday, Mr. Dauman won that initial battle for control when Viacom's board of directors named him executive chairman, succeeding Mr. Redstone. Yet Ms. Redstone has made her wishes clear. She was the sole Viacom director to vote against Mr. Dauman's nomination, and is opposed to having Mr. Dauman remain in charge. And so, the real fight has only just begun. "Shari is going to continue to advocate for what she believes to be in the best interests of Viacom shareholders," Nancy Sterling, a spokeswoman for Ms. Redstone, said in a statement. Though he is now simply chairman emeritus at Viacom and CBS, where he also ceded his role as executive chairman, Mr. Redstone continues to hold about 80 percent of the voting stock in the two companies through National Amusements, the private theater chain company started by his father. He legendarily survived a fire in a Boston hotel when he was 55 years old, grasping onto a window ledge while sustaining serious burns. In the following decades, he emerged as one of the most tenacious moguls in the entertainment industry. His personal life also made headlines, with two marriages, a string of girlfriends and feuds with both his daughter and his now estranged son. Upon Mr. Redstone's death, his stake in National Amusements is to be held by an irrevocable trust created to benefit his five grandchildren. Voting control of that trust is to be passed on to seven trustees, among whom alliances are now being formed. The trust could support the two succession plans enacted this week by the boards of Viacom and CBS, but it also could act like an activist shareholder, contesting those decisions, installing a new board and leadership team or even making moves to sell the company. Ms. Redstone will have her own constituency on the trust, starting with herself and her adult son Tyler Korff. Leonard L. Lewin, the divorce lawyer for Shari's mother, Mr. Redstone's wife of 52 years, is also a trustee. But Mr. Dauman is also a member of the trust, as is George S. Abrams, a Boston lawyer and a longtime Viacom director. The other trustees are David R. Andelman, a CBS director, and Norman I. Jacobs, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Redstone. Ms. Redstone, who controls the remaining 20 percent of National Amusements, has publicly feuded with her father over the years. In 2014, she declined a 1 billion buyout offer from her father for her stake in National Amusements, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. Though the terms of the trust state that she succeed her father as chairman at both CBS and Viacom, she has made clear that she does not intend to do so. But she also does not support Mr. Dauman in the role because of his position on the trust. Ms. Redstone is seeking a "leader with an independent voice," she said in a statement on Wednesday. The appointment of Mr. Dauman as Viacom's executive chairman rankled some investors concerned about the company's performance. While both CBS and Viacom face challenges in a changing industry, Viacom's businesses including the cable networks Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, and the Paramount movie studio have had the more difficult path over the last year. Total revenue for the company declined 4 percent during the 2015 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. Profit was down about 20 percent during the period, when the company faced weak ratings and ad sales, and a lackluster film slate. Viacom's share price dropped nearly 45 percent during that fiscal year. "Phillippe has six to nine months to deliver, and it is very hard to see how he can do that," said Mario Gabelli, whose investment firm Gamco is the second largest voting shareholder in Viacom and CBS. "They need someone with a creative dynamic. You can't have a lawyer who is a deal guy in the digital world." Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Even as Viacom has floundered, the board has endorsed Mr. Dauman's leadership. His total compensation increased 22 percent to 54 million during the 2015 fiscal year, from 44 million the previous year. Excluding stock awards, Mr. Dauman's pay decreased about 16 percent to 37 million. Viacom has said that it is turning the corner and has a plan for succeeding in the digital future, a stance the board seemed to affirm on Thursday. "In choosing a successor to Sumner, the board considered the need for seasoned leadership in this time of unprecedented change, Philippe's business experience and unparalleled knowledge of Viacom, and his long term vision for the company," said William Schwartz, chairman of the governance and nominating committee of Viacom's board. "We believe his becoming executive chairman is in the best interests of the company and all shareholders." Corporate governance at both Viacom and CBS has been the target of scrutiny by investors in recent months, prompted by a lawsuit filed in November by a former companion of Mr. Redstone, which challenged the media mogul's mental capacity and depicted him as a "living ghost." Manuela Herzer, a onetime romantic partner of Mr. Redstone, claimed that a confession of infidelity by a girlfriend half his age had set Mr. Redstone on a physical and mental downward spiral, unable to follow more than a brief conversation and requiring round the clock nursing care. The petition included salacious and embarrassing personal details about his physical condition and his sexual demands. Ms. Herzer said she was concerned about Mr. Redstone's health care. His lawyers called the suit "meritless" and said she was after his money. Separately, a shareholder lawsuit has claimed that board members of Viacom and CBS were conflicted and put the interests of the Redstone family before those of the companies. As questions over corporate governance mounted over the last several weeks, the boards of both CBS and Viacom started setting succession plans into motion. On Tuesday, Mr. Redstone sent a letter to Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, and CBS directors announcing his resignation. The board subsequently met on Wednesday and nominated Mr. Moonves chairman. Ms. Redstone has voiced her support for Mr. Moonves. Viacom's board of directors discussed the chairman's role Thursday morning in a conference call, with Mr. Dauman participating from a long planned vacation in St. Bart's and Mr. Redstone calling from his estate. The board later announced it had consolidated power and control with Mr. Dauman, who has been chief executive of Viacom since September 2006. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
new video loaded: For the Birds? Sure, It's New York Real Estate | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
THE PROBLEM WITH EVERYTHING My Journey Through the New Culture Wars By Meghan Daum Here's the problem with Meghan Daum's electrifying new book, "The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars." It's a critique of feminism's "fourth wave," a social media driven movement articulating not just the rights of women, along with microaggression concepts like "mansplaining," but also the fuzzier tenets of "intersectionality," a hitherto hidden matrix of privilege and oppression. But trickily for readers in today's age striated world, three (approximately) generations encounter this feminist movement and the broader culture wars of which it is a part in at least three different ways. First, baby boomers. Think someone 70 plus, like my friend Peggy, happily retired, living in a leafy enclave, who wears Native American jewelry without irony (she's from Pennsylvania). She sends her grandchildren Apple products and money for their college tuitions from a comfortable distance. Typical gently amused exclamation, regarding nonbinary pronouns: "'They, them, their'? Please. It's not even grammatical!" Second, Gen Xers. Around 50, or about Daum's age, they're the sweet spot for this collection. Or sweet sour, if you will, caught as these aging Gen Xers are in the culture wars' saw blades. Many have children in their teens and 20s, so they mis gender at their continual peril. Their workplaces, particularly if at cultural institutions, have become professional minefields: In these fraught times, linguistic slips involving any kind of race or sex or "otherness" can trigger a layoff. (One radio producer remarked, over his barely touched quinoa salad: "I'm 61 if I can just hang on for four more years.") These beleaguered, not yet retired middle agers might want to discuss "The Problem With Everything" with the third generation: the millennials and Gen Z's. Thirty five and younger, this cadre occupies a new world, particularly if culturally "woke." Their social media teems with hashtags ( DGAF Don't Give a expletive ), eye rolling GIFs (Emma Stone), raw outrage (I. Can't. Even.). In 280 characters, Twittering S.J.W.s (social justice warriors) "call out" and "cancel" their oppressors. Daum acknowledges such behavior is understandable, even necessary: "Trumpism has made us feel that the world is out of control." However, she insists, the migration of MeToo to BelieveWomen also "fundamentally flew in the face of 'innocent until proven guilty.'" Yes, that's where Daum's going right to the messy part, where dinner party conversations go to die ( AlFranken, anyone?). "I've never been more afraid of writing a book," she confesses (wisely). "I've never been more certain I had to." But there are few apologies in these "eight chapters of method driven meandering," with "occasionally inflamed, possibly unhinged gut reactions" (part of the fun, and terror). It may help to calm readers (especially younger ones) to remember that Daum is not a policymaker but rather a lauded memoirist and personal essayist. "My Misspent Youth" considered debt, "Life Would Be Perfect if I Lived in That House" real estate and "The Unspeakable" sentimentality. This book considers feminism in part because, as a friend advised Daum: "As a straight, cisgendered, able bodied, (mostly) heteronormative white chick, it's the only thing available to you anyway." She begins with a snapshot of feminism's history. Its first wave involved women obtaining property and voting rights. The second wave the 1960s and '70s, the era of Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine shifted focus to reproduction and workplace equality. For Daum's mother, the 1970s came too late: Her feminism meant buying Marlo Thomas's "Free to Be ... You and Me." But the new androgyny boom was, for a girl, freeing. In the 1975 Sears catalog, 98 percent of the toys were marketed to both boys and girls. On "Zoom," the hit '70s PBS television show for kids, the young cast wore unisex rugby shirts. Biggest child stars? Jodie Foster and Kristy McNichol, who "mapped proto queerness over every Disney film and ABC drama they appeared in." "I believe this is one of the great gifts of being a member of Generation X," Daum writes. "I also believe it's a big part of the reason many feminists my age have a hard time relating to younger feminists" raised with less explicitly gender neutral imagery. By 2005, after a murkier third wave ("a mishmash of aesthetics," "rock bands with vague ideologies attached to them"), less than a quarter of American women identified as feminists. Then came the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, when Beyonce kicked it before a giant lit up "FEMINIST" sign and "feminist" and "badass" became actual brands. (Christian Dior's "We Should All Be Feminists" T shirt currently retails for 860.) In 2011, the writer Flavia Dzodan declared: "My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bull expletive ." By 2016, struggling financially, seeing her quote reprinted worldwide on T shirts, tote bags and mugs with zero royalties, Dzodan updated her motto: "My feminism will be capitalist, appropriative, bull expletive merchandise." So feminist's nascent fourth wave abuts this tricky nexus where celebrity, marketing and journalistic clickbait collide. Does it matter if the cause like MeToo is just? Generations disagree. Case in point: Aziz Ansari. (Gen Z: On our bad date, Ansari did not read my cues re: sex! Gen X: So call Uber! Gen Z: You're ancient hags; no one cares what you think!) That said, Daum's analysis of college "rape culture" should make everyone (at least, Democrats of all ages) unhappy. In 2011, the Obama administration's Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter enabled college officials to find a student guilty of misconduct even if they were just 51 percent convinced of the student's guilt. In 2014, 28 Harvard Law School professors declared the decree "overwhelmingly stacked against the accused"; in 2017, four of them, avowed feminists, sent a memo to the Department of Education in support of the agency head who rolled it back: Betsy DeVos. But Daum's not here for the warm and fuzzies. A lifelong Democrat, in 2019 she feels tribeless. Divorced in midlife another thread here she spends nights following intellectual heretics online while downing half bottles of wine. Daum has long been averse to easy emotion. "The Unspeakable" included "Matricide," her searingly unsentimental essay about her mother's death. Here she expresses contrarian delight at John McWhorter, one half of the self named "black guys on Bloggingheads.tv," who critiques white liberal fawning over Ta Nehisi Coates: "The elevation of that kind of dorm lounge performance art as serious thought is a kind of soft bigotry which is as nauseating as it is unintended." (This is sure to dismay those Daum calls the "NPR listening, New Yorker reading, Slate podcast downloading" "wokescenti.") A final, fittingly paradoxical figure is Joan Didion, whom fourth wave feminists regularly fangirl on click baity lists like "Badass Women of History" and "11 Times Joan Didion Was the Coolest Writer of All Time." Now in her 80s, Didion was recently a fashion icon for Celine; her sunglasses have gone for 2,500 on Kickstarter. Daum's book opens with a quote from Didion: "The half truths, repeated, authenticated themselves." It's from Didion's 1972 essay, "The Women's Movement" she thought it was a crock. (She also thought that Richard Nixon was too liberal.) All the book's pearl clutching (more likely Resist T shirt clutching) bombshells aside, Didion is Daum's literary inspiration. In the end, more truly a prosist than an activist, Daum bemoans most what's happened to language. "Posting ' expletive Trump' on Facebook every five minutes doesn't convey political resistance as much as verbal atrophy," she suggests. Words have "been starved of oxygen." Regarding today's hot takes and memes: "Woke me when it's over." So what is feminism anyway? If various generations can agree, it's perhaps that experienced, cantankerous female authors of a certain age can be problematic without being canceled. I think of Daum's 20 something "analog" memories of walking down a Manhattan street, being whistled at by some homeless dude, and instead of tweeting "OMG. I. Can't. Even." simply flipping the bird. Though on future retellings, Chanel sunglasses are likely inevitable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Wealth and influence in the technology business have always been about gaining the upper hand in software or the machines that software ran on. Now data gathered in those immense pools of information that are at the heart of everything from artificial intelligence to online shopping recommendations is increasingly a focus of technology competition. And academics and some policy makers, especially in Europe, are considering whether big internet companies like Google and Facebook might use their data resources as a barrier to new entrants and innovation. In recent years, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have all been targets of tax evasion, privacy or antitrust investigations. But in the coming years, who controls what data could be the next worldwide regulatory focus as governments strain to understand and sometimes rein in American tech giants. The European Commission and the British House of Lords both issued reports last year on digital "platform" companies that highlighted the essential role that data collection, analysis and distribution play in creating and shaping markets. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development held a meeting in November to explore the subject, "Big Data: Bringing Competition Policy to the Digital Era." As government regulators dig into this new era of data competition, they may find that standard antitrust arguments are not so easy to make. Using more and more data to improve a service for users and more accurately target ads for merchants is a clear benefit, for example. And higher prices for consumers are not present with free internet services. "You certainly don't want to punish companies because of what they might do," said Annabelle Gawer, a professor of the digital economy at the University of Surrey in England, who made a presentation at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development meeting. "But you do need to be vigilant. It's clear that enormous power is in the hands of a few companies." Maurice Stucke, a former Justice Department antitrust official and a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, who also spoke at the gathering, said one danger was that consumers might be afforded less privacy than they would choose in a more competitive market. The competition concerns echo those that gradually emerged in the 1990s about software and Microsoft. The worry is that as the big internet companies attract more users and advertisers, and gather more data, a powerful "network effect" effectively prevents users and advertisers from moving away from a dominant digital platform, like Google in search or Facebook in consumer social networks. Evidence of the rising importance of data can be seen from the frontiers of artificial intelligence to mainstream business software. And certain data sets can be remarkably valuable for companies working on those technologies. A prime example is Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn, the business social network, for 26.2 billion last year. LinkedIn has about 467 million members, and it houses their profiles and maps their connections. Microsoft is betting LinkedIn, combined with data on how hundreds of millions of workers use its Office 365 online software, and consumer data from search behavior on Bing, will "power a set of insights that we think is unprecedented," said James Phillips, vice president for business applications at Microsoft. In an email to employees, Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, described the LinkedIn deal as a linchpin in the company's long term goal to "reinvent productivity and business processes" and to become the digital marketplace that defines "how people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done." IBM has also bet heavily on data for its future. Its acquisitions have tended to be in specific industries, like its 2.6 billion purchase last year of Truven Health, which has data on the cost and treatment of more than 200 million patients, or in specialized data sets useful across several industries, like its 2 billion acquisition of the digital assets of the Weather Company. IBM estimates that 70 percent of the world's data is not out on the public web, but in private databases, often to protect privacy or trade secrets. IBM's strategy is to take the data it has acquired, add customer data and use that to train its Watson artificial intelligence software to pursue such tasks as helping medical researchers discover novel disease therapies, or flagging suspect financial transactions for independent auditors. "Our focus is mainly on nonpublic data sets and extending that advantage for clients in business and science," said David Kenny, senior vice president for IBM's Watson and cloud businesses. At Google, the company's drive into cloud delivered business software is fueled by data, building on years of work done on its search and other consumer services, and its recent advances in image identification, speech recognition and language translation. For example, a new Google business offering still in the test, or alpha, stage is a software service to improve job finding and recruiting. Its data includes more than 17 million online job postings and the public profiles and resumes of more than 200 million people. Its machine learning algorithms distilled that to about four million unique job titles, ranked the most common ones and identified specific skills. The job sites CareerBuilder and Dice are using the Google technology to show job seekers more relevant openings. And FedEx, the giant package shipper, is adding the service to its recruiting site. That is just one case, said Diane Greene, senior vice president for Google's cloud business, of what is becoming increasingly possible using the tools of artificial intelligence, notably machine learning, to sift through huge quantities of data to provide machine curated data services. "You can turn this technology to whatever field you want, from manufacturing to medicine," Ms. Greene said. Fei Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is taking a sabbatical to become chief scientist for artificial intelligence at Google's cloud unit. She sees working at Google as one path to pursue her career ambition to "democratize A.I.," now that the software and data ingredients are ripe. "We wouldn't have the current era of A.I. without the big data revolution," Dr. Li said. "It's the digital gold." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the eighth and final season of "Homeland," the C.I.A. officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) returns to Afghanistan and comes across the child of a contact she dealt with years ago. He's growing tall now. When she last saw him, he barely came up to her knee. "Homeland," which returns Sunday night on Showtime, is about a lot of things, personal and geopolitical. But at its most powerful, the new season conjures that simple, sad feeling: My God, it's been so long. All of this the war, the fear, the vengeance has been with us for so many years, it's hard to remember a time without it. That feeling was built into "Homeland." It began, in 2011, a full decade since the Sept. 11 attacks. "24" the show's precursor, with which "Homeland" shares creative talent had by then aired eight seasons. Where "24" flourished in the fight or flight rush of 9/11's aftermath, spinning out cathartic fantasies of ever bigger terrorist attacks on the United States, "Homeland" looked at the psychic cost of all those years of fighting and catastrophizing. Jack Bauer, the tortured torturer of "24," took on the physical burden of the war on terror. He was a hard boiled St. Sebastian, pin cushioned with all the arrows he took for us over the years. "Homeland," created by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa of "24" and based on an Israeli series, focused on the war's internal wounds through Carrie, an officer living with bipolar disorder as well as lingering horror at the intelligence failures before 9/11. As dicey as it can be to use actual mental illness as a symbol for national trauma, Carrie was a kind of synecdoche for a rattled America. She both fought the shadow war for us and felt it more intensely so when she took the case of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), an American prisoner of war turned by his captors into a sleeper agent, who became her target and her lover. There could have been a version of "Homeland" that ran as a single, devastating limited series and went out a legend. This version did not. As it spun Brody's story into a second season, then killed him off in a third, it began to suffer from implausibility and plot one upmanship. And though it had a greater political sophistication than "24" and its like, "Homeland" still tended to see its non American characters more as objects than subjects. This blind spot was manifest in Season 5 when artists hired to tag a refugee camp set with Arabic graffiti painted "'Homeland' is racist" into their work without anyone on the production noticing. But even in its weaker seasons, "Homeland" was bolstered by a commitment to nuance, in its politics and its characters. Danes's raw nerve performance has been stunning throughout. And Carrie's partnership with Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) has been one of TV's most complicated pairings: They've been mentor and pupil, peers, surrogate family, adversaries and uneasy allies, their interactions charged simultaneously with warmth and with a necessary professional chill. Over the years, the thriller evolved to focus not just on America and the Islamic world but on crises within the West as well. In the most recent season, in 2018, Russian operatives launched a disinformation campaign that precipitated a constitutional crisis in the United States and ultimately led to the resignation of the president as well as Carrie's capture by the Russians, who withheld the medication that had kept her stable. It was a powerful treatment of a current day America where the horror had moved from sleeper cells to troll farms, where enemies attacked us not with our own aircraft but with our own animus. All these years, anxious and angry, we had been whetting sharper and sharper blades, the better to cut ourselves with. In the new season, Saul, now the national security adviser to the new president, Ralph Warner (Beau Bridges), is conducting negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan at last. When the peace process is undermined, he recruits Carrie, still recovering from spending months in a psychotic state as a captive though the C.I.A. is concerned that she revealed information during the long stretch of her imprisonment that she can't recall. This setup brings "Homeland" full circle. Carrie, having sacrificed her sanity and even custody of her daughter by Brody in the service of her mission, has to readjust to fieldwork while wondering, herself, what she might have said while the Russians had broken her. She may, in a way, be Brody now, and one of her own adversaries is herself at least, the mysterious, unmedicated version of herself lost to her own memory. The first four episodes of the season have their wild plot lurches but also the gimlet eye for human nature of "Homeland" at its best. Danes gives us a Carrie who's older and wiser ("I'm not as fun as I used to be," she deadpans, ordering a nonalcoholic drink) but also wrenchingly aware of her own precariousness. And the show is conscious of the collateral damage of the great game, as with the story of Samira Noori (Sitara Attaie), an Afghan woman whose husband was killed by a car bomb after she spoke out against government corruption. There's an elegiac feeling to "Homeland" returning to the site of a war a generation old. The season returns a number of characters from past seasons, but the long war, in a way, is the ultimate enemy formless, multiheaded and endlessly able to reconstitute itself and survive. There are glimmers of hope that this time might finally be different. But the show's realpolitik worldview suggests that you not bet on it, as it demonstrates in a scene that captures the mind set of endless war in miniature. Bunny Latif (Art Malik), a retired Pakistani general who figured into Season 4, is sitting with a revolver in his garden, where to the consternation of his neighbors he's been shooting the squirrels who steal from his bird feeders. Asked why he doesn't simply stop filling the feeders rather than spend his free hours turning his backyard into a war zone, he answers as if the question were insane: "That wouldn't be fair on the birds, would it?" In big wars and small ones, "Homeland" tells us, people can always find reasons to stick to their guns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, a ferocious song from Screaming Females' new album, 5 Seconds of Summer returns with a different sound and something extra: four bonus jazz tracks. 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. A clear punk pop structure does absolutely nothing to temper the ferocity of "I'll Make You Sorry" from "All at Once," the seventh album by the New Jersey band Screaming Females. Marissa Paternoster, the band's leader, singer and guitarist, sings the title with calm certainty at the beginning and makes it a rising threat as a repeated refrain; vocal melody, sharpened with Ms. Paternoster's penetrating vibrato, prevails in both verses and choruses, even as she flings shards of guitar from above and below. And the chorus is cutting: "I once was in love before I knew you/But I've given up." It's a song that accepts convention instead of veering wildly out of it, as Screaming Females songs have often done, and in the first verse, Ms. Paternoster sings, "Am I losing faith in my own anger?" No, just packaging it more tightly. J.P. Like many Bay Area rappers, Mozzy (from Sacramento) has been persistent, releasing around a dozen full length projects in the last three years. But he raps with the pensive tone of someone in no rush, answering only to himself. Coming off a shout out from Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys, he's just released a new single, "Nobody Knows," on which he continues to play earthen spiritualist, a man forever grappling with the here and now. JON CARAMANICA Drum line marches. Piano blues turnarounds. A duet between the conceptual artist Theaster Gates and the singing bassist Katie Ernst on Schubert's "Der Doppelganger." And, all over the place, the loose energy of the Kenwood Academy Jazz Band, a Chicago high school orchestra that superimposes an unexpected new dimension on Jason Moran's trio, the Bandwagon. A pre eminent jazz pianist, Jason Moran wrote "Looks of a Lot," a suite of blues derived compositions, in close collaboration with Mr. Gates. He debuted the music in a 2014 concert, and it's out in recorded form on Friday on Yes Records, the label Mr. Moran runs with his wife, the operatic vocalist Alicia Hall Moran. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO "Next to Me" is one of countless recent songs about gratitude for being loved despite so many imperfections, and it's delivered with folky fingerpicked guitar and an oh so sincere vocal. Yet as the narrator lists some unusual flaws "stress lines and cigarettes/politics and deficits" the beat constantly resists the rest of the song. In most of Imagine Dragons' big anthems, the drumbeat marches proudly in support of the melody, while in "Next to Me," the drums loudly sock a constant waltz against the 4/4 of guitar and voice. "I'll always let you down," the chorus proclaims. "Still I find you there next to me." Could this narrator be a hugely unpopular president speaking to his loyal base? J.P. Driving but not quite urgent, structured but not quite strong, anticipatory but not quite felt: "Saturdays" is the better of a pair of new songs from Twin Shadow (the project of George Lewis Jr.). It's laser focused on 1984, from the jumpy John Hughes soundtrack post new wave rock to the Bruce Springsteen reference to the light Prince brush strokes. And yet it's all nods and winks, homage that's careful not to ask any questions that haven't already been answered. J.C. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
In another sign that the value of sports media rights is still growing rapidly, the PGA Tour is expected on Monday to announce a lucrative new media rights agreement through 2030. Golf tournaments will remain on CBS, NBC and the Golf Channel where they have been shown since the mid 2000s while ESPN will show ancillary content on ESPN , its digital streaming service. While none of the parties would comment on the value of the agreement, four people familiar with the negotiations said the media companies would pay at least a 60 percent increase, even as golf's biggest star and driver of ratings, Tiger Woods, nears the end of his career. The current agreement runs through 2021, and is estimated to pay the PGA Tour 400 million annually. With tens of billions of dollars of sports media rights agreements expiring over the next few years, the PGA Tour purposefully began negotiations more than two years before its contracts were set to expire. "We wanted to be out in front of everybody," said Rick Anderson, the chief media officer of the PGA Tour. "Everyone who can go early in the sports marketplace is going to try to do that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Anna Laerkesen, a leading ballerina in the Royal Danish Ballet who, breaking a traditional mold, won international acclaim for her poetic originality as a dancer in the 1960s and later as a choreographer, died on Jan. 14 in Copenhagen. She was 73. Her death was reported by the Danish newspapers Politiken and Berlingske, which did not specify a cause. When Ms. Laerkesen joined the Royal Danish Ballet at 17, virtually all its members trained at the company's school. Ms. Laerkesen, however, studied with Edite Frandsen, a private teacher in Copenhagen, before spending a year at the Royal Danish Ballet school in 1959. The same year she joined the company as an apprentice, cast in a supporting role in the signature Royal Danish ballet "La Sylphide," by the 19th century Danish choreographer August Bournonville. Shortly afterward, when she had a huge success in the title role of the elusive sylph, it was clear she had brought out something stunningly new. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
James Galanos, a fashion designer who spent decades dressing America's social elite, most notably Nancy Reagan, died on Sunday at his home in West Hollywood, Calif. He was 92. His death was confirmed by Rosina Rucci, the sister of Mr. Galanos's friend and fellow designer Ralph Rucci. During his long career, Mr. Galanos (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable) earned the most accolades his industry had to offer, including several Coty Awards (he was the youngest designer to win one, in 1954), a lifetime achievement award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America and a bronze plaque on Seventh Avenue's Fashion Walk of Fame. He dressed the famous and the socially prominent the ladies who lunched, from Park Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue and outfitted Mrs. Reagan on four inaugural occasions, twice after Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California and twice after he became president. "Ronnie liked Jimmy's clothes very much," Mrs. Reagan said in a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair magazine. "Wearing Jimmy meant never going overboard or to extremes. Jimmy really set the standard." On another occasion, she remarked of a Galanos dress that "you can wear one inside out, they are so beautifully made." Mr. Galanos was in many ways as renowned for what he declined as what he embraced. More than any other American designer, he embodied the concept that elegance is refusal. He evaded celebrity, never sought a broad clientele and actively shunned the fashion establishment and its press. He did not stage fashion shows. He contented himself with providing precisely executed, chaste and ingeniously cut clothing to a small and unswervingly devoted group from what was once termed "the luxury niche." "I'm only interested in designing for a certain type of woman," Mr. Galanos once said. "Specifically, one that has money." Although his name was for decades among the best known and most revered in American fashion, he did not transform himself into a mass market brand, as his contemporaries Bill Blass and Geoffrey Beene did. While others developed less expensive collections and long lists of licensees manufacturing products under their names, Mr. Galanos stuck to designing costly luxury clothing. "There was an establishment quality to Galanos, a sense of privilege around his clothes," Harold Koda, a former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, told Vanity Fair. "A Galanos projected knockout glamour, absolute luxury, but the lightness of his handiwork prevented the clothes from ever looking like costume." Mr. Galanos authorized just two licenses one for furs and one for perfume between 1951, when he opened Galanos Originals in Los Angeles, and his retirement in 1998 from a business he believed had become irretrievably crass. "How many women can wear just a patch over their crotch and bra?" he asked in an interview with Women's Wear Daily at the time. "Aren't you embarrassed when you see a young girl walking down the street practically naked?" "Like a master craftsman, Mr. Galanos is constantly seeking new ways to achieve different effects, to extend the range of dressmaking techniques," Bernardine Morris, the New York Times fashion critic, observed in 1993. The French couturier Hubert de Givenchy seconded that opinion. "We don't make them this well in Paris," he said. When Mr. Galanos was given a career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1997, his work was reviewed by art critics, a sign of how successfully he had bridged the gulf between the fine and applied arts in creating designs that demanded to be taken seriously as cultural totems. A critic for Artforum magazine went so far as to inventory the component parts of a simple evening dress from 1969: "Bodice of black over yellow silk chiffon, vertically pin tucked; bead embroidery by D. Getson; Eastern embroidery; skirt of white silk and printed matelasse (double weave), printed in yellow, pink, pale green and brown with a black ground by Staron with a self belt by Winton." Although Mr. Galanos said when he retired that he had "no plans except to relax," in recent years he had turned his attention to photography, shooting both black and white landscapes and abstract works in color. Mr. Galanos was born on Sept. 20, 1924, in Philadelphia, to Gregory Galanos and Helen Gorgoliatos, immigrants from Naoussa, a town in Greek Macedonia, who ran a restaurant in southern New Jersey. He was raised in Bridgeton, N.J., and, after graduation from the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York in 1943, found work as a journeyman selling sketches to design houses, a common practice in the days before dressmakers automatically pitched their ambitions toward universal name recognition. Information on survivors was not immediately available. For a time Mr. Galanos worked as an assistant to the designer Hattie Carnegie. He decamped at age 20 for California, where he apprenticed himself to the costume designer Jean Louis at Columbia Studios. With the exception of an unpaid yearlong internship with the Parisian couturier Robert Piguet and a brief stint as a ready to wear designer in New York, he remained in California for the rest of his career. Yet he was never allied with his more adventurous West Coast competition, the designers from what is called the Golden Age of California who laid the groundwork for the athletic, sportswear inspired styles that became a potent cultural export of postwar America. While Los Angeles contemporaries like Rudi Gernreich explored futurism with topless swimsuits, thongs and monokinis, Mr. Galanos stuck to supplying the "little nothing" dresses that were his trademark to a coterie of celebrity loyalists like Marlene Dietrich, Rosalind Russell and Diana Ross, and to the moneyed elite of both coasts. Shortly after he established Galanos Originals, Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills and Neiman Marcus in Dallas placed orders. Influential fashion editors soon championed his work, and his reputation was established. Among his early clients was Grace Kelly. Stanley Marcus, the chairman emeritus of Neiman Marcus, once recalled that with her wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco approaching in 1956, she decided that "she didn't have the right thing to wear, so she called Jimmy and said she needed one of his beautiful chiffon dresses" within a week. He delivered. When Mr. Galanos retired from fashion in 1998, he was asked what he considered to be the highlight of his career. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Jack Renner, who with Robert Woods founded Telarc, a record label whose carefully engineered recordings were prized by audiophiles and won dozens of Grammy Awards 11 of them for him personally died on June 19 at his home in Portsmouth, R.I. He was 84. His daughter, Elizabeth Click, said the cause was cancer. In the early 1960s Mr. Renner was a high school music teacher in Cleveland looking for a way out of teaching when he began to turn a hobby, recording things, into a business. "There were a number of pressing plants around the country advertising in music magazines: 'Send us your tape and we'll make it a record,' " he told Stereophile magazine in 1998. "I found one that was doing franchising they set you up with professional gear and taught you the basics. My business was dealing mostly with high schools, churches, colleges, community choruses, bands, for I hate the term 'souvenir records.' " He soon met and teamed up with Mr. Woods, a vocal soloist who sang at Cleveland churches. Mr. Woods's contacts with musicians in the Cleveland Orchestra expanded the business, with various players in the orchestra making vanity records. "It gave us an opportunity to record some very fine musicians," Mr. Renner recalled in that interview. The two formed Telarc in Cleveland in 1977, starting off with a certain audacity: Recording Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra, they employed the rarely used direct to disc method, which captured the sound directly onto a disc rather than tape and was thought to offer superior audio quality. The album was called "Direct From Cleveland." "It met with mixed success," Mr. Renner said in a 2011 interview with the Audio Engineering Society. "There were too many fingers in the pie." But, he added, "it put us on the map." "It created a lot of stir among audiophiles," he said. "It had a bass drum that blew up speakers. Everybody accused us of hyping the bass drum. We didn't." Mr. Renner was Telarc's chief engineer, tackling the difficult task of how to record ensembles in a way that would capture the truest sound. Others were soon trying to copy his microphone placement practices. "When I first started making orchestral recordings with three and four microphones, I had a lot of imitators," Mr. Renner told Stereophile. "But people just didn't quite get it right. Because it's not just putting up three or four mikes. It's which mikes you choose, it's the cable, it's the electronics it's the whole signal path." He won the first of his Grammys in 1985, for best engineered classical recording, for an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra recording of Berlioz. But, with his projects scrutinized by audiophiles with exacting standards and varying tastes, he was always conscious that perfection was in the ear of the listener. "Direct From Cleveland" (1977), Telarc's first release, employed the rarely used direct to disc method, which captured the sound directly onto a disc rather than tape and was thought to offer superior audio quality. "I used to say that my recordings are made from the perspective of the best seat in the house," he told Stereophile. "And immediately, of course, somebody says, 'Well, who are you to say what's the best seat in the house?' " Jack Lee Renner was born on April 13, 1935, in Barnesville, in eastern Ohio. His father, Wade, was a dispatcher for the Ohio Highway Patrol and had played trumpet in the Marine Band. His mother, Elizabeth Decker Renner, was a homemaker. Jack grew up in Freeport, Ohio, and began playing the trumpet himself at 10. An uncle introduced him to the wire recorder, starting him on a hobby that would become a profession. Mr. Renner attended Ohio State University, receiving a bachelor of science degree in music education in 1960. He began teaching high school and strung together various jobs in his off hours. "I was doing everything possible to make ends meet," he said. "I directed a church choir and a semiprofessional men's chorus. I played in jazz groups and taught private lessons." After he and Mr. Woods started Telarc, they regularly recorded the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Pops, the Cleveland Orchestra and other classical ensembles. In addition to being an early adopter of digital recording technology, Mr. Renner and Telarc were quick to get into the compact disc game; Telarc issued its first CDs in 1983. If that turn to CDs produced any trepidation among Telarc fans, many of whom still viewed LPs as the purest form of recorded music, it did not last. Richard Dyer, reviewing a new Cleveland Quartet album in The Boston Globe in 1987, called it "an absolutely wonderful compact disc." "The sound of the string quartet is not the easiest thing to capture in the digital/compact disc format most string quartet CDs this listener has heard make him reach for the Anacin but Telarc has managed to make it sound musical," Mr. Dyer wrote. Mr. Woods and Mr. Renner eventually branched out from their classical roots, most notably into jazz: They recorded Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, John Pizzarelli, Dave Brubeck and others. In 2005, Telarc was acquired by the Concord Music Group, and Mr. Renner retired. Mr. Renner married Barbara Bates in 1961; she died in 1970. His second marriage, to Carol G. Reed in 1971, ended in divorce in 1994. In addition to Ms. Click, his second wife's daughter from a previous marriage, whom he adopted, he is survived by his wife, Barbara Pease Renner; two sons, Scott and John; and six grandchildren. "I like to think of myself as being a re creator," Mr. Renner told Stereophile, "trying to re create an event that occurred in time and space." Although many have made glum predictions about the future market for classical recordings, Mr. Renner remained optimistic. "I believe that as long as consumers are attending concerts and hearing live music they want to hear again," he told the audio site SoundStage! Ultra, "there will be an ongoing classical recording industry." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Like terrified moviegoers seated on the edges of their seats and at the mercy of their imaginations, astronomers expect this week to finally see the monster: a supermassive black hole. At 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday April 10, a group of astronomers who run a globe girdling network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to unveil their long awaited pictures of a pair of putative black holes. One of the objects sits at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, buried in the depths of interstellar dust and gas, and equivalent in mass to 4.1 million suns that otherwise have disappeared from the visible universe. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The other target is in the heart of Messier 87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo, where a black hole 7 billion times the mass of the sun is spewing a jet of energy thousands of light years across space. According to calculations, and if all has gone well, either or both of the black holes should appear as a tiny shadow backlit by the glow of radio energy at the galactic center. They might be circular, oval or some other shape entirely, depending on whether they are rotating, or if the Einsteinian equations describing them are slightly wrong, or if they are spitting flares of energy, which is how quasars produce fireworks visible across the universe. In such shadows the dreams of physicists die, time ends, space time, matter and light disappear into the primordial nothing from which they spring, and the ghosts of Einstein and Hawking mingle with history and memory. For the first time, astronomers will be staring down the pipes of eternity. If, in fact, astronomers have finally brought the monsters into view at last. The Event Horizon team has been extremely tight lipped. Nobody knows for certain if either of these black holes, if any, has been imaged. Shep Doeleman, director of the Event Horizon Telescope, was ebullient but guarded when reached last week at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "The team is working exceptionally hard to quadruple check all the results," he said. The unveiling will take place almost exactly a century after images of stars askew in the heavens made Einstein famous and confirmed his theory of general relativity as the law of the cosmos. That theory ascribes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper, and allows for the contents of the universe, including light rays, to follow curved paths. General relativity led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl like a mix master and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole. To Einstein's surprise, the equations indicated that when too much matter or energy was concentrated in one place, space time could collapse, trapping matter and light in perpetuity. Einstein disliked that idea, but the consensus today is that the universe is speckled with black holes waiting to vacuum up their surroundings. Many are the gravitational tombstones of stars that have burned up their fuel and collapsed. Any lingering doubts as to their existence vanished three years ago when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detected the collision of a pair of distant black holes, which sent a shiver through the fabric of space time. Since then, other collisions have been recorded, and black holes have become so humdrum that astronomers no longer bother sending out news releases about them. Nonetheless, astronomers are thrilled at the prospect of finally, actually seeing the previously unseeable. "Yes, I'm definitely excited to see the image!" Daniel Holz, of the University of Chicago, wrote in an email. "It's not really rational, since I know the math works and the theory has been thoroughly tested. But still, this would be a picture of the real thing, up close and personal. That is super cool." Priyamvada Natarajan, a Yale astrophysicist who is not part of the project, said, "It's exciting, even just technically, to get this up close and personal to a black hole." Especially when the black hole is no run of the mill stellar corpse, but one of the behemoths that crouch in the centers of galaxies and direct cosmic weather, launching thunderbolts across thousands of light years. Even if the new images do not overthrow relativity, they will be invaluable as astronomers' first glimpses into the hearts of these entities and the way they generate cosmically catastrophic energies. The center of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years from Earth, coincides with a faint source of radio noise called Sagittarius A (pronounced A star). By tracking the orbits of stars around this hub, astronomers have calculated that whatever sits at the center has the mass of four million suns. But it emits no visible or infrared light. If this is not a black hole, no one knows what it could be. The only way to be sure is to peer through the haze and record the shadow of oblivion. Which is no small job. According to the standard Einstein calculations, a black hole with the mass of 4.1 million suns would be only about 15 million miles wide a tiny area to observe clearly from this distance. Luckily, the black hole's gravity will magnify it to appear twice that size. But discerning even that is like trying to spot an orange on the Moon with the naked eye. It takes a big telescope to see something so small. Enter the Event Horizon Telescope, named for a black hole's point of no return; whatever crosses the event horizon falls into blackness everlasting. The telescope was the dream child of Dr. Doeleman, who was inspired to study black holes by examining the mysterious activity in the centers of violent radio galaxies such as M87. By combining data from radio telescopes as far apart as the South Pole, France, Chile and Hawaii, using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, Dr. Doeleman and his colleagues created a telescope as big as Earth itself. The network has gained antennas and sensitivity over the last decade. In April of 2017, the network of eight telescopes, synchronized by atomic clocks, stared at the Milky Way center and at the giant galaxy M87 off and on for 10 days. Astronomers have taken the last two years to reduce and collate the results. The data were too voluminous to transmit over the internet, and so had to be placed on hard disks and flown back to M.I.T.'s Haystack Observatory, in Westford, Mass., and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A question of unrivaled consequence has descended on this picturesque seaside city: Should the good citizens root for or against the Chargers, the football team that abandoned them a season ago but didn't go really all that far. In years past, the team's surprising success would be cause for widespread celebration. Fans would proudly wear team jerseys and caps, bars would overflow with viewing parties, and the team would dominate water cooler talk. The Chargers went 12 4 in the regular season, beat the Baltimore Ravens on the road in an A.F.C. wild card game, and now have a chance to topple the New England Patriots in Foxborough, Mass., on Sunday in the divisional round. But ambivalence has dominated San Diego's cool ocean breeze of late. After a long, messy fight over funding for a new stadium in San Diego that was never built, the Chargers left for Los Angeles in 2017, forcing legions of jilted fans to decide whether to follow the team north, or wash their hands of the beloved Bolts. Last year, the team began with four losses and missed the playoffs by a game, which made it easier for bereft fans to move on. Talk radio hosts trashed the team, an angry fan flew scathing banners over the team's new home in Carson, about a 45 minute drive south of Los Angeles (without traffic), and one restaurant owner gave out free tacos after every Chargers loss. Now the Chargers have returned to the postseason for the first time since 2013, recording their most wins in nearly a decade. The calculus has changed. Some fans are creeping back, making the 100 mile drive to Carson to watch the team or packing team friendly bars on game days. For other fans, the Chargers' success has deepened their resentment. "It's been a civil war and it's getting worse because the team is good," said Johnny Abundez, who is part of the fan group Bolt Pride and has been attacked for his continued allegiance. "The fight for San Diego has gotten personal." "It's O.K. to disagree, but not to be disagreeable," said Walchef, who has four Chargers season tickets at Dignity Health Sports Park, the team's temporary home. 