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LA FORZA DEL DESTINO Stream on Metopera.org. The venerable soprano Leontyne Price stars in this 1984 Metropolitan Opera production of Verdi's "La Forza del Destino," a somber tragedy set in 18th century Spain and Italy. This production is near the end of Price's Met career she retired from opera the following year and in a review for The New York Times, Will Crutchfield wrote that her "low notes have lost focus, the high ones strength and vibrancy." But, he added, "In between she has preserved to an extraordinary degree the core of beauty that made her unique. With a broad lyrical line she can still bring tears to the eyes." DADS Stream on Apple TV Plus. Bryce Dallas Howard directed this new, feature length documentary, which includes interviews with celebrity fathers, such as Will Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Conan O'Brien, Neil Patrick Harris, Judd Apatow and Howard's own dad, the director Ron Howard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
MELBOURNE, Australia Simona Halep of Romania is ranked No. 1 in the world in women's tennis. Last season, she won her first Grand Slam title, on the red clay of Roland Garros. On Monday night at Melbourne Park, she faced an opponent who, if judged by the numerical listing spit out by the pro tour's computer, should have been handled by Halep with relative ease. Except that player, currently ranked 16th in the world, is no slouch. That player, in fact, is Serena Williams, pure greatness in fishnet tights. Halep versus Williams in the round of 16 was a rare moment in tennis. It was a match in which the top ranked player was also the decided underdog. Not only was Halep facing a formidable opponent with 23 major titles, seven of them in Melbourne alone, but she was also confronting someone who had dominated their career head to head matchups, winning eight times and losing just once. So it was hardly a shock that Williams ended up improving that record on Monday, rolling past the 27 year old Halep by a 6 1, 4 6, 6 4 score. In the quarterfinals, Williams will now face seventh seeded Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic, who easily defeated Garbine Muguruza of Spain, 6 3, 6 1, to advance. Williams has beaten Pliskova twice in three matches, but the one loss came in the United States Open semifinals in 2016. Pliskova, meanwhile, has won all nine matches she has played this season. Williams will be the lower ranked player when they meet but is again the actual favorite. "I have to return better, but I will be ready," Williams vowed as she looked ahead to Pliskova. "She's ready, I'm ready, let's do it." It was vintage Serena confidence. And it also stood in contrast to her demeanor at the very beginning of her match against Halep. In those opening moments, Williams actually seemed shaky. She lost her first service game, the product of uncharacteristically poor shot making and a clunky double fault. Game after game flew by, six straight in all decided in Williams's favor. At the age of 37, she simply did not allow her younger opponent to find her rhythm. Total time for the opening set: 20 minutes. "I felt like I'd been hit by a train," Halep would say later. "I played really good," Williams said when asked about that first set. She spoke in a plain, matter of fact tone. A question came: "Were those six straight games the best you had played since coming back last year after the baby was born?" Still, Halep is among the most tenacious fighters in tennis, and as the match progressed, she began extending the rallies, which is more to her liking and style. She began serving better, fending off Williams's attacks. "I felt that my level is growing," Halep said afterward. "And I had more confidence." And after capturing the second set, there was a brief period in the third when Halep appeared to have Williams on the ropes. Williams looked fatigued, her movements slower and less sure. But midway through that final set, Williams fended off three crucial break points. In the last, she pinned Halep into a corner and blasted a backhand winner down the line. As happens so often in tennis, Halep had trouble bouncing back from missing such an important opening. And as happens so often when Williams seems to be in trouble, she broke serve in the next game, seizing control with a string of strong baseline replies. Afterward, Halep was asked about the dynamics of taking on Williams, and whose confidence should have been higher when the match began. "You are ranked No. 1, and she is Serena Williams," the questioner began before Halep politely cut him off. That one word response said it all, for Halep and for all of the women not named Serena who end up at the top of the computer rankings so long as she is playing. Williams now seems to be closing in on her old form after taking time off following the 2017 birth of her daughter. Even with that layoff, Williams still made the finals at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open last year. At the U.S. Open, she lost the final to Naomi Osaka in a swirl of controversy and accusations of sexism. Williams is on a collision course with Osaka again. Seeded fourth in Melbourne, Osaka advanced to the quarterfinals with a 4 6, 6 3, 6 4 victory over Anastasija Sevastova on Monday. Osaka next plays sixth seeded Elina Svitolina and could face Williams in the semifinals. Williams's goal is clear and right there for the taking. If she wins her next three matches, she wins her 24th Grand Slam title, at last equaling the Australian great Margaret Court's total of major singles championships. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
DISNEY'S LAND Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World Those who knew Walt Disney often described him as an uncomplicated man of conventional 20th century sensibilities: a lover of model trains, farm animals, lunch wagon food, hard work, evening belts of scotch and endless Chesterfield cigarettes. One of his rituals upon coming home from his movie studio was feeding his poodle, Duchess, a cold frankfurter, or "wienie," by leading her from room to room while throwing pieces on the floor. When he was designing what is arguably one of America's great physical masterpieces, Disneyland, he explained that he wanted to coax visitors through the park with a series of visual delights that he called "wienies": Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Moonliner, the Mark Twain riverboat, the carefully riotous verdure of the Jungle Cruise. The clockwork of the park and to some extent, the personality of the man who created it receives an expert inspection in Richard Snow's new history "Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World." This is primarily a construction saga, albeit a highly readable one set in an anxious nation that didn't know it needed Disneyland until Walt provided it. What America didn't lack in the 1950s was industrial capability, engineering know how and World War II logistical experience. Disney commandeered all of it. He was a generous kind of authoritarian; the park was indisputably his own vision, but he encouraged free flowing creativity from below. A publicist named Marty Sklar, for instance, devised the key insight that Disney didn't have carnival rides so much as it had "stories" that provoked intellectual free play. The management expert Van Arsdale France concocted a training program that serves as a corporate model today, with customers regarded with unfailing courtesy as guests. And the seductive arrangements of trees that soften the edges of the "lands," as different sections of the park are called, are the legacy of the landscape architect Ruth Shellhorn. No detail is too small for Snow: the sandy topsoil in Anaheim that resembled tiny ball bearings, Disney's habit of hiring people without their consent, the fragile aluminum bumpers on the Autopia ride, the park's address of 1313 Harbor Boulevard as a numerical anagram for "Mickey Mouse." All these fine points (one might call them historical wienies) draw upon what Snow acknowledges is "an immense body of literature" about the park, which may be one of the most scrutinized building projects of the last 500 years. It is therefore a disappointment that he includes only an alphabetical list of books and articles instead of endnotes, especially in a narrative full of reconstructed scenes that cries out for firmer sourcing. Snow also includes remembrances of the Disneyland from his childhood that would be perfectly at home in an afterword, but he lodges them distractingly in the second chapter. And for a book, like many others of its historical genre, that purports to show how its subject "changed the world," he gives only brief treatment to the multiple criticisms of Disneyland and its effect on American life. Some of these attacks come from academic reactionaries, certainly, but the park's social legacy calls for more conscientious treatment than three pages, which is significantly less attention than Snow gives to Walt's extended haggle with television networks. Despite these minor shortcomings, the pacing is well timed: Readers are led toward the climax of opening day, July 17, 1955, with narrative wienies aplenty and the whole enterprise is shown as a magnificent amoeba that was as much an accident as a mastered design. Disneyland visitors who know what they're looking for take note of the lamp burning in the partially shaded window above the fire station on Main Street (which is, despite its naked mercantilism, still the most beguiling of the many "lands"). This marks the apartment where Walt and Lillian, his wife, stayed during the most frenzied days of construction. The room is not open to the public, but this book is a worthy peek behind the drapes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LOS ANGELES To celebrate their first home win in 25 days, the Lakers on Sunday dropped streamers that had been collecting dust from the ceiling at Staples Center. The final lineup of the night included Alex Caruso, a 25 year old guard who spent most of the season in the N.B.A.'s developmental G League. Caruso knows things were not supposed to be this way. His mere presence in a crunchtime situation, no less was a vivid sign that the season had gone sideways for the Lakers, who will be watching the playoffs from various vacation destinations. Caruso also knows that the Lakers are playing fairly meaningless games, including Sunday's 111 106 victory over the Sacramento Kings. The Lakers (32 41) have nine more of these to go, starting Tuesday against the Washington Wizards. The buzz of LeBron James's first season as a Laker is gone. The roster will be overhauled again this summer as the franchise, which has not been to the playoffs since 2013, rummages for solutions. "But for me," Caruso said, "these games are really meaningful." The Lakers are searching for motivation wherever they can find it, especially as they head toward an off season of uncertainty. Coach Luke Walton's job status is tenuous at best, and 10 players on the current roster do not have guaranteed deals for next season. Some of them, like Caruso, are trying to showcase their skills in hopes of acquiring N.B.A. work next season. "I think this little stretch has been really good," Caruso said, "because it's finally allowed me to put all that work I've put in over the last two years and show how much I've evolved as a player. That I'm gaining confidence and making strides to get better and better." In 16 appearances for the Lakers this season, Caruso has shot 44.6 percent from the field, averaging 6 points and 2.2 rebounds. Even players who figure to be a part of the franchise's future are focusing on personal growth. A team is always a collection of individuals, but the Lakers' late season emphasis on "me" is particularly understandable. "I need to use these games to develop myself and play with the ball more," the second year forward Kyle Kuzma said recently. The Lakers were not yet mathematically eliminated from playoff contention when they lost to the Knicks at Madison Square Garden on March 17 that would happen five days later but Kuzma stood by his locker in a red leather jumpsuit after the game and spoke about the immediate future. "I'm just trying to use these last 13, 14 games whatever we have to just try to develop good habits," he said. "Season's pretty much over, so that's the only thing I can really do. Everyone knows I'm a good scorer and I can do that. I'm just trying to complete my game." Then there are the injured players who have largely disappeared from view: Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Josh Hart. For them, the end of this season is about rehabbing for the next one. After all the losses, injuries and general dysfunction, Walton continues to preach the importance of team play. Same as ever. "It starts with our effort and how we play and how we compete," he said. "And our guys have been doing a nice job of that, even though we haven't been winning games. Whatever lineups we've been putting out there, they're giving what they have. So that's the No. 1 thing." As for James, these are his first truly inconsequential games since his rookie season with the Cleveland Cavaliers, who finished well out of playoff contention. But even then, he could use the end of the season as an opportunity to hone his abilities and gain experience for future endeavors such as eight consecutive trips to the N.B.A. Finals. "If he's out there on the court, he's going to give what he has," Walton said. "That's probably a better question for him, but I'm getting to know him, and that's the type of person he is: He respects and loves the game. So if he's going to play, he's going to give what he has." James said he appreciated the fans who continued to show up. He also said he owed it to himself to play with genuine effort. "I've always respected the basketball gods," James said, "and if I'm on the floor, I got to try to play as hard as I can or do something to affect the game and not cheat the game." Still, times have changed for the Lakers, who have not been to the playoffs since 2013. Before that, they routinely fixated on the Western Conference standings and the number of wins they would need to make the playoffs. Now, the most important number in their universe is 3 percent as in, their odds of winning the N.B.A. draft lottery. Then again, the Lakers are not the only team that has so little at stake at this stage of the season. Look no further than the Kings, whose push for a playoff berth has deteriorated in recent weeks. Before Sunday's game, Coach Dave Joerger held a brief news conference. No one had much to ask. "I can give you some more stuff," he said. "I mean, it's sunny out. It's spring. It smells like March Madness, Lent and the N.B.A. playoffs. Get the seedings, get it done. Exciting times." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
January is typically a slow month for Paris, but reservations at four and five star luxury hotels slumped by up to 9 percent in the days following the attacks. A throng of visitors huddled outside L'As du Fallafel on the Rue des Rosiers, braving the cold for a taste of the legendary restaurant's takeout shawarma and chickpea fritters. Around them, people jammed onto the narrow cobbled street, dressed in bright scarves, arms loaded with shopping bags and cameras. It was a typical Sunday in the old Jewish quarter of the chic Marais district of Paris, except for one detail: groups of French soldiers in camouflage and bulletproof vests, toting submachine guns with their fingers near the trigger. Less than a month after 17 people were killed at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket in one of the worst terror attacks on France, the government has been maintaining high security around Paris to reassure travelers that the City of Light is safe. Jewish sites, mosques, hotels, department stores, music halls, museums and historic monuments are all under heightened protection, and a security plan called Vigipirate is in place at many sites, requiring visitors to undergo additional checks and bag inspections to enter. Surveillance has also been increased in the Paris Metro and in other high traffic areas. "For visitors, Paris is safe, just as it was before," said Francois Navarro, the managing director of the Paris Region tourist board. "We haven't seen any sign of panic or cancellations from visitors, although for the moment we have to wait and be cautious." Mr. Navarro said the tourism board had received thousands of messages of support and solidarity. Representatives of his office planned to reassure tourism professionals and would be visitors from other countries that Paris was open for business. Not everyone has been put at ease. January is typically a slow month for Paris, which hosted 47 million visitors last year. But reservations at four and five star luxury hotels slumped by up to 9 percent in the days following the attacks, according to MKG Hospitality, a travel study firm. "Paris tourism professionals have been wary for a long time about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the capital," Georges Panayotis, the president of MKG Group, said in a statement. "Given the emotional reaction, it's natural that some visitors would have deferred or canceled their stay." With an additional 10,000 soldiers and 5,000 more police officers being fanned out across France, though, Mr. Panayotis said he expected any downturn to be temporary. Indeed, many travelers who had already made plans for Paris for the most part appeared to stick with them. "I wasn't going to be afraid," said Joanne Negron, 51, who works for a power company in New York and had just arrived in Paris with her daughter, Siobahn Goodwin, 27, an accountant at Booking.com. "If we lived in fear, we wouldn't do anything." Stopping under the stony facade of Notre Dame, where more armed guards patrolled the sidewalks, they noted that security was "all over the place," including at the Marriott hotel near the Opera where they were staying. Ben Takai, 32, an epidemiologist from Washington, D.C., said he had no qualms about visiting amid heightened security. "Seeing soldiers with guns is not alarming we saw that in the States after 9/11," he said, as guards patrolled outside Chez Marianne, a Jewish restaurant on the Rue des Rosiers. "Things happen all over the world," Mr. Takai said, citing attacks by Boko Haram in Nigeria. "But you can't allow that kind of fear to affect your decisions. The world doesn't stop turning." Diego Moreria, 33, a literature teacher from Brazil, had stopped at the Shoah Memorial near the Seine River, where five armed guards stood near the door. Part of his family is Jewish. "Violence is everywhere," he said. "They're shocked in France because 17 people were killed. But in Brazil, you must leave the house every day with personal plans to stay safe." The attacks had also not changed the minds of Muslim tourists from Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, despite concerns within France's Muslim community of possible reprisals, said Bilal Domah, the director of CM Media, a London based events management company. Paris still topped the list of desired destinations for halal tourism, which is worth billions of euros annually to the European economy, he said. "France has open minded people who understand that not all Muslims are the same," he said. Travelers have also been visiting the site of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, where makeshift shrines have been erected. A 10 minute walk from the Bastille, near the rue Nicolas Appert, the site of the newspaper's former offices, Hisashi Kikushina, 28, from Hiroshima, Japan, said he wanted to pay homage to the victims. "I feel moved by what happened," he said. "I came because it's also a way to stand up for free speech." More travelers hovered over flowers strewn outside the Hyper Cacher market, the site of the second attack, this one in a Jewish community near the St. Mande Metro stop in eastern Paris. Mr. Navarro of the tourism board encouraged visitors to take in not just the city's classical monuments, but to venture to sites in ethnically mixed neighborhoods near the suburbs, which he said represented "two faces of the same coin, which is Paris." One highlight is the new Paris Philharmonic, a soaring steel music hall that was recently inaugurated at La Villette, a diverse quarter in the 19th Arrondissement. "We are here to welcome the world," Mr. Navarro said, "whatever their religion or nationality." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
While the subsequent visuals aren't as striking, the drama scarcely ebbs. Howard keeps the focus on the residents of Paradise. Several are introduced in detail as they grapple with how or whether to return. Nearby homes are scarce. The water is contaminated. The school district's superintendent says eight out of nine schools were damaged or destroyed. (We see makeshift classroom space in a mall.) And the residents, while navigating the civic complexities of reconstituting the town, and while living in a place that still poses hazards (a pyrogeographer says that controlled burning will make the woods safer and less prone to spreading fire), also need to care for their health. A film like "Rebuilding Paradise" could be made about other climate change driven catastrophes a notion that the closing montage makes explicit. But this particular movie has a special timeliness: Watching Paradise's high schoolers graduate at their athletic field something initially thought to be improbable inevitably raises the question of how the district will fare through the pandemic. Though it might seem generic in some respects, "Rebuilding Paradise" resonates with the moment. Rebuilding Paradise Rated PG 13 for terrifying fires, and PTSD. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In select theaters and available through virtual cinemas. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
You can't accuse a monitor lizard of being a picky eater. The carnivorous, fork tongued reptiles feed on insects, spiders, bird eggs, mollusks, crabs, fish, amphibians and rodents dead or alive. Deer represent a large portion of the diets of the Komodo dragon, the largest monitor lizard species, which is native to eastern Indonesia. "They'll feed at garbage piles and eat chicken bones. Whatever's available," said Fred Kraus, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan. "They probably would take puppies too, if they get them." Monitor lizards have been found living on the most far flung islands of Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean. For decades, people assumed humans dropped off these unfussy carnivores, turning them into especially threatening ecological invaders. But a study published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science refutes this presumption, demonstrating that the monitor lizards of Palau, the Western Caroline Islands and the Mariana Islands are previously undescribed species native to those islands. The team of scientists argues that the lizards likely rode ocean currents up to 1,500 miles in some cases, from Indonesia northeastward, where they naturally colonized these Pacific islands hundreds of thousands of years ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When the country trio Lady Antebellum announced last month that it would change its Civil War referencing band name to Lady A out of respect for Black people, the group credited the widespread protests against police brutality for revealing "blind spots we didn't even know existed." Barely a day later, another blind spot made itself known: Anita White, a blues singer and Black woman, had been using the stage name Lady A for over 20 years. "This is my life," she said. In the weeks that followed, an apparent detente between the two parties, initially celebrated on social media by both sides, faltered when representatives for White "demanded a 10 million payment," the band said in a statement on Wednesday. Now, the platinum selling Nashville group has filed a lawsuit that seeks no monetary damages, but asks the court to affirm "a trademark we have held for many years." The trio, whose suit says it began using the nickname Lady A not long after it formed in 2006, said that it was not aiming to have White change her moniker, but seeking to protect itself from further litigation. The group first applied to register "Lady A" for use in music, videos, live performances and merchandise in 2010, the suit says, adding "no oppositions were filed by any person or entity, including White." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
In his new Netflix special, "Standup for Drummers," Fred Armisen adopts the distinctively skeptical tone of an observational comedian when asking, "Do we ever need to bring our own cymbals?" The audience, made up exclusively of drummers, chuckles. Minutes later, he cracks another rhetorical joke: "Is it me or is it just so hard to get a snare drum to be exactly the right way?" It's not just him, but I confess I have no idea what he's talking about. I recognize the rhythms of the joke, and can tease out the general meaning with the help of context, but as a nondrummer, this joke is not intended for me. Nor does it need to be. There's an old school belief that great comedy should work for all audiences. It's never been entirely true. Taste varies wildly, and some of the best comedy, like the finest film or theater or art, can be obscure, esoteric or simply too odd, dirty or absurd to attract the biggest crowds. But in a splintered culture, where there are more options than ever catering to a multitude of types and inclinations, comedians are increasingly aiming for narrower niches. "Standup for Drummers" is the logical extension of this trend, a special representative of the moment, when you create your jokes but also curate your crowd. Of course you don't need to be in that room of drummers to see his special, which is what makes watching it on Netflix disorienting. Mr. Armisen, the "Portlandia" star who's also a drummer, delivers his material as if everyone is deeply conversant with double kick drum pedals and high hats. He appears to want to be relatable, even when he isn't. At times, that makes it seem as if he's doing a spoof, poking fun at the kind of hipster in a bubble character he often lampoons on the IFC series "Portlandia," currently in its eighth and final season. And there is a knowing wink here. But the more you watch, the more his set comes across as a genuine labor of love, comedy he hopes everyone likes, even though it really just caters to a small segment. And what's wrong with that? Drummers laugh, too, and material about them isn't exactly everywhere. You won't find any other stand up special with imitations of Keith Moon, Meg White and Larry Mullen Jr.; or one that pokes fun at the lighting in instructional videos for drummers. And for those who don't know anything about this world, there is fun to be had observing this clubby atmosphere from the outside. Mr. Armisen has long been a bridge between the comedy and music worlds, after his 11 years on "Saturday Night Live" with a job as the bandleader on "Late Night With Seth Meyers." On "Portlandia," he has done sketches filled with musicians like one this year about a reunion of aging punk rockers, which starred Henry Rollins, Krist Novoselic (formerly of Nirvana) and the Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty. Some of "Standup for Drummers" operates as an entertaining history lesson, as when he plays a series of drum kits from different decades, describing how the instrument has changed. Mr. Armisen is much more seasoned as a sketch performer and actor than a stand up and it often shows. His setups are repetitive, his transitions awkward and some of the jokes aren't fully formed. A bit about how he doesn't like blues isn't much more than that. "Aren't crazy people crazy?" is a line that should be cut. But someone with such diverse talents would be wasted toiling away at a comedy club. Mr. Armisen's jokes are at their best when they bleed into sketches, when they lean on characters rather than punch lines in his own voice. In one premise, he says that doo wop was once considered as edgy and angry as heavy metal. Then he puts on some doo wop music and imagines what a kid from the 1950s getting his mind blown would look like. His performance is all flailing limbs and coiled attitude, evoking a whole type in a few brief flourishes. It's something Mr. Armisen specializes in look at his brief appearance as Michael Wolff, the author of "Fire and Fury," on a recent episode of "Saturday Night Live." The skit captures his devil may carelessness in a flip of the hand. Part of what makes him gifted at these caricatures is his perceptive ear for the eccentric ways people talk, pointing out oddball pieces of rhetoric and habits of speech. He also displays a gift for accents. At one point, he puts up a video of a map of America and goes state by state, demonstrating the accent of every major city in the country. It's a marvel, and not entirely off point, since local differences are the kind of thing bands on tour know. It doesn't seem like a joke so much as a feat, and yet he's summing up entire regions with a slight change in intonation or affect. This is fairly subtle work, the kind that also reminds you that we're living in a big, complex country where even people in neighboring states talk differently. There's something wonderful about the idea of trying to speak to everyone. But in our divided, siloed culture, who really believes that's possible? Just as politicians play to their base, comedians now find their specific audiences, and because of social media and podcasts, they can communicate with them more directly than ever. The future of comedy is not in the size of your crowd, but in the depth of its passion. And the connection between performer and fan can be cemented with inside jokes, the shared, exclusive language of close friends. Something is lost in this shift away from monoculture and into aesthetic alcoves, but only the rigidly nostalgic will insist nothing has been gained. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
