text stringlengths 1 39.7k | label int64 0 0 | original_task stringclasses 8 values | original_label stringclasses 35 values |
|---|---|---|---|
The art world has long wondered what would become of S.I. Newhouse Jr.'s formidable art collection after his death, since the media mogul had been ill for some time. Now with Mr. Newhouse's death earlier this month the beginning of its fate has been determined. The Newhouse family has appointed as its representative , the art adviser and former principal auctioneer at Sotheby's. "Mr. Meyer is working closely with us on all matters related to the art collection, and will be advising us in the coming months and years," the family said in a statement. "We look forward to working with him." Mr. Meyer said in a statement: "Si Newhouse possessed an incredible eye, and with astuteness and passion assembled one of the greatest collections of 20th century art. He was my mentor and friend, and I am honored to now work with his family." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
FRANKFURT Nervousness about United States monetary policy and fears of a budget and borrowing breakdown in Washington are creating a bigger drag on the global economy than expected, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday. The report was a more pessimistic view of global growth than six months ago. The organization, which has 34 members worldwide, including the United States and most of the 17 members of the European Union that use the euro, said American policy was having far reaching harmful effects on developing countries like Indonesia and Brazil. Economic problems in those countries will ricochet to the United States and Europe, the O.E.C.D. said, in the form of weaker demand for products from the developed world. "We used to think of emerging countries as an engine of growth," Pier Carlo Padoan, the organization's chief economist, said at a news conference in Paris. "This view has to be adjusted." In its twice yearly assessment, the organization portrayed a world slowly recovering but still highly vulnerable to shocks. Global growth will be 2.7 percent this year and 3.6 percent next year, the O.E.C.D. estimated, almost half a percentage point less than previously predicted. Mr. Padoan said economists had been caught off guard by the near panic in financial markets that ensued after the Federal Reserve suggested in June that it might begin tapering off its stimulus to the United States economy. As market interest rates rose, investors fled emerging markets, amplifying other problems in countries like Brazil, Turkey or South Africa. "The recovery is real, but at a slow speed, and there may be turbulence on the horizon," Angel Gurria, the secretary general of the O.E.C.D., said in a statement. "The exit from nonconventional monetary policy will be challenging," Mr. Gurria said, "but so will action to prevent another flare up in the euro area and to ensure that Japan's growth prospects and fiscal targets are achieved." The O.E.C.D. said another paralyzing political deadlock in the United States like the government shutdown in October could plunge the world into recession, but some economists said that level of alarm was overblown. "We don't think the shutdown has had such a big impact on the U.S. or global economy," said Marie Diron, an economist who advises the consulting firm Ernst Young. But she said the O.E.C.D. may have wanted to send a message to Washington "and prevent a repeat of what happened in October." Congress and the White House reached a deal in October to finance the government through Jan. 15 and raise the federal debt limit through early February. But going beyond those deadlines will mean political cooperation that has seemed hard to achieve in Washington lately. The O.E.C.D., based in Paris, said in its report that the euro zone would grow 1 percent next year after output declined an estimated 0.6 percent this year. The organization had forecast 1.1 percent in May. Euro zone growth will not be strong enough to make a big dent in unemployment, which will not fall below 12 percent until 2015, the organization said. Ms. Diron quarreled even with that relatively downbeat prediction. "We think that this threshold will only be crossed in 2016," she said in an email. "A faster fall in unemployment would require a marked increase in productivity growth, which we have no evidence of so far." Still, there was some good news from Europe on Tuesday after the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association said that auto sales rose in the European Union for a second month in a row. New registrations of passenger cars rose 4.7 percent in October compared with the same month last year. It was the first time since September 2011 that European car sales had risen two months in a row, reinforcing expectations that the industry is slowly emerging from the worst downturn in 20 years. In the report, the organization urged the Fed to move gradually when it begins reducing the asset purchases it has used to stimulate the United States economy. Economists expect the so called tapering to begin in the spring. The organization also cautioned the European Central Bank to take action if necessary to avert deflation, a destructive downward spiral in prices. The report stopped short of telling the central banks exactly what policies they should pursue or when. But it was more blunt with American political leaders, urging them to abolish the debt ceiling. Another prolonged budget impasse would have catastrophic economic effects, the organization said. If Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling, forcing steep government budget cuts and leading to partial default on federal debt, growth in the United States would plunge almost 7 percent and the rest of the world would be pushed into recession, it said. For the United States, the O.E.C.D. forecast an expansion of 2.9 percent next year after 1.7 percent this year, also a slightly more upbeat forecast. But it said growth in China, estimated now at 8.2 percent next year after 7.7 percent this year, would be slower than it forecast in May. However, China has been relatively immune to the financial turmoil that hit other emerging countries, the O.E.C.D. said. In May, the agency forecast growth next year of 2.8 percent for the United States, 1.1 percent for the euro area and 1.4 percent for Japan. It said China would grow 8.3 percent next year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Images become cinema in "24 Frames," the last movie from the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (1940 2016). "I always wonder to what extent the artist aims to depict the reality of a scene," he reveals in the opening text. "Painters capture only one frame of reality and nothing before or after it." This wondering led him to digitally transform 24 still images into short, visually and thematically linked sequences that make up this alternately charming and frustrating labor of love, which he worked on during the final three years of his life. (It was completed under the supervision of one of his sons.) It opens on the painting "Hunters in the Snow," one in a series of seasonal landscapes by Pieter Bruegel the Elder dating from 1565. On the left side of the canvas, a group of men and dogs can be seen walking near people clustered close to a fire and a line of buildings; the right side of the painting shows a smattering of structures in the near distance and, beyond these, still more distant people skating and milling about on lakes of dark ice. Over the next few minutes, the painting begins to stir as smoke streams from a chimney, snow falls, a dog urinates against a tree and crows caw and fly. The addition of these modest sounds and movements is intriguing but adds no insight and certainly no beauty to the Bruegel, which needs no such interventions. The rest of "24 Frames" is more appealing. It consists of 23 segments that turn Kiarostami's own photographs, many in starkly beautiful black and white, into animations of about four and a half minutes. Filled with desolate vistas, a feathered and furred menagerie, and multiple aperture like windows, these fragments quickly establish a moody tone and over time become dolorous refrains. Each section is divided by fades to black and individual titles (Frame 2, Frame 15) that create a kind of countdown effect. A fine art photographer as well as a filmmaker, Kiarostami could set your heart to leaping with cinematic landscapes that sometimes linger longer than his stories: a rough, dusty hill delineated by a zigzagging path in "Where Is My Friend's House?"; two travelers motoring through a swaying field in "The Wind Will Carry Us." It's no surprise then that the images in "24 Frames" are consistently pretty and at times striking, harmoniously composed and filled with visual tension that make the shots vibrate even before something birds, horses, an unfortunate deer or an opportunistically placed cat starts moving in them. Many of the views are organized around an obvious center point, a leafless tree or bush, for instance, roughly set in a brilliantly white wintry expanse. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
TOKYO In 2005, SoftBank was in dire straits. The scrappy Internet services company had booked a 1 billion loss the previous year, its largest ever. A campaign to enter Japan's strictly regulated cellphone business had failed. Its share price, which had soared with the Internet bubble, had fallen to less than a tenth of its height in 2000. But the next move by Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's founder and chief executive, astounded corporate Japan. Mr. Son plunged deeper into debt to acquire Vodafone's Japanese cellphone unit for about 15 billion Japan's largest leveraged buyout at the time to muscle his way into the mobile market. SoftBank is now one of Japan's biggest companies its market capitalization is three times that of Sony's and Mr. Son is confident that his plan to break into the American mobile market with a 21.6 billion bid to buy Sprint will be easy. "We've fought far tougher battles than this," Mr. Son told investors on Friday in Tokyo at SoftBank's annual general meeting. Hours earlier, a rival bidder for Sprint had confirmed it was ending its pursuit of the mobile network, America's third largest. "It's just been so much easier this time round," he said. Most analysts agree that Mr. Son, who seems set to acquire Sprint along with its Clearwire unit, faces long odds as he seeks to compete in the American mobile market. But his record for taking on giant companies and coming out on top bodes well for his chances, they say. "Mr. Son is simply the most talented and audacious businessman Japan has ever produced," said Kazuo Noda, chairman of the Japan Research Institute. "And when he goes into a new market, he doesn't just take on the big guys. He changes all the rules." It is Mr. Son's background as an outsider in Japanese society that makes him so willing to take risks, people who know him say, including Mr. Noda, who first met Mr. Son, then a college graduate, three decades ago. A third generation Korean Japanese, a minority group that still faces discrimination in Japan, Mr. Son has spoken of his roots in a slum on the southern island of Kyushu. But after his family's fortunes improved, he made his way to the United States. At high school and then at college in California, Mr. Son was dazzled by an entrepreneurial culture that he said he felt had been lost in Japan. And most of all, he was persuaded the world was about to experience a revolution in information technology. Mr. Son founded SoftBank in 1981 first as a publisher of computer magazines, then as a successful distributor of computer software. Using money from that business, Mr. Son made a series of investments in the early 1990s, including a one third stake in what was then a little known American start up named Yahoo. That bet paid off, giving Mr. Son money to expand his empire as Yahoo's share price climbed. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. But Mr. Son burst into the big leagues in the 2000s, buying a stake in a bankrupt bank, a small telecommunications company, a baseball team and a part of Alibaba of China, now the world's largest e commerce company When SoftBank began offering fast DSL Internet service in Japan in 2001, it took on losses to undercut competitors' prices by half. Government officials fretted that the price war would cripple the entire market. But consumers loved the sharp fall in prices, and the DSL market grew almost thirtyfold in two years. Around that time, Mr. Son also started pushing the Japanese government to let SoftBank into the country's highly regulated mobile sector, dominated by NTT DoCoMo, a subsidiary of the former state telecommunications monopoly. When his demands were snubbed, Mr. Son took the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to court, accusing it of colluding with NTT to shut out competition. The ministry eventually agreed to talks, but ultimately gave SoftBank a license to an inferior spectrum. Mr. Son, furious, turned to Plan B. In March 2006, SoftBank announced it would acquire Vodafone's struggling Japanese unit, borrowing 1.2 trillion yen ( 10.3 billion at the time) to finance the purchase. A day later, Mr. Son returned his original license to the government. His bets since then have been as bold. He brought the iPhone to Japan, using aggressive marketing to sell a handset most analysts said would not do well there because of its simplicity. Since then, the iPhone has become Japan's best selling phone. And underscoring his doggedness, Mr. Son confirmed that SoftBank considered other options in case the Sprint deal fell through, including buying T Mobile, America's fourth largest carrier, majority owned by Deutsche Telekom. Now his doubters and his fans are watching the battle for Sprint. Mr. Son "will go down in corporate history, but only if he doesn't stumble with his big bet on Sprint," said Tadashi Yanai, founder and chief of Fast Retailing, which sells the Uniqlo brand of clothes, and an external board member at SoftBank. SoftBank's bid for Sprint, if it goes through, will be Japan's largest ever overseas acquisition. Dish Network, the satellite TV company, threw a wrench into the deal with a rival offer. To clinch the deal, Mr. Son raised his bid, while reducing the amount of capital it would inject into Sprint, raising concerns among some analysts that the move would hurt the American carrier's capacity to invest in network infrastructure. Mr. Son defended that move on Friday, saying the acquisition would generate annual savings of 2 billion over the next four years. But Softbank is also paying dearly for the acquisition. It will use proceeds from recent bond sales, including a 4.1 billion issuance that closed Wednesday in Japan's biggest retail offering by a nonfinancial company, to finance the deal. Mr. Son said that Sprint, with SoftBank as owner, would get aggressive in pricing handsets and service contracts by using global economies of scale to drive a hard bargain with phone makers. The two companies together sold 26.5 million phones last year, just a step behind Verizon's 28.8 million and AT T's 26.9 million. He said that unlike Vodafone Japan, Sprint would be a far easier corporate turnaround. Sprint has already been rebounding under Daniel R. Hesse, who reversed its reputation for poor customer service. Mr. Son says he is ready for another big move. "In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return," he said. "It's the same with investment." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The Bronx and Queens Are Crying Out for Help None Ms. Cruz and Mr. Blake are members of the New York State Assembly from New York City. This article has been updated to reflect news developments. Since March, the coronavirus has brought to our districts in the Bronx and Queens financial and physical devastation. The difficulties our communities face today the pandemic on top of police brutality and systemic racism make us fear for their survival. Our constituents, most of them people of color, have endured decades of deficient health care and suffer disproportionately from chronic medical problems that make them more vulnerable to severe cases of Covid 19. When the pandemic arrived, infection and fatality rates soared in our districts. District 39 in Queens, which Ms. Cruz represents, has an average infection rate of one in every 25 people; District 79 in the South Bronx, represented by Mr. Blake, has an average infection rate of one in 33 people. We begged the federal, state and city government for help with testing, protective gear, food and funding. Our cries went unheard for weeks. By the time some of that assistance finally arrived, hundreds of people had died. And some assistance, like financial help for undocumented New Yorkers, never came, even though these same New Yorkers have paid billions of dollars in taxes during their time in this country. Our businesses are also dying. New York has always taken pride in the diversity of its boroughs and their small businesses, which generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue for this city. Yet during a City Council hearing in late April, we learned that Manhattan businesses received a whopping 66 percent of the small business loans distributed in the city. Queens received 9 percent, and the Bronx received a stomach turning 1 percent. The numbers for the city's Employee Retention Grant Program were nearly as abysmal, with Queens receiving 16 percent of the grants and the Bronx only 3 percent. Then, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis increased the pressure on our constituents. Something finally broke for New Yorkers of color. Thousands of people poured into the streets to protest. But those protesters have faced violence from the New York Police Department, including during a peaceful protest in the South Bronx, and are under the constant threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in immigrant communities in Queens. It is impossible to breathe when tear gas, pepper spray, batons and cars are being driven into our bodies. A clash between protesters and the police in early June in the Bronx. Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times This is not to say that all cops are bad cops, but those officers who are responsible for the atrocities being committed against us need to face consequences. Instead of responding to the protests with the empathy and compassion that communities of color deserved, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo turned this city into a militarized police state. Yes, people destroying businesses some of them black and Latino owned must be held accountable. But the uprising is a direct reflection of our leaders' failure to advance a progressive agenda committed to eradicating systemic inequalities. George Floyd begged and pleaded, telling officers, "I can't breathe." Our communities are also being asphyxiated, not by hands or knees but by the weight of racism and oppression that extends far beyond the brutality of the police force. It is the weight of the purposeful systematic failures in health care, education, housing and economic advancement that most burden people of color. The two of us have been constantly undermined by the mayor, the governor and some of our own colleagues in our pursuit of meaningful police accountability. This week in Albany, we seek to advance important criminal justice reform bills. We also fear that history will repeat itself: Our work to eliminate cash bail for most misdemeanors, which went into effect in January, has been rolled back. Still, we repealed Section 50 a of the State Civil Rights Law, which allowed police officers to conceal their personnel records, and banned chokehold maneuvers. We are also committed to imposing criminal liability for officers who fail to obtain medical care for persons in custody. And instead of protecting and maintaining a 1.3 billion public safety budget, we need to help our children laugh and breathe by restoring programs like the Summer Youth Employment Program. Unless we begin to truly invest in the success of black and brown people, there will never be meaningful change. We cannot and we will not wait any longer. This is a moment for black and Latino communities to come together and recognize that we may speak different languages or come from different countries, but we are on the same journey for justice. We need transparency. We need accountability. We need revenue dedicated to rebuilding, restoring and advancing communities of color. And we need the opportunity to make the legislative, budgetary and structural changes for that to happen. We must be able to breathe. Catalina Cruz represents the 39th District in Queens in the New York State Assembly, where Michael Blake represents the 79th District in the Bronx. 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 |
Emilio Gomez of Ecuador played college tennis for the University of Southern California, and nearly quit the game two years ago. He said qualifying for this French Open was "the story of my father and our country." Emilio Gomez won his way into the tournament 30 years after his father, Andres, won the men's singles title there. Gomez and Korda in French Open Decades After Their Fathers Played It, Too Tennis remains a family game, and former French Open champion Andres Gomez's five children all became good enough to play college tennis in the United States. Only one became good enough to follow their father's path and play in the French Open, and when Emilio Gomez took to Court 3 on Monday for his Grand Slam tournament debut, Andres Gomez was back home in Guayaquil, Ecuador, watching it on a screen in the early morning with his stomach churning. His son got close, very close, pushing Lorenzo Sonego of Italy to a fifth set, but there will be no second round for the younger Gomez in Paris. Sonego prevailed 6 7 (6), 6 3, 6 1, 6 7 (4), 6 3 in just over four hours. "That's how tennis goes," Andres Gomez said by telephone. "I'm still happy. Obviously, I would have wanted a different result today, but clay is not his best surface. Good things are coming for him, I think." Just reaching the main draw was quite a journey for Emilio Gomez, a former collegiate player at the University of Southern California. He is 28 and nearly quit the game in 2018 after a string of disappointing results, only deciding to push on after winning two satellite events in Ecuador. But in this strange and disjointed season, he finally broke through in Paris, coming through three rounds of qualifying and saving two match points in the final round against Dmitry Popko. Thirty years after his father won the French Open in 1990, defeating Andre Agassi, Emilio made it into the main draw, breaking into tears. "To be on the courts where my father won is something special," said Emilio, ranked 155th. "I'm not a first level player like him, but I enjoy it." Choosing the same path as a champion parent is not without its perils. "Emilio had to carry the name on the back, and it was a heavy load, sometimes even heavier because he thought it was heavy," Andres Gomez said. "But I think Emilio started to enjoy being my son. Everybody is the son of somebody, and there's always expectations and sometimes expectations are a little tougher on some of them. Being the son or daughter of a neurosurgeon, which maybe doesn't get the recognition or exposure of an athlete, for sure in that family you're going to have a big, big bag to carry." Korda's father and coach is Petr Korda, the 1998 Australian Open champion from the Czech Republic who also reached the French Open final in 1992, losing to Jim Courier. Andres Gomez said he and Petr Korda had compared notes on the art of parenting and coaching. But the next generation Kordas are not just tennis players. Peter Korda and his wife, Regina, who was also a leading Czech player, also have two older daughters: Jessica, 27, and Nelly, 22, who are two of the leading women's professional golfers. Each has won multiple L.P.G.A. Tour titles, with Nelly tying for second in the ANA Inspiration, a major championship held earlier this month. "They are having a good year this year, so we're always in contact, and we're always talking about what we can do better, and how we're doing it," Sebastian said of his sisters. "But yeah, they're a big help, and I love them a lot." Sebastian, nicknamed Sebi, started out with a passion for ice hockey but decided to focus on tennis at age 9 after traveling to the United States Open in 2009 with his father when Petr was coaching the Czech player Radek Stepanek. "He played Djokovic on Ashe at like 10:30 at night," Sebastian said of Stepanek. "It was completely packed, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever after that. I went home and said, this is exactly what I want to do, just kind of fell in love with it." Home was Bradenton, Fla., which is also home to IMG Academy, the sprawling multisport academy where his sisters developed their golfing talents and where he honed his tennis skills. For the Kordas, juggling the travel to support their children's careers has long been complicated and is only getting more complicated: Petr chose not to travel to Paris in part because of French Open restrictions on player entourages and in part because of Nelly's and Jessica's golf schedule. "It's challenging," Petr said. "But once this year will be over and hopefully life will go back to the normal direction and the schedule will be much more firm in tennis and then golf, then I will make my schedule and try to balance it so I can always be between the girls and Sebastian." The Korda parents taught Sebastian the tennis fundamentals, which included a two handed backhand, which has developed into his best shot and is quite a contrast with his father's flat one hander. Petr is a lefty. Sebastian, like his mother, is a right hander. But both father and son are tall and wiry, and since winning the 2018 Australian Open boys junior title, Sebastian has grown a couple of inches taller than Petr. He is now 6 foot 5 and starting to make inroads on the main tour. Like Emilio Gomez, he qualified here for his first French Open, and on Sunday he upset Andreas Seppi, a 36 year old Italian with much more experience on clay and every other surface. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"Dapping" could be defined as elaborate handshaking, but that would only begin to describe this kind of greeting, developed by and still largely associated with African American men. Yes, hands clasp and shake, but they also slide and slap and snap. Something between a punch and an embrace, dapping is communication through touch, a dialect direct in its wordlessness but still rich in emotional nuance and gestural beauty like dance. All of these facets are illuminated by "Dapline!," a powerful dance that Renegade Performance Group debuted on Thursday in University Settlement's Speyer Hall on the Lower East Side. Choreographed by Andre M. Zachery with the artist LaMont Hamilton, this work for six men has no sound accompaniment but is hardly silent. Skin hits skin. Feet and fists pound the floor. Along with an array of dapping, there are suggestions of riots, protest marches, bullet wounds and police lineups, yet "Dapline!" draws strength from its abstracted ambiguity. In one section, a man makes his way down a line of the other men, slapping each body from top to bottom. It's a weapon check pat down but also an inspection of troops. It's both confrontational and intimate, the way that dapping can be both an expression of brotherhood and akin to the antler clashing of rutting moose. That section, though, is equally representative of the work's structural redundancies; each of the six men takes a turn as the patter. Nearly every other segment is weighed down by a similar playing out of permutations. Even if repetition is part of the point, thematically, the belaboring is weakening (as is the work's slow motion). Apart from a few brief, intense explosions of krumping by the dancers Brian Henry and TJ Rocka Jamez, "Dapline!" is disciplined to a fault and deadly serious, too, with no hint that dapping can express sly wit or play. But it is revelatory. Immediately upon exiting the theater, I ran into dapping on the street and saw it with new eyes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In 1972, the great music critic Andrew Porter, who died on April 3, opened a New Yorker essay with these words: "Why, they ask me, do you so much enjoy living in New York?" There was the light, he wrote, which "makes each day a visual adventure," and moreover the New York City Ballet. "Imagine a world in which Mozart's music was played regularly in only one town, by an ensemble directed by its composer ... There are other composers than Mozart, other ballet makers than George Balanchine. But each is central to his art." The connection between the "visual adventure" of New York's light and Balanchine's choreography was surely no accident. City Ballet is opening its six week spring season with 12 Balanchine ballets in three different "Black and White" performances that represent one brilliant extreme of the Balanchine enterprise, with theater made solely of the interaction of music and dance without decor. The dancers wear a range of the pared down attire (leotards, T shirts, tights, tiny skirts) widely if inaccurately known as "practice costume," black and white, in most cases. Again and again, the choreography makes light itself an adventure. Balanchine was always the greatest choreographic master of formal geometry. Tuesday, opening night, began with the complementary but contrasting Stravinsky duo of "Monumentum pro Gesualdo" (1960) and "Movements for Piano and Orchestra" (1963): Each is a sparse affair for a ballerina, her partner and a female corps de ballet, but in "Monumentum," in which each woman in the corps has a male partner, a gorgeous array of brilliantly changing patterns connects modernism to Renaissance harmony; while in "Movements," modernism, though even sparser, keeps breaking its banks, with splinterings of line, male female tensions, frequently asymmetrical arrangements, radical meters. On Tuesday, the quietly sensational Maria Kowroski, long experienced in this pairing but often muted by a certain diffidence of delivery, attained a new peak of authority. She and the female corps (six different women for each work) showed Balanchine's style of visually anticipating the music better than I have seen in many years: As steps arrived a fraction ahead of the notes, they made an extraordinary effect, showing you physical form to which Stravinsky's score then came as a confirmation. The quick succession of avenues, arcs, parabolas, zigzags and changing crosses that characterize Balanchine's Bach classic "Concerto Barocco" (1941) are familiar, but they should never be taken for granted. Eight years ago, the company's dancing of this ballet was shabby and subdued; but of late, the company notably its corps of eight women has demonstrated glowing pride in this choreography, boldly stepping out off balance (on Tuesday, when one corps member slipped for a moment, it was the result of bravery) and announcing the movement in shapes and phrases that truly play with the music, now ahead of it, now lingering on a fraction after it. At this performance, the spring of these women's feet had a special eclat perhaps the result of the company's rehearsing the extensive beats and jumps that characterize the choreography of August Bournonville; you could feel insteps tingling. (A program combining the company's "Bournonville Divertissements" with a new production of his two act "La Sylphide" joins the repertory next Thursday.) This exhilarating brio was exemplified by the ballerinas Teresa Reichlen and Sara Mearns in the "Barocco" lead roles; they've become the company's pre eminent pair in this ballet, and their duetting has the brilliant give and take of supreme musicianship. Amazingly, Balanchine began the adventure of paring away sets and costumes for "Concerto Barocco" as early as 1945. (My companion on Tuesday was proud to note that she danced a corps role in a 1945 Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo performance of the ballet; in those days the costumes were black.) Another early ballet for this process of reduction and concentration was "The Four Temperaments" (1946), whose Kurt Seligman costumes Balanchine began eliminating soon after the premiere. Today it's always danced in black leotards (women) and white T shirts and black tights (men); nobody should want it otherwise. In the opening duet, as a woman (the admirable Lydia Wellington on Tuesday) rotates her raised leg in three successive arcs of increasing height, we feel how Balanchine choreography opens up theatrical space; the leg acts like a searchlight. By the end, with ballerinas borne exultantly high along huge horizontal flight paths, the air itself has been galvanized. You can read "The Four Temperaments" one of the richest and most abundantly expressive of all dances as a creation myth. In the beginning "Male and female created he them" (in the King James Version words about the first pair of humans), and from this nucleus with a series of three inseparable couples in the opening theme Balanchine builds and builds, showing us men without women (the soloists of the Melancholic and Phlegmatic variations), woman and man meeting from afar and dancing as much independently as together (the lead couple of Sanguinic), and woman dancing alone (in the final, thunderous Choleric variation). We see social units, and finally a complex social order. Tuesday's performance was not vintage Balanchine (Ashley Bouder is a redoubtable Choleric, though I'd rather her brilliance and high emphasis were applied to Sanguinic); but since I'd seen the Royal Ballet dance a conscientious but far less idiomatic version two weeks before, I was happy simply to see accentuations that felt like home. Ana Sophia Scheller, after a long absence, danced a lucid account of Sanguinic, one of the toughest of all roles. Each of the four sections of the Webern "Episodes" (1959) gives us a different exploration of light and of male female drama at its most coolly experimental. Here both Jennie Somogyi and Rebecca Krohn were back after injuries and looking good; Ms. Somogyi, whose career has had many long interruptions this century, danced with a fluent assurance as if to say everybody else had been absent but never she. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Can Bieber hold No. 1 for more than a single week? Hot on his trail is the latest from the K pop group BTS, a chart juggernaut with legions of ultra dedicated fans around the world. Also this week, two new albums reached high on the chart but could not surpass Bieber. The Bronx born rapper A Boogie Wit da Hoodie reached No. 2 with "Artist 2.0," which had the equivalent of 111,000 sales including 149 million streams, more than "Changes," though only 3,000 copies of "Artist 2.0" were sold as a full album while Tame Impala, the neo psychedelic rock project of the Australian musician Kevin Parker, is No. 3 with 110,000 of "The Slow Rush." Roddy Ricch, last week's chart topper, fell to No. 4 with "Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial," and the South Korean group Monsta X opened at No. 5 with "All About Luv," its first all English album. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Grants, low interest loans and other government support might seem like manna for businesses under financial strain. But some chief executives and corporate boards might balk at the offer of billions of dollars in aid to help them ride out the coronavirus pandemic and keep the economy from sliding into a deep recession. Already, some corporate leaders are bristling at the potential terms of the grants and loans authorized by the stimulus legislation President Trump signed last week. Boeing's chief executive, David Calhoun, for one has suggested that the aerospace company could raise money elsewhere if it found the government's terms too onerous. The Treasury Department, led by Steven Mnuchin, a former investment banker, might try to avoid imposing conditions that companies find burdensome. But if the aid appears too lenient, popular support for the rescue could evaporate as it did with the bailout of banks and other businesses after the 2008 financial crisis. And some lawmakers and experts argue that Mr. Mnuchin ought to resist the temptation to cut businesses too sweet a deal to prevent them from walking away from the government's offer. "Either they don't need money, which means they shouldn't get the money," Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in an interview. "Or maybe they really do need it, in which case they should agree to some restrictions on how the money is spent." Taking a tougher line with companies could bolster the overall economic impact of the aid. Demanding that companies maintain hiring levels, for example, might mean that more people have money coming into their bank accounts, allowing them to spend on necessities and pay the rent or mortgage, said Phil Angelides, a former treasurer of California and chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was created by Congress in 2009. "It is more important to keep workers on the payroll, even if they're at home that needs to be the pre eminent condition," Mr. Angelides said. Of course, with revenues falling off a cliff and losses piling up, some companies may be so desperate that their chief executives happily accept terms like a temporary ban on companies buying their own shares, a condition that airline executives have said they are willing to accept. Others may accept aid simply because the public wants them to. One big difference between the economic problems of today and the 2008 financial crisis is that most of the companies in need of relief are not suffering from self inflicted wounds. "That's obvious to most people, and a C.E.O. will have this defense at his or her disposal," said Tony Fratto, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury and a former deputy press secretary for President George W. Bush. Right now, policymakers are keenly watching how airlines and Boeing might respond. Congress's rescue legislation identified airlines as eligible for federal aid and earmarked up to 25 billion in grants and another 25 billion in loans for the industry; cargo carriers have been offered 8 billion in grants and loans. Boeing is expected to be the biggest recipient of up to 17 billion lawmakers set aside for businesses considered crucial to national security. The act also authorizes the Treasury to provide 454 billion to back loans made by the Federal Reserve, which would enable the central bank to extend an additional 4 trillion of credit to businesses in all industries. Some of the restrictions set out by the legislation, like a temporary halt on companies using their own money to buy back stock, appear to apply to all company loans. But a commitment by companies to maintain hiring at or close to recent levels is not required across the board. It would apply to the aid for airlines and companies deemed important to national security, but only through the end of September. On Friday, United management told staff that the federal aid would prevent any substantial reductions in staff or pay through September, but suggested that layoffs may come if the recovery was as slow as the company expected. Treasury could also demand stock in exchange for supporting airlines and companies like Boeing. For some executives, giving the government shares in their company could be a big sticking point. In a TV interview last week, Mr. Calhoun, the Boeing chief executive, suggested he would not be interested in a rescue package that gave the federal government stock in the company. 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. "I don't have a need for an equity stake," he told Fox Business. "If they force it, we just look at all the other options, and we've got plenty of them." While the government has laid out initial guidance on terms for the 17 billion available to companies deemed essential to national security, it is expected to release more specific terms in the coming days. Until those terms are clear, Boeing is holding off on making a decision, two people briefed on the company's deliberations said. The airlines have not set out a clear position on giving the taxpayer stock. On Thursday, the chief executive of Southwest Airlines, Gary Kelly, told employees that the airline planned to apply for the grants to pay workers, but a spokesman declined to say whether the airline would be willing to give the government an equity stake in exchange for the assistance. Last week, Mr. Kelly said that the legislation only "gives us another option" and that the company could also "raise capital in the private markets." American, which has said it would seek aid from the government, referred questions about whether the government should take a stake in airlines to Airlines for America, an industry group. The group and United Airlines declined to comment. Delta Air Lines did not respond to a request for comment. But on Wednesday, the unions that represent flight attendants at several major airlines urged Mr. Mnuchin not to exercise his power to take stock in the airlines. They argued that if he did so, he could scare off executives from accepting the aid, which would, in turn, mean more layoffs. Congress did not make the rules surrounding equity stakes particularly onerous. In addition to giving Mr. Mnuchin discretion about whether Treasury takes any stake at all, the legislation prohibits the Treasury from exercising "voting power with respect to any shares of common stock acquired." That means companies don't have to worry about the government's participating in important shareholder decisions. And the act says the Treasury can accept senior debt instead of equity. Of course, companies that are running low on cash don't have much time to negotiate with the government. Without the federal aid, three big airlines American, Delta and United have only about four to five months before they would have to start making deep cuts or take out new loans, Moody's Investor Service said in a report published on Wednesday. With it, they have an estimated eight months of financial cushion. "The federal grant money will be the most significant relief valve for alleviating pressure on the airlines," Moody's said. Large retailers, in a frantic effort to conserve cash, have drawn down credit lines and are laying off or idling thousands of employees. Macy's, which announced this week that it was furloughing the majority of its 125,000 employees, said in a statement, "We are also working both directly and through our retail associations to assess any government relief bill and advocate for Macy's Inc. and the industry." Congress required fewer restrictions on the loan programs that will be set up with the 454 billion of Treasury backing. The legislation does not demand that companies taking out loans from these programs maintain hiring levels. It is unclear how hard a line Mr. Mnuchin will take with chief executives. One approach might be to tell reluctant executives that their participation is needed for the whole effort to work. Henry M. Paulson Jr., who was Treasury secretary in 2008, told chief executives of large banks that they needed to take billions of dollars in taxpayer funds regardless of whether they agreed with the government's terms, which many people across the political spectrum criticized. His goal, in part, was to avoid having investors consider banks that took the money as weak if stronger financial institutions did not accept the cash, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Good news, Apple loyalists: You won't have to burn 1,000 on your next iPhone. That's because for about 750, you can have the iPhone XR, which is just as fast and nearly as capable as its more expensive counterparts. The cheaper iPhone, which becomes available this Friday, is the model that most people should buy. This year's other iPhones namely the XS and XS Max devices, which cost about 1,000 and 1,100 and are already in stores are luxury devices better suited for enthusiasts willing to spend a premium for superior cameras or a jumbo screen. For everyone else, the XR is perfectly adequate and has few downsides. Its 6.1 inch screen, which is based on LCD, an older display technology, looks ever so slightly inferior to the OLED screens on the XS phones but you would need to be a movie buff to notice the difference. The XR's single lens camera is also less capable than the dual lens cameras on the XS models. Yet the XR can still produce very satisfying photos of people using portrait mode, also known as the bokeh effect, which puts the picture's main subject in sharp focus while gently blurring the background. The XR is slightly less durable than its more expensive cousins. Its glass back is not as tough as the one on the XS. Its casing, or chassis, is composed of aluminum instead of the more robust stainless steel on the costlier phones. Yet these differences are negligible. (I recommend that people use a case to protect those parts of the phone anyway; carrying a phone without a case is a bit like driving a car without bumpers.) All of these minor negatives add up to a win for price conscious consumers, especially as smartphone prices keep climbing iPhones a few years ago started at about 650, while prices for Android phones from Google and Samsung have also shot up to between 700 and 1,000. After I tested an XR for four days, here are the highlights. Apple developed a new kind of LCD to improve color accuracy and squeeze the XR's screen into the corners of the phone. The result is what Apple calls a Liquid Retina display, which looks better brighter and more vibrant than past iPhone LCD screens. I confess that I struggled to see a difference between the Liquid Retina screen and the OLED on an iPhone XS. The distinction is most evident in blacks: If you look at a photo taken in the dark, you will notice that the blacks on the XR's screen have a faint blue glow, which is coming from the backlight used to illuminate the screen, while the blacks on the XS look darker and more realistic because the OLED technology turns off individual pixels to make them black. While browsing Instagram on the XR and the XS, I came across a few photos that clearly looked better on the XS's OLED screen. One example was a professional photo for a New York Times Cooking article about cherry season. In the photo, which shows a variety of cherries in colorful baskets, the reds and cyans looked more accurate on the XS than on the XR, and some of the red stains on the wood table were more visible on the XS. These downsides were trivial. The vast majority of your time on a phone will probably be spent looking at amateur photos taken by friends and family anyway, so it's worth saving 250 to have this slightly less vibrant screen. If you are debating between an XS and XR, your buying decision will probably come down to the camera. The XR's single lens camera takes excellent, clear photos with lifelike colors, but because it lacks a second lens, it is less capable at taking those DSLR like portrait mode shots, which are a lot of fun. To do portrait mode with the XR's single lens, Apple used machine learning, which involves computers analyzing images to recognize people in the photo and properly sharpen them while blurring the background. Apple decided to limit its machine assisted image processing on the device specifically to human subjects. In contrast, the second lens on the XS camera helped the device do portrait shots of a wider variety of subjects, like dogs and objects. In addition to the help of machine learning, the two lenses worked together to create a depth of field effect that kept the main subject in sharp focus while blurring the background. In contrast, Google's 800 Pixel 3 also has a single lens and, with the help of machine learning, did a fantastic job in my tests producing portrait mode photos featuring dogs, food and people. Apple said that for the XR's portrait mode, the company wanted to focus on getting photos of people to look just right. That said, people who are less dog crazy and more interested in shooting photos of, well, people probably won't mind this limitation on the XR. In my tests, the XR was excellent at taking portrait photos of my partner, properly sharpening details of her head, including her hair strands, while blurring the background. Let's speed through what else you need to know about the XR: None Apple said the XR had the longest battery life among the new iPhones. It gets 16 hours of video playback, compared with 15 hours on the XS Max. In my tests, I didn't notice a meaningful difference. Both iPhones had long enough battery life to get me through the day. None In speed tests measuring a single computing core with a benchmarking app, the XR was just as fast as the XS, 49 percent faster than Google's Pixel 3 and 45 percent faster than Samsung's Galaxy S9. None The body of the XR is about half a millimeter thicker than the XS partly because the cheaper phone had to make room for the backlighting used to illuminate its LCD screen. In addition, the XR's 6.1 inch screen is a bit bigger than the XS with a 5.8 inch screen. As a result, it felt bulkier in the pocket than the XS. (Of course, the XS Max with a 6.5 inch screen felt the bulkiest.) None The XR lacks 3D Touch, the iPhone feature that lets users control some of the software by exerting pressure on the touch screen. Instead, placing your finger over a button, like the camera shortcut on the lock screen, and holding it down results in haptic feedback. This is a negligible omission: I forgot that 3D Touch even existed because I rarely use it. None The XR comes in six colors: white, black, blue, yellow, coral and red. The XS phones come in three: gold, white and black. As is often the case for new gadgets, good things come to those who wait. If you resisted splurging on the XS to wait for the XR, you will be rewarded with a great phone and some extra cash lying around. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Arlene Gottfried, whose arresting images of ordinary people in New York's humbler neighborhoods earned her belated recognition as one of the finest street photographers of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 66. Her brother, the comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried, said the cause was complications of breast cancer. Ms. Gottfried roamed the streets of New York, camera in hand, finding opportunity at every corner. Much of her work recorded the daily routines and local characters in the city's Puerto Rican areas, where cultural exuberance coexisted with poverty and urban blight. She struck pay dirt on a nude beach in Jacob Riis Park in 1980, when a Hasidic Jew, dressed in black hat and overcoat on a scorching summer day, unexpectedly appeared. A nude bodybuilder approached and asked her to take a picture of the two together "because," he said, "I'm Jewish." She obliged. The unforgettable photo shows a flexing nude, smiling proudly, next to his thoroughly nonplused and emphatically clothed companion. Ms. Gottfried's subjects were never specimens, held up for cold examination. She was part documentarian, part social worker, a warm and sometimes lingering presence in the lives she recorded. She spent 20 years with Midnight and ended up joining the gospel choir that was the subject of her first book, "The Eternal Light," published in 1999. "How her eye captures people, and how she touches them, that's hard to explain," her brother told The Guardian in 2014. "Someone else couldn't see the funny or odd or touching thing, and capture it. Kind of like how a singer can have a great song, but not know how to sing it. She's able to do that." Ms. Gottfried is prominently featured in a documentary film about her brother, "Gilbert," scheduled to open in November. Arlene Harriet Gottfried was born on Aug. 26, 1950, in Brooklyn. She spent her early childhood in Coney Island, living above the hardware store that her father, Max, ran with his brother, Seymour. Her mother, the former Lillian Zimmerman, was a homemaker. When Arlene was 9 the family moved to Crown Heights, whose growing Puerto Rican population captured her imagination. In later years she took the cry of a Puerto Rican street vendor, selling cod fritters and fireworks on the Fourth of July, as the title of her book "Bacalaitos Fireworks" (2011), an unvarnished but loving look at Puerto Rican life on the Lower East Side and in Spanish Harlem. "It was a mixture of excitement, devastation and drug use," she told The New York Times in 2016, describing the scenes she recorded. "But there was more than just that. It was the people, the humanity of the situation. You had very good people there trying to make it." When she was in her teens, her father gave her an old camera, and she began taking pictures as she walked around the neighborhood, a habit that became a career. "We lived in Coney Island, and that was always an exposure to all kinds of people, so I never had trouble walking up to people and asking them to take their picture," she told The Guardian. Ms. Gottfried took photography courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan because, she once explained, she did not want to listen to lectures or do homework. After leaving the school, she found work doing commercial photography at an advertising agency. In the mid 1970s she began a freelance career in which her work sporadically appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Fortune and Life. Although well known to photographers and photo editors, Ms. Gottfried remained unknown to the larger public for most of her career. That changed when her black and white work from the 1970s and '80s, some of it collected in her book "Sometimes Overwhelming" (2008), caught the wave of interest in the gritty, dangerous New York of yesteryear. An exhibition at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in 2014 attracted the attention of the national news media and led to shows in France and Germany. The attention seemed to startle her, since she described her vocation in modest terms. "I think I wander around and I see things that just speak to me, in one way or another," she told Time magazine in 2011. "There are things that you try to say something about, or a moment you want to hold." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In the spring of 2003, as the United States launched its invasion of Iraq, the astrophysicist was attending the annual conference of the Space Foundation, in Colorado Springs. The conference brings together professionals from various fields who share an interest in space scientists, commercial satellite makers, as well as government and military officials and as the invasion got underway, some of the attendees drifted to a television screen to watch the spectacle unfolding live on CNN. Whenever the anchor would announce a strike by, say, a cruise missile, employees of defense contractors in the crowd whose companies had helped make the missile would cheer. For Tyson, a popular television and podcast host as well as the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and a man who was raised in the city's generally liberal and antiwar milieu, the experience was a discomfiting epiphany. It forced him to consider that scientists like him had been intimately involved in the development of warfare's destructive capabilities. (He also understood that some conflicts are justified.) "I realized that my professional ancestors have been handmaidens to this kind of exercise since the beginning of time," Tyson said. That insight has now yielded his 15th book, "Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military," which he co wrote with his longtime editor Avis Lang and which just ended a three week run on the nonfiction list. There it joined Tyson's "Astrophysics for People in a Hurry" (2017), a witty guide to cosmological science that spent 73 weeks on the list. "Accessory to War" took Tyson and Lang more than a decade to write in part because the history of space scientists' entanglement with military might turned out to be so rich, encompassing technologies from maps and compasses to satellites, drones, GPS and rockets. "Do you realize that George Washington wrote lovingly of his telescope in waging the Revolutionary War?" Tyson asked. "This was known by the artist who painted 'Washington Crossing the Delaware.' Zoom in and look at what he's holding in his right hand." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A hot fashion rivalry is underway thousands of miles from the runways of Milan and Paris. It has nothing to do with couture houses or red carpets. It does not involve a luxury brand poaching the designer du jour from a competitor. The clash arises from recent claims made by boosters for Nashville and Columbus. Each city, it seems, considers itself the fashion capital of the United States, with the very notable exceptions of New York and Los Angeles. Each city, in other words, is vying for third place. "Columbus is ranked the No. 3 largest metro for fashion designers and is rapidly becoming known as the region to live, work and play everything fashion," goes a line from an email sent by the publicity firm DCI on behalf of Ohio's most populous city. A similar email from a Nashville publicist that recently popped up in my inbox has it that the country music capital, in Middle Tennessee, "now boasts the largest per capita concentration of fashion companies outside of Los Angeles and New York City." After puzzling over the dueling claims, I set out to determine which city is worthy of fashion bronze. I quickly found during my travels that both places have a lot going for them. As part of my investigation, I dined at hip restaurants, pawed through the racks at luxury boutiques and met with fashion powers and prospects in both towns. The New York fashion designer Isabel Toledo and her husband, the artist Ruben Toledo, make regular trips to Columbus, where an exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art recently celebrated their work. "There's huge fast fashion mass ness and a totally under the radar underground scene here," Mr. Toledo said. "It's a great mix." Over dinner at the Margot Cafe Bar in Nashville, in the stylish company of Van Tucker, the chief executive of the Nashville Fashion Alliance, and Libby Callaway, a fashion reporter turned Nashville publicist, I learned that Minnie Pearl, the hillbilly granny on "Hee Haw," was, in real life, a chic Diana Vreeland of the South. But it wasn't all gossipy expense account dinners. I had work to do. My aim was to judge Columbus and Nashville in various categories and, whenever possible, award a winner for each. The final tally would settle the matter. There can be only one third place finisher, after all. For the evidence and my ruling, please read on. Nashville "My take on Nashville fashion is there's pre Imogene and Willie and post Imogene and Willie," said Ms. Callaway, who once covered the industry for The New York Post. "They changed the conversation here." Indeed, fashion obsessives flipped for the heritage denim label founded in 2009 by Matt and Carrie Eddmenson. So did Gwyneth Paltrow, who became a fit model. The flagship store occupies a converted auto repair shop in the 12 South district, where I saw millennials gingerly handling pairs of 200 straight leg, cardboard stiff selvedge denim jeans. But these days the store is mostly symbolic. In 2015, the Eddmensons moved to Los Angeles, to be closer to their manufacturers. What does it say about a local industry when the most successful brand had to leave to grow? Nashville Nicole Kidman, one of numerous local celebrities, may have to do her serious shopping elsewhere. For all of its entertainment industry wealth, there is no luxury department store in the city's downtown area. But a bustling independent retail scene has sprung up to fill the void, including H. Audrey, Peter Nappi and Billy Reid. But for my money, the city's saving grace is its three locations of United Apparel Liquidators, the only in the South off price retailer that sells Chanel, Prada and other luxury goods at ridiculous markdowns. Columbus You may have heard that shopping malls are going extinct in a retail apocalypse. But that wasn't the feeling I experienced at Polaris Fashion Place, where two levels of stores hummed with consumerist joy as if it were 1989. Perhaps that's why brands treat Columbus as Test Market, U.S.A., trying out products there before rolling them out nationwide. After my mall visit, I stopped by Rowe Boutique, an independent shop in the trendy Short North neighborhood. The owner, Maren Roth, worked in the fashion trenches on both coasts before returning to her Ohio roots in 2007, "to bring a little of New York and L.A. to Columbus," she said. Next month, Ms. Roth and her fiance, Marc Desrosiers, plan to open KILN, a men's store, nearby. Winner: They are both winners. Nashville Every serious fashion town needs hip places to stay, and in recent years, boutique hotels here have become, well, a boutique industry. The first to gain acclaim was the 404 Hotel Kitchen, with five guest rooms and an adjoining restaurant inside a reclaimed shipping container. Then there is the Germantown Inn, with its six suites in a historic 1870s house; Urban Cowboy, a branch of the bed and breakfast that started in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and in the Gulch neighborhood, not far from Jack White's Third Man Records, is the newly opened Thompson Nashville, which has 224 rooms and three restaurants, including a rooftop cafe that doubles as an Instagram backdrop. Columbus Le Meridien Columbus, the Joseph hotel opened not long ago in the Short North district. And Columbus residents talk up their first boutique hotel the way new parents gush over their firstborn. "You've got to see the Joseph." "When are you gonna see the Joseph?" O.K., O.K., we saw the Joseph. We stayed there, in fact. There is a bar in the lobby with Illy coffee and an adjoining restaurant, the Guild House, that serves an excellent snapper. But Jack White isn't likely to walk through that door any time soon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Hazel Teo grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and later spent four years in Los Angeles earning a degree at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. After graduation, she had the chance to freelance in New York as a dress designer and stylist. A friend and classmate from Boston had a similar plan, so the two decided to room together. They focused on Brooklyn where Ms. Teo had a few friends. "We tried to look in Williamsburg, but even the smallest two bedrooms were way out of my budget," said Ms. Teo, 25. So, the roommates hunted for a cat friendly two bedroom for 2,500 a month in or near Bushwick "It was kind of our age group," Ms. Teo said. Ms. Teo's cat, Trouble, stayed temporarily with the friend's family in Boston. That one rented quickly, but the roommates settled on a three bedroom in a small rowhouse near Bushwick Avenue. The third bedroom could be a studio, holding their sewing machines, dress forms and work tables. The monthly rent was 2,400, but it was advertised as 2,200, which was the "net effective rent" for a 12 month lease with one month free. Ms. Teo preferred to pay the same amount each month. "We requested that the net effective rent be amortized over the course of the lease," Ms. Krueger said. The landlord agreed. But at the last minute, Ms. Teo's friend decided to return to Boston. Now, she was on her own. Having had a bad roommate experience before, she didn't want to risk a random roommate. "Being put in the same unit with someone that I don't know scares me a little bit," she said. "It has to be someone that I'm close to or someone I've met more than a couple of times." So she began hunting for a studio or one bedroom. Her budget was around 1,800. She considered an alcove studio in Bedford Stuyvesant. The rent was advertised at 1,745. But that, too, was a "net effective rent." Ms. Krueger again tried to negotiate for the same amount to be paid each month. "Usually the free rent comes out on the back end of the lease to ensure that the tenant stays for the full tenancy," she said. "I can understand how some tenants feel 'net effective rent' could be a little misleading," she said. Some listings emphasize the payment situation "so people are aware rather than blindsiding them, but it is not a perfect system." This landlord would not agree to spread the cost evenly over the lease term. Ms. Teo wasn't interested. "In those free months, I would spend more than I should," she said. "I didn't want that scenario. I would rather pay consistently. It felt annoying because it was advertised falsely." Ms. Teo saw an ad online for the Hamilton, a new rental building in Borough Park on the border of Sunset Park. As she walked past, Ms. Teo recognized the building. She went in and was shown three units. Reluctant to pay a few hundred dollars more for a one bedroom "the only difference was that there was a wall," she said she chose the least expensive one, a studio for 1,850. "What they told me was exactly what I got," she said. "There was no beating around the bush, no hidden agenda and no fine print." Ms. Teo arrived last winter. As a foreigner with a freelance income, she used Insurent as a guarantor. Her furniture came from Ikea. For other necessities, she shopped at Target at the Atlantic Terminal Mall, requesting an Uber car to transport her home with her bags. A young man arrived in a car. They got to talking. Later, she and her Uber driver by now her boyfriend drove to Boston to retrieve Trouble the cat. Ms. Teo's only complaint is that smoke from neighbors wafts in. "The smell travels through the vents, especially now in the summer when you close your windows and turn on the ventilation," she said. Though she overlooks a commercial thoroughfare, Fort Hamilton Parkway, the traffic and sirens are masked by the air conditioning. In her neighborhood, the pokey N train is the sole subway option. "If you want to go out at night to Williamsburg, you have to go to the city, transfer and go back to Brooklyn," Ms. Teo said. "Or you could take an Uber." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