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. Fans and former fans in San Diego have been bickering for years over whether to support the Chargers, but the effort to destroy someone's business crossed a line. A host of people jumped to Walchef's defense, including one of the team's most vocal opponents, Victor Lopez, who owns El Pollo Grill, a Mexican restaurant. Lopez, 42, is the restaurateur who was so angry that the team abandoned his hometown that he began giving out tacos after the team lost. The lines went out the door on Mondays and Tuesdays after defeats. He has given away about 4,000 tacos, by his estimate, but the publicity has brought Lopez an unexpected windfall. While some Chargers faithful stopped coming to his restaurants, many others have flocked. Lopez said sales were up about 25 percent because of the promotion. "But I'd give it all back to get my team back," he added. Still, the attacks on Walchef were too much, and Lopez, who said he once received a death threat, has defended his fellow restaurateur. In the spirit of civility, they made a bet: If the Chargers beat the Patriots on Sunday, Lopez will feed Walchef's staff. If the Patriots come out on top, Walchef will send barbecue to Lopez's workers. The loser will also donate to a GoFundMe campaign to help a local sports radio show host whose son recently died. The passions over loyalty to the Chargers in San Diego are a distant battle in Los Angeles, where the team is trying to find a foothold. The team plays in a small soccer stadium where visiting fans are often out in force, raising questions about whether the Chargers will be able to fill the 70,000 seat stadium they will share with the Rams starting in 2020. The team's recent success has eased some of those concerns. Sales of seat licenses at the new stadium being built in Inglewood have been brisk immediately after Chargers victories. Television viewership has ticked up in Los Angeles (and San Diego) after the team pulled off dramatic victories in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Baltimore. The Chargers are hopeful the team's resurgence will help them lock in key sponsors and a naming rights partner. "Timing is everything," Dean Spanos, the team's owner, said at the Chargers' practice facility in Costa Mesa this week. "Monday mornings are great when you win the playoffs." Still, winning over fans in Los Angeles will take time. The Chargers previously played just one season in Los Angeles, in 1960. The city is filled with transplants who root for their hometown team, and locals adopted other teams during the N.F.L.'s two decade absence from the market. The Rams, who arrived from St. Louis in 2016, have also battled the perception they are unloved in their new/old home. The team has a longer history in Los Angeles, having played in the area for nearly 50 years. But Rams home games are on occasion overflowing with fans of the visiting teams at the cavernous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Still, the Rams, who have won their division two straight years, are further ahead than the Chargers. The team's attendance jumped 14 percent this year, and its television ratings grew 49 percent compared with last season. When the Rams' game against the Chiefs was moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City, the team sold more than 75,000 tickets in just five days. Kevin Demoff, the Rams' chief operating officer, said that although it will take years to fully win over fans in the city, interest in the team is likely to grow when its new stadium opens. Already, the team has sold out its inventory of top priced seat licenses, which cost 100,000 each. "Once you add this new stadium, and the seen and be seen factor, it will dial up the brand," he said. The Chargers, though, are in an unusual position. While most fans in St. Louis have washed their hands of the Rams, the Chargers' biggest group of supporters are within driving distance, though many are unwilling to make the trek to Carson. "I understand how the San Diego fans feel," Spanos said. "I knew coming up here it was going to take maybe a generation to build that kind of fan base." In the meantime, fans in San Diego are searching for a new identity. Some fans like Walchef plan to buy season tickets at the team's new stadium. Others support the team but refuse to buy Chargers gear with the words "Los Angeles" on it. A few fans travel to Carson to tailgate but refuse to enter the stadium. "They left and it was a kick in the gut for me, and I've been an anti fan since then," said Abrams, who is donating all of his Chargers gear to charity. "My biggest fear is they'll get to the Super Bowl. We love a lot of the players, like Philip Rivers, but I can't get past what the ownership did to the city." Rivers, who has played his entire career with the Chargers, still lives in San Diego. He has urged residents to stay classy amid the consternation. "San Diego will always be special for me, and for many of us," he said. "You hope that some of those fans can be happy and be excited for the team they cheered for. We know that many of them may not. We know it is a hard decision and position to be in. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Designing a home with personal touches will make it your own but it could also make it harder to find buyers when you decide to move on. Decorating is always a very personal thing. Family photos, custom tile, a favorite chair in a quirky pattern these are the kind of things that can turn an empty shell into a home. But is it possible to take it too far? Could, say, an all gold master bathroom, a saltwater pool inside a townhouse or a rock climbing wall in a finished basement cost more than the price of the renovation? As special as these places may be, appraisers and brokers say that excessive customization can affect the price of a property when it is time to sell and, perhaps more important, limit the pool of potential buyers. "One of the biggest misunderstandings about property value is that the amenities you choose to add will translate to value," said Jonathan Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Because taste can be so specific, he said, "unless you find the perfect buyer, you're probably going to have to factor in a discount for the price to rip it out and renovate." Simply put: That rock climbing wall may have cost 15,000 to build, but you shouldn't assume that you can automatically tack that sum onto the asking price when you decide to sell, because not everyone will want a custom feature like that. When Jessica Schur began designing her dream home, a brand new, three story modern farmhouse in Greenwich, Conn., in 2017, creating an indoor playroom for her children, Austin, 7, and Julia, 3, was a priority. "Connecticut's cold winters mean the kids will be stuck inside at least three months of every year," Ms. Schur said. "It was important to me to give them a space where they could play, climb, jump and swing." With the help of Kimberly Handler, an interior designer, Ms. Schur hired Karri Bowen Poole, a grade school teacher turned designer who founded a company called Smart Playrooms, to turn her 1,500 square foot basement into an all seasons playroom. In addition to a 20 foot wide rock climbing wall, monkey bars and a mini basketball court, the new playroom has an arts and crafts area with a wall mounted chalkboard, a media lounge with hanging pod swing chairs and an under the stairs reading nook with string lights and a beanbag chair. There is also a hanging trapeze, as well as a built in ladder, a climbing rope, swings and plenty of brightly colored floor mats for worry free frolicking. "Nothing is irreversible: The panels come off and the bars come down," Ms. Schur said. "Besides," she added, "this is our family's dream home. We're not really concerned with resale value." Matt Hansen felt the same way about his six story townhouse in Hell's Kitchen. Mr. Hansen bought the 7,000 square foot home in 2011, when he was newly single after a divorce, and spent the next four and a half years renovating it for himself and his three sons, who come to visit. "I was going out a lot in the city," he said. "I wanted to have a space at home to entertain, too." "I love the whole floor because there's something for everyone," Mr. Hansen said. "What started as a personal room to retreat to evolved into more of a community gathering space for people of all ages." Now that his sons are college age, Mr. Hansen has decided to sell the townhouse, and has listed it for 11.95 million with the option of having all the bells and whistles in the rec room included and is hoping that another family (or bachelor) will appreciate his concept of indoor entertaining. "The entertainment floor is a huge selling point for the house," said Scott B. Stewart of Corcoran, Mr. Hansen's real estate agent. "Typically, properties of this size are designed solely for families, so to have a full floor dedicated to entertaining guests young and old is unique to the market." Maybe. But sometimes a highly personalized space can make finding the right buyer a lot harder. At 23 Cornelia Street, in Greenwich Village, David Aldea spent more than five years renovating his three floor townhouse. Along with a private garage and roof deck, Mr. Aldea worked with Galia Solomonoff, an architect, to turn the subterranean level of the townhouse into an indoor spa with a sauna, a gym and a saltwater swimming pool. At 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and five and a half feet deep, the pool required multiple city permits and the excavation of two stories below the existing basement level to complete. The back garden was also excavated to allow natural light into the space. The permit process was further complicated when the neighborhood received landmark designation mid renovation. The end result, however, is impressive. Surrounded by basalt stone floors, the pool area has double height ceilings, a crystal chandelier, a wet bar, a lounge and a 35 foot tall gallery space. Mr. Aldea even installed a dumbwaiter next to the pool to send food and drinks from the second floor kitchen straight to the underground area. "I find large townhouses somewhat boring," he said. "There should be a wow factor on every floor." Mr. Aldea bought the house for 5.3 million in 2005 and spent roughly 5 million on the renovation. He has listed it with the Deborah Grubman team at Corcoran for 14.9 million, or for 42,500 a month as a rental, he said, because he is "eager to build another one, and the design and build process is my passion." Finding the right buyer for the customized townhouse, which has been on the market since April 2017, has proved tricky. But Taylor Swift rented it last year, and Mr. Aldea has no qualms about holding out for an exceptional buyer who will understand his vision. "I always design homes for my own taste," he said. "If you design something to sell, you won't attract special buyers. I knew the pool was unusual for the neighborhood, and the right person will see the uniqueness." There is also a custom made gold leafed chair, a vanity with gold brass hardware, an antique crystal chandelier and a flashy piece of artwork by the British artist Ryan Callanan, appropriately titled "Big Money." In July, when Mr. Jaradeh listed the 6,000 square foot loft for 12 million with Steve Gold, a Corcoran agent, he was aware that finding a buyer for an apartment so taste specific would not be easy. "It's a very eclectic and aesthetic specific space. If you're a minimalist minded person, this isn't the place for you," he said. "Right now, the market is saturated with new developments, and this stands out as something truly unique," Mr. Gold said. "It's not going to be for everyone, but the right buyer will embrace it for the one of a kind place it is." As Mr. Miller, the appraiser, pointed out, if you think of the buyer pool for an apartment as a pie, "to enhance market value you need to appeal to the largest piece of the pie." And "not everyone wants a gold plated toilet," he added. "There are people that do, but they're few and far between." Still, highly customized rooms like these have been making an appearance in new developments. At 11 Beach, a luxury condominium in TriBeCa, full floor "private spa sanctuaries" have been installed in three of the single family townhouse residences, each one with its own 50 foot stainless steel indoor pool, sauna and steam shower. "These kinds of in home additions stand out to buyers because they're life changing," said Holly Parker, an agent with Douglas Elliman who is handling sales for 11 Beach. "To be able to exercise, relax and entertain inside your home will truly change the way you live." And sometimes customized spaces can actually simplify a home. At 150 Sullivan Street, in SoHo, Graham Hill bought a 350 square foot apartment in 2010 for 280,000, a few floors above a slightly larger studio he already owned. Mr. Hill, the founder of LifeEdited, a lifestyle and design company that specializes in pared down, eco friendly living, was determined to transform the tiny apartments into multipurpose spaces that reflected a "less but better" philosophy. After crowdsourcing a design competition on his website for the first apartment, Mr. Hill spent 365,000 turning the 420 square foot space into what he called LE1, a multifunctional apartment that can accommodate two guests and seat up to 12 for dinner. In 2013, once that renovation was finished, he began remodeling the smaller apartment. Three years and 275,000 later, LE2 was complete. Like its predecessor, it is a convertible micro apartment that can change its layout to accommodate a bedroom, a guest room, a home office and a dining room. In the living room, a modern Murphy bed folds down over the sofa to create a master bedroom, complete with a foldout mini nightstand. An adjustable coffee table lifts and expands into a full blown dining table that can comfortably seat up to 10. And thanks to a Hufcor accordion door, Mr. Hill was able to turn a small nook near the living room into a multifunctional room that can pivot from a home office with a fold down desk to a guest room to a minibar. All of the technology in the apartment, from the blinds to the projector and sound system, can be controlled by a smartphone app. And Mr. Hill furnished the space primarily with ready made pieces from Resource Furniture, including the sofa wall bed, the coffee slash dining table and the fold down desk in the office alcove. Mr. Hill said he found LE2 so comfortable that he has lived there at one point with a girlfriend and two small dogs on and off since its completion in 2016. "There's something wonderful about having a small space with only the stuff you need and really love," he said. "It makes for a more financially stable living situation and, in turn, a better quality of life." LE2 is now on the market for 750,000, fully furnished. And despite its ultra customized design, Jerrie Butler, a Corcoran agent, said the apartment has been a hit with prospective buyers, especially those looking to streamline their lives. Of course, as Mr. Miller observed, "the danger of improving a small space by adding significant functionality to it is that you may price out the buyer pool for studios." (The median sales price for a co op studio in SoHo in 2017 was 557,000, with an average of 584 square feet, according to a report Mr. Miller prepared for Douglas Elliman.) As far as Mr. Butler is concerned, though, you get what you pay for. "Every square inch of the apartment is utilized," he said. "It's modern but timeless space savvy never goes out of style in New York." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Adi Ezer, her husband and their two young sons left New York City in mid March and settled in Tennessee, where they are living on a farm with two other New York City based families. Here, Ms. Ezer's sons, Jonathan and Adam, visit some cows. Some families are sheltering in place together as a way to balance child care and work demands at home or farther afield. With schools closed and the streets empty across the country because of the coronavirus pandemic, many parents are spending their days tethered to their homes, trying to think up activities to occupy their children. If the parents are also working, the struggle can be even harder. But some families have come up with a solution: shared quarantine. Sheltering in place together has taken several forms, from couples who stay in place and choose to socialize with only one other family, to multiple families gathering in one place. These families might be bending the rules on social distancing, but they feel that they can also find strength in numbers without endangering anyone in their group. The parents share the child care responsibilities and, in some cases, the expenses, from food, to Airbnb and rental car costs, if they are venturing away from home. "All four of us have this real pressure to work and none of us could be child care providers for 100 percent of our time," said Ms. Bunsa. "When we started thinking about it, it was a little like when you first start dating someone. I had to ask, 'Are you seeing other people?' Because the plan only works if we only see one another and no one else." Trust is also a critical factor in their plan's success, as was both families' decision to shelter in place weeks before their state required that they do so. "They were taking this just as seriously as we were, only venturing out when necessary and really respecting the need to social distance," Ms. Bunsa said. Shlomit Shalit knew what was coming even before her children's school in the East Village announced last month that it was closing. Her native Israel had already shuttered schools and urged people to social distance, and she was convinced it was only a matter of time before similar rules would be instituted in New York. Ms. Shalit, who lives with her husband and two young children in Stuyvesant Town, recalled the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when, as a 6 year old, she and her family fled their apartment in Tel Aviv for the relative safety of the Israeli countryside. Now with children of her own, Ms. Shalit was overcome with the need to leave Manhattan for the relative quietude of upstate New York. But before packing up and decamping for an Airbnb, she contacted a neighborhood family. They too wanted to leave, so the two families began searching for a house large enough to fit them. In a matter of hours, the group of four adults and five children, age 5 and younger, were on the road, heading to a rental in the Catskills. Whatever the arrangement, there is one overriding consensus among these families: the benefits of throwing your fate in with friends and sharing child care outweigh the annoyances that can come with spending weeks, possibly months, in close quarters with people who are not your relatives. And although these families decided to share their lives before shelter in place orders were enacted, for some, the additional risks of failing to social distance still pales in comparison to the isolation of facing the pandemic alone. Some families have taken it a step further, embracing sharing their quarantine on a larger scale. Joseph Marshall, 42, a film producer, has decided to quarantine alongside three other couples who live on the same floor of his building in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The couples have become friendly since they moved in to the new complex in January 2019, bonding over their love for vegan food. Since the arrival of the coronavirus, they help one another with grocery shopping, picking up items the other couples need to eliminate extra trips. "I'll say, 'I'm going to the store tomorrow, what do you need?'" he said. "Someone will say potato or soy milk. It's really nice." They also pause every now and then for a spontaneous coffee break or Nintendo gaming session. He recognizes that interacting with his neighbors in this way carries risks. "We are not exactly six feet apart from each other, so it might not be the smartest thing," he said. "But we are helping to keep each other sane, and that is important too." (He added they are taking precautions including not hugging. If someone feels sick they restrain from the socializing.) Other families seeking to soften the solitude of sheltering in place, have done so farther away from home. "If it had been just me and my husband and my two boys in our small apartment, or even if we had rented somewhere on our own, it would have meant sitting the boys in front of a screen most of the day," said Adi Ezer, who is a marketing manager in the customer success department at UiPath, a robotic process automation company. Instead, Ms. Ezer, who is also seven months pregnant, joined with two other families to experience a joint quarantine. "I thought 'OK, why not?' We weren't that close with them, but we figured we would go for a week and see how it worked out. It has been working ever since." Ms. Ezer's group, which left New York in mid March, consists of six adults and seven young boys, ranging in age from 2 to 8 years old. With most of the parents working remotely full time, the adults have divided the weekdays into one and a half hour shifts, with parents taking turns overseeing mealtimes and child care. As for shopping, one person is designated to go to the grocery store with a mask and gloves, and once that person returns, all the items are wiped down before being put away. After leaving Manhattan some three weeks ago, Ms. Ezer and her companions settled in Tennessee, renting out Mountain Laurel Farm, an organic farm and retreat in the Appalachian Mountains of Northeast Tennessee. They plan to remain there for the foreseeable future, in part because of Ms. Ezer's pregnancy. (She is seeing a local doctor for her checkups and is hoping that life will soon return to normal and she will be able to return to New York in time for her June due date). With shelter in place orders and social distancing rules, some might consider the decision for multiple families to live together or share child care duties to be unsafe. However, "this kind of arrangement sounds fine," said Dr. Jessica Justman, the senior technical director of ICAP at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, as long as it "means the group is practicing social distancing from all others who are not part of the extended household and everyone in the extended household is truly staying away from all others, and very careful when food shopping, et cetera." The rise in the number of New Yorkers fleeing the city for rural areas has also become a focus of criticism, as smaller communities fear that the influx of mostly wealthy Manhattanites could threaten their safety. "We left the city early, but we are still trying to be very socially conscious and we found a house that is very remote, so we can isolate," said Ms. Ezer. "We wanted something that has space to run around, and where we don't have to disturb anyone or come into contact with them." And as the pandemic continues to stretch on, some wonder how long they can hold out. There are the financial considerations, as well as the social aspects, such as disparate parenting styles and the general irritations of spending so much time with another family. "We haven't completely budgeted everything. We are renting a car. We still have our New York rent," said Ms. Shalit, whose family is staying in the Airbnb upstate, paying roughly 150 a night. "The best part is having companionship, but the worst part is all the noise." The other family has committed to stay at the house through April, but Ms. Shalit and her family have so far paid for just part of the month. "I need to take it day by day. I am still in shock, and it is really hard for me to grasp this situation, so two weeks is about as far ahead as I can think," she said. For Ms. Shalit, her childhood experience with the gulf war closely resonates. While Tel Aviv braced for incoming scud missiles fired from Iraq, a young Ms. Shalit spent much of her time playing outside, largely isolated from the fear. "My memories are of a city girl hanging with her parents in the countryside. I want my kids to have that same feeling of freedom and not of stress." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"Why the hell did you arrange it?" That's the question the conductor Bernard Labadie said he's usually asked when a Bach lover learns that Mr. Labadie arranged the "Goldberg" Variations for chamber orchestra. After all, Bach composed that monumental set of 30 variations on a lilting theme for solo harpsichord. The piece has long been claimed by pianists, especially since Glenn Gould created a sensation with his 1955 recording. But an arrangement for strings? Why not, Mr. Labadie said to the audience at Zankel Hall on Thursday, before leading the Orchestra of St. Luke's in an elegant and lively account of his arrangement, written in 1997 for the ensemble Les Violons du Roy, which recorded it. (The program was part of the orchestra's three week, citywide Bach festival.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Heading east for the long weekend? On Friday, Gurney's Montauk will open the Fashion Collective at Gurney's for the season, featuring shopping with a view via weekly pop ups on the deck overlooking the beach. The resort label 6 Shore Road will kick thing off with a capsule collection of summery bits like a polka dot jumpsuit ( 160) and a gingham one piece ( 172). At 290 Old Montauk Highway, Montauk. Also on Friday, the sustainable fashion label KES will reopen its Hamptons shop. There you will find a capsule collection made in collaboration with the artisanal dyer Audrey Louise Reynolds. Easy pieces like an organic crinkled silk dress ( 395) and an oversize linen cape ( 525) are colored with a process that uses seawater with minerals, seaweed, squid ink, coral, shells and flowers, all from local sources. At 10A Jobs Lane, Southampton. The Reformation Beach House will open its doors with a selection of its most popular summer styles. Think breezy linen wrap dresses ( 218) and cropped everything. At 45 Main Street, East Hampton. Anthony Thomas Melillo of ATM will open a store showcasing his luxurious silk, cashmere and cotton basics as well as a new lace up sneaker that comes in a pretty blush suede ( 395). At 20 Newtown Lane, East Hampton. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services, a new analysis suggests. The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply. The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates. The psychiatrists' association is wrestling with one of the most agonizing questions in mental health where to draw the line between unusual and abnormal and its decisions are sure to be wrenching for some families. At a time when school budgets for special education are stretched, the new diagnosis could herald more pitched battles. Tens of thousands of people receive state backed services to help offset the disorders' disabling effects, which include sometimes severe learning and social problems, and the diagnosis is in many ways central to their lives. Close networks of parents have bonded over common experiences with children; and the children, too, may grow to find a sense of their own identity in their struggle with the disorder. The proposed changes would probably exclude people with a diagnosis who were higher functioning. "I'm very concerned about the change in diagnosis, because I wonder if my daughter would even qualify," said Mary Meyer of Ramsey, N.J. A diagnosis of Asperger syndrome was crucial to helping her daughter, who is 37, gain access to services that have helped tremendously. "She's on disability, which is partly based on the Asperger's; and I'm hoping to get her into supportive housing, which also depends on her diagnosis." The new analysis, presented Thursday at a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association, opens a debate about just how many people the proposed diagnosis would affect. The changes would narrow the diagnosis so much that it could effectively end the autism surge, said Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine and an author of the new analysis of the proposal. "We would nip it in the bud." Experts working for the Psychiatric Association on the manual's new definition a group from which Dr. Volkmar resigned early on strongly disagree about the proposed changes' impact. "I don't know how they're getting those numbers," Catherine Lord, a member of the task force working on the diagnosis, said about Dr. Volkmar's report. Previous projections have concluded that far fewer people would be excluded under the change, said Dr. Lord, director of the Institute for Brain Development, a joint project of NewYork Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center and the New York Center for Autism. Disagreement about the effect of the new definition will almost certainly increase scrutiny of the finer points of the psychiatric association's changes to the manual. The revisions are about 90 percent complete and will be final by December, according to Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force making the revisions. At least a million children and adults have a diagnosis of autism or a related disorder, like Asperger syndrome or "pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified," also known as P.D.D. N.O.S. People with Asperger's or P.D.D. N.O.S. endure some of the same social struggles as those with autism but do not meet the definition for the full blown version. The proposed change would consolidate all three diagnoses under one category, autism spectrum disorder, eliminating Asperger syndrome and P.D.D. N.O.S. from the manual. Under the current criteria, a person can qualify for the diagnosis by exhibiting 6 or more of 12 behaviors; under the proposed definition, the person would have to exhibit 3 deficits in social interaction and communication and at least 2 repetitive behaviors, a much narrower menu. Dr. Kupfer said the changes were an attempt to clarify these variations and put them under one name. Some advocates have been concerned about the proposed changes. "Our fear is that we are going to take a big step backward," said Lori Shery, president of the Asperger Syndrome Education Network. "If clinicians say, 'These kids don't fit the criteria for an autism spectrum diagnosis,' they are not going to get the supports and services they need, and they're going to experience failure." Mark Roithmayr, president of the advocacy organization Autism Speaks, said that the proposed diagnosis should bring needed clarity but that the effect it would have on services was not yet clear. "We need to carefully monitor the impact of these diagnostic changes on access to services and ensure that no one is being denied the services they need," Mr. Roithmayr said by e mail. "Some treatments and services are driven solely by a person's diagnosis, while other services may depend on other criteria such as age, I.Q. level or medical history." In the new analysis, Dr. Volkmar, along with Brian Reichow and James McPartland, both at Yale, used data from a large 1993 study that served as the basis for the current criteria. They focused on 372 children and adults who were among the highest functioning and found that overall, only 45 percent of them would qualify for the proposed autism spectrum diagnosis now under review. The focus on a high functioning group may have slightly exaggerated that percentage, the authors acknowledge. The likelihood of being left out under the new definition depended on the original diagnosis: about a quarter of those identified with classic autism in 1993 would not be so identified under the proposed criteria; about three quarters of those with Asperger syndrome would not qualify; and 85 percent of those with P.D.D. N.O.S. would not. Dr. Volkmar presented the preliminary findings on Thursday. The researchers will publish a broader analysis, based on a larger and more representative sample of 1,000 cases, later this year. Dr. Volkmar said that although the proposed diagnosis would be for disorders on a spectrum and implies a broader net, it focuses tightly on "classically autistic" children on the more severe end of the scale. "The major impact here is on the more cognitively able," he said. Dr. Lord said that the study numbers are probably exaggerated because the research team relied on old data, collected by doctors who were not aware of what kinds of behaviors the proposed definition requires. "It's not that the behaviors didn't exist, but that they weren't even asking about them they wouldn't show up at all in the data," Dr. Lord said. Dr. Volkmar acknowledged as much but said that problems transferring the data could not account for the large differences in rates. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Onstage at a recent industry conference with the longtime leaders of the country's biggest magazine publishers, Rich Battista, the new chief executive of Time Inc., did not seem the outsider. Tieless, with legs crossed, he ticked off his company's latest accomplishments robust digital growth, updated advertising capabilities with the swagger of a knowing publishing chieftain. "There's something really exciting happening at our company," he said, echoing what had become something of a rallying cry at Time Inc. "We're taking our brand to really exciting new places." A former television executive, Mr. Battista, 52, has been charged with revitalizing the most storied magazine publisher in the country. At the helm of the nearly century old Time Inc. since September, he has quickly worked to transform the home of Time, People and Sports Illustrated into a multimedia, multipurpose company, with a strategy heavy on online video, television and entertainment and noticeably lighter on magazine journalism. Among the ideas the company has floated: offering people paid services like a food and wine club and insurance for pets. Mr. Battista's zeal, however, may not be enough to save the Time empire, whose weekly publications helped propel the national conversation for decades but have struggled to maintain their relevance in the digital media environment. Time Inc.'s revenue has fallen every year since 2011, and investors have punished its stock since the company was spun off from Time Warner nearly three years ago. Brutal cost cuts and relentless executive churn have roiled the company. Smelling blood, potential acquirers have been circling the company for months. And while the board has not yet decided whether to pursue a sale, it has asked suitors to submit formal bids by this week, according to two people briefed on the company's plans. Five parties, including Meredith Corporation and an investor group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. and the media executive Ynon Kreiz, have expressed interest in buying the company in its entirety, the people said. Early last month, Time Inc. filed an amended change in control severance plan with the Securities and Exchange Commission that protects bonuses for executives deemed most likely to be affected by a sale. Time Inc. rebuffed a takeover bid of at least 18 a share from Mr. Bronfman and Mr. Kreiz last year, and it could ultimately decide not to sell. The company is also considering bringing on an outside investor. Mr. Battista and Jen Wong, 42, Time Inc.'s new chief operating officer, maintain that they are committed to advancing their plans for the company. During a recent interview at its new headquarters in downtown Manhattan, both insisted that Time was on solid footing despite its lackluster financial performance, and that it was done with any hand wringing about what its strategy should be. "Those things are behind us," said Ms. Wong, a former executive of the website PopSugar. "We're really focused on growth now." "Think of it," he said, "as a Time Inc. 'Shark Tank.'" Time Inc., with its portfolio of 22 magazine titles in the United States and 15 digital properties, has for years been a vastly different company from the one Henry R. Luce founded in 1922. Although the print business still brings in roughly two thirds of the company's 3 billion in annual revenue, focus has shifted toward other revenue opportunities, including short online videos and events. The magazines share resources, and editors work with the business side, an idea that for much of the company's history would have been anathema. More symbolically, Time Inc. recently moved from the iconic Time Life building in Midtown to a nondescript skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. "It has always been the case that former Time Inc. people say it's not what it used to be. Now it's really not what it used to be," said Daniel Okrent, a longtime former editor at Time Inc. who was also the first public editor of The New York Times. "It has the misfortune of having the same name, but it's not related." Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Like other print publishers that have experienced drastic declines in advertising and circulation, Time Inc. has slashed costs, closed bureaus and let talented but expensive journalists go. In the last year, it has replaced longtime editors at Real Simple and InStyle and laid off about 100 people across the company. While the occasional story in People still generates buzz and Time's covers sometimes draw attention (one from October featuring an illustration of President Trump won the American Society of Magazine Editors' Cover of the Year award), Time Inc.'s magazines no longer set the agenda or break memorable stories the way they once did. But analysts and former employees also describe distinct challenges and missed opportunities that made it hard for the company to adapt to a shifting media landscape. Management disagreements and cost cuts in the 2000s led to high profile departures that bled the company of talent and left it without a clear succession plan. Until the spinoff, Time Warner and its chief executive, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, took Time Inc.'s earnings and invested them in higher growth businesses like HBO, leaving Time Inc. itself with little money for reinvestment. "He saw that he had a stable full of horses, but he also saw that he had a garage full of cars," Josh Quittner, a former editor and digital editorial director at Time Inc., said about Mr. Bewkes. "So he was going to invest in the garage full of cars." A Time Warner spokesman said, "Time Warner has always fully invested in all of our operations, including Time Inc. when we owned it." Sitting on opposite sides of a table in a conference room near Time Inc.'s boardroom where a painting of Luce hangs Mr. Battista and Ms. Wong lauded new services and products, including a platform for youth sports, called Sports Illustrated Play, and a streaming video channel from People and Entertainment Weekly. The company has also poured resources into digital video. It recently started a personal finance video series called Coinage. Just last week, it introduced Well Done, a food video brand for social platforms including Facebook and Instagram. For the bigger screen, the company is working with television networks, including ABC and Investigation Discovery, on shows and special events that it can also cover in its magazines. Time Inc. is also focusing more on advertising. The company recently purchased several ad technology and data companies, including Viant, the owner of Myspace. And it now has its own advertising studio in Brooklyn called the Foundry. Mr. Battista and Ms. Wong insisted that Time Inc.'s magazines were still important to the company. And in early February, Mr. Battista and Alan Murray, Time Inc.'s chief content officer, sent a note to employees praising recent developments at the company, including a bump in Time magazine's online audience. "These achievements are a testament to one of our key points of difference Time Inc.'s trusted, quality journalism," they wrote. But Mr. Battista and Ms. Wong also said the company was looking to leverage the company's well known titles into other revenue opportunities. "The foundation of the company is, has been and will remain the power of these brands," Mr. Battista said. "It's about extending these brands and taking these brands far beyond, obviously, the printed word, which was the legacy of this company." To some in the industry, Time Inc. seems to be on the right track even if its financial results suggest otherwise. And within the company, some have described a new sense of collaboration. Employees congregate in common areas, where there are bowls of fruit and free snacks. The company's new headquarters feature bright video studios and test kitchens, instead of the bar carts and palatial executive offices of yore. (Laura Brown, the new editor in chief of InStyle, coyly described the space as "high concept.") "I think they're absolutely doing the right thing," said Tim Nollen, an analyst at Macquarie Capital. But, he added, "It remains to be seen how they actually can monetize what they're doing." Still, the de emphasis on traditional journalism has not gone unnoticed. One editorial employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering his employer, noted that whether the strategy worked or not, it was not going to lead to the kind of work that the company had historically prized. Time Inc. is now targeting 100 million in cost cuts this year, though it will not specify what parts of the company will be affected. The company expects revenue for this year to be roughly flat. Still, Mr. Battista and Ms. Wong are optimistic about Time Inc.'s future. They project that digital advertising revenue will reach 600 million this year and 1 billion in the coming years, and are confident that the company will return to growth. But Time Inc.'s future as an independent company is uncertain. There are certainly obstacles to a sale. Meredith flirted with buying Time Inc. in 2013, but a sale fell through in part because Meredith reportedly did not want to buy four of the best known titles Time, Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated. And while some see value in Time Inc.'s short form videos, others involved in the magazine industry say the company's appeal may not be in all of its new bells and whistles. In the end, it may be in those venerable magazines that made it so prominent in the first place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Federal Reserve rates are still really low. Mr. Bernanke believes unconventional policies can make up for that but with a caveat. SAN DIEGO Ben S. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair, said on Saturday that the types of extraordinary steps the Fed employed to help pull the economy out of the Great Recession should make up for the central bank's limited room to cut interest rates in the event of another downturn but that is contingent on a big "if." As long as the neutral interest rate the setting at which Fed policy neither stokes nor slows growth remains from 2 percent to 3 percent counting inflation, the Fed should be able to rely on tactics like snapping up bonds and promising to keep rates low in the event of another recession. But the neutral rate has been creeping lower for decades, dragged down by powerful and slow moving forces like population aging. Should it continue to fall, the tricks Mr. Bernanke and his Fed used to coax the economy back from the brink in the 2007 to 2009 recession might prove insufficient. In that case, "a moderate increase in the inflation target or significantly greater reliance on active fiscal policy for economic stabilization, might become necessary," Mr. Bernanke said in a speech delivered in San Diego at the economics profession's biggest annual meeting. The Fed currently targets 2 percent annual inflation, a level it believes is low enough to allow for comfort and confidence on Main Street while leaving the central bank enough room to cut rates, which incorporate price changes, in a downturn. That target is meant to be symmetric, meaning that the Fed is equally unhappy if prices run below or above 2 percent. While Mr. Bernanke expects the neutral rate to stay high enough that such action will not be necessary, just the admission that a higher inflation target could become appropriate something officials have been loath to consider and Mr. Bernanke himself has argued against is a major statement. Coming from a giant of modern macroeconomics, it underscores just how worried the field as a whole has become about the long running decline in borrowing costs. The former Fed chair Janet L. Yellen, in an interview in San Diego, called very low rates the macroeconomic "issue of our times." The Fed made 5 percentage points worth of rate cuts, lowering the federal funds rate to near zero, in the last downturn before beginning to buy bonds and rolling out other unconventional policies to stimulate the economy. Despite their efforts, the expansion that followed was plodding, leaving millions out of work for months on end. While the economy has recovered and unemployment has fallen to a 50 year low, interest rates have not returned to precrisis levels. Currently, the policy interest rate is set at 1.5 percent to 1.75 percent, leaving far less room to cut in the next crisis. Mr. Bernanke said policymakers should be able to compensate using a patchwork of other tools. They might eke out ammunition equivalent to 3 more percentage points of rate cuts by deploying mass bond buying and promises to keep rates lower for longer, based on his analysis. Such an approach "can largely compensate for the effects of the lower bound," Mr. Bernanke said. He also said the Fed could keep other new tools in its back pocket, including by maintaining "constructive ambiguity" about negative interest rates. "On one point we can be certain: The old methods won't do," he said. America is not alone in running low on monetary ammunition. Many advanced economies, including Japan and Germany, have seen interest rates slump lower as populations age, households and businesses save more and productivity slows. How much each driver matters remains up for debate. But what is increasingly obvious is some common force is at work. As the change has taken hold, economists and especially those at the Fed have become increasingly concerned. The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, John C. Williams, and his co authors declared several years ago that shared global changes were likely driving rates lower. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Before long, their colleagues had estimated that lower policy interest rates could mean the United States will have rock bottom interest rates as much as one third of the time. Compounding the Fed's problem, inflation has dropped lower. Price gains are incorporated into rates, so weaker gains mean less room to cut. Under the leadership of the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, the central bank has been carrying out a review of its policy framework, researching and talking through how it might supplement its policy tool kit and keep inflation from drifting lower. That process is expected to wrap up in mid 2020. In a blog post released Saturday, Mr. Bernanke endorsed arguably the most activist proposal aired to date, one laid out by a Fed governor, Lael Brainard, in a 2019 speech. Ms. Brainard suggested that the Fed commit itself to keeping rates lower for longer in advance, tying that pledge to the inflation rate, while also targeting rates on bonds with specific time horizons. To be sure, the current situation is not all bad news. In a world with lower inflation rates, for instance, the Fed can allow the unemployment rate to fall lower without worrying that prices will heat up too much, Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said on a panel at the gathering on Friday. But that benefit comes at a potentially perilous cost. Inflation could slip dangerously low, as households and consumers come to expect weak gains and act accordingly that seems to have happened in Japan. And if that happens, the Fed will have ever less room to cut rates. "Low inflation can become a self perpetuating trap," Mr. Bernanke said. "The costs associated with a very low neutral rate, measured in terms of deeper and longer recessions and inflation persistently below target, underscore the importance for central banks of keeping inflation and inflation expectations close to target." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Fox News suspended Eric Bolling, a longtime host at the network, on Saturday pending an investigation into reports that he sent lewd photographs to three female colleagues via text message. Fox News learned about the allegations against Mr. Bolling after an inquiry from HuffPost, the network said in an emailed statement. In an article published Friday night, HuffPost cited a dozen anonymous sources who said Mr. Bolling had "sent an unsolicited photo of male genitalia via text message to at least two colleagues at Fox Business and one colleague at Fox News." It said the messages had been sent several years ago and on separate occasions. A lawyer for Mr. Bolling, Michael J. Bowe, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Saturday. Mr. Bowe told HuffPost, "Mr. Bolling recalls no such inappropriate communications, does not believe he sent any such communications, and will vigorously pursue his legal remedies for any false and defamatory accusations that are made." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Jesse Fink was a co founder and chief operating officer of the internet travel site Priceline when it went public in 1999. The offering made him instantly wealthy, and he retired almost immediately. He and his wife, Betsy, who had met in forestry school, took their bonanza and began investing not in other high flying tech companies but in the earth: first a vineyard on Long Island, then a peach orchard in Colorado and eventually land in Wilton, Conn., that became Millstone Farm. The Finks are part of a broader trend of investing in sustainable farming practices, a movement that offers a range of investment levels, from debt and equity ventures that require smaller contributions to farms and land that cost millions of dollars. And Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods Market, which is expected to increase online purchases of organic food by consumers, could draw more interest from investors. With such promise come numerous risks. Land and farms are not liquid investments. Climate change has made the weather less predictable, with droughts mixed in with torrential rains, and early frosts in some parts of the country countered with abnormally warm periods in other parts. Still, the broader argument for long term growth in this sector is that people around the world are eating healthier and the demand will push up the value of sustainable agriculture. Shawn Lesser, a co founder of Big Path Capital, an investment bank focused on impact investments, which seek social as well as financial returns, said interest in agriculture had surpassed that of clean energy and affordable housing. "With agriculture or land, there are more knowns than with clean energy," Mr. Lesser said. "It's easier for people to get their arms around it." Amit Bouri, chief executive of the Global Impact Investing Network, a nonprofit advocacy group, said that clean energy and housing remained the largest sectors in its annual impact investor survey, but sustainable agriculture was the top area for people to increase their investments this year. "Food and agriculture have emerged as two of the most promising areas to achieve social and environmental objectives," Mr. Bouri said. How investors put money into this field, and what they expect in return, differ as widely as a person's preference for food. Investors looking to buy a sustainable farm should ask how willing they are to spend on their passion, said Lee P. Miller, a managing director at the Glenmede Trust Company. In 2005, the Finks turned their land into a 75 acre sustainable farm, growing crops and raising chickens, pigs and sheep. They also used what they learned from the project to inform other investment and philanthropic decisions involving sustainable agriculture, access to food, and food waste, Ms. Fink said. "It was a labor of love." Ms. Fink said some items produced at Millstone Farm made money, but the overall farm did not in the nearly 12 years the family owned it. "The way we ran it, it was not profitable," Ms. Fink said. "There's a lot of dollars that go into upfront infrastructure: buildings, fencing, greenhouses, buying a refrigerated truck." The Finks purchased the farm for 5.48 million in 2005 and sold it for 5.9 million in 2016, public records show. But the costs were not all dollars and cents. "The toughest parts were staffing, really finding the right people who believed in the mission and actually had the skills," Ms. Fink said. Understanding the level of capital and labor involved may prompt investors to make a smaller commitment to sustainable agriculture. They might opt instead to invest in land and lease it to farmers or invest through funds that are more broadly diversified. Ms. Miller said there was a divide between sustainable farmers who eke out a living and her clients, whom she called the passion farmers. "It's about how much they want to invest in their passion," she said. "They're not going to make money." Judy Carpenter bought the land for Lucky Clays Fresh Farm in Norwood, N.C., in 2009 but took two years to decide how to use the 505 acres. She had been the chairwoman of National Welders Supply Company, which her father started and which she sold in 2007 to Airgas, and her first order of business was to create a sport clay field where she could shoot. Her second, she said, was to find an animal to raise that she would not grow attached to. After much thought, she said, "I don't think I'd get attached to a fish." She sells farm raised tilapia and various types of lettuce and other vegetables. Hers is a twist on sustainable agriculture: using the fish to increase the nutrients in water to grow the plants and then cleaning the water so it gets used again. "It's entirely different than running anything like National Welders Supply Company," she said. "This one takes quite an investment up front. You have to be willing to make your mistakes. You have to put in a year or two before you make a profit." To that end, she said, she added a conference center to the property to help pay for the agricultural operation. Tim Crosby, principal of the Thread Fund, a philanthropic vehicle focused on improving sustainable agriculture, had been searching to buy a farm of his own but decided to be an investor in farmland and sustainable agriculture. He said one of his more satisfying investments buying 300 head of cattle for a farmer so he could increase his organic, grass fed beef business lost money. "We opened up a market faster and more cheaply than any grant" could do, he said. With the herd, the farmer was able to expand his business. And Mr. Crosby said he was able to see the value in an investment loss for tax purposes. Likewise, David E. Miller, a former banker, bought his uncle's farm in Illinois in 2007 to serve as the basis for an investment fund called Iroquois Valley Farms. The fund's aim was to buy farms that had been growing commercial products soybeans, corn, wheat and lease the land to organic farmers to revive soil that had been pumped full of pesticides and fertilizers. The fund now has 50 million in farmland investments, and has appreciated at 10 percent a year for the last decade, said Mr. Miller, the fund's chief executive. Yet his investors had to commit money to a fund that had no plans to sell the improved land and return their capital on a fixed date. "We never guaranteed any distribution," he said. "We said, 'Over time, you can expect your investment to increase as the farmers restore the soil and increase the value.'" Given the capital and labor intensive nature of agriculture, having a long term plan for such investments is crucial. The Finks, both in their early 60s, sold their farm last year so they could do different things with their lives and not be bound to the land. But their time as farmers informed what they have done through their family office and family foundation. One initiative is ReFED, a nonprofit organization that aims to reduce food waste. "A lot of the work we do philanthropically and through impact investment is focused on climate change and climate change mitigation," Mr. Fink said. "What the farm taught us was the impact of weather volatility. We got to learn firsthand what The Farmer's Almanac has said for years." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
