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One of baseball's enduring, endearing delights is its role as the background noise to a sports fan's life. For six months, you never really have to wonder if your team is playing that day. With only scattered exceptions, it is and if it's not, a bunch of other teams are right there waiting for you. Think of the scene in the movie "Almost Famous" when Penny Lane explains the healing powers of music: "If you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and visit your friends." The baseball fan's equivalent is the vast array of old games on YouTube. Need a quick fix in the off season? Just click. You probably know the score already, but never mind that: It's all about the way it makes you feel. There's a big difference, though, between recorded and live. In some ways, it's the very lifeblood of the baseball industry, a driving force behind its value to TV networks: Baseball offers more programming than any other sport, and people watch in real time. For viewers, there's a powerful connection to experiencing the moment, sharing the now. The coronavirus pandemic has trapped Major League Baseball in a forever off season, scrambling our hard wired hardball brains. As Jayson Stark pointed out in The Athletic, we just experienced the first April without M.L.B. games since 1883. Even by baseball's standards, that's ancient, a time when batters could still tell pitchers where to throw the ball, and none of the Black Sox had even been born. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Last fall, Carmina Albaladejo Ochogavia came to New York to work in her family's growing business, Carmina Shoemaker. She represents the sixth generation of cobblers in the family, which is from Majorca, Spain. The business was named for her grandmother, and so was she. After graduating from Kingston University London last spring, Ms. Albaladejo, an only child, worked at the company's factory and headquarters on Majorca. Then, with her father, she headed to New York for a week of apartment hunting before starting work at the family's new store, just north of Grand Central Terminal. Their mission was to find her a home preferably a spacious one bedroom where visiting relatives could stay for 2,400 a month or less. They found a few listings and visited some crowded open houses. One agent suggested that Ms. Albaladejo hunt downtown, figuring her social life would be there. But the inventory was disappointing. "In the East Village and West Village, maybe the streets were cute, but the apartments were super small," said Ms. Albaladejo, 22. "I thought that in such a city there would be a lot of supply. And there was, actually, but they weren't right." Mr. Chamoun told her she would find better values elsewhere in Manhattan. "Everyone wants to live downtown," he said. "Those apartments are smaller, and they demand top dollar." He lined up places ready for immediate occupancy. The first was in a 1930 midrise rental building in Murray Hill. Two large one bedrooms were available, one on the top floor for 2,695 and another, on a lower floor, for 2,595. Each had a little foyer, a small but windowed bathroom and a kitchen in a nook off the living room. Mr. Chamoun thought the building would be a good match. "But for Carmina to feel comfortable, she needed to see for herself what the market had to offer," he said. Besides, Ms. Albaladejo wanted a backup plan. As she learned the Manhattan grid, she also realized that Midtown East was better for her than downtown because she preferred to be within walking distance of the store. "During the week I work a lot," she said. "I want to come home and rest instead of going out on weekdays." In another Murray Hill building, built in 1963, she learned what a large and sunny alcove studio was like. "There was no clear definition of space," Mr. Chamoun said. "She wanted a bedroom and a living room two separate spaces." This one was 2,825. By now, her budget had climbed into the high 2,000s. In a 1963 building on East 36th Street, Ms. Albaladejo learned what a large and sunny alcove studio was like. "There was no clear definition of space," said Zain Chamoun, her broker. "She wanted a bedroom and a living room two separate spaces." Katherine Marks for The New York Times "It was a pretty building, more modern," she said. "But I didn't feel I would have my privacy when I had visitors." They took a detour to the 10 building Manhattan East complex on East 66th Street, but Ms. Albaladejo wasn't keen on the area. "I needed something more lively," she said. "The neighborhood was too calm." It was also a 25 minute walk to work, and now that she knew she liked Murray Hill, it felt unnecessarily far. The clear choice was the first Murray Hill building, which she had liked from the start. Now, a few days later, the higher floor unit was rented, but she was happy to go with the lower floor, where the bedroom looked up Second Avenue and the living room looked west toward the Empire State Building. Mr. Chamoun warned Ms. Albaladejo that because she was a foreigner with no credit history in the United States, any landlord would likely require a great deal of rent in advance. "Carmina wanted to present a bank statement from Spain," Mr. Chamoun said. "I had to explain that landlords in New York will not even look at bank statements from Spain." A large upfront outlay "was pretty much the only way these apartments would be willing to consider her," he said. Ms. Albaladejo visited the 10 building Manhattan East complex on East 66th Street, but wasn't keen on the area. "I needed something more lively," she said. Katherine Marks for The New York Times The family offered a year's rent, but the building preferred six months of rent and six months of security deposit. They rushed to assemble her application. "I wasn't aware of the amount of paperwork, because I thought if I had the money, that was it," Ms. Albaladejo said. "But no it was problem after problem. I needed a bank account, but to open a bank account I needed something else." Finally, she was able to sign a lease. The broker's fee was 15 percent of the annual rent, or almost 4,700. A day before her father returned to Spain, the two went to Ikea to buy furniture, including a sleeper sofa for her to use overnight when guests take the bedroom. She especially likes having a doorman. "The fact that someone wishes me a good day whenever I go out the door that makes my day," Ms. Albaladejo said. "The apartment is not the newest place ever, but it is well maintained. Everything is clean." She is learning to navigate the Midtown crowds and adjusting to the sirens that wail down Second Avenue. At first they woke her up, but no longer. "It gives me a feeling of life around me, and something happening, even though I am in an apartment living alone," she said. From her living room, she gazes at the Empire State Building, with its crown of ever changing colored lights. "The view is what got me," she said. "I follow it on Instagram. Even if I had the worst day ever, sitting on my sofa, it makes me feel at home." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Senator Kelly Loeffler's fervid campaign against her Democratic challenger in Georgia, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, has employed a new deceptive tactic, casting Mr. Warnock, a Baptist preacher, as un American by falsely attributing a controversial comment to him that was made by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Her attack has been bolstered by a multimillion dollar ad buy promoting a fallacious video of Mr. Warnock that uses the same out of context footage. In a news release distributed on Friday, Ms. Loeffler's campaign linked to a 2014 flyer showing that Mr. Warnock's church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, had hosted Mr. Wright, a controversial Chicago pastor known for his fiery rhetoric. "Warnock has a long history of praising Wright," Ms. Loeffler's release said, "calling him a prophet and celebrating his infamous 'God damn America' speech days after it was delivered. And Warnock himself has repeatedly said 'God damn America' in his sermons." Yet Mr. Warnock has uttered that phrase only in instances when he was referring to Mr. Wright's speech, not to endorse that sentiment himself. Mr. Wright, who was once Barack Obama's pastor, became a lightning rod in the 2008 presidential campaign as video clips of his incendiary language surfaced, and Mr. Obama broke ties with him that year before securing the Democratic nomination. In Mr. Wright's sermon that included the words "God damn America," he was criticizing the United States for its history of mistreatment of minority groups, including its enslavement of Africans. But in Mr. Warnock's speeches, including one he gave at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, he had quoted the phrase as part of an academic discussion of Mr. Wright's speech that explained how the phrase had been excerpted from the speech without context and "looped to the point of ad nauseam" to criticize Mr. Wright. The Rev. Raphael Warnock is the pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Ms. Loeffler's news release attacking Mr. Warnock followed a Facebook ad buy paid for by American Crossroads, a super PAC that supports Republican candidates and is believed to be spending as much as 35 million to keep Ms. Loeffler in office. The ads also lift excerpts from Mr. Warnock's Chautauqua speech as evidence that he had echoed Mr. Wright's statement. In the runoff campaign for one of Georgia's two Senate seats, Ms. Loeffler has tried to paint Mr. Warnock as a "radical liberal" and has also accused him of supporting the idea of defunding the police, which he denies. The Loeffler campaign, in an ad in November, had also said Mr. Warnock supported Mr. Wright's sentiments. In reality, Mr. Warnock has said that he supported Mr. Wright in the same way he celebrated the "truth telling tradition of the Black church," which he said makes people uncomfortable. Ms. Loeffler's latest attack against Mr. Warnock follows a controversy that emerged last week after she was photographed at a campaign appearance in Dawsonville, Ga., with a former Ku Klux Klan member, Chester Doles. After the photograph circulated online, Ms. Loeffler's campaign said she did not know who Mr. Doles was. (The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that there was no evidence to suggest that Ms. Loeffler knew him.) The Loeffler campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its latest attacks on Mr. Warnock. Michael J. Brewer, a spokesman for Mr. Warnock, called the latest attack ads "another lowest of the low in Kelly Loeffler and her allies' efforts to divide and mislead Georgians for their own political gains," adding that the clips showing Mr. Warnock had been "pulled from academic discussions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
'HUMA BHABHA: WE COME IN PEACE' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 28). This spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission includes two figures: one that is somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious mask face and that visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline behind it, and another bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny, black drapery. The title is a variant on the line an alien uttered to an anxious crowd in the 1951 science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. The installation also feels like an extension of the complex, cross cultural conversation going on downstairs, inside a museum packed with 5,000 years of art history. (Martha Schwendener) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876 1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum's own collection. But in 2018, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi's little known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost living things into the world and convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'CHARTING THE DIVINE PLAN: THE ART OF ORRA WHITE HITCHCOCK' at the American Folk Art Museum (through Oct. 14). Love in the time of science that could serve as the catchphrase for this ravishing exhibition of botanical and geological illustration from the first decades of the United States. Born in progressive Amherst, Mass., a few years after the Revolution, Orra White received a first rate scientific education like few girls of her day; then, with her beloved husband, Edward Hitchcock, she painted the plants, reeds, flowers and mushrooms of New England in exquisite folios. Later, Edward became president of Amherst College, and Orra painted and drew large scale illustrations for his lessons: Paleolithic skeletons, brightly striped cross sections of volcanic earth, a massive octopus munching on a three masted schooner. While the plant and mushroom paintings are delicate and painstakingly exact, the classroom aids are boldly imaginative but both are evidence of an extraordinary life in which carnal love and religious conviction intertwined with scientific discovery. (Jason Farago) 212 595 9533, folkartmuseum.org 'MARY CORSE' at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., and 'MARY CORSE: A SURVEY IN LIGHT' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Nov. 25). Light, and specifically the radiant light of Los Angeles, shaped Ms. Corse's career. She became interested not just in representing light, but also in making objects that emitted or reflected it. This duo of shows features her light boxes or "light paintings" made with argon gas and Tesla coils, as well as her paintings on canvas that include glass microspheres, like those used in the lines that divide highway lanes. Both shows are overdue representations for Ms. Corse, who was an early member of the loosely defined Light and Space movement of the 1960s and '70s in California. (Schwendener) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'CROWNS OF THE VAJRA MASTERS: RITUAL ART OF NEPAL' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Dec. 16). Up a narrow staircase, above the Met's galleries of South and Southeast Asian art, are three small rooms of art from the Himalayas. The space, a bit like a treehouse, is a capsule of spiritual energy, which is especially potent these days thanks to this exhibition. The crowns of the title look like antique versions of astronaut headgear: gilded copper helmets, studded with gems, encrusted with repousse plaques and topped by five pronged antennas the vajra, or thunderbolt of wisdom. Such crowns were believed to turn their wearers into perfected beings who are willing and able to bestow blessings on the world. This show is the first to focus on these crowns, and it does so with a wealth of compressed historical information, as well as several resplendent related sculptures and paintings from Nepal and Tibet. But it's the crowns themselves, the real ones, the wisdom generators, set in mandala formation in the center of the gallery, that are the fascinators. (Holland Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (through Oct. 8). Let us pray. After last year's stark exhibition of Rei Kawakubo's irregular apparel, the Met Costume Institute is back in blockbuster mode with this three part blowout on the influence of Catholicism on haute couture of the past century. The trinity of fashion begins downstairs at the Met with the exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican; upstairs are gowns fit for angels in heaven (by Lanvin, Thierry Mugler, Rodarte) or angels fallen to earth (such as slinky Versace sheaths garlanded with crosses). The scenography at the Met is willfully operatic spotlights, choir music which militates against serious thinking about fashion and religion, but up at the Cloisters, by far the strongest third of the show, you can commune more peacefully with an immaculate Balenciaga wedding gown or a divine Valentino gown embroidered with Cranach's Adam and Eve. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU: CARNE Y ARENA' at 1611 Benning Road NE, Washington (through Oct. 31, 9 a.m. 9 p.m.). Perhaps the most technically accomplished endeavor yet in virtual reality but closer in form to immersive live theater, created by a two time Oscar winner has arrived at a former church in Washington after outings in Cannes, Milan, Los Angeles and Mexico City. In "Carne y Arena" ("Flesh and Sand"), you explore the exhibition on your own with a motion sensitive headset that transports you to Mexico's border with the United States; brutal encounters with border guards interweave with surreal dream sequences, which you can perceive in three dimensions. The characters are computer renderings of the bodies of actual migrants; the landscapes are photographed by Mr. Inarritu's brilliant longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. It remains too early to say whether virtual reality will reshape art institutions, but this is a rare achievement, and not only for its political urgency. Tickets will be released only on the website at 8 a.m. Eastern Time on the 1st and 15th of each month of the exhibition's duration. (Farago) carneyarenadc.com 'BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ: CITY DREAMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 1). The first comprehensive survey of the Congolese artist is a euphoric exhibition as utopian wonderland, featuring his fantasy architectural models and cities works strong in color, eccentric in shape, loaded with enthralling details and futuristic aura. Mr. Kingelez (1948 2015) was convinced that the world had never seen a vision like his, and this beautifully designed show bears him out. (Roberta Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'OBSESSION: NUDES BY KLIMT, SCHIELE AND PICASSO' at the Met Breuer (through Oct. 7). The highlight of this uneven but jewel studded show of erotically charged nudes from the bequest of an eccentric woolen goods heir is Egon Schiele's incandescent "Seated Woman in Chemise." The 1914 drawing shows a nearly naked model seated on the floor holding apart her folded legs with her hands. From the top of her egg shaped, doll like head, so idealized it's practically inhuman, to the blunt exposure of her sex, rendered as simply and honestly as the medium allows, she's an unresolvable contest of fantasy and reality. (Will Heinrich) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: VISIONS OF HAWAI'I' at the New York Botanical Garden (through Oct. 28). Finding out O'Keeffe had a Hawaiian period is kind of like finding out Brian Wilson had a desert period. But here it is: 17 eye popping paradisal paintings, produced in a nine week visit in 1939. The paintings, and their almost psychedelic palette, are as fleshlike and physical as O'Keeffe's New Mexican work is stripped and metaphysical. The other star of the show, fittingly, is Hawaii, and the garden has mounted a living display of the subjects depicted in the artwork. As much as they might look like the products of an artist's imagination, the plants and flowers in the Enid Haupt Conservatory are boastfully real. (William L. Hamilton) 718 817 8700, nybg.org PHOTOVILLE at Brooklyn Bridge Plaza (through Sept. 23). One of this year's defining images a photograph of a 2 year old girl from Honduras crying while her mother is detained at the border will be on display at this sprawling photo festival, which runs this weekend and the next. More than 80 free exhibitions in and around shipping containers will stretch out under the Brooklyn Bridge and will explore themes such as elderly Japanese criminals, African religious traditions and youth prison camps. There will be a beer garden, workshops, portrait sessions in a tintype photo booth and booksellers; John Moore, who took the aforementioned photo, will be one of several photographers to discuss their work in evening talks and showcases. (Andrew R. Chow) photoville.com 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'THE SENSES: DESIGN BEYOND VISION' at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Oct. 28). There's a serious, timely big idea at this exhibition: As social media, smartphones and virtual reality make us ever more "ocularcentric," we have taken leave of our nonvisual senses and need to get back in touch, literally. Thus "The Senses" features multisensory adventures such as a portable speaker size contraption that emits odors, with titles like "Surfside" and "Einstein," in timed combinations; hand painted scratch and sniff wallpaper (think Warhol's patterned cows but with cherries cherry scented, naturally); and a device that projects ultrasonic waves to simulate the touch and feel of virtual objects. The show also presents commissions, videos, products and prototypes from more than 65 designers and teams, some of which address sensory disabilities like blindness and deafness, including Vibeat, which can be worn as a bracelet, brooch or necklace and translates music into vibrations. And if you bring the kids, they will likely bliss out stroking a wavy, fur lined installation that makes music as you rub it. (Michael Kimmelman) 212 849 8400, cooperhewitt.org 'THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Oct. 28). This exhibition of the great director's photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctor's appointments, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'TOWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1948 1980' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13). This nimble, continuously surprising show tells one of the most underappreciated stories of postwar architecture: the rise of avant garde government buildings, pie in the sky apartment blocks, mod beachfront resorts and even whole new cities in the southeast corner of Europe. Tito's Yugoslavia rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy, and its neither nor political position was reflected in architecture of stunning individuality, even as it embodied collective ambitions that Yugoslavs called the "social standard." From Slovenia, where elegant office buildings drew on the tradition of Viennese modernism, to Kosovo, whose dome topped national library appears as a Buckminster Fuller fever dream, these impassioned buildings defy all our Cold War vintage stereotypes of Eastern Europe. Sure, in places the show dips too far into Socialist chic. But this show is exactly how MoMA should be thinking as it rethinks its old narratives for its new home next year. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'DAVID WOJNAROWICZ: HISTORY KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Sept. 30). This artist was there when we needed him politically 30 plus years ago. Now we need him again, and he's back in this big, rich retrospective. Wojnarowicz (pronounced Voyna ROH vich), who died at 37 in 1992, was one of the most articulate art world voices raised against the corporate greed and government foot dragging that contributed to the early AIDS crisis. But he was far from a one issue artist. From the start, he took outsiderness itself, as defined by ethnicity, gender, economics and sexual preference, as his native turf. And from it he attacked all forms of exclusion through writing, performing and object making. In the show, we find him working at full force in all three disciplines, and the timing couldn't be better. Not long before his AIDS related death, during the culture wars era, he wrote, "I'm convinced I'm from another planet." In 2018 America, he would have felt more than ever like a criminal migrant, an alien combatant. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'CANOVA'S GEORGE WASHINGTON' at the Frick Collection (through Sept. 23). When Canova's statue arrived in Raleigh, N.C., in 1821, the American press went wild for the likeness by the Italian neoclassical sculptor of the first president, wearing Roman military dress and drafting his farewell address. Ten years later it was destroyed by fire, but the Frick has brought the full scale plaster model of the lost statue over from Italy for this smashing show that reveals how European artists were inspired by American revolutionary ideals. Canova's Washington, looming all alone over the Frick's circular gallery, wears thickly curled hair instead of the pulled back style he sports on the dollar bill, and in both his costume (leather skirt, strappy sandals) and his bearing, he embodies the ideals of the new republic, where principles come before power. Supplementary materials include a life mask of Washington and several smaller Canova models, including a nude Washington with some rather nice pecs. (Farago) 212 288 0700, frick.org 'HISTORY REFUSED TO DIE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION GIFT' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 23). This inspired foundation is dispersing around 1,200 works by black self taught artists from the American South to museums across the country. The Met's exhibition of 29 of the 57 pieces it received proposes an exciting broadening of postwar art. It is dominated by the dialogue between the rough hewed relief paintings of Thornton Dial and the geometrically, chromatically brilliant quilts of the Gee's Bend collective. But much else chimes in, including works by Purvis Young, Joe Minter and Lonnie Holley. (Smith) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE MAGIC OF HANDWRITING' at the Morgan Library Museum (through Sept. 16). With polemicists lamenting that cursive is going the way of the dodo and old school devotees of pen and paper posting their work on social media with hashtags like snailmail and penpal, this exhibition at the Morgan might seem at first glance to be part of this nostalgia. Instead, it simply luxuriates in the humble, intimate and sometimes very messy traces that some of the great figures of history have left behind. The show features some 140 items including a papal bull from Pope Anastasius IV and a photograph signed by Rasputin from the encyclopedic holdings of the Brazilian collector Pedro Correa do Lago, who owns thousands of letters, notes, receipts, manuscripts, signed photographs and other pieces documenting notable lives in the arts, politics, science and other fields. (Jennifer Schuessler) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org 'CHAIM SOUTINE: FLESH' at the Jewish Museum (through Sept. 16). The Russian Jewish artist Chaim Soutine (1893 1943), who spent most of his life in Paris, is best known for bloody, ecstatic paintings of beef carcasses. But it wasn't death that interested him it was the immaterial life force of the material world. Along with an instructive lineup of naked fowl, silver herring and popeyed sardines, this indispensable tribute to the transcendent but still undervalued painter centers on a stupendous 1925 "Carcass of Beef," glistening scarlet, streaked with orange fat and straddling a starry sky. (Heinrich) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'WAYNE THIEBAUD: DRAFTSMAN' at the Morgan Library Museum (through Sept. 23). Mr. Thiebaud has won a place in American art history for his densely slathered paintings of cakes, pies, ice cream cones, burgers, fruits and crudites. His drawings have been less celebrated, and this sweet show at the Morgan is the first devoted to his work in pen, charcoal and pastel. Mr. Thiebaud trained in commercial art and came to New York to work as a cartoonist. You can see the influence in his still lifes from the 1960s: The watercolor "Nine Jelly Apples" (1964) depicts the candied fruits to advantage from a high angle, while the pencil drawing "Ice Cream Cone" (1964) places the titular treat front and center, its edges as carefully teased as a model's coiffure. Mr. Thiebaud is sometimes called a realist, but that's not precise; his drawings (and paintings, too) rely less on artful imitation of appearances and affects than on a translation of low advertising into high art. (Farago) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"The Banishment," the second feature from the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is finally receiving a run in New York more than 10 years after its lead, Konstantin Levronenko, took the best actor prize at Cannes, where the film otherwise met with a mixed reception. Mr. Zvyagintsev, the subject of a current retrospective at MoMA, subsequently won wide acclaim for "Elena," "Leviathan" and "Loveless" (which opens next month after an Oscar qualifying run in December). As such, a film that might once have seemed too big for its breeches slow, cryptic, overly enamored of complicated camera movements and crepuscular compositions probably looks better than it did then, a necessary step in the evolution of a major filmmaker. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Mistaken identity is one of the most exhaustively used devices in comedy. Few plays, though, have taken it to the mad heights occupied by Nikolai Gogol's "The Government Inspector." This 1836 work in which a witless fop is assumed to be a powerful state functionary by corrupt politicians in the provinces infuses scathing satire with giddy surrealism. With its large cast and singular comic tone, it's a challenging work to stage. But then the Red Bull Theater, celebrated for its productions of Jacobean revenge tragedies, has never shied from the difficult. For Jeffrey Hatcher's new adaptation of "Inspector," which opens on Thursday, June 1, the director Jesse Berger has assembled a doozy of a cast, which includes such masters of mayhem as Arnie Burton, Stephen DeRosa, Michael McGrath, Mary Testa and, as the "lamest of lamebrains" of the title (Gogol's description), the peerless Michael Urie. (The Duke on 42nd Street; 646 223 3010, redbulltheater.com.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The cancer death rate in the United States fell 2.2 percent from 2016 to 2017 the largest single year decline in cancer mortality ever reported, the American Cancer Society reported on Wednesday. Since 1991 the rate has dropped 29 percent, which translates to approximately 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred if the mortality rate had remained constant. "Every year that we see a decline in cancer mortality rate, it's very good news," said Rebecca Siegel, director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the organization's report, which was published online in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Experts attributed the decline to the reduced smoking rates and to advances in lung cancer treatment. New therapies for melanoma of the skin have also helped extend life for many people with metastatic disease, or cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. Progress has slowed for colorectal, breast and prostate cancers, however. The rising rate of obesity among Americans, as well as significant racial and geographic disparities, likely explain why the decline in breast and colorectal cancer death rates has begun to taper off, and why the decrease in rates of prostate cancer has halted entirely. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
After the Indonesian island of Lombok was hit by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that has killed at least 90 people on Aug. 5, aftershocks have continued to shake the island. The quake followed a 6.4 magnitude on July 29, which killed 17; the island, home to hundreds of resorts, has been under various states of emergency since late July. Residents are slowly readjusting to the new normal as they have to pick up the pieces in some cases literally of their lives and rebuild. The damage to the island's growing tourism industry is less clear. Tourism is an increasingly important part of Lombok's economy, and while the island doesn't get the numbers of neighboring Bali, it has been earmarked by the government as an emerging destination. Last year President Joko Widodo identified 10 places around Indonesia's 17,000 islands to target as the next Bali, among them an integrated resort development in South Lombok called Mandalika. The earthquakes, though, may have temporary disrupted those plans. "Travelers are panicking," wrote John Konstantinidis, general manager of Authentic Lombok, a tour operator based in the popular, west coast beach area Senggigi, over email; he has lost 50 percent of bookings since the July 29 earthquake, he added. "A lot of people are also canceling because their hotels are damaged." Supratman Samsi, who has run Adventure Lombok, an outfitter also based in Senggigi, since 2006, said his bookings have dropped 20 percent, even though large sections of the island were not damaged by the quakes. "People are scared it's the first word they write in their emails," he said. "For sure the people here need to recover from the trauma but we also need the media to tell everyone how beautiful Lombok is, how amazing it still is. The areas affected were the east, north and west." Gili Trawangan, where images and video of stranded tourists massed on beaches have gone viral, is off Lombok's northwest coast. "Here in Senggigi many tourists have left, but some have stayed, saying that this can happen anywhere," Mr. Samsi continued. "And I don't think the effects will be forever." Hotels in parts of the island have closed as owners and management assess damage. The Sheraton Senggigi Beach Resort evacuated guests, many of whom chose to leave the island. While the property had no known reports of injuries to hotel guests or staff, it is not accepting bookings for now, as it assesses its structural integrity, according to a spokeswoman. The Aruna Senggigi Resort Convention has also closed its main building "for tests," said Indah Puritiara, the resort's marketing communications assistant manager, adding that some online travel agents have canceled about 50 percent of their bookings because of the quake. "Our building is still safe but we want to check it and all the rooms," she said. The Golden Palace, a four star property in Mataram (the capital of West Nusa Tenggara, Lombok's province) that welcomes mainly Indonesian guests, is also closed for safety checks while the luxury resort Oberoi Lombok, on the northwest coast near the Gili islands, is closed because of damage. Other properties in the northwest couldn't be reached by phone, their lines out of service or permanently busy. Air carriers have also reported cancellations. A spokesman for Singapore Airlines Limited, parent company of SilkAir, one of two airlines that flies to the island from outside Indonesia (the other is AirAsia), confirmed the cancellations, but declined to give exact numbers. Yet among the gloom some travel analysts and observers see reason to be hopeful. "The observation I have made is that one would think increasing terrorism would put a dampener on business travel, but we have found this to not be the case, business travel is increasing," said Dr. Robert Quigley, senior vice president and regional medical director for International SOS, a medical and travel security company. "If terrorism doesn't have an impact on travel, then I am not sure this earthquake would have an effect." He is quick to point out that the earthquake does present real dangers. "In addition to the seismic activity, the rubble, the physical trauma, broken bones, there is lots of dust in the atmosphere and this can exacerbate underlying conditions," he said. People on the ground in and around Lombok note that the reality on the island is more nuanced than the viral images suggest. In some sections of Lombok, business continues as if nothing happened. At Sempiak Villas on the south coast, the rooms are full and the resort continues to receive inquiries from travelers that have left devastated areas. Erik Barreto, who is based in Singapore and a founder of Rascal Republic, a parent company that has hospitality projects around Indonesia, including Lombok, described the general situation in the south as stable. "There are people in affected areas that can't get food and water. But we have a site in the south where we are building villas and a hotel called Samara Bay and there was no physical damage," he said over the phone from neighboring Bali. But that doesn't mean resumption of normality will happen quickly. "Places usually fully recover in two to three years" after major natural disasters. Others are more sanguine. Steven Moloney, who owns the boutique hotel Rascals Kuta Lombok (no relation to Mr. Barreto's company), on the island's south coast, said his property is at full occupancy. "People in south Lombok felt the earthquake like a tremor there was a little bit of shock, and then everything went back to normal," he said. "Some travelers who were staying in the north have now come down to Kuta. The restaurants here are full. People forget about things like this in two or three months." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Chinese authorities have encouraged people in the city of Wuhan to wear surgical masks in public to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus. The question is: do they work? Many infectious disease specialists say the cheap disposable masks, which cover the nose and mouth, may help prevent the spread of infections if they are worn properly and used consistently. But there isn't much high quality scientific evidence on their effectiveness outside health care settings, experts say. Most of the best studies, which are randomized controlled trials, focused on how well surgical masks protect health care workers in hospitals from picking up infections from sick patients, and found that consistent use of them helped. Dr. Julie Vaishampayan, chairwoman of the public health committee for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said surgical masks are really "the last line of defense." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A Billion Still to Spend, and Only Two Years to Do It THE ATLANTIC PHILANTHROPIES is down to its last billion dollars. The once ultrasecretive foundation funded by Chuck Feeney, who made his fortune as a founder of the Duty Free Shoppers Group, is making good on its promise to give away all of its money in the next two years. But unlike the early days of the foundation, when it went to great lengths to ensure recipients did not know the identity of their benefactor, it wants to go out with a bang when it makes its last grant in 2016. While the so called spend down of the foundation's assets includes plans for larger than normal grants and individual fellowships, it also involves sharing lessons learned in the process of giving away 7.5 billion over the last 30 odd years. "This whole notion of limited life does concentrate the mind," said Christopher G. Oechsli, president and chief executive of the Atlantic Philanthropies. "It introduces a dimension of urgency." For those unfamiliar with Mr. Feeney's story: He was born to working class Irish immigrant parents in New Jersey in 1931, attended Cornell University and, in 1960, co founded Duty Free Shoppers. The concept of buying single malt Scotch, perfume and leather attaches while waiting for a connecting flight at Heathrow proved to be wildly successful. The company was bought by Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH) in 1997 for several billion dollars. The foundation, first established in 1982, has focused on four areas: aging, children and youth, population and health, and reconciliation and human rights. It gave heavily to issues it believed could make a difference, like programs to bring together students from then warring factions in Ireland. "It seems great to give away money, but if you're really serious about having an impact and the expectations are high, it's a very demanding role," Mr. Oechsli said. In 2002, Mr. Feeney decided he wanted to give away all of his foundation money during his lifetime and set 2016 as the deadline. He's now 83. Warren E. Buffett said in June that Mr. Feeney was his and Bill Gates's hero for setting an example of using his vast wealth to help other people and for doing it in his lifetime. Mr. Gates also said in 2013 that his foundation would spend down its funds 20 years after he and his wife died. The notion of "giving while living" or setting up spend down foundations, as they're also known is growing in popularity. Fifty years ago they accounted for 5 percent of all foundations; in 2010 they were 24 percent, said Jamie Jaffee, managing director of the Philanthropic Initiative, an advisory firm. "We're seeing a trend where more and more people are starting to think about what impact and effect they can have in their lifetimes," Ms. Jaffee said. "They're feeling more of a sense of urgency to take more immediate actions. They're used to running their businesses, having real influence and seeing results." Spending all of a foundation's assets in a finite period focuses the mind, for sure. And it works when the aim is to have great impact in a short time, say, in an area like public health. Yet knowing that a foundation is going away at some point carries a burden. Mr. Oechsli said the Atlantic Philanthropies has tried to be candid with its recipients, even working with them so they can continue to exist without Atlantic's money. "Some received it quite well," he said. "For some it doesn't fully translate that we're spending down. They say, 'You have a lot of money. Why don't you continue to support this endeavor?' " It also had to manage employee retention, since at some point everyone would be out of a job. After trial and error, the foundation adopted a plan to lay people off only every six months to reduce the anxiety around the office. The carrot was a generous severance package for those who completed their assignment. One of the things the Atlantic Philanthropies is doing to preserve its legacy is creating a catalog of its work. This includes documenting its failures, in the form of a Top 10 list of blunders that other foundations can learn from. For example, Mr. Oechsli said, Atlantic gave too much to infrastructure projects in Vietnam when there wasn't the population to use them. It also funded the Center for Public Inquiry in Ireland, which was set up as a government watchdog but closed when allegations of improprieties were leveled against its director. He said he regretted not giving more money to Encore.org, a nonprofit group that promotes second careers with a social purpose. "Civic engagement of elders it's a field Atlantic Philanthropies has pioneered," he said. "We were a large funder and then we kind of dropped it. We left value on the table." When asked for his reaction, Marc Freedman, Encore.org's founder and chief executive, chuckled. "They took a risk on us from the get go," he said, to the tune of 35 million since 1997. "They took this huge bet on an issue the productive potential and social roles of people over 50 when no one was spending any money on it." He added: "Obviously, I wish Atlantic was going to go on in perpetuity, and yet at the same time there's been an understanding that they were able to invest much more heavily in these issues because they were a limited life foundation." With the increased interest in limited life foundations, some risks can come from the rush to give money away especially for those who make the decision at a young age. "Once you make these philanthropic gifts, generally speaking you can't take them back," said Sara Montgomery, philanthropic services specialist at Wells Fargo Private Bank, which has wealthy donors as its clients. "We don't want clients to say, 'I put this money in this foundation, and 30 years later things haven't worked out like I thought and now I'm feeling bitter about it.' " Yet running out of money isn't the only regret. "If you're 30 years old, you have a long time to live, and your values could change," Ms. Montgomery said. And if that money is set aside for something the donor loses interest in, it can be less fulfilling. Of course, donors and foundations can and do change course. Just as Mr. Feeney's foundation became a limited life foundation after 20 years of existence, others can decide to extend the lives of their organizations as long as they are doing the work they want. Seventeen years ago, Ted Turner stood up at a dinner and announced he was going to give 1 billion to the United Nations, and the United Nations Foundation was born. Two years later, the foundation's board decided to seek other funders, initially to leverage Mr. Turner's money but then to keep the work going. This year, the foundation received Mr. Turner's billionth dollar, but it has funding to continue for at least 15 years. "I think of us as a hybrid bringing together private sector principles and nonprofit energy and compassion," said Kathy Calvin, president and chief executive of the foundation. Ms. Montgomery said one client in his 50s with a net worth of 200 million had his own hybrid plan. He intends to put 100 million in a family foundation over the next 10 years and then spend the next 20 years giving away 90 percent of it to causes focused on renewable energy and farm to table projects. It will be up to his children to give away the final 10 percent when he's gone. With the end near for the Atlantic Philanthropies, Mr. Oechsli does not find the job easier. "I wake up some mornings and think it would be nice to cut 10 checks and be done with it," he said. "But that's not the best use of money. We have hundreds of millions of dollars to try to make a difference. You need to think really hard about doing it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Sarah Germaine Goulet and Daniel Vroman Riley were married Aug. 18 at Pilot Hill Farm on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. Daniel Goldstein, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated. Ms. Goulet, 32, is the owner of Sarah Goulet Communications, an arts communications company in New York. She graduated from Brown. She is a daughter of Marcy G. Glenn and Thomas G. Goulet of Denver. Her father is the owner of Woodcraft Unlimited, a commercial millwork manufacturer in Denver. Her mother works in Denver as a partner in the law firm Holland Hart. Mr. Riley, also 32, works in New York, where he is the features editor of GQ magazine. He is the author of "Fly Me" (Little, Brown and Company, 2017). He graduated magna cum laude from Duke. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
You could find reasons for both enthusiasm and skepticism when Asia Society announced last year that it would present a triennial of contemporary art, centered on art from what the organizers called "Asia and the world." Enthusiasm: Our supposedly global galleries and museums still engage too little with a continent that's home to 60 percent of the world's population, and the more new Asian art we see here, the better. And admission would be free. Skepticism: There are now more than 300 biennial and triennial exhibitions of contemporary art worldwide. In New York alone, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the International Center of Photography and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University all gum up their galleries with perennial festivals of new art. In the high water years of globalization the '90s and early 2000s the ennial exhibitions popping up all over promised to forge a new, worldwide field of artistic creation, with the West no longer at the center. Twenty odd years later, when digital networks have dissolved distances and novelty seems an artistic nonstarter, the format is feeling increasingly tired. "We Do Not Dream Alone," the inaugural Asia Society Triennial, was meant to spill out of the institution's Park Avenue headquarters, with major commissions on Governors Island and participatory installations in partnership with the New York Philharmonic. The coronavirus pandemic which, among its other injuries, has brought anti Asian prejudice to an appalling boil in the United States pushed almost all the largest projects out of reach, and made it impossible for most artists to travel. What is left is a scattershot, unadventurous assortment of new and not so new art, which barely reflects the ambitions espoused in those initial announcements. It feels less like a calamity than a missed opportunity, and might have benefited from a longer postponement and rethink. About two dozen artists, from the Middle East to Indonesia to New York, have works on view at Asia Society's headquarters. (They were selected by Boon Hui Tan, the recently departed director of the Asia Society museum, and Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, now promoted to the directorship. A second round of artists will take over the galleries in February.) There are a few of note, including Arpita Singh, an Indian artist born a decade before partition, whose forceful, thickly daubed paintings of fleshy and contorted women imbricate mythic and everyday imagery. Quite a bit more of the art here is easily summarized and biennial ready, as if communicating a single social or geopolitical concern was all a picture or an object can do. Ghiora Aharoni, a New York based Israeli designer, embroiders gowns with eyeroll inducing hybrid scripts of Hebrew and Arabic, Hindi and Urdu. Nasim Nasr, born in Iran and based in Australia, gives us a short video loop of women breaking apart religious prayer beads; you do not need the accompanying text to know they are "metaphorically defying patriarchal traditions." A second segment of the triennial, staged across Central Park in a large gallery of the New York Historical Society, purports to strike up a conversation between that museum's collection and contemporary Asian artists. But the hang is soporific there is not a single internal wall; old and new art is strung monotonously along the perimeter like so many PowerPoint slides and the juxtapositions are frequently forced. Thomas Cole's monumental five painting cycle "The Course of Empire" (1833 36) is placed as a mirror image of photographs of the artist Huang Yan, whose torso is tattooed with traditional Chinese landscapes. As for the hasty co optation of a vernacular painting of George Floyd, plus a poster with a raised fist sloganed "Asians for Black Lives," they ought to confirm that this show could have used a longer delay to think more systematically about the upheavals of 2020. There are, still and all, high points. New Yorkers have had few opportunities before to discover the work of Minouk Lim, one of the most important artists in South Korea, and at Asia Society a whole gallery is given to her disquieting mannequins and to her video "It's a Name I Gave Myself," a harrowing edit of footage from a 1983 television special featuring orphaned survivors of the Korean War, uncertain of their whereabouts or even their own given names. The hushed landscape photography of Taca Sui, at the Historical Society, and Xu Bing's silk woven copy of Confucius's "Analects," at Asia Society, offer pensive, knotty updates to the Chinese classical tradition. And maybe there will be surprises when the second group of participants appears in February; they include the Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo, renowned for her grueling durational performances, and Ahmet Ogut, an incisive Turkish artist of Kurdish descent. But bringing these artists and others together under one umbrella feels, at best, haphazard. This is a triennial in search of a reason for being although that does not make it so different from hundreds of others. Starting with the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 1995, the biennial/triennial format became decisive for the development of Asian contemporary art at the end of the last century. In Yokohama or Singapore, in Taipei or in Kochi, India, these festivals served as mixing points for artists East and West, brought Asian artists into a global orbit, and eventually became an ecosystem of their own. They talked a big game about "knowledge production" and "transnational discourses," even as biennials started to seem more satisfying for tourist boards and corporate sponsors than for artists. What should an ennial be now, as we approach the quarter way mark of the 21st century? The "new art from all over" model of the 2000s feels more and more like a dead end. The pandemic's sudden deceleration of the art world offers a chance at least to try something more tightly argued or historically engaged, so that when the motors of the market start revving again we at least know where we want to steer. Between the shortcomings of our "global" shows and the timidity of our "local" ones lie a thousand possible encounters, where we can meet in ways that truly change us. Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Crossing From Asia, the First Americans Rushed Into the Unknown Nearly 11,000 years ago, a man died in what is now Nevada. Wrapped in a rabbit skin blanket and reed mats, he was buried in a place called Spirit Cave. Now scientists have recovered and analyzed his DNA, along with that of 70 other ancient people whose remains were discovered throughout the Americas. The findings lend astonishing detail to a story once lost to prehistory: how and when humans spread across the Western Hemisphere. The earliest known arrivals from Asia were already splitting into recognizably distinct groups, the research suggests. Some of these populations thrived, becoming the ancestors of indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere. But other groups died out entirely, leaving no trace save for what can be discerned in ancient DNA. Indeed, the new genetic research hints at many dramatic chapters in the peopling of the Americas that archaeology has yet to uncover. "Now, this is the grist for archaeologists," said Ben Potter of the University of Alaska, who was not involved in the new papers. "Holy cow, this is awesome." Earlier studies had indicated that people moved into the Americas at the end of the last ice age, traveling from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge now under the Bering Sea. They spread southward, eventually reaching the tip of South America. Until recently, geneticists could offer little insight into these vast migrations. Five years ago, just one ancient human genome had been recovered in the Western Hemisphere: that of a 4,000 year old man discovered in Greenland. The latest batch of analyses, published in three separate studies, marks a turnaround. In the past few years, researchers have recovered the genomes of 229 ancient people from teeth and bones discovered throughout the Americas. The first, described in January by Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, was an 11,500 year old girl whose remains were found in eastern Alaska. The second was discovered hundreds of miles away, in western Alaska, and lived 9,000 years ago, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues reported on Thursday in the journal Science. The Ancient Beringians separated from the ancestors of living indigenous people in the Americas about 20,000 years ago. The new findings suggest they endured for several thousand years. Then they disappeared, leaving no known genetic trace in living people. But another wave of migrants from Siberia did not stop in Alaska. They kept moving, eventually arriving south of the ice age glaciers. Then they split into two branches. One group turned and headed north, following the retreating glaciers into Canada and back to Alaska. The other branch took a remarkable journey south. The genetic data suggest that this group spread swiftly across much of North America and South America about 14,000 years ago. The expansion may have taken only centuries. But the man from Spirit Cave also turned out to have a close genetic link to 10,400 year old skeletons found in Brazil, on the other side of the Equator. David Reich of Harvard University and his colleagues found a similar pattern in their own research, published on Thursday in the journal Cell. They uncovered a link between the ancient Montana boy and another group of ancient South Americans, including a 10,900 year old skeleton in Chile. Like Dr. Willerslev's work, the kinship suggests that migrants moved quickly from North America to South America. "We agree that this must be a rapid radiation," said Dr. Reich. Starting about 9,000 years ago, both teams found, additional waves of people moved southward. Dr. Willerslev's research suggests the new arrivals mixed with older South American populations. Dr. Reich, on the other hand, sees evidence for two waves of migrants who completely replaced the people who had lived in South America. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The new research also revealed instances of remarkable continuity, kinships that spanned thousands of years. Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues compared the genome of the man from Spirit Cave to those of four sets of remains found nearby in Nevada's Lovelock Cave, who lived as recently as 600 years ago. All of these people were closely related, his team found, despite being separated by 10,000 years of history. A similar bond was found in the Andes. John Lindo of Emory University and his colleagues analyzed DNA from seven people who lived at high elevations between 6,800 and 1,400 years ago. The researchers estimate that people who lived above 7,500 feet in the mountains were separated from the lowland populations between 9,200 and 8,200 years ago. Today, the mountain people still show a strong genetic link to the ancient remains. "This is not something that you see in most other regions of the world," said Dr. Reich. In 2015, Dr. Reich and his colleagues found that some living people in the Amazon carry some DNA that's most similar to that of people who live today in Australia and New Guinea. The researchers speculated that their ancestry included an unknown group, which the scientists called Population Y, who separately made their way into the Americas. In their new study, Dr. Reich and his colleagues found no trace of Population Y but Dr. Willerslev's team succeeded in identifying their DNA in some of the 10,400 year old skeletons in Brazil. "The million dollar question obviously is, how did this happen?" Dr. Willerslev said. Perhaps another group of Asians entered the Americas long before the ancestors of the man from Spirit Cave and other early Native Americans. Maybe they interbred with people in the Amazon before disappearing altogether. Or perhaps a few of the early members of the southern branch happened to have some odd genes that survived through the generations. The new rush of genetic samples reflects an improving relationship between scientists and indigenous peoples. For decades, many tribes rejected requests for DNA from researchers. The man from Spirit Cave, for example, was dug up by archaeologists in 1940 and stored in a museum. The local tribe, the Fallon Paiute Shoshone, didn't learn of the body till 1996. For years they fought for its repatriation. "It's utterly disrespectful," said Rochanne L. Downs, a member of the tribe's cultural committee. "If someone went into Arlington Cemetery and dug the grave of one of the soldiers and took their medals, there would be outrage." Initially, the tribe was opposed to looking for DNA in the skeleton, because scientists would have to destroy much of it. Dr. Willerslev met with the tribe and explained that he would require only a tooth and a small piece of ear bone. The tribe agreed to give him one shot at finding DNA in the Spirit Cave remains. Dr. Willerslev's results led the Bureau of Land Management to turn over the skeleton to the tribe. They buried the man from Spirit Cave at an undisclosed location last year. Ms. Downs wouldn't rule out similar studies in the future, but said each request would require careful consideration. "It's all going to be on a case by case basis," she said. "The main thing is our respect for the remains." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
