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In the taxonomy of the lesser building types of New York the de stooped rowhouse, the two story taxpayer, the midblock sliver building one is so obscure that even Linnaeus could be forgiven for overlooking it. It's the inside out tenement of the 1930s and 1940s, which had that elegant ingenuity born of necessity. Developers took rows of tenements facing commercial avenues, switched the residential entrances around to the back, and made the fronts into stores. Reorienting a structure to revamp its entrance became popular by the end of World War I. Among the turned around buildings were the houses fronting Sutton Place, rebuilt around 1919 so that their facades faced a greensward running down to the East River. A little later, Vincent Pepe took some old rowhouses on Minetta Lane in the West Village and rebuilt them as apartments entered through a rear courtyard off Minetta Street. But Depression economics pressed owners to further rethink the dwindling revenue stream from blocks of tenements. A near deathblow came in 1936, when the city required extensive upgrades in old law (pre 1901) tenements, and the typical owner faced a bill in the thousands of dollars to fireproof stairs. Many surrendered to rebuilding with a one or two story taxpayer, a temporary structure meant to stand only until the economy recovered, and allowing the landlord to forgo the bother of residential tenants. But the new economics also produced a microburst of creativity, and thus was born the inside out tenement. In its fullest expression, it combined a whole new facade, retail space, renovations to what had been cold water flats and a rear garden. It was sometimes quite ambitious. Such was the case with some 1937 tenements on the west side of Third Avenue from 77th to 78th Street. Owned by the Goelet family, the 13 tenements fronting Third faced a sizable repair bill, and the family decided to replace them with a two story structure designed by Edward H. Faile. Mr. Faile gave the building a severe factory style brick front, but the stores had (as I recall) delicate little mottled purple glass transoms and impossibly projecting round corner marquees, as if for a 1,000 seat theater. Above, the windows were mostly glass block, intended to screen out the noise from the Third Avenue El. In the back, Mr. Faile let 'er rip with a 200 foot long swath of tennis and badminton courts, past which the tenants walked to a double stairway rising over the backs of the stores, to their apartments on the second floor. These were set on a terrace with white painted brick and Regency details. For those who landed one of the eight 150 per month Goelet apartments, living over the stores was a little urban dream unless the clatter and roar of the El happened to bother you. The entire structure cost 120,000, whereas minimal renovations of the old tenements would have been 80,000. Nothing has been built to rival its ingenuity since. Another inside out creation was the Doelger family's Sutton Mews, finished in mid 1941 on First Avenue, from East 55th to 56th Streets. The family's architect, Walter Schneider, took a row of tenements, moved the residential entrances to the rear, where they faced a garden with flagstone paths, and redid the retail fronts. The stores had tenants like Billy's Bar, famous for its brass rails, dark paneling and gas lamps. Billy's served all kinds: "Truckmen and Fashionables Rub Elbows" said The New York World Telegram in October 1941. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. The Architectural Forum compared Sutton Mews to the fancy Sutton Place apartments and observed that "a brightly polished penny outshines a 20 gold piece." The apartments had Venetian blinds (sometimes used as room dividers), built in bathtubs, electric fireplaces and house phones. The courtyard walls were painted green, although the plantings seem to have been oversold: Photographs published in July 1941 show patches of dirt, spindly plants and indifferently laid pieces of bluestone, probably salvaged. Sutton Mews apartments ranged from 37 to 67 a month despite the polish, this penny still had the aura of a tenement. The postwar pickup spelled the end for the inside out tenement, as the dire economics of the Depression eased. I always liked the Doelgers' Sutton Mews, and was sorry to see it replaced by the colossally unfortunate Plaza 400, a co op apartment building, around 1968. Despite its remarkable character, the Goelets' enterprise came down after years of rumblings about demolition. Brendan Gill and Susan Henshaw Jones of the New York Landmarks Conservancy made a sustained effort to save it, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission turned it down three times. By that time the influential developers Aby Rosen and Trevor Davis owned the land, where they built the Empire, a condominium. These days you will have to search wide for an inside out tenement. There are a few hiding on First and Second Avenues, but none as ambitious as the Goelet apartments and Sutton Mews. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In the increasingly competitive space of children's television, Amazon Prime reached a deal to become the exclusive premium streaming service for most of PBS's shows for children, the company said on Friday. The deal means that much of PBS Kids programming including shows like "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood," "Wild Kratts" and "Odd Squad" will be removed from rival streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu, and will be available only on Amazon Prime. The shows became available on Friday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. For Amazon, it is the latest move in a battle among the streaming giants, along with HBO, to acquire or create as many children's television shows as possible. Last year, HBO acquired the rights to broadcast first run episodes of "Sesame Street," and by the end of this year Netflix will have 35 original series for children. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
How can you tell if a painting is a modern forgery? Mid 20th century nuclear bomb tests may hold a clue. For years, scientists have been refining techniques to determine the age of a painting using radiocarbon dating and the lingering effects of the tests. Now, a team of researchers has dated one such artwork using a paint chip the size of a poppy seed, according to a study published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's an amazing technical achievement," said Greg Hodgins, a professor at the University of Arizona who oversees a lab dedicated to radiocarbon dating and was not involved in the study. Developed in the 1940s, radiocarbon dating allows scientists to determine the age of a wide range of materials including fossils, cave paintings, parchment and even human remains by examining the types of carbon atoms they contain. Atoms of a single element but of different masses are known as isotopes. The carbon 12 and carbon 13 isotopes are stable, while carbon 14 is unstable. The mix of those isotopes is consistent among living things, but once organic matter dies its carbon 14 atoms decay. As a result, scientists can determine the age of dead organic matter up to tens of thousands of years old by calculating the ratio of those carbon isotopes. But that formula was drastically disrupted a little o ver half a century ago, with the advent of nuclear testing. Carbon 14 is naturally created when high energy cosmic rays collide with nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere. But the powerful aboveground nuclear bomb tests of the mid 1900s created even more carbon 14 isotopes out of that atmospheric nitrogen. In fact, so much carbon 14 had been created in the decade or so leading up to the signing of the partial nuclear test ban treaty of 1963 that levels in the atmosphere virtually doubled. "This bomb peak is really a unique signature," said Laura Hendriks, a doctoral candidate at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the lead author of the study, referring to the spike in atmospheric carbon 14. "It can be used in so many different fields, it's just unbelievable, although it's not a good thing." The effect of the bomb tests was akin to advancing a clock, according to Professor Hodgins. "In cosmic carbon dating terms, it's kind of like moving 5,000 years into the future," he said. That increase in carbon 14 was reflected in anything that lived or died after 1963, including wood and fibers that might make up the support or canvas of a modern work of art or the organic matter used to bind pigments in modern paint. Putting it to the test The idea of identifying forgeries by dating the binder used in paint, as Ms. Hendriks and her colleagues did in their study, was proposed at least as far back as 1972. And in 2015, experts in Italy used canvas fibers to determine that a painting purportedly by the French artist Fernand Leger and owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was actually a fake. But there have always been ways to circumvent that technique. Forgers have reused old canvases to create forgeries, neutralizing the effectiveness of testing canvas fibers. And historically, large samples were needed to conduct the analyses. (When scientists in the late 1980s determined that the Shroud of Turin, Jesus' reputed burial cloth, was a forgery, they used samples the size of postage stamps for their radiocarbon tests.) In the study published Monday, the samples that the team used were vanishingly tiny . Recent technological advances enabled the researchers to analyze hairlike strands of canvas fiber a few millimeters long and a paint sample that measured about half a square millimeter in area. The samples were taken from a known forgery, a painting of a 19th century village scene that was claimed to have been created in 1866. In reality, the work had been painted in the 1980s by Robert Trotter, an artist who was later jailed and fined for selling dozens of such fakes. A judge ordered some of those paintings to be handed over to experts for the purpose of studying forgers' methods. To prepare the samples, the team first cleaned them in solvent and acid washes to remove contaminants and varnishes. Then, it heated the samples to about 1,750 degrees Fahrenheit to release carbon dioxide, Ms. Hendriks said. That gas was captured and placed in a particle accelerator, where the carbon atoms from the sample were sorted and compared. The results for the canvas fibers were inconclusive. Mr. Trotter recycled old canvases for his forgeries, he said, and the fibers could be dated to anytime from the end of the 1600s to the mid 1900s, Ms. Hendriks and her colleagues found. The binder in the paint told a different story. It was fresh when the work was created, Ms. Hendriks said. According to her team's analysis, the oil used as the binder for Mr. Trotter's painting contained an excess of carbon 14 and came from seeds harvested either from 1958 to 1961 or from 1983 to 1989 long after the fake date of creation initially provided by Mr. Trotter. As useful as the method outlined in the study may be for identifying forgeries, it is not without limitations. "It's an important advance, but it's not a silver bullet," Professor Hodgins said. Radiocarbon dating is, by definition, destructive. While the team behind the study showed that it was possible to conduct the analysis using tiny samples, they still needed to remove material from the actual painting. In addition, clearing the sample of potential contaminants can prove difficult. And the usefulness of the bomb peak appears to be expiring, too. Levels of carbon 14 in the atmosphere are on course to return to prebomb levels after being absorbed by the ocean and are expected to fall further as they continue to be diluted by fossil fuel emissions. As a result, radiocarbon dating in the future will likely yield multiple results from before and after the bombing period. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
More than 10 percent of the world's population is now obese, a marked rise over the last 30 years that is leading to widespread health problems and millions of premature deaths, according to a new study, the most comprehensive research done on the subject. Published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine, the study showed that the problem had swept the globe, including regions that have historically had food shortages, like Africa. The study, compiled by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and funded by the Gates Foundation, looked at 195 countries, essentially the world's population, finding that rates of obesity at least doubled in 73 countries including Turkey, Venezuela and Bhutan from 1980 to 2015, and "continuously increased in most other countries." Analyzing some 1,800 data sets from around the world, researchers found that excess weight played a role in four million deaths in 2015, from heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease and other factors. The per capita death rate was up 28 percent since 1990 and, notably, 40 percent of the deaths were among people who were overweight but not heavy enough to be classified as obese. The study defined obese as a body mass index of 30 or higher and overweight as a B.M.I. from 25 to 29. By those measures, nearly 604 million adults worldwide are obese and 108 million children, the authors reported. Obesity rates among children are rising faster in many countries than among adults. In the United States, 12.5 percent of children were obese, up from 5 percent in 1980. Combining children and adults, the United States had the dubious distinction of having the largest increase in percentile points of any country, a jump of 16 percentage points to 26.5 percent of the overall population. A range of nutrition scientists, including ones who differ significantly on some issues in the field, uniformly praised the breadth, depth and quality of the study, and the significance of its message. "Its global implications are huge," said Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. He echoed others in saying the findings tend to also affirm smaller, more regional studies. "This study shows what we know: No country in the globe has reduced overweight or obesity levels. This is astounding given the huge health and economic costs linked with overweight and obesity." The study largely did not go deeply into the causes of obesity, but the authors said the growing accessibility of inexpensive, nutrient poor packaged foods was probably a major factor and the general slowdown in physical activity was probably not. "The change in physical activity preceded the global increase in obesity," said Dr. Ashkan Afshin, assistant professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and lead author of the study. "We have more processed food, more energy dense food, more intense marketing of food products, and these products are more available and more accessible," he added. "The food environment seems to be the main driver of obesity." Others agreed on the availability of poor diet, noting that such food can often be the most accessible and affordable. "What people eat is the key factor in whether they become obese or not," said Adam Drewnowsk, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington, who was not affiliated with the study, which he deemed "brilliant work by the best people in the business." He said getting people healthy food was easier said than done. "It is all very nice to talk about the need to eat less unhealthy foods and more healthy foods," he said. But "unhealthy foods cost less; healthier foods often cost more. People eat what they can afford." The research characterized growth of obesity in two ways, one that looked at countries that had the biggest leap in percentage points. After the United States, other countries with particularly significant jumps in percent of the population who are obese included Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt. But other countries had rates that rose much faster, even though they remained lower as an overall percent of the population. Broadly, the fastest rises were found in Latin America, Africa and China. In China, for example, less than 1 percent of the population was obese in 1980, but now more than 5 percent is, a fivefold increase. The rise in childhood obesity in China roughly paralleled that overall change. Three countries in Africa Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea Bissau had the fastest growth. Burkina Faso, the country with the fastest growth in the world in obesity, began in 1980 with around one third of a percent of its population as obese. Its rate rose to nearly 7 percent of the population. "The future health and economic burden facing all these countries is immense," Dr. Popkin said. Regarding the overall health implications of the study, one point made by the researchers is that there is a good news/bad news pattern emerging. The good news is that the disease burden caused by obesity is actually falling in some of the wealthiest nations. In the United States, the death rates associated with obesity fell from 63 per 100,000 in 1990 (the baseline year for this measure) to 61 per 100,000 people, reflecting medications that deal with the effects of obesity, like hypertension. The bad news is those remedies are not available in developing countries or are available only to the wealthiest people, leading to growing rates of associated deaths and without a clear solution. "Most of the obese people are dying because of cardiovascular disease and diabetes," said Dr. Afshin, lead author of the study. That has been somewhat mitigated in the United States "and other developed nations" with the use of drugs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
China's mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak has imperiled itself and the world because it is a land of 21st century science and 19th century politics. Scholars in China predicted a year ago in an article in the journal Viruses that it was "highly likely" that there would be coronavirus outbreaks, calling it an "urgent issue." Once the outbreak occurred, other Chinese scientists rapidly identified the virus and sequenced its DNA, posting it on Jan. 10 on a virology website for all to see. That was extraordinarily good and fast work. Meanwhile, the Communist Party instinctively organized a cover up, ordering the police to crack down on eight doctors accused of trying to alert others to the risks. National television programs repeatedly denounced the doctors as rumormongers. One of those eight doctors, Li Wenliang, caught the virus and died causing public outrage. Some Chinese make the point that if Li had been in charge of China, rather than President Xi Jinping, many lives might have been saved. "The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance," a law professor in Beijing, Xu Zhangrun, wrote this month in an online essay that was immediately banned. "The level of popular fury is volcanic, and a people thus enraged may, in the end, also cast aside their fear." Xu certainly cast aside his own fear, predicting that he would face new punishments but adding, "I cannot remain silent." He called on his fellow Chinese citizens to demand free speech and free elections and urged: "Rage against injustice; let your lives burn with a flame of decency; break through stultifying darkness and welcome the dawn." Xu is now incommunicado, but it is remarkable to see the groundswell of anger online toward the dictatorship. Citizens can't denounce Xi by name, but they are skilled in evading censors such as by substituting President Trump's name for Xi's. It's difficult to know where this goes, but this incongruity between 21st century science and 19th century politics is what a Marxist might call a contradiction. This creates long term challenges that are growing with a swelling middle class (now larger than America's) that is impatient with the corrupt, thuggish and narcissistic leadership. Ordinary Chinese see through government propaganda and realize that the mishandling of the coronavirus is only one example of the regime's ineptitude. Xi's government also mishandled a swine fever outbreak that began in 2018 and has now killed almost one quarter of the world's pigs. Earlier, China fumbled SARS. And at the beginning of the 2000s, it covered up an AIDS outbreak spread by government backed blood collection efforts. Vast numbers of impoverished farmers and workers died, for the government response was not to help those infected but to punish doctor whistle blowers. I will never forget a woman then who tried to give me her 4 year old son because she was dying of AIDS and her husband had already died. Granted, we Americans must have some humility in critiquing the regime, for it's a tribute to China's progress that a baby born in Beijing today has a longer official life expectancy (82 years) than a baby born in Washington, D.C. (78), or New York City (81). Still, the progress came from China's technocrats, doctors and scientists, the result in part of opening one new university a week for years. The peak of that technocratic, pragmatic approach came under Prime Minister Zhu Rongji in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, Xi has tugged China backward, stifling social media and journalism while cultivating something approaching a North Korea style personality cult around himself. Xi's propaganda apparatus extols him for personally directing the efforts against the virus and claims that the World Health Organization sent experts to learn from China's wise handling of the coronavirus. China's economic and educational success has created a savvy middle class that feels betrayed when the government spouts nonsense and targets doctors rather than a coronavirus. Doctors on the front line are working almost around the clock with limited supplies, taping up masks, using goggles made of plastic folders and eating only one meal a day or wearing diapers so as to go to the bathroom less often (for that means removing protective clothing that can't be replaced). So far, more than 1,700 medical workers have been infected and at least six have died. The contrast between heroic doctors and bumbling political leaders could not be more stark. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Many home schoolers feel misunderstood. People assume they're religious adherents, hippies or anti technologists who distrust institutions, when, in fact, they have a wide range of backgrounds and motives. Perhaps the most irritating misconception is that remote schooling, which is what the pandemic has foisted upon millions of families who normally send their children to traditional public and private schools, is the same as home schooling. Philosophically, they are worlds apart, say proponents like Ainsley Arment, of Virginia Beach, Va., the founder of Wild Free, a home schooling community and company that connects and supports parents who educate their children at home, or are considering doing so. "Our approach is less about replicating the classroom at home and more about awakening a desire to learn in the natural environment, from exploring nature and leaning into literature," said Ms. Arment, 42, who for 10 years has been home schooling her five children, ages 5 to 16. Men are a part of Ms. Arment's community, but she said she tailors her message to "home schooling mamas" because the vast majority of home schooling work, in her observation, is carried out by women. "We recognize that many husbands play a role in schooling, but Wild Free at its core is for moms," she said. "The point is not to say the women are relegated to this role or to being at home, the point is to empower women who have made this choice." She has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in a grass roots community that, long before social distancing, decided to reject mainstream schooling and rather educate within the family. "For me, this is a part of holistic living," she said, calling from her car parked in a hotel parking lot in Franklin, Tenn. Her husband and business partner, Ben Arment, 46, and their children were checking in after a nine hour drive from the Wild Free Farm Village, a 190 acre center in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Head Waters, Va. (on land formerly owned by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross). The previous weekend the company had hosted an immersive medieval themed weekend for about 30 families who came with R.V.s, tents and costumes. "Wild Free is a philosophy of parenting more than home schooling," Ms. Arment said, laying out her pitch to skeptics. "It's about seeing what happens when you strip away the middleman, the curriculum, the grades, the things that come along with getting a traditional education. It's about being there to see what is lighting your child up and going down that road and knowing you can go back to teaching grammar tomorrow." The image espoused (and Instagrammed) by Ms. Arment of children and adults reciting poetry and hiking nature trails is alluring, especially at a time when many have their noses pressed to Zoom screens for hours on end or are sitting at plexiglassed desks with masks on, uncertain if a Covid 19 outbreak is just around the corner, like a menacing bully. But home schooling, as Ms. Arment openly admits, can be exhausting and dispiriting work, and it will prevent the primary home schooling parent from working another job outside of the home, if at all. It requires a certain level of means and is most difficult, if not unattainable, for single parents. Even as she acknowledges these difficulties, Ms. Arment argues that if there is a will, there is a way, and that families can adopt elements of Wild Free's "intentional parenting" regardless of their school choices. Like so much these days, Wild Free grew out of an Instagram account. In 2014, after several years of sharing her practices, ideas, inspirations and lifestyle philosophies on social media, Ms. Arment branded the community "Wild Free," whose name comes from Henry David Thoreau's deduction that "all good things are wild and free." Of course, not everything is free. Among the company's offerings are "content bundles," which cost 19 per month (they include a monthly magazine and "concierge customer service") in addition to supplementary courses like a 49 program on nature journaling. The products "help immerse mothers in the Wild Free lifestyle," Ms. Arment said. Though it draws from Montessori, Waldorf, Charlotte Mason and "unschooling," Wild Free does not dictate a specific educational philosophy, but rather gently suggests that parents are the most intuitive educators of their kids and that a daily schedule should be built around imaginative play, spending time outside and reading great works of literature. "We as parents have been conditioned to believe that if something can't be measured, it isn't real learning, but science and education have been disproving this for decades," Ms. Arment said. "Play is productive. Curiosity leads to discovery. Movement develops the brain. Stories ignite imagination, and children really do become readers on the laps of their parents." Her ideas aren't revolutionary among devoted home schoolers. "Home schooling is a lifestyle dedicated to the joy of learning," said J. Allen Weston, the executive director of the National Home School Association. "True home schoolers understand that learning is an adventure to be experienced and cherished, not a chore to muddle through to get a grade." Mr. Weston believes the modern gig economy and the inequities of institutionalized schooling have antiquated many aspects of mainstream education. "We are telling kids that they've got to do good in grade school so they can get into a good high school, and then they've got to do well so they can get into a good college and get a good job," he said. "And then they're working at Starbucks with a degree hanging on the wall. My hope is that one bright side of this pandemic might be that the country may get back to the idea of learning for learning's sake." What Ms. Arment has done is package these ideals and helped communicate them to a wide audience. There are more than 1,000Wild Free groups around the world that meet (pandemic allowing) for live play, field trips and hikes. Along with the bundles and conferences (in 2019, some 2,000 Wild Free mothers convened in Frisco, Texas), there is an alternative scouting program and small group retreats. "The purpose is not to outdo public schools," she said, "it's to simplify, because kids are overloaded and it's interfering with learning." Since the pandemic, interest in "The Call of the Wild and Free" has picked up substantially, according to Judith Curr, the publisher of HarperCollins's HarperOne Group. By April 2020, monthly sales of the book had doubled, and by July, monthly sales had increased six times since the book's September 2019 publication. Ms. Arment said her readers are both home schoolers and parents who want to enrich their children's remote learning experience. "What many of us have been doing for years is suddenly becoming a fast growing trend with the pandemic," she said, "so our message is simple: You can do this." Ms. Arment had plenty of doubts herself when she started home schooling. "I thought it was weird," she said of the practice. She had attended public schools (her father was a professor, including for many years at West Point), and she majored in English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She and Ben Arment married soon after she graduated, and she worked with him on his entrepreneurial endeavors. During their oldest child's year as a first grader, she said she noticed his lack of excitement when he got on the school bus in the morning and his exhaustion when he got off. She hated the thought that his days of carefree child's play were behind him, and it made her sad that a teacher got to spend more time with him than she did. After making friends on Instagram with other mothers who were also home schooling and hungry for connection, Ms. Arment created the Instagram account and planned a first get together. One hundred and twenty five showed up. Mr. Arment had experience in event production, which came in handy as they added retreats, camps, pods and conferences. Stephanie Beaty, 43, is a mother of four children, aged 8 to 14, in the Wild Free community. Before her husband retired from the Navy two years ago and they moved to New Port Richey, Fla., the family moved frequently, never staying in the same location for more than two and a half years, and she felt home schooling provided stability and continuity. "My husband is a military guy, but I'm slightly anti establishment," Ms. Beaty said. She follows a math curriculum for each child and does group read alouds of history, Shakespeare and the study of virtues. In the past two years, she and her husband twice have packed up their R.V. and taken their children on monthslong outdoor excursions. "One of our children is an avid geologist, so we stopped at places like Hiddenite in North Carolina, and the Grand Canyon," said Ms. Beaty, who edits a magazine for the Wild Free explorers club, an online guided adventure program. "He would talk to the park rangers and learn about the rocks and terrain directly from them." The community connected Alison Fredenberg, a 44 year old mother of 10 children ages 3 to 20, in Chelsea, Mich., to other women at a time she felt isolated and even persecuted. She decided to start home schooling in 2004. "Everyone told me I was going to ruin my child," she said. Wild Free helped her overcome the isolation of rural living and home schooling and strengthen her commitment to her personal vision for education. Tending to cows and goats is part of a biology lesson; environmental studies involve planting of crops. "When you see patterns in the natural world season after season, it helps you to make sense of modern situations of instability," said Ms. Fredenberg, whose oldest child now attends M.I.T. and whose second oldest was accepted at Harvard. Ms. Arment said that one of the greatest advantages of Wild Free for parents is the education they get in the process. "One of my sons loves to take things apart and put them back together," she said. "That's how we have come to look at school and education. 'How do we take it apart and rebuild it in a way that works for us?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"I used to have nothing," the title character, played by Scarlett Johansson, says in the first trailer for "Black Widow." And "then I got this job, this family, but nothing lasts forever." Nothing except, it seems, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first entry in the series since the apparent finale, "Avengers: Endgame," in April, this stand alone spinoff flashes back to the events following the 2016 film "Captain America: Civil War." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Heads are starting to roll now, over the defunding of varsity athletic teams at colleges and universities across the country. Samantha Huge, the athletic director at William Mary in Virginia, resigned under pressure last week, just a month after cutting seven sports from her department in an attempt to balance an unwieldy budget made worse by the coronavirus pandemic. Huge won't be the last. Since April, more than 250 teams in about two dozen sports have been eliminated across collegiate sports, including all three N.C.A.A. divisions, affecting schools like Minnesota, Iowa, Dartmouth and Connecticut. Many are pushing back against the cuts: athletes and alumni of these programs; politicians; and of course, the entrepreneurs at the center of the 30 billion plus youth sports industry from recruiting services to travel tournament operators helping families chase coveted N.C.A.A. roster spots for their children. With fewer incentives for return on family investments in youth sports, dire predictions have been made about declines in youth participation, in Olympic medalists, even in the health of the nation. I'm not so sure about any of that. Let's take a step back. Since the early 1990s, according to the N.C.A.A., the amount of athletic scholarship aid dispensed at member institutions has grown to 3.5 billion from 377 million, with much of that bump because of the drastic rise in the cost of tuition. Official recruits also get preferential admission to selective colleges, a perk that has been known to drive some wealthier families to extremes. See Operation Varsity Blues. These incentives have transformed the landscape of youth sports, and not for the better. Children who flash early talent have more reason to train hard. But they are often specializing in one sport by age 12, suffering burnout and overuse injuries that were once rare, while families who can spend thousands of dollars a year on scouting showcases effectively push aside those with fewer resources. Children from the lowest income homes in the United States were playing sports at half the rate of those at the other end, and that's based on data gathered before the onset of the pandemic, which may only widen the divide between sports' haves and have nots. Reducing the number of varsity teams will mean fewer athletic scholarships, but also potentially less money spent pursuing them and more university support for other forms of campus sports. Ultimately, few of the cut varsity teams will actually perish. They will just transition to being club teams, many with the help of the athletic department and, as with all clubs on campus, funds allocated by the student government. How terrible could that shift be? Club athletes represent their colleges, wear the colors, but play more on their terms, not those of an athletic department groaning under the strain of an N.C.A.A. rule book and of a business model that turns many athletes into employees without paychecks. "I loved, loved, loved my experience," said Hanako Agresta, 21, who played women's club field hockey at UConn and is now headed to medical school. "We didn't have a coach so we had to plan our practices and travel. But my identity didn't revolve around being an athlete. Instead, I feel I was able to grow into a new identity by challenging myself on and off the field." Alumni donations can help hire coaches and a trainer, as they long have for the rugby club at Stanford, one of the universities that recently eliminated several varsity programs. "I feel for the athletes whose programs were just cut, but I think they will find that club frees up time to get passionate about other things," said Johnny McCormick, a former Stanford rugby player. "Now as a 33 year old dad with two kids, I really appreciate that. You only get to do college once." He remembers playing on a gorgeous campus field dedicated to rugby and taking buses to games around the Bay Area. He skipped one game to catch Shakespeare Week in Oregon. We need to move away from the idea that college sports must be varsity N.C.A.A. programs, full of recruited stars. About 460,000 collegians compete at the N.C.A.A. level. More than 11 million play club or intramural sports, nearly all of them for the joy and intrinsic benefits of athletics. The N.C.A.A. recently produced research showing that its athletes do better in life than other students. But any better than club athletes? I wish that had been part of the analysis. Separate research by the National Intramural and Recreational Sports Association, which helps colleges organize campus recreation, shows that members of club teams exhibit unusually strong leadership skills. In a lower level, intramurals, NIRSA discovered even more of those qualities. In campus recreational facilities, the only place the organization's survey found a stronger correlation with leadership was in groups of students who organized pickup games or joined fitness classes. General student bodies should be asked to provide more support for these activities, rather than varsity teams that very few can join. In the 2018 fiscal year, students underwrote N.C.A.A. Division I programs with 1.2 billion in mandatory and often undisclosed fees, according to an NBC Sports investigation. That was a 51 percent increase from a decade earlier, compared with a 37 percent jump in annual tuition at four year public colleges. A downsizing of varsity teams may force a reconsideration of the way Team U.S.A. athletes train. Many, at least in the Summer Olympic sports, develop their skills in N.C.A.A. programs with elite facilities. But so do competitors from abroad, drawn to the only university system in the world that offers athletic scholarships. In the 2016 Summer Games, nearly a quarter of all the medalists who had competed in the N.C.A.A. were representing countries other than the United States. National sports governing bodies may have to work more closely with a more concentrated set of universities to build Team U.S.A. Some already are. Did you know the school that sent the most Olympians, 18, to the 2018 Winter Games was tiny Westminster College, which didn't even have an N.C.A.A. program? The Salt Lake City school was merely the "official education partner" of U.S. Ski Snowboard, providing free tuition to emerging talent identified by the federation. Also, some of Team U.S.A.'s greatest performers, like the gymnast Simone Biles and the swimmer Michael Phelps, have never competed in college, because they reached elite status in high school and chose to accept lucrative sponsorships that disqualified them from N.C.A.A. participation. Mine is not a call for the abolition of big time football or basketball, or any revenue producing sport. These are marketing tools for universities, and they're not going away. Neither is Title IX, the federal law forbidding discrimination based on sex at educational institutions, which provides a level of protection for women's teams that were established long after men's programs had built up paying audiences. Some endangered men's teams, which produce little or no revenue, may even be preserved if bloated football rosters can ever be cut down. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Can "Saturday Night Live" still write an opening sketch that isn't about the misadventures of the Trump administration? This week's episode showed that yes, it can, though it still had to reach into its celebrity Rolodex to get it done. Jason Sudeikis, an "S.N.L." alumnus, returned to his longtime role as Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president, who this past week responded after four women said they were uncomfortable being touched by him. (The episode, hosted by the "Game of Thrones" star Kit Harington, also featured a couple of sketches lampooning that popular HBO fantasy drama.) In the opening sketch, Sudeikis met with two campaign aides, played by cast members Cecily Strong and Kenan Thompson, who explained that they had an urgent matter to discuss with him. "Joe, it's about all the touchy feely stuff," Thompson said. Strong added, "If you're really going to run in 2020, you have to change the way you interact with women." Slipping back into his gregarious, oblivious portrayal of Biden, Sudeikis said, "You guys know that I'm a tactile politician, right? I'm a hugger, I'm a kisser and I'm a little bit of a sniffer. But the last thing I ever want to do is offend anyone." His aides introduced him to a sensitivity training consultant (Kate McKinnon), whom Sudeikis greeted by putting his nose and forehead against hers. "I'm just connecting," he said. McKinnon replied, "So this is exactly the kind of thing that I'm here to prevent." Sudeikis said that he, too, had recently taken a DNA test, just like "Lizzie Warren." "It turns out that I'm one percent Eskimo so I'm allowed to do the kissing," he said. He and McKinnon then talked through a couple of hypothetical scenarios when meeting people on the campaign trail. If he were to greet a woman with a handshake, Sudeikis asked, "What if during that handshake, I go ahead and I tickle her palm a little bit?" McKinnon replied, "I would say no tickling at all." Sudeikis said, "Am I still allowed to do something like that gorgeous lift that they do at the end of 'Dirty Dancing'?" Who would you do that with?, she asked him. He answered, "Hell, I don't know. Whoever's strong enough to pick me up, I guess." Finally, Sudeikis was introduced to two prospective voters, the first played by Aidy Bryant. He put her in a headlock and gave her a noogie; she responded by punching him in the stomach. As she left the room, he said, "I have to say she's still on the fence." The second voter, played by Leslie Jones, greeted him enthusiastically. "You're Obama's granddaddy!" she exclaimed. Asked at the end of the exercise if he had learned anything, Sudeikis answered, "Not really, no. But the important thing, I think, is that I'm listening. I hear you and I feel you." He proposed a campaign slogan: "Let's hug it out, America Biden and some woman in 2020." Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen, said she'd already forgotten the ending to the show. "It's been so damn long since the last season," she said, adding: "Do you remember in Season 6 when we had sex? Did you know they filmed that?" John Bradley, who plays the hapless Samwell Tarly, asked him, "Do you think we'll still hang out after the show is done, like best friends? What about next Tuesday, I could come around by 6 a.m.?" Finally, Rose Leslie, who played Ygritte and is Harington's real life wife, asked him, "What are we going to do for money now?" The Other 'Game of Thrones' Sketch of the Week At the "Weekend Update" desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on Biden's troubles and the legal battle over the final report of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Four women have come forward claiming that Joe Biden touched them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. And yeah, I could see that. He looks like one of those uncles that calls spring 'Sundress Time.' It's very disappointing, but older people, in general, have a problem with boundaries. There's a lady in my building who's like 75. And every time I see her, she grabs my arm and says something dirty. It's very uncomfortable but I let her because she's hot. On Wednesday, Biden released a video responding to the allegations, and I'm not sure that it helped. Yeah, so it was supposed to be an apology, not a re enactment. Also, the look of the video is so weird. Why is it shot vertically? It looks like something from a premium, adults only Snapchat. And of course nothing puts women at ease like a man on a leather couch who's already taken off his tie. He might as well end the video by unbuttoning his shirt and saying, 'to find out what happens next, log onto GoDaddy.com.' And then a pro Trump group released a new ad saying that Biden's behavior with women is unacceptable and should instantly disqualify him from running. The group's name is Independent Republicans of New York, or IRONY. The House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena the full, unredacted Mueller report from the White House. Man, I really wish I knew about redacting when I was in school. I probably would have graduated. "I did my report, it's just redacted right now." If Donald Trump stole his presidency, why don't we just steal it back? If I was running for president, I would be in Putin's DMs right now, negotiating. Why is everybody trying to play fair with this guy? Even the F.B.I. Oh, you didn't find anything? Then plant it, you're the F.B.I. Just turn off your body cam and put some crack in his shoes, man. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
At least six million obese teenagers in the United States are candidates for weight loss surgery, experts estimate. Fewer than 1,000 of them get it each year. Many of these adolescents already have complications of obesity, like diabetes or high blood pressure. But doctors have been uncertain just how well surgery works for young patients, and whether they can handle the consequences, including a severely restricted diet. A new study provides some hopeful answers. Researchers followed 161 teenagers aged 13 to 19, and 396 adults aged 25 to 50, for five years after weight loss surgery. The teenagers actually fared better than the adults. The adolescents lost at least as much weight, and were more likely to see high blood pressure and diabetes ease or go away , the investigators reported on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This really changes the game," said Dr. Amir Ghaferi, a bariatric surgeon at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research. The paper, he said, added to evidence that obesity, like cancer, is best treated early, before long term damage from related conditions, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, sets in. Read more about teenagers and bariatric surgery. To have the surgery, teenagers in the study had to meet the same criteria as adults: a body mass index of at least 35 for instance, a person who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 192 pounds or more and obesity related health problems. Alternately, the adolescents could have a B.M.I. of at least 40 such as a person who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs at least 220 pounds without other conditions linked to obesity. There is no exact data on the number of teenagers who meet those criteria in the United States, said Dr. Thomas Inge, chief of pediatric surgery at Children's Hospital Colorado and lead author of the new study. He estimated that about 8 percent of American teenagers would qualify. "These are not kids who are pleasantly plump," said Dr. John Morton , a bariatric surgeon at Yale University. "Once you have a B.M.I. of 30, it is really difficult to lose weight on your own." There is no other treatment that results in a substantial and sustained weight loss in people who are severely obese. But the operation, gastric bypass surgery, is demanding. Surgeons close off most of the stomach, leaving a small pouch, and reroute the intestines. Afterward, patients must eat tiny meals at frequent intervals for the rest of their lives. It is a scenario that gives many parents pause. Should their teenagers wait, hoping science will come up with a less drastic solution? Or should their children have the operation before even more serious harm to the body occurs? Adding to the quandary is the fact there are just six accredited bariatric surgery centers in pediatric hospitals. Although some adult programs operate on teenagers, most of such procedures are done in pediatric settings, Dr. Morton said. Adults, by contrast, may choose from 850 accredited medical centers for weight loss surgery. Although the new study included adolescents with B.M.I.s of 35, most were much heavier. The average was 50, the same as the average for adults in the study. For most of the adolescents, the surgery was a success. On average, they lost about a quarter of their body weight, enough to make life much easier and for most to shed health problems. The teenagers weighed 324 pounds on average when they had the surgery. Five years later, the figure was 244 pounds. The adults weighed the same at the start and had a nearly identical result . An unlucky minority of patients both adults and teenagers did not fare as well. Some remained saddled with high blood pressure or diabetes. A few lost almost no weight, or even gained weight, in the five years after the surgery. The study did not randomly assign patients to have the surgery or not, which is the gold standard for clinical research. Since the adults had been obese for a much longer time, their condition might have been harder to treat with surgery. That makes it difficult to directly compare the teenagers and adults. But Dr. Ghaferi said the message is clear: It is best to intervene early. And if that is true, other experts wondered, what about even younger children? "What if an eight year old comes in, or a ten year old comes in, and they are severely obese? Why don't we offer this treatment and study the results?" Dr. Inge said. Already he has operated on children who are severely obese and have related medical conditions. The question now, he said, is whether to operate even before a child develops high blood pressure, diabetes, or sleep apnea. That question will require careful study, with researchers following children for years after surgery, Dr. Inge said. Even operating on teenagers raises issues that may not apply to adults. Can a miserable adolescent, for example, really can give informed consent to such a drastic, life changing operation? And can a teenager be expected to commit to following the very restricted diet required after the surgery, not to mention taking the needed vitamins and minerals? "Are they prepared to do that for the rest of their lives?" asked David B. Sarwer, a psychologist at Temple University who works with bariatric surgery patients. Substantial weight loss can have unexpected psychological consequences in teenagers, he added. Severe obesity "sets adolescents up for stigmatization," he said. A severely obese teenager "is likely known by every other student in the high school not because she is a prom queen, but because she is physically the largest student in the school." Stigma often leaves teenagers isolated and lacking social skills, a deficit that can hinder their development even after surgery to lose weight. And when formerly obese teenagers go to college, Dr. Sarwer said, often they are so ashamed of having been fat that they keep it a secret. Yet weight loss surgery can be transformative. Eric Decker, 33, a bartender and freelance makeup artist in Detroit, had the operation in 2006 when he was 17. He was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 385 pounds; no amount of dieting seemed to help. He tried to find a surgeon in South Carolina, where he lived, to operate on him, but no one would do it. He was referred to Dr. Inge, then at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Mr. Decker lost more weight than most he now weighs between 205 and 210 pounds. He speaks up now when someone speaks derisively of a person who is obese. He knows how it feels to be shunned for what medical researchers now deem a chronic disease, not a lifestyle choice. Without that experience, he said, "I don't think I would have that lens of compassion for people with their struggles." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
When Timothy Hellrung was told he had aggressive cancer this past June and had only days or weeks to live, he knew where he wanted to die. Mr. Hellrung, a 73 year old veteran of the Vietnam War disabled by Agent Orange, spent his last 10 days in hospice care at the community living center of the V.A. Ann Arbor Healthcare System in Michigan. The staff provided him with a roomy suite. A social worker wheeled in a bed for his wife of 44 years, Brenda, and gave her pajamas so she could be comfortable spending every night with him. "The V.A. became family to us," Ms. Hellrung said. On his first day in hospice, a roomful of veterans honored Mr. Hellrung by placing a pin on his clothing with the American flag and the words "thank you for your service." When her husband was nearing the end and put his hand in hers, Ms. Hellrung said, "I sensed he was in complete peace. I don't think he would have been if he had not been in the place where he wanted to be: At the V.A." Mr. Hellrung is one of the roughly 28,000 veterans who spent their final days this year in a V.A. hospice care program that provides a unique way of honoring their dignity at the end of their lives. The Department of Veterans Affairs' hospice program for this population is designed to specifically address the complexities they face as memories of the traumas of war surface in many cases, for the first time. Each veteran receives care from a multidisciplinary team, including social workers, physicians, nurses and spiritual leaders addressing not only physical but emotional, social and spiritual needs. Veterans tend to be more chronically ill compared to the general population, with high rates of disability, intricate psychiatric issues, post traumatic stress disorder and depression. Unlike their predecessors from World War II who were welcomed home as heroes, Vietnam veterans "were often spit on in the streets," said Dr. Scott Shreve, national director of palliative and hospice care for the V.A. Edo Banach, president and chief executive of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, said this led many of them to disassociate from the V.A., wary of receiving help from the government. A decade from now, there will be an estimated 500,000 vets dying each ye ar, with an increasing percentage of them Vietnam veterans, Dr. Shreve said. "It's a whole new framework for us in hospice care to be prepared for, and that's what we're trying to do." As the V.A. has come under fire for perilously long wait times to see a provider, it is holding up the hospice program as a point of pride: The department's policy requires that hospice services be provided without delay to enrolled veterans who seek them. "V.A. senior leadership has made it clear there is to be no wait list for these services," Dr. Shreve said. Read more about the efforts to expand veterans' health care under the Mission Act. As of June of this year, 63 percent of patients in V.A. medical centers chose hospice care, nearly twice as many as a decade ago. Yet experts say it is still underused. Hospice care is available to everyone under Medicare with a life expectancy of six months or less. But for veterans to receive the services through the V.A., they have to register, something only a third of the 22 million veterans in the United States have done. Dr. Shreve encourages vets to register early to avoid any delays when they are in need of hospice care. The V.A. hospice care program is offered at 170 V.A. hospitals, and the agency has more than 1,000 outpatient facilities that can make referrals, connecting veterans with other hospice providers. Veterans may be eligible for a broad array of benefits that Medicare doesn't offer, such as compensation for burial costs and a survivors' pension. Mr. Banach said obstacles to using hospice services include a general lack of awareness and the stoicism of some veterans. "There's a misconception about hospice that it means giving up," he said. And this is a population that has found it difficult to ask for help. The V.A. hospice program aims to normalize the process and renew the vets' faith in the system. In addition to care providers, there are veterans who volunteer to discuss shared experiences and "act as a gateway to accepting more help from more people," Mr. Banach said. The V.A. hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., where Mr. Hellrung spent nine days in hospice care in June. Nick Hagen for The New York Times At Vitas Healthcare based in Miami, Nancy Auster is a registered nurse who started her career serving in the Air Force 38 years ago. She serves as a liaison between vets and the V.A. who has helped veterans with challenges like retrieving lost medals. After telling a Vietnam veteran with no family, "Sir, we want to welcome you home," she recalls he replied in a faint voice, "I've waited 48 years to hear this." Deborah Grassman, who has cared for 10,000 dying vets as a hospice nurse practitioner at the V.A. for 30 years and now runs Opus Peace, a nonprofit that provides educational materials for health care providers, originated the pinning ceremony that Mr. Hellrung experienced. She says, "honoring vets isn't enough" and that hospice workers are trained to deal with the guilt and shame that many vets live with if they have killed people. "We help them unburden themselves and their family members," creating "a safe emotional space where that stoic wall can come down and the pain can come forth." Courtney Butler, assistant vice president of hospice at Amedisys, a Baton Rouge based company that is one of the nation's largest hospice providers, said it takes a special set of communication skills to work with the many vets who have P.T.S.D. "You need to be careful in how you approach them so you don't startle them. You shouldn't stand over them to intimidate them." Since veterans often have fractured family situations, with few or any loved ones present at the end of their lives, hospice care can help them feel less lonely, said Dr. Sanjay Saint, chief of medicine for the V.A. Ann Arbor Healthcare System, where Mr. Hellrung was treated. He said that about 70 percent of his typical hospital patients had visitors, but only 10 percent of those at the V.A. did. "That's another reason hospice care can be so comforting," he said. He recalled one veteran who was acutely ill but wanted to leave the hospital because he had no one to care for his dog. "That dog was his source of love," Dr. Saint said. One of the staff members helped him contact a neighbor to feed the dog. Ms. Hellrung continues to marvel at the way the V.A. hospice staff honored her husband after his service in an unpopular war. After his death on June 26, Mr. Hellrung was transported to the morgue in a coffin draped with the American flag. Everyone in the hallway saluted as "Taps" was played. "I knew my Timothy would have loved that," Ms. Hellrung said. "He was a military man." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