GIVE me an "S"! Give me a "T"! Give me an "E"! Give me an "M"! Yaaaaay STEM! O.K., that's not exactly what was said last summer at a cheerleading camp on the Southern Illinois University Carbondale campus. But that was the hoped for spirit as dozens of kinesthetically gifted girls in ponytails savored their first taste of college life three days at Southern Illinois perfecting their pyramids and pikes, sipping Starbucks in the student center, staying up late texting friends at home and across the room. If all goes according to the university's new recruitment plan, hosting camps for middle and high school cheerleaders serves a higher purpose: to help shrink a longtime gender disparity at Southern, a leafy campus of more than 20,000 students about five hours south of Chicago. At most colleges and universities, women outnumber men at 57 percent nationally. But Southern finds itself among a smattering of campuses with a few too many good men: women make up just 44 percent of undergraduates. And over all, only about 30 percent of Southern's students in STEM fields science, technology, engineering and math are women. Flanking the cheer camp director at an evening pep rally last summer, two university recruiters tossed out beach balls and pumped up Justin Bieber's "Baby," whipping an already raucous crowd into a frenzy of gleeful shrieking. They passed out raffle prizes to the girls who had diligently completed "Saluki V.I.P." information cards. Within 24 hours, the office of admissions had created for each an individualized Web page so recruiters could keep in touch, encouraging the girls to visit Carbondale and, ultimately, apply for admission. "The idea is that any pre college age group of girls who are visiting the university should be in touch with our recruitment staff, not in a heavy handed way, but as an opportunity to get the message out that coming to S.I.U. can transform their lives," says Rita Cheng, the university's new chancellor and first woman in the post. While the gender disparity dates back more than two decades in 1991, women represented just 41 percent of the student body officials have also been alert to a drop in overall enrollment of roughly 5 percent over the past few years. One of Ms. Cheng's first tasks was to roll out a recruitment overhaul in summer 2010 aimed at all girl high schools and camps. This semester, almost half of incoming freshmen are women. Still, men dominate, especially in some of the university's most well regarded programs just 10 of 171 students in aviation management, for example, are women. This is happening as a growing chorus of educators and officials at the Department of Education make pointed efforts to steer young women to STEM majors. "These P.R. efforts at universities may get a few girls from the cheer camp to apply, but the real trick is to get them interested way before then," suggests Patricia Albjerg Graham, a professor of the history of American education at Harvard. "We need to change the culture for little girls who are growing up now, and start expecting them to not only 'get' math and science, but to do well, take more A.P. classes, and join the math and science club." The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is lopsidedly male (37 percent of all students are women), dispatches female students to schools to share their enthusiasm for STEM and hosts a math contest for young girls that awards 25,000 to the winner. "The real issue is women are falling out of STEM fields all along the pipeline, starting in middle school and high school," says Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions. "To increase gender balance, it's all a matter of getting the right story out about science and engineering to young women, that it's not about sitting at a desk doing math all day." At M.I.T., he says, "we don't have to go beating the bushes" to attract women applicants. Indeed, for undergraduate programs this fall, 5,466 women applied, of which 16 percent were admitted. But more than twice the pool, 12,443, was male. Only 7 percent were admitted. Mr. Schmill is firm that there is no admissions advantage in gender. "The applicant pool for women is more self selecting," he says. "The women who are interested are very passionately interested." While Southern Illinois University, too, insists it pays no heed to gender in admissions, at Carnegie Mellon "there is no question that we do consider gender in fields like computer science and engineering, where women are critically underrepresented," says Michael A. Steidel, director of admissions. For example, there is no shortage at Carnegie Mellon of wonky men who delight in writing computer code in their spare time, but only 18 percent of freshman applications to the computer science program for this fall came from women. Women SCS supports academic, social and professional opportunities for women in computer science at the university. Carol Frieze, director of the group, says the percentage of female majors there peaked in 2000 at 39 percent. "But of course, the dot com bubble burst, and applications dropped for both men and women," she says. By 2007, the number of female majors had fallen to just 20 percent. But with word out that computer science is weathering the ailing economy, interest is climbing, Ms. Frieze says. This year women represent 32 percent of incoming computer science majors, and a quarter of undergraduates in the field. Texas A M, which began accepting women in the 1960s, is now 47 percent female. While some parity carries into the fields of biology, chemistry and math, the number of women drops significantly in engineeering, which is 80 percent male. To keep its statistics even, Texas A M officials reach out to girls as young as sixth grade with gender specific programs like "Expanding Your Horizons," one day workshops held on campus to immerse middle schoolers in hands on science experiments. In one physics lesson, for example, teams create devices that will slow the velocity of a falling egg and cushion it from breakage when dropped from the balcony of the science building. "It would be great if the girls decide they want to go to Texas A M someday, but most of all, we hope they are getting the bigger picture that going to college isn't scary and terrifying, and they start to think, 'I can do that,' " says Nancy Magnussen, director of the university's Educational Outreach and Women's Programs. Recruiters here also seek out promising girls at cheerleading, softball and basketball camps held on campus, says Karan L. Watson, executive vice president and provost at Texas A M. Undergraduate "big sisters" keep tabs on student interests. When the collegiate chaperones encountered a group of girls who were unable to pry themselves from watching a collection of "C.S.I." DVDs, recruiters tracked down a woman forensic science professor to drop by to deliver an impromptu lecture in the dining center. And for a group of visiting girls addicted to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," a sociology professor was dispatched to a pizza party to chat about her ethnographic research on fandom. Officials at Texas A M, like those at Southern Illinois, acknowledge that they frequently find themselves assuring parents of prospective students that their daughters will be safe on campuses made infamous for partying and incidents that have spun out of control. For years, tens of thousands of revelers fueled by alcohol would party in the streets of downtown Carbondale on Halloween Devil's Night, which was banned by the city in the late 1990s. Similarly, after the Aggie bonfire claimed the lives of 12 students at Texas A M in 1999, the autumn tradition celebrating the school's football team was abolished. "We are a fairly conservative school, but we have had our raucous moments, and there are parents who question what kind of influences their daughters will find on campus," Ms. Watson says. At the Southern Illinois cheer camp, the recruiter Tedgie Hennel had greeted the girls' parents upon arrival, helping them lug pillows, suitcases and bags of junk food up to the dorm rooms in Neely Hall. "Parents who were in college during the 1970s and 1980s will ask me, 'Is Southern still a big party school?' And when I tell them, 'No, it's really not,' some of them laugh and say, 'You can't fool me,' " Ms. Hennel says. "So I ask them, 'Who did you hear that from, our current students or other parents?' And then I invite them to come back down for a visit with their daughter." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Salmon farms belonging to Hidden Fjord seen from the island of Streymoy with the island of Hestur behind.Credit...Ben Quinton for The New York Times At the Edge of the World, a New Battleground for the U.S. and China Salmon farms belonging to Hidden Fjord seen from the island of Streymoy with the island of Hestur behind. TORSHAVN, Faroe Islands The mere existence of the Faroe Islands is a wonder. Tall peaks of snow patched volcanic rock jut out from the North Atlantic Ocean. Steep cliffs plunge into the deep waters of narrow fjords. The remote collection of 18 small islands, which sit between Iceland and Norway, is known for a robust puffin population and periodic whale hunts. The semiautonomous Danish territory also has a thriving salmon industry. Technology is not a common conversation topic among its 50,000 residents. Yet in recent weeks, the Faroe Islands have turned into a new and unlikely battleground in the technological Cold War between the United States and China. The dispute started because of a contract. The Faroe Islands wanted to build a new ultrafast wireless network with fifth generation technology, known as 5G. To create that new network, the territory planned to award the job to a technology supplier. That was when the United States began urging the archipelago nation not to give the contract to a particular company: the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. American officials have long said Huawei is beholden to Beijing and poses national security concerns. Then Chinese officials got involved. A senior Faroe Islands government official was recently caught on tape saying that the Chinese had offered to boost trade between the territory and China as long as Huawei got the 5G network assignment. "Commercially, the Faroe Islands cannot be very important to Huawei or anybody else," Sjurdur Skaale, who represents the territory in the Danish parliament, said over breakfast in the capital of Torshavn this week. "The fact that the Chinese and American embassies are fighting over this as hard they are, there is something else on the table. It is about something else than purely business." For more than a year, American officials have applied pressure on Britain, Germany, Poland and others to follow its lead in banning Huawei from new 5G networks. They argue the company can be used by China's Communist Party to spy or sabotage critical networks. Huawei has denied that it helps Beijing. But if the European nations side with Washington, they risk harming their economic ties to China, which has a growing appetite for German cars, French airplanes and British pharmaceuticals. In the Faroe Islands, Bardur Nielsen, the prime minister, has tried defusing the conflict. In a statement, he said his government "has not been pressured or threatened by foreign authorities in relation to the development of a 5G network in the Faroe Islands." Any decision about awarding a contract to Huawei, he said, would be made by the local telecommunications company, Foroya Tele. Foroya Tele said in a statement that it is testing different technologies. The choice of a 5G network provider, it said, "requires significant considerations given the scale and importance of the investment for the Faroe Islands." For the people of the Faroe Islands, the debate over Huawei and 5G is rooted in salmon more than in download speeds. Salmon is central to the territory's economy. More than 90 percent of the Faroe Islands' exports are fish, including salmon, mackerel, herring and cod. In the surrounding waters, thousands of salmon can be seen splashing inside large netted rings, where they are bred for meals in Paris, Moscow, New York and, increasingly, Beijing. After 2010, the islands' salmon exports to China picked up. At the time, the Chinese government had slowed the purchase of the fish from Norway in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in Oslo. China now makes up about 7 percent of the Faroe Islands' salmon sales. The Faroese government this year opened an office in Beijing to further expand trade. In 2014, the islands' salmon sales to Russia exploded after the European Union limited what fish other countries could export there. Those rules do not apply to the Faroe Islands because it is not a part of the European bloc. In all, salmon exports from the Faroe Islands are expected to top 550 million this year, up from roughly 190 million a decade ago. Last month, America's ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, went public with warnings against Huawei. In an opinion piece in the local Faroe Islands newspaper, Ms. Sands said there could be "dangerous consequences" if the company was allowed to build the 5G network. When countries let Huawei in, she said, "they agree to work under Chinese communist rules." In another interview with Danish Broadcasting this week, Ms. Sands accused a Huawei executive responsible for the Nordic region of "working for the Chinese communists," who are "exporting their spying, their corruption and bribery around the world." At the same time, China's ambassador to Denmark visited the Faroe Islands at least twice in the past two months. This month, the Danish national newspaper, Berlingske, published the transcript of an audio recording in which a senior Faroe Islands official is summarizing one of the meetings. Heralvur Joensen, a senior aide in the Faroese government, was caught on tape saying China's ambassador had threatened to block a trade deal and more fish sales if Huawei was not used for the 5G network. "It is a lice between two nails," said Rogvi Olavson, who lives in Torshavn and is a lecturer at the local university. "You're squeezed by the U.S. on the one hand and China on the other." While many residents said the Faroe Islands prefer the United States over China, several expressed anger at American officials for demanding that Huawei be banned. They said the company helped build the existing 4G network, which they use to make phone calls or share photos from some of the more far flung areas of the islands. Sissal Kristiansen, who designs sweaters and other clothing from Faroese wool, said she had listened to a recent interview with Ms. Sands. "It awoke this, 'Oh bugger off' feeling in me," she said. "We make our own decisions." Others are wary about harming economic ties with China, which they fear will retaliate if Huawei is not selected for the 5G network. Many locals remember an economic crisis in the 1990s, when about 10 percent of Faroese residents ended up moving abroad. Today, unemployment on the islands is almost nonexistent just 183 people were out of work as of Friday, according to government statistics. Like other Nordic countries, health care, education and other social services are free. There is virtually no crime. "China is not just a nice customer, it is a necessity," said Martin Breum, an arctic expert who has written about the Faroe Islands. The Faroese, he added, "have nothing else to sell to the rest of the world. They live off their fish." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It has often been assumed that Piet Mondrian was a cold, calculating, detached kind of man. Look at his paintings, his primary color planes divided by black lines, so formal and rectilineal: Hello, is there anyone in there? But it turns out that the Dutch painter was quite a vibrant character, apparently a lover of many women, who went out dancing at jazz clubs almost every night, and constantly experimented with new forms of art and new ways of seeing. A celebrated early 20th century abstract artist, Mondrian was labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis, and fled wartime Europe by ship on a harrowing 10 day journey to America, where he was embraced as a hero of Modern art. There, he developed a utopian vision of the world that held up the United States or, rather, what he experienced of it in the mixture of art and jazz in New York as a model of the open minded and the progressive. As an American art writer living in Amsterdam, I have long been curious about Mondrian, one of the most influential but perhaps least understood of the modernists. His boldly colored graphic works have been so thoroughly integrated into our cultural wallpaper that it's easy to forget he was a person. So it seemed an ideal time to go in search of Mondrian in the country where he was born and raised. The celebration coincides with a revealing new biography, "Piet Mondrian: A New Art for a Life Unknown," by Hans Janssen, a Dutch art historian and curator. The highlight of the de Stijl year is a major retrospective, "The Discovery of Mondrian," from June 3 to Sept. 24 at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, which owns the largest collection of his work. The exhibition is described as "an extensive tour of the life and work of Piet Mondrian," tracing the evolution of the artist's style from his childhood sketches to his final masterwork, "Victory Boogie Woogie," which he left unfinished on an easel in his East 59th Street studio in New York when he died of pneumonia at age 71 in 1944. I started my version of this tour last fall, at Mondriaanhuis or Mondrian House, in Amersfoort, where Mondrian was born in 1872. Now a museum, the house, about an hour by train or car from Amsterdam, is in the charming medieval city center, with its lovely narrow cobblestone lanes, vine covered brick houses and willows weeping over reflective canals. Mondrian's father was the headmaster of a school in Amersfoort. He was also an amateur artist and a gifted draughtsman who encouraged his son to draw at an early age and perhaps also imparted his love of music. It was Mondrian's uncle, Frits, his father's brother, though, who taught him how to paint. Inge Vos, a private tour guide with Amersfoortse Gidsen, which offers a Mondrian related tour, explained to me that the small town developed rapidly during the artist's early childhood, when its first shopping street, tramway and railway were built. "We think this probably influenced him," she said, "because if so many things around you change, you start to wonder about the truth of everything. He became fascinated with technology and change." For the next part of my journey, I traveled by train 2.5 hours to Winterswijk, about as far east as you can travel in the Netherlands before crossing the German border, about five miles away. This was the second town where Mondrian lived, between 1880 and 1892, and where he began his artistic journey. His family home here, a grand white three story house called the Villa Mondriaan, has also been converted into a museum devoted to his life story. It stands next to the former National School of Christian Instruction, where his father took another headmaster post. The museum has a room full of black and white portrait photographs from Mondrian's years in Paris and New York he cuts a clean and elegant figure, always in a tailored suit, even when posing in his studio, and often surrounded by artists and friends. Villa Mondriaan the painter dropped the second "a" to become more international provides a sense of the young artist as somewhat distracted and unfocused in school, but determined and gifted, especially as a draughtsman. From early on, he constantly revised his vision playing with line, exploring the dynamics of light, working with the form of things around him. After my visit to the museum, I followed a self guided eight stop walking tour that travels through and around Winterswijk to key Mondrian locations. This took me to an urban park, with winding trails and a narrow wooden footbridge. At location No. 4, I sat on a red stool called the Mondriaan Bench and faced the quaint Dutch city. A sculptural frame had been erected in the park black with red, yellow and blue rectangles designed to offer a picture frame view of the subject of one of Mondrian's early landscape paintings, a cluster of squat clay brick houses by a Romanesque church. This was the same aspect depicted in his 1899 "Farm Scene with St. Jacob's Church," a watercolor and gouache on paper he based on sketches he made here as a teenager. Mondrian started out here as a naturalistic painter of Dutch landscapes, working to capture the town's pastoral outskirts, often including farmers and their animals, in subdued color and muted light. As he moved farther away from the countryside, his work became more and more urbane, and so did he. In 1892, Mondrian moved to Amsterdam, where he stayed until 1912, with some stints elsewhere in between. His early years in the city are "shrouded in mist" according to Mr. Janssen "but, at the age of 25, it would seem that he was searching on several fronts for his own style." Unfortunately there are no landmarks of his life here, but the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the city's leading contemporary art and design museum, where he had his first significant group exhibition in 1909, has a collection of his works, and is exhibiting a selection through Aug. 6 as part of "De Stijl at the Stedelijk," which is devoted to the art movement. De Stijl started as a magazine, founded by Theo van Doesburg, with articles by artists, designers and architects who were trying to redefine art in the hopes that it would help create "a world of total harmony, and to unify art and life," according to the museum. Then it grew into an art and design movement. Mondrian was one of the de Stijl revolutionaries, but after seeing an exhibition of Cubist work at the Stedelijk in 1911, he decided to move to Paris the next year. Here, he attended theater works with sets by the painter Fernand Leger whose style of Cubism featured bright, primary colors; he was impressed by Josephine Baker's "danse sauvage"; and he became fascinated with the groundbreaking choreography of the Swedish dancer Jean Borlin, who combined Cubist and primitivist influences. All of this played into his evolving visual style. Mondrian seems to have been out on the town almost every night, had lots of lovers and loved to dance. "In Paris, I quickly mastered the Foxtrot, the Shimmy and the One Step," he wrote in a letter to van Doesburg, noting that he liked the Shimmy best: "At first, the heel toe was sort of tricky. Nowadays, they find ways around it." He never married, he would explain later, because when he was young he was too poor, and when he was older he never found the right woman. From all that he saw and experienced, he created a new kind of universe, starting with his own studio. He painted the walls in bright primary colors, like his canvases divided into large blocks of white, using thick black lines a three dimensional version of what he was painting at the time. The place became a destination for artists and admirers, such as Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Diego Rivera, Sonia Delaunay and Laszlo Moholy Nagy, the collector Peggy Guggenheim and the art dealer Sidney Janis, who all visited but apparently only by written appointment. Mondrian lived in this studio, at Rue du Depart 26, in the Montparnasse neighborhood, from the end of World War I until 1938, when he fled Europe. It was unfortunately demolished with the expansion of the Gare Montparnasse train station in the 1940s, and now is the site of the Tour Montparnasse, a skyscraper. Luckily, it was well documented in photographs, and you can get a good idea of it at Mondriaan House in Amersfoort and at the Gemeentemuseum show. Standing inside this studio was my favorite part of the journey. It's easy to see how this space represented, for him and others, a kind of ideal, where everything was functional, but also aesthetically harmonious a playground where art and life merged. While he lived there, Mondrian became internationally famous. Alfred H. Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bought his work in Paris, and so did the Guggenheim Museum. Forced to escape Paris after the Nazis targeted his work, he moved briefly to London, with the help of artist friends; after just barely surviving the Blitz, he traveled to New York on a Cunard ocean liner at the height of the U boat war, in a convoy that sailed only by night with all the lights turned off. He was welcomed by Ms. Guggenheim, who introduced him to artists in New York, among whom he was already famous. In his Manhattan studio, his work became ever more dynamic and abstract. At night, he traveled to Harlem to hear jazz jam sessions with artists like Thelonious Monk, and his fragmented, pounding, fractured sounds. He continued to dance, and to flirt. He worked up until the day he died, creating his final tribute to the promise of postwar America and its jazz: the rhythmical diamond shaped canvas he called "Victory Boogie Woogie." If You Go The Gemeentemuseum has the world's largest collection of paintings by Mondrian, including his final 1944 masterpiece, "Victory Boogie Woogie." "The Discovery of Mondrian" exhibition is scheduled for June 3 to Sept. 24. Stadhouderslaan 41, The Hague; gemeentemuseum.nl. Mondriaanhuis is where Mondrian was born in 1872. Today it is a small museum devoted to his life and work, with a recreation of his Paris studio. Kortegracht 11, Amersfoort; mondriaanhuis.nl. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BIG LITTLE LIES 9 p.m. on HBO. In its first season, this melodramatic murder mystery defined itself as a whodunit decidedly more interested in its characters than its puzzle . Forget the mystery of the killer; the season took until its final episode to even reveal who had been killed. Instead, the show, created by David E. Kelley ("Ally McBeal") and based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, trained its eyes on its beautiful Monterey, Calif., location and the lives of its central characters: a tech executive (Laura Dern), a retired lawyer (Nicole Kidman) and a recently remarried, very outspoken mother (Reese Witherspoon). While initially marketed as a mini series, the show is back for a second season this time moving past the plot of the novel and adding Meryl Streep, who plays the mother in law of Kidman's character, and Andrea Arnold ("American Honey"), who directs . BLINDSPOTTING (2018) 2:55 p.m. on ActionMax. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," out this weekend, "belongs to a handful of recent Bay Area movies about the African American experience that includes 'Blindspotting' and 'Sorry to Bother You.'" In each, she wrote, "black characters confront (among other things) gentrification." In "Blindspotting," that issue is even baked into the opening credits, which show, in split screen, Oakland from two different perspectives: that of longtime residents and that of wealthy transplants. The main character, Collin (Daveed Diggs), is a longtimer and when the movie starts, he's nearing the end of his probation and working at a moving company. The plot involves Collin's witnessing an officer involved shooting and struggling to maintain a friendship that threatens to derail him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Radiation treatment for breast cancer can increase a woman's risk of heart disease, doctors have long known. But the size of the added risk has not been clear. Now, a new study offers a way to estimate the risk. It finds that for most women the risk is modest, and that it is outweighed by the benefit from the treatment, which can halve the recurrence rate and lower the death rate from breast cancer by about one sixth. According to the study, a 50 year old woman with no cardiovascular risk factors has a 1.9 percent chance of dying of heart disease before she turns 80. Radiation treatment for breast cancer would increase that risk to between 2.4 percent and 3.4 percent, depending on how much radiation hits the heart. "It would be a real tragedy if this put women off having radiotherapy for breast cancer," said Sarah Darby, a professor of medical statistics at the University of Oxford in Britain, and the lead author of the study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Silvia Formenti, the chairwoman of radiation oncology at New York University Langone Medical Center, said she worried that women with cancer would misconstrue the findings to mean that radiation is dangerous and that they should have their breasts removed instead of having lumpectomies, in order to avoid radiation. "There is a wave toward mastectomy in this country," Dr. Formenti said. But at the same time, she and other experts say that the cardiovascular risk is real and that when radiation is given, every effort should be made to minimize exposure of the heart. In addition, women who have had radiation treatment need to be especially vigilant about controlling other factors that increase the odds of heart disease, like high blood pressure and cholesterol. Dr. Lori Mosca, the director of preventive cardiology at NewYork Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study, said the findings meant that a history of breast irradiation should be added to the list of risk factors for heart disease and taken into consideration by all doctors who are treating such patients. "We absolutely need to put on our radar screen that prior radiation to the breast may be a new and important risk factor for women," Dr. Mosca said. But she and other experts also warned that the results needed to be verified because the study was not a controlled experiment, but was based on an analysis of records and estimates of radiation exposure to the heart. Dr. Javid Moslehi, co director of the cardio oncology program at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the author of an editorial accompanying the study, said the research was the first to provide risk estimates correlated with doses in breast cancer treatment, over a long time period. "This is a huge paper, both in terms of how many women it impacts, and how it opens the door for new studies that need to be done," Dr. Moslehi said. He said the study reflected the fact that many people with cancer are now living long enough to encounter long term effects of both radiation and chemotherapy. They have given rise to a new and fast growing field in medicine, cardio oncology. About three million women in the United States have been treated for breast cancer, and the majority have had radiation. Although doctors try to spare the heart, it still gets some of the dose, especially when the left breast is treated. Radiation can damage the linings of blood vessels and scar the heart muscle. Dr. Darby's study is based on the records of 2,168 women who had radiation for breast cancer from 1958 to 2001 in Sweden and Denmark; 963 of the women had "major cardiac events" sometime after their cancer treatment, meaning a heart attack or clogged coronary arteries that needed treatment or caused death. From the treatment records, the researchers estimated the radiation dose to the women's hearts. They found that the risk began to increase within a few years after exposure, and that it continued for at least 20 years. The higher the dose, the higher the risk, and there was some increase in risk at even the lowest level of exposure. "It was certainly a surprise to us that the risk started within the first few years after exposure, as radiation related heart disease has traditionally been thought of as usually occurring several decades after exposure," Dr. Darby said. Radiation is measured in units called Grays, and the researchers found that for each Gray to which the heart was exposed, the odds of heart attack or another coronary events rose by 7.4 percent. The average dose to the heart over an entire course of radiation treatment was 5 Gray, they said. For an individual woman, the net effect would depend on her baseline initial risk of heart disease and the total radiation dose to her heart. Women who already had risk factors, especially those who had had heart attacks in the past, would have seen the largest absolute risk from radiation. Some radiation oncologists say that nowadays, the dose to the heart is lower than 5 Gray. Dr. Louis S. Constine, vice chairman of radiation oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said that 2 Gray was more common and that doctors could now put shields in front of the heart and "curve radiation around the chest wall instead of shooting it through the heart and lungs." Dr. Formenti thinks that for most patients, the best way to protect the heart is to treat them while they are lying on their stomachs, instead of the usual way, lying on their backs. Women lie on a table or a mattress with openings that let the breasts drop away from the chest. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Some Small Businesses That Got Aid Fear the Rules Too Much to Spend It When a 192,000 loan from the federal government's small business aid program arrived in his bank account last month, George Evageliou, the founder of a custom woodworking company, felt like one of the lucky ones. Under the program's rules, Mr. Evageliou has eight weeks from the day he received the cash to spend it. But nearly three weeks after the clock started on April 14, he hasn't used a penny. His quandary? If Mr. Evageliou wants his loan to be forgiven, he must spend three quarters of it paying the 16 workers he laid off from Urban Homecraft, his Brooklyn business, in late March. But bringing his workers back now, when they can't work in their fabrication shop or install woodwork in clients' homes, won't help his business. And if New York City remains shut when his eight weeks are up in mid June, Mr. Evageliou would have to lay off his employees again something he wants to spare them. The government has "made this so hard to use," he said. "It starts to feel like a lose lose situation." The 660 billion Paycheck Protection Program was meant to extend a lifeline to small businesses battered by the pandemic, allowing them to keep employees on the payroll. But it has been dogged by problems. Countless small businesses couldn't get money, and hundreds of millions of dollars instead flowed to publicly traded companies. Now many of the small businesses that did get loans are sitting on the money, unsure about whether and how to spend it. That's compromising the effectiveness of a program meant to help stabilize the country's reeling economy. Some owners don't see the point of hiring back workers when business is so slow. Others chafe at having to use the money within eight weeks, when they would like to keep the financial cushion for longer. And many of the owners are confused about whether they have any flexibility. They would rather use the cash to retool their operations for an altered world or buy protective equipment for workers, but the rules require them to spend it on specific expenses, like payroll. Owners also say they are afraid of running afoul of the program's rules, which are complicated, ambiguous and still evolving. Accountants, lawyers and lenders are struggling to understand the nuances and offering clients tentative guidance. "It's chaos," said Howard M. Berkower, a New York lawyer who advises corporate clients. "It's impossible for businesses to have any degree of comfort that they're following the rules when the rules are still being written." The 2 trillion CARES Act, which created the program, specifies that small businesses generally those with fewer than 500 employees can use the loan money to pay employees, but also for rent, utilities or interest payments. The loans will be forgiven if they are spent on those expenses within eight weeks and the business keeps paying the same number of employees, at the same rate, as it did before the pandemic. The Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration, which is running the program, added a restriction: For a loan to be forgivable, businesses have to spend at least 75 percent of it on payroll. Otherwise, the rules say, the borrower will pay interest of 1 percent on any portion of the loan that is not forgiven. But what's unclear is what happens if borrowers keep all the money as a loan to be used later or if they must spend the entire sum within eight weeks, with an economic turnaround still months away. Take Jodi Burns, the owner of Blazing Fresh Donuts in Guilford, Conn. Ms. Burns could use the loan she got an amount under 50,000 to hire back her eight employees, but she would be paying most of them to stay home, since the bakery is open only 12 hours a week these days. She would prefer to hold on to the cash beyond eight weeks; her hope is that it becomes a low interest loan she can use for payroll and rent when her shop is open longer. Ms. Burns doesn't know whether she can do that. She has called her local S.B.A. office, small business advisory organizations, a law firm and her lender to ask for guidance, but no one has given her any assurances. Moreover, having signed documents requiring her to use the funds for purposes allowed under the paycheck program's rules, Ms. Burns is nervous about misusing them. "I don't accidentally want to commit bank fraud," she said. "As long as they're using the funding for the operating expenses of the business, our interpretation and we think it's clear is yes, you can use it as effectively a working capital loan," said John Asbury, the chief executive of Atlantic Union Bankshares, a community lender in Richmond, Va. 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. But officials at Treasury and the S.B.A. won't confirm that interpretation. Asked repeatedly if companies can simply hold on to the money for now because paying employees doesn't make sense to them, an S.B.A. spokeswoman would say only that the funds must be used for purposes "consistent with the Paycheck Protection Program." Ryan Hurst, a partner at RKL, an accounting and advisory firm, said the program had been put together hastily and remained murky on critical issues. "Every day I'm sitting at my computer, hitting refresh multiple times a day, hoping we'll get more guidance from Treasury and the S.B.A.," he said. Since the S.B.A. has not provided lenders with customized application forms, many banks are using a generic document with provisions that do not apply to the paycheck program. Dutchess Maye, the owner of eduConsulting Firm, an educational services provider in Raleigh, N.C., received a contract from her bank that made no mention of having her 20,000 loan forgiven. Ms. Maye, who plans to use the money for payroll, balked at signing a legal document that didn't seem to describe the forgivable loan she thought she was getting. Her business has no debt, and the idea of incurring any especially as the economy is nose diving spooked her. "I felt it was predatory," she said. She called her lender, which assured her that the loan would be eligible for forgiveness, but the representative she spoke with told her that the bank had no idea yet what the process would be. In the end, reluctant to risk missing out on badly needed aid, she signed. But Ms. Maye plans to set 20,000 from her savings aside for a few months as a reserve. "I had to have a backup plan in order to take the money, in case I have to pay it back," she said. Coyote Ugly, an international chain of honky tonk bars made famous by the 2000 movie of the same name, is sitting on its loan money. The company's American bars have been closed since mid March. Bartenders and security staff were laid off immediately, but the bars' managers were kept on. Through a small Louisiana bank, nine of the company's bars in the United States applied for loans "because they were there," said Jeff Wiseman, Coyote Ugly's general counsel. At the time, executives figured the economy might reopen before the loans came due, in which case the money could be used for payroll and overhead like rent. The bars' loan applications ranging from 40,000 to 120,000 were approved in mid April. By then it had become clear that Coyote Ugly would not be serving customers for a long time. Some locations might never reopen. On April 18, Liliana Lovell, the company's founder and chief executive, told managers that most of them were being furloughed. Some were furious to be let go just as the company was granted the federal loans. Ms. Lovell and Mr. Wiseman acknowledged those grievances, but said Coyote Ugly hadn't had much choice. They didn't see the point in paying managers to sit around in empty bars, and in any case the funds would be exhausted within a couple of pay cycles. Their understanding was that if Coyote Ugly used most of the money for purposes other than payroll, like buying personal protective gear or cleaning supplies, the company would have to repay the loans with interest, further weakening its precarious finances. And so the hundreds of thousands of dollars remain deposited in Coyote Ugly's bank accounts, unused. "It's important for us to sit and wait," Ms. Lovell wrote in an email on Thursday to the laid off managers. Even borrowers who are happy with their aid see it as a temporary fix. Erik Anderson is a co owner of a string of high end hair salons for men, Scissors and Scotch, which has locations in several Midwestern cities. He and his partners, along with their franchisees, all got relief money and used it to pay employees, rent and utilities at their stores while they remained shuttered. Now, some of the states where Scissors and Scotch has locations are slowly reopening. But fewer stylists can work in the salons at once, and fewer customers will be allowed in. Everyone has to wear a mask. The salons' aid money will help supplement their stylists' earnings, since few, if any, of them will be able to work full 35 hour weeks. Mr. Anderson's understanding is that he is not allowed to use money from the small business program for work like reconfiguring his spaces, he said. He hopes more aid will be coming if he needs it or his company may not survive. When the loans run out, Mr. Anderson asked, "what are we supposed to do then?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
What's better than a quadruple wedding to end the summer? How about two? Dueling visions of "As You Like It," Shakespeare's most connubial comedy, frame September in what promise to be polar opposite productions. In between you can find almost anything under the sooner setting sun, including a Korean pop factory, a transgender Emily Post, and a mother just getting by. The Public Theater is first at bat in the Shakespeare series with the fifth of its annual Public Works offerings at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. These productions, involving a cast of hundreds drawn from every sphere (and borough) of New York life, are always joyful events, especially with light fare like last year's swell "Twelfth Night." "As You Like It" certainly qualifies, with its urban sylvan frolics and, in this case, amateur participants including members of the Bronx Wrestling Federation. The professional cast, directed by Laurie Woolery, features Ato Blankson Wood and Rebecca Naomi Jones as the lovers Orlando and Rosalind, Joel Perez as the fool Touchstone and Shaina Taub also the production's songwriter as the melancholy Jaques. Classic Stage Company's version, opening at the other end of the month, features Hannah Cabell and Kyle Scatliffe as the lovers, Andre De Shields as Touchstone and surprise! Ellen Burstyn as Jaques. There are no Bronx wrestlers, but even without the maximalism of Public Works, the director John Doyle, an expert in downscaled musicals ("Sweeney Todd," "Pacific Overtures") promises delights. His take on the story, updated to the Jazz Age, features original music by Stephen Schwartz ("Wicked," "Pippin"). For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday Is it Neverland or the theater where you don't have to grow up? In a new comedy at Playwrights Horizons, Sarah Ruhl explores that question through the story of a woman, based on her own mother, who is drawn back to the eternal boy 50 years after having played the role in her hometown children's theater. This would seem to hit a sweet spot for Ms. Ruhl, who is unusual in her pairing of philosophical daring and surreal tenderness. (Her previous works at Playwrights Horizons were the raucous "Stage Kiss" and the mysterious "Dead Man's Cell Phone.") Here she is joined by the director Les Waters, who staged Ms. Ruhl's Pulitzer finalist "In the Next Room, or the vibrator play," and by Kathleen Chalfant as the title 70 year old who is still, somehow, a child. In works like "The Homosexuals" and "Le Switch," the Chicago based playwright Philip Dawkins has written about the closet, self loathing and gay marriage. In "Charm," the first of his plays to be seen in New York, he turns his attention to another letter in the LGBTQ spectrum. The play focuses on Mama Darleena Andrews, a black, 67 year old transgender woman who teaches an etiquette class for homeless youth at a Chicago gay community center. (She is based on a real Chicago woman named Gloria Allen.) But her young students face problems, like hunger, that make table manners seem trivial. The first play I ever reviewed was Amy Herzog's "Belleville," directed by Anne Kauffman at New York Theater Workshop and, boy, was I glad it was good. I admired the way Ms. Herzog drove the story of a badly mismatched American couple on two tracks at once: the naturalistic, incremental accumulation of plot and the sudden, anarchic lurchings of mood. In her latest play, Ms. Herzog, working again with Ms. Kauffman at the same theater, applies that technique to an even more upsetting story. Carrie Coon ("The Leftovers") stars as the title character, a mother whose son was born three months premature. Now, almost three years later, her husband having been unable to deal with the consequences, she is left alone to care for a toddler who cannot toddle or speak or eat on his own. And yet Mary Jane is not totally alone, as the real world and the busy world of illness merge. When invited to answer questions or sing a song or lick someone's face in an interactive theater production, I'm usually the guy with the hard glare saying "Back off, actor." But even though the new musical "KPOP" is described as an "all in" experience "This show moves and so will YOU!" I'm sorely tempted to let myself go. For one thing, it's presented by Ma Yi Theater Company and by Ars Nova, that invaluable Off Broadway incubator of odd eggs. For another, "KPOP," conceived by Jason Kim and Woodshed Collective (the team behind "Empire Travel Agency" and "The Tenant"), really does sound like a blast: a deep dive immersion in the hysteria and hard work of star making at a Korean pop music factory. (Hence the title.) Will the boy band F8 make it? Will the nine woman group called Special K hold together? Will you? Comfortable shoes advised. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
