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Early last month, amid protests against police violence in the wake of the George Floyd killing, the pink brick wall surrounding the cemetery of the original St. Patrick's Cathedral in NoLIta was spray painted with graffiti, while a storm window protecting one of the church's soaring stained glass windows was broken. None of the graffiti "BLM," "PIG EW" appeared anti Catholic, suggesting that those wielding the paint cans saw the wall primarily as a blank surface that could serve as a billboard for their cause. But the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, at Mott and Prince Streets, is no stranger to civil unrest, and that very wall played a central role in deterring violence two centuries ago, when very different antagonisms roiled the city's streets. In 1836, the Gothic Revival cathedral was targeted by American born Protestant agitators who feared the building was a central command post from which the pope might move to take control of the Protestant dominated city. Alerted that the nativists planned to sack the cathedral, the church's Irish Catholic defenders posted armed sentries and cut holes for musket barrels in the recently built wall, which surrounded burial grounds both north and south of the building. As the "anti Catholic army" surged up the Bowery, "its advance scouts reported back on the fearsomeness of the Gaels' military preparations and the fortresslike impregnability of their walled cathedral," wrote the historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows in their book "Gotham." The nativists retreated. The stakes of the conflict rose as a hard nosed new archbishop, John Hughes, who was known as Dagger John because of the knifelike crucifix with which he adorned his signature, organized his community's immigrant filled ranks, endorsing political candidates and pressing for public funding of parochial schools. In 1844, the cathedral again came under threat after a pair of Catholic churches were torched in Philadelphia. As New York nativists planned a massive rally, the bishop warned that attacks on Catholic churches would be met in kind. Alluding to the Russians' scorched earth strategy in their war against the invading Napoleonic army, Hughes cautioned New York's nativist municipal officials that "if a single Catholic church were burned in New York, the city would become a Moscow." "This place is just breathing stories and lives long forgotten," Mr. Scorsese said of the church in "The Oratorio," a 2019 documentary. "And it was built by people who flocked here from all over the world to start a new life in this city, the city that for me has always been synonymous with America itself." This first St. Patrick's Cathedral was built from 1809 to 1815 after plans by the French born architect Joseph Francois Mangin, who codesigned New York's City Hall. The site, which had previously been used by St. Peter's Church as a graveyard, lay in what was still a rural area north of town. Constructed barely a generation after the 1784 repeal of the anti Catholic law in New York State, and primarily serving abjectly poor Irish immigrants, the cathedral was a bold assertion of Catholicism in the burgeoning, multiethnic metropolis. At 120 feet long and 80 feet wide, it was the largest church in the city and one of the earliest Gothic Revival buildings in the country. The north and south walls are made of rough gray fieldstone, each adorned with eight arched, stained glass windows divided into three sections and topped with elegant gothic tracery. The Mulberry Street facade, also primarily of fieldstone, has a pointed stained glass window as its centerpiece, flanked by four niches. The building was the seat of the archdiocese until the current St. Patrick's Cathedral was dedicated at 50th Street and Fifth Avenue in 1879. Old St. Pat's, as the first cathedral is colloquially known, then became a parish church until 2010, when it was declared a basilica by Pope Benedict XVI. Among those who helped finance the original cathedral was the remarkable figure of Pierre Toussaint, who has been declared "venerable" by the Catholic church, a step on the road to sainthood. Born a slave in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, Toussaint was brought to New York in 1797 by his French owners, whom he supported by serving as a kind of hairstylist to the stars tending the tresses of society women like Alexander Hamilton's granddaughter, Eliza Hamilton. Freed upon his owners' death, he bought the freedom of his future wife and his sister, and he became a leading supporter of the Prince Street orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity. He took Black orphans into his home and helped found the city's first school for Black children. Toussaint's hairdressing business made him wealthy and afforded him continual contact with the city's elite many of them Protestant from whom he raised considerable money to build the cathedral. In 1826, Toussaint sold tickets to a groundbreaking oratorio of sacred music at the cathedral to raise funds for a new Federal style orphanage at 32 Prince Street, which today houses church facilities and luxury condos. The Live Aid of its day, the oratorio was the biggest event of its kind New Yorkers had ever seen, featuring works by Joseph Haydn and George Frideric Handel. The main attraction was the first Italian opera company to perform in the Americas, a group led by Manuel Garcia and starring his daughter, Maria, who would become a celebrated diva under the name Madame Malibran. In 2004, Jared Lamenzo, an organist at Old St. Pat's and the basilica's future music director, unearthed this forgotten history at the New York Public Library, by way of a 1905 periodical. "I was ecstatic to find this program," Mr. Lamenzo said. "It was very important because it included this opera company featuring Madame Malibran, a superstar, who was all of 17 at the time." The organ was commissioned after the 1866 fire, a munificent investment that Mr. Lamenzo described as an inspiring statement to the church's Irish immigrants that "we're not going anywhere." As the neighborhood has evolved since then, the instrument has played at tens of thousands of weddings and masses attended by waves of Irish, Italian, Hispanic and Chinese immigrants, among others. But still the organ speaks with a voice resonant of the turbulent era in which it was created. "We call it a sound of solace and of joy there's a triumphant sound but there's also a sound of melancholy to it," Mr. Lamenzo said. "It was built after the Civil War, the archbishop Hughes had just died, and cholera is back in 1866." All these strains of history can be heard in the organ's breaths, he said, which produce "a visceral sound that can really get into you." 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 |
With the fate of a federal aid package suddenly thrown into doubt by President Trump, economic data on Wednesday showed why the help is so desperately needed. Personal income fell in November for the second straight month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, and consumer spending declined for the first time since April, as waning government aid and a worsening pandemic continued to take a toll on the U.S. economy. Separate data from the Labor Department showed that applications for unemployment benefits remained high last week and have risen since early November. Taken together, the reports are the latest evidence that the once promising economic recovery is sputtering. "We know that things are going to get worse," said Daniel Zhao, senior economist with the career site Glassdoor. "The question is how much worse." The answer depends heavily on two factors: the path of the pandemic, and the willingness of the federal government to provide help. Congress, after months of delays, acted on Monday, passing a 900 billion economic relief package that would provide aid to the unemployed, small businesses and most households. Most urgently, it would prevent millions from losing jobless benefits at the end of this week. But on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump demanded sweeping changes in the bill, throwing into doubt whether he would sign it. Mr. Trump's criticism of the relief effort, which he called a "disgrace," was that it was not generous enough: He called on Congress to provide 2,000 a person in direct payments to households, rather than the 600 included in the bill. Many economists view direct payments as among the least effective measures in the package, because much of the money would go to households that don't need it. But beyond the merits of any specific measure, the real risk is that Mr. Trump's comments could delay the aid, or derail it entirely. The data released Wednesday underscored the economy's fragility. Personal income fell 1.1 percent in November and is down 3.6 percent since July, as the loss of federal assistance more than offset rising income from wages and salaries. Consumer spending, which proved resilient in the summer and fall, declined 0.4 percent, an ominous sign for small businesses trying to survive the winter. Some of the biggest drops came in categories most exposed to the pandemic's impact: Spending on restaurants and hotels fell 3.8 percent in November, and spending on transportation, clothing and gasoline also declined. The pullback in spending is spilling over into the labor market. About 869,000 people filed new claims for state jobless benefits last week. That was down from a week earlier but is significantly above the level in early November, before a surge in coronavirus cases prompted a new round of layoffs in much of the country. A further 398,000 people filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, one of two federal programs to expand jobless benefits that were set to expire this month without congressional action. Some forecasters expect the December employment report to show a net loss of jobs. "The data just underscores the importance of fiscal support," said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist for Jefferies, an investment bank. Without it, she said, "there would be permanent damage, and it would probably be pretty significant." But the package may be enough to forestall the wave of evictions and small business failures that many economists warn is inevitable without it. And it should be enough to avoid a fall back into recession, which an increasing number of forecasters have said is likely without a quick injection of federal money. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The stakes are particularly high for the millions of Americans who would be left without an income during what could be some of the worst months of the pandemic. The relief package passed this week would extend two emergency programs that cover people who are left out of the regular unemployment system or whose benefits have expired. Roughly 14 million people were enrolled in the two programs in early December, according to the Labor Department, although fraud and data collection issues mean that figure may overstate the true total. But if the bill doesn't become law, the two programs will expire at the end of this week. That could push nearly five million people into poverty virtually overnight, according to an estimate from researchers at Columbia University. Carson Noel has spent 35 years in live events, working on cruise ships, on Broadway and at conventions across the country. The pandemic wiped it all away. "Literally over a one week period I watched the next six months of my work go away," he said. Mr. Noel, 51, has reached the end of both his regular unemployment payments and the emergency pandemic benefits, leaving him with no income. The bill passed by Congress would restore his benefits for at least a few weeks, but now those are in doubt. Even if the bill does become law, Mr. Noel said it was too late to rescue his finances. He has cut back his grocery bill and moved in with his sister in Tucson to save money, but even with his expenses pared to a minimum, his savings are largely depleted. "I'm good for about another month and then I'm in trouble," he said. "I'm just trying to survive at this point." Even if Mr. Trump does sign the relief package, millions of people could temporarily lose their benefits. By waiting until the last minute to act, legislators forced state labor departments which administer both state and federal unemployment benefits to prepare for the programs' end. Many states won't be able to reverse course in time to avoid a lapse in payments. State employment officials said they had been monitoring developments in Washington and were consulting with the federal Labor Department so that they could move quickly to reinstate benefits. But some affirmed that at least a brief lapse was inevitable. Any delay in signing the bill would make the lag even longer, said Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project. "Every day that this drags on, that's a day that it's hard to put food on the table for the kids, it's another bill missed, it's just another hardship," she said. Even as millions of jobless workers face the prospect of a bleak winter, however, some people and industries are in much stronger shape. Capital goods orders a measure of business investment rose in November, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, a sign that big corporations remain confident even as restaurants and other small businesses struggle to survive. In addition, household savings are more than 800 billion higher than in February, before the pandemic upended the economy. Economists said those savings were most likely concentrated among white collar workers who have held on to their jobs while saving money by cutting back spending on travel and leisure. Many have also benefited from the soaring stock market. High savings levels are one reason that many economists have been skeptical of the need for another round of direct aid to households, let alone the 2,000 a person demanded by Mr. Trump. Such payments might help people who have kept jobs but lost hours or income. But much of the money would go to households that are financially secure, and would most likely be saved rather than spent. Those savings could help fuel a rapid recovery once coronavirus vaccines are widely available, allowing Americans to resume traveling, attending concerts and gathering in bars and restaurants. But that prospect only underscores the need for aid to ensure that businesses make it until then. "Just a few months down the road, things will be dramatically better, but that's not a reason to suffer in the meantime," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Economics. "It's just shooting yourself in the foot to allow businesses to go bust." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Ryan Seacrest, the master Hollywood multitasker, was named Kelly Ripa's "Live" co host on Monday, giving him a high profile platform and bringing stability to an important ABC morning show as it prepares for new competition. "It's making sure the show is in the right hands one day, eventually, I'm sure of it, I will retire," Ms. Ripa, 46, who has been a "Live" host since 2001, said by phone. "And Ryan Seacrest, who is a seamless broadcaster and a kind human being, is the one who can take this show into the future." Mr. Seacrest, 42, speaking on a separate call, heaped similar praise on Ms. Ripa. "She is so smooth and seamless and wonderfully clever and quick she's part of people's lives, in their living rooms and I want to come in as a friend of hers and as a friend to the audience," he said. The honeymoon period may be short. Starting in the fall, NBC will make a renewed push for ratings supremacy in the 9 a.m. Eastern time slot that Ms. Ripa and her various wingmen have long dominated. Setting up what promises to be one of the most intriguing battles in television, an NBC spokeswoman said Monday that Megyn Kelly's new daytime talk show would go up against Ms. Ripa and Mr. Seacrest. Cue the Kelly versus Kelly tabloid headlines. Ms. Kelly joined NBC in January after a successful ratings run at Fox News. "It's always interesting to me when people try to pit us against other shows," Ms. Ripa said, brushing aside a question about increased competition. "We don't compare ourselves to anybody because we are the only ones who do what we do." Mr. Seacrest joins Ms. Ripa one year after her previous "Live" co host, Michael Strahan, abruptly left for a job at "Good Morning America" on ABC. It was a badly bungled transition: Ms. Ripa felt blindsided by Mr. Strahan's negotiations with ABC, which were kept secret until the last minute, and she saw ABC as slighting her show in favor of another. She did not come to work for three days while ABC did damage control. ("Live" is produced and distributed by Disney ABC syndication.) But Ms. Ripa, who recently signed a new multiyear contract, said she had moved on from that drama. "Whatever brought us to here was worth it 1,000 times over," she said. "This is a great, great moment." At the start of Monday's show, Ms. Ripa and Mr. Seacrest walked on stage holding hands. "Nice to see you, partner," he said. "Hi, partner," she responded, giving him a noisy kiss on the cheek. Then they discussed her weekend flu and his mother's texting vocabulary, and he read from a list of first day dos and don'ts. "I'm a little bit nervous," he said. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "Live," with its celebrity chitchat, home viewer trivia segment and occasional burst of confetti, has been a brightly lit national television institution since 1988, when Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford held the coffee mugs. Little about the bouncy show will change with Mr. Seacrest's arrival, at least at first. "Live," after all, still wins its time period, attracting an average of 3.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen. "We welcome Ryan's energy, enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit and look forward to all the possibilities that the future holds," Ben Sherwood, president of the Disney ABC Television Group, said in a statement. "Live With Kelly and Ryan," as the syndicated series will now be called, represents an important career moment for Mr. Seacrest. The program returns him to regular broadcast television a year after the end of "American Idol," which he hosted on Fox for 15 seasons. A successful run on "Live" could give a boost to Mr. Seacrest's personal businesses, which include a clothing line, Ryan Seacrest Distinction, and a coming skin care line. (The show also brings him another rich payday. Terms of his multiyear contract were not disclosed, but it is easily worth millions of dollars annually.) For ABC, which has pursued Mr. Seacrest for years, landing him required a herculean behind the scenes effort to rearrange his Rubik's Cube of a schedule. Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, was even involved, Mr. Seacrest said. Consider, for instance, Mr. Seacrest's Los Angeles radio show, "On Air With Ryan Seacrest," which iHeartRadio broadcasts on weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific time. It will continue in its present form. But he will now work from a New York recording studio instead of a California one, at least for most of the year, and some segments during the radio program's first hour since it will overlap with "Live" will be taped. "Very few people have both the appeal and the work ethic to accomplish this," Robert W. Pittman, chief executive of iHeartMedia, said in a statement. "I'm pleased to see him return to another regular TV platform." Mr. Seacrest's "American Top 40," a nationally syndicated weekend radio show, will continue. So will his hosting duties for iHeart events and his affiliation with NBCUniversal's E channel. Mr. Seacrest hosts red carpet specials for E, and his Los Angeles based production company supplies the network with reality shows like "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." Among his other commitments: hosting "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve With Ryan Seacrest" for ABC, maintaining endorsement deals with Coca Cola and Ford, and various philanthropic and nonprofit pursuits. "The puzzle of it all is what took a long time to figure out," Mr. Seacrest said of the negotiations with ABC. "I love to do a lot, but I am very conscious of making sure that no commitment is less favorite than another. They all deserve full focus, full attention, full energy." In many ways, Mr. Seacrest and Ms. Ripa are mirror images. They have a peppy polish, teacup physiques and an ability harder than it looks to engage celebrities in entertaining conversation. They first got to know each other more than a decade ago at Walt Disney World in Florida, where they hosted a Christmas parade telecast. Who would land the "Live" hosting job had been a topic of hot speculation for the celebrity news media over the last year. Anderson Cooper? Mario Lopez? For Ms. Ripa, who had approval over who would sit beside her on "Live," Mr. Seacrest got the job the day in November when he appeared on the show as her guest co host and did an awkward cooking segment with his mother, Connie. (They made oyster casserole.) "It's like he didn't even know what a kitchen is," Ms. Ripa said. "And I thought: 'Did we finally find a flaw in this person? Innnteresting.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
More middle class than nearby areas with housing that's relatively moderately priced this Westchester County hamlet is "not a snooty place." As their family grew, Rachael and Robert Benz needed more space: another bedroom, a bigger kitchen. But rather than move, they chose to stay and renovate. Why? They loved the tight knit community of Hawthorne, where they live. Hawthorne is a 1.1 square mile hamlet in the Westchester County town of Mount Pleasant, where both Mr. and Ms. Benz grew up. Mr. Benz, 47, owns Robert Benz Trucking, in Hawthorne; Ms. Benz, 46, is a teaching assistant at Virginia Road Elementary School, in nearby White Plains. Back in 2004, a few months before proposing marriage, Mr. Benz paid 417,500 for their home, and the couple moved into the 1,900 square foot Tudor, built in 1942 on a quarter acre. The house had one bathroom and four bedrooms, two of which were on the second floor and were "tiny and really unusable," Ms. Benz said. They began renovating right away, redoing the kitchen, the bathroom, the windows and the roof. Before they had their children a daughter who is now 12 and a son who is 10 they converted the second floor into a master bedroom and bathroom. And last year, they went all out, knocking down walls, building a family and media room in the basement, doubling the size of the kitchen and adding a third bathroom, laundry room, mudroom and an attached two car garage. "We went from 1,900 to 2,800 square feet," Ms. Benz said, "and completely redesigned the flow of the house." While the Benzes appreciate Hawthorne's strong schools, as well as its convenient location in central Westchester and the easy commute to New York City, what has kept them in the hamlet are their neighbors: families with whom they have formed deep friendships. The Benzes aren't alone in that sentiment. Carl Fulgenzi, Mount Pleasant's supervisor, is a lifelong Hawthorne resident. He described the hamlet's population roughly 4,650, according to 2017 census estimates as a mix of working class and white collar commuters. "A lot of people have been here for many years," he said. "It still has a small town feel." Yet change is afoot. A master plan, Envision Mount Pleasant, is in development to revitalize the town's hamlets. In Hawthorne, Mr. Fulgenzi said, the goals include adding more sidewalks and creating a transit oriented area around the Metro North Railroad station. And over the next decade, a 1.2 billion, 80 acre bioscience and technology campus, known as the North 60, is expected to rise in the southwest corner of Hawthorne, complete with shops, restaurants and a hotel and conference center. Despite the anticipated jobs and growth this will bring, Mr. Fulgenzi said he isn't concerned about the effect on Hawthorne's character: "It's on the outskirts of the hamlet, so it shouldn't change the dynamic." Hawthorne lies between the hamlets of Thornwood, to the north, and Valhalla, to the south and east. It is bordered on the west by the Saw Mill River Parkway and bisected north south by the Taconic State Parkway and, farther south, by the Sprain Brook Parkway. There are commercial pockets on Elwood Avenue and Commerce Street, to the north, but the main business corridor is along Route 9A, to the west, with a car dealership, a Comfort Inn, a Home Depot and the Executive Diner. Hawthorne's residential neighborhoods are in the hamlet's northern half, where quiet streets are arranged in tree lined, sometimes hilly grids. Modest homes, many of them Cape Cods and ranches, sit side by side on small lots. Some, like the Benzes', have been remodeled or rebuilt. On a few cul de sacs to the west, houses are newer and lots slightly larger. James J. Timmings, Mount Pleasant's assessor, said Hawthorne has 1,350 single family homes and 55 multifamily homes. There are also 56 condominiums in the Chateau on the Hill complex. There are no cooperative or rental buildings. In contrast, she said, sales are sluggish for houses listed over 750,000. As for annual property taxes, Ms. Leite said they average around 15,000, which is below the 2018 Westchester median of 17,392, as calculated by ATTOM Data Solutions. According to data from the Hudson Gateway Multiple Listing Service, as of Nov. 4, there were 13 single family homes on the market, from a two bedroom, 863 square foot colonial, built in 1906 on 0.23 acres and listed for 439,999, to a five bedroom, 2,776 square foot house, built in 2019 and listed for 899,000. There was one two family house for sale, for 549,000, and one condominium, a 1,797 square foot two bedroom, for 545,000. The median sale price for a single family home during the 12 month period ending Nov. 4 was 539,500, down from 563,000 during the previous 12 months. For multifamily houses, the median was 552,500, up from 527,800 last year, and for condominiums, the median was 390,000, down from 425,000 last year. Hawthorne wasn't always known as Hawthorne. Around the time of Mount Pleasant's incorporation, in 1788, the area was called Hammond's Mills, after Staats Hammond, who owned a sawmill and gristmill where the Saw Mill River passed through. Three decades later the name was changed to Unionville, because it sounded more patriotic, said James W. Maxwell, Mount Pleasant's town historian. It wasn't until 1901 that the hamlet became Hawthorne, named for Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. That was the year Ms. Hawthorne, a.k.a Mother Mary Alphonsa, founded Rosary Hill Home to provide palliative care to terminally ill cancer patients. The facility, still operational, perches atop a hill, surrounded by lush grounds, in the northeast corner of the hamlet. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The final design for the Museum of Modern Art's 400 million expansion project, which will be officially unveiled on Thursday, is striking and provocative less because of its look than its implicit message: MoMA isn't modern yet. Under the new plans, the museum is moving away from discipline specific galleries that feature established artists many of them white men and toward more chronological and thematic approaches that include multiple formats as well as more minority and female artists. Museum executives also want to update and streamline their Midtown Manhattan building once and for all, after several iterations over the years. The most recent an 858 million reconfiguration in 2004 by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi resulted in congestion and overcrowding. The new design calls for more gallery space and a transformed main lobby, physical changes that, along with the re examination of art collections and diversity, represent an effort to open up MoMA and break down the boundaries defined by its founder, Alfred Barr. "It's a rethinking of how we were originally conceived," Glenn D. Lowry, the museum's director, said in an interview at MoMA. "We had created a narrative for ourselves that didn't allow for a more expansive reading of our own collection, to include generously artists from very different backgrounds." Whereas galleries were formerly labeled according to discipline architecture, photography now each floor will represent a rough chronological moment. A floor devoted to the 1920s and '30s, for example, will include photography as well as drawings, paintings and sculpture. "The bulk of the discussion has really been the shift from a system that in some ways was outdated photography, media into one in which we're thinking about the entire presentation as a whole," said Ann Temkin, the chief curator of paintings and sculpture. "Today we're saying: Of course there are many histories; the collection represents those many histories," she added. "Don't repeat the dogmatism of the past." At the same time, the museum will still have discipline specific galleries. "Reassurance and surprise," Mr. Lowry said. "You can have a suite of integrated spaces and discipline spaces together for a much richer experience." Curatorially, this kind of reconsideration has already been applied to recent exhibitions like "A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant Garde," which covered the period of artistic innovation between 1912 and 1935 and included projects in painting, drawing, sculpture, prints, graphic design and architecture. Similarly, a February rehanging of some of its permanent collection timed to President Trump's proposed travel ban included books, collage and prints. "It allows us to open the narrative from our own holdings," said Christophe Cherix, the chief curator of drawings and prints, "to tell different stories." And one of the current shows, "Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction," on view through Aug. 13, examines the achievements of female artists between the end of World War II and the start of the feminist movement through paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, textiles and ceramics. Holland Cotter, in his review of "Making Space" for The New York Times, said he was encouraged by the diversity of the artists in the exhibition, though "much of what's here is late in arriving at MoMA." "It's time to give the White Guys a rest," Mr. Cotter wrote. "They're looking tired." With more openness in mind, the project's architects Diller Scofidio Renfro in collaboration with Gensler have designed exhibition space, expanded by 30 percent, with a stack of flexible galleries of varying height to accommodate different types of shows and different media. The overall expansion, including the west side, which is under construction, also calls for transforming the main lobby into a light filled, two story space with easier circulation, including a walkway that links the new galleries to the renovated east side of the building. New street level galleries to the west one a dedicated projects room, the other a space for contemporary design will be open to the public free of charge (like the sculpture garden, which has been free since 2013). There will also be a new studio space for media, performance and film, and a sixth floor lounge with an outdoor terrace facing West 53rd Street. The MoMA Design and Bookstore will be lowered one level and visible from the street through a glass wall. The existing galleries on the second, fourth and fifth floors will eventually expand west through 53W53, the residential skyscraper designed by Jean Nouvel, adding 11,500 square feet per floor. MoMA said it is has raised the money to cover the construction (with the help of a 100 million donation from the media mogul David Geffen) and is now focused on building the endowment. Throughout the process, MoMA will remain open and continue to present exhibitions. The main lobby entrance on 53rd Street will close as of Sunday, and visitors will enter through the Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder Administrative Building to the east. The renovation is less about the grand architectural gesture than it is about making MoMA feel like a more responsive place. "I call it a cross between archaeology and surgery," said Elizabeth Diller, a founding partner of Diller Scofidio Renfro. "There's no place to point: That's the new thing. It's everywhere." The goal of the overhaul is "to expand and enhance the quality of our galleries so we can show more of our collection in new and different ways," Mr. Lowry said, "to provide more public space and better circulation and whenever possible to connect the museum to its physical location, to open the museum even more to the street." As for filling the gaps in its holdings, MoMA has been making what Mr. Lowry described as "strategic acquisitions," citing as examples recent additions of work by black artists, female artists and Latin American artists. Programming will also aim to reflect a more nimble MoMA, with galleries turning over more often, museum officials said, trying to elevate collection shows to the level of loan exhibitions. To mark the opening of the expanded MoMA, in 2019, the entire museum will be devoted to its own collection. But this year, the first exhibition to be presented in one of the two reinvented third floor galleries is "Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive," which opens June 12, in honor of the 150th anniversary of the architect's birth. The Wright show, organized by Barry Bergdoll, includes furniture, tableware, paintings and textiles in keeping with what the museum's chairman, Jerry Speyer, said was an evolving approach to the presentation of art. "It's a continuation of the whole idea of taking down the silos less regulation, more fluidity," Mr. Speyer said. "It's a better way to show art. It makes more sense." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Hatchling sea turtles are sturdier than you may expect. They get their endurance from a stop and go crawling style. Wow. That is one determined baby sea turtle. On a beach right after hatching, that would be called a crawling frenzy. In a lab, on a little treadmill made from a belt sander, it's a test of stamina. Researchers want to know if more time spent crawling leaves the turtles tired when they reach the sea. Sea turtles hatch at night. In an ideal world, they scrabble down the beach toward the horizon over the water. It's brighter than the horizon over land. Then they swim for up to a day to get to the Gulf Stream. That's in an ideal world with no city lights. If they're on Florida's Atlantic coast, say near Boca Raton, there are lots of competing light sources. Many hatchlings get confused and just wander around, or they head straight for a bright building away from the sea. To test whether this extra wandering tired the babies out, researchers took 150 loggerhead and green sea turtle hatchlings to the lab and set them to crawling. Lured by a light at the front of the treadmill, they moved more than 500 yards, pausing now and then to rest. They could have given the turtles a longer track, except for one thing It just took so long that the turtle could do it, but the graduate student couldn't. After the treadmill, the turtles hit the pool, swimming in a small tank. To everyone's surprise, they were just fine. Tests of blood and respiration showed that the babies were not tired out by the crawling. All those stops left them in good shape. But the lights are still a problem. Every extra minute on the beach leaves the babies exposed to predators raccoons, foxes, birds. And if they're still on the beach when the sun comes up, they're cooked. All of this is why Dr. Milton was pretty irritated by one particular house. It made me want to leave a note on their door hi, you are personally responsible for the disorientation of 60 turtles last night. So Boca Raton residents, and this means you. When baby sea turtles hatch on a beach at night, their instinct is to head to the sea. The beach slopes down, which is one directional clue they follow. Another is light: The horizon over the sea is brighter than the horizon over land. But lights from towns and beach developments can distract the hatchlings. The sky glowing above a city can be disorienting, leading them to wander. And particularly bright lights can draw them away from the sea. You'd think the extra time crawling might wear out hatchlings, which need energy once they get in the water to swim for about a day to get to their destination, the warm current of the Gulf Stream. In a normal sprint from nest to waves, the babies have been shown to build up chemicals that indicate they've been pushing themselves. Sarah L. Milton, an associate professor of biology at Florida Atlantic University, and Karen Pankaew, a graduate student in biology, collected 150 loggerhead and green turtle hatchlings as they came out of the nests on beaches in Boca Raton, Fla. The researchers took the hatchlings to a lab, where they ran on a little treadmill and swam in a tank while their blood and breathing were monitored. The surprise finding: As the researchers reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, even after a couple of hours scrabbling the equivalent of about 500 yards, the turtles were fine by all measures and swam as well as turtles that didn't have an extended crawling period. The reason, apparently, is that they pause frequently in crawling if they are doing it for a long time, unlike the uninterrupted sprint they make when headed straight to the water. So disoriented turtles are not worn out. Dr. Milton answered questions in a telephone interview about the research. Our interview, below, has been edited for clarity and length. Q. This required a lot of late night work. Is that all on the part of your graduate students? A: I'm always up for the first few nights because I have to train the graduate students. After that it was all on them, and they had a few volunteer undergraduate students to help as well. We actually had planned to have the turtles do an entire kilometer, but it just took so long. It turned out that the turtle could go that distance, but the graduate student couldn't hang in there that long. The turtles are snatched up right away and go to the lab where they're on a treadmill. Do they get a rest before you release them? They were held at a nearby nature center that we work with. They take them out, along with other hatchlings that have been mis oriented that people bring to the nature center. Actually, they get a ride out on a boat when some of the local dive masters volunteer, and they take them out all at once and basically drop them off in the Gulf Stream. How did you make such a small treadmill? It's a belt sander. We put a power coupling on it so that we could slow it down. Obviously, we don't really want to be sanding the turtles. The crawling surface is actually hair scrunchies, so it would be soft and give them some traction. It was tough on the graduate students, because they had to watch them the entire time. When the turtles were crawling, we'd have the treadmill on, but as soon as they stopped, you had to turn the treadmill off. And then as soon as they started crawling, you had to turn it on again. So it was very labor intensive to do the experiment. What do the hatchlings do when they get to the Gulf Stream? They settle into the weed lines, that's what they're aiming for. They can eat all the amphipods and things that are hanging out in the sargassum, and they just live there for the next several years. Do your results mean we don't have to worry about human lights? They end up spending a lot longer on the beach than they otherwise would, both because they're disoriented and because they're stopping all the time. That makes them very vulnerable to predators. There's a lot of things out on the beach that like to eat baby sea turtles. Night birds, raccoons, foxes. And then also, they can end up being still on the beach in the morning when the sun comes up, which means they pretty much would just overheat and die. There are some people who don't think that turning off the lights, really, is going to do any good. But I can say from being out on the beach doing the study, it's very clear that we would have one house that had a porch light on in the back or something like that, and the turtle would head straight for it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The fashion industry is in a state of emergency. This has been made clear not only by the mounting bankruptcies of big name retailers, but also by the closure of beloved smaller businesses. These are shops that won't bounce back. Jill Wenger, the founder of the boutique Totokaelo, described her former customers like this: "Mature. Women that were not interested in doing what everyone else was doing and looking like everyone else. They definitely had a distinct point of view. A lot of them were old punk rock." These were the shoppers in the early years, 2008 to 2012, when it was still just a store in Seattle and an online presence known for its discerning taste. Then Totokaelo began offering men's wear, in 2013, and opened a location in New York, in 2015; in 2016 Ms. Wenger sold the company to Herschel (like the backpacks) Capital Corp. But in many ways, Totokaelo customers never changed. They are still luxury shoppers and fans of brands like Acne Studios, Marni and Yohji Yamamoto all consistent top sellers during the Wenger tenure. They are drawn to idiosyncratic neutrals and quality construction and the word "curation." They are also entertaining for writers to describe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Future prospects for a resurrection of Mazda's Wankel rotary engine don't look good, if a recent statement by the automaker's chief executive, Masamichi Kogai, is any indication. He said that sales of Wankel powered cars would have to hit 100,000 units per year for Mazda to consider production. (Autoweek) Ford announced on a YouTube video this week that it would introduce the redesigned 2015 Mustang on Dec. 5. The automaker said that a range of more fuel efficient powertrains would be offered on the new car to extend appeal beyond its current fan base. (Automotive News, subscription required) Two Indiana University professors conducted a study with more than 2,000 drivers in 21 cities across the United States and found that very few consumers about 5 percent understood the incentives available for electric vehicles. They concluded that this lack of understanding had been a crucial cause of slow E.V. sales. (Indiana University) Several minicars that will be displayed at the Tokyo auto show this week show that Japanese automakers are trying to spruce up the tiny kei cars. Honda will introduce a sporty micro roadster called the S660, Nissan is developing a new mini wagon with Mitsubishi, and Daihatsu is attempting to make kei cars more appealing with interchangeable body panels that help shed the kei car's reputation as boxy and unattractive transportation. (Bloomberg) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
NASHVILLE Once upon a time, not all that long ago, the word "Zoom" meant nothing more to me than the name of an old kids' show on public television or the punchline of a commercial for fast cars. "Google Hangouts" sounded like something only teenagers needed to know about, and "Microsoft Teams," if I had to guess, was some kind of technical support department requiring an hour on hold to reach. I am someone who would prefer to spend no amount of time in front of a screen but in fact spend nearly all my time in front of a screen. I am interested in teleconferencing software in the same way and to the same degree that I am interested in TikTok. Which is to say that I'm very happy for other people to be interested in such things. But another reason to be online myself? No thank you very much. Then the coronavirus gave me many more reasons to be online. I was still in the midst of traveling to support my first book when bookstores went into quarantine and book festivals were called off altogether. Back in the spring, all my scheduled talks were canceled. By fall, such events had moved online, and I had to learn what "Zoom" actually means in the 21st century. It hasn't been all bad. The pandemic quarantines made it possible for author events to happen anywhere because they were actually happening nowhere. I got to see the fabulous jungle scene emblazoned on Aimee Nezhukumatathil's wall when we talked about her breathtaking new essay collection, "World of Wonders," for Parnassus Books. I got to sit down with Helen Macdonald to talk about her own stunning new essay collection, "Vesper Flights." The conversation was a benefit for Humanities Tennessee, a nonprofit that is very near and dear to my heart though not at all near to Britain, where Ms. Macdonald lives. I have loved Helen Macdonald's and Aimee Nezhukumatathil's books for years, but I finally got to meet them only because of Zoom. Virtual events are not without their challenges. At a Southern Festival of Books session with the novelists Lee Smith, author of "Blue Marlin," and Jill McCorkle, author of "Hieroglyphics," I was online in Tennessee, Ms. McCorkle was online in North Carolina and Ms. Smith's digital image was breaking up in Maine. A nor'easter knocked out her Wi Fi connection just before the event began, so Ms. McCorkle ended up calling Ms. Smith on her cellphone to continue the conversation in a different disembodied form. But the greatest challenge to online book tours has not been the inevitable glitches of an unfamiliar and not entirely reliable technology. The greatest challenge has been to the survival of bookstores themselves. A retail bookseller's bread and butter are live events. The chance to meet a favorite author in real life is one of the crucial differences between a neighborhood bookshop and the online colossus that must not be named. When readers come out to hear an author talk, they tend to leave the store with a new book signed just for them. With any luck, they also leave with a stack of other books from the store's beautifully curated tables and shelves and often with a souvenir coffee mug or tote bag to boot. None of that can happen when author tours are canceled or moved online, which explains in part why bookstores have been particularly hard hit this year, despite the fact that book sales are up over all. According to the American Booksellers Association, at least one independent bookstore has closed every single week during the coronavirus pandemic. To add insult to mortal injury, the survivors are looking at a deeply troubled holiday shopping season. Mail orders, which have surged during the quarantines, now face significant delivery delays as shipping speeds drop with increased online orders across the retail landscape. Many stores are open to foot traffic but are operating under strict municipal or state orders that severely limit the number of customers who can be in the store at one time not the ideal scenario in a shopping season that can make or break the entire fiscal year. Books remain the ultimate gift: easy to wrap, available in such a multifarious array that there's truly something for everyone and, best of all, a desperately needed break from screens in the age of TikTok and Zoom. A book does not beep at you, spy on you, sell you out to marketers, interrupt with breaking news, suck you into a doomscrolling vortex, cease to function in a nor'easter, flood your eyes with melatonin suppressing blue light or otherwise interrupt your already troubled sleep. That's why my best beloveds are all getting books for Christmas. Who wouldn't want such benefits for the people they love best in all the world? Once upon a time, at the end of a harrowing year, a way to be a storybook hero presented itself to ordinary mortals in the midst of a dangerous shopping season: Buy books. Call your local bookshop or check the store's website and order books for everyone on your list. Then pick up your order curbside and head home with a feeling of peace and accomplishment, and the knowledge that you've helped to make the world a better place without endangering yourself or anyone else. Because the only way for bookstores to survive is for people to find a way to shop there, even as the coronavirus continues to surge. As Lisa Lucas, the departing director of the National Book Foundation, said at this year's virtual ceremony for the National Book Awards, "I'm just a girl, standing here in a ball gown and a pair of Crocs, in a library, asking you to love books with money." If I had a ball gown, I'd make the same plea, but I'd make it in my own neighborhood bookshop, Parnassus Books, surrounded by wagging shop dogs and the brilliant booksellers who always know what I need to be reading, even before I know it myself. Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss." 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 |
In 2018, the Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte honored overseas Filipino workers the women deployed to Dubai, Singapore and other countries as domestic help as heroes for their hefty contribution to the country's economy. But in "Overseas," an observational documentary set in a Philippine training center for such workers, the pupils question this designation. "How can you be a hero when you just work abroad for your own family's future?" one asks. The exaltation of desperate survival as a moral virtue emerges as the central irony of Sung a Yoon's wrenching film. The training center serves as a kind of microcosm. With its pastel colored walls and labeled rooms ("bathroom," "kitchen area"), it's the setting not just for cleaning and caregiving lessons but also role play exercises that prepare the women for the abuses often meted out by their employers. The trainees commit to these harrowing scenarios with a disorienting sense of play wearing, for instance, a corny, painted on mustache while playing the assailant in a sexual assault simulation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
On Wednesday, in a brief, vague video teaser, the immensely popular rap adjacent superstar Post Malone announced that something called the "Post Malone Nirvana Tribute Livestream" would be happening on his YouTube channel on Friday evening. Nirvana purists were skeptical. Sure, the 24 year old born Austin Post has paid homage, or at least lip service, to the rock gods before, breaking through with a catchy smash called "Rockstar" and quickly becoming the go to guitar wielding 20 something representing his cohort in feel good intergenerational awards show performances (with Red Hot Chili Peppers at last year's Grammys; with Aerosmith at last year's MTV Video Music Awards). On the other hand, Post Malone was born a year after Kurt Cobain died, makes narcotically sing songy tunes and writes lyrics about wearing Versace boxers and 50 carat rings on a superyacht. It was anyone's guess what that guy's cover of "Heart Shaped Box" was going to sound like. But as it turned out? Surprisingly faithful to the original. From the moment a contagiously grinning Post Malone walked into the frame and picked from his fleet of guitars, it was clear that he was not merely one of those come lately fans that Cobain dissed in "In Bloom" the kind who like to sing along but "don't know what it means" but a musician with a deep reverence for the Seattle trio and an intimate familiarity with its catalog. (He was also clad in a tent like floral dress, just like the ones Cobain sometimes wore in concert a tenderly observant detail.) He and his band opened with a pummeling rendition of the "In Utero" album cut "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle," featuring a refrain that, for any cynics, drew a clear line from Cobain's sensibility to Post Malone's emo inflected hooks: "I miss the comfort of being sad." Plenty of the viewers who tuned into the stream Post Malone incredulously announced at one point that 200,000 people were watching live were themselves missing all sorts of comforts, like the experience of hearing live music at earsplitting, soul cleansing volume. The event raised money for the World Health Organization's Covid 19 Solidarity Response Fund; a button in the corner of the screen encouraged those watching to donate. (The set is available on YouTube here; the banter between songs is peppered with spicy asides that make it less family friendly.) But what made Post Malone's live stream stand out amid the sudden glut of self recorded quarantine content was, quite simply, how good it sounded, how closely it approximated that now rare experience of seeing a rock band playing music in front of you really, really loudly. That it was a rock band that had run through these songs only "probably two times" before and was fronted by Post Malone turned out to be shockingly incidental. Rich and jagged, the guitar tones were just right. One got the sense, whether or not he'd admit it, that the "In Utero" engineer Steve Albini may have almost approved. They smoked cigarettes voraciously and traded goofy, inside jokey non sequiturs ("What's the deal with Applebees right now? I love expletive Applebees."). The whole thing had the endearing air of band practice taking place in the wealthy frontman's finished basement, while somewhere above there hovered permissive parents who didn't much care what they did, just so long as they did it in the house. "Shout out to Courtney Love for watching," Post Malone said at one point, one of those sentences that would have scanned as a schism in the pop cultural universe two months ago but now feels like one of the more normal things to happen on a given day. Across their 15 song set, Post Malone touched on all three of Nirvana's studio albums (including "School" from its debut, "Bleach") and played all but two of the tracks off the group's landmark 1991 album "Nevermind." That they skipped "Smells Like Teen Spirit" speaks again to the purity of the performance's overall intention not to pander to easily meme able, least common denominator Nirvana nostalgia but rather to share with a captive audience (here we are now; entertain us) some tunes that he and his buddies just really love playing live. The set's sole low point came when the tempo slowed, during a violin assisted rendition of the solemn "Nevermind" closer "Something in the Way"; unlike Cobain and Co., Post has not yet perfected his "MTV Unplugged" vibe. But that brief departure only put the performances' strengths crushing volume, giddy reverence, cathartic shouts into starker relief. After a scorched rendition of "Breed," Post Malone conceded that "this might be the first performance" of his on which he'd used "no Auto Tune at all." It wasn't missed. Post has a strong rock voice even more impressive and distinct than the artfully processed one heard on his own songs and was able to toggle fluidly between the melodicism of Nirvana's quiet moments and the throaty torrents of its choruses. He took particular delight in the incendiary "Stay Away," a song that means so much to him, he told viewers, that he got its title tattooed on his face. Post Malone seemed genuinely moved twice during the set once, when he'd been told that a viewer had donated 65,000, and then when he found out that the Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic was tweeting enthusiastically about the performance. ("I don't think these fellows can play any better," Novoselic wrote. "They are on fire!!!!") "Krist is watching!" a beaming Post Malone informed his band just before they launched into "In Bloom." Quipped Lee, to the camera, "I'm so sorry." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The scientist Joachim Messing in 2013. His work was influential, but he declined to patent it. "Jo's approach to the development of his DNA sequencing tools was to spread them freely and widely," a colleague said. "He was an incredibly generous man." Joachim Messing, a pioneer of DNA sequencing whose techniques enabled scientists to study the building blocks of viruses, improve the yield of crop plants and understand the development of cancer in humans, died on Sept. 13 at his home in Somerset, N.J. He was 73. His death was confirmed by his son, Simon, who said an autopsy report was inconclusive about the cause. At his death, Dr. Messing was the director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Dr. Messing, whose family and friends referred to him simply as Jo (pronounced yoh), became known in the scientific community for developing what is known as shotgun sequencing of DNA. That method involves breaking up long strands of DNA into hundreds of small fragments to determine the order of the four chemical building blocks of the molecule. These building blocks known as DNA "bases" and represented by the letters A, C, G and T tell scientists about the genetic information stored in each fragment. Because shotgun sequencing bypasses several steps used in older methods of sequencing, like the one Frederick Sanger introduced in 1977 for mapping DNA one base at a time, Dr. Messing's technique was able to decode genetic information much faster than before. It also enabled researchers to start tackling larger and more complex genomes. Dr. Messing spearheaded several big sequencing initiatives, projects that contributed to the understanding of the genetics of corn, rice, sorghum and other crops. His findings helped scientists engineer varieties of corn with higher levels of the amino acids lysine and methionine, essential building blocks of proteins that people can get only from their diet. Other studies led to the development of crops that were more pest resistant or were resilient in droughtlike conditions. However, Dr. Messing did not patent his work. "Jo's approach to the development of his DNA sequencing tools was to spread them freely and widely," said Robert Goodman, the executive dean of agriculture and natural resources at Rutgers. "He was an incredibly generous man." Joachim Wilhelm Messing was born on Sept. 10, 1946, in Duisburg, Germany, to Heinrich and Martha (Pfeifer) Messing. His father was a mason and had expected Jo to take over the family business when he grew up. His mother was more supportive of his decision to pursue science. He decided to study pharmacy as an undergraduate at the Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf because the curriculum, to his great satisfaction, covered a broad range of subjects particularly how plants produce chemicals used in treating disease. He paid for his education by working by day as an apprentice at a Duisburg pharmacy and by night helping out at the opera company across the street, a job that allowed him to indulge his interest in the arts. After earning a bachelor's degree in 1968, he went on to get a master's in pharmacy from the Free University of Berlin in 1971. But, always interested in biochemistry, he pursued a doctorate in that field at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. There he turned his attention to studying DNA on the advice of the Nobel laureate Feodor Lynen, who had been recognized for his research on cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism. Scientists had long known that DNA replication was the process by which cells pass on the instructions needed for carrying out all the functions of a living organism. The process requires an enzyme called DNA polymerase, as well as some sort of primer that provides the starting point for replication. While still a graduate student, Dr. Messing demonstrated that this primer is a piece of RNA that is complementary to the DNA that needs to be replicated. In 1974, he attended a conference at which Dr. Sanger presented early work on mapping the sequence of the DNA strand in a virus. (Dr. Sanger had won one Nobel Prize and would go on to earn a second.) Dr. Messing thought the process could be accelerated by cloning DNA and sequencing different chunks of it in parallel. He spent the next few years, including his research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, developing a suitable method for cloning genetic information. When he moved to the United States in 1978, Dr. Messing continued to work on his method for improving DNA sequencing. His first major success with shotgun sequencing came in 1981. Together with a team of biologists from the University of California, Davis, he was able to sequence the genome of the cauliflower mosaic virus. Once he had the tools to unlock complex genetic information, Dr. Messing moved on to studying food crops. "He was drawn to the utility of improving food crops," Dr. Goodman said, "rather than playing around with model plants." Other scientists used the shotgun sequencing technique in the Human Genome Project to identify approximately 20,000 genes in humans. Automation and further iterations of shotgun sequencing also allowed researchers to develop drugs targeting faulty proteins encoded by certain genes, and even helped them profile the genetic makeup of various tumors. Dr. Messing was recruited to the Waksman Institute at Rutgers as research director in 1985. He was promoted to director shortly afterward. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