I got to Wonder Valley, a remote community at the eastern edge of California's Mojave Desert, mostly by accident. I thought I was spending the weekend in Joshua Tree. This was nine years ago in the low information days of online vacation rentals before the ubiquitous smartphone before it became nearly impossible to wander or to get lost. When people in Los Angeles talk about "the desert" they mean one of two quite different things: They are either referring to the manicured, climate controlled, midcentury modern, golf green, martini chilled, enclaves of Palm Springs, Palm Desert, La Quinta and their surrounding resort cities, or they mean the High Desert, usually the town of Joshua Tree in the untamed, purportedly mystical, rawer, region to the north. Between these two lies Joshua Tree National Park where you can hike or meditate or get your mind blown by Martian red rock formations and landscapes too often called psychedelic. As an East Coast transplant I'd had my desert visions disappointed in Palm Springs where the swathes of sand between the elegant landscaping and the searing heat were distant rumors of the barren landscape I heard lay to the north in the bohemian oasis of Joshua Tree. That's where I wanted to be. I knew that I'd arrived in the High Desert when I saw the improbable Joshua trees on either side of the highway their thatched branches and spiky tufts of knifelike leaves reaching up toward the brutal sun instead of sensibly bowing toward the ground. Like many other inhabitants of the Mojave, Joshua trees seem to welcome a climate from which most living things seek shelter. This is the moment when, on subsequent trips to the desert, I usually find myself apologizing to whomever I've dragged along. "I get it," I say, "it doesn't look like much." In fact, Highway 62 doesn't even look like desert. I was surprised when my directions told me to keep going. It didn't seem possible that there was any more there beyond this point. Soon the sturdy adobes and ranch houses of Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms gave way to makeshift homes cobbled together from tumbledown cabins, shipping containers and trailers. I passed yards littered with the refuse of desert living heaps of scrap metal, shells of cars, rusted out water tanks signs that seemed to indicate all the things that might go wrong out here. Worse still, I passed a roadside sign: "Next Services 100 Miles." One hundred miles. I checked my gauge and tried to remember how far back the last service station was. The stores were gone but the beauty hadn't yet appeared only a savage terrain that seemed to stretch on for a nerve racking distance. I found the house I'd rented by turning right on a sand road that was marked, and then left on another that wasn't. (My host had told me to count the number of roads after the turn off which was difficult since there often wasn't much visible difference between the sand road and the sand of the desert itself.) It was dark when I arrived. I was disoriented and relieved. The house had a large enclosed yard filled with creatively appropriated salvage and what looked like a wooden deck that I hoped might conceal a hot tub or swimming pool. It turned out to be a viewing platform from which I could look out over desert toward the silhouette of a distant mountain range. In the morning, when the sun rose over the mountains like the dawning of a new planet in a low budget sci fi movie, I discovered that I was staying in one of many cabins spread out at somewhat regular intervals across the area called Wonder Valley an unincorporated community at the farthest reaches of the Morongo Basin. Some of these cabins had been duded up, fenced in and turned into compounds with jury rigged satellites and dirt yards filled with old pickups and rusted trailers. Some, like the place where I was staying, had been taken over by an early generation of artists for whom the desert seemed to provide a challenging canvas. But many sat empty, their windows boarded up or missing. Except for a bar and a used bookstore that's rarely open, there were and are no amenities in Wonder Valley. There are no stoplights or streetlights, nothing to punctuate the night sky. After dark, dogs howl and coyotes yip in anticipation of a kill. The landscape is monotonous a flat and almost ghostly expanse of scrubby desert whose most impressive feature is the tenacity of the flora, fauna and human beings who survive there. But there's an unsettling sort of beauty in the challenges Wonder Valley presents, especially after dark. For night is when this far corner of the Mojave gave me its odd reassurance that it was still possible to go somewhere unexpected, that it wasn't only O.K. to be lost, it was somehow necessary. A few days after soaking up the silence and marveling at the isolation, I went in search of supplies, a cocktail and human contact. That is how I found the 29 Palms Inn, a collection of timber and adobe cabins clustered around an oasis ringed with palm trees the sort of place that makes you feel as if you've stepped back into a 1950s dreamland and are the first person to discover its charms. The pool, adjacent to the bar, is enclosed by cinder block walls painted in gradients of purple to intensify the color of its water; the gradients of orange on the wall's exterior capture the sunrise and the sunset. On a later visit, a companion remarked, as we and settled into lounge chairs near the pool, sweet cocktails in hand, that he felt as if he were in a United States consulate on a small island in the South Pacific. I understood what he meant we were part of the world but at the same time unreachable. That first night a band was setting up a middle aged husband and wife with a keyboard and some backing tracks for their covers of Roy Orbison and Hank Williams. The crowd around the pool and at the bar was a mix of Marines, rugged tourists visiting Joshua Tree National Park, and some resident artists and musicians of a rougher cut who weren't there to escape the city. Many of these artists had painted the Twentynine Palms' Oasis of Murals a citywide celebration of the area's history, natural beauty and ancient spirit. The 29 Palms Inn is improbable in many ways in the variety of its buildings, the comforting, unpretentious food, the small houseboat drifting in the oasis, the sturdy garden where vegetables are coaxed from the soil, and the mix of hard core desert rats and clean cut Marines. Even more improbable is the Campbell House, a bed and breakfast recently acquired by the inn that is made up of a stone homestead and some cottages whose construction and frilly decor are more reminiscent of the New England countryside than something on the edge of a wilderness. I sipped my drink as swallows carved the purple sky above the inn and wondered how soon I might be able to return to this corner of the Mojave and when I did whether I could recapture the reassuring feeling of being able to wander and lose my way. Although I came to love the gritty flowers that bloom from the Mojave's desiccated land, the fields of cactuses that pop up unexpectedly, and the hidden oases that insisted you hunt for them by wandering off the main road, it was this sensation of dislocation that captivated me and called me back. I've been to the Mojave and to the 29 Palms Inn nearly a dozen times now and each time I discover a new way to get lost or at least to feel lost, which is how I first found myself at the Palms Restaurant, a bar so deep in Wonder Valley that travelers encountering it for the first time might well think it's a mirage. You get to the Palms Restaurant by driving east through Wonder Valley along Amboy Road, which runs parallel to the Twentynine Palms Highway about a mile to the south. You take this road until you begin to worry that you've gone too far that there is nothing out here, and certainly nothing capable of serving beer and grub. When you are certain you've gone too far, you arrive. It happens every time. The Palms is a roadhouse with a vibrant music scene there are stages both indoors and out. The owners, Laura and James Sibley, who own the used bookstore in the homestead cabin across the street (you bring your books to the bar to pay for them), perform regularly and also host a number of music festivals with packed lineups. The Palms is also the kind of bar, maybe one of a kind, where you can bring a preschooler for waffles on a Sunday morning while you sip a cold Corona chased with a tequila shot. Everything on the menu from the four bite burgers to the beef jalapeno sandwich is downright tasty and almost nothing costs more than five bucks. You have to wonder, what more could you need? Early on Sunday no one will be playing live music or pool but the bar will already be lined with regulars bent over their second drink of the day. No one will look up as your preschooler dances wildly, racing from the empty stage to the pool table, lost in her own world. And you will hope that as the world shrinks, places such as Wonder Valley and Twentynine Palms will still be here for her to discover. Big city artists and artisans and a rumored hipster hotel chain are coming, they always are the ones with the means to put Wonder Valley and Twentynine Palms on the map, the people who will harness the weirdness and bleakness for their own aesthetic. I understand the impulse. I have also tried to make the desert my own. But none us will be able to capture and resell the lonely magic. That belongs to the High Desert and to experience it, you will have to let yourself get lost. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
BRISBANE, Australia The start of the Australian Open is in two weeks, and the wildfires ravaging the country's southeast have forced the relocation of a second tier men's tennis tournament and stirred concern that the first Grand Slam tournament of the year could also be disrupted. With at least 25 people killed and hundreds of homes lost in the fires, and winds blowing smoke toward several large metropolitan areas, including Melbourne, the site of the Open, tennis has become an afterthought instead of maintaining its usual status as a centerpiece of the Australian summer. Australian Open organizers said Tuesday that if conditions became hazardous in Melbourne, all matches would be played on indoor courts and courts with retractable roofs. Calling its decision "unprecedented," Tennis Australia on Friday announced the relocation of the Canberra International, which was scheduled to begin on Monday in the Australian capital. The event was moved nearly 400 miles southwest to Bendigo, a town in Victoria about two hours northwest of Melbourne. The air quality in Canberra has been rated the worst of any major city in the world and was deemed too poor even for the tournament to be held indoors. Conditions in Melbourne, host of the Open, fluctuated last week, reaching their worst on Friday when the city was downwind of the East Gippsland fire. Shifting winds have sometimes carried smoke from nearby fires into the city. Denis Kudla, an American player who trained in Melbourne on Friday before heading to Bendigo, said he could not inhale or exhale fully without coughing during his practice session. "If it's anything like yesterday, I don't think it would be safe over a two , three week period," Kudla said of potential conditions for the Australian Open. "You could play, but who knows what damage we're actually causing to ourselves? It can't be good." Two weeks of main draw play in the Australian Open are scheduled to begin on Jan. 20, with the tournament's qualifying rounds starting a week earlier. Novak Djokovic, a seven time Australian Open champion and the president of the ATP player council, said Saturday that he planned to put air quality considerations on the agenda for the pretournament player meeting in Melbourne. The topic has come up before, related to playing amid air pollution in China. "If it continues the same way and if the quality of air is affected in Melbourne or Sydney, I think Tennis Australia probably will be forced to, I think, create some rules about it," Djokovic said. Tennis officials in Australia have said they do not plan to move any other events, but they have "committed substantial extra resources" to monitor the air quality, Craig Tiley, the Australian Open tournament director and Tennis Australia chief executive, said in a statement over the weekend. "Assessing the likelihood of smoke induced interruptions is a bit like how we treat heat and rain," Tiley added. "We have experts who analyze all available live data as specific to our sites as possible and consult regularly with tournament officials and, in the case of heat and smoke, medical experts." He continued: "The health of players, fans and staff is a priority at all times and we will continue to make these decisions with that in mind." Tim Henman, the captain of the British team in the competition, played down the impact on his players "in the context of what this country is going through." The effect on cities is largely dependent on which way the wind is blowing. With unfavorable winds on Friday, the conditions were bad enough to set off smoke detectors at AAMI Park in Melbourne, where a soccer match between Melbourne City and Western United was played as scheduled. Western United Coach Mark Rudan said afterward that he thought the game should have been postponed because of the smoke. "Some of the players came back into the rooms and said they struggled to breathe, felt it down their throat and lungs," Rudan told The Herald Sun in Melbourne. "But clearly there's rules and the doctors know what's safe and what isn't. It was testing conditions; I commend both sets of players." Tennis could prove tougher: A 90 minute soccer game is often less than half the length of a match at the Australian Open, particularly on the men's side, where matches are best of five sets. In 2012, the men's final between Djokovic and Rafael Nadal lasted 5 hours 53 minutes. "Nothing has ever been close to postponing or canceling a Slam, so this is going to be a tough decision, naturally," Kudla said. "But if the smoke gets worse, I couldn't imagine potentially playing a four , five hour match and not coughing like crazy postmatch trying to recover and feeling awful." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
SAN FRANCISCO Uber's autonomous vehicle unit is receiving a new investment, the company said late Thursday, just days before it begins pitching its business to public investors. SoftBank, Toyota and the Japanese automaker Denso will put 1 billion toward Uber's effort to develop autonomous cars. As Uber marches toward an I.P.O., the deal will help shield the company from tough questions about how the money losing endeavor is harming its profit prospects. The self driving unit, known as the Autonomous Technology Group, or A.T.G., will be restructured as part of the deal, allowing for a targeted investment rather than a broad investment in Uber, a ride hailing giant with a number of smaller businesses. The self driving group will answer to its own corporate board, made up of representatives from Uber, SoftBank and Toyota, with Uber maintaining majority control. The deal values this unit at 7.25 billion, the company said. Toyota and Denso's investment totals 667 million, while SoftBank's is 333 million. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'ALL THE FINE BOYS' at the Ford Foundation Studio Theater at the Pershing Square Signature Center (in previews; opens on March 1). Two teenage girls high on desire and low on inhibition make a plan to fascinate some men in Erica Schmidt's play for the New Group. Abigail Breslin ("Scream Queens") and Isabelle Fuhrman ("Masters of Sex") play the adolescents, with Alex Wolff and the marvelous Joe Tippett as the fetching objects of affection. 212 279 4200, thenewgroup.org 'COME FROM AWAY' at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater (previews start on Feb. 18; opens on March 12). On Sept. 11, 2001, 38 trans Atlantic flights were diverted to a small Newfoundland town whose local rituals include cod kissing. The community's embrace of thousands of panicky passengers has inspired this new Broadway musical, written by Irene Sankoff and David Hein and directed by Christopher Ashley. 212 239 6200, comefromaway.com 'DOLPHINS AND SHARKS' at Bank Street Theater (in previews; opens on March 1). It's survival of the fittest among the Xerox machines and staplers at a Harlem print shop. In James Anthony Tyler's new drama, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite for the Labyrinth Theater Company, a group of workers struggle for a living wage and a dignified life. Pernell Walker of "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" stars. 212 513 1080, labtheater.org. 'EVERYBODY' at the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center (in previews; opens on Feb. 21). The medieval morality play "Everyman" gets an update from the gifted playwright Branden Jacobs Jenkins (his last theatrical renovation: a brilliant take on "The Octoroon"). For Signature Theater, the director Lila Neugebauer mobilizes a cast including Marylouise Burke, David Patrick Kelly, Louis Cancelmi and Jocelyn Bioh. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'IF I FORGET' at the Laura Pels Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 22). Steven Levenson, the book writer for the Broadway hit "Dear Evan Hansen," specializes in contentious and sometimes calamitous families. In his new work at the Roundabout, three adult children gather to celebrate their father's 75th birthday and argue over his history and legacy. The director Daniel Sullivan's clan of actors includes Kate Walsh, Jeremy Shamos, Maria Dizzia and Larry Bryggman. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'KID VICTORY' at Vineyard Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 22). Teenagers with secrets feature prominently in the work of Greg Pierce ("Slowgirl," "Her Requiem"). In this new musical, written with John Kander, he homes in on 17 year old Luke, who has returned to his small Kansas town after a mysterious absence. Liesl Tommy directs the arrival. 212 353 0303, vineyardtheatre.com 'THE LIGHT YEARS' at Playwrights Horizons (previews start on Feb. 17; opens on March 13). All the world's a fair in this new play by the Debate Society, perhaps the most literary of devised theater companies, set at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Though the company members Paul Thureen and Hannah Bos typically assume lead roles, this time they've handed them off to a cast that includes Erik Lochtefeld, Rocco Sisto and Aya Cash ("You're the Worst"). 212 279 4200, playwrightshorizons.org 'ON THE EXHALE' at the Black Box Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 19). A particular kind of gun control comes to the Roundabout Underground courtesy of Martin Zimmerman's new play. Marin Ireland ("Sneaky Pete") stars as a professor affected by an act of violence who finds some unusual methods of recovery. Leigh Silverman directs. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'THE OUTER SPACE' at Joe's Pub (previews start on Feb. 23; opens on March 8). When we last met Ethan Lipton, the wry and mustachioed playwright and songwriter, in "No Place to Go," he was debating whether or not to move to Mars. This new rock 'n' roll song cycle, directed by Leigh Silverman ("Violet"), centers on a couple of earthlings who light out for starrier territory. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'THE PRICE' at the American Airlines Theater (in previews; opens on March 16). The Roundabout revives Arthur Miller's play about family and loyalty, tables and chairs. Under Terry Kinney's direction, the invaluable cast, including Tony Shalhoub, Jessica Hecht, Danny DeVito and Mark Ruffalo (who has been absent from Broadway for a decade), will play a grieving clan and a furniture dealer. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE' at the Hudson Theater (in previews; opens on Feb. 23). Let's get to the point: This Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine musical about the Post Impressionist artist Georges Seurat, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, arrives on Broadway after a triumphant concert production at New York City Center. Reviewing that earlier showing, Ben Brantley said it was "one of those shows that seems destined to be forever spoken of with misty eyed bragging rights by anyone who sees it." 855 801 5876, thehudsonbroadway.com 'THE LIAR' at Classic Stage Company (closes on Feb. 26). David Ives's adaptation of Pierre Corneille's 17th century comedy, which Charles Isherwood called "an effervescent delight," recites its final rhymes. This tale of a master who can't speak true and a servant who can't tell a lie is perhaps Mr. Ives's "most brilliant act yet of Franco American theatrical resurrection." 212 352 3101, classicstage.org 'THE TEMPEST' at St. Ann's Warehouse (closes on Feb. 19). As the magician Prospero, Harriet Walter will break her staff and drown her book for the last time. Ben Brantley called this show, the third of Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare plays set in a women's prison, "the most purely pleasurable of the trilogy and the most entertaining 'Tempest' I've ever seen." 718 254 8779, stannswarehouse.org 'YOURS UNFAITHFULLY' at the Beckett Theater at Theater Row (closes on Feb. 18). Miles Malleson's 1933 play, receiving its world premiere courtesy of the Mint Theater, is a refined, rueful and often shrewd comedy about polyamory. If the play's arguments don't compel, the psychological acuity, as embodied by the excellent cast, is remarkable. 212 239 6200, telecharge.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Kristina Mladenovic had reason to complain after blowing a 5 1 lead at a Grand Slam tournament for the second time this month. As rain roiled play elsewhere at the French Open on Tuesday afternoon, Mladenovic quickly took her comfortable lead in the first set of her opening round match under the new retractable roof over Philippe Chatrier Court against Laura Siegemund. Then, just as at the United States Open, it all came undone. On her first set point, Mladenovic hit a sharp, short backhand drop shot which Siegemund hurtled toward, reaching her racket under the ball and sending it barely back across the net. Mladenovic could not return it, but immediately appealed to the chair umpire, Eva Asderaki Moore, saying that her drop shot had bounced twice before Siegemund reached it. When Asderaki Moore shook her head in disagreement, Mladenovic covered her mouth in disbelief, but protested no further. Siegemund won the next two points, holding serve to pull to 2 5. Mladenovic had a second set point in the next game, and five more in the game after that, but could not convert any. Having saved seven set points, the last six without controversy, Siegemund leveled the first set and went on to win it and the match by a final score of 7 5, 6 3. Though Mladenovic admitted she "still had the result in my hands," she said her mind set was clouded by the missed call. "Probably I put a little bit less intensity in my focus," Mladenovic said. "Even though I tried, I was a little bit away, I was still in that point thinking, 'OK, I should have been in the second set already.' It wasn't easy." Mladenovic blew an even bigger lead in her last singles match; in the second round of the United States Open earlier this month, Mladenovic led, 6 1, 5 1, and did not convert four match points in a 1 6, 7 6 (2), 6 0 loss to Varvara Gracheva. Mladenovic said her collapse in New York should not be compared to the one in Paris. "Because the set was mine," she said. "It was just unlucky for me that the chair umpire didn't do her job." Mladenovic said she didn't expect Siegemund to concede the point on her own. "But if she would have done it, she would have all my respect and be super fair play," Mladenovic said. "Yeah, this thing didn't happen. But she's not the one responsible. I think the chair umpire is the one that should be really focused on that call." Siegemund also believed the officials should be solely responsible for making the right call. "Depends on the situation: if it's a close call and it's a set point against you, I think it's the umpire's responsibility," Siegemund said. "I'm coming running full speed; if in that call I say, 'Oh, it was a double bounce,' and later I see on the video it was not, I would be angry at myself." Siegemund, who won the mixed doubles title at the U.S. Open this month, also emphasized Mladenovic's bevy of other opportunities to close out the first set. "There is a lot more room to close the set," Siegemund said. "But if you want to jump on that one, you know, go ahead." Both Siegemund and Mladenovic agreed that video replay review, which has never been used to adjudicate such calls in tennis, would be a welcome innovation. "To err is human," Mladenovic said of the umpire. "Unfortunately, she will continue at Roland Garros; I will not continue at Roland Garros." The missed call was only the latest in a series of September setbacks for Mladenovic. After her singles loss at the U.S. Open, she was disqualified from the doubles draw, where she was part of the top seeded pair with Timea Babos, because she was identified as among a group of players who had spent time with Benoit Paire, who tested positive for the coronavirus. Mladenovic, who had been playing under tighter conditions than other competitors, was forced to isolate in her hotel for eight more days after her disqualification, hurting her preparation for the European swing on clay, her best surface. "I'm going to try to be a philosopher, and tell myself that if this has to happen, it has to happen in 2020, because seriously, it's a hell of a year," Mladenovic said. "I'm not sure what to say, I'm just wondering, why? Why does this happen? Why this sequence of bad spells?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
While you might think that the end of a long losing streak would delight a superfan like Lee, there are those Knicks supporters out there who don't especially want to win many or any more games. If the Knicks finish in the bottom three of the N.B.A., they will get the best possible chance, 14 percent, to land the top draft pick in June. A recent injury aside, that is still expected to be the Duke star Zion Williamson. A bottom three finish would also give the Knicks a 40 percent chance at a top three pick. As of Monday morning, the Knicks stand at 12 48, for the second worst record. Despite their win, they look likely to grab a bottom three spot, probably alongside the Phoenix Suns (11 50) and Cleveland Cavaliers (14 46). But the Chicago Bulls are looming, two games "better" than the Cavs. The league actually changed the draft lottery percentages this season in an effort to cut down on tanking, particularly after the 76ers went on a multiyear losing period of terrible play that got them several top picks. A year ago, the worst record offered a full 25 percent chance at No. 1, with the second and third worst teams getting 20 and 16 percent chances. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
If your knowledge of Meryl Streep's screen work is superficial, "Streepshow!" could drive you mad with frustration. But then Jay Stull's new play may have that effect even if you know your Mary Fisher from your Madeline Ashton. It is, after all, built on a concept that could have made for an ace sketch but instead takes up nearly five derriere numbing hours, split in two installments of two "episodes" each. In "Streepshow!," nine women are gathered in a house to compete in a reality TV contest a la "Big Brother" without knowing they're all emanations of Ms. Streep. The winner will get the opportunity to rewrite her life. It's a delicious idea to have the likes of Sophie Zawistowski (Dana Berger) from "Sophie's Choice" share a world with Francesca Johnson (Kristine Haruna Lee) from "The Bridges of Madison County" and Suzanne Vale (Sam Bolen) from "Postcards From the Edge," and the evening starts off promisingly, if a bit shambolically. In an inspired touch, for instance, the actors all sport Kabuki like makeup designed to heighten their cheekbones for maximum diva realness which doesn't care about gender assignations and includes men in drag. Quickly rising to the top are the alpha females Miranda Priestly ("The Devil Wears Prada") and Clarissa Vaughan ("The Hours"). It helps that Preston Martin and Claire Rothrock make a meal out of their impressions: He cuts a sleek knife sharp figure and delivers Miranda's lines in a threatening stage whisper, while she nails Ms. Streep's body language and intonations as the hoity toity Clarissa. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Linda, The protagonist of 's debut novel, hails from Minnesota's north woods and says little. If you have spent any amount of time in this part of the country, this reticence should be familiar. It is as if a code of silence blankets the land, much like subfreezing temperatures do for many months of the year. As Linda remarks upon venturing outdoors one afternoon, "My face changed into something other than face, got rubbed out." The cold is indifferent to human comfort and so too, Linda suspects, are most humans at least to the comfort of others. Linda's earliest years were spent on a commune where child rearing duties were shared by all adults; at one point she wonders whether her low energy parents, who meander along the perimeter of the action, never mattering much, are really hers. When a teacher taps a teenage Linda to represent her high school at History Odyssey, she selects wolves as her topic. She is unfazed by the judge's verdict that her report on wolves falls into the category of natural history and so misses the point. The rules of fiction dictate that trouble will start once Linda's attention turns toward people. The first development is the rumor that the aforementioned teacher likes some of his students too much. Then a couple with a young child move into a newly built house across the lake. They are from the ranks of citified "summer people," and Linda observes their halting gestures to inhabit the north with a blend of fascination and scorn. Their relative wealth will not compensate for their inexperience, that is obvious. It is not giving away too much to reveal that after ratcheting up the tension, Fridlund does not take readers to the sunless place many might guess a warren of child pornographers deep in the woods, an inconvenient hole in the ice. That I was relieved at the slow motion tragedy that does unfold is testimony to Fridlund's daring. An artful story of sexual awakening and identity formation turns more stomach churning; child sacrifice takes many forms, and sometimes the act doesn't require bloodshed but simply adults too wedded to their ideals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