After years of complaining that the twice yearly, four city, ready to wear circus made no sense, for brands or critics or consumers, some designers decided to do something about it. Burberry, Tom Ford, Thakoon and Tommy Hilfiger declared that the problem was the time lag between shows and sales (usually about six months, after which everyone is bored with the old clothes and has moved on), so they switched to a see now/sell now system. Brands in Italy and France just said no to that idea, but not before putting forth a different one: Bottega Veneta, like Gucci and Burberry, said separate men's and women's narratives made no sense, and announced that they would combine both sexes in one show. Meanwhile, in order to drum up more excitement on Instagram the kind that could be parlayed into sales Mr. Hilfiger also built an entire carnival on a pier for his collection, a show as show approach also adopted by Kanye West, who carted his audience to Roosevelt Island, the better to see an outdoor performance piece by Vanessa Beecroft that seemed to involve models standing like statues and then drooping in the sun. Or maybe the fainting bit wasn't part of the plan? No one knew quite what was going on, which pretty much summed up the whole experiment. Headhunters must have had a banner year in 2016. If once upon a time the top job at a big brand was the ultimate prize for many designers and once you got it, you didn't let go till they pried the sketch pad from your withered hands now the average term seems to be three years or less. It began with rumors that the trendsetter Hedi Slimane was going to leave Saint Laurent after one three year term, which he duly did, just as Brendan Mullane and Stefano Pilati left their posts at Brioni and Ermenegildo Zegna after stints of just over three years. Peter Copping was out at Oscar de la Renta in July, after less than two years; ditto Peter Dundas at Roberto Cavalli and Maxwell Osborne and Dao Yi Chow at DKNY. It was Justin O'Shea, however, who set a record for turnover at Brioni, lasting a mere six months. Blink and you'd missed him. Is this the new normal? Creative whiplash awaits. 3. But great designers still couldn't get a job. Careful who you call "plus size." The model Ashley Graham, erstwhile poster girl for the larger sector, entered the mainstream on the covers of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue and British Vogue, where, according to the Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, some designers refused to dress her, as it would have entailed making clothes tailored to her proportions. Ms. Shulman used her Editor's Letter to call them out (though she didn't name and shame). Similarly, Amy Schumer took to Instagram to scold Glamour for putting her on the cover of its "Chic at Any Size" special issue, rejecting the idea that she was anything other than normal; and Leslie Jones posted on Twitter about her problems getting designers to help her with her red carpet looks for the "Ghostbusters" premiere. Christian Siriano came to her aid, and Michelle Obama came to his, catapulting his profile up to another level. Getting on the right side of history, IMG Models then christened its male bigger bodied division wait for it Brawn. When Macy's announced it was closing 40 stores at the beginning of the year, many "The End of the Department Store" articles ensued, which were reinforced when Neiman Marcus announced job cuts later in the year after falling profits and rumors of its sale (they have since died down). Reports of retail's death are probably exaggerated, but what is certain is that their pain may be the specialty store's gain. Ikram, in Chicago, threw itself a star studded 15th birthday party (Mayor Rahm Emanuel showed up, as did George Lucas). In Dallas, Forty Five Ten opened a 37,000 square foot emporium, and Milan's destination store, 10 Corso Como, plans to open an outpost in New York. What do these stores have in common? They reflect an individual point of view. They don't try to please all of the people all of the time. Perversely, it's the new recipe for success. If men's wear has traditionally been a backwater of fashion, following more than leading trends in thought and design, there is one way in which that is clearly no longer the case: diversity. Despite decades of cultural breast beating, panel discussions and industry initiatives, tokenism in women's fashion remains. It is the uncommon women's wear runway whose racial composition bears much resemblance to that on the streets outside the shows. Yet, quietly and steadily (and motivated, it must be said, in large part by the buying power of previously neglected groups), men's wear has opened up to a wider view of what constitutes the consumer base and, for that matter, humanity. For this the credit goes largely to a small number of designers, agents and casting directors determined to expand opportunity while also mirroring what the writer Grace Paley once termed the "gorgeous chromatic dispersion" of our city and world. (The effort was most successful during New York Fashion Week: Men's.) A decade ago models like Hussein Abdulrahman, Adonis Bosso, Fernando Cabral, Abiah Hostvedt, Sang Woo Kim, or Michael Shockley may have been rare runway sightings. Now they are big earning members of a gifted pack. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It's an old fashioned idea planning for the worst and hoping for the best. When a Covid 19 case appeared in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, I created a shared online document for my family: "prepper list." We added everything we thought we'd need if the virus hit California: medicines, canned vegetables, rice. But we kept realizing there were random things we hadn't thought about: cat food, toilet paper, coffee. The prepper list started as a whimsical thought experiment, but today I checked off the final items. Then I started texting my neighbors and friends about pooling our resources. When I showed a friend my cabinets full of prepper supplies, she looked at me quizzically and asked, "So ... you went to Trader Joe's?" Yes, it may look like a little cozy shopping, but the raw psychological reality is that everyone I know is vacillating between freak out and denial. One night, my friends and I talked about "plague news" in such grisly detail that one of us had to declare a moratorium because he was getting too upset. So we watched three episodes of "Brooklyn 99" instead of figuring out whether we had enough medical supplies to survive two weeks of mandatory lockdown. This isn't some meme corroded, cynical response. We're coping the same way people did in previous plaguey times. News blackouts during the 1918 Spanish flu prevented people from understanding how deadly it was. And even afterward, when it was known that it had claimed 50 million to 100 million lives, only a few people wrote documentary accounts of the pandemic Katherine Anne Porter explored it in fiction with her novel "Pale Horse, Pale Rider." It was as if an entire generation just wanted to forget. Only in the 1970s did Alfred Crosby write a history of the devastating disease in a book called, tellingly, "America's Forgotten Pandemic." Back in the late 1340s, the English poet and essayist Geoffrey Chaucer survived the first wave of the Black Death that killed off 50 percent of London's population. He grew up in a world forever changed by a pandemic, and yet he mentions the plague only once in his enormous body of work. My point is that people have been trying to forget about pandemics for almost a millennium the urge to hide from the truth and binge watch comedy (or write "The Canterbury Tales") is strong. As a science journalist, I've been following news of this outbreak carefully and warning my friends of its coming. I thought I was ready. After all, my family still has boxes of N95 masks left over from two years ago, when San Franciscans dealt with heavy smoke from the California wildfires. But what I've realized over the past few days is that I'm ready for a world ending disaster and that's very different from being ready to survive in a world that's damaged but still going. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Despite citing the surge in coronavirus cases and economic fallout from the pandemic in California, Sutter Health failed to persuade a state judge on Thursday to delay the 575 million settlement it reached last December over accusations of price gouging and monopolistic practices. Sutter, which has already received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal coronavirus aid, argued it needed three more months to decide whether it should try to abandon the settlement terms. The sprawling health system in Northern California warned that the costs of the pandemic might force it to raise rates for patient care beyond caps set by the proposed settlement. But Superior Court Judge Anne Christine Massullo was not swayed. While sympathetic to concerns over the rising number of infections in California, the judge refused to give Sutter more time, scheduling a hearing next month on the preliminary agreement. Sutter Health could still try to block final approval of the settlement, which also prevents it from forcing insurers to include all of its health facilities in insurance policies rather than coverage for some. "Adjusting our entire integrated network to respond to Covid 19 has been an incredibly costly and difficult endeavor that will significantly impact us for years to come," Sutter said in a statement after the hearing. "Over the last few weeks, like the rest of the state, we've seen an uptick in cases of Covid 19, including hospitalizations that have pushed us to our highest surge levels," it added. "This surge requires ongoing emergency response efforts across our integrated network as we continue to provide high quality care during these uncertain times." The agreement is the result of a lawsuit filed by California's state attorney general, Xavier Becerra, who argued that Sutter had essentially cornered much of its market, corralling insurers and patients so they were unable to go somewhere else for less expensive or better treatment. Employers and patients paid much higher prices for care, Mr. Becerra contended. While Sutter did not admit any wrongdoing, the case represented an important victory for state regulators seeking to curb the power of large hospital groups, which through consolidation in recent years now dominate much of the country. Leemore Dafny, a Harvard health economist and former regulator, said, "What the California attorney general has succeeded in doing ought to inspire forward looking attorneys general." The settlement should be viewed separately from the economic impact of the virus on the hospitals, she said. The Sutter case could also have a significant impact on how the pandemic reshapes the health care landscape. Hospitals have clearly sustained a financial blow from the pandemic, with losses expected to exceed 320 billion by the end of the year, according to one estimate. Many of these large systems have already received a major portion of the 175 billion in federal funds allocated by Congress to help hospitals during the crisis. That federal aid has offset roughly a quarter of the loss of net patient revenues of the biggest hospitals in the state, according to a new analysis by researchers at the Petris Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Becerra's office had requested the report, which was released on Thursday after the judge's decision. Sutter has received 317 million in those federal funds as well as other government money because of the crisis, according to the report. The big hospitals that have the largest portion of revenues from private insurers and that operate in highly concentrated markets, including Sutter, received the most money, the researchers found. The calculation was adjusted to take into account individual hospital patient populations. The hospitals' "market power is giving them more reimbursement," said Richard Scheffler, the director of the Petris Center. Weaker facilities and physician practices are struggling to keep their doors open, and many are expected to be scooped up by the largest systems, which would increase their leverage even more. "This is the moment where strong antitrust enforcement is more important than ever," said Jaime King, a senior scholar at the U.C. Hastings College of Law. "The healthy systems are looking forward to the opportunity to make strong acquisitions," she said. "Regulators should be matching them toe to toe." As a way of preventing even further consolidation, which could lead to higher prices and lower quality care, Mr. Becerra is seeking greater authority to review the deals under a proposed state law. "This pandemic can't be an excuse for 'big fish' hospital systems to swallow up their smaller but able competitors," he said. "Increased market consolidation comes at a cost to consumers. "As our nation confronts today's health and economic crisis, we urgently need the tools to hold health care giants accountable to consumers and competition." But some combinations in which a larger system keeps a struggling hospital open to meet community needs are not likely to meet much resistance, said Torrey McClary, a health care lawyer with King Spalding. While the number of deals fell after the pandemic hit, health systems are likely to begin considering mergers and acquisitions in the coming months, she said. "Those conversations are continuing," Ms. McClary said. In making its argument for a delay, Sutter described the current crisis as having "completely upended the health care system in Northern California," according to its recent legal filings. It cited a 1 billion loss in the first three months of the year. Sutter contended that it might not be able to abide by the settlement terms, and raised the possibility that it would have to charge higher prices beyond the limits in the agreement because of surges in Covid 19 patients. In their report, however, the Petris Center researchers also pointed to the substantial financial cushion many of these hospitals have. They calculated that Sutter alone had more than 5 billion in financial investments and cash. Sutter responded by saying that the demands of the pandemic are forcing it to look beyond those assets. "While we are fortunate to have this ability based on our reserves, we believe we cannot solely support Covid 19 efforts today without responsibly balancing our future community and patient needs," the health system said in an emailed response. Mark Miller, a former federal official who is now an executive at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy that has been a sharp critic of high hospital costs, argued the big systems should be using their reserves rather than seeking to raise their prices. "We might expect them to draw on their own resources," he said, noting that they are also getting federal funds to help with their losses. "There is a legitimate fear they will use those funds to engage in further consolidation and further price increases," he said. Employers, which joined with unions and the attorney general to bring the case against Sutter, argued that it should not be allowed to use its market power to raise prices, despite the pandemic. "What Sutter seems to have overlooked is the people paying these bills," said Elizabeth Mitchell, the chief executive of the Pacific Business Group on Health, which represents employers that purchase coverage for their workers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This summer, as you're watching television or sifting through mail, you're likely to come across charities asking for your money. And at some point, you'll probably dig into your pocket to help victims of last year's Ecuadorean earthquake, the continuing drought in Yemen or some other worthy cause. It is statistically unlikely, however, that you'll write a check to help Syrian refugees. Though the Syrian crisis is a huge and heartbreaking story, it has translated into relatively little charitable giving. One large relief organization, GlobalGiving, found that people were three times as likely to donate to victims of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal or the 2011 Japanese tsunami as to those fleeing the war in Syria. Other refugee causes fare even worse. Which is surprising, because while you have probably never experienced an earthquake, visited Yemen or Nepal, or been personally affected by many of the causes you support, it's quite likely you have ancestors who were refugees or migrants themselves, and odds are good that you're working or living near emigres and their families. So why does one of the most important and heart wrenching issues have so much trouble attracting donations? A few years ago, a pair of social scientists in Britain began wondering why some charities were more popular than others. The researchers, the wife and husband team of Jennifer van Heerde Hudson and David Hudson, had spent years studying the ways charities solicited donations. Conventional wisdom held that the most effective appeals emphasized innocent victims. "Children who have lost their homes, starving families, the heartstrings thing," Mr. Hudson told me. "Ads that convey 'If you don't donate, people will die.' That's what everyone believes works." But when the researchers looked at nonphilanthropic industries, they saw the opposite. Nike doesn't tell people to exercise because otherwise they'll get fat and have a heart attack. Instead, the company uses stories of amputees running marathons to make you believe you can transform your life, if you just buy the right pair of shoes. So Ms. van Heerde Hudson and Mr. Hudson created two marketing campaigns for a charity in Bangladesh. The first showed an image of a sick and malnourished child and slogans like "Please donate before it's too late." The other hardly mentioned which problem the charity was trying to solve. Instead, it showed a smiling child holding a "Future Doctor" sign, and proclaiming that "all of us sharing a little more can make a big difference." It sought donations to "educate the next teacher, farmer or doctor." "The second ad was a huge success," Mr. Hudson told me. "The data was clear. If you can trigger a sense of hope, donations go up.'' Put differently, it's not entirely your fault you aren't giving to Syrian refugees. You just haven't been manipulated properly. To figure out if there's a better method, I began asking charitable organizations who they thought was the most innovative marketer in philanthropy. Everyone pointed to a group named Charity: Water. Charity: Water, which raises funds to deliver clean water in developing nations, began a decade ago by deliberately modeling itself on companies like Apple, Nike and Silicon Valley firms. "When we started, the biggest problem was that my friends said giving to charity was really depressing," said Scott Harrison, who founded Charity: Water in 2006 after a career promoting nightclubs. "So we came up with some rules: No pictures of crying children or people with flies in their eyes. No using guilt or shame. Only use mottos that people would want to wear on T shirts." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. One of Charity: Water's most successful marketing appeals tells the story of a 15 year old named Natalia, the president of a water committee in her village in Mozambique. In ads, Natalia stands in front of a well built with Charity: Water funds, arms crossed defiantly and explains how she previously walked long distances to get water, which meant she often missed school. Now, with a well in the center of her community, she makes it to school every day. Marketing is the art of telling stories so enthralling that people lose track of their wallets. And every marketer knows such stories can't be too complicated. So another tenet at Charity: Water is that solutions need to be presented in simple ways. "Our approach is that water is binary," Mr. Harrison told me. "People are either drinking clean water, which is good, or they aren't, which is bad. We want to present an easy choice." That strategy which the group propagates through online ads, social media campaigns, direct email solicitations and even the occasional billboard has been remarkably effective. Over the past decade, Charity: Water has raised 252 million and has supported 23,000 projects in villages and rural areas across Africa, Asia and elsewhere. It has become a cause celeb among tech entrepreneurs, Hollywood stars and the Twitterati. Unusually, 47 percent of its donors are millennials (most charities struggle to hit 10 percent). But Charity: Water has also drawn criticism from people who feel the group has oversimplified a complicated problem. Water isn't actually binary. Is it unequivocally good if Charity: Water builds wells in areas where terror groups are active? Is it wise to emphasize water over other philanthropic causes like vaccines or schools? Does it make sense to build wells in remote regions, where Charity: Water works, rather than large cities, where many more impoverished people reside? "There's lots of people who think Charity: Water is working on the wrong issue, or they're telling the wrong stories," said Patrice Martin, who helps run IDEO.org, a nonprofit organization that has worked with Charity: Water. "But what they've done is get Americans, especially millennials, interested in the lives of people on the other side of the world. We should be learning from them." That said, it can be hard to see how to apply some of the group's lessons to really complicated issues, like Syrian refugees. "With an earthquake, it's easy; everyone is an innocent victim, and they have a problem that will eventually end," said Amanda Seller of the International Rescue Committee, who notes that even the phrase "innocent victim" unfairly segments philanthropy. "Wars and man made disasters are really hard," Ms. Seller said, "because sometimes you can't tell the victims from the perpetrators or how long it'll last." What's more, when it comes to companies like Nike, we're comfortable with half truths. We know that buying sneakers isn't really going to transform us into marathoners. But we're less forgiving with charities, which we expect to be both philanthropists and educators, untainted by marketing sleight of hand. However, I think that's a mistake. We need more philanthropies that raise funds by mimicking the tactics of Madison Avenue. I went to the headquarters of Charity: Waters a few weeks ago and asked a few of its leaders to critique some Syrian refugee fund raising campaigns. With the acknowledgment that they are not expert on this topic, they saw a number of things they would change, focusing not on the message, but the way it's delivered. "These are all pictures of sad kids, crying women, scary statistics," Mr. Harrison said. "What kind of success stories can I tell? And what is success? How do we know when things are getting better?" If Charity: Water were to start a campaign for Syrian refugees, it would most likely feature a photo of a child who has carved out a successful life in the chaos. It would be hopeful and optimistic. If you donated to Charity: Refugee, you would be told precisely what you're buying two blankets, say, and 12 meals, as well as three picture books and then you would receive photos of those exact supplies in refugees' hands, something most charities don't do because they don't want to be constrained in how funds are spent. The Charity: Refugee campaign would not try to educate you about global politics, or Syria's complex tribalism. It would, instead, make you feel as if you've made the world a better place with just a few dollars. It would help you sleep at night, instead of giving you more to worry about. It would, in other words, be a great piece of marketing. It might even have a catchy phrase that looks great on a T shirt. And it would persuade more people to donate. Which, right now, might be what matters most. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The jury is still out on whether 21st century politics has reached a point beyond parody, but the one note satire "Mister America" proves that it's still possible to get laughs out of a single gag and just as possible to belabor the joke. The comedian Tim Heidecker ("Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!") stars as, well, Tim Heidecker, who for purposes of this movie is a first time campaigner. Tim is mounting an independent challenge to the San Bernardino County district attorney ( Don Pecchia ), who had previously tried to convict him in more than a dozen deaths. (A bad drugs incident at an electronic dance music festival has gotten Tim dubbed the "vape killer" by the press.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Abba has written and recorded new music together for the first time since the Swedish pop group split in 1982. In an announcement posted on the official Abba Instagram page, the four piece group Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog, Anni Frid Lyngstad and Bjorn Ulvaeus said it had recorded two new songs for a tour featuring digital versions of themselves. The hologram tour, which was announced in Oct. 2016, is a partnership with the "American Idol" creator Simon Fuller; no dates have been announced yet. The statement also mentioned a television special scheduled to air in December, which will feature one of the new tracks, "I Still Have Faith in You." "The decision to go ahead with the exciting Abba avatar tour project had an unexpected consequence," the group wrote. "We all felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the recording studio. So we did." The group said returning to the studio felt "like time had stood still and we had only been away on a short holiday. An extremely joyful experience!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A weak luxury market may be making some developers nervous. But the developers of 35 Hudson Yards, a 72 story condo hotel office hybrid where sales of 143 luxury apartments will start in mid March, are confidently predicting a speedy one year sellout. "It's not just a building," said Stephen M. Ross, the chairman of the Related Companies, which has partnered with the Oxford Properties Group on the project. "You're really buying into a lifestyle. Everything you want is right here." He was referring to other pieces of the Hudson Yards puzzle that will also soon be coming on line, including a shopping center with upscale tenants like a Citarella market and restaurants from chefs Thomas Keller and David Chang, and the much anticipated Shed, an interdisciplinary performance space that aims to add to the city's cultural landscape the way Lincoln Center did in the 1960s. The hybrid condo building, detailed with German limestone to distinguish it from typical glass spires, and designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, is a tapering tower with a square base and a curvy top and will be the tallest residential building in Hudson Yards. The condos, which are tucked into the 39 stories at the top of the building, range from two to six bedrooms, though three bedrooms make up the majority. Three apartments are penthouses, one of which will become the new home of Mr. Ross, 78, who will relocate from the Related built Time Warner Center. With a goal of creating a "more upscale" project than nearby condo 15 Hudson Yards, which came to market in 2016 and is "a little more casual," according to Mr. Ross, the interiors are styled with clean lines and unusual woods. In the kitchens, for instance, cabinets lack knobs. Instead, the edges of their doors have a "knife's edge" bevel, so fingers can easily grab them, said Tony Ingrao, the principal of the firm Ingrao, which designed the condo's interiors. And unusually, those cabinets are made of eucalyptus and have a surface that almost resembles polished stone, because of its shimmering finish. "Stephen likes lacquer," Mr. Ingrao explained. Counters are made of quartzite, a trendy material that's pricier than granite but has more depth, he added. Building amenities will include a gym with a yoga studio and meditation room, a lounge with billiard table, and a golf simulator game. Residents can also use the larger gym in the hotel, a 222 room facility in the middle of the tower, which is set to open in June and will be the first hotel from Equinox Fitness, the Related owned gym line. By 2030, Mr. Ross said, there will be 80 Equinox hotels, with minibars that can be customized with "health building elixirs," which refer to drinks with "special qualities," a spokeswoman said. The lower floors of 35 Hudson Yards will mostly contain the offices of Equinox, which will relocate from the Flatiron district, as well as a small hospital focused on physical therapy. For a condo that seeks to out luxury its neighbors, prices are predictably steeper. Units at 35 Hudson Yards, which is anticipating 1.53 billion in sales, start at 5 million for an apartment with two bedrooms, two and a half baths and 1,492 square feet, according to plans. Excluding the penthouses, which have not yet been priced, the average apartment will cost 11 million, or 4,100 per square foot. Sales, which are being handled by Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, start on March 15. The condo opens this fall. In comparison, 15 Hudson Yards Related's only other current Hudson Yards residence is fetching 3,300 per square foot, although after more than two years of marketing, only about 60 percent of its 284 market rate units have sold. Still, to the multimillionaires who will likely be drawn to 35 Hudson Yards, it may seem discounted to other high end high rises, like those along Billionaires' Row in Midtown. At 111 West 57th Street, once known as the Steinway Building, for instance, list prices average 6,500 per square foot, with even bigger ticket apartments reported at nearby towers. While many of the midtown buildings cater to out of town buyers who tend to stick to more established neighborhoods, 35 Hudson Yards will more likely appeal to native New Yorkers, according to David Childs, Skidmore's chairman emeritus, and the building's architect. "People will live here and not vacation here," said Mr. Childs, who also designed Time Warner Center and is perhaps best known for One World Trade Center. Since it broke ground in 2012, the 28 acre Hudson Yards development, which is mostly on platforms over a train yard, has been a clanging sprawl of construction. On March 15, after years of being hidden behind construction fences, several major components will open, including a 1 million square foot shopping center whose tenants include New York's first Neiman Marcus department store, as well as Cartier, H M and Kiehl's stores. That same seven level building, along Tenth Avenue, will be home to two dozen cafes and restaurants. And at 10 Hudson Yards, where the fashion company Coach is based, chef Jose Andres will cut the ribbon on Mercado Little Spain, a collection of bars and restaurants in a 35,000 square foot space. There's also the Vessel, a 15 story honeycomb shaped sculpture that's lined with stairs to encourage climbing. Parks threaded among the buildings will also welcome their first visitors, even as landscaping continues. A few weeks later, in April, the Shed, a 200,000 square foot interdisciplinary performance space, will start its season with an African American concert series. The second phase of construction at Hudson Yards will push westward, from 11th to 12th Avenues, between West 30th and West 33rd Streets. A platform over the train yard in that area will be built next year, Mr. Ross said. Plans for that space include five apartment buildings, a public school, parks and an office tower, which are expected to be finished by 2026. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber said Tuesday that it had fired Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer brought in to lead the company's self driving automobile efforts who was accused of stealing trade secrets when he left a job at Google. What Mr. Levandowski did when he quit Google to start his own company, Otto, which was acquired by Uber for nearly 700 million last year, is the key question in a closely watched lawsuit that pits one of the world's most powerful companies against Uber, a richly financed up and comer. The stakes are enormous for both businesses. Google was a pioneer in autonomous car technology and has spent nearly a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars on its effort, which is now run through Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet. And Travis Kalanick, Uber's chief executive, has said the future of his ride hailing company, privately valued at nearly 70 billion, hinges on work being done to create cars that can drive themselves. The dismissal of one of Uber's most prized technical talents also points to the risks of the star engineering culture that has emerged in Silicon Valley in recent years, leading to giant paydays for a small group of employees. That was certainly the case for Mr. Levandowski. Last August, when Uber announced it had bought Otto, Mr. Kalanick described Mr. Levandowski as "one of the world's leading autonomous engineers," a prolific entrepreneur with "a real sense of urgency." Uber agreed to pay 680 million mostly in company equity in exchange for the company's technology and a team of experienced self driving technology engineers. Mr. Levandowski and his staff would also be entitled to a small percentage of any profits earned from an Uber owned, self driving trucking business developed under Mr. Levandowski's direction. But just months after the acquisition, Waymo sued Uber in civil court, claiming that Uber was using trade secrets stolen from Google to develop Uber's self driving vehicles a plan Waymo alleges was aided by Mr. Levandowski. Uber has denied the accusations. But when Mr. Levandowski was ordered by a federal judge to hand over evidence and testimony, he asserted his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self incrimination. Uber has pressured Mr. Levandowski to cooperate for months, but after he missed an internal deadline to hand over information, the company fired him. She added: "We take our obligations under the court order very seriously, and so we have chosen to terminate his employment at Uber." Uber had little choice but to cut ties with Mr. Levandowski, legal analysts said. The company risked being tarnished if it continued to stand by him, as if it were indirectly condoning his actions. "I don't think this was an easy decision, but at the end of the day, Uber did what it had to do," said Elizabeth A. Rowe, a professor at the University of Florida's law school and an expert in trade secrets law. Firing Mr. Levandowski provides Uber "a way to cut off liabilities potentially and highlights that they were not acting willfully," said Russell Beck, an intellectual property lawyer and founding partner at the Boston law firm Beck Reed Riden. But firing Mr. Levandowski could mean that he becomes a witness against Uber if he were to claim, for example, that Uber executives looked the other way while he used proprietary information from Waymo to advance Uber's self driving car efforts. Uber has repeatedly said that it has developed its autonomous car technology on its own. "It makes it easier for Mr. Levandowski to cut a deal, because he's no longer associated with Uber," Ms. Rowe said. More grave for Mr. Levandowski are potential criminal charges. Judge William Alsup, who is presiding over the Waymo versus Uber civil case, referred the matter to the United States attorney's office to look into possible theft of trade secrets. The action opened Mr. Levandowski and perhaps Uber to the possibility of criminal charges if the Justice Department decides to pursue the case. Miles Ehrlich, a lawyer for Mr. Levandowski, did not respond to phone and email requests for comment. Court transcripts show Mr. Levandowski's lawyers have advised him to assert his Fifth Amendment right. Engineers like Mr. Levandowski are part of a small pool in Silicon Valley with the specialized know how to lead efforts on self driving cars. Technology companies and traditional automakers alike are sometimes paying tens of millions of dollars per employee. Sebastian Thrun, a founder of Google's self driving car project who now leads the teaching start up Udacity, said last year that the going rate for driverless car engineering talent was about 10 million a person. Ford Motor Company will spend 1 billion over the next five years on Argo AI, its artificial intelligence effort focused heavily on building self driving car software. As competition for that pool of talent has intensified, employers have become litigious. In January, Tesla sued Sterling Anderson the former head of its Autopilot self driving software division claiming theft of confidential information and poaching of Tesla employees to join his own autonomous vehicle start up, Aurora Innovation. The two companies settled the suit in April. Mr. Levandowski, however, may not see his rich payday from Uber. He has been employed at Uber for less than a year and none of his shares have vested, according to a person familiar with the terms of the agreement, nor has he met certain project milestones determined at the time of acquisition. Typically, shares in Uber reach vested status over a multiyear period. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
On the first day of seventh grade last fall, Caitlin Dolan lined up for lunch at her school in Canonsburg, Pa. But when the cashier discovered she had an unpaid food bill from last year, the tray of pizza, cucumber slices, an apple and chocolate milk was thrown in the trash. "I was so embarrassed," said Caitlin, who said other students had stared. "It's really weird being denied food in front of everyone. They all talk about you." Caitlin's mother, Merinda Durila, said that her daughter qualified for free lunch, but that a paperwork mix up had created an outstanding balance. Ms. Durila said her child had come home in tears after being humiliated in front of her friends. Holding children publicly accountable for unpaid school lunch bills by throwing away their food, providing a less desirable alternative lunch or branding them with markers is often referred to as "lunch shaming." The practice is widespread a 2014 report from the Department of Agriculture found that nearly half of all districts used some form of shaming to compel parents to pay bills. (About 45 percent withheld the hot meal and gave a cold sandwich, while 3 percent denied food entirely.) A Pennsylvania cafeteria worker posted on Facebook that she had quit after being forced to take lunch from a child with an unpaid bill. In Alabama, a child was stamped on the arm with "I Need Lunch Money." On one day, a Utah elementary school threw away the lunches of about 40 students with unpaid food bills. Hazel Compton, 12, remembers being given a sandwich of white bread with a slice of cheese instead of the hot lunch served to other children at her Albuquerque elementary school. (A school district spokeswoman said the sandwich met federal requirements.) Oliver Jane, 15, said that when she had meal debt at Shawnee Heights High School in Tecumseh, Kan., she was told to return her tray of hot food and was given a cold sandwich instead. "If you didn't eat the lunch, they were just going to throw it away," she said. "It seems unfair to me to expect a bunch of kids to be responsible for putting money in their lunch accounts when they don't even handle their own funds." Marty Stessman, superintendent of the Shawnee Heights Unified School District, said that younger children were allowed to take a limited number of meals despite debt, but that high school students were not. "Notices are sent home automatically when they go below 5, so it shouldn't be a surprise," Dr. Stessman said. "They should know before they get to the cashier." The problem of meal debt is not new, but the issue has received more attention recently because the Department of Agriculture, which oversees school lunch programs, imposed a July 1 deadline for states to establish policies on how to treat children who cannot pay for food. "It has been a longstanding issue in schools, one that's gone on for decades," said Kevin W. Concannon, who was the department's under secretary for food, nutrition and consumer services in the Obama administration. After a 2010 overhaul of school nutrition standards, the department heard from schools and advocacy groups about the burden of lunch debt and the shaming practices that often result. Last summer, the Agriculture Department concluded that meal debt should be managed locally, but required states to formalize their debt policies. "We're not telling schools what to put in their policy, but we do want them to think about the issue," said Tina Namian, who oversees the school meals policy branch. The department does not prohibit practices that stigmatize children with meal debt, but offers a list of "preferred alternatives," such as working out payment plans and allowing children with unpaid balances to eat the regular hot meal. In March, New Mexico passed a law that directs schools to work with parents to pay debts and ends practices like cold sandwich substitutes that may embarrass children. "Our biggest hope for this bill is that no student will have to contemplate what meal they are going to get," said Monica Armenta, a spokeswoman for Albuquerque Public Schools, where Hazel Compton was given a cheese sandwich. Minnesota and the San Francisco Unified School District, among others, also have adopted anti shaming policies. Recently, the Houston Independent School District notified its food service department that children with debt should be served the regular hot meal. "This is fundamentally a right versus wrong decision," said Brian Busby, the chief operating officer for Houston schools. "If a kid needs a meal, he's going to eat." But feeding hungry children whose families have meal debt does not solve the problem for schools, which still must grapple with paying the bill. In 2016, the School Nutrition Association published a review of almost 1,000 school lunch programs, finding that nearly 75 percent of districts had unpaid meal debt. One solution is the federal free meal program. But not every struggling family meets the income requirements, and those that do may have language barriers or fears over immigration status, or fail to file the paperwork. An Agriculture Department guidance document suggests that districts reach out to the community for help, for example through "random acts of kindness" funding and school fund raisers. Such efforts around the country have begun to help some districts solve the problem. In 2014, when a theater technician, Kenny Thompson, was mentoring fourth graders in the Houston area district of Spring Branch, he saw a cafeteria worker refuse to serve a child the hot meal of chicken, potatoes, fruit and milk. "The lunch lady says: 'I'm sorry, I told you yesterday you couldn't have this today. You need to tell your parents to pay their bill.' And then she turns around and gives him two slices of bread with cold cheese," Mr. Thompson said. He knew the child's mother was in the hospital, and he stepped in to pay the bill. Later, Mr. Thompson started Feed the Future Forward, which has hosted crawfish boils and charity golf tournaments to raise money for lunch debt. It has wiped out more than 30,000 in food bills and is planning an additional 23,000 in donations. The giving comes with a catch: Schools must promise they will not give alternative meals to children with unpaid bills. Spring Branch, where Mr. Thompson first witnessed the practice, has taken the pledge. Rob Solomon, chief executive of GoFundMe, said it had about 30 active campaigns to raise money for meal debt. Camille Billing, a teacher in Hamilton, N.J., recently started a GoFundMe page. In Galveston, Tex., a retired teacher, Donna Woods Stellman, paid off the city's meal debt after raising 1,000. A YouCaring page has raised more than 6,000 for students at impoverished high schools in Virginia. In West Palm Beach, Fla., two high school juniors started School Lunch Fairy to help erase lunch debts. While the efforts are laudable, "they should be a last resort," said Abby J. Leibman, president and chief executive of Mazon, a Jewish anti hunger organization. Others argue that school meals should be offered free to all children, regardless of income, as is the case in Sweden and Brazil. "We need to provide school meals on the same basis on which we provide school transportation and textbooks," said Janet Poppendieck, a senior fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute and author of "Free for All: Fixing School Food in America." Some cities, including Boston, Chicago and Detroit, offer free meals to all students under the Community Eligibility Provision, a federal regulation that allows schools and districts in high poverty areas to do so regardless of individual need. In New York City, a pilot free lunch program is under review. Most schools in the United States, however, do not qualify for the provision, and only about half of those that do take advantage of it. As a result, districts struggling with unpaid lunch bills, which can run into the millions in large urban areas, often resort to shaming tactics to push parents to pay. Crystal Jarek, a retired teacher in Lee County, Fla., said she remembered the staff taking debt notices to class. "The cafeteria staff would come in at noon, wearing their hairnets, and hand out letters," she said. "All the kids would turn around to see who was getting one." During the 2015 16 school year, Lee County began offering free meals for all students at 76 of its schools, including the one where Ms. Jarek taught. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The Federal Reserve chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, said the Fed would maintain its plan to trim its stimulus campaign by reducing its monthly bond purchases to 35 billion beginning in July. WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve on Wednesday sharply cut its economic forecast for 2014 even as it said the economy had bounced back after a nasty winter, allowing the central bank, in its view, to continue to retreat from its stimulus campaign. A melange of policy documents and public remarks by the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, carried the message that the Fed expected the recovery to maintain its slow and steady pace, and affirmed that the Fed intended an equally slow and steady retreat from its supporting role. The Fed announced, as expected, that it would cut monthly bond purchases by 10 billion in July, to 35 billion, and that it still planned to end purchases this fall. It also affirmed that it is likely to start raising its benchmark interest rate next year. "Growth in economic activity has rebounded in recent months," the Fed said in a statement after a two day meeting of its policy making Federal Open Market Committee. It said labor markets, household spending and business investment were all improving. There are "many good reasons" to expect faster growth going forward, Ms. Yellen said at a news conference after the statement was released. But she tempered that optimism by noting that Fed officials expect that damage from the recession will continue to weigh on the pace of recovery. Ms. Yellen said she was particularly concerned that some people who had been unable to find work would be permanently excluded from the job market. "It is conceivable that there is some permanent damage to them, to their own well being, to their families' well being and to the economy's potential," Ms. Yellen said, echoing a concern increasingly prevalent among economic policy makers. At the same time, Ms. Yellen sought to emphasize that the Fed regarded its forecasts as uncertain and its plans as malleable. Officials are concerned investors have grown too complacent about the trajectory of monetary policy and the economy. David Wessel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted that Ms. Yellen "looked for ways to feather the word 'uncertainty' into almost every answer." "She ticked off an impressive list of reasons why the U.S. economy should be doing better in the months ahead," he wrote in an analysis on the Brookings website. "But she knows the Fed has been consistently over optimistic about economic growth, and she didn't exude confidence." The Fed offered little information about the question most on the minds of investors: What comes next, after the central bank ends its bond buying campaign later this year? The aggregated forecasts of Fed officials, published Wednesday, showed a small increase in the average expected level of the Fed's benchmark interest rate at the end of 2015 and 2016. The median for 2015 rose to 1.2 percent from 1.125 percent, but it was not clear that the change reflected a forward creep in the views of Fed officials about the timing of a first rate increase from the level close to zero at which the Fed has maintained the rate since late 2008. The change is slight, and the documents do not indicate whether it is Ms. Yellen and her allies who changed their views. Comparisons were also complicated by shifts in the committee's membership, as two members left and two new arrivals submitted forecasts for the first time. Twelve of the 16 participants said they expected a first rate increase in 2015. Investors generally share that expectation, but Ms. Yellen, who appeared to affirm that timing at her last news conference, avoided a repeat on Wednesday. Asked about the meaning of the Fed's statement that it would raise interest rates "a considerable time" after it stops buying bonds, she said the timing depended on the path the economy follows in the months ahead. "While the Fed chair has tried to downplay those projections, they are consistent with Fed officials generally becoming at least a bit less dovish as unemployment continues to decline," Jim O'Sullivan, chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics, wrote in a note to clients. Other analysts saw less meaning in the movement, however, and markets continue to price in a somewhat later and slower increase in rates. "The dots are likely biased upward by the more 'hawkish' members of the F.O.M.C., with the consensus likely more dovish," Michael Dolega, senior economist at TD Bank Group, wrote in a note to clients. The Fed was more forthcoming about its economic views. Officials estimated that the economy would expand 2.1 percent to 2.3 percent this year, down from a March forecast for growth of 2.8 percent to 3.0 percent. It is the seventh straight year that the optimism of the Fed's initial forecasts has been gradually eroded by disappointing data. They also estimated that the economy in the long term would grow at a rate of 2.1 percent to 2.3 percent, markedly below their expectations just a few years ago. They continued to predict, however, that growth in 2015 and 2016 would exceed that average, topping 3 percent for the first time since the recession. Most Fed officials remained sanguine about inflation, making only small changes to their predictions that inflation will remain at or below 2 percent through 2016. Ms. Yellen also said concerns about financial stability were not playing a major role in the timing of the retreat. "I don't see the kinds of broad trends that would suggest to me that the level of financial stability risks has risen above a moderate level," she said. Some economists share the Fed's guarded optimism. James W. Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management, said he saw signs of gathering momentum, including increased lending by banks and borrowing by consumers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