How PETA Won Its Messy Fight and Took a Seat at the Table The alpaca's scream sounded like a high pitched electric pencil sharpener, more machine than mammal. It was awful, and that was the point. The group behind the video, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has been publicizing graphic scenes like this long enough to know which sights and sounds make people feel the most miserable. This footage was filmed during an "undercover investigation" at a Peruvian farm, the group said, and shown to The New York Times recently, before being released more widely. It's part of PETA's latest project: ridding the world of alpaca sweaters. That means agitating the people who wear them, the retailers who sell them and the manufactures who make them. PETA's mode of making social change has always been to inspire shock and ignite boycotts. For years, we've watched videos of screaming animals and seen red paint splatter fur coats. With these in your face and highly visual tactics, the activists helped win the culture war over fur. But it's been 15 years now since Anna Wintour was last dealt a tofu pie to the face. Behind closed doors, PETA has embarked on a mission of corporate diplomacy. These days, much of its activism involves organizing conference calls and sending forceful but respectful emails. Supporters don't flood the streets as often as they flood Twitter. The famously loud group, now 40 years old, is operating more quietly. More brands than ever are listening. How PETA Enacts Its Influence in Private One aspect of PETA's activism has not changed: There must be a villain. Before an investigation goes public, it's the job of Ms. Shields's team to make a list of candidates. Typically, this happens after PETA's investigations department has identified an industry (like angora wool) or an individual supplier (like a factory) suspected of abusing animals, and gathered supporting footage. The corporate responsibility team then determines which brands use the supplier or support that industry. Ms. Shields, 37, said that when choosing a target, PETA considers how much animal material is being sold by the company, whether the company can influence others and whether the company's core market has strong feelings about animals. (The more young female customers, the better.) Last year, for example, targets included Nordstrom (for fur) and Madewell (for cashmere). At the end of 2019, as the corporate responsibility team mulled over the alpaca investigation, its potential targets were narrowed down to H M, Gap and Anthropologie. The three brands were all reasonably likely to consider an alpaca ban; during a previous PETA campaign, each had promised to stop selling mohair products. On Dec. 9, PETA sent emails to the three companies. H M and Gap were warned that a "highly confidential investigation" into alpaca was coming, and they were asked to meet right away. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. H M responded the next day, according to emails provided by a PETA official. The company said it was "so grateful" that PETA had reached out and given it "the opportunity to act if needed." By the end of January, H M and Gap had spoken to PETA over video chat, exchanged emails with the group, received video of the writhing and wailing Peruvian alpacas and come to the same decision: They would not use the farm's parent company as a supplier in the future. A Gap representative explained the company's reasoning in an email to PETA, writing that it was "a result of business decisions that were already underway, and influenced by the findings from the investigation." The representative added: "Personally, I was heartbroken to watch the video and want you to know that this has been a top priority." To PETA's disappointment, however, neither company would commit to banning alpaca outright. ("Sorry for not having a more happy reply to send you this Friday," the H M representative wrote.) When asked about how decisions like these are made, H M's sustainability expert, Madelene Ericsson, said the company wants to use animal materials only when "we believe we can actually make a change for the animals" meaning to "only source from good farms." A representative for Gap did not respond to The Times before publication. PETA's attempts to sway Anthropologie went a little differently. This message was more pointed than those sent to H M and Gap, in part because while Anthropologie did ban mohair in 2018, it did not announce that decision until the day after PETA urged followers to protest Anthropologie. If the company worked with PETA now, before the alpaca video went public, it wouldn't be called out like that again. Anthropologie did not respond to the email, PETA said, or to follow up messages. (Urban Outfitters, the parent company of Anthropologie, declined to speak to The New York Times for this article.) With that, PETA found its target. Because of that lack of response, PETA plans to issue an "action alert" on Anthropologie, instructing supporters to send Anthropologie pre written emails using one of PETA's online tools pleading that the company "think of gentle alpacas." In the meantime, PETA will publicly highlight H M and Gap for cutting ties with the Peruvian farm. When Tracy Reiman, the executive vice president of PETA, considers the group's legacy, she thinks about a day in January 1994, when she and her colleagues stormed the offices of Calvin Klein, yelling and spray painting the walls until seven of them were arrested. Afterward, Mr. Klein agreed to a meeting with PETA, watched a graphic video and subsequently announced he would no longer sell fur. The activists declared victory, though the designer later said he made his decision before the raid. (Furriers cast doubt on this claim.) "We would work very hard to get an eight second clip from one of our videos on the news at night, which was nearly impossible because it was so graphic," Ms. Reiman said. "Now we'll put it on Facebook or Instagram, and millions of people will see it within 24 hours." That doesn't mean PETA has abandoned stunts. Most recently, the organization erected billboards that connected the origin of the coronavirus with meat: "Tofu never caused a pandemic. Try it today!" And it still tries to use the press to amplify its causes. (Which is why it will likely release its alpaca investigation to the public right after this article is published.) Now the power and ease of social media the way it fuels call out culture is one reason "we don't have to get arrested or push the envelope too far," Ms. Reiman said. "In the early days, we'd have to fight for two years to win a campaign. These days we tend to win within hours." Today PETA works behind the scenes with hundreds of retail companies, Ms. Reiman added, though a few refuse to publicly acknowledge the activists, and others completely ignore them. Some of these dealings are even warm (see: Gap and H M), in a sterile kind of way. Still, no matter how good the relationship with a company, Ms. Reiman said, PETA won't hesitate to put a brand on blast if its requests are ignored or rejected. When asked if he thought animal activists' approach or the industry's response had changed more, Mr. Smith said neither. Shoppers changed. They started caring more about fashion's environmental footprint, particularly younger consumers. Animals were part of that. A 2019 luxury market report by the Boston Consulting Group found that 36 percent of Gen Z respondents chose animal care as their most valued aspect of sustainability. Brands suddenly saw the marketing potential in going fur free, Mr. Smith said. Most of these brands didn't sell much fur anyway. (Leather and exotic skins which only a few companies have pledged to stopped using were another story.) When Gucci announced its fur ban on Instagram, it became the brand's most liked post that didn't have Harry Styles in it. "Now there's almost this competition," Mr. Smith said. "Everyone wants to be a leader." One of these contenders, H M, has had an animal welfare and material ethics policy in place since 2004, Ms. Ericsson said. Maintaining a "close dialogue" with organizations including PETA has become an important part of this policy, Ms. Ericsson said: "We share the same view that no animals should be harmed in the name of fashion." Sharing this view may be a radical shift from PETA's more notorious years, when fashion executives openly called the group "thoroughly obnoxious," and when it "had to beg, steal and borrow" attention, said Lisa Lange, the senior vice president for communications of PETA, who has worked there for 28 years. But supporters don't seem to mind the taming of PETA. In 2019, the organization's contributions hit 49.1 million, more than triple the contributions in 2000 the height of the era of throwing paint and pies. Playing (sort of) nice is working for PETA. "We're not knives out instantly," Ms. Lange said. "That's something I think people don't know. There is a lot of communicating that goes on before the knives come out." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Hundreds of people who consider themselves explorers attended the Explorers Club Dinner in New York City last month. From left: Ally Alegra, a documentary photographer and expedition leader; Baron Ambrosia, a long distance swimmer who calls himself the culinary ambassador to the Bronx; and Paul Rodzianko, an Arctic explorer and mountain climber. The dress code was "black tie or exploration attire." Eric Larsen seemed ill at ease in his tuxedo. He is more inclined to trudge across an ice shelf than mingle at a fancy party in Manhattan. Yet here he was, in black tie, nibbling on canapes at the American Museum of Natural History. Mr. Larsen came to this event because of how he makes a living. It's printed on his business card: Explorer. He had trekked to New York City from his home in Boulder, Colo., for his profession's version of the Oscars: the Explorers Club Annual Dinner and awards. More than a thousand people joined him this month for the four hour soiree beneath the museum's fiberglass blue whale. Among them were astronauts like Buzz Aldrin, astronomers like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a panoply of others who make a point of seeking thrills and seeking knowledge, in varying proportions. Theodore Roosevelt joined the club in 1915; at this year's dinner, there was a look alike in safari gear, hired by the hosts. But as this ghost of expeditions past bushwhacked through guests in evening wear, a less intrepid spirit came to mind not exploration, but nostalgia. For all the triumphs of the past, today's explorers face a daunting prospect: Our maps are fully drawn, and there is not much left for them to do. We may still search the ocean floors and rappel into uncharted caves, but it is hard to shake the feeling that these expeditions are not fundamental. It's like we are dabbing with a napkin at the few blank spots in the atlas. The "instinct to explore" may still persist, but it's lost its whiff of derring do more pickled than preserved. Do we really need explorers now, in the age of Google Maps? The Explorer Club's departing president, Alan H. Nichols, believes we do. "This is the golden age of exploration," he said in a meeting at the club's headquarters on the Upper East Side. Members come here to drink whiskey and host lectures amid the mounted tusks, sleds and axes. Some of Roosevelt's trophies decorate the rooms. In addition to his administrative duties, Mr. Nichols, 85, has been working on a project to find the tomb of Ghengis Khan. "They've been looking for the tomb for 750 years, and they haven't found him," Mr. Nichols said. "But we'll find him. Why? Because we've got underground penetrating X rays, we've got drones, we've got magnetometry. We've got all this stuff that explorers haven't had before!" But the growth of new technology poses problems for one of the club's most cherished precepts that exploration means adventure in the field, carried out by visionary risk takers. These days, many of our most thrilling expeditions are made remotely, using robot arms and sensors, and in place of legendary ship captains and mountaineers think of Ernest Shackleton and Sir Edmund Hillary we have expansive teams of scientists and engineers. When NASA sends up rovers to study the Martian surface, they are controlled by committee in Pasadena, Calif. It's hard to say if these men and women are explorers in the classic sense. "Their psychological experience is of being there," said Bill Clancey, a cognitive scientist who embedded with the Mars Exploration Rover mission in February 2004. He remembers sitting in a dark room, with heavy shades drawn across the windows so the researchers could match their schedules to the days and nights of a planet 140 million miles away. As the team sent commands up to the rovers, he said, the scientists built up a mental map of where they were. "They know what's around the bend and what's behind them. These are real experiences, the experiences of real explorers." It is easy to mistake the robots for explorers, Dr. Clancey said, even though they're just elaborate tools. Yet even in Pasadena, there was uncertainty about who or what, exactly, was behind the work. In one of the NASA team's first published science papers, the action was described in different ways: "We drove Spirit," the authors wrote, and then later, "Spirit drove away." The Explorers Club has grappled with these confusing, modern expeditions by honoring the scientists in charge. Not everyone agrees with their inclusion, though. Mr. Nichols caught some flack, he said, for offering Elon Musk a special honor at last year's annual dinner. "Explorers were coming to me and saying, 'It's ridiculous to call him an explorer.'" Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, has helped to foster journeys into space, but he has not gone on trips himself. The whole idea of exploration "will get redefined over and over again, and it will continue to trouble people," said Rosalind Williams, a historian of science at M.I.T. and the author of "The Triumph of Human Empire." Even in the 19th century, she said, people understood that "the end was in sight." They felt a new age coming, one in which humans dominate the planet, for better and for worse. For some self described explorers, this has meant turning inward. "It's about the story that I'm telling," Mr. Larsen, the Colorado explorer, said at the dinner. He makes a living finding sponsors for his polar expeditions, but he does not promise travel to new places. Instead, he finds a way to fill the old ones with a novel set of meanings. A few years ago, he tried to reach the South Pole ... on a bicycle. "At this point, it's not so much about 'I did this,'" Mr. Larsen said. "It's how I did it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Daniel Victor, a reporter in Hong Kong who covers news in Asia and overnight news in the United States, discussed the tech he's using. What are your most important tech tools for doing your job? My desktop assaults me with a terrible mess of information from far too many sources, and I like it almost as much as I hate it. To cope with that onslaught, or perhaps to enable it, I connect my MacBook Pro to two external monitors. One is dedicated entirely to TweetDeck, which allows me to mainline Twitter in deeply unhealthy ways. When you open the Twitter app on your phone, you see a single column of tweets; now imagine you had 14 similar columns with individual, narrow focuses, all updating in real time. That's what TweetDeck does for me, with custom lists I've created of news organizations, Hong Kong tweeters, my personal friends, Times journalists, and Philadelphia 76ers reporters and fans. It's out of control. But that's not the only way I suffocate myself, as I almost always have several dozen tabs open in Google Chrome. When I'm feeling truly overwhelmed, I use the OneTab extension to close them all but produce a handy list of links to each page I just closed. It can be a lifesaver. I still cover quite a bit of news in the United States, just from a different time zone, so my other tech needs are built around pretending I'm still there. If your phone was ringing and you saw the call was from an unknown number in another country, would you pick up? Many of the sources I'm calling probably wouldn't, I figure. Luckily, Google Voice allowed me to keep my American cellphone number I can place free calls from Gmail on my desktop and it'll show up on caller ID as the same central Pennsylvania number I've had for years. I also encounter some crucial websites that are available only inside the United States. I use NordVPN, a virtual private network, to trick the websites into giving me access. What have you noticed about the difference between the way people use tech in Hong Kong versus the United States? SMS is no longer part of my life. Instead, WhatsApp is universally used here for texting, both by my friends and sources. This is very common almost everywhere outside the United States, I've learned, and I've had to talk many of my American friends into using it to keep in touch. Hong Kong uses Octopus, a contactless card, for its subway system, and it can also be used at 7 Elevens and many restaurants. It's very handy. I also find there are more businesses that take Apple Pay I don't use my physical credit card nearly as often as I used to. There are a few things I wish I could have from back home. I deeply miss Venmo for settling small debts between friends, like a happy hour tab, and Google Maps has a nasty habit here of placing me about a block away from where I am, making it much less useful. You recently covered some of the Hong Kong protests over the extradition law. How did marchers use tech? The demonstrations thus far have been mostly leaderless there's no single person or organization deciding what comes next. Instead, they're directly voting on what actions to take by participating in online discussion forums, the most popular one being LIHKG. An individual will post with a suggested course of action, like protesting outside a specific building at a specific time. Other participants can upvote or downvote the post, and when a post gets enough attention, they solidify those plans. They've also used messaging apps like Telegram to communicate those plans and organize logistics, but a lot of protesters are wary of it after the police arrested the administrator of a group that had 20,000 members. There's a lot of fear that the government will use their digital footprint against them. A lot of protesters also share important information through the AirDrop feature of iPhones. I was anonymously sent two images while covering a demonstration, and I've had friends report they've been dropped images while commuting on the train. Another key difference is in how they have a far more hands off approach to social media than any comparable effort in the United States would. Whereas a lot of demonstrations in the United States would be grist for selfies and Instagram ready signs, protesters here are very concerned the government could identify their faces in photos and later charge them with crimes. Many hide behind surgical masks and would never post evidence of themselves taking part. They discourage people, even news photographers, from taking photos where faces are identifiable. It's not built for gaining likes, and they trust exposure will come through the larger messaging. You have been learning Cantonese. What apps and online programs have helped with that? Since I'm still awful at it, I use an app called Hong Kong Taxi Cards to show taxi drivers an image with my desired address written in Cantonese. Pleco is handy for quick translations, and includes audio files so I can come close to getting the pronunciation right. Google Translate has been pretty handy for audio translations whenever I travel. Outside of work, what's your favorite tech gadget or app and what do you use it for? I love One Second Everyday, an app that will cobble together a video of one second snippets. I found it a great way to smash together a year's worth of memories when I wrote about using it in 2015, and I'm doing it again this year to document my first year in Hong Kong. I may annoy my friends by taking videos every time we're together, but it'll be worth it. Can you please bid us adieu in Cantonese? Bai baai! (It sounds just like bye bye.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax in the James Bond film "Moonraker" (1979). He appeared in more than 200 movies. Michael Lonsdale, a versatile veteran of French cinema who was known abroad for his villains and antiheroes, including the sad eyed and subtly psychotic Hugo Drax in the James Bond film "Moonraker" and the mysterious intelligence broker in Steven Spielberg's "Munich," died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 89. The death was confirmed by Olivier Loiseau, his longtime agent. Over his long career, Mr. Lonsdale appeared in nearly 200 films, including "Day of the Jackal" (1973), in which he played the dogged detective Claude Lebel, and worked with a Who's Who of directors, including Mr. Spielberg, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel, Jean Jacques Annaud, and James Ivory, for whom he appeared as Dupont d'Ivry, a French diplomat, in "The Remains of the Day" (1993). "He was as much a presence as an actor," J. Hoberman, the American film critic, said in a phone interview, "a big hulking man, sometimes bearded, whose movements and voice were distinctively delicate." That incongruity was his calling card (as were his paintbrush eyebrows). In the avant garde films that he loved, most notably Marguerite Duras's "India Song" (1975), a gorgeously soapy tragedy that is a touchstone of the era's European art cinema, Mr. Lonsdale's shambling presence was a kind of ballast. He played a heartbroken vice consul in thrall to the adulterous wife of an ambassador, played by the equally compelling Delphine Seyrig. "I think it's his greatest film," Mr. Hoberman said. "It's a very minimal incantatory movie there's not much action, and yet he really holds the screen." In a Twitter post, the film critic Richard Brody, a contributor to The New Yorker, called Mr. Lonsdale "the secret agent of cinematic modernity." Le Monde described him as "an actor from elsewhere who seemed to embody the human condition by looking in from the outside." "He was Duras's bulky leading man and trusted friend, famous for his deep thrilling voice, the voice of a man in pain, an unrequited lover," Ms. Dupont wrote. "The morning after Duras died, I saw Lonsdale pacing in front of her apartment on the Rue Saint Benoit, this magnificent colossus, lost, with a bouquet that looked wilted by grief." Mr. Lonsdale's heart was in European cinema, the more experimental the better, but he did indulge his agent every once in a while by accepting a more commercial part. Mr. Loiseau said that Mr. Lonsdale at first rebuffed an appeal to play Rachel Weisz's father in "Agora," a 2009 Spanish drama set in ancient Egypt directed by Alejandro Amenabar. "'It's what I hate,'" Mr. Loiseau recalled him saying. "'Two hours of makeup, it's going to be very hot, and in the end it's just CNN in the fourth century, war all the time.'" Mr. Amenabar had to fly to Paris to woo Mr. Lonsdale. He relented because he thought the script was smart and because, Mr. Loiseau said, "As an agent I had to be a little greedy on his behalf." In 2012, Mr. Lonsdale was asked by a James Bond fan site if he had thought that his career might suffer if he accepted the role of Hugo Drax in "Moonraker" (1979), the 11th film in the series. "On the contrary," he said. "Because I made so many films that were not really very popular or didn't make much money, and I only made poor films, so I thought I might like to be in a rich film." "Moonraker" was a gift that just kept giving, for better or worse. Fans over the decades sent Mr. Lonsdale photos of him in the movie, hoping for an autograph, which he never gave. But when PlayStation added "Moonraker" to its 007 Legends game series, and asked Mr. Lonsdale to record the deep voice of his villainous character, he agreed. When he arrived at the studio, Mr. Loiseau recalled, a young Californian producer "behaved as if God was coming for a visit." In 2012, Mr. Lonsdale won a Cesar Award, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for his role as a monk in "Of Gods and Men," a film by the French director Xavier Beauvois set in war torn Algeria in the 1990s about the real life capture and murder of an order of monks by Muslim fundamentalists. In a startling and moving scene, Mr. Lonsdale's character explains his idea of love to a teenage girl in vivid secular terms as attraction and as a life force. It was pure improvisation, Mr. Loiseau said. "He was really a pure soul," Mr. Loiseau added, "solitary, but very humanistic." Mr. Lonsdale, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
OF all the conundrums faced by car shopping friends, this spurs the most calls for my advice: "We need room for the family, but we don't want a giant S.U.V. And no matter what, do not tell us to get a minivan." Mounting a halfhearted defense of the minivan's virtues but making no headway, I'll finally suggest that the van averse couple try out General Motors' solid three row crossovers, including the Buick Enclave and GMC Acadia, or the equally capable Ford Flex. Gauging their reaction to the Flex is a snap: people either love the Ford's bold, boxy visage or they think it looks like a Mini Cooper blown up to the size of a Macy's parade float. If said shoppers are on board with the styling, my conscience then dictates a caveat: "The engine," I'll say, referring to the Flex's 262 horsepower 3.5 liter V 6, "it's not terrible or anything." I hasten to add: "But it's just, well, O.K." That disclaimer is especially important, I feel, for people who will often fill all six or seven of the Flex's seats, or use it to tow a boat or trailer. That's when the Ford, which weighs roughly 4,500 pounds in its basic form and without people and their gear aboard, may start panting on uphill stretches. But after driving the Flex with the blissfully turbocharged, 355 horsepower EcoBoost V 6 a new option for 2010 the engine caveat has turned into a commendation. This engine, with a fat 350 pound feet of torque, is the most powerful V 6 in any family hauler you can buy, whether crossover, S.U.V. or minivan. To top its power, and then barely, you'll need the thirstier V 8s found in luxury S.U.V.'s like a Mercedes GL Class or the big Range Rover. The twin turbo V 6 also makes the Flex my favorite Minivan Replacement Vehicle. In addition to its distinctive style and versatile accommodations, this Flex is suddenly far more engaging to drive, perfect for parents who equate minivans with diaper pails on wheels. Previous attempts to design vehicles that work like a minivan without looking like one Mercedes R Class and the defunct Chrysler Pacifica, we're talking to you have typically gone down as oddball failures. But with nearly 40,000 sales in 2009, about 1,000 more than Ford's moribund Explorer, the Flex has been a modest success. Like its luxury cousin, the Lincoln MKT, the Flex is built on a modified version of the Taurus sedan platform; that architecture will also underpin Ford's replacement for the Explorer, to be released later this year. The direct injection EcoBoost engine is also available on the MKT (and MKS sedan), as well as the Taurus SHO. The EcoBoost's landslide advantage over the standard V 6 93 horsepower and a giddy 102 pound feet of torque lets the Flex hustle to 60 m.p.h., according to Edmunds.com, in a brisk 6.1 seconds. That's more than two seconds faster than with the base engine and quicker than any full size or midsize all wheel drive crossover, save for guzzling V 8 oddities like the 555 horse BMW X5 M. This Ford will even out accelerate the Porsche Cayenne S, a smaller S.U.V. whose 385 horsepower V 8 produces a 6.4 second run to 60 m.p.h. All wheel drive, an option on the base Flex but always paired with the EcoBoost engine, raised the price, but it also reined in upsetting torque steer from the front wheels when I mashed the gas. Otherwise, the power lunch is free, at least at the pump: the federal mileage rating of the Flex with EcoBoost, 16 miles per gallon in town and 22 on the highway, matches the nonturbo V 6 with all wheel drive. Cruising at just over 60 m.p.h, I actually managed 25 highway m.p.g. Ford's engineers did not simply bolt the turbo V 6 into the Flex and call it a day. Electronic power steering, more pleasingly weighted than the base model's hydraulic steering, is also part of the EcoBoost package. The well matched 6 speed automatic transmission adds a manual shift function, though that function is hobbled by awkward steering wheel shift buttons. The body is lowered nearly a half inch over 20 inch wheels, dual exhausts jut from the rear, and the suspension gets firmer springs and specially calibrated shock absorbers. "If we just dropped the engine in, the Flex would have gone fast, but the chassis would feel out of control," said Louis Jamail, Flex's chassis engineer. "We wanted to develop the chassis around the engine to make everything harmonious." The Flex does sing a new tune of confidence and command. Whether on sweeping curves of the Interstate or two lane country roads , the low riding Flex feels more connected and carlike than either the Honda Odyssey, long the standard for minivan handling, or the G.M. crossovers. A drive from New York to Rhode Island on a day with strong crosswinds gave me a chance to experience the Flex's Drift Pull Compensation feature, which can add resistance to the steering to help keep the vehicle in lane. Any effect was subtle, but it did seem to keep the Flex tracking straight. With the driver's needs addressed, passengers can focus on the things the standard Flex did so well, including its appealing space, comfort and functionality. Leather clad front seats recall overstuffed Barcaloungers. There's more legroom in the second row than in most big luxury sedans. Adult size third row seats pivot smoothly into the floor to expand cargo space. An optional panoramic Vista roof ( 1,495) extends over all three rows. For 2010, the Flex adds a telescoping steering wheel. Equally welcome is a newly optional 60 40 second row bench seat that adds 7 passenger capacity to Flex's standard 6 passenger layout. That bench did suffer a sticky seat folding mechanism during my weeklong test. Through the Sync telematics interface, managing a cellphone, iPod and navigation system can be done with your choice of pushbuttons or voice commands. The satellite radio's Sirius Travel Link, in addition to traffic and weather reports, can call up real time pump prices at gas stations and movie showtimes at theaters. And Ford's Active Park Assist, a 550 option, lets the Flex automatically and expertly parallel park itself. While my test Flex's rear camera solved any back up anxiety for me, the gizmo could be a boon to people who would otherwise struggle to dock such a plus size vehicle. The free lunch does end at the checkout counter. The EcoBoost SEL version starts at 40,395, with the deluxe Limited model at 44,035. With the Vista sunroof, park assist and a 395 contrasting white roof, my Limited topped 46,000 thousands more than a loaded Odyssey or the competing G.M. crossovers. A front drive, base engine Flex starts at 29,725, and ranges up to 40,245 for an all wheel drive Limited. But in the EcoBoost's defense, these big gun models include several features that cost extra on the standard Flex, including the bigger wheels, Sony audio system and leather seats. Do the math, and the guts of the EcoBoost package engine, suspension, electric steering, paddle shifters and dual exhaust add just over 2,200 to the vehicle's price. Because you cannot delete the all wheel drive, fancy wheels and other goodies, the Flex with EcoBoost will cost you more than most competing crossovers and minivans from mainstream brands. But in this case, count me in with the minivan intolerant. I'd take the Flex cooler, faster, yet equally family friendly in a heartbeat over those sliding door appliances of the suburbs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
What better way to commemorate Women's History Month, in March, than by taking a trip for women, led by women? As an another motivation to book such a getaway, International Women's Day falls on March 8. The popularity of such trips seem to have increased since the MeToo movement. Annette Youngbauer, a travel agent from Delafield, Wis., who specializes in women's group tours around the world, said that her sales of these trips have increased 200 percent since MeToo. "Whether it's a Caribbean cruise or hiking in Macchu Picchu, these trips are a lot about bonding and sharing each other's struggles and passions," she said. If that sounds good to you, here are four to consider. Deborah Calmeyer, founder of the travel company Roar Africa, has organized a women's empowerment trip in South Africa from June 11 to 16. Female guides and animal trackers who have broken stereotypes in these traditionally male fields will speak. Conservationists and philanthropists including Christine Schuler Deschryver, the director of V Day Congo, an organization that aims to end violence against women and girls, will also attend. The itinerary starts in the semidesert region of Karoo where travelers will visit the SA College for Tourism, an institute that trains women from at risk communities for jobs in the hospitality industry. The bulk of the trip will occur at a lodge in the semiarid savanna of the Kalahari, where guests will have the opportunity to see migratory birds and track black rhinos on foot. There will also be visits to ancient archaeological sites with rock carvings created some 380,000 years ago ( 15,600 a person, all inclusive). Kelly Lewis, founder of the travel guide company Go! Girl Guides and the chief executive of Damesly, a boutique travel company, is leading a trip to Honolulu, her hometown, from May 17 to 23. The theme of the trip is "finding yourself," and participants will engage in self identity work through workshops led by a life coach. Other activities include hula dance classes, lei making lessons, surfing, paddle boarding, snorkeling and rainforest hikes with picnic lunches ( 2,800 a person, with accommodations, some meals and activities included). In Canada, Wild Women Expeditions is offering a cultural retreat, from July 8 to 13, at a ranch near Calgary. The trip will introduce participants to the culture of the Cree, the indigenous people of the area, and is led by Tracey Klettl and Brenda Holder, two sisters with Cree heritage. Guests stay in canvas tents in the forest, and will be taught traditional Cree beliefs and skills including traditional plant medicine and archery ( 1,895 Canadian dollars per person , approximately 1,430 U.S., with accommodations, transfers, meals and activities included). Organized by Natural World Safaris, the "Women of the Arctic" expedition cruise will sail in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard from Aug. 10 to 20. A naturalist named Kate Humble is leading the trip, with other female naturalists are on hand as guides. Wildlife hikes to spot reindeer, foxes and polar bears will be planned, or travelers can simply relax on the ship and take in the landscape of ice dotted tundra ( 11,414 a person, with accommodations, meals and activities included). We have a new 52 Places traveler! Follow Sebastian Modak on Instagram, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And if you 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 |
Credit...Kenneth Tsang for The New York Times Every day for nearly five years, Juliet Shen's 94 year old grandmother in Shanghai has begun her day with a WeChat message to her 40 children and grandchildren scattered across the globe. And each time, the diaspora of family members across China, the United States and Central America respond with a cascade of warm replies. Ms. Shen, 27, who lives in Brooklyn, also chats with her parents in China and her brother in Nicaragua in a separate WeChat group, where they share thoughts about their daily meals and other quotidian routines. On Friday, Ms. Shen called her own meeting with her parents and brother to discuss the U.S. government's plan to hobble WeChat, the hugely popular messaging service that is a lifeline for many Americans to stay in touch with family and friends in China. When she heard the news about WeChat, Ms. Shen said, "I felt like the wind got knocked out of me. It is the only and easiest way I've stayed connected to my family." The escalating tensions between the United States and China have long been a largely esoteric issue for many people, something that seemed to be made up of officials bickering with each other over measures like tariffs and items like semiconductors. But the U.S. government's action to cut off the Chinese owned WeChat and another app, TikTok, from American app stores at midnight on Sunday has now made the battle intensely personal for millions of people. The feud is jeopardizing an essential means of communication when Americans are already restricted from traveling to China because of the coronavirus and travel rules. The Commerce Department's action on Friday focused on new downloads of WeChat and the ability to transfer payments through the app, but those who already have the messaging service are likely to see its service degrade over time because they will be unable to update it with software improvements and security fixes. The Trump administration's action further decouples the digital systems of China and the United States, creating an increasingly fragmented internet. The United States is imposing the type of exclusionary restrictions that China has long placed on foreign tech companies that tried to operate there. Facebook and Google dominate in most of the world, but they do not offer their services in China. Twitter is also blocked in China. WeChat, a do everything social network that is owned by China's Tencent, was one of the last major bridges connecting the two digital worlds. "This move is a page ripped straight out of China's playbook," said Lan Xuezhao, founding partner of Basis Set Ventures, a venture capital firm in San Francisco. Ms. Lan, who was born in China and travels there once a year, said that the internet experiences in the two countries had diverged for years, but that this latest escalation was "a new level." She herself has lots of family in China, including older relatives who all use WeChat and are not prepared to move to a new service, she said. "There's no way that people like me don't use WeChat," she said. "It's so essential." She added that she planned to use a virtual private network, a service that can disguise the true location of a user, to continue using WeChat in the United States. It's a common tactic employed by people in China to gain access to Google, YouTube and Facebook. Much has been made of the Trump administration's moves against TikTok, the viral video app owned by China's ByteDance, but the Commerce Department said a full ban of TikTok would not take effect till Nov. 12. TikTok is in deal talks with the American software maker Oracle and others, which may give it a reprieve from being blocked. That means the fallout is more severe for WeChat users. Lindsey Luper, 17, who lives in central New Jersey and has both TikTok and WeChat, said her family used WeChat to send money and canned goods to relatives in China who needed financial support and food. Losing access to the app is "very scary," she said. She enjoys TikTok, but she said what was happening with WeChat was much more distressing. "It's like comparing a game on your phone to the messages app," she said. "If both were getting banned, clearly one you need for communication with pretty much everyone in your life. And the other one, it's unfortunate, but it's not a necessity in the slightest." To prevent a WeChat ban, a group calling itself the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance has filed a motion in a federal court in San Francisco asking for a temporary injunction against the block. Other people said they were scrambling to find alternatives to WeChat. Sirui Hua, 29, a resident of Jersey City, N.J., told family and friends in China to sign up for QQ, a messaging app also owned by Tencent. He is also planning to use Apple's FaceTime to video chat with his parents in China. But it is hard to replicate the experience of WeChat, where he has more than 2,000 contacts, he said. Every Saturday evening, Mr. Hua's parents, who live in Jiangsu Province near Shanghai, message him their only child on WeChat for a one hour video chat. Lately, they have warned him to stay home and to always wear his mask as coronavirus rates increase in the United States. It's a reversal from early this year, he said, when he warned his parents to stay home in China because of soaring infection rates there. During the pandemic, WeChat has been a particularly important line of connection, he said. Mr. Hua has his WeChat desktop app open during the day, getting messages from dozens of friends in China. His phone app is where he sees the app's scrolling Moments feed, similar to a Facebook Timeline, which keeps him updated on how they are doing. Other WeChat users in the United States rely on the service to keep in touch with customers or maintain important cultural traditions. Hong Allen, 53, works for Usana Health Sciences, a nutritional and dietary supplement company that is based in Salt Lake City and has operations in China. Most of her clients and customers are in China, and she uses WeChat to communicate with them. Now, she is afraid she will lose all her contacts. "I really don't know what to do," said Ms. Allen, a resident of Vancouver, Wash. "How do I live?" Huajin Wang, 43, of Pittsburgh, uses WeChat to send a virtual red envelope of money a Chinese tradition of giving a cash gift in red packets for special occasions or holidays to friends and family. The U.S. restrictions would prevent that small but meaningful gesture, she said. "It's just a small amount, like 50 cents a person, but it is a tradition and sending it make me feel connected to these traditions," Ms. Wang said. Ms. Shen said she and her family decided to fall back on email and Skype for communication, the tools they used before WeChat became a daily fixture for them. She added that the feud between China and the United States had slowly pulled her family apart. Her father, a U.S. permanent resident, was held by Transportation Security Administration officials while traveling to China six months ago, and his laptop was confiscated, she said. Her parents, who have lived in the United States since the 1980s, were on their way to take care of their aging parents in Beijing and Shanghai. Now they are afraid they will face difficulties returning. "It's an impossible choice," Ms. Shen said. "They feel pressure to declare loyalty. It feels like no matter what we do, we will be punished." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For Many Boys With Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Bright Hope Lies Just Beyond Reach Lucas was 5 before his parents, Bill and Marci Barton of Grand Haven, Mich., finally got an explanation for his difficulties standing up or climbing stairs. The diagnosis: muscular dystrophy. "The first thing I read was, 'no cure, in a wheelchair in their teens, pass in their 20s," Mr. Barton said. "I stopped. I couldn't read any more. I couldn't handle it." Then he found a reason to hope. For the first time ever, there are clinical trials nearly two dozen testing treatments that might actually stop the disease. The problem, as Mr. Barton soon discovered, is that the enrollment criteria are so restrictive that very few children qualify. As a result, families like the Bartons often are turned away. "There is so much hope, but it's not for them," said Kristin Stephenson, vice president of policy and advocacy at the Muscular Dystrophy Association in Chicago. Even for the parents whose lucky child qualifies, good news may be followed by agonizing, life or death choices. What treatments seem most promising? Should he be enrolled in a trial with a placebo arm? Should he be placed in a less risky study that aims to slow the progress of the disease but will not stop it? Should the parents take their chances with a trial now or wait a year or two, as their child's condition worsens, until something better comes along? Often there is no easy way to decide. To help, her group has constructed detailed decision trees and leads families through them. Ms. Miller's own son, who is 22, does not qualify for the new clinical trials. Ryan and Brooke Saalman know how hard it can be to know what to do. "We did a lot of praying," said Ms. Saalman, mother of two boys with Duchenne in Columbus, Ga. They decided to enroll their oldest son, Jacob, 6, in a trial of a highly experimental drug. The trial requires weekly infusions at a site 100 miles from their home. He is one of the first boys to be treated. The investigators are testing a strategy called exon skipping: putting a molecular bandage over a tiny mutation in a large gene. The Saalmans also considered a gene therapy trial, in which scientists were attempting to insert a new gene that makes dystrophin. But they discovered that gene therapy may be irreversible. And if it didn't work, Jacob would be ineligible for an even more promising approach in the future: gene editing, to snip out the deadly mutation that causes Duchenne, an effort now in preclinical development. Gene therapy and gene editing both depend on a disabled cold virus to deliver the treatment. Once exposed to that virus, the body makes antibodies to it. Essentially, patients like Jacob get one shot at genetic modification. The Saalmans made a different decision for their younger son, Hudson, 2. He was offered a spot in two trials by companies that will accept younger boys. The Saalmans could not decide what to do. Hudson's disease is steadily progressing; muscle that he loses now is gone forever. But they finally made the difficult decision to wait. Hudson is still very young. If they wait, the Saalmans concluded, researchers will have learned more. Other trials are bound to begin. "It's a heavy thing," said Leslie Porter of Blanchard, Okla., whose 8 year old son has Duchenne. He does not qualify for any trials, and she dreads watching him deteriorate. "I just want time to slow down," she said. According to Ms. Stephenson, of the M.D.A., drug trials are seeking 2,500 patients. But most only want to enroll boys between the ages of 4 and 7 who are affected by the disease but not yet too debilitated, and who meet other clinical criteria, such as having a mutation in the right place in the dystrophin gene. The trials usually require functional tests, including one that measures how far a boy can walk in six minutes or how quickly he can get up from lying flat. For many, the criteria are just too stringent. "There are not enough patients," Ms. Miller said. "It will be difficult to fill all these clinical trials." Dr. Jeffrey Bigelow, a neurologist, and his wife, Alexis Bigelow, of Millcreek, Utah, hoped against hope that their son Henri, 8, would qualify for the only gene therapy trial that will accept boys his age. Then the Bigelows found out that enrollees of Henri's age have to be able to lie down and then stand up with their hands at their sides in less than 10 seconds. It took Henri 10 seconds to do that last spring, when he was evaluated for another trial. Now it would probably take him 20 seconds, his father said. "It feels like Henri is being punished for losing the ability to stand up from the ground too soon," Dr. Bigelow said. He also worries about older boys with Duchenne who are lucky enough to still walk. They are shut out from the trial because they are not yet in wheelchairs . And other trials won't accept boys that old. "These are boys who, like Henri, desperately need the treatment, and if they don't get it in the next one to two years, likely will be confined to a wheelchair, to never walk again," Dr. Bigelow said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
OAKLAND, Calif. Uber and Lyft must treat their California drivers as employees, providing them with the benefits and wages they are entitled to under state labor law, a California appeals court ruled Thursday. The decision points to growing agreement between the state courts and lawmakers that gig workers do not have the independence necessary for them to be considered contractors. But the California electorate will get to weigh in soon, too, when they vote in less than two weeks on a ballot initiative sponsored by gig economy start ups to exempt themselves from the law. The ruling by the California First District Court of Appeal is the result of a lawsuit brought by the state's attorney general and the city attorneys of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. The state and city agencies sued the ride hailing companies in May to enforce a new state labor law that aimed to make gig workers into employees. "Every other employer follows the law," Matthew Goldberg, deputy city attorney with the San Francisco City Attorney's Office, told the appeals court during arguments last week. "This is dollars and wages and money that is being stolen from drivers by virtue of the misclassification." After a lower court ruled that Uber and Lyft must immediately comply and hire the drivers, the companies fought back. They threatened to shut down completely in California and appealed the decision, winning a last minute reprieve from the appellate court while it considered the case. This time, Uber and Lyft are unlikely to threaten a similar shutdown. The appellate court required them to develop plans to employ drivers in case the ruling did not go in their favor, and the companies have considered establishing franchise like businesses in the state to avoid directly hiring drivers. Uber and Lyft may choose to appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court. But it could be a futile effort. In 2018, that court established a strict employment test that became the basis for the law Uber and Lyft are now fighting. "We're considering our appeal options, but the stakes couldn't be higher for drivers," said Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman. He argued that if the ballot measure, Proposition 22, fails, hundreds of thousands of drivers would lose work and the company might shut down its services in parts of the state Uber and Lyft have said that it would be too expensive to hire all of their drivers, causing catastrophic harm to their businesses. But that does not justify the losses for drivers who went without workplace protections, the appellate court said. "When violation of statutory workplace protections takes place on a massive scale, as alleged in this case, it causes public harm over and above the private interest of any given individual," the court wrote in its decision on Thursday. State officials have argued that the companies must comply with the law, known as Assembly Bill 5, so that workers can obtain sick leave, overtime and other benefits needs that have become especially pressing during the pandemic. "This is a victory for the people of California and for every driver who has been denied fair wages, paid sick days, and other benefits by these companies," San Francisco's city attorney, Dennis Herrera, said in a statement. "The law is clear: Drivers can continue to have all of the flexibility they currently enjoy while getting the rights they deserve as employees. The only thing preventing that is Uber and Lyft's greed." But Uber and Lyft have argued that they are technology companies, not transportation businesses. Employing drivers would force them to raise fares and hire only a small fraction of the drivers who currently work for them, they said. The companies are sponsoring a state ballot initiative, Proposition 22, to exempt them from the law and allow them to continue classifying drivers as independent contractors, while providing them with limited benefits. The court gave Uber and Lyft a grace period in which to make changes, and if the ballot initiative is successful, it could throw the ruling into question. "This ruling makes it more urgent than ever for voters to stand with drivers and vote yes on Prop. 22," said Julie Wood, a spokeswoman for Lyft. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Buyers For Nicole and Brent Ferrin, lots to do and "a ton of character" in the financial district. For four years, Nicole and Brent Ferrin were happy in their rented apartment in a postwar high rise building on Murray Street in TriBeCa. They paid around 4,000 a month for a loftlike one bedroom with around 1,200 square feet. They especially liked their two bathrooms. Last summer, a wake up call came in the form of a lease renewal. Online research showed it was possible to buy a suitable place for a little more than 1 million, so the Ferrins who met as students at Wake Forest University when Ms. Ferrin, now 29, was Nicole Pappas decided to hunt for a place of their own. They required "two very un New York things," Ms. Ferrin said: space and closets. Space meant an extra room bedroom, den or study for her many relatives, who visit often, and for a future child. As it turned out, their search for a place in a space and closet challenged city landed them smack in the path of Hurricane Sandy. But there was no way they could have known that. The Ferrins' wish list also included an open kitchen. When Ms. Ferrin cooked in their galley kitchen on Murray Street, "there was no place for Brent to sit and he would get in my way," she said. The two rarely eat together during the week, so "cooking on Friday and Sunday nights is our time together, and it wasn't really time together when I was in a walled off kitchen." Short on counter space, they stacked bowls on top of the toaster. And since the living room was at the other end of the apartment, there was a lot of shouting when friends came over. Despite their rental's large size, it didn't have sufficient closet space. Mr. Ferrin's bag of golf clubs always sat in full view, standing upright behind a couch in a corner of the living room. But they decided against the area after learning that the buildings are on land leased from the Battery Park City Authority, which meant lower sales prices but higher monthly charges. They went uptown to Greenwich Village. There they found a beautifully renovated two bedroom co op, listed at 1.1 million with a maintenance fee of around 1,450 a month. But it had the kind of galley kitchen they didn't want, and just one bathroom. And with 900 square feet, it was smaller than they would have liked. (It later sold for 1.06 million.) For their budget, the Ferrins found Greenwich Village offered less square footage than they already had. And, with their lease about to expire, they feared the co op approval process would be prohibitively time consuming. So a condominium seemed like a better bet, but there aren't a lot of them in Greenwich Village. What's more, they were reluctant to live too close to Ms. Ferrin's workplace. As the director of admissions for a Greenwich Village nursery school, she had had awkward street encounters with students and their families. Out of context, it was sometimes difficult to remember who was who. (Once, a mother approached her at the hairdresser.) The Ferrins knew they could get more space for their money in a financial district condo, though they worried that the neighborhood might be inconvenient and desolate during nonbusiness hours. And in the many office conversions they saw, they encountered narrow layouts and windowless home offices. One apartment, for 1.095 million, with monthly charges of around 1,100, was gorgeously done, but its one bathroom had only a shower. The seller had small children, who were bathed in a portable tub. That was a deal breaker. "We wanted a bathtub," Ms. Ferrin said. "We talked about it. Friends from outside of the city were, 'What do you mean, no bathtub?' " The other place, for almost 1.2 million with monthly charges in the mid 1,100s, had two bathrooms, one with a tub. But it was more of a studio with two windowless rooms, one of which was a raised platform with partitions instead of walls. The Ferrins wanted a real bedroom. At another converted office building, 75 Wall Street, the condominium atop Hyatt's Andaz Wall Street Hotel, they came upon a one bedroom with a refreshingly normal layout. The 1,100 plus square feet allowed for a home office, plenty of closet space, two bathrooms and a kitchen open to the large living room. "Their faces lit up when they saw the island for the kitchen," Ms. Stein said. The price was 1.2 million, with monthly charges in the low 1,300s. The couple paid 1.17 million and arrived in mid September a few weeks before Hurricane Sandy. "I grew up with hurricanes in Florida," Ms. Ferrin said. "I told Brent, if we stayed in the apartment and the windows blew out, we had a bathroom we could hide in, and he said, 'What are you talking about?' " At Thanksgiving, they successfully played host to Ms. Ferrin's large family, some of whom stayed at the hotel beneath. The neighborhood is growing on them. They are happily surprised at the enormous Duane Reade drugstores that are open 24 hours. "What I didn't realize is the financial district has a ton of character, which I like a lot," Mr. Ferrin said. "It is a little more lively and keeps getting better. It isn't as bad as I was worried about." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. American Ballet Theater (Monday through July 4) American Ballet Theater opens its Metropolitan Opera House season and the next stretch of its 75th anniversary with a series of mixed bills under the heading "Classic ABT." The selected repertory includes George Balanchine's resplendent "Theme and Variations," Agnes de Mille's boisterous "Rodeo" and Michel Fokine's "Les Sylphides," an early depiction of the ballerina as fairy. Mondays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m. (May 18 gala at 6:30 p.m.); Saturdays at 8 p.m.; matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m.; Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 212 362 6000, abt.org. (Siobhan Burke) Brooklyn Studios for Dance Studio Show (Friday) It's been a productive spring for Pepper Fajans, the founder of this new space at Cadman Congregational Church in Fort Greene. With an ambitious volunteer team, Mr. Fajans, a dancer, choreographer and stage technician, has transformed the church's dilapidated gym into a light filled arena for classes, performances and other gatherings, equipped with dance friendly infrastructure like a sprung floor. An inaugural five week series continues with performances by Hadar Ahuvia, Julian Barnett, Maiko Kikuchi and Mr. Fajans, before the space closes for more renovations this summer. At 8 p.m., 210 Lafayette Avenue, at Clinton Avenue, bksd.org (Burke) Sophia Cleary (Friday and Saturday) "Emerging Artist," that vague yet ubiquitous term, is the title and subject of Ms. Cleary's latest work. What does it mean, really, to emerge? Ms. Cleary replaces notions of budding promise with something intriguingly funereal. "I challenge the belief that the 'emerging artist' is someone who is full of potential," she writes. "The emerging artist is someone who is dying and/or already dead." Collective rebirth will also be explored. 8 p.m., the Performing Garage, 33 Wooster Street, near Grand Street, SoHo, theperforminggarage.org. (Burke) Damagedance (Friday and Saturday) The choreographer Jessica Taylor is celebrating five years of creating dance under the name Damagedance, which suggests work that is dark, moody and fractured. Stylistically, she's a proponent of the kind of contemporary pieces that merge the drama and polish of modern dance with spastic postmodern gestures, switching regularly from contemplative to urgent. At 7:30 p.m., Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street, between Rivington and Delancey Streets, Lower East Side, 212 219 0736, dixonplace.org. (Brian Schaefer) Rebecca Davis (Friday and Saturday) The title of Ms. Davis's new work, "Bloowst windku," welds parts of recognizable words (bloom, twist, windmill, haiku) into something unrecognizable. The same may be true of the movement, light and sound in this carefully constructed trio. In another twist on the ordinary, hundreds of security envelopes, amassed over three years, are put to inventive architectural use. At 8:30 p.m., Here, 145 Avenue of the Americas, at Dominick Street, South Village, 212 352 3101, here.org. (Burke) Mark Dendy Projects (Friday and Saturday) Before Astor Place was home to the Public Theater, the Blue Man Group and Indochine, it spawned the Astor Library, a precursor to the New York Public Library. In the guise of William B. Astor II, grandson of John Jacob Astor, the millionaire for which the place is named, the choreographer Mark Dendy explores the history of these storied blocks in "NewYorknewyork Astor Place," with the help of a cabal of characters. In the process, he ponders gentrification, race relations, tabloid news and more. At 7 p.m., with an additional performance on Saturday at 9 p.m., Joe's Pub, at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, 212 967 7555, joespub.com. (Schaefer) Marjani Forte (Friday and Saturday) For three years, the Harlem based choreographer Marjani Forte has been investigating the ways mental illness, addiction and poverty feed and follow one another in an endless cycle. "Being Here ... /this time" is the final expression of that research. A powerful previous iteration focused on the personal; here, Ms. Marjani implicates institutions. An evocative aural atmosphere, from the composer and sound designer Everett Saunders, reaches the audience via individual headphones. At 7:30 p.m., Gibney Dance Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Schaefer) Gibney Dance Company (Wednesday through May 16) In its 24 years, this ensemble has performed only the work of its founder and artistic director, Gina Gibney. Departing from that model, the troupe now presents "Work by Women," an evening of choreography by Amy Miller the company's associate artistic director and one of its finest dancers and Hilary Easton. Ms. Miller offers "Still and Still Moving," created with the composer Peter Swendsen, and Ms. Easton reprises excerpts from "The Short Cut," a 2005 work inspired by the progressive era management guru Frederick Winslow Taylor. At 7:30 p.m., Gibney Dance Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Burke) Rennie Harris (Friday through May 17) Mr. Harris and his Philadelphia based company, RHAW (Rennie Harris Awe Inspiring Works), return to the New Victory Theater with their latest foray into narrative, youth empowering hip hop. "LUV: American Style," featuring about a dozen young performers, tells the story of a daydreaming teenager who unjustly lands in prison. A classic rock soundtrack sets the unconventional backdrop for styles like popping, locking and boogaloo. Fridays at 7 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 7 p.m.; Sundays at noon and 5 p.m.; 209 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, 646 223 3010, newvictory.org. (Burke) Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (Tuesday through May 24) If the Midwest has a hub for European choreographers, Hubbard Street is it. This troupe of exceptional dancers, who thrive in many modes of contemporary ballet, travels east with two programs of works created at home and abroad. These include Jiri Kylian's stark and percussive "Falling Angels," Nacho Duato's Mediterranean tinged "Gnawa," a Crystal Pite solo and a tribute to George Balanchine by the Spanish choreographer Gustavo Ramirez Sansano. The resident artist Alejandro Cerrudo contributes two pieces, one on each program. Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through May 9 at 8 p.m.; May 9 and 10 at 2 p.m.; Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke) Alonzo King Lines Ballet (Friday through Sunday) At first glance, Alonzo King and San Francisco make an unlikely pair. The city has a hippie past and a high tech present, while Mr. King's Lines Ballet is the picture of refined classicism. Yet there's a California ease and earthiness to his work, too. Lines Ballet returns to the Joyce with two New York premieres: "Writing Ground," set to an omnist score of religious chants, with a libretto by the Irish writer Colum McCann, and "Concerto for Two Violins," set to Bach. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.; Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) Cherylyn Lavagnino Dance (Thursday through May 16) In recent years, Ms. Lavagnino has turned to themes of political oppression in her ballet based work. Her company's quadruple bill at St. Mark's Church includes the premiere of "Nadeje," which draws inspiration from Czech artists and writers to reflect on freedom of expression. Also on the program are last year's "RU," about a young Vietnamese political refugee, along with "Snapshots" (2010) and "Will" (2009), examining various facets of interpersonal relationships. At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Burke) New York City Ballet (through June 7) The spring season continues with a variety of all Balanchine programs (Friday through Sunday), Peter Martins's new staging of "La Sylphide" (Tuesday), a Jerome Robbins double bill ("The Goldberg Variations" and "West Side Story Suite," on Wednesday) and a program of "21st Century Choreographers," featuring works by Mr. Martins, Christopher Wheeldon and Justin Peck (Thursday). Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m.; David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, nycballet.com. (Burke) Ann Liv Young (Wednesdays through May 20) The irreverent Ms. Young presents "Elektra Cabaret" at Joe's Pub, casting a character often portrayed as wicked in a compassionate light. In this reimagined version of her full length "Elektra," she is joined by Marissa Mickelberg (chorus), Bailey Nolan (Klytemnestra), Charley Parden (Orestes) and Vanessa Soudan (Chrysothemis). At 9:30 p.m., Joe's Pub, at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, 212 967 7555, joespub.com. (Burke) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The global effort to eradicate polio, a disease that has been on the brink of extinction for years, is facing serious setbacks on two continents. The virus is surging in Somalia and the Horn of Africa, which had been largely free of cases for several years. And a new outbreak has begun in a part of Pakistan that a warlord declared off limits to vaccinators 14 months ago. The African outbreak began in May with just two cases of polio paralysis: one in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, and another in the huge Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, where thousands of Somalis have fled fighting between Islamic militants, clan militias, government troops and African peacekeepers. Now there are 121 cases in the region; last year, there were only 223 in the world. The new Pakistan outbreak is in North Waziristan, near the frontier with Afghanistan. It is in an area where a warlord banned polio vaccinations after it was disclosed that the C.I.A. had staged a hepatitis vaccination campaign in its hunt for Osama bin Laden. The warlord, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, banned all efforts until American drone strikes ended. Although only three North Waziristan children have suffered polio paralysis since then, even one case shows that the virus is in the area and could spread. The new outbreaks may delay a recently announced 5.5 billion plan to eradicate polio by 2018. Nonetheless, public health officials still believe that, with enough local political will and donor money, they can prevail by using techniques that have worked before. To prevent the disease from reaching Mecca during next month's hajj, Saudi Arabia has tightened its rules. Pilgrims from any country with polio cases must be vaccinated at home and again on arrival. Last year, nearly 500,000 pilgrims were vaccinated on arrival, Dr. Ziad A. Memish, the Saudi deputy health minister, said recently. The Pakistan outbreak is particularly frustrating because eradication had been going steadily forward despite the killings in December of nine vaccinators for which some blamed the Taliban. Public health officials had counted themselves lucky that despite simultaneous vaccination bans in North and South Waziristan, no polio virus was known to be circulating in the 250,000 children in those areas. Vaccination posts were set up on nearby highways and on buses and trains. Urban hospitals packed the vaccine on ice for families willing to smuggle it back to neighbors. But it was not enough. "The equation is simple," said Dr. Elias Durry, emergency coordinator for polio eradication in Pakistan for the World Health Organization. "Where you can immunize, the virus goes away. Where you can't, the virus gets in, and it will paralyze these poor kids." Dr. Durry said he hoped that parents whose children were paralyzed would speak up at local decision making councils, called shuras, that are common in tribal areas, and possibly put pressure on warlords to rescind the ban. The Taliban warlord in South Waziristan, Maulvi Nazir, was killed by a drone strike in January. Before the Waziristan outbreak, Pakistan had seen only 24 cases this year, about as many as it had at the same point in 2012. Most were around Karachi and Peshawar, where last year's killings of the vaccinators took place and where resistance to vaccines is highest. The Somali outbreak is different. There is little opposition to the vaccine itself, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, the W.H.O. assistant director general for polio. In several Muslim countries, including Pakistan, the drive has been hurt by rumors that the vaccine sterilizes girls or contains the virus that causes AIDS or pork products. But, he said, many cases are in areas south of Mogadishu where the Shabab, a militant group, operate. The group opposes mass campaigns because it believes the sight of thousands of vaccinators going house to house would undercut its claim to rule those areas. "It's all about control," Dr. Aylward said. Instead, the campaign negotiates with local chiefs and midlevel Shabab members to hold small drives. Other tactics have changed, too: children of any age, and sometimes adults, get the drops, and drives are held twice a month instead of every three months. Refugee camps face other obstacles. Large ones often have lawless areas on their fringes where vaccinators may fear to work because of predatory criminals. "When this started, I said, 'Brace yourself for hundreds of cases,' " Dr. Aylward said, because he knew that few children born in the last five years had been immunized. Still, he said he believed this outbreak could be beaten because it echoed the one that plagued the region from 2005 to 2007. It also began in Mogadishu, and it spread as far as Yemen and Eritrea and paralyzed about 700 children before multiple mass vaccination rounds snuffed it out. Kenya, Yemen and Ethiopia are already planning those with help from Geneva. Somalia is so dangerous for health workers that Doctors Without Borders pulled out of the country this month after 22 years there. But polio officials hope their campaign will not be targeted, largely because it creates thousands of temporary paying jobs for "volunteer" vaccinators. In Mogadishu in July, President Hassan Sheik Mohamud publicly took polio drops at an event encouraging parents to vaccinate. Asha Ali, 38, a mother of four, changed her attitude. "I was thinking the vaccine might sicken our children," she said. "I realized later that it was good." Hamdi Hashi, 26, said she accepted it "because I don't want this serious disease to cripple my children." But Habow Madey, in a different Mogadishu neighborhood, said her husband had forbidden vaccination, believing it causes "a mysterious disease." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