This week, we visit three national monuments (more than two dozen are under review by the Trump administration and could be made smaller and opened to logging and mining): Gold Butte in Nevada (below), Bears Ears in Utah and Berryessa Snow Mountain in California. It was 105 degrees, and I was in the Mojave Desert looking for ancient images of goat like creatures. I scanned the rock formations with my binoculars and then scrambled over some boulders and descended into a wash that was once a river. I guessed that only a handful of people in the world even know about the goats they are that obscure. In the wash, I noticed the fine gravel was disturbed by a large animal. There were no droppings of wild burros, so that ruled them out. The only other large animals would be bighorn sheep, mountain lions or mule deer, but they would not compress the gravel in such an irregular pattern. The only thing that could have made that sign was humans. I squatted down and looked closer. There were heavy steps each way. They could have been made two days ago or two years ago. Such imprints in the desert do not go away easily. I tracked the disturbed gravel up the wash, and off in the distance was a rock wall stained the color of rust and blood. I had found the site of the rock art known as 21 Goats. Earlier in the afternoon, I had written in my notebook, "Gold Butte is beautiful but not breathtaking." I was thinking about how it compares with other great destinations of the American West such as the Grand Canyon, the Badlands or Devils Tower. Gold Butte National Monument is inhospitable desert country with some small, plain looking mountains and buttes. It certainly has some wondrous rock formations and a rugged beauty and remote emptiness that I admire, but I did not initially think it would ever, as I wrote, take my breath away. I was wrong. When I spotted the goats, I made a sound that was a cross between a gasp and a hiccup. Although the site is called 21 Goats, the petroglyphs are commonly interpreted to be desert bighorn sheep, the monarch of the Mojave Desert. The bighorn is considered one of the greatest trophies among modern hunters. Among the sheep were snakey lines and bull's eye circles. This collection of petroglyphs is one of the reasons Gold Butte is one of America's newest national monuments. It was designated by President Barack Obama during his last days in office using the Antiquities Act, which gives presidents the authority to create national monuments. The Gold Butte proclamation protected 296,937 acres of land. However, some people think that is too much, and that caught the attention of the Trump administration. In April, President Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of 27 monuments. He asked Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to lead the review and make recommendations to possibly rescind the monument status, reduce the acreage or let it stand. Presidents have amended national monuments, but none have ever delisted one. Of the monuments to be reviewed, Gold Butte may be the least known. Even Google Maps hasn't recognized its borders as a national monument yet. On the interactive map, the area of Gold Butte remains white while all the surrounding lands that have some sort of protected status are demarked in public place green. While preparing for the trip, I asked around in the nearby town of Mesquite if there were any official maps for the Gold Butte area. Something that showed the topography, back roads and way points. All the answers were negative with one guy saying I should try to find "one of them old B.L.M. maps," referring to the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the monument. I made do by cobbling together a sheaf of maps of varied detail that I printed off the internet. As I would later learn, there are designated routes for off road vehicles and a main road, Gold Butte Road, which is designated as a National Backcountry Byway by the B.L.M., but as for hiking, you have to figure that out as you go along. I stopped at the library in Mesquite and asked if they had anything on Gold Butte. The helpful librarian guided me to a shelf of books on Nevada history, but none of them mentioned Gold Butte in their indexes. However, from behind the desk she did find a book from a local author. She handed me a 1992 copy of "Crazy Ed's Sagas and Secrets of Desert Gold" by the late Eddie Bounsall. Mr. Bounsall, a prospector and maker of build your own airplane kits, educates the reader about mining and minerals in the region but also covers a lot of ground on other subjects. "I've never believed in ghosts before but in the last 22 years living in the Gold Butte area we have had many very strange supernatural incidents happen with my family and to people who either worked for us of who were just visiting," Mr. Bounsall wrote before recounting some goosebumps inducing events. In a chapter on U.F.O.s, he presents a sure of himself argument that the human shaped petroglyphs found on the rocks are space people, and the local Native American tribes have been in touch with them for a long time. He also theorizes about how the early Spanish explorers left behind hidden treasure vaults of gold and silver in Gold Butte and the surrounding region. The Spaniards figured they could always get it later, so they left symbols etched to rock walls that indicated the secret way to the motherlode. On the way to Gold Butte, I crossed the Virgin River. On the north side of the river were two flagpoles, each with an American flag flying. Atop one pole was some metalwork that said "We The," and the pole next to it was topped with "People." Down below on a fence, a tattered banner hung limp. It read: This is the stomping ground of Cliven Bundy, the anti government provocateur who grazed his unpermitted cattle on Gold Butte rangeland and had a standoff here with government authorities in 2014. His ranch is right down the road. Across the bridge and at the turn off for Gold Butte Road, there is a gravel pull in with some Plexiglas covered B.L.M. signs about respecting and enjoying the desert, packing out trash and encouraging drivers to stay on marked routes. The signs are peppered with bullet holes. This is a common affliction among signs in the Gold Butte area. Past the Bundy Ranch and some horse farms, the road goes into an expansive valley, and another sign appears, one so new that it hasn't been shot yet. It's the only official B.L.M. sign that I saw naming this place as a national monument. This is the jumping off point. There is no ranger station, no information kiosk, no visitors' center, no restrooms, no water, no shelter. This is also where cellphone coverage peters out. After this sign, the valley widens and Joshua trees, which are primarily found in the Mojave Desert, appear. It's not a woody tree but more of a fibrous sponge that stores water. I inspected a dead one, and it had the feel of a crusty coconut husk. While pondering how man made rubbish can still find its way far into no man's land, a covey of Gambel's quail flushed off to my side. They are prized game birds among Western upland hunters. Gold Butte also holds chukar partridges, found in higher elevations. It is said that you first hunt chukars for fun, and the second time you hunt them for revenge because the cardiovascular workout is so brutal. Gold Butte was deemed worthy of monument designation for historical and cultural assets but also for environmental and conservation reasons. It is where the Great Basin, Mojave Desert and Colorado Plateau merge. The Joshua trees are a rare and iconic American treasure and Gold Butte has plenty of them, along with its cousin, the Mojave yucca. It holds multiple subspecies of cholla and prickly pear cactuses. All of the plants take a long time to grow. The barrel cactus that dot the hillsides can live to 130 years. Near 21 Goats, the Las Vegas bearpoppy is being restored. The plant grows only in Clark County, where all of Gold Butte is located, and cannot be transplanted. Near the Devil's Throat, a giant sinkhole over a hundred feet deep, grassland is being restored after wildfires in 2005. The desert was surprisingly full of life. Every time I hiked through the scrub, road runners, fence lizards, kangaroo rats and blacktail jackrabbits skittered under the creosote bushes. Up above, I spotted a golden eagle soaring on the drafts, and in the distance, I caught a glimpse of a prairie falcon diving at some doomed ground dwelling creature. Gold Butte is a large, flat topped hill, and the only settlement here went by the same name. Upon my arrival at the ghost town of Gold Butte, jackrabbits bolted from every direction. At one time, this spot had a post office, store, saloon and hotel. An estimated 2,000 miners lived here mostly in tents during its peak in 1908. They mined copper, gold, zinc, lead and magnesite. The boom died off in 1910. I hiked around and found mattress frames, tangles of rusty wire, an old oven, a sink, water tanks, an old stovetop range, a collapsed corral, metal drums, a couple of concrete pads and a large mining contraption. Most of these items had been used for target practice. There are two graves surrounded by a fence of metal piping. On the hillside, I found a mine. The entrance to the mine was fenced off, but there was no sign stating you can't go in there, so I climbed over the fence. When I illuminated the mine with my penlight, there was an odd shaped rock. It slithered. Maybe a panamint rattlesnake or a Gila monster. I climbed back over the fence. Hidden in the cliffs is the image of a man falling. The Falling Man is a mystery. No one is sure what it means, much like similar images in the Cave of Swimmers in the Sahara. It stands completely alone from the other rock art and this is contrasted by a nearby boulder that is completely covered with petroglyphs. It's Newspaper Rock, one of many newspaper rocks that are scattered over the deserts in the American West. It's like an ancient storyboard, but good luck making any sense of it. There are human footprints, a tortoise, more bull's eyes, more goats, squiggly lines and a rainbow. I sat in front of it and pondered the images until thirst set in and I had to hike back to the Jeep for water. I'm sure Crazy Ed led a hell of a life chasing Spanish hoards and prospecting for gold, but the real treasures of Gold Butte aren't buried underground. They are often right in front your face. You just need to burn some boot leather, and then at the right spot, look up. There they are. They will take your breath away. If You Go Fly into Las Vegas, rent a four wheel drive vehicle and head toward Mesquite, Nev., approximately 90 minutes away. On Highway 15, take exit 112 and head south on Riverside Road. Once you cross the Virgin River, you are in Gold Butte country. Some road sections of Gold Butte can be handled by a 2WD vehicle, but a high clearance 4X4 is the smartest and safest way to explore the rugged back roads. On the dirt roads, you will have an average speed of 10 to 15 miles per hour, and your teeth will still rattle. It is very slow going on some roads. Pack enough food and water to last for at least three days, along with standard emergency and survival gear. Bringing a can of gasoline is also wise. The possibility of a vehicle breakdown deep in the backcountry, with no cellphone signals and the extreme heat of the Mojave Desert, can make for a dangerous situation. During my explorations of Gold Butte, I saw only two other vehicles and not a single person. The possibility of nobody coming along to help you for a very long time is real. Mesquite is the best town to start or end an adventure in Gold Butte. Think of it as a miniature Las Vegas. It has a handful of affordable resorts, casinos, all you can eat buffets and restaurants. In town, you can gather provisions and last minute supplies at convenience stores and supermarkets and, most important, top off your gas tank. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Chuck Rhoades wants to be beaten. Needs it, in fact. He even asks his wife to take their kids out for the night so a professional dominatrix can come over and do what she is no longer willing to do herself. And when the domme does it, she does it hard. Bruises, welts, cuts, a shiner around the left eye: It's bad enough that even though he has come out of the kink closet, he still has to pretend he has taken up jujitsu just to avoid further embarrassment. He'll need the excuse, too, because he plans on doing this again and again and again. "Wendy," he says, as she looks at his battered body in shock, "what I did tonight I cannot live without." It's funny that "Billions" has moved Chuck and Wendy's sadomasochism to the forefront of the story. Even though a depiction of that aspect of their relationship opened the entire series, I don't think I ever appreciated what an effective analogy it is for the behavior of, well, pretty much everyone on the show. No one here seems fulfilled unless they're giving or taking a beating. In this week's episode, the prime mover in that respect is Chuck, and not simply because of the physical beating he sustains. Having regained his crown as king of New York's legal jungle, he is constantly seeking ways to destroy his foes before they come for his throat. Public enemy No. 1 in this respect is the United States attorney general, Jock Jeffcoat, who Chuck's staff discovers has been making suspicious trips to the Cayman Islands. While they can uncover no further evidence that he is taking advantage of that haven for financial shenanigans, they do get a direct hit on his fellow cabinet member Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), the unctuous hedge funder turned treasury secretary. But just as Chuck returns from the Caymans with a crooked banker named Abington (played by the "Cosby Show" veteran Geoffrey Owens, always a welcome sight on the small screen), who is prepared to spill all he knows about Krakow's conduct, Connerty and Sacker swoop in and whisk the witness away with F.B.I. backup. Of course, Chuck wanted Connerty to swipe the Krakow case, and in fact colluded with the garrulous and grasping Judge Adam DeGiulio (Rob Morrow) to help this happen. By taking the case, Connerty would sabotage his relationship with Jeffcoat, who would be virtually guaranteed to want to quash the investigation into his corrupt colleague. This is indeed what happens, but the result is the opposite of what Chuck had hoped. Connerty is crushed that he won't be able to take out the treasury secretary, yes. But he and Jeffcoat both realize this was all the work of their common enemy, Chuck. Instead of dividing them, Rhoades's ruse has brought them closer together. Bryan will likely need all the support he can get because amid all this maneuvering, he is also setting up a wiretap on Chuck and Charles Sr. Connerty believes, correctly, that Charles is doing dirty deeds to get a major land deal approved; he also believes, incorrectly, that Chuck is in on it. Will he find some other crime to prosecute Chuck's too cosy relationship with Judge DeGiulio, perhaps or will the whole thing blow up in his face? It's tough to say. On this show it often pays to be paranoid. The question is, paranoid about what? Is it worse to overstep like Connerty, or to underestimate like many others? Wags, for example, is usually among the most cynical and suspicious characters of the bunch. But he is so blinded by his desire to look legit in the eyes of the city's richest and most respectable financiers that he walks right into a gathering of their prestigious fraternity, in the full drag required of novices, without realizing his invitation was a setup by an old enemy. His promise of revenge is too profane for this publication even to paraphrase, but I'm quite sure it's as sincere as it is hilarious. Wags's boss, Bobby, also learns the hard way that he should have been more cautious. Turns out that during his brief hiatus from running his company, Taylor adjusted his contract with one of his proxy traders, Victor Mateo (Louis Cancelmi), to make their allegedly untraceable relationship a whole lot more traceable. Now Victor is in hot water for shady conduct with a research firm, and Axe could wind up boiling along with him. It's "a Trojan Horse time bomb," as Wags puts it. Bobby's first attempt to defuse that time bomb is to ask Chuck to take over the case against Mateo and make it go away. But Rhoades realizes that all the heat on him from Connerty and Jeffcoat would only draw more attention to the matter, and begs off. So Axe is left with only one other option: buy the research firm to silence its chief executive, shut down Mateo's firm to end its threat, and force Victor into what's essentially indentured servitude, back with the grunts at Axe Cap. Axe has yet to make a meal of his top target, Taylor Mason, but not for lack of trying. At one point early in the episode, he and his black ops guru, Hall, actually skulk around a rooftop across from one of Mason's facilities, dressed in black and casing the joint like heroes in a Marvel Netflix series. Taylor, of course, is aware of Axe's vindictiveness; Doug Mason, the brainiac hedge funder's aerospace engineer father, has been made aware as well, and their joint business venture is closed up tight. Not tight enough, though. Under the guise of friendship, Wendy has resumed contact with Taylor and begun combing through old therapy files, looking for a weakness to exploit. She finds one in Doug, whose failure has haunted his child for years. A not so chance meeting with Taylor's right hand man Mafee, whom Wendy is an old hand at manipulating, gives her enough info to determine which company the Masons are partnering with to make Doug's dream a reality. Possibly venting the rage that she is prevented from taking out on her narcissistic husband, Wendy presents Axe with truly vicious plan: Instead of destroying Doug's new venture himself, he can arrange things so that Taylor is the one who has to do the deed. The breach, and the damage to Taylor as a result, will be irreparable. So much of the pleasure of "Billions" lies in the skill with which its makers construct these byzantine schemes. But in the process of sorting through them, one can glide right by the seemingly less important moments that help make the show special. One is the return of Malin Akerman as Lara Axelrod, with whom Bobby finally cuts geographical ties. Another is the sight of Paul Giamatti with a safety pin through his nipple. And a thousand words could be written about Wags in drag. But in a way, this is fitting. A worldview in which life is all wins and losses, victories and defeats, giving a beating or taking one, requires so much scheming and scrambling that it's easy to miss moments that matter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The report that a man who traveled from Liberia to New Jersey had died on Monday from the viral illness Lassa fever is another reminder that infectious diseases can hop continents and elude detection by health care workers who do not know a patient's travel history. Following is information about the disease: WHAT IS LASSA? Lassa, like Ebola, is a viral hemorrhagic fever. But Lassa is from a different family, not as contagious and nowhere near as deadly as Ebola. IS IT CONTAGIOUS? Lassa does not spread easily from person to person, and health officials say there is little or no risk to the public. Several Lassa cases have occurred in the United States, all in travelers from other countries. There has never been person to person transmission in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Country Is Reopening. Is It Safe to Play Softball Again? Carl Slutz and the rest of the Golden Years Senior Softball League are waiting to hear those magical words in Palm Beach County, Fla.: "Play ball." The parks are open, but league play was delayed as they waited for permission to play. So Slutz's 10 person crew has been holding batting practice at a Boca Raton park a couple times a week, getting ready for games, which are scheduled to start soon. Everyone takes some swings. Some wear a mask. They store their gym bags and take refuge from the heat in two dugouts rather than one to allow for social distancing. "Some people are scared to come out of their houses," Slutz, 85, said in a recent interview. "I'm more of an optimist. My position is, if you are not near someone, you have nothing to fear." All across the country, even in the states hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic and those where new cases are rising, the reawakening is underway, for better or for worse. People are getting haircuts, sitting at restaurants often at outdoor tables and they are trying to figure out whether it is safe for recreational activities at a time of year that usually brings a cascade of beach volleyball, Frisbee, twilight tennis, pickleball, youth sports and barbecue sports. Safe or not, they are happening. Graham Gerhart, a member of California Burrito Ultimate, a San Diego Frisbee club, said his teammates had begun to chuck their disks in the park. In Seattle, Jude LaRene, who runs DiscNW, another Ultimate club, said players had begun informally to do drills in small groups. In Tucson, Ariz., Kare Williams, who owns CrossFit Milo, said classes that now allow only nine students, rather than 15 to 20, regularly fill up. A group of women holds pickleball matches every morning in Colorado Springs. "You just don't know what is right and what is wrong," said David Stothoff, a contractor from Pittstown, N.J., whose daughter is a standout volleyball player who would normally be practicing hard with her club team this summer. "I know precautions and safety measures to keep our employees safe, but it's much different from the high school sports standpoint. They are shoulder to shoulder at times and face to face at the net. The distance is supposed to be six feet in casual conversation, but I'd think during exertion that has to be increased. How that happens, I don't know." No one really does, not even Dr. Shmuel Shoham, an infectious diseases specialist with Johns Hopkins University. But he is trying to apply rationality to questions of sports and safety. 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. "You are trying to balance the physical and mental health benefits that sports and exercise bring with the potential risk," Shoham said. And it's not an insolvable problem with intractable rules. With infection rates still rising in more than 20 states, Shoham has divided sports into three categories: safe, problematic and somewhere in between. Ones that he views as really safe, provided you are not on top of someone else, include solo endurance sports like running and cycling; tennis, because the net serves as a divider; and golf (but don't share a set of clubs). "And Frisbee has got to be really safe," he said. In problem sports, close contact is endemic to the traditional form of the activity: wrestling, indoor basketball and probably soccer for the time being are some examples. And then there are the sports in the middle, which require some thought and adjustment. Softball and baseball probably work with a lot of hand cleaning if people are using the same bat. And don't crowd together on the bench. Some versions of volleyball are likely OK. And maybe, under certain circumstances, that three on three pickup basketball game at the park isn't too risky, if you know who you are playing with and all the players have been healthy and limiting their exposure. But not everyone in the doctor's field necessarily agrees with that. "Pickup basketball, that is part of New York, and I don't mean to sound like I am trying to get in the way of everyone's fun," said Dr. Theresa Madaline, a health care epidemiologist with the Bronx based Montefiore Health System. "I played basketball, and you spend a lot of time running into people and trying to steal the ball. That amount of close contact is problematic. There is risk there." Indeed, there is risk nearly everywhere, but managing it and being able to play the summer games Americans enjoy can be done in certain circumstances. Get in the Pool Shoham asked an infection control specialist at Johns Hopkins how she felt about swimming. She told him she had been taking her children to the community pool in their Baltimore neighborhood nearly every day. "There is chlorine everywhere," he said. The chlorine kills bacteria and seemingly the virus, so the biggest risk is probably a crowded locker room, he said. And any pool should be cleaning handrails on the pool deck and other surfaces throughout the day. Madaline said a problem could arise in a pool if it got too crowded and children were climbing on top of one another, but if a swim team wanted to hold training and the swimmers could keep their distance, then swimming should be fine. In some areas of the country where infection rates are low, youth sports have returned. This month, Maryland gave the go ahead for outdoor high school sports training to resume. Shoham said the key was to keep things local. If people from a community with few infections want to set up a practice, the risk may be low. Madaline said practicing with older children is most likely safer than with younger ones because they are better at following instructions about social distancing. The important thing for now, she said, is to modify the way the game is played. If it's soccer or lacrosse or another contact sport, a coach can organize dribbling and running and shooting drills where there is no contact. Shoham had this idea for baseball and softball: Either ban leading off a base or have the teams agree that the runner on first can take a reasonable lead but the first baseman cannot hold the runner on. That limits their proximity. Also, at this point, destination tournaments, in which dozens of youth teams from multiple states gather for three days for competition, should not happen, he said. Gerhart, from the Frisbee club, said members of the Facebook group he belongs to have begun to set up small beach volleyball games in San Diego, despite rules that are supposed to prohibit them. While Shoham is firmly against an indoor six on six volleyball game, two on two or three on three on the beach is doable. "That's better," he said. "The more people you have in a small area, the riskier it is," Madaline said. Gym owners across the country are well aware of that, and the responsible ones are cutting capacity and cleaning relentlessly. Williams, the CrossFit owner in Arizona, said her facility uses separate doors for entering and exiting so people do not pass each other. The building also has 25 foot ceilings and large doors they keep open to increase ventilation, and each member receives wipes and a spray bottle and is required to clean the area and the equipment they used when classes end. That won't completely eliminate risk, but it can help. "The gyms are a challenge," Shoham said. "It's got to be kept really clean. I'm not here to destroy the gym economy. I would be a little more nervous." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The owner of Chelsea Market, a popular food marketplace in West Chelsea, recently ignited a public furor when the city approved plans to add office towers to the squat structure. But before construction on the towers begins, the market now plans to expand by adding eight new spaces for vendors all without changing the exterior of the neighborhood landmark. A collection of industrial buildings that once housed the National Biscuit Company, or Nabisco, Chelsea Market will require no new space to house the new tenants, said Michael Phillips, a chief operating officer of Jamestown Properties, an acquisition and management firm based in Cologne, Germany, and Atlanta. Instead, the space for the new stores was created when Amy's Bread moved most of its baking operations off site, leaving thousands of square feet open that, along with the conversion of a loading dock and an office, amounted to about 5,700 square feet of space, he said. Construction on the project has already begun and will not disrupt the approximately 35 current tenants of Chelsea Market. In November, Jamestown received city approval to add two office towers to Chelsea Marketplace, one of them eight stories and the other seven stories, for a total of 300,000 square feet of space that could bring hundreds of new workers to the area, but construction on that project has not yet begun. The market fills the entire block between Ninth and 10th Avenues and West 15th and 16th Streets. Leases are currently being negotiated for the eight new retail outlets, and though no leases have been signed yet, Mr. Phillips said he expected that the stores would be up and running by mid February. "We're very focused on ethnic food and spices, and the whole beer growler, homemade beers and wine and spirits business, as well as local, New York produced products," he said. Currently, the market carries everything from fine foods and baked goods to prime meats and fresh lobster, along with a smattering of books, flowers and kitchen and home decor goods. Under the terms negotiated with the city for approval of the office towers, 75 percent of the vendors at Chelsea Market must remain food purveyors. All the tenants in space converted from Amy's Bread will involve food products, Mr. Phillips said. A map of the project's floor plan shows a possible bicycle shop and barbershop in the original loading dock and office space. Amy's Bread continues to have a presence at Chelsea Market in its reduced space, where it has a cafe, along with a small baking operation behind a glass panel so shoppers can watch baking demonstrations. The area formerly occupied by Amy's Bread is being built into small kiosks, much like an existing wing of the market where tenants like The Filling Station, Tuck Shop and Lucy's Whey operate. In the new wing, however, the emphasis will be on cooking and food preparation. Two spaces will have food counters where people can sit and watch chefs cook while they dine. "They're really sort of fitted out modern versions of a diner food counter with exhibition kitchens," Mr. Phillips said. Spaces will lease for about 200 to 400 a square foot, which is substantially more than typical rents in Chelsea, but the spaces are being delivered as almost completely turnkey, he said. "They include power supply, water supply, hood systems for cooking, kitchen equipment where there's cooking, so they're basically plug and play spaces," Mr. Phillips said. "The natural reaction would be, 'Wow that's a high rate,' but when you look at what comes with it, it makes a lot of sense." The spaces are being set up to incubate start up and smaller, less established businesses, Mr. Phillips said, companies that otherwise might find it hard to get a foothold in a neighborhood where retail rents have grown rapidly in recent years. Commercial rents in Chelsea currently can range from 175 to 275 a foot, levels that are 10 to 12 percent higher than at the real estate market's height in 2007, said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of the retail leasing and sales division at the brokerage Douglas Elliman. Chelsea Market's added emphasis on food is coming at a fortunate time for the market, which has become more of a destination for shoppers from outside of Chelsea, particularly with the draw of the High Line, an elevated park that runs along the western side of the market at 10th Avenue. "Food has become fashion, and it's a foodie world," Ms. Consolo said. "At the same time, we're also seeing the rise of people gifting with consumables, whether it's wine or pastries or chocolates. " Chelsea Market, which attracts about 120,000 visitors a week, will also have potential customers in the 1,000 office workers at the companies that are expected to lease space in the two new office towers, where Jamestown is not building any kind of cafeteria. Construction on those towers is scheduled to begin in 2015 and should take 18 months, Mr. Phillips said. That built in customer base may end up being crucial to Chelsea Market, depending on how its businesses react to a second large shopping center, the almost 300,000 square foot Pier 57, which will be constructed one block to the west and is scheduled to open in the spring of 2015, said Alexander E. Hill, an associate broker and associate director with the Winick Realty Group. "I think they'll compete," he said. "They're going to have restaurants at Pier 57." Other factors will also affect Chelsea Market, including the extension of the High Line up to Hudson Yards, a 26 acre commercial and residential district taking shape west of Eighth Avenue between 30th and 43rd Streets, Mr. Hill said. "There are tons of new residential developments planned for the Hudson Yards area, and people who live in Midtown West could potentially work in Chelsea Market and walk all the way down the High Line to work," he said. "So all those traffic patterns are going to completely change." In fact, it's possible that Pier 57, which is an effort on the part of developers to create a one of a kind retail experience that will attract locals and tourists from all over, will draw enough additional traffic to the area that it ends up benefiting Chelsea Market, much as the High Line did, brokers said. "The pier is going to be just another reason to go north of 14th Street and/or around that entire vicinity," said Robin Abrams, an executive vice president with the real estate firm, the Lansco Corporation. "If you have just one thing that somebody is visiting, grabbing a bite to eat maybe, you're limited in terms of the draw," she said. "But if you've got all these exciting things going on in the neighborhood now, the more people will go there because there are lots of things to do." Increased traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, was one of the main concerns for those who opposed Chelsea Market's plan to build the two office towers. Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, said that retailers might not envision it now, but the traffic created by all the new retail development in West Chelsea may well become a hindrance rather than a benefit. "West Chelsea has gone from one of the least congested parts of Manhattan to one of the most congested parts of Manhattan, which is a pretty dramatic transformation in less than a decade," he said. "I think at a certain point you can have too much of a good thing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Ever since a bite size peanut butter cracker made him sputter and cough and break out in hives when he was a toddler, Carter Grodi has been under doctors' orders to stay away from peanuts. He brought his own cupcake to school birthday parties, learned to read food labels, and turned 15 without ever tasting a Kit Kat, Twix or Three Musketeers bar, all of which may contain traces of peanut because they are made in facilities that process the nuts. But last year , Carter, now 16, gorged on those candies for the first time without having a reaction. He had just completed a yearlong clinical trial of an oral immunotherapy regimen that aims to reduce children's sensitivity to peanut allergens by gradually exposing them to peanut protein over the course of six months, starting with minute amounts that are carefully measured and increased incrementally under medical supervision as tolerance develops. The goal of the treatment is not to cure the allergy or enable children to eat peanut butter sandwiches, but to reduce the risk that an accidental exposure to trace amounts will trigger a life threatening reaction in someone with a severe allergy, and relieve the fear and anxiety that go along with severe peanut allergies. The results, announced Sunday at a conference of the American College of Allergy, Asthma Immunology in Seattle, may lead to approval of what could be the first oral medication that ameliorates reactions in children with severe peanut allergies. After six months of treatment followed by six months of maintenance therapy, two thirds of the 372 children who received the treatment were able to ingest 600 milligrams or more of peanut protein the equivalent of two peanuts without developing allergic symptoms. By contrast, only 4 percent of the 124 children who had been given a placebo powder were able to consume the same amount of peanut without reacting. The treatment does not work for everyone. Though only 4.3 percent of children receiving the active drug experienced side effects categorized as severe, compared to less than 1 percent of the children on placebo, 20 percent of the children in the active treatment group withdrew from the study, more than half of them because of adverse events. Fourteen percent of those on active treatment received injections of epinephrine, a drug used in emergencies, including one child who experienced anaphylaxis and required three EpiPen injections. By contrast, only 6.5 percent of those on the placebo received epinephrine. Demand for the new drug is expected to be high, and though it is made of peanuts, advocates for people with peanut allergies are already expressing concern about how it will be priced and whether it will be covered by insurance. One in 50 American children is allergic to peanuts. Peanut allergies are believed to cause more deaths from anaphylaxis, an acute allergic reaction that can include constriction of the airways, than any other food allergy. Deaths are rare, and the precise number is not known. Patients do not generally outgrow peanut allergies, so they must be vigilant throughout their lives. The double blinded, placebo controlled trial of the drug, called AR101 and developed by Aimmune Therapeutics, is to be published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Aimmune Therapeutics designed and sponsored the clinical trial, which was carried out at multiple medical centers. Five of the 13 authors of the paper are company employees, and the others serve on the company's scientific advisory board, for which they are compensated. Experts who were not involved in the trial said the outcomes exceeded their expectations, calling the results "potentially lifesaving." But they also cautioned that the treatment does not cure peanut allergies and should not be attempted at home. They emphasized that children who complete the regimen need to continue to eat a peanut free diet and may need to keep up maintenance therapy with minute doses of peanut, possibly for the rest of their lives. "This is not the cure, but it is a good first step," said Dr. James R. Baker Jr., chief medical officer of Food Allergy Research Education (FARE), a nonprofit advocacy group that focuses on food allergies, noting the results were better than he expected. Until now, he said, "We've had nothing, nothing to give these poor kids that can keep them from having these reactions and put them in a much more positive outlook on life. It's just a wonderful thing to have. "The fact that the kids were eating the equivalent of a peanut a day pretty much tells you that if they accidentally eat a peanut, they won't have a life threatening reaction," Dr. Baker said. Michael Perkin, a clinical epidemiologist and pediatric allergy consultant at St. George's, University of London who wrote an accompanying editorial about the study, said the regimen was "not a walk in the park" and requires tremendous discipline. Children are required to rest for two hours after receiving their daily dose but cannot fall asleep because of the risk of a reaction. Dr. Perkin said that the long term side effects of consuming allergens when one has a severe allergy are still unknown. But he described the results as "beyond exciting." "It isn't a cure like an antibiotic that makes a bug go away and it's not there anymore," he said. But "psychologically it makes a massive difference if you can keep your kid from living in fear. These kids can eat enough peanut that parents no longer will have to worry about their teenage daughter kissing someone who's eaten peanut butter. You cannot estimate what a psychological relief that is." For children like Carter Grodi, a junior in high school in Ocala, Fla., who completed the treatment a year ago and continues to ingest a small amount of peanut every day to maintain his low level tolerance, the treatment was transformative, making it easier to go out with friends and make plans to go away for college. He still does not knowingly eat peanuts or peanut products, but can tolerate the occasional undeclared traces of peanuts that slip into cookies and cakes from cross contamination in a kitchen or food processing plant. "I have that protection, that shield for the amount I can tolerate," he said, adding that he no longer takes the medication but eats two peanut M Ms a day. The treatment was not effective in the small number of adults enrolled in the study. The trial, said to be the largest of its kind, included 551 people, of whom 496 were 4 to 17 years old. All of the participants were tested for peanut allergy at the beginning of the study, and experienced reactions to very small amounts of peanut protein, equivalent to one third of a peanut or less. Most participants had a history of anaphylactic reactions after consuming peanuts, while over half had asthma and another food allergy. Those who had been hospitalized with a severe allergic reaction within the last 60 days were excluded from the study, however, as were those who had severe or poorly controlled asthma. The drug is described as a "peanut derived investigational biologic oral immunotherapy drug," but the active ingredient is simply defatted peanut flour that is carefully measured and packed into capsules or foil sachets of varying doses that are easily opened so the contents can be mixed into unheated food and consumed. At first, the participants were fed a dose of three milligrams of the drug, staying on that daily dose for two weeks before moving on to the next slightly higher dose, with the goal of eventually reaching a maximum dose of 300 milligrams, which is roughly equivalent to one peanut. The regimen is stretched over the course of six months, followed by six months of maintenance therapy at 300 milligrams a day. After the treatment and maintenance phase were completed, children were given a food challenge to see how much peanut protein they could tolerate. Most of those who completed the treatment were able to tolerate up to 600 milligrams of peanut protein, the equivalent of two peanuts; half were able to tolerate 1,000 milligrams of peanut protein. Almost all of the children experienced adverse allergic reactions during the course of the yearlong trial, whether they were in the active treatment group or the placebo group. But over all, the investigators were pleased with the low rate of adverse events. Only 4.3 percent of the children on active treatment had allergic reactions classified as severe, while 59 percent had moderate adverse reactions and 34.7 percent had mild reactions. Among children on the placebo, fewer than 1 percent had serious reactions, while 44 percent had moderate adverse reactions and 50 percent had mild reactions. Gastrointestinal pain, vomiting and nausea were the most common reactions in those on active treatment, followed by itchy skin, coughing and throat irritation. The idea of oral immunotherapy dates back to 1908, when a British doctor first reported desensitizing a child with an egg allergy to eggs by giving him small amounts of egg to eat over time, said Dr. Brian P. Vickery, the lead author of the paper, who was the lead scientist for the study and an employee of Aimmune Therapeutics while the trial was being carried out. He is now a consultant to the company, as well as an associate professor at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Food Allergy Program. "But most studies of this have been flawed and small, or uncontrolled," meaning they lacked a group of patients on placebo for comparison, Dr. Vickery said. "This trial is the most definitive look at whether this treatment is right for patients. It has generated the highest quality evidence to date about whether oral immunotherapy works and how safe it is." Although the treatment itself can induce allergic reactions, patients who complete the treatment gain protection from the inadvertent, accidental exposure. "You exchange that uncertain, unpredictable risk of having an accidental reaction that spirals out of control for these sort of lower level, mostly mild or moderate symptoms, that are manageable for most patients," Dr. Vickery said. Dr. Daniel C. Adelman, Aimmune's chief medical officer and the paper's senior author, said the company plans to submit a biologics license application to the F.D.A. by the end of the year. The drug has already been designated a breakthrough therapy that will receive priority review and go through an accelerated approval process, so it could be on the market by the end of 2019, a spokeswoman said. Another company, DBV Technologies, has already submitted an application to the F.D.A. for approval for a product called Viaskin Peanut, which also aims to treat young children with peanut allergies by delivering an immunotherapy compound through a patch worn on the skin. "It's pretty exciting," said Carolee Grodi, Carter's mother, of the new treatment, saying it came at a good time for her son, who was becoming more independent. "It's not eradication of the allergy, it's just protection against an accidental exposure, but that's huge. People don't realize it, but peanuts are everywhere." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
The Trump administration threatened on Friday to withhold federal money from California if the state does not drop its requirement that private insurers cover abortions. In an announcement on the morning of the March for Life, the high profile annual anti abortion rights demonstration, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would give California 30 days to commit to lifting the requirement. If the state does not do so, the administration said it will take steps to cut off money from one or more federal funding streams. "People should not be forced to participate, or pay for, or cover other people's abortions," said Roger Severino, director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration issued a notice of violation, declaring that California was not complying with the federal Weldon Amendment, which says that certain funds can be withheld if a state or local government discriminates against a "health care entity" for not providing or paying for abortions. The announcement was intended as a warning shot to several other states that also require insurers to cover abortion, including New York, Oregon, Washington, Illinois and Maine. "We're sending a message that if any state has done what California has done, they should expect to be found likewise in violation," Mr. Severino said. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, said the state would not change the requirement. "Despite a federal opinion four years ago confirming California's compliance with the Weldon Amendment, the Trump Administration would rather rile up its base to score cheap political points and risk access to care for millions than do what's right," Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement. "California will continue to protect a woman's right to choose, and we won't back down from defending reproductive freedom for everybody full stop." The California's attorney general, Xavier Becerra, tweeted: "We will fight this by any means necessary." In a briefing with reporters, administration officials would not say which funding streams might be cut off or how much money might be involved. Jocelyn Samuels, who served as director of the Office of Civil Rights for H.H.S. from 2014 through the end of the Obama administration, said that billions of dollars could potentially be at stake. Ms. Samuels noted that the stark language of the Weldon Amendment says that "none of the funds" that Congress appropriates for the departments of Health and Human Services, Education and Labor can be made available to a state that is found to have violated the amendment. If the Trump administration wanted to impose a narrower penalty, like withholding funding from a specific health care grant, that might have to be determined by a court, she said. If California is deprived of money because of its abortion coverage requirement, it would be the first time the federal government has withheld funding because of health care provider conscience laws, said Ms. Samuels, who is now the executive director of the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. "This is all uncharted waters," Ms. Samuels said, adding that in 2016, the Obama administration evaluated the same California insurance requirement and determined that it did not violate the Weldon Amendment because only the health insurers ordered to provide abortion coverage had standing to object, and none of them had. Mr. Severino cited two religious organizations that had complained that they felt compelled to obtain insurance that included abortion coverage for their employees: the Skyline Wesleyan Church and the Missionary Guadalupanas of the Holy Spirit, Inc. The latter organization, a Catholic order of religious sisters, previously sued the state of California over the requirement, a lawsuit that was dismissed by an appeals court in August. "I don't know how this makes sense to anybody," Mr. Severino said. "Not only is it the wrong thing to do to force nuns to pay for abortion services for fellow nuns, it's against the law." President Trump, who once said he was "very pro choice," has worked to earn the support of anti abortion groups with a series of actions, including preventing organizations that receive federal family planning money from referring patients for abortions and appointing judges to the Supreme Court who have a record of conservative rulings in abortion cases. Last year on the day of the March for Life, the Trump administration levied a similar accusation against California, saying it violated federal conscience protection amendments with a state law that required religiously oriented "crisis pregnancy centers" to inform women with unintended pregnancies about the option of abortion. But that federal action appeared to be largely symbolic because the Supreme Court had already struck down the California law on free speech grounds. The Supreme Court said recently that it would hear a case in which the Trump administration is trying to allow a range of employers with religious or moral objections to opt out of the Affordable Care Act's requirement that most insurers provide free coverage of birth control. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Credit...Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times A Nun, a Doctor and a Lawyer and Deep Regret Over the Nation's Handling of Opioids PENNINGTON GAP, Va. Years before there was an opioid epidemic in America, Sister Beth Davies knew it was coming. In the late 1990s, patient after patient addicted to a new prescription painkiller called OxyContin began walking into the substance abuse clinic she ran in this worn Appalachian town. A local physician, Dr. Art Van Zee, sensed the gathering storm, too, as teenagers overdosed on the drug. His wife, Sue Ella Kobak, a lawyer, saw the danger signs in a growing wave of robberies and other crimes that all had links to OxyContin. Barry Meier reports on a confidential government memo that had the potential to change the trajectory of the opioid crisis, but it was hidden from the public. Watch The Times's new TV show, "The Weekly," on FX and Hulu. Today, two decades later, their experience, and their continued work with people struggling with addiction, illustrates the national failure to contain an epidemic that not only continues but also has grown more complex. Those here who witnessed the epidemic unfold see it as a tragedy of missed opportunities. Dr. Van Zee said that he believed the Food and Drug Administration could have blunted the epidemic's course in 2001 by forcing Purdue Pharma to reformulate OxyContin so that it was harder to abuse, a step the drugmaker did not take until 2010. The three also believe that the Justice Department could have changed the behavior of other opioid makers if it had charged executives of Purdue Pharma in 2007 with felonies, as federal prosecutors had recommended, in connection with OxyContin's illegal marketing. Instead, department officials negotiated a deal under which the executives pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges that did not include jail time. In the years that followed, executives of other opioid makers and distributors kept shipping millions of addictive pain pills into towns like this one apparently without fear of serious penalties. "I think the trajectory would have been completely different," Dr. Van Zee said recently. "It would not have reached the magnitude that it did." The consequences of inaction continue to haunt this former mining town of about 1,900, set in the far southwestern corner of Virginia near the border of Kentucky. Dr. Van Zee, who is 72, rises at 4 a.m. to take care of paperwork before spending 10 to 12 hour days at a community health clinic. Some of his patients, still, are addicted to opioids. Sister Beth, now 86, continues to run her treatment center, and is seeing more people turning to heroin and fentanyl, which are cheaper and more deadly and a new scourge, the return of methamphetamine . "It never ends, the whole cycle," she said. "We are still losing people to it." I came to Pennington Gap for the first time nearly 20 years ago, reporting for The New York Times about OxyContin's growing abuse. I got to know Sister Beth, Dr. Van Zee and Ms. Kobak, and they became central characters in a book I wrote called "Pain Killer" that was set in this town. Both Sister Beth and Ms. Kobak had previously taken on fights in this part of Appalachia, to protect the rights of workers and the environment. But Dr. Van Zee was an unlikely activist. When OxyContin came on the market in 1996, he prescribed it to his cancer patients to blunt their excruciating pain. He found it hard to believe that a pharmaceutical company would recklessly market a drug that had such an addictive potential to a much wider population. A local pharmacist, Greg Stewart, said a sales representative for Purdue Pharma had told him that OxyContin was safe because it was a long acting narcotic and so would not appeal to drug abusers who liked Percocet and other short acting pain pills because they delivered a quick high. But teenagers and others in town quickly discovered that crushing an OxyContin pill released large quantities of the narcotic oxycodone. Sister Beth recalls getting a phone call from Mr. Stewart as she was starting to see people addicted to the drug. "Beth, believe me," she recalled him saying, "this is going to be the worst disaster that ever hit Lee County." One executive pulled out a full page advertisement that Purdue Pharma, which would add a new warning label on OxyContin, planned to run in a local newspaper attacking the recall drive. Ms. Kobak exploded. "You have done more to hurt Appalachia than the coal industry has ever thought about doing," she said and stormed out. Sister Beth implored people to turn down the drugmaker's money. "This is blood money," she said. "They are trying to buy us off." The recall drive fizzled out , and by the mid 2000s, the people of Pennington Gap were trying to combat a growing opioid epidemic in other ways. Dr. Van Zee received training that allowed him to prescribe buprenorphine, a medicine that blunts cravings for opioids, to his patients. Sister Beth, Ms. Kobak, Dr. Van Zee and others helped start a local inpatient addiction treatment facility, the only one for many miles. They all were encouraged in 2007 when the Justice Department announced criminal indictments against Purdue Pharma and three of its top executives in connection with deceptive marketing of the drug. That July, Sister Beth stood in drizzling rain outside a federal courthouse in Abingdon, Va., disappointed about the outcome of the case. In the courtroom, a judge had approved a deal struck between the Justice Department and the three Purdue executives. Under it, the men were allowed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge that did not accuse them of personal wrongdoing and for which they would not face jail. Sister Beth said recently she was glad that some justice had been done, but that it was not enough. "I think it would have made a considerable difference if these people had been arrested and done jail time," she said. The problems of today's opioid epidemic still plague this town. Drugs tainted by counterfeit fentanyl are now sold on the streets. The ravages of methamphetamine can be seen in the hollowed bodies of addicts who suddenly fly into psychotic rages. The inpatient treatment facility was forced to close after several years for lack of funding. Sister Beth also said that government funding, both state and federal, was woefully short of what was necessary for people to get the help they needed. "It has just started to get better," she said. Virginia's decision last year to expand Medicaid, which has paid for treatment of many low income people in other expansion states, may have helped, along with an injection of federal grant money to states for addiction treatment and prevention. Sister Beth, Dr. Van Zee and Ms. Kobak , who is now retired, have been reading with fascination the new documents about Purdue Pharma and its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, that have recently emerged in lawsuits and elsewhere. As it turns out, it was in 2001, the year they and others in town confronted Purdue Pharma executives about the overzealous marketing of OxyContin, that a son of one of company's founders, Dr. Richard Sackler, wrote a now infamous email about the need "to hammer on the abusers in every way possible" for the drug's problem. "I was impressed by what looked like their commitment to get some type of accountability and responsibility," he said. But that never happened. In March, Purdue Pharma agreed to pay 270 million to settle. As a result, all its internal documents remain sealed. Oklahoma state officials said they struck the deal because of concerns that Purdue Pharma, which faces thousands of lawsuits, might soon file for bankruptcy. Dr. Van Zee said he couldn't question the state's decision but was deeply disappointed by it. Now, he and the others are looking to a federal courthouse in Ohio, where nearly 2,000 lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and other opioid manufacturers and distributors have been consolidated under one federal judge. After living through the opioid epidemic for 20 years, Dr. Van Zee, Ms. Kobak and Sister Beth all share the belief that the only way to prevent a similar catastrophe is for the truth to come out about the actions of corporations and the failures of public officials. "I hope it puts a light on what huge systematic changes we can make so that this doesn't happen again in 20 or 30 years," Dr. Van Zee said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays. The Tour de France, like many major sporting events, is on hold because of the pandemic. But last weekend, I watched cartoon likenesses of professional cyclists fighting to win a virtual version. Connected to the Zwift virtual world for running and cycling were the real life athletes riding stationary bicycles in their dining rooms, garages or backyards. When they had to ride up a steep virtual French mountain, I watched a split screen video feed of their real life faces straining and their heart rates soaring. It was genuine fun. Most of you probably aren't cycling fans like me. But this sport, mostly associated with cheating and rich Europeans, has figured out virtual competitions that are (almost) as inviting as the real thing for athletes and spectators. What surprised me most was how seriously the cyclists seemed to be taking a not real Tour de France. There were no medals or prize money at stake, yet people at the top tier of their sport were thrashing themselves to win a video game. "We're all competitors, and this pandemic has taken that opportunity away from us," said Lauren Stephens, who won a mountainous virtual Tour de France women's race on Sunday. "To be able to compete at this level in your living room for me, it's pretty enjoyable." On race day, Stephens woke up early in her Dallas home and set up in her dining room, which was filled with stationary bicycles, a 40 inch television to watch herself on Zwift, three fans and a dehumidifier to stay cool. (Cycling indoors is sweaty.) During the race, Stephens and the rest of her Tibco Silicon Valley Bank team used the messaging app Discord to hash out strategy. In a way, cycling is an ideal virtual sport. Compared with a basketball team, it's easier to translate what an individual cyclist or runner does at home into real world road speeds. And cycling is already technology obsessed. Even many amateurs ride on Zwift have gadgets to measure their vital statistics, and use apps to compare themselves with others who rode up the same hill. I hope some of the fun elements of virtual cycle racing will mesh with the real thing. It was great to track the pros' vital statistics like power and heart rates. And even Stephens said the close up shots of the pros on Zwift showed viewers the pain of racing that TV footage doesn't capture. Best of all, without having to travel to France, more than 44,000 mortals got to ride the same virtual Tour de France roads as the professionals. (It took me nearly two hours to cycle the course that Stephens finished in under 48 minutes.) I bet racecar fans would get a kick out of driving on the Daytona 500 course, and soccer fans would love to see their favorite players' heart rates as they raced down the pitch. I got to do the equivalent of both. After I wrote earlier this week about the potential dangers of products sold on Amazon by a sprawling network of merchants, Christina Barber Just in Leverett, Mass., emailed with a follow up question: If I'm careful to buy directly from Amazon not another merchant can I be assured that I'm not going to get a counterfeit product? Good question. You can never be fully assured something isn't counterfeit, but retailers like Amazon are legally accountable for the products they sell. In theory, that would make a company more careful about what it sells. One of the risks of buying from outside merchants on Amazon is that it's a legal gray area whether you can sue Amazon over a fake or dangerous product it lists on its site but doesn't sell itself. I'll tell you my personal online shopping habits, Christina. If I'm shopping on Amazon for a product that could be dangerous if it's counterfeit or unreliable vitamins, children's toys or makeup, for example I almost without exception make sure I'm buying an item sold by Amazon itself rather than one of the millions of merchants that sell on Amazon. Here's what to look for: On the right hand side of Amazon product pages, underneath the "buy" button there is text that explains the product "ships from and sold by Amazon.com." That means Amazon bought the item from the product manufacturer and is reselling it, just like any conventional store. That's what I want. I tend to keep hunting if the text says a product is "sold by" a different company. There is similar advice with more detailed safety tips here from a Wall Street Journal columnist. Online at Walmart and Target, I also mostly buy merchandise sold directly by those companies rather than outside merchants although compared with Amazon, outside merchants represent a small percentage of goods those retailers sell online. Before we go ... None The tech surveillance state meets free love San Francisco: A wealthy technology executive is paying for a private network of security cameras around the city, and he's found a surprisingly receptive audience, writes my colleague Nellie Bowles. Many San Franciscans are tired of property crimes and are willing to set aside the city's famously anti authority streak to install cameras overseen by neighborhood groups rather than the police. None You sure about that tech surveillance, San Francisco? A company that analyzes social media posts helped law enforcement track the location and actions of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, according to The Intercept, an investigative news outlet. Civil liberties advocates have said it's an infringement of privacy rights for law enforcement to use drones, smartphone data harvesting and other technologies to keep tabs on protesters. None Who is welcome in the kid safe zone? After multiple crises about distributing videos of children, YouTube has carved out a spot with child friendly videos. But Bloomberg News reported that some Black video creators say YouTube has unfairly excluded the programming they make from its app for kids. It's part of a broader question about whether YouTube and other online hangouts are living up to their pledges to promote diversity. We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you'd like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech nytimes.com. If you don't already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
How the Lakers Beat the Heat in Game 1 of the N.B.A. Finals LeBron James is not accustomed to Game 1s like these. James's teams lost the series opener in eight of his previous nine trips to the N.B.A. finals, but Wednesday night's start to the 2020 finals against the Miami Heat went as well as James and the Los Angeles Lakers could have hoped. The Lakers cruised to a 116 98 victory after stretching their lead to as many as 32 points in the third quarter. Anthony Davis rumbled for a dominant 34 points in the first finals game of his career, and James added an efficient 25 points, 13 rebounds and 9 assists for a near triple double. The Heat could not build on their early 13 point lead and, more worryingly, watched two of their three best players hobble off with injuries. While the Lakers were dominating the boards (54 36) and limiting the Heat to just 14 trips to the free throw line, Miami lost point guard Goran Dragic (left foot) for the entire second half and center Bam Adebayo (left shoulder) for most of it. 1st Quarter: The Lakers fight back from their deficit with 3 pointers. Miami's Jae Crowder came into the N.B.A. finals mired in a 4 for 28 slump from the 3 point line. All Crowder did in the first quarter was make his first two 3s and start out defensively against the Lakers' Anthony Davis, allowing his teammate Bam Adebayo to roam freely early on the defensive end. Moving the ball crisply and getting everyone involved as this team is known to do, Miami surged to an early 23 10 lead. Back to back 3s from Kentavious Caldwell Pope, with LeBron James resting on the bench, kept the Lakers from losing touch early. Caldwell Pope's 3s sparked a 21 5 run from the Lakers to close the opening quarter and surge into a 31 28 lead with a corner triple from the Lakers reserve Alex Caruso capping the comeback. N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver said the league 'can do better' on diversity. Silver acknowledged in a pregame news conference that the league "can do better" when it comes to the hiring of Black head coaches. "I don't see a way to operate a league where the league office, the commissioner, is dictating to a team who they should or shouldn't hire. Or who they should and shouldn't fire, frankly," Silver said in response to a question about whether the league should institute its own version of the Rooney rule the N.F.L. policy that teams must interview people of color for coaching positions. In the last year, several Black coaches have been dismissed or resigned, including Doc Rivers, who mutually parted ways with the Los Angeles Clippers this week. There are five more head coach openings in Philadelphia, Indiana, New Orleans, Houston and Oklahoma City. White coaches have filled previous openings this season with the Knicks, Nets and Bulls with Tom Thibodeau, Steve Nash and Billy Donovan being hired. "We're in discussions with all of those teams about making sure there's a diverse slate of candidates," Silver said, adding, "Let's talk again after we fill these six positions and see where we are because I know we can do better." Silver also said at the news conference that many of the details for next season were still up in the air. He reiterated that the earliest start would be Christmas "a traditional tentpole day for the league" but that it was more likely to begin in January. He also said it was the league's goal to have fans in seats, even before a vaccine has been widely distributed, "dependent on some additional advancements." "Rapid testing may be the key here," Silver said. Bam Adebayo is one of Miami's breakout stars. "He reached out to us," Calipari said. "He was like, 'Why isn't Kentucky recruiting me?' "He didn't ask me how many guys I had," Calipari continued. "He didn't ask me if I was going to recruit anybody else like him or, 'Am I going to get the ball all the time?' He's built different." Adebayo has proved it all year, ascending to All Star status in his third N.B.A. season and playing with distinction in the league's bubble. Read more about Bam Adebayo's big season here. Halftime: The Lakers find their shot and take the lead. After a slow start, the Lakers recovered quickly and entered halftime with a commanding lead, 65 48. The Heat led by 13 in the first quarter, but the Lakers got hot from the perimeter and took a 31 28 lead at the end of the first. In the second quarter, the Lakers outscored the Heat, 34 20. The Lakers did much of their damage from deep, shooting 11 of 17 from 3. Anthony Davis led the Lakers with 18 points on 11 shots. LeBron James had 9 points, 7 rebounds and 6 assists. The Heat offense was carried by Jimmy Butler, who scored 16 points and dished out 4 assists. Miami only shot 43 percent from the field. There was the N.B.A. finding itself embroiled in a conflict with an international superpower as well as the United States government all over a general manager's tweet. Followed by the shocking deaths of Kobe Bryant and David Stern. The Knicks being the Knicks. Several high profile injuries and then: the season's postponement as a result of the pandemic, followed by months of social unrest. But the finish line is in sight. At a time when teams would normally be gearing up for a new season, the N.B.A. is still trying to complete the old one. It's been a long year, so you'll be forgiven if you don't remember all the twists and turns that brought us here. Here is a rundown of the strangest N.B.A. campaign in the league's history. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
This article contains spoilers for Season 3 of "Dear White People." Late into Season 3 of the college campus satire "Dear White People," released on Netflix earlier this month, the series takes an intriguing turn: Moses Brown ( Blair Underwood ), a beloved computer science professor, is accused of sexually assaulting one of his students, Muffy Tuttle ( Caitlin Carver ). It's a familiar story line to anyone who has consumed a movie or TV show made within the last couple of years in the wake of MeToo. Yet "Dear White People" complicates this narrative by layering a racial component on top of its discussion of sexual harassment Moses is a powerful black man, Muffy is a white student. In a subversive way, the show's writers attempt to reconcile two strands of equally fraught issues: a history of black men not being believed when accused of raping white women, and a history of women not being believed when accusing men of rape. The act in question is never shown; early on we do see Muffy and Moses engage in a platonic academic relationship. But in the seventh episode, Brooke ( Courtney Sauls ), a campus newspaper reporter, overhears Muffy disclose to Coco ( Antoinette Robertson ) an encounter she had with Moses, during which Muffy says she felt she "had to" have sex with him. Soon, the word has spread to the other students. An entire episode is devoted to the question of whether or not he did it, and the divide among the classmates echoes debates taking place around MeToo. Most of the students who believe Muffy are black women, including Joelle ( Ashley Blaine Featherson ), and wish to honor Muffy's desire to keep her own identity a secret, while wanting to see Moses punished . Those who cast doubt on Muffy's accusation and defend Moses are the black male students especially Joelle's boyfriend, Reggie ( Marque Richardson ), who views Muffy's accusation as an example of a white woman wrongfully besmirching the name of a "good" black man. Reggie accuses Joelle of taking Muffy's side because she is "jealous" of the time he has spent working with Moses. Reggie's wariness comes with historical context, which he uses as a defense for Moses a "rich history" of black men who have been imprisoned, beaten, tortured and even lynched for unfounded accusations of sexual transgressions against white girls and women. As I watched Season 3 unfold, I was reminded of "When They See Us," Ava DuVernay's limited series that brought renewed attention to the infamous Central Park jogger case when it premiered on Netflix in May. That real life injustice in which five black and brown teenage boys were wrongfully convicted of beating and sexually assaulting a white woman, only to be exonerated after serving years in prison sits squarely within that lineage. P art of the Emmy nominated drama's power lies in how meticulously it breaks down the outsized role race played in their case, particularly in how the general public was quick to assume the boys ' guilt. Existing alongside these reference points made in "Dear White People" is the Moses character itself: A new addition to the show, he's first introduced as a charismatic and honorable figure. His pro black stump speeches on campus attract the admiration of the black student population, including Reggie, who seeks him out as a mentor. Moses gives Reggie sound advice on how to make it as a black man in a white dominated world. Before the accusations, the audience is meant to like this professor. And the show's writers need us to like Moses, to understand Reggie's initial doubt of Muffy's accusation, if only for a moment. "We had to blind you the audience from seeing really who he is, almost right away," the creator and executive producer Justin Simien recently told Variety. He added, "There were heroes in my personal life who I thought were allies who ended up being antagonists, and there were people who I thought were antagonists who ended up being allies and being mentors to me." Reggie's reaction parallels those who believe the victims of Bill Cosby or R. Kelly are part of a conspiracy to bring down a prominent black figure, and Joelle bluntly challenges that notion. "Why are black men so quick to defend each other on this?" she asks him, exasperated. "You do know these things happen in our community, too, right? And I don't just mean a little bit," she adds. Taking into account the experiences of both women and black men against this backdrop is a tricky feat to pull off successfully, but it mostly works. The message the writers seem to be sending is: Black communities are not immune to patriarchy and sexism. Yes, there have been an untold number of Central Park Fives but that can't obscure the need to hold those who are actually responsible for sexual harassment and sexual assault accountable for their actions. By season's end, Reggie eventually comes to believe Muffy when it becomes clear that Moses has tried to silence her; he publicly confronts Moses at a work meeting with other students present. The narrative's conclusion gets a bit bungled here: In an abrupt manner that suggests the writers weren't sure how to wrap it up, the response to Moses' downfall is relegated to a scene in which the main characters sit around and express their sadness over what has happened . It's unclear what exactly will happen to Moses now that he has been exposed. Still, I remain in awe of the bold route "Dear White People" takes in its blunt attempts to marry the MeToo movement with race proof that, in its third season, "Dear White People" remains necessary viewing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