So you've seen the musical. You've memorized the cast album. You've read the book, you've downloaded the app, and you've streamed the bonus track videos. Here comes another way to indulge your "Hamilton" mania: a high tech, interactive, traveling exhibition. The musical's creative team, following other pop culture phenoms from "Star Wars" to "Downton Abbey," has created "Hamilton: The Exhibition," which will open in November in Chicago, where the musical has been running since 2016, and then move to other cities. The project differs from other brand extending entertainment industry gallery ventures in one key respect: Because this musical is a work of nonfiction, based on Alexander Hamilton's life, the museum style exhibition aspires to historical accuracy, and has been developed in consultation with experts at Yale and Harvard. The exhibition's creators much of the same team that put together the musical say they are seeking to answer questions asked by the show's fans. "There was no way of anticipating the fact that 'Hamilton' has sparked this interest in this era, and in this founder who didn't really get his due," Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator and original star of the musical, said. "This is much more historically rigorous than two hours of musical theater could ever possibly be, and it really is to satisfy the demand of people who learn a little bit in our show and want to know more." The exhibition's creative director is David Korins, who designed the set for the stage musical; the company behind the project is Imagine Exhibitions, which has produced similar programs delving into "Angry Birds," "The Hunger Games" and many other popular titles. The other key players include Jeffrey Seller, the musical's producer; Thomas Kail, the musical's director; and Joanne Freeman, a Yale history professor whose research helped inform the musical. "There's a spectrum of responses to the musical among academics, but to me this is the supreme teaching moment for early American history not to teach the play, but to use it to teach," Ms. Freeman said. "To understand what America is, we have to understand the past, and if people come away from this exhibit having a sense of all the people engaged in this big debate over who had power and who didn't, and the contingencies of that moment, and thinking 'This is kind of interesting,' that would be wonderful." The exhibit, with an audio guide narrated by Mr. Miranda, parallels the arc of the musical, leading visitors through the life of Hamilton, starting with his childhood in St. Croix, and moving through his immigration to New York, his military and political careers, his family life, his writings, his scandals, his death in a duel and his legacy. A Harvard legal historian, Annette Gordon Reed, has been asked to assist with historical accuracy. Some of the features will be visceral (an opportunity to look down the barrel of a gun alongside a reconstruction of the Weehawken, N.J., dueling grounds), and others will be academic (an explanation of the debates over Hamilton's financial policy ideas.) There will be artifacts mostly replica letters, documents and objects as well as a scale model of New York in 1773, a walkway between military barracks, video, and, yes, music from the show. Marked by a 60 foot high statue of a quill, the presentation will be housed in a large stand alone tent (250 feet by 100 feet), and is scheduled to open Nov. 17 on Chicago's Northerly Island, a Lake Michigan peninsula near several popular museums. Tickets are not yet on sale, but are expected to be about 35 for adults, about 25 for children, and free for students from schools with high percentages of low income families. Although such exhibitions have become a common way for the entertainment industry to cater to, and profit from, the passion of fan culture, "Hamilton" appears to be the first stage work to attempt one. That reflects the unusual success of the musical, which opened in 2015 and is now the highest grossing show on Broadway each week. The musical, which won a Pulitzer Prize as well as 11 Tony Awards, also has productions running in London and Chicago and two touring North America. Mr. Seller said the exhibition will be financed by investors, and will seek to turn a profit; he declined to specify the cost of building or operating the project. But he and Mr. Miranda said profit is not the primary motivation. "Economically we don't need to do this," Mr. Miranda said. "This is just another stab at sharing our enthusiasms." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
With some cheering it on and others anxiously holding their breath, Hollywood's latest comic book movie, "Joker," laughed its way to the bank this weekend, opening to robust ticket sales and signaling to Warner Bros. that a risky move had paid off. "Joker" sold about 93.5 million in domestic tickets this weekend. The movie made an additional 140.5 million overseas, according to Warner Bros. "This is a very strong opening," David A. Gross, a movie consultant, wrote in a report this weekend. Moviegoers' embrace of "Joker" came amid a heated debate over whether Warner Bros. was being irresponsible by releasing it. The R rated film starring Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker, the DC Comics villain, tells an origin story for the character, showing how his homicidal anger grew out of intense isolation and rejection. Some worried that the movie, rather than critiquing societal issues, might instead be painting an overly sympathetic portrait of a man whose descent into brutal villainy echoes the back stories of actual mass shooters. The film's bleak tone and artsy look are pointedly atypical for a comic book movie; its director, Todd Phillips, envisioned it as a gritty character study in the mold of "Taxi Driver." (Phillips is best known for "The Hangover.") The film won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last month, which helped lend it artistic legitimacy. Phoenix, better known for working with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson and Lynne Ramsay than for starring in superhero moneymakers, is widely anticipated to net an Oscar nomination for his performance. But as the release date for "Joker" inched closer, criticism intensified. Undergirding it was the memory of the 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colo., which occurred during a midnight showing of the Warner Bros. superhero movie "The Dark Knight Rises," also based on characters from DC Comics. Last month, relatives and friends of those killed in that shooting sent a letter to Warner Bros. expressing disquiet over "Joker." "When we learned that Warner Bros. was releasing a movie called 'Joker' that presents the character as a protagonist with a sympathetic origin story, it gave us pause," the letter said. In its own statement, Warner Bros. wrote that "it is not the intention of the film, the filmmakers or the studio to hold this character up as a hero." In the lead up to the release of "Joker," the F.B.I. warned of online threats, adding to fears that screenings of the movie might be targeted with violence. That prompted the police in cities including New York and Los Angeles to step up theater security. The movie opened without incident, though signs of audiences' anxiety were apparent. According to The Associated Press, a number of moviegoers left a screening in midtown Manhattan on Friday night after a man cheered and applauded on screen murders. Consuming what appeared to be alcohol, he reportedly spat on patrons as they left the theater. "All the nervousness built around the film" made the experience particularly unsettling, one moviegoer, Etai Benson, wrote in an online exchange with the news agency. Warner Bros. made a bet that audiences would respond to an edgy, artsy, boundary pushing movie and this weekend proved them right. While opening sales for "Joker" were not as high as they were for "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" ( 166 million in 2016) or "The Dark Knight Rises" (about 161 million in 2012), Gross, the movie consultant, noted in his report that character spinoffs typically make less money than the original movies. "Joker" was able to perform roughly in line with other spinoffs relative to their main series counterpart. "The Batman franchise, including this spinoff, is playing at an extremely high level," Gross added. Reinforcing that success is the fact that "Joker" cost 55 million to make, a modest amount for a major production. "The Dark Knight Rises," by comparison, cost an reported 250 million to bring to life. "Joker" didn't have much serious competition this weekend. The next highest grossing movie on domestic screens was Universal's "Abominable," an animated family movie that opened last weekend and brought in an additional 12 million domestically this weekend. "Downton Abbey," distributed by Focus Features, came in third place, selling 8 million in tickets during what was its third weekend in theaters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It's 2020, So of Course Mike Tyson Is Boxing Again Mike Tyson is back for a pay per view fight. Well, not exactly a fight. ("It's an exhibition bout between two former champions," said a seemingly exasperated Andy Foster, the California State Athletic Commission executive officer. "I don't know another way to put it.") Somehow, Tyson's being back in the ring is a natural cap to 2020. A documentary series in the spring allowed millions to watch Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls run it back. The Fresh Prince recently returned to Bel Air alongside the original Aunt Viv. Prince Akeem will soon be coming back to America from Zamunda, courtesy of Eddie Murphy. We reside in an era saturated in nostalgia, rampant with reruns in service of our need for safe, constant pandemic entertainment. Relentless news cycles make it difficult to imagine a hopeful tomorrow. We hug the familiarity of what we know. On Saturday, he will fight Roy Jones Jr., 51, another once skilled boxer long past being past his prime. ("This exhibition, I can understand the appeal for it," said Steve Farhood, a Showtime boxing analyst, adding: "You can't expect much. You can train your body as much as you want, you're still 50 something years old.") But nostalgia sells, and Tyson always proved a draw. And if you're thinking that Tyson needs the money, no, that is apparently not the case. His cannabis company appears lucrative. The fight ("If you know anything about his fighting career, he's been done for a while; a long time," said Louis Moore, a boxing historian and professor at Grand Valley State University) will earn funds for several charities under the umbrella of the Mike Tyson Cares foundation. "Why can't I do something bigger than me?" Tyson said during a recent telephone call, while acknowledging that he is known to be selfish. "Like I said: 'Why do I always have to think about me? Why can't I think about somebody else for once in my life?'" The roots of the exhibition, scheduled at Staples Center in Los Angeles, began with the same catalyst that has caused many a man to fall. "Ego," Tyson said not "temporary insanity," as the former champion George Foreman claimed. "Everything is a reason in my life," Tyson said. "I do everything for a reason." He said he was more than 100 pounds overweight, felt labored walking a block and didn't like how he looked in the mirror. He started eating vegan and training again inside the ring when he felt something familiar. "The first time I ever boxed, boom, I get hit to the side, my ribs crack," Tyson said of his return. "Boom, I get hit in the jaw a couple times. And you know what? It never once came to my mind to say, 'What the hell am I doing here?' I sort of said, 'I'm in the right place.'" He posted a couple of sparring videos that quickly went viral. "I have no idea about it. I don't look at YouTube. I mean, I'm starting to look at YouTube for music. I didn't know it had so many stories." Opportunities and offers poured in. "Oh listen," Tyson said. "At first, it was the M.M.A. fight with Bob Sapp. Then it was Tyson Fury. Then it was Shannon Briggs, and now it's Roy Jones. So I don't know how we got from Mr. Sapp to Roy Jones Jr., but that was the route we went." The World Boxing Council announced the creation of yet another belt for Saturday night's bout, the Frontline Battle Belt. The main event is scheduled for eight rounds of two minutes each. The night will be presented not by a legacy boxing network but by Triller, a social video app that raised money from entertainers with the elevator pitch of establishing a U.S. based TikTok alternative. The Tyson Jones matchup is the calculated culmination of an evening of spectacle from beginning to end. Rappers including DaBaby, Lil Wayne and French Montana are scheduled to perform live. Ne Yo will sing the national anthem. There is merchandise on sale. Tyson and Jones may not even be the most improbable bout. The undercard features a match between the YouTube personality Jake Paul and the former Knicks player and dunk specialist Nate Robinson. "It was Mike's idea to kick off the league with his own fight," said Watts, adding that she is planning four calendar events in 2021. During the interview, Tyson imagined other boxers participating in bouts for charity, like Fury, Deontay Wilder, Floyd Mayweather and Oscar De La Hoya. "That would be powerful," he said. "My ego would mean nothing. That would do off my ego, if we all got together." This is another act in Tyson's winding life, with the seniority of someone who perhaps did not envision making it this far. "I know it seems different, me being who I was before and who I'm becoming and trying to become in life, but that's just what it is," Tyson said. "I didn't choose this route. I wasn't navigating. I'm very grateful to be alive. I learned a lot of gratitude." Tyson's boxing debut introduced him as "the hunter, the pressure fighter who will try to push his opponent's nose bone into his brain, as he once famously said," Farhood said. A rape conviction and prison stint marked a steep downfall. Three decades later, an environment of tolerant silence has changed with regard to abuse in the world of sports and entertainment. "During the time when this happened, it was fairly rampant but just underreported" among many famous men in sports, said Miki Turner, a former sports columnist who is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California teaching journalism. She added: "I'm glad that this movement has really emerged and really sort of shaken all the nuts from the trees." Tyson said that until his downfall he was too self centered. "I didn't want to be humble. I got humbled. Life beat me into submission," he said. "I lost my babies, I lost people I loved and it just I had to get it together and found my head. And it could be me. I could be gone tomorrow or 10 minutes from now. You know what I mean? I'm not no religious freak, man, don't get me wrong, OK?" This being 2020, it is not that perfect world. But Saturday should at least be an interesting night. Mike Tyson is again scheduled to fight. ("We expect it to be a spirited exhibition, a good exhibition of boxing skills, but it's an exhibition," Foster said.) His goal is as it was 30 years ago: to land as many punches as hard as he can. "No one," he said, "is going to be disappointed." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Jordan Kristine Seamon, left, and Francesca Scorsese in "We Are Who We Are," a new series that is set in 2016. The supermarket at the U.S. Army base in Chioggia, Italy, looks as if it could be anywhere in the world. That's exactly the point. As Britney (Francesca Scorsese), a teen living on base, explains it to new kid Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer), all the military stores like it are precisely alike, down to the same items in the same places in the same aisles. "So we don't get lost," she says. Good luck with that. Getting lost is the natural condition of humans, and teenagers in general: You wander, get waylaid, and in the process hopefully find out who you are. That process is the subject of "We Are Who We Are," the languid, lusty, sun baked teen drama from Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me by Your Name") that begins Monday on HBO. We meet Fraser, in fact, staring at a "Lost and Found" sign at an Italian airport, where he has arrived with his mother Sarah (Chloe Sevigny), the new commander of the base, and his other mother, Maggie (Alice Braga). Sulky and withdrawn under a protective helmet of bleached hair he would rather have stayed home in New York he sets off to explore the base and Chioggia, running into a group of Army kids off for an afternoon at the beach. Introverted and flinchy, Fraser is an unsettling character to enter the story through, with an awkward, defensive personality and hints of a troubled past. At one point he slaps Sarah over a minor annoyance; at another, she accidentally cuts herself and he instinctively puts her finger in his own mouth. They fight and comfort each other intimately, and his problems seem to frustrate and terrify her. (Sevigny, who made her debut in Larry Clark's 1995 teen panic flick, "Kids," is nuanced and convincing as the commanding officer uncertain on the home front.) But he is a lot of work, maybe more work than you'll want to invest as a viewer. But "We Are" opens outward with the second episode, which shows us the same day through the eyes of Fraser's neighbor Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamon, an astonishing newcomer). She's more settled than Fraser popular and close to her conservative father (Scott Mescudi, better known as the rapper Kid Cudi) but is also searching for her place, experimenting with her gender expression and testing her friendships. As the two meet and form a close, platonic alliance, the focus broadens to Caitlin's circle of friends white and Black, Christian and Muslim, American and European, military and civilian, all thrown together in a limbo that's both America and Italy and yet not wholly either, living a curious existence that's both tightly regimented and exhilaratingly free. I'm not sure if this is a realistic portrait either of overseas base life or of military family dynamics, but the uncanniness of the setting feels key to the story. The series's real setting is adolescence. The physical location is simply an otherworldly backdrop for its flirtations and fights to play out against, like an enchanted wood in a Shakespeare comedy. It's funny that it took an Italian director to see the potential in the stories of American military kids. But then again, an American might have been more burdened by the urge to comment topically. There's little military politics in the first four episodes (of eight), other than a slowly percolating subplot about deploying soldiers to Afghanistan. And American politics creep in only at the edges, with ads and TV footage from the Trump and Clinton campaigns (the series is set in 2016) and the MAGA hats that Caitlin's father orders for the two of them, though campaign gear is forbidden on base. All these touches, so far, feel more like quirkily deployed set dressing than statements. Many of the supporting characters are thinly drawn, and the plot is slight and shaggy. Friends ally and drift apart, arguments whip up and dissipate like summer cloudbursts. Guadagnino's gift here is more for atmosphere and emotion, and the episodes burst with them. They're rich with sun and salt and a touch of melancholy. The camera revels in the Labrador like energy with which these kids except Fraser leap into any available body of water. There's a lot of leaping in "We Are Who We Are," figurative and literal. The young characters make impulsive life decisions with the same energy they use for dangerous, illicit rides on the Army base zip line. (Guadagnino, who shares the writing with Paolo Giordano and Francesca Manieri, also has an eye for a great visual metaphor.) All this comes together in the fourth episode, centered on an impulsive, all night house party. It's a finely detailed, living fresco of libido and intoxication, all these teenagers inhabiting their bodies as if they were just unwrapped birthday presents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
WHAT'S LEFT OF ME IS YOURS By Stephanie Scott In Japanese, there are two words for "love" and several gradations, including "miren" (lingering attachment), "kataomoi" (one sided longing), "aishiau" (mutual love) and "fukai aijo" (deep love). When a crime of passion is committed in Stephanie Scott's debut novel, "What's Left of Me Is Yours," it is up to three Japanese judges to reach a verdict by determining the kind and depth of love that bound murderer to victim. Scott, a Singaporean British writer who was born and raised in Southeast Asia, drew inspiration from a real life murder trial that took place in Tokyo in 2010. It was much remarked upon at the time for involving a "wakaresaseya," or professional "breaker upper," who was hired by a husband to seduce his wife in order to gain leverage in divorce proceedings. Scott's way into her narrative is to meditate on the fate of the young daughter whose family is ripped apart by the tragedy. In the novel Sumiko is 7 when her mother, Rina, is killed in 1994. Looking back as a young adult, she realizes she was a footnote to the main event. "Lives to be rebuilt are always less interesting than lives destroyed," she muses. "Even in Japan, I disappeared from the page." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Two years ago, when Jackie Brenner was 16, she was struggling to recover from a difficult knee surgery and to deal with her mother's fight with breast cancer. Her life was full of stress. She started researching meditation, yoga and nutrition, and she incorporated what she found into her daily routine. Soon, she started spreading her enlightenment to other students. Through Piece of Peace, Ms. Brenner's nonprofit, she teaches others how to live healthy lives. The volunteers work at places like Y.M.C.A.s and Boys Girls Clubs to teach Ms. Brenner's nutrition curriculum to younger children. They learn how certain foods affect the body, and they practice yoga poses and study the benefits of meditation, which Ms. Brenner said she finds particularly important. Research has documented how students' frustrations, fears and out of school trauma can get in the way of learning. A growing number of schools now teach children how to meditate and quiet their anxieties, hoping that their increased focus will help them perform better in school. Ms. Brenner's work fits right into this trend. "Through meditation, I feel every kid can find that inner peace and that inner quiet that we all kind of lose, especially in school and with all the stressors we have in life," she said. Tara Garcia Mathewson "We've got to stop looking at it as a soft and fluffy skill," Ms. Borba said. "Just like you're helping your kid practice math skills, you're helping your child practice the skills of empathy." Experts say many of today's young adults show far less ability to be empathetic than young adults did in the 1980s. Teachers say that after the training, they often see an immediate impact. "The kids who are most in tune with their feelings and others' feelings tend to be the ones who excel," said Lynn Bamrick O'Meara, a Detroit area kindergarten teacher of 34 years. The final year too often meanders, as students load schedules with electives, allow their grades to sag and fritter away time until graduation. Some must take remedial courses when they get to college. But at some high schools, seniors are swapping electives they don't need for courses their futures demand. Enrollment in classes that let high schoolers earn college credits has jumped, and some states are even starting to tighten high school graduation requirements to better align them with the needs of the labor market. According to one study, more than 635,000 students under 18 took community college classes in 2015, an increase of 122 percent from 2001. Participation in Advanced Placement classes has risen, too: 2.7 million students took at least one A.P. exam last year compared with 1.3 million in 2006. The growing cost of college is driving parents to get students into these dual enrollment programs, said Adam Lowe, executive director of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships. Take Goose Creek Memorial High School, in the oil industry hub of Baytown, Tex. The school has made a point of hiring teachers with master's degrees who are credentialed to teach classes in which teenagers earn dual credit with nearby Lee College. Some students have even earned an associate's degree while still in high school. Goose Creek has started sharing data with Lee College to track academic progress and help connect the students with local employers. With these and other changes, Susan Jackson, the principal, says the share of her students who are graduating ready for college and careers has grown from 40 percent a few years ago to 75 percent. Joel Vargas, a vice president of the nonprofit group Jobs for the Future, says educators will need to keep a close eye on quality as demographic changes compel colleges to scour for students to fill emptying classrooms. But stitching together high school with college and careers will become only more important as good jobs for people without advanced training disappear, he says. "Communities will need to be more thoughtful about how to provide an on ramp into the future for young people." Caroline Preston What I Wish I'd Known Before College We asked some of The New York Times's 2018 newsroom interns what they wish they had known before they went to college. Illustrations by Kyle Hilton. "I feel like community college puts you in a really real world situation because you're with all different types of people, and that helped me understand that I just need to make whatever I want to do happen." "It's significantly different from high school, and you don't have to do everything, like you did in high school." "At the end of the day, everything works out. One bad grade on an exam, on a project, is not the end of the world." "There's a lot of luck and chance that goes into things that are beyond our control. Being more aware of that and knowing that there are a lot more options than people realize." "Not everyone is going to be there the entire time: Everyone is on a different path, a different journey, so they may not come back to school next year." "I really wish I would have gotten into the habit of jumping on top of deadlines and stayed ahead of the curve earlier in college. I was surprised by how much there was to learn in such a short amount of time." Getting More Out of Screen Time No matter how hard they try, many parents have trouble keeping their children away from screens. If they will be watching anyway, can you make that time more productive and educational? That's the idea behind "Preschool Clues," a new book by Angela Santomero, the creator of the popular children's show "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood," which has some suggestions to help preschoolers get the most out of screen time and help parents feel less guilty. Show the same episode again and again ... and again.When children repeatedly watch the same episode, they understand and retain information better. Pause the episode and ask questions. "What do you think will happen next?" "What is the character feeling?" This teaches children to be critical thinkers, Ms. Santomero said. "The more we model it, the more they will ask these questions no matter what they are watching." Include characters in dinner conversation. Ask your children to reflect on the shows they've watched by talking about characters as if they're real life friends. "What did Daniel Tiger do today?" Use the show in playtime. You can encourage critical thinking about media by including characters in play drawing pictures from a show, re creating a craft activity, or writing or drawing a new end to the story. It has become the norm for teachers to use their own money to pay for supplies. Ninety four percent of them do so, spending a median of 297, according to a Department of Education survey. That is now shifting teachers are becoming fund raisers. PledgeCents, an educational crowdfunding website, partnered with Teach for America in 2015 to make free crowdfunding pages for new T.F.A. recruits. Last summer, they raised more than 300,000 and over 90 percent of new recruits signed up, according to Andyshea Saberioon, PledgeCents' founder. But Mr. Saberioon said he believed that crowdfunding sites weren't the ideal solution. So this summer, he began a new project with Alice Keeler, a math teacher from California, called Teachers Are Professionals. The goal of the site is to eliminate the expectation that teachers pay out of pocket for anything. "Schools have always been asking teachers to hustle as fund raisers," Ms. Keeler said. "But that just goes back to the cultural expectation that teachers are funding their own classroom, and that's what needs to change." In the short term, Ms. Keeler wants to bring teachers across the country together so that they can get bulk order discounts on educational technology. Her long term goal is to give teachers who sign up at teachersareprofessionals.com three technology products of their choice, three professional development books, and a 300 gift card to a big box store or online retailer. Ms. Keeler and PledgeCents will work with corporations and private donors to raise money. At the moment, however, they don't plan to lobby for increased public education spending. Sharon Lurye | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
FRANKFURT Unemployment in the euro zone continued its steady rise in May, according to data published Monday, underscoring the human effects of a financial downturn that has lasted a year and a half. The jobless rate in the 17 countries that belong to the euro zone was 12.1 percent in May, adjusting for seasonal effects, according to a report from Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency. That figure compared with 12 percent in April, which was revised down from 12.2 percent reported earlier. Based on the revised figures, May unemployment was at a record high. Eurostat estimated that 19.2 million people in the euro area were jobless in May, an increase of 67,000 from April. For all 27 countries in the European Union, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 10.9 percent. The European bloc expanded to 28 countries on Monday when Croatia officially joined. Joblessness in the euro zone has been rising almost without interruption since early 2008, when the financial crisis began, declining only briefly at the beginning of 2011. And analysts see little prospect for a sustained decline anytime soon. While economists expect the euro zone economy to stabilize in the course of this year, growth will most likely remain too slow to generate large numbers of jobs. "The measure that offers the greatest potential for job creation in the short to medium term is an easing of credit conditions," Marie Diron, an economist who advises the consulting firm Ernst Young, said in a statement. "This would allow companies to invest and as a result recruit in the euro zone." The European Central Bank will hold its monetary policy meeting on Thursday, but it is not expected to introduce more stimulus to the euro zone economy. A cut in the benchmark rate, to 0.25 percent from a record 0.5 percent, is possible, but many say it would be unlikely to do much to encourage lending in troubled countries like Spain and Italy. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Banks in those countries are trying to cope with rising numbers of bad loans and are reluctant to lend no matter how cheaply they can borrow from the European Central Bank. And the central bank remains reluctant to effectively print more money, as the Federal Reserve in the United States and Bank of England have done, because of opposition from Germany to more aggressive action. Eurostat also reported on Monday that inflation in the euro zone rose to 1.6 percent from 1.4 percent because of a surge in energy prices. While inflation remains below the central bank's target of about 2 percent, the uptick is likely to provide a further argument against increasing the benchmark interest rate. Compounding the bank's challenge, the numbers released showed that there remained a big difference in economic performance among euro zone countries. These differences make it difficult for the central bank to form a monetary policy that is appropriate for all members. Unemployment rates in Spain and Greece were about 27 percent in May, with youth unemployment remaining well above 50 percent. In contrast, unemployment in Austria was 4.7 percent and in Germany was 5.3 percent. Both had youth jobless rates below 9 percent. If there was any good news, economists said, it was that unemployment may not go up much more. "An end to the euro zone labor market downturn is not yet imminent," Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING Bank, said in a note to investors. "However, with the recession across the euro zone petering out, the peak in unemployment should not be too far away, either." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A New Era for the Berlin Film Festival, With Two at the Top None Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, the co directors of the Berlin Film Festival, in the event's offices. The first edition programmed by the new leaders will run Feb. 20 through March 1. Lena Mucha for The New York Times BERLIN On a recent morning, the Berlin Film Festival's two new co directors were arguing about accents specifically, what kind of voice should introduce the filmmakers in live announcements at this year's event. "On this issue, I like an accent," said Carlo Chatrian, its artistic director, adding that a non native English speaker would best reflect Berlin's cosmopolitan identity. "But we already have so many accents," protested Mariette Rissenbeek, its executive director. When another team member floated the idea of a German person introducing the films in broken English, Rissenbeek winced. "No, no, no," she said. "It cannot, under any circumstances, be embarrassing." After erupting into laughter, the group agreed. Promotional posters for the Berlin Film Festival, often called the Berlinale, on the Potsdamer Platz, where many screenings take place. This year's Berlinale, as the festival is often called, will be the first time the event has been overseen by not one, but two leaders an arrangement that proponents say allows specialists to focus on areas of expertise rather than having a single all powerful figure responsible for both creative and business decisions. In an era when organizations are being scrutinized for gender disparities in leadership positions, it also allows a man and a woman to share the top role. In this case, Chatrian, 48, is responsible for programming decisions and Rissenbeek, 63, is handling logistics, staffing and finances for the event, which begins on Feb. 20 and runs through March 1. "With MeToo, this idea of having autocratic, solitary rulers running cultural institutions began to change," Andrea Hausmann, a professor at the Institute of Arts Management in Ludwigsburg, said in a telephone interview. The dual director concept known here as a "doppelspitze" has existed in Europe and elsewhere for decades, and has become especially popular in Germany's cultural sector in the last few years. The arrangement requires a level of coordination that can prove challenging, even to seasoned chiefs. Many hope it will help reinvigorate the Berlinale, which is considered one of Europe's most important film festivals but has recently drawn accusations of lackluster curation. Chatrian, who was born in Italy, previously worked as the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and Rissenbeek, who is from the Netherlands, led a promotional agency focused on German film. In a joint interview, Chatrian said the doppelspitze structure had allowed him to take a more hands on curatorial approach than his predecessor, Dieter Kosslick, who oversaw the festival alone for 18 years. Under Kosslick's leadership, the festival expanded significantly in size and scope. "Everyone was aware that Dieter had a lot of things on his plate," Rissenbeek said. "If the activities grow time after time, you need to change the structure so people can cope with the amount of work." Lena Mucha for The New York Times In recent years, the Komische Oper opera company in Berlin, the Deutsches Museum in Munich and numerous state funded theaters around the country have embraced the model. Tanztheater Wuppertal, the dance company founded by Pina Bausch, appointed joint leaders in 2018, with Bettina Wagner Bergelt taking over the group's artistic direction and Roger Christmann handling its business concerns. Ms. Wagner Bergelt said the arrangement was a savvy way of ensuring a more by the books approach to money in the theater world. "For a long time there were gray zones where you could make agreements without contracts, for example," she said in a telephone interview whereas these days financial decisions need to be made with more attention to detail, ideally by people with a keen financial sense. "It's like any other business now," she said. Elsewhere the structure has proved ill fated. In 2016, the Berlin State Ballet company announced the joint appointment of the contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz and the more classically inclined Johannes Ohman as directors. The arrangement unraveled last month, after Ohman announced that he was leaving the company to take a job in Stockholm. At a tense news conference last week, Waltz suggested that she might continue in the role with a new partner, adding that the collapse of the partnership with Ohman "does not mean the model of a doppelspitze has failed." Rissenbeek and Chatrian said their collaboration had, thus far, gone off without a hitch. "But we still have some time," she joked, noting that the festival doesn't start for a few weeks. "If he had said he wanted the opening film to be, I don't know, a small, Russian black and white film that's five hours long, I would have said it's a no go," she added. "But he didn't suggest it." Sigourney Weaver, left, and Margaret Qualley in "My Salinger Year," which will be the 2020 Berlinale's opening film. The Berlinale will instead kick off with "My Salinger Year," a film by the Canadian director Philippe Falardeau. The film, starring Sigourney Weaver, focuses on a woman working for the writer J.D. Salinger's literary agent. Chatrian estimated that he had watched around 800 films as part of the selection process, and said he had closely overseen the curation of all festival programs. "That would not have been possible if I had 10 meetings a day like Mariette," he said. This year's competition lineup will include a new film by the Berlinale favorite Christian Petzold, as well as works by noted art house directors like Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt and Philippe Garrel. "DAU. Natasha," part of a notoriously long gestating art project by the Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, will also be shown in competition. The British actor Jeremy Irons will head the jury. Rissenbeek and Chatrian have made some structural changes to this year's festival. Two programs Culinary Cinema, focusing on food related movies, and NATIVe, a section dedicated to films made by members of indigenous communities were cut because, Chatrian explained, he had struggled to find enough features that met his standards. They also created a new section, called Encounters, dedicated to "aesthetically and structurally daring works from independent, innovative filmmakers." The festival announced last week that it would suspend the Alfred Bauer Prize, an annual award named after the festival's first director, which is typically given to a film that "opens new perspectives on cinematic art." The prize's suspension followed a report in the German newspaper Die Zeit revealing that Bauer had worked as a high ranking functionary in the Nazi film bureaucracy. Critics have reacted to this year's lineup with cautious optimism. Katja Nicodemus, a longtime Berlinale observer who is a reporter and critic with Die Zeit, said in an email that this year's program seemed "intriguing and persuasively curated," but noted that, like Dieter Kosslick, the new doppelspitze had not been able to attract the top ranks of auteur filmmakers to Berlin. "It seems largely reminiscent of Kosslick's competition lineups," Nicodemus said. Chatrian said that he expected criticism but added that, like his predecessor, he was aware of the need to balance more auteur driven work with audience pleasing films. "I think there is room for both," he said. "In that respect, the identity of the Berlinale is not at stake." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In the epigraph to "A Star Is Bored," Byron Lane's wildly funny and irreverent debut novel, the author embellishes a boilerplate disclaimer: "This is a work of fiction. ... Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental, including names, places, weapons and sexual acts." Lane was a personal assistant to the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, and her fictional doppelganger in this novel is 56 year old Kathi Kannon, who starred as Priestess Talara in the film "Nova Quest." Kathi is mystifying, maddening and captivating, and her relationship with Charlie Besson, her 29 year old assistant, is essentially a love story except instead of the traditional Hollywood romance, it features two largehearted, misfit souls forming an unusual friendship. When we meet Charlie, his "life feels like rot." He loathes his job as a graveyard shift writer for a TV news station, and he struggles with what his therapist labels "passive suicidal behavior" self destructive drinking, marijuana use and unsafe sex. He's never been in a serious relationship, and he continues to mourn his mother, who died suddenly when he was 12. His hopes for his future rise when an acquaintance arranges the interview with Kathi, "heroine of film, television, maybe my life." When Charlie was a boy, his mother gave him a beloved Priestess Talara action figure, which his abusive, homophobic father took away. "He thought female action figures were the reason I 'ran like a girl,'" Charlie says. His father terrorized him for being gay, and his father's "masculine voice is still screaming at me, in my head ... even while here, auditioning for a new role in Hollywood's royal court." Their meeting calls to mind falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Nearly every sentence Kathi utters is darkly comic, even when she tries to remember Charlie's name. He reminds her it starts with a "C," and so she guesses and lands on a lewd word for a type of penile jewelry that can't be printed here. This becomes his sobriquet. (By the way, if penis jokes don't make you crack a tiny smile, then it's likely this novel isn't for you.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Isabel Leonard sang the title role in Nico Muhly's "Marnie." The choreography is by Lynne Page, the direction by Michael Mayer but where does one start and the other stop? Opera folk use the expression "park and bark." This denotes an old fashioned kind of acting in which singers take up a fixed position onstage, "park" there and sing, the implication being that opera performers attend solely to their "barking." This parking can be an art, too: Since stillness in opera is accompanied by music, its eloquence can be immense. But when singers prove skilled in movement, the physical side of opera becomes related to choreography: It connects humans to music in terms of space, time and meaning. This side of opera keeps growing in sophistication. Take the Metropolitan Opera's recent staging of Nico Muhly's "Marnie." The title character is often shadowed by four look alike silent Marnies, dressed in identical early 1960s couture in strikingly different colors; at other times, she's shadowed by 10 silent men in gray. The other Marnies, moving like the troubled heroine's echoes or auras, amplify the drama's central psychological mystery: Who is Marnie, what is she? In a memorable fox hunt scene, the gray men lift Marnie up she's fallen from her horse and suspend her in the air, in a moment out of time. The choreography is by Lynne Page, the direction by Michael Mayer but where does one start and the other stop? It's impossible to know. There probably have been productions for centuries in which opera direction has been akin to choreography. The Morgan Library Museum has a libretto for Verdi's "Aida" that the composer annotated while supervising its early Italian performances. His notes, although incomplete, are often very precise in directorial matters. For large ensemble scenes, in which the opera abounds, Verdi is remarkably like a choreographer in the way he attends to pattern. For intimate ensembles, he indicates precise details about the varied directions in which singers should face, as well as aspects of expression. I've seen performances of "Aida" far less focused than the one he notates. Some of the most eloquent choreographic imagery of 2018 occurred in the Met's production of Wagner's "Parsifal," revived in February. Especially in Act I, Francois Girard's direction charges the whole stage space with contrasting geometries. On our right, the Knights of the Grail, dressed in white, make neat, concentric rings. On our left, a silent chorus of shadowy women makes quite different lines. These women, dressed in black, their heads veiled as if in mourning, are half silhouetted. Who are these women? They're not in Wagner's libretto. He wrote just one female character, Kundry, and a singing chorus of sirens, the Flower Maidens, who appear only in Act II. Kundry, traumatically divided between carnal and spiritual forces, and the Flower Maidens are femmes fatales who try to lure Parsifal (and by implication other knights) from the path of virtue; Wagner's knights, though they're stirring and needy in other ways, are conceived as ludicrously chaste. Because large parts of the drama concern a male fraternity whose members seldom mention let alone esteem women, "Parsifal" has been called misogynistic. The "Parsifal" choreographer, Carolyn Choa, is also the director choreographer of the Met's "Madama Butterfly," conceived by her husband, Anthony Minghella, who died in 2008. One particular layer of this "Butterfly" production, last seen in March, is its attention to the heroine's past as a dancing geisha; another is its use of a puppet for her child. At all points, it demonstrates a choreographer's sense of drama within time and space. You can tell why a number of choreographers over the centuries, not least George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and Mark Morris, have staged whole operas, not just their dances. Still, directing singers is a very particular art: Try to make them move too precisely to the music, and some of them look like unmotivated marionettes, the more so if they have to share the stage with dancers. Nonetheless, the last few years have also brought productions in which singers and dancers truly integrate. In Stefan Herheim's staging of Verdi's "Les Vepres Siciliennes," for the Royal Opera in 2013, the action occurs not in medieval Sicily, as Verdi intended, but in the theater for which he wrote it: the Paris Opera. Regarded as the world's most prestigious opera house at the time, the Paris Opera obliged composers to include extensive ballet scenes in each work; Verdi wrote his most extended ballet for "Vepres," which had its premiere there in 1855. Mr. Herheim's production, often absurdist, makes ballet a frequent accompaniment for the stage action. When I saw the revival in fall 2017, the marvelous bass Erwin Schrott, in the role of Procida, sang his great aria "Et toi, Palerme," while the female corps de ballet, like sylphs from the Romantic ballet, danced around him. He even partnered one of them, providing admirable physical support while singing. Andre de Jong's choreography is deliberately generic; and yet the ballet Romanticism of that scene shows Procida's yearning soul. The characters in this "Vepres" inhabit not one plane of history but two: both the Paris of the premiere and the medieval Sicily of Verdi's opera. Is it mere chance that so many of the most inventive opera choreographers are women? Earlier this year, Lizzie Gee made the dances for English National Opera's new production of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe," a British comedy about fairies and aristocrats. The director was Cal McCrystal ("One Man, Two Guvnors"), who makes it deliberately, happily outrageous. Though this company's chorus has been dancing in many productions over the decades, I was amazed to see the enthusiastic precision with which Ms. Gee got these singers, as fairies, doing specific ballet steps: You could feel how all of them had a whale of a time. Her choreography closely, lovingly and hilariously refers to the fairy scenes of classically Romantic ballets, including "Giselle" and (especially) Ashton's "The Dream." Yet more gobsmacking was the quantity of ballet performed by the baritone Marcus Farnsworth. Gilbert and Sullivan make his character, Strephon, half mortal (the top half), half fairy; Mr. Farnsworth's lower half does a remarkable amount of ballet steps. He lifts and partners, too. There are many species of music theater, and of movement. Phelim McDermott's production of Philip Glass's "Akhnaten" originally for the English National Opera in 2016, and expected for the Met in fall 2019 evokes the two dimensional tableaus of Egyptian art while making them vibrate and ripple with marvelously judicious musical effect. Mr. Glass's music, famously, employs loops and repetitions in its orchestral accompaniment: Mr. McDermott matches these, with the visual marvels achieved by the skills group Gandini Juggling. The ensemble juggling often small scale, sustained over long periods and patterned across areas of the stage creates a kind of music drama I've never known: an extra layer of suspenseful background excitement against which the often ceremonious movement of the leading characters takes off. Here, as in "Parsifal," "Marnie" and other recent stagings (in Verdi's notes for "Aida," too), opera, not merely its supplementary dances, becomes choreography. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