NEW ORLEANS As the Ohio State Buckeyes moved into striking range of a touchdown that could have sent them to the national championship game, Raymond Turner could not bear to watch. His grandson, Nolan Turner, a junior safety for Clemson, would end up as the last line of defense against the Buckeyes an opportunity as alarming as it was thrilling. Nolan had been beaten early in the fourth quarter for a touchdown pass that gave Ohio State the lead, which Clemson reclaimed with less than two minutes to go. Now, in the final seconds of the game, Raymond sat in the stands with his eyes closed, bowed his head and had a conversation with his late son, Kevin, who was Nolan's father. "I was talking to my son in heaven," Raymond Turner said. "I said, 'Kevin, we need some help here anything.'" "I said, 'Oh, my God, Nolan intercepted the ball,'" Raymond said. "I know people don't like to hear that kind of talk. But I had chills running down my spine." In recent years, an increasing awareness of brain injuries connected to playing football has led to a reckoning about America's most popular sport, forcing fans to reconsider their devotion to the game as a wave of former players developed dementia or died by the time they reached middle age. It is hard to imagine a family with more to reconcile than the Turners. Kevin, a bruising fullback who played eight seasons in the N.F.L., died at age 46 in 2016, six years after he began receiving treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a rare, incurable degenerative disease that is better known as Lou Gehrig's disease or A.L.S. So when Kevin's parents, Raymond and Myra, and his ex wife, Joyce, watch Nolan run around on a football field in front of adoring fans wearing a No. 24 jersey, just as his father did in college front and center are reminders of what football has given and taken away. "There's mixed emotions," Raymond said. "Nolan's doing really well, but it worries me sometimes after what happened to my son. It's kind of a God's will thing whatever happens is supposed to happen." Said Joyce Turner: "Absolutely, it is very bittersweet. The past few weeks, obviously we're ecstatic for Nolan that he had such a wonderful game, and so happy for him and so thankful there were no injuries, but there's always that fear namely concussions." "When he's on the field, I can tell it's Nolan without even looking at his number," Myra said. "He walks like Kevin, he runs like Kevin. ..." She stopped and began to cry. Clemson Coach Dabo Swinney understands. "Every time I look at Nolan," he said, "I feel like I'm in 1989 all over again, because they're spitting images of each another." Swinney and Kevin Turner were teammates and close friends at the University of Alabama, often arriving together at Raymond and Myra's recreational vehicle after games to eat grilled meat and drink beer. As Clemson's interim head coach in 2008, Swinney lured Kevin into briefly being an "emergency grad assistant" for a bowl game. After Nolan's senior season in high school in Vestavia Hills, Ala., he had opportunities to walk on at Alabama and Clemson, but had only one scholarship offer as signing day approached from Alabama Birmingham. Clemson, though, ended up scrambling to fill positions when four defensive backs decided to leave early for the N.F.L. Swinney quickly landed three new defensive backs before he looked at a videotape of Turner. He then called Turner's high school coach, who assured Swinney that Nolan could keep up at Clemson. Next Swinney showed the video to defensive coordinator Brent Venables, who said: "I like this guy. Where is he?" Swinney flew the next day to meet with Turner and offer a scholarship. "I told Nolan, here's what's going to happen," Swinney said. "We're going to offer you a scholarship and everybody's going to say it's a pity party, it's only because of your dad, blah, blah, blah. Now, it is because of his dad, in that I had a relationship. But he got a scholarship because he's good." When Kevin was told in 2010 that he had A.L.S., Nolan stopped playing football for his middle school team. As to why, it depends on whom you ask. According to Raymond, Kevin asked Nolan to do so. "He said: 'Won't you sit out a year and see if this is what you want to do?'" Raymond said. "'You've got to really love football to know if this is the beating you want to take and you go through the age where the bones need to grow and you put on weight.'" Joyce, who had three children with Kevin before they divorced, said: "At the time, his dad and I thought: Well, maybe he's not playing because of what his dad is going through. But now, if you ask Nolan, it was 'Our team was absolutely terrible. I wanted to focus on basketball.' I was so excited. I thought it was because of the dangers of football." Nolan laughed when his mom's recollection was recounted for him. "Whatever she said you take it with a grain of salt because it's usually never true," he said, all but rolling his eyes. "She has her own stories. I thought I was going to be a basketball star in eighth grade so I was not going to play football." He returned to football a year later because he missed it. Nolan, who used to watch his father's old videotapes in a V.C.R. "I'm glad I'm not playing against him; he used to kill people back there," he said discussed the dangers of the sport with his father, but said his father never tried to dissuade him from playing. The discipline, camaraderie and life lessons that he took from football were hard to replicate in other sports, Nolan said. If others in the family were anxious when Nolan suffered a concussion during his senior year in high school, Nolan was not. He termed it "a slight concussion" even though specialists say there is no such thing. "I didn't really give it all that much thought," Nolan said. Walking away from football is not easy for a family like the Turners. Raymond played in high school and then coached Kevin for almost a decade, beginning at age 5. Kevin then coached his two boys. Nolan began to play tackle football when he was 8. "It's hard to get out of your blood," Joyce said. What gives everyone in the family a degree of comfort is changes to the sport that have been made around the margins. Some teams now have less contact in practice; Kevin was certain that practice collisions were primarily responsible for his depression and A.L.S. There is greater vigilance about concussions; rules have been changed in an attempt to make the game safer; and the Turners place great trust in Swinney to care for Nolan. Joyce said she is at peace. "I really am," she said. "It goes back to everything happens for a reason. It's tragic what we went through with Kevin, but I feel like he played a big part in making the game safer. When he played in the N.F.L., I'm just a wife and mom sitting in the stands watching the team doctor on the sidelines doing the follow my finger test after Kevin had a horrific hit. I knew that couldn't be right." She continued: "I hated the game when he first got diagnosed. I hated everything about it. Once I started seeing the changes in the helmets, the trainers out there, taking players off the field and taking it serious, and what they go through when they feel like you might have gotten a concussion, the extensive tests. It's made me feel so much better. I wanted to love the game. I love the game again." Still, players are bigger than ever, seasons are longer than ever, and many changes are so new that there is little data on whether the game has become safer, a point she acknowledged. "There's no guarantee," Joyce said. "If you're not playing with a concussion, I'm assuming they're going to be O.K. down the road to avoid A.L.S., C.T.E., dementia all that stuff is caused by playing with a concussion." A year from now, Nolan will consider his career path. He is on track to graduate in August with a degree in finance, and he could follow in the steps of Myra, who worked as a financial services manager. Coaching is another possibility. But with another year of development, Swinney believes Nolan has a chance to play in the N.F.L. After all, as a freshman, Nolan did something that plenty of N.F.L. players struggle with he tackled quarterback Lamar Jackson, then of Louisville, in the open field. "As a competitor, you're always looking for the next step so it's definitely something I would pursue trying to play in the league," Nolan said. Raymond said he would support his grandson if he pursued a career in the N.F.L., and if not, "that would suit me fine." "I told him," Raymond said, "you don't have to be the best athlete in the world to be back there, but it wouldn't hurt to be the smartest. If you know the game, it makes up for a lot of deficits. He knows the game." Once Monday's championship game is over, Raymond anticipates that he and Myra will eagerly shift attention to their youngest grandson, Cole. He is a sophomore in high school and a talented athlete. Best of all: He plays only basketball. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka Southern China has its assembly plants. India has customer support centers, research laboratories and low cost lawyers. And Sri Lanka's contribution to global outsourcing? Accountants thousands of them, standing ready to crunch the world's numbers. As this tiny island nation staggers back from a bloody, decades long civil war, one of its brightest business prospects was born from a surprising side effect of that conflict. Many Sri Lankans, for various reasons, studied accounting in such numbers during the war that this nation of about 20 million people now has an estimated 10,000 certified accountants. An additional 30,000 students are currently enrolled in accounting programs, according to the Sri Lankan Institute of Chartered Accountants. While that ratio is lower than in developed economies like the United States, it is much greater than in Sri Lanka's neighboring outsourcing giant, India. Offices in Sri Lanka are doing financial work for some of the world's biggest companies, including the international bank HSBC and the insurer Aviva. And it is not simply payroll and bookkeeping. The outsourced work includes derivatives pricing and risk management for money managers and hedge funds, stock research for investment banks and underwriting for insurance companies. Many developing countries have "one particular competency that they do better than anyone else," said Duminda Ariyasinghe, an executive director at Sri Lanka's Board of Investment. "Financial accounting is that door opener for us." With widespread use of English and a literacy rate of over 90 percent, along with rock bottom wages, Sri Lanka hopes to transform its postwar economy from a sleepy tea and textiles island into a tiny, high end outsourcing powerhouse. Already there are thousands of other Sri Lankans working in more common outsourcing fields, like information technology and software development. About 50,000 people in Sri Lanka are now employed in one form of outsourcing or another, according to Slasscom, an outsourcing trade group, and that figure is growing by 20 percent a year. During the war, Sri Lankan certified accountants would often use their skills as a springboard out of the country. That is why there are now Sri Lankans sprinkled among executive suites around the world, including the vice president of global business services at American Express and a financial controller at Standard Chartered Bank in the United Arab Emirates. Now, though, the government and business community hope the country's young financial whizzes will have reason to stay home instead. Sri Lanka's government, headed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, expects revenue from so called knowledge based outsourcing which includes accounting to triple to 1 billion in revenue by 2015. The stark wage differences between Sri Lanka and America, or even Sri Lanka and India, are a big part of the country's drawing card. In the United States, the median annual wage for accountants and auditors in May 2008 was 59,430, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sri Lankan workers in the accounting profession receive an average annual pay package of 5,900, according to a 2010 survey by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. Wages in Sri Lanka for financial outsourcing are about one third less than in neighboring India, and hiring educated employees is easier in Sri Lanka, according to executives who do business in both countries. "Skilled talent is accessible," said Dushan Soza, managing director of the Sri Lanka office of WNS Global Services, an outsourcing company with about 350 people in the country. Because Sri Lanka's accountants are still a relatively untapped asset on the global market, Mr. Soza said, hiring is easy and turnover is minimal. In the Indian city Mumbai, companies like his would have to go far out of the city to hire because of the level of competition, he said, but here in Colombo "two miles from my office is my hiring range." Many international executives also quietly admit that Colombo's colonial architecture, excellent seafood restaurants and proximity to miles of sandy beaches make it a more alluring business travel destination than India's outsourcing centers. Sri Lanka's accounting specialty is rooted in the country's history of colonialism and conflict. State financed universities here have traditionally not had enough places for qualified students, and they were often closed intermittently during the war. So students who could afford to attended private schools instead in many cases accounting schools with British origins that date to Sri Lanka's independence from Britain in 1948. Over time, becoming a qualified accountant has become something well educated, business minded people in Sri Lanka do in addition to getting a degree in, say, physics or business management. Now, though, many students choose accounting over another degree. When Nilushika Gunasekera, secured a coveted spot at a public university, she turned it down to go to a privately run accounting school. University students do not get any exposure to a real business environment, she said, and they have several years to "take things easy." "I didn't think going to the university would add value," she said. After accounting school, Ms. Gunasekera joined an outsourcing company doing work in cash management and banking. She now works for the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in Colombo, a trade group. If the rest of the world discovers Sri Lanka's pool of low cost accountants, as the government hopes, the country could lose some of its competitive edge because wages will go up and there may not be enough workers to meet the demand. But the government is offering various other incentives including tax breaks, subsidized telecommunications and streamlined procedures for setting up new businesses meant to encourage international companies to come here instead of India, Eastern Europe or the Philippines. As foreign companies ramp up their presence here, local developers are building to accommodate them. In a neighborhood thick with tea warehouses and crossed by rail tracks, Jeevan Gnanam is turning the textile mills his grandfather built into a high tech outsourcing center. Orion City, as the development is called, is miles from Colombo's slick World Trade Center skyscrapers, near a canal fringed with rundown buildings and palm trees. But it has already drawn big name clients, including a division of the publishing giant Pearson and MphasiS, a technology company partly owned by Hewlett Packard, which has said it will hire 2,000 people here in the next three years. "Sri Lanka offers us a rich talent base that will allow us to serve our global clients," said Dinesh Venugopal, chief corporate development officer for MphasiS. Ultimately, Orion City will have three million square feet of office and retail space, including a 19 story building, said Mr. Gnanam, 28, who is the chief executive of the consortium that manages the development. It was difficult to convince his father and uncle that technology, not textiles, were Sri Lanka's future, he said, but they have come around recently. Building the industry and attracting foreign investment is crucial, he believes. "Economic development has to take place," he said, "for people to put the war in the past." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A 5 to 10 year old child might overhear a hyperbolic statement about the coronavirus and say to Mom or Dad something like, "I'm afraid we're all going to die." The appropriate response is a very clear one that invites clarification: "We're not all going to die. Tell me what you heard that makes you think that." It is important that we do not promote an apocalyptic narrative. Kids this age are less self involved than younger kids, and so they worry about the impact not just on themselves but on others around them. Yes, you want to educate, but you also want to know what they've heard and how they've interpreted that information. Make sure to ask questions. At this age, most children have begun to hone far more sophisticated thinking skills. They think both logically and abstractly. They also can understand sarcasm and irony. It is not helpful to talk carelessly about doomsday scenarios, but an older child is far more likely to see the humor in sarcasm than a younger child. Remember that adolescence is very stressful even in the absence of a national emergency. Kids in this age group are likely to have concerns that feel much more pressing to them than how many people have the virus or how much toilet paper is stocked in the house. Don't be surprised to hear something like: "This is all ridiculous. I'm going to hang out with my friends tonight. Nobody is sick." The best response here is: "I know you want to hang out with your friends. But we're part of a community and we have to protect not only ourselves, but others in our community as well." Tap into the part of your child who understands that there are others in the world besides him or her. Adolescents can be very self centered but also socially conscious. Remind them that their aunts and uncles and grandparents need their help. Sympathize with their lack of access to friends. This is really tough for young teenagers. And finally, as parents, our first order of business must be to calm ourselves. This does not mean sticking our heads in the sand, but it might mean limiting our own exposure to frantic and frightening media. For many of us, it will require pulling out those behaviors that serve us well in other times of stress meditation, gardening, exercise, nature. We are showing our children what it means to tolerate emotional discomfort. This is not the last time in life we will face a global threat. And it certainly is not the last time our children will. This is not the apocalypse. The crisis will pass. In the meantime we will have to teach our children how to deal with uncertainty. We don't have to love it. But we do have to model it. Madeline Levine is a clinical psychologist and the author of "Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World." 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 |
Protesters gathered on Friday outside the Salle Pleyel in Paris, site of the Cesar Film Awards, where Roman Polanski and his film "J'accuse" were up for 12 prizes. It won three, including best director. LONDON Roman Polanski, the film director who fled the United States in 1978 while awaiting sentencing for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, was a big winner Friday night at the Cesars, France's equivalent of the Academy Awards, leading several actors to walk out of the ceremony in outrage. He was named best director for "J'accuse" (The English title: "An Officer and a Spy") about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer wrongly convicted of treason in what remains France's most notorious miscarriage of justice. "Very few" people applauded Mr. Polanski's best director award, said Le Monde, the French newspaper. Adele Haenel, one of France's most prominent young actresses who said she had suffered from sexual abuse in the country's film industry, was one of those who left the room at the Cesar ceremony, waving an arm in disgust and appearing to say, "Shame." Ms. Haenel previously complained this month in an interview with The New York Times about his nominations. "Distinguishing Polanski is spitting in the face of all victims," she said. "It means raping women isn't that bad." Mr. Polanski's film won two other awards, having led the nominations with 12, the most of any movie. Mr. Polanski was given the award for best adapted screenplay along with Robert Harris, the British novelist. The movie also won for best costume design. It was nominated for the best film award, but that honor went to "Les Miserables," a crime drama that shows the harsh reality of life in Paris's immigrant heavy suburbs. But he was not there to collect any of the prizes. He announced on Thursday that he would not attend the ceremony because he feared a "public lynching" from protesters outside, angered at his links to child sexual abuse. "We know how this evening will unfold already," Mr. Polanksi said in a statement. "What place can there be in such deplorable conditions for a film about the defense of truth, the fight for justice, blind hate and anti Semitism?" Mr. Polanski pulled out of the 2017 awards for the same reason. Mr. Polanski has been a fugitive from the United States since 1978, when he fled before sentencing in a statutory rape case. He has faced more accusations of sexual assault since then. On Friday, the French police fired tear gas outside the Paris concert hall hosting the Cesar Film Awards in a clash with people protesting the director, according to local news reports. Protesters also pulled down a safety barrier outside the venue, but the police pushed them back, so they did not make it onto the red carpet. Other demonstrators waved placards reading, "Shame on an industry that protects rapists." The United States considers Mr. Polanski a fugitive of justice but has been unable to secure his extradition. He has also faced other accusations of sexual assault. In November, Valentine Monnier, a photographer, accused Mr. Polanski of raping her in 1975, when she was 18, in a ski chalet in Switzerland. He has denied the accusations. Reviewers praised "J'accuse" at the Venice Film Festival last year. "The longer you look at it, the more impressive it grows," Xan Brooks wrote in The Guardian. It won similar acclaim in France after its release in November, and the film topped the country's box office. But it was also met with protests, and some in France's film industry distanced themselves from Mr. Polanski. After the Cesar nominations were announced in January, a host of French feminist organizations said they would protest the ceremony. "If rape is an art, give Polanski all the Cesars," they said in an open letter published in a leading newspaper. Mr. Polanski, though absent, loomed large throughout the evening. Florence Foresti, the actress and comedian who hosted the event, started the event by welcoming "predators" in the audience. "There are 12 moments when we're going to have an issue," she said in a reference to Mr. Polanski's 12 nominations. Ms. Foresti, who was not onstage when he was named best director, did not return for the end of the ceremony. She wrote on Instagram that she was "disgusted." Mr. Polanski's decision to withdraw from this year's award ceremony didn't ease the controversy. On Friday morning, Franck Riester, France's culture minister, said in a television interview that if Mr. Polanski won best director at the Cesars, it would be "a bad symbol given we must all be aware of the need to fight against sexual violence and sexism." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Brady Hill used his skills for buying and selling baseball cards to purchase his first car and to pay his way through Louisiana State University. Now that he's the chief executive of Greensource, one of the country's largest T shirt printing companies, Mr. Hill is again devoting time and financial resources to his hobby. "Seven or eight years ago, I went to see these cards I had in my safe deposit box that I was going to keep forever," said Mr. Hill, 47. "I said, 'This is cool.' Then I looked on eBay and said, 'Wow, this is legit.'" Prices have certainly risen for collectible trading cards. Over the past decade, as the Standard Poor's 500 stock index has roared back from the 2008 crash, an index of the top 500 baseball cards has done even better beating it by more than double. Mr. Hill and his wife have put about 20 percent of their net worth in baseball cards, he said. They did so for both investment and aesthetic reasons. "What's more fun?" Mr. Hill asked. "Having a Babe Ruth rookie card or shares of stock where one false move and it goes down?" The cards make for remarkably portable assets. If Mr. Hill held his 1916 Babe Ruth card in one hand and his 1952 Mickey Mantle in the other, he would have about 1.2 million pinched between his fingers. Those sky high values mean that collecting cards is no longer child's play; it's a big money realm of affluent collectors who have their eye on returns. And Mr. Hill is part of a growing group of collectors who see their cards as investments, even if the type of investment they are artwork or security is debatable. The company has three indexes of the top trading high value cards: the top 100, 500 and 2,500. The indexes are based on auction sales data from the past 10 years. The top three are the 1952 Mantle, like Mr. Hill's; a 1954 Hank Aaron card; and a 1933 Babe Ruth card. Over the past decade, the Mantle card has appreciated 590 percent, the Aaron card 829 percent, and the Ruth card 305 percent. "Most collectors feel they've done well with their cards as investments," said Brent Huigens, chief executive of PWCC Auctions. "But there was no statistical analysis available. There was no data for them." Mr. Huigens said card collecting was something of a hybrid of investing in stocks and fine art, and his indexes try to account for that. "There's a lot of nostalgia in cards, which compares to the art markets," he said. "But it's like a stock market because of all the data we have." PWCC, which is one of 10 or so big card auction sites, helped collectors sell 50 million in cards last year. Like any investment, what goes up can go down, and investing in trading cards has its own risks. Mr. Huigens pointed out that many cards in the top 500 had fallen in value. There have also been several card bubbles over the past three decades. He said a small group of collectors with about 20 million among them ran up prices in 2016, but the broader collecting market did not follow. "They put all their money into one card and not others," he said. "They created outliers they couldn't maintain. The market has had to reassess itself." The other driving force in turning a card hobby into an investment opportunity has been the acceptance of a single recognized grading system for the condition of the cards. An independent company called Professional Sports Authenticator will rate any card and give a grade from 0 to 10, which assesses a card's condition and, in most cases, determines its price. The rising interest in cards as investments, though, is not spread evenly through the collecting universe; it is strongest at the highest end. Mr. Huigens said the rate of appreciation and high prices slowed beyond the top 100 cards. But like any investment, you need a strategy. Mr. Hill said he focused on cards where "supply meets demand." "You can't just buy rarity," he said. "If it's the only one, everyone is going to know what you paid for it. There is no chance for appreciation. You have to wait for someone to come to your door and wrestle it away from you." The PWCC indexes shy away from the rarest cards because, Mr. Huigens said, they do not trade often enough, and the indexes are a measure of cards that are liquid. One parameter he set was all the included cards must have been sold at least 10 times in the last 10 years, with at least two sales in the last two months. PWCC also uses the grade not just on the player, the year and the maker when picking cards for its indexes. The top card in the index is the 1952 Topps Mantle in Grade 8 condition, which is worth about 400,000. There are only 33 known examples of this card in the world, Mr. Huigens said. Sitting atop the excluded list is a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, once owned by the hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky. (Mr. Gretzky's own 1979 playing card is ranked No. 44, at a price of 25,000, the second highest ranked hockey card, behind Gordie Howe's.) To collectors, this Wagner card has a mystical aura. It has been in the collection of Ken Kendrick, managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, since 2007. He reportedly bought it privately for 2.8 million, but its value now would be far higher should he wish to sell it. Mr. Kendrick owns the top 25 cards in the finest specimens available. Yet he remains a collector's collector. In an interview, he said that in the 1990s, when he stepped back from running Datatel, the technology company he founded, his first priority was to complete the sets that he and his brother created when they were boys. He needed 40 cards for the full 1952 set, he recalled, and he went to work. "During that time, I began to learn about the high value cards with great grades," said Mr. Kendrick, whose Diamondbacks will host the Colorado Rockies on opening day on Thursday. "The market has changed in terms of how the youth is involved or exposed to it," said Joseph Orlando, chief executive of Collectors Universe, the parent company of Professional Sports Authenticator. "For a whole generation of millennials, Pokemon was a game with universal, global appeal." For most collectors, a love of the hobby remains at the center. Mr. Kendrick said he was working on improving the quality of the cards in his 1952 Topps set. "I have a full set of cards from that year and extra cards, but they're not the most highly graded," he said. "I've moved up the rankings, and I'm No. 2." As for No. 1? "A lawyer in Alabama," Mr. Kendrick said. "He knows I'm gaining on him." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
A Los Angeles woman has accused the music mogul Russell Simmons of sexual battery and rape in a civil lawsuit filed against him Wednesday in federal court there. The lawsuit asks for 5 million in damages from Mr. Simmons, the multimillionaire Def Jam Recordings co founder who, in the last two months, has been accused of sexual misconduct, assault or rape by at least 10 other women, and has been the focus of a police investigation. Mr. Simmons has strenuously denied any misconduct. In a statement Wednesday, he called the lawsuit allegations "absolutely untrue." He added: "I look forward to having my day in court where, unlike the court of public opinion, I will have the ability to make use of fair processes that ensure that justice will be done and that the full truth will be known." In the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Jennifer Jarosik, 37, said she first met Mr. Simmons, 60, in New York in 2006, and that they became friends based on a mutual interest in meditation, yoga and veganism. Ms. Jarosik was interested in interviewing Mr. Simmons for a documentary she was making; Mr. Simmons agreed and said he would help her produce and finance the film, which they began working on, the complaint says. Ms. Jarosik said that, in 2016, she went to Mr. Simmons's home in Los Angeles, at his invitation, and he asked her to have sex. She said no. He became aggressive, the complaint alleges, and pushed her onto the bed; when she tried to push back, he knocked her to the floor and raped her, she says. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Savage x Fenty is back for another body positive bash now with men's underwear and a meditation on sexuality. There are no real parties. Concerts? Canceled. Fashion shows are either digital or distanced. So who would dare throw a party concert fashion show in the middle or the beginning or the end of this? Rihanna, obviously. Last year, the Savage x Fenty show ushered in a new era of lingerie, replacing the airbrushed fantasy of Victoria's Secret sexiness with a forceful display of inclusivity. This year, the creative director Rihanna wasn't about to cede control of her new realm: The fall 2020 line was designed pre pandemic, and the collection's show would go on despite it. "There's a lot riding on this," she said in an interview the night before filming began. "It's new territory for everyone, including Amazon Prime." (Amazon is streaming the nearly hourlong production starting Friday.) Update: In 2021, Rihanna's Fenty lines were put on hold. While the first show was shot in front of a live audience at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the second, called Vol. 2, was filmed over a few days in early September at the empty Los Angeles Convention Center. This time there are multiple sets, including a James Turrell esque tunnel, a psychedelic jungle and a neon factory line. There are still celebrity guest stars, dance numbers and musical performances (like by Rosalia, wearing a sheer version of bike shorts), but they're broken up by interview clips and documentary footage of the line's creation. Although the "Savage x Fenty Show Vol. 2" lacks the energy naturally born from the reaction of a crowd, it is more elaborate and more focused on giving substance to Rihanna's vision of lingerie, not just introducing it. Here is what that means. 1. The Writing on the Bra Some trivia about Rihanna: She writes everything by hand. "I don't even like to type emails," she said. The first designs to appear in Vol. 2 are covered in her handwriting and doodles; bras, underwear and bodysuits are graffitied in "xoxo," smiley faces and hearts. Rihanna said she was inspired by the concept of diaries. "I wanted to have my handwriting be a part of it, but I never really had a journal, so I didn't even know what I would write in a diary, besides doodles," she said. The medium may be personal, but the content (dollar signs and yin and yang symbols) reveals little about the woman who drew them. Still, lingerie is not unlike diary entries: secrets held until they're not. In the show's first act, models strut and dancers slither with these entries on their chests and chains around their hips. In subsequent interview clips, Rihanna, Cara Delevingne, Erika Jayne of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" and more talk about being children and keeping secrets. The biggest difference between the first and second Savage x Fenty shows is the presence of many more men, who writhe and wiggle along with the rest of the models and dancers and actors. The fall line introduces men's underwear and loungewear, designed by Christian Combs, the son of Sean Combs. By Savage x Fenty standards, the collection is tame boxers, robes, satin trunks and pajamas in black and lavender. The trunks play a starring role in the show's most emotional segment, a cathartic dance to a Frank Ocean song led by a shirtless dancer in the kaleidoscopic rain forest. The pieces are meant to adapt as women's wear. But all is not equal: Performers like Rosalia and Ella Mai wear lingerie while singing in the show, but the male performers, including Bad Bunny and Travis Scott, get to wear real pants. In interstitial interviews, Rihanna explains her philosophy about self expression. She talks about her appreciation for drag queens ("inspiring") and attitude toward inclusivity ("second nature"). The drag queen Gigi Goode talks about being a virgin. The model Paloma Elsesser talks about having sexuality "co opted into a performance for someone else." Rihanna presents sexuality as complicated, a gray area between empowerment and exploitation. "Sometimes it's tainted because you've had horrible experiences or been robbed of your own power," she says. In one scene, Lizzo dances energetically in front of a mirror while wearing royal blue lingerie and white sneakers. She's watching herself, feeling herself, seducing herself. On the other side of the mirror, another dancer moves to a different, slower song. She's also wearing royal blue lingerie, but she closes her eyes and jerks away from the mirror. When she does look at it, her reflection is distorted, like a mirror in a fun house. The message contradicts much of lingerie marketing: Confidence doesn't come with the clothes. Sexuality, Rihanna says in the show, "has to be owned or earned." There aren't many signs that the "Savage x Fenty Show Vol. 2" was filmed during a pandemic. In an early scene, a group of male dancers wear face masks made of fishnet (not recommended for droplet protection). A line from a voice over early in the show feels like a taunt for the socially distant: "Skin, touch, feel, ouch." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Fast fashion has been popular for years, but until recently, the concept hasn't caught on with furniture. The words "fast" and "cheap" and "dining table" somehow don't inspire. But a Japanese company called Kamarq is now selling chairs, shelves and other furnishings for barely more than the cost of an H M T shirt. How? Kamarq is starting a subscription service similar to Netflix pay as little as 5 per month and instead of DVDs (remember those?), the company will send you furniture. At the end of each subscription period (either six or 12 months), customers can exchange products for new ones or keep them. The debut collection, which includes chairs, stackable shelves and a bookcase, all in bright colors like pink and yellow that recall Gaetano Pesce and the 1980s Memphis movement, goes on sale this week at a pop up shop in SoHo, to coincide with NYCxDesign, an annual celebration of design. Five bucks doesn't get you much a single shelving unit on the 12 month plan, delivered to your home via FedEx. Other pieces cost slightly more, though less than 18 per month, based on the same plan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Several things have been credited with driving Stephen Colbert's recent ratings surge: liberals craving a safe space, a backlash to his rival Jimmy Fallon's hair tousle of Donald J. Trump, and Mr. Colbert simply being more comfortable as the host of his late night show on CBS. But when the September to May TV season ends on Wednesday night, Mr. Colbert will be the victor in total viewers over Mr. Fallon because of an unlikely reason: the DVR. Mr. Colbert's remarkable comeback is one of the biggest stories in TV, and it is the first time in 22 years that CBS will best NBC in the time slot other than 2010, when Conan O'Brien was removed from "The Tonight Show" in favor of a return to Jay Leno. And though Mr. Colbert has been winning in total viewers on an almost nightly basis for some time he's had more total viewers than Mr. Fallon for 16 consecutive weeks those victories alone would not have been enough to narrow the enormous deficit he faced over all just a few months ago. Nielsen's season to date data includes seven days of delayed viewing, and it is there where Mr. Colbert has made up tremendous ground on Mr. Fallon, racking up big numbers in an area where nightly network talk shows are usually not a factor. Viewers are fine with catching up on a scripted comedy or drama a week after it originally aired, but who wants to watch Monday night's talk show on a Friday when most of the jokes will have gone stale? Primetime shows often depend on significant DVR and on demand views to goose their numbers. The top rated show in broadcast, "The Big Bang Theory," sees its ratings jump 35 percent when seven days of delayed viewing is factored in. Advertisers examine three day and seven day delayed data when considering how much to pay for commercial time on a show. But nightly talk shows are different. In the 2012 13 season, for instance, David Letterman's "The Late Show" only saw a 2 percent gain and Jay Leno got a 3 percent bump from seven days of delayed data, according to Nielsen. By time Mr. Fallon took over "The Tonight Show" in 2014 those numbers rose: Mr. Fallon saw his delayed viewers rise by 11 percent. Mr. Colbert has taken it to a new level. This season, Mr. Colbert has seen his numbers jump 18 percent thanks to delayed viewing. (Though gains this size are rare among broadcast networks, they are less so among cable late night shows. Trevor Noah's "The Daily Show," for example, shows considerable gains through playback though his overall audience is much smaller.) Since January, when Mr. Colbert started his weekly winning streak, his audience has jumped an average of 20 percent when seven days of delayed viewing numbers are factored in, according to Nielsen, a net of an additional 551,000 viewers. Mr. Fallon's show added 212,000 viewers, a rise of 8 percent, and Jimmy Kimmel's ABC show netted just an extra 81,000 viewers for 4 percent growth. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Mr. Colbert still trails Mr. Fallon in a significant statistic the important 18 to 49 year old demographic. Mr. Fallon has a rating point of 0.81 for the season compared to Mr. Colbert's 0.58 and Mr. Kimmel's 0.48. But his growth in total viewers is a significant change in a late night battle that had gone NBC's way for a long time. At the moment, just 22,000 viewers separate Mr. Colbert and Mr. Fallon on a nightly basis Mr. Colbert is averaging 3.19 million viewers compared to Mr. Fallon's 3.17 million. But by time the season to date delayed data through May 22 is tabulated which will take several weeks the gap between Mr. Colbert and Mr. Fallon will expand even further. The current numbers take into account shows only through the first week of May. They do not include a May 9th show that will be a big one for Mr. Colbert. That's when he hosted a "Daily Show" reunion of sorts with Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Ed Helms and Rob Corddry. Mr. Colbert had an audience of 3.78 million people that night one of his biggest audiences since he took over. But over the next three days, an additional 1.3 million people watched the show, bringing the total audience for the episode 5.1 million. That's the biggest total audience for an episode of "The Late Show" since September 2015. That week was good for the ratings for Mr. Colbert, who was perhaps buoyed by the attention he got when it became known that the Federal Communications Commission was looking into whether he violated the agency's rules when he made an off color joke about President Trump. And this week hasn't been too bad either. In addition to finding out that he was going to win the season ratings battle, Mr. Colbert also found out he was off the hook with the government. The F.C.C. concluded on Tuesday that no action will be taken against him. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Researchers from Cornell and the New York City Audubon Society have been monitoring the memorial, which consists of two pillars of 44 spotlights aimed directly upward to simulate the fallen Twin Towers, since it was first presented in 2002. In 2008, the team began using radar and acoustic sensors to track how many birds the light was attracting and how it affected their behavior. In 2010, the beams attracted so many birds that the researchers convinced the memorial's operators to turn off the lights for 20 minute intervals, which presented "a unique opportunity" to study "behavior in birds when these incredibly powerful lights were on versus when they were off," said Dr. Farnsworth. The lights were briefly extinguished again in 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016. Compiling data from seven nonconsecutive years, the researchers found that bird density near the installation was 20 times greater than surrounding areas, causing sometimes fatal collisions with structures and other birds. Alterations to the birds' migratory paths also put them at risk of death and starvation from arriving late to their destinations. All such behaviors ceased within minutes of the lights being turned off. The installation affected more than 1.1 million birds cumulatively in those seven years, the researchers said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It has been two and a half years since astronomers in Hawaii discovered a strange, cigar shaped object speeding through the solar system on a trajectory from far away and toward even farther away. Today Oumuamua, the Hawaiian term for "scout," as the object was named, is now long gone, somewhere between the orbits of Saturn and Neptune and on its way to the Great Out There, but astronomers are still wondering and debating what it was. The cosmic interloper was first thought to be an interstellar asteroid, a chunk of rock shed by another star system. Then astronomers decided it must be a comet, likewise flung loose from some faraway star and planetary system. Briefly they speculated that it could be an alien artifact, a derelict probe like the giant spaceship in Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Rendezvous With Rama," or a fragment from a planetesimal that was ripped apart by a gravitational interaction or collision. Now a pair of Yale astronomers have suggested that Oumuamua was neither an asteroid nor a comet. Rather, it was a cosmic iceberg: a chunk of frozen hydrogen. Moreover, it was a primordial leftover, originating not from another planetary or star system at all but from a place and time where stars and planets didn't exist yet: the deep, dark core of an interstellar cloud, one of the galumphing assemblages of gas and dust that shadow the starry lanes of the Milky Way, and where stars are sometimes born. That might not sound as exciting as an alien spaceship, but if the assessment is accurate, it would provide astronomers with direct insight into stellar nurseries, a part of the universe that human technology cannot access. These clouds, composed mostly of molecular hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, can contain the mass of tens of thousands of suns and span hundreds of light years. At their center, where no sun yet shines, protected from radiation, the temperature can plunge to a few degrees above absolute zero, cold enough for hydrogen itself, the lightest, most volatile and most common element in the universe, to freeze. In turn, these frozen particles, stick to small grains of interstellar dust, growing in a few thousand years into an ice cube 1,000 feet wide. "Oumuamua is now long gone and is not observable in any way," Darryl Seligman, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, said in an email. But, he added, if he and his colleagues are right, more cosmic icebergs will surely come to be detected, and inspected, by facilities like the new Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile. The European Space Agency is mulling a project called the Comet Interceptor, a spacecraft that would be parked in space near Earth and could chase comets and other alien wanderers as they come through the solar system. "If the hydrogen hypothesis is correct, we should be able to prove our theory by detecting future objects," Dr. Seligman said. Also, he added, it would mean "Oumuamua bears no genetic relation to Borisov," referring to 2I/Borisov, an interstellar comet that visited our solar system late last year. Dr. Seligman, then a graduate student at Yale and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, and his adviser, Greg Laughlin, came to this conclusion after studiously recreating Oumuamua's trajectory and analyzing all the forces and influences on it during its journey. They published their results in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Karen Meech of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, whose team discovered Oumuamua, described Dr. Seligman as "a very creative and highly competent scientist" with whom she would happily collaborate, although she said she had not yet spent enough time with his paper to venture an opinion on his hypothesis about Oumuamua. "There are lots of creative ideas out there about this object," she said. She mentioned a suggestion by Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at the University of Bordeaux, that Oumuamua was a fragment of alien planetesimal that had been sheared off by a close encounter in its home system. Originally Oumuamua showed none of the sizzle and flash typical of comets dirty snowballs that blow off gas and dust into tails and glowing comas when sunlight warms them. Astronomers concluded that it was inert, like an asteroid. Yet its brightness varied wildly, suggesting that it was irregularly shaped and tumbling. Astronomers eventually concluded that the object was about 1,000 feet long and cigar shaped, evoking the image of a rocket cylinder. But further analysis revealed that it was speeding up as it exited the solar system, evidence that gas boiling off the surface of the icy body was giving it a boost. That meant it was a comet after all. But when Dr. Seligman and Dr. Laughlin tried to simulate the comet's behavior based on calculations of how much energy it would have received from the sun, they found that water ice, the main constituent of ordinary comets, did not provide enough oomph to explain the comet's acceleration. "Frozen hydrogen does, however, offer a compelling mechanism for acceleration," Dr. Seligman said. Being more volatile, it could easily supply the necessary energy boost. It wouldn't take much, he noted. The subliming hydrogen would add about 200 feet per second to the velocity of a cosmic ice ball that was already speeding along at 40 miles per second. "This speed increment would be a big deal on the autobahn, but it's a rounding error on the cosmic racetrack," Dr. Seligman said. Dr. Laughlin added in an email, "As Oumuamua passed close to the Sun and received its warmth, melting hydrogen would have rapidly boiled off the icy surface, providing the observed acceleration and also winnowing Oumuamua down to its weird, elongated shape, much as a bar of soap becomes a thin sliver after many uses in the shower." But that version of events would require rewriting Oumuamua's origin story yet again. Forget about alien planet systems or even aliens. Solid hydrogen can exist only at temperatures below 6 degrees Kelvin, or 6 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. To find temperatures cold enough to freeze hydrogen out of the interstellar gas, you would have to go inside the coldest, densest lumps, called prestellar cores, in big, dark molecular clouds. "In fact, you need to do it in a starless core, because if you formed a star, then the radiation would destroy all of the icebergs," Dr. Seligman said. Interstellar molecular clouds are interesting places. Radio astronomers from the University of Arizona recently detected the presence of many of the organic molecules thought necessary for the evolution of life, such as methanol and acetaldehyde, in the dark, icy cores of these clouds. Some of these clouds eventually collapse when they are thrown off balance by the shock waves of supernova explosions or collisions with other clouds. The result can be a profusion of starbirth, as captured in the famous Hubble Space Telescope image known as the Pillars of Creation. Luckily for those who would like to study a sample of these primordial prebirths and probe their chemical secrets, such clouds do not always collapse and bear stars. They can disperse, leaving behind a cosmic iceberg to float among the stars. In this case, Dr. Seligman calculated, the object that would become Oumuamua wandered for less than 100 million years not long, on the galactic scale before encountering us. If this version of events is accurate, telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is designed to scan the entire sky every three days, are likely to find more wandering hydrogen icebergs entering the solar system, Dr. Seligman said. Astronomers will be able to watch them light up and evolve as the erosive power of sunlight gets to work. For those of us stuck probably forever near our home star, you have to appreciate a universe that delivers takeout. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Phylicia Rashad as Angel Allen in "Blues for an Alabama Sky" By Pearl Cleage at Arena Stage in 1996 Pearl Cleage's drama "Blues for an Alabama Sky" drops the audience into the world of Harlem Renaissance artists after the Champagne has stopped flowing. They include the tantalizing lounge singer Angel Allen and her roommate, Guy, a confident gay costume designer. Leland, an Alabama transplant, comes to be part of their dysfunctional family of artists, who are grappling with poverty, pregnancy, homophobia and how to create in desperate times. First presented by Atlanta's Alliance Theater in 1995, "Blues" has been consistently produced regionally and at universities since, but Keen Company is staging the first major New York production beginning Feb. 4, directed by LA Williams. The show is slated to run through March 14 Off Broadway, at Theater Row. "These characters have been moving around in New York," Cleage said by phone recently. "Now they are in New York." It is Angel in whom many black actresses, including Phylicia Rashad, Robin Givens and Jasmine Guy, have found an ideal leading lady. She is straight shooting and charismatic, a bit past her prime but slinking her way in and out of men's lives always to their detriment. Rashad, a few years beyond "The Cosby Show," originated the part in a show directed by Kenny Leon. "Rashad's Angel is worn down by life but still a fighter, and still a full blooded woman," The Washington Post wrote in its review when the production moved to Arena Stage there. "She's more sensual putting on a dress than most women are taking one off." While writing "Blues," Cleage wanted to portray characters not typically found onstage. When Alliance remounted it on its 20th anniversary, she rewrote the ending, leaving Angel unredeemed. "People don't always see the light," the playwright explained. On the eve of its New York premiere, The New York Times spoke to six actors who've played the role, including Alfie Fuller, who is starring in the Keen Company production. How did Angel help them take flight? Edited responses follow. The Tony Award winning actress and director has been friends with Cleage since they were theater students at Howard University in the 1970s. She performed in "Puppetplay," one of Cleage's earlier works. "I had not seen or spoken to Pearl in some years when Kenny Leon approached me. The fact that Pearl had written it was enough to persuade me. The period in which the play is set, the world in which it takes place, during the Harlem Renaissance, is a very exciting time in human history. Angel is a beautifully complex human being who knows her physicality, but not her self. The role couldn't have come at a better time in my career." The star of "Tyler Perry's The Haves and the Have Nots" on OWN and Perry's new Netflix film "A Fall From Grace," she understudied Rashad in 1995 and starred in the Alliance's 2015 revival, directed by Susan Booth. "People tend to marginalize us; they don't show the varying shades of black women at all. The thing I love about Angel is that people want to make her sweet or downtrodden so you can root for her. Angel shakes you up. I love how people come to 'Blues for an Alabama Sky' and they fall in love with her all the way through. Then, at the end, they're side eyeing Angel and you don't know where to put her. For me, that makes her human. That's a testament to Pearl." Her first lead role was in the 2011 African Continuum Theater Company production of the work in Washington. She is now a performing arts consultant and splits her time between Washington and New Orleans. "The director, Walter Dallas, created these beautiful tableaus. In the final scene, he had Angel standing alone after everyone had departed. I was staring out into the audience beneath this beautiful blue light with gorgeous music playing behind me. It was hard as an actor to not be personally overwhelmed. I am a black woman and I have had to sacrifice a whole lot in life just trying to do well, be well and make myself proud." Played Angel in 2012 at the Lorraine Hansberry Theater in San Francisco just after graduating from the American Conservatory Theater. She co starred in the 2019 feature film "Don't Let Go" opposite David Oyelowo. "Angel gave me permission to trust my insecurities and strengths. During rehearsals I was very emotional and didn't have the confidence to lead the play. The director Michelle Shay called a rehearsal with only me. She sat across from me quiet and regal and she said, 'Angel is scared too.' I believe she was giving me something each of those characters give one another: creative energy, freedom to be reckless and love." Played Angel in the 2017 production at Chicago's Court Theater, directed by Ron OJ Parson. It was her first leading role in a play and the experience motivated her to move to Los Angeles to expand her career. She is now a star of the forthcoming Netflix series "Warrior Nun," which is based on a manga graphic novel. "At the time I played Angel, I was working on getting my own independence and changing as a woman, which in turn made me start evolving as an artist. I dug deep into the history of the time and listened to a lot of Bessie Smith ... During the rehearsal period we talked about what it would have meant for Angel to have to go back to the South if things did not work out economically in Harlem . She would've had to settle down, get married, have kids. For her, that's a death sentence." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Several years before his death, Paul Taylor began preparing for his company's future without him. The troupe would no longer perform his dances alone (he made nearly 150 in his 64 year career) but, like other veteran modern dance ensembles, would bring in outside choreographers to keep the repertory fresh, evolving. Such a plan, while judicious, doesn't guarantee stability. In its first major New York engagement since Taylor's death last summer, the company finds itself, naturally, in a state of profound transition. Appearing as part of the Orchestra of St. Luke's Bach Festival , the troupe has a new artistic director, Michael Novak, who came to the role after eight years as a much admired company dancer. And as newer dancers settle in, six longtime company members plan to depart this year, including the most senior, Michael Trusnovec, whose Bach Festival performances will be his last with the ensemble. To watch the three dance programs at the Manhattan School of Music on Friday and Saturday, was to witness one era giving way to another, uncertain but with flashes of a bright future. For the first time, Taylor's six works set to Bach, spanning four decades, are being shown together, providing an occasion to revisit classics like "Esplanade" (1975) and "Promethean Fire" (2002). In conversation with the Taylor oeuvre, the in demand Pam Tanowitz (on Friday) and the Canadian choreographer Margie Gillis (on Saturday night) unveiled their own new responses to Bach. Except for an early misstep, the Orchestra of St. Luke's provided lush and crisp accompaniment. It was only during "Junction" (1961), the oldest work and the first on the opening program, that the music went glaringly astray, in a muffled and out of key cello suite. This piece was also rockiest for the dancers, as they seemed to still be adjusting to the small dimensions of the quaint Neidorff Karpati Hall stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook cautioned Wall Street on Wednesday that it could face intensifying difficulties in its advertising business from the coronavirus pandemic, but also indicated that the toll would not be deep. The company, which reported rising revenue and profit for the first three months of the year, said that it experienced a significant reduction in advertising in the last three weeks of March and that its business would continue to be affected by "issues beyond our control." It added that it would not give forecasts about future financial results because of the coronavirus impact. But the ad declines flattened in April, Facebook said, adding that it had "seen signs of stability" and that "advertising revenue has been approximately flat compared to the same period a year ago." Coupled with relatively robust financial results from Google's parent company, Alphabet, on Tuesday and from Microsoft on Wednesday, Facebook and other tech giants appear to be limiting the pain from the pandemic as people flock to their digital services while in lockdown. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Jackie Kennedy's recently resurfaced packing list for the fateful autumn trip to Texas she took with her husband, President John F. Kennedy, contains plenty of interest for fashion historians. In the margins of the weekend's itinerary, which she had written out for her personal assistant, the first lady scheduled the visit outfit by outfit. For the day of Nov. 21, her look would be head to toe Chanel: a white coat, skirt and blouse, with a black hat atop her head and a gold and navy bracelet on her wrist ("safety pin," she wrote underneath, perhaps in reference to its clasp). In the evening, she would don a black velvet dress with satin shoes and white kid gloves. And of course the jewelry had been considered: pearls with a diamond bracelet and earrings. Mrs. Kennedy was not one to leave room for surprises. But even the best laid plans can change. The gloves, for one, surfaced on her descent from Air Force One in Houston, paired with the daytime Chanel suit. If she wore the bracelet, it went unseen. And the days that followed would stray much further from the first lady's notes. Jackie Kennedy's bloodstained pink Chanel suit tells more acutely than any other image the story of what happened in Dallas on Friday, Nov. 22. But the notes she prepared for her personal assistant, Providencia Paredes, read as stage directions for a weekend of political theater and a catalog of the wardrobe that made her the most fashionable first lady of the 20th century, referenced by her successors to this day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The premise of the comedy "Yesterday" is surreal and yet tantalizingly simple: What if you woke up to discover you were the only person who still remembered the music of the Beatles? And what if you used this knowledge to recreate these songs for a world that had never heard of this uniquely famous and ubiquitous rock group , propelling yourself to superstardom in the process? Even if you had tried to make "Yesterday" before its screenwriter, Richard Curtis, and its director, Danny Boyle, got to it, you'd have encountered a massive, yellow submarine sized obstacle: the characters in your movie would need to perform numerous Beatles songs enduring hits like "Help!," "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road" that have been revered for more than half a century, and that are among the most fastidiously protected assets in popular music. "Yesterday," which opens Friday, is not a biography of the Fab Four; it is a fanciful tribute to their work and its lasting power, and while it burnishes their reputation, it is also a project that helps new versions of their music reach audiences that have become overly accustomed to the original recordings. The story that "Yesterday" tells is essentially "a prism though which to see something that we love, which is pop music, and the music of the Beatles especially," said Boyle, the Academy Award winning director of "Slumdog Millionaire." Curtis, the screenwriter of "Love Actually" "and "Four Weddings and a Funeral," said that the Beatles' songs have become a universal constant of modern life to the point where he has seen one of his young sons sing "We Can Work It Out" in a school play about the Battle of Hastings. Beatles songs "have become quintessential expressions for another generation," Curtis said, adding that the new film was a story "about how music spreads, and how the particular magic of the Beatles is irresistible." "Yesterday" began several years ago with a script at one point called "Cover Version" written by Jack Barth and Mackenzie Crook; Crook, a star of Britain's "The Office" and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, would have directed. Early in the film's development, its producers sought the help of Nick Angel, a longtime music supervisor for films and TV series as well as a former record label executive with a deep roster of music industry contacts. Their concern was that the Beatles songs were so fundamental to the film that it wasn't worth pursuing without them. "This is like buying the underlying rights of a book to turn into a movie," said Angel, who is an executive producer of "Yesterday." "If you can't get the book, you can't get going." And at that preliminary stage, Angel said, "there was a fairly large degree of skepticism that either the songs wouldn't be obtainable or they would be so astronomically expensive as to be unobtainable." There was no plan B without the Beatles, either; though there were other pop and rock acts with catalogs full of hits the Rolling Stones, Prince, Elton John none had made music that felt as all encompassing and none were contemplated as alternatives. "So many of those artists, you need the artists as much as the songs," Angel said. "The Stones' songs are brilliant, but they're also about Jagger and Richards, whereas the Beatles songs are just incredible melody after incredible melody." Angel and his colleagues started discussing the film with Apple Corps, the Beatles' company, and with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which holds the copyrights to most of the band's songs, including those written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. (In 2017, McCartney reached a confidential settlement with Sony/ATV after he sued to reclaim his rights to his songs.) Nick Oakes, who is Sony/ATV's head of sync and creative licensing in the United Kingdom, said that interest in the music of the Beatles remained strong. "We're inundated with requests to use the Beatles' catalog all the time, and obviously we have to be very careful about what we move forward with," he said. Oakes said that when the company is deciding whether to license a song for use in a movie, a video game or an advertising campaign, several criteria are considered: Who is behind the project? How prestigious is it? How big is it and how widely will it be seen? Though these factors can seem subjective, Oakes said that each project must ultimately feel respectful of the Beatles. "It has to be the right product, it has to be the right film, it has to be the right brand," he said. "We don't want to be detrimental to the group or their legacy in any way. It's about making sure that every part of it is right." (Representatives of Apple Corps declined to comment for this article.) Individual Beatles songs have been heard and performed in various movies over the years. But very few films in which the band was not directly involved have used whole swaths of its catalog, and those movies are not remembered all that fondly. The rogues' gallery includes "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the dopey and much derided 1978 musical that starred the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton; and "Across the Universe," a '60s era period romance directed by Julie Taymor that was a box office misfire in 2007. In recent years, Oakes said, Sony/ATV had been approached with other Beatles related pitches that were ambitious in scope but "none of them really got out of the starting blocks." Angel said that after his earliest conversations with Apple Corps and Sony/ATV, he felt he'd heard "positive noises, that should this come to pass and get made, they would look upon it favorably." As he and his producers further discussed the film and met with production companies, Angel said, "We also knew that we needed to get the script worked on and developed more." Here, Angel turned to Curtis, who was hooked by the film's underlying plot device but wanted to write his own screenplay. "I'm not good at working on other people's material," Curtis said, "but I loved that idea and I said if you just leave it at that, I'd love to have a go at writing the script." (He shares story credit on "Yesterday" with Jack Barth.) Curtis is a lifelong Beatles fan who, at the age of 8, once waited outside a Swedish hotel just to watch the mop topped bandmates step onto their balcony. In the film, a struggling singer songwriter named Jack Malik (played by Himesh Patel) becomes the unexpected beneficiary of the Beatles' creative output, leading him to the precipice of a life filled with fortune and adulation. With Curtis came the involvement of Working Title, the British film and TV company owned by Universal, where Curtis has a production deal. Boyle, whose films include "Trainspotting," and "28 Days Later," became its director soon after. With each of these developments, the Beatles' rights holders felt the film grew more credible and worthy of the band's music, while telling a tale that glorified its work. "It's the message of the film that the world is a lesser place without these songs," Oakes said. Beyond the homage, "Yesterday" is also a commercial opportunity. The band remains one of the most successful acts of all time, but it still needs to find innovative channels to reach new listeners and new ways to present familiar songs. "There has been a generational change," said Tim Bevan, the co founder and co chair of Working Title. "My kids, they know who the Beatles are. Do they listen to them regularly? It would be a lie to say they do that. I think the opportunity to hear these great songs in a film in 2019 is a good thing." Bevan added, "My 15 year old boy saw the movie and I'm used to hearing some ghastly rap coming out of his bedroom. And I wandered by that evening and I heard the dulcet tones of Paul McCartney singing. So it worked for me." A deal was struck between Sony/ATV and the "Yesterday" filmmakers, allowing the use of 17 Lennon McCartney compositions. This covered scenes of Jack performing in concerts and recording sessions, as well as comedic moments when Jack can't completely remember the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby" or when it's suggested to him that he record the classic anthem "Hey Jude" as "Hey Dude." Though publications like Billboard have estimated that the licensing fees for "Yesterday" may have cost as much as 10 million, Sony/ATV declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal. (The filmmakers also used the songs like "Here Comes the Sun," "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," which were written by George Harrison and whose copyrights are owned by his Harrisongs publishing company.) Curtis said he was given no instructions nor restrictions on which Beatles songs he could use in the screenplay, though he favored well known tracks."We definitely had to veer towards popularity," Curtis said, "because a lot of the moments are, oh my God he's playing that?" As "Yesterday" nears its release, the filmmakers find themselves walking the same fine line they did throughout its creation. They are not seeking the formal endorsement of the Beatles, but they are hopeful that the surviving band members and the Lennon and Harrison estates see the movie as an act of affection and admiration. "You don't expect wild vindication or anything like that," Boyle said. "But you have to pay your respects." So far, there has been some encouraging feedback. Ringo Starr said in an email, "I loved it. It's a great premise he's like us but nobody knows him." Starr added, "I thought the vibe of the movie was great and it's really interesting especially if you're one of them." The band also gave permission for its own recording of "Hey Jude" to be played over the closing credits, the rare use of an actual Beatles track (rather than a cover version) in a movie. "That was something everyone felt would be a good and respectful thing," said Bevan, the Working Title co chair. "They would never have done that if they didn't like the film." Curtis said he tried not to worry inordinately about what judgment the Beatles might render on "Yesterday." But he did write to McCartney and ask for his blessing to title the film after one of his tracks. "It's everybody's word but it's his song," Curtis said. "In the context of a Beatles movie, it fairly obviously refers to him. And he did write me back and said, 'I think you might find 'Scrambled Eggs' works better" invoking the placeholder lyrics that McCartney had used when he only had the music and no words for the song. "It was actually a very funny name for a movie," Curtis recalled. "But he said, 'If you're not willing to accept that suggestion, I suppose 'Yesterday' is all right." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The Pulitzer Prizes startled a lot of people this year with an award that's usually greeted as an afterthought: the music prize, which went to Kendrick Lamar's album "DAMN." It was not only the first time a music Pulitzer was given to a hip hop album, but also to any work outside the more rarefied precincts of classical and, occasionally, jazz composition indeed, to an album that reached No. 1 on the pop chart. And while it has been reported that "DAMN." was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer music jury, the award was met in other quarters with disgruntlement and even outrage. Here, Zachary Woolfe, the classical music editor of The New York Times, and Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic, discuss the choice. JON PARELES To me, this prize is as overdue as it was unexpected. When I look at the Pulitzers across the board, what I overwhelmingly see rewarded are journalistic virtues: fact gathering, vivid detail, storytelling, topicality, verbal dexterity and, often, real world impact after publication. It's an award for hard won persuasiveness. Well hello, hip hop. ZACHARY WOOLFE One comment I read on Facebook, from a gifted young composer and pianist, was "I have complicated feelings about this, but also, I mean, about damn time." Yes, and yes. There seems to be broad agreement, which I join, about the quality of "DAMN." its complexity and sensitivity, its seductive confidence and unity, its dense weaving of the personal and political, the religious and sexual. But there is also wariness, which I join, about an opening of the prize not to hip hop, per se, but to music that has achieved blockbuster commercial success. This is now officially one fewer guaranteed platform which, yes, should be open to many genres for noncommercial work, which scrapes by on grants, fellowships, commissions and, yes, awards. "DAMN." was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer music jury. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. PARELES That response is similar to many publishing world reactions when Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize in Literature that a promotional opportunity was being lost for something worthy but more obscure, preferably between hard covers. A literary figure who had changed the way an entire generation looked at words and ideas was supposed to forgo the award because, well, he'd reached too many people? Do we really want to put a sales ceiling on what should get an award? The New York Times and The New Yorker already have a lot of subscribers ... uh oh. WOOLFE I don't think there is a universal desire for the Nobel to reward obscurity; I'm sure many who were skeptical of Mr. Dylan's win would have been just fine with the best selling Philip Roth. But it has felt for decades like an integral part of the Pulitzer's mission is to shine a light on corners of music that are otherwise nearly ignored by the broader culture. The award has acted as a reminder though long a way too stylistically limited one that artmaking exists beyond the Billboard (and now Spotify) charts. "DAMN." is surely deserving, yet its victory feels like another sign of the world, and therefore the musical culture, we live in embodied by the streaming services, through which the biggest artists and albums get more and more, and everyone else gets a smaller piece of the pie. This system is corrosive to music, period classical, jazz, hip hop, everything. It's the reality and there are certainly a lot of very popular artists who are very meaningful, Mr. Lamar among them but I don't like every aspect of it. PARELES I completely agree with you about the unhealthy overall effects of winner take all culture. The word "trending" makes me instinctively recoil; as critics, you and I both want to direct people beyond popularity charts. But choosing "DAMN." wasn't a capitulation to mere popularity. The album is a complex, varied, subtle, richly multilayered work, overflowing with ideas and by no means immediately ingratiating. You have to give it genuine attention and thought to get the most out of it, just as with any other Pulitzer winning composition. Meanwhile, wasn't the music Pulitzer, for many decades, largely the captive of a small, insular academic music scene? The Pulitzers refused a special citation for Duke Ellington, who never won the award. They ignored jazz artistically subtle and sublime, commercially endangered until Wynton Marsalis finally got a Pulitzer in 1997. They were unconscionably late looking awfully cliquish to me even in recognizing Minimalism: Steve Reich got his Pulitzer in 2009, not in 1977 for "Music for 18 Musicians." To me, it looks like some of the squawks are complaints about exclusivity being breached. And if you ask me, it should have happened sooner. I hereby nominate, for a retrospective Pulitzer, Public Enemy's 1988 album "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back": an experimental sonic bombshell, a verbal torrent, a mind expander. For that matter, the Pulitzers were late on Kendrick Lamar, too: "To Pimp a Butterfly," from 2015, has even more musical breadth than "DAMN." (which has plenty). WOOLFE There have been so many missed opportunities. The year after it turned down Ellington the main Pulitzer board rejected the music jury's recommendation it could have given the regular prize to Coltrane's "A Love Supreme." How about Joni Mitchell's "Blue," which could have won in 1972 she's Canadian and therefore ineligible, but remember, this is my fantasy world over a decade before the prize finally got around to recognizing a female composer? Philip Glass, never quite beloved in the academic realm, remains Pulitzer less. And I'll just leave this right here: Kanye. You could play these games forever. It is belated and necessary that the award widen to encompass a fuller picture of what music is. But if that widening further marginalizes noncommercial work which doesn't view itself as exclusive but simply as endangered in an economic system that conspires against it something important will be lost. Responsible eclecticism is what I'd want going forward from Pulitzer juries, for whom the "DAMN." award will hopefully be freeing in the best sense. PARELES What were the pieces from the other two finalists, Ted Hearne and Michael Gilbertson? WOOLFE Like Mr. Lamar, who's 30, these guys are strikingly young. Mr. Gilbertson, 30 as well, wrote a string quartet that veers from glassy to robust, and Mr. Hearne, 35, wrote "Sound From the Bench," a cantata for chamber choir, electric guitars and drums. Like Mr. Lamar's album, the finalists are politically charged: Mr. Hearne, always socially conscious, here mashes up texts from Supreme Court decisions to suggest the ambiguities of identity and humanity. (A corporation has speech, you say?) And Mr. Gilbertson has said that he adjusted his initial sketches for his quartet after the 2016 election, making them "more introspective and comforting." Almost as significant as Mr. Lamar's win, for me, is the trio taken together: a new generation, turning the world around it into music. PARELES I'll have to put them in a playlist. I'm not suggesting that the Pulitzers mirror the Top 10 or the Grammys. (Please, no.) And next year, sure, give the prize to an album that sold 11 copies after a lone college gig somewhere. But I think we're seeing a shifting perspective on the way contemporary classical and jazz composition often draw on the ideas of hip hop or world music or pop, as if to elevate them by carrying them into the concert hall. According to the Pulitzer reporting, "DAMN." got added to consideration when the jury was looking into a composition with hip hop influences, and decided to go to the source where the ideas, in this case, are even stronger, both rawer and smarter. The prize citation praises "DAMN." for its "vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism," which to me has a whiff of condescension there's all sorts of brainpower and artifice in there, too but let's enjoy the win. Regarding noncommercial outreach, Mr. Lamar often collaborates with first rate, innovative jazz musicians, like Kamasi Washington, who not only are happy to work with him but also benefit in their own audience growth from showing up in his album credits. One thing that also strikes me about giving the award to "DAMN." is that it quietly sets aside two previous Pulitzer givens: that the winning piece was performed by live musicians in real time and that it was written by a solitary composer. But "DAMN." has multiple producers, composers and performers (even Rihanna and U2 cameos!) layering tracks in studios. Mr. Lamar is the auteur, fully in charge but not the sole creator. It's another way of making music that deserves respect. WOOLFE This year's Pulitzer actually reinforced that old Romantic illusion of the singular composer. It was given to Mr. Lamar alone not, as in the Grammys, to the album's songwriting or producing teams, too. PARELES Maybe they should change the citation to "Kendrick Lamar and staff" like the reporting prizes. To me, both the Dylan Nobel and the Lamar Pulitzer which is not the first hip hop Pulitzer; Lin Manuel Miranda got that for drama with "Hamilton" are signals that the old prize giving institutions are rethinking the ways in which they used to circumscribe the idea of quality. As long as they're conscientious, that can make the awards only more significant. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The last meeting for many of Deadspin's journalists took place on Wednesday in a conference room adorned with fake black cobwebs, a large spider and bloody handprints beside the words: "HELP US." The plea, it seemed, went unanswered. By Thursday, almost the entire staff nearly 20 writers and editors had resigned. The journalists at the site, founded as a sports blog in 2005, had chafed against an instruction handed down Monday in the form of a memo from management to confine themselves to sports related posts. While largely focused on sports, Deadspin for years had delved into a broad range of topics in a voice that was sometimes rude, often funny and always conversational. On Tuesday, the site's top editor, Barry Petchesky, was fired after refusing to go along with the order. The departures shocked fans of the site, which put a new spin on sports coverage for a generation of digital natives. But they were the result of a long buildup of resentment between the journalists and their new bosses, according to interviews with 13 current and former employees of Deadspin and G/O Media. The main topic of discussion at the Wednesday meeting was the stick to sports memo, which was signed by Paul Maidment, the editorial director of G/O Media, the company that became the owner of Deadspin and sibling sites like Jezebel and Gizmodo six months ago. Stories that showed the intersection of sports and other topics were fair game, Mr. Maidment wrote in the memo. He said at the meeting that he had enjoyed a recent post about President Trump getting booed at a World Series game. But purely non sports content was forbidden. Deadspin writers and editors considered that to be meddling. Mr. Maidment, a British veteran of The Financial Times and Forbes who was brought in as the editorial director of G/O Media this year, called the staff meeting on Wednesday. And as it unfolded, he appeared eager to listen. "Paul was very reasonable, and nothing he said was so inflammatory that I was like, 'I'm going to quit right now,'" said Kelsey McKinney, a staff writer who resigned later that day. She suggested that Mr. Maidment was in a difficult position, serving as an emissary for G/O Media. But he failed to persuade the journalists that the company's editorial direction was in their and the site's best interests. "He tried to paint it broadly but was not willing to be specific about what posts we had done that fell outside of that mandate," said Chris Thompson, a staff writer who also resigned this week. "He resisted altogether the institutional knowledge of the people in the room." Soon after the meeting, Deadspin writers and editors began filing into his office to quit. Many of them posted the news of their resignations on Twitter, and Deadspin became a trending topic on social media into the night. The company came into existence after Deadspin and its sibling publications were sold by Univision to the private equity firm Great Hill Partners in April. Univision had bought the sites when they were part of Gawker Media in a bankruptcy sale. Founded by Nick Denton, the company had been financially ruined when Terry G. Bollea, the former professional wrestler known as Hulk Hogan, won a 140 million judgment against Gawker for an invasion of privacy lawsuit backed by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. 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. G/O Media installed Jim Spanfeller, a digital media executive who had previously run Forbes.com, as its head. Mr. Spanfeller promptly got rid of some top editors and made Mr. Maidment the editorial director. Signs of tensions between the irreverent journalists and the management team came quickly. They were not helped by an Aug. 2 Deadspin article whose reporting was critical of G/O Media, Mr. Spanfeller and his executive team. The piece took issue with their "lack of knowledge about" the sites now in their portfolio and "their seeming unwillingness or inability to get up to speed." A few weeks later, Deadspin's top editor, Megan Greenwell, resigned, saying in a farewell post that her job had become untenable, given management's demands. (Ms. Greenwell recently completed a stint as a weekly advice columnist for The New York Times.) The next major event at G/O Media occurred on Oct. 10, with the shuttering of its politics site, Splinter. On Monday, the day of the "stick to sports" memo, all of the G/O Media websites published posts that decried the new video ads on their home pages. The ads were offensive to readers, the articles argued, because they were set to play automatically, with sound. Such ads are broadly understood to lift advertiser impressions while annoying readers. The posts were swiftly removed without a warning from G/O Media to the sites' editors. "We were existentially angry about a post being taken off our website a red line we thought was uncrossable," said Tom Ley, Deadspin's features editor, who resigned Wednesday. Staff members, members of the Writers Guild of America East union, discussed how to respond on a private Slack channel. Their collective bargaining agreement included a no strike clause, so a strike seemed out of the question. And quitting seemed drastic. "It's hard to lose your job," said Ms. McKinney, the former staff writer. "There are not a lot of jobs in our industry." They settled on a protest consistent with the site's cheekiness: They would conspicuously post stories that had nothing to do with sports. "We thought that was a Deadspin style way of handling it, and something that our readers would be in on and find clever," Mr. Ley said. "We didn't want to be preachy, we just wanted to try to have some fun with it." And so on Tuesday morning, Deadspin featured articles on subjects like a Washington pumpkin thief and the German actor who played a villain in "Ghostbusters II." Mr. Petchesky, the interim editor in chief, was pulled out of a meeting and escorted to the office of Mr. Spanfeller, the chief executive. There, he was fired. Mr. Petchesky said Mr. Spanfeller ordered him to leave using an obscenity. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Spanfeller declined to comment.) Shaken by the editor's departure, Deadspin staff members retreated to a nearby Planet Hollywood in Times Square for a drink. Roughly a third were ready to quit, Ms. McKinney estimated. The others thought they should try to negotiate editorial protections or the reinstatement of Mr. Petchesky. They gathered again later that evening at the Magician, a Lower East Side bar popular among Gawker era bloggers, for a planned wake for Splinter. On Wednesday morning, the workers met in Ms. Greenwell's vacated office. The sentiment had turned. More staff members were inclined to leave. The meeting with Mr. Maidment followed in the afternoon. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Maidment declined to comment.) During the meeting, Deadspin staff members laid out their case for posting articles that did not touch on sports. A recent internal study found that a small fraction of Deadspin's posts fell under this category, and that they drew a larger readership than sports stories. Some staff members also described what they saw as a lack of clarity from the editorial director. Where should they draw the line between a sports piece and one that would flout the new rule? A weekly N.F.L. preview called the Jamboroo by Drew Magary, a popular writer who confirmed Thursday that he had also resigned often started with a long personal essay. And what about the landmark Deadspin essay from 2014 on "Gamergate"? Would that be off limits, given that G/O Media has a separate video games site, Kotaku? There was the broader question: Why? In digital media, Deadspin would be considered, from a business perspective, a modest success. In a good month, it had 20 million unique visitors, according to Mr. Ley. Now Deadspin is down to few, if any, staff members. Mr. Maidment is running the site himself as G/O Media seeks a new top editor. Those who resigned do not expect to benefit from the agreement on severance that was reached four years ago, when Gawker Media became a union company. G/O Media told them they would be paid through Friday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The situation, as Zenit St. Petersburg's players trooped back into their changing room in Lisbon's Estadio da Luz, was encouraging. From the moment the Champions League's groups had been drawn in August, Group G had the look of the most finely poised, the least predictable: no obvious favorite, no vast financial disparity, no doomed makeweights. So it had proved. Going into the final round of games, three of the group's four teams had a chance to qualify for the competition's lucrative Round of 16. Germany's RB Leipzig, top of the group, would do so by avoiding defeat away to Lyon. Lyon could get through with a win or a tie, depending on how Zenit fared in its game against last place Benfica. Even the Portuguese side had something to play for: a win could propel it into third place, and the consolation prize of a spot in the Europa League. At halftime, Zenit and Benfica were tied, goalless. In the changing room, Zenit's manager, Sergei Semak, and his coaching staff checked for updates from France. The news was good: Leipzig was winning. If Zenit could just hold steady, a place in the last 16 of the Champions League was there. Two minutes later, Benfica scored. Within half an hour, Zenit had collapsed completely, conceding a penalty and then scoring an own goal. "It is too hard to take," the Zenit wing Aleksei Sutormin said afterward. "I am lost for words." Lyon, meanwhile, had recovered to snatch a draw against Leipzig. Zenit was not just out of the Champions League, the competition sponsored by its primary backer, the Russian oil giant Gazprom. It was out of Europe altogether. The next day, a Wednesday, the other Russian team in the Champions League went out the same way: Defeat at Atletico Madrid meant Lokomotiv Moscow finished at the bottom of its group, too. On Thursday, the campaigns of Russia's two entrants in the Europa League, CSKA Moscow and Krasnodar, drew to a close with a whimper: Krasnodar, which still held out hope of qualifying on the final day, was beaten, 3 0, by Getafe in Madrid. There is no simple explanation for why that is. The temptation is to find some sort of broad, overarching theme, something that binds all of the failures together, some fatal flaw in Russian soccer. But the individual circumstances are too different for that to be convincing. In the Champions League, Lokomotiv had a tough group, featuring not only Atletico but Juventus. Zenit did not, but it was still just 45 minutes from making it through. Perhaps both might reflect, a little, on nothing more than bad luck. The Europa League exits were more striking. CSKA is mired in financial trouble, having been bailed out by VEB, a state owned bank, and is searching for an owner. Spartak Moscow which was eliminated even before the group stage is recovering from internecine strife, pitting the (former) manager against both the players and the board. And Krasnodar, a team widely seen not just as Russian soccer's feel good story but a model of its future, basically just blew it. The fact that there is no easy pattern to trace, though, should not be taken as proof that Russian soccer has no systemic problems. Some are relatively new. The collapse of the ruble, in 2014, as well as the rise of the Chinese Super League, brought to an end the era of Russian teams' recruiting world class talent through sheer financial muscle. There are still fine imports in the Russian Premier League Malcom, Joao Mario, Andre Schurrle as players, and coaches like Domenico Tedesco but they have the air, now, of castoffs as much as mercenaries. In 2015, Russia announced a limit on the number of foreign players a club could field only six at a time and employ. The quota has, in effect, simply served to inflate the salaries of homegrown players, entrenching a sort of lucrative mediocrity. The fact that many clubs are wholly or partly state owned, meanwhile, has left teams at the mercy of broader economic forces, with budgets cut and ambitions dulled for political, rather than sporting, reasons. Russia's authorities have responded to this season's failure by talking of reform: the Russian Premier League might expand; the country's cup competition may be altered; the rules on foreigners may be changed. There is even, as there always is, a movement to change the season back to a spring fall schedule, rather than the European style fall spring calendar introduced in 2010. "All of these are different forms of self deception," Mikhashenok wrote. They are tinkering with the edges, laying the ax to the branches, rather than the root. (And even then, it is hard to see why anyone would do much to change the status quo: Thanks to the stadiums built for the 2018 World Cup, Russian domestic attendances are up.) Russia has long been a curiosity in soccer. Its teams have occasionally flourished against their peers in western Europe CSKA and Zenit won the Europa League in 2005 and 2008; Spartak, in particular, made an impression in the Champions League in the 1990s but the country has never quite punched its weight, even in those cash soaked, oligarch years of the early 2000s. What has happened this season may be an aberration, so far, but it is also a reminder that soccer does not wait around. Russia may always have been Europe's sleeping giant, but that is not a status that lasts forever. At some point, it changes from sleep into something deeper, something more lasting, something from which you do not wake up. There is almost a touch of genius in the absurdity. For years, there has been pressure on English soccer to incorporate some sort of winter break into its proudly chaotic schedule: The clubs wanted to protect their players, and the Football Association wanted to increase the national team's chances of performing well in summer tournaments. The problem was that, while everyone agreed it was a good idea, nobody would give an inch. The F.A. would not countenance changing the date of the F.A. Cup's third round. The E.F.L. (which runs the three professional leagues below the Premier League) would not alter its flagship knockout tournament, the E.F.L. Cup. The Premier League would not give up its Christmas and New Year's fixtures. The broadcasters would not consider having a couple of weekends free of elite soccer. Fans agreed with some, most or all of them. So we have what we have now: a break staggered over two weeks, so that everyone gets a rest, but nobody has to go without soccer; the F.A. Cup's fifth round shunted to a midweek to accommodate it; the E.F.L. Cup stubbornly complicit in its own demise. It is a winter break that is not really a winter break, a change that is not really change. Everyone gets what they want, and nobody does. It is soccer's answer to that classic British compromise, the constitutional monarchy. It has, it should be admitted, just about worked (like constitutional monarchy). The main flaw, really, is that it is a month or so too late. The players needed a break after those dizzying few weeks of constant games over the holidays; a spate of hamstring injuries proved as much. The uneasy peace the current half a loaf scheduling solution has brought may hold for a while, but more substantive change the abolition of the E.F.L. Cup, perhaps, or front loading Premier League games in the fall will have to come at some point. In what can only be described as a seismic shock, the United States women's team has qualified for the Olympics. Much more interesting is what comes next, as Vlatko Andonovski has to whittle down his squad not to 23, as it would be for the World Cup, but to 18. Some big names have already fallen by the wayside; some even bigger ones may yet join them. It will be "cutthroat," Carli Lloyd said, in such a way that you maybe think she is looking forward to it. And after a few months of reporting, together with my colleagues Tariq Panja and Kevin Draper, we produced this piece on the Premier League's yearlong search for a new chief executive. It is not necessarily a position that inspires fascination, but the story behind the eventual appointment of Richard Masters is a significant one in understanding the league's direction. The Premier League has always operated as a collective, with all 20 teams equals when it comes to making decisions off the field. That compromise may not hold for much longer, and that tension comes at a dangerous time, when the world's pre eminent domestic league must find a way to cope with a shifting media landscape. Its competitors especially in Germany and Spain seem to be innovating rather better, at this point, while the Premier League is consumed by competing internal agendas. I agree, of course, that the Ballon d'Or is a strange gauge, but it is and this was the thrust of last week's column Neymar's own gauge. He wants to win one. The injuries are a perfectly valid point, but I wonder if, in moving to a club whose whole season rests on a handful of games in March and April, he is a little more at the mercy of poor fortune. If he is injured in the spring in Paris, the whole season is rendered pointless. That isn't true (quite) at Barcelona, say. Paul Skwiot and Sam Reynolds also got in touch to question my assertion that Lionel Messi is the finest player in history. "The entire nation of Brazil disagrees with you," Paul wrote. Sam, meanwhile, would rather I went with "one of the finest." "Ronaldo is smashing records at his fourth team," she wrote. "It is not just Messi's world: he also lives in Cristiano's." It would be very dull indeed if we all agreed on this subject. That's all for this week. If you like defacing pictures of dogs with unrelated criticism, fill your boots here. I'll see all but the most foul mouthed comments you make on Twitter, and keep the messages coming to askrory nytimes.com. Oh, and there's the podcast, and the sign up link to send your friends and enemies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In 1968, Agnes Varda was living in Los Angeles and trying to put together a film called "Peace and Love." She had arrived from France to join her husband, Jacques Demy, who was shooting a movie for Columbia. They loved Los Angeles, where they ate with Mae West and hung out with Jim Morrison. Harrison Ford was going to be in "Peace and Love" and there was talk of money from Columbia. But the studio didn't want to give Varda final cut, so she did what she always did: She went her own way. When Varda died in March at 90, she left behind an astonishing body of work that includes dozens of movies, short and feature length, fiction and documentary. (She never made "Peace and Love," but remained friends with Ford.) She directed her first feature, "La Pointe Courte," in 1954, when she was 26; her last movie, "Varda by Agnes," had its premiere in February at the Berlin International Film Festival. It will be a long time before we fully grasp her legacy. The retrospective that runs at Film at Lincoln Center through Jan. 6 is a fine place to start exploring her bequest. There is nothing surprising about Varda walking away from a Hollywood studio. "I understood pretty fast that this was not my thing," she told The Los Angeles Times in 1969. "I really do movies because I love them," she continued, "I cannot put my life in a factory." She was fully independent, which is the first place to start when considering her work; she was an artist, feminist, mother, wife, innovator and restless seeker. Her work can be classed by geography and spaces, by movies set in cities and the country, in streets and homes, in France, Cuba, Vietnam and the States. She ended up making great films in California, including the short "Black Panthers," for which she interviewed Kathleen Cleaver and the imprisoned Huey P. Newton, and the feature "Lions Love (...and Lies)," with a turn from the director Shirley Clarke. Peripatetic by inclination and by calling filmmakers spend a lot of time on the road making and promoting their work Varda traveled widely, collecting images, faces and friends. You could also categorize Varda's life as a series of befores and afters: before and after cinema, after Demy and before her later life celebrity. An entire series could be created out of her images of cats, her spirit animal and constant companions. There are cats everywhere in her movies and in the art installations that became a crucial part of her artistic output. One cat rubs against her in "The World of Jacques Demy," one of several movies she made about him; a cartoon of another cat rolls his eyes at her in "The Beaches of Agnes." She had many other interests: women, motherhood, bodies, surfaces and the divide between fiction and nonfiction that she explored (exploded). Varda's films have a strong tactile quality, which may seem strange given the medium she chose. She's particularly attentive to textures, like the rough, furrowed dark earth that becomes the grave for the protagonist in her masterpiece "Vagabond," about a young rootless woman wandering a cold country. You see the touch of Varda's camera in the sublime "Jacquot de Nantes" when she closely pans over the mottled, wrinkled face of her dying husband (Demy died soon afterward in 1990), a tender cinematic caress that finds a corollary in the blunt image of her own mottled, wrinkled hand in "The Gleaners and I." In each, she faces mortality directly as a concrete fact. A documentary about foraging in life, in art "The Gleaners and I" became Varda's best known movie, and it brought her new audiences and ushered in a final, excitingly productive period. She shot some of it herself using a small, light digital camera that she could use as freely as a pen. She had always been a personal filmmaker. Finally, in her early 70s, she had a camera a tool, she called it to practice what years earlier she had termed "cinecriture" (cinematic writing). The coinage had nothing to do with scripts but instead expressed the ineluctably Vardian aspect of her cinema, one that is fundamentally handmade rather than industrial and fully alive to the world. In a 1970 interview, Varda spoke about the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, with whom she studied at the Sorbonne in the 1940s "He really blew my mind" singling out his ideas on the poetic imagination, the material world and the elements (earth, air, fire, water). Imagination isn't a means for forming images of reality, Bachelard observed. "It is the faculty for forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality," he wrote. "It is a superhuman faculty." Adding: "The imagination invents more than objects and dramas it invents a new life, a new spirit; it opens eyes which hold new types of visions." This too is a way of approaching Varda's work. Varda's inspiration for her first feature, "La Pointe Courte," was Faulkner's "The Wild Palms," which alternates, contrapuntally, chapter by chapter between two stories. She had her own idea for a similarly structured narrative that she envisioned as a novel. Visually minded at the time she was a photographer for a theater company she created a drawn outline of her story that a friend suggested would work better as a film. With help from a cooperative and a budget of 14,000, she turned her story into "La Pointe Courte," which alternates between a man and woman dealing with their relationship and a fishing village facing its own challenges. (Her editor was Alain Resnais, who introduced her to Jean Luc Godard and other future new wavers.) As the couple walk through the village in "La Pointe Courte," amid people and past a stray cat, the man (Philippe Noiret) and woman (Silvia Monfort) pause. The woman walks out of the shot while the man remains, standing in profile as the camera pushes past him to focus on a jumble of cut trees in the background. As the man speaks ("I've wanted to come back for a long time"), the camera at last stops, the image now centered on a tree trunk with two long branches that look like outstretched arms. Offscreen, the woman asks the man why he didn't come back sooner without her. The camera stays on the strangely anthropomorphic tree trunk, which could be waving or asking for help but is of course also a piece of wood. The man, who has remained offscreen, murmurs, "With or without you," and then there's a cut to the woman, who's standing still next to a huge metal winch. "It was the same to you," she says quietly, perhaps with regret or accusation. In one short scene, Varda has opened up the coordinates of this relationship and deepened our perception of these two characters. Here and throughout "La Pointe Courte," the performances of the leads are stylized, self conscious, a touch awkward, and convey a sense the couple is stuck. Varda is expressing something about them through how they walk and talk together, but also by how she juxtaposes them with the village, its inhabitants as well as its physical properties. She wanted to associate the woman, who's from the city, with steel, and the man with wood, because his father was a carpenter. She wasn't dabbling in symbolism, but counterpoising characters and specific images that together create meaning. "La Pointe Courte" announced Varda to a world that wasn't prepared for her. It was shown at Cannes and found admirers, but it would be seven years before she made her second feature, "Cleo From 5 to 7." (Varda describes its title character perfectly: "from the looked at subject she becomes the looking subject.") This remained a pattern, with success followed by struggle, which is at least partly attributable to her sex. But she persevered, finding ways to film even when she stayed home raising her son, Mathieu Demy. For instance, for her 1976 documentary "Daguerreotypes," an allusion to the Paris street where she lived, she powered her equipment with an electric cord plugged into her home, limiting her range to its length. She called it a "new umbilical cord." It was an ingenuous solution to a practical problem. It is also a reminder that one of the persistent hurdles that female filmmakers face is finding the time and the space for their art while caring for children (something that, at least historically, male directors didn't worry about). Varda found, as she always did, a way to keep making movies, which is another way to view her legacy. She carved out a cinematic space for herself and in doing so by the example of her films but also by insistently pursuing the life of the artist she helped open a space for other women. During another interview, around the time of her 1977 drama "One Sings, the Other Doesn't," she said, "Ninety nine percent of the films you see are so much against women." She was for us. "Varda: A Retrospective," organized by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson in conjunction with Janus Films, runs Dec. 20 through Jan. 6 at Film at Lincoln Center. Varda's daughter, Rosalie Varda, will introduce some screenings. For more information, see filmlinc.