TARRYTOWN, N.Y. Maybe it's the regular shows at the 128 year old music hall. Or the 38 minute express rail commute to Grand Central Terminal. Perhaps it's the attractive new housing developments on the Hudson River or being named one of the nation's 10 prettiest towns last year by Forbes magazine. Whatever the reason, Tarrytown a diverse suburban New York village of 11,354 people is having a moment. With only four stores available for rent, it is humming with new businesses, including a soon to open sushi restaurant, a home goods store and a recently opened toy store using a space where the previous tenants included a flooring retailer and a bike shop. Both of those businesses are still thriving in Tarrytown, in new locations. "The town has gone from antiques stores to boutiques and restaurants," said John Sardy, a 30 year resident and executive director of the local chamber of commerce. Mr. Sardy, who also sells residential real estate, said Tarrytown's appeal was unsurprising. "People want the charming village," with the easy commute into Manhattan that allows residents to combine city life and small town ease, he said. Amid the miniboom, though, "a lot of people are still struggling," said Drew Fixell, Tarrytown's mayor for the last nine years. There are really three Tarrytowns, "the new Tarrytown, the old Tarrytown and an immigrant community," Mr. Fixell said. "We've become more Latino in the past 10 years. I have plenty of Latino neighbors." Unlike some wealthier Westchester towns, Tarrytown has long offered a more affordable mixture of co ops, condominiums, single and multiple family homes and rentals. That resulting economic diversity is itself a draw for some merchants. "I'm so glad I chose Tarrytown," said Colleen Goudie, co owner of ShayLuLa, a two year old, 700 square foot store selling jewelry and women's accessories. Ms. Goudie said she had been ready to sign a lease in Bronxville, a more upscale Westchester County community, but now appreciated a local clientele hungry for a new shop. "I didn't know Tarrytown could handle luxury," said Ms. Goudie, who worked for many years in the luxury goods industry. "When I was growing up in Nanuet across the river, Tarrytown was blue collar. I hadn't been over here in 15 years, but I could see right away the town's potential." Her choice of location "has been better than my wildest expectations," with shoppers now even coming from Bronxville, a 30 minute drive. "I did shift my buying pattern to more affordable items. We have things for 50 to custom diamonds up to 4,000." Mike Love, co owner with his wife, Alicia, of Coffee Labs Roasters, a cafe and coffee roasting shop, was a pioneer, opening in 2003 with a 10 year lease and a five year extension. "We chose Tarrytown because one of our friends lived here. It had little niche stores, cool streetlights down Main Street." Of all the river towns Dobbs Ferry, Hastings on Hudson, Irvington and Ossining "this was the most lively," he said. "No one was here but us. I used to watch people going into the 7 Eleven to get their coffee. It took us awhile to become known." Their initial rent for 2,000 square feet was 2,600 a month and is now 4,000, plus town property taxes of 9,000 to 10,000 a year, he said. Today, their customers range from hedge fund traders to day laborers. "Coffee is a luxury that everyone can attain," he said. The mix of his clients and close retail neighbors a florist, pet store, restaurants and a coin operated laundry are positive aspects, he said. "Tarrytown is not Scarsdale, Katonah or Armonk," he said, referring to three of the county's most affluent areas. Edward J. Hart, who owns several commercial buildings in town, says Tarrytown is "still very much in transition." "Since 2008, it's been a slow evolution," he said, referring to the period after the economic downturn in 2007 and 2008, when several of his tenants, including a yogurt shop that spent heavily to renovate its space, struggled and went out of business. Another yogurt shop, which also sells crepes, replaced it and has done well, he said. "They've been tremendously successful thanks to that combination of two things." Mr. Hart, who has commercial properties in other area towns like New Rochelle, Eastchester and Mount Vernon, and lives on Long Island, has a broader perspective of the recent commercial changes. "I personally think Tarrytown is unique. Right now there's an infusion of younger people who have discovered its older homes. I sense an uptick right now." Rents for his properties run to the mid 20s per square foot, he said, after hitting a low in the downturn of high teens to low 20s. One space that remained vacant for two years, since the closing of Tarrytown Gourmet, a 16 year tenant, is soon to reopen with a tenant who has signed a 20 year lease, said Edward Coco, who has owned the building since 1990. The space is 13,000 square feet, and Mr. Coco would say only that he was charging more than 20,000 a month in rent, plus a share of insurance, operating costs and property tax. Mr. Coco defended the two year wait. "I'm waiting for the kind of tenant I'm comfortable with." he said. "I have someone now who will rent the whole building and who will be good for Tarrytown and good for me." The new tenant will also be spending heavily to renovate the space, he said. He would not reveal his client's name, but said it was part of a regional chain. For Ilda Sampaio, a co owner of Salon 2000, a block away from Mr. Coco's property, running a business in Tarrytown has been a mixed blessing. Her hair salon now has four direct competitors, in a town where the main street has about that many stoplights. She moved here in 1987 from Portugal and, in 2005, signed a 10 year lease on her 2,500 square foot space. It's not easy to stay afloat, she said. "A lot of businesses can't keep up. The minimum rent is already high. A lot of clients tell me they're amazed by how things keep changing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In Taiwan, Modest Test of Driverless Bus May Hint at Big Things to Come TAIPEI, Taiwan Rolling with a barely audible hum beneath banyan trees, a brightly painted shuttle bus cruised through a university campus here. The electric vehicle crawled along at a speed of no more than six miles per hour. And only 12 passengers could fit inside. But the bus also drove itself, raising hopes in Taipei that autonomous public transportation would be up and running here within a year. "The idea of one day being able to ride around this city in driverless vehicles is quite exciting," said Amber Chen, who was riding with her son Ruey She, 8. The bus tests are partly to prove that the autonomous driving technology is safe to deploy on the city's busy streets, and partly to gather the data needed to improve the artificial intelligence that steer such vehicles. The effort, one of the earliest in Asia, could help position Taiwan as both a pioneer in autonomous public transportation and, if things go according to plan, a producer of driverless buses. So far, the bus being tested, the EZ10, has breezed through its trials on the campus of National Taiwan University, which have been in progress since May. But successful testing on a closed course at low speeds can only reveal so much about how the buses would fare in traffic. Getting them on the road at busy times is the next step, and the program's backers are eager to see that happen quickly. One obstacle: Despite active support from Taipei's municipal government and its mayor, Ko Wen Je, the testing has only tacit approval from the central government, said Wei Bin Lee, commissioner of Taipei's Department of Information Technology. "The rest of the world isn't going to stop and wait for you just because you're sputtering along," he said. Martin Ting, the general manager of 7StarLake, the Taiwanese company testing the buses, said in an interview that the EZ10 was suited for three scenarios: closed campuses; short, fixed circuits; and city bus routes. Such situations abound in Taiwan, which has 23.5 million people and is home to more than 150 universities and colleges, 100 plus industrial parks and 15 theme parks, as well as densely urbanized sections on its northern and western coasts. In August, the EZ10 began late night trials on a short stretch of Xinyi Road, a six lane artery in downtown Taipei. "Our ultimate goal is to autonomize the entire Xinyi Road main line," Mr. Ko, the mayor, told local media when the trials started. The EZ10 is built by the French company EasyMile. It uses GPS and eight laser sensors to navigate predetermined routes. Front and rear cameras enable it to detect and avoid obstacles. At 550,000 a unit, including import taxes, it is nearly twice the price of a larger bus with a driver. Mr. Ting said he hoped to import three more buses next year and begin manufacturing them under a license from EasyMile by the end of 2018, with the goal of getting half of the components from Taiwanese suppliers. That would eliminate the 45 percent import tax, saving approximately 200,000 per bus. Then EasyMile could seriously consider other Asian markets, he said. "After we've started supplying Taiwan, we're going to sell to Japan, Australia, China and South Asia," he said. "Australia already wants 100 vehicles and Japan has strong demand before the 2020 Olympic Games." The EZ10, with a top speed of 25 m.p.h., achieves "Level 4" automation under the standards of the global engineering association S.A.E. International, meaning its route is chosen by humans but there is no one behind the wheel and it can avoid obstacles on its own. Tesla's Autopilot system is considered Level 2, although Elon Musk, the company's chief executive, said this year that Tesla was only two years away from Level 5: complete autonomy. For any level of vehicle autonomy to work, urban infrastructure must be updated. Traffic lights, for example, would require special signals to direct autonomous vehicles. Then there is the issue of creating three dimensional maps, and developing the computing power needed to use them for detection and navigation. In a dense, urban area like Taipei, they must account for the way tall buildings can distort GPS signals. "You need to make a map with 99.999 percent accuracy, which is not easy," Mr. Ting said. "It takes time and money." He added that processing all of the data would require cloud computing and a high speed wireless connection. Technological hurdles aside, national lawmakers in Taiwan have more important priorities than autonomous vehicles, including a contentious infrastructure package. And political concerns make many lawmakers cautious about embracing even an experimental system, knowing that any accident could derail long term plans. Nonetheless, the administration of President Tsai Ing wen has made creating "smart cities," which include technological innovations like autonomous vehicles, a national priority. "It is time to use our strength in information and communication technology to bolster domestic development," Ms. Tsai said at a smart city forum in Taipei in February. Jason Hsu, a legislator who visited Silicon Valley with Mr. Ting, said that Taiwan could set itself apart, especially in Asia, by focusing on public transportation with Level 4 vehicles. Many countries in the region, including China, are involved in autonomous vehicle research and development, he noted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
BLAST FROM THE PAST We don't have a crystal ball so we can't look into the future to see what will be on the best seller list in 2020. What we do have at the Book Review is the ability to look back either in our library of bound issues dating back to 1930 or in TimesPast, a handy digital tool that takes us back to the eras when O. Henry was carousing at Pete's Tavern and Dorothy Parker was holding court at the Algonquin. I was curious to find out what mere mortals were reading and writing 100 years ago, so into the archives I went. In the books pages from the Jan. 4, 1920, edition of The Times, among ads for writing coaches and diet books ("Why Grow Fat?") some things never change I stumbled on "What the New Year Will Bring in Books." The unbylined article relied on the expertise of Sir Ernest Hodder Williams, president of the London publishing firm Hodder Stoughton and vice president of the George H. Doran Company in New York, who declared "the coming twelvemonth" to be "'the biggest year ever' in the reading of books." "In these times that follow the war, people are reading fiction to 'get away' from the drabness of everyday existence," said Sir Ernest. "I believe that fiction will mean more to the public than it ever has." He described the most popular novels of the time: the "open air" story that took "city clerks and other busy indoor workers into a broad, open outdoor life" and the domestic one that dealt "with young people in a bright and pleasant way." He also said, "The detective novel and the novel of sheer adventure are always popular." As for futuristic fiction and stories of war, Sir Ernest did not have high hopes for their success: "People have lived so close to life, to bigness and reality in these past years that they are not interested in reading theories. They want facts." He continued, "One thing I do look for, and that is a tremendous flood of sex novels. I think that is inevitable. I think myself that the new candor will be, in the long run, a good thing for society. ... The old secrecy in relation to sex can never come back. Moreover, the sexes are franker and more friendly with each other than they have ever been before. Men and women have worked and suffered side by side through all these hard years." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Jesse Watters, the Fox News host who took heat this week for making a joke about Ivanka Trump that was criticized as lewd, said on Wednesday that he would be taking a family vacation until Monday. The move came just three days after his show began airing in a new high profile time slot. Mr. Watters, who denied that his comment about President Trump's daughter was sexual, announced his upcoming absence near the end of Wednesday night's edition of "The Five." He will miss two days of the show's first week in prime time after it took over the 9 p.m. slot from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and he will miss his "Watters' World" show on Saturday. A Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the vacation had been planned before "The Five" moved to its new time slot, or if the time off was related to the criticism Mr. Watters had received throughout much of Wednesday. Toward the end of Wednesday's hourlong show, Mr. Watters and his fellow hosts marveled at a wild baseball play in which a base runner leapt over the catcher to score a run, then he segued abruptly into his vacation announcement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Danielle Macdonald of 'Bird Box' Tries Her Hand at Graffiti "I feel like I'm doing something illegal, and I like it," Danielle Macdonald said. It was a shivery Monday morning, and Ms. Macdonald shook a spray can and hissed an arc of orange paint. After starring in the recent Netflix movies "Dumplin'" and "Bird Box," Ms. Macdonald, 27, was receiving a master class in graffiti writing from an artist who calls herself Anjl. The classroom was a semi vacant lot in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, ringed by a chain link fence and barbed wire. Even though the class broke no laws, it still felt just a little criminal. For Ms. Macdonald, learning to write graffiti is a yearslong dream (she once tried to find every Banksy in London). Knowing the dream was a messy one, she had dressed down, wearing a black puffer jacket, bright bluejeans and old sneakers. Her hair, the color of raw honey, twirled in the wind. She was kitted out in plastic gloves and a plastic apron, which gave her the look of an extremely chilly food service worker. This was not the apocalyptic world of "Bird Box"; no blindfold required. Anjl asked if she had a nickname of her own. "Yeah," Ms. Macdonald said with hesitance, "but it's not very cool." "In graffiti it could be cool," Anjl said. Ms. Macdonald decided to drop the "a." Her tag: DNDi. Anjl unpacked cans from a duffel bag and fitted them with yellow banana caps. She explained that holding the can next to canvas would make a thin line and spraying from a couple of inches away, the distance of a clenched fist, would make a wider one. She demonstrated her own tag, full of curlicues, arrows and a halo, then turned the canvas over to Ms. Macdonald, who approached it warily, holding a can of emerald green. "I don't really know what I should be doing," she said. "Do whatever you want," Anjl said. Ms. Macdonald hasn't landed her film roles by hanging back. As a gifted actress in an industry with blinkered ideas of how leading ladies should look, she credits her success, in part, to being "just, like, really stubborn" and believing that you "have to own who you are," she said. Her arm outstretched, she sprayed her tag, the letters ascending like painted up talk. "I don't know what that is," she said, sounding uncertain. In person, she is a lot less outspoken than her onscreen characters, perhaps from being on damp, unfamiliar turf. Ms. Macdonald was more confident as she wrote it again in purple. And braver still when she tried two colors: sandy yellow bubbles filled with khaki green. Graffiti was hard, but not nearly as hard as learning to rap for "Patti Cake ." In "Dumplin'," in which she plays an outspoken teenager who mutinies against the beauty pageant culture her mother (played by Jennifer Aniston) loves, she had to sing backup for Dolly Parton. That was hard, too. So was playing a pregnant wife in the middle of an apocalypse in "Bird Box," the meme generating horror movie starring Sandra Bullock. "Every scene where I had more than, like, three lines, I'm basically crying," Ms. Macdonald said. For a big finish, Ms. Macdonald would collaborate with Anjl on their "masterpiece": a word that they would color in and then ornament with shadows and highlights. Anjl suggested "Brooklyn" or "New York City," but as Ms. Macdonald noted, those involved a lot of letters. They settled on "NYC" instead. Anjl outlined the three foot tall letters, and Ms. Macdonald filled them in with darkening shades of orange and red. "A sunset type situation," Ms. Macdonald said. As an actress, Ms. Macdonald is as meticulous as she is fearless. Graffiti, with its fast pace and occasional drips and relative lack of control, was a big adjustment. "I'm scared to go outside the lines," she said. But she sprayed on. Once Anjl added the shadows in black and the highlights in white, the piece was complete. Teacher and student stood back to admire their work, drips and all. "I'm a perfectionist so this is hard for me," Ms. Macdonald said. "The cool thing about it is it's almost better when it's not perfect. But it's still hard for me." "That can be the hardest part about being an artist," Anjl said. "I never feel like it's totally finished." Ms. Macdonald stripped off her apron and gloves and struck some tough girl poses next to her teacher. "I feel cooler than I actually am. And cold," said Ms. MacDonald, who grew up in Sydney. She planned to go in search of a latte while the canvas dried. Anjl encouraged her to keep tagging when she returned to Los Angeles, where she lives with a dog and a cat. Ms. Macdonald didn't volunteer if she lived with anyone else, though she did say that dating in Hollywood is "super weird." Ms. Macdonald agreed that graffiti would be harmless fun. "It's like the safe thing to do," she said. "It's better than a D.U.I." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Twenty five years ago, the economist David W. Breneman published a controversial report lamenting a shift away from liberal arts toward practical courses like engineering and business. Now, more and more university students enroll in professional programs, and the small colleges that were the hallmark of a liberal education are increasingly adding market oriented programs. Some are closing. Sweet Briar, the 114 year old women's college in Virginia horse country, is one of the latest to run into trouble. Dr. Breneman, who had just finished six years as president of Kalamazoo College when he wrote his paper, went on to be dean of the school of education and a director of the school of public policy at the University of Virginia. After 10 years on Sweet Briar's board, he stepped down in June as a new crew took on a rescue mission. What does the trend away from liberal arts tell us about America? I don't think one should get melodramatic about this, but we are drifting toward turning college into a trade school. And that is ultimately harmful. The original ethos of education was that it prepared people for citizenship, for enlightened leadership, enhanced their creativity. There was a tradition going back to Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia, that a liberal arts education was the core of our democracy. If we lose an educated populace, we're open for demagogy. We need broadly educated people. In 1990 there were thought to be 600 liberal arts colleges. You looked at their curriculums and said there were really about 200. Three years ago, researchers counted 130. Where are things heading? Most of the very fine liberal arts schools are going to survive. But some of them are verging more into professional fields. In 15 years, the number of liberal arts colleges might be down to 120 because of the pressure to add more practical offerings. And the closure of small private colleges that morphed out of liberal arts long ago is going to continue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
LOS ANGELES By making it easy for people to buy movie tickets online or through a smartphone app, Fandango has experienced breakneck growth over the last two years. A couple of taps and presto! The seats are yours. But that, Fandango has decided, is no longer good enough. To keep growing and, with any luck, help theaters and studios entice Americans, particularly young ones, to go to the movies at all Fandango will alter course. Instead of relying on customers to come to it, Fandango will also go to them: Over the weekend, for instance, Fandango will begin selling tickets to Hollywood movies directly on Facebook. In a first, Facebook users in the United States (only a portion initially) will be able to buy tickets without leaving their news feeds to coming films like "The Magnificent Seven," starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt; "Storks," a Warner Bros. animated movie; and the comedy concert movie "Kevin Hart: What Now?" While tested in rudimentary ways in the past, a robust, continual melding of movie ticket purchases with Facebook's vast audience has never been done before, Paul Yanover, Fandango's president, said. "It's not just about purchasing ease, it's also about bringing along groups of people," Mr. Yanover said. "Hey, we're going to see this movie. Why don't you come along? Great. Boom. Done." Julie Ask, an analyst with Forrester who was privately briefed by Fandango on its plans, offered an enthusiastic appraisal. "Consumers, particularly young ones, find it inconvenient to hop into different silos to get something done," she said. "They want it all in one place. That sounds obnoxious, I know the definition of a 'first world problem' but it's true, and Fandango is solving it for them." Facebook represents only one area of expansion for Fandango, which NBCUniversal owns. On Tuesday, Fandango began allowing users of Apple's enhanced iPhone messaging app to buy tickets without leaving a texting conversation. Anyone using Apple's new iOS 10 operating system can tap on a Fandango applet while on the Messages page. Posters for films playing in theaters pop up. Tapping a poster brings up a display of nearby theaters and showtimes, along with purchasing options. A Fandango interface designed for Snapchat (again, allowing users to buy tickets without toggling between apps or leaving the platform) is on the way. "This is about Fandango appearing in these environments in an organic, natural way the way people communicate with each other now, the way they actually discover, plan and buy," Mr. Yanover said. Although Mr. Yanover is not ready to show his full hand, he said in an interview at Fandango headquarters that additional offerings were in the works. Might Fandango, for instance, introduce ticket buying on YouTube, where it operates a popular channel, Movieclips, stocked with trailers and snippets of old films? Mr. Yanover smiled, but declined to comment. 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. Social networks are crucial marketing tools for Hollywood, but actually acquiring customers has remained an elusive goal, in part because companies like Facebook have been more focused on other priorities. But that is changing. "There is now an arms race to offer more and more services and keep people in their environments longer," Ms. Ask said. Anything that increases ticket sales is likely to be warmly embraced by studio executives and theater buyers, who have been fighting to keep moviegoing relevant as in home entertainment options proliferate. About 513 million people went to the movies over the summer, a 3.5 percent decline compared with a year earlier, according to studio data. For the year so far, attendance is up about 1.2 percent. "The social aspect of what Fandango is doing is really important for Hollywood," said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at comScore. "Most people do not go to the movies alone, and there is the potential here to turn a two ticket purchase into a four ticket purchase." Fandango is facing competition from a start up called Atom Tickets. Incubated by Lionsgate, with additional financing from Disney and 21st Century Fox, Atom has promoted itself as a way for theaters and studios to increase group sales by making it easier for friends to plan outings. The Atom app, introduced this year, has also made discounts, particularly for less popular showtimes, part of its mission, along with concession stand preorders. But Fandango is the giant in this segment of the industry, servicing about 27,700 movie screens in the United States and growing quickly. So far this year, ticketing revenue is up 51 percent compared with the same period last year, according to a Fandango spokesman. In 2015, Fandango grew by 81 percent. About 70 percent of Fandango tickets are sold on mobile devices. "We're really proud of our growth, and people will still come to us, but we've spent a lot of time watching how movie discovery and planning is changing," Mr. Yanover said. "And I think these offerings we are unveiling are an important shift, not just for Fandango, but for Hollywood as a whole." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
SpaceX launched a "pre flown" rocket into space on Thursday. If the company can repeat it, this method could slash the price of space travel in the future. SpaceX did something on Thursday that really hadn't been done before: launch a cheaper, partially used rocket into orbit. That may be a stride toward slashing the price tag of sending payload to space. For Elon Musk, the company's billionaire founder, successfully flying reusable rockets over and over is a crucial step toward his dream of sending people to Mars. The rocket, carrying a telecommunications satellite, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The first stage, or booster, is the big segment of the Falcon 9 rocket with nine engines that get the rocket off the ground. The booster used Thursday was the same one that lifted cargo for NASA to the International Space Station in April 2016 and then landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic. It was SpaceX's second successful booster landing, and the first on the ocean platform. (The previous December, a booster had successfully turned around and landed on land at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.) The recovered booster was ferried to port in Jacksonville. Company officials have not provided many details about the refurbishment. In January, the booster, securely held down, was test fired at SpaceX's facility in Texas. It was then shipped to Florida to be prepared for launch. The used booster indeed worked just as well as a new one. "We just had an incredible day today," Mr. Musk said. Why Is This a Big Deal? It is cheaper than using a new rocket, potentially much cheaper. Until now, rockets have almost all been single use. Once the fuel is expended, a rocket stage plummets to Earth, a quick demise for a complex machine that cost tens of millions of dollars to build. Mr. Musk has likened that to scrapping a 747 jet after one flight, which would make air travel impossibly expensive. We do not know. Ms. Shotwell, the SpaceX executive, has suggested launches with reused boosters could be discounted, to 30 percent off the usual 62 million price tag. SES asked for 50 percent off. Both SpaceX and SES are private companies, and they have not divulged the negotiated going rate, except to acknowledge there was a discount. Mr. Musk has suggested that rocket launches could eventually be much cheaper since the cost of the rocket propellants are less than 1 percent of the full price ticket for a launch. So, if a rocket could be simply refueled like a jetliner for another flight, the cost of space travel could drop to a fraction of what it is now. But the stresses of spaceflight on reused boosters like the rising mileage on a used car, sometimes called "pre owned" in today's parlance are much greater. The economics will depend on how many times a booster can be flown, and how much the individual expense will be to refurbish the booster and particularly the engines each time. From the start, SpaceX engineers designed the Falcon 9 boosters to be reusable. The engines can be fired many times, and the bottom of the rocket is shielded to protect against the heat of re entry into the atmosphere. On the first Falcon 9 launches, SpaceX attempted to use parachutes to recover the boosters, but that failed. The company then turned to using the booster's nine engines to bring it down to a soft, precise landing. "Grid fins" and cold jet thrusters on the booster are used to flip the booster and help steer it to its destination. New Shepard has already made repeated hops above 62 miles, the altitude considered the boundary of outer space. However, unlike Falcon 9, it has not and cannot accelerate to the speeds needed to orbit Earth. Its strategy is to perfect the technology through many New Shepard launches, and then apply it to New Glenn, an orbital rocket bigger than Falcon 9, that is to start launching from Cape Canaveral around 2020. The first stage of New Glenn is to land similar to the way SpaceX recovers the Falcon 9 boosters. Older rocket companies like United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have studied reusable rocket concepts in the past but concluded the trade offs were not worth the benefits. For example, saving fuel for the booster landing reduces the amount of payload the rocket can take to orbit, and reusing rockets could raise the cost of building new ones, because fewer would be built. The United Launch Alliance is planning a bit of reusability for its next rocket, the Vulcan. But instead of landing the entire first stage, the plan is for the engine compartment the most valuable piece to eject and descend via parachute, and then be plucked out of the air by a helicopter. Blue Origin and SpaceX appear to be betting that cheaper launches will lead to many more flights into space, for commercial and tourism jaunts. What About NASA's Big New Rocket? NASA is currently developing the Space Launch System, which is to become the most powerful rocket ever, to take astronauts to deep space and eventually Mars. The booster stage, with four engines, and two additional boosters on the sides, will all be thrown away every launch. Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who oversaw development of S.L.S. and now a professor at Purdue University, said the agency did study the possibility. But it concluded that the rocket's immense size and the small number of launches one every year or two were not worth the cost. The satellite is SES 10, which will end up in a geostationary orbit to provide telecommunication services for Latin America. The satellite was deployed about a half hour after launch. SpaceX's next launch for NASA, a cargo mission currently scheduled for May, will continue the reusability theme. The rocket will be entirely new, but the mission will reuse one of the capsules from one of the earlier cargo runs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
There's a comet hanging over Rachel Chavkin's dining room table. It's an assemblage of spheres and tubes and rods, fashioned from welded steel spray painted gold, that hovers above her morning yogurt. The chandelier is a memento of the theater director's biggest triumph and most spectacular setback "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812," an inventive, immersive electro pop opera, adapted from Tolstoy's "War and Peace," that in 2016 blazed onto Broadway with Josh Groban, fresh pierogies and rave reviews, but then imploded in a conflagration of social media, identity politics and money woes. Now she's back on Broadway with another eye popping, folk fueled musical unlike anything else commercial theater has to offer: "Hadestown," a fervid reimagining of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The shows she has overseen have seeped, literally, into the 38 year old director's skin. Her right forearm is inked with staging advice she gave to an apprehensive actor in "Great Comet": "We're just gonna go for a walk." And up her left arm is the image of a Matisse cutout called The Lyre, depicting the stringed instrument that symbolizes Orpheus. She never expected to be on Broadway, but she has high hopes for "Hadestown," and is enormously proud of "Comet." Asked if that first Broadway experience was scarring, she takes issue with the very premise of the question. "Sure, I'm scarred by it, but that's not a bad thing to me," she said. And then, pointing at skin visible through the enormous holes in her jeans, "I love my scar on my knee from a bike accident I had several years ago. Because that's your life." The only woman directing a musical on Broadway this season, Ms. Chavkin has been making enormously inventive, and often wildly experimental, work for years, both in New York's downtown precincts and in Britain, where she has found a home away from home at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that propelled her into bigger and bigger jobs. Her work is often politically pointed, her casts and crews strikingly diverse, and her stagings athletic many of her shows, including "Hadestown," feature moments of intense exuberance that she connects to her affection for '80s D.C. hard core punk, and a desire to counter her own tendency for intellectualism. "I direct by whether I feel what's happening on stage in my body," she said. "And I mean that quite literally is my body moved, on a cellular level, by what I'm watching? If not, then I keep pushing." Much to her surprise, she is on a bit of a Broadway bender "Great Comet" opened in 2016; "Hadestown" opens April 17, and she's also directing the aspiring for Broadway historical musical "Lempicka," about a bisexual Polish emigre Art Deco portraitist (Ms. Chavkin, obviously, likes a challenge). "It is amusing to me that I am a Broadway director, because that is so far from my conception of myself, but, at the same time, I'm acutely aware of how privileged I am to be making a living making work that moves the hell out of me," she said. She's also pregnant. Although she's not sure she wants to raise children she's worried that "having a child would decenter my arts life, at least to a certain degree" she volunteered to conceive and carry a child for a gay couple in Texas with whom she has long been friends. She's expecting to give birth in late August. "I wanted to go through the biological act of being pregnant like I'm interested on an athletic level, on a spiritual level, and on a life experience level," she said. "I'm an artist, and I want to have all the experiences." She is juggling about 10 projects in various stages of development inspired by subjects as varied as Van Gogh, "Moby Dick" and "Gone With the Wind," and is working on a film she's not yet ready to describe. But she finds the subject of her industriousness tedious. "My fear is that my tombstone will say 'She was busy,' " she said. "I love being busy, but I hope that's the least interesting part of me. It gets remarked on a lot, and I wonder whether men hear that as much." Ms. Chavkin is the only child of a pair of left leaning lawyers who split up three days after she left home for college. "The way I would phrase it on the record is that I grew up in a fairly emotionally volatile house," she said. She was raised in Silver Spring, Md., a suburb of Washington. Her father, David Chavkin, worked in and out of government on civil rights law; he's now retired. Her mother, Sara Rosenbaum, is an influential Medicaid policy expert who teaches at George Washington University. Ms. Chavkin's childhood contained obvious clues to the woman she has become a director who now says, "I'm constantly looking around the room and asking who's not present, and why." As a 6 year old, or so she's been told, she was organizing a game of mommy daughter on the playground when one child told her she didn't want a black girl to pretend to be her mother. "Apparently, without hesitating, I said, 'Well, you'll just be an orphan then,' and moved on," she said. Then, at about 12, she quit Hebrew school, declaring that she couldn't abide some of her classmates. "They were saying racist things, and I hated being with them," she said. "I came home and told my parents, and they let me drop out." "I really do believe that my health is physically, spiritually interrelated to the health of others," Ms. Chavkin said in one of a series of recent interviews, "and so if I'm living in a white supremacist, exclusionary system, then I feel less healthy." A latchkey child from an early age, she played a lot of soccer, read a lot of books, and smoked a lot of pot. "I started getting high and doing a lot of drugs with friends from the time I was in middle school through high school," she said. But she was also editor of the newspaper, editor of the literary magazine, co editor of the yearbook, co captain of the soccer team and a valedictorian. "I didn't want to be bored," she said. Her parents took her to theater, at the Olney Theater Center, and the Kennedy Center, plus the now closed Harlequin Dinner Theater ("you have pot roast and see 'Dreamgirls'") and, about once a year, while visiting grandparents, on Broadway. She also spent six life changing summers at Stagedoor Manor, a theater camp in the Catskills, recalling "I just fell madly in love with it. I don't look back at those days and go, 'Those were my halcyon days,' by any means the status of the place and the way it played out among the campers is really gross but I have to acknowledge that it's probably why I'm in the theater." As a theater student at N.Y.U., Ms. Chavkin found herself drawn to the experimental, loving a Sunday night class called "Creating Original Work" in which the only assignment was to be interesting alone onstage for 10 minutes, and discovering the Wooster Group, a mainstay of the downtown avant garde scene, and realizing "I want that." "I lost interest in plays," she said. "I was like, 'There are no plays,' which was a stupid and ignorant thing to say, but that was how I felt." She thought of acting as like sport, in which she could discern whether someone was "authentically present" by their breathing, their posture, "and whether their body is alive." She took up postmodern dance. The decade after graduation was a swirl of odd jobs and theatermaking. She worked at Barnes Noble, taught at N.Y.U., served as a personal assistant for two psychiatrists, sold beef and bison at a farmer's market, did some marketing for Adidas. Oh, and she got another degree a master's of fine arts at Columbia. But she was always creating shows weird, ambitious, inspired by reading and a curiosity that took her from bebop music to the theory of relativity. Her collaborations with fellow N.Y.U. grads led to the formation of a company, the Team, where she is still the artistic director today. She also fell in love, on a Team trip to Scotland, with a theater electrician from Iowa; she and Jake Heinrichs have been together since 2005, and married since 2011; he is now a lighting supervisor at the Signature Theater, and they live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Her work outside the Team took off after a 2010 production of "Three Pianos," a boozy song cycle riffing on the work of Franz Schubert. She directed it at the Ontological Hysteric Theater; it then got picked up by New York Theater Workshop, won an Obie, and Ms. Chavkin was on her way. When one of the writers of "Three Pianos," Dave Malloy, embarked on a long shot quest to fashion a musical from a 75 page section of Tolstoy's "War and Peace," he again turned to Ms. Chavkin to direct. "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812" was a sensation from the moment it opened Off Broadway at Ars Nova, and four years later it arrived on Broadway. It lasted 10 months before closing amid a social media frenzy over the financially shaky production's decision to replace a black performer with a more famous white performer in a starring role. Ms. Chavkin said she learned several lessons. On a mundane level, she is being more mindful of weekly running costs, eliminating a pyro effect from "Hadestown" to keep the budget down; on a cultural level, she is less dismissive of the power of social media; and on a psychological level, she said, she feels "a lack of solidity" that has made her far more protective of "Hadestown." But "Great Comet" earned Ms. Chavkin a Tony nomination and brought her visceral directing style to the attention of new audiences. Mr. Groban, its original Broadway star, recalls meeting her and thinking, "This is a human being who reminds me of all the reasons why I was excited to get into theater at a young age." Now, he says, "I would follow this person anywhere." Among those who saw "Great Comet" in its first production was a Vermont singer songwriter, Anais Mitchell, who had recorded a concept album about a Greek myth that had long intrigued her. That album was "Hadestown," and Ms. Mitchell was looking for a director who could help her shape it into a full fledged stage musical. "There is something timeless about someone so moved by love and grief that they want to change the space time continuum to get their lover back," Ms. Chavkin said. "And in Anais's version, it's not just about getting your lover back, it's about changing a potentially unjust society." For Ms. Chavkin, each iteration of the show has been a chance to try to refine her vision recasting, restaging, rethinking. "'Hadestown' is the hardest thing I've ever directed by far," she said. "The process has been long, and we have screwed up at times. But it feels like we're finally in a rockin' balance." She's not done yet on the day before the first preview, she was still wrestling with what sound should open the show should it be a trombone or a guitar as she and the rest of the creative team tried to figure out how best to balance loveliness and exuberance, hope and tragedy, story and symbol. And she's still working listening to her own breathing, hoping that if she is moved, audiences will be as well. "I have huge hopes for 'Hadestown'," Ms. Chavkin said. "I want it to be in everyone's ears and hearts." Show that inspired you to be a theatermaker: When I was 16, I saw an immersive, really raw production of "Hair" in a loft at the Studio Theater in D.C., and was totally undone by it. I wanted to get up and help burn draft cards. Key influence on your work: The humor and rawness and realness of experimental artists (Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service, Radiohole). Dislike onstage: Lack of rigor. A lot of middle or upper class white people talking about their problems without acknowledgment of their privilege or context in the wider world. Plays about Alzheimer's that radically misrepresent the disease. Why "Hadestown"? Anais Mitchell's music (including Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose's orchestrations). Its heart and its politics have kept me hooked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
WARWICK, N.Y. In the end, it was the rain, not the virus, that drove some moviegoers to leave the drive in theater here Friday as a storm interrupted the season's first shows. Hours before, SUVs, sedans and pickup trucks had crunched along the gravel road leading to the Warwick Drive In's three screens, and then were directed to a grassy mound where they parked for the evening to watch the double features. "It was this or tennis," said Ivonisa Tesoriero, who works in human resources at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and was celebrating her 39th birthday. A pile of empty pizza boxes sat on the ground as she chatted with family and friends. As the sun set, masked ticketholders lined up at the snack bar to order candy and buttered popcorn, dutifully planting themselves six feet behind the person in front of them. Children horsed around. Adults sipped beverages. An older couple ate ice cream on lawn chairs as smoke from a nearby grill wafted toward them. It felt like that first, euphoric summer night of the year. Except a note of caution hung in the air. After two months of pandemic lockdown in New York, when the only movies to see were controlled by your remote, state officials had lifted the bans on some activities and on this night the first night drive ins around the state could open locals and curious out of towners flocked to Warwick's outdoor theater. At one point, staff members had to start turning people away. At a time when Americans are wary of rubbing elbows with strangers, the drive in theater, a low tech vestige of another era, has emerged across the country as a popular escape hatch. Church services and concerts have been held drive in style, and school administrators have considered the setup for high school graduations. In Warwick, after employees had herded roughly 300 cars into a socially distanced formation and families began celebrating just being outside their own homes, lightning flashed to the north of the big white screens. A bad omen that was followed by a torrent of rain about 45 minutes into the first set of movies. All three screens showing "Trolls World Tour," "Bad Boys for Life" and "Jumanji: The Next Level" cut to black. In the minutes it took for the pictures to reappear, some cars had begun to crunch back down the gravel road, headed for home. "There were some power glitches, but it was a very good night," said Beth Wilson, who owns and manages the drive in with her husband. "We sold out. People were just so happy to be outside." Ms. Wilson had received just four days' notice that she would be allowed to open on May 15. On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo authorized the opening of drive ins and also cleared the way for other "low risk" activities like landscaping, gardening and, as Ms. Tesoriero noted, tennis. "Talk about going back to the future," Mr. Cuomo said with a smile, "back to drive in movie theaters." The featured films would have to be slightly stale releases, like "The Invisible Man" and "Sonic the Hedgehog," which had debuted before the pandemic shut down movie theaters and delayed premieres. But that did little to deter an audience. The drive in has been a staple in Warwick, a town of about 32,000 near the New Jersey border, since the 1950s, serving as both a family friendly attraction and a popular date night spot. Michael Sweeton, 63, the town supervisor, remembers going to the theater when he was a child, seeing movies like the original "Star Wars" with the sound blaring out of speakers on poles. (Nowadays, moviegoers tune their radios to a station that plays the movie's audio.) Children like Mr. Sweeton would try to sneak into the drive in through an adjacent cornfield, hoping to get inside undetected and see a movie for free. "It's a shot in the arm to get us past the sad, dark period of the past two months," Mr. Sweeton said of Friday's opening. Ms. Wilson's father had started working in the drive in theater business as a windshield cleaner when he was 13. He bought the Warwick Drive In from its original owners in 1977. Eighteen years later, when he retired, Ms. Wilson and her husband took over the theater. Visitors were required to wear masks when outside their vehicles (a few cheated). At the snack bar, customers had to stay at least six feet apart, which took some stern enforcement from the staff. And the condiments only came in individual packets to limit any possible exchange of germs between snacking moviegoers. Garrett and Laura Gioe had arrived with their four children more than two hours before showtime to ensure they would have a spot. To them, a drive in double feature was an opportunity to get their family of six (with one more coming soon) out of the house. Mr. Gioe had been looking for an announcement like this for weeks, thinking that drive ins had to be allowed to operate long before a typical movie theater. For Ms. Gioe, going to the drive in gave a semblance of normalcy to life that she hadn't felt in a long time. "Seeing people, the interaction," she said, "it's what humans are made for." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