FRANKFURT BMW'S designers and engineers have long vowed that the company's eventual battery powered cars would not be geekmobiles but true BMWs, with all the zip, handling and style that the German automaker is known for. Norbert Reithofer, the chief executive, is fond of saying that an environmentally friendly auto should not be "a vow of poverty on wheels." BMW fans can soon decide for themselves whether the company has delivered on its promise. On Friday in Frankfurt, BMW unveiled working prototypes of the i8, a plug in hybrid sport coupe that will carry a six figure price tag, and the i3, a four seat battery powered compact car aimed at a wider market. The two cars are the first from the company's new "i" subbrand for electric cars, plug in hybrids and other alternative power vehicles. While BMW hasn't disclosed what other models may be in the works, the i8 and i3 appear to be the high and low ends of what may someday be a broader line of low emission, high mileage offerings. Though officially labeled concept cars, the prototypes presented in Frankfurt are essentially the vehicles that will begin rolling off an assembly line in Leipzig, Germany, in 2013. BMW plans to market the cars in all of its main markets, including the United States, by the end of 2013, with the emphasis on urban areas. There was never much worry that the i8, versions of which BMW has shown before, would disappoint purists. With a battery powered electric motor turning the front wheels and a 1.5 liter 3 cylinder gasoline engine driving the back, the i8 will race from a standstill to 100 kilometers per hour (or 62 miles per hour) in 4.6 seconds, BMW says. That is faster than the most powerful version of BMW's Z4 sports roadster and competitive with most incarnations of the Porsche 911. The i8 is also a riposte to the Audi R8 E tron and Mercedes Benz SLS E Cell, electric sports cars that have already been publicly shown in concept form and will go into limited production within the next two years. The four seat i8 can go 20 miles solely on battery power and will theoretically travel more than 100 miles on a gallon of gas when the engine and batteries are working together, with the electric motor providing a power boost during acceleration. The company concedes that hard driving will cut that figure in half; this BMW may be green, but it can also be aggressive. It is less clear if the i3, presented as a city car, will rate a place alongside highly regarded BMWs like the 3 Series. The fuzzy renderings the company had shown before Friday, as it carefully rationed information about the electric car project, looked more like a streamlined Mini than a prototypical Bimmer. There had remained doubts as to whether the company was really willing to risk its prestige on a market for electric cars that, for all the hoopla, remained unproven. But based on the model shown in Frankfurt, BMW has clearly concluded that the i3 will cast a positive halo on its brand. The car is visually a BMW, including the trademark double kidney grille, which, however, is purely decorative. The battery powered i3 doesn't need a front air intake for engine cooling. The i3 also preserves the rear wheel drive format that is another BMW hallmark. At the same time, designers have updated the design language for the iPhone generation. Familiar elements, including a prominent roundel badge and L shaped taillights, mix with features like transparent roofs and side panels, the better to show off the carbon fiber passenger compartment and the seats of leather tanned with environmentally friendly olive oil. The i cars also signal that they represent a new kind of BMW. In contrast to the monocolor of most conventional cars, the i8 and i3 prototypes have what BMW calls layered schemes, swoops of carbon black and light gray on the body panels, with blue accents. The i3 aims for Euro coolness rather than the techno nerdiness of a Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf. "It is a BMW," said Richard Steinberg, who is in charge of the company's electric car operations in the United States. "It remains an ultimate driving machine." The performance metrics of the i3 seem respectably BMW like. It can go from 0 to 62 m.p.h. in less than 8 seconds, faster than some variants of BMW's 1 Series and 3 Series cars. Moreover, the i3 will deliver a nice kick from stoplights, reaching 60 k.p.h. (37 m.p.h.) in just 4 seconds, according to BMW. That is because electric motors deliver peak torque from a standstill. In internal combustion engines, torque increases, up to a point, with the engine speed. "You really accelerate right off the line," Mr. Steinberg said of the i3. Electric car skeptics, who are legion, may focus on the obvious disadvantages, primarily the limited range. The i3 will be able to go 80 to 100 miles between charges, which will take about four hours from the 240 volt charging unit that Mr. Steinberg said most buyers would want to install in their garages. "Range anxiety is a bit of a myth," Mr. Steinberg said, citing field studies with battery powered Minis indicating that most people travel well under 100 miles a day. Still, in recognition that many buyers may worry about running out of juice, BMW announced Friday that the i3 would offer an optional gasoline range extender engine. The engine will be able to generate electric power if the batteries run low, in a manner similar to the Chevrolet Volt, though the i3 will have more range on the batteries alone. Many analysts remain unconvinced. "People still need to get their heads around the whole range anxiety thing," said Tim Urquhart, senior analyst at IHS Automotive, a market research firm in London. "There are still huge obstacles" to mass market acceptance of electric vehicles, Mr. Urquhart said. Demand for the battery powered Nissan Leaf and the Volt plug in hybrid has so far exceeded the limited supplies in the United States. But sales of electric vehicles in Britain already seem to be slackening, he said. Noting that the Leaf starts around 36,000, Mr. Urquhart said, "It's a pretty rarified subset of buyer who is going to be in the market for this vehicle." But BMW may in a better position than Nissan or Chevrolet to command a premium price. And the German company argues that it has gone further than competitors to design an electric car from scratch, exploiting the technology's underappreciated virtues. Range aside, electric cars have some distinct selling points. They are easy to drive, and with an energy recuperation system that slows the car when the driver eases off the accelerator, the driver will use the brake pedal mostly for sudden stops. Acceleration is smooth and quiet, and there is no fuel smell. (Granted, some car buffs will miss that gasoline aroma.) Electric power also frees the body designers from many constraints. The i8 and i3 have carbon fiber passenger compartments mounted atop an aluminum frame that supports the drivetrain. The lightweight body cancels out the extra weight of the batteries and helps to extend the driving range, BMW says. The so called LifeDrive design allows BMW engineers to array the batteries and other components evenly around the car for optimal weight distribution and sporty handling. The design, which requires no side pillars behind the front seats and no tunnel for a driveshaft, makes the i3 exceptionally roomy for a small car, BMW says. The i3 has bench seats front and rear and no gearshift to intrude, allowing passengers to exit from either side. In short, with the i3 and i8, BMW is trying to make the argument that battery power is not just greener, it is more stylish and more fun. It may take a while to convince customers of that, Mr. Urquhart of IHS Automotive said. But BMW can apply its investment in lightweight technology to other models, he said, while also positioning itself as the premium carmaker with the most advanced electric car program. "They may not be making much money this decade," he said. But "it's all part of a wider strategy to be not only the leading premium carmaker, but also the leading high efficiency carmaker." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
One gallery at the Newseum includes materials dealing with the 9/11 attacks, including newspaper front pages from the day after. The Newseum Is Increasingly Relevant, but Can It Survive? WASHINGTON The front pages of newspapers telling of the 9/11 attacks are prominently on display at the Newseum here. Sixteen years later, their headlines still scream. "AMERICA'S DARKEST DAY," declares The Detroit Free Press, all in caps. In a screening room nearby, journalists talk on video about their experiences that day. A box of tissues is within arm's reach. If journalism is history written in the moment, there are few more compelling places to appreciate that than the Newseum, a cathedral to the craft, on Pennsylvania Avenue. "This is probably one of the most memorable things that most people experience when they come here: the top of the 9/11 tower," the museum's chief operating officer, Scott Williams, said as he pointed toward an exhibit of looming debris recovered from the attacks. But just as the profession it celebrates is in distress struggling financially in the internet age and attacked as purveyors of "fake news" so, too, is the Newseum. The Newseum has run up deficits every year since it opened a grand new home in 2008. Though it attracts a respectable number of visitors (820,000 expected this year) who pay top dollar ( 24.95 for adults) in a city filled with free museums, the institution is simply not taking in enough money to cover its bills. It still owes roughly 300 million on its new building, and the interest rates on the loans spiked last year. Its fund raising has long been sluggish for a museum with a 61 million operating budget. It relies each year on large infusions of money from the Freedom Forum, the foundation that created the museum and has given it more than 500 million over the last 20 years. In fact, the Freedom Forum, which champions the First Amendment and whose own endowment has shrunk since the recession, now says it cannot continue to support the Newseum at the same level. In 2015, the most recent year for which financial statements are available, the Forum provided 21.4 million, or more than a third of the museum's budget. It also took in 7.5 million in admissions. Still, the museum ran up a 2 million deficit. "We have not been successful in closing the gap," Jan Neuharth, the chief executive officer of the Forum, said. All of which has put the museum's future in doubt. Jeffrey Herbst, who served as the Newseum's chief executive officer and president for two years, stepped down from his post at the end of August. "We had different visions of how to address the Newseum's financial challenges and at the end of the day, decided to separate amicably," Mr. Herbst said in a phone interview. He declined to elaborate. The museum has just begun an in depth review to try to right the ship. Everything is on the table, museum officials say, including selling the building that houses the Newseum. That would be an ignoble fate for a structure borne of such ambition. The concept for the museum was hatched by the Freedom Forum, which was started in 1991 by Al Neuharth, Ms. Neuharth's father and the founder of USA Today. In 1997, the Newseum opened in a smaller location in Rosslyn, Va. But Mr. Neuharth had a bolder plan to build a palace to journalism on a piece of prime real estate in downtown Washington. The gleaming building overlooking the National Mall covers 643,000 square feet and has seven floors of gallery space and two floors of conference space. All 45 words of the First Amendment are etched into a 74 foot tall marble tablet on the building's facade. "It's a great venue." Ms. Neuharth said, before acknowledging, "it's very expensive to run the museum here." It didn't help that the museum's new home opened just after the recession hit. News organizations who were generous supporters at the outset found themselves contending with their own financial challenges. Journalists, who do not have the deep pockets of some professions, were not a particularly bountiful source of money. Unlike other museum boards, the Newseum did not require its members to donate to the institution until 2015. The Newseum would not say how much its trustees are expected to give. Bob Schieffer, the retired CBS anchor and author of a new book "Overload: Finding the Truth in Today's Deluge of News," said he wasn't surprised that the Newseum had struggled to raise funds from news organizations and journalists. "I think it's probably more difficult now than ever because you have these big newspaper chains, their revenues are down," Mr. Schieffer said. In 2015, the last year for which figures are available, the Newseum collected 6.3 million in donations, or about 10 percent of its budget, a small amount for a museum of its size. That has put pressure on the Freedom Forum to make up any shortfalls. In 2007, the Freedom Forum's endowment was at a little more than 550 million. Two years later, in the Newseum's first full year of operation in the new building, it shrunk to below 400 million. That same year, it provided 52.4 million of the Newseum's 92 million budget. "For large, mature museums," Ms. Wilkening, the consultant, said, "very few are likely to have a single donor or foundation contributing even five percent of their operating budget." That budget has been trimmed significantly in recent years, and there have been four rounds of layoffs. "It's the fact that they're charging 24 a person to go through a place," Mr. Reynolds said. "Every other place that they are competing against along the Mall is free." Though the Newseum is listed as a popular attraction on TripAdvisor, attendance is still meager compared with other top museums in the area, many of which are federally funded. The National Air and Space Museum, for example, a division of the Smithsonian that charges no admission, has already taken in 5.8 million visitors this year, according to data reported through September. Will President Trump's attacks on the news media spur attendance, or hurt? So far, the museum's popularity seems to be on the upswing. But admissions, even at the most popular museums, typically offset only a fraction of an institution's operating budget. So the solutions will need to be much broader, museum officials agree. "Our advocacy is more important than ever," Ms. Neuharth said. "We need to get a handle on the finances so that going forward for generations to come we can continue that advocacy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
ATHENS After nearly two weeks of tense negotiations, Greece and its troika of foreign creditors said Monday that they had clinched an agreement on economic measures that Athens must enforce to secure the release of further crucial rescue money. Those measures include thousands of layoffs in the civil service. "We wrapped it up; we have a deal with the troika," Yannis Stournaras, the nation's finance minister, told reporters. Greece has been offered two bailouts worth 240 billion euros, or about 310 billion, over the last three years through a memorandum of understanding with the troika, which comprises the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In a televised address, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said the deal showed that years of austerity were beginning to pay off. "The situation is changing," he said. "Until recently, Greece had been the example to avoid. In two years, Greece will no longer depend on the memorandum. It will be a country with growth." The troika issued a joint statement saying that Greece was on course to curb its huge debt burden, which stood at 160 percent of gross domestic product at the end of last year. "Fiscal performance is on track to meet the program targets, and the government is committed to fully implement all agreed fiscal measures for 2013 to 2014 that are not yet in place," the troika said, adding that the release of a loan installment of 2.8 billion euros that had been due in March "could be agreed soon by the euro area member states." Poul M. Thomsen, the I.M.F. envoy to Athens, said in a conference organized by The Economist that the 2.8 billion euros, as well as an additional 7.2 billion euros for the recapitalization of Greek banks, could be released as early as next week The troika said that an agreement had been reached on streamlining the Greek civil service and emphasized the importance of recapitalizing Greek banks without delay. It added that Greece would probably return to growth next year. Mr. Stournaras was even more upbeat, saying Greece aimed to achieve a primary surplus this year, which would allow it to seek more debt relief, according to an agreement with creditors. The issue that caused negotiations to stall in mid March was the overhaul of the civil service, a contentious topic that has tested the cohesion of Greece's fragile coalition government. The two sides finally agreed over the weekend that 15,000 civil servants would be dismissed by the end of next year, including 4,000 this year, according to reports in the Greek news media. The departures are to include employees close to retirement and an estimated 2,000 who have been accused of disciplinary offenses. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. In his address, Mr. Samaras said the 15,000 layoffs in the state sector would be replaced by new recruits as part of "a qualitative upgrade of the civil service." "The same number of new young people will be recruited in their place," he said. Mr. Thomsen of the I.M.F. had said earlier that there would be new hires in the civil service, without specifying how many or in which areas, though the troika is believed to be eager to see the bolstering of tax collection services. The plan for the civil service overhaul prompted vehement reactions from the government's political rivals, with Alexis Tsipras, the head of Syriza, the main leftist opposition party, calling it "a human sacrifice" that would merely swell the ranks of the unemployed, who now make up 27 percent of the population. Others have said they suspect the hiring pledge is a way to start laying people off without strong protests. Antonis Manitakis, the administrative reform minister who has been assigned the task of overseeing the public sector overhaul, said on Monday that the Greek civil service, which had just under 800,000 employees in 2010 when the country signed the first of its two foreign bailouts, was expected to shrink by a quarter by 2015, with 180,000 departures. These departures would include layoffs but would chiefly be early retirements, Mr. Manitakis said, without offering a breakdown of the figures. As Mr. Samaras confirmed in his speech, foreign inspectors also accepted Greek demands to reduce by 15 percent a property tax that was introduced as an emergency measure in 2011 but has been extended. The two sides were also said to have agreed on allowing Greeks who owe taxes and social security debts to pay them off in up to 48 monthly installments. Mr. Thomsen said that widespread tax evasion "remains a huge problem," though he added that Greece had "indeed come a long way." "The fiscal adjustment has been exceptional by any standard," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The California case in which 13 siblings were found imprisoned at home earlier this week is shocking, but not without precedent. Lurid cases have come to light over the years of children locked in closets and basements, held captive by parents who have crumbled under the weight of drugs, extreme religious conviction, personality disorders or their own abusive backgrounds. The good news, trauma experts say, is that recovery is indeed possible. Victims can reclaim their lives. "The clinical data is encouraging," said John A. Fairbank, co director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. "There are good treatments available for children seriously abused and traumatized." In particular, said Dr. Fairbank, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke, good results have been shown with a relatively short term cognitive behavioral therapy tailored for trauma patients, an approach developed in the early 1990s but widely disseminated in the last 15 years. A significant hurdle to recovery for the California siblings and children in analogous situations, said psychologists, is that their captors were not stranger kidnappers but their parents. "In doing the healing work, you look at what the patient's support systems are, " said Priscilla Dass Brailsford, a trauma psychologist and an adjunct professor in the department of psychiatry at Georgetown University. "The biggest supports are parents and family. These kids don't have that. The parents were the aggressors." Experts interviewed for this article, who underscored that they had no direct knowledge of the California case, said that because the siblings' primal assurance of unconditional love and safety had been ripped away, they would almost certainly struggle to trust and attach to future supportive figures. "The notion that this was done by parents increases a child's helplessness and hopelessness," said Nora J. Baladerian, a Los Angeles psychologist who often treats traumatized individuals. Dr. Dass Brailsford compared the 13 siblings' situation to that of prisoners of war, who have been deprived of food, freedom and sufficient nurturing. "One glimmer of hope is that they did not go through this alone," she said. "Prisoners of war are isolated as part of their torture. These children at least had each other." Before formal therapy can begin, the siblings must be placed in a safe, nurturing environment where kind treatment will be a positive constant they can rely upon, experts said. They added that keeping as many siblings together as possible would be important, to sustain their bonds. Daniel L. Davis, a forensic psychologist in Columbus, Ohio who has treated victims and perpetrators and evaluates children for juvenile court, said that there is not one behavioral model that adequately describes a typical parent perpetrator. "There are risk factors, certainly," he said. A list might include a prior history of abuse, domestic violence, and a cluster of personality disorders such as antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. Such people, he said, might be overly emotional, unpredictable, manipulative and exploitative. But like other trauma experts, Dr. Davis emphasized that children can be remarkably resilient. He treated an elementary school age boy whose parents had kept him locked away for such a long period that the child showed significant developmental delays. "But with intensive treatment and real effort by a support team, his growth was impressive," said Dr. Davis. "His parents were sent to prison." Other examples of children locked away from society by parents do occasionally emerge. A documentary "The Wolfpack" tells the story of seven siblings isolated in a Lower East Side apartment by their father. In 2015, three siblings were found locked by their parents in a urine and feces infested room in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. That same year, a teenage girl in Murfreesboro, Tenn., was also discovered having been locked in her bedroom for months by her parents, who had allowed her three siblings to travel at will. Dr. Davis said that while poverty is an element in many cases, it is certainly not a signature characteristic; indeed in the California case, the family lived in a middle class neighborhood and the father, David Allen Turpin, had reportedly once been employed as an engineer. But poverty afflicted situations may come to light more often, Dr. Davis noted, "because the perpetrators don't have the resources to keep shielding from public scrutiny." Formal treatment begins after children are placed in a secure home and assessed for trauma related symptoms, including post traumatic stress disorder. They may be unwilling or unable to describe their experience. Nightmares may roil them. The slightest trigger the rattle of keys, for example might send them into a hysterical tantrum. They may seem hyper aroused or vigilant, ever alert and cringing, braced to flee or fight. Younger children may act out the trauma as they play; for others, the emotional pain may be so overwhelming that they seem numb. "But the majority of these children can bounce back, " said Anthony P. Mannarino, director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. "I'm not saying they'll forget it but they can find a way to go forward." Dr. Mannarino is a co developer of trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF CBT). The typical treatment, he said, is 12 to 16 sessions. First, a therapist works with a child to manage terrifying thoughts and feelings about the experience. Next a therapist helps the child gradually discuss the trauma. "Those memories are really scary," Dr. Mannarino said. "Maybe the parents said, 'You deserve what you're getting, it's your fault,' and the child may have internalized shame. Helping them talk and processing that distortion gives them a chance to understand that they are not to blame." Finally, TF CBT involves the child's new caregivers. "We work with them to understand that the child's behavior expresses what happened to the child, as opposed to who they really are," said Dr. Mannarino. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
PARIS The night the United States beat Britain at the Women's World Cup to secure a place in the final, Clare Waight Keller, the Brit at the helm of Givenchy, let loose with a little anarchy in the palace. The events were not necessarily connected, but they had a kind of conceptual resonance. Sometimes you just want to smash some porcelain. Or, in the case of the couture, some invisibly finished, tailored to the nth degree, every sequin in its place, perfection. When the world doesn't behave quite as you'd like and the goal posts move, you can either take refuge in beauty and the way things have been done, or create a little ruckus. Ms. Waight Keller, for one, took the latter approach, imagining a winged creature trailing shreds of feathers and fringe, straps hanging off parachute puffs of pink taffeta and iridescent green jacquard, as she smashed her way through a host of classic chateaus (in reality it was the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, part of the Louvre complex, one of the most elaborate palaces in France). Fringed, shredded houndstooth and tweed were inspired by black and white tile flooring; glinting silver sequin tunic capes and jackets provided a jolt of silverware (silverwear); mint green and black feathered fantasias escaped from the aviary; and asymmetric ball gowns of beaded fringe and under feathers, tulle and lace, teetered alluringly close to the edge of coming undone. The collection was about as cool as couture gets in its elaborate insouciance and it had an energy that has been largely missing in a week where safe and stately has been the rule. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WASHINGTON The sharp decline in the country's fertility rate during the economic downturn has come to an end, federal data show, as an improving economy encouraged Americans to resume having babies. The number of babies born in the United States in 2012 remained flat, the first time in five years that the number did not significantly decline, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The leveling off capped a 9 percent decline in the fertility rate from 2007 to 2011, a drop that demographers say began after the recession took hold and Americans started feeling less secure about their economic circumstances. The decline "has come pretty close to grinding to a halt," said Carl Haub, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit research group. The fertility rate is the total number of babies born per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. Last year it stood at 63, down slightly from 2011. At the current rate, women could expect 1.9 babies on average over their lifetimes, down from a high of 3.8 in 1957, said Brady E. Hamilton, a demographer and an author of the report. The United States has a higher fertility rate than many other developed countries, bolstered by Hispanic immigrants, who are more likely than whites to be in their childbearing years. When rates are lower, as they are in countries like Germany and Japan, youth populations shrink, which can lead over time to a reduction in the size of the labor force and diminished tax bases. "There's a widespread perception that a moderately growing population is advantageous for economic growth and for a growing society," said Hans Peter Kohler, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. That is why news of the 2012 figures had demographers buzzing. "It's exciting," Professor Kohler said. "My prediction would be that we'll see further stabilization and possibly growth in 2013." The birthrate tends to rise and fall with economic cycles. The rate fell by a fifth during the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to Mr. Haub, creating a crater in the population that moved up the age ladder over time. In 2011, the Pew Research Center analyzed the fall in fertility by geography and found a strong link between falling fertility and economic malaise: the only state to show a slight increase in fertility between 2008 and 2009 was North Dakota, which had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. The decline had been particularly pronounced for women who were among the hardest hit by the recession: young women and Hispanics. The data released on Friday showed that the fertility rate for both groups was still in decline, though the pace of the drop had slowed considerably. Young Hispanics have experienced the largest decline, with the rate down by a third since 2007 among women ages 20 to 24, said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire. But slightly older women, in their early 30s, saw an increase in their fertility rate in 2012, up from a flat rate in 2011 and a decline in 2010. Women in their early 40s were the only ones not to experience a decline in fertility during the economic downturn, as they did not have the time to delay childbearing. "It seems like change is working its way backwards," said Gretchen Livingston, a demographer at the Pew Research Center. "We are seeing the next youngest group dipping a toe in the water." It is still unclear if the recent decline in births will be made up by a surge in fertility over the next few years, as happened during the baby boom after World War II. "A big question is what will happen to the 1.3 million forgone births?" Professor Johnson said. "Will women start to have these babies, or will the births never be made up?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A friend and fellow baseball fan recently sent an email and an old photo to offer his appreciation to our medical staff. Gleaned from the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the image showed an exhibition game played in Pasadena, Calif., in Jan. 1919. The scene shows the batter, catcher and umpire all wearing surgical masks, as are those watching from the grandstand. The image was captured just a few months before the third and final wave of the devastating influenza pandemic that emerged in 1918. One hundred years later, we are all wearing masks again but without the game. It is a cruel twist of biology that the social distancing required in response to the Covid 19 epidemic has also necessarily robbed us of baseball, something that might help to heal our souls. But wait we must for a sport that has previously proved nearly impervious to both war and pestilence. During the pandemic of 1918, the World Series was held after a regular season abbreviated not because of influenza, but because of the Great War in Europe. Though ill advised from a medical perspective, the Red Sox and Cubs were given dispensation until Sept. 15 to play the World Series, whereupon the war department's "work or fight" order would be enforced, requiring the ballplayers to do one or the other in service to the nation. The Red Sox defeated the Cubs four games to two, bolstered by the pitching performance of a young lefthander named Babe Ruth. Baseball continued to play uninterrupted during World War II following President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Green Light" letter written in early 1942 to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first Commissioner of Baseball. While F.D.R. noted that the decision about the baseball season was up to the Commissioner and baseball club owners, he recommended that the games proceed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Facebook has gone on the attack as one scandal after another Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech has led to a congressional and consumer backlash. Inside Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt the 2016 American election. Congressional and federal investigators were closing in on evidence that would implicate the company. But it wasn't the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network's security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation. Mr. Stamos's briefing had prompted a humiliating boardroom interrogation of Ms. Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, and her billionaire boss. She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal. Sheryl Sandberg is said to have asked Facebook employees to examine George Soros's finances after he criticized the social media giant. "You threw us under the bus!" she yelled at Mr. Stamos, according to people who were present. The clash that day would set off a reckoning for Mr. Zuckerberg, for Ms. Sandberg and for the business they had built together. In just over a decade, Facebook has connected more than 2.2 billion people, a global nation unto itself that reshaped political campaigns, the advertising business and daily life around the world. Along the way, Facebook accumulated one of the largest ever repositories of personal data, a treasure trove of photos, messages and likes that propelled the company into the Fortune 500. In Washington, allies of Facebook, including Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, intervened on its behalf. And Ms. Sandberg wooed or cajoled hostile lawmakers, while trying to dispel Facebook's reputation as a bastion of Bay Area liberalism. This account of how Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg navigated Facebook's cascading crises, much of which has not been previously reported, is based on interviews with more than 50 people. They include current and former Facebook executives and other employees, lawmakers and government officials, lobbyists and congressional staff members. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, were not authorized to speak to reporters or feared retaliation. Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg available for comment. In a statement, a spokesman acknowledged that Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had since made progress fixing the platform. "This has been a tough time at Facebook and our entire management team has been focused on tackling the issues we face," the statement said. "While these are hard problems we are working hard to ensure that people find our products useful and that we protect our community from bad actors." Even so, trust in the social network has sunk, while its pell mell growth has slowed. Regulators and law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe are investigating Facebook's conduct with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that worked with Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign, opening up the company to fines and other liability. Both the Trump administration and lawmakers have begun crafting proposals for a national privacy law, setting up a yearslong struggle over the future of Facebook's data hungry business model. Despite a turbulent two years, here's why almost no one in tech thinks Mark Zuckerberg should step down from the company he built. "We failed to look and try to imagine what was hiding behind corners," Elliot Schrage, former vice president for global communications, marketing and public policy at Facebook, said in an interview. The question was unusual. Mr. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Ms. Sandberg's domain. In 2010, Ms. Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook's chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Ms. Sandberg installed another friend, a well connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Ms. Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration. Some at Facebook viewed Mr. Trump's 2015 attack on Muslims as an opportunity to finally take a stand against the hate speech coursing through its platform. But Ms. Sandberg, who was edging back to work after the death of her husband several months earlier, delegated the matter to Mr. Schrage and Monika Bickert, a former prosecutor whom Ms. Sandberg had recruited as the company's head of global policy management. Ms. Sandberg also turned to the Washington office particularly to Mr. Kaplan, said people who participated in or were briefed on the discussions. In video conference calls between the Silicon Valley headquarters and Washington, the three officials construed their task narrowly. They parsed the company's terms of service to see if the post, or Mr. Trump's account, violated Facebook's rules. Mr. Kaplan argued that Mr. Trump was an important public figure and that shutting down his account or removing the statement could be seen as obstructing free speech, said three employees who knew of the discussions. He said it could also stoke a conservative backlash. Mr. Zuckerberg did not participate in the debate. Ms. Sandberg attended some of the video meetings but rarely spoke. Mr. Schrage concluded that Mr. Trump's language had not violated Facebook's rules and that the candidate's views had public value. "We were trying to make a decision based on all the legal and technical evidence before us," he said in an interview. In the end, Mr. Trump's statement and account remained on the site. When Mr. Trump won election the next fall, giving Republicans control of the White House as well as Congress, Mr. Kaplan was empowered to plan accordingly. The company hired a former aide to Mr. Trump's new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, along with lobbying firms linked to Republican lawmakers who had jurisdiction over internet companies. Still, Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg decided to expand on Mr. Stamos's work, creating a group called Project P, for "propaganda," to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Mr. Stamos's original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook, and pressed to issue a public paper about their findings. Alex Stamos, Facebook's former security chief, met with criticism as he investigated Russian activity on the platform. But Mr. Kaplan and other Facebook executives objected. Washington was already reeling from an official finding by American intelligence agencies that Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, had personally ordered an influence campaign aimed at helping elect Mr. Trump. If Facebook implicated Russia further, Mr. Kaplan said, Republicans would accuse the company of siding with Democrats. And if Facebook pulled down the Russians' fake pages, regular Facebook users might also react with outrage at having been deceived: His own mother in law, Mr. Kaplan said, had followed a Facebook page created by Russian trolls. Ms. Sandberg sided with Mr. Kaplan, recalled four people involved. Mr. Zuckerberg who spent much of 2017 on a national "listening tour," feeding cows in Wisconsin and eating dinner with Somali refugees in Minnesota did not participate in the conversations about the public paper. When it was published that April, the word "Russia" never appeared. Ms. Sandberg's subordinates took a similar approach in Washington, where the Senate had begun pursuing its own investigation, led by Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican, and Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat. Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate investigators' concerns about the company, while publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook. But inside the company, employees were tracing more ads, pages and groups back to Russia. That June, a Times reporter provided Facebook a list of accounts with suspected ties to Russia, seeking more information on their provenance. By August 2017, Facebook executives concluded that the situation had become what one called a "five alarm fire," said a person familiar with the discussions. Ms. Sandberg also reached out to Ms. Klobuchar. She had been friendly with the senator, who is featured on the website for Lean In, Ms. Sandberg's empowerment initiative. Ms. Sandberg had contributed a blurb to Ms. Klobuchar's 2015 memoir, and the senator's chief of staff had previously worked at Ms. Sandberg's charitable foundation. But in a tense conversation shortly after the ad legislation was introduced, Ms. Sandberg complained about Ms. Klobuchar's attacks on the company, said a person who was briefed on the call. Ms. Klobuchar did not back down on her legislation. But she dialed down her criticism in at least one venue important to the company: After blasting Facebook repeatedly that fall on her own Facebook page, Ms. Klobuchar hardly mentioned the company in posts between November and February. A spokesman for Ms. Klobuchar said in a statement that Facebook's lobbying had not lessened her commitment to holding the company accountable. "Facebook was pushing to exclude issue ads from the Honest Ads Act, and Senator Klobuchar strenuously disagreed and refused to change the bill," he said. In October 2017, Facebook also expanded its work with a Washington based consultant, Definers Public Affairs, that had originally been hired to monitor press coverage of the company. Founded by veterans of Republican presidential politics, Definers specialized in applying political campaign tactics to corporate public relations an approach long employed in Washington by big telecommunications firms and activist hedge fund managers, but less common in tech. Definers had established a Silicon Valley outpost earlier that year, led by Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush who preached the virtues of campaign style opposition research. For tech firms, he argued in one interview, a goal should be to "have positive content pushed out about your company and negative content that's being pushed out about your competitor." Facebook quickly adopted that strategy. In November 2017, the social network came out in favor of a bill called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which made internet companies responsible for sex trafficking ads on their sites. Google and others had fought the bill for months, worrying it would set a cumbersome precedent. But the sex trafficking bill was championed by Senator John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota who had pummeled Facebook over accusations that it censored conservative content, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and senior commerce committee member who was a frequent critic of Facebook. Ms. Sandberg had said little publicly about the company's problems. But inside Facebook, her approach had begun to draw criticism. Some colleagues believed that Ms. Sandberg whose ambitions to return to public life were much discussed at the company was protecting her own brand at Facebook's expense. At one company gathering, said two people who knew of the event, friends told Ms. Sandberg that if Facebook did not address the scandals effectively, its role in spreading hate and fear would define her legacy, too. So Ms. Sandberg began taking a more personal role in the company's Washington campaign, drawing on all the polish that Mr. Zuckerberg sometimes lacked. She not only relied on her old Democratic ties, but also sought to assuage skeptical Republicans, who grumbled that Facebook was more sensitive to the political opinions of its work force than to those of powerful committee leaders. Trailing an entourage of as many as 10 people on trips to the capital, Ms. Sandberg made a point of sending personal thank you notes to lawmakers and others she met. Her top Republican target was Mr. Burr, whose Senate committee's Russia investigation had chugged along. The two spoke by phone, according to a congressional staff member and a Facebook executive, and met in person this fall. While critics cast Facebook as a serial offender that had ignored repeated warning signs about the dangers posed by its product, Ms. Sandberg argued that the company was grappling earnestly with the consequences of its extraordinary growth. She made the same case in June at a conference of the National Association of Attorneys General in Portland, Ore. At the time, several attorneys general had opened or joined investigations into the company. Facebook was eager to head off further trouble. The company organized several private receptions, including what was billed as a conversation with Ms. Sandberg about "corporate citizenship in the digital age" and a briefing on Cambridge Analytica. While Facebook had publicly declared itself ready for new federal regulations, Ms. Sandberg privately contended that the social network was already adopting the best reforms and policies available. Heavy handed regulation, she warned, would only disadvantage smaller competitors. That afternoon, the A.D.L. issued a warning from its Twitter account. "Depicting Jews as an octopus encircling the globe is a classic anti Semitic trope," the organization wrote. "Protest Facebook or anyone all you want, but pick a different image." The criticism was soon echoed in conservative outlets including The Washington Free Beacon, which has sought to tie Freedom from Facebook to what the publication calls "extreme anti Israel groups." An A.D.L. spokeswoman, Betsaida Alcantara, said the group routinely fielded reports of anti Semitic slurs from journalists, synagogues and others. "Our experts evaluate each one based on our years of experience, and we respond appropriately," Ms. Alcantara said. (The group has at times sharply criticized Facebook, including when Mr. Zuckerberg suggested that his company should not censor Holocaust deniers.) Facebook also used Definers to take on bigger opponents, such as Mr. Soros, a longtime boogeyman to mainstream conservatives and the target of intense anti Semitic smears on the far right. A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti Facebook movement. He was a natural target. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January, he had attacked Facebook and Google, describing them as a monopolist "menace" with "neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions." Definers pressed reporters to explore the financial connections between Mr. Soros's family or philanthropies and groups that were members of Freedom from Facebook, such as Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, as well as a progressive group founded by Mr. Soros's son. (An official at Mr. Soros's Open Society Foundations said the philanthropy had supported both member groups, but not Freedom from Facebook, and had made no grants to support campaigns against Facebook.) Definers also circulated research about other critics of Facebook, such as Diamond and Silk, the pro Trump social media stars who had claimed they were treated unfairly by Facebook. In at least one instance, the company also relied on Mr. Schumer, the New York senator and Senate Democratic leader. He has long worked to advance Silicon Valley's interests on issues such as commercial drone regulations and patent reform. During the 2016 election cycle, he raised more money from Facebook employees than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
THE DAWN WALL (2018) Stream on Amazon or Netflix; rent on Amazon, Google Play or YouTube. In "Free Solo," which won the Oscar for best feature documentary, we watch Alex Honnold become the first person to scale Yosemite's 3,000 foot high El Capitan wall without ropes. An equally awe inspiring feat is captured in "The Dawn Wall," a documentary on two climbers, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, who in 2015 completed the first ascent of El Capitan's southeastern face using only hands and feet (they had ropes to catch them if they fell, but not to help them climb)." That climb took six years of preparation and meticulous planning. Why did they do it? "I love to dream big, and I love to find ways to be a bit of an explorer," Caldwell said an interview with The New York Times. "These days it seems like everything is padded and comes with warning labels. This just lights a fire under me, and that's a really exciting way to live." OFFICE SPACE (1999) Stream on Amazon or Hulu; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. For those who yearn for more authority at work, consider this comedy by Mike Judge a cathartic watch. Fed up with his job at a tech company, Peter (Ron Livingston) tries to get fired, but his aloof behavior earns him a promotion. When his two friends (Ajay Naidu and David Herman) are laid off instead, the three decide to seek revenge by embezzling from the company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