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A layered latte made at home by Bob Fankauser, a retired engineer in Oregon, who wanted to know how espresso poured into heated milk created those layers. Any good barista will tell you that if you want to make a nice latte you pour milk into the espresso not the other way around. But there's another style of latte out there, too the layered latte, or layeredlatte as you'll find on Instagram. Created by accident, or by baristas experimenting with new drinks, these striped beverages start with a glass of heated milk and then pour in the espresso. They're not as pretty or popular as a unicorn Frappuccino or a rainbow latte, but they have their own charm. Bob Fankhauser, a retired engineer in Portland, Ore., accidentally created his own layered latte at home and wanted to know why these pretty layers form. "It's a really intriguing phenomenon," said Mr. Fankhauser. "There's no obvious reason that the liquid should organize itself into different density layers." Last year, Mr. Fankhauser sent an email including photos of his accidental layered lattes to Howard Stone, a chemical engineer who studies fluid dynamics at Princeton University and inspired him and a graduate student to test this out. The team published their results Tuesday in Nature Communications. Anyone can try this at home, but chefs creating layered jellies or bioengineers developing synthetic human tissues may find this one step process useful, they suggested. After recreating the latte with their own espresso and milk, the team created a simulated coffee drink, injecting heated, dyed freshwater into heated, denser saltwater to test the scientific parameters that make this spontaneous layering possible. Pouring hot espresso into warm milk at a certain speed, they found, induced an interaction between temperature and density that caused the drink to separate into layers of different densities. The same basic phenomenon, called double diffusive convection, creates layers of water in the ocean. There, water containing different amounts of salt has different densities, just like espresso and denser milk in a latte. When the liquids try to mix, layered patterns form as gradients in temperature cause a portion of the liquid to heat up, become lighter and rise, while another, denser portion sinks. This gives rise to convection cells that trap mixtures of similar densities within layers. Nan Xue, a graduate student in Dr. Stone's lab who led the study, found that even if you disturb the layers with a gentle stir (or a sip, said Mr. Fankhauser), they will reform and stay put for minutes, hours, even days. As long as the mixture is still warmer than the air around it, the stirring creates another density gradient, similar to that produced by pouring. But stir after the latte reaches room temperature bye bye stripes. To create your own layered latte, pour hot espresso over a spoon into a tall glass of milk of about the same temperature. Wait a few minutes for the layers to form as the liquid cools. Success requires experimentation. In Brooklyn, Casey Lampe, a barista at Stone Fruit Espresso and Kitchen tested variations of this process over five trials. He found that layers form better depending on the speed of your pour, the height of the glass, the ratio of espresso to milk and the temperature and density of the two. There wasn't time to perfect the experiment before the cafe got busy, but most of the trials produced a few layers, including a thin layer of milk at the bottom of the glass. Mr. Lampe concluded layered lattes may be better suited for novelty than flavor: "If you stir it and it goes back, it's almost like at the end, you're just drinking warm milk," he said. But Mr. Fankhauser, who admits he may not catch on to flavor subtleties, thinks the coffee tastes fine and was worth his original curiosity. "To know that you played a little role in somebody discovering something is just delightful," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"Is this a dream?" Alma (Rosa Salazar) asks her father, Jacob (Bob Odenkirk), in the second episode of "Undone." It's a reasonable question, and the answer makes more sense than you might assume. For starters, there is the little fact that Jacob is dead, killed one Halloween night years ago when Alma was a girl. Nonetheless, she's been seeing and talking to him, ever since a car accident left her with a, shall we say, altered view of reality and time. Today becomes the past becomes her childhood becomes the future. Her father's description of her situation also describes the feel of the transfixing and lushly beautiful "Undone," which comes to Amazon Prime Friday. It's reality and it's not reality, a grounded, naturalistic story that now and then slips its tether like a helium balloon and drifts into a half dream state. "Undone" creates this hypnagogic feeling as much through its appearance as through its story. As directed by Hisko Hulsing ("Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck"), it's animated using rotoscoping, in which artists trace images on top of live action footage (an effect used in films like Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly," whose animation team contributes to "Undone"). The effect of rotoscoping is a little like turning a dial that lowers the gravity by 25 percent or so. Even in mundane scenes, everything's a little more buoyant. People move as if they're living underwater. This describes how Alma passes through her life pre accident; at 28, she feels stuck in a rut. She shuffles from work at a day care center to semi committed home life with her boyfriend, Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay) to sparring with her judgmental mother, Camila (Constance Marie), and her practical minded sister, Becca (Angelique Cabral). Salazar, who digitally acquired a set of massive anime eyes in "Alita: Battle Angel," gives Alma an air of sulky rebellion, a slacker in aspic. After the accident, everything becomes more trippy, scary and exciting. It's not just the visions of Jacob (played by Odenkirk in buttoned down hipster mode). It's the tendency of her reality to suddenly shatter literally, the background will suddenly collapse like building blocks and for her to appear in her own future, or her distant past, or someone else's. It may be the hereditary legacy of her grandmother's schizophrenia, or a shamanistic power. But it's closer in spirit to recent series like Amazon's "Forever," which probed the boundary of death to probe the meaning of life, and Netflix's "Russian Doll," whose protagonist navigated an altered state of reality as she came to terms with her past. (Purdy wrote some of the more adventurous, nonlinear "BoJack" episodes, including "Time's Arrow" and "The Old Sugarman Place.") Like those series, the less said about the advancing plot the better. The story, such as it emerges, is part sci fi, part family dramedy, part paranoid thriller, part murder mystery (one mystery being whether there has in fact been a murder). But the series is driven by the dynamic between Alma, at 28 still in a stage of teenage rebellion against expectations, and Jacob, a melancholy dreamer himself, whose unconventional outlook she's drawn to even as she still resents his disappearance. Their partnership develops into a kind of bittersweet buddy comedy in the bardo. When Jacob tries to analogize Alma's psychic adjustment which she fears is insanity and he insists is a great power to learning to drive a stick shift, she snaps, "If you want to teach your daughter to drive a stick, don't die!" "Undone" has humor and story enough to make it more than an art object. And it's rooted in specificity, from Alma's Mexican Jewish heritage to the show's vividly realized setting in San Antonio, Tex. But make no mistake it is magnificent art, a world opulently realized from its oil painted backgrounds to its sound design. (Alma wears a cochlear implant; sometimes she disables it as an escape and the world takes on an eerie, submarine quality.) You don't watch this show so much as fall into it. People still find it weird and dissonant when an animated story is sad, especially in a TV series. But really, what better medium to work through grief, alienation and mourning emotions that distort the world and lead old memories to leap out at you like jump scares in a haunted house? And in fact, animation has been used to tell some of the year's best stories about women and girls and their experience of trauma. In Netflix's surreal, unfortunately short lived "Tuca and Bertie," Bertie, a songbird, returns to the camp where she was sexually abused as a child, embraces a young version of herself depicted as a silhouette, and takes strength from confronting the memory. This August, in Cartoon Network's mini series, "Infinity Train" (available to stream through the network online), Tulip (Ashley Johnson), a 12 year old coder grappling with her parents' recent divorce, runs away from home and hops what turns out to be an unusual locomotive. Each car contains a unique world: one made of crystal, one ruled by sentient corgis, one inhabited by people made of water and a silver tongued feline con artist (Kate Mulgrew). The train is a puzzle Tulip must solve in order to get home. And the puzzle is Tulip herself. She takes on a series of quests that force her to face her own feelings of guilt and resentment, befriended by One One (Jeremy Crutchley and Owen Dennis, the show's creator), a tiny bipartite robot (one half optimistic, one half depressive), and the noble corgi king Atticus (Ernie Hudson). Like "Adventure Time" or "Steven Universe," "Infinity Train" is nominally a kids' show, funny and raucous, but with a heart that speaks to all ages. The 10 11 minute episodes which, like the train cars, seem to hold vastly more than their size would permit enfold slapstick, loss, sacrifice and history's most emotionally moving rendition of "Word Up" by Cameo. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The city of Besancon, France, near the Swiss border. In its glory days, the watch industry here employed 20,000 workers. BESANCON, France Besancon, the ancient city in the eastern part of the country near the border with Switzerland, is known as the watch capital of France. It is that but this community of about 120,000 also is the birthplace of Victor Hugo and the Lumiere brothers, the home of the University of Franche Comte and a Unesco World Heritage site for its citadel and fortifications, part of the defensive system built around France by Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban under orders from King Louis XIV. Besancon dates to the Gauls, and to the Romans, whose triumphal arch and columns can be seen in and near the Square Castan. The area also is the site of the Cathedrale St. Jean de Besancon, with its renown astronomical clock of some 30,000 mechanical parts and dozens of figures that re enact Christ's burial and resurrection every day. After all, the city may have a varied history but it still revolves around time. "There is nobody in Besancon who doesn't have somebody in his family who has made watches," said Philippe Lebru, the founder of Utinam, the clock and watch company named after the city's Latin motto (in English: "If God wills"). Besancon's formal watchmaking role began shortly after the French Revolution, when the government decided to create a production center so the country could stop relying on imports from England and Switzerland. The businesses grew quickly. By the 1800s and the early 1900s, the owners of watch companies were living in elegant townhouses built of the region's distinctive pierre de Chailluz, a limestone in mottled tones of gray and beige. Ateliers, with extra wide windows to let in the light so workers could see the tiny pieces they assembled, were tucked behind the homes. The Musee du Temps reflects the city's role in timepieces "from sundials to atomic clocks," according to its director, Laurence Reibel (and plays host in June each year to the Les 24H du Temps fair held in its courtyard). The museum's displays include an example of a timepiece from Besancon's glory days: the Leroy 01, completed in 1904. It has 24 complications, and for decades, Ms. Reibel said, was considered the world's most complicated watch. The watch industry here, which now employs around 1,500 people, had 20,000 workers then. The decline came to Besancon in what locals call La Crise du Quartz, the sharp downturn in mechanical watch production and sales that followed the rise of quartz watches in the 1970s. Lip, the timekeeper of the Tour de France in the 1950s, closed its doors in 1977. The change in the city was palpable. Afterward, when 5 p.m. rolled round the time the Lip workers usually went home "the streets of Besancon were silent; no one was driving their car home," said Frederique Coobar, the city's public relations manager, who grew up here. Over the years, other companies closed. The watch school, Ecole Nationale d'Horlogerie de Mecanique d'Electricite, closed. The company that made movements, France Ebauches, closed. The Observatoire, shown here in an undated photo, opened in 1880 to certify the accuracy of timepieces using the stars. Because the city's residents were known for their precision work on watches, their skills soon were transferred to work on the microtechnologies required to manufacture medical devices and instruments for the defense and aeronautics industries. "Besancon became the capital of microtechnology," Mr. Laporte said. But since the 1990s, watch and clock making has been coming back. Long case clocks with a distinctive hourglass shape, called Comtoise clocks, have long been made in ateliers in the outskirts of the city and in the villages of the surrounding Jura mountains. Now, two men are keeping them alive: Philippe Vuillemin bought an old factory 12 years ago, and after making the necessary tools "They were all gone during the war," he said he began producing about 100 Comtoise clocks a year at his Manufacture Vuillemin business. It would be safe to say the tall clocks that Mr. Lebru makes at Utinam were inspired by the Comtoise design, but their stainless steel cases bear little resemblance to the originals. Also, he patented his design for a suspended cage to hold the internal mechanism so the clocks no longer have to rest on flat surfaces. Mr. Lebru was the designer of the clock, a six ton wall installation, that greets visitors at the TGV train station in Besancon. He said that a Swiss company has ordered one; "This means so much, that the Swiss should come to me, a Frenchman." Mr. Lebru also makes watches with a twist, like the one with hands that circle counterclockwise, intended for left handed wearers. His shop on Grande Rue sells the watches made in Besancon by brands such as Humbert Droz, Lornet, March LA.B and FOB Paris. In the spring he plans to open a glass fronted workshop in the mostly pedestrian Old Town so people can watch him work, and to sell online. "Things are changing," he said. "Three young French watchmakers are coming to Besancon, because of its renown for horlogerie. Today, with the computer for knowledge and Kickstarter for funding, it's easier to design and make a watch." The quartz crisis also led to the closure of many of Besancon's repair shops, which serviced the mechanical watches made in the city. But gradually that sector has been reviving, too. In 2012 Breitling opened a new glass and blond wood service center in an industrial park; its director, Steve Napias, arrived in the region last year from Breitling's operations in Toronto. "There people would tell me, 'Oh, I've never met a watchmaker before,'" he said. "Here, everyone knows a watchmaker." Other watch service centers are in and around Besancon, said Pierre Dieterle, the economic director for greater Besancon: "There's Swatch, Festina from Spain, Seiko from Japan, Tissot and Longines." Audemars Piguet has a center, too. According to Mr. Dieterle, there are also companies producing watches or watch components for Zadig Voltaire, Cerrutti, Christian Lacroix, Ted Lapidus, Mugler and what he described as "les grandes marques de la Place Vendome," the luxury jewelry and watch houses grouped around the famous square in Paris. Another Bisontin institution also has made a comeback. The Observatoire de Besancon, opened in 1880 to certify the accuracy of timepieces using the stars, has worked its way back to certifying about 100 watches a year. It had shut down in 1970 but reopened in 2002 and now is operated by the university. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Week in Tech: Do You Prefer Free Speech, or a Perfectly Clean Internet? Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news: In the quest to clean up the web, the gray area between good and bad will be hard to handle. As the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris burned last Monday, a YouTube effort to fight misinformation failed. The platform's automated fact checking feature a box that shows facts to help viewers contextualize footage incorrectly displayed information about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks alongside live streams of the fire. "These panels are triggered algorithmically, and our systems sometimes make the wrong call," YouTube said in a statement. The company said it had no further details about what went wrong. The failure raises a question: If a platform can't provide facts reliably, how can we trust it to take down bad content correctly? Facebook, YouTube and other Big Tech companies say malign content will have to be policed automatically, because it's too big a job for humans. But algorithms will struggle against our subjectivity. This is a hard problem. In a profile by my colleague Daisuke Wakabayashi, YouTube's chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, said borderline content material that is potentially harmful but does not break rules was particularly hard to police. Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of political communication at Oxford University who studies misinformation, said, "The problem will never be solved, if solving it means getting rid of all the bad stuff, because we can't agree on what the bad stuff is." Accept that, and a hard question follows. "Knowing that things won't be perfect, what do we feel is most desirable?" Mr. Nielsen asked. "A system that errs on the side of caution, or one that errs on the side of being permissive?" Decisions on that appear set to be shaped by regulation, such as draft legislation approved by the European Union on Wednesday that would require platforms to take down terrorist content within one hour of notification from the authorities, or this month's proposals from Britain to fine tech companies if they don't remove "harmful" content quickly. This quickly descends into the thorny issue of potentially infringing rights of free speech to ensure that platforms remain clean. Lawmakers will have to wrestle with what kinds of algorithms they want deployed to enforce their regulation, and there is no easy solution. For years, Apple and Qualcomm were locked in bitter patent battles across three continents. The iPhone maker sought 27 billion in damages; its former chip supplier wanted 15 billion. My colleagues Don Clark and Daisuke Wakabayashi reported on Wednesday that the companies had agreed to dismiss their litigation. The settlement includes a multiyear agreement for Qualcomm to supply chips to Apple, and an undisclosed one time payment to Qualcomm from Apple. Why the change? Playing a big role were two small characters: 5G. Both companies care deeply about it. As The Wall Street Journal noted, Qualcomm "trained its focus on the future promises of 5G" for more than two years, concentrating its efforts on developing standards and new chips that enable smartphones to access the networks. The new 5G technology will provide far faster data speeds, and is expected to be widely adopted in the coming years. Apple has worried about its source for those chips. While it was locked in battle with Qualcomm, the chip maker's components which are already fit for inclusion in phones were not an option. That left some unpalatable options: Go with Intel, its 4G supplier. But rumors of delays at Intel suggested that could have pushed back the release of a 5G iPhone by a year. Team up with Huawei, which said Tuesday that it was "open" to selling 5G chips to Apple. But that could look bad for the iPhone maker, given Washington's concerns about national security risks posed by Huawei. Against that backdrop, the desire for 27 billion in damages faltered. Apple will probably still want to work with another modem supplier, but for now the situation appears to be mutually beneficial for the two companies. 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. Less so for Intel, perhaps: Just hours after the settlement was announced, the company said it would no longer work on 5G smartphone chips, citing "no clear path to profitability." The gamer with 45,000 years of experience Last weekend, OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization, gave one of its algorithms a tough challenge: It had to play the strategy video game Dota 2 against a team of the world's most proficient human players. Dota 2 is difficult. Two teams of five players battle each other, but have incomplete information (they can't see the whole game arena), lots of complexity (each player can make dozens of actions across a large playing area) and must think in advance (games last around 45 minutes). OpenAI's algorithm uses five so called artificial neural networks, each controlling a player, that learn by playing games against themselves. The ones that played last weekend boasted the equivalent of 45,000 years of total game play experience. "It's almost an evolutionary scale," Greg Brockman, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, said. "It's perfectly honed for its environment." How did the algorithms do? They won, taking the first two games in a best of three competition. "It's a significant milestone," Shimon Whiteson, a professor of computer science at Oxford University, said. And it "shows that we still haven't reached the limits of what we can achieve when using existing algorithms," he added. OpenAI faces another test this weekend, when it takes on teams worldwide over the internet. Mr. Brockman says there is a "50 50 shot that we'll win every game." But the news highlights a problem facing A.I.: its astonishing demand for computer power to master a single task. The 45,000 years of experience took 10 months to acquire on thousands of powerful computer processors, and the algorithms would need other training to master a new skill. Overcoming that is one of the biggest challenges in A.I. And some stories you shouldn't miss China is using A.I. to profile a minority group. Hundreds of thousands of face scans and new algorithms have enabled the government to track members of a largely Muslim group. Google's huge data cache is being used as a dragnet. Its user tracking is being employed by investigators to find suspects and witnesses near crimes, but it could snare the innocent. Insurance doesn't necessarily cover cyberattacks. Big companies thought they were covered for losses resulting from the 2017 NotPetya attack. They were wrong. Samsung's 2,000 foldable screen smartphone is already breaking. Some gadget reviewers found that its screen failed after several days of use. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero." We have contained this, and the economy is "holding up nicely." It's not nearly as serious as the common flu. We're going to have 50,000 or 60,000 deaths, and that's great. OK, we may have more than 100,000 deaths, but we're doing a great job and should reopen the economy. You sometimes hear people say that Donald Trump and his minions minimized the dangers of Covid 19, and that this misjudgment helps explain why their policy response has been so disastrously inadequate. But this statement, while true, misses crucial aspects of what's going on. For Trump and company didn't make a one time mistake. They grossly minimized the pandemic and its dangers every step of the way, week after week over a period of months. And they're still doing it. Now, everyone makes bad predictions; God knows I have. But when you keep getting things wrong, and especially when you keep getting them wrong in the same direction, you're supposed to engage in some self reflection and learn from your mistakes. Why was I wrong? Did I give in to motivated reasoning, believing what I wanted to be true rather than following the logic and evidence? To engage in such self reflection, however, you have to be willing to admit that you were wrong in the first place. We all know that Trump himself is incapable of making such an admission. At a time of crisis, America is led by a whiny, childlike man whose ego is too fragile to let him concede ever having made any kind of error. And he has surrounded himself with people who share his lack of character. But where do these people come from? What has struck me, as details of Trump's coronavirus debacle continue to emerge, is that he wasn't getting bad advice from obscure, fringe figures whose only claim to fame was their successful sycophancy. On the contrary, the people telling him what he wanted to hear were, by and large, pillars of the conservative establishment with long pre Trump careers. On Saturday The Washington Post reported that in late March Trump was unhappy with epidemiological models suggesting a death toll over 100,000 which, by the way, now seems highly likely. So the White House created its own team led by Kevin Hassett, whom The Post describes as "a former chairman of Trump's Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases." And this team produced an analysis Trump aides interpreted as implying a much lower death toll. What The Post didn't say was that aside from not having any background in epidemiology, Hassett has an, um, interesting record as an economist. He first attracted widespread attention as co author of a 1999 book claiming that stocks were greatly undervalued, and that the Dow should be 36,000 (which would be around 55,000 today, adjusting for inflation). It quickly became clear that there were major conceptual errors in that book; but Hassett never admitted error. In the mid 2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting that only liberals believed that there was. In 2010 Hassett was part of a group of conservative economists and pundits who warned in an open letter that the Federal Reserve's efforts to rescue the economy would lead to currency debasement and inflation. Four years later Bloomberg News tried to reach signatories to ask why that inflation never materialized; not one was willing to admit having been wrong. Finally, Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in business investment; it didn't, but he insisted that it did. You might think that an economist would pay some professional penalty for this kind of track record not simply one of making bad predictions, which everyone does, but of both being wrong at every important juncture and refusing to admit or learn from mistakes. But no: Hassett remains, as I said, a pillar of the modern conservative establishment, and Trump called on him to second guess experts in epidemiology, a field in which he has no background. And Hassett isn't even uniquely bad. Unlike, say, Stephen Moore, who Trump tried to put on the Federal Reserve Board, he does not, as far as I know, have a history of simply getting basic numbers and facts wrong. The moral of this story, I'd argue, is that observers trying to understand America's lethally bad response to the coronavirus focus too much on Trump's personal flaws, and not enough on the character of the party he leads. Yes, Trump's insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P. Trump's narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn't an outlier; he's more a culmination of the American right's long term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump's character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths. 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 |
"Fire in Dreamland," Rinne Groff's shaky parable of art and love and licorice at the Public Theater, is set just after Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 catastrophe that devastated New York's coastline, flooding Coney Island. But Ms. Groff has another calamity in mind: the conflagration that tore through Coney Island in 1911, destroying the Dreamland amusement park's wood and plaster fantasia. No people died, but many exotic animals did. That really happened: the baby elephant that suffocated because his trainer wasn't there; the black maned lion that was shot as he fled up a railroad track, while the fire hoses sprayed hopelessly. (Some consolation, six Shetland ponies were blindfolded and led to safety.) You may find all this somewhat easier to believe than Ms. Groff's affectionate, but never especially persuasive play, directed by Marissa Wolf. Six months after Sandy, Kate (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a low level bureaucrat working in economic redevelopment, is hunched over on the boardwalk weeping. She's interrupted by Jaap (Enver Gjokaj), a Dutch film student who has just dropped his cellphone in the murky surf. Jaap is a little intrusive, but a lot handsome, so she listens to his pitch: He's here to make a movie about the animals lost in the Dreamland fire. As they circle each other in a damp mating dance, the actor Kyle Beltran sits upstage, marking each scene change with a clack on a clapperboard. Eventually, he enters as Lance, Jaap's film school colleague. With fragmentary scenes and jump cuts, "Fire in Dreamland" is a play about moviemaking, about the ways in which history and memory are redeployed as art. It is also, at least in theory, about the conflict between dreams and responsibility and the damage, much of it collateral, that dreams can inflict. Dreams or to put it less romantically, obsessions have fascinated Ms. Groff for a while. She investigated them in early plays like "Inky" (a nanny in thrall to Muhammad Ali) and "The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem" (a mathematician infatuated with prime numbers), and again in later ones like "The Ruby Sunrise" (one woman fixated on inventing television and another determined to have that story told) and "Compulsion" (a man gripped by Anne Frank and her diaries). What happens to pursued dreams is pretty much her remit. In "Fire in Dreamland," the dreamer is Jaap. It could just as easily be Kate, so captivated by his ambition that she upends her own life to help him make his movie. But Kate wants to focus on practical things, like Final Draft (for screenwriting) and Kickstarter (for funding), while Jaap just wants to talk about the "breadth of my vision." Here, the play borrows from the current template of the rom com, in which love allows a childish man to grow up and an uptight woman to loosen up. But there's something uglier and yet not ugly enough operating here. The audience needs to be seduced just as Kate is seduced, and that's unlikely partly because Jaap's film project seems so dubious, but mostly because Jaap is so blatantly bad news. Kate is drawn to him in the way I've watched moths drawn to lighting rigs. The sizzle is all the wrong kind. In the first scene, Jaap imposes on Kate while she's weeping. In the next, he walks out on her when she questions the movie's story arc. (He's Dutch, so "I want some licorice" replaces the old pack of cigarettes excuse.) In the third, he's borrowing her credit card ambivalently lent to buy Bitcoin. There are so many red flags, the play verges on semaphore. Jaap manipulates Kate, gaslights her, belittles her. "You are a petty bureaucrat," he tells her. That Kate momentarily mistakes him for a relief worker is probably the funniest and saddest thing in the play. Because Jaap isn't the relief; he's the disaster. Would this matter less if his proposed film sounded better or more plausible? I don't want to make the argument that great art somehow excuses pathological narcissism, and I don't think Ms. Groff or Ms. Wolf do either. Debates about art and pragmatism falter in the face of what is clearly an abusive relationship. But because the play cares for all its characters, it sidesteps acknowledging just how abusive the relationship is. Ms. Jones is an actress of luminous intensity. She isn't ideally cast as a bureaucrat petty or otherwise but she's still a treat to watch, even when (or especially when?) she has to shimmy into full Mermaid Parade regalia. Mr. Gjokaj, a familiar presence from TV ("Agent Carter," "Dollhouse"), wears his masculinity lightly, which mitigates some of Jaap's awfulness. His boyish enthusiasm makes you wonder if Jaap is just another victim of his own flimflam. (But you can also wonder: So what?) To say more about Mr. Beltran's Lance risks spoilers. But the character is nevertheless underwritten, which Mr. Beltran's twitchy sympathy nicely disguises. Ms. Wolf directs him and the others with obvious compassion, though more hard nosed clarity might help. The play takes a more compelling turn just at the end, exploring what we do after a calamity and how we might, with care and pain, rebuild our boardwalks and our hearts. That's a recovery project I'd like to see. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Harvey Fierstein in a dressing room as he prepares for the play "Bella Bella."Credit...Ryan Lowry for The New York Times Harvey Fierstein in a dressing room as he prepares for the play "Bella Bella." Should you meet Harvey Fierstein when he is taking a break from rehearsal of "Bella Bella," his new one person show, do not suggest he is playing a woman. He will slap his palm to his chest. And in a voice that in real life can only be described as actually, all the old "gravel" cliches don't come close so let's not try he will growl: "I DON'T PLAY A WOMAN. I AM A WOMAN." Then he will sip his diet Coke and launch back into running lines for the monologue he wrote and will star in, about the feminist New York lawyer and congresswoman Bella Abzug. Late last month in a Manhattan Theater Club rehearsal room, he stood before a plywood approximation of the real set: a bathroom of the Summit Hotel in New York City, where, for some 85 minutes, Mr. Fierstein will channel Abzug , known for her quotable, take no prisoners manner, as she awaited election results from her 1976 bid to become the Democratic candidate for a United States Senate seat. Still, it's not without risk for a production to present a male star in what is at its core a one woman play. Especially one about a woman who had to bob and weave her way through the patriarchy in order to make what since have been regarded as historic civic contributions. "I am not putting on makeup, I am not putting on a wig, I'm not even a woman pretending to be Bella," he said in an interview. "What I have to say you can trust because I am not a person here in disguise." Facing the play's director, Kimberly Senior, 46, he recited his lines, in character as Bella. "Women are simply more fluid," he said, eyes wide, hands gesturing and intonation straight out of the Lower East Side. "We adjust. We consider not only the goal ahead but the reality of the ground below our feet. We're not wedded to the policies of the past because, frankly, we had nothing to do with creating them. We see things men don't seem to even notice because we aren't wasting our time defending our masculinity." Mr. Fierstein, 65, adapted much of the language in the show from Abzug's speeches and writing. He also interviewed and took editing advice from friends of Abzug's like Gloria Steinem, who had dropped by rehearsal several days earlier. In the play, Abzug, who died in 1998, recalls her career leading up to the vote count and thus offers a highlight (or lowlight) reel of mid 20th century American history: Jim Crow and McCarthyism, Kennedy and Nixon, Betty Friedan and Stonewall and beyond. Mr. Fierstein and his director have kept the rehearsal room open to a revolving c ontingent of female visitors from various professions, generations and backgrounds. "We want to know what resonates with women of different ages," said Ms. Senior, whose credits include directing the Pulitzer Prize winning play "Disgraced" and, more recently, the campus set "The Niceties." "And we want to know what references younger women need to Google." Few writers or actors have challenged gender norms in theater like Mr. Fierstein , from his breakthrough in "Torch Song Trilogy," about the offstage life of a gay drag performer, through the books he wrote for the smash musicals "Kinky Boots" and "La Cage Aux Folles." Most famously, he donned a spangled dress and oversized wig to play the mother and wife Edna Turnblad in "Hairspray." The role earned him his second acting Tony Award. But Mr. Fierstein is playing Abzug without drag, while still trying to channel her particular brand of womanhood a combination of intelligence, moxie, Yiddish humor and a savvy understanding of how to maneuver through a sexist power structure. This was after Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Mr. Fierstein saw an opportunity to highlight the role of a historical woman activist and politician. Last year, he and Liz started looking for a Bella. First, as a favor to Mr. Fierstein, Patti LuPone did a table reading. "She's got the balls," Liz Abzug said, joining Ms. Senior and Mr. Fierstein at the rehearsal space. Ms. LuPone was headed to London to star in "Company," however; trying to sign her on would prevent them from staging the play before late 2020. "I wanted to do the play now," Mr. Fierstein said. As he considered other actresses, he realized that Abzug already had begun to re emerge in pop culture. He called Bette Midler. She told him she was already playing Abzug in Julie Taymor's film adaptation of Steinem's memoir, "My Life on the Road." He called Kathy Bates. She reminded him she had just played an Abzug adjacent character in "On the Basis of Sex," last year's Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic. There was also Kathy Najimy. But she was helping to produce the play, "Gloria: A Life," in which Abzug was a character. Early this year, Mr. Fierstein turned to his agent, Chris Till of CAA, and asked him to organize two readings at the agency's offices in the Chrysler Building, and to fill the room with producers, actors and writers. "Have you been in their conference room?" he asked as he told the story. "When you go there, let me just tell you, steal the notepads. Such nice paper." Anyway. In the absence of an actress, Mr. Fierstein read the play as Bella. Calls came in after the reading, with theater producers wanting to stage it if they cast an audience grabbing female star. A few nonprofit theater producers chimed in and said they'd do it even without a big star. But at CAA, the audience had responded to Harvey as Bella. And the more Mr. Fierstein considered playing the role, the more it made sense to him. "I'm a male writer, writing about this woman, and if I take an actress and make her say my words, in a funny way I'm doing what so many men have done to so many women over the years, turning them into our puppets," he explained. But he knew he needed a woman to direct him, and he felt he needed a director who wasn't already a colleague or a friend: "If I was going to write it and act it, I had to be challenged and have someone who will ask, 'Is this truthful? Is this real? Is this necessary?' " "I don't want anything in the play that discredits her," the director answered. "Why does she have to say, 'Without a fact to stand on?' I'm listening with my 2019 ears. 'Fact' is now a very loaded word. Can you at least put less emphasis on 'without a fact'?" Mr. Fierstein raised an eyebrow. "Do you want to talk to the writer or do you want to talk to the actor? You can't have it both ways." He changed the line. "Without a tape or a break in," it now goes, "I knew that this was not a man to be trusted." In the play, Abzug says, "Flexibility, the willingness to let go of a position that is no longer sustainable, is NOT an attribute found in male leadership." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
TO many people, the notion of living without oil at least the various forms of oil sloshing around in their cars and S.U.V.'s is a scratchy shirt, nuts and twigs kind of idea. But with electric vehicles of various degrees pure battery, hybrids and plug in hybrids on the way from major automakers, more drivers will be finding out how scratchy that shirt might be. As the wide variety of designs poised for delivery indicates, there is no general agreement bouncing through the drivosphere over which technology will be the one to deliver us onto a squeaky clean, chirping bird Electric Avenue. For many, myself included, the answer seems simple. Plug in hybrids are here well, almost now. While it is true that a lot of coal stands to be burned recharging the batteries of these cars, let me point out that they can also wring many of their miles from cheap, potentially carbon free energy sources like those 36 sparkly blue photovoltaic panels on the roof of my Southern California home. Typically, the plug in hybrids on their way to showrooms will enable the first 10, 20 or even 50 miles of a trip to be electron based, which in my case would be spotlessly solar powered. Effectively these would be electric cars for most of my driving short around town errands yet retain the useful range of a gas powered vehicle for those few times a year when I pack up the family and head over the river and through the wood to Grandmother's house. A plug in car, of course, is optimized for neither type of trip. The weight of its gas engine cuts into the distance it can drive in battery only mode, and the mass of the extra batteries squanders some petroleum when the engine is providing the drive power. On the balance, though, a plug in makes sense for my situation. And thanks to the solar array that generates enough electricity to power this 3,200 square foot home our family is close to being "off the grid" for a Los Angeles residence I would also come closer to being freed from oil dependency. NO CARBON Solar panels on the roof of the author's home charged the Prius. Dexter Ford for The New York Times Toyota, which has the biggest footprint on the hybrid field, is promising to sell a conservative plug in Prius to the public in 2012. The Chevrolet Volt, which General Motors says will drive 40 miles on its battery pack before a gas powered generator takes over, is poised to hum off the assembly line late in 2010, hungry for available wattage. The Fisker Karma, an 88,000 plug in luxury sedan, is also scheduled for delivery late this year. And last week Volkswagen announced that the Blue E Motion, based on the Golf, would be offered in the United States in 2013. A number of independent companies already offer conversions that transform existing hybrids into plug ins with the addition of battery packs and associated power control hardware. A converted car can fuel up from a wall outlet, topping off its batteries with electricity from the utility grid, or in my case, power that is homegrown. To learn whether this was more theory than reality, I spent a week driving a 2005 Toyota Prius converted by Plug In Solutions of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., which offers a system designed to allow electric only driving as far as 50 miles at up to 52 miles per hour. By virtue of sheer numbers, the 2004 9 Prius is the popular basis for conversions: in those four calendar years, nearly 750,000 were sold in the United States, according to J. D. Power Associates. The Plug In conversion uses all of the factory installed Toyota electrical parts, mechanical parts and software, with some additional tricks. A 300 pound bank of lithium iron phosphate batteries, made by China Aviation Lithium Battery, is stowed in the compartment behind the rear seat, over the spare tire cavity but under the floor. To accommodate the extra weight, stiffer rear springs are installed. A 110 volt charger goes underneath the battery pack in the now empty spare tire cubby (an aerosol inflator replaces the spare), where it also warms the batteries in cold weather. A discreet plug in the rear bumper provides the electrical connection. As built by Toyota, the nickel metal hydride battery of this second generation Prius has an electrical capacity of about 1.3 kilowatt hours the power equivalent of 13 100 watt bulbs left on for an hour in your teenager's bedroom. In the interest of battery life, the Prius's control software limits how deeply the battery can be charged and discharged. Less than half of its 1.3 kilowatt hours is available to move the car, Toyota says. The conversion by Plug In adds 10 kilowatt hours to the overall electrical capacity. An owner whose daily commute is less than 25 miles each way and does not include freeways or steep hills could theoretically get through the work week without burning any gasoline or having to recharge at the office. CONVERT The added battery pack is under the rear floor, entirely out of sight. Dexter Ford for The New York Times How much will it cost to refill the battery pack? At the average cost of electricity in the United States, about 11 cents per kilowatt hour, it's just over a dollar a fill up about 2 cents a mile. In California, electricity averages about 16 cent per kilowatt hour, making the cost slightly over 3 cents a mile. The converted Prius has three driving modes: all electric, blended and standard Prius. Selecting the all electric mode with the tiny toggle on the top of the dashboard limits the top speed and acceleration. Only the 76 horsepower electric motor is moving the car in this mode, so the initial acceleration is best described as eventual. On my first outings in stoplight to stoplight traffic, I often found myself tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. As speed gathers, the Prius does a reasonable job of keeping pace with the flow up to its 52 m.p.h limit. Because of a quirk in the software marriage between the stock Prius and the plug in system, it is necessary to stop completely, shut off the car and reboot out of all electric mode should you want to go, say, 53 m.p.h. On most local trips this is not a big problem; you just have to know where you are going, as you would for any daily trip. Even the archeological pace of initial acceleration soon becomes routine. Blended mode, activated by a rocker switch illuminated in red just left of the steering column, feels like driving any other second generation Prius, but with an added 25 50 m.p.g. showing on the LCD mileage display. The system uses as much battery power as possible, delaying the signal to spin up the gasoline engine until absolutely necessary. Plug In Solutions says that blended mode can yield more than 100 m.p.g. and that the car can run this way for up to 100 miles. My results differed. Keeping up with traffic on Interstates 5 and 405 required speeds of 75 80 m.p.h. on the 56 mile trip between my home and Plug In's headquarters. And relatively little of my mileage was spent at slower urban speeds. Final mileage was 67.2 mpg for the full tank (nearly 700 miles), but I routinely saw readings over 80 m.p.g. on the dashboard display. When the auxiliary battery pack starts to run low the 50 mile range seemed plausible based on my week of varied driving the car switches over to the native Prius mode, relying more on the gas engine. The gasoline engine generator cannot recharge the auxiliary battery pack; you'll have to plug into a 110 volt outlet for that, a 10 hour process when the battery is depleted. The full 10 kilowatt hour system in the car I tested costs 11,995 with the battery pack, or 6,995 without batteries. A 4 kilowatt hour system is 6,995 with batteries, 3,200 without. Estimates for installation from several of the 20 dealer installers around the country started at 1,000. The systems carry a three year warranty, which does not cover the batteries (those are warranted by the battery maker). The company says that because the system does not alter the Toyota hybrid components, it should not affect the car's factory warranty. This is not a clear cut matter, though. A Toyota spokeswoman, Jana Hartline, said that the company's policy calls for a case by case evaluation of whether a modification has caused a particular failure. The I.R.S. allows a tax credit equal to 10 percent of the cost of converting a vehicle to a qualified plug in electric drive motor vehicle. The maximum credit, which runs through 2011, is 4,000. Some states have game changing tax credits as well. Colorado offers an 85 percent credit, up to 6,000, for conversions. What makes the most sense to me is choosing the 4 kilowatt hour system that Plug In Solutions sells, as the major benefits of a plug in hybrid system accrue in the first 10 15 miles of each trip. Converting the car your family uses for the most frequent, shortest distance trips to mall, school or market offers the best value. Remember those solar panels on my roof? Since the system was installed about three years ago, our electric bill has averaged 166. A year. We make virtually all the power we consume and that's in a house with two adults, two teenagers, four flat screen HDTVs, seven computers you get the idea. The cost? After I factored in second mortgage interest, tax writeoffs and inflation over the 40 year projected life of the system, it looks like we'll save about 78,000 compared with the cost of buying electricity from the utility. And prices of systems have plunged since we took the plunge: our 6 kilowatt system that cost about 39,000 three years ago is about 28,000 today. Is it worth it to convert your existing Prius when plug in hybrids from established automakers seem just around the corner? It depends on your Prius. If you already have one you love ideally, one that happens to be out of warranty it just might make sense. Or, for a little more than 6,000 you could turn a 15,000 used Toyota into a near zero carbon conveyance that's still capable of taking off for Burning Man when the spirit moves. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
WASHINGTON When Ben S. Bernanke walked into the Federal Reserve's ornate boardroom in December 2009, the officials who were gathered around the long table gave the Fed's chairman a standing ovation. Mr. Bernanke had just been crowned Person of the Year by Time magazine. The recession had ended, unemployment had crested and Mr. Bernanke was widely regarded as singularly responsible. But the return to normalcy that Mr. Bernanke and his committee began to chart at that end of the year meeting soon proved premature. The Fed had arrested the financial crisis, but the moment would also turn out to be the beginning of a yearslong series of failures to provide a sufficiently large dose of stimulus to restore the battered American economy to its previous health. Transcripts the Fed released on Wednesday of its 2009 policy meetings show that Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues had a relatively clear understanding of the depth of the nation's economic problems. But they were hobbled by doubts about the Fed's ability to do more and by concerns about the potential political and economic consequences. At that December meeting, Mr. Bernanke told his colleagues that he was acutely aware of "fairly substantial" calls for the Fed to be doing "a lot more." But he quickly added: "The reason I personally, at least, am not convinced that that's the right way to go is that the connection between what actions we can take at this point and effective easing in the markets is not at all clear. For example, on the one hand, mortgage rates are already extraordinarily low it's not clear that we can lower them much more." He would eventually change his mind. Over the course of his second term as Fed chairman, which began in early 2010, Mr. Bernanke orchestrated three more rounds of bond buying, more than tripling the volume of purchases that the Fed had made during 2009. The latest batch of crisis era transcripts the Fed releases annual installments after a five year delay adds a chapter to the Fed's halting journey from a single minded focus on inflation in the years before the crisis to its broad and continuing embrace of responsibility for stabilizing the financial system and reviving job growth. Mr. Bernanke, who left the Fed last year at the end of his second term, emerges as a perceptive judge of economic conditions and a consultative leader who rarely pushed to impose his perspective on his colleagues, even when he turned out to be right. His successor, Janet L. Yellen, then the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, appears in these transcripts as prescient in her concerns about the enduring weakness of the economy. She warned at the December meeting that the Fed might need to resume its bond buying but she went no further, and neither did anyone else. In early 2009, financial markets were still in disarray, and Fed officials worked closely with the incoming Obama administration on a successful plan to restore confidence through a series of measures, including theatrical "stress tests" of the largest banks. At the same time, the Fed began to shift from firefighting to reconstruction, the work that remains its focus. The Fed had already reduced its benchmark interest rate nearly to zero in December 2008. It had also started to buy mortgage backed securities in January, seeking to revive the availability of financing for borrowers. At the Fed's second meeting of the year, in March, officials agreed to expand that program substantially. On top of the existing plan to buy 600 billion in mortgage bonds, the Fed said it would buy a further 1.05 trillion in mortgage bonds and Treasury securities. Just three nights earlier, Mr. Bernanke told the CBS program "60 Minutes," during the first live interview conducted by a Fed chairman, that he saw "green shoots" signs of emerging recovery in financial markets. But at the meeting, Mr. Bernanke made clear the overall picture was still grim, and other officials agreed. Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said he had taken soundings from 29 corporate executives. "In fact," Mr. Fisher said, "one actually called me and said, 'Do you want some good news?' But caution prevailed. Ms. Yellen, among others, worried that a larger balance sheet could interfere with the Fed's ability to increase interest rates as the economy began to recover. Officials also worried the Fed could overwhelm the capacity of the financial system if it tried to buy too many bonds. And, from the outset, some officials fretted that higher inflation would surely result. The greatest doubts, however, were focused on the likely benefits of the purchases, particularly of Treasury securities. Officials generally agreed that buying mortgage bonds was helping, but there were no comparable problems in the Treasury market. The best argument, several officials said, was simply the idea that it was worth trying everything. "We don't know exactly how much a Treasury purchase program would do, but, if we start one, we'll be able to answer that question," Mr. Dudley said. The Fed has publicly insisted in the intervening years that buying Treasury bonds had important benefits, even as a number of academics have published studies contradicting that conclusion. Mr. Bernanke joked last year, "The problem with Q.E. is it works in practice, but it doesn't work in theory." But the transcripts show that Fed officials at the time harbored the opposite view. "On theoretical grounds, I believe there's a very strong case that they should have some effect, but it has been awfully hard to identify exactly what that effect is," Ms. Yellen said at the Fed's June meeting. "I would say the benefits don't merit the costs." By the second half of 2009, this skepticism was being reinforced by optimism that the recession was over. The National Bureau of Economic Research would later determine the downturn had ended in June. "I think it does appear that the real economy is reaching something of an inflection point," Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said on June 24, accurately capturing the underlying shift. But even though the economic ship was no longer sinking, it was still struggling to advance. The Federal Open Market Committee came up with many ideas and made many attempts to revive the American economy. The Fed repeatedly overestimated the strength of the economy in the years before the financial crisis. Officials continued to understate the nation's economic problems well into 2008. The 2009 transcripts show, however, that most officials were cleareyed about the weakness of the recovery. "If you put all of those imbalances together and you think about what is going to support sustainable economic growth, it is a little hard to see where a robust recovery is going to come from," Mr. Bernanke said in April, and he maintained this caution through the rest of the year. Daniel Tarullo, a Fed governor, noted at the Fed's November meeting that the word he had heard the most during the discussions was "sluggish." But when the Fed convened in December, there was unanimous agreement it was time to stop buying bonds. Mr. Bernanke expressed "somewhat more confidence" about the health of the economy, although he was careful to describe the Fed as "walking on eggshells." Elizabeth A. Duke, a Fed governor, said the mortgage market still needed help, but she doubted that the central bank could provide it by buying more bonds. "I think there's uncertainty about the benefits of adding to our longer term purchases and some costs to that as well, so I'm not prepared to argue for that," said Donald L. Kohn, the Fed's vice chairman. Ms. Yellen warned in November that retreating too quickly might leave the economy in a "dangerous deflationary situation," a prescient forecast. Now she told the committee that she had shown the Fed's optimistic job growth forecast to the San Francisco Fed's board. They were "incredulous," she said. But Ms. Yellen did not push for the Fed to keep buying bonds. She noted only that if the retreat went badly, "I think we may need to resume purchases." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
General Motors will more than double the size of a recall issued this month for an ignition switch defect in some of its small cars, the automaker said in a news release Tuesday. The expansion brings the number of vehicles covered by the recall to nearly 1.4 million in the United States. The recall is aimed at vehicles with ignition switches that could inadvertently turn off the engine and vehicle electrical system disabling the air bags if the ignition key is jarred or the vehicle's operator has a heavy key ring attached to it. G.M. said in the release that it was now aware of the deaths of 13 front seat occupants in crashes where the front air bags did not deploy. G.M. had previously recalled about 619,000 vehicles in the United States, including Chevrolet Cobalts from the 2005 7 model years and 2007 Pontiac G5 models. Now the automaker is adding 2003 7 Saturn Ions, 2006 7 Chevrolet HHRs and 2006 7 Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky models. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A national law firm, established to defend corporate clients against toxic tort claims and mass tort claims, has signed a five year lease for a 6,716 square foot space on part of the second floor of this 28 story TriBeCa building. There is retail space on the ground floor, with offices on floors two to seven and condominiums above. The landlord is creating several perimeter offices and a conference room for the firm, which plans to move in late this fall. This four story, mixed use 1931 building, with 25 feet of frontage, has six vacant apartments: three already gut renovated, with exposed brick and new wood floors, and three that the buyer would need to renovate. The 6,900 square foot building is next to the elevated subway tracks for the J and Z lines. Moe Sports, a clothing shop, has occupied the retail space for about 10 years, and has five years remaining on its lease. A local landscape design firm has bought this 6,273 square foot, one and a half story commercial warehouse consisting of two adjacent structures. One, a concrete block building with metal roofing, features a mezzanine level with an office. The other is made of corrugated metal. The property, with three loading bays, has 24 years remaining in the Industrial and Commercial Abatement Program, a New York City property tax savings program that offers the owner over 50 percent in tax abatements. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Scout Raskin owns three dogs, a cat, turtles and a pair of hermit crabs. Still, she longed for a country pet to round out the menagerie at her home in a semirural neighborhood in Los Angeles County. A horse was too big for the backyard, a chicken impossible to cuddle. That is why in March she found herself at a Jack in the Box in Lancaster, Calif., a desert town on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, where she met a goat breeder with two Nigerian dwarf kids in the back of his Honda Odyssey. Ms. Raskin had picked out Spanky and Pippin online weeks earlier and was taking them home. She was inspired, in part, by the goat yoga craze popular among Lululemon wearing Hollywood women and actresses like Rebecca Romijn. "Goats are hot these days," said Ms. Raskin, a former child actress. "Adults mostly want to get down on all fours and let the goats jump on them." Goats have long been a popular subject of videos and online memes. There are fainting goats, screaming goats, goats in pajamas and goats with anger issues. There is a virtual game where the sole purpose of a goat is to wreck stuff and even a Tony Award winning play by Edward Albee, "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?," in which the lead character has an affair with the pet in question. But in the past few years, a swell of fun loving billys has moved offline and into people's backyards, living rooms and hastily built barns. Indeed the number of registered Nigerian dwarf goats, beloved for their size and frisky good nature, has increased 7.5 percent in three years, according to the American Goat Society. "I know there are stereotypes: They eat cans and smell bad," said William Kowalik, a representative of the American Goat Society. "That's not true. They are very much like dogs. They are great pets. The goats know what kind of mood you are in. They can get a person to open up." Angela Bailey lives a 20 minute drive from St. Paul. A friend suggested she get a goat, saying their milk was easy to digest. In May, Ms. Bailey's husband gave her two kids for her birthday. "They wag their tails when they are happy," she said. " They like to be scratched and petted, and they love to be around all of us." Equally appealing, she said, "their poop does not stink." Ms. Bailey's city friends weren't as thrilled. "It felt like they were rolling their eyes a little," she said. Her six children, though, have warmed up to the goats, especially her girls. "There's a lot of hugging going on," she said. Goats have a defined social caste, despite their laid back goofiness. "Everyone has their own spot," said Mr. Kowalik, who has goats and lives in San Antonio. "They learn the order, and if you don't follow it, they will pout." If a goat sniffs another goat's food, "they'll walk off and refuse to eat," he said. "If a piece of watermelon touches the ground, they won't eat it. They also get into: 'That's not my bowl. I am not going to drink from it.'" Despite those peccadilloes, goats are, for the most part, tolerant of humans. That was the appeal for Quinn Edwards who works in technology and lives in Draper, Utah. He has four Nigerian dwarf goats who have 35,000 followers on Instagram. "I had a friend growing up who was into mules and he would say, 'This one has a good personality,'" Mr. Edwards said. "To me, it was just a stupid mule." Well, that was until he got Kevin. "He's the best," he said. "When he came home, the other goats were a bit bigger, and he never left my side." They took walks. They cuddled. Then the calls started. "A guitarist in H20, a popular punk band from 1990s, called and wanted to come by and see the goats," said Mr. Edwards, who obliged. "I'm thinking, 'You guys were my favorite band.'" Another time a family from Pennsylvania went to his house to visit Kevin and company. And last year, Mr. Edwards got a message from a college friend in Los Angeles who wanted to visit his goats after seeing photos on Facebook. She was getting a divorce, Mr. Edwards said. He was single. They texted for months. She came to see the goats, then moved back to Utah. In April, they got married. Perhaps the most difficult part of owning a goat is finding a neighborhood zoned for farm animals. Leanne Lauricella started the Goats of Anarchy animal rescue in 2015. She had left her job as an event planner in Manhattan and moved to rural New Jersey, where she adopted two rescue goats. The herd has grown to 52, a haven for animals that have lost feet because of frostbite, are missing limbs, were abused or have congenital disorders. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