After lagging behind its competitors in starting clinical trials, the French drugmaker Sanofi has announced plans to speed a vaccine development timeline that could yield approval from regulatory authorities sometime next year, perhaps in the first half of 2021, the company announced on Tuesday. The company and its partner in the endeavor, GlaxoSmithKline, originally projected that a vaccine would be available, at the earliest, in the latter half of next year. Like other contenders in the race for a coronavirus vaccine, Sanofi is eager to push forward. Still, "such fast tracking and intense scale of vaccine production is totally unprecedented," and the future unknown, said Padmini Pillai, an immunologist at M.I.T. The Sanofi GSK vaccine contains a laboratory synthesized version of the coronavirus's "spike" protein, which decorates the surface of the virus and is crucial to its ability to enter host cells. This so called recombinant vaccine is also formulated with one of GSK's proprietary adjuvants, compounds that can enhance the body's immune response to a foreign onslaught, in theory boosting the staying power of a given vaccine. A combined Phase I/II clinical trial for the vaccine, originally scheduled for December 2020, will now begin in September. The goal is to have the recombinant vaccine fully licensed by June 2021. In news briefings on Tuesday, both companies expressed confidence in their collaboration and its potential to deliver a successful vaccine. Sanofi's history with vaccine development runs deep; its production lines are responsible for hundreds of millions of doses of the flu vaccine each year. "As all eyes are on prevention of infectious disease through vaccines, this is a pointed moment in time where we are called upon to seek innovative ways to protect public health," Thomas Triomphe, executive vice president of Sanofi Pasteur, the company's vaccines global business unit, said in a statement. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Sanofi is also developing a separate set of vaccine candidates with Translate Bio, an American therapeutics company, on a slightly less expedited timeline. This second batch of recipes is based on mRNA technology, an approach being taken by several of Sanofi's competitors, including Moderna and a partnership between BioNTech, Pfizer and Fosun Pharma. Such mRNA vaccines are new; to date, none have been cleared for use in humans. Still, they have been touted as a potential improvement on their predecessors, especially for their scalability and versatility, Dr. Pillai said. They are engineered to coax human cells into manufacturing proteins that resemble those made by the coronavirus, thus avoiding the need for the pathogen itself. The aim is to elicit a strong immune response that would protect the body from disease should the actual virus try to settle in. Saad Omer, a vaccine researcher and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, said that Sanofi, a company with notable "muscle memory of manufacturing and distributing vaccines at a large scale," was well poised to push forward innovative vaccine formulations, like those containing mRNA. But "that doesn't mean we shouldn't be cautious about projecting timelines," Dr. Omer added. The Sanofi Translate Bio mRNA vaccines are currently in preclinical testing. Sanofi expects Phase I trials to begin by the end of 2020, and hopes to seek approval with regulatory bodies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the European Medicines Agency by the close of 2021. As a part of this push, the French company has announced that it will expand its collaboration with Translate Bio, striking a deal in which the American group will receive 425 million in upfront payments. If a coronavirus vaccine concoction made by Sanofi and its partners, or by one of their competitors meets the mark sometime next year, it will be a record. Most vaccines take many years, if not decades, to develop. The mRNA formulation in particular would be the "first of its kind" if approved, said Asher Williams, a chemical engineer at Cornell University. But there are plenty of hurdles. Researchers are wisely pursuing multiple types of vaccines, Dr. Omer said, since the various recipes, each employing different bits of the coronavirus, are likely to range in their efficacy. A multipronged approach is a good way for the global community to hedge its bets on curbing the spread of disease. "I think there's reason to be cautiously optimistic," Dr. Omer said. "But we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
PARIS For Dior, it is a revolution: a woman leading its creative side for the first time in the house's 69 year history. On Friday, Maria Grazia Chiuri will unveil her first collection for the house to an audience (and clients) on the edge of their seats with anticipation. So it is fortuitous that this turning point coincides with the release of a glossy, eight part television drama calculated to remind us how it all began. "The Collection," Amazon Prime's first original British series, which debuted in Britain this month and will be aired in France starting in November, tells the story of two brothers one a businessman, the other a designer and their mission to build a great couture house that would reinstate Paris as the center of the fashion world after the end of the Nazi occupation. The series is gorgeously shot, contrasting the gritty, wounded reality of postwar Paris with the bright lights, opulence and excess of the world of haute couture. Alas, the accents of its mostly British cast tend to undermine the feeling of authenticity a problem alleviated by the addition of Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep's daughter, as an American heiress, and the French actress Jenna Thiam as the working class daughter of Sabine's chief seamstress who unexpectedly becomes the face of the fashion house. On another, however, "The Collection" works as a thinly fictionalized version of the Dior success story, and a reminder of what it was like when men were running the show. The series's creators say they drew inspiration for the House of Sabine, as the fictional fashion house is named, from a number of Paris designers, including Balenciaga, Fath and Lelong. But the parallels between the Sabine brothers' "new look" collection in 1947 and Christian Dior's collection that same year an event that transformed couture and ushered in the New Look that still resonates today are unmistakable. Gone was the hard, boxy and masculine look (including liberating trousers) that came with wartime fabric rationing. "Hideous and repellent" is how Dior described that look. Instead he made sculpted dresses of as much as 25 yards of the finest luxury fabrics: ultrafeminine, but a burden to wear. Corsets shrank waists by up to two inches; crinolines and padding made full, calf length skirts even more voluminous. Busts were lifted and breasts made into pointed cones. High heels and wide brimmed or tilted tri cornered hats completed the look. Comfort was not the point: not then, and not now, on the small screen. The costume designers Chattoune Fab acknowledge the retrograde feel of the 30 dresses they created by hand for the female stars of "The Collection." (They also pieced together 1,200 outfits for the rest of the cast.) "Women had been liberated during the war with jackets and trousers, and suddenly, Ooh! Fashion comes, and it's, 'Let's go back to corsets and be uncomfortable,' " said Chattoune, whose name is Francoise Bourrec. "When people came to the studio and picked up the dresses, they were stunned to feel how unbelievably heavy they were. They were really very painful for the models to wear." Even after the war, with rationing still in place, not everyone celebrated the return to luxurious decadence. In one scene in the series, a young model wearing an opulent Sabine dress is mobbed by a group of poor women selling fruits and vegetables. It is reminiscent of an actual event in the fall of 1948 on the Rue Lepic in Montmartre, when two older women, enraged at what they saw as irresponsible ostentation and waste, tore at a Dior dress worn by a young woman. "As an American, you seldom get to see this dark, seamy side of Paris after the war," said Oliver Goldstick, the creator, writer and executive producer of "The Collection." "It was very, very cold. There was no fuel. The cafes were empty. This was not Gene Kelly dancing on the banks of the Seine." Big money played an important role. The House of Sabine is bankrolled by a French cotton magnate, just as Dior opened his own couture house with funding from Marcel Boussac, a war profiteer and the country's cotton king, at the time the richest man in France. Even the series's overheated dialogue about the high stakes facing the House of Sabine "Nothing bold or magnificent is built from fear"; "Just remind people that Paris is where it begins and ends!" could have been uttered by Dior himself, who once announced, "In an epoch as somber as ours, luxury must be defended inch by inch." Still, the designer's unapologetic approach to marketing French fashion and courting the American market made him a national treasure; two years after he started, Dior's couture exports accounted for 5 percent of France's total export revenue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LAST fall, Alfredo Sosa Velasco landed happily in New York as a visiting scholar at New York University. He was provided with a furnished studio with a balcony, for 1,275 a month, in Washington Square Village, the university owned housing complex. When his yearlong program was almost up, Mr. Sosa Velasco, who received a Ph.D. in Romance studies from Cornell University, was thrilled to be offered a position teaching Spanish language and literature at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. "If you want to be in New York," he said, "you have to be willing to do the commute, because getting a job in New York is very difficult." He showed up at an open house for a studio at a co op on East 88th Street, listed at 275,000, with a monthly maintenance in the mid 600s. That apartment, with plenty of sun and a brick wall, was nice inside except for the narrow shower. The studio wasn't for him, but there he met Morgan Turkewitz, an agent at Citi Habitats, and decided to search with her. At that point, Mr. Sosa Velasco knew little about the New York market. "After talking with him, I knew he needed some guidance," Ms. Turkewitz said, "so I sent him some first time buyer's information." When she informed him it could take four to six months to buy a place, he was aghast. "My first thought was, this is impossible," he said. After all, he had friends who had bought homes elsewhere and had closed the deal within a week, he said. His price range was up to 270,000 and he planned to make a down payment of 10 percent. "I thought the percentage was kind of negotiable," he said. "I didn't think it was established by the co op." After all, some friends had put down a mere 3 percent elsewhere. Ms. Turkewitz informed him that, though some co ops allow a 10 percent down payment, many require at least 20 percent. "It is not a negotiable thing," she said. It wasn't negotiable with him, either, so from the start, they limited their explorations to cat friendly buildings that would accept 10 percent down. One possibility was a one bedroom on the ground floor on East 98th Street. The asking price was 259,000, with maintenance in the high 500s. Mr. Sosa Velasco liked the convenience of the location but not the long, skinny layout and lack of light. The place remains for sale at 229,000. But two more possibilities arose in a small walk up building filled with studios, each with a little more than 400 square feet. The building, in the East 80s, allowed cats but not dogs. One of the studios appealed to Mr. Sosa Velasco. Facing the back of the building, it was listed at 264,000, with maintenance in the low 700s. He especially liked the bathroom, which had a windowed nook perfect for Rafael's litter box. He worried about timing. He had a firm departure date for his N.Y.U. housing, and he didn't want to rent, having calculated that renting was more expensive than buying. "I was, like, what am I going to do with the cat?" he said. He could always crash with friends, but he didn't know "if Rafael would scratch their furniture or something like that. I wouldn't have put my friends in that situation." The co op board met just in time, however, and allowed Mr. Sosa Velasco to buy the place for 250,000. He closed in late summer, exactly four months after he met Ms. Turkewitz. He was impressed that she had accurately predicted his apartment hunting timetable. "I learned so much about real estate in New York City," he said, "I could get the real estate agent license." Mr. Sosa Velasco had his floors polished and walls painted, and replaced the old kitchen appliances. He had never before owned furniture, so he splurged at Ikea. Everything in the apartment is new, from silverware to scratching post. "I assembled furniture like crazy," he said, doing most of it himself except for the bed and the large mirrored wardrobe. Even with the help of friends, these projects took two days. "The apartment looks completely different from the time that I bought it," he said. At some point he plans to redo part of the kitchen, which has a strange double sink that consumes the limited counter space. The shopping situation in his new neighborhood, with its many large retailers, is especially convenient. In the Village, he found himself going from store to store. There, "the shopping was much more individualized or specialized," he said. "It was more trips that you had to take." And now he finds that "something subconscious" seems to be at work: "Whenever I go out, I want to buy something for the apartment." He doesn't mind his long commute, which he makes three or four days a week. A monthly train ticket costs 415. On school days, he usually rises at 5:30. By 6:30, he is heading to the subway, bialy and coffee in hand. The subway leg is one stop on the express. When he arrives in New Haven, after a ride of an hour and 40 minutes, he catches the shuttle provided by the university. "What I like about the commuting is I don't have to drive, which saves me a lot of time," he said. "I told my friends that, instead of having office hours, I have train hours. I do all of my reading, grading and lesson plans on the train." He heard that Madonna lives just a few blocks away, as does Ricky Martin. "When I talked to my mom, she was, like, where are you living that you are next to all these people?" he said. "You are living in the hot spot." To him, he is. "Now that I have the apartment I am happier than ever," he said. "I think that I am the happiest person in the city." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
I will arise and go now. ... Surprisingly often, when I get up from a chair to leave a room, those six melodramatic words will unfurl in my mind. Somehow William Butler Yeats's poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," which, like millions of other people, I first read in college, stays rooted in me: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. ... And I'm off, not to the dentist or the shopping mall but, mentally, striding emerald slopes, making for a place of myth. Yeats named the poem after an actual place, an island in the middle of Lough Gill, a lake that spreads itself languidly across five miles of furiously green landscape in County Sligo in northwest Ireland. A few years ago, I found myself in Dublin and decided to do it for real: go to Innisfree. It would be a four hour detour from the research I was doing for an article, but I had not the slightest doubt the journey would be worthwhile. Thanks to the popularity of the poem (voted by readers of The Irish Times in 1999 as their all time favorite work of Irish poetry), "Innisfree" is a bit of a brand. There are Innisfree cosmetics, an Innisfree Eau de Parfum, an Innisfree B B, an Innisfree Hotel and a Rose of Innisfree tour boat that does the lake. But I know these things only from Google. Thankfully, none of it was evident on my drive. I didn't use a GPS; I just relied on a couple of tiny handmade looking road signs that popped up as I entered the region, which pointed the way to "Lake Isle of Innisfree." The last stage of the journey involved no tourism bric a brac, only small, twisty, increasingly difficult to navigate roads, mossy tree trunks, wind, willows, heather, cloud knuckles and gray rock. William Butler Yeats wrote longingly of the Irish island Innisfree when he was a young man of just 23. When I reached the lakeshore, I found the opposite of a tourist site. I could barely make my way out to the water to get a view, so thick was the shoreline with trees and brush. A farmhouse with a couple of S.U.V.s parked outside stood nearby, and there was a little concrete dock jutting out into the lake, pointed almost directly at Innisfree a few hundred yards away. I got out on the dock, sat cross legged facing the island, and let the wind say what it had to say. For decades, this place had reverberated in my mind; now I was actually there. Yeats, born in 1865, the son of an artist, was a childlike intellectual. He would forget to eat, or put food in the oven and let it burn. He was devoted to mysticism and seances. He spent decades in love with the Irish nationalist and proto feminist Maud Gonne; after she rejected his marriage proposal for a final time, he shifted his attention to her daughter. A few weeks after she, in turn, spurned his marriage offer, he proposed to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees, who, despite knowing where she ranked, became his devoted life partner. As she essentially said after his death, she saw the shimmer of his soul. "For him, every day he lived was a new adventure," she once told the Yeats scholar Curtis B. Bradford. "He woke every morning certain that in the new day before him something would happen that had never happened before." Yeats was in his 50s when he married. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is a young man's poem, written when he was 23. It is filled with a romantic longing for the past: the Irish past, the mythic past and also Yeats's own. He had spent his childhood in County Sligo before moving to Dublin and then London. This countryside, the lake and its islands, this composition of greens and grays and blues, was fused within him. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee; And live alone in the bee loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. Of course, as I approached the lake, the poem was reverberating in my mind, and at first the imagery seemed to live up to it. The lake is five miles long, fringed with greenery; moody hills rise on the opposite shore. The furrowed water was dotted with little islands, some of them very atmospheric. As it happens, though, Innisfree is not one of the atmospheric ones. It's tiny, and looks like a bur, a bristling seed pod, almost angrily sprouting trees and brush from its humpy back. Some have speculated that Yeats chose it because of the poetry in the syllables of its name, and the last syllable's suggestion of freedom. You'd have a hard time building a cabin on it, and it's too lumpen for a glade. But to leave it at that to say that Yeats picked a dud would be like declaring that you had no music in your soul. The whole landscape echoes the poem. You realize, sitting there, identifying the sound of the lake water with the deep heart's core, that the Yeats who wrote the poem does not actually intend to retreat from the world and move to this spot. He is reaching for something. He is aware, at 23, of death and the inexorability of change. He is searching, trying to find his balance, his center. He knows he left it somewhere in his past, as we all have done. The poem is a mental exercise, a meditation. You could perform the exercise in a parking garage. It isn't meant to be enacted. Then I realized that my meditation was different from Yeats's. If he was using his mind to find his center, I was using him using history, poetry, travel to get to the same place. And there I was. All of County Sligo is "Yeats Country." He mined it, traced its contours, translated them to verse: "black wind," "wet winds," "noisy clouds," "thorn trees," "the clinging air." He did it so thoroughly, it's almost as if the craggy loveliness of the countryside were carved to suit his poetry, rather than the other way around. "Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen Car," from Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child," describes a misty waterfall to the north that seems like something out of Peter Jackson's "Hobbit." A few miles away from the lake, the stupendous mountain slab called Ben Bulben rises like a natural acropolis, the home of some ancient race of Irish gods, a height whose purpose can only be to evoke awe. It became another geographic touchstone for Yeats so much so that in his poem "Under Ben Bulben," he eerily directs the reader to his own grave, in the nearby cemetery of Drumcliffe. Actually it's the grave of another Yeats he refers to, an ancestor. But after his own death, in France, his body was transferred there, as if people treated his poem as a last will and testament. It's only a four mile drive from the shore of Lough Gill to Sligo town, and civilization. Sligo is an ancient and lively enough little center, dominated by its cathedral and ringed with pubs where there's nonstop rugby and soccer on the telly and you can order not just Irish stew and Guinness, but also chicken curry and New Zealand sauvignon blanc. For a tourist, it's the practical base. But pleasant as this is, it was the antithesis of why I had come. Yeats's meditations weren't urban, and neither was mine. I am told that there are enormous salmon lurking beneath the waters of Lough Gill, and that otters make the lake their home, and that the lush forest along the banks called Slish Wood, which Yeats in "The Stolen Child" calls Sleuth Wood, harbors rare orchids, ivies and thistles, and that, yes, the evening can be full of the linnet's wings. I saw none of these remarkable things. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
They're the two most common words you might expect to hear on a film set. One gets the cameras rolling; the other stops them. The question then becomes what to do with all the footage. The art of editing, of assembling various camera angles of various scenes for dramatic effect, has long been a crucial component of cinema, from D.W. Griffith's crosscutting in "Birth of a Nation" to Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" shower scene to Paul Greengrass's white knuckle "Bourne" action sequences. At the same time, though, a counternarrative of cinematic tortoises has nestled alongside these itchy splicing finger hares. More and more directors are using long takes scenes unspooling in real time, free of edits as a sobering reminder of temporality, a virtuosic calling card, a self issued challenge or all of the above. The trend may have reached its commercial apotheosis with the 2015 Academy Award winner, "Birdman," which told the story of an action hero's attempted Broadway comeback seemingly in real time. (Peak TV has also gotten involved, in a particularly daring 2017 "Mr. Robot" episode as well as extended action sequences in "True Detective" and "Daredevil.") Now the director Sam Mendes has created a one shot wonder with "1917," set in the no man's land of the World War I trenches. His efforts which, like many of the films discussed here, do cheat with more than one cut are part of a tradition that goes back at least 70 years. Here is a timeline of pivotal films (and a few noteworthy scenes) that are all "Action!" and no "Cut!" Alfred Hitchcock filmed the psychological thriller "Rope" in a series of 10 minute takes, hiding most of the necessary cuts (film cameras at the time couldn't shoot any longer) by panning past a character's back or a piece of furniture. The film's star, James Stewart, was less than impressed: "The really important thing being rehearsed here is the camera, not the actors!" he muttered during filming. Soon Max Ophuls ("Le Plaisir") and Vincente Minnelli ("The Band Wagon") would try similarly adventurous experiments, though never for an entire film. By the time "Touch of Evil" opened, Orson Welles had tried his hand at splashy long takes in both "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons." But his three plus minute opening sequence in "Touch of Evil," in which we see a time bomb placed in a car and then sweat out the inevitable explosion, remains his gold standard. It also threw down the gauntlet for similarly ambitious opening shots by the likes of Robert Altman ("The Player"), Kathryn Bigelow ("Strange Days"), Brian De Palma ("Snake Eyes") and Alfonso Cuaron ("Gravity"). Long takes found a home in avant garde film as well, few longer than "Empire," in which Andy Warhol filmed the upper floors of the Empire State Building in slow motion, resulting in a film just over eight hours long. Mikhail Kalatozov's Soviet Cuban coproduction, all but lost for decades, had cineastes reeling when it resurfaced in 1995, in no small part because of shots like this one, which descends from a hotel rooftop and even goes underwater for a time. Judging from a near identical shot in 1997's "Boogie Nights," Paul Thomas Anderson was among those who liked what they finally saw. "Film is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie," Jean Luc Godard famously said. By that measure, this horrific traffic jam offers more than seven minutes of unalloyed truth, scored almost entirely by a cacophony of blaring car horns. Martin Scorsese's penchant for long tracking shots, still visible in "The Irishman," reached its apex in "Goodfellas," when we spend three minutes tailing Henry Hill taking his future wife to the Copacabana nightclub. The Copa shot, as it's become known, reportedly took eight takes to get right. Not content with filming an entire movie in one take, Mike Figgis filmed four of them at the same time with the split screen "Timecode." With more than 2,000 actors and three orchestras, "Russian Ark" roamed around dozens of rooms of St. Petersburg's Winter Palace in just one 96 minute take. The director, Alexander Sokurov, had enough battery power for only four attempts; the fourth one was the charm. The only digital manipulation in Park Chan wook's stunning 25 vs. one "Oldboy" fight scene involved inserting a knife in the protagonist's back after the fact. Spike Lee added a few degrees of difficulty when he remade the film a decade later, only to see the studio insert a cut midway through. By this point, an inserted knife is child's play compared to the digital trickery in "Children of Men." Essentially coming full circle from the days of "Rope," Cuaron used deft edits to create a seamless look for a pair of action sequences, including an elaborate ambush. (Spoiler: The Ping Pong ball is also a bit of digital trickery.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Winston Churchill has been a source of both admiration and criticism ever since he was elected as Britain's prime minister in 1940, when the country was in the midst of World War 11. "Darkest Hour ," a nominee for best picture at this year's Academy Awards tells the story of how Churchill helped Britain combat Nazi Germany and lead the nation to victory; the actor Gary Oldman won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar this year for his portrayal of the prime minister. Mr. Churchill's granddaughter, Celia Sandys, has written five books on various aspects of her grandfather's life and frequently accompanied him on his vacations. In a collaboration with the tour operator Tauck, she gives lectures about her grandfather on two of the company's trips, a cruise along the Seine and a visit to London and Paris. Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Ms. Sandys about the man she called "grandpapa." What's your opinion on how your grandfather is portrayed in "Darkest Hour"? Gary Oldman plays him incredibly well, and I think the movie balances his slightly ferocious side with the anguish he faced in inspiring England to win World War II. In many instances, the onscreen depictions of my grandfather make me wince because they're not accurate. For example, he had a slight lisp, and in some films, that lisp is exaggerated. Some films also overdramatize his ferociousness. Perhaps more so than many other leaders, Mr. Churchill has been a continued source of fascination for so many people. Why do you think that is? World War II is a crucial part of world history, and he had a key role in the war. He became prime minister on May 10, 1940, when the war had already been going on for several months. It was a difficult moment for the country. The British Army was marooned on the beaches of Dunkirk, in France, and surrounded by Germans. My grandfather ordered a fleet of small boats to go across the Channel and pick up the soldiers. The Air Force flew overhead to help protect the boats. Incredibly, many of the soldiers survived, which was a huge boost to England's morale because everyone thought that they would either die or be taken as prisoners. The success of Dunkirk gave my grandfather an incredible boost at the start of his premiership and increased his popularity on the international stage, where he still plays his part. How often did you travel with your grandfather and to what destinations? We took five trips together. He had nine other grandchildren, but they were either too young or had other commitments. I happened to be of the right age and available and feel very lucky that I had a lot of one on one time with him. Our first trip, in 1959, was a monthlong vacation on the Onassis yacht sailing around the Greek Islands. We were a group of a dozen, including my mother, Diana, and the opera singer Maria Callas, and her husband. Aristotle Onassis was our host. We visited Mykonos and Delos and many other islands and eventually ended up in Istanbul. During the cruise, my grandfather would sit on the boat's deck and puff a cigar every day and take in the scenery. We also took several trips to Monte Carlo and stayed at the Hotel de Paris for several weeks at a time. Painting was his favorite pastime, and we used to go to the surrounding hills, where he painted the landscape, and we had fabulous picnic lunches. Is there one memory that stands out from your travels together? On one of our last trips, to Monte Carlo, which was in 1962, he fell down in his hotel room in the middle of the night and broke his hip. Everyone thought he was going to die, including him. The day after this happened, the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, sent a plane to pick us up. He lay on a stretcher on the flight home. I held his hand the whole time and prayed that he would make it. He ended up living three more years, and we took another trip to France the following year. Did your grandfather have any travel rituals? Painting. He painted constantly when he was on the road and never traveled without his paints. What questions do Tauck guests most often ask you about your grandfather? Some people ask why I think he wasn't put back in office for a second consecutive term as prime minister, but many also ask what sort of grandfather he was. I tell them that he was warm and affectionate. To us, he was grandpapa, not a famous person. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