MELBOURNE, Australia For Simona Halep, it was better to think that the United States Open wasn't held last year. Top seeded Halep was ousted from that tournament within its opening hours, blasted off the court by Kaia Kanepi in a 6 2, 6 4 demolition that sent shock waves through the newly built Louis Armstrong Stadium. Five months and 10,000 miles removed from that scene on Tuesday evening at the Australian Open, Halep was able to build back her sturdy defenses, digging into a gritty first round rematch and defeating Kanepi, 6 7 (2), 6 2, 6 4, in 2 hours 11 minutes. Halep, who has had a tendency to give into negativity when being outplayed, did not relent this time. She expressed frustration, exasperation and disbelief after Kanepi struck many of her 40 winners, but remained dialed in throughout. Halep said all she could control was her effort. "I think it's the best match I played in the last period, not giving up for one ball," she said. "I think I improved in that direction." Halep's consistent, rugged defense eventually outlasted Kanepi's attacking; Halep hit only eight unforced errors in the final two sets, compared with 36 by Kanepi. Though a first round win against a player ranked 71st would not normally be a milestone for a top seed, it was a steep test for Halep. Not only had she been clobbered by Kanepi in their previous meeting, Halep had not won a match since, losing three times and pulling out of the year end championships with a back injury. Halep, who has maintained her No. 1 ranking despite not winning a match since August in Cincinnati, projected no precariousness. "If I'm thinking of all these things," she said, "I cannot play tennis anymore." A No. 1 ranked player whose ranking merits a Wheaties box but whose dominance belongs on the side of a milk carton is hardly a rare phenomenon in women's tennis. Dinara Safina, Ana Ivanovic and Angelique Kerber are among those went through crises of confidence when they reached the top of the ladder. Halep preached contentment, particularly after winning a long awaited first Grand Slam title at last year's French Open. "I'm not putting pressure on myself anymore with the results, but I'm still motivated," she said. "What comes now, it's a bonus." Halep split with her longtime coach Darren Cahill at the end of last season, but she projected much of the clarity he instilled in her game perhaps because the two are still in close contact. Cahill, also an analyst for ESPN, the American rights holder for the tournament, was on her court during pretournament practices. "It's great to have him around," she said. "Also it's tough that he's not in my team anymore. I don't know what I'm going to do. For sure, I need a coach, because at this level you cannot do it alone. I'm just chilling for the moment, and we will see after this tournament." Because of Halep's slide, and the even distribution of titles around the top tier of the tour, nine women can leave Melbourne with the No. 1 ranking at the tournament's end. Halep, who finished the last two seasons at the top, said retaining the spot was not in the front of her mind. "The ranking doesn't matter anymore," she said. "I play tennis because I like it. Now my challenge is to win every match I play. I know it's probably impossible, but I'm trying just to stay with this thought, and give it my best." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Watching "Succession," the HBO show about the most despicable plutocrats to seize the public imagination since the Trumps were forced on us, made me want to tax the ultrarich into a homeless shelter. And it almost made a Bernie Bro of me. That's the thing about class loathing: It feels good, a moral high with its own endorphins, but is ultimately self defeating. A Bernie Sanders rally is a hit from the same pipe: Screw those greedy billionaire bastards! Sanders has passion going for him. He has authenticity. He certainly has consistency: His bumper sticker sloganeering hasn't changed for half a century. He was, "even as a young man, an old man," as Time magazine said. But he cannot beat Donald Trump, for the same reason people do not translate their hatred of the odious rich into pitchfork brigades against walled estates. The United States has never been a socialist country, even when it most likely should have been one, during the robber baron tyranny of the Gilded Age or the desperation of the Great Depression, and it never will be. Which isn't to say that American capitalism is working; it needs Teddy Roosevelt style trustbusting and restructuring. We're coming for you, Facebook. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." The next month presents the last chance for serious scrutiny of Sanders, who is leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire. After that, Republicans will rip the bark off him. When they're done, you will not recognize the aging, mouth frothing, business destroying commie from Ben and Jerry's dystopian dairy. Demagogy is what Republicans do best. And Sanders is ripe for caricature. I'm not worried about the Russian stuff Bernie's self described "very strange honeymoon" to the totalitarian hell of the Soviet Union in 1988, and his kind words for similar regimes. Compared with a president who is a willing stooge for the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, a little vodka induced dancing with the red bear is peanuts. Nor am I worried about the legitimate questions concerning the candidate's wife, Jane Sanders, who ran a Vermont college into the ground. Again, Trump's family of grifters from Ivanka securing her patents from China while Daddy made other promises to Beijing, to Don Jr.'s using the White House to leverage the family brand give Democrats more than enough ammunition to return the fire. Trump bragged about sexual assault, paid off a porn star and ran a fraudulent university. He sucks up to dictators and tells a half dozen lies before he puts his socks on in the morning. A weird column about a rape fantasy from 1972 is not going to sink Bernie when Trump has debased all public discourse. No, what will get the Trump demagogue factory working at full throttle is the central message of the Sanders campaign: that the United States needs a political revolution. It may very well need one. But most people don't think so, as Barack Obama has argued. And getting two million new progressive votes in the usual area codes is not going to change that. Give Sanders credit for moving public opinion along on a living wage, higher taxes on the rich and the need for immediate action to stem the immolation of the planet. Most great ideas start on the fringe and move to the middle. But some of his other ideas are stillborn, or never get beyond the fringe. Socialism, despite its flavor of the month appeal to young people, is not popular with the general public. Just 39 percent of Americans view socialism positively, a bare uptick from 2010, compared with 87 percent who have a positive view of free enterprise, Gallup found last fall. What's more, American confidence in the economy is now at the highest level in nearly two decades. That's hardly the best condition for overthrowing the system. So called Medicare for all, once people understand that it involves eliminating all private insurance, polls at barely above 40 percent in some surveys, versus the 70 percent who favor the option of Medicare for all who want it. Other polls show majority support. But cost is a huge concern. And even Sanders cannot give a price tag for nationalizing more than one sixth of the economy. A ban on fracking is a poison pill in a must win state like Pennsylvania, which Democrats lost by just over 44,000 votes in 2016. Eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another Sanders plan, is hugely unpopular with the general public. Sanders is a rigid man, and he projects grumpy old man rigidity, with his policy prescriptions frozen in failed Marxist pipe dreams. He's unlikely to change. I sort of like that about his character, in the same way I like that he didn't cave to the politically correct bullies who went after him for accepting the support of the influential podcaster Joe Rogan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
For our first ever Love issue, we asked four authors to recount times when love and travel intersected in their lives: Alexander Chee writes about a possible betrayal in Spain. Jami Attenberg recalls how a friendship deepened in Sicily. Sarah Hepola remembers a road and an uncertain future in Mexico (below). And Sloane Crosley looks back at a relationship that took three trips to kill. We also have six writers recounting transformative moments that happened while traveling; a roundup of new hotels and resorts for all kinds of relationships, and a collection of readers' stories of loves found and lost on the road. My boyfriend and I had been dating for two years when we took the trip to Mexico. We were both 30, so people grew suspicious. "See you in January, when you have a ring," said a friend, who had gotten married the previous year. The ages of 28 to 30 were like a game of falling dominoes among our circle, but my eyes were tracking other competitions. I could name all of the writers who published successful books before 30, and I could rattle off the parts of the world I had yet to visit, but marriage was still a distant prospect to me, like planning dinner before you've eaten lunch. I actually had a dream once that my boyfriend and I went to his sister's wedding, but it turned out to be our wedding, and I woke up slick with sweat and panicking. I wasn't certain he was right for me, but I did like the idea of being right for him. Cynics are often romantics in disguise, and my married friend's joke was enough to release certain fantasies into the air. My boyfriend spinning me around on a deserted beach. Dinner by candlelight, a box creaked open like an oyster shell: Will you? We began our 10 day vacation in Mexico City, a sprawling metropolis of untapped beauty, where we promptly went to the bar. The tequila came in tall glasses that resembled test tubes, and the custom was to sip the liquor and savor the nuance. Until then, tequila had been the kind of bad idea someone pulled off a shelf at 1 a.m., and we used other verbs to describe what happened next: Slam, guzzle, shoot. But slowing down felt adult, sophisticated. My boyfriend announced that when we returned to Dallas, he wanted to open a bar called Correct, where all of the liquor would be served according to its origin country. Chilled Russian vodka, German beer never served ice cold. He was an M.B.A. student who liked to brainstorm concepts for bars, which suggests how often we were sitting in one. Bars were our safe havens. I always felt connected to him when we were nuzzled in those vinyl booths, under dim lighting, maybe because we could literally see eye to eye. He was tall and lanky, while I was short and curvy, and sometimes I caught a glimpse of us while we were walking, and we looked like mismatched glassware, a champagne flute with a snifter. A bar dissolved the differences between us, though. A bar always felt like being held. We flew to a small village on the Pacific Coast called Mazunte. The weather was an immaculate 80 degrees. We ate lunch at a beach grill that served fish tacos, and I nudged my bare feet into the sand, making tiny mountains with my toes, and then we headed toward the shore, the nervous part where we had to reveal ourselves. He was the first in the water. I sat on a towel and watched him splash around like a little boy. "It feels amazing," he assured me, and I waited until strangers had stopped passing, and then I took off my top and the little gingham skirt that hid the heartbreaking part of my thighs, and I hustled out in my one piece fast enough that maybe nobody saw me. Whenever I allowed myself to return to water, I was overwhelmed by how much I had missed it. Out on dry land, I felt hollow in some indescribable way, but the water connected me to something larger than myself. As the waves gently rocked me and I stared up at the open sky, I wondered why my soul had felt so half empty before, why I kept frantically trying to fill it. My boyfriend and I became playful that afternoon, which was rare for us. We usually got that way only after a night of drinking. I kept leaping on his back, and he would cart me around, diving into the waves as I squealed with delight. I called him my tortuga, because the area was known for its sea turtles. "Tortuga! Mi tortuga!" I would howl into the wind. And I thought: A person would be lucky to spend a life with this man. It was my goal back then to appreciate what I already had. That night, we got lost on the way to dinner. We ended up on some stone pathway that climbed into a leafy terrain, following signs that were definitely not for the place we read about in the guidebook. I was starting to get snippy when we popped out into the most intimate restaurant on an oceanside cliff. The whole place felt like a secret. We were greeted by a good looking man whose native language was Spanish, though he spoke to us in a chummy English. He explained that he owned the place with his Swiss wife, and he gestured inside to a thin, casually elegant blonde before returning to his cocktail and his paperback. "That guy has the life," my boyfriend said, staring at the pretty Swiss woman as she glided around the interior, and I agreed, but I had that sinking feeling I got whenever his eyes settled too long on another woman, like I was the floppy puppy dragged out of a carnival by the kid who had his heart set on the lion. I was drunk by the time we got back to our hotel. The ocean was empty, dark and churning, and I remembered the voluptuous sensation of the waves from earlier that afternoon. I stripped off my clothes and ran naked toward the ocean. "You're crazy," he said, but I thought I had finally gotten it right. I liked the midnight version of myself, the one who wasn't so flinching and scared, the one who sprinted straight into the open mouth of adventure. "Come on." I waved him toward me. He unbuckled his jeans with a look of grim resignation and folded them on the sand. "I have no idea what the hell is in this water," he said, his pale skin glowing as he marched toward me. I kissed him for his sportsmanship, and I leapt on his back again. "Tortuga! Mi tortuga!" I yelled, but he wasn't laughing this time. He was scanning the dark waters with a pained look on his face. It's strange how one person's paradise can be another person's nightmare. Eventually, we walked back onto the shore, and we made out while lying on the wet sand, the tide crashed up against us like we were in a freaking romance novel. But afterward, I still felt pouty that he hadn't played my game. Drunk me was rarely happy with the things she had. Drunk me liked to rummage around the cabinets looking for more. Our last stop was Oaxaca City. We took a winding overnight bus and arrived bleary eyed to a quaint hotel door still locked at 8 a.m. The bus had been my idea, but it was much worse than I had anticipated, and I felt guilty. In my mid 20s, I had traveled alone through South America, and I had suffered such a pinch of loneliness, but now I worried about him. Was he having fun? Had I made the right choices? Sometimes I thought this travel was just me trying to outrun my unhappiness. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to stay still for a while. On New Year's Eve, we had dinner at the finest hotel in the city, which had been recommended by a restaurateur who loved it so much she held her wedding there. I could get married here, I thought, as we walked through the white corridor and into a courtyard in full bloom. The dinner was on a rooftop offering a romantic view of the colonial city, and each table had a warm amber candle, and I grew jumpier as the courses unfolded, as ceviche gave way to squash blossoms gave way to mole. I was not really a diamond ring kind of woman, but I promised myself if he had one, I would be happy. He reached down to pick up something from the floor at one point, and my heart went sideways, but it was just his napkin. Dessert came and went. We ordered a second bottle of wine, or maybe our third, and I slumped back into the realization that there would be no ring, there would be no proposal. At 12 o'clock, the old year tipped into a new year and we stayed the same. I returned to Dallas with no ring. I met my friend at the bar, and he regretted the joke he had made before we left. "He should have asked you to marry him," he said, and I thanked him. More than anything, I wanted to be a woman that a man wanted to marry. It was less a wish to move forward and more a fear of being left behind. I still wonder what would have happened if he and I had continued. It wouldn't have been so hard. Maybe I never would have stopped drinking, which is what I needed to do to finally write my book. Maybe he never would have found the thin, casually elegant blonde he married and with whom he is now raising a child. That alternate life will remain a mystery, because one evening, a few months after we returned, he turned to me and said the words that will change the course of your life: "I can't do this anymore." And the way he said it, I could tell: He was certain. He had given me the gift I needed. We could finally set each other free. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The chief executive of the Miami Marlins has the most postseason experience of anyone in baseball history. For Derek Jeter, all of it came in his first act, as shortstop for the Yankees 158 games in the caldron of the playoffs and World Series. Now comes No. 159, on Wednesday afternoon at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where Jeter will watch his Marlins face the Cubs in the opener of their best of three playoff series. He will not be in uniform, so he will be nervous. "It's completely different, because you have no control whatsoever," Jeter said by phone on Sunday, before the Marlins beat the Yankees to finish 31 29, their first winning record in 11 years. "You can't talk to guys while they're going through a game. Obviously, it's exciting, because it's an organization that we built and you're pulling for guys to be successful. It's frustrating. It's all these emotions." It has been an eventful eight years since Jeter's last trip to the postseason, which ended when he broke his ankle diving for a grounder in the 2012 American League Championship Series. He retired with a flourish in 2014, became a husband, a father, a Hall of Famer and, in late 2017, a part owner of the Marlins, presiding over their baseball and business operations. As a player, Jeter was eminently accessible yet intensely private, rarely given to introspection. The major exception was his postcareer ambition: He talked openly about his dream of owning a team, and he did not have to wait long. While Bruce Sherman is the Marlins' principal owner, Jeter, 46, has recast the Marlins in his image, weathering two years as the worst team in the National League to become the most unlikely entrant into baseball's 16 team playoff field. "The approach that I've talked to our players about since Day 1, the first spring training in 2018, was, 'Listen: Every single pitch, every at bat, every inning, every single game counts and if you take that approach, there's no added pressure,'" Jeter said. "You get to the postseason, it's the same game that you played in spring training. That's the approach we take, and I think it's a big reason why our group's been able to bounce back from a lot this year." After their opening series in late July, the Marlins missed a week because of an outbreak of 20 positive Covid 19 cases. Only five players were active for all 60 games, and the team made a staggering 174 roster moves in all. It was a low key triumph of front office hustle, and after the Marlins clinched a playoff berth on Friday, Jeter spent the night calling scouts and baseball operations staffers to thank them, as Peter Gammons reported on Twitter. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. "Building a great team on the field, in the front office, it's still the same thing," Jeter said. "You have to understand what you're good at and where you need help. I've always been very good at knowing what I don't know." All those years with the Yankees, Jeter was paying attention. The Marlins' front office, coaching and scouting staffs are loaded with people who have strong ties to the Yankees. The Marlins have rarely spent like the Yankees, and when they have especially in 1997, when they won their first World Series, and in 2012, when they opened Marlins Park they quickly reversed course. Jeter hopes for more than fleeting success. "It's not like we're trying to chase winning one time," he said. "We all know how difficult it is to win. We want to have an organization that, year in and year out, we have an opportunity to compete for a championship." Opportunity has always been a telling word for Jeter. Joe Torre, his manager for 12 years with the Yankees, spoke often of how Jeter reacted when the team cleared a starting spot for him in 1996: Jeter acknowledged only that he had the opportunity to win the job. He was not entitled to it. Three years ago, as a rookie executive with the Marlins, Jeter said much the same thing. He did not expect fans to trust him, because they did not know him. He was careful with his promises and pledged to alter his mind set to fit his new role. "When you're playing, you're competing for that particular year," Jeter said. "When you're in this position, you're playing for this year, next year, three years, five years down the road. So you've got to have a certain amount of patience but I don't have a lot of it. I tried, but I don't have any." "Hold on one sec, I'll tell you one thing I have more patience with players than most, because I understand how difficult it is to play this game," Jeter said. "I understand that players are going to struggle, and quite frankly I like to see players when they struggle, because everyone's going to do it. It's just a matter of seeing how you're going to bounce back." The Marlins have acquired several intriguing prospects via trades, often banking more on tools than track records. Some have indeed struggled in their first taste of the majors: Infielder Jazz Chisholm was 9 for 56 this season, and outfielder Monte Harrison was 8 for 47. Sixto Sanchez finished poorly but looked dominant in his first five pitching starts, with a 1.69 earned run average. The Marlins control Sanchez for six more seasons, while the player they traded for him, catcher J.T. Realmuto, will be a free agent this winter after two seasons with Philadelphia. The Marlins' depth in young pitching, Jeter said, gave him hope that the team would contend. Combine that with an opportunistic offense that ranked second to San Diego in stolen bases, and the Marlins have the type of roster Jeter envisioned for Manager Don Mattingly, who predated Jeter with the Marlins after first managing the Los Angeles Dodgers. "Speaking with Donnie over the last couple of years, I told him the type of team I want to build," Jeter said. "I want to build a team with pitching, I want to build a team with athletes, I want to build a team that's aggressive, bunting, hit and run, stealing, and Donnie's on board with it. He loves it, and you see that with our group now. We play aggressively. Yeah, we make mistakes, but aggressive mistakes are fine." Mattingly and Jeter were the last two captains of the Yankees, and neither played anywhere else. But the Yankees passed on Mattingly as a successor to Torre, and the Steinbrenners have never put the team up for sale. Mattingly and Jeter, then, are like so many other New Yorkers who moved to South Florida for opportunity and reinvention. "People will say, 'What are you, a Yankee or a Marlin?'" Jeter said. "Well, look, I'll always be a Yankee. My entire playing career was in New York. You'd never want to change that. I have quite a special relationship with the Steinbrenner family and the fans in New York. But now we're building an organization down here in Miami, which doesn't mean you have to pick one or the other." With the Yankees also in the playoffs, though, there's a chance that could change by late October. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Young African Americans and their allies are demanding change, leading people of all backgrounds to talk about issues that have lain dormant for decades. What do they want? Inclusion and representation now. Here, seven students talk about the problems, the protests and themselves. Bio: Senior, English/African American studies; co organizer of We Are Done movement; producer and co author of "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem" video My Story: I am totally African American. My grandfather was a sharecropper in rural Alabama who moved to Atlanta and became a mechanic and worker at General Motors, so I grew up in Atlanta around middle class black people. To come to Alabama and see this kind of segregation was horrifying to me. A lot of people who were impoverished 50 years ago, around the time of Selma, are still impoverished. Nothing has changed structurally. "I've been blogging about the Machine for about a year, and every time I'd post something my hand would shake." Amanda Bennett Bob Miller for The New York Times It would be a lie to say I've never been fearful for my safety. I've been called the "n" word by fraternity men. I've had Muslim friends called the "n" word. Because of how Alabama is, black kids don't have the political connections to make their voices count, so they're even more vulnerable. I've experienced dozens of micro aggressions: being forced off the sidewalk, or asked during class if all black people eat collard greens, or why the slaves didn't just free themselves this was in American literature class; we might have been reading "Huckleberry Finn." Having to put on a happy face and pretend these things aren't dehumanizing to me was a farce. The root cause of these issues is the Machine, an underground coalition of 28 fraternities and sororities that has controlled politics on campus for over 100 years. In recent decades, the Machine has been accused of assaulting and intimidating students they've been known to key cars and draw swastikas on campus and electioneering in student government and local elections. I've been blogging about the Machine for about a year, and every time I'd post something my hand would shake. But I thought: I have a voice. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do anything. What I was doing was bigger than myself. What We Want: We Are Done was a demonstration held on Nov. 19. We marched from Malone Hood Plaza, where George Wallace stood and said Vivian Malone and James Hood could not enter, to the Gorgas Library, named after the wife of the Confederate general Josiah Gorgas, who was the university's eighth president. About 300 of us sang "We Shall Overcome." We Are Done was not just a protest; it's also a movement. We are done tolerating the bigotry, injustice and social inequality on campus. We have 11 demands, which include implementing a division of diversity, funding programs that support multicultural work, and requiring the trustees to acknowledge the Machine and take steps to bring it above ground. Our demands are not radical but a logical extension of human rights. "Ferguson sparked a movement on campus that let us know we have the right to fight back." Storm Ervin Daniel Brenner for The New York Times Bio: December 2015 graduate, sociology/black studies; co founder of Concerned Student 1950 (the year the university admitted its first black students) My Story: My freshman roommate would use colorblind racist terms like "ghetto" or "hood rat" to describe me. I went to a frat party and I saw a Confederate flag. I can't say all white students are racist at Mizzou, but the culture I experienced was. It gave me a new way of understanding my reality it was not about any individual, it was structural and institutional. The higher ups enable this culture. We had the poop swastikas going on, and our leadership was silent about it. The Legion of Black Collegians puts on a homecoming for black students. They were rehearsing for an upcoming event when people called them "niggers." President Wolfe didn't find the need to do anything. About a week later, 10 of us stood in front of President Wolfe's car during the all school homecoming parade. We each recited a line about an incident of racist violence at Mizzou since 1950. A police officer put his hands on my chest; we were shoved off the street. Wolfe's driver hit one of the demonstrators. Wolfe sat there and watched. I have always wanted to give back to black people. Ferguson is two hours away. I had gone there in 2014 and added my body power to actions. Ferguson sparked a movement on campus that let us know we have the right to fight back. Now I definitely want to pursue a life in policy and social change. What We Want: We released eight demands we thought would make the university less harmful to blacks. We want to see more black faculty. We want more black psychologists and mental health care officials. We want the president and chancellor to be selected by a collective of students, staff and faculty of diverse backgrounds. In the U.S., we get to choose our officials, but that's not how it works at public institutions: The curators are not chosen by the people, they're chosen by the governors. That's not fair. "I'm African American and 6 feet 5. I'm constantly followed in stores; I'm pulled over a lot when I'm driving." David C. Turner III Emily Berl for The New York Times Bio: Ph.D. candidate, social and cultural studies in education; national organizer with the Black Liberation Collective, a coordinating hub for student activists My Story: My mother was very interested in giving us a nuanced understanding of what it means to be black. She graduated from Tennessee State University, a historically black college. We lived in Nashville for two years, and she would take my sister and me to certain places to show us things to help us see what black folks have to fight for. My dad was a former drug addict who went into drug rehabilitation work. He made sure we understood that just because these folks are down on their luck doesn't mean they matter less. After reading Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" in 11th grade, I understood that education was part of a system to help reproduce oppression and oppressive contexts. If I was going to do anything with my life, it would be to transform that. I'm interested in education for social change. Not teaching in schools, but education that helps you see yourself and your world differently. I'm African American and 6 feet 5. I'm constantly followed in stores; I'm pulled over a lot when I'm driving. I was 18 and the police almost blew my head off because I reached for my registration too quickly. I've never been taken in, but I've had to pay a lot of fines for mundane things. I had to pay 200 because my taillight wasn't bright enough! That's what we're fighting against. Just because Berkeley sits on the political left doesn't mean racism doesn't happen here. On campus, if more than five black people congregate, a police presence pops up. They never say anything; they just stand there and watch, which is creepy. Students at the social work school here held a teach in over racist comments one of their white professors had made. He said Black Lives Matter should focus on black on black crime rather than police brutality. He read a rap song he wrote about it. First and foremost, it's empirically inaccurate for someone with a Ph.D. who studies vulnerable communities to assert such a thing. Second, to be so culturally insensitive as to insist that the only way you can get black students to understand is to do a rap song, especially in a graduate program at one of the top schools in the country, is insulting. What We Want: Folks were asking Mizzou, "How can we help? How can we be there for you?" They said, "Don't come here; we want you to do this on your campus." There hasn't really been a coordinated effort to help build student leadership at the national level for at least two decades, since the Black Student Leadership Network. We want to help students build their campaigns so their message gets out to a larger audience. Young black people have the potential to transform American politics. That's what we're seeing at this very moment. "On Facebook it was heavily hinted I was a traitor and white sympathizer" Josh Freeman, left "Students are intimidated or otherwise unwilling to express what they believe." Josh Zuckerman, right Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times Bio: Sophomore, mechanical and aerospace engineering; co founder of Princeton Open Campus Coalition, aimed at protecting "diversity of thought and the right of all students to advance their academic and personal convictions in a manner free from intimidation" My Story: I went to a small, mostly white high school in Norfolk, Va. My friends and I both black and white kids would joke with each other in ways that could be considered racist. But there was no animosity between us. We'd known each other forever. At Princeton, everyone is much more concerned with the way they speak. If students at Princeton feel they must protest, then there is a problem that needs to be discussed. But they're not trying to discuss it, they're trying to force their ideals on the university. I respect what the student activists are doing here, but not the way they're going about it and the directions of the demands. They try to silence anyone who disagrees with them. It's a very "us versus them" mentality. On Facebook it was heavily hinted I was a traitor and white sympathizer. What We Want: I disagree with those who want to rename the Woodrow Wilson building and college. Wilson is a part of Princeton's history. We can't erase this, no matter what. We have to discuss the good and the bad with his legacy. My Story: I've always been interested in politics. I joined The Princeton Tory, a political and philosophical magazine with a conservative bent, in my freshman year. I'm now editor in chief. But the coalition has nothing to do with the magazine. This is something I've been feeling for a long time, that students are intimidated or otherwise unwilling to express what they believe. What We Want: Before the P.O.C.C. was founded, a friend and I wrote a petition outlining what we found objectionable about the demands that the Black Justice League had made; it has more than 1,800 signatures. One goal is to try to unite people across all ideologies. We need a campus culture where disagreement is managed in a civil manner and no one resorts to name calling or bullying techniques to silence those who disagree with them. My Story: My dad has been in jail off and on since I was born. The longest he's been out is three months. I don't even know what he's in for. Although I don't see him that often, I give him all the credit. He pushed upon me the importance of being educated and being aware locally and nationally. I haven't experienced racism on campus at all. Part of it is the environment I've been in I'm an athlete. I played football and we're treated differently. We get more respect. But also, there are two criteria for racism to exist: The person making the comments or gestures has to intend to do it, and the receiver has to be willing to accept that gesture or comment as racist. "Sticks and stones can break my bones" that's my attitude. What We Want: We founded TEAM Jayhawks in response to the protests on campus. The other founders and I felt the activists were going about it in a disrespectful manner, and in a way the larger student body could not empathize with. For example, at a community forum hosted by the chancellor, members of a minority group, Rock Chalk Invisible Hawk, took the mike and started cussing her out. Now, Rock Chalk had been trying to push its demands for two years; they lashed out because nothing had been done. They were angry. I understand that. We stand in solidarity with other minority organizations on campus, but our methods are different. Two friends and I are entrepreneurs, and a few months ago we did "Start Up Weekend." We learned about a concept called design thinking, a human centered approach to solving problems. We plan to have people gather around and come up with ideas on a topic we give them. From there, they'll break into small groups, share their ideas and get feedback. Not only do you get insight and answers but a perspective you may not have had before. We don't want to be called activists. We're educators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
"Chris Wallace did two things right there that Trump absolutely hates: He proved him wrong, and he made him do homework." TREVOR NOAH "Come on, Chris. Trump didn't come on Fox News to get fact checked. Talk to your colleagues." STEPHEN COLBERT "When asked yesterday about his statements that downplay the severity of the coronavirus, President Trump said, quote, 'I guess everybody makes mistakes.' Yeah, but there are mistakes, and then there are mistakes. When I over water one of my plants the economy stays open and Americans can still travel to Canada." SETH MEYERS "Here's where the interview got really sad. Lately, Trump has been bragging nonstop about passing a cognitive test. Now remember, passing this test is not impressive. It checks for things like brain damage, asking real stumpers like 'Name these three animals,' making it the most difficult test Trump has taken since the one where he had to get all the pee in the cup." STEPHEN COLBERT "It's chilling to see the most powerful man in the world bragging that he passed a test that they give people to find out whether they should be allowed to take the bus by themselves." STEPHEN COLBERT | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
CHANTING MUSIC PLAYING I had quite an amazing experience one Saturday morning while I was washing up some dishes. I heard a voice, quite definitely a voice out of this world, say to me, "Prepare yourself, you are to become the voice of interplanetary parliament." You became a channel for the transmission of messages from cosmic intelligence. Yes, that's right. CHANTING Never before has the energy invoked by the simple expedient of prayer been stored in a physical container, so that it could be used at any time. And that's the whole essence of Operation Prayer Power. I see it as an opportunity to just let out all my my feeling to help save the world. Once the prayer is stored in the battery, we are able to release it and send it to hold off disasters and helping humanitarian crisis situations. We've used it in the past to move hurricanes and to aid peace talks that prevent nuclear war and the destruction of our planet. You are liable to upset the balance of your earth through number one, atomic experimentation, number two, your deviation from the spiritual laws. Part of our evolution is to is to learn how to get out of this mess that we're in. But other beings can help guide us. Lord Buddha is a cosmic master from Venus. Sri Krishna was a cosmic master from Saturn. Master Jesus was a cosmic master from Venus. I gave my life to earth, so that she might be saved from imminent catastrophe. I ask you now in these days to give all that you can give. CHANTING Blessed are they who work for peace. O mighty father of all creation, let your light flow through this world now. Let it shine into the hearts and minds of men. CHANTING The Aetherius Society is playing a really huge role behind the scenes. We have been cooperating with the cosmic masters to send out energy through our spiritual energy radiating equipment. We've sent thousands of prayer hours to uplift everybody's consciousness. Still can you take part in the great adventure to lead the earth as a unit toward sanity. The most important thing is to just be of selfless service, because that's what the sun does and look how great and mighty it is. It gives energy to the whole solar system. So maybe we could be like the sun one day, if we just give and give. CHANTING And even if you do not believe in God, then believe in good, please. It's the same thing. MUSIC PLAYING | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
WHO KILLED GARRETT PHILLIPS? 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. For years, Potsdam, a small town in upstate New York, was consumed with a case that seemed crystal clear to so many residents. In 2011, 12 year old Garrett Phillips was strangled to death in his home. The police identified Oral Nicholas Hillary, a soccer coach and a former boyfriend of Phillips' mother, as the primary suspect. Hillary said he was innocent. But he was charged with second degree murder in 2014, despite the lack of conclusive forensic evidence. The county prosecutor said the investigation was over, but two years later, Hillary was acquitted. In this new two part documentary, those involved with the case unpack why Hillary was swept up in it and point to questions that remain unanswered. CASH PAD 10 p.m. on CNBC. The hosts Jordan Rodgers and JoJo Fletcher (of "The Bachelorette") help homeowners spruce up and transform their properties into coveted short term rentals in this new series. The show begins with a married couple in Stonewall, Tex., who want to give their empty cottage a second life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
One day when L. J. Krumenacker was a teenager, he left his home to hunt for fossils. He drove about an hour and a half to Paris Canyon in Bear Lake County in southeastern Idaho and stopped at a foothill covered in sagebrush. Mr. Krumenacker got out of his car, picked up the first large rock he saw and smashed it with a hammer, uncovering seven or eight fossilized shark teeth. "I did a double take. I thought, 'No, this is impossible.' But they really were shark teeth," Mr. Krumenacker said. "Immediately I thought this spot was important because you don't go out and randomly find 250 million year old shark teeth on accident." It was more devastating than the event that annihilated the dinosaurs some 186 million years later. Scientists think it may have been caused by intense volcanic activity that released tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide, heating the planet and acidifying the oceans. And the fossils Mr. Krumenacker first stumbled upon in Paris Canyon may be a sign that life on Earth recovered much more quickly than previously known. "Something in the neighborhood of 90 percent of species went extinct," said Daniel Stephen, a paleontologist at Utah Valley University and an author of the paper that appeared in Science Advances on Wednesday. "Just imagine you go outside, look around you and nine out of 10 of every life form you see around you have vanished." Though Mr. Krumenacker believed the fossil site was important, it took him more than a decade to draw professional paleontologists to Idaho. Since his first find, Mr. Krumenacker, who is now a doctoral student at Montana State University, made frequent trips back to the Paris Canyon site and uncovered shrimp and sponge fossils. These soft bodied specimens typically don't fossilize well, but the ones he collected were pristinely preserved. They were just the discoveries he needed to attract the attention of other paleontologists and finally organize a professional dig. Now, about 20 years after Mr. Krumenacker found the shark teeth, he and a team of researchers have identified more than 750 individual specimens at Paris Canyon, including ancient squids, lobsters, fish and other marine creatures. By dating the rocks at the site, they determined that the location was part of a thriving underwater ecosystem some 250 million years ago, only about 1.3 million years after the Great Dying. Most previous research had suggested that it took between 10 million and 20 million years for ecosystems to recover. "To build these diverse ecosystems, you're almost starting from scratch from the mass extinction event," Dr. Stephen said. "The information that my colleagues and I have gathered tell us that at least in some places the recovery was relatively rapid." The marine life at this location may have been as bustling and flourishing as a healthy coral reef today. There would have been seven foot long sharks swimming among squidlike creatures with tentacles that had hooks, and armored cephalopods with coiled shells called ammonites sharing the sea with mollusks in shells shaped like ice cream cones. There might have also been dolphinlike marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs and schools of bony fish. The ocean floor would have been covered in scavenging shrimp and lobsters, as well as sponges, clams and ancient starfish relatives that stood on stems and resembled underwater flowers. "It's fairly remarkable just because it's so diverse," Mr. Krumenacker said. "You're roughly a million years after the worst extinction in the history of the planet and we have this diverse ecosystem. It's much earlier than people thought." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. He arrived in Cheyenne, Wyo., from Las Vegas, where he explored an unexpected side of the city, and then moved on to Huntsville, Ala. When the planners restoring the Wyoming State Capitol building in Cheyenne unearthed a set of old blueprints for the building, they realized that, at some point in the past, history had fallen prey to bureaucracy. A cluster of fluorescent lit offices and a copy room on the building's second floor, it turns out, had been home to the Wyoming territorial assembly and later the Supreme Court. Where people now battle paper jams, a constitution had been drafted and statehood ratified. When I visited the Capitol on my sixth stop of 52, teams of painters were recreating the original trompe l'oeil wallpaper, others were restoring the wooden banisters of the viewing deck and, in general, bringing the entire section of the building back to its single room , former glory in time for July 10 when Wyoming will celebrate 129 years of statehood. 2019 also marks 150 years since the territory of Wyoming guaranteed women the right to vote and hold office 51 years before the country guaranteed women voting rights with the 19th Amendment . On the eve of statehood, from that very room, Wyoming officials sent a rebuttal to the United States Congress, which was reluctant to welcome a state where women could vote. The telegram reportedly said something along the lines of: "We will remain out of the Union 100 years rather than come in without the women." More than 1,000 miles away, another momentous paint job was underway in Huntsville, Ala. When I saw it, the 363 foot tall vertical replica of the Saturn V rocket that towers over the city was about a quarter of the way through its face lift, the line between bright white and weathered yellow marking the progress. It, too, is set to be finished this summer, just in time to commemorate 50 years since the Saturn V rocket built in Huntsville launched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon on July 16, 1969. February might not be the ideal time to visit Wyoming, but it does help you understand the resilience of its original inhabitants and those who came during the Western expansion. I felt it most while standing right by the dome of Cheyenne's capitol building during a behind the scenes look at the ongoing restoration project. The wind quickly turned every exposed part of my body numb, and when I opened my mouth, it was like sinking my incisors into a scoop of ice cream. "This is not a climate for you if you're soft to the world," Affie Ellis told me over pizza a few days later. "Our women have a no nonsense attitude to the world. They get things done." I had asked her what it was about Wyoming that had led to so many firsts for women. Including her own. An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Ms. Ellis became the first Native American in Wyoming's senate when she assumed office in January 2017. Long before Ms. Ellis, there were others who gained prominence after the territory's decision to grant women's suffrage. There was Esther Hobart Morris, the country's first female justice of the peace; the first female jurors in a jury convened in Laramie the year after suffrage passed into law; Martha Symons, the first female bailiff; and Nellie Tayloe Ross, who became the first female governor of the United States in 1925. Everyone I spoke to, from legislators to museum curators, viewed the 150th anniversary of women's suffrage in Wyoming as an opportunity to shine a light on the state's significance for women's rights. On Dec. 10 the state will celebrate suffrage in the same room in the capitol building where it was defended on the eve of statehood. But even now, you can see reminders of it everywhere. In front of the Cheyenne Depot Museum, a bronze statue of a woman staring into the horizon honors those women who took the train to Wyoming, like Esther Hobart Morris did in 1869. There's another statue of a woman, by the sculptor Veryl Goodnight, leaning on a wagon wheel outside the Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum; it's titled "No Turning Back" and honors the earliest homesteaders . At the Wyoming State Museum, you can see a flag given to the new state "from the Women of Wyoming," and a letter from British suffragists congratulating the women of Wyoming on their victory. None Just a short drive from Cheyenne is the Terry Bison Ranch, home to a hotel, a steakhouse and a whole lot of bison. If you've got the stomach for it, take the train tour to the ranch to feed bison from the palm of your hand and then dig in to a seriously delicious bison burger at the Senator's Steakhouse. None If you're focusing your Wyoming trip on Cheyenne, it's worth spending an afternoon in Laramie, about 40 minutes away. Home to the University of Wyoming, it exudes an energy that's at once young and quirky. Grab a vegetarian bite at Sweet Melissa and bounce between the many antiques shops that dot South 2nd Street. You can also get an extra dose of history at the Laramie Plains Museum, a reconstructed 19th century home with a hallway dedicated to Wyoming women's firsts, and the House for Historic Women (closed in the winter), which honors Louisa Swain, the first woman to vote in a general election, and other Wyoming women. None I made the mistake of flying into Casper and driving to Cheyenne, when I should have flown into Denver because it's closer, and my flight made a layover there anyway. But I did have the pleasure of driving on Highways 30 and 487, which snake through wide open plains and the occasional one street town. There are omissions and complications. With so much focus on the heartiness of the pioneer women, I saw a disheartening lack of attention paid to the indigenous women who were here long before. One exception was an expansive section of the Wyoming State Museum devoted to the stories of the tribal groups who once called the plains home, including a candid portrayal of genocide and displacement. There's also the murkiness around why the territory of Wyoming was the first to pass women's suffrage at all. The established narrative that Wyoming was facing a population crisis and needed to incentivize women to move out West is on shakier ground these days. For one, it discounts the role of women like Esther Hobart Morris and others who, some say, were fervent campaigners for suffrage, not grateful recipients of men's magnanimity. But there's also evidence of a political battle won by legislators who believed that if black men were going to vote, then as a counterweight, white women should as well. The anniversary is forcing Wyomingites to confront that history and ask those questions. The result is that a major focus of the sesquicentennial is on encouraging more civic engagement from the women of Wyoming. Ms. Ellis, for example, felt compelled to run for office when she took her daughter to a Senate debate. At the time, there was only one woman in the State Senate. Looking around the room, Ms. Ellis's daughter asked her, "Mom, do they let girls be in the Senate?" "It was all I needed to hear to turn my life upside down," Ms. Ellis told me. Wondering where Seb is right now? You can hear from him by asking Alexa to "open the 52 Places Traveler." You can learn more about Alexa and The Times at nytimes.com/voice. Mr. Moore now volunteers here as a NASA emeritus Docent at the Center. Clad in a white lab coat, he talks to visitors under the shadow of a Saturn V rocket he helped build. He was reassigned to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center when it was established in 1958. His job was to build a rocket to get people into space, instead of one that could reach Moscow in a single flight. Mr. Moore told me stories for an hour, him leaning on his walker, me insisting (to no avail) that maybe we find somewhere to sit down. He told me about the strange tension that came from working with a team of German engineers under the guidance of Dr. Wernher von Braun who, a few years earlier, had been designing the V 2 rockets that had rained carnage on London. He walked me through the steps that led to a full fledged space race with Russia first, a race for intercontinental ballistic missiles, then satellites, then the moon each of which Mr. Moore was a part of. Of the Apollo 11 launch itself when he saw the rocket he had helped design send three astronauts to the moon he was remarkably understated. There's a lot going on in Huntsville to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. Space is the city's calling card and can be found everywhere, from the names of local beers (try the Straight to Ale Monkeynaut) to novelty menu items (I heard about, but did not seek out, a supercharged pig in a blanket called the "Werner von Brat"). The Space and Rocket Center is, predictably, going all out to celebrate 50 years. On July 16, launch day, an attempt to break a Guinness World Record for launching the most miniature rockets into the air at once 5,000 of them will be hosted here. (I saw a trial run of 300 and, with only two failing to launch, it would appear they're almost there.) A new, state of the art planetarium just opened in the center, too, which tells the story of the Apollo launch, and can do things like map the stars exactly as they would appear in the Huntsville night sky if there was no light pollution or cloud cover. A small, but powerful, exhibit on the Apollo landing has just opened, with as much attention paid to the technicalities of the launch as to the political, social and cultural context in which it occurred. There will be concerts, a car show and models of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), the next generation of rocketry, set up across the Tennessee Valley. It's all very fun, but to come face to face with a reservoir of living history like Mr. Moore and hear the firsthand stories of someone who took us to the moon is the real reason to go to Huntsville now. That, and everything not related to rockets, as many a resident told me. None For drinks, head to Campus 805. Once a middle school, the complex has been converted into an appealing array of breweries, restaurants and bars. Another place I loved was A.M. Booth's Lumberyard, a deceptively gigantic space that includes multiple bars, outdoor patios, music stages and a restored train car from the 1920s that you can have dinner in. None A short drive from the city center will get you to Burritt on the Mountain. The centerpiece is the mansion of William Burritt, who willed the land to the city upon his death in 1955, but the highlights are the 19th century structures that are home to a living history museum, with re enactors in period appropriate attire, and the view of the city. None There's a lot of development going on in Huntsville, including the building of what will amount to a second downtown at MidCity. For now, much of it is still a construction site, but it's worth heading to The Camp, an outdoor live music venue with a food truck that serves a dangerously good hot chicken sandwich. In fact, "more than just rockets," was a kind of rallying cry I heard again and again. Being in a place that was trying to go beyond its history was a stark contrast from my experience in Cheyenne, where there was a concerted effort to embrace the past. In Huntsville, nowhere is that reinvention more on display than at Lowe Mill Arts and Entertainment, a cotton mill that's been repurposed into the largest privately owned arts facility in the country. Walking through its endless corridors, I passed a studio where an artist creates "plausible, fictional maps;" a cigar box guitar workshop; a facility that creates miniatures for tabletop role playing games; and a pottery store. On its periphery, the Tangled String Studio is a performance space and workshop where Danny Davis who, for 30 years, worked on propulsion systems for NASA builds custom guitars and mandolins. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert scoffed at the news that President Trump had donated a portion of his salary to the Department of Homeland Security. Each called the move hypocritical but for different reasons. Colbert pointed out that Trump was simultaneously proposing to cut the department's budget, and Meyers's critique was even more straightforward. "His most recent proposal for wall funding would take 5 billion away from the Department of Homeland Security budget. So, Trump's paycheck donation is like robbing a restaurant, then on your way out throwing a nickel in the tip jar. impersonating Trump 'Here you go. Buy yourself something nice, like an alarm system.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "President Trump yesterday tweeted a picture of a signed check that he wrote donating 100,000 of his annual salary to the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, if you want to give part of your salary to the government, you could just pay your taxes." SETH MEYERS | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Sitting comfortably in my living room, I had every intention of listening to the boxed set that had recently landed with a thud in my mailbox. For Bach lovers, Glenn Gould fans and pianists (I'm all three), here was perhaps the ultimate find of recording history, finally available: the nearly five hours of Gould's complete recording sessions for his momentous debut album, Bach's "Goldberg" Variations." But I couldn't make it through, not even close. Let me explain. In four intense sessions in a Manhattan studio in June 1955, the 22 year old Gould recorded his breathless, uncannily clear account of the "Goldbergs." The release turned what had previously been considered a lengthy piece for harpsichord, of interest only to Bach specialists, into a runaway hit. It also made the gangly, eccentric Gould an unlikely classical superstar. The tapes of those sessions were stored for years in the archives of Columbia Records, now Sony Classical. But in a 2004 interview, the recording's producer, Howard H. Scott, said it would be a "disgrace" to make them public. Though Gould might have objected, I have no problem with Sony's decision to release these sessions. (A few selected outtakes were actually included in two previous Gould "Goldberg" reissues.) In an essay, Robert Russ, the producer of the new set, argues for the documentary value of the tapes, which he deems part of our cultural legacy. Fair enough. But who is the target audience for this? When I first received the set, I wondered whether even the most devoted Bach and Gould lovers would actually listen to all 282 tracks. The final recording is exhausting enough: Ignoring all the structural repeats in the score, Gould brought the "Goldbergs" in at just over 38 minutes, while performances that adopt more conventional tempos and observe all the repeats can last up to 90. It's still amazing to hear the seemingly impossible clarity of Gould's playing, the sometimes manically fast tempos. And, for all his frenetic energy, in passage after passage, he brings out the music's majesty, dancing grace and tenderness. Hearing the intense young Gould at work during these arduous recording sessions, playing through a variation at a breakneck tempo with prickly sound, then playing it again, and again, and again, is not just exhausting; it's stupefying. What, I asked myself, was the point? And yet the more I dipped into these takes, the more revealing they seemed not just of Gould's process, but also of the conflicting imperatives of making a recording. The master pianist Artur Schnabel, for one, initially resisted entreaties to make records. The nature of a performance, he wrote in a memoir, "is to happen but once, to be absolutely ephemeral and unrepeatable." Schnabel eventually decided that the potential benefits outweighed the downsides. His discography includes a probing survey of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas, recorded in London during the early 1930s. Listening today, you might wonder why he approved some of the takes. The demonic, perpetual motion finale of the "Appassionata" Sonata, for example, has stretches of hectic, rushed and smudgy playing. But Schnabel's account also has exciting sweep and wondrous shadings. The flaws wouldn't have bothered him a bit in a live concert. Clearly, in this recording, he was trying maintain a semblance of that "ephemeral," "unrepeatable" immediacy. Perfection wasn't the point. The artists who are usually the easiest to record are those who report to the studio with a thought through and fully prepared performance. All they need to do is repeat it for the microphones. This may explain why Arthur Rubinstein, who simply loved playing the piano for people, also felt at home in a recording studio. Over his long career, Rubinstein matured as an artist and altered his thinking about many of the works he played. But in the moment of making a recording, from all reports, he was content simply to lay down his current concept of a piece. That was that. That was not Gould. As Mr. Scott explains in that 2004 interview, Gould "changed a lot as he recorded because he wanted to try different tempos, different accents, different phrasings, because that's why he loved recording so much." His restless, searching mind is part of what made his playing so engrossing and original. But it's also what made it challenging, Mr. Scott said, to complete the "Goldberg" recording. Gould's restlessness courses through every track (at least those I listened to). He begins by playing the opening aria at a gently lilting tempo and with pristine clarity, though a hint of intensity hovers within. "Listen, hey, who the heck tuned this piano this morning, listen to this," Gould says, thumping on a note that sounds off. In Take 2, he plays the aria more fleetly and brightly, though the tempo slows a little as the music unfolds. Still, he shaves 8 seconds off the timing of Take 1 (which was 2 minutes, 7 seconds). In Take 3 he teases out certain crucial notes in the left hand; in Take 4, to me, the melodic line sings out more prominently. In Take 5, he plays with a noticeably lighter touch and thinner sound. The producer says that it was beautiful, but ventures, "Only I must tell you " Gould guesses the problem. "You mean the voice?" he asks. (Gould famously could not prevent himself from singing along when he played. And his voice, though muffled, comes through now and then.) He tries again. But now he's clearly rattled, as you can hear in some edgy notes and general uptightness. "No, now you've got me a mental block, same thing happened," he says. Take 3, played at Gould's desired racing tempo but now with brio and command, would be the approved one of the first variation. Still, Gould plays more takes 13 in all! between which he often expresses exasperation with himself. ("It really sounds as if it hasn't been played for a week.") As I kept listening to take after take, my mind froze. After a while, I stopped being able to figure out why Gould and Mr. Scott finally went with certain versions and not others. The entire recording could have been edited much differently and still created a sensation. And, in fact, Gould grew to feel that his 1955 "Goldberg" recording was, he said in an interview near the end of his life, "just too fast for comfort." In 1981, he had recorded the work again, with a still bracing but generally mellower approach. Overall, this is the version I prefer; it was released the following year, just days before he died of a stroke, at only 50. Over his career, Gould increasingly embraced recording's potential to foster experimentation. He gave up playing concerts in 1964 and retreated to the studio, where he got involved with the detailed engineering of his releases, sometimes juxtaposing different portions of a piece played with various styles and approaches into a curious final synthesis. In a 1966 article, "The Prospects of Recording," he fantasized about a future when listeners would be granted tape edit options and could patch together their preferred versions of, say, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, from recordings by different conductors. A happy compromise has emerged over the last couple of decades, as sophisticated digital technology has made live recordings, which are cheaper to produce, almost preferable to studio ones. Engineers can record an orchestra in a series of performances of, say, an epic Mahler symphony, and then select one version, essentially, for release. But through digital editing, they can fix any problems, down to replacing a single wrong note with a correct one from another performance. The best results combine "ephemeral" immediacy with good sound and perfect (or perfect enough) execution. Schnabel might well have been delighted. It is this world, in effect, into which Gould was taking his own tentative steps. For me, the most poignant parts of the "Goldberg" sessions come when he stops for a moment to practice a passage sometimes slowly, sometimes with just one hand. Here, for an instant, he seems like all dedicated pianists, trying hard to bring clarity, a particular touch, lyrical shape or rhythmic bite, to a phrase. You get a fleeting, revelatory glimpse into Gould's feeling his way into this music. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