LOS ANGELES LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers has shown throughout his 16 year N.B.A. career that he is good at a lot of basketball related activities, including scoring, passing, rebounding and winning. But perhaps one of his most remarkable assets a feat, really is his durability. He seldom misses games because of injury. But now, less than a week after turning 34, James is still on the mend from straining his left groin in a win over the Golden State Warriors on Christmas Day. The timetable for his return remains uncertain. The Lakers announced on Friday, before playing the visiting Knicks, that James would not make a coming trip with the team for back to back games against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday and the Dallas Mavericks on Monday. The Lakers' next game after that is on Wednesday against the Detroit Pistons at Staples Center. The team said in its statement that James was making "progress with his recovery" as he received daily treatment from the team's medical staff and that he would be re evaluated in one week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Vivian Perlis, a musicologist who founded Yale University's Oral History of American Music, an invaluable archive of audio and video interviews that she directed for more than 40 years, died on July 4 at her home in Weston, Conn. She was 91. The oral history project includes some 3,000 recordings of interviews with composers and other major musical figures, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Duke Ellington to John Adams. The eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock described it as an "incomparable resource." Ms. Perlis came to run the project accidentally, after taking a job as a research librarian at the Yale School of Music in 1967. She had become involved there with the library's extensive Charles Ives collection, and one day she made a visit to New York City to pick up some additional materials donated by Julian Myrick, who had been a partner with Ives in an insurance business. Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder. She was fascinated by the stories that Mr. Myrick, an elderly, hard of hearing former Southerner, told about the iconoclastic, curmudgeonly Ives. This led her to conduct a series of more than 60 interviews over several years with people who had known and worked with Ives. A nephew in Danbury, Conn., Ives's hometown, recounted playing baseball with "Uncle Charlie." The composer Lehman Engel recalled hearing Ives talk about the "old days," when the "sissies," meaning timidly conservative performers, refused to play Ives's flinty music. At the time, Ms. Perlis faced disdain from traditional musicologists who thought recorded interviews would be merely anecdotal, overly subjective and prone to factual inconsistencies. There were "sneers about anything that wasn't hard line research," Mr. Hitchcock said in an interview with The New York Times in 1997. The "establishment types" in his field, he added, "considered it pipsqueak stuff." Ms. Perlis's persistence paid off. In 1974, for the Ives centenary, selections from these interviews edited and arranged by her were published by Yale University Press as "Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History." The next year the book won the Otto Kinkeldey Award, the highest honor of the American Musicological Society, named after its first president. Two subsequent books, which Ms. Perlis wrote with Copland, had more mixed receptions. "Copland: 1900 Through 1942" and "Copland Since 1943," both published in the mid 1980s, include long excerpts from Ms. Perlis's comprehensive interviews with the composer, explanatory passages by Ms. Perlis and insightful comments from many Copland friends and associates, among them Ned Rorem, Leonard Bernstein and Agnes de Mille. But the portrait of Copland's life is veiled. There is no mention of his homosexuality. Vivian Goldberger was born in Brooklyn on April 26, 1928, to Charles and Frances (Platzer) Goldberger. Her father, an entrepreneur, started the Applicator Brush Company, building it around his own inventions. Her mother helped with the business and raised the couple's three children. Vivian attended the University of Michigan, studying harp and piano, and earned a master's degree in music history there. She moved to New Haven with her husband, Dr. Sanford J. Perlis, whom she married in 1948 and who became a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. Ms. Perlis began doctoral studies in musicology at Columbia University in the early 1960s, only to meet dismaying resistance. "I had three small children at home in Connecticut and was taking the train down to 125th Street for my classes at Columbia," she said in the 1997 interview. "When I asked for some flexibility regarding the requirement to study full time, I was turned down flat. So I could either orphan my children or give up the Ph.D. That would never happen today." She became a harpist with the New Haven Symphony while working the library job at Yale that led to her founding the oral history project. For years Ms. Perlis essentially had to secure financing for the project on her own. The Yale School of Music provided office space and work study students to assist with the endless task of transcribing interviews. But she often felt "like an orphan," she said, as she labored in her basement headquarters. Things changed in the late 1990s, when the main library at Yale joined the school to sponsor the project, ensuring steadier support along with a larger, climate controlled space. From the start Ms. Perlis buttressed the collection with existing recorded interviews acquired from radio stations and historians, building it into one of the most extensive oral history archives in America. Her hunches about young composers who might become important proved savvy: For example, she recorded an interview with John Adams when he was in his 20s, years before his opera "Nixon in China" brought him to international attention. In 2005, working with the project's associate director at the time, the oboist and author Libby Van Cleve, Ms. Perlis wrote "Composers' Voices From Ives to Ellington," an acclaimed book that came with two CDs. (Ms. Van Cleve became the project's director on Ms. Perlis's retirement in 2010.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Cheers from the audience at the 144th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show nearly lifted the roof at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night as Daniel, a 5 year old golden retriever, circled the arena. After beating out 32 setters and spaniels in the sporting class, Daniel became one of the first golden retrievers to make it to the final round, best in show a feat noted in Daniel's hometown paper. The crowd, and fans watching online, were behind him. "If Daniel doesn't win we riot," one supporter wrote on Twitter. But instead, a black standard poodle named Siba took the pageant's top prize, and was showered with purple ribbons and silver trophies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Kate Figes at her home in London in 2009. Reared by Eva Figes, a prominent feminist author in her own right, Ms. Figes initially felt inhibited about writing. "It's not easy to believe you can when your own mother is one, too," she said. LONDON Kate Figes, a feminist writer known for her shrewd, sisterly books about family life, among them a primer on the turmoil of new motherhood and investigations into long term relationships and infidelity, died on Dec. 7 at her home in London. She was 62. Felicity Rubinstein, her literary agent, said the cause was cancer. Ms. Figes's most successful book, a best seller in the United Kingdom that enabled her to break into the American market, was "Life After Birth" (1998). In the book, drawing on interviews with hundreds of new mothers, she explored the extreme shifts in identity that women undergo after childbirth as well as topics like sexual desire, sleeplessness and maternal ambivalence, a virtually taboo subject at the time (and one that elicited hate mail). Ms. Figes contended that a mother's unconditional love for her child does not necessarily come at birth; it grows as the physical shock fades and may well be preceded by unhappiness, confusion and disillusionment. Admitting to this does not make you a bad mother, she insisted. She was also critical of natural childbirth, viewing the injuries some women in labor sustain as unnecessary. Ms. Goodings became her editor after she and Ms. Figes (pronounced FIE jez) appeared together on a panel at a girls' school and got to chatting about how "girl talk," of the complaining sort, can be both a tool for bonding and a cathartic release. The encounter led to Ms. Figes's writing "The Big Fat Bitch Book for Girls" (2009) for Virago, which specializes in books by and about women. She furthered her exploration of female experiences in two more books for the publisher, "Couples: How We Make Love Last" (2010) and "Our Cheating Hearts: Love and Loyalty, Lust and Lies" (2013). Ms. Figes didn't begin writing full time until her early 30s. Though she was reared by a single mother, Eva Figes, herself a feminist author, Ms. Figes initially felt inhibited about writing. "It's not easy to believe you can when your own mother is one, too," she once said. Until then, she had worked in publishing, first as a sales representative to bookstores and then as a publicist and editor for the feminist imprint Pandora Press. "She was very much part of the feminist community," Ms. Goodings said. Ms. Figes's first book was in fact an appraisal of feminism, "Because of Her Sex: The Myth of Equality for Women in Britain," published in 1994 by Macmillan, where Ms. Rubinstein was her commissioning editor. "People weren't really talking about feminism in the early '90s," Ms. Rubinstein said in a phone interview. "Kate did a huge amount of research and synthesized it all into something readable and personal." That personal tone would define all nine of Ms. Figes's books, even those dealing with topics in which she acknowledged she was inexperienced, like cheating spouses. Ms. Figes had left publishing to write for newspapers and work part time as fiction editor for the British edition of Cosmopolitan magazine when she went to Ms. Rubinstein with an idea for a second book. Ms. Rubinstein, in her own career shift, had by then become a book agent. Ms. Figes had given birth to the first of her two daughters in 1989 and found that while there were plenty of books about pregnancy and child development on the market, there were none that dealt with the wrenching transformations that motherhood required. "The literature seemed to hurdle over the mother as if she didn't exist or wasn't crucial to bringing up a happy, healthy child," she later wrote. Her brainstorming with Ms. Rubinstein led to "Life After Birth." "When I became a mother myself," Ms. Rubinstein said, "that book saved my life." Catherine Jane Figes was born in London on Nov. 6, 1957, to John and Eva (Unger) Figes. Her father, whom Ms. Figes characterized as "absent" and "unreliable," ran an employment agency. Her parents' marriage ended in a bitter divorce when Kate was 5. Eva Figes, who was Jewish, had fled Nazi Germany as a child with her parents in 1939. She became an acclaimed novelist, though it was for her nonfiction polemic, "Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society," that she is best known. The book, published in 1970, joined Germaine Greer's "Female Eunuch" and Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" as among the most important feminist treatises of that time. Ms. Figes's relationship with her mother was complex and difficult, Ms. Figes wrote. Though she was close to her younger brother, Orlando Figes, who became a historian and an author, theirs was a "chaotic and insecure" childhood, she wrote. She left home for good at 17 after having what she described as "a blazing row with my mother." Ms. Figes was vague about what she did immediately after leaving home, but she went on to study Arabic and Russian at the Polytechnic of Central London, now known as the University of Westminster, graduating in 1981. In 1988 she married Christopher Wyld, a BBC News foreign editor who became director of the Foreign Press Association in London. Her husband and brother survive her, as do two daughters, Eleanor and Grace Wyld. Ms. Figes and her husband had lived in the same house in North London since they were married. In the years before she developed breast cancer, which ultimately spread to her bones, Ms. Figes trained as a relationship counselor, a role that flowed naturally from her writing, Ms. Rubinstein said. In her books on female issues, she said, Ms. Figes "would explain to readers what was happening, would put it into words; she would be funny about it, consoling; she would normalize it." Ms. Figes's final book, "On Smaller Dogs and Larger Life Questions," published in 2018, charts the changes in life that middle age brings (including her bonding with a miniature wire haired dachshund named Zeus). With her cancer diagnosis breast cancer that had gone undetected in routine mammograms it also became a book about facing up to mortality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
MY NEXT GUEST NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION on Netflix. Jay Z has been startlingly honest and introspective over the past year, whether on his wrenching album "4:44" or in a wide ranging interview with The New York Times. He vents and ponders his past once again with David Letterman, who nowadays is far more prone to play therapist than crack wise. In this interview, Jay Z recalls crying from happiness after his mother came out to him and his favorite moments with his daughter, Blue Ivy. He also discusses his favorite rappers, like Snoop Dogg and Eminem. 6 BALLOONS on Netflix. You might be confused if you're expecting comedy from the two normally hilarious leads of "6 Balloons," Abbi Jacobson and Dave Franco the stars of "Broad City" and "21 Jump Street." But they take on much bleaker roles in this new film by Marja Lewis Ryan. Based on a true story, the movie follows a relapsing heroin addict (Mr. Franco) and his sister (Ms. Jacobson) over the course of one night, as she drives him and his 2 year old daughter through the underbelly of Los Angeles in search of a detox center. SETH ROGEN'S HILARITY FOR CHARITY on Netflix. Seth Rogen has a knack for getting a ton of famous comics together in the same room, whether at "The Roast of James Franco" or at a fictional house party in "This Is the End." The lineup of this special, which will raise money for Alzheimer's disease research and care, includes Tiffany Haddish, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kumail Nanjiani, Sarah Silverman and both members of the "Oh, Hello" duo, Nick Kroll and John Mulaney. And look out for a cameo from a perplexed Jeff Goldblum. TROY: FALL OF A CITY on Netflix. It's honestly surprising that this era of Peak TV would last so long without a rousing and high budget depiction of Homer's epic war tale. This eight part series from the BBC revels in sex, blood, elaborate costuming and rousing monologues to tell the story of the two countries that went to war over the most beautiful woman in the world. The reviews have mostly been strong. VICE 11 p.m. on HBO. The sixth season of this documentary series dives into the United States' juvenile justice system. The episode centers on Michael Kenneth Williams, most famous for playing the stickup man Omar on "The Wire," who has a personal connection to the subject: his nephew Dominic DuPont is serving a 25 year to life sentence at Rikers Island. Mr. Williams visits him and other inmates in prison, examining the system's cruelties as well as the steps communities are taking to reduce the incarceration rates of youths. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It's easy to take for granted the Federal Reserve's ability to raise interest rates. Even among the legions who doubt that Fed officials will pick the ideal moment to start increasing rates for the first time since 2008, few question the Fed's technical competence. The central bank has a long history. The engine is known to work. So it may come as a surprise to learn that the old engine is broken. When the Fed decides that it's time to "lift off" perhaps this week, but more likely later this year it will be relying on a new system, assembled from spare parts, to make interest rates rise. There is a general agreement among economists and market analysts that the Fed's plans make sense in theory. A team led by Simon Potter, a former academic who now heads the Fed's market desk in New York, has been testing and fine tuning the details by moving billions of dollars around the financial system. But markets have a long history of scrambling the best laid plans. "If something is going to go wrong, I haven't been able to figure out what, but there's a lot of reason for caution," said Stephen G. Cecchetti, the former chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements. "We've never done this before." The stakes are huge. The Fed is in charge of keeping economic growth on an even keel: minimal unemployment, moderate inflation. It tends to operate conservatively and to change very slowly because when it errs, the nation suffers. Yet the Fed has found itself forced to experiment. The immense stimulus campaign that it started in response to the 2008 financial crisis changed its relationship with the financial markets. It has pumped so many dollars into the system that it cannot easily drain enough money to discourage lending, its traditional approach. Instead, the Fed plans to throw more money at the problem, paying lenders not to make loans. The Fed, embedded in the banking system, has also concluded that working through the banks is no longer sufficient to influence the broader economy. It plans to strengthen its hold by working directly with an expanded range of lenders. Fed officials have repeatedly expressed confidence that the plan will work. "The committee is confident that it has the tools it needs to raise short term interest rates when it becomes appropriate to do so," Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, told Congress earlier this year, referring to its policy making body, the Federal Open Market Committee. And if the new approach does not work at first, Mr. Potter said in a recent speech, then his team of monetary mechanics "stands ready to innovate" until it does. The markets desk at the New York Fed has put monetary policy into practice since the mid 1930s. In the decades before the Great Recession, the desk exercised its remarkable influence over the American economy through its control of an odd little marketplace in which banks could come to borrow money for a single night. The Fed requires banks to set aside reserves in proportion to the deposits the banks accept from customers. The reserves can be kept in cash or held in an account at the Fed. Banks that need reserves at the end of a given day can borrow from banks that have a surplus. Before the crisis, the Fed controlled the interest rate on those loans by modulating the supply of reserves: It lowered interest rates by buying Treasury securities from banks and crediting their accounts, increasing the supply of reserves; it raised rates by selling Treasuries to banks and debiting their accounts. As the crisis hit in 2008, the Fed pressed this machine to its limits. It bought enough securities and pumped enough reserves into the banking system to drive interest rates on short term loans to nearly zero. The federal government now pays about a dime to borrow 1,000 for one month. Companies with good credit pay about a dollar to borrow 1,000 from money market funds and other investors. To switch metaphors, the old monetary policy machine sits at the bottom of a lake of excess reserves. The Fed would need to sell most of the securities it has accumulated before short term rates would start to rise. Selling quickly could roil markets; selling slowly could allow the economy to overheat. So the Fed decided to find another way. Instead of draining all that excess money, the Fed decided to freeze it. For the last seven years, the Fed has encouraged financial risk taking in the service of its campaign to increase employment and economic growth. By starting to raise interest rates, the Fed intends to gradually discourage risk taking. The straightforward part of the plan is persuading banks not to make loans. In a serendipitous stroke, Congress passed a law shortly before the financial crisis that let the Fed pay interest on the reserves that banks kept at the Fed. Written as a sop to the banking industry, it has become the new linchpin of monetary policy. Say the Fed wanted to raise short term interest rates to 1 percent, meaning that it did not want banks to lend at lower rates. Because the glut of reserves is so great, the Fed could not easily raise rates by reducing the availability of money. Instead, the Fed plans to pre empt the market, paying banks 1 percent interest on reserves in their Fed accounts, so banks have little reason to lend at lower rates. "Why would you lend to anyone else when you can lend to the Fed?" Kevin Logan, chief United States economist at HSBC, asked rhetorically. This is not a cheap trick. Since the crisis, the Fed has paid banks a token annual rate of 0.25 percent on reserves. Last year alone, that cost 6.7 billion that the Fed would have otherwise handed over to the Treasury. Paying 1 percent interest would cost four times as much. The Fed has sent roughly 500 billion to the Treasury since 2008. As the Fed raises rates, some projections show that it may not transfer a single dollar in some years. Instead, the Fed will pay banks tens of billions of dollars not to use the trillions it paid them previously. At first, Fed officials thought that paying interest to banks would establish a minimum rate for all short term loans, exerting the same kind of broad influence as the old system. It soon became clear, however, that rates on most such loans remained lower than 0.25 percent. Even banks that needed overnight loans found they could borrow more cheaply. The average rate in July was 0.13 percent about half of the Fed's new benchmark rate. The rest of the financial system is also awash in cash, and lenders like money market mutual funds put downward pressure on interest rates as they fight to attract borrowers. When liftoff arrives, however, the Fed plans to place this machinery inside the familiar language of the old system. It is likely to announce that it is raising the federal funds rate, the interest rate that banks pay to borrow reserves, from its current range of 0 to 0.25 percent to a new range of 0.25 to 0.5 percent. The Fed does not plan to emphasize that this rate is now a stage prop or that the real work of raising rates will be done outside the limelight by its new tools. On weekdays at about 12:45 p.m., the New York Fed's trading portal, known as FedTrade, plays three musical notes F E D signaling that Mr. Potter's shop is open for business. So begins another day of training camp, another test of the Fed's plans to borrow money from nonbank financial companies. The Fed's traders sit at terminals in a converted conference room. Along one wall are five chairs and five sets of computer monitors beneath five historical photographs of the trading desk: men answering phones, men writing bids in chalk on a long board and, in the most recent photograph, from the 1980s, a glimpse of a woman in the background. On another wall is a screen that links the room in New York by videoconference with a backup trading room at the Chicago Fed. Potential lenders a preapproved group of 168, including a bevy of money market funds and the housing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have 30 minutes to offer the Fed up to 30 billion each. At 1:13 p.m., a warning message starts blinking red. At 1:15 p.m., the Fed closes the auction and accepts up to 300 billion in loans at an interest rate of 0.05 percent. During two years of experiments, the Fed team has adjusted the rates it pays, the amounts it accepts and the time it enters the market, among other variables. Mr. Potter and his lieutenants have also held lunch meetings with investors on the other side of the portal to solicit advice and complaints. The size of the program poses the most obvious risk. Fed officials limited daily borrowing to 300 billion because they didn't want to freeze more money than necessary. They also worry about exacerbating market downturns by giving investors a new place to flee. These concerns were heightened by reports that some investment companies were interested in creating money market funds that would be advertised as the safest place to park money because the money would be parked at the Fed. Last year, at the end of September, shortly after the cap was imposed, lenders offered the Fed 407 billion on a single day. Demand was so high that instead of asking for interest, some lenders offered to pay the Fed to take the money. The Fed ended up borrowing at zero percent and turning away 107 billion in loans. A cardinal rule of central banking is that you don't starve financial markets during panics, and the Fed has been leaning in the direction of doing more. It has already announced that it is willing to borrow at least 200 billion through a parallel program at the end of September this year, for a total of 500 billion. It has also suggested that it may raise the cap during liftoff. "My sense is we're better off making sure we can maintain control," James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Fed, said in a recent interview. "This is where the nutty people on the bond trading desks have control," joked Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman, when asked if the Fed's plan would work. Mr. Blinder's point was that markets ultimately determined the cost of borrowing money, particularly for longer term loans like mortgages and corporate bonds. The Fed can be precise in its planning, but the market is unpredictable in its reactions. Fed officials have emphasized that they do not want the liftoff to surprise investors. "This has probably been the most telegraphed 25 point rate hike in history," said Wayne Schmidt, chief investment officer at Gradient Investments in Arden Hills, Minn. "I think when they actually do something, it will be more of a nonevent." But there are at least three reasons markets are becoming less predictable. The rise of an interconnected global financial system has weakened the Fed's influence over interest rates. When the Fed last raised short term rates, beginning in 2004, officials were surprised that long term rates failed to rise because foreign money was pouring into the housing market and other domestic investments. This time, there are plenty of warnings that the weaknesses of other developed economies could once again make it harder for the Fed to raise domestic interest rates. "Financial market conditions have come to depend increasingly not only on developments at home but also on developments abroad," William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a February speech in which he cautioned the Fed's control over those conditions had been "loosened." Finally, investors say regulatory changes are keeping some large traders on the sidelines, making it harder to buy and sell, even in the highly liquid market for Treasuries. That can exacerbate market movements because when people are in a hurry to buy or sell, they tend to chase the best available offers. "The depth of the market is not what it used to be," said Tad Rivelle, chief investment officer for fixed income at TCW, a Los Angeles investment firm that manages some of the world's largest bond funds. "You can get the same trades done, but it takes more time." "People are very concerned about those 12 minutes last year," said Mr. Cecchetti, now a professor of finance at the Brandeis International Business School. "I'm very reassured by the fact that there were only 12 minutes." Moreover, Mr. Cecchetti said that removing some liquidity was a good thing because much of that liquidity was a result of public subsidies for the banking system that had encouraged undue risk taking. "Does it mean that there's going to be more high frequency volatility? Sure," he said. "It means the Simon Potters of the world are going to have to be much more careful about what they're doing. But that seems to me to be kind of O.K." Mr. Potter has worked at the New York Fed since the late 1990s, but he spent most of his career there in the research department before taking over the markets desk in 2012. He became more involved in the practical side of the Fed's work during the financial crisis. In a 2012 speech at New York University, Mr. Potter said the experience particularly during a four week period at the peak of the crisis had impressed upon him the limits of theory, the need to understand what investors are thinking and the value of flexibility in policy making. "For economists who did not have the opportunity to observe the panic up close as I and most of my colleagues had, the developments in this four week period must have been bewildering, given how widely events on the ground and theory diverged," he said. That perspective may come in handy. The last time the Fed shifted the basic mechanics of monetary policy was in the early 1980s, when Paul Volcker was its chairman. That campaign is remembered as a triumph of central banking. Mr. Volcker succeeded in driving inflation down toward modern levels, ending a long period in which governments had floundered helplessly to prevent rising prices. But Mr. Faust, the Johns Hopkins economist, says the messiness of Mr. Volcker's triumph is often overlooked. The Fed's initial plans did not work and were revised and did not work and were revised again and still didn't work. He said the Volcker episode was a reminder that monetary policy is not figure skating. The Fed is likely to flail, he says, but it will be measured by its success in getting interest rates to rise, not by the grace of its performance. "If you're into the internal plumbing, I suspect there will be times when that looks messy because this is new," Mr. Faust said. "But central banks can raise interest rates, and they will. And as long as that happens, from the standpoint of the broader economy, everything is fine and the rest will be forgotten or become a footnote of history." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The PEN World Voices Festival, which for the past two years has highlighted geographic regions like Africa and Mexico, will shift its focus this year to gender and power in the age of President Trump. This year's festival, which runs from May 1 7 in New York, will feature 150 writers in a series of talks, readings and workshops related to social justice, sexuality and politics. "Amid visa bans and an America First foreign policy, PEN World Voices is now an important antidote to an America at risk of only talking to itself, fanning baseless fears, and damaging relations with allies around the world," Suzanne Nossel, PEN America's executive director, said in a statement. "This year's festival will center on both celebration and mobilization, rallying around PEN America's mission to defend free expression and enable the breadth of voices vital to an open marketplace of ideas." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In January, rumors swirled that the art collector and patron Agnes Gund had sold her prized 1962 Roy Lichtenstein "Masterpiece" for a whopping 150 million, placing it among the 15 highest known prices ever paid for an artwork. Ms. Gund is confirming that sale now, revealing that she parted with the painting (for what was actually 165 million, including fees) for a specific purpose: to create a fund that supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. This new Art for Justice Fund to be announced Monday at the Museum of Modern Art, where Ms. Gund is president emerita will start with 100 million of the proceeds from the Lichtenstein (which was sold to the collector Steven A. Cohen through Acquavella Gallery). "This is one thing I can do before I die," Ms. Gund, 78, said in an interview at her Upper East Side apartment, where the Lichtenstein used to hang over the mantel, along with works by Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko. "This is what I need to do." Ms. Gund, together with the Ford Foundation, which will administer the fund, has asked other collectors to do the same, in the hopes of raising an additional 100 million over the next five years. The effort is noteworthy, not only for the amount of money involved rarely do charitable undertakings start at 100 million but because Ms. Gund is essentially challenging fellow collectors to use their artworks to champion social causes at a time when the market has made their holdings more valuable than ever. "The larger idea is to raise awareness among a community of art collectors that they can use their influence and their collections to advance social justice," said Darren Walker, the Ford Foundation's president. "Art has meaning on a wall, but it also has meaning when it is monetized." Those who have already committed to the fund and are being called founding donors include Laurie M. Tisch, a chairwoman of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Kenneth I. Chenault, chief executive of American Express, and his wife, Kathryn; the philanthropist Jo Carole Lauder; the financier Daniel S. Loeb; and Brooke Neidich, a Whitney trustee. "I was moved by her passion," Ms. Tisch said of Ms. Gund, adding that she would contribute 500,000 in proceeds from a Max Weber painting she recently sold. "It's ambitious, but when Aggie puts in a 100 million, that's a real signal that it's important and I'm happy to be a part of it." The fund will make grants to organizations and leaders who already have a track record in criminal justice reform like the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. that seek to safely reduce jail and prison populations across the country and to strengthen education and employment opportunities for former inmates. The fund will also support art related programs on mass incarceration. "There's long been this criticism that people who have the means to acquire fine art are allowed to surround themselves with beautiful things while they are unwilling to look at the ugly realities that sometimes shape a community or a culture or a country," said Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. "Using this art to actually respond to over incarceration or racial inequality or social injustice is a powerful idea." The impetus for the fund was personal. Six of Ms. Gund's 12 grandchildren are African American, and she has worried about their future as they've matured, particularly in light of shootings of black teenagers like Trayvon Martin in Florida. "I have always had an extreme sensitivity to inequality," Ms. Gund said. She added that she was also deeply affected by Michelle Alexander's 2010 book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," and by Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary, "13th," about African Americans in the prison system. He added: "Aggie is in the unique position of being a prominent, privileged white philanthropist who also has African American grandchildren. So she is a witness to the barriers that they have faced as they have matured in a world that still has a narrative about expectations of them." Participation in the fund does not require the sale of artwork, Mr. Walker said; any type of support is welcome. Because criminal justice "has never been very popular in philanthropy," Mr. Stevenson said, "I'm hoping the fund will help energize some long overdue reform efforts. "Right now in the United States, we have the highest rate of incarceration," he continued. "The Bureau of Justice is projecting that one in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison. We have incredibly high levels of poverty. There's despair in many communities." Mr. Stevenson will take part in an evening event at MoMA on Monday to announce the fund that will also feature Piper Kerman, author of "Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison," and Glenn E. Martin, president and founder of JustLeadershipUSA, which aims to reduce the prison population, in conversation with The New York Times Op Ed columnist Charles Blow. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Simple cellphones can tell one type of mosquito from another by their hums, which may be useful in fighting mosquito borne diseases, according to new research from Stanford University. Calling their project "Shazam for Mosquitoes," after the phone app that identifies music, students from the university's Bio X institute showed that common cellphones could record mosquito wing beats accurately enough to distinguish, for example, Culex mosquitoes, which spread West Nile virus, from Aedes mosquitoes, which spread Zika. Even older flip phones, which are still used in parts of Africa, are sensitive enough to do the job. The students envision a crowdsourcing initiative in which phone users around the world send in sound samples of mosquitoes landing on them, which could be sorted by the embedded GPS and time coordinates to build a worldwide mosquito distribution map. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
When it comes to the huge profits of American technology giants, Europe wants a slice of the cake. Google on Thursday became the latest company to agree to pay back taxes, in this case 306 million euros, or 334 million, to the Italian authorities for its operations in the country from 2002 to 2015. Under a similar agreement in late 2015, Apple agreed to pay Italy EUR314 million in back taxes. But Apple and the Irish government are appealing a separate EUR13 billion tax charge levied by the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, which said the company owed more tax on its businesses in Ireland. As European lawmakers grapple with how much tax technology companies should pay on their overseas operations, industry executives are considering repatriating hundreds of billions of dollars under the Trump administration's proposed "tax holiday," which would shrink the current levy of 35 percent, before deductions, on such income. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
After five weeks at No. 1, Drake has ceded the top of the Billboard album chart to Travis Scott. Mr. Scott, a popular Houston rapper who now has the publicity bonus of a place in the Kardashian universe he has a baby daughter with Kylie Jenner reached the top with "Astroworld," which had the equivalent of 537,000 album sales in the United States, the year's second biggest opening week after Drake's "Scorpion." Mr. Scott's total includes 349 million streams and an impressive 270,000 copies sold as a complete album, according to Nielsen. As with other recent releases by Dave Matthews, Shawn Mendes, Pink and others, Mr. Scott linked album sales to concert tickets although unlike the others, who bundled CDs with ticket sales, Mr. Scott sold his album first and promised his fans access to "a future Travis Scott headline tour," with details to follow. "Scorpion" fell to No. 2 with 138 million streams but only 9,000 copies sold as a full album, for an "album equivalent" number of 117,000. In the six weeks since it came out, Drake's album has racked up 1.9 billion streams yet sold just 255,000 copies as a complete package. Also this week, two other rappers opened high on the chart: Mac Miller started at No. 3 with "Swimming," and YG bowed at No. 5 with "Stay Dangerous." Post Malone's "Beerbongs Bentleys" is in fourth place, still a streaming hit after 15 weeks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Sierra Dawn Thomas and Joe Anglim, who met as contestants on "Survivor," were married Nov. 23 at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah. Joe Anglim and Sierra Dawn Thomas met on the 30th season of the reality TV show "Survivor." A few years later, they were carrying a torch for each other. Heading into tribal council that night, Joe Anglim sensed he was vulnerable. After two weeks competing on the 30th season of the reality TV show "Survivor" in 2014, he had proven to be the best athlete in the game, and three of his seven tribemates agreed he had to go. Mr. Anglim had a pact or alliance in "Survivor" parlance with two other tribe members to vote another challenger out of the competition. That left his fate up to fellow contestant, Sierra Dawn Thomas. "I remember it so clearly, the fear in his eyes and him being scared of going home," Ms. Thomas said of Mr. Anglim on the day of the vote. "I kept reiterating that tonight, I'm not going to vote for you." But a few elimination ceremonies later, Mr. Anglim didn't get that same assurance. Ms. Thomas wrote his name down on her ballot, the votes were tallied, and his torch was extinguished. Despite Mr. Anglim's best attempts to form an alliance, Ms. Thomas kept her rival at arms' length during the competition. But when they arrived back stateside after 39 days of filming in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, she helped him download Snapchat at the airport so they could keep in touch. "For the next few years, we were Snapchatting our lives to each other," Mr. Anglim said. Mr. Anglim returned home to Scottsdale, Ariz., and Ms. Thomas to Ogden, Utah. It wasn't long before they began making trips to visit one another and other fellow castmates, who together became a tightknit community outside of the show. "The game is designed to separate you and make you not want to be friends," said Mike Holloway, the winner of Season 30. "But we found a unique group of people that wanted something more out of this than being an experience that we watch back on TV." "Sierra and Joe would always fight like brother and sister," said Carolyn Rivera, the Season 30 runner up. "I told Sierra, 'You know you're in love with him you have to get over it. Honey, you've got this.'" "We were both dating other people at the time," Ms. Thomas said. "People would always be like, 'I don't know about your relationship with Joe.' But we literally just friend zoned each other." As their friendship grew, even their families began to notice something between them. For their fellow contestants, it was only a matter of time before the two realized it as well. "I'd go through my phone and ask myself, 'Why are there so many pictures of me and her?' he said. "People are constantly saying I think there's more with you two. You start asking yourself, do I love this person?" Three years after competing against each other on the show, the two began dating, and Mr. Anglim moved in with Ms. Thomas in Ogden last year. They've even began breeding horses at Ms. Thomas's family stables, though Mr. Anglim has yet to take up riding. "I fell in love my best friend," Ms. Thomas said. "I know that sounds crazy and you hear people tell you that all the time, but it actually happened with us." The two aren't the only couple to have met on "Survivor." There have been at least seven other "Survivor" marriages since the show debuted in 2000, including Rob Mariano, a.k.a. "Boston Rob," and Amber Brkich, who were engaged on a live "Survivor" season finale in 2004. "We're both lucky because Survivor treated us so well," Ms. Thomas said. "We got awesome edits and not much hate. So when people see us out, they're super excited. Even if we're on a date night, we always take that time to talk to people." The couple also takes part in charity events with other "Survivor" contestants for charities such as Amanda Hope Rainbow Angels, a nonprofit organization in Phoenix focused on pediatric cancer care, and Operation Underground Railroad, which rescues children from sex trafficking. Mr. Anglim, beloved by fans of the show for his shoulder length mane and thick man bun, raised 10,000 for the two charities by cutting and donating his locks earlier this year. The money was put up by the pop star Sia, who challenged Mr. Anglim to the haircut in a tweet during the final reunion episode for his most recent season. "I said absolutely, let's cut it off," Mr. Anglim said. "I was so glad. I was ready to get rid of it." "I pray God blesses us on this day, forever in our union," Mr. Anglim said in his vows to Ms. Thomas. "To you now I give my word, my thoughts and my actions, and my whole heart and intention to love you. I love you and you alone. To you I vow, forever and ever, amen." He accented the last amen with a gospel tinged melody. In her vows, Ms. Thomas said, "I will love you faithfully, through good times and bad, regardless of the obstacles that we face. I will put us above all and first always. I promise not just to grow old together but to grow together. Today I give you my hand, my heart and my love forever." The couple exchanged rings and shared a first kiss as newlyweds. Mr. Sauve presented them as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Francis Anglim, and the couple walked down the aisle before returning to the altar to snap a few group portraits with their families. 'Survivor' Reunion The reception was held at the Gala Hideaway Event Center in nearby Layton, Utah. Among the 300 guests were 11 former "Survivor" contestants from various seasons. They included: Mike Holloway, who was the best man at the wedding, Carolyn Rivera, Max Dawson, Jenn Brown, Dan Foley, Terry Dietz, Missy Payne, Andrew Savage, Chris Underwood, Aubry Bracco and Tyler Fredrickson. Toasts The bride's sister and maid of honor Amber Ercanbrack gave the first toast of the night. "When I met Joe, I was a little skeptical, I'm not going to lie," she said. "I had to be the overprotective sister. But quickly I learned that Joe was the real deal and perfect for Sierra. Joe I'm smoking your torch for being a single man. The tribe has spoken. Welcome to the family Joe." Mr. Holloway, the best man and sole survivor from Season 30, followed with his toast. "Joe and I, when we came off the show, became very fast friends," he said. "We went on trips together; we talked endlessly about the game of Survivor. We talked about the girls we wanted to date and the girls that wanted to date us or him," he said jokingly. "You're both always willing to give your time and give our love," Mr. Holloway told the couple. "And we appreciate it. We're here to be on this journey with you and support you and love you and help you succeed in this thing we call marriage and life." Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
At dawn, whole fields of sunflowers stand at attention, all facing east, and begin their romance with the rising sun. As that special star appears to move across the sky, young flowers follow its light, looking up, then over and westward, catching one final glance as the sun disappears over the horizon. At night, in its absence, the sunflowers face east again, anticipating the sun's return. They do this until they get old, when they stop moving. Then, always facing east, the old flowers await visits from insects that will spread their pollen and make new sunflowers. Those flowers too, will follow the sun. In a study published Friday in Science, researchers revealed that the sunflower's internal clock and ability to detect light work together, turning on genes related to growth at just the right time to allow the stems to bend with the arc of the sun. The research team also showed that when fully grown, as tall as people in some cases, plants that always face east get a head start, warming up early to attract pollinators. To get to the bottom of sunflowers' pursuit of the sun, Stacey Harmer and Hagop Atamian, plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, and their colleagues studied sunflowers in fields, pots and growth chambers. First, to find out what the advantage of this solar tracking might be, they prevented outdoor potted sunflowers from tracking the sun. As a result, the plants grew smaller than those that followed the sun. Chasing the sun promoted growth. But what triggered it? The fact that sunflowers switch directions at night to face east again, with no apparent cue, suggested an internal clock at work. The researchers put sunflower plants in a room with lights rigged to mimic the sun's path on different light and dark cycles. The plants behaved as expected on a 24 hour cycle. But during a 30 hour day, they were confused. And when plants that had learned a 24 hour cycle outdoors were placed under a fixed light indoors, they continued to bend from east to west for a few days, as if following the sun. This meant that a 24 hour circadian rhythm was guiding the sunflowers' movement. But without muscles, how did they move? The answer was in their stems. Like those of other plants, the stems of young sunflowers grow more at night but only on their west side, which is what allows their heads to bend eastward. During the day, the stems' east side grows, and they bend west with the sun. Dr. Atamian collected samples of the opposite sides of stems from sunflowers periodically, and found that different genes, related to light detection and growth, appeared active on opposite sides of the stems. Now the researchers needed to know why mature sunflowers wind up facing east when they are done growing. They found that east facing flowers in pots, as opposed to ones they forced to face west at dawn, were warmer and attracted more pollinators. Heating up the west facing flowers brought in more pollinators as well. The researchers think the plants develop an eastward preference when young, and continue it as mature plants because being warm in the morning when bugs are more active offers an advantage. "If you've ever driven across the south of France at the right time of year, there are these huge fields of sunflowers, all facing east. You wonder how they got there, and why they bothered," said Winslow Briggs, a plant biologist who discovered phototropins, the photoreceptors in plants responsible for their ability to align with the sun. Dr. Briggs, who was not involved in the research, said the study demonstrated how sunflowers do it. But many unknowns remain: For example, just how does the young sunflower weave together light signals, the circadian clock and growth rates to reorient its head every night? While the scientific inquiry continues, perhaps some space remains to imagine sunflowers and their romance with the sun. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
L'Oreal is not a name usually associated with International CES, the annual consumer electronics show, but Guive Balooch, global vice president of L'Oreal's Technology Incubator, was in Las Vegas on Wednesday to unveil the beauty giant's new foray into wearable tech and it's not a bracelet (thank the heavens). Or at least that's what it looks like. Created in conjunction with PCH, the Irish product engineering firm that also manufactures the notably wearable wearable Ringly (the cocktail style ring that notifies you when you get calls, text messages or calendar events), the new device is being called My UV Patch. It is a "stretchable sensor" with a diameter of one inch and thickness of 15 microns(think Band Aid like), containing flexible electronics that can be worn on the skin pretty much anywhere and that, with the help of your phone, can tell you how much UV exposure you are subject to at what times of day. It comes in the shape of a heart, with little blue squares that fade the more evil skin cancer causing rays (sorry, UV exposure), you get. "It's a fashion statement!" Mr. Balooch said by telephone from Las Vegas, where he was making the rounds with Liam Casey, the founder and chief executive of PCH. The L'Oreal incubator is about three and a half years old (it is based in New Jersey and has a sister lab, the California Research Center, in San Francisco) and it started talking to PCH about teaming up 18 months ago. The patch, which can be worn from the shower to the beach, lasts five days and can then be peeled off and tossed in the garbage (it is environmentally safe, Mr. Balooch said). It is used with an app that will be available for iOS as well as Android devices; you scan the patch with your phone, and can find out when you are at greatest risk of too much exposure, and what you might do about it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
After a spare no expense renovation that juxtaposes late 19th century architectural elements against Venetian plaster walls and a futuristic six foot tall marble fireplace, a sprawling artist's studio in a former textiles warehouse in SoHo has metamorphosed from a bare bones loft with great light to a self illuminating, Savant powered 7,200 square foot pleasure palace ripe for the ultraluxury market. The top floor penthouse at 383 West Broadway, between Spring and Broome Streets, is about to be listed at 32 million, a price point that, if met, would break the prevailing record for a downtown co op by 4.5 million. According to its listing brokers, Leonard Steinberg of Douglas Elliman Real Estate and Adam Modlin of the Modlin Group, the downtown record was set nearby by Rupert Murdoch's former co op at 141 Prince Street, which the designer Elie Tahari bought for 24.675 million in 2005 and sagely sold to Ted Waitt, a founder of the computer company Gateway Inc., for 27.5 million. As that trophy aerie did, this one includes a picturesque water tower on its roof. For intrepid climbers in search of even better views of the World Trade Center to the south and the Empire State Building to the north, the tower's metal ladder is intact. Besides six custom skylights dominated by a pyramidal 30 foot high bulkhead skylight above the oak and marble stairway, the home receives northern and southern light; the library/game room section of the great room overlooks the West Broadway skyline. Low maintenance billionaires who prefer their frills without a lot of stuffy fuss the small co op is not awash in intrusive white glove concierge services may find themselves right at home, especially if they enjoy table tennis, outdoor showers and high end cigars. (There is a walnut and steel Ping Pong table in the great room, a Boffi shower on the roof, and a sizable humidor in the wine room; conveniently, the co op's anchor tenant is the noted tobacco boutique OK Cigars.) The monthly charges for the five bedroom five and a half bath penthouse the great room has 16 to 22 foot ceilings, cast iron columns lit by LED lights, and a 60 inch revolving LED Samsung TV screen recessed into a custom console are a relatively non stratospheric 5,223. That, apparently, is the compensation for having to open your own front door. The seller of the studio turned penthouse is the minimalist sculptor and earthwork artist Charles Ross, who was among the pioneering artists to colonize and reanimate SoHo's industrial landscape in the late 1960s. Mr. Ross moved to 80 Wooster Street in 1967. In 1973, he and several friends bought 383 Broadway, a block through building with separate entrances on West Broadway and Wooster, and he set up a studio and living space on its sixth floor. He rented out the smaller top floor space on the Wooster Street side. (He also spends part of the year in the New Mexico desert, where he has worked on Star Axis, an earth/sky sculpture and observatory, since 1976.) The arrangement lasted until 2006, when a friend, the British fine arts photographer Damion Berger, had a vision for the underutilized West Broadway studio and proposed a grandiose renovation from which they could both benefit financially. "I approached my friend and fellow artist with a deal to which he agreed," said Mr. Berger, who entered a partnership with Mr. Ross. The artist downsized to the Wooster side of his property in 2010, essentially granting Mr. Berger, the managing partner in the venture, permission to demolish the studio and replace it with a tastefully sybaritic penthouse. The co op agreed to sell the roof rights in 2011: besides the shower, the rooftop amenities include an outdoor kitchen with a Wolf barbecue and a dumbwaiter, Balinese stone walls, an ipe wood deck, a covered patio, outdoor television and audio, and a sunning/play area with a synthetic grass base and a hammock large enough for a crowd. "I led the transformation of his former studio space into a bespoke family residence that in my opinion is one of downtown's most exceptional and sophisticated penthouses," Mr. Berger said. He was assisted by his wife, Debla Manara Berger, an interior designer, and his brother in law, Piero Manara, an architect. The siblings own the Monaco based design firm Casamanara, the source of the furnishings, which are included in the asking price. Mr. Berger's artwork on the walls throughout the residence is not, though it is available for the right price. He did not stint on amenities. The Bulthaup kitchen has a Carrara marble counter and sink, Gaggenau appliances, a pantry and a laundry room. Four of the bedrooms have en suite baths. The master bath, with polished Gaudi slab marble and a wall of white onyx, has an octagonal skylight and a free standing cast stone soaking tub. There is also a spa bath with a steam shower that accommodates six people comfortably and provides chromatherapy via a fiber optic starlight lighting system integrated into the mosaic tile ceiling. The shower actually twinkles. Party on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Over breakfast with her daughter and son in law, Joyce has some news to break. "So I've decided what I'm going to do in my retirement," she says brightly. "I'm going to kill our president." When Joyce (Marcia Jean Kurtz) made this announcement on Monday night at the top of Emily Chadick Weiss's "The Fork," at Ensemble Studio Theater the crowd whooped with laughter and applause. An unsettling sign of the times? Maybe. But definitely a happy indication that the 36th Marathon of One Act Plays, produced with the Radio Drama Network, is off to a rousing start. Directed by Andrew Grosso, Ms. Weiss's assassination fantasy is one of five plays on the marathon's Series A. (B arrives later this month, C in June.) Like the show's other high point Cary Gitter's "How My Grandparents Fell in Love" "The Fork" deftly shades boisterous humor with political alarm and awareness of mortality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Lawyers for the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, are looking to transfer a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by the former anchor Gretchen Carlson to a New York federal court, a move her lawyers immediately dismissed as "judge shopping." In papers filed on Friday, Mr. Ailes's lawyers argued that the case should be heard in federal court in Manhattan rather than the New Jersey federal court that it was moved to last week and that the matter should be resolved in arbitration, a change that would effectively shield the proceedings from public scrutiny. Minutes later, Ms. Carlson's lawyers issued their own brief, rejecting the contention by Mr. Ailes's team that arbitration was required. It was the second Friday in a row marked by a skirmish between the sides in a case that has transfixed the television world and raised questions about the future of Mr. Ailes, a towering newsman who has long been a figure of controversy and fascination. Ms. Carlson's team, in its brief, said that the anchor is not claiming a breach of contract, since she named Mr. Ailes as the sole defendant, and did not name her employer, Fox News. 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. On Friday, one of Mr. Ailes's lawyers, Susan Estrich, said that Ms. Carlson was trying to circumvent the arbitration clause by initially filing her suit in New Jersey Superior Court. (To do so, Ms. Carlson's team cited Mr. Ailes's ownership of a home in New Jersey.) Ms. Estrich said the case should be heard in Manhattan federal court, because Fox News is based in Manhattan; Mr. Ailes primarily resides in New York; and Ms. Carlson, a resident of Connecticut, is accusing Mr. Ailes of violating New York City's Human Rights Law. Last Friday, Mr. Ailes's lawyers argued that the case should be moved to federal court and submitted for arbitration. There could be another reason for the request. Thomas F. Doherty, a partner in the labor practice of the New Jersey law firm McCarter English, said that a New Jersey court "may lack the authority to compel arbitration in New York." Mr. Ailes, he explained, would need to transfer the case to pursue an arbitration in New York, which is where Ms. Carlson's contract stipulates any arbitration case would have to take place. A lawyer for Ms. Carlson, Nancy Erika Smith, called Mr. Ailes's move on Friday "illegal, unprofessional and unethical." "You don't get to judge shop in the United States of America," she said. In response, Irena Briganti, a Fox News spokeswoman, said: "We're trying to get this to the court where it belongs. If anything, Gretchen Carlson's lawyer was attempting to judge shop by having this heard in her comfort zone of state court in Bergen County, where neither Roger nor Carlson reside." Last Wednesday, Ms. Carlson, 50, filed a suit in which she argued that she was fired from her weekday afternoon show on Fox News after rebuffing sexual advances from Mr. Ailes, 76. She also said she had been sexually harassed at Fox News. Her description of sexual harassment and retaliation on the part of Mr. Ailes has been followed by accounts of other women who say Mr. Ailes acted inappropriately in professional settings. But a multitude of Fox anchors and on air personalities have also spoken in support of Mr. Ailes, saying that Ms. Carlson's ratings had fallen and that she was upset about being let go by the network. Mr. Ailes has denied all the charges. Earlier this week, Ms. Carlson said in an interview with The New York Times that by filing the suit she "finally felt it was time to stand up" for herself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