New Jersey police officers are now barred from using a facial recognition app made by a start up that has licensed its groundbreaking technology to hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country. Gurbir S. Grewal, New Jersey's attorney general, told state prosecutors in all 21 counties on Friday that police officers should stop using the Clearview AI app. The New York Times reported last week that Clearview had amassed a database of more than three billion photos across the web including sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Venmo. The vast database powers an app that can match people to their online photos and link back to the sites the images came from. "Until this week, I had not heard of Clearview AI," Mr. Grewal said in an interview. "I was troubled. The reporting raised questions about data privacy, about cybersecurity, about law enforcement security, about the integrity of our investigations." His order to prosecutors was reported earlier by NJ.com. In a promotional video posted to its website this week, Clearview included images of Mr. Grewal because the company said its app had played a role last year in Operation Open Door, a New Jersey police sting that led to the arrest of 19 people accused of being child predators. "I was surprised they used my image and the office to promote the product online," said Mr. Grewal, who confirmed that Clearview's app had been used to identify one of the people in the sting. "I was troubled they were sharing information about ongoing criminal prosecutions." Mr. Grewal's office sent Clearview a cease and desist letter that asked the company to stop using the office and its investigations to promote its products. "We've received the attorney general's letter and are complying," said Tor Ekeland, Clearview's lawyer. "The video has been removed." The video also included a claim that the New York Police Department had used Clearview's app to identify a man who was accused of planting rice cookers made to resemble bombs around the city. As reported by BuzzFeed, the Police Department said the app had played no role in the case. "There is no institutional relationship between the N.Y.P.D. and Clearview," said Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the department. "The N.Y.P.D. did not rely on Clearview technology to identify the suspect in the Aug. 16 rice cooker incident. The N.Y.P.D. identified the suspect using the department's facial recognition practice, where a still image from a surveillance video was compared to a pool of lawfully possessed arrest photos." Some officers in the Police Department are said to be using the Clearview app without official authorization, The New York Post reported on Thursday. In addition to placing a moratorium on the Clearview app, the New Jersey attorney general's office has asked the state's Division of Criminal Justice to look into how state law enforcement agencies have used the app. Mr. Grewal wants to know which ones are using "this product or products like it," and what information those companies are tracking about police investigations and searches. An earlier episode in which police officers received calls from the company after uploading a photo of a Times reporter to the app indicated that Clearview has the ability to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for. Mr. Grewal said that his office would not have to preapprove use of a tool like Clearview AI by the police, but that maybe it should. His office reviews, for example, new forms of less than lethal ammunition to make sure that it's a "safe tool to have out there." "I'm not categorically opposed to using any of these types of tools or technologies that make it easier for us to solve crimes, and to catch child predators or other dangerous criminals," Mr. Grewal said. "But we need to have a full understanding of what is happening here and ensure there are appropriate safeguards." This week, Clearview also received questions from United States senators, as well as a letter from Twitter demanding that the start up stop scraping photos from its site. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
REDMOND, Wash. Last week, Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, slipped on a glove made of cardboard and clenched his hand into a fist, causing a robotic hand with fingers made of drinking straws to mimic his movements. The glove was one of several engineering projects built in a makeshift laboratory on Microsoft's campus. The company spent the last year talking to thousands of teachers and designing high tech experiments that require mostly low cost parts. It will give the designs to schools for free so teachers can use them in their lesson plans. The projects are part of a major push the company announced Tuesday at an event in New York to make its products more attractive to school administrators, students and teachers. The push includes a new version of Microsoft's Windows operating system for classrooms, tweaks to its Office applications and a new Surface laptop for students in a collection of bold colors. While the dollars available in the education market are compelling enough for big technology companies like Microsoft, classrooms also offer an opportunity to make a first impression on young people who could eventually buy their products. Microsoft remains a force in classrooms around the globe. But the company's relevance in schools in the United States is in jeopardy after years of progress by Google, whose software dominates sales of new devices in schools. Google has gained ground in public schools by offering a tightly connected system of free classroom apps, lower cost laptops called Chromebooks and a web based console that allows schools to remotely manage thousands of student devices. Industry analysts said Microsoft's initiative was the company's first credible response to Google's recent encroachment into education. "I am not going to predict that they are going to take back the entire market or anything like that, but this is the best move that I could have seen them making against Chromebooks," said J. P. Gownder, a technology analyst at Forrester Research, a market research company, where Microsoft is one of his clients. Some of Microsoft's moves are intended to make its products more appealing to educators by simplifying them and, in some ways, restricting them. The new version of its operating system, Windows 10 S, will run only applications that have been vetted by Microsoft and placed in its online app store, to prevent students from downloading software that could slow the performance of their computers. Microsoft has also devised a way for schools to get new computers running on a network quickly, without manually configuring each one, by plugging in a USB memory stick. A Microsoft management system called Intune for Education allows schools to set further limits on classroom computers, like locking them down so students cannot cheat by surfing the web during tests. The tools are designed to be easy enough for teachers to use, since many schools do not have dedicated technology administrators. "Sometimes school districts aren't managing the devices," said Terry Myerson, a Microsoft executive vice president. "Teachers are on the front lines of managing the devices." The company is also making full versions of its Office applications, rather than more limited web versions, available to schools for free. It has modified a version of its Microsoft Teams group chat tool so teachers can collaborate with students. It is also waiving the cost of an educational version of Minecraft, a popular video game it owns, for the first year schools use it. While much of Microsoft's focus is on software that makes using inexpensive devices often in the 200 to 300 range more palatable, the company will also release a 999 device called the Surface Laptop, a twist on its Surface tablets. The device will run Windows 10 S. Tech companies are fiercely competing for business in primary and secondary schools in the United States, a technology market expected to reach 21 billion by 2020, according to estimates from Ibis Capital, a technology investment firm, and EdtechXGlobal, a conference company. It is a matter of some urgency for Microsoft. Chromebooks accounted for 58 percent of the 12.6 million mobile devices shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States last year, compared with less than 1 percent in 2012, according to Futuresource Consulting, a research company. By contrast, Windows laptops and tablets made up 21.6 percent of the mobile device shipments to schools in the United States last year, down from about 43 percent in 2012. Outside the United States, Microsoft Windows devices accounted for about 64 percent of mobile device shipments to schools last year, Futuresource said. Apple has similarly experienced a steep Chromebook related decline in shipments of iPads and Mac laptops to schools. Its mobile shipments to schools fell to 19 percent in the United States last year, from 52 percent in 2012. Like Microsoft, Apple is not taking the Chromebook phenomenon lying down. Apple recently introduced an iPad management app called Classroom, which enables teachers to assign shared iPads to students and create virtual classrooms to guide students through lessons. Apple also introduced lower pricing for educational institutions on its newest iPad model. The iPad starts at 329 for consumers and at 299 for schools. Google began to take off in schools in the United States in 2013, when school districts started making bulk purchases of Chromebooks, which are now made by Acer, Asus, Lenovo, HP and other computer makers. Because the laptops run on Google's Chrome operating system and revolve around web based apps, they are often cheaper, easier to manage and faster to boot up than traditional laptops. By contrast, Mr. Gownder of Forrester Research said that Microsoft software is so feature rich that technology experts in many school districts have had to devote their summers to preparing Windows laptops for students one device at a time. And some of Microsoft's initial attempts to contend with Google's rise in schools stumbled. In 2014, Microsoft announced it would be going head to head with Chromebooks by working with device manufacturers to introduce cheaper Windows laptops. But some schools found the lower priced Windows devices too cheaply made to withstand student use and too low powered to efficiently run Microsoft software. "The cheapest of them would not work," said Hal Friedlander, a former chief information officer of the New York City Department of Education. Officials at Omaha Public Schools, which spends about 570,000 annually on Microsoft software and is investing 8 million to buy students Windows devices, welcomed the company's more comprehensive approach to the classroom. About 200 teachers in the district have completed professional development activities called the Microsoft Innovative Educator program. Some of those teachers are already using the Microsoft Teams chat service with their students. "Now it's not four or five different experiences based on which app you are using," said Rob Dickson, the executive director of information management services for Omaha Public Schools. "It's a single app with all those experiences within it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
They make the gentlest rippling sound, these candlelit figures gliding ever so slowly through the water, perambulating around a spare scattering of boulders. In a vast, shallow pool, beneath the high arched ceiling of the Park Avenue Armory 's Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the hems of their filmy white kimonos trail along the surface. The tableau is so tranquil that you might not even notice, as you take your seat, that you're already being drawn into the ethereal, meditative otherworld where Satoshi Miyagi 's spellbinding "Antigone" will unfold. A n ancient Greek tragedy by way of Japan, it is visually and aurally splendrous a large cast spectacle, with hypnotically paced choreography borrowed from the tradition of Noh theater. Most of the principals here are played by two actors: one, kneeling in the water, to speak the dialogue; the other, on a nearby rock, to perform the movements. Eye popping design is what we've come to expect from shows at the Armory, and this Shizuoka Performing Arts Center production, with an 18,000 gallon expanse of water, does not disappoint. What's most extraordinary, though, is the visceral potency of Mr. Miyagi's staging. Its particular blend of the classical with the contemporary renders the play about a young woman who risks her life to defy the cruel dictate of a reckless, power mad king both timeless and urgent. Without any political overlay, it speaks directly to our rancorous present. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
See How Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem and More Draw a Bunny None Karsten Moran for The New York Times Sabra Embury writes fiction and literary criticism for Vice, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Believer. I started this 10 second rabbit project a little over a decade ago as a way of channeling the artistic curiosity of the inspiring people around me. At parties I'd collect unsigned, loose leaf doodles from people around a room, and then we'd guess who drew each based on our assumptions about one another. Like handwriting analysis, but with bunnies. Why bunnies? Because they're tough to mistake for any other creature, thanks to the exaggerated stretch of their ears. They're fun to draw even for people who possess no art skills at all. (Plus, imagine asking Jonathan Lethem to draw a chicken.) I later began asking authors at readings to sign their books with a rabbit, scrawled in 10 seconds or less. The time limit gave the whimsical scheme structure, and it also put participants at ease; I wasn't asking for serious art. Still, they'd often protest, "I can't draw!" before inevitably conceding, and eventually admitting they enjoyed the break from routinely asking to whom they should inscribe the book. Margaret Atwood, for one, embraced my request with a glow: "This is great!" she said, adding a carrot. Others (I've amassed 70 of these over the years), both reluctant and charmed, would sigh a "here goes" as I counted to 10. Karsten Moran for The New York Times Lynch drew his rabbit in his newly published book of lithographs and drawings. We were at Book Soup in L.A. at the time, and when I asked him for it the people in the room kind of collectively held their breath, then exhaled when he finished. His assistant handed the book back to me as if it were a newborn baby, then Lynch said something along the lines of "thank you, that was interesting." Karsten Moran for The New York Times At first I thought he wasn't going to do it, then he dropped a couple F bombs and told me to start counting. Months later when I ran into him at Chateau Marmont for the launch of "Imperial Bedrooms," he fondly remembered our interaction as a mild assault. 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. Karsten Moran for The New York Times It is surprising that Mark Z.'s rabbit deviates so dramatically from an ordinary figure? That it's slightly unsettling? Not really. Also: confidence. Karsten Moran for The New York Times Nicholson Baker drew his bunny for me at Skylight Books in L.A. It's amazing how shy, kind and unpretentious it looks, since the description pretty much sums up the author, both in his writing and how he seemed to be in real life. Karsten Moran for The New York Times I love how Blume channels Aesop with the placement of her rabbit whether she did it intentionally is anyone's guess. This is also my son Felix's first official rabbit. Who knows, maybe one day he'll carry on the tradition. Definitely one of my all time favorite authors. I'd say Williams's rabbit is concentrated rather than small. Tiny like the zero redundant details which make the difference between a good sentence and a great sentence. And she's definitely a master of that. The dog being beside it makes sense, too. Karsten Moran for The New York Times The most neurotic looking rabbit in my collection. Coincidence? Karsten Moran for The New York Times When I think of Lethem's writing style, complexity and control both come to mind. A laid back professionalism. Having said that, his rabbit with its perfect posture looks to me as though it would never suffer fools. Karsten Moran for The New York Times Amelia is hands down one of the most creative people alive. If there's a new way to do things, she probably had something to do with it. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
MS. FISHER'S MODERN MURDER MYSTERIES Stream on Acorn TV. The Australian crime show "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" about an elegant heiress turned detective in 1920s Melbourne named Phryne Fisher got rave reviews in the land down under when it debuted in 2012, and gained a global following with distribution by Netflix, Acorn TV and PBS. This spinoff takes place in the '60s and focuses on Phryne's audacious niece, Peregrine (Geraldine Hakewill), who inherits Phryne's fortune after she disappears and is presumed dead. And shocker! Peregrine becomes a sleuth, too, chasing murderers with the help of a hunky detective (Joel Jackson) and women from her aunt's Adventuresses' Club. AMERICAN HONEY (2016) Stream on Netflix; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. This nearly three hour movie is a dizzying trip across Middle America in the company of some very reckless youth. At the outset, Star (Sasha Lane), a poor teenager in Oklahoma, leaves her family to join a group of drifters who ostensibly sell magazine subscriptions door to door. (They mostly pass the time partying and hustling gullible customers.) The story grows darker, but it also gives way to tenderness when Star becomes involved with Jake (Shia LaBeouf), a high earner who answers to the group's leader, Krystal (Riley Keough), in more ways than one. He's a lot to handle, and so is Star. By the end, it's clear that the tale is really about the baggage we carry and where it might lead us. "The movie is a sprawling anthology of contradictory feelings, sensations and genres," A. O. Scott wrote in his review in The New York Times. "It's an episodic travelogue, a coming of age chronicle and an indictment of grim social conditions." WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN' (2010) Stream on Amazon; rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. The director Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth") sheds light on the failings of the United States public education system in this alarming documentary. Educators explain how ineffective schools and teachers have kept thousands of students from academic success, and we see part of the process in action: The lens follows five children whose chances of going to charter schools rely on highly competitive lotteries. THE SHOW MUST GO ON: THE QUEEN ADAM LAMBERT STORY (2019) 8 p.m. on ABC. Last year's Oscar winning biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody" tells the story of Queen's electric frontman, Freddie Mercury. This new documentary jumps ahead to the band's second life, focusing on the rise of its current frontman, Adam Lambert, who first sang with the group as a finalist on American Idol in 2009 and joined a new version of the outfit in 2012. Named after a song from Queen's 1991 LP "Innuendo," the movie features behind the scenes concert footage and interviews with Lambert, the founding band members Brian May and Roger Taylor and the "Bohemian Rhapsody" star Rami Malek. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology 2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by e mail, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a resume. "I think we were duped," one of the scientists wrote in an e mail to the Entomological Society. Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well known publications and events. Steven Goodman, a dean and professor of medicine at Stanford and the editor of the journal Clinical Trials, which has its own imitators, called this phenomenon "the dark side of open access," the movement to make scholarly publications freely available. The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them. Open access got its start about a decade ago and quickly won widespread acclaim with the advent of well regarded, peer reviewed journals like those published by the Public Library of Science, known as PLoS. Such articles were listed in databases like PubMed, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine, and selected for their quality. But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. "Most people don't know the journal universe," Dr. Goodman said. "They will not know from a journal's title if it is for real or not." Researchers also say that universities are facing new challenges in assessing the resumes of academics. Are the publications they list in highly competitive journals or ones masquerading as such? And some academics themselves say they have found it difficult to disentangle themselves from these journals once they mistakenly agree to serve on their editorial boards. The phenomenon has caught the attention of Nature, one of the most competitive and well regarded scientific journals. In a news report published recently, the journal noted "the rise of questionable operators" and explored whether it was better to blacklist them or to create a "white list" of those open access journals that meet certain standards. Nature included a checklist on "how to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or a publisher." Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, has developed his own blacklist of what he calls "predatory open access journals." There were 20 publishers on his list in 2010, and now there are more than 300. He estimates that there are as many as 4,000 predatory journals today, at least 25 percent of the total number of open access journals. "It's almost like the word is out," he said. "This is easy money, very little work, a low barrier start up." Journals on what has become known as "Beall's list" generally do not post the fees they charge on their Web sites and may not even inform authors of them until after an article is submitted. They barrage academics with e mail invitations to submit articles and to be on editorial boards. One publisher on Beall's list, Avens Publishing Group, even sweetened the pot for those who agreed to be on the editorial board of The Journal of Clinical Trails Patenting, offering 20 percent of its revenues to each editor. One of the most prolific publishers on Beall's list, Srinubabu Gedela, the director of the Omics Group, has about 250 journals and charges authors as much as 2,700 per paper. Dr. Gedela, who lists a Ph.D. from Andhra University in India, says on his Web site that he "learnt to devise wonders in biotechnology." Open access publishers say that the papers they publish are reviewed and that their businesses are legitimate and ethical. "There is no compromise on quality review policy," Dr. Gedela wrote in an e mail. "Our team's hard work and dedicated services to the scientific community will answer all the baseless and defamatory comments that have been made about Omics." But some academics say many of these journals' methods are little different from spam e mails offering business deals that are too good to be true. Paulino Martinez, a doctor in Celaya, Mexico, said he was gullible enough to send two articles in response to an e mail invitation he received last year from The Journal of Clinical Case Reports. They were accepted. Then came a bill saying he owed 2,900. He was shocked, having had no idea there was a fee for publishing. He asked to withdraw the papers, but they were published anyway. "I am a doctor in a hospital in the province of Mexico, and I don't have the amount they requested," Dr. Martinez said. The journal offered to reduce his bill to 2,600. Finally, after a year and many e mails and a phone call, the journal forgave the money it claimed he owed. Some professors listed on the Web sites of journals on Beall's list, and the associated conferences, say they made a big mistake getting involved with the journals and cannot seem to escape them. Thomas Price, an associate professor of reproductive endocrinology and fertility at the Duke University School of Medicine, agreed to be on the editorial board of The Journal of Gynecology Obstetrics because he saw the name of a well respected academic expert on its Web site and wanted to support open access journals. He was surprised, though, when the journal repeatedly asked him to recruit authors and submit his own papers. Mainstream journals do not do this because researchers ordinarily want to publish their papers in the best journal that will accept them. Dr. Price, appalled by the request, refused and asked repeatedly over three years to be removed from the journal's editorial board. But his name was still there. "They just don't pay any attention," Dr. Price said. About two years ago, James White, a plant pathologist at Rutgers, accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of a new journal, Plant Pathology Microbiology, not realizing the nature of the journal. Meanwhile, his name, photograph and resume were on the journal's Web site. Then he learned that he was listed as an organizer and speaker on a Web site advertising Entomology 2013. "I am not even an entomologist," he said. He thinks the publisher of the plant journal, which also sponsored the entomology conference, just pasted his name, photograph and resume onto the conference Web site. At this point, he said, outraged that the conference and journal were "using a person's credentials to rip off other unaware scientists," Dr. White asked that his name be removed from the journal and the conference. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The last time Peter John Dario saw his father alive was on March 14, at the entrance to a hospital in Edison, N.J. An employee took him away in a wheelchair, telling Mr. Dario and his mother gently but unequivocally that they could not go in the building. In a fog of worry and confusion, as he watched his father's diminished silhouette disappear through the door, Mr. Dario forgot to say goodbye. Five days later, his father, Peter Dario, died of respiratory failure from an infection caused by the coronavirus. He was 59. None of the members of his large family several of them now also sick with Covid 19 were at his side. Of all the ways the coronavirus pandemic has undermined the conventions of normal life, perhaps none is as cruel as the separation of seriously ill patients and their loved ones, now mandated at hospitals around the world. At most hospitals, exceptions are being made only for patients receiving end of life care, hospitalized children and pregnant women in labor. Last week, after New York Presbyterian discovered that multiple pregnant and postpartum patients in its labor and delivery unit had Covid 19 with minimal or no symptoms it barred all visitors, including partners. Mt. Sinai Hospital System followed suit. But on Saturday night, following an outcry from expectant parents, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed an executive order requiring all medical facilities licensed by New York State to allow one support person for patients who are in labor. "This disease has demonstrated to us just how vulnerable the greater community can be when we have a virus circulating that no one has any immunity to," said Nancy Foster, a vice president of the American Hospital Association. "And that extraordinary reality has forced us to take extraordinary measures." While the infection control rationale is clear and sound, the consequences for patients, their loved ones and the hospital personnel who must enforce the rules are profound. Clinicians and hospital staff said keeping families away had been among the darkest experience of their professional lives. The restrictions run contrary to a hospital's desire to keep patients and families together, not only for the salutary effect of something as simple as a hand held, or a chair pulled close to a bed, but because having a relative present can ease the workload of a medical team. It can also provide crucial information that a confused patient may not be able to offer. Hospitals are receiving frequent requests for leniency, especially for patients in intensive care units. "This isn't easy but we have to deny the vast majority of them," said Dr. Shereef Elnahal, president and chief executive of University Hospital in Newark, N.J., which is, like other hospitals, managing the requests on a case by case basis. The restrictions raise distressing questions, especially when it comes to end of life visits. How close to the end of life must a patient be to merit a visitor? Is near death the right time? Why not earlier, when a patient is healthier, and of sound mind? Peter Dario, who had diabetes and was on dialysis, started to look sick at the beginning of March, said his daughter Marsha Dario, 32, a nurse. His 86 year old mother in law, who also lives in the household, was already sick with Covid like symptoms. When Marsha Dario picked her father up from dialysis on March 7, he was weak, dizzy and vomiting. She told him he needed to go to the hospital. But he refused. His condition worsened. Struggling to breathe a few days later, he finally agreed to go to the hospital but only if his wife, Luzviminda Dario, 63, came too. Although his wife was sick by then as well, she went. "They were inseparable," said Peter John Dario, his son, who is 23. The day after he was admitted to John F. Kennedy Medical Center, Peter Dario lay unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator. Three days later, on the night of March 19, the hospital called the family to say his fever had spiked and he was unstable. Finally, a nurse said one family member would be allowed in. The previous day, Luzviminda and Marsha Dario had received positive test results for the coronavirus and were in quarantine at home, so Peter John Dario rushed to the hospital. While he was being screened at the entrance for the symptoms of coronavirus infection, his father died. Just as difficult is the prohibition of visits with patients who have other grave illnesses or are undergoing risky surgery. This month, Brittany Sanchez, 32, was at home in Las Vegas getting her two small children ready for bed when she had a seizure and collapsed. The next morning, her parents went to the hospital anyway. A security guard refused to let them enter the building. "Heather said they'd have to call the police on her to keep her from going in," her father, Don Last, said. Eventually both were allowed in. A few days later, Ms. Sanchez was flown on a medevac jet to the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center for a major neurosurgical procedure. U.C.S.F., too, was in lockdown and Ms. Sanchez's parents were not allowed in the hospital. The surgery would be complex and dangerous. "There was a reasonable chance she was going to have a problem," said Dr. Mitchel Berger, the neurosurgeon who performed the procedure. Dr. Berger tried and failed to persuade his hospital to make an exception to the no visitor rule. Ms. Sanchez's father was beside himself. The night before the surgery, he sent Dr. Berger a text. "You will have my daughter Brittany's life in your hands tomorrow," he wrote. "I expect you to treat her as if she were your own daughter. I will never forgive myself that I was not able to hold her hand through this. Bring her back home to me whole." The surgery lasted nearly seven hours. As soon as he was finished, Dr. Berger went to find the Lasts, who were waiting outside the hospital. From six feet away, he told them the surgery had gone well, and apologized again for being unable to allow them in. "They said they knew it wasn't my fault, but that I just couldn't imagine what it would be like to be in that situation," he said. "And they're right. I couldn't imagine it." Some hospitals are buying iPads to give to patients for virtual visits. Others are helping patients speak with their family and friends over FaceTime. Dell Hutchinson, who lives in Oakland, Calif., would gladly have accepted a virtual visit with his wife, but she was too sick to use her cellphone. Mr. Hutchinson's wife, Sandi Hutchinson, was hospitalized on Feb. 19 with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, bleeding around her brain. On March 15, the hospital stopped allowing visitors. This left Mr. Hutchinson with one option: calling her room through the main switchboard. But she also could not operate the bedside telephone, Mr. Hutchinson said, which meant he had to hope there was a doctor, nurse or other staff member in the room to pick up when he called. When Mr. Hutchinson did manage to speak to his wife, he wasn't able to glean much. Her voice was monotonic. "Without being able to read her body language, how could I know how she was really doing?" he asked. "I couldn't." Just as the Dario family was absorbing the news of Peter Dario's death, tragedy swept through the household again. On Monday, Cresenciano Victolero, Luzviminda Dario's 86 year old father, weak and short of breath, was rushed to the same hospital where his son in law had died. No one was allowed to visit. On Wednesday, a nurse called to say they were unable to maintain his blood pressure. A granddaughter headed to the hospital. Mr. Victolero died while she was en route. "But they held pronouncing him until she got there," Marsha Dario said. "The nurse cried with her." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men. A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter and equated its members with "flat earthers" over their embrace of calls to defund police departments. Days earlier, the profession's de facto governing body, the American Economic Association, sent a letter to its members supporting protesters and saying that "we have only begun to understand racism and its impact on our profession and our discipline." A group of economists, mostly from outside academia, last week hosted an online fund raising effort for the Sadie Collective, an organization that aims to bring more black women into the field. Black economists say the events have brought some progress to a field that has long struggled with discrimination in its ranks and with a refusal by many of its leaders to acknowledge discrimination in the country at large. But the profession remains nowhere close to a full scale shift on racial issues: On Wednesday, the director of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, told reporters, "I don't believe there is systemic racism in the U.S." Black Americans are vastly underrepresented among economics students and professors, a wide range of data have shown. There are no black editors of the most prestigious economics journals. There are no black professors in the main economics department at Chicago, Mr. Uhlig's employer, which is one of the most storied departments in the country. In a survey of economists released by the American Economic Association last year, only 14 percent of black economists agreed with the statement that "people of my race/ethnicity are respected within the field." As protests against discrimination have grown in recent days, a conversation has erupted often led by black economists over how the lack of diversity has left the profession ill equipped for a moment where policymakers are seeking ideas on how to combat racial inequality in policing, employment and other areas. "Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities," the Howard University economist William Spriggs wrote to colleagues in an open letter that was posted this week on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are equal," he continued. "We find ourselves, as so often happens in these ugly police cases, having to prove that acts of discrimination are exactly that discrimination." Mr. Uhlig's Twitter posts criticized demonstrators for not coordinating recent protests with law enforcement, before singling out Black Lives Matter over calls to defund the police. "Look: I understand, that some out there still wish to go and protest and say defundpolice and all kinds of stuff, while you are still young and responsibility does not matter," Mr. Uhlig wrote. "Enjoy! Express yourself! Just don't break anything, ok? And be back by 8 pm." The posts drew a swift backlash, including criticism from several white colleagues at Chicago and a petition calling for him to resign his editorship of the Journal of Political Economy, considered one of five journals with an outsize role in the field. Mr. Uhlig, a 59 year old German citizen, also faced scrutiny over past writings on his blog circulated on Twitter by the Slate journalist Jordan Weissmann that criticize black protesters in the United States. 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. Those included a 2017 post in which he asked supporters of National Football League players kneeling to protest police brutality, "Would you defend football players waving the confederate flag and dressing in Ku Klux Klan garb during the playing of the national anthem?" Mr. Uhlig also wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2016, complaining about calls for greater diversity in the motion picture industry at the Academy Awards. "This whole 'diversity more American blacks in Hollywood movies' thing?" he wrote. "So so strange. Really." Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair, said in an email on Wednesday that "the tweets and blog posts by Harald Uhlig are extremely troubling" and that "it would be appropriate for the University of Chicago, which is the publisher of the Journal of Political Economy, to review Uhlig's performance and suitability to continue as editor." Mr. Uhlig apologized on Tuesday evening for his Twitter posts. He said in an email interview on Tuesday night that his "flat earther" comparison "appears to have caused irritation" but disagreed with critics who say his comments "hurt and marginalize people of color and their allies in the economics profession; call into question his impartiality in assessing academic work on this and related topics; and damage the standing of the economics discipline in society." The reference to the Klan, he said, was a case where "I chose an extreme example" to make a point about free speech. "Discrimination and racism is wrong," Mr. Uhlig wrote in an email. Later, he added: "I would love to have more black economists (or is it 'Afro American economists'?) among our undergraduate students, Ph.D. students and faculty. It is my impression that the good ones are highly sought after. We also have very few American Indians among our colleagues. We need to find good way to change these numbers." Some conservatives hailed Mr. Uhlig as a champion of free speech and a victim of "cancel culture" although critics said they were not seeking his dismissal from his tenured professorship. Critics, however, held up Mr. Uhlig as an example of the deeply embedded advantages of white economists, including nearly full control over the journals that determine, in their selections for publication, which economists receive acclaim, tenure and top jobs. "This is a way in which potentially good ideas, potentially good contributors of ideas to the economics profession, have been thwarted because of a gatekeeper," Lisa Cook, a Michigan State University economist and one of the profession's few prominent black women, said in an interview. Ms. Cook leads the American Economic Association's Summer Training Program, a decades old effort to recruit black and Latino students to the profession. She said students often asked her how she overcame discrimination in the field, and whether they would be welcome. "They're asking where does this racially hostile environment come from?" she said. "Why does this racial discrimination exist in the pinnacle of the social sciences?" Economics has a history of discrimination and, in some cases, outright racism. George Stigler, a Nobel laureate and an early leader of the American Economic Association, criticized the civil rights movement in 1962 and wrote that African Americans' disadvantages in the labor market stemmed in part from their "inferiority as a worker." "Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers' competition," he wrote. Few scholars today would use such language. But the ideas persist: Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers. Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, says the lack of diversity in economics affects what is studied and how. "We study things that are related to race and racism all the time, but we are inclined to figure out what other explanations may be at play," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
During the 2008 presidential race, two online upstarts, Politico and The Huffington Post, elbowed their way onto the rope line and, for better or for worse, helped change the way campaigns were covered. In 2012, it was BuzzFeed's turn. The site that specialized in cute kittens and funny lists turned up at the Iowa caucuses and sped up the news cycle even further, flooding Twitter feeds with tidbits from the trail. Will 2016 be the Snapchat election? The question arises after last week's reports that Snapchat, America's fastest growing smartphone app, had hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division. Snapchat has said little about its plans, and both it and Mr. Hamby declined to comment for this article. But a couple of things are clear: A company known for enabling teenagers in various states of undress to send disappearing selfies to each other is getting into politics. And with well over 100 million users, a huge swath of whom are in the United States and between the ages of 18 and 31, its potential to shake up the next election is considerable. "There is no harder riddle to solve in politics than reaching young Americans who are very interested in the future of their country but don't engage with traditional news," Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, wrote to me in an email. "Snapchat may have just made it a whole lot easier to solve this riddle." There's nothing quite like a presidential race for a new media company looking to make its presence known. Campaigns are pageants, and the candidates aren't the only ones on stage; so, too, are the outlets that cover them. Break a story, push it out across social media, and you're on the map. That's what happened with BuzzFeed, which was the first news organization to report that John McCain was endorsing Mitt Romney in early 2012, only three days after the site started covering the campaign. (An anonymously sourced story that Romney spray tanned would come later.) Snapchat is hardly the only social platform looking to beef up its content with the hope of better engaging its audience. Facebook has been talking to a number of media companies, including The New York Times, about hosting their articles and videos on its own servers, rather than driving users to their external sites. But Snapchat is going a step further: It is creating its own content. This is something social platforms have generally been reluctant to do for the simple reason that it's difficult. And expensive. What might Snapchat's political coverage look like? This year, the company introduced a feature called "Discover," which allows Snapchat's media partners CNN, Vice and ESPN among them to post content to the app every 24 hours on their own Snapchat channel. Think of it as something akin to a cable TV bundle, only with content specifically meant, or at least edited, for Snapchat's users, with a lot of bright colors and crisp images, plenty of videos and a minimum of text. It's snack food for your smartphone. On Comedy Central's channel on Saturday, you could watch the comedians Key Peele play Mayweather and Pacquiao at a prefight news conference. Vice's channel opened with a story about drug use in China; swipe to the left and you'd find a video about Baltimore. Snapchat also has its own channel: For now, you're more likely to learn about Nicki Minaj performing at a bar mitzvah than you are about Rand Paul's position on Iran. This could change under Mr. Hamby. But maybe more interesting are the possibilities with regard to Snapchat's "Live" feature. Here's how Live works: The company drops a digital boundary, or "geofence," around an event. Snapchat users within the boundary can upload their "snaps" still images or video to a Snapchat "story" built around the event. These snaps are stitched into a narrative by a team of Snapchat curators. They are basically home movies, shot by the app's own users. Over the weekend, Snapchatters could watch reactions from England to the birth of the new royal baby or videos from the Kentucky Derby. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The audiences for some of Snapchat's stories have been enormous. During a 24 hour stretch in January, nearly 25 million people tuned in to its coverage of New York's "snowpocalypse." Over three days in April, some 40 million watched Snapchat's feed from the Coachella music festival. These are numbers that network executives can only dream about. It's easy to imagine Snapchat dropping a geofence around the Iowa State Fair during a candidate's visit, or even around a presidential debate. Would these events be as popular among Snapchat's users as a rock concert? Maybe not, but even a fraction of that viewership would be significant. Mr. Hamby, who is 33, joined CNN in 2004 straight out of journalism school. He had a front row seat as the web and smartphones eroded the network's stature as an indispensable source of political news, especially during campaign season. But there's something else about Mr. Hamby that makes him uniquely qualified or uniquely unqualified to lead Snapchat's foray into politics. In 2013, he wrote a 95 page report for Harvard's Shorenstein Center that criticized how campaigns were covered in the digital era. In the report, Mr. Hamby does not romanticize an earlier age, when a handful of anointed reporters the Boys on the Bus, as the writer Timothy Crouse called them crafted the dominant political narrative of the day. But Mr. Hamby also disliked a lot of what he saw on the campaign trail in 2012. He writes that social media forced both reporters and campaigns "to adapt to a treacherous media obstacle course that incentivized speed, smallness and conflict, leaving little room for good will or great journalism but plenty of tweets." The gist of Mr. Hamby's complaint is that the hyperactive metabolism of today's media and the general lack of access to the candidates have produced a lot of shallow, self involved reporting. Can he reverse this trend working for an app whose multibillion dollar valuation is built on the back of technology that makes selfies disappear after 10 seconds? "It sounds ludicrous given how Snapchat started, but I don't know what Snapchat is going to evolve into," said Jeff Greenfield, a campaign trail veteran who is active on Twitter and said he was impressed by Mr. Hamby's report. Snapchat, with its celebration of the ephemeral, may wind up only contributing to the problems that Mr. Hamby identifies in his report. At the same time, the app's popularity gives it the potential to bring millions of first time voters into the political discourse. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Although Sydney's state art museum is perennially popular it attracts about a million people a year it looks cramped and outdated in its current form. And in the last two decades it has lost ground in terms both of visitor numbers and quality of experience not only to Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria but also to art museums in smaller cities like Brisbane and Canberra, which have benefited from their own expansions. The gallery's director, Michael Brand, has had to fight opponents of the plan on multiple fronts. Conservative voices from within Sydney's art world have questioned the need for any upgrade. A former prime minister once known as a great champion of the arts has publicly lambasted the project. Private donors have appeared reluctant to come on board. And the state government, which is ultimately responsible for funding the museum, had been unable to commit for years. A windfall created by the privatization of the state's electricity infrastructure changed the financial equation. But even as the government established a culture and arts fund of 600 million Australian dollars (about 452 million), it came under pressure to steer money away from so called "elite" arts institutions and toward less established organizations in the outer suburbs and regions. To make the grant promised for the Sydney Modern project more palatable, the government announced a new Regional Cultural Fund of 100 million Australian dollars (about 75.4 million). Officials hope, meanwhile, that Sydney Modern will double attendance and bring an additional 1 billion into the economy over 25 years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Get attached to any New York institution and you will eventually see it replaced by something more contemporary, whether it's the 7 Eleven that takes over the space of your favorite corner bodega or a new set of "Saturday Night Live" cast members who get handed the reins of its long running parody of "Fox Friends." On this week's episode, hosted by Natalie Portman and featuring the musical guest Dua Lipa, it fell to the "S.N.L." performers Alex Moffat, Heidi Gardner and Beck Bennett to play chipper, clueless incarnations of the Fox News morning hosts Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade. If this moment briefly made some longtime "S.N.L." viewers wistful for the days when Taran Killam, Vanessa Bayer (as Gretchen Carlson) and Bobby Moynihan handled these duties, at least the rest of the show offered cameos from other "S.N.L." alums to help us deal with the transition. The "Fox Friends" parody that opened the show started with Gardner saying hello to viewers, "whether you're fixing your breakfast or getting dressed for work or laying in the Lincoln Bedroom, tweeting with an Egg McMuffin on your chest." But the moment that most excited the hosts was a surprise phone call from a special guest: President Trump (Alec Baldwin), who said he was "doing my P90X morning exercises right now." However, as viewers could see, he was clearly lying down in the Lincoln Bedroom and tweeting with an Egg McMuffin on his chest. Gardner congratulated Baldwin on the recent State of the Union address, gushing, "Your speech was maybe the best speech in the history of this country." Baldwin replied, "You know a lot of people are saying, including Paul Ryan, that it was better than Martin Luther King's 'I Dream of Jeannie' speech." Looking for something else to watch this weekend? Here are the 100 best movies on Netflix. In other memorable moments from this episode: "Saturday Night Live" delved more deeply into history America's and its own in a pre Super Bowl sketch set at the Second Continental Congress in 1775 and featuring the former "S.N.L." cast members Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey. Informed that the colonists have just won the Battle of Bunker Hill, a delegate played by Beck Bennett sighed, "Now we have to hear the boasting of the Patriots of New England." Enter a rowdy contingent of braggadocious colonial types, including Portman, Dratch and Moffat, who recounted the victory. "We get pushed back way behind our line, like 40 yards," he said in a thick New England accent. "But our guy, Captain Thomas Brady, he's got like the best cannon and we come back like we always do." Not to be outdone, Fey and the cast members Kenan Thompson and Mikey Day strode into the room as the Philadelphia delegation, vowing that they too had victory in their sights. "So grease up them poles 'cause Philly's gonna win and then one of these guys is going to punch a police horse," Fey said. Explaining why they identified themselves with Eagles the team that will face the New England Patriots at the Super Bowl on Sunday Fey said, "We Philadelphians are swift, we are deadly, and our eyes are all a little too close together." Recapping the controversy surrounding a partisan memo released by House Republicans, the "Weekend Update" co anchor Colin Jost said: This memo came from 40 year old virgin Devin Nunes, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. I've got to say, I don't really trust this guy to untangle a vast conspiracy. I wouldn't really trust him to untangle a pair of headphones. Now I'm trying to put myself in his shoes, and it's pretty easy because his shoes are Velcro. But I don't really understand how any of this is important, so I'm just going to treat this memo like every other memo I've received at work and completely ignore it. At this point, if you actually want to get my attention, the bar is set at 'Porn star spanks president with magazine.' Also, this is a four page memo that just cherry picks information from a FISA document that's like 50 or 60 pages long. It's like when you see a blurb for 'Transformers 5,' and it says, 'It blew my mind,' when the full quote is, 'It blew my mind that God allowed this.'" Mr. Jost's co anchor, Michael Che, continued: "First of all, you know damn well Donald Trump didn't read this memo. It's four pages long. And the only time Donald Trump reads four pages in a row is when he's ordering breakfast." Portman reprised her role as Jacqueline Kennedy (as seen in Pablo Larrain's 2016 film "Jackie") in a sketch where she offers advice to Melania Trump (Cecily Strong), who is hesitating about attending the State of the Union. Speaking in broken English, Strong asked, "How can I be good first lady when Donald make it so hard?" Portman replied, "All first ladies have a platform. Yours is bullying, mine was little hats. Your approval rating is through the roof." Strong answered, "Yes, yes, people like me because they're like, 'That lady look how I feel.'" Stick around for additional appearances from the former first ladies Hillary Clinton (Kate McKinnon), Michelle Obama (Leslie Jones) and, for some reason, an ax wielding Martha Washington (Aidy Bryant). Unlikely Double Act of the Week In a deskside segment on "Weekend Update," Strong and McKinnon played the French actresses Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot, trying to apologize for any misunderstandings after their denunciation of the MeToo movement. At least, Strong was trying to explain herself, while the more eccentric McKinnon dug herself into deeper and deeper holes. Strong explained, "It's important in France to question, to debate, to challenge popular opinion. Me, I don't want romance to die. But me, if I went too far or hurt any woman, that was absolutely not my intention." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Love and tradition are key ingredients in the food and drink and music of Colombia's rainy Pacific Coast region. This port city of 400,000 is at the center of it all. At Stall 06 in the dilapidated temporary quarters of the Pueblo Nuevo market, Rosana Angulo was getting frustrated with my persistent queries about that day's lunch options. "Come here, come here," she shouted in the staccato Spanish of Buenaventura, a city of 400,000 and Colombia's busiest port. I followed her into the tiny kitchen, where a jumble of pots battled for space, settled unevenly on chunks of glowing coals. She picked them up one by one. "This is the squid, this is the shark, this is the shellfish stew, this is the shrimp, this is the piangua clam, this is the donkey paw snail ..." There were a dozen in all. Love and tradition are key ingredients in the food and drink and music of Colombia's rainy Pacific Coast region. But there are others. The achiote seed is used to achieve a yellow orange hue. Herbs, grown in raised gardens known as azoteas, impart rich, earthy flavors: the thick, fuzzy leaves of oreganon, which is sometimes called Cuban oregano but is not oregano; cimarron, more commonly known as culantro, which is not cilantro; and poleo, apparently called pennyroyal in English, though not the English I know. I ordered the piangua a tiny squishy black clam that collect s at low tide in mangrove swamps as well as the shrimp and the crab. That's called a triple (TREE play), and it cost me just 18,000 pesos, about 6.35. Until very recently, anyone who wanted to take a deep dive into the Africa inflected culture of the Colombian Pacific would have been best off heading to Cali, about 100 miles inland over the West Andes, to attend the Petronio Alvarez Pacific Music Festival. The six day affair features the rhythms of the region, and crowded with vendors selling traditional food, as well as viche, the sugar cane liquor that serves as the base of its drinks and traditional medicine. (This year the festival runs from Aug. 15 to 20.) That's because traveling to Buenaventura would have been a very risky prospect. "Cocaine Wars Make Port Colombia's Deadliest City," read a Times headline from 2007. In 2014 the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos sent in troops to stabilize the city, and though violent drug gangs still operate, the murder rate is down below the national average, and the city is making a move to attract tourists. In 2017, Buenaventura became a member of the Unesco Creative Cities Network, based on its gastronomy, and if the new Galeria Pueblo Nuevo (the official name of Ms. Angulo's market) is ever completed, it will have a fine showcase for its product. I questioned whether a visit the idea of an old friend from Cali, Catalina Ortiz was a good idea. But Catalina convinced me that, given standard precautions, not only was it safe but not to be missed. Plus, she had a friend there, Stephanie Bueno Torres, who was starting a tourism website and would show us around. "We have preserved our ancestral culture," said Elver Rengifo Micolta, a local radio journalist I met outside Buenaventura, as my travel companions Adam and Steve and I waited to board a jury rigged, motorbike powered wooden rail car on our way to the San Cipriano Natural Reserve (more on that later). "The best of the music and cuisine, it retains its original elements, just as they arrived from Africa." I found that to be true although there is also a significant indigenous influence. But the region's culture has a distinctively different feel, especially in a country that overall is about 10 percent black. Our plan was to spend a day in Cali which, though not on the coast, has a large migrant population from the Pacific region, then drive three hours over a northern stretch of the Andes, adding side trips to San Cipriano and the beach towns of Urumba Malaga Bay National Park. Buenaventura is still not a city for random wandering, so we spent most of our time in the center of town, which felt safe to us. We found ourselves based mostly on Calle 1 (First Street), which is packed with hotels serving port visitors, restaurants and bars blasting salsa, and a snazzy new park on the water's edge packed (at least on weekends) with mango eaters, basketball players, bouncy castle bouncers, lighthouse stair climbers and an unmistakable this is the place to be feeling. There are few attractive buildings; city hall is an ugly tower only partially salvaged by a soaring mural depicting the history of the city. An exception is the Tequendama Inn Estacion, a three story neo Classical building from 1920s known informally as Hotel Estacion, a good option to stay at 178,500 pesos for a couple, or at least visit for spectacular views of the sunset over the bay and passing cargo ships if you're lucky, at the same time. The Galeria is a short cab ride away, but everything else we did was in walking distance. Our first night, we had dinner at Cafe Paci fico , which elevates traditional dishes to fine dining without altering them much, as with the jealousy inducing whole snapper in coconut milk and azotea herbs (I had the triple far less glamorous), and serves them with fresh fruit drinks, such as an icy blackberry/coconut mix. The decor is elegant and peppered with the work of local artists and artisans, both Afro Colombian and indigenous. It's so much classier than anywhere else in the gritty town that it was almost unsurprising when the owner, Saul Monard Diaz Granados, came up to our table speaking perfect English, the result of living from age 3 to 12 in New York. (It was actually extremely surprising .) The next morning we drove half an hour to a town called Cordoba and bought tickets (4,000 pesos) for the ride to the San Cipriano Natural Reserve, on brujitas, or little witches, one of the most fun and ingenious forms of transportation I've ever seen: The community (also called San Cipriano) that serves as a launch point for the reserve is only accessible by rail through the jungle, but the passenger line no longer runs, so the locals have rigged wooden platforms with benches and attached a motorbike whose rear wheel propels you along the rail at speeds just on the fun side of the cool/terrifying divide. We hired a guide for 12,000 pesos each for a guided 45 minute hike. Soon we were fording a brisk river, clambering up and down hills of mud not that far from the color of Ms. Angulo's seafood. The adventure ended refreshingly, with a dive into the pooling water under a lovely waterfall. We headed back to town for a 13,000 peso lunch of fried fish before catching a brujita back to the car. The next day was dedicated to food and finally! viche, which is still largely unregulated but increasingly popular. "The first swig is like a big fire is set in your body," Bernardo Giraldo, my taxi driver from the Cali airport, had said. "The second is when it starts to be tasty." That description was uncannily accurate, we found, when Stephanie, our guide, took us the next afternoon to one of Buenaventura's finest purveyors. Lucia Solis sells her wares under the Semillas de Vida brand out of stall 77 in another temporary market right across First Street from the mural. Ms. Solis, a sixth generation producer, makes different concoctions that target specific diseases and require deep knowledge of native plants, roots and seeds. "It comes from generations," Ms. Solis told us. "It's a gift from antiquity." Perhaps most intriguingly, women commonly take viche before, during and after pregnancy, under direction of the traditional midwives known as parteras. Different creations are said to help women conceive, stay healthy through the pregnancy, ease contractions and to stop postpartum hemorrhaging. "Giving birth without viche," Ms. Solis said, "is like giving birth without a womb." "You can drink and get healthy at the same time," read Ms. Solis's promotional materials a pretty good slogan if this stuff ever goes international. (Its export is currently prohibited.) Some have strong or bitter flavors, but the real crowd pleaser for us was Ms. Solis's arrechon, made with viche, cream, eggs and local fruits like borojo and chontaduro. It tasted like eggnog made with peaty Scotch and is famed for its aphrodisiacal qualities. (If you're looking for a cover story, she said it also works for anemia.) Adam and Steve had to go home a few days earlier than I did, so Stephanie and I headed on a somewhat nausea inducing speedboat ride out to Juanchaco (70,000 pesos, round trip), one of the easygoing beach villages inside the national park. The beaches were lined with palms and peppered by tiny crabs, though the rather silty brown sands aren't made for magazine covers. For Stephanie, that's a good thing: "If the sand were white, the big hotel chains would have already come in." I found it beautifully rustic, with plenty of places to camp or stay for cheap, and enjoy traditional meals and viche based concoctions. But we spent most of our day exploring the bay in a tub of a motorboat, zooming around isolated waterside nooks and crannies, stopping at tropical waterfalls for dips, watching pelicans dive bombing or fish, or watching our guide, Cristian Hurtado, crack open a coconut for us at remote Juan de Dios beach, home to a rustic eco resort of the same name that Catalina raved about. I'll have to save that for my next visit. Seth Kugel hosts Globally Curious, a YouTube series on travel philosophy. His book, "Rediscovering Travel," is out in October from W.W. Norton Company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In some of the most remote and impoverished corners of the world, where respiratory illnesses abound and trained medical professionals fear to tread, diagnosis is increasingly powered by artificial intelligence and the internet. In less than a minute, a new app on a phone or a computer can scan an X ray for signs of tuberculosis, Covid 19 and 27 other conditions. TB, the most deadly infectious disease in the world, claimed nearly 1.4 million lives last year. The app, called qXR, is one of many A.I. based tools that have emerged over the past few years for screening and diagnosing TB. The tools offer hope of flagging the disease early and cutting the cost of unnecessary lab tests. Used at large scale, they may also spot emerging clusters of disease. "Among all of the applications of A.I., I think digitally interpreting an image using an algorithm instead of a human radiologist is probably furthest along," said Madhukar Pai, the director of the McGill International TB Center in Montreal. Artificial intelligence cannot replace clinicians, Dr. Pai and other experts cautioned. But the combination of A.I. and clinical expertise is proving to be powerful. "The machine plus clinician is better than the clinician, and it's also better than machine alone," said Dr. Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego and the author of a book on the use of A.I. in medicine. In India, where roughly one quarter of the world's TB cases occur, an app that can flag the disease in remote locations is urgently needed. The Chinchpada Christian Hospital in Nandurbar, a small town in northwest India, serves members of the Bhil tribal community, some of whom travel up to 125 miles to visit the center. The 50 bed hospital has eight doctors, and only the most rudimentary medical equipment. Clear across the country, Simdega, one of the 20 poorest districts in India, is isolated from the nearest town, Rourkela, by nearly five hours of travel on bumpy roads. The tribal population in the district lives in tiny hamlets surrounded by dense, evergreen forest. Simdega's medical center, which has 60 beds and three doctors, is in a clearing of the forest "literally in the middle of nowhere," said Dr. George Mathew, the director. The meager staff has to manage everything that comes its way, "from malaria to myocardial infarcts to convulsions to head injuries," Dr. Mathew said. Over the years he has taught himself to read X rays, and when he is stumped he appeals to the radiologists among his far flung friends and former colleagues. Though Nandurbar and Simdega are separated by more than 800 miles, their populations are startlingly similar. Malaria, sickle cell disease and TB run rampant among them, compounded by poverty, reliance on spiritual healers and alcoholism even among the children. "TB tends to get neglected and diagnosis is delayed often," said Dr. Ashita Singh, the chief of medicine at the Nandurbar hospital. By the time people arrive at these medical centers, they often "are very, very ill and have never even been evaluated anywhere else," she said. But in some patients, the X rays carry signs that are too subtle for a nonexpert to detect. "It's in that group of patients where A.I. tech can be of great benefit," Dr. Singh said. The arrival of the coronavirus and the lockdown that followed cut off these remote hospitals from the nearest towns, and from radiologists, too. It also further delayed and complicated TB diagnoses because both diseases affect the lungs. A few months ago, both hospitals began using qXR, an app made by the Indian company Qure.ai and subsidized by the Indian government. The app allows the user to scan an X ray. If it finds evidence of TB, it assigns the patient a risk score. Doctors can then perform confirmatory tests on patients with the highest risk. At the hospital in Nandurbar, the app helped diagnose TB in 20 patients in October, Dr. Singh said. Apps like qXR may also be useful in places with a low prevalence of TB, and for routine screening of people with H.I.V., who are at high risk of contracting TB, as well as for those who have other conditions, experts said. "Most chest X rays for people who are suspected of having tuberculosis are read by people who are not remotely expert at interpreting them," said Dr. Richard E. Chaisson, a TB expert at Johns Hopkins University. "If there were an A.I. package that could read the X rays and the CT scans for you in some remote emergency room, that would be a huge, huge advance." qXR is among the more promising of the A.I. based apps for detecting TB. The company that made the app didn't realize that potential until a doctor at an Indian hospital suggested it a few years ago. In studies comparing different A.I. applications that were conducted by the Stop TB Partnership, all of the A.I. apps outperformed experienced human readers, and qXR seemed to fare best. The app identifies TB with an accuracy of 95 percent, according to Qure.ai's chief executive, Prashant Warier. But that level of precision is not based on real world conditions, which Dr. Topol called "a common problem" with A.I. based apps. A TB program may be less precise in the United States or Western Europe than in India, because the prevalence of the disease is lower in those places, Dr. Topol added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The Right Backdrop for Art Is Bold. Or Maybe It's Neutral? There's nothing like art to bring life to your home, whether it's a valuable piece you bought in a gallery, or a collection of street art you brought back from vacation. But before you hang it on the wall, consider the backdrop. The color you paint your wall is as important as the frame you select, said Donald Kaufman, a color consultant who has worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. If a frame is good, he explained, "it completely disappears" and the same goes for the wall color. "You just don't want to notice the wall color behind a picture," Mr. Kaufman said. "You want it to feel like the picture or art is comfortable in its surrounding and allows you to participate with it intensely." So how do you choose the right color for your art? We asked the experts for guidance. Look at the Big Picture Begin by considering the entire room the architectural details, the furnishings, the flooring and the amount of natural light the space gets as well as the kind of mood you want to create. The goal, Mr. Kaufman said, is to find a wall color that will minimize any "discordant elements" that distract from the art. That's something color consultants have to do even when they're working with museums. When Mr. Kaufman developed a color scheme for the second floor of the American Wing at the Met, he said, he had to take into account several periods of American art, as well as varying lighting across galleries and architectural details like limestone wainscoting and light oak floors. The wall color he chose had to make "the stone look good without making the floor look bad," he said, and also "neutralize the architecture," allowing the curators to organize the paintings thematically. The color he settled on was "a medium, warm neutral," he said, that "took its cue" from the stone, creating a cohesive environment that receded so artwork like Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" and John Singer Sargent's "Madame X" came to the fore. His advice? First, create balance in a room by considering "how dark or light the color of the paint is," he said, "before considering whether it's red or green." The color of the paint isn't nearly as important as its intensity, he said, and how it affects the way various elements in the room work together. "Art tends to talk to other works of art, and you don't want to miss that conversation," he said, noting that the same goes for furnishings. "That's what hanging art is about: It's like having people over for a dinner party who's going to sit next to whom?" Jamie Drake, who founded the interior design firm Drake/Anderson with Caleb Anderson, offered another way of thinking about that. "Remember you're choosing for your home, and your home isn't a museum," he said. "You may want your art to be the centerpiece, but it must exist as part of the whole room." Consider the Style of the Art Now that you've taken the surroundings into account, focus on the art. But don't try to match it. A matching background color won't make the art stand out, said Ellen O'Neill, the director of strategic design intelligence for Benjamin Moore. Instead, she suggested, look for a subtle coordinating color "that draws the eye to the piece." "The color of the wall that supports the collection photography, oil portraits, even collages of objects should serve as the backup singer," she said, something that "flatters but does not distract." On the other hand, "if you are showcasing bold graphic pieces, a backdrop that provides contrast is preferable," said Joa Studholme, the color curator for Farrow Ball. That could mean using a pure white, which works well as a backdrop for contemporary art with strong colors, like a Warhol. But white walls "can be less sympathetic to more traditional art," Ms. Studholme said. "If you hang an Impressionist painting against a white background, the radiance of the white can prevent the subtlety of the colors in the painting from being revealed." So what should you choose instead? "You might want to think about a shade that is reminiscent of the era of the artwork, like Georgian inspired Paean Black," she said. In October, Christie's used the dark, red based color as a backdrop for paintings and porcelain featured in its sales brochure, while the inky Stiffkey Blue was paired with French furniture, lighting and sculpture. "Many representational pieces from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries look most ravishing against strongly colored walls, even lacquered ones," Mr. Drake said, citing the example of his own bedroom, where Deborah Oropallo's "Napoleon, 2001" hangs against deep gray lacquered walls. "The severity of the wall color, Benjamin Moore 2129 20 Soot, is a fantastic contrast to the light and exuberant palette in the artwork," he said. Think About the Finish Flat paints offer the least reflective finish, followed by matte, eggshell and gloss, which is highly reflective. "There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to choosing a finish to hang art against," Mr. Drake said. "The art will tell you." Mr. Kaufman, however, offered a word of pragmatic advice. "If you move your art around a lot, it's easier to touch up flat finishes," he said, adding, "the finishes I like the best are the flattest flat and the highest gloss." Ms. Studholme recommended flat paint for highlighting watercolors and oils, because its lack of sheen allows the art, not the wall, to reflect light. With other types of art, a high sheen is preferable. "In very contemporary homes we are seeing the use of full gloss or estate eggshell on walls to complement bold pieces of sculpture, contemporary art and neon pieces," she said, explaining that high gloss walls "have a harder look to them, so create a stronger backdrop for these more graphic pieces." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
PUBLIC safety "is the responsibility of everyone at the university," exhorts the Ohio State Web site. Taking that message to heart after a series of robberies on or near campus last year, Sara Rosenberg organized her friends into a posse of self protection. "We always make sure we have somebody to walk with after dark," said Ms. Rosenberg, who will be a sophomore in the fall. She also signed up for a self defense class and became a connoisseur of mace dispensers. "You have to find one with a steady stream instead of a spray or it could blow back in your face," she said, adding: "You have to realize that you're on a big campus so big that we have our own zip code and the city is around it. Things can happen." Shuttles between the library and residence halls are a fact of life, often with a long wait time, and colleges invest heavily in keeping students safe. The University of Miami plans on adding license plate recognition software to its surveillance system, and smart cameras at Johns Hopkins use algorithms to detect potentially troubling behaviors, including loitering, cars stopping suddenly and people who fall. Department of Education statistics from 2006 to 2010, the latest available, show no significant change in campus crime, said Gary J. Margolis, a former police chief at the University of Vermont whose consulting firm received a grant from the Department of Justice to develop best practices in campus crime prevention. And some data, he said, even indicate a decrease. But news of shootings and assaults sends shock waves through students, parents and administrators. With Virginia Tech held liable for failing to issue a timely warning in the 2007 shooting massacre, alerts are becoming part of the soundtrack of college life. Ohio State had 20 last year. At orientation every year, newly arriving freshmen sit through mandatory talks by security personnel, warning against letting strangers "piggyback" their entry into locked dorms, and whenever high school seniors visit prospective colleges they are shown the ubiquitous blue light call boxes, with their 911 panic button. "When you take your kid on the tour, every school spends a lot of time talking about safety and security," said Ellen Weber, an executive in Philadelphia who visited American, Temple and the University of Pittsburgh with her daughter, Rebecca. "Then we went up to McGill in Montreal, where nobody mentioned security. When I asked about it, someone said, 'Oh, you must be from the States.'" In about 80 percent of campus crime, students are the perpetrators, according to the nonprofit Clery Center for Security on Campus. But town gown tensions make students wary. "There have been incidents where people from the wider community have shown up and caused problems," said Julia Black, a senior at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "There is that dynamic when you have an elite institution integrated into a community with more socioeconomic diversity. But in the age of smartphones, we learn pretty quickly if there's any street we might want to avoid." Last year, rumors abounded that an assault on two male students at Ohio State, situated in the heart of Columbus, was related to gang initiation in the city. The speculation, which seemed to have stemmed from a remark made in the student paper by the father of a victim, turned out to be false. But some sorority and fraternity members felt particularly vulnerable and stopped wearing their letters for fear they would attract attention. "The perception is that if you're able to afford the costs of Greek life, you can be targeted," said Katie Nord, a recent graduate. She and her friends grew weary of the constant vigilance. "We were spending all our time worrying," she said, "and we had to rearrange plans in order to be safe. If I wanted to stay late at the library but everyone else was leaving, I had to leave." Life at Ohio State did not always feel so perilous to Ms. Nord. "It changed 100 percent last year," she said. "When I first got there, I would walk everywhere by myself. You feel invincible until something bad happens to you or someone you know." The most recent crime statistics from her school, covering the years 2008 to 2010 and about 56,000 students, show that the number of aggravated assaults, five, remained the same. Burglaries actually went down, from 197 to 147, as did reported sex crimes, 32 to 12. The enhanced sense of danger may have something to do with the enhanced alert procedures. "One of the things that contributed to public alarm was the change in laws requiring us to have notification and timely information," said David Rose, the university's police captain. "We used to have an opt in system. Students had to find our Web site and sign up for the alerts. Now it's opt out, and over 100,000 people get those e mails, including people who hadn't gotten the previous notices. It generated a lot of speculation that there was a large pattern of robberies." Technology for today's students is a double edged sword. The iPads, laptops and smartphones that make them prey for thieves also allow the administration to communicate safety precautions. "This is not a generation that will show up at a pizza event to talk about locking their bikes," said Dr. Margolis, the consultant. "We have to reach them in a different way." Alexandra Huttler, a sophomore at Duke, depends on a phone app called Circle of 6. With one click, the preset message "Come and get me; I need help going home safely" can be sent to her six selected contacts. "I never walk alone," she said. "My best guy friend will come get me." An app called the Guardian lets Brown students estimate how long it will take them to walk a particular distance, triggering an alarm unless the timer is deactivated on arrival. "But that's what my friends and I do informally 'Text me when you get there,'" said Chandler Carter, a Brown sophomore. All new students are also given a personal safety device with a pin that can be removed to set off a loud alarm and flashing light. While acknowledging widespread anxiety, Dr. Margolis begs for perspective. "You can be safe but not feel safe, and you can feel safe but not be safe," he said. "Statistically speaking, you're more likely to be the victim of a crime in the dorm by people you know than to get mugged walking across the green." "Let's educate kids and have conversations about safety," he said, "but not create a sense of paranoia that when you step out of a residence hall, someone's waiting in the bushes. I'm more interested in talking with young women about drinking from the communal punch bowl at a party than wanting to make sure my child knows about the seven different kinds of pepper spray and how they can be deployed." Experts are adamant about one point: inebriation causes crime. All new students at the University of California, Merced, are required to participate in the Violence Prevention Program, which helps them anticipate problems, like seeing a young woman who's drunk being led away at a party. "We give students sample scripts to safely step in and speak up," said Kari Mansager, director of the program. "They're understandably nervous, but I tell them, 'I'd rather you be embarrassed if you're wrong about a situation than allow these things to happen.'" At Kalamazoo College in Michigan, "students are the biggest support for one another, never leaving a party alone, always making sure someone knows you're there," said Phoebe Solomon, a senior. "It's awful walking home at night. I call people to keep me company. It's like carrying a tiny witness with me." Not so fast, said Paul Cell, chief of police at Montclair State in New Jersey; he warns that talking while walking distracts and creates a false sense of security. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
SAN FRANCISCO At least 25 prominent artificial intelligence researchers, including experts at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and a recent winner of the prestigious Turing Award, have signed a letter calling on Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies because it is biased against women and people of color. The letter, which was publicly released Wednesday, reflects growing concern in academia and the tech industry that bias in facial recognition technology is a systemic problem. Some researchers and even some companies are arguing the technology cannot be properly controlled without government regulation. Amazon sells a product called Rekognition through its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services. The company said last year that early customers included the Orlando Police Department in Florida and the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon. In January, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a peer reviewed study showing that Amazon Rekognition had more trouble identifying the gender of female and darker skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. It mistook women for men 19 percent of the time, the study showed, and misidentified darker skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Before publishing their findings on Amazon Rekognition, the M.I.T. researchers released a similar study examining services from IBM, Microsoft and Megvii, an artificial intelligence company in China. All three updated their services to address concerns raised by the researchers. In separate blog posts from the Amazon executives Matthew Wood and Michael Punke, the company disputed the study and a Jan. 24 article in The New York Times describing it. "The answer to anxieties over new technology is not to run 'tests' inconsistent with how the service is designed to be used, and to amplify the test's false and misleading conclusions through the news media," Dr. Wood wrote. Amazon did not directly engage with the M.I.T. researchers. The letter released on Wednesday was signed by the Google researchers Margaret Mitchell, Andrea Frome and Timnit Gebru; the Facebook researcher Georgia Gkioxari; William Isaac, a researcher at DeepMind, the London lab owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet; and Yoshua Bengio, one of the world's most important A.I. researchers. Last week, Dr. Bengio was one of three people to receive the Turing Award often called "the Nobel Prize of computing" for his work with neural networks, the technology that underpins modern facial recognition services. "There are no laws or required standards to ensure that Rekognition is used in a manner that does not infringe on civil liberties," the A.I. researchers wrote. "We call on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition to law enforcement." The researchers added that Dr. Wood and Mr. Punke had "misrepresented the technical details" of the M.I.T. study and modern facial recognition technology. Amazon declined to comment on the letter on Wednesday. A day after this article was published, an Amazon spokeswoman responded, saying that the company had updated its Rekognition service since the M.I.T. researchers completed their study and that it had found no differences in error rates by gender and race when running similar tests. Microsoft, by contrast, improved the accuracy of its facial recognition last year after an earlier M.I.T. study reported that its system was better at identifying the gender of lighter skinned men in a photo database than darker skinned women. During a February talk at the Cornell Tech graduate school in New York, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, said the company had "participated in the market for law enforcement in the United States," but had also turned down sales when there was concern it could unreasonably infringe on people's rights. In February, Microsoft backed a bill in Washington State that would require notices to be posted in public places using facial recognition tech and ensure that government agencies obtain a court order when looking for specific people. The bill is still pending. But the company did not back other legislation that provides much stronger protections. Mr. Punke wrote in his February blog post that Amazon also supported regulation of facial recognition technology and called for law enforcement agencies to "be transparent in how they use facial recognition technology." But Amazon has declined to disclose how police or intelligence agencies are using its Rekognition system and whether the company puts any restrictions on its use. Amazon has said that it has not received any reports of Rekognition misuse by law enforcement, and that the company's acceptable use policy prohibits customers from using its services in ways that violate laws. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Already in deep distress, the patient was rushed last week to a hospital in Northern California, severely ill and unable to breathe on her own. Doctors at the University of California, Davis Medical Center, near Sacramento, provided the woman with critical care but also considered an unlikely diagnosis: infection with the coronavirus. Hospital administrators said they immediately requested diagnostic testing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but the procedure was not carried out because the case did not qualify under strict federal criteria: She had not traveled to China and had not been in contact with anyone known to be infected. The announcement on Wednesday that the woman was indeed infected left health officials in California searching for people she may have exposed to the virus and testing the medical workers who have treated her. The case has raised difficult questions about whom to test and whether the nation is prepared to keep the virus under control. Even before the announcement on Wednesday, frustration had been mounting among health providers and medical experts that the agency was testing too few Americans, which may slow preparations for an outbreak and may obscure the scope of infections. "I think the diagnostic issue is the single most important thing that keeps me up at night right now," said Lauren Sauer, director of operations at the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response in Baltimore. In California, health officials are tracing close contacts of the woman, who lives in Solano County but has not otherwise been identified. Health care workers who have treated her are being monitored for the infection, and some employees at the medical center have been told to stay home. Officials are bracing for a larger outbreak in Northern California. "There's almost assuredly going to be a significant number of people testing positive," said Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the director of Sacramento County's Department of Health Services. The case has heightened concerns about the nation's ability to test large numbers of people. Only the C.D.C. performs the tests that confirm a novel coronavirus diagnosis, a process that often takes days. The C.D.C. had distributed diagnostic testing kits to state health departments, but they turned out to be flawed. Replacement kits have not yet been distributed. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Ms. Sauer said Johns Hopkins had treated several patients who did not fit the testing criteria, and for whom it requested coronavirus testing. In all but one case, the hospital was able to persuade the C.D.C. to run a test, or eventually identify another cause for the patient's illness. The C.D.C. is "pretty much the only place we can access testing," she added, and the agency has been unwilling to grapple with cases that do not fit its criteria. "The idea that we would have to really fight to get that test done, when C.D.C. is saying they have capacity, is alarming." Ms. Sauer said. "It is a challenge when the most important piece of information does this person have this disease, yes or no is not accessible, and there's no timeline for improved accessibility." After the diagnosis in California, the C.D.C. has pledged to greatly expand the state's ability to test patients for the coronavirus, officials said. "Testing protocols have been a point of frustration for many of us," Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a news conference on Thursday. California had just 200 testing kits left, he added. The governor said Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., promised that state physicians would have a much greater ability to test patients who were showing symptoms, a change the governor said "can't happen soon enough." The C.D.C. has committed to sending a team to California to help track people and make sure they are contacted by health officials about their possible exposure, Mr. Newsom said. "They are being interviewed points of contact, family members and others," he said. Experts said they were perplexed by the C.D.C.'s inability to fix the test's flaws. "The obvious observation is that many countries are capable of testing rather widely," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. "Why can't we?" Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The C.D.C. operates two laboratories that test for the coronavirus and can handle approximately 400 specimens per day. Agency officials say there is no testing backlog, but it is unclear whether the labs will be able to keep up with demand if the need and eligibility increases testing substantially. Under the new federal criteria, people with respiratory symptoms who traveled to Iran, Italy, Japan and South Korea should be tested not just those who traveled in China. So should severely ill patients with acute lower respiratory symptoms who are hospitalized and in whom other diagnoses have been ruled out. A criticism of the new criteria, however, is that doctors will have to wait until someone is extremely ill to test for the virus if that person did not travel to the affected regions or have contact with a known case. "If we could identify these people earlier who don't specifically meet one of the two criteria, or some sort of broader travel criteria, we could get them tested," Ms. Sauer said. "You have to wait until someone's really sick to push that test now, even with this new criteria. Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said he planned to appeal to Vice President Mike Pence whom President Trump named to lead federal preparations "to order the C.D.C. to develop a rapid point of care test" that hospitals could use to screen patients. In the meantime, Mr. Raske said, the Wadsworth Center, New York's public health reference laboratory, should be certified to do these tests. If more community acquired infections turn up, and the disease cannot be contained, the strategy will have to become one of mitigation, said Dr. Neil Fishman, associate chief medical officer for the University of Pennsylvania Health System. "That's a little difficult to do when you don't have a readily available test, and when the turnaround time for the test can be days instead of hours," he said. Thomas Fuller contributed reporting from Solano County, Calif., Nicholas Bogel Burroughs from New York and Michael D. Shear from Washington, D.C. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
For the better part of the 16 years it has been on the air, "Survivor" hasn't really been about actually surviving. The CBS reality show, which features more than a dozen contestants vying for 1 million in a remote jungle, has mostly been about strategy, gamesmanship and athletic achievement. Sure, the conditions can be dreadful, and yes, people are somewhat regularly evacuated out of the game, but no one's life ever really appeared to be at risk. In the most recent episode of "Survivor," three contestants collapsed in the Cambodian sun, and one had to be rushed to a hospital. For several minutes of the episode, one contestant, Caleb, was lying on his back, his face beet red, gasping for air. The on site doctor told him to "stay with us." Jeff Probst, the host of the show and an executive producer, said that the temperature was well over 100 degrees on the day the episode was shot last spring, but that having three contestants collapse was unprecedented. "We've shot 32 seasons over 16 years, and those shoot days equate to three and a half years of nonstop shooting in the jungle, and nothing like this has ever happened," he said in an interview Thursday. For more than 40 minutes, the contestants dug through sand, looking for bags, in a challenge. The scene that played out on television was true chaos: One by one, three contestants fell to the ground. Caleb was the third to collapse, and when that happened, Mr. Probst asked for members of the crew to help in what was suddenly developing into a medical emergency. Boom microphones were on screen. Crew members were running, gathering ice, water bottles, umbrellas and fans. Mr. Probst said more than 70 crew members rushed to the scene. "Sometimes in medical evacuations, you might see a cameraman in a shot but that's it," he said. "This was a definite 'break the fourth wall' where you don't pay any attention to where the cameras are. The story, while it's also important, was such a second class consideration." Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Mr. Probst said that the three contestants all had heat exhaustion, and that Caleb's condition was "very serious." "It's easy to say, you guys would love the drama," he said. "But the truth is, I'm much, much happier when we haven't had any interaction with our medical department." In 2009, another contestant, Russell, collapsed to the ground in an episode that Mr. Probst had previously called the scariest he had witnessed as host. In a conversation I had with Mr. Probst last year for an article about the surprising stability of "Survivor," which remains the most viewed show in its time slot he said that the incident with Russell was so terrifying that he was ready to quit the show. "It definitely rocked my world," Mr. Probst told me then. "I was holding his head when his eyes were rolling to the back of his head. And I said: 'Man, maybe I've lost my way here for a second. I need to get out and let someone else carry this show.' " When I read the quotation back to Mr. Probst on Thursday, he said that the incident with Caleb was even scarier, but he didn't feel the same way this time. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
