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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. President Trump lobbied for a border wall in his nationally televised speech Tuesday night. The wall is his one precondition for reopening the government, which has been shut since Dec. 22. If Congress doesn't bend to his demand, Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency. The move would give his office vast new powers; the Constitution is not clear on what limits those powers might have. Researchers in recent days have pointed out that in a national emergency the president could shut down communications between citizens, or dispatch troops within the country. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
If Trump Tweets It, Is It News? A Quandary for the News Media Since Election Day, President elect Donald J. Trump has proposed a U turn in American diplomatic relations with Cuba, boasted about negotiations with a major manufacturer, trumpeted false claims about millions of illegal votes and hinted that he might upend current free speech laws by banning flag burning. All in 140 characters or less. As news organizations grapple with covering a commander in chief unlike any other, Mr. Trump's Twitter account a bully pulpit, propaganda weapon and attention magnet all rolled into one has quickly emerged as a fresh journalistic challenge and a source of lively debate. How to cover a president's pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague? Does an early morning tweet amount to a planned shift in American policy? Should news outlets, as some readers argue, ignore clearly untrue tweets, rather than amplify falsehoods further? In interviews on Tuesday, political editors and reporters said that, for now, they planned to apply the same news judgment they would apply to any statement by a powerful leader, even as some acknowledged that social media allows Mr. Trump to reduce complicated subjects to snappy, and sometimes misleading, slogans and sound bites. "Reporting complex policy issues out of tweets, I would say that's not ideal," said Carrie Budoff Brown, the newly installed editor of Politico, adding: "We have to treat it as one piece of a bigger reporting puzzle that we have to put together." But fundamentally, she said, the thoughts of a president elect are inherently newsworthy as long as journalists also provide readers with the right context, like whether a proposal is feasible or legal, or correct a baseless claim. "This is the way he's communicating with millions upon millions of people, and as journalists we can't ignore that," Ms. Brown said. Some readers disagree. On social media, there have been calls for news outlets to boycott covering Mr. Trump's tweets entirely. Critics say that any coverage elevates unsubstantiated assertions and murky policy suggestions. Part of the concern is that Mr. Trump's Twitter posts can have a ripple effect in the media ecosystem. Producers of morning shows and newspaper assignment editors wake up to head turning statements from the future leader of the free world; those remarks sometimes dominate coverage for hours. Even if journalists insert caveats or clearly label a statement as false, the remarks still reach a large audience. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. But many veteran journalists argue that keeping the public in the dark about their president's comments would be a worse sin. "Anything that a president would say even if it was libelous or scandalous it's the president talking, and I think you report it," said Chris Wallace, the "Fox News Sunday" host who moderated this year's third presidential debate. "Under any definition, it's news, whether it's sensible or not, factual or not, productive or not." Mr. Wallace recalled that as a reporter in Washington, he reported one liners from President Ronald Reagan as he boarded a helicopter to Camp David. "As far as I'm concerned, this is like Donald Trump making a statement on the way to the helicopter," Mr. Wallace said of the president elect's tweets. Handling Mr. Trump's Twitter account has been a hot topic in big newsrooms. Matthew Purdy, a deputy managing editor at The New York Times, said on Tuesday that the Mr. Trump's remarks had to be assessed one by one. "Clearly his tweets are a window into policy decisions or his state of mind," Mr. Purdy said in an interview. "Just because he tweets it doesn't make it news. But just because he tweets it doesn't make it frivolous either." Steven Ginsberg, senior politics editor at The Washington Post, agreed. "My view, frankly, is that everybody is getting way too caught up with the fact that he's tweeting," he said, adding that even if Mr. Trump "shouts something on a street corner, I think it's worth taking up on its own merits." "In this postelection period, anything he says in any way you have to consider it and you have to weigh whether it deserves a story," Mr. Ginsberg said. At some publications, the calculus about coverage is more about the resources on hand. At The Los Angeles Times, covering every Twitter post would prevent reporters from focusing on other political issues, like the future of the Affordable Care Act. "We've got a smaller staff than some other folks do, so I'm sure there have been ones that we've passed on," said David Lauter, the paper's Washington bureau chief. Still, Mr. Trump's tweets have become particularly intriguing. Typically, presidents elect hold news conferences after the election but Mr. Trump has not, offering few opportunities for journalists to question him about plans for his administration. (He has granted interviews to "60 Minutes," The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.) "These pronouncements on Twitter are the only available evidence of what the man is thinking, or wants us to think he's thinking," said Todd Gitlin, a former political activist who has criticized press coverage of Mr. Trump. There is also a novelty factor. American presidents, aware that their words carry gravity and consequence worldwide, are typically circumspect in their remarks, opting for dry statements and withholding major proposals until a legislative or legal framework is in place. Mr. Trump seems to relish doing the opposite, as he did throughout the election season. Jack Shafer, who writes about the media for Politico, said that journalists could ultimately best serve the public by being judicious in the way they report on Mr. Trump's tweets. "I think that you starve the troll by just pointing out that the troll is lying and the troll is trolling," Mr. Shafer said. "Don't ignore him, but hold him accountable when he tweets for effect." Some have speculated that come January, Mr. Trump may rely less on Twitter, once he moves into the White House and has the Oval Office and West Wing briefing room at his disposal. But asked about this on Tuesday, Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, issued a reply: Don't bet on it. "President elect Trump has amassed an incredible social media following, one he used very effectively throughout the campaign to communicate his message," Ms. Hicks said in an email. "He intends to continue utilizing this modern form of communication, while taking into account his new role and responsibilities may call for modified usage." For now, Ms. Hicks declined to say if Mr. Trump would move his musings to the White House's official POTUS Twitter account. As of Tuesday, POTUS had 12.3 million followers. And realDonaldTrump? 16.3 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
What stands out about "Black Lightning" are not the scenes in which the title hero zaps a gajillion volts of justice through a crew of murder minded gang members. You can already see that sort of thing on CW home to "The Flash," "Supergirl," "DC's Legends of Tomorrow" and "Arrow" and the rest of superhero supersaturated TV. What you don't see so often on this youth oriented network is what happens after. Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams), the hero's middle aged alter ego, lies in bed, sore and moaning from the exertion. "Black Lightning is getting too old for these streets," he says. The other distinctive part of the show is, of course, the "Black" in the title. "Black Lightning" is immersively, not incidentally, black: The good guys and bad guys, teachers and students, victims and criminals and reporters are mainly African American. The series was developed by Salim Akil, who produces with his wife, Mara Brock Akil; the two have worked together on "Girlfriends," "The Game" and "Being Mary Jane." Producers also include Greg Berlanti, of CW's other comics franchises, but this show has a different sensibility. It's pulpy entertainment with a sense of purpose. Most superhero series, for instance, begin with young protagonists discovering their powers. "Black Lightning," airing Tuesdays, is the reluctant comeback story of a hero grappling with heroism's limits. By day, Jefferson is a high school principal, something of a local hero for his outreach to troubled students. Until nine years ago, though, he patrolled the fictional city of Freeland, wearing a space age electro suit that one observer likens to a Parliament Funkadelic outfit. Targeted by the police for vigilantism, he wearily gave it up. But he's drawn back in as the city is overrun by a brutal gang, the One Hundred, which ends up threatening his two daughters: Anissa (Nafessa Williams) and Jennifer (China Anne McClain). In the first two episodes, "Black Lightning" is suffused with the ideas of Black Lives Matter, though it comes at them from an angle. The pilot, for instance, involves street protests, not against police brutality but against gang violence. But the parallel images are unmistakable, as is the use of smartphone video by ordinary citizens, in both episodes, as a means of fighting back. In a key early scene, Jefferson is driving and arguing with Anissa, whom he just bailed out after her arrest at a protest. He quotes the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence." She answers with Fannie Lou Hamer: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." Suddenly, they're pulled over by police officers one of them white who suspect Jefferson in a liquor store robbery, though he's in a suit and driving a Volvo wagon. For a moment, his eyes flare with the glow of his suppressed power, but he reins it in. The superhero who must hide his nature from the authorities is old hat in comics. So are arguments over vigilantism and the limits of nonviolence. But the context of "Black Lightning" is everything. Here, the image a powerful black man quelling his emotion and struggling to present as calm, smaller, nonthreatening has the strength of parable. The weakest part of the show so far is the actual superheroism. The One Hundred's members are thinly sketched, and they make paltry competition for an armored superguy who shoots lightning from his fingertips. Their leader is a more intriguing, ruthless presence: Tobias Whale (Marvin Jones III, who raps under the name Krondon), an African American with albinism who denigrates other black people as "darkies." But the arch villain gets little screen time early on. Mr. Williams has to carry most of the story. Fortunately, he's up to it, inhabiting his character's strength, his burden and his sense of humor in a series that's picked an opportune moment to strike. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Q. Do M.R.I. scans cause any harm? A. Magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I., is considered one of the safest technologies for looking deep inside the body, because it doesn't carry the radiation risk of X rays or PET scans. "Over all, M.R.I. is a very safe test," said Dr. Max Wintermark, chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University. Most concerns about M.R.I.s involve people with metal, such as shrapnel, embedded in their bodies, or someone with an implanted medical device, like a cochlear implant or an older pacemaker. The imaging system's strong magnetic field can slightly shift or heat up embedded metal and disrupt the activities of medical devices. It can also draw metal objects into the magnetic field, and there are still occasional accidents when standard safety procedures are not followed and M.R.I. magnets have sucked in hospital beds, screwdrivers, oxygen tanks and other metal objects. "That's why we take extreme precautions to know if a patient has a device, so we can take appropriate measures to make it safe for them, too," Dr. Wintermark said. In some cases, people with implants or embedded metal cannot safely get an M.R.I. and must use a different scanning technology instead. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
For Mariah Carey, this year's Christmas season started promptly on Halloween night, just as the clock struck 12 a.m. and the calendar rolled over into November. In a charmingly lo fi skit posted to the singer's social media channels, Carey falls asleep at 11:59 p.m. in her costume (a hair metal rock star) before being awakened at midnight (now wearing wintry pajamas) by a call from Santa. So began the most spirited edition yet of the singer's now annual campaign to push "All I Want for Christmas Is You," her 25 year old seasonal hit, to the next level again. On Monday, that mission was accomplished as the song reached an unprecedented industry pinnacle, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, becoming both the song that took the longest to do so and the first Christmas track to take the top spot since "The Chipmunk Song" 60 years ago. "All I Want for Christmas" becomes Carey's first No. 1 since 2008 and her 19th overall one fewer than the Beatles, the record holders. But it boasts by far the most miraculous journey, spanning three decades, with a surge in recent years thanks in part to a technology driven shift in listener habits, including the ubiquity of holiday playlists, and renewed marketing muscle. Perhaps above all else, there is the sturdiness of the songwriting on what many consider to be a final modern entry into the Christmas song canon. "There are the classics the standards that everybody grew up with and then there are the reinterpretations or new originals," said Dave Bakula, a senior analyst for Nielsen Music. "Mariah lives in that sweet spot of both." "This song is not one of those things that decays year over year, with some old style message," he added. "It's a simple, straight ahead pop gem that just happens to be about Christmas." Carey, in an interview, demurred on the importance of hitting No. 1. "It's something my die hard fans think about, and people that are really close to me are talking to me about it literally all year," she said. "But I don't need something else to validate the existence of this song. I used to pick it apart whenever I listened to it, but at this point, I feel like I'm finally able to enjoy it." "I just truly love the holidays," she added. "I know it's corny, and I don't care." Still, a commercial juggernaut of this size requires a plan. As one of three Carey originals on her 1994 album "Merry Christmas," which also included takes on "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World," "All I Want for Christmas" has become a cottage industry unto itself for the singer, who, in recognizing its everlastingness, has spent years building an extended universe around the track. Rob Stringer, the chairman of Sony Music Group, wrote in an email: "Every year we focus a campaign around new ways to market 'All I Want for Christmas' because the opportunities for people to hear this perennial classic just seem to grow and grow." Beginning in 2014, Carey has performed a slate of Christmas shows anchored by the megahit, with stops in Las Vegas, Paris, London and Madrid; on Sunday, she closed this year's run with a sold out concert at Madison Square Garden, performing "All I Want for Christmas" as a long teased encore surrounded by 11 Christmas trees, a gospel choir, her two children, bursts of fake snow and, of course, Santa Claus. Then there are the tie ins: a children's book (from 2015) and an animated film (2017), along with endless online content, from a GQ video in which Carey expounds on her love for Christmas to an Amazon Music mini documentary on the song's endurance. Last month, for the album's 25th anniversary, Sony released a deluxe edition of "Merry Christmas" with four different renditions of its big hit leaving off the Justin Bieber duet version from 2011 and a nearly three foot long printed timeline of the track's life span. But wait, there's more. While the YouTube version of the song's music video has been viewed some 600 million times since 2009, a new cut featuring archival footage was added this year, following a black and white cut from 2016 all of which count toward the song's Billboard chart placement. The onslaught worked: "All I Want for Christmas" was the most streamed song in the country last week, with more than 45 million plays, up from 35 million the week prior. And while the track was pushed into the 21st century by a climactic performance in the 2003 holiday rom com "Love Actually," which has enjoyed a similar populist long tail, its digital success has skyrocketed since 2014, as streaming has come to dominate how people listen to music. That year, "All I Want for Christmas" was streamed only about 12.6 million times from early November through December, according to Nielsen. By 2016, that number was up to 61 million, and last year, it reached 185 million streams, reaching a new peak of No. 3 on Billboard as it frequently appeared near the top of Christmas playlists, from Spotify's official Christmas Hits to endless user generated versions. Radio airplay has followed suit, with the song receiving about 42,000 spins last year, up from 24,000 spins in 2014. iHeartRadio, the largest radio broadcaster in the United States, said that since its release, "All I Want for Christmas" had reached an audience of about 1.8 billion on its stations. "This is consistently the best testing Christmas song for us," said Tom Poleman, the company's chief programming officer, "and as a result, one of our most played Christmas songs at radio." The track "fits sonically next to every contemporary artist, and it also crosses genres," he explained, allowing it to be played on almost any format. Like most Christmas miracles, the song's genesis is both contentious and shrouded in mystery. Carey, who does not acknowledge her age or the passage of time, joked that when she wrote the song, she was "in the womb, darling." The truth is that her label at the time, Columbia Records, had the idea for a Christmas album and that she initially balked. Carey was a young artist coming off her third album, "Music Box," a commercial smash, and holiday collections were then considered an afterthought, for over the hill acts. "I'm not one to be giving all sorts of credit to record company executives," Carey said, "but I do think it turned out to be a brilliant business move." According to the singer's version of events, which has coalesced into near mythic status over the years, "All I Want for Christmas" first came to her alone at a house in upstate New York as she noodled on a Casio keyboard with "It's a Wonderful Life" blasting in the background. She sang a melody and played a chord progression into a mini tape recorder, she said, and later recorded a full arrangement with her frequent collaborator Walter Afanasieff. Afanasieff, who produced "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion and worked with Carey on hits like "Dreamlover" and "Hero," remembers things differently. "I don't know how to explain Mariah's version of things. I know when I look at the song's copyright 50 percent to her, 50 percent to me we both wrote the song," he said. "I sat at the piano with Mariah in the room, and I started plunking out like I always did, on every single song we've ever written together a particular chord," hitting upon the "boogie woogie" piano that gives the song its driving momentum. (Afanasieff recalled this occurring in the Hamptons.) Carey later finished lyrics, while Afanasieff composed the track, which consisted of no live instruments, on a digital keyboard sequencer. They recorded the song over the summer, decking the studio halls to get in the Christmas spirit. "We just did whatever the hell we wanted, including this totally slow intro verse that ends in the title of the song," Afanasieff said, noting that the track does not even have a proper chorus. "There's no rhyme or reason, it just worked out, even though it broke certain rules. I think that's part of the reason it's lived so long." Carey, who split dramatically with her label a few years later, and Afanasieff have not spoken in more than 20 years. But each Christmas, their song comes back around. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Johnny Majors, a homegrown college football hero in Tennessee who coached Pittsburgh to an undefeated season and a national championship before returning to his native state to forge a successful 16 year head coaching career at the University of Tennessee although one that ended in bitterness died on Wednesday at his home in Knoxville, Tenn. He was 85. The University of Pittsburgh announced his death. No cause was given. The even tempered Majors was a college head coach for 29 years: five at Iowa State (1968 72), four at Pittsburgh (1973 76), 16 at Tennessee (1977 92) and four more back at Pittsburgh (1993 96). His overall record was 185 137 10. Majors's coaching years at Tennessee, in Knoxville, where he had been an All America tailback, brought three Southeastern Conference championships and 12 postseason bowl trips. But just before the 1992 season, he underwent quintuple heart bypass surgery, and his offensive coordinator, Phillip Fulmer, was named interim coach while Majors recovered. Fulmer won the first three games of the season. Majors then returned and lost three of his first five games. Some people felt Majors had returned too quickly, some felt his football philosophy was too conservative, and some felt Fulmer was maneuvering to get the job full time. University officials decided to replace Majors with Fulmer, offering Majors a job as assistant athletic director. He declined, and negotiated a buyout of more than 500,000 (about 910,000 today) with two years left on his contract. (Fulmer held the head coaching job until 2008, when he, too, was forced out. He is now Tennessee's athletic director.) "The University of Tennessee jerked the rug out from under me," Majors said at the time. "I have a lot of anger and a feeling of betrayal." As the newspaper The Tennessean said: "It broke his heart. It also stung his professional pride." John Terrill Majors was born on May 21, 1935, in Lynchburg, Tenn., to Shirley and Elizabeth Majors. His father was a well known high school football coach who became head coach at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn. As a freshman, Johnny was a T formation quarterback for a hapless Lynchburg High School team. "We won one game," he recalled. "We lost the first three by scores of something like 58 0, 55 0 and 65 7." That one win came against a team his father coached at Huntland High School, and the loss rankled the elder Majors, who vowed that it would be the "last dad blamed time a son of mine plays against me," as Johnny Majors recalled in a memoir, "You Can Go Home" (1986, with Ben Byrd). Shirley Majors then moved the family to Huntland, about 20 miles to the south, where Johnny finished out his high school career playing for his father's squad. (Three of his brothers also played for their father.) Jackie Sherrill, who was an assistant under Majors at Iowa and Pittsburgh and succeeded him as Pitt's head coach, said in an interview on Wednesday that Majors's father had been a major influence on his son's coaching career. "He was exposed to what a football coach was, and what it took to be a football coach and a successful coach," said Sherrill, who added that he spoke to Majors on Sunday night. "And he was certainly exposed to how to treat players." At Tennessee, Majors had an All America career as a 5 foot 10, 165 pound tailback who did much more than run. He variously passed, punted, called signals and played safety in a 6 2 2 1 defense. (His brother Bobby also achieved All America honors playing for Tennessee.) In 1956, Johnny Majors's senior year, Tennessee was 10 0 in the regular season and ranked second nationally to Oklahoma before being upset by Baylor in the Sugar Bowl. In the voting for the Heisman Trophy as the nation's outstanding player, Majors finished second to Paul Hornung, the Notre Dame quarterback and future N.F.L. Hall of Fame running back for the Green Bay Packers. In 2012, Tennessee retired Majors's No. 45 jersey. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a player in 1987. His death came two days after that of another former Southeastern Conference head coach, Pat Dye, of Auburn, a fellow Hall of Fame inductee. Considered too small to play in the National Football League, Majors was not selected in the draft. Instead, he spent 11 years as an assistant coach three seasons at Tennessee, four at Mississippi State and four at Arkansas before becoming head coach at Iowa State. In his next job, at Pittsburgh, he inherited a team with 11 consecutive losing seasons and only one victory the year before. He quickly brought in 83 recruits, and his first team there went 6 5 1. Three years later, in 1976, with the Heisman Trophy winner Tony Dorsett at tailback, Pittsburgh went 11 0 in the regular season, defeated Georgia in the Sugar Bowl and was voted national champion. Majors was voted coach of the year in 1973 and 1976. Pitt has not won a national championship since then. After his ill fated tenure at Tennessee, Majors returned to Pittsburgh to take on another rebuilding job. This time the magic was gone. After the second game of his first season, a 63 21 loss to Virginia Tech, he walked into the media interview room and asked, "Do you have any questions?" When no one spoke up immediately, he asked, "Do you have any answers?" In his second stint at Pittsburgh, his teams finished 3 8, 3 8, 2 9 and 4 7. In his final season, Pittsburgh lost to Ohio State by 72 0, Miami by 45 0, Syracuse by 55 7 and Notre Dame by 60 6. Majors resigned after that. "I'd like to coach probably until I couldn't walk," he said on stepping down, "if I had enough good teams." Majors and his wife of 61 years, Mary Lynn Majors, had a son, John, and a daughter, Mary, who also survive him. (Tessa Majors, an 18 year old Barnard College student whose murder in Manhattan in December gained wide attention, was a great niece.) Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. "He spent his last hours doing something he dearly loved: looking out over his cherished Tennessee River," Majors's wife told Sports Radio WMNL in Knoxville on Wednesday. Majors received an unusual honor from a young actor (and former high school and college football player), who considered him his childhood hero. As a tribute, Harvey Lee Yeary, who would become the star of the television shows "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Fall Guy," adopted the stage name Lee Majors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
BECKET, Mass. Some paradoxical time capsule hovers around or within the Royal Danish Ballet. Although the choreographer August Bournonville (1805 79) didn't create the company, he bequeathed it such a wealth of touchingly human choreography that it remains his. The Royal Danes, as they're known, also perform other ballets, like "Giselle" and new creations. These vary in excellence: In 2011 it brought three modern horrors to New York before winding up with Bournonville, where suddenly the world looked right again. This week, they're performing repertory by Bournonville and others here at the Jacob's Pillow festival, where they've visited since 1955. (Their last appearance was in 2007.) Nikolaj Hubbe, himself a Pillow student in 1985 and an unforgotten principal of New York City Ballet from 1992 to 2008, was visible in the audience; he's now completing his 10th year as the company's artistic director. It would be wrong to say that the Royal Danes have kept their mastery of Bournonville free of all corrosion. To name just the two points most obvious this week: Its ballerinas used to wear softer point shoes (with memorably quieter landings); and some of its bygone male dancers used to deliver double air turns alternately to right and left, a wonderful skill that has a kinesthetic effect on the viewer. Bournonville is by no means exclusive to the Royal Danes: I've admired performances of his ballets by companies around the world. But the way his Copenhagen heirs deliver his work reveals a wealth of understanding that feels close to the heart of dance. These ballets make exceptional challenges on technique, yet that never seems the point. Principally they express brio, phrasing, musicality, wit, line, feeling. Some of the world's oldest extant choreography often feels the freshest, the most innocent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
SAVANNAH, Ga. Behind the immaculate gray walls of the Customs and Border Protection's laboratory here stands a cabinet containing three plastic vials filled with a sticky, yellowish substance. Honey, or so an importer has claimed. The lab's task: Determine whether the samples are adulterated with sweeteners or syrups, and, if they really are mostly honey, figure out where it originated. If the honey comes from China, often the case, the entire shipment from which the samples came may be subject to additional taxes. The chemists here regularly test a wide range of imported goods, but they specialize in analyzing agricultural imports. With remarkable precision, these scientists can tell you where the peanuts in your peanut butter came from and where the mangoes in your jam were grown. But honey, No. 0409 on the 2015 Harmonized Tariff Schedule, has been a focal point for the lab and the source of a long running international food scam that has challenged even the existing forensic technology. Americans consume an average of 1.4 pounds of honey a year, about three and a half six ounce bottles. Some 70 percent of it is imported. In 2001, the Commerce Department enacted a stiff tariff on Chinese honey, nearly tripling the import duty, after American producers complained that Chinese competitors were dumping their products on the market. Then, honey imports from other countries spiked, including from nations not known for large bee populations. According to the American Honey Producers Association, Malaysian beekeepers, for example, have the capacity to make about 45,000 pounds of honey annually, but the country has exported as much as 37 million pounds of honey to the United States in a year. As it turned out, Chinese honey was being shipped through ports such as Shanghai, or Busan, South Korea, and slapped with labels from other nations to skirt American duties. The practice is known as transshipment, or "honey laundering." Some of it was not even real honey, but a mix that included corn and rice sweeteners. In an effort to stanch the flow of illicit honey, chemists at the lab here have tested thousands of samples pulled from barrels and containers at ports across the Southeast. In 2008, the lab demonstrated with about 90 percent accuracy that honey imported from Thailand, the Philippines and Russia had originated in China. The evidence helped federal prosecutors build a case against two large American importers who were suspected of buying illegal Chinese honey to avoid more than 180 million in duties. But this kind of detective work is daunting. At the C.B.P. lab, the analytic work takes place inside what's known as the "country of origin" room. Inside are standing metal shelves filled with bags and plastic totes of imported honey, along with peanuts, shrimp, garlic, mangoes and other foods. On a recent Tuesday, Robert Redmond and Christopher Kana, two of the lab's analytic chemists, took a small honey sample and added an acid to digest it. The result looked like muddy water. In recent years, scientists have demonstrated that subtle chemical variations in many foods, including honey undetectable to the tongue or the naked eye can give a strong indication of where it originated. The C.B.P.'s analytic work depends, in part, on these naturally occurring geographic "tracers." Once a sample is diluted, the liquid is pumped into a device called a mass spectrometer that is about the size of an office copier. Inside, a nebulizer turns the sample into a fine mist over heated argon, a process that yields a distinct signature of trace elements. The spectrometer can measure chromium, iron, copper and other elements to several parts per quadrillion. Each combination of trace metals reflects the composition of certain soils: The elements were taken up by flowering plants and then foraged by bees. Soils vary from region to region, and by statistically comparing the presence of some 40 different elements to a reference database collected by C.B.P. attaches and employees, the scientists can ascertain the probable origins of many samples. In late 2012, Mr. Redmond traveled to Taiwan and India to collect and test honey. His findings were then added to the database, and now lab chemists can compare honey arriving in the United States and said to be from those countries. But it's only the latest maneuver in a scientific cat and mouse game that has stretched on for years. At first, the detection of transshipped honey relied on a simple test for an unapproved antibiotic, chloramphenicol, discovered in Chinese honey. Carson Watts, former director of the C.B.P. lab in Savannah, said, "Very shortly after word got out that we were using chloramphenicol to identify Chinese honey, they stopped using it." Around 2006, unscrupulous importers appeared to be cutting honey with high fructose rice syrup or disguising cheap, pure honey as an artificial blend. (At the time, the import duty applied to artificial blends that were more than 50 percent honey by weight.) The problem? Reliably determining the ratio of rice syrup to honey is nearly impossible. "An importer could present goods to Customs and say, 'This is 90 percent rice syrup, 10 percent honey,' and Customs really has no way of knowing," said Michael J. Coursey, a lawyer in Washington who has represented American honey producers. He added, "For two or three years, C.B.P. was pretty much the Dutch boy with its finger in the dike." In 2011, the government accused three companies of importing millions of dollars' worth of rice fructose blend that in fact was mostly taxable honey. The importers said the product was less than 50 percent honey. The scientists at the Savannah lab swung into action, producing evidence that pollen abundance in the blends showed the substance to be mostly honey. But defense lawyers challenged the research on scientific grounds. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Neeson plays Tom, a bank robber who throws away his ill gotten gains for love. Tom meets Annie (Kate Walsh) as he is looking to rent a storage unit, and they hit it off so well, he gives up his life of crime. Hoping that he can broker a light sentence and return quickly to his lady love, Tom calls the F.B.I. to confess to stealing 9 million from small town banks. But his plans are thwarted as two federal agents decide to abscond with Tom's stolen money. If Tom wants to restore order, he'll have to take on the law. The writer and director Mark Williams doesn't aim for surprise or suspense, so much as he aims to show competence. The action sequences zip along pleasantly, clearly mapping the positions taken in the cat and mouse game between an honest crook and crooked cops. The actors are given enough space to build up some chemistry, whether the teams we watch are the romantic pairing of Neeson and Walsh, or Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos as the two conflicted agents. The film is forgettable and facile, the kind of movie that comforts on cable on nights when nothing else will summon sleep. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It is yellow and very boxy. It weighs two tons. It has a tanklike suspension and durability. It has folding jump seats. It has not regularly been driven on the streets of major cities in more than a decade, but it is still beloved. Although the legendary Checker cab hasn't been manufactured in 32 years, it still has an outsize reputation. Just ask the 50 or so Checker cab, car and limousine owners who are bringing their vehicles to New York from all over the country this weekend to bestow some deja vu and nostalgic reminiscence at the annual four day Checker Car Club of America convention. You can see the cars, talk to the owners and sit in their cabs on Friday at the 2014 Checker Car Show. It is free to the public and will be held, rain or shine, from 3 p.m. until sunset on Box Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There will also be music, hot dogs, popcorn and, of course, cheesesteaks. The last official Checker taxi in New York rang up its final fare in July 1999. Impostor taxicabs manufactured by other automakers have been prowling the city's streets ever since. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
NO family wants to build a business only to see it disappear when family members get tired of running it. But let's face it, what that business really represents is a large majority of the family's wealth. There are a host of tried and true methods to get money out of the company short of selling it. The founders could take cash out or have the company take on debt to pay them out. They could bring in a minority partner to make an investment. But all of these options pose risks to the company and the family. Samuel P. Phelan and his two brothers considered these options, but they went for a more complex structure that allows them to have a say in the company and give their children control while leaving day to day operations in the hands of professional managers. They had taken over Taconic Farms, a breeder of genetically modified rats and mice for laboratory testing, from their mother, who had run the company since their father died in 1955. The company, based in Hudson, N.Y., has 800 employees in three countries and 125 million in annual sales. The United States government and major pharmaceutical companies are clients. Still, no successor among their seven children had emerged. Over the last decade, the brothers, who are all in their 60s and 70s, had been thinking about how to keep the company in their family. "There were members of the family involved in the business, but it became pretty evident that they weren't going to become the C.E.O. of the company," said Mr. Phelan, who is the executive board chairman. "The other children were either too young and didn't know their careers or had started other careers." The Phelan brothers faced a situation common to anyone who has built a business with family involvement. If they sell outright, they risk that the proceeds could have unforeseen effects on their children and grandchildren. If they try to keep the company in the family, they run the risk of the company failing, or worse, tearing the family apart. The brothers reached a conclusion that may not be for every company or family. They decided to create a holding company, Phelan Family Enterprises, to own and manage the three brothers' shares in the family business and to put their children and the children's spouses in charge of the holding company. They then brought in professional managers to run Taconic Farms. There are plenty of financial structures that can be used to protect a family business from estate taxes. But those strategies often fail to take into account the biggest issue: internal family dynamics and how those conflict with the decisions a company needs to make. "Everyone talks the talk, but few people set up multigenerational structures rather than handing off a company from one generation to the next," said Frederic Marx, partner at Hemenway Barnes, a Boston law firm and an adviser to the Phelan family. The American model of a family owning a single business "comes at this," he said, "by looking at the family business and saying, 'Let's see what happens when you die.' " Mr. Marx said he considered what the Phelans did more of a European model of creating a group that manages the original company but also invests in other ideas that family members have. With this model, he said, the founder of the company could retain control of the holding company while giving children and grandchildren the capital to start other businesses or do something completely different. Getting the structure right took nearly a decade of thinking, Mr. Phelan said. When he and his brothers realized that their children would be overseeing the company instead of running it, they wanted to make sure the children knew what this would entail. "We wanted to teach governance as much as it could be taught but also to get that sense of the company instilled into the next generation," Mr. Phelan said. "It wasn't hard to instill that pride of ownership. We had to come to grips with, 'Is it worth it?' " To keep the seven children and their spouses together, the family set up a family council that has monthly meetings. They have semiannual family retreats and drew up a list of family values that they enforce. "We call people on the carpet when we don't see the values upheld," Mr. Phelan said. While it would have been far easier, and probably quicker, to sell the company, there are advantages to keeping a company family owned, even if it is being run by someone else, wealth advisers said. From a purely business perspective, keeping a business private reduces the pressure to make decisions quickly. It can also protect the family members in other ways. "Sometimes you're protecting the inheritors from themselves," said William Woodson, co head of the ultra high net worth business for the Americas at Credit Suisse Private Banking. "They can't create the kind of liquidity that allows them to invest in other things where they won't make good choices." But Mr. Woodson said that most families could not make the transition out the way the Phelans did. "Intellectually, they know they should do something, but they postpone that decision until it is too late," he said. And families who do create these types of family structures usually do so only when they're forced to. Andrew Tanner, a managing director in the private business group at U.S. Trust, equated the realization to stubbing your toe. "No one wakes up one day and says, 'I think it would be a good idea to bring in outside management,' " he said. "It doesn't often work out that Mom and Dad have four kids and one ends up in finance, one in sales, one in operations and one in human resources." Mark Stevens, who last summer sold a substantial stake in MSCO, a marketing firm he created 18 years ago, said he was able to distance himself from the emotion of his business, where his wife also works, by thinking about it as an opportunity to put some money in the bank, bring in fresh ideas and still retain his chief executive role for a couple of years longer. Yet Mr. Stevens, who is 65, said he was open to the sale because he had seen many people miss their chance. "We have people coming in all the time saying they should have an exit strategy or 'I had one but I didn't act on it,' " he said. "I've heard this for decades." In its design, the European style family group the Phelans have devised is both pragmatic and optimistic. Mr. Marx said the structure allowed the family to diversify their interests. The cash generated by the company will build up in the holding company, where it can be used for other investments or to help finance the companies family members start. "There are only a certain number of people who can be in any family business," Mr. Marx said. "If you're able to diversify the business, there are other businesses the family can go into." For the optimistic, the structure also allows for family members to come back to the company if they want to. Still, there are risks that the structure will be too restrictive and create additional problems. "It's pretty simple: a family is a very different type of organization than a business," said Marion McCollom Hampton, senior partner at Banyan Family Business Advisors. "A family is historically rooted and it's a place where people depend on each other for their identities. A business is supposed to be a meritocracy, where emotion is supposed to be put aside and the business is run rationally." And if this exercise in family ownership and cohesion does fail, the next generation can sell their stakes or the whole company. Mr. Phelan said he and his brothers thought of doing just that many times. "I don't think there is a family that is serious about its business and is committed to it that doesn't ask itself periodically, 'Where would you rather be? Here slogging it out or in the Caribbean?' " he said. "When we came to grips with wanting to be on a beach some time, we thought about a sale. But it was never in our DNA to do that." Now that decision will be up to their children. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
In 1925, the Spanish government hired a doctor named Ildefonso Canicio to head up a malaria research center in the Ebro Delta, where the disease was endemic. Dr. Canicio worked with patients from the surrounding rice fields for several decades, until he contracted malaria himself. He died of unrelated causes in 1961, the year malaria was eradicated from Spain. Among the belongings he left behind were blood samples such as the ones above used to diagnose three patients in the 1940s. Now those samples, each just one or two drops of blood smeared onto a microscope slide, may have solved a long running mystery: how some strains of the malaria parasite arrived in Europe and in the Americas. Malaria has not been endemic in Europe for more than half a century, but the continent once was a hot zone. The European strains are now extinct, however, so it has been difficult for scientists to figure out exactly how the disease evolved and spread across the globe. In a study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they retrieved DNA from malaria parasites in Dr. Canicio's old blood samples: Plasmodium vivax, found today in Asia, the Middle East, South and Central America, and parts of Africa; and its more virulent cousin, Plasmodium falciparum, which accounts for 90 percent of malaria deaths. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The popular D.J. is streaming music and memes to thousands with a fog machine from Target and "having the best time ever," he reports. Around 10 p.m. on a recent Saturday night, the party really found its groove. Diplo, the D.J., songwriter, and record producer, was holding court behind a pair of Pioneer decks, wearing a Kermit green poncho and matching bucket hat, manipulating an undulating, underwater sounding dance track with buttons and knobs. Next to him, the D.J. Dillon Francis bobbed his head. The crowd, 8,000 strong, had questions ("What's this song?"), comments, ("these guys scare me, but in a good way") and requests ("Where is the anti bacterial gel?"). Diplo invited a fan, Robin Spears, to share the spotlight with him and Mr. Francis on one condition: dance. Ms. Spears happily obliged, throwing her hands above her head and then back and forth, swimming through air. Her roommate, Sterling Morris, pumped her fist and then turned around, backed it up, and wobbled like a Weeble. "It was a little nerve racking, at first, but then it was like, 'Whatever, it's just Instagram, who cares?'" Ms. Spears said. The coronavirus pandemic and subsequent stay at home orders have delayed or canceled scores of music festivals and concerts. Nightclubs around the country are closed, bottle service booths empty, dance floors mopped clean of their usual glaze of sweat, vodka and Red Bull. But Diplo, the stage name of 41 year old Thomas Wesley Pentz, he of magazine covers (GQ, Fast Company, Billboard), highest paid D.J. lists ( 25 million last year, according to Forbes) and high profile collaborations ("Old Town Road"), intends to keep the party going. What else is he going to do? In March, Diplo short for diplodocus, his favorite dinosaur began a series of live broadcasts that air Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday on social networks including Instagram, YouTube and Twitch: a residency, of sorts, streamed directly from his house in the Beachwood Canyon neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills to yours. Other D.J.s are trying this too. Derrick Jones, a.k.a. D Nice, has attracted virtual visitors including Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Joe Biden to Club Quarantine, his weekly Instagram live stream of hip hop. Ahmir Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove, drops music and musings in regular intervals on YouTube and Instagram. Many celebrities are using this moment to broadcast unvarnished versions of themselves to the world, with varying degrees of success. Here is Miley Cyrus, hosting a talk show from her living room, there is Madonna, waxing poetic about the "great equalizer" that is Covid 19 from her rose petal filled bathtub. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. Diplo disseminates no news or advice. He does not offer recipes or at home workouts. By combining his music, which ranges from otherworldly ambient tracks to mainstream club bangers, with of the moment video ("Tiger King" clips) and internet memes (Thanos twerking, Cardi B's coronavirus rant), he creates a diversion that manages to take the absurdity of lockdown and turn it into an excuse to celebrate: If we're all inside, welp, might as well jump on the couch and have a good time. No one asked him to live stream, and no one is paying him for his time (yet), but here he is, the pandemic party starter the world didn't know it needed. "At this point, I don't care, I'm super happy not going on tour," he said on a recent Friday over Zoom, clad in a white cowboy hat with blue snakes embroidered on the underside of the brim, and a long sleeved T shirt that read, "Save the Humans." He was sitting at his dining table, below a shelf of basketballs signed by pop stars he has worked with: Ariana Grande, John Mayer, Camila Cabello and "more that are illegible." "FOMO doesn't exist anymore," Diplo said. "I'm having the best time ever in my live streams. I was doing 300 shows a year before this. I hated going to dinners with the promoters I didn't like, I hated all the travel to get there. I love the shows, but everything else is kind of awful: paying for flights, paying for a jet, that's stuff we had to do, and I hated it. I kind of hate my house now, but other than that, I've learned to really respect all this, you know, time, all the time we have here." Diplo wakes up when he wakes up. He spends some time with his Peloton, bought last month, and Mirror, not live streaming any of it. ("I tried working out on Instagram Live," he said, "but people don't really care, they just want to watch me with a shirt off or something, they're not, like, getting their bands out.") He goes for a walk around his neighborhood, answers email and checks in on his sons, ages 5 and 9, who live nearby with their mother, Kathryn Lockhart, and have taken easily to home schooling. Diplo oversees their French lessons. "It's cool to be part of that because I can actually learn a little bit, but their level of French is so high, they think I'm stupid when I try to speak," he said. "They're embarrassed." His own work, these days, involves a lot of experimenting with eerie tones and sounds. "I'm making a 'Blade Runner' kind of soundtrack," he said. "It's super different from what I usually do, but I'm learning. It's what's driving me when I wake up I want to make a sound like how these empty streets of Los Angeles sound." He plays some of his melancholy compositions on his Friday show, Corona Sabbath, which, owing to its doomsday vibe, is less popular than Saturday's "Coronight Fever," which can attract as many as 25,000 people across all platforms at any given time. Twitch, a live streaming service founded nine years ago, is his platform of choice. "The people who are on Twitch are this, sort of, new millennial audience that's really hyperactive on internet culture," he said. "Anything you do there is kind of magnified, it goes viral quicker, because the audience is so connected." He noted that his audience on Twitch about 3,200 at 10 p.m. on the second Saturday in April is nothing compared with that of professional video game players like Tyler Ninja Blevins, known as Ninja, whose followings earn sponsorships that rival those of athletes (Mr. Blevins makes a reported 500,000 a month). "There are, like, 20 different sponsors that can sponsor different aspects of their lives," Diplo said. "Gamers have done a really good job of building that market out of nothing and there's a lot of money to be to be made. D.J.s, not so much, but we're brand new." Though Twitch doesn't release traffic or engagement numbers of specific users, Mike Olson, the company's head of music, said Diplo is "performing really well." He cited Diplo's consistency and ability to connect with the audience he repeats things like, "heck yeah, we're dancing" into the microphone, which results in a spike of comments and emoji, or "emos" as they're called on Twitch. "He's doing a lot of things right," Mr. Olson said. There have been missteps. Diplo was meant to spend the second weekend of March in New York, shooting a music video and preparing for the South by Southwest and Ultra Music festivals. When all of that got canceled, he went to his local Target and bought a fog machine. In his living room, he set up a green screen. Because of his Sirius XM satellite radio channel, he already had the equipment needed to broadcast high quality sound from home. He called Parris Goebel, a choreographer and friend. "I was like, 'I don't want to be at home just reading the news all day because that's probably not good for my mental health,'" Diplo said. Ms. Goebel sent him a troupe of "the best dancers in L.A.," he said, and they twerked around him, wearing face masks, while he played dance music. "We got a lot of flak for that because that was the first week of social distancing, and we were definitely not doing it right." Now, the dancers have their own green screen and camera setups at home, so he can showcase them safely. "We bought so much technology to make it so that everybody who dances for me can dance remotely," he said. He still has occasional IRL collaborators, like Mr. Francis, who is signed to Diplo's record label, Mad Decent, and comes over every Saturday for Coronight Fever. "The only reason we're doing that is because we were the last people we saw before we started quarantining," said Mr. Francis, who is 32. "We know exactly who we're seeing, which is just each other, and the people that live in Wes's house. I go and eat Wes's food. It works out for me perfectly." "I'm not totally quarantined out, I'm not going to lie," Diplo said. "Some people come and help. But we take their temperature." (Not exactly a foolproof method of testing, but again, OK.) He got up, rifled around the kitchen countertop and came back with a forehead thermometer. "Come here, Mike, I didn't test you yet." He ran the thermometer across Mr. Milosh's forehead and showed me the readout: 97.4, in the normal range. "If he was 99.9, he'd be out," Diplo said. Like the rest of those sheltering in place, he's still figuring out how to best make use of this time at home. While sponsors haven't been lining up, last Saturday, DoorDash and Feeding America donated 500,000 meals to families in need: one for every viewer of that evening's Coronight Fever. "I've been hired to D.J. a few parties on Zoom for people," Diplo said. "That's something that we would have predicted would happen in like, 20 years, not fast tracked to the summer of 2020, but I think that's going to be the future of entertainment." "You'd have to ask my booking agent," he said. "The numbers are just starting to happen, so I'll take whatever. The costs are low, I don't have to travel, I don't got to go anywhere." And will his fans stick around, even if they can't physically go to him? "Honestly, yeah," said Ms. Spears, who has seen Diplo perform in Atlanta, Las Vegas and New York. "I've been aging out of festivals." (She is 30.) "I'm done with camping. Having the festival brought to my living room where the drinks are free and there's no line for the bathroom? That's incredible." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