CHICAGO Almost a year after he walked out of court seemingly a free man, the actor Jussie Smollett returned to court on Monday to again face charges that he had lied to the police about a hate crime attack that detectives said he had staged. Mr. Smollett, 37, appeared in court two weeks after a special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, announced that a grand jury had indicted Mr. Smollett on nearly identical charges that the Cook County State's Attorney's Office dropped 11 months ago. Mr. Smollett's lawyer, Tina Glandian, entered a plea of not guilty as her client stood before the judge, hands clasped and with his black overcoat still on. The judge, James B. Linn of Cook County Circuit Court, allowed the actor to remain free, saying he was not a flight risk and rejecting prosecutors' request for 10,000 bail. Mr. Smollett walked out without comment, his departure captured by a line of television cameras in the hallways outside the courtroom. A timeline of the case What we know about the evidence The case has spellbound the city ever since Mr. Smollett, who played a son of a hip hop mogul on the Fox drama "Empire," reported on Jan. 29, 2019, that he had been attacked by two men who shouted racist and homophobic slurs, placed a noose around his neck and poured bleach on him. Mr. Smollett, who is gay, told the police that the attackers also yelled, "This is MAGA country," a reference to President Trump's 2016 campaign slogan. But the Police Department concluded that Mr. Smollett had paid two brothers to stage the attack because he was unhappy with his salary on "Empire." Weeks after Mr. Smollett was indicted, the state's attorney's office dropped the charges against him. In exchange, Mr. Smollett performed 15 hours of community service and forfeited the 10,000 bond that had released him from jail. Prosecutors said at the time that it was an appropriate resolution because Mr. Smollett was not a violent criminal and had a long record of community service. But the outcome angered prominent officials in Chicago, including then Mayor Rahm Emanuel; the city is now suing Mr. Smollett for more than 130,000 it said it had spent investigating the reported hate crime. Mr. Smollett has maintained his innocence throughout, denying that he had hired the brothers. A judge appointed Mr. Webb, a former federal prosecutor, as special prosecutor last year after concluding that the State's Attorney, Kim Foxx, had acted improperly when she handed the case to her deputy instead of someone outside her office. Ms. Foxx had removed herself from the case because of contact she had with representatives of Mr. Smollett when the police still considered him a victim. When the office approved the first grand jury indictment, it appeared to have strong evidence against Mr. Smollett, Mr. Webb said. There was no indication that prosecutors had learned new information casting doubt on Mr. Smollett's guilt before the office dropped all of the charges against him without requiring that he admit wrongdoing, Mr. Webb said. Ms. Glandian, the actor's lawyer, said on Monday that she had filed a motion with the Illinois Supreme Court arguing that the new indictment constituted double jeopardy because Mr. Smollett had already been punished by forfeiting the 10,000 bond. "Trying to punish him a second time around is not permitted," she said outside court, adding that it was "very frustrating" for Mr. Smollett to be back in court nearly a year after the charges were dropped. Mr. Webb did not comment on the motion, but is likely to argue that because Mr. Smollett never was tried or pleaded guilty, he was still eligible to be prosecuted. Ms. Foxx is running for re election, and her opponents in the Democratic primary have criticized her office's handling of the Smollett case. Her campaign denounced the "James Comey like timing" of the new charges, referring to the former F.B.I. director's public pronouncements about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server just before she lost to Mr. Trump. Mr. Webb said that he had not found any wrongdoing by Ms. Foxx's office, but that he was still investigating. Mr. Smollett was dropped from the cast of "Empire" after his arrest last year. Since then, his acting and singing career appears to have stalled, and he has had little public exposure beyond his court appearances. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The Tokyo Marathon, one of the world's largest races, with an estimated 38,000 runners, has been restricted to elite runners because of new cases of the coronavirus confirmed within Japan, organizers announced Monday. After a case of the viral respiratory disease was confirmed in Tokyo, the organizers said in a statement, they could not "continue to launch the event within the scale we originally anticipated." The marathon, scheduled for March 1, will be held only for elite runners and wheelchair athletes, a field that now includes about 200 participants. More than 300,000 runners had applied to run the Tokyo Marathon, which draws hundreds of thousands of spectators and more than 10,000 volunteers annually. The race is one of the Abbott World Marathon Majors, a collection of the six largest marathons in the world. One runner, Christopher Warnick, was still planning on participating until he heard Monday morning's news. "Yesterday I ordered enough surgical masks and Purell for a week and was basically planning to troop it out," he said. Warnick, from Brooklyn, said the race would have been his sixth Abbott Marathon Major before he turns 60 in April. Running all six major marathons is a bucket list item for many distance runners. "That's definitely disappointing," he said, "but at the end of the day people's health is more important than a race." Japan has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases outside of China, most of them linked to a Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined off the coast. The viral outbreak has sickened more than 71,300 people in Asia and killed at least 1,775 people as of Monday morning. The Tokyo Marathon is the latest in a growing list of athletic events that have been canceled, postponed or relocated as the outbreak spreads, and the last minute changes are raising questions about whether the epidemic will affect Tokyo's upcoming hosting of the summer Olympic Games. The Hong Kong Marathon, scheduled for Feb. 9, was canceled. The World Athletics Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China, were postponed from this March to March 2021. An LPGA Tour event scheduled to take place in early March on Hainan Island in China was canceled. The Chinese Grand Prix was postponed. World Rugby Seven Series events scheduled to take place in Hong Kong and Singapore in March have been postponed to October. Three qualifiers in China, Japan and the Philippines for the 2021 International Basketball Federation Asia Cup have been postponed. "This is yet another example of how this coronavirus is having global impacts beyond the immediate and traditional concerns of public health," said William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "It's having economic and social ramifications that are profound." A week ago, Tokyo Marathon organizers announced new safety measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, including handing out alcohol based hand sanitizers and surgical masks. In a statement, the organizers asked participants to monitor their body temperature and "refrain from participating in the event" if they had a fever or were "experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness." Some runners had already decided not to participate in the race, citing fears over the outbreak. The last time a major marathon was canceled was in 2012, when the New York City Marathon was called off two days before the race in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Tokyo Marathon organizers said 2020 participants could defer their entry to the 2021 race but would have to pay the fees again. They were not offered refunds for this year's race. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
149 Avenue C (between East Ninth and 10th Streets) A five year lease is available for a 600 square foot storefront with 16 feet of frontage in this six story East Village co op. The co op board is primarily looking for a nonprofit or a community based tenant for the space, which most recently served as the pop up headquarters for Carlina Rivera, a Democrat who won the City Council's Second District seat in November. The space, which has a small outdoor area, was also once home to Barnyard Cheese, a popular sandwich and cheese shop, which reopened on Avenue B in 2016. Zinntex, an apparel company run by three brothers, Ricky, Ithan and Barry Zinn, has signed a seven year lease for a 5,670 square foot loft space for its showroom, office and design space on the fourth floor of this 18 story building in the garment district. The 1928 building has a recently renovated lobby and elevators. The company, which received four months rent free for its build out, will move in around February from 1407 Broadway. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The end of Gawker Media as an independent company is near. Under financial pressure from a 140 million legal judgment in an invasion of privacy lawsuit by the former wrestler Hulk Hogan and contending with the deep pockets of Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who provided funding for the case and others against the organization Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put itself up for sale two months ago. At the time, the digital media company Ziff Davis submitted an opening bid of 90 million, essentially setting the floor for an auction on Tuesday. Final bids are due Monday at 5 p.m. A dozen to two dozen parties have expressed varying degrees of interest in Gawker Media, and three to five companies have emerged as the most likely bidders. So who might buy it? Here are some possibilities: WHY IT MAKES SENSE Ziff Davis was the first company to publicly put a dollar figure on its interest in Gawker Media, and its 90 million bid might be more than other companies are willing to pay. In addition, Ziff Davis, a once mighty publisher of computer magazines, now has a portfolio of technology, gaming and men's lifestyle sites. "The additions of Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Kotaku would fortify our position in consumer tech and gaming," Vivek Shah, the chief executive of Ziff Davis, wrote in an internal staff memo in June, referring to Gawker's media properties. Mr. Shah also said other properties Jalopnik, Deadspin and Jezebel "would broaden our position as a lifestyle publisher." But Ziff Davis, like other potential buyers, may be more interested in Gawker Media's e commerce business, which the company has built over the last several years as it has looked beyond advertising for revenue. WHY IT MAY NOT WORK As a so called stalking horse bidder, any potential buyer would have to exceed Ziff's 90 million bid. But by submitting the first bid, Ziff Davis telegraphed what it was willing to pay, and it could be outbid in the auction if it does not think Gawker Media is worth much more. If Ziff Davis, a subsidiary of j2 Global, an internet services and publishing conglomerate, does end up the winner, Gawker Media would become part of a large public company. That could be good for Gawker if it is allowed to operate more or less on its own. But Gawker could end up being a small fish in a very large pond. WHY IT MAKES SENSE Univision, the Spanish language media company, has made moves in recent months suggesting it is looking to build its online portfolio, particularly to reach a younger audience. In January, Univision acquired a large stake in The Onion, the comedy and satirical digital media company. And in April, it acquired full control of Fusion, a news site and cable channel that it started with the Walt Disney Company in 2013. Univision also owns other digital properties, including The Root, a site focused on African American issues. Univision and Gawker Media had been in discussions about a potential investment in the past, though those ended because of the Hogan trial, according to two people briefed on the talks. WHY IT MAY NOT WORK Univision might not want to spend more money on digital investments right now. For Gawker Media, becoming part of Univision poses benefits and challenges similar to those of becoming part of Ziff Davis: It would be part of a large company, which would be good if it were left alone but bad if it were swallowed up and forgotten. Univision declined to comment. 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. WHY IT MAKES SENSE New York magazine most likely does not have enough cash on hand to buy Gawker Media by itself. But it is owned by the Wasserstein family trust, and Pamela Wasserstein is the chief executive of New York Media, the magazine's parent company. Bruce Wasserstein, who bought New York magazine for 55 million in 2004, was an investment banker and founder of the private equity firm Wasserstein Company, which manages capital on behalf of the Wasserstein family and other investors. New York magazine, whose online brands include Vulture and The Cut, has also been on a digital push lately. It recently started Select All, a technology and culture site led by Max Read, a former editor of Gawker. WHY IT MAY NOT WORK It is not clear whether New York magazine will be able to muster up enough financial help, either from Wasserstein Company or elsewhere, to secure a deal. Ms. Wasserstein declined to comment. WHY IT MAKES SENSE Penske Media, which owns brands including the Hollywood publications Deadline and Variety, could fit Gawker Media's sites into its portfolio. It has not shied away from buying down on their luck media companies in the past: In 2014, it bought Fairchild Fashion Media, whose publications included the fashion magazine Women's Wear Daily, from Conde Nast for about 100 million. And it bought Variety for 25 million in 2012. WHY IT MAY NOT WORK Penske may not have the money (though it could team up with an investment firm or another company for help). Penske Media declined to comment. WHY IT MAKES SENSE Vox Media has a collection of sites including Vox.com, the sports site SB Nation and the technology site The Verge that could absorb Gawker Media's sites relatively easily. (The editorial director of Vox Media is Lockhart Steele, a former managing editor of Gawker Media.) WHY IT MAY NOT WORK Vox Media could offer Gawker Media a deal in the form of stock. But Vox Media is not a public company, and valuing its stock is an inexact science. The other option would be to team up with another company or an investment firm that could supply cash for an acquisition. In any case, it is not clear what Gawker would bring to the company that it does not already have. A spokeswoman for Vox Media declined to comment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
WHEN Trent Brown was laid off from his job as a sales representative in 2010, he chose to view it as an opportunity to make a life change. Instead of searching for some other company job, he decided to help his wife, Janell, expand her cupcake and cake making hobby into a business. Just six months after he lost his job, they opened One Sweet Slice in the Salt Lake City area where they lived. Mr. Brown, 35, triumphantly wrote on his wife's blog, "Thank you for laying me off, corporate America." Posing with their four children on their website they represent one of those stories everyone loves. Lose your job, find a passion and turn it into a business that's fun and successful. But while their cakes and cupcakes garnered acclaim including winning Food Network's television show "Cupcake Wars" and brought in substantial revenue, it wasn't enough to support their family. And the decision to open a second store pushed them into unexpected debt. "I'm pretty conservative and I knew it would be difficult, but it was a hundred times more difficult than I thought it would be," Mr. Brown said. So, even though "everyone thinks we're wildly successful," he decided he had to return to the corporate world to support his family. And given his age, it was a realistic option. While his wife is still in charge of overseeing the stores, a few weeks ago he started a job as an interactive marketing manager. In these times of job insecurity and rapidly evolving careers, reinvention is both a dream and a comfort for many. "During the Great Recession, when the labor market was at its weakest, business creation rose to record highs," said Dane Stangler, director of research at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. From 2004 to 2010, the number of new businesses both those with employees and one person operations grew steadily from an average of 470,000 a month to an average of 565,000 a month annually, according to the Kauffmann Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, an annual study conducted by the foundation. It dipped a little last year, probably because of the improving job market. It's impossible to say how much of that business activity is part of a second career move. But according to Encore.org, which helps people over 60 find meaningful work, a 2011 survey found that almost 40 percent of Americans aged 44 through 70 are already in or eager to start second careers. But the numbers say nothing about the true human and financial cost of reinvention or the failure to reinvent. So maybe it's time to step back and consider some of the lessons learned from those who didn't strike it rich the first time out, or even the second, and, some experts suggest, judge ourselves less harshly in the process. "We have an intoxication with starting fresh, with rebirth, with radical heroic transformation," said Marc Freedman, chief executive of Encore.org. "It makes for a very dramatic story, but it sets an impossibly high bar for people at any stage of life." That doesn't mean, he said, that people can't move to different paths and successfully change careers. But rather than reinvention, we should look at it as reintegration of building on the knowledge, interests and skills a person already has. The image of throwing out a past career, he said, and careening in a totally different direction is "unrealistic and misleading." Karin Hazelkorn, 59, can attest to this. She took a generous buyout from Cisco Systems in 2011, where she worked for 12 years in marketing, business development and project management, with the aim of converting her love of handcrafted textiles and desire to preserve the craft into a new career. She moved from San Francisco to New York for half a year, took classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology, went to industry trade shows and traveled to Southeast Asia to test her idea of creating a partnership between textile artisans and fashion houses. But it wasn't coming together. She admired those people who seemed to go "from banker to baker" and felt a little deficient. "Did they work harder than me? Have better contacts?" she said. Eventually she decided her initial idea wouldn't work, and now is considering other opportunities that will combine her business skills and knowledge of textiles. She is excited, but it is different from her original plan. "I would tell people to really build on the skills you have," Ms. Hazelkorn said. "It may not be exactly what you wanted to do, but it's a more natural move." The inspiring stories that portray drastic career moves in a rosy light "are coming from a good place," said Ofer Sharone, a professor of work and employment research at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But they go too far. They paint a picture that someone can take complete control, when they can't." And, not everyone knows her passion or has one. "People in the labor market are blaming themselves for not being able to find a passion," said Professor Sharone, author of the book "Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences." "The presumption is everyone has a deep seated passion, but they might not." Dreaming big while being realistic is one critical piece of advice. Another is to have a financial cushion. Kevin Lincoln, who was laid off in 2006 from his job at a paper mill in Green Bay, Wis., after 34 years, was one of the fortunate ones. His severance package included displaced workers' benefits that paid for training and education. He went to a community college to study leadership and management, graduating with almost straight A's. But the jobs were hard to come by largely he believes, because of his age and he's now working as a delivery driver for about half his previous salary. "It's easy to say I'm going to reinvent myself," said Mr. Lincoln, 62. "Just go and try." Without financial resources, said David Blustein, a professor of counseling, developmental and educational psychology at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, "people need to think of a survival job in the short term, and ideally scaffold up to a long term plan." Tiffany Aliche, 30, of Newark, had savings. But her desire to become a financial coach after being laid off as a preschool teacher cost her big. She went through her savings and ended up moving back in with her parents. Her condominium went into preforeclosure, and she reduced her possessions to fit into two suitcases. But by working free and doing relentless social media marketing, she started her company, the Budgetnista, last year, and made almost as much as she did as a preschool teacher. She said she hoped to surpass that this year. But knowing that her family would never let her end up homeless or starving is what allowed her to continue, she said. Something that is not always obvious is that critical success does not always equal financial success. One writer who wanted to see if she could develop a thriving business making artisanal jams said the impressive accolades and awards were wonderful, but "there was no money." Of course, everyone defines financial success differently. For some it's reaping in large profits. For others, it's not going bankrupt. That's the case for Seely Gerraughty. Fifteen years ago, she and her husband left their jobs in Houston and bought a deserted crack house in Narragansett, R.I. Ms. Gerraughty, who was a medical social worker, and her husband, a national editor at The Houston Chronicle, turned it into the Blueberry Cove Inn. The first year they made 50 in profit. Now the inn is successful, in that it has survived and is usually full during the high season. But "most of our profit is plugged back into the infrastructure," said Ms. Gerraughty, 57. Owning a B B may seem like a dream career, if you gloss over the fact "you're on duty 24/7 and I worked from July to November without a single day off. There is brutal, grinding work behind any small business," Ms. Gerraughty said. But the Gerraughtys cannot say they did not know what they were getting into. They did their research before deciding to buy an inn, particularly by going into online chat rooms of trade organizations. "In those chat rooms, they don't paint the rosy pictures," she said. Mr. Brown agreed, saying he wished he and his wife had better understood some basics, like pricing and costs, before plunging in. Now they review their financials with local free assistance from the Small Business Administration and their marketing strategies with mentors from SCORE.org, which provides free mentoring and workshops for small businesses. And Ms. Hazelkorn said it was crucial to talk to people and ask pointed questions from those who will give you real world feedback on your ideas, not just friends and colleagues who will encourage you. Of course if your second career doesn't work out or you tire of it, there's always the possibility of a third one. "I'm not settled on a career choice," Ms. Gerraughty said. "I like long drives I'm thinking of long haul truck driving." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
This article is part of the Opinion Today free newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it every weekday. One of the biggest lessons I've learned covering the daily information wars of the Trump era is that a meaningful percentage of Americans live in an alternate reality powered by a completely separate universe of news and information. Some are armed with their own completely fabricated facts about the world while others, as the journalist Joshua Green wrote in this section in 2017, rearrange our shared facts "to compose an entirely different narrative." There is little consensus on the top story of the day or the major threats facing the country. You will have noticed this if you've ever watched a congressional hearing and flipped between CNN or MSNBC and Fox News. The video feed is the same but the interpretation of events is radically different. Personally, I've never seen a clearer demonstration of the Two Universes phenomenon than this week's Republican National Convention. For three nights, in a shameless display of loyalty to President Trump, the party has conjured up what my colleague Frank Bruni described as an "upside down vision" of the world. Theirs is a universe in which the coronavirus pandemic is largely in the rear view (on Aug. 25, 1,136 Americans died from the virus) and where, according to Representative Matt Gaetz, radical Democrats threaten to "disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS 13 to live next door." A universe where the existential dangers of climate change pale in comparison to those of cancel culture even as the West is ravaged by blackouts and wildfires and the Gulf Coast is slammed by a devastating hurricane. This week, my colleague Jamelle Bouie described some of what we're seeing as the "Fox Newsification of the Republicans" by "a president who rose to political power via the cable news channel and who exists in a codependent relationship with the network." The comparison is apt, as Fox News has been extremely successful in crafting and selling an alternate reality to its viewers each night for well over a decade. The trick is to evoke two dueling emotions fear and devotion one conspiracy theory at a time. Fox News has mastered this and so has the R.N.C. It's why the convention paraded out Patricia McCloskey one half of the St. Louis couple who went viral for wielding guns at Black Lives Matter protesters. Her message was designed to provoke feelings of victimhood and racial fear. "What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country," she said. "Make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats' America." That threat is far more potent when it's paired with a second alternate reality: that Donald Trump is the one and only competent protector, the "bodyguard of Western civilization," as the R.N.C. speaker Charlie Kirk put it on Monday evening. The power of a conspiracy theory is to offer an easy explanation for something uncomfortable, which is why conspiracy theories thrive during times of alienation or social change. But while one conspiracy theory can be dangerous on its own, it is not a worldview. It's when you stitch enough of them together that an alternate reality forms. This same convergence phenomenon is also behind the alarming growth of the QAnon movement, which now acts as a big tent for conspiracies actively courting and absorbing other fringe theories into its sprawling narrative. Adrian Hon, a developer who designs alternate reality games, told me recently that QAnon's dynamics remind him of the worlds he's helped create, calling it "a collaborative fiction built on wild speculation that hardens into reality." My colleague Paul Krugman recently pointed out similarities between the conspiracy movement and Mr. Trump's campaign effort, though he doesn't think the "desperate strategy" will work. Having reported on the pull of these alternate realities up close, I don't feel certain about any outcome anymore. It's hard to see things clearly or make predictions in such a fractured information ecosystem. And as The Times contributor Thomas Edsall notes, we'll be stuck here for a while Mr. Trump's rhetorical strategy "will have long term consequences for the Republican Party." If you'd like more analysis on how that strategy played out in Night 3 of the R.N.C., my colleagues offer their views on the highs and lows here. My only prediction is that, no matter the outcome in November, I doubt we'll be returning to shared reality anytime soon. 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 |
who, with her enabler, Ilana Glazer, mines stoner slacker millennial angst in Comedy Central's "Broad City" can usually feel the unmistakable rhythm that means things are working. But in "6 Balloons," Marja Lewis Ryan's harrowing study of addiction and codependency, arriving Friday, April 6, on Netflix, Ms. Jacobson struggled to find that beat. As Katie, an exacting Angeleno preparing for her boyfriend's surprise birthday bash, Ms. Jacobson found her dramatic debut almost as nerve fraying as her character's cruise along Skid Row in search of a detox facility, yet again, for her heroin addicted brother, Seth (Dave Franco). Along for the terrifying ride: his 2 year old daughter. "I just have gotten to a point, at least with 'Broad City,' where I feel comfortable and a little bit in control," she said. "With comedy, you can really hear if it's working. Within the rhythm of a scene, you know if it's funny. And with this, I wasn't as sure of myself because it's a different beast." Ms. Jacobson, 34, now splits her time between Los Angeles, where she's voicing Princess Bean in Matt Groening's new animated series, "Disenchantment," out this summer on Netflix, and New York, where "Broad City" is headquartered. During a call from the show's writers' room, in the midst of conjuring up Season 5 (the premiere date has yet to be announced), she talked about her walk on the dark side and being a woman in the comedy boys' club. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. "6 Balloons" is your first dramatic role. Yes, besides, you know, the day to day of living and breathing. How did you find the confidence to take on such dark material? I really trusted Marja and her vision of the film and the characters and the fact that she did go with Dave and me, both actors that are known for comedy. And the story is based on the real life of one of the producers, Samantha Housman. Sam was always on set with me, and I could check in with her: "What are you feeling now?" Because it was such a mix of balancing all these emotions of being so disappointed and angry while trying to also present that everything was under control. The movie reminds us that the opioid epidemic impacts every class. I'm from the Philadelphia suburbs, a middle or upper middle class area, and unfortunately, I can count a lot of people I have known from high school that have died from overdoses. It's devastating. It's also why I really wanted to get this part because I don't know another movie that's talking about this specific thing. What can we expect from Season 5 of "Broad City"? We're going to go back to summer months, which feels more appropriate for the show. Last season we shot in the winter, and it got darker in many ways. And now in Season 5, even more than in 4, it's very much more serialized and intense, while still obviously maintaining comedy first. It goes deeper than we ever have in the friendship. Amy Poehler is an executive producer of the show. And until this coming season, so was her manager, Dave Becky, who has been criticized for ignoring sexual misconduct allegations against his client Louis C.K. It just didn't feel right to have his name on a show that represents the exact opposite of what was going on with Louis. Do you have your own MeToo moment? I don't have a major story particularly to tell, but there are so many stories within my story. The world of comedy is definitely a boys' club. And looking back, Ilana and I were so caught up in making this show that we had blinders on that along the way there were things constantly happening. Reasons why the show wouldn't work here, wouldn't work there. People taking us seriously or not. Being the bosses in the workplace and treated differently than if we were men. For me it's these many, many, many things accumulating to, like, an "Oh!" It's bringing to light so much where I used to think, "That's the norm, that's how things work here." And now it's like, "No, they don't, and they're not going to at least on projects that I'm involved in on a higher level." Early on, you and Ilana described your characters as being 15 percent more exaggerated than your real selves. Five seasons in, what's your number? I actually think it's way more now. In an amazing and very necessary way, personally I need her laughs Abbi on the show to be different from me. It's funny that I say that, because the core is the same. I get to blow up my insecurities and my fears and my flaws for the show. But I yearn for us to be different because it's so exposing and vulnerable and scary to have this person. I'm living a double life, you know? But then, even in Season 5, some of the biggest things that happen are so me and so directly my life that yeah, I just negated what I said about making her different. Because at the end of the day, the character has to be pulled from my reality. And as you can tell, it's a very confusing and constantly wild ride over here! | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A C.D.C. division is working with an industry standards group to develop filtration standards and products that meet them will be able to carry labels saying so. How Effective Is the Mask You're Wearing? You May Know Soon More than 100,000 varieties of face masks are currently for sale. They come in silk, cotton and synthetics; with filters and without; over the head and over the ears. They have sparkles and sunflowers; friendly greetings and insults; cartoon characters and teeny reindeer. What they don't have is a label that shows how well they block infectious particles, an omission that has frustrated public health officials during the coronavirus pandemic. Those experts note that there is a big range in the effectiveness of various designs, and some barely filter out particles at all. "The most fundamental, basic question is, What is the safest mask and how do I assure that I have that, and my family members and children have that?" said Fran Phillips, who stepped down in August from her post as deputy health secretary of Maryland. "It's so startling that we are here in this moment and we don't have that information." That may change soon. A division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working to develop minimum filter efficiency standards, and labels showing which products meet them, for the vast and bewildering marketplace for masks and other face coverings. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a division of the C.D.C. known as NIOSH, has been quietly writing guidelines with an industry standard setting organization, ASTM International (formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials), that are expected to be made public next month. "By having a standard in place you will be able to know what level of protection is being achieved and you'll have a consistent way of evaluating these products," said Maryann D'Alessandro, director of the NIOSH National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory. Since the pandemic began, there has been little federal oversight of masks and other face coverings. Both the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C. have some authority over the industry. The F.D.A., which regulates medical devices, shares authority with NIOSH for oversight of N95 respirators, which are the most protective devices available. But most of the masks worn by the general public are just pieces of cloth and don't come under any regulatory oversight. Sales of masks took off after the F.D.A. issued an emergency measure in April when health care facilities were struggling to secure enough protective gear that said in part that the agency would not take action against companies selling them to the general public. At the same time, however, the F.D.A. also noted that these products "may or may not meet fluid barrier or filtration efficiency levels." That warning didn't hurt the market, and some critics now blame the F.D.A. for the poor quality of many of the products being sold. The effectiveness of masks can range "from 0 to 80 percent, depending on material composition, number of layers and layering bonding," said Dale Pfriem, president of Protective Equipment Consulting Services and a member of the standards development working group addressing mask guidelines. The gold standard for masks is the N95, which fits tightly and can filter out at least 95 percent of very small particles. But N95 masks are generally reserved for health practitioners, and they have been in short supply since the outbreak began. Hospitals, desperate for more N95s, have been driven to a booming black market to secure them. To offset the shortage, the F.D.A. last spring authorized the sale of the KN95, the Chinese equivalent of the American N95. But the agency soon detected fraudulent and counterfeit products and narrowed the field of permissible KN95 imports. Despite that, the agency acknowledges that there is still rampant fraud, with countless companies stamping "KN95" on masks that do not meet the F.D.A. standards. One step below the N95s in terms of protection are F.D.A. approved surgical masks, which must meet certain agency standards. The surgical mask style is often copied by companies that sell imitations, which do not offer the same level of protection. Just about any mask is better than no mask, public health experts say. The C.D.C. has updated its guidance on masks numerous times, noting that a tightly woven, multilayered fabric offers better protection than a mask made from a single layer of fabric or a loose knit for both the wearer and the people with whom the wearer comes in contact. But the agency's website offers no clarity on whether masks with filters offer better protection than those without them, nor about how synthetic fabrics compare with cotton or other materials. "There's been a critical need for some kind of national program to test and certify masks, and to communicate with people how to use and care for them," said Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech and a leading expert on airborne viruses. A working group of federal and industry officials has proposed one high and one low filtration requirement that manufacturers and distributors can adopt and list on their labels. The lower standard is a 20 percent filtration barrier and the higher is 50 percent. Those numbers are more protective than they sound. The filtration efficiency percentages are based on a product's efficiency at filtering particles measuring 0.3 microns, which, as the generally most penetrative particles, are standard for NIOSH tests. "Twenty percent efficiency at 0.3 microns would translate to 50 percent efficiency at one to two micron particles, and 80 percent efficiency at blocking particles that are four to five microns or larger," Dr. Marr said. "I think it will be useful." According to Dr. Marr, the coronavirus itself is 0.1 microns, but it is carried in aerosols of about 0.5 microns or larger. Jeffrey Stull, a member who is assisting in writing the standards, said the group would also rate masks and face coverings for "breathability." The standard setting project, he said, has been a long haul. "It's been a very difficult process," said Mr. Stull, president of International Personnel Protection Inc. "We've been struggling to find this consensus on what the performance level should be. We were originally talking about higher levels, and they said, 'No, 80 percent of the industry can't comply that's not going to do anyone any good.' So we had to balance it out." Manufacturers who want to note that they meet the ASTM standard must first have their products tested by an accredited laboratory. They should also be able to show that their masks provide a reasonable fit to the population at large. Those who do comply with the standards can then note that they meet the ASTM standard on the product or the packaging. There is no enforcement mechanism, however. Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard, called NIOSH's work in developing the standard "regulatory entrepreneurship." "It's saying, 'Let's use the tools we have, even if we don't have formal regulatory tools," Mr. Carpenter said. "It is an alternate mode of regulation. It can have a pretty important regulatory effect because if you don't comply with the standards, you don't get the seal of approval." Mr. Pfriem hopes the standards catch on. "What we have here is a really good standard," he said. "Manufacturers will have something to design their products to, and something to put in their marketing materials and packaging, and consumers will have a sense of confidence." He added, "I can tell you that a lot of what is marketed on eBay and other sites, that are manufactured, say, in your neighbor's garage, won't be able to meet this standard." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The vast grasslands of Nebraska, the Sand Hills, cover more than a quarter of the state. The region "reminds you of a place we like to think we used to be," the author writes. In 1954, as an impetuous, irascible 16 year old, I got my first view quite by accident of Nebraska's Sand Hills. In my sophomore year of high school it had occurred to me that the lakes and forests of Michigan were too small for my burgeoning personality. I was an athlete of sorts, a student leader, but also an addict of Faulkner and James Joyce. Throw in Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky and I was an absurdly premature powder keg and felt I should look in a far field. With the help of the only teacher who didn't think I was nuts, I wangled a job at a resort in Colorado by saying I was a college student, a small fib. My mother gave a resounding "no" to my trip. My father, however, said "yes," and that was my trump card. He was a government agronomist but had a somewhat shaky youth. At my age he was working as a shovel man on a cross Michigan pipeline, camping out even in winter. I often think of this hardship compared with my own rather flimsy problems. Over an arduously goofy summer in which I discovered that college girls necked more intensely than the high school girls back home, the most memorable event was slopping coffee all over the saucer of Earl Warren, the chief justice of the Supreme Court at the time. I was embarrassed, but then I had never seen a famous person in real life. A long day of short rides brought me outside Ogallala on the south end of the Sand Hills, a National Natural Landmark in north central Nebraska. The name would make most people think they were going to see sand dunes rather than lush, green rolling hills that cover more than a quarter of the state. But sand dunes in fact are what they are, stabilized by tall and short grass that grows from them. The impact of some 20,000 square miles of these hills unsettled me completely. It is without a doubt the most mysterious landscape in the United States. You begin to doubt your sensibilities, and if your car doesn't have a compass, carry one along for the detours you'll take to resolve your overwhelming visual curiosity. There had been no more intelligence to my stop in Ogallala than liking the name because of my study of American Indian cultures and history. To the north I saw a long row of cottonwoods, and I guessed they lined the North Platte River. It was now evening, and I decided to sleep near the river in my minimal bedroll, an Army blanket wrapping a sheet. I climbed a fence, a simple act that I recognized later predestined the writing of 1,200 pages of fiction in my novels "Dalva" and "The Road Home." There was no blast of light, and I wasn't hearing Beethoven in my head, but I was feeling giddy and overly dramatic and far too brave to walk back to Ogallala and check into a motel. The Platte was wide, shallow and sandy, certainly not the trout river it was up near its beginning in Colorado. I found a patch of bare, sandy ground, unlikely cover for rattlesnakes, and smoothed out a spot for my bedroll. I wanted a campfire, but I was already trespassing and feared a grass fire like those used to drive the buffalo hither and yon. I was cold and damp all night and got up several times to exercise my way back into warmth. There was a lovely half moon that was strong enough to make the landscape glow. That and the sound of the running Platte were enough to allay my discomfort. The moon buried itself in the river as it does in Chinese poems. I was fine as long as I didn't think about the future and my unrealistic ambition to become a poet and novelist. When the moon set in the predawn hours, it became truly dark and I was at first frightened by the sound of heavy breathing. But then, as an ex farm boy, I recognized the odor of cattle. It was O.K. as long as it wasn't an unruly bull, who would have been snorting immediately. In the first dim light from the east I could see a circle of curious calves surrounding me. I muttered good morning and several ran for it. That was the night I fell in love with the Sand Hills. I celebrated by carving the mold off a piece of Cheddar and opened a can of 19 cent Boothbay sardines, a standby in my youthful hikes. There were severe thundershowers early but that helped get me a long day's ride all the way to Brainerd, Minn., where I spent the night trying to sleep on a picnic table in a park while a number of stray dogs growled at me. Finally, a spaniel with a good heart jumped up on the table and cuddled with me, helping to raise the frigid temperature. I had been accepted and the growling dogs departed. One more awkward moment occurred a scant three hour hitchhike from Brainerd, when a car dropped me in Duluth, Minn., the next day. (There was no trouble getting rides with my blue Air Force suitcase.) Duluth is a wonderful city on the west end of Lake Superior and is worthy of a few days of any traveler's time. I had stopped in a pawnshop and bought a blackjack on display, a weapon any boy needs. Not 20 feet down the street, two cops grabbed me and took the blackjack. They said they were charging me with carrying a concealed weapon. Since I was a minor, they called my home, then took me to the bus station and shipped me out of town toward Michigan. In the ensuing years, in honor of my Nebraska baptism, I read widely on the state and its environs and our great prairie from Conrad Richter's "Sea of Grass" to all the novels of Wright Morris and Willa Cather, and all of the work of Mari Sandoz. I had already written three novels and wanted to start something ambitious. I was living with my wife and daughters on a small farm in northern Michigan, where we had spent so many of what we called "macaroni years" to describe our small budget, though I often stayed in Santa Monica, Calif., when working on screenplays. One important night on the farm, I dreamed of an attractive woman in her 30s sitting on a balcony of an apartment in Santa Monica, thinking of her childhood back in Nebraska. I dreamed about her several nights in a row, and the die was cast. However, my dream heroine was a stern muse, and I spent several years writing "Dalva" and the sequel, "The Road Home." When I invented the character Dalva, I was at a point in my career where I was much criticized for my limitations on writing about women, that I was sexist and macho, so that I wanted to create a character who was not only beautiful but very complicated and intelligent. She is as mysterious as the landscape from which she emerges. The name Dalva came through the character's uncle, who had traveled in Brazil, where I once spent a month and learned about samba. "Dalva," I was told, is from perhaps the most haunting of all sambas and means O morning star "estrela d'alva." First of all, to write in the voice of my heroine, I had to familiarize myself with her homeland. Research and reading also played a part in getting to know the landscape. Photographs even more so. In the photography section of the Nebraska State Historical Society, I was also able to study the history of the Sand Hills, largely family photographs assembled over the years. It's one thing to be reading about a place in 1913, but for a novelist it means a great deal to see it all in photographs, with their fidelity to the texture of life itself. But an equally important entry point was going there. All told I made at least a dozen trips to the Sand Hills while writing the two novels. I was utterly dumbfounded by the tens of thousands of miles I drove there. Never used for farmland, the Sand Hills are said to be one of the most unique grasslands in the world and the largest, intact native grasslands in North America. There are a number of good ways to enter the Sand Hills. I usually drove from northern Michigan and could make it in a day and a half, but then I'm fond of road trips. I liked entering Nebraska up west of Sioux City, Iowa, and taking Route 12 across the top of Nebraska with my destination being Valentine in Cherry County. I have friends there, and it has a very good steakhouse, the Peppermill, and a number of decent motels. The route is good for what ails you. There is relatively no traffic, and you can stop on a high hill between Verdel and Niobrara, where there is a fantastic view of the Niobrara River emptying into the Missouri River in a grand marsh. The whole road is sparsely settled and a specific relief from our crowded areas. This is true of Nebraska in general. It reminds you of a place we like to think we used to be, and even of a place we'd all like to live in now. Over the years the Sand Hills have become a state of mind when I don't want to be where I am, like London or Los Angeles. I have entered Nebraska from all four directions and they all work. If you're in a hurry or live distantly, you can fly into Omaha or the state capital, Lincoln, where you must stop and visit the notable State Capitol, the first in the United States to incorporate a soaring tower rather than the classic dome. The 400 foot tower has an observation deck from which you can look out over Lincoln and the surrounding plains. The building is a true architectural adventure; I've spent a full day wandering within it. The drive from Lincoln or Omaha into the Sand Hills is pleasant and easy. Another good way is to fly into Rapid City, S.D., and take Route 79 and 385 south to Chadron, Neb. It is a beautiful road from which you can see the Black Hills mountain range. About halfway down you can detour and drive east to visit Wounded Knee, the site of the shameful massacre of the Sioux. When you reach Chadron, rather than driving immediately for Valentine detour west a short ways to Fort Robinson, a grand old fort and an Army remount station that once held as many as 5,000 horses for the United States Cavalry. The fort is the site of the death of Crazy Horse. It has been restored and there are even a limited number of rooms for rent for tourists. There aren't all that many roads in the Sand Hills so it is easy to crisscross them all. There are 500,000 cattle, far more cattle than people. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