IN PURSUIT OF DISOBEDIENT WOMEN A Memoir of Love, Rebellion, and Family, Far Away By Dionne Searcey Dionne Searcey grew up in Wymore, Neb., a child of a young widow who prayed that her daughters would stay out of trouble and go to a Christian college. Their mother wanted Dionne to find a "nice minister in training" and live out her days as a "stay at home preacher's wife," serving her husband, kids and church. The plan worked for Searcey's sister but not for Searcey, who got busted at her Christian college for sneaking out to a Rolling Stones concert. The administrators talked about suspension, and even expulsion. Instead, she dropped out and enrolled at the University of Nebraska, abandoning Jesus for journalism. The student rule breaker went on to work as a crime reporter in Chicago, and spent a decade at The Wall Street Journal before she was hired to write about the U.S. economy for The New York Times. By the time Searcey was 44, the mother of a young son and twin daughters, her husband, an executive at a conservation nonprofit based at the Bronx Zoo, was spending 45 minutes every night hunting for a legal parking space on their street in Brooklyn. Their dual career household's New York life "had devolved into a huge, rat raced rut," she writes. She decided to take off. She joined The Times's foreign desk and flew her husband and children away to live in West Africa. The family lucked out. They landed in Dakar, Senegal, home to some of the region's best music, to a particularly warm kind of hospitality known as Teranga and as I was struck on my last visit to endless seaside muscle gyms that make you think of Venice Beach. Searcey and her husband abandoned much of the advice they'd been given back in Brooklyn. Her children skateboarded without helmets or elbow pads and washed their sandy feet in the French bidet, "perfect for spraying off grains between little toes." They stopped taking the malaria medicine prescribed by their pediatrician; "long sleeves, candles, bed nets and spray were more than enough" to keep them safe. Her husband became addicted to surfing. Some reporters view the world from the top down. Others, among them some of the very best, prefer to see it from the bottom up. Searcey is one of the latter. Avoiding what a colleague who also served as a Times bureau chief in Africa calls the "ooga booga" the stereotypes that mark Africa as primitive and violent she dived into her "beast of a beat," which sprawled across some two dozen countries, some with capitals most Americans didn't even know how to pronounce, such as Ouagadougou ("wah gah DOO goo"). Stretching from the Sahara in the north to the Congo River in the south, Searcey's beat demanded a mix of every kind of reporting. 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. When she arrived in West Africa, northeastern Nigeria, one of the region's poorest areas, was beset by a militant Islamist group whose attacks would make it the biggest story of the day. For seven years, Searcey writes, Boko Haram "had been roaming the countryside, raiding villages, burning homes, murdering people and stealing livestock in rural communities where the families of farmers and fishermen lived hand to mouth. The group was hellbent on returning the region to a state where a harsh interpretation of Islam ruled. They wanted a caliphate." A year before she got there, Boko Haram had kidnapped more than 250 girls from the small Nigerian town of Chibok, invading the girls' school as they slept and driving off with them in the back of their trucks. For months, Boko Haram taunted the girls' parents and the government, broadcasting videos of the girls in captivity. The kidnapping turned the war into a celebrity cause with its own hashtag: BringBackOurGirls. Searcey made the story of Boko Haram's bullying tactics her own, focusing especially on how the group used young women, turning some of them into suicide bombers, to advance their cause. Women bombers were a rare phenomenon in Africa's Islamist wars, she writes. Yet enlisting them for this job made strategic sense. They were less likely than men to be suspected, and in conservative societies were less likely to be thoroughly searched. Searcey traveled to northeastern Nigeria and across the border where the group was pursuing its war into Cameroon, an area the French called the "Extreme North." To find out what was really happening there, she had to get past officious government spokesmen and cagey U.N. officials who thought journalists should take down dictation rather than do their own reporting. Over the next few months, two remarkable fixers helped her in her sleuthing: a Sierra Leonean named Jaime Yaya Barry, who had helped The Times cover the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and, later, a northern Nigerian named Shehu, who had already established a reputation locally for his reporting on Boko Haram. Interviewing a woman bomber would offer a new way to look at Boko Haram, Searcey believed. But locating one who would reveal her intention to blow herself up would not be easy. (And anyone who had already pushed the detonator button was dead.) Then she was introduced to a woman called Rahila. Rahila told Searcey that she had been stolen from her home one morning when Boko Haram arrived in three vehicles, abducting as many women as possible. She spent 10 months as a captive of the group. They didn't have a lot to eat, and Rahila quickly lost weight. Then one day they were rounded up and driven to an old cement factory where another group of young women was being held. These girls were plump. Some were crying. They told Rahila they had been kidnapped from a school in Chibok. Rahila realized they were Boko Haram's most famous hostages the Chibok girls. Soon the girls began training. First they were sent to Koranic school days and days of it. Then weapons training, and, later, decapitation school. "Always cut from the back of the neck," their instructor told them, "to prevent the victim from squirming. They'll die quicker that way." Next came suicide bomb school. "Keep the bomb tight in your armpit," Searcey reports the girls were advised, "to stop it from shifting around and exploding too soon. When you reach a crowd of 10 or 20 people, detonate." "You press this," Rahila told Searcey, miming the act of pushing a button. "They taught us that as soon as you pressed it you'd go directly to heaven." In the end, though, Rahila couldn't go through with a bombing. Taking advantage of a moment when a big crowd was assembling at the Boko Haram camp, she ran away, trudging with her grandchildren for seven days to the border between Nigeria and Cameroon until she reached the desert refugee camp where Searcey recorded her account. "In Pursuit of Disobedient Women" abounds with stories like that of Rahila, the suicide bombing school dropout. Quietly listening, Searcey takes down the details of their everyday experience including details the authorities around her might prefer were not made public. In doing so, she reveals herself to be, even today, one of the "disobedient women," bearing witness to so many ordinary lives tossed and turned by other people's whims. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Probing the sexual and professional misadventures of a struggling filmmaker after a breakup, the writer and director Adam Christian Clark ("Caroline and Jackie") has cast himself in the lead of his unflinching semi autobiographical "Newly Single." Clark's alter ego, Astor Williams Stevenson, comes across as a Todd Solondz character trapped in a Woody Allen film: Amid the familiar personality quirks, airy loft setting, glowing cinematography and orchestral score, the toxicity of Astor's narcissism and frustration leaps out. He even flagellates himself with a paddle. In one montage, Astor prowls the Los Angeles dating scene, attempting to break the ice with every woman at the bar by flashing a 50 bill. Curiously, it is set to a melancholy Ronald Stein tune from the 1960 film "The Threat," as if to elicit sympathy for Astor's obnoxiousness. Scenes in which he repeatedly harasses his ex Valerie (Molly C. Quinn) leave no doubt, however, that Astor is a tool. He appears agreeable only in meetings and conference calls pertaining to his film, even if his colleagues find one of his artistic choices exploitative. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A Hudson Valley oasis of Italian art debuts eight up and coming artists and new wearable safety tech upon its reopening. COLD SPRING, N.Y. I've been cheating, and it's likely you have been too: Six feet apart is a lot farther away than most people seem to hope it is. I know this because at the recent reopening of Magazzino Italian Art, the museum of postwar and contemporary work here in the Hudson Valley, I wore a piece of social distancing hardware called an EGOpro Active Tag. It was attached to a lanyard around my neck. The tag is required for all visitors, and it's programmed to vibrate for a few seconds every time the wearer is closer than six feet to a tag worn by another person. I misjudged my spacing quite a few times, and the incessant buzzing was annoying. But that's the point, of course. It made me retreat, and quickly. "The technology makes a lot of sense to me," said Harry Wilks of Plattekill, N.Y., one of the visitors I encountered. "It would make even more sense on the weekend, when it's more crowded." My interviews weren't exactly helping the situation. Mr. Wilks added, "Mine didn't go off until you came up to me to talk." Magazzino, founded in 2017 by the collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, is the first museum in the United States to use the technology. That Magazzino takes pandemic safety seriously is clear from the beginning of a visit there. Temperature checks are now required for all visitors, administered in a little tent outside the entrance. "Nobody's fussing about it so far," said Jay Nicholas, a visitor services assistant, who took mine. Masks are required, too. The museum, which was closed for four months, is admitting 10 people per half hour via advance reservation, and it assumes a 90 minute visit. It could have more visitors, according to state and county guidelines, but they decided to start cautiously. "We wanted to find a way to have a new normal," said Vittorio Calabrese, Magazzino's director. "Art does not stop." It was roomy and very quiet inside the high ceilinged white galleries, arranged in a ring; the 20,000 square foot building was designed by the Spanish architect Miguel Quismondo. In galleries four and five, of eight, there are several artworks that incorporate neon, and I could distinctly hear the neon humming. Highlights from the collection assembled by Ms. Olnick and Mr. Spanu fill most of the galleries, part of an ongoing exhibition called "Arte Povera," dedicated to the Italian movement of the same name from the 1960s and '70s, when pioneering Italian artists voiced their dissent about the direction of society. Works by the movement's greatest names are on display, including Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Jannis Kounellis, Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto. The collection shows how Arte Povera encompassed many different media and styles, with a conceptual approach that frequently addresses nationality, immigration and geography; some of the practitioners worked until very recently, or are still at it. The current selection starts in the lobby, with Mr. Pistoletto's reinterpretation of the Italian tricolor flag, made with rags, "Stracci italiani" (2007). Inside the galleries, his cheeky "Adamo ed Eva" (1962 87) is a portrait of a naked couple on polished stainless steel, so that the viewer can't help but enter the picture when standing in front of it. At 87, he is still working. Mr. Boetti (1940 1994) is represented by several works, including "Mappa" (1983), an embroidered work that he commissioned Afghan artisans to help him make, and "Pannello luminoso" (1966), a Color Field style red rectangle. Scattered throughout are works by Mr. Kounellis, who died in 2017, on the theme of travel and on the journey of memories. He gets his own dedicated gallery, too. It has a 1960 untitled painting mixed with several later sculptures in steel and iron (one of them incorporates coffee, which you can smell before you get to it). Now, there's also a special show, "Homemade," in the last gallery, featuring work made by eight Italian artists quarantined in New York during the pandemic. It began as an online and Instagram invitational, and morphed into a real exhibition. "Magazzino wanted to support artists making new work during this time," Mr. Calabrese said. He added, "Some of these artists had to deal with a lot of anxiety and stress. And the common sentiment was that this kept them going. We called our regular video meetings 'Zoom apperitvi.'" One of the artists in "Homemade," Alessandro Teoldi, was on site when I visited. To keep our buzzers calm, we circled each other at a remove as we chatted. Mr. Teoldi, who hails from Milan and lives in Brooklyn, talked about his 2020 piece "Untitled (Delta, Norwegian, COPA, Lufthansa, Thomas Cook Airlines, Hawaiian and Iberia)," which is an abstract assemblage of stretched airline blankets that looks from afar like a painting. He made it just before the pandemic hit. "I buy them on eBay or I steal them when I travel or when I used to travel," Mr. Teoldi said. I think his phrasing made us both a little wistful. His commissioned works, a series of four reliefs called "Untitled (hug)," gets at an essential feature of the pandemic the lack of physical intimacy. The four panels, cast in cement after starting out as a paper collage, all show people hugging. The material, Mr. Teoldi said, helps underline "being home but not being able to move, stuck in a building made of cement." Having a commission to work on "was a great experience for me," Mr. Teoldi said. "Quarantine was such a scary time." The other artists in "Homemade" are Andrea Mastrovito, Beatrice Scaccia, Danilo Correale, Davide Balliano, Francesco Simeti, Luisa Rabbia and Maria D. Rapicavoli. Mr. Spanu and Ms. Olnick were on hand for the reopening they live about five minutes away in Garrison and were sitting in Magazzino's big, open courtyard, around which the galleries circle. I wondered about the high tech approach and whether it was somehow out of place, given that Arte Povera literally "impoverished art" had commonplace materials as one of its core tenets. "Arte Povera artists were expressing their times the big transitions they all lived through, the freedom and idealism," she said. "Their motto was, 'Art is life.' And this" she gestured at a small, distanced circle of people all wearing masks and attached to buzzers "is life now." 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, N.Y.; 845 666 7202, magazzino.art. Entry is free, but reservations are required. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
VANCOUVER, B.C. In between the time the coronavirus started to make headlines but before life shut down to restrain the pandemic, an independent filmmaker conceived, shot and finished postproduction on a movie about the contagion. Thanks to the availability of relatively cheap digital equipment, there is rarely much lag time these days between real life events like Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and films about them. But this new movie, by Mostafa Keshvari, is unusual in that it was made even as the story is still unfolding. Keshvari's 63 minute "Corona" looks at what happens when seven people are trapped in an elevator, and begin to realize that one of them has Covid 19. The movie is about fear and "a study of society, people and moral choices," Keshvari, 33, said in recent phone and email interviews about the movie. "We are all in this ride together." Vancouver, known as "Hollywood North," is Canada's gateway to Asia, and also an epicenter in the country's Covid 19 crisis. As news reached here of a "Wuhan virus," there were increasing reports of harassment of Chinese Canadians and others of Asian heritage. Patronage of Chinese Canadian businesses dropped by up to 70 percent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded on Monday to James P. Allison of the United States and Tasuku Honjo of Japan for their work on unleashing the body's immune system to attack cancer, a breakthrough that has led to an entirely new class of drugs and brought lasting remissions to many patients who had run out of options. Their success, which came after many researchers had given up on the idea, "brought immunotherapy out from decades of skepticism," said Dr. Jedd Wolchok, a cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It has, he said, "led to human applications that have affected an untold number of people's health." Before Dr. Allison's and Dr. Honjo's discoveries, cancer treatment consisted of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormonal treatments. A statement from the Nobel committee hailed their accomplishments as establishing "an entirely new principle for cancer therapy." The drugs based on their work belong to a class called checkpoint inhibitors, with tongue twisting names that have nonetheless become familiar to many patients. The first ones approved were ipilimumab (brand name Yervoy), nivolumab (Opdivo) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Others have since come to market. Earlier attempts by other researchers to recruit the immune system to fight cancer sometimes worked but more often did not. Dr. Allison and Dr. Honjo succeeded where others had failed by deciphering exactly how cells were interacting so they could fine tune methods to control the immune system. Checkpoint inhibitors do not work for everyone and they have only been approved for some cancers. They can have severe side effects, and they are expensive, costing more than 100,000 a year. But the approach, known as immunotherapy, has become a mainstay of treatment for a number of types of cancer, and a great deal of research is underway including work by Dr. Allison and Dr. Honjo to find the best ways of combining checkpoint inhibitors with one another and with standard treatments to help more patients. The checkpoint inhibitors now on the market are used for cancers of the lung, kidney, bladder, head and neck; for the aggressive skin cancer melanoma; and for Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers. Doctors are using immunotherapy to help the cells of the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells. T cells are a type of white blood cell that can identify and kill infected, damaged or cancerous cells. Each T cell has clawlike receptors on its surface that can recognize and lock onto antigens, foreign or abnormal protein fragments on the surface of infected or cancerous cells. The T cell must be activated before it can find and attack cancer cells. A specialized cell presents the T cell with an antigen from a cancer cell, along with a co stimulator protein. The T cell begins to hunt down and kill any cells that are covered with the same antigen. Cancer cells can avoid destruction by taking advantage of a switch on the T cell called an immune checkpoint. The checkpoint can shut down the T cell and suppress the immune response, allowing the cancer to grow undisturbed. Drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors can physically block the checkpoint, which frees the immune system to attack the cancer. A single T cell can kill thousands of cancer cells. T cells are a type of white blood cell that can identify and kill infected, damaged or cancerous cells. Each T cell has clawlike receptors on its surface that can recognize and lock onto antigens, foreign or abnormal protein fragments on the surface of infected or cancerous cells. The T cell must be activated before it can find and attack cancer cells. A specialized cell presents the T cell with an antigen from a cancer cell, along with a co stimulator protein. The T cell begins to hunt down and kill any cells that are covered with the same antigen. Cancer cells can avoid destruction by taking advantage of a switch on the T cell called an immune checkpoint. The checkpoint can shut down the T cell and suppress the immune response, allowing the cancer to grow undisturbed. Drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors can physically block the checkpoint, which frees the immune system to attack the cancer. A single T cell can kill thousands of cancer cells. T cells are a type of white blood cell that can identify and kill infected, damaged or cancerous cells. Each T cell has clawlike receptors on its surface that can recognize and lock onto antigens, foreign or abnormal protein fragments on the surface of infected or cancerous cells. The T cell must be activated before it can find and attack cancer cells. A specialized cell presents the T cell with an antigen from a cancer cell, along with a co stimulator protein. The T cell begins to hunt down and kill any cells that are covered with the same antigen. Cancer cells can avoid destruction by taking advantage of a switch on the T cell called an immune checkpoint. The checkpoint can shut down the T cell and suppress the immune response, allowing the cancer to grow undisturbed. Drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors can physically block the checkpoint, which frees the immune system to attack the cancer. A single T cell can kill thousands of cancer cells. T cells are a type of white blood cell that can identify and kill infected, damaged or cancerous cells. Each T cell has clawlike receptors on its surface that can recognize and lock onto antigens, foreign or abnormal protein fragments on the surface of infected or cancerous cells. The T cell must be activated before it can find and attack cancer cells. A specialized cell presents the T cell with an antigen from a cancer cell, along with a co stimulator protein. The T cell begins to hunt down and kill any cells that are covered with the same antigen. Cancer cells can avoid destruction by taking advantage of a switch on the T cell called an immune checkpoint. The checkpoint can shut down the T cell and suppress the immune response, allowing the cancer to grow undisturbed. Drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors can physically block the checkpoint, which frees the immune system to attack the cancer. A single T cell can kill thousands of cancer cells. T cells are a type of white blood cell that can identify and kill infected, damaged or cancerous cells. Each T cell has clawlike receptors on its surface that can recognize and lock onto antigens, foreign or abnormal protein fragments on the surface of infected or cancerous cells. The T cell must be activated before it can find and attack cancer cells. A specialized cell presents the T cell with an antigen from a cancer cell, along with a co stimulator protein. The T cell begins to hunt down and kill any cells that are covered with the same antigen. Cancer cells can avoid destruction by taking advantage of a switch on the T cell called an immune checkpoint. The checkpoint can shut down the T cell and suppress the immune response, allowing the cancer to grow undisturbed. Drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors can physically block the checkpoint, which frees the immune system to attack the cancer. A single T cell can kill thousands of cancer cells. Dr. Allison, 70, is chairman of immunology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. He did the work recognized by the Nobel committee while working the University of California at Berkeley and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "When I'm thanked by patients who recover, I truly feel the significance of our research," Dr. Honjo said during a news conference at the Japanese university, according to Japanese news reports. He added: "I'd like to continue researching cancer for a while so that this immunotherapy will help save more cancer patients than ever before." In a telephone interview, Dr. Allison said that when checkpoint inhibitors work, patients "are good to go for a decade or more." He said he was working with other researchers, including his wife, Dr. Padmanee Sharma, an oncologist at MD Anderson, to understand the mechanisms so the treatments would help more patients. "It's a big challenge," Dr. Allison said. "But we know the basic rules now. It's just a matter of more hard work to put things together based on science." Dr. Allison said he first heard about the prize via calls and texts from family, friends and colleagues who had seen news reports, before the Nobel committee could reach him. He was in New York, and the committee did not have his cellphone number. Dr. Allison and Dr. Honjo, working separately, showed in the 1990s how certain proteins act as "brakes" on the immune system's T cells and limit their ability to attack cancer cells. Suppressing those proteins, they theorized, could transform the body's ability to fight cancer. Dr. Allison identified a checkpoint called CTLA 4. Dr. Honjo found a different one, called PD 1. Those discoveries made it possible to develop drugs that would stop the checkpoints from working, so that the T cells would be free to fight cancer. The process is often referred to as taking the brakes off the immune system. Ipilimumab was based on Dr. Allison's work on the checkpoint CTLA 4. The later drugs work on PD 1. Former President Jimmy Carter received a checkpoint inhibitor, Keytruda, in 2015 when melanoma had spread to his brain and liver. His last scan, in June, showed no cancer, an aide said. A study published in August found that combining Yervoy and Opdivo significantly prolonged life for people in a desperate situation, with melanoma that had spread to the brain. But for all their successes, the danger is that these treatments can also turn the fury of the immune system against the patient's own tissue, leading to side effects that can be severe. The lungs, intestines and sometimes even the heart have become inflamed. The thyroid gland can turn sluggish. Damage to the pancreas has caused diabetes in some patients. Others have developed rheumatoid arthritis. When the drugs were first introduced, side effects even caused some deaths. Doctors have learned to better control the problems. Overall, the side effects from ipilimumab, or Yervoy, are considered worse than those from the other checkpoint inhibitors. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