As Republican senators work to fix their troubled health care bill, there is one giant health insurance subsidy no one is talking about. It is bigger than any offered under the Affordable Care Act subsidies some Republicans loathe as handouts and costs the federal government 250 billion in lost tax revenue every year. The beneficiaries: everyone who gets health insurance through a job, including members of Congress. Much of the bitter debate over how to repeal and replace the law known as Obamacare has focused on cutting Medicaid and subsidies that help low income people buy insurance. But economists on the left and the right argue that to really rein in health costs, Congress should scale back or eliminate the tax exclusion on what employers pay toward employees' health insurance premiums. Under current law, those premiums are not subject to the payroll or income taxes that are taken out of employees' wages, an arrangement that vastly benefits middle and upper income people. That one policy tweak could reduce health care spending, stabilize the health insurance market and, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, shrink the federal budget deficit by between 174 billion and 429 billion over a six year period. Lawmakers briefly pondered the idea this year but quickly abandoned it, recognizing how politically explosive it would be. Still, as Congress seeks to push ahead with major changes to the health system and the tax code, there has been a growing awareness of how long established tax subsidies like the mortgage deduction for homeowners have contributed to economic inequality in the United States. Republicans who have been fighting for seven years to repeal the Affordable Care Act argue that the Medicaid expansion has cost too much, that the subsidies for lower income insurance customers are in some cases handouts. Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the chairman of the Finance Committee, likened the expenditures recently to "the dole." "The public wants every dime they can be given," he told reporters in May as he left a health care meeting to explain the difficulty in cutting those programs. "Let's face it, once you get them on the dole, they'll take every dime they can." The tax exclusion, though, is also a subsidy, one that disproportionately helps the affluent, who are more likely to receive generous health benefits from an employer and who fall into higher tax brackets, making the tax break worth more. A 2008 study by the Joint Committee on Taxation found that not paying taxes on these benefits saved people with incomes less than 30,000 about 1,650. For people with incomes above 200,000, the average tax savings was 4,580. The Affordable Care Act required companies to start reporting the value of employer sponsored health benefits on W 2 forms (Box 12; Code DD). But most people don't even realize they get a subsidy typically worth thousands of dollars a year. For the federal government, the health benefits exclusion is the single largest tax expenditure, accumulating over the next decade to about 1.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. (Economists say it is effectively the federal government's third largest health care expenditure, after Medicare, which cost about 581 billion last year, and Medicaid, at 349 billion.) It costs five times as much as the subsidies the Affordable Care Act set up to help people buy health insurance, which are estimated to total 49 billion this year. And it is far more than the 70 billion the federal government is spending to expand Medicaid under Obamacare this year. But few lawmakers, Republican or Democrat, have ever argued to change the exclusion. The closest Congress came to making the system more progressive that is, to make it scale up according to income was the so called Cadillac tax included in the Affordable Care Act. That was supposed to tax the most generous employer benefits to help pay the subsidies in the law, but its effective date got pushed back to 2020. Both the Republican House and Senate health bills shove it back further, so long a decade in the Senate bill that many analysts say it is unlikely to ever take effect. Business groups, which tend to back Republicans, argue that a cut in the tax exclusion is a tax increase; labor unions, which tend to support Democrats, say it will lead them to lose benefits at the same time their wages have stagnated. "We don't think it does the things economists say it's going to do," said James Gelfand, senior vice president for health policy for the Erisa Industry Committee, which lobbies for large employers. "Ultimately these proposals are designed to end the employer sponsored system," he said. "They're not indexed to reality." The benefit began with the wage controls of World War II. Employers got around those limits by offering more generous health benefits, and the Internal Revenue Service and later Congress said those benefits did not have to be taxed. Employer based health insurance now covers more than half the non elderly population in the United States. The average premium in 2016, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, was 6,435 for an individual and 18,142 for a family, and the tax exclusion reduced the cost of insurance by about 30 percent. Even economists who dislike the exclusion recognize its benefit: It pools risk, the way some countries have done with national health insurance, and reduces adverse selection by encouraging the healthy to buy insurance. But economists also argue that the exclusion creates perverse incentives that drive up the cost of coverage. Studies have found it encourages workers to buy more expensive insurance and to use more medical services than they need. "Because we have invented a system where most people have extremely generous coverage, no one asks about the price, and no one tells them what the price is," said Joseph Antos, an economist and scholar in health care policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Every year the Congressional Budget Office analyzes options for reducing the deficit, including reductions in the tax exclusions for employer provided health insurance. In its 2016 analysis, the C.B.O. found that imposing income and payroll taxes on premiums higher than the 50th percentile beginning in 2020 this would be contributions above 7,700 a year for individuals and 19,080 for families would cut the federal deficit by 429 billion by 2026, more than either the House or Senate health bills would achieve, according to C.B.O. analyses. It would also cause four million fewer people to have employer based health insurance, the analysis found. Half of those people would go to health insurance exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act, fewer than 500,000 would enroll in Medicaid, and one million would remain uninsured. Subjecting premiums at the 75th percentile or higher to payroll and income taxes beginning in 2020 premiums higher than 9,520 for an individual and 23,860 for a family would reduce the deficit by 174 billion by 2026, the C.B.O. found. Economists bet that employers would pay less for health insurance and pass on that savings in the form of higher wages. But business groups and business owners say that is unlikely. Particularly in high cost states, employers say offering a less attractive package of health benefits hurts their ability to hire. "Good employees are the most important resource companies have, and this is part of the landscape that folks expect," said William McDevitt, a shareholder with Wilkin Guttenplan, an accounting and consulting firm in New York and New Jersey. "Messing with that matrix to generate revenue, I just see it as anarchy, politically." Even if companies did increase wages, employees would have to pay higher taxes, leaving them with less money to buy health insurance. "You're going to tell every employee they're going to pay 20 percent more in federal taxes? Is that going to change what they need and their behavior?" asked Bill Grant, the chief financial officer of Cummings Properties in Massachusetts, a real estate firm that spends about 2 million a year to pay about 70 percent of the health insurance premiums for its 350 full time employees. "And if part of that premise is that they are using more than they need, is paying more to Uncle Sam going to change that lifestyle? I don't think so." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The Bloomberg administration set in motion on Friday a broad contingency plan for a school bus drivers' strike, sending letters to parents and principals and buying hundreds of thousands of MetroCards for students who could be left without transportation. But a statement by the union's president indicated that the timing of a strike, if one were to be called, was unclear. A strike would affect more than 150,000 New York City public school students, from preschool through 12th grade, including about 70,000 children who receive special education services. In his letter, the city schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, called the strike a "strong" and "immediate" possibility. But the bus drivers' union, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, offered no clues about its timing. In a statement, its president, Michael Cordiello, said that a strike was likely but that "there are no immediate plans for one." The union's members are expected to discuss the strike, the threat of which is centered on job protections for the union's most senior members, at a meeting on Tuesday. Nonetheless, the city spared no effort to plan for the event, drawing up detailed rules, conditions and safeguards. Field trips requiring yellow bus service would be canceled, but after school programs would continue. Delays of up to two hours would be forgiven, and absences would be excused from students' attendance records if they happened as a result of the strike. The city's Education Department spent 1.3 million buying 300,000 MetroCards to give to students who are picked up at bus stops and to parents whose children might need an escort to school because they are disabled or too young to ride the subway on their own. Parents who drive will be reimbursed based on the number of miles traveled, while those who use another type of private transportation can turn in receipts for reimbursement. "We are deeply concerned about the impact of a strike on your schools and school communities," Mr. Walcott wrote to principals. On Friday, the city issued a request for bids for the transportation of roughly 14,000 preschool students who have special needs. Unlike existing contracts governing the transportation of older students, the agreements with drivers of preschool students would not require new companies picked for the job to hire, by order of seniority and at the same rate of pay, bus drivers, matrons and other workers from the companies that lost the contracts. The specter of a strike is an interesting turn of events for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. For years, his administration had fought alongside the union to keep the seniority based protections in the contracts, in part because removing them could have prompted the union to strike. In July, however, the city made an about face, asking Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to veto a bill it had helped develop that would have extended the protections to bus contracts for preschool students who receive special education services. Mr. Cuomo did just that in September, citing a decision by the State Court of Appeals that including such protections drives up cost and drives away competition. (The protections are part of the contracts, which expire in December 2012, that govern the transportation of about 138,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade.) In a news conference at City Hall on Friday, Mr. Bloomberg characterized a possible strike as "illegal" and the union's behavior as "outrageous" based on the court ruling. He said the city had asked the National Labor Relations Board for a ruling of unfair labor practice against the union, whose members are employed not by the city, but by private companies with which the city arranges contracts to provide transportation. In the meantime, a coalition representing the four largest school transportation companies issued a statement, saying the companies would seek a court injunction to prevent a strike. "We're asking for cooler heads to prevail and for the drivers to stay on the job," Carolyn Daly, a spokeswoman for the coalition, said in an interview. Most of the students who would be affected by the strike live in Brooklyn and Queens, some of them outside the city's public transportation grid. About 102,000 of them are in elementary school; of those, approximately 30,000 have special needs, and some of them require specific travel accommodations, limited travel time and door to door service. Joe Williams, who lives in Crown Heights, has a 12 year old son who is picked up at home and taken to a school in Bensonhurst, another Brooklyn neighborhood a few miles away. Mr. Williams said it would be "very selfish" if the bus drivers were to strike, adding that the job protections they are demanding are "a luxury they don't want to give up." "There is no consideration for the people they are transporting, the most vulnerable," he added. The bus drivers' union has threatened to strike before, most recently last year, over proposed changes to their health benefits. The last time it did strike was in 1979, and the work stoppage lasted three months. The city employed extreme measures, like using buses that took inmates to the jails on Rikers Island to take children to school. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
LOS ANGELES I ask the artist Betye Saar, who is 93 and set to open concurrent solo shows this fall at two major museums the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art if she has any theories as to why big ticket attention is finally coming her way. She skips mentioning the obvious factors: She's a woman; she's black; she's lived her whole life on what she calls "the other side of the planet" (Southern California). "Because it's about time!" she says. "I've had to wait till I'm practically 100." We're standing in her home, which is also her studio, in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. She has lived and worked here since 1962, when the neighborhood was becoming a New Agey arts enclave. The house, stacked vertically up the side of a ravine, is all stairs and platformlike rooms with a small garden nestled within. The division between domestic and work space feels indeterminate. Order prevails but clear surfaces are hard to find. For half a century, Ms. Saar has been one of the country's most inventive and influential makers of intimately scaled assemblage. And she has brought a distinctive range of content to the medium, encompassing global culture, popular mysticism, personal history and American racism, which she coolly refers to as "national racism," as if it were a scientific category, or a consumer brand. After her father's death in 1931, when she was 5, Ms. Saar was nurtured by a great aunt, Hattie Parsons Haynes Keyes, a long lived mentor and model of self shaping in a matriarchal line. As a child, Ms. Saar also returned to Watts for visits. There, watching the Italian immigrant Simon Rodia build his fantastical towers from scrap materials mirrors, seashells, broken titles embedded in cement, she learned a lasting lesson: "You can make art out of anything." In college she studied art, an unpromising option for a black woman at the time. She ended up doing social work, then moved into the design field. In 1952, she met and married (and later divorced) the ceramist Richard Saar. They had three daughters, Alison and Lezley, both now artists, and Trayce, a writer. Toward the end of the decade, Ms. Saar went back to school for a degree to teach design. Destiny, in which she believes, had other plans. "One day I wandered into a printmaking workshop," she says, "and forgot about teaching." She joined and became an artist. Her MoMA solo, "Betye Saar: The Legends of 'Black Girl's Window,'" which will debut with the reopening of the newly expanded museum on Oct. 21, is a survey of her rare, early works on paper 42 of which MoMA recently acquired supplemented by a selection of her assemblages. When asked why MoMA had come so late to collecting her work, Ann Temkin, the museum's chief curator of painting and sculpture, said, "For the most part (and with notable exceptions) until this past decade we were not looking in the directions where we would have found Saar's work. And speaking personally," she added, "for that reason now is such an inspiring and rewarding time to happen to be a curator." By the mid 60s, pushing hard against the conventional boundaries of the medium, she came up with new display formats. She began placing different prints, sometimes with drawings and photographs, in thick wood frames made from repurposed window sashes. "Black Girl's Window" is an example. It's as much about sculpture as printmaking. It's a self portrait as an altarpiece. In 1967, she saw an exhibition of Joseph Cornell's boxed assemblages and with that experience she turned the corner. She started making assemblages of her own. Her learning continued to expand. A 1970 visit to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, in the company of a fellow Los Angeles artist, David Hammons, introduced her to the charisma of African and Oceanic art ritual intensive, spiritually empowered. It also delivered a lesson in cultural politics: Most of this "primitive" art was installed, as if in storage, in the museum's basement. Nobody was looking at it. "Back then," she says, "even black Americans were sort of ashamed of African art." But what others rejected, she embraced: the art's use of organic matter feathers, skins, dirt, hair and its empowering function. Her enthusiasm, which infused her art, had an impact. "One of the things that gave her work importance for African American artists, especially in the mid 70s, was the way it embraced the mystical and ritualistic aspects of African art and culture," says the painter Kerry James Marshall, who took a collage course with Ms. Saar at Otis College of Art and Design in the late 1970s. "Her art really embodied the longing for a connection to ancestral legacies and alternative belief systems specifically African belief systems fueling the Black Arts Movement." She started traveling to Bali, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal always foraging for objects and images, and particularly attracted to those with devotional associations. "Wherever I went, I'd go to religious stores to see what they had," she says. Ms. Saar's responses to American racial and gender politics have grown increasingly complicated over time. In 1974, she and another artist, Samella Lewis, organized a group show of black women artists for Womanspace, a pioneering cultural center in Los Angeles. (Ms. Saar was on its founding board.) She was shocked to find the audience split along racial lines. Blacks came; whites didn't. "The white women did not support it," she told the art historian Ruth Askey in 1981. "It was as if we were invisible." She was later embroiled in a divisive art world conflict around the use of derogatory racial images . In 1997, she spearheaded a letter writing campaign directed at a young African American colleague, Kara Walker, who, at 28, had won a MacArthur "genius" grant. Ms. Walker's silhouette tableaus of antebellum slavery followed Ms. Saar's lead in mining racial caricatures, but within them created morally ambiguous narratives in which everyone, black and white, slave and master, was implicated as corrupt. On the subjects of slavery and white supremacy, Ms. Saar had little patience with ambiguity. Ms. Walker's art, she concluded in a 1999 television interview, had been made "for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment." Soon afterward, she herself returned to the subject of racism. Much of the work in her 2017 solo show, "Betye Saar: Keepin' it Clean," at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles (and later at the New York Historical Society) featured gun toting mammies. "I keep thinking of giving up political subjects," she says, "But you can't. Because racism is still here. Worse than ever." On my visit to her studio, there is an assemblage in progress on this subject. In August, its components included two striking photographs, one of a slender young African woman, almost nude, playing a musical instrument; the other, a well known 1863 archival picture of an African American man seen from behind, his bare back scarred from whippings. Ms. Saar positioned the pictures on either side of a scuffed up child size piano with missing keys, added an 18th century diagram of a ship filled with slaves and capped the ensemble with an antique clock . "It's about slavery, before and after," she says. "I call it 'Skin Song.'" She later removed the photograph of the African woman. Improvisation has always been her modus operandi. Mr. Marshall remembers that "in her class, we made a collage for the first critique. We were then told to bring the same collage back the next week, but with changes, and we kept changing the collage over and over and over, throughout the semester. From that I got the very useful idea that you should never let your work become so precious that you couldn't change it." A second assemblage in her studio is very much in the planning stages. Its encasing frame is set: a small, light rectangular box painted gray. But its components still lie unfixed on a worktable: a small metal heart; a tin healing charm in the shape of eyes; a skeletal antique fan; an abstract print by Ms. Saar suggesting a cloudy sky ("Of all natural things, the sky is my favorite," the artist says). She had just added a tiny computer board glinting like a filigreed brooch. The format and contents suggest a reliquary. It's dedicated to Ms. Saar's great aunt Hattie, her early role model. When Hattie died in the early 1970s, the artist inherited a trunk filled with personal effects: letters, family photographs, handkerchiefs, trinkets. Over the years, she's been preserving them in her work, inspired by the spiritual belief, shared by many cultures, that the dead live on in what they've touched and treasured. "I think the chanciest thing is to put spirituality in art," Ms. Saar says as she gently shifts elements of the assemblage around, trying this combination and that. "Because people don't understand it. Writers don't know what to do with it. They're scared of it, so they ignore it. But if there's going to be any universal consciousness raising, you have to deal with it, even though people will ridicule you." "And you have to deal with personal emotions, because they're there," she added. "I think people are afraid of those too. My younger sister's husband died this year. I said to her, you've got to start making something beautiful. Beauty is a form of spirituality. Once you start making something with your hands, the healing starts. I call this creative grieving." Not that grieving, creative or otherwise, is necessarily uppermost in Ms. Saar's mind. She has a scheduling crunch to deal with. There's work to finish and send out. Coming up fast is a date to fly to New York to oversee the installation of the MoMA show. ("For the first time ever" at her request "the museum will have purple walls," she confides.) And there are longer range plans. As we move from the workroom into the exuberantly planted garden for a sit down, she says: "I'm 93, and going for 94. Aunt Harriet lived to 95. I want to beat her record." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Cep might not have known about "The Reverend" before 2015, but the people around Lake Martin, Ala. where the murders took place certainly did. That's because Lee spent so much time in the area researching Maxwell. "Down there they've all known about the book since the 1970s. When they heard she was publishing a new book, they were sure as they could be it was the one about the reverend." There's no clear origin story for "The Reverend." Cep points out that Lee and her sisters "were obsessed with true crime, and they followed cases like this all the time." In addition, she says, the Maxwell case "intersected with Lee's interest in how justice can be found inside and outside a courtroom." So did Lee leave behind a manuscript for "The Reverend" or not? Lee once wrote in a letter, "I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book length account." But Cep says many of the author's friends are sure that "when the archive is unsealed, there is going to be more work. There are more manuscripts where 'Watchman' came from." Tonja B. Carter, Lee's longtime lawyer and the executor of her estate, hinted in a 2015 Wall Street Journal op ed that another book does, in fact, exist. What does Cep believe? "I think there's potential for her to have written the whole thing," she told The Times recently. "People who lived around her ... heard the typewriter at all hours of the day and night." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"I would wear almost everything," T.V.F. said with enthusiasm during the collection presentation, and indeed, in a video that played as a backdrop to the show, she did. Then she turned to her grandmother, sitting nearby, and pointing at a bright green shearling said, "D.V.F." she calls her grandmother by her initials "that would look good on you." This is actually his second tour with the brand. He was its creative director from 2001 to 2011 (Diane von Furstenberg is his daughter's godmother), and his return to the brand is one that he and she both characterize as a kind of "coming home." Indeed, there's history between the three: He and Talita worked together when she was nine years old and accompanied her grandmother to Florence for a DVF guest show at Pitti Uomo. He has watched her grow up. "I've known him all my life," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Commercial surrogacy the birthing of another woman's baby in exchange for cash is an act of benevolence, or of exploitation. It celebrates life. It commodifies life. It's a moral outrage. A blessing, a gift. It pays women fairly for their hard work and altruism. It reduces women to vessels, turning their bodies, and babies, into merchandise. So many factors gender, race, religion, class may determine where you come down on the surrogacy debate. So may your media diet. Perhaps you've heard disturbing tales about "baby factories" in India or Ukraine. Or maybe you've read uplifting profiles of women who call surrogacy the most meaningful job they've done. plays with many of these notions in her debut novel, "The Farm," which imagines what might happen were surrogacy taken to its high capitalist extreme. The titular "farm" is Golden Oaks, a "gestational retreat" in upstate New York that caters to the ultrarich. The concept: Clients pay for Hosts to carry their children; those Hosts, selected via a rigorous vetting process, move into Golden Oaks for the duration of their pregnancies. There, they are surveilled er, pampered 24/7, to ensure that the (very expensive) unborn children they're incubating will reach maximum potential. In exchange for their service, Hosts receive a modest stipend and, upon successful delivery, a big ol' bonus. It's a win win for everyone! What could go wrong? This book is one of our most anticipated titles of May. See the full list. I'm reminded of the words a wise doula once spoke to me: "Bodies are chaos." And those bodies, containing as they do human minds with human will, are apt to foil even the most stringently regulated environment, to violate the terms of the most airtight, lawyered up the wazoo birth contract. At the heart of "The Farm" are four women through whom Ramos creates a group portrait of female striving, for survival, for status, for purpose. Each has her own reasons for chasing the dollar, and each will sacrifice something vital health, dignity, family, freedom to obtain it. 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. Jane, a half Filipina, half American single mother to an infant daughter, begins the novel living in a cramped Queens dorm with other Filipinas toiling to send remittances back home. Also sharing space there is Ate, Jane's industrious 67 year old cousin, a "brown Mary Poppins" to the children of the 1 percent, who tips off Jane to the opportunity at Golden Oaks: "The work is easy and the money is big!" This is catnip to Jane, who above all yearns to provide a home for her daughter to properly nest. Accepted into the Farm, where many Hosts are different shades of brown, Jane rooms with Reagan, the "holy trifecta of Premium Hosts": white, pretty, educated. Reagan, an artsy idealist with white savior tendencies, grew up in Chicago's posh northern suburbs but needs money to win independence from her overbearing father. Prone to sentimentality and heavy handed moralizing, and not a little naive, she is aggressively recruited by Mae, the Farm's director, who knows that Reagan or, more precisely, her womb could represent "a record breaking year end bonus." If the book has a villain, it's the ambitious, covetous Mae, a mercenary wolf in Yves Saint Laurent clothing. Mae, who has staked her future on the Farm, isn't yet hedge fund wealthy, but as a high end service provider to the filthy rich, she has eaten at their tables, flown in their jets and styled herself in their image (with help from the sales racks at Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman). In other words: She has sampled the goods, and most desperately wants in. Mae positions the Farm as a luxury haven (massages, fitness classes, cashmere loungewear), but the place also boasts rather sinister features. Cameras line the hallways. Hosts must relinquish their cellphones and forgo visits from friends or family. A media center offers contact with the outside world, but all calls, email and web browsing are monitored. Hosts wear wristbands tracking their every hop, skip and heartbeat, and are mostly forbidden from knowing anything about their employer clients (in the name of "fetal security"). Take a human, isolate her, strip her of agency in the guise of "care": If that sounds like a recipe for abuse, well, it is. Soon Jane, Reagan and other Hosts begin defying the Farm's rigid system. Their insubordination threatens to sabotage Mae's ambitions, and to imperil their own bids for security and liberty. "The Farm" may be an "issue" book, but it wears the mantle lightly. It's a breezy novel full of types (the Shark, the Dreamer, the Rebel, the Saint), and veers, not always successfully, from earnestness into satire. That shift in voice can obscure the novel's intent though to be fair, ambiguity may be the point. Ramos's characters articulate both sides of the surrogacy argument: "You're letting a rich stranger use you," one objects; it's "an incredible thing to give someone life," says another. Where "The Farm" stands on the wealth gap is also fuzzy. Some of its sharpest scenes are those skewering the rich: imperious Upper East Siders who utter racist, cringe inducing microaggressions, or Mae's globe trotting, surfer bro boss, who in a single brainstorm evokes everything odious about a would be pregnancy commodification industry: "What if we began sourcing more of our Hosts from lower middle class Caucasians?" he suggests. "They've been hammered for decades no wage growth, unions emasculated. ... I bet we don't have to pay them much more than we pay our immigrant sourced Hosts, but and here's the nub of it we could charge a premium." The modern worker: Never mind laying her off from the factory; turn her into the factory. Yet Ramos also lingers indulgently over the trappings of the wealthy, to the point where reading this novel felt a bit like watching several hours of reality TV luxury porn. So "The Farm" isn't not a critique, but it's also not an indictment. Is commercial surrogacy profiteering or opportunity? Is it inherently racist? Does it honor or degrade women? The novel's too neat ending won't provide satisfying answers. But the stage is set for lively book chat, perhaps over a "gorgeous Armand de Brignac, the color of liquid gold" or just a boxed chardonnay. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Skating Is Familiar With Scandal. Now It Is Confronting Something Grimmer. The United States figure skating championships begin Thursday in Detroit, 25 years after Nancy Kerrigan was attacked there by associates of Tonya Harding. It is a sport where drama and scandal, on the ice and off, are as commonplace as sequins. The outrageous and bumbling clubbing of Kerrigan on Jan. 6, 1994, made skating more popular than it has ever been. Television ratings soared, along with skaters' paychecks. Last year, the mockumentary "I, Tonya" even won an Academy Award for best supporting actress. But skating's attraction has long ebbed outside of the Olympics. And this year's American championships return to Detroit at a grim moment, following the apparent suicide of a former star who had been suspended by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an organization whose primary mission is to investigate accusations of sexual misconduct. John Coughlin, 33, won American pairs titles in 2011 and 2012 and, at the time of his death on Friday in Kansas City, Mo., he held a leading advocacy position as the chairman of the athletes commission of the International Skating Union, the sport's world governing body. "My wonderful, strong, amazingly compassionate brother John Coughlin took his own life earlier today," his sister, Angela Laune, wrote in a Facebook post on Friday night. Coughlin's story reflects both an enhanced effort to construct a safety net to protect athletes against sexual impropriety and the imperfections that remain in that web, not just in figure skating, but in every sport. By all accounts, Coughlin was well liked in the sport as a competitor, coach and commentator. Johnny Weir, the skating commentator and a two time Olympian, wrote on Twitter that Coughlin "was a person who was talented, had an incredible laugh would go out of his way to cheer someone up." But troubling concerns had surfaced recently about Coughlin, made more disquieting by the fact that he was supposed to be an international voice for skaters' rights. Last Thursday, Coughlin was given an "interim suspension" by SafeSport, which meant he could not be involved in skating until accusations against him were resolved. On Sunday, a person with knowledge of the Coughlin case, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that more than one skater had accused him of sexual misconduct that went beyond harassment. Also on Sunday, USA Today reported that two complaints against Coughlin involved minors. U.S. Figure Skating, the national governing body, has said little, beyond expressing shock and condolences. Daniel Hill, a spokesman for SafeSport, said on Sunday that "the center has a charter to put an end to sexual misconduct in the Olympic movement, and we have exclusive authority to investigate those cases." Hill was speaking in general terms and not specifically about Coughlin. Referring to sanctions against individuals, Hill said, "We will only use those if there are concerns and we believe individuals need to be kept safe now." In an interview with USA Today on Jan. 7, Coughlin called accusations against him "unfounded" and stated, correctly, that a preliminary sanction "in no way constitutes a finding by SafeSport or that there is any merit to the allegation." The U.S. Center for SafeSport was created by the United States Olympic Committee in 2017, after allegations of sexual abuse were repeatedly made in such sports as gymnastics and swimming. Reaction to SafeSport's effort to curb sexual misconduct in figure skating has been mixed and complicated. "Is SafeSport cleaning up the sport? I'd have to say my answer, generally speaking, is yes," said Craig Maurizi, a longtime coach and the director of figure skating at the Ice House training center in Hackensack, N.J., said on Sunday. "I think the mechanism is making people think twice before they act." At the same time, Maurizi criticized SafeSport for the manner in which it was adjudicating a high profile case involving him that has been going on for two decades. In 1999, in an investigative report in The New York Times, Maurizi accused a former coaching colleague, Richard Callaghan, of engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct with Maurizi when Maurizi was 15 and a skating student of Callaghan's. Later, Maurizi said, Callaghan abused his position of authority to initiate a full sexual relationship when Maurizi was 18 that lasted, on and off, for years. Callaghan, who with Maurizi assisting, coached Tara Lipinski to an Olympic gold medal in 1998, vehemently denied in the Times story that he had ever had sex with Maurizi or that he had engaged in improper behavior. Maurizi filed a complaint with U.S. Figure Skating in 1999, but it was dismissed because it had not been filed within the required 60 days of the alleged improper conduct. On Jan. 31, 2018, Maurizi refiled his grievance, this time with SafeSport, which gave Callaghan a provisional suspension in March 2018. At the time of the suspension, Callaghan told ABC News: "That's 19 or 20 years ago. I have nothing to say.'' Meanwhile, it is now nearly a year after Maurizi's complaint was resubmitted, but the case has yet to be fully resolved. "Are they dragging their feet?" Maurizi said of SafeSport. "Absolutely." SafeSport says it resolves cases as quickly as possible, but acknowledges a backlog from being underfunded and understaffed. A three year grant from the Justice Department, worth 2.2 million, is intended for education and prevention programs and cannot be used to reduce the case backlog or hire investigators, Hill said. Maurizi, whose wife, Tara Modlin, was Coughlin's agent, also questioned whether due process was being fairly granted to all parties in cases investigated by SafeSport. "It's such mixed emotions and mixed feelings, given the situation with my friend who felt he didn't have due process and was not given an opportunity to voice his side," Maurizi said of Coughlin. An interim suspension is not a final disposition of a case but a step taken to prevent possible further harm to athletes until an investigation is concluded, said Hill, the SafeSport spokesman. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A daylong rally by City University of New York students against a planned tuition increase turned turbulent Monday evening when marchers ignored police requests to clear the lobby of a building where the university's trustees were meeting and 15 people were arrested. The students were pushed to the ground and taken away in handcuffs from the lobby of Baruch College, in Manhattan, while protesting a planned tuition increase for the 2012 13 academic year, on which the trustees are to vote next Monday. Carlos Pazmino, 21, a City College student who helped organize the protest, said that after students began opening lobby doors to the building where the CUNY trustees were holding a public hearing on the 14th floor, CUNY public safety officers surrounded the entrances and pushed back, using their batons. He said that when students formed a line to push past, the officers began hitting the students with the batons. "I saw two people knocked down by cops," Mr. Pazmino said. "They were arrested, and one guy's head was bleeding." During the fighting, students on higher floors dropped books down on the police, and captured the scuffle on video. A crowd of 200 to 300 protesters outside beat on the lobby's windows, also shouting, "Shame." Of the 15 arrested by officers with CUNY's Department of Public Safety, most were issued summonses for disorderly conduct. According to a statement released Monday night by CUNY, the hearing room was filled, and protesters in the lobby were directed to an overflow room equipped with live video of the hearing. But some refused to go to the room, and instead surged toward turnstiles, where officers and college officials met them. Some ignored two requests to leave or go to the overflow room, according to the statement, and officers "secured the space and removed the protesters." One officer was taken to a hospital with chest pains, and two others received minor injuries, the university said. The meeting went on as scheduled. The protest began with a handful of organizers who marched through the cafeteria at City College at lunchtime. The group is demanding the repeal of the tuition increase approved in the summer by the city and the state: 300 a year for five years. Later in the afternoon, the protest moved to Madison Square Park, where CUNY students from other colleges had agreed to meet. The growing crowd then marched on to Baruch College, at Lexington Avenue and 24th Street. At Baruch, the campus police restricted access to the hearing to those who had registered, and set up barricades around the building, the William and Anita Newman Vertical Campus Conference Center, in whose lobby the confrontation occurred. At one point, the police told those who had pushed into the lobby, and refused to leave, that they would be arrested for trespassing. The students then sat down, and were pushed to a wall by the campus police. "We have made it clear to the university that violent response to students who are protesting nonviolently is not acceptable," said Barbara Bowen, the president of the faculty union, the CUNY Professional Staff Congress, who was in the meeting while the students were being arrested. At the afternoon protest at Madison Square Park, protesters chanted, "Banks got bailed out, students got sold out." A small group of New York University and New School students joined the rally to support CUNY students, apparently part of an unrelated campaign by Occupy Wall Street organizers called Occupy Student Debt. Andrew Ross, an N.Y.U. professor affiliated with that group, said it was aiming to get one million students to pledge that they would not pay back their loans. But Denise Romero, 19, a junior at Baruch and one of the organizers of Monday's protest, insisted that the CUNY protest was independent of Occupy Wall Street. "We support them and they support us, but we are not affiliated," she said. She added that CUNY students were protesting not only tuition increases but also the university's push for a public private partnership. CUNY received 1.4 billion in private philanthropy this year, according to a university spokesman. "We want more student representation," said Ms. Romero, who had registered to speak at the hearing Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
For more than two decades, Ryan Adams has been a particular kind of indie rock tastemaker. Emerging from the alt country scene of the mid 1990s, he became a prolific and respected singer songwriter in the 2000s. And he used his growing platform as a tool to be a vocal booster of female talent. Behind that public front, however, was a far darker truth, a recent investigation by The New York Times revealed. According to several women, Adams used the promise of professional help as a lure for sex and emotionally abusive romantic relationships. In one case, he leveraged the adoration of an underage fan and aspiring musician into sexually explicit communications. Adams denies the claims. The F.B.I. is now investigating Adams's interactions with the underage fan, and since the publication of the article, the release plan for his next album, the first of three LPs planned for this year, has been put on hold. On this week's Popcast, the two reporters on the Ryan Adams story: None Joe Coscarelli, the pop music reporter for The New York Times None Melena Ryzik, a culture reporter for The New York Times | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Ice Age hunter gatherers, foraging the bone chilling, unforgiving steppes of what today is Russia, somehow completed a remarkable construction project: a 40 foot wide, circular structure made from the skulls, skeletons and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths. The reason remains a mystery to archaeologists. "The sheer number of bones that our Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere and brought to this particular location to build this monument is really quite staggering," said Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in England. "It does boggle my mind." Alexander Dudin, a researcher from the Kostenki Museum Preserve, and a team of scientists began excavating the 25,000 year old mammoth bone circle in 2014 at a site called Kostenki 11, which is 300 miles south of Moscow. It is the third structure uncovered at the site. The discovery was published Monday in the journal Antiquity. Archaeologists have unearthed about 70 mammoth bone structures across Eastern Europe. But this one is the oldest on the Russian plain thought to be made by modern humans. Most of the previously identified structures were small, leading researchers to conclude they were most likely used as winter dwellings on a nearly treeless landscape. But the researchers said this circle was too large for a roof, which might suggest it was used for a different purpose. "There are more than 60 mammoths in this one structure," said David Beresford Jones, an environmental archaeologist at the University of Cambridge and an author on the paper. He added, "It doesn't make much sense, really, as a house." The team suggested that the hunter gatherers instead might have butchered massive mammoth carcasses at the site and then stored the meat and fat in nearby permafrost as if in an ancient refrigerator. Dr. Pryor arrived at Kostenki 11 in 2015 and quickly went shoeless, tiptoeing so that he wouldn't crush any of the hundreds of mammoth bones scattered around the site. The ring, which also included ribs, jaws and leg bones, had probably been piled 20 inches high before collapsing thousands of years ago, he said. The team collected sediment samples from inside the bone circle and from three large pits located outside. Through further processing, they identified more than 400 charcoal pieces, evidence of wood burning. The charcoal came from conifers such as spruce, larch and pine, suggesting that trees still grew in the harsh, frozen environment. They also radiocarbon dated the charcoal, which further supported that the site was about 25,000 years old. They also found burned mammoth bones, which indicated that the Paleolithic people were probably starting fires with wood and then using the beasts' greasy bones to feed the flames. Bone fueled fires burn brighter than wood fires, but spread less warmth. "You won't produce a nice good fire for roasting your mammoth meat on," Dr. Beresford Jones said. But the flames would have allowed the hunter gatherers to work through the night to hastily strip meat off mammoth bones before hungry wolves and foxes arrived to try to seize the haul. The team also uncovered plant material similar to what is seen in modern parsnips, carrots and potatoes. This suggested that the Paleolithic people may have supplemented their mammoth meals with vegetable side dishes. Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University in England, applauded the team for the methods they used to recover ancient charcoal from the dirt. But he said it could not be ruled out that the structure might have been used as a cozy home during the long winters, which could reach minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The team acknowledged that they did not fully solve the mystery of how the mammoth bone circle was used. They still do not know whether the hunter gatherers killed or scavenged the beasts, how long the location was used or if it held any ritualistic importance. "These woolly mammoth circular structures are really enigmatic, but they are hugely impressive," Dr. Pryor said. "They speak to a time when our human ancestors were battling against the coldest and harshest and most difficult point of the last glacial cycle in Europe." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
SANTA MARGHERITA, Italy In Italy there are seasons and then there is the season. Summer comes, the country's woes are set aside, and, to the eternal refrain of "tutti al mare" ("Everyone to the sea"), the exodus to the consoling coast begins. The national debt fades between sea and stars. This year is a little different. Masks dangle from ears in the new insouciant look or are tied around elbows then used for a bump greeting. Beach chairs are (anti ) socially distanced. With stores operating two at a time limits, the line for focaccia is so long that people read an entire newspaper (and Italians still read them) as they wait. Americans have almost vanished, as have the Russians. Children's beach chatter revolves around the all canceling virus, which gives a new edge to games of tag. The difference is the coronavirus, lurking like the knowledge that summer will end. Contained, almost defeated, yet out there beyond the drone of the chirping cicadas, leaving Italians in a limbo between liberation and fear. Among Western nations, Italy was the first to be hit hard by the pandemic. The country learned the loneliness of a new form of death. Its doctors battled in extremis. It watched army trucks transporting coffins to remote cremation sites from the overloaded morgues of Bergamo. Then, strange thing, after some initial missteps, Italy did what it has had the most difficulty doing since the unification of the peninsula in 1861: It cohered into a nation and brought a fierce national will to bear on the virus. It went into disciplined lockdown. It set aside, through a unified front, the old slurs exchanged between northerners and southerners, the old parochialism of city states with longer histories than the nation they find themselves in, the old derision directed at its politics. I am tempted to say that 2020 was the year of Italy's emergence, 159 years after the Piedmont statesman Massimo d'Azeglio declared: "We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians." Perhaps that's an exaggeration, but not without its truth. Italy brought its rate of new infections now about eight per 100,000 inhabitants down to one of the lowest in Europe, lower even than Germany. It did so as the United States, which spent untold postwar treasure on keeping Italy stable, threw its doors open to the pandemic through leaderless fracture. This, in contrast to Italy, has been the season of American unraveling. I mentioned the buzzing cicadas and their summer crescendo. In Aesop's fable generally known in English as "The Ant and the Grasshopper," but in Italian as "La Formica e la Cicala" ("The Ant and the Cicada"), the industrious ant spends its summer laying in supplies for the winter while the carefree cicada passes the time singing, or, as Italians describe improvident laziness, scratching its belly. When winter comes, as it does, the starving cicada begs the ant for food. The ant, vindicated, tells it to go dance away the winter. Writing the other day in Milan's Corriere della Sera, Antonio Scurati asked: "Dear reader, are you a cicada or an ant?" His fear, he said, was that Italians were tending cicada. The sun is shining, let's live a bit and believe that the emergency has passed forever. In this Phase 2 of the virus, with a rise in cases in countries including Spain and France, it's an ant or cicada moment in many societies. I confess to being something of a cicada by inclination, not in slothful tendencies I hope, but in the belief that a life lived in fear and obsessive prudence is not worth living. How to weigh the cicada's chirping pleasure against the ant's cautious husbandry, a short happy life against a long inhibited one? The answer is not evident. As with most things in life, it lies in balance. It's equally hard to say at what point reasonable, lifesaving precaution over the virus becomes unreasonable, job destroying, school closing and life quenching fear harder still because rampant fear was a striking characteristic of many societies before the virus. For Italy, the overriding question is how not to suffer a chaotic relapse from the crisis induced effectiveness of national unity. There will be renewed division and disappointments, but I don't believe anything can undo what Italy revealed of itself. Italy had a good war. To a degree unimaginable in Donald Trump's America, and beyond even that of many Europeans, Italians showed what long history teaches: civic wisdom. A summer fairy tale gripped Italy. It centered on Atalanta, the small soccer club of Bergamo, the northern town that was the virus's epicenter. Against all odds, Atalanta reached the quarterfinal of Europe's premier club competition, the Champions League, where, in an empty stadium, it played Paris St. Germain, the French capital's rich Qatari owned club. When Atalanta took the lead in the first half, a loud cheer coursed down the Italian peninsula. I watched the game this week with Antonio Colpani and Laura Vergani, both from Bergamo. Colpani told me of his mother's near death and his own battle with the virus. Vergani recalled the constant sirens and how one day they stopped because the streets were empty anyway and local authorities had concluded that the sound spread panic. "We beat it," Colpani said. "Non mollare mai." He smiled as he uttered the phrase Never give up by which Bergamo lives. "Mola mia" in Bergamasco dialect. Atalanta, unyielding, clung to its 1 0 lead until the last minute. Then Paris St Germain scored, and a moment later scored again to win 2 1. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
While most visitors to New Orleans want to be in the heart of the city's dynamic French Quarter, there's no denying that its boisterous vibe doesn't appeal to all travelers. Fortunately, there's a more relaxing option a streetcar ride away in the Garden District. The 18 room Henry Howard Hotel, a historic double gallery townhouse, was built by the acclaimed architect Henry Howard in 1867 as a mansion for Edward Conery, a steamship owner and ship chandler, that he later bestowed to his two daughters. After years as a rundown inn, the New York based Fitzgerald Hotel Group modernized the property while maintaining structural elements for its opening in February 2016. Local culture is tastefully celebrated throughout, from snare drums used as coffee tables in the ground floor parlor to the second line brass instruments hanging above beds in each guest room. The designer Lauren Mabry of Hunter Mabry Design pulled inspiration from both the building and the city's past for a stunning interior overhaul that is both fun and elegant, and unlikely to date itself. Located in the lower Garden District, only a 10 minute taxi ride from the French Quarter, the hotel sits a block away from St. Charles Street (also known as the Mardi Gras route). The restaurants, bars and antique shops of Magazine Street are a short walk away, as are several of Henry Howard's other architectural projects that are worth checking out. Our Queen Superior room was located in the north wing, accessible from an outdoor covered corridor, overlooking a nearby parking lot. It was smartly decorated, with red pine hardwood floor, custom toile wallpaper featuring New Orleans icons like the steamboat and the St. Charles streetcar, an iron bed canopy, a mounted trumpet, vintage chairs done up in a black and white stripe fabric, and oil portraits by the local artist Hayley Gaberlavage. But it was a cramped fit for two people. The dressing table was small but helpful in the absence of a closet large enough to properly store our luggage (there was only hanging storage). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Fox News, television's equivalent of a presidential safe space, kept up its steadfast defense of President Trump even as he faced an uproar this week over his response to the violence at a white supremacist rally in Virginia last Saturday. Anchors like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson praised the president and lauded his bare knuckle criticism of the news media. But notably, some pundits broke ranks. Eboni K. Williams, a host of the 5 p.m. show "The Specialists," derided Mr. Trump in exceptionally blunt terms, calling his initial remarks about the rally "cowardly and dangerous" and accusing the president of minimizing "blatant, flagrant hatred" rather than risk roiling a portion of his base. It was the kind of unvarnished criticism that Fox News usually outsources to liberal guests and Ms. Williams, who is African American, said that her words had come with a price. "I've been on Fox News on and off for five years now," Ms. Williams, 33, who calls herself politically moderate, said in an interview on Wednesday. "Never in my life had I received the response that I received." Ms. Williams is not registered in any political party, and she said last year that she did not vote for Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton for president. She said she had felt compelled to air her indignation with Mr. Trump in part because she believed her audience deserved a diversity of viewpoints. "I felt utterly compelled in that moment, particularly as a black woman who works on Fox News Channel, and has the privilege and a responsibility to address an audience that otherwise doesn't necessarily get my point of view, or the point of view of people like me," she said. "They probably don't see much of any of the diverse point of view that I can offer." Not every viewer has been pleased. "I couldn't get to the remote soon enough" to change the channel, one Twitter user wrote on Wednesday, after Ms. Williams again criticized Mr. Trump on the air. Another wrote: "I wonder if FoxNews now regrets the divisive hateful words spewed out of the nasty mouth" of Ms. Williams. Mr. Hannity and other anchors, including the morning show hosts on "Fox Friends," rarely question the president, and several of them recently dined with Mr. Trump at the White House. Rupert Murdoch, Fox News's executive chairman, is a regular adviser to Mr. Trump, even counseling him on the fate of Stephen K. Bannon, the president's chief strategist. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. But Mr. Trump has his critics on Fox News. Juan Williams regularly battles with his pro Trump co hosts on the prime time show "The Five." The daytime news anchor Shepard Smith can offer up tough criticism. "So far we've been unable to find the very fine people protesting with the white supremacists," he said sarcastically on Wednesday's broadcast, referring to Mr. Trump's assertion that "very fine people" were among the demonstrators in Charlottesville. Ms. Williams's criticism was more scathing. Addressing Mr. Trump directly on the air Monday, she said: "While you personally may not be a racist, President Trump, what you are is all too happy to reap the benefits of their support, and you even tacitly encourage them with evasive, irresponsible statements." Ms. Williams, a lawyer who formerly worked at CBS News, said in the interview Wednesday that her superiors at Fox News had not expressed concern. "I'll tell you the truth, if they had said anything, it would have shocked me," she said. "I'm no puppet for the network. I call Fox as I see Fox. And for me it's been a positive experience. It's not been a perfect experience, but I'm there because the good outweighs the bad." Her "Specialists" co host, the libertarian commentator Kat Timpf, has also drawn attention for criticizing Mr. Trump on the air, calling his news conference "one of the biggest messes that I've ever seen." "The Specialists" usually features the anchor Eric Bolling, who was suspended this month after HuffPost reported on accusations that he had sent lewd messages to co workers. (Mr. Bolling has denied wrongdoing.) Ms. Williams acknowledged that his absence had created some uncertainty. "The future of our show hangs in the balance," she said. Rumors have circulated that Fox News might reshuffle its schedule, adding Laura Ingraham in prime time and moving "The Five" from 9 p.m. to 5 p.m., when "The Specialists" now airs. Asked about the speculation, Ms. Williams said, "Your guess would literally be quite as good as mine." She added: "We have no idea. They've not told us or any of the other co hosts or producers anything other than they believe in this show." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