ATLANTA The Big Ten and the Pac 12 called off their football seasons before they started. The South's premier college football conferences called a play for time. Never was it more publicly clear than this week, five months after the N.C.A.A. and its conferences canceled basketball tournaments in response to the coronavirus crisis, that college sports leaders are sharply divided over the prospect of athletic competitions during a pandemic. By midday on Wednesday, the Atlantic Coast, Big 12 and Southeastern Conferences had all publicly broken with the Big Ten and Pac 12 and reinforced their ambitions to play beginning next month. The Big Ten and the Pac 12 concluded on Tuesday that it was simply too dangerous to try to play sports this fall. "Reasonable people can disagree on it, and the Pac 12 and the Big Ten are seeing much of the same information that we're seeing," Bob Bowlsby, the Big 12 commissioner, said after his league released its football schedule on Wednesday morning. "But our board believes in our scientists and has come to a conclusion that's different, and so have the leadership of the SEC and the A.C.C." Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, said in an interview that he had regarded the moves by other leagues, including smaller conferences, as "informative, not determinative." For officials in the SEC, the Big 12 and the A.C.C., the collective home of 14 of the last 15 national champions in football, salvaging a season is the lone route to delivering on what they pledged for players and pulling in the many hundreds of millions of shared dollars that help keep athletic departments, including lower profile sports, afloat. And as skeptics say those goals and needs collide with medical science and the notion of amateur athletics, conference and university officials insist that they would change their approaches if circumstances warranted. But for a range of reasons across universities they include students, budgets, politics, science and local culture the leagues' short term strategies hinge on patience. "We could look and understand in this new environment that time needed to be provided," said Sankey, whose university presidents and chancellors wanted to gauge how their campuses fared once students returned en masse this month. The Big 12 will allow nonconference games in September before advancing to league play on Sept. 26, the day the SEC season is to open. "We just didn't feel like there was a need to say we've got to stop today," Keith Carter, the athletic director at Mississippi, a member of the SEC, said in an interview on Wednesday. "We're not to the season yet. We've got a lot of things to figure out between now and Sept. 26, but we just feel like there's a pathway to move forward today." Indeed, the choice the Big 12 announced on Wednesday may ultimately be regarded as a masterstroke that propped up the remnants of the college football season, or as a stopgap that merely postponed its collapse. The plot twists of college football are such that the Big 12, a conference that was on the verge of disappearing a decade ago, may have given the A.C.C. and the SEC enough political breathing room to try to press ahead despite what the Big Ten commissioner described on Tuesday as "too much uncertainty, too much risk." What any remaining teams will play for during a season that many players sought is somewhat hazy after the week's upheaval. "It's too soon to say what the implications are," Bill Hancock, the executive director of the College Football Playoff, said on Wednesday. "We will stay flexible." For now, to the surprise of some outside lawyers who see a liability crisis in the making, many of the nation's finest, proudest football programs, including Alabama, Clemson, Louisiana State and Oklahoma, are wagering that they can endure a viral storm far better than many of their states have. The Big 12 said Wednesday that its members would test football players three times a week. The SEC is trying to strike a deal with an outside company to standardize virus screenings throughout the conference. And the A.C.C., scheduled to start its season Sept. 10, plans to have its players tested within three days of a scheduled game. It said Tuesday that it would "continue to follow our process that has been in place for months and has served us well." "The virus is basically going to tell us where we can go and what we can do, but we feel like we have a good plan and protocols in place," Carter said. College sports leaders said they had learned from early testing efforts, which led to some teams across the country pausing workouts, tightening rules or spurring players to acknowledge the frightening perils of the virus. Still, many top universities have said little about the state of the virus on their campuses and within their athletic programs, even though officials fear that they could wind up with clusters of cases that could lead to lasting health consequences for some people. New spikes, which many medical experts believe are all but inevitable as students return to classrooms and dormitories, could imperil the leagues' plans. Bowlsby said the Big 12 would encounter "bumpy spots" in the fall, and he acknowledged that the virus and knowledge about it were fluid. "What we thought was golden 60 days ago is garbage today," he said. These days, the warnings that football may not happen are perhaps more apparent than ever. Sankey said Wednesday that there were "no assurances of a season at this point." "Our runway is shortening," Carter said. "If we feel like we can't do this in a safe manner, we may pivot." What is more certain than any game happening is that college football is likely headed for a round of I told you so jabs, depending on how the season and its risks unfold. The central question is what those judgments might be based on: either a halt as urgent as the one that ended March's basketball tournaments, or a team raising a title trophy without regret for having played. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
As Americans grapple with problems of racism and power, a newly declassified trove of White House tapes provides startling evidence of the bigotry voiced by President Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser. The full content of these tapes reveal how U.S. policy toward South Asia under Mr. Nixon was influenced by his hatred of, and sexual repulsion toward, Indians. These new tapes are about one of the grimmest episodes of the Cold War, which brought ruin to Bangladesh in 1971. At that time, India tilted heavily toward the Soviet Union while a military dictatorship in Pakistan backed the United States. Pakistan flanked India on two sides: West Pakistan and the more populous, and mostly Bengali, East Pakistan. In March 1971, after Bengali nationalists won a democratic election in Pakistan, the junta began a devastating crackdown on its own Bengali citizens. Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger staunchly supported the military regime in Pakistan as it killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis, with 10 million refugees fleeing into neighboring India. New Delhi secretly trained and armed Bengali guerrillas. The crisis culminated in December 1971 when India defeated Pakistan in a short war that resulted in the creation of an independent Bangladesh. I documented the violent birth of Bangladesh and the disgraceful White House diplomacy around it in my book "The Blood Telegram," published in 2013. Much of my evidence came from scores of White House tapes, which reveal Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger as they really operated behind closed doors. Yet many tapes still had long bleeps. In December 2012, I filed a legal request for a mandatory declassification review with the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. After considerable wrangling, the Nixon archivists at last released a few unbleeped tapes in May 2018 and July 2019, then 28 more in batches from October 2019 to this past May. (There are bleeps still remaining on a couple of the reviewed tapes, some of which I am appealing.) It was stunning to hear a conversation between Mr. Nixon, Mr. Kissinger and H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, in the Oval Office in June 1971. "Undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women," said Mr. Nixon. "Undoubtedly," he repeated, with a venomous tone. He continued, "The most sexless, nothing, these people. I mean, people say, what about the Black Africans? Well, you can see something, the vitality there, I mean they have a little animallike charm, but God, those Indians, ack, pathetic. Uch." On Nov. 4, 1971, during a private break from a contentious White House summit with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India a rare woman leader at the time the president harangued Mr. Kissinger about his sexual disgust at Indians. Mr. Nixon said: "To me, they turn me off. How the hell do they turn other people on, Henry? Tell me." Mr. Kissinger's response is inaudible, but it did not discourage the president from his theme. The president, in between bitter sparring matches with Mrs. Gandhi about the danger of war with Pakistan, suggested to Mr. Kissinger that his own sexual neuroses were having an impact on foreign policy: "They turn me off. They are repulsive and it's just easy to be tough with them." A few days later, on Nov. 12, 1971, in the middle of a discussion about India Pakistan tensions with Mr. Kissinger and Secretary of State William P. Rogers, after Mr. Rogers mentioned reprimanding Mrs. Gandhi, the president blurted, "I don't know how they reproduce!" Mr. Kissinger has portrayed himself as above the racism of the Nixon White House, but the tapes show him joining in the bigotry, though the tapes cannot determine whether he truly shared the president's prejudices or was just pandering to him. On June 3, 1971, Mr. Kissinger was indignant at the Indians, while the country was sheltering millions of traumatized Bengali refugees who had fled the Pakistan army. He blamed the Indians for causing the refugee flow, apparently by their covert sponsorship of the Bengali insurgency. He then condemned Indians as a whole, his voice oozing with contempt, "They are a scavenging people." On June 17, 1971 in the same conversation as Mr. Nixon's outburst at "sexless" Indian women the president was furious at Kenneth B. Keating, his ambassador to India, who two days earlier had confronted Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger in the Oval Office, calling Pakistan's crackdown "almost entirely a matter of genocide." Mr. Nixon now asked what "do the Indians have that takes even a Keating, for Christ, a 70 year old" here there is cross talk, but the word seems to be "bachelor" or "bastard." In reply, Mr. Kissinger sweepingly explained: "They are superb flatterers, Mr. President. They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That's how they survived 600 years. They suck up their great skill is to suck up to people in key positions." Mr. Kissinger voiced prejudices about Pakistanis, too. On Aug. 10, 1971, while discussing with Mr. Nixon whether the Pakistani junta would execute the imprisoned leader of the Bengali nationalists, Mr. Kissinger told the president, "I tell you, the Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure." He added, "They just don't have the subtlety of the Indians." These emotional displays of prejudice help to explain a foreign policy debacle. Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger's policies toward South Asia in 1971 were not just a moral disaster but a strategic fiasco on their own Cold War terms. While Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had some reasons to favor Pakistan, an American ally which was secretly helping to bring about their historic opening to China, their biases and emotions contributed to their excessive support for Pakistan's murderous dictatorship throughout its atrocities. As Mr. Kissinger's own staff members had warned him, this one sided approach handed India the opportunity to rip Pakistan in half, first by sponsoring the Bengali guerrillas and then with the war in December 1971 resulting in a Cold War victory for the Soviet camp. For decades, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger have portrayed themselves as brilliant practitioners of realpolitik, running a foreign policy that dispassionately served the interests of the United States. But these declassified White House tapes confirm a starkly different picture: racism and misogyny at the highest levels, covered up for decades under ludicrous claims of national security. A fair historical assessment of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger must include the full truth, unbleeped. Gary J. Bass is a professor at Princeton and the author of "The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide," which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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 |
Once the Electoral College has met and every state's election has been certified, there is no constitutional provision for an "alternate slate" of electors. A group of people who gather in a room and claim they are electors, as state party backed Republicans did in a few states on Monday, have no more authority than if the people reading this article decided that they, too, wanted to be members of the Electoral College. So while Republicans in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan followed the White House's lead, making or discussing moves to form their own competing slates of pro Trump electors, it was a theatrical effort with no legal pathway. Electoral College slates are tied to the winner of the popular vote in each state, and all five of those states have certified their results in favor of President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. The most the Republicans could do was claim a symbolic moment, saying that the people who showed up would have been the slates of electors had President Trump won those states. But since he lost them, and numerous state and federal courts have rejected his and his allies' baseless claims of voting fraud, these groups have no actual significance. Mr. Trump's supporters have also seized upon some superficial murkiness in the Constitution and federal law as to whether a state legislature could appoint its own slate of electors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
WHILE I was driving the new BMW X1, the Russian nesting dolls called matryoshka came to mind. Like several purveyors of sport utilities and crossovers, BMW has offered models that initially seemed to be sized just right, at least until Americans decided, like antsy homeowners, that they needed more room. BMW duly expanded its smallest S.U.V., the X3, after customers complained that it wasn't spacious enough for family duty. There was only one problem: the redesigned X3 was suddenly as spacious inside as the X5, which had been the bigger and more expensive of the pair. So BMW gave the X5 a significant stretch, too. All this one size upmanship, with a continuing microscopic experiment how many American guinea pigs will squeeze into tinier, fuel efficient cars? has opened up a wholly unexpected niche within the crossover niche. Hence, the concept of Russian nesting dolls: the X1 is the baby, slotting neatly inside the X3 and X5 a smaller space than you might have imagined possible for a quasi S.U.V. BMW's new baby is no mistake, so long as Americans are eager to pay 32,000 to 52,000 for a crossover with no more interior space than a compact station wagon. I wouldn't bet against it. The X1 is based on the solid 1 Series, and it may easily outstrip the popularity of that small but pricey coupe. The X1 is much more practical, and it offers the raised ride height and all wheel drive that Americans have voted for time and again. The X1 travels fast, handles dynamically and is surprisingly luxurious for a junior crossover. If that's not enough, it delivers fairly spectacular mileage, at least when drivers act as if they're in a Prius, not an M3. A weeklong spin in the 240 horsepower X1 xDrive 28i delivered what seems to be a harbinger of success for utility vehicles: the women that I encountered fell hard for it. One actually said, "When you told me you were bringing a BMW, I didn't picture anything like this." Their refrain matched what I hear when I'm forced to take my friend's Shih Tzu for a walk: "Oh, it's so cute!" As with that little dog, I heard it enough times that I began to believe it myself. Honestly, the BMW is awfully cute, with a streamlined profile and an intriguing tussle of convex and concave surfaces. Deep set headlamps glide into a crisp crease along the doors, finishing in striking tubes of crimson light in the taillamps. Arrow shape cutouts in the tailgate lend a sense of forward motion. Gray sections of the front and rear fascias contrast with optional 18 inch wheels in a glossy geometric pattern. So how small is this thing? Stretching 176.5 inches, the X1 is two inches shorter than a Ford Focus sedan. The BMW is 6.5 inches shy of its X3 big brother and about three inches narrower. The X1's roofline is also lower by a significant 4.6 inches than the X3's. That avoids the school bus silhouette of many compact sport utilities, and the seating position is barely higher than a sedan's. Ultimately, the X1 is more of a jacked up luxury hatchback than any sort of truck. The reclining back seat will just fit two adults with minimal complaint, though there is a dubious center perch for three abreast situations. But riders will also see a level of luxury and features many at extra cost, given that this is a BMW not far removed from an X3 or X5. The lovely midnight blue paint of my 28i test car contrasted with rust color leather seats and doors, dark copper trim, a natty gray and aqua pinstripe across the seats and an embossed "X" on the front headrests. A parabola of matte finish wood ( 500 extra) makes an arc along the dash and is repeated on all four doors. While the xDrive 28i starts at 33,245, the fancier interior is part of the available xLine and Sport Line trim packages ( 1,900 for either) or the M Sport Line ( 2,500 or 3,000). The M Sport upgrade also adds niceties including sport seats, a firmer suspension, paddle shifters and summer tires. Another 600 brings handsome 19 inch alloy wheels. There are 25 cubic feet of storage behind the second seat row, matching the enlarged 2013 edition of the 3 Series wagon that will go on sale next spring. Dropping the rear seats, which are split in a 40/20/40 configuration, opens up 56 cubic feet of cargo space a surprise, given the vehicle's small footprint. Still, taller roofed S.U.V.'s can handle yet more stuff, including more unwieldy items; consider the roughly 71 cubic foot cargo hold of the utilitarian Honda CR V. The BMW, to its credit, feels anything but utilitarian. The company's new 2 liter turbocharged TwinPower engine is rapidly transforming BMW's American lineup. If there's a better combination of 4 cylinder power and economy in the world today, I haven't driven it. With 241 horsepower and a mighty 258 pound feet of torque, the TwinPower scoots the xDrive 28i from a standstill to 60 m.p.h. in a company estimated 6.3 seconds. Yet that muscle takes no toll at the pump, with the all wheel drive model achieving an impressive E.P.A. rating of 22/33 m.p.g. The CR V manages just 30 highway m.p.g., even with 56 fewer horsepower and a deficit in torque of 95 pound feet. For special effects rocketry, the 39,345 xDrive 35i gets a stronger and more sonorous in line 6 that counts advantages by threes: 3 liters of displacement, 300 horsepower and 300 pound feet of torque. Acceleration to 60 m.p.h. drops to 5.3 seconds, though fuel economy also drops, to 18/27 m.p.g. In a first for a BMW sport ute, the X1 offers a rear wheel drive version, the sDrive 28i. Starting at 31,545, this most affordable X1 makes financial sense for people whose lives and driveways are unencumbered by snow. Mileage for this version is even better, at 24 m.p.g. in town and 34 on the highway. Buyers of the more expensive 35i may pointedly inquire as to why they get only six forward speeds; a slicker 8 speed ZF automatic transmission is reserved for 4 cylinder models. Fans of manual gearboxes are out of luck, with no stick shift offered in any X1. Flight aficionados may recall the bullet shaped X 1, piloted by Chuck Yeager in 1947, as the first aircraft to break the sound barrier. BMW's X1 may be less quick, but it's fast enough to sweep aside petite crossover competitors, including the Mini Countryman and the new Buick Encore. With its powder keg of an engine, the 35i seems an anomaly in its class. Even a 420 horsepower Porsche Cayenne GTS won't beat this BMW in a drag race, and saddled with roughly 1,000 additional pounds, the Cayenne would be likely to lose a battle on the racetrack as well. Interestingly, all wheel drive X1s have a secret weapon you won't find even on a megapowered 100,000 M5 or M6: hydraulic steering rather than the electrified units sweeping through BMW and the industry at large. I returned enthusiastic from an early drive wondering why the X1 felt more connected than some BMW automobiles I'd been testing. One answer is the X1's old school steering, which has no electric motors to filter out road feel. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ?Lo mejor? It'll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tia, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone). On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro, then the president of Cuba, proclaimed that any citizen who wanted to leave the island could depart from the nearby port of Mariel. In the six months that followed, nearly 125,000 Cubans journeyed across the Straits of Florida, including thousands of queer men and women fleeing persecution. Casimiro Gonzalez and Manuel Rodriguez were among them. Theirs is one of the many stories highlighted in Queer Miami: A History of L.G.B.T.Q Communities, a new exhibition at the HistoryMiami Museum tied to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Using archival footage, photographs and memorabilia, the curator Julio Capo Jr., an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, traces Miami's L.G.B.T.Q history (and struggles) from 1890 to the present, including how the city was shaped by Cuban immigrants. Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Rodriguez met in a movie theater in Havana when they were in their 20s. They arrived in the United States in 1980, and, after nearly half a century together, they married in 2015. When I spoke to them over the phone, they alternated between finishing each other's sentences and cracking jokes at the other's expense. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. What was the Cuban government's attitude toward gay people in the '70s? GONZALEZ: It wasn't safe for us. Police officers would often raid movie theaters. The lights would come on, and they'd round up anyone they didn't like the look of into buses, and haul them off to jail. They'd do that at cabarets, too. RODRIGUEZ: When Fidel Castro said people could leave, I went to the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and told them I stole clotheslines, that I was a homosexual and was against the revolution. I really piled it on. Afterward I hid in my house for two days, afraid to even come near the window, while I waited for my exit permit. Mobs would throw eggs or worse at people like us. Casimiro would walk to my house to see me. On the third day a police officer in a motorcycle came by and called out my name, signaling that it was time for me to go. My mother had made me a steak sandwich, but I could barely get it down. GONZALEZ: Enough talk about steak sandwiches, you're making me hungry! RODRIGUEZ: It was almost 7 p.m. when I left Cuba on May 15, 1980. They piled 289 of us on a little shrimp boat. All but around 17 of us were prisoners the government had forced the boat owner to take with him. There was no space to sit or even puke if you got seasick. GONZALEZ: After he left I stayed in bed, chain smoked and drank coffee. I couldn't eat anything. I finally got my exit permit 11 days later. Our boat ran out of gas and we drifted. Eventually we were rescued by an American military ship, a battleship. These doors opened up, and I was sure cannons would come out of them. Incredibly our boat went inside the belly of the ship. I thought, "This is the end! They're going to make picadillo out of us and throw us back in the water!" But the Americans were nice to us. They gave us something to eat, and then I had the luxury of arriving in Miami in a helicopter. RODRIGUEZ: Llego en estilo, but he didn't have a penny in his pocket. Manuel Rodriguez, left, and Casimiro Gonzalez at home in Chicago in 1980. When you arrived, the United States was on the precipice of the AIDS crisis, and homophobia was rampant, yet you were free from the neighborhood watches back home. What was that like for you? RODRIGUEZ: I remember how free I felt. The first time we went dancing, we stood with our mouths agape. Men were dancing with men, women with women. We began adapting to all these things, which were new to us. Though back then the Latino community criticized people like us, so we were still very private. None of my co workers ever knew. GONZALEZ: He told them he was married in Cuba and that he left 40 kids behind! Things have changed so much since then. We lost so many friends to AIDS. In the days before FaceTime and email, leaving home felt more permanent. Did you ever doubt your decision to leave? At this point you've lived in the United States longer than you did Cuba do you feel American? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
This Mediterranean style house is in the Lo Barnechea district of Santiago, Chile, on a hillside acre overlooking the Andes. The three story, 6,400 square foot concrete house has four bedrooms, four full bathrooms and one half bathroom. It was built about 25 years ago and has been well maintained, although a buyer in this price range would probably want to update the kitchen and master bath, said Maria Jose Borquez Yunge, an agent with the Christie's International affiliate Borquez Associates, which has the listing. The living areas, on the first floor, are all lined with windows and include a large living room with several sitting areas, a study and a dining room big enough for a table seating 14. The kitchen was designed for service rather than as a gathering space; it is connected to two small bedrooms and a bath for staff, Ms. Borquez said. The finished lower level, accessible from an outside entrance, could be used as a recreation or family room. There is also an in ground swimming pool, and several covered terraces with mountain views. The house is two minutes from the highway, and less than 10 miles from downtown Santiago, Ms. Borquez said, yet still very private: "You don't see any houses, because they are down the hill, and at night, you see all the lights in the valley." Evergreen trees help maintain privacy. Santiago International Airport is about 30 minutes away. A report last year from the Brookings Institution noted that while Santiago has enjoyed considerable economic growth in the past 20 years, and accounts for almost half of Chile's gross domestic product, the city faces challenges to continued growth. Productivity gains have slowed in recent years, job creation is low and income inequality is high. The homeownership rate has declined as rentals have become more popular, said Matias Montalva, an owner of Montalva Quindos, a real estate agency and developer. He attributed that, in part, to people marrying later and having fewer children, as well as tighter lending standards. Santiago saw an increase in housing prices between 2010 and 2015, but the pace has slowed since, said Nathan Lustig, an entrepreneur and a principal at Andes Property, a company that provides furnished rentals in Santiago, primarily to foreigners. A value added tax on the sale of new properties went into effect in 2016, and "prices for new construction went way up, as everybody tried to buy before the new tax came in," Mr. Lustig said. "And they've kind of stayed that way." The value added tax rate is 19 percent, but the final rate is usually lower, because it is applied to the sale price after the land value is deducted, said Jose Tomas Marambio Yanes, a real estate lawyer in Santiago. Still, Santiago's home prices are among the lowest of those in the capital cities of South America, Ms. Borquez said, noting that properties above 1 million are considered very high end, and take longer to sell. There are few foreign buyers in Santiago, and those who do buy are usually employed in the city or looking for an investment. Most are from the United States or Europe, Mr. Lustig and Ms. Borquez said, though interest from Chinese investors is growing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Good news for viewers ready to take a break from the drama in D.C.: The third season of "The Crown" has landed on Netflix. In the recently released trailer, as Queen Elizabeth (played by Olivia Colman) is getting ready for her Silver Jubilee, she says, "On days like today, ask yourself, 'In the time I've been on the throne, what have I actually achieved?'" Before finding out the answer and delving into the next phase of delectably upper crust family drama royals watchers may want to brush up on the House of Windsor with these books. 'Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch' by Sally Bedell Smith New to "The Crown?" Welcome to your Cliffs Notes. Published to coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Sally Bedell Smith's biography taps a host of public sources, plus friends and former courtiers who dish up intimate tidbits "all too often about horses and corgis," wrote our reviewer, Alan Riding. His other quibble: "Elizabeth has lived a remarkable life yet one that, quite frankly, is a bit dull to recount. Put differently, her somewhat dysfunctional family has provided far livelier copy." Fans of "The Crown" may disagree. What's a castle without the bling? In his heavily illustrated celebration of jewels, a former director of the Royal Collection explains how necklaces have been shortened and brooches dismantled to suit different queens' tastes. Our reviewer writes, "He also recounts a few family scandals. Queen Victoria battled with her German cousins over inherited jewelry, and her granddaughter in law, Queen Mary, had to buy back another batch of treasure from a cousin's mistress." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
"Love Is Blind," the unconventional Netflix dating series, wrapped on Feb. 27. Lauren Speed and Cameron Hamilton, who were married on the show on Nov. 16, 2018, emerged as fan favorites. It's hard to win over fans on a romantic reality show. But Lauren Speed and Cameron Hamilton did. Ms. Speed, 34, a content creator, and Mr. Hamilton, 29, an A.I. consultant, met on "Love is Blind." The premise of the Netflix show is to allow singles to, well, mingle while they sit in pods, talking through walls. The idea is to put up some barriers in an effort to break down the barriers we all face in dating, the foremost being appearances. It doesn't sound like something that should work. It did. Two couples got married, including Ms. Speed and Mr. Hamilton, who tied the knot in November 2018. But even if love is blind, a reality show is pretty opaque. I called up the couple to hear more about their experience. What were you doing before the show? Lauren: I was pretty much throwing myself into my business. I have a media business do production work, videography, as well as photography, I'm a content creator. My dating life was pretty sucky if we're being honest. I was almost ready to give up on being in a relationship or married. I'm in my 30s, my business was going well. But when the opportunity came along for the show, I was intrigued. The concept was so different because it wasn't based purely on aesthetics. Lo and behold, I lucked out. Did either of you try dating apps? How did you end up on the show? Lauren: I tried the dating app thing one or two times and it freaked me out. I was afraid to find someone and meet up with them and them be a serial killer or something. Cameron: I didn't have any fear of serial killers. I was going out on a lot of dates but I was cutting them off after the first or second date because I wasn't finding people who were a good match for me. I was liking the pictures but then I was basically ignoring everything else and so I was basically being shallow in how I was conducting my dating life and was feeling quite lonely as a consequence of that. I was reached out to by a casting agent. I didn't apply. Lauren: A casting agent slid into my DMs. It's kind of crazy because I don't know how she found me on Instagram. I don't know, I must've hashtagged lonelydating or something. I went through the whole application process, had to do Skype interviews, multiple Skype interviews. Also, they had to do a psych evaluation. That kind of made me feel a little bit more ease about the situation, like at least they're testing people. Cameron: As time went on, the dates got progressively longer. We went on progressively fewer dates overall because you were just kind of focusing in on who you were most interested in. Really from the start, we were dating probably 16 hours a day, multiple dates a day. Did either of you have feelings for other people? Lauren: We did make connections with other people, however it was more from a friendship vibe. Up until close to the end, I went on dates continuously with Mark, Damian, and Carlton but after a certain point, after you connect with someone like Cameron and I connected kind of early on, you just kind of talk about the friendships with these people. Cameron: Up until the end, I was going on dates with Diamond, I think Jess, and Kelly and Giannina. But like Lauren said, it was all very platonic. We would talk about the other person who they were interested in and I talked a lot about Lauren with Jess. She would talk about Barnett and Mark with me. That was just kind of how the dates went. It was all platonic basically but we formed good friendships, so it's not a waste of time. So let's get to the point where you said "I love you." Wasn't that the first episode? Lauren: I wanted to share that with him. Really, I wanted to see how he would react. You can tell when I said it, I was like, "Ooh, what is he going to say?" But I just threw it out there just to see what would happen and he reciprocated it and I pretty much melted after that. I mean, it was over. It was over. A lot of times, the conversations that we see on reality shows are about the relationship and not really about the specifics of who the people are. What did you guys talk about in the pods? Lauren: We really bonded certainly on our love for our family. We're both super family oriented, very close with our parents, with siblings as well as just basically we're really into the arts, very career focused and goal oriented. We're both entrepreneurs. We both want to have children in the future. Cameron: Both kind of extroverted introverts. Also, we kind of balance each other out where Lauren's very upbeat and has this really contagious charisma, I'm more calm, cool, collected type. We balance each other out in that respect and kind of boost each other respectively. Did you know what you would say when you got to the altar and were you able to communicate that with each other beforehand? Or was that a part of the show? Lauren: I was pretty much kind of nervous all the way up until I got to the altar. In the back of my mind, I know that I really wanted to marry Cameron but I was scared. It's a big deal. Of course I knew that I wanted to continue this relationship with this man. I don't know if I told him that or not. Cameron: I mean it was hard because I was ready to go and I think she thought maybe it would've been nice to have a bit more time. Thankfully, we've been married for a year and a half now. Lauren: Yeah, I took the leap just because I didn't want to stop my own happiness. I would've never probably have forgiven myself and thank God that I didn't. It seemed like some of the other cast members were blindsided. Were you directed to not reveal what your decision was? Lauren: We had the power to do whatever we wanted to. We were free to talk to each other up until the wedding because we had a little break in between the bachelor and bachelorette parties and the wedding. Cameron: Yeah, absolutely no one was forced to do anything at all. We all knew what we signed up for, people could walk away if they wanted to. We could tell each other, "Hey, I'm going to say yes tomorrow," if we wanted to. There was no restrictions like that or producer involvement. Lauren: If anything, it's just been a learning curve for the both of us. I was teaching Cameron about our hair and twist outs and braids and all that stuff. But he's dated black women before so he's kind of been there. Me, on the other hand, things are kind of more new for me than for him. We haven't really experienced anything strange in public besides a few stank looks here and there. We live in the South, so a lot of old ideals still resonate with some of the people down there, especially the older people. Lauren, you spoke about things that are specific about black culture. Has anything surprised you about living with a white person? Lauren: Actually, girl, I went to Maine and it was one of the most Caucasian places I've ever visited. I don't know if this is a Caucasian thing or a Maine thing but, what's it called, babe? Mincemeat pies. OK, Cameron says it's a Maine thing but I'd never heard of it. I guess it's like a fruity pie, I don't know. But as for white culture, not really anything shocking but, I wasn't shocked by anything because I've been around white people, you know? Lauren, has Cameron ever used your toothbrush? Lauren: Not that I know of, girl, but I'm thinking about setting up cameras in the bathroom. After a couple of these press interviews, I'm kind of questioning if he's sneaking in there or not. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
With every new episode of "Saturday Night Live," you can find us here writing about the most notable sketches. See you next Saturday, April 14, for an episode hosted by John Mulaney with musical guest Jack White. President Trump had his sights set abroad this week, announcing plans to send National Guard troops to the United States border with Mexico and hurtling toward what many fear will become a trade war with China. But on Saturday evening, he faced an unexpected crisis much closer to home: In Midtown Manhattan, the president's flagship edifice, Trump Tower, briefly caught fire. Just hours later, Alec Baldwin took the stage less than half a mile away to reprise his recurring role as Trump in the opening sketch of a "Saturday Night Live" episode hosted by the "Black Panther" star Chadwick Boseman and featuring the musical guest Cardi B. "Let's make this quick because I've got a lot of trade wars to escalate here, O.K.?" said Baldwin's impatient President Trump, by way of a greeting. "That's why I just announced tariffs on more Chinese products, including fireworks and finger traps." He hastened to introduce his counterparts from Estonia, Lithuania and, Baldwin said, "I wanna say Stankonia." (The third Baltic nation is actually Latvia. "Stankonia" is the title of an album by the hip hop duo OutKast.) Want to know what's new on your streaming services? Lucky for you, we've done all the hard work and picked the best titles to watch. When Baldwin was compelled to take questions from reporters, he deflected a query about the president's claim that he was unaware of the payout that the pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels received in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement about their relationship. "Borat, you wanna take that one?" he asked Alex Moffat, playing President Raimonds Vejonis of Latvia. "We have an expression in my country," Moffat said. "And it translates roughly as, 'This man is lying.'" The final query of the cold open came from a reporter played by Melissa Villasenor, who wondered if the president was worried that the new trade tariffs would imperil the United States' standing in the world. "I'm the only one who's willing to actually say this: I don't care about America, O.K.?" Baldwin replied. "This whole presidency is a four year cash grab, and admitting that will probably get me four more years." In other memorable moments from this episode: "This might be the blackest 'Black Jeopardy' yet," he announced. Categories included "Fid'na," "Aw Hell Naw" and "White People," among others. The contestants were Leslie Jones as Shanice, Chris Redd as Rashad and Boseman as his "Black Panther" character, T'Challa, the king of a fictional, quasi utopian, all black African nation called Wakanda. As you might imagine, T'Challa experienced a bit of culture shock. He bungled questions about credit card debt and parenting, before buzzing in on a clue about law enforcement: "The policeman says there's been some robberies in your neighborhood and asks if you have any information." Boseman responded, "What is, not only do I tell this man what I know, but I also assist him in tracking down the offender. After all, our ministers of law enforcement are only here to protect us." Thompson twisted his features into an expression reminiscent of the nauseated face emoji. "I'm thinking you haven't spent much time in America," he said. A robotic Mark Zuckerberg, played by Moffat, stopped by "Weekend Update" to address the criticism he has received since the Cambridge Analytica data leak. "Hi there, Colin," he greeted Jost, before instructing himself to "begin eye contact." "Unlike my facial expression, Facebook is going to change," Moffat promised, in an interview punctuated by high pitched giggles and stiff attempts at dabbing. "My point is, sure, maybe Facebook sold out our democracy to Russian troll farms. My bad? But, on the other hand: Farmville. To be honest, I feel great about Facebook's future. I sleep easy at night, upside down in my pressurized sleep egg. And sure, I still have all your photos, your memories, your unspoken thoughts and fears. But, America, look at me in my shark eyes when I say this that, on behalf of everyone on Facebook, I'm sorry. On opposite day!" Probably Uncalled For Sketch of the Week What started out as a sketch about three girlfriends at Disneyland found its punch line in the R B singer R. Kelly, who has been the subject for many years of disturbing accusations. Staring into a "magic" mirror that had shown her friends their "personal Disney princesses," Jones was surprised to find the leather clad musician staring back at her, then gyrating with a bag of popcorn held over his crotch. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Harley Sitner was in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn for a wedding in March, feeling as if he'd just been sprayed by a skunk. Mr. Sitner's hometown, Seattle, where he owns a camper van restoration, repair and rental business called Peace Vans, was the site of one of one of the first huge coronavirus outbreaks. "People were like, 'Stay away,'" he recalled. Back home, with peak road trip season approaching, his employees reported a rush of cancellations on rental vans. Mr. Sitner had just hired a "super awesome" marketing manager and began thinking he might have to lay her off. School was canceled and all but the most essential businesses were ordered to shut down. Mr. Sitner was compelled to give his employees a month off, save for a skeletal crew that stuck around to perform essential services like repairs. "We were looking at some pretty significant revenue black holes," he said. Then, in mid April, the phone started ringing in the repair shop. But it wasn't just that. There was also a run on a new line of modern camper vans his company had announced with Mercedes Benz at the Chicago Auto Show in February: produced by a third party manufacturer called Driverge, sleeping four apiece, and starting at 69,000 without kitchen and cabinetry, 89,000 with. "We sold like 28 of them in 30 days," Mr. Sitner said. "Some people are saying they're not getting on a plane for two years or never going to Europe again." Mr. Sitner is 52, with a 10 year old daughter named Eden Peach. In person, he projects a tender, Michael Stipe ish vibe, wistfully remembering that "until recently, we hugged so many of our customers" and brewed espresso in the shop's front office. Over the years, Mr. Sitner has served clientele from aging hippies to Instagramming millennials, and all political persuasions. (In the lot of Peace Vans there was an old VW bus from Iowa awaiting restoration with a National Rifle Association sticker on the driver's side window and a painting of the word "Peace" on the side panel.) But the venture with Mercedes, which began casually after he began buying the chassis of the brand's Metris van from a dealership down the street, has brought a new kind of buyer, Mr. Sitner said. Ed Stevens, a 51 year old tech entrepreneur in Dallas, had planned to take his wife, Robin, and two adult children scuba diving in the Caribbean when the pandemic took hold. The virus's spread, he said, was the reason he started looking to buy a camper van. "We canceled the reservation and hunkered down, and then I started thinking, 'I can work from anywhere, Robin's taking a class online, and we thought we'd just cruise the whole country," he said. "As soon as I saw the official partnership between Mercedes and Harley, that was the motivating factor." Mark and Linda Kimlin had just spent the winter in Spain before returning to New York City in mid March, feeling "very lucky to escape unscathed," said Mr. Kimlin, 63. But New York was itself about to get scathed, and with the lease up on their Upper East Side apartment, the Kimlins high tailed it to a home they owned in New Paltz, north of the city. (They expect to return to the city when things "settle down," Ms. Kimlin, 65, said.) Their daughter had planned to get married in California in July (the celebration has been postponed, though not the ceremony) and, Mr. Kimlin said, "it seemed like a good time for wide open spaces and not getting on an airplane." His son in law to be had driven a simpler version of the Metris camper van and shared his positive experience with Mr. Kimlin, who bought one from Peace Vans on the strength of that recommendation and the fact that his wife "likes camping, but with a comfy bed." Talk to any camper van owner and they'll tout the relatively small size of their vehicles compared to traditional RVs and the taller Mercedes Sprinter vans that many Amazon delivery drivers whiz around in, explaining that the more compact Mercedes Metris and VW Vanagons are easily usable as second cars in dense neighborhoods in major metropolitan areas. But they're also great for when a wildfire jumps the highway and bears down on your house the precise scenario Naomi Neilson stared down in mid June at her house in Shell Beach, Calif. "Everyone was like, 'Where are you going to go?' And I was like, 'I don't know, I'm going to take my van and go," said Ms. Neilson, 46, who owns a Metris camper van and runs a bathroom fixture company called Native Trails. "I just threw some food and drinks in the fridge and was ready to go. It took me 10 minutes. I went down the coast a little way and just relaxed. I didn't end up needing to evacuate for the whole night, but it was nice to be able to just throw a couple things in there and know I had a place to sleep and cook for as long as I needed." Of course, this is something owners of Volkswagen Vanagons have taken comfort in for decades. While Metris owners like Mr. Stevens never considered buying such a lovable relic of hippie culture because he "didn't want to be spending two days somewhere while my transmission gets shipped in from God knows where," VW owners like Brian Kolonick of Cleveland think the hassle's worth it because, he said, "my kids think I'm cool for a minute." "It's the way it smells, the way it drives, the way people look at you you're bringing them some level of joy," said Mr. Kolonick, 42, who works in digital health for a company called Conversa in Portland, Ore. He rented a Vanagon from Mr. Sitner before he bought one, and said some VW scenesters turn their nose up at him because he "can't repair things" and has to call a mechanic. He'll often visit Vanagon forums online, where he occasionally finds die hards dissing the Subaru engines in some custom conversions, arguing that they're "taking away from the slow running intensity" of the stock motor. And it's fair to surmise that some VW devotees think Metris owners are a tad soft. "We have friends who have them, and I've got to admit, we joke about their vans," said Jim Samuel, 58, a realtor and University of Oregon grad in Seattle who named his 1991 Vanagon "Bertha," after the Grateful Dead song. "But it comes down to people, ultimately." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"Sesame Street" is moving to a new streaming home. New episodes of the 50 year old children's television franchise will appear first on HBO Max, the streaming app from Warner Media that will debut next year, the company announced on Thursday. And for the first time, much of the enormous back library of "Sesame Street" will also be available to watch on HBO Max. Since 2015, new episodes of "Sesame Street" have appeared first on HBO and the premium cable channel's streaming platforms. The new five year deal moves the show to the broader streaming platform, which will include HBO's programming along with Warner Bros. movies and reruns of classic series like "Friends" and "The Big Bang Theory." PBS will remain the free, over the air outlet for "Sesame Street." New episodes will appear there roughly nine months after they premiere on HBO Max. Financial terms were not disclosed. Warner Media, which is owned by AT T, is expected to announce a subscription price for HBO Max this month. Most industry analysts expect it will be at least 15 a month, the current price of HBO. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
With Help From Herb Alpert, Letting the Light In at the Harlem School of the Arts A typical Saturday at the Harlem School of the Arts would find families chatting with each other as one child runs out of a dance class in tights, or another lugs a viola. A quick bite or check in with parents, and they would dash to a drawing or singing class. This happy noise occurred in what the school's founder, Dorothy Maynor, called the Gathering Place, a two story high room that also hosted performances and exhibitions of student work, and where performers from the worlds of jazz, Broadway and classical music would drop by so that children could see and meet working artists up close. But the Gathering Place, which dates from 1977, was enclosed by concrete block walls. Children and families came in through a forbidding brick entrance. "I mourn the level of energy this place had," Eric Pryor, the school's president, said, looking forward to the school's post pandemic future, when children and families can return. (Many students continue to take classes by video.) With many performers and arts organizations staring at a financial abyss, the Harlem School of the Arts has risen and thrived through adversity. Ms. Maynor was an acclaimed lyric soprano of Black and Native American ancestry with a wide smile and a talent now largely overlooked. "Miss Maynor's voice is phenomenal for its range, character, and varied resources," wrote The Times critic Olin Downes in a review of a famed concert at Town Hall in 1939. She sang classical repertory at the world's concert halls, but retired in 1963, having performed at Dwight Eisenhower's presidential inauguration but never at the Metropolitan Opera, which did not hire African American singers for leading roles when she was in her prime. (She died at age 85 in 1996.) She started the school in the community house of St. James Presbyterian Church, where her husband, the Rev. Shelby Rooks, was rector. The classes promptly drew swarms of applicants even as Harlem was wracked by protests and riots in 1964 after the fatal shooting of a Black teenager, James Powell, by a white off duty police officer. The school finally moved into its own building next to the church in 1977. Its architect, Ulrich Franzen, designed the school around the Gathering Place, as Ms. Maynor had requested, to more generously accommodate parents who had spontaneously appropriated a hallway in the community house to savor their children's development. With New York City just two years past its brush with bankruptcy, the new 37,000 square foot building with studios, practice rooms and four large dance spaces designed with the help of George Balanchine, was an extraordinary act of faith at a time when the city's future was very much in doubt. Though the school thrived for years, it was forced to close its doors in 2010 because of poor financial management. Kate Levin, commissioner of the city's Department of Cultural Affairs in the Bloomberg administration, coordinated support to get the school back on its feet. A donor appeared unexpectedly from California as if conjured by Ms. Maynor, who had been a prodigious fund raiser: Herb Alpert had read about the fate of the school. "It had given such creativity to the community," he recalled by phone from his home in Malibu. "How could people in New York allow it to fold?" He matched the funds Ms. Levin raised from several donors: 500,000 from his Herb Alpert Foundation founded with his wife, the singer Lani Hall. In 2012, when new leadership was in place and the school was again humming, Mr. Alpert added 2 million to erase the school's debt and established a 3 million endowment for student financial aid. "Herb sticks out as an unusual cat on the philanthropy scene," said David Callahan, the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a website that monitors givers and their gifts. Few philanthropists rescue foundering organizations or retire debt, he said. "They want to set sail with the ship, not go down with it." He added, "Arts education is a big gap in the philanthropic marketplace." Mr. Alpert's fortune derives substantially from the sale of A M Records in 1989 for 500 million. The foundation mainly supports arts and music education. The Harlem School is one of Mr. Alpert and Ms. Hall's legacy organizations, which receive sustaining gifts over time. Mr. Alpert said the trumpet he picked up in grammar school "had taken me so many places in my life. I think every kid should have that opportunity at an early age." Rona Sebastian, the foundation's president, added, "Getting rid of the debt was the only way to save the school and work toward the future." When Mr. Pryor asked the architect, Ms. Imrey, to look at some problems with the building in 2018, he inquired about how the school could more clearly transmit its mission to the community. "I said they should get rid of the solid front wall," Ms. Imrey explained. She sketched a 70 foot wide metal and glass expanse to replace it. "I insisted on this huge glass front door," Ms. Imrey said. "I had this image of a young girl running to her lesson from the subway. She would run up to this big door but be able to open it herself. This makes the school her place." Mr. Pryor liked "taking the veil off the front so people could see what was going on." And Mr. Alpert agreed to support the renovation. "When you feel good and feel welcomed, you bring creative energy to a space," he said. "That's what we wanted to create." What's now called the Renaissance Project was born. Mr. Alpert brought in the acoustician John Storyk, who had worked on Jazz at Lincoln Center. Mr. Storyk proposed sloping the glass wall outward to reflect the sound around the room. Arrays of speakers permit multiple seating and performance configurations. The advanced theater technology is expected to attract more talent to the school and, ultimately, lead to income from outside events. With the completion of the Renaissance Project last month, the facility has been renamed the Harlem School of the Arts at the Herb Alpert Center. All the new possibilities await a time when the school's programs for adults and children can resume. "We're looking at forming small pods of kids, especially for dance," Mr. Pryor said, noting that practicing at home doesn't work: "You can't move properly in a kitchen" As the school moves urgently though cautiously toward reopening, he pointed out, "Some kids and their families are dealing with depression, separation anxiety, loss of family members, isolation. A few are homeless." He imagined having them all back in the Gathering Place, now officially called Dorothy Maynor Hall, after their first patron. "I know," he added, "that they would eat this up." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
'ARTISTIC LICENSE: SIX TAKES ON THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through Jan. 12). Displays that artists select from a museum's collection are almost inevitably interesting, revealing and valuable. After all, artists can be especially discerning regarding work not their own. Here, six artists Cai Guo Qiang, Paul Chan, Richard Prince, Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems and Jenny Holzer guided by specific themes, have chosen, which multiplies the impact accordingly. With one per ramp, each selection turns the museum inside out. The combination sustains multiple visits; the concept should be applied regularly. (Roberta Smith) 212 423 3840, guggenheim.org 'AUSCHWITZ. NOT LONG AGO. NOT FAR AWAY' at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (through Aug. 30). Killing as a communal business, made widely lucrative by the Third Reich, permeates this traveling exhibition about the largest German death camp, Auschwitz, whose yawning gatehouse, with its converging rail tracks, has become emblematic of the Holocaust. Well timed, during a worldwide surge of anti Semitism, the harrowing installation strives, successfully, for fresh relevance. The exhibition illuminates the topography of evil, the deliberate designing of a hell on earth by fanatical racists and compliant architects and provisioners, while also highlighting the strenuous struggle for survival in a place where, as Primo Levi learned, "there is no why." (Ralph Blumenthal) 646 437 4202, mjhnyc.org 'PIERRE CARDIN: FUTURE FASHION' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Jan. 5). He was never a great artist like Dior, Balenciaga or Saint Laurent, but Pierre Cardin still at work at 97 pioneered today's approach to the business of fashion: take a loss on haute couture, then make the real money through ready to wear and worldwide licensing deals. He excelled at bold, futuristic day wear: belted unisex jumpsuits, vinyl miniskirts, dresses accessorized with astronaut chic Plexiglas helmets. Other ensembles, especially the tacky evening gowns souped up with metal armature, are best ignored. All told, Cardin comes across as a relentless optimist about humanity's future, which has a certain retro charm. Remember the future? (Jason Farago) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image (ongoing). The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER' at the Neue Galerie (through Jan. 13). You could be forgiven for drawing a connection between Kirchner's shocking color palette and his character. It would be understandable enough, considering his problems with morphine, Veronal and absinthe; the nervous breakdown precipitated by his artillery training in World War I; and his suicide in 1938, at the age of 58, after the Nazis had denounced him as a degenerate. But to linger on Kirchner's lurid biography would be unfair to the mesmerizing technical genius of his style, amply on display in this exhibition. Surrounding more or less sober portrait subjects with backgrounds of flat but brilliant color, as Kirchner did, wasn't just a youthful revolt against the staid academic painting he grew up with. It was also an ingenious way to articulate subjective experience in an increasingly materialist modern world. (Will Heinrich) neuegalerie.org 'YAYOI KUSAMA: EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE' at David Zwirner (through Dec. 14). Ignored for decades in New York and Tokyo, this 90 year old artist is enjoying a not unmerited surge in public visibility, but just what do audiences get from taking photographs of their colored reflections in her Infinity Mirror Rooms? Kusama first made a mirror environment in 1965, when she was staging orgiastic happenings that encouraged "self obliteration"; now the self has been subsumed by the social media profile, and our digital narcissism has made the abandonment Kusama once encouraged impossible. If you want to line up for an hour or more for your selfie opportunity, be our guest, but the rest of the show, including some excellent new steel sculptures, requires no wait. (Farago) davidzwirner.com 'THE LAST KNIGHT: THE ART, ARMOR, AND AMBITION OF MAXIMILIAN I' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 5). Kaiser Max, who ruled the Holy Roman Empire in the years around 1500, anchors the Met's largest show of arms and armor in decades: a gleaming showcase of heavy metal and Hapsburg propaganda. Maximilian I, who ruled a swath of Europe stretching from the Netherlands to Croatia, would have looked resplendent on the battlefield when he wore the tapered suit of ribbed and fluted steel here. What really broadcast his power were public spectacles of chivalric glory, in which he jousted with local noblemen and foreign champions in ritualized mock combat, still dangerous despite the staging. He also embraced the hottest technology of the late 15th century: printmaking, which allowed the emperor to broadcast his military prowess through books and monumental woodcuts. The pen, or at least movable type, was for Maximilian even mightier than the sword. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALVIN BALTROP' at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (through Feb. 9). New York City is a gateway for new talent. It's also an archive of art careers past. Some come to light only after artists have departed, as is the case with Baltrop, an American photographer who was unknown to the mainstream art world when he died in 2004 at 55, and who now has a bright monument of a retrospective at this Bronx museum. That he was black, gay and working class accounts in part for his invisibility, but so does the subject matter he chose: a string of derelict Hudson River shipping piers that, in the 1970s and '80s, became a preserve for gay sex and communion. In assiduously recording both the architecture of the piers and the amorous action they housed, Baltrop created a monument to the city itself at the time when it was both falling apart and radiating liberationist energy. (Holland Cotter) 718 681 6000, bronxmuseum.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'NOBODY PROMISED YOU TOMORROW: 50 YEARS AFTER STONEWALL' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Dec. 8). In this large group show, 28 young queer and transgender artists, most born after 1980, carry the buzz of Stonewall resistance into the present. Historical heroes, including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, are honored (in a film by Sasha Wortzel and Tourmaline). Friends in life, Johnson and Rivera are tutelary spirits of an exhibition in which a trans presence, long marginalized by mainstream gay politics, is pronounced in the work of Juliana Huxtable, Hugo Gyrl, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and Elle Perez (whose work also appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial). (Cotter) 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org 'OCEAN WONDERS: SHARKS!' at the New York Aquarium (ongoing). For years, the aquarium's 14 acre campus hunkered behind a wall, turning its back to the beach. When aquarium officials last year finally got around to completing the long promised building that houses this shark exhibition, maybe the biggest move, architecturally speaking, was breaking through that wall. The overall effect makes the aquarium more of a visible, welcoming presence along the boardwalk. Inside, "Ocean Wonders" features 115 species sharing 784,000 gallons of water. It stresses timely eco consciousness, introducing visitors to shark habitats, explaining how critical sharks are to the ocean's food chains and ecologies, debunking myths about the danger sharks pose to people while documenting the threats people pose to sharks via overfishing and pollution. The narrow, snaking layout suggests an underwater landscape carved by water. Past the exit, an outdoor ramp inclines visitors toward the roof of the building, where the Atlantic Ocean suddenly spreads out below. You can see Luna Park in one direction, Brighton Beach in the other. The architectural point becomes clear: Sharks aren't just movie stars and aquarium attractions. They're also our neighbors as much a part of Coney Island as the roller coasters and summer dreams. (Michael Kimmelman) 718 265 3474, nyaquarium.com 'PUNK LUST: RAW PROVOCATION 1971 1985' at the Museum of Sex (through Nov. 30). This show begins with imagery from the Velvet Underground: The 1963 paperback of that title, an exploration of what was then called deviant sexual behavior and gave the band its name, is one of the first objects on display. Working through photos, album art and fliers by artists like Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith and, yes, the Sex Pistols, the exhibition demonstrates how punk offered a space for sexual expression outside the mainstream. In the story told by "Punk Lust," much of it laid out in placards by the writer and musician Vivien Goldman, one of the show's curators, graphic sexual imagery is a tool for shock that frightens away the straight world and offers comfort to those who remain inside. While some of the power dynamic is typical underage groupies cavorting with rock stars images from female, queer and nonbinary artists like Jayne County and the Slits make a strong case for sex as an essential source of punk liberation. (Mark Richardson) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'BETYE SAAR: THE LEGENDS OF "BLACK GIRL'S WINDOW"' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 4). "Black Girl's Window," which consists of an old window frame that Saar filled with a constellation of images, is the focus of this exhibition, one of several helping to reopen MoMA. Concentrating on Saar's early years as an artist, it tracks the experiments in printmaking and assemblage that led her to arrive at the titular work. Despite the unusual color of the gallery's deep purple walls, the show is relatively modest a scholarly study of a specific period, anchored by MoMA's recent acquisition of a group of 42 of her works on paper. Two pieces from 1972 that represent her shift from the mystical to the political "Black Crows in the White Section Only," which brings together a variety of racist advertisements, and "Let Me Entertain You," which shows a minstrel singer with a guitar transforming into a black liberation fighter with a rifle serve as a kind of coda. Their appearance at the end offers a tantalizing glimpse of the iconoclastic artist Saar was on her way to becoming. (Jillian Steinhauer) 212 708 9400, moma.org THE SALON ART DESIGN FAIR at the Park Avenue Armory (Nov. 15, 11 a.m. 8 p.m.; Nov. 16 17, 11 a.m. 7 p.m.; Nov. 18, 11 a.m. 5 p.m.). Featuring 56 art and design galleries from more than 10 countries, this interior design exposition, in its eighth year, offers a look at myriad approaches and techniques, as well as a sampling of the results of their application. In the immersive environments Salon's exhibitors have created for the fair, Art Deco, Bauhaus and midcentury pieces mingle with contemporary items. (Peter Libbey) 212 777 5218, thesalonny.com 'STONEWALL 50 AT THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY' (through Dec. 1). For its commemoration of the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, the society continues with two micro shows: "By the Force of Our Presence: Highlights From the Lesbian Herstory Archives" documents the founding in 1974 by Joan Nestle, Deborah Edel, Sahli Cavallero, Pamela Olin and Julia Stanley of a compendious and still growing register of lesbian culture. And "Say It Loud, Out and Proud: Fifty Years of Pride" turns a solo spotlight on charismatic individuals: Storme DeLarverie (1920 2014), Mother Flawless Sabrina/Jack Doroshow (1939 2017), Keith Haring (1958 90) and Rollerena Fairy Godmother. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'T. REX: THE ULTIMATE PREDATOR' at the American Museum of Natural History (through Aug. 9). Everyone's favorite 18,000 pound prehistoric killer gets the star treatment in this eye opening exhibition, which presents the latest scientific research on T. rex and also introduces many other tyrannosaurs, some discovered only in this century in China and Mongolia. T. rex evolved mainly during the Cretaceous period to have keen eyes, spindly arms and massive conical teeth, which packed a punch that has never been matched by any other creature; the dinosaur could even swallow whole bones, as affirmed here by a kid friendly display of fossilized excrement. The show mixes 66 million year old teeth with the latest 3 D prints of dino bones, and also presents new models of T. rex as a baby, a juvenile and a full grown annihilator. Turns out this most savage beast was covered with believe it! a soft coat of beige or white feathers. (Farago) 212 769 5100, amnh.org 'VIOLET HOLDINGS: LGBTQ HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE N.Y.U. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS' at Bobst Library (through Dec. 31). With the Stonewall Inn now a National Historic Landmark (and a bar again; it was a bagel shop in the 1980s), nearby New York University has produced a homegrown archival exhibition at Bobst Library, across the park from Grey Art Gallery. Organized by Hugh Ryan, it takes the local history of queer identity back to the 19th century with documents on Elizabeth Robins (1862 1952), an American actor, suffragist and friend of Virginia Woolf, and forward with ephemera related to the musician and drag king Johnny Science (1955 2007) and the African American D.J. Larry Levan (1954 92), who, in the 1980s, presided, godlike, at a gay disco called the Paradise Garage, which was a short walk from the campus. (Cotter) 212 998 2500, library.nyu.edu 'ELECTIVE INFINITIES: EDMUND DE WAAL' at the Frick Collection (through Nov. 17). How does a contemporary artist enter a scene as formidable as Henry Frick's Gilded Age mansion? For de Waal, the English ceramist and author of the acclaimed family memoir "The Hare With Amber Eyes," the answer is with modesty. Only as you follow de Waal's site specific installations in nine of the museum's galleries does his own restrained music begin to ring out. Below Ingres's dangerously seductive "Comtesse d'Haussonville," he installs little strips of solid gold leaning against two huddles of white porcelain; in the richly appointed West Gallery, two pairs of overlapping flat screen shaped glass boxes ("From Darkness to Darkness" and "Noontime and Dawntime") distill the experience of being overwhelmed by painted imagery into a lucid kind of serenity. (Heinrich) 212 288 0700, frick.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