ENEMIES AND NEIGHBORS Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917 2017 By Ian Black Illustrated. 606 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. 30. Do we need another history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict? Most Americans, even those who care about the subject, would probably say no. For one thing, most Americans already know what they think. Israel/Palestine is the foreign policy equivalent of abortion. The debate is vicious but predictable, and in the American political mainstream its contours haven't changed much in a quarter century. In the Trump era, moreover, Americans don't care as much. Conservatives pay less attention to the security of Israel's borders and more to the security of America's. Liberals are too worried about the survival of democracy in the United States to focus on its survival in the Jewish state. Given these realities, even an Israel/Palestine book with a mind bending thesis would struggle to command attention. And Ian Black's new history of the conflict, "Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917 2017," isn't mind bending. Its central theme is that Zionism and Palestinian nationalism were irreconcilable from the start, but that ordinary Jews and Palestinians have interacted in creative ways nonetheless. If you find that argument plausible, it's most likely because you've heard it before. But if "Enemies and Neighbors" breaks no conceptual ground, it has other merits. It's a good read. Black, a longtime correspondent and editor for The Guardian of London, has a gift for summary. He synopsizes events in sharp, fast paragraphs filled with vivid detail. And by largely avoiding the international politics of the conflict, he keeps a tight focus on events on the ground. In describing the communal violence that broke out in 1929, for instance, he notes that Arabs from the village of Qaluniya attacked their Jewish neighbors in Motza, killing every member of the Maklef family except 9 year old Mordechai. He survived by jumping out a window and went on to become the Israeli Defense Forces' second chief of staff. Black also shows how certain dynamics recurred again and again across the decades. He notices that from the early days of Zionist immigration, Jews relied on Palestinian labor to help build the state that Palestinians opposed. In 1889, he notes, Zichron Yaakov, an early agricultural settlement comprising 200 Jews, employed 1,200 Arab laborers. Almost a century later, after Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Six Day War, an Israeli sociologist noted that "at night the campus" of Tel Aviv University "is like a big dormitory for Palestinian workers." In the 1990s, after Benjamin Netanyahu's government responded to Palestinian terrorism by restricting movement from the occupied territories into Israel proper, a Palestinian complained that "most of the people in our village want to be connected to Israel and to have the opportunity to work in Israel." Zionism's need for Palestinian labor, and the willingness of many Palestinians to provide it, fits comfortably into neither the Zionist nor Palestinian nationalist narrative. But Black weaves it into his. And Black notices that from the beginning, Zionists tried to bypass the Palestinians by dealing with other Arab leaders, who were less hostile to Jewish ambitions. In 1919, Emir Faisal, who wanted Zionist support for his bid to lead the newly independent Syria, signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann endorsing further Jewish immigration to Palestine. After its takeover of the West Bank, Israel promoted pro Jordanian Palestinian politicians, whom it considered more conciliatory than the newly created Palestine Liberation Organization. In the late 1990s, Ehud Barak infuriated Yasir Arafat by prioritizing negotiations over the Golan Heights with the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad. These days, Netanyahu often implies that an Israeli rapprochement with the Sunni gulf states built around their common hostility to Iran would force Palestinians to curb their nationalist demands. Such wishful thinking, Black shows, has a long history. He savors moments when the ideological mask lifts, and Jews and Palestinians see each other not merely as threats, but also as human beings. He tells the story of the future prime minister Golda Meir, during Israel's war of independence, touring neighborhoods of Haifa from which Arabs had recently fled and being reminded of abandoned Jewish towns in Europe. Upon reaching a desolate apartment block, she encountered an elderly Palestinian woman, who began sobbing. Meir broke into tears too. Still, Israel did not permit Haifa's Arab refugees to return. Similarly, Black recounts an astonishing 1956 eulogy by Moshe Dayan, then the chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces, for a young kibbutz member murdered by Palestinian fighters near Gaza. "Let us not blame the murderers today," Dayan said. "Why should we complain about their burning hatred for us? For eight years" since Israel's war of independence "they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, watching us transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt, into our property." Dayan was not suggesting that Israel give those lands back. To the contrary, he told the bereaved kibbutzniks that "we have no choice but to fight." But in contrast to many current Israeli and American Jewish leaders who claim that only cultural pathology explains Palestinian hostility to Zionism, Black shows that some former Israeli leaders understood and even empathized with the Palestinian opposition that they nonetheless sought to quash. Black does not romanticize Palestinian nationalism. Again and again, he shows how Palestinian leaders harmed their own cause. He tweaks them for boycotting the legislative council elections that Britain then Palestine's mandatory power held in 1923, while the Zionists participated. He condemns the Mufti of Jerusalem for rejecting a 1939 British White Paper that went a significant way toward meeting Palestinian demands. And he reports that in the mid 1990s, when Arafat ran the newly created Palestinian Authority, a ton of cement in Gaza cost 74. Of that, 17 went to the P.A. and another 17 went to Arafat's personal account at a bank in Tel Aviv. But Black also punctures the view, often endorsed by American pundits and politicians, that Palestinians bear virtually all the blame for the failure of recent efforts to create a Palestinian state. He hews to a view common among academics: that even when Israeli and Palestinian leaders both supported the two state solution, they meant dramatically different things by it. Even the most moderate Palestinian leaders meant a sovereign state on (or extremely near) the 1967 lines, with a capital in East Jerusalem and the right (which might not be fully exercised) of Palestinian refugee return. Even the most generous Israeli leaders meant a less than sovereign state without full control of Palestinian East Jerusalem, minimal, if any, refugee return and Israeli settlement annexations that, the Palestinians claimed, turned their prospective state into Swiss cheese. In the Netanyahu era, this gulf has only widened. Black notes and doesn't dispute "the growing belief that a two state solution" is now "defunct." But he's also skeptical of proposals for one secular binational state. He offers no vision for progress and no expressions of hope. The book ends with the words: "No end to their conflict was in sight." No wonder Americans, who are depressed enough about their own country, are turning away. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
For the hundreds of thousands of people who descended on Bethel, N.Y., over a rainy weekend in August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a defining cultural moment a peaceful demonstration of the glories of rock music, with a starry lineup including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Santana, the Grateful Dead and a new band called Crosby, Stills and Nash. But in business terms, Woodstock was a disaster. In almost all the ways that concert promoters measure the success and smooth operation of their events, Woodstock was a failure. Crowd control was impossible, as fans arrived in droves estimates went as high as 450,000 whether they had tickets or not. Sanitation was minimal. Bumper to bumper jams snarled roads for miles. ("Traffic Uptight at Hippiefest," The Daily News declared on its front page.) And the festival's producers said they ended up 1.3 million in debt the equivalent of about 9 million today. Those drawbacks wound up feeding the mythology of Woodstock as a temporary utopia that defied the norms of a materialist society; traffic jams and mud, after all, may have been a small price to pay for uniting a generation through the communal powers of "peace and music." Yet the problems of Woodstock and of Altamont, in California four months later, where a man was killed by a Hells Angels security squad stunted the growth of American rock festivals for decades. What young fans saw as groovy gatherings, with clothing optional, were viewed by local governments around the country as dangerous and disruptive events that they did not want in their backyards, and they passed laws accordingly. The boomlet in rock festivals began with Monterey Pop in 1967, with an attendance estimated at a more manageable 100,000 over three days. Crucially, it was captured on film, so rock fans everywhere could watch Janis Joplin wail and Hendrix light his Stratocaster on fire. (Woodstock, too, gained much of its cultural aura and its eventual profits from the 1970 film directed by Michael Wadleigh.) Soon festivals began to sprout everywhere. Arrivals in 1968 included San Francisco Pop, Miami Pop and the Northern California Folk Rock Festival; 1969 brought Denver Pop, Atlanta Pop and Atlantic City Pop, held two weeks before Woodstock, with Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and Santana. Festivals spread around the world, too: Glastonbury in England, the paragon of muddy concertgoing, began in 1970; Roskilde, in Denmark, started the next year. But in the United States, the growth sputtered after Woodstock and Altamont. Festivals did not die entirely; among the major ones over the next decade were the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973, and two California Jams in Ontario, Calif., in 1974 and 1978. Yet the momentum was lost, and it was not until 1999, with the arrival of Coachella, that the American rock festival truly began to take root again. What happened? According to historians, musicians and concert promoters, a combination of factors were at work, including the failure of most festivals to turn a profit; the professionalization of the rock business in the 1970s, which groomed superstars to pursue their own large scale tours; and the development of a network of summer touring venues. But the biggest factor, they said, was simply the bad publicity around large, poorly organized festivals, which led many state and local governments to tighten their rules on permits for public gatherings. Exhibit A is an amendment to the New York public health law, signed by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in May 1970, which said that events attracting more than 5,000 people had to comply with regulations over sewage and medical facilities, food service, fire and other protections to guarantee that they could go on "without hazard to health and safety." The bill was sponsored by H. Clark Bell, an assemblyman from the town of Woodstock, and news coverage at the time linked the bill to the local outcry over the festival. Tom Ross, then a young talent agent who would go on to run the music division at the Creative Artists Agency, said that such laws were drafted out of fear. Woodstock and Altamont are the best known examples of disasters. But there were others, like the Celebration of Life Festival in tiny McCrea, La., in June 1971. The event had promised Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, Miles Davis and B.B. King. None of them appeared, and attendees scrambled for food and water and clashed with police; there were at least three deaths, including two from drowning and one from a drug overdose, and dozens of arrests. A front page story in The New York Times took stock of the devastation and proclaimed: "Rock Fiasco in Louisiana May Signal End of an Era." New laws made festivals more difficult and expensive to produce, but not impossible. One of the biggest was the Summer Jam in July 1973, in Watkins Glen, about 25 miles west of Ithaca. An estimated 600,000 people came to see the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead and the Band, leading once again to widespread traffic problems. Shelly Finkel, one of the promoters of the event, recalls that, to meet state regulations, they had to supply 1,000 portable toilets. "Four or five days before, the state came in and counted 950," Finkel said in an interview. "They said, 'We're not letting you open unless there are 1,000.'" See all of our coverage of Woodstock at 50. The festival's toilet vendor scoured the Northeast none were left in New York, Finkel said and found 50 in Pennsylvania, which were quickly trucked to the festival grounds. "As they got closer to the gates, we hear these noises in the johns," Finkel recalled. "We start opening them, and kids are hiding in the johns, to get in early to the festival." According to Finkel, the Summer Jam actually turned a profit. "It was under 1 million, but it was great," he said. The scale of festivals like Woodstock and the Summer Jam offered a kind of confirmation to the developing business of rock 'n' roll. The new rock stars, and their managers, realized that if huge audiences would go to see them in muddy fields, they would also be likely to pay to see them in more controllable venues like stadiums. "Woodstock showed the power the bands had to attract huge audiences," said Michael Lang, Woodstock's promoter, "and shortly after the festival, the music business morphed into the music industry." Lang, who was involved in the 1994 and 1999 Woodstock anniversary concerts, unsuccessfully spent the better of part of 2019 battling with partners and municipal governments to put on a 50th anniversary show, and to some extent was ensnared by the same permit regulations that were passed after his original event 50 years ago. Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills and Nash, sees the glory days of the American rock festival as the beginning of corporate interest in such events. "When 300,000 or 400,000 kids are assembled in one particular place," Nash said, "that's when all the corporations started to think: 'My God, a captive audience. I can sell them another pair of sneakers and another cola here.'" Nash's band was one of those that got a glimpse of its commercial power at Woodstock. The group had released its debut album just two months before the festival and was making its second major appearance there. By 1974, the band then joined by Neil Young, as Crosby, Stills, Nash Young was rock royalty, and went on a major stadium tour that became a blueprint for the industry. The American rock festival was dying out, even as it blossomed in Europe. With top acts pursuing their own large scale tours, where they controlled the environment and stood to earn the most, there was little reason for rockers to play festivals well through the 1980s and '90s. "Until acts got paid a premium for doing a festival," said Mitch Rose, a top agent at C.A.A., "there was probably no incentive for them to do a festival." That began to change with Coachella, which was partly conceived as a California mellow version of big European festivals like Glastonbury (minus the mud, plus heat and dust). Coachella lost money in its early days, but now the festival, and offshoots like Desert Trip the 2016 classic rock Valhalla that featured the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, the Who, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Roger Waters have become some of the industry's most coveted cash cows, with gross ticket sales in excess of 100 million. The economics of festivals today have become their own barrier. With any large festival costing tens of millions of dollars to produce, few promoters outside of the major corporations like Live Nation and AEG can afford to properly mount and market a large scale event. The festivals that did survive over the long haul, like the Newport jazz and folk events in Rhode Island and the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival, often had strong connections to a local community and steadily built their brand power over decades. One of the principal founders of those events is George Wein, who bemoans the big money that now drives festivals but still sees hope for a strong artistic and cultural vision. "The question is, are you in a festival because of the music or are you in it to make money?" Wein said in an interview. "If you are in a festival for music, you're going to last forever. If you are in a festival to make money, it will only last as long as it's making money." For Nash, the lasting lessons of Woodstock are not about ticket grosses or security perimeters or booking guarantees, but about peace and love. "I think what the hippies stood for is still true today," Nash said. "That love is better than hatred, that peace is better than war." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Governments in both Turkey and the United States abruptly suspended visitor visas between the two countries on Sunday. The actions were the latest in increasing tensions between Turkey and the United States, which stem from the failed coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the criticism from the United States and its Western allies over his increasingly authoritarian methods. The tensions boiled over on Sunday, when Turkey arrested a local employee of the American consulate in Istanbul, accusing the employee of being a follower of the cleric Fethullah Gulen, an opponent of the president who lives in self imposed exile in Pennsylvania. What exactly do these visa suspensions mean for travelers from the United States who may be interested in visiting Turkey or if they already have a trip planned to the country? Here, answers to questions about travel to turkey. If I live in the United States, can I still visit Turkey? It depends, said Aydan Karamanoglu, a spokesman for the Turkish Embassy in Washington D.C. "Right now, it is impossible for U.S. residents to come to Turkey if they need a visa and are applying for it in person because it is not possible to apply for a visa in person," he said. Those who already have Turkish visas, however, can still visit Turkey, he said. Turkey also grants e Visas, which allows travelers to obtain visas by applying online through evisa.gov.tr, but only citizens of some countries are eligible to apply for these e Visas. U.S. citizens are not eligible, and therefore, citizens who live in the United States are currently unable to visit Turkey. Citizens of countries such as Norway, Australia and India, on the other hand, are eligible to apply for e Visas to visit Turkey (evisa.gov.tr has a list of all eligible countries) and can do so if they live in the United States. Can I visit Turkey if I am a citizen of the United States and live abroad? It's possible but not guaranteed. You will need to apply for a visa and can do so by visiting your local Turkish embassy or consulate, Mr. Karamanoglu said. I have a trip to Turkey booked, and now I'm ineligible to apply for the Turkish visa I need to take that trip. What should I do? You may be able to get a refund. Misty Belles, the director of global public relations for Virtuoso, a luxury travel network, said that travelers who have booked their trip with one of the network's more than 16,000 advisers should be assured that this adviser will be their advocate in trying to obtain a refund. "In unforeseen circumstances, such as this one, it's an adviser's job to liaise with your hotels, airline and ground tour operators to help you get your money back, but a refund isn't a guarantee," she said. The tour operator Intrepid Travel runs 16 trips a year to Turkey, and according to Michael Sadowski, a spokesman for the company, any American travelers booked on coming trips who are affected by the visa suspension will be issued full refunds or can use their deposit toward another tour. On Monday, Turkish Airlines announced a refund policy for ticketholders who are affected by the visa suspension. Passengers holding Turkish passports flying to the United States, and passengers holding United States passports flying to Turkey on Turkish Airlines and AnadoluJet between Oct. 9 and Oct. 31, with tickets issued on or before Oct. 9, can make reservation changes free of charge or get refunds on unused tickets; the airline will carry out these changes and refunds until Oct. 31. Why did the United States and Turkey suddenly suspend visitor visas between the two countries? On Sunday, the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey's capital, announced that it was suspending nonimmigrant visa services in Turkey. The move meant that Turkish citizens would no longer be allowed to apply for a visa in Turkey to visit the United States. However, they can still apply for one at a United States embassy or consulate in another country. Later that day, Turkey suspended its nonimmigrant visa services in the United States. "We have applied this measure because we have been subject to the same measure from the U.S.," Mr. Karamanoglu said. On Monday, the United States Ambassador in Turkey, John Bass, issued a statement saying that the arrest of a Turkish staff member by Turkish authorities was the primary reason the embassy suspended its nonimmigrant visa services. It was the second such arrest this year, Mr. Bass said. "Despite our best efforts to learn the reasons for this arrest, we have been unable to determine why it occurred or what, if any, evidence exists against the employee," he said. How long are the visa suspensions expected to last? In his statement, Mr. Bass said that he hopes that the visa suspension won't last long. "The duration will be a function of ongoing discussions between our two governments about the reasons for the detention of our local staff members and the Turkish Government's commitment to protecting our facilities and our personnel here in Turkey," he said. Mr. Karamanoglu said that the duration of Turkey's visa suspension depends on the United States. "If the U.S. government revokes its measure, we will revoke ours," he said. Is it safe to visit Turkey? The U.S. Department of State has a warning on its site, which was updated on Sept. 28, about visiting Turkey because of the continuing threat of terrorism in the country. "We recommend U.S. citizens carefully consider the need to travel to Turkey at this time, and avoid travel to southeast Turkey," the warning says. This warning was initially issued following the string of terrorist attacks in the country over the last two years, including one last June at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, which killed dozens of people and wounded more than 200. In fact, the number of visitors from the United States to Turkey has dropped in the last year: according to the Turkish Culture and Tourism Office in New York City, around 459,500 people from the United States traveled to Turkey in 2016; in 2015, however, that number was around 798,800 travelers. But although Turkey does have a continued threat of terrorism, it shouldn't be an off limits destination, said Jim Duck, a senior intelligence analyst for iJet International, a travel intelligence firm based in Annapolis, Md. "If you already have a visa or are otherwise eligible to visit Turkey, the country is largely safe and poses no greater risk than travel to many other parts of the world," he said. However, Mr. Duck added that Turkey's southeastern provinces, especially those along the Turkey Syria border, should be avoided because of significant security concerns. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Droughts and heat waves wiped out nearly a tenth of the rice, wheat, corn and other cereal crops in countries hit by extreme weather disasters between 1964 and 2007, according to a new study. The paper, published Wednesday in Nature, examined data on the effects, over five decades, of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts on national crop harvests. "People already knew that these extreme weather events had impacts on crop production," said Navin Ramankutty, a geographer from the University of British Columbia and an author of the report. "But we didn't know by how much, and we didn't have a basis for how that might change in the future." Dr. Ramankutty and his team combined data from a disaster database with food production information from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. They looked at about 2,800 weather disasters, such as the 1983 1984 drought in Ethiopia and the 2003 European heat wave, along with data on 16 different cereals, including oats, barley, rye and maize, grown in 177 countries. They found that droughts cut a country's crop production by 10 percent, and heat waves by 9 percent, but that floods and cold spells had no effects on agricultural production levels. His team estimated a loss of more than three billion tons of cereal production from 1964 to 2007 as a result of droughts and heat waves. "We don't think about it much, but rice, wheat and maize alone provide more than 50 percent of global calories," Dr. Ramankutty said. "When these grain baskets are hit, it results in food price shocks, which leads to increasing hunger." As the global population soars, food production will need to increase to feed the extra mouths. But if the world is to meet those demands, it must do so efficiently and sustainably, said Pedram Rowhani, a land change scientist from the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, who is another of the study's authors. "By losing 10 percent of our production, we're emitting greenhouse gases and using water, oil, energy and land for nothing and not feeding anybody with it," he said. "We need to reduce that so we can feed more people and become more sustainable." The team also found that the effects of droughts were more severe for crops produced in developed countries than in underdeveloped countries. Dry spells caused losses of nearly 20 percent in North America, Europe and the Australasia region, but only 12 percent in Asia and 9 percent in Africa. They found no significant effects from droughts in Latin America. One reason for the discrepancy, Dr. Rowhani said, is that developed nations tend to grow more uniform crops, which may be more vulnerable to drought, while underdeveloped countries grow diverse patches of plants that may have greater resilience. The team also found that droughts occurring since 1985 were more severe than earlier ones, causing average losses of about 14 percent compared with about 7 percent. They suggest that climate change may affect the frequency and severity of these events in the future. But they said they were unable to discern whether the increase could be the result of droughts getting more severe or earlier data sets being more limited. The disaster database relied on reports from news and humanitarian agencies, which the team said could have resulted in some disasters being underreported, especially during earlier years. "It was a clever study in the sense that they used a data set that hasn't really been looked at for this type of question," said David Lobell, a climate scientist from Stanford, who was not involved in the study. He said the results were consistent with previous work that looked at climate change and crop production. "It helps reaffirm the importance of these types of extremes for food production, even in relatively modern and developed agricultural systems," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
FOR years, Japan has flooded its moribund economy with money: interest rates near zero, asset purchases by the central bank and public works projects that have dammed the nation's rivers and paved remote mountain roads. Japan's central bank redoubled that effort Tuesday, lowering its benchmark interest rate to a range of 0 percent to 0.1 percent a symbolic, if slight, edging down from the previous 0.1 percent. The Bank of Japan also said it would set up a fund of 5 trillion yen, or 60 billion, to buy government bonds, commercial paper and other assets in a bid to shore up a faltering economic recovery. Stock markets around the world reacted favorably, as investors apparently saw it as a sign that central bankers in leading markets will continue trying to stoke their economies. And yet, there seems to be a widespread sentiment in Japan that the announcement on Tuesday may do little to reverse the strong yen and persistent deflation that threaten the economic recovery. Some economists say the Bank of Japan is still not doing enough to get funds flowing again into the economy, and that its soft spoken governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, must open up the money hose even further. Others say that easy money has been available in Japan for so long that more funds in the economy will do little to get the country out of its slump. Still others say the problem is not the amount of money in the economy. Japan's woes, they insist, stem from how that money is allocated to "zombie" companies propped up by easy money, or immense income transfers to the country's burgeoning elderly things the central bank has little power to change. The money that the central bank had already been pumping into the economy, they say, has either sat in bank coffers bank lending has been sluggish, despite loose monetary policy or lent out to the same venerable but obsolete companies by loan officers untrained and ill equipped to identify new promising entrepreneurs and other more dynamic, creative borrowers. The easy credit, in fact, has "further impaired the efficient allocation of resources," Ryutaro Kono, chief economist for Japan at BNP Paribas, said in a note to clients Tuesday. "The proper policy response," he said, "should be to facilitate structural reform." "Japan's low growth and deflation may be partly caused by the corporate segment remaining somewhat profitable and competitive, thus unwilling to take on risks," Mr. Adachi said in a note earlier this year. Households have also been reluctant to spend, because of a combination of factors, including pessimism over future income after two decades of sluggish economic growth and the rising value of cash in a deflationary economy. (When prices are falling, cash in hand is worth more every day.) With the interest rate cut, the central bank effectively reintroduces a policy of a zero interest rate for the first time since July 2006. But given the already low rate that was in place, the effect may be largely symbolic. "Though there will be debate over the effects of the monetary loosening, I believe the Bank of Japan has done all it can at this time," Hirokata Kusaba, an economist at the Mizuho Research Institute in Tokyo, said in a note. But that also meant that the bank "had now depleted most of its policy options." The other way that the central bank had hoped to bolster the economy was to weaken the yen, which has battered the nation's export industry. A strong yen hurts Japanese exporters by making their goods more expensive overseas and eroding the value of their overseas revenue. Despite the weaknesses in the Japanese economy, the yen tends to strengthen against other currencies in times of global financial uncertainty, partly because the country still runs a current account surplus. The yen's value is also related to the difference between Japanese interest rates and those elsewhere. Low rates in Japan could give investors more incentive to sell the yen to invest in higher yielding currencies, which would weaken the yen. More purchases by the central bank of government bonds and other assets could have a similar effect. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The author, most recently, of "Difficult Women" on what moves her in literature: "Basically, I love reading things that make me feel the same way I feel when listening to Beyonce slayed." What books are on your night stand now? They aren't necessarily on my night stand, but the books I am reading or threatening to read right now are: "I'm Judging You," by Luvvie Ajayi; "Made for Love," by Alissa Nutting, which is out next year; "The Fireman," by Joe Hill; "Swing Time," by Zadie Smith; "All the Birds in the Sky," by Charlie Jane Anders; "Black Water Rising," by Attica Locke; "The Wangs vs. the World," by Jade Chang; "Thrill Me," by Benjamin Percy; and "The Sympathizer," by Viet Thanh Nguyen. What's the last great book you read? "Commonwealth," by Ann Patchett. She is one of my favorite writers, and I loved the ambitious, almost too ambitious, narrative structure of the novel and these little worlds she kept building and tearing down to move the story forward. The book is also set in Los Angeles, one of my favorite cities. What's the best classic novel you recently read for the first time? I want to say something impressive here, but I cannot remember the last time I read a classic novel, let alone one that would rate as "the best." Oh, I suppose I've read "Anna Karenina" in the last decade. That was a great book DRAMA for days. What's your favorite book no one else has heard of? I came up in the small press world, so a lot of my favorite books have come from micropresses books with runs of 25 or 75, rarely more. Anyway, one of my favorite books few people have heard of is "I Am a Magical Teenage Princess," by Luke Geddes. It's this amazing collection of short stories that is sharp and dark and mostly about teenage girls. The highlight is the story "Betty and Veronica," about the Archie Comics characters as lovers in a high school. I will reread that story every chance I get. It's amazing and also so sexy. What do you like to read for solace or comfort? For inspiration? When the world is too much, I love to read thrillers and romance novels. I just want to lose myself in something either intriguing or ludicrously romantic. For inspiration, I go back to my favorite books, the ones I wish I had written. This seems sufficiently vague given that I haven't listed any titles. My No. 1 go to book is "The Age of Innocence," by Edith Wharton. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? 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. I love Zadie Smith; Emily Nussbaum; Marcy Dermansky; Lily Hoang; xTx, Dana Johnson; Alexander Chee; Terry McMillan; Toni Morrison; Celeste Ng; Claudia Rankine; Saeed Jones; Rickey Laurentiis; Robin Coste Lewis; Lindsay Hunter; Cynthia Bond; Elisa Gabbert; Cristina Henriquez; Jesmyn Ward; Laura Lippman; Eduardo Corral; Alissa Nutting; Meg Wolitzer; Randa Jarrar; Alicia Erian; Catherine Chung; and Vanessa Veselka, to name a few. What do you read when you're working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? I read books I aspire toward in my own writing and books that capture the tenor of what I'm going for in a given project. I don't really avoid much of anything. What moves you most in a work of literature? I love when I read something that feels like the writer has taken a blade to my chest and cut my heart out. Basically, I love reading things that make me feel the same way I feel when listening to Beyonce slayed. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? I love literary fiction so long as it is not about (a) writers, (b) sad white people in sad marriages or (c) sad white writers in bad marriages. I know literary fiction tends to lack plot, but I don't care. I also love spy thrillers, novels about drug cartels, and the like. I read a fair amount of poetry. I work pretty hard to avoid self help books. I'm beyond the kind of redemption offered by those books. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? I read both physical books and e books with equal vigor. E books are so great. I can have hundreds of books in the palm of my hand. That is so cool. I read multiple books at a time, and I read at all times of the day, whenever I can find a pocket of time. What's the last book that made you laugh out loud? The last book that made you cry? "Homegoing," by Yaa Gyasi; and the brutality of what her characters endured made me sob. The history of this world is a bloody wound. The last book that made you furious? "Evicted," by Matthew Desmond. My God, what that book lays bare about American poverty. It is devastating and infuriating and a necessary read. How do you organize your books? My books are organized alphabetically. I want to find what I want when I want it. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? The Vanessa Michael Munroe series by Taylor Stevens. They are so addictive! Also, Stevens made up a job title informationist. I love the absurdity of it almost as much as I love Robert Langdon's "symbology." But seriously, the books are a fun read. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? A signed copy of Ina Garten's "Make It Ahead" cookbook. Ina is a goddess. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? I have a real soft spot for Dirk Pitt from the Clive Cussler books when he still wrote them himself. Dirk is this amazing, handsome, brash, adventurous guy who loves the ocean and cars and his sidekick Al Giordino. And he just always knows what he needs to know exactly when he knows it. He wouldn't get kicked out of bed is all I'm saying. And in the books, he doesn't get kicked out of bed. My favorite villain is Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's "Misery." She was certainly . . . committed. You have to admire that. And I also recognize that beneath her pathology, she was just lonely. I understand what loneliness can make a woman do. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I was a voracious reader as a child. Books were my escape and my salvation from being a nerdy little loser. The "Little House on the Prairie" books were certainly the most formative books for me. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on, and my parents did not censor my reading at all, so I also have fond memories of "The Clan of the Cave Bear" and the like. Things happened on pelts that blew my young mind. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? Frankly, President Obama is well read and wouldn't have needed my advice, though, vainly, I would love if he read something I wrote. I would require the new president to read, well, any book at all, because he does not give the impression he has ever read a book. I'd offer recommendations, but anything I might suggest is well beyond his reading level. Alas. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Edith Wharton, Zadie Smith and Samantha Irby. Oh, what a night we would have. Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? I cannot handle the "My Struggle" books by Knausgaard. I struggle with them. I struggle mightily. The last book I put down without finishing (though I do hope to get back to it someday) is "Everybody's Fool," by Richard Russo. I am a huge fan of Russo "Straight Man" and "Nobody's Fool" are two of my favorite books, but the latest one just didn't grab me. Whom would you want to write your life story? Zadie Smith. I seem like a stalker now, but she is such a great writer. My life would be in good hands with her. What do you plan to read next? Next up: "Lazaretto," by Diane McKinney Whetstone, and "The Stand," by Stephen King. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
It was a long night of Twitter for Roseanne Barr. Hours after ABC canceled her reboot of "Roseanne" because of her racist tweet about a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, Ms. Barr returned to the platform and posted more than 100 times. She tweeted, retweeted, reply tweeted and, in many cases, deleted tweets from her account, therealroseanne, which has been active since March 2011 and has 774,000 followers. Ms. Barr's overnight barrage comprised apologetic remarks, aggrieved statements, personal attacks, fond messages to her supporters and pointed references to the shadowy conspiracy theories that have long been a staple of her social media presence. The stream of tweets began hours after she declared, "I apologize. I am now leaving Twitter." After two tweets apologizing again to the former presidential adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Ms. Barr addressed her supporters directly at 12:03 a.m. Eastern time, telling them not to defend her even if she thought it was "sweet" of them to try. Losing her show, she wrote, was nothing compared with being labeled a racist over a single tweet. "That I regret even more," she wrote. Not long before that, she retweeted a post from the account LegendaryEnergy, which has more than 15,000 followers, that defended the post by Ms. Barr that had started the firestorm: a tweet likening Ms. Jarrett to the Muslim Brotherhood and "Planet of the Apes." "I look like a monkey," LegendaryEnergy wrote. "Why? My DNA is 96% similar to a monkey's. It makes scientific sense." At one point overnight, Ms. Barr blamed the insomnia medication Ambien for the incendiary tweet. In a post she later deleted, she wrote: "It was 2 in the morning and I was Ambien tweeting." But that tweet also had a note of contrition, saying the offensive post had gone too far. "It was egregious," she wrote. "Indefensible. I made a mistake." But she also offered apologies to Ms. Jarrett. " ValerieJarrett I want to apologize to you. I am very sorry to have hurt you. I hope you can accept this sincere apology!" she posted at 11:39 p.m. Minutes later she wrote to Ms. Jarrett again, saying her words had been insensitive and tasteless. "I am truly sorry," she wrote. "My whole life has been about fighting racism. I made a terrible mistake." As the dawn approached, Ms. Barr seemed ready to log off: "thanks for all your kind comments, everyone! Love u all goodnight." But she was back on the platform soon afterward, with a stream of retweets including one of a post that attacked Ms. Jarrett made by an account that purports to belong to a Georgia politician, but is a known fake. Then there was her retweet of a statement of support from a real politician one of her fans President Trump. "Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that 'ABC does not tolerate comments like those' made by Roseanne Barr," the president tweeted. "Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn't get the call?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Children with attention deficit problems improve faster when the first treatment they receive is behavioral like instruction in basic social skills than when they start immediately on medication, a new study has found. Beginning with behavioral therapy is also a less expensive option over time, according to a related analysis. Experts said the efficacy of this behavior first approach, if replicated in larger studies, could change standard medical practice, which favors stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin as first line treatments, for the more than four million children and adolescents in the United States with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D. The new research, published in two papers by the Journal of Clinical Child Adolescent Psychology, found that stimulants were most effective as a supplemental, second line treatment for those who needed it and often at doses that were lower than normally prescribed. The study is thought to be the first of its kind in the field to evaluate the effect of altering the types of treatment midcourse adding a drug to behavior therapy, for example, or vice versa. "We showed that the sequence in which you give treatments makes a big difference in outcomes," said William E. Pelham of Florida International University, a leader of the study with Susan Murphy of the University of Michigan. "The children who started with behavioral modification were doing significantly better than those who began with medication by the end, no matter what treatment combination they ended up with." Other experts cautioned that the study tracked behavior but not other abilities that medication can quickly improve, like attention and academic performance, and said that drugs remained the first line treatment for those core issues. "I think this is a very important study, and the take home is that low cost behavioral treatment is very effective," said Mark Stein, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Washington, "but the irony is that that option is seldom available to parents." The study enrolled 146 children with an A.D.H.D. diagnosis from ages 5 to 12 and randomly assigned half on a low dose of generic Ritalin. The other half received no medication, but their parents began attending group meetings to learn behavior modification techniques. Behavior modification for A.D.H.D. is based on a fairly simple system of rewards and consequences. Parents reward the good or cooperative acts they see; subtle things, like paying attention for a few moments, can earn a pat on the back or a "good boy." Completing homework without complaint might earn time on a smartphone. Parents withhold privileges, like playtime or video games, or enforce a "time out" in response to defiance and other misbehavior. And they learn to ignore irritating but harmless bids to win attention, like making weird noises, tapping or acting like a baby. The researchers had the children's parents and teachers rate their behaviors, including recording disciplinary problems. The school evaluation included a "daily report card" describing the child's day. Jacqueline Vaquer of Miami and her husband took their son Alec, who received an A.D.H.D. diagnosis at age 5, to a behavior modification course and learned, among other things, how to reduce his wandering in class. "We created a boundary around his desk with tape, and the teacher kept track of how often he crossed it," Ms. Vaquer said. Each week, she said, "if he reduced the number of checks, he got a small reward, like a toy or his favorite dessert frozen yogurt with M Ms," she said. Alec, 6, is now able to sit still for long periods in class and has not gone on medication, his mother said. After two months, the yearlong study took an innovative turn. If a child had not improved, he or she was randomly assigned one of two courses: a more intense version of the same treatment, or an added supplement, like adding a daily dose of medication to the behavior modification. About two thirds of the children who began with the behavior therapy needed a booster, and about 45 percent of those who started on medication did. But the behavior first group had an average of four fewer rules violations an hour at school than the medication first group. One likely reason, the study authors wrote, was parents of children who started on drug treatment were less interested in following up with the behavior classes, which involved eight group sessions over the year and one individualized lesson. "The behavioral modification is a lot of work, and they may have thought, 'Well, it won't make that much difference,'" Dr. Pelham said. In a separate paper, Dr. Pelham and a different set of authors compared the costs of the different treatment sequences, taking into account the price of drugs, doctors' time and parents' time. Having children and their parents begin with behavioral treatment and follow with medication, if needed, cost an average of 700 less annually per child than treatment as usual, in which a doctor writes prescriptions and periodically monitors behavior, the team found. The analysis did not account for the psychological cost to parents in terms of a child's tantrums, slammed doors and hurled tableware of carrying out behavioral techniques. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Kristin Borda, who is the program lead for a Little Bellas chapter in New Jersey, witnessed how concerns about what their peers might think can melt on the bike trail on her group's first outing. "There's a super steep dirt hill on the trails we ride," she explained, and many of the girls were wary. But then a couple of them asked if they could try it. The first girl didn't make it to the top of the hill. That spurred another rider to try. "Before you know it, everyone is saying 'I want to try next.' I mean, they're not making it up this hill. We spent 30 minutes, and they were not making it, but they would not give up. They wanted it so badly," she said. And no one seemed to care how they looked when, stalling out mid climb, they tumbled over sideways. Concerns about beauty standards can likewise lift the moment a mud puddle turns a girl riding a bike into a Jackson Pollock painting. "On cold, rainy days we have mud competitions, so it takes the girls' minds off of 'Oh, it's 35 degrees and raining.' It's kind of the opposite of gender norms for girls," said Ms. Davison. Dr. Whittington, who takes young women on canoe trips as part of her research, adds: "I love to watch them transition from caring what they look like to not caring. I love how it challenges their femininity and the social constructs they live in." By day five, when the girls need to portage over land, they happily embrace the challenge. "When someone asks if they want help they're like, nope, we're all set, we've been carrying these for several days." Of course, there's mud on soccer fields, and you can learn stick to itiveness from basketball drills or batting practice. But mountain biking doesn't come laden with the politics and expectations of team sports. "No one sits on a bench," said Ms. Davison, "and no one gets stuck playing just a single position." Even better: Parents are often left sitting in cars at the trailhead. "Parents are parents," she says, and every now and then one gets aggressive about his or her child's performance. But as soon as the kids ride off and into the woods, they're free to recreate on their own terms. What they do, once they get into those woods, can be pretty empowering. "There's a certain work ethic you have to have to be a mountain biker," said Annika Peacock, who is now 15. "If there's a section of the trail that's really hard for me, I'll go try it five more times. I say to myself, yes, yes, yes, I can do this." And then the next day? "I go back and do it again." She now competes against other teens as part of the National Interscholastic Cycling Association, an organization working to bring mountain biking programs to high schools throughout the United States. Annika's mother says of her daughter, "She's this petite little bundle of smiles, but she has this self talk inside her that says 'I can do this', and she will ride and re ride something until she gets it. There's this resilience she's trained in herself. She's fierce." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