PAPPYLAND A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last By Wright Thompson For the dedicated whiskey connoisseur, getting a taste of Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve bourbon is a Tolkien worthy quest. With a small production run and a lengthy 15 to 23 year aging process that creates a limited supply/high demand situation, the spirit is decidedly elusive at its starting retail price of about 120. Bars that stock it can charge 75 a shot or more, and collectors' sites list the whiskey for 5,000 a bottle. So, what is it about Pappy Van Winkle? Wright Thompson sets out to answer that question in "Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last." The book is a soulful journey that blends together biography, autobiography, philosophy, Kentucky history, the story of bourbon's origins and an insider's look at how the Van Winkle whiskey is made and marketed. The human ley line running through all of this is Julian P. Van Winkle III, the grandson of Julian "Pappy" Van Winkle Sr., who opened the Stitzel Weller Distillery just outside Louisville on Derby Day in 1935 and produced various brands until he died in 1965. "There was no way to separate the bourbon's mythology from his personal history," Thompson writes of Julian III. To get the story, the author spent part of three years following Van Winkle as he continued the family business he took over in 1981. Now made in partnership with the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, his Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve is a grandson's liquid tribute to his ancestors. Thompson, an ESPN senior writer by way of Mississippi, comes off as the Boswell of bourbon country here a keen literary observer and respectful fanboy with an obvious affection for his subject, even nicknaming him "Booze Yoda." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Two public policy graduates at the Kennedy School at Harvard University are trying to build a business of helping municipalities with a task at which they are notoriously deficient: managing and marketing their real estate portfolios. Called OpportunitySpace, the start up works with municipal governments to put their publicly owned real estate holdings in a public online database. Specifics about each property, such as square footage, assessed value and delinquent taxes, are linked to its address. The parcels are mapped geographically. The developers, Cristina Garmendia and Alexander Kapur, say their 2013 master's thesis spawned the business, which is nearing the end of its incubation phase at the Harvard Innovation Lab. The mission of OpportunitySpace, they say, is threefold. A public database can help governments better leverage what has often been "a lazy asset," Mr. Kapur said. It can give developers an easy way to find upfront information about available properties, and it can provide transparency around publicly owned buildings and land, that way generating more creative thinking around development possibilities. "It just seems like the knowledge set for how to invest and develop is limited to such a select group of people that there's an opportunity to use technology and data to open up access to this market," Mr. Kapur said. "More competition, more ideas, more visibility, more market transparency will create better outcomes." Though many of its features are still in development, OpportunitySpace just completed a pilot program with four Rhode Island municipalities, including Providence. The city's inventory 1,363 publicly owned parcels, including parks and recreational areas is now posted online. Mayor Angel Taveras said he hoped to eventually make the site accessible from a smartphone. "We're trying to remove barriers to redevelopment, making it easier for anyone to find properties available," the mayor said. "We're using technology to provide critical information." Developers tend to want to do a lot of "quiet research" before opening a conversation with a municipality about a particular property, said Lawrence J. Platt, a commercial real estate broker, developer and consultant in Providence. They typically use online listing services like LoopNet and CoStar to search for opportunities, but the fees can be prohibitively expensive for municipalities, he said. Cristina Garmendia, left, and Alexander Kapur, who created OpportunitySpace, the online real estate database. Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times For that reason, he described OpportunitySpace as "a very logistical starting place" for municipalities trying to market their properties. "It's a chance for communities to get into the game in a more cost effective way," he said. Most cities are "fairly disorganized" when it comes to keeping track of their real estate holdings, said Ted Smith, the chief of civic innovation for the Louisville Metro Government, in Kentucky, which was the host city when Mr. Kapur and Ms. Garmendia began developing OpportunitySpace. And, he added, the geographic information systems that municipalities do use, such as Esri, are not public. Louisville is using OpportunitySpace to showcase an old, vacant armory downtown that is ripe for redevelopment. "Our aim was to raise the visibility of that armory before some savvy developer that was clearly pro forma driven grabbed it up and pursued whatever vision that they had," Mr. Kapur said. "There has been a lot of community engagement and discussion around this property." The database also supported a Louisville sponsored contest seeking suggestions for creative uses for publicly owned vacant lots. Louis Johnson, an urban designer, worked with a winning team that he said used OpportunitySpace to pinpoint lots in a postindustrial neighborhood they knew to be experiencing a resurgence. In partnership with a nonprofit group, Anchal, Mr. Johnson is building a demonstration garden to introduce people to plants that can be used to make natural dyes. Mr. Kapur and Ms. Garmendia said they were working on layering in additional property information. Other features in the works include maps showing where public investments, subsidies or abatements are focused, master plan details and zoning maps. Users can also register to receive alerts about certain properties, Ms. Garmendia said. "Say you specialize in redeveloping lighthouses or schools," she said. "You can register to receive an alert when and if those properties go up for sale." The OpportunitySpace plan calls for charging cities a manageable subscription fee, but will generate much of its revenue by selling more sophisticated levels of data to the private sector. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The playwright Lynn Nottage, left, is one of the signatories to the "We See You, White American Theater" statement. Another signatory: the Tony winning actor and director Ruben Santiago Hudson, right. More than 300 theater artists black, Indigenous and people of color on Monday published a blistering statement addressed to "White American Theater" decrying racial injustice in their industry. "You are all a part of this house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy," said the statement, which was published on the web. "And this is a house that will not stand." The signatories include the Pulitzer Prize winners Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori Parks, Quiara Alegria Hudes and Lin Manuel Miranda; the film and television stars Viola Davis and Blair Underwood; and many Tony Award winners, including the actor and director Ruben Santiago Hudson and the playwright David Henry Hwang, who is the chair of the American Theater Wing. In the weeks that followed, as discussion of race relations has intensified, numerous black theater artists have taken to social media to describe experiences of racism. Two playwrights have begun surveying theatermakers of color about their experiences. The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an organization pressing for social change, this week is holding a three part forum "for the Broadway community to heal, listen, and hold itself accountable to its history of white supremacy." In Britain, a group of theater artists has put together its own letter, calling for greater disclosure about diversity statistics by theaters there. There is even a petition circulating to make the Apollo Theater, the historic Harlem venue, a Broadway house. The statement addressing "White American Theater," outlining the ways in which, it argues, artists of color are unjustly treated in the theater world, declares itself to be "in the legacy of August Wilson's 'The Ground on Which I Stand'," an important 1996 speech by the playwright about race and the American stage. Headlined "We See You, White American Theater," the statement repeatedly uses the phrase "we see you" to punctuate its observations about the theater world, and adds, "We have always seen you. And now you will see us." It expresses concerns about programming ("We have watched you program play after play, written, directed, cast, choreographed, designed, acted, dramaturged and produced by your rosters of white theatermakers for white audiences"); labor unions ("we have watched you turn a blind eye as unions refuse to confront their racism and integrate their ranks"); media ("a monolithic and racist critical culture"); and nonprofit organizations ("asking us to politely shuffle at your galas, talkbacks, panels, board meetings, and donor dinners, in rooms full of white faces, without being willing to defend the sanctity of our bodies beyond the stages you make us jump through hoops to be considered for"). The statement comes at a time when most American theaters, including all of those on Broadway, are closed indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic and most theater artists are unemployed. As unrest in the country over race relations has intensified, many theaters, as well as many commercial theater productions, have issued statements decrying racism and pledging to support systemic change; some have also opened their doors to protesters. It was not immediately clear who organized the statement, or what the collective's next steps will be. Several signatories referred press questions to an email address; an inquiry to that address was not answered. The statement was posted as a petition on change.org, where tens of thousands of people signed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A group of publishers sued Internet Archive on Monday, saying that the nonprofit group's trove of free electronic copies of books was robbing authors and publishers of revenue at a moment when it was desperately needed. Internet Archive has made more than 1.3 million books available free online, which were scanned and available to one borrower at a time for a period of 14 days, according to the complaint. Then in March, the group said it would lift all restrictions on its book lending until the end of the public health crisis, creating what it called "a National Emergency Library to serve the nation's displaced learners." But many publishers and authors have called it something different: theft. "There is nothing innovative or transformative about making complete copies of books to which you have no rights and giving them away for free," said Maria A. Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, which is helping to coordinate the industry's response. "They've stepped in downstream and taken the intellectual investment of authors and the financial investment of publishers, they're interfering and giving this away." The lawsuit, which accused Internet Archive of "willful mass copyright infringement," was filed in federal court in Manhattan on behalf of Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley Sons and Penguin Random House. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"If it didn't belong to Joan Rivers, a used one like this would probably be worth about 100 bucks," said Jonathan Greenstein, a.k.a. the menorah man, who owns and operates what is reputed to be the only auction house in the United States solely dedicated to appraising and selling antique Judaica. "But this one is worth about 5,000 because it belonged to her." The typical seder plate features sections for the symbols of Passover, like bitter herb (usually horseradish), which signifies the bitterness of slavery that Jews experienced in Egypt; or "karpas," a green vegetable that denotes spring (usually parsley). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Rob Gronkowski, the All Pro tight end who left the N.F.L. after the 2018 season, plans to return to the league, this time with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Gronkowski, who did not officially retire when he stepped away from the game last March, was traded by his old team, the New England Patriots, to Tampa Bay, where he will be reunited with quarterback Tom Brady. The Patriots will send Gronkowski and a seventh round pick, the 241st overall selection in this week's N.F.L. draft to the Buccaneers, and receive the second of Tampa Bay's fourth round picks, the 139th pick overall, in return. Brady, 42, who became a free agent for the first time after spending two decades in New England, signed a two year contract worth as much as 60 million last month with the Buccaneers. Gronkowski, the game's most dominant tight end during his nine years in New England, helped the Patriots win three Super Bowl titles. His goofy, frat boy persona off the field made him one of the more colorful players in the league. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. 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. But on the field, he was no joke. In nine seasons, Gronkowski, who will turn 31 next month, caught 521 passes for 7,861 yards and a Patriots record 79 receiving touchdowns. He was named to the Pro Bowl five times and was first team All Pro four times, taking full advantage of his size and speed to find mismatches. He was often considered Brady's favorite target, and a big one at 6 foot 6. However, a series of injuries led to questions about how much longer he could play. He hinted for several seasons that he was considering leaving the N.F.L. because of the wear and tear on his body, which led to missed games because of numerous injuries, including a torn knee ligament, a broken forearm, a herniated disk in his back, among others. He left the league on a high note, helping the Patriots the only team he had played for beat the Los Angeles Rams in the Super Bowl following the 2018 season. During his time away from football last year, Gronkowski, known simply as Gronk, appeared at wrestling events, promoted cannabidiol products as pain relievers and focused on his charity. Even so, he remained in demand. The owner of the Patriots, Robert K. Kraft, made no secret of his desire to persuade Gronkowski to return to the team in time for the playoffs last season. Gronkowski had not turned in his retirement papers, so the Patriots still held his rights. The Patriots offense was not nearly as potent without Gronkowski, and their season ended quickly after one playoff game. Gronkowski is in the last year of his contract, which includes a 9 million base salary and 1 million in bonuses. During his appearances as a Fox Sports commentator before this year's Super Bowl. "I feel great," he said. "Sort of better every day. It's been really good for me." Gronkowski was named the WWE 24/7 champion at WrestleMania 36 earlier this month and moves to Florida, where the wrestling promotion is considered an essential service. Though Gronkowski passed on the chance to return to the Patriots, he apparently felt well enough to come back to the N.F.L. if he could play again with Brady. The teammates will join a Buccaneers team already stocked with offensive talent and guided by head coach Bruce Arians, an offensive mastermind who favors Kangol hats, expletives and wisecracks, in stark contrast to Bill Belichick's morose ways. In his first season in Tampa last year, the Buccaneers had the third best offense in the league, with an erratic Jameis Winston at quarterback. Winston is gone, but much of the talent around him is still there. Frustrated by the relative lack of offensive talent around him in New England last season, Brady will now throw to Gronkowski, as well as Mike Evans and the speedy Chris Godwin, two 1,000 yard receivers last season who are both over six feet tall. With Brady and Gronkowski reunited in Tampa, the N.F.C. South, which includes the New Orleans Saints, could become one of the most competitive divisions in the league. And the once sleepy Buccaneers, who haven't made the playoffs since 2007, are destined to become fixtures in prime time. And not for nothing, Super Bowl LV will be held in Raymond James Stadium, in Tampa, Fla., Brady and Gronkowski's new home field. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Troy Young became the head of Hearst Magazines, the publisher of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Town Country, after an internal power struggle. Update: Troy Young has resigned, the chief executive of Hearst told employees. For decades Hearst magazines have advised American women on how they should conduct themselves in the home (Good Housekeeping, Redbook), in society (Harper's Bazaar, Town Country) and in the bedroom (Cosmopolitan). This is the company whose stars have included Oprah Winfrey, the head of O: The Oprah Magazine, which Hearst has helped run since 2000; and Helen Gurley Brown, the groundbreaking editor who transformed the once staid Cosmopolitan into a racy monthly that angered conservatives and feminists alike while selling big on newsstands. But inside the Hearst Tower in Midtown Manhattan, the Hearst Magazines leader, Troy Young, has drawn complaints from people who said he had made lewd, sexist remarks at work. And in recent weeks, inspired by the civil rights movement, current and former employees at Cosmopolitan and another Hearst women's title, Marie Claire, have spoken out on social media and during staff meetings on what they describe as a toxic environment. Mr. Young, a former advertising executive, joined Hearst in 2013 as its first head of digital media. He quickly changed the corporate structure so that the editors of the magazines' websites reported to him, rather than to the editors of individual publications. As part of his plan, digital editors with relatively low salaries replaced high priced veteran print editors. His work impressed Steven R. Swartz, the chief executive of Hearst Communications, and Mr. Young succeeded David Carey as Hearst Magazines president in 2018, winning the job over the high profile former editor and magazine executive Joanna Coles. That promotion came after at least four employees had complained about what they described as Mr. Young's bullying or harassing behavior to the human resources department or senior executives, according to four former Hearst employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation. One incident involving Mr. Young occurred during a visit to the Cosmopolitan office when he was the digital head, according to two people who were present. Mr. Young picked up one of the sex toys that had been sent to the magazine and asked if he could keep it, the people said. Referring to the openings of two toys, he said he would "definitely need the bigger one," the people said. Mr. Young also emailed pornography to a high level Hearst editor, Jay Fielden, according to three people with knowledge of what happened. Mr. Fielden complained to Mr. Carey, who was then the division president, the people said. In May last year, Mr. Fielden left Hearst, where he had been the top editor of Esquire and Town Country. He declined to comment for this article. At a Cosmopolitan holiday party in 2013, Mr. Young joined a group in which a young staff member was describing a bad date with a man who complained of an ex girlfriend's odor. The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive conversation, said Mr. Young had told her that she should have inserted her fingers into herself and asked her date if he liked her smell. The woman said she was shocked by his comment and walked away. Two Esquire staff members witnessed the incident: Nate Hopper, an assistant editor at the time, and Ben Collins, an editor who is now a reporter for NBC. Both confirmed the Cosmopolitan staff member's recollection. "I think he violated the decency of what was otherwise a friendly conversation," Mr. Hopper said. "It has been something that I wish I had done something about in the moment for a very long time." Mr. Young, 52, addressed the former Hearst employees' complaints in a statement for this article: "Specific allegations raised by my detractors are either untrue, greatly exaggerated or taken out of context. The pace of evolving our business and the strength of my commitment is ambitious, and I sincerely regret the toll it has taken on some in our organization." As for the holiday party, he said in a separate statement, "Candid conversations about sex defined the Cosmo brand for decades, and those who worked there discussed it openly." He did not address the other specific allegations. A Hearst Magazines spokeswoman said that, during Mr. Young's years as digital chief, his "relentless pursuit of excellence was at times combined with a brash demeanor that rubbed some the wrong way." The spokeswoman added, "Since being named president of the division, he has worked to develop a more inclusive management style." Ms. Pels held staff videoconferences in the wake of social media comments posted last month by Jazmin Jones, who had worked under Ms. Pels as a video editor at Marie Claire. In an Instagram post, Ms. Jones, who is Black, accused the company of racial discrimination, saying she was made to feel uncomfortable in threads that touched on race in the interoffice communications app Slack. 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. A screen shot of a Slack conversation posted by Ms. Jones shows an editor, whom she identified as Ms. Pels, commenting disparagingly on the hair and makeup of a staff member of color during an on camera appearance for a Marie Claire video. Ms. Pels sprinkled the Slack conversation with remarks that she was committing a human resources violation by making the complaint. In an interview, Ms. Jones, 30, said, "Hearst doesn't care about you if you're not a skinny white lady." During a videoconference last month for the Cosmopolitan staff, a woman of color confronted Ms. Pels over being pulled into meetings she would not normally have been part of when camera crews were present. She said her inclusion was evidence of the company's attempt to promote a false appearance of staff diversity, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times. Prachi Gupta, who covered politics for the Cosmopolitan site during the 2016 presidential campaign, before Ms. Pels became editor, said she felt that Black and brown women were made to "feel less than equal" at the company. "Because there were no women of color in leadership positions, I was not able to seek advice or counsel when I was pushed into some of the uncomfortable positions," she said. Last month Hearst Magazines appointed Samira Nasr, previously Vanity Fair's fashion director, as the top editor of the U.S. edition of Harper's Bazaar. She is the first woman of color to hold the post. And Cosmopolitan started an initiative, "Cosmo Can Do Better," that calls for the hiring of more Black people and people of color. As part of it, the magazine released staff statistics, saying its work force was made up of 29 percent Black people and people of color, 61 percent white employees, with 10 percent undisclosed. Its leadership comprised 21 percent people of color, the survey said. A Hearst spokeswoman said the company is committed to diversity at all levels. Michelle Ruiz, a former senior editor at Cosmopolitan, said the messages of inclusion and empowerment from many Hearst publications were at odds with company leadership. She described an encounter with Mr. Young at the Hearst cafeteria that took place when she was heavily pregnant. "So, is the baby mine?" he said, as she recalled it. "For an executive at the company to suggest that he'd impregnated me was clearly inappropriate," said Ms. Ruiz, now a contributing editor at Vogue.com. "There's a real hypocrisy to elevating this man to lead a company populated with magazines that are preaching women's empowerment on their covers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
LONDON The diplomatic standoff between Qatar and its Arab neighbors spilled into the sports world once again Thursday as a Qatari vice president of Asia's soccer confederation was barred from traveling to the United Arab Emirates ahead of the region's top tournament. , vice president of the Asian Football Confederation, was denied permission to travel from Oman to the U.A.E. after airport officials said he wouldn't be let into the country. The U.A.E., with Saudi Arabia and a handful of other Mideast countries, broke diplomatic relations and severed all ties with Qatar in 2017. Mohannadi is the chairman of the A.F.C.'s competitions committee, a group with overall responsibility for the Asian Cup. Prohibiting him from traveling to the U.A.E. is the first sign that long simmering political tensions in the Gulf are likely to have ramifications for continent's biggest tournament. Mohannadi immediately wrote a letter of complaint to Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al Khalifa, the Bahraini royal who is the A.F.C.'s current president. The organization said in a statement that it was aware of reports that Mohannadi was being denied the right to travel and that it would investigate. The A.F.C. said it had been "assured of visas and entry permits" for tournament organizing committee members and executives. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Dylan Crossman, left, Ellen Cornfield and Douglas Dunn. They, and Jonah Bokaer, all former members of Merce Cunningham's company, are making new works for the Harkness Dance Festival in honor of his centennial. Douglas Dunn has been making dances since 1971. His choreography has earned acclaim and awards, but presenters don't call as frequently as they once did. That helps explains why, when Mr. Dunn was asked to present a premiere in the 92nd Street Y's Harkness Dance Festival this year, his emotions were mixed. Gratified to have his work chosen, he was disturbed by the reason underlying the choice: that 50 years ago he danced in work by someone else. That someone else was Merce Cunningham, a giant of American dance, whose centennial is being honored this year with performances across the globe. Throughout March, the Harkness festival is joining the celebration, featuring programs of new work by Mr. Dunn and three other choreographers Ellen Cornfield, Jonah Bokaer and Dylan Crossman who danced in the Cunningham company, as much as 40 years apart. That company, founded in 1953, no longer exists, having disbanded in 2011, two years after Cunningham's death. But Cunningham's influence is far from dead, as these choreographers know better than most. It's a storied element of modern dance lineages: Dancers leave a company to become choreographers, then struggle to distinguish themselves from the company style, as children strive to differentiate themselves from their parents. Cunningham got his start dancing for Martha Graham, and was one of very few to escape her enormous shadow. Now his shadow is huge, his influence evident in generations of choreographers who never danced for him. But for those who did not just the Harkness four, but many others, including Karole Armitage, Neil Greenberg and Kimberly Bartosik the anxiety of influence is particularly acute. Some hallmarks are technical: a classical clarity, an animal alertness, a penchant for difficult coordinations of torso and feet. Some have to do with time and space, with creating what Cunningham in 1952 called "a space in which anything can happen," like nature, which "makes a space and puts lots of things in it," things that are "all unrelated, yet each affecting all the others." When Mr. Crossman first started presenting his own choreography and people remarked on its resemblance to Cunningham's. Mr. Crossman wondered if he would have received such comments had he not been known as a Cunningham dancer. But wonder was all he could do, since dancing for Cunningham was his main claim to fame. The other three Harkness choreographers might speculate similarly, but with each the Cunningham influence is unavoidably apparent. The easiest aspect to notice is the technique, which, as Ms. Cornfield explained, is "indelibly imprinted" on their bodies from years of performing Cunningham and on their minds from years of watching. Another layer is their reaction to some of the radical methods developed by Cunningham and his partner, the composer John Cage. How strictly do they maintain the independence of dance from music, creating each apart from the other? Do they use chance procedures in choreography, making choices by rolling dice or consulting the I Ching? Harder to sense in their work are their responses to Cunningham's personality. He was, as Mr. Dunn characterized him, aloof and "impersonal," not one to give much encouragement, at least not verbally. He was a man of few words, and yet the little he said was often phrased so that you might be thinking about it for the rest of your life. In separate interviews, the four Harkness choreographers spoke of Cunningham's example as a life changing liberation. They all spoke of gratitude and ambivalence. Exceptions proved the rule. Mr. Dunn recalled a time after he had been taking class with Cunningham for months and thinking that Cunningham hadn't noticed him, when suddenly the reserved teacher whispered in his ear, "I think your legs are getting longer." ("Now that's seduction," Mr. Dunn said.) "We never had what you could call a personal conversation," Mr. Dunn continued, "but I would sometimes ask him things and he would answer so beautifully, as if he been waiting for that exact question." These kinds of responses, which Mr. Bokaer likened to Zen koans, also appealed to Mr. Dunn. "The rhetoric was brilliant," he said. "It always left space around it. It was never prescriptive. He never told us what to think or feel." Mostly, there was no comment not when Mr. Dunn grew a beard or tried something a little wacky in a less structured section of choreography or danced Cunningham's solos in the wings while Cunningham was performing them onstage. And to Mr. Dunn, this silence felt like freedom. When he started making his own work, he assumed it would be like Cunningham's, "because that's what I loved," he said. It wasn't at first. Then it was, so much so that he tried not to think about it anymore. Forced by the Harkness festival to look at the connections again, Mr. Dunn said he noticed the space he tries to give his dancers, requiring them to be accurate but letting them be themselves. But what they did get, Ms. Cornfield said, "was someone's absolute truth, in a physical sense." "Merce was very sensitive to the states people were in," she continued. "You could feel it when he was watching you." Developing as a choreographer, Ms. Cornfield said, has been a process of "shedding the part of me that wants to do it right." A hard choice came in 2003, when she decided to stop teaching at Cunningham's studio. "I realized that I was organizing movement material that would be appropriate for his dancers, and it was keeping me in that place as an artist," she said. Since then, she's experimented with gestures and shows of emotion that diverge from Cunningham's example. But it can be difficult for her to separate what's his from what's hers. Making a dance and adding music later makes sense to her, she said, because she grew up in a rural environment, dancing to the sounds of nature. Part of her new dance, when two different trio sections happen at once, is "definitely an homage to Merce." When Mr. Bokaer joined the company in 2000, at 18, he was the youngest person ever to do so. He was also, to his knowledge, the only person of Middle Eastern origin. In the years since he left the company, in 2007, he said, it's the second distinction that has loomed larger, as his work as a choreographer, including what he has planned for the festival, has grown to stress identity in ways that Cunningham never did. Mr. Bokaer, 37, drew a stark contrast between Cunningham's mentorship and that of the experimental theater director Robert Wilson, with whom he's worked closely since 2006. Where Cunningham was "monastic and reserved at best," Mr. Wilson gives "an overabundance of communication and clarity": copious notes, shoptalk at all hours, warmth. "But what I appreciated about Merce's way," Mr. Bokaer said, "was that it opened up a whole plane of animalistic intuition that was very intense." Sometimes, Mr. Bokaer's dancers remark on the space and freedom in his work. "I would like to think that's something I received from Merce," he said. Mr. Crossman, 34, was among the last dancers to be hired by Cunningham, joining the company a month before Cunningham's death and staying through the farewell tour. Yet for two years before he joined, he was one of four helpers working with Cunningham, who was nearly 90, every day as he continued to choreograph. "I think we had a more fun, storytelling, grandfatherly version of Merce than maybe other people did," Mr. Crossman said. "We had more input, because it made it easier for him. Our asking questions accelerated the process." Still, if "Merce Cunningham is watching you, you go 300 percent all the time," Mr. Crossman said, and the principle of always giving everything is one he holds for his dancers and himself. Working for Pam Tanowitz, a prime example of a choreographer who never danced for Cunningham yet is heavily influenced by him, Mr. Crossman said he felt freer to take liberties and bring more of himself to the work. Mr. Crossman's piece for the festival addresses politics as Cunningham never did, but his aesthetic preference for presenting virtuosic people, rather than characters, as much as his use of chance and separating dance from music, certainly derives from Cunningham. So much does. For years, Mr. Dunn told a story about his last performance with the Cunningham troupe, in which Cunningham gave him a solo but then ended up dancing himself at the same time. Mr. Dunn used to tell the story as one about the mercurial, possibly vindictive Merce, until the writer Nancy Dalva suggested that Mr. Dunn think of the episode not as Cunningham upstaging him, but as Cunningham dancing with him. That's how Mr. Dunn prefers to think of it now, which is wise, since he and his fellow Cunningham alums will always be dancing with Merce. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Dr. Robert J. Cerfolio is all about efficiency. So when Dr. Cerfolio, a surgeon, planned his move to New York, he told his real estate agent he needed to be within walking distance preferably no more than four blocks of his workplace, NYU Langone Health. Dr. Cerfolio, often called Cerf, was coming from Birmingham, Ala., where he had been chief of thoracic surgery at the University of Alabama Hospital. (He performs non heart chest surgery, primarily of the lungs and esophagus, including robotic surgery.) They spent more than 20 years in Alabama, but four years ago, Lorraine died of cancer. Dr. Cerfolio's parents still live in New Jersey, where he grew up; two of his three siblings live in the Northeast; and the youngest of his three sons just started at Columbia University. So now it made sense to return to New York City. Though Dr. Cerfolio prefers to own, renting seemed feasible for the moment. "I'm still learning about the area and not ready to commit to a long term place just yet," he said. "I am not going to throw away my valuable time sitting in the car or stuck on a subway," he said. In Birmingham, his drive to work took just 14 minutes in the early morning hours; the same trip home, in traffic, consumed an hour. Last winter, the hospital referred him to Steve Hallerman, an associate broker at Citi Habitats, for help with the hunt. Mr. Hallerman, familiar with what was available in the immediate area, nudged Dr. Cerfolio's four block range up to 10 or more blocks. And one Sunday, Mr. Hallerman took him out to see some options. "The budget was 8,000, 10,000, 12,000, whatever," Mr. Hallerman said of the monthly rent. "He didn't know what he would get for his dollar. It is like buying a car: I will show you a Volkswagen and a Tesla. He was unfamiliar with Manhattan, and I wanted to give him a feel for different buildings." At 9,000 a month, a beautiful three bedroom on a low floor at the Abbey Condominium, a former church parish house near Stuyvesant Square, had no views and lacked amenities. And in any case, Dr. Cerfolio's taste tended toward modern buildings. He also didn't relish a 20 minute walk to work on cold winter mornings. But just north of the hospital, on First Avenue, the American Copper Buildings were rising: two copper clad towers connected by a skybridge, in the shape of a crooked "H." Dr. Cerfolio loved the unusual exterior, gleaming in the sun. He chose a two bedroom, two bathroom unit one of three, out of 761 units, with a terrace for 14,100 a month. The view is of the East River and Queens in one direction and the Empire State Building in the other. His new home is far smaller than his Alabama residence, but the transition was not difficult. "My kids were out of the house and my wife had passed away, so I was looking forward to a new phase," he said. The building amenities, including a pool and gym, should be ready later this month, according to the developer. Until then, Dr. Cerfolio has been working out on his terrace nearly every morning. The building has smart elevators, so his wait for an elevator is brief. And his efficiency in getting to work is unparalleled. "The median time is two minutes and 20 seconds," he said. "I can go in under two if I go really fast." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times While your travel plans may be on hold, you can pretend you're somewhere new for the night. Around the World at Home invites you to channel the spirit of a new place each week with recommendations on how to explore the culture, all from the comfort of your home. Paris is a collective fantasy, from the booksellers along the Seine to the gray zinc rooftops of its cream stone buildings. For ages, the city has been the place to turn for lessons in l'art de vivre, the art of living, influencing fashion, philosophy, culture, art and gastronomy around the world. Today, pop up shops and hipster brunch spots are as much a part of Paris as street lamps and Gothic architecture. But the romance of the city is timeless. When visiting, I like to be a flaneur, a stroller with no destination, winding through the medieval streets of the Marais, pausing to hear a jazz band, dipping into the Musee Carnavalet, shopping in SoPi (South Pigalle), popping into Eric Kayser for croissants, sitting in the sun on a green metal chair in the Luxembourg Gardens. Evening might bring a ballet at the Palais Garnier, or a sidewalk bistro table from which to watch the crowds go by. These days, my apartment is the bistro, boutique and boulangerie. Yet, it turns out, this too has a certain romance. Eric Kayser, the artisan baker who opened the first of his shops in Paris, teaches you how to make classic French breads, including "la baguette," on his lively Maison Kayser Academy YouTube channel. Game for a full meal? Julia Child's television episodes, including some shows with Jacques Pepin, are on PBS online (you'll also find her on YouTube). A New York Times Cooking editors' collection, "French at Home," tempts with dozens of recipes. And for dessert? Cookbook author and Times columnist Dorie Greenspan said in France "dessert might be cheese, fruit or maybe the sturdy gateau that almost all French cooks know how to bake: Yogurt Cake. I make it often and always think of Paris and my friends when I do." Turn your couch into a box seat at the ballet Dim the lights and nestle into your sofa like it's a box at the Palais Garnier to watch ballet and opera clips on the Opera National de Paris' YouTube channel. When you need an intermission, do as the audiences do and get a glass of Champagne. The Times' wine critic, Eric Asimov, offers recommendations online. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The largest of Connecticut municipalities, New Milford is several towns in one. The familiar tentacles of suburbia spread outward from the busy village center. Farther north, the subdivisions eventually give way to farmland, storied estates and dazzling vistas New York weekender territory. The lower western edge of town, on the other hand, is oriented toward Candlewood Lake, an 11 mile man made creation that spills across five towns. It was the lake that drew Jeanne and William De Lorenzo to New Milford, in Litchfield County, in the 1970s. Then living on the Upper East Side, they heard about Candlewood from a woman they chatted with in a park. When they went there looking for a vacation cottage, New Milford in particular had what they were looking for. They chose a rustic cottage within the private Candlewood Lake Club community. Their summers for some 30 years thereafter were filled with tennis, parties on their pontoon boat, gardening, communal dinners, and, of course, lots of sunsets. "We didn't have a television there for years," she said. "It was Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit." Now in their 70s, the De Lorenzos have reluctantly put their four bedroom cottage on the market; it is listed at 549,000. Although in good repair, the house has a simplicity anomalous among the area's many expanded or rebuilt homes. But if lake living is no longer the tranquil experience of the past, that hasn't made it any less popular. More than a thousand homes line the shore, many of them year round residences. Entry level for a house on the water is about 50,000 under the De Lorenzos' asking price, but from there the numbers spiral into the millions, said Kevin Donovan, an agent with Advanced Waterfront. People who want to build new typically buy a house they can knock down, he said. That way they can build within the same footprint, which may be closer to the water than current regulations would allow. A very active lake in the summer, Candlewood is open to motorboats. Because of increasing traffic, however, a state regulation as of March banned boats 26 feet or longer. Only people who already have big boats on the lake may use them. Growth has changed New Milford as a whole, too. Since 1970, the population has grown 86 percent, to 28,000. But quite apart from speeding up the pace of life, the new people have also enriched it, by filling the ball fields, expanding the arts and preservation communities, and reviving what is now a much appreciated downtown. "New Milford's really become a lovely town," said Jeremy Ruman, who works for a law firm downtown and heads a restoration effort for the Merwinsville Hotel, a 19th century station edifice that thrived when the railroad still ran through town. "You go out downtown on a weekend night and there's great food and you can go to the movies in our theater. It's like when you live in a little neighborhood in New York and you go to the local places and you're just happy. It's super." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SOUTH BEND, Ind. In the remarks he prepared for his parting address to the University of Notre Dame class of 2017, Rev. John I. Jenkins urged the graduating seniors to turn and applaud their families. Father Jenkins, the Notre Dame president, did not end up delivering those words, though. Earlier on, the featured commencement speaker, Vice President Mike Pence, stole his thunder by issuing a similar order. And Mr. Pence did Father Jenkins one better by explicitly noting how many checks most of their loved ones had written to the university. Anyone contemplating the full cost of attendance at what is arguably the nation's most prominent Catholic undergraduate institution probably wonders just how big those checks are for four years here. Families with teenagers starting this fall can expect to pay close to 300,000 over four years, assuming costs increase 3 percent or so each year. Even families with incomes over 100,000 who qualify for financial aid will still probably pay a whole lot more than they would at their flagship state university easily 50,000, 100,000 or 150,000 more. All of which invites an obvious question: In what holy book is it written that we owe anything like this kind of expenditure to each of our children? Father Jenkins, 63, would seem like an excellent person to ask, and not just because of his priestly collar. While he is not a parent, he is a son, one of 12 children who grew up in Omaha. And while his father was a doctor, his parents put the dozen children through Catholic schools and then expected them to spring for half of their subsequent college educations, that way teaching them something about value on top of the lessons in values. So Father Jenkins, a onetime prom king, went to work, starting his freshman year in high school. "I probably had to lie about my age," he said. He began as a busboy at an International House of Pancakes and then moved to a hospital job and a post office position. In college, he found work at a slaughterhouse that paid 5.50 an hour, enough to cover his 2,000 share of Notre Dame's tuition through summer wages alone. He still hitchhiked to South Bend once in a while to pinch pennies, though. No such path is available to undergraduates now. It would take more than 4,000 hours (or 100 weeks of full time work) at prevailing campus wages to pay for half of the annual rack rate at Notre Dame today. And while only 30 percent or so of the students pay the full price, even the ones with large financial aid packages work only a fraction of that amount. Loans loom large, as does the role of parental savings, with many families contemplating the right amount to set aside each month while their future undergraduate is still in utero. So I asked Father Jenkins to point to some of his favorite religious readings and teachings that might shed light on the question of just how much hustle, sweat and sacrifice families should expect of themselves. One question that bedevils most families with children who can afford to save something is whether they should prioritize retirement savings or college savings. The passage here seemed to echo that line of inquiry and answer it squarely: Providing for the financial security of a surviving spouse in old age is on an equal plane with shoveling money away for tuition payments. God's plan here would then conflict with the traditional financial planning rule that says that it's best to save for retirement first, since it can be harder and more costly to borrow (say, through a reverse mortgage) for retirement than it is to borrow for college. Thus, better to make sure that the last to die in a two person couple will do so with dignity, right? "I would challenge the assumption that it's the spouse who comes first," Father Jenkins said, speaking of what actually goes on in the real world outside of the Catechism. "I would think that it is children first. Many parents I know would give their lives over their child's lives." Given this instinct for actual sacrifice, wrecking your retirement projections to pay five figures more each year for a private college that your teenager falls in love with doesn't seem like such an unlikely outcome. Father Jenkins said it was humbling for him to see the financial sacrifices people make to afford a Notre Dame education. But as I pressed him in his book filled office under the iconic Golden Dome, he could not quite bring himself to advocate trading retirement security for tuition savings. "What do I want to say?" he said, putting his head in his hands, pausing and closing his eyes for a moment. "I guess if it's a comfortable second home in Florida," he continued, a smile creeping over his face, "versus education, I'd encourage them to think about the value of education in that person's life. But if it's my wife who is going to be left alone and penniless should I die if I don't do more, that should be taken into account." Elsewhere in the Catechism, we picked apart what at first felt like a bit of social justice boilerplate. "Society ensures social justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or individuals to obtain what is their due, according to their nature and their vocation." In the context of college costs, it takes on added meaning. Notre Dame guarantees to meet the financial need of the students it accepts, thus helping them get "their due" if they are smart enough to gain admission. But does the high list price that many families pay represent a sort of cross subsidy that they should actually feel good about, one that makes it easier for the university to grant money to others? Like many other schools with large endowments, Notre Dame does remind families that the cost of educating its students is actually higher than the retail tuition price. That means everyone is on scholarship in a sense. "I don't think it gives people a great amount of solace," Father Jenkins said. "But I've said it before." In theory, the endowment might support a full price of 50,000 instead of close to 70,000, but that wouldn't be in keeping with another Catechism passage that notes the "scandal" of excessive economic disparity. "If you make it 50,000, you're subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of what you could do for poor or middle class families," he said. Alas, we found no writings that addressed a related question head on: How can one justify spending (or borrowing) 10,000, 20,000 or 40,000 more per year at Notre Dame than one might at a flagship state university? Father Jenkins did not quite attempt such a full throated justification and said he would never want to make anyone feel bad for choosing a lower cost option. "I don't want to appear to be saying to that family, 'You don't care about your kids,'" he said. At Notre Dame, such upselling hasn't been necessary that often. In the past three years, an extraordinarily high 56 percent of students who have been accepted to the institution have chosen to attend. Still, Don Bishop, associate vice president for undergraduate enrollment, said he had been noticing in recent years that those among the 44 percent with six figure incomes who applied for financial aid seem to be choosing cheaper schools a bit more often. So to other families who are likely to face similar questions of value in the coming years, Father Jenkins suggested that they ask themselves whether a school has the potential to be transformative. Here, he is stacking the deck a bit, given the edge he might have at a faith based institution to effect such wholesale personal changes. Still, the gauzy possibility that a place may turn teenagers' brains inside out and help them connect with a tribe, a spouse, a lifelong mentor or all of the above has caused many parents to dig deeper and feel really good about it. But if you're looking for an absolute edict one way or the other in the Catechism or a guarantee in Notre Dame's institutional data on student outcomes, Father Jenkins cannot help you. "There are dimensions to this that transcend this sort of analysis, and parents raising children have to make those decisions all the time," he said. "Obviously, there is no instruction book that comes with your kid." Come on, I protested. Not even the Bible? "Not even the Bible," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
At 3 a.m. on a recent Sunday, Herb Wilson's wife fell backward in the bathroom of their New York apartment and hit her head. It was not her first fall. She has Parkinson's disease and has fallen many times, causing him worry. The previous time his wife had fallen, Mr. Wilson, 79, had taken her to a hospital emergency room, where they spent five hours waiting for her to be examined and discharged. This time, they went to a concierge emergency room for faster service. "I called up at 3:15, and they said come over," Mr. Wilson said. "I walked in there at 3:30 in the morning, and a physician, a technician and a physician's assistant were waiting for me, literally, at the door." The facility, Priority Private Care, administered a CT scan and read the results on the spot. Mr. Wilson's wife was fine, and they went home. "I was out of there in 40 minutes," he said. For such service, he pays 10,000 a year. The fee covers concierge emergency room access for him, his wife and their adult daughter. Fees for treatment are charged per visit. Paying more for better, faster care may not be fair, but the concept has been around for decades. Concierge physicians often charge patients directly, bypassing insurance companies that discount their rates. They do this through annual membership fees but also with charges for each visit. In return, patients get direct access and more time with a doctor. Top hospitals have also started to provide concierge services, offering programs with stately names that are meant to coddle dignitaries, celebrities and international patients paying their own way. In New York, Mount Sinai Hospital has its Executive Services Department, the Hospital for Special Surgery offers its Ambassador Services, and Weill Cornell Medicine provides its International Patient Services. But emergency rooms by law treat the sickest patients first. If you've been shot, you'll be seen right away. If you're stable, you're going to wait and you could keep waiting depending on who else comes in. Waiting in emergency rooms is the norm. In Maryland, it's about three and a half hours on average; in North Dakota, the wait is comparatively speedy: You're in and out in about an hour and a half. A lot of people are fed up with the process, but few can do anything about it. That's where Priority Private Care, with its care center on the Upper East Side, saw an opening for a clientele familiar with the costs and benefits of concierge medicine. Dr. Bernard Kruger, a board certified physician in oncology and internal medicine, started the company 18 months ago with two partners. He had a concierge medical practice for 15 years but saw its limitations, particularly on weekends if a patient was hurt and needed an X ray or blood work. He got the idea for a concierge emergency room after helping a patient, an actress, who had fallen off a horse. "I brought her to Mount Sinai," Dr. Kruger said. "The head of the department came down. We still waited five hours for a CAT scan. I said something is wrong here." The Priority Private Care facility is sleek and modern, with a Chuck Close painting hanging on the wall. In addition to being well staffed, the center has the imaging machines and laboratory equipment for blood work to get results quickly and help doctors make a diagnosis. Dr. Kruger summed up the experience: "You get seen right away. You get treated right away. You have a consistent doctor with you." It has its limits. It is not equipped to handle a gunshot wound, for instance, and it is not a surgery center. But according to a 2013 study by Truven Health Analytics, about three fourths of emergency room visits by people with insurance did not require emergency room level care. That's a lot of waiting (and unnecessary visits), given that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are 141 million emergency room visits each year. The same C.D.C. study said that 11.2 million emergency room visits resulted in people being admitted to the hospital and 1.8 million, or about 1 percent, of those visits ended with people being admitted to critical care units. The founders of Priority Private Care envisioned a service focused on three areas. The first is emergency care. They believe they can handle about 80 percent of the cases that require emergency care. The second is access to a network of specialists and the ability to get patients in to see someone quickly. This was one thing that attracted Russ Coniglio, a businessman who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., but keeps an apartment in Manhattan. "You call a specialist on Park Avenue, and they say six months," said Mr. Coniglio, who works in the beauty care business. But when Dr. Kruger calls a specialist, he said, "they say come right over." "I don't know how you put a price tag on it," he said. "If you have a problem and wait three weeks for the appointment, that's hard to do." Mr. Coniglio also put his children on the plan, and both of his college age sons have used it for emergency services for sports related injuries. Those medical connections also extend to getting a patient admitted into a hospital through its V.I.P. services, if additional care is needed. The third is convenience for any ailment, like a sore throat or a cough, that crops up after hours or on the weekend. "As long as we have to staff a full facility to effectively run empty, people can use us for convenience services," said Andrew Olanow, a co founder of Priority Private Care. The center differs, though, from hospital emergency rooms, which have to take anyone who walks in off the street. Priority Private Care is not obligated to do that, though Mr. Olanow said it would. "If they're gushing blood, we'd stabilize them and walk them the one and a half blocks to Lenox Hill," he said of a nearby hospital. Texas has addressed concierge emergency rooms in a different way. The state allows free standing emergency rooms, many of which act as concierge providers. The advantage is the greater attention and the quicker passage through the emergency room. Like Priority, though, if you've been shot or need surgery, the staff members will get you to a hospital emergency room. "I get to spoil my patients and go over every lab and sit with them," said Dr. Harvey Castro, a former emergency room doctor who is now medical director of Coppell ER in the Dallas area. "We have extra staff who can go and walk a person's dog. We've picked up children at school." In lieu of a membership fee, Coppell ER bills insurance companies and collects the hefty emergency room payments. That can be lucrative for the emergency room, if expensive for the insurance company. Priority Private Care's membership fee decreases as more family members are included. Mr. Wilson said it was 5,000 for him, 3,000 for his wife and 2,000 for their daughter. The center has 1,100 members, from about 350 families. Mr. Olanow said it planned to cap membership at 2,000 to 2,500, depending on how crowded the facility got. On a given day, the center, which has two doctors and a physician assistant ready to go, sees four or five patients. A typical emergency room doctor sees three patients every hour. But like a hospital emergency room, it also gets patients who come in with nonemergencies. Mr. Wilson, who lives just a few blocks away, said he had awakened one morning with a pimple and wondered whether Priority Private Care could take care of it. "It was really bothering me," he said. "They said come on over." When the concierge E.R. is empty, a visit for any ailment is welcome. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