On Monday night, late in the program for the 69th annual benefit and student fashion show at Parsons School of Design, a group of graduating seniors stood onstage and extolled the talents of one of the evening's honorees. She was "inspiring." Her style was "amazing." Her brand was "amazing." (There were a lot of "amazings.") Who was this fashion paragon, role model for all of the young would be designers in the room thanks to her creativity, philanthropy and talent? Not, as it happened, a fellow graduate who had fought her way to the top of the industry through perseverance, sweat and imagination. Not a retailer who had promoted and facilitated the growth of multiple businesses over the years. Yes, the Barbadian musical artist/entrepreneur who has, it seems, officially made the transition from fashion plate to fashion force a mere three years after being crowned a "fashion icon" by the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Or so her positioning on the same platform that has also honored alumni like Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan and Jason Wu would suggest. But is her trajectory from a good celebrity to dress to a serious creative a new paradigm or a paradox? What exactly is the lesson it was enshrined in a quasi academic setting, after all of Rihanna? It began in 2008, when she performed at a benefit for Raising Malawi sponsored by Gucci and held at the United Nations, to the delight and discovery of the style set in attendance. Six years later, she received her CFDA award and set off a thousand flashbulbs when she stood onstage in a sheer rhinestone spotted Adam Selman gown and white fur boa. In short order she signed a deal with Puma to become its creative director and design her own line (Fenty x Puma), took that line to the runways of New York Fashion Week and then to Paris (where she showed in the same site as Valentino), became contributing creative director of Stance Socks, received the Footwear News Award for shoe of the year (the first woman to do so) and dipped in and out of collaborations with Dior (on sunglasses), Manolo Blahnik (on shoes) and Chopard (on high end jewelry). She did this all while maintaining her position as an ambassador for Dior and wearing clothes from a broad assortment of names from Vetements to recent Parsons grads with whom she has no contractual relationship. "She has a quite unique ability to do it all at the same time," said Burak Cakmak, the dean of fashion at Parsons. And he is referring not just to her own creativity, but also to her ability to get the global brands with whom she works to agree to her (very flexible) terms. This has never really happened before. A brief history review: Up to this point, there have been effectively three kinds of strategies for celebrity would be designers. First, the "license your name and make a profit from your fame" approach, one that has had varying levels of success: Jennifer Lopez's Sweetface line failed and Jessica Simpson's namesake empire was a wild success. Second, the "humble yourself before the industry and disappear into the atelier to pay your dues" tack. This has been the favored mode if you want to be seen as a serious fashion person, as exemplified by Victoria Beckham, the Olsen sisters and (at least at the moment, a somewhat chastened) Kanye West. And third, the newest iteration: the pop up rock collection gambit, as adopted by Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and the Weeknd, and essentially an expanded, upstyled version of what used to be called "tour merch." Rihanna, however, fits into none of the above. She is both serious about, and promiscuous in, her style. While she says she is heavily involved with her brand, she also freelances widely across the fashion world, often for competing names. One has to do with the reputation she built as a risk taker who does not hew to a singular path but zigs and zags as she desires: musically, sartorially and professionally. In this hypothesis, her career in fashion simply reflects her career in music, and thus has its own authentic internal logic (authenticity being a big deal these days). Especially when you consider her evident delight in dressing up. And it is also possible that she is simply the most visible beneficiary of a battle that was fought first by Ms. Beckham et al., who took the initial heat for (we all assumed) daring to think that because they wore clothes well, they could make clothes well. "Kanye paid the dues for Rihanna," said Marina Larroude, the fashion director of Barneys, referring to the fact that Mr. West, with all of his ambition, hubris and early attempts to show in Paris, softened us all up and made us willing to entertain the idea that celebrities can legitimately become designers, and that their work should be judged on its own merits. But what sort of message does that send to the rest of the fashion world? To consumers, for example, about where the value in their garments lie? To the kids sitting in the audience looking at Rihanna after going to school to learn exactly the sort of thing she never did? "Anything is possible!" said Fern Mallis, a fashion consultant. "It's a whole new ballgame in this industry, and she shows that." That's one way of looking at it. Mr. Cakmak offered another. The whole serve many masters thing is a situation most design school graduates face, he said. They may start their own brand, but they also have to work behind the scenes for others to pay for it, and Rihanna models this behavior (even if she is not so much hidden as front and center in every scene). As for the notion that she swooped in without any training and was almost immediately regarded as a substantive player, he said that in today's world "there's a studio behind every person selling a product," and you need both to succeed. Rihanna has, for example, her stylist, Mel Ottenberg. And Puma, which is owned by Kering, which also owns Gucci and YSL (among other brands). There is a lot of traditional know how to back her up, and the need for traditional know how equals jobs. "We're all rethinking the system, and Rihanna is part of that," Ms. Larroude said. She may be the most visible signpost of it. Certainly, onstage at Parsons in an oversize khaki suit (designed by Matthew Adams Dolan, a Parsons alumnus), she was impossible to miss. But whether the direction she signifies is up or down or merely a big sideways hop is not yet entirely clear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In 2018, when Louis Vuitton named as its men's wear artistic director, it made Mr. Abloh, the founder of Off White, a Nike collaborator and the former creative director for Kanye West, one of the first black designers at the top of a French heritage house. The appointment was seen as the dawn of a new era and a move by an industry that had long struggled to face its racism. Rather than merely appropriating or pillaging the traditions of black culture, it was acknowledging the truth. Mr. Abloh was initially cheered as a pioneer and a symbol of progress, and held up by many as a role model. "To show a younger generation that there is no one way anyone in this kind of position has to look is a fantastically modern spirit in which to start," he said two years ago in an interview with The New York Times. This weekend, however, as the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer spurred anguished waves of Black Lives Matter protests and riots across the United States, Mr. Abloh became for some a symbol of a different kind: disappointment. And a chunk of social media the communications tool that he mastered and used to build his empire especially a chunk from the subculture of Black Twitter, began to take sledgehammers to the pedestal on which he had been placed. In response to questions about the building anger, Mr. Abloh sent a lengthy statement to The Times addressing the issue of racism and clarifying his posts and record, and then decided to rescind it. A spokesman texted that he had no comment for the moment, as "he has changed his mind in how he will respond to this whenever he does finally respond." As reports of protests and looting spread across the country, Mr. Abloh started posting on Instagram Stories and chastised looters for damaging businesses to which he had a connection. He began with a familiar topic: the notion that "streetwear is dead." "Case point 81 why I said 'streetwear' is dead," read one post, alongside a video of the Round Two vintage store in Los Angeles after it was broken into and looted. Another photo, depicting smashed artwork amid broken glass at the Fat Tiger workshop in Chicago, was accompanied by a caption that read: "Our own communities, our own shops ... this shop was built with blood sweat and tears." Then came another post, this time of a busted door at the RSVP Gallery in Chicago. In a long note alongside the photo, Mr. Abloh said that 11 years ago he and the gallery owners had made a "commitment to make something our local community could see without the access we had been fortunate to access." "Today that same community robbed us. If that heals your pain, you can have it ..." the caption read. He also wrote a passionate comment under a post by Sean Wotherspoon, the owner of Round Two. It read: "You see the passion, blood, sweat and tears Sean puts in for our culture. This disgusts me. To the kids that ransacked his store and RSVP DTLA, and all our stores in our scene just know, that product staring at you in your home/apartment right now is tainted and a reminder of a person I hope you aren't. We're a part of a culture together. Is this what you want?? When you walk past him in the future please have the dignity to not look him in the eye, hang your head in shame...." Some people applauded Mr. Abloh's message. But the series of posts soon triggered a fiery online debate over his contribution to the black community and wider global conversations about contemporary fashion and culture, including the commodification of the civil rights struggles of African Americans. Tensions were stoked further on Sunday, when Mr. Abloh posted a screen shot to show that he had made a 50 donation to a Miami art collective called Fempower to help with the legal expenses of arrested protesters. Twitter swiftly took exception to the amount of the donation, with scores of users pointing out that most of Mr. Abloh's products cost multiples of that number. As a black American fashion designer, Mr. Abloh has always been a rarity in an industry famous for its elitism and lack of diversity, though slow signs of change have begun to appear. Still, most fashion corporations have been relatively quiet in their public responses to the protests, despite the fact that America remains the world's most valuable market for sales of personal luxury goods and that a growing chorus of consumers is demanding that brands stake out a moral position. For some companies, the lack of response may stem from the sector's own shameful history with race, recently embodied by the controversies around Gucci's blackface balaclava and Prada's "Little Black Sambo" figurines. Others may simply be terrified of saying something insensitive in a charged and painful moment in history. A number of designers, including Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Marc Jacobs, have made statements of solidarity with protesters via personal social media accounts. "Property can be replaced, human lives cannot," Mr. Jacobs wrote in a post, later acknowledging in response to a comment below the post that several of his stores had been damaged by looters. Telfar Clemens, an African American designer with a growing fan base and industry attention, simply posted a burning police van with no caption. Duckie Thot, who models for Fenty Beauty and is a vocal supporter of better representation in fashion, demanded that the industry be more vocal in its support for protesters. But other high profile industry figures faced a backlash when they entered the conversation. As violent scenes unfolded from New York to Los Angeles, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, wrote a letter on vogue.com. In it, she said Joe Biden should pick a black woman to be his running mate. The move prompted many Twitter users to point out that the first time a black photographer had shot a cover for the American edition of the magazine had been in 2018 and at the behest of Beyonce. (Ms. Wintour has been at the magazine since 1988.) Criticism was also leveled at Louis Vuitton, Mr. Abloh's employer, which appeared to go ahead with a women's handbag introduction via influencers on Instagram as the crisis in America gained momentum. Diet Prada, the Instagram site that acts as the self appointed moral police of fashion, raised questions about the LV decision, asking, "Considering both the luxury brands and the influencers they work with have a global reach, do they have a duty to align their activations with world news, particularly amid such growing unrest?" (The site has not addressed Mr. Abloh's posts.) None of the opprobrium has reached the level now surrounding Mr. Abloh, however. "Once you're a success, especially a unique success, and a pop culture exemplar, this comes with the territory," said Bethann Hardison, a former model and modeling agent, and a longtime advocate for diversity in fashion. "You become a victim of it, but you are also a winner of it, and you have to wear that crown. The question is how you wear it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
With the planet facing potentially severe impacts from global warming in coming decades, a government sponsored scientific panel on Tuesday called for more research on geoengineering technologies to deliberately intervene in nature to counter climate change. The panel said the research could include small scale outdoor experiments, which many scientists say are necessary to better understand whether and how geoengineering would work. Some environmental groups and others say that such projects could have unintended damaging effects, and could set society on an unstoppable path to full scale deployment of the technologies. But the National Academy of Sciences panel said that with proper governance, which it said needed to be developed, and other safeguards, such experiments should pose no significant risk. In two widely anticipated reports, the panel which was supported by NASA and other federal agencies, including what the reports described as the "U.S. intelligence community" noted that drastically reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases was by far the best way to mitigate the effects of a warming planet. But the panel, in making the case for more research into geoengineering, said, "It may be prudent to examine additional options for limiting the risks from climate change." "The committee felt that the need for information at this point outweighs the need for shoving this topic under the rug," Marcia K. McNutt, chairwoman of the panel and the editor in chief of the journal Science, said at a news conference in Washington. Geoengineering options generally fall into two categories: capturing and storing some of the carbon dioxide that has already been emitted so that the atmosphere traps less heat, or reflecting more sunlight away from the earth so there is less heat to start with. The panel issued separate reports on each. The panel said that while the first option, called carbon dioxide removal, was relatively low risk, it was expensive, and that even if it was pursued on a planetwide scale, it would take many decades to have a significant impact on the climate. But the group said research was needed to develop efficient and effective methods to both remove the gas and store it so it remains out of the atmosphere indefinitely. The second option, called solar radiation management, is far more controversial. Most discussions of the concept focus on the idea of dispersing sulfates or other chemicals high in the atmosphere, where they would reflect sunlight, in some ways mimicking the effect of a large volcanic eruption. The process would be relatively inexpensive and should quickly lower temperatures, but it would have to be repeated indefinitely and would do nothing about another carbon dioxide related problem: the acidification of oceans. This approach might also have unintended effects on weather patterns around the world bringing drought to once fertile regions, for example. Or it might be used unilaterally as a weapon by governments or even extremely wealthy individuals. Opponents of geoengineering have long argued that even conducting research on the subject presents a moral hazard that could distract society from the necessary task of reducing the emissions that are causing warming in the first place. "A geoengineering 'technofix' would take us in the wrong direction," Lisa Archer, food and technology program director of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Real climate justice requires dealing with root causes of climate change, not launching risky, unproven and unjust schemes." But the panel said that society had "reached a point where the severity of the potential risks from climate change appears to outweigh the potential risks from the moral hazard" of conducting research. Ken Caldeira, a geoengineering researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a member of the committee, said that while the panel felt that it was premature to deploy any sunlight reflecting technologies today, "it's worth knowing more about them," including any problems that might make them unworkable. "If there's a real showstopper, we should know about it now," Dr. Caldeira said, rather than discovering it later when society might be facing a climate emergency and desperate for a solution. Dr. Caldeira is part of a small community of scientists who have researched solar radiation management concepts. Almost all of the research has been done on computers, simulating the effects of the technique on the climate. One attempt in Britain in 2011 to conduct an outdoor test of some of the engineering concepts provoked a public outcry. The experiment was eventually canceled. David Keith, a researcher at Harvard University who reviewed the reports before they were released, said in an interview, "I think it's terrific that they made a stronger call than I expected for research, including field research." Along with other researchers, Dr. Keith has proposed a field experiment to test the effect of sulfate chemicals on atmospheric ozone. Unlike some European countries, the United States has never had a separate geoengineering research program. Dr. Caldeira said establishing a separate program was unlikely, especially given the dysfunction in Congress. But he said that because many geoengineering research proposals might also help in general understanding of the climate, agencies that fund climate research might start to look favorably upon them. Dr. Keith agreed, adding that he hoped the new reports would "break the logjam" and "give program managers the confidence they need to begin funding." At the news conference, Waleed Abdalati, a member of the panel and a professor at the University of Colorado, said that geoengineering research would have to be subject to governance that took into account not just the science, "but the human ramifications, as well." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Sebastien Bourdais and Mike Conway each won a race Sunday in an IndyCar twin bill in Toronto over the weekend. The victory in the rain delayed first event ended a drought of more than six years for Bourdais, a four time series champion. He finished just over three seconds ahead of Helio Castroneves, the series points leader. Tony Kanaan took third. Conway won the second race, in which Bourdais finished ninth. Kanaan improved to second, while Will Power came in third and moved to within 13 points of the series lead with four races left on the schedule this season. Castroneves, whose car suffered slight damage on the standing start, slipped to 12th from pole position. J. R. Todd, whose last victory came in 2008, won the Top Fuel final Sunday at the National Hot Rod Association event at Bandimere Speedway in Morrison, Colo. He edged Brittany Force in a tense side by side duel to the finish line. In other professional classes, Robert Hight won the Funny Car final, and Allen Johnson took his fourth victory this season in the Pro Stock final. Andrew Hines won in Pro Stock Motorcycle. Tony Stewart won a sprint car race Friday night in Auburn, Mich. It was Stewart's first race on the dirt track cars since breaking his leg in a crash last August. After the race, the usually taciturn driver sent out a jubilant Twitter message: "If you haven't heard already, I ran my sprint car tonight and won! Felt great to run it again. Was a 2nd place car but had a little luck. :)" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Not all arbiters are created equal. There are the fashion editors and stylists who make their way around town during fashion weeks, dispensing judgments and Instagram posts as they go. They still have the power to move the needle for a brand. But so does Justin Bieber, who bounced his way into the Kith show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Thursday night. So does LeBron James. He doesn't come to many fashion shows, but he came to this one, as good a sign as any that it had the makings of a major event. Mr. James had even had a preview. Earlier that day, he had posted an Instagram of himself wearing a pair of shorts from a Kith and Versace collaboration that would be unveiled at the evening's show. Yes, Versace. That Versace. Donatella Versace is, apparently, one of the many who recognizes the pull that Kith and its founder, Ronnie Fieg, have on the fashion hungry crowds. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
VAIL, Colo. After Friday's International Evening of Dance here, a California friend, visiting Colorado for a few days, texted me to say: "Can't believe I just saw that lineup! Amazing ballerinas Sara Mearns, Yuan Yuan Tan, Isabella Boylston, Linda Celeste Sims, and Tiler Peck on the same stage in one night!" She's right about the astonishing lineup and yet her list omitted the names Lil Buck, Misty Copeland, Herman Cornejo, Bill Irwin, Misa Kuranaga, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener, Fang Yi Sheu, Wendy Whelan and more, who all were warmly applauded in the program's 14 pieces. There are other reasons to pay heed to the Vail International Dance Festival, but this plenitude and diversity of talent alone makes it extraordinary. For audiences unused to watching these dancers, this was heady stuff. Accustomed as I am to seeing them, I single out just three of Friday's elements to illustrate how intoxicating these Vail evenings can be. One was something that New Yorkers know to be marvelous, the divertissement pas de deux from Act II of George Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1962), as danced by the City Ballet principals Tiler Peck and Jared Angle. And yet not even New Yorkers have seen these two cast so exquisite a spell in this extraordinary adagio. Mr. Angle is the most tenderly solicitous of cavaliers, and on Friday, Ms. Peck, playing with time with supreme elegance, found miraculous pauses and sharp accents within the choreographer's gossamer legato, leading the audience deeper and deeper into her magic. The second was Sara Mearns's first performance of Alexei Ratmansky's "Fandango," to music in a Spanish style by Luigi Boccherini. Here's a dance that's been seen only in Vail; it was created in 2010 for Wendy Whelan. A long, colorful solo study in rhythmic intricacy with breaks in which the ballerina (who never leaves the stage) walks playfully around her musicians before continuing in a different tempo it's a worthy successor to the Spanish solos with which the Romantic ballerinas of the 19th century used to enchant audiences. Ms. Mearns, another New York City Ballet principal, brought to it a luscious and brilliant coordination of upper and lower body; momentary stops within dense phrases found her in gorgeously sculptural positions before she darted onward. And then Ms. Peck returned in "Time It Was/116," a ballerina meets clown sketch with none other than the superlative clown actor Bill Irwin; this was one of Friday's four world premieres, with Ms. Peck and Mr. Irwin choreographing their own material. Mr. Irwin's shape changing skills are extraordinary, defying, from an observer, both comprehension and a straight face. Ms. Peck endearingly held her own: As Mr. Irwin took on ballerina qualities, she took on clown ones. New York City dancegoers who think they know Ms. Peck's range are mistaken. Year after year at Vail, she has proved herself the ideal festival artist, always tackling the unfamiliar. In past seasons, I've seen her dance choreography by Larry Keigwin, Paul Taylor and Matthew Neenan. Her eccentric comedy with Mr. Irwin became all the more amazing here, because in ballerina roles this year, she attained a new degree of elegant refinement. On Saturday (an almost entirely different program, though largely with the same dancers), Ms. Peck and Zachary Catazaro danced the main pas de deux from Antony Tudor's "The Leaves Are Fading," in which a lovers' relationship suddenly seems to move into a different time zone, a new kind of transcendence. Later in the same program, she and Mr. Angle danced an enthrallingly multifaceted account of Balanchine's "Duo Concertant," ranging from playfulness to poignancy. Both these roles were new to her this festival; she made them newly piercing. On Saturday, Ms. Mearns was unwell as she later tweeted altitude sickness struck, immediately after "Fandango" but her replacement was an especially illustrious addition to this galaxy: Carla Korbes, who, although in the 22nd week of pregnancy and two months after her retirement from Pacific Northwest Ballet, danced "Elegie," Balanchine's 1982 solo choreographed to the Stravinsky viola solo of that name. As when she first danced it here in 2012 (the first to perform it since Suzanne Farrell, for whom it was made), she was accompanied by the violist Nicholas Cords. This time she seemed, if possible, yet more beautifully rapt, delivering gestures of contemplation and grief in a steady crescendo up to a point of urgency, only then to return to quiet stillness. With one exception, Saturday's 12 items were entirely different. Friday featured choreography not only by Alvin Ailey, Balanchine, August Bournonville, Marius Petipa and Mr. Ratmansky, but also four world premieres. These were the Peck Irwin sketch; tiresome pop frolics by Alejandro Cerrudo, for himself and Ms. Whelan; the Mitchell/Riener duo, for themselves and Melissa Toogood; and "Mind Noise," an odd but riveting piece by Ms. Sheu. What's more, it featured several notable role debuts. Saturday's program added the choreographers Kenneth MacMillan, Antony Tudor and Christopher Wheeldon, and other role debuts. Various kinds of flamenco, modern dance and Memphis jookin enriched the palette. Part of what makes the Vail festival historic is that it showcases several talented young dancers who are still on their way to the top. Three who made strong impressions in these International Evenings were Jeffrey Cirio, the former Boston ballet soloist who has just joined American Ballet Theater; the Pacific Northwest Ballet soloist Angelica Generosa; and the exceptional New York City Ballet corps dancer Joseph Gordon. Some selections on these programs were piffle. Apart from the Cerrudo Whelan number (an essay in gangly cuteness to Nat King Cole) and the Mitchell Riener trio (which suggested they found no merit in the Mas Ysa music they had chosen), Ms. Tan's "Carmen" solo (for herself and five chairs) was a distillation of "Carmen" cheap dance cliches. Other cliches, however, were avoided: This was a gala type evening without any sets of fouette turns ! And the program's sheer eclecticism enchanted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The slide caused seismic tremors that first registered at magnitude 2.9, , according to data from the Alaska Earthquake Center. But that magnitude was computed as if the tremors were from an earthquake. Scientists at the center later recalculated the magnitude and came up with a higher figure, 5.5. The source of the slide appears to be a peak on the west side of the glacier that was more than 6,500 feet high. It is unclear how much rock broke away, but an early estimate from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory suggested the slide involved more than 132 million tons of material. The Alaska Panhandle in and around Glacier Bay National Park has been the source of many large landslides in recent years. Scientists say the slides will most likely continue as warming temperatures cause more glacial melt. Glaciers buttress the mountainsides that surround them; when the ice disappears, the slopes lose some of their support, and erosion or earthquakes can cause them to collapse. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
This is the story my mother remembers, the story she has always feared would repeat itself. That no matter how comfortable we as Jews may feel today, it only takes a small group of people (and a large group of people to sit idly by) to turn everything on its head. I remember watching with her in our living room as Donald Trump assumed the presidency in 2017. It was on her mind. As he approached the podium for his oath she asked me, with tears welling in her eyes, "Are we going to have to leave?" At that point I didn't think the answer was yes; I'm not sure I do now, either. But with each incident that has followed, family conversations have become more frequently wrapped up in those kinds of questions. First there was "Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville, Va. Then the attack in Pittsburgh, on a synagogue that looked an awful lot like ours. Then San Diego, Jersey City and other smaller but significant incidents in between. Jewish students' experiences on college campuses are becoming increasingly uncomfortable. This fall, swastikas were drawn in a school in our district, and in another one nearby. And in December, there were several anti Semitic attacks in a little over a week in New York arguably the Jewish capital of this country ending with the Hanukkah stabbings in Monsey. Now is the first time that I have truly felt, in my (admittedly few) 23 years of life, such an overwhelming fear of impending doom. It seems to be all anyone talks about anymore, perpetually swirling around us, and for good reason. If war won't destroy the world, climate change will. And now to add to it, the wave of anti Semitic attacks over the past year are instilling the seeds of fear into many millennial American Jews for perhaps the first time. Not even, perhaps, because we fear for ourselves but because we fear for the future of our children and our grandchildren. I can't help but think this is unnatural: We are so young! Many of us have yet to figure things out for ourselves, have yet to hold our own in the world. And yet we wonder and worry for those who will follow us because we are so palpably and devastatingly confronted with hints of what they will face if we do not act. My mother, I now understand, has carried that very same fear with her all along. Well before any of the warning signs of the past few years, before anyone else seemed to be concerned, she was, because she had lived it. She was part of a community that had once felt exceptionally durable and perfectly coexistent, but instead fell apart before her eyes. The answer, of course, is to act. (We are all guilty of not acting.) To push back on our suffocating culture of complacency that if we're not directly in harm's way, right now, we do nothing and be the ones to go against the grain until the grain goes in the right direction. Make people uncomfortable when they say or do something they shouldn't, no matter how innocuous it may seem, so that we may look back upon these decades not as the moment when more could have been done, but as a mere malignant spike in a generally positive direction. Our children will thank us for looking out for them. For understanding all that is at risk. I now thank my mom every chance I get. 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 |
Federal Reserve officials on Friday outlined the case for an interest rate cut, making clear in their first public remarks since the central bank chose to leave policy unchanged this week that inflation and rising global risks are weighing heavily on their minds. Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said in an essay posted online that he had pushed for a 0.5 percentage point rate cut at the central bank's June meeting on Wednesday, motivated by worries that inflation was too low. Mr. Kashkari does not vote on policy this year and could not dissent from the decision to hold rates steady, but he still participates in the discussions. James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and a dissenting vote in the decision to keep rates steady, said he wanted to move more quickly to get ahead of any future weakness. Mr. Bullard's "no" vote was the first dissent during Jerome H. Powell's tenure as Fed chair, a position he took on in February 2018. Cutting rates now "would provide insurance against further declines in expected inflation and a slowing economy subject to elevated downside risks," Mr. Bullard said in a statement released on Friday. "Even if a sharper than expected slowdown does not materialize, a rate cut would help promote a more rapid return of inflation and inflation expectations to target." While the rate of growth remains decent and unemployment is at its lowest level in nearly 50 years, the Fed is fighting stubbornly weak inflation. The Fed has not consistently hit its 2 percent target for inflation, which is meant to guard against economy damaging deflation, since formally adopting the goal in 2012. The problem is now being compounded by mounting uncertainty over the slowing of economies in Europe and Asia and a continuing trade war by President Trump that spans much of the world. "In this environment, especially in the last six to eight weeks, there has been elevated uncertainty about the outlook," Richard Clarida, the Fed's vice chairman, said on Friday about why policymakers might cut interest rates. His comments came during an interview on Bloomberg Television. A growing number of officials are expecting that interest rates will come down by the end of the year, based on projections released after the meeting on Wednesday, and Mr. Powell emphasized the growing risks at his post meeting news conference. The Fed is watching warily as Mr. Trump's trade war drags on. The president is set to meet with President Xi Jinping of China at an upcoming Group of 20 summit, and tensions could ease or worsen at that point. Slowing global growth is another major concern, as factory indexes slump the world over. "Crosscurrents from policy uncertainty have risen since early May, crimping business investment plans, raising concerns in some financial market segments, and weighing on global growth prospects," Fed Governor Lael Brainard said in Cincinnati, Ohio Friday. Risk management in the current environment "would argue for softening the expected path of policy when risks shift to the downside," Ms. Brainard added. Part of the concern with slowing global growth is that in Europe and Japan, monetary authorities already have negative interest rates, leaving them limited room to respond to a downturn. Mr. Clarida emphasized that America's central bank, by contrast, has sufficient space to deal with economic weakening. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." "We have the tools necessary to sustain the expansion, a strong labor market and stable prices, and as appropriate, we will deploy those tools," Mr. Clarida said during the Bloomberg interview. "We have the flexibility that we need that other countries wish they had." But the United States, like other countries, is fighting persistently low inflation. The Fed's preferred price gauge came in at 1.5 percent in April, and while some of that shortfall will probably be short lived, the slide in inflation expectations threatens the outlook for future price increases. "In the past few months, the job market has slowed, wage growth has flattened, inflation has continued to come in below our 2 percent target, inflation expectations have fallen, and the yield curve has inverted," Mr. Kashkari wrote in a post on the website Medium. A yield curve inversion happens when interest rates on short term bonds rise above those on longer term ones, an unusual occurrence that reflects market pessimism about future growth and often precedes recessions. "I believe the committee should now take action to re anchor expectations at 2 percent," Mr. Kashkari wrote. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"Game of Thrones" is a fantasy saga, of course, but it is also a mystery, one that has obsessed fans throughout its run. While many big narrative questions have been answered, like the one about Jon Snow's true parentage, several remain as the show nears its end, including two of the most pressing: Who will survive? And who, if anyone, will take the Iron Throne? Fans wrestling with these and other questions can find support on YouTube, which harbors a community of "Thrones" sleuths that is seemingly as populous and deep as the world George R.R. Martin created in his "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels, the inspiration for the series. Want exclusive "Game of Thrones" interviews and news, as well as the internet's best articles on that week's episode? Sign up for our Season 8 newsletter here. Alt Shift X, Emergency Awesome, Gray Area, Ideas of Ice and Fire, Lucifer Means Lightbringer, Nerd Soup, New Rockstars, Talking Thrones these are just a handful of channels whose creators scrutinize book chapters and TV episodes in search of bread crumbs and Easter eggs to help enlighten "Game of Thrones" devotees. For many of these "Thrones" pundits, the urge to dissect the show on YouTube stemmed from not knowing what else to do with what had become a consuming obsession. "Eventually I was like, 'I have so many points, and I'm repeating them at work, and I'm repeating them with friends and with my girlfriend,'" said Filup Molina of New Rockstars. "' I should just make a video and send it around.'" Quinn Howard, who runs Ideas of Ice and Fire, echoed Johnson's sentiment. "The community that has cropped up around 'Game of Thrones' fandom is a particularly great one," he said. To keep this community happy, Gray Area, Ideas of Ice and Fire and Nerd Soup are posting recap videos the morning after each episode this season. New Rockstars is releasing its talk show, "Westeros Weekly," every Monday afternoon. All four channels supplement these recaps throughout the week with additional analysis and preview videos. Other commentators don't wait until Monday: Alt Shift X is hosting interactive chats on YouTube directly following each episode. Shortly after the Season 8 premiere, more than 23,000 viewers showed up for the channel's live stream Q. and A. session. They kept the chat window scrolling at a dizzying pace by adding their speculations, assessments and a multitude of sad face and elephant emoji; they seemed to share Queen Cersei's disappointment that the pachydermal war machines would not be joining her armies. Topics that surface during these sessions, based on revelations and questions raised in the episodes, then inform what is covered in the channel's weekly analysis videos. Over the past few weeks, "Game of Thrones" scholars have endured many sleepless nights , and even more await as their watch is ending . The analysis videos can take days to complete, and both Molina and Natal admitted to pulling all nighters to post their recaps on time. "I'm losing my mind with all the work we've already done, and I feel like the real work hasn't even begun," Natal said. But their love of the "Game" keeps them going. "These are the best storytellers of our time," Molina said . "These are the people who are the best in the world at what they do, and they are all coming together on one project." Howard was a fan of the books years before the television show debuted in 2011. "The series balances grittiness with elements of fantasy in a way that most other fantasy series just can't," he said. Natal, who didn't catch "Game of Thrones" fever until the end of Season 5, said: "This world to me is the pinnacle of fantasy writing. It's just the greatest fictional universe that has ever been created." And even after the last episode of "Game of Thrones" airs, Martin's creation will linger. The author has yet to finish "A Song of Ice and Fire," and Johnson plans to post videos about its perpetually imminent sixth novel, "The Winds of Winter." HBO is also developing a "Game of Thrones" prequel pilot that, if all goes well, could appear as early as next year. Molina said that New Rockstars would resurrect "Westeros Weekly" if the prequel finds a similarly devoted audience. Johnson, Howard and Natal said that they would give it a chance, too. "It's like 'Breaking Bad' whatever they do, I'm on board," Natal said. (That AMC drama gave rise to the series "Better Call Saul," and there is a sequel movie in the works.) As for who will wind up on the Iron Throne, opinions are divided. Howard and Natal believe it will be ... no one. "The Iron Throne is a symbol of power," Natal said. "It's a symbol of a feudalistic society, and that has to be destroyed if they want to build a new world, if they want to build a better world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
WASHINGTON The Trump administration is weighing reimposing tariffs on Canadian aluminum over concerns about rising exports to the United States, a move that would strain ties and possibly incite Canadian retaliation just as a revised North American trade deal goes into effect. The tariffs would revive a bitter fight that complicated efforts to complete the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, which goes into effect on July 1. To pave the way for that pact, the Trump administration agreed to drop tariffs it had imposed on aluminum and steel from Canada and Mexico but retained the right to reinstate levies if it observed a spike in metal imports. Imports of raw Canadian aluminum into the United States have increased since that agreement was signed. But Matt Meenan of the Aluminum Association, which represents U.S. and foreign based companies that make up the vast majority of the industry, said the uptick was consistent with historical trends and "not particularly surprising given market fundamentals." "We don't think it warrants going back to the drawing board on all of this stuff and certainly not a week before implementing U.S.M.C.A.," Mr. Meenan said. Several companies that make aluminum in the United States have asked for greater protection. But business groups that have long opposed the tariffs were quick to criticize the move, saying the United States risked inciting another trade war at a critical moment. "Bringing back these tariffs would be like a bad horror movie," said Neil Herrington, the senior vice president for the Americas at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Canada will surely retaliate against U.S. exports. This is the wrong way to mark the entry into force of the new North American free trade agreement on July 1." President Trump imposed tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum in 2018, an effort to shelter manufacturers like U.S. Steel and Century Aluminum. But the tariffs, which were imposed on national security grounds, rankled close American allies. Last May, the Trump administration agreed to exempt Canada and Mexico from the tariffs, a concession that ultimately helped bring to a close negotiations over revising the North American Free Trade Agreement. The deal contained a provision that allowed the United States to again raise tariffs in the event of a surge in imported products. The countries promised to carry out consultations if a surge occurred, and if those were not successful, the governments could impose a tariff of 25 percent on steel products or 10 percent on aluminum products. American officials have tried to persuade their Canadian counterparts to voluntarily restrain their own exports. Those discussions included a call Friday on between Kirsten Hillman, Canada's ambassador to the United States, and senior officials with the Office of the United States Trade Representative. American officials told their Canadian counterparts that if the situation was left unresolved, the United States planned to move ahead with restrictions on Canadian aluminum as of July 1, according to people familiar with the discussions. The Office of the United States Trade Representative did not respond to requests for comment. Speaking at a virtual event on Tuesday, Ms. Hillman said that discussions were continuing over the issue, and that Canada firmly believed that their aluminum exports were not "hurting the U.S. market in any way." "We're emphasizing with our American friends the fact that we have this deep, mutually supportive industry, and that far from being harmful to the American aluminum sector, our aluminum exports are indeed a great help and benefit," Ms. Hillman said. The return to tensions with Canada comes at a particularly delicate moment, as the Trump administration prepares to usher in its signature North American trade deal. 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. The revised pact fulfills a key campaign promise for Mr. Trump by updating the quarter century old NAFTA with stronger protections for workers and new rules to encourage auto manufacturing in North America. It also contains a provision that was expected to bolster the continent's metals production, by requiring least 70 percent of the steel and aluminum an automaker purchases to originate in North America. But in a congressional hearing last week, Mr. Trump's top trade official indicated that the United States was readying challenges in areas where it believed Canada and Mexico might not be in compliance with the new agreement, including over Mexico's treatment of labor issues and biotechnology products. "There are a number of things we're looking at that are quite troubling," the official, Robert E. Lighthizer, told the House Ways and Means Committee last Wednesday. "One of the reasons I wanted to get this into effect on July 1 was so we could start enforcing it." Mark A. A. Warner, a Canadian and United States trade lawyer, said the dispute had arisen in part because "surge" was not clearly defined in the agreement the three countries reached. Tariffs on Canadian aluminum would be a "setback," Mr. Warner said, but that "shouldn't derail the Canada U.S. relative trade detente leading up to the November election." "It's probably not in Canada's interest to react in a way that makes it a bigger target for a cornered, mercurial president in search of new ways to return to his 'golden oldies,'" Mr. Warner said. The tariffs have plenty of critics among the many industries that use aluminum to make other products, including cars, boats and beer kegs. Much of the aluminum industry, which is composed of multinational companies with operations around the world, also opposes the levies. Two companies with U.S. aluminum production, Century Aluminum and Magnitude 7 Metals, have urged the administration to reimpose tariffs. In May, the American Primary Aluminum Association, which represents the two companies, sent a letter to Mr. Lighthizer and Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, saying that an import surge from Canada was threatening the viability of their business. "The surge of Canadian metal has a caused the price to collapse and is endangering the future viability of the U.S. primary industry," the letter said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
LONDON Less than a week after the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool shocked English soccer's leagues, clubs and fans with reform proposals that would have led to the biggest changes in the sport in a generation, their big idea has been unanimously rejected. At an emergency meeting of the Premier League's 20 clubs on Wednesday, the ideas for remaking English soccer that were brought forward by United and Liverpool, England's two most successful clubs including reducing the size of the Premier League to 18 teams from 20 and handing more power to the country's richest teams were quickly shot down. The plans would have required the backing of 14 teams to pass, a figure that looked unlikely almost as soon as details of the project leaked on Sunday. The Premier League said Wednesday that its members had agreed unanimously that the proposal "will not be endorsed or pursued." The ideas, which also included changes to prize money agreements as well as to the split of the television revenues that have made the Premier League the richest domestic soccer competition in the world, received vocal and widespread backing from owners of cash strapped teams in the lower divisions, many of them seduced by promises of large cash handouts as they struggle to stay afloat in closed stadiums during the pandemic. But elsewhere, there had been a near universal rejection of the plan, and accusations of opportunism leveled at United, Liverpool and other members of the so called Big Six clubs, a group of the richest teams in the league, who would have stood to gain most if the reforms were adopted. Fan groups, the Premier League, England's Football Association and even the British government, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, quickly aligned against the proposals. Operation Big Picture was the brainchild of the Liverpool owner John W. Henry and his billionaire counterpart at Manchester United, Joel Glazer, and it had the active and vocal support of Rick Parry, the chairman of the English Football League, the organization responsible for the three professional divisions beneath the Premier League, who had been involved in the discussions. "I think it was an acknowledgment in the room that English football's model is a huge success, but it hasn't been reviewed or modernized for a long time, and so perhaps there has been some systemic issues built up that need dealing with," the Premier League's chief executive, Richard Masters, told reporters after presiding over Wednesday's meeting with club officials. In their totality, the plans would have been beneficial to the biggest clubs as well as to dozens of lower division teams who have little hope of playing top division soccer. A middle tier of clubs, aspirants for places in the Premier League and those in the lower reaches of the top division, would almost certainly have seen their fortunes suffer, however. That led to tense exchanges behind the scenes, with groups on all sides accusing one another of "self interest." Despite that, Masters insisted the days of tension which included threats that the richest clubs might break away from the Premier League or even join the E.F.L. should they not get their way had not damaged relationships between the league's member clubs. "I don't think it takes a huge amount to put things back together," Masters said. "Actually, the sort of solidarity among the collective is incredibly strong. It takes quite a lot to pull it apart. "I don't think it's irreparably damaged the Premier League," he added, "and I think that today's meeting proved that." The league now plans, he said, to speed up and expand discussions to reform its structure. The elements under discussion mirror those that the reform plan sought to tackle, including the competition's structure, governance, financial regulation and the commercial and broadcasting arrangements that have been the engine of the Premier League's growth since its inception in 1992. The plight of some of the lower divisions teams has become so dire, according to some E.F.L. chairmen, that without aid from richer clubs or the government which has declined to provide it a number of them will run out of cash before the end of the year. That had made the promise of an immediate payment of 250 million pounds, about 325 million, more important to them than the prospect of surrendering greater power over the future of English soccer to a handful of top teams. "Is it a concern? 100 percent it is. Do I trust them? No I don't," Peter Ridsdale, the chairman of Preston North End, a team in the second tier Championship, told reporters on Tuesday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
As the pandemic has forced theater companies to reinvent themselves as digital creators, colleges and even high schools have delivered some of the most innovative projects. The latest example is Baldwin Wallace University's exciting take on Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's Broadway hit "Spring Awakening," which the university, in Ohio, is bringing back for an encore after a November run. Victoria Bussert's production alternates between Zoom and outdoors scenes (looking mightily impressive despite being filmed mostly on an iPhone). The actors often wear masks, which actually works well in a show about sexual repression, and the finale is especially effective. Dec. 17 20; bw.edu/events. From Arts at the Old Fire Station, based in England, comes a revival of the British playwright Mike Bartlett's fast paced 2014 play, "An Intervention," in which two friends, A and B, discuss their lives and political engagement. The production stars Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson, of the comedy duo Britney (named after Clive's now removed brain tumor). This version is said to have been "updated and reworked," and we'll hazard that Bartlett ("King Charles III," "Love, Love, Love") might have been inspired by the past year's headlines. Through Jan. 12; oldfirestation.org.uk. Baltimore's Everyman Theater presents the premiere of Caleen Sinnette Jennings's semi autobiographical "Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains," in which the protagonist, Jackie, attends college in Vermont at the onset of the 1970s. The show concludes Jennings's trilogy that follows Jackie at different times in her life "Queens Girl in the World" and "Queens Girl in Africa" are also available on demand. Through Feb. 4; everymantheatre.org. Debra Ann Byrd, the artistic director of the Harlem Shakespeare Festival, also opts for the solo route to tell her story in "Becoming Othello: A Black Girl's Journey," presented with the National Arts Club. The director, Tina Packer, is another woman with keen insights on the bard: She founded Shakespeare Company in Lenox, Mass. Dec. 16 22; facebook.com/HarlemShakespeareFestival. In "Between the Two Humps," Halley Feiffer ("Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow") applies her comic touch to a fairly famous story let's just say the characters include a Joseph (Noah Robbins) and a Mary (Kara Young). Of particular interest is Gabriel, played by the performer Peppermint, who made quite a splash in the Go Go's musical "Head Over Heels." This new play is part of MCC Theater's LiveLabs series. Starts Dec. 17; mcctheater.org. "Burning Bluebeard," from the Chicago company the Ruffians, is about the fire that killed more than 600 people at a holiday show in 1903. Thanks to streaming, more people can now discover a production that has proved an enduring hit in Chicago since its 2011 premiere. The streaming version is a live capture of last year's edition. Through Jan. 3; porchlightmusictheatre.org. After well received productions of classics by its namesake, Moliere in the Park presents its first contemporary American play with Christina Anderson's "pen/man/ship," about what happens when a Black surveyor boards a ship traveling to Liberia in 1896. The company's virtual productions make imaginative use of video filters and effects, and this new one, directed as usual by Lucie Tiberghien, does not disappoint. The impressive cast includes Crystal Lucas Perry and Kevin Mambo. Through Jan. 4; moliereinthepark.org. The Congress for Jewish Culture presents a reading of S. Ansky's supernatural play "The Dybbuk" for the 100th anniversary of its world premiere. The show was a sensation in the first decades of the 20th century, and is a staple of Yiddish theater. The actors dialed in live from all over the world to perform, under Allen Lewis Rickman's direction. Available now; congressforjewishculture.org. For its gala this year, New York City Center presented Audra McDonald in a pared down showcase held in the empty venue. Backed by the pianist and music director Andy Einhorn, the singer highlighted biggies of musical theater, with some nifty curios thrown in watch for Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's melancholy "It Never Was You," for example, or Frank Loesser's devilish tongue twister "Can't Stop Talking." Through Jan. 3; nycitycenter.org. Going virtual hasn't stopped mentalists; if anything, they thrive online. Jason Suran pulls off some whoppers in "Reconnected" and here is a good place to belatedly apologize to my fellow Zoom audience members for yelling an awe struck "Noooo!" after Suran correctly guessed a verb I'd chosen. jasonsuran.com. As for Eric Walton ("Esoterica"), he will livestream his new show, "Virtual Impossibilities," from the Wild Project, in Manhattan's East Village. Dec. 16 20; thewildproject.org. Like many of us, Tom DeTrinis is angry. Unlike most of us, he has channeled his rage into a comic solo show "Making Friends," which was filmed at the Pico Playhouse, in Los Angeles, for the IAMA Theater Company. DeTrinis has appeared in several of Justin Sayre's camp tastic plays, and he directed Drew Droege's popular solo "Happy Birthday Doug" (Droege returned the favor here). Add the participation of "Crazy Ex Girlfriend" choreographer Kathryn Burns, and this could make for good catharsis. Dec. 17 Jan. 11; iamatheatre.com. Aside from a body mic here, a computerized lighting board there, the essence of theater has changed little in hundreds of years. Yet here we are, questioning whether live performance and physical togetherness are essential to the art form. The cast members of the San Francisco Playhouse's staging of Jason Robert Brown's "Songs for a New World," for example, lip synced numbers they had prerecorded. We are watching them do so from our own home. It's a safe bet that back in February, few would have called this experience theater. Through Dec. 31; sfplayhouse.org. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"We in leadership positions," Bill Rauch, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's artistic director, told The New York Times in 2015, "need to do everything we can to reflect the world we live in." On Friday, Mr. Rauch and his colleagues continued that push when announcing the festival's 2018 season, which features a record five plays by women there are 11 in total and a production of "Oklahoma!" that has same sex couples in leading roles. This seven month series also offers deep explorations of Native American and African American history. In an email on Sunday, Mr. Rauch said that he had been obsessed with introducing cross gendered casting into "Oklahoma!" for decades, and that he began discussing the idea with Ted Chapin, president and chief creative officer of the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate, roughly a year and a half ago. Mr. Rauch became artistic director in 2007, and has since begun a number of initiatives aimed at broadening the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's cultural reach. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Echo speakers can also be used to get access to other streaming services, including Spotify, Pandora and iHeartRadio, but its more advanced features, like combing through lyrics, will work only with Amazon's service. "We think the next phase of growth for streaming is really going to come in the home," Steve Boom, Amazon's vice president of digital music, said in an interview. Since it was introduced two years ago, Amazon's speaker line which includes the cylindrical Echo, for 180, and two cheaper models, Tap and Dot has become a surprise hit, and the company has been expanding its services for the connected home. The technology can be used to check the weather, order a pizza and, of course, buy stuff from Amazon. It is already causing competitive ripples. Google introduced its own version and the connected speaker company Sonos announced an Amazon partnership, in what was widely interpreted as an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" moment. While Apple's Siri has long had the ability to answer voice commands, Amazon's speakers and new music service represent a new frontier. In some ways they work to create a so called lean back experience, letting people play the music of their choice with a minimum of effort. According to Amazon, one of the most popular commands on the service is simply, "Alexa, play music," which generates a Pandora like playlist based on a customer's past listening. But as with Siri, it is hard not to try to stump Alexa's electronic brain. Amazon says it has applied machine learning to anticipate conversational inquiries, like searching for lyrics or half remembered titles. For example, say, "Alexa, play that song that goes 'put up a parking lot,' " and the speaker will play Counting Crows' version of the Joni Mitchell classic "Big Yellow Taxi." (Purists may cringe, but this version was chosen because it is the most popular one on Amazon. "Alexa, play the song that goes 'put up a parking lot' from the '70s" will bring forth Ms. Mitchell's original.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The Ole Sereni Hotel, near Nairobi National Park, is one of the award winning author Zukiswa Wanner's top spots in the Kenyan capital. The author, above left, sits at the hotel's Eagle's Bar. The prominent author Zukiswa Wanner, born to a South African father and a Zimbabwean mother in Zambia, has a complicated relationship with Nairobi, the Kenyan capital and her adopted city of seven years. "In its many layers, Nairobi has the beauty and the frustrations of all African cities I love," said Ms. Wanner, 43, a former columnist at Daily Nation, Kenya's leading newspaper. "With the added convenience of being a gateway to the rest of the world, I miss it when I stay away for too long but it also tires me when I stay too long without leaving." The award winning author of nine books, with themes revolving around gender, sex, race and nationality, is also the moderator of regular talks with African artists in a series sponsored by Goethe Institut Nairobi, a nonprofit cultural association. Ms. Wanner says Nairobi is a magnet for a reason. "What I love about Nairobi is how accessible it is to the rest of the continent and the world. I often feel like I'm staying in the center of the world. Its people, across the economic brackets, also have beautiful appreciation of art that warms the heart." She is drawn to out of the way places that make her forget about the city's intense traffic. Here, Ms. Wanner shares her five top spots. This popular 134 room hotel has four restaurants overlooking Nairobi National Park, a game reserve where you can feed baby elephants and see giraffes and other wildlife. Ms. Wanner says she enjoys watching the animals and unwinding at sundown with a cocktail or beer. Her frequent drink of choice there is the Kenyan Tusker beer. The bookstore, founded in 1988, has a wide selection of books from across the globe, including influential authors such as Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya, and Charles Mungoshi from Zimbabwe. Situated in the middle class neighborhood of Hurlingham, the shop is also well stocked with both the latest books and classic works, in addition to a large children's collection. "In a city that prides itself on being digital, Bookstop defies any and all arguments of the book being dead by constantly, quietly, stating, through its continual presence, 'long live the book,'" Ms. Wanner said. Visual artists work in the studio space of this nonprofit organization started by the National Museum of Kenya in 1995. They also showcase and sell works that include paintings, ceramics, sculptures and bags. "A visit into the space is like attending an exhibition that's continually in progress. And it's a great thing. Reserve at least two hours to go through the space, to truly enjoy the experience," Ms. Wanner said. At this spot, you can either participate in paintball or go karting, called GP karting in Kenya. Both activities require protective gear for safety. "I prefer GP Karting. I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie and unlike paintball shooting, which is a team sport, in GP Karting one's win is entirely in their hands." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Europe's festering debt crisis may well be approaching its own post Lehman Brothers moment, when fear of the unthinkable finally prompted British and American governments to take radical action and force most of their capital thin banks to accept government money whether they liked it or not. But to the frustration of many, Europe seems far removed from such a drastic move. Instead, the euro zone's top banking supervisor will announce on Friday the results of its latest examination into the health of its financial institutions. It is an exercise that an increasingly desperate European Union hopes will quell investor fears that the region's banks have become too impaired by holdings that may be seriously overvalued to provide the loans needed to stimulate economic growth. While European finance ministers pledged this week that they would have a backstop plan for vulnerable banks, in practice that task will be left to national banking regulators, who have varying levels of resources and political will. The banks' stress test results come at a time of cresting market anxiety, spurred in particular by worries of a strike by domestic buyers for Italian government bonds. On Thursday, the yields on two year Italian bonds an accurate gauge of short term market sentiment were at 4 percent, higher than Spain's and double what they were a year ago. (For Greece, two year money is available at a rate around 30 percent.) And the overnight Euribor rate what banks in Europe charge each other for short term loans more than doubled over the last week, to 1.47 percent from 0.6 percent, as banks within the euro zone have become more reluctant to lend to each other. That is still well below the high of around 4 percent reached after the Lehman collapse. But bankers say the increased jitters in Italy are leading investment banks to demand higher amounts of collateral and cash to back up their loans to Italian counterparties. The stress test is the third in three years but only the second in which results are being made public. It is being overseen by the European Banking Authority, based in London, which has scoured the balance sheets and capital levels of 91 banks, focusing on the exposure banks have to the dubious sovereign debt of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. The survey last year was widely condemned after Irish banks failed just months after receiving passing grades. Regulators have tried to strike a different tone this year. "There will be a certain number of banks that will not pass and others that barely do so," said Michel Barnier, the European Union commissioner for internal markets. That fact, he said, "will be strong evidence that these tests are credible." The new tests will require a reserve benchmark of 5 percent core Tier 1 capital and that the banks be able to handle a 0.5 percent economic contraction in the euro zone in 2011, a 15 percent drop in European stock markets and potential trading losses on sovereign debt. Since the last stress tests a year ago, the banks have raised 67 billion euros ( 94.2 billion) in new capital, according to Morgan Stanley, a relative pittance given that European banks have on their books 1.1 trillion euros in government debt from Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. For some large and systemically important banks, the margin for error is thin indeed. At the French bank Credit Agricole, Greek holdings are about equal to its equity. (Societe Generale and BNP Paribas also have significant Greek bond exposures but benefit from larger capital buffers). And for the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is majority owned by the British government, the same is the case for the Irish loans on its books. Other banks seen as vulnerable include Germany's landesbanks, typically owned by state and municipal governments, whose officials treasure the influence the institutions convey in the local economy. Helaba is the only German bank expected to fail the stress test, though others may come close. Europe's critics argue that a stress test that lacks a central impetus forcing banks to increase capital in a significant way could do more harm than good. The results will highlight the fragility of systemically important financial institutions, the critics say, without providing the means to strengthen them. In that vein, they say the European Financial Stability Facility, a 440 billion euro ( 625 billion) rescue fund set up to funnel cash to weak nations should be tapped not to buy discounted Greek debt on secondary markets as is being discussed, but to invest directly in sickly euro zone banks, either from existing funds or via a bond offering. "It is clear that the combination of the stress tests and the coming restructurings will require bolstering European bank capital using the E.F.S.F. and national sources, probably in combination," said Barry Eichengreen, an economist and expert on the euro at the University of California, Berkeley. According to bankers, policy makers in the United States and Canada, as well as at the International Monetary Fund, have been privately urging Europe to take such a step. Such a move would be politically fraught, however. What is more, Europe's decentralized system of regulators and pseudo government actors which includes the European Central Bank, the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Banking Authority, as well as 17 national governments in the euro zone and the lack of a figure like Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former United States Treasury secretary, or Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, to concentrate wavering minds, makes such a sweeping, ego bruising action very difficult to undertake. While more powerful than the institution that preceded it, the European Banking Authority still lacks crucial powers like the ability to oversee revamping of a pan European financial institution. In addition, this round of stress testing will suffer from a crucial weakness of last year's round: it will not examine what would happen to banks if Greece or another European country defaulted on its debt. The tests "will probably show a small minority of banks failing, mainly in the euro zone periphery, with possibly a few banks in core euro zone countries failing, too," Marie Diron, an economist who advises the consulting firm Ernst Young, said in a note. Europe's banks tower over the economies in which they operate, much more so than in the United States. That gives them not only significant political influence but also explains why European governments have been so reluctant to push for a write down on bank debt holdings. In France, the assets of the top five French banks are 325 percent of gross domestic product, in Belgium the ratio is 199 percent and in Italy 140 percent. In the United States, the figure is 60 percent. In Spain, for example, Banco Santander, the largest bank in the euro zone by market capitalization, has assets that are 114 percent of that country's G.D.P. Demand for low cost loans from the European Central Bank, a barometer of banks' ability to raise money in open markets, remains high. On Wednesday, 230 banks took out one week loans at 1.5 percent interest from the central bank, a sign that many continue to have trouble borrowing in money markets at interest rates they can afford. But until Europe's leaders can develop a unified approach to the crisis, such uncertainty is likely to continue. "Europe's reluctance to face up to the problem of its banks is very dangerous," said George Soros, the hedge fund executive, who advocates a centralized regulatory authority and a Europe wide deposit guarantee system. "The authorities are just buying time. But they are wrong because time is working against them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