SAN FRANCISCO Four years ago, Edward J. Snowden's disclosures that the federal government was hacking America's leading technology companies threw the industry into turmoil. Now WikiLeaks has shaken the tech world again by releasing documents Tuesday that appear to show that the Central Intelligence Agency had acquired an array of cyberweapons that could be used to break into Apple and Android smartphones, Windows computers, automotive computer systems, and even smart televisions to conduct surveillance on unwitting users. Major technology companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, were trying to assess how badly their core products had been compromised. But one thing clearly had been ruptured yet again: trust between intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley. "After the Snowden disclosures, the Obama administration worked hard to re establish relationships and government industry partnerships," said David Gutelius, chief executive of the marketing technology company Motiva, who has worked with the federal government on national security projects. "This leak will challenge those ties to some extent. But I don't see companies simply walking away from the table as a result of this. Government and industry still need one another." The tense relationship between the technology industry and government agencies has been well documented. After the disclosures by Mr. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, the government appeared to give some ground to the industry, which was angered by previously unknown snooping on their products and embarrassed by disclosures of their cooperation with intelligence agencies. The government allowed companies to describe in broad terms the number of secret court orders for access to customer information that they receive. President Barack Obama also promised that the government would share knowledge of security flaws so that they could be fixed. But last year, relations soured again after Apple resisted a Justice Department request for help accessing the iPhone of one of the attackers in the 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. As the company's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, explained in a letter to customers at the time, "The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers." In that case, the government eventually found a way into the phone without Apple's assistance. The documents posted by WikiLeaks suggest that the C.I.A. had obtained information on 14 security flaws in Apple's iOS operating system for phones and tablets. Apple said Tuesday night that many of those security issues had already been patched in the latest version of its software and it was working to address remaining vulnerabilities. The leaked documents also identified at least two dozen flaws in Android, the most popular operating system for smartphones, which was developed by Alphabet's Google division. Google said it was studying the flaws identified by WikiLeaks. Android is more difficult to secure than Apple's software because many phone makers and carriers use older or customized versions of the software. The documents released by WikiLeaks reveal numerous efforts by the C.I.A. to take control of Microsoft Windows, the dominant operating system for personal computers, using malware. They include techniques for infecting DVDs and USB storage devices with malware that can be spread to computers when they are plugged in. "We're aware of the report and are looking into it," Microsoft said in a statement. Security experts said it was not surprising that the government had stockpiled flaws in major technology products to use for spying. "The real scandal and damaging thing is not knowing these things exist, but that the C.I.A. could be so careless with them that they leaked out," said Matthew D. Green, an assistant professor in the department of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Inside technology companies, the revelations set off a scramble to assess the potential damage to the security of their products. The vulnerabilities, some of which were already known in the security community, could leave individual users of computers, mobile phones and other devices open to being snooped on. Technology companies are likely to plug the holes, however, even as new ones are discovered by spy agencies and others. The more serious near term effect could be on the reputation of the C.I.A. and the relationship between the technology industry and the intelligence community. Denelle Dixon, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla, which makes the Firefox web browser and was mentioned in the WikiLeaks trove, said that if the reports were accurate, the C.I.A. and WikiLeaks were undermining the security of the internet. "The C.I.A. seems to be stockpiling vulnerabilities, and WikiLeaks seems to be using that trove for shock value rather than coordinating disclosure to the affected companies to give them a chance to fix it and protect users," Ms. Dixon said in a statement. "Although today's disclosures are jarring, we hope this raises awareness of the severity of these issues and the urgency of collaborating on reforms." Oren Falkowitz, a former N.S.A. official and the chief executive of the cyberdefense firm Area 1 Security, said that WikiLeaks, run by Julian Assange, had again succeeded in disrupting the status quo, as it did during last year's presidential election with the release of emails from the Democratic National Committee. "If you understand the Assange playbook," Mr. Falkowitz said, "a lot of it is just to create chaos." But Mr. Falkowitz added that perhaps the most important message behind Tuesday's leaks was that neither government agencies nor companies can trust their employees to keep their most precious information secret. "We expect governments to be involved in espionage," he said. "What we don't expect is that the people within these organizations would create vulnerabilities by disclosing them." In a statement accompanying the documents, WikiLeaks said that the security flaws could easily fall into the wrong hands. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The actor and comedian June Diane Raphael has starred in television shows as varied as "The Bachelor" spoof "Burning Love," and "Grace Frankie." Co written with the author Kate Black, her book, "Represent: The Woman's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World," will be published Sept. 3. Ms. Raphael has two children with her husband, Paul Scheer, the actor. A vacation with children is, she says, "a work trip." "One with tons of enjoyment and fun, but I've had to really divorce myself from the word 'vacation' because it implies something that is relaxing and luxurious, and when you have small children and you're traveling, there's just so much grit and hard work that goes into it." When she gets a chance, she loves to head to the most decadent hotel she can find; she treats herself to one every Mother's Day. "I love the Four Seasons, I love the Peninsula. I love being in a robe. I am the person who will use every amenity offered to me and provided to me. I want to go to the gym, I want to go to the spa, I need a service, I will be in every hot tub, I will be in it all." Here's what she can't travel without. "I do love those Away suitcases. I can't say enough about this bag. To me it's just a smooth operator, I just enjoy the sensory experience." "I'm never proud of what I'm buying, but I'm definitely like, 'oh, what is this Kate Middleton story? I'll be picking you up, and I'll be picking you up, Domino, and I'll be picking you up, O magazine.' The royal stuff is what really draws me. I'm like, 'where are Meghan and Harry?' So whatever publication they're on, from Us Weekly magazine to OK!, I'm going to be purchasing." "I just read 'Thick: And Other Essays' by Tressie McMillan Cottom, and I loved it. It's one of those books where I read an essay, had to reread it, had to look up all the footnotes, do some other reading around it. It was just such a deep dive, and it's such a wild mixture of academic research and data and intellectual thought and personal experience and her own sort of vulnerable writing." "Both of my parents have passed away and I have their mass cards, which have pictures on them, with me at all times. So that's a very personal thing that I travel with, and then when I'm on set or if I'm on location, those come with me and I put them out, and if I'm in a hotel room for a while, I'll put them out. And it's just a lovely reminder and reflection, and a way to have them with me." "I usually do a lot of work on airplanes and it's that kind of sustained, focused work that I'm not often able to do in my everyday life. Then if that's done or if my computer runs out of juice, I will head into a movie or a TV show. I find myself more emotional on fights. I think there's something about not being on earth, but not being dead. I'm more vulnerable and my emotions are more available. I've had several experiences on flights where I've watched a movie and have been crying hysterically to the point where people are like, 'Are you O.K., ma'am?' So I have to be wary of not watching anything that's really triggering." This interview was edited and condensed for clarity. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The writer and director Lynn Shelton, who in the last decade emerged as a strong voice in contemporary American independent film, has died at the age of 54. Her films often captured regular people facing irregular or extraordinary, scenarios that forced them to view their lives differently. Here is a look at highlights from her filmography, including review excerpts and information on where you can stream the movies. In Shelton's first feature (which premiered at film festivals in 2006 but got a theatrical release in 2011), Amber Hubert stars as an actress who, on her 23rd birthday, finds a letter to herself written when she was 13. Then she's visited by her 13 year old self in the flesh (Maggie Brown). In her review, Jeannette Catsoulis called the film "a gentle survey of the chasm between youthful dreams and adult reality." Considered Shelton's breakthrough, "Humpday" stars Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard as two straight friends who pledge to film themselves having sex with each other as ""the ultimate art project." In his Critic's Pick review, Stephen Holden wrote that the movie "sees through its male characters' macho pretensions to contemplate the underlying forces hard wired into men's psyches in a homophobic culture." It was later the source of a French language remake as well as a play. In this romantic comedy, Iris (Emily Blunt) invites her friend Jack (Mark Duplass) to stay at her family's vacation home after his brother dies. While there, he encounters Iris's sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), and things get complicated. Describing one of the characters' encounters in his review, A.O. Scott called it "at once entirely believable and wildly, uncomfortably funny." At the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, Shelton spoke about the film and what drew her to the kinds of characters she wrote: In this comedy drama, a massage therapist (Rosemarie DeWitt) finds it difficult to do her job when she develops an aversion to touching people. In his review, Stephen Holden wrote that it took chances that moved beyond Shelton's previous work: "Its humor is softer and more ambiguous than that of Ms. Shelton's earlier films, and its characters are harder to pin down." Shelton spoke about one sequence in this Anatomy of a Scene video: In this comedy, a couple (Jillian Bell and Michaela Watkins) go to a pawnshop run by Mel (Marc Maron) to try to sell a Civil War sword that they say contains documentation proving the Confederacy won the war. In his review, Glenn Kenny wrote that while the film has a broad satirical concept, it "is more concerned with its people marginal folks and their dreams and disappointments." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Danielle and James Ellerby pose for wedding photos at the Manhattan Bridge with Oluwayemi Kehinde (left) and Marc Alterman, both part of the Wedding Hashers running group. When Danielle and James Ellerby show off photos from their 2018 wedding, they have a bit of explaining to do. It's not because the couple, who live in Halifax, England, eloped while on vacation in New York City. It's because their witnesses were two strangers in T shirts and running shoes. "Who are these two random guys in tuxedo shirts?" Mrs. Ellerby, 29, said she is asked most often about the pictures. Those two random guys are members of the running Wedding Hashers, as they call themselves and their Instagram handle. They are a group of five runners from New York and New Jersey who wear custom made, sweat wicking shirts that look like tuxedos. They run mostly around Brooklyn to get in pictures with as many wedding parties as possible (with permission). This side hobby to their running habit started in 2016 because the group's regular Thursday lunch running route took them past some popular wedding photo spots in Brooklyn, including Brooklyn Bridge Park. "We'd run by these scenes of wedding couples taking photos and we thought we should try to get in one of these and that it might be fun," said Marc Alterman , 61. He is often the member who approaches couples about getting into their photos. "The couples seemed to get a kick out of it, and we got a kick out of it," he said. Their photo shoot plans work well on weekday runs, Mr. Alterman said, because most of their members work in Downtown Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Municipal Building, so they encounter couples having pictures taken after courthouse weddings. One Saturday in June, though, several members of Mr. Alterman's New Jersey based running club, the Raritan Valley Road Runners, participated in a group wedding run (the women wore pink and black tuxedo tank tops). Mr. Alterman called the event "their own bridal party" of about a dozen runners. The group started in Manhattan, ran over the Brooklyn Bridge, then around Brooklyn. They got in the photos of 14 couples that day and one bachelorette party. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Mrs. Prorock Rogers said she had a blast, and not just because they had near perfect weather. "I'm a hopeless romantic," she said. "I've been married for almost 30 years so I'm a big fan of couples and finding that forever person." Mr. Alterman lives in North Brunswick, N.J., but he was born and raised in Brooklyn and has worked for the New York City Board of Education since 2001. "The people of this city are often portrayed as cold and unfriendly," "Honestly, I've never found that to be the case. Of course there are exceptions, but I generally don't find New Yorkers particularly rude or uncordial, unless you give them a reason to be." Mr. Alterman says only a small percentage of couples decline to have their photos taken with the runners, and that's often because of language barriers. He says he finds local couples warm and friendly. But for out of towners who marry in Brooklyn, he said, "I'd like to think we play the role of good will ambassadors, dispelling the notion that New York can be a hostile place." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Powered by healthy spending from increasingly optimistic consumers, the American economy is emerging as an island of relative strength in the face of renewed torpor and turmoil elsewhere in much of the world. Just hours after Russia unexpectedly cut interest rates on Friday in response to a shrinking economy and worries over its banks, and European officials reported more signs of weakness on the Continent, new government data showed the American economy grew at a decent 2.6 percent rate in the final quarter of 2014. That pace represents a downshift from the blistering 5 percent growth rate recorded in the third quarter and was modestly below what economists had been expecting. Nonetheless, most economists viewed the report in a positive light and saw the robust consumer spending as pointing to an improving economy in 2015. The combination of plunging energy prices and a healthier job market in late 2014 helped consumer spending rise last quarter by 4.3 percent, the fastest rate of growth since early 2006. And in a separate report on Friday, the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment in January rose to its highest level since January 2004. "The windfall to consumption from lower energy prices is showing up," said Michael Gapen, chief United States economist at Barclays. "And we all know that over the long term, where the consumer goes, the economy goes." Not everything was rosy, though. While consumer spending accounts for nearly 70 percent of economic output in the United States, there were weaknesses elsewhere that could drag on growth in the months ahead and which are likely to foster continuing turmoil in markets for stocks, bonds and currencies. The country's trade balance deteriorated, shaving a full percentage point off the overall growth rate, as export gains slowed sharply from earlier in the year, while imports surged. Although any single quarter represents a snapshot of the economy, rather than a nuanced portrait, experts suggested the falloff in net exports reflected a stronger dollar, which makes imported goods more competitive domestically while increasing the price of American products abroad. It also reflected weakness in Europe and other overseas markets, which are becoming tougher for American companies. "Although cheaper imports are a boon for shoppers, import growth will subtract significantly from growth in G.D.P. in 2015 and 2016," said Doug Handler, chief United States economist at IHS. He expects the economy to expand at a rate of 3.1 percent in 2015, as lower energy prices encourage shoppers to keep spending, overwhelming other headwinds. Friday's estimate by the Commerce Department of economic output last quarter is the first of three the government will make; as more data is reported, upward or downward revisions are possible. One clue will come next week, when trade figures for December are released. For all of 2014, the economy grew at a rate of 2.4 percent, roughly in line with the underlying trend of the last five years. One notable negative in late 2014 was a 1.9 percent fall in spending on new equipment by companies, reversing increases of more than 11 percent in the previous two quarters. Many economists expect business spending to be lackluster in the coming months, hurt by deep cuts among drillers and other energy companies because of plunging oil prices. Military spending, which tends to be volatile, plunged last quarter and was another major drag on the overall trend, subtracting about 0.4 percentage point from the growth rate. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. "The composition was what we thought: strong private consumption, modest growth in investment and drags from trade and government spending," Mr. Gapen added. "But I think the government spending drag is a one off and there is tangible evidence that the consumer is in a much better place than in previous years." Looking ahead, many economists expect 2015 to start off at about the pace of last quarter's trend, with growth picking up over the course of the year. Guy Berger, United States economist at RBS, is looking for the economy to grow by about 2.7 percent in 2015. As was the case last quarter, he expects consumers to more than make up for whatever softness there is in spending by companies. In a separate but closely watched announcement also released Friday morning, the Labor Department reported that its employment cost index rose 0.6 percent in December, slightly better than the figures for hourly wages and about what was expected. This quarterly survey of compensation costs is closely watched by the Federal Reserve, as well as many private economists, to gauge overall wage growth for American workers. This week, the Fed signaled it would not raise short term interest rates before June, at the earliest. Although Fed policy makers have been encouraged by stronger hiring, they remain concerned about very weak inflation along with paltry wage gains. The 0.6 percent rise in compensation costs was healthy, Mr. Berger said, but not big enough to persuade Fed policy makers to move up their expected rate increase, which he predicts will come in September. By contrast, the outlook in Europe seems to be getting grimmer. In Western Europe, officials said on Friday that prices in the eurozone fell for the second month in a row in January, underscoring weak demand there and highlighting the challenges facing the European Central Bank in getting inflation closer to its annual target of 2 percent, which would help encourage more spending by business and consumers. In Moscow, the Central Bank of Russia abruptly cut interest rates by two percentage points to 15 percent, in an effort to ease the strain on the country's financial system but risking a further fall in the ruble. Russia, a major energy producer, is also reeling from falling crude prices as well as sanctions imposed as a result of the crisis in Ukraine. "We're leading the pack here in terms of economic growth," Mr. Handler, crediting the Fed's aggressive efforts in recent years to stimulate the economy, which the E.C.B. has only very recently begun to emulate after years of more timid steps. "We didn't do the navel gazing we had in Europe." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
We've come a long way from the era of the fictitious circumnavigator Phileas Fogg. Traveling around the world today can take far fewer than 80 days, especially by plane, as the following multimodal trips indicate. Here are some options for tourists who have enough of the spirit of exploration to try to circle the globe. Private jet trips can encircle the globe in a matter of weeks. Four Seasons Hotels Resorts (fourseasons.com) sends its 52 seat private jet on a 24 day trip departing Sept. 3, 2017, from the United States for Asia, Africa and Europe, staying in each stop for a few days at its resorts to snorkel in the Maldives or go on safari in Tanzania ( 135,000 a person). Since 1995, TCS World Travel (tcsworldtravel.com) has been offering trips around the world by jet. It has four trips scheduled for both 2017 and 2018, including its 24 day "Around the World Classic" trip departing Sept. 27, 2017, that stops at Machu Picchu; Easter Island; the Great Barrier Reef; Angkor Wat; the Taj Mahal; the Serengeti Plain; Petra, Jordan; and Marrakesh, Morocco ( 79,950 a person). For those with four or more months on their hands, luxury cruise lines stitch together itineraries with some sections sold separately into complete circumnavigations. Best known for its trans Atlantic cruises, Cunard (cunard.com) offers an around the world departure over 120 nights aboard the 2,068 passenger Queen Elizabeth (from 19,998 a person). Departing Jan. 7, 2017, from Southampton, England, the ship travels west to New York and the Caribbean. After transiting the Panama Canal, it visits Mexico, Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Vietnam and South Africa before continuing homeward. Another circumnavigation will run Jan. 7 to May 10, 2018. Oceania Cruises' (oceaniacruises.com) 2018 circumnavigation, "Around the World in 180 Days," departs Jan. 3. Round trip from Miami, the 684 passenger Insignia visits 40 countries and 87 ports beginning in the Caribbean and Brazil before crossing the Atlantic for Africa and rounding the Cape of Good Hope to India, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, South Pacific islands, Hawaii, Mexico and Panama Canal (remaining cabins from 39,999 a person). Those who have hundreds to spend rather than thousands can hop a Maris freighter (freightercruises.com) as it circumnavigates the seas. Many ships reserve a few cabins for leisure travelers on around the world trips ranging from 54 to 126 days (fares are 100 to 130 euros, about 112 to 145, per person per day). Ships vary, but usually carry four to 12 passengers in cabins with private bathrooms. Passengers eat meals in the dining room with the ship's officers and have access to any shipboard fitness facilities. Port calls usually last about a day, but sometimes less on smaller container ships and mail boats. The carrier's website describes its freighter cruisers as "often an affluent but unpretentious lot who relax on board in shorts and sandals, lie reading a book in a deck chair, hearing nothing but sea gulls and waves." Round the World Tours (aroundtheworldtours.com) offers a variety of ways to go, including by ship and by jet, and a choice of themed trips, from surfing to couchsurfing. For maximum land contact, its luxury train itinerary strings together the world's iconic train routes, including the Venice Simplon Orient Express from London to Istanbul, the trans Siberian Railway from Moscow to Beijing and the trans Australia train known as the Ghan over the course of about two months. Travelers hop flights between rail routes and in some cases, such as the Reunification Express train in Vietnam, join small group tours (fares from PS8,900, or 11,295, a person). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Roseanne Barr spoke with Patrick Healy, the politics editor and a former culture reporter and editor at The Times, about the premiere of the reboot of her show on ABC. Mr. Healy asked the actress and showrunner about her support for President Trump and her decision to make her character, Roseanne Conner, a supporter as well. The interview split readers, some of whom said they would boycott the show over Ms. Barr's views, while others praised her outspokenness. The premiere of "Roseanne" on Tuesday drew 18.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen. Mr. Trump even called Ms. Barr to congratulate her on the revival and to thank her for her support. Readers weighed in on the interview and the show's premiere on our website and on Facebook and Twitter. These are edited excerpts from readers' comments. I have decided to boycott the show and I am sure no one will care, but I will care. It is a point of personal preference and internal integrity. BARBARA SIEGMAN, LOS ANGELES Was interested in watching until I heard she supports Trump. Can you say boycott? COLIN Used to love the old show Roseanne Barr too. Things change. Now, not only do I dislike the woman, I'll never let my TV rest, even for a moment, on her show. I do hope it fails. The wrong side of history is no place to be. MSANNIEREGARDS, VIA TWITTER If Roseanne is being truthful in this interview, I have new respect for her. She factually rejects the interviewer's attempt to misrepresent Mr. Trump's position on a number of issues, and she is not afraid to do so. Good for her. PAUL, WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. As for Roseanne the actual person, she's never been afraid to shock or say whatever she wants, so I'm surprised that anyone is surprised and offended. I don't require that the actors in a show or all of its characters agree with me politically in order to enjoy it. E.G., NEW YORK When did we become so weak that we can't even bear to hear an opinion that is different from our own? I hope that the show can help us remember that we didn't always hate the other side. LISSA ANN, VIA FACEBOOK No Explanation for Her Political Position Was really hoping to see someone I thought was smart and articulate explain how they can support Trump without devolving into a tirade against the left and she completely passed on it. It was an opportunity to explain your views to an audience that needs to hear it. And you passed. For me, that calls into question whether the views are genuine, or whether they are supported by anything other than hatred and bigotry. TK, VERMONT I was genuinely interested in hearing her point of view and she punted. How are we liberals supposed to "listen" to the "forgotten people" (or in this case, a wealthy Hollywood actress/Hawaiian macadamia nut farmer) if the "forgotten people" never engage us? STACY, NEW YORK So the same Roseanne Conner that stood up to an overtly misogynistic factory boss, who treated women laborers as objects and used his power to curry sexualized and behavioral compliance, now supports a man who wields the highest amount of power in the world who both personally and rhetorically embodies the exact same behaviors and male privilege? DAVE BRACKMAN, VIA FACEBOOK Too bad blue collar is now identified with Trump and low class. Not necessarily accurate. CLAIRE D., KENNEBUNK, MAINE Roseanne seems to be trying to cover both sides and especially trying to tell how working class is coping or not at these gruesome times. RISTO T. KOUKKALA, VIA FACEBOOK I liked how they handled the Hillary/Trump business and it was quite a true reflection of what's happening in families right now. I was surprised that I was able to laugh about it, as I have been very upset since the election. The show was a good reminder that we need to relax. ROXANE DANIEL, VIA FACEBOOK Loved every minute of Roseanne's show. This country has become so politically correct, uptight and thin skinned that it's making everyone nuts. HOBBS7, UTAH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Visitors to the White House will notice a makeshift sign taped to the door of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, entry point for the reportorial corps that regularly covers President Trump and his administration. "Masks Required Beyond This Point," it reads. "Please wear masks over both your nose and mouth at all times." The sign was not put up by the White House. The correspondents had to do it themselves. Throughout a pandemic that has now landed squarely in the West Wing, Trump officials who routinely shunned masks declined to institute thorough safety protocols to protect the White House press corps, according to interviews with reporters who now face the prospect of a rapidly escalating outbreak in their daily work space. "The only place on the White House grounds where a mask has been required is the White House press area, and the only people who have routinely violated that rule have been White House staff," Jonathan Karl, ABC's chief White House correspondent, said in an interview. Reporters who traveled with Mr. Trump over the past week learned that Hope Hicks, his adviser, had tested positive only after reading press reports on Thursday. Many had traveled near Ms. Hicks, and had spent time with family and friends in the days since. On Monday, Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said she had tested positive for the virus. Two of her deputies, Chad Gilmartin and Karoline Leavitt, also tested positive. Last Thursday, Ms. McEnany stood maskless at her lectern inside the press room and conducted a briefing with more than a dozen reporters, hours before Mr. Trump's positive test was revealed. Over the weekend, she again briefed reporters on the White House grounds without a mask. At least three White House correspondents have tested positive for the virus in recent days, including a New York Times reporter, Michael D. Shear. All had recently covered official White House events or traveled on Air Force One. Other reporters with potential exposure are being tested daily or self quarantining as a precaution. "I felt safer reporting in North Korea than I currently do reporting at The White House," a CBS News correspondent, Ben S. Tracy, wrote on Twitter on Monday. "This is just crazy." White House officials said on Monday that they would provide rapid virus tests to reporters who had traveled with Mr. Trump over the past week. But the White House asked that the reporters arrive there at the same time for the tests, a condition that worried some correspondents because of the prospect of a gathering of exposed individuals. John Roberts, the Fox News correspondent who briefly removed his mask during an on camera exchange with Ms. McEnany at her Thursday briefing, said he was feeling healthy but was considering a virus test in light of the press secretary's announcement. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "I can't say that I'm surprised at all," Mr. Roberts said during a Fox News segment on Monday, "because whatever infection and mode of transmission that has seized the White House, it has literally gone through that building like a scythe." The White House Correspondents' Association, which negotiates with the administration over access and safety issues, said in a statement that it would continue encouraging its members to work remotely if they did not have pressing business at the White House. "We wish Kayleigh, the president and everyone else struggling with the virus a swift recovery," the group said. But White House reporters are also expected to keep close tabs on a dramatic moment for the nation and for Mr. Trump's presidency work that is difficult to do from a distance. Members of the press corps also constitute the roving pool that closely tracks Mr. Trump's movements, providing citizens with real time information about their president. Early in the pandemic, White House reporters took steps to minimize their exposure to the virus, reducing the number of correspondents who attended news briefings and requiring masks and social distancing in the cramped warren of West Wing workrooms assigned to the press. Advisers to Mr. Trump, who frequently interact with reporters, rarely followed those same rules and mostly declined to wear masks indoors. When one Trump friendly correspondent, Chanel Rion of One America News, declined to follow the distancing rules at briefings, the press corps objected, but White House officials intervened to allow Ms. Rion to stay. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. There was a measure of poetic justice in Thursday's news that Steve Bannon, the populist political guru who charted President Trump's rise to power, was arrested on a yacht on Long Island Sound and charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of Mr. Trump's supporters. The pitch was like a twisted version of the 19th century campaign to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty with small donations from individual Americans: This time, the American people would fund a wall along the southern border of the United States. "It's the American people coming together to chip in and give five bucks," said Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran who, with Mr. Bannon's help, created a nonprofit called We Build the Wall, ostensibly to raise money for the project. They collected more than 25 million. They even built a short stretch of border wall near El Paso. But on Thursday, federal agents arrested Mr. Kolfage, Mr. Bannon and two of their associates, and charged the men with spending a chunk of the money on themselves. The Justice Department said Mr. Kolfage used some of the money to buy a boat, "Warfighter," which he sailed in a boat parade held in President Trump's honor on July 4 in Destin, Fla. According to the government, Mr. Bannon pocketed about 1 million. The alleged fraud, at first blush, amounts to a clever misappropriation of Mr. Trump's political image. The nonprofit wrapped itself in Mr. Trump's flag, billing itself as a vehicle for supporting the president's agenda, using his picture in its advertising and emphasizing that it had sought advice from the Department of Homeland Security. But the scheme is also quintessentially Trumpian a faithful copy of the president's knack for trading on the hopes of disaffected Americans. We Build the Wall, in other words, was basically a Trump tribute band. The plan itself was cribbed directly from Mr. Trump. It is the president, after all, who has sold many Americans on the fantastical idea of a simple solution to a complex problem a border wall, which experts describe as unlikely to stop illegal immigration. Crucially, Mr. Trump sold the border wall from the outset as a workaround for people frustrated that they couldn't achieve their policy goals through the democratic process. He said Mexico would pay, so there was no need to ask Congress. Then he tried to shift money from the defense budget to start construction. We Build the Wall shared that ethos. As the nonprofit explained on its website, "Our mission is to unite private citizens that share a common belief in providing national security for our Southern Border through the construction, administration and maintenance of physical barriers inhibiting illegal entry into the United States." This wasn't a lobbying group. The point wasn't to persuade Congress to build the wall. The idea was to usurp a basic function of government. At first, Mr. Kolfage said he was raising money to fund federal construction. Then, with Mr. Bannon's help, he went back to donors and asked them to recommit their gifts instead to the private construction of a wall, according to the government. The men repeatedly insisted all the money would go toward construction of the wall; they were arrested Thursday because the government said they didn't keep that promise. (Of course, it's hardly clear that using the money to build a longer wall would have been a better outcome.) Last year, Donald Trump Jr. flew to El Paso to speak before the privately funded section of the wall, which is about 300 feet long, describing it as "private enterprise at its finest." But the Trump administration soured on the project this summer. After concerns were raised about the stability of the wall, the president criticized the quality of its construction in July. He insisted he planned to build a better wall, even though his administration hired the same firm that the nonprofit had hired to build the El Paso wall. On Thursday, the president said that paying privately for the border wall was "inappropriate." Mr. Bannon joins a long list of advisers to President Trump who have been charged with crimes, including Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign chairman; Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser; and Michael Cohen, his longtime personal lawyer. The details of the charges must have prompted at least a glimmer of recognition. Just last year, the president settled charges brought by the New York State attorney general that he had made personal use of donations to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, including to buy a 10,000 portrait of Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump agreed to close the foundation and donate its remaining money to "reputable" charities. On Thursday, the White House resorted to its familiar insistence that this latest round of arrests did not involve people closely connected to the president. Mr. Bannon was dismissed as someone merely involved in "the early part of the administration." Mr. Bannon worked as the president's chief strategist from January 2017 to August 2017. The looming question, however, is whether President Trump will keep Mr. Bannon at arm's length. Americans can feel little confidence that Mr. Bannon will receive a fair trial and, if convicted, a fair punishment. By commuting Roger Stone's sentence in July, Mr. Trump demonstrated a willingness to shelter his current and former associates from the legal consequences of their actions. It is a sad reality of the moment that Americans have reason to question whether justice will be served. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Q. You recently wrote about hard drive cleanup for Windows. Could you also address the same issue for Macs? A. For years, Mac computers did not come with utilities like Disk Cleanup and the newer Storage Sense found in Windows, but Apple added new tools in 2016 with the release of its macOS Sierra system. If your Mac is running at least that version of the system, go to the Apple Menu, select About This Mac and click the Storage tab. On the Storage screen, you should see a graphic showing your drive's available space. Click the Manage button on the right side of the box to get started. The resulting storage management screen offers four ways to clear off old files: Store in iCloud, Optimize Storage, Empty Trash Automatically and Reduce Clutter. As one might expect, the Store in iCloud option punts documents, photos and Messages off your Mac's drive and into your iCloud online storage locker. While this does free up room on the computer, you may have to buy more iCloud storage space from Apple if you fill up your five gigabytes that come free with an iCloud account. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
DETROIT As self driving cars become increasingly real, automakers are already reimagining how passengers may actually ride in the cars, without the need to pay such close attention to the road. In at least one case, envisioned by Mercedes, the design would borrow more from the vintage carriages still on the road in "Downton Abbey" than briefcase cars in "The Jetsons." The Mercedes F 015 Luxury in Motion concept car, on display at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, features what the company describes as "four rotating lounge chairs that allow a face to face seat configuration." In other words, the driver (and front passenger, too) can swivel around and make direct eye contact with the people in the back. This concept actually goes back a long way. Horse drawn carriages commonly offered vis a vis seating for passengers, and it has been a feature of self driving car fantasies at least since the 1950s. In the late 1960s, Chrysler Imperials could briefly be ordered with an option that included a swiveling front passenger seat and a folding table for on the road business meetings a kind of precursor to the custom conversion vans of the 1970s. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Francois Lesage, who for more than a half century led the embroidery atelier that has served couture designers from Charles Frederick Worth through Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel, died on Thursday in Versailles, France. He was 82. In a statement, the Lesage company, which was acquired by Chanel in 2002, said that Mr. Lesage died at a hospital after a long illness but provided no further details. Mr. Lesage was revered for maintaining the couture craft and its tradition of making every stitch and attaching every bead by hand. The number of true couture designers has dwindled over the last few decades, and so have the ranks of the artisans, known as "petites mains," upon whom they rely. Mr. Lesage sought to ensure the future of the company, France's oldest embroiderer, by establishing a school near its headquarters in Montmartre. The Lesage family has been closely associated with couture embroidery since the 1920s, producing elaborate visions of leaping horses for Elsa Schiaparelli, Van Gogh's irises for Yves Saint Laurent and an enormous faux leopard skin that became a dress by Jean Paul Gaultier. Each work required hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours of precision beadwork to create, commanding prices of 100,000 or more for an elaborate ball gown. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Credit...Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times Start Ups Braced for the Worst. The Worst Never Came. SAN FRANCISCO Getaround, a car sharing start up, started the year by laying off 150 employees and scaling back some operations after it spent too much on a rapid expansion. Two months later, with the spread of the coronavirus, business got even worse. The company laid off another 100 employees, asked those who remained to volunteer for pay cuts, obtained a government loan of 5 million to 10 million and battled bankruptcy rumors. But in May, something unexpected happened: Business bounced back when people began using the start up's cars to get on the road again. Getaround's revenue in the United States for the year is now 40 percent above where it was a year ago. Last month, it brought back all of its furloughed employees and started hiring again. "We have seen a very, very fast recovery," said Sam Zaid, Getaround's chief executive, adding that he was now raising more cash. "It's been a bit of a wild ride." Funding for young companies has stayed robust, particularly for the larger start ups. Some of them, like the stock trading app Robinhood and Discord, the social media site, have pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars in new capital in recent months, boosting their valuations. And initial public offerings of tech companies have come roaring back, alongside a surging stock market. "Things generally are substantially better than our worst fears 90 days ago," said Rich Wong, an investor at Accel, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The stabilization has created a surreal disconnect between tech start ups and the broader economy. While retailers, restaurant chains and many other companies are filing for bankruptcy and are dealing with one of the worst downturns on record, the tech industry has largely sidestepped the worst of the destruction. Demand has surged for start ups that offer virtual learning, telehealth, e commerce, video games and streaming, and software for remote workers. Start ups in areas like fitness or children's activities also quickly adapted their offerings to go virtual. That doesn't mean tech start ups have escaped unscathed. Some like those providing travel services, restaurant software or tickets to events watched revenue disappear. Stay Alfred, a luxury hospitality start up in Washington, recently began winding down its operations, blaming the virus. ScaleFactor, an accounting start up in Texas, and Stockwell, an office vending machine start up that was previously known as Bodega, did the same. But over all, the money has continued flowing. Start ups in the United States raised 34.3 billion in the second quarter, down slightly from 36 billion a year earlier, according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. Much of the financing went to the largest companies, with the number of "mega rounds" (deals larger than 100 million) on a pace to top last year's total. "People are trying to focus on who they believe the winners are, on companies that have pivoted successfully to meet the new norm," said Heather Gates, a managing director at Deloitte who advises start ups. Across Silicon Valley, the start up panic began dissipating around May. That was when layoffs slowed to a trickle, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks start up layoffs. Just 5 percent of the hundreds of companies that did layoffs went out of business, according to the site. Hiring is now picking back up. Job openings posted to a network run by Drafted, a recruiting company, increased 30 percent in the last month, said Vinayak Ranade, its chief executive. "Everyone woke up and thought, 'Wait a second, people are still going to do business,'" said Steve Sloane, an investor at Menlo Ventures. "They're just going to do it online." Some of the shift was fueled by start ups adapting their businesses to the pandemic. One of those was ActivityHero, an online marketplace for children's activities. In April, the San Francisco start up's bookings dropped 88 percent as summer camps around the country canceled their programs, said Peggy Chang, its chief executive. She worried the company wouldn't survive the year. So ActivityHero encouraged its providers to offer virtual activities, promoting them to parents with free classes and small discounts. By the summer, bookings were back just online. Now, Ms. Chang said, she sees online activities as a springboard to expand faster when in person activities return. Envoy, a start up in San Francisco that sells sign in systems to offices, also suffered its first monthly net loss in February and March, said its chief executive, Larry Gadea. But that changed in May after the company formed a service called Protect, with features for limiting capacity in the office and managing which employees are in the office. Around that time, working from home was becoming untenable for some people and companies wanted a way to allow a limited number of workers to return. Around 100,000 workers have used Envoy's new system at 500 offices, Mr. Gadea said. "It saved the business," he said. Some larger start ups have seized the opportunity to raise even more cash from investors. DoorDash and Instacart, two delivery services that have become more popular in the pandemic, collectively raised more than 600 million in funding in June, lifting their valuations to 16 billion for DoorDash and 13.7 billion for Instacart. Robinhood, the online trading start up, raised 280 million in May and added 320 million in July as day trading surged while people were quarantined. Canva, an online design software provider, saw its growth accelerate as more people worked remotely, and it doubled its valuation to 6 billion in June. Discord, a social media chat service whose use increased roughly 50 percent in the pandemic, raised 100 million in June in a matter of weeks. Ruben Flores Martinez, founder of Cashdrop, an e commerce start up, said he had struck out trying to raise funding for his company in January. But the virus pushed local merchants to move online, leading hundreds of them to try Cashdrop's software. "Covid just came and accelerated stuff exponentially," said Mr. Flores Martinez, who ultimately raised 2.7 million in funding for his start up in July. He said he didn't meet any of the investors in person, an increasingly common trait of start up deal making in the pandemic. In a June survey of more than 150 venture capital firms conducted by OMERS Ventures, more than two thirds said they were willing to do deals remotely. Half said their pipeline of new deals was the same as or more robust than it was before the pandemic. Cyan Banister, a start up investor who put money into Cashdrop, said she had expected new deals to dry up in the pandemic. But she said her firm, Long Journey Ventures, had met so many new companies over Zoom calls that she and her partners instead became concerned that they were investing too quickly. The firm has done five deals, and Ms. Banister has made six personal investments in the pandemic. "People made enough bread and grew enough gardens and decided to start working on a start up now," she said. "We're seeing people start to build things and come up with ideas." The home rental company Airbnb, which initially lost more than 1 billion in revenue from travel cancellations, has also seen bookings improve to pre pandemic levels as people look for getaways within driving distance of their homes. In a recent virtual meeting with employees, Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, expressed surprise at the rebound. "This is something I never would have imagined telling you even eight weeks ago," he said. "It kind of defies logic in a way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For her performance as an enterprising exotic dancer in Lorene Scafaria's "Hustlers," the Ms. Lopez earned some of the highest praise of her career. A strong awards season campaign was mounted, and she was honored with a string of nominations and wins among film critics' circles at the end of last year. Momentum seemed to be building for her to earn a nod for a best supporting actress Oscar with most awards season pundits deeming Ms. Lopez's chances in the category a fairly sure bet. Yet on Monday, Ms. Lopez's name was not among those announced during the Oscar nominations unveiling. The extreme disappointment I feel is twofold. While the track record of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a measurement of artistic excellence is debatable, its cultural cachet is undeniable. A nomination for Ms. Lopez would have burnished her legacy as an actress, more than 25 years after her breakout role in "Selena." Even more dispiriting is what Ms. Lopez's snub means for Latinx representation more broadly Ms. Lopez was the only Latinx performer with a real shot of recognition in the major categories this year and seemed to shoulder much of the burden of fending off another OscarsSoWhite. (A kind reminder that the Spanish born Antonio Banderas, who earned a deserved nomination for best actor for "Pain and Glory," is not Latinx.) The absence of Latinx representation is a longstanding issue for the academy. Had she been nominated, Ms. Lopez would have been the first American Latinx actress singled out by the academy since Rosie Perez, who earned a best supporting actress nod in 1994 for "Fearless." The magnitude of this quarter of a century gap might be difficult for some to understand at first the entertainment industry tends to lump together American born Latinxes, Latin Americans and Hispanics into a monolithic entity, inaccurately plumping numbers in otherwise well intentioned studies about diversity. Indeed, only a handful of American Latinx actors have ever been nominated for film's highest acting honors: In addition to Ms. Perez, they include Rita Moreno (who won in 1962), Jose Ferrer (a winner in 1951), Edward James Olmos (nominated in 1989) and Benicio del Toro (a winner in 2001). If only American born Latinxes were considered in the data research focused on diversity in studio productions and what types of roles they are offered, calling the results dismal would be an understatement. And then there's the fact that no American Latinx filmmaker has ever been nominated for the best director Academy Award, in part because they are rarely considered to helm the "prestige" films Oscar voters are usually attracted to. It's evident that an illusion of inclusion in relation to Latinx people has permeated Hollywood over the past decade. The heavily decorated Mexican directors Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro collectively referred to as "the Three Amigos" have served as a flimsy Band Aid to an industry that heralds their accomplishments as proof that everyone who matches their idea of Latinx is being celebrated. Mr. Cuaron's "Roma," a Latin American behemoth backed by Netflix, took home three awards at last year's ceremony. This followed closely on the heels of Mr. Inarritu's "Birdman" and "The Revenant," Mr. del Toro's "The Shape of Water" and Mr. Cuaron's "Gravity," all awarded some of the highest honors by the academy. A narrative of substantial Latinx representation was constructed, one that doesn't acknowledge how that representation hasn't translated to the screen even in works by Latin American filmmakers. (Aside from "Roma," which is set in Mexico with Spanish dialogue, those other films starred the likes of Sandra Bullock, Leonardo DiCaprio and Michael Keaton.) And stateside Latinx creators have been virtually erased both onscreen and behind the camera. This year, without any of the men in the overachieving trio in the race, the mirage of collective advancement has vanished. While the Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto received his third nomination, for "The Irishman," and the Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa was nominated for her documentary "The Edge of Democracy," they serve as little consolation. Ms. Lopez's snub should show pundits and other observers how blatant the exclusion truly is, not only from the glitz of the red carpet, but more alarmingly, from the production pipeline as a whole. A good start on the path to overhauling this outrageous reality is for more people in high places to become aware that Latin American and United States born Latinx people aren't granted the same opportunities, nor are their stories, while related, the same. The few Latin American actresses who've been shortlisted for the acting categories in recent memory have delivered monumental performances playing characters exhibiting familiar tropes: Mexico's Adriana Barraza in "Babel" as a nanny crossing the border who is eventually deported; Colombia's Catalina Sandino Moreno in "Maria Full of Grace" as a drug mule; and more recently, Yalitza Aparicio in "Roma" as a housekeeper for an upper middle class family in 1970s Mexico City. What's noteworthy about Ms. Lopez's turn is that it does not abide by preconceived and cliched expectations of who a Latinx woman is, specifically one born and raised in the United States. In a recent interview with Variety, Ms. Lopez recalled the limiting biases that affected the jobs she was offered early in her career: "Maybe 30 years ago, it was very 'Oh, you're the Latin girl,' " she said. "'You'll do Spanish roles; you'll play maids; you'll only be limited to this little box.' " Characters that are unambiguously Latinx, but are depicted beyond their cultural identity, are a rarity in several of Ms. Lopez's earlier roles, she often portrayed women who could arguably be coded as white. But as Ramona in "Hustlers," she doesn't have to erase her ethnicity. Ramona isn't a Latinx stereotype. There's no use of Spanish language dialogue or references to her abuela to make the point that she is a Nuyorican. But the hints are there her last name is Vega, and the actress Emma Batiz, who plays her daughter in the film, is also Latinx. And of course and above all, it's J.Lo in a role she was meant to play, a role that shows off her strengths, while allowing her to become the force of nature she hasn't always seen herself as. "I've always been so much a romantic, so much about having a relationship, and this woman is the total opposite," she told A.O. Scott in an interview for The New York Times Magazine. "And to play that, to live in those shoes, to walk in those very high heels, in that skin, made me realize I'm out here on my own. That's what I need to teach my daughter, that aspect of it, that you can do it on your own." Ms. Lopez was Lorene Scafaria's first choice for Ramona in "Hustlers," and through Ms. Lopez's company, Nuyorican Productions, the actress served as a producer of the film. But a couple of questions arise: If it has taken this long for a household name like Ms. Lopez to attain such a meaty and perfectly tailored part, what's the fate of those emerging Latinx voices without such clout? And what does it mean that this type of Latinx character not a maid, not a drug mule, not a nanny wasn't acknowledged by the academy? Ms. Lopez will be fine; her degree of superstardom and ability to produce her own projects should hopefully ensure even more great roles for her. But even if she had been nominated this year, no one person can or should shoulder all that responsibility. It's imperative to have a wide array of Latinxes partaking in all disciplines. Pioneers and symbols are important needed even, as lighthouses in oceans where role models have been scarce but more so is foundational change to an industry that continues to bet on our money as audiences, but not our talent and stories. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