RUSSELL PETERS: DEPORTED Stream on Amazon. The Canadian comic Russell Peters discusses topics like mean internet comments and the experience of getting an endoscopy in this new stand up special, filmed at a stadium in Mumbai. Peters takes advantage of having such a large audience to banter with several of the audience members including a man who offers an endoscopy story of his own. SAINT LAURENT (2015) Rent on Amazon, Google Play and iTunes. The French director Bertrand Bonello is back in theaters this weekend with "Zombi Child," a drama that flits between Haiti and France. In this biopic, Bonello flits from one decade to another to explore the life of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. The movie casts multiple different actors as Laurent, painting a portrait of an over the top perfectionist both in his prime and toward the end of his life. "The film is a compulsively detailed swirl of moods and impressions, intent on capturing the contradictions of the man and his times," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. "Observations of Saint Laurent at work and in love give way to panoramic, intricate surveys of the world of commerce and culture in which he suffered and flourished." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Over and over again, Mr. Giuliani and other members of the president's legal team suggested that Mr. Trump had evidence to prove that "massive fraud" had been committed in swing states across the country. But Mr. Giuliani himself had undercut that accusation in one high profile case, telling the federal judge overseeing a suit in Pennsylvania, "This is not a fraud case." Mr. Giuliani, speaking at the Republican National Committee's headquarters in Washington, claimed that Mr. Trump would prevail in the election if only he could get his day in front of a judge. "Give us a chance to prove it in court and we will," he said. The problem? In many of the instances that Mr. Giuliani mentioned, the Trump campaign has already had its chance in court and failed. For example, Mr. Giuliani quoted a Detroit poll worker named Jessy Jacob, who submitted an affidavit in the case Costantino v. City of Detroit. Ms. Jacob claimed that she had witnessed poll workers in Detroit, a heavily Democratic city, encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and that while she was working at "a satellite location" she was instructed by her superiors not to ask for voters' identification. On Friday, however, that case was dismissed by a Michigan circuit judge, Timothy M. Kenny, who said that several of the charges it contained were "rife with speculation and guesswork." Judge Kenny specifically addressed Ms. Jacob's accusations, saying they were "generalized" and asserted "behavior with no date, location, frequency or names of employees." Mr. Giuliani also cited an affidavit in the case from Melissa Carone, a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, to claim that trucks intended to transport food instead brought "thousands and thousands of ballots" to Detroit. But Judge Kenny had also rejected that story, saying that Ms. Carone's description of the events at a vote counting center in Detroit "does not square with any of the other affidavits" and that her "allegations simply are not credible." In referring to other cases brought by the Trump campaign, Mr. Giuliani made even vaguer accusations and provided no evidence to support them. He claimed that he had more than 100 affidavits alleging voting improprieties in a federal lawsuit the campaign filed in Michigan, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Benson. But the campaign's own lawyers voluntarily dismissed that suit just hours before Mr. Giuliani held his news conference. Mr. Giuliani further said that the Trump campaign had affidavits proving that nearly 700,000 mail in ballots in Pennsylvania had been tainted. But no such affidavits have been filed in the campaign's federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania that is seeking to halt the certification of the vote there. Moreover, Mr. Giuliani never mentioned the affidavits when he personally appeared at a hearing in the case on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Giuliani also claimed that President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted a few days before the election to "have the best voter fraud team in the world." This was a reference to a deceptively edited video that spread on social media. In his original remarks, Mr. Biden was referring to efforts to protect against voter fraud. Sidney Powell, another lawyer for Mr. Trump, baselessly warned of "massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States." She claimed that tabulating software used by Dominion and Smartmatic, two voting machine companies, was "created by Hugo Chavez." Ms. Powell cited a partially redacted affidavit from an unnamed former military official in Venezuela that accused Smartmatic of helping to rig that country's elections. But Smartmatic did not provide technology to any battleground state in this year's presidential election in the United States, nor has it sold any software or hardware to Dominion, which is a competitor. Electronic voting security experts told The New York Times that the affidavit contained no evidence of a rigged election in the United States. Software made by Dominion was used to count votes in several swing states, and the company has been a target of misinformation from Mr. Trump's allies, but there is no evidence that the software improperly changed any vote tallies. Ms. Powell also wrongly claimed that a British baron named Mark Malloch Brown was one of the "leaders of the Dominion project" as well as the billionaire George Soros's "No. 2 person" in the United Kingdom. Mr. Malloch Brown is Smartmatic's chairman and sits on the board of Mr. Soros's Open Society Foundations. Mr. Soros has been the target of numerous conspiracy theories propagated on the right, some of them with anti Semitic overtones. The Trump campaign has not yet included allegations about Dominion machines in any of its more than 30 lawsuits where the accusations would have to be proven in front of a judge. Shortly after Mr. Giuliani's news conference, which was carried live on Fox News, the Republican strategist Karl Rove appeared on the channel and said that Mr. Giuliani should prove his "strange" accusations in court or "withdraw" them immediately. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Doctor Is In. In Your House, That Is. While only a relative handful of doctors still offer them, there is growing evidence that comprehensive home medical care could be a viable alternative to the attendant woes and soaring expenses of institutional health services, particularly for those in late retirement. It will take some important legislative changes before focused, less intrusive care in a dignified, comfortable setting can become more widely available. The polarizing politics surrounding the Affordable Care Act makes any reform to the health care system particularly challenging. Still, given the overall popularity of Medicare Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both say they support it getting a new home medical care benefit through Congress looks more promising. At the heart of the home care renaissance is a combination of high tech, portable medical equipment and the age old practice of doctors coming into the home to personally examine and treat their patients. "We can do X rays, EKGs, medical records and other applications in the home," said Dr. Thomas Cornwell, who has made more than 32,000 house calls in his Chicago based practice and wants to see Medicare support more home based medical care. "I had a 92 year old patient with a very high temperature," Dr. Cornwell said, citing an example. "I brought in a portable X ray and diagnosed pneumonia; she didn't have to go to the hospital, and lived four more years." Dr. Cornwell is spearheading a national effort to revive physician house calls even as he pushes for doctors to be more fully compensated by Medicare for doing them. He is also training doctors to offer home based care through the House Call Project, which is sponsored by the Home Centered Care Institute. He is chief executive of the nonprofit institute. Home medical care may well be the key missing link in the "aging in place" model aimed at helping millions more older adults avoid spending the last years of their lives in nursing homes and other institutions. Over the past decades, however, home care has been dwarfed by the significant shift of treatment to offices, clinics and hospitals. More than 50,000 practitioners work exclusively in hospitals, compared to about 5,000 doctors who make home based visits to Medicare patients. Dr. Cornwell used his smartphone to read Ms. Hanrahan's heart rate. Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times But a modest counterrevolution toward home care, devoted to a lower cost, patient centered approach, is underway. House calls to Medicare patients rose from 1.5 million in 1995 to more than 2.6 million in 2014, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Generally, the most expensive patients to treat have myriad health problems like diabetes and congestive heart failure. The top 5 percent of care intensive patients account for 50 percent of total medical expenses, according to government data, with a median cost of more than 43,000 per person. Dr. Cornwell and others argue that many of these gravely ill Americans can be better cared for at less overall expense at home. "People want to be at home," said Dr. Joanne G. Schwartzberg, a scholar in residence at the Accreditation Council for the Graduate Medical Education, who is working with Dr. Cornwell to advance home based care. "Research has shown that these patients have better health outcomes at much lower costs. Now the challenge is to train more physicians in providing this complex but rewarding form of medical care." For now, people looking for home medical services need to do their own research. A nearby hospital may already offer a program. Referrals are also obtainable through visiting nurse associations or the American Academy of Home Care Medicine. There are signs that the triad of care using doctors, nurses and the latest technology could help patients with multiple conditions. Linda V. DeCherrie, who runs one of the largest academic house call programs in the country out of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, received a 9.6 million Medicare innovation award to study the expansion of home care "to include hospital level care at home and what it means for patients." Dr. DeCherrie, who supervises two programs at Mount Sinai that treat more than 1,500 patients, says comprehensive home based health care "has the potential to provide solutions for many problems," suggesting that seeing patients in their natural environment may offer improved care. "It can be quite an ordeal to see a doctor in a hospital if you are a frail older adult," Dr. DeCherrie said. "Patients are much happier not to have to go through that. In a home, you can get a better picture of what's going on." The next step for broad based home medical care is a legislative push to expand Medicare's reach into the home and to revamp the prevailing fee for service model that rewards quantity of treatment over quality and cost savings. Unless the traditional economic model is changed, experts say, few doctors would be interested in providing home based care. It's often a money loser for physicians under the current system. Dr. Cornwell said he would like to see a new payment model that would allow Medicare to share any savings relative to hospitalization with doctors who make house calls. "It would have profound national impact," Dr. Cornwell said. "It would save billions in health care costs. For the horribly sick, hospitals are the worst place." The Independence at Home Act (S. 3130), a bill supported by a bipartisan group of senators, would expand a Medicare home care demonstration program "so that it can benefit more Medicare beneficiaries with severe chronic illness and disability through coordinated, home based primary care," according to an endorsement letter backed by organizations including AARP and the Retirement Research Foundation. The first phase of the home medical care program demonstrated medical cost savings of 35 million ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 per patient. Another independent study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs showed a 24 percent reduction in total costs and 62 percent fewer hospital stays, translating to some 9,000 in savings per veteran using home based care. Although the home medical care bill is unlikely to see action in Congress this year, Dr. Cornwell hopes it may be revived next year. But many policy, fiscal and political hurdles need to be crossed before home care can really take off. How will doctors be monitored in the home? How will Medicare gauge the effectiveness of home based treatments? Will Medicare reimbursement be enough to cover the costs of physicians, nurses and equipment? What about long term care financing in addition to primary care that could provide better funding for custodial care outside of nursing homes? Those questions, among others, are being considered by a diverse group of lawmakers, health care professionals and Medicare officials. Whether long term care costs, which often include nonmedical caregiver or semiskilled home care, should also receive more support through government programs is another challenging issue. "Many people who need help with basic tasks of daily life want to and can remain at home, rather than being forced to live in institutions in order to get care," said Judith Feder, a professor of public policy at Georgetown. The image of a doctor making house calls may recall a quaint Norman Rockwellesque painting, but home medical care could be part of a better future, too. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The much anticipated return of Megyn Kelly and Donald J. Trump to a prime time debate started innocently enough. "Mr. Trump, hi," Ms. Kelly said at the Republican debate Thursday night. Further pleasantries were extended before Mr. Trump added: "You're looking well. You're looking well." And then she kicked off a fairly intense interrogation of Mr. Trump over 40 minutes, during which she questioned him about his stance on immigration, a Trump University lawsuit and whether he flip flopped on statements he made about Syrian refugees. It was the first time the two shared the same stage since the first Republican debate, in August, when Ms. Kelly asked Mr. Trump about his treatment of women and he responded sharply. He drew criticism in the days that followed for suggesting that Ms. Kelly had been angry at him and that she had blood pouring out of her "wherever," a remark many saw as a reference to menstruation. That debate, which drew a record 24 million viewers, set off a monthslong feud. In that time, Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he had no respect for Ms. Kelly, and, as a result, he has been in an on again, off again war with Fox News. In late January, he skipped a Fox News debate that Ms. Kelly was moderating and taunted the network, saying, "Let's see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me.'' That wild back story stoked enormous anticipation for Thursday night, and when they were finally reunited, Ms. Kelly did not back down. In her first question to Mr. Trump, Ms. Kelly asked whether his stance on deporting illegal immigrants was more flexible than he had led voters to believe. She referred to a Buzzfeed article that said he had expressed a less than firm commitment in an off the record portion of a meeting with The New York Times editorial board. Mr. Trump said he remained committed to the issue but conceded: "There's always give and take. There's always negotiation." Throughout the night, Fox News deployed slides and videos to fact check the candidates's statements, and to show what appeared to be a reversal of positions on various issues. And during the occasionally raucous debate, Ms. Kelly said "stand by" seven times to interrupt cross talking candidates, something that many people on social media said was a remarkably polite way to say "shut up" (Ms. Kelly also said "with respect" five times, a gentle way to either course correct the conversation, or to ask a clarifying question of Mr. Trump). 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. "Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is they believe you tell it like it is," Ms. Kelly said at one point. "But time and time again in this campaign, you have actually told the voters one thing, only to reverse yourself within weeks or even sometimes days." Fox News then reeled off three videos on the war in Afghanistan, Syrian refugees and whether Mr. Trump thinks former President George W. Bush lied about the reasons he gave for the war in Iraq. It set off an intense 12 minute back and forth. Mr. Rubio got involved, and brought up what he called the Better Business Bureau's D minus grade of Trump University in a review. Mr. Trump disputed this before Ms. Kelly intervened and confirmed "the rating from the Better Business Bureau was a D minus." She then asked further questions about a lawsuit against Trump University and brought up yet another slide from a court opinion on the case. Mr. Trump scoffed but did not express the same level of pushback as in the first debate. After the debate on Thursday, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, he said he found the moderators to be "very fair." Mr. Trump later appeared with Sean Hannity of Fox News and gave Ms. Kelly and Fox News strong reviews. "I really think the moderators were very, very good tonight, the three moderators," he said. "I thought Fox did a very good job tonight." For the time being, detente. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Whenever I have taught Andrei Platonov's hallucinatory masterpiece, "Soul," a novella about the Soviet expansion into Central Asia, I've noticed that many of my otherwise knowledgeable undergraduates have only a vague idea of what happened in Eastern Europe between the Russian Revolution and the 1980s liberalizations of Glasnost. It often seems that the terror and mass murder orchestrated by Stalin and his henchmen have somehow acquired, at least in the West, a weirdly kitschy, ironic patina. In Manhattan, a charming bar called KGB hosts literary readings in a space decorated with Communist era memorabilia; one can hardly imagine similar events in a swastika festooned Cafe Gestapo. Nor can one envision Hitler's final days in the bunker portrayed with the zany slapstick that animated Armando Iannucci's 2017 film, "The Death of Stalin." As we watch its heroine's existence devolve from an oppressive domestic servitude into something disastrously worse, 's sprawling, ambitious first novel, "Zuleikha," reminds us just how brutal the Soviet system was. A devout Muslim living in a Tatar village in the Kazan region, Zuleikha is married to the much older Murtaza and is in thrall to her blind and deaf mother in law, a sadistic bully Zuleikha thinks of as the Vampire Hag, who in turn refers to Zuleikha as "a pitiful hen." Zuleikha begins her day by emptying the old woman's chamber pot and after gathering wood, feeding the livestock, cooking, cleaning and being beaten by Murtaza is finally allowed to sleep on the tin trunk, studded with protruding nails, that serves as her bed. Having borne four daughters who died in infancy, Zuleikha is lonely and unhappy, but patient, submissive and unable to imagine a life significantly better or worse than her own. Among her unpleasant duties is the task of hiding food from the Red Army soldiers who periodically arrive to raid the family larder: "At first they collected only grain. Then potatoes and meat. And during the Great Famine, in 1921, they began making a clean sweep of everything edible. Poultry. Cattle. And everything they could find in the house." Now the government has decreed that the kulaks the wealthier peasants need to be wiped out. Their land is to be seized and turned into collective farms, while the farmers are to be slaughtered or deported to prison camps. "In the middle of February 1930, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic ... approve the decree 'On the liquidation of kulaks as a class in Tataria.'" When Murtaza refuses to surrender some seed grain to the cavalryman who demands them, he is shot and killed. Zuleikha "as a kulak element of the first category. Active counterrevolutionary" is evicted from her home and sent on the long, punishing journey that will occupy much of the novel. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The former employees on the show who shared their accounts laid most of the blame for their bad experiences on Mr. Glavin and two other top producers, Mary Connelly and Andy Lassner. Warner Bros. said Monday that Ms. Connelly and Mr. Lassner would remain in their roles. In a second BuzzFeed News investigation, former staff members accused Mr. Leman of sexually harassing a number of employees. Mr. Leman has denied "any kind of sexual impropriety." Ms. DeGeneres, a comedian and host who has been a staple of daytime TV since "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" made its debut in 2003, has come under fire recently for claiming ignorance of how her show was run. On Monday, she informed her staff of the changes via videoconference. She also said that Stephen Laurel Boss, the DJ known as tWitch, who plays music during the show and serves as her sidekick, would join the program's executive producer ranks. Ms. DeGeneres also apologized to her staff during the videoconference, her second apology in recent weeks. In July, she sent the program's employees a statement that read, in part: "On Day 1 of our show, I told everyone in our first meeting that 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show' would be a place of happiness no one would ever raise their voice, and everyone would be treated with respect. Obviously, something changed, and I am disappointed to learn that this has not been the case. And for that, I am sorry." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
BIRDING WITHOUT BORDERS An Obsession, a Quest and the Biggest Year in the World By Noah Strycker Illustrated. 326 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 27. On Nov. 7, 2017, a group of bird watchers spotted a chunky brown bird foraging on the grassy edge of Ocean Parkway in Cedar Beach on Long Island. The dumpy chicken like creature with a rufous shoulder patch was a corn crake (Crex crex), a meadow dwelling relative of the cranes from Europe. Corn crakes usually migrate to spend the winter in the grasslands of sub Saharan Africa. Though they can show up in North America, it's with startling irregularity. The Cedar Beach bird was only the second corn crake recorded in New York State since Grover Cleveland was president. The following day, hundreds of birders from as far as North Carolina, Michigan and Minnesota came to see the corn crake, which was lucky for them because he soon died, hit by a car on the busy parkway. For each lucky birder who saw the Cedar Beach corn crake, there are thousands of others who wish they had, myself included. Each of us has nurtured our own private dreams of someday encountering it. As a Connecticut birder, Paul Desjardins, put it, "It only took me 58 years to see this bird." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Where do birding dreams come from? Mostly, they come from books. Next to high quality optics, the most important resources for a birder are books. Behind every birder is a library a privately curated collection of dozens even hundreds of volumes, including field guides, bird finding guides and specialized monographs on specific groups like warblers, sparrows or gulls. And, just as seed catalogs induce a gardener's visions of glorious future harvests, there are bird books whose goal is simply to inspire dreams about birds, the love of birds and plans for future birding trips. Simon Barnes's "The Meaning of Birds" is a book of essays that explore the biology of birds and our abiding fascination with them. Barnes is the former chief sportswriter for The Times of London, and the author of more than a dozen books on sports, horses and horse racing, cricket and bird watching. Loosely organized as a series of conceptual chapters, the book is passionate, inviting, even lyrical. In the opening passage, Barnes shows us that the angels carved into the ceiling of an ancient church in East Anglia fly on the wings of marsh harriers the same charismatic raptor we can observe in American wetlands today. He compares the effortless buoyant flight of the harriers to the graceful presence of the angels, and brings us closer to the bird loving artisans who carved them long ago. Having never imagined angel wings as coming in any variety other than generic swan white, I was grateful to Barnes for opening my eyes to the ornithological inspiration for angels. Barnes can also be a bit sloppy with biological details. For example, there is no evidence that the tubes in an albatross beak function like pitot tubes to measure their air speed; rather, these nasal channels are for the outflow from their salt glands and allow them to survive in a high sodium, oceanic environment. Before one conjecture, Barnes suggests that the reader may "miss this bit if you have taste for scientific rigor." Although I felt that way at times about the whole book, Barnes provides a companionable view of why we love birds, their lives and futures. Bernd Brunner's "Birdmania" is a cultural history of the varieties of human ornithological obsession. Much like Barnes's book, "Birdmania" is also a series of choppy vignettes organized into topical chapters. However, Brunner focuses more on the mania than the birds. To Brunner, birdmaniacs are mostly an odd, selfish and even cruel bunch. The English bird illustrator and publisher John Gould is described as an "unscrupulous profiteer." The travelogues of Hugo Weigold, a pioneer bird bander in the early 20th century, are described as "full of cold blooded arrogance." The pioneering American bird watcher Phoebe Snetsinger, who traveled the world to observe 8,674 bird species before being killed in a traffic accident during a birding trip in Madagascar, is presented as an example of "wealthy people who cut themselves off almost completely from their partners, children and other family obligations ...just to add one entry or another to a fervently kept list of bird sightings." To make sure his pessimistic message is right up front, a third of Brunner's 19 chapters focus on famous liars in ornithology. We meet the French ornithologist Francois Levaillant, who cribbed some illustrations for his "Natural History of the Birds of Africa (1805 08)" from other sources, and incompetently (or deviously?) included numerous species not found on the continent. We are also introduced to the 20th century aristocratic British ornithologist, spy and sociopath Richard Meinertzhagen, who switched tags among bird specimens to support his hypotheses and who might have shot his first wife to hide the deception before running off with his children's nanny. Brunner has a special gripe against the scientific collectors of birds. Yet he never acknowledges, or perhaps comprehends, the vital contributions that museum collections make to our understanding of the biology of birds. Of course, birdmaniacs are people, too, with human foibles and faults. But Brunner makes little attempt to understand the cultural or intellectual contexts in which these historical birdmaniacs lived and loved birds. Even if some of his harsh judgments are accurate, "Birdmania" does not portray birdmania as very attractive. Perhaps the censorious tone is exaggerated by the translation from the German original, but I was left wondering whether Brunner actually likes birds, bird people, or even people in general. Noah Strycker's "Birding Without Borders" is a firsthand account of a serious case of birdmania. In 2015, at age 28, Strycker set out to see as many bird species as he could in a single calendar year. This feat of extreme birding is called a Big Year, and it can be pursued on the local, state, continental or global scale. Strycker's goal was to be the first person to see more than half the world's roughly 10,100 species of birds in one year. Starting in Antarctica on Jan. 1, Strycker took 112 plane flights and traveled through 41 countries on all continents to observe 6,042 species of birds, smashing the previous record of 4,341. The birding travelogue genre was invented in 1955 by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher with the publication of "Wild America," a sort of ornithological "On the Road" about their year bird watching across North America. "Birding Without Borders" is an updated, global birding travelogue for the modern age. Strycker is a digital native, and his is a decidedly digitally enabled Big Year. Strycker used the internet to find local birders to guide him in every country he visited. Throughout the year, he tallied his observations on eBird, an electronic bird sighting database, and posted daily descriptions of his adventures on a blog maintained by the Audubon Society. When Strycker finds himself on Christmas night in Western Australia just 30 birds shy of 6,000, he uses eBird to calculate which country he should visit last to maximize his remaining week. (The answer? Northern India!) "Birding Without Borders" is lighthearted and filled with stories of exotic birds, risky adventures and colorful birding companions. You don't get deep insights into why Strycker did this, but you get the sense that he would be fun to bird with. I would have liked deeper discussion about how to plan the best Big Year route. Of course, I would love to have heard Strycker's stories about what it was like to see specific birds that I have dreamed of, like the white necked rockfowl in Ghana, and the sapayoa in Panama. To really appreciate Strycker's book, readers must have moved beyond merely enjoying local birds to dream about the dizzying diversity of the birds of the world, and have imagined how rewarding it may be to see them all. It's a beautiful dream. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For her role in "Mindhunter" as Wendy, Anna Torv took on a role more stoic than the men's. "When you're an actress," she said, "you don't even realize that the majority of the time you end up carrying the emotional weight of whatever scene you happen to be in." This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of "Mindhunter." The Netflix drama "Mindhunter" is about an F.B.I. unit that studies serial killers, but the series is all tell, no show most of the violence is described rather than depicted. Another sleight of hand is that one of the most compelling characters in the second season, which dropped on Aug. 16, is not one of the killers or agents but the unit's coolly dispassionate psychologist on loan from academia, Dr. Wendy Carr, as portrayed by the Australian actress Anna Torv. Torv first came to the attention of American viewers on the Fox series "Fringe" (2008 13), in which she played both the F.B.I. agent Olivia Dunham and her alternate universe version, referred to as Fauxlivia. At one point they even fought each other, predating Tatiana Maslany 's clone wars on "Orphan Black" by a few years. Wendy's calm aloofness is most likely a byproduct of her analytical mind and of being a closeted lesbian in law enforcement, and Torv plays it with a minimalist precision that does not preclude a certain sneaky warmth. Watching her performance is like listening to Dusty Springfield in a world of Mariah Careys. "She gives everything 'depth,'" said David Fincher ("Seven," "Zodiac"), an executive producer and director on the series, in an email. "Her perceptible thoughtfulness is always 'on' even when it's understated." He added: "She knows that Dorothy has to leave the Yellow Brick Road from time to time and that drama lies in the areas that are often 'off limits' or 'out of bounds' for what's been established for Wendy." Season 2 includes major developments for Wendy, who conducts her first interviews with killers and develops a romance with a free spirited bartender, Kay ( Lauren Glazier ). Yet throughout, Torv maintains a poise that is almost hypnotic. In a phone interview Thursday, she spoke from Los Angeles about the outsize emotional expectations placed on actresses, and about the extra challenges of playing such a stoic role. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. True crime has long inspired pop culture. Was it a subject you were ever interested in? It's not something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, honestly. I started with John Douglas's book, "Mind Hunter: Inside the F.B.I.'s Elite Serial Crime Unit," written with Mark Olshaker , and did a bit of research on the serial killers that we were talking to on the show. I don't find it particularly pleasant to go deep into that. My character has a little bit more of an intellectual approach to it not that it doesn't seep into her life, which is a lot of what the show is about. It has been said that Wendy is based on a woman named Ann Wolbert Burgess. Did you meet her? No. When I started the book, I realized, "Oh, she is probably Ann Burgess," but we took it so far away from her that I think it would do Burgess a disservice to say that. It's just a completely different character. Wendy shows very little outward emotion. The strong, impassive type is relatively common among male actors, but we don't see that so much from actresses. What I find fascinating is that when you're an actress, you don't even realize that the majority of the time you end up carrying the emotional weight of whatever scene you happen to be in. If someone's going to cry, it's going to be the girl. If someone is emotional and having a meltdown, it's going to be the girl. And so you end up getting really good at it. Not even getting good at it it's just the expectation, so that's what your instincts end up honing. All of a sudden to be in the skin of this woman who is just so dry ... Anytime I showed a flicker of something, especially in the beginning, David would be like, "Please, pull it back." How much of it was in the script? The writers do a beautiful job but, there aren't a lot of physical directions. We do have the luxury of rehearsals. One of my favorite scenes is the first time Kay and Wendy sleep together after they've been on a date, and the aftermath of that. I really love that scene, and the director Andrew Dominik gave a couple of gorgeous, playable character notes. Do you feel the emphasis on understatement when playing Wendy reflects the series's general approach? David has set up the show, and even though we have other beautiful directors come in, he was the tastemaker. Building suspense, drama or action in a show about serial killers with no blood, no action and no guns, that's the choice. Sometimes people think shows or stories should just hit the audience over the head with what they're wanting to say, and they don't give people enough credit. David always says this one thing that I think is so right: "I don't want to see two people having an argument where one's right and one's wrong. I want to see two intelligent people who are both right." That's what makes the show smart and not engulfed in melodrama. Is that what ultimately happens between Wendy and Kay they are both sort of right and sort of wrong? The heartbreak is that it was a relationship that could have been something, that should have worked. Wendy studies patterns of behavior, but she's totally incapable of holding the mirror up, which I think is true of all the characters. The show hasn't been officially renewed for a third season yet, but Fincher is said to have a five year plan for it. What would you like to explore with Wendy? With the relationship with Kay, we were able to see a bit more of Wendy outside of the office. You understood her a little more, like you could go, "Oh, there are three dimensions to her that side is just the way she has to live her life at the office." I was incredibly grateful to have these opportunities. So I guess more of that laughs . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times LOS ANGELES "This is the house that 'Wrinkle' built," the filmmaker Ava DuVernay said, giving a tour of a three building complex a large office around a bright courtyard, a two story production facility and a light filled event space, in a former paint factory here. It had been hers for about 24 hours, and already she had big plans for the decor. "We're going to black woman ify it," she said. Ms. DuVernay had just put the finishing touches on the Disney movie that paid for it, "A Wrinkle in Time," her adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 young adult sci fi classic. It, too, had been black woman ified. Her choices in casting, tone and vision have been as groundbreaking as the fact that she was directing it in the first place, the first woman of color at the helm of a 100 million studio tentpole. To hear her tell it, though, that milestone meant less to her than the opportunity to plant seeds, as she called it: cultivating, as she always has, a new way of looking at the world. She set out to "feminize" the movie, about a headstrong middle schooler in this case, a biracial girl who searches for her missing scientist father and saves the universe from encroaching evil. "When you say 'feminizing,' people think of softness in certain places, but I think of strength in other places," where it's normally overlooked, Ms. DuVernay, 45, said. Her previous projects like the civil rights drama "Selma" and the documentary "13TH," about mass incarceration and her company Array, which distributes films by underserved directors, have given her an activist platform that seems inseparable from her voice. In "Wrinkle," she found a different range: Two weeks before preproduction, her beloved stepfather died, suddenly, and all at once the film became much more personal than she could have realized. "Wrinkle," as anyone associated with it will tell you, is not an easy book to adapt. To rescue her father, Meg Murry, the physics loving heroine played by Storm Reid, now 14 skips across galaxies with her little brother and a friend, encountering fantastical creatures and menacing beasts. But her trajectory is elliptical, and when she finally meets the bad guy, it's a brain. "The villain is the darkness inside of you," Ms. DuVernay said. "There's no Darth Vader, no battle scene. Her action is progressive, and it's internal." To translate that to the screen, "it has to be lyrical, and intimate," while also balancing a coming of age saga, an adventure tale and a story that has been beloved by middle schoolers for more than half a century, Ms. DuVernay said. "That's why I frigging did it, because it was hard." It was Ms. DuVernay's multicultural casting ideas "Hamilton" was a reference that helped sell her vision to Disney. "Once she presented it like that, it was one of those things where you couldn't see the film any other way," said Tendo Nagenda, the executive vice president for production for Walt Disney Studios, who sent Ms. DuVernay the script. "And little did she know that the desperation on my part to make sure she did it went to an all time high." Mr. Nagenda who was raised in Los Angeles by a Ugandan father and a mother from Belize added that he saw it as part of his mission at Disney to broaden the narrative. When he realized the film would be the first big budget, sci fi fantasy to feature a young girl of color as the lead, "it made me ask the question, why is that?" That "Wrinkle" is arriving on March 9, after Ryan Coogler's "Black Panther," another Disney film, has seemingly rewritten the cultural code of Hollywood, either sets it up for blockbuster success or makes any disappointing box office all the more bitter. There's little chance it will be a phenomenon like "Black Panther," Mr. Nagenda said, but that film and the marketing lessons it taught may unlock new theatergoers. "Audiences are responding to stories in which they feel they are represented and have a voice, and where the film itself is cognizant of that," he said, "and I think our film has a lot of that." Ms. DuVernay was careful to note that "Wrinkle" is not broad fare like a Marvel superhero movie; it's intended for 8 to 12 year olds. "I don't know if I'll ever do anything like this again," she said. And so, given the chance, she put her stamp on it, using locations not far from where she grew up in Lynwood, Calif.: She shot in West Adams, a historic black district in Los Angeles; and Crenshaw High School, nearby, stands in for Meg's James Baldwin Middle School in the movie. "The best part of working with Ava, she wanted this to be an emotional adventure," said Ms. Lee, the writer and co director of "Frozen," the animated megahit. Putting it on the page was almost therapeutic, she said: "There are always the heroes you wish you had as a kid, the ones you wish spoke to you, that say, 'You're more than you think you are.'" More than any character she's created, Meg embodies that leap in confidence "with the most sincerity." Ms. Reid, the star, booked the part in eighth grade, having read the book in sixth. She kept a journal chronicling Meg's feelings. She came as prepared, Ms. DuVernay said, as David Oyelowo, playing Martin Luther King Jr. in "Selma." Ms. Reid, who has been acting since she was 3, understood the impact this role could have on other girls. "I do a feel a sense of responsibility, like that I have to keep them uplifted and I have to keep inspiring them," she said. Ms. DuVernay thought of Meg as just a regular kid who finds her potential, but to Ms. Reid, she is a superhero: "She is an African American girl that is smart, that is beautiful and that basically realizes that she is enough," she said. With that realization, "she just taps into her superpowers to be able to save her dad, her brother and save the world." The inclusive casting of Meg and the three guides got the attention, but Ms. DuVernay spent as much time obsessing over the role of Calvin, Meg's friend, played by the Australian actor Levi Miller. She chose him, in part, she said, "because that was so powerful, to show a white boy following a black girl through the movie." "I've never seen that," Ms. DuVernay continued. "I mean, I have a crew of thousands of people, and it's not lost on me that I have white men coming up to me all day long like, 'What do I do?' And in my early career, there's some white men that have a problem with that, a problem with even asking me what to do, and taking my direction and believing that I know what I'm saying, because they have no context for even seeing it." "I felt that so deeply as I was making the film," she said, "this girl who literally cannot wrap her mind around the fact that he's gone, and the moment when they say he could still be here ." She broke off, crying. Her stepfather's name was Murray Maye. All throughout production, when there was a script note or a lighting change for Mr. Pine's character, she couldn't bring herself to say Dr. Murry, as crew members did; she referred to him only as "the father." "I feel like the film is looking for him in a way," she said, in tears. "And that's why I don't care what anybody thinks about it. I don't care. I don't feel pressure about the whole first, blah blah blah. I know it's 100 million for the studio. They'll be fine. Ryan's made sure of that for me." (She and the "Black Panther" director are close.) "So, you know, this means a lot to me, and I know it's going to mean something to some people. Some people will see it, see all the things we put in there." Ms. Winfrey did. "I grew up in an era where there was absolutely zero, minus, images" of girls like her in pop culture, she said. "So I do imagine, to be a brown skinned girl of any race throughout the world, looking up on that screen and seeing Storm, I think that is a capital A, capital W, E, some, AWESOME, experience," she added by phone. "I think this is going to be a wondrous marvel of an experience for girls that in the future they will just take for granted." The entertainment press made much of the fact that Ms. DuVernay had never worked with special effects (which is rarely belabored when male directors make the same leap). But neither had Ms. Winfrey. "My first time being hung from the ceiling!" she said. She found getting up and getting down so nerve racking that she asked the crew to just keep her rigged up. "The crew's going to lunch, and they're like, well we can't leave you hanging! I go, 'Oh yeah, you can!'" she said. (She stayed up there. Just picture it.) Ms. DuVernay, though, "was in her element," Ms. Winfrey said, recalling that when she observed the huge cranes with the camera, "and there's Ava, in her dreads and her sneakers and her vest and her jeans, surrounded by lots of big guys and lots of big machinery, saying, 'Cut, stop, let's take that again,' it just would make my heart swell, that she had taken on something that was this enormous, and was managing it so well." "Wrinkle" is a very girlie movie; at one point, a character is saved from a fall by a field of gossipy flowers. And Ms. DuVernay is warm and girlie, too at our meeting, we talked about the joys and pitfalls of fake eyelashes; crying, she peeled hers off. "I like clothes, I like makeup, I like looking at pretty dresses," she said. Onscreen, the Mrs. characters change costumes at every appearance: Ms. Winfrey described her look as "Beyonce's aunt from another planet." And none of these glitter tinged fantasies subtract from Ms. DuVernay's own mission, that cultivation of new perspectives and realities. To her, "Selma" and "A Wrinkle in Time" share a foundational message: "Civil rights work and social justice work take imagination, to imagine a world that isn't there, and you imagine that it can be there. And that's the same thing that you do whenever you imagine and insert yourself in a future space, or in a space where you've been absent." To imagine a world where a girl like Meg can fly was "super emotional to me," she said. "And then to be able to make it so, even on camera for a little while, for two hours to change the world for that small amount of time, it's very powerful. It's addictive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Ready for the most shocking part of Sarah Kane's "Crave," a throat punch of a play livestreamed by the Chichester Festival Theater through Saturday? Here it is: a live audience. In the minutes before "Crave" began, remote spectators could watch as actual (masked) theatergoers took socially distanced seats. Earlier this week, I turned my computer volume up, the better to listen to the endangered language of hushed conversations and rustling programs, my personal pathway to A.S.M.R. Those sights and sounds will disappear on Thursday, when a renewed lockdown will again shutter live theater in England. But for a handful of days, you could know that Kane's particular vision of misery had row after row of company. Then again, Kane, an English playwright who hanged herself in 1999 while hospitalized after a suicide attempt, may be all the company you need. In her wrenching, austere, bleakly comic works, the world interior and exterior is always, already burning. If yours feels on fire, too, her 1999 play, "Crave," is just the timed ticket. A quartet for four voices, "Crave" provides dialogue for four characters, identified in the script as C, M, B and A. They are played here, under Tinuke Craig's precise, minimalist direction, by Erin Doherty, Wendy Kweh, Alfred Enoch and Jonathan Slinger. The actors first appear in low light and only gradually assume form, standing at the edges of four identical treadmills, dressed in varying shades of gray. (Alex Lowde did the design.) On the screen behind the actors, hands materialize, then arms, shoulders and heads, sometimes filmed in negative. Voices appear before faces do, reciting short, staccato lines koans absent of Zen that form a bitter music. "If I could be free of you without having to lose you," one says. "You can only kill yourself if you're not already dead," says another. The actors, Doherty particularly, can pack a wealth of ruin into just a few consonants and vowels. The voices sometimes echo each other or, more rarely, speak chorally. Eventually, characters begin to suggest themselves: an older woman and a younger woman, an older man and a younger man. While the actors never look at or speak directly to one another, the outlines of relationships emerge, most of them unhappy. "Crave," as the name suggests, is a play about desire's double edge. Wanting food, warmth, shelter keeps us alive. Darker drives imperil that life, or make it feel not worth living. Love despised, longed for balances on the tip of that knife. "Only love can save me, and love has destroyed me," one character says. A meditation on power and powerlessness, "Crave" is about being trapped in the straitjacket of your own yearning body and the shards of your own splintered consciousness. It's solipsistic, yes, but navel gazing only if you understand the blood, muscle, fat and viscera tangling just under that belly button. Pricked ears will hear allusions to Shakespeare, the Bible or Plato. But Kane's obvious stylistic forerunner is Samuel Beckett, though she never veils desolation in allegorical trees or ashcans. Kane has a way of making specific devastation feel universal and totalizing. So honestly, it was some relief to see "Crave" through a screen rather than face that absolute anguish live. Those masked theatergoers are brave, for reasons beyond the pandemic. The actors are brave, too. During the 50 minute play, each runs an emotional marathon. And a mile or so on those treadmills. Whether you consider "Crave" the best show for this moment of one of the worst likely comes down to whether you want art that works to understand the world or that helps you to escape it. Most days I don't know what I want. But when the treadmills stilled and the lights came up, I did something I hadn't done in a while. I got up out of my broken desk chair and I applauded. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Pop music and fashion never met cuter than in George Michael's "Freedom! '90" video. Sure, other catwalk favorites starred in music videos during that era, and fashion photographers like Steven Meisel and Herb Ritts were recruited by stars such as Madonna, Chris Isaak and Janet Jackson to burnish their visuals. But the convergence of a pop hit maker's irresistible rhythms and lyrics, a group of models at the peak of their fame and a director on the verge of his own runaway success gave "Freedom! '90" a jolt of stylish energy that has yet to fade after more than a quarter century. Directed by David Fincher, who was at the start of his film career, and filmed over several days at Merton Park Studios in London, the video from Mr. Michael's 1990 album, "Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1," brought together five models Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz who were then the queens of fashion. It runs for six and a half minutes, and its production also gathered a team of novice professionals who would go on to become major forces in fashion, including the stylist Camilla Nickerson, the hairdresser Guido Palau, the makeup artist Carol Brown and the model John Pearson. Naomi Campbell, model. We'd done a British Vogue cover with Peter Lindbergh with all of us. I met George in L.A., and he said: "I've been told that I need to speak to you to get the girls for the video. What would it take to get you?" We were living in America, so I said you'd have to fly us in, basically. I said yes, and then Christy and Tatjana and everyone came in. The night before the video, I didn't sleep at all, because we did five shows for Thierry Mugler in Paris. He had 76 models, and it was the big finale of him designing, although none of us knew that then. The last show finished at around 3 o'clock in the morning, and George was there. So from there I went back to my hotel, packed my bags and went on the first flight to London. David Fincher knew exactly what he wanted. He didn't really give us parts, but he knew exactly which part of the song he wanted each and every one of us to sing. I was more the active one. Cindy was sultry. I don't think any of us knew what it would become. We knew the song was a hit, but we didn't know in any way what effect it would have in terms of videos, the way it would affect people. We were all really excited on the day it was going to be aired. They all had great premieres back in the day. They don't have them anymore. Not that I've seen. MTV's changed. Hasn't it? I got to see George a little bit more after that because Kate Moss was neighbors with him. When we did the Olympics, he sang there in London. We all did the finale, and he was rehearsing and Kate and I went to watch him with this amazing choir singing "Freedom." After, he invited us all back to his home and he had this really nice after party in the garden, and we all got to light these wishing lanterns and we all did that together. That's the memory I'm going to keep. Guido Palau, hairdresser. I don't know how I got the job. George Michael and David Fincher had seen some of my work in British Vogue. It was a different time then. It was a big, big production, a six day video because they had to bring in all the girls. Every girl had a day, though Christy and Linda were there together. My part was to make the girls the best they could look as who they were. They weren't playing characters. They were playing themselves. And each had their own personality: Linda the comedian, Christy much more classic, Cindy the pinup, Tatjana this kind of film noir, and Naomi a very strong kind of woman. We extracted that from them. They weren't prodded at all, though there were some surprises, like Linda's hair, which she'd done for a job for someone else. It wasn't like I said, "Oh, dye your hair blond," not at all. At the time, we really didn't realize how iconic the video would become. I was probably a bit naive about the whole thing seeing how it was a bit of a lucky break job for me. What I remember most is the days being very long, and at the end of the day, the red wine would come out. There we'd be in the location van drinking and singing with George. Tatjana Patitz, model. I was in my own zone. I had to kind of slide up and down the wall for part of the day. The feel of the set was so run down, this big, loft kind of vibe. There was another setup with me laying on a chaise longue with a black smoking jacket. I think I may have had a bustier on. And I was smoking, even. People still smoked in videos then and even in films. George Michael wasn't on the set the day I was there, but I'd met him a few times in L.A. Herb Ritts shot a cover of me and him for a magazine I'm trying to remember what magazine it was. So many magazines have come and gone. Glamour was very present in fashion in those days, feminine glamour, people looking at inspiration from the movie stars of the '40s and '50s Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner. A lot of magazines were pairing models with pop stars or movie stars to shoot covers. It was very different those days. The business was much smaller and wasn't as saturated, not as fast as it is now. Models were known by their first names, and suddenly the glamour we embodied at that time crossed over to pop music videos and film. We were part of the entertainment industry, which made it really fun. George was very nice, almost a little shy. Maybe that's the wrong word. He was mellow and kind. I was quite star struck at the time because I grew up with Wham and their music; he was one of my first teenage crushes. In the five or so times I met him, he was always very pleasant and sweet but timid, not one of those vivacious, out there people who take a room by storm. I remember the shoot being in fall or early winter. I flew in on the Concorde for the day and flew back to New York right after that. It's funny. A lot of people were using models in videos then, but this one in particular stood the test of time. It's not like you look at "Freedom! '90" now and say, "Oh, my God, it's so '80s!" It's not like "Working Girl." John Pearson, model. My agent called up and said: "Hey, do you want to do this video? All the big girls are doing it.'" Of course I said yes. I was a big George Michael fan. I used to see him all the time in London at the clubs. I arrived at the studios at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and met David Fincher briefly, and then basically sat around all day and watched while Christy and Linda were being shot. There's one shot where Linda puts her head underneath her sweater that's amazing. That wasn't rehearsed. Linda really knows how to use her body to communicate in an elegant way, never cheap and tawdry. George was there, very warm and nice but very shy. The day went long, and the producer said at the end of the day, "Can we shoot you tomorrow?" I didn't have another job booked, so I said, "Sure." Then he said, "Do you mind doing it for nothing?" I said, "No way." It was a little bit bolshie of me, but I knew what the girls were getting. In the end, I was paid 15,000 for the day, which is not bad to hang out with these fabulous, beautiful girls. But I'd been working nonstop for three years, and I wasn't going to do it for free. And it turned out to be one of those fabulously easy, surfing the day jobs, everyone riding on this wave of semistardom and recognition for the models. I really didn't realize how big it all was at the time. Candis Cayne, actress, model and former drag personality. There was a group of girls in N.Y.C. in the '90s, and we didn't want to model ourselves on anything other than the supermodels. Linda and Naomi and Christy. So when the video of "Freedom!" came out and they were all in it, we were obsessed. I used to do shows at Boy Bar, so I decided I was going to do "Freedom!" and got Lina and Mistress Formika and Sherry Vine to play the various parts. I was Linda. She was my favorite. We did the whole thing naked under white sheets. After the very last chorus, we dropped the sheets and were completely naked holding our groin areas. That song meant a lot to us. There were singers we knew were gay then, but no one really talked about it. We just grabbed onto songs and artists who knew who and what we were, whether it was Madonna with "Vogue" and "Truth or Dare" or George Michael with "Freedom!" I don't know if he was openly gay or not, then. I guess not. But it was almost O.K. because we all knew and it was such a homophobic time. It was so oppressive, particularly when you factor in the AIDS epidemic. To be open would have been a career killer. But going to a club, listening to "Freedom!," it was an escape. Alan Hunter, one of the original MTV V.J.s. It was a funny moment in my life. I was driving my kid to day care on a day where I didn't know where my career had gone. I'd left MTV. My agent wasn't calling. I was depressed. And I turned on the radio, and on came George Michael's new song. It was George Michael at the peak of his writing skills. It was such a brilliant self referential capstone I'd ever heard. It was his take it back song. He was saying, "Everything that brought me to pop stardom I now disavow." Then I saw the video shortly thereafter with all that iconography he'd used in his past, and he literally sets those things on fire and explodes them. The leather jacket he'd worn and the jukebox from "Faith." And he just steps away. He wasn't even in the video. It showed how serious he was, even while he said it all with a lot of love. It was such a joyous song. I actually felt happy. Zac Posen, fashion designer. I was 10 years old, 10 or 11. I'd see it in my living room waiting for Madonna to come on. I probably wanted to be the child in "Open Your Heart." But what I remember about "Freedom!" was that it was kind of a seminal predecessor to grunge. Because you have these incredibly glamorous beauties in a very industrial, Corinne Day, London type space. There's water dripping down the walls and George Michael's leather jacket is on fire, and the models are naked. It was really the glamour of the '80s transitioning into something more raw that was to come. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber laid off 350 employees on Monday, in the latest indication that the ride hailing company is trying to respond to concerns among investors that it is losing too much money. The cuts, the third round in recent months, were focused in the autonomous vehicle unit, operations, recruiting and customer support, an Uber spokesman said. Since July, the company has cut more than 1,000 jobs, more than 2 percent of its work force. Shares of Uber began trading on Wall Street in May, in one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in recent years. But the stock's performance has been disappointing, with its price down about 30 percent since the first day of trading. Investors reacted favorably to the layoffs on Monday, sending Uber's share price up 4 percent in afternoon trading. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Female physicians at some of the nation's most prominent public medical schools earn nearly 20,000 less a year on average than their male colleagues, according to an analysis published on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. Before adjusting for factors that could influence income, the researchers found that the absolute difference between the genders was more than 51,000 a year. Several studies have found a persistent pay gap between male and female doctors. But those reports relied mostly on doctors reporting their own incomes, or focused on pay disparities in one specialty or one region, or on starting salaries. The new study draws on salary information from a much larger, objective sample. The researchers went to great lengths to account for a variety of factors that can influence income, such as the volume of patients seen by a physician and the number of publications he or she had written. "It's 2016, and yet in a very methodically strong, large study that covers a broad swath of the country, you're still seeing at the very least a 10 percent difference in what men and women take home," said Dr. Molly Cooke, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, who has studied salary disparities among physicians. Dr. Vineet M. Arora, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, wrote an editorial accompanying the study. "This paper is going to make women academic physicians start a conversation with their institutions to promote transparency and gender equality, because at the end of the day, it's not fair," she said in an interview. The analysis included data on roughly 10,000 physician faculty members at 24 medical schools, including those of the University of North Carolina and the University of Washington. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital relied on public databases of employee salaries in 12 states, and data from Doximity, a networking site for physicians, to adjust for factors that can influence income years since residency, specialty and age, for instance. After adjusting for a variety of factors, the researchers found that female neurosurgeons and cardiothoracic surgeons and women in other surgical subspecialties made roughly 44,000 less than comparable men in those fields. The average pay gap between female and male orthopedic surgeons was nearly 41,000. The difference was about 38,000 among oncologists and blood specialists, about 36,000 among obstetrician gynecologists and 34,000 among cardiologists. Radiology was the only specialty in which women were paid more. Their adjusted average salary exceeded that of male radiologists by roughly 2,000. Pay differences by gender appeared across all faculty ranks. Full female professors made roughly the same income ( 250,971) as male associate professors ( 247,212) despite outranking them. The study's limitations included a lack of information about who was on a tenure track. More important, reported incomes in some states may not include all payments to physicians, but both men and women are likely to have been affected by such an exclusion. The researchers also found stark variations in the salary gap at different medical schools, suggesting some address pay inequities more aggressively than others. "The biggest surprise is there are some schools where this doesn't seem to be an issue," said Dr. Anupam B. Jena, the study's lead author and an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. At two medical centers in the West, female physicians were paid roughly 54,000 and 59,000 less, on average, than their male counterparts. At two schools, there was little income difference. Dr. Jena declined to the identify the schools. "What policies, procedures, leadership or culture at these sites helps to counteract a gender pay gap?" Dr. Arora asked in her editorial. Dr. Cooke said her salary had been corrected twice by university administrators once after research she helped conduct revealed pay disparities among physicians in the late 1980s. She attributes the persistent pay gap partly to the complicated and individualized nature of academic salaries, as well as a lack of transparency. A subtle bias against women often is a factor, she said, "until a periodic study comes along, where people go, 'Oh, my God, it's happening, again.'" In the worst cases, the pay gap exists because of "clear discrimination by department chairs in salary settings," Dr. Jena said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Den of Thieves" opens with unfootnoted statistics about Los Angeles, "the bank robbery capital of the world," where such heists apparently occur every 48 minutes. That's about the rate at which this surprisingly long, wildly ambitious, thoroughly ludicrous crime thriller delivers its own big scores. Itself a plundering of "The Driver," the original "Point Break" and "Heat," the movie is less concerned with the mechanics of police work than with the mind meld that forms between an obsessed cop, Big Nick (Gerard Butler), and his target, Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), who leads a group of Marines turned bank robbers planning to crack a branch of the Federal Reserve. To catch them, Nick recruits a mole, Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) a bartender who moonlights as a getaway driver then inexplicably blows his own cover. Is there a reason, other than the writer and director Christian Gudegast's desire for a stylish confrontation, for Nick to turn up when Merrimen is at the shooting range? In the funniest, most gratuitous tangent, a member of Merrimen's crew played by Curtis Jackson, a.k.a. 50 Cent, has the others intimidate his daughter's prom date. With almost compulsive detail, "Den of Thieves" rattles off title cards identifying places and major characters, some of whose names sound like Los Angeles suburbs. The would be regional authenticity is marred by obviously off location work. It's no surprise when the ubiquitous Georgia peach logo surfaces in the credits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The 146th Kentucky Derby was rescheduled for September. It is not clear whether the Preakness and the Belmont the second and third legs of the Triple Crown will be run. You can move the Kentucky Derby to September from May. But you can't expect horses to show up at Churchill Downs without some warm up races. A series of prep races was announced this week for the Derby, but uncertainty over what tracks will be open and when left it spotty and tentative. A few prep races were run in the early part of the year before the coronavirus shut down many American tracks. A few more have been held during the pandemic at tracks like Gulfstream in Florida and Oaklawn in Arkansas that pressed on without fans. Most of the traditional prep races have been scattered throughout the calendar now, if they have been rescheduled at all. The Santa Anita Derby, the major prep in California, is now in June, rather than April. The Blue Grass in Kentucky has been postponed indefinitely but might still be run in July. Churchill Downs said it expected to add some New York races to the list later, and the Wood, the major prep there, could be one of them. Other races that are normally held post Triple Crown have suddenly become preps, like the Haskell at Monmouth in New Jersey. The Travers at Saratoga is also a possibility, though neither race has a date yet. 