When Dr. Juan Aviles went to school in Puerto Rico, teachers taught him that the original people of the island, the Taino, vanished soon after Spain colonized it. Violence, disease and forced labor wiped them out, destroying their culture and language, the teachers said, and the colonizers repopulated the island with enslaved people, including Indigenous people from Central and South America and Africans. But at home, Dr. Aviles heard another story. His grandmother would tell him that they were descended from Taino ancestors and that some of the words they used also descended from the Taino language. "But, you know, my grandmother had to drop out of school at second grade, so I didn't trust her initially," said Dr. Aviles, now a physician in Goldsboro, N.C. Dr. Aviles, who studied genetics in graduate school, has become active in using it to help connect people in the Caribbean with their genealogical history. And recent research in the field has led him to recognize that his grandmother was onto something. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, for example, shows that, on average, about 14 percent of people's ancestry in Puerto Rico can be traced back to the Taino. In Cuba it is about four percent while in the Dominican Republic it is more like six percent. These results, and others like them based on DNA found in ancient Caribbean skeletons, are providing new insights into the history of the region. They show, for example, that the Caribbean islands were populated in two distinct waves from the mainland and that the human population of the islands was also smaller than once believed. But those living on the islands before colonial contact were not fully extinguished; millions of people living today inherited their DNA, along with traces of their traditions and languages. Before the advent of Caribbean genetic studies, archaeologists provided most of the clues about the origins of people in the region. The first human residents of the Caribbean appear to have lived mostly as hunter gatherers, catching game on the islands and fishing at sea while also maintaining small gardens of crops. Archaeologists have discovered a few burials of those ancient people. Starting in the early 2000s, geneticists managed to fish out a few tiny bits of preserved DNA in their bones. Significant advances in recent years have made it possible to pull entire genomes from ancient skeletons. "We went from zero full genomes two years ago to over 200 now," said Maria Nieves Colon, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the new study. The genes of the oldest known residents of the Caribbean link them with the earliest populations that settled in Central and South America. "It's a Native American population, of course, but it's a very distinctive deep lineage," said David Reich, a co author of the study and a geneticist at Harvard Medical School. But it's not yet clear exactly from where on the mainland those early Indigenous Americans set sail in dugout canoes to reach the Caribbean islands. "I don't think we're as close as we thought we'd be to an answer," said Dr. Nieves Colon, a co author of another large scale genetic study in July. Part of the problem is that scientists have yet to find ancient DNA in the Caribbean that is more than 3,000 years old. The other problem is that ancient DNA is still scarce on the Caribbean coast of the mainland. "There's a lot we can't see because we don't have old DNA," Dr. Nieves Colon said. About 2,500 years ago, the archaeological record shows, there was a drastic shift in the cultural life of the Caribbean. People started living in bigger settlements, intensively farming crops like maize and sweet potatoes. Their pottery became more sophisticated and elaborate. For archaeologists, the change indicates the end of what they call the Archaic Age and the start of a Ceramic Age. Dr. Nieves Colon and other researchers have found that the DNA of Caribbean islanders also shifted at the same time. The skeletons from the Ceramic Age largely shared a new genetic signature. Their DNA links them to small tribes still living today in Colombia and Venezuela. It's possible that the migrants from the Caribbean coast of South America brought with them the languages that were still being spoken when Columbus arrived 2,000 years later. We don't know a lot about these languages, although some words have managed to survive. Hurricane, for example, comes from hurakan, the Taino name for the god of storms. These words bear a striking resemblance to words from a family of languages in South America called Arawak. The DNA of the Ceramic Age Caribbeans most closely resembles that of living Arawak speakers. In the Ceramic Age record, it becomes hard to find people with much Archaic ancestry. They seem to have survived in a few places, like western Cuba, until they vanished about 1,000 years ago. The people bearing Ceramic Age ancestry came to dominate the Caribbean, with almost no interbreeding between the two groups. "It seems like the Archaics were just overwhelmed by the Ceramics," said William Keegan, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History and a co author of the new study. Dr. Keegan, who has been studying Caribbean archaeology for over three decades, said the new DNA findings had surprised him in many ways, giving him a host of new questions to investigate. Dr. Reich and his fellow geneticists also discovered family ties that spanned the Caribbean during the Ceramic Age. They found 19 pairs of people on different islands who shared identical segments of DNA a sign that they were fairly close relatives. In one case, they found long distance cousins from the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, separated by over 800 miles. That finding flies in the face of influential theories from archaeology. "The original idea was that people start in one place, they establish a colony someplace else, and then they just cut all ties to where they came from," Dr. Keegan said. "But the genetic evidence is suggesting that these ties were maintained over a long period of time." Rather than being made up of isolated communities, in other words, the Caribbean was a busy, long distance network that people regularly traveled by dugout canoe. "The water is like a highway," Dr. Nieves Colon said. The genetic variations also allowed Dr. Reich and his colleague to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European contact. Christopher Columbus's brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain putting the figure in the millions. The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration: the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens of thousands. Colonization delivered a huge shock to the Caribbean world, drastically changing its genetic profile. But the Ceramic Age people still managed to pass on their genes to future generations. And now, with a population of about 44 million people, the Caribbean may contain more Taino DNA than it did in 1491. "Now we have this evidence to show that we weren't extinct, we just mixed, and we're still around," said Dr. Aviles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In honor of its 130th anniversary this year, the Hamilton Princess and Beach Club in Bermuda will introduce "The Princess Rum" in partnership with the country's venerable Gosling's Rum in the fall. "Rum is a key part of the Bermudian culture," said Scott Evans, the director of sales and marketing at the Fairmont managed resort. "A Dark and Stormy or Rum Swizzle not only sounds fun, but they make the Bermudian experience much richer. Having our own exclusive rum will allow our guests to taste a one of a kind liquor." The Omni Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire now has its own Woodford Reserve bourbon called, fittingly enough, the Mount Washington. The Beverly Hills Hotel in California has its own Evans Williams Single Barrel Bourbon from the Bardstown, Ky., distillery. The hotel's "Barrel Number 376" was aged 10 years in a new charred American oak barrel now on display at the bar. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Now Lives In a one bedroom apartment in a landmark building on the Upper East Side. An avid equestrian, however, she spends as much time as possible riding and showing her four horses in Wellington, Fla. Claim to Fame The surname says it all. Her father is David Rockefeller Jr., the prominent fourth generation member of the Rockefeller family. But Ms. Rockefeller is distinguishing herself with her namesake fashion label. The contemporary clothing line features lots of opera coats, tweed jackets and three quarter sleeve dresses, and is inspired by her preppy lifestyle. Big Break After marrying Matthew Bucklin, an entrepreneur, in 2010, Ms. Rockefeller decided to pursue her lifelong dream of starting a fashion line. "I was influenced by my grandmother Peggy McGrath Rockefeller," she said. "She was so stylish and always put together in a way that seemed effortless, whether at the stables or a black tie wardrobe." Her first collection was inspired by the Picasso painting "Femme et Chien Sous un Arbre," which hung in her childhood home. In 2014, she opened a 1,000 square foot pop up shop in SoHo. "Having a successful brick and mortar space was a great litmus test for the brand's traction with consumers," she said. "Designing and wearing my gown for the 2015 Met Gala was a momentous occasion, too." Latest Project When Reed Krakoff shuttered operations last fall, and his lead handbag designer, Bassam Ali, became available, Ms. Rockefeller jumped at the opportunity. Her first handbag collection, available in September, includes the Oxer satchel ( 1,125), which is finished with brass hardware inspired by a horse's bridle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
TOKYO In a manga comic book that is well known here, "My Wife Is an Elementary School Student," a 24 year old teacher marries a 12 year old girl as part of a top secret social experiment. There is no depiction of actual sex. But the teacher's steamy fantasies fill the comic's pages in graphic detail, including a little naked girl with sexually suggestive props. Meanwhile, in a widely available new DVD, a real life Japanese model poses in a tiny white bikini. She makes popcorn in a maid's costume. She plays with a beach ball while being hosed down with water. The model, Akari Iinuma, is 13 years old. Japan, which has long been relatively tolerant of the open sale and consumption of sexually oriented material, lately has developed a brisk trade in works that in many other countries might be considered child pornography. But now some public officials want to place tighter restrictions on the provocative depictions of young girls referred to as "junior idols" that are prevalent in magazines, DVDs and Web videos. One particularly big target is manga comic books that depict pubescent girls in sexual acts. It a lucrative segment of the 5.5 billion industry for manga, illustrated books drawn in a characteristic Japanese comic book style. A newly revised ordinance by Tokyo's metropolitan government, which restricts the sale of such material, has prompted a national debate between its publishers and critics inside and outside Japan, who say the fare exploits children and may even encourage pedophilia. Other local and regional governments, including the Osaka Prefecture, are considering similar restrictions. "These are for abnormal people, for perverts," said Tokyo's governor, Shintaro Ishihara, angrily throwing two comic books to the floor during an interview. Mr. Ishihara spearheaded the ordinance changes, which take effect in July. While the revised law applies to an area containing only about a tenth of Japan's population, Tokyo is the nation's media capital and a de facto arbiter of the country's pop culture boundaries. "There's no other country in the world that lets such crude works exist," Mr. Ishihara said. The new law specifically bars only the sale to minors of the restricted comics and videos. But industry executives say it will essentially end publication of the material by discouraging risk averse publishers and booksellers from handling it at all. "There are no victims in manga we should be free to write what we want," said Yasumasa Shimizu, vice president at Japan's largest publishing company, Kodansha, which is participating in the boycott. "Creativity in Japanese manga thrives on an 'anything goes' mentality." Manga taps into a history of erotica that dates at least as far back as the ukiyo e prints of 17th to 19th century Japan, including Hokusai's famous portrayal of a fisherwoman and octopi in a salacious encounter. But it was as recently as the 1980s that comic magazines like Lemon People introduced a wider audience to sexual manga featuring young girls. "There is a culture, an industry that worships youth and innocence," said Mariko Katsuki, who published a book last year chronicling adults who are attracted to small children. "Much of the attraction is nonsexual, but sometimes it becomes a dangerous obsession." The new Tokyo law, which applies to anyone under 18, bans the sale of comics and other works including novels, DVDs and video games that depict sexual or violent acts that would violate Japan's national penal code, as well as sex involving anyone under age 18. The ordinance also requires guardians to prevent children younger than 13 from posing for magazines or videos that depict them in sexually suggestive ways. Legal experts say that Japan's laws against child pornography are lax by international standards. Japan has banned the production or distribution of any sexually explicit, nude images of minors since 1999, when Parliament passed a law in response to international criticism of the wide availability of such works in the country. But even now, unlike the United States and most European countries, Japan does not ban the possession of child pornography. In recent cases in the United States and Sweden, authorities have made arrests over manga books imported from Japan depicting sexual abuse of children. An American manga collector, Christopher Handley, pleaded guilty in 2009 to violating the 2003 Protect Act, which outlawed cartoons or drawings that depict minors in sexually explicit ways. Japan's 1999 law has also helped stamp out a formerly popular genre of photo books depicting nude under age girls. One of the genre's best selling books, published in 1991, featured nude photos of the actress Rie Miyazawa, who was not yet 18 at the time of the photo shoot. But in the last five or six years, books and videos have emerged that sidestep the law by featuring girls, some as young as age 6, posing in swimsuits that stop short of full nudity. These models, who are paid about 200,000 yen ( 2,400) a shoot, often dream of careers in acting or music, industry insiders say. Junior idol photo books and DVDs are widely available on Web sites like Amazon's site in Japan and in specialized bookstores. At least eight magazines are devoted to such photos, including Sho Bo, which features girls of elementary school age. "I loved the white bikini," Ms. Iinuma, the 13 year old model, told the adult male fans who turned out at the Sofmap electronics store in Tokyo for an event to promote the release of her second DVD, "Developing Now." It is a plotless 70 minutes of Ms. Iinuma in various costumes and poses. Hiromasa Nakai, a spokesman for the Japan Committee for Unicef, said the abundance of child pornography in Japan made it even easier for those who would normally not be considered as having clinical pedophilia, a psychiatric disorder characterized by a sexual obsession with young children, to develop a sexual interest in children. "To a degree, it has become socially accepted to lust over young girls in Japan," Mr. Nakai said. "Condoning these works has meant more people have access to them and develop an interest in young girls." There have been earlier moves to regulate pedophilic material in Japan, especially after the murders of four little girls in 1988 89 by a man police described as a pedophile. The case spurred local governments across Japan to adopt ordinances setting some limits to sales of pedophilic works, including a loose ratings system for explicit manga books imposed by the publishers themselves, and also set the stage for the 1999 anti child pornography law. Already the Tokyo government checks for "unwholesome" manga publications and can order publishers to label them as for adults only. But supporters of more regulation say those efforts have been sporadic. "We believe that when the rights of adults or businesses violate children's rights, children must come first," said Tamae Shintani, head of Tokyo's parent teacher association for elementary schools. "But we also respect free speech, so the least we can ask is people keep their fetishes under wraps." The industry's defenders say comparing manga to pedophilia involving real children is absurd. "Depicting a crime and committing one are two different things; it's like convicting a mystery writer for murder," said Takashi Yamaguchi, a Tokyo lawyer and manga expert. Mr. Yamaguchi and others also contend that the Tokyo government pushed through the new regulations without ample debate. Some also worry that stronger regulations will harm an industry whose fortunes have already fallen in recent years; sales of comic magazines, in particular, have dropped by a third over the last decade, to 24.3 million in 2008. The manga artist Takeshi Nogami, whose best known work features high school girls riding military tanks, says he senses a disdain among policy makers toward manga itself. "They think reading manga makes you dumb," he said. In late December at the Comic Market, a self published comic book fair that is held twice a year in Tokyo and attended by more than 500,000 people, manga titles depicting adults having sex with minors were on open display. And they were readily available to fans like Koki Yoshida, age 17. "I don't even think about how old these girls are," Mr. Yoshida said. "It's a completely imaginary world, separate from real life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
It Just Got Easier, and May Soon Be Cheaper, for Americans to Travel to Brazil None Lianne Milton for The New York Times Starting this week, Americans wishing to visit Brazil will be able to apply online for a visa for a 40 fee, down from the 160 fee applicants were previously charged at consulates. Brazil rolled out the new e visa system, which is also available for Japanese, Canadian and Australian citizens, in an effort to jump start its tourism sector, which has struggled amid rising violence in much of the country, a prolonged economic recession and residual apprehension following the 2016 Zika epidemic. "If we want to compete for international tourists, we need to do away with the bureaucracy and extend a red carpet so they choose our destinations," Brazil's tourism minister Marx Beltrao said in a statement. The e visa program is kicking in weeks before the Brazilian government is expected to sign an "open skies" agreement with the United States. The pact will allow market forces, rather than government regulators, to dictate the frequency and destination of flights between the two countries. Brazil's Senate is expected to approve the deal next month, following passage in the lower House of Congress last month. Open skies agreements that Washington has signed with other countries have significantly expanded the number of daily flights, leading to cheaper fares. Since the United States signed one with Colombia in 2010, for instance, three new airlines began offering service between the two countries, eight new routes were launched and daily flights more than doubled. The Brazilian government estimates that the e visa system will increase travel from the four eligible countries by 25 percent and make Brazil a more attractive destination to hold conferences and other large events. More than 570,000 Americans traveled to Brazil in 2016, according to the tourism ministry, a figure exceeded only by the number of Argentines who flock to the beaches in the country each year. So why visit Brazil now? Having arrived here last July to run coverage of the southern cone of South America for The New York Times, I have a few tips and a word of caution. Rio de Janeiro, my new hometown, is a dazzling seaside metropolis with an embarrassment of riches for beachgoers and music lovers. If you've never been, it should be at the top of your list. You should be mindful, however, that like much of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro is grappling with an epidemic of violence. It is easy to overlook in tourist hot spots like the area that includes the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana, but you should do your homework to avoid stumbling into a dangerous neighborhood. Another caveat: brace yourself for reliably inattentive service. If gorgeous beaches surrounded by a constellation of mountains isn't your thing, Sao Paulo, the largest metropolis in South America, has more to offer in the way of museums, awe inspiring architecture and culinary innovation. You can visit what may be the coolest building in Latin America: the curvaceous Copan built by the renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer downtown. Or the modern Museu do Futebol, an ode to the country's soccer rich history tucked inside the Art Deco Pacaembu Stadium. But be forewarned about the city's notorious traffic jams and graffiti smeared streets that give much of the city a blighted feel. If you've been there, done that, consider going a bit further afield. You can travel to Brazil's wine country yes, there is one! near the southern city of Porto Alegre. While Brazil's wine sector is dwarfed by industry titans Argentina and Chile, several sparkling wines made here are excellent and reasonably priced. Seeking more adventure than a buzz? Consider a trip to the Pantanal, the largest wetlands in the world, in Mato Grosso do Sul state. You can catch a glimpse of jaguars, macaws and caimans by going on safari like tours. There are also beautiful waterfalls and freshwater rivers to swim in. As a relative newcomer to Brazil, I'd be delighted to get tips from veteran travelers. Tweet or email me about destinations that exceeded your expectations, funky hotels and delightful eats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
AUDACITY How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail By Jonathan Chait 240 pp. Custom House. 27.99. If everything had gone according to plan, these would be valedictory days for President Obama. With the economy humming if not roaring and his approval ratings higher than they were through most of his time in office, Obama expected to take a victory lap, map out his memoir and hand the reins to a like minded successor to build on his accomplishments. But everything did not go according to plan, and instead he finds himself bequeathing his record to Donald J. Trump, a man he disdains, who was elected in large part on a promise to take a sledgehammer to anything with Obama's name on it. Obama is left trying to explain the debacle, salvage what he can from the wreckage and make his case to history that his was still a transformative presidency. In his corner will be Jonathan Chait of New York magazine and one of the country's leading progressive voices, who has come to Obama's defense with "Audacity," a timely, trenchant and relentlessly argued book presenting the 44th president in terms that he himself would approve. Not only did Obama change America for the better, Chait writes, he also cemented a new policy infrastructure that will resist Trump's efforts to tear it down. To be sure, this was a book written largely before the November election with the evident expectation that Hillary Clinton would be preparing to move into the Oval Office, and it cannot help reading that way. After Trump shocked the world with his improbable Electoral College victory, Chait tweaked the text to address the upheaval in American politics. But he did not change his fundamental conclusion or buy into the notion that Clinton's defeat represented a harsh verdict on Obama. 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. "She lost despite, not because of, her association with the popular sitting president," Chait writes. Republicans nurtured the opposite conclusion to justify a demolition of Obama's new foundation. "The myth of repudiation had a clear purpose: to make it appear both fair and inevitable that the conquering Republican government would destroy Obama's legacy." But, he adds, "the fatalistic conclusion that Trump can erase Obama's achievements is overstated perhaps even completely false." Chait's point is that "good ideas advance in fits and stops" and that Obama's presidency "represented one of those great bursts" that will not simply be erased despite momentary setbacks. Whether that is the case remains to be seen. Certainly in facing the judgment of history, much of the record that Obama will point to is beyond any Republican effort to reverse. He helped pull the country back from the brink of the economic abyss, saved the auto industry, ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and broke the ultimate racial barrier. Yet despite Chait's confidence in the durability of Obama's legacy, other elements of his agenda appear to be in jeopardy. Obama's health care program, efforts to ease immigration rules, crackdowns on emissions by coal fired plants, regulations on Wall Street, labor rules intended to improve worker conditions and a free trade pact with Asia all seem unlikely to survive, at least in the form he prefers. The fates of his nuclear agreement with Iran and his diplomatic opening to Cuba are at least in question, although Trump may ultimately find it harder than he thinks to unravel either. Other presidents, of course, have been followed by successors of the other party who in the end sustained their signal accomplishments. Dwight Eisenhower did not undo Harry Truman's record, nor did John Kennedy undo Eisenhower's. Richard Nixon, given the chance, left Lyndon Johnson's Great Society largely in place. Even Obama preserved many of George W. Bush's achievements, including the vast bulk of his tax cuts, his Medicare expansion, his AIDS fighting program in Africa and his homeland security architecture. Trump, on the other hand, is more mercurial, so it is harder to predict how far he will go to wipe out Obama's imprint on the country. He has sent conflicting signals since the election about his commitment to following through on certain campaign promises while Obama has quietly tried to nudge him away from a radical change. It could well be that Trump unintentionally helps his predecessor's case for history as a point of contrast that whatever Obama's leadership flaws, his calm, no drama performance will look better in hindsight to many Americans. At the same time, it raises the question that if Obama was so successful, why do so many Americans feel so dissatisfied and left behind? How could an America that twice chose Barack Obama decide to replace him with Donald Trump? Beyond noting Clinton's popular vote margin, Chait, like others on the left, points to willful distortion by Republicans determined from the start to tear down Obama and cynical news media that were complicit in that strategy. But he also faults liberals who were too willing to flay a president they agreed with because he failed to achieve some impossible standard of progressive perfection. Indeed, Chait's book seems more like an argument with the left than with the right. "The yawning chasm between the scale of Obama's achievements and the mood of his supporters presents one of the mysteries of the era," he writes. "Its resolution also helps us understand how to judge the Obama presidency. What would a successful presidency even look like? Would Democrats recognize one if they saw it?" While Chait agrees that "Obama has not done the job perfectly," he echoes Michael Grunwald in "The New New Deal" by making the case that his programs will have long lasting if often overlooked impact. Obama's fiscal stimulus package, for instance, was "a gigantic success," not only by helping stanch job losses but also by investing in the future in the form of renewable energy, transportation infrastructure and scientific research. Likewise, Obama's health care program covered 20 million more Americans while also producing an "economic miracle," Chait says, in slowing the rise of medical costs even though premiums for some continued to rise sharply. Obama's green energy revolution, he adds, has already brought down climate change emissions and "changed the economic calculus irreversibly." While Obama's foreign policy may not have transformed the world, Chait concludes, he made incremental progress and avoided catastrophic mistakes. For disenchanted Obama supporters, this appraisal may seem like a surprise. The Obama who leaves office has traveled a long way from the hope and change moment eight years ago. In his early days, he was likened to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, even Ronald Reagan. When things turned dark, he was compared unfavorably with Johnson, Jimmy Carter, even George W. Bush. "The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline," Chait says. "Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president." Now he will be compared with his successor, and that is a comparison Chait thinks favors Obama. "Trump is the poisoned chalice of a failed ideology," he writes. "Obama, not Trump, is destined to supply the model for American governance in the decades to come." Chait's argument probably will not persuade many on the right, who still see a president who expanded the size and reach of government at home while undercutting American authority abroad. But it may encourage those on the left and in the middle to come around again to a president they once believed in. For Obama, that may be enough for now. Deprived of the valediction he had sought in November, Obama may want to keep a copy of Chait's volume on the night stand in his new home in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
We look back upon the Great Depression as a discrete event with a beginning and an end; a long and profound economic shock but one that turned out to be nonetheless temporary. In the 1930s, however, many feared that what John Maynard Keynes clinically called "equilibrium at less than full employment" might, in fact, be the new normal forever. There is a lesson here for us, somewhere. In hindsight, the Depression suggests our era will, too, eventually emerge from its economic morass. Yet we should hardly let optimism carry us away. Despite timid buds of growth, profusely irrigated with money by the Federal Reserve, we could be in for a much more enduring stagnation than our leaders in Washington are willing to concede. As he delivered his fifth State of the Union address, President Obama, not unlike President Franklin D. Roosevelt early in his second term, seemed to have given up far too early in the game on trying to stimulate the recovery. In "Freedom From Fear," his history of the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, David Kennedy notes that fears that what Keynes called "technological unemployment" might become a permanent feature of the labor market, especially among the less skilled and the elderly, date back to the administration of President Herbert Hoover. He quotes Lorena Hickok, a former reporter for The Associated Press who joined the Roosevelt administration in 1933 to work on the New Deal: "The majority of those over 45 probably will NEVER get their jobs back," she said. Her boss, Harry Hopkins, agreed: Given "improvements in management and technology," private businesses might never be able to absorb all able bodied workers. Indeed, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, which created the Works Progress Administration that funneled over 13 billion into public jobs (the equivalent of about 218 billion today) and employed 8.5 million people over eight years, was hardly meant to be just "emergency relief" for the job market, Mr. Kennedy wrote. Rather, it aimed to relieve a potentially permanent shortcoming. The job market is not in as bad a shape as it was at the depths of the downturn in the 1930s. The standard measure of unemployment stands at 6.7 percent rather than over 20 percent. Still, by any reading of the statistics, the economic emergency set off by the implosion of the housing bubble is far from over. The fear, however, seems overdone. Many economists go pale at the thought of a mass program of public jobs to combat unemployment. They envision a bungling bureaucracy choosing investments, hiring workers and firing them. Even if the right investments could be identified, they fear the new jobs would demand skills the unemployed simply do not have. The aversion is anchored in history. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter ran into trouble trying to increase jobs with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Even as voters expressed skepticism of "fake" jobs, public employee unions demanded that the cheaper CETA workers not compete for tasks performed by government employees. Politically vulnerable to exposes of petty corruption, the program was killed as soon as Ronald Reagan came to office. Though the program employed 750,000 workers at its peak in 1978, it was perceived largely as a failure. The experience of the 1970s hardly settles the debate, however. Recent precedent with other forms of public job promotion is not all bad. Thirty nine states used 1.3 billion from the fiscal stimulus package passed in 2009 to create more than 260,000 jobs by subsidizing private employers. A subsequent evaluation of the program found that two thirds of these jobs would not have existed without the subsidy. Many of those jobs went to people who were difficult to employ, including workers who had been jobless for a long time, people on welfare and workers with criminal records. Yet after the program ended in September 2010, 37 percent of the formerly subsidized workers kept their jobs. Our experience, moreover, has taught us specific rules of thumb for governments searching to increase employment. "It works best if you hire people that would not otherwise be hired, to do something productive that is not already being done by somebody else," said Lawrence Katz of Harvard, formerly chief labor economist in the Clinton administration. "Long overdue infrastructure investments would be a good place to start, coupled with funding for positions cleaning parks and the like, which could help disadvantaged workers like the long term unemployed." Not every unemployed worker may be qualified to build infrastructure. But many might. Today, there are 1.5 million fewer jobs in construction than there were before the financial crisis six years ago. Plenty of unemployed workers out there know how to build things. There is a fair chance that the private sector, left to its own devices, will never hire them. Mr. Summers proposed a list of factors that could be holding the economy back. A slowdown in the expansion of the labor force and weaker productivity growth might be restraining investment, he suggested. The concentration of income among the very richest could be curbing consumer spending. Importantly, he has noted that the forces restraining growth preceded the crisis. "Even a great bubble wasn't enough to produce any excess in aggregate demand," Mr. Summers said in his November speech. Whatever is wrong with the United States economy has been wrong for a while. There are potentially great benefits to government investments in public works at a time like this. The legacy of the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s included half a million miles of highways, 100,000 bridges and as many public buildings. It includes the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, S.C., and the Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon. And it would not even be very expensive. With the borrowing costs of the federal government below the rate of inflation, investments would actually help reduce the nation's debt burden. Lenders are, in effect, paying the government to borrow money. Perhaps the best argument for government investment to increase jobs and raise demand is that the alternatives seem much worse. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
He's particularly annoyed by Sarah (Samantha Elisofon), with whom he is given a homework assignment that obliges them to visit the Brooklyn Bridge together. Sarah has a winning and nearly constant smile and a startling openness. The film, written and directed by Rachel Israel, respects these characters by portraying their whole, unfiltered selves. In many respects the romance that develops between David and Sarah is like a conventional one. There's even an "it's not you, it's me" conversation. The movie grows more moving as David gets real with himself about his own loneliness, and his rich parents' bigotry and denial. (The parents are played by the veteran actors Jessica Walter and Tibor Feldman, and they work well with Mr. Polansky and Ms. Elisofon.) "Keep the Change" is not a seamlessly crafted movie, but it's awfully tenderhearted and thoroughly disarming. It deserves to be widely seen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ?Lo mejor? It'll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tia, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone). After more than a week of mass protests in Puerto Rico, Gov. Ricardo Rossello announced on Wednesday night that he would resign. Hundreds of thousands of protesters stormed the streets after the contents of a leaked private group chat revealed sexist, crass and profane comments made by Mr. Rossello and 11 friends and aides. These included calling former New York City Council speaker Melissa Mark Viverito a whore, and joking about shooting Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan. Members of the activist organization Colectiva Feminista en Construccion were also targeted in the messages. In one exchange, a chat participant posted a photo of an activist wearing a T shirt that read: "Antipatriarchal. Feminist. Lesbian. Trans. Caribbean. Latin American." The governor mocked her with the reply, "That has to be some kind of record, no?" The Colectiva has been pushing Mr. Rossello on feminist issues since he was elected in 2017. In November 2018, they camped outside of his mansion for three days, demanding that he declare a state of emergency as domestic violence surged across the island post Hurricane Maria. He refused at the time, but met with them earlier this year, when the Colectiva gave him a list of demands, including the introduction of a gender studies curriculum in public schools to help prevent violence against women. I spoke with Zoan Davila Roldan, a spokeswoman for Colectiva Feminista (which is nonhierarchical but has a few selected representatives), to discuss the ways these protests are the product of years of feminist activist efforts and what Mr. Rossello's resignation means for Puerto Rico. This interview has been edited and condensed. What has it been like to see so many people in the streets, to see this movement, which has been building for years? It has been amazing, and it's the result of all the work that's been done. We didn't see ourselves as a movement. Our mission was to create a movement, with an awareness of the paradigm shifts in the country. It's seeing the fruits of our labor over the last few years become a reality. How do you think the chats reflected the culture of the government? When we protested in November, one of the things that was evident was that one of the ways to eradicate gender based violence and deal with that problem in an effective way was to introduce education that considered gender. The state's mission has been to work with survivors of domestic violence, but they don't have any kind of public policy to prevent the violence. In the conversations that we had with the governor's aides, there was a resistance to the topic of gender studies. The comments in the chat reflect that there is no real awareness of how gender based violence affects women, of the violence we experience. If anything, the chat reflects how necessary gender studies is, because even government officials who say they're conscious of these things aren't actually aware. I saw a lot of protesters reclaiming some of the sexist words used in the chat, like "puta" and "gatita," on their signs. For those of you who have been in this fight for so long, what was it like to see people reclaiming those words? I think it's incredible that people reclaimed the words used in that chat to demean these women, to demean us. They have used it as a statement of indignation, as a tool to demand his resignation. Because the word "puta" is used to provoke women who are free to make decisions about their bodies without worrying about stigmas imposed by society. Women like those mentioned in the chat, they speak about them that way because they're women who are leaders, women who have challenged stigmas and social standards, because they're women who dissent from the leaders who have these patriarchal and misogynistic views. With these protests, women have been some of the main participants. It's been a lot, a lot of us. Women from all kinds of occupations have taken to the streets. And I think it's been because of that recognition of state violence, and how the state enacts violence on them. How do you feel now that Mr. Rossello has resigned? What comes next? For many years, we've been demanding for life in Puerto Rico to change. A slogan that we use and that we have in one of our campaigns is, "Let's build another life." Something that these protests have shown us is a change in the consciousness of the people. Before, it was taken for granted that someone who was appointed in the elections would stay there for four years and there was no way of removing them. We're happy and proud that the people fought to finally remove Ricardo Rossello from the government. Because this is more than removing a simple figure. It's also a warning to whoever will take this post and other positions of leadership. This is a country that recognizes the power it has and is going to use it. Here are more stories to read this week. As someone whose name has been chronically mispronounced or reduced to a nickname, I was moved by this essay by N'Jameh Camara on the beauty of embracing your name as the child of immigrants. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
After a Tragedy, Calculating the Best Ways That People Can Help UNFORTUNATELY, it has become a sad tradition. An unthinkable tragedy occurs the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., or the bombings at the Boston Marathon. We are stunned, and then to help the victims, to start the healing, to just feel like we are doing something we give money. And a few months later, news reports pop up. The funds aren't being disbursed properly. Charities are competing to collect. The money isn't going to the right people or it's not being handed out quickly enough. And the milk of human kindness sours a little. I, like many others, have become perplexed. Where should I give or even should I give? Donating to help people recover from a disaster, natural or otherwise, is nothing new. Newspaper reports of the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which killed more than 2,000 people, so touched people that they sent money, blankets, clothing, food, lumber and medical supplies. In fact, it was the first major disaster served by the Red Cross, then recently created. Of course with television and Web videos, the immediacy of such catastrophes is that much more intense. And the Internet has allowed giving to be done more quickly and more directly. Funds set up to aid victims "have become standard practice," said Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit that evaluates charities. Not all such funds are the same. The 7 billion September 11 Victim Compensation Fund was established by an act of Congress. The 20 billion compensation fund after the 2010 BP oil spill was set up by the oil company. Both were tied to agreements by the recipients not to sue. On the other hand, funds set up after other calamities like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 all the way through to the Boston Marathon bombings consist only of charitable donations and given without strings attached. Few have operated without controversy. "The results of these funds have been very mixed," Mr. Berger said. "There is an ongoing tension between moving the money quickly and vetting who gets it." People have often been frustrated with traditional charities, he said, not trusting sometimes with good reason that the money is going to the right people and not being used, say, for lavish salaries. And fraudulent charities have popped up after many of these tragedies. In response to such concerns, a group of 70 parents and families affected by the dismal litany of shootings from Columbine High School in Colorado to the Oak Creek Sikh Temple in Wisconsin to the Newtown, Conn., elementary school want to set up what they call a National Compassion Fund to aid victims of human made disasters, as opposed to natural ones, on the theory that the Red Cross is already managing those. The idea would be that the next time and it will happen a mass shooting or bombing or some other crime occurs people can donate to the national fund and a specific protocol will swing into place to collect the money and get it directly to the victims. "Every single time one of these tragedies occurs, the same thing happens," said Mai Fernandez, executive director of a nonprofit, the National Center for Victims of Crime, which is considering overseeing the National Compassion Fund. "People say, 'Oh my God, I want to do something, someone collects a United Way or a community foundation and there's no protocol to give the money. It's time to get our act together.' " In Newtown, for example, the bulk of the money was donated to the United Way of Western Connecticut, which then created a new foundation to give out the funds. There are, however, disputes about the role of the various charities involved in distributing the more than 20 million collected and how the money should be spent. The National Compassion Fund, still in the planning stages, would be endorsed by a state or local official immediately after a tragedy occurs that is fatal or causes life changing injuries to at least five people in a public place. It would have tax exempt status and money would be distributed within six months, Ms. Fernandez said, with "every dime to go to the victims," as a nontaxable gift. A lot still needs to be worked out like finding donors who will pick up the administrative costs and a partner to collect and distribute the money but the One Fund in Boston is a good example of the right way to do things, Ms. Fernandez said. The fund has raised almost 40 million and checks will go out to victims and families starting July 1, said Camille Biros, deputy administrator of the One Fund. It sounds good. But is it? "People are so touched by these tragedies that they want to reach out," said Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. And the desire is that the money goes out instantly. But that may not serve the real needs of the victims or community, she said, noting that, "with the Oklahoma City bombing, they're still dealing with severe mental health care needs." Charities need to do better to educate people about the continuing needs of the community, she said. "Maybe give 20 percent now but hold back 80 percent," she said. "It may be a harder sell, but I think it's more responsible." Also, perhaps people should think more deeply about why they are donating. We are moved by grief stricken families and maimed bodies. But is sending money to help them the best way to help? What about donating at least some money to mental health advocacy, since many of these crimes seem to involve mentally disturbed people? Or gun control advocacy? Or whatever you think might help prevent a future catastrophe. "Other charities need to raise this conversation so people will be thoughtful," Ms. Palmer said. Michele Landis Dauber, a professor of law and sociology at Stanford, who has long studied disaster relief, noted that wanting to give to people instead of a general cause is not new. The famous Depression era photographs by Dorothea Lange and others were aimed at raising support for New Deal programs. But people often wanted to donate directly to the people shown in the pictures, she said. "But just because people want to give to an icon doesn't mean they should," said Professor Dauber, who is the author of "The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State." "What if all the needs are met what do we do with the excess money? And why cut it off at five people? What happens if four people are injured or killed?" In addition, she said, the goal of larger, established charities is to make sure that money is spread evenly around communities when calamity hits. Such individual victims' funds could lead to "inequalities and inequities," she said, if lots of money is given in one case, and far less in another. "It's sacrilegious to say, but due to fate, terrible and awful things happen. Why is one person's grief more deserving than another?" she said. "Questions of equity can overwhelm an ideal like this an ideal that honors an impulse that might not be rational." I don't have the answers, but it's something we need to debate. As Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer who has overseen more of these funds than anyone else in the country, said at a recent symposium, "American values get called into question every time you set up one of these programs." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
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