An Upper East Side mansion that was home to the Broadway producers Howard and Janet Kagan for the last decade finally sold after more than a year on the market and a hefty price reduction. The elegant limestone structure, at 11 East 82nd Street, was acquired by an anonymous buyer for 30.1 million, making it New York City's most expensive closing in March. The Kagans, whose productions include "Tuck Everlasting" and the revival of " Pippin ," bought the late 1890s house in 2009 for 24.5 million, then undertook a top to bottom renovation. When they put the 22 room home back on the market in 2017, they initially sought 44 million. This wasn't the only spruced up townhouse to sell at a big discount last month. In Greenwich Village, a carriage house at 23 Cornelia Street, where the pop star Taylor Swift once lived, closed at 11.5 million, less than half its original 24.5 million price from two years ago. A few blocks away, at the Greenwich Lane complex, a new townhouse fared better, selling for almost 22 million, nearer to its 25 million price tag. The townhouse contains nine bedrooms, seven full and two half baths, two eat in kitchens, and a large recreation room and den. The master suite encompasses the third floor and features a separate library, plus two baths and an oversize dressing room. Although the house was completely redone, with renovations led by the architect Stephen Wang, many original details from the turn of the last century remain. Among them: six marble fireplaces, inlaid wood flooring, intricate moldings, wrought iron and brass balustrade, and tall ionic columns that frame the drawing room. Monthly taxes on the property are 15,910; Louise C. Beit of Sotheby's International Realty was the listing broker. The Greenwich Village carriage house where Ms. Swift lived is between Bleecker and West Fourth Streets. The seller, David Aldea, who runs a strategic technology consultancy, bought it for 5.3 million in 2005, then spent the next five years on extensive renovations that cost another 5 million. Working with the architect Galia Solomonoff, Mr. Aldea transformed the 21 foot wide brick structure, built in the early 1900s, into a modern home, with a private garage, an expansive rooftop terrace and, on the basement level, an indoor spa with a sauna, gym and saltwater pool. The three level house has about 5,500 square feet of interior space, including four bedrooms and five and a half baths, according to the listing with the Corcoran Group. Ms. Swift had rented the place for 40,000 a month while she awaited the completion of renovations at her TriBeCa townhouse in 2016. Back on the Upper East Side, Mr. Herbert, the founder of Pantone, and Michelle Herbert sold an 11th floor residence at 778 Park at 73rd Street, an exclusive apartment house designed by Rosario Candela in the early 1930s. The sale price was 27 million, according to property records, which was below the most recent list price of 32 million. The buyer was Kimberly R. Kravis, a philanthropist and daughter of Henry R. Kravis, the billionaire founder of the private equity firm KKR Company. The fully renovated unit has six bedrooms and five and a half baths, along with three fireplaces and striking cityscape and Central Park views from its 39 oversize windows. About a block away, at 740 Park Avenue and 71st Street, another Candela designed co op, a duplex, closed at 20.5 million. It was sold by investment banker Peter Huang, who reportedly bought the apartment in the mid 1970s for 145,000. The purchase was made through a trust. The 7,500 square foot unit is on the fourth and fifth floors, with five bedrooms and five and a half baths, as well as 41 windows, 21 closets and three wood burning fireplaces. And at the Plaza Residences, a revamped penthouse duplex with about 4,000 square feet of interior space and a nearly 500 square foot terrace became the second most expensive sale in March when it sold for 29 million. A four bedroom, four and a half bath apartment on the sixth floor sold for 19.6 million. Both transactions were done through limited liability companies. The Saltzes, who own the 200 acre Anderson Acres Farm in Kent, Conn., paid 15 million for a loft like penthouse at 443 Greenwich, the development where the actors Meg Ryan and Jake Gyllenhaal also have homes. Their new penthouse has around 3,500 square feet of interior space, with three bedrooms and three and a half baths. There is also a rooftop terrace of nearly 1,100 square feet enough room for the couple to plant a few more blooms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The director, Jiayan "Jenny" Shi, reads Zhang's diary entries in voice over and ponders her similarities with the missing woman. Both attended the same university in China, and shortly after arriving in the United States, Shi herself got into a car with a stranger, as Zhang is shown doing in security footage. (Zhang, in one of her most foreboding diary entries, had written of another circumstance in which she was walking in heavy rain and yearned to be inside a passing car.) Cultural expectations become a huge part of the story. Zhang's family and boyfriend grow frustrated with the justice system in the United States (the pace is slow and there's no way to make a suspect talk). Shi films Zhang's family members in China as they consider their lives without her. ("Americans won't give up on my daughter, right?" her mother asks.) The film captures their ordeal with compassion and a measure of self reflexivity, which is as much as this unavoidably grim material could ask for. Finding Yingying Not rated. In English and Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Another weekend in Palm Beach. Another grand party attended by members of Team Trump. With 400 of his closest friends in attendance, the New York financier Stephen A. Schwarzman celebrated his 70th birthday on Saturday at his Four Winds estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Partygoers feasted on short ribs, while two camels wandered along a stretch of sand and a gondolier propelled his craft across the pool. Guests were treated to a 12 minute fireworks display that could be seen across Lake Worth Lagoon. To top off the evening at what is just one of the multibillionaire's many homes, Gwen Stefani sang "Happy Birthday to You" before taking a quick twirl with the birthday boy around a dance floor constructed inside a two story tent where acrobats shimmied and jumped. The cost? A person familiar with the planning who was not authorized by the host to speak on the record estimated it at between 7 million and 9 million. How, exactly, does one spend in the millions on a single party? Ken Fulk, a San Francisco events planner who oversaw the wedding of the technology entrepreneur Sean Parker, had some general estimates. A fireworks display can cost as much as 50,000, he said. Dinner for 400 at such an affair can come to about 200,000. But that doesn't include waiters and other staff members, he said, which can add another 60,000. As for Ms. Stefani's "Happy Birthday" performance? That would cost as much as 500,000, according to a Business Insider poll of CelebrityTalent.net. The guests had cocktails in the entry hall before moving on to the dining area, where later they ate cake sculpted in the shape of a Chinese temple with a dragon curled around the edges of the roof, according to one guest. The day after the celebration, some 150 people attended a private lunch hosted by Mr. Schwarzman. And what about the camels? Mr. Fulk estimated they cost 1,500 apiece. "We've had a few camels at parties, too," he said with a laugh. Mr. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the global private equity firm the Blackstone Group and the chairman of the President's Strategic and Policy Forum, a group established by Mr. Trump in December, has hosted grand affairs before. His 60th birthday soiree in 2007 was pilloried by some as an example of Wall Street excess in the time before the financial crash. That one, which reportedly cost between 3 million and 5 million, took place at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. Martin Short was the master of ceremonies, Marvin Hamlisch played piano, and Rod Stewart and Patti LaBelle serenaded the guests. The Feb. 11 party marked the second Saturday in a row that Palm Beach society feted itself. President Trump and the first lady attended an American Red Cross ball on Feb. 4 at Mr. Trump's Mar a Lago resort, a party with a theme of "From Vienna to Versailles." With its harpists, and waiters in powdered wigs, it was an exercise in 18th century French opulence. Many of the guests at Mr. Schwarzman's party were affiliated with the new White House, among them Mr. Trump's daughter and son in law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and his cabinet picks Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross and Elaine Chao, according to Bloomberg. The Schwarzmans sat together at their table with David Koch, the businessman and supporter of conservative causes, who sat to the left of Mr. Schwarzman's wife, Christine Hearst Schwarzman. Ivanka Trump was seated to Mr. Schwarzman's right. The event was planned by the New York firm Van Wyck Van Wyck, in coordination with Ms. Schwarzman. According to its website, Van Wyck Van Wyck's clients have included former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and companies such as Rolex, Amazon and Cartier. Executives for the company declined to comment on the party's cost. The Trump team seems unable to resist a theme party. In December, a "Villains and Heroes" costume party hosted by the Republican donor Robert Mercer drew a contingent that included one of Mr. Trump's senior advisers, Kellyanne Conway, who wore a Supergirl costume; the billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who dressed as the pro wrestler Hulk Hogan; and Mr. Trump, who wore his usual suit and tie. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Even as the economy remains weak and the number of troubled banks creeps higher, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's quarterly report card on Tuesday showed that the banking sector is slowly starting to recover. Agency officials said the list of "problem banks" reached 829 in the second quarter, an increase of 54 lenders, many of which were small community banks. While that is a smaller increase than in previous quarters, the number of problem banks remains at its highest level in more than 16 years. Not all of those banks are destined to founder, but officials reiterated that they expected the number of failures to continue to rise modestly before peaking later this year. So far this year, 118 banks have failed, with 45 closing in the second quarter. Even so, bank earnings continue to rebound. The banking industry posted a 21.6 billion profit in the second quarter as loan losses stabilized, the report card said. That profit reversed a 4.4 billion loss a year earlier, and it was the industry's best results since the credit crisis began in the third quarter in 2007. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The worst part of sampling a dead gorilla for Ebola, said Dr. William B. Karesh, is the flies. "You can imagine the sense of panic," he said. "A hundred thousand ants and carrion flies are coming off the carcass or climbing up your arms. They get inside your hood and are crawling on your face or biting you. "After half an hour, you have to get out and pull off the hood, clean up and disinfect. It's not for the faint of heart." The task described by Dr. Karesh a former chief field veterinarian at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs New York's zoos was part of an unusual research project. Scientists were trying to predict human Ebola outbreaks by detecting them first in apes and other forest animals. The team recently published a study in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B detailing 12 years of this work in the Republic of Congo. In some ways the study, which lasted from 2006 to 2018, was a failure. Only 58 samples were gathered from dead animals, and none was positive for Ebola. Therefore, the team's hypothesis that animal sampling could be an early warning system for human outbreaks was not proved. The good news, however, was that there was no epidemic. From 1994 to 2003, there had been multiple human outbreaks of Ebola in the Republic of Congo or neighboring Gabon. Weeks or months before each one, dead gorillas and chimpanzees were reported, sometimes hundreds of them. (Those die offs contributed to the classification of western lowland gorillas as critically endangered.) Sarah H. Olson, a W.C.S. wildlife health specialist working in the Republic of Congo and a co author of the study, conceded that carcass surveillance had been "a massive, massive challenge." But other components of the program, she argued, were highly successful. For example, she said, public education teams visited hunting villages across a wide swath of the country to explain why it was dangerous to eat or even touch animals found dead. The educators also put up posters and aired radio spots. Previously, she said, "people saw dead animals as a gift from God, food they didn't have to work for." Many, but not all, human outbreaks of Ebola have been traced to eating carcasses. But the biggest the West African outbreak that began in late 2013 and killed more than 11,000 people did not begin this way. That outbreak is thought to have started when a child played inside a tree where Ebola infected bats roosted and left droppings. After years of education efforts in the Republic of Congo, "people there adamantly told us they don't eat carcasses any more," Dr. Olson said. "That's a big change." The teams also trained local veterinarians and park rangers to don protective gear to do tests safely, and helped the national laboratory in the Republic of Congo's capital, Brazzaville, improve its Ebola testing for both animals and humans. The work was supported by the United States Agency for International Development's 200 million Predict program, a ten year effort to find animal diseases that could jump to humans. Other funders included the Fish and Wildlife Service, the German government and several private foundations. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the study was the authors' descriptions of how incredibly difficult it is to even find dead animals in a dense rain forest, and then to safely take samples from them. The first obstacle is that sick animals often crawl off to die in thick brush or near water. "It's not like they're laying out on a golf course," Dr. Karesh said. "In the first day or two, hunters can pass one by and not even know it's there. Later, they smell it or they even hear the flies." Dr. Alain U. Ondzie, a W.C.S. veterinarian in the Republic of Congo, described a terrifying moment for a team he was leading through the jungle in 2007. They had been walking and camping for eight days and had run out of water. When they finally came across a rivulet, the porters and trackers threw themselves on the ground to drink. Only then did one spot a dead gorilla in the water just upstream. "They cried, 'It's all over for us we'll be dead before we reach a village,'" Dr. Ondzie said. "We were very fortunate later to learn the carcass was not positive." The research program relied heavily on asking local hunters to report carcasses. Most hunters are from the Mbenga subgroup of the forest dwellers known as pygmies. (The term is often seen as pejorative but there is no uniformly accepted substitute; subgroups genetically related to one another are widely scattered across Central Africa, but share no common language or name.) Many hunting villages are bound in virtual enslavement to local farming villages, Dr. Karesh explained, which complicates relationships with outsiders. Also, impoverished hunters may not own cellphones, and even if they do, coverage is spotty. (Without phones, hunters send messages by asking passing drivers of logging trucks to relay the word when they reach the next town. ) On arrival, the team must clear a path to the carcass and then establish a perimeter about 60 feet back while the two designated samplers don hooded Tyvek suits with goggles and three pairs of gloves. Working under those conditions in tropical heat can be excruciating, as Dr. Karesh explained. Other samplers described fogged goggles and cameras, and sweat running down their arms to form water balloons in the tips of their gloves, reducing their dexterity. "It can be quite a fiddly thing," said Dr. Eeva Kuisma, a W.C.S. technical adviser. She recalled being with a team that had to stand up in a dugout canoe trying to keep a test tube rack balanced as they sampled a dead monkey snagged in an overhanging branch. Dr. Olson described the delicate task as like using the tweezers in the child's game Operation, always nervous that the buzzer will go off but the stakes are higher because the carcasses, like human ones, can teem with live virus for up to a week. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Merely living in the jungle can be nerve racking, Dr. Kuisma added, because you are always aware that animals you cannot see are watching you. She had never seen a leopard or been close to a large crocodile, she said, but the animals the trackers feared most were forest elephants, which lurked nearly invisibly in the leafy shadows. "If you can even see one, you're too close," she said. "They're usually not aggressive, but a mother with a calf may charge you." She herself had been charged by a male gorilla she startled while taking a morning jog on a logging road. "You hear this shout it's kind of like a sharp bark," she said. "And then they charge. It's usually a mock charge, but that one made me do a 100 meter personal best." Despite the difficulties, Dr. Olson argued, ongoing surveillance and education programs are cheap to run and also build trust with local villagers something vividly lacking in the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where medical teams and treatment centers have been attacked. The idea, she said, "deserves a closer look from the international community." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Dr. Joseph E. Lifschutz, a psychiatrist who spent a weekend in jail in 1969 defending his contention that a legal privilege of confidentiality should be extended to psychotherapists, a position later affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, died on April 15 in Alamo, Calif. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his grandson Andy Lifschutz. Dr. Lifschutz, a Brooklyn native, landed in a Northern California jail amid a lawsuit in which a high school physics teacher was suing a student who had cracked his jaw. Though the teacher publicly acknowledged that he had been Dr. Lifschutz's patient, Dr. Lifschutz refused to divulge his notes or even to confirm that he had ever treated the man. His principled stand eventually established a legal precedent and influenced a Supreme Court decision asserting that the right of confidentiality that applies to lawyers, clergy members and married couples also extends to psychotherapists. His case "was the first to assert clearly and formally that a constitutional right to privacy includes a psychotherapist patient privilege," Robert G. Meyer and Christopher M. Weaver wrote in "Law and Mental Health: A Case Based Approach" (2006). Dr. Saul Levin, chief executive and medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, called confidentiality one of the most important principles in medicine. "I applaud Dr. Lifschutz for going to such great lengths for his patient, even at the risk of his own freedom," Dr. Levin wrote in an email. Technically, Dr. Lifschutz lost his case: The courts ruled that therapists, unlike priests, were not covered by an absolute privilege; that confidentiality was accorded to the patient, not the doctor; and that the disparate treatment of priests and therapists by the judicial system did not deny him equal protection under the law. Still, the California courts recognized the necessity of confidentiality and set limits on how much a doctor had to disclose, even in cases in which a patient appeared to have waived a right to privacy by claiming mental or emotional stress. "For the proper practice of psychotherapy, a patient has to open his mind as completely as humanly possible," Dr. Lifschutz told The New York Times after his weekend in jail. "He must have absolute assurance that what he says will have total confidentiality." In 1996, Dr. Lifschutz sat through the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in a subsequent doctor patient privilege case, Jaffee v. Redmond. In that case, the court ruled that federal judges must allow mental health professionals to refuse to disclose patient records in civil and criminal proceedings. Their ruling cited the Lifschutz case. "Was it harder for the U.S. Supreme Court justices to dismiss the importance of confidentiality in psychotherapy while in the presence of someone who had gone to jail for it?" Bram Fridhandler, a California psychologist, wrote in 2005 in The San Francisco Psychologist. "We can only speculate. But we know that their decision has become the single most influential legal statement of the need for confidentiality to support effective psychotherapy, which they describe as a transcendent value for society." Joseph Emanuel Lifschutz was born in Brooklyn on April 30, 1924, to Oscar Lifschutz, who ran a grocery in the Williamsburg neighborhood, and the former Miriam Schor, both of them immigrants from Europe. A graduate of Boys High School, he attended City College, Brooklyn College and the University of Oregon before serving in the Army in World War II. He completed his college studies after his military service, graduating with a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1945. He then earned a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. During the Korean War, as an Army medical corps captain, he began seeing psychiatric patients at Madigan Army Hospital in Tacoma, Wash. His marriages to Barbara Welch and Ellen St. Sure ended in divorce. He is survived by his longtime companion, Jean Neihaus; three children from his first marriage, Yolanda Gamble and Nathan and Thomas Lifschutz; a sister, Rita Wroblewski; six grandchildren; and five great grandchildren. Another son from his first marriage, Mark, died. Dr. Lifschutz's involvement in the confidentiality issue began in the late 1950s, when he opened his practice in Orinda, a San Francisco suburb. Among his first patients was Joseph F. Housek, a teacher at Burlingame High School in San Mateo County. Ten years later, in 1969, Dr. Lifschutz received a subpoena to testify in a Superior Court suit that Mr. Housek had filed, seeking monetary damages for physical injuries and severe mental and emotional distress he said he had endured after an altercation with a student, John Arabian. In a deposition, Mr. Housek revealed that he had undergone therapy with Dr. Lifschutz for six months. Mr. Arabian's lawyer, who subpoenaed Dr. Lifschutz, said that by claiming mental distress and revealing the therapy, Mr. Housek had waived his right to privacy about his prior psychological state. Nonetheless, Dr. Lifschutz refused a court order to testify, even though his lawyer was unable to find a precedent for a therapist's asserting confidentiality when his patient had not done so. Cited for contempt of court on Dec. 5, 1969, he was ordered to San Mateo County Jail. He was released after three days pending resolution of the case. Dr. Lifschutz's appeals, all the way to the Supreme Court, were denied. In April 1970, the California Supreme Court ruled that Dr. Lifschutz had to answer "at least the question" which Mr. Housek had already confirmed of whether he had treated Mr. Housek. Dr. Lifschutz confirmed that he had treated Mr. Housek and turned his records over to the presiding judge, who reviewed them privately and found nothing relevant to the lawsuit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Based on the runaway best seller written by Mario Puzo (it was the first paperback to ever sell six million copies), the movie that changed both filmmaking and perceptions of gangster culture was an instant hit. "Francis Ford Coppola has made one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment," Vincent Canby, the New York Times chief film critic, raved when the film was released in 1972. The drama became the highest grossing film of the year and, at that point, ever. Largely considered among the best movies of all time (the American Film Institute ranked it No. 2 behind "Citizen Kane"), it garnered 11 Academy Award nominations, taking home three: adapted screenplay, picture, and actor for Marlon Brando's performance as Don Vito Corleone. No movie ever had "Part II" in the title before, a renegade concept added at the behest of Coppola. And its sprawling story, ranging across the 20th century from Italy to New York, California and elsewhere, transcended the mere gangster film and lives as a uniquely American epic, complete with a re creation of an immigrant's journey through Ellis Island. A box office hit that successfully turned Robert De Niro into a Hollywood star, the sequel collected 11 Academy Award nominations and won six, including supporting actor for De Niro, along with director and picture. It was the first film follow up to win the top prize, effectively cementing the allure of the movie sequel. 'The Godfather: The Complete Novel for Television' As the first two films reverberated throughout popular culture, their impact was bolstered by the power of television. NBC originally shelled out a reported 10 million in 1974 just for "Part I," resulting in the biggest TV audience for a theatrical release at the time. Coppola, in need of money to help bankroll what would become his next masterpiece, "Apocalypse Now," brainstormed an entirely new "Godfather" experience in 1977, recutting the first two films with the editor Barry Malkin. They toned down the violence, added scenes originally left on the cutting room floor, and presented the story in sequential order in lieu of the epic's time shifting narrative. Later released on VHS, licensed by HBO, AMC and Amazon Prime throughout the years and marketed under numerous titles ("The Godfather Epic," "The Godfather Saga"), this version, too, was acclaimed. "The chronological rejiggering works extremely well," The Times's television critic, John J. Connor, wrote in his 1977 review, adding that the reimagining, "in some ways, constitutes a pronounced improvement." Coppola has readily admitted that he was strapped for cash when Paramount Pictures coerced him into orchestrating another installment of the Corleone chronicles. While its story is just as grand as the others, including an art imitating life subplot about a Vatican in debt, the production was rushed, its over the top action scenes were reminiscent of the recent hit "Die Hard," and when Winona Ryder dropped out at the 11th hour, the infamously inexperienced Sofia Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola's 18 year old daughter) stepped in to play the ill fated Mary. The movie received mixed reviews from critics and posted lackluster box office results. And while the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, it walked away empty handed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Eliza was fleeing her captors with her young son in her arms when she was stopped short by the banks of the frigid Ohio River. With the unthinking courage that comes from desperation, she leapt from one ice floe to another, occasionally falling into the freezing water and hoisting herself up, until arriving on the riverbank across the state line. After witnessing her harrowing journey, a white man who should have captured her ended up helping her ashore instead, directing her to a safe house rather than into the arms of her pursuers. The story of a white man moved to save a slave so tugged at the heartstrings that the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe included a version of it in her novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." For many who were assigned the book to read in school, the tale of Eliza is their first indelible image of escape from slavery. The actual flight of Eliza began in Kentucky and ended on the riverbanks in Ripley, Ohio, abolitionists at the time said, making a white character based on a patroller one of the best known saviors. But the true Moses of Ripley was a former slave named John P. Parker, who helped make the town a major nexus in the path of kidnapped Africans and their descendants determined that their lot in life was not to be thought of as property. I had never heard of Parker or of Ripley, though I grew up about an hour and a half north of the town, on State Route 68. Fortunately, the story of Parker has not been entirely lost. It lives on, partly in the house and former foundry he owned that has been turned into a museum and a National Historic Landmark. The red brick building where Parker worked and lived is, quite frankly, stunning. As I pulled up to it, the late afternoon sun was setting over the hills in Kentucky, and its reflection in the glassy river bathed the facade in amber from below. Still I wondered, given the modest size of the structure, whether it held enough of Parker to tell his tale. It didn't quite, but Mr. Scott took care of what the house and its relics couldn't. So did "His Promised Land," a gripping memoir sold there based on an interview with Parker, which revealed a man who seemed never to shrink from a challenge. John Parker was born to a black woman and white father in Norfolk, Va., and was sold from his family to a slave merchant and then resold for profit to a doctor in Mobile, Ala., all by the time he was 10. If the prospect of never again seeing his mother didn't persuade him that slavery was atrocious, watching a fellow member of a chain gang being beaten to death convinced him that the institution was evil. Still, his time with the doctor wasn't the worst that forced labor had to offer: He learned a trade (working at a foundry) and the doctor's children sneaked him books and taught him to read. Parker made sure to avoid the same fate of my own forefathers who toiled in the hot fields of the Deep South. When he learned that the doctor planned to sell him at auction, he persuaded a woman named Elizabeth Ryder to buy him, and he promised to repay her with earnings from a foundry. Because he had learned a trade, the widow could lease him to the foundry, earn money on his labor, and anything above the promised amount of the lease would be his to keep. The arrangement was common, but resulted in freedom only for some. Rather than stay in the South, Parker settled in Ripley, making enough money to build the home next to his workshop, to marry and to raise children there. His career as a foundryman is the stuff of lore. He obtained a patent for a part that was in demand at tobacco factories, and became one of the richest men in the region, at that time a major trade hub in the United States. He constantly risked it all for what he called his "war with slavery." The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 strengthened penalties for those who helped people escape slavery. For that reason, perhaps, he rarely sheltered runaways, and a tour of his house does not feature the crawl spaces and secret passageways that some on the Underground Railroad do. What it does contain are the sort of exhibits you'd expect: a mural detailing accomplishments like Parker's appearance at a world exposition for a part he created. But the real story lay in the relics from the foundry that are on display and adorn the home. Some door hinges on the ground level (an item that I'd never thought of as decorative) are from Parker's foundry. Tools made from the foundry are shown as well. The stairs at the front entrance were made in the foundry, too; they just needed a fresh coat of paint. On the lower level sits a boat that doubles as a frame for a series of paintings depicting Parker's life. The craft is one he took night after night, combing the river for people who needed a hand on their way from a slave state to a free one. Parker may have been a warrior against slavery, but he was not a lone one. Many who escaped stayed with one of the more than 300 people in Ripley estimated to be in service to the Underground Railroad, making it the largest network in the region. The Ripley chain included John Rankin, a clergyman who hosted the refugees and is the town's best known participant in the Underground Railroad; his house, which has been restored and is open to the public, sits on a large hill now named for him. And of course nearby Cincinnati has no shortage of sites to visit, like the Harriett Beecher Stowe House, or the fantastic National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, stocked with a replica of a slave cabin and immersive programming. The fervent belief in the fundamental freedom of all people, regardless of color, was built into the foundation of Ohio. The land within the state's bounds was originally settled as part of the Northwest Ordinance, the federal statute that set forth a westward expansion that would be propelled by settlers' own grit rather than that of enslaved laborers. The first American settlement was created in 1788 in Marietta, Ohio, farther east along the river, and its residents outlawed slavery when the territory became a state 15 years later. Ohio's free status ensured that refugees fleeing to the North would have to cross the state's southwestern border, a formidable river. These days, the rich history of the land along that border is largely hidden, when you drive along the water. Along Route 52, I stopped at a diner where nobody asked if you wanted your grilled cheese sandwich on whole wheat or seven grain, nor did they ask what sort of cheese you wanted, because it was assumed the answer would be American. I passed a town called Utopia, whose boarded up windows and stillness suggested it was anything but. There was another called Higginsport, which was a bit more pulled together but still contained an assemblage of buildings in disrepair. Somewhere around there, I saw it: the Confederate flag. It was on the wrong side of the Ohio River (notwithstanding the short lived occupation by a Confederate general that was mainly a looting mission). That flag flying so close to the river represented both abolition's triumph and its failure. The borders between states may have become less significant, and the river is little more than a lovely landscape, complete with migrating birds. Yet it also means that even in Ohio, the flag of the rebel army, which fought for the right to keep people in bondage, flies. The whole of America may be a free state but it is still tainted with the residue of the institution that the state's first settlers knew was a sin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
7 CHINESE BROTHERS (2015) Stream on Pluto TV, Sundance Now, Tubi or Vudu; rent on Amazon, iTunes or YouTube. Jason Schwartzman stars in this charming comedy about a booze slugging slacker who calls his French bulldog his best friend. He can't hold a job to save his life, but that changes when he ends up at a Quick Lube and actually enjoys the work. STICKS AND STONES Stream on BritBox. This three part workplace drama follows Thomas (Ben Nwosu), a sales associate who faints during an important presentation and winds up losing a crucial client. His juniors are furious, and they won't let him forget it. Their bullying, combined with stress at home, drives Thomas over the edge, and he begins to wonder whether his paranoia is justified or simply in his head. There's a touch of humor in the show, yet for the most part, it may not convince people who are still working remotely to return to the office anytime soon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
One day in 2013, I sat down in a Starbucks in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington with Hugh Moren, then a junior at the nearby George Washington University. I asked him how much money he was borrowing to go to college. "Eighty two thousand dollars," he said. "By the time I graduate, a hundred ten." The number shocked me, but not as much as the way it didn't shock him. Hugh Moren was born in Warwick, R.I., and like generations of smart young people raised in the country's decaying industrial towns, he spent his adolescence plotting to leave. He wanted to study international relations and get a degree from a university with a good reputation. But his family didn't have any money, and tuition, fees and room and board at George Washington ran almost 60,000 a year. So he borrowed as much as the federal government would lend him and went to private lenders like Sallie Mae to borrow more. He had plans and aspirations: a job with a Swiss company that organizes international science conferences, then the Foreign Service exam and, he hoped, a life in diplomacy overseas. Yet I don't think he entirely understood what it meant to have a six figure indenture hanging around his neck when he was 21 years old. He assumed everything would work out. Hadn't it worked out for all the people who had taken his path before? We got up and walked across Pennsylvania Avenue onto campus. I knew the university by reputation: an up and coming school that had become more exclusive and expensive over time, the home to many respected scholars and a student body that was, if not quite the caliber of nearby Georgetown University, nationally competitive. As we entered the grounds, the iconography resonated deeply, evoking memories of my own college experience. The campus library stood to the right, and beyond that a basketball arena, food court and bookstore. Someone had pasted Greek letters on the inside of a dormitory window. There were bronze statues. Pathways crisscrossed University Yard, like any classic quad. But instead of being in the middle of campus, it was stuck off to the side, with light foot traffic. This seemed less a campus than a collection of university like structures scrunched together in an area two sizes too small. Construction cranes promised newer buildings to come. I talked to a half dozen of Hugh Moren's fellow students. A highly indebted senior who was terrified of the weak job market described George Washington, where he had invested considerable time getting and doing internships, as "the world's most expensive trade school." Another mentioned the abundance of rich students whose parents were giving them a fancy sounding diploma the way they might a new car. There are serious students here, he acknowledged, but: "You can go to G.W. and essentially buy a degree." I went on the university's website to look for some kind of data or study indicating how much students at George Washington were actually learning. There was none. This is not unusual, it turns out. Colleges and universities rarely, if ever, gather and publish information about how much undergraduates learn during their academic careers. Colleges may be afraid of what they would find. A recent study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that, on average, American college graduates score well below college graduates from most other industrialized countries in mathematics. In literacy ("understanding, evaluating, using and engaging with written text"), scores are just average. This comes on the heels of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's "Academically Adrift," a study that found "limited or no learning" among many college students. Instead of focusing on undergraduate learning, numerous colleges have been engaged in the kind of building spree I saw at George Washington. Recreation centers with world class workout facilities and lazy rivers rise out of construction pits even as students and parents are handed staggeringly large tuition bills. Colleges compete to hire famous professors even as undergraduates wander through academic programs that often lack rigor or coherence. Campuses vie to become the next Harvard or at least the next George Washington while ignoring the growing cost and suspect quality of undergraduate education. The man who made the George Washington University what it is today sits in the corner office of a building with his name on the entrance the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, where he now teaches a few blocks away from University Yard. The university was an inexpensive commuter school when Stephen Joel Trachtenberg became president in 1988. By the time he was finished, two decades later, it had been transformed into a nationally recognized research university, with expanded facilities and five new schools specializing in public health, public policy, political management, media and public affairs and professional studies. U.S. News World Report now ranks the university at No. 54 nationwide, just outside the "first tier." It was no secret where the money had come from to pay for it all: the students and their families. Under Mr. Trachtenberg's leadership, tuition grew until George Washington was, for a time, the most expensive university in America. Mr. Trachtenberg was raised in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood before attending Columbia University, Yale Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. After a stint working for the United States commissioner of education, he was hired as a senior administrator at Boston University; soon after, in 1971, John R. Silber was hired as president. By then, the American research university had evolved into a complicated and somewhat peculiar organization. It was built to be all things to all people: to teach undergraduates, produce knowledge, socialize young men and women, train workers for jobs, anchor local economies, even put on weekend sports events. And excellence was defined by similarity to old, elite institutions. Universities were judged by the quality of their scholars, the size of their endowments, the beauty of their buildings and the test scores of their incoming students. That created an opening for those who wanted to mimic the established schools. Buildings and scholars could be bought, and as long as the students were relatively smart when they enrolled, few questions would be asked about what they learned in college itself. Indeed, because the standard university organizational model left teaching responsibilities to autonomous academic departments and individual faculty members, each of which taught and tested in its own way, few questions could be asked that would produce comparable results. So John Silber embarked on a huge building campaign while bringing luminaries like Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel on board to teach and lend their prestige to the B.U. name, creating a bigger, more famous and much more costly institution. He had helped write a game plan for the aspiring college president. Mr. Trachtenberg absorbed those lessons well. "I learned my craft from John Silber," he told me. Other universities were eager to hire administrators who could help them climb the ranks of higher education fame and fortune. The University of Hartford came calling, and in 1977 Mr. Trachtenberg became its president. He spent 11 years there, always building. Mr. Trachtenberg understood the centrality of the university as a physical place. New structures were a visceral sign of progress. They told visitors, donors and civic leaders that the institution was, like beams and scaffolding rising from the earth, ascending. He added new programs, recruited more students, and followed the dictate of constant expansion. The George Washington University came with some assets, most importantly a prime location just a few blocks from the White House, but it had little money and suffered from an inferiority complex. "I was given an institution and told, 'Make this place better,' " Mr. Trachtenberg said, " 'and by the way, be embarrassed that you're not Georgetown.' " Everyone wanted something from him: better facilities, better colleagues, better students and all of those things cost money. He had no base of rich alumni like the Ivies or Georgetown did. Fund raising was a chicken and egg problem: Rich people wanted to support something that was already excellent, but excellence as they understood it required millions of dollars to buy. Mr. Trachtenberg, however, understood something crucial about the modern university. It had come to inhabit a market for luxury goods. People don't buy Gucci bags merely for their beauty and functionality. They buy them because other people will know they can afford the price of purchase. The great virtue of a luxury good, from the manufacturer's standpoint, isn't just that people will pay extra money for the feeling associated with a name brand. It's that the high price is, in and of itself, a crucial part of what people are buying. Mr. Trachtenberg convinced people that George Washington was worth a lot more money by charging a lot more money. Unlike most college presidents, he was surprisingly candid about his strategy. College is like vodka, he liked to explain. Vodka is by definition a flavorless beverage. It all tastes the same. But people will spend 30 for a bottle of Absolut because of the brand. A Timex watch costs 20, a Rolex 10,000. They both tell the same time. The Absolut Rolex plan worked. The number of applicants surged from some 6,000 to 20,000, the average SAT score of students rose by nearly 200 points, and the endowment jumped from 200 million to almost 1 billion. It wasn't easy, because the schools it was competing with in the national market for students, scholars and money weren't standing still. "We built a new building, they built two new buildings," he said. "That's what was going on all the time." He looked for opportunities to paint the luxury school picture. He built Ivory Tower, a residence hall of one and two bedroom suites complete with living room, kitchen and private bathroom (featured last year on the College Finder website as one of the five best dorms in the United States). He expanded squash into a varsity sport, as it was at a small number of elite Northeastern campuses. The university became a magnet for the children of new money who didn't quite have the SATs or family connections required for admission to Stanford or Yale. It also aggressively recruited international students, rich families from Asia and the Middle East who believed, as nearly everyone did, that American universities were the best in the world. Mr. Trachtenberg's successor, Steven Knapp, is not one for liquor and watch metaphors. But the house that Stephen Joel Trachtenberg built remains. Few students are poor enough to qualify for a federal Pell grant. In 2013, only 14 percent of the university's 10,000 undergraduates received a grant a figure on a par with elite schools but far below the national average. The average undergraduate borrower leaves with about 30,800 in debt. The university is more expensive than ever, though it is no longer the most expensive university in America. It is the 46th. Others have been implementing the Absolut Rolex Plan. John Sexton turned New York University into a global higher education player by selling the dream of downtown living to students raised on "Sex and the City." Northeastern followed Boston University up the ladder. Under Steven B. Sample, the University of Southern California became a U.S. News top 25 university. Washington University in St. Louis did the same. And in hundreds of regional universities and community colleges, presidents and deans and department chairmen have watched this spectacle of ascension and said to themselves, "That could be me." Agricultural schools and technical institutes are lobbying state legislatures for tuition increases and Ph.D. programs, fitness centers and arenas for sport. Presidents and boards are drawing up plans to raise tuition, recruit "better" students and add academic programs. They all want to go in one direction up! and they are all moving with a single vision of what they want to be. When research documenting the academic consequences of the status race is released, colleges generally try to change the subject. I asked Mr. Trachtenberg if it was morally defensible to let students borrow tens of thousands of dollars for a service that he himself had compared to a luxury good. He is not, by nature, one for apologies and second guessing. "I'm not embarrassed by what we did," he said. "It's not as if it's some kind of a bait and switch here. It's not as if the faculty weren't good. It's not as if the opportunities to get a good degree weren't there. There's no misrepresentation here." He seemed unbowed but also aware that his legacy was bound up in the larger dramas and crises of American higher education. "I'm in favor of a perfect world," he said. "I didn't get to be a president in a perfect world. I got to be president in a world in which I was living." He had seen the university from the Olympian vantages of Cambridge, New Haven and Morningside Heights, watched it grow with students and federal money during the great mid 20th century expansion and lived in the caldron of administrative ambition. And so he built the perfect representation of what, for good and for ill, American higher education has become. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
What books are on your nightstand? I don't know if I have a nightstand anymore. I do have an avalanche of books with a reading light sticking out of it. From across the room, I can see the autobiography of Lili'uokalani, the Hawaiian queen and songwriter who composed "Aloha 'Oe," Sigrid Nunez's "The Friend" and two novels by Marie Claire Blais, a Quebecoise writer who now lives in Key West: "La Belle Bete" and "Soifs." What's the last great book you read? I just read two great books at the same time: I reread Jean Stafford's "The Mountain Lion," which is one of the strangest and angriest novels of the 20th century, and for the first time I read Morgan Parker's "There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce," a brilliant poetry collection playing so cunningly with pop culture that it reminded me that pop culture is astonishingly deep and fascinating and is only considered frivolous because it like caretaking careers and the domestic sphere is devalued for being considered primarily feminine. What's your go to classic? And your favorite book no one else has heard of? I read "Middlemarch," by George Eliot, at least once a year because I want to curl up inside Eliot's warm intelligence. My first semester in college, Toni Cade Bambara's "Gorilla, My Love," blew my mind. It was one of the first 20th century short story collections I ever read, as well as the first to show me how much joy and playfulness there can be with the contemporary form. What books would you recommend to someone who wants to know more about Florida? Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's "The Yearling" is one of the best books ever written about Florida; adults don't read it often nowadays because at some point it was miscategorized as a children's book. Marjory Stoneman Douglas's "The Everglades: River of Grass" is as urgent and lively a work of ecological reporting as any I've read, and it pairs beautifully with Cynthia Barnett's "Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S." And Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a clear, hot blaze of a book. 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. Which writers novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets working today do you admire most? This is a deeply incomplete list, but among fiction writers, I love Joy Williams, Louise Erdrich, Lorrie Moore, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Han Kang, Marilynne Robinson, Rachel Cusk, Laila Lalami, Kelly Link, Tania James and Deborah Eisenberg. The poets I love include Claudia Rankine, Brenda Shaughnessy, Monica Youn, Tracy K. Smith, Ada Limon and Anne Carson, who may be my favorite living writer of all. Annie Baker is my playwriting queen. In nonfiction, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Jill Lepore, Sarah Manguso and Eula Biss are essential. Whose opinion on books do you most trust? Librarians and booksellers are quiet superheroes. Other writers read an extremely high percentage of the weird and brilliant stuff I love books in translation, experimental work, books by small presses with the added bonus that after a few drinks, writers are never afraid to argue ferociously about books. I will read almost anything put out by small, innovative publishers like the New York Review of Books Classics, Dorothy, Coffee House Press and Graywolf. And I like critics who love passionately but who actively interrogate their own biases and tastes. I sit down to work every day, but if my own words don't come, I read others' work slowly, for sound and image and larger resonance. Some months or, in dry spells, even some years I write nothing at all, and read a book or two a day. I read again at night before falling asleep, but nighttime reading is for fun. What moves you most in a work of literature? In all genres, I wait in ambush for the exact, perfect, telling detail, the thing that makes the scene or line come alive. What book by somebody else do you wish you had written? Wishing you'd written another person's book is like wishing you had another person's soul. That said, there's no end of my envy for others' brilliance, and at times I've wished I had Anita Loos's wicked humor, Ottessa Moshfegh's ironic snappiness, Mary Shelley's inventiveness, Edith Wharton's elegance and grand scale, on and on, without end. What's the last book you recommended to someone in your family? My sister, a professional triathlete, is a huge reader, and I sent her Maggie Nelson's "Bluets." She ate it up. What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves? As a result of a profoundly failed project, I have a deep shelf of books by belle epoque French courtesans and demimondaines. I find the women subversive, smart and funny. My favorites are Celeste Mogador, who became a countess, and Gisele d'Estoc, a bisexual anarchist painter who famously had a bare breasted sword fight with her female lover in a public park. Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain? To some readers, Mr. Rochester is a romantic hero, but in truth he's a sociopath who keeps his grieving wife locked in the attic and tries to gaslight poor, plain, abused Jane Eyre then marry her bigamously. Charlotte Bronte was sly and brilliant and I feel sure she knew he was a villain. The great Jean Rhys made his villainy wickedly explicit in "Wide Sargasso Sea." What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? I was a shy child, and vastly preferred books to people, so I devoured absolutely everything with no discernment at all until I was in middle school, which is excellent training to be a novelist. With my own little boys, I reread the work of Jean Craighead George, in particular "My Side of the Mountain" and "Julie of the Wolves." Over the decades since I first found the books to be rollicking adventure stories, they've become chilling horror stories of lonely children lost and desperate to survive in unforgiving wilderness. If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing? It would be inane to ask museumgoers to rate the paintings they see: With visual art, there's an understanding that the viewer's objective stance heavily influences the perception of the work. Online rating systems have made otherwise smart people view books as commodities. It's true that not all books aspire to art, of course; but if a book that does aspire to art is treated as a commodity, readers do it a vast injustice by overlooking their own responsibility in the success or failure of the work. A reader does at least half of any book's heavy lifting. It's sometimes hard work, and there are certainly objective measures of quality in writing, but I try to assume that when an otherwise celebrated book doesn't connect with me, it's because of who I am when I read it, not because of the book's own inherent badness. If I try again later, maybe the book will resonate with a future me. This happened with Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children," which I hated the first three times I tried to read it, then on the fourth, I discovered it to be a work of genius. What do you plan to read next? I don't plan to read these books next, per se, because some haven't been written yet, but I hope to read very soon the debut work of the brilliant new writers Alice Sola Kim, C Pam Zhang, Mesha Maren and Sonya Larson. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? This is a fantasy, so instead of three writers, I would invite every woman writer I have mentioned here, plus hundreds of others I did not have space to name. I would serve unlimited quantities of excellent wine and we would get blitzed and the conversation may eventually meander to touch on that most baffling of questions: When male writers list books they love or have been influenced by as in this very column, week after week why does it almost always seem as though they have only read one or two women in their lives? It can't be because men are inherently better writers than their female counterparts (this would get a huge laugh. After all, Toni Morrison, Can Xue, Marie N'Diaye and Elena Ferrante are in the room!). And it isn't because male writers are bad people. We know they're not bad people. In fact, we love them. We love them because we have read them. Something invisible and pernicious seems to be preventing even good literary men from either reaching for books with women's names on the spines, or from summoning women's books to mind when asked to list their influences. I wonder what such a thing could possibly be. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Team Origen stretching in its training room. The team's new devotion to preparation has paid off. COPENHAGEN The squats and leg lifts were harder than they looked, and after a few sets, Alfonso Aguirre Rodriguez placed his hands on his knees and attempted to compose himself. In November, Aguirre, a 24 year old professional video game player from Spain, joined the five man roster of Origen, a League of Legends team that competes in the game's top European league. The players all signed in late fall were told at the time that the team might be run a bit differently from what they were accustomed to. Now here they were, five young men who make their living sitting almost completely still in front of desktop computers, sweating through an hourlong workout in a cramped gym. "I think I'm going to puke my oatmeal," said Aguirre, who is known in the gaming community as Mithy. "I'm dying." Some years ago, traditional sports leagues were revolutionized by young analysts wielding computers. The way things had always been done, it turned out, was not always the best way to do things. Now echoes of that transformation have arrived in the growing world of professional e sports, where gamers are being shepherded toward a new frontier, oddly, by the old, corporeal wisdom of traditional sports. The debate about whether competitive gamers can be considered athletes may never end. In the meantime, though, gamers are increasingly acting like them. Origen is one of two teams owned by Rfrsh Entertainment, an e sports company based in Copenhagen. Two years ago, the organization hired Kasper Hvidt, a former captain of Denmark's national handball team, to be its sporting director. Hvidt, 43, had no previous exposure to gaming. But that was the point. E sports in recent years have crept into the mainstream, attracting new fans, new sponsors and new investment. The top professionals now make six figure salaries and earn even more with endorsements and prize money. And yet, Hvidt observed, their approach to performance remained amateurish. "They don't look at themselves as physical human beings," said Hvidt, who won the European handball championship with Denmark in 2008. "It's common sense, in a way. But with them it was not." Rfrsh has a validating narrative under its belt. The company's other team, Astralis, which competes internationally in the first person shooter game Counter Strike: Global Offensive, had gone almost a year without winning a tournament when Hvidt joined the organization in mid 2017. In 2018, the team earned 3.7 million in prize money while putting together one of the most dominant years ever by any team in any e sports game. And so Origen this year has set off on the same journey of athletic self improvement. As recently as last year, the players' typical day might have been a sedentary extravaganza of sugary energy drinks, fast food and unresolved psychic tension. Now, their days are interposed with protein smoothies, yoga mats and slow paced breathing exercises. The effects of those changes, the team said, have been plain to see: After starting the current season with a 1 4 record, Origen went on a tear, winning 11 of its final 13 matches, finishing the regular season in second place and securing a first round bye for the playoffs, which began Friday. "These are little things," Fabian Broich, Origen's assistant coach, said. "But they add up, and over the long term you have a more emotionally stable team and a more focused team." At Rfrsh, Hvidt has assembled a performance team a physical trainer, a sports psychologist, a massage therapist, a medical doctor and a nutritionist and constructed a lifestyle plan for the players that combines scientific research, old school sports wisdom and simple common sense. Broich, 28, a former professional soccer player from Germany, acts as a liaison between the management team and the players, implementing the principles on the ground. The players, who hail from five European countries and range in age from 18 to 24, live in Denmark and fly each weekend to Berlin, where the League of Legends matches are taped in front of a boisterous studio audience. In Copenhagen, they are required to get around by bicycle (a rule they all hated at first) and have fitness and yoga classes during the week. On Mondays, they meet with the team psychologist for an "empty the backpack" session. Every morning, the team meets for breakfast in Broich's apartment, a ritual designed in part to get the gamers night owls and notoriously late risers out of bed at a reasonable hour. Their other meals are catered with guidance from the nutritionist. "Before, I would go to sleep at 5 a.m. and wake up at 2 p.m. the next day, eat McDonald's two times, and that'd be it," Patrik Jiru, 18, an Origen player from the Czech Republic, said as he ate a salmon and vegetable omelet one recent morning. After breakfast, the players biked to the gym for a core workout and a physical therapy session. "Last time we did this, my body was sore for three days," Jonas Andersen, 24, an Origen player from Denmark known as Kold, said as he grabbed a medicine ball. Mikkel Hjuler, a trainer who works with Danish Olympians, guided the team through some gaming specific exercises. He had the players wrap their fists inside elastic bands and flex their fingers. He taught them a neck exercise favored by boxers. The players were willing participants, but they admitted that their ambitions, from a physical standpoint, were modest. "I'm O.K. with being chubby as long as I don't pass out when I'm running which, right now, I might," Aguirre said. The players continue to train several hours a day in front of computers, but even those sessions now borrow elements from traditional sports. Before a recent scrimmage session at the Rfrsh headquarters, Broich distributed magnesium pills and protein bars. (He keeps vitamin D and krill oil in his arsenal, too.) Later, he blended a potpourri of nutritional supplements moringa, matcha, maca, chlorella, acai and a half dozen others into a thick protein shake. In their meeting room, a quotation attributed to the N.B.A. coach Phil Jackson "The strength of the team is each individual member" was scribbled on a dry erase board. After one practice game, the team laid out yoga mats and stretched on foam rollers. Trevor Henry, 31, a broadcast commentator for Riot Games, the company behind League of Legends, marveled at how quickly the game's competitive landscape was professionalizing. He was happy, for instance, that some teams were reconsidering their use of gaming houses, a classic e sports setup in which players live and train together under one roof. "Go back just a few years: Professional players would play 10 to 11 hours every day and do takeout food every day," Henry said. "Pizza boxes would stack up rooms. Laundry would never get done. I'll be brutally honest: Teams didn't wash the team shirts. They'd have the same team shirt that they'd wear 24 weeks in a year that has never seen detergent." This lifestyle part monk, part fraternity brother was not only accepted but also held up as the very reason the players were successful. But that wisdom is now being challenged, and in Europe the shift by League of Legends this year to a 10 team, franchise model (akin to American sports leagues) has encouraged organizations to make more long term investments. Last year, Fabien Devide, the chairman of Team Vitality, a French gaming organization, spent seven months embedded in his League of Legends team's gaming house in Berlin. He was startled by what he saw. "It was a madhouse," Devide said, describing an atmosphere with an utter lack of boundaries between personal and professional life. "It can become a toxic environment very quick." Devide said Team Vitality planned to move its players into separate apartments later this year. Acknowledging the pioneering example of Rfrsh, he said he was formalizing plans to open a training center for his organization in Paris and hire a performance director, in the mold of Hvidt, to devise a program grounded in traditional sports ideas. Teams now understand that championships are won and lost in the details. When Origen was assembling its squad last year, Hvidt asked potential signees to complete a personality test with hundreds of questions to make sure it was building an emotionally compatible group. In December, the players convened for a preseason camp with one catch: no computers. Instead, the players spent several days completing trust exercises and discussing their dreams with Lars Robl, a sports psychologist who spent two decades in the Danish special forces "the real Counter Strike," he joked and whose other clients include the Danish soccer club F.C. Midtjylland. Robl's job now is to help the gamers see themselves as elite athletes, just like the soccer players. "They have the same DNA," Robl said. "They're just not aware of it yet." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