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. Some normally minor races, like the Matt Winn at Churchill on May 23, have gained outsize importance in the absence of many of the traditional preps by the mere fact that they are being run at all. It is not even clear whether and when the second and third legs of the Triple Crown, the Preakness and the Belmont, will be run. Both have been postponed from their usual dates in May and June, but no new dates have been set. It is even possible that the three races will be run out of their traditional order for the first time in almost a century. Derby prep races not only give horses warm ups, they also winnow the potential field. Without enough preps, too few horses will be winnowed, and it will be harder to identify the 20 best to race at Churchill. This problem led to the running of two Arkansas Derbys earlier this month, so that all the contenders could enter. It's very unlikely we will have two Kentucky Derbys in September, but almost everything else in the Triple Crown this year seems uncertain. Leagues hoping to return sometimes have to deal with governmental rules. That can be tricky enough, but it gets even more complicated when there are multiple governments to deal with. The Australian Football League was working hard to get the all clear to restart the season on June 11. But at least one state, South Australia, was causing problems with stricter rules that required arrivals to quarantine for 14 days. Still, there were high hopes that the league could get an exemption. But on Wednesday, the state said that a plan to have Aussie rules players fly to games and leave immediately afterward was not acceptable. As a result, it seems that the two league teams in the state, Adelaide and Port Adelaide, may have to play all their games away from home. "Modification or exemptions to S.A. quarantine requirements for A.F.L. players and staff were not outweighed by the public health risk," Police Commissioner Grant Stevens and Chief Medical Officer Nicola Spurrier said in a statement rejecting the exemption. A group of Adelaide players and a coach had previously been in trouble for training in groups of eight, when the league had limited training to groups of no more than two. The struggles with different rules in different jurisdictions could be a sign of what's to come for North American leagues, which are potentially facing varying federal rules in the United States and Canada, not to mention the possibility of dozens of rules in different states, some eager to reopen for business and others keeping strong lockdown rules. It feels like the world of soccer is coming to life, as more leagues announced restarts this week. Germany relaunches the Bundesliga this weekend, and a second major European league, Portugal's Primeira Liga, will return June 4. The Czech Republic is targeting May 23, and Denmark is looking ahead to May 28. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Heavy silver jewelry and rings that reflect the forms and imperfections like cracks in a stairway in Palermo, Sicily, which inspired the designer Sofus Graae, who works at the Goldsmiths' Center in London. LONDON For young craftsmen, making a name among well established brands is perhaps the hardest part of the trade. To do so, the artisans working at London's Goldsmiths' Center have the backing of a group that follows the spirit of medieval guilds. The center's parent, the Goldsmiths' Company, is one of the oldest livery companies, or guilds, of the City of London. It received a royal charter in 1327 to control the standard of silver and precious metals being sold through the hallmarking system. While most of London's other medieval guilds, such as the Fanmakers, have seen their original trade disappear, the Goldsmiths' company has kept its link to the profession. Two years ago, it opened a space for trainees and postgraduate students to work and study. "One of the challenges in London is access to workshop space. A lot of people have been priced out of workshops," said Peter Taylor, director of the center, which provides training to offset what he described as a decline in technical courses in mainstream education. "They come to us for up to a year to really kick start their business," Mr. Taylor said of his students. "We really work with them on professional development, business practice, as well as product development." The center is run by a charity that, in addition to the courses, funds bursaries to support young professionals at the start of their careers. It also provides subsidized studio spaces. Craftsmen working here can showcase their work at a range of events each year. This fall, for example "Shine," running until Nov. 25, shows work by students and young designers in the center's state of the art building in Clerkenwell, London's historical craft metalworkers' district. Sofus Graae and Birgit Marie Schmidt have been using one of the small studio spaces since last year, while their business, Smith/Grey, gains a footing. The couple bring contrasting backgrounds to their jewelry. Mr. Graae, from Copenhagen, previously worked as a designer of special effects for the cinema while Ms. Schmidt trained as an architect in Vienna. "She has been teaching me plenty on the bench, and I learn every single day," said Mr. Graae in a recent interview, describing the work they do as "the ultimate playground." "Many of our collections aren't rooted in one specific design style," he added. "They're rooted in a memory or a story that means a lot to us." One such collection was born during a trip to Palermo, Sicily. Inspired by "Palermo Shooting," the 2008 film by Wim Wenders, Mr. Graae went on a three day walkabout, taking photographs and making molds. The result was a collection of heavy silver necklaces and rings that reflect the forms and the imperfections like cracks in a stairway found in the Sicilian city's streets. The Goldsmiths' Company opened a space two years ago for trainees and postgraduate students to work and study. Smith/Grey use sterling silver for most of their pieces, often with yellow or rose gold plating. "Our audience are in the realm where it's affordable and accessible," Mr. Graae said. They create two seasonal women's collections and one men's collection a year. In the minimalist workshop that just about accommodates two people with an array of tools, models, molds and press cuttings, where most of the work is done, they compare ideas and experiment with new techniques. In the "Covert" series, heavy silver rings and bracelets were designed from molds of frozen fabrics printed with 3 D technology. "We find our story and our narrative and we can translate it to any type of material, concrete if we wanted to," Mr. Graae said. "And we believe that there is an audience out there that are willing to listen to those stories and want to participate in it." And this audience is growing, thanks to the location in the heart of London and the exposure the brand gets from recognized clients. This summer, Ellie Goulding, an English pop singer, was wearing Smith/Grey's "Knuckleduster Ring with Horses" at a concert. One of the designers' most sought after pieces, it features delicate horse figures emerging of a double gold plated bronze ring in the shape of the hand to hand combat weapon. At "Shine" this year Smith/Grey exhibits a custom made signet ring of gold plated silver in the "Made for Makers" series. The design was made in collaboration with and inspired from the work of a local tailor, Joshua Kane. After three years, designers like Smith/Grey have to hand the space to new occupants. The hope is that by that time their brand will stand on its own feet. "From 'Setting Out,' which is our shared studio workshop space, to a starter studio: That's the kind of progression that we want to see in the building," Mr. Taylor, the center's director, said. "And then ultimately somebody ending up having their own, larger workshop, where they can have somebody working for them." Kyosun Jung, a silversmith from South Korea, is a recipient of the precious metal bursary that allows young creators to finance the cost of their materials. At "Shine," she exhibits three robust silver cups in a "Reversible Drinking Set." Each cup has a dual function; the champagne flute is teamed up with a shot cup, the red wine cup with a white wine cup and the water cup with a cocktail cup. A water stream pattern, created with soldered wires, runs through each cup. They vary in size according to their functions. "Silver is a metal which has great versatility and gives me great pleasure using it making my pieces," said Ms. Jung in an email last month. "I hope other people can share my appreciation of this wonderful metal." Having spent the last four years studying English and silversmithing in Britain, Ms. Jung has distinguished herself in several competitions. Last year, she won the Young Designer Silversmith Award with a silver sake set that is now held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Slow moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean. The sound waves hit the sea floor, penetrating miles into it, and bounce back to the surface, where they are picked up by hydrophones. The acoustic patterns form a three dimensional map of where oil and gas most likely lie. The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic. As part of the Trump administration's plans to allow offshore drilling for gas and oil exploration, five companies are in the process of seeking permits to carry out seismic mapping with the air guns all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Central Florida to the Northeast, for the first time in three decades. The surveys haven't started yet in the Atlantic, but now that the ban on offshore drilling has been lifted, companies can be granted access to explore regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. And air guns are now the most common method companies use to map the ocean floor. "They fire approximately every 10 seconds around the clock for months at a time," said Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. "They have been detected 4,000 kilometers away. These are huge, huge impacts." "Researchers saw a complete absence of life around the air gun," said Michael Jasny, director of marine mammal protection for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of several environmental groups suing the federal government in an effort to stop the seismic surveys. Each seismic shot from the air guns is estimated to reach up to 260 underwater decibels, equal to about 200 decibels in the atmosphere. Container ships, another noisemaker on the seas, make sounds up to 190 decibels the equivalent of 130 decibels in the atmosphere. (The launch of a space shuttle, by contrast, reaches about 160 decibels for those nearby. ) Every 10 decibels is an order of magnitude. An explosion of 200 decibels, then, is 10 times more intense than the sound of a container ship. Because water is much denser than air, sound travels underwater about four times faster and much farther than above the sea's surface. "At any one time, there are 20, 30 or 40 seismic surveys going on around the world," for oil and gas exploration, as well as for geological research, Dr. Nowacek said. All told in the first year of the newly approved exploration, more than five million of these huge explosions would occur all along the United States' eastern coastline. Harming or injuring marine mammals is forbidden under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. In November, NOAA issued five authorizations allowing seismic exploration companies to "incidentally, but not intentionally, harass marine mammals." Because of the government shutdown, a second other government action required to begin testing has been postponed until at least March 1. The companies involved in the exploration disagree sharply with the claims of harm. "More than 50 years of extensive surveying and scientific research indicate that the risk of direct physical injury to marine mammals is extremely low," Gail Adams Jackson, vice president of communications for the International Association of Geophysical Contractors, said in a statement. She contended that the groups' efforts are solely aimed at stopping offshore exploration and development. The companies and NOAA Fisheries said that the effects on marine life could be kept to a minimum by careful monitoring and mitigation, which would involve acoustic monitoring to detect mammal vocalizations and shutting down exploration when sensitive species like the endangered North Atlantic right whales are observed. There are no more than 400 to 500 of the migratory right whales, which can grow up to 60 feet long, and calve and nurse their young from North Carolina to Florida. Right whales are already emaciated and stressed by a warmer ocean they live in the Gulf of Maine, which has warmed considerably more than other bodies of water. Reproduction has been drastically reduced. And the seismic noise can mask ship sounds, resulting in collisions, another leading danger for the whales. Years of constant blasts could be extremely harmful, others argue, and not just for right whales. Because of the way sound reverberates in the ocean, the noise can be unrelenting. "Prolonged chronic stress of any kind is bad, because it shunts resources away from reproduction," Dr. Nowacek said. "It presses your adrenal glands to produce adrenaline and stress hormones, causes weight loss and immunosuppression." In a landmark study, when ship traffic greatly decreased after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, researchers noted a significant drop in stress hormones in the feces of right whales in the Bay of Fundy in Canada, the first evidence that ship noise can cause chronic stress in whales. Moreover, acoustic communication is primary in the marine ecosystem, where visibility is so limited. Many whale species are highly intelligent, social beings and communicate in the clicks, moaning, singing and calling of their own languages. Some whales, and orcas (the largest in the dolphin family despite their killer whale designation), hunt prey through echolocation, a kind of natural sonar. "Sound can travel enormous distances very fast and whales have evolved to take advantage of that," said Dr. Clark, who has listened to whales near Ireland from coastal Virginia. "They can hear storms a thousand miles away." Aside from the seismic noise, compounded sounds from container ships to navy sonar are posing a problem for marine life. As the number of ships moving around the world has increased significantly in recent years, cavitation, the noise from the synchronous collapse of bubbles created by a ship's propeller, as well as the rumble of ship engines, poses a bigger and bigger problem. A recent study found that shipping noise could double by 2030. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Noise masks whale expressions between families, which can affect orientation, feeding, care of young, detection of prey and even increase aggression. Already 80 percent of communications of some species of whales is masked by noise, according to models assessed by a team of biologists. "It's ripping the communications system apart," Dr. Clark said. "And every aspect of their lives is dependent on sound, including finding food." Regulations on underwater noise are few and far between and experts are searching for solutions. The United Nations recently held a weeklong symposium on noise pollution and marine life. Voluntary efforts to turn down the volume are having an effect: The Port of Vancouver started the ECHO (Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation) Program, asking mariners to reduce noise by having ships slow down and fix cavitation on the propellers. At the same time, though, if the Trans Mountain pipeline is built from the tar sands of Alberta to a port near Vancouver, as planned, tanker traffic in the Salish Sea is expected to increase by seven times. Marine biologists say that would exacerbate the difficulties the region's endangered orcas already face in finding prey. Scientists and environmentalists are urging that more research be conducted, to learn much more about the effects of sound and ship traffic on the creatures of the sea. "The effects on marine mammals are felt across an extraordinarily large scale," Mr. Jasny, the marine mammal protection director, said. "And loud noise has an effect on species across the food web." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Amazon and Walmart are battling to dominate the grocery market, fueling a price war that could rearrange where America shops for food. To get a firsthand glimpse of this competition, we have periodically been testing Amazon's effect on grocery prices since the online retailer bought Whole Foods last summer. Heading into Super Bowl weekend, we thought we would compare the price of ingredients for Steak 'n' Bacon Cheddar meatballs. So we shopped for the same items (or as close as we could find) at a Whole Foods and a Walmart. Our experiment was inspired by the opening of the Whole Foods 365 brand store in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn on Wednesday the first 365 store on the East Coast. Whole Foods promotes the stores as a less costly option for shoppers. Our plan was to bake one batch of the cheesy, three meat delicacy using only ingredients from a Walmart and a second batch with only items from the Whole Foods 365. Then we would ask our newsroom colleagues which version of the meatball described by the chef who created it as "the heart stopper" tasted better. While the 365 line of stores was launched before Amazon's acquisition, the vibe of the new Brooklyn store seems in keeping with Amazon's consumer first approach. The store is easy to navigate and pushes its private label, and less expensive, 365 brand products. Wherever possible, we bought 365 brand items, including steak, hamburger, salt, pepper and olive oil. Many of the items were organic, and the eggs came from cage free chickens. That helped drive up the prices. Next, we went to the Walmart Supercenter in Secaucus, N.J., and bought almost entirely from Walmart's Great Value brand, which offers few organic options. One ingredient that drove that difference: Whole Foods' organic shredded Cheddar cost nearly three times as much as the Walmart brand, which was not organic. The price of a dozen eggs at the two stores was comparable. For the highly unscientific taste test, we served the meatballs in the New York Times newsroom on Friday afternoon. The taste testers were not told whether they had chosen a Whole Foods or a Walmart meatball until after they voted. Some said the Whole Foods batch had too much bacon flavor. Others found the steak bits in the Walmart meatballs too chewy. When the votes were tallied, the Whole Foods meatball prevailed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The present is getting better. The future, not at all. Even as more Americans say the economy is improving, a clear majority remain fearful about their children's financial prospects, according to a study released Monday. The pessimism is not limited to the United States, either, according to the report, which was produced by the Pew Research Center. In France, more than 70 percent of respondents said they doubted that their children would be better off financially, with a similarly bleak outlook reported in Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany. "Even in advanced economies where people think they are doing well, like Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, they are worried about their kids' financial prospects," said Bruce Stokes, director of global economic attitudes at Pew. "Clearly, even though unemployment is falling and growth is returning after the financial crisis, this pessimism raises questions about whether this is a temporary phenomenon." The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, surveyed people in 32 countries this year and found that overall sentiment about the current economic situation had rebounded sharply from postrecession lows. But the views varied widely across borders. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
RB Leipzig's executives have long since grown used to the protests. Some are eerie: Union Berlin's most ardent fans dressed in black plastic and stood in silence for the first 15 minutes of a game between the teams. Some seem a tad petty: Borussia Dortmund still refuses to use Leipzig's crest when the team visits Signal Iduna Park. And, occasionally, they get a little gory: Dynamo Dresden fans once greeted RB Leipzig by throwing a severed bull's head onto the field. Nobody at the club would have been surprised, then, when a banner criticizing Dietrich Mateschitz, the billionaire founder of both the team and its ultimate backer, Red Bull, appeared in the stands during a game at Schalke in 2017. Mateschitz had recently criticized the German government's decision to open its borders to refugees from the war in Syria, and a television network owned by Red Bull had earned a reputation as a platform for populist figures in both Germany and Austria. "The patron of the most authoritarian club calls himself a pluralist," the banner read. "What a joke." What made the demonstration noteworthy was not the presence of the banner over the decade in which it has risen from German soccer's regionalized fifth tier to the semifinals of the Champions League, the club has inspired far worse but its location. It was not brandished by the home supporters. It was, instead, the work of RB Leipzig's own ultras. On the other hand, there is in a sporting sense much to admire about Julian Nagelsmann's team: its inventive, bright young coach; its commitment to playing attacking soccer; its belief in nurturing talent; its intelligent and productive recruitment. The fact that it is owned by Red Bull might feel a little tacky, but to those outside the Bundesliga its ownership structure is nothing out of the ordinary. To most fans in Germany, though, particularly those in the country's "organized" fan scenes an umbrella term that encompasses hooligan firms, ultra factions, interest groups, progressive activists and what are effectively supporters unions the very existence of RB Leipzig is an affront to all that they believe in. The team's primary purpose, as they see it, is not to play soccer or represent a community, but to increase Red Bull's brand visibility. The entire organization is, in their eyes, an artificial construct weaponized by an international corporation and brazenly circumventing the 50 1 rules that are supposed to place ultimate control of German clubs in the hands of their fans so that it can sell a few more cans of energy drink. While that is a view shared by many mainstream fans Robert Claus, a researcher on German fan culture, said that while "there are some subjects where what ultras think and what the majority of fans think are not the same, RB Leipzig is a different matter" it is most keenly felt, and often most publicly expressed, by the ultras. RB Leipzig is the antithesis of what ultra groups, regardless of which team they are attached to, represent. To be an ultra is to be opposed to a team like RB Leipzig. And yet, as that banner at Schalke proved, there is a second side to the story. The strict binary might hold in principle, but it does not in practice. "Sooner or later, when you're a season ticket holder, as I was when I was 13 or 14, you don't just look at the field, you look at the banners and the flags in the stadium," said a Leipzig fan known as Mucki. "It feels wild and uncontrollable, and it fascinates you." Mucki who agreed to speak only under a pseudonym was a child when RB Leipzig was formed in 2009, and barely into double figures when he started to attend games. He did not think, then, about the reason this club had landed, almost fully formed, in his hometown; he just found the idea of following a team with ambition thrilling at a time when the two traditional clubs in the city, Lokomotive and Chemie, were toiling in obscurity and flirting with oblivion. As a teenager, he was invited by friends onto the kurve at Red Bull Arena the team's home stadium, in the middle of the city and though he does not self define as an ultra he was a member of Red Aces, the club's first ultra faction. Now he is part of Rasenballisten, a fan group that aims to "support the team, but not Red Bull." Though there is considerable esprit de corps in Germany's ultra scene groups often acting in concert on issues they consider important Leipzig's various groups are not seen as "equals," according to Claus. "There is a very active ultra scene, and they are quite progressive on things like homophobia and racism," he said, issues that unite ultra factions. "But as far as I know, they are not part of the broader fan organizations. They are not connected, because they are not really accepted." Mucki recognizes that, to many, he is an impossible contradiction: someone who might be regarded as an RB Leipzig ultra. The emotions generated by seeing the team win are real, but his relationship with his club is complicated, layered. "The bond I have with the team is a love hate thing," he said. Mucki and his colleagues are, of course, aware of the way their team is viewed by their peers across the country. Though he is quick to point out that "only a few clubs are not global businesses" even Dortmund has sold the naming rights to its stadium he does not hide behind accusations of hypocrisy. "I understand the points they make," he said. "But it is easy to point these things out. We are trying to change them." They have had some success. He believes that Red Aces were integral to helping the club foster an "open minded, tolerant" environment that has voiced support for refugees and staged demonstrations against Pegida, the Islamophobic group that first gained prominence in Dresden before spreading across Germany. Earlier this year, though, Red Aces disbanded. Partly, Mucki said, its members were "tired," not of hostility from the outside but of resistance from the club itself. "They want an organized fan culture, but they do not want it to be critical," he said. "They want us involved in certain processes we were invited to give our views on the redesign of the stadium but on others, they tried to keep us down." That was a particular problem when it came not just to pyrotechnics the club, he said, issued statements condemning fireworks displays "within minutes" but to anything that might be regarded as political. Oliver Mintzlaff, Red Bull's head of soccer, has said publicly that he does not believe sports and politics should mix, an idea that is anathema to Germany's organized fan scenes. It is, in other words, precisely the same sense of disenfranchisement felt by fans, ultras or not, of almost every other major club in Europe. The only difference is that RB Leipzig's fans have been exposed to it scarcely a decade after the club was formed. The team's rise has been so rapid that its fans have not been able to keep up. Other ultra groups are rising, ready to take Red Aces' place. One observer of the fan scene in the city estimated each group contains between 50 and 100 members, most of them younger than Mucki in his early 20s is now. They have grown up with RB Leipzig in the city, the first generation of fans for whom supporting the team is not a conscious choice. The original ultras have gone their separate ways. "Some still go, just as ordinary fans," Mucki said. "Some have joined other groups. Some do not go at all." Red Aces had been part of Rasenballisten, a coalition of groups dedicated to changing "what people make of their club." Mucki decided to remain in the hopes of continuing that battle. It operates under an alternative logo one based on Leipzig's cityscape and rejects outright the use of the bull as a symbol for the team. That is the iconography of the sponsor, and nothing more. In an ideal world, a form of that logo will one day supersede Leipzig's current crest. That is the aim: not to complain about Leipzig's existence, but to try to change it. To look inside the artificial and find the authentic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Pregnancy changes a woman's brain, altering the size and structure of areas involved in perceiving the feelings and perspectives of others, according to a first of its kind study published Monday. Most of these changes remained two years after giving birth, at least into the babies' toddler years. And the more pronounced the brain changes, the higher mothers scored on a measure of emotional attachment to their babies. "Just fascinating," said Dr. Ronald E. Dahl, director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. He said the researchers' interpretation that changes in the brain enhance women's maternal responses is "provocative, and I think it's likely to be true." In the study, researchers scanned the brains of women who had never conceived before, and again after they gave birth for the first time. The results were remarkable: loss of gray matter in several brain areas involved in a process called social cognition or "theory of mind," the ability to register and consider how other people perceive things. What might the loss mean? There are three possibilities, said Paul Thompson, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the study. "The most intuitive is that losing gray matter is not beneficial, that later on there may be negative consequences." Or, he said, it could be just a "neutral" reflection of pregnancy related "stress, diet, lack of sleep." A third possibility is that the loss is "part of the brain's program for dealing with the future," he said. Hormone surges in pregnancy might cause "pruning or cellular adaptation that is helpful," he said, streamlining certain brain areas to be more efficient at mothering skills "from nurturing to extra vigilance to teaching." The study strongly leans toward the third possibility. "We certainly don't want to put a message out there on the lines of 'pregnancy makes you lose your brain,' as we don't believe this is the case," said Elseline Hoekzema, a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who led the study at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain. "Gray matter volume loss does not necessarily represent a bad thing," she said. "It can also represent a beneficial process of maturation or specialization." Pregnancy, she explained, may help a woman's brain specialize in "a mother's ability to recognize the needs of her infant, to recognize social threats or to promote mother infant bonding." The study, which took more than five years, involved 25 women in their 30s in Spain who had never been pregnant but were hoping to conceive. Their brains were scanned before becoming pregnant and within few months after giving birth. For comparison, 20 women who had never been pregnant were also scanned twice, about the same number of months apart. Only the pregnant women showed gray matter reduction, thinning and changes in the surface area of the cortex in areas related to social cognition. Changes were so clear that imaging results alone could indicate which women had been pregnant. The researchers said they did not yet know what was being reduced in size: neurons, other brain cells, synapses or parts of the circulatory system. Many of the women had been recruited for the study at a fertility clinic, and the 16 who conceived after fertility treatment were compared with nine who conceived naturally. The treatments caused no difference in brain changes; nor did the sex of the babies. The researchers also scanned the brains of 17 men who were not fathers and 19 first time fathers before and after their partners' pregnancies. The two male groups showed no difference in brain volume. Researchers wanted to see if the women's brain changes affected anything related to mothering. They found that relevant brain regions in mothers showed more activity when women looked at photos of their own babies than with photos of other children. Six months after giving birth, the mothers answered questions on the Maternal Postnatal Attachment Scale, used to assess a woman's emotional attachment, pleasure and hostility toward her baby. The degree of changes in the mothers' gray matter volume predicted the degree of hostility and attachment, Dr. Hoekzema said. Experts said more research was required, involving more women and clearer assessments of social cognition to substantiate whether gray matter loss is truly linked to "theory of mind" and improved mothering skills. But there are some precedents for making that connection. A 2014 study showed "people with better spontaneous 'theory of mind' also have less gray matter volume in pretty much exactly these regions," said Rebecca Saxe, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the new research. During another period of roiling hormonal change adolescence gray matter decreases in several brain regions that are believed to provide fine tuning for the social, emotional and cognitive territory of being a teenager. "We think it is creating plasticity for learning, not that adolescent brains are wacko or making them crazy," said Dr. Dahl of the University of California, Berkeley. Perhaps there is "a similar turbulent period around pregnancy," he said. In the study, the women's cognitive abilities were tested before and after pregnancy, and "there was no loss of memory, verbal skills or working memory," Dr. Saxe noted, providing "evidence against the common myth of 'mommy brain.' " Two years after they gave birth, scans of the brains of 11 women who had not had second children showed the same gray matter loss in the same areas, except for an area in the hippocampus, which had regained volume. Dr. Thompson said it was notable that the hippocampus, important in memory, appeared to recover, possibly because of all the learning and activity required of new mothers. "That boost in the memory system is something that many of us in neuroscience would give our eyeteeth to achieve," he said. Brain areas lose volume "like the erosion of the coast, but there are not many things that put the coast back." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
I almost but not quite feel sorry for Donald Trump. He's at war with two "invisible enemies" at once the coronavirus and Joe Biden and both remain highly elusive, the pathogen by nature and the politician by design. Biden, who made a rare public appearance on Tuesday, has been wise to stay out of sight. Trump is now in a full on race to the bottom with himself, pushing uglier and uglier positions that appeal to smaller and smaller segments of the American public. Why get in his way? Of course, eventually Biden will debate the incumbent and will need a simple, clear message to counter Trump's tired "Make America Great Again" trope. I have an idea for Biden's bumper sticker. As I think about what kind of president Biden wants to be and what kind of president America needs him to be, the slogan that comes to mind was suggested to me by the environmental innovator Hal Harvey. Harvey didn't know he was suggesting it; he just happened to sign off a recent email to me by writing: "Respect science, respect nature, respect each other." I thought wow, that's a perfect message for Biden, and for all of us. It summarizes so simply the most important values Americans feel that we've lost in recent years and hope to regain from a post Trump presidency. Biden should highlight his commitment to all three values in every speech and interview he gives. They draw such a clear, simple and easy to remember contrast with Trump. Start with respecting science. Trump's obvious disdain for truth telling is annoying when he exaggerates his crowd sizes, his hand sizes, the size of his bank account or the size of his election victory. But his disdain for science has become fatal, as we're seeing in this widening pandemic. Trump has gone from offering quack remedies, like disinfectant, ultraviolet light and hydroxychloroquine, to mocking people, including Biden, for adopting the easiest and most scientifically proven method for limiting the spread of the coronavirus: wearing a face mask. The pro Trump governor of Arizona, where the virus is now spiraling out of control, at one point actually barred local officials from mandating that residents wear masks. That's as crazy as when Trump declared, "If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any." Attention, fellow Americans, this impugning of scientific methods, this embrace of conspiracy theories, this undermining of truth and data by our president and vice president this is not happening in other countries. This is not happening in Germany, France, China, South Korea, Denmark, Canada, Israel or Japan. This is a form of American "exceptionalism" that we never imagined possible. We're not leading. We're not following. We're lost. "This is Dark Ages stuff," remarked Harvey, founder of Energy Innovation. "A prime difference between the Enlightenment and the Dark Ages is respect for knowledge, respect for science. The whole idea of progress requires objectively looking at problems, finding and testing solutions, and then spreading and using the best of them. That's how we grow, that's how we learn, that's how we prosper." Indeed, it is amazing to think that in the year 2020 Biden could actually run for president with an ad that says: "I believe in the Enlightenment, Newtonian physics and the Age of Reason. The other guy doesn't." As for respecting nature, that has two meanings. The first is to respect the power of nature, which Trump has utterly failed to do. She doesn't negotiate. You cannot seduce her or sue her. She does whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate. Full stop. Which means in a pandemic that she will just keep infecting people relentlessly, mercilessly, silently and exponentially until she runs out of people to infect or a vaccine or exposure makes enough of us immune. She also doesn't keep score. She'll make you sick and then blow down your house with a tornado. Trump's lack of respect for nature may be a political asset for him with his base, but it's been a disaster for the country. He has built no coordinated national strategy against a virus that demands coordination because the virus evolved to exploit any cracks in your personal or communal immune system, and it pays no heed to the Oklahoma Texas borderline. Respect for nature also means understanding that we live on a hard rock called planet Earth with a thin cover of oceans and topsoil, enveloped by a thin layer of atmosphere. Abuse that soil, junk up those oceans with plastics, distort that atmospheric blanket and we will likely (further) destroy the perfect Garden of Eden that has been the basis of all human civilization. And remember, as bad as this pandemic is, it's just training wheels for the big, irreversible atmospheric pandemic: climate change. The latest evidence? See National Geographic online: "An extended heat wave that has been baking the Russian Arctic for months drove the temperature in Verkhoyansk, Russia north of the Arctic Circle to 100.4 degrees F on June 20, the official first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere." That's 100 degrees in the Arctic! Respect each other? That's not so easy in the midst of our other pandemic a pandemic of incivility. You cannot exaggerate the impact on the whole civic culture of having a president who has elevated name calling, denigration and lying to a central feature of his presidency, amplified by the White House. We have social networks whose business model is to elevate and spread the most enraged voices from the far right and the far left, and generally bring out the worst in people. Almost every day now some public figure, or just everyday American, has to apologize for some inane or hurtful tweet. But this pandemic of incivility is fed by many sources. We have white police officers who feel such a sense of impunity that one of them kept his knee on a Black man's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while people were recording him on their phones. The other is getting people out of Facebook and into each other's faces again not to shout or denounce, but to listen. It's important what you learn when you listen. It's even more important what you say when you listen. Listening is a sign of respect. And it is amazing what people will let you say to them if they first think that you respect them. That's our job. It's the only way to make America great again. 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 |
Digital Divide Is Wider Than We Think, Study Says Ferry County in northeastern Washington spans more than 2,200 square miles of mostly forestland, rivers and lakes. And according to the Federal Communications Commission, everyone in the sprawling county has access to broadband internet. But that is not the reality experienced by the roughly 7,500 residents of this county, which is rich in natural beauty but internet poor. The county seat, Republic, has basic broadband service, supplied by a community cable TV company owned by residents. But go beyond the cluster of blocks in the small town, and the high speed service drops off quickly. People routinely drive into town to use Wi Fi in the public library and other spots for software updates, online shopping or schoolwork, said Elbert Koontz, Republic's mayor. "We don't really have broadband coverage across the county," Mr. Koontz said. "We're out in the woods." A new study by Microsoft researchers casts a light on the actual use of high speed internet across the country, and the picture it presents is very different from the F.C.C. numbers. Their analysis, presented at a Microsoft event on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., suggests that the speedy access is much more limited than the F.C.C. data shows. Over all, Microsoft concluded that 162.8 million people do not use the internet at broadband speeds, while the F.C.C. says broadband is not available to 24.7 million Americans. The discrepancy is particularly stark in rural areas. In Ferry County, for example, Microsoft estimates that only 2 percent of people use broadband service, versus the 100 percent the federal government says have access to the service. Fast internet service is crucial to the modern economy, and closing the digital divide is seen as a step toward shrinking the persistent gaps in economic opportunity, educational achievement and health outcomes in America. In some areas with spotty or no service, children do their homework in Wi Fi equipped buses or fast food restaurants, small businesses drive to internet hot spots to send sales pitches and medical records are transported by hand on thumb drive memory sticks. Accurate measurements on the reach of broadband matter because the government's statistics are used to guide policy and channel federal funding for underserved areas. Telecommunications experts and some politicians have pointed to the shortcomings of the official F.C.C. statistics for years. Last year, the agency began a formal review, still in progress, of how to improve its broadband measurements. "Maintaining updated and accurate data about broadband deployment is critical to bridging the digital divide," Ajit Pai, the commission chairman, said at the time. "So we're teeing up ideas for collecting more granular and standardized data." The Microsoft researchers shared their analysis with F.C.C. officials. The agency declined to comment on the findings. The issue with the current F.C.C. statistics, experts say, is that they rely on simplistic surveys of internet service providers that inherently overstate coverage. For example, if one business in an area has broadband service, then the entire area is typically considered to have broadband service available. The Microsoft researchers instead looked at the internet speeds of people using the company's software and services, like Office software, Windows updates, Bing searches and maps, and Xbox game play. The Microsoft data is much more detailed than the official government statistics, said John Kahan, Microsoft's chief data analytics officer for external affairs. Microsoft plans to put the national comparisons, as well as state and county data, on a website this month. The Microsoft analysis also includes county unemployment data, which points to the strong correlation between joblessness and low rates of broadband use. The unemployment rate in Ferry County, for example, is 11 percent, more than twice the statewide rate. "The worst place to be is in a place where there is no access to the technology everyone else is benefiting from," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. Expanding broadband also benefits Microsoft and other tech companies because it enlarges the market for their products and services. And like others, Microsoft is promoting a potential solution. Microsoft's plan is a mix of old and new technology that involves harnessing the unused channels between television broadcasts, known as white spaces. The technology is sometimes called "super Wi Fi" because it behaves like regular Wi Fi but uses low powered television channels to cover greater distances than wireless hot spots. It is a less expensive alternative to wiring homes, particularly in less populated and remote regions. The technology is promising, experts say, but one tool among a handful needed to bring broadband connectivity to rural America. Other tools include fiber networks, satellite coverage and high speed mobile service. A key challenge is bringing down the cost of devices that use white space technology. In mid 2017, they cost 800, but are now just 300, Microsoft says. The goal is to get the price to 100. Last year, Microsoft announced plans to work with internet providers and hardware firms to propel the adoption of white space technology. To date, the company says, it has deals in 13 states to bring broadband to over a million people in rural areas. Microsoft on Tuesday said its Airband initiative planned to reach three million rural residents by July 2022, a million more than its target announced last year. Microsoft is urging the government to keep the white space broadcast spectrum open for public use. It is also pushing to get a larger portion of the more than 4 billion a year that the F.C.C. and the Agriculture Department spend in grants and subsidies to bring broadband to rural areas. Microsoft competitors and critics say one of the wealthiest companies in the world is lobbying for an advantage and government money. Broadcasters also worry the white space technology could interfere with local television service. "Broadcasters have always supported rural broadband deployment," said Dennis Wharton, executive vice president for communications at the National Association of Broadcasters. "But we're skeptical whether Microsoft can deliver that service without significant interference and disruption to local television signals in smaller markets." In Ferry County, a white space broadband effort will begin next year. Declaration Networks, a company that focuses on bringing broadband to rural areas, has just received a commitment for money from the F.C.C. for the project. "Ferry County has a lot of needs, and we're going to try address that," said Bob Nichols, chief executive of Declaration Networks, which is based in Vienna, Va. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
KANSAS CITY, Mo. Just about the only thing that looked familiar about the N.F.L.'s long awaited return Thursday night was the sight of Patrick Mahomes effortlessly leading the Kansas City Chiefs up and down the field. The Super Bowl M.V.P. threw for 211 yards and three touchdowns, Clyde Edwards Helaire ran through the rain for 138 yards and another score, and the Chiefs began defending their first championship in 50 years by beating the Houston Texans, 34 20, before a socially distanced crowd of about 17,000, a figure limited due to the coronavirus pandemic. Travis Kelce, Sammy Watkins and Tyreek Hill each caught touchdown passes for the Chiefs. They have won 10 straight dating to last season. That run includes a come from behind 51 31 victory over the Texans in the divisional round of the playoffs. The Texans' Deshaun Watson threw a touchdown pass and ran for another score, but he also was under relentless pressure and was intercepted once. David Johnson provided the biggest bright spot for Houston, running for 77 yards and a score. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Early in "Don't Forget the Driver," Pete Green, a tour bus driver on England's southern coast, returns from a day trip across the Channel and discovers he's picked up a stowaway, a frightened young African woman. It's a chance for him to do some small thing outside the sad orbit of his daily life, something decent and possibly heroic. And it's absolutely terrifying after a weak attempt to assist, Pete has to stagger away and sink to the ground. If helplessness and disorientation are your primary responses to the world we find ourselves in, "Don't Forget the Driver," a melancholy BBC comedy premiering Tuesday on the streaming channel BritBox, should speak to you. Pete, played with microscopic gradations of acerbity and unease by the wonderful Toby Jones, has spent years staying out of the world's way, stitching himself a small cloak of invisibility. But across the show's six episodes (a second season has been ordered) he rallies, rising to a particularly modern occasion with a stumbling, slightly oblivious but undeniable courage. Jones and the playwright Tim Crouch, the show's creators and writers, began work on "Don't Forget the Driver" five years ago, and Brexit is never mentioned. But the fate of the stowaway, Rita (in an alert and graceful performance by the Eritrean actress Luwam Teklizgi), is both the engine of the modestly screwball plot and an element of abiding anxiety, an intrusion of the collapsing world order into the sunny, bland streets of Bognor Regis. Corpses presumably of desperate migrants have been washing up on Bognor's beaches, unsettling the locals, but Rita is a living and increasingly determined force who has to be dealt with. One side of "Don't Forget the Driver" details the slightly sinister but mostly comic travails of Pete and his daughter, Kayla (Erin Kellyman), as they cope with this new, non English speaking member of the family. This involves tortured attempts at communication and a few scenes of whimsical action, including a slow motion chase by Godzilla like bus drivers through an English history in miniature park. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Not all that happens there is dancing. Letters, words and patterns are drawn in chalk on a blackboard. Some of this action is highly choreographed; some is done more naturalistically. At other times, dancers talk or scream. The climate onstage, however, is never one of freedom. There's always a sense that Big Brother is watching. The company performs Gaga, a movement style developed by Mr. Naharin to heighten sensation and imagination and to go beyond familiar limits. But even when the 16 dancers are at their wildest, they look driven rather than driving. Near the end, all the dancers do unison movement routines that evoke various folk forms of the Near East: here a slow turning step with one arm raised, suggesting the movement of dervishes; there a two step number with arms outstretched, reminiscent of the dabke, an Arab folk dance. Yet the look is always one that deprives them of freedom rather than liberating them. Even when earlier on three or more subgroups are doing entirely different, often intense things, the mood is controlled, involuntary, dragooned. To me, they look like citizens of a totalitarian state. Or rather, as in other Naharin works, they look like pawns in this choreographer's game. There are dance works in which this can add up to powerful drama. In Bronislava Nijinska's "Les Noces," for example, the society of a Russian village is made to look like a huge machine, with the wedding's bride and groom the most passive participants. But there the overall effect is one of cumulative pathos. Mr. Naharin's works abound in theater games and exercises: Despite the fullness of the movement, the drama is an intellectual one. In some works, performers deliver effects; Mr. Naharin's dancers become effects. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Powers, whose books include an acclaimed biography of Mark Twain and, with James Bradley, "Flags of Our Fathers," is a deft craftsman of sweeping tours of history but also intensely personal human narratives. He brings all his talents to bear in this account of his literature loving, endearingly goofy, high achieving family's descent into hell. Powers, his college professor wife, Honoree, and their children had a beautiful life in Middlebury, Vt., until their younger son, Kevin, a gifted musician, began to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia at age 17. Three years later, in 2005, he took his own life. Dean, the Powerses' elder son, also developed the disease but eventually found some stability and a productive life through vigilant, compassionate care. In the boys' letters and emails to their parents, elegantly threaded through the book, you can hear the voice of a family holding tight to one another and frantically expressing love as a shield against an onslaught of pain. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that handles the decline of one's children with such openness and searing, stumbling honesty. This sort of truth telling is particularly difficult inside a family, where fictions are often deeply baked and compounded by what they have invented (or ignored) to survive tragedy. And this candor is always serving a larger purpose: "to arm other families with a sense of urgency that perhaps came to us too late," Powers writes. "When symptoms occur in a loved one, assume the worst until a professional convinces you otherwise. Act quickly, and keep acting. If necessary, act to the limit of your means. Tough advice. Tough world." Powers's stated objective, and one that he brilliantly fulfills, is "to persuade my fellow citizens in the Schizophrenic Nation that their ordeals, while awful, are neither unique to them nor the occasion for shame and withdrawal," and "to demonstrate to those who fear and loathe 'crazy people' that these victims are not typically dangerous, weak or immoral, or in any other way undeserving of full personhood." But he is less successful in his second goal: to call for America to "turn its immense resources and energy and conciliatory good will to a final assault on mental illness." In doing so, he creates what feels like two books, alternating his family's story with a densely reported, sometimes dizzying survey of mental illness through history, from 1403, when London's notorious Bethlehem "Bedlam" Hospital first began accepting "lunaticks." He shows how major leaps in science and innovation have found twisted applications in the care and treatment of the mentally ill Darwin's theories of evolution become the basis of Nazi eugenics; pharmaceutical companies promoted "wonder drugs," freely exaggerating claims, playing down dangerous side effects and unjustifiably inflating prices. These are mainly horror stories, broken by the occasional crusader heroes like Dorothea Dix, who fought for the establishment of America's first mental hospitals in the 19th century. More often, even the best intentions have had disastrous consequences. In the 1960s the deinstitutionalization movement shifted patients from large, crowded psychiatric hospitals to what was viewed as more effective and humane community settings. Today there are some 10 million Americans with mental illness and only 45,000 inpatient psychiatric beds, leaving the suffering to shuffle between "crisis hospitalization, homelessness and incarceration." Jails and prisons are now the nation's largest mental health care facilities. The worst data point: There are 38,000 suicides a year in this country, and 90 percent of the victims are mentally ill. Midway through, the book fuses into a powerful coherence. Sweeping exposition and finely grained narrative weave together, as confusion, pain and uncertainty emerge in the Powers home. An email from Dean, in college in Colorado, about a football game "I think that game was fixed, and probably by the government" strikes Powers as odd. Dean's behavior becomes erratic. His father blames drugs or alcohol. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Tronc, the parent company of The Los Angeles Times, abruptly replaced the newspaper's top leadership on Monday in a shake up that stunned many in the newsroom. Ross Levinsohn, a longtime media executive who held a senior position at Fox's digital group and was once considered a top candidate to lead Yahoo, was named publisher and chief executive of The Times. Jim Kirk, who until this month was editor and publisher of The Chicago Sun Times, will be the interim executive editor and will run the newsroom's day to day operations. Mr. Levinsohn and Mr. Kirk, who joined Tronc less than two weeks ago after the sale of The Sun Times, will replace Davan Maharaj, who has been The Times's publisher and editor since March 2016, when Tronc combined the two roles across its newspapers. Several other leaders at the paper, including Marc Duvoisin, a managing editor; Megan Garvey, the deputy managing editor for digital; and Matt Doig, the assistant managing editor for investigations, were also fired. Lawrence Ingrassia, another managing editor and a former editor at The New York Times, recently said he was retiring. "We're frankly not where we need to be from a digital perspective," Justin C. Dearborn, the chief executive of Tronc, said in a telephone interview on Monday. "We also think The L.A. Times over all just needs a little refresh and a little personality back." The shake up at one of the country's most storied newspapers occurred roughly a year and a half after Tronc's new leadership team, led by the Chicago entrepreneur Michael W. Ferro Jr., gained control and began shifting the company's focus to digital and pushing a technology driven approach to journalism. The company, formerly called Tribune Publishing, which also owns The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun, rebuffed a takeover bid from Gannett last year after a bitter public process. Mr. Dearborn said that The Times was not transforming itself fast enough on the digital side under its current leadership and that Mr. Levinsohn was hired to expedite that change. Mr. Levinsohn, who has advised Tronc for roughly 14 months, said in an interview that he would focus on expanding The Times's presence "on all platforms." "They do a great job of putting the newspaper out there day in and day out," said Mr. Levinsohn, who was interim chief executive officer at Yahoo. "I think it's important to be fast, to be accurate, to have opinions and to get that out into the world in a more aggressive fashion." Though Monday's purge surprised some in the newsroom, internal grumbling about the newsroom's leadership had surfaced recently and some of the paper's journalists had sent letters of complaint to Tronc executives, according to several people familiar with the complaints, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Tension arose between Tronc's leadership and Mr. Maharaj over proposed budget cuts, which Mr. Maharaj was resisting, one of the people said. Mr. Maharaj was not available for comment. This is not the first leadership overhaul at The Times in recent years. In 2015, the paper's publisher, Austin Beutner, was fired after only a year in the job, a move that sharpened divisions between The Times and its Chicago based parent company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SAN FRANCISCO Last September, the board of the online lending company Social Finance ousted its chief executive, Mike Cagney, after questions about sexual misconduct. The move was prompted by a board investigation that found Mr. Cagney was romantically involved with an employee, even though he had previously told directors that he was not involved in any extramarital workplace relationships, said four people with knowledge of the deliberations. Years earlier, Mr. Cagney had also promised the board he would not have affairs with employees after they learned of another relationship, said the people. Yet just months after Mr. Cagney departed SoFi, two venture capitalists who had been on the company's board and knew many details of his actions invested 17 million in his new start up, called Figure. Since then, Mr. Cagney has raised another 41 million from others for the lending start up, which will open soon. Mr. Cagney's swift comeback from ouster to new company took four months provides one of the starkest illustrations of the speed with which the technology industry is moving past the sexual harassment allegations that swept Silicon Valley and many other industries over the last year. Apart from Mr. Cagney, 47, other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors who lost their jobs in the MeToo movement are also rebounding. Steve Jurvetson, an investor who left his venture firm DFJ last fall amid an investigation into inappropriate workplace conduct, is back with a new investment fund. And Justin Caldbeck, another venture capitalist, has resurfaced giving public talks about what he learned from grappling with sexual harassment claims. Their resurgence is being enabled by Silicon Valley's start up ecosystem, where money is plentiful and many are eager to bet on experienced investors and entrepreneurs. In those situations, what happened in the past even if it was in the very near past often becomes a marginal factor, said Nicole Sanchez, chief executive of Vaya Consulting, a company in Berkeley, Calif., that advises tech companies on inclusivity. "The way the big boys do business is that nothing is ever personal," said Ms. Sanchez. "It's, 'Can you make me money?' It doesn't really matter who gets hurt." Mr. Cagney said in an interview on Friday that it had been a mistake to lie to SoFi's board and to have the two relationships with employees. He said it had taken him many months to convince his investors that he had changed. "There was a relatively long process of them understanding how I thought about it: 'Did I really learn a lesson from SoFi? Was I really going to try to do things differently?'" he said. But Mr. Cagney said he had never promised SoFi's board that he would not enter into any new workplace relationships and he disputed that the board pushed him out last year. He said he had resigned on his own and could rejoin SoFi's board anytime because he is one of the company's biggest shareholders. The two SoFi board members who funded Mr. Cagney's new company were David Chao of DCM Ventures and Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. They have both left SoFi's board. Mr. Anderson did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Mr. Chao, who has joined Figure's board, said he had pressed Mr. Cagney on what he would do differently and was convinced that the entrepreneur was creating a workplace "where all employees are being heard and treated fairly, period." He added, "We believe that he genuinely learned from his mistakes." There is no clear agreement on how businesses should think about reinstating people after sexual misconduct, and each case presents its own complexities. But Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings' College of the Law, said the investors who funded Mr. Cagney's new company despite being aware of his past problems were taking a big risk. "Should someone who just created an incredibly hostile work environment, and lied to his board, after doing what he had explicitly promised not to do, be hired as a C.E.O.?" Ms. Williams said. "It doesn't seem like a close one to me." Mr. Cagney helped found Social Finance in 2011 to refinance student loans online. The start up grew rapidly and has gained a valuation of more than 4 billion, providing big returns on paper for his early investors. The board learned separately that Mr. Cagney was in a relationship at that time with a woman in SoFi's marketing department, said the people briefed on the deliberations, who declined to be identified because the details are confidential. After Mr. Cagney acknowledged the relationship with the woman in the marketing department, he promised the board he would not do anything like it again, three of the people said. The agreement was referred to by some employees as Mr. Cagney's "fidelity pledge." Several former SoFi employees told the Times last year that the board's actions around the settlement did not prevent the spread of a toxic culture in the company. Last year, SoFi's board started an internal investigation after a lawsuit from former employees alleged sexual harassment was pervasive at the company's satellite office north of San Francisco. The investigation was conducted by the law firm Sullivan Cromwell. As part of the investigation, Mr. Cagney's behavior quickly came under scrutiny. At the time, he denied to board members and staff that he was in an intimate relationship at the company with anyone other than his wife, who also worked at SoFi, the people familiar with the proceedings said. Mr. Cagney reversed himself after Sullivan Cromwell told the board there was ample evidence in emails, hotel receipts and the manifests of private jet flights that he had used company resources to pursue a romantic relationship with an employee, the people said. Mr. Cagney said he had previously suggested that employee as a promising candidate for chief financial officer. SoFi has since settled the lawsuit about the satellite office. Mr. Cagney said on Friday that he took responsibility for a "get it done culture" that had led to some "untenable circumstances." He added that he lied to the board "to protect the people involved." After Mr. Cagney's exit, it took SoFi several months to find its footing. The company hired a new chief executive, Anthony Noto, this year. It recently added two women to its board. SoFi also instituted an ethics policy that explicitly prohibits intimate relationships between supervisors and subordinates. Mr. Cagney returned more quickly. Within weeks of leaving SoFi, he began talking to SoFi employees about a new company, two people who met with him said. When he hired former employees, SoFi sent him letters asking him to cease and desist. Mr. Cagney denied on Friday that he had recruited any current employees at SoFi. His new company, Figure, is set to issue a variety of loans and to record every detail about them on a blockchain, the new kind of database that was introduced by Bitcoin. According to a business plan given to investors and obtained by The Times, the Figure blockchain will have its own cryptocurrency that will be used to pay loan holders. The company also plans to do a so called initial coin offering to sell its token to investors. When Mr. Cagney began raising money for Figure last year, he approached current and former SoFi board members such as Mr. Chao of DCM and Mr. Anderson of Baseline. Both are prominent Silicon Valley investors, having made regular appearances on the Midas List, the Forbes magazine ranking of the most successful and powerful venture capitalists. Mr. Anderson was one of the earliest investors in Instagram and Twitter, while Mr. Chao had led DCM's bets on BitTorrent and Bill.com. Both had also been on SoFi's board during parts of Mr. Cagney's tenure there and knew at least some of his history at the company, according to five people familiar with the investors and documents reviewed by The Times. DCM and Baseline invested the 17 million in Figure in January. Another recent investor in Figure, RPM Ventures, had also funded SoFi. A current RPM partner, Adam Boyden, was the chief operating officer at SoFi when the problems with Mr. Cagney came up in 2012. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Even if "All Out War" sometimes felt more like the Hundred Years' War, eventually it had to end. In its eighth season finale, "The Walking Dead" brings Negan's yearslong arc to a conclusion following the show's lowest rated season since its humble beginnings, and perhaps for that precise reason, the writers gave every viewer everything one could possibly want. This week's episode attempts to have it both ways, and very nearly succeeds. The faction of fans braying for Negan's bloody demise and those loyalists holding fast to the show's founding principles of humanity and mercy both get their way in the multiphase battle that fills out this episode's back half. It may be the safest route the episode could have taken, but in one of this series' most rocky seasons, the safest also happens to be the wisest route. In "The Dark Knight," Heath Ledger's nihilist Joker taunts his caped nemesis: "You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self righteousness, and I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever." Over the two episodes preceding "Wrath," Rick and Negan have arrived at the understanding that they're locked in a similarly elemental soul deep clash. They each recognize too much of themselves in the other to completely abandon pity, and so when the two of them break off from the main battlefield for a mano a mano showdown by a solitary tree, there can be no definitive resolution. For Rick to take Negan's life would be a betrayal to Carl's memory, his final request being for peace. Rick's turning his back on his own son's dream would have been the cruelest, most cynical turn in a show that has frequently drawn criticism for those very traits. Rick takes the high road without softening up, allowing Negan to live against Maggie's strongly stated wishes, then threatening to open up his stitches as he lies convalescing. There's a cold calculation to Rick's mercy stroke, as he openly admits that he's only allowing Negan to live because his followers need a living symbol of reconciliation. But even if his choice is driven purely by optics, it paves the way for the kinder future heralded by this season's flash forwards, imaginary or no. Instead of descending further into the hell of war, he has moved one large step closer to this episode's closing image, a picturesque dusty lane he strode with Carl during the boy's early childhood. But it wouldn't be "The Walking Dead" if the lust for violence weren't fully and generously sated. When Rick and Negan square up beneath the tree, the finishing move is a slash across the neck that certainly looks like a killing blow. It's the best example of the plentiful non twist twists littering this season, an unusually well executed pseudo execution. The basic function of that bait and switch may be similar to, say, Henry's implied death and surprise return. But where that particular narrative decision generated pathos (and rewrote Henry's personality, just when he was growing into one of the show's more conflicted characters see him this week, dully pledging to be a good boy), this one has more vindictive, pleasurable results. The catharsis stemming from the schadenfreude of Negan's death isn't canceled out when he survives the day. While the writing may be manipulative, the satisfaction persists because Negan still has to live with his own defeat. Negan must come to terms with the humiliation, with the emasculation, with the undeniable fact that he is the inferior. This is a just fate for him and not a sadistic one, threading a difficult tonal needle. But aside from brief interludes of happiness the playful back and forth between Ezekiel and Jerry, however short, was one of the episode highlights the future promises more danger. With Negan effectively neutralized, the show needs a new villain, and this episode hastily whips one up with a rebel faction among the coalition. With Daryl and Maggie concerned about the weakness evident in Rick's having permitted Negan to live, they agree that Rick must be stopped. This isn't the first time there has been a difference of opinion as to how things should be run, however. In the past, members of the coalition have had the presence of mind to talk out their differences and continue working toward a common good. The question of why Daryl and Maggie would now play saboteurs instead of directly approaching Rick nags at a viewer as the season winds up. And as the final credits roll on another season, a larger picture coheres. The minutiae of the "All Out War" story line were often frustrating week to week, with characters used as tools for easy drama, interrupting their developmental arcs. But considered as a whole, this season's hard nosed inquisition into the cost of long term conflict stands up to scrutiny. The ideas weren't always well expressed, and yet the perspectives the season offered on the personal compromises that members of militarized groups must make for the sake of a mission have value. Those intrepid viewers still on board with the show are made to trek through miles of carnage every week; mercifully, at the end, there's hard won insight waiting for them. A Few Thoughts While We Survey the Wreckage: Eugene remains a wordsmith of great intellect and silliness, speaking to those around him primarily as a form of amusement for himself. He explains his turncoat scheme to manufacture defective bullets with the elegant turn of phrase, "a modicum of phooey for a full kablooey." Jadis mentions to Morgan that her real name is Anne, conjuring memories of Ezekiel's full reinvention in this season's fourth episode, "Some Guy." The zombie apocalypse brought more strife than anyone had imagined possible, but for a select unmoored few, it was a precious opportunity. During this evening's commercial breaks, AMC raised quite a ruckus over Morgan's migration from "The Walking Dead" proper to its spinoff, "Fear the Walking Dead." Having bested his budding schizophrenia, Morgan is probably ready for a change of setting. And yet his departure leaves something to be desired. For a show so dogged in its creating a sense of momentousness for every plot twist, the episode's big loss lands rather unceremoniously. The 10 second countdown in the climactic fight between Rick and Negan doesn't amplify the tension as much as it does break the scene's rhythm to create a new one. That false step aside, there's a clear sense of forethought to the mise en scene; the quietly poetic quality to the open field, the tree and the delicate stained glass panes hanging from it evoke old samurai films. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
If social media is any indication, many people are suddenly very concerned about dying from the bite of "kissing bugs." Don't be. The bugs are not any more likely to kill you than they have been for the last couple of centuries. Despite news reports this week advertising the sudden presence of the bugs in various Southern states, triatomines, as the insects are formally known, have lived in the United States since at least the 19th century. Dr. Susan Montgomery, the epidemiology team leader in the parasitic diseases branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that a sighting of a specimen "would not be news." Many of the more alarmist news reports, Dr. Montgomery said, are "referring to information that we have had on our website for five years now." Triatomine bugs were first identified in the State of Georgia in 1855, she said. They are known to carry a parasite that can cause Chagas disease, which the bugs transmit through their feces. They do feed on blood, but there's no kissing. People can live for years without knowing they have Chagas. About 30 percent of those infected will go on to develop serious heart disease. But federal authorities do not recognize the disease as being very prevalent. There have been only about 30 reported cases of people acquiring the disease in the United States since the 1950s, according to the C.D.C. Dr. Montgomery said that more studies needed to be done regarding the frequency of infection and methods of prevention. Recent news reports have called the C.D.C.'s position into question. A joint investigation by The Dallas Morning News and a Texas NBC affiliate said that Chagas was "spreading in Texas," and that 12 to 15 patients had acquired the disease in the state. Melissa Garcia, a research associate at the Baylor College of Medicine specializing in tropical medicine, said that it was possible that the C.D.C. considers Chagas to be rare in the United States simply because there have been very few epidemiological studies looking for instances of the disease. "It's likely that transmission is going on at a higher rate than has previously been discussed or known," she said, though she confirmed that "it's not incredibly easy to get infected." Dr. Montgomery said that most of the cases to which the Texas investigation referred were included in the C.D.C.'s official estimate of 30 locally acquired cases since the 1950s. "For others there isn't sufficient evidence from careful public health investigations to say confidently that those cases were autochthonous, or acquired in the United States," she said. Triatomine bugs feed indiscriminately on animal blood, though the parasite that causes Chagas disease can affect only mammals. The insects are known to live in brush or in woodpiles near human homes, as well as under porches and concrete. The C.D.C. recommends that people not touch or squash triatomine bugs if they think they have encountered one, but to instead place a container on top of it and take it to a local expert for identification. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
CURTAIN CALL The view from Opera Tower in Miami, where many Argentines are buying investment condos. IN early August, Jorge Sanchez, a broker with Douglas Elliman, flew to Buenos Aires to sell some Miami real estate. He returned to Florida a few days later with four signed contracts from Argentines for apartments in a 60 story tower in downtown Miami. The fact that the buyers signed the contracts without ever flying to Miami to see the building Opera Tower speaks volumes about how eager, and desperate, Argentines have been to direct their money out of their country and into real estate in Miami and New York. In the past few months, Argentines have quietly passed Brazilians to become the most active group from Latin America buying Miami real estate, according to Millie Sanchez, executive vice president of development marketing for Douglas Elliman Florida. Brazil's demotion from the top spot likely has something to do with the weakening of its currency, the real, versus the dollar in recent months. But in Argentina, a weakening peso and 25 percent inflation, economists say, have spurred many affluent Argentines to move their money into American real estate by expensive and sometimes illegal means. Economic and political uncertainty around the globe are benefitting real estate in the United States, especially in Miami and New York, the two "safe haven" American cities foreign investors usually look to first. South Florida's real estate market is certainly no stranger to capital flight from Latin America. But the velocity at which some Argentines are investing in Miami real estate has shocked some brokers here. "The desperation of the Argentine people has taken over and they are actually market leaders here now," Ms. Sanchez said. "Any project today in Miami is probably being sold 50 percent to the Argentines." The government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Argentina's president, has been trying to stop the capital outflow, which nearly doubled to 21.5 billion last year from 11.4 billion in 2010, with increasingly severe methods. The government began restricting access to dollars last November, days after Ms. Kirchner won a second four year term. What's driving all this? Argentina has struggled to preserve its hard currency reserves in the Central Bank and sustain a trade surplus. The country has had limited access to international credit markets, owing to its inability to win back the confidence of global investors after its 100 billion default in 2001. The government has refused to take on more debt, to rapidly devalue the peso, or to reduce spending, which it needs to sustain programs for the poor and working class that make up its voter base. Instead, Ms. Kirchner's government has chosen to clamp down on capital flight by whatever means possible. Banks in Argentina are lending at rates some 10 percent under the inflation rate, economists say. There are few profitable investments left in the country, said Eduardo Blasco, a financial consultant in Buenos Aires. Argentines are buying foreign properties not only to park their savings but also to make extra income through rentals. "Argentines don't want any more Argentine risk," Mr. Blasco said. So they are willing to risk their savings on Miami real estate instead. At Opera Tower, at 1750 North Bayshore Drive, half of the 30 apartments sold in the past month were bought by Argentines, Ms. Sanchez said. Most were all cash purchases, even though the developer, Florida East Coast Realty, has offered to finance up to 65 percent of the purchases. The building has become almost a pure investment play. Owners are occupying less than 5 percent of the apartments, which are selling for 250,000 to 650,000 for studios, one bedrooms and two bedrooms, said Ana Tajes, Opera Tower's sales director. Opera Tower is popular with Argentines because the developer is offering to lease back the apartments from the buyers, pay their monthly maintenance charges and give them an annual net rent equal to 6 percent of the purchase price for three years. Argentines have also been scooping up apartments in Manhattan. Maria Velazquez, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman, met a group of Argentines in Miami earlier this month and accompanied them to New York. She said she has sold six apartments totaling 8 million to Argentines since last November, including four apartments at One Museum Mile, located at 1280 Fifth Avenue. In December, Ms. Velazquez represented a group of Argentines that bid 10.35 million for eight apartments at 400 Fifth Avenue. They were later outbid, she said. "They wanted to act fast and get their money out" of Argentina, Ms. Velazquez said. "Whoever buys in New York already has four or five apartments in Miami." While her Argentine sales have been strong, Ms. Velazquez lately has been selling even more in New York to another skittish group from Latin America: Venezuelans. Concerns about the Oct. 7 election in Venezuela, in which the 13 year incumbent, President Hugo Chavez, faces perhaps his stiffest challenge from Henrique Capriles, have led to a new exodus of cash from the country that is finding its way into New York real estate. In the past year Ms. Velazquez said she has sold 35 million worth of Manhattan real estate to Venezuelans, including nine apartments at the Aldyn (60 Riverside Boulevard), three of which were 7 million penthouses of about 3,096 square feet each. In contrast to about four years ago, when many Venezuelans struggled to wire large sums of money out of the country because of government restrictions, this time around they are using funds from accounts in Switzerland and the Virgin Islands, she said. Some Argentines are using money that was already waiting in American bank accounts. Others have been willing to pay a black market premium of up to 40 percent to convert their money into dollars at home, and a commission of up to 7 percent to transfer funds abroad through a currency exchange house, an illegal transaction, economists said. The dollar restrictions have caused Argentina's own real estate market, which has traditionally been transacted in dollars, to flatten, as Argentines sit on their properties, said Marina Dal Poggetto, an economist in Buenos Aires. "Those that have properties don't want to sell in pesos, only in dollars," she said. "But buyers don't have dollars." The government controls are having a profound effect. Capital flight from Argentina plunged 69 percent to 3.57 billion in the first half of 2012, from 11.7 billion in the second half of 2011. Deserving part of the credit is Argentina's national tax agency, which has used a team of 50 specially trained dogs most of which are golden retrievers and Labradors to sniff out the dye in dollars and other foreign currencies. The Kirchner government has boasted about the dogs' exploits. In February, the government said, Tiza found 110,000 in a car crossing into Uruguay. In July, Isidoro and Bruno, two other dogs, found 20,000 in a car trying to cross the border with Paraguay. Then last month, Catalina, which appeared to be a black Labrador, found 187,000 reals ( 92,493) in the airbag of a Toyota Hilux at a border crossing with Brazil. The busts pass for black humor in Argentina these days. But a good chunk of the money that is managing to slip out by determined Argentines is finding its way into Florida and New York real estate, and for brokers here that is no laughing matter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Vehicles of the "Tripoli Brigade," a militia loyal to the U.N. recognized government of Libya, paraded in the capital on July 10. PARIS While many American foreign policymakers are focused on China and the South China Sea, some should take a closer look at Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean, which could be the next geopolitical flash point for Europe and NATO to confront. To some extent, a similar dynamic is at play. Just as China makes territorial claims that put it at odds with other Asian nations, Turkey is the increasingly disruptive, rising power in the Eastern Mediterranean all too eager to make its intentions known in Libya and Syria. For the West, Turkey's assertiveness is a complex challenge. For one thing, Turkey, as a NATO member, is part of the very alliance it is disrupting. For another, Russia has also expanded its role in the region, and most of the West is largely hesitant to get involved there. The situation looks like a perfect illustration of the new world disorder. The Eastern Mediterranean has not been a quiet place since 2011, when the Arab Spring unseated Col. Muammar el Qaddafi in Libya and led President Bashar al Assad of Syria to unleash a war on his own people. A NATO intervention in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from crushing a popular uprising failed to make things any better. Libya became a lawless kingdom of rival militias, open to Islamist extremists, where migrants heading to Europe would be kidnapped and ransomed before being put on rickety boats by traffickers. Traumatized by their failure, as well as the killing of the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, NATO countries have largely stayed away from the region. Russia, Iran and later Turkey have filled that vacuum in Syria, helping Mr. al Assad crush the opposition at a tragic human cost. And now, Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey are repeating a similar scenario in Libya, where, like a modern czar and sultan on parallel neo imperial tracks, they have established a de facto condominium. Today, Libya is divided in two parts. The western part, around the capital, Tripoli, is ruled by a United Nations backed government, which survived a yearlong offensive by rival forces in May, thanks only to support from Turkey. Turkey provided firepower and brought in thousands of mercenaries from Syria. The assault on Tripoli was led by Khalifa Hifter, a self styled field marshal who controls eastern Libya. He is supported by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt and enjoys assistance from perhaps 1,000 Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private army with close links to the Kremlin. Having halted Mr. Hifter's offensive, Turkey now has a decisive hold on Tripoli. What will Turkey do with it? The question is of primary concern to the European Union. "What happens in the Eastern Mediterranean is no longer a peripheral issue for Europe," the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, noted in a recent report. Turkey's ever expanding activities in the area have many tentacles: Turkey's unresolved dispute with Greece over Cyprus is complicated by claims to recently discovered gas fields. That led Turkey to strike a deal last November with Libya for a maritime boundary that created an exclusive economic zone that encroaches upon Greek and Cypriot interests. Turkey's ruling party also has links with the Muslim Brotherhood, and, of vital importance, Turkey controls a crucial migrant route to Europe. As always, the European Union is divided. France took the lead but marched ahead alone, not trying to involve Italy, which has historical links and business interests with Libya. Concerned about the spread of jihadist groups in the lands south of Libya, France early on put its bet on Mr. Hifter, who seemed better armed to serve as a bulwark against Islamist terrorism. Wrong choice. "Hifter committed a grave mistake when he decided to launch an offensive on Tripoli," a French diplomatic source now reckons. The French could not stop him, the Americans would not try, and the Russians helped him. France now finds itself isolated when confronting Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean. On June 10, off the Libyan coast, a Turkish flotilla encountered a French frigate, the Courbet, under NATO command as part of an operation to enforce a U.N. arms embargo on Libya. The French and Turkish versions of the incident differ: Paris lodged a complaint but a NATO investigation was inconclusive. When France looked for support in its clash with Turkey at a NATO meeting, it could rally only eight countries to its side out of 30, and neither the United States nor Britain came to the rescue. Yet President Emmanuel Macron has not hesitated to accuse Turkey of "criminal responsibility" in Libya. Among Mr. Macron's advisers, Turkey's purchase of the S 400 air defense system from Russia is considered a challenge to NATO as much so as it is a challenge to all Europeans when Turkey brings Syrian mercenaries into Libya. Could France be right to sound the alarm about Turkey's ambitions? Unfortunately, being right alone doesn't help much. "The mission of France has always been to have a vision that no one shares," Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington, has joked. Last November, after NATO didn't respond when Turkey endangered French forces in Syria, Mr. Macron referred to a "brain death" of the alliance because it had not reacted to a member's breach of NATO solidarity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The number of workers filing new unemployment claims fell last week, the government reported on Thursday, but the levels remain achingly high as the incipient economic recovery struggles to maintain a foothold. The Labor Department reported that 757,000 workers had filed new claims for state unemployment benefits, a drop of 73,000 from the previous week. Another 345,000 new claims were filed under a federal jobless program that provides benefits to freelancers, part time workers and others during the pandemic. Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. "Some recovery is better than no recovery, but we want this to be stronger," said Ernie Tedeschi, managing director and policy economist for Evercore ISI. "It's at risk of getting knocked off its slow momentum if we get another shock, another wave of the virus." While coronavirus cases are again surging in the United States, a second round of federal relief faces opposition from Senate Republicans over a possible 2 trillion price tag. "The claims remain very elevated, and the lack of continuing fiscal aid for the unemployed is going to weigh on consumer attitudes and consumer spending," said Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics. "It's a very painful reality for those households who were relying on it." Seven months into the pandemic, the nature of the job losses is changing. The hope that business interruptions would be brief and that most laid off workers would quickly be rehired has faded. Every week, more Americans join the ranks of the long term unemployed, defined as those out of work for more than 27 weeks. Most state unemployment insurance programs, which end benefits after six months, offer little help for this group. The federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, however, provides an additional 13 weeks of benefits. Benefit limits mean that some of the latest dips in state jobless rolls may not reflect a return to work but rather laid off workers who are falling off state rolls and shifting to the federal program, or leaving the labor market altogether. In a speech on Wednesday, Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor, warned that as more layoffs became permanent, job growth was likely to continue to slow. "The job finding rate for those who are permanently laid off is less than half the rate of those on temporary layoff," Ms. Brainard said, "so the speed of labor market improvement is likely to decelerate further if these trends continue." In a survey conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey, just over half 53 percent of those who lost jobs during the coronavirus crisis had returned to work. That is up from 38 percent in August, and it is consistent with government data showing that the United States has regained a bit more than half the jobs lost last spring. Among those still out of work, however, just 39 percent said they thought they would go back to their old jobs. The gap between the two groups is stark. People who have returned to work say their finances have held up relatively well, and they are about as optimistic as people who never lost their jobs. Finances have improved in the past year for one in four of them, a possible reflection of the stimulus checks and extra unemployment benefits that helped workers early on in the pandemic. 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. Most who are still out of work, however, say their financial situation is worsening. A third say that their unemployment benefits have expired, or that they tried and failed to get benefits. As a group, the unemployed are pessimistic not just about their finances but about the economy as a whole. The decline in fortunes has changed the dynamics of the presidential election, now less than two weeks away. John Michael Purdon, 22, said he had voted for President Trump in 2016 but was now voting for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Purdon is temporarily working as a substitute teacher near his home in Barnegat, N.J., but that was not the plan. He graduated in April from the University of Pittsburgh and expected to be in a nursing residency at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, "but right now, hospitals don't have the money." On June 1, before he found the teaching gig, he applied for unemployment benefits. They didn't arrive until the end of August, he said. In his view, the economy is faltering in part because of the government's mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic. "I'm a health care professional myself," Mr. Purdon said, and "certain things were overlooked in trying to rush the economy back too quickly." In the SurveyMonkey poll done for The Times, jobs and the economy outranked other issues like health or the environment in importance. Respondents were pretty evenly divided on who would do a better job on the economy, with 49 percent of registered voters choosing Mr. Biden and 47 percent picking Mr. Trump. (On other issues, like handling the pandemic, respondents preferred Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by a much larger margin.) Voters who have lost their jobs during the pandemic rate Mr. Trump a bit worse on the economy, favoring Mr. Biden by 53 percent to 42 percent. (There is little difference in preference between those who have since returned to work and those who remain unemployed.) Voters who never lost their jobs, on the other hand, slightly prefer Mr. Trump on the economy. Job losses may have chipped away slightly at Mr. Trump's rating on the economy among one group: Republicans. Among Republicans who have lost their jobs and remain unemployed, 85 percent prefer Mr. Trump on this issue, compared with 96 percent of Republicans who have held on to their jobs throughout the pandemic. The Labor Department's report on jobless claims, which aims to summarize information provided by the states, is the best official accounting available, but it inevitably has its flaws. According to its calculations, more than 23 million Americans are receiving some form of unemployment relief, but that is probably an overestimate. States have different accounting methods, and the variety of programs and retroactive payments mean that some applicants may be double counted. There have also been reports of widespread fraud particularly in the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which Congress approved in March for freelancers, the self employed and others ordinarily ineligible for state benefits. This week, for example, the Justice Department announced that it had brought 12 cases of fraud or money laundering related to unemployment insurance. And state prosecutors have filed charges related to unemployment insurance fraud against dozens of individuals. Thursday's report from the Labor Department did offer updated figures from California, which had stopped accepting new claims for two weeks while it revamped its system to institute fraud prevention measures and reduce its backlog. The state, where many of the jobless receive benefits on debit cards, said it was aware of 350,000 cards that had been frozen because of indications of fraud, including a high number of claims at particular addresses. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Honda Motors said Tuesday that workers at a parts plant had walked off the job just days after the company settled a separate strike by agreeing to substantial pay raises for 1,900 workers at its transmission factory. The new walkout, at an exhaust system factory in the city of Foshan, will force Honda to halt work Wednesday at one of its four auto assembly plants in China, the company said. The assembly plants had just reopened after closing for almost two weeks because of the earlier strike at the transmission factory, which is also in Foshan. The second Honda strike comes amid growing signs that, in a recent and remarkable shift of labor dynamics, China's huge migrant work force is gaining bargaining power. New pressure to raise pay and improve labor conditions, coming in part from the Chinese government, is likely to raise the cost of doing business in China and could induce some companies to consider shifting production elsewhere. Another big employer wrestling with labor issues, Foxconn Technology a giant contract electronics manufacturer that has also announced wage increases in China this month said Tuesday that it was reconsidering the way it ran its operations in response to criticism of its workplace practices. Foxconn, which has experienced a string of suicides among workers at its sprawling, citylike campuses in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, said it was considering turning the management of some of its worker dormitories over to local governments in China. "Because Foxconn is a commercial enterprise operating like a society, we're responsible for almost everything for our workers, including their job, food, dorm and even personal relationships," Arthur Huang, a Foxconn spokesman, said Tuesday. "That is too much for a single company. A company like Foxconn shouldn't have so many functions." Foxconn, a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan, makes devices for companies like Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard. Hon Hai's shares fell more than 5 percent Tuesday in Taiwan, to their lowest level since August, after the company said it would seek to pass on its higher labor costs to clients. As the company held annual shareholder meetings in Taipei and Hong Kong, small groups of people demonstrated outside, urging the company to improve conditions for workers. Turning over management of employee dormitories to the government authorities would be a drastic change for Foxconn, which, like thousands of other manufacturers in southern China, has lured peasants from rural areas to work at giant, gated factory compounds. One of the company's Shenzhen campuses employs 300,000 workers and covers about one square mile. The campus has high rise dormitories, a hospital, a fire department, an Internet cafe and even restaurants and bank branches. Some workers have complained, though, that the long workdays they are expected to put in, with few days off, give them little free time to take advantage of any amenities. Foxconn said Sunday that it planned to double by October the salaries of many of its 800,000 workers in China to 2,000 renminbi, or nearly 300, a month. The announcement of a big raise by one of the country's biggest exporters seems likely to put pressure on other companies to follow suit, analysts say. The chairman of Foxconn, Terry Gou, told the Taipei shareholders' meeting that the company was looking to shift some unspecified production from China to automated plants in Taiwan, Reuters reported. After years of focusing on luring foreign investment, Chinese government officials are now endorsing efforts to improve conditions for workers and raise salaries. The government hopes the changes will ease a widening income gap between the rich and the poor and prevent social unrest over soaring food and housing prices. "We therefore believe that a faster than expected labor cost increase has now become a political imperative," Mr. Ma said in a report, citing comments from Beijing's leadership about improving social justice. But analysts say wage pressure is also coming from labor shortages in coastal cities as the country's declining birth rate reduces the number of young people entering the work force. Factories in southern China that used to advertise in search of employees 18 to 24 years old are now recruiting much older workers. The labor shortages are being worsened by an economic boom and improving job prospects in inland provinces that have long supplied a steady stream of migrant workers to industrial areas. TPV Technology, a contract manufacturer that produces computer monitors with about 16,000 workers in five cities in China, said it raised salaries by 15 percent in January and planned to raise them again, perhaps as early as July. "We'll adjust our salary to the market and to our competitors' level," said Shane Tyau, a vice president at TPV, which is based in Hong Kong. "If Foxconn announces another round of pay raises, we'll reconsider our wage level, too." Economists say that China's labor force is growing increasingly bold and that over the last year, periodic strikes in southern China some supposedly involving global companies have been resolved quietly or not reported in the media. But the Honda strikes, like the spate of Foxconn suicides, are noteworthy for having generated considerable public attention. To resolve the strike at its transmission plant, Honda last week offered workers raises of 24 to 32 percent. That strike had forced Honda to shut down its four assembly plants in China. Now Honda has been a target again. The exhaust system factory is controlled by a joint venture between a Honda subsidiary and a Chinese company. Honda said the strike would force it to stop work at its Guangqi Honda Automobile assembly plant in the city of Guangzhou. Honda owns a network of production facilities in China, including the car assembly factories and three auto parts manufacturers, as well as two motorbike plants, two plants that make generators, pumps and other power equipment and three research centers. Those numbers do not include factories opened in China by Honda subsidiaries like Yutaka Giken, which separately runs four auto parts manufacturers in the country. Honda declined to speculate Tuesday on whether it was vulnerable to additional strikes for having already shown a willingness to raise wages at the transmission factory. "It's not at all clear at this point whether the two strikes are related," said Natsuno Asanuma, a Honda spokeswoman. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
S. I. Newhouse Jr. and The New Yorker seemed like a mismatch at first. He was a shy Syracuse University dropout who learned the magazine trade through working at the fashion titles Glamour and Vogue. Little by little, he rose through the ranks at Conde Nast, the glossy magazine company purchased by his father in 1959, and became its chairman in 1975. The New Yorker was something quite different from the glossies where he had made his name. The high minded, text heavy, general interest weekly often held itself aloof from news cycles and popular culture. Its staff included more than a few strong willed writers and editors, many of them Ivy League bred, who took a dim view of media executives. There were moments over the last three decades when they were convinced that Mr. Newhouse did not have their best interests at heart and might even destroy the publication they had pledged themselves to with an almost religious devotion. The suspicion started with his aggressive 168 million purchase in cash! of the magazine in May 1985. When Mr. Newhouse unceremoniously dumped its longtime editor, William Shawn, in 1987, the staff nearly went into revolt. And then, there was the time, in 1992, when he handed the magazine to Tina Brown. And yet, Mr. Newhouse, who died on Sunday at age 89, ultimately proved to be the man who would preserve The New Yorker and protect it during the most turbulent period in the industry's history. When, for instance, consultants from McKinsey Company stalked the hallways of Conde Nast's former headquarters at 4 Times Square in 2009 in search of ways to cut costs, trouble followed. Magazines were shuttered Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride and several surviving magazines saw their budgets slashed by 25 percent. Mr. Newhouse did everything he could to favor the fabled weekly. "Ever since the technological revolution began, it's been a complicated time in the magazine business," The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, said in an interview on Sunday. "And S. I. Newhouse has supported The New Yorker in a way that I could never have imagined." It took a while for many New Yorker writers and editors to come around. In the mid 1980s, Mr. Newhouse went after The New Yorker with gusto, buying up stock as he tried to wrest it away from its longtime publisher, the yeast magnate Peter Fleischmann. It was a hostile takeover bid, one that unnerved those in The New Yorker's offices on West 43rd Street in Midtown. "The future of the magazine seemed to be in the gravest of jeopardy after S. I. bought it," John Bennet, an editor who worked at the magazine for four decades before his retirement last year, said in a telephone interview. As the former New Yorker writer Jonathan Schell put it in Carol Felsenthal's biography, "Citizen Newhouse," the notion of Mr. Newhouse owning the magazine was "greeted with horror, absolutely with horror." The magazine was stocked with assertive, big name writers Pauline Kael, Renata Adler, George W. S. Trow and Mr. Newhouse was aggressively shy. "If I wasn't intimidated by The New Yorker before, I am now!" he said in his first speech to gathered staff. Longtime staff members were also not used to outsiders, and they feared that Mr. Newhouse would turn it into Vanity Fair, the bright and brash monthly magazine that served as a guide to the go go 1980s. To keep The New Yorker from falling into the wrong hands, Mr. Shawn, the editor, considered reaching out to Warren Buffett to "come to the magazine's rescue," according to Lillian Ross, a star writer for the magazine, in her 1998 book, "Here but Not Here." The staff was in an uproar. More than 150 writers and editors wrote a letter asking Mr. Gottlieb not to join, saying that The New Yorker had never "achieved its pre eminence by following orthodox paths of magazine publishing and editing." Even J. D. Salinger broke his long public silence by signing the letter, although he was concerned that it was not "strong enough," according to Ms. Ross. Mr. Gottlieb took the job anyway. If he did not reinvent the magazine in his five year tenure, neither did he turn it into a moneymaker. The median age of the magazine was rising, and Mr. Newhouse decided to make yet another change: He fired Mr. Gottlieb and replaced him with Ms. Brown, the 38 year old British editor who had made a splash with the celebrity and royalty heavy Vanity Fair. Once again, staff members feared that their magazine was under threat. Ms. Brown introduced a lot more photography to the magazine along with new bylines. She also broke with fusty convention by embracing gimmicks, like making the comedian and sitcom star Roseanne Barr a guest editor for an issue in 1995. The longtime staff writer Ian Frazier quit in protest, telling The New York Observer he was "outraged." "This is the Newhouse company doing weird things," Mr. Frazier said at the time. Another longtime writer at the magazine, Ms. Adler, said in her 1999 book, "Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker," that under Ms. Brown "the magazine lost its character." "There was no longer anything special about it or even characteristic of it," Ms. Adler continued. "It became a magazine like any other, only less clearly defined." Not every writer felt that way. Mr. Remnick, whom Ms. Brown hired, said, "Tina woke the thing up." Ms. Brown, for her part, paid tribute to Mr. Newhouse in a remembrance on Sunday for Time.com: "He was a publishing force whose religion was quality, whose taste and ambition led him to assemble a roster of some of the best editors in America and gave them the resources to do their best work without interference." Mr. Newhouse hired Mr. Remnick to take her place in 1998. In the next 19 years, the magazine has stabilized financially as well as editorially. And Mr. Frazier came back shortly after Mr. Remnick started. Mr. Bennet, the veteran, said that the magazine has been "in a true golden age for the last 10 or 15 years. I think it is as good as it ever was." Its healthy state is thanks to its late owner, he added. "Si made the decision" to hire Mr. Remnick, Mr. Bennet said, "and he deserves great credit for that." It also turns out that the taciturn, hands off owner was precisely the one The New Yorker most needed. Mr. Remnick said that by the time the magazine became profitable in the early 2000s, they discussed it during their regular lunch for about a minute and a half before moving onto other topics. "There was no endless dwelling about this," he said. "There was no sort of indication that this was the most important thing in the world to him." The last 20 years has been a gut check time for media owners. It's easy to imagine that in someone else's hands, the magazine could have ended up in a very different position. The Wenners are selling Rolling Stone. Time Inc. is in a vicious cycle of budget cuts. Even New York magazine, which remains robustly funded by the Wassersteins, has gone biweekly. When it came to The New Yorker, Mr. Newhouse didn't buckle. "If we were owned by almost anybody you can imagine, we'd be in trouble," Mr. Remnick said. "I think a faith and a kind of love of the idea of The New Yorker allowed us to survive in ways that was very hard for anybody to see on the staff in the '80s." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
At 8:45 p.m. on a warm, clear night, the last rays of the setting sun lit up a remote mountaintop a thousand feet above the small Chilean town of Vicuna. Mother Nature's show, however, was just beginning. I saw Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, first. Later came the Tres Marias, as the three glittering studs in Orion's belt are known here. Then as violet hues faded to black, there were dozens, then suddenly hundreds of stars. An hour later the Milky Way blazed across the dome of the sky, a glimmering helix of light and darkness. Emilio Lepeley, our guide for the night at Mamalluca Observatory, aimed a green laser into the sky. "The Incas had dark constellations," he said, referring to the practice of finding forms in the "empty" areas between stars. "Can you see the llama?" Outside, 50 or so people milled about at the observatory doors, the usual summer crush waiting their turn for a peek through the telescope inside. Mamalluca is one of about a dozen observatories in northern Chile's Elqui Valley region that cater to astrotourists (once known simply as stargazers). An oasis in an otherwise arid landscape, the roughly 90 mile long valley stretches from the Pacific Ocean eastward into the Andean foothills. Its geography, with the cloud blocking Andes to the east and the bone dry Atacama Desert to the north, produces exceptionally clear conditions, optimal for stargazing. Starting in the 1960s, a string of major international research telescopes were built here to take advantage of that, including Cerro Tololo, La Silla and Gemini South, and in 2014 work began on the planet's most powerful space camera. Within five years, an estimated 70 percent of the world's astronomical infrastructure will be in Chile, much of it in the Elqui Valley. Increasingly, would be astronomers and stargazers are getting in on the act, too, drawn by the region's famously clear night skies and a host of charms equally evident by daylight. Growing popularity among Chileans and international visitors, however, has posed a challenge of its own: As towns sprawl onto surrounding hillsides and resulting light pollution spreads, will those pristine night skies last? To reach Vicuna, the biggest municipality inside the valley and a hub for astrotourism, I had driven an hour east from the coastal city of La Serena, climbing slowly along the aptly named Ruta de Las Estrellas, or Route of the Stars. Vineyards and orchards along the valley floor eventually gave way to cactuses stippling the flanks of steep ridges. The region has long been a getaway for Chileans, who flock to a string of small towns filled with centuries old Spanish churches and distilleries that produce pisco from local grapes. After dark, however, attention turns to the skies. At 9 p.m., a battered S.U.V. rumbled up, and I got inside with a half dozen other stargazers. On a moonless night, we barreled up rutted dirt roads for nearly an hour, climbing along switchbacks before reaching our destination, the privately run Pangue Observatory, which was seemingly the only structure for miles. We were met by Eric Escalera, a retired French astrophysicist who formerly worked at nearby La Silla Observatory. "Government telescopes are actually very boring," he said, leading us to an outdoor viewing platform and a 10 foot tall telescope silhouetted against the sky like a piece of artillery. "They're just for collecting data you never actually get to see anything. This is more fun." On the isolated ridge, conditions were inky black, and it was impossible to see more than a foot or two ahead without a flashlight. Mr. Escalera motioned to the Milky Way, even gaudier up here, and pointed out two faint puffs of light nearby distant galaxies more than 150,000 light years away known as the Magellanic Clouds. To actually use Pangue's 25 inch telescope (enormous for hobbyists, though puny, we were told, by research standards), it was necessary to climb a stepladder and look into an eyepiece at the top. Mr. Escalera first focused in on the Tarantula Nebula, a nursery for stars located inside the Large Magellanic Cloud. Through the mirror, the mass of gas and dust did indeed look like a giant spider, its body outlined by the nebula's pale glow. (Don't expect those brilliantly colored images of outer space that show up on screen savers and dorm room posters; the real thing turns out to be much more subdued.) As the night wore on, we took turns gazing at a creamy mass of stars called a globular cluster; Jupiter, with four of its moons and bands of tropical clouds; and an aging pair of stars called Eta Carinae, racing toward a violent end as a supernova. But the real show, at least for a novice like me, didn't require a telescope at all. As midnight approached, the southern sky was a dense canopy of stars, packed tighter than I'd thought possible. A distant thunderstorm in Argentina sent up flashes of light from the east, while the screech of night birds cut through the darkness. The next day, on a hot, cloudless morning, I continued my journey east on the Ruta de Las Estrellas. After Vicuna, the valley floor drops away dramatically and the drive turns into a twisting, roller coaster ascent. I passed adobe houses clinging to cliffside ledges and fruit stands selling fresh tuna, the fruit of the local cactus, before reaching the village of Pisco Elqui, a traditional favorite among Chilean vacationers that's been enjoying a mini boom in recent years. It was nearly dark when we toed along the lip of a yawning canyon and scampered up a rise only to discover a tour van, which had evidently arrived via a less harrowing route. The advance group had been nice enough to start a campfire, however, as well as mix up a round of pisco sours, which were passed around as we turned our view to the darkening sky. Laser pointers flitted through the darkness, tracing over constellations (Orion, Taurus, Cancer), the glowing orb of Jupiter and the intergalactic dandelion puffs of the Magellanic Clouds. Afterward, we looked into a small, eight inch portable telescope, hauled up the mountain on our account, at the famous red supergiant star, Betelgeuse, and Sirius, which glittered like a diamond under a jeweler's loupe. But it was hard to miss the dull glow of lights from the valley below, which blotted out all but the most brilliant stars in one corner of the sky. "Pisco Elqui is getting bigger all the time," Mr. Munoz said. "More construction means more light pollution." Indeed, unblemished skies are becoming harder to find throughout the valley. The yellowish glare from the growing twin coastal cities of La Serena and Coquimbo whose combined populations have nearly doubled in the last 20 years to more than 400,000 is a constant on the western horizon, while light pollution in Vicuna has already raised flags at the major international observatories. Meanwhile, the influx of domestic and international travelers means Elqui Valley's stars now have more competition than ever. With billions of dollars in astronomical infrastructure at stake, the Chilean government has had to go on the defensive. In 1999, a law to protect the integrity of night skies in places like the Elqui Valley was implemented, which included provisions to shield streetlights and limit the power of public lighting. Beefed up requirements went into effect in 2014, taking into account billboards and new sources of pollution like LEDs and other so called white lights, big offenders in terms of sky glow. But late that same night on the edge of Pisco Elqui, it would have been hard to imagine a more brilliant sky. Several miles outside town, near where this leg of the Ruta de las Estrellas dead ends against the vertical wall of the Andes, a collection of mini geodesic domes has been built on a hillside part of Elqui Domos, a hotel catering to stargazers. Each PVC wrapped dome has a raised bed inside, with a zip away panel in the ceiling a private window onto the universe. (The domes do turn into ovens once the sun rises, however, a factor to consider if you plan to sleep in.) By the time I got back from my mountain trek, most domes had gone dark, but the silhouettes of a few were still glowing softly. I stepped inside mine, climbed to the loft and unzipped the skylight. Orion stared back at me, bow tensed and ready. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, more and more stars came into view, stars packed upon stars. I watched a gleaming planet climb higher in the sky before falling asleep. How to Get There The city of La Serena, gateway to the Elqui Valley, is a one hour flight from Santiago. From the airport, rent a car and follow Ruta 41, part of the Ruta de Las Estrellas, which extends east to Vicuna (a roughly one hour drive) and other astrotourism hot spots. Solar de los Madariaga, Gabriela Mistral 683, Vicuna; solardelosmadariaga.cl; double rooms in a late 1800s Spanish colonial home (and museum) from 36,000 Chilean pesos (about 60 at 613 pesos to the dollar) per night. Refugio Misterios de Elqui, Arturo Prat (no street number), Pisco Elqui; misteriosdeelqui.cl; private cabanas for two on landscaped garden terraces from 60,000 pesos per night. Elqui Domos, Camino Publico Pisco Elqui Horcon Km. 3.5, Pisco Elqui; elquidomos.cl; mini geodesic domes with zip away skylights for up to four people from 85,000 pesos per night. To see the most dazzling skies, it's best to visit around the new moon, the time each month when the moon is not visible. Astronomictourism.com, a privately run website, compiles information on local offerings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
A worker checking the production of chloroquine phosphate in China last month. There has been "anecdotal evidence" that chloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, might work against the coronavirus. Nearly 70 drugs and experimental compounds may be effective in treating the coronavirus, a team of researchers reported on Sunday night. Some of the medications are already used to treat other diseases, and repurposing them to treat Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, may be faster than trying to invent a new antiviral from scratch, the scientists said. The list of drug candidates appeared in a study published on the web site bioRxiv. The researchers have submitted the paper to a journal for publication. To come up with the list, hundreds of researchers embarked on an unusual study of the genes of the coronavirus, also called SARS CoV 2. To infect a lung cell, the coronavirus must insert its genes, co opting the cell's own genetic machinery. The cell begins to produce viral proteins, which are used to produce millions of new viruses. Each of those viral proteins must be able to latch onto the necessary human proteins for the process to work. In the new study, the scientists investigated 26 of the coronavirus's 29 genes, which direct production of the viral proteins. The researchers found 332 human proteins targeted by the coronavirus. Some viral proteins seemed to target just one human protein; other viral proteins are capable of targeting a dozen human cellular proteins. The researchers sought drugs that also latch onto the human proteins that the coronavirus seems to need to enter and replicate in human cells. The team eventually identified 24 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat such seemingly unrelated diseases as cancer, Parkinson's disease and hypertension. On the list were such unexpected candidates as haloperidol, used to treat schizophrenia, and metformin, taken by people with Type 2 diabetes. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The investigators also found candidates among compounds that are now in clinical trials or that are the subject of early research. Intriguingly, some of the possible treatments are drugs used to attack parasites. And the list includes antibiotics that kill bacteria by gumming up the cellular machinery they use to build proteins. But some of those drugs also attach to human proteins. The new study raises the possibility that this side effect might turn out to be an antiviral treatment. One drug on the list, chloroquine, kills the single celled parasite that causes malaria. Scientists have long known that it can also attach to a human cellular protein called the sigma 1 receptor. And that receptor is also the target of the virus. Chloroquine has been much in the news this past week, thanks to speculation about its use against the coronavirus some of which was repeated by President Trump at a news briefing at the White House on Friday. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, followed the president's remarks with a warning that there was only "anecdotal evidence" that chloroquine might work. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The toppling of Roseanne Barr from her racist late night tweet to the early morning backlash and ABC's axing of her highly rated show took less than 12 hours. That is the equivalent of hyperspeed for businesses and brands that are accustomed to taking their time when it comes to high stakes decisions about key employees who land in hot water. But the intensity and immediacy of the social media age have turned corporate crisis management into an exercise where minutes, and sometimes seconds, count. And the praise that ABC executives received this week for their swift response will most likely serve as an example to other businesses facing public relations disasters. "It's the concept of the golden hour of crisis response," said Kara Alaimo, who teaches public relations and reputation management at Hofstra University. "It's a term borrowed from emergency medicine: Everyone knows if you get a heart attack victim to the hospital in the first hour, they're more likely to survive." Ms. Alaimo added: "If you respond quickly, you get to frame the narrative, rather than allowing other people to frame your actions and motivations for you. That is the key to surviving a crisis on social media." Still, every public relations fiasco is unique, a circumstantial stew of cultural context, financial consequence and the particular flavor of the offense. In some ways, experts said, ABC and its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, benefited from the sheer outrageousness of Ms. Barr's remark, which depicted Valerie Jarrett, an African American woman and one of President Barack Obama's closest advisers, as the product of "muslim brotherhood planet of the apes." "It was a fait accompli that advertisers were going to abandon the show," said Stu Loeser, a communications consultant for Fortune 500 companies who was the press secretary for former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. For ABC and Disney, Mr. Loeser said, the choice was simple: "Do we do the right thing now, or do we do the right thing when we're left with no other choice?" But companies must sometimes face murkier scenarios while still experiencing the same pressures of a fast moving Twitter conversation that can quickly coalesce into boycotts and protests. Last September, ABC's corporate cousin ESPN came under intense pressure after the "SportsCenter" host Jemele Hill, who is African American, called President Trump a white supremacist. "Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists," Ms. Hill wrote on Twitter. Trump allies, including the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called for Ms. Hill to be disciplined or fired. At first, ESPN said that Ms. Hill had merely violated its social media guidelines and described her opinions as her own. Then, after the Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he would bench players who "disrespect the flag" at games, Ms. Hill suggested a boycott of the team's advertisers. ESPN suspended her. Ms. Hill had ventured into highly emotional issues of politics and race, and from the network's perspective, some viewers who disagreed with her opinions might have felt alienated. But a harsher punishment for Ms. Hill could have set off its own backlash from a different portion of its audience. Ms. Hill has since moved from "SportsCenter" to The Undefeated, an ESPN website focused on sports and race. "It isn't a bright line, and it isn't a science," Mr. Loeser said of the way companies weigh their handling of an employee who has stirred public controversy. 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. "Any company has multiple key audiences: clients, advertisers, customers, employees and regulators," he said. "Not every case is as clear as 'Roseanne,' and you're often going to leave yourself with one or another segment of your audience angry." Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that Disney executives had let slide "HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC." Ms. Sanders, in her press briefing, cited Ms. Hill and remarks made by the host Joy Behar and the comedian Kathy Griffin on "The View" as examples of incendiary comments or behavior that did not lead to a similar outcome. Ms. Griffin, who had posed for a photo holding what appeared to be the president's decapitated head, took back her apology to the president in an appearance on "The View" but by then she had been fired from her New Year's Eve hosting gig on CNN. Ms. Behar, who had mocked the religious faith of Vice President Mike Pence on the air, apologized for her remarks, and Mr. Pence later said that he had forgiven her. Unlike Ms. Barr, none of those broadcasters made a racist remark of the kind that have caused employers to cut ties. The radio host Don Imus, in 2007, lost his national radio and television shows about a week after he referred to members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy headed hos." As with Ms. Barr's tweet, the blatant racism of Mr. Imus's remarks drew an intense backlash from a wide audience. But he was hired by the New York radio station WABC after eight months off the air. In 1988, the sports commentator Jimmy Snyder, known as Jimmy the Greek, was fired by CBS Sports a day after the airing of an interview in which he suggested that African American athletes were physically superior because of breeding during the era of slavery. Companies crafting a response to a crisis "should think about what a reasonable person would reasonably expect an organization to do, under such circumstances," Ms. Alaimo said. In Ms. Barr's case, she said, "I think that reasonable Americans don't believe that it's appropriate to say the things that Roseanne said. When you think about how to respond to a crisis in those terms, I actually think that the answer becomes rather obvious to companies." She added: "I'm astonished by the companies that don't seem to apply it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
When it comes to her career, the actress Felicity Jones is game for taking on a range of roles, including the fierce Jyn Erso in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in "On the Basis of Sex," the biopic on the Supreme Court justice that will be out on Dec. 24. In beauty matters, Ms. Jones, 35, is a bit less adventurous but still willing to switch up her regimen if it's good for her sensitive skin. Raised in England, in the Bournville village of Birmingham, she now lives in London, where you may find her at her favorite yoga studio. I get up and wash my face with water. Then I pull my hair back and run down to the gym. It's the best way for waking up and putting yourself in a good mood. When I come back, I exfoliate I do that once or twice a week. I use a product by Caudalie that has a very fine grit. It's not too abrasive. Or I use this cleanser by La Roche Posay that's amazing for sensitive skin. A lot of products do irritate my skin, so when I find something that works, I'm fairly loyal. Then I moisturize. My skin care game is about hydration, hydration, hydration. When you do a lot of traveling, you have to put a lot of care into your skin. Occasionally I like to have a facial because it's incredibly relaxing, but I find it's the day to day care that's key, and that includes not too much caffeine, not too much alcohol, rest and water. I'm an ambassador for Cle de Peau, and I use La Creme. It has a really fine texture, which I love. I use the eye cream as well. Then I do SPF I have the one by La Roche Posay. At night, I use the same products, but first I take off my makeup with Bioderma Sensibio micellar water. It's fantastic it doesn't dry you out. I really enjoy makeup. I always have. When I was younger, I used to take art classes, so when I approach makeup, I love the artistry, and I love the colors. It can change a face, honestly. For the Ruth Bader Ginsburg role, I had lots and lots of in depth conversations on the details of Ruth's face, down to the shape of her teeth. I was obsessed. I had my teeth capped so the shape would be the same. Eyebrows are hugely powerful the way you shape them. I also contoured and wore blue gray contact lenses. When I'm off, I do brown mascara I love one by Charlotte Tilbury and brown Cle de Peau eyeliner. I like brown during the day because I like the effect to be a little bit softer. If I'm going out at night, then I'll probably go for a black, something a bit more graphic. I use a little blush. I like either a pinky blush with pink lips, or sometimes I go for an apricot blush for daytime. Those by Nars are great. Or I do Glossier Cloud Paint. And I do love the Cle de Peau concealer, which I use everywhere. I use it under my eyes and on my nose because it gets red out and covers my spots. If it's night and I need more coverage, I use the Foundatio n from Cle de Peau. If I'm going to the set, I'm usually up so early, at 4 a.m., that fragrance doesn't enter into my head. But I do wear fragrance in my everyday life. I've been wearing Diptyque 34 Boulevard Saint Germain for the last few years. It's quite unisex, and it's not too sweet. I absolutely love wigs and hairpieces. Playing Ruth, her hair is pivotal. When she was younger, she followed the pressure of looking a certain way, from her clothes to her hair. But by the '70s, that dissipated, and she evolved to her one look: the low ponytail. She loved the scrunchie and the hair scarf. For her, it was about being practical and saving time in the morning. She has kept that style for 30 years. It's like Karl Lagerfeld or Anna Wintour. When you stick to one look, icon status is yours! For myself, I tend to do a natural looking blow dry. I like it with a little movement and not too done. My hair icons would be Kate Moss or Jane Birkin. Because I have naturally wavy hair, my main goal is to control the flyaways. I like the Davines Oi All in One Milk for that, and it keeps it glossy. I use a hair serum by Davines as well. With all the styling on set, my hair can get dry. A hairdresser once recommended the Leonor Greyl Masque Fleurs de Jasmin, and now I use it once a week. I love, love getting a deep tissue massage. I also have a fantastic physical therapist, David Higgins, who I worked with on my last job. I was doing a lot of running around and stunts. It's really important for actors to look after their bodies, and when working on films, you have to think like an athlete. If I'm in a hotel, I go to the gym and spend a long time on the step machine. It's about trying to target and tone. I also work with Amy Rosoff Davis she's fantastic. She just gets my body and how to make it work. And she has a background in dance and Pilates and yoga, and all the movements are about building your core. It's about making you strong and lean. I also love restorative yoga anything that calms the adrenal glands. I'm based in London, and I go to Triyoga. They have places all over the city. I eat very healthily when I can, but I'm not too hard on myself. For me, it's all about common sense, and I don't like extremities in diet. Sometimes you need to treat yourself. Otherwise you become very boring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When the mills that birthed the industrial revolution in cities like Manchester and Birmingham still powered the British economy of the mid 20th century, Robert Stevenson was a frequent visitor to the Midlands. Eastman Machine, the company his family helped start in upstate New York 128 years ago, had a big factory 100 miles north of London, and Britain accounted for roughly a fifth of the firm's sales. That was then. While Britain is still an important market for Eastman's sophisticated cutting tools, its workshop there was shuttered in the 1970s, and British customers are now served by Eastman's main factory in Buffalo and a smaller one in China. So when the British electorate stunned the world on Friday with the results of the vote to leave the European Union, it was a shock for Mr. Stevenson, but not because it poses an immediate threat to Eastman's bottom line or the job security of its heavily blue collar, 120 strong work force in downtown Buffalo. What most concerns Mr. Stevenson and owners of businesses big and small is what the so called Brexit says about the shape of economic things to come. "You never know if there will be a domino effect, and we worry about other countries securing their borders," Mr. Stevenson said. "We were certainly surprised." For all the shock and awe on Wall Street and financial markets around the globe on Friday, the imminent danger to the underlying American economy is relatively small. What's far more worrisome is whether Britain's decision represents an end to the economic integration and opening markets that have helped propel sales at companies like Eastman over the last few decades. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, politics and economics have mostly moved in one direction, with the elites on both sides of the Atlantic favoring policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, the introduction of the European currency and the entry of China into the World Trade Organization. Business has applauded these moves, but voters are not necessarily on board as they once were. "I think a lot of the market reaction is less about the financial impact and more about populism and what it means for the liberal economic order," said Glenn Hubbard, a top economic official to President George W. Bush who now serves as dean of the Columbia Business School. The Brexit vote, he added, reflects a deep distrust of the benefits of the global economic system among a wide swath of voters in Europe and the United States, and a broadly held view that government institutions whether in Washington or Brussels are calcifying and don't work well. "Both of those forces have a lot of wind at their back," he said. "In the near term, you're seeing markets being roiled, and feedback effects for the Federal Reserve," Mr. Hubbard said. But for now, at least in the United States, "I don't think it's going to raise recession probabilities." When it comes to commerce, Britain is not even among the United States' top five trading partners it's currently the seventh largest, according to the United States Census Bureau, which tracks trade data. American exports to Britain last year totaled 56 billion, or just over 0.3 percentage point of gross domestic product. Partly that's a reflection of how the United States, despite leading the era of globalization, remains something of an economic island. Exports account for 13.4 percent of American economic output, according to the World Bank, compared with roughly 30 percent for Britain. Several economists estimated that the fallout from the vote would probably end up decreasing growth in the American economy by about a quarter of a percentage point or less, while postponing any push by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, possibly through the end of 2016. "The flight to safety means lots of people are flocking to U.S. Treasury bonds, putting downward pressure on interest rates," Mr. Bernstein said. "One possible outcome is that Fed's path to higher interest rates may become flatter as these events play out." Brexit's impact on the United States economy will mostly be felt through the falling value of the pound and the euro against the dollar, Mr. Bernstein said, which is "likely to slow down inflation and exacerbate our trade deficit." 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. A surging dollar would hurt American exporters facing weaker demand from customers in Europe and Asia. In fact, Mr. Stevenson's main worry on Friday was whether his British competitors might actually benefit in the short term. "With the pound dropping 10 or 15 percent, it may strengthen a couple of our competitors in the U.K.," he said. "I think they could be quite happy about it and gain market share." As befits the owner of a company that survived World Wars I and II, outlasted the Great Depression and the Great Recession, and survived the collapse of the American textile industry all without abandoning Buffalo Mr. Stevenson has learned to adapt to potential shocks like Brexit. Increasingly, that's meant focusing on making high tech, software driven equipment to cut composites and carbon based fabrics for the aerospace industry and automakers, rather than the woolens and cotton Eastman's equipment was once designed to slice. Many of Mr. Stevenson's current customers in Britain are in these sectors, he noted. The dressmakers and hosiers and other clothiers that once populated England's redbrick towns have long departed. "Our focus has been to understand where the market is going," said Mr. Stevenson. Twenty years ago, 70 percent of Eastman's products were of traditional fabrics; the rest were space age materials. Now, it is the reverse, which is among the reasons a fifth generation of Stevensons will have a company to take over. "Our goal has been to maintain the company in Buffalo and as a family business," Mr. Stevenson said. "My son is 40, and I'm 65, and he is focused on these new materials. This saved our butt." For those exporters that have managed to hang on in the industrial heartland of Britain, the Brexit could actually be good news, simply because the pound's plunge against currencies like the euro and the dollar makes their goods more competitive. British exports like Rolls Royce jet engines, high end Jaguar automobiles and certain food products could get a lift. Last month, for example, Britain exported the largest cargo of wheat to the United States in more than two decades. So would British hotels and restaurants, eager to host American visitors looking for what could amount to a 10 to 20 percent off sale. Chief executives of major American companies are paid well to see around corners, and must adapt their businesses even to trends they oppose, or face the consequences in the form of falling stock prices and angry shareholders. That's among the reasons General Electric, which relies on foreign markets for more than half its revenue, has been preparing for the kind of political retreat from open markets that the British vote to leave the European Union represents. "Companies must navigate the world on their own," G.E.'s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, said in the commencement speech last month at the N.Y.U. Stern School of Business. For G.E., he said that meant seeking to achieve "a local capability inside a global footprint." Today, its 420 factories spread across the world give G.E. "tremendous flexibility," Mr. Immelt said, with jet engines, power generators and rail locomotives increasingly manufactured at several sites to ensure market access. "A localization strategy," Mr. Immelt said, "can't be shut down by protectionist politics." G.E. had prepared for the risk that Britain might vote to leave the E.U. by hedging in foreign currency markets. But beyond that immediate step, a G.E. spokeswoman said on Friday it was too early to discuss longer term moves the company might make. Mr. Immelt, in a statement, said that G.E., America's largest manufacturer, which employs 22,000 people in Britain and 100,000 in Europe over all, remains "firmly committed" to both Britain and Europe. While Brexit's impact on Britain's overall economy may be mixed, its London based financial sector is likely to feel the full force of the coming storm. The City, as London's equivalent of Wall Street is known, has boomed in the last 20 years as a global financial capital, especially for Continental banks seeking a more market friendly home than Frankfurt or Paris. With a recession in Britain now a distinct possibility, some experts worry that a government desperate to create and maintain jobs could seek to save the financial sector by making the City more attractive as an offshore haven. "This could lead to London becoming even more like the Cayman Islands and other British territories, skirting around regulations, in a race to the bottom for the financial sector," said Adam S. Posen, a former member of the rate setting committee at the Bank of England and now president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "This potentially could leave pretty big holes in the financial safety net." He pointed to the 2008 crisis involving the insurance giant American International Group, where a hedge fund like subsidiary operating in London and under less stringent rules nearly brought down the company and contributed to the financial crash. "They could get away with things in London that they couldn't get away with in New York," Mr. Posen said, "So imagine repeating that on a larger scale or a more frequent scale." Of course, dangers like those are the hardest to anticipate. "Right now we're in one of those points in history," Mr. Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute said, "where there are lot of 'unknown unknowns,'" referring to the infamous comment by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the Iraq war. Consider two very different types of uncertainty, Mr. Hassett explained, citing a well known economic metaphor. If you bet on a roulette wheel, you know all the possible outcomes and the attendant risks. But now imagine a game where you don't know all the places the roulette ball might land, or the chances of it falling into different slots or even the prizes if you are fortunate enough to bet correctly. "In those types of situations," he said, "anything can happen. And if you don't know what will happen, the optimal strategy might be to assume the worst." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"Journalistic objectivity be damned. I'm hoping it wins the entire lot." That's Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post and former editor of The Boston Globe. It has been a disorienting time for the journalists like Mr. Baron depicted in "Spotlight," the film about The Globe's investigation in 2002 of sexual abuse of children by members of the Roman Catholic clergy. Mr. Baron, portrayed in the movie by Liev Schreiber, said the embrace from Hollywood had melted away any pretense of impartiality about the outcome of the Oscars race. The movie is up for six Academy Awards, including best picture. With the ceremony approaching, Mr. Baron weighed in Wednesday with an essay for The Post. Mr. Baron said he was overcome during the film's showing at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. After the credits rolled, the actors were called on to the stage, then the journalists, for a sustained standing ovation. "It was an emotional moment," he wrote. "I thought about the long ago work that led to the movie, and how its impact would now be magnified. I thought about how the public might now see why journalism is necessary. And I thought about the oddity of this whole scene in which I had a part: how the saddening subject of sexual abuse had arrived at this bizarre intersection with celebrity, paparazzi and red carpet interviews." Mr. Baron said the idea for a movie had bounced around for years before suddenly taking off in 2014. Only when he met with his acting counterpart, Mr. Schreiber, did Mr. Baron begin to appreciate what he'd gotten himself into. "We met for less than two hours, and as we talked it occurred to me that this was not quite an interview," he wrote. "This was an observation session, much like a psychiatrist's. Only these observations would not remain confidential. They would be revealed to millions." On the film set, Mr. Schreiber would eventually portray him as "a stoic, humorless, somewhat dour character that many professional colleagues instantly recognize," Mr. Baron wrote. Mr. Baron was just the latest of several journalists from The Globe to weigh in on the experience. In an essay in The Globe in late 2014, Walter Robinson, the investigative team leader portrayed by Michael Keaton, said he was a fan of Mr. Keaton's work in "The Paper," the 1994 journalism drama, but this was different. Now, the son has his own Hollywood avatar in Mr. Slattery. But he has lost any reservations. "People might see the film who would have never read the story originally," Mr. Bradlee said. "We are hopeful, as a result of the film, more survivors will come forward, and it will give journalism, especially print journalism, which is in a bad way in this country right now, a shot in the arm." One reporter, Matt Carroll, the so called data geek on the team played by Brian d'Arcy James, has avoided the limelight. "I just wanted someone who was better looking than me, which frankly is not all that difficult," Mr. Carroll said in an interview with The Globe. "He looks great. I keep telling people he does me better than I do me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Credit...Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times When people ask Lorraine Bracco how she's doing these days, the actress said she usually gives the same answer. "I say I'm crazy," she explained. "A little nutty, but good." To be clear, she doesn't mean the kind of insanity that would get someone committed by Dr. Melfi, the psychiatrist she played on "The Sopranos," or that would compel someone to sit atop her mobster husband in their marital bed while aiming a gun at him, like she did in "Goodfellas." "More fun crazy," Bracco said. "I think one of the things they would say about me is that I'm fun." It is that spirit call it intrepidness, call it recklessness that drove Bracco, inspired by little more than a news article she read on her phone, to purchase a ramshackle house in Sicily for the price of one euro and restore it to its former glory. And it is that same boldness that spurred her to contact HGTV and persuade the cable channel to have a camera crew document her efforts. Even as she recounted its origin story in a Zoom conversation earlier this month, Bracco could not help enumerating all the red flags that warned against this undertaking for starters, she didn't speak Italian and had never been to Sicily before. "There would have been a lot of reasons not to do it," she said. "But I was so intrigued." On a recent Wednesday morning, Bracco, 66, was speaking from her year round home in Bridgehampton, N.Y. She sat in a living room she had decorated with black and white photos of favorite artists and performers like James Brown, Elizabeth Taylor, Federico Fellini and John Huston. "I'm inspired by them all," she said. She was similarly energized by that news story she'd read online about two years ago, reporting that Sambuca, a small hilltop town in Sicily, was selling abandoned and ruined homes there for one euro. (The local program, which required new owners to restore the dwellings within three years of purchase, was established to encourage tourism and boost the region's economy.) As Bracco recalled, "I said to myself, what do I have to lose? What is the downside?" Bracco would tell you that her most ambitious achievement in life is not maintaining a 40 year long acting career but raising her two grown daughters, Margaux and Stella. As you may have surmised, though, she has a side that craves adventure. "I have no interest in skydiving, things like that," she said, but she has experience in the real estate market, seeking residences as well as investment opportunities: "I've always made money, and that's been good for me." Bracco traces her paternal lineage back to the Sicilian capital of Palermo, though her father was born in Detroit and her parents raised their family in Westbury, N.Y. She's still fluent in French, from the formative years she spent modeling and acting in Paris (and working as a DJ for Radio Luxembourg), but, needless to say, "this did not help me in Sicily," she explained. A fan of home renovation shows and HGTV programming, Bracco was convinced her Sicilian renovation project could make for a good series for the channel. So she contacted directly Loren Ruch, an executive there, and pitched the idea. Ruch, who is HGTV's group senior vice president of development and production, said that Bracco's approach "was completely not our typical way of finding a show, but it felt right." "If it was a celebrity that just asked us to buy them a vacation home, we would probably politely decline," Ruch said. (HGTV said that it covered its own production costs for "My Big Italian Adventure" and compensated Bracco for appearing in the series, but that she paid the costs for the home renovation herself.) She spent the next several months working with a contractor, artisans and laborers to rebuild the structure, provide it with electricity and running water and outfit it to her particular tastes. As with any artistic endeavor, there were creative differences to overcome. "I wanted two dishwashers and they were like, aah, two dishwashers?" Bracco recalled. "I said that's what I'm used to I have a family, and I expect a lot of people to come. I put French doors in the bathroom, to open up onto a little terrace. And they would be like, 'Mamma mia.' They thought I was slightly off. But in the long run, it's gorgeous." In total, Bracco estimated that the home restoration cost her between 250,000 and 300,000, considerably more than the 150,000 she had budgeted for the project. "One euro, my ass," she said. Still, the enterprise was not without fringe benefits, like the fans that Bracco encountered on shopping trips to Palermo who recognized her not from the internationally acclaimed Italian American sagas "The Sopranos" and "Goodfellas," but from her role as Angie Harmon's mother on the TNT police drama "Rizzoli Isles." Harmon, who visited Bracco in Sicily during the making of "My Big Italian Adventure," said that the two of them have remained so close since "Rizzoli Isles" ended in 2016 that she still refers to Bracco as "Ma." She, too, was surprised by the initial condition of Bracco's property. "I was told there's a couple walls missing, but you don't think it's, like, rubble," she said. "But Ma has exquisite taste, so I knew she was going to make something really beautiful out of it." She was also impressed to see how swiftly Bracco had settled into Sicilian culture. "She takes me to a cheese stand, and it's all I hear about for two days," Harmon recalled. "'We gotta go to the cheese stand, it's all about the cheese.' I'm like, OK, I get it. How good could it be? And she was right it was really, really good cheese." Still, she is seeing differences in how she is treated at this stage of her career. "Roles are coming less and less," she said. "Our pay grade is a lot less than the men, which is really unfair, and it's very hard to fight." Even on her best known film and TV projects, Bracco said, "I would bet my bottom dollar that I got paid an nth of what all those boys were paid." She said it has only been in recent years, as prominent peers like Michelle Williams and Patricia Arquette have called attention to the issue, that women have felt comfortable asserting themselves and demanded to use a famous "Goodfellas" quote "Pay me." (Bracco used the entirety of the quote, only the latter half of which can be printed here.) Of course, in order to get paid, the part has to exist in the first place. There are still far fewer opportunities for middle aged actresses than for their younger counterparts, Bracco said. When a role becomes available "at my age range, there are 50 actresses that want that role," she said. "Whether they're 10 years younger than me or 10 years older than me, that's what that's about." In that sense, Bracco said, "My Big Italian Adventure" was something she could do on her own, without having to seek anyone else's approval, knowing that the results depended solely on the effort she put into it. As she explained, "if I had a husband or partner, would they have said to me, 'Absolutely not we are not doing that. Why would you go and try to build a house in Sicily?'" It has been several months since Bracco finished work on the house, and while she will not be able to fully appreciate it until after the pandemic has subsided, she said it felt sufficiently empowering just to get it done. "Oh, I'm empowered," she said with a laugh. "I often butt against things that people say, 'Oh, oh, oh, no, no.' But I make things happen. I do." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It started with Einstein. His famous E mc2 revealed a vast asymmetry in the cosmic relationship between matter and energy. In time, experts looked into the possibility of exploiting the disparity. Today, North Korea is hard at work on that agenda. Its nuclear program has succeeded in producing blasts in the Hiroshima range. In each case, trillions of atoms in a tiny smidgen of matter estimated at roughly one gram, the weight of a dollar bill broke their nuclear bonds in violent bursts of primal energy. The North now seeks to turn bits of nuclear fuel into even more powerful blasts. Experts say its ultimate goal is to transform an ordinary atom bomb into a hydrogen bomb, which can raise its destructive force by 1,000 times. "I can't imagine they're not working on true thermonuclear weapons," said Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who from 1986 to 1997 directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atom bomb, and whom the North Koreans in seeking recognition as a nuclear power have repeatedly let into their atomic facilities. "But that's a big step," Dr. Hecker cautioned. "You have to pay attention to what they're doing but take their claims with a grain of salt." On Sunday, the North fired a medium range missile in an act of defiance, its second in a week. Both tests were successful and seen as demonstrating the slow improvement of its nuclear arsenal. Lise Meitner as a doctoral student in Vienna in 1906. Later, Dr. Meitner did a calculation estimating how much energy a split atom might release. The discovery, called nuclear fission, led to a global race to split heavy atoms in chain reactions. Experts say atomic history especially that of the American program, the world's most successful, which other nations often seek to mimic can help distinguish North Korea's credible accomplishments from bluster and empty threats. The nuclear age began in 1938 over a snowy Christmas holiday in Sweden when Lise Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, tried to make sense of a colleague's puzzling experiments on uranium. During a hike, the physicists sat on a tree trunk and discussed the unlikely possibility that its atoms had split in two. Dr. Meitner knew Einstein's equation. She did a calculation estimating how much energy a split atom might release. Suddenly, all the experimental facts fell into place. The discovery, called nuclear fission, led to a global race to split heavy atoms in chain reactions. The fuels of the first atom bombs were either uranium or plutonium, both heavier than lead. Soon, scientists found another way to free the hidden energy by fusing two light atoms into one. The fuels were deuterium and tritium, rare forms of hydrogen. They were known as thermonuclear because their ignition required the blistering heats of an exploding atom bomb, which acted like a match. Fusion which powers the sun and the stars turned out to release far more energy. It led to history's most powerful blasts as well as decades of superpower brinkmanship with thousands of nuclear arms. The United States in 1951 injected a tiny amount of thermonuclear fuel into the core of an atom bomb, boosting its power. The explosion was roughly three times stronger than the Hiroshima blast. In 1954, on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the United States tried that approach. The fireball expanded for miles. The shock wave swept neighboring atolls clean of vegetation and animals. In minutes, the mushroom cloud rose some 25 miles. Slowly, its radioactivity spread around the globe. The destructive force of that single hydrogen device turned out to be far greater than all explosives used in World War II, including the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The blast, code named Bravo, was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It was the nation's most violent thermonuclear test ever. But as Einstein foretold, the amount of matter that Bravo converted into energy was mind bogglingly small on the order of 1,500 grams, or about three pounds. Few experts think North Korea will get close to mastering the secrets of true hydrogen bombs any time soon, if ever. But they cite a range of evidence suggesting that the isolated nation is now working hard to raise the destructive force of its nuclear arsenal with thermonuclear fire. "It's possible that North Korea has already boosted," Gregory S. Jones, a scientist at the RAND Corporation, said of the first step down the thermonuclear road. The prospect of the North making strides in missiles topped with nuclear arms that could threaten the United States has prompted the Trump administration to increase pressure on Kim Jong un, the North's leader. In South Korea, a new uncertainty is Moon Jae in, a liberal who favors talks with the North. He recently won the race to succeed the nation's ousted president. Much of the technical debate over North Korea and estimates of the global threat it poses turn on the degree to which the nation has succeeded in miniaturizing its nuclear arms. As usual, the United States set the standard. A hydrogen bomb derived from the Bravo test was more than 24 feet long and weighed 21 tons. That was no problem for a big aircraft. But it was way beyond the lifting capacity of any missile the military had in mind to strike distant targets. So American experts sought to devise small, light, highly efficient hydrogen arms weighing just a few hundred pounds not tons. Eventually, they were able to fit more than a dozen atop a single missile. In short, the size of nuclear weapons dropped significantly as their destructive power rose. Even so, they were quite large given that the amount of matter they converted into energy was so small. Why? A main reason was that designers used massive parts to keep the exploding bomb intact as long as possible. Otherwise, the arms would tear themselves apart before much fuel got burned up. The world's first atom bomb, the Gadget, tested in 1945 in the New Mexican desert, had a fuel efficiency of less than 20 percent. Thereafter, over years and decades of experimentation, designers learned how to raise the burn rate. Exactly how far is a federal secret. The North, like most countries with nuclear ambitions, has followed the American playbook. The question is how much progress it has made since its first atomic test more than a decade ago. Two detonations last year helped clarify the picture. The first, in January, was about as powerful as the Hiroshima blast. With typical swagger, the North declared it had detonated a hydrogen bomb a claim experts universally rejected. The explosion was far too small. Still, emerging clues suggested the North was indeed going down the thermonuclear road particularly in enhancing its atom bombs. Experts found evidence that it had modified a reactor to make tritium, built a plant that could gather up the radioactive gas, and produced a thermonuclear fuel ingredient in such abundance that it was selling it online. David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear arms, said the findings "add credibility to North Korea's claims that it has been developing thermonuclear or boosted fission weapons." That March, another clue emerged. It was a photo of Mr. Kim and his entourage gathered around a shiny ball described as a miniaturized bomb meant to fit inside a missile warhead. Some Western analysts belittled it as the disco ball. Nonetheless, many said it appeared to be a realistic mock up. Size alone made the claim plausible. The Gadget was about five feet wide. In contrast, the disco ball was much smaller perhaps two feet wide. That was the width of America's first boosted atom bombs. Boosting can either raise a blast's destructive power or lessen the need for atomic fuel, making a weapon much easier to diminish in size. Soon after the photo emerged, American and South Korean intelligence officials concluded the isolated country had indeed finally succeeded in its efforts to shrink some of its nuclear arms. "I think it's pretty clear they've weaponized and miniaturized," Bruce Klingner, a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Korea branch, recently told a group in Washington. The finding went to warheads for short and medium range missiles able to hit much of Japan and South Korea. Experts say the North still has a long way to go in perfecting warheads for its intercontinental ballistic missiles, none of which have undergone flight testing. Last September, the North set off another blast its fifth. By some estimates, the explosion was twice as strong as the Hiroshima bomb. That suggested its designers had used more atomic fuel, had achieved a higher rate of burning, or had engaged in thermonuclear boosting. Conceivably, delays in the detonation could stem from the stepped up pressures that Beijing and Washington are trying to exert, though experts note that the North often tries to defy coercion. Whether the nuclear test is big or small, delayed or scrapped, botched or successful, experts say the North's program is now moving steadily beyond the rudiments of nuclear arms design, raising not only global alarms but the geopolitical stakes. For his part, Einstein was horrified by the spread of nuclear arms and often spoke out against them. He worried that the human race had insufficient wisdom to free the primal energies. "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking," he remarked, "and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
While it's common to hear about people who made moving to New York a major life objective, many transplants end up in the city more by happenstance than intention here thanks to a job, a graduate program or a partner, rather than a burning desire to be a New Yorker. Krijn Mossel, 44, and John Rinaldi, 49, fall in the second category, having moved to Brooklyn a few months ago from Mountain View, Calif., so that Mr. Mossel could take a job as a technical account manager at Google. But to their delight, they've found the change of cities to be just what they hadn't known they were looking for. "When you come out the door here, you see other people," Mr. Rinaldi said. "It's lovely!" He was sitting in the living room of the couple's one bedroom apartment at 461 Dean Street, the modular tower adjacent to the Barclays Center in Prospect Heights. "Mountain View was very much a bedroom community. I'm much more of a city mouse." He added: "Just living in New York, we've doubled the amount of walking we do. We've both increased our steps a lot up from 2,500 to 5,000, to 5,000 to 10,000." Warned off by their friends from trying to find a place in Manhattan "they told us it would be too expensive, too small, too crazy," Mr. Rinaldi said the couple decided to look at Jersey City, Hoboken, Queens and Brooklyn. But even coming from the Bay Area, where housing is known to be pricey, they were surprised by how expensive and small apartments were outside of Manhattan. In Mountain View, where the two had lived after leaving behind a decrepit, if well located, apartment in San Francisco, they had had a new mother in law apartment of about 1,000 square feet, with polished concrete floors and high ceilings, for 2,650 a month. (The mother in law for whom the unit had been designed had declined to take up residence.) Their current place costs 3,605 a month, although by signing a 27 month lease they got three months free. "It's a little painful," admitted Mr. Rinaldi, who worked full time as a voice and piano teacher and an actor/singer in the Bay Area but who now also works as an operations coordinator at the educational nonprofit Breakthrough NY. "But we looked at a lot of places that cost the same and were not as nice." Mr. Mossel agreed: "It was definitely the top end." They had initially given themselves a budget of 2,500 to 3,000 a month, but reluctantly increased it to 3,500 after noticing that their options vastly improved once they went over 3,000. Their apartment has the trifecta of features that, in addition to being an easy train ride from Manhattan, included things that local friends had cautioned about expecting: air conditioning, a dishwasher and a washer/dryer unit. Their other requirements were few. Mr. Rinaldi is a devotee of the decluttering guru Marie Kondo, and the only thing Mr. Mossel ever collected was piles of paperwork, so they didn't feel that they needed a whole lot of square footage (they had done a huge book purge before leaving California). Still, they hadn't wanted to live in a shoe box. One of the selling points of their current place, Mr. Rinaldi said, was that "it actually had a floor plan," with a small entrance area by the front door and a hallway connecting the living room and the bedroom, unlike many of the one bedrooms they saw. Though it has been thoroughly Kondo d, the apartment's decor is far from bland. Keeping only what you love means having a space that better reflects you, Mr. Rinaldi said. To wit, he has a pastel and pencil sketch of an owl done by his mother and 50 smoking pipes, down from 300. The men were ambivalent about living in new construction, but after looking at a handful of not so nice older walk ups in Fort Greene that were just as expensive, they figured why not. One landlord, Mr. Mossel recalled, took him down to a basement with low ceilings to show him the washer and dryer, which were behind a cage. "It's like 'Silence of the Lambs,'" the landlord remarked. "I was like, 'That's not really a selling point,'" Mr. Mossel said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
An act of bearing witness, the play is the story of Mr. Gomez's quest to understand the epidemic of murders and disappearances of women that raged for years in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and that he says has not stopped. He grew up just across the border, in El Paso, Tex. As Mr. Gomez did, the playwright narrator in "the way she spoke" travels to Juarez to interview locals for their stories a mother whose daughter disappeared, a man convicted of multiple murders, the driver of a bus that took women to work in the area factories . The narrator's trip to a city he discovers to be more dangerous and fearful than he grasped as a boy forms the spine of this structurally ambitious play. But the dominant voice doesn't belong to any of the people of Juarez. It belongs to the playwright narrator. The performance opens with an actress arriving in an empty theater to read a script, from start to finish, for its author, her old friend. His play demands that she embody him and the various people he encounters in Juarez. The actress character is meant sometimes to be herself, sometimes to be only haltingly familiar with the script and sometimes to disappear into its roles. This is immensely challenging, and possibly not as sensible as using at least one more actor would be. Ms. del Castillo, an accomplished screen actress and a Telemundo star, seems miscast here, unable to slip into the skin of her many characters. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Credit...Nathanael Turner for The New York Times LOS ANGELES In army green camouflage and black sweats and with two heavy gold chains swinging with each step of his Nikes, Damien Hirst was in an unusually quiet mood. Sipping from a can of Diet Coke at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, his jeweled fingers shining, the artist craned to watch as his last nine foot canvas was installed. Mr. Hirst is used to directing a legion of assistants, but on this day he was pensive. After so many years relying on others, every one of the works in his new series of "Veil Paintings" was done by his hand and his alone, he said. Twenty four huge oil works in splashes of blood red, electric blue and rich gold are his homage to the glorious color harmonies by the post Impressionist Pierre Bonnard. Their meaning? "I make it up after the fact," Mr. Hirst said. "I don't even know what this kind of work is. They make me happy, they feel good to look at, they sort of confuse me." Maybe the public is too busy trying to pin down one meaning, he mused. Maybe there is none. "Truth's quite hard to find these days." Yet isn't that what he's done time and again since he burst onto the scene in the early 1990s? Last year, his rediscovered sunken "treasures" in Venice 189 artworks and artifacts, purported to be the possessions of a second century collector and produced in editions of three netted over 330 million, stirring the pot for dissent. With such a loose interpretation of what is and isn't real, and a recent Netflix mockumentary about the adventure furthering that narrative, outrage and applause have followed. Beyond Mr. Hirst's heaps of money and rococo persona, his relationship to truth with a capital "T" might be his biggest draw. That's why there remains an air of anticipation around this show his first in the Los Angeles area since 2012 despite its modest scale. Mr. Hirst said he completed this series in the down time leading up to the two Venice exhibitions, "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable," as most of the craft he displayed there was outsourced, giving him time to work in secret on his first love: painting. With his oeuvre ranging from pointillism to cadavers as sculpture the infamous shark in formaldehyde, shocking in 1992, was inspired by the film "Jaws," he said much of it was made by an army of helpers. Was that the impetus for this different show? Mr. Hirst says no. Help is common, he points out, from Michelangelo to the modern day. "Whether you use lots of assistants or do it on your own," he said, "as long as the result is what you want, it doesn't matter to me." It might to collectors. This year's personal touch could bump a value thinned after years of flooding. Representatives from Gagosian Gallery say the entire series has sold. "If they're all sold, it's a testament to the fan base of Damien," said Adam Lindemann, a New York collector who owns a handful of the artist's work and said he doesn't intend to sell. "People believe in him and follow him, those collectors aren't just market conscious. They're not buying as speculation." Asked about the Venice show when it debuted last year, Eli Broad, the philanthropist and museum founder, remarked that it was "kind of hokey." Recently he called Mr. Hirst "an innovative artist who always moves in new directions." The Broad would not comment on whether it had purchased any of the new work to add to its collection. The public, however, still responds. At last week's opening, A listers from film and the arts stood in a line stretching around the block to get in. Mr. Gagosian, who has represented Mr. Hirst for three decades (Mr. Hirst left him in 2012 but returned in 2016), said the series sold so quickly, he may have underpriced the paintings. "He's never shown work like this, so we agreed on pricing that we thought was correct. They went from half a million for the smallest, 1.7 million for the larger ones." This isn't quite a new style. Mr. Hirst did similar paintings in the early 1990s, but color was frowned upon back then, the artist recalled, and he "didn't have the courage at the time" to embark on such a large scale so early on. These paintings he pumped out of his London studio over 12 hour work days while his team of carpenters, architects and electricians ensured that Venice remained on schedule. This is the anti Venice, Mr. Hirst said, adding, "I won't be rushing to do something like that again." "I just had a gap," he continued. "My work for Venice stopped about a year before it opened. In a way that was a stroll compared to this." Another series of paintings, this one from 2016 and created by his team, will be shown later this month at Houghton Hall in England. They are an extension of his famous Spot Paintings. Venice was a tumultuous period. Separated from the mother of his three children, the fashion designer Maia Norman, and recently involved with Katie Keight, a model, Mr. Hirst is 11 years clean from smoke, drink, drugs, ever aware of the hourglass. "I've got all of those addict sort of behaviors," he said, including being a workaholic. "I loved all that, and it screws you up and screws with your relationship and your family. I stopped all that." "You've only got so many 10 years in your life, don't you?" he went on, recalling Venice's toll. "My son said to me, in Venice, 'Dad, you don't need to do this.'" Despite his wild success, Mr. Hirst still sees himself as an outsider in what he calls a "stuffy" scene in which people "look their nose down" at him for breaking rules. Like many powerful men, he retains a deep desire to be accepted by the working class world he arose from in his case, a postwar industrial Leeds of poverty and broken homes. Growing up without money, and then being known for it as much as the work, still stings. "When I grew up, I never thought I'd get paid doing a job I enjoyed," he said. "I thought, oh, I'll probably make art, little things on the weekend. That was what I was looking forward to." Once known for trouble, even sticking a piece of chicken into the opening of his penis in a restaurant, for shock value, and getting sued for it, he has visibly mellowed. Maybe it's a result of therapy, he mused, which he attends once a week. "A lot of people when they meet me, they think I'm O.K. in the end, 'I like that guy.' I think that surprises people. I have no idea what I do when I meet people for the first time." Mr. Gagosian understands the shift. "He's sober, which makes communication a lot more reliable," he said. "He's healthy, he's into yoga. He likes to tease people, but there's not a mean bone in him. He's endearing, he's always been that way, even when he wasn't sober. He was fun when he was drinking, too. Too much fun for his own good." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
WASHINGTON The future of cellular service is coming to a neighborhood near you. But who gets to decide when, where and how it gets delivered is still a heated fight. The new technology, known as 5G, delivers wireless internet at far faster speeds than existing cellular connections. But it also requires different hardware to deliver the signals. Instead of relying on large towers placed far apart, the new signals will come from smaller equipment placed an average of 500 feet apart in neighborhoods and business districts. Much of the equipment will be on streetlights or utility poles, often accompanied by containers the size of refrigerators on the ground. More than 300,000 cell stations now provide wireless connections, and 5G will bring hundreds of thousands perhaps millions more. The prospect of their installation has many communities and their officials, from Woodbury, N.Y., to Olympia, Wash., insisting that local governments control the placement and look of the new equipment. They say that the cell stations could clutter neighborhoods with eyesores and cost the communities a lot of potential revenue. "Residents across the country are just now beginning to understand the harms that hasty and insensitive small cell deployments can inflict on their communities," said Jim Baller, the president of Baller Stokes Lide, a law firm in Washington that represents municipalities on communications issues. But telecommunications companies hoping to cash in on what is predicted to be 250 billion in annual service revenue from 5G by 2025 are pushing to build the system as quickly and cheaply as possible. And they have the federal government on their side. The companies, like Verizon Communications and AT T, say that the equipment will be safe and unobtrusive, and that it is needed to support future applications like driverless cars. Dotting them throughout neighborhoods is necessary for full coverage, they say, because the new 5G signals do not travel as far as the radio frequencies now in use. The new equipment, AT T told the Federal Communications Commission last year, "will revolutionize the way consumers and businesses use mobile broadband services, and of the emerging internet of things." And the F.C.C., under the leadership of Ajit Pai, its Republican chairman, has strongly encouraged weakening regulations to accelerate the deployment of new 5G technology including reducing the role of local governments. This week, another Republican F.C.C. commissioner, Brendan Carr, announced details of a plan to streamline the environmental and historic review process for 5G infrastructure, saying it could cut costs by 80 percent. The agency will vote on the measure this month. Mr. Pai and Mr. Carr have said regulatory changes are necessary to keep pace with global competitors. But bringing high speed service to underserved areas closing the digital divide has also been one of Mr. Pai's central arguments for reining in local regulations. The money companies save from fewer regulations, he says, can be used to expand broadband into rural areas. City officials are not buying it. Mobilitie, one of the nation's largest cell tower operators, submitted an unofficial plan in Montgomery County, Md., in the fall, designating where the company might want to place small cells. Of the 215 small cell sites in that plan, only 11 were in areas with fewer than 1,000 people per square mile. "It is deeply disingenuous to suggest that the need to pre empt urban areas' ordinances is so we can bring broadband to rural areas," said Mitsuko R. Herrera, the county's technology special projects director. "There is zero evidence to support that premise." Jason Caliento, a Mobilitie senior vice president, agreed. "Small cells are a tool in the toolbox, but alone are not going to solve the rural divide," he said. In January, Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose, Calif., resigned his seat on an F.C.C. 5G advisory committee, saying it was rigged to give industry what it wanted "without any obligation to provide broadband access to underserved residents." In response, Mr. Pai said the F.C.C. looked forward to working with the committee "to remove regulatory barriers to broadband deployment and to extend digital opportunity to all Americans." The wireless industry has filed multiple comments to the F.C.C. complaining about delays from local governments. AT T executives said officials in California, whom they did not identify, had delayed deployment of small cells by more than 800 days because they "scrutinized" antenna designs, radio frequency exposure and effects on property values, among other things. Companies have suggested cutting local approval windows by a month or more. Cities and counties argue the delays are caused by the wireless companies themselves. Officials in Montgomery County said Mobilitie had routinely filed incomplete applications that caused months of setbacks. Mobilitie officials said their relationship with local governments was "evolving" and leading to better collaboration. "I don't think we've ever seen more progress" than has occurred lately, Mr. Caliento said. City officials say shortening reviews risks small cell facilities becoming unsightly and unsafe. That is what worries Donna Baron, a 75 year old retiree who learned a streetlight near her home on DuFief Drive in North Potomac, Md., was marked to become a small cell, as were dozens more nearby. She held up an image of a possible cell station that might replace the light. "The pole is a lot rounder, it has boxes on it and a huge fake mailbox at the bottom," Ms. Baron said. If the F.C.C. pre empts local rules, "you're going to end up with a Medusa, with a bunch more stuff attached." Wireless companies are also asking the F.C.C. to cap local fees. AT T says that three California cities assess fees of 2,600 to 8,000 a year per attachment, and that a "Georgia municipality is considering an annual fee of 6,000 per node." David Young, who manages infrastructure leases for Lincoln, Neb., said he understood the carriers' frustration. But he said cities had a responsibility to charge fair rates. He has negotiated with wireless companies to pay 1,995 a year per pole. He set the rate based on market analysis, which he discussed with the companies. "They were quite happy to pay the price that we asked," Mr. Young said. Texas cities can't negotiate rates. Last year, the State Legislature passed a law pushed by AT T that allows cities to charge carriers no more than 250 per pole each year. Before the law, cities often charged 1,500 to 2,500 a year per pole, and the change will cost Texas cities as much as 1 billion over eight years, the Texas Municipal League estimated. AT T argues that charging fees not based on cost violates the federal Communications Act, which blocks local governments from prohibiting broadband services. A group of Texas cities led by the city of McAllen, near the Mexico border, filed a lawsuit last year against the state, arguing that the new cell site law violated the state Constitution, which prohibits the Legislature from forcing cities to grant something of value to corporations. Lawyers representing Texas argue the state has the authority to cap municipalities' pole rental fees. During oral arguments in December, a judge denied the state's motion for dismissal, and last month denied the cities' request for a temporary injunction. The case is expected to go to trial this year. The maneuvering in Washington has left people like Marc King, 71, a longtime resident of Germantown, Md., feeling resigned. "A Russian woman stood up to speak at one of these public meetings, and she said that when she lived in Russia, the government slam dunked her and she had no say," Mr. King said. "Now she lives in the United States of America, where she's getting slam dunked by the government and she has no say. That gives you a window into what's going on here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
As to why, well, it can't have escaped sportswear behemoths Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo that an entire generation of consumers whose hearts and minds and wallets the companies would like to capture has displayed an affinity for this range of rose colored shades. Nor can they have missed the fact that public figures of all sorts including Gwyneth Paltrow, Harry Styles and Rihanna have suddenly started sporting (yes, I meant to use that word) clothes in said colors. Over the weekend, not only did Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, wear a bright pink Alexander McQueen dress to the Trooping the Color parade in honor of Queen Elizabeth's birthday, but she also dressed her daughter, Princess Charlotte, in a pink party frock. When golfers and royalty make the same sartorial choices, you know it's not just a fashion thing. Millennial pink may have started as a runway trend for both men and women the Gucci designer Alessandro Michele and his muse Jared Leto love a dose of pink but it has become something else: a shorthand or symbol of this particular moment in time, from the looser definitions of gender and gender stereotypes to the refusal to be boxed in to a traditional set of dress code mores and expectations. That it has reached critical mass in unexpected places, like the fairway, simply speaks to its use as a means of connecting a person or a discipline that might seem elitist or inaccessible to the values of a larger group. Can you relate? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
With quarterback Drew Brees out for several weeks because of rib and lung injuries, the New Orleans Saints' Super Bowl hopes rest with a jack of all trades who is sometimes dismissed as a mere role player: the all purpose running back Alvin Kamara. Sorry, were you expecting the team's backup quarterback, Taysom Hill? Hill, the gadget specialist and wish fulfillment figure currently filling in for Brees, is certainly critical to the Saints' success. But Kamara has been their best offensive performer this season, by far, and he has emerged as a worthy candidate for the N.F.L. Most Valuable Player Award. Through Week 11, Kamara ranked second in the league with 1,179 total yards from scrimmage and 12 combined rushing and receiving touchdowns. His 67 receptions tied him for seventh in the N.F.L. and led all running backs. Per Pro Football Reference, Kamara leads the league with 619 yards after the catch and 14 broken tackles after receptions. Coach Sean Payton lines him up at running back, various wide receiver positions, kick returner and occasionally as a wildcat quarterback to make the most of his diverse talents. Kamara's production has been vital to the Saints in a season in which Brees's skills have continued their noticeable decline and Michael Thomas has missed six games because of injuries and the alluring siren song of wide receiver misbehavior. (Thomas missed one game for "disciplinary reasons," reportedly after an altercation with a teammate during practice.) The Saints' offense this season often consisted almost entirely of Brees floating soft tosses into the flats or handing off so Kamara could dodge and juke his way around defenders for significant gains. Yet despite their overreliance on one individual, the Saints are 8 2, in first place in the N.F.C. South and at the front of the conference playoff race. Kamara isn't exactly an unsung hero: He's a three time Pro Bowl selection and a perennial first round pick in fantasy football leagues, where his combination of rushing and receiving production is highly coveted. But his contributions may be undervalued, for a variety of reasons. Kamara is a "committee back" who shares carries with Latavius Murray. He's an all purpose back who gets upstaged on statistical leaderboards by rushers whose production is not split into two categories, such as the Minnesota Vikings' Dalvin Cook (the current leader in scrimmage yards and touchdowns) and the Tennessee Titans' Derrick Henry (last year's rushing leader). 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. Kamara also lacks the folk hero origin story of Hill, the scrambling 30 year old perma prospect who overcame multiple collegiate injuries and worked his way up from the proverbial mailroom of the Saints' practice squad to earn an extended audition as Brees's long term replacement. Kamara played only a minor role in Hill's starting debut, rushing 13 times for 45 yards and one touchdown (with zero receptions) in Sunday's 24 9 victory over the Atlanta Falcons. Payton surprised the Falcons by treating Hill like a real quarterback instead of building a game plan out of read options and easy tosses to Kamara. Hill surprised his skeptics by looking more like a real quarterback than a Mary Sue written into the Saints' fan fiction to appeal to the middle aged high school legend demographic. It's one thing to use unexpected tactics to baffle the hapless Falcons, who earlier in the season mixed up the procedures for handling an onside kick and a live grenade. The Saints face the Denver Broncos' tighter defense on Sunday, and future opponents (including the Falcons again in two weeks) will be ready to take away the Hill to Thomas connection. The Saints will need Kamara more than ever. Then Brees will (probably) return as the playoffs approach, and the Saints will go back to needing Kamara just as much as they always have. No matter how irreplaceable Kamara may be to the Saints, he remains a long shot for M.V.P. consideration. The last nonquarterback to win the award was Adrian Peterson in 2012, when he rushed for 2,097 yards. The closest all purpose performers like Kamara to win the award were LaDainian Tomlinson, who had 2,323 scrimmage yards and 31 touchdowns in 2006, and Marshall Faulk, who had 2,189 combined scrimmage yards and 26 touchdowns in 2000. Kamara is on a pace for 1,886 yards and 19.2 touchdowns: excellent, but not eye popping enough to win an award almost exclusively reserved for quarterbacks. Kamara's M.V.P. case is far stronger once assumptions about the relative values of quarterbacks and running backs are set aside. He has spent most of the season assisting a fading Hall of Famer whose average throw this season traveled just 5.8 yards downfield (per N.F.L. Next Gen Stats, the second lowest figure in the league). He's now tasked with propping up a nondenominational Tim Tebow surrogate. He's responsible for 31 percent of the offensive yardage for a team that swept Tom Brady's Tampa Bay Buccaneers and is on a seven game winning streak. And his dual rusher receiver role makes him a more effective focal point for a modern N.F.L. offense than workhorses like Cook and Henry. OK, even accounting for all that, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes may still be a better M.V.P. candidate in 2020. Kamara remains the most valuable player on the Saints. And if he can lead them to the Super Bowl, that's all that will really matter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Every year, hundreds of thousands of obese Americans undergo weight loss surgery in a last ditch effort to shed pounds and control their Type 2 diabetes. Now a new study suggests that bariatric surgery may also have other significant health benefits, cutting the overall risk of serious cardiovascular events and premature death by almost half. The study, published in the medical journal JAMA on Monday, is not definitive. Though it compared the long term outcomes of about 2,300 bariatric surgery patients with some 11,500 closely matched patients who had not undergone surgery, it was an observational study, not a randomized controlled trial of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine. But the findings were so striking that an editorial accompanying the paper suggested that weight loss surgery, rather than medications, should be the preferred treatment for Type 2 diabetes in certain patients with obesity. "The new information here is the ability of bariatric surgery to control macrovascular events like strokes, heart attacks, heart failure and kidney disease," not just improve weight and diabetes control, said Dr. Edward H. Livingston, the editorial's author. "That's a big deal." A bariatric surgeon himself, Dr. Livingston said he had long been known as a "curmudgeon" who was reluctant to make claims about the long term health benefits of weight loss surgery. "This is the first time I've come out publicly saying, 'You know what, this may be a better way to go,'" he said, adding that insurers should cover the procedure more liberally. But other scientists were less certain, and even the study's authors said the findings must be confirmed in clinical trials that randomly assign patients to have surgery or continue with regular care. "This study needs to be taken with a giant grain of salt," said Dr. David M. Nathan, director of the Diabetes Center and Clinical Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study. "It will be interpreted as, 'You see, the surgery reduces heart disease,'" he said. But, he added, "it doesn't show that." A similar observational study last year that compared 5,301 obese patients with Type 2 diabetes who had bariatric surgery with 14,934 patients who served as controls also found improved outcomes in patients who underwent the operation. Both Dr. Nathan and Dr. Livingston said the comparisons between patients who had surgery and those who did not were flawed, because people who elect to undergo weight loss surgery are in many ways different from those who do not. Surgical patients are highly motivated, for instance, and healthy enough that surgeons do not turn them away. The results of the study of weight loss surgery known as bariatric surgery and sometimes as metabolic surgery were presented on Monday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Paris. The study, carried out at the Cleveland Clinic, was partly funded by Medtronic, a company that makes medical equipment used in weight loss surgery. The researchers first combed through electronic medical records to identify 2,287 patients with obesity and Type 2 diabetes who had undergone one of four types of weight loss surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. The majority of patients had undergone gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy, while a smaller number had adjustable gastric banding or a duodenal switch procedure. The scientists then identified 11,435 control patients with obesity and diabetes for comparison five times the number of surgery patients. Although the researchers made an effort to match the control patients closely to the surgery patients, there were differences between the groups. The members of the control group were slightly older and had double the smoking rates of the surgery group; the surgery patients were slightly heavier to begin with, and had higher rates of high blood pressure and high cholesterol. The main question the scientists sought to answer was whether those who had surgery were less likely to experience death or one of five major complications associated with obesity and diabetes: coronary artery events (like heart attacks), cerebrovascular events (like strokes), heart failure, atrial fibrillation or kidney disease. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The investigators found that over a period of eight years, 30.8 percent of patients who had weight loss surgery either died or developed one of the conditions, compared with 47.7 percent of patients who did not have surgery , a 40 percent reduction. Surgery patients were also 41 percent less likely to die of any cause during the study period: Ten percent died, compared with 17.8 percent of the patients who did not have surgery. "The differences were simply astonishing," said Dr. Steven Nissen, chief academic officer of the Heart Vascular Institute at Cleveland Clinic and the study's senior author. "We struggle to make small incremental improvements in cardiovascular mortality, and here's an eight year trial where the magnitude and absolute reduction are very large," he added. Patients who had metabolic surgery also lost an average of 15 percent more weight than those who did not, and they had lower blood sugar levels. They needed less medication to control diabetes and less insulin after the operation than the comparison group, and required fewer drugs to control blood pressure and cholesterol. The sustained weight loss means "you've taken away the burden on the heart of pumping blood to a large body mass," Dr. Nissen said. Dr. Ali Aminian, a surgeon who was the study's lead author, said the next project would be to carry out a randomized controlled clinical trial that randomly assigned similar patients either to weight loss surgery or to regular care. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
From left: Mayank Austen Soof; Krista Schlueter for The New York Times; Christopher Gregory for The New York Times; Bryan Derballa for The New York Times From left: Mayank Austen Soof; Krista Schlueter for The New York Times; Christopher Gregory for The New York Times; Bryan Derballa for The New York Times Credit... From left: Mayank Austen Soof; Krista Schlueter for The New York Times; Christopher Gregory for The New York Times; Bryan Derballa for The New York Times 15 Years Later, PEN World Voices Festival Is Still Trying to Unify the World The novelist Salman Rushdie co founded the PEN World Voices Festival 15 years ago, when he was president of PEN America, but it has roots in a conference that occurred decades earlier. In 1986, more than 600 prominent writers from around the world, including Rushdie, gathered for a PEN Congress in New York City. "It was sort of exciting for a young writer to be there amongst all these giants yelling at each other," Rushdie said. "There were lots and lots of really terrible arguments." Women writers felt underrepresented in the conference's panels. South African writers were upset that a government official who supported apartheid had been invited to speak. It was this sort of cross cultural dialogue that Rushdie hoped to emulate when he started the PEN World Voices Festival in 2005, in the wake of 9/11 and amid a resurgence in isolationist attitudes. Since then, the festival has convened hundreds of authors and intellectuals from dozens of countries to sit in conversation with American writers. Every year, the festival a week's worth of public events across New York City is organized around a theme tied to issues dominating public discourse. After Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 presidential election, the following year's events revolved around the subject of gender and power. Last year, following Donald Trump's first year in office, the theme was "resist and reimagine," and panelists discussed how other parts of the world had handled their own political unrest. Chip Rolley, the festival's director, said his goal was to draw a connection between what we're reading and "the stories in the news, the things we're talking about to our friend over dinner, what we're reading about on the subway station, the things we're tweeting about." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The theme of this year's festival, which kicks off Monday, is "open secrets," with events devoted to exploring the positive and negative effects of the increasingly blurred lines between public and private information. Some of the events highlight social movements that have emerged anchored by personal testimony. "It Happened to Me" for instance, will bring together seven writers, poets and essayists, including the French memoirist Edouard Louis and the Japanese journalist Shiori Ito, to share personal traumatic experiences. "Siri, Where's My Democracy?" will focus on the decrease of privacy online, with several journalists and a privacy expert discussing foreign intervention in the 2016 presidential election and what it means that our lives can now be monitored online. PEN America, founded almost a century ago, is both a literary and an advocacy organization, which means its content is "much edgier" and more political than that of many other literary groups, Nossel said. The organization's international reach also allows the conference to introduce attendees to new writers. Ito's book "Black Box," for instance, has not yet been translated into English. "It's oxygenating," Nossel said, "to hear these different perspectives and to consider how our country looks from the outside." The festival starts on Monday, and will close with a keynote lecture by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy at the Apollo Theater on May 12. More than 200 writers will participate, including Marlon James, Jennifer Egan and Masha Gessen. If in the past PEN World Voices was meant to unify American writers and intellectuals with the rest of the world, it's now also trying to do the same within the United States' borders. This year, for the first time, there will be additional days of programming in Los Angeles part of an attempt to nationalize the festival, Nossel said. "After the 2016 election, there were threats that we were used to combating around the world, but we never thought we would encounter on our own doorstep," she said, adding that it's essential that we "keep the channels of connection and communication, people to people, alive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LAGOS, Nigeria Fifty years ago, on Jan. 15, Nigeria's civil war ended. Fought between the country's southeast region, which seceded and called itself Biafra, and the rest of the country, which Britain supported and armed, the war was brutal. Over a million people died during three years of conflict. After being starved into submission by a blockade, the Biafrans surrendered and their leaders promised to be "loyal Nigerian citizens." Half a century later, the war's legacy continues to hold Nigeria captive. It simultaneously brings the country together and pushes it apart. In the early aftermath of the war, the country appeared to be unified. Despite the war's shocking human tragedy, reconciliation was remarkably rapid. War and partition ironically created a consensus: The country, now united, should never be allowed to break apart again. The government declared a general amnesty for wartime combatants, refused to punish either those who led the secession or those who suppressed it and did not give medals to any soldiers who fought in the so called Brothers' War. The country was re engineered to prevent another secession. To find a way for Nigeria's more than 250 ethnic groups to live together peacefully, the country was split into 36 states, most of which coincided with the location of a major ethnic group. The federal government, whose power was increased, provided the states with funds which created a financial deterrent against secession. Postwar leaders found another way of building national unity: the concept of "federal character." A new Constitution required the composition and conduct of government to "reflect the federal character of Nigeria." Its purpose was to ensure that no ethnic group would monopolize leadership of the government or be excluded from national economic and political opportunities. Still in place today, it in effect operates as one of the world's biggest affirmative action schemes. Nigerian law even bans political parties if they adopt names, logos or mottoes with ethnic, geographic or religious connotations, or if their membership does not satisfy constitutional diversity requirements. But these efforts to ensure national unity, however well intentioned, froze Nigeria in time bound assumptions about what the country should look like. The postwar desire to prevent another secession generated a near obsessive ethnic micromanaging of national life and created a nation that exists almost simply to share money and jobs. "Federal character" became the most controversial two words in Nigeria's Constitution. An ethnic quota regulates almost every facet of public life: Admission to the government and the Civil Service, schools and universities, the military and the police is decided by regional origin. Rather than working as a glue for unity, the fixation on ethnic sharing of national opportunities and resources made Nigerians more aware of their ethnic differences. Resentment rose in parts of the country badly served by the quota system. The irony is plain: To prevent the recurrence of a war fought at least partly on ethnic lines Biafra was populated mainly by the Igbo ethnic group Nigeria's rulers solidified ethnic identities. What's more, instead of ensuring the country's unity, the postwar settlement generated conflict. For much of the past 20 years, Nigeria's military has been engaged in fighting insurgencies in the north and south of the country. The long running insurgency in the oil producing Niger Delta region, in the country's south, has indirect links to the postwar settlement. By controlling revenues from the country's lucrative petroleum industry and requiring them to be shared nationwide, the federal government stripped control from local communities. The postwar settlement created another profound division: between Nigeria's people and their political leaders. For much of the past 50 years, Nigeria has been governed by the soldiers who won the war. For three decades, the form of rule was direct: Nigeria was under military dictatorship. But the passage to democracy, undertaken in 1999, did not dispel the military's hold on the country. Military rulers were reluctant to cede power to, or accept the demands of, civilian opposition groups that called for national restructuring and the devolution of power to state governments. Instead, the generals engineered what the civilian opposition criticized as an "army arrangement" and ceded power to one of their own the retired general Olusegun Obasanjo, to whom the Biafran Army surrendered in 1970. The generals' reluctance to dismantle the postwar system mummified Nigeria, ushering in a kind of gerontocracy. In a country whose population is overwhelmingly young two thirds are under 30 the distorting effects of such generational asymmetry cannot be understated. Even now, the officers of the civil war continue to rule the country. Muhammadu Buhari, a 77 year old retired major general, is Nigeria's current president. Even one of the seeming successes of the postwar period the speed with which the country moved on brought difficulties. In the rush to "forgive and forget" after the war, Nigeria skipped key questions about its purpose, its form and its destiny. There was no official narrative of what happened, nor an appraisal of lessons learned from it. The absence of official accounts led others to fill the void. Denied the chance to articulate their grievances through formal channels, such as a war crimes trial or a truth and reconciliation commission, the Igbo ethnic group, which spearheaded the secession, has richly chronicled its suffering and sense of injustice. Barely a year goes by without an Igbo author publishing a book about the war. One of the most successful African novels of the past 15 years, "Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, tells the story of the civil war from a distinctly Biafran perspective. The history written not by the war's winners but by its losers has become yet another means of division. The parts of the country that won the war want to stop talking about it and view the Igbos, with their memorializing habits, as something of a fifth column. Ironically, the Igbos, who may be Nigeria's most widely dispersed ethnic group, are found in every corner of the country. With substantial nationwide business and trading interests, polyglot and intermarried with many other groups, far from a group set on secession, they show how much Nigeria has changed in the past 50 years. But Nigeria remains haunted by the ghosts of its civil war. It simply stopped the war without addressing its root causes. And by refusing to discuss the war's legacies, the country's rulers bred a deep, dangerous disenchantment. The war may have ended 50 years ago, but its effects are far from over. Max Siollun ( maxsiollun) is a Nigerian historian and the author, most recently, of "Nigeria's Soldiers of Fortune." 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 |
GLEN ROCK, N.J. In a class full of aspiring engineers, the big bad wolf had to do more than just huff and puff to blow down the three little pigs' house. To start, he needed to get past a voice activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners. "Excellent engineering," their teacher, Mary Morrow, told them one day early this month. All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C's of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e n g i n e e r i n g. The high performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a 100,000 redesign of the science curriculum. Spurred by growing concerns that American students lack the skills to compete in a global economy, school districts nationwide are packing engineering lessons into already crowded schedules for even the youngest students, giving priority to a subject that was once left to after school robotics clubs and summer camps, or else waited until college. Supporters say that engineering reinforces math and science skills, promotes critical thinking and creativity, and teaches students not to be afraid of taking intellectual risks. "We still hear all the time that little kids can't engineer," said Christine Cunningham, director of Engineering is Elementary, a program developed at the Museum of Science in Boston that offers ready made lessons, for about 350 each, on 20 topics, and is now used in all 50 states, in more than 3,000 schools. "We say they're born engineers they naturally want to solve problems and we tend to educate it out of them." The Obama administration's Race to the Top competition, which will distribute 4.35 billion in education stimulus money to states, favors so called STEM programs, which stands for science, technology, engineering and math. At the same time, Congress is considering legislation, endorsed by more than 100 businesses and organizations like I.B.M. and Lockheed Martin, to promote engineering education from kindergarten through 12th grade. In Manassas, Va., which has a thriving biotech industry, the local school district has spent 300,000 on a children's engineering program since 2008, equipping its six elementary schools with tool kits for projects like making musical instruments from odds and ends, building bridges with uncooked spaghetti and launching hot air balloons made from trash bags and cups. At the new Midway Elementary School of Science and Engineering in Anderson, S.C., kindergartners celebrated Groundhog Day by stringing together a pulley system to lift a paper groundhog off the floor. But as these lessons have spread, some parents, teachers and engineers question how much children are really absorbing, and if schools should be expending limited resources on the subject. Engineering is not a requirement in most states. (New Jersey is an exception: the state standards mandate some exposure to engineering by second grade.) "Just giving kids an engineering problem to solve doesn't mean it will lead to learning," said Janine Remillard, an associate education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is not opposed, but believes that good teaching is essential to making any curriculum work well. She pointed out that schools have long offered project based learning, without calling it engineering, like building Lego robots or designing a cushion for an egg drop. First graders at Coleman Elementary School in Glen Rock, N.J. The district teaches 10 to 15 hours a year of engineering from kindergarten through fifth grade. "Ideally, you want them to come away with knowledge that goes beyond that problem," Professor Remillard said. "They could just go through the motions and end up with a robot that can do a particular thing, but the next problem they face will be a new problem. This is where good teaching comes in." William E. Kelly, a spokesman for the American Society for Engineering Education and former dean of the engineering school at Catholic University in Washington, cautioned that engineering lessons for youngsters should be kept in perspective. "You're not really learning what I would call engineering fundamentals," he said of such programs. "You're really learning about engineering." Here in Glen Rock, where students have long excelled at math and science, administrators and teachers decided to incorporate engineering into the elementary grades to connect classroom learning to real life, as well as to instill social skills like collaboration and cooperation that are valued in the work force, said Kathleen Regan, the curriculum director. "At first, everybody was like: 'Engineering? Kindergarten?' " recalled Dr. Regan, noting that one school board member joked that she must be married to an engineer (no; a lawyer). But now, Dr. Regan said, the engineering lessons have become so popular that children are talking about their projects at the dinner table, and some of their parents have started researching engineering colleges. Ms. Morrow and Jennifer Burke, who also teach classes for the gifted and talented, developed the engineering lessons and run them in all four elementary schools. They plan multiday projects, often built around classic and popular stories like the Three Little Pigs, and take students step by step through the engineering process: design, build, test, evaluate. "They have to have the thinking skills of an engineer to keep up with all the innovation that's constantly coming into their world," Ms. Morrow said. First graders were recently challenged with helping a farmer keep rabbits out of his garden. In teams of four, they brainstormed about building fences with difficult to scale ladders instead of doors and setting out food decoys for the rabbits. They drew up blueprints and then brought them to life with plastic plates, paper cups, straws and foam paper. Then they planned to test their ideas with pop up plastic rabbits. If the fences were breached, they would be asked to improve the design. "It gets your brain going," said Elizabeth Crowley, 7, who wants to be an engineer when she grows up. "And I actually learn something when I'm doing a project like you can work together to do something you couldn't do before." In the kindergarten class that was designing homes none out of hay, wood or brick for the three pigs, Ms. Morrow started the lesson by asking the 20 children sitting cross legged on the carpet if they knew what engineers do. "Well," Ms. Morrow allowed, "they could write a poem about something they build." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
What to wear on the campaign trail? This may seem like an odd question to ask on Christmas. After all, we just got through one electoral cycle, and the next doesn't start until well, 2015. We're in the fallow period of the year, or at least we should be except that I am not talking about political campaigns. Or not entirely. I am talking about Oscar campaigns, and my question was sparked by the push that has been waged quite publicly over the last few weeks by Angelina Jolie, director of "Unbroken," the movie based on Laura Hillenbrand's best selling book about World War II and the triumph of the human spirit, which opens Thursday. The film has been generating nominee buzz all autumn, especially for its director, and despite being passed over for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild nod, it still has a chance at the Academy Awards shortlist, to be announced in January. Presumably, a big opening weekend would help and if your family is anything like my family, moviegoing may play an important role in this week's holiday entertainment, especially feel good, true life epic moviegoing. And yet, perhaps more meaningful is the way Ms. Jolie has been shaping her image in pursuit of her goal, edging it from look at me stardom to self effacing behind the scenes dom. It has been fascinating to watch. And, it seems to me, it is as good a demonstration as any I have seen about how seriousness of wardrobe can be used to convey seriousness of purpose. Consider her ingredients: muted colors; classic shapes; skirts that are strict, straight and to the knee; pumps, never platforms; long sleeves. Imagine a perfectly tailored high fashion take on the librarian look of silver screen cliche and you'll get the idea: soft power for the celluloid set. And then consider Ms. Jolie on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter "risk takers" issue in a simple round neck white silk shirt. Or on the covers of both Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly in white shirt sleeves (there is nothing like a man's white shirt, the building block of C.E.O. style everywhere, to convey one's getting down to business side). Or, for that matter, the cover of Variety, in a black and white polka dot pussy bow blouse. See Ms. Jolie on "Today" in a simple black sweater and black trousers, and at the British premiere of "Unbroken" in a white caped pencil skirt dress by Ralph Russo. See her at Buckingham Palace, where the queen made her an honorary Dame Grand Cross in October, in a dove gray Ralph Russo skirt suit. See her in Sydney, Australia, this month in a draped gray Versace knee length sheath. See her, in other words, reject pattern and print and paillettes and anything at all distracting. (Remember her vials of Billy Bob Thornton's blood around the neck days?) And opt instead for clothes that telegraph propriety and taste and very good manners; clothes that would, in another context, probably be called boring, but that pretty succinctly imply that Ms. Jolie is committed to the mission of being behind the camera instead of in front and is, in fact, more comfortable there and will do what it takes to be a credible contender in that arena. To that end, even Ms. Jolie's red carpet appearances have been relatively conservative (compared, anyway, with the 2012 Versace leg baring moment), from her tux at the 2014 Bafta awards to the sparkly but fully covered Elie Saab she wore to the Oscars. It may seem ridiculous to believe that drab colors and a lack of skin are required to convince the world of career commitment, but like it or not, in the eye of many beholders, playing into the stereotype is a shortcut to achieving the result. Gravitas through greige! It may be embarrassing to admit (O.K., it definitely is, largely because of what it says about our own knee jerk assumptions), but it works. Simply consider the words of the actress Kerry Washington, who told Glamour in 2013 of her own epiphany vis a vis public dress: "I was like: 'I'm missing a really important tool. If I am the C.E.O. of the Kerry Washington Corporation, my marketing department is really lax.' So I sort of developed a new character: Red Carpet Kerry." The theory is the same. After all, part of the business of film is creating characters out of costume, and that works equally well for public character. And I am not suggesting that it is not sincerely meant simply that it is strategic. Certainly, Ms. Jolie is not the first actress to use clothes as a tool to facilitate a certain impression and professional trajectory. I would venture to say that, along with understanding that many actresses were deeply insecure about their own taste and more than happy to cede that decision making to someone else, a large chunk of the reason for Giorgio Armani's success with the Hollywood set has been his ability to tamp down the sex side of the equation. There's a reason, when Julia Roberts testified before Congress way back in 2002, she wore a white shirt, black jacket and eyeglasses. It's just that Ms. Jolie has embraced the idea more comprehensively, and possibly successfully, than her peers have. And the result has implications beyond the world of red carpets and Oscar nominations. Indeed, in a truly weird turn of events, adding the "Unbroken" campaign to Ms. Jolie's humanitarian work as United Nations special envoy has produced a not entirely ironic jolieforpresident movement online, such that Vanity Fair raised the question of her (unofficial) political intentions in its December cover story in full seriousness. In case you didn't read the piece, the actress replied, "I am open." Whether or not this ultimately adds up to an Oscar nomination for Ms. Jolie (and frankly, maybe she should get one for playing herself), her approach is worth studying as we enter that other campaign season, and questions of "appropriate" dress circle around politics. (See: the recent decision by Republicans in the Montana state legislature to create guidelines about what constitutes acceptable professional attire.) After all, she may be using it herself ere long. Think of it as a primer for spinmeisters and candidates everywhere even a present. Merry Christmas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
New York City neighborhoods change; that's life. And one that has changed drastically is the swath of real estate between 14th Street and Canal Street, east of the Bowery, known as the Lower East Side. Its northernmost section, the East Village, was psychedelia central in the 1960s, and in the early 1980s a hot, if short lived, art gallery scene. The whole area, with a history of ethnic diversity and radical politics, had been "Loisaida" to its largely working class, Spanish speaking residents. The 1980s art scene lasted just long enough to get the gentrification ball rolling and significantly alter the landscape, not least its ethnic mix. But after a lull, galleries are back, farther south, and lots of them. And a few historical traces of the rich culture of Loisaida hang on. More spring gallery guides: Highlights Brooklyn Chelsea TriBeCa, SoHo and the West Village Upper East Side and Harlem LOISAIDA CENTER Although most of the area's widely seen art of the 1980s was aimed at the mainstream art market, some if it was neighborhood directed. The exhibition "La Lucha Continua The Struggle Continues, 1985 2017," at the Loisaida Center, documents a monumental piece of that work: a series of 26 murals painted in 1985 and 1986 on the sides of four tenements surrounding an empty lot turned garden called La Plaza Cultural. This was political art in the truest sense, site specific, topical (its themes included gentrification, immigration and United States intervention in Latin America at the time) by a multicultural group of 34 artists, led by Eva Cockcroft (1936 1999). All but two of the murals are now gone, and those two exist in a vanishing state at the fence enclosed Plaza Cultural, on East Ninth Street, near Avenue C. But all were extensively documented, while in progress and finished. And the show, meticulously organized and annotated by Jane Weissman of the nonprofit Artmakers Inc., with input from some of the original participants, captures both the project's vibrant, bigger than life look and its spirit, which was very much a product of street wisdom and together we can ideals. KAI MATSUMIYA A tradition of political art on the Lower East Side lives on in the work of the Austrian born New York Conceptualist Rainer Ganahl, who has been responding to current events with antic, deadpan wit for almost 30 years. The work in this packed show, "Legacy: Bush, Obama, Trump," covers, in its references, roughly half of that time. In a series of ballpoint pen drawings, he illustrates the phenomenon of combat as made for TV spectacle, introduced by George W. Bush, and of drone warfare that was business as usual during the Obama administration. More recently, he has made drawings of words that have been Donald J. Trump's weapon of choice, like "fake news," in a 1930s German designed script. The good news, which is also bad news, is that Mr. Ganahl is unlikely ever to run out of fresh material for his art. The show, which has included public readings of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," will close on May 3 with the release of a related book. BADLANDS UNLIMITED This independent publishing company, established in 2010 by the Hugo Boss Prize winner Paul Chan, is staffed entirely by artists: Parker Bruce, Ian Cheng and Ambika Subramaniam, with Micaela Durand as director. It publishes in both digital and analog formats, and has temporarily turned its modest office headquarters into a gallery like display of one of its more recent products, a line of ready made protest posters called "New Proverbs." Rainbow colored, with eye socking type, they're modeled on signs designed and carried by members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. signs notable for their anti Semitic and anti gay and transgender content. The Badlands versions change the targets without always diluting the offensiveness. This is instant art as politics. Drop by, plunk down your cash and hit the street, ready for a fight. ABRONS ARTS CENTER This gallery at the Henry Street Settlement has a long record of nurturing socially conscious art, and sustains it with "Archival Alchemy," a group show assembled by Saisha Grayson for the 20th anniversary of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective. Much of what's here is, indeed, archival, in the sense of its recycling material from a near and distant past, as in Maya Mackrandilal's takeaway photo tributes to historic female activists; Zinnia Naqvi's real and re enacted family pictures; and in the binders of the information compiled by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani on South Asian immigrants reported missing in the United States since Sept. 11. The collective energy here is strong, even when individual entries aren't easily readable. And one message prevails: The idea of post identity art is not only undesirable, but it's also delusional. STEVEN HARVEY FINE ART PROJECTS Sedrick Huckaby, who lives in Fort Worth, takes his New York solo debut bow with this wonderful show, "The 99%," and brings much of the population of his African American neighborhood with him into the limelight. His small oil on canvas head shot paintings of family members are as texturally dense and detail specific as ancient Egyptian Fayum portraits. In his dozens of lithographic likenesses of hometown friends he likened the series to a patchwork quilt the sitters, accompanied by conversational quotations, look casually but distinctly regal. Symbolism enters the work in a paint caked sculptural tableau about the plague of black incarceration, but politics is really there throughout the exhibition, which feels like a completely realized act of civic and familial devotion. MITCHELL ALGUS GALLERY In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Steve Keister's abstract sculptures were one of the delights of the SoHo gallery scene. Hollow, suspended fiberglass forms, often pointed like projectiles, brought to mind kites and rockets, objects that fell between missiles and toys. He went on to make floor bound works that repurposed pieces of Modernist furniture as armatures for stretched spandex. For a while he didn't seem to show much, and when he returned, it was with glazed ceramic pieces cast from plastic foam packing materials assembled to suggest pre Columbian sculptures: bat gods, monkey gods, jungle cats. In "Post Columbian," the mini survey at Mitchell Algus, we get 1987 and 2017, and they're both terrific in complementary ways: Abstract meets Aztec, which, of course, happened in an earlier history of Modern art. INVISIBLE EXPORTS Stephen Irwin, who lived and worked mostly in his birthplace of Louisville, Ky., and died there of chronic heart disease in 2010, at 51, used commercial pornography, gay and straight, as his basic material. Extracting images from magazines, he bleached and sanded the surfaces until the sexual content was reduced to a minimum: A hand reaches out from what looks like a tear in a curtain; a wide patch of white could be sand or skin. The effect is the visual equivalent of hearing the faint sounds of what might, or might not be, lovemaking coming from another room. In this show, titled "Check to see if still dead inside," it leaves eroticism teasing but unsensational, and may have provided a way for an artist living with a constant threat of erasure to deal with that idea. CALLICOON FINE ARTS The multidisciplinary artist Lee Relvas is, among other things, a performer, and her lithe, openwork sculptures in "Some Phrases," at Callicoon, give the impression of choreography in progress. Although, at first glance, they look completely organic, like bentwood crafting, they're made in segments, with lengths of sanded down plywood joined with epoxy. The curving shapes have a graphic lift, like music notations unsurprising, given the artist's parallel career as a singer and composer. She's a writer, too, and her sculpture gains a lot a necessary shot of drama by being viewed through the lens of a short first person memoir, identified by Ms. Relvas as "a fiction," that comes as a handout with the show. BRIDGET DONAHUE The scroll like, free hanging paintings of the Chicago based artist Lisa Alvarado have been most often seen as backdrops for the music group Natural Information Society, for which she plays harmonium. Her recent inclusion in the traveling exhibition "The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now," has changed that, and in her New York solo debut at Bridget Donahue, "Sound Talisman," Ms. Alvarado is a painting star. Her two sided banners divide the open gallery into chapel like spaces that sing with color and pattern, channeling Mexican and Tibetan textiles; Anni Albers; and AfriCobra artists like Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell and Barbara Jones Hogu. With their funky luxe, her banners hold their own just fine, though they will again set the scene for music when Natural Information Society's founder, Joshua Abrams, performs at the gallery on May 8. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
According to Peter Hansen, the property's director of food and beverage, the CBD menu has been a big success. "All the items are frequently ordered, and our customers keep asking us for more options," he said. Also in California, the Spa Solage at Solage, Auberge Resorts Collection, in Napa Valley, launched a massage, facial and body scrub ( 160 to 420) which all incorporate a CBD oil, an anti inflammatory that is supposed to help with insomnia, pain relief, anxiety and eczema. (The oil does not contain THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana.) Peggy O'Shaughnessy of Austin, Tex., and her daughter, Claire Rivers, booked CBD facials at the spa in August, and Ms. O'Shaughnessy said that the experience was unlike any other facial they've had. "Claire wanted to see if the facial would help her inflammation, and it made a big difference," she said. "For me, it was so deeply relaxing. I could feel a difference compared with other facials." Body Wraps with Sage, Lavender and CBD in Colorado The spa at the St Julien Hotel Spa, in Boulder, Colo., also has several new CBD treatments (none contain THC) including a classic massage, a deep tissue massage and a service called the Ultimate Colorado Bliss Experience (from 160 to 295) that includes a rose sugar scrub, a body wrap with lavender and sage CBD infused body butters and scalp and body massages. "Given all the research about the benefits of CBD, we couldn't not offer these," said Susan Hunnell, the spa's director. One of the spa's massage therapists, Nadene Moccia, said that many of her regular clients are thrilled about the services. "Since marijuana became legal in Colorado, I've had clients ask if we could give treatments with CBD because they had heard about the wellness benefits, and now, I can say yes," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
I find myself fantasizing about a Covid 19 vaccine that will get us back to living our lives. About a triumphant announcement that the trial was a resounding success, and science has won, that there is a safe effective vaccine in production, and that we should all line up to get our shots a vaccine that will give us back freedom of association, freedom of travel, freedom from the various kinds of worry, anxiety and fear that are filling our news cycles and our minds. It's a comforting fantasy, but for now it's just a fantasy. Caught in this endless nonstop news swirl, many people parents and others can probably understand what it's like to be hoping and waiting and maybe even praying for a vaccine. It's a moment that should connect us with our not too distant history, and maybe make us wonder whether we've lost some valuable perspective. In 1955, when the first clinical trials showed that Jonas Salk's new polio vaccine was "safe, effective and potent," it was front page headline, above the fold news. The New York Times offered this: SALK POLIO VACCINE PROVES SUCCESS; MILLIONS WILL BE IMMUNIZED SOON; CITY SCHOOLS BEGIN SHOTS APRIL 25. "It was a remarkable moment when an entire nation breathed a sigh of relief that this hideous childhood disease could be prevented," said David Oshinsky, a professor of medicine at N.Y.U. Langone Health, and the author of "Polio: An American Story." "When that announcement was made, church bells chimed, factory whistles went off, adults ran into the street and began hugging each other." Can you imagine the sigh of relief when there's an effective coronavirus vaccine? Given the intensity of the news cycle right now, it's not actually so hard to imagine we might have an international moment like the one that came when the Salk trial results were announced: banner headlines, church bells ringing. A medical V Day, where V meant both vaccine and victory, over a feared and previously deadly enemy. For most of us alive now, it's a new experience to be longing for a vaccine. The success of the Ebola vaccine (approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2019) was a great and speedy achievement, but I'm not sure that the general public in the United States was profoundly aware of it, or profoundly relieved. And the vaccines that have been added into the schedule in recent years work wonderfully, but it's not clear that people were living in fear, waiting and hoping for an HPV vaccine, or even a meningitis vaccine. One vaccine that many people wished for urgently but that never arrived was an H.I.V. vaccine, which is still not close. Yes, there was powerful advocacy by people whose children's lives had been destroyed by meningitis (the so called meningitis vaccine actually specifically works against one very particular bacteria, Neisseria meningitidis, so named for its propensity to cause meningitis). But it wasn't something that had the general public terrorized, as polio terrorized parents in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. "Right after the vaccine was described as safe, potent and effective, Jonas Salk was invited to the White House," to meet President Eisenhower, Dr. Oshinsky said. "And for the first time in anyone's memory, Ike really choked up, thanked him for saving the children of the world, and that really is just a high moment in science, it's hard to imagine the gratitude people felt." If we get a vaccine for the coronavirus, it will immediately make our world a safer, easier, more reassuring place once again. Science will have solved a problem, so that we can once more walk (and fly and sail) more comfortably through the world at least until the next problem comes along. Vaccines have given us such remarkable peace of mind that we have come to take them for granted. Can we really any longer imagine the world before vaccines? Imagine for a minute what it was like when the virus out there was smallpox, a much deadlier epidemic disease than Covid 19. Or more recently, when the virus out there was polio, which regularly caused paralysis and death in children. People still had to go about their business and make their decisions about every detail of daily life: Attend a social gathering? Let your kid go to the swimming pool on a hot day? Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Vaccines give us a way to protect ourselves individually, but they also give us a way to create a safer world. Smallpox vaccine was not only a person by person triumph, but a huge international human victory over an accumulated historical tide of human misery and death. People have lost that sense of awe and gratitude for both the individual safety that vaccines represent, and also for the glorious communal project of collectively wiping out a source of pain and disability and death. "Polio really taught people that science could do it," Dr. Oshinsky said. "What made vaccines so vitally important at that time was that they were providing protection against diseases that were out there that people saw every day." And with the disappearance of many of those diseases, that sense of imminent danger had perhaps been lost. Consider the measles epidemic of 2019, which meant that not only the children whose parents distrusted and refused a safe and effective vaccine were at risk, but also that babies too young to be vaccinated and people with immune deficiencies were suddenly living with the possibility that the virus might be in their surroundings. Now, recent events have reminded us all of what it is like to feel vulnerable and unprotected. Same thing with flu there's a safe flu vaccine, not always perfect, but it lowers your odds of getting the disease, and of getting really sick if you do get the disease. And again, flu vaccine reduces the chance that the virus will be circulating in the population, and that the vulnerable (children, the elderly, those with underlying medical conditions) will be exposed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 20,000 (and possibly more than 50,000) deaths from flu this season in the United States, including over a hundred in children. And yet, it's a struggle every year to convince people to take flu seriously, to get vaccinated, to practice good handwashing all the things that are suddenly understood to be matters of life and death. Maybe we could all resolve that next year (and yes, there will be a next year), we'll take flu seriously and greet the flu vaccine with at least a little sense of celebration and appreciation of science and public health. "It breaks my heart to see that the fear of a pandemic is the only thing that may bring this respect for science back," Dr. Oshinsky said. "What we have now is sort of a rediscovery of the fact that we do need this sort of protection." And when we do have that sort of protection, when the Covid vaccine comes, we will need to cooperate and think collectively and deploy it as we should do with the flu vaccine not only to save our individual selves, but to make a safer world. Vaccines are one of our human victories, a triumph of our ingenuity and intelligence, our science taking advantage of our biology by turning on our immune systems, and we need to be worthy of them. Dr. Perri Klass is the author of the forthcoming book "A Good Time to Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future," on how our world has been transformed by the radical decline of infant and child mortality. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Often, the brands that we think of as big umbrella mainstream dinosaurs did not in fact begin that way. I remember fondly and a little perplexedly the Banana Republic that was on the immediate left of the entrance to the Pier 17 mall at South Street Seaport when it opened in 1985. There were plants jutting out at odd angles, and most of the safari gear was, to my memory, sand beige or military green. Shopping there was experiential and disorienting, just as intense as in the Sharper Image across the hall, which still had a "Back to the Future" sheen. Banana Republic, J. Crew, even the Gap: They all began by encapsulating a narrow slice of American life, and then streamlined, expanded and mainstreamed it from there. It is too early to say with certainty whether Faherty will have such longevity, or impact. But it is taking a path already trod by bigger, now universally known companies, starting with a particular outsider aesthetic and sandpapering it just enough to get broader traction. In Faherty's case, the muse is the ocean. Founded in 2013 by twin brothers, both with beach hair, the company specializes in clothing appropriate for dressing up to head out for a day on the sand, then stripping down once you get there. There isn't much in the way of outerwear. Most of the clothes are pre wrinkled, or at least unstructured. Colors tend toward pastels that have been run through the washing machine 50 times faded, but still retaining that saccharine glow. The forsaking of such a specific vision is a necessary step on the path toward wide scale growth. Not everyone lives near a beach, or even likes going to one. (For example, me.) People in the middle of the country might choose to dress aspirationally, or they might find doing so to be unreasonable. In order to convince people outside your core audience that you have value, you typically have to soften your edges a bit, in order to let more people in. This will happen to Faherty at some point perhaps soon if it's aggressive, or lucky, or both. It has six stores right now: two in Manhattan, one in Boston, one on Nantucket, and two in Southern California. None are more than a few miles from an ocean. This is a starting point, but probably not the end. I visited both New York locations one in SoHo, the other in the West Village in recent weeks. One afternoon, I wandered in wearing all black, which is a thing I've found myself doing lately, perhaps because I'm going through a hardcore phase, or perhaps because I seek armor against a world that feels increasingly doomed to chaos, against which some camouflage is necessary. Everything in the store shrieked at me to tell me I was wrong. Sky blue! Pale pink! Baja! Ikat! All the looks of surf hippies the world over had been gathered here in one place. It was toylike and a bit ideologically stultifying. Even though there were all sorts of garments, they all seemed designed for the same exact purpose. The long sleeve button up shirts, mostly in faded plaids ( 128 to 168), hung loosely, so as not to grip the body or absorb its sweat. The short sleeve polos ( 88) had slightly more structure but still felt limp. These were clothes that make sense in direct proportion to our proximity to water and sunshine. Both stores are relatively small, which worked against the implicit breeze suggested by the clothes. In the dressing room, accented with nautical theme pieces, I tried on one colorful piece after the next pink shorts, lavender plaid shirt with little success. As a lark, I took a chance on a hooded anorak in a Nantucket red based Baja print ( 228), which is to say, a trompe l'oeil of an actual (and presumably much, much cheaper) Baja hoodie. It looked sharp enough, even if it lacked imagination. It was unclear just who might have need for a garment less effective and more expensive than the one it replaces. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
It should have been the perfect overture: A passionate opera fan meets a star tenor at a glamorous cast party. But the curtain nearly fell before their love story even began. The tenor, Michael Fabiano, had just brought down the house at the Metropolitan Opera singing the male lead in Verdi's "La Traviata" that night in February 2017. After changing out of his costume and a dark wig that covered his cropped, nearly bald head he went to the party, where he found himself chatting with Bryan L. McCalister, a young associate director on the Met's board. "I asked, 'What did you think of the performance tonight?'" Mr. Fabiano, 34, recalled. "He said, 'Oh, I guess it was O.K. It wasn't that good. I was here when it was a new production, when Natalie Dessay and some other tenor sang.' He didn't even name the tenor!" That all changed when a Met official picked up a microphone and began thanking the cast, going from the smallest roles to the biggest. When he got to the "wonderful Alfredo, Michael Fabiano," Mr. Fabiano gave what he described as "an exaggerated papal wave." Mr. McCalister, mortified, let out a gasp and turned a deep, deep red. "I was like, 'Oh no!"' Mr. McCalister, 40, recalled. (In his defense, he explained, he had been a soprano fan who paid little attention to tenors: "If you ask me who sang Isolde, I'm like, Debbie Voigt! And if you ask who sang Tristan, I have no clue.") He tried to fix things by belatedly praising Mr. Fabiano's performance, but the damage was done. "I said, 'I'll see you later,' and I walked away," Mr. Fabiano said. That might have been that, had a deus ex machina not intervened in the form of Ann Ziff, the chairwoman of the Met board. She invited them both to her table at dinner. "We ended up talking the rest of the night, and by the end of the night I had asked him out," Mr. Fabiano said. Soon they were spending almost all of their time together. "With an opera singer, you either do or you don't," explained Mr. Fabiano, who sings at leading opera houses all over the world and travels for most of the year. "You can't drag it out, and space it out, and go on dates here and there. Because I'm on the road so much." A few weeks after they met, Mr. McCalister flew to Saba, in the Caribbean, to go diving, and visited the duty free shop. "I sized my engagement finger, and took a picture of it and wrote the number '9' on it with a little arrow and texted it to him," Mr. McCalister said. "I knew. I knew." But there was a cloud on the horizon. Mr. Fabiano's New York engagement was nearing an end, and he would soon have to resume the peripatetic life of an opera singer, spending up to 10 months a year traveling, with engagements booked years in advance. His next stop was Aix en Provence, France, where he was singing Don Jose in a new production of Bizet's "Carmen." Mr. Fabiano proposed the night before he left for Aix, that May. Mr. McCalister flew to Aix a few weeks later to spend Memorial Day weekend with Mr. Fabiano, who was staying in a Provencal home of a patron of the festival, complete with a lavender field, and grew despondent at the thought of returning to New York. "I was like, 'I don't want to leave,'" Mr. McCalister said. "Michael said: 'You don't have to.'" So Mr. McCalister, who is developing an image consulting company and works as the global brand ambassador for Pologeorgis, a luxury outerwear company, flew back to New York, put his affairs in order, and then joined Mr. Fabiano on the road. It surprised some fans, he said, who had not realized he was gay. "My colleagues, the people that I work with, my friends, my family, I'm out to everybody," he said. "It wasn't like I was hiding. But I never felt the need to make some pronouncement about it, because it doesn't define who I am. My work defines who I am, my service defines who I am. The pronouncement that was important was that I was marrying someone wonderful. And it happens to be a man." Since then, he said, he and Mr. McCalister had been embraced and thanked by many for their openness. Because even in 2018 in the world of opera, when so many leading singers, conductors, composers, directors and critics are gay, some stars are not out. Mr. Fabiano said that as a young singer he had been warned to never discuss his sexuality, and told that it would hurt his chances of becoming a serious opera singer. He said he was glad to leave that advice behind. "I cannot help but think of the many marriages that have taken place on the stage here," said Joseph Della Fave, Mr. Fabiano's uncle who was ordained by the Universal Life Church to officiate. "And I hope that your marriage is nothing like any of them." He cited operas with ill fated marriages. He spoke of the couple's future together, in operatic terms: "Will you hit the high notes, and recover when you don't? Will you be willing to transpose the score when your voices change? Will you have the fortitude and commitment to make it through a duller second act?" During their vows, Mr. McCalister told Mr. Fabiano, who flies planes in his spare time, that "I love your sense of adventure and willingness to take calculated risks" and promised him head rubs "for now, after each performance, and then still when we venture to new mountains and greater heights." And Mr. Fabiano spoke about a final act. "Please promise me," he said to Mr. McCalister, "that you will live at least one hour after me, because I don't want to be on this earth without you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Three years ago, Alexandra Hirsch moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, taking in a friend as a roommate. The sunny two bedroom was nicely redone inside. "It was stereotypically perfect Brooklyn," she said. Ms. Hirsch, 28, an interior designer for an architecture firm, met Brady Donnelly through her roommate. Mr. Donnelly moved in a year ago, and later the roommate went off to travel. The apartment was in the thick of hipster Brooklyn, atop the restaurant Five Leaves, on a corner near McCarren Park. "It was really busy, really central, a hectic and young place to live," said Mr. Donnelly, 29, who owns a digital creative agency, Hungry. Friends who lived nearby started moving elsewhere in Brooklyn. The couple's top floor apartment had leaks after storms. "I once had every single pot and pan out holding water," Ms. Hirsch said. They were also concerned that Hudson, an Old English bulldog, would eventually have trouble with the stairs. The catalyst for their departure, however, was the rising rent, which was pushing 4,000 a month. They didn't need a second bedroom. "We were basically paying for a storage room," Ms. Hirsch said. Last summer, they began the hunt for someplace smaller and cheaper, between 3,000 and 3,500 a month. The couple wanted to stay in Brooklyn, and hoped for a sunny, dog friendly one bedroom in a charming brownstone, with few stairs for Hudson. Condition was important so "we wouldn't have to worry about coming home to a leak or something broken," Ms. Hirsch said. Ms. Hirsch took charge of the hunt. They considered a top floor two bedroom on Dean Street in Crown Heights, for just 2,800 a month, but were leery of the stairs and another potentially leaky top floor. "It would be moving laterally, aside from we would be spending less," she said. Everything Ms. Hirsch visited seemed lackluster. "To make the move is a big deal," she said. "It's expensive and it takes a lot of time. There was nothing that made us want to jump when we saw any of them." After viewing 347 Lorimer, a renovated clothing factory in Williamsburg, the couple changed their approach. They liked the conveniences offered by the amenity filled building, though they moved on because the neighborhood seemed desolate. "Once we started thinking about ease of life, we started liking the idea of a new building with all of the amenities," Ms. Hirsch said. "It will help us get through our day better." They had seen ads for 365 Bond, rising on Bond Street near the Gowanus Canal. The neighborhood seemed interesting and convenient. The building offered extras they knew they would use a dog walking service, a valet for dry cleaning, a rooftop, common rooms and a gym on site rather than several blocks away. She summoned Mr. Donnelly. "I couldn't tell if my anxiety was excitement or a bad anxiety," she said. "I needed another opinion." His opinion was they should jump on it. "It was hard to come up with reasons not to," he said. "They roll out apartment openings in groups, so we didn't know if the next batch would fit within our budget." Ms. Hirsch preferred a boxy layout facing the street with a big kitchen that included a peninsula. Mr. Donnelly preferred a longer, narrower corner unit facing an interior courtyard. But the apartment with the big kitchen had just been rented, so Mr. Donnelly got his wish. The building's 430 units are around 70 percent rented, said one of the leasing agents, Aster Thomas, a saleswoman at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The couple's rent is 3,580 a month. They received one month free on a 13 month lease, making their monthly layout equivalent to 3,305. They arrived late in the summer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
He fostered the careers of more than a dozen Nobel laureates, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing. Tom Maschler, the swashbuckling British publisher who fostered the literary careers of more than a dozen Nobel laureates and conceived the coveted Booker Prize to promote fiction, died on Oct. 15 in a hospital near his home in Luberon, in southeastern France. He was 87. His death was confirmed by the Central Hospital of Apt, about 40 miles east of Avignon. A Jewish refugee from Nazi occupied Vienna, where his father was a publisher, Mr. Maschler was 26 in 1960 when he was named literary director of Jonathan Cape, the prominent London publishing firm, a month after the death of its founder. He catapulted to early fame by buying the British rights to Joseph Heller's debut novel, "Catch 22," for a bargain 250 pounds in 1961 (the equivalent of about 700 then and about 6,500 today), and, the next year, by transplanting himself to Idaho shortly after the suicide of Ernest Hemingway to help Hemingway's widow, Mary, prepare the novelist's memoir "A Moveable Feast" for publication. Among the authors Mr. Maschler discovered, incubated or published and who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature were Gabriel Garcia Marquez ("the greatest writer I have published ever," he once said), Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa and V.S. Naipaul. He also published or nurtured Martin Amis, Jeffrey Archer, Julian Barnes, Bruce Chatwin, Roald Dahl, John Fowles, Clive James, Ian McEwan, Edna O'Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut. Neither he nor his critics considered him a scholar. He was rejected by the University of Oxford when he applied as an English major. He admitted to being a labored writer. His memoir, "Publisher" (2005), was widely mocked by reviewers, including one who concluded that it established Mr. Maschler's mantra as "When in doubt, claim credit." But no one disputed that the splashy Mr. Maschler, who had lived largely by his own wits since he was 12, had jolted the clubby British publishing world with his discerning eye for fiction and his Barnumesque promotional ingenuity. He acquired a collection of writings and doodles by John Lennon and published them in two volumes, "In His Own Write" in 1964 and "A Spaniard in the Works" in 1965. After a painting by Kit Williams in a Mayfair gallery caught Mr. Maschler's eye, he published Mr. Williams's picture book "Masquerade" (1979), which contained hidden clues to the search for a jeweled rabbit and inspired a treasure hunt mania. He decided to publish an early manuscript attributed to an author named Virginia Stephen, before he was informed that it was the maiden name of Virginia Woolf. And after overhearing Desmond Morris, a zoologist, drop the phrase at a cocktail party, he commissioned Dr. Morris to write "The Naked Ape" (1967), a biological perspective on human behavior that became a best seller. He later recalled counseling Dr. Morris, "If you turn this into a book, it'll be so successful you'll never again be taken seriously by scientists, but you'll be very rich." His crowning achievement arguably came in 1969, when he persuaded the sugar trading firm Booker McConnell to establish a literary prize to rival the French Prix Goncourt. The award, given annually, was later called the Man Booker Prize and is now known as the Booker Prize. "The Booker may be the most important thing I've ever done," Mr. Maschler told The Guardian in 2005. "It certainly had an impact, and if it means people think they should occasionally read a good novel, that is something I'm very proud of." Thomas Michael Maschler was born on Aug. 16, 1933, in Berlin to Kurt Maschler, a successful publisher's representative who later became a publisher himself, and Rita (Lechner) Maschler. The family fled to Vienna in 1938 to escape anti Jewish pogroms, but the Nazis soon followed. When Nazis arrived at the Maschlers' home to arrest Kurt, a Jewish Socialist, he was away on business. They confiscated his valuables but allowed Tom one keepsake from his father's study. He chose a blue crayon. Treated for manic depression as an adult, Mr. Maschler found therapy unhelpful. "They invariably latched on to this business of Nazis coming to the house when I was 5," he told The Guardian. "It really didn't affect me, but therapists do love that sort of thing." (After the war, though, he learned that three of his grandparents had been murdered in the Holocaust.) Failing to gain passage to Sweden, where they had hoped to proceed to America, Tom and his mother moved to Britain. (His parents had separated by then.) His mother took a housekeeping job on a country estate while he attended a Quaker school. When he was 12, he was sent to Brittany to learn French. Shortly after that he won a summer scholarship to a kibbutz in Israel, which he was able to reach only after he had audaciously written David Ben Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, asking him to intercede on his behalf. Mr. Maschler was admitted to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics (but not English). He rejected the offer after he learned that he had been accepted because of his prowess at tennis. Instead he traveled to the United States, where he worked in a tuna cannery, was detained for hitchhiking and wrote travel articles for The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times (for which in 1952, at the age of 19, he chronicled a sojourn that had begun when he arrived in New York that year with 13). He returned to Europe and, after succeeding as a tour guide in Britain and failing as a film director in Italy, entered publishing in 1955 as a production assistant at Andre Deutsch. He moved to MacGibbon Kee, to Penguin and finally to Cape, where he was chairman from 1970 until the company was bought by Random House in 1991. Mr. Maschler's survivors include his wife, Regina (Kulinicz) Maschler, whom he married in 1988; three children, Ben, Hannah and Alice, from his first marriage, to Fay Coventry; and several grandchildren. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Why Some Say the Eclipse Is Best Experienced in a Crowd Right about now, maybe you're looking at your bank account and reports of unprecedented traffic and wondering why you thought it was a good idea to experience the eclipse in the particular spot you chose. You felt original, planning to watch near a mountain of cars (Carhenge, near Alliance, Neb.) or along the moon's limb (Glendo, Wyo.). But then you saw that thousands of other people had the same idea. Some are warning of a "zombie apocalypse," as hordes of befuddled sky gazers strain the resources of towns more accustomed to hosting pancake breakfasts than managing Coachella size gatherings. Don't worry. Here are four reasons human behavior researchers say that you made the right decision to experience the eclipse in a crowd even if the portable toilets overflow. Why is it that excitement can feel so much more intense when we're in a group with others feeling the same emotion? Fergus Neville, a social psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, believes this results from seeing our own emotions reflected in the faces of others around us, which validates our own experience and amplifies the intensity of our feelings. Using a variety of tools, including surveys and heart rate measures, he has tried to assess this magnification process. "I think that you can have the experience with small groups, but that the more people you see in your group who are sharing your experience, then the stronger the validation effect and thus the stronger the experience," he said in an email. Perhaps this is worth keeping in mind the day before the eclipse, as you drive around trying to find a store that hasn't yet sold out of water. Given the macho, aggressive reputation that some sports fans have, Dr. Neville said people are often surprised by that finding. What it hints at is something other researchers have found as well: Many of us who seem not to want to interact with strangers actually do. We just don't know how to make it happen in normal life. So why is it much easier to do in some crowds than others? The critical ingredient, researchers say, is a sense of shared social identity. That's something that is pretty much guaranteed in a field full of people in matching glasses, waiting for the moon to cover the sun regardless of whether you hang out in the same kinds of places normally. This past weekend in Charlottesville was a tragic reminder of how group dynamics can go awry. But a crowd that gathers to protest something, researchers say, operates differently than a crowd that gathers to enjoy an experience. And in either case, more people doesn't necessarily translate into more danger. "The fear of crowds flows from the idea that crowds are irrational and that they need to be controlled," said Clifford Stott, a social psychologist at Keele University in Britain. But a large body of research from the past decade, he said, has shown that "people don't panic people self regulate." That's not to say that local officials are off the hook. Helping ensure that there's sufficient water and emergency services requires planning. It's also crucial that even when authorities feel like their resources are strained, they continue to remind themselves that people are there for something positive and capable of responding to thoughtful communication. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
ARLENE AND LARRY DUNN, both music aficionados, had always been fans of two ensembles at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. So, the Dunns put the retirement community Kendal at Oberlin on the top of their list after they began looking for a new home. In addition to having a rich cultural life, the Dunns could audit Oberlin's classes free and attend lectures. Last year, the Dunns sold their home in rural LaCrosse, Ind., and moved to the college community in neighboring Ohio. "We love being around young people," said Ms. Dunn, who is 71. "And Oberlin is a very active community." Like the Dunns, many other retirees are opting for college retirement communities, where they can take lifelong learning courses, mentor college students and even get a degree. Though exact estimates vary, there are now about 60 college retirement communities in the United States, like those near Stanford, Notre Dame and Penn State. As baby boomers retire in large numbers, these communities will experience significant upticks in popularity, said Andrew J. Carle, an assistant professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a senior housing expert. People want intellectually stimulating environments, he added. Learning driven communities offer other benefits, experts say. Housing prices are usually stable in college towns, since there's a steady influx of people, says Jan Cullinane, author of "Retire Happy" and other books. And retirees can also attend plentiful cultural and sports events. Even more important, medical care near universities is usually cutting edge, Ms. Cullinane added. "Universities have medical institutions that do ongoing research," she said, adding that the University of Michigan, which also has a retirement community nearby, is doing research on celiac disease. Some communities are also tightly intertwined with colleges, bringing students and residents together. Lasell Village, on the campus of Lasell College in Newton, Mass., is managed by the college. Residents are required to take 450 hours of classes every calendar year. Wide ranging choices include criminology, the Ecstatic Heart of Poetry and Crucial Cases in American History. All of the Lasell Village classes are overseen by a college dean. And each of the 16 mostly residential buildings has a classroom, where over 60 classes are held, in addition to the classes offered at the college. "People need engagement," says Paula Panchuck, vice president of Lasell Village at Lasell College. "They do not have to sit and twiddle their thumbs here." Dr. Warner Slack, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and his wife sold their house in Newton to move to Lasell Village in 2012. Though Dr. Slack is still practicing, his wife has taken watercolor classes, along with studying the psychology of loss and other topics. "We can use all of the Lasell College facilities, including the library," said Dr. Slack, 80. "And the courses keep people mentally alive. There's also a lot of interaction with college students." One downside, experts add, is that college retirement community fees can be costly. Upfront entrance fees can range from an average of 100,000 to 500,000, says Mr. Carle, the George Mason professor. Then there are also monthly fees, which may include the cost of rent, meals and transportation. Though most communities offer only rentals, they also usually offer continuing care, he adds, like nursing home supervision, and the level of care depends on the contract you sign. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' At Kendal at Oberlin, entrance fees range from 92,000 to 488,500 and are based on the residence size. Additional monthly apartment fees are 2,591 to 4,844, which also depend on the size of the apartment. And at Lasell Village, entrance fees start at 300,000; monthly fees begin at 3,100. For that cost, however, residents can also receive more intensive care like assisted living and nursing home care as they age. Some communities even have on site doctors and nurses. "That care continuum is important," Mr. Carle said. The bulk of the entrance fee is also typically refundable after a resident moves out. The contract will show the exact percent at Lasell Village it's 90 percent. Experts suggest having an elder care lawyer check your contract. Even within college retirement communities, contracts vary widely. Most people opt for a life care contract, where residents pay an entrance fee and monthly fees, said Lisa McCracken, a senior vice president in Ziegler investment bank's senior living sector. The retirement community then picks up most of a resident's long term care costs. However, contracts may also be offered as modified versions or fee for service, she added. There are lower cost options, too, that don't include higher levels of care. The college retirement community Rivers Run, near the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, focuses on independent living residents, and there are no upfront fees. Instead, people can buy a cottage or rent an apartment, which ranges from 2,400 up to 3,200 a month. Rivers Run also offers many ways to harness brain power, which has been shown to help stave off diseases like dementia. Residents can audit classes free, including courses on foods of the world, basic figure drawing and personal financial management. There's also an on campus Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, where courses are developed by members. Holly Kylen, a retirement coach and financial adviser with ING Financial Partners in Pennsylvania, suggests doing the financial planning early, so money can be saved for the best fitting community. "Start pricing them when you're between ages 50 and 55," she said. "That's usually when a person can best focus financially." Besides their fees, college retirement communities vary widely. Mr. Carle suggests looking for one that's within one mile of the campus. "Some are built 20 minutes away," he said. Many colleges, like those in the Ivy League, don't have available land nearby, though, he added. "However, universities in the West and Midwest have lots of land," he said. Mr. Carle also suggested scouting out college senior housing where at least 10 percent of the residents are retired professors or part of the college faculty. Margaret Spicer, 69, moved into Kendal at Hanover in New Hampshire after teaching at Dartmouth for 35 years. "Several of us here are former Dartmouth professors," she says. "I didn't want to leave all my friends." Before choosing Kendal, Ms. Spicer considered four retirement communities near colleges. "But this area has been my home since 1974," she says. "And we can audit any course at Dartmouth." "Look at your personal priorities before signing a contract with a housing community," says Ms. Cullinane. "What are the non negotiables? Is it health care? Lifelong learning? Are there airports close by? Narrow the choices down to three or four things that you must have. Then look at four to six places." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
A few weeks ago, Hannah Sparks of The New York Post reported on "a morbid and chillingly astute new slang term for the coronavirus pandemic: boomer remover," because the virus has proved particularly deadly for the elderly. But, because it is also disproportionately deadly for men and for African Americans, I worry about how it will affect black men in particular, and have come to use another chilling term to characterize it: a "brother killer." And I fear that the worst may be yet to come, at least until treatments are developed and a vaccine discovered. There are silent populations of black men, largely removed from public view and public consciousness, who will remain vulnerable long after we "open the country back up," whatever that looks like, and return to some semblance of normalcy. For these men, the devastating effects of this virus may be as much about pre existing social conditions as pre existing medical ones. These are the people living on the edge of society, existing in the shadows, our own iteration of untouchables, exempt from America's sympathies the homeless, the incarcerated, those living with H.I.V./AIDS. According to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, "people living on the streets, in shelters or in their cars are more vulnerable to an outbreak of highly communicable diseases like Covid 19." The group attributes that vulnerability in part to "close quarters, compromised immune systems and an aging population" as well as the fact that "without adequate, permanent and stable housing, people lack a restroom for frequent hand washing, laundry facilities, and personal hygiene." According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a total of 552,830 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2018. And while black people were only 13 percent of the population, they made up 40 percent of the homeless population. Furthermore, men are 70 percent of the homeless among individual adults. Who will even test this population for the virus? People with homes and jobs are finding it hard to get tests, and some are being outright refused. As the Pew Research Center pointed out last year, at the end of 2017 there were nearly a half a million people in federal and state prisons, and a plurality of those prisoners were black. Nine out of 10 inmates are male. There were nearly three quarters of a million Americans held in local jails in 2018, and about a third of them were black, according to the Bureau of Prison Statistics. In fact, the rate at which black people were jailed was nearly three times the rate at which white people and Hispanics were jailed. The Cook County Jail in Chicago has emerged as a hot spot for the coronavirus and Covid 19, with more than 300 inmates and more than 200 employees testing positive for the virus. Seventy three percent of the people in that jail are black and 93 percent are men. And, to add insult to injury, national data show that 70 percent of the people in local jails are not yet convicted of any crime. Many simply can't afford to post bail, so they wait in jail on a trial for the charge or until they enter a plea to it. People living with compromised immune systems are also at risk. H.I.V./AIDS can lead to such a compromised system, particularly among those not in treatments and whose virus hasn't been suppressed. Black men have the highest rate of new diagnoses of H.I.V. The H.I.V. prevalence rate for black people is eight times the rate for white people and nearly three times the rate for Hispanics. There are over a million Americans living with H.I.V. Nearly half a million of those are black. Only 61 percent of those black people received treatment for the virus in 2016 and only about half were able to suppress the virus. And H.I.V. is now heavily linked to poverty. In 2013, there were 282,100 Medicaid beneficiaries with H.I.V., according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and they were "more likely to be male (56 percent vs. 42 percent), or black (50 percent vs. 22 percent)" than the Medicaid population overall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
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