President Obama, who has weighed ruling out a first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict, appears likely to abandon the proposal after top national security advisers argued that it could undermine allies and embolden Russia and China, according to several senior administration officials. Mr. Obama considers a reduction in the role of nuclear weapons as critical to his legacy. But he has been chagrined to hear critics, including some former senior aides, argue that the administration's second term nuclear modernization plans, costing up to 1 trillion in coming decades, undermine commitments he made in 2009. For months, arms control advocates have argued for a series of steps to advance the pledge he made to pursue "a world without nuclear weapons." An unequivocal no first use pledge would have been the boldest of those measures. They contend that as a practical matter no American president would use a nuclear weapon when so many other options are available. Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry said in a recent interview, "It's the right time," noting that the pledge would formalize what has been America's unspoken policy for decades. But in the end, Mr. Obama seems to have sided with his current advisers, who warned in meetings culminating this summer that a no first use declaration would rattle allies like Japan and South Korea. Those nations are concerned about discussion of an American pullback from Asia prompted by comments made by the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry also expressed concern that new moves by Russia and China, from the Baltic to the South China Sea, made it the wrong time to issue the declaration, according to senior aides in the Defense and State Departments. Secretary of Energy Ernest J. Moniz, whose department oversees the nuclear arsenal, joined in the objections, administration officials confirmed. The New York Times interviewed more than a half dozen administration officials involved in or briefed on the nuclear debate. All insisted on anonymity to describe internal administration deliberations on nuclear strategy. The United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II in 1945 the only example in history of a first use, or any use, of nuclear weapons in warfare. Almost every president since Harry S. Truman has made it clear that nuclear weapons would be used only as a last resort, so the pledge would have largely ratified unwritten policy. Administration officials confirmed that the question of changing the policy on first use had come up repeatedly this summer as a way for Mr. Obama to show that his commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in American strategy and thus the risk of nuclear exchanges was more than rhetorical. But the arguments in front of the president himself were relatively brief, officials said, apparently because so many senior aides objected. Mr. Carter argued that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong un, the North Korean leader, could interpret a promise of no first use as a sign of American weakness, even though that was not the intent. The defense secretary's position was supported by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Moniz, two architects of the Iran nuclear deal, who cautioned that such a declaration could unnerve American allies already fearful that America's nuclear umbrella cannot be relied upon. Mr. Trump talked explicitly in interviews about withdrawing military forces from Asia unless Tokyo and Seoul paid more for their presence, and said in March that he was willing to see them build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on Washington. According to one senior administration official, Mr. Kerry told Mr. Obama that a no first use pledge would also weaken the nuclear deterrent while Russia is running practice bombing runs over Europe and China is expanding its reach in the South China Sea. Mr. Obama and his national security team have rejected a second option: "de alerting" nuclear missiles ready to fire on short notice. The fear is that in a crisis, "re alerting" the weapons could escalate a conflict. Earlier, Mr. Obama and his aides also decided against eliminating one element of the "triad" of land , air and submarine launched weapons. The idea was to remove the missiles based in silos across the American West, which are considered outdated and vulnerable to a first strike. But the Pentagon argued strongly that the ground based missiles were the part of the system with which they had the most assured communications, and that it was too risky to get rid of them. In the past year, arms control advocates, including some of Mr. Obama's former aides, have argued that Mr. Obama still has time to repair his reputation as an atomic visionary. "Let Obama be Obama," Andrew C. Weber, an assistant secretary of defense for atomic programs from 2009 to 2014, said in an interview. Mr. Weber strongly opposes the White House's recent approval of a nuclear cruise missile. "The defense complex is doing a full court press, so things are going to be very hard to change," he said. Mr. Obama's favorite nuclear strategist in his first term, the retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. James E. Cartwright, wrote in a New York Times Op Ed article last month with Bruce G. Blair of Princeton University, a former Minuteman launch officer, that "nuclear weapons today no longer serve any purpose beyond deterring the first use of such weapons by our adversaries." "Our nonnuclear strength, including economic and diplomatic power, our alliances, our conventional and cyber weaponry and our technological advantages, constitute a global military juggernaut unmatched in history," they concluded. Mr. Obama made the eventual elimination of nuclear arms a centerpiece of his 2008 presidential campaign. In contrast, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has said little this year about her nuclear plans, and Mr. Trump has argued for a major military buildup. Once Mr. Obama took office, his ambitions were frustrated. While he achieved a major arms control treaty, New Start, in 2010 driven through the Senate by Mr. Kerry it came at a price: He won Republican votes by agreeing to a sweeping plan to modernize the American nuclear arsenal and build a new generation of weapon carriers, including bombers, missiles and submarines. In 2013, some of Mr. Obama's former national security officials criticized the plan, saying his original vision was in danger of being turned on its head. The doubters included Philip E. Coyle III and Steve Fetter, who had recently left White House posts. One study estimated the modernization cost at 1 trillion over three decades. The Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, released an analysis showing that Mr. Obama had dismantled fewer nuclear warheads than any other post Cold War president. Inside the White House, Mr. Obama asked for new ideas to advance his agenda before leaving office. In May, he went to Hiroshima the first American president to do so and reaffirmed his vision of a nonnuclear world. "We must have the courage to escape the logic of fear," he said at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. "We may not realize this goal in my lifetime. But persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe." Ten days later, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, outlined possible efforts in a speech to the Arms Control Association, a private group in Washington. His list included putting more nuclear material under tight security, reaffirming a global ban on nuclear testing and revisiting the administration's plans to modernize the nuclear arsenal. It was an agenda sure to please his audience, but one that would largely fall to the next administration to execute. The president, Mr. Rhodes said, "will continue to review these plans as he considers how to hand the baton off to his successor." That review included the no first use pledge. Behind the scenes, Mr. Carter argued that a ban on first use would be unwise. If North Korea used biological weapons against the South, he and other Pentagon officials said, the United States might need the option of threatening a nuclear response. Mr. Kerry argued that Japan would be unnerved by any diminution of the American nuclear umbrella, and perhaps be tempted to obtain their own weapons. The same argument, he said, applied to South Korea. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Carter have not taken public positions in large part because they do not want to appear to influence Mr. Obama as he makes a decision. Had Mr. Obama issued the no first use declaration, officials conceded, the next president could have rejected it. In an interview this year, Mr. Trump bristled at the idea, saying he would never want to weaken America's leverage. Mrs. Clinton has not spoken on the issue during her campaign. But a no first use policy would have been hard for either to undo. Military experts say the next president would hesitate to reverse such a decision since the quick reversal would confuse allies and possibly fray important coalitions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
We take the weekend to highlight some of the recent books coverage in The Times: Our cover review this week is of Nell Freudenberger's novel "Lost and Wanted," about a quantum physicist in mourning. Our reviewer, Louisa Hall, sung its praises: "Freudenberger navigates complicated concepts from physics with admirable clarity, and those concepts entanglement, uncertainty, gravitational waves help us feel in new ways the ongoing influence of dormant friendships, the difficulties involved with believing in attachments that can't be observed, the enduring pull of discarded hopes." It's hard to narrow down the list of worthy books this week, but a few nonfiction titles stand out: Leo Damrosch's "The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age"; "Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster," by Adam Higginbotham; "Solitary," by Albert Woodfox; and "Horizon," by Barry Lopez. Higginbotham joins us on the podcast this week to talk about his sweeping new history of the nuclear accident and its aftermath, and later, Nellie Bowles discusses Clive Thompson's new book, "Coders," a study of Silicon Valley's "brogrammer" culture. Susan Choi's fifth novel, "Trust Exercise," is about theater students at a performing arts high school. It's about misplaced trust in adults, and about female friendships gone dangerously awry. Dwight Garner says that the novel "burns more brightly than anything she's yet written." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
More than seven decades after the Red Army threw open the gates of Auschwitz, the literature of the Holocaust has grown so voluminous and varied that we might assume there are no further tales to tell. If memoirists like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Tadeusz Borowski and Liana Millu have failed to exhaust that particular vein, readers can always turn to a huge corpus of secondary material, including such strapping volumes as "The Holocaust Encyclopedia." Surely at this stage, there is little left to surprise them. Wrong! "Deviation," an autobiographical novel by the Italian writer and critic , is a case in point. The author spent time in both a German labor camp in Frankfurt, run by the industrial giant IG Farben, and in Dachau, the very first concentration camp built by the Nazis. Her description of the horrors she encountered in these places is vivid but not especially novel. What is shocking is that she volunteered for both ordeals. In 1944, the 18 year old D'Eramo went to the IG Farben facility of her own accord, as a kind of Fascist candy striper, and was expelled only when she took part in an abortive strike. Soon afterward, having been shipped back to Italy, she insisted on going to Dachau. On the surface, this sounds like insanity, or the stuff of black comedy. That D'Eramo then escaped, drifted around the chaos of the collapsing Reich, sneaked into a transit camp a stone's throw from Dachau, and was ultimately paralyzed when a crumbling wall fell on her back, only deepens the mystery of her motives. In fact, that mystery is the whole point of "Deviation," which was published in Italy in 1979 and viewed as a memoir with the thinnest of fictional veneers. D'Eramo is desperate to figure out not only what she did but why. We are meant to understand her initial rationale as ideological. The daughter of a minor Fascist official, who stuck by Mussolini even after the regime's implosion in 1943, she concluded that the Nazis were victims of bad P.R. and set off on a fact finding expedition of her own. "I had to go to the places about which the most outrageous stories were told, the Nazi concentration camps," she writes. "That's why I ran away from home on Feb. 8, 1944, and went to Germany as a simple volunteer worker, with pictures of Mussolini and Hitler in my backpack, sure about what I was doing." The naivete is astounding. After all, the Fascist state was gone. A deflated and syphilis ridden Duce presided over the shrinking Salo Republic a German puppet regime that employed D'Eramo's father as an under secretary for propaganda. Hitler's thousand year Reich was battered by Allied bombings and the scorched earth approach of the Red Army from the east. This was a weird moment to argue for the essential goodness of the Axis powers. 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. Then again, D'Eramo's first word on any subject is seldom the last, or best. The deeper we get into "Deviation," which zigzags between historical periods and spurns any notion of chronology, the messier her motives appear. It becomes clear that she left for Frankfurt in a fit of adolescent angst, intent on defying the "inaccessible divinity" of her father. Yet she was no less determined to shed the skin of her middle class background, to reinvent herself as a kind of Pan European proletarian. In this mission, at least, she made some initial headway. Assigned an easy job by IG Farben because of her connections back home, she lobbied the camp management for more wash basins and better food for the Russian prisoners. ("The soup is a disgrace," she told the director, "it contradicts the Nazi Fascist promises of civility.") For her troubles, she was reassigned to work with the Russians, loading and unloading giant blocks of frozen sulfuric acid, which ate away at her hands. Next came the strike, reportedly organized by a shadowy network of French resistance fighters. The idea, we read, was to shut down labor camps throughout the country, bringing the German industrial machine to its knees just as the Allies landed in Normandy. The author, who by now was not so much anti Fascist as pro labor, eagerly signed on. Yet the strike failed, at least in Frankfurt, and the disconsolate D'Eramo, with her fellow organizers now turning on her, attempted suicide by rat poison. At this point the Germans lost patience and sent her back to Italy. There, presumably, some good parental discipline would straighten her out. But D'Eramo was not done deviating from her fate which, in the author's universe, is just another word for the expectations of other people. She climbed off the train in Verona, in the Salo Republic, and instead of joining her parents in Como, she attached herself to a convoy of Dachau bound deportees. The sheer perversity of this move will be hard for many readers to swallow. Chalk it up to PTSD, or to a crazed appetite for self reinvention. In any case, it was equally indigestible for the author, who erased the whole episode from her mind for decades. "That this is how it happened," she writes, "I later denied even to myself. I had to turn 50 before acknowledging that I had been repatriated. What I said initially so often that I came to believe it myself was that I had been deported to Dachau with my comrades after the strike." In time, D'Eramo also blotted out other parts of her agonizing Wanderjahr. Such erasure became a form of anesthesia. "Deviation," then, is not only (or even primarily) a narrative of incarceration. It's a book about memory suppression, and about the slippery nature of identity itself, slapped together from docile facts and devious fictions. For this reason, the recovery of D'Eramo's experience is no less momentous than the experience itself. As it happens, her memories bobbed back to the surface during periods of extreme stress, not exactly uncommon during the postwar years, when the wheelchair bound, drug addicted author struggled to make a life as an academic, a wife, a mother. It took her husband's serial philandering and the disintegration of her marriage, in 1953, to jog loose her flight from Dachau in 1944. In fact, forays into her private history felt oddly liberating: "Held captive by paralysis, by fever, by drugs, by the betrayals and by my jealousy, what else could I do but look for a less imprisoned version of myself?" It is the present that amounts to a kind of incarceration, both psychological and physical. The past, paradoxically enough, is full of freedom. D'Eramo's constant toggling between past and present, blindness and insight, would be a challenge for any translator. Anne Milano Appel, who has translated writers as stylistically varied as Primo Levi and Claudio Magris, rises to the occasion. Here and there she is a touch too literal, but for the most part, she deftly tracks the quicksilver and sometimes knotty texture of the author's prose. There is, however, another challenge to reckon with. Although D'Eramo earned a doctorate in philosophy, her treatment of such matters in "Deviation" is subpar. Confronted with the problem of evil, which inescapably reared its head in Dachau, she decides that it's all about class a Marxist remedy that seems shallow and evasive. To concede that we are all capable of ghastly behavior is plain honesty. To thereby blur any distinction between monsters and victims is the sort of nonsense that Primo Levi, to choose just one example, spent a lifetime protesting. There is also the fact that D'Eramo, for all her fascination with the return of the repressed, never really gets to the nub of her own behavior, never really penetrates beyond her cognitive dance of the seven veils. For what it's worth, I suspect that shame a simple, supple, completely disabling emotion is at the root of her self imposed amnesia. No matter. Even at its dullest and most doctrinaire, "Deviation" is kept afloat by D'Eramo's archaeological ardor, and by the surreal twists and turns of her narrative. There is indeed another tale to tell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Economy seats, even for long haul flights, are getting tighter than ever. As more airlines try to squeeze more passengers onto their planes and then squeeze more money out of those passengers by charging for things that used to be free (like checked baggage and onboard snacks) passengers are increasingly looking for, and willing to pay for, a better travel experience. To answer that demand, many airlines are turning to a new class of service: premium economy. Around 20 airlines, most of which are based abroad, currently offer dedicated premium economy cabins on long haul routes. More carriers are set to introduce them in the coming years. On airlines from American to Qantas, premium economy offers travelers bigger seats and improved amenities for a price that is somewhere between regular economy and business class. Here's a guide on what to expect (and what not to) if you decide to upgrade on your next flight: What exactly is premium economy and why am I am hearing so much about it now? Premium economy was first introduced by Eva Air and Virgin Atlantic in 1992 as a new travel option for long haul passengers who wanted a bit of extra comfort. The cabin was successful for both airlines and in the years since, more companies like Singapore Airlines and Air New Zealand have introduced their own versions. U.S. based carriers have been among the last to adopt the premium economy model, but American Airlines first started offering it in 2016 and Delta and United have both announced plans to roll out premium economy on their long haul routes in the near future , with Delta saying the cabin will be on all of its international wide body planes by 2021. Premium economy tickets can cost two or three times as much as regular economy ones, and the difference in fare is mostly profit for the companies . | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN SIMEON, Calif. It was the ultimate pool party. The benefit "V.I.P. Swim Experience" in the Neptune Pool at Hearst Castle here started with a troupe of Esther Williams look alikes in matching white bathing caps and lipstick red halter suits doing fan dives off the marble steps of the pool's signature Roman Temple beneath a heroic pediment of Neptune. As day descended into night, it was the bucket list set's turn, as guests who paid more than 1,000 for the real life fantasy of swimming in the Neptune Pool plunged into 345,000 gallons of frigid nirvana designed for the publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst. "My husband doesn't know what I spent on this, just so you know," Barbara Littrell, a retired elementary school office manager from Costa Mesa, said. She quit smoking 21 years ago and was using some of her cigarette savings for the swim, during which she wore a feather boa. The singular evening, in which some wore wet suits and took underwater selfies, and one man glided around wearing a neoprene mermaid's tail was a benefit by the nonprofit Friends of Hearst Castle to celebrate the completion of the largest restoration project in the property's history: a five year, 5.4 million project to repair cracks that caused the pool to leak up to 5,000 gallons a day. The effort also involved replacing the 20,000 marble tiles that make up the pool's Grecian style mosaic floor. It was drained in 2014 at the height of a drought and with the exception of Lady Gaga, who created a brouhaha by having the pool temporarily refilled for a music video (in exchange for a large donation) while state water conservation measures were underway had not been splashed in since. The funds from the event will go toward art and architecture conservation and education programs at the Castle, a 115 room, 123 acre love nest perched ethereally on a hill overlooking miles of coastline. Hearst canoodled there with the actress Marion Davies while his wife lived elsewhere. Located south of Big Sur, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the lush estate was donated by the Hearst Corporation to the state in 1958 and is now Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument, the most popular state park in California, with some 800,000 visitors a year. The Castle, or what Hearst described as "my little hideaway on my little hill," was built by Hearst and the architect Julia Morgan over 28 years, starting in 1919, much of it in the Moorish Spanish style. The current Neptune pool is the third iteration; like so much of the Castle, the idea started simply, as a reflecting pool for night blooming lilies, then morphed into a utilitarian swimming pool and was later reimagined as a fantastical piece de resistance incorporating ancient Roman fragments that Hearst snapped up in Italy in 1922. The siren call of the pool runs deep: Impossibly blue from the sky's refracted light, it is a watery cinematic paradise in which Hollywood stars communed with marble beauties shapely nymphs, mermaids with pageboy hairdos and Venus rising voluptuously from a conch shell held by musclebound mermen the statues positioned just so, so the water laps at their perfect Carrara derrieres. The sculptures were the work of the Parisian artist Charles Georges Cassou and commissioned by Hearst in 1930. They were all were conserved as part of the restoration. Hearst, a feverish collector, had a profound attachment to the site, which had been in his family since 1865. He hired a trailblazer: Morgan was the first female graduate of the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and the first licensed female architect in California. The two shared a passion for art and architecture, and a relentless drive for perfection. But they were also a study in contrasts: she five feet tall and dressed in no nonsense gray tweed, he a portly 6 foot 3 and shaped "like a giant avocado," as Niven recalled in a memoir. The pool was largely inspired by Italian villas, like Hadrian's at Tivoli and the Villa Borghese in Rome, with a hefty dose of Hollywood thrown in. Morgan scaled her ensemble to be experienced from the water. "They were after effect rather than authenticity," combining Hearst's acquired antiquities with Morgan's ingenuity, Ms. Kastner noted. The architect designed some three dozen pools during her nearly half century career. "There's no evidence that Julia Morgan set her toe in a body of water bigger than a bathtub," Ms. Kastner said. "But in Hearst, she grasped the sensuality of what water and architecture represented." This is why the perk of perks for the park's employees has been an annual staff swim (it may or may not be revived). It is also why nearly every year, some cheeky visitor will illegally jump into the pool, which is a misdemeanor subject to citation or arrest. "Sometimes they say they 'fell in,' even though they had their shoes off and someone was holding their cellphone," Scot Steck, the supervisor of the park's 72 guides, said. The restoration itself was filled with plot twists for the preservation architects, the California firm Page Turnbull, beginning with scuba divers mapping the cracks by injecting dye into the crevices to see how much they leaked. Icy looking stalactites from dissolved white marble had formed beneath the pool, which was built on an elevated slab system. The serpentine green tile had naturally occurring asbestos, later deemed hazardous. "We had to shift gears, with people in white suits coming in rather than just chipping the tiles out," said Tom Dufurrena, the principal in charge. The architects replaced all 20,000 tiles with marble from the original quarry in Vermont. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When the New York Foundling, one of the city's largest and oldest child welfare agencies, completes a 5.5 million renovation of its Chelsea headquarters this summer, it will squeeze more workers into less space and lease its top three floors, bringing in substantial revenue. The renovation is the latest step in an effort by the Foundling, a nonprofit organization, to generate income from its 14 story building at 590 Avenue of the Americas, between 16th and 17th Streets. Like other New York City nonprofit groups, the Foundling needs money to further its mission, and it is seeking to make better use of its most valuable asset its real estate. The charity estimates that the entire building is worth more than 100 million. It sold six of the floors to the New York City School Construction Authority in 2008. "Nonprofit organizations often stay wedded to their structures for a long period of time," said Andrew A. Lance, a partner at the law firm Gibson, Dunn Crutcher who specializes in nonprofit real estate. "But real estate is a huge part of their capital that they need to review on a regular basis. Is it actually an appropriate or best use of that capital? Often it is not." The Foundling, which was established after the Civil War to care for abandoned infants, began parceling off its headquarters five years ago when it sold the lower six stories to the School Construction Authority to make way for a new elementary school, which will open in the fall of 2014. It is using some money from that sale to pay for the renovation. Its renovated 30,000 square foot space will house offices, a crisis nursery and a program for teenage mothers. The charity is downsizing at an uncertain time, as government financing continues to shrink. In May, cuts imposed by the federal sequester will take 600,000 from its 12 million Head Start preschool program, said William F. Baccaglini Jr., the chief executive of the Foundling. He predicted other cuts would follow. At the same time, child welfare needs are changing as the agency's employees tend to spend more time in the field than in their offices. "The flexibility that leasing provides is very attractive to our charity," said Bethany A. Lampland, the Foundling's chief operating officer. "At the end of the day, we still have the option to sell the entire asset." "Real estate has been a critical component in the Foundling's ability to grow," said Mr. Baccaglini. In 1985, the organization sold its previous headquarters on the Upper East Side to Donald J. Trump for 60 million and built the Chelsea location three years later for 45 million. As part of the renovation, the organization will consolidate administrative staff from other sites in the city, adding 20 percent more employees to the office, even as the space shrinks by 30 percent. To make space for the additional staff, the Foundling is turning to a bullpen style open floor plan. The new layout will do away with corner suites for executives and windowless cubicles for lower level staff. Even Mr. Baccaglini will give up his office and move to the bullpen. Persuading executives to relinquish coveted office windows was not easy, and many protested, Mr. Baccaglini said. But for most employees, the new open design is a vast improvement. Work was completed on the eighth floor offices last October, giving staff members a glimpse of the space to come. Gone are the dreary cubicle walls, dingy industrial carpet and faded turquoise trim. Now, with the open design, the building's original eight foot tall windows provide impressive city views and ample natural light to the entire floor. File cabinets lining the walls have cushions fitted on top so they double as window seats. Staff members bought white pendant lights from a nearby West Elm store to decorate the employee lunch bar. A quotation from Helen Keller stenciled onto a wall reads, "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." "We don't think that the office environment is somebody's workstation," said Randolph H. Gerner, a principal at Gerner Kronick and Valcarcel Architects, which designed the space. "We think somebody's office environment is the entire space." Renovation of the crisis nursery, which provides emergency care for infants and small children, was completed last November. The young mothers' support program, which houses teenage mothers and their infants, consolidated from two floors onto one remodeled floor in January. The Foundling will begin marketing the 5,000 square foot floors in the next two months. It plans to offer staggered, midterm leases, giving it the flexibility to reclaim floors if it decides to expand again. It hopes to rent the space to another charity, it said. Because the Foundling is a nonprofit organization, it benefits from a property tax abatement. If it leases the floors to another nonprofit group, it can pass that abatement along, lowering the rent. "This is a very attractive situation for other nonprofits," said Susan Kahaner, a broker with the commercial real estate firm CBRE, who is marketing the space. "The property tax abatement is not very common," she said. "Only a handful of buildings offer this." The average asking rent for office space in Midtown south was 59.83 a square foot in January, according to data provided by CBRE. The Foundling will offer its space to nonprofit groups for about 40 a square foot, providing an opportunity for a nonprofit group to operate in a neighborhood that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. "This has traditionally been a neighborhood where nonprofits have existed," said Jennifer Ogden, another CBRE broker who is also marketing the floors. "But a lot of them have had to look for alternative markets because they can't afford to pay these rents." Leasing brings complications because the Foundling will now have to take on the role of landlord. "Not for profits are not always so good at being landlords," said Kenneth D. Levien, founder and principal of Levien Company, a real estate project management firm that specializes in nonprofit groups. "What do they know about being landlords? You now share the building with someone else, and how does that work for you?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Indie romantic comedies are swarming with aimless, emotionally damaged men seeking meaning in the arms of confident young women. Sometimes, like Ben (Thomas Middleditch) in "Entanglement," these sad specimens are permitted clinical passes for their weird behavior; but whether in need of restraints, medication or simply a decent barber, they are almost always presented as desirable romantic partners. Let's go with that, then. "He's not good in a crisis," Ben's father informs us, though a montage of botched suicide attempts has already established Ben's misery bona fides and general ineptness. His wife has skedaddled, but his nosy neighbor (the delightful Diana Bang) is eager to clean his house and enable his quest to track down the woman who was once almost his adoptive sister. Like the wiring in Ben's brain, it's complicated. Impressively photographed and perkily paced, Jason Filiatrault's story never droops quite as much as its lead character, injecting a welcome poignancy that tempers the cuteness. And Mr. Middleditch (star of the smart HBO comedy "Silicon Valley" and those grating Verizon commercials) is blessedly low key, dialing down the neuroses and allowing his director, Jason James, to control the increasingly sanguine mood. Yet the job of rescuing the movie from a well of cartoonish whimsy falls on the gifted Jess Weixler as Hanna, the mystery woman who gives Ben the eye and a reason to live. Pert and pretty and smart mouthed, Hanna is intriguing and a little dangerous the splash of vinegar that counters the sugar. That she would give Ben the time of day is more than enough notice that all may not be as it seems. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
You've heard it before: When the markets become erratic, or seem poised for a prolonged downturn, the best thing you can do is nothing at all. But if you're on the cusp of retirement or, perhaps worse, newly retired a turbulent stock market can make you feel particularly vulnerable. While there's some validity to those feelings, it's more productive to redirect any panic into prudence, which will help ensure your money lasts longer. For older people invested in stocks, the performance of the market in the early years of your retirement can have a lasting effect on your portfolio, which will remain a dynamic entity for perhaps three more decades . If you have to start selling investments when they are worth less, you'll have to to sell more shares to get the cash you need and the repercussions build on themselves. "That can really start digging a hole in your portfolio that becomes harder to dig out of," said Wade Pfau, professor of retirement income at the American College for Financial Services. "It is really the first 10 years of the market performance in retirement that are going to drive your outcome." While the S P 500 lost 6.2 percent last year, the final three months of the year were especially volatile. It's unclear where the market will go tomorrow, or the next decade. But whether you're getting close to retirement or just starting to work, part of your financial success is a matter of chance: The growth of your portfolio is largely determined by when you started investing and when you retire. Let's say a person saved 15 percent of her earnings a flat salary that grew with inflation during a 30 year career. If that person retired in 1982, she would have accumulated just over five times her final salary. If she retired in 2000, however, she would have amassed 17 times her salary. The same type of variability can occur based on the sequence of your market returns in retirement except it's amplified because instead of adding to the money you've invested, you're spending it. Here are some other steps retirees can take to lengthen the life of their savings when markets are less than cooperative: Portfolio Check. Retirees need to ask themselves a couple of key questions. Is my portfolio broadly diversified in low cost investments, such as index funds? Is my allocation to stocks one that my stomach can handle should the market plummet 50 percent, as it did in 2008 and 2009? If you answer "no" to these questions, you should reassess (preferably with a pro) how reducing your stock exposure might change your ability to spend what you want in retirement. Mindful Spending. One of the most widely cited rules for retirement spending might be what's known as the 4 percent rule. It suggests that retirees who withdrew 4 percent of their initial retirement portfolio balance, and then adjusted that dollar amount for inflation each year thereafter, would have created a paycheck that lasted for 30 years. (The numbers crunched by a financial planner more than two decades ago were based on a portfolio evenly split between stock and bonds.) Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' But if your portfolio value takes a significant hit, your withdrawal rate may have to increase to support your spending. If that rate starts to approach 5 percent, and certainly 6 percent, there's a greater chance you'll outlive your portfolio, Mr. Pfau warned. So adjustments may be in order. The simplest way to deal with a dip would be to hold your spending steady, rather than increasing it with inflation. That approach can be enough to steady your finances even if your portfolio were to drop by 25 percent from its original value at retirement, according to Judith Ward, a senior financial planner with T. Rowe Price, based on a recent study. She suggested to keep spending steady for two to four years, depending on when the portfolio rebounds. "Keep in mind, steady spending over a number of years may still result in some kind of spending cuts depending on the inflation environment," she said. "That may be the easiest and most intuitive approach for many retirees." Create a Smoother Ride. Traditionally, investors reduce their exposure to stocks as they approach retirement. But one novel approach is to cut that exposure even further then get back into the market as you age. This strategy, studied by Mr. Pfau and Michael Kitces, director of wealth management at Pinnacle Advisory, is to increase your stock holdings over time. Portfolios that started with about 20 to 40 percent in stocks at retirement, and then gradually increased to about 50 or 60 percent, lasted longer than those with static mixes or those that shed stocks, according to their analysis. Another option is to buy a guaranteed paycheck with a portion of your savings. With an immediate annuity, you pay a lump sum to an insurer in exchange for a guaranteed stream of income for life. A common approach is to consider how much of your must have basic expenses like food, shelter, property taxes are covered by Social Security and any additional income, such as a pension. Then, buy enough annuity income to cover the gap. It also simplifies your financial life, which becomes increasingly important as you age. But be careful with annuities: There are many types, and they can be complex and not necessarily sold to you by someone who is legally required to put your financial interests ahead of his or her own. Hold a Cash Reserve. If you're approaching retirement and worried about a significant market correction, there's another strategy that might provide some peace of mind: Keep up to two years of basic living expenses in cash to cover, say, the costs of housing, food and other essentials. With that sort of buffer, you can try to avoid tapping your investment portfolio for a while, giving it some time to recover. Putting too much money in cash, however, may weaken overall returns because you will have less invested to begin with, and therefore less to build on. Look for Higher Returns. This does not involve chasing after some hot stock or growing sector. It's far more boring and counterintuitive, but guaranteed to deliver a higher paycheck in retirement over the long run: delay Social Security as long as you reasonably can. "The effective return of delaying Social Security is much higher than what you will earn in the market today," said David Blanchett, head of retirement research for Morningstar. "It is like a 10 percent guaranteed return." Your benefits generally rise by 8 percent for each year you wait to collect the check beyond your "full retirement age" that is, the age you're eligible for a full benefit, which is currently 66 years and 2 months for people born in 1955. Someone set to receive a full benefit of 1,413 monthly (the average benefit amount), who instead waited two more years, would receive roughly 1,640 an amount that would rise with inflation. You can think of the money you don't receive while you delay benefits as a payment for higher guaranteed income later on. And that payment buys you far more in annuity income than if you tried to buy it from a commercial insurer. Get Help. If you doubt you have the strength to avoid temptation and stay the course or you want assistance developing a coping strategy this is the time to seek professional help. It can potentially make or break your retirement. But you need to get the right type of help, which means avoiding salespeople and brokers who call themselves advisers but get paid only when they sell you something. Instead, find a certified financial planner who isn't afraid to promise in writing that he or she will act as a fiduciary, which is legal speak for putting your interests ahead of their own. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
At least two people were killed and dozens sickened by E. coli outbreaks in Canada and the United States that the authorities in Canada have linked to romaine lettuce. Health officials in the United States are not yet ready to blame the American outbreak to the leafy green. Still, they say, the Canadian finding has proved helpful and both outbreaks appear to have been caused by related strains of the bacteria, suggesting the possibility of a shared source. "They've done a really thorough job there, and I think that gave us a really good clue to start with," Dr. Matthew Wise, who oversees investigations into such outbreaks for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a telephone interview on Friday. In all, at least 58 people in both countries have been sickened, and two one in California and one in Canada have died. In the United States, the C.D.C. has so far linked at least 17 reports of illness in 13 states to the outbreak. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LOS ANGELES In one of the more awkward box office pairings in memory, the rough sex sequel "Fifty Shades Freed" was No. 1 at North American theaters over the weekend, while the cuddly cute "Peter Rabbit" did well with children in second place. "Fifty Shades Freed" (Universal Pictures), which did not delight critics nearly as much as it did pun enthralled headline writers, arrived to ticket sales of roughly 38.8 million. Based on the third and final book in the "Fifty Shades" series by E.L. James, "Fifty Shades Freed" cost an estimated 55 million to make, not including marketing. It was directed by James Foley ("Glengarry Glen Ross") and co stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan. The "Fifty Shades" cultural fever ended a long time ago: Most readers discovered that a little of Ms. James's writing goes a long way. But ticket sales for the final movie adaptation marketed by Universal with a baldfaced tagline, "Don't miss the climax" were solid, declining only 16 percent from initial results for its series predecessor, "Fifty Shades Darker," a year ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
MCC Theater's 2020 "Miscast" gala is its first to happen online, but in a way it's an easy pivot. For years, the theater has posted performances from the star studded live event on YouTube, where they have attracted quite a following. Here, in alphabetical order, is a highly subjective list of "Miscast" favorites to check out. If you loved Jonathan Groff as the foppish King George in "Hamilton," you will find him irresistibly adorable in this deliriously silly, tap happy 2012 homage to Sutton Foster, which has Groff playing Reno Sweeney, surrounded by a flock of dancers. In the musical, the song belongs to Anita and Maria, so having men sing it sounds like a recipe for camp. But Lin Manuel Miranda and Raul Esparza's 2014 duet isn't a sendup and that's the source of its loveliness. "I Am What I Am" (from "La Cage Aux Folles") Jennifer Holliday as Albin, the slighted half of a gay male couple divided about living openly? It's probably not in the casting cards. But this song is Albin's assertion of dignity, and that's a universal human notion. At the 2017 gala, Holliday makes it her own exquisitely powerful affirmation, quite movingly. Katrina Lenk, who was in previews as Bobbie in the gender flipped "Company" when Broadway shut down, takes on another male role here, fiddling her way through Tevye's most famous song. The 2018 number was her idea, and it is almost guaranteed to make you want to see her do the show. The only part of this 2016 video that you should disregard is in the introduction, when Keala Settle says she would never be able to do the show justice. Hoping to see her play Don Quixote in a full production might be tilting at windmills but her singing his anthem is an unequivocal victory. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Directed and developed by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh for the Dublin based Fishamble: The New Play Company, "Charolais" is the story of Siobhan's desire to eliminate her female competition for Jimmy's attention: his septuagenarian mother, Breda, who so intimidates him that it's forever before he tells her that she's going to be a grandmother; and a beautiful golden Charolais cow he treats with greater tenderness than he does Siobhan. Sounds like a catch, doesn't he? Siobhan thinks he is, anyway, and this is what starts her scheming. "Hush, little baby, don't be afraid," she sings to her belly, "Mammy's goin' to murder the Charolais." The cow, the only other character who gets whole scenes of the play to herself, does seem to be Siobhan's principal rival. Yet there comes a point during the 65 minute performance when you may wonder just whose blood was on that carving knife. Did she really kill Breda, or did she off the cow? The brilliantly twisted thing about "Charolais" is that what Siobhan wants, ultimately, is a snug little nuclear family, and what could be more proper than that? The trouble with pitting Siobhan against the nameless Charolais, at least in Ms. Stapleton's performance, is that the cow is by far the more charming of the two: a cartoon fantasy of French allure, a haughty chanteuse trapped in a barnyard life. Like Siobhan, she is a sexual creature, full of lustful yearning, but she dreams of handsome bulls, not of Jimmy or as she disdainfully calls him, "ze oaf." Audience members at 59E59 Theaters get a glossary of Irish terms tucked into their program, but there still seemed to be a gulf of language, or maybe accent comprehension (Irish, not French), between Ms. Stapleton and her spectators on Tuesday night. As a storyteller, she was having difficulty taking her listeners along. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SAN FRANCISCO Bill Gates is stepping down from the board of Microsoft, the software giant he helped found more than four decades ago. Mr. Gates said on Friday that he would also step down from the board of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run by his close friend, Warren E. Buffett. "I have made the decision to step down from both of the public boards on which I serve Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities including global health and development, education, and my increasing engagement in tackling climate change," Mr. Gates wrote in a LinkedIn post. For decades, Mr. Gates was the face of Microsoft. Known for his technical acumen and ruthless business practices, he helped to establish Microsoft's Windows software as the primary system for the personal computer. Microsoft said Mr. Gates would remain a technical adviser to the company. Mr. Gates has slowly been stepping back from Microsoft in recent years. He left his day to day role at the company in 2008 and served as the board's chairman until 2014. The company said he wants to devote more of his time to his philanthropy at the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world's biggest nonprofit organizations, which was started with the billions of dollars he made from Microsoft. Mr. Gates remains one of the largest individual shareholders of Microsoft. As of December, he held more than 100 million shares of Microsoft, roughly 1.3 percent of the company's shares. His stock is worth about 16 billion. He said he would remain active at the company and would work closely with Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive. "Microsoft will always be an important part of my life's work and I will continue to be engaged with Satya and the technical leadership to help shape the vision and achieve the company's ambitious goals. I feel more optimistic than ever about the progress the company is making," Mr. Gates wrote in his post. In his post Microsoft career, Mr. Gates has become better known for his work in fighting infectious diseases and climate change. Last month, the Gates Foundation said it would commit an additional 100 million to fight the coronavirus. The organization pledged 10 million earlier in the year. He has persuaded Mr. Buffett, his bridge partner and neighbor on the list of the world's richest people, to donate most of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. Mr. Gates joined the Berkshire Hathaway board in 2004. The conglomerate has nominated Kenneth Chenault, the former chief executive of American Express, to replace Mr. Gates on the board. Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, said in a research note that Mr. Gates's stepping down from the Microsoft board was not a surprise and that it was a vote of confidence for Mr. Nadella and the direction of the company. Mr. Gates founded Microsoft in 1975, dropping out of Harvard and joining Paul Allen, his friend and technology collaborator since their teenage years at a private high school in Seattle. In 1975, they moved to Albuquerque, N.M., where a fledgling microcomputer company, MITS, made the Altair 8800, a primitive machine often credited as the first personal computer. Microsoft's first product was a version of the BASIC programming language that could run on the underpowered Altair computer. That was the start. Later, after Mr. Gates moved Microsoft to suburban Seattle, a succession of highly successful commercial products followed the MS DOS operating system, the Windows operating system and the Office collection of productivity programs, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. By the mid 1990s, Microsoft was the dominant personal computer software company, so much so that it became the target of a series of antitrust investigations. In a landmark federal case, a lawsuit filed in 1998, Microsoft was eventually found to have repeatedly violated the nation's antitrust laws. Mr. Gates stepped aside as chief executive in 2000, after the antitrust ruling. In recent years, his main occupation has been as a philanthropist, donating billions to world health and disease eradication programs. But the antitrust battle of the 1990s still rankles Mr. Gates. At a New York Times DealBook conference last fall, he was asked if the suit made the technology market more competitive. "No," Mr. Gates replied. "Everyone else can say that if they want. It's not true to me, and I will never change that opinion." Daisuke Wakabayashi reported from San Francisco and Steve Lohr from New York. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A team of scientists has developed an experimental prototype for a fairly quick, cheap test to diagnose the coronavirus that gives results as simply as a pregnancy test does. The test is based on a gene editing technology known as Crispr, and the researchers estimated that the materials for each test would cost about 6. "We're excited that this could be a solution that people won't have to rely on a sophisticated and expensive laboratory to run," said Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and one of the pioneers of Crispr technology. On Tuesday, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues posted a description of their device on a website dedicated to their project, but their method has not yet been tested by other scientists, nor have their findings been published by a scientific journal that subjected them to scrutiny by independent experts. Two other teams of researchers, one in Buenos Aires and the other in San Francisco, are also working to devise new tests to detect the virus using gene editing technology. Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Health, said that it was important that scientists search for new kinds of tests for the coronavirus. But he cautioned that the research so far offers only a proof of concept, and that it remains to be seen how well the test would perform in real world conditions compared to the standard tests now in use, known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. "There's a long way to go from that to a scalable technology that works," he said. PCR is a venerable technology, invented about 35 years ago by the biochemist Kary Mullis. It allowed scientists to find pieces of DNA that contained a particular sequence, even if that sequence was extremely rare. The researchers began by creating special tags that could grab onto the particular piece of genetic material they wanted to find. Once a piece was tagged, they could duplicate it. Repeating this procedure over and over again, PCR could create billions of new copies of the original piece. On its own, a single piece of DNA was too small to detect, but billions of copies were easy to spot. But if a sample did not contain the desired sequence, PCR would yield nothing. Dr. Mullis won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for inventing PCR. It proved to be a workhorse for biological research, as well as for forensic DNA tests and other applications. In January, when scientists discovered the coronavirus that causes Covid 19, they used its genetic sequence to create PCR tests for it. In a pandemic, however, PCR has some drawbacks. Its recipe involves many steps, which are typically carried out by trained technicians. Some companies have invented self contained devices that test for the coronavirus and deliver a result in minutes. But the price tag for the devices can be steep, and the chemical supplies have sometimes been hard to come by. In order for states to safely reopen, public health experts say that millions of people will have to be tested every day. But the current state of testing is falling far short of that goal. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues hope to fill that gap with tests that were affordable and easy enough to use without special expertise. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "You really need new technologies that are more distributed, that don't require thousands of trained people or need centralized labs," said Omar Abudayyeh of M.I.T., one of Dr. Zhang's collaborators. Dr. Abudayyeh, Dr. Zhang, and their colleague Jonathan Gootenberg at M.I.T.'s McGovern Institute have been trying out Crispr to see if it can work as that new technology. Crispr originally came to fame several years ago as a way to precisely edit DNA. Like PCR, the procedure begins with the creation of a molecular tag that can lock onto a particular spot in a gene. The tag carries with it an enzyme. When the tag lands on the DNA, the enzyme cuts it at that spot. Crispr can be used to snip out a segment of DNA, or even replace it with a new piece. In recent years, scientists have figured out new things to do with Crispr's tags and enzymes. Dr. Zhang and other researchers have been retooling it as a way to detect viruses. They fashion a tag that zeros in on a viral gene. But instead of cutting the gene, the enzyme gives off a signal that it has reached the target. In March, researchers at University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and at CASPR Biotech in San Francisco published the details of a Crispr based test for the coronavirus. They posted a preprint online that has not yet gone through peer review. Last month, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and at Mammoth Biosciences published another Crispr based test in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Dr. Zhang's team has been working on a test of their own as well. They built it on research they published last year, before the pandemic. They created a Crispr based system for detecting viruses they called Sherlock, short for Specific High sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter Unlocking. Earlier this year, they adapted the Sherlock test to find the coronavirus. But their test, like those from other groups, required moving a sample into a series of tubes to carry out separate reactions. "It's a little inconvenient, especially if you want to scale it up," Dr. Zhang said. "So we focused our efforts on turning it into something that's easy to run." Recently, the researchers figured out how to combine a lot of the reactions in a single tube, allowing them to run the test faster and more cheaply. They called the method STOPCovid. The process starts with putting samples in a tube with chemicals that can tear open viruses. The researchers then use an eye dropper like device to move some of the liquid into a second tube containing the Crispr molecules. For the reactions to finish, the tubes need to sit in water at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour. To see if the coronavirus is present, the researchers devised a procedure similar to a pregnancy test: They stuck a piece of paper in the tube. Two lines appearing on the paper meant the coronavirus was present. The researchers tried out the test on samples from 12 patients with Covid 19. For 11 of them, they successfully detected the virus on 3 out of 3 tries. For the 12th, they succeeded 2 out of 3 times. When they tested five healthy people, all consistently tested negative. The researchers found that the test worked both on nasal swabs and saliva. The researchers estimate that the materials for one test would come to about 6. They are in discussions with manufacturers to create a single cartridge in which the two steps could take place. They expect that with mass production, the cost would go down even further. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues have set up a website with the instructions for STOPCovid in the hope that other researchers will try out their procedure and find ways to improve it. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Tumblr was sold this month, reportedly for a bargain basement price, to Automattic , the parent company of WordPress . This was exciting news to Tumblr users, whose platform could be called the last bastion of a friendly social internet. As the big networks have become dangerously bigger, nostalgia for the kinder, stranger online communities of yesteryear like the video app Vine, or Myspace in its heyday has increased. Tumblr too became a smaller, less exciting place after it was purchased by Yahoo in 2013. No one at Yahoo seemed to know quite what to do with Tumblr particularly its large community of adult content creators. Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017 and, the following year, banned pornographic content on Tumblr Many thought the company had thrown out the baby with the bath water; the site lost nearly a third of its users. Automattic's chief executive, Matt Mullenweg , is an enthusiastic proponent of Tumblr and of the open web more broadly. We asked him questions. Can you tell me a little bit just about what your vision is for the site? How do you see Tumblr fitting into the landscape as it currently exists, and what are the opportunities for the site? I do believe that the bulk of that knowledge about what's best for Tumblr next actually comes from the current team. So it's not that I have any special knowledge or anything. I'm a Tumblr fan as well, and I know publishing. I know WordPress. These are the things I would consider myself an expert in, not Tumblr. But the lessons from one side of it, I think, many of them are applicable to the other side, especially when you look at WordPress's history of really giving users control, allowing creativity and expression. I'm looking forward to bringing some of that freedom and creativity to the Tumblr community as well. You've said to judge you by the next 18 months or so. What should we be looking for? We still have to close and get all the servers moved over and everything. So I'd say give us a few months to get all that. Beyond that, I would say absolutely look for new functionality on the site. I don't want to dive deep into the road map, but some things are just a little obvious. Just to give one example that I know has been pressing on people's minds, when someone tries to visit your site they won't get a huge block of legal language. I think it'll increase people's traffic quite a bit actually. The social internet has gone through a lot of changes. I wonder if you could talk about how Tumblr fits into that a little bit. It doesn't matter if there's no one else in your town, or wherever you live, who's into the same things you are. You can find your tribe online. And at its best, Tumblr is a very tribal product. You're able to connect with all facets of your identity and, in fact, express different parts of yourself very easily through different accounts. That's something that I do believe Tumblr encompasses and in fact it created a lot of what's best about the social web. There's some people who subscribe to tribes whose worldviews are not quite as rosy. How do you go about that process of making sure that people are able to bond over similar interests but that they're not getting together and inciting violence or radicalizing each other? I think first you have to have very clear policies. Now if anyone cares about Automattic's policies or Wordpress.com's, they're on the website. And we try to spell them out, not just in legalese but really in clear human language. And second, I think that you need to approach those policies how they translate into reality with some common sense. With a human touch. You're not ever going to be perfect. I will never say that Automattic or anyone will get 100 percent. But I do believe that you can take a humane and iterative stance which strikes a really good balance between nurturing the type of conversation and communities and user experience that you want people to have while still allowing for a wide variety of expression. And I am overall incredibly proud of what WordPress has done there really over the past 16 years of our existence. I wonder if you can give me any insight into why the governance of WordPress often seems to have been more thorough. Over the long arc, what we've tried to do is build up trust with the world at large and our community, to handle things in a reasonable way. Which includes making mistakes sometimes. But correcting them as you would hope a human would or a friend would. I wonder if you have any examples of that kind of thing where you really had to shift your mind set. Yeah we actually were called out in The New York Times quite well. It was an episode I'm incredibly ashamed of. We had a large number of Sandy Hook deniers that were using the platform to spread misinformation that what causing a lot of harm to families. And so that's something we've worked on a lot. I would say now we're at a much, much better place. Was it a policy change that allowed you to clean that up? Merely discussing a conspiracy I don't think was directly in our policy. So we both evolved from the policies to encompass this particular behavior. But I also think you could never enumerate everything bad everyone could ever do. Who would you like to get using Tumblr who's not already using it? I want to get the most creative people in the world, who have something to say and share, on Tumblr. Just full stop. And it's so easy to use. The mobile app is so good. The community is so strong. It's an incredible platform for artists, for writers, for musicians. It's true that Tumblr, even in its state where it's smaller than it has been in the past, still defines the culture in so many ways. The things that start there spread out to the news, to the radio, to BuzzFeed. It really is a source of a lot of this. So for people who want to be close to the source, it's the place to be. I think people were really excited to see you addressing the possible return of RSS feeds. Is that a definitive part of your plan? I am since my earliest years, since my teenage years, a strong proponent of the open web. So you can expect that to continue in everything that I do or have influence on in my career. There are some technical issues there, particularly as we migrate data centers A lot of the stuff will be after that migration. But count that as high on my list. As far as I could understand what you said to The Verge, when it came to porn on Tumblr, you talked about how difficult it is with the app stores. And then you also talked about more finely defining what can be allowed on there. Am I understanding the second part of that correctly? Hmm. So Wordpress.com has very clear policies around this. They have not had some of the pushback that Tumblr has. There's also a question of implementation. Art is allowed under Tumblr's current policies. But there are some stories of people sharing things that are very much defined as art and running into the filters. So I think there's really two parts there. There's one, unifying these policies. And then two, making sure that there's no bugs in the implementation. Because I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be posting something particularly if you've been using Tumblr for many many years and get a false flag. I know, you've talked about this a little bit. But I wonder about just kind of a broad timeline. When did you become aware that this deal was a possibility? When did that discussion start? And when did it become a real serious possibility? It's been at least a few months in the making. It was a ton of work on both sides. Did you see my blog post about the price? I really do mean that. I have a ton of respect for how Verizon approached us and I'm very much looking forward to really the entire Tumblr team coming over. The way that Automattic approaches acquisitions is much like a Berkshire Hathaway. We want the management, we want the team. We want to take things that aren't working and help them grow and be better versus more of a chop and sell. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Chrysler said this week that it would double production of the Ram 1500 EcoDiesel pickup, increasing the model's share of all Ram pickups from 10 to 20 percent. Ram is currently the only light truck manufacturer to offer a diesel engine in a light duty pickup. The Ram 1500 EcoDiesel comes with a 240 horsepower 3 liter diesel V6 with a fuel efficiency rating of 28 miles per gallon. (The Detroit News) Johan de Nysschen, the new chief executive of Cadillac, said last week at a meeting of dealers in Las Vegas that the automaker would have to address the oversupply of 2014 sedans in order to tackle Cadillac's long term sales goals. He said the surfeit of inventory was the result of overambitious planning on the production side, and said he was prepared to cut production if dealer lots remain swollen with unsold cars. (Automotive News, subscription required) Jim Farley, Ford's sales chief, said Monday that Ford had increased its annual sales goal for the next six years. The automaker sold 6.2 million vehicles in 2013, and Mr. Farley said it would sell 9.4 million a year by 2020. (Reuters) The United Auto Workers union announced Monday that it had signed an agreement with two German unions to organize about 1,500 workers at Volkswagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. National Right to Work, the nonprofit legal advocacy group that had opposed union organization at the facility, called the agreement a "back room deal" that sought to undermine a vote by workers earlier this year against union representation. (Reuters) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Let's see, 533 divided by 9 that makes the suspects' average age just shy of 60, which happens to be the birthday I celebrated a few weeks before reading "The Last Job: The 'Bad Grandpas' and the Hatton Garden Heist." I readily cop to being a grumpy old woman, albeit one with a longstanding affection for caper stories. A good heist tale is a good heist tale; a dull one can't be rescued by the fact that the thieves are pensioners. Yes, the Hatton Garden job was big and brazen in execution, undone by the gang's almost comical hubris. But is it a great story, with the zeitgeist kick of, say, the 2009 Bling Ring? Dan Bilefsky, a New York Times correspondent who arrived in London about the time Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. was burglarized, is a brisk, enthusiastic storyteller. And the crime was undeniably a sensational one that seized the public's imagination well before anything was known about the suspects. The size of the haul alone made it a big deal: The thieves, working over the long Easter weekend, jimmied open 73 safe deposit boxes, taking away cash, gold and jewels valued at 20 million at the time. Bilefsky draws on interviews, court testimony and transcripts from the Metropolitan Police to put together a meticulously researched procedural. But the early sections of the book are weakened by the fact that the mastermind, Brian Reader 76 at the time of the burglary provided no additional information to what was already in the public record. Bilefsky is left to make deductions about Reader's motivations, ranging from "a fearlessness borne of age" to "a bravado perhaps conditioned by age." My hot take? Reader was a thief. Thieves steal. However, the men's ages do matter when the case goes to court. The prosecutor Philip Evans vividly rendered here; the book is at its best when focused on the good guys realizes he has to combat the narrative that these are harmless old men who swindled some vague, faceless banking entity. Bilefsky reminds us that the plundered safe deposit boxes belonged to individuals "Holocaust survivors; young entrepreneurs; retirees; immigrants ... who had arrived penniless to Britain in the 1960s after fleeing strife or civil war." Ultimately Hatton Garden Safe Deposit was forced into liquidation; much of the loot has never been recovered. "People don't seem to look at it as a robbery," Hatton Garden's new owner said in a 2016 newspaper interview. "Here they say, 'O.K., they were just some old men chancing their luck.' It's strange, but there you go. I can't explain it, but I'm no psychiatrist." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency authorization of a Covid 19 antibody treatment made by Eli Lilly that is similar to a therapy given to President Trump shortly after he contracted the coronavirus. The decision, announced on Monday by the agency, is likely to be seen as a valuable tool to treat patients with Covid 19 at a time when the pandemic is raging across the United States, hospitals are overwhelmed and doctors have few options to treat the disease. Eli Lilly said that its treatment, called bamlanivimab, should be administered as soon as possible after a positive coronavirus test, and within 10 days of developing symptoms. The authorization applies only to people newly infected with the virus, and the agency said it should not be used in hospitalized patients. It is authorized for people who are 12 and older and at risk for developing a severe form of Covid 19 or being hospitalized for the condition. The F.D.A. said that included people who were over 65 and obese a key group that early studies have shown can benefit the most from the treatment. "It's a great day for science and medicine sort of a feat of what's possible," said Dr. Daniel M. Skovronsky, the chief scientific officer of Eli Lilly. The company and its collaborators, including the National Institutes of Health, he said, were able "to create a new drug, manufacture it, test it in clinical trials, and get it authorized for use in just seven months." In October, the company announced that it had reached a 375 million deal to sell 300,000 doses of the treatment to the U.S. government. The emergency authorization for Eli Lilly raised immediate questions about who would get access to the treatment at a time when emergency authorizations for coronavirus vaccines might still be weeks or months away. The news came on the same day that Pfizer announced positive early results from its coronavirus vaccine trial. That vaccine might get emergency authorization sometime this year, but even then it would not be available to most Americans until well into 2021. In a statement on Monday, Alex M. Azar II, the health secretary and a former executive at Eli Lilly, said the F.D.A.'s emergency authorization for bamlanivimab was a "step forward" in "bridging us to the rollout of safe and effective vaccines." Eli Lilly has said that it expects to have enough doses to treat up to one million people by the end of the year, and that it will be able to significantly increase production thereafter. But that means that even in the best case scenario, there won't initially be enough to curb a virus that is now infecting more than 110,000 people a day in the United States. "It's kind of the best times for these therapies to enter, because they can have an impact," said Dr. Walid F. Gellad, who leads the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh. "It's also the worst time because we don't have enough doses, and it's going to add to the backlog of testing." Dr. Skovronsky said the company has been working "nonstop" since March to manufacture as many doses of the treatment as possible, without knowing if it would be successful. "It's something I wish we had infinite supplies of medications of, for sure." Eli Lilly will begin shipping the treatment to the national distributor AmerisourceBergen, which will allocate it with help from the federal government. AmerisourceBergen also helped distribute the antiviral drug remdesivir, the first drug that the F.D.A. approved to treat Covid 19. The company said that decisions about distribution would be overseen by the federal government and would be based on the number of confirmed Covid 19 cases in each state or territory for the previous seven days. Each week, state health departments will then decide where those doses should go. Antibody treatments enjoyed a burst of publicity in October, when Mr. Trump received an infusion of a cocktail made by the biotech company Regeneron and then enthusiastically promoted the drug. In a video released on Oct. 7, the president claimed without evidence that it was a "cure." In early studies, Regeneron's cocktail of two powerful antibodies has shown promise at keeping the infection in check, reducing emergency room visits and hospitalizations in patients who get the treatment early in the course of their disease. Regeneron has also applied for emergency authorization with the F.D.A. But it is impossible to know whether the Regeneron treatment helped Mr. Trump. He was given multiple drugs while at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and many people recover from the coronavirus on their own. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Last month, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spent time with Mr. Trump in the days leading up to his diagnosis, said he had received Eli Lilly's experimental treatment shortly after he tested positive for the coronavirus. For months, outside researchers have been closely watching the development of antibody treatments. And top White House officials have been agitating for faster progress. At one point over the summer, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, lashed out at drug officials on Operation Warp Speed, the administration's vaccine and therapy development program, for what she saw as sluggishness in setting up clinical trials for antibody treatments, according to one senior administration official. The president and two of his top advisers Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump's son in law have called Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, to press for speed in agency reviews, two other senior officials said. Although neither Regeneron nor Eli Lilly has completed its antibody trials, evidence so far suggests that such treatments work best early in the course of the disease, before the virus has gained a foothold in the body. The F.D.A.'s emergency authorization covers only a single antibody treatment developed by Eli Lilly, but the company is also developing a combination of two antibodies that has shown that it could be more effective in reducing the viral load in patients. In an early analysis, the two antibody combination reduced the hospitalization of newly infected patients by about 5 percentage points. Eli Lilly has said it plans to apply for emergency authorization for the combination treatment this month, but will only have about 50,000 doses of that therapy before the end of the year. Early evidence shows that the antibody treatments do not work well once people are sick enough to be hospitalized. Eli Lilly stopped giving its treatment to hospitalized patients in a government run trial, because the company said it did not seem to be helping them. And Regeneron paused enrolling the sickest hospitalized patients in one of its trials. In issuing the emergency authorization, the F.D.A. said that the treatment had not been shown to benefit hospitalized patients and that monoclonal antibodies like bamlanivimab might be associated with worse outcomes when given to hospitalized Covid 19 patients who need high flow oxygen or mechanical ventilation. This creates a problem for distributing the treatment, because it is only for people who are not hospitalized, yet those people must be infused intravenously by a health care provider. Getting it to the right people will require quick turnarounds in testing, as well as coordination among federal, state and hospital officials many of the same challenges that have complicated the U.S. response to the pandemic. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
President Trump went to West Virginia this month to talk about tax cuts, but he got a bit distracted. He talked about China, the North American Free Trade Agreement, border security, "sanctuary cities" and states he won in 2016. Eventually he turned to his prepared comments on taxes. "This was going to be my remarks," he said, holding up a sheet of paper. "It would have taken about two minutes, but" and here he threw the paper over his shoulder "to hell with it. That would have been a little boring. A little boring. Right. Now I'm reading off the first paragraph, I said, 'This is boring.'" If Mr. Trump has lost some interest in the 1.5 trillion tax overhaul that he signed into law last year even though the White House keeps scheduling events to promote it, including one in Florida on Monday well, the country is right there with him. A brief flurry of activity is planned this week by supporters and opponents of the new law, to coincide with Tuesday's filing deadline for 2017 income taxes. But otherwise, by all sorts of metrics, Americans aren't talking very much about a law that Republicans had hoped to make a centerpiece of their midterm election message. Several topics on cable have displaced taxes. In March, mentions of the word "Stormy" spiked on MSNBC and CNN, for example. All three networks have begun talking more about "trade" over the past two months, as Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and threatened additional tariffs on products imported from China. Trade concerns have overtaken tax cut inquiries among users of online search engines, too. Data from Google Trends shows a surge of searches for the "tax cut" topic in November and December. It died down in January just as interest in "tariff" searches picked up. Even Mr. Trump has struggled to keep his focus on tax issues since signing the bill. He tweeted the word "tax" about as much from January through the end of March as he did in December alone. His overall discussion of taxes in speeches, interviews, news conferences, videos and Twitter also declined through the end of March from late last year. Instead, Mr. Trump is talking and tweeting more about trade. Congressional Republicans have pushed hard to keep tax cuts in the news, in the belief that they will be a potent electoral weapon for the fall. So have liberal organizers, who have held rallies protesting the overhaul throughout the winter and early spring, believing that opposition to it will galvanize support for Democratic candidates in the midterm elections. For two months after the bill passed, it appeared that Republicans, buoyed by a surge of corporate employee bonus announcements linked to the new law, were right to press their case. The law's poll numbers improved from dismal levels before its passage. But as those bonus announcements died down and the conversation around the law died, too public support waned again. Interviews with voters in swing states suggest that the law may not have much power to move them to support Republicans this fall, and the party abandoned tax themed ads in a special House election in Pennsylvania last month. A new poll by the online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times shows the public almost evenly split on the law, with 48 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving. That is down from a 51 percent approval rating in February, and it suggests that the law may have hit a high water mark among voters if they're even thinking about it anymore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The online vitamin and supplement marketplace is fierce, star studded and murky. The Kardashians endorse gummies they say promote hair health. Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop website pushes pills and liquids in the name of holistic wellness. Even the conspiracy website Infowars is partly funded through the sale of potions and powders. In this crowded field, the start up Ritual, which sells its own line of multivitamins for women, has tried to stand out by focusing on facts. Its brightly colored ads on Instagram and Facebook have talked up openness around its ingredients, which are packaged in clear capsules and mailed to customers each month. Recently, Ritual introduced a campaign emphasizing its focus on science over gimmicky wellness trends, pitching journalists on its "pioneering message to differentiate between the myths and facts in the space." Yet a closer look at Ritual's marketing showed that the Los Angeles company, which has raised 16.5 million in funding, has not always helped customers separate facts from spin. The company has paid for articles on websites like Well Good and PureWow, and then taken positive quotes from those articles in its ads on Facebook and Instagram. It has also used news coverage from CNN and The New York Times to suggest that the outlets endorsed benefits from its vitamins. A Facebook ad referring to The Times, CNN and Vogue. The articles about Ritual in those publications did not describe such benefits. Katerina Schneider, Ritual's chief executive, said that wasn't the implication. "People want to believe that there's some all natural, healthy supplement that they can take that's going to make them feel and look better, and a lot of times much of it is based on hype or misleading marketing," said Bonnie Patten, the executive director of Truth in Advertising, a nonprofit organization. In an industry built on products that do not require reviews for safety or effectiveness from the Food and Drug Administration, companies can easily get away with making dubious claims. Ritual, which started selling vitamins in 2016, features a quote from the lifestyle site Well Good on its home page, saying, "Everyone you know is about to start taking this buzzy multivitamin." The line is also cited in Facebook and Instagram ads. But while it appears to be an editorial endorsement, it comes from a post that Ritual paid for the online equivalent of a magazine advertorial. Another Ritual ad includes a quote plucked from a different sponsored Well Good post, which links to the article under the excerpt: "Bottom line: I'll be signing up for that recurring subscription." This ad, like the other ad making use of a line from a Well Good post paid for by the company, includes an article link. Ritual has also featured praise from the site PureWow: "One month was great. But improving my health over time is really the goal. And to do it with a vitamin that I'm not skeptical about? All the better." That bit of testimony also comes from a post paid for by the company. A Facebook ad quoting a post on Wellandgood.com that Ritual paid for. A Facebook ad in which Ritual quotes its own paid content. Katerina Schneider, Ritual's chief executive and founder, said the company did not believe it was misleading to use those quotations in its ads, although they were taken from sponsored posts. "If it were a statement of more substance, about the product's efficacy or something mirroring a structure function claim, we would treat it differently," Ms. Schneider said in an email. Cryptocurrency group loses bid for copy of U.S. Constitution. The company that produced 'Parasite' is in talks to buy Endeavor's scripted content arm. Critic of Teamsters leader claims victory in race to succeed him. She added that the links included in the ads that quote from the sponsored Well Good pieces are enough to give consumers an idea of Ritual's financial relationship with the site. It's a powerful marketing tactic, particularly among supplement companies, to refer to popular publications in ads to bolster credibility, Ms. Patten of Truth in Advertising said. "The key really in all this kind of marketing is transparency, so it has to be clear if the content is advertising," she said. Ritual has sometimes used news coverage about the company in unusual ways. Its home page and several ads feature the quotation, "Multivitamins for people who check the ingredients first," which it attributes to The New York Times. That phrase was pulled from the display copy on the front page of the Business Day section and does not appear in the linked 2016 business story about Ritual. Ms. Schneider defended the use of the blurb, saying the phrase was "well constructed and illustrates our mission better than some of the copy we've written ourselves." Other ads from the company have said, "Meet the visionary vitamin making headlines in New York Times, CNN, and VOGUE for its clean label transparency and glow worthy benefits." The articles about Ritual in those publications did not describe such benefits, but Ms. Schneider said that wasn't the implication. Sales of dietary supplements and multivitamins rose to 20.7 billion last year in the United States from 16.4 billion in 2012, according to Euromonitor International, a provider of market research. (That excludes single vitamins and tonics.) The firm forecasts sales of 24.1 billion in 2022. The booming industry has, in recent years, been bolstered by Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, where brands peddle promises to social media users based on whom they follow and what they read. Consumers who shun beauty supplements endorsed by the Kardashian and Jenner sisters may opt for new lines from the makeup mogul Bobbi Brown or the YouTube personality Tati Westbrook. Goop readers can buy cheekily named vitamin packs like "Why Am I So Effing Tired?," while Infowars readers can purchase "Brain Force Plus" to help fight the "war" on their minds. Then there's the more sober, science citing but still Instagrammable approach of Ritual and start ups like Care/of, which customize daily vitamin packs for consumers based on a quiz. Ritual has also aimed to share more information than other multivitamin companies: Its site details ingredients and their origins and says the pills are vegan and free of gluten and genetically modified ingredients. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
, the real estate developer and presidential hopeful, sold one of the two penthouses he owned at the Trump Park Avenue to the founder of the Fresh Market, a supermarket chain, for 21,383,250, a transaction that was the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records. Mr. Trump, whose primary residence is a different penthouse at the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, maintained the full floor apartment, PH24, at 502 Park Avenue and 59th Street, as an investment after converting the building, designed by Goldner Goldner in the late 1920s, into a luxury condominium a decade ago. He is also selling another investment apartment there, PH31 32, a 6,278 square foot duplex at the pinnacle, with an asking price of 35 million, according to Michelle E. Griffith of Trump International Realty, the agent for both units. Ray D. Berry, the founder and chairman of the Fresh Market, purchased PH24, which has monthly carrying charges of 16,272, at a significant discount from the most recent asking price of 24.995 million. He was represented by Alatia Bradley Bach and Leighton Candler of the Corcoran Group. The 12 room apartment, with numerous floor to ceiling windows that offer expansive cityscape views, has five bedrooms and seven and a half baths over 6,192 square feet; it includes a private elevator that opens to a foyer, a great room and a library/media room. The master suite has a study and two baths. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
CBS is presenting its 2016 17 fall schedule to advertisers at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday afternoon. Here is a preview. CBS has tried for the last couple of years to find a worthy successor to "The Big Bang Theory," which remains TV's top rated comedy. Those efforts have yet to pay off, but CBS is taking a mighty big swing this year. The network is expanding from one two hour comedy block in its fall schedule last year (on Wednesday night) to two blocks this year (adding Monday night). CBS's entertainment president, Glenn Geller, told reporters on Wednesday morning that the network's development strategy was about "big comedy and big, big stars." CBS executives are going with three recognizable names: | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Home for the holidays after passing the eighth largest tax cut in United States history, Republicans could be forgiven for reveling in the warm embrace of nostalgia. Who among them won't raise a glass to Ronald Reagan, a welcome ghost of administrations past, the revered Republican president whose first State of the Union address promised the biggest tax cut ever to "expand our national prosperity, enlarge national incomes and increase opportunities for all Americans"? Speaker Paul D. Ryan might chuckle fondly at Reagan's tale of woe from a worker in the Midwest a precursor to Mr. Ryan's "Cindy" who made the everyman's case for a tax cut by complaining, "I'm bringing home more dollars than I ever believed I could possibly earn, but I seem to be getting worse off." For all the backslapping over a job well done, however, Republicans are proving notably more reluctant to acknowledge the true impact of the tax changes that Reagan wrought. That's because Reagan's cuts didn't quite work as advertised. Gross domestic product grew quickly during his two terms, averaging about 3.5 percent a year, pretty decent compared with the current measly pace. For one in two Americans, though those in the bottom half of the income pile income actually shrank on Reagan's watch. In 1980, the year he was elected, they earned 16,371 a year on average, in today's dollars, according to the World Wealth and Income Database. By 1988, Reagan's last year in office, they had to make do with 16,268. Reagan promised to "continue to fulfill the obligations that spring from our national conscience," to help those who legitimately could not help themselves. But even throwing in the impact of taxes and transfers from all government programs, Americans on the bottom half of the income scale did not fare much better. By 1988, they were taking in 21,614, on average, 8 more than in 1980, after inflation. The sliver of America that did get ahead was, you guessed it, the one at the tippy top: the richest Americans, those in the highest 1 percent of the income distribution. Their earnings grew by about 6 percent a year. Whatever gains that Republican tax cuts have bestowed on the economy in the years since Reagan promised voters a city on a hill, they have all shared the same distributional peculiarities. President George W. Bush passed two rounds of tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, arguing that the United States had a budget surplus "because taxes are too high and government is charging more than it needs." To make his case, in 2001 Mr. Bush deployed the Ramos family of Pennsylvania, which he said would save 2,000 from his first round of cuts. "If we had the money," Steven Ramos, a school administrator, told somebody on the president's staff, "it would help us reach our goal of paying off our personal debt in two years' time." 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. And yet, during Mr. Bush's two terms, the average income of the bottom half of Americans slid from 17,827 to 17,473, accounting for inflation. After factoring in taxes and transfers, that sum did increase 3.5 percent, or about 0.4 percent a year. The bottom half of Americans fared better under President Bill Clinton, who actually raised taxes. On average, their incomes rose by a fifth over his two terms, after taxes and transfers, a gain of over 2 percent per year, after accounting for inflation. Their lot also improved during President Barack Obama's administration, census data shows. (The series from the World Wealth and Income Database ends in 2014.) Over a 34 year stretch starting in 1980, a period during which the nation's top income tax rate plunged from 70 percent to as low as 28 percent, settling at just under 40 percent today, the grand Republican promise of faster growth has proved to be, if not necessarily false, at least irrelevant for the very segment of the electorate for which it was directed. In 2014, the economy was 2.5 times larger than it was in 1980, but the bottom half of the population made only 21 percent more, on average, even after including government benefits. America's middle families earning more than the bottom 30 percent but less than the top 30 percent gained only 50 percent in those 34 years. By contrast, the after tax incomes of Americans in the top 1 percent families like President Trump's or Senator Bob Corker's tripled. That is less surprising when one realizes that for all the stories about harried workers in the Midwest shouldering an unbearable tax burden, tax relief since Reagan's fateful State of the Union speech has mostly been aimed at benefiting the well to do: The average tax rate for Americans in the bottom half of the income pile was higher in 2014 than it was in 1980. The rate at the top declined. After multiple repetitions, the Republican promise that the road to paradise is paved with tax cuts may have finally lost its power. Only about a third of voters seem to support the current Republican strategy a much smaller proportion than the one that favored the tax cuts passed in 1981, under Reagan, and 2001, under Mr. Bush. Still, Republicans are having a hard time letting go of Reagan's message. Mr. Trump's Council of Economic Advisers claimed that the corporate tax cuts proposed by the president would give households in the middle of the income scale a boost of 3,000 to 7,000 a year. Mr. Ryan offered a single mother named Cindy, an assistant manager at a local restaurant who was created by Republican staff members of the House Ways and Means Committee. She makes 30,000 a year, according to Mr. Ryan, and will be mighty pleased with the extra 700 a year she will get from the Republican tax cuts. The question now is whether the actual harried working class voters who helped deliver Mr. Trump to office buy the story. The president they voted into power did not campaign on a platform of tax cuts for the rich. His latter day embrace of Reagan's tax cutting agenda might strike them as a betrayal. It has been going on for a very long time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The playwright Murray Schisgal in 1970. He was, one critic wrote approvingly, "one step ahead of the avant garde." Murray Schisgal, a playwright and screenwriter who took his offbeat brand of humor to Broadway in the Tony Award winning comedy "Luv" and to Hollywood in the hit farce "Tootsie," died on Thursday in Port Chester, N.Y. He was 93. His death was announced by his son, Zach. Over a six decade career in theater, Mr. Schisgal employed elements from the theater of the absurd like flooding dialogue with cliches and presenting fantastic situations as probable to write about such domestic themes as marriage, sex, family, loneliness and failure. His first Broadway success, "Luv," opened in 1964, with Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin in the original cast. It ran for 902 performances, won three Tony Awards (including one for Mike Nichols's direction) and earned Mr. Schisgal nominations for best play and best author of a play. While the play was a hit, Mr. Schisgal, with characteristically self deprecating humor, implied that during the previews the Broadway crowd questioned coming to a play that thematically seemed like more of a downtown experience. But the critics were encouraging. Writing in New York magazine, Walter Kerr described Mr. Schisgal as "one step ahead of the avant garde," referring to the stagnant state of trans Atlantic theater in the decade since Samuel Beckett addressed the meaninglessness of existence in a post atomic age. The theater scene, in the early 1960s, was full of derivative playwrights stuck in Beckett's philosophical purgatory, and Mr. Schisgal's approach, to trade gloom for irreverence, provided an escape hatch. "If the avant garde, up to now, has successfully exploded the bright balloons of cheap optimism," Mr. Kerr wrote, "Mr. Schisgal is ready to put a pin to the soapy bubbles of cheap pessimism. Whatever social and philosophical stalemates we have come to, wit at least need not be halted in its tracks." Mr. Schisgal explained his unusual title as an expression of his belief that the word "love" had become so misused that what people experienced, felt and thought could be discussed only by using a different word. "L u v is the perversion of l o v e," he told The Times in 1964. "I don't have the audacity to define the other." "Luv," a wildly comic three character play, opens with two men, Harry and Milt, on a bridge. Harry, feeling the vast emptiness of life, wants to kill himself, but Milt tries to convince him that love is a reason to live. The love that Milt extols, however, is realized by Milt's persuading Harry to marry Milt's wife, Ellen. The three proceed to compete over whose life has been the unhappiest. Outside theater circles, Mr. Schisgal was best known as one of the writers of "Tootsie," the smash 1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman as a struggling actor who secures a role by auditioning as a woman. The script is now considered one of the most successful collaborations in film history, but during years of development that involved a revolving door of writers and abandoned drafts, it came to be widely known as "the troubled 'Tootsie.'" The project began as a script called "Would I Lie to You?" written by Don McGuire. In a second incarnation, a draft by Robert Kaufman, George Hamilton was initially attached to it as the star, but the producer, Charles Evans, saw a different actor in the role, Mr. Hoffman, and showed him the script. Mr. Hoffman had met Mr. Schisgal when they worked together in regional theater in 1965 in Stockbridge, Mass. Mr. Hoffman starred in Mr. Schisgal's play "Jimmy Shine" on Broadway in 1968 and directed his play "All Over Town," also on Broadway, in 1975. "All Over Town" flopped, but the two continued to collaborate and remained friends for more than 50 years. Mr. Schisgal was hired as the project's third writer, and it was during this period that the script became "Tootsie." But executives at Columbia, saying they wanted a different voice, replaced him with Larry Gelbart, a creator of the television series "M A S H." Mr. Gelbart worked on the script for almost two years before leaving the project, but Sydney Pollack, the director, continued to tweak it with Elaine May, who acted as a script doctor. During this time Mr. Schisgal returned to work on the script with Mr. Hoffman, who frequently argued with the director about changes. "I wrote a speech for myself in the party scene," he told The Times in 1983, "but it was cut. You just see me in a brief shot, going to the refrigerator. Whenever I look at it, I just miss it, but I picked up a couple of hundred bucks doing it." "I think I'll take both of these," he said. Murray Joseph Schisgal was born in the East New York section of Brooklyn on Nov. 25, 1926, to Abraham and Irene (Sperling) Schisgal, Jewish immigrants from Europe. His father was an Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient who worked in the garment industry; his mother was a bank clerk. Murray showed a passion for storytelling from an early age. "I couldn't fall asleep without telling myself a story," Mr. Schisgal wrote in an introduction to a collection of his plays. "I needed another reality, another set of circumstances that had nothing to do with my conscious life." "From the bits and pieces of the day's events," he added, "I scrounged about for the thread of a story. Once I had one, my imagination took over and wove a facsimile of myself into an elaborate melodramatic narrative, at the conclusion of which I inevitably triumphed and was loudly applauded by my relatives and neighbors." Mr. Schisgal dropped out of high school to volunteer for the Navy and was inducted soon after turning 17. While serving in the Pacific, he read everything he could. He was honorably discharged as a radioman third class after the war. When he came home, he played saxophone and clarinet in a jazz combo and went to night school to get his high school diploma. He wrote fiction in his spare time. In addition to his son, Mr. Schisgal is survived by a daughter, Jane Schisgal; his sister, Diane Troy; and four grandchildren. His wife died in 2017. While Mr. Schisgal accepted that as a screenwriter he held little control over his words, he found it audacious that anyone should tell a playwright what to put on the page. "The theater is not a place for propaganda or where one seeks consolation," he told The Times in 1965. "What we should seek is an aesthetic experience." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Google Up Against Laws That Thwarted Microsoft (and Others Since 1890) None Jason Henry for The New York Times Two weeks ago, House lawmakers concluded a 16 month investigation into Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook and called for sweeping changes to curb their market power. The lawmakers' verdict: Traditional antitrust laws aren't up to the challenge, and the laws need their biggest overhaul in more than 40 years. But the Justice Department, after its own 16 month investigation, filed a major suit against Google on Tuesday relying on those very same antitrust laws. And according to the agency, the laws are more than enough to successfully challenge Google's monopoly behavior. That's because under existing antitrust laws, a company is a violator if it has used restrictive contracts to protect its dominant position, undermining competition and thus harming consumers. The Justice Department, in constructing its case against Google, followed those requirements to the letter. Its suit, which was joined by 11 states, accuses Alphabet's Google of cutting a series of exclusive deals with Apple and other partners that thwarted competition in the markets for search and search advertising. That stifling of competition, the suit says, ultimately leads to consumer harm by giving people fewer choices. "The case looks narrow but fairly strong," said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. "The focus on restrictive contracts by a dominant company is as old as the Sherman Act," which is the bedrock antitrust law of 1890. Google, in a statement, called the government action "a deeply flawed lawsuit that will do nothing to help consumers." Whether antitrust laws need modernizing and whether the Justice Department can win its case against Google with existing laws are not mutually exclusive matters. Both are expected to proceed along parallel tracks. The House lawmakers' recommended changes to antitrust law are simply a legislative framework and may take years to come to fruition. And the Justice Department's action against Google is also likely to be protracted, with the company saying on Tuesday that it expected the case to take at least a year to go to trial. The specifics of the Justice Department action, legal experts said, strongly echo the last major antitrust case against a big technology company, Microsoft. That suit, filed in 1998, claimed Microsoft was using its gatekeeper power as the owner of a dominant personal computer operating system, Windows, to block the potential threat from internet browsing software. The Justice Department accused Microsoft of using restrictive contracts with PC makers and others to inhibit the distribution of the software of Netscape Communications, the commercial pioneer in the browser market. And it worked. After a lengthy trial, Microsoft was found to have repeatedly violated the nation's antitrust laws. "That was the last big win for the government, so it makes sense to map a similar path," said Sam Weinstein, a former official in the Justice Department's antitrust division and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law. The Microsoft case also helps the government make an argument for consumer harm in the Google case. In antitrust, consumer welfare is often associated with a monopolist demonstrating its power by raising product prices to maximize profit. Google's search service is free to consumers, which means the government cannot point to rising prices. But prices didn't really figure into the Microsoft case, either. The software giant bundled its web browser for free into its dominant Windows operating system. Consumer harm, the government argued, can result in several ways. Less competition in a market means less innovation and less consumer choice in the long run. That, in theory, could close the market to rivals that collect less data for targeted advertising than Google does. Enhanced privacy, for example, would be a consumer benefit. "The harm is to competition, and the consumer loses as a result," said Tim Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School (and a contributing New York Times opinion writer). Yet the Microsoft case is also a cautionary example. It took years, with a settlement eventually approved in 2002. Its impact is debated to this day. Without the suit and years of scrutiny, some observers said, Microsoft could have throttled the rise of Google. Others insisted that the technological shift toward the internet and away from the personal computer meant that Microsoft lost the gatekeeper power it once held. Technology, not antitrust, opened the door to competition, they said. The Justice Department, in its suit and in a briefing with reporters, was vague about what remedies the government would propose if it won the case. But at this stage, Google is so dominant in search that giving consumers the choice to select another search engine may not make much of a difference. Google is regarded not only as a search service that provides relevant results, but as a verb what people think of as internet search. Given a choice, they might well choose Google, and the company would argue that was because it was a superior product that people preferred. "It's hard to argue that this case, whatever the outcome, will really change the competitive landscape in search," said A. Douglas Melamed, a former senior official in the Justice Department's antitrust division, who is a professor at the Stanford Law School. The standard critique of antitrust law, with its lengthy court battles, is that it is late and slow, unsuited to addressing anticompetitive concerns in fast moving high tech markets. That is a genuine concern, legal experts said. Still, filing the suit this week could make a difference, they agreed. "A suit like this one does send signals to the market and to the firm itself about what kind of competitive behavior is acceptable," said Scott Hemphill, a professor at New York University Law School. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Last summer, the executive Joel Stillerman started work at Hulu as its first ever chief content officer. On Friday, the streaming platform announced that he was out. Hulu had lured Mr. Stillerman away from AMC, where he had a hand in "The Walking Dead" and "Better Call Saul." His sudden exit was part of a broader reorganization at Hulu, which has attracted a growing number of subscribers but faces an uncertain future. Hulu hired Mr. Stillerman to pursue ambitious original programming and acquire shows from other networks for its expanding library. But soon after he moved from New York, where AMC has its headquarters, to Santa Monica, Calif., where Hulu is based, he ran into knotty complications. For one thing, he arrived when Hulu, after years of trying to find its footing in Hollywood, had hit upon some unexpected momentum thanks to "The Handmaid's Tale," which last year became the first program from a streaming service to win an Emmy for best drama series. The project was overseen by Craig Erwich, who will remain in charge of original programming at the company. Second, Mr. Stillerman soon found himself working without the person who had hired him, Mike Hopkins, who left the company as chief executive in October to become the head of Sony's TV division. Mr. Hopkins was replaced by Randy Freer, the former chief operating officer of the Fox Networks Group. Mr. Stillerman's vision for Hulu's future did not impress his corporate overlords, and there were some chemistry issues with Mr. Freer, said three people familiar with the reasoning behind his departure. Mr. Freer, now seven months into the job, made the decision to reorganize the company. A Hulu spokeswoman said, "This change was entirely due to the reorganization, and not at all about performance." Mr. Stillerman declined to comment. Even before he took the job of chief content officer, the position was not exactly seen as one of the hottest jobs in Hollywood. It had taken Hulu several months to fill it, partly because of the company's unique some would say tangled corporate structure. Unlike Netflix executives, who have the freedom to make deals with little oversight, Hulu's leaders must answer to many masters: the Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, Comcast and Time Warner, all partial owners. The merger mania sweeping through corporate media means that the latest reshuffling may stay in place for only so long. If Disney prevails in its bid to acquire most of 21st Century Fox, it will become Hulu's majority owner. On the other hand, if Comcast succeeds with its rogue bid for most of 21st Century Fox, it will assume 60 percent of the company. Whatever the outcome, Hulu is likely to have a majority owner for the first time and, with it, a new content strategy. 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. For the time being, the position of chief content officer has been expunged. As Hulu has introduced a live TV service and expanded its original programming and its library of content, which now includes vintage shows like "ER" and "30 Rock," its number of subscribers has surpassed 20 million. And yet the losses are mounting: In 2017, the company lost nearly 1 billion, a figure that will climb to more than 1.5 billion this year, according to the firm BTIG. Spending freely seems to be part of doing business in streaming, however: Netflix is expected to have a negative free cash flow of anywhere between 3 billion and 4 billion this year. Hulu's competitors are also ramping up their executive ranks. Amazon, a sleeping giant in the entertainment industry, is showing signs of getting its act together, having hired the executive Jennifer Salke from NBC this year in the first of several moves meant to assure Hollywood that it can, at last, become a real player. And Netflix continues to gobble up talent, striking megadeals with the producers Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes, not to mention the Hollywood newcomers Barack and Michelle Obama. The company has 119 million paying subscribers, including more than 55 million in the United States. Hulu, which is available only domestically, has undergone shifts in its identity several times since it started in 2007. Until the success of "The Handmaid's Tale," it was seen primarily as a place where viewers could click their way to last night's episode of a network television show. In addition to the news about Mr. Stillerman, Hulu announced that the senior vice president of experience, Ben Smith, and the head of partnerships and distribution. Tim Connolly, were no longer with the company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
As the years passed, Judy Sheridan's mother, Helen Stoltz, became less and less able to care for herself. Now 99, Mrs. Stoltz resided in an assisted living facility in the Bronx, where she had a one bedroom with meals and other services for around 3,600 a month. Ms. Sheridan, an interior designer (sheridaninteriorsinc.com), called her mother three times a day and visited once or twice a week, taking the subway from her combination home and office in Midtown. Mrs. Stoltz had additional help at bedtime, but hiring an aide for daytime hours was expensive and still not ideal. "The two of them would be staring into space," Ms. Sheridan said. "My mother is not good at conversation these days." So Ms. Sheridan resolved to find a two bedroom house for herself and her mother. They needed a yard, because Mrs. Stoltz likes to be outdoors. They also required an entrance with few steps. With a top price of around 400,000, Ms. Sheridan went on the hunt a little over a year ago for a two family, intending to have an income producing tenant. She focused on the Bronx, where housing prices were comparatively low, and where her mother's doctors were. But finding an easily accessible house and yard proved difficult. Most of the houses she saw were unsuitable in many ways. Ms. Sheridan assumed that two family houses would be two side by side units, but what she came across was one unit atop another. The owner's apartment was typically upstairs, sometimes with an exterior spiral staircase to the yard. Ground floor apartments were usually small studios or one bedrooms. Many places were in bad shape. Last year Ms. Sheridan visited an upholstery shop she had heard about, Custom Design Studio, on Bruckner Boulevard in Mott Haven. The owners directed her to Allison Jaffe of Key Real Estate Services. "I was concerned about what was available in their price range and about finding appropriate living space for them," Ms. Jaffe said. A lot of sellers were "overreaching on their asking prices," and reluctant to negotiate. Last fall the women went to Throgs Neck to see a suitable place a detached two family Cape Cod, converted from a one family. The listing price was 439,000. Ms. Sheridan offered 370,000, then 385,000. But, concerned about the lengthy bus to train or express bus commute to Midtown, she declined to offer more. A house over a store situation arose at a mixed use brick building on East Tremont Avenue in Schuylerville. A steep staircase led to the three bedroom residential unit, but the owner had installed a stair lift in front. What they were seeking for Mrs. Stolz was access to the backyard, but as Ms. Jaffe reasoned, "If you can put a lift in the front, you can put a lift in the back." The asking price was 469,000. "I absolutely wanted it," Ms. Sheridan said. She looked forward to updating the interior. As for the chair lift, "Mother enjoyed riding up and down in it." But she would need a commercial loan, which required a larger down payment and had a higher interest rate than a conventional mortgage. The purchase wasn't financially feasible. Another opportunity came in Allerton, where a semi attached two family house, in need of renovation, was listed for 449,000. The two bedroom lower unit was larger than most and accessible through a door beneath the front stairs. Ms. Sheridan's offer of around 400,000 was declined. The seller took the house off the market. "He changed his mind and that was it," Ms. Sheridan said. After nearly a year, she decided to give up the hunt and leave her mother where she was. "I said O.K., I'm done," she recalled. "I cannot go through this emotional roller coaster thing anymore." Late last winter, Ms. Jaffe contacted her about a place in Soundview, near Parkchester. This one was a bungalow, lacking a rental unit. Ms. Sheridan didn't want to bother looking, but she went, getting lost on the way. She was amazed to find almost everything she wanted. The house had three bedrooms, a fenced yard and even a dishwasher, something oddly hard to find. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Mr. Monda bought the house from Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, for 15.5 million in 2006 and soon after transformed its 10,745 square feet of interior space into a showplace for his extensive art collection, adding museum quality lighting and audiovisual accouterments, yet keeping the 1887 exterior intact. A fitness area, with the lap pool, was installed in the 1,800 square foot basement. The house has six bedrooms, six full baths and two partial baths, along with a roof terrace with Central Park views and a 21 by 27 foot rear garden. Mr. Iankovsky never moved into the house and placed it on the market for 32.7 million in 2013, but there were no takers; it was re listed in September for 27.75 million, its most recent asking price. Asit Parikh of Nest Seekers International brought the buyer, whose identity was shielded by the limited liability company . Ms. Kaufman described the purchaser as a high ranking business executive from China who paid all cash and was considering relocating his family to Manhattan. The executive's wife, Ms. Kaufman said, was smitten with the home's spectacular dome skylight encircled by a Guggenheim esque stairway, while he loved the pool. "In my eyes it sealed the deal for him," she said. The runner up last week, at 19,500,000, was the sale of a fully renovated 3,168 square foot apartment at the Residences at Mandarin Oriental at 80 Columbus Circle by the Russian billionaire Oleg Baibakov. Mr. Baibakov bought the apartment, No. NT71C, for 13.5 million at the height of the market in 2007; the new buyer was identified by the limited liability company Sky Mansion East. Monthly carrying costs for the three bedroom three and a half bath residence, with views of the East and Hudson Rivers, are 11,496, according to the listing with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Jacky Teplitzky was the broker. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