BRUSSELS European Union leaders pledged on Friday to take further steps to set up common banking rules for the bloc, but they delayed plans for a shared budget for the euro zone nations as pressure appeared to be easing on the single currency. At the end of a two day summit meeting, the leaders fully endorsed a deal, reached Thursday by European finance ministers, to place the region's biggest banks under the supervision of the European Central Bank. The leaders also agreed on the need to put in place by 2014 a central means for shutting down failing euro zone banks. That policy is aimed at stopping banks from accumulating so much debt that they put the finances of countries like Ireland and Spain at risk, in turn threatening the future of the euro. But the leaders also appeared to take advantage of the relative calm in financial markets to avoid rushing toward any further central integration of banking in the region. At a news conference Friday at the end of the meeting, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany brushed off suggestions that leaders were complacent. She acknowledged, however, the difficulties of pressing 27 different nations to adopt similar fiscal and economic systems in the middle of a period of low growth and high unemployment. "On the one hand, we have accomplished a lot," she said. "But we also have tough times ahead of us that can't be solved with one big step." Analysts were mostly unimpressed by the results. "The E.U. summit failed to deliver any big decisions," Gizem Kara, an analyst with BNP Paribas, wrote in a research note Friday. "Certainly, some countries Germany, in particular, with its election in September may want to postpone major decisions as much as possible." Pursuing a more integrated banking framework could entail even more difficult negotiations than in the case of the banking supervisor because it implies that nations share some liability for failing lenders in other countries and that they give up some sovereign rights over how those decisions would be made. As part of efforts to make it acceptable, the European leaders said the resolution system should receive significant financing by banks, in advance. A financial "backstop" to ensure failing banks do not endanger national finances should be "fiscally neutral over the medium term" and ensure that "public assistance is recouped by means of ex post levies on the financial industry," the leaders said in their formal conclusions. But other plans, like a bigger budget for the euro area, would have to wait amid continuing disagreement on what it should be used for. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. France has continued to emphasize the need for a budget to counter economic shocks and better manage unemployment. But Germany wants the money mainly available for countries that carry out painful structural reforms. Leaders agreed to establish a so called solidarity fund for euro area countries, which would be limited to 10 billion to 20 billion euros ( 13 billion to 26 billion). The fund would be linked to countries signing contracts in exchange for carrying out reforms. "To me it seems rather intelligent to start with a specific fund dedicated to these contracts for employment, growth and competitiveness, more than waiting for an eventual budget for the euro zone that perhaps will never come," the French president, Francois Hollande, said in a news conference Friday. The current atmosphere of calm could still be broken by events in Italy, where the economy is contracting, debt levels are rising and Silvio Berlusconi, the scandal tainted former prime minister, has threatened to try to reclaim his old office next year. It remained unclear Friday whether Mr. Berlusconi would run and, if that were to happen, whether he would campaign on promises to reverse reforms put in place by Mario Monti, the current prime minister. But leaders are aware that the re emergence of Mr. Berlusconi who attended a meeting of center right parties in Brussels on Thursday could destabilize markets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Beginning in 1969 and continuing through the last two years of her life, Diane Arbus traveled regularly by bus to New Jersey to photograph people at residences for the developmentally and intellectually disabled. Her first destination, the coeducational Woodbridge State School, was just across the Hudson from her Manhattan apartment. Quite soon, though, she determined that an all female institution in Vineland, in the southern part of the state, provided richer opportunities. The photographs in the "Untitled" series, at the David Zwirner gallery through Dec. 15, are mostly taken in Vineland. Departing significantly from the work that built Arbus's reputation, they include some of the most mysterious and haunting pictures of her 15 year artistic career. The "Untitled" exhibition is the first in Zwirner's new partnership with the Fraenkel Gallery of San Francisco to co represent the Arbus estate. Rather than start with her iconic portraits of sideshow freaks, cross dressers, pro Vietnam war demonstrators and nudists, the New York gallery opted to show this less familiar, late work, which until now has never been seen in its entirety. "Entirety" should be marked with an asterisk. Arbus exposed roughly 1,900 frames of film in these institutions; she committed suicide in July 1971 without having fully edited or titled the pictures. It fell to her older daughter, Doon, to decide what constituted the series, relying (but perhaps not exclusively) on images Arbus chose to print. A book published under Doon's auspices in 1995 included 51 pictures; additional ones have been released since. Of the 66 photographs at Zwirner, six are prints made by Arbus. (Five have never been publicly shown before.) One was shot with a Pentax 6x7, the cumbersome camera Arbus was trying out at the very end of her life. While the portrayal of madmen and fools has a venerable artistic tradition, Arbus's subjects are intellectually disabled, not insane, and they are physically unrestrained. No one had ever made pictures quite like these. Arbus arrived at two great insights. The first was that it would be more poignant to show her subjects happy. Her friend Richard Avedon had photographed at the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital in 1963, recording scenes of pain and degradation. Frederick Wiseman's 1967 film, "Titicut Follies," set at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, was similarly bleak and despairing. Crucially, Arbus searched for moments of celebration, not suffering, during games and holidays. Her second brilliant stroke was to photograph outdoors, amid trees and fields, scrubbing off journalistic or sociological details of the institutional settings and entering the universal realm of dream and myth. In the exhibition, you can see the evolution of her thinking. Compare those two images with the great Vineland photograph "Untitled (6) 1970 71," in which a girl, crablike on the lawn, is poised to tumble head over heels. On the right, another girl stands with her head thrown back in laughter and her arms pointed down, while a third girl on the left is staring at the ground with her arms inching toward akimbo. A photograph is always a frozen moment, but in this picture, time itself seems to have stopped advancing. Describing the event to her younger daughter, Amy, who was about the age of these girls, Arbus wrote: "Once during Simon Says there was a pause and one girl sat down. Everyone knew it was important. She bent her head to her knees and with an odd shiver somehow the rest of her followed in what looked like the first somersault." In the photograph, the children seem as archaic as the figures on a Greek vase, with a backdrop of trees that are dark and indistinct and a lawn that rakes upward. One of Arbus's lifetime quests was to expose what she called the "flaw," a telltale detail that reveals the crack between the way people wish to present themselves and how they actually are seen. In the "Untitled" series, she was dealing with subjects devoid of guile. Her most rewarding visits came at Easter, when the women beamed beneath their fancy hats, and at Halloween, when they wore costumes and masks. For an artist who had deployed a battery of strategies, including surprise, exhaustion and intimacy, to coax sitters into dropping their masks, it was novel to photograph people who, even when their faces were covered, revealed their unguarded selves. In "Untitled (4) 1970 71," the stances of four masked figures are so forceful that each conveys a distinct personality. Arbus was used to guiding her subjects, much as she had done when she'd run a fashion photography partnership with her husband, Allan, at the outset of her professional life. But now, with the "Untitled" pictures, she faced people who would not respond to direction. They just were and she watched them be. She calculated the lighting by trial and error, experimenting with daytime flash and slow shutter speeds to produce images that were sometimes blurry, sometimes sharp, with shadows that were soft or distinct, all in ways she couldn't predict. The best photographs waft before your eyes with the visceral immediacy and spotty specificity of a remembered dream. Because of tightened protections on informed consent, it is unlikely that such photographs as well as Avedon's work at East Louisiana State could be made today, at least in the United States. That is true, too, of the pictures that are the closest precedent to Arbus's "Untitled" series: Peter Hujar's little known but excellent photographs at residences for developmentally disabled children in Southbury, Conn., and for spastic children in Florence, Italy, made from 1957 to '58 while he was in his early 20s. Hujar, too, zeroed in on kids playing games and having fun. But unlike Arbus, who abstracted and softened her scenery so it resembles stage flats, Hujar employed in his square format pictures all the tricks of Henri Cartier Bresson: strong diagonals (of slides, swings and supporting rails); inventively off kilter angles; and asymmetric groupings. Hujar's youthful pictures are empathetically grounded; Arbus's mature ones are unearthly. The "Untitled" photographs evoke paintings by Ensor, Bruegel and especially the covens and rituals conjured up by Goya. "Untitled (58) 1970 71" is dominated by a slightly blurred woman with an open mouth and faraway eyes. She seems to be undergoing either rapture or catastrophe. Behind her, clasping her arm and in sharp focus, is a beak nosed, wryly smiling figure, a demon with an Easter bonnet who might be ushering her to the other side. Arguably the greatest picture in the series is "Untitled (7) 1970 71." In it, a white haired woman wearing a black eye mask and a white cotton nightgown holds the hand of a younger woman, who has a mustache drawn on her face. Other women trail after, to the edge of the frame and beyond. It is a procession. The sky is glowering with gray clouds, and the shadows that the women cast are long and black. We can't explain this photograph. We can only marvel at it. In the almost half century that has elapsed since Arbus made the "Untitled" pictures, photographers have increasingly adopted a practice of constructing the scenes they shoot and altering the pictures with digital technology in an effort to bring to light the visions in their heads. The "Untitled" series, one of the towering achievements of American art, reminds us that nothing can surpass the strange beauty of reality if a photographer knows where to look. And how to look. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Lantern has no Hollywood experience. Its portfolio includes underperforming auto dealerships and a company that recycles zinc. Lantern became involved with the Weinstein Company this year, when it agreed to help finance an attempt to help the troubled studio avert bankruptcy. That effort, led in part by the billionaire Ron Burkle, fell apart in March. The Weinstein Company imploded in October after dozens of women publicly accused its former chief executive, Harvey Weinstein, of sexual misconduct stretching back decades. It announced on March 19 that it would file for bankruptcy. The movie and television studio, once known for Oscar winning films like "The King's Speech" and "The Artist," had less than 500,000 in cash. It was facing a mountain of debt and a swelling number of lawsuits, including one by New York's attorney general. Lawyers for the studio had bragged that its assets a library of old films, a small television production business and a handful of unreleased new films had drawn interest from as many as 60 potential bidders. But in the end there appeared to be only Lantern, with its bid to keep the studio whole; Sonar Entertainment, with a nibble on the television division; and Inclusion Media, led by Mr. Kagan, a former partner at the hedge fund Harbinger Capital who has reinvented himself as a Tony Award winning producer of Broadway shows like "Pippin." Inclusion's 315 million proposal, which the Weinstein Company said was submitted after the deadline and did not meet other requirements for a qualified bid, was notable for including a settlement fund for Mr. Weinstein's victims of at least 25 million. On Tuesday, five of the named plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits pending against Mr. Weinstein said in a news release that they "strongly opposed" the Lantern purchase, which did not include a specific fund for victims, and that they supported Mr. Kagan's effort. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
New York Theater Workshop will stage five productions in its 2018 2019 season, ending it with a new solo show by Anna Deavere Smith. The Off Broadway company announced Wednesday that it would lead off this fall with "What the Constitution Means to Me" by Heidi Schreck, a play about Ms. Schreck's experience giving speeches about the United States Constitution as a high school student in the hopes of getting college scholarships. Oliver Butler will direct. The New York premiere of "Slave Play," by Jeremy O. Harris, an exploration of race and gender in the antebellum South, will follow in the winter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Dick Allen in 1973, when he played for the Chicago White Sox. He was the National League's rookie of the year in 1964, the American League's most valuable player in 1972 and a seven time All Star. Dick Allen, who was among baseball's leading sluggers of the 1960s and early '70s, playing mostly with the Phillies and Chicago White Sox, but who found himself a target of Philadelphia fans in his early years with the club, an outgrowth of racial animosity, died on Monday in Wampum, Pa. He was 78. Allen, who hit 351 home runs in his 15 major league seasons, was a seven time All Star: three times with the Phillies, once with the St. Louis Cardinals and three times with the White Sox. He was named the National League's rookie of the year in 1964, with the Phillies, and the American League's most valuable player in 1972, with the White Sox. He batted over .300 seven times, though when he hit .316 with the 1973 Sox a leg injury had shortened his season to 72 games. The Phillies' management sought to make amends for the abuse Allen had received from fans in the 1960s. In September the team retired his uniform number, 15. Mike Schmidt, the Phillies' Hall of Fame third baseman, said in a speech at a team ceremony honoring Allen in September that "Dick was a sensitive Black man who refused to be treated as a second class citizen." "He played in front of home fans that were products of that racist era," Schmidt continued, and alongside "racist teammates" at a time when there were "different rules for whites and Blacks." "Fans threw stuff at him," he said, "and thus Dick wore a batting helmet throughout the whole game. They yelled degrading racial slurs. They dumped trash in his front yard at his home." In his first stint with the Phillies, Allen gained a reputation as a difficult personality. He demanded a trade in June 1969 after the team had suspended him for not showing up for a doubleheader against the Mets at Shea Stadium. A month earlier, he had been fined 1,000 for missing a team plane from Philadelphia to St. Louis. "I wonder how good I could have been," Allen wrote in his memoir, "Crash: The Life and Times of Dick Allen" (1989, with Tim Whitaker). "It could have been a joy, a celebration. Instead, I played angry. In baseball, if a couple things go wrong for you, and those things get misperceived, or distorted, you get a label. I was labeled an outlaw, and after a while that's what I became." Allen played with the Phillies from 1963 to 1969 and had a second stint in Philadelphia in 1975 and 1976. He was with the Cardinals in 1970, the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1971, the White Sox from 1972 to 1974 and the Oakland A's in 1977, playing first base, third base and the outfield. Richard Anthony Allen was born on March 8, 1942, in Wampum, a small town near Pittsburgh. One of nine children, he was raised by his mother, Era, who supported the family by working as a domestic. Allen was signed by the Phillies when he graduated from high school for an estimated 70,000 (almost 600,000 in today's money). After playing in the minors, he made his major league debut in early September 1963. During his early years with the Phillies, his teammates called him Richie, a name he disliked. "My name is Richard, and they called me Dick in the minor leagues," he once said. The name Richie, he added, "makes me sound like I'm 10 years old." It wasn't until 1972, his first season with the White Sox, that he entirely shed his "Richie" moniker. The Sox referred to him in their press book as Dick and instructed their public address announcer to do the same. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The artist Francisca Benitez has a way of turning boundaries into art. In a 2008 work, "Property Lines, New York," she invaded private spaces by making graphite rubbings of those demarcations on New York City sidewalks. The act of transferring the markings onto paper was something of a secret performance. More recently, she has explored boundaries in relationship to communication with a focus on sign language and gesture. It's helpful to know that Ms. Benitez's father is deaf, and while she didn't grow up signing, she has since immersed herself in that world. Her latest work, "As you lean on me and I lean on you, we move forward," presented by Friends of the High Line, includes herself and nine deaf and hearing impaired performers. It's the third performance piece she has made dealing with signing. Ms. Benitez, born in Chile but based in New York, has also created a temporary sign language school in a museum in Santiago and produced a group work translating the poems of the Cuban writer Nicolas Guillen for the Havana Biennial. Performed on a balmy Tuesday night near the 14th Street High Line entrance, along a part of the path covered with water (a paradise for bare feet), "As you lean on me" is about what happens to expression once language is removed. Is a gesture ever meaningless? The largely improvised work, executed in silence, is defined by three actions: a game of exquisite corpse, in which the cast stands in a row and passes a sign rather than a word or an image, as the Surrealists did, to create an absurdist composition; a segment in which one performer starts to illustrate a scene with movement (a fishing expedition, for instance) and the others fill in the rest of the picture (they became fish); and a solo, in which a performer delivers a monologue with florid fingers as the others follow in rapt attention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Chamberlain, the second most important actor in the lead up to war curiously, he is left out of the book's subtitle in favor of his successor, Winston Churchill tried desperately to negotiate a lasting solution to the crisis. In keeping with much recent scholarship, Hett presents Chamberlain as a complex figure, intelligent and composed but also vainglorious and gullible. After a meeting at Hitler's Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden in September 1938, Chamberlain wrote that he had "established a certain confidence which was my aim and on my side in spite of the hardness ruthlessness I thought I saw in Hitler's face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word." Even after March 1939, when Hitler's seizure of most of the rest of Czechoslovakia showed the bankruptcy of Chamberlain's appeasement strategy, he clung to the belief that the Fuhrer could be reasoned with. That Hitler might actually desire war was to the prime minister's rational way of thinking impossible, especially following the mass carnage of World War I. Still, with Hitler now turning his murderous gaze toward Poland, the Chamberlain government shifted to a strategy of deterrence, joining with France to guarantee Polish and later Romanian independence. It also stepped up preparations for war, introducing peacetime conscription for the first time in British history and commencing Anglo French military staff talks. War came a few months later. For the Western leaders and their populations, the second half of the 1930s represented, Hett argues, a "crisis of democracy." In the minds of influential observers like Churchill and the American columnist Walter Lippmann, it seemed an open question whether the major democracies could respond effectively to the threat from totalitarian states that were primed for war and had ready access to resources. Could Western leaders mobilize their competing interest groups and fickle constituents to support costly overseas commitments? What if these same constituents fell under the sway of fascism, with its racist and nationalist appeals? Harold L. Ickes, the irascible and perspicacious American secretary of the interior, saw the danger. "Fascism is an ever present threat, even here in America," he warned in a speech before the Cleveland Zionist Society at the end of 1938. "Every intelligent man and woman knows that the danger that threatens America is the same that has already engulfed other countries." Ickes's fear was not realized, not then little by little, Hett writes, democratic leaders in Washington and London found their footing. They were able to turn back the totalitarian threats while upholding what Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Today, we are again in a crisis of democracy, a point Hett stresses from his opening pages. Perhaps he does so with more insistence than necessary, as if uncertain his readers will grasp the parallels between the 1930s and our own day without his firm direction. Still, it's hard to disagree with his overarching judgment: "Above all, the world of the 1930s was wracked by a fundamental conflict: Should the world system be open and international, based on democracy, free trade and rights for all, anchored in law? Or should the world be organized along racial and national lines, with dominant groups owing nothing to minorities and closing off their economic space as much as possible to the outer world? Today we face this very conflict once again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Most nights find Susan Tammany working at the David H. Koch Theater dressed in black, wearing a name tag, handing out programs and helping balletomanes to their seats. But she won't be working as an usher on Thursday night at City Ballet's spring gala. "I said to her, 'Opening night, you take off because you've got to take a bow!' " said Peter Martins, the company's ballet master in chief. That is because Ms. Tammany will be playing a very different role that night: designer of the sets and costumes for City Ballet's new production of August Bournonville's 1836 ballet "La Sylphide," staged by Mr. Martins, which is having its premiere at the gala. For Ms. Tammany, an artist by day who moonlights as an usher, the job was a reunion of sorts. She designed "La Sylphide" when Mr. Martins first staged it 30 years ago for the Pennsylvania Ballet, in a production that was later broadcast on public television. But she said she was stunned when Mr. Martins approached her about doing it again at City Ballet. "I was in the theater," Ms. Tammany recalled. "He said he'd been looking for me, but I sometimes get sent to different tiers. Then he said, 'I want you to do this again.' I said, 'Okaaay, let's do it again!' I was astonished." Some of Ms. Tammany's designs are bolder, and more modern, than those typically used in Romantic ballets. The painted backdrop for the forest scene in the second act is an almost phantasmagorical explosion of color, quite unlike the demure landscape painting type backdrops of many a story ballet. Its colors may dazzle dancegoers who have spent the last week watching the company perform the more austerely designed "Black and White" Balanchine ballets. Her day job and night job have intersected before dancers and choreographers, including Mr. Martins, have collected her paintings. But Ms. Tammany said it had been thrilling to see her designs built on a scale big enough to fill the stage of the Koch Theater, and to be able to watch as scenic artists turned her artwork into an enormous backdrop. "I took pictures of them painting it," she said. "It's like they have these big brushes on sticks it's amazing, just amazing." Mr. Martins said he had long hoped to bring "La Sylphide," in which he danced when he was a boy training with the Royal Danish Ballet School, to City Ballet, noting that George Balanchine, City Ballet's founder and guiding spirit, had been an admirer of Bournonville. After reviewing a videotape of the old production, he said, he grew determined to stage it in New York and to keep Ms. Tammany's designs. "I thought, 'Do I need a new designer?' " he said. "I looked at it carefully, and I thought: 'Why? This is exactly how it should be.' I love it today as much as I loved it then." The original sets have been lost, he said. And Ms. Tammany made some changes for this new production, redesigning the first act and the costumes, and tweaking the sets so the ballet could be performed without an intermission. She also reimagined the witch's caldron, taking inspiration from the mysterious Gundestrup Caldron, an ancient silver vessel that is now in the National Museum of Denmark. "I wanted to make it much more spooky," she said. "It's not a caldron they make soup in, do you know what I mean? It's a caldron that they do bad things in." Ms. Tammany has worked on and off as an usher for decades, while painting and teaching. She said being an usher has been in many ways ideal for someone who came to love ballet as a little girl after seeing the film "The Red Shoes." "It gives me the time to do what I need to do, and the music is beautiful," she said. But she acknowledged that it might be odd when she returns to work later in the run of "La Sylphide" and watches the audiences she seats as they react to her work. "It's going to be weird," she said. "Maybe people will come out and say, 'I hate it.' I'll just say, 'Hmpph, what do you know?' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WHITEFIELD, N.H. The last choruses of "Don't Feed the Plants" reverberated across the mostly empty theater. Shredded paper fell from the lighting grid. The 44 masked ticket holders, meticulously spaced out across the 250 seats, rose for an ovation, then waited for directions about which doorways to use to reduce crowding as they filed out into the autumn sunshine. Ethan Paulini, who played the sadistic dentist in the production of "Little Shop of Horrors" that ended with a matinee here on Sunday, removed his white lab coat and offered the hint of a smile from behind his black mask. The first fall season here at the Weathervane Theater, which Paulini also runs as its producing artistic director, had come to an end. Five weeks. Three shows. Twenty six performances. Zero known Covid 19 cases. In some ways, the moment seems strangely modest, given that in parts of Europe and Asia, theater is back in some big cities. But the United States has controlled the virus less well than other countries the American per capita death rate is higher than that of many other nations and as a result, the performing arts are particularly hobbled here. That has left innovation, with the exception of a few one person shows, largely to small theaters in rural areas where the pandemic has been less scourging. In August, a production of "Godspell" at Berkshire Theater Group in Western Massachusetts became the first outdoor musical with union actors performed in this country during the pandemic. This "Little Shop," in the Great North Woods region of New Hampshire, was the big indoor test case. "This was an experiment, and it could have gone either way; we could have failed miserably, or we could have succeeded," said Jorge Donoso, 29, who played Seymour and also serves as the company's development director. "But we've definitely succeeded, and I hope this gives a little bit of confidence to people." Weathervane, a seasonal theater where a drummer typically summons patrons back to their seats following intermission, started with a key advantage: It is in a remote area, bordering the White Mountains, with very little coronavirus. Whitefield, the 2,200 resident town where Weathervane is based, is part of Coos County (pronounced co oss), which as of Wednesday had no deaths attributed to the pandemic. That allowed the cast, crew and musicians to create a quarantine bubble together, starting for many in June, so that when they finally got permission to perform, their risk was low. The company had even set aside a 12 room carriage house to isolate anyone who tested positive; it was never used. "Everyone took it very seriously, because no one wants to be the person that messes it up for everyone," said Paulini. "We made it pretty clear it was grounds for immediate termination if we heard somebody was not complying." Citing that bubble, this show, unlike the production of "Godspell" in the Berkshires, did not use partitions, masks or social distancing onstage. Concluding that the actors were not a risk to one another, the company allowed the performers to touch, pass props and sing together. The actors had all kinds of anxiety. Robert H. Fowler, 59, who lives in New Jersey and first performed here in 2010, said he was apprehensive not only about the virus, but also about returning to a predominantly white area as a Black man during this year of intensified unrest over racial justice. But Fowler, who is also the company's associate artistic director, said that as soon as he saw an audience in "Little Shop" he played Mr. Mushnik, the plant store owner he knew he had made the right decision. Of course, for many, coming to New Hampshire was also a chance to escape New York. "I was excited to not have to hear the sirens every day," Donoso said. "Where we are staying, you can see mountains for miles, so it was serene." The actors were also happy to be working, earning not only a salary but credit toward health insurance, which few are able to do this year. "I feel grateful to be the guinea pigs," said Marisa Kirby, 32, who is spending her third summer at Weathervane, playing Audrey in "Little Shop" and running the intern program. "We're lucky." They started slow: canceling a few preseason events scheduled in June, then allowing a company of student interns to perform outdoors for children and then indoors for no more than 20 people. (Those performances were streamed, too.) The professional actors started out streaming musical revues, and then in August, after submitting an 84 page safety plan, they got permission from Equity to stage three fall shows in repertory. It was the theater's inaugural fall season, which ran through Columbus Day, when the region is laden with leaf peepers. Plenty of patrons were eager to return. "There was no question but that we would go," said Lorain Giles, a 69 year old retired United Church of Christ pastor. She and her husband, Bill, live in Massachusetts, but spend each summer in nearby Lunenberg, Vt., and the Weathervane is a regular part of their routine. "We refused to live in fear," she said. "We trusted them, and wanted to to celebrate them being open, and we were just glad to be out among other human beings." But there were also those who held back. Beth Cape, 56, who owns the local Barron Brook Inn and works at the Northern Gateway Regional Chamber of Commerce, was eager to see the theater reopen the area was already struggling, and the pandemic has dealt a tough economic blow. But she opted not to go to any shows this year, because her husband has a health condition that might make the virus more dangerous for him. "Some years, it's like magic in a bottle you're sitting there and your hair is standing up on your arms, because they're that good," she said of the theater. "But my husband's life is worth more than me taking part in things right now." Weathervane, founded in 1966, is in the lowest income region of New Hampshire, according to Phil Sletten, a senior analyst at the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute. It has a high population of seniors, and a reliance on tourists (ATV riding and snowmobiling are popular activities) and second homeowners to help the economy. The theater expected to have a 650,000 annual budget this year but wound up spending less because of canceled summer productions. It normally raises about half its costs through ticket sales; this year it will raise just 20 percent that way, and will make up the difference through fund raising and a grant from the state of New Hampshire. Even in healthier years, the theater has periodically been in financial danger. "My thought was that if the theater didn't open this summer, it would never open again," said Debi Soukup, a 66 year old retired teacher who lives in Florida but spends summers in Whitefield. The theater took precautionary steps that have become standard for professional performance during the pandemic: regular testing of cast and crew for the virus; temperature checks for ticket holders; and no seating within 20 feet of the actors, to keep patrons far from any aerosols during singing. The effect on the staging of "Little Shop," which ran in repertory with a revue and a play, were minimal. Most significant: Paulini, unwilling to put puppeteers in confined spaces, ruled out using a large puppet (frequently used in other productions) to represent the bloodthirsty plant at full height. Instead, Audrey II (that's the plant's name) was incarnated by an actress, Monica Rosenblatt, cloaked in foliage and wearing an upturned hoop skirt designed to look like a maw. And at the end of a show in which "the human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence," Donoso, as Seymour, crawled through the plant's toothy legs and vanished backstage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. The most frequently posed query in N.B.A. circles over the past several weeks When do you think next season will start? had also been one of the hardest to answer. Even Commissioner Adam Silver, at a news conference before Game 1 of the finals, cautioned reporters that it was too soon for him to provide details in response "to most of your questions" about the 2020 21 season. That all changed Friday after a board of governors meeting. In yet another reminder of 2020's seemingly boundless unpredictability, numerous team owners supported the league's new plan to push for a Dec. 22 start date just 10 weeks removed from the Los Angeles Lakers' six game championship triumph over the Miami Heat. The league office cannot unilaterally impose its preferred timetable upon N.B.A. players, but negotiations are underway before a looming Friday deadline to modify the current labor agreement. Although that deadline has been moved back three times, expectations are that the sides will ultimately strike a deal this time on the terms for next season, such as setting the salary cap and luxury tax figures and an overhauled calendar with Dec. 22 as opening night. These are the three main reasons a December start, after the longest N.B.A. season, suddenly became the target: This is what the league's television partners want. Throughout the N.B.A.'s three month stay at Walt Disney World, all signs pointed to the 2020 21 season beginning in 2021. League insiders frequently cited mid January as the earliest possible start date, and several said they would not be surprised to see the wait extended until February or March. Playing the long game, it was often suggested, would enhance the chances of fan attendance for at least a portion of the regular season. Of course, over the two plus weeks since the season ended, daunting projections about the spread of the coronavirus this winter have led to rising pessimism about the league's ability to admit even small crowds anytime soon. Multiple teams thus began to whisper last week that momentum was building to start the new season around Dec. 25 to preserve the ability to broadcast five games on Christmas Day. It is smart business for any league, when possible, to make its broadcast partners happy. Just as establishing the bubble inside Disney World's gates, rather than in Las Vegas or any other proposed locale, presumably only strengthened the N.B.A.'s bond with Disney, moving up the timetable for next season for the networks' benefit is another potentially grand gesture. The league's current TV contract with Disney and Turner runs through the 2024 25 season, but it's not too early to start thinking about the next one especially when there is so much negative noise about the N.B.A.'s TV ratings. The league wants to give fans (and players) their summers back. Starting the new season before Christmas would probably enable N.B.A. players to participate in the Tokyo Olympics in July 2021. And several of the league's top international players, such as Italy's Danilo Gallinari, Marco Belinelli and Nicolo Melli and France's Evan Fournier and Rudy Gobert, have said in recent weeks how important it is to them. The league wants to make that happen, if possible, which would also prevent high profile N.B.A. playoff games from clashing with the Summer Games. But the bigger motivation for preventing the playoffs from straying too far into July is to avoid playing throughout the summer for a second successive season, while also restoring free agency as the centerpiece of the N.B.A.'s summer calendar. League officials have publicly downplayed concerns about the recent ratings decline, pointing to the N.B.A.'s mammoth social media following as a source of optimism about its broader appeal. Vocal critics with little to no evidence increasingly attribute the plunge to a leaguewide embrace of social justice causes, but the dip has had an impact even if there is no clear cut explanation. Long held fears among N.B.A. traditionalists that the viewing audience will inevitably shrink after July appear to have been validated. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing in from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line. Q: You may have written about this before and I missed it, but why is Bill Russell not included in every serious GOAT discussion? He played in a very different time, but his standout achievement winning 11 championship rings shouldn't be diminished by when he played. Chris in Dallas Stein: Russell has always figured prominently in this discussion at least when I've discussed it. He's the greatest winner in basketball history. Bob Ryan, the Boston Globe legend, likes to say that Russell is "the greatest documented winner in all of North American sport." As such, I've insisted for years that Russell and Kareem Abdul Jabbar (also colossal at both the collegiate and pro level) are right there with LeBron James as Michael Jordan's foremost rivals in the GOAT race. Yet it's also true, as noted in a recent newsletter, that I have amended that position in the wake of James's latest title run with the Los Angeles Lakers. I doubt he'll ever do enough to win over even a fraction of the Jordan supporters who believe His Airness's 6 0 record in the finals is the unassailable difference maker. But I do think James, fueled as well by his longevity and his off court stature, moved into his own stratosphere by leading a third franchise to a championship. Which is to say that, yes, I do believe James has separated himself from even Russell and Abdul Jabbar. Saying so, unfortunately, will be interpreted in some corners as downgrading Russell's 11 rings because they were won in a league that never had more than 14 teams when he played. It will also mean, to some, that I am docking Abdul Jabbar points for needing Magic Johnson's assistance to win five of his six championships. I prefer to see the promotion of James to an undisputed No. 2 in the GOAT rankings as giving him bonus points for all he has achieved (including nine trips to the finals in a 10 year span) in the modern N.B.A., while facing the sort of scrutiny none of his GOAT rivals have ever known. Not that I expect to sway you. Perspectives will forever vary on this one. As Jordan himself suggested in an interview with Cigar Aficionado from 2017 that was recirculated recently, trying to grade his achievements against Russell's is an "unfair parallel." "Because we played in different eras," Jordan said. Q: I think that Anthony Davis should have been co most valuable player of the N.B.A. finals with LeBron James because of Davis's defense on Jimmy Butler and his fabulous shooting. Don't you agree? Rolf Sternglanz (Stony Brook, N.Y.) Stein: I don't believe in co winners of such awards, so no. Co winners are pretty much impossible, anyway, on an 11 voter ballot when the voters have license to choose only one player. You could certainly argue that the 11 0 vote in James's favor was too lopsided, but I can't fault any of my colleagues who voted for him. As ridiculously disruptive as Davis was as a defender, on top of his uber efficient scoring, James was huge in the finals and throughout the postseason. And, like it or not, James was always going to get extra credit from voters for the intangible leadership he provided the Lakers. On his first attempt, Davis certainly validated that he is the most imposing tag team partner James has ever had, but James empowered Davis and Coach Frank Vogel to function better than ever in their roles. That stuff does count. Q: Why are the Lakers' championships that they won in Minnesota counted as part of their franchise total? Do the Oklahoma City Thunder have one championship because of the Seattle SuperSonics' title in 1979? Jamal Mohmand (Houston, Texas) The 2011 12 season, delayed by a lengthy lockout, is the only season to have started in December. Teams played 66 regular season games that year; 70 to 72 games is the target for next season. If the 2020 21 season starts Dec. 22, as the league office now hopes, only 72 days will separate the opener from the last day of the previous season, when the Los Angeles Lakers clinched the 2019 20 championship with a Game 6 N.B.A. finals victory over the Miami Heat on Oct. 11. The same gap, between Toronto's clinching victory in Game 6 of the 2019 N.B.A. finals over Golden State and opening night of the 2019 20 season, was 131 days. In 21 playoff games for the Lakers in his first taste of the N.B.A. postseason, Alex Caruso started only one game. That start came in Game 6 of the N.B.A. finals and crucially enabled the Lakers to speed up their pace for the series clincher, with Miami clearly weary after the Heat had managed to pull out an intense victory in Game 5. Caruso has started 13 regular season games in his three seasons with the Lakers. Hit me up anytime on Twitter ( TheSteinLine) or Facebook ( MarcSteinNBA) or Instagram ( thesteinline). Send any other feedback to marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
China is taking another step to restrict what can be posted on the Internet in its country by issuing new rules barring foreign companies or their affiliates from engaging in publishing online content there without government approval. The rules, which were jointly released this week by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that beginning March 10, foreign companies or foreign joint ventures will be restricted from disseminating a wide range of content online, including text, maps, games, animation, audio and video. The rules also apply to digitized books, art, literature and science. The new regulations would allow foreign owned companies to cooperate with a Chinese partner to publish content on the Web in China, but they must get government approval. China already has some of the world's most restrictive policies on the dissemination of information. Chinese TV and the news media are censored; the government has censors monitoring popular social media platforms, like WeChat; and American Internet giants, like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, have been blocked in China for years. Legal scholars say the new rules seem aimed at restricting any type of content that might be considered a threat to the Communist Party, or social stability, with the regulations hinting at a greater effort to bring anything published by foreign entities under Chinese law. "This is the latest in a series of legal changes that seek to restrict the influence of foreign or western ideas," said Jacques deLisle, an authority on Chinese law who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. "And it's also part of a larger attempt to exercise control over the Internet and new media." The new regulations, though, do not detail exactly what types of content and which organizations would be affected. Though the new rules, for example, might seem to apply to foreign news organizations in China, existing rules already restrict global media outlets from posting content on the Internet using servers inside China. Most global news outlets, including The New York Times, are published on servers outside China, and are unlikely to be affected by the new rules. Still, legal experts say the regulations announced this week are broad enough to pose challenges to a wide range of foreign multinationals operating in China, since many of them act as distributors of online content or services. There are also questions about how such regulations would be enforced, and what types of companies would be considered distributors of online content. As a result, they could raise market access issues for foreign companies in China ahead of trade talks with the United States. Analysts say Chinese laws are often vague and broad, which gives regulators the ability to claim greater jurisdiction. As a result, how laws are implemented is often more important than the letter of the law. Enshrining a leader. China's Communist Party delivered Xi Jinping, the country's top leader, a breakthrough on Nov. 11 that will help secure his political future by enshrining him in its firmament of era defining leaders in a resolution reassessing the party's history. A momentous decision. Senior party leaders approved the resolution at a gathering focused on reviewing the party's 100 year history. A communique from the meeting said that under Mr. Xi's leadership, China had "made historic achievements and undergone a historic transformation." Rewriting history. The resolution is expected to become the focus of an indoctrination campaign. It will dictate how the authorities teach China's modern history and how they censor discussion of the past, including through a law meant to punish people who criticize the party's heroes. Third of its kind. With the resolution, which was issued in full on Nov. 16, Mr. Xi can cement his status as an epoch making leader alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw the only two other resolutions of this kind, in 1945 and in 1981. One key question is the impact such regulations would have on companies like Apple and Microsoft, which run online platforms in China that provide services and sometimes content. For example, Apple's Chinese App Store offers games and other apps in the country while Microsoft has a joint venture through which it provides a cloud version of Windows and Office software. Internet companies, like Akamai and Cloud Flare, have operations that work to speed traffic to foreign websites or host them through servers in China. A large number of foreign games for smartphones are released through joint ventures between Chinese companies and multinationals, and it appears the new regulations could affect those partnerships. Multinational companies have long complained that the rules in China are discriminatory. Foreign firms need licenses that can be difficult to get to operate web services in China, and there are restrictions on their ability to invest in many Chinese sectors. Several big companies, including Microsoft, have also been the subject of anti trust investigations. The regulations stipulate that anything published online should "serve the people" and promote socialism and do no harm to national interests, barring, for instance, the spreading of rumors or propagating evil cults. Paul Gillis, an accounting expert who teaches at Peking University in Beijing, says a lot will also be determined by the way China executes and enforces the rules, since there is tremendous variation in the way laws are enacted and enforced in the country and to whom they apply. "What about law firms and accounting firms are they going to be subject to these rules?" he said. "And what about companies that just have an instruction manual online, are they also going to fall under this type of rule?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
PARIS "Salvator Mundi" may have been the biggest headline of the year for Christie's auction house, but it was not its only record breaker. On Tuesday the auction house's final handbag and accessories sale was another game changer. With sales totaling 2.37 million euros (about 2.7 million), the Paris auction exceeded expectations and topped last week's event in New York ( 1.58 million). Though it trailed November's 5.24 million take in Hong Kong (40.909 million HK dollars), it set a precedent of its own. As Matthew Rubinger, Christie's senior director, luxury handbags and accessories, observed pre auction, in each sale there are pieces that are "theoretically the most valuable or theoretically the most popular. And then there's what happens in real time." It wasn't, for example, the Himalaya Kelly in new condition. It wasn't the pristine black crocodile Birkin with diamond encrusted hardware despite the fact an Hermes Birkin Himalaya with diamond pave hardware recently went for 383,522 at Christie's in Hong Kong, setting the world record as the most expensive handbag ever sold at auction. And it wasn't the Courchevel yellow mini Kelly originally owned by Elizabeth Taylor though that one sold for 47,196, more than double the price it fetched when Christie's auctioned the actress's estate in 2011. Rather, just as the sale appeared to have crested, sparring broke out between two remote bidders, one online and one on What's App, over Lot 172: a metallic bronze chevre leather Birkin with gold hardware. Inspired by Hermes's celebrated window displays by Leila Menchari, that Birkin cost less than 10,000 euros in 2005, the only year it was produced. It sold for 100,000 euros ( 117,394) to a bidder in Hong Kong, setting a world record for a leather Birkin sold at auction. "I think this lot is a really good example of where the market is today," Mr. Rubinger said after the event. "It proves that the market is driven by collectors who come for something unique and different." Indeed, Tuesday's sale also saw a spike in popularity for lesser known styles. Several Hermes Constance bags surged past high estimates. One, a custom piece in etain Epsom leather, sold for 20,648. In the end, the Himalaya Kelly sold for 110,615. The crocodile and diamond Birkin went for 103,241. Still, a client searching for relative bargains could find plenty: Early in the auction, an azalea pink Birkin produced this year sold for 11,799, while bids for several Birkins and Kellys in neutral colors like tosca, ebony or a caramel gold went for 7,300 to 10,500, a range comparable to current retail prices (but without the waiting list). A Matryoshka evening bag from the 2012 Chanel Metiers d'Art Paris Bombay collection, a style produced in such small quantities that it has become a collector's favorite, fetched 22,123, over triple the original price. In another first, Mr. Rubinger and his team took a risk on a collection of 40 crystal handbags consigned by a single European client, who preferred to remain anonymous. Most pieces were pre 1999 figurative styles by Judith Lieber, along with a few by Kathrine Baumann, a designer with no significant track record at auction. A Baumann Coke bottle and Diet Coke can were the top sellers at 4,130 each. Bids for Lieber models, such as a koi fish, a sleeping cat or a violin, all topped 3,000; other models, like the silver and black swan style Mr. Big offered Carrie in "Sex and the City," sold for an average of about 1,200. Handbags have fast become a core category for Christie's, Mr. Rubinger said, attracting approximately 30 percent new buyers, including more women and young bidders than those drawn by other categories (jewelry included). European buyers accounted for 53 percent of the Paris sale, according to Christie's, while 25 percent of purchases came from Asia and 20 percent from the United States, a substantial increase from last year. "With the paintings, it's such a major financial decision that no one is having fun with it," Mr. Rubinger said. "It's all so serious. But for bags, we want sellers to be excited that their stuff is in the sale, and for buyers to be excited to own something. If there's not that emotion, then it just doesn't work." For future sales, the handbag department will be focusing even more on top collector pieces, Mr. Rubinger said. "We've been shifting toward highly special, important pieces for a year and a half, and it's working well," he said. "Every season we're breaking new ground." As for the record setting Birkin, Mr. Rubinger said by Wednesday morning he had already fielded several queries from clients who own similar bags. "The market has already shifted," he said. "Now, people are asking for much higher numbers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Carnegie Hall will open its season with Gershwin for the second year in a row this fall, the hall said Thursday as it announced its 2018 19 plans. The new season will focus on the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, the pianist Yuja Wang and the mandolin player Chris Thile who will become the rare nonclassical composer to be given the hall's prestigious composer in residence position. The hall's annual festival will be called "Migrations: The Making of America" and will explore the musical traditions created by immigrants from Scotland and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries; Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th; and black Americans who left the South during the Great Migration. "Virtually all of those migrations happened for the worst possible reasons be it starvation, persecution, people being treated in the most terrible ways," Clive Gillinson, Carnegie's executive and artistic director, said in an interview. "And out of that came some of the greatest beauty, and some of the most extraordinary, wonderful experiences." The decision to give Mr. Thile the hall's Debs Composer's Chair is something of a break with tradition. Mr. Thile, who is best known for his work with Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers and as the host of the public radio show "Live from Here," is only the second nonclassical composer to be given the position, which has been held by the likes of Pierre Boulez, John Adams and Meredith Monk. "We will definitely be moving across a broader canvas there," Mr. Gillinson said of the composer position, noting that it was previously held by Brad Mehldau, the pianist and composer who sometimes plays with Mr. Thile. Mr. Thile will give several concerts, including one in May that will feature performances by both Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers. Here are some highlights of the season. Carnegie is devoting a Perspectives series to Mr. Thomas, the conductor known as M.T.T., who plans to wrap up a 25 year run as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 2020. Even before the season starts, he will lead Carnegie's National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America at the hall and on a tour of Asia. Mr. Thomas will open the season proper on Oct. 3, leading the San Francisco Symphony in music of Gershwin and Ravel in a concert featuring Renee Fleming and Audra McDonald; he and the orchestra will return the following evening for a Stravinsky program with the violinist Leonidas Kavakos. Mr. Thomas will later in the season conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in music by Ives and Mahler, as well as Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, with Igor Levit, who recently won the Gilmore Artist Award, as soloist. (Mr. Levit plays a recital in October.) Finally, Mr. Thomas will return with the New World Symphony, the orchestral academy he co founded, for concerts featuring Carnegie's other Perspectives artist, Ms. Wang, in Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 5. Ms. Wang, a technically dazzling pianist, will be showcased in a variety of settings in her own series: She will play arrangements of Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" with a quartet of percussionists, including Martin Grubinger, and collaborate in other concerts with Mr. Kavakos, the violinist; the comedy team of Igudesman Joo; and the cellist Gautier Capucon, with whom she will play Franck and Rachmaninoff. John Eliot Gardiner will lead the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique in two Berlioz programs, including the "Symphonie Fantastique" and "Lelio." Valery Gergiev will conduct the Mariinsky Orchestra in a concert performance of Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker." The Czech Philharmonic and its new chief conductor, Semyon Bychkov, will perform a Dvorak program featuring the cellist Alisa Weilerstein. Ivan Fischer brings his Budapest Festival Orchestra for two nights of Bartok. Andris Nelsons will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a Strauss program featuring Ms. Fleming singing selections from "Capriccio," and Thomas Ades will lead the ensemble and Kirill Gerstein in the New York premiere of his piano concerto. (Mr. Ades and Mr. Gerstein also play a two piano concert.) Yannick Nezet Seguin will conduct two of his orchestras: He will be back in front of the Philadelphia Orchestra for three concerts, and will lead the Met Orchestra, where he is the music director designate, in Mahler's "Ruckert Lieder" and Bruckner's Symphony No. 7. The elusive tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who defied expectations by not canceling his Schubert recital at Carnegie this month, is scheduled to return in October to sing music from German operettas and films of the 1920s and '30s. Anna Netrebko, herself a multiple canceler on Carnegie in the past, will give a recital in December. The countertenor Iestyn Davies, currently appearing on Broadway in "Farinelli and the King," will join the lutenist Thomas Dunford in a program featuring music by Dowland, Purcell and Handel. And the mezzo soprano J'Nai Bridges will sing songs and spirituals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
What's in the Tax Bill, and How It Will Affect You (UPDATED) Republican lawmakers passed a sweeping tax overhaul this week. Several of the most anticipated changes such as a significant increase in the standard deduction and the curtailing of state and local income tax breaks made the final cut of the bill. Some of the most controversial proposals, like eliminating the medical deduction, were wiped away. Many of these provisions are temporary, however, and are set to expire after seven years. They all take effect in 2018, unless noted otherwise. The child tax credit is increased to 2,000 for each child and up to 1,400 of that can be delivered in the form of refundable credit, which means taxpayers can receive money back even if they have no tax liability. (Taxpayers may also reduce their tax bill by up to 500 for other dependents who are not children.) But that all changes in 2025, when the deductions and exemptions revert to current law. NOW You can generally deduct the amount you pay for state and local income taxes, including property taxes, on your federal income tax return. You can also deduct the interest you pay each year on mortgage debt up to 1 million, a cap that can cover multiple homes. Plus, you can generally deduct up to 100,000 in interest you pay on a home equity loan or line of credit. NEW PLAN Taxpayers may deduct only up to 10,000 total, which may include any combination of state and local income taxes and property taxes (or sales plus property taxes in states where there is no income tax). But don't bother trying to prepay your state and local income taxes for 2018 before year end to circumvent the new limit. The proposal is one step ahead of you and your accountant and won't allow it. For homeowners who pay their state income taxes quarterly, it is O.K. to pay the last and final installment due Jan. 16 on or before the last day of this year, if you want to claim the deduction this year. Taxpayers can also prepay their 2018 property taxes as long as their local jurisdiction allows it. You can also deduct the interest paid on mortgage debt up to 750,000; that includes your primary home and one other "qualified residence," which may include a mobile home or a boat. But if you bought a property before Dec. 15, you can still deduct interest up to 1 million (the limit under current law). Home equity loan interest is no longer deductible for anyone. NEW PLAN In 2017 and 2018, you can deduct out of pocket medical expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income. But come 2019, it will go back to the 10 percent threshold for all taxpayers. NOW Under the Affordable Care Act, individuals must buy a qualifying health insurance plan or pay a penalty unless they qualify for an exemption. NEW PLAN The penalty is reduced to zero, which, in practice, means that fewer healthy individuals may sign up for coverage and that is expected to lead to higher premiums for people who do not qualify for premium subsidies. NOW The A.M.T. is an alternative way of calculating income taxes due, to make sure that people with lots of deductions don't pay too little. It often hits higher income families, especially in states where the state income tax is high. NEW PLAN The A.M.T. will not go away, even though many Republicans had hoped to eliminate it. But through 2025, it will apply to fewer people and kick in at higher income levels. NOW In general, estates pay 40 percent federal tax on inherited property, but rules waive that tax for estates up to 5,490,000. NOW People who own small businesses of various sorts generally pay income taxes based on the normal rate for individual taxes. Often, they are involved in or run partnerships, sole proprietorships, limited liability companies and S corporations. NEW PLAN Starting next year and before Jan. 1, 2026, individuals can generally deduct 20 percent of their qualified business income from a partnership, S corporation and sole proprietorship. There are limits, however, including a phaseout for the deduction that begins at 157,500 of individual income and 315,000 of income for couples filing jointly. NOW Your money grows free of any capital gains taxes and you can withdraw it tax free to pay for higher education expenses. NEW PLAN Nothing changes with higher education, but you will also be able to withdraw up to 10,000 each year, per child, to pay for private or religious school and receive the same tax benefits. Also, families can roll 529 funds over to ABLE accounts, which offer tax advantages for people with disabilities. NOW You can deduct fees you pay to an investment adviser and similar expenses related to money management but only if they add up to at least 2 percent of your adjusted gross income. The same rule applies to work expenses your employer does not reimburse you for. NEW PLAN These will no longer be allowable deductions, though that lasts only through 2025. NOW Under current law, you can perform a kind of do over if you've recently converted an individual retirement account into a Roth I.R.A. The way this works is that if you make the conversion and then the value of the account falls or some other circumstance changes before Oct. 15 of the following year, you can recharacterize the Roth so that it is a plain old I.R.A. again. This could allow people to avoid paying high tax bills on an amount of money that had then fallen in value after the conversion. NEW PLAN No more do overs. Once you convert to a Roth, it stays a Roth. NOW If you're a victim of a house fire, flood, burglary or similar event, you can generally deduct losses as long as each loss is more than 100 and all losses collectively exceed 10 percent of your adjustable gross income. NEW PLAN Starting next year, taxpayers can still deduct these losses using the same rules but only if the loss occurred during an event that the president officially declared to be a disaster. NOW Alimony is a deductible expense for people paying it, and those who receive it must pay income taxes. NEW PLAN Divorce would become a bit more burdensome for the ex spouse who pays alimony because it would no longer be a deductible expense. But the person receiving the payments would no longer need to pay tax on the income received. The change would take effect for divorce and separation agreements executed starting in 2019. Ex spouses who want to modify existing agreements created on or before Dec. 31, 2018 can continue to follow the current 2017 tax rules, as long as they specify that in the new agreement. These individuals are likely to stick with the old rules generally speaking, it would only make sense to change to the new tax treatment if the ex spouse paying the support is in a lower tax bracket than the recipient. NOW Taxpayers can deduct moving expenses even if they do not itemize their tax returns as long as the new workplace is at least 50 miles farther from the old home than the old job location was from the old home. (If you had no workplace, the new job must be at least 50 miles from your old home.) NEW PLAN Moving costs would generally no longer be a deductible expense starting in 2018, though it allows some exceptions for members of the military. NOW You can usually deduct the amount your tax preparation specialist billed you or any similar tax related expenses, like software you purchase and the fee to file your forms electronically. NEW PLAN Taxpayers would no longer be able to take this deduction. NOW You can exclude up to 20 a month from your income for expenses related to regular bicycle commuting, as long as you are not receiving other pretax commuting benefits from your employer. NEW PLAN Starting next year, these expenses are no longer deductible. NOW There are different ways to measure the change in the cost of living. Right now, the federal government largely relies on what's known as the Consumer Price Index, referred to as the C.P.I. NEW PLAN The bill would change the measure to what's known as the chained C.P.I., which generally rises more slowly than what is used now. This would slow the speed at which tax brackets grow with inflation, so taxpayers would more quickly find themselves in higher marginal tax brackets. Using a slower growing measure also means certain tax breaks would also grow more slowly, like the earned income tax credit, among others. This change is permanent; the measure would continue to be used even after other tax changes, including the increased standard deduction, expire. NOW You can deduct gambling losses but only up to the amount of any gambling income during any given year. NEW PLAN The bill clarifies that people (including many professional gamblers) who also deduct wagering expenses, such as the cost of travel to and from a casino, must add those expenses to their total losses before comparing that sum to their total taxable winnings for the purpose of making the overall deduction calculation. This clarification does not apply to expenses that gamblers incur beyond 2025. NOW In general, when you owe a debt and the entity to whom you owe it forgives that debt, the amount of the forgiven debt counts as taxable income. This is not currently the case for the people who will soon benefit when the federal government wipes away their debts under the public service loan forgiveness program (and also people in some other health service and other loan programs). But the amount is taxable when student loan balances are forgiven in the event of a death or disability. NEW PLAN Discharged debt in the event of death or total and permanent disability will no longer be taxable. The provision expires after 2025. NOW This year, if a child collects unearned income above 2,100, that money is generally taxed at the parents' tax rates instead of the child's, if the parents' rate is higher. (Children are generally defined as someone under the age of 19, or a full time student under 24.) NEW PLAN Under the new rules, the child's net unearned income would be taxed using the brackets that trusts and estates follow; that system has a top bracket of 37 percent, which applies to income that exceeds 12,500. Tax experts said this won't change much for higher income families since they were already paying similar rates. But middle class families could feel more of a pinch if their children have portfolios generating significant income from, say, an inherited individual retirement account. For children with smaller amounts of unearned income, they may come out slightly ahead. The rules revert to today's law in 2025. Taxation on children's earned income is unchanged and is taxed at single taxpayers' rates. WHAT DID NOT CHANGE STUDENT LOAN INTEREST The House had proposed to repeal the deduction for student loan interest, but the final bill has no repeal. ADOPTION ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS The House had proposed to repeal the deduction for financial assistance that an employer may provide when an employee adopts a child, but the final bill has no repeal. DEPENDENT CARE ACCOUNTS At one point, the House had proposed to eliminate workplace dependent care savings accounts that allow employees to put away 5,000 free of income taxes each year. It later altered the provision to have the accounts disappear in 2023. The Senate never proposed any change, and there is no change in the final bill. TUITION WAIVERS Employees of educational institutions who receive reduced tuition or a waiver for themselves, spouses or dependents are generally not taxed on that income. This is particularly helpful for certain graduate students; their tuition is waived as part of arrangements in which they teach or perform research at their university. The House had proposed to tax the benefit, but the final bill does not have this provision. EMPLOYER PAID TUITION When employers pay your tuition for continuing education, the amount they pay is not taxable income for you as long as it meets certain conditions and amounts to no more than 5,250 a year. The House had proposed that the benefit be taxable, but the final bill does not have this provision. CAPITAL GAINS WHEN SELLING A HOME With some exceptions, a married couple filing their taxes jointly can exclude up to 500,000 in capital gains on the sale of a home, as long as they have used it as a primary residence for at least two of the last five years. A single individual can exclude up to 250,000. The House and Senate both proposed to make this rule more strict, but neither provision prevailed, and the rule will remain the same. TEACHER DEDUCTION Teachers can take a 250 deduction for money they spend on certain job related and classroom expenses. The House wanted to eliminate the tax break, while the Senate wanted to double it temporarily. Neither proposal made the final bill, and the rule will remain the same. 401(K) TAX BREAK Before the House and Senate introduced their bills, there were rumors they might try to restrict the amount of pretax money that people could put into their workplace savings accounts. They did not try to do this, though, and the rules for these accounts remain the same. ELECTRIC CARS Buyers of qualifying plug in electric vehicles, like the Chevrolet Bolt or Volt and Tesla's cars, can sometimes get a tax credit for up to 7,500. The House had proposed eliminating the tax break, but the provision didn't make the final bill. So the tax break remains. ARCHER MEDICAL SAVINGS ACCOUNTS These accounts came into existence before health savings accounts but work in similar ways. The House bill had proposed to take away the tax break for contributions to the accounts, but that did not make it to the final bill SELLING STOCK AND MUTUAL FUNDS Under current law, people who have shares of stock or funds in a taxable investment account can choose which shares to sell if they are selling part of their investment. This allows people who bought shares at different times to sell only the ones that will help them pay the least amount in taxes on any gains. The Senate proposed to restrict such moves, but its provision did not make it to the final bill. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
A French platform asked auteurs to put together their ideal cinematheques. It turns out filmmakers with seemingly little in common share favorite movies. To heck with algorithms: Sometimes, you need a human touch. A few years ago, three French filmmakers, inspired by pop stars' playlists on Apple Music and Spotify, decided the model could apply to film streaming. "We wanted to launch a site that would be the ideal online cinematheque and we thought we'd use directors as curators," Cedric Klapisch recently said via FaceTime. In 2015, Klapisch ("L'Auberge Espagnole" and its sequels) and his friends Pascale Ferran ("Lady Chatterley") and Laurent Cantet ("The Class") helped start the platform LaCinetek. Organized around lists submitted by directors from all over the world, the catalog is a unique peek into these filmmakers' brains. The project puts a cool spin on the "recommended if you like" approach, basing it not on your viewing history but on tips from those who actually make movies. At first the founders called on people they knew hence the large number of French participants but LaCinetek now has an international roster of contributors, including Dario Argento, Marjane Satrapi and John Woo. It also includes posthumous lists gleaned from Francois Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa, among others. "We're trying to reach out to Noah Baumbach, if you know how to contact him," Klapisch said. "We're also looking for Paul Thomas Anderson." The selection purposefully steers clear of recent releases films must be at least 15 years old. "Sites like Netflix or Amazon focus on the freshness of their catalog," Klapisch said, laughing. "For us it's the opposite: we're into rancid movies, the ones that aren't fresh." Definitely not "fresh" is F.W. Murnau's silent masterpiece "Sunrise" (1927), which appears on 21 filmmakers' lists; "Vertigo" is a close second. Alfred Hitchcock earns the most mentions of all directors, followed by Jean Renoir. While people in the United States can't subscribe to LaCinetek, Americans can still peruse the lists and use the addictive cross referencing function. You can easily spot, for example, which 13 directors picked "Barry Lyndon" as a touchstone, or the only one to include "Bambi" (looking at you, Damien Chazelle). Even better is when you realize that only two directors picked a certain movie, thus illuminating unexpected connections. Here are five films picked by couples that may not be so odd after all. It's not at all surprising that Park Chan wook, responsible for the brutal action movies "Oldboy" and "Lady Vengeance," included Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror classic "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in his recommendations. More intriguing is the festival circuit favorite Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose experimental, gently elliptical style is light years away from both Hooper's and Park's. Ah, to be a fly on the wall when a curious gore fiend decides to watch Weerasethakul's idiosyncratic ghost story "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives." 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' It is simply delightful to imagine Bong Joon Ho ("Parasite") and Celine Sciamma (the period romance "Portrait of a Lady on Fire") bonding over "Close Encounters," Steven Spielberg's hit about the buildup to an alien encounter. The film, from 1977, is the rare big budget blockbuster to display a poetic touch and, perhaps even odder nowadays, a sense of brooding ambiguity that still allows for hopefulness. The choice is perhaps not so surprising from the director of "The Host" and "Snowpiercer," but it casts an intriguing light on Sciamma, a director known for naturalistic work. She submitted an eclectic list that is fairly heavy on fantasy and science fiction, including another Spielberg movie, "E.T. the Extraterrestrial," as well as "Soylent Green," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "2001: A Space Odyssey," among many others. The late Agnes Varda often adopted a poetic visual style and was attuned to people's quirks; the Scottish born Lynne Ramsay, whose best films include "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and "Morvern Callar," tends to take a stern, unflinching look on life on the edge of acceptable norms. The two seem to share little, but their picks overlap six times. The only film exclusive to both directors is Roman Polanski's Palme d'Or winning "The Pianist," from 2002. At first the relatively conventional drama feels like a left field choice, but the film is about survival, something both Ramsay and Varda touched upon through their careers. Equally interesting, of course, is why Polanski's movie, which was showered with awards when it came out, has so few other fans. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is streaming on the Criterion Channel; "Lady" is on Fubo; "Pickup" is on Flix Fling. Martin Scorsese, among the most passionate of cinephiles, and the brilliant, unpredictable Leos Carax are both fascinated by the mystique of filmmaking itself The New York Times described Carax's last movie, "Holy Motors," as "a love letter (or an elegy) to the cinema." Typically, Scorsese submitted not one but two lists to LaCinetek: "foundational films" and an "alternative list." It's in the latter that he and Carax pair up on three movies. There are two American noirs: Orson Welles's virtuosic "The Lady From Shanghai" (1947) and Samuel Fuller's "Pickup on South Street," a violent slice of pulp from 1953. Then there is Rainer Werner Fassbinder's made for TV epic "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1980), which clocks in at almost 16 hours. All three choices are classic yet subversive, and always boundary pushing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
At roughly 7,000 feet above sea level, Santa Fe, N.M., offers visitors a culturally diverse experience, steeped in the history of the American West. The relatively dry climate (with cool mornings and nights) and above average air quality attract many outdoor enthusiasts to the area, which has nearly 1.5 million acres of national forest. With a compact downtown dominated by pueblo style architecture and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the background, Santa Fe has preserved its inviting, small town feel. Don Pedro de Peralta, a Spanish conquistador who later became governor general of New Mexico, established the present day location of the city from 1609 to 1610. As a result, Santa Fe is the oldest capital city in the United States, despite New Mexico's relatively young statehood. (The state was admitted to the Union in 1912, ahead of only Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii.) Fernanda Santos, chief of the Phoenix bureau of The New York Times, occasionally finds herself in the area when reporting in the American Southwest. When arriving in Santa Fe from Albuquerque, one can generally choose between Interstate 25, roughly an hour's drive, and State Route 14, a National Scenic Byway also known as the Turquoise Trail. "The Turquoise Trail is a gem," Ms. Santos said. "The road goes up and down and around the mountains, crossing old mining towns like Madrid, whose shops sell beautiful pottery, paintings and American Indian jewelry for less than you'd buy them in Santa Fe. One spot I love is Conley Studio Pottery, which features work from several New Mexican artists." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
This is my last regular column before Election Day, so what is there left to say? Instead of giving you an answer, let me leave you with a question, which I think is the question. What would you do if your kid came home from school and said: "Mom, Dad, my teacher said President Obama ordered the killing of the U.S. Special Forces team that supposedly killed Osama bin Laden. My teacher said Bin Laden is actually still alive, that the guy the Navy SEALs killed was a 'body double.' He also claimed that Obama's aides got Iran to send Bin Laden to Pakistan so Obama could have a 'trophy kill.' What's a trophy kill? My teacher said he had heard all of this somewhere on the internet and he just thought he'd pass it along to our class. Mom, Dad, is this true?" I know how I'd respond. I'd immediately call the school principal and ask how someone peddling such vile and fraudulent conspiracy stuff could be teaching in any classroom in America. Who wouldn't? It violates the most basic judgment and norms of decency that we expect of anyone teaching in public school or serving in public office. And that is really the question Donald Trump's voters can't ignore: Why would you be ready to fire your kid's teacher for passing along such disgusting nonsense but be willing to rehire the nation's teacher in chief our president, the man with the most read blackboard in the world after he peddled exactly these crazy conspiracy theories to some 87 million people on Twitter the other day? Is there anything more warped? On Oct. 13, "Trump retweeted a post from an account linked to QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists, which has since been suspended," reported CNN. "The tweet alleged 'Biden and Obama may have had SEAL Team 6 killed,' that Osama bin Laden was still alive, and that the man killed in the Obama directed raid led by SEAL Team 6 was actually a body double. Later that night, Trump retweeted a post claiming top Obama administration officials colluded to bring Bin Laden from Iran to Pakistan for 'Obama's trophy kill.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Outbid, but Not Down or Out For two years, Amber Krause and Deepak Rao were happy in a one bedroom with a view of the American Museum of Natural History. Then the rent rose from 3,100 a month to 3,600. "Renting wasn't very economically sound for us," Mr. Rao said. "We were paying more for the location and the view than for anything else." So last fall, they decided to buy a two bedroom a place they could "plan to stay forever," Ms. Krause said. With little knowledge about purchasing, they made an appointment at the Corcoran Group's West Side office and met an agent there, Michelle King. Ms. Krause wanted a nice kitchen and room for a dining table. Mr. Rao wanted abundant light. The two liked the Upper West Side, but were also interested in parts of Brooklyn. Beyond that, "we were trying to be as flexible as we could," Ms. Krause said. Their budget was up to 800,000. "I would research apartments nonstop and figure out how many apartments we could see on Sundays, with Michelle making appointments for us during the week," Ms. Krause said. On Saturdays, they visited open houses in Brooklyn. They ruled out tiny second bedrooms and shabby kitchens. Mr. Rao disliked dark places that "needed to have a light on during most of the day." A two bedroom in a postwar co op building on West 103rd Street was "the first apartment we felt comfortable with and excited to make an offer on," Ms. Krause said. It was larger than most, with nearly 1,000 square feet. The asking price was 699,000, with maintenance of almost 1,400 a month. The couple offered 720,000, worried they were overbidding. But they were outbid, and the apartment sold for 740,000. On the Bushwick edge of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, they found a duplex of nearly 1,000 square feet in a boutique condominium building. With a price of 795,000, it included three outdoor spaces. Monthly charges were a bit more than 300. The couple arrived early for the open house, finding "a line of people standing outside in the snow," Ms. Krause said. "It was by far the nicest apartment we had ever seen. We didn't know a lot about the neighborhood, and what we saw wasn't necessarily charming, but the apartment more than made up for its surroundings." That one had 17 bids and sold for 995,000. The couple were stunned. It was shortly after the holidays and "the market took off like crazy," Ms. King said. In any event, the couple preferred Park Slope. "The things we liked about the Upper West Side, we figured we'd like in Park Slope," Mr. Rao said. Another similarity: "Park Slope is really expensive." They were outbid on three places there: a new condominium building on Fourth Avenue, and two walk up buildings. Back in Manhattan at the West 103rd Street building, they visited an apartment in the same line as the one that got away, but on a lower floor, also for 699,000. Monthly maintenance was in the low 1,300s. The kitchen wasn't quite as nice. Ms. Krause thought, "O.K., if we didn't get the first one, we could get the second one." Again, they were outbid. That one sold for 750,000. At this point, the couple had made six offers. "They were despondent," Ms. King said. "For every single one of them, they bid over ask and some went significantly over ask." They were worried, too. "I am a planner," Ms. Krause said. But in this case, "I had no control, so it was hard for me. It was discouraging because we were hearing from Michelle that we were solid candidates in terms of our finances." So they downsized. "We had to seriously consider one bedrooms because we were essentially priced out of two bedrooms," Ms. Krause said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The trials of the humble honeybee are magnified to epic proportions in the meticulous, magnificent documentary "The Pollinators." Combining extensive interviews with purposeful nature photography, the film presents a thoroughly researched look at the causes and effects of the rapidly declining bee population, essential for the food supply in the United States. The film emphasizes the crucial role bees play in pollinating plants so that they can bear fruit, and it shows how parasites, pesticides and the lack of biodiverse habitats within industrial farming have created an increasingly hostile environment for the bees to do their work. Beekeepers can help to regenerate bee populations, but if too many bees die too quickly, the entire food supply chain is imperiled. "The Pollinators" uses the almond industry as one example: Each year, beekeepers transport their hives to California to help farmers pollinate their orchards for the almond harvest. With bee populations in decline and the popularity of almonds constant, this means nearly every commercial bee in the country must be deployed just to keep up with that harvest. If the director Peter Nelson shows the weakness of current industrial farming models, he also shows agricultural alternatives by following experts in their fields, including the farmers and beekeepers whose livelihoods are at stake. The natural beauty of these specialists' orchards does more than lend loveliness to dense information it gives its audience a way to visually understand agricultural health. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"Art doesn't come from what is around you, but from what is inside of you," says the French painter and author Francoise Gilot. The 96 year old French painter and author Francoise Gilot famously known as the former lover and muse to Pablo Picasso, and the mother of two of his children, Claude and Paloma has a book of sketches out this week that she completed during her travels to India, Senegal and Venice between 1974 and 1981. While most artists use sketchbooks to harness their impressions into material for their work to help them remember Ms. Gilot has used hers to forget. "Things I have seen, I want to take them out of my mind," she told me as we sat in her brightly lit living room on Manhattan's Upper West Side. (Ms. Gilot's home doubles as a studio in which she still paints nearly every day. Canvases are hung on the two story high walls, stacked on the floor and displayed on easels.) "Art doesn't come from what is around you, but from what is inside of you." Her distinctly whimsical sensibility permeated our conversation. When asked about her years with Picasso and the comparisons that have been made between their work, she replied with a sly grin: "Sometimes you need an umbrella when it rains." But Ms. Gilot has hardly lived her life under the shelter of that umbrella. Dorothea Elkon, her New York gallery owner and longtime friend, stressed Ms. Gilot's fierce independence. While the legacy of her relationship with Picasso has endured as an undeniable presence in her life (Paloma Picasso called it a "nuisance" to her mother), Ms. Gilot has worked hard to maintain her autonomous presence in the art world. "It's a dedication that's essential in her life," said Ms. Picasso, who vividly recalls being a child, sitting on the balcony outside her mother's studio and watching her paint for hours. By the fall of 1953, Ms. Gilot had ended the relationship. Picasso was displeased; after all, she was allegedly the only woman ever to have left him. He ran her out of town and turned the Paris art world against her, Ms. Elkon said. In 1955, she married the French artist Luc Simon. Their marriage lasted only a few years and produced one daughter, Aurelia. In 1970, Ms. Gilot married the virologist Jonas Salk; they were together until his death in 1995. The sketches in this latest book are a stylistic departure from her body of work, and she considers them deliberately unfinished, completed as they were in notebooks she kept while traveling with Salk when he was collecting research on the polio vaccine he developed (except for the sketches from Venice, a city that has captivated her since childhood). They contain watercolor drawings but also words, written in careful, beautiful script. For Ms. Gilot, colors, text, shapes are used interchangeably synesthetically. "If you can think of something in words, then you can see it in images too," she said. Narrative has always been paramount to Ms. Gilot. The floor to ceiling bookshelves that line the walls of her apartment, which is just down the block from the Hotel des Artistes, are a testament to her literary mind. Visual monographs on Claude Monet, Francis Bacon and, yes, Picasso are shelved alongside volumes of T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and Evelyn Waugh. She has published collections of her own verse, and even these sketchbooks contain full pages devoted solely to her handwritten text. "I was always good with poetry and letters," she said. Ms. Gilot's friend, the actor and playwright Therese Cremieux, who interviewed her for the pamphlet that is included in "Three Travel Sketchbooks," is the one who convinced her to publish this book. Ms. Gilot was hesitant. "Francoise said, 'No, it's not going to interest anyone,'" said Ms. Cremieux, who argued that readers would like to see what Ms. Gilot calls "the process." Aurelia Engel who, in addition to being her daughter, is also Ms. Gilot's archivist noted that if you look through her body of work, "you can see all of the people in her life coming through, all of the friends, the men in her life, the children growing up, the places she went. You can really feel the emotion she is going through and how she reacts, and what catches her eye or memory." The publication coincides with a period of particular commercial success for Ms. Gilot. "In the last 10 years, there's been a tremendous snowball of interest in her work," Ms. McGaughey said. "Pieces that sold for 10,000 10 to 15 years ago are twice that or more now. The market can't get enough of her." A few weeks after I met with Ms. Gilot, I visited the Elkon Gallery on the Upper East Side where several of her works are held. Two of those works had been viewed by a potential buyer that week: a painting of herself with Paloma, "Protection," from 1954, and a drawing, "Self Portrait by the Sea," from 1946, which she completed when she was 25 the year she began living with Picasso. In the 1946 drawing, she's looking upward and there's a man in the background walking toward her. It reminded me of something she said about her art when we met: "In the work of all the generations of painters who were like Picasso, the figure is so huge, it's all over the painting," she explained. "Whereas me, I have turned it the other way around. The figure is lost in a universe that is very much bigger." One could say the same about her personal outlook on life, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
As airlines try to convince Americans to fly again, they have touted their policies for keeping passengers safe, including the requirement that everyone onboard a plane wear a mask. But travelers on recent flights said the rules are not being enforced. And flight attendants said they have been told not to confront passengers who opt to not follow them. Drusilla Lawton flew from South Carolina to Wyoming in May on two American Airlines flights and said the mask rule wasn't being enforced during boarding or on the plane. "I was just horrified watching the gate agent let people through without their masks," said Ms. Lawton, a part time portfolio manager. "When I was walking down the aisle I was wondering, 'How many people aren't wearing a mask?' There were so many." Ms. Lawton said the first leg of the trip was "particularly bad" and the people across the aisle from her, those in front of her and those behind her did not wear masks. Although the woman sitting next to her put on a mask after Ms. Lawton asked her to, there was never an announcement from the flight crew or captain about the rules. On social media and in emails to The Times, other travelers described similar scenarios, which left them feeling they had to choose between confronting fellow passengers and possibly encountering hostility, and sitting on a flight for hours potentially being exposed to the coronavirus. The patchwork enforcement of policies has left passengers uncomfortable, confused about whether they should be wearing masks or not, and concerned about their safety. They've also left flight attendants with the difficult task of trying to make people do something they won't be punished for if they choose not to comply. "Airlines have said follow the guidelines, but don't enforce them, don't tackle people to the ground and don't turn flights around if they don't listen," said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants union. "That gets around to the public then it's, 'I don't have to do this. There are no consequences if I don't do this.' That, too, can lead to conflict, not just with the flight attendants, but with other passengers, who get angry and all of a sudden we have to break up a fight." Recent passengers on Delta Air Lines have posted on Twitter about fliers failing to wear masks ("What's the point in requiring if there is no follow through?" one man asked the airline in a tweet). Another Delta passenger wrote on Twitter that he asked a flight attendant about the mask rule after seeing a passenger, a flight attendant and the pilot without masks on. He was told that the rules couldn't be enforced. And after one doctor's Twitter post about the lack of social distancing on a United Airlines flight went viral, another United traveler said she'd had to ask a gate agent to put on a mask before getting on a full flight to Chicago from New Jersey. "If you're traveling right now, be prepared to advocate for yourself," she wrote, adding that, "United did not follow their own social distancing guidelines," and many travelers were not wearing masks. Nicole Carriere, a spokeswoman for United, said that face coverings are mandatory for all employees and passengers onboard and the airline is providing free masks to customers who need them. In instances where people refuse to wear a mask, they can be pulled aside "to further understand their concerns and discuss options," Ms. Carriere said. "This would include things like moving them to a new seat where they could maintain a safe social distance from other passengers." Denying someone boarding would be a "last resort," she said. Aims Coney, 65, recently flew from Missoula, Mont., to Boston with his wife. When the boarding group for their second flight, on American, was called, people gathered close together, causing him some anxiety about the lack of social distancing, Mr. Coney, who is known as Andy, said in a phone interview. "The crew made no effort to ask passengers to wear their masks properly and even joked about the rule with an obnoxious guy across from us with his mask under his chin who seemed to be enjoying making everyone else uncomfortable," he said. Mr. Coney, said that he and his wife were also particularly concerned about people traveling without masks because the two of them are in the "over 65 vulnerable group" and had been deferring their return home to Massachusetts since mid March. They only decided to fly home after American announced its social distancing rules and safety measures. Typically, when an event as major as the coronavirus is involved, government agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have come together with airlines, unions and other stakeholders to create policies and emergency procedures to help travelers and transportation staff, said Ms. Nelson of the flight attendants union. But since the coronavirus pandemic began, no such coordination has taken place. That has left the airlines to set their own rules and their own standards of enforcement. "In normal times something like this calls for a federal response, but we don't have it," Ms. Nelson said. "In an event like 9/11 things were incredibly transparent. There were emergency procedures put into place. None of that is happening now. We don't have consistent rules, so the airlines are trying to figure out how to navigate this." Last month, Reuters reported that the three airlines instructed their employees not to enforce the rules that had been promoted to travelers. "Once on board and off the gate, the face covering policy becomes more lenient," American said to its staff in an email that was quoted in the Reuters report. "The flight attendant's role is informational, not enforcement, with respect to the face covering policy." Ms. Nelson said that one concern for flight attendants has been about what happens if there's a confrontation with a passenger who is asked to wear a mask, but doesn't want to. "All of this is so fuzzy because the airlines have made this edict and they can't enforce it," said Benet Wilson, an aviation expert at The Points Guy, a travel site aimed at frequent fliers. "Airlines can say people should follow these rules all they want, but in the end, if they tell a person they can't come on they have to refund them and they don't want to do that." The airlines, Ms. Nelson said, are creating policies quickly, in a changing environment and without unifying guidance, so rules can be confusing for people flying with multiple airlines. "It's likely that a traveler who read about how this will work could get to the airport and things are very different by the time they get there," she said. The airlines have also said they will leave middle seats open when possible to encourage social distancing and change boarding procedures in order to avoid having big groups congregate at the gate or on the jetway. But passengers have complained that these guidelines are also not always being followed. Lisa Hanna, a spokeswoman for Delta, said that the airline is requiring people to wear masks "beginning in the check in lobby, and across Delta touchpoints, including Delta Sky Clubs, in jet bridges and onboard for the duration of the flight except during the food and beverage service. A face mask is required to begin the boarding process, and also strongly encouraged in high traffic areas including security lines and restrooms." Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for American, said that "American, like other U.S. airlines, requires customers to wear a face covering while on board, and this requirement is enforced at the gate while boarding. We also remind customers with announcements both during boarding and at departure." But Tony Scott said that wasn't the case. Mr. Scott, a 53 year old marketing executive who lives in Los Angeles, booked a first class ticket on the airline, expecting that with social distancing policies he would have adequate space. But the passenger next to him, a teenage girl, refused to wear one. When he talked to the flight attendant, he was told that masks were optional, even though the American app said otherwise. The flight attendant later told Mr. Scott that masks were mandatory, but not for children. "This was a 16 17 year old Caucasian girl," Mr. Scott wrote on Twitter. "I explained that I'm in the HIGH RISK category as an African American male with asthma and other health issues. No other accommodation was offered." Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The return of Major League Baseball took a troubling turn on Monday when a looming threat became reality: an outbreak of positive coronavirus tests within a team. While league officials said there were no plans to suspend or cancel the season which began just last Thursday two games were postponed Monday after the Miami Marlins learned that at least 14 members of the team's traveling party, including 12 players, had tested positive for the virus. "The health of our players and staff has been and will continue to be our primary focus as we navigate through these uncharted waters," Derek Jeter, the Marlins' chief executive, said in a statement, adding that the team needed to "take a collective pause and try to properly grasp the totality of this situation." For many Americans, the long delayed return of baseball was a sign of normalcy during a pandemic that has shut down much of the nation and thrown daily activities into disarray. Even without fans in the stands, the league's return had seemed like a triumph, or at least a comforting sight, after more than four months with a largely shuttered sports landscape. But the news about the Marlins was a stark reminder of the challenge facing a country trying to find a more normal routine. If baseball, a 10 billion industry operating in a controlled environment and employing frequent testing cannot prevent infections, then how are schools, restaurants and other retail businesses going to do so? "I think it's another indictment of the United States' overall approach to Covid," said Dr. Michael Saag, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He added: "We find ourselves impatient. And that's what I think we're suffering from, both in terms of not just Major League Baseball but for every other thing we're trying to do." The crisis baseball is confronting also raises concerns for other sports planning their return, particularly professional and college football, given the shifting geography of the outbreak. While many leagues preparing to start up again are doing so in contained environments, playing all their games in one or two locations, the National Football League is planning on holding games at its usual stadiums across the country, like baseball. The Marlins, for now, are staying in Philadelphia, Jeter said, while awaiting the results of another round of testing for players and staff. The Phillies were tested at their ballpark on Monday while the Yankees stayed at their hotel, which the Marlins did not share. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. The Orioles, who were in Miami, made plans to return to Baltimore, where they are scheduled to host the Marlins on Wednesday and Thursday. The Marlins news heightened a sense of dread among players and coaches who opted to participate in this season. At least a dozen players opted out before the restarted season. "This thing really hits home now that you see half a team get infected and go from one city to another," said Washington Nationals Manager Dave Martinez. He added: "I'll be honest with you, I'm scared, I really am." Kansas City Royals first baseman Ryan O'Hearn, who returned to his team Monday after missing the opening series following a positive coronavirus test, said the Marlins' outbreak was sobering. "It seems like it's spreading like wildfire," O'Hearn said. "It's definitely a scary situation. Everyone realizes the kind of risk we're taking." On Friday, the first day of games for most teams, the league announced that only six of 10,939 samples it had tested that week (or 0.05 percent) had returned new positives. But most of those tests were conducted while teams were training at their home parks, before traveling to road sites. The league is attempting to stage a 60 game regular season using 30 stadiums across the United States, including a Class AAA ballpark in Buffalo for the Toronto Blue Jays, who were barred from playing home games by the Canadian government because of the risk of travel to and from the United States. Baseball's decision to play games at home sites stands apart from professional basketball and hockey, which are preparing to resume play in contained environments, rather than across the continent. The National Basketball Association, which will resume its season on Thursday, is housing players and holding games at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., while the National Hockey League is using sites in two cities when it restarts on Saturday: Toronto and Edmonton. Those leagues are also using fewer teams and planning fewer games than baseball is; both were deep into their seasons when sports shut down in mid March, so hockey teams will move directly to the playoffs, with 24 of 31 teams taking part, while the N.B.A.'s plan involves only 22 of its 30 teams for the end of its season. The professional football season is set to begin on Sept. 10, while decisions about fall college sports, including football, have been largely left to university presidents and conferences. While some conferences, including the Ivy League, have canceled fall sports and others have already pared down their schedules, most major universities are expecting to move ahead with varsity sports. But even they have acknowledged the tenuous nature of those plans. "I'm personally concerned about schools reopening in hot spot states, and we know where they are," Dr. Saag said. "I think Major League Baseball is kind of the vanguard on this, and the other collections of people be it students or campuses or the N.B.A. perhaps it's all going to follow suit because we're in such a big hurry." In an interview with The New York Times in May, Commissioner Rob Manfred outlined the challenges of planning baseball during the pandemic. "One of the things that floated up from one of the experts is, 'Gee whiz, a way that you can do this is to quarantine players,'" Manfred said, adding later, "And then you're going to start a four and a half month season, and your life is going to be hotel to ballpark, back to hotel, room service, not see your family." "So then we realized, gee, that's pretty tough. So then we started talking about including families, and you realize as you get into that phase that you get into quarantine numbers that are insane." Manfred said that the league had considered holding games in three hubs: Arizona for teams in the Western divisions, Texas for teams in the Central and Florida for teams in the East. At the time, Manfred said, those states were most receptive to holding games. As baseball considered that plan late in the spring, though, the spread of the virus ebbed in some hard hit parts of the country and businesses began to reopen as states pushed for economic recovery. Baseball then shifted its focus to playing in stadiums with no fans and while outlining extensive health and safety protocols, even as the coronavirus began to spread in wider swaths of the country. While many players opposed the quarantine idea, some may now question the wisdom of the path the sides chose. "You just see comments, 'Oh, this was expected,'" Yankees pitcher Adam Ottavino said in an interview Monday. "To me, OK, so, well, if it was expected, it's just so reckless in my opinion. But a lot of guys didn't want to do the bubble. "I would've been willing to do the bubble. I thought, personally, that was a no brainer. But I don't speak for everybody," he said. In an interview with MLB Network Monday evening, Manfred said, "We knew that we were going to have positives at some point in time. I remain optimistic that the protocols are strong enough that it will allow us to continue to play, even through an outbreak like this, and complete our season." "I don't put this in the nightmare category," he added. Baseball adjusted its schedule so that teams would play only within their geographic divisions this season, yet reduced travel is still travel, with all it entails flights, bus rides, checking in and out of hotels, meals, hauling equipment from clubhouse to clubhouse, and so on. Some of the official safety rules seemed unrealistic and have been routinely broken, such as the ban on high fiving and spitting, strict social distancing in the dugout and replacing any balls touched by multiple players. Scott Servais, the manager of the Seattle Mariners, said Monday that players and staff must be more vigilant. At big moments in games, he said, safety protocols have been ignored. "I think we're saying all the right stuff, but then you watch the games," he said. "We have to do the right thing. And sometimes you let your emotions get in the way, you just react, and we weren't clearly thinking and slowing it down enough in those spots." David Price, a veteran pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers who opted out of playing this season, citing his family's health, questioned the sincerity of baseball's commitment to players' well being. "Now we REALLY get to see if MLB is going to put players health first," Price wrote on Twitter on Monday. "Remember when Manfred said players health was PARAMOUNT?! Part of the reason I'm at home right now is because players health wasn't being put first. I can see that hasn't changed." With player availability expected to be in flux because of the virus, teams are carrying 30 active players (instead of the usual 26), with a pool of 30 additional players available at an alternate training site near home ballparks. But the idea was to provide coverage for a few absences, not an outbreak like the one the Marlins are experiencing. The league has known all along that such an outcome could be devastating. "If we have a team or two that's really decimated with a number of people who had the virus and can't play for any significant period of time, it could have a real impact on the competition," Manfred said in an interview on "The Dan Patrick Show" on July 2. "And we'd have to think very, very hard about what we're doing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Politics of Dress at the State of the Union None How much of an impact does a fashion statement have the second (or third) time around? Last year at the State of the Union address, a majority of the women of the Democratic Congressional Caucus wore white white suits, white dresses, white shirts, white jumpsuits as a nod to the suffragists, to women's rights, as a silent riposte to President Trump and as a message to the electorate about their own unity. This year, many of them did it again. On the podium, Speaker Nancy Pelosi wore a white pantsuit with her dagger like Speaker's Mace pin on her lapel. Before the event, the women had posed en masse: We're ready in our suffragette white for tonight's State of the Union. WomenUnited pic.twitter.com/prl9Gz1Nqs Rep. Debbie Dingell ( RepDebDingell) February 4, 2020 In the House of Representatives chamber, they sat as a visible block: an island of white in a sea of largely dark suits and the occasional bright blue or red jacket. It was not as startling or as striking as it was last time at this point, post Hillary Clinton candidacy, the white suit has become a political uniform of its own, on par with Mr. Trump's navy suit and red tie (which he also wore Tuesday evening). The color's meaning, and signifier as a form of female empowerment and protest at major public moments, has been codified. We are even starting to expect it. Many female members of Congress wore white at the State of the Union address on Tuesday. But that doesn't mean it was not an effective tactic. In a moment where the only person speaking is the president, but millions outside the chamber are watching, it allowed those members of Congress to have a say. The clothes become a proxy for the point. In the context of the impeachment drama that has been playing out and is expected to come to a close on Wednesday, it was a reminder: That battle may be almost over, but the fight is still on. Clothing has always played an outsize role in the theater of this administration. Mr. Trump responds to the concept of dressing the part, be it the part of a military general, a spokesperson (Sean Spicer missed that memo during his time as press secretary and communications director in the executive branch), or part of the opposition. After all, it's an easy signifier; something almost anyone can read. The irony is the one person who seems reluctant to avail herself of this tool is the first lady. Melania Trump long ago refused to engage in any consistent way with the game of diplomatic dressing; refused to imbue her wardrobe with any meaning other than "clothes I like" (well, except for that confusing "I Really Don't Care, Do U" coat moment); refused to hew to the tradition of supporting American industry by wearing American designers. Even at such freighted moments as the State of the Union, when there's no question the camera will keep panning up to her balcony box, where she sits smiling (sort of) and waving, a silent image. Speaker Nancy Pelosi wore her Speaker's Mace brooch on her lapel. If there was ever a time to engage with that sort of performative dress, it would be the State of the Union; ever a time to support her husband by sartorially waving her (and thus his) patriotism in the face of those who say he has suborned it, this was it. Though Mrs. Trump dipped a toe in the waters for her husband's first major Congressional address, wearing a sparkling suit by Michael Kors, at the following State of the Union came a suit from Christian Dior, then a coatdress by Burberry, and on Tuesday evening, Mrs. Trump wore a dark navy suit from Dolce Gabbana. The Italian label is a staple of her wardrobe remember the 51,500 floral coat she wore to the Group of 7 meeting in Sicily on her first foreign tour? but lately it has been in the spotlight for being canceled in China after seemingly offending the entire country with an ad campaign. Maybe Mrs. Trump wasn't aware of its blunders, or that before that the designers had also been embroiled in controversies over fat shaming and same sex families. Maybe she didn't care that those watching might construe her choice to wear Dolce at such a high profile event as tacit support and that indeed, those pictures of her can be used as exactly that sort of evidence forevermore because she just likes Dolce's clothes (certainly the suit, which was buttoned up to the throat with two military rows of buttons, strictly tailored, was very much in her style comfort zone). If people want to read the wrong message into what she wears, that's their problem. She always looks polished and appropriate. No question. Maybe that is how she defines her duty; her message is there's no message. But when so many others in the room are using clothing as conversation and signaling their intent well in advance and when her role is as the symbolic partner of the nation, is that really an option? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Even as Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief on Thursday that the government shutdown was over and the risk of a default on United States debt was off the table for now, attention immediately turned to a critical, if more ordinary, matter for investors and traders: when will federal number crunchers be providing data on the economy again? The short answer is that the first new figures will be available early next week, but the bigger picture is one of delays stretching into December. What is more, the catch up process could also help slow any decision by the Federal Reserve to ease back on its stimulus efforts. The most eagerly awaited number, the update from the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics on unemployment and job creation in September, will come out Tuesday, Oct. 22, two and a half weeks after it was originally supposed to be released. And the October jobs report, originally set for a Nov. 1 release, will be delayed until Friday, Nov. 8. The Consumer Price Index for September will slip from an original release date of Oct. 16 to an Oct. 30 announcement. And the first estimate for economic growth in the third quarter, prepared by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, is vulnerable to a delay from the original release date, Oct. 30. "We are talking to our sister statistical agencies and we hope to come up with a new release schedule as soon as possible," said Jeannine Aversa, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. "We hope to have more information next week." The statistics aren't of interest just to economists and other number watchers. Most of the time, or at least in the absence of cliffhangers like the approach to the government shutdown and debt ceiling deadline, Wall Street zigs and zags with each new reading on trends like unemployment, economic growth and inflation. The unemployment data are being watched especially closely now because the Federal Reserve has said any decision on whether to ease back on stimulus efforts depends on continuing improvement in the labor market. And without information from the labor statistics bureau, no one knows if that is happening. As a result of the delayed data, as well as the economic fallout from the shutdown itself, most experts don't expect any Fed tapering to begin until December at the earliest and possibly not until early 2014. Much of the work for the September report had been completed by the time of the shutdown, allowing Labor Department officials to move quickly to reschedule the release for Tuesday. Announcements for other figures from the bureau, like the consumer inflation report for October, will slip past the original mid November release date, while the November producer price index will probably be delayed into mid to late December. The Commerce Department is hoping to come up with its own revised schedule on Friday, one official said. "Our data production is like a factory," he said. "It's not like we can hire more people to clear the logjam. But I'm sure they will be working late to get this out quickly." The Bureau of Economic Analysis depends on data from the Census Bureau, another branch of the Commerce Department, for many of its reports. And the economic directorate of the Census Bureau alone has 1,300 to 1,400 staff members, the official explained, so rebooting systems after nearly three weeks is not so simple. "Our vision of the economy became increasingly blurred," he said. "It's going to take a little time to get our vision to be better." One piece of data that the government has managed to release during the shutdown, initial unemployment claims, showed a drop of 15,000, to 358,000, in the week that ended Oct. 12. Still, that is well above the 308,000 weekly average recorded in September. But Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the accuracy of those numbers was undermined by the fallout from the shutdown as well as technical problems in California. "The jobless claims numbers are hopelessly compromised by the distortions caused by the California systems mess and the government shutdown," he wrote in a report Thursday. "Furloughed federal government workers are not counted in the numbers but people temporarily laid off as a result of the shutdown are included. The Labor Department, however, has no way of identifying these people, so we are in the dark." Another indicator Thursday, the October survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, was stronger than expected. The current conditions index came in at 19.8, above the 17.1 average for the third quarter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
President Trump on Thursday exaggerated the potential of drugs available to treat the new coronavirus, including an experimental antiviral treatment and decades old malaria remedies that hint of promise but so far show limited evidence of healing the sick. No drug has been approved to treat the new coronavirus, and doctors around the world have been desperately administering an array of medicines in search of something to help patients, especially those who are severely ill. The malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are among the remedies that have been tried in several countries as the virus has spread around the world, killing at least 9,800. Both drugs have gone into short supply in the United States this month, as word has spread of their potential benefit to coronavirus patients. Manufacturers of the generic products have said they are ramping up production. One company, Teva, said it would donate millions of pills of hydroxychloroquine to hospitals, and another company, Mylan, said it would restart production of the drug. Doctors in China, South Korea and France have reported that the treatments seem to help. But those efforts have not involved the kind of large, carefully controlled studies that would provide the global medical community the proof that these drugs work on a significant scale. In a White House briefing Thursday, Mr. Trump said the anti malaria drugs had shown "tremendous promise." "I think it's going to be very exciting," he said. "I think it could be a game changer, and maybe not." The drugs' potential has been highlighted during broadcasts on one of Mr. Trump's favorite news channels, Fox News, where hosts like Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirro have trumpeted the possibility of a real treatment. "They've gone through the approval process," Mr. Trump said of the drugs. "It's been approved, and they did." But the F.D.A. has not approved any drugs for use in the treatment of coronavirus, and the drugs were already available, to treat malaria as well as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. To date, the F.D.A. has not added the coronavirus to the list of illnesses for which the drugs are specifically approved. Then again, doctors have been free to use both old malaria drugs for any purpose deemed appropriate. At the briefing on Thursday, Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, who has been the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration for only three months, tended to walk back some of the president's more inflated predictions that these drugs might vanquish the virus altogether. He said Mr. Trump had asked the agency to look into chloroquine to fight the coronavirus, and that it was setting up a large clinical trial to evaluate the drug. Some hospitals in the United States have already begun using the drugs for coronavirus patients, apparently reasoning that they may help and are unlikely to do harm. They are cheap and relatively safe. Laboratory studies have found that they prevent the coronavirus from invading cells, suggesting that the drugs could help prevent or limit the infection. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Not everyone can take the drugs: They are not safe for people who suffer from heart arrhythmia, or those with impaired kidneys or liver. The University of Minnesota is conducting a study in which people who live with a coronavirus patient are being given hydroxychloroquine to find out if it can prevent the infection. Dr. Hahn also said that the agency was allowing sick patients to use remdesivir, the not yet approved antiviral drug made by Gilead. Such so called "compassionate use" programs allow patients to take unapproved, experimental drugs if they have no other options. Remdesivir has already been given to patients on a compassionate use basis, including the first coronavirus patient in the United States, who was treated in Washington State in late January. Remdesivir is being studied in clinical trials, but the results are not available yet. It was studied to treat Ebola, but did not work well enough to be useful for that disease. Dr. Hahn noted that the agency's job was to prove that drugs were safe and effective. "What's also important is not to provide false hope, but to provide hope," he said. As word has spread about chloroquine's potential, demand in the United States has overwhelmed the country's only supplier of the drug, the New Jersey generic manufacturer Rising Pharmaceuticals. Chloroquine has been in short supply since March 9, according to the American Society of Health System Pharmacists, which tracks drug shortages. Hydroxychloroquine, which is made by more companies, has been in shortage since Thursday. Ira Baeringer, chief operating officer of Rising Pharmaceuticals, said his company had been tracking the use of the drug in China and elsewhere. They increased production about three weeks ago, he said, and are meeting all of their orders. But he acknowledged that pharmacies may currently have low stocks. "We are experiencing an extraordinary demand, as you can imagine, but we are shipping to all of the orders," Mr. Baeringer said. He noted that the product had not yet been extensively tested for coronavirus so it was unclear how well it works. "We're really trying to understand what the need is going to be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
On Tuesday, the S P 500 stock index hit a record high. The next day, Apple became the first U.S. company in history to be valued at more than 2 trillion. Donald Trump is, of course, touting the stock market as proof that the economy has recovered from the coronavirus; too bad about those 173,000 dead Americans, but as he says, "It is what it is." But the economy probably doesn't feel so great to the millions of workers who still haven't gotten their jobs back and who have just seen their unemployment benefits slashed. The 600 a week supplemental benefit enacted in March has expired, and Trump's purported replacement is basically a sick joke. Even before the aid cutoff, the number of parents reporting that they were having trouble giving their children enough to eat was rising rapidly. That number will surely soar in the next few weeks. And we're also about to see a huge wave of evictions, both because families are no longer getting the money they need to pay rent and because a temporary ban on evictions, like supplemental unemployment benefits, has just expired. But how can there be such a disconnect between rising stocks and growing misery? Wall Street types, who do love their letter games, are talking about a "K shaped recovery": rising stock valuations and individual wealth at the top, falling incomes and deepening pain at the bottom. But that's a description, not an explanation. What's going on? The first thing to note is that the real economy, as opposed to the financial markets, is still in terrible shape. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's weekly economic index suggests that the economy, although off its low point a few months ago, is still more deeply depressed than it was at any point during the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And this time around, job losses are concentrated among lower paid workers that is, precisely those Americans without the financial resources to ride out bad times. What about stocks? The truth is that stock prices have never been closely tied to the state of the economy. As an old economists' joke has it, the market has predicted nine of the last five recessions. Stocks do get hit by financial crises, like the disruptions that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the brief freeze in credit markets back in March. Otherwise, stock prices are pretty disconnected from things like jobs or even G.D.P. And these days, the disconnect is even greater than usual. For the recent rise in the market has been largely driven by a small number of technology giants. And the market values of these companies have very little to do with their current profits, let alone the state of the economy in general. Instead, they're all about investor perceptions of the fairly distant future. Take the example of Apple, with its 2 trillion valuation. Apple has a price earnings ratio the ratio of its market valuation to its profits of about 33. One way to look at that number is that only around 3 percent of the value investors place on the company reflects the money they expect it to make over the course of the next year. As long as they expect Apple to be profitable years from now, they barely care what will happen to the U.S. economy over the next few quarters. Furthermore, the profits people expect Apple to make years from now loom especially large because, after all, where else are they going to put their money? Yields on U.S. government bonds, for example, are well below the expected rate of inflation. And Apple's valuation is actually less extreme than the valuations of other tech giants, like Amazon or Netflix. So big tech stocks and the people who own them are riding high because investors believe that they'll do very well in the long run. The depressed economy hardly matters. Unfortunately, ordinary Americans get very little of their income from capital gains, and can't live on rosy projections about their future prospects. Telling your landlord not to worry about your current inability to pay rent, because you'll surely have a great job five years from now, will get you nowhere or, more accurately, will get you kicked out of your apartment and put on the street. So here's the current state of America: Unemployment is still extremely high, largely because Trump and his allies first refused to take the coronavirus seriously, then pushed for an early reopening in a nation that met none of the conditions for resuming business as usual and even now refuse to get firmly behind basic protective strategies like widespread mask requirements. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Favorable exchange rates between the dollar and both the euro and the pound, along with expanded air routes linking the United States and Europe, are helping to bolster tourism to Europe this summer despite lingering concerns over security in the wake of terrorist attacks over the past two years. From high end travel agencies, including Kipling Clark, to more affordable trips offered by Globus, operators are reporting strong interest in travel to Europe. Among the Globus family of brands, which includes Cosmos and Monograms tours and Avalon Waterways river cruises, traffic in many European regions is up 30 percent this year over last. The airfare prediction app Hopper analyzed flight searches for the coming season and found that fares are down about 18 percent versus 2016, a drop it attributes to the growth of low cost carriers and depressed fuel prices. "People are looking at their checkbook and saying, 'How scared do I need to be, considering Europe is less expensive than it has been?'" said Jim Berkeley, founder and chief executive of the California based travel agency Destinations Adventures International. As a growing feature of the travel landscape, security threats have ushered in a range of travel practices from easy behavioral adjustments like dressing inconspicuously, to training in taking evasive action that many experts endorse. "Whether there's a risk or not, you should put in place at least the basic procedures: Think ahead and be prepared," said Christopher Hagon, managing partner of Incident Management Group, a Florida based international security consulting firm. Pretrip planning for safety includes reading the Department of State's travel alerts and warnings. The department issued an alert on May 1 for general European travel, which notes, "Extremists continue to focus on tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, and local government facilities as viable targets." "I find those reports more intellectual, in depth and measured than the U.S. State Department site," said Mr. Berkeley, who urges his clients to consult the British source. Thinking ahead may also involve purchasing travel insurance, particularly plans that cover trip cancellation, in case an incident arises between the time of booking and the time of travel, or trip interruption, when something occurs during travel. "You need to do the research on the insurance plan to make sure the insurance plan you buy covers a violent act or State Department warning, or that an incident doesn't void your plan," said Jason Clampet, co founder and editor in chief of the travel news site Skift. Travelers interested in learning to identify threats and mitigate risks from the pros can take a new online course that covers awareness and emergency response from AKE International, a global security firm that specializes in corporate travel and protecting high net worth individuals (the course costs about 65). Security experts and travel professionals advise being prepared when traveling abroad, including packing to maintain a low profile by leaving behind any flashy jewelry, short shorts and Yankees baseball caps. Experts also stress avoiding gatherings and large crowds. "If there's a demonstration, don't watch and hang out," Mr. Berkeley said. "Go the other way." Additionally, travelers should practice basic awareness, which means paying attention to what's happening as you step out of a hotel, restaurant or train station. "The biggest thing we find is that people are completely unaware not only of issues that occur in that destination, but unaware of what's going on around them in public because they're looking at their phone," Mr. Hagon said. FoneTrac, a newly updated app from GlobalSecur (part of the Incident Management Group), delivers security alerts in the event of an emergency and monitors users' locations by asking them to check in on a regular schedule with the tap of a button. A panic button summons immediate assistance. The basic service costs 12 a month, with more expensive options that include emergency medical support and evacuation coverage. When it comes to lodgings, some agents avoid booking their clients in American associated hotels, such as Trump hotels, abroad. "We've started shifting to small boutique luxury properties. Terrorists may be looking for Western symbols," said Randy Lynch, chief executive of Kipling Clark. He also recommends dining in smaller, family owned restaurants that are off the beaten track over larger or more lauded establishments. Self interest meets pragmatism in tour operators who now advertise their services as including the provision of an ally on the ground, such as a tour director, to turn to in case of emergencies. Guides, drivers and, of course, friends can also fill this role. Travel agents, too, remain on call to assist clients. "It's a new world out there, and we're always one email or call away from clients to give our support and help make the best decisions," said Michael Holtz, president of the travel agency SmartFlyer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
She Pulled Her Debut Book When Critics Found It Racist. Now She Plans to Publish. Earlier this year, Amelie Wen Zhao's literary career almost imploded before it had even begun. Her debut novel, "Blood Heir," was six months away from publication, but it was already getting pummeled. The controversy started in January, when some readers argued that Zhao's depiction of slavery was racially insensitive. It quickly snowballed into an online pile on, as some commenters who hadn't read the young adult fantasy book expressed outrage about its contents. Zhao was stunned. "There were so many voices chiming in, and only a few people had read the book," she said in a recent interview at her publisher's office. Overwhelmed by the criticism, she told her publishers to cancel the novel's June release. Keira Drake and Jonah Winter, two authors who faced criticism on social media for their books, talk about how they responded. Afterward, Zhao, who is 26, agonized over her decision. She kept herself occupied at her day job as a portfolio manager at an international bank. Then she collected herself and reread her book several times, examining the plot and characters to see if the critics were right. She decided they weren't. In March, Zhao called her editor at Delacorte Press and told her that she wanted to move forward with the novel after all. She made some revisions, and "Blood Heir" is now scheduled to be released in November. "Ultimately, it's true to my vision," she said. Zhao's decision to move ahead with publication will likely reignite the fractious, ongoing debate about diversity, representation and "cancel culture" in the young adult literary world. While some see the discussion about cultural appropriation in fiction as a necessary, if painful, step toward addressing the lack of diversity in publishing, others argue that the online Y.A. community has become too cutthroat, even intolerant, in its attacks on first time authors who tackle challenging social issues or write outside their immediate cultural experience. When the controversy over "Blood Heir" erupted, battle lines were quickly drawn within the close knit children's publishing community. A small but influential group of authors argued that the novel dealt insensitively with race and the legacy of slavery, and was an affront to nonwhite communities. The book's cancellation then prompted an equally passionate backlash to the backlash from a camp that rallied to Zhao's defense, arguing that the novel's critics, who claimed to be championing diversity, had bullied a young Asian woman into silence. "How a Twitter Mob Derailed an Immigrant Female Author's Budding Career" read one headline in Tablet magazine. Other people faulted the author herself for caving to pressure. 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. Zhao is of course not the first or even the most recent Y.A. novelist to be buried under an avalanche of criticism before her book even came out. Keira Drake's fantasy novel, "The Continent," was delayed by her publisher and rewritten after readers blasted it as "racist trash" and "offensive" in early reviews. In 2017, Laurie Forest was bombarded with hundreds of negative reviews on Goodreads by readers who claimed her debut fantasy novel, "The Black Witch," was bigoted, months before the book's release. And in February, Kosoko Jackson pulled his young adult debut novel, "A Place for Wolves," a story set in the 1990s during the Kosovo war that features two gay American teenagers. Jackson decided to cancel the publication after a firestorm erupted on social media over his decision to set the story against the backdrop of genocide, and to make the story's villain an Albanian Muslim. "I apologize to those I hurt with my novel," he wrote in a statement. The blowup over "A Place for Wolves," which was scheduled to be published in March by Sourcebooks Fire, was particularly fraught, because Jackson, a young gay black man, works as a sensitivity reader, or an expert who helps authors and publishers vet books for potentially problematic content and stereotypes. Jackson was also part of the chorus of voices denouncing "Blood Heir," an ironic twist that was seized upon by observers who claim the movement to police potential cultural appropriation in literature has gone too far. "From the outside, this is starting to look like a conversation focused less on literature than obedience," Ruth Graham wrote in an article on Slate about Jackson's novel. While there are often controversies simmering in the young adult literary world, the magnitude and speed at which the backlash builds seems to have accelerated, often amplified by social media. "It's a platform where outrage travels quickly and often out of context," said Kat Rosenfield, a pop culture writer and young adult novelist. "It's possible that some of the successful campaigns to either pull books or edit books have emboldened people to feel like initiating some of these complaints on Twitter can lead to some concrete action." As a result, authors and publishers have grown increasingly wary of stepping into cultural minefields. Many are turning to sensitivity readers to help them identify potential cultural pitfalls before publication. Still, some free speech advocacy groups worry that the environment has gotten so heated that it could lead to self censorship. "What is worrying to us is the chilling effect," said Svetlana Mintcheva, the director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship, an advocacy organization that is developing a support network for young adult authors who face pressure to call off their books. "If you're a white author, would you want to have a minority character?" Of course, critiquing a work of literature is by no means equivalent to censorship. Many who advocate for more diversity in children's publishing note that the problem isn't authors who write outside their own cultural backgrounds, but those who do it badly, in a way that perpetuates stereotypes. "If we're going to push for diversity and push for representation in Y.A. literature, then it should be done right," said Ricci Yuhico, the managing librarian for young adult services at the Mid Manhattan Library in New York. "We want to make sure our teen patrons have good books to turn to when they ask for stories that represent them and can broaden their worldview." Zhao was surprised to find herself in social media's cross hairs. Born in Paris and raised in Beijing, Zhao had been writing fiction since she was in grade school but never imagined she could make a living from it. She studied economics at U.C.L.A. and New York University, and found a job in finance in the United States when she graduated. She came up with the plot for "Blood Heir" in 2014, during a family trip to Russia. She imagined a fictional empire where a group of people called Affinites, who have special powers, are feared and trafficked for labor by the powerful elite a system that is challenged by a fugitive princess who wields magic. In describing the plight of Affinites, Zhao aimed to invoke real world issues, including human trafficking and indentured servitude in Asia. "What I sought to interrogate and critique was the modern day epidemic of human trafficking and endured labor," Zhao said. "It wasn't something I had seen in Y.A. literature." She also drew on her own experience as an immigrant and her feeling of being powerless and not belonging, she said. After Delacorte sent out advance reader copies of the novel to reviewers, librarians and booksellers, many of the early responses were positive. But those were soon drowned out by blistering critiques. "This book is about slavery, a false oppression narrative that equates having legitimately dangerous magical powers that kill people with being an oppressed minority, like a person of color," a reader wrote on Goodreads. A social media conflagration ensued. Within days, Zhao issued an apology on Facebook, announcing that she had asked her publisher not to release the book. For a young debut author, it felt like a fatal blow to her career. "I was really caught off guard," she said. "It was very devastating to me that the book was read in a totally different cultural context." Her editor, Krista Marino, was similarly taken aback. "We had had many readers at that point and hadn't received any such feedback," she said. Still, Delacorte said they would support her decision to withdraw the book or move ahead with the release. After Zhao decided she wanted to release the book, she and her publisher sought feedback from scholars and sensitivity readers in an effort to resolve any ambiguity around the type of indentured labor depicted. They had academics from different multicultural backgrounds, as well as one who studies human trafficking in Asia, evaluate the text, and Zhao added new material and made changes based on their comments. They had additional sensitivity readers vet the book for racial and other stereotypes. It's unclear whether such efforts will mollify Zhao's critics, or if the release of "Blood Heir" this fall will ignite another cycle of outrage a backlash to the backlash to the backlash. There's also the risk that the controversy will dampen enthusiasm for the book among readers and booksellers. But Zhao and her publisher seem more excited than wary that readers will have a chance to evaluate the book for themselves. "We ultimately think our Y.A. readers are very smart," Marino said. "They can read what they want to read and use their critical thinking skills to work through it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A Powerful Reporter Got Away With Sexual Misconduct for Decades. His Paper, and His Union, Looked the Other Way. As the American news business shrank and struggled over the past decade, a new wave of labor activism caught fire. A younger generation of labor leaders rose up and offered a powerful and progressive vision: They would be transparent, sensitive to issues of racism and sexism and truly accountable to workers. The movement delivered new leadership, including a stunning upset last December, as a 32 year old data reporter named Jon Schleuss ousted the longtime, 61 year old president of the NewsGuild, the nation's largest journalists' union. "We must do more to promote democracy and transparency in our own house," declared Mr. Schleuss, the first openly gay president of the union. So it would seem natural that when Mr. Schleuss was alerted, just days after his election, to sexual misconduct by a prominent union official, he would be eager to investigate. The initial accusation, as is often so in these cases, was unconfirmed and secondhand. Its subject was a powerful union figure any new leader would be reluctant to alienate: Michael Fuoco, the 69 year old formidable and charismatic president of the Pittsburgh local, which was headed toward a possible strike in a bitter contract fight. Mr. Schleuss did not aggressively pursue the claims about the Pittsburgh local president, allowing Mr. Fuoco, a bigfoot crime reporter at The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, to hold onto his power. But had he looked into Mr. Fuoco's conduct over decades at the guild and the newspaper, he would have found a startling picture of a man repeatedly accused of abusing his position. And it would not have taken much sleuthing. An afternoon's phone calls I made this summer turned up three former Post Gazette journalists who described experiences involving Mr. Fuoco making unwanted advances on them or sexually harassing them. Other female journalists at the paper told me they routinely warned young women to avoid Mr. Fuoco at regular guild hosted happy hours. And more reporting revealed darker secrets: two women who were taught by Mr. Fuoco in college journalism classes said he had pressured them into sexual relationships. One became pregnant with his child, according to court records. He was so prolific in his harassment, that woman told me, he was like Pittsburgh's Harvey Weinstein. The NewsGuild was hardly the only institution that looked the other way. The Post Gazette management received at least two complaints about Mr. Fuoco's conduct over two decades. The newspaper's executives knew of his sexual relationship with at least one former college student and gave him a wrist slap of a week's suspension part of what many women say was a climate in the newsroom in which they had no real support or recourse. "I felt like both the management and the union lacked respect for women," said a former Post Gazette reporter, Annie Siebert. But the way the NewsGuild handled the accusations is, in part, the story of a new generation of activist minded labor leaders struggling to take hold of the movement's sprawling organization, and grappling with a legacy inside the labor movement that contains the same troubling dynamics around race and gender as other institutions of American life. Pittsburgh is a union town, and the characters and history that gave it its identity still play an outsize role here. The journalists' guild was long a junior partner to the other big unions mailers, Teamsters, platemakers, paperhandlers, pressmen, machinists and others who manufactured and distributed as many as 530,000 Sunday copies of The Post Gazette in the 1990s. Now, the paper is printed only three days a week, and Sunday circulation barely tops 100,000. Mr. Fuoco has led guild members in confrontational battles with management, which has moved to shrink health care benefits and other spending. And yet The Post Gazette remains one of the best local newspapers left in America. The staff, which has gone 14 years without a raise, still competes for Pulitzers even as members grudgingly produce society stories about the lavish Kentucky Derby party hosted by John Robinson Block, one of the eccentric twins who inherited and still run the paper. The accusations about Mr. Fuoco came to Mr. Schleuss from an independent labor journalist and activist who lives in Pittsburgh, Mike Elk. After Mr. Elk wrote about sexual harassment in another union in 2019, a reporter for The Washington Post, Moriah Balingit, contacted him with a tip about her own bad experience at The Post Gazette. Even though she didn't give him her permission to tell her story to the union, he decided he had an obligation to do so. He emailed Mr. Schleuss in December 2019, requesting "that the Guild open its own investigation into this." He met with Mr. Schleuss in January to press the matter and shared Ms. Balingit's name with him. The union did not take the inquiry any further. But disturbing secrets lay just below the surface. The news business in Pittsburgh is a small world, full of people who have worked together for decades. Mr. Fuoco had led the union since 2010 with a fierce determination and outsize personality. He had a reputation for telling great stories and for passionately defending reporters facing discipline for anything from showing up late for work to plagiarizing from Wikipedia and for harassing young female interns. Post Gazette veterans called his behavior an open secret, dating back at least to the 1990s. One woman, who asked not to be identified, said she complained both to the union and to the company's head of human resources about both hostile and sexual emails from Mr. Fuoco in January 2000, when he objected to her doing a story on his police beat. (The newspaper said it had no record of the complaint.) "All the women knew to keep an eye out for him," Annie Siebert, who worked at The Post Gazette until 2013 and was active with the union, told me in a phone interview last week. 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. Other women I interviewed offered more specific accusations. Ms. Balingit described how, as a 22 year old reporter at a guild party in 2008, she stepped outside for a smoke, and Mr. Fuoco tried to kiss her. A former staff photographer, Rebecca Droke, said he kissed her, unexpectedly and inappropriately, while they were seated next to each other at a gathering after an awards banquet in Harrisburg in 2013. "There needs to be a real reckoning and real accountability for what happened there," said Ms. Droke, who worked at the paper from 2006 to 2019, including as an assistant managing editor. Ms. Balingit, who worked at The Post Gazette from 2008 to 2014, said she realized how hostile the environment had been only after she left to work at The Washington Post, and things were different. "I remarked to a friend that I'd been working there for 18 months and hadn't been harassed a single time," she said. "It was striking to me." Mr. Fuoco's stature in the city extended well beyond the newsroom, as did his reported misbehavior. He taught journalism classes at Point Park University (where the guild also represents faculty) and the University of Pittsburgh. Diana Kelly, who was a 22 year old senior in his class back in 2002, had transferred home to Pitt because she was struggling with depression. She told me that Mr. Fuoco had encouraged her, telling her she was a talented writer with a big future, and invited her out for a drink after the semester ended. "It became very clear that it wasn't about him talking to me about my future career opportunities," she recalled. Soon, she felt trapped in a sexual relationship with him that continued until 2006, emails she shared with The Times and a former college friend confirmed. "As a teacher now, it just horrifies me," Ms. Kelly told me in an interview last week. Ms. Kelly knew she wasn't the only student to have had that experience. Mr. Fuoco was, simultaneously, trying to distance himself from another young woman, whom he had met when he came to lecture before a journalism class at Point Park University in 2002. Later that year, when she was 22 and still a student, as well as a stringer for The Post Gazette, she became pregnant and had Mr. Fuoco's child, an account confirmed in part by court documents in their child support case. The former Point Park student complained to the Post Gazette in 2011, describing their relationship and claiming that Mr. Fuoco had threatened her, according to emails she shared with me. The newspaper's vice president of human resources, Stephen B. Spolar, responded in another email, saying that based on reading her email and talking to Mr. Fuoco, "I have concluded that your argument is a personal one," and he instructed her not to contact Mr. Fuoco "during work hours." The Post Gazette suspended Mr. Fuoco, for one week, for using company time and resources such as his company email account on the personal matter, a current and a former Post Gazette executive said. Both said they would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity because it is a personnel issue. Mr. Fuoco responded to the suspension by blaming the former student for the salary he lost. "I want my money and I want it before I leave work today," he wrote to her on April 16 in an email she shared with me. The company said in a statement this week that it believed that it had "appropriately addressed the single complaint." Some inside the newsroom were not eager to cross Mr. Fuoco. They feared his power, and for their reputations, in a town that effectively has just one major newspaper left. Others worried about undermining their cause during a bitter contract fight with the Block Communications Group, which owns the newspapers and is trying to impose a tough new contract on employees. Mr. Elk, an abrasive gadfly whose website covers corruption inside unions, did not have those restraints. He became almost fixated on the issue, sending Mr. Schleuss increasingly personal emails, calling his inaction on Mr. Fuoco "pathetic." On September 22, Mr. Elk published anonymous accusations on his independent labor focused website, Payday Report. "Fuoco, president of the Pittsburgh NewsGuild since 2010, has been accused of using union happy hours to prey upon, make unwanted sexual advances, and grope women who were sometimes 30 to 40 years younger than him,'' the website reported. Three days later, Mr. Schleuss was in town to march with Post Gazette members demanding a new contract. He also met privately with Mr. Fuoco, telling him "everything was fine because everyone knows that Elk is insane and has a vendetta against the Guild," Mr. Fuoco told me in an email. (Mr. Elk describes himself a "dissident member of the guild" and said he identifies as autistic.) Mr. Schleuss said he didn't recall the details of that conversation. But as he was driving back to Washington that night, Mr. Schleuss received a call from the former Point Park student, who had gotten his number from Mr. Elk. "I was worried that because of his reporting style, people weren't believing the substance of Elk's reporting," she told me. "I knew it to be true because I experienced it." She said she was impressed by the union leader's "zero tolerance attitude" on their call. Mr. Schleuss then moved swiftly, briefed the Pittsburgh union leadership, and Mr. Fuoco agreed to step down that evening. He also resigned from the newspaper. Mr. Schleuss said he thought he and his union had handled the accusations appropriately throughout, despite almost a year of inaction. "The moment that I got concrete evidence that was credible and actionable, I acted," he said. Mr. Fuoco said in an email that the accusations of sexual misconduct are "false," and he said the union had not at any point conducted a real inquiry. "If there ever was an investigation over the past two months I have no knowledge of it because NO ONE ever contacted me," he said in an email. Last week, Mr. Schleuss sounded a bit like the management executives the union has chastised in recent years, promising new training to fight sexual harassment and other forms of bigotry and to enforce an environment of mutual respect. But it is clear that the searing cultural and generational issues tearing at newsrooms cannot be easily tamed within the union. Mr. Fuoco's resignation set off a new election at The Post Gazette, and last month members watched election committee members count ballots over Zoom. The results, when they arrived, shocked guild leaders. Members had, by a vote of 55 to 52, chosen a 28 year old breaking news reporter, Lacretia Wimbley, over a member of the paper's old guard as their new president. A young Black woman would lead the union. It was a rejection of, among other things, Mr. Fuoco's theatrical preparations for a strike that had divided the newsroom and raised concerns with top national union officials. But a week later, in a miniature echo of Rudy Giuliani's Pennsylvania misadventures, Post Gazette reporters received an email: Some mail in ballots had not come with return addresses, and were therefore, well, invalid. The election was open to challenge if the losing candidate chose to. The acting president of the Pittsburgh guild, Ed Blazina, announced that the election would be rerun, prompting a furious response from the apparent winner and her supporters. "On the same day the guild sends out a statement demanding more diversity in the newsroom, it removes an African American woman as its president," Mark Belko, a real estate reporter, wrote in an email to other members, calling it an "outrage." For now, the union is in the hands of a longtime union colleague of Mr. Fuoco, Mr. Blazina, a transportation reporter who has worked at the paper since 1983. The accusations against Mr. Fuoco came as "a complete, total shock to me, and to this day I know nothing firsthand about it," Mr. Blazina said. When asked about Mr. Fuoco's reputation for, at minimum, being overly aggressive with women at union gatherings, he said: "I can tell you he wasn't handsy with me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Being obese, smoking or having high cholesterol, high blood pressure or diabetes in midlife is associated with an increased risk of dementia later in life. Now researchers have found these five risk factors correlate with the development, years later, of amyloid brain plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The study, in JAMA, evaluated 322 men and women from 1987 to 1989, when their average age was 52. From 2011 to 2013, they used PET scans to measure their level of amyloid plaques. After adjusting for age and other factors, they found that compared with those with no midlife risk factors, those with one had an 88 percent increased risk for elevated levels of plaques, and those with two or more had nearly triple the risk. There was no association in those who developed these risk factors later in life or in those with the ApoE4 gene, which also increases risk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
WASHINGTON Edgar M. Welch, a 28 year old father of two from Salisbury, N.C., recently read online that Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in northwest Washington, was harboring young children as sex slaves as part of a child abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton. The articles making those allegations were widespread across the web, appearing on sites including Facebook and Twitter. Apparently concerned, Mr. Welch drove about six hours on Sunday from his home to Comet Ping Pong to see the situation for himself, according to court documents. Not long after arriving at the pizzeria, the police said, he fired from an assault like AR 15 rifle. The police arrested him. They found a rifle and a handgun in the restaurant. No one was hurt. In an arraignment on Monday, a heavily tattooed Mr. Welch, wearing a white jumpsuit and shackles, was ordered held. According to the criminal complaint, he told the authorities that he was armed to help rescue children but that he surrendered peacefully after finding no evidence that "children were being harbored in the restaurant." He was charged with four counts, including felony assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a gun without a license outside a home or business. Unbeknown to Mr. Welch, what he had been reading online were fake news articles about Comet Ping Pong, which have swollen in number over time. The false articles against the pizzeria began appearing on social networks and websites in late October, not long before the presidential election, with the restaurant identified as being the headquarters for a child trafficking ring. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with more attacks against the pizzeria as believers in the child trafficking conspiracy became more zealous. Within hours of the publication of one of the debunking articles, a post on Twitter by Representative Steven Smith of the 15th District of Georgia not a real lawmaker and not a real district warned that what was fake was the information being peddled by the mainstream media. It was retweeted dozens of times. On YouTube, a step by step takedown of the Times article was viewed nearly 250,000 times and passed around on Twitter and Facebook. A surge of new fake articles amplified the original pieces, now linking the child abuse ring known as Pizzagate to a global pedophilia ring reaching Britain. "We should all condemn the efforts of certain people to spread malicious and utterly false accusations about Comet Ping Pong," James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, said in a statement on Sunday. Mr. Alefantis, who has repeatedly refuted the fake news articles, has closed the pizzeria for a few days. He has prominent Democratic friends and previously communicated with Mrs. Clinton's campaign chairman, which he has said may have made him a target. The shooting underscores the stubborn lasting power of fake news and how hard it is to stamp out. Debunking false news articles can sometimes stoke the outrage of the believers, leading fake news purveyors to feed that appetite with more misinformation. Efforts by social media companies to control the spread of these stories are limited, and shutting one online discussion thread down simply pushes the fake news creators to move to another space online. "The reason why it's so hard to stop fake news is that the facts don't change people's minds," said Leslie Harris, a former president of the Center for Democracy Technology, a nonprofit that promotes free speech and open internet policies. When users are caught abusing the terms of one media platform, they simply go to another, she said. The viral nature of the misinformation was illustrated again late Sunday, not long after the police arrested Mr. Welch and called Pizzagate a "fictitious online conspiracy theory" in their report. Some individuals on Twitter said Mr. Welch was an actor used by the mainstream media to divert attention from the alleged crimes at Comet Ping Pong. Followers of a shuttered Reddit thread on Pizzagate dissected the episode on a new online network called Voat. The storm of fake news has swept up not only Comet Ping Pong, but its neighboring businesses. Conspiracy theorists have linked symbols that some local businesses on the same street as Comet Ping Pong used in their logos to symbols of pedophilia code. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. At Terasol, a French restaurant across the street from Comet Ping Pong, the owner, Sabrina Ousmaal, said she received daily phone threats and her business's Facebook page had been filled with false accusations, including, "You guys mind explaining the pedophilia symbol removed from your website then?" She added that the symbol was not on her restaurant but on the store of a nearby shop and was a swirl within a triangle. Ms. Ousmaal said she and her husband had called the police and the F.B.I. but had received little guidance. "I am appalled and horrified," Ms. Ousmaal said of the shooting on Sunday. "Nothing has been done. This is not free speech. This is a hate crime." Tech companies and government leaders have been struggling to solve the problem of fake news, with Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, earlier promising to work on technology tools to slow the gusher of false digital information. In a news briefing on Monday, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said free speech rights pose a challenge for media platforms to prevent misinformation from leading to episodes like the gunman at Comet Ping Pong. "Many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley didn't develop this technology to make it easier for hate to be propagated online; their idea was to build a community where people could more effectively communicate and engage in commerce," Mr. Earnest said. "If you do administer a platform that is used extensively to propagate hate and to inspire acts of violence, well, I think most people are going to be less likely to use the platform." For purveyors of fake news who have continued pushing the Pizzagate theory even after the facts have been debunked, whether Comet Ping Pong is even engaged in a pedophilia ring is beyond the point. Jeffrey Marty, a lawyer from Florida, said in a phone interview that he was the man posing as Representative Steven Smith from Georgia's fictional 15th District. He said that he was frustrated with the way the mainstream media covered the election and that he believes that most of his 24,000 followers know that his account is a parody. Mr. Marty, who has tweeted links to fake news stories and repeatedly said the mainstream media needs to investigate Pizzagate, declined to say whether he actually believed the Comet Ping Pong allegations. "I just think you need to investigate. There are clues everywhere," he said. "But I don't agree with what happened at the restaurant." Mr. Welch has long supported family values, his friends said Monday. He briefly volunteered at the Locke Township Fire Department in Salisbury, according to the chief, Rusty Alexander. Friends described Mr. Welch as a doting father who loved the outdoors. While he had been arrested while driving impaired in 2013 and was sentenced to probation, the shooting on Sunday was out of character, his friends said. "That's not at all the person I know," Louis Bodak, whose son Matthew is a good friend of Mr. Welch's, said about the shooting. Mr. Welch is scheduled to appear in court again on Thursday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
When he died last Saturday at 78, Jose Antonio Abreu was widely remembered as the founder of El Sistema, Venezuela's system of free music education and youth orchestras and as the mentor of the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, one of classical music's most famous figures. His influence spread further through the proliferation of youth orchestras in underserved communities inspired by El Sistema. Here Mr. Dudamel leads one of them, the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (known as YOLA), in a bit of Beethoven's Ninth. Sure, older musicians might have more polish, but it would be hard to top the visceral excitement of watching this ensemble's young timpanist beat his way into the boffo ending, live at the Hollywood Bowl. MICHAEL COOPER Mr. Abreu's legacy can also be seen on podiums around the world, where a number of young Venezuelan conductors who trained with him or El Sistema besides Mr. Dudamel are beginning to make their marks. Christian Vasquez, who learned violin as a child in San Sebastian de los Reyes, Venezuela, and studied conducting with Mr. Abreu, is now the chief conductor of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra in Norway. Here he conjures wistfulness as the waltz theme returns in the third movement of Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 a dance tinged with regret. MICHAEL COOPER There's no regret in this dance. Rafael Payare, a graduate of El Sistema and a conducting student of Mr. Abreu's, once played principal horn in El Sistema's flagship ensemble, the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. He is now the music director of the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland, and was recently named the next music director of the San Diego Symphony. When he led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra earlier this year in the Symphonic Dancers from Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story," he took full advantage of the ensemble's famous brass section to turbocharge the mambo. MICHAEL COOPER Domingo Hindoyan, who grew up in Caracas and studied violin with El Sistema, has conducted frequently in Europe in recent years, including at the Berlin State Opera, and will soon become the principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera this winter conducting Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore" lending a vulnerable delicacy to this woodwind interlude in the overture. MICHAEL COOPER Of the many things to admire about the Bavarian State Opera's concert performance of Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier" on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, I was especially captivated by the surprising details Kirill Petrenko drew from the orchestra. His conducting brought out sophisticated comedy, as well as romance and heroism, that I didn't even know existed in the score. Similar thoughtfulness is on display in this video of him leading the overture to Wagner's "Tannhauser" in a production by Romeo Castellucci that had its premiere last year in Munich. There's a flash just one measure of revelatory madness in the theme from Tannhauser's song of love to Venus. The violas and cellos have a run of 16th notes full of accidentals that break free from the key signature. With heavy bowing and accents that rise above the rest of the orchestra, the measure suddenly colors the ecstatic passage with a touch of lunacy. JOSHUA BARONE Read our review of the Bavarian State Orchestra. Read our review of the "Tannhauser." Many performers known for their artistry on a specific instrument have proficiency on a second one. But the violinist Julia Fischer, who played Brahms's Double Concerto on Wednesday at Carnegie with Daniel Muller Schott and the Bavarian State Orchestra, has much more than proficiency on the piano, her first instrument as a child. For a 2008 concert in Frankfurt with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, Ms. Fisher, having played Saint Saens's Violin Concerto No. 3, returned after intermission for a poetic and technically adept performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto. Listen to the moment in the first movement when she draws out the lyrical thread during a stretch of rustling passagework and then dispatches a burst of double octaves with crispness and ease. ANTHONY TOMMASINI By its nature, the cello usually has a mellow, rich sound that some cellists can't help exaggerating. Not Mr. Muller Schott, who knows how to bask his instrument without going to excess. There was always something focused and refined about his playing during the Brahms concerto at Carnegie. His restraint comes through even in a piece where it's hard to resist extremes: Max Bruch's anguished and elegant "Kol Nidrei." In this video he plays an arrangement for soloist and eight other cellos. During an agitated episode, backed by erupting tremolos, Mr. Muller Schott's intense expressivity is balanced by admirable clarity and directness. ANTHONY TOMMASINI The violinist Christian Tetzlaff is a consummate Bachian, as he showed again on Wednesday evening at Alice Tully Hall, playing four of Bach's six unaccompanied works for his instrument. But I first knew him as a brilliant young modernist, when he made his American debut in Schoenberg's Violin Concerto with Christoph von Dohnanyi and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1988. He reverted to that mode last October, performing Gyorgy Ligeti's quirky concerto with Francois Xavier Roth and the Gurzenich Orchestra of Cologne. Here Mr. Tetzlaff's unaccompanied playing comes near the end, in a blazing two minute cadenza that shows virtually every aspect of his sensational technique. JAMES R. OESTREICH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
MEMPHIS When thousands of white students abandoned the Memphis schools 38 years ago rather than attend classes with blacks under a desegregation plan fueled by busing, Joseph A. Clayton went with them. He quit his job as a public school principal to head an all white private school and later won election to the board of the mostly white suburban district next door. Now, as the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district is being dissolved into the majority white Shelby County schools, Mr. Clayton is on the new combined 23 member school board overseeing the marriage. And he warns that the pattern of white flight could repeat itself, with the suburban towns trying to secede and start their own districts. "There's the same element of fear," said Mr. Clayton, 79. "In the 1970s, it was a physical, personal fear. Today the fear is about the academic decline of the Shelby schools." "As far as racial trust goes," Mr. Clayton, who is white, added, "I don't think we've improved much since the 1970s." The merger a result of actions by the Memphis school board and City Council, a March referendum and a federal court order is the largest school district consolidation in American history and poses huge logistical challenges. Memphis teachers are unionized, Shelby County's are not; the county owns its yellow buses, the city relies on a contractor; and the two districts use different textbooks and different systems to evaluate teachers. Toughest of all may be bridging the chasms of race and class. Median family income in Memphis is 32,000 a year, compared with the suburban average of 92,000; 85 percent of students in Memphis are black, compared with 38 percent in Shelby County. But Kenya Bradshaw, who was recently elected secretary of a separate 21 member commission set up to recommend policies for combining the new districts, sees the merger as a chance for Memphis "to re envision its educational system." "I hope people can see that this is an opportunity to reflect on our history and not make the same mistakes," said Ms. Bradshaw, an advocate for educational equity, who is black. "If people are leaving for reasons that they don't want their children to be around children of color or children who are poor, then I say to them, 'I bid you farewell.' " Though race has become the elephant in the room, the process actually began last winter as a struggle over finances. Fearing that suburban politicians and Tennessee's Republican dominated legislature might alter this arrangement to allow more tax money to stay in the suburbs, Memphis voted in December to surrender the school charter. Multiple lawsuits ensued, and a federal judge ruled on Sept. 28 that the two districts would be governed by a unified board but would run separately for two years, and then would combine in 2013. In the mid 1960s, Memphis had about 130,000 students, nearly equally split among whites and blacks, in segregated schools. Efforts to desegregate were met with subterfuge and delay, said Daniel Kiel, a University of Memphis law professor who has written about the topic. Federally ordered busing in 1973 provoked white flight, with about 40,000 of the system's 71,000 white students abandoning the system in four years. More recently, the suburbs have diversified, as middle class black families left behind an impoverished central city. But the Shelby school board remained all white, and much of the system still seems segregated. Collierville High School, outside Memphis, was 82 percent white last year, while Southwind High, 10 miles away, also outside the city limits, was 94 percent black. As for the city, Marcus Pohlmann, a political science professor at Rhodes College, said that he had hoped to compare student achievement among middle class and impoverished schools, but that he could not. "There are no middle class black schools in Memphis," he said. "They're all poor." Despite the current inequality, nobody expects the demographics of schools to change much, because most students in both districts are assigned to neighborhood schools and housing tends to be segregated. That has not changed the minds of people like Mr. Clayton, who told The New York Times in 1975 that he had left the public schools because of mounting chaos caused by desegregation. Mr. Clayton, who was the principal of two traditionally white Memphis high schools from 1964 to 1973, won election in 1998 to the Shelby County school board, where he and his colleagues were shocked when the Memphis board first voted for the merger. "We all tried to figure out how to stop it," he said. They have not given up. The legislature passed a law in February that, as of September 2013, lifts a prohibition on the formation of autonomous school districts, and five of the six Shelby County suburbs have hired consultants to study the finances of breaking away. For now, the two new boards are trying to combine the districts, which, improbably, have both long had their headquarters in a rambling office building in central Memphis. A corridor linking the two wings of the building has, for years, had double locked doors whose glass panels are covered with particle board. "This is our Berlin Wall," said Irving Hamer, Memphis's deputy superintendent. Billy Orgel, a telecommunications executive who was elected president of the merged school board, asked officials of both districts to break down the barricade. "We need both systems' employees to see each other, work together and become not just colleagues but friends," he said. Mr. Orgel said the doors had been opened, but a few days later, people in the building said they were still locked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
But are they together together? Together enough? No, it seems. Which is to say: They are not married, and that is a crisis. "New Girl" rivals "Fiddler on the Roof" for its focus on engagements, marriages and parental approval. It's also disdainful of singledom in a way that's jarringly out of sync with the show's otherwise sunny demeanor: The pursuit of a long term monogamous and almost always heterosexual romantic relationship is the be all end all for every character. So Season 7 hinges on a specious will they won't they for Nick and Jess to get engaged, just as Season 2 danced around a will they won't they for Nick and Jess in general (yep, they would). The show likes a slow build, but the only thing that's ever stood in any couple's way has been an arbitrary shenanigan. There aren't even ones that got away on "New Girl," because everyone's one who got away comes back for a second try. Jess's onetime one who got away Sam returned, and then left Jess for his one who got away. What do we want? Coupledom! When do we want it? On season finales! In the penultimate episode of Season 5, Nick, the unhygienic but lovable novelist, declared that there are only seven kinds of stories: "Man versus man, man versus dog, dog versus zombie, James Bond, stories of kings and lords, women over 50 finding themselves after divorce and car commercial." He soon after adds an eighth: "Fat boy talks to idiot." These narrative categorizations are unimpeachable. And in this structure, "New Girl" falls under "women over 50 finding themselves after divorce," because the thrust of the show is a slow crawl toward self actualization. The show's overemphasis on matrimony is really its attempted emphasis on stability. "New Girl" is a show about hatching into adulthood, but it's never been sure how to let its characters actually hatch already. Professional advancement, enlightened attitudes about one's parents, clarity of purpose nothing seems to stick or to lead to any meaningful gains in confidence or conviction. Perpetual self doubt is the hormone that powers one's body through its 20s but at, say, 41 it starts to seem less darling and more tragic, on men and women alike. At the start of "New Girl," Jess is cripplingly insecure, and that only barely abates as the series goes on. She's in good company, at least, as it turns out every character on the show is insecure, and truly no one can communicate. Of the 144 episodes of the show that I have seen, the story arc for probably 120 can be summarized as "I didn't know how to tell you...." Imagine "The Office" if every character was Season 2 Pam, forever. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
I arrived on Thursday around opening time, at 10 a.m., and got in line with about 150 others waiting to get through security and into the Great Hall. Mayke Dijkman, a chatty flight attendant who was visiting New York from the Netherlands, told me, "I think all the museums all over the world should be free," but she added that the price hadn't dissuaded her from going in. Artists on the fee NYC museums 12 or less As I walked inside, I was struck immediately by the new signs making it clear that the general admission prices were for "visitors from outside New York State," and that for New York State residents and students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, "the amount you pay is up to you." Those of us from in state headed for one of the manned ticketing booths to show our ID except today there was a snaking line extending from them, which wasn't the case the day before. My new friend Mayke had her choice of going to one of the new self service ticketing kiosks with a hot pink screen, or attaching herself to a staff member who can sell tickets on the fly with an iPad. Some of the lingo was new too. There were "kiosk facilitators," and "wayfinding ambassadors" who roamed about assisting discombobulated museumgoers and groups on field trips. ("Egypt to the right, Aphrodite to the left.") I dutifully walked up to the manned booth, curious if my Yankees cap would suffice as proof that I was a New Yorker. There was a sign nearby that said "we accept many forms of residency verification," including a current bill and a library card. (The Met has said that it won't be too rigid about its new policy at first. People without a valid New York State ID will simply be asked to bring one next time.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Kanye West's latest album, "Ye," has just seven songs. Its artwork was apparently finished on the way to its listening party in Wyoming. And the album's prerelease publicity tour included Mr. West calling 400 years of slavery "a choice." Yet the album still opened at No. 1 on Billboard's chart, becoming Mr. West's eighth in a row to reach the top tying a record of consecutive chart toppers that is held only by Eminem and the Beatles. "Ye" had 180 million streams and sold 85,000 copies as a full album, according to Nielsen, giving it the equivalent of 208,000 album sales in the United States in its first week out. Unlike Mr. West's last album, "The Life of Pablo," which was at first available only through Tidal, "Ye" was widely available on major streaming services from the start. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Also this week, Post Malone's "Beerbongs Bentleys," another recent streaming hit, held at No. 2 in its sixth week out, with 121 million streams. Ghost, a theatrical Swedish metal band that performs in full costume including that of a skull faced antipope for its lead singer, Papa Emeritus opened at No. 3 with 61,000 sales and 5 million streams for "Prequelle." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
With the New York gala circuit on hiatus because of the coronavirus outbreak, here is how some patrons and society figures are spending their time and money while self isolated. (Interviews have been edited.) Where are you hunkering down? At my family home in Long Island. What do you miss most from your pre Covid life? I live in Manhattan. Being at the epicenter of this global crisis is particularly disheartening. New York is a place always pulsing with energy. To feel that energy drained is so antithetical to what the city is. Have you looked for novel ways to compensate? It occurred to me that we needed to be doing more than sending out love and thoughts. We needed to be creating a sense of community, raising funds and offering critical resources. So we tried to come up with a creative solution to replicate the sense of a charity event. Can you describe it? We introduced the first ever Zoom gala. The idea was to use a digital platform for fund raising, to foster a sense of social connection while doing good. Unlike Instagram Live, you could actually see the other attendees. They included some of our committee members, people like Paul Arnhold, Danielle Lauder and Satchel Lee, Spike Lee's daughter. We wanted to give guests the chance to feel their best, whether it was wearing their finest pair of sweats or rocking an awesome party outfit. What were some highlights of that event? We had Ty Sunderland as a D.J. Cheat Codes and Anna of the North performed. Have your efforts paid off? We raised 5,000 in less than 24 hours since announcing this party on Tuesday night, and more than 20,000 overall. We asked for small grass roots donations: 25 as a base fee, but people could donate more, or less. We wanted this to feel accessible and diverse in a way a formal seated black tie dinner could never be. How are you spending your downtime? I've been binge watching TV. I'm midway through "The Tiger King." And, like a lot of Americans right now, I'm baking banana bread. Where is she hunkering down? In her apartment building on the Upper East Side. What's keeping you in the city? I don't have a country house. And I feel safest in New York. I think I would go crazy hearing crickets. Please take us through your day. I think of reading the paper as a full time job. I have a love/hate relationship with my television right now. A positive distraction has been my new Andrew Cuomo crush. He's my virus daddy. I love how strong his language is. I never thought of him as sexy before. But now, he's hot. What else are you doing? I've made a quarantine vlog, if you will, based on a character resurrected from a show I did in Williamstown; later it moved to the Carlyle. I've called my character Dzanielle. She lives on Instagram as a caricature of Upper East Side moms grappling with the traumas of canceled SoulCycle classes and visible roots. How do you manage family time? We're not one of those families working on 10,000 piece puzzles or making a fig loaf the kind of thing you see on Instagram. More often we're all piled up on my bed watching reruns of "Game of Thrones." What about charity work? I've just donated to the River Fund, an organization in Queens set up to fight hunger and poverty. In the same way there is triage in the hospital intake room, there is going to be some philanthropic triage. People will have to prioritize. Your food insecurity will be first. You're not going to be thinking about the American Friends of some international philharmonic. And your writing? Everyone asks, "What are you working on?" That makes me feel pressured, like I have to turn out a masterpiece. People are always reminding you, "Shakespeare wrote 'King Lear' when he was under plague quarantine." But Shakespeare didn't have three kids whining, "What are we having for dinner?" Is there an upside to self isolation? Just being together as a family is nice. My husband and two daughters have breakfast, lunch and dinner together every single day. I keep reading all these statistics about how divorce rates are soaring. I think this seclusion has been great for our marriage. What's your secret to keeping calm? And connected? We have Post Morrow, a beautiful nature preserve, near our house. We go there on lots of long walks. I'm also rewatching all my favorite Disney classics on Disney . I've gotten to see "Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty," "Cinderella" and "Alice in Wonderland." I'm using the Houseparty app, which is quite fun. You can share your screen. It's like bringing a bunch of your friends into your room. What do you miss? I never thought I would say this, but I miss jumping on the subway to get to meetings. I miss going into a cafe and actually being able to sit down and check a few emails Who's been cleaning your house? Um, me. (chuckles) Is that a challenge? Yes. How are you keeping up your charitable contributions? The Hilton foundation has donated over 10 million to coronavirus relief efforts. During April I am donating 20 percent of my Nicky Hilton x French Sole shoe sales to the LifeWay Network's Covid 19 Freedom Fund, which assists human trafficking survivors. How do you envision life post Covid? I'm not upset that we can't shake hands anymore. I think we're going to just throw that out completely. We have become very touchy as a society; it's not necessary. We'll be seeing the world through a new set of eyes and not taking basic things for granted anymore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The filmmaking is point and shoot rudimentary (when it wants to get fancy, it resorts to split screen effects that bring to mind the 1980s production software called Video Toaster). The acting is awkward (Mr. Dash himself has a leading role), and the characters themselves indifferently delineated. Cliches are rife, both in dialogue ("Sometimes good guys have to do bad things") and construction (shootout scenes are frequently scored to arias and fake arias sung by Radmila Lolly). And yet this anecdotal movie about drug dealers and their internecine troubles, and their further troubles with the justice system, can be oddly persuasive. Narrated by Mr. Dash's character, named O.G., the movie begins by laying out the meaning of the title phrase. Which is pretty much what you'd infer: that you don't rat out your partners in the criminal enterprise that players call "the game." The movie then shows various gang members and rivals facing each other down, wiping each other out, and eventually giving each other up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
One night recently I got an unexpected glimpse of how my children see me. I noticed new pictures on my phone, and vaguely recalled that one of my 5 year old twins had been playing with my phone while I was working on a local news article and attempting to feed the baby. I had been deep into fact checking federal housing guidelines and scouring pages of city zoning code, trying to meet a deadline that I had already pushed back twice. I had also been deep into my feelings of guilt as I once again tried to placate my four children with electronics so that I could work. As I once again fed them frozen foods, heated on a cookie sheet for dinner rather than a nutritious meal. The scene my son captured shows me balancing a bottle with one hand and a laptop with the other, instead of looking my baby in the eyes and bonding through her feeding. What made him pause his constant movement and silliness to freeze frame that moment of our life? "I liked that you were working at home instead of having to go to the coffee shop for some peace and quiet," he said. "So that meant I was being good! I like when you are here. I don't like when you leave me." I felt the guilt knock the wind out of me. My child thought my leaving to work was a consequence of his behavior. He thought that I left when my kids didn't meet my expectations. What a lot of weight for a small child to carry. I vowed to rephrase the way I spoke about going to work. More about me, less about them. Then, he kept going: "But I like that you tell stories for the newspaper. Your stories are about love and people. People who need help." He saw the heart of what my passion is, too, then. Yes, sometimes I write silly parenting stories or odes to naptime, but the heart of my work is stories that expose injustice or highlight the beauty of humanity and the need for compassion. I have to believe that this passion will have a positive effect on my children, in some way. When I looked at the image through this vantage point, I didn't see only my missteps, my guilt, my inadequacies. I saw strength, as well. I saw a woman myself who was failing just a little at all the things that matter to her, but was still doing all the things that mattered to her. I wasn't choosing either/or. I was choosing all of it, in whatever haphazard manner I could hold onto it. In one of my earliest memories, my mother is taking a work call, juggling the phone, a legal pad and a box of Cheerios she was doling out to keep my infant twin brothers quiet in their high chairs. The physical balancing act was apparent, but it took me years to understand the emotional balancing act she was managing while working full time throughout my childhood. I was raised in a suburb of Pittsburgh in the 1980s where most of my friends' moms stayed home. In my mom's Stitch and Bitch sewing group, she was the only one who worked. We had a nanny. My mother, a Realtor, out earned my father as the real estate market began to boom in the early '90s, and her salary fueled the comfortable upper middle class life that I was raised in. My image of my mother includes her walk in closet full of pumps and power suits, and the scent of Calvin Klein Eternity with her kiss as she headed out to an evening meeting. I was immensely proud of her. My brothers and I scampered around the edge of a new construction site a farm razed for houses and strip malls, where our Super Wal Mart now stands as I watched her hold her own among a group of powerful wealthy men. My childhood wasn't without disappointment over some events my mom missed, but for the most part she managed to be present at the things that mattered. I took it for granted that my mother could, and did, have it all. Three decades later, I am a working mother of four children. Our oldest is in first grade, our twins in preschool, and our youngest was born last summer. Adding a newborn into the mix, shuffling night feedings with Lego club, homework and preschool art shows nearly broke me. I was editing articles all the time from my phone, shushing my kids to be quiet as I threw some distractions onto the high chair tray. I asked my superhero working mom about how she had managed to do it all, 30 years ago. Most days, she told me, she felt that achieving something for herself made her a better mother when she was home, but even years later she sometimes can't shake the feelings of regret. "I worried all the time," she said. "Was it wrong to want a career with three young kids? What 'firsts' was I going to miss?" A generation later, my fears are exactly the same. That my kids will be in therapy one day talking about how they saw too much of the back of their mom's phone as she typed work emails. That it is impossible to ever be enough, for everyone, in every area. My mom, now retired, is a daily presence in our life. Whether grabbing my big kids from school so I can work through the baby's afternoon nap or showing up with dinner and matching all of my socks, she gets it. On a deep, visceral level, she gets me. She managed this balancing act for decades and assures me that it's worth it. All of it: worth chasing my professional dreams while chasing my babies. Worth modeling for my two daughters what my mom modeled for me, that they can assert their place firmly in the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Every good narrative needs someone wearing the black hat, and in at least the first two episodes of "The Last Dance," the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan, that man is Jerry Krause. Who was Krause? And why did he play such a big, and contentious, part in the Chicago Bulls' dynasty and Jordan's career? What happens in the documentary? In the opening episodes, Krause is depicted as being hungry to take credit for the work that the Bulls players are putting in on the floor. "He had a way of alienating people," the team's owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, said in the documentary. The documentary shows scenes of Jordan openly mocking Krause for his weight and details the acrimonious relationship Phil Jackson had with Krause. When Krause's stepdaughter got married, Krause invited much of the team but not Jackson. Read more on the death of Michael Jordan's father, James Jordan. "His relationship with me had become such a circus there was no chance for reconciliation," Jackson said. There was also the case of Scottie Pippen, who was tremendously underpaid compared with his peers and whom Krause openly explored trades for. This led to Pippen demanding a trade, a move Jordan called "selfish." "He tried to make me feel so special, yet he was still willing to trade and do all that stuff but never would tell me to my face," Pippen said. "After you're in the game for a while, you realize that nobody is untradable, but I felt insulted." Multiple Bulls detailed Pippen berating Krause on the team bus. "We had to say, 'Hey, tone it down,'" Jackson said. Not everyone criticized Krause though. "Was Jerry Krause a bad guy? No," said Bill Wennington, a center on the team. "He was a good guy. If you saw him interact with your kids, you knew he was a good man." How did Krause come to the Bulls? Krause was hired as Chicago's general manager by Reinsdorf in 1985, a year after the Bulls had drafted Jordan. Although Jordan was rookie of the year, the team was under .500 and lost in the first round of the N.B.A. playoffs. Krause was charged with finding a supporting cast to help the Bulls become champions. He had been both a baseball and basketball scout in his early years, and had a reputation as a hard worker and a shrewd judge of talent. He used those skills to help build the Bulls dynasty. At 5 foot 6, a bit scruffy and less than fit, he was an incongruous sight at Bulls games, and was never fully embraced by the fans, who were understandably in thrall to Jordan. (Jordan called Krause Crumbs because of the doughnut flakes supposedly always on his face.) When the team got rings for the first championship in 1991, Krause was the only person booed by the home crowd. Why didn't he get along with Michael Jordan? Or almost anyone else? As part of restructuring the team, Krause traded Charles Oakley, a favorite of Jordan's, in 1988. The player he acquired, Bill Cartwright, was seemingly not as good, but filled the center role the team needed and was part of the team's first three championships. Krause drafted Toni Kukoc, a star Croatian player, in 1990, and for three years sang his praises while trying to lure him from Europe. He finally landed him in 1993, right as Jordan was retiring to play baseball. Krause's constant hype of Kukoc annoyed Jordan and Pippen, who, after all, won three straight championships without him. Krause was fairly unfiltered and had a habit of making remarks that seemed to play down his players' contributions and build up his own, not the best move to gain players' trust and loyalty. Before the 1997 98 season, he said that players do not win championships, organizations do, a remark that was widely repeated. He later claimed he had been misquoted. At the same time, he was forcing out Jackson, who coached all of the Bulls' championship teams, telling him that he would go after the 1997 98 season no matter how well the team did. After duly winning title No. 6 in 1998, Jackson went on to win five championships with the Los Angeles Lakers. The Bulls are still waiting for a post Jordan title. In 2011, Krause said that he no longer spoke with Jackson and that the reason was personal, not professional. Getting good press was difficult for Krause, in part because he tended to be contemptuous of the news media. "He treats us like we're morons," Sam Smith of The Chicago Tribune said. Doesn't Krause get any credit for the Bulls' success? Krause was the architect of six championship teams, from 1991 to 1993 and 1996 to 1998. But hardly coincidentally, the years in between were the ones in which Jordan left to try baseball. Still, his scout's nose contributed to acquiring Pippen, Kukoc, Steve Kerr, Dennis Rodman, Ron Harper and other key Jordan teammates. He traded center Olden Polynice to move up three places in the draft to land Pippen, a product of a small college, Central Arkansas, who went on to a Hall of Fame career as Jordan's most important teammate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LONDON When Lisa McGee was 13, she wrote a letter to Chelsea Clinton. It was November 1995, and President Bill Clinton was scheduled to visit the city of Derry in a show of support for Northern Ireland's peace process. It would be the first time a sitting president of the United States had come to the troubled region. In an interview, McGee, the creator of "Derry Girls," recalled that she saw an opportunity to make a new friend. So she wrote to the president's daughter to invite her to see a film at the city's Strand movie theater. "She never replied," said McGee, now 38. "The innocence of that. Living in this place that's violent and scary, but we were these eejits running about writing letters to Chelsea Clinton." In the "Derry Girls" universe, the mundane and the profound sit side by side. Cease fires, bombings and kidnapping are given equal narrative weight to teen crushes, field trips and visits to the chip shop , which is to say that they are barely given weight at all. In the first episode of the first season, a character is distraught at news of a bomb on a bridge, because it means she can't get to the tanning salon. In a subsequent scene, when the girls' school bus is stopped by British soldiers, one of them stares down the barrel of their machine guns and flirts . In the second series, a scuffle at school prom is intercut with euphoric street scenes following the 1994 cease fire by the Irish Republican Army. McGee based the show on her own experience of growing up in Derry. The city, which is also called Londonderry by unionists who want the region to remain part of the United Kingdom , was a unique maelstrom of sectarian violence and adolescent angst in the 1990s. Lisa McGee, the "Derry Girls" creator, said of the show: "I feel it's my responsibility to show Derry for what it really is." She remembered key events in "the Troubles," as the conflict was called, "like they were yesterday," she said: the 1994 cease fire, Mr. Clinton's visit and the 1998 Omagh bombing. "But a lot of it for me was just having to go a different way to school because of a bomb scare," she said. "Derry Girls" debuted on Channel 4 in Britain in January 2018 and was an instant hit: It became the most watched television show in Northern Ireland since records began in 2002, with a 64 percent audience share. On Netflix, it attracted a global audience, including from India, Pakistan, Mexico and the United States . In April 2018, Gleann Doherty, a tour operator in Derry, added a "Derry Girls" guided walk to his repertoire. A 90 minute tour around the show's locations, it was particularly popular with fans from the United States, Canada and New Zealand, he said in a telephone interview, adding that many international viewers said they watched the show with subtitles to decode the accent and slang. "It's now my second most popular tour, after the Bogside tour," Doherty said. "Now for every ticket I sell for the City Walls tour, I sell five for 'Derry Girls.'" The show has been commissioned by Channel 4 for a third series, which McGee is writing now. In time, she said, she would like to take the story up to the Good Friday Agreement that ended the conflict in 1998. What makes "Derry Girls" unique is the light touch it uses to deal with the heavy hand of history. "We couldn't present that dreary Northern Ireland again, where it's always men in leather jackets, everything's gray and nobody has a sense of humor," McGee said. Seamas O'Reilly, a writer whose memoir about growing up in Derry in the 1990s, "Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?," will be published in March 2020, called the show "the first bit of good publicity that Derry has had in 20 years." "It shows it as a very boring, normal, mundane place with teenagers, discos and funny neighbors," he said. "It's not like Sarajevo with everyone sleeping on sandbags. It captures very well that Derry is a chirpy, well meaning place but it also has a legacy of so much trauma." The second series ends with archive footage of Mr. Clinton's 1995 speech in Derry: "You have so much more to gain by working together than by drifting apart. Have the patience to work for a just and lasting peace." It was a deliberate choice, McGee said, in the light of the current turmoil in Northern Ireland over Britain's impending departure from the European Union, known as Brexit. Derry is on the border with the Republic of Ireland, which is a member of the bloc; and in the 2016 referendum, 78 percent of voters in Foyle, the parliamentary district that contains Derry, favored remaining in the European Union. Many fear that the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic will inflame sectarian tensions and threaten stability. "There's always a belief in your head, when you're from there, that it could turn, because you've seen it turn before," McGee said. "It's made me double down on how important peace is." The killing of Lyra McKee, a journalist, by a dissident republican group called the New I.R.A. during riots in the Creggan housing estate in April was a grim marker of the city's current problems and the dangerous disaffection they can breed. Foyle has an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent, more than twice the average in Northern Ireland. In 2017, Derry was listed last of 57 United Kingdom cities surveyed by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in its "Good Growth for Cities" report. "I don't think I've ever seen the people of Derry this angry," McGee said of the aftermath of the murder. "There was a very clear message being sent: that we weren't going back." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In Spike Lee's newest film, "Da 5 Bloods" (streaming on Netflix), three African American veterans of the Vietnam War are dismayed to learn that a fourth buddy, Paul, is now a supporter of President Trump. Delroy Lindo, the actor who plays their conservative pal, said he too was dismayed by the character's choice. "I asked Spike if we could make Paul conservative or even an archconservative without specifically being Trumpian," Lindo, 67, said by phone from his home in the Bay Area. But Lee held firm and Lindo said he had to think more empathetically about the character. It worked: Reviewing the film for The New York Times, A.O. Scott raved that Lindo's performance was "achingly specific, rigorously human scaled." You worked with Spike Lee several times quite a few years ago. How did you end up coming back together for this project? Simple. Spike called me. We had not spoken in quite a few years. And Spike called and asked me to read the script and let him know what I thought. You've probably heard by now that I did indeed have reservations about the Trumpian aspect of the character. I told Spike I was really having a hard time with that aspect. I asked Spike if we could make Paul conservative or even an archconservative without specifically being Trumpian. Spike said let me think about it. Three or four days later, he said he really needed the character to be specifically a Trumpite. I then said give me a few days with the script. I think I read it two more times, my lady read it, and it was clear to me that Paul was the part I needed to play. I was able to rationalize in my head how and why Paul could have become a Trump supporter. Paul is a man who had been betrayed in his personal life, betrayed by his country in the manner in which many, many Vietnam vets were abandoned, essentially, by their own country. Added to that, the various betrayals and abandonments and the loss that I have experienced in my personal life led me to conclude that Paul is a man who is deeply vulnerable to being caught up in this individual saying, "I can make it better." Now, I am 3,000 percent not a supporter of Trump, but all I had to do was get to a point where I could empathize with how a person could arrive at that place. And once I did that, I was fine. You said you felt this was a role that you had to play. I started seeing Paul as a larger than life Shakespearean and Wilsonian tragic character. It was every bit on par with Hamlet, Othello, many of the characters in August Wilson's plays. I did Herald Loomis, a huge tragic character in "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" , and Walter Lee Younger in "A Raisin in the Sun," a large tragic character. That's gold for any actor to tackle that magnitude of a part. I'm curious about the acting challenge of playing the flashback scenes without makeup or special effects. In reading the script, and in playing the scenes, it just made sense. Never at any point did I question the authenticity. I'll be curious to see how audiences respond. Let me ask you about some of your earlier work with Spike Lee. I read you turned down a role in "Do the Right Thing." Broadly speaking that's true. We hadn't worked together at that point in either of our careers. But I got a call saying that Spike wanted me to audition for "Do the Right Thing" for one of the three corner men ultimately played by Frankie Faison, Robin Harris and Paul Benjamin. Reading it on the page it felt to me, no, this is not for me. So I said, respectfully, I'd rather not audition for this. I wanted to ask you about "The Good Fight." What was behind your decision to leave? There are a number of components, not least of which was the fact that I'm supposed to do "Harlem's Kitchen" a planned drama on ABC in which he would play a chef and the head of a family with three daughters . Zahir McGhee, the creator, has written the first three episodes, and the prospect of investigating this American family emotionally and psychologically is potentially very exciting. But as far as Adrian Boseman the lawyer he plays on "The Good Fight" is concerned, I'm really gratified that audiences seemed to respond. I wish more black people watched it. For whatever reason, there's not a lot of black people watching it in the same numbers. So that's a regret, if I can use that word. A clip from the show went viral recently and it seemed like some people thought it was a real interview as opposed to a scene from the show. When did you find out you were going viral? My son came downstairs and said, "Dad, you're blowing up the internet." What? It's hilarious to me. And it kind of stunned me that people thought that was me saying that. It's really a potentially illuminating window into not only social media, but how we communicate in the 21st century. But here's the understanding I've come to: Even though the scene is not real, the sentiments expressed in it are authentic. And so certainly black people, possibly for whites, but black people who were looking at that were saying, "That is so right on." And if you think about having that visceral of a response, it's not so much of a leap to then psychologically and emotionally believe that it's real. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Re "Will We Get Used to the Dying?," by Charlie Warzel (Opinion, May 6): How apt that "Live and Let Die" played as an arrogant President Trump without a mask visited a factory in Arizona that makes masks. It is a perfect theme for his re election campaign because the message to those of us who are classified as "old" or "poor" or "working class" is that we are expendable. Thousands of deaths a day is our society's offering in exchange for reopening our economy. The poor and the working class return to work because they have to, they take their chances, serving all of us, as our economic needs trump their health. They have been told by the president that they are "warriors" and some must die, but the dying never stops. Those on the front lines the health care workers carry on without adequate protection. Our message to President Trump must surely be that we will not "get used to the dying," that our vote is power, and that we will leverage our vote in November if we live that long. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The playwright Terrence McNally, the actress Rosemary Harris and the musician Harold Wheeler will be honored for their lifetime achievements at this year's Tony Awards. The awards administrators named the honorees on Thursday, as this year's theater season draws to a close with the opening of the final Tony eligible show. Nominees for competitive awards will be announced on Tuesday, and the awards ceremony will be broadcast on CBS on June 9. Check out our Culture Calendar here. Mr. McNally, 80, is a four time Tony winner, for the plays "Love! Valour! Compassion!" and "Master Class," and for the books of the musicals "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "Ragtime." His writing has been the basis of 24 Broadway productions; the 25th will be this summer, when his play "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune" is to be revived on Broadway, starring Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon. Ms. Harris, 91, won a Tony Award in 1966 for "The Lion in Winter." She has appeared in 27 Broadway shows, and is currently featured as Mrs. Higgins in a Lincoln Center Theater revival of "My Fair Lady." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A FARM rich in history, soil and charm changed hands last month in Morris County. In a complex deal more than a decade in the making, the 740 acre property, the Scott Farm, was divided into two parts, both preserved permanently for agricultural use. One was sold to Ronald Weiss, a New Jersey doctor, who will treat patients with a farm grown vegan diet; the other buyer was Sean Campbell, a British investor, who will grow apples to make hard cider. "It's really about the dirt," said Dr. Weiss, an internist based in West New York. "This is storied dirt, settled by Germans who came to this valley on foot in the 1700s, and put up the stone buildings that still stand on my farm." More to the point, he said, "This is also prime soil in great shape for organic gardening." Dr. Weiss paid 2.525 million for 348 acres, according to county real estate records. Although in the process of hiring a farmer to do the actual growing, he is to live on the property as well. It is home to an 1836 Federal style house built over a stream, and he and his wife, Deborah, are working with an architect on plans to make it functional for them and their two young children. A large stone barn with partly collapsed walls, believed to date to the 1700s, is to be turned into a food and wellness center, said Dr. Weiss, who has worked in conventional medicine for two decades, including a stint in the emergency room at Passaic Valley Hospital. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
RAMALLAH, West Bank As New York City was moving toward a full confinement mode, I got an email from the daughter of a Palestinian friend from the West Bank. She lives and works in the city and was looking for advice from a veteran of long term confinements. "I was too young at the time of the Israeli military curfew in 2002 to remember," she wrote, and then asked: "How did you all manage?" In 2002, when my neighbors and I had our movement severely restricted by an Israeli military siege, I tried my best to continue living as normally as I could. It was springtime then, as it is now. I would look out the window and lament my inability to venture out to the lush hills all around covered with wildflowers. But the danger lurking outside my house back then was readily recognizable: armed soldiers enforcing the stay at home orders. Only Palestinians were under threat. While we suffered, normal life continued elsewhere, indifferent to what we were enduring. How did I survive that monthlong curfew? By carefully organizing my day. By refusing to succumb to despair and warding off boredom. By keeping busy and dividing the day into distinct activities: reading, writing, cooking, exercising, listening to music, taking care of my garden pots and communicating by telephone with others. Looking inward helped me gain perspective on how completely the world around me was falling apart. I started to keep a daily journal. This self imposed ritual enabled me to get a handle on what the changing times meant for me and my neighbors, what it could teach all of us about the ways we interact and the world in which we live. A common crisis can bring out the best in people, as was the case in Ramallah in 2002 and as is the case today in so many communities dealing with the coronavirus. A common crisis reveals solidarity that few suspected existed before, and inspires acts of kindness. Unlike the Israeli guns that posed an equal threat to anyone moving outside of their homes without permission, the virus discriminates by age. The older you are, the larger the target on your back. No doubt, the young face drastic losses. With schools closed and final exams canceled, many will be losing a year and their careers will suffer. But to see less vulnerable young people help older, more at risk members of the population is heartening. In Palestine, the degree of self control among the population has been impressive. The coronavirus first struck in Bethlehem, the city most visited by tourists. In early March, Greek Pilgrims returned home and tested positive. The Palestinian Authority tracked down those who had been in contact with them and closed down Bethlehem to prevent the spread of the virus to other parts of the West Bank. The Palestinian Ministry of Health, supported by an NGO, the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, launched a massive information campaign of preventative measures. Initially there were violations and the virus spread in the town which reached 40 cases. Then several more cases popped up in other West Bank cities less frequented by tourists. The seriousness of the danger settled in. In a culture where shaking hands is the usual mode of greeting, the practice almost immediately stopped. Mosques closed their doors to worshipers. From my house I can hear the call to prayer which now includes the words, "Do your prayers at home." The degree of precaution exercised by the population reflected the awareness of the limitations of our health system. As one doctor put it: The Ramallah hospital barely manages in normal times, let alone during the outbreak of an epidemic. Like everyone else, I was closely following local and international news about the development of the pandemic. Yet my first reaction was denial of the enormity of the crisis. For instance, as Ramallah's many cafes, restaurants, schools, colleges and the university shut down, traffic greatly diminished, and I felt a sense of relief that my city was returning to how I remembered it before the massive development of the past two decades. But the reality that we face here and everywhere has now set in. The West Bank is under lockdown for two weeks. As the restrictions on our freedom of movement continue, one begins to marvel at how adaptable humans are. Activities and pastimes that felt indispensable are soon dropped without second thought. But human adaptability is both a strength and a threat. As we adapt to a narrowing of our lives, there are those who are watching and marking how far they can squeeze, making permanent what was supposed to be temporary after the crisis passes. That is what happened in the West Bank after the 2002 siege ended. The strangulating roadblocks that Israel had placed as a "temporary measure" became a permanent feature of the landscape. Many measures in countries around the world, including Western democracies, that would have been unthinkable a month ago are being deemed necessary to curb the spread of the disease and introduced without resistance. Will they be rescinded after the threat subsides? Fear is a tyrant's best friend. Even the liberal West must beware of those with authoritarian impulses taking advantage of this crisis to normalize practices people would resist in less dire times. My advice to my young friend facing restrictions in New York? Make the best of a bad situation by discovering a capacity for self discipline and self reflection you did not know you had. Appreciate the many daily acts of selflessness being performed by your neighbors, and think about performing considerations and kindnesses for people more vulnerable than you. But at the same time, be vigilant. Note measures being taken now that would not be tolerated in normal times. The Covid 19 threat will pass, but what will follow? Unlike any other event during my lifetime, this pandemic serves as a reminder of our common humanity and shared fate. What will its legacy be for your generation? Never forget this moment in time when our collective well being so clearly depended on the good will and behavior of others, and act accordingly. Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer who lives in Ramallah and is the author of "When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege" and "Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Scientists have been altering the genes of mice, pigs, goats, chickens and butterflies for quite some time. But even as Crispr, a transformative gene editing tool, made seemingly impossible genetic alterations possible, reptiles had remained untouched. That changed with the birth of a nearly transparent Anolis lizard, the first gene edited reptile, according to the draft of a study made public this week. Ashley Rasys, a graduate student at the University of Georgia who was involved in the lizard's creation, arrived shortly after he broke through his thick M M size shell. "I was floored," she said. "We weren't really expecting to generate an albino lizard at first," she added. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The steps involved in creating him are outlined in the paper, which was first reported by Science magazine. Scientists now have another model to utilize in genetic research. "When we want to understand human biology we go to one of these model systems," said Douglas Menke, the director of the genetics department at the University of Georgia and another author of the study. Until now, all 10,000 species of reptiles have been off limits. "People thought they were just too hard to work with," he said. The challenge was figuring out how to access lizards' reproductive systems in the right way at the right time. What his team has proved, he said, is that it is possible. "We can now create two to four mutant lizards from just a day's work," he said. It took the scientists about two years to figure out how to access the reproductive system of the lizards in the desired way. Then they had to use their genetic scalpel to target the lizard mom's eggs, while they were still growing inside her. The scientists could have altered a variety of genes, but they focused on the mutation that codes for albinism in large part because that tweak is visual. Producing an albino lizard would show their gene editing was successful. They thought it would take at least two generations to get there, however. Having an albino mother does not mean a person or a lizard will be albino. Both the mother and father must carry the mutation. Because researchers were targeting the lizards' eggs before they were fertilized by the father, they thought that getting the albino mutation into the paternal DNA would take additional breeding. And yet their very first gene edited lizard emerged without any pigment. Three of the other 146 edited eggs did as well. Somehow they had altered both maternal and paternal DNA in one fell swoop. The researchers have a hypothesis about why that will require additional study. George Church, a geneticist affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T., called the application of Crispr to lizards "significant." Dr. Church uses genome modification techniques to try to reverse aging in dogs, to make pigs more compatible for organ transplants in humans, and to protect elephants from herpesvirus. There is a movement to use gene editing to combat pathogens and environmental threats. Many reptiles are endangered. "Editing could help," he said. Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist from Washington University in St. Louis, was also enthusiastic. "This study opens the door to studying the genetics of lizard evolution," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
As awards season officially gets underway post Golden Globes and we prepare to be inundated by stars in gowns imagery galore, it is worth pausing to consider the interesting case of Nicolas Ghesquiere, artistic director of Louis Vuitton. It's possible that he has evolved into his generation's Hubert de Givenchy, with a gaggle of Audrey Hepburns at his surround. Together they recreate a primer on celebrity dressing and fashion that has been lost in the race to the cash register that red carpet dressing often seems to have become. It's an unexpected evolution, to say the least, but possibly also an instructive one. The latest Vuitton luminary is Ruth Negga, whose appearance at the Globes in a gold and silver sequined LV T shirt gown with a scuba zip up the front and anatomical seaming at the torso landed her not only on every best dressed list (yes, mine included), but also had Vogue crowning her as the breakout best dressed star. As it happened, she joined Michelle Williams on the red carpet, Ms. Williams having been attached to Vuitton since 2014. She sported a generally applauded strapless white lace column at the Globes, though her LV dress was somewhat overshadowed by her apparently controversial decision to wear a thin black velvet bow around her neck like a choker. And Ms. Negga followed last year's breakout name, Alicia Vikander, who also happens to have been dressed by Vuitton during her debut awards season: a multigown marathon of modernized Cinderella tropes that culminated with an Oscar win in a strapless yellow waltzing dress with pixel like beading. It was published pretty much everywhere and defined her as a movie star who straddled digital cool and silver screen grace. The point was, neither woman resembled anyone else. They didn't look as if they had copied a best dress from yesteryear, nor did they look like fashion aspirants who had just stepped off the runway. They looked like what viewers could only assume was themselves. Or at least the selves they wanted to introduce to the world. That kind of definition requires careful planning, coordination and some sort of personal connection between model and modeler. And it is this connection that often seems to be missing from so much of what we see these days, and why so many dresses just, well, miss. It has fallen victim, presumably, to falling film revenues, which in turn have made lucrative endorsement deals evermore important to a celebrity's bank balance. The result is what looks, at least from the outside, like stars and starlets auctioning themselves off to the highest bidding brand whether there seems to be any real shared sensibility between them. Or, to be fair, being auctioned off by managers and stylists it's hard to know who is behind the deals and then switching allegiances as the contracts end. Sometimes a designer is involved in the decision, but sometimes not. Raf Simons was famously surprised when he was artistic director of Dior at the news that Rihanna was going to be a face of the brand. It has all created a situation that undermines the twin goals this arrangement was supposed to achieve: casting a starry halo on a product so that consumers who relate to certain celebrities then start relating to the names they are wearing, while ensuring that said celebrities never embarrass themselves by revealing that they secretly take their dress cues from souvenir lamps. Mr. Ghesquiere has begun to stand out as a reminder of a different approach, one in which that promise is actually fulfilled. It begins with the women themselves, who tend more to the arty, independent film mode rather than the blockbuster mode. It's hard to imagine any market researchers worth their salt recommending them as a celeb most likely to move merch. Or, for that matter, any luxury executive jumping up and down in delight at, say, the news of Ms. Williams's "Manchester by the Sea" role: a drab working class woman who has suffered an unspeakable tragedy. Yet their spiky, silent personas and unexpected choices make a certain amount of sense with Mr. Ghesquiere's spiky, film focused fashion both are often categorized as "challenging" and they are mutually complementary. The actresses give the luxury handbag behemoth a veneer of niche cool; the designer polishes his or her more outre edges. And it has to do with an investment in time. After all, Mr. Ghesquiere made his major red carpet debut in 2002 when he was creative director of Balenciaga, dressing Jennifer Connelly for the Oscars in a limply tiered strapless number that the BBC characterized as a shade of "pale dung." Ms. Connelly won the award for best supporting actress, but the gown landed her on pretty much every worst dressed list (including some "worst dressed of all time" lists). And the avant garde Blade Runner like Balenciaga creations that followed on, say, Charlotte Gainsbourg at the 2007 Met Gala did nothing to change Mr. Ghesquiere's reputation as not really a red carpet kind of guy. This would normally have most agents advising their clients to run far, far away in the direction of a bias cut goddess gown (and who knows, maybe their agents did suggest it), yet both women stuck with him, suggesting a mutual appreciation that went beyond marketing. Finally, there's the requisite ability to sublimate the designer ego, a skill Mr. Ghesquiere admits he had to learn. For years he wanted the red carpet simply to mimic the runway, when that kind of pure fashion in a Hollywood context often looks wrong: See Sophie Turner, roundly panned at the Globes for her dress, which happened to be the last look from the October Vuitton show. But with Ms. Vikander, Mr. Ghesquiere was clearly charged with building a public image for her over the period of the awards season, and he finally understood (and accepted) that it was her image, not his and not that of Vuitton. All of which could not have happened without actual personal communication but with some sort of meeting of the minds and trust. Mr. Ghesquiere is by no means the only designer who has worked closely with specific actresses. Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino and Emma Stone collaborated on her dress for the Globes; Joseph Altuzarra and Evan Rachel Wood did the same on her tuxedo. And there is no doubt that Mesdames Williams, Connelly and Vikander, all of whom have appeared in Vuitton ad campaigns and dutifully show up at the ready to wear collections, have been paid by the brand for their work and their appearances. But you don't feel they have been bought. That distinction matters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
One instruction remains consistent and clear during the coronavirus pandemic: Stay home. For many of us, that means taking our daily activities work, school, medical care and connecting with loved ones online. But not for everyone. The coming weeks will lay bare the already cruel reality of the digital divide: tens of millions of Americans cannot access or cannot afford the home broadband connections they need to telework, access medical information and help young people learn when school is closed. When public health requires social distancing and even quarantine, closing the digital divide becomes central to our safety and economic security. Eliminating the digital divide permanently is a long term problem that requires sustained resources and commitment. But the federal government and the technology and communications sector should work together right away to take immediate, emergency actions to get high quality broadband into homes in communities hit by the coronavirus. Here is what a connectivity stimulus should include: The Federal Communications Commission must act. Every year, the commission spends about 8 billion to bring communications services to rural communities and low income Americans. During this crisis, we should rapidly use these funds to increase the stock of lendable free hotspots available through schools and public libraries, expand the reach of telemedicine, and enhance Lifeline, the only federal program with the sole mission of bringing affordable communications to low income Americans and a critical aspect of our social safety net in times of economic turmoil. This would not be the first time the F.C.C. has expanded Lifeline in a crisis; the George W. Bush era F.C.C. strengthened its programming as a result of Hurricane Katrina. This would have the added benefit of injecting money into the economy as Congress considers other stimulus options. We should also eliminate red tape and extend regulatory flexibility where doing so would allow broadband providers to quickly expand access. The commission could, for example, expedite decisions on waivers and experimental licenses that would let providers deploy unused and inefficiently used wireless spectrum or new technologies to increase their capacity and reach. All broadband providers should join the effort to support Americans in need. We often think of the digital divide as a rural issue, but Census Bureau surveys show that three times as many households in urban areas remain unconnected as in rural areas. In urban areas, cost is often the problem. Based on Pew data and the American Community Survey, researcher John Horrigan estimates that more than 18 million households lack broadband because it's too expensive. To meet the needs of low income people, some broadband providers already offer a lost cost tier. In times of emergency, no American should go without a connection because of cost. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
a really well liked guy, young, seemingly fit and healthy, had gotten married relatively recently and had a new baby. Just relocated to LA and started feeling sick and was diagnosed with the virus. Spent months in the hospital. And ultimately, he died. So the big union, Actors' Equity, that represents 51,000 professional actors and stage managers across the country has forbidden its members from auditioning, rehearsing, or performing in person. And every actor I know is unemployed. Unemployment is almost total in the theater world. There is no work. And that means not only no income, but it really threatens everyone's access to health care. Because actors earn health insurance by working, and they're not working. And so it's a devastating time for a group of people who, already, many of them live on the edge. And so a couple months into the pandemic, here comes this theater in Western Massachusetts that wants to do "Godspell". This is a region of the country that has a very low coronavirus caseload. "Godspell" only has 10 actors and doesn't involve any romantic entanglements or hand to hand combat. And the theater, the Berkshire Theater Group, is willing to do almost anything that Equity wants to get this show going. So based on all of that, the union agrees. This is the only musical with union actors taking place in the United States of America this summer. And everyone in the theater world is watching, some with horror, some with excitement, some with dread. The stakes are enormous. Because if this works, it might be a model for continuing to do some theater in some parts of the country and in other parts of the world. And if it doesn't work, it's going to send a terrible signal about the ability of the theater world to limit risk. Yeah, it's so weird, you know? Actors are used to kind of being really close to one another and reading one another and talking toward one another, singing toward one another. And "Godspell" is a show that is kind of about building community and often that involves things like hugging. And so suddenly, they're in these boxes. And it's absolutely strange. But it's going. They're getting it down. And then, they hit a roadblock. The stage manager one morning is watching the rehearsal and he doesn't love what he's seeing. People are too close to each other. And they might be singing at each other. So he goes over to talk to the director. And the director is upset. They only have two weeks of rehearsal. They're halfway in. And he feels like he doesn't yet know the rules under which they have to operate. So he stops the rehearsal. And then Nick Edwards, the actor who's playing Jesus, he feels like he can't wait for all these people in the Berkshires to debate about what is and what is not permissible. And instead, he dials New York. He calls the union. And he says, we need some rules. We need some guidance. We need some definitive decision. And the news, although clarifying, is not great. They're going to have to restage most of the numbers that they've already learned. They're going to have to use masks more often. They're going to have to stand behind screens more often. They're going to have to rethink a lot of the blocking in a way that's going to mean re rehearsing much of the first half of the show. We're still so far from Broadway restarting, from the kind of theater that so many of us used to see, where we sat cheek by jowl with other people in these old buildings. What we have is a small production of a 50 year old musical under a tent in a rural corner of western Massachusetts. It's not a sustainable path forward for theater in America. It's not what we had before the pandemic. And it's not what we hope to have. But I think it's meaningful. It's a group of actors. It's a theater showing a way to make art, to see art for now. And it's succeeding. The show has been selling out. It's extended. So far, the actors have been safe. And the audiences have been safe. The union has even decided to allow a few more shows to go forward. They're all small. They're all in rural New England. But this time, they're going to be indoors. And for me, a guy who used to go see Broadway shows multiple nights a week, I'm now contemplating the possibility of renting another car and driving to the White Mountains of New Hampshire so that next month I can see another experiment in making theater during a pandemic. Before he was detained, Prude, who had been suffering from mental health problems, ran out of his brother's house in an erratic state wearing no clothes, saying that he had the coronavirus and spitting. Police who encountered him apparently placed the hood over his head to prevent Prude from spitting at them. And The Times reports that the Trump administration plans to bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month, capping a high profile investigation into whether the tech giant has abused its dominance over online search. The decision appears to be controversial within the Department of Justice. Most lawyers working on the case say that the charges are being rushed. But those lawyers have been overruled by the Attorney General, Bill Barr. The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, MJ Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, and Liz O. Baylen. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Mahima Chablani, and Des Ibekwe. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Tuesday, after the holiday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A surge in the number of infants born with tiny brains has led Brazil's health ministry to warn pregnant women to take extreme measures to avoid mosquito bites, which may infect them with a recently arrived virus. Some prominent obstetricians in Brazil now advise women against becoming pregnant at all. The increase in microcephaly an incurable form of brain damage has been blamed on an epidemic of the Zika virus, which was unknown in Latin America before this year. A few Zika infections have been detected in the United States in returning travelers. Those imported cases "will likely increase and may result in local spread of the virus in some areas of the United States," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned recently. The mosquito species that transmits Zika virus are common in Florida and along the Mexican border, but the pathogen has not yet been found in them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
GUIDONIA, Italy Emanuele Tedeschi wiped sawdust from his hands and gestured around the cavernous woodworking factory that has been in his family for two generations. The big machines, which used to run overtime carving custom furnishings for private homes, Roman palazzi and even the Vatican, sat idle on a shop floor nearly devoid of workers. ''A year and a half ago, the noise from production was so loud that you had to shout to be heard,'' said Mr. Tedeschi, walking amid pallets of cherry and other fine woods stacked up and waiting for a purpose. Since a government austerity plan designed to shield Italy from Europe's debt crisis took hold last year, the economy has tumbled into one of worst recessions of any euro zone country, and Mr. Tedeschi's orders have all but dried up. His company, Temeca, is still in business. For now. But among Italy's estimated six million companies, businesses of all sizes have been going belly up at the rate of 1,000 a day over the last year, especially among the small and midsize companies that represent the backbone of Italy's 1.5 trillion euro, or 2 trillion, economy. The situation has become more urgent after inconclusive elections in February that left politics in Rome gridlocked. ''With no one governing the country, there will be more paralysis, so things will get worse,'' said Mr. Tedeschi, 49, casting a worried glance at his wife and their 23 year old son. They help fill the trickle of orders, now that Mr. Tedeschi has had to lay off 6 of the 11 full time employees he had in mid 2011. A new caretaker government, which could be installed in weeks, is unlikely to be strong enough to pass growth enhancing reforms, deepening problems for Italy, and for Europe, that could take years to reverse. ''This underscores the likelihood of Italy having a Japan like decade with phenomenally slow growth,'' said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. ''And it raises painful questions about the long run stability of growth in the euro zone over all.'' Italy's political quagmire might not roil global financial markets right away, Mr. Rogoff added. But it raises the specter of the European crisis ''grinding on and on,'' he said, and would certainly make it harder for European leaders to cut deals ''on the big picture things that are needed to stabilize Europe.'' The afflictions of Italy's economy, one of Europe's largest, are not necessarily new, of course: a lumbering bureaucracy, stifling labor regulations and a heavy reliance on companies with 50 or fewer employees that are struggling to compete in the global marketplace. As the 17 nation euro currency union's economy was expanding an average of 1 percent for much of the last decade, Italy grew at only half that rate, according to the International Monetary Fund. But Italy's longstanding problems have grown worse in the last year as tax increases and spending cuts were pressed by Mr. Monti, who took over as prime minister in November 2011 after the euro crisis forced out Silvio Berlusconi. Last year the economy shrank 2.4 percent. One in two small companies cannot pay its employees on time, according to CGIA di Mestre, a research institute. With layoffs surging, unemployment rose to 11.7 percent in January. Youth unemployment has jumped to 38.7 percent. 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. The austerity program was intended to reduce the risk of a debt crisis and ensure the backing of the European Central Bank, but instead it left the country with no growth. And without growth, Italy will have a harder time paying down its 2 trillion euros ( 2.6 trillion) in debt, one of the largest debt burdens in the euro zone. In some respects, Italy is not as hobbled as some other euro countries. The Italian government has managed to shrink the budget deficit. Industrial companies like Ferrari, Benetton and Ducati continue to help Italy maintain the euro zone's second largest manufacturing base after Germany. But it is businesses like Mr. Tedeschi's ones with fewer than 50 workers, which constitute the vast majority of Italy's economy and long provided much of its vitality that are buckling as banks halt lending and taxes rise. Credit issued by Italian banks fell in 2012 to the lowest level in more than a decade. And the government owes an estimated 70 billion euros in unpaid bills for goods and services to Italian companies. Mr. Tedeschi started feeling the pinch in late 2011 at his factory in Guidonia, an industrial town north of Rome in Lazio, a sprawling region that is in many ways a microcosm of Italy itself. Here, amid low lying mountains and rolling green hills, are many midsize factories specializing in products stamped "Made in Italy." But hundreds of those businesses have been shut lately. "In one and a half years, everything changed," Mr. Tedeschi said. "People started feeling afraid, and they stopped spending money. All the promises Monti made to relaunch the economy and help us enhance productivity never materialized." Orders for Temeca's custom built bedrooms, kitchens, windows and doors slowed to a trickle. Even the Vatican, which commissioned a choir stand and furnishings for one of its palaces from Mr. Tedeschi's company, stopped placing orders last year. Recently, he took a step he had hoped never to have to make: laying off employees, including a man who had been with the company for more than 30 years. "When I had to fire those people, I cried," he said, sitting in his small office under a picture of Mother Teresa as his wife, Annarita Neroni, and his son, Lorenzo, looked on. Mr. Tedeschi said several members of a local trade group took their own lives last year when they could no longer maintain their business. "This is a moment where if you stay alone in this situation," he said, "you will wind up by shooting yourself." Mr. Tedeschi's wife said the family stopped drawing salaries more than a year ago to make payroll for the remaining workers. Disillusioned with the economy's rapid erosion under Mr. Monti, the family voted for the anti establishment Five Star movement, led by the comedian turned activist Beppe Grillo, in the February elections, even though they knew it might lead to chaos. "It's a form of protest," Lorenzo Tedeschi said, adding that he had been drawn by Mr. Grillo's plan to cut billions of euros in corruption and wasteful spending. "We need to start from scratch in this country, and he gives us hope that there is a chance to make things equal." That may be tough, given that the discord Mr. Grillo created is likely to delay a recovery. Few people believe that official forecasts of a return to mild growth this year will materialize. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
For 18 days last month, a team of computer security experts found themselves engaged in a digital version of hand to hand combat with a group of hackers determined to break into the network of a military contractor. Every time the hackers, believed to be Iranian, gained a toehold in one server, the defenders shut down their access. A few days later, the hackers would come in through another digital door, and again the defenders would block them. While dueling with the hackers, the security experts said they encountered something that they had never seen before when dealing with an Iranian cyberattack: a Russian connection. Specifically, they found that the Iranians were using a tool set developed by a known Russian hacker for hire and sold in underground Russian forums. The tool had popped up in connection with an attack in Ukraine in 2015, when Russian hackers successfully shut down parts of Ukraine's power grid. "This is the very first time we've cataloged an attack where Iranian hackers are working with Russian hackers for hire," Carl Wright, an executive at TrapX, the Silicon Valley security firm that interdicted the hackers last month, said in an interview last week. TrapX says it cannot name the victim of the attack, the details of which have not been reported until now, because of confidentiality agreements. But the intrusion represented a "historic" partnership between Iran's hackers and Russians who are auctioning their skills and tools to the highest bidder, said Tom Kellermann, a computer security expert who previously served as the chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, the Tokyo based security giant, and was a member of a commission advising the Obama administration on online security. "Iranian hackers have dramatically increased their cyberweaponry and tactical proficiency as a result," Mr. Kellermann said. Security experts outside TrapX said that it was possible that the attackers had faked the Internet Protocol address in the attack, and that Iran's hackers had simply grabbed the Russian hacking tool off the web and customized it for their attack. Still, TrapX researchers said that several web domains used in the attack had been registered to a Russian alias, and that three email addresses continue to be used by a hacker in Russian hacking forums and in the underground web. The security experts had become very familiar with the Iranian hackers, who had gotten the nickname "OilRig" because they first emerged in hackings on oil companies in Saudi Arabia and later Israel. The hackers had been moving west, targeting a growing array of military, financial and energy companies in Europe and, more recently, the United States. Security experts said the Iran's OilRig hackers had become easy to spot over the course of hundreds of attacks on contractors, energy companies and government agencies. By most accounts, these hackers could best be described as the "B Team," not nearly as sophisticated as the Chinese, Russian or Eastern European hackers whom security firms have been monitoring for more than a decade. But what OilRig's hackers lacked in sophistication, they made up for in determination. They did their research. They were patient. When they were caught, they would wait for the dust to settle before trying again. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Researchers at TrapX came across the Russian tool set in the course of what Mr. Wright described as a running battle with the Iranian hackers last month. More than 70 percent of the code used in the attack was identical to the code OilRig had used in hundreds of previous assaults on organizations. The targets ranged from oil companies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to government agencies and companies in Turkey, Europe and the United States, including a small tech firm in rural Vermont called AI Squared that helps websites serve people with visual impairments. But in the final stage of the attack, TrapX's defenders saw a big shift in the hackers' methods, tools and techniques. "It was a departure from anything they've done in over 200 documented attacks," said Moshe Ben Simon, vice president of TrapX Labs, the company's research arm, said in an interview. At one point, the defenders watched as the attackers got close to the part of their clients' network where the most valuable intellectual property was housed. It was in this final stage that the hackers downloaded two new sets of tools. The first was a basic hacker's kit that could do things like steal usernames and passwords. The second tool had never popped up in an OilRig attack before. It was wrapped in encryption and had been designed to evade the techniques investigators use to figure out how a hacking tool works. It took weeks to crack the tool and extract information, Mr. Ben Simon said. The security researchers found OilRig code used in previous attacks, combined with a type of malware called BlackEnergy that was used in an assortment of attacks, including the 2015 effort by Russian hackers that took out parts of Ukraine's power grid. They also found that the hacking tool was conveying information from the victims' systems to a server that had also popped up in the Ukraine power grid attack. Mr. Wright said evidence also indicated that the hacker was renting out services on the underground web. In the end, TrapX's researchers were able to bait the attackers with a web server containing fake data aimed at tricking them into divulging their tactics, and hopefully frustrating them into giving up. It worked. OilRig's hackers injected their malware into the server, which TrapX then analyzed and used to shut the hackers out of their clients' systems. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. An old two story brick building in a shabby part of town, formerly a distribution center for Budweiser beer, is now the world's most powerful factory for analyzing genes from people and viruses. And it is a factory. At any given time, 10,000 tiny test tubes each holding a few drops of gene containing fluid are being processed by six technicians, working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year two on the night shift using 50 dishwasher sized machines in two large rooms. The machines spit out sequence data onto a computer screen in the form of a long list, in order, of the letters that make up genetic material. That is three billion letters if the genes are from a person. Another 64 technicians do the more labor intensive work of preparing the samples for analysis. It is all in service of researchers who work for the Broad Institute, a gleaming, lavishly endowed genetics center a few blocks away. The sequencing center has worked on human DNA from an international effort, the 1,000 Genomes Project, that looks at the genes of thousands of people from around the world. It has gotten sequences of microbes, like dengue fever, malaria and West Nile virus. It has gotten genetic sequences from animals like chimpanzees. The Ebola and Lassa group, led by Pardis Sabeti, wants to know what the viruses look like. Do they mutate while they are infecting people, possibly evading the immune system? Are some strains more deadly than others? And what about the genetics of the people who are infected? Are some people more resistant, perhaps even immune, to these viruses because of tweaks in their own genes? The research is emblematic of a new direction in public health, which uses powerful genetic methods and applies them to entire populations. The aim is to get a detailed picture of disease epidemiology, as the disease is happening. Armed with such data, doctors should be better able to stop epidemics and researchers can get clues to treating and preventing infections. In one of their first investigations, the group traced the start of the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone from a single funeral in May that ended up infecting 14 women. One person who had been at that funeral showed up at Kenema Government Hospital a few hours' drive from the village where the funeral was held. "That first case was manageable," Dr. Sabeti said. But several weeks after the funeral, there was a fear that an epidemic could have been sparked. The fear turned out to be true. "The virus was like a tidal wave coming into the country," Dr. Sabeti said. Sierra Leone's department of health and safety sent epidemiologists to the remote village to trace the disease, asking who had been at the funeral and who had the funeral participants contacted. They found 14 ill with Ebola and an additional 35 people who tested negative for Ebola but had been exposed and had some symptoms. Did they really have no virus in their bodies? That's where genetic sequencing provided an answer. "The government wanted to know if they were negative for real or was the diagnostic test just not picking Ebola up?" Dr. Sabeti said. The blood from those people was sent to the Broad Institute, where any viral genetic material in it was sequenced. Those 35 were not infected they had no Ebola virus in their blood. But the test found the virus in the blood of the 14 who had the disease. As the group examined the genetics of the Ebola viruses in different patients 78 in the first few weeks of the outbreak in Sierra Leone they noticed the virus was continually mutating, which raises questions about whether it could become airborne or more deadly. Dr. Sabeti said the mutations were not a surprise because that was what viruses did. But, she added, "it is also always something we should be concerned about." It probably would take many major mutations for the virus to be able to spread through the air or become more virulent, she said. "But, again, any change is one change too many, and we should stop this thing as quickly as we can." For their continuing work on why some who are exposed to Ebola become sick and die while others escape infection or become sick and recover, the investigators need to study the genes of the patients themselves. That can be difficult. In Sierra Leone, Dr. Sabeti said, people do not want researchers studying cells of people who died. Lassa also can have dreadful consequences only 16 percent of those admitted to hospitals in Sierra Leone with Lassa survive. Lassa, unlike Ebola, infects the brain, so survivors often end up with permanent neurological damage like deafness, dizziness or psychiatric symptoms. Dr. Sabeti's interest in Lassa was piqued seven years ago, before there was an Ebola epidemic, and before sequencing reached today's low price and fast speed. She had decided to look at already determined DNA sequences from people around the world with a simple question: Are there new gene mutations, ones that only recently emerged in a population, that might protect against disease? The idea was that if a disease entered a population and was deadly, those who carried a protective mutation would survive and reproduce and soon that good mutation would become common. She saw one such mutation in Nigeria it was a slight tweak in a gene and so common that 34 percent of the population there has it. The gene, called LARGE, is 10 to 50 times bigger than other genes. The gene still functioned, but why did so many people have this variation? It turned out that the role of the LARGE gene was well known, studied by Dr. Michael B.A. Oldstone at Scripps and his colleagues. LARGE modifies a protein on the surface of cells that the virus uses as an entryway. Without LARGE, that group found, Lassa cannot get into cells. Now that was interesting, Dr. Sabeti thought. Could the little tweak she had found in LARGE among so many Nigerians make it harder for the virus to infect them? Lassa had been in Nigeria for about 1,000 years. If this gene mutation was protecting people, how would she know? Dr. Sabeti looked at DNA sequences from Sierra Leone, where Lassa entered about 150 years ago. Ten percent had the mutation in the LARGE gene. Elsewhere in the world, the mutation was unheard of. This told her that it was likely that the mutation was protective. To confirm her suspicion, she had to get data cells from people who were exposed to Lassa and fell ill and those with similar exposure who resisted the virus. That way, she could test whether the LARGE mutation was linked to a better outcome. It is a difficult project and still underway, but so far, based on a small set of data, the mutation in LARGE does appear to be protective. Dr. Sabeti was far from the first to investigate Lassa a small contingent of researchers had been focusing on the illness for years but without the benefit of rapid genetic sequencing. The disease came to worldwide attention in the 1960s, said Dr. Joseph B. McCormick of the University of Texas School of Public Health in Brownsville, when some American missionaries became sick and died. Lassa, Dr. Sabeti said, "likely kills tens to hundreds of thousands of people every year." She is concerned the virus is spread by mouse urine and outbreaks occur from winter until spring, when the mice enter homes. "Everyone is so myopically focused on Ebola," she said, that they are not testing for Lassa and other infectious diseases in many places. The challenge with Lassa and Ebola, though, was to follow the spread of the viruses in real time. And that meant finding a quick and accurate way to get the genetic sequences of Lassa and Ebola viruses from samples of blood. It took the Broad group five years to develop such a viral blood test there is very little virus in blood samples; the blood often has been stored under less than ideal conditions in tropical heat; and before a sample can be examined, the researchers have to kill any viruses in it so it does not infect laboratory workers. But the chemicals that kill the viruses make it even harder to fish out the virus. "The method really came together in the past year," Dr. Sabeti said. Now the group is starting to study how variations in the genetic sequences of the viruses affect the course of infection. And they are asking how quickly and easily the viruses spread by tracing the genetic footprints of the viral strains. "There are hundreds of mutations evolving in individuals," she added. "We can see the new mutations emerging, and it helps us understand transmission." She said the work could also help with the development of methods of diagnosing the diseases as well as work on vaccines and treatments. There should be practical payoffs, too. People who come to clinics ill with fevers, diarrhea or vomiting could receive an accurate diagnosis. Many clinics send blood samples to labs to test for Ebola, but those with Lassa have just been sent away, told that what they had was "not Ebola," which does not help much. "I proposed several years ago to do a genetic study with Ebola," Dr. Pardis said. But it was infeasible: There were too few patients. The situation, unfortunately, has changed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Here's a sales pitch you don't often hear: Let us invest your money. You can count on a return of 3 percent, though there is a chance it will be less. But we can guarantee this return for 10 years. Sure, the 12 percent returns of Bernard L. Madoff proved ephemeral and the financial crisis lowered investors' expectations. But 3 percent? Maybe less? That certainly seems to be a meager return, particularly given the stock market's fast start this year. Yet this was the pitch I heard when I met Jeff Maurer, chief executive of Evercore Wealth Management, and John Apruzzese, Evercore's chief investment officer. They formed the firm four years ago with several former executives from U.S. Trust. I joked with them that offering such measly returns did not seem to be a good way to win new business. "We don't win every client we pitch," Mr. Apruzzese said. It turns out, though, that these low returns do not come from poorly performing investments. The firm is simply being honest. That 3 percent return includes projections on performance of many types of investments but also assumptions on tax rates, inflation and fees both theirs and those of the outside managers they use. "One of our key principles was transparency on fees, which has hurt us," Mr. Maurer said. "Another was how we talked about what could happen in a downturn, which has also hurt us." Mr. Maurer said his firm preferred to say that there was a chance your portfolio could go down 25 percent, instead of trying to attach a probability to its happening. Saying there was a 1 percent chance, he said, was misleading because the chance of a market collapse like the one in 2008 was small. But it happened nonetheless. Fees, of course, are a constant source of friction in investing. If you are the type of person who believes it is impossible to get better than the market rate of return, then you probably believe that the lowest fee index fund or exchange traded fund is the way to go. On the other hand, if you are the type of person who believes that managers can get returns higher than the market average, you may be willing to pay higher fees, calculating that the net return will be better or at least the swings in the investments' value will be less volatile. What piqued my interest was that Mr. Maurer and Mr. Apruzzese made a point of disclosing all the charges, even the ones investors would not see. With that knowledge, investors could understand what those fees were doing to their portfolios' returns. So I asked to come back and play a prospective client to see how they revealed the fees. For the record, I was not assessing the quality of their advice or their offerings but how they presented likely returns, warts and all. Evercore manages 4.7 billion and has an average account size of 10 million, so the firm serves a rarefied niche. Most of its clients also have the bulk of their wealth in taxable accounts and not in tax deferred retirement accounts, where the money is taxed only when it is taken out. But regardless of their wealth, all investors would benefit from asking their advisers to subtract not just their management fees, as most already do, but the fees in the investments themselves. Investors would also benefit if their advisers factored in inflation and any probable taxes. At the very least, this would give a sense of the real return and help investors be more realistic. For the purpose of the meeting, Mr. Maurer and Mr. Apruzzese created a fictional me who resembled a typical 40 year old client of theirs. The fictional me began his career at a top tier consulting firm and is now an executive at a financial firm. He earns 500,000 a year with a 500,000 bonus. He has company stock worth 1.5 million with a lot of embedded capital gains and he inherited 4 million in 2010. He has a 500,000 mortgage on a 2 million house. His goal is to retire at age 60. Mr. Maurer said this typical client would probably arrive with over half of his 10 million portfolio in cash and municipal bonds and another 20 percent in retirement accounts. Only about 10 percent would be invested in equities other than the company stock. Mr. Apruzzese walked me through the six baskets the firm uses for thinking about how money is invested: cash, defensive assets (municipal and taxable bonds), credit strategies (high yield bonds, mortgage backed securities), diversified market strategies (commodities, foreign bonds, liquid alternative investments), growth assets (stocks) and illiquid alternatives (private equity, venture capital). This was a fairly standard approach. Advisers generally aim to divide up a portfolio in ways that investors can understand, regardless of their level of financial sophistication. Another popular way is to put money into fictional buckets for specific needs, like current expenses or charity. For me, the firm presented three investment options capital preservation, balanced and capital appreciation, which could be translated as conservative, moderate and aggressive portfolios. Mixing the six baskets together for each objective generated pretax, after fee returns of 6.1 percent, 7 percent and 8.2 percent a year, with maximum losses of 15 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent, respectively. The projections were for the next decade. I selected the balanced portfolio, and Mr. Apruzzese showed me how taxes reduced the solid 7 percent return to 5 percent, by factoring in long and short term capital gains at the highest federal rates. Inflation of 2 percent knocked it down to 3 percent. (The capital preservation portfolio fell to 2.3 percent, while the capital appreciation portfolio ended up at 3.9 percent.) "When some people see that 3 percent return, we never hear from them again," Mr. Maurer said. "We have clients come in and say I was at X competitor and they said there were no fees. I say, 'O.K., but they're selling you all their own products and the fees are embedded in them.' " But what about Evercore's fees? That came later, though Mr. Maurer said most clients did not focus on them the way I did. "It's about explaining what the fees are," he said. "We don't get a placement fee or any revenue sharing. We try to get the lowest fees possible for that investment solution." Like most wealth management firms, Evercore has a sliding fee scale for its advice the more money you have, the lower the fee. On 10 million, the management fee was 0.88 percent, though no fee was charged on the 1.5 million in company stock. The firm manages municipal bonds and core equity portfolios itself but does not charge a fee on top of the management fee. This equated to 76,250 a year to them. On the 4.5 million of the portfolio invested with outside managers, the fees were 1.03 percent or 46,480. Many of those fees, though, would normally be deducted from the returns of the funds in a way that most investors would not notice. Mr. Apruzzese said calling attention to those fees was important. In total, the fictional me paid 1.23 percent of the portfolio, or 122,730, in annual fees. "By expressing it in dollars, that makes a real impact on clients," Mr. Apruzzese said. "Most advisers talk in percentages or, worse, basis points, and no one knows what a basis point is." Still, what I would have liked to see was a pre fee return along with the returns before taxes and inflation. I asked why it was not presented this way. Mr. Apruzzese said it was because the firm showed clients returns that it expected would be lower than the actual returns. Those higher gains would then cover the fees. But he added that most clients the kind of people who actually have the 10 million I was pretending to have preferred to talk about what they could do with their money and not be bogged down in the minutiae. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Vicki Lansky, a best selling author who dispensed recipes and practical advice that helped a generation of parents cope with child rearing challenges and housekeeping, from cradle cap to divorce, died on Jan. 15 at her home in Plymouth, Minn. She was 75. The cause was nonalcoholic cirrhosis, her husband, Stephen Schaefer, said. Ms. Lansky's path to publishing was serendipitous, but she churned out more than 30 books, wrote newspaper and magazine columns and produced a newsletter. She championed natural, do it yourself versions of store bought baby food and more healthful alternatives to sugary snacks, and offered homespun counseling drawn from her experience. Her first book, "Feed Me I'm Yours," began inauspiciously as an anthology of favorite recipes that she organized with several neighbors in 1974 as a stay at home new mother. The collection was intended to raise money for the Minneapolis chapter of the Childbirth Education Association, which advocates family centered maternity care. Later published widely, the book sold millions of copies. "I think my mother would be astonished to know that I gave out cleaning and household advice to millions of people for nine years as a columnist for Family Circle magazine," Ms. Lansky wrote in The Huffington Post. "After all, she not I had made a career of homemaking." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The potential scandal of romance between an Israeli and a Palestinian is only one reason they can't be seen. The film gradually brings Saleem's pregnant wife (Maisa Abd Elhadi) and Sarah's husband (Ishai Golan), a colonel in the Israeli military, closer to the truth, even as it shows how suspicion and bureaucracy raise the political stakes for all involved. The lovers' relative guilt looks different inside and outside their homes. Alayan's light directorial touch can make the storytelling seem overly straightforward. But his tight control over the proceedings becomes clear in a closing shot that elegantly encapsulates the film's complexities. The Reports on Sarah and Saleem Not rated. In Arabic, English and Hebrew, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Cars can stray from their original mission after a few generations. Porsche has never wavered with the 911. An instant classic when first seen in 1963, the iconic shape has always been shorthand for top notch performance, engineering, and peer envy. It has evolved, blasphemously switching from air to water cooled engines in the late 90s. Available in coupe, targa, and convertible form, there are various performance models too. (ON CAMERA) Why go with the GTS? Well for about 15 grand over the Carrera S model, Porsche throws in 35,000 worth of equipment, much of it performance oriented. And everyone loves a bargain. Starting at 115,000 it's one I can't afford let alone the 142 grand as tested price but hey, I choose my profession. GTS gets wider hips normally exclusive to all wheel drive and GT3 models. This one is fully lined in Alcantara, and trimmed up in carbon fiber. (ON CAMERA) Remember, 911s pistons fire horizontally, not vertically like most engines. If you really want a good look at the flat six, become good friends with your mechanic. The 3.8 liter, cranking out 430 horsepower and 325 lb. ft. of torque, is not visible here but fluids can be toped off It's a Porsche so I'll be reaching (SOUND UP) for the ignition on the wrong side all week long. (SOUND UP) (ON CAMERA) That sounds nice but lets take it to a higher level (SOUND UP) Cog swaps are courtesy of the legendary 7 speed PDK gearbox, it's far more popular than the 7 speed manual. Streaking to 60 in just under four seconds (SOUND UP) speed is not an issue. Excuse me for not verifying the claimed limit of 190 miles an hour. (ON CAMERA) GTS has a gravitas about it that you have to be behind the wheel to fully comprehend. It's very direct, very precise without behaving like a caffeinated squirrel. The electric power steering is the best I've run across. The configurable gauge cluster is appreciated too, got to love the g force meter. With the engine singing from behind, 911 has a distinctive mechanical quality, very welcome in this digital world. (ON CAMERA) One thing the GTS offers over the standard Carrera S, 30 more horsepower (SOUND UP) that's value I can get behind. As expected the performance oriented suspension is stiff though not bone jarring. Hey, buyers know what they're getting into here. Speed is fun (SOUND UP) good to know the brakes compliment the power. (SOUND UP) (ON CAMERA) Let me just say kids, this (SOUND UP) is a tangible reason to study hard and be successful. There will be owners that never approach the corning limits, they are that high. In case you're wondering I averaged 17 miles per gallon better than expected. Inside, passengers will be greeted by top shelf craftsmanship, crisp readable gauges and perhaps the most over engineered cup holders known to mankind. Seriously. Upgraded sport seats in GTS have the perfect amount of support and great belts. It's easy to understand why this car costs what it does but at this price a back up cam would be nice. There are lots of identical buttons the user interface is basic but decipherable. (ON CAMERA) Yes there is a back seat. No, there's not a lot of room. Definitely keep it to kids in safety seats. Most of the time this space will be used by very lucky luggage. Looking to keep things out of site? The TP does not lie, the trunk is hardly cavernous. (ON CAMERA) Buy a Cayenne or Panamera if you're looking for practicality from your Porsche. 140 grand buys rich heritage and durability forged from years of endurance racing. It's also the price of a BMW i8, that's bursting with new tech. One is akin to Rolex. The other, an Apple Watch Edition. 911 is a classic, that's always evolving. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
At a recent Seahawks football game in Seattle, Shy Sadis, 41, took a drag on a slim vapor pen that looked like a jet black Marlboro. The tip glowed red as he inhaled. But the pen contained no nicotine. Instead, it held 250 milligrams of cannabis oil loaded with THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. "Nobody noticed," said Mr. Sadis, who owns several marijuana dispensaries in Washington State. "You pull it out of your pocket, take a hit like a cigarette, put it back, and you're done. It's so discreet." The device, called a JuJu Joint, heralds a union that seems all but inevitable: marijuana and the e cigarette, together at last in an e joint. For years, people have been stuffing marijuana in various forms into portable vaporizers and into the cartridges of e cigarettes. But the JuJu Joint is disposable, requires no charging of batteries or loading of cartridges, and comes filled with 150 hits. You take it out of the package and put it to your lips that's it. There is no smoke and no smell. Since their introduction in April, 75,000 JuJu Joints have been sold in Washington State, where marijuana is recreationally and medically legal. The maker says that 500,000 will be sold this year and that there are plans to expand to Colorado, where recreational use is legal, Oregon, where it will be legal in July, and to Nevada, where it is decriminalized. "I wanted to eliminate every hassle that has to do with smoking marijuana," said Rick Stevens, 62, the inventor and co founder of JuJu Joints with Marcus Charles, a Seattle entrepreneur. "I wanted it to be discreet and easy for people to handle. There's no odor, matches or mess." Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Many addiction researchers fear that e cigarettes will pave the way to reliance on actual cigarettes, especially in teenagers. And THC adversely affects the developing brain, some studies have found, impairing attention and memory in adolescents and exacerbating psychiatric problems. "In some ways, e joints are a perfect storm of a problematic delivery system, the e cigarette, and in addition a problematic substance, cannabis oil," said Dr. Petros Levounis, the chairman of the psychiatry department at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Each JuJu Joint contains 100 milligrams of THC, twice as much as a traditional joint, as well as propylene glycol, a chemical normally used to absorb water in foods and cosmetics, said Suchitra Krishnan Sarin, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. "We do not know the effects of inhaling constant doses of this agent," she said. "We know very little about these products and what they contain." Mr. Stevens, a former marketing executive who spent 30 years in the tobacco industry, defended the device's THC content, pointing out that each inhalation is metered by the device. "Our goal is not to get people stoned so they sit in the corner and vegetate," he said. Local retailers report that JuJu Joints are catching on, especially with women and consumers in their 40s to 60s. "You wouldn't believe the demographic this has opened up," said Ed Vallejo, 60, a manager at New Vansterdam, a recreational store in Vancouver, Wash. "This is the older, retired set. The younger set can't afford it." JuJu Joints for recreational use cost 65 to 100 each, 25 percent of which goes to the state's Liquor Control Board. It costs a suggested donation of 25 at medical dispensaries. Purchasers must be at least 21. "The underlying reason people buy it is because of its design and because you can smoke it in public," said Lindsay Middleton, 21, a bud tender at Green Lady Marijuana, a recreational store in Olympia. Though smoking marijuana in public is illegal, customers report using JuJu Joints while skiing, hiking and going to concerts. Law enforcement agencies are concerned that discreet vapor pens filled with cannabis oil are already being abused by teenagers, and that many are sure to lay hands on JuJu Joints. "If you go on Instagram, you will find hundreds of thousands of postings by kids on how they are using variants of e cigarettes, or e cigarettes themselves, to smoke pot in the presence of their parents and at school, and getting by," said Barbara Carreno, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to the latest Monitoring the Future Survey, an annual study of 40,000 teenagers conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2014 marked the first year that more teenagers used e cigarettes than traditional ones. The study also found that in the past year, 35.1 percent of 12th graders consumed marijuana, making it the most common illicit drug among high school seniors. But users of medical marijuana may prove to be the largest market for e joints. The Food and Drug Administration recognizes no legitimate medical use, and there is little high quality research backing marijuana as a remedy for the scores of conditions for which it is being used. A few studies, however, suggest ingredients in marijuana may help relieve pain and improve appetite in patients with cancer, AIDS and multiple sclerosis. Some researchers argue that marijuana especially in the form of nebulized vapor could be found beneficial to even more patients, if the federal government loosened research restrictions. "There may be and probably is a legitimate medical use for vaping cannabis, but we need to do the research to figure out if it's true and to find out the dosing," said Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "But with marijuana being a Schedule 1 drug, it's so onerous to get the licensure that many people actually skilled to do the research just choose not to." Mr. Stevens is developing a JuJu Joint that contains only cannabidiol, or CBD, a nonpsychoactive extract of marijuana that advocates say can prevent seizures. This version contains less than 0.3 percent THC, so it would be legal nationwide. "This day and age, everybody has a vapor pen," Mr. Sadis said. "You don't know if they're smoking marijuana or nicotine." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Many world leaders generally have wider latitude on Twitter and Facebook because their comments and posts are regarded as political speech that is in the realm of public interest. But what will happen to President Trump's accounts on the social media platforms when he leaves office? At Tuesday's hearing, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, said the company would no longer make policy exceptions for Mr. Trump after he leaves office in January. During Mr. Trump's time as a world leader, Twitter allowed him to post content that violated its rules, though it began adding labels to some of the tweets starting in May to indicate that the posts were disputed or glorified violence. "If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away," Mr. Dorsey said. In contrast, Mr. Zuckerberg said at the hearing that Facebook would not change the way it moderates Mr. Trump's posts when he leaves office. Since Election Day, Facebook has labeled a few of Mr. Trump's posts and has pointed users to accurate information about the results of the election, but it generally takes a hands off approach. Facebook does not fact check world leaders but could fact check Mr. Trump after his term as president ends, a company spokesman said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
THE ICE AT THE END OF THE WORLD An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future By Jon Gertner More than a million years ago, snow fell on Greenland in the summer. Temperatures were low enough that it stuck, and the ice pack accumulated over the millenniums, eventually stacking higher than 10,000 feet and covering over 700,000 square miles. This frozen desert supported no life. Temperatures regularly ran dozens of degrees below zero, especially during the many months the sun declined to appear. As one 18th century visitor recorded, the ice sheet was a frigid, deadly place that had "no use to mankind." Of course, if there's a place so miserable that most humans avoid it, there will be a hardy minority spurred by the challenge. These courageous, often exhibitionist explorers, questing after knowledge as much as fame, are the subject of Jon Gertner's fascinating and encyclopedic book, "The Ice at the End of the World." Rather than limit himself to a handful of picturesque expeditions, he follows a century long parade of adventurers and scientists onto the ice, delineating how each laid the groundwork for the next. "To an unusual degree, problems in the Arctic are worked on not just at a particular moment in time, but over generations," he writes in this engrossing history of a once useless place now transformed into one essential to confronting the existential threat of global warming. Gertner's story begins in 1882, when the seal hunting Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen glimpsed Greenland from a ship and was "drawn irresistibly to the charms and mysteries of this unknown world." The ship's captain denied him permission to hopscotch 25 miles on a series of ice floes to reach shore, but Nansen was the sort whom friends had learned not to warn that a ski jump was impossible, lest he be compelled to prove them wrong. Years later he organized an expedition with the motto "Death or the west coast of Greenland," and struck out from the east coast on skis with five men, each dragging a sled with 200 pounds of gear. Gertner vivifies the horrors of this 350 mile "death march" beyond the quotidian frostbite and near starvation. With prose so lucid it's easy to overlook its elegance, he conjures how the men's breath condensed into icy crowns inside their reindeer fur sleeping bags and how their lack of fuel forced them to stick snow stuffed flasks down their shirts so their body heat would melt the crystals into drinking water a process so slow that though "surrounded by trillions of tons of frozen water, they awoke thirsty, worked thirsty, slept thirsty." Remarkably, after two hellish months, they stepped off the ice and into the history books as the first people to traverse Greenland. Ostensibly, Nansen and his men suffered for the scientific goal of disproving the nonsensical theory that the glacial island's center was an oasis full of pine trees and reindeer. They may have, however, been more enticed by anticipation of the tens of thousands of admirers who met their return ship. Certainly, for those questing immediately after Nansen, science was often a pretext for glory, and selfish pursuits attracted ignoble men. The American Robert Peary managed to prove that Greenland was an island by dogsledding to unvisited sections of its coast. After shamelessly exploiting the Polar Inuit on whom he relied, he reaped huge financial rewards on the lecture circuit on his return home. As Gertner notes, Peary "was the kind of man who would reach into a barrel of biscuits, throw a handful into the air, and then laugh as his Inuit friends scurried to pick them up from the floor and eat them," and he fathered at least two sons with an Inuit girl in her early teens. But as the map of Greenland filled in, and there were fewer exploratory laurels to be won, the "men of ego" gave way to the "men of research," for what besides science could compel people back into that polar wasteland? Early in the 20th century, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener was one of the first people to guess that Greenland's massive ice sheet acted as a sort of air conditioner for the world and that understanding it was crucial to comprehending earth's climate. During his data gathering he endured hardships equal to Nansen and Peary at one point, frostbite wounded his face with leprotic "ulcerous yellow spots" before he eventually died on the ice. But his findings prompted the world to better understand the ice sheet's importance. And as technology improved, hardscrabble expeditions powered by Icelandic ponies were replaced by government sponsored battalions of scientists harnessing snow tractors and ski lift like systems to move their gear, and even employing a miniature nuclear reactor to keep warm. It is in finessing this transition that Gertner manages a magic trick, transforming his hybrid book from one of physical to intellectual adventure. For though the Arctic journeys become boring tractor rides and the scientists are, alas, less memorable than the roguish adventurers, the drama of discovery skates the narrative forward. For as researchers better understand the ice sheet, they also realize it may be the best way to understand why temperatures are rising across the world. Gertner, a veteran science writer for prestigious magazines and the author of a best selling book tracing how technologies developed at Bell Labs, is in his element describing how each intellectual eureka moment led to the next. We meet Henri Bader, a Swiss glaciologist working for the Americans during the Cold War, as he and his team drill thousands of feet into the icecap, extracting tiny frozen bubbles, the gases of which help them to reconstruct the history of the climate going back more than 100,000 years. With that revelation established, Gertner is off to the races chronicling the efforts to grapple with the next logical question How fast is the world warming? When he arrives at the present, he joins modern day Wegeners on airplane flights that use lasers to measure the stupendous amount of meltwater pouring off Greenland each summer as they attempt to understand how all these changes will transform the world. It is here that the book completes its last metamorphosis, from a scientific history into a submission to the ever growing canon of climate change literature. "Big Climate Change Book" is an identity that Gertner and his publisher work mightily to claim, and yet the book felt to me too idiosyncratic, too multifaceted, to be neatly pegged there. Gertner provides us with the obligatory descriptions of the catastrophic upheavals that may ensue when Greenland's three quadrillion tons of ice liquefy and rising seas send half a billion refugees fleeing their drowned homes. But unlike other recent books that have captured the public's attention with excruciating play by plays of how the environmental apocalypse will go down or poetic laments for the ailing natural world, Gertner invests his writerly energies less in describing what is happening to Greenland's ice than to how we know it. It is the baton race of science, with knowledge passed from one Arctic investigator to the next, that seems to captivate him most. This is an intriguing way to frame a book about global warming, but it also raises the question: What makes this one unique? By the end of the book, his approach appealed to me for several reasons, most notably because it impressed on me like nothing I've read before how hard earned climate change facts are, with statements as taken for granted as The earth is warming having been gleaned only at the cost of lives and decades of cumulative toil. And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that Gertner never really saw his project as primarily about climate change. Gertner spends a lot of pages in the introduction offering multiple and sprawling rationales for the existence of this book, but it seemed to me that ultimately he was seized by the same irresistible "charms and mysteries of this unknown world" that had possessed his forebears. This is a book about obsession. Nansen's and Peary's and Wegener's and Bader's and ultimately Gertner's obsession. I mean that as a compliment, for despite the book's composure, it is this wild and viral obsession that is the most compelling thing about it. And when, in the final paragraph, Gertner stands on the shore of Greenland, watching icebergs that have calved off glaciers floating past, I couldn't help thinking that he had won a place for himself in the lineage of explorers he had been chronicling. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The last time he played at Dodger Stadium, in 2018, Mookie Betts hit a home run in the clinching game of the World Series. The next time he plays there, on opening night of the major league season Thursday, he will be the highest paid player in the National League. Betts won his championship with the Boston Red Sox, who decided in February to save money by trading him to the Dodgers along with starter David Price. The Red Sox knew Betts would cost a fortune when he became a free agent after the 2020 season, and he seemed determined to test the market. So much for that assumption. The Dodgers locked up Betts Wednesday with a 12 year, 365 million contract extension, a deal that stretches through 2032. The only player guaranteed more money than Betts is the Los Angeles Angels' Mike Trout, who signed a 12 year, 426.5 million contract before last season. "The market wasn't what I was worried about just fair value," Betts said in a news conference over Zoom. "That's been my No. 1 thing for my whole career: the value, and that's it. Once we got to that point, being somewhere I loved being, the match was perfect." Betts, 27, was the American League's most valuable player in 2018 and might have the best all around talent in the majors. No other player can match his totals in both homers (134) and stolen bases (119) over the last five seasons, and he has four Gold Gloves in right field to go with a .301 career average. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. While no fans will be in the stands to greet Betts on Thursday, there should be plenty in time. The Dodgers have led the majors in attendance in each of the last seven seasons, winning the N.L. West every year. But for all their popularity and profitability, they still have not won a championship since 1988. They lost the World Series in five games to Boston in 2018 and in seven to Houston in 2017, the year the Astros used an illegal sign stealing scheme. Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers' president of baseball operations, acknowledged this spring that the revelations of the Astros' cheating might have consumed him if only he were not so busy. "If there was something I could do to change the outcome, I would spend more time on it, but it's just not productive energy," Friedman said in an interview, adding that most days were already packed. "Spending time thinking about that just isn't helpful in what we're trying to accomplish looking forward. So that helps whenever my mind starts gravitating toward that." Friedman played the long game to get to a moment like Wednesday's. He spent more than five years making careful, disciplined moves for the Dodgers, consistent with his pedigree as architect of the low budget Tampa Bay Rays for more than a decade. The Dodgers hired Friedman after the 2014 season, trusting him to find Rays style bargains to complement their big but responsible spending. Sticking to that plan made it easy for the Dodgers to spend so lavishly on Betts: The combined value of Friedman's three most lucrative deals for the Dodgers before Wednesday's with Clayton Kershaw, Kenley Jansen and Justin Turner is about 237 million, or less than two thirds of what the Dodgers now owe Betts. Friedman has made bad deals, too, but nothing that hamstrung the Dodgers from affording a contract like this. Players like Max Muncy and Chris Taylor afterthoughts for other teams became cost effective contributors. The farm system nurtured players Friedman inherited, like Cody Bellinger, Corey Seager and Julio Urias, and developed more, like pitchers Walker Buehler and Dustin May and catcher Will Smith. "We've done a really good job of identifying when players reach the point of being ready, and that last mile what has allowed us to be as successful as we've been has been our clubhouse culture at the major league level," Friedman said, crediting Manager Dave Roberts and the coaches. "They do a tremendous job of instilling it, and then our players carry it out unlike anything I've ever seen. When young players come up, our veteran players actively try to help them acclimate." Along the way, Friedman has sometimes frustrated Dodgers fans by resisting splashy free agent investments or refusing to deal prospects in trades. In season deals to acquire Yu Darvish and Manny Machado helped, but only to a point; the Astros hammered Darvish in the 2017 World Series, and Machado hit .182 against the Red Sox in the 2018 World Series. Darvish and Machado left as free agents, but the Dodgers decided they did not want to risk losing Betts after a 60 game cameo. Friedman was just waiting for the right investment to come around. "Patience isn't necessarily a virtue of mine, but we've had to kind of practice it throughout this in that, if you're going to make a bet like this, you want to feel as confident as you can about the human, about how much they care, about their work ethic, and I can't imagine feeling more confident than we do about Mookie," Friedman said. "So that helps, but also us staying patient and doing things to help us in the short term but not necessarily costing us in the long term has provided us some flexibility to be able to do that. Obviously we're really excited with how it turned out." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
You no longer need to renovate or spend a lot of money to incorporate smart technology into your home. Here's how to do it in a few quick steps. Just a few years ago, creating a smart home with coordinated controls for lighting, motorized shades, multiroom audio, and heating and cooling required an expensive, comprehensive home automation system and a renovation. "When you used to think about these systems, it was very much high end," said Mark Spates, a senior product manager for Nest and Google Home in Mountain View, Calif. "It was a luxury." Today, many of those functions are accessible through affordable, consumer friendly products. You can pick and choose the functions you want and install many of the products yourself, without opening up any walls. "One of the advantages of these systems is that they're light, from an infrastructure standpoint," said Michael K. Chen, an architect in New York who has designed big budget homes with automation systems requiring dedicated air conditioned control rooms, as well as simpler homes with small scale technology products from the likes of Nest, Sonos and Lutron. Most smart home products use wires for power but rely on Wi Fi to communicate with the internet and smartphones. A home Wi Fi network is a requirement, and the range of that network matters. In a small space like a one bedroom apartment, a single Wi Fi router is probably sufficient. But in larger homes, it may not be enough. "You need to have Wi Fi throughout your house," said Elizabeth Mathes, the director of smart home at the Home Depot in Atlanta. "If you think of having a smart garage door opener and most of our garage door openers are now smart you need to have Wi Fi at the very edges of your house. Same for a smart doorbell or a smart door lock." The way to create a robust home network like that, she said, is to install a mesh Wi Fi system, like Google Wi Fi (from 129), Linksys Velop (from about 126) or Eero (from 199), which uses a handful of devices to create a single network over a larger area, preventing dead zones. There is no need to make your home a technological wonderland on Day 1. "Starting with one piece is the way to go," Mr. Spates said. "I started my journey with a single smart plug." That allowed him to turn a lamp on and off using an app. "What you're doing is taking a very logical step that solves a problem," he said, "or adds value to your home immediately." Choose the thing that seems most useful for your lifestyle a smart dimmer, thermostat, speaker, security camera or something else and add other things later if you find the first device helpful. With Home Depot customers, Ms. Mathes said, "Normally, once they buy one thing, we see them come back over the next several months and buy six or seven other appliances to really build it out." There are basically two ways to add this functionality: with smart bulbs or smart dimmers. Smart bulbs like Philips Hue (from about 70 for a starter kit) and LIFX (from about 20 a bulb) are the easiest to install just screw them into an existing socket and offer dimming and optional color changes. The products themselves, however, may not be as aesthetically pleasing as standard bulbs, and may not fit every type of light fixture. Smart dimmers like Lutron Caseta (about 100 for a starter kit) and Leviton Decora Smart (from 45 a switch) replace existing wall dimmers and switches to control fixtures with standard bulbs, although installing them does require some simple electrical work. Beyond being able to control your lights from anywhere, an advantage to either type of system is the ability to set scenes with numerous fixtures dimmed to predetermined levels, and to schedule lights to turn on and off automatically. Matthew Bremer, the principal of Architecture in Formation in New York, has designed large homes with elaborate home automation systems for some of his clients, but he often chooses Lutron Caseta dimmers for smaller projects, including his own apartment in the Bronx. "I can walk in and hit the top button and know it's on the setting where every light in the apartment goes on to just the light level that I like at night everything is dimmed to make the perfect martini," he said. "The second one is for the housekeeper: Everything goes on super bright." He also has a setting that turns off every light in the apartment. "From an energy conservation standpoint, that's enormous," he said. Multiroom audio systems, which once required expensive, cumbersome equipment and lots of cable, are now easy to put in place. A longtime leader is Sonos, which makes speakers (from 149 each) that can be plugged in to any electrical outlet. They use Wi Fi to simultaneously play the same music across all rooms, or different music in different rooms, with independent volume controls for each, through an app. The company also makes home theater speakers, as well as amps that can power built in and outdoor speakers. "We use Sonos a lot, even at the super high end," Mr. Chen said. "Anywhere you have power, you can have music, and I think that's great. Suddenly, there's no need for complex additional equipment to properly zone your apartment or house into different areas. It's just set up to do that well." Apple offers similar functionality with its AirPlay technology, through its HomePod speakers ( 349) and select speakers made by other manufacturers. Google does the same with Google Home speakers (from 49) and other manufacturers' speakers with Chromecast built in. Amazon Echo speakers (from about 50) can also play multiroom audio. Worried about water leaks? Flo by Moen ( 499) attaches to a home's main water supply line (plumbing work is required) to monitor water use and watch for leaks, and sends its findings to your smartphone. In the event of a serious problem, like a burst pipe, it automatically shuts off the water supply. Want to beef up home security? There are plenty of Wi Fi video doorbells, indoor and outdoor cameras, and security sensors that alert you to unexpected activity and allow you to keep an eye on things when you're not at home. "Nest and Ring are two of the biggest companies out there that have whole home security and monitoring all in one ecosystem," said Mr. Nyberg, at Best Buy. "Ring is owned by Amazon and Nest is owned by Google, so you can feel confident that they aren't going to get outdated over time." Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant can all make controlling a smart home with voice commands easy, but the idea of adding smart speakers with microphones that are always listening for the next command makes some people uneasy. Indeed, mistakes have been made. Last year, for example, Alexa inadvertently recorded a couple's conversation at their home in Portland, Ore., and shared it with an unintended recipient. Using a virtual assistant is optional, and the choice comes down to your feelings about convenience, privacy and trust. For now, there are a few ways that most people control their smart homes. When David Renken, an architect in the Los Angeles office of Skidmore, Owings Merrill, was renovating the 1920s bungalow in Long Beach, Calif., that he shares with his husband, he installed Lutron Caseta dimmers, Sonos speakers, and security cameras and smart locks from AT T Digital Life. "All of this stuff is tied together, so that when we drive into the driveway, the home knows we're approaching, turns lights on and unlocks doors," he said. Once they are inside, they typically use Alexa to control lights and audio with voice commands. "We started the system small," Mr. Renken said. But it has grown to include nearly all of their light fixtures, indoors and out: "Once you get spoiled, having to get up to turn the light off becomes a real annoyance." 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 |
The "Great Comet" is getting a new star. Okieriete Onaodowan, who played Hercules Mulligan and James Madison in the original Broadway cast of "Hamilton," will succeed the pop singer Josh Groban as Pierre this summer in the musical "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812." The casting choice is striking. It reflects a bet by Broadway that "Hamilton" alumni have ongoing, bankable box office appeal (another member of the original "Hamilton" cast, Phillipa Soo, will star in an adaptation of "Amelie" opening in April). And it is the rare instance in which two black actors are leading the cast of a show that is not about black characters: Mr. Onaodowan will star opposite Denee Benton as Natasha. Mr. Onaodowan, a son of Nigerian immigrants who was raised in New Jersey and took up acting when an injury ended his high school football career, will assume the role on July 3, the day after Mr. Groban's departure, and has committed to staying until Sept. 4. The musical, set in 19th century Russia, is adapted from a section of "War and Peace" in which Pierre is a wealthy but dejected member of the Moscow elite. "It's very different from what I've done before there's a lot to dig into," said Mr. Onaodowan, who, following Mr. Groban's lead, will learn to play the accordion for the role. "I like the fact that Pierre is a guy who really wants to move forward, but doesn't necessarily know how, and I think a lot of people can relate to that for many reasons." Mr. Onaodowan, who goes by the nickname Oak, was recommended for the role by the musical's director, Rachel Chavkin; he starred in a 2014 production of a play about boxing, called "The Royale," when she directed it at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. "In 'Hamilton,' he focused more on rap skills than singing skills, but we had done a workshop for a musical in which he had a massive R B aria, and he slayed it, so I knew he's got incredible pipes," Ms. Chavkin said. "This is going to introduce a whole other side of him to everyone who loves him from 'Hamilton' he really is a star." Ms. Chavkin said she was also proud of the message the casting sent. "It is emblematic of the world we have worked to put together, which is utopic and multiracial and pluralistic it's a world that has space for everyone," she said. Ms. Benton, who has repeatedly said that she had never thought a woman with her skin color would be cast as a Russian princess on Broadway, was similarly pleased. "Having the opportunity to have two black actors star is, to me, irrefutably huge," Ms. Benton said. "Actors of color definitely feel the limitation to have to tell the stories the world has decided are your own, when if you look at the breadth of characters handsome white male actors can play, they're given access to the whole range. It's exciting to have that same opportunity." The musical, powered by generally strong reviews and the enthusiasm of Mr. Groban's ardent fan base, has been doing well at the box office, grossing over 1 million most weeks since opening. But any time Mr. Groban has been absent, grosses have dipped, making the choice of his replacement important for the health of the show. "The Great Comet" will be Mr. Onaodowan's fourth Broadway show he was in a 2012 revival of "Cyrano de Bergerac" and in the 2014 musical adaptation of "Rocky," as well as in "Hamilton," which opened in 2015. Last year, he played Kristoff during developmental work on Disney's musical adaptation of "Frozen," but he said he was not continuing in that role. Mr. Onaodowan first saw "The Great Comet" at opening night in November and was in the audience again on Tuesday night, when he intently studied Mr. Groban's movement and voice. "I have a lot of work to do," Mr. Onaodowan said after the show. Mr. Groban, who is leaving to resume his recording career but expects to act again in the future, said he was delighted with the choice of Mr. Onaodowan to succeed him. "I love this guy I'm a fan, he's an amazing actor and an incredible human being," Mr. Groban said. "I couldn't be more inspired and gratified that I'll be passing the torch to somebody that I know is going to absolutely crush it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LOS ANGELES Viacom has turned to one of Hollywood's most seasoned and respected executives, James N. Gianopulos, to revive its faded Paramount Pictures operation. But some analysts worry that Paramount is already too far gone. Mr. Gianopulos, who turns 65 in April, will take over as chairman of Paramount on April 3, Viacom said on Monday. Mr. Gianopulos, the consummate Hollywood insider who is treasurer of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, previously ran 20th Century Fox. Viacom is counting on him to bring immediate stability to Paramount, which has been in free fall. The studio, which lost 445 million in its last fiscal year, found modest Oscar season hits in "Fences" and "Arrival." But it has mostly become a bomb factory, releasing unpopular films like "Silence," "Allied," "Ben Hur," "Zoolander 2," "Monster Trucks" and "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi." Paramount's previous chairman, Brad Grey, was ousted in February. The studio's vice chairman, Rob Moore, was fired in September. Some remaining Paramount leaders are openly hunting for jobs. Viacom is also betting that Mr. Gianopulos has something to prove. Fox edged him aside as chairman last year, deciding to bring in Stacey Snider, who is younger and whom Fox saw as having stronger creative instincts. Since then, Mr. Gianopulos has been eager to rewrite his Hollywood ending. But any turnaround at Paramount is years away under the best of circumstances. In recent Hollywood history, rarely has a major movie studio been in such a shambles. Among other problems, Paramount has suffered from years of severe underinvestment by Viacom and its absentee owner, the ailing Sumner M. Redstone. Missed opportunities to buy source material for event movies Marvel Entertainment was a partner until Disney snapped it up for 4 billion in 2009 have left Paramount with a shortage of franchises. Moreover, the few series that Paramount has are weakening. The last "Transformers" movie, released in 2014, took in 30 percent less in North America than its predecessor. (The next chapter, "Transformers: The Last Knight," arrives in June.) Paramount's aging "Star Trek" film series hit a similar snag last year. Its "Mission: Impossible" franchise is anchored by Tom Cruise, and how long he can remain an action star is an open question. "We don't think Paramount has enough top tier intellectual property to successfully dig its way out of the profitability hole it finds itself in," Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen and Company, wrote in a recent report. Mr. Gianopulos worked at Paramount before. In the mid 1980s, he was the studio's senior vice president for business affairs and international operations. It was a boom time. In 1986, Paramount had five of the year's 10 top selling films at the domestic box office, including "Top Gun," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Crocodile Dundee." But the movie business has changed substantially. With streaming services like Amazon and Netflix as new competitors for leisure time and movie attendance in the United States flat, studios have veered toward extravagant, effects driven films that can play on a global stage. Mr. Creutz estimated that 30 movies with budgets of 100 million or more will be released this year, seven more than in 2015. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Paramount has tried to stay in the game by cutting costs and bringing in outside financing partners, including several from China. Some of these deals have proved fruitful. Partnerships with Huahua Media, Shanghai Film Group and Weiying Technology helped push "xXx: The Return of Xander Cage" to 162.5 million in ticket sales in China earlier this year. But outside investment has also proved problematic. Along with limiting risk, the practice limits returns. It can also lead to major internal distraction: Philippe Dauman, who was forced out as Viacom's chief executive in August, had considered a partial sale of Paramount to raise money, throwing the studio into chaos for a time. The ground can also shift quickly: A 1 billion deal with two Chinese firms to cover 25 percent of Paramount's slate over three years has run into static, although Viacom has insisted the money will ultimately materialize. Mr. Dauman's successor, Bob Bakish, has outlined a turnaround plan for Paramount that involves a greater reliance on partnerships with Viacom cable networks like MTV and Nickelodeon. (The problem is that some of those brands have lost much of their cultural relevance.) In a memo to Viacom employees, Mr. Bakish called Mr. Gianopulos "a hugely talented executive, with a strategic vision, strong business expertise and deep industry and creative relationships that are second to none." He added that Mr. Gianopulos would have "a running start" because of Paramount teams "who are right now exploring new ways to strengthen the studio and position it for success." A spokeswoman declined to make Mr. Bakish or Mr. Gianopulos available for interviews. Despite its challenges, Paramount retains signs of life. The studio's marketing and publicity departments are considered strong. Mr. Grey started a fledgling television production business that could grow into a profit center. And several coming movies could be hits, including "Ghost in the Shell," a science fiction action drama set for release on Friday; and "Baywatch," a raunchy adaptation of the lifeguard television series. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In her stand up, Wanda Sykes periodically argues with the roll of fat around her stomach, which she calls Esther, after Esther Rolle, the actress who played the mom in "Good Times." Esther, a cantankerous sort with a deep voice and an appetite that could match the plant in "Little Shop of Horrors," is both foil and id. When one of Sykes's children made an impolite comment about the size of her belly, Esther lashes out: "Break her little wrists!" Sykes, the responsible half of this splendid double act, would never think of such a thing. Many know Sykes from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or "black ish," where, like Esther, she is extremely funny in a fairly limited (and often disgruntled) role. Or perhaps as a pioneer, since she has been the first African American woman to do a whole lot of things in comedy, including perform at the White House Correspondents' Dinner (she was also the first out lesbian to do so) and conceive and star in her own prime time sitcom, "Wanda at Large." But to understand the full range of her singular gifts, to learn why she has secured her place in the comedy elite, you must look to her far too obscure stand up career, where Esther has been a critical character for more than a decade. Since the late 1990s, Sykes has produced a few superb specials ("Tongue Untied," "I'ma Be Me"), one absolute classic (the 2016 "What Happened ... Ms. Sykes?"); and a new hour debuting Tuesday on Netflix, "Not Normal," that is, by her standards, just fine. Sykes's first big break was as a writer, on "The Chris Rock Show" on HBO (where she also occasionally performed), and you can detect some similarities with Rock in the way she sets up a premise, the swagger of her umbrage and even some phrases. (She wrote a book called "Yeah, I Said It," one of his best known refrains.) She is also at her core a social commentator whose forceful and charismatic delivery (she has one of the great withering stares in comedy) gets laughs so easily that you can overlook the craftsmanship of her jokes. If anything, her material varies more than Rock's, since she has been just as comfortable doing personal and political jokes, self deprecating stories and fiery takes, going wonky and raunchy. In her early stand up, she talked about her marriage with bluntness. When the audience applauded her announcement that she was married in a 1998 Comedy Central half hour , she responded pointedly: "Obviously you don't know anything about my marriage." There is a long history of comics complaining about their spouses, but Sykes persuaded you she wasn't doing shtick. And then when she got divorced, came out of the closet, married a white Frenchwoman and adopted two white children, her perspective and stories expanded and became far more idiosyncratic. The comedy became less about the difference between men and women and more about the specific circumstance of being Wanda Sykes. In "What Happened," there are set pieces about being a minority in her own house that, like "Get Out," use the tropes of horror to explain the experience of being black in white spaces. When her toddler called her "Mammy" instead of "Mommy," Sykes had the look of someone who had seen the sunken place. She also did a wonderful if more conventional bit about having sex while children were in the house that did not rest on the joke of the youngsters interrupting so much as the threat. It's the anxiety that quickly veers into paranoia that Sykes dramatizes in a few gestures. And yet, these domestic scenes are always mixed with bracing and incisive takes on issues of the day that dig into the musty language of political argument to find humor. For instance, she has the funniest rebuttal you will ever hear to trickle down economics, which boils down to an unavoidable truth: "Nothing good trickles." "What Happened" didn't get the attention it deserved, perhaps because it premiered on Epix. On Twitter, she said she went with that channel because she was offended by the offer from Netflix, after the comic Mo'Nique raised the question about pay equity on the powerful streaming service. Sykes's follow up, "Not Normal," is her Netflix premiere, and she suggested to Variety that speaking up might have helped her negotiating position. It's similar in subject matter to "What Happened ... Ms. Sykes, " Ping Ponging between politics and her family, but the material is thinner, the connective tissue not as polished as it could be. She has too many lines that get applause as opposed to laughs. In part, she suffers from the challenge that has stymied many comics in specials lately: coming up with a new slant on Donald J. Trump in a rapidly shifting news cycle. "It's not normal that I know I'm smarter than the president," she jokes. She has more success when she shifts from the politics of the president to those of "The Bachelor." She has contempt for that show, and suggests that this is not the time for women to overlook its sexism: "The only time you hear MeToo on 'The Bachelor' is when someone says 'I have chlamydia.'" The freshest material here is toward the end when she does more than 10 minutes on aging. Many female comics (Rita Rudner, Elayne Boosler) have been exploring this subject, but none with the force that Sykes does in describing its physical impact, including hot flashes. Is this a design flaw or something else, she asks. "When you get older, you can't bring life into the world, so they set you on fire." As Sykes gets worked up about a subject, she can be ferocious, and much of her television work takes comic advantage of this. On Wednesday, she stars in a live reboot of "The Jeffersons" ("All in the Family" is also being revived on the same night), in which she plays the matriarch, Louise Jefferson, opposite Jamie Foxx's George. But this isn't the only homage to a classic Norman Lear sitcom she's making this week. In her special, she brings back Esther (without mentioning her relationship to Rolle) in a joke about noticing her wife giving her jiggling stomach the side eye in the bathroom. This leads to a full body impersonation of Esther, which Sykes imagines gleefully celebrating being out in the open by doing a cheerfully wiggling dance, one that might remind some fans of her role in the cult hit "Pootie Tang." It's a departure of sorts for Esther, a happy go lucky side coming to the fore. Like Sykes herself, Esther can't be pigeonholed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It's official: Jay Z is buying an online streaming company that competes with Spotify and Apple. On Friday, the investment vehicle that the rap star used to make a 56 million bid for the Swedish technology company Aspiro announced that it had acquired enough of Aspiro's shares to take over the company. Aspiro, which is publicly traded in Sweden, operates subscription streaming services under the brands WiMP and Tidal, which entered the United States market last fall. Jay Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, made his offer for Aspiro in late January through an entity he controls, Project Panther Bidco. Aspiro shareholders had until Wednesday to consider the offer, which needed 90 percent approval for Project Panther to take it over. "All conditions for completion of the offer have been fulfilled, and the offer is therefore declared unconditional,'' Project Panther said in a statement on Friday. "Accordingly, Panther will complete the acquisition of the shares tendered in the offer." Aspiro will be delisted from Nasdaq Stockholm, the statement added. Other than saying in January that "Panther's strategic ambition revolves around global expansion and upscaling of Aspiro's platform, technology and services," Jay Z has not revealed further plans for Aspiro. But his interest may have to do with high definition audio. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Even as the Boston Red Sox announced Alex Cora's departure for his role in the Houston Astros' cheating scandal that marred the 2017 season, the manager's former bosses spoke glowingly about him. In 2018, after all, Cora had guided the Red Sox to a World Series title. "He was a tremendous manager for us on all levels, so we're going to miss him," Red Sox owner John Henry said in January. Sam Kennedy, the team's president, called Cora "an extreme talent," and when asked about the possibility of a second chance, said: "He's apologized to us for the embarrassment that this caused. He'll go through a process of rehabilitation, so we'll see what happens." Ten months after Cora was ousted, and with a Major League Baseball imposed 2020 suspension now complete, the Red Sox announced on Friday evening that Cora, 45, was back in his old job. "This past year, I have had time to reflect and evaluate many things, and I recognize how fortunate I am to lead this team once again," Cora said in a statement issued by the team. "Not being a part of the game of baseball, and the pain of bringing negative attention to my family and this organization was extremely difficult. I am sorry for the harm my past actions have caused and will work hard to make this organization and its fans proud." "Cora was involved in developing both the banging scheme and utilizing the replay review room to decode and transmit signs," Manfred wrote in January. "Cora participated in both schemes, and through his active participation, implicitly condoned the players' conduct." Soon afterward, the Red Sox and Cora "mutually agreed to part ways." While Red Sox officials then said that Cora had expressed remorse to them, Cora's team issued statement didn't have an apology or admission of wrongdoing. Cora thanked the team's executives and called his two seasons with the Red Sox "the best years of my life." It wasn't until April, when M.L.B. announced its investigation into allegations of the Red Sox stealing signs during the 2018 season, that Cora first publicly apologized. He said then that he took "full responsibility" for his role in the Astros' scandal and called the team's collective conduct "unacceptable." Cora was not disciplined by M.L.B. relating to Boston's sign stealing scandal, which Manfred called "far more limited in scope and impact" than Houston's. J.T. Watkins, the Red Sox video replay operator, was the only person formally disciplined as a result of that report. At the time, though, Manfred announced Cora's suspension for the 2020 season for his role with the Astros' sign stealing. During the 2019 season, the Red Sox fired Dave Dombrowski, their president of baseball operations who had hired Cora and helped build the team that won the 2018 title. Chaim Bloom replaced Dombrowski and promoted Cora's bench coach, Ron Roenicke, to manager for the 2020 season. The Red Sox, who are rebuilding under Bloom, were one of the worst teams in the major leagues this year, going 24 36 during the truncated season. Before the final game of the season, the Red Sox told Roenicke he would not return as manager in 2021, once again fueling speculation that Cora would return. "Cora is an outstanding manager, and the right person to lead our club into 2021 and beyond," Bloom said in a statement on Friday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In her new book, "Girl Logic," the comedian writes about the hidden genius of irrational behavior. The title, she writes, refers to "a characteristically female way of thinking that appears to be contradictory and circuitous but is actually a complicated and highly evolved way of looking at the world." Traveling, on the other hand, doesn't have to be complicated, as Ms. Shlesinger has learned from her many years on the road. "A very long time ago I accepted that travel is just a necessary evil, and unlike many things in my life, I decided going with the flow would make it less painful," Ms. Shlesinger said. The problem, she added, is that not every traveler is as sensible. "There should be an F.A.A. fine for those who bring hot food that emits odor onto the plane," Ms. Shlesinger said. "You're deemed selfish and you have to take some sort of social awareness class." The following are edited travel tips from Ms. Shlesinger, who will be headlining the New York Comedy Festival on Nov. 11. Always be nice to the front desk staff because they can choose to make your life a living hell, and they'll remember you. You're going to run into all types, but the best idea is to always give them a second chance and be nice, because I found that those are typically the people who will say, "We're not going to charge you for the internet. Thanks for coming." When you travel, try having an open mind, not just about the city that you're in, but about the surrounding areas. One time I went to Detroit and outside of Detroit is a city called Hamtramck. Another comic took me to this Polish neighborhood and we went to the basement of this house where there was this 50 year old Polish restaurant. We got to experience that and I bought a bunch of Polish stuff and it was cool. Trying to really get to what's at the heart of a city or region, I think, is what makes it an experience, not eating at the Chili's in Terminal C. The People Make the City (the Food, Sometimes Not as Much) For me cities are defined by the type of person who comes to my show. I chose to shoot my Netflix special in Denver because the people there are just happy. It's really about the people. And I try to always find the one thing people are famous for. I'm very open minded about eating when I travel, but I went to Cincinnati years ago and I tried Skyline Chili. I will be back to Cincinnati but not for Skyline Chili. Be Kind to Parents on Planes (You Might Be One Someday) I am tired of people giving eye rolls to mothers with screaming babies. You know, it's not the mother's fault and she is trying as hard as possible to get the kid to stop crying. I know that one day when I have a child on a plane, and if that child cries, I swear on my life, if one person gives me an eye roll I am going to have to be air marshal dragged off that plane for attacking them. I'll be like: "I spent my teens and my 20s and a good part of my 30s allowing everyone's baby to cry. I have earned the right to have my baby cry. And you will respect that." Do Your Research Before Going Through Security There should be a special place, not only in hell, but in an off site waiting area where if you get to security and you ask a question like, "Can I bring this bottle of water" or "Do I have to take off my shoes," you automatically get sent to this special waiting room. And, you know what? You don't get to take the flight. We can't have you on a flight, because if you're someone that asks those kinds of questions, who knows what you're going to do on a plane? You're probably going to do something like bring a hot hamburger and stink up the entire aircraft. You never feel great after drinking. They try to make it like, "Oh, you're on Virgin Airlines. It's a big sex party." And you're like, "No, I need to brush my teeth and eat this Jidori Chicken dinner before we cross some sort of prime meridian so I get some normal sleep." But if you take a Virgin Airlines flight first class, it's almost like flying private. They really shoulder the responsibilities of your mental anxiety. Otherwise, they start with, "This is a full flight, so we're going to need you to remove your arm. We hate you." Allow Extra Time When Flying Out of LAX Honestly, my only anxiety comes from getting from my home to LAX. I don't feel this with any other airport. The thing about LAX is it's just so congested, so you pull up and there's a 40 minute line just to get into your terminal, and you're like, "I'm going to miss this 30 minute flight to Las Vegas." I also believe that LAX was built based on a blind child's drawing competition, because the Tom Bradley international terminal is right in the middle of the domestic terminals. There's no reason that if I'm flying to Chicago that I need to pass people flying on, like, Aer Lingus, trying to get to Ireland. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Playing Games Can Be Hard Work. So Can Choosing Which Ones to Display. LONDON Last week, Marie Foulston stood in the Victoria and Albert Museum trying to explain what was so groundbreaking about a host of recent video games. At the same time, she was trying to play one, controlling a horse onscreen that was, absurdly, driving a taxi cab. "We have this concept that a game is something where you can die, where you get points, and you win and lose," she said. "But these show ..." She suddenly stopped talking, and instead made a noise of frustration. Her taxi had crashed into a wall. "We talk about video games as design ..." she restarted, but then drove into a swamp. The horse's customer left the taxi in search of a better ride. "See," she said. "I told you I can't play games and talk at the same time." Ms. Foulston, 35, has one of the more unusual jobs in Britain's museums. Since 2015, she has been the curator of video games at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has just opened her first exhibition in that role, "Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt," which runs through Feb. 24. There have been exhibitions on video games before, most surveying their rise from arcades to virtual reality, or trying to convince audiences that games have artistic merit and deserve to be in museums in the first place. But Ms. Foulston has taken a different approach, showing how, over the past decade, technology has shaped the way games are designed and experienced and even challenged our idea of what games are. (One in the exhibition, Queers in Love at The End of The World, lasts ten seconds and involves the player choosing what to say, or do, to their partner moments before the apocalypse. No one wins.) "People still justify video games as having value because of the amount of money they make, but that's been true for a long time," Ms. Foulston said. "We don't talk about what makes them interesting as design. That's what a museum can do." "We say every game in here is groundbreaking and pushing boundaries," she added. "But what they're fundamentally doing is pushing at the limits of the definition of games. That's what's really exciting." Ms. Foulston started playing games around age 10, when her father brought home a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. "He told my mum it was a gift for me and my sister, but I think it was more for himself," she said. Whenever she found a game overwhelming, she would let her father take the controller and act as his navigator, shouting at him what to do. "People think of games as isolating or a solitary pursuit," Ms. Foulston said. "But for me it was always a social activity.". She fell away from games in her late teens, but came back to them in her mid 20s, she said, impressed by the increasing imagination and creativity she was seeing in them. In 2011, Ms. Foulston found a way to get others interested in the games she was enjoying. She helped found The Wild Rumpus, a group that puts on sweaty events part arcade, part club night where people can play independent games like Roflpillar, where the players control a caterpillar's movements by rolling around in a sack. Being a video games curator is not what people would expect, Ms. Foulston said. "Sadly, my day job's like many others: doing spreadsheets and sending emails. It's not that glamorous." She has played games all day to understand them as design objects, she added, but, "there is part of me still wrestling with the idea that it's work to play games." Since taking the role, much of her time has been spent obtaining exhibits from designers, such as diaries containing their original ideas or a storyboard outlining a game's story arc. "Marie was interested in the process of making the game," said Jenova Chen, the creative director behind Journey. "To me, that was a very fresh idea. I've worked with other museums, and they just wanted the finished product." The exhibition features some of Mr. Chen's notebooks, filled with comments on the game mixed with doodles and the occasional shopping list. On a tour of the exhibition, Ms. Foulston appeared most excited about a room on political games. It begins with Phone Story from 2011, which is about the production of smartphones. Apple removed the game from the App Store just days after its release: It includes scenes with children mining coltan in Africa and of suicidal Chinese factory workers. There are also games that raise issues of sex, race and domestic violence. Some of those games and their developers have been heavily criticized for politicizing games, a trend that started in 2014 with "GamerGate," when a fight about ethics in games journalism became a culture war. Ms. Foulston said she disagreed with this criticism. "We're still at the beginning of seeing where games have to go and what subjects they have to cover," she said. "When people talk about the future of video games, they often talk about the hardware, the technology virtual reality, augmented reality," Ms. Foulston said. "But for me, it's not that. It's about the people new designers, different designers, different perspectives, different voices." There are real risks in airing such views, like a deluge of online abuse. "As a woman in games, I have to be very careful with everything I say," Ms. Foulston said. Ms. Foulston said she hoped her exhibition and her job would show that games are being taken seriously, even by leading museums. The time for questions like "Are video games art?" has long passed, she said. Some people will always find her job strange, she added, no matter how many exhibitions she puts on. That doesn't include her family, however. "I did this talk where I made a joke that the good thing about working at the V A was my mum now understands what I do," Ms. Foulston said. "And my mum listened to it and said, 'How dare you? I've always understood your work.' " "I was like, 'I know, mum. I'm sorry. It just sounds good.' " | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
HAARLEM, the Netherlands Most people associate Leonardo da Vinci with his visions of beauty: the "Mona Lisa," for instance, or his perfectly proportioned "Vitruvian Man." But if we had been alive at any time from the 16th century to the 19th century, we would most likely have associated the Italian Renaissance master with bulbous noses, protruding foreheads and sunken chins. Until the 19th century, nearly all of Leonardo's famous portraits were held in private collections, and his public masterpiece, "The Last Supper," was accessible primarily to visitors of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. His drawings often of men and women with strangely deformed or exaggerated features which he called "visi mostruosi," or "monstrous faces," and which scholars call "grotesques" were distributed widely, and avidly copied. The Teylers Museum in Haarlem, a city 12 miles west of Amsterdam, is exploring this aspect of the artist's career, with its "Leonardo da Vinci" exhibition, which runs through Jan. 6. It includes about 90 artworks in total, 32 of them by Leonardo. Leonardo was a true Renaissance man, fascinated with everything the mechanics of flight, architecture, engineering, botany, artillery and human anatomy but one of his favorite private pastimes was to draw faces, either as scribbles in the margins of his notebooks or as fully conceived sketches later used for paintings. But as far as we know, Leonardo never used the monstrous faces in his paintings, said Michiel Plomp, a co curator of the Teylers show. "He wrote a lot about how important it was to have a diversity of faces in an artwork, Mr. Plomp said in an interview, "but if you look at the few paintings he made, there are angelic faces everywhere." Mr. Plomp said that Leonardo would often follow strange looking individuals to try to memorize their faces so that he could sketch them later. At least once, he went so far as to invite some strangers into his home, where he told jokes, and then later drew images of them laughing, Mr. Plomp added. Some were designed to entertain. "He seemed to be making a series of these ridiculous figures laughing or ranting and raving, maybe to amuse himself," Professor Kwakkelstein said. Leonardo may have also decided "to have them printed and engraved as a series of comic figures to make people laugh." Others were used to explore expression. "Human emotion and human character is an essential characteristic of Leonardo's art," Professor Kwakkelstein said. "He was essentially interested in body language and how it's related to emotions and character." The exhibition includes a vast range of Leonardo's faces, from the absurd to the sublime. It begins with a series of profiles that may have been inspired by coins or sculptures, such as "Head of a Youth, Turned to the Right," which may be based on Antinous, the famously handsome lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian, or on Leonardo's own pupil Salai, who was described as "a graceful and beautiful youth with fine curly hair." In the exhibition's final room, a full scale, printed reproduction of "The Last Supper" is presented across from a version that has been attributed to a follower, Andrea di Bartoli Solari, and that usually hangs in Tongerlo Abbey in Belgium. Comparing the two, it's easy to notice that Leonardo's version presents a wider range of human emotion and expression. "Leonardo da Vinci worked all his life in trying to render faces as a kind of mirror of the soul, and this was the apotheosis," Marjan Scharloo, director of the Teylers Museum, said of the "The Last Supper." "Here you see anger, shock and disbelief," she said, standing in front of the painting. "All of their faces are expressing something to which we can connect, and he was the first one to do this is in this convincing way." In other words, she said, Leonardo's fascination with ugliness was part of his pursuit of beauty. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Here, Spenser is a former cop who spent a few quality years in the clink for assaulting a corrupt superior, something that tells us a couple of things: He's a decent guy with principles and his continuing good health testifies to his fighting skills by way of confirmation, we see him casually dispatch burly inmates who attacked him. After his release, Spenser gets dragged into a conspiracy involving dirty policemen, machete wielding gang members and plans to build a casino on the grounds of the aforementioned track. The perfunctory plot matters less than the scenes depicting Spenser's relationships with his old buddy Henry (Alan Arkin); his new buddy Hawk (Winston Duke); his former girlfriend Cissy (the comedian Iliza Shlesinger); and his dog, Pearl. Those moments are Berg and Wahlberg at their loosely funny best, clearly enjoying making room for the supporting cast to strut their stuff Duke is especially winning as a laconic gentle giant working on his MMA moves. The prospect of spending more time with this crew is not a bad one. Rated R for violence, language throughout and sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The first curse on mankind was imposed because of an apple, and for all that happened to Herman Rosenblat in his 85 years the horrors inflicted in Nazi concentration camps, the gunshot wound he suffered when his Brooklyn television repair shop was robbed, the global fame bestowed by two appearances on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" it is an apple for which he will be most remembered. That first bite of the fruit was built on a lie. Mr. Rosenblat, who died on Feb. 5 at a hospital in Aventura, Fla., wrote a moving but largely unexceptional Holocaust memoir in 1993. What distinguished it was one scene: a momentary encounter in a snow dappled field in Germany between a starving teenage inmate at Schlieben, a subcamp of Buchenwald, and a young girl watching him from the other side of a barbed wire fence. According to his own story, as recounted in another book: "He saw her pull something from her pocket. An apple? She squinted, gauging the distance between them, swung her arm in a few practice throws, then hurled the apple with a force that surprised him. The fruit flew across most of the distance between them before it dropped to the ground, rolled under the fence and landed just inches beyond the wire on Herman's side." Twelve years later, he recognized that same young girl as the woman with whom he was on a blind date in Coney Island, after she recounted her version of the story. " 'That boy was me,' Herman said," Penelope J. Holt wrote in "The Apple," "and he smiled at the beautiful angel by his side." This Holocaust story had a happy ending. The couple wed and remained married for more than 56 years. Except that the story, as Herman Rosenblat told it, was not true. After appearing on "Oprah" in 2007 and presenting Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, the woman he met on the blind date in Coney Island, with a ring from J. C. Penney to mark their 50th wedding anniversary, Mr. Rosenblatt acknowledged, "The reality was that I wasn't telling the truth, because she didn't throw the apple to me, but in my mind I believed she did." His "Angel at the Fence," which Berkley Books was to publish on Valentine's Day in 2009, was never released. A feature film inspired by the book was also scrubbed. What Ms. Winfrey had hailed as "the single greatest love story" she had ever heard proved instead to have been a hoax. Mr. Rosenblat died at 85 after undergoing heart surgery, his son, Kenneth, said. Besides his son and his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Renee Enea, and three grandchildren. He was born on Sept. 23, 1929, in Poland, where his parents ran a store. Much of the memoir of his family's frightful persecution by the Nazi invaders may have been true. His father died of typhus. When he was 12, Herman and his siblings were herded into ghettos and camps where he and his three brothers managed to stay together for six years. His mother was separated for "processing" and apparently killed. He said he moved to America in 1950, and seven years later he did meet Roma on a blind date. He later explained that he had written his memoir because, while he was hospitalized for the gunshot wound he suffered in the 1992 robbery, "my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust." But what led him to embellish the story is anybody's guess. In 1995, he submitted an abridged version to a New York Post love story contest. It was also featured in "Chicken Soup for the Soul" and stirred Ms. Winfrey, the film producer Harris Salomon and the literary agent Andrea Hurst. Mr. Rosenblat received a book advance of about 50,000 and about 100,000 more for the film rights (neither of which, apparently, was ever returned). He even accompanied Mr. Salomon to Auschwitz, where he not only re enacted the apple tossing encounter on camera but further embroidered his account, this time recalling that the young girl returned "every day" to deliver more apples. But after Holocaust scholars, several infuriated relatives and a reporter for The New Republic concluded that the story had been concocted, Mr. Rosenblat admitted that the apple was in his mind's eye. Ms. Winfrey said she was "disappointed." His collaborators said they had been duped. "I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate but to love and tolerate all people," he said. "I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream." In Ms. Holt's 2009 book, "The Apple: Based on the Herman Rosenblat Holocaust Memoir," in which certain incidents were fictionalized, he is quoted as saying: "When I met Roma, after the war, she told me that one time she had thrown an apple to a little Jewish boy, and I thought that this could have been me. I wanted it to be me." "He cemented Roma into a corner of his gruesome survivor account and honored her with the love story that she deserved," Ms. Holt wrote. In fact, during the war Roma and her family, who were Jewish, were passing as Roman Catholics, living with a Polish family 200 miles away. She had never tossed an apple to anyone. "I don't know why he lied, but if you can't trust a Holocaust survivor, who can you trust?" Mr. Salomon said in an interview, suggesting that Mr. Rosenblat's motivation was less likely money than vanity and that, for whatever reason, most of his immediate family was complicit. "Herman liked being in the limelight. He also needed a hook, something to separate his Holocaust story from all the others." He had told his story so many times that perhaps he had even persuaded himself that the woman he married was the same young girl he imagined had salved the hunger of a starving teenager across the barbed wire barricade of a concentration camp. "In my imagination, in my mind, I believed it," he told "Good Morning America." "Even now, I believe it, that she was there and she threw the apple to me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Clairo's 'Pretty Girl' Went Viral. Then She Had to Prove Herself. Less than a week after finishing her freshman year at Syracuse University, the singer, songwriter and producer Claire Cottrill, who performs as Clairo, was in the back seat of a chauffeured S.U.V., eating Chick fil A and living out the surprising mundanity of her music industry dreams. "I'm literally the most inexperienced person," Ms. Cottrill, 19, said, reflecting giddily on the series of firsts that had greeted her in Manhattan after final exams. As an emerging artist with a viral song ("Pretty Girl") and a fresh phalanx of devoted personnel (manager, publicist, label), Clairo was spending two days performing the awkward get to know you dance with publications, agents and streaming services such as Spotify that will, ideally, be partners on her path to fame. But while such glad handing can quickly become a chore, Ms. Cottrill was bubbling with wide eyed possibility, like Charlie on his golden ticket tour, even as she was asked to fire finger guns into a camera for promotional GIFs. In the elevator down from a SiriusXM interview, during which she'd picked nervously at the sleeve of her Palace sweater, Ms. Cottrill, who is often mistaken for a precocious middle schooler, grew teary eyed at the genuine interest being shown in her work. "I feel like a little star right now," she said. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Both a culmination and a beginning, the release on Friday of Clairo's debut six song EP, "diary 001," marks a bizarre period of flux for the singer, whose woozy, homemade pop concoctions are blooming into something bigger. Though she had been releasing charmingly lo fi music online since her early teens (including acoustic covers of Mumford Sons and Frank Ocean), everything accelerated for Ms. Cottrill last summer with "Pretty Girl," which she wrote and recorded herself on GarageBand and uploaded to YouTube with an equally crude yet representative video: a girl, alone in her room, singing directly into her laptop. Nearly 15 million views later, Clairo was another potential breakout from a self starting generation of songwriters unbeholden to genre or equipment, who innately understand branding and the currents of the online zeitgeist. Yet given the force and velocity of her ascent and her beginnings in an internet based D.I.Y. scene (Bandcamp, Le Sigh, Rookie) Clairo has also come in for criticism regarding her careerism and connections. Almost as quickly as fans began worshiping her as "mom!" and "queen!" in comment sections, Ms. Cottrill inspired a digital counter movement that questioned whether some shadowy Svengali had engineered her success conversations not unlike the skepticism and conspiracy mongering that accompanied the rise of Lana Del Rey and Lorde. Focusing largely on her father, Geoff Cottrill, a marketing executive who has worked for Coca Cola and Converse, message boards, student newspapers and YouTube lit up with takes that undermined Clairo's agency and questioned the legitimacy of her seamless self presentation and viral video. At first, that criticism stung, though it also struck her as barely veiled sexism, Ms. Cottrill said over pizza the day after her media blitz. "The fact that there has to be a man behind my success when I genuinely have worked so hard is frustrating," she said. "At the end of the day, when people say, 'Oh, she's an industry plant,' I'm like, 'No, I just have representation, like every single other artist you listen to.' I'm not the first person to get a manager." "Pretty Girl," which she initially recorded for an indie rock compilation benefiting the Transgender Law Center, was organic and took off without any marketing muscle or shortcuts, Clairo insisted. "I put it on YouTube, and then the algorithm just ate it up," she said, which led to interest from major labels, including Columbia, RCA and Capitol. "Things just happen afterward when things go viral," Ms. Cottrill said. "People reach out." She did have an advantage: knowing where to turn amid the surreal, smoke and mirror haze of internet hype. Ms. Cottrill's father consulted an old friend, Jon Cohen, an executive at Cornerstone, the marketing agency behind The Fader magazine. Mr. Cohen later signed her to a 12 song deal with his company's Fader Label and introduced Ms. Cottrill to Pat Corcoran, Chance the Rapper's manager, whose company Haight Brand took her on as a client near the end of 2017. Mr. Corcoran, 28, praised the fullness of Ms. Cottrill's vision, from her direct, diaristic songwriting to her high school vlogs and social media. "She lives very artfully," he said. "It made me feel young again." He brushed off any insinuation that Clairo was manufactured. "There are major label artists that are getting pushed by the biggest companies in entertainment Sony, Warner Bros., Universal and they can't even accomplish what she's done from her bedroom," Mr. Corcoran said. Ms. Cottrill, who grew up in a small Massachusetts town, sowed her interests both online and in local scenes, frequenting house shows in Boston and Philadelphia. Her early songs were guitar based, inspired by lo fi singer songwriters like Frankie Cosmos and Calvin Johnson. But as D.I.Y. musicians like PC Music began flirting with pop sounds and signifiers and streaming further eroded musical borders Ms. Cottrill turned to beat making on her laptop. The "diary 001" EP bridges both worlds, building on the coy, understated bedroom pop of "Pretty Girl" and "Flamin Hot Cheetos" toward sturdier numbers like "4EVER" and "B.O.M.D.", which could pass for Top 40 hits, if not for Ms. Cottrill's wonderfully flat affect. With soft, sugary synths, playful electronic drums and vaguely R B melodies, Clairo songs are the thoroughly modern type Spotifycore? calibrated for repeated streaming from computer speakers. But her embrace of pop, and the surge it's given her career, also made Ms. Cottrill uneasy, especially as her every move has become fodder for dissection on Reddit. She recalled a particularly dark night in her dorm room at Syracuse where she studied in the Bandier music business program when the negative comments sent her into a spiral of shame and sobbing. Ms. Cottrill called Shamir, a singer she's known since she was 16, whose early career arc was similar. "He made me feel like I wasn't so alone in all this," she said, referring to the parts of virality that aren't so "peachy." Shamir, in an interview, added: "I've seen this girl grind from the beginning." He warned her that "this industry is just built to eat up young girls and young artists in general," he said, and urged Ms. Cottrill "to make sure that her support system is strong." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
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