School, as most of us know it, came to a halt this spring. There were no graduation gatherings and no proms. No study abroad or in person summer classes. And what will happen in September is still largely unknown. Yet in the digital world, a different kind of academic community is thriving, one where students have created a niche of their own, along with an aesthetic that mirrors the world they once knew. Known as Dark Academia, it is a subculture with a heavy emphasis on reading, writing, learning and a look best described as traditional academic with a gothic edge; think slubby brown cardigans, vintage tweed pants, a worn leather satchel full of a stack of books, dark photos, brooding poetry and skulls lined up next to candles. Sydney Decker, for example, an 18 year old theater student in the United States who runs the popular MyFairestTreasure, a Dark Academia themed Instagram account, began posting about Dark Academia outfits in January 2020, after discovering the community at the end of her fall semester in college. She has since amassed over 18,000 followers and focuses on mood boards inspired by literary references, such as retro looks that mimic Hogwarts houses and wardrobe ideas for Neil Perry from "Dead Poets Society." "I am completely obsessed over the fashion associated with the aesthetic: the tweed blazers, plaid pants, black turtlenecks and sophisticated accessories," Ms. Decker said. "Part of me truly aspires to collect all of these pieces and wear them whenever possible." In the halls of Dark Academia, nostalgia and a world free of modern technology reign. Many of the community members focus on what life might have been like in the 19th and early 20th century at private schools in England, boarding schools, prep schools or Ivy League colleges in New England. A typical post may involve teens showing off their argyle sweaters to classical tunes, followed by a series of photos of leather bound books, handwritten notes, a page from "Wuthering Heights" and a shot of classic Greek architecture. It's not unusual to see fans dressing up as their favorite book characters or posting vintage photos of novelist Donna Tartt, author of "The Secret History," Dark Academia's essential text. The 1992 murder mystery told in reverse deftly connects its characters and plot to the English suits, French cuffs, plaid shirts and tweed jackets that define them. According to Natalie Black, director of Strategy Insights at Hierarchy, and the founder of Culture x Curate, it is "The Secret History" that serves as a guide to transforming "the entire aesthetic into an actual lifestyle. The trend is an interesting remix from a broad range of eras, from the 18th century to the 1940s." Though it's unclear how and where, exactly, Dark Academia began, many users discovered it on Tumblr. Ana Alsan, for example, a 21 year old English literature and linguistics student in Brazil who runs the Dark. Academia Instagram account, said she initially encountered the subculture on Tumblr in 2014. "It was not the 'Dark Academia' that we know today," Ms. Alsan said. Instead, Dark Academia on Tumblr focused on dark photos and written posts about what books to read. "But it had a lot of gothic and classic aspects." Lilly Borges, 15, who posts videos of her argyle sweaters, classic architecture and Virginia Woolf novels under the Dark Academia tag also found Dark Academia on Tumblr when it was a much smaller community. "The community is very special to me because as a child I was very shy and reserved. I kept to myself, and was very interested in academics at a young age," she said. "My favorite book in 7th grade was 'Crime and Punishment.'" Though it can sound niche, part of Dark Academia's appeal is the fact that it is both more approachable aesthetically than other popular internet subcultures one example being Cottagecore, the internet aesthetic inspired by a romanticized interpretation of rural life and also emphasizes inclusivity and gender fluidity. To be part of Dark Academia, you don't have to have access to a country house, a field of flowers, a big kitchen for baking or an expensive prairie dress. Most of the clothing Dark Academia fans wear is vintage and can easily be found in secondhand stores or sites. Laura Piszczatowska, a history student in Norway, runs the Dark Academia Instagram account Geminnorum (over 28,000 followers), where she posts photos of old Spanish buildings by night, the flicker of a candle and typewriters. On TikTok, she makes videos set to piano music from the Vitamin String Quartet showing stacks of books, cups of tea, antique postcards and letters written in ink. "My typical outfit is tweed pants, black turtleneck or a white shirt, elegant shoes and long coats," she said. "My favorite coat is one I thrifted for a low price." Similarly, Evelyn Meyer, a 20 year old who created the "Dark Academia check" sound in September 2019, often favors clothing from the men's section of Goodwill in her videos, as well as the pages of books tacked up on her wall, a typewriter she owns, and paperback novels by beatniks and transcendentalists. "The androgynous vintage blazer is definitely representative for the aesthetic," said Dilara Schloz, a fashion historian and researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, who considers herself an adherent of the Dark Academia subculture. "It can be worn by boys, girls and anyone who does not fit into any of these definitions. Anyone can be feminine and anyone can be masculine. The silhouette of a classic Dark Academia outfit often reminds us of a 1930s or 1940s men's look." Indeed, Dark Academia also has a dedicated LGBTQ following, in part thanks to the fact many of the books and films that Dark Academia prizes such as "Kill your Darlings," about the poet Allen Ginsberg, and "If We Were Villains," by M.L. Rio, with LGBTQ characters. "It's a very open community, even though it's about classics," said Lucien K, 21, who posts Dark Academia TikToks of himself reading books and doing makeup to the tune of Vivaldi. "It's also about breaking stereotypes regardless of gender or sexuality." As study halls, workshopping essays and round table discussions go virtual, and many students are left wondering when they'll be able to dress up and go to classes again, Dark Academia is filling the void. "I think a good part of Dark Academia is aesthetics, but it's also a community," said Declan Lyman, 15, who posts Dark Academia videos on TikTok. "The more you get into the whole vibe, the more you feel connected to other people in the tags. The main point is a desire to learn." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The 85th N.F.L. draft might have lacked the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip and bro hugs with Roger Goodell, but the first virtual draft in league history still had its football pyrotechnics. There were a few chip shots, like quarterback Joe Burrow getting picked first overall by the Cincinnati Bengals. But there were also plenty of other surprises and intrigue not all of it generated by the Raiders. Aaron Rodgers now knows how Brett Favre felt. Favre, umm, did not take it kindly when Green Bay drafted Rodgers with the 24th pick in 2005. The Packers traded up to select Jordan Love at No. 26, not because they envision him succeeding Rodgers this season, or even in 2021. The job still belongs to Rodgers, 36, who is under contract through 2023. But Green Bay, at a prime draft spot, did not ignore other areas of need wide receiver, especially so that Love can back up Rodgers indefinitely. Perhaps Rodgers can fend off Love, as Tom Brady did in New England with Jimmy Garoppolo, forcing Green Bay to deal the Utah State quarterback for other assets. The Packers did not improve their 2020 team on Thursday night, and Rodgers when not wondering why the team hasn't picked an offensive skill player in the first round since, well, him surely could question how he now fits into the Packers' long term plans. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. The Dolphins, despite razing the roster, won a few games last season and still drafted the quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa, it was reportedly tanking for. That's some good karma right there. Miami's grand plan started taking shape during free agency, when it lured cornerback Byron Jones, linebackers Kyle Van Noy and Elandon Roberts and the defensive end Emmanuel Ogbah. But it did not truly come to fruition until Thursday night, when the team could expend some of the draft capital it had compiled. Miami took Tagovailoa at No. 5 and their future left tackle, Austin Jackson of Southern California, at No. 18 before trading down and adding an athletic corner, Noah Igbinoghene of Auburn, at No. 30. And they're not done: The Dolphins have three picks Friday, when the second and third rounds are held, and nine (!) on Saturday, for rounds 4 through 7. Jackson will bolster an offensive line that allowed 58 sacks last season, and Igbinoghene slides into the most improved secondary in the A.F.C. East. But Tagovailoa is the centerpiece, and for a team that's been searching for a quarterback since Dan Marino retired, he represents an altogether fitting choice. By shedding talent last off season, the Dolphins chose an unpopular rebuilding path. They were chided and lampooned. It was a risk because weird things happen in the N.F.L. and even bad teams win sometimes. In the end, that strategy led them to Tagovailoa, who, because of health and durability concerns, is hardly a safe pick. But the Dolphins were rewarded for their aggressiveness once, and now they hope they will be again. The Tom Brady era may be over in New England, but don't expect coach Bill Belichick to change. The Patriots had the 23rd pick in the first round, but rather than use the spot to upgrade at, say, quarterback, it traded the pick to the Los Angeles Chargers and received a second round pick (37th overall) and a third round pick (71st overall) in return. There's a method to Belichick's trades. The Patriots had traded a second round pick last season to get wide receiver Mohamed Sanu, and have not made a first round pick in four of the past eight years. Now they have 13 picks over the next two days of the draft. But as my colleague, Bill Pennington, noted, the Patriots will probably have to trade a top player to create salary cap space. They currently have about 1 million in cap space, which isn't enough to sign even their incoming draft class. But packaging, for example, the All Pro guard Joe Thuney with a valuable 2021 pick would free up 15 million in cap space. The ultimate currency in any debate about the strongest college conference is how many players end up in the N.F.L. This year, the Southeastern Conference was undeniably the winner, with 15 of its players selected with the first 32 picks of the draft. Nine of those picks came from L.S.U., the national champions, and Alabama. Auburn and Georgia each had two players selected. Three Ohio State players were chosen Thursday, including the second (Chase Young) and third (Jeff Okudah) picks over all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
NASHVILLE One day last fall, deep in the middle of a devastating drought, I was walking the dog when a van bearing the logo of a mosquito control company blew past me and parked in front of a neighbor's house. The whole vehicle stank of chemicals, even going 40 miles an hour. The man who emerged from the truck donned a massive backpack carrying a tank full of insecticide and proceeded to spray every bush and plant in the yard. Then he got in his truck, drove two doors down, and sprayed that yard, too, before continuing his route all around the block. Here's the most heartbreaking thing about the whole episode: He was spraying for mosquitoes that didn't even exist: Last year's extreme drought ended mosquito breeding season long before the first freeze. Nevertheless, the mosquito vans arrived every three weeks, right on schedule, drenching the yards with poison for no reason but the schedule itself. And spraying for mosquitoes isn't the half of it, as any walk through the lawn care department of a big box store will attest. People want the outdoors to work like an extension of their homes fashionable, tidy, predictable. Above all, comfortable. So weedy yards filled with tiny wildflowers get bulldozed end to end and replaced with sod cared for by homeowners spraying from a bottle marked "backyard bug control" or by lawn services that leave behind tiny signs warning, "Lawn care application; keep off the grass." If only songbirds could read. Most people don't seem to know that in this context "application" and "control" are simply euphemisms for "poison." A friend once mentioned to me that she'd love to put up a nest box for bluebirds, and I offered to help her choose a good box and a safe spot for it in her yard, explaining that she would also need to tell her yard service to stop spraying. "I had no idea those guys were spraying," she said. To enjoy a lush green lawn or to sit on your patio without being eaten alive by mosquitoes doesn't seem like too much to ask unless you actually know that insecticides designed to kill mosquitoes will also kill every other kind of insect: earthworms and caterpillars, spiders and mites, honeybees and butterflies, native bees and lightning bugs. Unless you actually know that herbicides also kill insects when they ingest the poisoned plants. The global insect die off is so precipitous that, if the trend continues, there will be no insects left a hundred years from now. That's a problem for more than the bugs themselves: Insects are responsible for pollinating roughly 75 percent of all flowering plants, including one third of the human world's food supply. They form the basis of much of the animal world's food supply, as well. When we poison the bugs and the weeds, we are also poisoning the turtles and tree frogs, the bats and screech owls, the songbirds and skinks. "If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet's ecosystems and for the survival of mankind," Francisco Sanchez Bayo of the University of Sydney, Australia, told The Guardian last year. Lawn chemicals are not, by themselves, the cause of the insect apocalypse, of course. Heat waves can render male insects sterile; loss of habitat can cause precipitous population declines; agricultural pesticides kill land insects and, by way of runoff into the nation's waterways, aquatic insects, as well. As individuals, we can help to slow such trends, but we don't have the power to reverse them. Changing the way we think about our own yards is the only thing we have complete control over. And since homeowners use up 10 times more pesticide per acre than farmers do, changing the way we think about our yards can make a huge difference to our fellow creatures. It can make a huge difference to our own health, too: As the Garden Club of America notes in its Great Healthy Yard Project, synthetic pesticides are endocrine disrupters linked to an array of human health problems, including autism, A.D.H.D., diabetes and cancer. So many people have invested so completely in the chemical control of the outdoors that every subdivision in this country might as well be declared a Superfund site. Changing our relationship to our yards is simple: Just don't spray. Let the tiny wildflowers take root within the grass. Use an oscillating fan to keep the mosquitoes away. Tug the weeds out of the flower bed with your own hands and feel the benefit of a natural antidepressant at the same time. Trust the natural world to perform its own insect control, and watch the songbirds and the tree frogs and the box turtles and the friendly garter snakes return to their homes among us. Because butterflies and bluebirds don't respect property lines, our best hope is to make this simple change a community effort. For 25 years, my husband and I have been trying to create a wildlife sanctuary of this half acre lot, planting native flowers for the bees and the butterflies, leaving the garden messy as a safe place for overwintering insects. Despite our best efforts, our yard is being visibly changed anyway. Fewer birds. Fewer insects. Fewer everything. Half an acre, it turns out, is not enough to sustain wildlife unless the other half acre lots are nature friendly, too. It's spring now, and nearly every day I get a flier in the mail advertising a yard service or a mosquito control company. I will never poison this yard, but I save the fliers anyway, as a reminder of what we're up against. I keep them next to an eastern swallowtail butterfly that my 91 year old father in law found dead on the sidewalk. He saved it for me because he knows how many flowers I've planted over the years to feed the pollinators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
"Sonic the Hedgehog" shot to the top of the box office this weekend, opening to an estimated 57 million in domestic ticket sales a somewhat unlikely success story for the film, an adaptation of a video game series about a little blue creature with a superhuman sprint. The movie could easily have been a box office disaster. Domestic moviegoers haven't always been particularly kind to adaptations of video games; "Warcraft" and "Assassin's Creed," from 2016, and the more recent "Tomb Raider" reboot, all struggled at the box office. And the creators of "Sonic the Hedgehog" redesigned its digital title character, delaying the movie's release, after audiences ridiculed an early trailer. But "Sonic the Hedgehog," distributed by Paramount Pictures and based on the Sega video game character, has more than avoided catastrophe. It brought in an additional estimated 43 million overseas this weekend, according to the studio, bringing its global opening weekend total to 100 million. The movie's budget was reportedly 85 million. Directed by Jeff Fowler, "Sonic the Hedgehog" pairs its blue, fur covered hero (voiced by Ben Schwartz) with a human friend played by James Marsden, and pits them against a mustachioed villain played by Jim Carrey. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Bronwyn Anne Thompson Haltom and Thomas Hicks Midanek were married Dec. 29 at Loft 310, an events space in Kalamazoo, Mich. Randy Campbell, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated. The bride, 27, and groom, 29, own THM Consulting, a political and marketing consulting firm based in Kalamazoo, for which she specializes in digital consulting, client management, copy writing and creative design, and he in general consulting and advertising. The bride, who graduated from the University of Michigan, is a daughter of J. Colby Wingate and Richard Carothers Haltom of Kalamazoo. The bride's father owns Lawton Ridge Winery in Kalamazoo. Her mother is the co author of "Cooking with Gluten and Seitan" (Book Publishing Company, 1993). The groom, who graduated from American University, is a son of Deborah Hicks Midanek Bailey of Grenada, Miss., and James I. Midanek of Wilmington, Del. The groom's mother is the founder and managing partner in Solon Group, a company in Grenada, Miss., that focuses on turnaround situations, restructuring and financing for companies. His father is the chief investment officer at the Bank Corp in Wilmington. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
ESPN's pregame show "College GameDay" is a fixture of the college football season for a company that pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the Big Ten Conference to show its games. Canceled games present a new financial challenge to those deals. Kevin Warren, the commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, might exhale slightly on Saturday afternoon in Indianapolis once the final whistle blows and Northwestern or Ohio State is crowned the league's champion. His conference will have completed a most unusual football season, one where matters like whether it was even safe to play at all became far more urgent than who won or lost. But in the days after the game, Warren will retrain his attention on a conundrum nearly as daunting as playing a season during the coronavirus pandemic: what to do about the approximately 110 million worth of football games the Big Ten failed to deliver to its television partners. Nobody expects a solution right away. "You have to look at the relationship over the long haul," Warren said in an interview this week. "You can't just look at the season in 2020 and that certain content was not delivered the way it was written in the contract years before." Executives across American sports have been grappling with similar issues as games have been canceled and seasons truncated. The fates of television deals are particularly crucial in college sports, where athletic departments have warned of the possibility of financial ruin and schools in some leagues, including the Big Ten, have gone months without money from ticket sales. Stocked with some of the biggest brands in sports, including Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State, the Big Ten earns more revenue more than 781 million in its 2019 fiscal year and distributes more money to its member schools than any other league in college athletics. Most of the money, an average of around 440 million each year through 2023, comes from its media rights agreements with Fox, ESPN and CBS. And while college broadcasting contracts can cover a range of sports, ESPN and Fox are mostly paying the Big Ten for football games. Fox's contract with the league ordinarily guarantees it between 24 and 27 games annually, as well as the championship matchup, while ESPN's contract promises it 27 games. (The Big Ten's agreement with CBS covers only basketball games.) But this season, because of reduced schedules and the cancellations of games because of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox will only show 16 games and the championship, while ESPN will show just 15. In other words, the Big Ten owes its media partners at least 20 football games. They will have to make that up with money, even if it's not clear how (or how much) they might pay. For the 190 million it pays on average annually, ESPN also gets 38 men's basketball games, some women's basketball games and about 30 events in Olympic sports. For most conferences that are strongest in football compared with other sports, football games make up about 80 percent of the value of rights agreements, according to two of the people. Eighty percent of the 190 million ESPN pays on average annually means that ESPN is paying around 152 million to show 27 games, which means that each regular season game is worth about 5.5 million each. The math for Fox yields a similar figure but is a bit more complicated because for the 240 million it pays on average annually, it also gets the championship game and the first pick each year of which games to broadcast. That means Fox and ESPN would normally pay around 110 million for the 20 games the Big Ten did not deliver. Those figures are broad outlines because individual games are not line items in the contract agreements. One university administrator at a Big Ten school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the value of each game was better understood as a range, estimating between 4 million and 6 million apiece. "We are missing games, as is the conference," said Mark Silverman, the president of national networks at Fox Sports. "Obviously everyone is being financially impacted by this." There are no specific contractual mechanisms to resolve the missing games. That makes the situation difficult but it also provides an opportunity to be creative. But Warren, a lawyer by training who took over the Big Ten this year after working as a top executive in the N.F.L., said he had spent much of the recent months tending to the league's broadcast partners. Health and safety issues dominate his days, Warren said. But relationships in the television industry follow close behind, and he traveled this year to California, Connecticut and New York to huddle with top broadcast executives. "The way I have to look at it is we're sitting on the same side of the table with our partners and not across from them," Warren said, adding that "people didn't throw their hands up and say, 'We'll see you in court.'" The end of football season, once nobody needs to adjust week to week to whether games are happening at all, is expected to accelerate negotiations. Warren declined to detail what the Big Ten might ultimately offer the TV networks to satisfy the league's obligations. But industry experts said what the conference surrenders will almost assuredly be a combination of money and other considerations. "It varies depending upon what is involved," said Silverman, who has seen major alterations to Fox's normal schedules with Major League Baseball, NASCAR, the Pac 12, Big 12 and Major League Soccer, among other leagues. He added: "Can you create more games, can you not? How long is this deal versus this other deal?" Media agreements with professional sports leagues usually have language for how to deal with a strike or a lockout, and one off game cancellations because of extreme weather or other unexpected events can be resolved over the course of the season. If the Big Ten had not played football this fall, like its university chancellors and presidents originally decided in August before reversing course in September, the contracts could have rolled over another year, expiring in 2024 instead of 2023 Instead, by playing a shortened season only within its conference this autumn, the Big Ten set up what could become a complex, high stakes dance testing contract law, interpersonal relationships and business ties. "This will be an iterative process, and it will be an ongoing process," Warren said. "This will never be, and it was never going to be, where we sat down and had one day and it was going to be clear." The outcome of the talks will reverberate throughout the league's footprint, which is largely in the Midwest but reaches from Nebraska to New Jersey. Athletic teams across the country are being cut, and the N.C.A.A., stung by the cancellation of its national basketball tournaments in the spring, reduced its payout to conferences by hundreds of millions of dollars. State budget crunches because of the pandemic are sure to soon affect public colleges and universities, even those with self sustaining athletic departments. Every dollar counts. Ohio State's athletic department, for example, earned 210.5 million in operating revenue during the 2018 19 school year, according to a financial report it submitted to the N.C.A.A. Ticket sales, its biggest source of revenue, generated almost 60 million and will shrink to close to nothing in 2020. It reported receiving almost no revenue from the state, university or student fees. Its second biggest source of revenue was media rights an expansive category that includes television deals brokered by the Big Ten which accounted for 22 percent of its budget, 45.6 million. Television revenue, which the Big Ten distributes close to evenly to its member institutions, is even more important to the schools that aren't traditional athletic powers. At Minnesota, for instance, media revenue accounted for 33 percent of the athletic department's 130.5 million in operating revenue in 2018 19. There are conspicuous benefits to leagues and media companies working out what to do about lost games without court fights. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Harold Evans, the crusading British newspaperman who was forced out as editor of The Times of London by Rupert Murdoch in 1982 and reinvented himself in the United States as a publisher, author and literary luminary, died on Wednesday night in New York City. He was 92. His wife, the editor Tina Brown, confirmed his death in a statement. She told Reuters, where Mr. Evans had been editor at large, that the cause was congestive heart failure. From smoky Fleet Street newsrooms to star studded literary circles in New York, Mr. Evans climbed to success with relentless independence, innovative ideas and an appetite for risks that often led to postwar changes in journalism, publishing and public tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, he helped redefine high quality newspapers and pushed back legal restrictions on the press. In the United States, he edited national magazines, introduced new scope and glitz to book publishing as the head of Random House, wrote history books and a best selling memoir, and, with Ms. Brown, who edited Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, dazzled and upset the cognoscenti. Sometimes risking ruinous fines or even jail, he challenged British libel and national security laws; campaigned successfully for national Pap tests to detect cervical cancer; exposed the horrors of thalidomide; and traced the bungling of Britain's secret intelligence services in the case of Kim Philby, the double agent who defected to Moscow. Journalists in 2002 voted for him as Britain's greatest newspaper editor of all time. But at the peak of his success he ran afoul of Mr. Murdoch, the Australian media magnate. Mr. Murdoch had added The Times and The Sunday Times, together the broadsheet voice of the British establishment for 200 years, to his tabloid empire and then reneged on his promise not to interfere with their editorial independence. It was a titanic yearlong struggle that Mr. Evans inevitably lost, as he recalled in "Good Times, Bad Times," a 1983 memoir that chronicled the episode. "Ultimately, all stands or falls on the values and judgement of the proprietor," he wrote. "At its highest levels, a great newspaper is not simply a personal possession but a public trust." Arriving in the United States in 1984, he landed on his feet, but his wife hit the ground running. Formerly editor of Tatler magazine in Britain, Ms. Brown became the editor of Vanity Fair (1984 92) and The New Yorker (1992 98), injecting those magazines with new energy while stoking controversies with her own iconoclastic style. She later started and edited the news website The Daily Beast. Mr. Evans taught at universities, edited several publications and was the founding editor of Conde Nast Traveler. But it was as president and publisher of Random House, from 1990 to 1997, that he gained prominence and came to symbolize an era of change in publishing, a business unaccustomed to swift, startling moves. Acting with journalistic speed, Mr. Evans shook up staffs, spent millions, turned profits, provoked resentment and admiration, and created a buzz more often associated with Hollywood movies than books. His mandate from the owner, S.I. Newhouse Jr., was to revamp a narrowly focused, barely profitable house that had embodied excellence since publishing James Joyce's "Ulysses" in 1934. He soon broadened Random House's list of titles to include business, science, art, photography, poetry, current events and blockbuster novels. He published Norman Mailer, William Styron, E.L. Doctorow, Henry A. Kissinger, Joe Klein's anonymous 1996 novel "Primary Colors," and Gen. Colin L. Powell's "My American Journey" (1995, with Joseph E. Persico). But he overspent lavishly on some advances: 2.5 million for Dick Morris's "Behind the Oval Office" (1997) and 5 million for Marlon Brando's autobiography, "Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994, with Robert Lindsey). Mr. Evans bubbled with enthusiasm for the photographs of Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe, for a reintroduced list of Modern Library classics, and for his unabashedly commercial promotions a festival of Shaw plays to publicize a new biography and, to advertise "Beast," Peter Benchley's giant octopus sequel to "Jaws," beach banners proclaiming "There's something in the water!" Harold Matthew Evans was born in Manchester, England, on June 28, 1928, the oldest of four sons of Frederick and Mary (Haselum) Evans. His father was a railroad engineer, his mother a grocery shopkeeper. He was 11 when World War II began, and he hid with his family in shelters near their grimy rowhouse on the outskirts of Manchester as German bombers destroyed the city center. He graduated in 1943 from St. Mary's Road Central School, where he played soccer, edited a student newspaper and became an ardent moviegoer. "Hollywood reinforced my infatuation with newspapers," he recalled. "I identified with the small town editor standing up to the crooks, the tough reporter winning the story and the girl, and the foreign correspondent outwitting enemy agents." He got his first job in 1944 at a weekly, The Ashton under Lyne Reporter, before serving in the Royal Air Force from 1946 to 1949. He studied economics and political science at the University of Durham, graduating in 1952, and then joined The Manchester Evening News as a reporter and editorial writer. On an American fellowship from 1956 to 1957, he studied at the University of Chicago and Stanford University. In 1953, Mr. Evans married Enid Parker. They had three children, Ruth, Katherine and Michael, and were divorced in 1978. He married Ms. Brown in 1981 they had met when he was editing The Sunday Times and she wrote for the paper as a freelancer and had two children with her, Georgie and Isabel. In addition to Ms. Brown, his children survive him, as do two grandchildren and a brother, Peter. In 1961, Mr. Evans became editor of The Northern Echo, a paper in Darlington, a working class area in northeast England. There he began crusading, demanding an inquiry into the case of Timothy Evans (no relation), who had been hanged in 1950 for killing his wife and infant daughter, largely on the testimony of a neighbor who was later convicted of the crimes. His campaign led to a posthumous pardon and contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in Britain in 1965. Hired in 1966 by The Sunday Times, he became editor a year later and transformed the staid weekly into Britain's best investigative paper. His reports in 1967 revealed that the Soviet mole Kim Philby had not been a low level diplomat when he defected in 1963 but the head of anti Soviet intelligence and chief liaison to the C.I.A. Charges that Mr. Evans had jeopardized national security with his revelations were withdrawn in embarrassment. What many called his greatest triumph arose in an inquiry into the tranquilizer thalidomide, which caused severe deformities in thousands of babies and led to lawsuits against a drugmaker. Mr. Evans campaigned for compensation for the victims and challenged a law against publishing articles that might prejudice pending lawsuits. The drugmaker finally paid settlements, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain's efforts to suppress the reports had violated free speech, and Parliament liberalized the country's civil contempt laws. After his much publicized departure from The Times and his move to the United States, Mr. Evans taught at Duke and Yale Universities, became editor of the book publisher The Atlantic Monthly Press and took up the post of editorial director of the newsmagazine U.S. News World Report, with a mandate to redesign it. He was later the founding editor of Conde Nast Traveler, where he worked from 1986 to 1990. The magazine broke ground with tough reports by writers who, unlike those covering the travel industry for many other publications, were forbidden to accept free travel, meals or accommodations from those they were writing about. Some advertisers withdrew, but the magazine prospered and won awards. Mr. Evans became an American citizen in 1993. After leaving Random House in 1997, he was an executive of The Daily News in New York, U.S. News World Report (in a second stint), The Atlantic Monthly and the business magazine Fast Company. During this time he wrote "The American Century" (1998, with Gail Buckland and Kevin Baker), a lavishly illustrated best seller that critics called an ambitious and innovative approach to history. Other books followed: "War Stories: Reporting in the Time of Conflict From the Crimea to Iraq" (2003), "They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine, Two Centuries of Innovators" (2004, with Gail Buckland and David Lefer), his best selling memoir "My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times" (2009) and "Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters" (2018). In 2011, he was named editor at large of the Reuters news agency. For all Mr. Evans's forays into magazine editing, book publishing and writing, he never lost his passion for newspapers. "How delicious the smell of the still warm newsprint!" he wrote in "My Paper Chase." And he remained a muckraker at heart. "A newspaper is an argument on the way to a deadline," he declared. "If there isn't any argument, there's not much of a newspaper." Yet he feared for the future of newspapers and what impact their decline might have on the democratic institutions that he so extolled in his book "The American Century." "I think a certain commitment to the public good has vanished in the race for circulation," he told NPR in 2009. "I think that is accentuated when you get newspapers taken over, as you have across America, by people who either borrow extensively to buy the paper, or never had any interest in what real journalism is about in the first place. "The kind of investigative journalism, which I think is the absolute essence, is in danger and, in fact, in many places has vanished," he added. "We have to have this searchlight to know what the hell is going on. So when newspapers or TV neglect reporting, so you get chunks of opinion without any factual basis whatsoever, we're all going to suffer for it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. Conservative activists who want the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates distributed chocolate coins in golden wrappers at the local airport last week as Fed officials arrived for their annual policy retreat. Liberal activists in green "Whose Recovery?" T shirts formed a receiving line at the resort hotel in the heart of Grand Teton National Park where the meeting was held, to personalize their argument that the Fed should wait. Sometime soon possibly as early as mid September and probably no later than the end of the year the Fed plans to raise its benchmark interest rate one quarter of one percentage point, a mathematically minor move that has become a very big deal. Investors, who always pay attention to the Fed, are paying particular attention now. The central bank has held short term rates near zero since December 2008; the impending end of that era is one cause of recent financial market turmoil. But the Fed's plans have also become the latest point of contention in a broader debate about the government's management of the American economy, pitting liberals who see a need for more aggressive measures to bolster growth against conservatives concerned that Washington and the Fed are already doing much too much. "There shouldn't be this intense interest in a quarter point increase, and there shouldn't be this intense interest in whether it comes in September or December," said Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton economist and the Fed's vice chairman in the mid 1990s. "But the Fed remains the center of the financial universe. People stare at it like they stare at the North Star." And so, as Fed officials conferred with other central bankers and academics, the liberal activists held two days of "Fed Up" teach ins in a room directly below the main conference, while the conservatives convened a "Jackson Hole Summit" at a nearby dude ranch. In the decades before the financial crisis, policy makers generally agreed that central banks should focus on moderating inflation. Now, both that goal and the best way to achieve it are subjects of debate. Liberals argue that the Fed should aim more broadly to lower unemployment and encourage rising living standards. Conservatives want to strengthen the focus on inflation by requiring officials to follow rules in making policy. "The conference was more about what we don't know, about a candid willingness to analyze what we don't know," said Lucrezia Reichlin, a professor at London Business School and former director general of research at the European Central Bank. "It did not really inspire confidence" in monetary policy. The formal program, on "Inflation Dynamics and Monetary Policy," was devoted to the vexing reality that inflation in recent years has not behaved as economists predicted. The basic paradigm, known as the Phillips Curve, is that inflation falls as unemployment rises, and rises as unemployment falls. But inflation did not fall as much as expected during the Great Recession, and it has remained surprisingly weak during the recovery. Over the course of two days, the invited academics argued that the real story was more complicated. One study, for example, presented evidence that prices fall more slowly during recessions because cash short firms actually tend to increase prices in the face of declining demand for their products. "Once you integrate all these dynamics, it may turn out that life is not that simple," said Eric M. Leeper, an economist at Indiana University and co author of a paper arguing that central banks need better economic models. Central bankers, however, have shown little interest in paradigm shifts. Several said that the basic understanding of inflation, while obviously imperfect, remains more functional than any alternatives. "I don't think the folks at the Fed are of a mind to redesign monetary policy just because of what happened during the crisis," said Jon Faust, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University and a former adviser to the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, and her predecessor, Ben S. Bernanke. Indeed, Vitor Constancio, vice president of the European Central Bank, said the euro area was currently experiencing "a renaissance of the Phillips Curve." Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, painted a somewhat more complicated picture of inflation, arguing that the role of labor market slack is easily overstated, and that exchange rates play an important role. But his bottom line, too, was that the Fed understands inflation well enough to predict its movements. While domestic inflation has been surprisingly sluggish for years now, Mr. Fischer said on Friday that his confidence in an eventual rebound remained "pretty high." The organizers of the fringe conferences acknowledged the odds against their more radical proposals. The Center for Popular Democracy, which organized the "Fed Up" campaign, wants the Fed to keep rates near zero even as overall unemployment falls, to spur wage gains and help members of minorities, in particular, find jobs. It brought about 50 people to Jackson Hole as part of an effort to engage community groups that generally focus on civil rights or local issues like minimum wage laws. Dawn O'Neal, 48, makes 8.50 an hour as a day care worker in suburban Atlanta; her husband has not found regular construction work in a year. When Ms. O'Neal needs a refill on her asthma medication, she cuts back on food, buying hot dogs instead of beef and canned vegetables instead of fresh vegetables. "I don't feel like anyone at the Fed has ever had to make a decision about whether to eat or get medication, and so when I hear that they're going to raise interest rates in September, it angers me and it scares me," Ms. O'Neal said. The protesters struck a chord with some officials at the main meeting. Jason Furman, President Obama's chief economic adviser, went downstairs and delivered an impromptu speech. "We don't comment on monetary policy, but what I can say is that monetary policy matters," he told the activists. The prosperity of the late 1990s, he added, resulted in part from "a set of decisions made by the Federal Reserve that allowed that to happen." Other officials, however, said the push for low rates was misguided. "The biggest risk for those that are less fortunate is that we would go back into recession," said James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, who said he leaned toward raising rates in September. "I'm hoping my policy would lengthen out the expansion longer." The conservative conference was aligned with efforts by congressional Republicans to impose new restrictions on the Fed's conduct of monetary policy. A leading proposal would require the Fed to choose a formula for setting rates and stick with it. This view has few fans among the central bankers, who see their own judgment as an essential part of policy making. Mr. Blinder said part of the disconnect between the officials and the activists may reflect that broader concerns motivate liberals and conservatives. Conservatives see the Fed as enabling the growth of the federal debt, while liberals see the Fed as contributing to the rise of inequality. Mr. Blinder said the central bank had little power to reverse either trend. "They overstate the importance and power of the Federal Reserve," he said. All it can do, he added, is "address these problems around the edges." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
BERLIN Wrapping up a five day visit to Europe, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China concluded trade deals in Germany worth several billion euros, including a contract to purchase 88 Airbus A320 aircraft. The deals, announced during a signing ceremony in the Chancellery here, signaled a major shift in German Chinese relations as China tries to modernize its economy and Germany seeks more markets for its high technology goods. Germany and China agreed to establish special government consultations, which means representatives of the two countries will meet regularly and will discuss a wide range of topics, like trade, investment, education, environment, human rights, security and the rule of law. "A new chapter has been built," Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said during a news conference with her Chinese counterpart. Mrs. Merkel's decision to meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, in 2007 provoked sharp criticism from the Chinese leadership and the threat that German companies would lose out on lucrative contracts as a result of that meeting also held in the Chancellery. While no contracts were canceled, Mrs. Merkel has in the meantime given far more attention to trade and economic ties with China as Germany has ridden out the global financial crisis. Germany is Europe's strongest economy, with one of the bloc's lowest unemployment rates, because of its export driven economy and more flexible labor force. Earlier Tuesday, Mrs. Merkel said bilateral trade with China could increase to EUR200 billion, or 285 billion, by 2015 as the two countries "significantly deepen" their ties. Trade between the two countries amounted to EUR130 billion last year, an increase of 34 percent from 2009, according to the Federation of German Industry. Mr. Wen said that trade between Germany and China could double within five years. Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Wen spoke at a Chinese German business forum. The entourage Mr. Wen took with him to Hungary and Britain, earlier in his European visit, paled in comparison to the delegation in Germany: 13 ministers and more than 300 managers. He called for "mutual respect" for the different historical and cultural backgrounds of China, Germany and the European Union. "China respects the European political system," Mr. Wen told the business forum. "On the other hand, we expect respect for China's system and China's territorial integrity." Mrs. Merkel, who spent more than four hours in talks with Mr. Wen on Monday evening in a government lakeside villa in south Berlin, gave him the full red carpet treatment, including military honors Tuesday morning. Accompanied by almost all of the German cabinet, Mrs. Merkel began her government's consultations with China. China overtook Germany as the world's biggest exporter in 2009. China is Germany's third biggest trading partner, after France and the Netherlands and ahead of the United States. "We both take the view that what is good can become better," Mrs. Merkel said at the business forum. She added that China and Germany were "ideal partners" to develop electric cars, for example, and said both countries wanted to "deepen our investment relationship." Despite the bonhomie of the public meetings and the trade and investment deals won by German companies, Mrs. Merkel, on behalf of German industry, raised several sensitive issues with Mr. Wen. One was technology transfer, in which Chinese companies dismantle a machine, copy it and manufacture it. "This is a big issue," said Friedolin Strack, director of the Asia unit of the Federation of German Industries. German industry, too, was critical of the way Chinese companies are subsidized in their international activities, especially in Eastern Europe. A recent study by the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations, a lobby for German industry, criticized China for providing low cost loans and subsidies to Chinese firms competing for contracts in Eastern Europe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
From a personal library, one would expect personal criticism. But Coetzee provides no such thing, if by personal we mean sentimentalized reflections on the moments in his life at which he encountered such books or the lessons he has taken from them and tried to bring into his own fiction. In fact, these essays could be described as antipersonal. The hero is always the writer under discussion. This is a curiosity of Coetzee's criticism: that a writer who cares so deeply about reinventing the boundaries of fiction would so frequently stay within the margins of orthodox criticism. With the sole exception of the incandescent "Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett," Coetzee's essays rarely venture far from formula: They usually include an overview of the life of the author, the historical context in which the author worked, a plot summary and a breakdown of the aesthetic inner mechanics of the piece. But within these conventions, Coetzee is as perspicacious and erudite a guide as one could hope for. His biographical sketches of the life and times of the authors he addresses are excellent, concretely informative while also marbled with interesting tidbits. (Robert Walser, I learned, developed "psychosomatic cramps" in his right hand that he attributed to an unconscious enmity for the pen, leading him to adopt an alternative form of script he called his "pencil system.") But the meat of Coetzee's overviews can be found in other good introductions by other critics. What can't be found anywhere else, where Coetzee is unparalleled, is his ability to capture the psychology of individual characters, to lay bare the inner working of their minds, and in so doing bring to light the source of their enduring interest to readers. Of Defoe's heroine Roxana, for example, Coetzee writes: "Roxana does not pretend that the virtue whose loss she intermittently laments is something she deeply and sincerely believes in. On the contrary, she is happy to remain in a divided, ambivalent state in which she wants to resist seduction but equally wants her resistance to be swept away. She is well aware of this division or ambivalence within herself. ... Implicitly she recognizes that she finds being seduced more interesting (more engaging, more thrilling, more erotic, more seductive in prospect) than giving herself in a direct, unambiguous way; that the prelude to the sexual act can be more desirable, more erotically fulfilling, than the act itself. Seduction, the thought of seduction, the approach of seduction, the imagined experience of seduction, turns out to be profoundly seductive, even irresistible." If one is to appreciate Coetzee's essays, one must recognize how precisely, with what concentration, he lays bare a terrifically complex psychology, giving readers a handhold on which to build even more complex readings of their own. (Readings that would likely, in today's atmosphere, quickly point out that "irresistible" seduction isn't the fruit of effective persuasion but rape, a fact Coetzee draws attention to elsewhere in the chapter.) One must also admire the subtle brilliance of Coetzee's sentences, as in the last line of the passage quoted above, in which seduction is discussed in a manner that itself impersonates seduction, with the repetition of phrases (the thought of seduction, the approach of seduction and so on) heightening the thrill for the reader until the sentence succumbs to the seduction it has performed by landing upon "even irresistible." "Late Essays" is filled with many moments of such perfect insight, moments when the reader is left enthralled by Coetzee's powers of perception. Another example is this gem, on the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert: "What is wrong with systems, to Herbert, is that they are systems. What is wrong with laws is that they are laws. Beware of angels and other executives of perfection." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.