But none succeeded like "Dads and Moms Deserve More Time Off With Their Kids," which features a real life couple (the "Catfish" host Nev Schulman and Laura Perlongo) striking silly domestic poses as they make the case for more parental leave. "It's going insanely viral," Mr. Segal said a few hours after the video went live. He was at dinner with his co founder, Jarrett Moreno, who helped raise nearly 25 million in funding from big name investors like Bill Maher and Ryan Seacrest. By the time dinner ended, the video had spiked to 21 million views, from 15 million. "Feel free to write down that this happens every day," Mr. Segal said jokingly. At the Attn: staff meeting, Mr. Segal wore black jeans and a wrinkled dress shirt as he listened to a pitch lamenting that there are more police officers than counselors in some American school districts. When a young woman proposed a video about reducing the stigma against women who have an abortion, he questioned whether that stigma would preclude women from sharing the video on Facebook, where Attn: has more than three million fans. "There's the launch of Shout Your Abortion," she replied, "where women are coming forward. ..." "Perfect!" Mr. Segal said, interrupting in a way he often does when he gets excited about an idea. He combines intellectual curiosity with a short attention span, which means he rarely lets people finish their thoughts but often has a compelling reason for butting in. To get people to share the abortion video, Mr. Segal urged the staff member to open with a focus on advocacy. "That way people are applauding women speaking out," he said. A few minutes later, an earnest 20 something pitched an idea about the disappearing bumblebee. "Bees aren't kittens they don't engender a lot of sympathy," Mr. Segal interjected. "Why should I care?" "Because bees pollinate a third of U.S. crops," the staff member said. "Blueberries, cranberries, tomatoes." This led to a brief discussion about the cause of the bee carnage, which was apparently due in part to a pesticide (neonicotinoid) that no one in the room could pronounce. "I would open with, 'You're literally going to run out of blueberries, cranberries and tomatoes,'" Mr. Segal concluded. "Scare people. Then you can talk about ... bees." Mr. Segal certainly isn't alone in targeting progressive leaning young people with shareable video content. Mic, NowThis and Upworthy are a few of Attn:'s more established competitors. But he seems particularly skilled at translating complicated issues into short, cogent content. "Matthew's smart enough to not try to fight an unwinnable war against the brief attention span of millennials," said Mr. Maher, who recently narrated an animated Attn: video about Mr. Trump. "In 90 second videos, Attn:'s getting young people to care about things that actually matter. And, you know, sometimes you have to trick people into caring." "If you want the dog to eat the pill," Mr. Maher added, "you have to wrap it in a piece of bologna." Mr. Segal probably wouldn't put it that way, but he relishes the challenge of taking seemingly wonky issues and making them "shareable" (a word he uses practically every few seconds). He's especially proud of Attn:'s video about the less than thrilling topic of gerrymandering. "We were like, 'How the hell are we going to make gerrymandering interesting and shareable?'" he said. He and his team decided to make a "Schoolhouse Rock" like animated video that has been viewed nearly six million times. "If there's one thing that eventually goes on the Attn: tombstone," Mr. Segal said, "it should probably be, 'Makers of the Most Viral Video Ever About Gerrymandering.'" Though many of Attn:'s videos feature interviews with politicians and celebrities (like Elizabeth Warren and Snoop Dogg), Mr. Segal is careful not to give them too much screen time. In the video about our dirty oceans, which features an on camera interview with Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr. Segal opens not with Mr. Kerry but with an image of a dead shark with blood in its mouth. "I wish it were as simple as people wanting to hear John Kerry talk about how messed up our oceans are, but you have to work a little harder if you want people to care," he said. Mr. Segal learned that lesson at Our Time, a nonprofit he founded with Mr. Moreno in 2011 that worked to empower young voters. "But we did too many years of the hard sell: Go register to vote, or else," Mr. Segal said. "It became clear to us that if people don't understand the issues, or why their vote matters, telling them to vote is a moot point. "Politics are confusing," he continued. "Fewer and fewer states are teaching anything about civics. But when you turn on cable news, there's very little discussion about issues, or why they matter." As a freshman at Kenyon College in Ohio, Mr. Segal didn't know much about issues either. Nor did he understand the difference "between a state senator or a U.S. senator," he said. Still, he was excited to vote in his first presidential election. Mr. Segal cast his ballot early that morning in 2004, but he watched friends stand in line all day; some were still waiting to vote when the networks called the election for George W. Bush. "I'm like, 'Wow, every vote apparently doesn't matter,'" Mr. Segal said. "And we were lucky, because we could skip class and our professors would cheer us on. But what about the single mother working two jobs? It really pissed me off." Mr. Segal spoke out publicly, and before he knew it, he was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, which was investigating voting irregularities. "It seems almost hypocritical that a society so focused on the importance of the vote did not concern itself more heavily with the actual process of voting," he told Congress. Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, met Mr. Segal soon after and remembers being impressed by his dedication and moxie. That was echoed by Mr. Seacrest, who said he invested in Attn: partly because he found Mr. Segal "so engaging, intense and ferocious." Leading up to Election Day, Mr. Segal and Attn: have focused much of their attention on voter registration. They've started a "3 Minutes" video campaign, which features celebrities like Usher and Mary J. Blige talking about specific issues. "It took me three minutes to roll this blunt," Snoop Dogg says in a haze of smoke for his recent Attn: video. "It only takes three minutes to register. If you want your marijuana legal, then register." Despite concerns that millennials won't vote in this election, Mr. Segal said he expects them to turn out. "That's my hot take," he said. "It's not just about voting against Trump or electing Hillary. People are getting fed up with police brutality, the war on drugs, the minimum wage, three strikes laws, the transgender bathroom controversy." But even with the looming election, Mr. Segal is careful not to overwhelm his audience with politics. In recent months, Attn: has produced videos about how weddings are too expensive to attend, how public bathrooms in Japan put America to shame and how society discriminates against people with tattoos. Tattoo phobia? "A lot of employers won't hire people with visible tattoos," he said. "Maybe it's not as serious or seemingly existential as a video about how our oceans are going to kill us, but it's still a serious economic issue with generational implications." The more one talks to Mr. Segal, the more convincing he is as the ideal personality for an issue driven media company aimed at young Americans. He clearly cares about a lot of things, but he also "gets bored really easily," he confessed. Might his short attention span be similar to Mr. Trump's? Mr. Segal looked momentarily pained by the question. "I hope never to be compared to Donald Trump again," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
It may be that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But as Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle demonstrate in the new Hulu comedy "PEN15," the same is true of those who remember it painfully well. The series, arriving Friday, kicks off just before the first day of seventh grade in 2000 for Maya Ishii Peters (Erskine) and Anna Kone (Konkle). Maya, hoping to start school with a new identity, picks up a pair of scissors to give herself Sarah Michelle Gellar's haircut. The next morning her handiwork corrected by her mother with the aid of a mixing bowl she slumps next to Anna in their morning car pool. "It looks so good!" Anna assures her, with a brace faced smile. It does not. And their first day goes as badly as you might expect: This is middle school, after all. But what distinguishes the series isn't the cringe comedy. It's the immediate sincere weirdo voice, which powers "PEN15" through an uneven but delightfully odd first season. "PEN15," the square peg kid sister of "Broad City" and "Eighth Grade," dispenses its turn of the century details AskJeeves, AIM chat rooms, dial up modems, "Wazzup?" with the precision of an "Only '00s Kids Will Get This" quiz. (Want to feel old? The year 2000 is exactly as long ago now as 1980, the setting of "Freaks and Geeks," was when that show premiered.) But there's more to "PEN15," which Erskine and Konkle created with Sam Zvibleman, than millennial nostalgia. What it recalls best is the period in life when friendship is more like mutual superfandom. Maya and Anna vow to experience everything together, from first kisses to first cigarettes; in one episode they share a T shirt and refer to themselves as "Mayanna." If all this seems hyperrealistically well remembered, it may be because Erskine and Konkle were themselves 13 year olds in 2000. This is both the gimmick and the hurdle of "PEN15." A lot is riding on how much you buy these 30 something women as middle schoolers, even as they're surrounded by actual middle school aged actors. Personally, I entirely forgot that the actresses are old enough to purchase their own beer. O.K., almost entirely it is unsettling when a scene calls for them to flirt with their young co stars, but the show wisely deploys Konkle's real life boyfriend as a mouth double for a kiss. The key is that, rather than use the casting for grotesquerie or sight gags, Erskine and Konkle just play it straight, drawing on memory and personal experience. (Adding to the from life feel of the series, Erskine's real life mother, Mutsuko Erskine, plays Maya's mom.) Plan ahead for the month to come with our culture calendar. Anna has a gawky cheerfulness that helps smooth over the dawning reality of her parents' (Melora Walters and Taylor Nichols) strained marriage. Maya is more extroverted, a class clown with a manic side that she uses as an all purpose defense mechanism most affectingly when Maya, who's Japanese American, is picked on by a clique of racist mean girls. Their transformation isn't just about costumes, posture and orthodontics; it's how the co stars carry themselves. Maya and Anna are, as Britney Spears would sing a year later, not girls and not yet women. They still play with Sylvanian Families dolls, but channel their awakening hormones into having the teeny woodland creatures play out torrid soap dramas. ("I can't do this anymore. I have a wife and kids at home!") Sometimes, they can regress into babyhood; other times, they're possessed by puberty, as when Maya discovers masturbation and finds herself aroused by everything from horse figurines to desert landscape art. Joining a miniboom for raunchy coming of age comedies ("Sex Education," "Big Mouth"), "PEN15" brashly claims the kind of horny humor that past teen comedies reserved for guys. In one episode, Maya and Anna come into joint possession of a pair of thong underwear long story and it's an empowering experience akin to putting on the One Ring. But the show also understands that sex comedy isn't just about sex. In this case, it's about growing and self definition and letting go of childhood. "PEN15" often walks a line between sweet and crude, between memoir and sketch comedy, and sometimes it falls smack off it. (The title, which comes from an orthographic schoolyard prank, is an example; it just kind of sits on top of the show like graffiti carved on a desk.) When it works, though, it's an idiosyncratic tribute to friendship at its most possessively intense. As the girls sit on the floor and playact a Sylvanian Families vignette, Maya asks Anna, "Can we, like, never not do this?" The beauty of "PEN15" is to let you know exactly how she feels, even as you know the answer to her question. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The genetic genealogy industry is booming. In recent years, more than 15 million people have offered up their DNA a cheek swab, some saliva in a test tube to services such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com in pursuit of answers about their heritage. In exchange for a genetic fingerprint, individuals may find a birth parent, long lost cousins, perhaps even a link to Oprah or Alexander the Great. But as these registries of genetic identity grow, it's becoming harder for individuals to retain any anonymity. Already, 60 percent of Americans of Northern European descent the primary group using these sites can be identified through such databases whether or not they've joined one themselves, according to a study published today in the journal Science. Within two or three years, 90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from their DNA, researchers found. The science fiction future, in which everyone is known whether or not they want to be, is nigh. "It's not the distant future, it's the near future," said Yaniv Erlich, the lead author of the study. Dr. Erlich, formerly a genetic privacy researcher at Columbia University, is the chief science officer of MyHeritage, a genetic ancestry website. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The science involves a search for third cousins. To identify a person through a DNA sample, an investigator uploads a previously analyzed genetic sequence to a database. The goal is to find someone who shares enough DNA to place them in the third cousin or closer range. Most of us have at least 800 people out there, somewhere in the world, who fall into this category. So long as one of these people is in a database, a skilled sleuth may be able to use other publicly available information to start building a family tree and figure out the person's actual identity. That technique has been used in recent months to identify more than 15 suspects in murder and sexual assault cases. The breakthroughs began in April with an arrest in the case of the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California with rapes and murders in the '70s and '80s. Other successes soon followed. A truck driver in Washington State was charged with the murder of a Canadian couple in 1987; a DJ in Pennsylvania was charged with the murder of a teacher in 1992. Watching these developments, Dr. Erlich wondered about the odds of identifying any given person through cousins' DNA in one of these databases. His analysis is based not on the big genealogy databases such as 23andMe and Ancestry, but on two of the smallest: GEDmatch, which has around one million profiles, and MyHeritage, which had around 1.5 million at the time of the study. That's because, for legal and logistical reasons, the larger sites cannot be easily used to identify anyone other than customers who mail in saliva. But the smaller sites, set up to help genealogists maximize the odds of finding relatives, are more flexible. GEDmatch allows law enforcement officials to search for genetic matches in its database in murder and sexual assault cases. MyHeritage does not, but it permits uploads from external labs. With both, it's hard to be sure what's being uploaded: grandma's saliva, crime scene blood, a sample from a medical study or something else entirely. To determine the odds of correctly identifying an individual from a given DNA sample, Dr. Erlich and his colleagues from Columbia University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the New York Genome Center analyzed 30 DNA kits chosen at random from the GEDmatch database. Their results were eye opening. The team found that a DNA sample from an American of Northern European heritage could be tracked successfully to a third cousin distance of its owner in 60 percent of cases. A comparable analysis on the MyHeritage site had similar results.The analysis focused on Americans of North European background because 75 percent of the users on GEDmatch and other genealogy sites belong to that demographic. To identify an individual of any ancestral background, all that is needed is a database containing two percent of the target population, according to Dr. Erlich. Some experts have raised questions about the study's methodology. Its sample size was small, and it didn't factor in that more than one match is often required to identify a suspect. CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist with Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, also expressed worry in an email that the Science paper may obscure the difficulty involved in puzzling out someone's identity; it takes a highly skilled expert to build a family tree from the initial genetic clues. Still, she said, the takeaway of the study "is not news to us." In recent months Ms. Moore has been involved in a dozen murder and sexual assault cases that used GEDmatch to identify suspects. Of the 100 crime scene profiles that her firm had uploaded to GEDmatch by May, half were obviously solvable, she said, and 20 were "promising." "I think it's a strong and convincing paper," said Graham Coop, a population genetics researcher at the University of California, Davis. In a blog post in May, Dr. Coop calculated just how lucky investigators had been in the Golden State killer case. He reached a statistical conclusion similar to Dr. Erlich's: society is not far from being able to identify 90 percent of people through the DNA of their cousins in genealogical databases. "This is this moment of, wow, oh, this opens up a lot of possibilities, some of which are good and some are more questionable," he said. In an alarming result, the Science study found that a supposedly "anonymized" genetic profile taken from a medical data set could be uploaded to GEDmatch and positively identified. This shows that an individual's private health data might not be so private after all. Dr. Erlich has urged genealogy companies to consider attaching some sort of cryptographic signature to the genetic profiles they analyze. This would help ensure that whoever uploads a genetic profile is who they say they are, and making it harder for anyone to abuse this data, should they, for example, want to figure out who attended a protest. Daniel MacArthur, a genomics researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, said he endorses the cryptographic signature, but that it doesn't go far enough. "We live in a world where people are very interested in obtaining and sharing their genetic data to learn more about themselves," he said. "It's a natural human instinct. But legislative protection is required to ensure that it's not used for nefarious purposes." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It was love at first sight for Fred Glazier, who saw the Ford Mustang at the 1964 World's Fair. Soon after, he bought his own, and he still drives it today. When the Ford Mustang was introduced 50 years ago this month, it was first to break from the gate in a market class that would come to be known as pony cars. With a long hood and a short rear deck proportions carried forward by the Chevrolet Camaro, Plymouth Barracuda and many others the Mustang looked ready to bolt. And bolt it did, as 22,000 wowed Americans placed orders for the car on April 17, according to Ford, the official first day of sales. Naming the car for a horse proved to be a stroke of marketing genius. Not just any horse, mind you (a car named Clydesdale might never have been so popular) but one that conjured images of rugged wild horses roaming the American West: The drama that imagery invoked was supported by the car's fresh style and a galloping steed front and center in the grille. Underneath, the Mustang was essentially Ford's Falcon, a solid compact that was available with V8 power and a 4 speed manual transmission. Those underpinnings were enough to get the pony car sales competition off to a fast start. America was smitten, and buyers showed up in droves, eager to put down 2,368 for the base model or more than 3,400 for a loaded version. Ford had projected first year sales of about 100,000; instead, it sold 418,812 Mustangs, setting a single year sales record. It was, in brief, Mustang mania. The earliest cars off the assembly lines have a special place in Mustang lore. Officially, they are titled as 1965 models, but enthusiasts draw a distinction between cars built before August 1964 and those built later, calling the early cars '64 1/2 models. There is reason for this: The car was revised after a few months of production with trim changes, different engine options and a reset of the vehicle identification number sequence. Among the fans who will be celebrating the Mustang's 50th birthday will be some owners who bought the car when it first went on sale. Here are the stories of some early buyers who could never let go. Kathy Miller of Boardman, Ohio, had just graduated from high school in the spring of 1964 when her parents, Ken and Lois Mitchell, bought her a Mustang. At the time, Ms. Miller might have been more interested in academics than cars, but she has since become one of the most enthusiastic fans of the model. The Prairie Bronze Metallic coupe she took delivery of a half century ago was a basic machine 6 cylinder engine, automatic transmission, manual steering and brakes but it quickly won her heart. "They had only been out a month," Ms. Miller said in a recent telephone interview. "Everyone admired that car. My girlfriends and I would go riding around." She is still having fun with it. The car was restored about 10 years ago, and Ms. Miller regularly takes it by trailer to shows. There she is apt to meet others who share the distinction of being the original owner of a first year Mustang, and she maintains a database of those with similar credentials at 50th anniversary mustang.com. Marc Snyder of Enterprise, Ala., who became a Mustang owner at 15, might have been youngest of the original buyers. "I didn't even know Mustang was in the works when I started working on my dad to let me get a car," he said. In early April 1964, Mr. Snyder and his father, James, went car shopping. They looked first at a Chevrolet Corvair that Marc Snyder described unappealingly as a "puke green 4 door" model. "Then we went to Bemis Motor Company in Byron, Ill., on April 17, 1964, and saw a Poppy Red Mustang on display," Mr. Snyder said. "I wanted it, but it had been sold earlier that morning." He continued: "So on April 22, dad and I ordered a Wimbledon White 6 cylinder Mustang. I was told that it would be delivered on June 18, so on that day I rode my bicycle to the dealership and watched my car roll off the truck. On the 20th, my 16th birthday, I drove the new Mustang down to Oregon, Ill., and took my driver's license test. "Until '67 or '68 mine was the only Mustang in Byron. It's a small town; my graduating class numbered only 35. When I went back, some of my classmates asked if I still had the car. Felt good to say yes." Fred Glazier first saw the new Mustang on Ford's Magic Skyway ride at the 1964 New York World's Fair. The magic worked; Mr. Glazier was spellbound. "I was excited about the car and wanted to buy one," he said. "I called about 10 Ford dealers within 50 or 60 miles of home found one at Conroy Ford in Doylestown, Pa. It had been sold, but the financing had failed, so I was able to buy it." Mr. Glazier traded in his '54 Corvette. His fiancee, Susan, who was quite fond of the 'Vette, was not pleased. "We're still married," Mr. Glazier said, "so I guess she got over it." Mr. Glazier's Mustang is a Rangoon Red coupe with a 260 cubic inch V8 and 3 speed manual transmission. He drove it for 15 years, stored it for 26 years and did a complete restoration in 2006. Gail Wise had just graduated from Chicago Teacher's College when she and her parents went car shopping on April 15, 1964, two days before the Mustang's introduction. Ms. Wise said in a phone interview that she told the salesman she wanted a convertible, but there were none in the showroom, so the salesman invited her to have a look in a back room at something that had just been delivered. "I loved it," Ms. Wise said. "The salesman said he wasn't supposed to sell it, but for some reason he did. When I drove away from the dealership everyone was giving me thumbs up. I drove it to school the next day, and the 7th and 8th grade boys crowded around it." And that is how Ms. Wise introduced Mustang to the world, two days before it was revealed at the World's Fair. Ron Hermann didn't take delivery of his Mustang until after the official introduction, but he put down a deposit to reserve the car on April 8, 1964, and the date on the Pennsylvania title certificate is April 14. The blue convertible was a demonstrator sample, so while the car was his, it would not be delivered until the area dealers had their turns displaying it. Mr. Hermann's father, Adam, was a friend of the general manager of Barr Ford in Philadelphia, who made available the list of when and where the car would be shown. Mr. Hermann traveled to each dealership to protect his investment. "I'd go there and tell people to keep their hands off my car," he said. He maintained that protective mode, driving the car for a brief time before storing it in a heated garage, where it has remained for almost 50 years. "I drove it only when it was new," he said, "honking at girls and waving at them." Today, the Mustang shows 17,000 miles on the odometer and, according to Mr. Hermann, is 100 percent original. "I never really got to enjoy the car," he said, "because I had to protect it. I hope to one day donate it to a museum." Grant Martin of Shawnee, Kan., saw the new Mustang on display at the New York World's Fair in April 1964. When he returned home, he bought a Mustang coupe, equipped with the 260 cubic inch V8, from Whittaker Stikels Ford. "I was going to school in Montreal," Mr. Martin said. "Drove up there the day after I bought the car. Drove it for 41 years and put 603,000 miles on it. I quit driving it in 2005 and restored it." The car was stolen in 1977, and although the police recovered it two hours later, Mr. Martin wasn't informed for three weeks. "I was pretty sad," he said. "Hadn't realized I was so attached to the car. After that, I knew I had to hang onto it." Phil Florio was at a Ford dealership in Centereach, N.Y., the day his Wimbledon White Mustang coupe was delivered. Mr. Florio's car was among the first to be produced with the high performance 289 cubic inch V8, a 271 horsepower engine known as the K Code option, which was not available until the summer of '64. Mr. Florio had read about the option earlier that year, he said, in Hot Rod magazine. The dealer had no information about it, but an order was placed. "I told the dealer that if I wasn't there when the car came in they could keep it," Mr. Florio said. "I knew what they were going to do with it. They were going to hot rod it around. It was on the upper rack of the truck when it arrived and enclosed in a bag. The only time Ford saw that car again was for the 3,000 mile checkup." Mr. Florio has put 65,000 miles on the car, which is original save for a repaint about 12 years ago. Some of those miles were logged on drag strips, where the car recorded a best elapsed time of 13.08 at 105 m.p.h. Laki Malamatenios, a native of East Africa, had been in the United States for only a couple of years when he visited a Los Angeles area Ford dealership on April 17, 1964, to see the new Mustang. The white coupe on display did not immediately win him over, but later that night he found himself unable to stop thinking about the car. Soon after, he ordered a car, then waited. And waited. Months later, after his car still had not arrived, he was offered a Poppy Red Mustang ordered by another customer who had canceled. "The car has been on the road ever since," Mr. Malamatenios said. "I raced the car at one time and changed the dash out to install full instrumentation, so I'm not sure of the mileage but it's around 200,000. I drove it to Birmingham, Ala., and back for the 45th anniversary celebration and will drive it to Charlotte, N.C., for the 50th." "I really love the car," he said. "In '69 I almost traded it in for a Mach 1. But when it was time to turn over the keys, I couldn't do it. After that I knew I'd keep it forever." Jerry Bridgforth was among the lucky young drivers who received a first year Mustang as a graduation present. Mr. Bridgforth's coupe was ordered in March 1964, a month before the release date. The car was built on May 6 and delivered to Curtiss Ford in Savannah, Ga., on May 13. Powered by the 260 cubic inch version of Ford's small V8, it did not pack as much punch as Mr. Bridgforth wanted, so he upgraded it with a high performance intake manifold and exhaust headers. At his local drag strip's Mister Mustang race, he beat 29 other cars to take home a trophy. Having had his share of fun with the car, Mr. Bridgforth sold it in 1969 to buy a Mach 1 Mustang. Over the years he proved his devotion to the marque, buying two other Mustangs, a '66 Shelby G.T. 350 H and a 2006 Shelby GT H. But the one that got away bothered him. Fortunately, he knew where it was disassembled and in boxes in a garage not far from his house. It had been taken apart with thoughts of a restoration, but sat untouched for over 30 years. It took years of arm twisting, but now Mr. Bridgforth and the Mustang he loved first and best are reunited. The car has been restored, and it will be in Charlotte, N.C., to celebrate the 50th anniversary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
On the basis of "Leaning Into the Wind," when it rains, the British artist Andy Goldsworthy immediately drops to the ground and lets the water outline his body. He describes two ways of approaching the world: "You can walk on the path, or you can walk through the hedge." It's almost a given that this documentary about his ephemeral, nature based art will eventually show him trudging through a hedge, oblivious to or uninterested in the perfectly functional sidewalk next to it. "Leaning Into the Wind" is a de facto sequel to "Rivers and Tides" (2003), by the same director, Thomas Riedelsheimer. Because time erases or alters Mr. Goldsworthy's sculptures, movies are the ideal medium to capture them (although with the sequel, the switch from 35 millimeter film to digital cinematography has removed some of the artisanal quality). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Fifteen years ago, Paul Kuhn co founded Philadelphia's Curio Theater Company. Now, having reached the conclusion that his leadership is part of a racist power structure, Kuhn says he is relinquishing all authority to choose plays, directors and designers to a new co artistic director, Rich Bradford, who is Black. Across the country in Berkeley, Calif., Jon Tracy, a white man who serves as the artistic facilitator at TheatreFirst, is demoting himself, and the company is creating a new, term limited position of artistic director, hoping the opening will provide an opportunity to diversify its leadership. And in New York City, William Carden is planning to leave Ensemble Studio Theater a company he joined in 1978. All four people on its artistic staff are white, and Carden, who has been the artistic director since 2007, said he believes his departure is the way to prompt change. The outcry over racial injustice this summer was followed at first by a wave of statements in which American theatrical institutions, with a flurry of news releases and website postings, declared themselves allies of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now there is a second wave: changes to leadership and practices at a handful of theaters around the country. The theaters are mostly small, and it remains unclear how calls for change in the industry will (or won't) affect life at larger institutions, many of which have been programmatically and financially hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic. But there are indications on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at regional theaters that the charges of systemic racism aired this summer, along with the advocacy of several organizations pressing for change, are having an initial impact. Look, for example, at Baltimore Center Stage, whose artistic director, Stephanie Ybarra, has supported calls for transformation of the industry. Ybarra, responding to demands for change published by an online collective called "We See You, White American Theater," announced that her theater would make a series of changes, most of which were included among those demands: scheduling rehearsals only five days a week (rather than the standard six); eliminating "10 out of 12" rehearsal days, when artists are expected to work 10 hours; paying playwrights during rehearsal periods; and equalizing compensation for work on the theater's small and large stages. "I am hopeful that change is afoot, but I am also waiting, along with my BIPOC colleagues," Ybarra said, using an acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color. "Part of me is in a position of power and accountable like everyone else, but I'm also walking through our industry for over two decades as a Latinx woman with all of the institutional trauma that comes with it, and on that front I'm waiting." Not all of the change taking place is voluntary. In Philadelphia, the nonprofit PlayPenn, which supports the development of new work, accepted the resignation of its artistic director and fired its associate artistic director after receiving allegations that it "was not meeting community members' expectations for racial and cultural competence." In Georgia, the Serenbe Playhouse laid off its entire staff following allegations of racism. And at the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, executive director Ginny Louloudes was placed on leave after a group of current and former employees wrote a letter saying "her presence is toxic, abusive and an obstacle to progress." The organization, which provides a variety of forms of assistance, including performance, rehearsal and office space, for many small theaters, has appointed Risa Shoup as interim executive director. "As at so many organizations and institutions, people are seeing that they can take control of what's happening in their workplace," said Susan Bernfield, a member of the alliance's executive committee. In the commercial realm, change is less obvious, but there are some noteworthy data points. The musical "Company" has pledged to hire 10 paid apprentices, all of them Black, when Broadway resumes. The musical "Wicked" is sponsoring the Broadway Advocacy Coalition's "artivism" fellowship, which plans an inaugural class of Black women artist activists focused on systemic racism and criminal justice reform. And the Broadway League, the trade association of theater owners and producers, this month doubled the number of Black members of its board of governors, from two to four, by adding Brian Moreland, a producer, and Kendra Whitlock Ingram, the president and chief executive of Milwaukee's Marcus Performing Arts Center. "This is our organic evolution, but also really timely," said Sarah Bellamy, the artistic director. "For over four decades we've been focusing on things like narrative change and inclusion countering painful and stereotypical depictions of our people, and celebrating our joy but we have to care about what happens to Black people when they're offstage too." The calls for equity are rippling across the industry in other ways. The Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation said it would establish a new residency program pairing midcareer directors and choreographers of color with theaters seeking to make change. And at a time when theaters are laying off employees, rather than hiring, a number of institutions and organizations are nonetheless announcing new Black leaders. In New York, the Public Theater is naming two artists of color Saheem Ali and Shanta Thake as associate artistic directors. The Tank, a New York nonprofit that seeks to nurture emerging artists, named Johnny Lloyd, who is Black, as a new director of artistic development, as the theater examines "how white supremacy is limiting our mission," according to Meghan Finn, the artistic director. In Washington, Ford's Theater this week named Sheldon Epps, who is Black, as a senior artistic adviser; in the announcement, the theater cited "the national reckoning for racial justice" as context. And Theater Philadelphia, an umbrella organization, named LaNeshe Miller White as its executive director; she was the co founder of Theater in the X, a company focused on African American work. One of Miller White's proposals is to require theaters to meet specific hiring targets in order to compete for Philadelphia's annual Barrymore awards. "I've always had a focus on access and equity for people of color," she said, "and now I get a prime position to be able to enact that." The resignations by white leaders are the most dramatic developments. "At this moment of ignition we're in," said Tracy, the artistic facilitator in Berkeley, "it just felt like a time to throw the gauntlet down." Kuhn, now the co artistic director at Curio, said he had been struck, during a pandemic Zoom gathering of local theater leaders, by "staring at all the white squares." "It's been on our minds for a very long time that we weren't fulfilling our mission as a theater to serve our West Philadelphia audience, and as a white leader I had created that environment," he said. "We were trying to make movement, and we thought it was genuine, but at best it was glacier speed, so I felt I needed to make a change and make it immediately." Bradford, his new co artistic director, said he was pleased to have the opportunity. "There are going to be changes," he promised. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Lamborghini today released images and specifications for its successor to the V10 powered Gallardo, since 2004 the junior model to the automaker's flagship nameplates first the Murcielago, then the Aventador. Following the Lamborghini tradition of christening cars with names associated with Spanish bullfighting, the new model will be called the Huracan 610 4, after a bull that fought valiantly in Alicante in the late 19th century. The Huracan will make its public debut at the GenevaMotor Show inMarch. The new 3,135 pound Lambo which features a 610 horsepower 5.2 liter V10 will have big shoes to fill. Lamborghini said in a release that 14,022 units of the Gallardo were sold over its 10 year production run, more than any other model the company has offered. Like the outgoing Gallardo LP 560 4, the Huracan has a top speed of 201 miles per hour. But the new model boasts a zero to 62 m.p.h. time of 3.2 seconds, two tenths of a second faster than the Gallardo. All that power goes through a 7 speed dual clutch transmission and an all wheel drive system, and exuberant drivers will appreciate the Huracan's standard carbon ceramic brakes. Variable ratio steering and adjustable suspension damping are optional upgrades that promise to sharpen the car's dynamic performance. The Huracan is new from the ground up, Lamborghini says, splashed with an array of LED lighting that will make it "unmistakably a Lamborghini" at night. As with other more pedestrian cars, the Huracan's interior gets an infotainment stack, and the instrument panel is actually a 12.3 inch display screen. Not that Lamborghinis have ever been the standard for fuel efficiency, but at a time when economy concerns have begun to tickle the highest reaches of the automotive universe, even supercars are subject to appraisal. Lamborghini says that with the addition of stop start technology, the Huracan will get about 19 miles per gallon. The Huracan, which will be assembled in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy, on an all new production line, is due to begin appearing in customers' undoubtedly well appointed garages next spring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
After a spate of deaths from bird flu among patients in China, the World Health Organization has warned all countries to watch for outbreaks in poultry flocks and to promptly report any human cases. Several strains of avian flu are spreading in Europe and Asia this winter, but the most worrisome at present is an H7N9 strain that has circulated in China every winter since 2013. China has reported over 225 human cases since September, an unusually high number. The nation's Lunar New Year vacation starts soon, and as it does, live poultry shipments increase, and holiday travelers often spread the flu. The fatality rate is not yet known, because some victims are still hospitalized. But Dr. Margaret Chan, the health organization's director general, said this week that China had had more than 1,000 cases in the last four years, of which 39 percent were fatal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Watch Jason Statham confront a massive whale in "The Meg." Or catch a Motley Crue biopic on Netflix. THE MEG (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO; Stream on HBO platforms; Rent on Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. When the trailer for this blockbuster was released last year, it gave the impression of an ironic B movie in the vein of "Sharknado." Loosely based on the 1997 novel "Meg" by Steve Alten, it follows a rescue diver (Jason Statham) who's called on to save a crew of scientists trapped in a deep sea submersible from a 75 foot prehistoric shark. When the film landed on the big screen, it shattered box office expectations but most critics gave it scathing reviews. Variety said the movie is "'Jaws' on dumbed down steroids." The Hollywood Reporter called it "generically derivative." And in her review for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote, "The movie feeds us bite sized, subtitle friendly dialogue, finger puppet characters and a string of brainless set pieces masquerading as a plot." If there's anything to hang onto, it's shots of Statham's impressive swimming skills, such as this scene where he channels Dory from "Finding Nemo." 8 p.m. on NBC. NBC airs the final programs of this year's competition, taking place in Saitama, Japan. The player to watch is Nathan Chen, who, at 19, is a freshman student at Yale and the defending world champion. If he comes out on top in the men's field, he will become the first American man to win back to back world titles since Scott Hamilton earned four consecutive championships from 1981 to 1984. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Kerry Washington in a scene from "Little Fires Everywhere," for which she received an Emmy nod for lead actress. She also executive produced the show, which was nominated for best limited series. Kerry Washington's most visible Emmy nomination on Tuesday was for her lead role as Mia Warren, a roaming artist and headstrong mother of a teenage daughter in "Little Fires Everywhere." But that acting nod was just one piece of a big morning for Washington all around, much of it as a producer. "Fires," of which Washington was an executive producer, also received a nomination for best limited series or movie. And two other nominated projects showed the growing reach of her new production company, Simpson Street. "American Son," a Netflix adaptation of the Broadway play, received a nomination for best TV movie. (Washington also plays a mother in the film who awaits news about her missing son at a South Florida police station.) "Live in Front of a Studio Audience," which restaged Norman Lear sitcoms from the 1970s, was nominated for best variety special. Washington was an executive producer on both. Washington took a moment on Tuesday to discuss her four nominations, getting back to work during the pandemic and the way her nominated works contain messages that align with the national debate over racial justice. Three projects that you executive produced received Emmy nominations this year. How does that feel? Crazy. Surreal. I have to say, the thing that has meant the most to me this morning, the thing that my heart really swells about, is Lynn Shelton's nomination. I'm so grateful that the Academy has honored her in this way. It's so immensely deserved. At a time when women's voices in directing and producing are just so important, to really honor her, in her passing, for her extraordinary work on our show, is just so meaningful. I just keep getting so emotional thinking about it. Shelton died at age 54 in May. It's striking to me that three out of your four nominations are for executive producer roles when I think the American television audience knows you primarily as an actress. What does that say about where you are in your career right now? We really took a bet on ourselves by being such diverse producers. It's exciting because I'm really drawn to doing different kinds of work, and I really love producing, so it's exciting for the company to be acknowledged in this way. What was it like to have two roles on "Little Fires Everywhere" to be the lead actress and also to be overseeing the project as an executive producer. It's really what I know. I entered the world of producing as an actor producer. Our first project was "Confirmation" for HBO, and I was a producer and actor on that. It's funny for me when I'm producing and not in it. It's a funny feeling. In terms of planning new projects during the coronavirus pandemic, how far out can you plan given the uncertainty in the entertainment industry right now? There's filming happening. People are starting to really work on different protocols. We had almost finished "The Prom" with Ryan Murphy for Netflix when the shutdown happened, and so just recently we've been working to finish. There's innovations happening. People are really trying to figure out how to get back to work safely. We'll be part of that effort to figure out best practices and make sure we're putting people's health ahead of business but also looking for ways to return to business and for people to be able to support themselves. Have you been on a set yet? I haven't. I've only been doing remote from home filming stuff. But we're figuring out how to move forward. Is the idea of being back on a set anxiety inducing, or are you ready? Can both be true? All over the country you're seeing people wanting to be in community and be at work and be living their lives. But the virus is really scary and has to be taken seriously. The debut of "Little Fires Everywhere" felt sandwiched between two major national moments. When it started, it was the pandemic; then after the series ended, it was the killing of George Floyd in police custody and the protests for racial justice that followed. Do you think the discussions happening around the country and in all sorts of institutions about racism and racial justice resonate with issues in the show? I would say, in some ways, "American Son" deals with these issues in a much more direct manner. That material is really about the value of Black life in the face of police violence. It was really interesting to see the film surge back into people's consciousness and conversation because of this real awakening around the movement for Black lives. A lot of those themes particularly unconscious bias and microaggressions and the '90s modality of reaching for colorblindness a lot of that is explored in "Little Fires" in ways that I think are really important. That was Lauren Neustadter and Reese Witherspoon my dear, dear friend they had the idea to cast me as Mia and to produce this project together. Neustadter and Witherspoon were also executive producers. They opened up a landscape. In the novel, Mia is racially ambiguous. But by making her African American in the '90s, we were able to really bravely go into narrative territory that was exciting. The casting opened so many doors in the story that the book didn't go into. It's funny you say that because that's how I always describe the role of adapting. We work with a lot of writers on a lot of special material. I always say, when you develop literature it's like you're going into all the same rooms but by transforming it for a visual medium you get to open those drawers and dig inside. I was listening to "Code Switch" on NPR and they had a whole episode on this idea of a "Karen," or, an entitled white woman, and they mentioned Reese Witherspoon's character on "Little Fires" as the prototypical Karen. Would you agree? I'm no Karen expert, but that sounds about right. But I think one of the things that is so extraordinary about the show is Reese's performance. Just by labeling that social phenomenon as "Karen," it requires a level of stereotyping that can be reductive, and what Reese did was really breathe so much humanity into that perspective, into that worldview, that we understood it, that we could unpack it. We could be invited into it and really examine it more. I think her performance is so beautiful because it required a level of nuance and a commitment to the humanity of her character that I think was artistically heroic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Conservation groups submitted an emergency petition last week requesting that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service increase protection for the only wild population of red wolves left in the world. Red wolves, which are bigger than coyotes, but smaller than gray wolves, are the only wolf species found completely within the United States. Trapping, shooting, poisoning and destruction of habitat in the 1960s, however, eliminated all but 17 of them from their native range, which was primarily in the Southeast. In By 1980, red wolves were declared extinct in the wild, and the last animals were gathered and bred, then reintroduced in North Carolina in 1987. They were the first federally listed species to be returned to their native habitat, and have served as models for other programs. Recently the population has declined by more than 50 percent in just two years. There are only 45 to 60 red wolves now living in the wild, and they are threatened, mostly by hunters mistaking them for coyotes and shooting them, said Tara Zuardo, a wildlife lawyer at the Animal Welfare Institute. The wildlife service recently announced a review of the Red Wolf Recovery Program. It was prompted in part by pressure from North Carolina's Wildlife Resources Commission, a state run conservation agency funded in part by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses, which has called the program a failure and claimed that wolves have damaged private land. Some changes to the program were taken against the advice of some of the biologists of the federal red wolf program. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"We're at war," the video began. "No one wants to admit it, but humanity is under attack." The narration continued, delivered over swelling music and video of protests and gunfire: "One very specific man might be all that stands between humanity and the greatest threat of our brief existence." The man being offered as the savior of a doomed world is Donald J. Trump. And last week, Mr. Trump shared the video with the millions of people who follow him on Twitter and Facebook as he tries to secure the Republican nomination for president. But the original version of the video, titled "Trump Effect," appeared nine days earlier on Reddit, the popular online message board, posted by its anonymous creator. Given Reddit's reputation as an unruly and sometimes extreme corner of the Internet, it is perhaps not surprising that the video pushed the boundaries of campaign promotion: By turns grave and winking, it borrowed an apocalyptic narration by the actor Martin Sheen from a 2010 trailer for the video game Mass Effect 2. At the end, a clip showing Hillary Clinton making barking sounds was followed by the words "BEWARE OF DOG." The video linked on Twitter was taken down within hours for copyright reasons, and other copies subsequently vanished from the Internet. But that the video migrated from Reddit to Mr. Trump's official accounts shows not only the candidate's unfiltered promotional strategy, but also the disparate ways in which his many supporters take up his cause online and the ease with which Mr. Trump incorporates their narratives into his own. In the absence of a large, organized online operation, the Trump campaign has leaned on its candidate's huge following on social media, where supporters share links and photos, argue on his behalf and spread his views to friends and family. But if major social media platforms are where Mr. Trump amplifies his pronouncements, sites like Reddit and 4chan have become a sort of proving ground, where an extreme, Internet amped version of Mr. Trump's message is shared and refined. At least 90,000 people on Reddit have subscribed to a community called "The Donald," in a group known as a subreddit. Its members post material full of slang, insults and inside jokes. Users refer to each other as "centipedes" a reference to a series of popular videos in which Mr. Trump is compared to the creature, which is a "nimble navigator" just like the candidate himself. (Mr. Trump has shared these videos as well.) Many usernames include the letters MAGA for Make America Great Again. Political campaigns have become increasingly aware of Reddit, where young users rallied around Barack Obama in 2012, and, to a lesser extent, Ron Paul in 2008. "The Bernie Sanders Reddit is very much working in concert with the Sanders campaign organization," said Micah L. Sifry, a co founder of Personal Democracy Media, which examines the intersection of politics and technology. "The Sanders people have strategically realized this is an asset." "In Trump's case, none of that support is being developed," Mr. Sifry said. If anything, he said, "the Internet maybe shows the latent capacity of Trump supporters. They're there, and they might be excited to be given something to do." Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, wrote in an email, "We are not involved with Reddit." The "Trump Effect" video, she said, "got to us via Twitter." The subreddit is intentionally insular, but widely read, ranking among the most active on the site. According to Reddit's own measurements, it produced nearly 52 million page views in March. In the same month, the largest subreddit supporting Mr. Sanders, who has visited the site to answer questions, and whose campaign maintains an active presence there, drew almost 36 million, despite having more subscribers. 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. In subreddits supporting other candidates, users promote favorable stories, feud with foes and rally support through phone banking or "Facebanking" campaigning to Facebook friends. On The Donald, the message is relentless as are the insults. Opponents are referred to as "cucks," which is short for "cuckservative," as in "cuckold" now used as a derisive term for liberals and moderate Republicans recently popularized by far right online commentators and white nationalists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group shares content and tone with parts of 4chan, the infamous and anonymous message board that traffics in shock, and where Mr. Trump who regularly scorns "political correctness" has found substantial, if oblique, support. Visitors to the group will find a cascade of offensive postings. Some members share open antipathy toward Muslims, sling insults with relish and mock anyone who takes umbrage. "We have a relationship with 4chan," said one Reddit moderator, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified out of fear, he said, of harassment. "It's a little bit scary to some people, the way they talk." (Moderators, like all Reddit users, are listed only by self selected handles). To charges of racism, the moderator, who said he was a 32 year old technology worker, said that "white nationalists" had been banned from the group. "We kicked them out before it became an issue for Trump," he said in a phone interview. Members respond to accusations of bigotry with defiant claims of persecution at the hands of critics. It is an article of faith among posters that anti racists are the real bigots, feminists are the actual sexists, and progressive politics are, in effect, regressive. Support for Mr. Trump on 4chan and similar sites started off as a manic elation and disbelief at the spectacle of it all he's behaving like us! On Reddit at least, that elation has turned into real support. In between meme photos and lengthy threads of mockery, users also post calls to action that offer tangible benefits to Mr. Trump. They remind one another of voter registration deadlines and share rhetorical strategies for dealing with opponents. The group maintains a delegate counter, links to pro Trump videos and articles, and provides materials instructing new visitors on how to help with the campaign. Recently, the group has focused on holding question and answer sessions known on Reddit as AMAs, for Ask Me Anything with figures including the conservative commentator Ann Coulter, the immigration activist Roy Beck and Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at Stony Brook University whose election model is favorable to Mr. Trump. (Mr. Norpoth, who did not express support for any candidate, said in an interview that he had been invited to participate by a student, but was unaware that he was speaking to a Donald Trump group. "It took me a little bit to find my bearings," he said.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