THE two tone gray '29 Duesenberg Model J Dual Cowl Phaeton that sold at a recent RM Auctions sale here brought a somewhat surprising 1.2 million. Even though it had been restored to pristine condition, the price was still about a quarter million dollars more than expected for such a classic. Why the premium? Quite possibly, it was because Elvis Presley had driven it in the 1966 film "Spinout." No, the King did not spin it out in the movie he used it to tow racecars. "Absolutely a very good price for that car," said Shelby Myers, a value specialist for RM. "It had an extensive and interesting history. Without that provenance, however, such a car might have brought 15 to 20 percent less." In auction parlance, this is called celebrity provenance, meaning someone famous once owned or notably appeared with the vehicle and it has been known to incite bidders to irrational exuberance. Examples of this ruboff effect were evident at this month's Arizona classic car sales. Celebrity ownership does not always assure top dollar. "It really depends on who the celebrity is," Mr. Myers said. "Age brings a premium." As an example, he cited Steve McQueen, whose Ferrari Lusso sold in 2007 for 2.3 million, blowing away presale estimates of about 1 million. "People of a certain era grew up envying Steve McQueen," he said. "Now ownership by a modern celebrity, say even a Brad Pitt, would not add much to a car's value." David Gooding, founder of the Gooding Company auction house, agreed. "In the instance of the Lusso, McQueen had a long term association with that car, and there was plenty of photo documentation of him with it. Without those components, celebrity provenance gets pretty weak and doesn't help." Alleged, but unproven, provenance can actually hurt. An unusual aqua green 1941 Lincoln Continental Coupe offered by RM may have been a good example. It was said to have been the car bought by Orson Welles for Rita Hayworth, his romantic interest at the time. But the association could not be proved beyond doubt. Instead of drawing bids close to its presale estimates of 150,000 to 200,000, bidding for the Lincoln fizzled out at 100,000 and the car was withdrawn from the sale. "Celebrity cars with strong, proven provenance get good dollars," Mr. Myers said. "But ones with questions? Buyers steer clear of them." An odd but noteworthy example of what one person's attachment to a certain celebrity can do to a vehicle's auction price was demonstrated three years ago with the late actor James Coburn's 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder. It was sold to a British radio host for the exceptional price of nearly 11 million, far beyond the established value for that model. "That was crazy and out of whack," Mr. Gooding said. "It didn't even have the original engine." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The crimes and misdemeanors of science used to be handled mostly in house, with a private word at the faculty club, barbed questions at a conference, maybe a quiet dismissal. On the rare occasion when a journal publicly retracted a study, it typically did so in a cryptic footnote. Few were the wiser; many retracted studies have been cited as legitimate evidence by others years after the fact. But that gentlemen's world has all but evaporated, as a remarkable series of events last month demonstrated. In mid May, after two graduate students raised questions about a widely reported study on how political canvassing affects opinions of same sex marriage, editors at the journal Science, where the study was published, began to investigate. What followed was a frenzy of second guessing, accusations and commentary from all corners of the Internet: "Retraction" as serial drama, rather than footnote. Science officially pulled the paper, by Michael LaCour of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald Green of Columbia, on May 28, because of concerns about Mr. LaCour's data. "Until recently it was unusual for us to report on studies that were not yet retracted," said Dr. Ivan Oransky, an editor of the blog Retraction Watch, the first news media outlet to report that the study had been challenged. But new technology and a push for transparency from younger scientists have changed that, he said. "We have more tips than we can handle." The case has played out against an increase in retractions that has alarmed many journal editors and authors. Scientists in fields as diverse as neurobiology, anesthesia and economics are debating how to reduce misconduct, without creating a police state mentality that undermines creativity and collaboration. "It's an extraordinary time," said Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and a founder of the Center for Open Science, which provides a free service through which labs can share data and protocols. "We are now seeing a number of efforts to push for data repositories to facilitate direct replications of findings." But that push is not universally welcomed. Some senior scientists have argued that replication often wastes resources. "Isn't reproducibility the bedrock of science? Yes, up to a point," the cancer biologist Mina Bissell wrote in a widely circulated blog post. "But it is sometimes much easier not to replicate than to replicate studies," especially when the group trying to replicate does not have the specialized knowledge or skill to do so. The experience of Retraction Watch provides a rough guide to where this debate is going and why. Dr. Oransky, who has a medical degree from New York University, and Adam Marcus, both science journalists, discovered a mutual interest in retractions about five years ago and founded the blog as a side project. They had, and still have, day jobs: Mr. Marcus, 46, is the managing editor of Gastroenterology Endoscopy News, and Dr. Oransky, 42, is the editorial director of MedPage Today (he will take a position as distinguished writer in residence at N.Y.U. later this year). In its first year, the blog broke a couple of retraction stories that hit the mainstream news media including a case involving data faked by an anesthesiologist who later served time for health care fraud. The site now has about 150,000 unique visitors a month, about half from outside the United States. Dr. Oransky and Mr. Marcus are partisans who editorialize sharply against poor oversight and vague retraction notices. But their focus on evidence over accusations distinguishes them from watchdog forerunners who sometimes came off as ad hominem cranks. Last year, their site won a 400,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to build out their database, and they plan to work with Dr. Nosek to manage the data side. Their data already tell a story. The blog has charted a 20 to 25 percent increase in retractions across some 10,000 medical and science journals in the past five years: 500 to 600 a year today from 400 in 2010. (The number in 2001 was 40, according to previous research.) The primary causes of this surge are far from clear. The number of papers published is higher than ever, and journals have proliferated, Dr. Oransky and other experts said. New tools for detecting misconduct, like plagiarism sifting software, are widely available, so there's reason to suspect that the surge is a simple product of better detection and larger volume. Still, the pressure to publish attention grabbing findings is stronger than ever, these experts said and so is the ability to "borrow" and digitally massage data. Retraction Watch's records suggest that about a third of retractions are because of errors, like tainted samples or mistakes in statistics, and about two thirds are because of misconduct or suspicions of misconduct. The most common reason for retraction because of misconduct is image manipulation, usually of figures or diagrams, a form of deliberate data massaging or, in some cases, straight plagiarism. In their dissection of the LaCour Green paper, the two graduate students David Broockman, now an assistant professor at Stanford, and Joshua Kalla, at California Berkeley found that a central figure in Mr. LaCour's analysis looked nearly identical to one from another study. This and other concerns led Dr. Green, who had not seen any original data, to request a retraction. (Mr. LaCour has denied borrowing anything.) Data massaging can take many forms. It can mean simply excluding "outliers" unusually high or low data points from an analysis to generate findings that more strongly support the hypothesis. It also includes moving the goal posts: that is, mining the data for results first, and then writing the paper as if the experiment had been an attempt to find just those effects. "You have exploratory findings, and you're pitching them as 'I knew this all along,' as confirmatory," Dr. Nosek said. The increasing challenges to the veracity of scientists' work gained widespread attention recently when a study by Michael LaCour on the effect of political canvassing on opinions of same sex marriage was questioned and ultimately retracted. The second leading cause is plagiarizing text, followed by republishing presenting the same results in two or more journals. The fourth category is faked data. No one knows the rate of fraud with any certainty. In a 2011 survey of more than 2,000 psychologists, about 1 percent admitted to falsifying data. Other studies have estimated a rate of about 2 percent. Yet one offender can do a lot of damage. The Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel published dozens of studies in major journals for nearly a decade based on faked data, investigators at the universities where he had worked concluded in 2011. Suspicions were first raised by two of his graduate students. "If I'm a scientist and I fabricate data and put that online, others are going to assume this is accurate data," said John Budd, a professor at the University of Missouri and an author of one of the first exhaustive analyses of retractions, in 1999. "There's no way to know" without inside information. Here, too, Retraction Watch provides a possible solution. Many of the egregious cases that it posts come from tips. The tipsters are a growing cadre of scientists, specialized journalists and other experts who share the blog's mission and are usually not insiders working directly with a suspected offender. One of the blog's most effective allies has been Dr. Steven Shafer, the current editor of the journal Anesthesia Analgesia who is now at Stanford, whose aggressiveness in re examining published papers has led to scores of retractions. The field of anesthesia is a leader in retractions, largely because of Dr. Shafer's efforts, Mr. Marcus and Dr. Oransky said. (Psychology is another leader, largely because of Dr. Stapel.) Other cases emerge from issues raised at post publication sites, where scientists dig into papers, sometimes anonymously. Dr. Broockman, one of the two who challenged the LaCour Green paper, had first made public some of his suspicions anonymously on a message board called poliscirumors.com. Mr. Marcus said Retraction Watch closely followed a similar site, PubPeer.com. "When it first popped up, a lot of people assumed it would be an ax grinding place," he said. "But while some contributors have overstepped, I think it has had a positive impact on the literature." What these various tipsters, anonymous post reviewers and whistle blowers have in common is a nose for data that looks too good to be true, he said. Sites like Retraction Watch and PubPeer give them a place to discuss their concerns and flag fishy looking data. These, along with data repositories like Dr. Nosek's, may render moot the debate over how to exhaustively replicate findings. That burden is likely to be eased by the community of bad science bloodhounds who have more and more material to work with when they pick up a foul scent. "At this point, we see ourselves as part of an ecosystem that is advocating for increased transparency," Dr. Oransky said. "And that ecosystem is growing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
To get the moves right for "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," Mr. Tarantino went to a 1960s dancing 'it' girl: Toni Basil. LOS ANGELES When Toni Basil's agent told her that an anonymous filmmaker from an unidentified production company wanted to chat, she was intrigued. It was something about the 1960s, she was told, so she mopped her dance studio floor in case she'd have to teach the boogaloo or the watusi. She signed a nondisclosure agreement. Then she met with Quentin Tarantino. Ms. Basil, a dancer and choreographer, and Mr. Tarantino clicked. They swapped television dance show trivia: "He knew the names of the go go dancers on 'Hullabaloo,'" she said in an interview. "He knew I was assistant choreographer on 'Shindig.'" Mr. Tarantino invited Ms. Basil to be the choreographer on his latest movie, "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," set over a handful of days in 1969, about a fading television actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), his stuntman sidekick (Brad Pitt) and real life characters including the actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Though the movie is not a musical and only intermittently bubbles into dance, Mr. Tarantino lavishes as much care on recalling an era of American social dance as he does on recreating the look of the marquee of the Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. "Of course Toni Basil is the right person to choreograph the '60s; this was her era," said Nigel Lythgoe, the creator and executive producer of "So You Think You Can Dance," speaking by phone in Los Angeles. (Ms. Basil was a judge in early seasons.) "Toni was at 'The T.A.M.I. Show,' in the wings, next to Mick Jagger, watching James Brown, when Mick said, 'How do I follow that?'" Ms. Basil was something of a dancing "it" girl in Los Angeles in the '60s. She bopped on the beach in a red bikini in "Pajama Party" (1964) and "did the dog" in the Elvis Presley movie "Viva Las Vegas" (1964). She lived in freewheeling, bohemian Topanga Canyon, befriending visual artists and rock stars, and falling in with the New Hollywood crowd that included Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. "I knew Sharon," Ms. Basil said, referring to Sharon Tate. "Whew. I also dated Jay Sebring " Tate's celebrity hairdresser, played by Emile Hirsch in the movie. (Both were killed by the Manson family in August 1969 at the home Tate shared with her husband, the director Roman Polanski.) Ms. Basil, 75, a striking woman with kohl lined cat's eyes, spoke animatedly in her Spanish style bungalow in the Fairfax neighborhood here about her "full circle" experience on "Once Upon a Time ..." Her post '60s career she is probably best known for her hit record "Mickey" (1981) was evident in the clutter of showbiz memorabilia decorating her home: posters of Bette Midler and David Bowie, for whom she choreographed and staged extravagant concerts (she worked with Ms. Midler for more than four decades); and a photo of her with the Lockers, her crew of street dancers that codified, and elevated, urban dance styles in the '70s. Ms. Basil said she still dances every day, and you can catch a glimpse of her form d uring the opening credits of Mr. Tarantino's movie. Clad in her signature fedora, she and Ms. Robbie do the twist on a Pan Am flight carrying Polanski and Tate to Los Angeles. There are two choreographed sequences in the movie, and the first is quick. It spotlights Mr. DiCaprio in a high gloss redo of NBC's "Hullabaloo," a mid 60s variety show that featured a posse of jazz and go go dancers gyrating around musical guests. ("Shindig," on ABC, was the competition.) For Mr. Tarantino's "Hullabaloo," Ms. Basil put Mr. DiCaprio at the center of a glowing white set, doing what she called a "sexy smooth mischievous" twist. Behind him, three go go dancers, in de rigueur white boots, do the pony punctuated by finger snaps. At Mr. Tarantino's request, the dancers gesture, as in Motown choreography: pointing a single finger, or raising it to the lips, like "hush!" For the film's second, more elaborate, choreographed sequence, a sprawling party at the Playboy Mansion, Mr. Tarantino and Ms. Basil oversaw a cast of 240 extras, who were given Ms. Basil's video compilation "Popular Dance Crazes of the '60s" to study. Ms. Basil winnowed out the good dancers "who could twist, who could jerk, who could pony?" Her first rule: no sneakers. "I auditioned some heavy hip hop people they couldn't handle it," she said. "The '60s was leather soles and a wooden floor. That's why the twist, the simplest dance, was such a sensation. Everyone could do it. They just swivel their feet and the upper body fell naturally in the opposite direction." Fifteen people were selected to be Playboy bunnies, circulating at the party. But after five hours of filming, Ms. Basil said, Mr. Tarantino had an idea: What if they danced? Ms. Basil was tasked on the spot with creating a dance for four of the extras. Mr. Tarantino put them on apple boxes so they could be seen, but they were still behind a throng of dancing partygoers. "I knew it couldn't be the pony, it couldn't be the twist," Ms. Basil said. "It had to be the jerk the dance that is from the waist up." She worked quickly, constructing a movement chain from the go go playbook. "These are nondancers," she said. "They're nervous. They're learning unison in a bunny costume, in high heels, on boxes. Cameras are waiting. You instruct your strongest girl: 'You call out the steps under your breath like a ventriloquist, 'Do the jerk, change, lasso arms, change.'" Before the '60s, Ms. Basil said, social dance "was partnering; it was the jitterbug." But in the '60s, partners split apart: "Freedom what the '60s were about." Now, with dancers no longer holding hands, "arms started to dance," she said, and the jerk, the swim, and the hitchhike appeared, each a dance for gesticulating arms. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"To speak of the new ballet one must speak most of all about its physical production," a critic wrote after the premiere of Marius Petipa's "The Sleeping Beauty" in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1890. Critics commented on the magnificence of the sets and, especially, of the extravagance of the costumes, which were rendered in "silk, velvet, plush, gold and silver embroideries, wonderful brocades, feathers, and flowers." Scenic extravagance has always been part of the allure of "Sleeping Beauty," a ballet based on a Perrault fairy tale about the triumph of good over evil. To many, it represents the summit of late 19th century classicism and the fullest expression of the Russian school of ballet. (Not to mention the most sumptuous of Tchaikovsky's ballet scores.) This sense of opulence also lies at the heart of Alexei Ratmansky's new staging for American Ballet Theater, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera House on Friday after an initial run in Costa Mesa, Calif., in March. Every aspect of this production looks to the ballet's past. For the steps, Mr. Ratmansky has mined a collection of ballet notations recorded shortly after the 1890 premiere. But his sense of history is fluid; he also drew upon other, later productions. Mr. Ratmansky approached the designer Richard Hudson best known for his spectacular designs for the stage production of "The Lion King" with whom he had collaborated on his 2010 "Nutcracker." Mr. Hudson agreed, with the understanding that he would riff on, rather than slavishly copy, Bakst's designs. The dance historian Caroline Hamilton helped locate and document the costumes, which are scattered around the world in museums and collections. "I discovered Bakst when I was a student," Mr. Hudson said in a phone interview from London. "What struck me most was the extraordinary contrast of color." Illustrations of the costumes for "Beauty" bear this out: vibrant reds side by side with brilliant shades of orange; contrasting patterns layered one upon the other. For this production, Mr. Hudson has slimmed down the volume of the Bakst dresses, softened the fabrics and lightened the palette by a shade or two. But he has preserved the riot of color, resisting the current tendency to make everything neatly match. Most of the fabrics were found in the garment district in New York and Indian fabric stores. To our contemporary eye, the costumes appear very decorative. Mr. Hudson has used all manner of embellishments: wide cuffs, sashes, tassels, braiding, appliques and thousands of buttons. The Queen's gowns, in particular, are enormous, with voluminous sleeves and wide skirts supported by panniers, and trains so long they have to be carried by tiny pages. And then there are the ornate headpieces and floppy, wide brimmed hats. Everyone wears a wig. ("They're uncomfortable and hot," Hee Seo, one of five Auroras, said.) There are 210 of them, three times as many as in any other Ballet Theater production, the head of the wig department, Rena Most, said. The Queen's perruque towers above her like a sheaf of wheat, augmented further by a spray of giant feathers. The costumes for fairies and for Aurora, while more restrained, go well beyond the usual classical tutu and tights look. The skirts fall right to the knee, a few inches above Bakst's hemline. "The bodice is cut in such a way that the line of the seam tapers your waist, with a wide skirt, very feminine and flattering," the soloist Stella Abrera, who dances the Lilac Fairy and the Fairy of Temperament on alternating nights, said recently. A petal shaped strip of fabric at the hips, or peplum, further enhances the hourglass shape of the tutu in the famous Rose Adagio. "The length of the skirt was a major decision," Mr. Ratmansky said by phone during a break in rehearsals. "It has to be modest and reflect the overall style, but of course it should not cover too much of the movement." Most important, he said, "when they lift their legs, it shouldn't stick up stiffly, so we don't see what's under the tutu." Ms. Abrera noted that, because of the length, they had to "use a little bit more torque in the turns." For the men, there is the novelty of dancing in knee length breeches, worn over the usual tights. But as Cory Stearns, one of five dancers alternating the role of Prince Desire, explained, the look suits the more old fashioned style of the choreography. "The Prince's variation is all petit allegro," a technique characterized by small, fast jumps and flickering beats of the lower legs; "there are no split jumps or big bravura steps, and no need really to see the full line of the leg," he said. The complex coordination required to ensure that all the scenic elements and costumes would be ready in time for the March premiere constituted, in itself, a kind of ballet, its movements choreographed by the company's wardrobe supervisor, Bruce Horowitz. Most of the 400 costumes were made in New York. The dance boots came from Portland, Ore. Many of the hats were constructed at Laboratorio Pieroni in Rome. The Teatro alla Scala in Milan, which co produced the ballet and shared its 6 million price tag, took care of props and scenery. (The production will be at La Scala in September.) Compared with the costumes, the scenic elements are relatively pared down: Layered drop curtains denote fanciful Neoclassical interiors, airy rotundas, a formal garden and an autumnal mountain vista. The drops were made in workshops in Milan, Turin and outside of Venice, where the canvases were laid on the floor to be painted with giant brushes. Of one thing we can be sure: The designs for this "Sleeping Beauty" won't please everyone. Neither did Bakst's one critic said that the 1921 production was nothing but "Clothes! Clothes! Clothes!" But this opulence is intrinsic to the ballet. As Mr. Ratmansky put it a week before the premiere: "It represents the high point of aristocratic high art, reflecting on the order and harmony that lies behind beauty." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Department of Homeland Security recently decided to bar New York residents from federal programs that allow "trusted travelers" expedited transit through airports and border checkpoints. The Trump administration is defending the decision as a rational response to New York's enactment of a law denying federal immigration authorities free access to the state's motor vehicle records. In truth, the department's decision is spiteful retaliation against people who reside in a state that declines to bend to the administration's immigration priorities. Whatever its other virtues or vices, the decision offends constitutional norms that are neither liberal nor conservative but simply American. New York wasted no time in filing a federal suit to block the Department of Homeland Security's move. The state's lawsuit raises a number of plausible process based objections and seeks to take advantage of legal doctrines usually associated with right leaning judges. But it misses an opportunity to frame the case more fundamentally, in terms of principles grounded in personal responsibility and a refusal to punish people for the sins of others. New York argues that the department's move was hasty and arbitrary and imposes unjustified and even irrational pressure on the state to cooperate with federal authorities by sharing data they say they need to protect the nation while facilitating travel. The state's arguments have some force, but their premises might have limited appeal to judges deferential to executive power in matters involving immigration and allegedly implicating national security. Moreover, federal courts across the ideological spectrum might well sympathize with the administration's claim that it cannot safely administer the expedited transit programs without access to personal information uniquely available through state motor vehicle records. The state might fare better with its federalism based arguments: It objects to the use of national power to influence state lawmaking. Here, New York is armed with the Supreme Court's 2018 opinion in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, which invalidated a federal law flatly prohibiting states from legalizing sports gambling. The court in that case held the federal law to be a forbidden form of federal commandeering of state legislative power. But it's far from obvious that the action New York challenges is sufficiently analogous to this or other cases in which the Supreme Court has declared federal legislative provisions unconstitutional because of demands they made on states. No less concerning for progressives, relying upon a line of precedents rooted in states' rights could solidify recent conservative doctrine in ways that could limit future federal power to enact national policy on vital issues such as climate change or health care reform. Fortunately, those objecting to the Department of Homeland Security's decision needn't invoke controversial legal notions to establish its constitutional flaw. Although constitutional law doesn't always track ordinary moral intuitions, this is an instance where it does. The most fundamental principles of fairness and due process, principles neither liberal nor conservative, tell us that individuals should never be punished for things they haven't done which is precisely what the Department of Homeland Security is doing here. The Department of Homeland Security is indiscriminately penalizing New York residents both those directly denied access to expedited transit and those derivatively affected by the attendant economic and social consequences for the actions of lawmakers in Albany. In so doing, the department violates not just some technical legal doctrine but also an ancient and axiomatic principle undergirding virtually any decent system of laws. This central, intuitive principle of justice is also firmly rooted in federal constitutional doctrine. Its influence is evident, for example, in Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 case in which the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law denying undocumented children access to the state's system of free public education. The court in that case reasoned, "Even if the State found it expedient to control the conduct of adults by acting against their children, legislation directing the onus of a parent's misconduct against his children does not comport with fundamental conceptions of justice." The same logic applies here. Even if the Department of Homeland Security finds it expedient to control the conduct of the New York legislature by acting against its constituents denying them access to federal programs at airports and border crossings anywhere in the nation simply because of their state residency doing so clashes with the most basic conceptions of justice. It might be urged that a state's residents are not wholly without influence on the lawmakers for whom they vote and who theoretically represent them. But one needn't be cynical about the workings of representative democracy to recognize the limits of that idea. For one thing, much of the harm the Department of Homeland Security's rule visits upon those residing in New York is aimed at people ineligible to vote there, either because they're undocumented immigrants or because they're green card holders. For another thing, the rule obviously can't differentiate between those who voted for the lawmakers supporting the state law to which the department objects and those who voted against them. Finally, even those who voted for the legislators responsible for enacting the state law at issue may well have done so for reasons entirely unrelated to information sharing by the Department of Motor Vehicles. While we can hope that this example of President Trump's vindictive post impeachment behavior may be promptly struck down by our independent federal judiciary, we mustn't lose sight of this president's other dangerous acts of retaliation, which may lack readily available judicial remedies. With the ultimate referendum on the president's lawlessness just 10 months away, citizens should take keen note of just how willing Mr. Trump is to punish anyone who doesn't loyally embrace his political agenda and even those who might embrace that agenda but happen to be in his way. Laurence H. Tribe ( tribelaw) is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a co author, most recently, of "To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment." 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 |
To save himself from a miserable home life, Stephan Wolfert joined the Army. And to save himself from the Army, Mr. Wolfert became an actor. He has merged these experiences in "Cry Havoc!" at the New Ohio Theater, a full bore autobiographical solo with a meddling co writer named William Shakespeare. The piece is directed by Eric Tucker of Bedlam, a theater company that specializes in antic versions of Shakespeare and other literary classics. Mr. Tucker also helped to shape "Cry Havoc!" through Bedlam's outreach program for veterans. Onstage, Mr. Wolfert leaps and prowls as he describes his experiences during the Persian Gulf war of 1991 (he served stateside) and the post traumatic stress that still dogs him. He remains concerned by the lack of services available to veterans struggling to make the transition to peacetime life. "We were wired for war," he says. "But at the end of our military services we were not unwired from war. We were not rewired for society." Mr. Wolfert is a puckish performer with a lithe build. Through his eyes we feel the terror of Fourth of July fireworks, the shock of sudden movements, the consolation of alcohol. Sometimes he offers sympathetic digressions from his own experience, like the tale of an African American soldier in World War I or a discussion of the rape of female soldiers. Throughout, he peppers this material with lines from Shakespeare, a lot of them. And that's a problem. It isn't that the verse defeats Mr. Wolfert he's busy and leans heavily on gesture, but he has a real passion for the language. (And he manages to make it through several fervent orations without spitting. Impressive.) Yet taken out of context, the brief quotations lose force, diminishing from battle cry to T shirt slogan. The longer speeches get in the way, too. Sometimes Mr. Wolfert will offer genuinely persuasive analyses, like dark and insightful readings of Antony's speech in "Julius Caesar" or a section of "Henry V," but mostly the iambs gum up his own story. At a climactic moment, Mr. Wolfert describes how, after a more than usually traumatic experience as a waiter for a caterer, he drove back to his apartment and held a shotgun to his head. As he mimes the pressure of the barrel, he begins to recite "To be or not to be." Yes, this is a great speech. Yes, Mr. Wolfert delivers it nicely. But it was Mr. Wolfert's particular question in his particular voice that I wanted to hear. Identifying with Shakespeare's characters helped him make sense of his own life. But with that accomplished, this show should give Shakespeare a furlough. After Mr. Wolfert concludes his monologue with a fast forward dance recap stagehands create a ring of chairs and the audience circles up for a combination of talk back and group therapy. Mr. Wolfert asks the veterans in the house to identify themselves and elicits their experiences, giving each a hug. Then he broadens the conversation to audience members related to veterans, audience members affected by war and finally everyone else. This coda is affecting, also protracted and self congratulatory. It certainly isn't theater and yet it works as a reminder of what theater does so well and what it did for Mr. Wolfert. In feeling empathy for others, he was able to better understand and forgive himself. He wants that for everyone. The obligatory sharing can feel strained. Less strained: the quality of mercy that motivates it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Call it the zombie version of Art Basel Miami Beach. The annual fair, originally scheduled to unfold next week with the contemporary art world converging in South Florida, was canceled in September by its Swiss based organizers a cultural casualty of the coronavirus. Over a dozen Miami satellite fairs followed suit, all mirroring Basel's pivot to online "viewing rooms." The art circus, it seemed, was not coming to town. Yet this week, Miami's art scene was anything but quiet, even as the number of Covid 19 cases and deaths rose, giving Miami Dade the highest per capita rate of any large county in Florida. Previously closed museums announced ambitious new in person exhibitions, from public institutions like the Perez Art Museum Miami to the open to the public privately owned Margulies Collection at the Warehouse. Galleries were likewise rolling out formidable solo shows, as were hotel lobbies and poolside bungalows. One leading fair had sprung back to life: Design Miami, partly owned by Art Basel, was being staged in a scaled down manner, with 10 galleries setting up inside a storied building on the mainland. The local pandemic toll is jarring: During the past seven days, Miami Dade County, which includes both Miami and Miami Beach, recorded 49 new deaths from Covid 19, and nearly 13,000 new infections. With epidemiologists expecting those numbers to rise, it's worth asking: Is Miami's art world paying attention? "I understand some are saying 'