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I spent a lot of time this week trying to come up with the best way to get those who make things in Silicon Valley to better understand the suicide of Alex Kearns, a student at the University of Nebraska. He killed himself after he mistakenly believed that he had a 730,000 negative balance on the millennial popular Robinhood app, which he had downloaded to learn about investing. The tragedy got a lot of attention, especially after Forbes reported that Mr. Kearns left a note behind asking, "How was a 20 year old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollars of leverage?" Embedded in that query is a much bigger one that has been plaguing the tech industry and its innovative entrepreneurs for far too long: What is the reason for their persistent tendency to ignore the potentially dangerous impact of their creations? These days the companies can seem not just careless but also predatory. Is it to make more money? Is it because growth trumps safety? Is it rank sloppiness? Lack of foresight? A design flaw that could have and, more to the point, should have been anticipated? A laser focus on innovation? All of the above? Perhaps the reason hardly matters, since, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "Everybody, soon or late, sits down at a banquet of consequences." And that is the ashen meal now in front of Robinhood's co founders and co chief executives, Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt. The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has become a phenom since its founding in 2013. Using an addictive and hyper gamified interface, seamless and instant onboarding to the glories of trading and an occasional dollop of animated confetti to jack up the fun factor, Robinhood use has grown fast among young people, many of whom are newbies to investing. While there have been troubling outages and worries that the app has been designed to feel more like a casino than a sober pathway for important financial decisions, the longtime idea of democratizing entrance to the stock market I covered the advent of popular online trading companies like eTrade in the late 1990s is an important one. And there is no doubt that Robinhood has been among the most innovative standouts in the fintech space (especially in removing friction, which is at the heart of this app, and in offering new features like fractional shares). That success has attracted 1.2 billion in investments from eager venture capital firms, including 280 million last month from the top tier investor Sequoia Capital, bringing Robinhood's valuation to 8.3 billion. And the pandemic has been a boon to the company, making it a good bet for investors. Robinhood has added an astonishing three million accounts in the first quarter of this year, bringing the total to 13 million. A growth chart that goes up and to the right is all well and good, but has Robinhood, as one person said to me, "made the classic Silicon Valley mistake of applying games and brain hacks to an extremely important sector," even as it underinvested in key parts of the business like customer service? Robinhood has certainly doubled down on eliminating friction, which in Silicon Valley is almost like a religious tenet. Too many clicks are akin to a major sin to techies, as are too many "just a sec" warnings, even though most people find stop signs useful if irritating in real life. It's not clear yet how things went awry in Mr. Kearns's case, except that the way the app rendered his account before his death appeared to make him think that he was deep in a financial hole. Of his own accord, he was engaged in complex options trading, but without much oversight on the transactions and without enough information about options trading on the app. All added up, the calculation proved deadly for him. Options trading can be very risky and is not recommended for the inexperienced investor like Mr. Kearns. To do it, Robinhood requires an eligibility questionnaire and for a user to certify his investing experience, along with signing an acknowledgment of risk and a promise to read its materials on the topic. Other brokerage firms provide more substantive interactions on their riskiest financial instruments and even offer to explain risks in real time conversations before allowing an investment to proceed. One investor I spoke with likened the Robinhood experience to giving a Ferrari to a kid without a driver's license. That kind of carelessness is especially problematic when it comes to young men, who studies have shown are more attracted to online trading, especially because of its often addictive characteristics, and whose emotional investment can be too high. In an interview with me this week, Mr. Tenev said the company could not comment on the specifics of Mr. Kearns's account because of privacy concerns. But clearly chastened and shaken by the tragedy, he acknowledged that fast growth has been a management issue. "We had our challenges and had not anticipated 2020 shaking out the way it did," Mr. Tenev said. "Customer support has been strained, but the team has been hiring." A company representative said Robinhood had grown its customer service department by over 40 percent already this year, which has included adding registered financial services professionals. And the company says it wants to double its customer service staff by the end of the year. Mr. Tenev stressed again what he and Mr. Bhatt had written about Mr. Kearns in an unusually self critical blog post: Robinhood announced a commitment to more investment in app education resources, significant changes in its interface around options and a 250,000 donation to suicide prevention. "It is certainly not lost upon us that Robinhood, especially with retail investing in America, has recognized that we have a huge responsibility," he said. "We want to be out in front of issues and be the best and safest options platform." Still, some think Robinhood failed Mr. Kearns. Bill Brewster, a professional investor whose wife is Mr. Kearns's cousin, said the young man appeared excited and eager to learn about investing. It was Mr. Brewster who raised Robinhood's failures in the Kearns matter on Twitter. While he gave the company credit for its response and some of the moves it says it is going to make, Mr. Brewster remains worried that Robinhood does not understand or appreciate its responsibilities. "You are playing with real fire to allow inexperienced people to play with the riskiest of financial instruments," he said. "There is always personal responsibility, of course. But as a society, I think we owe youth some sort of oversight, and it feels like someone was asleep at the wheel there." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
In a fall season without many live shows, everything is up for grabs. That includes the canon of classics and where Bill Irwin might be performing. Every September, stages around the country spring back to life after the summer slowdown. This year, however, all usual bets are off as theaters ponder not just their fall seasons, but what exactly constitutes a season as opposed to an assemblage of ad hoc programming. Chicago's Steppenwolf company, for example, has announced a virtual slate under the umbrella "Steppenwolf Now," starting in November, while New York Theater Workshop is unveiling seven new projects from its pool of "artistic instigators," beginning with part one of Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's "What the Hell Is a Republic Anyway?" on Sept. 27 and Oct. 5. So what else is happening in a theatrical back to school unlike any other? The Vineyard Theater, on the other hand, is combining live shows and virtual ones, with a focus on brand new material. Conceived by Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Tyler Thomas and Reggie D. White, the multipart "Lessons in Survival" lets the Commissary, the Vineyard's collective in residence, recreate historical audio documents by artists and activists. Actors employ in ear feeds to bring the words to new life while we audience members watch from home. (Part 1 is Oct. 6 Nov. 1; vineyardtheatre.org.) Fans of the great Bill Irwin will be happy to know that he is turning up with both of these Off Broadway institutions: His in person performance "The Busking Project" is presented to Vineyard members Wednesday through Oct. 3, and his tweaked and retitled "On Beckett/In Screen" is at Irish Rep on Nov. 17 22. For his new project, the Caracas born director Moises Kaufman ("Torch Song," "The Laramie Project") is adapting Jonathan Jakubowicz's novel "Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard," about the devastation brought on Venezuela by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. Kaufman's Tectonic Theater Project and Miami New Drama are presenting select scenes in a virtual reading, in Spanish with English subtitles. (Oct. 6 at 7 p.m.; tectonictheaterproject.org.) The writer performer Drew Droege's solo "Happy Birthday Doug," in which he captured an uproarious gallery of partygoers, joins his earlier comedy, "Bright Colors and Bold Patterns," on BroadwayHD; it will not make you miss wine bars. (Premieres Thursday; broadwayhd.com.) The following week, "The Boys in the Band" lands on Netflix. While technically this is a film, the director Joe Mantello reunited the cast of his Tony Award winning revival of Mart Crowley's now classic play, so the world can check out Zachary Quinto, Jim Parsons et al. camp it up like 2018 is 1968 all over again. (Sept. 30; netflix.com.) Nikki M. James ("The Book of Mormon") and George Salazar ("Be More Chill") a stage couple many of us would love to see burn the boards in real life are leading a reading of Megan Loughran's "The Silverfish" for New York's endearing, scrappy Urban Stages. The plot involves some kind of scheme, and it's likely high jinks will come into play. (Wednesday at 7 p.m., through Sept. 27; urbanstages.org.) In a rather different vein from pretty much anything you could think of "Kiki and Herb: Seeking Asylum!" is streaming for the next several weeks. Nothing can match the mayhem of a live performance by Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman's gonzo Dada cabaret act, but this live recording of the pair's 2016 reunion show at Joe's Pub will be a good proxy. (Thursday through Nov. 5; publictheater.org.) Speaking of dream teams, the "!Viva Broadway! Hear Our Voices" concert presented by Playbill and the Broadway League has wrangled quite the roster to celebrate Latinx Heritage Month: Antonio Banderas, Gloria Estefan, Christopher Jackson, John Leguizamo, Lin Manuel Miranda, Chita Rivera, Daphne Rubin Vega and many, many more. Connoisseurs will be happy to see the marvelous Andrea Burns, of "On Your Feet!" and "In the Heights," turn up as the host. (Oct. 1 at 8 p.m., through Oct. 5; broadway.org.) With regular theater ground to a halt, now is a good time to reset some clocks, and repertoire is one of them. Hedgepig Ensemble Theater is partnering with Ma Yi Theater Company, American Players Theater and the Classical Theater of Harlem to "Expand the Canon." They selected nine obscure plays by women and are giving some of them virtual readings. Still to come are Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's "House of Desires," Fumiko Enchi's "Restless Night in Late Spring" and Zora Neale Hurston's "Spunk." (Through Oct. 1; hedgepigensemble.org). Every summer, PTP/NYC (born Potomac Theater Project) sets up camp in New York and presents a repertory season, usually featuring uncompromising, undersung (at least in the United States) works. This year, the company is presenting four virtual productions on its YouTube channel. Of particular note are two shows by British experimentalists: Howard Barker's "Don't Exaggerate (desire and abuse)," Oct. 1 4, and Caryl Churchill's "Far Away," Oct. 15 18. (Through Oct. 18; ptpnyc.org.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SHOULD a Phoenix area jeweler be able to create his own private insurance company to cover his jewelry stores against possible terrorist attacks, specifically those "relating to radioactivity from a 'dirty' bomb or from nuclear fuel or nuclear waste"? And should he be allowed to sell such terrorism policies to other small business owners who operate in large cities, even though the insurance he created openly states that it will not cover claims in cities with more than 1.5 million people? The answer, the Internal Revenue Service said in a 422 page response, is no. The business owner's lawyers said it was perfectly legal. A judge is expected to rule in the case this year. That ruling may determine the future strategies of entrepreneurs and small business owners who have set up their own insurance companies to cover all manner of risks, some against likely occurrences, others less so. Establishing these so called captive insurance companies, which are wholly owned subsidiaries of private companies, is perfectly legal where there are legitimate insurance needs not covered by commercial insurance companies. Captives have become increasingly popular in the last decade because they greatly reduce affluent business owners' tax bills. The premiums paid to the captive are tax deductible. (The tax code has allowed premiums of up to 1.2 million a year to be tax free.) Some small captives are coming under scrutiny when the insurable risks many for things unlikely to happen or already covered more economically by commercial insurance are being used as a way to sidestep taxes, since few, if any, claims are paid out. And the money paid into the captive can be transferred to heirs at greatly reduced tax rates. The I.R.S. is using the captive set up by Benyamin and Orna Avrahami, the owners of the Arizona jewelry stores, to challenge the validity of some small captives. It is arguing in its brief filed in United States Tax Court that the couple should not be able to deduct the premiums paid to their captive insurer. How many captives have exploited the tax rules is hard to know, because captives are regulated by individual states as is any insurance company and some, as in the Avrahami case, have incorporated themselves offshore, which gives them an added layer of secrecy. Captives face other challenges as well. Congress included language in its 2015 appropriations bill that tightens the rules that grant people large tax breaks on the premiums they pay into these insurance companies. The rules take effect next year. "What you're going to see is a lot of people scrambling to understand what's happening," said David J. Slenn, a lawyer at Quarles Brady in Naples, Fla., and the chairman of the American Bar Association's captive insurance committee. "They're going to have to fix the structure so in 2017 they qualify to make the election" to get a tax break on the premiums. Concern about small captive insurance companies has been percolating since they landed on the "Dirty Dozen List of Tax Scams" published by the I.R.S. last year. If the small captive doesn't pay out insurance claims, the money accumulates as it does in a commercial insurance company. The company could elect to pay dividends to the people who own the captive. In the abusive structures, lawyers and accountants say, the captives pay out little in claims and the people receiving dividends are the children or grandchildren of the people who set up the insurers. While those dividends would be taxed, the rate would be far lower than the income tax rate that the business owner would have avoided in putting the premiums into the captive, and the money would go to the heirs without being subject to the much higher gift tax rate. In the appropriations bill, Congress set out to make this more difficult. At first glance, the appropriations bill seemed to give small captives a lift by increasing the tax deductible premium in 2017 to 2.2 million and indexing it to inflation. But Congress then added new hurdles. To prove that they are entitled to a tax deduction of the premiums, small captives now must meet one of two requirements. One requires that a captive prove that no more than 20 percent of the premiums come from one policyholder. Jay D. Adkisson, former chairman of the A.B.A. captive insurance committee and a lawyer at Riser Adkisson, said captives owned by one person wouldn't be able to meet this standard. Policyholder is defined in such a way that all family members are treated as one policyholder. The second requirement prohibits an insured company from being wholly owned by one person and the captive by his or her heirs. And it limits the difference in ownership to 2 percent, Mr. Adkisson said. If, for example, the insured company were owned 100 percent by the parents, their children could own only 2 percent of the captive. "People are scrambling to understand that ownership rule," Mr. Slenn said. "It can be pretty dangerous, and not just to those who are trying to abuse the transfer tax." There could, for example, be business owners who have used captives to pay claims but at the same time, on the advice of their accountants and lawyers, have named their children as the owners of the captive as part of an estate planning strategy. Or, Mr. Slenn said, there could be trusts that own the small captives as well as other assets, but it is the business owner's children who are the ultimate beneficiaries. Still, in some situations, certain types of trusts may still work. There is also no allowance for an existing captive to be grandfathered in under the new guidelines. If people don't make changes this year, they could be subject to the taxes that a regular captive pays next year. A captive could also find itself responding to an I.R.S. investigation, litigation or penalties. Yet if the owners unwind the small captive, they could be hit with capital gains taxes on the premiums paid into the captive, Mr. Slenn said. The I.R.S. has signaled in the Avrahami case that it may be stepping up its enforcement efforts. At the very least, the agency seems to be making an example of this couple, who took what the I.R.S. deemed aggressive steps in the construction of their small captive. The couple enlisted Celia R. Clark, one of the lawyers in this field who has written about the estate tax benefits of captives. With her assistance, the couple created a captive with restrictions on the amount, manner and reason it would pay out claims. (It paid out a claim only after the I.R.S. began investigating it.) It also, the I.R.S. says in its brief, seemed to base its annual premium on the size of the tax deduction the couple needed for a given year and not on the price of the risk it was insuring. "In one year, you have half the premium charged, when there hasn't been any change in the exposures presented by the risk," said Donald W. Bendure, a risk and insurance management consultant at Robert Hughes Associates. He recently criticized the Avrahamis' captive in a call for American Bar Association members. "It really does have to make sense." Mr. Adkisson, in the same call, was even harsher in his criticism: "The formalities are followed, but they're undone by email. Celia Clark, the owner of the company, the tax attorney and the C.P.A. are talking about a lot of issues where they make it pretty clear that what they're trying to do is create Kabuki theater for the service so if the service takes a look, it looks like a real captive." Ms. Clark declined to comment. Tim A. Tarter, a tax lawyer in Phoenix who is the Avrahamis' defense lawyer, said, "We believe the facts support a finding that this was set up the way it was intended to insure risks that are not available commercially or to provide gap type coverage." While tax planners are often aggressive on behalf of their clients, there are many other owners of small captives who will need to rethink what they have done. "This is years of some bad practices finally coming to light," Mr. Slenn said. "A lot of people are waiting to see what happens with Avrahami." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Reviews of my book "My War Criminal: Personal Encounters With an Architect of Genocide" were recently published in the daily New York Times (Jan. 30) and the Sunday Book Review (Feb. 9). The subject of this book, Radovan Karadzic, is responsible for a genocide that took place during the Bosnian War. I want to acknowledge that the publication of my book has deeply hurt the victims who are still living with the trauma of Karadzic's unpardonable actions. I decided to write this book in an effort better to understand the ecosystem in which genocidal leaders like Karadzic are created. I tried to show how he used the power of his charisma to inspire horrific atrocities against defenseless civilians; but in highlighting his magnetism, I have hurt those who suffered under Karadzic's rule. I condemn Karadzic's extraordinary cruelty to Bosniak civilians, and I am truly sorry for the pain I have caused. I will keep the victims' continuing pain foremost in mind in my future research and writing. In the concluding paragraph to his review of Richard Davies's "Extreme Economies" (Jan. 26), Matthew Yglesias suggests that malice and indifference on the part of the powerful are as much to blame for failures in economies as "'mistakes' of judgment." It seems to me that malice and indifference will always be an influence, and that the most equitable economies are those with both well designed rules that prevent those factors from gaining a strong foothold, and vigilant monitors, to tinker with the system as needed in order to maintain the status quo (since "mistakes" of judgment are almost inevitable). Capitalism, like fire in a fireplace, can be beneficial when it's carefully tended and monitored, but disastrous when left on its own, and allowed to wreak havoc. I enjoyed Joe Moran's review of Dennis Baron's "What's Your Pronoun?" (Feb. 2), but I'm afraid I'm one of the dying breed who defend the generic "he." Maybe it's because I'm too old a dog to learn a new trick (or unlearn an old one). Or maybe it's because it's what I learned as a high school freshperson. In reference to Laurie Anderson's By the Book (Feb. 2): In the face of all the cyberspace bashing we get bombarded with these days, it is refreshing to encounter someone who says, "I'm happy to read electronically now and I no longer compare the differences between screen and paper." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Stanley Greene, whose visceral and brutally honest images of conflict and fearlessness in the most perilous of places made him one of the leading war photographers of his generation, died on Friday in Paris. He was 68. The death was confirmed by the photographer owned agency Noor Images, of which Mr. Greene, who lived in Paris, was a founding member. No cause was given, although associates said he had been treated for liver cancer for several years. Mr. Greene was one of the few African American photographers who worked internationally. He traveled widely, making powerful images of conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and the republics of Chechnya and Georgia, among other places. Some of his pictures were too raw for many publications. Mr. Greene's commitment to telling the unvarnished truth extended to his assessments of the ethical questions facing photojournalism. He railed against the use of computer programs like Photoshop to alter the scenes of news images, a practice that he said turned photos into "cartoons." And he scorned photographers who staged images in an attempt to recreate a missed moment after arriving late to a news scene. "We have to be ambassadors of the truth," he told Lens in 2015. "We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard because the public no longer trusts the media. We are considered merchants of misery and therefore get a bad rap." Mr. Greene had once aspired to be a painter, like Matisse, or a musician, like Jimi Hendrix, but he discovered his true instrument the first time he picked up a camera, he told Michael Kamber in the 2010 Lens interview. Mr. Kamber, a former conflict photographer himself and the author of "Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories From Iraq," compared Mr. Greene to a jazz musician. "Stanley is like the Charles Mingus of photography," Mr. Kamber, the founder of the Bronx Documentary Center, said in an interview. "Stanley is about his heart, his emotions and his feelings. His photos are very impressionistic, like a stream of consciousness." "He was one of those journalists who went toward the bullet," Ms. Tucker said, "because that's where the story was." Stanley Greene was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 14, 1949, and grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. His father, also named Stanley, was an actor, producer, filmmaker and director; his mother, Javotee Sutton Greene, was an actress. His father, an activist devoted to black culture, was blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and was reduced to taking anonymous bit parts. Information on survivors was not immediately available. The younger Mr. Greene had a "somewhat privileged yet traumatic childhood," his longtime friend Jules Allen said. "There was a loneliness there that was insatiable, but he was blessed enough to at least partially deal with his pain through photography." As a teenager, Mr. Greene joined the Black Panthers and was active in the antiwar movement. His dreams of becoming a painter gave way to photography, and he was encouraged in that pursuit by the renowned photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. In the 1970s, Mr. Allen and Mr. Greene shared a darkroom and a studio in San Francisco while Mr. Greene studied photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Some of his early work was published in "The Western Front," a book that chronicled the city's punk music scene in the 1970s and '80s. He cut as striking a figure as some of the musicians he photographed. "Stanley was a punk rocker who drove a Mustang," Mr. Allen said. "He wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, a black beret, two scarves, three watches and four bracelets, as well as two great cameras and a bandoleer of film strapped across his chest." Mr. Greene worked as a fashion photographer in the 1980s and moved to Paris, where he later joined the Vu photo agency. He worked extensively in Africa and the former Soviet Union. He was the only Western photographer in Russia's White House in 1993 during an attempted coup against the president, Boris Yeltsin. Trapped inside, amid shelling and gunfire, Mr. Greene continued to take photographs throughout the building, capturing two images that received World Press Photo awards. "The fact that I thought I was going to die gave me courage," he wrote in "Black Passport." "Courage is control of fear. I think that this incident is the one that steeled me. I'm no hero, but it made me so that once I commit to a story, I have to see it through." A 1992 Moscow encounter with Kadir van Lohuizen, a fellow member of Vu, began a close friendship that would lead to their founding Noor Images, a collective of photojournalists, in Amsterdam. Given the emotional toll and the physical dangers of his work, Mr. Greene discouraged others from following in his footsteps. "Though I'm bombarded by young photographers who ask me how to become a conflict photographer, I tell them, 'Get a life,'" he wrote in "Black Passport." "If they persist, I tell them about the consequences. I tell them there is no glory." Even as his health was failing, Mr. Greene continued to work. He returned last month from a road trip through northern Russia, where he and Maria Turchenkova began a project on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. At the end of "Black Passport," Mr. Greene reflected on the centrality of storytelling to the human experience. Wars are fought, he said, because people have different views of the same story. "Photography is my language, and it gives me the power to tell what otherwise is not told," he said. "Eugene Smith told me vision is a gift, and you have to give something back. He haunts me like that. It's not the bang bang that compels me. It never was. At the end of the day, it is not about death; it is about life. "The quest is to try to understand why human beings behave the way they do," he continued. "The question is, How does this happen? And sometimes, the only way to find out is to go to where it is happening. One day the neighbors are talking to each other over the fence, and the next they are shooting at each other. Why is it that we don't consider life precious, and instead we literally let it drip through our fingers?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Sarah Isgur Flores, a Republican political operative whose hiring by CNN last month set off an uproar among liberals and several Democratic presidential campaigns, will no longer take on a management role at the network, CNN said on Friday. Instead, Ms. Isgur, who was the chief spokeswoman for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said she would be an on air political analyst for CNN, a more traditional entry level role for government officials who pursue television careers. She will also occasionally write commentary for the network's website. When Ms. Isgur's position initially described as a "political editor," with a role in coordinating CNN's 2020 campaign coverage was announced three weeks ago, it set off confusion and frustration inside the cable network and Democratic political circles. Several journalists at CNN voiced concerns about the hire. They questioned how a partisan spokeswoman and recent alumna of President Trump's administration, who had stayed on at the Justice Department after Mr. Sessions's departure in November, could be granted a senior journalistic role at the network. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
KAZUO MIYAGAWA: JAPAN'S GREATEST CINEMATOGRAPHER at Japan Society and the Museum of Modern Art (through April 29). Was the same person really responsible for the ghostly compositions in Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu" (on Monday at MoMA), the delicate balance of color and geometry in Yasujiro Ozu's "Floating Weeds" (on Friday at Japan Society) and the Tohoscope symmetries of Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" (on Wednesday at MoMA)? Yes, and add to Mr. Miyagawa's accomplishments a virtuosity with high speed athletics in Kon Ichikawa's "Tokyo Olympiad" (on April 21 at Japan Society and April 29 at MoMA), a pioneering use of the bleach bypass process a source of the dystopian look in films like "1984" and "Seven" on Mr. Ichikawa's "Her Brother" (on April 20 and 21 at MoMA) and the 17th century imagery in Masahiro Shinoda's "Silence" (on April 26 and 29 at MoMA), adapted from the Shushaku Endo novel later filmed by Martin Scorsese. This retrospective of Mr. Miyagawa's career is so extensive and filled with rarities that it seems to have required three theaters to host it. (Film Forum previewed the series with two Mizoguchi features last week.) 212 715 1258, japansociety.org 212 708 9400, moma.org QUADROPHILIA: FIRST ANNIVERSARY 21 FILM SALUTE! at the Quad Cinema (April 13 23). To celebrate one year of showing movies in its sleekly renovated incarnation, the Quad is holding encore showings of noteworthy titles from the past 12 months. They include "Paris, Texas" (showing on Sunday and Thursday), featured in last fall's Harry Dean Stanton retrospective, which opened shortly after the actor's death in September, and "Swept Away" (on Thursday), which screened during the Lina Wertmuller series that reinaugurated the venue last April. 212 255 2243, quadcinema.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Sea spiders are abundant in waters across the globe, and most are so small that you could hold one on the tip of your pinkie. But in the swirling waters around our planet's icy poles, these spiders are giants. If you held the largest of these creatures, its gangly legs would just dangle off the palm of your hand. Antarctic sea spiders got so big because some 30 million years ago, the Southern Ocean got cooler. This trait, known as polar gigantism, is thought to be essential to why they and many other cold dwelling invertebrates of unusual size managed to survive. Researchers wondered what allowed animals like these to reach such gigantic sizes. They also want to know what will happen as the waters they inhabit continue to get warmer, because it's thought that extremely cold water marine animals can only tolerate a tiny range in temperature, making them particularly vulnerable to global warming. In a study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of scientists challenged giant sea spiders collected in Antarctic waters to exercise to exhaustion in a kind of aquatic crossfit class. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
WHEN Ken Kavula of Genesee, Mich., retired from his job as a high school principal at age 53, he decided to defy conventional wisdom and manage his own financial life including his retirement accounts and a mix of stocks and bonds he had either accumulated on his own or inherited. Fifteen years later, Mr. Kavula, now 68, has ridden the huge highs and crushing lows of the markets so well that he has enough to live off, for now, without even tapping some accounts. Although he had no professional money management experience or investment credentials, he was far from a newbie to the complexities of financial management when he retired. He had been studying investing for years and had been a member of several investment clubs since the late 1980s. "That gave me confidence I could make money on the money I had," Mr. Kavula said. There are good reasons for retirees to manage their own financial lives: Saving money on fees is one benefit, and more closely aligning investments with personal goals is another. But there is dangerous ground along the way: Taxes, estate planning, rules around gifting to relatives, timing of withdrawals from retirement accounts and other issues can be immensely complex and are getting more so. Although retirement confidence has been rising somewhat since the end of the last recession, it's still shaky. A recent Deloitte Center for Financial Services studyfound that "45 percent of respondents felt 'very secure' in having enough savings and income to maintain a comfortable retirement lifestyle, a sizable jump from the 28 percent in Deloitte's initial survey in 2012." For those who are reluctant to go it entirely alone, a growing alternative for retirees is the model of do it yourself investing done through so called robo advisers. After you enter your risk tolerance and other information in an online form, a software program automatically creates a portfolio of low cost exchange traded funds. It's a way to avoid paying commissions or being tempted by brokers pushing you into investments you do not quite understand. Betterment, Personal Capital and Wealthfront started the robo adviser model. Not to be outdone, more traditional firms have entered the arena. The discount broker Charles Schwab, for example, introduced its Intelligent Portfolios robo adviser in March. Yet the new generation of automated portfolio managers may not be suitable for retirees who have complex financial needs. One of the biggest concerns that human advisers have when it comes to their algorithmic alternatives is how investors will use them during market downturns. Skittish retirees may make some costly timing decisions by selling at the wrong time. "These programs are still in their infancy, said Tom Balcom, of 1650 Wealth Management in Lauderdale by the Sea, Fla. "Will investors sell out and change portfolio allocations when they're scared?" Another issue retirees can face is how to make withdrawals from retirement accounts in the way that minimizes taxes. Given the choice of withdrawing funds from a 401(k), Roth I.R.A. or a conventional I.R.A., for example, which would produce income subject to the lowest tax? Few, if any, robo advisers provide this service, and it is a difficult question for investors, although some automated options do provide tax loss harvesting services to lower tax bills. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' But financial transactions with large tax implications often need the guidance of someone with extensive experience in financial planning, especially for investors with multiple retirement accounts. "I had a 62 year old client who retired and went to a discount broker," said Carolyn Walder, a certified financial planner with Lifetime Wealth Planning and Management in Alexandria, Va. "They advised him to take his income from his I.R.A. instead of from his individual brokerage account, which had a lot of capital losses built up from the 2000 to 2002 tech debacle," Ms. Walder added. "That move cost him about 15,000 in taxes that he did not have to take. They were doing it all wrong." But advisers might create more problems than they solve, in addition to costing more than the solo strategy. Roy Chastain, 69, who had retired from his job as a lawyer for the state of California, originally chose to work with a large brokerage adviser, but called it a "disaster." "I didn't have a large portfolio, and they offered me products and limited advice," recalled Mr. Chastain, who lives in Sacramento. "They were more salesmen than analysts." Like Mr. Kavula, he now manages his own portfolio of individual stocks, mutual and exchange traded funds. He has been a member of an investment club since 1994. A solution could be to combine do it yourself management with human help, by using an adviser to set up a portfolio that you would then monitor and control. This approach, using a mix of E.T.F.s and mutual funds, can save money in fees, but the price goes up if you give in to likely efforts from advisers to push you toward more active management. "Brokers have an incentive to go to active management to add value," said Chris Chen, a fee only adviser with Insight Financial Strategists in Waltham, Mass. That often translates into higher fees and expensive mistakes. Mr. Chen said that when one of his clients was with another broker, "he paid 2.7 percent in fees, which included advisory and mutual fund expenses," he said. This compares "to about 1 percent to 1.2 percent annually for an E.T.F. portfolio that includes advisory fees and E.T.F. costs. A lot of decisions go into constructing a portfolio. There are so many moving parts." Yet another option is a model that combines the call in services of a financial adviser with the ability to use online tools. Such a hybrid model was recently announced by the Vanguard Group, the large mutual fund company. Vanguard's Personal Advisor Services, available to clients with at least 50,000 in assets, charges a 0.30 percent annual advisory fee, in addition to mutual fund or E.T.F. management expenses ranging from 0.05 percent to 0.19 percent annually. Still, there's nothing wrong with managing your own low cost portfolio, as long as you understand the risk involved and can find help for any additional financial concerns. Before setting out on your own, it is wise to ask and answer several questions to determine what you'll need to complement your financial skill set. "What's the complexity of your needs?" asked Robert Stammers, director of investor education for the CFA Institute, a group that represents investment professionals. "What's the cost of making a potential mistake?" For example, what if you need to integrate an investment strategy with a tax and estate plan? You will probably need to work with an estate planning lawyer and financial adviser to ensure that everything aligns with your intentions. You will also need to be honest about your ability to confidently stick to your investment policy, which is a written plan on how much risk you want to take in all market conditions. Will you sell when the market goes south or buy more stocks? There are many tools online that will help you make the best spending, withdrawal and tax decisions on your own. One resource is the nonprofit group BetterInvesting, which provides educational support on stock investing and investment clubs, and which has chapters around the country. But advisers say a little bit of hand holding can go a long way, as can joining forces with other investors. For his part, Mr. Kavula, who speaks across the United States to help educate investors, has joined clubs affiliated with BetterInvesting. His advice? "Don't try to hit a home run and don't be greedy. Be patient on your way to investing. People heading in and out of the market won't be successful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The recent presidential election inspired a notable amount of accessorizing, with hats and T shirts, as impassioned voters wore their positions on their sleeves (or head or chest). The postelection atmosphere suggests this trend is not slowing down any time soon. The latest political fashion statement? The safety pin, an object that's been adopted in the past by statement making celebrities (remember Elizabeth Hurley's Versace dress?) and the punk movement. After the election of Donald J. Trump, fears are growing that segments of his base may physically or emotionally abuse minorities, immigrants, women and members of the L.G.B.T. community. As a show of support, groups of people across America are attaching safety pins to their lapels, shirts and dresses to signify that they are linked, willing to stand up for the vulnerable. "It's a matter of showing people who get it that I will always be a resource and an ally to anyone and everyone who wants to reach out," said Kaye Kagaoan, 24, a graphic designer from the Philippines who lives in Brooklyn. "When I saw it on Facebook, it was so simple. It resonated with me." On Friday, the actor Patrick Stewart posted a photo of himself to Twitter wearing a pin on his jacket, and the photographer Cass Bird shared an Instagram post about why she's wearing one that started with "If you wear a hijab, I'll sit with you on the train" and ended with: "If you need me, I'll be with you. All I ask is that you be with me, too." Between the two statements, sentences began with "If you're a person of color ... " and "If you're a refugee ... " and offered various forms of support. The actress Jaime King posted the same words to her Instagram account. In wearing the safety pin, participants are taking a page from protesters of the Brexit referendum results. After British citizens voted to leave the European Union in June, the nation experienced a 57 percent rise in reported xenophobic incidents. An American woman living in Britain tweeted a suggestion that people wear safety pins to show support to those experiencing abuse. Two days later, safetypin was trending on Twitter. The woman, who used a Twitter account, cheeahs, that has been deleted, had been inspired by the illridewithyou movement in Australia, in which people offered to take public transportation with Muslims fearing a backlash after a Muslim gunman held people hostage in a cafe in 2014. Those who've donned the pin over the last week are quick to point out that their message isn't necessarily in opposition to the president elect. "More than anything, it's pro kindness," said Sabrina Krebs, 22, a Barnard student from Guatemala City. "I wouldn't say it's resistance towards Trump. It's a form of resistance to hate and to negativity." It is also, Ms. Krebs noted, a readily accessible item. "Everyone has safety pins in their house," she said. "It's something everyone can join." (But in case someone wants a more haute kind of protest, fashion has already jumped on the movement, with Fashionista suggesting "13 Safety Pin Brooches to Wear Now and for the Next Four Years," with items ranging from a rhinestone covered pin to one with crystal embellishments.) And it's easy to put on. "It doesn't take much to wear a safety pin," said Robert Clarke, 52, a truck driver from Harrington Park, N.J. "I have them on several jackets, so I don't have to think about it." Some Twitter users voiced criticisms of the safety pin trend, calling it "slacktivism," a word that blends "slacker" and "activism." They expressed concern that wearing something doesn't equate to action. Christopher Keelty, an author and nonprofit fund raiser, denounced the safety pins as something white people are wearing to assuage their guilt. "They'll do little or nothing to reassure the marginalized populations they are allegedly there to reassure; marginalized people know full well the long history of white people calling themselves allies while doing nothing to help, or even inflicting harm on, non white Americans," he wrote. Wearers responded by acknowledging the critique. "I recognize that wearing a safetypin is not sufficient action and does not supplement provide active, constructive work," OliviaHungers wrote. "Donate time. Donate money. Support people in your community with action. If you still wear the pin be sure to be ready to back it up." For his part, Mr. Clarke said that the pin isn't just a signal of allegiance to those he encounters, but a constant reminder to himself. "A big part of wearing it is the mental preparation on my part," he said. "If I do see something, I've thought it through, and I'll stand up and say something and not be a silent witness." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
With a fortune estimated at over 5 billion, Sumner M. Redstone could afford the best estate planning that money could buy. What he ended up with is a mess no matter the outcome of the welter of lawsuits swirling around Mr. Redstone, the ailing media mogul who turned 93 last Friday. A lawsuit brought by Manuela Herzer, one of Mr. Redstone's late in life romantic partners, stripped him of whatever dignity he might have hoped to retain by publicly revealing humiliating details about his physical and sexual appetites and his diminishing mental capacity. A medical expert said Mr. Redstone suffers from dementia that's "toward the severe end of moderate." That case was dismissed last month, but the testimony was just the curtain raiser for a far more important showdown now unfolding between Mr. Redstone's previously estranged daughter, Shari Redstone, and the man who had seemed to be his handpicked heir apparent, Philippe Dauman. The fate of the Redstone controlled CBS and Viacom hang in the balance. Mr. Dauman is the chief executive of Viacom, and was until recently Mr. Redstone's longtime confidant and a trustee of the trust that controls 80 percent of National Amusements (his daughter owns the remaining 20 percent). National Amusements in turn owns 80 percent of the voting stock in both CBS and Viacom. Mr. Dauman now finds himself in the seemingly contradictory position of arguing that Mr. Redstone, as his lawsuit asserts, "suffers from profound physical and mental illness," only months after he said in court papers filed in Ms. Herzer's case that Mr. Redstone was "engaged and attentive." (Mr. Dauman maintains in his lawsuit that Mr. Redstone has deteriorated since then.) Mr. Redstone "now faces a situation where it appears that people around him are competing for control and each has their own objectives," said Georgiana Slade, head of the trusts and estates group at the law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley McCloy in New York. "It seems that many people with an interest are attempting to influence decisions related to his estate, the trust and Viacom. But the real question should be: What does Mr. Redstone himself want?" While it may be an extreme example of the high stakes and chaos that can result, "the Redstone pattern is happening in epidemic proportions," said Kerry Peck, an estate planning specialist and managing partner at Peck Ritchey in Chicago and a co author of the book "Alzheimer's and the Law." As Americans live longer and more families are forced to cope with common late in life issues like dementia, the problem is getting worse. "It's a huge issue nationally as the elderly population grows and their minds start to falter," Ms. Slade said. "I've seen charities coming after people for multiple gifts: Sometimes these donors don't remember that they already gave the previous week. Romantic partners, caregivers who take advantage of the elderly we're seeing it all." Elderly people may be especially susceptible to the influence of people who happen to be around them during their waning days. Ms. Slade and other Milbank lawyers were co counsel to the public administrator overseeing the estate of Huguette Clark, the reclusive heiress who died in 2011 at the age of 104. Despite good health, she lived the last 20 years of her life in New York hospitals. She bestowed lavish gifts on various caregivers ( 31 million to one nurse) and left the bulk of her 300 million fortune to her nurse and a charitable foundation controlled by her lawyers and accountant, to the exclusion of family members. The family challenged the will in court and Milbank, on behalf of the public administrator, sought to recoup the gifts for the estate. The cases were settled and family members said they hoped to call attention to a growing problem of elder abuse. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "This is an issue for lots of people of even modest wealth," said David M. English, a professor of trusts and estates at the University of Missouri School of Law and former chairman of the American Bar Association's commission on law and aging. Professor English said the most common approach is the creation of a trust, either revocable (which means it can later be changed) or irrevocable, that anticipates such a problem and defines what the creator of the trust means by incapacity. This could be a much less rigorous standard than is typically applied by courts in the absence of such a definition. "The document should define the meaning of incapacity and, more importantly, indicate who determines incapacity," Professor English said. Mr. Redstone created such a trust, but it cedes little control to others as long as he remains alive, and it doesn't specifically define incapacity. According to his lawyers, his trust is irrevocable, but Mr. Redstone is the sole beneficiary as long as he's alive, and he has the power to remove or add trustees unless he's "incapacitated." "This can occur only if Mr. Redstone is adjudged incompetent by a court, or upon the delivery of a document signed by three doctors stating that, based on medical evidence, he is unable to manage his affairs in a competent manner," according to a court filing by Mr. Redstone's lawyers. Who controls the seven trustee board of his trust is critical, since the National Amusements trust will control Mr. Redstone's assets, including his dominant stakes in CBS and Viacom, should Mr. Redstone die or be deemed incapacitated. Though long at odds with Ms. Redstone (who is a trustee, as is her son), Mr. Dauman and the other four nonfamily trustees seemed safely in charge as long as they retained Mr. Redstone's support. But last month, Mr. Redstone abruptly dismissed Mr. Dauman and another longstanding trustee in what Mr. Dauman called "a shameful effort by Shari Redstone to seize control." Mr. Dauman and his co trustee filed suit in Massachusetts (where Mr. Redstone's trust was created) to have their dismissal deemed invalid on grounds that Ms. Redstone had isolated her father and was exercising undue influence over him, all claims that Ms. Redstone denies. The trial is scheduled to begin next week. Mr. Redstone's lawyers filed suit in Los Angeles, seeking a ruling that the trustee changes were valid. Which court would prevail in the event of inconsistent rulings could be the subject of yet another round of litigation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"Describe the Night," Rajiv Joseph's sprawling and intricate drama exploring decades of Russian history through a handful of interconnected lives, won an Obie Award for best new American play on Monday night. The play, which weaves together truth and fantasy, was mounted late last year by the Atlantic Theater Company, after a production by Houston's Alley Theater that had to be relocated because of Hurricane Harvey. Both productions were directed by Giovanna Sardelli. The New York Times review was negative, with Jesse Green calling the play "frankly tiresome," but other critics were more positive, with Sara Holdren calling it "dense and fascinating" in New York magazine. A new production of the play, directed by Lisa Spirling, is now running at Hampstead Theater in London. This is the second time that Mr. Joseph has won a best new American play prize from the Obie Awards; in 2016 he won for "Guards at the Taj." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"Jesus Christ Superstar" will rise again and tour North America. The announcement that a recent London production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice musical will begin touring in fall 2019 came just days after NBC aired a well received live performance of the show. This production, directed by Timothy Sheader, opened in Regent's Park Open Air Theater in 2016, and won the 2017 Olivier Award for best revival. (It returned for another sold out stint in 2017.) In his review in The New York Times, Matt Wolf wrote that the production "delivers a genuinely primal jolt, locating fear and foreboding in what can so easily devolve into overindulgent camp." The creative team includes Drew McOnie (choreography), Tom Scutt (set and costume design), Lee Curran (lighting design), and Tom Deering (music supervision). Specific dates and locations have yet to be announced, but producers said the show will make more than 50 stops. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In a biopic about the mating rituals of anglerfish, it's unclear what would earn the film its R rating: the sex or the violence. Born into an inky deep sea world, the males of certain anglerfish species exist solely to sniff out their mates. Upon locating his lady (who might be up to 60 times his size), the male will nip at her belly. His mouth then dissolves in a sludge of chemicals that physically fuse him to his bioluminescent bride, forever commingling his blood and tissues with hers. This grotesque ritual, called sexual parasitism, looks just as bizarre as it sounds. To an immunologist, though, the aesthetics of this macabre form of unholy matrimony aren't actually the weirdest part. Two genetically distinct animals, no matter how much in love, shouldn't be able to merge their flesh without serious consequences, said Dr. Thomas Boehm of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. It's the same reason that transplanted organs often get rejected by a recipient's body: Vertebrate immune systems are built to wage war on any foreign matter. And yet, some male anglerfish are full time grafts the ultimate live in boyfriends. "It really is a mysterious phenomenon," Dr. Boehm said. With the help of modern genetic sequencing, Dr. Boehm and his colleagues may have solved this deep sea dilemma. Anglerfish have largely jettisoned a branch of the immune system that's been a fixture of vertebrate bodies for the last 500 million years, they report in a study published Thursday in Science. The adaptation may help the clingiest of couples stick together. It's a substantial sacrifice to make, even for sex: Similar changes would be lethal for humans and no other animals have yet been documented doing the same. "This is some of the cooler science I've read in a while," said Jesyka Melendez Rosa, an evolutionary biologist and expert in the genetics of the immune system at the University of Puerto Rico who wasn't involved in the study. "It just goes to show, nothing is sacred." Anglerfish have good reason to resort to extreme evolution. Thousands of feet below the surface of the sea, where the sun's rays don't shine, both food and friends are scarce. Many males never actually manage to find a female. "So if they do meet up, what better thing to do than to bite and hold and stay that way?" said Theodore Pietsch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington and an author on the study. That's probably why sexual parasitism has supposedly evolved multiple times across the anglerfish family tree. In some cases, the attachments are temporary the boys hop on and off as they please. In others, though, the males become permanent fixtures on the females. These longer lasting hookups come with a price. After males glom onto their girls, their innards rapidly atrophy until little more is left than a bulbous pair of testes, fringed with gills, protruding from the female's flank like a sperm filled saddlebag. "There's basically no integrity at this point," Dr. Pietsch said. In the most extreme version of this trait, females of some species will host up to eight male consorts at a time. To figure out how the fish tissues tolerate each other, the researchers sequenced the genes of 10 types of anglerfishes. They found that two of the most decorated species, where females sported entourages of males, had lost their ability to produce functional antibodies and T cells two types of immune system sentinels that greatly underpin the body's ability to distinguish its own cells from unfamiliar ones, and annihilate inbound threats. That strategy comes in handy when animals must contend with germs or cancerous cells, said Zuri Sullivan, an immunologist at Yale University who wasn't involved in the study. The so called adaptive immune system, to which antibodies and T cells belong, also helps the body remember past encounters with pathogens so they can be vanquished again. "It provides this huge benefit," Ms. Sullivan said. "It's a big thing to lose." Similar genetic changes were present in anglerfish that melded monogamously, though to a lesser degree. These more faithful fish still had genes that allowed them to manufacture a limited selection of disease fighting antibodies, for instance. Least altered of all were the ephemeral attachers, who seem to have retained the genes for T cells and a blunted antibody response. In general, the less durable the bond, the more intact the immune system, Dr. Boehm said. That pattern makes sense: Short lived flings between partners can withstand some tissue rejection, but the stakes are far higher when a relationship is for keeps. Dr. Boehm said the data so far point to the possibility that deterioration of anglerfish immunity preceded the rise of sexual parasitism. But figuring out the order of these events is really "a chicken or egg situation," Dr. Melendez Rosa said. The researchers also don't yet know how anglerfish manage to ward off infections. But there's more to the immune system than antibodies and T cells; perhaps other members of this complex cavalry have risen in the ranks to compensate, Ms. Sullivan said. "Clearly, these animals are doing fine," she said. Finding these answers will likely require finding more rare deep sea anglerfish. It took several years to amass 31 specimens with enough DNA to analyze, Dr. Boehm said. But the researchers are up for the challenge. "We are not quite sure what lessons the anglerfish will teach us," Dr. Boehm said. "But we know they have done something really incredible." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
None The Panthers are more than just Christian McCaffrey. Carolina was one dimensional over the last few seasons, relying on the decidedly multidimensional McCaffrey to do nearly all the work. But with McCaffrey on injured reserve with an ankle injury, the Panthers have rediscovered their other players. Sunday's win over the suddenly reeling Arizona Cardinals was powered by quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, who threw for two touchdowns, and ran in another his first rushing touchdown since Dec. 20, 2015 and running back Mike Davis, who rumbled for 111 total yards from scrimmage. None Russell Wilson and Dak Prescott are running out of superlatives. Between Wilson tying Peyton Manning's record for passing touchdowns through four games (16) and Prescott becoming the first player to throw for 450 or more yards in three consecutive games, the young season has already provided numerous moments that required deep dives into Pro Football Reference's Stathead database for any adequate comparisons. But while Prescott has an absurd (and record setting) 1,690 yards passing through four games, his 1 3 record has him way below Wilson (4 0) as far as early consideration for the Most Valuable Player Award. None Running back is a dangerous position. The Cleveland Browns are anxiously awaiting the results of a magnetic resonance imaging test of Nick Chubb's right knee, as the star running back needed to be helped off the field in Cleveland's huge win. Losing Chubb for any amount of time would be a huge blow for Cleveland, but the news is likely worse in Los Angeles where the Chargers could be without Austin Ekeler for several weeks after he injured his knee and hamstring on the same play. Chubb is better than Ekeler, but the team is buoyed some by the presence of Chubb's backup, Kareem Hunt. None The spirit of Jameis Winston lives on in Tampa Bay. Last season, Winston kept Buccaneers fans on an emotional roller coaster with 33 touchdown passes and 30 interceptions, and he broke a record that had stood since 1966 by having seven of his interceptions returned for touchdowns. Tom Brady has stabilized the team quite a bit in a 3 1 start to the season, and his five touchdown passes on Sunday powered a come from behind win over the upstart Los Angeles Chargers. But Brady also threw a pick six in the first quarter, giving him an N.F.L. leading two that has already matched his career high, which he set in 2001 and matched in 2015. None The Rams and Giants have very convenient amnesia. Shortly after the Rams Giants game a 17 9 victory for Los Angeles at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. a fight broke out between the Rams' Jalen Ramsey and the Giants' Golden Tate. Giants Coach Joe Judge said he didn't know "all the details," Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald "didn't see it," and Giants center Nick Gates, who got in the middle of the fight, was "just trying to protect my teammate." They all walked entirely around the drama between the players that has come as a result of Ramsey's tumultuous relationship with Tate's younger sister (Ramsey and Breanna Tate have two children). Neither Ramsey nor Tate was made available to the news media. Seahawks 31, Dolphins 23 Russell Wilson had what qualified as a great game for anyone else and a good one for him (360 yards passing, two touchdowns), but he had a ton of help, with Chris Carson rushing for 80 yards and two touchdowns on 16 carries and Seattle's struggling defense providing a pair of interceptions. Browns 49, Cowboys 38 Dak Prescott is not particularly interested in the passing records he has set in his team's 1 3 start to the season, saying "I'd give all those yards back for a different record. I care about one stat and that's to win, so when we don't do that no other stats matter." Buccaneers 38, Chargers 31 Los Angeles was leading by 24 7 with less than a minute to play in the second quarter when Tampa Bay's Ndamukong Suh forced a fumble that seemed to steal the game's momentum. The turnover led to a quick Buccaneers touchdown, and it set the stage for a huge comeback win in which Tom Brady completed touchdown passes to five different receivers. Bills 30, Raiders 23 This one played out a lot like every other Buffalo game this season, with Josh Allen dominating, the team's defense struggling and it all adding up to a victory. The Bills are 4 0 for just the second time since 1992, when they made their third consecutive Super Bowl appearance. Saints 35, Lions 29 It's not particularly noteworthy for New Orleans to have a big day on offense, or for Detroit to collapse, but it gets more exciting when factoring in that the Saints were missing six injured starters and had an incredibly late night after one of the team's players had a false positive result on a coronavirus test. Colts 19, Bears 11 A garbage time touchdown made the score seem somewhat close, but the Indianapolis defense thoroughly dominated this game, making Nick Foles look a lot like Mitchell Trubisky, the quarterback he supplanted. Eagles 25, 49ers 20 It has been a trying season for Philadelphia, with losses to Washington and the Rams and a tie against Cincinnati, but after this wild upset of San Francisco aided mightily by one of the more brutal interceptions you'll ever see the Eagles are inexplicably leading the N.F.C. East. Rams 17, Giants 9 It was another loss for the Giants they're used to those but some uninspired play from Los Angeles, and a few great plays from Giants quarterback Daniel Jones, had Big Blue driving with a chance to tie the game in the final minute. Jones threw an interception that effectively ended the game, but that the Giants were in it at all after coming in as 12 point underdogs was impressive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"Billie" has one of the most unusual and (at least in its initial presentation) disturbing hooks for a documentary in some time. It begins by talking not of Billie Holiday but of Linda Lipnack Kuehl, an arts journalist who in 1971 embarked on a biography of the singer Holiday. That work was never completed; Kuehl died in 1978, in what officials deemed a suicide. Kuehl amassed a formidable research archive, including tape recordings of interviews with Holiday's collaborators, friends and lovers. (These categories frequently overlapped.) Some of her work was used in subsequent published biographies, but this movie's director, James Erskine, acquired the rights to her entire collection, and "Billie" is the first project he derived from it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Women in travel advertisements and in social media tend to be a certain style, a certain race and a certain body type, and it's very nonindicative of real women who travel. It makes it look like women in travel are all white, blond and young. We invite women to share their travel photos with us that are unedited. We've gotten such a great response , with mothers with their kids on top of mountains after a rainstorm. Their hair is frizzy and they look happy. We're trying to directly fight the problems with the travel industry, from sexism to ageism to lack of diversity, with the stories we put out. What do women bring to travel writing that's unique? In the first issue, we had the honor of publishing a travel essay by Gloria Steinem about her early travels in India. She wrote about how traveling as a Western woman in India, she was able to access a lot of facets of society that her male travel counterparts weren't. She could be talking with the men, then in the next moment she could be in the kitchen and making Bengali sweets with the grandmothers. That's an interesting thing that women bring to travel writing, that ability to access cultures on a deeper level because you're able to connect with women, go into women only spaces and get a deep feel for the culture that sometimes men cannot. Women bring a certain level of accessibility and compassion to their writing. The publication covers women of hill tribes in Thailand seeking independence and the pressure on women in China to marry. Is travel your springboard for larger issues? Travel ultimately should be a vehicle to larger issues because when you travel, you're connecting to another culture. As part of connecting to that local culture, you take the good with the bad. If you're visiting a place like Colombia, yes, they have beautiful beaches and great food and it's biodiverse, but if you go and completely leave out anything going on in terms of politics and history, you're completely missing out. I think the travel industry has a very rainbow colored view of traveling. We're trying to get to the realness of travel, and that's the good and bad and that's beauty in the hard parts of travel. In another essay, a writer processes her father's suicide while traveling in Alaska. What is the role of travel in a personal journey? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Alex Ethan Fishman and Anthony Richard Shirk were married March 21 at their home in New York. Rabbi Gary Katz officiated. On Nov. 8, the couple is to have a celebratory ceremony led by Rabbi Matthew L. Green at the Roundhouse, an events space in Beacon, N.Y. Mr. Fishman (left), 29, is a senior innovation manager at PepsiCo in New York. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the son of Debra J. Fishman and Dr. Randy T. Fishman of West Bloomfield, Mich. Mr. Fishman's mother is a stay at home parent. His father is a dentist at several facilities in the Detroit metropolitan area. Mr. Shirk, also 29, works in New York as a solutions consultant for Pegasystems, a software company focused on customer engagement and digital process automation based in Cambridge, Mass. He graduated from Duke. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Two exhibitions opening on Saturday, June 24, at the conjoined Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, N.Y., promise unfamiliar artists and revisionist viewpoints. The larger of the two, "Picture Industry," is a sprawling show organized by the artist Walead Beshty that spans from the late 19th century to the present. It will represent some 80 artists with photographs, slide projections, film, historical documents and more. Through Dec. 15. The second show, "No to the Invasion: Breakdowns and Side Effects," presents works dating from 1990 to the present, by 28 artists of Arab heritage living and working around the world, all from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation in the United Arab Emirates. Photo based and video works are favored. And the destabilization of the region since the Iraq Kuwait war frequently registers. Through Oct. 29. (bard.edu/ccs/) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The J. Paul Getty Trust will invest 100 million in the conservation of antiquities from ancient societies across the world, citing threats such as sectarian violence and climate change, officials of the Los Angeles based organization said Tuesday. The trust, which operates the Getty Museum, has long focused on Greek and Roman antiquities. This new program, however, is designed to expand the conservation efforts it underwrites to countries where they have not worked before, including Southeast Asia and Central and South America. "These are things that have survived over the course of millenniums," said James Cuno, the president of the Getty Trust, "There's a sense of threat to the integrity of the ancient world, and it's occurring on our watch." Many of the projects already slated to receive money focus on training local conservators and archaeologists in other countries rather than deploying a Getty specialist to do preservation work . In Erbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdish region, for example, the Getty says it will fund a training program for 12 Iraqi specialists, teaching them emergency conservation skills and strategies for preserving damaged cultural relics. "The Getty can't go in ourselves and do the conservation without building partnerships," Mr. Cuno said in an interview. "The task is to work with local authorities to face the conservation of their cultural heritage." The initiative does not directly address criticism that, in the past, the Getty and other Western museums have been quick to rescu e relics from unstable or developing countries and appropriate them into their collections. But it clearly demonstrates the Getty's interest in cultivating resources that will allow treasures of cultural heritage to be preserved in their countries of origin. Mr. Cuno said the new initiative was not related to any criticism but founded in the simple fact that training people on the ground is more fruitful than limited intervention. "That's where the investment of resources can have a longer life than just coming in and addressing one part of the problem," Mr. Cuno said. Mr. Cuno, who formerly ran the Art Institute of Chicago, has been a major voice in the charged debate over the repatriation of antiquities. He has argued that important antiquities, rather than be returned, should stay in countries that have the resources to keep them safe a stance that has been criticized by some as paternalistic. The debate over repatriation was revived four years ago when Islamic militants made a show of destroying centuries old relics in places like the Mosul Museum in Iraq. In that moment, Mr. Cuno said, he was struck that "all we were doing was wringing our hands and expressing outrage." It seemed to him like the right time to put a significant chunk of Getty's resources toward a solution that would involve enhancing the abilities of local conservation efforts in the endangered areas. Some of the money will also be spent in areas outside conflict zones, such as an archaeological site in Cyprus, in the Mediterranean region where the institution has done much of its work since its founding in 1982. (The Getty Villa in Los Angeles, designed to resemble an ancient Roman villa, houses the institution's ancient Greek and Roman art.) The mosaics and other relics at the site, many of which were discovered by a farmer in the 1960s, are currently under threat from a variety of factors, including exposure to the elements, overdevelopment in the city and an oversaturated tourism industry, said Jeanne Marie Teutonico, the associate director of programs of the Getty Conservation Institute. Working with Cyprus's Department of Antiquities, the Getty will devise a strategy for preserving the mosaics through a possible combination of archaeological shelters and reburial to avoid damage from the sun, sea and air. "If you leave them exposed without a shelter you need continued maintenance," Ms. Teutonico said. "We're seeing more thunderstorms, heavier rain, warmer temperatures. All of that accelerates deterioration." Other projects to receive Getty funding include a training program on conserving earthen architecture in Abu Dhabi and an initiative to digitally preserve two decades worth of data from an excavation site in central Turkey. Michael McCormick chairs the Science of the Human Past, a network of Harvard researchers investigating world history with new scientific and archaeological approaches. The Getty's program is now possible, he said, thanks to an influx of new technologies, including more sophisticated approaches to genetic testing and material science. And it seems to embrace a global understanding of the ancient civilizations, whereas previous conceptions have revolved around Greece and Rome, without connecting them to their broader context. "There is an expanding understanding of the ancient world," he said, "through the growing awareness that we are a species of migrants who have been on the move since our earliest days." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Children in peril. The subject appears to be all the rage right now, if we judge by this year's Oscar nominated live action short films, which are screening alongside their animated and documentary counterparts before the Feb. 24 awards ceremony. Four of the titles in question feature a child in some kind of horrific danger whether it involves kidnapping, murder, accidental death or racial violence. Emotional manipulation is nothing new to cinema, but it can be particularly repellent if a film's story feels pointless. And sadly, some of this year's live action nominees which range from a drama about the real life 1993 murder of the Liverpool toddler James Bulger ("Detainment") to a stylized thriller about two boys stuck in quicksand ("Fauve") may seem cheap in that regard, with ghastly images and scenarios that appear designed to make us feel like we've seen something important and meaningful, without delivering on either import or meaning. By contrast, the one live action short that doesn't cavalierly put children in jeopardy, Marianne Farley's "Marguerite," a drama about an older woman who learns that her caretaker is a lesbian and has a surge of memories about thwarted love, feels like a reprieve. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
How are you asking the listener to think differently about Beethoven's music through this kind of programming? I'm looking for the perception that one could have of this music if one looks to the sense that it had originally. I'm trying to transpose it, so that we understand better what Beethoven meant. He was a troublemaker. He belonged to a world in which everyone spoke a collective language, everybody used the same tools, but he used them so differently. He incarnates the revolutionary in the history of art. I love this dimension, maybe because I'm French and we have a certain history one, by the way, that influenced Beethoven himself. But how can you communicate it? I thought that choosing pieces where compositionally he is really disruptive, and trying to connect them with pieces by avant gardists from other eras where they try, maybe in the same compositional dimension or a similar one, to go forward I thought that could be something that has some strength. At the end of his creative life, Beethoven is so independent, so personal, and we see that he is really between two eras, Classicism and Romanticism. He grasps models, patterns, but he transforms them completely. What does he do, for instance, in his late piano sonatas? He transforms the sonata heritage the emblem of the instrumental Viennese Classical style by inoculating it with the big polyphonic tradition, coming from the Renaissance. He makes a hybrid between musics from different heritages, and gets an object that is completely different. And the same thing with Berg. We are between post Romanticism and Modernism, and Berg obviously mixes a Classical heritage with a late Romantic style. The whole piece emerges in a flow of hyper polyphony, that gives to this so called sonata the impression of an irresistible compact opera. So we are at four not equal moments, but similar moments in the history of music, and we have composers who are extremely knowledgeable, who mix different traditions, in order to get a richer, stranger, more complex compositional object. There are audible links between the finale of the "Appassionata" and the Stockhausen, but what other connections do you see? In the case of the "Appassionata," what's amazing is how Beethoven composed completely new music, but with a triad, a traditional chord of three sounds. From the start, he presents it in all the registers, so it's spatial music; but in order to be intelligible, to be understood as a good communicator, he uses the most simple possible material. In both cases they are pioneers in composition, but they are music makers who make it so that everybody can feel the gestures. So put the end of the Beethoven with the start of the Stockhausen, and don't put a break between them, and everybody will feel it's the same family of thinkers. Is there a particular way you try to play the Beethoven to bring out connections like these? You always adapt your interpretation. Your interpretation is not something stuck, that you repeat forever. If you make a real program as you can make a real exhibition, where you put together pieces of art that can enlighten each other of course you will look at the pieces differently. It doesn't mean that you are betraying yourself. Drawing attention to "Beethoven the avant gardist" raises the question of whether there is still an avant garde in composition. As someone so in touch with new music, is there? There are cultural contexts and moments in our history that are favorable for the avant garde, and of course, consequently, moments when that is not the case. After the Renaissance you had Mannerism; after the phenomenal avant garde of the start of the 20th century, you had the '20s and the '30s; after the '50s and the '60s, you have eras like ours that have been more comfortable. But it would be too easy to say, yes, we are too commercial; we are a period of neo this, neo that; there is nothing at all said that is interesting in the arts. Of course this is not true. It is more interesting than that; the era is quite complex. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Another year, another persistent worry that the Grammy Awards will once again fail to recognize boundary pushing black performers. The nominations are led by Kendrick Lamar, Drake and a crop of female artists a promising shift after years of complaints about a lack of diversity at the music industry's big night. However, nominations don't necessarily turn into wins: Two years ago, Beyonce was snubbed in the major categories; in 2018, Jay Z received the most nominations of any artist and walked away empty handed. But at this year's ceremony, which will take place Feb. 10, there is one category in which the Recording Academy has nominated a surprisingly sophisticated set of performers, all of whom are black: best music video. (In addition to the artist, this Grammy is awarded to the video's director and producer.) In the Grammy context, the music video category No. 83 out of 84 on the official list is generally an afterthought. It was instituted in 1984, the same year MTV inaugurated its Video Music Awards, just as the medium was becoming central to star making. At this moment when artists are as likely to develop their audiences on YouTube as on any audio only platform, and in which expertise in self presentation and self promotion is mandatory the category feels essential. The nominations recognize clips that shaped conversation as much as the songs they illustrate. Some of these videos are wholesale pieces of art in which the visuals and music are fundamentally inseparable; sometimes the importance of the video itself trumps that of the song. Childish Gambino's "This Is America" and Joyner Lucas's "I'm Not Racist" present competing narratives about the state of black life in this country. "Apes t," by Jay Z and Beyonce (recording as the Carters), is a lush fantasia about dismantling old power hierarchies. Janelle Monae's "Pynk" is a wild, psychedelic tour of female amorousness. And Tierra Whack's "Mumbo Jumbo" serves a strong dose of surrealism. Of these nominees, "This Is America" was the most influential and revelatory last year, a stark, violent, ecstatic and darkly comic statement of intent from Childish Gambino, the musical alter ego of the actor Donald Glover. It was also the first music project from Glover that embodied the tension and savvy of his work in other mediums, particularly the television show "Atlanta." In the video, Glover saunters, slides, shimmies and bolts his way through a warehouse. His body movements careen from the sensual to the frustrated he is a performer, a pleaser, but one at war with those impulses, torn between delivering joy and extinguishing it. Sometimes he's nailing dances from the Instagram Explore page or the video sharing app Triller, but then he brakes hard, finds a gun and kills fellow performers offering less fraught forms of musical healing. "This is America/Don't catch you slippin' up," he raps, setting terms for negotiating a white society that leaves barely any margin for black error. At the end of the video, as Young Thug sings, "You just a black man in this world/You just a bar code," Glover runs directly at the camera first in darkness, only the whites of his eyes and teeth visible. Then he emerges into the light, frantic, no longer in control. As music, it is onerous agitpop an egregious case of bothsidesism. As video, it's unintentionally comic, mawkish passing for sober. Throughout the clip, the tension grows; the white man stands up and hovers over his counterpart, pointing and yelling. Eventually, the black man stands up, flips the table, knocks the MAGA hat off his sparring partner's head. It seems like there will be resolution, that the guy who insists he's not racist will finally come to the realization that he is. But then the men face each other and hug, a hilarious conclusion that pretends problems can be solved by simply airing grievances, not addressing them. It feels antiquated and childishly hopeful, as if it had been released in a less tumultuous time like, say, the early 2010s. Both of these videos are premised on the anxiety that's born of systemic misunderstanding, confrontation and racism. For a recalibration of that dynamic, there is "Apes t," the audacious Jay Z and Beyonce video filmed in the Louvre, which proposes that black beauty and creativity belong in museums, too, and that no exclusively white space should remain that way. It is a lavish affair, aesthetically and conceptually, energized by the fact that, on a basic level, the art on the Louvre walls is static, but the performers in the space are not. When a passel of dancers, lying prone atop the Daru staircase, begins to convulse and come to life, it feels like watching birth. All three of these videos are designed as provocations of a sort, thinkpiece bait event releases designed to cut through online clutter. Put out a song on streaming services, and it might be swallowed whole by the ocean. In this crowded climate, creating a vivid video is a survival strategy, especially with no tastemaker outlet (a la MTV) directly promoting/privileging the format. That is how the most effective music videos function today: as time stopping conversation pieces. But this category also recognizes artists who understand how crucial video is to image formation, and who build it into their output from the earliest stages of their careers. Monae's "Pynk" is excerpted from a short film called "Dirty Computer" that accompanied her 2018 album of the same name. Since her early days, Monae has excelled at character development, and her music functions best as part of an audiovisual whole. "Pynk" is a frothy, playful celebration of sexual openness, straightforward in narrative but inventive in presentation. It was part of a broader story she told last year, in art and in public life, about coming out as queer. The 23 year old rapper Tierra Whack is a natural visual eccentric and fantastical inheritor of Monae, as well as of Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, the director Chris Cunningham and others. Her excellent 2018 debut album, "Whack World," was 15 minutes long, one minute per song, and released as one long video full of Whack inhabiting various oddball characters. Strangely, she's nominated here for "Mumbo Jumbo," a single that predated that album. Where "Whack World" feels like an extended art project, "Mumbo Jumbo" scans as a micro horror film. Whack is in a dentist's chair, singing through a mouth retractor. At the end of her surgery, her smile has been exaggerated into an overblown grin. She walks out onto the street, which is as decrepit as Glover's warehouse, and is surrounded by suffering people saddled with the same false grin almost an echo of the hollow eyed sunken place victims in "Get Out." The song is fine, sort of an extended melodic mumble. But for Whack, perhaps more than any of her fellow nominees, the video is the story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
ARCHIE ELAM is on his third career transition. Now 61 and living in Stamford, Conn., Mr. Elam is a 1976 graduate of West Point. His two decade Army career included acting as head of operations for the 18th Airborne Corps 24th Infantry Division in the first war against Iraq. The Army sent him to get an M.B.A. at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, a degree that started his private sector career in 1996. He was a manager at General Electric, United Technologies, Accenture and elsewhere, mostly focused on Six Sigma, a collaborative program for improving company performance by cutting out waste, and running customer relations management systems and overseeing other large scale operations. His next act? Working at a nonprofit organization. Mr. Elam recently graduated from Encore!Hartford, a four month training program for corporate professionals over age 50 looking for a career in the nonprofit sector, public agencies and government. "The stuff you volunteer for, you care about, you do for free, and then one day you realize you can get paid to do something you care about," he said. "How cool is that!" Baby boomers closing in on the traditional retirement years often seek purpose and a paycheck in a second career, also known as an encore experience, next chapter or unretirement. Whatever the term, nonprofit work focused on addressing society's pressing needs and promoting arts and culture has a particular allure for many in this group. "People want to give back; they want that social impact in the next phase of their life," said Kate Schaefers, a career and leadership coach in the Minneapolis St. Paul area. "They also turn the three legged retirement stool Social Security, personal savings and retirement savings into a four legged stool by adding paid work." The timing is auspicious. The nonprofit sector has been vibrant in recent years. From 2007 to 2012, nonprofit employment increased every year, from 10.5 million jobs to 11.4 million jobs, for a gain of about 8.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By contrast, total private sector employment dropped by 3 percent in that period. This year, 57 percent of nonprofit groups surveyed said they expected to create new positions, an increase of 7 percentage points from last year, according to the 2016 Nonprofit Employment Practices Survey by Nonprofit HR, a the human resources firm. By comparison, the firm notes that only 36 percent of private companies surveyed said they intended to increase staff size, the same percentage as in 2015. Catherine Foley, 62, is among those who have shifted from the corporate world to the nonprofit sector. She worked for 25 years at Salt River Project in Arizona, among the nation's largest public utilities. For 17 of those years she was manager of corporate affairs with responsibility for advertising communications, philanthropy and community outreach. In 2008, Ms. Foley, known as Rusty, took advantage of an early retirement opportunity. In the middle of the worst recession in decades, the timing was "scary," she said. But she knew that "there were other things I wanted to do with my life." For the next two years, she sat on a number of community boards, including that of the Arizona Citizens for the Arts. In 2010 she became its interim executive director, and a year later she took on the job permanently, overseeing its two employees, many volunteers and 350,000 budget. "It's an opportunity to use the professional skills I had accumulated over the years for something I had a personal passion for," she said. "It's energizing." The transition for experienced baby boomers from corporate America to nonprofit America is probably easier than ever. The management guru Peter F. Drucker wrote in The Harvard Business Review in 1989 that "management was a dirty word for those involved in nonprofit organizations." The word suggested a hardhearted focus on the bottom line instead of pursuing a social mission. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Mr. Drucker noted, however, that nonprofit boards and donors had come to realize that good management was critical to fulfilling their mission. "The nonprofits are, of course, still dedicated to 'doing good,'" he argued. "But they also realize that good intentions are no substitute for organization and leadership, for accountability, performance and results." The gap has narrowed considerably further since the Drucker article 27 years ago. On the corporate side, many businesses explicitly embrace social responsibility as an important goal, while others embrace ventures that seek to blend purpose and profit. At the same time, nonprofit organizations have moved from society's tributaries into the mainstream. "There is a greater flow of ideas between the two sectors," said Thomas J. Tierney, co founder of the Bridgespan Group, which has headquarters in Boston and helps nonprofit organizations and foundations increase their social impact. "There is a greater flow of talent between the sectors." That said, the transition remains personally challenging. Fund raising, writing grants and dealing with donors are unfamiliar tasks to those who forged their careers in profit making companies. Those who worked for big corporations are used to much more support. Ms. Foley, only half jokingly, said that what she really missed was an information technology department. And the pay is almost always lower, with more modest benefit packages. "If it isn't a mission personal to you, you will not get through the tough times," said Nora Hannah, executive director of Experience Matters in Phoenix, an organization that works with private sector workers who want to shift into community based nonprofit groups. The transition from a corporate environment to a nonprofit is largely a Do It Yourself effort. But programs like Encore!Hartford, Experience Matters, Social Venture Partners and Encore Fellowships offer valuable educational and matchmaking services for those seeking a second act career. "I can't tell you how many times we have been approached by people in the for profit sector wanting to make the transition to nonprofits and they struggled with it," said Marc Freedman, founder and chief executive of Encore.org, which is based in San Francisco and promotes second careers for social good. "There needs to be something more like a Match.com." The techniques that work well in any job search apply here. Think about your passions. Understand the underlying skills accumulated over a lifetime of work rather than job titles. Network, network and network. That is what Catherine Bergstrom, 56, a former first selectman in Burlington, Conn., did. She completed the Encore!Hartford program in 2013. The program encourages its students to set up informational interviews with nonprofit organizations, and she said she found them invaluable for figuring out what she wanted to do next. "I would call people up and everyone said, 'yes,'" she said. "I would talk to the executive directors." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
New York City's ultraluxury real estate frenzy with its sky piercing condominium towers and 100 million price tags has finally come to an end. Even with every conceivable amenity, the eight and nine digit prices attached to trophy homes with helicopter views and high end finishes never bore much relation to actual value. Rather, a class of superrich investors primarily drove the market, choosing high priced real estate as their asset of choice, because it was less volatile than other investments and they could use shell companies to hide their identities. But today a four year construction boom aimed at buyers willing to spend 10 million or more has flooded the top of the market just as global market turmoil has caused wealthy investors to pull back and the federal government has moved to scrutinize some all cash transactions. As the volume of sales at the uppermost level has dwindled, some sellers have made drastic price cuts and some projects have been delayed. Developers of the skyscraper planned for 111 West 57th Street said they would postpone marketing materials and events for condominiums in the building, some priced as high as 57 million, until next year. At 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere, full floor apartments originally listed for 78 million to 85 million have been split in two and priced at approximately 40 million each. In and around West 57th Street, known as Billionaires' Row, "it's not just slow it's come to a complete halt," said Dolly Lenz, a broker to the superrich. She attributed the lack of activity along the Midtown corridor to oversupply, little differentiation among glassy ultraluxury units and peak pricing. "That's a death knell," she said. New York is not alone. After the global financial crisis hit in 2008, investors turned to high end real estate around the world as a safe place to park their millions. But since the middle of 2014, prime property values have dropped in Paris, Singapore, London, Moscow and Dubai, said Yolande Barnes, director of world research at Savills, a global real estate firm. "These cities have acted as a store of wealth," said Ms. Barnes, who sees the current decline in values as "an inevitable setback that you get after a long bull run." Though the market still has a long way to go before fire sale pricing sets in, the declines may indicate that a ceiling has been reached. And even as sales over 10 million drop off in Manhattan, the bulk of the market remains robust, with competition particularly heated for homes priced for less than 3 million. In the first half of the year, contracts signed for Manhattan residences costing 10 million or more dropped by about 18 percent, to 107 units, down from 130 a year ago, according to data compiled by Olshan Realty. In the Miami area, 216 homes and condos priced at 10 million were on the market at the end of June, a 43 percent jump from a year ago, according to data compiled by Esslinger Wooten Maxwell Realtors. "By anyone's measurement, that's more than you'd like to have," said Ron Shuffield, president of that firm, pointing out that only 26 houses and condos in that price range sold in the 12 months through June. "The global misperception was that the demand would be endless," said Jonathan J. Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraisal firm. "The reality was the market was not as deep as what was thought." As supply has overtaken demand, prices of luxury properties have fallen. Last month, after more than three years on the market, the crystal bedecked penthouse at the Baccarat Hotel Residences on West 53rd Street in Manhattan sold for 42.55 million 29 percent less than the original 60 million asking price. After a year on the market, the 45 million triplex penthouse at 10 Sullivan Street, developed by Madison Equities and Property Markets Group, was divided into two units, now listed for 11.5 million and 28.5 million. Some sellers are even showing a willingness to take a loss. At One57, on West 57th Street, the Midtown tower credited with starting the boom in skyscrapers aimed at the extremely wealthy, four apartments up for resale are priced at less than the seller paid, including a three bedroom listed for 27.95 million that sold for 31.67 million in 2014, according to Streeteasy.com. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Extell Development Company, which is still selling units at One57 four years after beginning sales, reduced the projected sellout value of the tower to 2.56 billion in March, a markdown of 162 million from its 2013 projections. Developers who cling to their original asking prices are either rejiggering their product or casting a wider net to reach buyers. At the Woolworth Building in downtown Manhattan, where the top floors are being converted to condos, ornate interiors are being toned down in favor of a more contemporary look to appeal to a wider pool of buyers. To find buyers for Le Palais Royal, a 159 million mansion in Hillsboro Beach, Fla., that has 7 million worth of 22 karat gold leaf and a 27 foot waterfall, Joseph Leone, the developer, has flown to London, Los Angeles, Dubai and Singapore to put together a team of brokers to sell the property rather than hiring just one firm. "I believe clients are looking for something unique," Mr. Leone said. "They are still here, but you need to change your strategy. You need to be creative." While prices at the high end continue to set records, that's largely because many of the deals that are closing now involve contracts that were signed as long as 18 months ago, when many of the buildings were still under construction and the market was stronger. Developers insist that sales at the top are continuing, just at a slower pace than in recent years. "There is still very good activity," said Gary Barnett, the president of Extell, "but it's hard to close deals because people are not in a rush." To help attract buyers to an unsold 20.1 million, three bedroom apartment on the 45th floor of One57, Extell hired the designer Jennifer Post to decorate it at an estimated cost of 1 million. "Unless you give them a real imperative to buy," Mr. Barnett said, "they think, 'I can come back in a month and it will still be there or maybe the price will be lower.' That's why we're doing these things, to get these deals closed." Mr. Miller of Miller Samuel was less optimistic. "It takes a while for sellers, whether in new development or resales, to capitulate to sudden changes in the market," he said. "It's not that there aren't any buyers at this level. It's that there aren't buyers willing to pay 2014 prices." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Manhattan's luxury market ended the first quarter with a surge of high priced closings. Three properties sold for more than 30 million during the month of March (and several more were at or near 20 million), according to New York City property records. But not all these transactions yielded big profits, and some were years in the making. The most expensive sales for the month were on the Upper East Side. The former Vanderbilt mansion, which was owned by Elizabeth Ross Johnson, an heiress to the Johnson Johnson fortune who died last June, sold for 39 million. A full floor apartment was sold for 35 million by Joseph J. Plumeri, the vice chairman of First Data, a payments processing company, and an owner of a New York Yankees Class AA affiliate. And on Midtown's Billionaires' Row, a 94th floor penthouse near the pinnacle of super tall 432 Park Avenue went for 32.4 million. Jeffrey Immelt, the former chief executive of General Electric, sold his Upper East Side apartment, while Brigitte Kleine, the former president of the fashion label Tory Burch, sold her Greenwich Village townhouse. The actress Jessica Hecht and her husband, Adam Bernstein, a TV director, sold their Midtown co op; and the estate of the British playwright Peter Shaffer sold his Upper West Side penthouse. Also, the singer Zayn Malik, a former member of the band One Direction, bought a SoHo penthouse. THE BIGGEST SALE, the mansion at 16 East 69th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, was handled through the limited liability company Falconer, the same entity that Ms. Johnson had used to buy the home in 2011. Ms. Johnson, who was known as Libet, bought the house in a private sale from Sloan Lindemann Barnett, the author and socialite, and her husband, Roger Barnett, the chief executive of the Shaklee Corporation, a purveyor of nutrition and cleaning products. She paid 48 million, which was 9 million more than what it just sold for. The home was put back on the market for 55 million in 2016. The buyer was identified as Chen Tianqiao, a Chinese billionaire and a founder of the Shanda Investment Group, whose interests include online game development. The 1881 neo Georgian house of red brick and limestone was once owned by Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, the wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and the family matriarch. The 33 foot wide, five story structure has around 12,000 square feet of space that features seven bedrooms, including an enormous master suite on the third floor. There's a large gym on the fifth floor and an entertainment room and lounge in the basement. The home also has five wood burning fireplaces, a landscaped rear garden and two terraces, including one off the formal dining room on the second level. Serena Boardman of Sotheby's International Realty and John Burger of Brown Harris Stevens were the listing brokers. THE APARTMENT SOLD by Mr. Plumeri is on the 15th floor of 995 Fifth Avenue, at 81st Street, across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The limestone and brick co op building, the former Stanhope Hotel, was designed by Rosario Candela in the mid 1920s and redeveloped by the Extell Development Corporation in 2008. Mr. Plumeri, a part owner of the Trenton Thunder minor league baseball team, had purchased the apartment through a limited liability company in 2010 for about 21 million. He put the unit back on the market in 2013 for 32 million after a full renovation, during which time he complained about structural defects that had surfaced. The nearly 8,400 square foot apartment has sweeping views of the Met, the Central Park reservoir and the cityscape. There are six bedrooms, seven full baths and two half baths, along with a library, a paneled study with a bar and a fireplace, and formal living and dining rooms. Its enormous master suite has a sitting room, as well as two bathrooms and two large dressing rooms, one with another bar. THE PENTHOUSE AT 432 PARK No. 94B, a half floor unit sold just three months after it was placed on the market, though for well below the 40.5 million asking price. (Its sister unit, No. 94A, was listed at the same time and is still available, for 41 million.) A sponsor apartment, the home has around 4,000 square feet, three bedrooms and three and a half baths, as well as a library with a fireplace. The master suite has dual walk in closets and a marble bathroom with a separate soaking tub. This unit has panoramic city views and is two floors below the top floor penthouse, which sold in September 2016 for almost 87.7 million. The concrete and glass skyscraper, between 56th and 57th Streets, is currently the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, topping out at 1,396 feet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Fox News has been the highest rated cable news network for 15 years, making it a source of immense profit for its parent company, 21st Century Fox. It is a significant voice in national politics and, with its extensive use of graphics and its comfort with editorializing, a major influence on its competitors. The network's pugnacious style and its position as a platform for conservative politics and ideas have made it a hit with an audience that felt ill served by other news outlets. It has also made the network a target of derision by those who feel it is more a mouthpiece for the Republican Party than a legitimate news network. Through it all, Fox News has been led by Roger Ailes, its chairman. That ended on Thursday when Mr. Ailes was officially ousted after accusations of sexual harassment made by a former anchor. Below, a look at the two decade shared history of Fox News and Mr. Ailes. The network was started on Oct. 7, 1996, by Rupert Murdoch, who hired Roger Ailes as its founding chief executive. Among its first shows were "The O'Reilly Report" (later renamed "The O'Reilly Factor") and "Hannity Colmes." Executives asserted that the network would take a "fair and balanced" approach, and Mr. Ailes said other news outlets were often unfair when covering topics like religion. Ted Turner, who started CNN as a 24 hour news channel in 1980, said he looked "forward to crushing Rupert Murdoch like a bug." By January 2002, Fox News surpassed CNN in the ratings and became the No. 1 cable news channel. It has remained on top since. Coverage of Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan After the Sept. 11, attacks, Fox News began promoting military issues. Many programs and correspondents covered the fighting in Afghanistan with a sense of patriotism. Fox News Channel's political talk shows were dominated by conservative commentators, including many of the "neoconservatives" who had pushed for the war in Iraq. During the early years of the Iraq war, media critics took note of what seemed to be an explicitly pro war stance, even when issues like torture and waterboarding came to light. Mr. Ailes never ceded any biases in the news coverage. "If we look conservative, it's because the other guys are so far to the left," Mr. Ailes said in an interview in The New York Times Magazine. Brit Hume, once of ABC News, was one of the most prominent hires that Mr. Ailes made when the network began in 1996. Over the years, he hired Greta Van Susteren away from CNN, and he hired Chris Wallace, a longtime network correspondent, in 2003. The topics of discussion on various Fox shows were a favorite target for Jon Stewart when he was the host of "The Daily Show." Mr. Stewart said that he talked about the network a lot because it was "truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization." Conservative leaning pundits, in particular Bill O'Reilly, were also the basis of the character played by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report." In 2009, as the Tea Party movement gained strength, Fox hosts actively covered and promoted Tea Party rallies. Issues ranging from big government to questioning President Obama's birthplace were long running topics of discussion on various shows. Donald J. Trump even entered the "birther" debate by notably proclaiming his doubts on Fox News. "A birther is a person that wants these are great Americans in many cases, in most cases they want to see the president was born in this country," Mr. Trump told Fox News's Greta Van Susteren in March 2011. "They want to see the president actually has a birth certificate." Tensions between Fox News and the Obama administration escalated in the first term. "I've got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration," Mr. Obama said in 2009. Over his time in office, however, Mr. Obama has done one on one interviews with Fox News hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Chris Wallace. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In Jack Ferver's new work, dancers perform solos about their inspirations: Judy Garland, Brian Boitano, Martha Graham and wait for it My Little Pony. What do Martha Graham and My Little Pony have in common? For two dancers in Jack Ferver's latest work, they were childhood idols. "Everything Is Imaginable" showcases five queer dancers whose early obsessions come to life in carefully crafted solos. It was born from Mr. Ferver's fantasy: playing with friends. As a gay child growing up in Wisconsin, he didn't have many. What he had was bullying, and it was incessant. "I learned how to make myself small, discreet," he said, "to disappear so that I wouldn't get hurt." At the same time, he wanted to perform. "That psychic polarity of wanting to be public while also feeling I had to disappear to be safe really began to emerge as I was making this show." The cast features James Whiteside, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater; Lloyd Knight, a principal of the Martha Graham Dance Company; Garen Scribner, a former member of San Francisco Ballet and a Broadway actor; and Reid Bartelme, a costume designer and dancer whose career has straddled both ballet and contemporary dance. Mr. Ferver began by asking each performer to name a childhood idol; he then choreographed solos based on that person. The first two weren't entirely surprising: Mr. Whiteside's idol was Judy Garland, and Mr. Knight selected Martha Graham. But Mr. Scribner, who trained as a child to be a figure skater, threw a curveball when he named Brian Boitano. "All of a sudden one of my cast chose a man," Mr. Ferver said, adding that growing up queer, "I certainly didn't identify with any male characters I saw on TV or in film." Mr. Bartelme gave Mr. Ferver even more to marvel at: He chose My Little Pony. "What I loved is that Reid loved a toy, an object that embodied some sense of play," Mr. Ferver said. In choreographing the solos, Mr. Ferver thought about creating a "psychic space" for his performers that incorporated who they were as children and who they are now. For Mr. Whiteside, a classical (if exuberant) dancer, the solo was challenging. "A lot of the beauty of Jack's work is seeing virtuosic dance done on his body," he said. "It looks very serious when I do it, and at first that was something that I found took away from the performance." He discovered a way his approach could make sense: "Judy was polished from a young age to appear a certain way, and the same thing with me," Mr. Whiteside said. "Even through all that, you can't mask what's underneath." Mr. Ferver has a solo and icon of his own: Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle/Catwoman in "Batman Returns." "She's this geek who gets killed and then turns into this revenge person who can't accept intimacy," he said. "I really get that. I deeply feel that I run on two tracks: Love and revenge, I wish I could tone my revenge back. But I can't. It's just my nature. I'm a Scorpio rising." "Everything Is Imaginable" also includes a group number in which the cast seems to be transported to a nightclub it's a reference to the men lost to AIDS and duets, including one for Mr. Ferver and Mr. Bartelme, who are especially close. They have known each other since 1996, when they were students at Interlochen, an arts academy in Michigan; they reunited in New York in 2007. Up to that point, Mr. Ferver had tried to erase his past but that was no longer possible with Mr. Bartelme in his life. "When you're known you're vulnerable," Mr. Ferver said. "So to have him onstage with me has been about how to create dynamics for myself where I can be vulnerable as someone who has learned how to not be to protect myself." And a little over two weeks ago, Mr. Ferver was forced into accepting his vulnerability even more. He tore his calf muscle, an injury that he sees as being woven into the very fabric of "Everything Is Imaginable," which is about the shattering affects of trauma. Mr. Ferver can't jump; his injured leg cannot withstand full weight. His therapist advised him not to travel forward. The second half of the show has changed dramatically because of this for the better, he said. (Mercifully, his Catwoman solo remains, altered accordingly.) An actor and a dancer inspired by Martha Graham, Mr. Ferver is also a dexterous writer who takes humor seriously. How do we lead viewers into "the dark end of the woods?" he said. "Beginning with something more known: funny, entertaining, accessible. They can breathe." In the days leading up to his performances, Mr. Ferver and his cast met at Gibney, in Lower Manhattan, where the choreographer was given a Dance in Process residency. As the artist Jeremy Jacob worked on sets for the show, the dancers rehearsed and took some time out to talk about their solos. Here are edited excerpts. Before I knew that Judy was a gay icon, I loved her. I was probably 9 or 10. I could sense, even as a child, that there was something a little off about Judy. She's intense and visibly damaged, and her performances have a harried quality to them. As a ballet dancer, I relate to that. I have a sort of emphatic enthusiasm that I can't seem to put away. And that's really one of the first things that drew me to her: this gritty magnetism. I only skated for about two and a half years. As a 7 , 8 year old I knew I was different, but I didn't know I was gay. Brian wasn't out no one was really out in the industry. There was something so athletic and artistic about what he did on the ice, and I probably saw something in him that I saw in myself that I couldn't yet place or name. I saw a reflection. That's what this is all about. I wanted to look back at that time and remember the feeling of being out there and the freedom. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A Trump campaign rally in May 2016. Facebook reported that "malicious actors" used fake accounts during the campaign to promote links to stolen information. Nearly a year after Election Day, Facebook's role in our modern political infrastructure is finally coming into focus. We now know, for example, that Russian linked Facebook ads reached roughly 10 million Americans during the presidential election season, and that Russian government actors posed as Americans on Facebook to push divisive social issues like gun control, gay rights and the Black Lives Matter movement. We also know, thanks to a recent interview with Brad Parscale, President Trump's digital campaign director, that the Trump campaign considered Facebook's advertising microtargeting tools essential to its victory. But there is much more to know. Facebook has addressed some election related questions, and may share more next month when its executives testify in front of the House and Senate intelligence committees. These investigations may focus solely on Russian interference, but they could also produce valuable information about how Facebook operates as a company, how it views its role on the political stage, and how it plans to safeguard its platform from malicious activity in the future. The conversation about Facebook would benefit from more facts, and less speculation. So this week, I sent a list of some of my unanswered questions to Facebook. Two representatives Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief security officer, and Joe Osborne, a company spokesman responded to several questions in some detail. The company declined to answer several other questions, but I include those here as well, in hopes that they might one day be answered. Below are my questions, followed by Facebook's responses, where applicable. 1. In an April 2017 white paper, your security team disclosed an incident during the 2016 election in which "malicious actors" were discovered to be using fake Facebook accounts to promote links to stolen information. The paper did not name the actors, but it was later revealed that this referred to a coordinated campaign to promote emails that were stolen from Democratic National Committee officials by Russian hackers and published by WikiLeaks. It has also been reported that Facebook's legal and policy teams pressured the security team to exclude any mentions of Russia from their report. Why did they want to keep this information from becoming public? In our April white paper, "Information Operations and Facebook," we described the activity that we detected from a sophisticated threat actor that was spreading stolen information about specific political targets in the run up to the U.S. election and using it to feed press stories that they could then amplify. We took steps to disrupt this activity and reported details to the relevant authorities. In this white paper, we noted the challenge of attributing threat activity to foreign actors ourselves, but we specifically referenced the assessment of the U.S. government that this actor was tied to Russia's intelligence services. This was an accurate statement of what we knew about this particular actor at the time, and it appropriately relied on the U.S. intelligence community's public analysis. We have been forthcoming at every opportunity about what we know about these information operations. In addition to our white paper, last month we disclosed advertising activity on our platform that we believe is linked to the Internet Research Agency, a different group from the one we described in April. We undertook this research on our own, and we named the group based on our best assessment because we weren't aware of a comparable public report from the government. 2. Related to the above question: In July 2016, WikiLeaks complained that Facebook was censoring links to a page on its website that hosted the hacked D.N.C. emails. Your chief security officer, Alex Stamos, replied to WikiLeaks (in a tweet that has since been deleted) saying that the issue had "been fixed." Links to WikiLeaks were subsequently restored. Did Facebook's security team manually override a tool that flagged these fake accounts as suspicious? If so, who was responsible for the decision to restore access to WikiLeaks, despite having detected a suspicious campaign to promote its stolen documents? Did you notify law enforcement that your security team had intercepted a coordinated influence campaign? Mr. Stamos: The temporary block of some WikiLeaks links by our automated spam fighting systems had nothing to do with information operations. It was caused by WikiLeaks posting thousands of raw emails several of which contained links to malicious phishing and spam sites found in industrywide block lists. We removed the block after we determined that the WikiLeaks links themselves were not harmful. 3. You recently announced you were adding 1,000 human moderators to the team that reviews Facebook ads. How many human ad reviewers did Facebook employ in November 2016? And what percentage of political ads that ran on Facebook during the 2016 election cycle did they review? Joe Osborne, Facebook spokesman: We don't usually share the sizes of specific teams at Facebook. Our teams review millions of ads around the world each week, and we use a mix of automated and manual processes. We're not sharing an exact break out of the number of manually reviewed political ads. 4. Of the 1,000 human moderators you're hiring, how many will be based in the United States? Will you be hiring moderators to review ads in non English languages? What kinds of pre hire screening will you do to make sure that these moderators are not affiliated with foreign governments, extremist groups, or others looking to influence the American political process? Mr. Osborne: We are still working through where the moderators will be based, but likely across regions including the U.S., Europe and Asia. 5. You recently told advertisers that new ad campaigns that involved "politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues" would be reviewed by humans before being approved. What guidelines will reviewers be given about which ads to allow and which to reject? Will these guidelines be made public? 6. Your advertising policies allow advertisers to opt out of appearing next to content that involves "debatable social issues." Which social issues do you define as "debatable," and how did you make that call? Is your definition of "debatable social issues" globally consistent, or does it vary by region? 7. In countries with regressive social policies, such as criminalizing homosexuality, do you allow the local authorities to determine which issues are considered debatable? 8. Last year, ProPublica found that Facebook advertisers could exclude certain ethnic groups from seeing advertisements about housing, employment and credit, in violation of federal anti discrimination laws. In response, Facebook announced it would no longer allow ethnic group targeting for those ad categories. Did you consider extending the ban on ethnic group targeting to all ads, including political ads? Did you consider that political campaigns might use ethnic group targeting to suppress voter participation among certain ethnic groups? (Trump campaign officials claim to have used targeted Facebook ads to suppress African American voters in the weeks leading up to the election.) 9. Did you, at any point leading up to the 2016 election, consider adding disclosures to political ads that made clear who was paying for those ads? If so, why did you decide not to include that feature? 10. You have said you are committed to protecting election integrity and supporting democratic ideals. However, there have been reports that you have built tools to censor speech in certain authoritarian countries, such as China, where you hope to be allowed to operate. How will you choose which elections and democratic processes to protect? When promoting democratic ideals conflicts with your corporate goals, which will you prioritize? 11. Mr. Trump's digital campaign director, Brad Parscale, has said that Facebook sent "embeds" to work inside the Trump campaign offices and help them use Facebook more efficiently. (You have responded that these offers are standard for political campaigns, and that you "offered identical support to both the Trump and Clinton campaigns.") What kinds of work did your employees do on behalf of the Trump campaign? Were they involved in writing or editing any of the campaign's Facebook posts? Were they given page roles or posting rights on any Trump campaign Facebook pages? Were they authorized to report any illegal or suspicious activity they found in the course of their work? If so, did they make any such reports? 12. Your advertiser website lists "success stories" of political campaigns that have used Facebook advertising to increase turnout and win elections. Knowing that Facebook could be used to influence election results, why did you not use a United States presidential election as an occasion to build the proper safeguards to make sure that your system was not gamed by foreign or malicious actors? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In a city that can seem to be wringing every last drop of value out of its real estate, while giving block after block a squeaky clean gloss, a Manhattan loft building at 13 West 27th Street stuck out glaringly on a recent tour. Rubble filled an elevator cab inside the Beaux Arts structure, which is near Fifth Avenue, and peeling paint and graffiti marred a stairwell. The wood floors were so buckled that they resembled ripples on a pond. That a property could be so decrepit in a neighborhood teeming with trendy restaurants, coffee shops and hotels would seem to defy all business logic. But the situation at the 11 story structure is hardly typical. Until recently, it was owned by F. M. Ring Associates, a rather reclusive family owned development firm that in recent decades seemed to have essentially abandoned its high rises, most of which are found in the neighborhood known as NoMad (north of Madison Square Park). While many factory and office buildings in the area once used by toy makers and furriers were transformed into fashion boutiques and technology companies, the Rings' buildings were a blight, according to many brokers, residents and property owners. "It hurts a neighborhood when you have these dark buildings, these retail holes," said Leslie Spira Lopez, the president of Kew Management, a longtime landlord that has six buildings in the area. "It can hold back a neighborhood." But after a complex battle that lasted for years, the Extell Development Company has purchased the bulk of the Ring portfolio, which at its peak was made up of 15 Manhattan buildings. And though Extell officials have not detailed plans for most of the Ring properties, several will soon be revived. This spring, Extell leased four of the buildings, including 13 West 27th, to the Kaufman Organization, a development firm, for 115 million in a 99 year deal. After improving the buildings, which has involved adding air conditioning and discarding old mannequins, Kaufman plans to lease them to some of the technology companies flocking to the area. Long empty retail spaces at the sidewalk level will gain restaurants as well. "The trick is to keep the old building but make it relevant for tech tenants," Grant Greenspan, a Kaufman principal, said on a recent afternoon inside the skylight lined top floor of 119 West 24th Street, a 12 story tan brick building near the Avenue of the Americas. To do so, Kaufman is tearing out internal walls to create open floor plans; multiple vendors are wiring those floors, so backup power will be available. The building will also offer sensors so tenants can monitor the energy consumption of their offices remotely, Mr. Greenspan said. It's supposed to open this fall, along with 19 West 24th Street, a 12 story former Ring building near Fifth Avenue that's being similarly renovated. Asking rents for both are about 65 a square foot. The other two Ring buildings that Kaufman now controls, 45 West 27th Street, which contains about 65,000 square feet and dates from 1909, and 13 West 27th Street, which is about the same vintage and size, will take longer to fix up because of their dilapidated condition. Special approvals are also required, as the buildings sit in the Madison Square North historic district. It would seem to be a good time, and the right place, to cater to the tech industry. Venture capital continues to buoy the industry in New York, even if it may not have produced many breakout hits so far. And that industry is increasingly choosing the NoMad, Union Square and Flatiron neighborhoods, brokers say. This year through May, tech companies and media companies with a tech focus have leased 900,000 square feet in those areas, out of a total of 1.8 million feet leased, according to Cushman and Wakefield, the commercial brokerage. The company recently unveiled a website, TechBeat, to address that market segment. Jamie Katcher, a Cushman senior director, said that Sony's lease for 525,000 square feet at 11 Madison Avenue, at East 24th Street, accounted for much of the tech growth in the neighborhood. "Companies are drawn here because they want an ecosystem to live, work and play," he said. Among the attractions, he added, are Eataly, the Italian market, and the Ace Hotel, which also has a Stumptown cafe and restaurants, along with the refurbished Madison Square Park. Why the Rings did not tap the same types of tenants for their buildings, which operated below capacity for years, or any other tenants for that matter, is not entirely clear. Reached for comment, Frank Ring, a principal of the firm, would not discuss the conditions or sales of the buildings and called reports of tensions with the other principal, his brother Michael, over the properties overblown. Attempts to reach Michael Ring were unsuccessful. Real estate experts say things changed for the worse for the brothers' buildings after the death in 1988 of their father, Leo Ring, who had amassed much of the portfolio. Some brokers and landlords blame Frank Ring, who they say played a larger role in day to day building operations than Michael Ring in recent years. And court papers indicate that Frank Ring was involved in the contentious negotiations with the Gay Men's Health Group, an AIDS focused nonprofit group that was the longtime tenant at 119 West 24th Street. Renovations at 27 West 24th Street, a building near Fifth Avenue. Before moving out in 2011, the group met with Frank Ring to discuss retrieving its security deposit, according to court papers, minus the cost of any basic repairs that were needed. But Mr. Ring insisted the money be spent replacing the roof, windows, a water tank and plumbing and electrical systems, as well as "decorative stonework" on the facade, according to the documents. Arguing his requests were excessive, the group, one of the Rings' larger tenants, sued its former landlord for 2.8 million in 2012. The suit was dropped last year but terms of any settlement have not been disclosed. The G.M.H.C. did not return calls seeking comment. In a telephone interview, Mr. Ring said he could not discuss the dispute with G.M.H.C., citing a confidentiality agreement. Other buildings required major upgrades, some brokers said. At 13 West 27th, for instance, there are 57 open violations that carry fines dating back to 2000, some of them for hazardous conditions, according to building department records. Even in boom years, the Ring brothers did not sell their buildings, leaving some vacant for long periods. But Michael Ring began taking steps in 2011 to unload his properties. Last summer, after a series of events that included Mr. Ring's promising his stake to a different buyer, then seemingly changing his mind, Extell swooped in and purchased much of his share for about 100 million, giving it control of 14 of the Rings' buildings. Michael Ring retains a minority stake, Extell officials said. Next, Extell filed a lawsuit for every building in which Frank Ring still had a stake, claiming that his mismanagement made it impossible for them to be co owned effectively and basically seeking court approval to force a sale. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
New York night owls have hooted for years that the wildest, weirdest after dark scenes have flourished somewhere else. But recent developments, like the creation of an Office of Nightlife and the repeal of the anti dancing Cabaret Law, offer hope that the dark era of club raids and closings (R.I.P. 285 Kent, Death by Audio and so many others) is in the past. Jackie Molloy for The New York Times So it was appropriate that Elsewhere, a cavernous music and arts space, opened on Halloween and shortly afterward hosted Mayor Bill de Blasio for the signing of the Cabaret Law's repeal. The spot comes from the team behind Glasslands, a scruffy, perma sweaty utility closet of a club whose 2014 closure set off an especially loud, and perhaps final, round of eulogies for Brooklyn bohemia the Williamsburg style at least. The more polished Elsewhere doesn't revive Glasslands' rough D.I.Y. aesthetic, but it has lifted nocturnal spirits. The Place: The 24,000 square foot colossus thumps amid an industrial stretch of Bushwick still untouched by lifestyle condo developers. Inside, a warren of narrow hallways connects five spaces, including the main warehouse style room, a second floor cafe and a huge art filled courtyard. Those with traumatic memories of waiting for the restroom at Glasslands can breathe easy: Elsewhere is overrun with bathrooms, most of them loudly proclaiming their gender neutrality. A rooftop is scheduled to open this summer. The Crowd: Alarmingly youthful, experimentally coifed and apt to voice roommate complaints and social media anxieties ("Why is his Snapchat blocked?") between drink orders. On a recent Tuesday night, the crowd included a man in a glow in the dark rhinestone cowboy ensemble drawing attention away from the main stage. The Playlist: Live acts come from a wide spectrum: techno (Octave One), hip hop (Deca) and indie rock (Matt Pond PA). Piped in music on one night harked back to Olde New Brooklyn with tracks by LCD Soundsystem. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In the last several months, The Boston Globe and The New York Times have both printed front page editorials calling for stricter regulation of guns in the aftermath of mass shootings. It was the first time since 1920 that The Times had run an editorial on Page 1. The Virginian Pilot, which had its own mass shooting to cover when a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others on campus in 2007, ran a front page editorial on Saturday that pleaded for a detente of sorts. "Let's just stop and mourn and wonder how in the world America became this unspeakably, relentlessly terrorized place," it said. The Daily News of New York has used its front page in recent months as an editorial vehicle to inveigh against violence and congressional inaction in the face of it, including one last month with the image of the dome of the Capitol soaked in blood. While many front page editorials are intended to soothe and promote resolve, other bold decisions by news organizations have been criticized as sowing divisiveness. The New York Post, for instance, was excoriated on Friday for deciding to use the headline "Civil War" on its front page on the Dallas shooting. A headline on the conservative Drudge Report, "Black Lives Kill," also drew harsh rebukes. Like other editorials, the one in The Dallas Morning News addressed the violence gripping the country. "We are surely not alone in asking, as our hearts break, what kind of country are we creating where such violence has become so frequent?" the editorial said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The conductor Robert Spano, who made the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra a force to be reckoned with in contemporary American music, announced on Tuesday that he would step down as music director in 2021, after completing his 20th season. Mr. Spano, 56, is the fourth music director in the orchestra's history, and he used his tenure to champion new music, regularly programming works by living composers including Jennifer Higdon, Michael Gandolfi, Osvaldo Golijov and Christopher Theofanidis who he presented to audiences as "the Atlanta School of Composers." During his tenure to date, the orchestra has performed 49 world premieres, commissioned 28 works and co commissioned another 13. "The thought of leaving is overwhelming, but it's the right thing to do," Mr. Spano said in a telephone interview. "Twenty years just seemed like a good benchmark to say, O.K., time for something new for me, for the orchestra, for everybody. And that's healthy." When the orchestra's management, struggling with deficits, locked its players out in 2014, for the second time in two years, Mr. Spano took the rare step for a music director of speaking publicly on behalf of the musicians, more than 40 percent of whom had joined the orchestra during his tenure. He lamented that the players had "been asked to leave the building," leaving Atlanta "with a deafening silence." When the lockout ended, he worked with the orchestra's board to raise more than 27 million to restore 11 positions. "I think that's a great sign of recovery," Mr. Spano said in the interview, noting that there was more work to be done. "There's a lot of room for hope." Mr. Spano kept the orchestra's profile high with tours, including to Carnegie Hall, and recordings. During his penultimate season, in 2019 20, the orchestra will celebrate its 75th anniversary with a series of special projects and events. He said that he hoped to be able to devote more time to composing and to conducting opera, and that he plans to continue as the music director of the Aspen Music Festival and School, a prestigious summer academy. Mr. Spano added that he had been particularly gratified by the way Atlanta audiences had embraced new music and said that he had gone out of his way to play more than just one piece by the living composers he showcased; to play those pieces more than once; to record them; to play them on tours; and to play them at youth concerts. Now, Mr. Spano said, Atlanta audiences want even more new music. "I get as many complaints for more Higdon," he said, "as I do for more Beethoven." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Pepsi's multimillion dollar ad campaign featuring the rapper Cardi B and her holiday helpers is really something of a throwback as companies shift toward targeted online ads. In a 22nd floor suite of the Ritz Carlton in Manhattan, sipping a nonalcoholic sparkling rose from Pepsi, I was waiting for Cardi B to talk to me about Christmas. The Grammy winning rapper stars in Pepsi's new holiday commercial. It is set in Cardi's Twerk Shop, where Cardi B offers twerking tips to an elf as a jingle plays. When she arrived for the interview, she seemed exhausted. She curled up on the couch, bundled herself in a blanket and laid her head near my lap. She talked about the commercial, which went online on Thursday, saying the outfit she wore during filming was edited in postproduction to mask some of her cleavage. In an advertising environment that has shifted toward targeted online ads, Pepsi's multimillion dollar campaign with its celebrity spokeswoman, its elaborate sets, and a planned broadcast rollout during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and several N.F.L. games is really something of a throwback. These days, companies need to reach people who are flipping through their phones, looking to get 10 percent off their next shoe purchase. Their seasonal ads are a long way from the campaigns that helped shape the American idea of Christmas. Coca Cola spread the modern image of Santa Claus with full color magazine ads starting in the 1930s. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer originated as part of a promotion for Montgomery Ward in 1939. Hershey's "Christmas Bells" commercials, which have featured Hershey's Kisses candies since 1989, have been around longer than many millennials. The electronics company Philips, famous for its decades of commercials featuring Santa riding Norelco shaving products, stopped running the ads after 2011. "Our marketing strategy has evolved to more of an always on, less seasonal approach," Shannon Jenest, a marketing executive at Philips, said. In recent weeks, companies like Best Buy and Macy's have pulled back on spending for digital holiday ads compared with last year, even as the total amount that brands spend on online advertising has more than doubled, according to the advertising analytics platform Pathmatics. Retailers spent nearly 21 percent less on holiday TV ads in the United States from Oct. 28 through Wednesday than they did during the same period last year, according to the research firm Kantar. Gap is keeping its Christmas focused advertising away from television. Home Depot and Wayfair have cut their spending on holiday focused TV commercials by more than half, Kantar found. Still, the giant red bows atop cars won't completely disappear from TV commercials. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been plowed into seasonal marketing this year, including Oreo's first holiday campaign since 2016. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Acel Moore, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who co founded the National Association of Black Journalists and awakened his white colleagues and their readers to everyday life in black communities, died on Friday at his home in Wyncote, Pa., near Philadelphia. He was 75. The cause was complications of diabetes and chronic lung disease, his wife, Linda Wright Moore, said. Mr. Moore, who was hired as a copy boy by The Philadelphia Inquirer and worked his way up to reporter, columnist and associate editor, blazed the trail for countless proteges by lobbying for more minority hiring in newsrooms, mentoring prospective reporters and advocating more coverage of black life. "I saw how racism and the exclusion of blacks from both employment and news coverage by The Inquirer and other news agencies impacted on the events daily," Mr. Moore recalled in his column, Urban Perspectives, in 1981. "I saw how blacks were only featured in crime stories, how stories about the masses of blacks were ignored," he continued. "Only the extreme elements of the black community were news. Blacks never died, never married, never did the normal things that whites did." To Mr. Moore there were no ordinary people, just people whose voices would not ordinarily have been heard like Winifred Mitchell, who, when President Ronald Reagan died, watched on television as other men eulogized him as a great American. "And she said: 'I must have been living in a different America than those men,' " Mr. Moore wrote. "Mitchell is also a great American. She is a black, middle class, educated 74 year old widow of a World War II veteran. She is a retired teacher and an active churchgoer who tutors children. And she's conservative about many things; she's no radical ideologue. She felt left out of Reagan's America. And I know how she feels." Acel Moore was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 5, 1940. His father, Jerry Acel Moore (the name Acel, pronounced ACE el, was believed to be a variant of Asa), was an electrician at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. His mother was the former Hura Mae Gordon. In addition to his wife, a former journalist, he is survived by a son, Acel Jr., from a previous marriage; his daughter, Mariah; his sister, Geraldine Fisher; and his twin brother, Michael. After high school, Mr. Moore joined the Army and served as a medic. In 1962, a time when a group of black ministers was threatening a boycott of The Inquirer for the almost total absence of blacks in its newsroom, he was hired as a copy boy. He helped change the newsroom's culture when he refused to answer an editor's perfunctory summons, "Boy!" "I stood my ground by not answering to what was not my name and took the fellow aside who yelled 'Boy' loudest and most frequently," Mr. Moore recalled in 2011 when he accepted a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists. "I told him, quietly and privately, that calling a black man 'boy' was a classic, racist insult, and if he said it again that night, I would meet him after work and we could discuss it outside." The association grew from the 44 members who gathered for its founding assembly in 1975 to more than 3,000. It provides education and career development opportunities and promotes diversity in hiring and coverage. Mr. Moore was promoted to reporter in 1968, a month before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He was the paper's fourth black reporter. "I do what I do for two reasons," he said in an interview with Butch Ward of the Poynter Institute, a former Inquirer editor. "First, to tell the true story of black people in Philadelphia and across America, because 40 years ago, that was not done. And second, to make a difference, to erase stereotypes that go beyond race, and to have an impact on the world because of what I write." In the 1970s, he interviewed distraught mothers whose sons were victimized by gang violence. "They trusted Acel to tell their story because he was not a stranger to their fears," said Arlene Morgan, a former colleague and now assistant dean of the School of Media and Communication at Temple University. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The New York Times Company announced on Wednesday that it had appointed David Perpich, a senior executive at the company, as president and general manager of the product recommendation site The Wirecutter. The Times Company acquired The Wirecutter and its sibling, The Sweethome, in October for about 30 million, a move intended to expand the company's repertoire of service and lifestyle journalism. The Wirecutter provides recommendations for electronics and gadgets. It earns affiliate commissions from retailers when readers click through the site to buy the products it recommends, a business model that the Times Company found attractive as it pursues new revenue sources to offset the steep declines in print advertising. Mr. Perpich, who oversees the company's products and helped establish The New York Times's paywall, will lead The Wirecutter's business and editorial operations. He begins his new role in March and will report to Mark Thompson, chief executive of the Times Company. "David's goal and mine will be to continue to grow The Wirecutter and to more fully integrate it into the life of The Times," Mr. Thompson said in a statement. "Both organizations remain committed to creating products that serve our readers and become an indispensable part of their lives." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"I was born in the favela, and the clothes I wear are a form of resistance. The tattoos I wear carry a strong symbolism; each of them represents one of my strengths. On the face, I tattooed the symbol of Exu, one of the orixas from Candomble, my religion, and on my arm, I have tattooed the map of Africa to feel more at home and to remember my ancestry. None of the clothes I wear cost more than 2. First of all, because I'm poor and, second, because I've adopted an anti capitalist attitude myself." Niazia Nascimento Ferreira, 26, artist Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "I like to wear elaborate looks, whether to go to the supermarket or to go to a party. I only use custom pieces that are mined in thrift stores or made by my friends, so I can create a unique look that expresses my individuality. As gay, black, peripheral and non binary, I grew up seeing in the media bodies and clothes that I couldn't identify with, but today this is changing. More and more, I see black people rescuing their ancestry, and transvestites occupying their spaces. Finally I feel welcomed and represented, and I hope I can make room for other women to feel good too." Luan Gurunga, 22, stylist and producer Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "I like to think of fashion beyond consumption or fast fashion, but as a way to feel beautiful and comfortable. I think clothes are good for our self esteem. It's one more way, among the many ways, of feeling good in the world. I try to bring in my style a little of the places I went to, and play with creativity. Life is already very tedious, it's good to be able to create with your own hair, to discover its colors. As I travel a lot for work, I always have knowledge of the work of the local artisans, incorporating pieces of handicrafts in my look. This necklace, for example, was purchased from an artisan in the Amazon. My coat is from my grandmother, it came from Japan, the purse belongs to a dear friend. The pieces have sentimental value to me and help me to remember my origins." Mariana Midori, 28, journalist Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "I use whatever I'm comfortable with and what makes me feel beautiful. Being beautiful to me is not the same as being beautiful to others. I like to look in the mirror and feel good about myself. Shaving my head has brought me an enormous sense of freedom. People ask me if I'm on cancer treatment or if I have leukemia, but I don't care. People in Sao Paulo care a lot about appearances, they are very individualistic. In smaller cities, people are simpler, care less about style, want to enjoy the beach and life. I highly value where I come from and who I am. And I feel good." Thaiane Veloso de Oliveira, 22, model Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "I live in Sao Paulo, two hours from downtown. I feel that, when I'm here, I need to be better dressed than ordinary people so they won't be suspicious of me. I think all black people go through this. I make my own accessories, mixing elements of nature like rocks and shells with more urban materials such as plastic and spray. In everything I wear, I try to bring elements of my Afro indigenous ancestry. I am what I wear, so I like to choose each piece." Shirlei Rosa Arantes, 22, entrepreneur Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "I think the most important thing is to come up with a style of your own. When I look at an outfit, I first see if it matches who I am, and then I buy. I have very simple pieces, from thrift to more sophisticated items." Vanessa Monn, 21, model Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "I like to do research about style, to study issues related to the African diaspora, and to wear everything that relates to it. I always seek to subvert the use of my clothing. Today, for example, I'm wearing a scarf as a top. Yesterday, it was on my head, and today it is on my body. I'm happy to make my own clothes." Gislaine, 20, student Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "In my style I try to embrace the geek culture, which is part of my life," said Wallace Barbeiro de Almeida, 30, a front end developer, at left. "I mix up animes and pokemons. I always customize the pieces I buy so that they look more like me. Formerly, I was very uptight about showing my body. In Sao Paulo, I expanded my horizons. I can wear my shorter shorts, have my chest exposed and show the hairs on my body. I do not have to worry about being strong, either. Men can also be thin or short. I'm happy to be the way I am." "I am an architect and I really enjoy being in the city. My personality is very urban. Today, I wanted to wear shorter shorts to show more of my legs. I always cut my clothes to fit them better on my body. Today's sunny weather was the inspiration to choose what I'm wearing," Pedro de Biasi, 27, who is an architect and teacher, said. Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times "It is through my style that I tell my story, in a simple, visual way. I always look for pieces that have some story in my life. This necklace, for example, I bought from a Moroccan craftsman on an unforgettable trip. I also prefer to buy pieces from Brazilian designers with many colors, because we need a happier world. Fashion is a way of getting in touch with people, making friends, or starting a conversation. Fashion is also for people to have fun with, and to amuse the world. My style is a guide for me to never lose myself. It's a personal brand indeed." Paula Nadal, 32, journalist Gabriela Portilho for The New York Times | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Fables give us archetypes to live by in nutshell form. Need a reason to press on against overwhelming odds? Just see how persistence paid off for Aesop's slow but steady tortoise. Feeling a tad smug? Consider the comeuppance that awaited that same fable's haughty hare. While Aesop did not work his magic expressly with young audiences in mind, the pithy, visually arresting narrative mode he left his indelible mark on has proved a good match for the children's picture book, a genre that likewise thrives on brevity and the wish to reveal the essences of things in their clearest possible form. Oliver Jeffers does a fine job of filling the ancient taleteller's big sandals in THE FATE OF FAUSTO: A Painted Fable (Philomel, 96 pp., 24.99; ages 4 to 8). As the title suggests, Jeffers has drawn inspiration as well from the German Faust legend, in which a quintessentially arrogant man sells his soul to the Devil's emissary in return for the chance to realize his wildest dreams. In Jeffers's pared down version, Mephistopheles has been dropped from the cast and only monomaniacal Fausto remains, depicted here as a well dressed older gent who bestrides a world he sees as basically a nonstop series of occasions for personal conquest. It is never enough for this man to savor the scent of a flower or the graceful bend of a tree, or to take in the majesty of a mountain. A field, a forest, a lake: Fausto must own them all. With each turn of the page, and with echoes too perhaps of the Grimm tale "The Fisherman's Wife" and Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree," the breathtaking scope of his rapaciousness ticks up another notch. In fables, archetypes point to inevitable consequences. We soon understand that Fausto is in for a great fall and find ourselves rooting for it. Jeffers paints Fausto and the objects of his desire with the nonchalant finesse he is known for and in the richly saturated colors he generally favors. More surprising is the decision to let blank space predominate on nearly every page, a strategy that symbolically isolates Fausto within his world and makes visible the emptiness of his relationship to it. The narrative is spare and firmly voiced and, as is customary in fables, Jeffers delivers swift justice in a few concluding words that make for an ending that satisfies for being both fair minded and irrevocable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
At a pub in London last month, shortly before Britain ordered its citizens to stay home, a small group of life savers shared drinks. It included Rebecca Shipley, a professor of health care engineering at University College London, her U.C.L. colleague, Tim Baker, a former racecar engineer, and some intensive care unit physicians. On the agenda that night was a discussion to devise methods of handling the deluge of patients infected by Covid 19. The doctors said that the most critical items needed were mechanical ventilators and continuous positive airway pressure machines, or CPAPs. Baker instantly knew where to turn. In another life he had designed engines for the Jordan Racing team (now Racing Point), a team in Formula One racing. He knew that Formula One teams trained in shaving milliseconds off their race times are capable of producing extremely high quality machinery in a remarkably short span. The next day, March 25, Baker met with two engineers from Mercedes AMG Petronas, the leading Formula One team, based in the British Midlands. They had lunch, then worked through the night on a new design for CPAP machines that could be produced rapidly. Within 100 hours of the initial pub meeting they had a prototype in hand, and within 10 days they had first regulatory approval from the British government to begin production. "We are approaching 200 already in circulation," Baker said in a telephone interview from London, "and we have the go ahead to produce 300 a day for a week and then 1,000 every day." Like Mercedes, other Formula One teams are working long hours to accelerate the production of much needed ventilators, and across athletics many sporting goods manufacturers are repurposing their factory floors and lending their equipment, material and know how in a widening team effort to fight Covid 19. "Our company culture is an athletic mind set," said Ed Kinnaly, the chief executive of Bauer hockey equipment, which is making face shields for medical personnel. "Our employees viewed this challenge of beating this virus like beating a competitor." Bauer, and its sister companies Cascade and Maverik, are based in Liverpool, N.Y., and in Blainville, Quebec. Their factories normally produce Bauer's hockey skates, helmets and face shields as well as lacrosse equipment. But now they are turning out larger plastic face shields, similar to welding masks, to be used by hospital workers as extra protection against splatter that could contain the contagion. Kinnaly said one of his engineers approached him last month with the idea. A design was created, the machinery adjusted and soon after production was underway. The company began by making about 3,000 units per week at each location and, as the work force grows more familiar with the process, Kinnaly hopes to ramp up production to 70,000 per week by the end of April. They are not alone. In Lawrence, Mass., the New Balance athletic shoe company is making cloth face masks for doctors, nurses and hospital staff. Just outside of Oxford, England, the ROKiT Williams Racing team has joined with several other Formula One teams to produce ventilators and in Easton, Pa., Fanatics, a company that normally makes baseball uniforms, is using that fabric pinstripes and all to manufacture masks and gowns. Last week, the New England Patriots sent one of its team jets to China to bring back 1.2 million of the desperately needed N95 protective masks while many other sporting goods companies and teams also contribute to the effort. And it is not just sports. Several other industries, including fashion houses like Prada, Gucci and Eddie Bauer, and perfumeries like Dior and Givenchy, shifted their factory production toward medical supplies and hand sanitizer for the battle against the coronavirus. In many cases the stories are similar: As people in the Western Hemisphere became increasingly aware of the shortage of vital medical equipment like ventilators, and masks, which help health care professionals guard against infection, people at those companies realized they could help. Wheeler said he and his technicians have consulted with physicians at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals, along with experts at Harvard and M.I.T. to expeditiously produce the best possible masks. They have retrofitted some machinery and fabrics from their sneaker production, but are also working with new materials, including nonwoven, melt blown fabrics. Those could help New Balance to provide N95 masks, which block 95 percent of airborne particles that are 0.3 microns or larger, and can be used in emergency rooms. In Charlotte, N.C., TheMagic5, a fairly new company that produces goggles for competitive swimmers, has been sending custom built goggles at cost ( 15) to several dozen emergency medical workers, nurses and doctors in New York after they send the company scans of their faces. The project is in the early stages, but the initial testing suggests the goggles can be worn by health care professionals for long stretches without pain, adjustment or fogging up. "I was thinking, how bad would I feel if we didn't help, if we didn't even test whether they could work," said Rasmus Barfred, a triathlete and one of the company's founders, who lives in New York. "I think a lot of people in sports think that way, too." While much of the sports world has focused on producing gear that protects medical personnel, the Formula One effort, nicknamed Project Pitlane, is aimed at helping patients. Covid 19 can cause severe breathing difficulty in its worst cases, but the CPAP machines could help keep people off the ventilators, which are in short supply. According to Shipley, the U.C.L. medical engineer, data from Italy and China shows that patients who use CPAP machines soon after infection are 50 to 60 percent less likely to need a more invasive ventilator, which also requires sedation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Downtown Albuquerque used to be a derelict stretch with dodgy streets, closed cement warehouses and graffiti scuffed railroad cars from the nearby train station. But revitalization efforts are luring field to fork chefs, hops obsessed brewers, eco chic designers, craft brewers, single estate coffee roasters and a crop of contemporary artists who are pushing the city's artistic sensibility into the limelight. As the 12 block corridor surrounding Central Avenue takes on a more polished sheen, the atmosphere has remained original and proudly New Mexican, attracting legions of tourists and residents alike. This multifunctional market, open May through October, has re energized the defunct former blacksmith shop of the Santa Fe Railroad. The proudly dowdy space with colorful windowpanes draws upward of 4,000 visitors every week and shows off upcycled architectural designs, block printed T shirts and seasonal bites (with red and green chiles). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Northern Lights illuminate the sky above the start of the ice road to remote Tuktoyaktuk, which will be replaced by a permanent road by the end of 2017.Credit...Christopher Miller for The New York Times The Northern Lights illuminate the sky above the start of the ice road to remote Tuktoyaktuk, which will be replaced by a permanent road by the end of 2017. In the Arctic, roads are magical. They appear in the fall and melt in the spring. Others, buckled by permafrost, undulate in the snow. Many are invisible to the naked eye caribou migration routes that exist only by instinct. During the sunless, frigid winter, the Arctic Ocean becomes one vast road for polar bears and snowmobiles. Amid these roads, a new one is being built, an 85 mile sliver topped with gravel in Canada's Northwest Territories. It will link the town of Inuvik to the smaller village of Tuktoyaktuk, known locally as Tuk. Anywhere else, its creation would be minor, a rounding error for departments. But this road is different, because Tuk sits on the Arctic Ocean. It would be the only public highway to its shores and would fulfill a decades old dream to link all three Canadian coasts Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic. When finished in late 2017, the road to Tuk will be accessible from the Dempster Highway, which begins in the Yukon Territory near Alaska and heads northeast across the Arctic Circle. Driving to Tuk from the United States will be an epic road trip. Starting where I live in Chicago, Tuk will be just over 3,700 miles away. The difficulty does not end with completion of the road. Because of climate change in the Arctic, maintenance costs are harder to predict. If the permafrost melts in places, the concern would be "the road slumping and becoming a roller coaster," said Kevin McLeod, director of the Highways and Marine Services Division with the Northwest Territories' Department of Transportation. The road is situated at the northern tip of the Northwest Territories, a vast expanse almost three times the size of California, with a population of just over 43,000 people. This juxtaposition of land and population is crucial to its extraordinary beauty. True wilderness is five minutes out of town. The landscape forest, tundra, countless rivers and lakes, mountains, a vast tapestry of sky feels like North America's last frontier. I first visited the area several times as United States consul general for central west Canada from 2012 to 2015. I was there during polar day, a period of 24 hour sunlight that lasts from late May into July. At 2 a.m., I remember the town of Inuvik shimmering like high noon. During an 18 year career as an American diplomat in places like France, Israel and Haiti, this Arctic expanse in neighboring Canada was the most exotic place I had been. Because of its high latitude and extreme weather variations, sometimes it seemed like another planet. After leaving Canada, I kept thinking about Inuvik and Tuk and the road being built near the top of the world. I landed in Inuvik in the early afternoon last December, five days after the sun disappeared below the horizon. Polar night. The sun would not return until Jan. 7. In December, the average high temperature is minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The sky looked lighter than I had imagined, a monotone canvas of gray clouds. As I stepped off the plane, the cold hit my face and curled under my parka. Perfectly white snow covered the land, draping the skinny trees of the surrounding forest. With a population of 3,265, Inuvik is the largest town in the Mackenzie delta. It sits on permafrost about 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle. This limits digging into the ground, so water and sewage pipes zigzag through town in elevated metal corridors called utilidors. It gives this utilitarian town an unfinished appearance. I walked around Inuvik that evening, surrounded by snow and ice. It grew on my face mask, filled my field of vision, swirled above me and formed the ground that I walked on. My breath billowed like smoke, hung motionless for a few seconds and then began to rise. In the sky above, I saw a dark green fluorescent arc of light: the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. They were so near they could have been a welcome banner strung between two lampposts. They seemed slightly agitated, moving in tiny bursts. Later in the trip, several people recounted their parents' warning about the aurora: "If you whistle at them, they'll come down and cut off your head." Outside the Mackenzie Hotel where I stayed, it was minus 13 degrees. Aurora College, the only postsecondary institution in the delta, has a campus here. I visited the next morning to talk about the road to Tuk and, more generally, to get a sense of the delta. One of the students I met was Jaclyn Andre, 27, who goes by Jayda. She is tall, with a calming voice that seems tailor made for her goal of being a nurse. Jayda was born and raised in Fort McPherson, a small Gwich'in community on the Dempster Highway 115 miles southwest of Inuvik. Jayda spoke of her deep connection to the land, and described a wilderness paradise of caribou, berries and pristine water filled with fish. Throughout my trip I spoke to others who described the region in the same way. It was a stark contrast to my childhood conception of the Arctic as a desert of snow and ice. Jayda said she was "kind of excited" about the road to Tuk because it would bring new attention and new people to discover her region. She said the Dempster Highway not only provided access for her community, it also served as entertainment. Elders in her community sometimes sit on the riverbank with binoculars and watch ferry traffic cross the Peel River, near Fort McPherson. They call this pastime "spyglass." Over all, though, Jayda had mixed feelings about the road. She wondered whether more traffic would lead to more substance abuse in her community. And she worried that the limited medical capabilities in the region would be diverted away from the communities and focused on the road. Although small communities like Jayda's are likely to be affected if there are more visitors to the region, Tuk will be affected the most. The village will gain year round access to the outside world. Currently there is an ice road connection to Inuvik, but that is open only four months out of the year. The rest of the time, Tuk residents depend on expensive air connections to leave. From Inuvik I was hoping to travel to Tuk by ice road, but everyone said it wasn't open just yet. For generations, the ice road has been Tuk's winter lifeline, allowing its residents to drive to get cheaper gas, cheaper milk and to use Inuvik's larger recreation facilities. It winds through the mouth of the Mackenzie River and skirts across the Arctic Ocean on the way to Tuk, opening sometime in mid December and usually closing by the end of April. To people living in Tuk and Inuvik, the ice road isn't nerve racking at all. It's wide and solid and part of their normal routine. Everyone told me it was safe, though sprinkled among these assurances are unsettling anecdotes, like the one where a truck driver pulled over to take a break, heard a grumbling sound, and leapt out of the cab in just enough time to watch his truck plunge into the ocean. My own trip on the ice road was uneventful. It was late in the evening when I finally arrived in wintertime Tuk (population 965), a string of prefabricated houses separated by sporadic streetlights and mounds of snow. Though small in population, the Inuvialuit village of Tuk has a disproportionally high profile, perhaps because of its location and history. It sits near caribou and polar bear migration routes, and the waters are filled with abundant beluga whales, seals and fish. Pingos, hills of dirt covered ice several hundred feet tall, dot the treeless landscape. During the Cold War, a Distant Early Warning (DEW) line radar station tracked Soviet planes from a promontory next to the ocean. The station is still active, although it is now controlled remotely. Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1970 for the centennial of the Northwest Territories. In 1995, it was Metallica's turn. They headlined the Molson Ice Polar Beach Party, also known as the Party on the Permafrost. People in Tuk remember the concert as being very loud. "Before you went into the tent, they were handing out earplugs," said a resident and former mayor, Mervin Gruben. Jenny Jacobson, another resident who attended the concert, said the music could be heard at summer fish camps a half hour away by boat. During my time there, however, Tuk was small town quiet. I stayed with Emmanuel Adam, pastor of the Glad Tidings church, and an accomplished hunter with a striking lineup of fox pelts in his living room. Mr. Adam is 63, born and raised in Tuk. Of medium height, with sturdy glasses and a precisely trimmed mustache, he speaks in a deliberate, thoughtful cadence that feels like a decades long echo of my Presbyterian minister grandfather. Mr. Adam lives above his church. His living room and kitchen divide the same rectangular space. Caribou jerky dries on a tray suspended from the kitchen ceiling, and a wood burning stove makes the living room cozy. The Arctic Ocean is just steps away, a white covered plain that stretches to the horizon. Dogs howl in the evening, their voices melding with the noise of the wind. My world the world of regular day and night, where below freezing is considered cold felt impossibly distant. I stayed with Mr. Adam because Tuk has no hotel or restaurant. Amenities are limited to a gas station and two grocery stores. This lack of tourist infrastructure worries him and others in town. They are in favor of the road to Tuk because it gives their village year round access to the world, but also because they hope tourists will flock here to dip their toes in the Arctic and experience the unique culture of this place. The road brings hope that Tuk and the region will experience more economic prosperity. This is a sentiment shared by many in the community, like Jackie Jacobson, the former territorial representative for this region, and husband of Jenny. I met Mr. Jacobson three years ago, when he was speaker of the Northwest Territories' legislature, and I was the newly arrived consul general visiting the capital of Yellowknife. He is 43, with the kind of youthful face that makes it easy to imagine what he looked like in his teenage years. Only weeks before my December visit to Tuk, Mr. Jacobson lost by four votes in his bid for a third term as the territorial representative. The loss was clearly weighing on Mr. Jacobson the weekend I was in Tuk. He suggested going "on the land," to an area known locally as Husky Lakes. "On the land" is a phrase laden with meaning here. It means reconnecting with Inuvialuit traditions, hunting to feed family, getting away from modern troubles. Mr. Adam, who is a friend of Mr. Jacobson, has a cabin on Husky Lakes, and he goes there every chance he can get. It's about three hours away by snowmobile, and near the future road to Tuk. As I stepped outside the next morning, the sky was a kaleidoscope of darkness, a blue expanse and thin white clouds radiating from the horizon. I thought polar night would be dreary and dark, but I was wrong. Without the deadline of sunset and sunrise, dusk and dawn linger in the sky for hour after breathtaking hour. When I lowered my eyes to the land, I saw the silent blinking of construction trucks on the road to Tuk. Though I understood why some welcome the road, I felt a pang of sadness at something man made and permanent cutting through this wilderness. Sometimes, a road is a mirror held up to reflect our own lives. My reaction came from living in a place where wilderness is an ancient memory, described in old books and museum exhibits. But Mr. Adam and Mr. Jacobson are surrounded by the vast Mackenzie delta, and they believe a modest road will make living there more sustainable. Late that afternoon, on the way back to Tuk, my inexperience with snowmobiles showed and I tipped over. Floundering in the deep snow, I tried to lift the snowmobile, but it was too heavy. I stood there quietly, looking around at the enveloping darkness. It was an intense moment: separated from other humans in an environment that can shift from beautiful to cruel in seconds. But then Mr. Adam quickly returned and together we righted the snowmobile. A half hour later we were in his living room drinking tea and listening to Christmas music. I left Tuk the next morning. Mr. Jacobson picked me up, and I asked him to take me to the end of the road, a snow swept cul de sac that juts into the Arctic. I imagined all the people who will arrive here once the road to Tuk is completed. They will dip a toe or even swim in the Arctic. They will breathe the crystalline air and listen to the silence. They will dodge mosquitoes. Some will do what I did that morning take pictures of their children's Flat Stanleys propped next to the Arctic Ocean. Afterward, Mr. Jacobson drove through Tuk and nosed his truck onto the Arctic Ocean, bound for Inuvik. This was likely to be the second to last season for the ice road. When the road to Tuk is finished, the ice road will be no more. "End of an era," he said. This far north, roads are magic. As one melts into the water, another rises across the permafrost to take its place. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
It was a bit uncanny to read Nell Zink's new novel, "Doxology," in the wake of the suicide this month of David Berman, the beloved singer and songwriter best known for his work with Silver Jews, his indie rock band. A similar type of outside the box musician, named Joe Harris, dies too young (heroin) in "Doxology." Berman and Harris are different in many ways. But they share a surreal sense of humor. Zink shows us Harris onstage at one point, "rocking out to his own conception of beauty, alone and weird." Berman and Harris also share a restless sort of talent that can lead artists to become more influential dead than alive. "Doxology" isn't fundamentally a music novel. It has many other things on its mind, including a subversive history of American politics from Operation Desert Shield through the start of the Trump presidency, and it's superb. In terms of its author's ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media warped mind and soul, it's the novel of the summer and possibly the year. It's a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral satirical intellection. It's bliss. "Doxology" displays two generations of an American family. Pamela and Daniel are semi clueless young people who move individually to New York City in the late 1980s. They might have dropped sideways, like bookmarks, out of a Jonathan Lethem novel. He is fleeing college life after graduation; she is just fleeing. They meet, marry, struggle financially and play in small anti bands, sometimes with Harris before he becomes famous. Pamela's musical motto is: "If you gotta suck, suck loud." They're '80s hipsters, in other words, a genus with which Zink is intimate. Here's a sample of this writer's sociological acumen her ability, like Tom Wolfe by way of Lorrie Moore, to cram observation into a tight space: "The '80s hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the 'hipster' in the new century. He wasn't a '50s hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture," she writes. "Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open wheel motor sports and Jell O salads from whence he sprang." 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. Zink adds, as a flourish: "An '80s hipster couldn't gentrify a neighborhood." She writes: "His presence drove rents down." Also: "The '80s hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks." If you care about this sort of thing, Zink writes about music as if she were a cluster of the best American rock critics (Ellen Willis, Ann Powers, Jessica Hopper and Amanda Petrusich, let's say) crushed together under a single byline. This novel is replete with erudite signifiers that drop all over the place, like a toddler eating a pint of blueberries: Robert Christgau jokes, nods to the "Casio core" sound, paeans to the righteous punk glory of Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. One band sounds "like lawn mowers ridden by nymphets playing banjos." When Pamela plays guitar, "her fingers move like it's freezing out and she lost her mittens." Pamela goes into a funny monologue about the weird confluence between Todd Rundgren ("Todd is God," she says), John Lennon and Mark David Chapman, Lennon's assassin. Daniel stares at her and thinks: "It was a kind of knowledge he didn't expect a woman to have, much less care enough to say something post sensitive about." Post sensitive is not a bad description of Zink's Weltanschauung. Her women tend to be the sort of people for whom, as the old joke has it, there was no Santa at 6, no stork at 9 and no God at 12. Her previous novels include "The Wallcreeper," "Mislaid" and "Nicotine," and I've admired many aspects of each of them. "Doxology" puts her on a new level as a novelist, however. This book is more ambitious and expansive and sensitive than her earlier work. She lays her heart on the line in a way she hasn't before. Daniel's day job is through a temp agency. Zink charts the nature of this sort of work through the tech revolution; she probes the inequities of outsourced labor. Pamela is a computer programmer. They live in an illegal apartment on the Lower East Side and, somewhat accidentally, have a daughter they name Flora. The World Trade Center falls. Zink writes about Lower Manhattan as well as she does about everything else. About the wind down there, she says: "In a culture given to self mythologizing, that wind would have had a name, like the Mistral or the Santa Ana. In the financial district, it was weather." With fear and asbestos in the air Pamela and Daniel "behaved like two cats hit by separate cars" Flora goes to live for a while with Pamela's parents, who lead a very comfortable middle class life in the Cleveland Park section of Washington, D.C. These are the same controlling parents that Pamela, a tough stemmed flower, ran away from home to escape and did not speak to for many years. With time, everyone has mellowed. Flora blossoms in D.C. All sides agree she should go on living there. It's among this book's mysteries why Pamela and Daniel let their daughter go so easily, but that's a mystery we can chew on at another time. This book slowly becomes Flora's. She goes to college (George Washington), and becomes interested in climate change and soil erosion. Count on Zink's acuity here, too. She pulls the moral mask from a good deal of save the planet posturing. Flora describes how certain people "made sustainability look like what it was (the nutrition label on selling out)." Flora gets increasingly political and, with no other jobs on offer, joins the Green Party candidate Jill Stein's 2016 presidential campaign and goes to battleground states. She's aware that Stein is a joke, but doesn't think her candidacy poses a threat to Hillary Clinton. Flora is just building her resume. She falls in love with an older Democratic campaign strategist, a handsome and cynical semi hack, who sees earlier than anyone else the existential threat to American life posed by Trump. To say more about this novel's plot would be wrong. "Doxology" loses a bit of its sweep, if none of its intelligence, in its final half. Yet it has taken a running leap, regardless, at greatness. Zink writes as if the political madness of the last four decades had been laid on for her benefit as a novelist. (As in John Updike's Rabbit novels, the news is always licking up like flames in the background.) Like a mosquito, Zink vectors in on the neck of our contemporary paranoia. She has got a feral appetite for news of our species, good and ill. As dark as "Doxology" can be, it's no wonder that its title means a hymn of praise. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
I'M about to go out and buy a turkey. And naturally, because I write about finance, I was thinking about how much I would pay for it and, more specifically, whether the rising price of agricultural commodities and fuel had affected the cost. It turns out that turkey pricing is not much tied to commodities prices. Instead, other factors, like tight margins for farmers and perceptions of value, play a much bigger role. For most of us, the price we pay for our turkey bears little relation to what it costs to raise it. A frozen Shady Brook Farms turkey at my local Stop Shop in Stamford, Conn., was advertised this week for 58 cents a pound. That would put the cost for a standard 16 pound turkey at 9.28. At the A. P. up the street, an unnamed frozen bird was on sale for 49 cents a pound. This is price competition at its fiercest and both below cost. Cody Brokmeyer, agricultural statistician in charge of turkeys at the National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the average cost of a live turkey in October was 77 cents a pound. But processing adds another 40 cents or so a pound. Then, there are the shipping costs. And those ads cost something, too. In other words, there is no way a turkey costs 49 cents a pound. "It's very competitive at the retail level, and that turkey gets someone through the door," said John Anderson, senior economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation. Contrast that with the high end turkey, whose price is determined as much by scarcity as allure. Heritage turkeys essentially, old fashioned varieties that are much bigger and take longer to reach maturity are becoming increasingly popular, and they command top dollar. Heritage Foods USA, based in Brooklyn, sells a 16 pound turkey for 114 plus shipping. Here is a look at some of the numbers behind the bird, for those of us picking up our turkeys in the next few days. They may influence your purchasing decisions, or at least help you appreciate how a turkey can cost more than 100. COMMODITIES AND PRICE The two main commodities that go into a turkey are feed corn and soybeans. Prices for both have gone up sharply in the last year. Since feed is typically 60 to 70 percent of the cost of raising a turkey, I figured there would be a commensurate rise in turkey prices. But I found out that while the price of a turkey has risen this year, it has increased only moderately. David Harvey, poultry analyst at the Agriculture Department's Economic Research Service, said the price for a bushel of feed corn was 6.69 in September, up 54 percent from 4.32 the year before. He attributed the increase to a combination of greater demand for feed ingredients here and abroad but also to increased use of ethanol, which is made from corn. He said the spot price for processed turkey in September was 1.10 a pound, up 7 percent from the previous year. While it would seem easy for farmers to raise prices for Thanksgiving what else are people going to eat? the market is not as inelastic as I thought. "Just because your inputs go up, you can't just dump it on the consumer," Mr. Brokmeyer said. "There's only a certain amount that people will pay for turkey." The price is also driven by contracts throughout the supply chain, with farmers, processors, distributors and stores. Mary Pitman, of Mary's Turkeys in Fresno, Calif., which raises free range, organic and heritage turkeys for stores and restaurants on the West Coast as well as some Whole Foods stores, said she negotiated the price of her turkeys in February and did not take into account the possibility of such an extreme spike in commodities prices. Her farm will lose money on turkeys this year. IMPACT ON PRICE Most of the grocery stores and the large, commercial turkey producers I called did not want to discuss how they set their prices. One exception was Stew Leonard Jr., the president and chief executive of Stew Leonard's grocery stores in Connecticut. He said he expected to make no money on the 1 million pounds of turkey he will sell for Thanksgiving. Where he makes money is on the side dishes that round out a Thanksgiving dinner. He stocks a fresh bird for 1.49 a pound and one that is free of antibiotics and hormones for 2.79 a pound. "What amazes me about Thanksgiving is here you have people squabbling over 99 cents a pound or 59 cents or 1.49," he said. "Then they'll go over to the deli counter and buy Boar's Head sliced turkey that we sell for 7.99 a pound all year round, and they say, 'Wow, you're 7.99 and not 8.99.' " A different type of pricing model is in place for the boutique turkey market, one based on choice and the allure of something that is the food equivalent of a luxury car. Beagle Brodsky, the manager of Willie Bird Turkeys, a farm in Santa Rosa, Calif., that supplies turkeys to Williams Sonoma, said the farm was gearing up for its annual overnight shipment. He said United Parcel Service would pick up 10,000 pounds of turkeys on Monday and deliver them all by Tuesday. Williams Sonoma charges 99.95 to 175 for these Willie Bird turkeys, plus 15 for shipping. Mr. Brodsky said annual sales of the birds were around 40,000, up by about 1,000 birds from last year. While he said Willie Bird had been hurt by high commodities prices, he was more worried about the security of his turkeys, which roam 400 acres in the mountains of Sonoma County. "We're trying to keep the mountain lions out of the large fields," he said. Other distributors of high end turkeys bristle at talk about price. Peter Martins, the founder of Heritage Foods USA, said it was unfair to compare heritage turkeys with frozen turkeys. "There isn't a premium," he said. "It's a fair price. No one believes that 99 cents a pound is the real cost." And he has many customers who agree with him. On Wednesday, he had only turkeys weighing eight to 10 pounds left, for 72 plus shipping. The 22 pound birds, priced at 148, were sold out. WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE? The difference between frozen and fresh is pretty obvious. A frozen turkey was probably killed sometime over the summer and has been sitting in a freezer since, while a fresh one was killed days before. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials threw up their hands in January, deciding that they could not decide whether market turmoil would impede domestic economic growth. The Fed in recent years has issued an assessment of its economic outlook after each meeting of its policy making committee, but that assessment was missing from the statement after the most recent meeting in January. An official account, published on Wednesday after a standard three week delay, makes clear that Fed officials simply did not know what to say. "Most policy makers thought that the extent to which tighter conditions would persist and what that might imply for the outlook were unclear, and they therefore judged it was premature to alter appreciably their assessment of the medium term economic outlook," the meeting account said. It was the first time since March 2003 that the Fed declined to characterize the risks to its outlook, according to Michael Feroli, chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase. The Fed is unlikely to raise its benchmark interest rate while this confusion persists, suggesting that investors are right to discount chances of a rate increase at the Fed's next meeting, in March. But according to the account, Fed officials remain optimistic that the market turmoil will not leave a lasting mark, indicating that rate increases could resume this year. "Lack of agreement on the balance of risks puts the committee into a 'wait and see' posture," said Kevin Logan, the chief United States economist at HSBC. "In our view, it is nearly certain that the committee will not be raising the federal funds rate at the March or April meetings. It is not likely that enough time will pass before those meetings take place for the uncertainty surrounding the international economic and financial market situation to clear up." Fed officials probably wish they hadn't scheduled a meeting for late January, given the convulsions in financial markets caused in part by falling oil prices and broader concerns about the health of the global economy. Officials worried that investors were tightening financial conditions, raising interest rates for riskier borrowers while plowing money into safe havens like Treasuries. Domestic economic data also has been inconsistent. The growth of gross domestic product slowed in the fourth quarter even as the economy continued to add jobs in large numbers. Incomes are rising but household and business spending has slackened somewhat. And the persistent sluggishness of inflation provided one more source of uncertainty. The Fed maintains an official expectation that inflation will rise as job growth continues. Yet the continued decline of oil prices and the dollar's strength are delaying any such rebound, and some Fed officials noted worrying signs that people's expectations for future inflation also were eroding. Some officials thought the costs and benefits of the forces roiling the global economy, taken together, would have a surprisingly small effect on the domestic economy. Lower stock prices are draining wealth from households, but falling oil prices put money right back into the same pockets. Moreover, those officials continue to expect faster growth later this year. "It might prove prudent to wait until the inflation data are stronger before we undertake a second rate hike," Patrick T. Harker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, said on Tuesday at the University of Delaware. But, "I believe as we move into the second half of the year with economic activity growing at trend or slightly above trend, the unemployment rate below its natural rate, and price pressures starting to assert themselves, policy can truly normalize." Others, however, thought tighter financial conditions already had increased risks to the economic outlook. Several Fed officials, according to the minutes, argued that "waiting for additional information regarding the underlying strength of economic activity and prospects for inflation before taking the next step to reduce policy accommodation would be prudent." Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and one of the 10 voting members of the policy making committee this year, said on Tuesday that recent economic developments meant the Fed should wait before raising rates again. "In my own view, if inflation is slower to return to target, monetary policy normalization should be unhurried," he said at Colby College in Waterville, Me. "A more gradual approach is an appropriate response to headwinds from abroad that slow exports, and financial volatility that raises the cost of funds to many firms." According to the account, few officials felt confidence in their assessments. It was easy enough to leave rates unchanged, but they still had to say something. So the Fed professed honest bewilderment. "Most participants indicated that it was difficult to judge at this point whether the outlook for inflation and economic growth had changed materially," the account said. Mr. Feroli of JPMorgan Chase described the minutes as downbeat, emphasizing economic risks like the impact of tighter financial conditions. "The effects of these financial developments, if they were to persist, may be roughly equivalent to those from further firming in monetary policy," the account said. Yet in keeping with the Fed's uncertain mood, the account also echoed recent comments by the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, suggesting that investors had overreacted and could reverse themselves. "The large magnitude of changes in domestic financial market conditions was difficult to reconcile with incoming information on U.S. economic developments," it said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Imagine that 90 percent of all people living with H.I.V. were diagnosed and treated with drugs. Would that be sufficient to end the AIDS epidemic? Scientists tried to answer the question in three enormous studies published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Instead of simply urging people to get testing and treatment for H.I.V., health workers in five African countries went door to door, or set up mobile sites, offering tests for H.I.V., tuberculosis and other diseases to everyone in certain communities. Anyone who tested positive for the infection was set up with clinic appointment to receive antiretroviral drugs. Then investigators assessed whether these efforts made any difference in the number of new H.I.V. infections in those communities. Results from three of the studies suggest that the strategy comes nowhere near bringing the rate of new infections with H.I.V., or incidence, down to zero. But all of the studies showed that incidence dropped by about 30 percent, and one found a decrease in H.I.V. related deaths. Worldwide, there were roughly 38 million people living with H.I.V. in 2018. The epidemic continues to ravage Africa: About 26 million people on the continent have H.I.V., of whom just 16.5 million receive drug therapy. One of the new studies, called Ya T'sie (a reference to teamwork in the Setswana language), focused on 15 pairs of villages in Botswana, while a second, called Search, examined 32 rural communities in Kenya and Uganda. The largest of the three studies, PopART, looked at 21 communities in Zambia and South Africa. Together, the studies cost more than 200 million and included nearly 1.5 million people. "The scale and scope of these studies is remarkable," said Dr. Wafaa El Sadr, an H.I.V. expert at Columbia University in New York and leader of a group that helped fund PopART. "This is public health research at its best." In a bid to slow the epidemic, the United Nations set "90 90 90" targets for the year 2020: diagnose 90 percent of people infected with H.I.V.; treat 90 percent of those diagnosed with antiretroviral therapy, regardless of disease stage; and keep the virus suppressed in 90 percent of those who are treated. If this strategy were carried out successfully, it would leave nearly three quarters of infected individuals with such low levels of H.I.V. in their blood that they would be unable to infect anyone else. The new studies were the first to try the so called universal test and treat approach, and all of them surpassed the 90 90 90 targets. Each study was designed differently, but broadly speaking, the teams randomized entire communities to receive either the standard of care for that country, or some combination of treatments, including testing for H.I.V., TB and sexually transmitted infections; counseling; condoms; prenatal care; and voluntary medical circumcision. Each study arrived at roughly the same 30 percent figure for the drop in incidence. Given the studies' size and complexity, however, the details are not straightforward. A key finding from all three studies was the importance of a "warm handoff": Community health workers made sure that everyone who tested positive for H.I.V. showed up at a clinic for treatment. They called or texted people to remind them of their appointments, and escorted them to clinics if necessary. "Some people for so many reasons don't show up," said Dr. Shahin Lockman of Harvard University, who led Ya T'sie. "They're scared, they're not ready, they're worried, they're busy." "Linkage to care was the critical weakness in TasP," said Dr. Gilles Van Cutsem, an adviser to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, who was not involved in the newer studies. "That is the most difficult part to achieve." Given the scale of the three new studies, the researchers expected their analyses to be complex. But the teams also faced unexpected snags. In 2013, when the trials began, the standard of care in those countries was to offer antiretroviral drugs only to H.I.V. infected people with a CD4 count a measure of certain immune cells in the blood of 350 or less. (The range for a healthy person is 500 to 1,500.) By 2016, however, the countries all began offering universal treatment that is, antiretroviral drugs to anyone who is H.I.V. positive, regardless of CD4 count although not universal testing. The change was good for patients, of course, but made it difficult, and perhaps even unnecessary, to assess the benefits of universal treatment. The switch had the biggest impact on PopART, which split its 21 communities into three groups: one received universal testing and treatment, while the second got universal testing but treatment according to local guidelines. The third group held to local guidelines for both testing and treatment. Once the countries switched to universal treatment, however, the first two groups "were essentially identical," said Dr. Richard Hayes, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine, who was a co leader of PopART. "When we originally designed this study, we never expected that to be such a rapid change." Despite both groups being identical, only the second showed a 30 percent drop in H.I.V. incidence a result that has so far stumped the researchers. (The first group showed a 7 percent decrease, but that was not a statistically significant result.) "Oh my God, talk about a weird finding," said Dr. del Rio. "I don't know. I don't know what to make of it." While they attempt to solve the mystery, Dr. Hayes and his colleagues have opted to combine the results from both the first and second groups and reported a cumulative drop in incidence of 20 percent. The Search study also had its share of problems. That team's approach included tests even for chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, and the investigators saw a 32 percent decrease in H.I.V. infections. But the comparison group also showed a similar drop perhaps because the researchers also offered the full testing package even to people in that group, said Dr. Diane Havlir of the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study. Still, the team saw a 23 percent decrease in deaths from H.I.V., and 59 percent decrease in TB infections among people with H.I.V. Testing for a range of diseases is helpful and realistic, Dr. Havlir said, because it reduces stigma and makes it easy to enroll patients in care for many conditions. "If you're not just doing it for H.I.V. and you're committed to building care for these other diseases, it's a shared cost," she said. In all of the new studies, health workers had the most trouble reaching men and young people for H.I.V. testing. Some of the teams tried setting up tents and camps near farms, taxi ranks, schools and sports events, and operated them even on weekends and evenings. "Men go from having a pediatrician to having a geriatrician, that's been a consistent finding in global health," said Dr. Del Rio. "It also shows where we need to put a lot of our efforts." But those efforts are unlikely to be carried out on anywhere near the scale of these new studies, partly because of the expense, and because universal treatment has already become the standard. "These are all really important studies, but never again will they be performed," Dr. Del Rio said. "Because the world has changed, we will not see this again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The first American woman to walk in space has become the first woman to reach the deepest known spot in the ocean. On Sunday, Kathy Sullivan, 68, an astronaut and oceanographer, emerged from her 35,810 foot dive to the Challenger Deep, according to EYOS Expeditions, a company coordinating the logistics of the mission. This also makes Dr. Sullivan the first person to both walk in space and to descend to the deepest point in the ocean. The Challenger Deep is the lowest of the many seabed recesses that crisscross the globe. Dr. Sullivan and Victor L. Vescovo, an explorer funding the mission, spent about an hour and a half at their destination, nearly seven miles down in a muddy depression in the Mariana Trench, which is about 200 miles southwest of Guam. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Merry X Men Holiday Special (Marvel Entertainment), an anthology from Marvel Comics with 22 stories (most of them a single page each), presents the first 25 days of December in the lives of the X Men and X Women: Jubilee plans a Hawaiian vacation with her son, Shogo, and is thwarted by a villain; a little girl plays with Deadpool and Jean Grey action figures; and Beast tries to find the perfect "Star Wars" gift for his love interest. Two somber pages, in particular, resonate: Those of Dec. 2 and Dec. 9. Kitty Pryde lights a menorah on Dec. 2 and remembers her father and 12 million others who were massacred by anti mutant forces in Genosha, an island nation that was supposed to be a haven for mutants. "Their lives, their dreams, their futures, were stolen from them by hate," she thinks. Oh Santa, how you've let yourself go over the years! Klaus and the Crying Snowman (Boom! Studios), is a retelling of the early years of Santa Claus, when he was hunky and burly and looked like a lumberjack. In this story, Klaus joins forces with a cursed snowman against Norse gods, with the universe at stake. There is time travel and bold action, but at the core is a tragic tale of how the snowman came to be. The drawings of Dan Mora do a fantastic job of imbuing this sad creature with coal eyes and a carrot nose with recognizably human expressions. The DC Comics Nuclear Winter Special (DC Entertainment) offers 10 new stories. Two are especially emotional. One, "Memory Hearth," depicts an encounter between a future version of Superman (from the 853rd century) and the Martian Manhunter. "You thought you had no one," the Man of Steel of the future tells the other alien hero, but "you've never truly been alone." In the other, "Last Daughters," Supergirl and an orphan named Lucy are in a not too distant future when Earth's environment is close to inhospitable. Supergirl resolves to get Lucy off the planet to a new world, where she will have a chance at a better life. It nicely echoes with a twist the journeys of Superman and Supergirl and the sacrifice their parents made for them in the wake of Krypton's destruction. "Memory Hearth" is by Steve Orlando, Brad Walker, Andrew Hennessy, Nathan Fairbairn and Clayton Cowles, and "Last Daughters" is by Tom Taylor, Yasmine Putri, Tom Derenick and Deron Bennett. All We Ever Wanted: Stories of a Better World (A Wave Blue World), another anthology, edited by Matt Miner, Eric Palicki and Tyler Chin Tanner, is for anyone who likes a dose of good news to balance out the frequent bad. "We felt so strongly the best gift right now, in these times, is a bit of hope," Miner said of the project, which has 24 short stories loaded with hope. (More "Star Trek" and less "Mad Max," the editors promised.) In January, Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel (Koren Publishers Jerusalem) makes its debut. The tone of the book, which Jews have been reading for centuries at Seders (the festival meal), is respectful yet playful. "We're connecting a new generation to our loving history, by illustrating the fully unabridged, authentic text in the sequential storytelling style of comics a Jewish innovation, you know," the narrator says. The narrator's pose legs astride, puffed chest and hands along his waist recalls Superman, whose creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were Jewish. But even before the debut of the Man of Steel in 1938, innovation came from Max Gaines, who was also Jewish, in 1933, when he had the idea to reprint newspaper comic strips, which proved popular for sales and inspired the creation of original comic books. As with all Haggadot, this one gives instructions for the order of the ritual retelling of the Exodus story, from slavery to freedom. Starman is a tale of a legacy a son carrying on the heroic persona established by his father, finding his own path, starting his own family told over more than 80 issues by James Robinson. But Starman 25 (DC Entertainment, 1996) is a stand alone story with Jack Knight, the title hero, encountering a down on his luck homeless man (Pete) dressed as Santa. A locket with a picture of Pete's wife and son, who died in a car accident, has been stolen, and Jack finds him crying on a park bench. Jack spends the evening helping Pete, despite having family and friends waiting at home for a holiday meal. Jack, who starts out in the series as a bit self centered, radiates compassion in this issue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
INSURER defections and double digit premium increases may be making consumers wary of seeking health insurance through Affordable Care Act marketplaces. But despite the turmoil, health care advocates are still urging people to shop for 2017 coverage when the annual open enrollment period begins on Tuesday. "Go shopping," said Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president for health initiatives with the Community Service Society in New York. "You may be eligible for more financial help than you think." Premiums for benchmark plans on HealthCare.gov, the federal marketplace, are increasing by an average of 25 percent, the government said. But 85 percent of those insured through the marketplace are eligible for tax credits that can significantly lower those premiums. In many parts of the country, tax credits can reduce premium increases to "essentially zero," Cynthia Cox, associate director of Kaiser Family Foundation's program for the study of health reform and private insurance, said this week in a call with reporters. And because tax credits and financial help increase when premiums increase, some people may be eligible for assistance next year even if they weren't this year. "As premiums go up, so do premium tax credits," said Elizabeth Hagan, senior policy analyst with Families USA, an advocacy group. The catch is that keeping the lowest possible premium may require consumers to change plans, which can mean switching doctors a hassle many people want to avoid, especially if they have complex medical conditions. Still, "as long as they're willing to shop around and change plans," Ms. Cox said, they can save money. About 11 million people are enrolled in marketplace plans. The federal government estimates that 2.5 million people who pay full price by buying individual coverage could qualify for financial help if they shopped on the marketplace instead. Changes in premiums for 2017 plans vary widely, according to an analysis from the Kaiser foundation. Cities like Phoenix and Birmingham, Ala., will have sharp increases in premiums for "benchmark" silver plans before the application of tax credits. But premiums for such plans in Indianapolis, Cleveland and Providence, R.I., will decrease. Even in markets where just one insurer is participating, however, consumers generally have a choice of plans, Ms. Hagan said. In New York, where the average increase is about 17 percent, Ms. Benjamin said low income families and individuals could qualify for an "essential" plan that has no deductible and a monthly premium of either nothing or 20 a month. The option was offered for the first time for 2016, and about 360,000 people are enrolled, she said. Here are some questions and answers about marketplace open enrollment: When is open enrollment for marketplace plans this year? Open enrollment runs from Nov. 1 until Jan. 31, 2017. But you must enroll by Dec. 15 if you want your coverage to start on Jan. 1. Consumers can't enroll in coverage until Tuesday, but they can prepare now by previewing available plans on HealthCare.gov. Where can I get help choosing a plan? Advocates recommend meeting in person with a trained assister or "navigator," who can help you compare options. "This is hard stuff," Ms. Benjamin said. "Don't do it by yourself." On HealthCare.gov, you can click on "find local help" to search for assistance by ZIP code. You will also find a checklist of information and documents you will need to enroll. Advocates recommend setting up an appointment soon, so you will have time to consider options and ask questions without pressure. "Try not to wait until the last minute," said Erin Singleton, chief of mission delivery for the Patient Advocate Foundation. What is the penalty for going without health coverage? The minimum penalty is now about 700 per adult. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
'HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE' at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism's holiest genesis tale that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906 7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org 'BLUE PRINTS: THE PIONEERING WORK OF ANNA ATKINS' at New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (through Feb. 17). An intimate, exquisite show of a pioneer of photography and natural science. In the early 1840s, Atkins, a seaweed loving Englishwoman, began documenting aquatic plants through the new technique of cyanotype (or blueprint, as architects would later call it), and sewed her spectral images into the very first books of "photographical impressions" albeit ones made without a camera. Atkins, perhaps assisted by servants, placed hundreds of specimens of seaweed or algae on coated paper, left them in the sun, and then washed the exposed sheet to produce white shadows of the plants against rich Prussian blue backgrounds. Each one is a little miracle, with neuronlike roots winding across the page, the leaves revealing every branching vein. (Jason Farago) 917 275 6975, nypl.org 'CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876 1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum's own collection. But in 2018, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi's little known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost living things into the world, and they convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'EMPRESSES OF CHINA'S FORBIDDEN CITY' at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (through Feb. 10). Every emperor of the Qing dynasty had dozens of wives, concubines and serving girls, but only one of them could hold the title of empress. The lives of women at the late imperial court is the subject of this lavish and learned exhibition, which plots the fortunes of these consorts through their bogglingly intricate silk gowns, hairpins detailed with peacock feathers, and killer platform boots. (The Qing elite were Manchus; women did not bind their feet.) Many empresses' lives are lost to history; some, like the Dowager Empress Cixi, became icons in their own right. Most of the 200 odd dresses, jewels, religious artifacts and scroll paintings here are on rare loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing you will not have a chance to see these again without a trip to the People's Republic. (Farago) 978 745 9500, pem.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'BRUCE NAUMAN: DISAPPEARING ACTS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18) and MoMA PS1 (through Feb. 25). If art isn't basically about life and death, and the emotions and ethics they inspire, what is it about? Style? Taste? Auction results? The most interesting artists go right for the big, uncool existential stuff, which is what Bruce Nauman does in a transfixing half century retrospective that fills the entire sixth floor of MoMA and much of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. The MoMA installation is tightly paced and high decibel; the one at PS1, which includes a trove of works on paper, is comparatively mellow and mournful. Each location offers a rough chronological overview of his career, but catching both parts of the show is imperative. Nauman has changed the way we define what art is and what is art, and made work prescient of the morally wrenching American moment we're in. He deserves to be seen in full. (Holland Cotter) 212 708 9400, moma.org 718 784 2084, momaps1.org 'LILIANA PORTER: OTHER SITUATIONS' at El Museo del Barrio (through Jan. 27). This exquisite survey of 35 objects, installations and video by this Argentinian born American artist covers nearly half a century, but feels unanchored by time and gravity. In pieces from the early 1970s, Porter adds spare pencil lines to a photographs of her own face as if to challenge optical perception: Which is more real, the artist or the artist's mark? Later, she began assembling and photographing groups of toys and figurines found in flea markets and antiques shops to tease out political puzzles. And despite a witty use of miniaturist scale, cruelty and loss run through the work. In the 2009 video "Matinee," tabletop statuettes live tragic lives: A ceramic child is suddenly beheaded by a hammer. (Cotter) 212 831 7272, elmuseo.org 'POSING MODERNITY: THE BLACK MODEL FROM MANET AND MATISSE TO TODAY' at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (through Feb. 10). This landmark show uses a new lens on 19th century French art history. Progressiveness both artistic and social is measured by the way black women are depicted in the paintings of the period; this yardstick is also applied to subsequent generations of European, American and African artists. A revelatory thesis, brilliantly executed. (Smith) 212 854 6800, wallach.columbia.edu 'STERLING RUBY: CERAMICS' at the Museum of Art and Design (through March 17). Adept at most art mediums, this artist is at his best in ceramics, especially in the outsize, awkwardly hand built, resplendently glazed baskets, ashtrays and plates and the objects that verge on sculpture in this show. These works actively incorporate accident and aspects of the ready made, have precedents in the large scale ceramics of Peter Voulkos and Viola Frey, but may be closest in spirit to the Neo Expressionism of Julian Schnabel rehabilitated, of course. (Smith) 212 299 7777, madmuseum.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day's not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history that won't go away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter) 718 638 8000, brooklynmuseum.org 'ANDY WARHOL FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 31). Although this is the artist's first full American retrospective in 31 years, he's been so much with us in museums, galleries, auctions as to make him, like wallpaper, like the atmosphere, only half noticed. The Whitney show restores him to a full, commanding view, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way, with an emphasis on very early and late work. Despite the show's monumentalizing size, it's a human scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet of our market addled present. What we have instead is Warhol for whom art, whatever else it was, was an expression of personal hopes and fears. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'ARMENIA!' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 13). The first major museum exhibition devoted to the art of Armenia officially its "medieval" era, but in fact spanning nearly 1,500 years bulges with weighty stone crosses, intricate altar frontals and flamboyantly illuminated Bibles and Gospel books unlike any manuscripts you've seen from that time. Armenia, in the Caucasus Mountains, was the first country to convert to Christianity, in the fourth century, and the richly painted religious texts here, lettered in the unique Armenian alphabet, are a testament to the centrality of the church in a nation that would soon be plunged into the world of Islam. By the end of the Middle Ages, Armenian artists were working as far afield as Rome, where an Armenian bishop painted this show's most astounding manuscript: a tale of Alexander the Great that features the Macedonian king's ship swallowed by an enormous brown crab, hooking the sails with its pincers as its mouth gapes. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE CHARTERHOUSE OF BRUGES' at the Frick Collection (through Jan. 13). In the 1440s, Bruges was home to a strict Carthusian order, whose leader, Jan Vos, commissioned paintings by two of the best artists in Flanders, reunited here: "Virgin and Child With St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth and Jan Vos," probably begun by Jan van Eyck and finished by his workshop after his death; and another picture of the Virgin and the monk by Petrus Christus. The larger Van Eyck was for public devotion, while the Petrus Christus, no bigger than a sheet of loose leaf, could be clasped or even kissed during prayer. The brilliance of this show is that it looks beyond form to matters of use and extends our view of European religious art beyond painting. These works were meant for so much more than just our gaze. (Farago) 212 288 0700, frick.org 'SARAH LUCAS: AU NATUREL' at the New Museum (through Jan. 20). Lucas emerged in the 1990s with the YBAs (Young British Artists), a group that included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and that didn't focus on a particular medium or style. They were postpunk which is to say, more focused on attitude than aptitude with a Generation X nihilism and malaise, as well as the clear message that anything, artistically, could be borrowed, stolen or sampled. Self portraits are among Lucas's weapons. Instead of sexualized, made up or fantastic portraits, hers are plain, androgynous and deadpan. And this exhibition, with its 150 objects many of them sculptures created in plaster or from women's stockings and tights stuffed with fluff is populated with penises and with cigarettes penetrating buttocks, rather than the breasts and vulvas modern artists have used to demonstrate their edginess. At just the right moment the MeToo moment Lucas shows us what it's like to be a strong, self determined woman; to shape and construct your own world; to live beyond other people's constricting terms; to challenge oppression, sexual dominance and abuse. (Martha Schwendener) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org 'FRANZ MARC AND AUGUST MACKE: 1909 1914' at Neue Galerie (through Jan. 21). Marc and Macke worked at the forefront of German art in the early 1900s, experimenting with audacious simplifications of forms, infusing colors with spiritual meanings and, in Marc's case, specializing in dreamy portraits of otherworldly animals. With the Russian born Wassily Kandinsky, the two friends also helped found a hugely influential circle of Munich painters known as the Blue Rider. But this dizzying, overstuffed exhibit at the Neue Galerie ends abruptly: Both men were killed in combat in World War I, Marc at 36 and Macke at 27. (Heinrich) 212 628 6200, neuegalerie.org 'THE PROGRESSIVE REVOLUTION: MODERN ART FOR A NEW INDIA' at Asia Society (through Jan. 20). The first show in the United States in decades devoted to postwar Indian painting continues a welcome, belated effort in Western museums to globalize art history after 1945. The Progressive Artists' Group, founded in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the afterglow of independence, sought a new painterly language for a new India, making use of hot color and melding folk traditions with high art. These painters were Hindus, Muslims and Catholics, and they drew freely from Picasso and Klee, Rajasthani architecture and Zen ink painting, in their efforts to forge art for a secular, pluralist republic. Looking at them 70 years on, as India joins so many other countries taking a nativist turn, they offer a lovely, regret tinged view of a lost horizon. (Farago) 212 288 6400, asiasociety.org/new york | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In recent decades, many institutions of higher education have increasingly been awarding money to students who do not need that aid to afford college. More than half of the 339 public universities sampled in a paper published by New America at least doubled the amount they spent on so called merit aid from 2001 to 2017; more than 25 percent quadrupled the amount. About two out of every five dollars these schools provided in institutional aid went to students the government deemed able to afford college without need based aid. The schools do it because well to do families, overall, bring the institutions more tuition dollars than their lower income peers. By diverting such a large share of limited dollars from students who need help to afford college to students who don't, schools are exacerbating a long term trend of many schools enrolling far more students from families at the top of the income ladder than from those at the middle and bottom of it. This fall, it is likely that the practice of awarding merit aid to students who could afford college without it will only accelerate. Because schools will be starved for money because of Covid 19 closures, they may look to offset a potentially historic decrease in enrollment by competing for a shrinking pool of wealthier students. Simultaneously, countless colleges are anticipating declines in revenue since more campuses will be closed, meaning they could be even hungrier for the tuition fees wealthy families pay. (Most merit scholarships aren't anywhere near full rides.) Currently, merit aid and financial aid are effectively in the same pot at most schools, so the funds for the increase we expect in merit based aid are likely to be culled from the pool of financial aid available to talented students from working class families. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Mr. Colbert's recent surge is intriguing, in light of the Trump presidency and given the host's association with biting political commentary from his days on Comedy Central's "Colbert Report." For the week of Jan. 16, the week before the inauguration, Mr. Colbert came within 8,000 viewers of tying Mr. Fallon, the closest he had come to his NBC competitor since the week he came on the air. During the week of Jan. 23, Mr. Colbert was in repeats, which threatened to blunt his momentum, but it appears viewers tuned back in last week. Jimmy Kimmel's ABC show is in third place in both total viewers and among adults under 50. Mr. Colbert's show has taken on a political charge in recent months, and it has only accelerated since Mr. Trump won the election. He has been openly critical of Mr. Trump, and last week Jon Stewart, Mr. Colbert's old late night partner on Comedy Central, appeared in a scathing segment. Mr. Fallon, by contrast, has been criticized for being somewhat apolitical and appearing too cozy with Mr. Trump, especially in a September segment when he playfully tousled Mr. Trump's hair. Two weeks of data is a small sampling, and the ratings can reverse course at any moment, particularly if these frenetic opening weeks of the Trump presidency show any signs of dying down. Mr. Fallon has been a ratings juggernaut since he took over "The Tonight Show" three years ago, and his lead among 18 to 49 year olds is no small matter. But Mr. Colbert's recent results are a welcome relief to CBS executives. It was only a year ago, after Mr. Colbert had failed to impress with his post Super Bowl show, that there was concern among CBS executives that his show was adrift. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. Frances Isbell has spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that has left her unable to walk or even roll over in bed. But Ms. Isbell has a personal care assistant through Medicaid, and the help allowed her to go to law school at the University of Alabama here. She will graduate next month. She hopes to become a disability rights lawyer "I'd love to see her on the Supreme Court someday," her aide, Christy Robertson, said, tearing up with emotion as Ms. Isbell prepared to study for the bar exam in her apartment last week but staying independent will be crucial to her professional future. "The point of these programs is to give people options and freedom," said Ms. Isbell, 24, whose family lives a few hours away in Gadsden. Those services include dental care for adults, long term care for disabled and elderly people living at home, certain therapies that children with disabilities receive in school, prosthetic limbs and even prescription drugs. The battle over replacing the Affordable Care Act has focused intensely on the future of Medicaid, the state federal health insurance program for the poor and vulnerable created more than 50 years ago as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Much of the debate has centered on Republican proposals to roll back the recent expansion of the program to millions of low income adults without disabilities. But the House and Senate bills would also make profound changes to the very nature of Medicaid, shifting it from an open ended entitlement to a program with strict federal funding limits. Those changes would have far bigger consequences over time, affecting many more of the roughly 74 million Americans on Medicaid. The threat to optional services may be especially acute in states, like Alabama, that already spend far less than the national average on Medicaid and are averse to raising more revenue through taxes. The drain on Medicaid funding would worsen over time under the bill that Senate Republicans are working to pass, with the new funding limits starting in 2021 and having the biggest impact more than a decade from now. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicaid spending would be 26 percent lower under the Senate plan than it would be under current law in 2026 and 35 percent lower in 2036. The office predicted that states would be forced to "eliminate optional services, restrict eligibility for enrollment or adopt some combination of those approaches." Under the Senate plan, states would receive a fixed annual amount for each Medicaid beneficiary, with each category of beneficiaries, like children and the disabled, getting a different base amount based on recent costs. The amount would increase every year by a formula that is expected to grow more slowly than average medical costs after 2025. Disabled children would not be subject to the spending caps. Avalere Health, a consulting firm, estimated in a report that federal spending on individual state Medicaid programs could decline between 6 percent and 26 percent under the Republican plan by 2026. The biggest drops would be in states that expanded Medicaid, but the cuts would compound more sharply for every state in later years. Conservatives say Medicaid spending, which consumes a major and growing portion of the federal and states' budgets, needs to be reined in. The current system of unlimited federal matching funds, they say, has encouraged states to milk as much as they can, sometimes wastefully; capping funding, their argument goes, would make Medicaid more efficient and ensure it can continue to help the most vulnerable Americans, including people with disabilities. "The fiscal sustainability of Medicaid is essential to making sure that those who depend on the program can know it will be there for them in the future," Avik Roy, a conservative health care analyst, wrote last week in Forbes. Alabama's two Republican senators, Richard Shelby and Luther Strange, have expressed quiet support for the Senate bill, although Mr. Strange has said he wants to make sure that "the most vulnerable in my state" are protected. Gov. Kay Ivey, also a Republican, has said she wants to see a final version of the bill before weighing in. For decades, the only type of long term care that disabled Medicaid beneficiaries could receive was in nursing homes. But starting in the early 1980s, Medicaid began providing the option of "home and community based services," allowing people with disabilities to stay in their homes with paid help. States now spend slightly more for these services than for nursing home care, which is a mandatory benefit under Medicaid. Nationally, almost three million people received Medicaid long term care services at home or in their community in 2013, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. About 13,000 people were getting these services in Alabama in 2015, according to the state. Medicaid pays for only 25 hours a week of help for Ms. Isbell. It is not enough; she received an additional 25 hours of help through a Department of Education program during her three years in law school. "It's still significantly less than I would get in other states," she said this past week eating a lunch of leftover spaghetti in her apartment in Tuscaloosa with the help of her aide. She knows disabled people who choose to get catheters, she said, rather than do "pee math" figuring out how soon they will need to use the bathroom and whether an aide will be there to help. "People are struggling so much to get by with the hours they have as it is," she said. "But the way this bill was written, you have to just make a general prediction that these services will be cut." Eric Harkins will never be able to have a job. With cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and a seizure disorder, he cannot speak or move other than scooting across the floor on his knees and elbows. But Medicaid has allowed his sister, Kimberlee, to pursue a career as a vocational rehabilitation counselor instead of caring for him full time. It pays for aides to care for Mr. Harkins for 125 hours a week, an amount that was increased after his mother had a debilitating heart attack and underwent surgery several times over the last few years. "He requires help with every aspect of daily living," Ms. Harkins said, stroking her brother's arm as he watched a cartoon in their living room one recent afternoon in Vestavia Hills, outside Birmingham. "If our caregivers went away tomorrow, I'd have to quit my job and take care of Eric." Mr. Harkins, 33, likes playing with toys meant for toddlers, watching shows on his iPad and going on outings to Target and restaurants, though it usually takes his sister and an aide to get him there. Because he can be physically aggressive, a day program is out of the question, Ms. Harkins said. But his mother, Judy Harkins, said that if he was placed in a nursing home, "he would die, and it would kill me, too." Mr. Foster spent eight years on a Medicaid waiting list to get the coverage. Before he got it, help came from his mother, Susan Ellis, and his two younger siblings, who have since moved away. His father, Michael Foster, worked six days a week as a coal miner, though he retired recently. Both parents are 67 and have health problems of their own, although Ms. Ellis still works for a nonprofit disability rights group. Mr. Foster lives in what used to be their garage in a modest split level home in Vestavia Hills. His living quarters has its own entrance. Since he was 17, he has worked on weekends at Chuck E. Cheese's, dressing in costume and entertaining children at birthday parties. His father drives him back and forth now, but in the future he may rely on Medicaid for help getting to work. "My hope is that when Mike and I aren't around anymore, he will be able to maintain his life the way he lives it now," Ms. Ellis said. "That means living in the community he's grown up in." As she spoke, Mr. Foster emerged in workout clothes, smiling toward his personal care assistant, Amancia Carrera, who was waiting to take him for their regular Monday sandwich at Subway "It's the best time for us to really talk, with eye contact," Ms. Carrera said and the gym. "She's an active person, and I'm real active, too," Mr. Foster said of Ms. Carrera, who also works with him on basic math and reading and helps him with housekeeping, meals and bills. "I like having Amancia in my life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
With "Hansel Gretel," the Park Avenue Armory once again aims ambitiously, and at great expense, for participatory public art but settles instead for public entertainment. In this latest attempt, the subject is surveillance. Your every move is eerily recorded from above by a grid of cameras, which register your ghostly image beneath your feet, while a few tethered drones buzz overhead. Yet surveillance, so much a part of everyday life, is mostly reduced from threat to mildly educational fun here. The work encourages further variations on the snow angel selfie, as visitors spread out on the floor and then rise, like Lazarus, leaving behind blurry images of themselves, which they rush to photograph. (It is, in fact, a selfie of a selfie.) At times the scene feels like a large, overactive picnic in a park. A collaboration several years in the making, this immersive, super high tech installation in two parts reunites Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist activist dissident, with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss architects overseeing an inspired restoration of the armory's historical building. The three worked together on the astounding looking National Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a work of starchitecture whose basketlike structure is known as the Bird's Nest. The work is one of those shows that has "How much did this cost?" written all over it. (The armory would not say.) It teems with fashionable relevance, dovetailing with newish knowledge that the National Security Agency spent years collecting emails and texts that Americans exchanged with people overseas, and at a time when the executive wing of the federal government is displaying disturbing authoritarian tendencies. It is ominous that one day all the streets in cities across the world could be watched by this blanket surveillance. Yet here, at least, that prospect is not nearly as scary as "Hansel and Gretel" read aloud, with its evil stepmother, abandoned children, cookie covered cottage and cannibalistic witch who eventually dies by being shoved into a burning oven. (The book is for sale in the armory's gift shop, along with a line of surveillance skirting products.) This more benign "Hansel Gretel" is a kind of thinking person's "Rain Room," the popular water installation seen at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013. Its sheer spectacle inspires brief awe, then you figure it out, and it is reduced to technology, and fun. The fun is especially dense in the large, somewhat lighter areas of the drill hall floor called "clearings," where the captured images erode more slowly. Visitors hold and repeat deliberate poses for a kind of Muybridge, stop motion effect. Or they collaborate, joining hands in rings. Dancers and yoga devotees may especially revel. Sometimes the effect is "Tron" like. Infrared outlines constantly form and reform around the images strewn about the floor, as if a military analyst were zooming in for a closer look; straight white lines of light suggest cross hairs or coordinates and sometimes seem to appear behind people as they walk. One of the creators' better ideas was to avoid the armory's grand Park Avenue entrance for a small door on Lexington Avenue where you walk in at street level (as into a park, as Mr. Herzog put it, albeit one with a 15 admission fee). Navigating a long, black, tunnellike passageway feels ominous and subterranean; it made me think of Saddam Hussein's spider hole hide out, or a corridor installation by Bruce Nauman, done chic. It leads directly into the vast, darkened Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which is Part 1, and to a few powerful moments of genuine disorientation. Here you walk up a slight slope and then downward for more parklike effect. Before I realized that the images on the floor mirrored the visitors' movements, it felt like coming upon a hastily covered mass grave or killing field, where bodies and body parts were poking out of the earth, or maybe Pompeii as it was being excavated. But this brief poetic haunting quickly dissipated once it became clear that the blurry images were our own doing and that nearly everyone was looking at and photographing images of themselves or others. That's when the picnic frolic set in. I expected "Hansel Gretel" Part 2 to be redemptive, raising the level of seriousness or at least dread. To reach it, you exit the drill hall back onto Lexington Avenue and walk around to the armory's main Park Avenue entrance. There, the press statement said, "visitors transition into the role of the observer." We would surveil ourselves being surveilled on iPads (nicely arranged on library tables). I imagined that the technology would allow me to see myself walking around Part 1, taking photographs and notes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
William Jordan at his home in Dallas. Special circumstances helped ease his donation of a work by Diego Velazquez to the Prado Museum in Madrid. In 1988, William Jordan saw a portrait in a catalog from a London auction house. The work was attributed to Justus Sustermans, a Flemish painter in the Medici court in Florence. But as an art historian, Mr. Jordan was sure it was actually a work by the 17th century master Diego Velazquez. He bought the painting for 1,000 pounds much less than a Velazquez would have cost and had it shipped to his home in Dallas, where it was cleaned and reframed. And there it hung for nearly 30 years. Last year, his hunch was validated. The Prado Museum in Madrid, which owns a third of all of Velazquez's works, said Mr. Jordan's painting was the real thing. Mr. Jordan then did something many art collectors dream of doing: He donated the work, worth an estimated 6 million, to the Prado, where it was quickly put into a show of Velazquez's work. In addition to the exhibition, which runs through the fall, Mr. Jordan received a catalog filled with scholarly essays on the work and accompanying photos. And to top it off, he will be eligible for a tax deduction because the donation was made not to a foreign museum but to the American Friends of the Prado Museum, a United States based charity. If this seems like the way collectors typically sail through donations of art, think again. Mr. Jordan's tale sounds like some supercharged episode of "Antiques Roadshow," but most collectors struggle to donate their art, even valuable art, to museums. "There's this natural feeling that you can walk up to the Met and they'll take your work," said Steve Schindler, chairman of the art law committee of the New York City Bar Association and a partner at Schindler Cohen Hochman. "It's not so." Or as Evan Beard, national art services executive for U.S. Trust, put it: "If you have a Picasso worth 6 million or 7 million, every museum in the country will say thank you, thank you, thank you." For other works, particularly collections of mixed quality, there is likely to be a negotiation. It's a lot easier to donate art when the museum asks for it first. "My clients who have donated to museums have had really long term relationships with the museums," said Nilani Trent, an art adviser in Manhattan. "They've been part of the museum for many, many years. Usually, the museum has approached them and said, 'This is a weak part of our collection.'" Stephanie Ingrassia, who is a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which named a contemporary art gallery after her and her husband, Tim, made her first donation to the museum in 2007. It was a work by a well known feminist artist, Ana Mendieta, called "Untitled (Guanaroca First Woman )." The process was fairly painless because the museum did not have a piece of art by such a significant artist, Ms. Ingrassia said. "It's a piece that I loved, but my family didn't really understand," she said of the work, which is a photo of a vagina carved in sand. "It was very well received. It's often on view." Since then, Ms. Ingrassia, 52, has donated about 10 works, and contributed money with other trustees toward additional pieces. But she said her interest contemporary art dovetailed with an area where the museum was expanding. Other donations have a more difficult time getting approval. "We're being very careful with what comes into the collection," Ms. Ingrassia said. "We used to be a place where Grandma's furniture ended up." Being turned down is a reality, though, for any collector. Ms. Trent has been trying to help a client donate his art to museums so that he can change the nature of his collection. His offers have been rejected. "It's not that they're bad," she said. "It's that they don't fill a hole." If a museum is on the fence about a donation or collection, it might ask for additional money in the form of an endowment to accept the art. "The first thing people are surprised with is when the museum comes back and says, 'I'll take your painting if you give us an added endowment to care for the work of art,'" Mr. Beard said. "Usually, a museum will want one or two specific items in your collection to fill gaps, and they look at everything else as cost because they're going to have to store it." Being asked for money after offering works of art may sound ungrateful. But museums are bound to maintain and not sell off their collections, and storing all the pieces they cannot show can cost thousands of dollars a year. Yet Mr. Beard said the request for a significant sum could also be a signal to collectors that they should look elsewhere. "Is it better to go for a midsize regional museum where your works will be a focus," he asked, "or an encyclopedic museum where your works will see the light of day every five years?" Of course, museums are not the only place to donate art. Collectors can donate to charities where the art may be displayed or sold to finance projects. Jane Wilton, general counsel of the New York Community Trust, said the organization was given hundreds of works by Joaquin Torres Garcia in 1992. The collector who donated the art wanted it to be used to pay for research into AIDS and H.I.V. And it did, though it took the community trust nearly 15 years to sell it all. Institutions may push back on gifts for another reason: fear of provenance or authenticity. Antiquities are particularly fraught, given patrimony laws that protect artifacts. "You may have some great Egyptian artifacts and you'd love to have them in the museum when you die, because who else is going to take them?" Mr. Schindler said. "But if you don't have good proof that they came out of the ground before 1970, good luck." And there is the risk that cherished works of art are not real. Ms. Wilton said one such piece hangs in her office as a reminder to be diligent in evaluating bequests. "It's supposed to be by Winslow Homer," she said. "It turned out to be a Homer Simpson." One big benefit is whether the institution provides a tax deduction. If the work goes to a museum, the donor gets the full deduction. If it goes to a nonprofit where art is not central to the mission, the donor is eligible only for the value of the piece when it was purchased. In 2014, a group of Spanish art enthusiasts set up the American Friends of the Prado Museum, which promotes the museum in the United States. But it has the added benefit of ensuring that donors get a tax deduction for their gift, which they are technically donating to an American nonprofit organization that in turn lends it to the Prado. (The Louvre and the Vatican Library have similar 501(c)(3) tax exempt organizations in the United States.) Mr. Jordan, who was the deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth when he bought the Velazquez, is not, by his own admission, a wealthy man. But he said he had known every director of the Prado since the 1970s and wanted the museum have the piece. "The museum has had a long relationship with Bill Jordan," said Miguel Falomir, director of the Prado. "He's not just a collector. He's a scholar. He's collaborated with us. He's created exhibitions. He's an old friend of the museum." Velazquez's artwork is "important to understand his early development in Madrid," Mr. Falomir added. "It provides a lot of detail for us. It's something we'd like to display in our permanent collection." That's the type of validation every collector wants to hear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
AURORA, Colo. With repercussions from the sexual harassment allegations against Bill O'Reilly rippling through the country this week, Kimberly JaJack, a longtime Fox News enthusiast, descended into her basement on Wednesday, curled onto the sofa and clicked on the television. Mr. O'Reilly, the star she calls her primary news source, beamed into the room, already barreling into the questions of the day on "The O'Reilly Factor," the nation's No. 1 cable news show. "Caution!" he said, like a sportscaster gearing up for a bout, as he offered up his signature opening, "you are about to enter the no spin zone!" At a commercial, Ms. JaJack, 53, released the sigh of a conflicted woman. "Sexual harassment, that's not something you turn a blind eye to," she said, gripping the remote. "But what has happened? Is it going to be enough for me to say I'm not watching Bill O'Reilly anymore?" Similar scenes played out across the nation this week, as fans of Mr. O'Reilly wrestled with the news, disclosed in a New York Times report last weekend, that he had reached settlements totaling about 13 million with five women who accused him of harassment. Should they believe the women and drop Mr. O'Reilly from their TV news diet? Ignore the women and stay loyal? Or recognize that it could all be true and forgive him? For Ms. JaJack, a black evangelical Christian who said she often feels alone in a family of Democrats, the allegations about Mr. O'Reilly posed a particular test. She did not love how the host had covered the Trayvon Martin case ("Slanted" in favor of the gunman, she said.) Or how he recently mocked the hair of Maxine Waters, a black congresswoman. ("Very inappropriate," she said.) And she certainly does not condone sexual harassment. She said she learned of The Times's report through a news alert on her phone. "I don't want to say it's the norm," she said of her reaction, "and I don't believe in that. Because I don't believe all of this is acceptable behavior. But it's just like, it doesn't surprise me." Mr. O'Reilly has been her beacon for current events, guiding her through turbulent and sometimes lonesome political waters since she became a Republican around the year 2000. "Some probably think he's a little arrogant," she said, sitting on a couch where she has watched him so many nights that the cushion bears a comfy indent. "But I find that he stays focused on the issue at hand." As an example, she noted how in an early segment Wednesday evening, Mr. O'Reilly had directed a guest away from discussion of a possible connection between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia, and toward his topic of choice: Whether the Obama adviser Susan Rice was, in the host's words, "using her position with President Obama to surveil and hurt Mr. Trump." Ms. JaJack likes that Mr. O'Reilly has focused on the issues of illegal immigration and the attack on an American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, topics she believes other news organizations overlooked. She supplements her media diet with Politico, The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal. "I'm not saying he's pure," Ms. JaJack said of Mr. O'Reilly, who has said the allegations against him have no merit. "Nobody is, including myself. But for the most part, I don't hear him belittle people or talk down on people. He speaks from the left. He speaks from the right. And he's giving you his experience, his knowledge." Mr. O'Reilly, now 67, joined Fox News in 1996, drawing both fans and critics with his pugnacious style and conservative bent. In 2015, the show brought about 178 million in advertising revenue to Fox News, according to Kantar Media. About 80 percent of Mr. O'Reilly's viewers are over the age of 55, according to data from Nielsen, a trend that has held steady for years. Men make up 54 percent of the audience, Nielsen said. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. And Mr. O'Reilly's audience is growing. So far this year, his total viewers are up 23 percent from last year's average. His shows this week, since the Times's article appeared, are drawing about 10 percent more viewers compared with a week ago, Nielsen said. In downtown Denver, a financial analyst named Shelli Barkley, 58, stood in the shade outside her office on a recent morning. She said she was "skeptical" of the veracity of the allegations against Mr. O'Reilly. She added that the host's interactions with women might have been misunderstood. "We've all done things we regret. One person's sexual harassment is another person's flirting." Along with a friend, Sue Thielen, 52, Ms. Barkley said that she would continue to watch Mr. O'Reilly several times a week. A few blocks away, Tom Miller, 67, sat at a picnic table with his wife, Sheryl, and their dog Magic. Fox News is a key information source for the couple. "If that occurred, I don't agree with it," Mr. Miller said of the harassment claims, suggesting that an appropriate action would be a temporary suspension of Mr. O'Reilly. But Mr. Miller said he had trouble believing the allegations. "The news is so skewed nowadays, it's pathetic," he said. Ms. JaJack grew up here in the Denver suburb of Aurora, surrounded by Democrats. Around 1994, she became a born again Christian, a transformation that eventually spurred her to join the Republican Party. She opposes abortion, she said, and that issue most informs her vote. She lived in the Washington, D.C., area for many years, working contract jobs as a scheduler, administrator and management analyst in the federal government before returning to Colorado to help her mother. She served as an alternate delegate for Mr. Trump at the Republican National Convention, and then voted for him in the fall. She said she that she had not paid much attention to the details about the sexual harassment allegations, and that she had no idea if they were true. Then a reporter told her about Wendy Walsh, a former regular guest on Mr. O'Reilly's show, who said that the host invited her to his hotel room and then, when she declined his invitation, reneged on an offer to secure her a lucrative position with the network. Ms. JaJack expressed sympathy for Ms. Walsh, but said that such behavior is part of the working world. "I think that probably happens to many of us," Ms. JaJack said. Later in the conversation, though, she struck a more disapproving tone. "If it's happening," she said, "they're going to have to learn to either change their culture or change the men's attitude." "It's not right," she continued. "No ma'am. I don't care if it's Fox, I don't care if it's CNN, I don't care if it's the White House and the president. It's not right. Point blank." On television, Mr. O'Reilly was wrapping up his show with a pitch for a coming tour. "Please remember, the spin stops here," he said, pointing a pen at Ms. JaJack in the basement room. "We're definitely looking out for you." Afterward, with her great nephew bouncing on her hip, Ms. JaJack said she would not stop watching the show. "Some people lose their way," she said, speaking directly to Mr. O'Reilly. "I accept you because I believe in you. And believe in Fox News." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
NANCY DREW 9 p.m. on the CW. Sex, darkness and a dash of the supernatural are added to the Nancy Drew formula here, in a series that reimagines that classic young sleuth for a contemporary audience. The hourlong drama raises Drew's age to 18, and it relocates the action to Maine. The show also gives Drew (played by Kennedy McMann ) a tough back story: In this show, she has a strained relationship with her father, and her mother has recently died. There are also ghosts, an element that factors into the show's first major case , which involves the murder of a socialite. "At the core is the idea of a young woman who believes in righting wrongs and finding the truth," Stephanie Savage , a creator of the series, said in a recent interview with The New York Times. FAMILY TIME 9 p.m. on Bounce TV. Six seasons have gone by since this sitcom introduced Anthony Stallworth ( Omar Gooding ) and Lisa Calloway Stallworth ( Angell Conwell ), a married couple who started off the series by winning the lottery and relocating to the suburbs. The seventh season sees the couple transitioning into empty nesters. That lifestyle should support more quips among their fellow adults, like Cheryl ( Shanti Lowry ), whom, in Wednesday's season premiere episode, explains a new home "security system" to Lisa. "Basically, it's just a recording of a couple arguing," she says. "That way it always sounds like there's someone bickering at home." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Over 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the past six weeks. That is roughly 20 percent of the labor force. And that number is likely to grow larger as most states are ill equipped to handle the onslaught of the newly unemployed. While unprecedented numbers of people are seeking unemployment compensation, many state government employees are still receiving paychecks as they sit idle at home. In Illinois, state government employees are set to receive a 261 million automatic pay raise in July. Common sense, it seems, has been suspended in the "Land of Lincoln." To make matters worse, many state leaders now demand a bailout by the federal government the American taxpayer. This should not happen. States already raise taxes on their residents. Workers and small businesses need help more than government bureaucracies. As the White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett has warned, the unemployment rate could reach "Great Depression levels." On May 6, The Times reported that "more than 40 percent of the nation's 30 million small businesses could close permanently in the next six months because of the coronavirus pandemic." Concerns about the economy are real. Instead of bailing out state governments, the federal government should focus on helping workers and small businesses the taxpayers get back on their feet. Failure to do so will continue to hurt state economies, saddling them with insolvent balance sheets. One way to help, which will not cost the federal government more money, is to allow people collecting the enhanced unemployment benefit of 600 per week to go back to work and keep the payment until the end of the program. This would remove a major disincentive to return to employment and would amount to a short term raise. Second, federal funding is likely to diminish over time, creating further holes in state budgets. Shortfalls created by the disappearance of federal stimulus funds was a primary reason for the budget crisis that many state governments faced after the last recession. As The Times reported a decade ago, "Officials repeatedly warned states and districts to avoid spending the money in ways that could lead to dislocations when the gush of federal money came to an end." The article continued, "But from the start, those warnings seemed at odds with the stimulus law's goal of jump starting the economy, and the administration trumpeted last fall that school districts had used stimulus money to save, or create, some 250,000 education jobs." A year later, many state and local governments were near bankruptcy. Third, a federal bailout would stop state governments from enacting meaningful reforms. When I took office as governor of Wisconsin in 2011, we faced a deficit and a gap of several billion dollars in our next budget. Remnants of the recession and failures in federal funding, including the phase out of stimulus funds for schools, state and local governments, were the main reasons for our fiscal challenges. Options for balancing the budget included employee layoffs, job killing tax increases or draconian cuts in Medicaid. Instead, we chose reforms that allowed school districts and state and local entities to balance their budgets while still providing core services. According to the MacIver Institute, since 2011, those reforms have saved more than 12 billion, which has resulted in additional funds for vital programs. Plus, schools and other entities no longer have seniority or tenure, as traditionally understood. They can hire based on merit and pay based on performance. Now, they can put the best and the brightest in the classroom. Our reforms helped create a surplus every year we were in office. Our bond rating improved, our pension was fully funded number one in the nation and our rainy day fund was hundreds of times larger than when we took office. The reforms worked. In contrast, our neighbor to the south fought meaningful reform for years. Illinois had a backlog of unpaid bills, among the worst funded state pension system in the nation, a budget deficit and an underfunded rainy day fund. Taxpayers across the country should not have to bail out the politicians in Springfield who refuse to get serious about solving their state's financial crisis. Fourth, the federal government cannot afford to do it. The national debt is now over 25 trillion and could exceed 41 trillion over the next decade. We need officials in the federal government to get serious about supporting reforms that will balance the budget, and we need many state leaders to do the same. The debt and deficit problems faced by the federal government are a reminder that bipartisanship is not always a good thing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Leaked news this month that China and Iran had come to the verge of signing a 25 year trade and military partnership agreement struck like a geopolitical storm in Washington a rising rival of America and a longtime foe joining forces to threaten the United States's predominant position in the Middle East. The agreement ambitiously promises to bring a huge Chinese presence into Iran's economic development, in exchange for a regular supply of heavily discounted Iranian oil. Yet in Iran and China themselves, the reaction was hardly ebullient. Critics of Iran's beleaguered president, Hassan Rouhani, called the deal a new Treaty of Turkmenchay, after the notorious 1828 accord under which a weakened Persia ceded much of the South Caucasus to the Russian Empire. In Beijing, a government spokesman who was asked about the deal dodged rather than criticize Washington, insisting blandly that Iran is merely one of many countries with which China is "developing normal friendly relations," and claiming not to have further information about the reported deal. Tehran's and Beijing's ambivalence hardly suggests a loving embrace between the two adversaries of America; rather, it reveals the conundrum each faces in pursuing closer ties with the other conundrums that the United States can turn to our advantage. In recent years, as the United States has been bogged down in unrewarding conflicts in the Middle East, China has been quietly expanding its economic, diplomatic and even military activities in the region. Beijing's motives are straightforward but varied: It seeks to advance its interests, such as a pressing need for energy imports and for destinations for surplus capital and labor. In practice, it tries to advance President Xi Jinping's signature Belt and Road Initiative, which is aimed at reshaping regional economic topographies in China's favor and counters what Beijing sees as an American effort to contain it. In short, China seeks to establish itself in the eyes of the world and its own people as a great power capable of contending with the United States. Yet Chinese leaders are aware that few of the great powers have emerged unscathed from Middle East adventures and that they face a particularly formidable set of obstacles. The region's deep political fissures make it difficult for outsiders to avoid taking sides in its many conflicts. This poses a risk for a China that aims to be a friend of everyone Iran, Israel and Arab states alike to maximize the benefits of its regional engagement while minimizing its commitments. Consistent with this balancing act, the leak of the China Iran agreement roughly coincided with the biannual China Arab States Cooperation Forum early this month, which prompted numerous proclamations of Chinese friendship with Iran's Arab rivals. Even more daunting is the outsize role played by the United States in the region, one that ironically benefits Beijing as it expands its economic ventures without being able to provide adequate security for its capital and citizens deployed to the region. For all its "wolf warrior" bluster, China continues to pick its battles with Washington. So far, it largely has chosen not to wage them in the Middle East for example, doing little beyond diplomatic finger wagging to shelter Iran from American secondary sanctions. So even as China seeks to make strategic gains in the Middle East, it does so sotto voce bolstering its own role and challenging Washington's without fanfare. Iran, China's foremost regional partner, faces a conundrum of its own. Squeezed by America's "maximum pressure" campaign, Tehran needs whatever friends it can find. And China, which beside being rich and powerful shares Iran's revisionist inclination to challenge the United States's role in the international order, would seem to be a perfect match. Yet Iran's history has made it suspicious of external powers, and China's "help" in recent years buying Iranian oil in small quantities at a steep discount and crowding out Iranian domestic producers with low cost imports seems not to have engendered affection among the Iranian populace. What Iranians seem to desire is to be no one's junior partner, but to be self sufficient and stand among the likes of Russia and China as equals. What amount to challenges for China and Iran in further developing their ties constitute opportunities for an America worried about the partnership between them. The United States should, at every step, aim to exacerbate the conundrums each faces. It should, for example, emphasize that Iranian dependence on China besides being costly is a policy choice and that the door remains open to the rest of the international community if Tehran is willing to compromise on its nuclear ambitions and regional policies. And Washington should enlist regional partners who may otherwise prefer to enjoy the benefits of good relations with Beijing while leaving it up to the United States to confront China when it empowers Iran through arms sales or investment. Make no mistake: The China Iran relationship has long been important for both countries, contributing for example to Iran's nuclear and missile advancements. And whether in the form of formal partnership agreements or simply ad hoc cooperation, those relations are very likely to grow closer yet in coming years, as China tries to project power westward and Iran seeks to insulate itself from the debilitating effects of American power and enhance its own regional influence. But while the deepening of the Iran China relationship may be inevitable, the United States shouldn't let it be easy for either Tehran or Beijing. Michael Singh ( MichaelSinghDC), a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, is the managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. 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 |
Lonely Planet, the travel guidebook publisher, has just released "The Best Things in Life Are Free," a hardcover book ( 22.99) detailing free and bargain attractions and experiences in more than 60 cities and destinations worldwide. Each article features six to 18 recommendations, including cherry blossoms, inexpensive hot springs and a professional sumo wrestling practice free to viewers in Tokyo; free museum days in Oslo; snorkeling beaches in Sydney; a bargain graffiti tour in Bogota, Colombia; and low priced happy hour spots in Venice. In the United States, the guide features such free finds as the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C., and outdoor organ concerts in San Diego. Cities covered reflect popular tourist destinations, with a bias toward places considered less affordable. "We thought covering expensive cities was probably more of value," said Jessica Cole, the editor of the book. "There are fewer in Africa because there are many affordable cities there compared to Dubai or London." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In any case, of Heine's two great Romantic preoccupations, Mr. Padmore said, Schumann leaned more toward thwarted love, in "bitter and acerbic" poems. Brahms leaned more toward death, in "less troubled" texts; this composer saw death as Heine's "cool night" as early as 1885, 11 years before his biblical contemplations of the subject in "Four Serious Songs." Mr. Padmore did not so much sing this music as inhabit it. He seemed less concerned with tonal allure than with tracing every line, every emotion as it passed. He threw himself into the music, reminding me at times of his acclaimed interpretation of the Evangelist in Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" with the Berlin Philharmonic, under Peter Sellars's direction, but to better effect here. (Perhaps a minority of one, I thought that Mr. Sellars turned Mr. Padmore into a sort of voodoo doll, grotesquely enacting Jesus's sufferings as he powerfully described them.) Mr. Padmore projected the texts admirably and produced much beautiful tone, but there was also a lot of purposefully strained, attenuated sound in the high register. The only real disappointment, with memory of Matthias Goerne's burly baritonal "Dichterliebe" in February still in mind, was Mr. Padmore's reading of the rumbling "Ich Grolle Nicht" ("I Don't Complain"), which seemed, perhaps inevitably, lightweight. Mr. Lewis interacted artfully with Mr. Padmore, always present and expanding to fill the gaps in the text. His most delightful moment of friction came in "Das ist ein Floten und Geigen" ("What a Fluting and Fiddling") in "Dichterliebe," where he rambled off on his own, gaily winding around and through the song. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Credit...Jennifer Pottheiser/NBAE, via Getty Images In a Miami hotel room, Derrick Jones Jr. and his agent, Aaron Turner, sat on a gray, three seat couch with a laptop propped open on a coffee table in front of them. This was the start of N.B.A. free agency last weekend, compressed and frenzied, squeezed in just after the draft and right before training camp, when dozens of players mulled multimillion dollar offers as they sat in hotel rooms, living rooms and bedrooms around the world. For Jones, 23, the moment offered time to reflect on how he had carved a long route to stability. He would end the night with an agreement for his first guaranteed N.B.A. contract after being passed over in the 2016 draft out of U.N.L.V. He latched on in the N.B.A.'s developmental league before climbing his way to the Phoenix Suns and the Miami Heat, earning a reputation as a dynamic leaper and a grinding defender. On this night, Turner, the 34 year old president of Verus Basketball, had secured meetings with three teams he believed would be interested in offering the contract that Jones hoped for, a multiyear deal starting at the league's midlevel exception of 9.76 million. An article published the day before in The Miami Herald had stirred some anxiety. In it, an anonymous executive speculated about Jones: "If he got even 7 million a year, I would be shocked. If he gets 15 million over two years, his agent should get a bonus." Turner preached confidence to Jones about his market value based on analytics. The N.B.A. allowed teams to begin negotiations with free agents on Friday at 6 p.m. Eastern time. Turner checked in with the three teams he had planned on meeting with five minutes later to ensure they were indeed interested in offering a deal starting at the midlevel. Returning to the Heat remained an option, although Turner predicted Miami would want Jones back on a one year deal. The Charlotte Hornets could offer the largest contract. However, the Hornets had targeted Gordon Hayward, and Jones could not bypass other options to wait them out. (Charlotte agreed to a four year, 120 million deal with Hayward later that weekend.) Jones started his first meeting, with representatives of the Sacramento Kings on a video conference call at 6:28 p.m. Jones, wearing a black T shirt, listened quietly and intently, nodding during much of the eight minute pitch. Few N.B.A. players endured as much whiplash as Jones in 2020. He won the N.B.A. dunk contest in Chicago on his 23rd birthday; as a child, he had told his father he would win it one day. The next month, the coronavirus pandemic shut down the league. Jones's personal chef left Miami, forcing a diet change that caused him to drop several pounds. Then Jones tested positive for the virus but recovered in time to join the N.B.A. restart in a bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., where he struggled with being away from his three young sons for months. In the final seeding game before the playoffs, Jones collided with Indiana Pacers center Goga Bitadze and was carted off the court on a stretcher with a sprained neck. Then he played only spot minutes as Miami advanced to the N.B.A. finals against the Lakers. He had averaged 23.3 minutes and 8.5 points per game during the regular season. The setbacks stunted his momentum. Turner believed that Jones had untapped offensive potential and a high defensive ceiling. To demonstrate that ahead of free agency, he sent teams an informational packet showcasing Jones's advanced defensive metrics. "Talk about what you do offensively," Turner said to Jones between meetings. "Let them know, too, whatever calls we have next, 'I'm going to elevate this team defensively.'" Jones smiled. "That's something that they know that's going to happen," he said. Still, Jones delivered the line in his next meeting, with a delegation from the Portland Trail Blazers. "If I was to come there, I believe that me and Robert Covington could help the team a whole lot," Jones said, adding that he hoped to be named defensive player of the year in the future. "On defense, I'm going to be guarding the best players. That's what I want." The Portland call lasted nearly an hour, with Jones engaged and asking questions. He appeared ready to commit in the moment. "By the end of the night, we'll get back to you," Turner said, ending the call. Jones received a delivery of chicken wings during a break before a final pitch from the Minnesota Timberwolves. After an encouraging meeting, Jones could envision himself as part of an organization that treats its players holistically, styling personalized nutrition, sleep and recovery plans. "They made it a little harder," Turner said after the call. "Just because I can tell they're so creative. They're different. I like that." "That made me start thinking a little bit more," Jones said. "They helped themselves a lot with that," said Anthony Wells, Jones's trainer, who was also in the hotel room. "It all sounds good," Jones said before listing some of Minnesota's immovable components. The team featured a franchise player in center Karl Anthony Towns; plus Malik Beasley; the No. 1 overall draft pick, Anthony Edwards; and the former All Star point guard D'Angelo Russell. "That's four players ahead of me that's going to touch the pill," Jones said. He returned to the Trail Blazers. Their organization is geared for the playoffs, built around guard cornerstones in Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. Jones was looking to expand his offensive responsibilities, and he could reduce some of Lillard and McCollum's offensive burden by bringing the ball up after grabbing a rebound. The organization had a healthy track record of developing wing players like Nicolas Batum, Al Farouq Aminu and Wesley Mathews Jr., leading to large contracts later in their basketball careers. The Trail Blazers had inquired about Jones's sons and detailed the area's community and educational system, aspects that caught Jones's attention. They also talked with Wells about how his work with Jones could be incorporated into the team's program. The meetings over, Jones declared Portland as the favorite, a place where he would be willing to sign a two year deal with a player option for the second season. "I might be able to get you more, but that's 20 million," Turner said. "Your life just changed for your kids completely." The Trail Blazers had cautioned that they would be talking to other free agents that night and would sign the first who called back agreeing to an offer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"YOLO," Danielle Walker said, explaining why she had just spent a chunk of her biweekly 900 paycheck on an adorable outfit quilted navy vest, cranberry plaid riding pants and knit sweater from the "equestrian shop" at Janie and Jack, the children's clothing store in the Mall of America where she works. "You only live once" also appears to be the motto of many of her customers. "It seems like people are looser with their spending," said Ms. Walker, 25, who lives in nearby Apple Valley, Minn., and has a 5 year old daughter. "It's just amazing how impulsive they are, but then I realize I do it." American consumers are energetically engaged in a spendathon. American businesses, by contrast, are not. Nathan Jeppson, the chief of Northwest Hardwoods , a major manufacturer of hardwood lumber, is definitely not in a YOLO mood. He recently canceled a 1.75 million order to buy 19 forklifts for his sawmills and dry kiln yards. "We can't justify that spend without certainty," said Mr. Jeppson, who has watched from his office in Tacoma, Wash., as sales and profits plummeted because of continuing trade discord between the United States and China. "So we'll go into salvage and repair mode till there is." His company has also shelved plans for millions of dollars in other equipment purchases and investments. "We cut 80 percent of the capital budget that we anticipated spending," he said. In addition, 100 of the 1,600 member work force were laid off; another 125 had their hours reduced. Businesses and households swim in the same economic soup and their outlooks gloomy or bright are usually in sync. But in recent months, the two seem to occupy opposite ends of a teeter totter, with consumers continuing to spend while business owners and managers are chastened by doubt and uncertainty. The economic expansion has extended its record run despite this curious divergence. The question is how long it can continue. "They will catch up with each other," said Richard Curtin, director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan . When they do, if consumers are in the lead and businesses respond in kind, the economy will keep growing. If business anxiety spreads to households, the risk of a recession looms. Other news is largely ignored. In the October consumer survey, one in four respondents brought up the negative impact of tariffs. Just 2 percent mentioned the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. At the Mall of America, Charles Barr was feeling flush from his promotion to general manager at Popeye's and the 200 a week raise that came with it. Seated outside the restaurant, which overlooks a snaking orange roller coaster, Mr. Barr said he splurged on two purchases this year: a used GMC Acadia for 30,000 and a 70 inch television for 900 from Best Buy. "A man is measured by the size of his television," he said, laughing. Business managers and executives tend to focus on a wider landscape. Nearly two thirds of chief executives surveyed by the Conference Board in September talked about the troubling and lasting fallout from the trade war. "We definitely have a cautious eye on what's going on," said Adam Briggs, vice president for sales and marketing at Trans Matic Manufacturing , a metal stamper in Holland, Mich., that employs 275 people. He mentioned tariffs, slowing manufacturing and persistent uncertainty. "We're definitely taking the same steps as more companies are right now, and scrutinizing capital investment," Mr. Briggs said. While "2020 is not going to be 2009," he added, "most people believe the economy is not going to grow and may shrink a little bit." But business and consumer outlooks can diverge for only so long, economists say. They are part of the same feedback loop. Businesses that are wary, like Trans Matic and Northwest Hardwoods, pull back on spending, hiring and pay increases. Those moves can push up the unemployment rate, hold down wages and worry consumers, who in turn become more cautious about spending. And that further undermines business confidence, which ... well, you get the idea. The cycle, of course, can just as easily run the other way. Enthusiastic consumer spending pushes businesses to produce more goods and services, encouraging managers to invest more money, compete for workers and increase wages, which bolsters consumer confidence. The disparity in confidence levels is already much smaller in places where local conditions match the broader economy, like states with large manufacturing centers that have declined, Mr. Curtin of the University of Michigan noted. In his view, consumers are the primary engine. "Consumer spending is pretty robust and businesses need to spend and expand to accommodate that demand," he said. Business investment has fallen since mid 2018, he said and "still consumers are carrying the economy." Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, disagrees. A co director of the research panel responsible for the Survey of Business Uncertainty for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Mr. Bloom sees business in the lead. "Business is more forward looking," he said. "We're at the end of a very long expansion, and there are now a number of politically driven headwinds: Trump's trade fight with China, Brexit and Europe's slowdown. It's the last song of the night." He described consumers as more backward looking. The average person tends to notice the very low unemployment rate and reports of stock market rallies, he said, which create a sense of good times. The shopping spirit was on display a few days ago at Nordstrom's new seven story crystalline palace in Manhattan. The women's shoe department was so busy that customers had to take a number, as if shopping at a meat counter for chuck roast instead of for Jimmy Choo's. Sales are sure to heat up further as the holidays approach, regardless of whether consumers flip through store racks or stay on the couch. Radial, which fulfills orders for retail brands like Cole Haan and Rag Bone, plans to add 21,000 temporary workers to handle the rush. "E commerce continues to grow," said Tim Hinckley, Radial's chief commercial officer. "No matter what happens, we see an optimistic outlook." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
What does Bob Dylan think about winning the Nobel Prize? The Swedish Academy, which bestows the award, does not know because it has not spoken to him. And Mr. Dylan, despite performing twice since being named the latest Nobel laureate in literature last week, has yet to make a public statement about the honor. Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the academy, told Swedish public radio on Monday that the academy has been in contact with an associate of Mr. Dylan, but apparently not with the artist himself. Ms. Danius said she did not know whether he planned to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10. "Right now we are doing nothing," Ms. Danius said, according to a translation of her comments reported by the British newspaper The Guardian. "I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now, that is certainly enough." It has been four days, as of Monday, since Mr. Dylan, 75, won the Nobel, the first time the award has gone to a musician. The announcement set off a debate in literary circles over whether Mr. Dylan was an appropriate choice. On Thursday night, just hours after the announcement. Mr. Dylan and his band played at a theater in Las Vegas, and he said not a word about winning the world's highest literary honor. The next day, he was at Desert Trip, the classic rock festival in Indio, Calif., and again made no remarks from the stage, though observers studied his performance for any clue of a reaction, however remote. Mr. Dylan's set at that show was almost identical to that of the first weekend, with an intriguing addition: "Why Try to Change Me Now?," a chestnut written by Cy Coleman and Joseph McCarthy that Mr. Dylan included on his 2015 album "Shadows in the Night." A spokesman for Mr. Dylan declined to comment on Monday. Mr. Dylan's reticence is well known. He gives relatively few interviews, and in concert he rarely interacts with his audience. He also maintains a close command over his business affairs, to the extent that even Columbia Records, the label that has been Mr. Dylan's home for almost his entire five decade career, seemed to be waiting for a cue from its famous artist, publishing little more than a perfunctory tweet about the Nobel. But it is extremely unusual for a Nobel laureate to respond with radio silence. Even Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer who was not well enough to attend the ceremony when she won three years ago at age 82, sent her daughter to Stockholm to accept the prize on her behalf. In the literary world, early dissent about Mr. Dylan as a choice for the award has turned into a chorus, as some writers, including the poets Amy King and Danniel Schoonebeek, have called on Mr. Dylan to turn the honor down, as Jean Paul Sartre did in 1964. 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. "Will Bob Dylan even show up to the ceremony?," Mr. Schoonebeek, wrote on PEN's website after the organization asked writers and publishers to respond to the award. "Everyone already knows his records front to back, he's already a household name all over the world, does this award do anything to effect any change whatsoever?" He added: "If he hasn't done so already, Bob Dylan should turn down the award." The novelist Porochista Khakpour faulted the Swedish Academy for honoring a music icon over international authors who could draw overdue attention to an entire region. "The Nobel, which is a very international prize, is such a great opportunity to introduce us to someone who we've never heard of," Ms. Khakpour said in an interview. Mr. Dylan, who may be a contrarian or may just be unpredictable, has turned up for far lesser honors. He was present at the Golden Globes in 2001 to accept the award for best original song, for "Things Have Changed" (from "Wonder Boys"), giving a speech of about 15 seconds in which he thanked his band, his record company, his family "and that's about it." When he was honored by MusiCares, a charity connected to the Grammy Awards, in 2015, Mr. Dylan stunned a roomful of jaded record executives and journalists with 35 minutes of prepared comments. He went into revealing detail about his songwriting methods and how songs can resonate a glimpse, perhaps, at how he might handle a Nobel speech, should he choose to make one. "These songs of mine," he said, "they're like mystery plays, the kind Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they're on the fringes now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Too Old for Hard Labor, but Still on the Job LIKE many people, Steve Guadalupe has had a varied career. Now 68 and living in Miami, he started in the Air Force working in personnel. He left in 1983, using his technology background to get jobs at centralized bank data centers. When that work dried up in the late '80s, he shifted into construction, eventually ending up on a maintenance crew for a six story medical building on the grounds of the Baptist Hospital of Miami. "Climbing up and down ladders, your legs would be sore when you got home," he said. "As I got older, I decided I wouldn't be able to keep doing that." With his youngest son in college, he still needed an income. In 2000, Mr. Guadalupe shifted from maintenance to running the concierge desk, directing people when they enter the medical building for a procedure or visit. He knows the building well, and he likes the work. Maintenance pays more, he noted, but "this job, I can do until I'm 80." Blue collar jobs are hard work. Eventually, most blue collar workers find the wear and tear on their bodies too draining to continue. Moreover, many industrial companies are reluctant to hire or keep older workers as the number of such jobs shrinks. Yet many blue collar workers, like their white collar counterparts, can't afford or don't want to retire (often a combination of the two). The solution many are turning to is to switch to jobs that require less heavy lifting but still take advantage of their accumulated knowledge and skills. The downside? The pay is often less. One option is mentorship. With a worsening shortage of welders, machinists and other crafts workers, apprenticeship programs offer older skilled workers a less strenuous job opportunity: Teaching their craft to the next generation. "Blue collar retirees are committed to their fields," says Robert Eckardt, executive vice president at the Cleveland Foundation. "There is space for blue collar people to mentor." Gary Dudich, 64, followed in his father's footsteps to become an ironworker in the Cleveland area after graduating from high school. He retired in 2007 after three decades of practicing his craft. His pension is 1,924 a month, after taxes and health care premiums are deducted. The problem is, his pension will be cut to a mere 741 a month at the end of this year unless Congress devises a bailout for his troubled multi employer pension plan. Mr. Dudich has already returned to work to pay off his bills so he won't lose his home if his pension shrinks. He has gone to car shows with some students and, since he has a flip phone, some call him the "Star Trek guy," he says. "These kids are great," he says. "As long as my health is good, I want to do this. I'm having a good time, and they're having a good time." The last few decades have been hard on blue collar workers. Smokestack America has been battered by low cost international competition. Many companies shuttered their domestic plants and set up shop in low cost regions abroad. Others used technology to enhance productivity and slashed their work forces to sustain their operations. Technological advances have made some skills obsolete. Job transitions are rarely easy. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Still, a community and technical college infrastructure has developed over the years to educate and retrain skilled labor. "It's actually easier for blue collar people to get help thinking about alternative careers because most of the government help is aimed at them," says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. "Funds and training associated with displaced workers at the federal level, state and local work force development programs, and community colleges all aim at the less than four year college jobs." This postsecondary system is a valuable resource for older workers to tap when seeking new, less stressful opportunities. Older students are usually seeking a certificate that enables them to leave hard labor. Rich Wagner, president of Dunwoody College of Technology in downtown Minneapolis, cites the example of electricians. The job calls for climbing up and down ladders, lugging equipment and installing wiring. As they wear down, older electricians often show up at Dunwoody and similar trade schools to earn a certificate that can qualify them to be, among other things, project estimators on electrical projects. "Former electricians are really good estimators," Mr. Wagner said. Self employment is another option. Although the transition to self employment after age 50 is more common among college educated workers, 10 percent of older workers without a college degree are self employed, according to Richard Johnson, labor economist at the Urban Institute in Washington. Again, although the income can be spotty, a big advantage of self employment is flexibility. Consider Joe Anania, who grew up racing and repairing motorcycles in Pittsburgh. When he had a family, he became an airline mechanic for the steady paycheck. He settled in the Twin Cities area, working 21 years as a mechanic for Northwest Airlines (now Delta Air Lines). After a failed strike in 2005, he didn't want to return to Northwest so, reviving his youthful passion, he turned to restoring vintage motorcycles. Now in his late 50s, he plans to stick with the venture for the long haul. "It's nice being your own boss," he says. "I can always back off and take less work." The movement among college educated workers in their 50s and early 60s to leap into new careers rather than give up paid work is gaining momentum. But that's also true for other older Americans. For those 65 to 69 with only a high school diploma, for example, the labor force participation rate for men was 30.3 percent in 2015, an increase from 26.7 percent in 1995. Women's participation rose to 24.2 percent from 17.9 percent in the same period. "It isn't just the best educated people who are extending their work lives," Mr. Johnson said. Studs Terkel, in his oral history of working life, didn't smooth over the struggles of blue collar workers. But he also emphasized the dignity and pride that come from work. "It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor," he wrote in the highly acclaimed book, "Working." Even as hard working bodies wear down, there is much to be said for continuing the search and avoiding torpor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The story of why Joni Mitchell quit piano lessons is also the story of how Joni Mitchell wrote her first song. She was around 7, and the tune was called "Robin Walk" "it was real bouncy," she remembers in a spirited interview with Cameron Crowe for the liner notes of her new archival collection, "Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963 1967)." "I played it for my piano teacher, who slapped me across the wrist with a ruler for playing by ear," Mitchell, now 76, continues. "She said, 'Why would you play by ear when you can have the masters under your fingers?'" The young Joan Anderson retorted, "Well, the masters had to play by ear to come up with that stuff." That was her last piano lesson. She realized, "I didn't have any masters I wanted to follow." When she finally came into her powers, Mitchell would interrogate a question no less ambitious than what it meant to live freely as a human unbound by the demands of tradition and convention whether as a woman seeking sexual and professional equanimity in a man's world; an artist expressing her true self in a trend crazed and increasingly corporate music industry; or a child of nature worried that modernity was taking us too far from the garden. A strident perfectionist and curator of her art, Mitchell has in the past been dismissive of her earliest music, calling it the work of a "competent mimic" and even "a squeaky girl on helium." But revisiting some of these archival recordings and performances made her "forgive" her beginnings, she says in the liner notes. Now, this five disc collection culled from the years before her 1968 debut album, "Song to a Seagull," maps the precise topography of the cliff from which Mitchell leapt and took flight. In the early 1960s, when Joan Anderson was a neatly coifed Canadian art student, the folk revival was in full swing, but most musicians still performed traditional songs, like the ones Harry Smith collected on his influential 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music." In keeping with the times, the first disc finds a 19 year old Mitchell covering old murder ballads ("John Hardy") and Woody Guthrie approved miners' laments ("Dark as a Dungeon"). She didn't yet have her own guitar, so she played a four string baritone ukulele. At the time of the collection's earliest live performance, though, in October 1964, she had a secret: She was pregnant with a friend's child. Free in that way that only men can be, the friend split for California ("hearing that everything was warmer there"); Joni stayed and gave birth alone in the frigid Canadian winter. "So I entered the bad girls' trail," she recalls in the 2003 documentary "Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind." But she has also equated this supposed fallenness with the arrival of her songs, which, after putting her newborn daughter up for adoption, began to pour out of her as a kind of postlapsarian poetry. "I think I started writing to develop my own private world," she says in the film, "and also because I was disturbed." Cultural context emerges in the collection's banter with audiences, D.J.s and interviewers. Even in the mid 60s, singer songwriters (let alone female ones) were still so rare that Shay, and most other commentators, make a point of telling listeners with awe that Mitchell also wrote the songs she's singing. "What shall I call you?" Shay muses to the flaxen haired novelty sitting beside him, in a recording of his Philadelphia radio show "Folklore" included in the collection. "An authoress?" She offers an alternative: "Composer." Too often, mistakenly, artistic maturity is conflated with self seriousness. What marks the evolution of Mitchell's songwriting, though, is the gradual emergence of lightness, fluidity, even bawdy humor. Mitchell rapidly outgrew the stereotype of the forlorn folkie, because in order to fully capture the flickering sensual experience of being alive she knew she needed to express more varied emotions than just despair. So, in early songs like "Dr. Junk" and "What's the Story Mr. Blue," she drew from the fleet footed rhythms and strumming patterns of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, anticipating tempos she'd chase further on "Blue" (1971) and "Court and Spark" (1974). Her vocal stylings had to catch up to the new songs she was composing, too. "I used to be a breathy little soprano," Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1969. "Then one day I found I could sing low. At first I thought I had lost my voice forever. I could either sing a breathy high part or a raspy low part. Then the two came together by themselves. It was uncomfortable for a while, but I worked on it, and now I've got this voice." This purposeful expansion and even de gendering of her vocal range is perhaps the most remarkable transformation across these discs. That "raspy low part" fully emerges on a May 1967 tape Mitchell subtitled "A Record of My Changes." A few months prior, she had ended her brief first marriage to Chuck Mitchell, and with it their relatively anodyne duo Chuck Joni. (He does not appear on any of the material in this collection.) In cultivating a deeper chest voice to complement that airy soprano, Joni suddenly didn't need a man to harmonize with. As a solo artist, the contradictions within herself could now join to sing their own intimate duets. "You know, if you sing it pretty, like a lot of people that cover my songs will sing it pretty, it's going to fall flat," she reflects in the liner notes. "You have to bring more to it than that." A beautiful woman (as she's identified, tirelessly, by industry men in the collection's newspaper clippings and audio snippets) insisting that there was much more to her than just beauty was its own kind of subversion. So over these four years of remarkable artistic growth, we can also hear the thrill of a woman shrugging off the shackles of affably feminine likability and politeness. In the liner notes, she quotes of all spiritual gurus the mantra of Thumper from "Bambi": "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." "That was my philosophy for a long time as a young person," Mitchell adds, "however, I lost Thumper's guidance as I grew older." A thorough but imposing six hours of material, this collection is less about any specific unearthed gem than the larger transformation it charts. The final disc, featuring three consecutive live sets from October 1967, showcases a performer with lifetimes' more wisdom than the happy to be here ingenue of 1963. Its most breathtaking moment comes when she plays an early arrangement of "Little Green," the candid ode to the daughter she'd put up for adoption. (Here, unlike the version that later appeared on "Blue," she sings her daughter's name in a rich, yearning wail: "Kelly green.") Just four years earlier, Mitchell could hardly tell a soul the secrets of her inner world; now, for strangers, she's singing the song of herself with arresting candor. Or maybe, in the vulnerable exchange of these songs she's learned to craft, there's no such thing as a stranger. "I write it with the optimism that people will be able to see themselves in it," she says in the liner notes. "Therefore, we have a common experience. But that's the only way I can justify writing as intimately as I do. I think it's only human, and then other humans will feel this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Cancer is a disease of mutations. Tumor cells are riddled with genetic mutations not found in healthy cells. Scientists estimate that it takes five to 10 key mutations for a healthy cell to become cancerous. Some of these mutations can be caused by assaults from the environment, such as ultraviolet rays and cigarette smoke. Others arise from harmful molecules produced by the cells themselves. In recent years, researchers have begun taking a closer look at these mutations, to try to understand how they arise in healthy cells, and what causes these cells to later erupt into full blown cancer. The research has produced some major surprises. For instance, it turns out that a large portion of the cells in healthy people carry far more mutations than expected, including some mutations thought to be the prime drivers of cancer. These mutations make a cell grow faster than others, raising the question of why full blown cancer isn't far more common. "This is quite a fundamental piece of biology that we were unaware of," said Inigo Martincorena, a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England . These lurking mutations went unnoticed for so long because the tools for examining DNA were too crude. If scientists wanted to sequence the entire genome of tumor cells, they had to gather millions of cells and analyze all of the DNA. A mutation, to be detectable, had to be very common. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. But as DNA sequencing grew more sophisticated, Dr. Martincorena and other researchers developed methods for detecting very rare mutations, and they began to wonder if those mutations might be found in healthy cells, hidden below the radar. Dr. Martincorena and his colleagues began their search in skin; its cells are battered daily by the sun's ultraviolet rays, which trigger mutations. "We thought it was the lowest hanging fruit," Dr. Martincorena said. In a study in 2015, he and his colleagues collected bits of skin left over from cosmetic surgeries to lift drooping eyelids. They examined 234 biopsies from four patients, each sample of skin about the size of a pinhead. They gently coaxed the top layers of cells, known as epithelial cells, from the underlying tissue. Dr. Martincorena's team then fished the DNA from the healthy epithelial cells, and carefully sequenced 74 genes that are known to play an important role in the development of cancer. Mutations that are common in cancer genes were remarkably common in these healthy skin cells, too, the researchers found. About one of every four epithelial cells carried a mutation on a cancer linked gene , speeding up the cell's growth. It was possible, the scientists knew, that skin was peculiar. Maybe inside the body, away from the onslaught of ultraviolet rays, were healthy cells that didn't carry these key mutations. To find out, the researchers decided to study cells of the esophagus. The team gathered tissue samples from nine healthy organ donors who had died, then they sliced the tissue into dozens of tiny squares and examined the same 74 cancer related genes. Dr. Martincorena and his colleagues found that new mutations arose more slowly in the esophagus than in skin. But once those mutations emerged, they caused the esophageal cells to multiply faster than normal esophageal cells. Over time, these rogue cells spread out across the esophagus, forming colonies of mutant cells, known as clones. Although these clones aren't cancer, they do exhibit one of cancer's hallmarks: rapid growth. "These mutant clones colonize more than half of your esophagus by middle age," said Dr. Martincorena. "It was eye opening for me." Dr. Martincorena and his colleagues reported their findings on Thursday in the journal Science. By examining the mutations, the researchers were able to rule out external causes for them, like tobacco smoke or alcohol. Instead, the mutations seem to have arisen through ordinary aging. As the cells divided over and over again, their DNA sometimes was damaged. In other words, the rise of these mutations may just be an intrinsic part of getting older. "It seems that no matter how well one takes care of oneself by eating well, getting exercise and limiting certain vices, there's likely only so much one can do against the need of the body to replace its cells," said Scott Kennedy, a cancer biologist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. The study also raised questions about efforts to detect cancer at its earliest stages, when cancer cells are still rare, Dr. Kennedy said: "Just because someone has mutations associated with cancer doesn't mean actually they have a malignancy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
For the Jose Limon International Dance Festival, now in its second and final week at the Joyce Theater, the Limon Dance Company has invited troupes from across the country and the world to join it in performing the work of its namesake choreographer, who died in 1972. The intention is to show the spread of Limon's legacy, but during Program C on Tuesday, that wasn't the only effect. Members of sjDANCEco, a company founded in San Jose, Calif., by the former Limon dancer Gary Masters, performed "Mazurkas," Limon's 1958 suite of dances to Chopin. They did not perform it very well. Even apart from the wobbles and stumbles, the dancing was tentative and imprecise, only in the general vicinity of the choreography's shapes and rhythms. In the context of the festival, though, this subpar performance functioned as a reminder of how hard it is to get Limon right not just how physically difficult the movements are, but also how much concentration and faith it takes to keep the style from seeming irredeemably antiquated and hokey. The failure of sjDANCEco in this respect set into relief the amazingness of what the Limon Dance Company regularly accomplishes. On Program C, the host troupe had less to work with than on previous programs. "Carlota" was the last piece that Limon made before his death, and it's a weaker version of earlier dramas. It is about the Empress Carlota, whose husband, Maximilian, was the short reigning Hapsburg emperor of Mexico (Limon's home country), until he was executed in 1867. The original dancer in the title role was Carla Maxwell, who has heroically served as the company's artistic director since 1978 and recently announced her plans to retire. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
MILLBURN, N.J. Some shtick refuses to grow moss. It defies reason that Georgia Engel, doing Georgia Engel, should seem so uncommonly fresh in the generally stale new musical "Half Time," which opened this week at Paper Mill Playhouse here. Ms. Engel is portraying a hip hop loving kindergarten teacher in this work of calculated uplift, directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, a specialist in the genre ("Kinky Boots"). And she projects exactly the same persona that made her famous four decades ago when she appeared in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." In that beloved 1970s series, you may recall (especially if you're a member of this production's target age group), Ms. Engel portrayed Georgette, the human equivalent of cotton candy. She was an airy, abstracted, confectionary presence a case for the dangerous notion that innocence is the best defense and you would have thought a little of her would go a long way. Yet here she is, some 40 years later and 69 years old, deploying that same perplexed stare and breathy little girl voice. And she totally lights up the stage, while bringing bright new inflections to song and dance moves inspired by Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur and Run DMC. I hadn't been conscious that I was missing Ms. Engel, but evidently I was. Ms. Engel is one of several legitimate reasons to stay awake during this production, which was inspired by Dori Berinstein's 2008 documentary "Gotta Dance," about a basketball halftime dance team made up of performers over 60. Featuring a book by Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin, with songs by Matthew Sklar and Nell Benjamin, "Half Time" allows you the pleasures of reacquaintance with other vintage talents. They include Lillias White, who won a Tony Award in 1997 as a big voiced, big hearted, blunt spoken prostitute in "The Life," who appealingly shows up here as a big voiced, big hearted, blunt spoken grandma. The septuagenarian Andre De Shields, a two time Tony nominee who never met an audience he wasn't determined to seduce, is on hand to strut his radioactive charisma as a determinedly seductive widower. And, striking a terpsichorean pose before a wall of mirrors why, it's Donna McKechnie, who won a Tony in 1976 for "A Chorus Line." In that benchmark musical, Ms. McKechnie, then in her early 30s, portrayed a once successful dancer who is afraid she's over the hill. Now, at 75, Ms. McKechnie is playing, uh, a once successful dancer who is afraid she's over the hill. Such conscious juxtapositions of past and present might seem unkind. But the cast members who make up this show's central chorus line, all over 60, still do what they once did with grace and style, if less athleticism. Which is, after all, the point of a production that advertises itself as "the new musical about not acting your age." In this case, Tara (a shiny Haven Burton), a former member of the dance team for the (fictitious) New Jersey Cougars, is assigned the task of assembling a publicity garnering novelty act of seniors doing hip hop. The group more accustomed to swing, ballet and the electric slide resist this new style. But it turns out that one of them, the demure Dorothy (Ms. Engel), has a hip hop fluent alter ego named Dottie whose favorite recreation is to toss aside her cane and make like "the white Paula Abdul." Can the others learn what's necessary from Tara and Dottie during a mere three weeks' of rehearsals? Will they be able to do so without tripping over cumbersome sitcom cliches about learning to get along and being honest with themselves? The answer to the first question is well, duh yes. The answer to the second is, perhaps equally predictably, no. The show is structured to evoke sentimental suspense. Many of the main characters who also notably include the diminutive, ever smiling Mae (Lori Tan Chinn) and the fiery Camilla (a vibrant Nancy Ticotin) have (eminently guessable) secrets to be unveiled in spotlighted solos. David Rockwell's gymnasium set is punctuated by regular projections (by Jason Lee Courson) counting down the number of days left before the big public performance. The team members along with several of Tara's young assistants become friends, quarrel, make up and learn and teach life lessons, while singing pleasant, repetitive numbers of aspiration and revelation (including three written for the show by Marvin Hamlisch, who died in 2012). And the pace is somehow that of a meandering snail. Part of this has to do with the dancing, which is a surprise given Mr. Mitchell's status as a crowd pleasing choreographer. In "Half Time" (which was staged in an earlier version in Chicago in 2015), his work lacks the kind of through line that all shows about putting on a show require the sense of an act developing by visible degrees until it takes its thrilling final form. There is one moment when the impeccably put together Joanne (Ms. McKechnie), a doctor's wife who danced on Broadway in her youth, and Tara the coach do a quick point counterpoint of choreographic gestures. It suggests a real dialogue between styles and generations. Yet the exchange is fleeting and never picked up again. And the script's genuinely funny lines are so rare that when they occur you wonder if you haven't misheard. (I did enjoy it when Ms. Ticotin's Camilla snapped before her big salsa style dance number, "You're stereotyping me. I'm always being stereotyped. Hand me my castanets!") The show mostly avoids patronizing its characters with cute oldster humor. (Although my date suggested it might be subtitled "Seniors do the darnedest things.") And I wouldn't have missed Ms. Engel demonstrating the art of the street dance style known as tutting. Her un self conscious conviction, and pure pleasure, cut right through the prevailing slow stream of treacle. She and her enduringly gifted co stars definitely deserve the showcase that "Half Time" gives them. But they also deserve a vehicle as original as their own idiosyncratic talents. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
About 80,000 babies and toddlers die of AIDS each year, mostly in Africa, in part because their medicines come in hard pills or bitter syrups that are very difficult for small children to swallow or keep down. But on Friday, the Indian generic drug manufacturer Cipla announced a new, more palatable pediatric formulation. The new drug, called Quadrimune, comes in strawberry flavored granules the size of grains of sugar that can be mixed with milk or sprinkled on baby cereal. Experts said it could save the live s of thousands of children each y ear. "This is excellent news for all children living with H.I.V.," said Winnie Byanyima, the new executive director of UNAIDS, the United Nations agency in charge of the fight against the disease. "We have been eagerly waiting for child friendly medicines that are easy to use and good to taste." Cipla revolutionized the provision of AIDS drugs for adults almost two decades ago, pricing them at 1 a day. The new pediatric formulation will likewise be priced at 1 a day. The announcement by Cipla and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an offshoot of Doctors Without Borders that supported the development of the drug, was timed to coincide with World AIDS Day, which is Sunday . Despite big advances in the prevention of mother child transmission of H.I.V., about 160,000 children are still born infected each year, according to UNAIDS, mostly in the poorest towns and villages of Africa. Almost half of them die before the age of 2, usually because they have no access to drugs or cannot tolerate them. Quadrimune is still under review by the Food and Drug Administration, and F.D.A. approval almost inevitably leads to rapid certification by the World Health Organization. The company hopes to get a decision by May. Trials in healt hy adults showed that the new formulation gets the drugs into the blood; the four drugs in it were approved in the 1990s and are used in many combinations. A clinical trial in H.I.V. infected infants, run by Epicentre, the research arm of Doctors Without Borders, is now underway in Uganda to prove to African health ministries that children accept the new formulation. Most of the research costs have been paid by UNITAID, a Geneva based organization set up by France, Norway, Brazil and some other countries which imposed special taxes on airline flights that are dedicated to bettering global health . Currently, the most common pediatric drug combination includes a syrup that is 40 percent alcohol, has a bitter metallic taste that lingers for hours and must be transported in cold trucks and then kept in a refrigerator something that many poor rural families do not own. Moreover, each drug must be squirted into a child's mouth with a separate syringe, so a mother must have up to four syringes on hand and clean them for each subsequent use. Children generally have to take the medicines twice a day for the first four years of life. When liquid versions are unavailable, some pills cannot be crushed and mixed in juice; they must be swallowed whole. In contrast, Quadrimune contains four H.I.V. drugs: ritonavir, lopinavir, abacavir and lamivudine. The granules are coated first in a polymer that doesn't melt until it reaches the stomach, and then with sweet, fruity flavoring. Dr. Kogie Naidoo, who heads treatment research at Caprisa, an AIDS treatment and research group based in Durban, South Africa, who was not involved in Quadrimune's development, said the new formulation could solve many problems she and her colleagues encounter while treating children. Cipla, founded in 1935, was the first generic drug company to offer H.I.V. drugs in Africa. In 2001, its chairman, Yusuf K. Hamied, upended the global pharmaceutical industry by offering to supply a three drug cocktail to Doctors Without Borders for 1 a day. At the time, multinational drug companies were charging up to 15,000 for their regimens and refusing to lower prices except in secret negotiations with a few countries and were working to block generic competitors from the market. An estimated 25 million Africans were then infected and thousands were dying every day. (The industry was also suing South Africa's president, Nelson Mandela, over a law he had signed authorizing the government to cancel drug patents and award them to generic makers.) In 2001, Dr. Hamied said he was losing money at the 350 a year price; his break even point was 600, he said, and he offered it to other buyers for that. But he said he acceded to requests from AIDS activists for the 1 a day price to deliver a shock to his Western competitors and because such a nice round figure was likely to make headlines (a gambit he is clearly repeating now). In the decades since, increased generic competition has driven the price of triple therapy in poor countries to below 100 a year. "Over the past 20 years, Cipla has pioneered fixed dose combinations for children and I do believe our Quadrimune could be a winner," Dr. Hamied said in an interview this week. Because all four drugs in the formulation are older and no longer patented, Cipla might eventually offer it in wealthy countries too, he said. But that market is quite small because most pregnant women in the Wes t are tested for H.I.V. and immediately put on antiretroviral drugs, which reduces to near zero the chances that they will infect their babies in the womb, during birth or through breastfeeding. The 1 a day price is for Quadrimune doses appropriate for children of between 20 and 30 pounds, he noted, so the cost for newborns would be even lower. Paradoxically, treating infants with H.I.V. has actually become harder in recent years than it was two decades ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Outside of Alaska, the park is most closely associated with Richard Proenneke, who filmed himself while building his own cabin in 1967 and 1968. The 16 millimeter reels were later turned into the "Alone in the Wilderness" documentaries, which are frequently shown on public television. Though he was the only one who captured his cabin life on film, "there were many cabin builders of that era," Ms. Richotte said. The cabin at Priest Rock "was built to be a home," she said. "It was lived in and loved by the Woodwards for many years." Allen Woodward, a pilot in Anchorage, built the cabin his second at Lake Clark in the mid 1970s. His wife, Marian, started spending summers there with him in 1986. Public use cabins are not Airbnbs. Nobody leaves a tin of granola for you. You bring what you need and pack it out too ; nothing left behind. Tara and I are both avid backcountry cooks, so we brought cookware, stoves and even a collapsible kitchen sink, along with real food, including the ingredients for a shrimp heavy paella and garam masala seasoned chickpeas and tomato. I also brought a backup meal of dehydrated pad thai, in case Alaska's often unpredictable weather delayed our pickup. Tara had two fishing rods and her waders for catch and release fishing. Our Cessna climbed away from the gridded layout of Anchorage and across Cook Inlet, the greenish aqua and silty river waters that feed it bumping up against each other. It was sunny and warm at the start of the 90 minute flight. A short time later, we dipped back into winter as we flew through the pass between the Neacola and Chigmit mountain ranges. The temperature dropped. Snow ruled the landscape. We soon landed in Port Alsworth, which is more a busy hive than tourist destination, though there are several lodges. The town has a year round population of 156. There are no restaurants or shops. On summer days, there's a food truck that sells hamburgers and thick shakes. There's also a new school, a Bible camp and a retreat for wounded veterans run by the evangelist Franklin Graham's organization, Samaritan's Purse. And, of course, Lake Clark National Park's headquarters. Beth Hill, an owner of Tulchina Adventures, a local outfitter, met us by the plane. She offered to hold our bags while we hiked the only maintained trail system in all of Lake Clark. We threw our gear into Ms. Hill's beautiful bumper stickered beater of a truck, grabbed our daypacks and bear spray and went off to explore. Though rated "moderate" in difficulty, the two mile hike to Tanalian Falls had just enough uphill to keep it from feeling like a stroll. White paper birch trees, thin layers of bark peeling off and waving in the breeze, lined the trail. The nonstop call and response of birds was our soundtrack as we descended the last bit of the trail. And then, through the sound of the waterfall growing louder with each step, we heard the blast of a giant whooping noise. A minute later, standing by the waterside, I saw a flash of brownish black fur running toward Tara. I started to yell "bear!" Then I saw the rest of the animal. Not a bear. A Karelian bear dog, its white front legs and bushy wagging tail upending my fright. The swimmers (Did I imagine they were blushing?) gathered their packs and headed off with the pup. Tara and I went back to the trail to climb to the upper falls. We walked out onto the lava rocks for a better view: The frigid glacial water tumbled down 30 feet, sending spray into the air. We each took a spot on a flat area of rock, pulled out our lunches, and listened to the water roar. It was glorious. Just after starting back, another flash of fur. "Bear," Tara said, steadily. There was no fear the black bear was about 50 yards off. We were close enough to see it but far away enough not to be in his way. The bear wanted nothing to do with us. It disappeared into the trees. We hiked back to town to meet Ms. Hill at her place. She loaded our gear, rental kayaks and two other Karelian bear dogs (it turned out the interloper was hers too) into the truck. I sat in the back on the cooler, happy to ride outdoors on the way to the lake, one of the dogs leaning against my legs. After transferring our gear and kayaks (and the dogs) to Ms. Hill's motorboat, we started the eight mile ride to the cabin. On the lake, the mountains, rising up 6,000 feet and stretching along the shoreline, stole all my attention. Tara and Ms. Hill were deep in conversation but, sitting behind them, the wind whipped their words away before I could hear them. The whole day had already been a grand adventure that left me crazy happy, but now my giddiness was going into overdrive. These wild places are why I love Alaska so, and why, after 12 years of trips to Alaska, this Brooklyn born, New Jersey raised, East Coast die hard moved here full time five years ago. The 35 foot tall rock in sight, it was clear where Priest Rock's Anglo name had come from "Looks like a priest's hat," Tara said, helpfully as well as its much older Dena'ina name, Hnitsanghi'iy, which means "the rock that is embedded." Ms. Hill helped us carry some of our gear into the cabin. We made a plan to call her by satellite phone Sunday morning to check that all was well for our Monday pickup, and then she loaded the dogs back into the boat and took off. The cabin didn't just feel like a home; it was a home. While looking through a National Park Service book about the area, I was tickled to see that some of the pieces in the cabin a print of a bathing man surprised by a visit from two bear cubs, a wooden stool with one of its three legs extending out at a sharp angle were original to the place. Outside, there was an old wooden ladder and a weathered hand built handcart with a busted wheel; a clean outhouse (with a fancy toilet paper holder bolted to the wall); an old rowboat, clearly loved and well used, a tiny chip of paint still showing up as bright aqua; and enough wood to feed the stove and fend off any chill for weeks, maybe months. I wanted to stay, to keep the rest of the world at bay. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Nicole Michell Phipps, a soft spoken 21 year old woman in a furry hood who showed up at the Navy recruitment center in Harlem on Tuesday, said she was drawn to the military in search of more "structure" in her life. She was hesitating about signing up for the military because she knew she could be risking her life. At 18, she said, she had not been ready for such a choice. "I would say, yeah, 18, you just come out of high school," Ms. Phipps said. "You're really not sure what to do. I would say 21 is probably the best." The same went for smoking, she said. Voting? "I think 18 is good for that," she said. "It's not causing harm to your body." When New York City officials proposed on Monday to raise the minimum age to legally buy tobacco in the city to 21 from 18 which would make it the highest of any major city in the United States people across the country, commenting on news Web sites, were outraged by a seeming inconsistency. Updating a well traveled argument about minimum drinking ages, they considered it ludicrous that 18 year olds would be able to fight in wars but not buy cigarettes. As it turned out, many of the young people walking into the military recruitment center on 125th Street the next day also saw the inconsistency. In general, they thought that it was true that they were not mature enough to make life or death decisions on their own before 21. That applied not only to smoking and drinking, but also to combat. They saw a dangerous world out there, and they wanted to be protected from it as long as they could be. If it were up to them, they said, no one could fight in a war until 21. And if the city wanted to act in loco parentis on something as bad as smoking, well then, that seemed right to them, too. Patrick Brown, a lanky 21 year old with braces on his teeth, said that just three years ago, he would never have enlisted on his own. It would have to be "50 50" with his mother, and even now, he said, he had consulted her, and felt better knowing that "she was O.K. with it." Eighteen, Mr. Brown said, is too young to fight and die for your country. Is it too young to smoke? "If the parent condones it, then I guess it's acceptable," Mr. Brown, a nonsmoker, said. Ms. Phipps said she had once tried cigarettes but did not like them. Every decision is like a life lesson, Ms. Phipps said. "At 18, you are supposed to make bad decisions." Brain experts say that Ms. Phipps is right, that the teenage brain is different. "The executive function, the portion of the brain which is capable of making certain types of decisions, is really not fully developed until actually over 21," said Cheryl G. Healton, dean of Global Public Health at New York University, and a supporter of the higher age minimum. "If you're old enough to serve your country, then you're old enough to make your own decisions on what you do to your body," he said while outside a Veterans Affairs center in Lower Manhattan. But a few moments later, he began to rethink his position. "It could help a lot of people out," noting that a week ago he buried his 60 year old father, a heavy smoker who died from throat cancer. But Mr. Gonzalez added that for anyone under 21 who is serving in the military, "there should be exceptions" to the law. At the Harlem recruitment center, Dana Farmer Jr., 24, said he thought that 18 year olds were not mature enough to make decisions about war or smoking, but also that raising the age to buy cigarettes would not stop them from smoking if they wanted to. He said he hoped to play tenor sax in the Navy band as a strategy to avoid being shot at in Afghanistan. He was considering signing up so he could pay off his college loans faster than if he continued to work for low wages at Duane Reade, but he knew he was potentially endangering his life. "You've got to take the good with the bad," he said. At 18, was he mature enough to figure that out? He answered instantly: "No, no, no." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In America, if you are black and aim higher than the reach history has set for you, the white gaze will try to leech your spirit of its racial identity. Very often, it will succeed. Such is the case with the fashion fixture and former Vogue editor at large Andre Leon Talley, whose memoir, "The Chiffon Trenches," is at once a summing up of his decades long career and a pointed commentary on how whiteness works. Talley grew up in Durham, N.C., raised by his grandmother while his parents pursued careers in Washington, D.C. His childhood consisted of school, church, cousins and Talley's favorite place, the library, where he discovered Vogue. Although he writes about having dreamed of meeting Pat Cleveland (one of the first black models he saw in the pages of Vogue), it was the magazine's depiction of Truman Capote's Black and White Ball a refined world where "bad things never happened" that appealed to Talley most. After watching the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Talley became obsessed with Jackie. "I created my fantasy world through Jackie Kennedy," he writes. "A hefty diet of fashion glossies and fashion supplements taught me everything I needed to know." Among those lessons was how to be a Francophile, an identity Talley embraced, majoring in French studies at North Carolina Central University before earning a scholarship to Brown University, where he would receive his master's and begin pursuing a doctorate. Talley planned to become a French teacher, but his personal style and Kabuki makeup caught the attention of two affluent white students who brought Talley to his first fashion show. There, he met the legendary editor Carrie Donovan, who told him that New York City was the only place to be if he wanted to work in the field. He abandoned his studies, packed his most precious items "My navy coat, two pairs of velvet Rive Gauche trousers, two silk Rive Gauche shirts, and my first bespoke black silk faille smoking shoes" and made his way to the Big Apple. Thanks to a letter of introduction from a friend's father, Talley landed an apprenticeship with the former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. He writes: "She must have loved the idea of my presence, the combination of my looks, tall and honey colored; my impeccable manners and grooming; and my blossoming unorthodox style. Plus my master's degree!" 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. Talley is not exactly honey colored, but choosing a euphemistic description for the color of black skin has long been a way to make blackness less black to white people. Still, it's the bit about his master's degree that's most soul crushing the Studio 54 version of W. E. B. Du Bois's black double consciousness: Let me in! I'm not black, I'm honey colored! And I'm articulate and clean and educated! Talley climbs the ranks of the magazine elite, spending three years as a writer for Women's Wear Daily before being promoted to its Paris correspondent, launching himself into a dichotomous volley between self erasure and performative pride. "I had arrived in a place where I was accepted and where I now belonged," Talley writes. "My blackness was not important. What was important was that I was smart." And then, a few paragraphs later: "I was always seated on the front row at the couture and ready to wear catwalk shows, the only black man among a sea of white titans of style." Can his blackness simultaneously be unimportant, and also allow him to stand out among white titans? When Talley is accused of stealing sketches from Yves Saint Laurent and giving them to Givenchy, he writes, "A black man is always getting accused of doing something egregious." But then he turns around and asserts: "I knew my very being was shocking to some people. That I was black, sure, but also that I was so tall and thin, that I spoke French meticulously" as if being black were secondary to his physique and aplomb with a foreign language. Paloma Picasso, Talley's "friend" there are many "friends" in "The Chiffon Trenches" discloses that the Yves Saint Laurent publicist Clara Saint had been "going around all of Paris" calling him "Queen Kong"; and later a white male editor publicly humiliates Talley, accusing him of sleeping around with designers ("insinuating I was just a big black buck"). Both are hurtful to Talley, particularly the comparison to an ape: "It dehumanizes us, implies that we are less than human beings." And yet, Talley doesn't directly challenge anyone about the racism. His time working at Ebony magazine gets a single chapter, revealing little about what it was like to be embraced by black industry insiders who were proving to be as important in the fashion world as their white counterparts. Meanwhile, Talley cultivates a relationship with the celebrated creative director Karl Lagerfeld, and is ushered back into the white, Eurocentric fashion world as a front row guest at the German designer's debut Chanel show: "This was the apex for me. I was lucky to be a friend of Karl Lagerfeld. The color of my skin ... mattered not." By the time we arrive at the point where Talley admits, "I'm not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman," he has already belittled himself in about 50 different ways. Throughout his career, Talley relies on Lagerfeld and other wealthy white patrons to maintain the lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed (his insistence on the latest Louis Vuitton luggage is a theme). There are people he called "friends" who made racist remarks about him behind his back; who cut him out of their social circles without reason; who thought nothing of taking him off important guest lists. There are people for whom he was their first or only black friend, who staged an intervention with Talley about his weight but remained silent when he was the object of cruelty. Talley is twice relegated to purse holder: first for Paloma Picasso, then for the longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour, with whom Talley had a notoriously fraught relationship. The sordid details of their association are no doubt the reason most people will read his book but, while they manage to be both heartbreaking and devoid of emotion, and are perhaps compelling in a Freudian context, these nuggets are the least interesting aspect of Talley's story. For all its name dropping, backstabbing, outsize egos, vivid description and use of words like "bespoke" and "sang froid," "The Chiffon Trenches" is less about the fashion elite than it is about a black boy from the rural South who got swallowed whole by the white gaze and was spit out as a too large black man when he no longer fit the narrative. But the white gaze has done its work, and Talley's disconnect to blackness his own and others' is palpable. As in the introduction, where he writes about "great strides" for black folks in fashion, his mention of efforts by the black former model Bethann Hardison to diversify the industry feels hollow. "People forget to think about diversity," Talley writes, "but they forget less when there are people in place who put them in the moment where they must really think about it. A moment of awareness of black culture." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Treatment guidelines suggest that nearly half of those over age 40 nearly 50 million people in the United States at least consider a cholesterol lowering statin to reduce heart attack risk. But a new large study of people who had an inexpensive heart scan found that half of those who were statin candidates had no signs of plaque in their heart and very little chance of having a heart attack in the next decade. Some cardiologists say the results could go a long way toward helping patients make a more informed choice about whether to begin taking the drugs. The test is a CT scan that looks for calcium in coronary arteries, a signal that plaque is present. It used to be expensive about 500 but now typically costs between 75 and 100. Still, it is generally not covered by insurance and so is not often used to assess risk. The X ray dose is about that of a mammogram. Advocates for the scan say it should be used to "de risk" people. It can let those who do not want to take statins know whether their chance of a heart attack is actually extremely low. "Maybe this is a tool to actually do less," said Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a Yale cardiologist and senior author of the paper, published on Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. For those who have no objections to taking statins, there is no need for a heart scan, Dr. Krumholz said. But for those who are reluctant to take them, he said, "I am willing to use this to refine their risk estimate." Others say the test can lead to an array of other medical problems, some of which are gravely serious. Heart researchers have long known that plaques in coronary arteries start out as pimplelike bumps but get waxy and hard and filled with calcium as time passes. Calcium shows up as white flecks in CT scans. The hard plaques are not the dangerous ones it is the softer ones that rupture and cause a heart attack. But the amount of calcium in arteries can give a good idea of the presence or extent of coronary artery disease. Dr. Krumholz and Dr. Khurram Nasir, a preventive cardiologist at Baptist Health South Florida, who conceived the new study, reasoned that research on heart scans had not been designed to help doctors make treatment decisions they face today. Current guidelines have vastly increased the number of people who are eligible to take statins. Many people, though, are reluctant to take them. So, the investigators asked, could a scan identify those whose actual risk is lower than what was calculated? The study subjects were nearly 4,000 men and women ages 45 to 84 and included blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians who were recruited in 2000 through 2002. According to today's guidelines, half had risk scores high enough that a statin would be recommended or should be considered. But guidelines then were more conservative, and in accordance with them, the subjects did not take the drugs. All had heart scans, and half had no calcium visible on the scans. The subjects were followed for 10 years. It turned out that the actual incidence of heart attacks or disabling chest pain in those with zero calcium was half or less than what the risk calculator predicted. For example, a person who, according to the current risk calculator, has a 12 percent risk of a heart attack in the next decade should take a statin, the guidelines say. But if that person has a calcium score of zero, the actual risk turned out to be 4 percent, below the 7.5 percent threshold for recommending a statin according to the guidelines and below the 5 percent risk for considering a statin. Dr. Nasir said he has been using the study's findings in his clinic. First, he asks patients for whom statins are recommended according to the current guidelines if they would want to avoid taking the drugs if they turn out to have a calcium score of zero and an actual risk of less than 5 percent. Most tell him that they would. He then sends them for a scan. But the study was observational, not the highest level of evidence. The problem, critics say, is that there has never been a rigorous study randomly assigning people to a change in treatment based on a scan and demonstrating that the change improves outcomes. Dr. Libby of Harvard, for one, is leery. Although very few heart attacks may have occurred over a decade in people with no calcium, he said non calcified plaques may be developing that could cause trouble. And the time span for worrying about a heart attack is more than a decade, he said. One problem with the scans is what doctors call incidentalomas unexpected incidental findings, like lung nodules. The new study reported such findings in 5 percent of patients, but radiologists have reported incidences in the double digits. All too often these findings start patients on a diagnostic odyssey, getting tests and biopsies, sometimes exploratory surgery, only to find that there was nothing wrong. Routine heart scans of tens of thousands of people would uncover a "not negligible" number of incidentalomas, Dr. Libby said. Then there will be the people, with no symptoms of heart disease, who turn out to have a high calcium score. Dr. Libby explains what often happens next: The doctor suggests an angiogram, an X ray of the arteries. It shows one of the arteries is 70 percent blocked. The cardiologist inserts a stent, a wire cage to keep the artery open, although many researchers doubt stents will prevent heart attacks in symptomless people on today's medical therapy. Now the patient, with the newly inserted stent, has to take a powerful anti clotting drug and aspirin for at least the next year. Because the drugs make bleeding more likely, the patient notices blood in his stool. Before he can have a colonoscopy to check on the blood, he has to stop the anti clotting drugs for a week. But without them he risks getting a clot at the site of the stent and having what could be a fatal heart attack. "Now we have taken a healthy person, asymptomatic, and turned him or her into a patient," Dr. Libby said. But others, like Dr. Daniel Soffer, a general internist at the University of Pennsylvania, see a real benefit in using heart scans to de risk patients. "All the other biomarkers get blown away compared to the calcium score," he said, adding that it is "far and away the best marker of risk." The new study justifies, to him, a practice he began years ago of using scans with the belief that they could be better than a risk calculator for some patients. One of his patients, Rena H. Barnett, 65, had a scan a decade ago. Her mother died of a heart attack, and Mrs. Barnett knew her level of LDL cholesterol, the bad kind, was very high at 190. But she said statins and other cholesterol lowering drugs made her depressed and made her muscles ache so much she could not get out of bed in the morning. She tried lowering her LDL level by becoming a vegetarian, but it did not budge. Relaxation with yoga did not help. But when Mrs. Barnett had a heart scan, she learned that her calcium score was zero. Five years later she had another scan. Zero again. For now, Mrs. Barnett is not taking anything to lower her cholesterol levels. "It's not that I feel good about it. It would be nice to have it lower," she said. But her anxiety has lifted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Like most large events, fan conventions including San Diego Comic Con, WonderCon and Dragon Con, have shifted gears this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Some have been postponed or canceled; others have moved their programming online. While the panels and screenings that take place at these conventions can easily be streamed from one's home, the meet and greets and spontaneous connections made at the events have been harder to translate to a virtual environment. That includes interactions between attendees and retailers. The artist alley is a hallmark of fan conventions, populated by people selling illustrations, paintings, patches, pins, figurines, comics and other goods that reference popular franchises. Most of those indie artists make the majority of their yearly sales at these events. And this year, all of them are feeling the crunch. "It's been tough! From a business perspective, conventions represent a significant portion of our income stream, so it has made me feel less secure generally," Karen Hallion, 47, wrote in an email this week. She is a freelance illustrator and has produced work for entertainment clients including Marvel and Disney. She started a Patreon in 2015 to support her personal work, which includes character mash ups ("Doctor Who" meets "Finding Nemo," for example) and a forthcoming children's book. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Clockwise from top left: Lawrence Agyei for The New York Times; Idris Solomon for The New York Times; Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times; Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune, via Getty Images Clockwise from top left: Lawrence Agyei for The New York Times; Idris Solomon for The New York Times; Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times; Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune, via Getty Images Credit... Clockwise from top left: Lawrence Agyei for The New York Times; Idris Solomon for The New York Times; Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times; Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune, via Getty Images I hear so often from white men in the theater, "Oh, we don't know what to do because all of the black people get the opportunities." But you have only to look at the numbers. And it's shocking. Every second of every moment of my career is touched by some degree of a kind of racism that is just pervasive in the landscape of America. This moment, where the world is blowing up, comes out of a pent up frustration about the way we as people of color have been navigating the world. It is frustrating to me and, I will presumptuously say, most other African Americans or people of color in my industry. I could list off some anecdotal "this thing happened and that thing happened." I will say that I feel it around marketing. I feel it around reviews. I feel it around opportunities. For years it's a little bit less, because I've asked my agent to address this but for years, it was a given that if I was produced, it would be in the company's smaller theater. It's every production at every institution with an acknowledgment that even within those institutions, I have been supported and nurtured and given an artistic home. Because that's the expletive of racism in our country. The people that you're working with love you, often. And you love them, often. And the country is entrenched in institutional, societal racism. Oh my God, I'll say this and then never have another Broadway production. But I think this is the time to speak truth. Everywhere there's this racism and a lack of opportunity, and we know that the Great White Way is even more so. It's a world that has been run by white men, and it's a world that has high, high stakes. The higher the economic opportunities in our country, the more black people are denied access. Period. You look at our Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights who are African American, and you look at our genius grant winning playwrights who are African American, and then you measure how many people who have those kinds of accolades have access to venues on Broadway who are white versus who are black. You look at the people with those credentials and how many regional theater shows they have had, main stage shows, next to their peers. And it's tangible. On the first day of a rehearsal, the whole theater company comes into the room and you do the meet and greet, and then you read the play. Always those rooms are at least 98 percent white people. The institutions aren't diverse in any way. The theater world is made up of really smart people. You figured out how to make people buy seats at between 150 to 500. You can figure out how to not be racist. But there's not a real investment in it. There just isn't. And that's how our country has functioned. We talk a good game about it. All of the institutions are writing letters about how they stand in solidarity. But until you show me institutional change, I don't want to hear it. I wrote a play called "Smart People." It was at Second Stage, Off Broadway. At the heart of it was this idea that if white leaders of institutions, and white people in general, could just acknowledge the depths of their embracing a kind of white supremacy that allows them to allow institutions to be not inclusive and not equitable, maybe we could fix it. When producers and regional theaters don't look at you as a whole individual, and only interested in what you can bring to the racial conversation, I think that's a form of racism as well. And to me, it's a form of racism when you don't give black people, and people of color, an opportunity to write about the work that's created. We need to work harder for diversity in terms of who is writing about what's onstage. I have a radical optimism, built in my heart, that says right is going to win, and we are going to get there. I'm not giving up on regional theater, I'm not giving up on Off Broadway theater, I'm not giving up on Broadway theater, I'm not giving up on America and I'm not giving up on our world. But I think it's going to take listening. It's going to take all of us. What do I think our world should look like? We're storytellers, so I think this is a great opportunity for artists to build that vision. All I can do is go by the plays that a lot of artists have been doing over the years the Katori Halls of the world, the Jocelyn Biohs of the world, the Tarell McCraneys of the world, the Jeremy O. Harrises of the world. My world is shaped by the hopes and dreams of those plays. I definitely see a world where we don't have the knees of the people that are supposed to protect us on our necks, suffocating the life out of us. Kenny Leon, a 64 year old director, served as the artistic director of two Atlanta nonprofits, the Alliance Theater, which is one of the nation's leading regional theaters, and True Colors Theater Company, which he founded to celebrate black storytelling. He has directed 11 productions on Broadway; the most recent was this year's revival of "A Soldier's Play," and in 2014 he won a Tony Award for a revival of "A Raisin in the Sun." 'Black artists who have been wounded: Come on home.' I'm really interested in how Penumbra can lend the tools of our practice to help solve some of those inequities in really meaningful partnerships with people on the front lines of that work. That's the work I'll be commissioning, that's the equity work we'll be doing. That's how we'll serve the community. I come from a tradition of making art by, for and about black folks, and certainly everyone's welcome. I was given an opportunity to be loved and to be trusted and to try and test and fail and given cover in a way that I think a lot of other people haven't. But right now, we're seeing artists of color who have been proximate to white led theaters start to organize. I haven't grown up proximate to that whiteness and white power and that leveraging of money, so I haven't experienced the kind of abuse that these brilliant artists have had in white theaters. And there is a tension, a generative tension, I think, between folks who are kind of embedded within and caring for legacy institutions and those working as free agents. Some of those folks have even been required to be gatekeepers, to keep other people of color out. And when you start to realize that you've been used in that way, or required to perform that role, that's a deep wound. Our activist mothers and fathers warned us about this tactic. Larry Neal, in one of his early essays, said "The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community." I differentiate between black theater and plays with black people in them. Black theater always has a social justice imperative and community uplift embedded in it, whereas plays with black people in them might actually be injurious or do harm to the black community. If white institutions would be willing to take up the work to involve, educate and activate white audiences, that would go a long way in helping us move forward. Activate your white audiences to talk about whiteness. Say, "We are going to roll up our sleeves, and we're going to work with our white folks to support racial equity, to fight white supremacy and anti blackness." That would be tremendously powerful. Whether or not they're willing to do that work, I don't know, because it's hard. In the same way, a legacy black institution like Penumbra Theater is going to lean in hard to attend to the black community and support people of color. There's a role for everybody in the movement. The most profound thing that we can practice right now is discernment to be patient, wherever we sit, whether we're an artistic director, a playwright, a producer, whether you're white or black or whether you're emerging or at the pinnacle of your career. Using discernment to figure out exactly what your most potent role can be. And not getting distracted by the shiny things that might get flashed in front of you. Sarah Bellamy is the artistic director of Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of only three professional African American theaters in the nation to offer a full season of performances. It was founded by her father, Lou Bellamy, in 1976; since taking over as artistic director in 2017, Bellamy, 42, has produced "For Colored Girls," "This Bitter Earth" and most recently, "The White Card." 'How do we right this wrong? We come to the table with demands.' When we talk about the Great White Way, there is one thing we can never separate from it, and that is the American dollar. The Great White Way is a commercial business. I get it, money must be made. But for so long this business has put forward the message that with black and P.O.C. producers, writers, directors, choreographers, stage managers, and actors, money can't be made. That is simply false. That is simply racist. That is not taking a chance on the power of collaboration. How many white artists are given the chance to try and fail, over and over again, before becoming critical successes? Yet for blacks and P.O.C. it's a one and done deal?! That is unfair. Furthermore, if you so strongly believe that black and P.O.C. artists don't possess the necessary skills, then provide the space to teach us. I am interested in producing. Invite me in, so I can learn; then give me a chance to execute, without the pressure of having to soar above and beyond the first time. Because the truth of the matter is, you are just looking for any excuse to take me down. Lastly, I would love to see more care. That may sound simple and trite, but it's a basic human decency often passed over. I need you to take care in the way you choose to speak to me. I need you to take care in the construction of the sentences you choose to say to me. A white person of power once gave me a note at intermission of a performance about a song I sang, in a moment where the character knows he is singing, with a little more passion, and they said, "You're not in 'The Color Purple'!" There was no care given in the choice to say those words to me. I also need you to take care in your actions. That can be as simple as greeting me when you see me for the first time that day; or not as simple as considering for yourself, if asking a black man to steal an item onstage from a store is really pushing forward the appropriate narrative, before handing me this new addition to the story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE A Memoir By Casey Gerald 386 pp. Riverhead Books. 27. There we were, about a thousand people gathered at the 2016 TED conference, waiting for the very last speaker of a weeklong lineup of exceptional humans. The session's host announced that the speaker would be Casey Gerald, who swaggered onto the stage, an athletically built, baldheaded and clean shaven black man dressed in all black. Gerald stood, backdropped by velvet curtains, waited for the applause to quiet, and then began sharing an anecdote about the time when, on New Year's Eve 1999, he sat in a church with his grandmother and her congregation, fearing that when the clock struck midnight, the rapture would commence. Gerald went on to share stories from a journey that began when he was a boy in a blighted Dallas neighborhood and spanned up to his role as the cynosure of a room comprising no small number of the 1 percent. Near the end of his talk, Gerald announced the disbandment of MBAs Across America, an organization he co founded to connect business students with entrepreneurs around the country. He also proclaimed that he was shirking the role of savior that had been foisted upon him, "because our time is too short and our odds are too long to wait for second comings, when the truth is, that there will be no miracles here." Gerald's magnificent memoir, "There Will Be No Miracles Here," opens with the same anecdote that began his TED talk, though in the book, he punctuates the retelling by announcing a kind of thesis. "Mine, then, is the story of a peasant boy...and, with luck, God and His miracles or lack thereof," he writes. Indeed, in just over three decades, what a phenomenal life the self proclaimed peasant boy has lived. He spent his early childhood in Ohio, where his father had been a football star at Ohio State University. When Gerald was 8 years old, his father moved the family, which includes his older sister and mother, back to their hometown the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas. Back home, Gerald's father began working for his father, who is, as Gerald puts it, involved in "the greatest business in America: the business of saving souls." The successes of Gerald's grandfather proved enough to turn Gerald's father into his "supplicant." Meanwhile, Gerald's mother, whom he describes as a woman of curious habits, stayed at home applying makeup for a fair amount of the day. We learn early on that she suffered from manic depression and bipolar disorder, that his father developed a drug habit, one that landed him in prison, and that his older sister assumed the role of his caretaker. Gerald's mother disappeared later, leaving him to wonder for years whether she had died. 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. Around this time, Gerald started to explore his sexual identity with the help of a new thing called the internet. He did it in secret, since, as he puts it, "I was in the early stages of crafting a new life, or a new story, in the image of perfection." He also began playing sports, although his athletic success wasn't immediate. In a hilarious passage, he describes a youth football game where the defense kept blocking his end zone attempts right around the line of scrimmage. "Goddamn it, son!" his coach said. "Listen to me. You're embarrassing yourself. You're embarrassing your family. Get your ass low, keep your eyes open, and run for your life!" Gerald lived an itinerant existence in high school until his sister, who had briefly escaped to college, returned to Dallas and insisted the two live together. They scraped by until Gerald came up with a scheme to supplement his sister's meager income by cashing the disability checks of their missing mother. After a year of this, the siblings discovered the account had been shut down, a fact that ended their hustle but also suggested their missing mother was alive. His sister located her in St. Louis, and they drove to pick her up. While all of this domestic chaos was going on, Gerald evolved into a celebrated scholar athlete, one recruited by the Yale University football team. And though he hadn't heard of Yale before that recruitment, he decided to attend the school in the belief that his acceptance had transmuted him into a symbol, into the great pride of his school, town, people. It didn't take long after he arrived at Yale for Gerald to divine the ethos of the students and, in particular, the apparent class divide among the black students, who were invested, he writes, "in the distinction between their kind and mine." He couldn't shake his feeling of alienation from people he imagined would help him: "The more time I spent in their midst, the more I became convinced that they were the problem not any individual boy or girl or mother or father but the ideas that they represented, of a class apart, and all the trappings that came with it: the mixer, the galas, the networking reception, the panels to discuss blackness in theory when actual blackness was having one hell of a hard time right down the street when I was having a hard time." Fueled in part by an intent to surpass Yale's black bourgeoisie, he and a few friends established the Yale Black Men's Union. He later joined Wolf's Head, one of the college's oldest and most esteemed secret societies. Meanwhile, his football cohort matured from a crew of bench warmers into starters on some of the best teams in Yale history. Gerald became not only a team star but a finalist for the Draddy Trophy, which honors the nation's top scholar athlete, as well as a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. One of the book's most engrossing moments involves the crisis of having his Rhodes interview scheduled on the same day as the Yale Harvard game. At times Gerald moves too quickly to the next scene or idea, when he might have benefited from a more sustained explanation of his thinking. On the other hand, he just might have crafted a consummate 21st century memoir for readers whose brains have been rewired by Google, their attention always under siege. Gerald also pushes stylistic conventions, with short passages where he writes about himself in the third person or directly addresses the reader. He includes metanarratives as well as letters, emails and speeches. And ever present is the enchantment of his voice, one that is at turns exuberant, humorous, unsentimental, imaginative, keen. While Gerald's style is engaging, the locus of the book is his extraordinary journey. Though the chronology is a little unclear regarding the end of his time at Yale and beyond, his odyssey includes tenures in Massachusetts, New York, Washington, D.C., and back home in Texas. It leads him to Lehman Brothers right before their 2008 collapse, then to one of Washington's most influential think tanks, then to Harvard Business School, where he and a few peers founded MBAs Across America. Along the way, he learns plenty about his country, the elites who run it and the underclass subject to their rule. He often relays his insight with indelible aphorism. For instance, he writes that America is "ruled on the surface by people with authority, ruled in fact by people with power people, often, in the shadows." A few years before Gerald suffered the terror of believing he'd been left behind in the rapture, his fifth grade teacher assigned him to write a speech titled "I'm the Mayor Now and This Is My New Plan." Gerald explains that since he was unsure whether he had to deliver the speech from memory, he "assumed the worst." He enlists some of his sister's friends to help him brainstorm and writes the speech from his notes. The next day, he recites it in class without botching a single word. He's insouciant about the deed but his teacher screeches her astonishment. "One night, in slavish fear, I got my homework so wrong that it was perfect," he writes about the experience. Gerald might have once seen himself as a peasant boy, and maybe deep down still does. But his life, and this memoir, serve as proof of his prodigious talents, of the truth that, for the gifted like him, struggles that range from a serious hardship to a little mistake can yield something miraculous. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In his first speech as president of the United States, Donald J. Trump declared, "From this day forward, it is going to be only America first, America first." If you had taken his words at face value, you might have expected that big American companies that make nearly all of their money in the United States would flourish in a new, America First environment. But that's not the way it has turned out, at least not in the stock market so far. Shares of American companies that make nearly all of their sales domestically have lagged behind those that generate most of their revenue outside American borders. In fact, those globalized companies I'll call them International First companies have outperformed America First companies by a wide margin. Paul Hickey, a founder of Bespoke Investment Group, an independent market research firm, ran the numbers at my request. He found that 113 companies in the Standard Poor's 500 stock index make at least 50 percent of their sales outside the United States. Their fortunes depend, to a large extent, on the rest of the world's economic trends. It's also relevant that many of these companies, like Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Pfizer, General Electric and Exxon Mobil, have stashed billions of dollars overseas. They stand to receive a windfall under proposed Trump administration tax policies that would allow them to repatriate that money at a very low rate, perhaps 10 percent, compared with the current statutory federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent. That potential bonanza, in itself, gives them a boost in the stock market. By contrast, the America First category contains 161 S. .P. 500 companies that make at least 90 percent of their sales within the United States. The group includes retailers like Macy's, Nordstrom and Target, railroads like CSX and Norfolk Southern, and regional natural gas and petroleum companies like Southwestern Energy, Range Resources and Pioneer Natural. All of their fortunes are determined mainly by events and policies within the United States. While each stock has its own story, Mr. Hickey said he found a clear pattern in the overall data. From the presidential election on Nov. 8 through this past Tuesday, he said, shares in the International First group gained an average 13.56 percent, compared with only 8.15 percent for the America First shares, for a spread of 5.41 percentage points. That's a substantial gap for a roughly six month period. And it would be even larger if Mr. Hickey had used asset weighted and not equal weighted performance numbers in his calculations, because the International First group is salted with gigantic companies like Apple, Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft. Their enormous market capitalizations Apple's is more than 800 billion have an outsize impact on asset weighted indexes like the S. .P. 500. Why have the internationally oriented companies outperformed the domestically focused ones? Several factors explain the discrepancy. First, the initial wild enthusiasm in financial markets for Trump policies faded. "There was a lot of optimism by people in the markets about America First policies right after the election," Mr. Hickey said, "but in 2017 in actual terms, that has been completely flipped." Soon after the election, when the Trump rally in the overall stock market had the most momentum, the America First companies did outperform the International First group. The markets may then have been reacting to Mr. Trump's publicly stated views, which he summarized in his inaugural address this way: "Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our product, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs." American companies with little foreign exposure maintained an advantage in the stock market until mid March, when the tables turned and the International First group pulled ahead. As I wrote in March, it wasn't just the stock market that changed course: The shift started in the currency markets. The dollar, which had soared on Mr. Trump's surprise election victory, began to weaken against other currencies, particularly the Mexican peso. More precisely, measured against a basket of currencies, the dollar peaked in strength on Jan. 3 with a 6.53 percent gain since the election and then began to plummet. On Thursday, the dollar was still stronger than it had been on Election Day, but by less than 1 percent. Some of that decline may have been simple mean reversion, a tendency of markets to return to an average level after a big move. But there was more to it than that. While the Trump administration's effort to crack down on unauthorized immigrants has been real enough Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests jumped by nearly 40 percent in Mr. Trump's first 100 days the administration has not done much to alter international trade patterns. That may still happen. On Thursday, it notified Congress that it intends to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). But the parameters of that renegotiation have narrowed sharply, perhaps in response to substantial resistance to many of Mr. Trump's policies by companies that have prospered under Nafta. Jeffrey Immelt, the General Electric chief executive, for example, has urged the president to avoid protectionism, and said on May 12 in Mexico that his company is "very supportive" of Nafta. What's more, Mr. Trump has moderated his position on China, reaching new trade agreements that may increase, rather than hamper, bilateral trade. That could improve the prospects for globalized American companies. And Mr. Trump decided to send a delegation to Beijing for China's economic conference on its new Silk Road plan, known as the Belt and Road initiative. That, too, could lead to more business for internationally minded American capitalists. The International First companies have also been helped by signs of economic improvement in Europe and strong performance in foreign stock markets, many of which have been outperforming the American stock market in both local currency and in dollar terms. In short, American companies with heavy exposure to foreign markets have gotten some international tailwinds. Domestic problems Mr. Trump's political struggles, and Congress's inability to enact major legislation may have led the stock market to ignore the Trump agenda. That helps globalized companies. "You don't hear much about America First policies these days," Mr. Hickey said. "But it's becoming clear that even if you don't get thorough tax policy reform done or a big infrastructure stimulus program done, the stock market isn't falling apart. Instead, the stocks that are leading the market now are not America First plays, they are international plays companies geared toward international exposure that benefit from a weaker dollar and better growth overseas." Then there is the tax question. Despite the political turmoil in Washington, tax cuts and a possible windfall for the International First companies remain on the table. The administration still aims at repatriating at least some of the 2 trillion in stranded overseas corporate cash and ending the taxation of newly minted corporate profits earned abroad. Market analysts are already calculating the potential benefits to companies with substantial foreign earnings and big cash hoards, like Apple. Put all of that together, and you get a recipe for a rally in International First companies. America First may be the administration's slogan, but for the most part, the stock market has been ignoring it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. We think of Covid 19 as killing primarily the elderly around the world, but in poor countries it is more cataclysmic than that. It is killing children through malnutrition. It is leading more people to die from tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS. It is forcing girls out of school and into child marriages. It is causing women to die in childbirth. It is setting back efforts to eradicate polio, fight malaria and reduce female genital mutilation. It is leading to lapses in vitamin A distribution that will cause more children to suffer blindness and die. The U.N. Population Fund warns that Covid 19 may lead to an additional 13 million child marriages around the world and to some 47 million women being unable to get access to modern contraception. In short, a pandemic of disease, illiteracy and extreme poverty is following on the heels of this coronavirus pandemic and it is hitting children hardest. The greatest impact of Covid 19 may be not on those whom the virus directly infects, but on those shattered by the collapse of economies and health and education systems in developing countries. Many schools and clinics are closed, medicines for AIDS and other ailments are sometimes unavailable, and campaigns against malaria and genital mutilation are often suspended. "The indirect impact of Covid 19 in the Global South will be even greater than the direct impact," Dr. Muhammad Musa, executive director of BRAC International, an outstanding Bangladesh based nonprofit, told me. "The direct impact, as tragic as it is, affects those infected and their families. The indirect impact has economic and social consequences for vastly more people with jobs lost, families hungry, domestic violence up, more children leaving school, and costs over generations." In this sense, many of those whom Covid 19 kills never actually get the disease. Instead, they are children who die of measles because they couldn't get vaccinated in a time of plague up to 80 million children may miss vaccinations. Or they die of malnutrition because their fathers lost jobs as rickshaw drivers or their mothers couldn't sell vegetables in the market. As is often the case in economic crises, the burden falls particularly on girls. More are being married off as children so that the new husband's family will feed them, or they are sent off to the city to work as maids in exchange for food and negligible incomes while facing an end to education and significant risk of abuse. "The major challenge being faced by students is hunger," said Angeline Murimirwa, executive director for Africa of Camfed International, which supports girls' education in developing countries. More than 60 percent of Camfed's students in Malawi report suffering a lack of food. Before this crisis, 4 percent of girls in Zimbabwe married by 14. That figure may now worsen. Years ago I heard of a wrenching query from a bright and ambitious Kenyan girl: Should she drop out of school and give up her dreams, or should she accept a sexual relationship with a man who would then pay for her education but who she feared had H.I.V.? More girls will now face such impossible choices. The crisis is driven by lockdowns and economic collapse, coupled with plummeting remittances from overseas. BRAC found that more than two thirds of the people it works with in Liberia, Nepal, the Philippines and Sierra Leone said that incomes had been greatly reduced or had disappeared. "If you're a day laborer and you're told you can't leave your shack one day, the next day you've got no income to buy food," noted Mark Lowcock, the United Nations' humanitarian chief. "I would bet my house that there's going to be an increase in poverty head count, an increase in child mortality, an increase in maternal mortality." Bill Gates and others are calling on Congress to include 4 billion in the next American stimulus package to help ensure that everyone worldwide can get vaccinated for the coronavirus. Don't think of that as charity, but as an investment in global health security and we also need emergency investments for education, polio and nutrition. But, so far, rich countries have mostly been self absorbed and small minded, not considering that a distant outbreak can again cross their own borders. A United Nations appeal for 10 billion for Covid 19 response has raised only about a quarter of that. One of humanity's triumphs in modern times has been a historic trend since about 1990 in which extreme poverty (defined as someone living on less than 2 a day, adjusted for inflation) has tumbled by about two thirds. Tragically, that is now reversed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
"The Ferryman," a British play about a sprawling family in rural Northern Ireland that starts to unravel in a crush of heartbreaking secrets, painful resentments and revelations of past crimes, is coming to Broadway. The play, written by Jez Butterworth and directed by Sam Mendes, features an enormous cast for a nonmusical production (with a 30 plus member cast) as well as a live rabbit and a goose (at least in the London production). Set in 1981, it evokes the sweeping state of a nation themes of Mr. Butterworth's other epic like work that reached Broadway, "Jerusalem." But "The Ferryman" also feels as if it's a cousin to that other memorable melodrama about a big family under one roof, "August: Osage County." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Infosys Built Its Global Machine With Indian Workers. Can It Adjust to Trump's 'Hire American'? When Infosys, a big Indian technology outsourcing company, opened a new office in Indianapolis this year, executives hailed it as a step along a new path. Infosys built itself into a global giant by running the digital engine rooms of American corporations with armies of engineers in India. But the new technology center a sprawling open plan space in a downtown office tower is in the epicenter of the American Midwest. And its recruits are people like Keith Smith Jr., a graduate of Indiana University, who previously held a variety of jobs before Infosys trained him as a software engineer. Ravi Kumar, a president of Infosys, described the office as "a manifestation of what the future is going to look like." The company, a shining success story in the Indian economy, is under mounting pressure to hire more Americans and do significantly more work onshore, in what would be a striking overhaul of its corporate culture and its business practices. In the process, Infosys has become a case study of how market forces and immigration changes by the Trump administration are reshaping corporations. Infosys is staring at two daunting challenges to its long successful business model, which generated 2.5 billion in profit in its last fiscal year. Companies are increasingly adopting technologies best built by small teams working side by side with customers, like cloud computing and mobile apps. It is work better situated in the Indianapolis tech center than thousands of miles away in India. Policy changes from the Trump administration may be even more threatening. As part of his efforts to curb the flow of foreign workers into the United States, President Trump called for tighter controls on skilled worker visas in his "Buy American, Hire American" executive order last year. All the steps Infosys is now taking "would be a huge change," said Rod Bourgeois, an expert on the industry and the head of research at Deep Dive Equity Research. "It's not in their DNA." Other big offshore outsourcing companies are also responding to the market and political threats, including Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Cognizant. But Infosys made the biggest, most public commitment to building up its work force in the United States, when the company declared last year that it would hire 10,000 workers in America by sometime in 2019. Then, Infosys began to announce the creation of tech centers in America. Indianapolis was the first, followed by offices in Raleigh, N.C.; Providence, R.I.; and Hartford. Last month, the company said its next hub would be in Arizona. Infosys says it has hired more than 5,800 American workers. "We will be looking for talent that is closer to our client clusters," said Mr. Kumar, who is the point man in the company's initiative to hire American workers. "And our operating model will evolve." For now, though, an estimated 80 percent of the 200,000 Infosys workers are in India, a market that accounts for 3 percent of its worldwide revenue of 11 billion last year. The company garners 60 percent of its revenue in North America, mainly in the United States, where Infosys employs more than 20,000 workers, analysts estimate. About two thirds of the Infosys workers in America, they say, have been Indians with skilled worker visas. The main such visa program, H 1B, was intended to bring in talented foreigners with special skills who would complement the domestic work force and strengthen the United States economy. In 2013, Infosys paid 34 million in a civil settlement with the Justice Department and other federal agencies, which accused the company of systemic abuse of visa rules, including on B 1 visas meant for short trips for training or attending conferences. In that settlement, Infosys agreed to improve its visa compliance practices. The government continues to monitor the company. One current and two former Infosys employees, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, said federal investigators had questioned them in recent months about the company's visa handling. The Justice Department and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services did not respond to requests for comment. Infosys also faces two private, civil lawsuits accusing the company of discrimination in hiring, promotions and firing. The accounts from testimony and interviews with witnesses tied to those suits vary in detail. But the stories share themes that illustrate how hard it could be for Infosys to change its ways. The plaintiffs and witnesses were experienced lawyers, human relations managers, salespeople and engineers who joined Infosys as the company expanded rapidly in the United States. Things went smoothly at first, when the newcomers brought in new customers or smoothed the way with government agencies. But tensions surfaced. Important decisions were all made in India. Questions were unwelcome. Complaints brought retaliation reassignments, demotions, abrupt firings and belittling remarks. "It's basically a corporate caste system, run out of India," said Erin Green, a former immigration lawyer for Infosys, who filed one of the civil suits against the company in Texas last year. "And people who are not Indian are at the bottom." Daniel Kotchen, a lawyer who has a pending suit against the company in Wisconsin on behalf of former workers, said, "Infosys has a business model that is discriminatory its rigid and explicit preference for a certain kind of person." Infosys is fighting the suits, denying discrimination and saying its work force reflects the global labor pool for technology skills. "Employment at our company," Infosys said in a statement, "is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and the needs of our clients." Even as Infosys increases hiring in America, its lower paid engineers back in India still animate the business. Wage rates in India have risen in recent years, but the gap is still sizable a third or a fourth the rates in the United States. Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, describes the Infosys presence as an important building block for his state's economic development and well worth a generous incentive package of tax credits and training grants. Governor Holcomb shrugs off critics who claim that Infosys undercuts American workers. "They're hiring here," he said. Mr. Smith, the recent recruit who was hired last October, spent his first two months in an intensive training program, honing his skills in several programming languages and developer tools. Before Infosys, he held jobs in marketing, video production and work force recruiting, and completed a four month course at a coding boot camp. His current Infosys assignment is helping a large telecom company on web projects. Mr. Smith, 35, views his Infosys job as an on ramp to the digital economy. "I see limitless potential," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
One couple, one full time job at the Department of Agriculture, a couple of other gigs running a janitorial business and a cake making venture, plus the pastor position at New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church in Ferguson, Mo. That's what it takes for Alonzo Adams and his wife, Ronica, to make ends meet, and that's without any money left for retirement savings. Every one of us makes money trade offs nearly every day, whether we realize it or not. Residence over retirement. Later over now. Needs over wants. Faith over financial facts. But all too often these trade offs are subconscious, which means we don't discuss them openly and fail to question them relentlessly. "It's like money is just this big blob," said Sallie Krawcheck, a co founder and chief executive of Ellevest, an online investment service for women that tries to make these trade offs visible. "People think about it conceptually and not in terms of wanting to start a business, retire well, buy a house or have a baby." Jordan Hightower, at home with her fiance, Michael Villalpando, in Tacoma, Wash. After losing her sister in the Haiti earthquake, she started spending more money on travel and other experiences. The blob, she concluded when she was starting her business, needed clearing up. "This is not money to get more money," she said. "It's money to do these things. Help me figure out what I can afford and when and what the trade offs are to getting there." The people you'll encounter in this section have been sorting it out for themselves for some time now. Their household income is at or close to the median in their area. Meeting the most basic of needs is usually not a problem, but it's a challenge to figure out how often to allow themselves things they want and to weigh those desires against longstanding debt or the contributions they probably ought to make to their futures. Below are some of the most common trade offs that they and all of us face most often. In January 2010, Jordan Hightower's younger sister, Molly, was killed in an earthquake while volunteering in Haiti. Jordan soon resolved that she would end her "one day" saving mentality and focus on today. That meant travel, to a dozen bachelorette parties around the United States and to 23 countries around the world in the last seven years. While she's traveled on a hostel budget and managed 4,000 in annual retirement savings, her down payment savings have suffered, even as prices for starter homes in Tacoma, Wash., have risen. Jordan, 31, has no regrets, though. A wedding and kids are on the horizon in the next few years, and she plans to adjust her house savings accordingly now that she's been able to see and do so much. "I'm not worried or sad about changing those things," she said. Time With Family Vs. Time for Work Martin and Raquel Vergara met as rivals, operating neighboring mall kiosks. She eventually became a personal banker, while he is a mixed martial arts fighter and a personal trainer. "We are investing time in our kids," said Martin, who is 25. "That means more than money." Even single parents make similar decisions if they possibly can, and some believe it's necessary. Natalie Davis was 31 and pregnant when her husband died unexpectedly five years ago. Now, she has a 10 year old boy and a 4 year old girl. She's also no longer a full time executive, even though she ran up some credit card debt and sacrificed savings after her decision to work less. For her, the choice wasn't a close call. "They needed it," she said, even though her husband did not have life insurance. Being with her children more often also helped clarify what counted as a mere want when it came to the family budget. "Sometimes my son will really want something and I used to feel guilty, being that he doesn't have his dad," she said. "I used to do everything I could to get him what he wants, and now I don't stress on that anymore." The Job You Love Vs. the One You Trained For Chris and Tanya Brashers have faced health problems, landlord problems and employment problems. Both have declared personal bankruptcy. Soon, they will move from Bryan, Ark., to Fairhope, Ala. They are both veterans, and they are crossing their fingers that the optimistic new postal address will bring new career opportunities for Chris, who is 46. He trained as an engineer, but his passion is photography, and his research suggests that he will be able to get freelance work there. While the couple is in debt, Tanya, who is 41, professes a certain serenity about their circumstances given all they have experienced. "I've learned not to depend on money for your happiness," she said. "Now, living as simply as we do, I'm kind of at peace." Alonzo, 46, the minister with multiple other jobs, works 65 to 70 hours each week so his children can grow up in a safe neighborhood. The family has a security system, but they sometimes forget to turn it on and then leave the doors unlocked. Nobody comes in. "Would I be that comfortable in another neighborhood?" he said. "The neighborhood where I grew up in? Nope." So the family has physical security, paying now so that the kids can have a better later, as Alonzo puts it. But hanging over that trade off is another one that he said so many African American families face. "What can I leave for them?" he wondered. "Most black people leave their families a bill when they die, not a legacy. Not an estate. We don't have estates. The only thing we know about estates is when we see the sign for estate sales, and we get happy because this is a real big garage sale." All joking aside, Alonzo doesn't need to look far to see where a lack of retirement savings can get you, given that his father is still a pastor at the church as well. Black preachers just die, he said. They don't retire. Still, at least his choice is deliberate: Trade a better later for himself for a better later for his children. It's the same trade off parents have made for centuries, and it's a swap that many parents continue to make without much hesitation. Read what other people are saying about how they make ends meet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
SAN FRANCISCO The 2020 presidential election is still 13 months away, but already Iranians are following in the footsteps of Russia and have begun cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the campaigns. Microsoft said on Friday that Iranian hackers, with apparent backing from the government, had made more than 2,700 attempts to identify the email accounts of current and former United States government officials, journalists covering political campaigns and accounts associated with a presidential campaign. Though the company would not identify the presidential campaign involved, two people with knowledge of the hacking, who were not allowed to discuss it publicly, said it was President Trump's. In addition to Iran, hackers from Russia and North Korea have started targeting organizations that work closely with presidential candidates, according to security researchers and intelligence officials. "We've already seen attacks on several campaigns and believe the volume and intensity of these attacks will only increase as the election cycle advances toward Election Day," said Oren Falkowitz, the chief executive of the cybersecurity company Area 1, in an interview. Microsoft's report is the latest indication that cyberattacks and influence campaigns against political candidates are likely to accelerate heading into 2020. In 2016, Russian hackers infiltrated the computer networks of Democrats and Republicans, then selectively disseminated Democrats' emails, including those of John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, in an effort to harm Mrs. Clinton's campaign. Microsoft said the attacks occurred over a 30 day period in August and September. That was roughly after the Trump administration announced additional sanctions against Iran, more than a year following the president's withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. Iranian officials concede that the sanctions, intended to choke off the country's oil revenue, have plunged the economy into a recession. More recently, the administration has considered a cyberstrike to punish Tehran for what officials charge was an Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities last month. It is all part of a low level, daily cyberconflict between the two countries. Iranian hackers have been engaged in a broad campaign against United States targets, according to Microsoft. The company found that hackers had tried to attack 241 accounts, using fairly unsophisticated means. The hackers appeared to have used information available about their victims online to discover their passwords. It was unclear what information they had stolen. While the Microsoft report did not name Iran's targets, it found evidence that hackers had infiltrated email inboxes in at least four cases. But the four successful hacks did not belong to a presidential campaign. Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign's communications director, said in a statement that "we have no indication that any of our campaign infrastructure was targeted." Representatives for other presidential candidates said on Friday that their campaigns had not been targeted. For weeks, officials from the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency have said they are particularly concerned about Iranian backed attacks. Their worries stemmed from rising tensions over new sanctions on Iran and nascent Iranian activity in the 2018 midterm elections. While the officials said they believed that all the presidential campaigns were likely targets, Mr. Trump's has long been considered a prime one. It was Mr. Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal and ramped up sanctions. The United States has also designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group. The guard corps oversees the nuclear program and, by some accounts, Iran's best hacking group, its Cyber Corps. But it is not clear whether the group that Microsoft identified reports to the Cyber Corps or is made up, deliberately, of freelancers and others whose affiliations are harder to trace. 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. When Iranian officials are asked about cyberattacks, they admit nothing but note that attacks have been two way. Three times in the past decade, the United States has directed cyberweapons against Iranian targets. The most famous attack, code named Olympic Games, wiped out about 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear enrichment site. In recent weeks, United States Cyber Command was asked to develop options for retaliating against the missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil fields. Officials reported that a cyberstrike against Iran was emerging as the most attractive option, in an effort to avoid the kind of escalation that might result from a more conventional strike. So far, there is no evidence of such action, but it might take a while to gain access to Iranian computer networks, and the results might be subtle. Security executives at the Democratic National Committee warned staff members in an email this week that Iranian hackers might be targeting their email accounts with so called spearphishing attacks, in which hackers try to lure their target into clicking on a malicious link or attachment. That link or attachment can give attackers a foothold into a computer network. The hackers were also believed to be interfering with an additional security feature known as two factor authentication a common security method that asks for credentials beyond a password and were creating fake LinkedIn personas to make their email lures more believable. After Russia's interference in 2016, Democrats have repeatedly warned their Republican counterparts that election interference cuts both ways, and that state sponsored hackers may not always seek to help the Republican candidate. But to date, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has refused to bring any election security bills to the floor. And Mr. Trump has yet to acknowledge Russian interference in the 2016 election, even as cybersecurity experts collect evidence that Russian hacking of organizations close to the 2020 campaigns is again underway. James A. Lewis, a former government official and cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a recent interview that cyberinterference, even from Russia, might not necessarily benefit Mr. Trump in 2020. "The Russians have come to the conclusion that, so long as President Trump is in office, U.S. Russian relations will remain at a standstill," Mr. Lewis said. Cybersecurity experts that specialize in disinformation say they have witnessed several coordinated disinformation campaigns aimed at influencing the 2020 campaign. The bulk of that disinformation has originated domestically, said Cindy Otis, the director of analysis at Nisos, a cybersecurity firm in Alexandria, Va. She said other nation states were closely watching these domestic operations but appeared to be holding back. "We've seen a lot of disinformation on the domestic front, but nation states are likely to amplify those narratives, as we saw Russia do in 2016," Ms. Otis said. "But with so many candidates still in the running, nation states seem to be waiting before they put all their efforts into one basket." Some cybersecurity firms said they were also witnessing what appeared to be the beginning stages of several different nation state cyberattacks on American political campaigns. In July, Tom Burt, Microsoft's corporate vice president, told an audience at the Aspen Security Conference that Microsoft had evidence that Russia, Iran and North Korea had been the most active nations conducting cyberattacks. With funding tight, only a handful of Democratic presidential campaigns have invested in a full time cybersecurity officer. Instead, they have relied on advice from the Democratic National Committee and DigiDems, a Democratic technology firm founded after the 2016 presidential campaign. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In this season of infection, the stock market little more than a twitching corpse, in an atmosphere of alarm and despondency, I am reminded of the enlightenments of the strict curfew Uganda endured in 1966. It was, for all its miseries, an episode of life lessons, as well as monotonous moralizing (because most crises enliven bores and provoke sententiousness). I would not have missed it for anything. That curfew evoked like today the world turned upside down. This peculiarity that we are now experiencing, the nearest thing to a world war, is the key theme in many of Shakespeare's plays and Jacobean dramas, of old ballads, apocalyptic paintings and morality tales. It is the essence of tragedy and an occasion for license or retribution. As Hamlet says to his father's ghost, "Time is out of joint." In Uganda, the palace of the king of Buganda, the Kabaka, Mutesa II also known as King Freddie had been attacked by government troops on the orders of the prime minister, Milton Obote. From my office window at Makerere University, where I was a lecturer in English in the Extra Mural department, I heard the volleys of heavy artillery, and saw smoke rising from the royal enclosure on Mengo Hill. The assault, led by Gen. Idi Amin, resulted in many deaths. But the king eluded capture; he escaped the country in disguise and fled to Britain. The period that followed was one of oppression and confusion, marked by the enforced isolation of a dusk to dawn curfew. But, given the disorder and uncertainty, most people seldom dared to leave home at all. "Kifugo!" I heard again and again of the curfew a Swahili word, because it was the lingua franca there. "Imprisonment!" Yes, it was enforced confinement, but I also felt privileged to be a witness: I had never seen anything like it. I experienced the stages of the coup, the suspension of the constitution, the panic buying and the effects of the emergency. My clearest memory is of the retailing of rumors outrageous, frightening, seemingly improbable but who could dispute them? Our saying then was, "Don't believe anything you hear until the government officially denies it." Speaking for myself, as a traveler, any great crisis war, famine, natural disaster or outrage ought to be an occasion to bear witness, even if it means leaving the safety of home. The fact that it was the manipulative monster Chairman Mao who said, "All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience," does not make the apothegm less true. It is or should be the subtext for all travelers' chronicles. The curfew three years into my time in Africa was my initiation into the misuse of power, of greed, cowardice and selfishness; as well as, also, their opposites compassion, bravery, mutual aid and generosity. Even at the time, 24 years old and fairly callow, I felt I was lucky in some way to be witnessing this convulsion. It was not just that it helped me to understand Africa better; it offered me insights into crowds and power and civil unrest generally, allowing me to observe in extreme conditions the nuances of human nature. I kept a journal. In times of crisis we should all be diarists and documentarians. We're bound to wail and complain, but it's also useful to record the particularities of our plight. We know the progress of England's Great plague of 1665 because Samuel Pepys anatomized it in his diary. On April 30 he wrote: "Great fears of the sickness here in the City it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all!" Later, on June 25, "The plague increases mightily." And by July 26: "The Sicknesse is got into our parish this week; and is endeed everywhere." A month later he notes the contraction of business: "To the Exchange, which I have not been a great while. But Lord how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people, and very few upon the Change, jealous of every door that one sees shut up lest it should be the plague and about us, two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up." In that outbreak of bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas, a quarter of London's population died. My diary these days sounds a lot like Pepys', though without the womanizing, snobbery or name dropping. The progress of the Covid 19 pandemic is remarkably similar to that of the plague year, the same upside down ness and the dizziness it produces, the muddle of daily life, the collapse of commerce, the darkness at noon, a haunting paranoia in the sudden proximity to death. And so much of what concerned me as important in the earlier pages of my diary now seems mawkish, trivial or beneath notice. This virus has halted the routine of the day to day and impelled us, in a rare reflex from our usual hustling, to seek purification. Still writing gives order to the day and helps inform history. In my journal of the Ugandan curfew I made lists of the rumors and tried to estimate the rate at which they traveled; I noted the instances of panic and distraction there were many more car crashes than usual, as drivers' minds were on other things. Ordinary life was suspended, so we had more excuses to do as we pleased. My parents' habits were formed during the Great Depression, which this present crisis much resembles. They were ever after frugal, cautious and scornful of wasters: My father developed a habit of saving string, paper bags, nails and screws that he pried out of old boards. The Depression made them distrustful of the stock market, regarding it as a casino. They were believers in education, yet their enduring memory was of highly educated people rendered destitute "college graduates selling apples on street corners in Boston!" My mother became a recycler and a mender, patching clothes, socking money away. This pandemic will likely make us a nation of habitual hand washers and doorknob avoiders. In the Great Depression, Americans like my parents saw the country fail and though it rose and became vibrant once more, they fully expected to witness another bust in their lifetime. Generally speaking, we have known prosperity in the United States since the end of World War II. But the same cannot be said for other countries, and this, of course, is something many travelers know, because travel often allows us glimpses of upheaval or political strife, epidemics or revolution. Uganda evolved after the curfew into a dictatorship, and then Idi Amin took over and governed sadistically. But I'd lived in the dictatorship and thuggery of the Malawi of Dr. Hastings Banda ("Ngwazi" the Conqueror), so Uganda's oppression was not a shock. And these experiences in Africa helped me deconstruct the gaudy dictatorship of Saparmurat Niyazov, who styled himself "Tukmenbashi" Great Head of the Turks when, years later, I traveled through Turkmenistan; the Mongolia of Jambyn Batmonkh, the Syria of Hafiz Assad, the muddy dispirited China of Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guo Feng. As for plague, there have been recent outbreaks of bubonic plague in Madagascar, Congo, Mongolia and China, producing national moods of blame shifting and paranoia, not much different from that of Albert Camus's "The Plague." We're told not to travel right now, and it's probably good advice, though there are people who say that this ban on travel limits our freedom. But in fact, travel produces its own peculiar sorts of confinement. The freedom that most travelers feel is often a delusion, for there is as much confinement in travel as liberation. This is not the case in the United States, where I have felt nothing but fresh air on road trips. It is possible to travel in the United States without making onward plans. But I can't think of any other country where you can get into a car and be certain at the end of the day of finding a place to sleep (though it might be scruffy) or something to eat (and it might be junk food). For my last book, I managed a road trip in Mexico but with hiccups (bowel shattering meals, extortionate police, bed bugs). But the improvisational journey is very difficult elsewhere, even in Europe, and is next to impossible in Africa. It is only by careful planning that a traveler experiences a degree of freedom, but he or she will have to stick to the itinerary, nagged by instructions, which is a sort of confinement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Snapchat Finds Itself on the Wrong Side of a Racial Lens. Again. With its lens tool, Snapchat allows some 150 million daily users to alter reality and play with identity in ways that border on the absurd. You can turn yourself into a pineapple, a dog or a character befitting a Roy Lichtenstein painting. The lenses are blunt, feature warping tools that generate more than 30 million enhanced selfies a day. Any missteps quickly enter the public record. Snapchat lenses have drawn criticism in the past with accusations that the app was promoting blackface or encouraging whitened skin tones as an ideal of beauty. So when it pushed a lens to some users this week that gave them slanted eyes, distorted teeth and puffy cheeks, some critics called it a racist caricature of Asian people "yellowface." And they wondered if these repeated controversies pointed to a larger problem that the company has with diversity. The news and the outrage went wide on Wednesday, with reports by The Verge and Motherboard, a day after Snapchat said it had dismantled the feature. The company offered an explanation: The lens was meant as homage to anime characters, not as a caricature of Asian people. But for observers who have experienced racism, the lens reminded them of hurtful stereotypes in action. Others roundly rejected the anime comparison. In an email, Grace Sparapani, a Korean American art student whose tweet about the photos was widely shared, said that the lens was "hurtful and uncomfortable to say the least." She added that "it's hard to argue with the side by side comparison of the very gross Asian caricature and the filter's effects. It shows that the filter isn't just yellowface, but yellowface taken to its derogatory extreme." Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Snapchat is not the only company to cross these cultural tripwires. American culture seems involved in an endless struggle over diversity and inclusion, from corporate boardrooms to Hollywood and the devices we all carry in our hands. And Snapchat's huge audience of younger people who are more racially diverse than their older counterparts might mean that they are even more likely to expect sensitivity. When one of Snapchat's lenses creates an image that is insulting to a user, Katie Zhu, 25, said in an interview on Thursday, "it's much harder for these types of things to go unnoticed like they did before." On Thursday, Ms. Zhu, a product manager and engineer who works for Medium, decided to delete her Snapchat account and encouraged others to do the same. In an essay for Medium and in a telephone interview, she said she believed that the race related controversies reflected a lack of diversity in hiring practices at Snapchat. Ms. Zhu criticized the company's mostly white, all male leadership and ended her essay with a hashtag: DeleteSnapchat. "It's either that they had no diverse representation of people of color on their staff to the point where they're able to make decisions like this," Ms. Zhu, who is Chinese American, said, "or they do have some people of color who are working there, but they're not in positions where they feel safe or comfortable to speak up." Other observers share her view, a complaint that Snapchat has left largely unanswered. The company does not release figures about diversity on its staff, noting its status as a private company. On Thursday, Snapchat declined to discuss the racial backgrounds of its staff, but according to a spokesman, the company recently hired a recruiter to focus on underrepresented populations and on driving inclusion efforts internally. For her part, Ms. Zhu said she would keep her Snapchat account closed, adding, "I wonder if they actually need more users like us to be able to say that this is not O.K." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Each Friday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Farhad: Good morning, Mike! How was your week? I've been busy trying to get my digital life in order. For instance, I've decided to check my email just twice a day, and I'm carrying around my Kindle so that when I get the urge to check Twitter on my phone, I read a book instead. I have high hopes that it will make me fitter, happier and more productive. What do you think? Mike: Um, no wonder it's taking so long for you to respond to my emails. I'm going to start texting you my email threads instead. Prepare for a lot of chain letters. Farhad: Great. Well, let's talk tech. First, quickly: Google is spending 1.1 billion to hire about 2,000 employees from HTC, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that has run into financial problems. Google and HTC have long been partners HTC made Google's Pixel smartphone so this deal effectively creates a more tightly integrated team for building Google's hardware. And Google has bet big on hardware lately. On that note: Nest, one of Google's sister companies, unveiled a set of home security gadgets this week. I wish I had some sparkling insight to offer here to make sense of all this. Why is Google, which has repeatedly failed to make it big in hardware, spending so much to become a big player? But the answer is really straightforward: because it has the money, so why not? We're at that stage in the tech industry where every one of the five tech giants is doing everything, because their money is endless and their appetites are ferocious. There is not much more to it than that. Mike: I honestly am a bit confused here. Remember the Motorola debacle from a few years back? Google paid more than 12 billion to buy Motorola Mobility, another struggling handset maker, in an attempt to take on Apple more directly and own the hardware stack from top to bottom. That didn't work out so well. Google ended up selling Motorola for parts after it realized that, uh, no one wanted to buy Motorola phones. Some people are saying this is about gaining more expertise inside Google for building hardware. O.K., I guess. But let's hope it works out better than last time. Farhad: Let's turn to Apple, Facebook and Amazon, since they all had a rough week. For Apple, it was about a buggy smartwatch. The new Apple Watch is supposed to work on cellular networks, meaning it can reach the internet even if you're away from your phone. Our own reviewer, Brian X. Chen, found that it worked quite well, but reviewers at The Wall Street Journal and The Verge discovered a flaw in the devices that prevented them from reaching cellular networks in some instances. Apple said it would fix the bug in a software update, but it's still an embarrassing slip from a company that prides itself on getting things perfect. Mike: Do we have to call this one "Watchgate?" I swear, every few iPhone launches we see some damning flaw in the hardware, and it takes a little shine off their huge annual product introductions. However, people will still buy their new iPhones in droves, as they always do. Probably the new watch, too. And to be fair to Apple, at least they aren't shipping phones that explode in your pants pocket. Farhad: Facebook, meanwhile, had to scramble to fix its ad targeting engine after ProPublica found that advertisers could use the system to target ads using racial slurs for instance, people could show ads to "Jew haters." Other reporters soon found that Google's and Twitter's ad systems could also be used to target heinous categories. Coming on top of reports that Russia used Facebook's ad system to manipulate the American election, the stories fed the perception that these companies just don't know how their systems are being used. Mike: And don't forget that Facebook finally came out with a nine point list on how the company plans to comply with continuing investigations into Russian linked ads and even begin some forms of self regulation for political ads on Facebook. It's a huge story. Farhad: Oh, for further evidence of the cluelessness of tech companies over their platforms, Amazon's website has been recommending bomb making materials to people, a British report found. Boy oh boy. Remember when tech was fun and zany, when it was all about getting cool gadgets? We're long past that. Mike: I started playing a video game the other day that's basically Grand Theft Auto meets San Francisco hackers. Part of the game includes making guns from a 3 D printer. The future is terrifying. Farhad: The rapidly deteriorating image of tech companies is having real world consequences. Our colleague Cecilia Kang reported that Facebook and Google have lost so much clout in Washington that they've all but given up trying to stop a sex trafficking bill that they think could have negative consequences for their businesses. The bill would allow people to sue some websites for the content they host a huge change to existing law, which doesn't hold companies responsible for stuff their users post on their sites, as long as they work to take down illegal material. Internet giants were gearing up to fight the law, but they've determined that the growing anti tech sentiment makes it too difficult. It's hard out there for a tech giant other than all those billions of dollars they keep raking in. Mike: Right, and I think tech companies have grown wise to where the tide is turning. Right now, we're seeing Facebook try to get ahead of Congress by announcing that it wants to essentially regulate its own political ads, largely because it doesn't want Congress to intervene. Also, I can only imagine that Google, Twitter and Amazon are bracing for the possibility of this story picking apart their businesses, too. In any case, the future is scary! Should we trust these tech companies that say they've got it covered, and have our best interests in hand? Farhad: Um ... probably not? O.K., see ya. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
What did President Trump know and when did he know it? Whom did he pressure out of self interest? Are there emails or tapes? And, maybe, let's call some witnesses. No, I am not referring to the Ukraine mess. And not the Barr none desecration of the Justice Department through the president's egregious tweet meddling in the Roger Stone case. I am talking about a "Star Wars" themed face off between Mr. Trump and the Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos. Things got more problematic for the Trump administration last week when a judge ordered that work be stopped on a huge 10 billion, 10 year, cloud computing project for the Defense Department called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, also known as JEDI. Amazon is pointing the finger right at you guessed it Mr. Trump, who has spent a lot of time trashing Mr. Bezos along with his newspaper, The Washington Post, and the enormous company he founded, often conflating them all into one billionaire blob of a rival. The Grand Canyon size gulf in business talent and wealth between the two surely is a factor here. There is a long history of petty comments by the commander in grief aimed at the internet legend. And there was that report by a staff member for the former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, saying that Mr. Trump had expressed a desire to "screw" Amazon. (Even earlier, Mr. Trump declared during his campaign that the company was "going to have such problems" when he became president.) The continuing public and private enmity is at least partly why Amazon is claiming it lost the bid. While Amazon had been seen as a front runner for the contract, in October, it was awarded to tech's other Seattle based behemoth, Microsoft. Amazon sued in December. Many think it's an uphill battle for Amazon. But if the company continues winning legal motions, there is the possibility of a discovery process that could force the Trump administration to reveal what kind of pressure the president may have brought to bear to stop Amazon from winning the JEDI project. Some at Amazon believe the administration may have changed the terms of the proposal to advantage Microsoft. Microsoft argues that it got the contract fair and square. Frank Shaw, a Microsoft communications officer, said the Defense Department "ran a detailed, thorough and fair process" and determined that its needs "were best met by Microsoft." He said the company was "disappointed with the additional delay." For its part, the Pentagon is peddling the idea that the legal delay "deprived our war fighters of a set of capabilities they urgently need," even though it was Mr. Trump who originally asked to have the bidding process reviewed last summer. Some sources told me the government will seek to limit discovery to the technical record and rely on executive privilege to protect whatever Mr. Trump did or said related to the award (does the executive privilege excuse sound familiar?). That includes blocking testimony by Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. The fact that Amazon has been hired by the federal government many times bolsters the company's case that its loss of the JEDI project is part of the president's vendetta against Mr. Bezos. One oddity that Amazon will surely point out is that Mr. Esper recused himself from the process citing a conflict of interest because of his son's job at IBM. That's unusual since IBM was not considered a top contender and weirder still since Mr. Esper did not step aside until the very last moment of deliberations. And he was the one who prolonged the bidding contest upon orders from Mr. Trump. One of the most important factors in this battle compared to a lot of other fights in which Mr. Trump delays and obfuscates and makes noise to muddy the waters is Mr. Bezos's tenacity. From my time spent with him in the days of Amazon's founding, I know him well enough to say that he will fight as long as it takes, and he can outmaneuver any mud that Mr. Trump can throw at him. Amazon has also been lucky since Mr. Trump's behavior in the JEDI process seems to recall how he got into trouble with Ukraine and, more recently, with the Justice Department's handling of the Roger Stone case (and really in so many instances). To that point, Amazon said in a statement, "President Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to use his position as president and commander in chief to interfere with government functions including federal procurements to advance his personal agenda." And that was the nicest part of the statement. Mr. Trump's supporters may think that he brings it all and more when he is attacked. But I'd say Mr. Bezos brings it all to a fight and also a drone howitzer, an army of lawyers and a huge wallet. And if Mr. Trump is already rattled politically by the willingness of the real billionaire Michael Bloomberg to go to the mattresses using his 62 billion fortune, remember that Mr. Bezos is more than twice as wealthy as that. Mr. Bezos did just that this week with the announcement that he would devote 10 billion of his own money to fund climate change initiatives under the Bezos Earth Fund. Even as some denounce Amazon's toll on the environment and call for taxing the company more, this laudable initiative was a smart move for Mr. Bezos and will burnish his reputation. It will also irritate Mr. Trump, no friend to climate change solutions. Unfortunately, what is getting lost in these clashes of titans is that it is critical that the Pentagon modernize its tech as quickly as possible, as it faces challenges across the globe, most especially from China. Right now, the Defense Department is working with patched up systems from the 1980s and 1990s. So, given that both Microsoft and Amazon are U.S. based giants, the mess that Mr. Trump has created with his careless words and perhaps with his actions only hurts the security of this country. So, while it might be called JEDI, it feels an awful lot more like "Spaceballs." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Something as basic as a New York slice has provided the recipe for a fierce fight over a lease in the Sony Building in Midtown, pitting a restaurateur against giant landlords. Joseph Allaham, a longtime tenant with a restaurant in the Sony Building, has been battling eviction ever since he opened a kosher takeout pizzeria, Pizza da Solo, in the atrium at 550 Madison Avenue last winter. Solo, his adjacent Italian restaurant, could also close if he loses his court case. The dispute is yet another page in one of those classic New York tales, in which the sale of a Manhattan skyscraper can suddenly shift the relationships between tenants and landlords, sometimes emptying retail storefronts in a way that quickly alters the character of a city block. In Mr. Allaham's situation, the feud also has fractured a longtime friendship and strained ties in the real estate community. The trouble began, he said, shortly after Sony sold the tower for 1.1 billion to Joseph Chetrit and other investors, in a deal that closed in March. Sony, which is staying on as the major retail tenant for two or more years and holds the restaurant's lease, began eviction proceedings against Mr. Allaham, contending that the pizzeria generates litter in public areas and violates lease requirements. But Mr. Allaham, who praised Sony's stewardship as his landlord for many years, is suspicious and believes that Mr. Chetrit, a major real estate developer, supports the eviction because of plans to turn the building into a hotel condominium tower with a different retail mix. If that is the case, it saddens him because he and Mr. Chetrit have been friends for a decade. Mr. Allaham says Mr. Chetrit and his wife, Nancy, attended his wedding in 2008, and their son Jonathan was one of the ushers. The Chetrits held a party at their summer home in Westhampton for the newlyweds a few days later, according to friends. And their families vacationed at the W hotel in Miami Beach in 2011. "Imagine your best friend turning on you. It's awkward, and it's painful," Mr. Allaham said. "But I'm not going to leave." Mr. Chetrit did not respond to repeated messages asking for comment. Sony also declined several requests for comment. But in court documents filed in State Supreme Court, Sony said Pizza da Solo was "substantially increasing the volume of garbage and other refuse which we must remove from the atrium." Besides, Sony said, the pizzeria, which occupies a small space that formerly housed a newsstand, was supposed to become only a waiting area for Solo, which serves kosher Italian dishes on white tablecloths. "There was never any discussion" about Mr. Allaham's "constructing, opening or operating a pizzeria," the documents say. Mr. Allaham asserts that the table lined atrium is a public passageway connecting East 55th and East 56th Streets, and that most trash there comes from people who walk through it. He also says some of Sony's employees helped him install its red tiled pizza oven last December, as part of a 500,000 renovation. Still, Mr. Allaham may have a tough time proving one of his central claims that Mr. Chetrit and his brother Meyer spent three hours last March in Mr. Chetrit's modest Fifth Avenue office to try to persuade him to move out. Mr. Allaham asserts that he was offered 500,000 if he would vacate both Solo and Pizza da Solo within six months. In a separate twist, Sony also contends that Mr. Allaham is violating the terms of his lease because another of his restaurants, Prime Grill on West 56th Street, is less than two blocks from Solo and is drawing away customers. Sony receives a portion of Solo's receipts as a condition of the lease; Mr. Allaham says his Sony Building restaurants make about 5 million a year, in space that costs about 400,000 annually, or about 75 a square foot, and that could be leased till 2028. But David Bistricer, a partner in Clipper Equity, which teamed with Mr. Chetrit to buy the Sony Building, disputed Mr. Allaham's account and said in an interview that Mr. Chetrit and Mr. Allaham never met as described. "There was no meeting between them, because I would have known about it if there was," said Mr. Bistricer, who is perhaps best known for his failed bid in 2007 to buy Starrett City, the Brooklyn housing complex whose formal name is Spring Creek Towers. Besides, he said, "Why would we even want him out? He's paying a decent rent." He also suggested that Sony might suddenly be clamping down on Mr. Allaham, for the first time since Solo opened in the atrium in 2004, because of its own lease concerns. Under the terms of the building's sale, Sony becomes a tenant for at least the next few years, and as a tenant it needs to be more careful about its subtenants, Mr. Bistricer said. "If Sony violates their lease, they could be evicted," he said. Despite this dispute, the renovation plans for the building are moving forward. Mr. Bistricer said that he had hired Robert A.M. Stern, the architect behind the successful condo project at 15 Central Park West, to come up with designs for the building. The 37 story granite tower, formerly the AT T Building, opened in 1984. Designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, it is known as the Chippendale tower, for its curved roofline that resembles the top of a dresser. Mr. Bistricer did note that "high end retail" was being considered for the building, on a street that can command retail rents of 1,000 a square foot, though its Starbucks coffee shop has no plans to close soon, according to a spokeswoman for that company. (Just a few weeks ago, chef Todd English was spotted a few times meeting with others in the atrium and appearing to tour the space, fueling speculation that one of his restaurants might become atenant. A spokeswoman for Mr. English dismissed the idea, saying he was shopping for a television.) The public atrium itself, whose 100 foot roof is glass, could be changed only with the approval of the New York Department of City Planning. Executives in real estate who know the parties and often dine at Mr. Allaham's restaurants described the situation as tense. The Sony dispute is occurring while Mr. Chetrit is embroiled in another, more prominent case involving the Chelsea Hotel, which he bought in 2011. Dozens of tenants there are suing him for the conditions during renovations, including collapsed ceilings, a lack of heat or hot water, and "plumes of hazardous dust," according to court papers. A trial in that case began last week. Mr. Allaham seems set on seeing his own case through to the end, even though he owns five restaurants in Manhattan. To him, it's a matter of principle to resist being pushed around by the rich and powerful. Mr. Allaham, who emigrated from Syria in 1994 at 17 and delivered groceries in Brooklyn until his car was stolen, said: "You can make money. But you can't let the money make you." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Last fall, when Isabella Boylston and Alban Lendorf, both principal dancers at American Ballet Theater, burst onto the stage in Twyla Tharp's "Brahms Haydn Variations," there was a noticeable surge of energy in the hall. The partners looked elated; he tossed her up into the air so high that it felt almost reckless, then caught her as if it were nothing at all. Her dancing was big and bold, unleashed by the freedom and assurance his partnering gave her. Mr. Lendorf, who is Danish and still serves part of the year as a member of the Royal Danish Ballet, joined Ballet Theater in 2015 but was sidelined by an injury for a year. So when the 2016 fall season came around, he and Ms. Boylston had been rehearsing together for only a few weeks. Their partnering conveyed a sense of discovery how high can I throw you before everything falls apart? but also an enviable ease and trust, the kind that usually develops over years of dancing together. (They will be dancing in "Swan Lake," which begins Monday, June 12, as part of the company's spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House, their New York debut together in this most paradigmatic of ballets.) It got me thinking: What is it that makes certain partnerships click? Where does the essence of that chemistry lie? So I asked them, along with two other dance couples one from New York City Ballet, the other from the Indian classical dance company Nrityagram. "I feel like Alban is a really gifted partner. And when you're good at something, you get into a positive feedback loop. As your confidence grows, your partnering abilities grow along with it." Isabella Boylston Mr. Lendorf, 27, and Ms. Boylston, 30, met about a decade ago, at a ballet competition. They hit it off immediately. "We had a mutual admiration for each other's dancing," she said at the Met recently during the break between a matinee and the evening show. Both dancers are extremely musical he is also a very good pianist and essentially sunny. When they were first paired together at Ballet Theater, they felt a natural chemistry, which made their partnership easy. "The nice thing is that at the beginning, when you're still trying to figure out where the other person's center of gravity is, Bella gives you a chance," Mr. Lendorf explained, using Ms. Boylston's nickname. "Because, as a guy, you feel stupid when the woman isn't perfectly in balance. But she gives you that extra second so you can fix things." In part, this willingness to let her partner find his way is a question of temperament and technique, but, as Ms. Boylston confesses, there is also a method behind her approach: "Ballet is frustrating you're never as good as you want to be. So I always try to think about how I can get the best out of my partner. I try to make them feel good and comfortable and confident so I'll get more out of them." The feeling, Mr. Lendorf said, is mutual. "If she feels good, you don't have to worry, because she actually tells you where she wants to be with her dancing. She makes the shape, and you can follow." Sara Mearns, 31, and Jared Angle, 36, of New York City Ballet, have been dancing together for about 10 years, though they can't remember exactly when they were first paired up by their boss, Peter Martins. In conversation, they tend to finish each other's sentences, often correcting details like Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold in the classic film "Gigi." They are not, nor have they ever been, a couple. "Our partnership isn't based on a sexual attraction," Mr. Angle said, between rehearsals at the David H. Koch Theater during the final week of the spring season. "And that's a good thing, because that can create so much unnecessary conflict," Ms. Mearns said, completing his thought. "You don't even need to be friends," he continued, "but there has to be respect, manners." Ms. Mearns is a passionate, intense performer; Mr. Angle is more elegant and understated, one of the most coveted partners in the company, someone who can unobtrusively fix any problem a balance gone awry, a wonky turn. It's one of the things Ms. Mearns loves about dancing with him. "He lets me do what I'm going to do and waits to see what happens, and once he sees where I'm going, if I'm not balancing on my leg or whatever, he just lightly taps me back into place," she said, demonstrating the lightness of his touch by raising one finger and tapping at the air as if pushing a button. Mr. Angle thrives on the way his partner lets herself be led by the music in performance. "It's exhilarating," he explained. "Her openness to the stage experience is something I love. And if something goes a little off, she knows I'm going to save it." They prefer not to rehearse too much, so as not to lose that feeling of discovery. "He has taught me to relax out there," Ms. Mearns said. "To just be me." When Bijayini Satpathy, 44, and Surupa Sen, 47, dance together, their movement seems motivated by a single thought. The two are specialists in the Indian classical dance form Odissi, from the Eastern state of Odisha, and are regular visitors to New York. Their approaches are quite different Ms. Satpathy's dancing is all curves and sensual lines, and Ms. Sen's is more sculptural and forceful but at times they move in such perfect unison that they create the uncanny illusion of being two copies of the same person. "We're guided by the same force, with similar impulses to rhythmic punctuations and melodic intonations," Ms. Satpathy said in an email from India, where they were preparing to go on tour. The two live, work and grow their own food on a dance ashram called the Nrityagram Dance Village, near Bangalore in southern India. For them, dance and teaching are not only a profession but a way of life. There are no distractions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Lance Price is a microbiologist on a mission to precisely match bacteria in the supermarket meat with those in women with urinary infections. Twice a month for a year, Lance Price, a microbiologist at George Washington University, sent his researchers out to buy every brand of chicken, turkey and pork on sale in each of the major grocery stores in Flagstaff, Ariz. As scientists pushed carts heaped with meat through the aisles, curious shoppers sometimes asked if they were on the Atkins diet. In fact, Professor Price and his team are trying to answer worrisome questions about the spread of antibiotic resistant germs to people from animals raised on industrial farms. Specifically, they are trying to figure out how many people in one American city are getting urinary infections from meat from the grocery store. Professor Price describes himself as something of a hoarder. His own freezer is packed with a hodgepodge of samples swabbed from people's sinuses and inner ears, and even water from a hookah pipe. But the thousands of containers of broth from the meat collected in Flagstaff, where his nonprofit research institute is based, are all neatly packed into freezers there, marked with bar codes to identify them. He is now using the power of genetic sequencing in an ambitious attempt to precisely match germs in the meat with those in women with urinary infections. One recent day, he was down on his hands and knees in his university office in Washington, studying a family tree of germs from some of the meat samples, a printout of more than 25 pages that unfurled like a roll of paper towels. Its lines and numbers offered early clues to Professor Price's central question: How many women in Flagstaff get urinary infections from grocery store meat? He expects preliminary answers this fall. Researchers have been warning for years that antibiotics miracle drugs that changed the course of human health in the 20th century are losing their power. Some warn that if the trend isn't halted, there could be a return to the time before antibiotics when people died from ordinary infections and children did not survive strep throat. Currently, drug resistant bacteria cause about 100,000 deaths a year, but mostly among patients with weakened immune systems, children and the elderly. There is broad consensus that overuse of antibiotics has caused growing resistance to the medicines. Many scientists say evidence is mounting that heavy use of antibiotics to promote faster growth in farm animals is a major culprit, creating a reservoir of drug resistant bugs that are finding their way into communities. More than 70 percent of all the antibiotics used in the United States are given to animals. Agribusiness groups disagree and say the main problem is overuse of antibiotic treatments for people. Bugs rarely migrate from animals to people, and even when they do, the risk they pose to human health is negligible, the industry contends. Scientists say genetic sequencing will bring greater certainty to the debate. They will be able to trace germs in people to their origins, be it from a farm animal or other patients in a hospital. Representative Louise Slaughter, a Democrat from New York who has pushed for legislation to control antibiotic use on farms, said such evidence would be the "smoking gun" that would settle the issue. Professor Price is seeking to quantify how extensively drug resistant bugs in animals are infecting people. He is trying to do that by analyzing the full genetic makeup of germs collected from both grocery store meat and people in Flagstaff last year. The plummeting cost of genomic sequencing has made his research possible. He is comparing the genetic sequences of E. coli germs resistant to multiple antibiotics found in the meat samples to the ones that have caused urinary tract infections in people (mostly women). Urinary infections were chosen because they are so common. American women get more than eight million of them a year. In rare cases the infections enter the bloodstream and are fatal. Resistant bacteria in meat are believed to cause only a fraction of such infections, but even that would account for infections in several hundred thousand people annually. The E. coli germ that Professor Price has chosen can be deadly, and is made even more dangerous by its tendency to resist antibiotics. The infection happens when meat containing the germ is eaten, grows in the gut, and then is introduced into the urethra. Dr. Price said the germ could cause infection in other ways, such as through a cut while slicing raw meat. The bugs are promiscuous, so once they get into people, they can mutate and travel more easily among people. A new strain of the antibiotic resistant bug MRSA, for example, was first detected in people in Holland in 2003, and now represents 40 percent of the MRSA infections in humans in that country, according to Jan Kluytmans, a Dutch researcher. That same strain was common in pigs on farms before it was found in people, scientists say. Dr. Price, 44, began his career testing anthrax for resistance to the Cipro antibiotic for biodefense research in the 1990s. His interest in public health led him to antibiotic resistance in the early 2000s. It seemed like a less theoretical threat. Dr. Price, trained in epidemiology and microbiology, has been sounding the alarm about antibiotic resistance for a number of years. He recently told a Congressional committee that evidence of the ill effects of antibiotics in farming was overwhelming. He thinks the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to limit antibiotic use on farms have been weak. In 1977, the F.D.A. said it would begin to ban some agricultural uses of antibiotics. But the House and Senate appropriations committees dominated by agricultural interests passed resolutions against the ban, and the agency retreated. More recently, the agency has limited the use of two important classes of antibiotics in animals. But advocates say it needs to go further and ban use of all antibiotics for growth promotion. Sweden and Denmark have already done so. Ms. Slaughter said aggressive lobbying by agribusiness interests has played a major role in blocking passage of legislation. According to her staff, of the 225 lobbying disclosure reports filed during the last Congress on a bill she wrote on antibiotic use, nearly nine out of ten were filed by organizations opposed to the legislation. But the economics of food presents perhaps the biggest obstacle. On large industrial farms, animals are raised in close contact with one another and with big concentrations of bacteria laden feces and urine. Antibiotics keep infections at bay but also create drug resistance. Those same farms raise large volumes of cheap meat that Americans have become accustomed to. Governments have begun to acknowledge the danger. The United States recently promised 40 million to a major drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, to help it develop medications to combat antibiotic resistance. But Dr. Price says that new drugs are only a partial solution. "A lot of people say, 'let's innovate our way out of this,' " he said. "But if we don't get a handle on the way we abuse antibiotics, we are just delaying the inevitable." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Watch where you step," John Waters said gleefully, as he opened the door to his West Village apartment. He gestured to the floor, which was arrayed with what looked like construction rubble, a cardboard box with packing peanuts spilling out, a mousetrap. In the corner was a pile of dog poop. It was all art, of course the rubble handmade by the Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss, the box an objet from the New Museum's gift shop, and the mousetrap, one of several trompe l'oeil pieces by Doug Padgett, whose stopped clock and faux light switch also trip up Mr. Waters regularly. The very realistic poop was a must, given Mr. Waters's scatological legacy with Divine in "Pink Flamingos." He's careful about displays, too. "Whenever I come to my New York apartment, I have to become the installer; I put on my white gloves, take everything out because there's a lot of floor art, and it's the enemy of cleaning people," said Mr. Waters, the filmmaker, author, performer and bon vivant of bad taste. He has an expansive, and very seriously considered, art collection even if a lot of it is funny and some of it is, in his words, "ugly." (He likes brown art, he said, for that very reason.) "Can you go wrong in collecting monkey art?" he asks, unrhetorically, in a meticulously researched chapter in his new book, "Mr. Know It All." Read Alan Cummings's take on the new John Waters book. He began collecting as a teenager in suburban Baltimore, where his first pieces included an Andy Warhol print of Jackie Kennedy, purchased in 1964, for 100 "which was a lot then," he said. "A hundred dollars was like 1,000." His walls he has a home in Baltimore and another apartment in San Francisco are very nearly overstuffed, "so I only buy little art now," he said. "I don't buy anything if I can't hang it up. I collect to live with it." Some of it he scoops up gallery hopping, a favorite pastime. Some is by friends, like the small arch made of pill bottles for H.I.V. medications by the artist Frankie Rice, with whom Mr. Waters said he recently dropped acid. ("We hallucinated for 12 hours" it's in the book.) In a tour one Monday morning, dressed for the occasion in pointy ankle boots that his friend Mary Boone, the gallerist turned federal prisoner, had given him Mr. Waters told typically wild stories about, say, the time that the Republican strategist Lee Atwater ("a huge fan of exploitation movies") led him on a secret tour of the Reagan White House. He's now at work on a novel, the one thing he wouldn't discuss: "It's bad luck to talk about something before you do it." This painting looks like your apartment. It's a pretty early Karen Kilimnik piece. I love it for many reasons. A) the artist would have no idea, but it looks exactly like my dining room in Baltimore; B) it's on fire, and our family business was fire protection. I always have a little bit of pyromania in me because my father used to take us to watch people's houses burn down. It was like a family thing we'd hear the siren and we'd run out. It was really when I felt close to my father. Also, I love that it's just off center. I always think that art is mistakes. You have a roll of toilet paper in your living room. That's George Stoll. I had to get the super in the building to approve that I was going to dig into the wall. I don't know what he thought like, scat queen, or something but I said, "Well, it's art." He was like "yeah, yeah." But it is chiffon, and every time I come in, I have to unwind it. Are there any pieces that arrived at a meaningful time in your life? The Warhol anus painting. It hangs in his bedroom, and Mr. Waters correctly predicted that The New York Times would not print an image of it. I treated myself to that after one movie. And when they did the catalogue raisonne and came and inspected it, they told me you see the footprint of Andy's dog that walked across the painting, Archie. You travel a lot. How do you deal with the art that you encounter on the road? Well, I bring art. And sometimes take the art down that's hanging and put mine up. I have the framed medical license of the Baltimore doctor that gave everybody, including me, speed in the '60s and didn't know that it was drugs. He just thought it was a new thing for diets but I did weigh 128 and was 6'1," and he gave me like 200 Black Beauty pills. Besides liking the work, what guiding principles do you follow in collecting? It has to sometimes, at first, make me angry. It has to delight me and surprise me and kind of like, put me off a little bit at first, and then I embrace it. The kind of art I like is the one that makes people angry, that hate contemporary art the ones that easily fall for the bait of it. I always go to that first. I have a piece called "Contemporary Art Hates You." And it does, if you hate it first. You have to embrace why it hates you. You see it in a different way you learn a magic trick. So to me, each one of these pieces relaxes me and makes me tense at the same time which is what art should do. All art that works infuriates people at first. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In all of these cases, individuals in institutions or networks took action autonomously, without answering to higher authority. Part of the digitally driven movement that elected Mr. Bolsonaro, they listen to his frequent dog whistles or, in many instances, direct exhortations and then take matters in their own hands. Some of what they consume is available to public scrutiny, on open platforms like Twitter or YouTube. But some of it is shared only privately through WhatsApp. And it appears to come from high places: Content can often be traced back to the president's inner circle or even to Mr. Bolsonaro himself. In February, he shared a particularly dramatic video urging his supporters to protest against Congress. That episode underlined something important: Mr. Bolsonaro relies on the country's institutions to defy him. Without their defiance, he can't fire up his supporters. And the coronavirus crisis has supercharged his tendency toward antagonism. Seeing a situation from which no good could come, Mr. Bolsonaro seems to have decided the path to political safety lies in refusing responsibility for the pandemic's toll and keeping his base in a state of frenzied anger. So he calls for protests, attends public barbecues and turns a blind eye as his followers openly harass journalists. For all his bombast, Mr. Bolsonaro doesn't want to be seen to be in charge. He prefers to tell an underdog story of a lone wolf fighting against the powerful establishment, relying on an energetic base of support to maintain his position. He is perhaps the world's only strongman who likes to project an image of weakness, not strength. None of this is inconsistent with Mr. Bolsonaro's own history. As a young soldier, he was accused of rebellion and almost kicked out of the Army. And he has often praised individuals who acted outside official chains of command. His biggest hero, by his own account, is someone who took that approach to an unspeakable extreme: Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the only person ever held officially responsible for torture under the dictatorship. The hideous practice, though widespread in the 1960s and '70s, was not officially recognized by the generals that presided over the country. But Colonel Ustra pursued it vigorously. Mr. Bolsonaro, who never misses a chance to pay his respects to Colonel Ustra and his family, took note. His entire presidency is based on the premise that there are many Ustras hidden within powerful institutions and spread out across society, ready to turn his suggestions into practice. Many expect the world after the pandemic to follow one of two paths: either increased authoritarianism, with top down control and centralized surveillance, or more distributed power, based on solidarity and serving local needs. But Mr. Bolsonaro proves that authoritarianism can exist even when power is dispersed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
In all, according to the magazine Semana, which first published the allegations, the military compiled elaborate dossiers on more than 130 people, including former generals, politicians, trade union leaders, social activists and at least two dozen journalists. Using computer tools and software, the magazine wrote, "they carried out searches and massively and indiscriminately collected all the information possible about their objectives to prepare military intelligence reports." The targets included some Semana reporters and, in addition to Mr. Casey, reporters for The Wall Street Journal and NPR. The unit's tools, according to The Wall Street Journal, included listening devices and other equipment supplied by the United States; The Journal also reported that members of the intelligence unit helped themselves to American aid money. That resources supplied by the United States to combat drug smuggling to the United States were used to spy on American reporters is especially galling. The Pentagon must also address how it monitors its aid. But Colombia's status as one of America's main allies in the region is also at stake. For its own sake, and its future, Colombia needs to ensure that its army abide by strict rules of behavior. There appears to have been some progress in that regard. Semana's reports have led to the firing of 11 officers of the intelligence unit. The magazine also reported that the resignation of the top army commander, Gen. Nicacio Martinez Espinel, was related to the allegations of illegal surveillance, though he has denied this. The government of President Ivan Duque, a major recipient of U.S. aid, has condemned the secret surveillance and has directed the defense minister to investigate intelligence work done over the past decade. Mr. Duque's own credibility is also at stake. A conservative, he campaigned against the peace deal because he thought it was too soft on the rebels. He was a senior officer in northeast Colombia in the years of the illegal killings, and it was he who appointed General Martinez Espinel as commander of the army last year over opposition from groups like Human Rights Watch. From 2002 to 2008, nearly 5,000 civilians or guerrillas were killed outside of combat, according to the United Nations. More than 1,100 members of the security forces have been convicted of crimes related to the deaths, according to the government. Illegal wiretapping likewise has a history in Colombia. Less than 10 years ago, the country's intelligence agency was dismantled in a scandal over secret surveillance. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
With the film industry undergoing one of the biggest shifts in its history, I spoke to nearly two dozen top names in Hollywood about what the movies will look like in 10 years. Here, the Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer, currently in theaters with "Ma," presented a path to profitability for big studios: Let underrepresented people see themselves on the big screen. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. Have you noticed any recent changes in the industry that are only going to intensify over the next 10 years? Absolutely. I think across the board, women of color are being offered substantive roles, and that is an underserved audience that will drive people to the box office. I also think that while there is a change in how young people view film and television, there will be loyalists who continue to show up at the box office. There are very few people who are still box office draws, so the studios are going to have to play an outside game and look at the demographics that are underserved, then bring more stories that they want to see to the theaters. Is that outside game becoming more inside? Do you think studios have passed a rubicon when it comes to finally recognizing those demographics? Well, as a result of "Girls Trip" and "Hidden Figures," Jessica Chastain and I sold a comedy to Universal, and I know a lot of other movies have been bought where the women are the leads. Now listen, I'm the first person to tell you that the men who brought me into the box office still keep me there. Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Kevin Hart, the Rock I show up, I'm there! But I'm also there for Brie Larson, Taraji P. Henson , or Michelle Yeoh. I'm there for Awkwafina, I'm there for Jessica. So I can't wait for that dynamic to change. Is there an example of that attitude changing when you've been in recent meetings with studio executives? Well, honey, the fact that they call me in! I don't really go to meetings unless I know how serious they are time is something ephemeral, so I don't waste mine. If you're calling me, you better have some money, and you better have some idea of what you expect from me. So the fact that people are calling me, a woman of a certain age and demographic, to sit down on studio films which have not been my bread and butter there's definitely a paradigm shift. As all these new streaming services debut over the next year or two, how do you think that will affect the movie industry as we know it? Well, here's what I don't want, and I'm going to be real honest about it. I don't want people to not show their movies in a movie theater first. I like the idea of movies showing there and then going to streaming and devices. I'm a loyalist to that degree. I also enjoy streaming. Christmas Day, I watched Sandra Bullock in "Bird Box." I watched Will Smith in "Bright," too. I support both, but the power dynamic will change if people don't continue to support films in the theater. A lot of filmmakers still pine for that theatrical release, but at the same time, streaming offers the sort of reach that many films never get. But we don't really know the reach, because they don't give us the numbers! I want to know the metrics. With streaming, they don't really have to give us that information, and I'm a proponent of knowing, because knowledge is power. Studios aren't making as many midbudget movies anymore, either. There will definitely have to be some changes made to the outmoded model of how films are greenlit and made. Films like "Hidden Figures" were made for under 25 million, which means that those of us on the top of the ticket weren't paid upfront. Well, those days are gone, because we're demanding our money. But you can still make those types of movies and allow people to share in the box office success by deferring part of their money. They're also going to have to stop paying certain people astronomical amounts of money when they can't justify it. You shouldn't be able to go in and say, "I want 20 million" if your last four movies haven't earned you that right. I'm going back to what Janet Jackson said: "What have you done for me lately?" So a lot of things will have to change. You made headlines recently when you and Jessica Chastain asked for equal pay on your upcoming Universal movie. What else needs to change over the next decade when it comes to compensation? Contracts will have to be reviewed to make sure royalties and all of that reflect the people who aren't at the top of the ticket, the people who make their living as weekly players and day players. But I think there have been some considerable changes made when it comes to actresses and equal pay. Are we where we should be? No, but we certainly are better than where we were. So I'm encouraged by the strides that are being made in that regard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
WORCESTER, Mass. Although College of the Holy Cross was founded here in 1843, and eight other prominent institutions of higher learning followed, it has taken most of the last two centuries for this sizable New England city to consider itself a college town. It does now. From one end of the city's 245 acre central core to the other, Worcester is attending to the 35,000 college students who study and live here, and its primary boulevards are steadily filling up with the civic amenities that attract new residents. They include a busy public transit hub, comfortable and affordable housing, new restaurants and watering holes, computer stores and coffee shops, a performing arts theater, biotech research facilities, incubators and office space for start up companies, and renovated parks including one alongside City Hall with an ice rink larger than the one in Rockefeller Center. The newest project in Worcester's revitalization portfolio is CitySquare, a 565 million, 12 acre mixed use development just east of City Hall. It replaces a two story, one million square foot downtown shopping mall that took up almost 10 percent of Worcester's central business district. The former Worcester Center Galleria, built at a cost of 127 million, thrived for a decade after it opened in 1971, but by the turn of the century it had gone dark. In the two years since it was demolished, Worcester spent 59 million burying utilities, preparing building sites for new construction, and reconstructing and connecting four streets in the district to the city's street grid. Market interest in CitySquare has been strong, according to city data. In 2013, Unum, a Tennessee based insurer, opened a 76 million, 214,000 square foot, seven story office tower alongside an 860 space parking garage. St. Vincent Hospital built a 30 million Cancer and Wellness Center. Across the street, the Worcester Regional Transit Authority built a 14 million bus transit hub alongside 103 year old Union Station, which reopened in 2000 after a 32 million renovation. The station is on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited line and is a stop for 20 commuter trains daily to and from Boston that serve 1,500 passengers. In 2014, the city and Hanover Insurance Group, the primary landholder and CitySquare development manager, finished agreements with Roseland Property Company to build 370 market rate rental apartments in a cluster of five story residential buildings at a cost of 90 million. The first building will hold 239 apartments; the second building, 131. Next door to the apartments will be a 36 million, six story Marriott hotel with 150 rooms. The hotel will sit atop a two level parking deck, now being built, that will be large enough for 550 vehicles. Construction of the residential project is scheduled to start this spring, with hotel construction to follow. Just a single 1.2 acre parcel in CitySquare remains undeveloped. City officials and Hanover executives said they were marketing the land as a prime downtown site for an office tower, with spaces for ground floor retailing. "For so many years the old mall just served as a big roadblock for people and vehicles in our downtown," said Michael E. Traynor, the city's chief development officer. "You couldn't walk from City Hall to the train station. It just killed the spirit of this city and was a big turnoff for students," Mr. Traynor said. "Now with the mall gone, new buildings in place, new streets, new businesses settling there, it's like 'Welcome to the 21st century economy.' " One reason that CitySquare is developing so quickly is that Worcester had a lot of practice over the last decade rebuilding its downtown, with considerable help from the city's colleges and universities. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1865, developed a partnership with the Worcester Business Development Corporation to turn an 11 acre parcel on the edge of its 6,000 student campus into a life sciences teaching, research, laboratory and office complex called Gateway Park. The university has invested over 110 million in the project to build the 40 million, 125,000 square foot Life Sciences and Bioengineering Center, which opened in 2007. Next to it is a new 32 million, 92,000 square foot, four story bioengineering academic and research building. Gateway Park, at the intersection of Lincoln Street and Interstate 290, includes a 20 million, 128 room Courtyard by Marriott; an 11 million parking deck; and a 39 million, 89,000 square foot, 258 bed dormitory that opened in 2013. A 10 million, 100 room Hampton Inn is under construction. In 2009, the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences opened a new campus in downtown Worcester, renovating an office building to fit in classrooms, two auditoriums, laboratories and faculty offices. In 2010, the university acquired the downtown Crowne Plaza Hotel for student housing and for two public vision and dental health clinics. The pharmacy college's campus is just down the street from the 180 million Worcester Trial Court, the largest state court building in Massachusetts, which opened in 2007. Just a few blocks away is the 110 year old, 2,300 seat Hanover Theater for the Performing Arts, renovated in 2008 at a cost of 32 million, all of it raised in a private, communitywide capital campaign. According to the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Worcester's steady redevelopment, fostered by well over 1.3 billion in public and private investment, is producing results that are at the top of urban demographic and economic performance in New England. The city's population has climbed to more than 182,000 residents, up 13 percent from its modern low of under 162,000 in 1990. Worcester is now the second largest city in New England. The jobless rate in October, 5.6 percent, was lower than the state's unemployment rate of 6 percent. The city added 6,900 new jobs from October 2013 to October 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and average wages during that period increased nearly 5 percent. Quinsigamond Community College also is involved in the city's resurgence. In 2014 the two year college expanded its campus to a building that once was the newsroom and printing plant for The Worcester Telegram Gazette. The building on Franklin Street, across from City Hall, was renovated at a cost of 40 million. The college's laboratories and training suites occupy 73,000 square feet of the 135,000 square foot, four story building. In a telling detail that illustrates just how serious college administrators are about their downtown mission, the renovation plan deliberately left out a cafeteria. "Part of our plan was to put feet on the street," said Gail E. Carberry, Quinsigamond's president. "We didn't get aggressive about cafes and cafeterias. We want students to frequent the restaurants and coffee shops that are already here." A generation ago, Worcester's weary downtown was an impediment to attracting students, college administrators said. Today, shoppers, office workers and students fill the city's sidewalks. "We haven't rushed to rebuild the city," said Frederick H. Eppinger, the president and chief executive of Hanover Insurance Group. Hanover, based in Worcester, is a publicly traded company, with revenue of 5 billion in 2014; it employs 5,200 people, 2,000 of them in Worcester. "We've done it one section of the city at a time so people, particularly our students, can see the change and feel the momentum." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When Amazon agreed last year to begin collecting sales tax in New Mexico, state officials celebrated what they said could be tens of millions of dollars in annual tax revenue. But they aren't cheering in Albuquerque City Hall. A year after that announcement, New Mexico's largest city hasn't seen a dime from Amazon. That's because the online shopping giant's deal applied only to the 5.125 percent statewide tax, not to the 2.375 percent tax tacked on by the City of Albuquerque. "The loser in that arrangement is cities," Mayor Tim Keller said. "Cities are really being left to themselves." Thanks in part to a series of deals with state governments in recent years, Amazon is collecting sales tax in every state that has one. But those deals don't always extend to taxes assessed by local governments. The company still isn't collecting sales taxes in dozens of cities, including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, according to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left leaning think tank. Carl Davis, the report's author, said local governments were missing out on millions in tax revenue when other income streams are also under strain. And local retailers, many already struggling to compete with online retailers, are effectively forced to charge more for their products than online sellers that aren't required to collect local taxes. "It's just a direct price advantage that shows up on customers' receipts," Mr. Davis said. "You never want to end up in the situation where the companies you're offering better deals to are the ones that don't even have roots in your community." Amazon says it collects taxes in every jurisdiction where it is required to do so, and Mr. Davis's report found that the company does collect local taxes in most states. But a hodgepodge of state laws govern tax collection, meaning there isn't a simple solution for municipalities that are now left out. Amazon is facing increasing scrutiny over its tax policies. Despite being one of the largest retailers in the country by revenue, Amazon pays relatively little in federal income tax, largely because of its low profit margins. Until several years ago, Amazon also collected little in state sales taxes, and in most states still does not collect taxes on goods sold on its platform by third parties. (Amazon collects taxes on such third party sales in Washington State, and agreed this month to begin doing so in Pennsylvania.) The company has also faced criticism for requesting tax incentives from state and local governments to lure Amazon facilities, including its planned second headquarters. Mr. Davis, however, said his findings were less the fault of Amazon than of state tax systems that don't require, and in some cases don't allow, online retailers to collect local taxes. He said states rushed to strike deals with Amazon without always ensuring that local governments would benefit as well. 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. "It's just been overshadowed by the state issue," Mr. Davis said. "It's smaller dollars at play, but for these communities, it's dollars that matter." Amazon sometimes collects taxes where other online retailers do not. In Chicago, for example, Amazon collects local taxes because it has warehouses and other facilities in Illinois; online retailers that don't have a physical presence in the state generally don't have to collect taxes there. Usually it is states not cities or counties that decide who has to collect local sales taxes. In most states, taxes are based on the location of the buyer, and retailers are required to collect local sales taxes alongside state taxes. But in some states, including New Mexico, taxes are based on the location of the seller, meaning there is no mechanism for collecting taxes from sellers that don't have a physical presence in the area. Other states have other legal quirks that affect local tax collections. Those loopholes have existed for years, but their significance has grown greatly with the rise of online retail, said Scott Peterson, vice president of government relations as Avalara, a company that helps retailers calculate and collect sales taxes. A pending Supreme Court case, South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc., could change the legal landscape, but not necessarily simplify it. Depending on the outcome, the case could pave the way for states to require companies to collect sales taxes even if they don't have a location in the state. But local governments in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and other states still wouldn't be able to collect taxes without help from their legislatures. Local government officials in many parts of the country say the rise of tax free online shopping has had a big impact on their budgets. Albuquerque, for example, relies on the sales tax or what is known in New Mexico as a gross receipts tax for nearly two thirds of its general fund revenue, which totaled about 500 million last year. The city's finance department estimates that it lost out on 5 million in tax revenue on Amazon purchases in 2016, although calculations are difficult because of a lack of available data. Lost revenue from other online retailers adds millions of dollars more. Mr. Keller, the mayor, said Amazon benefited from city services, such as the roads used by delivery trucks carrying its packages and the police officers who makes sure packages aren't stolen. But unlike local retailers, the company doesn't chip in. "This is the fundamental way we fund American society, and thanks to technology they found a way to opt out of that," Mr. Keller said. "They're getting a free ride." For businesses, the practical effect of that free ride is probably small, at least outside of a handful of high tax jurisdictions. Local sales taxes add just 1 or 2 percent to prices in most cities, not enough to sway most shoppers' decisions. But retailers said the tax was a matter of fairness: Why should local businesses be at a disadvantage, however small, against a much larger, out of town rival? "The 2 percent doesn't drive someone from my place to Amazon, but it doesn't help," said Richard de Wyngaert, owner of Head House Books, an independent bookstore in Philadelphia. "I just feel that if not all businesses, why any business? If we don't all pay taxes, why should any of us? To me, it's ludicrous. There is a social contract with your citizens." Candelora Versace, who with her husband runs a custom jewelry shop in Santa Fe, N.M., said that her customers frequently buy gemstones online, then come into the store to have them put into settings. She said that she doubted they were explicitly trying to avoid paying Santa Fe's roughly 3 percent sales, but that regardless of their intent, the effect on the community was the same. "The roads don't pay themselves. The schools don't fund themselves," Ms. Versace said. "When they don't want to pay the tax, it cheats us. It cheats those of us who live here and have businesses here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
A federal judge ruled in favor of BuzzFeed on Wednesday, bringing to a close a defamation lawsuit filed by a Russian technology executive over the website's publication of a dossier containing unverified reports of connections between Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign and the Russian government. In her ruling, Judge Ursula Ungaro of the United States District Court in Miami, said that BuzzFeed was protected in its publication of the dossier by the fair report privilege, which gives news organizations latitude in reporting on official government proceedings. "We are thrilled by today's outcome, and thank Judge Ungaro for taking the time to consider this case on the merits," Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, said in a statement. The suit was filed by Aleksej Gubarev, the head of XBT, a company based in Luxembourg, and Webzilla, a Florida tech company. Mr. Gubarev and his companies were named toward the end of the dossier, which was compiled by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 campaign at the behest of Mr. Trump's political rivals. "First and foremost, nothing in today's ruling by the court suggests in any way that the allegations concerning Mr. Gubarev, Webzilla, or XBT Holding were true," Mr. Gubarev's lead lawyer, Val Gurvits of Boston Law Group, said in a statement. "Instead, the court ruled on a narrow legal issue, finding that BuzzFeed had a privilege to publish the information even if it was false." Days before BuzzFeed's posting of the 35 page document on Jan. 10, 2017, United States intelligence directors briefed President Barack Obama and the president elect on the dossier. Those briefings constituted what the law calls "official proceedings," providing BuzzFeed with legal protection to publish the dossier as part of an article headlined "These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia." Mr. Gubarev, a resident of Cyprus, claimed that BuzzFeed had acted recklessly in publishing the dossier, which alleged in its final section that Mr. Gubarev and his company were involved in hacking the Democratic Party. 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. He filed suit last February, arguing in his complaint that BuzzFeed's decision to publish the dossier was "perhaps one of the most reckless and irresponsible moments in modern 'journalism.'" Soon after Mr. Gubarev took legal action, BuzzFeed blacked out his name and those of his companies from the dossier as it appeared on the site. In her decision, the judge noted that the BuzzFeed article on the dossier included the disclaimer that it included "specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations." After the ruling, Mr. Gubarev's lawyers told BuzzFeed News that they planned to appeal. "When we started this case, we knew that it would be a marathon and not a sprint," Mr. Gurvits said in his statement. "We remain convinced that, after appeal, this matter will be presented to a jury and that we will succeed in vindicating the plaintiffs' good names." Mr. Smith, the editor, posted a statement on Twitter in praise of the decision: "As Judge Ungaro affirmed in her ruling, a key principle underlying the First Amendment is that the public has a right to know about actions taken by its government. As we have said from the start, a document that had been circulating at the highest levels of government, under active investigation by the F.B.I., and briefed to two successive presidents, is clearly the subject of 'official action.' Moreover, its publication has contributed to the American people's understanding of what is happening in their country and their government." Days before the inauguration of Mr. Trump, BuzzFeed was alone in making the dossier public. A debate raged among journalists and politicians over the ethics of its decision to publish. NBC's Chuck Todd, for one, said on air that BuzzFeed had "published fake news." Although a number of news outlets, including The New York Times, had received the report, they decided not to publish the document, because they could not corroborate its contents. Mr. Smith was staunch in the belief that he was acting in the public good. "Without the dossier, Americans would have found it difficult to understand the actions of their elected representatives and government officials," he wrote in an Op Ed for The New York Times. The dossier is still live on BuzzFeed. Mr. Gubarev filed the suit in Broward County, Fla. The case was later transferred to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida at BuzzFeed's request. BuzzFeed was represented by Davis Wright Tremaine and Roy Black. Mr. Trump condemned the fact that the dossier had been made widely available. "Are we living in Nazi Germany?" he said on Twitter the day after it was posted. And in a news conference, he called the BuzzFeed a "failing pile of garbage." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Often, when actors or directors with Oscar contenders sit down opposite your Carpetbagger, I can sense the barely concealed anxiety underneath their brave faces. There are so many year end movies jostling for award season attention, and it's possible that their passion projects could get lost in the scrum. It was striking, then, when I recently met up with a relaxed and grinning John Krasinski, who's treating the awards run of "A Quiet Place" as an unexpected victory lap. Krasinski directed and starred in the postapocalyptic horror movie about a family besieged by sound seeking monsters, and since "A Quiet Place" was an out of the gate hit last spring, "it's nice to have the pressure off and have this be a celebration than for it to be an angsty, scary time," Krasinski said. In a year with many populist contenders in the mix, including "A Star is Born" and "Black Panther," the team behind "A Quiet Place" now hopes to convert that box office passion into award season heat. So far, Krasinski's wife and co star in the film, Emily Blunt, has picked up a SAG nomination for her work, and the movie has scored top 10 mentions from organizations like the National Board of Review and American Film Institute. That means Krasinski, 39, has spent almost an entire year promoting his film, but he's happy to overextend himself. "I do feel wiped," he told me, "but it's a whole different ballgame to be talking about something you love." Here are edited excerpts from our conversation: Your first breakthrough was as an actor on "The Office," which became a hit later into its run. By contrast, "A Quiet Place" was an overnight phenomenon. How did you experience that kind of success? "The Office" was so gradual that there was time to process it, but with "A Quiet Place," when you're fired out of a cannon, you don't really know you're in the air until you're almost on the way down. It's changed my life completely. It felt like this was a story I had always wanted to tell, and I didn't even know it was lacking in my life, so there was this satiation from it that I didn't realize I needed. When I was walking my daughter to school for the first time after we premiered at South by Southwest, I felt like, "You're getting your full dad for the first time." What was that first public screening like? We were driving there, and my wife said: "What do you want to worry about? Focus on one thing, because if you worry about the whole movie, you'll drive yourself crazy." I remembered George Clooney told me that they clapped at the end of the drama he directed "Good Night and Good Luck," so I said, "It'd be cool if they clapped." Of course, I chose the end of the movie, which was stupid. She said: "O.K., just focus on that. Don't worry about what the audience does until that moment." When Emily cocked the gun at the end of the movie, they exploded. They jumped out of their seats, they were shaking the chairs. I remember that so clearly because Emily turned to me and screamed, "Oh my God!" And very apropos, I couldn't hear because everyone was so loud. That's when I knew, "There's something here." A horror movie is not unlike a comedy in that way: If it works, people have a visceral reaction to it. It's funny you say that because I really did take on this project because of some advice Greg Daniels gave me when I was working on "The Office." He told me, "Your job is not to deliver these lines funny. Your job is just to deliver these lines. If people find it funny, that's up to them you just play the honesty of it." That's how I approached this movie, and I don't know if I would have done this had he not given me that advice. I would have gone in thinking, "I've got to scare people because this is a genre film," and it would have been horrible. The film is expected to be a strong Oscar contender in the two sound categories, which people often mix up. Since sound was such an important part of your movie, it strikes me that you might be the perfect person to explain the difference between those two categories. There's sound mixing and editing. The editing is getting all the sounds in place, putting this sound next to that sound. Sound mixing is making sure they all come together to sound real. If crickets were as loud as the music, it would be insane: You have to diminish the crickets to whatever it's supposed to be to feel real. That whole idea, I thought I understood until I did this movie. It can either be a tool set that will fix things, or it can be a magic kit where you blow the lid off and start concocting potions of sound. That was mind blowing to me. At the same time, if a movie really works, it may play well even without sound when you're watching it over someone's shoulder on a plane, for instance. The truth is that I did that exactly for the first month of editing. On the first day or two, I was going through different sounds with my editor to equalize it out, and I just said, "Hit mute." And we hit mute for what might have been five weeks. The first cut and the second cut were all done without one ounce of sound. I needed to be able to connect with these characters without anything else. When you had that silent cut, did you ever think, "This could practically be a complete film on its own?" One hundred percent, and that sounds super pretentious, but it's true. Even on silent, there was so much communication happening. I didn't think our movie would be so commercially accepted because the only other time I've seen someone do a movie with no spoken dialogue is Paul Thomas Anderson at the beginning of "There Will Be Blood." That first 12 to 14 minutes where Daniel Day Lewis doesn't speak was a huge touchstone for me. Paul Thomas Anderson hosted an award season screening for your film. That's got to be gratifying. I think I've only told my wife this, so why not say it in an interview: That was the moment that was the most surreal of all this. He emailed me and said, "You need to call me," and we talked on the phone and he was so specific and so honest about the movie. He's been so kind to me through my career, but we were talking like we were on an even playing field and that tripped my wires. What I love most about Paul is that he loves movies. I'll tell you a big life lesson. Paul was over at my house, I think it was my 30th birthday party, and I had just seen a movie I didn't love. I said to him over a drink, "It's not a good movie," and he so sweetly took me aside and said very quietly, "Don't say that. Don't say that it's not a good movie. If it wasn't for you, that's fine, but in our business, we've all got to support each other." The movie was very artsy, and he said, "You've got to support the big swing. If you put it out there that the movie's not good, they won't let us make more movies like that." Dude, Paul Thomas Anderson is out there on the wall for us! He's defending the value of the artistic experience. He's so good that maybe you project onto him that he's allowed to be snarky, but he's the exact opposite: He wants to love everything because that's why he got into moviemaking. And ever since then, I've never said that I hate a movie. John Krasinski explains how he went about writing "A Quiet Place." You're writing a sequel to "A Quiet Place." Does it worry you that the first film was such a big hit that Paramount may treat this like the "Purge" franchise, cranking out new installments on a yearly basis? Totally. I can't stop them from doing that. I'm a realist, I know how the studio operates. At first, I wanted nothing to do with a sequel I told my wife, "It can never be this good again." And she said, "Of course it won't. Take this movie, put it on a mantel so you can look at it anytime you want, and then go out and do something else." Paramount was asking a bunch of writers and directors what they might do with it, and to their credit, they didn't take any of those pitches because they felt a little more franchise y. Meanwhile, I had this tiny idea that fit that world and could be exciting. Paramount asked if I would write it and I'm doing that now, but I'm still thinking about what I want to do next. If I can crack the idea, I would love to direct it again, and if I can't, I would love to give it to someone else with my fingerprints on it to make sure it's being taken care of. I know that anyone reading this will be like, "Yeah right, art guy," but I do have sort of a parental feeling about this movie, and I don't want "A Quiet Place" to turn into an action movie where 400 people have machine guns. Or did I give away the ending to the sequel? Laughs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Spend enough time on this verdant peninsula and someone will tell you: "I have a friend here who has lived in four different countries and never moved." A 100 year old Istrian, for example, would be able to say that she was born in Austro Hungary (which ended in 1918), came of age when Istria was part of Italy (until 1947), spent most of her adult years as a Yugoslavian, and, finally, starting in 1991, became Croatian. This peninsula in the northern Adriatic is made up of about 90 percent Croatian territory (the rest is Slovenian with a tiny sliver going to Italy). Istria may be a microcosm of 20th century southeastern European history, but it's also a magical, 21st century playground for those who like sun, beaches, hill towns, Roman ruins, local wine, truffles and top notch dining. Italophiles will feel at home here as most of the population is still bilingual, speaking Italian and Croatian. The stunning seaside towns of Rovinj, Porec and Pula may attract most visitors but the inland medieval hill towns of Motovun and Groznjan and their artsy communities and restaurants serving truffle laden pasta dishes are certainly worth a visit. When the San Servolo brewery first began producing beer, or pivo, in 2013, little did anyone know that people would be soaking in it five years later. The newly opened San Servolo Resort and Beer Spa, next to the brewery, just outside the hilltop town of Buje, offers guests and non guests the chance to have a 45 minute soak in hoppy beer while drinking unlimited amounts of lager from the bathtub side tap. For this reason, it might be a good idea to book a room at the hotel. After a beer bath, spa guests can sweat it out in the sauna or go for a swim in the pool (which is filled with water, not beer). The spa (including the beer bath) is 525 kuna for guests (or about 82), 700 kuna for non guests. Hidden down some steps on the southern side of Rovinj's Old Town is Valentino, a cocktail bar that mostly attracts a foreign clientele. The appeal here is that seating is on lounge chair cushions situated on rocks just above the Adriatic Sea. Add some cocktails and you've got a recipe for possible disaster. Yet once you take in the view and ambience, you'll be happy to pay more than you like for a drink. The average drink the Aperol spritz is very popular here costs 90 kuna. Steer clear of the recommendations of the servers who have a proclivity for voluntarily recommending some of the most expensive options on the drinks list. It's no surprise that Croatia's first Michelin star was awarded to a restaurant in Istria. There's the Italian influences in various pasta dishes, and the longtime emphasis here on local, artisanal products (long before it became fashionable). Monte, in the Old Town of Rovinj, is proud of its star. The restaurant makes its own olive oil (a few miles away, near the Lim fjord), and sends out creative Italian and Istrian inflected dishes from one of three multicourse options that might include Adriatic tuna tartar, oxtail and lobster dumplings, and fennel ice cream. Most of the wines from the excellent list are from Istria. Six courses are 849 kuna, not including wine. Croatia, specifically Istria, wasn't always on the truffle map. Italians from Piedmont would cross over the border to buy white truffles from Istrians, then quietly transport them back to northern Italy to sell them as "Italian." But all that changed on Nov. 2, 1999, when a local Croatian truffle hunter, Giancarlo Zigante, and his dog, Diana, unearthed a nearly three pound white truffle, at the time the biggest one ever found. Suddenly, the world was aware that the prized white truffle could be found and purchased for much cheaper prices in Istria. Get a taste of these white truffles and go on a truffle hunt at Prodan Tartufi, near the town of Buzet, where the Prodan family and their dogs take visitors on an hourlong hunt and then cook up a truffle laden meal that includes truffles with eggs, truffles with sausages, truffles with cheese, and more truffles. The experience and meal costs about 475 kuna a person. Housed in a 600 year old former olive mill at what is basically a countryside intersection, the 17 seat Toklarija is an essential stop on a fine dining tour of Istria. The eccentric chef and owner, Nevio Sirotic, puts the "slow" in "slow food," with lunches lasting for three or more hours. But the rustic, fireplace lit dining room invites you to stay a while. Sirotic sources nearly all his ingredients locally, including in the restaurant's back garden. The multicourse meal might, depending on the season, include dishes such as wild asparagus salad, prosciutto filled ravioli, and a super slow roasted suckling pig that is so tender you can leave your knife on the table. They don't take walk ins, so reservations are a must, as they only prepare enough food for diners they're expecting that day. The six course tasting menu is 450 kuna. 6) 4 p.m. THE ART OF THE STROLL Groznjan still has an abandoned feel to it. After World War II, many of this hill town's longtime residents fled for Italy, leaving few inhabitants. By the late 1960s, artists and bohemian types had settled in. Today the charmingly ramshackle village, with its chunky cobblestone lanes, is crammed with galleries. At Galerija Il Punto , the artists Gordana Kuzina and Edvard Kuzina Matei sell their handmade jewelry and paintings of local land and seascapes (including images of Groznjan). "We moved here 15 years ago to sell our work," Mr. Kuzina Matei said. "We couldn't afford Zagreb anymore so we settled here and love it." Galerija Gasspar sells the work of several local artists, including Burhan Hadzialjevic's intriguing, otherworldly glass sculptures and bronze and stone sculptures by the English born local artist Gail Morris. Just 10 miles across the lush Mirna River Valley from Groznjan sits Motovun, possibly the most picturesque hill town on the peninsula and the birthplace of the racecar driver Mario Andretti. The diminutive walled town is mostly filled with shops selling local products but it's a delightful pit stop to walk the medieval walls (20 kuna) and pick up some local products. Try OPG Vivoda, just before the town gate, a small shop run by the family of the same name who produce olive oil (one liter bottles for 110 kuna) and herb infused brandy called travarica on their nearby farm (one liter bottles cost 130 kuna). Celebrating its 20th year in 2018, Damir i Ornella, in the seaside town of Novigrad, is one of the great Istrian dining experiences. The menu focuses mostly on crudo. Damir works the front room, carving up raw branzino and de shelling scallops at a tableside cart and then sprinkling the just pulled from the sea morsels with local olive oil, squirts of lemon and dashes of salt and pepper before serving. Ornella is in the kitchen cooking up the occasional seafood laced pasta dish. The menu changes daily based on what their fishermen catch that morning. The five course tasting menu at this seven table spot starts at 500 kuna a person before wine. Set on a pleasant marina in the old fishing village of Fazana, about five miles north of Pula, Stara Konoba is good place to sit outside and watch the boats rock and the fisherman walk by. The Old Tavern, as it's translated, has a menu that leans toward the sea, as one would expect. Grilled sardines, fried calamari, fish soup and pastas sprinkled with clams, mussels and shrimp are menu standouts. Expect to pay about 250 kuna a person for lunch. There's more than one reason to drive out to Pula at the southern tip of the peninsula but you really only need one: the first century A.D. Roman arena is the world's sixth largest ancient Roman amphitheater of the more than the 200 that still exist, once holding more than 20,000 gladiator loving spectators. Its sibling in Rome may inspire more oohs and ahs because of its size and majesty but Pula arena's exterior ring is still fully enclosed. The entrance fee is 50 kuna. Elsewhere, the well preserved 2,000 year old Temple of Augustus and other ruins of Rome are scattered throughout the town. Another reason you might visit Pula: It's home to Istria's main commercial airport. Hotel Lone (Luje Adamovica 31, Rovinj; hotellone.com; doubles from 1,400 kuna), a 248 room property whose past life was a drab Communist era hotel. But the talented Croatian architecture firm 3LHD got ahold of it in 2011 and transformed the property into one of the sleekest spots to lay one's head in the country, adding clean lines and modern art installations. Some rooms have private hot tubs on balconies. Lone (pronounced Loh nay) is about a 15 minute walk from the center of Rovinj. Meneghetti (Stancija Menegeti 1, Bale; doubles from 1,400 kuna), is an old homestead set on 30 acres (much of which are vineyards for the property's own wine) down an unpaved road. The nine rustic rooms and 15 suites have ceiling beams, antique furniture and wine refrigerators. Villa Tuttorotto (Dvor Massatto 4, Rovinj; villatuttorotto.com; doubles from 740 kuna) is a seven room hotel smack in the center of Rovinj's compact Old Town. Service is attentive and warm and most rooms have a view of the sea. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery was preparing the wall text in 2014 to accompany an image of the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., the museum decided to note that Mr. Mayweather had been "charged with domestic violence on several occasions," receiving "punishments ranging from community service to jail time." Such context is common for controversial subjects in art. But far less so for artists themselves centuries of men like Picasso or Schiele who were known for mistreating women, but whose works hang in prominent museums without any asterisks. Now, museums around the world are wrestling with the implications of a decision, by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, to indefinitely postpone a Chuck Close exhibition because of allegations of sexual harassment involving potential portrait models that have engulfed the prominent artist in controversy. Mr. Close has called the allegations "lies" and said he is "being crucified." The postponement news on Thursday has raised difficult questions about what to do with the paintings and photographs of Mr. Close held by museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London and the Pompidou in Paris, as well as by high spending private collectors and whether the work of other artists accused of questionable conduct needs to be revisited or recontextualized. It is a provocative moment for the art world, as the public debate about separating creative output from personal conduct moves from popular culture into the realm of major visual artists from different eras and the institutions that have long collected and exhibited their pieces. "We're very used to having to defend people in the collection, but it's always been for the sitter" rather than the artist, said Kim Sajet, director of the Portrait Gallery, which has a large body of Mr. Close's work. "Now we have to think to ourselves, 'Do we need to do that about Chuck Close?'" "You can't talk about portraiture in America without talking about Chuck Close," she added. "There are lots of amazing artists who have been less than admirable people." For the most part, curators and museum directors say that making artistic decisions based on personal behavior is a dangerous road to go down. All of the museum officials interviewed said they plan to continue to retain and show their Close holdings, in part because he has not been charged with any crime and the accusations have not been proven in a court of law. "How much are we going to do a litmus test on every artist in terms of how they behave?" said Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, which collects Mr. Close's work. "Pablo Picasso was one of the worst offenders of the 20th century in terms of his history with women. Are we going to take his work out of the galleries? At some point you have to ask yourself, is the art going to stand alone as something that needs to be seen?" To be sure, art history is riddled with important figures of ill repute. The Baroque painter Caravaggio was accused of murder, as was the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The early 20th century painter Egon Schiele spent 24 days in jail on charges of statutory rape involving a 13 year old girl. (He was acquitted of rape, but found guilty of exposing children who posed for erotic drawings in his studio.) "Women who were available to serve as artist models were almost always considered sexually 'compromised,'" said Rebecca Zorach, a professor of art history at Northwestern University. "They didn't have even the modicum of leverage some women might have against sexual assault." There have been recent attempts to call attention to artists' alleged misdeeds toward women. Last spring, for example, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles's exhibition of work by the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, protesters (including a former curator at the museum) handed out postcards asking in Spanish, "Where is Ana Mendieta?" It was a reference to charges that Mr. Andre had contributed to the death of Ms. Mendieta, his wife and a fellow artist, in a fall from a window of their apartment in 1985. (Mr. Andre, now 82, was acquitted of charges of second degree murder in 1988.) Generally, however, museum officials argue that the quality of the art should be kept separate from the conduct of the artist. "By taking action in the form of canceling an exhibition or removing art from the walls, a museum is creating an understanding of an artist's work only through the prism of reprehensible behavior," said Sheena Wagstaff, the Met's chairman for Modern and contemporary art. "If we only see abuse when looking at a work of art, then we have created a reductive situation in which art is stripped of its intrinsic worth and which in turn provokes the fundamental question of what the museum's role in the world should be." Moreover, art experts say, Mr. Close's work deserves to remain in the canon, given its important influence in redefining portraiture. His immense photographic paintings the best known of which depict leading cultural figures like the composer Philip Glass and President Bill Clinton (who in 2000 presented Mr. Close with the National Medal of Arts) have been acclaimed as both technically realistic and emotionally expressive. "He innovated how the portrait could be seen," Mr. Reynolds said. "That is a creative force that's got to be reckoned with and will endure." The National Gallery had planned to feature about two dozen paintings, photographs and works on paper by Mr. Close as part of a rotating series of installations called "In the Tower." The museum's decision to cancel the show its Close painting "Fanny/Fingerpainting" will remain on view may have been influenced by the fact that the National Gallery gets 72 percent of its 164 million budget from the federal government, which tends to avoid courting controversy. Anabeth Guthrie, a spokeswoman for the gallery, said the decision to postpone the Close show was made solely because of the harassment accusations and not because of political pressure. Art experts say the National Gallery's cancellation has a significant impact, akin to rescinding an Oscar from an actor. "It has enormous symbolic authority and power as an institution," said Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. "This is a time when sending messages is very, very important, particularly for national institutions. Their message is: If you're accused of these acts, you will not get an exhibition at the National Gallery." Rather than focus on which artists to censure, Mr. Eccles added, institutions should consider which artists will expand the definition of what belongs in a museum, namely female artists and people of color. "We can't not show artists because we don't agree with them morally; we'd have fairly bare walls," he said. "It's about addition bringing new voices in and new artworks in." Some museums increasingly provide personal information to contextualize their art. In describing the Clinton portrait by Mr. Close that is currently and will remain on view, for example, the Portrait Gallery's wall text says: "Clinton's denial of his sexual relationship with a White House intern, while under oath, led to his impeachment, but he was not convicted in the Senate trial." The museum's online entry for the rap artist Tupac Shakur says that he was "repeatedly condemned for his explicit, violent, and at times misogynistic lyrics." Whatever museums ultimately decide to do about Mr. Close, some say they can no longer afford to simply present art without addressing the issues that surround the artist that institutions must play a more active role in educating the public about the human beings behind the work. "The typical 'we don't judge, we don't endorse, we just put it up for people to experience and decide' falls very flat in this political and cultural moment," said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has Close works in its collection. "We must be keenly aware of the responsibility and consequences of our decisions within this context." "The question is," he added, "what are the decisions that place us on the right side of history?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
RISTO NYKANEN'S Russian wife hates his hobby. She came from Leningrad, in the old Soviet Union, before its name reverted to St. Petersburg. Mr. Nykanen's hobby? He gathers and restores old Ladas, the boxy Soviet automobiles that were once the family car of Finland, but have become collectors' items for contrarian collectors. "Whatever came from Soviet Russia, all this is crap," said Mr. Nykanen, 47, explaining why many Finns, and not just his Russian born wife, loathe the Lada. But for Mr. Nykanen, a Finn who runs a machinery import business when not buying and restoring the Russian clunkers, the cars represent a bittersweet chapter of his nation's history. Built starting in the early 1970s, based on the already dated design of the Fiat 124, Ladas are emblems of the Cold War, when Finland sought to strike a delicate balance between the Soviet Union and the West. Over the years, while cars from Western Europe, America and Asia evolved with fresh styling and improved engineering, the Lada failed to keep pace. Still, the standard model seated five and cost 40 percent less than, say, a comparable Opel. And basic Russian technology overcame at least some of the weaknesses: a dearth of insulation offered little protection against severe Finnish winters, a deficiency the Lada countered with a blast furnace heater. "It had two settings hot or extra hot," Mr. Nykanen said with a laugh. "An excellent choice." Introduced to Finland in 1971, the Lada for decades was one of the country's best selling car brands. Sales peaked in 1998, at 15,390 Ladas, some 10 percent of the market. By late last year the car's longtime importer, the Delta Auto Group, gave up the business, saying it had not sold even one Lada since 2009. Now Delta deals in the cars that Finns prefer today, like Kias, Mazdas and Mitsubishis. "No one's rushed to take up sales of the Lada," said John Costin, a 69 year old Englishman and former General Motors executive who was brought in as chief executive two years ago, to turn Delta around after heavy losses. "Lada and Brand Finland don't go together." For Mr. Nykanen, the Lada's popularity was inevitable, as was its decline, reflecting the arc of Finnish Russian history. For more than a century Finland was part of the huge Russian empire before gaining independence after World War I. Long after, it maintained a wary but open relationship with its giant neighbor. But with the collapse of communism, Finland threw itself wholeheartedly into the arms of the West, joining the European Union in 1995. Avtovaz, the largest Russian automaker, still makes Ladas in Russia, though production of the boxy, anachronistic 2107 model known in Western Europe as the Riva ends this month. Renault, the French automaker aligned with Nissan, is seeking control of Avtovaz and expects to build some form of its Romanian Dacia models in the Russian plant. Finland, which has assembly factories for various foreign brands but has no domestic auto industry, has not totally rejected Russian cars. Last month, the Moscow based company Marussia Motors, owned by a group of Russian investors, announced an agreement with Valmet Automotive, the Finnish contract manufacturer that builds the Fisker Karma plug in hybrid, to assemble a new luxury sports car, the Marussia B2. The B2 is intended to compete with the likes of Porsche, of Germany, and Ferrari, of Italy. Rattling off the countries where Marussia hopes to sell the B2, Denis Muravlev, a company spokesman, wrote in an e mail, "Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union, and Western Europe, including Finland, of course." But no one expects the high performance coupe to replace an Everyman car like the Lada. Over the years Mr. Nykanen has bought five Ladas, which he reverently restores and keeps in a garage on the edge of Helsinki. He estimates there are 15,000 Ladas left in Finland. In the 1990s, when Russians began traveling freely to Finland after the Soviet Union's collapse, thousands poured in to buy used Finnish Ladas and drive them home where, during the Soviet era, Russians had waited years to take delivery. "More than 30,000 of our Ladas went back to Russia," said Mr. Nykanen, citing a figure supported by auto registration data. Many Finns wish them good riddance. "For me, it reflects the old Soviet Union," said Hakan Rosenstrom, an optometrist who drives a Volvo. "It's not very popular." But for collectors like Mr. Lykanen, the Lada retains some allure. Lada buffs hold regular road rallies, even sometimes racing the old machines. And in 2008, he was part of a convoy of nine Finnish Ladas, with two or three people to a car, that made a weeklong pilgrimage to the Russian city of Tolyatti, on the Volga River, to pay homage to the factory where their cars were assembled. Renault, which now owns a stake in the manufacturing complex, refused them admittance. "We did some sightseeing and came home," Mr. Nykanen said. For everyday use, Mr. Nykanen owns a sporty two door Opel. But its computerized innards do not fully impress him. "If a nuclear bomb goes off, all microchips will collapse," he said. He affectionately tapped the hood of one of his Ladas, a washed out gray 1974 sedan. "Well, this is one model that has no chips inside," he said. "It's all mechanical. It's atom bomb proof." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
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