It took the State of the Union to get her in a state of quasi support. On Tuesday night Melania Trump finally appeared in public alongside her husband (or at least in the same very large room, though they apparently arrived separately) for the first time since the public allegations that President Trump had conducted, just weeks after Mrs. Trump had given birth to the couple's son, an affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels. That Mrs. Trump did so in a white pantsuit with a glowing white blouse exactly the kind of outfit that became a symbol of her husband's rival, Hillary Clinton, during the last election, and has since become widely accepted as sartorial shorthand for both the suffragists and contemporary women's empowerment and something of an anti Trump uniform, and also what the women gathered behind Kesha wore to display their sisterhood at Sunday's Grammy Awards seemed to be about as subtle a slap in the face as could be contained in a garment. She was playing her part, applauding and smiling with the special invited guests whose stories were mentioned in the president's speech, but she wasn't doing it entirely as scripted. Of course, it's possible Mrs. Trump chose the suit, an ivory Christian Dior style with cropped trousers and curvaceous jacket, to stand out against the sea of black worn by the Democratic Women's Working Group and its supporters, following the donning of black at the Golden Globes in honor of Time's Up and MeToo. (Though many of those same women wore white to her husband's first address to a joint session of Congress last year.) It's possible Mrs. Trump did it to show solidarity with the female members of the G.O.P., who had been urged to wear patriotic red, white and blue, as were the members of the Cabinet. Many of the men sported ties that matched the blue ones worn by the president and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, and the red one on Vice President Mike Pence. It's possible she just liked the color, and what it symbolizes about new beginnings (also, of course, purity, but that takes us back to the idea something else might be going on). It's possible she had no idea that Maria Grazia Chiuri, the artistic director of Christian Dior, made waves in her first collection with a best selling T shirt announcing "we should all be feminists." But given that clothes became a symbolic dividing line during this State of the Union like seemingly never before the members of the Congressional Black Caucus also expressed their point of view through their attire, with some wearing kente cloth and black outfits in reference to, and repudiation of, the president's denigrating comment about Africa and Haiti this month it's hard to believe that the potential (and, indeed, probable) interpretations of her choice escaped the first lady. Especially because during her husband's address last year, Mrs. Trump came under fire very quickly for her choice of what was seen as a let them eat cake black sequined Michael Kors suit, so she must know how much what she wears to this particular event matters. Especially because she has proved, over the last few months, perfectly cognizant of the way dress can be used as an implicit form of messaging, wearing red Dior for her trip to France for Bastille Day, and Dolce Gabbana to the G 7 in Sicily. And especially given the almost elated reception that greeted her decision to wear a bright pink pussy bow blouse for an appearance during the campaign after her husband's previous public sexual shaming, the "Access Hollywood" tape in which he made vulgar remarks about women. If she has paid any attention at all to public reaction (or if her team has), she cannot be ignorant of the fact that when she seems to use clothing as a subversive tool to suggest what she presumably cannot say, it provokes a groundswell of support. Though it was unclear at the time whether Mrs. Trump really understood the implications of that blouse choice, wearing a white suit to the State of the Union indicates that, indeed, she did. That when it comes to what she wears and what she means by it, she chooses her moments. Sometimes, such as at the Easter egg roll, it's just about a pretty dress. But other times, as this time, her fashion is accessorized with a pointed subtext. At the very least, it's dangled as a tease to those who would like to think it could mean more. But taken together with the wardrobe choices of the Democrats and the Republicans, the first lady's white suit was the final piece of what appeared to be an unprecedentedly politicized use of dress during a State of the Union. Indeed, Ivanka Trump, in understated plaid Oscar de la Renta, was one of the rare people in the room who didn't seem to be using her clothes to communicate anything other than taking a back seat. The audience was theoretically supposed to be silent the president was talking but their clothes spoke for them. And they did it at a time when millions of viewers across the country were watching, and could read the message in the material. Why wait for the official rebuttals? They can start white now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
I F you're worried that you haven't saved enough for retirement, you're probably right. Most of us haven't. In fact, the Employee Benefit Research Institute found the majority of American workers had put away less than 25,000 for their golden years. But even those people are in better financial shape than Susanna Wilson, 70, who saved nothing. Her only dependable income is a Social Security check of about 900 a month. "I can never retire," she said, her voice trembling as she stared at the floor of her living room in Grass Valley, Calif. "Probably about every two weeks when the bills are due, that's when I get really worried. I think 'How am I going to pay this one?' " It should never have come to this. Ms. Wilson attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1950s, though she left before graduating to move to New York and marry her college sweetheart, the Minimalist sculptor and sometime rock musician Walter De Maria. Ms. Wilson spent her prime earning years engaged in various creative endeavors in New York, mostly as a designer. Her clothing line, O'Susanna, found a home in the late 1970s at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's. Glamour and Seventeen magazines featured Perfumes by Susanna, including a popular fragrance called Strawberry Love. In her 40s, Ms. Wilson moved to California and became a publicist. At her peak, she made around 65,000 a year, she said, and not a penny of that made its way into a retirement fund. "One thing kind of led to another," Ms. Wilson said. "I've always put all my money into my businesses. And I always thought the business I was in was going to be a great success." She also raised a daughter, Corie, 36, who lives in Los Angeles with her two children and is not in a position to help her mother financially. Now twice divorced and living alone with her Shetland Sheepdog, Rooney, Ms. Wilson subsists on those government checks, plus a one day a week job at a local jewelry store that pays 12.50 an hour. She received no alimony from either divorce. Ms. Wilson also makes little girls' dresses under her O'Susanna label, at a vintage Singer Featherweight sewing machine in her dining room. But she sells only about six a month for around 200. Grass Valley, an old gold mining town of 12,300 residents in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, near Lake Tahoe, isn't an expensive place to live. But Ms. Wilson isn't the only one struggling. Her friend Molly Fisk, 55, a poet and teacher, was visiting the house and joked that her retirement planning was "all tied up in MasterCard futures. Sad but true." Ms. Wilson would probably manage on her current income, though not without sacrifice, were it not for the debt she had accumulated. All told, she averages about 1,400 in monthly income, including Social Security (adjusted for one of her former husbands' earnings). A third of that goes toward fixed expenses like utilities. She pays 300 toward a mortgage balance of 5,477. She inherited the house, fully paid off, from her parents, but took out the mortgage a few years ago to pay for repairs. The balance of her income goes toward the monthly minimum payments on 9,000 in credit card debt, racked up for daily living expenses. "I think I might just have to declare bankruptcy," she said. "I just can't live with that." Before she takes that drastic step, Ms. Wilson should consider some other options, said Elizabeth Rutter Baer, a certified financial planner in Lansing, Mich. She worries that Ms. Wilson is "extremely close" to the edge and isn't getting anywhere with her debt payments because she keeps putting more expenses, like food, on her credit cards. Yes, she could try to find other income, Ms. Baer said. But that's a short term solution. At some point, despite her excellent health, Ms. Wilson may not be able to work. "Bankruptcy is possible, but my advice is, let's liquidate assets and get those debts paid off," Ms. Baer said. To that end, Ms. Baer recommended something she said she had never before suggested: a reverse mortgage. Such mortgages allow homeowners to tap existing home equity to receive a lump sum or monthly checks. Unlike a home equity loan, however, borrowers don't have to make any repayments until they no longer live in the home. The strategy can be risky, with high fees and sometimes poor counseling for borrowers. Reverse mortgages are available only to homeowners 62 or older. "Susanna is the ideal candidate," Ms. Baer said. "This is one instance where it could work." The house is valued from 150,000 to 200,000. Ms. Baer said Ms. Wilson should work with a bank to see if she could wrap the current mortgage into a reverse and then take cash out. Ms. Wilson is already making phone calls to explore the idea. Ms. Baer also noted that Ms. Wilson was part owner, with her two brothers, of several tracts of timberland in northern California. The land's value has dropped because of the economy, but Ms. Baer said that shouldn't stop them from selling it. "Whatever the purpose of this land was before, today's the rainy day," she said. "It may not be that much, but at this point 25,000 would change her life, totally." Ms. Wilson said she was discussing this with her brothers and a real estate agent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
DUBLIN Ireland has finally taken its medicine, accepting the financial rescue package European officials have been pushing for several weeks. But even as Europe moved to avert this latest debt crisis, economists and policy experts are increasingly debating whether it would be better, and fairer, for the Continent's weakest economies to default on payments to lenders. Many experts now say that bailouts only delay the inevitable. Instead of further wounding their economies with drastic budget slashing, the specialists assert, governments should immediately start talks with bondholders and force them to accept a loss on their investments. The risk, of course, is an investor panic that would seize financial markets at a time when the global economy remains on tenterhooks. But an organized restructuring of debt that would reduce the amount of money troubled countries owed, especially in conjunction with a financial aid package, might provide a quicker path to recovery and avoid the trauma of a forced default down the road, some economists argue. To be sure, it is easier to propound solutions from the comfort of a policy research institution as opposed to actually making a decision when more than one country's financial future is at stake the broader euro zone could be affected as well. "Policy makers face the same dilemma as in any crisis with respect to haircutting bonds, and the real life decisions are always extremely difficult," said Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, who faced just such a quandary in 1994, when he helped arrange a 47 billion rescue package for the Mexican government as it teetered on the verge of default. "Holding bondholders harmless contributes to moral hazard and increases risks elsewhere," Mr. Rubin added. "But imposing bond haircuts can make future market access expensive or impossible for an extended time and can create serious contagion effects elsewhere." The term "haircuts" refers to the loss an investor takes when a borrower fails to pay back its loans. One signal that the policy pendulum may be swinging away from bondholders came this month when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, supported by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, tried to convince other European leaders that bondholders needed to accept some of the risk in future bailouts. The move spurred a bond market rout, and Ms. Merkel had to retreat. But her argument has taken hold in the debate over how best to handle debt crises as Europe turns its attention from Ireland which will receive 109 billion to 123 billion in loan as part of the rescue package to the shaky economies of Portugal and Spain. Proponents of a default say that Argentina and Russia, in 2002 and 1998, found life after a debt restructuring. Both reneged on their foreign loans and, after devaluing their currencies, were able to recover. Even so, any talk of default or a debt restructuring, the term that bankers and technocrats prefer remains anathema in capitals like Athens and Dublin. Their leaders fear that they would be put in a financial penalty box and denied fresh access to funds. Complicating matters is that, unlike Argentina and Russia, Ireland and other troubled European countries that use the euro as a common currency cannot devalue their currencies; thus, they lack this tool to help nurse their economies back to good health by improving their competitive position and increasing exports. In Ireland, which has an external debt 10 times the size of the economy and bank losses that jeopardized the country's solvency, there is little sympathy for those who lent to the country's faltering banks. Those who favor restructuring say it is only fair that lenders absorb losses and share the pain. A loss of this amount for lenders would be roughly the same as the government is planning to extract from its citizens over the next four years in the form of spending cuts and tax increases so as to bring its deficit down to 3 percent of gross domestic product, from 32 percent. "There is just no escaping debt restructuring for Greece and Ireland," said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a Harvard professor and expert on sovereign debt crises. But if it is inevitable as many financial analysts and mainstream economists like Mr. Rogoff and Nouriel Roubini are now saying why not do it now? That is not easily done, says Mr. Rogoff, who was a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund when Argentina defaulted. He points to the fact that the I.M.F. executive board, which has authority to approve all aid disbursements, is controlled by the main creditor banking nations like the United States, Britain, Germany and France, whose investors stand to lose the most in a default. "The I.M.F. never comes in and says, 'We will give you money but you have to restructure,' " he continued. "Restructuring only happens at the end of a failed program." This year, the monetary fund made clear its position on default when it issued a staff paper defiantly titled: "Default in Today's Advanced Economies: Unnecessary, Undesirable and Unlikely." Authors of the report say the views are their own and not the fund's. Yet, in arguing that indebted economies like Greece and Ireland will not follow in the path of Argentina, they echo a view that the monetary fund has long embraced. Unlike Argentina before it went belly up, Greece and Ireland have large primary deficits, which means that even without paying interest on their debt they still spend more than they collect in taxes. The deficit is about 10 percent of G.D.P. in each case. So abandoning their debt obligations would not eliminate the need for cash, which would become all the more acute because their default would deny them access to international debt markets. The authors also take on what they call the "soak the rich argument." In the case of Argentina and Russia, for example, the creditors were largely banks in the United States. In the euro zone, more than 2 trillion euros in sovereign debt belonging to Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal is held largely by German, French, British banks and, in the case of Greece, local banks and pension funds. So the investor pain would be felt throughout Europe, and could well ignite a systemic panic as banks across the Continent suddenly found themselves with big losses. Here in Ireland, people are doubtful that default is the answer. "Ireland is in the business of paying back its debts," the Prime Minister Brian Cowen said as he campaigned on tiny Arranmore Island off Ireland's north coast over the weekend. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
In the Christian tradition, icons are meant to remind flawed humans of what they could become. Paintings of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the saints remind the devout to aspire to holiness and sacrifice in their daily lives. Meditating on an icon can be a form of prayer: Lord, make me more like them. Amy Coney Barrett, whose Supreme Court confirmation hearing began Monday, is a living icon for conservative Christian women. Judge Barrett has combined the dual pathways of motherhood and career into one, showing that both can be holy vocations. Her judicial record holds out the renewed possibility of a conservative Supreme Court majority for decades; her role as a mother of seven, including two adopted children and one with special needs, is a testament to the ways her pro life views bear out in her personal life. Since President Trump announced his plan to nominate Judge Barrett, many conservative Christians have thrilled at the possibility of her symbolic power in the culture wars. Anti abortion groups such as Concerned Women for America and the Susan B. Anthony List are campaigning on her behalf, while Senators Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse have defended her faith against what they see to be anti Christian bias. To her champions, Judge Barrett represents a new form of feminine strength living proof that women are strong enough to have both a career and children, and that abortion may in the end primarily serve to let both men (sexual partners) and The Man (discriminatory workplaces) off the hook when it comes to pursuing true gender equity. So it's worth asking: If Judge Barrett's Catholic faith and indisputable career accomplishments make her such a young heroine of the Christian right, why doesn't the traditional Christianity to which she adheres encourage more women to be like her? To be clear, few in even secular communities can be like Judge Barrett. Most Americans do not enjoy the privileges of class and elite education that she has had as a federal judge and legal scholar. A flexible workplace and supportive spouse things many men take for granted remain elusive for many women. But there's another reason few Christian women can simultaneously pursue career ambitions and family life in the ways Judge Barrett has: In traditional Christian communities, women are often asked to sacrifice the former at the altar of the latter. Research for a book I wrote about the roles of Christian women suggests that Judge Barrett is the exception, not the rule, to traditional Christian teachings on women's work and vocation. Most of the 125 plus women I interviewed over two years said they had heard from a peer, pastor or professor that being a wife and mother was, by God's design, their highest calling and that a career would distract from that. As such, many Christian women with professional ambitions feel less than Christian, or woman, if they follow those ambitions in the way that Judge Barrett has followed her own. If second wave feminism denigrated the work of caregiving, many Christian communities over the past 50 years have responded by imbuing motherhood with a holy glow. (Visit an evangelical church over Mother's Day weekend and you might be blinded by it.) To be sure, many of the women I interviewed did feel called to have children. But they also felt called to start a nonprofit, go back to school, organize politically or interview for the role of C.E.O. Yet only the call to pursuits outside the home prompted shame. That shame is powerfully enforced from without. One young woman I interviewed excitedly told her pastor that she had gotten into law school. The pastor responded that she should consider that no Christian man would want to marry a lawyer. On her first visit to a Seattle megachurch, a female advertising director heard the pastor preach that he didn't know any women who worked outside the home. An older Christian woman told me at age 27 that if I continued to invest in my career, I would lose the chance to marry and have children and that I better make my choice soon. These attitudes play into the notion that "good" Christian women can be only one thing. (They also understandably raise questions about Judge Barrett's own faith community, the People of Praise, and its teachings on male headship.) Traditional Christians believe that God designed men to be leaders in the church and home, and that women are to submit to male leadership in these spheres. This explains why many Christians have a hard time encouraging women to take on jobs and careers where they will wield authority over men. If a church teaches the essence of femininity is godly submission, it is difficult to then, in turn, encourage women who are called to lead and hold authority at work. In 2017, the evangelical polling firm Barna Group found that of all Americans, evangelicals were the group least likely to be comfortable with a workplace comprising more women than men. They were also the group least likely to believe that women face barriers at work. Judge Barrett herself shows that women can be many things at once: an accomplished student, law professor, judge, mother, spiritual leader, wife and, in her words, "room parent, car pool driver and birthday party planner." At a 2019 event, she said this wouldn't be possible without a husband who is "a complete all in partner" in raising children and running a household. Elsewhere, she has described an office and courtroom culture that has welcomed her children's presence. Judge Barrett is set to become the most visible conservative Christian woman in public life since Sarah Palin, who once responded to questions over her work family balance with the following: "To any critics who say a woman can't think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I'd just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave." (I imagine Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have agreed.) But if a generation of girls is to follow in Judge Barrett's footsteps, they will need explicit support from religious leaders. As such, evangelical and traditional Catholic communities must find ways to honor and affirm the ambitions of half their members. They could do so by teaching the dignity of "secular" professional work at all levels; by publicly advocating generous pro family workplace policies; by confronting sexism and sexual harassment outside the church as well as in; and by calling men to champion their wives' careers and to share family duties. But while many Christian leaders would affirm these as goals, it would take nothing less than a reversal of church based gender norms for a groundswell of Christian men to put their wives' careers first and to take a primary caregiver role in the way that Judge Barrett's husband has. It's been disheartening to see so much religious illiteracy applied to Judge Barrett's personal life in recent weeks. We might hope for journalists to look beyond dystopian novels to decipher what a "handmaid" is, for instance. But to set the record straight, on handmaids and beyond, conservative Christians must do their part to imagine a broader and more humanizing vision for women's place in the public square. Christianity has always contained a liberatory seed: one that tells women that the human desire to work, create and shape institutions is as important, even as holy, as their ability to bear children. If Christians don't like the handmaid stereotypes, now is the time to be clear on all that Christian women can do and be. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Credit...Millard H. Sharp/Science Source The Great Breakup: The First Arrivals to the Americas Split Into Two Groups Early inhabitants of the Americas split into two populations over 13,000 years ago, according to a new study of ancient DNA, and remained separated for thousands of years. Eventually, somewhere, the two groups met again and began commingling. Today, their descendants inhabit a vast region stretching from Mexico to the southern tip of South America. The research, published on Thursday in the journal Science, paints a complex picture of human migrations through the Americas. When people arrived in the Western Hemisphere from Asia, they didn't just move to new territories and settle down. "This study is important because it begins to move us away from overly simplistic models of how people first spread throughout the Americas," said Deborah A. Bolnick, a geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study. The findings emerged from a study of 91 ancient genomes of people who lived as long as 4,800 years ago in what are now Alaska, California and Ontario. They represent a major addition to the catalog of ancient DNA in the Western Hemisphere. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Until the 1990s, archaeological sites provided much of the evidence for the spread of people across the Americas. There's firm archaeological evidence that people had reached southern Chile by 14,500 years ago, for example; some researchers even argue that people arrived several thousand years earlier. Yet archaeology alone has left many questions unanswered, such as who exactly lived in those early sites and how they were related to each other. Geneticists are seeking to answer some of those questions by looking at the DNA of living Native Americans. Early studies on small fragments of genes suggested that all Native Americans south of the Arctic descended from the same group of migrants, who may have traveled across the Bering Land Bridge connecting Asia to what is now Alaska at the end of the last ice age. But the pace of this research slowed in the early 2000s, thanks in part to the distrust that many Native American communities felt toward scientists after a long history of abuse. In a 2004 lawsuit, the Havasupai Tribe sued Arizona State University for misleading members about what their DNA would be used to study. That conflict left many researchers reluctant to get embroiled in similar controversy. As scientists learned how to extract DNA from ancient human remains, a similar conflict arose. Many museums store Native American skeletons, often exhumed without consent from burial grounds. Native American communities reclaimed many of these remains and often turned down research requests. In recent years, however, these strains have started to ease. Each summer, Ripan Malhi, a geneticist at the University of Illinois and co author of the new study, and his colleagues run a workshop at the University of Illinois to train Native American students in genetics, focusing on research that can help their communities. He also has established long running relationships with Native American communities in Canada and Alaska. Christiana Scheib, another co author on the new study, traveled to California to meet with tribal representatives. She explained why she wanted to study Native American remains in California museums. "Some of them were surprised," said Dr. Scheib, who now heads the ancient DNA research group at the University of Tartu in Estonia. "They said, 'You're the first researcher to talk to us and ask our opinion.'" In the new study, Dr. Scheib, Dr. Malhi and their colleagues searched for DNA in remains they had gained permission to study. They succeeded in finding genetic material in the teeth and ear bones of 91 individuals. In some cases, they were only able to retrieve fragments of DNA; in other instances, they found enough material for an accurate reconstruction of the entire genome. The researchers then compared the new data to publicly available genetic information about other people both living and ancient in North and South America. The scientists also looked at DNA from communities in Asia for close relatives. At first, the family tree that emerged was baffling, suggesting close genetic connections between distantly related people. "We kept getting results that didn't make sense," Dr. Scheib said. A closer look resolved some of the mystery. From their data, the researchers concluded that living Native Americans descended from a population of Asians who moved into Alaska and then expanded southward, likely along the coast. Soon afterward, that original population split into two groups, which Dr. Scheib and her colleagues call ANC A and ANC B. The oldest genome yet found in the Americas, from a 13,000 year old boy in Montana, belongs to ANC A. By then, the groups already must have split in two. The oldest evidence of ANC B, on the other hand, comes from an 8,500 year old skeleton discovered in Washington State known as Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One. At some point, at least a few ANC B people must have moved far to the east: Dr. Scheib and her colleagues found that people as old as 4,800 years in what is now southern Ontario belonged to ANC B. Once they arrived, these people put down roots. Algonquin speaking people living today in Ontario also belong to ANC B. But when the scientists looked at DNA from people in California and further south, they were surprised to discover mixtures of ANC A and ANC B ancestry. The oldest evidence for this mixture comes from people who lived 4,500 years ago on what are now the Channel Islands, off the coast of California. These people were 58 percent ANC A and 42 percent ANC B. The researchers found similar DNA mixtures in living people in Mexico and South America. Dr. Scheib and her colleagues put forward a few scenarios that might explain these results. It's possible that ANC A people moved down the western coast of the Americas, establishing fishing communities along the way. Thousands of years later, a lineage of people descending from the ANC B group also expanded southward, making contact with those communities. Dr. Malhi said that there may well have been other massive migrations in the Americas. In the new study, for example, the researchers found that ancient people in what is now Ontario, as well as living Native Americans in places like Alaska, had ancestry related to the Inuit of Greenland. It's possible, then, that Arctic people moved south in the past few thousand years, mixing their genes with those of ANC B people. One way to explore these hypotheses is to find more ancient DNA from other parts of the Americas. But first Dr. Malhi said that he and his colleagues also want to talk with living Native Americans about their histories. Their stories may preserve information about contacts between distantly related peoples in the far past. "By not just looking at genes but also talking with communities, we might be able to find something," said Dr. Malhi. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Devices that produce soothing sounds in order to lull infants to sleep can be loud enough at maximum volume to damage their hearing, researchers reported Monday. Infant sleep machines emit white noise or nature sounds to drown out everyday disturbances to a baby's sleep. The machines, sometimes embedded in cuddly stuffed animals, are popular gifts at baby showers and routinely recommended by parenting books and websites. Some sleep experts advise parents to use these noisemakers all night, every night, to ensure the best rest for a newborn. Many parents say their babies become so used to the sounds of rainfall or birds that they will not nap without them. Researchers at the University of Toronto evaluated 14 popular sleep machines at maximum volume and found they produced between 68.8 to 92.9 decibels at 30 centimeters, about the distance one might be placed from an infant's head. Three exceeded 85 decibels, the workplace safety limit for adults on an eight hour shift for accumulated exposure as determined by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. One machine was so loud that two hours of use would exceed workplace noise limits. At 100 centimeters, all the machines tested were louder than the 50 decibel limit averaged over an hour set for hospital nurseries in 1999 by an expert panel concerned with improving newborn sleep and their speech intelligibility. "These machines are capable of delivering noise that we think is unsafe for full grown adults in mines," said Dr. Blake Papsin, the senior author of the paper and the chief otolaryngologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. The study was published in the journal Pediatrics. Dr. Papsin got the idea for this study after a parent brought a portable white noise machine to the hospital that sounded as roaring as a carwash. "Unless parents are adequately warned of the danger, or the design of the machines by manufacturers is changed to be safer, then the potential for harm exists, and parents need to know about it," said Dr. Gordon B. Hughes, the program director of clinical trials for the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, who was not involved in the study. Safe use is possible, the study's authors suggest. "Farther away is less dangerous, a lower volume is better and shorter durations of time, all things that deliver less sound pressure to the baby," Dr. Papsin said. Yet some models are designed to be affixed to the crib, like Homedics' SoundSpa Glow Giraffe and Baby Einstein's Sea Dreams Soother. The findings are bound to surprise many parents. After finding a recommendation for white noise in "Happiest Baby on the Block," Naomi Tucker, 39, bought a machine so that her daughter, Chiara, 15 months, could fall asleep nightly to ocean waves. The device masks sirens and household noise in the family's two bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. A fan outside her door is "an extra barrier of sound, so we don't have to tiptoe," said Ms. Tucker, a family therapist. For naps in the stroller or the car, she and her husband use a white noise app on an old cellphone. Tired of tossing and turning? There are some strategies you could try to improve your hours in bed. None Four out of five people say that they suffer from sleep problems at least once a week and wake up feeling exhausted. Here's a guide to becoming a more successful sleeper. Stretching and meditative movement like yoga before bed can improve the quality of your sleep and the amount you sleep. Try this short and calming routine of 11 stretches and exercises. Nearly 40 percent of people surveyed in a recent study reported having more or much more trouble than usual during the pandemic. Follow these seven simple steps for improving your shut eye. When it comes to gadgets that claim to solve your sleep problems, newer doesn't always mean better. Here are nine tools for better, longer sleep. "It's surprising because I hadn't thought of it, but I can see why that would be the case," Ms. Tucker said of the study finding. Her daughter's Graco device is set to maximum volume, but it is still not all that loud, she said. It is also five feet from the crib. Dr. Marc Weissbluth, a pediatrician and author of "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child," said parents could still use the machines, with new precautions. "If it's too close or it's too loud, this might not be healthy for your baby," he said. But "a quiet machine that's far away may cause no harm whatsoever." The study authors recommended that manufacturers limit the maximum noise level of infant sleep machines. Michelle Landesman, the customer care director at Marpac, said that the company's Dohmie sound conditioner for babies has a decibel range of 50 to 75. "Our measurements are only taken six inches away from the machine, and that's obviously much closer than we'd recommend," she said. Ashley Mowrey, a spokeswoman for Graco, declined to specify the loudest output for its Sweet Slumber Sound Machine. Brian J. Fligor, an audiologist and a spokesman for the American Academy of Audiology, said that the new study may have overestimated the sound exposure to infants by roughly seven decibels. Dr. Fligor questioned the authors' way of accounting for the differences between the ear canals of adults and newborns. "I don't see these results as a call for drastic reduction in use," he said. A concern, briefly raised in the Pediatrics study, is whether listening to white noise can be detrimental to auditory development. A 2003 study published in the journal Science found continuous white noise delayed development of the brain's hearing center in newborn rats. In humans, the brain of a newborn is learning to differentiate sounds at different pitches even during sleep, said Lisa L. Hunter, scientific director of research in the division of audiology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. "If you've conditioned them to white noise, there's every indication that they might not be as responsive as they otherwise should be to soft speech," she said. The new study did not ask parents how these machines were used in households. Six parents interviewed for this article said they used them nightly, and all through the night, for their children. Lauren Toner Perry, 32, a senior kindergarten teacher at Hutchison School in Memphis was given an infant sleep machine at her baby shower. She has used it to mask the clattering of dishes in the kitchen while her 4 month old daughter sleeps. Now she is reconsidering, even though it is pretty quiet. Still, Mrs. Perry said, "It's kind of next to her crib." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive, and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, said on Twitter on Thursday that they had finalized the details of their divorce. Mr. Bezos will keep 75 percent of the couple's Amazon stock and all of their ownership of The Washington Post and the Blue Origin space company, Ms. Bezos wrote. Mr. Bezos will also have "sole voting authority" over Ms. Bezos' Amazon shares, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. After the divorce, Ms. Bezos will own roughly 4 percent of Amazon, a stake that was worth almost 36 billion on Thursday. By keeping 75 percent of the couple's Amazon shares, or about 12 percent of the company, Mr. Bezos will most likely remain the richest person in the world. His remaining stake in the company was worth almost 108 billion on Thursday. (Bill Gates, the second wealthiest, is worth 102 billion, according to Bloomberg.) Experts had said that in Washington State, where Amazon is based and where the couple have been raising their four children, Ms. Bezos was entitled to roughly half of their assets. They have other investments and properties across the United States. The details of divorce settlements are not public, and theirs could contain other compensation for Ms. Bezos. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A serial subletter, Ms. Vila, 31, sticks with apartments in much the way Henry VIII stuck with wives. Yes, it's true she did once manage to stay put for a full year the current record in a two bedroom place near Union Square. But balance that against the apartment above a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Ms. Vila departed after just one month another personal record. Since transferring from George Washington University to New York University 11 years ago, Ms. Vila, an entrepreneur, has lived in 15 apartments in New York in neighborhoods including Greenpoint, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn; and Union Square, the West Village, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, Chelsea and Chinatown in Manhattan. But Ms. Vila's moves have not all been domestic. She lived for brief periods and also sublet in Mexico City, Peru and Cairo, where she was a founder of the Engine Room, an organization that consults on the use of technology for social change. If her name is on a lease, after a few months she tries to arrange for someone to take it over so she can sublet elsewhere. When she locates a place to sublet, she finds a reason to abandon ship so she can sublet somewhere else. Her bank account has sometimes suffered. If she were so inclined, she could blame the whole thing on dear old dad. She's a daughter of Bob Vila, the home improvement television host, "and in our family it was the norm to move a lot," Ms. Vila said. Her own particular moves have been motivated by circumstances, like a breakup; by a realization that a particular apartment is in an area that is too much of a party scene; by a simple desire for a fresh start; or sometimes by a chance to occupy what Ms. Vila views as the holy grail: a unique space. In Williamsburg, for example, she sublet first in a former rocket factory, then a few years later in a former pillow factory. Three apartments ago she lived in a converted seminary in Clinton Hill, last year in the basement of an active synagogue in Chinatown. Along the way there have been a few illegal sublets, "but nothing to keep me up at night," she said. "You have to try different places to learn what you want," continued Ms. Vila, who has, with partners, turned her residential restlessness into a business, Flip, that helps people find sublets. "You may not know how much you miss a place that had natural light until you move to a space with no light. You learn from missing things and then, ultimately, you learn what are the variables that you care most about." She's never regretted bailing on an apartment, she said. After all, her peregrinations have made her a true citizen of the city. "I understand what it's like to live in many neighborhoods, not just visit them," Ms. Vila said. "There is something about waking up and going to that coffee shop down the block." She has a storage unit in Clinton Hill, an account at Rabbit Movers and an understandable preference for traveling light. "The way I think about it, I'm always doing spring cleaning," she said. "I only have the clothing I wear on a regular basis. I kind of pride myself on not having stuff." Of course, these people have asked Ms. Vila other questions: What gives with all the moving? When are you going to settle down? Have you considered that you may have commitment issues? 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. Yes, she's considered it. Yes, she has problems in that area personally, academically (she did transfer, after all) and professionally. "Not being able to commit to an apartment has, for me, been similar to not being able to commit to a person," she said. In her career as an entrepreneur, "there are a lot of moments where I've felt: 'I have to get out of this,' or 'This isn't going to work. I have to find my exit strategy.' That's the analogue." Ms. Vila has a one year lease on her current apartment in the East Village. She loves her garbage disposal, the built in niche with bookcases around the bed and the large backyard. "I've decided with this one that I'm going to stay here for the whole year," she said. "I'm 31 now. I'll leave only if I move in with my boyfriend." She's acutely aware that family and friends are skeptical. "They're saying, 'You will move in with him just so you can move into another apartment,' " Ms. Vila said. "I don't know if money is being exchanged," she added, "but they're definitely taking bets." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN JOSE, Calif. It may be lonely at the top, but that phrase seldom applies to the N.H.L. All Star Game. Among the four coaches whose teams were in first place at the cutoff point this month Paul Maurice had two of his Jets in tow, Jon Cooper guided three players from his Lightning and Todd Reirden had three of his Capitals named to the team, though Alex Ovechkin opted not to participate. The remaining coach, Calgary's Bill Peters, was accompanied by only left wing Johnny Gaudreau. Each team is required to be represented in the game, meaning the Pacific Division leading Flames had as many All Stars as each of the four last place teams. Yet Calgary features four of the top 15 scorers in the N.H.L. among their forwards, as well as the front runner for the Norris Trophy in defenseman Mark Giordano, among other key contributors. "You're a little bummed; you want as many teammates as you can have here," Gaudreau, a New Jersey native, said during All Star Weekend. The Flames have had little else to lament this season, posting the best record (33 13 5) and goal differential ( 45) in the Western Conference. Since New Year's Eve, they have won 10 of 12 games and earned points in 11 of them. They have put a much maligned early season blowout loss to Pittsburgh distantly in their rearview mirror, evolving into a team that plays with pace, vigor and swagger. Soon after Peters was hired, the Flames received his endorsement of a deal that brought in two more additions from Carolina: right wing Elias Lindholm and defenseman Noah Hanifin. Lindholm found himself on a line opposite Gaudreau almost by serendipity. The free agent acquisition James Neal was penciled into that slot. But Sean Monahan's wrist reconstruction surgery one of four operations he had in the off season limited his ability to grip his stick for faceoffs. Lindholm, a strong defensive player who can take draws, alleviated Monahan's burden. Since then? The line has combined for 192 points, more than any other line except Colorado's combination of Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog, all of whom were named All Stars. MacKinnon said Lindholm was an outstanding complement to a tandem poised for a big step forward. "Adding a guy like Lindholm is just going to work," said MacKinnon, whose Avalanche fell to Calgary, 6 5, in a Nov. 1 game in which the Flames slathered five third period goals on Colorado. "They're so dominant, and they're the big reason that Calgary is doing this well." Eric Duhatschek, a senior writer for The Athletic who has spent nearly four decades covering hockey in Calgary said that, without undermining the two potent scoring lines that propelled the Flames to the 1989 Stanley Cup championship, this line had been superlative. Gaudreau, listed at 5 feet 9 inches and 165 pounds, leads the team in goals (29), assists (44) and points (73), driving play in a way that had been typically seen from centers like Edmonton's Connor McDavid, with whom he is tied in points. Peters compared Gaudreau's role to that of Chicago's Patrick Kane, another smallish American wing. Gaudreau bested Kane, a player after whom he patterned his game, in the puck control relay for the second straight year. Matthew Tkachuk rounds out Calgary's four top 15 scorers. He has anchored their second line while bringing his signature hostility and studiousness. He and Lindholm have set career highs in points with 31 games remaining. Monahan, Gaudreau, Hanifin and Giordano, the team captain, are all on pace to reach career highs during February. While his aforementioned teammates are all in their 20s, Giordano is an anomaly, taking steps forward at 35, an age when most players are in decline. Duhatschek compared Giordano's combination of genetic gifts and meticulous preparation to that of Chris Chelios, who played a significant role in the N.H.L. into his 40s. Neither Gaudreau nor Peters was surprised at Giordano's jump in production, with Gaudreau calling him "the ultimate captain." He has returned to the Norris conversation for the first time since 2015, when a torn biceps cut his season short. Last season the Flames lost 17 of their final 24 games and missed the playoffs. But if they can finish this season the way they have finished games, they may cruise to a top seed. They have been the best third period team in the league this with a 39 goal differential in the final frame. Their 80 third period goals this season are 13 more than that of any other team, and the most in any period. "They just find a way to win games," said McDavid, whose Oilers have lost two of three games to Calgary this season, including one after a third period Flames rally on Nov. 17. "Their belief in themselves is really high and they come back in so many games. It's really impressive to see." Calgary has not advanced past the second round since it lost the Stanley Cup finals in seven games to Tampa Bay in 2004. One promising parallel to that season has been a change in goal. Then, the Flames acquired Miikka Kiprusoff, who transformed suddenly into a franchise goalie. Now, David Rittich has emerged to solidify Calgary's final line of defense. Vegas goalie Marc Andre Fleury praised Rittich's maturity, patience, agility and improvisation. Rittich has picked up 19 of a possible 22 points in his last 11 starts. After a disappointing start to the season, the veteran Mike Smith has won 10 of his last 12 starts as well in what has now become a backup role. Duhatschek compared Rittich, a Czech, to his most venerated countryman, Dominik Hasek, in terms of his attitude, competitiveness and mental makeup. "Rittich is an absolute key to keep this thing going," Duhatschek said. "If he can keep this rolling, they are capable of doing what that '04 team did and win some rounds in the playoffs." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