What Does It Mean to Play the 'Best' of Bach? LEIPZIG, Germany "Bach's best." It's an irresistible concept, but does it mean anything? Such judgments are always fraught when it comes to artistic creations, even more so where the primary purpose of the works was not artistic but religious. That is the case with Bach's sacred cantatas, the focus of this year's Bachfest Leipzig, which ran from June 8 through 17. Sheer beauty, whatever that may mean, will take you only so far. Bach's music in the cantatas, as Richard Taruskin noted in The New York Times almost two decades ago, "was a medium of truth, not beauty." "And the truth he served was bitter," Mr. Taruskin continued. "His works persuade us no, reveal to us that the world is filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is a pain, that reason is a snare." So what exactly can "best" mean? The works that seduce our ears most, or the ones that most effectively scare the dickens out of us with visions of fire and brimstone? (The festival seemed to favor pretty and vividly dramatic sounds without immersing itself unduly in blood and gore.) The distinction matters, because if these works are to gain wider circulation, they should be understood for what they are: music of Bach the musical preacher. And wider circulation is what this Bachfest was seeking for them. The festival, financed mainly by the city of Leipzig since its founding in 1999, is administered by the Bach Archive here, in the city where Bach lived and worked from 1723 to his death in 1750. The idea of a ring of cantatas, loosely modeled after presentations of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" down the road in Bayreuth, arose from a 2016 discussion between John Eliot Gardiner, the president of the archive, and Michael Maul, then the dramaturg and now the artistic director of the festival. Mr. Maul was looking for a way to elevate Bach's 200 or so surviving sacred cantatas, in some ways the very heart of his output, to a level of public awareness comparable to that of the Passions ("St. Matthew" and "St. John") and the Mass in B minor. Mr. Gardiner, one of the few living conductors who has performed and recorded all the sacred cantatas, many of them repeatedly, hatched the notion of a ring. So there was the Ring, which dominated the festival's opening weekend astounding, exhilarating, exhausting, a major artistic and audience success. 33 cantatas, some 18 hours of music performed within 48 hours by top flight interpreters. The list was unquestionably impressive in variety and dramatic range, as fellow completists can attest, especially as brought to life by Mr. Gardiner. Bach's cantatas, exalted as some of them seem, were utilitarian creations. As Thomaskantor, Bach was responsible for music in the city's major churches, St. Thomas and St. Nicholas. Each week he presented a cantata by himself or by another composer a "sermon in sound," as it was often called at the festival relating to the Gospel text for the particular Sunday. During his first years in Leipzig, Bach, though busy with teaching and family, usually presented his own works, developing several annual cycles. He often wrote from one week to the next. What that meant, Mr. Wollny said, was that Bach typically had to write a cantata in three days from, say, Sunday afternoon to Wednesday morning before turning it over to copyists to prepare the parts for rehearsal. Given such stringent demands, the level of workmanship and imagination in these works is remarkably high. But how to choose one work over another for today's listeners? (They are already somewhat falsified, as was pointed out by several speakers, by being presented three or four at a time in a concert setting.) Mr. Maul, for his part, backed off the notion of "best" a bit in a conversation after the Ring weekend, allowing that these selections might more properly be called merely personal favorites (on whatever basis). In a way, Mr. Wolff added, what he called the "randomness" of the selections "makes the point better, in the range of construction, of features, of the tricks Bach uses." The larger Bachfest returned to earth after the Ring. In the next big event, on June 12, one of the cantata interpreters, Masaaki Suzuki, led his Bach Collegium Japan in Mendelssohn's great oratorio "Elijah," at the Gewandhaus, the city's main concert hall. (Mendelssohn conducted the work's premiere in Birmingham, England, in 1846, in English; the German version used by Mr. Suzuki is called "Elias.") Mendelssohn, the director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1835 to '47, was largely responsible for a 19th century revival of Bach's music in Germany, spurred by his 1829 performance of the "St. Matthew Passion" in Berlin. He also had a Bach monument, which still stands near St. Thomas, erected in 1843. Appropriately, Mr. Suzuki beefed up his forces for "Elias" adding American student groups he has worked with, the Yale Voxtet and Juilliard415 and he showed a fine flair for Mendelssohn's incandescent style, with excellent work from the expanded chorus and orchestra. The German baritone Christian Immler, also familiar to early music audiences in New York, gave a game if somewhat underpowered account of the title role. Then it was back to Bach for the rest of my stay in Leipzig. On June 13, again at the Gewandhaus, Andras Schiff, a consummate Bach pianist, offered an ample program of works he has played often: the "Italian" Concerto, the French Overture in B minor and the "Goldberg" Variations. You never know entirely what to expect from the impish Mr. Schiff, whose stamina is no less amazing than his capacious memory, and he often displays both at the end of a concert with a generous helping of encores. Here he did something different. Having finished the "Italian" Concerto to the obvious delight of the audience, he took a bow, sat down and, without comment, played the whole 12 minute piece again. The first attempt had been fast and seemed slightly out of control at moments, to be sure, though most other pianists would have proudly accepted such results. "I repeated the whole 'Italian' Concerto because I was not happy with the first performance," Mr. Schiff later explained in an email. "It happens. This is a piece that I can play in my dreams, and it's very often one of my encores. However, at the beginning of a recital, it's much harder to get into the spirit, and therefore I wanted to give myself a second chance, like a second serve in tennis." As he has done so often, Mr. Schiff showed complete mastery in the French Overture and "Goldberg" Variations, his concentration and stamina clearly unaffected by the early detour. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A reform minded government in Japan and aggressive action by the central bank there have pushed growth to 1.5 percent up from 0.3 percent three years ago. The Economy Is Humming. Bankers Are Cheering. What Could Go Wrong? For decades, the global economy has been defined by dissonance. There has been the Japanese recession. The financial crises in the United States and Europe. And drama in emerging markets throughout. But as central bankers, finance ministers and money managers descend on Washington this week for the fall meetings of the International Monetary Fund, they will confront an unusual reality: global markets and economies rising in unison. Never mind political turmoil, populist uprisings and threats of nuclear war. From Wall Street to Washington, economists have been upgrading their forecasts for the global economy this year, with the consensus now pointing to an expansion of more than 3 percent up noticeably from 2.6 percent in 2016. Economists from the I.M.F. are likely to follow suit when the fund releases its biannual report on the global economy on Tuesday. The rosy numbers are noteworthy. But what's more startling is that virtually every major developed and emerging economy is growing simultaneously, the first time this has happened in 10 years. "In terms of positive cycles, it is difficult to find very many precedents here," said Brian Coulton, the chief economist at Fitch, the debt ratings agency. "It is the strongest growth we have seen since 2010." In Japan, a reform minded government and aggressive action by the central bank have pushed growth to 1.5 percent up from 0.3 percent three years ago. In Europe, strong domestic demand in Germany and robust recoveries in countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy are expected to spur 2.2 percent growth in the eurozone. That would be more than double its average annual growth in the previous five years. Aggressive infrastructure spending by China; bold economic reforms by countries including Brazil, Indonesia and India; and rising commodities prices (helping countries such as Russia) have spurred growth in emerging markets. And in the United States, despite doubts about President Trump's ability to pass a major tax bill, the economy and financial markets chug along. In fact, one of the few large economies not following an upward path is Britain, whose pending exit from the European Union is taking a toll. Having grown at an average annual pace of just over 2 percent from 2012 to 2016, the British economy is expanding just 1.5 percent this year. Still, the good news may result in some backslapping this week for policy makers and regulators more accustomed in recent years to putting out financial fires than basking in improved economic well being. "The meetings will celebrate this period of synchronized economic growth and calm financial markets," said Mohamed A. El Erian, chief economic adviser to the fund giant Allianz. There are plenty of reasons to hold off on uncorking the Champagne. Wage gains have been slow in coming. And most experts think the current sweet spot of positive growth, low inflation and accommodating central bank policies could be fleeting. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Mr. El Erian, for example, said he was nervous about several possibilities: that global growth could taper off; that prices of stocks, bonds and other financial assets are unsustainably high; and, most important, that markets might not be prepared when central banks reverse their efforts to stimulate economies by keeping interest rates low and buying huge sums of assets. But for the time being, investors, economists and policy officials point to a growing quantity of data that highlight the power of this recent burst of economic growth. Business sentiment in Japan and Europe is at 10 year highs. And last month, manufacturing activity in the United States hit its highest level in 13 years. A big driver for growth in emerging markets, said Mr. Coulton, the economist at Fitch, has been Chinese imports, which are up more than 10 percent this year. China is the world's largest consumer of raw materials such as oil, steel and copper, and it is increasingly buying them from emerging economies. Global portfolio managers like Rajiv Jain of GQG Partners, who oversees 9 billion, have been quick to capitalize, snapping up shares of Russian banks and French construction companies. But with interest rates still historically low, investors have been pushing into even riskier assets, including the bonds of emerging market economies, to eke out returns. Some countries are taking advantage of the frenzy by issuing more debt. Argentina recently sold so called century bonds, which don't come due for 100 years. Jordan and Ukraine issued government bonds that mature in 30 years and 15 years, respectively. Susan Lund, an expert on global financial trends at the McKinsey Global Institute, said these types of investments from global asset managers tended to be longer term and thus less destabilizing than the so called hot money from commercial banks that contributed to recent debt crises in the United States and Europe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, says the media is getting his company all wrong. His remark, in a lengthy email exchange with The New York Times, came in response to renewed scrutiny of Sinclair after a video spread rapidly showing anchors at dozens of its stations across the country reciting the same speech about media bias. Mr. Smith defended the anchors' segments, known as "must runs," and likened them to the late night shows that networks air on their local affiliates. "Not that you would print it, but do you understand that every local TV station is required to 'must run' from its network their content, and they don't own me," he wrote on Tuesday. "That would be all their news programming and other shows such as late night talk, which is just late night political so called comedy." In the Sinclair mandated segments, the anchors warned that some media outlets published fake stories. They also said they were "concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country." "Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility," the anchors added. "Now more than ever." The video was assembled by the sports news site Deadspin and posted on Saturday. Soon after it went online, it triggered an outcry on social media and prompted many critics to denounce Sinclair's practice of requiring its local television stations to air must runs. The company, already the country's largest broadcaster, is set to expand its empire: Sinclair is waiting for regulators to approve its 3.9 billion deal for Tribune Media. The transaction, which was announced in May, would extend Sinclair's reach into seven in 10 American homes, with more than 200 stations in cities big and small. Opponents of the deal have cited the dangers of media consolidation, as well as Sinclair's willingness to use must runs to advance a mostly right leaning agenda. On Monday, the criticism directed at Sinclair drew the attention of President Trump, who often praises media outlets that espouse his viewpoints and denounces other news organizations. "So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. "Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke." The Trump administration has enacted or proposed policy changes that would seem to benefit Mr. Smith and his company. Mr. Smith did not answer a question about his relationship with Mr. Trump and said he did not "engage in Twitter, Facebook or other such activities and have not read anything the president has said." Sinclair, which is based in Hunt Valley, Md., has responded forcefully to the criticism prompted by the Deadspin video. On Monday, Mr. Livingston, the Sinclair news executive, said in a statement, "We aren't sure of the motivation for the criticism, but find it curious that we would be attacked for asking our news people to remind their audiences that unsubstantiated stories exist on social media, which result in an ill informed public with potentially dangerous consequences." Mr. Livingston also sent an email to employees about the video, urging "context and perspective." "I know many of you and your stations are now in the media spotlight after the launch of our corporate news journalistic responsibility promotional campaign," he wrote. He added that the "false stories" that the script referred to were "unsubstantiated ones (i.e. fake/false) like 'Pope Endorses Trump' which move quickly across social media and result in an ill informed public." Employees at one Sinclair owned station, KATU in Portland, Ore., received an email from their general manager warning them not to reply to calls or complaints about the video. "Please DO NOT answer any questions or get into any discussions with callers, as they try to navigate to someone internally," the general manager, Robert Truman, wrote. "Most certainly don't talk to any press about this issue." The attention on Sinclair has embarrassed, frustrated and angered current and former employees, some of whom have decided to speak out about the promo and working for Sinclair. One employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his job, said he was troubled that the promo had overshadowed his station's journalism. "Across the entire company, I can tell you there is very little respect for the must run pieces," said Aaron Weiss, who worked several years ago as a news director for Sinclair in Sioux City, Iowa. "I'm sure you can find pockets of folks who think they're great. But in general, no one thought that these were good journalism." Mr. Weiss also wrote an opinion piece critical of Sinclair for HuffPost that was published on Monday. Another Sinclair employee, Molly Shen, an anchor at KOMO, a station in Seattle, took another view. In a Facebook post on Monday, she wrote that she "wasn't forced" to read the script. "I didn't do it to save my job or anyone else's," Ms. Shen added. "I did it because I do sincerely believe in what we do every day at KOMO as local journalists." On Wednesday, a segment from the Sinclair pundit Mr. Epshteyn escalated Sinclair's response to concerns about the company. "In terms of my analysis playing during your local news, as you see, my segments are very clearly marked as commentary," Mr. Epshteyn, wearing a navy jacket and red tie, said. "The same cannot be said for cable and broadcast news hosts, who inject their opinions and bias into news coverage all the time without drawing any lines between them." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Q. I got a message asking me to verify a new Dropbox account, but I never signed up for Dropbox. I suspect this is a hoax, but I looked at the return address and it seems to be pointing to Dropbox itself. Has my email account been hacked? A. A compromised email account is often a possibility, especially if you have not taken precautions like enabling two factor authentication, but a new wave of fraudulent spam has been going around and it uses supposed Dropbox verification as bait. In this type of phishing attack, the perpetrators put a legitimate Dropbox address in the message's sender field usually no reply dropbox.com, which is the real address Dropbox puts on messages when it is legitimately asking you to verify a new account. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
"American Weekend," the bracing first album the songwriter Katie Crutchfield released as Waxahatchee, was "a result of a snowstorm, a visceral stupor, and a personal breakthrough," she wrote in the liner notes. Stranded for a week in her parents' home near Alabama's Waxahatchee Creek, she found out in winter 2011 what so many of us are learning right now: that self isolation can lead to heightened emotions, antic spurts of creativity and relentless self scrutiny. "I don't care, I'll embrace all of my vices," Crutchfield wailed on "Grass Stain," a muddy and urgent late night confession. Seven years and three increasingly polished Waxahatchee records later, Crutchfield realized in summer 2018 that she was never going to drink herself happy. "It's not a very dramatic story," she said in a recent Pitchfork interview. "I had gone back and forth a lot about my substance issues, and I woke up one day and said, 'I'm done with this forever.'" And so on her confident and accomplished fifth album, "Saint Cloud," Crutchfield takes the same hard look in the mirror that she did nearly a decade ago, only this time without the murky filter of those vices. Though Crutchfield was raised on a steady diet of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, discovering punk's sound and ethos cemented her as a musician. She and her twin sister, Allison, formed the pop punk band the Ackleys while still in high school, and they later found a cult audience with their scrappy, lyrical D.I.Y. trio P.S. Eliot. Back then, the twins found plenty to bemoan about their hometown: Birmingham, Ala., was politically conservative and even its seemingly utopian underground music scene was woefully sexist, leading her to reject her Southern identity. On "Saint Cloud," Crutchfield, now 31, embraces the homegrown twang she once rebelled against. (The album's title, like the moody closing number, is a nod to her father's Florida hometown.) "Saint Cloud" is a departure from the hoarse holler and blustery distortion of Waxahatchee's previous record, "Out in the Storm" from 2017; instead it finds her adopting a cleaner sound. She sounds at ease with herself: The lead single "Can't Do Much" has a gentle, breezy energy and guitar licks as delicately intricate as handkerchief embroidery. "I love you 'til the day I die," she sings. "I guess it don't matter why." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
TOKYO A week ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, were promoting the Summer Olympics in Tokyo as the balm the world needed to show victory over the coronavirus pandemic. On Tuesday, the virus won out. Bach and Abe bowed to a groundswell of resistance from athletes, from sports federations, from national Olympic committees, from health experts and formally postponed the Games, which had been scheduled to begin in late July, until 2021. The decision brought both a sense of relief and impending chaos to international sports. Abe broke the news after a phone call with Bach, when complaints that the I.O.C. was not moving quickly enough to adjust to the coronavirus pandemic became too loud to ignore. The decision which organizers in Japan resisted the longest, according to people involved with the process became all but inevitable after the national Olympic committee in Canada announced on Sunday that it was withdrawing from the Games, and Australia's committee told its athletes that it was not possible to train under the widespread restrictions in place to control the virus. Brazil and Germany, too, called for postponing the Games. And the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, after initially declining to take a stand, joined the fray Monday night, urging the I.O.C. to postpone. In announcing the decision, Abe said that he had asked Bach for a one year delay and that Bach had "agreed 100 percent." It was an extraordinary turnabout: The Olympics have been canceled only because of world wars, in 1916, 1940 and 1944, and have carried on even in the tense climate after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 17 people died after the quarters of the Israeli team were stormed by Palestinian terrorists. Bach said the situation had become untenable in recent days as the World Health Organization described the acceleration of the virus in Africa to Olympic leaders. That forced the I.O.C. to shift its focus from whether Japan could be safe at the start of the Games to what was immediately happening in various other countries. "We had growing confidence in the developments in Japan," Bach said in a conference call with journalists. "In 4 1/2 months, these safe conditions could be offered. Then we had this big wave coming from the rest of the world." As the virus spread, Bach said, athletes began voicing concerns about risking their health to continue training. It became clear that the pandemic was "rocking the nerves of the athletes, and it's also not a situation we have ever been in," he said. Bach said that finalizing the details of a new schedule and negotiating adjustments in the global sports calendar with leaders of international federations, who were caught off guard by the speed of the decision, would take time. "There are a lot of pieces of a huge and very difficult jigsaw puzzle," he said. Yoshiro Mori, the president of the Tokyo organizing committee, said that the scope and the dates of the Games in 2021 were uncertain, but that it was clear that they could not be held anytime in 2020. "I am disappointed," Mori said. "But to be on course with a certain direction is a sigh of relief." The postponement could result in adjusting the dates to avoid the hottest weeks of the summer in Tokyo, a concern Olympic organizers faced before the pandemic. The I.O.C. considered other alternatives, like holding the Games without fans in arenas or delays of varying lengths from just a few months to all the way to 2022. The committee's leaders never seriously considered fully canceling the Games or taking them away from Tokyo, but executives with the local organizing committee were caught by surprise at how quickly things had changed from Sunday's declaration by the I.O.C. that it would make a decision on rescheduling the Games within four weeks. Bach had been emphasizing that life was returning to normal in Japan, which has not been hit as hard by the virus as China, Italy, Spain and the United States. On Sunday in Sendai, in Northern Japan, about 50,000 went to a welcoming ceremony to view the Olympic flame, and people in Tokyo have been taking the subways and dining in restaurants, a stark contrast to life in coronavirus hot spots closer to the I.O.C. headquarters in Switzerland. Muto said the decision would cause countless complications. Thousands of tickets have been sold to people in Japan and abroad, who may no longer be able to use them. Japan has already invested at least 10 billion in the Games after beating out Madrid and Istanbul to win the rights to host, and the delay will undoubtedly increase costs. Leases on many of the competition venues and contracts with employees will have to be extended. "When it comes to who is going to pay for it, that is what we are going to discuss going forward," Muto said. This delay came after numerous other postponements or cancellations of sports in Japan and around the world, and after many governments urged people to limit their physical interactions. The decision quickly gained the support of national Olympic committees from around the world. In a statement, Andy Anson, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, said a postponement was the only decision his organization could support. "It would have been unthinkable for us to continue to prepare for an Olympic Games at a time the nation, and the world no less, is enduring great hardship," Anson said. Sarah Hirshland, the chief executive of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which did not support a postponement until Monday night, said in a letter to Team U.S.A. athletes, who had become increasingly frustrated by her lack of action, that "taking a step back from competition to care for our communities and each other is the right thing to do." The signal that the decision was certain came earlier Monday, when Australia announced that it would not be able to send a team to Tokyo. John Coates, the leader of Australia's Olympic organization and an I.O.C. member, is a close ally of Bach's and leads the I.O.C.'s coordination commission for the Tokyo Games. At a time when Japan's economy is already stumbling, the delay of the Olympics could deal a serious blow. In a report early this month, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. projected that a cancellation of the Games would erase 1.4 percent of Japan's economic output. One of the trickiest aspects of moving the Games is handling the broadcast rights that drive significant revenue for the International Olympic Committee. Nearly three quarters of I.O.C. revenue comes from broadcast rights, and about half of those fees are paid by the American broadcaster NBC. Broadcast partners and other Olympic partners may seek a reduction in their fees if there are substantial changes to when the Olympics are staged or if organizers reduce the number of sports. The complications will ripple beyond the Games themselves. The international governing bodies for track and field and swimming, for example, planned to hold world championships in 2021 and will have to work with their athletes and host cities to possibly reschedule those events. The Summer Olympics attract more than 11,000 athletes from more than 200 countries, and the I.O.C. prides itself on being more than a competition, representing values such as unity and peace, bringing the world together every two years in sports and friendship. The coronavirus initially broke out in China in December but has quickly spread across Asia, Europe and North America, and many health experts have been concerned that bringing together people from disparate parts of the globe especially athletes who live closely in a village might ignite an additional outbreak. The Olympic torch relay through Japan was scheduled to start Thursday. The flame will now stay in Fukushima, site of the nuclear meltdown triggered by an earthquake and tsunami nine years ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"Arch" by Ai Weiwei installed at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. This unpainted steel cage is pierced by a mirrored opening, and suggestive of conjoined figures. They quote Marcel Duchamp's 1937 design for the entrance of Andre Breton's Paris art gallery. Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times "Arch" by Ai Weiwei installed at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. This unpainted steel cage is pierced by a mirrored opening, and suggestive of conjoined figures. They quote Marcel Duchamp's 1937 design for the entrance of Andre Breton's Paris art gallery. Ai Weiwei lives his life in public: blogging his anger at the Chinese government, transforming his detention into harrowing dioramas, and now Instagramming up a storm from his exile in Berlin. Over the last two years, the world's most famous artist activist has been traveling to refugee camps from Greece to Iraq and Gaza to Myanmar, documenting the displacement of millions and the borders they are desperate to cross. Others might have stayed behind the camera. Mr. Ai, now a refugee himself, puts himself right in front. The worldwide refugee crisis is the subject of "Human Flow," Mr. Ai's new film, and it also informs a gargantuan undertaking of new public artworks in New York, running from Harlem to Flushing and united under the title "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors." Put aside its cheesy title, cribbed from Robert Frost, and there is a fair deal to admire in this new endeavor, which consists of new sculptures in the form of steel barriers; hundreds of lamppost banners of refugees past and present; and interventions at bus stops across the five boroughs. Remember the 1990s, when the hawkers of globalization told us this century would see borders fall? In fact construction of international walls and fences has surged worldwide to deter unauthorized migration; Europe's borderless Schengen zone is under existential threat; Brexit promises to divide Ireland once again; and, if someone has his way, a "big, beautiful wall" may rise south of here soon. Mr. Ai saw those barriers firsthand while filming "Human Flow." Now he has brought them to New York, where they fit in with alarming naturalness. This week I saw a solid hunk of the hundreds of small and large additions Mr. Ai has made to New York's streets and parks. Out in Queens, Mr. Ai has encircled the Unisphere the stainless steel globe that's the primary symbol of the 1964 World's Fair with a running mesh lattice that rises to about knee height. "Circle Fence" cannot be traversed; this is an insuperable border. Yet the nets' soft and pliant forms, which you're free to touch or sit upon, may put you in mind of fishermen or trapeze artists more than of guards and wardens. There's a similar tension between menace and shelter in a series of fences and barriers erected in the East Village and in Harlem. The facade of Cooper Union's original building where Abraham Lincoln gave the address that drove him to the presidency in 1860 has been retrofitted with five chain link baffles that turn its north portico into a prison yard. The burlesque nightclub The Box, over on Chrystie Street, is now topped by a double height metal grille, as if for riot prevention. And commuters along 125th Street will see metal barricades behind two bus stops, gently curving behind their rear glass panels. Similar barriers have been erected elsewhere in Harlem, and behind bus stops in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The strongest of Mr. Ai's new sculptures is "Gilded Cage," standing 24 feet tall at the southeast entrance to Central Park. This elegant, quietly ominous pavilion consists of an inner ring, inaccessible to viewers, fenced off by hundreds of soaring arched steel struts. A small section of the inner ring has been cut out, so you can walk into the heart of this threatening pergola. Look up from inside, and Mr. Ai's sculpture resolves into abstract beauty; look into the central ring, and you'll see its symmetry disrupted by turnstiles familiar from the New York subway, or United States Mexico border crossings. (You may remember that Mr. Ai once had another set of sculptures on view in this square: his "Zodiac Heads," which appeared during his detention in 2011.) In many of Mr. Ai's best sculptures, repeated forms are freighted with historical or political overtones and yet remain ice cold whether in "Template" (2007), his collapsed assemblage of 1,001 Ming and Qing Dynasty doors, or "Straight" (2008 2012), his harrowing arrangement of steel rods recovered from buildings destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake. "Gilded Cage" continues that idiom, even as it relies on prefab metal instead of found materials. As in the sculpture of Mona Hatoum or Rachel Whiteread, this excellent new work uses Minimalism to deliver a very un Minimal emotional jolt. That extends to the monochrome paint job a buff gold that echoes Augustus Saint Gaudens's nearby memorial of William Tecumseh Sherman, as well as the fastidiously polished brass in the atrium of the nearby Trump Tower. The counterpart to "Gilded Cage" is the even taller "Arch," which occupies nearly the whole space underneath the marble arch in Washington Square Park. This simpler, unpainted steel cage is pierced by a mirrored opening, its form suggestive of two conjoined figures. They may appear to bystanders as weary travelers, though mega fans of Marcel Duchamp will pick out the reference: The figures quote the French American artist's 1937 design for the entrance of Andre Breton's Paris art gallery. Mr. Ai's invocation of the Master in this location has a sideways political salience, if you know your downtown history. During World War I, Duchamp and his buddies broke into the Washington Square Arch and proclaimed an "independent" Greenwich Village republic, not subject to the laws and borders of the world outside. Compared to the sphinxlike "Gilded Cage," "Arch" wears its convictions more publicly. This is a big, public ode to freedom of movement, yoking America's first president (a dissident) and most influential Dadaist (an immigrant). The test of a work of art's success, though, is not how fluently it communicates a single message; the test is how forcefully it reflects, unsettles, and transforms the world in which it intercedes. By that standard, "Gilded Cage" stands as the greater achievement, enfolding inside and outside, warden and captive, into a single, synthesized public form. "Arch," by contrast, offers less, and risks being remembered only as a selfie backdrop for woke narcissists. Bridging all these works are two hundred lamppost banners, depicting immigrants and refugees some of whom Mr. Ai photographed in Iraq's Shariya refugee camp, others snapped on his cellphone during his travels for "Human Flow," and still more borrowed from historical sources. (Among the last category: Emma Goldman, floating above 7th Street.) Rather than printing the images with ink, the artist used a laser cutter to remove the white space from each photograph; each banner, therefore, is a cutout negative of a refugee, and the sky and the city are visible through their faces. If you've seen the Guggenheim's muscular, rigorous new exhibition, "Art and China After 1989," for which Mr. Ai has curated the film program, you will not be surprised by the forthright advocacy of these lamppost portraits, as well as "Arch" and other blunt interventions at city bus stops. In the 1990s he took an impish tack, whether he was photographing a flasher in Tiananmen Square or dropping a millennia old Chinese urn, in biting parody of both western performance art and Cultural Revolution iconoclasm. His art turned to direct advocacy in 2008, when he began his essential "Citizen's Investigation" of the death toll of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, whose results are on view at the Guggenheim. Since then he has reoriented his sculpture, videos, and social media accounts to serve almost as a broadcast medium for Chinese and global freedom and, as a result, he has endured frequent gripes that his activism has got the better of his art. I've always found that gripe to be unfounded. Like his hero Duchamp, Mr. Ai has wholly erased any border between his art and his life and there are some emergencies, among them the displacement of more human beings than any time since World War II, that this artist can only address with bluntness. That sometimes lends itself to less challenging sculpture, like in Washington Square, or simple boosterism, as in the refugee portrait banners. Step back, though, and look at the project in aggregate, and "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" displays all the confidence and moral passion of his most important later projects. One of the great surprises of this citywide artistic outcry is that Mr. Ai's obstructions "very almost art, but maybe, maybe not," as he told The New York Times last week don't actually disrupt the city very much, but plug into the urban fabric of New York with an ease I found disturbing. Passengers waiting for the bus on 125th Street behind Mr. Ai's barricades went right on with their commutes. Tourists in Corona Park were taking their selfies with a fence in frame. At Cooper Union and in Washington Square, metal barriers from the N.Y.P.D. echoed the artist's own. South of "Gilded Cage," shoppers on Fifth Avenue wended through ad hoc concrete obstacles around the president's own tower. Mr. Ai's citywide checkpoints are a hundred muted bells that add up to a deafening alarm: We have accepted so many physical and political limits that new ones go unnoticed, and we may not protest our shrinking freedom until it's too late. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Desire and dreams meet beautifully in "Sylvie's Love," an old fashioned romance for 21st century hearts. Modestly scaled yet emotionally expansive, it tracks a pair of young lovers over years of happiness and regret, from the late 1950s to the early '60s. As the world turns, they meet, fall hard, hesitate and separate. Amid the kisses and sighs, Nancy Wilson sings ("all my bright tomorrows belong to you"), and the screen floods with bold colors and passions. Abandon that fortress you're hiding in, this movie says. Let the feelings in, let the tears flow this is what films are made for. Our heroine, Sylvie an irresistible Tessa Thompson lives with her parents in Harlem. She works in her father's record store (Monk in that bin, Sonny Rollins over there) and dutifully models when her mother teaches etiquette to girls in saddle shoes. Sylvie, with her pixie haircut and perfectly fitted turtleneck, her doe eyes and softly expressive face, looks like she should be waiting for her close up on the Metro Goldwyn Mayer backlot. But she is a Black woman in 1957 America and that kind of cinematic adoration won't be afforded characters like hers until movies like this can be made, films that show you what motion pictures could have and should have been. When an up and coming saxophonist, Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha, a producer on the movie), walks into the record store, the story quickly settles into its groove. Sparks fly, although it takes Sylvie a little longer than Robert to notice (or admit) what's happening. She has a fiance, the son of a wealthy doctor, whom she met at a cotillion. What's a cotillion, Robert asks, one of the story's nods at class difference. But Robert is cute and flirty, and soon he and Sylvie are restlessly exchanging meaningful looks. When they finally kiss, the moment is as tremulous and carefully staged as a classic studio romance: It's night, the lighting is beautiful and so are they. "Sylvie's Love" is just the second feature from Eugene Ashe, who knows how to move the camera (and when not to), but also how to stage inside the frame. He's an obvious cineaste; a scene in a Chinese restaurant flooded with red lighting reads like a fluttering valentine to Wong Kar wai's "In the Mood for Love." But Ashe isn't indulging in fanboy allusions to burnish his credentials. Rather, like Todd Haynes in his tragic melodrama "Far From Heaven" (and Douglas Sirk once upon a studio time), Ashe is using a familiar, long derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath. Because Ashe takes melodrama seriously, he commits to its lush sincerity. He doesn't wink at you, soliciting knowing giggles about the nakedness of the emotions. Instead, he asks you to go all in, to fall in love with Sylvie and Robert the way they tumble for each other, to worry and root for them. That's easy to do because both actors are so appealing. Thompson's ability to externalize emotions is particularly important for what Ashe is doing and why he holds on her face when she first hears Robert play in a club. As she listens, her face opens and the feelings rush in animating it, warming it and it's clear that now she really sees him. Ashe leans on Thompson, letting her do a lot of the work when Sylvie and Robert are together. Asomugha is a good reactor and nice to watch, but he doesn't have Thompson's emotive range. The rest of the cast is first rate and includes a number of welcome faces, among them Eva Longoria, Lance Reddick, Erica Gimpel and Aja Naomi King. I'm less persuaded by Jemima Kirke as the Countess, a wealthy jazz fan who swoops into Robert's life, providing cash and connections. A more convincing emblem of how white paternalism comes sheathed in patronage might have been good, but then, like most of the white characters, the Countess is fairly irrelevant. That's to the movie's point. "Sylvie's Love" does a largely convincing job recreating a 1950s Hollywood melodrama, if not in all its particulars then certainly in its emphasis on passionate emotions and feelings. The characters don't sound like they've spent time on the couch; they talk and sometimes figure things out, but they don't over explain with self help insights. At times, they mouth clunkers ("the times they are a changin'"), because Ashe's script isn't always up to his ambitions. But it's lovely when the filmmaking does the talking, when the opulent score swirls and the palette vibrates with its many shades of blue and splashes of bright red, green and pumpkin. Ashe's most radical move is how he marshals classic melodrama to tell a story of Black love that would never have been told in old Hollywood. (Today's commercial mainstream has pretty much given up on pure romance, alas.) Particularly instructive is his insistent focus on the inner lives of his characters, on what Sylvie and Robert long for, and dream of, as human beings, rather than as emblems of race or avatars of ideals. The larger world presses in, as it must, and there are references to the civil rights movement here and there. Yet as important are all the white faces on the TV shows that Sylvie watches, images that she studies and hopes to one day change. Ashe wants you to consider the lives of his lovers, but he also wants you to swoon, he wants you to make the empathetic leap so you feel and think about other lives deep in your body. Critics used to sneer about melodramas, dismissing them as three hankie weepies. Bring tissues, they wrote, advice that ridiculed both the films and their presumptive female audience. You should grab tissues to watch "Sylvie's Love," but I mean it encouragingly. I watched the movie early one December morning alone. I was transfixed, and transported. This year has given us many things to cry about, but here is a story to get lost in and to pleasurably, gratefully, weep along with. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
It is time to bid a gentle and grateful farewell to Bernie Sanders's quest for the presidency. On Tuesday, even as the coronavirus pandemic roiled the primaries and kept some voters away from the polls, Joe Biden swept to victory in three states Illinois, Arizona and Florida. The results were not close. In Florida, with 219 delegates on the line, Mr. Biden bested Mr. Sanders by some 40 points, winning every county in the state. In Illinois, with its 155 delegates, his margin of victory topped 20 points. The harder you look at the math and at the voting coalition that Mr. Biden has put together, the harder it is to see a way for Mr. Sanders to make a comeback. On Wednesday morning, his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, announced that the candidate would be "having conversations with supporters to assess his campaign." Such conversations are tough for any candidate. For Mr. Sanders, who has inspired a passionate following with his image as an unbending fighter, dropping out would be all the more excruciating. Even as his electoral prospects have dimmed, many of his supporters have urged him to stay in the race to keep his ideological vision and his revolution alive. If anything, they see the coronavirus crisis, and the economic havoc it is wreaking, as an argument to keep Mr. Sanders's voice front and center, arguing for the interests of the people over the powerful. And with a growing number of states postponing voting out of health concerns, some of Mr. Sanders's allies see an opening to keep the cause alive a bit longer. Mr. Shakir suggested that a decision about dropping out was not imminent, noting that "the next primary contest is at least three weeks away." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
DAN SULLIVAN, a junior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, notices the warning signs now, even during finals when most everyone seems stressed. "I can tell the difference between someone tired who has a lot of work and someone who is dreading the next 24 hours, the next week," observes Mr. Sullivan. "It's kind of like there's no light at the end of the tunnel for them. It's not like 'I'm going to take this test and it's going to be over' and there's a sense of relief." Mr. Sullivan has learned to listen for whispers of despair and to reach out to such students before things get worse. He is one of about 250 students in the Student Support Network, a program that teaches them how to get help for troubled friends and acquaintances. In six one hour sessions, they hear about depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicide and substance abuse. They role play, learning to cast judgments aside. And they practice, practice, practice how to gently persuade another student in distress to go for professional help, even if it means walking them to the counseling center. In hoodies that say "We've Got Your Back" (on the back, of course), they are known around campus as a low key, empathetic ear. Mr. Sullivan knows his limits. "We're not trained to be counselors. We're trained to know when a counselor should step in." Which is, he adds, when someone says: "I can't get out of bed and I'm miserable" or "I can't sleep." These are cues to have a chat, ending in a suggestion to seek counseling. On two occasions, Mr. Sullivan has made such a suggestion, each successfully. Students have often been witness to their peers' skirmishes with depression, anxiety, self injury or eating disorders. As the population of students with psychological problems has risen, so have such encounters. Many universities focus on training professors, coaches and other staff members to recognize common signs of mental distress and to intervene. Now the idea of training students is gaining traction. In the past year, programs based on W.P.I.'s have started at the University of Maine, Towson University, Massachusetts Bay Community College and Boston University. Since 2009, the Friends Helping Friends program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has trained students for two semesters (earning six credits) to work with classmates in distress. In turn, the students have briefed 3,500 other Greensboro students to do the same. At Edward Waters, a historically black college in Jacksonville, Fla., 20 students were trained last year to aid struggling peers. Before then, "barely anyone" visited the counseling center, says C. Blake Hacht, a college spokesman. Afterward, 16 students came consistently for the year, he says.That success helped earn a grant for a suicide prevention program, which along with the students' work is bringing an average of 35 students a week to the center. Last year, two Cornell engineering students committed suicide. This year, Cornell University rolled out Friend2Friend to more than 1,000 students, including 750 first year engineering students. They watched a DVD of peers trying to help a friend in crisis, then discussed with facilitators how to identify and aid such friends. Multiple studies have shown that students in distress turn first to their friends. One nationwide study published in 2009 by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin revealed that only about half of those seriously considering suicide told anyone; of those who did, two thirds first told a peer. "That was striking to people on campuses working with this problem," says Ann P. Haas, director of prevention projects at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Also striking: almost no one told a professor. The study's authors called for colleges to teach students how to respond to peers in distress. "Students aren't necessarily calling hot lines or going to drop in centers," says Alison K. Malmon, founder and executive director of Active Minds, a nonprofit organization of college students working to reduce the stigma of mental health issues. "They are talking to their peers." Many of the young confidantes in the Texas study didn't push their troubled peers to get professional help. Students who want to help are often at a loss on how to behave. Before beginning W.P.I.'s program in 2007, Charles C. Morse, W.P.I.'s director of counseling and assistant dean for student development, asked students about how they felt about helping friends with problems. "A lot of students feel they're way over their head," he says. "It's 2 a.m. and they are texting their friend who is talking about cutting themselves and they are trying to cope." One common reaction when dealing with an anguished friend is to try to minimize the friend's pain as in, things will be better in the morning, observes Dori Hutchinson, director of services at B.U.'s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. Students are trained not to do that and not to offer a quick solution, even though it goes against the urge to buffer an uncomfortable situation. Largely, students say they just listen to students vent about everyday problems. But Tracy Sears, a W.P.I. junior, has walked at least five students to the counseling center. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
'Evil Eye' Review: The Man of a Mother's Dreams May Not Be Mr. Right None Want to feel old? In "Mississippi Masala" (1991), Sarita Choudhury played a young woman in America whose romance with a Black man scandalizes her tradition bound Indian family. In "Evil Eye" she plays an Indian mom scandalized by her daughter's romance. Time does fly. But "scandalized" may be too mild a word. In Delhi, her character, Usha, has, conventionally enough, been pushing for her daughter Pallavi, who lives in New Orleans, to settle down. So, when Pallavi (Sunita Mani, late of "GLOW") meets Sandeep (Omar Maskati), a man of both means and the preferred ethnic background, you'd think Usha would be thrilled. But she starts out distrustful and becomes terrified. Usha is a deeply superstitious woman, who's given Pallavi jewelry meant to ward off the "evil eye." She consults with astrologers. And she's haunted by vivid dreams and visions. Of abuse at the hands of a man, of death by drowning and more. Eventually we become privy to the real life trauma that drives Usha's anxiety. But could her suspicions that Sandeep is somehow connected to the man who stalked her many years ago be true? The directors, the twin brothers Elan and Rajeev Dassani, keep the tension percolating before letting loose with a final confrontation that is truly something to see, even though it doesn't entirely cut it in the suspension of disbelief department. Choudhury is excellent here as a fraught matriarch as good as she was as a young rebel three decades back. And Maskati's performance is a slippery mix of suave and menacing, which helps sell the farthest fetched elements of this story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
If Stephanie Williams didn't know she was going to marry LaMarr Coles III after their first phone call, she sensed she might after their first date. And she definitely knew it two weeks in, at the end of date No. 3. "I was already in love with him," she said, on the September 2019 evening she invited him for a home cooked dinner at her parents' house in Upper Marlboro, Md. "But the way he reassured me that night he was so calm made me realize how special he was." Not everyone would have displayed the composure Mr. Coles did when she set the kitchen on fire while heating tortillas, she said. Ms. Williams and Mr. Coles matched on Tinder on Aug. 22, 2019. The next day, they spent eight hours on the phone. "I was doing my laundry when he called at maybe 11:30 or 12, and we didn't get off until probably 8 o'clock," Ms. Williams said. They had a lot to talk about. Mr. Coles, 28, had just moved to Suitland, Md., from Suffolk, Va., for a job in corporate development at the Boys Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. Ms. Williams, 29, was a case manager at Community of Hope, a Washington organization that helps prevent homelessness. Her roots in the area gave her plenty of suggestions for a newcomer. Ms. Williams, who lived with her parents in Upper Marlboro, needed more like an hour she had nearly glued her eyes shut while applying false lashes and she took it. By the time she arrived at the National Harbor, he was frustrated and thinking of bagging the date. "But then I saw her pull up, and she looked at me with that smile," he said. "I couldn't be mad anymore. I experienced love right then." Sometime during dinner at the restaurant Rosa Mexicano followed by a Ferris wheel ride, she experienced it, too. She still has the text to prove it. "Omg, it was perfecttttt," she messaged her friend Winnola Chesney at 12:56 a.m. on Aug. 31, 2019. "Girl, we're getting married!," she wrote. "When you do, I want to sit in the front row with your mom," Ms. Chesney replied. Patricia Williams, in her teens, went to work cleaning homes and offices in Washington, too. After she married Ms. Williams's father, Gene Williams, an appliance repairman, she felt a pull to help poor Salvadoran children. "So when Steph was little, I'd take her to the thrift shop to buy toys and shoes for the children who live in the jungle, who have no electricity," she said. "She'd help me pick clothes and then we'd box them up and send them." The younger Ms. Williams loved the feeling of giving. Before and after finishing college at Bowie State University in 2019, she gravitated toward nonprofit work. That tendency spoke to Mr. Coles, whose life has been shaped by a nonprofit group. "I was a club kid," he said. "Starting in fifth grade, the Boys Girls Clubs were a refuge to me." The Boys Girls Clubs of America provide after school programs to children who might otherwise have nowhere to go. Mr. Coles, who graduated from Old Dominion University in 2014 after a peripatetic upbringing in a military family, benefited from the clubs' structure and mentorship. His parents, LaMarr Coles Jr., a retired Navy officer who works for the Department of Defense, and his mother, Vickie Coles, a child care business owner, liked the organization, too. When Mr. Coles was 16 and wanted to apply for a first job at a Chick fil A restaurant, his mother drove him instead to the Boys Girls Club. "She was like, I think you should work here." He has ever since. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. And then he encountered that actual fire. Ms. Williams accidentally set her parents' kitchen ablaze while cooking tostadas on their third date. "Orange flames started shooting out of the toaster oven," she said. Her mother was away. Her father, watching television two floors up, didn't smell the smoke. "It was 911 in there," she said. "I had never used a fire extinguisher, but LaMarr knew exactly what to do." By the time the fire was under control, the kitchen was covered, floor to ceiling, with extinguisher residue. "I was throwing chicken away," she said, "and he started rinsing it under the sink saying, 'It's still good. We can still eat it.' I felt so embarrassed I had almost killed this boy but the way he handled it, he didn't make me feel bad. It showed me how he deals with conflict, how sweet he is." On their second date, a few days after the National Harbor outing, he drove her to Solid State Books in Washington. "I love bookstores," Ms. Williams said. "He told me to pick any book I wanted. That's my love language." She walked out with a copy of Tayari Jones's "An American Marriage" and a full heart. The two made their relationship official a few months later at another bookstore, Greedy Reads in Baltimore. While Ms. Williams browsed, Mr. Coles paced the aisles. By the time they left the store he had asked her to be his girlfriend, and she had accepted. Then she made a proposition of her own. "I told him, 'OK, now that I'm your girlfriend, you have a year to marry me.'" She was joking, sort of. "He was like, 'Dang! We've only been dating 30 minutes!' But I told him, 'I'm that girl! What's wrong with you?'" Ms. Williams was not really on a mission to secure a quick engagement. "But I didn't want to do that thing where you date four years and you don't know where it's going," she said. "I think LaMarr knew that." By December, he was typing the word "marriage" into his phone to see where it would lead him. Before he had the chance to engineer the kind of proposal he felt Ms. Williams was worthy of, though, the world was hit with the coronavirus. While they figured out ways to get together during quarantine, hiking and meeting for spins around the grocery store, they started talking about ground rules for a marriage. "We agreed we had a responsibility to help other human beings," Mr. Coles said. "Like, if one of my homeless clients needed a tent and we could buy it, we would both be like, OK, let's do it!," Ms. Williams said. In March or April, they sat down with a premarital workbook, "Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts." "We were having these great conversations every week over that book," Mr. Coles said. One night when they were "really vibing," he said, he went home and picked out online a James Allen engagement ring. On July 25, after it arrived, he proposed at Greedy Reads. Greedy Reads was closed to the public because of the pandemic. "So I kind of did a little plea to the owner," Mr. Coles said. "All women love to talk about marriage." Julia Fleischaker, the owner of Greedy Reads, was no exception. Once the bookstore was secured, Mr. Coles enlisted his mother's help. "I sent her a diagram of the store and told her exactly where I want the rose petals to be, where I want to take pictures." Instead of driving Ms. Williams to the bookstore for the proposal, he took her to the National Aquarium. She suspected that a proposal could be forthcoming, but by the time they reached the shark tank, she figured she had miscalculated. "Everybody knows the sharks are the end," she said. "My hope was depleted." On Dec. 6, Ms. Williams and Mr. Coles were married in an outdoor microwedding for 25 guests on the patio of the Viceroy Washington, D.C., by Mr. Coles's godfather, the Rev. Dr. Kevin Jackson, a licensed officiant through the Commonwealth of Virginia. Ms. Williams, accompanied down the aisle by her father, wore a lace off the shoulder dress and veil; Mr. Coles donned a tuxedo. In handwritten vows, Mr. Coles called Ms. Williams his heart and soul. "You're someone who would give their last to help a stranger," he said, choking back tears. "I plan to master your love language." Ms. Williams, also struggling with emotions, thanked Mr. Coles for being her best friend. "You keep me brave when I let fear get the best of me," she said. "You came to my rescue before I even called you for help." After rings were exchanged and the couple's parents laid a lasso rosary over them to symbolize their intention to be bound together forever, the Rev. Dr. Jackson pronounced them married. With a kiss and a nod to the 75 guests who had watched via livestream, they left the altar hand in hand. Sensibly Small The wedding was followed by a reception with Champagne and light bites. Mr. Coles said the small, Covid conscious wedding was more his style than a lavish event. "As long as my parents are there and Steph is standing by my side, that's all that matters to me," he said. Favorite Child Ms. Williams said her mother and Mr. Coles get along so well that Mr. Coles is now Patricia Williams's favorite child. Patricia Williams has a hard time denying it. "Every time I say his name I cry because I am so grateful to God for him," she said. "He's a beautiful person." On the Move The day after the wedding, the couple moved into an apartment in Arlington, Va. "We wanted to wait to move in together until after we were married to show respect to our parents," Ms. Williams said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
PASADENA, Calif. At 4 a.m. on the second Sunday of every month, headlamps light up like fireflies in Lot K of the Rose Bowl Stadium here. They are worn by collectors searching for treasure: Hans Wegner club chairs, perfectly aged Levi's jeans (preferably from before 1971), and AC/DC and Wu Tang Clan concert T shirts. Owners of vintage clothing stores complain relentlessly about the deals being "gone," yet they not only come back, but also scale the chain link fence at the perimeter to get a head start before the gates open at 5 a.m. This is what Patrick Matamoros, a dealer who placed Kim Kardashian in a Sade shirt and Rihanna in a Whitney Houston one, did in August, shortly before he nearly came to blows with another vintage dealer. The immediate cause of their spat was a Black Crowes T shirt, but the kerfuffle was years in the making. "It just seemed so condescending," Mr. Matamoros said afterward. The argument escalated quickly. "I called him a thief and a liar," Mr. Cole said. "I said if he called me a thief again, bad things would happen," Mr. Matamoros said. Mr. Cole sneered at him and walked away. Once he saw the price tag, Mr. Matamoros turned regretful. "It was 150," he said. "It wasn't worth 50." Still, he bought it from the seller. Partly because he felt responsible for destroying it. But mostly to spite Mr. Cole. "I haven't had a chance to repair it yet," he said. All over the East Coast, flea markets are withering away. Buyers don't want to bundle up on winter mornings and scour for merchandise that can be found easily on eBay, Etsy or 1stdibs, with better guarantees. Sellers don't want to load pickup trucks with merchandise that can easily be sold online. Once frequented by Andy Warhol, Greta Garbo and Susan Sontag, the major weekly Manhattan flea markets in Chelsea began downsizing in 2005, after almost 30 years. The outpost inside the parking garage on West 25th Street closed in 2014. "What's driving them is the desire to be cool and to have the next post on Instagram," Ms. Boes said, as she described how "these kids" scour through social media posts, Goodwills and rag houses for rare finds. "Then they wear it once or twice and sell it at the flea or over Instagram and buy something else." The legalization of marijuana has also fortified the market, not simply because lots of dealers start getting high with one another at 6 a.m., but also because so many of the products being sold contain THC or refer to weed culture. Tristyn Rhoades, 29, is a self described practicing witch who lives in the San Bernardino Valley with her husband and 3 year old son. A year and a half ago, Ms. Rhoades turned her love of potions and spells into an apothecary business. During the week, she sells cannabis oil infused bath bombs over Etsy. On Saturdays, she brings them to the Silver Lake flea, sharing a booth with her friend Nicol Aiko, a 30 year old jewelry designer who fashions gemstones into crescent moons, fairy and marijuana leaf shapes. Ms. Rhoades is also among the 2,500 sellers paying about 100 for a booth at Rose Bowl, which for 50 years has taken place on the second Sunday of every month in the parking lots surrounding the 90,000 seat football stadium that the U.C.L.A. Bruins call home. The Rose Bowl flea was started by Richard Gary Canning, whose firm RG Canning Attractions began with concert promotion and car shows. The market was intended as a peripheral revenue stream. In the 1970s and '80s, the Rose Bowl's biggest market was antiques, Mr. Redd said. In the early 2000s, the vintage clothing market exploded and the Rose Bowl became a religious ritual for hoarder hipsters united in the desire to get baked and beat each other to Cross Colours jackets, Chanel handbags, Charlie Brown sweatshirts and other assorted pop culture peculiarities. After rolling in before dawn, sellers use the next few hours to set up their stations and buy among themselves. Around 8 a.m., the Bowl becomes a street style spectacular, as the bearded and tattooed rummage for Red Wing work boots amid collectors like Lisa Eisner, a jewelry designer and frequent companion to Tom Ford; the transgender actress Candis Cayne; and Brad Pitt, known among this crowd as much for his furniture expertise as for his movies. A few years back, Mr. Redd said, Mr. Pitt came in and spotted a chair he wanted. The seller was asking 600 for it. Mr. Pitt knew it was worth much more than that. So he pulled out a wad of cash and gave the seller a 2,000 bonus. "Free O.J." shirts from back when O.J. Simpson was on trial for the murder of his ex wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, abound. They usually trade for about 100 each, which is around what it costs to get an old R. Kelly shirt (not cheap for someone now infamous for alleged sex crimes). Nicholas Baier, a dreadlocked dealer at the Bowl, was shopping near his station and stumbled upon a shirt with a Confederate flag. He wasn't offended. "I have Bill Cosby in my booth," he said with a shrug. "It's history." (Mr. Baier is white.) Recently, Mr. Matamoros has been buying up Russian Harley Davidson, Tower Records and McDonald's shirts. "The potential for misinterpreting why someone is wearing a Russia shirt right now is awesome," he said. "I want the shirts I sell to be political. I'm trying to say something." Which is what, a reporter asked. "Don't be boring!" Mr. Matamoros said. Given how easy it is to search for concert tees on eBay, finding an authentic one from the Talking Heads 1983 tour for 50 has gotten increasingly unlikely. And shirts by Bell Biv Devoe and En Vogue cost a lot, the prices propelled by scarcity (most R B and hip hop acts from that time did not tour extensively) and surging demand from kids born in the '90s, who now have money, nostalgia and a desire to look like Kanye West, even as they make fun of his behavior. The Oliphant brothers' wives are merely "understanding," about their hobbies, according to Jeff, while Ms. Corbett has become an enthusiastic partner. After years of competing for customers at the Rose Bowl and bumping into one another at hobbyist events, the Corbetts and the Oliphants barely speak. "It is what it is," Mr. Corbett said. And when Jeff Oliphant seemed particularly cheery on a recent summer morning, it didn't take long to figure out why. "He's not here!" Mr. Oliphant said, smiling brightly. Brian Cohen, a 44 year old dealer who that morning was selling a rack of '50s era harlequin print shirts, priced at 50 each, said: "There could be an ensemble Christopher Guest movie based on the cast of characters at the Rose Bowl." Mr. Cohen, wearing a retro flattop, as if he was the sidekick from a James Dean movie, wasn't being judgmental. In 2008, he plunked down 25,000 on a black crepe Hawaiian shirt with swirling tigers and bright red clouds. "I only wore it once," he said. "It's sitting in a bin with a bunch of other shirts, being enjoyed by no one." "There was so much action. I couldn't believe it," Mr. Cohen said. Soon after, he moved to Los Angeles and took a monthly space at the Rose Bowl. "The night before, I couldn't even fall asleep," he said. "I was just so excited about all the things I could sell, all the things I could buy." He had a Pavlovian response to the stench of vintage clothes wafting through the dry Pasadena air. And he was fascinated by the people: driven by a compulsion to acquire, yet seldom displaying any serious inclination toward power and wealth. Indeed, many were selling simply so they could keep collecting. "The biggest thrill wasn't really making a profit," Mr. Cohen said. "It was finding that new rare piece for the collection." The Bowl's organizers also defy the conventional laws of capitalism, even as the business got more complicated in the internet age. "We do not tell sellers how to run their businesses, and we take no cut from sales," Mr. Redd said When customers arrive at the Rose Bowl on Sunday mornings, Mr. Cohen said, the first sentence out of their mouth has become, "'Is that really your best price?' Even if they don't speak English, they know the word 'discount.'" Although Mr. Cohen has kept his head above water in 2016, he even opened his own store, Vintage on Hollywood, in Los Feliz finding balance is tough. "My romantic life has definitely suffered because of this," he said, describing dates during which he tried to put his phone away but couldn't help himself when it started buzzing and he realized there were incoming photographs of clothes he was interested in buying. Today, there are a lot more young women selling at the Bowl, and many sell in smartly designed tented booths with tribal rugs on the ground. But Mr. Cohen disdainfully calls them "the Etsy girls" and laments their effect on the Bowl: "It became all about ambience." Sean McEvoy, 37, who has sold vintage Sonic Youth T shirts and highly collectible denim at the Bowl for a decade, has a wife, Rikki McEvoy, who runs his online business Mr. McEvoy walked over to to a seller with a collection of Levi's and picked out six pairs he thought he could resell. But getting the price from 1,700 to 850 was brutal. "I got to have a ciggie," Mr. McEvoy said at one point. "I'm getting stressed out." Even after Mr. McEvoy prevailed, he seemed unsure of whether he'd gotten a great deal or a big discount on a rip off. Off in the distance, Mr. Matamoros was complaining about the cost of his shirts. "Every month it gets harder," he said. Yet the bowl is his calling and his compulsion. He knows what would happen if it went away. "I'd be homeless," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