All this is in Tom Feiling's lively, baggy "The Island That Disappeared," which belongs to the higher class of clever scrapbook, bolstered with the best sources and very fluent storytelling. If the narrative can seem ramshackle, that's the nature of its subject: Why try to hold history together with map references when the really interesting events tend to happen in the margins? Feiling further muddles things by bringing in other islands when it suits him, which doesn't help. But he has one huge advantage: the rich 17th century records of the original Providence Island Company, which tried to found a Promised Land South to rival the famous one in Massachusetts. Although its settlers arrived on the sister ship to the Mayflower, relations between the two settlements were rather fraught. God's favor wasn't obvious. Woodworm got into the tobacco, which was the colonists' lone hope of a cash crop. On one occasion, the outnumbered English defenders were reduced to cutting up organ pipes from a ruined church and throwing them at the Spanish. The island's settlers quickly realized there was money in being pirates or, if you prefer, special forces in the godly war against Spain. And so the place began to divide disastrously between the holy and the military. At home, meanwhile, the company's members were involved in the English Civil War, which interrupts Feiling's story to no great purpose and helped to wreck Providence. The island was taken by the Spanish and became Santa Catalina, was then lost by them and taken back again; but now Feiling's story changes. It's no longer about the Promised Land. Providence has become just one more island where people wash ashore. Feiling tracks some of those extraordinary individuals and makes them live, but now his facts don't fit his larger aim, to show in microcosm "how the Western world came into being." He may want to talk about the big picture, but the story of Providence wasn't about the making of "a mighty empire." It was about God, food and money. When the British of that time talked about empire, they meant Ireland and nothing much beyond the British Isles. It was only later that a British citizen would have the opportunity to feel guilty about such things. And the guest appearance by David Cameron at the end of the book seems bizarrely out of place. Providence's past would be odder, wilder and more intriguing without being seen through such modern spectacles. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The division highlights the challenge of setting monetary policy when Mr. Trump's trade policy is clouding the outlook for an otherwise decent looking economy. Because it is unclear how much trade tensions will slow growth and whether they will eventually ease, Fed policy must aim at a moving target as it tries to keep the economy expanding steadily. The president's next round of tariffs on Chinese goods is expected to take effect Sept. 1, and Mr. Trump has shown no sign of backing down, even as global growth shows cracks and after a powerful recession signal flashed in bond markets. While consumer spending and overall economic growth are holding up in the United States, household confidence declined in preliminary August data as Americans became less positive about the economic outlook. Some businesses are holding off on investment as Mr. Trump's trade war fuels uncertainty. Given that backdrop, officials wanted to make sure they "avoided any appearance of following a preset course," minutes from the meeting show. "Members generally agreed that it was important to maintain optionality" in setting interest rates. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, indicated at his news conference after the meeting that the Fed could make additional rate cuts, but did not commit to the timing or extent of future decreases. His comments, and in particular his characterization of the July move as part of a cyclical adjustment rather than the start of a series of cuts that will return borrowing costs to rock bottom, disappointed some investors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Diane Ravitch, the historian and former assistant education secretary who has become an outspoken critic of those who favor high stakes testing, tenure reforms and other controversial measures aimed at the public schools, has joined with other education advocates to form a group that will grade and endorse political candidates. The group will be called the Network for Public Education and is co founded by Anthony Cody, a former teacher and now a blogger on education issues. It will try to bring together parents, teachers and other local interest groups from across the country through social networking. Ms. Ravitch said the network was calling for broad minded public school curriculums that included arts, sciences, foreign languages and physical education; better financing for schools; more respect for teachers; and the "appropriate use of testing to help students and teachers, not to punish or reward students, teachers, principals, or to close schools," she wrote in an e mail. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prepares to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv later this week, he has reportedly asked, "Do Americans care about Ukraine?" Here's why the answer should be yes: Ukraine is defending itself and the West against Russian attack. If Ukraine succeeds, we succeed. The relationship between the United States and Ukraine is key to our national security, and Americans should care about Ukraine. Russia is fighting a hybrid war against Ukraine, Europe and the United States. This war has many components: armed military aggression, energy supply, cyber attacks, disinformation and election interference. On each of these battlegrounds, Ukraine is the front line. For the last seven months, I represented the United States in Ukraine and regularly visited the front line of the military conflict. After its occupation of Crimea, Russia sent its army, security forces, undercover agents, weapons, funding and political instruction into Ukraine's southeastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, a region known as the Donbas. The 280 mile line of contact between Russian led forces and Ukrainian forces has stabilized but has not gone quiet. To the contrary, the front line in the Donbas region marks the only shooting war in Europe. Every week Russian led forces kill Ukrainian soldiers and take casualties in return. During the 12 hours of my last visit, in November, a Ukrainian soldier was killed and another wounded. Since the Russians invaded in 2014, 14,000 Ukrainians have died in this war. The United States and our allies support Ukraine in this war by providing the Ukrainian armed forces with weapons, training and support. American security assistance to Ukraine regularly receives broad, bipartisan support in Congress; the importance of that assistance to Ukraine and to U.S. national security is not at issue. On the energy battlefield, the Kremlin is trying to bypass Ukraine and increase German and European dependence on Russia by spending billions on an unnecessary underwater natural gas pipeline, a political project without economic justification. In another show of bipartisan political support for Ukraine, Congress late last year passed sanctions on companies attempting to complete the pipeline, forcing a significant delay in the project. Russia's hybrid war is also an information war. Starting at home, Russian media is dominated by the state, leading its citizens to believe they are under threat from a hostile West and convincing them that President Vladimir Putin protects them from corrupt enemies. Russia's trolls and internet hackers target Ukrainian, European and American political and social fault lines, exaggerating differences and fomenting dissension. They seek to weaken Western alliances, undermine confidence in democratic institutions, and turn citizens against citizens. We and other NATO allies are working with Ukraine to counter this malign influence. The Russians interfered in our elections in 2016 but not before interfering in Ukraine's elections in 2014, and Britain's Brexit referendum earlier in 2016. Because Ukraine is the front line, we assisted the Ukrainian central election commission in its preparations for their 2019 elections to defend against further Russian interference. Their efforts, with our assistance, successfully frustrated Russian attacks. But the Russian challenge is even broader than hybrid warfare. The Kremlin is attacking the rules that have guided relations among nations since World War II, rules that kept the peace among major European powers for 70 years. With their invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Mr. Putin trashed those rules, spurned international consensus, violated the treaties and principles that even previous Russian and Soviet leaders had respected even in the breach. Mr. Putin seems to want to return to the law of the jungle that characterized relations among nations for centuries before 1945, where powerful nations dominated and invaded less powerful nations, where nations established spheres of influence that oppressed neighbors, leading to war and suffering. That was how the Russian Empire and Soviet Union conducted international relations dominate, control and absorb neighboring lands. A return to jungle rules threatens not just Ukraine and the United States, but global stability itself. Until Russia withdraws from Ukraine both Donbas and Crimea and recognizes that Ukraine is an independent, sovereign nation, other nations cannot be secure. Until Russia recommits to a rules based international order, Western nations are in jeopardy. Ukraine is the front line. In an even broader sense, Russia's attack on Ukraine and the West is an attack on democracy. The question of how nations govern themselves democracy versus autocracy is being fought out among and within nations. Russia, China, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria all are autocracies, all are unfree. In the contest between democracies and autocracies, the contest between freedom and unfreedom, Ukraine is the front line. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The first African clinical trial of an experimental vaccine against hookworm is planned for next year. While rarely fatal, hookworm infestations are a serious problem for 600 million of the world's poor, especially for children going barefoot. By constantly draining their victims' blood, the worms cause anemia, stunted growth and learning problems, and leave children too weak to go to school. When they infest pregnant women, both mother and fetus are weakened. The worms enter through the feet and ride the bloodstream to exit in the lungs, where they are coughed up and then swallowed into the intestines. Once there, two sets of teeth help them attach and suck blood. They grow to half an inch long. Dr. Peter J. Hotez, director of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, explained that the vaccine creates antibodies not against the parasites themselves but against two enzymes found in the worm's own gut one that detoxifies the iron in its blood diet, and another that digests blood proteins. Without those enzymes the worm slowly dies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A Philadelphia company that sells software used in hundreds of clinical trials, including the crash effort to develop tests, treatments and a vaccine for the coronavirus, was hit by a ransomware attack that has slowed some of those trials over the past two weeks. The attack on eResearchTechnology, which has not previously been reported, began two weeks ago when employees discovered that they were locked out of their data by ransomware, an attack that holds victims' data hostage until they pay to unlock it. ERT said clinical trial patients were never at risk, but customers said the attack forced trial researchers to track their patients with pen and paper. Among those hit were IQVIA, the contract research organization helping manage AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine trial, and Bristol Myers Squibb, the drugmaker leading a consortium of companies to develop a quick test for the virus. ERT has not said how many clinical trials were affected, but its software is used in drug trials across Europe, Asia and North America. It was used in three quarters of trials that led to drug approvals by the Food and Drug Administration last year, according to its website. On Friday, Drew Bustos, ERT's vice president of marketing, confirmed that ransomware had seized its systems on Sept. 20. As a precaution, Mr. Bustos said, the company took its systems offline that day, called in outside cybersecurity experts and notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Nobody feels great about these experiences, but this has been contained," Mr. Bustos said. He added that ERT was starting to bring its systems back online on Friday and planned to bring remaining systems online over the coming days. Mr. Bustos said it was still too early to say who was behind the attack. He declined to say whether the company paid its extortionists, as so many companies hit by ransomware now do. The attack on ERT follows another major ransomware attack last weekend on Universal Health Services, a major hospital chain with more than 400 locations, many in the United States. NBC News first reported the attack on UHS on Monday, and said it appeared to be "one of the largest medical cyberattacks in United States history." The incidents followed more than a thousand ransomware attacks on American cities, counties and hospitals over the past 18 months. The attacks, once treated as a nuisance, have taken on greater urgency in recent weeks as American officials worry they may interfere, directly or indirectly, with the November election. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. A ransomware attack in Germany resulted in the first known death from a cyberattack in recent weeks, after Russian hackers seized 30 servers at University Hospital Dusseldorf, crashing systems and forcing the hospital to turn away emergency patients. As a result, the German authorities said, a woman in a life threatening condition was sent to a hospital 20 miles away in Wuppertal and died from treatment delays. One of ERT's clients, IQVIA, said it had been able to limit problems because it had backed up its data. Bristol Myers Squibb also said the impact of the attack had been limited, but other ERT customers had to move their clinical trials to pen and paper. In a statement, IQVIA said the attack had "had limited impact on our clinical trials operations," and added, "We are not aware of any confidential data or patient information, related to our clinical trial activities, that have been removed, compromised or stolen." Pfizer and Johnson Johnson, two companies working on a coronavirus vaccine, said their coronavirus vaccine trials had not been affected. "ERT is not a technology provider for or otherwise involved in Pfizer's Phase 1/2/3 Covid 19 vaccine clinical trials," Amy Rose, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said. Companies and research labs on the front lines of the pandemic have been repeat targets for foreign hackers over the past seven months, as countries around the world try to gauge one another's responses and progress in addressing the virus. In May, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security warned that Chinese government spies were actively trying to steal American clinical research through cybertheft. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
No doubt Mr. Netanyahu believes his reasons for annexation outweigh these dangers. Throughout his tenure as prime minister, he has expanded Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and the regions he would now annex, including the Jordan Valley, have become integral parts of Israel in all but name. There have been no negotiations for at least two years, and, in the eyes of Israeli conservatives, the two state solution that has long been declared the goal is dead. Having served longer than any prime minister in Israeli history, Mr. Netanyahu probably believes the expansion of the Jewish state in the biblical Hebrew lands of Judea and Samaria would become his legacy, and the new baseline for any future negotiations. And he is keenly aware that the Trump administration, which has basically granted him and the Israeli right wing all their wishes a United States Embassy in Jerusalem, an announcement that the United States will no longer regard Jewish settlements as illegal, and acceptance of Israeli control over the Golan Heights and expanded Jewish settlements on occupied territory offers a particular opportunity to extend Israeli sovereignty with American approval. On the more tawdry political level, where Mr. Netanyahu thrives, annexation would cement for him the support of the Israeli right, and would cloak him with the mantle of a Jewish hero when he comes before the court in July to face corruption charges a cloud that has figured heavily in his maneuvers. The Israeli left opposes the annexation, but Mr. Netanyahu's erstwhile political challenger, the former army chief of staff Benny Gantz, who fought the prime minister to a stalemate in three national elections, is now allied with Mr. Netanyahu in a unity government and has no veto over annexation. Mr. Trump has his own considerations. One of them is the evangelical right, which for reasons of its own zealously supports Israeli expansion, and is a critical part of the president's re election arithmetic. Mr. Trump would be most reluctant to buck this following by openly challenging Mr. Netanyahu, even if he was so inclined. But the administration has its own interest in slowing Mr. Netanyahu down, and that's the peace plan Mr. Trump's son in law, Jared Kushner, produced in January. It's a one sided plan that basically gives Israel all the lands Mr. Netanyahu wants to annex, and it was rejected by the Palestinians, who had no part in its creation. But the plan at least envisions an Israeli expansion in the context of a peace agreement in which the Palestinians receive a huge amount of financial aid and the promise of connection routes among their enclaves. A unilateral Israeli move would be an embarrassing repudiation of Mr. Trump's boasts that he has the key to a peace deal. And if Mr. Netanyahu really is thinking of his legacy, he should take seriously that Mr. Trump may not be president next year and he would be left holding a territorial claim nobody recognizes, not even Israel's closest and most important friend. While Mr. Biden, a strong supporter of Israel, has said he would not reduce America's security support for Israel, breaking with Mr. Netanyahu over the West Bank could seriously diminish America's traditionally bipartisan support for Israel. For what? For a symbolic gesture that would not make the settlements any more legitimate in international law than before, but would raise the threat of violence, undermine Israel's standing in the world, harm Israel's tentative alliances with Arab states, and further reduce the already thin chance of a peace settlement, which remains the only way to end this terrible conflict. 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 |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'AS YOU LIKE IT' at Classic Stage Company (in previews; opens on Sept. 28). No need to pack bug spray when you head to this Forest of Arden: John Doyle directs Shakespeare's comedy of love, redemption and shepherds, with music by Stephen Schwartz, here set in the Jazz Age. Hannah Cabell plays Rosalind, with Kyle Scatliffe as her amateur wrestler lover, Andre de Shields as Touchstone and the astounding Ellen Burstyn as the melancholy Jaques. 212 352 3101, classicstage.org 'A CLOCKWORK ORANGE' at New World Stages (in previews; opens on Sept. 25). If ultraviolence in the real world has left you eager for more, consider this London import, a stage version of the futuristic Anthony Burgess novel. In Alexandra Spencer Jones's production, Jonno Davies stars as a young man with some marked antisocial tendencies and a penchant for suspenders. 212 239 6200, aclockworkorangeplay.com 'KPOP' at A.R.T./New York Theaters (in previews; opens on Sept. 22). Have you ever dreamed of rock stardom and the adoration of millions of preteen girls? Then step inside this immersive musical, a collaboration of Ars Nova, Woodshed Collective and Ma Yi Theater Company. The director Teddy Bergman, the playwright Jason Kim and the composers Helen Park and Max Vernon take audiences inside a South Korean hit factory. 212 352 3101, arsnovanyc.com 'THE HOME PLACE' at the Irish Repertory Theater (previews start on Sept. 27; opens on Oct. 10). Brian Friel's drama set in 1870s County Donegal, just before the land war, settles in at the Irish Rep, directed by Charlotte Moore. Two cousins, one a kindly landowner, the other a scientist with some troubling theories about race, find themselves enmeshed in a debate about property and power. 212 727 2737, irishrep.org 'THE LAST MATCH' at the Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (previews start on Sept. 28; opens on Oct. 24). Theater anyone? In Anna Ziegler's play, a meditation on mortality, an all American on the verge of retirement and a younger Russian challenger face each other across a U.S. Open court. Gaye Taylor Upchurch's production stars Wilson Bethel and Alex Mickiewicz, with Zoe Winters and Natalia Payne as the women in the stands. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'MARY JANE' at New York Theater Workshop (in previews; opens on Sept. 25). Amy Herzog, a playwright with a genius for character and a sense of moral urgency, reunites with the director Anne Kauffman for this new work. Carrie Coon ("Fargo," "The Leftovers") stars as a single mother caring for a sick child. With Liza Colon Zayas, Danaya Esperanza, Susan Pourfar and Brenda Wehle. 212 460 5475, nytw.org ' MY LINGERIE PLAY 2017: INSTALLATION 9: THE CONCERT AND CALL TO ARMS!!!!!!!! THE FINAL INSTALLATION"' at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater (previews start on Sept. 27; opens on Oct. 9). Diana Oh's unmentionables have given her a lot to talk about and inspired eight previous installations. In this culminating event at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, co directed by Orion Stephanie Johnstone, Ms. Oh will detail her intimate history of intimates, finding the political in the very personal. 866 811 4111, rattlestick.org 'TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS' at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on Oct. 2). Nia Vardalos's adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's "Dear Sugar" advice columns sweetens another Public Theater season. Last December, Ben Brantley called it "a handkerchief soaking meditation on pain, loss, hope and forgiveness." Thomas Kail directs a cast including Ms. Vardalos, with Hubert Point Du Jour and Natalie Woolams Torres as the advised. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'TORCH SONG' at Second Stage at the Tony Kiser Theater (previews start on Sept. 26; opens on Oct. 19). More than 30 years later after this play's first production, a nice Jewish boy is still trying to find a nice man. Michael Urie stars in Harvey Fierstein's play about a drag queen longing for a husband, children and the love of his mother (Mercedes Ruehl). Moises Kaufman directs the balladry. 212 246 4422, 2st.com 'THE TREASURER' at Playwrights Horizons (in previews; opens on Sept. 26). Max Posner's last play, the sibling comedy "Judy," was set a couple of decades in the future. He bounds back to the present with this tale of an aging, free spending mother and the grown son assigned to keep control of her purse strings. David Cromer directs Deanna Dunagan and Peter Friedman. 212 279 4200, phnyc.org 'FOR PETER PAN ON HER 70TH BIRTHDAY' at Playwrights Horizons (in previews; closes on Oct. 1). Sarah Ruhl's play about a troupe of aging siblings flies off to Neverland. Though Jesse Green praised some aspects of Les Waters's production, he wrote that for a work like this to fly, it "needs a great deal more fairy dust than it gets here." 212 279 4200, playwrightshorizons.org 'INANIMATE' at the Flea Theater (closes on Sept. 24). Nick Robideau's play about Erica a young woman who discovers her "objectum sexuality," or objectophilia, and a wholehearted attachment to the sign at the local Dairy Queen finishes its run. Ben Brantley praised this play, which also brings to life the objects of Erica's affection, as a "sly and very likable comedy." 212 352 3101, theflea.org 'THE SUITCASE UNDER THE BED' at the Beckett Theater (closes on Sept. 30). Now that the Mint has staged them, these four short plays by the Irish writer Teresa Deevy (1894 1963) likely won't be going back into the luggage in which they were discovered. Andy Webster praised Jonathan Bank's direction, writing, "He clearly adores Deevy, and ultimately so will the audience." 212 239 6200, minttheater.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A full floor aerie on the 77th floor of One57, where the city's two most expensive single family residences were purchased recently, sold to a mystery European buyer for 47,782,186.53 and was the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records. The monthly charges for the sponsor unit, No. 77, with four bedrooms and five and a half baths spread out over 6,240 square feet at 157 West 57th Street, are 11,806. The apartment is just above the "Winter Garden" duplex penthouse, which sold for 91.5 million last month the city's second priciest sale to a group led by the hedge fund mogul William A. Ackman. The most expensive transaction in the city was a 10,923 square foot duplex penthouse on the building's top two floors that sold late last year for 100.47 million and closed in January. The buyer of No. 77, identified in city documents as Unit 58A Acquisition Corp., went into contract on the apartment in January 2012, but did not close on the all cash deal until recently because he was having custom upgrades installed, according to his broker, Robert Dvorin, who made the sale while at Town Residential and is now at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Wendy Maitland, the president of sales at Town, also oversaw the transaction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. This week, Farhad and Mike also talked with Nellie Bowles, who just joined The Times as a technology reporter. Farhad: Good morning, Mike! I got back from vacation in Hawaii this past week. I ate at the famous doughnut place and passed out, and then I ate at that famous shave ice place and also passed out. I didn't have much poke, though. I bet you're disappointed in me. Mike: Honestly, I am disappointed in you, but not for the reasons you think. I'm mostly hurt you didn't bring me back a souvenir like I asked. Did I not specify 15 pounds of macadamia nuts? Farhad: Well, next time. Anyway, speaking of people who are disappointed in me, we have a special guest today Nellie Bowles, who just joined The Times to cover digital culture. Nellie, I'm thrilled you could chat with us today. Here is the basic drill: We go over the big tech news of the week, make fun of Mike, and then make fun of Mike some more. Sound good? Farhad: Great. O.K., here goes. So, let's start with Snap. Remember Snap? It made an app that teenagers really loved. They loved it so much people thought it would be the next Facebook. But yeah, no, that didn't happen. This week Snap's stock price plummeted after Morgan Stanley, the bank that led the company's recent I.P.O., issued a report downgrading the company's shares. Now Snap is trading under 17, its I.P.O. price. Mike: Talk about a knife in the back. Has Brian Nowak, the Morgan Stanley analyst who wrote the report, not heard of Snapchat's viral dancing hot dog? Billion dollar idea right there. Farhad: What's ailing Snap? Facebook, obviously. The social giant has copied basically all of Snapchat's best features. Instagram, also owned by Facebook, seems to have kneecapped Snapchat's growth. Also, advertisers don't seem to be warming to Snap's platform. What can they do? Is Snap done? Mike: I don't think it's fair to count them out entirely. Snapchat still has a lot of highly engaged users who love the product, and the company is moving into augmented reality, via the aforementioned Mr. Hotdog. Nellie: People seem to have overestimated how loyal kids are to apps and how impactful stunts like Spectacles are. But mostly I think Snap out cooled itself. They designed the app to be explained by word of mouth, so olds like me couldn't use it very easily. The only snap I've snapped was me asking if I was snapping. That said, it's worrisome how fast Facebook consumed this company, its last real social competition. And it's a reminder that we may still be seeing only the beginning of Facebook's reign. Mike: Honestly, I feel it's an issue of expectations. The bankers compared Snap to Facebook during the I.P.O. roadshow. But it's nowhere near the scale of Facebook, nor will it ever be. That was what Twitter's bankers did during its I.P.O., and look how well that worked for them in the long term. My advice, which I take to heart: Underpromise, overdeliver. Snapchat seemed to do the opposite. Farhad: In other news, the internet celebrated two big events this week. First, Prime Day. On this special day of grace, Peace Be Upon Jeff, we pledged our honor and devotion to Amazon. I picked up a few deals, and Amazon said it rang up huge sales of its Echo devices. Did you two find any bargains? Mike: Um, yeah. I went a little wild and bought a printer and a PlayStation. Paper documents and killing bad guys are two very important things to me. Thankfully, I did not buy 100 knockoff iPhone cables like everyone else. Farhad: The day after Prime Day, in an odd bit of timing, the internet moved on to the "Day of Action" a huge online protest in opposition of the Federal Communication Commission's plan to undo so called net neutrality regulations. Lots of internet companies altered their sites to show off the horrors they say will come when the government scraps rules meant to prevent broadband companies from blocking or throttling certain sites online. The protests were big, but from my view, they weren't really internet stopping; I'd doubt if they changed much of the politics of the issue. Am I wrong? Nellie: Never thought I'd say this, but you're completely right. Net neutrality isn't a charismatic issue, and it's difficult to galvanize folks to march for internet speed. Net neutrality rules could be scrapped before most people know what they were in the first place. Mike: Where is John Oliver and his viral video team when you need him? I agree with Nellie, it seems like a done deal, and quite tough to get into the weeds with folks in a way that would make them care about the issue either way. . I guess it's time to prepare to watch Netflix originals with the spinning wheel of latency interrupting me every so often? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Lawrence Tesler using an Alto personal computer sometime during his tenure at Xerox in the 1970s. As a young researcher at Xerox, he helped to develop today's style of computer interaction Lawrence Tesler, a pioneering computer scientist who helped make it easier for users to interact with computers, whether cutting and pasting text or selecting text by dragging a cursor through it, died on Sunday at his home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 74. The cause was not known, his wife, Colleen Barton, said, but in recent years he had suffered the effects of an earlier bicycle accident. Mr. Tesler worked at a number of Silicon Valley's most important companies, including Apple under Steve Jobs. But it was as a young researcher for Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that he did his most significant work: helping to develop today's style of computer interaction based on a graphical desktop metaphor and a mouse. Early in his Xerox career (he began there in 1973), Mr. Tesler and another researcher, Tim Mott, developed a program known as Gypsy, which did away with the restrictive modes that had made text editing complicated. For example, until Gypsy, most text editing software had one mode for entering text and another for editing it. Mr. Tesler was passionate about simplifying interaction with computers. At Apple he was responsible for the idea that a computer mouse should have only one button. For many years the license plate on his car read, "NO MODES." His first breakthrough at Xerox PARC came when he took a newly hired secretary, sat her in front of a blank computer monitor and took notes while she described how she would prefer to compose documents with a computer. She proceeded to describe a very simple system, which Mr. Tesler then implemented with Mr. Mott. The Gypsy program offered such innovations as the "cut and paste" analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as "what you see is what you get" printing (or WYSIWYG), a phrase Mr. Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output. And Gypsy brought to fruition the idea of opening a computer file by simply clicking on a screen icon while pointing at it with the mouse cursor. Before that, files had to be opened by typing the file name into a command line. "At Xerox he pushed a lot for things to be simpler in ways that would broaden the base of users," said David Liddle, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist who worked with Mr. Tesler at Xerox PARC. "He was always quite focused on users who weren't also Ph.D.s in computer science." Mr. Tesler later joined a small team of researchers run by Alan Kay, a visionary computer scientist who had pioneered the idea of a so called Dynabook, which would become the inspiration for today's laptop computers. The group was developing a software environment called Smalltalk, and Mr. Tesler developed a system for searching for software components, which he named the browser. "He can be hailed as one of the true pioneers of many important aspects of personal computing," Mr. Kay said. After attending a demonstration of the Altair, an early hobbyist personal computer, at a Palo Alto hotel in 1975, Mr. Tesler returned to PARC to alert his colleagues to the arrival of low cost systems. His warnings were largely ignored. He continued to press for less costly computers. In 1978, with Adele Goldberg and Douglas Fairbairn, he designed a portable machine called NoteTaker, a forerunner of luggable computers like the Osborne, Kaypro and Compaq machines of the early 1980s. But Xerox declined to commercialize the NoteTaker; only a few prototypes were made. It was Mr. Tesler who gave Mr. Jobs the celebrated demonstration of the Xerox Alto computer and the Smalltalk software system that would come to influence the design of Apple's Lisa personal computer and then its Macintosh. Mr. Tesler left Xerox to work for Mr. Jobs at Apple in 1980. "The questions the Apple people were asking totally blew me away," Mr. Tesler was quoted as saying in a profile that appeared in IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, in 2005. "They were the kind of questions Xerox executives should have been asking but didn't." In addition to helping develop the Lisa and Macintosh, Mr. Tesler founded and ran Apple's Advanced Technology Group, after which he led the design of the Newton hand held computer, although that proved unsuccessful. The group also created much of the technology that would become the Wi Fi wireless standard, and Mr. Tesler led an Apple joint venture with two other companies that created Acorn RISC Machine, a partnership intended to provide a microprocessor for the Newton. Although Apple eventually sold off its holdings in that venture, it would come to dominate the market for the chips that power today's smartphones. The chip architecture created by the partnership is today the most widely used microprocessor design in the world. Mr. Tesler left Apple in 1997 for a start up and later went on to work for both Amazon and Yahoo. He left Yahoo in 2008 and spent a year as a product fellow at 23andMe, the genetics information company. He was most recently an independent consultant. Lawrence Gordon Tesler was born in the Bronx on April 24, 1945, to Isidore and Muriel (Krechmer) Tesler. His father was an anesthesiologist. In 1960, while attending the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Tesler developed a new method of generating prime numbers. He showed it to one of his teachers, who was impressed. As Mr. Tesler later recalled, he told the teacher that the method was a formula; the teacher responded, "No, it's not really a formula, it's an algorithm, and it can be implemented on a computer." The teacher said he would first get him a programming manual and then figure out where to find a computer. One day Mr. Tesler was sitting in the school cafeteria reading his manual, which offered instructions on how to program an IBM 650 mainframe in the most low level, arcane machine programming language. A student walked up to Mr. Tesler and asked, "What are you doing with that?" The other student alerted Mr. Tesler to a program at Columbia University, which gave high school students programming time. He was able to use a university computer for a half hour each week, teaching himself to program before he got to college. He attended Stanford, graduating in 1965 with a degree in mathematics. While there, he became involved in a number of early projects that prefigured personal computing. Mr. Tesler had early access to a computer known as a LINC when he worked as a student programmer for the Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg. The LINC, designed by the M.I.T. physicist Wesley A. Clark, is believed by many computer historians to have been the first true personal computer. Mr. Tesler's first start up venture was a programming consulting company located in a shopping mall next to the Stanford campus. He also used a mainframe computer to build a system to permit the student rooting section at Stanford football games to program elaborate card stunts. It was, Mr. Kay said, a forerunner to the ways in which modern graphical displays would be programmed. In 1969, with two other scientists at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Mr. Tesler created a design for a small computer and proposed it to the calculator company Friden. Although intrigued, the company declined to pursue the idea. Mr. Tesler left computing for a short while after that and moved to an Oregon commune with his daughter from a short lived marriage. Lack of work led him back to the Bay Area, where he would join Xerox PARC. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In this era of global warming, when there is extreme weather like the recent heavy rains that led to flooding in Paris and other parts of France and Germany, the question inevitably comes up: Did climate change play a role? Not too long ago, the immediate response from most climate scientists would be that while it is generally accepted that global warming will lead to more rain because warmer air can hold more moisture, it is difficult to attribute any one event to climate change. A more detailed answer, perhaps with a definitive conclusion, would come months or years later in a paper published in a peer reviewed journal. But scientists in Europe have much more rapidly assessed the role of climate change in the European floods, when parts of France got a month's worth of rain in a few days in late May. Their conclusion is that climate change made the flooding in France far more likely. But they were unable to draw a conclusion about Germany. The researchers, from a group called World Weather Attribution that is coordinated by the climate change research organization Climate Central, used similar approaches to the methods employed by longer peer reviewed studies. This includes analyzing historical temperatures for the region and running many computer simulations with regional climate models, including some in which it is assumed there is no human caused climate change. For an extreme three day rain event like the one that occurred in France, the scientists' best estimate was that global warming increased the probability of such a deluge by 80 percent for the Seine River basin (which includes Paris, where the river rose about 20 feet above normal) compared with a world where the climate was not changing. For the Loire River basin, to the south and west of Paris, the best estimate was a 90 percent greater likelihood. For both regions, the researchers said, they had high confidence that there was at least a 40 percent greater likelihood of a three day deluge because of climate change. In Germany, even though the rains were caused by the same meteorological conditions essentially a zone of low pressure air that stalled over the region the rains tended to come in shorter, more intense bursts, said Heidi Cullen, chief scientist at Climate Central. So in their analysis of Germany, the researchers looked at the likelihood of one day extreme events, but their analysis found no consistent link to climate change. The study by the team, which includes scientists from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Oxford University and other institutions, will soon be submitted for peer review and eventual publication in a journal. But the group has embraced this rapid response approach as a way of increasing public awareness of the effects of climate change. "After every event like this, there's a lot of speculation in the media about whether climate change is responsible," Dr. Cullen said. "The scientific community has the responsibility, and the tools, to analyze these things objectively." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
SAN FRANCISCO No one knows what the future of self driving cars will look like, or how long it will take to get there. But every major player in the field is striking partnerships to be ready for the day when autonomous vehicles finally become mainstream. That includes Uber, which on Monday announced a new deal with Volvo. Under the agreement, Uber plans to purchase as many as 24,000 self driving Volvos once the technology is production ready, putting the vehicles into its extensive ride hailing network. "Everything we're doing right now is about building autonomous vehicles at scale," Jeff Miller, Uber's head of automotive alliances, said in an interview. "We don't know exactly how an autonomous world will look. But we know that we want to be the platform that's at the center of it, from a ride sharing standpoint." The deal is an extension of an agreement Uber made with Volvo nearly two years ago, when the ride hailing company started its research and development efforts in autonomous vehicles in earnest. Uber has worked with third party component manufacturers to build software and hardware for driverless cars, then worked closely with Volvo to outfit the automaker's XC90 vehicles with the technology. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"I don't think there really is a right time to start a business," Carter Altman said Monday before his presentation at the kickoff of New York Fashion Week: Men's, an event that nowadays barely merits the grandiose name. For a start, it covers little more than three days, features fewer designers than in any recent season (under two dozen) and has a single headline designer in Todd Snyder. Mr. Snyder, whatever his considerable chops, is hardly the household name Tom Ford is. And Mr. Ford, who is as of Jan. 1 the chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, the group that schedules and oversees the twice yearly gathering, will hold his fashion show on Friday in Los Angeles. Mr. Altman has a point, though. The time is never optimal for a fashion start up in a town like New York, with its astronomical rents, dwindling ranks of wholesale suppliers and a garment district that big tech swallowed whole. Seen through that lens, that independent designers would still elect to show here says as much perhaps about native pluck as skill, and maybe also a kind of indomitable naivete. Mr. Altman, whose label is called Carter Young, is 21 and newly graduated from New York University. Though he has no retail clients yet (his work sells online at carteryoung.shop), what he does have is talent and a precociously developed viewpoint. For his presentation at New York Men's Day, he edited his ideas down to a tight grouping of deceptively simple and durable stuff: a cropped and boxy patch pocket sports coat, a slightly off kilter denim barn jacket, some letter carrier trousers, a coat upcycled from the same fabric used to make uniforms for the California Highway Patrol. There was a so called vegan suit, rough cowhide belts intended to shred over time and get gnarly, and an Eisenhower jacket and shirting embroidered with silhouettes drawn from the artist Kristin Beaver's "Sidekick Portraits." Ms. Beaver's images were first created in the decaying, yeasty and intensely creative city that was the ruined Detroit of the early aughts. The loft building where New York Fashion Week: Men's takes place is the kind of rough industrial holdout that abounded in Manhattan in the 1970s, when areas of this city looked an awful lot like the ruin Detroit would soon become. That loft building is now hemmed on all sides by glass walled skyscrapers that form the Hudson Yards development. Although the gleaming cynical hulk of that mall was just across 10th Avenue from the loft building, it felt light years away from the raw aspirations on view during New York Men's Day. In reality, there may be few commercial prospects available in a landscape dominated by malls and mass chain retailers for independent designers like Pablo Leon, a young Mexican American designer whose family members worked as undocumented field hands in California's Central Valley. "As Mexicans we had to be invisible there," Mr. Leon said before a show that, as in the work of Willy Chavarria, a powerful Mexican American designer also from Fresno, fused hothouse theatricality, ruffs and surplices and other ecclesiastical elements with some sartorial markers of gang culture. "I was invisible being brown and being gay. The problem is how to be seen." The customary mobs turned out for New York Men's Day in their usual wonderful glad rags and following them, the predictable packs of street style photographers. Often it is hard to say which is more compelling, what's on the runway and what drifts in off the street. Just as challenging is imagining what will become of the mountains of images captured of people like Paris Warren, who walked eastward on Monday from 10th Avenue into a throng of professional shutterbugs and at least one reporter wielding his iPhone camera. What was it we were each so eager to document? For me, it was the droll way Mr. Warren, a creative director and stylist, both updated and queered the look of macho '70s blaxploitation film stars the leather jacket with floppy lapels stitched in white, the snuggly mock turtleneck and the snugly knotted durag made from an Hermes scarf. Moments like that generate their own brand of ephemeral magic. You want to bottle it just as you hope someone may find a way to harness the reverberant energy of labels like Official Rebrand, whose collection was so rife with wacko references graffiti, sloganeering, kiddie sketches and femme butch dualities that if the designer, MI Leggett, omitted the kitchen sink it must have been an oversight. You hope that the Timo Weiland, Donna Kang and Alan Eckstein, the talents behind the label Timo Weiland, can finally make a paying career out of plumbing the depths of their youthful nerdiness. ("I played piano and had my hair permed into an Asian Afro when I was a kid," Ms. Kang explained.) You want their assortment of separates in Necco wafer colors and fireplug red suits to wear for shocking the judge at your pretrial hearing to find their way into the wider world. You wish for someone like Aaron Potts, who started APOTTS to "fill my life with beauty, creativity, passion, direction and people I love and who inspire me" after being laid off from a job he loathed, he said, to connect with backers able to support a vision for a fashion future in which people dress, if they care to, like a cross between a Mormon Elder and a roadie for Sun Ra's Arkestra. In a recent Instagram post promoting an evening discussion on "The Search for Signs of Intelligence in Men's Fashion" (held at the CORE Club, that YMCA for the 1 percent), the Airmail columnist Richard David Story decried what he judged to be the sorry state of men's fashion and the sheer madness of what he sees on the runways of New York, Milan, Paris and also the pages of The New York Times. Conundrums and outrages of the sort that fuss Mr. Story are at the heart of events, however uncommercial, like New York Fashion Week: Men's, and of what remains of fashion creativity in this town. In reality, there is no shortage of opportunities for men to drag up in three piece suits or stuffy French cuff shirts or the general attire of "Businessman Realness." But why bother? For all that ails it, New York fashion, including that for men, could use a healthy a dose of "Funny Face" medicine. "Banish the black!" as Kay Thompson famously intoned in that 1957 cinema classic. "Think pink!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
An earlier installation of backpacks left by migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. The backpacks are exhibited in the show "State of Exception/Estado de Excepcion." Strong political art is hard to make. So when it turns up, it's worth a look. In an era of "great, great walls" and "bad hombres," an exhibition called "State of Exception/Estado de Excepcion" at Parsons School of Design fills the bill. It starts with a kind of special effects installation, a video of what looks like fast flowing river projected across the gallery floor and surging toward you. You walk over it to enter the show, and the shuddering current makes you feel woozy, as if you don't quite know what your feet are doing. The image turns out not to be of water but of human debris castoff clothing, backpacks, water bottles seemingly swept along by some unseen force. From wall labels, you learn the source of the stuff. It all belonged to illegal immigrants entering the United States from Mexico through the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, one of the hottest, driest stretches of land North America. The hazards of trying to cross it are potentially deadly: heat stroke, (summer temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees), dehydration and attacks robberies, rapes, murders by bandits and border patrols. From 2001 to 2009, at least 2,500 migrants died, and probably many more whose bodies vanished. The statistic comes from the 2015 book the show is based on, "The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail," written by the American anthropologist Jason De Leon, with photos by Michael Wells. An assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Mr. De Leon is founding director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research initiative that studies clandestine and unauthorized desert traffic between Mexico and the United States, and collects its material traces. Migrants have varied reasons some criminal, but a vast majority not for heading north: to escape poverty and political oppression, or to join family members, or simply to try to upgrade their lives. But why would anyone try to cross here, through what's known to be a natural killing field? Mr. De Leon suggests that decision is forcibly determined by politics. In the 1990s, the United States cracked down hard on immigration from Mexico. The Clinton administration beefed up on patrols and erected walls near border towns like Nogales to create, at least in the public eye, the impression that the problem was contained, at a time when Republicans in Congress were preparing immigration control legislation. A result of this show of power, in the opinion of Mr. De Leon and other advocates for immigrants, was to push determined border crossers out into rural areas where walls ended and the desert began. He characterizes this policing strategy, known as "prevention through deterrence," as a form of passive violence, funneling migrants into inhospitable terrain, where nature would do the dirty work of finishing some of them off. The Parsons exhibition, organized by Amanda Krugliak, an artist, and Richard Barnes, a photographer, with help from Mr. De Leon, is a document and an indictment of that policy. Mr. De Leon's argument is not one shared by the many Americans who approve of deterrents to illegal immigration. A record number of illegal immigrants some three million were deported during the Obama administration, and nearly two million by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The Trump administration last month released a far reaching plan to arrest and deport vast numbers of unauthorized immigrants. Dozens of small personal items are preserved in photographs: eyeglasses, dentures, medication vials, toiletries, letters, rosaries, prayer cards with pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, all stored in transparent plastic bags. The objects that were found with the bodies of desert border crossers and are part of an archive kept by a nonprofit group in Tucson called the Colibri Center for Human Rights formed to locate the next of kin of dead or missing migrants. In 2012, on a Sonoran research trip, Mr. De Leon and a group of his students came across the body of a young, and at the time, unidentified Ecuadorean woman who had tried to make the crossing and failed. In his book he writes about the wrenching effects of the discovery, particularly on his students, some of whom, in her memory, later tattooed the GPS coordinates of the spot where she was found onto their bodies. Mr. Barnes photographed the tattoos, and the bagged personal effects, and the images in show's video. You could debate whether the resulting images qualify as art or as scientific data. My own definition of art is broad. Is the material in question interesting to look at? Has it been made interesting to think about? Is it being shown in an "art" context? If the answers are "yes," then art is what you have. And it can be particularly powerful when it coincides with red alert political realities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war, "Funny Boy" centers on a protagonist who is effectively fighting on two fronts. Arjie played by Arush Nand as a boy when the movie begins in 1974 and by Brandon Ingram around the start of the war in 1983 is regarded as "funny" because he likes to wear makeup and doesn't like sports. As he soon realizes, he is gay in a country that criminalizes homosexuality. He's also Tamil, which means he belongs to Sri Lanka's ethnic minority, although his family's wealth insulates it to a degree from the toll of the violence roiling between the Tamils and the majority Sinhalese. When Arjie is a boy, his father (Ali Kazmi) pushes him to avoid "girly things" and instead work on his cricket. But Arjie is encouraged by a cool aunt, Radha (Agam Darshi), who helps cultivate his interest in theater and teaches him to put nail polish on his toes where no one can see. In what becomes a motif, the director, Deepa Mehta, cuts to shots of older Arjie sitting in his younger's self's place at crucial moments like this one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (May 14 July 7). "Giselle" was a smash hit from the moment it had its premiere in Paris in 1841, and more than a century and a half later, it remains the quintessential Romantic ballet. Performances of "Giselle" (Monday through May 19) open American Ballet Theater's spring season with seven of the company's principal ballerinas trading off in the title role of the peasant girl who is deceived by a nobleman in disguise but nevertheless defends him against the wilis, those famously fierce, vengeful sirens. 212 362 6000, metopera.org MILKA DJORDJEVICH at the Chocolate Factory (May 16 19, 8 p.m., through May 26). In 1965, Yvonne Rainer introduced her "No Manifesto," which argued against spectacle and style in performance and helped usher in the genre known as postmodern dance. In "Anthem," Ms. Djordevich pushes back against those edicts by embracing "theatricality, virtuosity and sass" through a mix of various dance styles and repetitive movements that grow in complexity before dissolving in chaos. The goal is, in part, to reclaim female sexuality in dance, which the choreographer's four dancers do while surrounded on all sides by the audience. 718 482 7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org FLAMENCO VIVO CARLOTA SANTANA at BAM Fisher (May 15 18, 7:30 p.m., through May 20). To celebrate its 35th anniversary, this New York based flamenco company is giving itself a gift: a new work by the great flamenco dancer and innovator Belen Maya. That work, for six dancers, is called "Mujeres Valientes" ("Brave Women"), and it honors the courage of Latin American women fighting injustice over the centuries, particularly the 17th century poet and philosopher Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and the 19th century revolutionary Manuela Saenz. In addition, Flamenco Vivo presents two rising choreographers from Spain, Jose Maldonado and Guadalupe Torres, who each perform a solo. 718 636 4100, bam.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The United Nations Children's Fund has made a deal with six vaccine manufacturers that will cut in half the price of a shot that protects children against five diseases, the fund announced last week. The deal will mean three years' worth of vaccine at an average price of 84 cents a dose; buyers currently pay about 1.84, according to Unicef. Unicef will buy about 450 million doses for 80 of the world's poorest countries. Low and middle income countries purchasing vaccine for themselves can also qualify for the lower prices, Unicef said. The vaccine protects against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae Type B (known as Hib). Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, estimates that the shots will prevent more than five million deaths by the year 2020. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A type of breast implant linked to a rare cancer can still be sold in the United States, even though it has been banned in many other countries, the Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday. The implants, which have a textured or slightly roughened surface, as opposed to a smooth covering, have been associated with a cancer of the immune system called anaplastic large cell lymphoma. The vast majority of the cases have occurred in women with textured implants, mainly those made by Allergan. But the F.D.A. said that the risk, though increased, was still low, and that there was not enough data to justify banning the implants. It also said that in some patients with lymphoma, the type of implant was not known, so smooth implants could not be ruled out as a cause. Dr. Mark Clemens, a plastic surgeon and expert on the lymphoma at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said the disease was linked exclusively to textured implants. He said there were no known cases of the lymphoma anywhere in the world in a woman who had only smooth implants. Some cases had occurred in women with smooth implants, he said, but they previously had textured ones. He described the F.D.A. as "erring on the side of being conservative." Worldwide, he said, there have been more than 600 cases of the lymphoma, and about 20 deaths. In the United States, there were 265 reported cases. About 10 million women around the world have implants, which are used for cosmetic breast enlargement, or for reconstruction after mastectomy for breast cancer. Only about 10 percent of the implants used in the United States are textured, but in other countries the figure can be as high as 80 percent. The agency's announcement followed a two day public hearing in March, in which researchers and implant makers presented data, and women described a number of illnesses they developed after getting implants, including the lymphoma. The F.D.A. statement acknowledged that in some women, implants may be associated with systemic problems called "breast implant illness," which includes a constellation of symptoms like chronic fatigue, pain, cognitive and immune problems. It was issued by principal deputy commissioner, Dr. Amy Abernethy, and Dr. Jeff Shuren, director of the center for devices and radiological health. "We believe women considering a breast implant should be aware of these risks." Agency officials pledged to take action to make sure that both women and health care providers are better informed about the risks. The statement said the F.D.A. would consider requiring a black box warning its most serious for the products and requiring that doctors go over a checklist with patients describing implant risks as part of the informed consent process before surgery. But the agency did not commit to these actions. Jamee Cook, co founder of Breast Implant Victim Advocacy, said she was disappointed that textured implants will not be banned. But she welcomed the F.D.A.'s proposals to ensure patients are better informed about the potential risks of breast implants. "There is information in the manufacturer's pamphlet, but it is 40 or 60 pages long," Ms. Cook said. "Pulling it all together on a piece of paper that the patient has to actually sit here and read and check off all these boxes, and then, if she still wants those implants, power to her, that's her decision as a patient. But we want them to have all that data readily available before making the decision." Agency officials also said they would no longer allow manufacturers to file summary reports that include dozens or more adverse events associated with breast implants or other medical devices that are less accessible than those filed in the public agency database called MAUDE (Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience). But Madris Tomes, a former program manager for the agency who founded a company called Device Events, said manufacturers could still use a new system of summary reporting put in place in August, called the Voluntary Malfunction Summary Reporting Program. "I feel like this change is just semantics," Ms. Tomes said. "What will keep manufacturers from duplicating their behavior and doing the same thing they were doing before, filing deaths and injuries in summaries so they aren't viewable to the public?" A spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said that breast implants would not be part of the new summary reporting system. Raylene Hollrah, who was treated for the implant associated lymphoma in 2013, said she was disappointed that the F.D.A. did not impose a ban. She has become an advocate for patients, meeting with F.D.A. officials several times. At the hearing in March, she urged that the textured devices be removed from the market. She praised the agency's proposals to add warnings to implant labeling, and require doctors and patients to go over a checklist describing the risks. Noting that the agency's statement was not definitive, but used words like "would" and "could" for the actions proposed, Ms. Hollrah said, "It's progress, but we are going to be watching closely. I can guarantee that we are here now and will be here in the future to make sure this is followed up. We're not going away." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
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