From the beginning, Donald J. Trump has taken a rather peculiar view of the new coronavirus: If he can't see the damage it's doing, it's not doing any damage. It was how Trump justified saying nothing to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who blithely kept his state open through April 2. "They're doing very well," Trump said of Floridians on March 31. "Unless we see something obviously wrong, we're going to let the governors do it." It is how he justifies opening up the country when tests remain in short supply. "You don't need testing," he explained on April 10, "where you have a state with a small number of cases." Tests were necessary only "if there's a little hot corner someplace." Where he could see it, in other words. The hole in this reasoning is not terribly difficult to spot. It's like offering to use a condom after you've already gotten a woman pregnant. Horse has left the barnism as national policy. Yet this is now the logic for reopening the United States, ZIP code by ZIP code. One could argue, to some degree, that Trump is simply doing what humans are hard wired to do. "We believe our eyes before we believe what people tell us," said Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard social psychologist and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," when I phoned to ask him about the infuriating persistence of this habit. "The apparatus that sees the world is over 400 million years old. The prefrontal cortex the part of the brain that comprehends projection models from the C.D.C. is maybe 2.5 million years old. That's brand new, in evolutionary terms. It's still in beta testing." Which is why fighting things we can't see is so hard, like pandemics and climate change. But this, one could argue, is the most important job of the presidency: to sweat the long term stuff. Our implicit assumption is that presidents will plan, self moderate and reason. Executive function is an essential requirement for executive office. In Trump, alas, we have the opposite: a man renowned for intellectual incontinence, rather than discipline. His plans to fight this pandemic vary from hour to hour, minute to minute. He has all the focus of a moth. It'll miraculously disappear I mean it's a mild flu I mean it's serious I mean reopen the country I mean don't reopen the country I mean yes reopen the country I mean I have absolute authority I mean the governors will do it. His prefrontal cortex the very part of the brain that controls executive function, anticipating and regulating and decision making is entirely offline. If this indiscipline were conjoined with a devil may care courage an indifference to what others thought, a willingness to quickly adapt that would be one thing. But it isn't. And having the strength to establish new norms is another cognitive requirement to lead during a crisis. Trump, curiously, was selected and celebrated precisely for his gleeful assault on norms. But during this pandemic, he has been remarkably hesitant to help establish a new way of life. Only under duress did he start to encourage a national program of social distancing. He persisted in shaking hands at news conferences, even when the rest of us were leaving six foot wedges between ourselves and our fellow citizens. He says that he, personally, won't wear a face mask. Trump was certainly not the only official who was slow to adapt. Human beings are hard wired to follow the herd. On March 2 Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, was still encouraging New Yorkers to "get out on the town despite the coronavirus." He went to the gym in Brooklyn on March 16, even after he'd announced the city schools were shutting down. (Then again, Trump, on March 2, said he expected deaths to be in a "much smaller range" than those from the flu. On March 10, he still said: "Just stay calm. It will go away.") Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, perhaps the most trusted man in America right now, admitted recently that he rode the subway to work in the early days of the pandemic. "When the White House heard that, they went completely nuts," he said. "If some people are riding the subway, how bad could it be?" Gilbert said when I asked him about this phenomenon what psychologists call "normative influence." No one wants to be a chump. "Human beings look to other human beings to know what to do," he said. "It's the primary way we know what to do." Which makes the early action of some of our governors all the more remarkable particularly Mike DeWine of Ohio. On March 3, the day after de Blasio was encouraging New Yorkers to mingle, DeWine was canceling the Arnold Classic, a health and fitness Lollapalooza that draws some 60,000 participants from 80 countries. (It was named after Arnold Schwarzenegger, natch.) I spoke to DeWine last week to try to determine what, precisely, gave him the fortitude to cancel that event. He was three days ahead of the city officials in Austin, Tex., who canceled South by Southwest, and at the time even that was considered extreme. He canceled school before any governor in the nation. He shut down restaurants and bars long before New York. And his state had far fewer cases of Covid 19 than New York. And he's a Republican. Red state governors have been far more reluctant to issue stay at home orders during this pandemic than blue state governors. To this day, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota still hasn't issued one, though more than 300 workers in a pork processing factory in her state fell ill, forcing the entire plant to shut down on Sunday. "I've spent over 40 years in public office," DeWine, 73, told me. "When I've made mistakes, it's usually because I didn't have enough information. I didn't ask enough questions, I didn't ask the right people, I didn't drill down deep enough into the facts. That experience was helpful in regard to this." But you can be selective about where you get your information. What became clear, in talking to DeWine, is that he cast a very wide net to get his facts. He spoke daily to the mayors of the state's biggest cities, all Democrats. He spoke regularly with his health director and an informal council of 14 doctors from around the state. He has given his cell number to so many regular citizens over the years "My wife says I've given it to everybody in the state" that he got a burst of texts (in some cases with accompanying pictures) that reported people were crammed together in bars and big box stores, complaining that social distancing wasn't working. This wide range of sources was key. As the lawyer and behavioral economics expert Cass Sunstein has noted most recently in his book "How Change Happens" if you want to shift norms, it helps to know that people have secret, unarticulated beliefs, and what were those texts to DeWine if not an expression of that? (Their tacit message: Please make these people listen.) It also helps to have viewpoint diversity in your brain trust. If you spend time with people who think only like you do, your biases harden and move even further to the extreme. Which describes the life of Donald J. Trump. He moves from one echoing cavern to another, whether it's Twitter or his own cabinet meetings. Now he wants to reopen the country. It's essential to our economic health, it's true. But the president refuses to concede there's a testing problem, and absent testing, it may be hard to get many people to go back outside. Before, no one wanted to be the only chump to avoid crowds; now many will be reluctant to be the chump who rushes toward them. Because that's the new normal. It's going to be hard to undo. Even if Trump refuses to wear a mask. 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 |
Sometimes the hypersophisticated tunesmiths hail from small town Peru, Ind., like Cole Porter. And sometimes the heartfelt songwriters, the ones capable of moonshine lullabies and Christmases that are both merry and bright, come from Lower East Side flophouses and saloons. That's where a preteen Izzy Baline, who would soon become the century spanning troubadour Irving Berlin (1888 1989), hawked newspapers that earned him half a cent a copy. Less than a decade after he left his family's Cherry Street tenement at age 13, his songs were bringing in 2 cents per copy of sheet music and some of them sold 500,000 copies. This miraculous ascent makes up the breeziest sequence in James Kaplan's empathic biography "Irving Berlin: New York Genius." Like his subject, though, Kaplan ultimately finds this pace impossible to maintain. Izzy's "sweet, hoarse voice" earned him all sorts of pre child labor laws work: song plugging on Tin Pan Alley, singing in the chorus of a Broadway bound musical, interrupting a vaudeville show (that included a 7 year old Buster Keaton!) as a faux audience member, working from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. as a saloon singer. Your voice would get hoarse, too. Racy parody lyrics devised on the spot for drunks quickly evolved into full blown songwriting, and in 1907 "I. Berlin" was listed as the lyricist for "Marie From Sunny Italy," the first of his roughly 1,500 credited songs. Among Berlin's early, career making smashes were "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (1911) and "Play a Simple Melody" (1914), a pioneering use of counterpoint in popular music. But the constantly self doubting Berlin, whose first wife died just five months after their wedding, was "precocious in many things, including sorrow," Kaplan writes. One of Kaplan's strongest passages illustrates how the 23 year old widower whittled his sincere but maudlin lyrics into the devastating, incantatory "When I Lost You." Kaplan, a longtime entertainment journalist and the author of a well regarded two volume biography of Frank Sinatra, is generally on surer footing with Berlin's lyrics, which he describes as "modernism on the hoof: startling formal innovation smuggled into a seemingly banal idiom." 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. However, as perhaps befits a composer who relied on his ever present transposing piano, which permitted the lead fingered Berlin to plunk out a melody in the key of F sharp (which is heavy on the black notes) and hear it in any key, Kaplan goes easy on musicological analysis. He's in good company: Even the otherwise laser sharp musicologist Alec Wilder all but gave up on trying to describe Berlin's compositional style, and the composer essayist David Schiff once called him "the Homer of the pop tune, and also the Zelig." Berlin was sincere in his populism: He was fond of saying "the mob is always right" (although that's an easier stance to take when the mob likes you). But this meant he sometimes clashed with his collaborators and their more gimlet eyed sensibilities. George S. Kaufman famously suggested changing the Berlin lyric "I'll be loving you always" to "I'll be loving you Thursday." It isn't hard to guess which of the two men was a regular at the waspish Algonquin Round Table and which was a sporadic visitor. As the book's subtitle suggests, Berlin was a New Yorker through and through, notwithstanding a fair amount of flights to Hollywood, where he once presented the Academy Award for best song to himself. And like the city itself, Berlin rarely slept: He once lost a 50 bet by proving unable to sit in a chair for five minutes and, perhaps owing to those all night saloon gigs as a teenager, he was a lifelong insomniac. In 1942, however, Berlin pulled up stakes in a big way and headed off to war. Berlin employed that song in the wake of Pearl Harbor for the even bigger "This Is the Army," which he presented on Broadway before taking it on a tour of the British Isles and then to military bases. At his insistence, the show included two dozen black soldiers, making the cast the only integrated armed forces unit in the entire war. One highlight of the tour was a rather odd lunch with Winston Churchill, who (possibly) thought he was meeting the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. (Kaplan is skeptical on this point.) At the time, Berlin's "White Christmas" on its way to becoming the biggest selling single in history had made itself a staple for soldiers far from home. Despite this book's inclusion in Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series of biographies, Kaplan doesn't particularly dwell on the fact that the author of "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade" was born Israel Baline in Belarus, the son of a cantor. (He does, however, quote from the Philip Roth novel "Operation Shylock," which is all too happy to discuss this.) Surprisingly, Kaplan makes more of Berlin's Jewishness in discussing "God Bless America," which was such an instant hit that a movement soon arose to have it replace the widely un beloved "Star Spangled Banner" as the national anthem. Berlin demurred at the idea, but a full blown culture war sprouted over the two songs, with coded and overt allusions to the "strange and specious substitute for religion" that resulted in "God Bless America." At no point did anyone accuse Berlin of overcomplicating his music or his message. "In Berlin's hands, simplicity was power," Kaplan writes. "He knew it; he sweated blood over it." A common thread throughout the book is the debunking of such claims as Berlin's writing one song in 18 minutes and another in a cab ride from rehearsals. After all, when Berlin drew up his nine rules for writing popular songs, his final rule was: "The songwriter must look upon his work as a business, that is, to make a success of it, he must work and work, and then WORK." One work that did genuinely come quickly was Berlin's towering "Annie Get Your Gun" score, which he essentially wrote in 18 days, not long after returning from "This Is the Army." Perhaps the two and a half years he had spent in the shadow of death had given him a new sense of urgency, or maybe he fed off the energy of his illustrious creative team, which included Joshua Logan, Dorothy Fields and (as producers) Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Either way, masterpieces like "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly" and "There's No Business Like Show Business" issued from Berlin more or less on a daily basis. But after another Broadway success with "Call Me Madam," Berlin ended his Great White Way career with a dud, the plodding "Mr. President" of 1962. Its story of a former POTUS allowing himself to be put out to pasture seemed uncomfortably apt for the 74 year old Berlin, who was watching new musical and narrative innovations eclipse his toe tapping model. Amazingly, though, that eclipse stretched out over another 27 years, a period that Kaplan understandably struggles to make as captivating as the days of playing gin rummy with Samuel Goldwyn and matching wits with Cole Porter. During that time, Berlin painted still lifes; he drifted in and out of depressions; he received tributes and awards by the bushel; he wrote mildly salacious letters to old pals. But one disadvantage of living to the age of 101 is that the number of old pals gradually dwindles. Berlin's cheering section was eventually reduced to a group of well wishers who sang "White Christmas" under his Beekman Place window each Dec. 24. Of course the songs remain. As long as there are hearts to swell, "Always" and "How Deep Is the Ocean" will swell them. The introduction of ragtime into America's musical consciousness will forever have "Alexander's Ragtime Band" as its soundtrack. And even without displacing that other national anthem, "God Bless America" continually rings from each mountain and prairie and ocean white with foam. Like that transposing piano, Irving Berlin's American soundtrack can slide up, down and in any direction we might need. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
David Hallberg, the American Ballet Theater and Bolshoi Ballet principal, has written a memoir, "A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back," which will be published on Nov. 7 by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon Schuster. In a statement on Thursday, the publishers said that the memoir would cover Mr. Hallberg's early life and training, his career at Ballet Theater and his decision to join the Bolshoi Ballet in 2011, as well as the severe ankle injury that kept him offstage from 2014 until late last year. In an email interview, Mr. Hallberg, who is currently performing with Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, said that he had begun to write down his experiences of dancing with different companies during the period when he joined the Bolshoi and was still working frequently with other international troupes. He said that the "true backbone of the book" took shape after he suffered a potentially career ending injury, which led to a yearlong sojourn in Melbourne, Australia, where he underwent physical therapy at the Australian Ballet. "I lost the ability to express my art, and consequently was a step away from leaving it all," Mr. Hallberg wrote in an email. "Beforehand, I had climbed the highest peaks I thought imaginable, with an ego in tow. I used my artistic instrument to its limit and subsequently crashed and burned." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Jordan Casteel in Harlem. This month, the artist will have her first institutional show in New York, at the New Museum. When the artist Jordan Casteel arrived on campus as a college freshman, her mother marched her into the dining hall not for a meal, but to greet the kitchen staff. They had met the president and dean, but these were the people, her mother explained, who would truly be taking care of her. Ms. Casteel recalls being shy, but her mother was right: The first person she approached, a baker named Betty, became a surrogate parent. "She cooked me Sunday meals, would bring me birthday cakes," said Ms. Casteel. Nearly a decade later, they still talk on the phone. "There's really something magical that can happen when you take that risk," she said. This particular alchemy, the kind that begins with a nervous hello and transforms strangers into family, lies at the core of Ms. Casteel's practice. Nearly 31, she has attracted widespread acclaim for colossal portraits of friends and neighbors, works celebrated for their tenderness, keen social commentary and technical brio. Her first institutional show in New York an exhibition of nearly 40 canvases spanning seven years opens at the New Museum on Feb. 19. "What we see when we look at one of Jordan's portraits is her ability to represent her subjects in their fullness," said Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Ms. Casteel completed a residency in 2016. "She is able to capture a sense of spirit, a sense of self, a sense of soul." Currently looming above the High Line, at West 22nd Street, is a wall size rendering of one such person: Fallou Wadje, a Senegalese born clothing designer, who sold her hand painted wares outside the Studio Museum at the time of Ms. Casteel's residency. Of all the people working inside the building, Ms. Wadje said the artist was the one who always stopped and talked with her. The two became friends, and, in 2017, Ms. Casteel painted "The Baayfalls," a portrait of Ms. Wadje with a fellow member of the Baye Fall, the Sufi Muslim order for which the piece is named. When High Line Art invited Ms. Casteel to present one of her works as a 1,400 square foot mural, she chose it without hesitation. "To have an immigrant story so prominently placed at this time in this world, in New York City it just feels right," she said. The painting, her first public art commission, will be up through December. "It's crazy, when you go there, the energy of it is just so strong," said Ms. Wadje as she played a video of herself crying when she first saw the mural. Ms. Wadje, who is currently writing a book on spirituality, subsequently posed for another painting called "Fallou," now owned by the music producer Swizz Beatz. The exposure, she said, may help her realize her own projects. "It's a tool," she said. "I'm going to use it." The New Museum curator, Massimiliano Gioni, who organized Ms. Casteel's show, said he hopes viewers gain a new perspective on contemporary life in New York. He was struck by Ms. Casteel's approach to celebrating vocations that, he said, "get too quickly marginalized because we think of them according to certain stereotypes." As Ms. Casteel once pointed out to him, "We tend to think of a guy working on a laptop in a cafe as an entrepreneur." But not, he said, "someone selling T shirts or statues on the street." Ms. Casteel is most at peace when she is alone in her studio, but she is a gregarious friend and neighbor, quick to crack jokes and burst into fits of raspy laughter. A recent afternoon found her in Benyam, an Ethiopian restaurant near her Harlem apartment, wearing black jeans, high top sneakers, and a loose sweater that hung around her tall willowy frame. When Ms. Casteel came inside, the restaurant's chef and co owner, Helina Girma, rushed over to rub her hands warm. Ms. Casteel is a regular here; a reproduction of "Benyam," her 2018 portrait of Ms. Girma and her two brothers and business partners, hangs beside the bar. "There's a difference between living here and being of and with the people who live here and caring about people more than just on a surface level," she said. Her interest in the lives of others stems, she said, from her upbringing in Denver, where her mother, Lauren Young Casteel, runs a philanthropic group. (It is also part of Ms. Casteel's heritage: Her grandfather was the civil rights activist Whitney Moore Young Jr.) "Empathy is something that I have been really raised thinking about," said Ms. Casteel. "What does it mean to come outside of oneself into someone else and understand the common grounds, or even the differences, that might exist?" At home, Ms. Casteel grew up with prints and exhibition posters by artists of color, but the museums she visited rarely told stories that felt relevant to her family's history. "I wasn't seeing them in institutions or feeling that they were being valued in those institutions," she said. Ms. Casteel's artistic career caught her somewhat by surprise. She studied anthropology and sociology at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., until she took a painting class during a semester in Italy. She found herself happy in a way that she "hadn't been before" and switched majors. After a stint teaching special education in Denver, she enrolled in the painting M.F.A. program at Yale University. It was a rocky transition. While most of her classmates had gone to art schools as undergraduates, she arrived in New Haven with three paintbrushes and no clue how to stretch a canvas. "I think all of us were confused by my presence," she said with a laugh. "Impostor syndrome was very real." Ms. Casteel found a sense of direction in the summer of 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin. She returned to Yale thinking about how she might use portraiture to counteract images of black men as victims or violent criminals. "I came back with intention: I'm going to paint black men as I see and know them," she said. "As my twin brother, as my older brother, as people that I love. I wanted to find a way to get other people to see them in their humanity." But the artist found ways to subvert these tropes. She painted her subjects in their homes or other intimate settings, and posed them so their genitals were obscured. Ms. Casteel also chose to depict the men at a scale impossible to ignore. (She loves the idea that a collector buying one of these works might have to rearrange the furniture "to make room for this giant black body.") Each man makes riveting eye contact with the viewer. "Having us sit nude meant that we could be ourselves without having anything projected upon us," said the writer Jireh Breon Holder, the first participant in the series, who has since become a close friend of Ms. Casteel. "Jordan rendered us with such specificity. She really paid attention to the detail of our interior life as well as what we looked like. At the time, we really did not have many opportunities to be other than big black men." Finally, Ms. Casteel painted some of her models in traffic stopping shades of lavender, green and glacial blue, forcing the viewer to contend with "blackness" as a concept and as a construct. When the portraits debuted in New York in 2014, at the downtown gallery Sargent's Daughters, in a show called "Visible Man," they caught the attention of critics and art world heavyweights. Cecilia Alemani, the High Line Art curator, said she immediately began imagining the works at a public scale. Ms. Golden offered Ms. Casteel the Studio Museum residency after seeing the exhibition In the past decade, museums and the market have increasingly embraced figurative painters of African descent, and Ms. Casteel is often discussed in conjunction with other black artists, including Amy Sherald, Kerry James Marshall, Kehinde Wiley and Barkley Hendricks, who died in 2017. Their various approaches are so distinct, however, these associations strike some experts as artificial. Others feel that it's important to collectively examine recent work in this vein. As Richard Powell, an art history professor at Duke University and the author of "Black Art: A Cultural History," put it: "For me, it would be intellectual dishonesty to say, 'Here we are in 2020' and not say, 'We have this whole group of artists who are invested in painting the black figure.'" "Admittedly, they are all very different, he added, "and yet they all see this black figure as a launchpad, a jumping off point." If anything unites these painters, said Mr. Rolling, it's a "call and response to the absence of relatable figures in the canon of painting." Or, he added, "the overwhelming presence of whiteness." For some of Ms. Casteel's sitters, the chance to counteract institutional neglect is a reason to participate. "I knew I wanted to use this opportunity to place my mom and I in the art historical canon," said Emmanuel Amoakohene, one of Ms. Casteel's students, who posed with his mother in 2019. The scale of the radiant, seven foot canvas, he said, "makes me feel like I matter." Even now, asking strangers to be sitters is "terrifying," Ms. Casteel said. But the bonds she has created through her work make each introduction easier: "I'm constantly reminded of the fact that there's something bigger that awaits me if I take that chance." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Not so long ago the idea of merely setting foot in the United States would have filled FIFA's leaders with dread. The idea of holding an important meeting there would have been rejected as absurd. That was because a sprawling corruption indictment by the United States Department of Justice in 2015 had threatened the very existence of FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. The investigation had produced the dawn arrests of more than a dozen top power brokers in the sport and eventually led to the ouster of some of the organization's most powerful figures. It left others fearful of traveling to the United States for any reason, lest they risk being picked up by the authorities. Yet this week, almost four years later, FIFA is bringing the members of its governing council a body that, in an earlier incarnation, was accused by the American authorities of engaging in graft schemes dating back decades to United States soil for the first time since the scandal broke. The 37 member body, an expanded group now known as the FIFA Council, will hold a meeting in Miami on Friday to discuss, among other things, a significant expansion of the 2022 World Cup and a multibillion dollar plan for a new World Cup style competition for clubs. The site of the meeting, FIFA says, is the latest sign that it has moved on from its corrupt past. "It's probably fair to say that there is a symbolic significance for the FIFA Council to meet in the U.S.A. for the first time since 2015," FIFA, which is based in Zurich, said in a statement. Four years ago, images of police officers leading soccer officials out of a luxury Swiss hotel in two separate dawn raids gripped the sporting world, unleashing a crisis that has cost FIFA millions of dollars and led to years of turmoil. Dozens of soccer officials, businessmen and companies have since pleaded guilty to charges in United States courts; others are fighting extradition; and two men, including the former head of South American soccer, were jailed after a 2017 trial in New York. The crisis also led to the ouster of a number of executives not named in the indictments, including FIFA's longtime president at the time, Joseph S. Blatter. While there is little sign another blockbuster raid is in the offing, United States authorities' interest in FIFA has not dimmed. Multiple defendants who have pleaded guilty in the case have not yet been sentenced, with prosecutors again agreeing this year to push back decisions about the punishments of at least five people, including an Argentine businessman who testified at the New York trial and has served as a key cooperating witness. "FIFA remains ready to assist public authorities in all cases and, while the experience was difficult, we are finally very grateful that the U.S. Department of Justice intervened when it did to address some serious governance problems and, in so doing, help put FIFA on the path to reform," its statement added. The current leadership has attempted to build bridges with the American authorities. FIFA's top legal official, the deputy secretary general Alasdair Bell, made it a priority to visit Brooklyn and meet with prosecutors upon joining the soccer body in September. His visit came a month after FIFA's president, Gianni Infantino, met with President Trump at the White House. Such trips were considered perilous four years ago. Blatter and his former No. 2, Jerome Valcke, who faces a separate corruption investigation in Switzerland, skipped the Women's World Cup when it was held in Canada in the summer of 2015, only weeks after the first raids in Switzerland. Other officials also have stayed safely out of reach. FIFA has not confirmed whether any council members will skip next week's meeting, though at least one may not travel, according to a person familiar with the council member's thinking. Coming to Miami also renews focus on Concacaf, the regional confederation that governs soccer in North and Central America and Caribbean. Based in the city, Concacaf is one of soccer's six regional governing bodies, but it perhaps felt the most damage from the scandal: three of its former presidents were charged by United States authorities, and an internal probe later found multiple examples of rogue behavior, including self dealing, indiscriminate use of private jets and even the recruitment of a private detective to snoop on individuals, including the former U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati, who still sits on the FIFA Council. Concacaf, which nearly closed amid a banking crisis brought on by the Justice Department case, is largely prospering after introducing governance reforms. It has also changed headquarters, moving from a location in Miami Beach that was the target of F.B.I. raids in 2015 to a new office in the city's business district. Its current president, Victor Montagliani of Canada, said Concacaf had "long turned the page" on its existential crisis. "Having FIFA come to Miami for the first time since the events of 2015 marks a momentum forward for world football," he said, "and we are glad to play our part." While its worst days may have passed, global soccer continues to be dogged by sporadic episodes of unethical behavior by senior figures. A Ghanaian member of the FIFA Council, Kwesi Nyantakyi, received a lifetime ban last year after being caught on camera accepting thousands of dollars in cash from an undercover reporter. And last week, another council member, Lee Harmon of the Cook Islands, received a three month ban for the illegal resale of tickets to last year's World Cup in Russia. To Miguel Maduro, a former governance head at FIFA, the continuing problems are both structural and cultural, part of a system that he said was still being run as a "political cartel." Infantino, for example, will stand unopposed for re election later this year in an election that will mirror the one for the presidency of European soccer in February. In that race, the incumbent, Aleksander Ceferin, was re elected by acclamation. Perhaps the biggest sign of FIFA's difficulties in changing the culture is its inability to wean the council members who will be in Miami off the kind of lifestyle even they have acknowledged to be excessive. At previous meetings, for example, members have described being met on the airport tarmac and whisked to luxury hotels without having to go through the usual arrival protocol. Even after FIFA's reforms, they receive annual salaries of 250,000, plus an additional per diem, to attend as few as three meetings a year. "That's one of the reasons you maintain the cartel," Maduro said. "You have to satisfy the people that keep you in power." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Roughly one in four newspapers in the United States has closed since 2004, and many that managed to survive have been cut to the bone. Now, more than 260 dailies will be controlled by the same company. Shareholders voted on Thursday to approve a deal that would join the two largest newspaper chains in the United States, all but guaranteeing the creation of a newspaper colossus that is likely to result in thousands of layoffs. The combination of GateHouse Media and Gannett already the two largest newspaper owners in the country, by both number of papers and print circulation, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina means that more than 550 newspapers, 300 of them weeklies, will have the same owner. The merger is expected to reach formal completion on Tuesday, the companies said in a statement on Thursday. Shareholders with stakes in both companies voted in favor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The vaccine against HPV, introduced in 2006, appears to be very successful in preventing cancer in real world circumstances. HPV, or human papilloma virus, is a common sexually transmitted disease, and while most cases are harmless, some types of the virus can cause genital warts and cancer. Researchers reviewed 40 studies of HPV infection in 14 high income countries, with data from more than 60 million people followed for up to eight years after vaccination. The study is in The Lancet. They found that the prevalence of HPV 16 and 18, which cause most cases of cervical cancer, decreased over the period by 83 percent among girls ages 13 to 19, and by 66 percent among women 20 to 24. Infection with three other high risk types, 31, 33 and 45, decreased 54 percent among girls 13 to 19. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
For years, Marcy Sherman Lewis went to a beauty salon in St. Joseph, Mo., every few weeks for a haircut and highlights. It had become something of an ordeal to prepare her husband, Gene Lewis, for this outing; he has Alzheimer's disease, at 79, and helping him shower and dress, insert hearing aids and climb into the car was a very slow process. But she could no longer leave him at home alone. And once at the salon, "he just sat, watched TV, slept didn't bother anybody," said Ms. Sherman Lewis, 62. Her stylist kindly trimmed his hair, too. Then last month, the salon owner took Ms. Sherman Lewis aside. "Marcy, he makes my other patrons awfully uncomfortable," she said. "I was dumbfounded," Ms. Sherman Lewis said. "It's O.K. for other people's little grandchildren to be running around sometimes. What am I supposed to do, keep him in a crate in the car?" Like so many caregivers, she has discovered that along with the abandoned career, the hands on tasks, the medical scheduling, the insurance tussles and the disrupted sleep, she faces another trial: social isolation. "It's hurtful," she said. "You need friends more than ever." But where are they? Betsey Brairton, 48, cares for her mother, Sue, in rural Olean, N.Y. The elder Ms. Brairton, 79, suffers from spinal stenosis, arthritis and lingering damage from a stroke, so she has limited mobility. "We hardly go anywhere, and nobody comes here," said her daughter. When she does leave for an hour or two, she's afraid to put down her cellphone. Though a couple of friends occasionally invite her out for dinner, "I can't commit to anything, in case my mom is having a bad day," Ms. Brairton said. She has begun to worry that when she does spend time with others, her narrowing life leaves her with nothing interesting to say. Those who work with caregivers know this phenomenon well, especially when the cared for person has dementia, a particularly arduous responsibility. "Caregiving is done with a lot of love and affection, but there's a lot of loss involved," said Carey Wexler Sherman, a gerontologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. "People talk about friends disappearing, about even family members not wanting to be involved. It's a lonely business." Sometimes, caregivers isolate themselves. Barbara Moscowitz, senior geriatric social worker at Massachusetts General Hospital, hears clients lament that with a loved one whose dementia related behavior can be startling, venturing out in public creates more apprehension than pleasure. "They say, 'I'm exhausted trying to explain to people why she's doing what she's doing, why they shouldn't be angry or afraid,'" Ms. Moscowitz said. "It's just easier to stay home." Yet a habit of avoiding others or watching them avoid you collides with a growing body of research showing how damaging isolation and loneliness can be. They are associated with a host of ills, including heart disease and stroke. Among older people, isolation is linked to depression, even higher mortality. Lonely old people, Dutch researchers have found, are more apt to develop dementia. We've long thought of these factors as dangers for the people being cared for. But they also imperil caregivers, who are often older adults as well. Years of caring for his wife, now deceased, who had early onset Alzheimer's, left Les Sperling, 65, so despondent that "I'd stay in my room in the dark and sleep all day," he said. "I didn't want to come out." Mr. Sperling, of Lake Worth, Fla., went into therapy and took antidepressants until he felt able to function again. We know something about how to help caregivers feel less alone. Researchers have shown that even modest sounding interventions can reduce their sense of isolation and improve their mental and physical health. Mary Mittelman, director of the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias Family Support Program at NYU Langone Health, has been conducting such studies for years. With federal and state grants, the program involving several counseling sessions, followed by support groups and phone access to counselors as needed has inspired others that have been adopted throughout New York and in several other states. "The support is what leads to less stress, less depression, better health and delayed nursing home admissions," Dr. Mittelman said. Interestingly, her team has found that "instrumental support," in which others actually help with tasks, has less impact than emotional support. "Having someone outside who is paying attention and who cares is more important," she said. Other initiatives, like Savvy Caregiver and REACH, have demonstrated similar effectiveness. Because they are offered under various names in different states, Area Agencies on Aging can help besieged caregivers find free local programs. And since getting out of the house can be a struggle, program developers are also testing online versions. Caregivers already gather in Facebook groups and on websites, but experts have mixed feelings about online chats and groups. "They provide anonymity, and that may permit more honesty," said Dr. Wexler Sherman, the gerontologist. "Sometimes you need to vent at 2 a.m." "But we need skills," she said. "Being a caregiver is a job." Online, is the information passed along accurate and useful? Is there a trained, knowledgeable moderator? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Denzel Washington will return to Broadway this spring in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh." Mr. Washington will play the lead role of Theodore Hickman, a.k.a. Hickey, a charming traveling salesman, in this dark and poetic drama that unfolds in a Manhattan saloon. The play will be directed by George C. Wolfe and produced by Scott Rudin. Further casting has yet to be announced. A two time Oscar winner for his film roles, Mr. Washington has become a steady presence on Broadway lately. He appeared in "Fences" in 2010, winning a Tony Award, and "A Raisin in the Sun" in 2014. Both were box office successes. He starred in the film adaptation of "Fences" last year as well. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Brutality overrides everything else in "Kangaroo: A Love Hate Story" views of beautiful landscapes are hard to enjoy after seeing wild animals, including their young, maimed and slaughtered. But the filmmakers are determined to sound a wake up siren, and they blast it here with extra strength. The documentary, directed by Mick McIntyre and Kate McIntyre Clere, begins with a look at the kangaroo and its place in Australian culture: It's both a widely used mascot and, to some, a hallowed creature. But the animal is considered a pest by farmers and ranchers, and a profit source by pet food companies and leather processors. Meat exporters are rushing to build a market for human consumption of this marsupial in China and Russia. The filmmakers scrutinize processing plants, where carcasses are butchered by the trailer load, and deride the Australian government, which they suggest is mismanaging the populations. "Millions of kangaroos are slaughtered every year in Australia to provide meat for cats and dogs, and also for humans," in what is the largest terrestrial wildlife killing anywhere on earth, one interviewee says. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The Metropolitan Museum of Art excels at discreet introductions: modest, magnetic shows that enable us to make the acquaintance of artists many of us have barely heard of. Occasionally these shows establish an unexpected reciprocity, their commonalities and differences evolving into a lively dialogue. An odd pairing of this sort is the gift of two small shows of mostly small paintings by two 19th century artists. "Peder Balke: Painter of Northern Light" presents the work of a Norwegian artist revered in his homeland for his renderings of some of its most dramatic coastline vistas in his first show in the United States, and it has been organized by Asher Ethan Miller, a curator of European paintings. "City of Memory: William Chappel's Views of Early 19th Century New York," organized by Amy Bogansky when she was a research associate in the American Wing, is the first time the Met has shown all 27 of its paintings by this American tinsmith and amateur artist his extant work since acquiring them in 1954. Together they illuminate different ways of being an artist, the role of observation and memory in art, the importance of size, the difference between trained and untrained talent, and also the growth of nationalism. Balke (1804 87) and Chappel (1801 78) were almost exactly the same age, and shared humble origins and an inborn romanticism, but they worked in different styles, under vastly different circumstances on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Balke, who led something of a charmed existence, came to paint the natural sublime of coastal Norway, a region then struggling to achieve independence and national identity. Today he is considered one of its greatest Romantic artists. Chappel had a more hardscrabble life, probably spent entirely in Manhattan, and toward its end he painted scenes of everyday life in the budding metropolis of his childhood. Neither man was destined to be an artist; both worked largely from memory and died in obscurity. Chappel's was lifelong; Balke's was not. Born to landless peasants, Balke was lifted from rural life by talent so evident that the locals bankrolled the early phase of an artistic education that took him from Oslo to Copenhagen and Stockholm. He loved Norway's wildness, making several walking treks through it. But his formative experience came in 1832. Traveling by boat up Norway's west coast, he found his own Mont Sainte Victoire: the big, startlingly rectangular headlands of the North Cape (NordKapp), jutting into the North Atlantic and thought at the time to be the northernmost point of Europe. He saw it only once and may have made sketches (although virtually none survive), but it, and the waves crashing around it, haunted his work from then on. In "The North Cape" (1853), the first of the 17 Balke paintings in the show, we see this promontory as a broad horizontal seemingly formed by a single brush stroke. It announces Balke's interest in paint as material, even if the scene's moonlight is so excessively bright and sharp that you may be forgiven for thinking it has a small light attached to its frame. It gives you the feeling Balke sometimes had more talent than he could control. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Eleanor Roosevelt was the most important first lady in American history. Or at least until Hillary Clinton. But when Hillary was in the White House she claimed she was communing with Eleanor's spirit, looking for inspiration. Eleanor came from an important family Uncle Theodore, after all, was president. But her upbringing was so grim that it's a wonder she emerged functional, let alone one of our nation's great humanitarians. Her haughty mother humiliated her by calling her "Granny." Her alcoholic father was the beloved parent, but hardly someone you could count on in a pinch. Once she reached adolescence, Eleanor was installing triple locks on her bedroom door "to keep my uncles out." She compensated for feelings of unattractiveness and rejection with good works. As she grew to adulthood, Eleanor threw herself into the settlement house movement to serve the poor. Her boyfriend Franklin was impressed and a little shocked by her activities. He announced after she took him on a tour of tenement life on the Lower East Side: "My God, I didn't know people lived like that." Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were distant cousins in a family that would probably not have chosen Franklin as most likely to succeed. The joke was that "F.D.R." stood for "Feather Duster Roosevelt." But he had grand ambitions, and David Michaelis, the author of biographies of Charles Schulz and N. C. Wyeth, suggests he "was wise enough to know (as only a boy named 'Feather Duster' knows) that if his will to power was to be taken seriously, he needed a woman of urgency by his side." Michaelis's "Eleanor" is the first major single volume biography in more than half a century, and a terrific resource for people who aren't ready to tackle Blanche Wiesen Cook's heroic three volume work. At more than 700 pages it's hardly a quick read, but it's a great resource for people who don't know a whole lot about her. 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. Eleanor and Franklin married in 1905 and she quickly had six children, five of whom survived. Her public story began in 1921, when Franklin came down with polio. The disease robbed him of his ability to walk, and Eleanor became his legs. She was an unstoppable force in his successful campaign for governor of New York in 1928. Her energy level always seemed to be someplace between prodigious and terrifying. Following her through the pre White House era, you can already see how she'd evolve into a first lady who visited with more than 400,000 troops in the South Pacific in World War II. "I'm only being active until you can be again," she wrote him. "It isn't such a great desire on my part to serve the world I'll fall into habits of sloth quite easily!" The marriage, sadly, was not working out nearly as well in private as it was in public. Eleanor, Michaelis says, "found the sexual side of their marriage less than pleasant and perhaps so did he." If so, Franklin's diffidence was apparently limited to his wife. Back in 1917 Eleanor discovered he had been having an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, which Michaelis suggests was an important moment in American history. Maybe it was, since the marriage became more of a political partnership than romantic attachment. Eleanor agreed to stay and Franklin vowed he would never see Lucy again, in what turned out to be one of American history's more famous broken promises. Eleanor's own romantic life gets thorough treatment, given that much or all of it seemed to involve crushes rather than consummation. There was Earl Miller, a state trooper who tutored her in self defense. And Lorena Hickok, an Associated Press reporter who would eventually leave her job to work in the White House. Eleanor was definitely in her thrall. ("Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close.") But women of their generation often wrote letters to friends that sounded like mash notes and historians have had a hard time with the very specific question of whether Eleanor and her "Hick" did the deed. Michaelis's description of their relationship suggests the physical details didn't matter. What's really important to history is Eleanor's public life once Franklin was elected president in 1932. She wanted to bring him stories about the real America and she traveled around the country bearing witness to the grief of its Depression racked citizens. It was not at all what Americans expected of a first lady but as time went on, Michaelis writes, "fewer minded that the wife of the president was driving alone by night through villages and four corners hamlets and stopping for gas on the outskirts of town." Michaelis is careful to point out the ways in which the younger Eleanor was not ahead of her time. He has a collection of examples of her early anti Semitism. And she told white Southerners she "quite understood" their point of view on racial matters. But she evolved, way ahead of most of the nation. In 1938, she attended a memorable meeting of human rights groups in Birmingham, where the not yet notorious Sheriff Bull Connor banned integrated audiences. So Eleanor sat on the side where the Black participants were cordoned off. When the police ordered her to move, she put her chair in the aisle and sat down. After Pearl Harbor, Eleanor insisted on going to the Pacific war zone to support the troops. A visitor asked Franklin if that kind of trip wouldn't leave her exhausted. "No," her husband replied. "but she will tire everybody else." Eleanor's worry was different she was afraid that the troops would hear rumors about a female visitor, imagine a glamorous entertainer and be disappointed when she walked into the room. Not a problem. She toured the hospitals, speaking to each wounded soldier, and got up at 5 in the morning so she could have breakfast with the enlisted men. Fleet Adm. Bull Halsey, who had lobbied vigorously against her trip, recanted, declaring, "She alone accomplished more good than any other person or any group of persons who passed through my area." Eleanor was not with Franklin when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the presidential retreat in Warm Springs, Ga., in 1945. And she was shocked when she discovered his old lover Lucy Mercer had been there, and that her daughter Anna had set up Mercer's trip to give her ailing father the kind of comfort his wife never seemed able to provide. Harry Truman cannily appointed Eleanor to a high profile job in the new United Nations General Assembly, which was about to open in London. Early on she kept a low profile, working "six and a half days a week, 18 to 20 hours a day." Her goal was adoption of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948, it happened. Moments after the vote, Michaelis reports, she quietly walked into the room, wearing no ceremonial clothes or makeup. "Her fellow delegates then accorded her something that had never been given before and would never be given again in the United Nations: an ovation for a single delegate by all nations." Her private life had evolved in a radical new way her last great unconsummated love, Dr. David Gurewitsch, had married a young art dealer and set up housekeeping in Manhattan. In 1959, after "three decades in which Eleanor had spent no more than 10 days in a row in any one apartment or home, or even in any one town and city," Michaelis writes, she bought half a share of a townhouse in Manhattan where from age 75 on, she "lived under the same roof with the man she loved and with that man's wife." She was a kind of precursor to the Gray Panthers, in a commune of her own choosing. She died on Nov. 7, 1962, exactly 30 years after the day Franklin was first elected president. She had wanted a simple funeral, but, as Jackie Kennedy noted, it turned into an event "as complicated as an inauguration," with the president, vice president, two ex presidents, three first ladies (past, present and future) and the chief justice of the United States among the mourners. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
President Trump's riveting show allowed much of the television news business, in particular, to put off reckoning with technological shifts toward mobile devices and on demand consumption. It's the End of an Era for the Media, No Matter Who Wins the Election Follow our live coverage of Election night and Trump and Biden results There's a media phenomenon the old time blogger Mickey Kaus calls "overism": articles in the week before the election whose premise is that even before the votes are counted, we know the winner in this case, Joe Biden. I plead guilty to writing a column with that tacit premise. I spent last week asking leading figures in media to indulge in the accursed practice of speculating about the consequences of an election that isn't over yet. They all read the same polls as you do and think that President Trump will probably lose. But many leaders in news and media have been holding their breaths for the election and planning everything from retirements to significant shifts in strategy for the months to come, whoever wins. President Trump, after all, succeeded in making the old media great again, in part through his obsession with it. His riveting show allowed much of the television news business, in particular, to put off reckoning with the technological shifts toward mobile devices and on demand consumption that have changed all of our lives. But now, change is in the air across a news landscape that has revolved around the president. And given the jittery pre election timing, I'll try to keep these items short so you can check Nate Silver's Twitter feed in between reading them. Before the 2016 election, Andrew Lack, then the head of NBC News, warned colleagues that MSNBC's revenue would take a 30 percent hit if when Hillary Clinton was elected, two people familiar with the remark told me. (After the debacle in 2016, few in the media wanted to be quoted speculating about what happens after the election.) Well, TV sure dodged that bullet! CNN's chief, Jeff Zucker, later told his Los Angeles bureau that Mr. Trump had bought the declining business four more years, a person who was there recalled. (A spokesman for CNN said that Mr. Zucker would not have speculated on future ratings.) And it has been a profitable time for cable news, a record breaking year for political books and, generally, a bonanza for the legacy media that live rent free in the president's head. That may be ending. MSNBC and other outlets that thrived on resistance to Mr. Trump may see their audiences fade, said Ken Lerer, a veteran investor and adviser to old media and new, who also predicted that The New York Times would "cool off" as you, dear reader, find other things to do. And the people who continue to pay attention to the news will stay online. "The pandemic has advanced digital by four or five years and it will not go back to what it was," Mr. Lerer said. In corporate media, that means what Cesar Conde, the new chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, has been calling an "omnichannel" strategy, as brands like MSNBC no longer see themselves primarily as television. For new outlets, it's an opportunity to press their advantage of being native to this new world. "Many media organizations have spent the past four years generally failing to adapt to a campaign, a president, a White House and an administration that is extremely online," said Stacy Marie Ishmael, the editorial director of the nonprofit Texas Tribune. "We are only, four years in, getting to grips with how to contend with rhetorical techniques, messaging and communications steeped in misinformation and propaganda." Others predicted a deeper cultural shift from Stephen Colbert's biting satire back to the sillier Jimmy Fallon, from politics back to entertainment, whenever the studios can get production running again. But some veterans of the business of politics doubt that news coverage can really calm down or that consumers can look away. "If Biden is elected, conservatives will be energized, not retreating," said Eric Nelson, the editorial director of Broadside Books, HarperCollins's conservative imprint. "Trump will keep tweeting, and new scandals from his presidency will keep unfolding for well into 2022. By the time that all chaos and nonsense runs out, Trump could be running again for 2024." You aren't the only one just barely hanging on until Election Day. Most of the top leaders of many name brand American news institutions will probably be gone soon, too. The executive editor of The Los Angeles Times, Norm Pearlstine, is looking to recruit a successor by the end of the year, he told me. Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, just bought a house out of town and two Posties said they expected him to depart next year. He hasn't given notice, The Post's spokeswoman, Kristine Coratti Kelly, said. And the executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, is on track to retire by the time he turns 66 in 2022, two Times executives told me, dampening speculation that he might stay longer. Over in big TV, Mr. Zucker, of CNN, has signaled that he's frustrated with WarnerMedia, and broadcast television is overflowing with speculation about how long the network news chiefs will stay on, though no executives have suggested imminent departures. "Everyone is assuming there's going to be turnover everywhere, and everyone is absolutely terrified about who is going to come in," one television industry insider said. This isn't just the usual revolving door. Newsroom leaders face strong pulls in conflicting directions. Outlets all along the spectrum, from the staid BBC to the radical Intercept, have been moving to reassert final editorial control over their journalists. But newsroom employees like a generation of workers across many industries are arriving with heightened demands to be given more of a say in running their companies than in years past. New leaders may find opportunities to resolve some of the heated newsroom battles of the last year, or they may walk into firestorms. 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. Mr. Pearlstine, the only one talking openly of his departure, told me that the new "metrics for success might be different as well issues such as inclusiveness, such as being anti racist, such as really commanding some new platform, be it podcasts or video or newsletters, in addition to having journalistic credentials." The right wing cable channel has been riding high as the quasi official White House network, though it has always been at its strongest when it's attacking Democrats who seem poised to take power. But the approaching election has executives around Lachlan Murdoch, Fox's chief executive, preparing to battle on several fronts: with left wing critics, with what senior executives fear could be regulatory retribution from Democrats and perhaps most of all from James Murdoch, Lachlan's more liberal brother and critic, according to a person familiar with the company's plans. And Lachlan Murdoch ends the election cycle as he began it: with no real control of the network's high profile talent and an unusually low profile for a figure of his nominal political power. One data point: a surprised patron of the Midtown power lunch spot Estiatorio Milos in late October reported overhearing Mr. Murdoch politely spelling his name to a hostess who didn't recognize him. The battles over speech and censorship, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci tweeted recently, are becoming "attention wars." As recently as last week, senators were dragging in tech executives to complain about individual tweets, but the arguments are about to turn more consequential. The platforms are increasingly being pushed to disclose how content travels and why not just what they leave up and what they take down. "We're in this brave new world of content moderation that's outside the take down/leave up false binary," said Evelyn Douek, an expert on the subject and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. In practice, Twitter, Facebook and the other big platforms are facing two sources of pressure. The first is from Australia and the European Union, where Germany has become the latest to push toward tight copyright restrictions. "We are now at an inflection point with the digital platforms," Rod Sims, the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, told me in an email. "The tide has turned all around the world as governments and antitrust enforcers now see the size of the challenge ahead." The second source of pressure is the United States, where President Trump has pushed to repeal or revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from being liable for what they publish while allowing them to moderate content. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a co author of the 1996 law who would head the powerful Finance Committee if Democrats take control of the Senate, said he was skeptical that changes to Section 230 would actually stop misinformation or what conservatives claim is censorship. And he noted that Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he supports some revisions, too. "He made his money, and now he wants to pull up the ladder behind him," Senator Wyden said in an interview on Saturday. "The fact that Facebook, of all companies, is calling for changes to 230 makes you say, 'Wait a second.'" Mr. Wyden said his priority when it comes to big tech in the new Congress would be privacy legislation. The media's internal conflicts, meanwhile, play out on Twitter and, increasingly, on Substack, a newsletter platform where large audiences are paying for work by anti Trump conservatives and iconoclastic voices on the left, who were joined last week by Glenn Greenwald, the national security journalist and free speech advocate who helped found The Intercept and quit in a dispute over whether his work should be edited. Staying Sane for the Next 48 Hours Nothing good will come of reading political news, much less Twitter, between now and the election. Election week is usually a good time to hide out at the movies, but with theaters closed, you'll have to find escape elsewhere. Two favorites: The Times's brilliant Election Distractor on the web; and for your Kindle, Malka Older's Centenal Cycle, a bit of high concept political sci fi that will prepare you for many of the coming tech and political battles. On election night, however, come to Twitter for the jokes and stay for what is really one of the highlights of American democracy, such as it is: the reassuringly sophisticated, nerdy and nonpartisan vote counting conversation that you can listen in on among the likes of Mr. Silver, Nate Cohn, Ariel Edwards Levy and Brandon Finnigan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Mick Magsino and Cara Barrese met while working at Corbis, the photo agency. Shortly after they married nearly a decade ago, they left their Jersey City rental and moved for work to Santa Monica, Calif. There, they last lived in a two bedroom on the top floor of a small apartment building in a quiet, walkable neighborhood not far from the ocean. They paid just under 2,400 a month. The only thing missing was a washer dryer. The laundry room "was downstairs with coins," Mr. Magsino said. "It was horrible. It was like college." Earlier this year, Mr. Magsino was offered a job as director of sales for the image archive at Art and Commerce, an agency representing fashion photographers and stylists, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Ms. Barrese, who works in sales for the publications Modern Magazine and Art in America, was able to transfer to her employer's Manhattan office in the Flatiron district. Last summer, the couple planned their return to New York with some trepidation. They were concerned about high rents and other costs of living, including day care for their 3 year old son, Noel, which they figured would double in price. They resigned themselves to giving up at least some space and sunlight. The couple decided on a division of labor. Mr. Magsino would take charge of the housing hunt while Ms. Barrese would find day care for Noel. His aim was a two or three bedroom rental, preferably on a top floor to avoid noise from stompers above. "We had heard the horror stories about living under a kid," Mr. Magsino said. He also was set on living within well regarded School District 15 in Brooklyn, which includes Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. Their budget topped out at 4,000 a month. "Everyone was saying, 'Do you realize Brooklyn is, like, the hottest real estate market in the world?' " Mr. Magsino said. He did. "We never lived in Brooklyn and why not?" he said. "Let's do this before we do the suburbs. If you have kids, you do Brooklyn." If he could have his druthers, his preference was for Park Slope. He flew to New York as an advance scout; Ms. Barrese would follow once he had a few leads. "We had four days to find a place," Mr. Magsino said. "We were not getting on a plane without finding something." He visited 22 Caton Place, a new rental building in Windsor Terrace on the Kensington border. There, two bedrooms started in the mid 3,000s a month. He thought the layouts lacked an obvious spot for a dining table, but did like the small home office, envisioning a "tiny half man cave," he said. Ms. Barrese, however, didn't want such a space, knowing it would turn into a junk room. He saw several apartments across the street on lower floors at the brand new Kestrel. "I wasn't feeling it," he said. "The view wasn't great. We were moving all this way I really wanted to be in Park Slope." But the leasing manager at the Kestrel, Lisa Taylor Belardo, was able to show him a place that would soon be available. It was on the desired top floor, spacious and airy, with a stacked washer dryer. "Usually when new construction does releases, we do our lower floors and work our way up," Ms. Taylor Belardo said. Mr. Magsino liked this one, for 3,795 a month with one month free on a 13 month lease, and was eager for his wife to see it. When Ms. Barrese arrived from California the next day, he had more places lined up. "I wanted to show her for comparison's sake," he said. A sunny top floor two bedroom in a 2006 condominium building, the Simone, on McDonald Avenue in Windsor Terrace, was 3,800 a month. The master bedroom faced Green Wood Cemetery. "Some people like that stuff, but I thought it was creepy, a little macabre for us to wake up to," Mr. Magsino said. The walk to the subway seemed uncomfortably long for a small child. "So that was a good alternative, but not good enough," he said. At a new three story condominium in Park Slope, a convenient three blocks from the day care center Ms. Barrese had found for Noel, a top floor two bedroom was available for 4,000. The location was great, but "they were vague on water and heating fees, and you probably pay through the nose for those," Mr. Magsino said. The one bathroom had no bathtub, a setup that was not ideal for a child. The rental requirements seemed absurd. The landlord required "a guarantor from one of our families, which in our 40s is not something we would ask," Ms. Barrese said. "They were very unreasonable. It was Park Slope, so I understand that's a norm. The properties are in high demand." The couple declined to pursue that one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
If there are two things that "Saturday Night Live" loves, it's geopolitics and celebrity cameos, and it got to indulge both of these infatuations in this weekend's opening sketch, set within the socially ruthless confines of the NATO cafeteria. The segment, which kicked off an episode hosted by Jennifer Lopez and featuring the musical guest DaBaby, was based on a real life incident in which several world leaders were caught on video at a NATO meeting near London, seeming to mock President Trump for his lengthy news conferences. The "S.N.L." interpretation cast Jimmy Fallon (playing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada), Paul Rudd (President Emmanuel Macron of France) and James Corden (Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain) as the cool kids of the dining hall, all looking down their noses at Alec Baldwin (playing Trump), who shuffled in holding a plate piled high with burgers. Back at the cool kids' table, the three other leaders continued to insult Baldwin's Trump behind his back. "Did you hear him talk about climate change the other day?" Rudd said. "He said we need stronger toilets." Corden agreed. "He is!" he said. "He's dumber than me." Rudd and Fallon urged Corden to hold a party at Buckingham Palace, and after overhearing their plans, Baldwin tried to find out further details. Fallon insisted that Baldwin wouldn't like it. "You'd have to walk up stairs," he said. Rudd added: "The food is high quality but small portions. It's your nightmare." After another attempt to get that coveted seat, it was offered instead to a different world leader: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany (Kate McKinnon). Debating whether she should accept the offer, McKinnon excitedly asked herself: "Is this happening? Am I about to sit at the cool kids' table? Just relax, Angela. Should I bring my fluegelhorn?" It's been a while since we last heard from Darius Trump, the "Empire" inspired sendup of President Trump played by Kenan Thompson. But he was back this week, along with his children Darius Jr. (Chris Redd) and L'Evanka (Ego Nwodim), in another installment of "S.N.L."'s satirical series "Them Trumps." This latest episode had Thompson about to enter a rally in Hershey, Penn., where an adviser (Moffat) warned him that a possible impeachment could turn the public against him. "The media don't make or break me," Thompson asserted. "My people will always support me." (Redd added: "The media is all lies. It's in my new book." Then he held up a book titled "The Media Is All Lies.") Speaking to a stadium crowd, Thompson said: "They say I abused my office. And you know what? Maybe I did. Because I will do whatever it takes to win this election. I will pop somebody in the head, right on Fifth Avenue, with my own gun if I have to. "And I know you will always have my back," he continued, "even though I'm black." At which point he was pelted with fruit and chased out of the arena. Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors, Colin Jost and Michael Che, continued to riff on the latest impeachment developments. This week, Democrats announced that they would be moving towards impeachment before Christmas. So Trump was right, a lot of Americans will be saying Merry Christmas again. After announcing articles of impeachment, Nancy Pelosi criticized a reporter who asked her if she hates President Trump, saying, "As a Catholic, I don't hate anyone." Which is crazy, because as a Catholic, I know, there's always one person you hate: yourself. Also, the Catholic approach wouldn't be to impeach Trump. It would be to quietly transfer him to a different presidency. President Trump warned France that if it imposes a tax on U.S. tech companies, the U.S. will retaliate with attacks on French wine. And I've got to admit, it is pretty funny that all of Trump's tariffs are just based on lazy stereotypes. Like, if it was Japan, I bet he'd try to tax ninja stars. Or if it was Italy, spaghetti. God forbid it was a black country, he'd probably tax those Popeyes chicken sandwiches. In a separate riff, Jost turned his focus to recent revelations that Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, had been in contact with Trump's personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and with Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani's who, as The Times reported, "helped Giuliani come up with negative information to further his strategy on Ukraine." "According to AT T, Representative Devin Nunes spoke with Giuliani associate Lev Parnas on the phone for more than eight minutes," Jost began: "Which, if true, would be the longest call ever completed on AT T. And that means that Giuliani, Devin Nunes and Lev Parnas were in constant contact during the whole Ukraine scheme. I'm just impressed these geniuses were able to come up with a plan at all. Usually when people with their mental capacity team up, all they do is talk about different kinds of shrimp. And with that, the screen behind Jost cut to an image of Tom Hanks and Mykelti Williamson from the movie "Forrest Gump." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"If everyone's stomachs are up to it, we can go see the elephants," said Rian Labuschagne, his voice crackling through my aviation headset. Receiving the thumbs up from his three passengers, Mr. Labuschagne, who was then manager of Zakouma National Park in Chad, steered the fixed wing Cessna C180 toward a spot 12 miles south. Earlier that morning, his rangers had spotted the elephants there. It was precisely these elephants that had drawn me to this remote Central African park. Although few Westerners have heard of it, Zakouma is home to one of the most stunning conservation success stories in Africa. Unchecked poaching had previously rendered the protected area a near war zone: as rebel factions attempted to overthrow the government from 2005 to 2010, poachers took advantage of the country's lawless state to massacre 90 percent of the park's elephants. But after taking over Zakouma's management in 2011, Mr. Labuschagne and his team transformed it into a rare safe haven for Africa's imperiled elephants. "If you look at the Central and West African savannas, elephants have almost been exterminated their populations are just being lost nonstop," said Chris Thouless, the director of the Elephant Crisis Fund at Save the Elephants, a nonprofit organization based in Kenya. "Zakouma, however, is an outstanding exception." I nervously gripped the seat as drafts of warm air tossed the tiny, dated vessel to and fro. But the scenery below was well worth the nerve racking ride. We passed over an 850 strong herd of buffalo, smoky dust trailing in their wake, and sent a seemingly endless procession of crocodiles slithering into the murky Salamat River. In an adjacent wetland, several hundred pink pelicans took flight like cherry blossom petals in the wind, making me momentarily forget my nausea and angle for a better view. Ten minutes later, the elephants came into view. Too numerous to count, they were congregated in and around a narrow, latte brown channel in the Salamat. Some had their strawlike trunks stuck into the water, others were simply cooling off in the knee deep mud. Babies adorable in their ungainliness playfully splashed around their elders' feet. As we circled overhead, Mr. Labuschagne pointed to still more elephants streaming through the scrubby forest to join their families and friends at the water. "When we first came here, flying over, we could still see white bones everywhere marking the massacre sites," he said. "Now, the elephant population is going up." "People just couldn't get a grip on the poaching, and the expectation was that the population was going to go the way that everywhere else was obliteration," he said. Starting in 2002, heavily armed poachers on horseback, many from Sudan, relentlessly stormed the park, reducing the elephant population to just over 400 from 4,000 in less than a decade. "In my time in Zakouma, I lost seven rangers killed by poachers, and we twice received visits from the rebels," said Luis Arranz, who served as the park manager from 2001 to 2007. "All the difficulties came from the poachers, who were ready for everything to kill and to die for ivory." Everyone assumed the animals were doomed. But the president of Chad, Idriss Deby a longtime advocate for his country's wildlife was not willing to give up on Zakouma's elephants. He began exploring the possibility of bringing in African Parks, a South Africa based nonprofit organization that specializes in managing and rehabilitating failing protected areas, to take over Zakouma's management. But immediately, his government advisers opposed the move. Dolmia Malachie, the coordinator of Chad's National Elephant Action Plan, said he was at first opposed to the African Parks model of doing things especially of handing control of the park over to a foreign group. "I was able to convince everyone in the ministry that we would not give Zakouma to African Parks," he said. But in 2010 ignoring Dr. Malachie and others Mr. Deby handed over Zakouma's reins to the foreign nonprofit. Although Mr. Deby who has been in power since 1990 has a concerning track record in terms of human rights abuses and corruption, conservationists generally regard him as an ally. "The key thing is he's allowed African Parks to save Zakouma, and has also given them a management agreement for a new area in the north," said Dr. Thouless, referring to Ennedi, a 15,000 square mile Unesco World Heritage Site signed over to African Parks in February. "That is a sign of commitment." Shortly after Mr. Deby made his decision, Mr. Labuschagne and his wife, Lorna, who are originally from South Africa, were brought in to direct efforts in Zakouma. They quickly set to work modernizing the park's communication center and facilities; weeding out corrupt staff; training and better equipping the rangers; and building stronger relationships with local communities around the park. Even Dr. Malachie was quickly won over: "When Rian came, he did a fantastic job," he said. "I don't know of any other park manager who has been able to do as great a job as he did." Things could have fallen apart in 2012, however, when a catastrophic poaching attempt claimed the lives of six rangers. But rather than give up, the Labuschagnes doubled down on their efforts. "When it was finalized and we knew that they were dead, we had to go to each family and tell them it was very, very difficult," Mr. Labuschagne said. "But we used that incident to argue for better communication equipment and for better arms and ammunition, because we knew this could potentially happen again." They also formed a team of anti poaching rangers called the Mambas, who quickly took to the job. "The Chadian mind set is very proud, very effective and no nonsense," Mr. Lamprecht said. "If you take that kind of brave, strong person who doesn't easily give up and you give him the necessary training to do the job, you then have a very good ranger." At the same time, the Labuschagnes also began inviting people from surrounding villages to visit including around 5,000 children annually for free educational overnight safaris. "The mistake most parks make is they don't allow the local population to come in for nothing or for a very small amount," Ms. Labuschagne said. "We felt it was more important to get people here than to get a park fee out of them." Because of the park's heightened security and the increasing support of surrounding communities, Zakouma has not suffered a confirmed poaching incident since January 2016. After a several year stretch with very few births, the elephant population has once again begun growing, and six black rhinos arrived this month from South Africa. A critically endangered species, black rhinos became extinct in Chad in 1990 when the last animals were poached for their valuable horns. "For Chad, the arrival of black rhinos means that the international community is respecting the security we can provide, and is therefore happy to send rhinos here," Mr. Lamprecht said. To make way for all the new arrivals, in October 2017, African Parks signed an agreement with the Chadian government to take over management of the neighboring Siniaka Minia Faunal Reserve, adding over 1,700 square miles to Zakouma's existing 1,100 square miles. The expansion was necessary to safely accommodate the quickly growing elephant population, which is expected to hit the 1,000 animal mark by 2024. As the situation on the ground continues to improve, tourism will play an increasingly important role in Zakouma's recovery. "Chad" and "tourism" are not words that usually go together, however. A State Department travel advisory warns of land mines, suicide bombers and bandits, and the country shares borders with volatile neighbors, including parts of Nigeria that are strongholds of the terrorist group Boko Haram. I was warned by several concerned friends and family that I risked being kidnapped if I dared to follow through on my travel plans. "Chad is an extremely unstable place, and always has been," said John Campbell, the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for African policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. "Visiting Chad is not like visiting South Africa, and Americans should be very careful if they choose to go there." That said, he continued, traveling to places like Zakouma is not really on the same level as visiting much of the rest of Chad. Visitors are whisked from the airport to the national park, and once there, they are guarded by well trained rangers and supportive local communities who act as eyes and ears on the ground. "It's going to be less risky because you're talking essentially about people in a bubble," Dr. Campbell said. "What they're doing is visiting a park that is organized and run by outsiders supported by outside money." Mr. Lamprecht said that, at the moment, the situation in Chad is stable. While that could always change, for now his goal is for tourism to eventually contribute up to 50 percent of the park's operational income. "If we were pessimistic, we would never get anything done," he said. The Labuschagnes who moved to Tanzania in February 2017 after six years at Zakouma first laid the foundations for visitors at Zakouma by creating Camp Nomade, a luxury safari camp, and the first of its kind in Chad. As Nomade's name suggests, its aesthetics match those of the surrounding nomadic communities, and the camp is also mobile, allowing it to move with the wildlife on the Rigueik floodplain "one of the most beautiful places in Zakouma, and busiest in terms of birds and game," said Matthieu Radot, the camp's current manager. Camp Nomade is not cheap, but that has not stopped it from selling out since opening in 2015. (A stay there runs a steep 5,500 per person for seven nights, not including chartered flights from N'Djamena.) I had the opportunity to overnight at Camp Nomade with Mr. and Ms. Labuschagne in January 2017. I was immediately struck by the careful attention paid to even the subtlest details. Hand woven grass fences surrounding the kitchen and en suite bathrooms made the camp blend in with the scrub and trees on the edge of the floodplain, while carpets and leather sourced from artisans throughout the country gave the cozy, open air common area a distinctly Chadian feel. My home for the night a modest but comfortable walk in tent that provided an unbroken view of sprawling wilderness was sewn by local seamstresses. "The biggest goal was not to have Nomade look like those commercial projects you see in Southern Africa," said Jamie Sparks, who was the camp manager when I visited, and who left the job so she could write a cookbook cum memoir about her time in Zakouma. "Everything here was produced at Zakouma or around Chad." The menu, likewise, is distinctly Chadian albeit with Moroccan and Libyan flair, and with wine imported from France. At dinner I could not stop gorging on the homemade bread that Ms. Sparks baked that afternoon and served alongside a rich mutton and fresh vegetable stew perfumed with cinnamon, turmeric, harissa and Senegalese pepper. But that didn't prevent me from going for seconds on dessert, a cloud light chocolate mousse flavored with dried ginger and other spices sourced from the local market. As we chatted at an open air table under the stars and a fat, bright moon, we were interrupted by the occasional buffalo bellow from somewhere in the darkness. By day, there is no shortage of exploring to be done. Zakouma's famous elephants are always a game drive highlight; after spotting the herd from the air, I was lucky enough to be able to take a walking safari to see them up close on my first day in the park. We heard them before we saw them deep chortling and growling sounds coming from the thick brush. Quietly and ever so slowly approaching them, with the Labuschagnes in the lead, we were able to watch adults and several babies enjoying a late afternoon lunch of leaves and grass, not 50 feet away. The elephants, however, are not the only draw. Visitors can also view herds of buffalo and tiang a type of antelope in numbers rarely seen elsewhere, and the park hosts an estimated 950 Kordofan giraffes almost half of the world's remaining population of that imperiled subspecies. Lions, cheetahs and leopards may be spotted during the day, while night brings out a parade of smaller carnivores, including serval, genets, civets, pale foxes and honey badgers. Zakouma is also a birder's wonderland, boasting nearly 400 species, including migrants from both the northern and southern hemispheres. I was treated to an aerial display of awe inspiring proportions on my last evening there as spur winged geese, black crowned cranes and millions of red billed quelea came in to roost, filling the sky like animated confetti. "The best word to describe what makes Zakouma so special is 'abundance,'" said Stuart Slabbert, African Parks' conservation led economic development manager. "You'll see four or five lion prides on one drive, a couple hundred endangered giraffes and birds in the millions." Sightings of any given species are not a guarantee, however a fact that only contributes to Zakouma's sense of discovery. I did not see any big cats while I was there, for example, but a group that arrived days before me saw several. "In South Africa, the rangers know where the game is and you know you're going to see your Big Five," said Josh Iremonger, a Botswana based private guide who often leads tours in Zakouma. "But at Zakouma you do feel like you're on this expedition and you don't know what you're going to see." Because Chad remains one of the least visited nations in the world, visitors are also rewarded by an entire park virtually to themselves. When Mr. Iremonger leads groups there, he often goes days without seeing another vehicle, save for those of the rangers and of locals passing through on public roads. "Whereas if you go to the Maasai Mara or to the Serengeti or to certain parts of Botswana, it's going to be chockablock with vehicles," he said. Yet getting to Zakouma is easier than you might expect: I flew Air France directly from Paris to Chad's capital, N'Djamena, and African Parks arranges chartered flights from there. Once on the ground, guests often pursue specific interests such as photography or birding, or they may simply be lured in by the promise of a destination largely unexplored, Ms. Sparks said. Virtually all, however, are passionate about wildlife conservation. For such people, Zakouma is not only an ideal destination for its inspiring story and the animal viewing opportunities it offers, but also for a chance to directly support such endeavors. Following a core principle of the African Parks model, all visitor profits go toward park management and projects in local communities, including building schools. The plan is to increase those profits by broadening Zakouma's international appeal and accessibility through Tinga Camp, a less exclusive but more affordable option than Camp Nomade, priced at 135 to 145 per night. Its 24 rooms, including ones suitable for hosting families, will receive a complete makeover in 2018. "We're trying to open the doors to Chad for more and more people," Ms. Sparks said. "You'll get an incredible trip, and you'll be helping the elephants." One morning during my stay at Tinga Camp, I enjoyed my coffee on an elevated porch just feet from two male elephants grazing in the bushes before me. As the 13,000 pound animals stripped branches from trees and munched absent mindedly on leaves, the few other tourists staying there a group from the United States embassy, escaping N'Djamena for a long weekend gathered to snap photos. It suddenly struck me just how drastically the elephants' world has changed in the last few years. People formerly their hunters and killers are now their protectors and saviors. This fact did not appear to be lost on the elephants: relaxed and accommodating, they seemed content to share their space with us. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Can a parade of new mid rise apartment buildings turn an ugly duckling of a street into a swan? For the better part of two decades, city officials and business owners have been trying, with modest success, to revamp Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, the seven mile thoroughfare that stretches from Park Slope to Bay Ridge and is often criticized for being ungainly, overly busy and even dangerous. Now a spate of rentals and condos, together with improvements like bike lanes and zoning changes that allow taller buildings, finally have real estate professionals optimistic about the long awaited makeover. "This will someday be like Park Avenue," said David Ennis, the chief executive of the Daten Group, the developer behind 575 Fourth Avenue, a 70 unit condo in South Park Slope that began sales this month . Hedging a bit, Mr. Ennis added, "We at least think Fourth Avenue will be completely different." But there's little doubt that development is shifting into high gear. More than two dozen condos and rentals have recently opened, are underway or are planned, according to Halstead Property Development Marketing. Most are concentrated along Fourth Avenue's northern half, like Mr. Ennis's condo, a charcoal toned, 11 story structure at Prospect Avenue that took the place of an auto body shop, next to the Prospect Expressway. With a mix of one to four bedroom units, plus a pair of townhouses, 575 Fourth offers amenities like a roughly 9,000 square foot courtyard with lawns, benches and pergola shaded grills. Truck noise won't interfere with a barbecue, Mr. Ennis promised: "It's secluded." Farther north, a different auto body shop and car detailing business near President Street is being replaced by Parlour, a dun brick condo with arched windows at 243 Fourth Avenue. Developed by Brodmore Management, the 12 story building, which began selling in March, is offering 19 two to five bedroom units starting at 1.7 million. Perhaps no developer has taken more interest in the corridor than Adam America Real Estate, which has undertaken more than a half dozen projects since 595 Baltic Street, a rental, opened in 2017. Other rental buildings include No. 470, which is open, and Nos. 535 and 555, which will welcome tenants later this year. Also among Adam America's latest projects is Arbor Eighteen, a condo at 185 18th Street being codeveloped with CGI Strategies in the Greenwood Heights neighborhood. The building has 73 units, which sell for about 1,200 a square foot, or starting at 565,000 for a studio. It came to market in January and is set to open by the end of the year, said Omri Sachs, an Adam America co founder. There, too, developers are offering owners a way to tune out traffic, courtesy of a tucked away courtyard that's lush with bamboo and ferns. But if that doesn't do the trick, they say residents can leave the tree challenged block and head to nearby Prospect Park (which is nearly a mile away). A rendering of Parlour, a condo at 243 Fourth Avenue that is offering 19 two to five bedroom units starting at 1.7 million. A few blocks closer is Green Wood Cemetery, the sprawling historical landmark that is a bullet point in Arbor Eighteen's marketing campaign. "It's a place where people can go with their strollers," Mr. Sachs said. The building's location, Mr. Sachs added, is also ideal for Manhattan commuters. An R subway station that also offers occasional D, N and W service is a block away; the financial district can be reached in about 25 minutes. For years, Fourth Avenue served almost like an electric fence, especially for those coming from points east, corralling people into Park Slope, residents say. "It was a psychological barrier, 100 percent. Fourth was never your destination," said Carly Robins, who last year traded a two bedroom condo in Boerum Hill, where she had lived for 12 years, for a three bedroom condo on Fourth Avenue, in the Park Slope section. The apartment, at 613 Baltic, a 43 unit building from JDS Development Group, cost 2 million, said Ms. Robins, who works as a voice over actress. Since the condo kicked off sales in 2015, it has struggled to find takers for its one to three bedrooms, which currently average 1,500 a square foot. The least expensive two bedroom in early April was 1.48 million. Brown Harris Stevens took over marketing last October at the building, which has nine units left. Across Brooklyn, the average sales price for new condos in the first quarter of 2019 was 1.06 million, down about 20 percent from the same period last year, according to Douglas Elliman Real Estate. But Tim Simmons, the Brown Harris Stevens associate broker in charge of sales at 613 Baltic, said that a sluggish luxury market, and not the shortcomings of the street, is the reason. "I never had the same prejudice against Fourth Avenue that people who lived in Brooklyn do," said Mr. Simmons, who relocated to the area in 2017 after 15 years in Manhattan. In fact, Fourth Avenue reminds him of Tenth Avenue in West Chelsea, before the creation of the High Line a conveyance for vehicles without much in the way of foot traffic. Fourth Avenue will change "fundamentally in the next five or 10 years," he said. There's been no shortage of plans to spur investment. In 2003, city officials rezoned a 17 block chunk in Park Slope to encourage apartment buildings with as many as 12 stories, significantly higher than the five story walk ups that had dominated the street . In 2005, a nine block segment in Greenwood Heights got similar treatment. Ditto for Sunset Park and its length of Fourth Avenue, in 2009. But government intervention has its limits. Despite the zoning changes, the street still lacks the classic Brooklyn streetscape of boutiques and independent restaurants. A more familiar sight might be a place to order cheap cheeseburgers from a drive through window, especially as you head south. Recognizing that development wasn't solving all of the avenue's problems, city officials amended much of Fourth Avenue's zoning in 2011. Today, from 24th Street north to Atlantic Avenue, the city requires that stores take up at least half of the ground floor in new buildings, to avoid extra large apartment lobbies or other sidewalk deadening uses. Rezoned areas could also get rezoned again. A plan is afoot to change the look and use of the Gowanus neighborhood, which extends west of Fourth Avenue. Under the current proposal, blocks from 15th Street to Pacific Street would be changed to allow for buildings of up to 17 stories, from the current 12 stories. The city is expected to launch the official review process next winter. "If the rezoning happens, it will be like a development frenzy," Mr. Sachs said. At the same time, this wide street with skinny median strips is the continuing target of a comprehensive, if slow moving, makeover. About a decade ago, the Bay Ridge section of Fourth Avenue was deemed one of the most dangerous streets for pedestrians in the region. But after improvements were made in 2014, including extended curbs and extra crosswalks, the accident rate fell. Similarly, reducing the number of driving lanes in Park Slope made the street safer there, too. In addition, the Department of Transportation has promised to add bike lanes, install sculptures, elevate median strips and plant trees in the medians, according to plans. Located at 267 Sixth Street, at the site of a former gas station that required a special cleanup, the glassy 104 unit rental offers studios to two bedrooms. One bedrooms this month started at about 3,000. In Brooklyn, one bedrooms averaged 2,900 last month, according to Elliman. "Everything is very positive over there," Mr. Naftali said. The surge in luxury housing, and its upward pressure on rents, is squeezing out longtime residents, said Trevorn Frederick, the owner of New Prospective Realty, a two year old firm with an office on Fourth Avenue near 21st Street. Already, Park Slopers are being displaced to Sunset Park, said Ms. Frederick, who has worked in the area for years. "Sometimes people's incomes just do not support what's in the market," she said. And while she likes that there are fewer carwashes around, Ms. Frederick does not want Fourth Avenue to completely give up its automotive ways. "Those parking spaces are really nice," she said, "when I bring my laundry to the laundromat." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The shift is an eco friendly measure, he said, and not related to public pressure from activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has been petitioning Canada Goose to stop using fur since at least 2006. Four years ago, the advocacy organization introduced a full scale campaign against the company, urging supporters to protest and boycott. While not all of Canada Goose's jackets are made with fur, the company's unapologetic commitment to fur has been making headlines ever since. In addition to organizing demonstrations, erecting billboards and plastering fliers around the company's brick and mortar stores, PETA has waged court battles over its freedom to advertise against Canada Goose and filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about the company's animal sourcing claims. In 2017, PETA acquired stock in the company, a tactic that allows activists to file shareholder resolutions detailing their demands and causing some corporate chaos. Just last week, PETA said it had submitted a proposal calling for the company to stop using coyote fur and goose down. (Regarding goose down, the company announced in its sustainability report that by 2021, it planned to be fully certified in the Responsible Down Standard a commitment adopted by companies like the North Face and Eddie Bauer to not use down from farms that force feed or pluck from live birds. PETA has criticized the standard's creators as "protecting companies, not animals.") Still, Mr. Reiss said the new fur policy was not a response to external pressure. "The fact that we've been targeted did not factor into this decision at all," he said. To wit, "we're still using fur," he said, even if it is reclaimed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Any New Yorker who is able to do so ought to vote early and in person. The news this week that the city's Board of Elections sent defective absentee ballots to nearly 100,000 voters makes this need clear. The board has caused problems for years, from long lines at the polls to illegal voter purges. This week, tens of thousands of voters, mostly in Brooklyn, opened their absentee ballots to find someone else's name printed on the envelope they are meant to mail back, making the ballots unusable. Board of Elections officials said that a vendor, Phoenix Graphics, was to blame. Phoenix Graphics said Wednesday that it would send new ballots to New Yorkers at no cost. The board needs to hold the company to that promise, without delay. It would be helpful for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other state officials to support the effort as well. In addition, New Yorkers should remember that they can now vote early, thanks to state election reforms signed into law last year. Early voting starts on Oct. 24 for the November election. (New Yorkers can find their polling location at the B.O.E. website.) That change, which was long overdue, will help mitigate crowds and allow in person voting to happen more safely during the coronavirus pandemic though the practice is thought to be relatively low risk at any rate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A conceptual and artistic triumph, NBC's live telecast of "Jesus Christ Superstar" on Easter Sunday may have finally justified the recent live musical fad on network TV. Some technical flubs and one mixed bag lead performance aside, the production was genuinely thrilling, taking chances with the staging of a classic but controversial Broadway show, much more daring than previous live musical broadcasts like "The Sound of Music" or "Peter Pan." With the R B hitmaker John Legend playing Jesus Christ, Sara Bareilles as Mary Magdalene and Brandon Victor Dixon as Judas Iscariot, NBC's "Superstar" didn't lack for talent or star power, drawn as it was from the worlds of pop and theater. The real masterstroke, though, was the decision to perform live before a large audience at the Marcy Avenue Armory in Brooklyn. The energy of the crowd clearly goosed the cast, counteracting the over prepared stodginess that hampers so many of these specials. And the crowd's passionate whooping underscored one of the musical's central themes: the dangers of uncritical celebrity worship. Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, "Jesus Christ Superstar" has long held something of a surprise place in the modern theatrical canon. Debuting in 1970 as a rock opera album, it made the leap to Broadway in 1971 and was nominated for five Tonys winning none. The 1973 movie adaptation by the director Norman Jewison was a box office hit, but it is rarely touted as one of its era's great films. John Legend, Sara Bareilles and their co stars on "Superstar." Told largely from Judas's point of view, the story closely follows biblical accounts of Christ's arrest and crucifixion in Jerusalem, while adding substantial criticism of Jesus's followers; his communion with disreputable people; and his open, dangerous antagonism of both the Jewish and the Roman authorities. The musical then pushes back against its own skepticism, depicting the powers that be as corrupt, cynical and manipulative, exploiting the anxieties of Judas and the other apostles. In the years immediately after its premiere, the musical raised eyebrows and ire with its decidedly nontraditional spin on Christ's last days. By considering Jesus more as a cultural phenomenon than as a divine figure, and by exhibiting as much sympathy for Judas as for the man he betrayed, Mr. Webber and Mr. Rice delivered an interpretation of the Passion Play as radical in its way as director Martin Scorsese's much protested film "The Last Temptation of Christ" did in 1988. NBC's version showed reverence primarily toward the original musical, which for decades has told an ancient story in a way that pushes the audience to reconsider its relevance to the world today. Directed by David Leveaux and Alex Rudzinski, it respected the source material's sublime ambiguities, which many nonreligious fans have interpreted as subversive just as some pop culture savvy Christians have clung to it as a refreshingly tuneful, exultant expression of how faith can triumph over doubt. As Jesus, Mr. Legend delivered where it counted, putting his rich, soulful voice to work in seamless performances of well loved songs like "Everything's Alright" (in duet with the equally accomplished Ms. Bareilles) and "Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)." Mr. Legend was less impressive as an actor. This was a song only production, with zero dialogue, but it did require Mr. Legend to react which he tended to do with a broad facial expression best described as, "John Legend is worried." The powerful and charismatic Mr. Dixon more than compensated for any of the headliner's shortcomings. Given what "Jesus Christ Superstar" ultimately says about idols and the people in their shadow, it is appropriate that this production was dominated by a Broadway veteran best known for replacing Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr in the Tony winning smash "Hamilton." This show has always been less about the titular "superstar" than about the people surrounding him. This theme was evident in the telecast's staging. In the early going, audience noise sometime overloaded the sound mix, making it hard to hear the lyrics. But by urging the crowd to go bananas every time Mr. Legend sang or even moved, the creative team reinforced the idea that perhaps the masses gathered around Jesus weren't paying close attention to his actual message. The set design and costuming were effectively minimalist, with a vaguely post apocalyptic "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" feel. Exposed scaffolding, freshly painted graffiti and a teeming horde of shabby looking extras added to the overall vibe of controlled chaos. That mayhem occasionally gave way to moments of startling clarity, including: Alice Cooper's magnificently scenery chewing performance of "King Herod's Song"; Mr. Dixon's rousing take on the show's big anthem, "Superstar"; and a miraculous bit of stagecraft during the crucifixion, in which Mr. Legend's Jesus seemed to disappear into another dimension. Give a lot of credit to the network, and to Mr. Legend, who was one of this broadcast's executive producers (along with Mr. Lloyd Webber, Mr. Rice, and the televised theater veterans Neil Meron, Marc Platt and Craig Zadan). A live musical about Jesus on Easter Sunday may seem like a safe choice, catering to an audience that has made Christian themed movies like "I Can Only Imagine" into hits. But from the multicultural cast to its deconstruction of religious iconography, this "Jesus Christ Superstar" was as thoughtful and challenging as the show has ever been. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In an effort to entice visitors, some hotels in Napa are offering attractive deals. At the upscale Meadowood Napa Valley, guests who book a three night stay through a travel adviser get a fourth night for free. The offer is valid from Nov. 15 to April 30, 2018, and rates start at 600. Those who book their stay with an adviser who is part of the Virtuoso travel network also receive 50 credit to use toward breakfast, 100 to use at the resort's spa, a box of chocolates and, depending on availability, a room upgrade and early check in/late checkout. Find a Virtuoso adviser on virtuoso.com. Solage and Calistoga Ranch, both Auberge Resorts, are offering a second free night on stays arriving Sunday to Wednesday and a third free night on stays arriving Thursday to Saturday. The offers are valid to March 31. Nightly rates at Solage begin at 425; reserve by calling 866 942 7442. Nightly rates at Calistoga Ranch begin at 725; reserve by calling 855 942 4220. Travelers who book their stay at Solage through a Virtuoso adviser also get daily breakfast, a 100 resort credit, a bottle of wine, a mudslide treatment at the property's spa and a room upgrade as well as an early check in/late checkout, depending on availability. At Calistoga, Virtuoso amenities include breakfast, a wine tasting at several Napa wineries and, depending on availability, a room upgrade and early check in/late checkout. Bel Abri Napa Valley Inn, a 15 room boutique property, has nightly rates starting at 149 between Dec. 1 and March 1, 2018. Stays include breakfast and a nightly wine and cheese tasting. Book by calling 877 561 6000. Napa River Inn has a Dinners on Us package, inclusive of accommodations, a welcome basket of fruit and chocolates, room service breakfast from the locally renowned Sweetie Pies Bakery and 100 dining credit each night of a stay to use at a choice four restaurants, all within walking distance from the property. Valid until Jan. 30 and on weekdays thereafter. Nightly rates start at 269. Book by calling 877 251 8500. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
LONDON The London real estate market was abuzz. A wealthy Greek banker wanted to spend up to PS60 million (nearly 100 million) for a home, and was in a hurry to make a deal. Real estate agents recall sifting the listings for some of the most prestigious, and expensive, properties in South Kensington, a favored area for London's international set. But the house hunter, Lavrentis Lavrentiadis, never made a purchase in the spring of 2011, agents say. Within months his failing institution, a small lender known as Proton Bank, was seized. The Greek government, suspecting that Mr. Lavrentiadis may have moved money out of the country, is now investigating his activities to determine whether he engaged in fraud and money laundering. Greece, heavily in debt and desperate to track down money wherever it can, is leaving no stone unturned. Mr. Lavrentiadis has denied the accusations, and his lawyer did not respond to questions about any interest his client might have had in London properties. But the Greek banker's rumored flirtation with this city's prime real estate market, and the frenzy it stirred among sales agents, is telling. At the request of the Athens government, the British financial authorities recently handed over a detailed list of about 400 Greek individuals who have bought and sold London properties since 2009. The list, closely guarded, has not been publicly disclosed. But Greek officials are examining it to determine whether the people named who they say include prominent businessmen, bankers, shipping tycoons and professional athletes have deceived the tax authorities by understating their wealth. "These people have money and they are known but it is not clear yet if they have violated any laws," said Haris Theoharis, an official in the Greek Finance Ministry. Tax investigators have been examining the list to see whether there is any overlap between those who bought London properties and those already identified as being tax cheats. The Greek government, under pressure from its international lenders to raise 13.5 billion euros ( 17.4 billion) through tax increases and spending cuts, is intent on making the well heeled share the burden. Studies have shown that the country may be forgoing as much as 30 billion euros a year in uncollected taxes, with a significant portion of that amount having been shipped out of the country as the affluent seek shelter from Greece's financial storm. This week, the government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras opened an investigation into the bank accounts of more than 30 Greek politicians to determine whether they should be charged with tax evasion and the illegal accumulation of wealth. The politicians on the list included the president of the Greek Parliament, Evangelos Meimarakis, creating an embarrassing distraction for Mr. Samaras's coalition government. Mr. Meimarakis is a former defense minister who has also been implicated in accusations concerning a money laundering network said to involve two other former ministers. London, long a magnet for foreign real estate investors, has become a special focus for Greek officials trying to track down money taken from the country. Bankers say that accounts in Singapore and even in the country of Georgia have become favorite destinations for fleeing funds, more so than the traditional haven of Switzerland, because the looser rules and regulations of those countries about accepting large sums of foreign money. But while Singapore and Switzerland have been reluctant to divulge information about its Greek clientele, the British government has been more cooperative in sharing its real estate records. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. There is an air of desperation to this Athens fund raising drive, which includes leasing out empty Greek islands and even putting up for sale the former residence of the Greek consul general in the tony London neighborhood of Holland Park. But with Greece's membership in the euro at stake, every conceivable revenue raising strategy is being pursued, even if it remains unclear how successful it will be. "Greeks are panicking," said Sandy Triantopoulou von Croy of EPPC, a real estate firm in London that does a lot of work with Greek clients. "They just do not know what to do with their money." Mr. Lavrentiadis was not the only bank chief to dabble in London real estate. Theodoros Pantalakis, a former chief executive of Agricultural Bank of Greece, another ailing lender, caused a stir in Athens this year when it was revealed that in 2011 he transferred 8 million euros abroad with the intent of buying a property in London. Mr. Pantalakis has said that the authorities were informed of the transaction and that the appropriate taxes were paid. Greek money, along with wealth from China, Russia and various other countries, has kept the high end of London's property market buoyant despite or maybe because of the global financial turmoil. According to research by Savills, a London based property company, PS20 billion of foreign money has been invested in prime residential real estate here since 2006. The biggest year on record was 2011, when foreigners snapped up PS5.2 billion worth of new residences. With economic uncertainty in the euro zone increasing this year, demand for these properties in 2012 shows no sign of letting up, real estate agents say. Investors from Italy and France have been most prominent in using London properties as a hedge against the euro. But the Greek influx has been especially striking. Officials in Greece examining these transactions estimate that about 250 Greeks invested more than PS100 million in prime London residences in 2009 and 2010, according to records collected with the assistance of the British government. As the crisis grew worse last year and this year, government officials say it is likely that the inflows increased. Not everyone, of course, was looking for a PS60 million manse as Mr. Lavrentiadis was said to have done. Even in London, with its enclaves of billionaire oligarchs and sheiks, such requests do not frequently roll around. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Carnegie Hall opened its new season on Wednesday with a determinedly festive gala program featuring Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. Guest stars Renee Fleming and Audra McDonald sang opera and musical theater favorites wonderfully, and there was Gershwin galore, including a stylish account of "An American in Paris." But the real start of the season, for me, came the next night when Mr. Thomas returned with his San Francisco players for a Stravinsky program. Mr. Thomas is presenting a Perspectives series at Carnegie throughout the season, and if Thursday's program did not look that adventurous on paper, bracketed by two staples, the mix of pieces was telling and the performances were thrilling. He opened with "Petrouchka" and ended with "Le Sacre du Printemps" ("The Rite of Spring"). In between, Mr. Thomas led the 1931 Violin Concerto. It might have seemed curious to include this astringent Neo Classical score alongside the teeming "Petrouchka" and still shocking "Sacre." But with the violinist Leonidas Kavakos as soloist, the performance emphasized the rhythmically jagged and harmonically crunchy elements of the music in a way that made the concerto seem radical on its own terms. Though the concerto doesn't turn up on orchestra programs that often, it's a staple of the New York City Ballet (including this season), one of many Stravinsky scores that George Balanchine choreographed. On Thursday night, by coincidence, the New York Philharmonic also performed the concerto, with Leila Josefowicz as soloist, on Jaap van Zweden's latest program as the orchestra's music director. I caught the second performance on Friday, a rare chance to hear contrasting, and equally exciting, accounts of an elusive score. The opening Toccata nods to the heritage of that Baroque era form, which typically involves lively tempos and rapid fire runs. Stravinsky's toccata unfolds in animated strands, full of spiraling figures for the violin and bursts of dancing chords. But the music is continuously fractured and disrupted. Playing with rhythmic bite and a touch of impishness, Mr. Kavakos made it seem like Stravinsky had intriguingly reassembled the broken pieces of a toccata in the wrong order. Mr. Kavakos captured the ambiguity of the mellow Aria I movement, which shifts between nervously skittish and melodically yearning passages. Aria II finally gives the soloist a chance to spin out long lyrical phrases, though they wander unpredictably. Playing with emphatic brio and earthy tone, Mr. Kavakos captured the manic energy of the discombobulating Capriccio finale. One reason this concerto is not a top choice for violinists looking to make an impression with an orchestra appearance is that Stravinsky often keeps the soloist in a seemingly subordinate role: taking a turn trading phrases with solos in the orchestra; dispatching repetitive riffs to prop up some forceful episode in the strings or winds. But at the Philharmonic on Friday the brilliant Ms. Josefowicz was having none of that. One of the most dynamic musicians of her generation, Ms. Josefowicz seized on every phrase of the violin part to bring out its character and musical content. She made the most of each moment, playing with brightness, mystery, eagerness whatever the music called for. Mr. van Zweden drew vibrant, punchy playing from the orchestra. This program, overall, was the most successful of his tenure so far. I had had doubts over the level of Mr. van Zweden's commitment to contemporary music. But each of his programs so far has opened with a compelling performance of an ambitious premiere. This time it was Louis Andriessen's episodic and mercurial "Agamemnon," a 20 minute tone poem inspired by Greek antiquity. The lavishly orchestrated score abounds in raucous, militaristic fanfares; eerie high pitched chords and grumbling percussion, all to suggest the warlike atmosphere that permeates Agamemnon's public and family lives. Mr. Andriessen, a Dutch modernist master, has been deeply influenced by jazz. But as in other works of his, the jazz elements here are processed through his acute ear and powerful imagination. Bouts of thick, piercing chords make the orchestra fleetingly sound like a modern day big band; frenetic thematic lines, for all their pointillist leaps and intensity, almost seem improvised. Under Mr. van Zweden, a fellow Dutchman, the Philharmonic will be exploring the music of Mr. Andriessen this month. On this thoughtfully conceived program, the Andriessen piece led to the Stravinsky concerto. After intermission came an austerely beautiful account of Stravinsky's tartly sonorous Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Stravinsky dedicated this 1920 work to his friend Debussy, who had died in 1918. So it made both musical and biographical sense to end with Debussy's "La Mer." While at times the performance led by Mr. van Zweden was overly emphatic, as is his penchant, it was certainly a bold, almost cinematic "La Mer." After Mr. van Zweden opened the Philharmonic season with an alternately bombastic and ponderous account of Stravinsky's "Sacre," it was a treat to hear the extraordinary performance Mr. Thomas led at Carnegie. The Introduction to Part I sounded newly suspenseful and dangerous, especially during the more subdued passages. When the Dance of the Adolescent Girls broke out, Mr. Thomas at first kept the lid on the pounding chords and dark, folk line tunes. We had a long buildup ahead of us, and Mr. Thomas, with savvy theatrical instincts, wanted to take us there step by step. So when the savage, frenzied episodes came, the music sounded all the more harrowing. The entire performance was riveting, and elicited an exuberant ovation from the audience. Mr. Thomas's Perspectives series is off to a great start. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
According to the Krebs on Security blog, several recipients of this particular blackmail campaign observed that the password included in the message was old, some by about a decade, and not currently in use. For those who haven't changed their passwords in years, the ruse could appear more realistic, and the hustle itself may become fine tuned as the perpetrators weave in fresher bits of stolen user data. Updating your passwords frequently is a good security practice. So is adding two factor authentication to verify your identity beyond the password, by use of unique codes generated by text, authenticator apps or special USB keys plugged into the computer. If you have a lot of passwords to wrangle, keep track of them in a secure password manager program; Wirecutter, a product review site owned by The New York Times, recommends LastPass. You can report phishing incidents on the F.B.I.'s Internet Crime Complaint Center site. Personal Tech invites questions about computer based technology to techtip nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
LUPITA NYONG'O: Good evening. We are the two actors you keep hearing about but whose names you have trouble pronouncing. KUMAIL NANJIANI: Actually, I have to come clean. Kumail Nanjiani is my stage name. My actual given Pakistani name is Chris Pine. So you can imagine how annoyed I was when the other when the white Chris Pine showed up. The "real" Chris Pine. NYONG'O: We are also immigrants. I'm from Kenya. NANJIANI: And I'm from Kenya is in the house. And I am from Pakistan and Iowa. Two places that nobody in Hollywood can find on a map. NYONG'O: And like everyone in this room, and everyone watching at home, we are dreamers. We grew up dreaming of one day working in movies. Dreams are the foundation of Hollywood. And dreams are the foundation of America. NANJIANI: And so to all the dreamers out there, we stand with you. Now, the nominees for achievement in production design. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
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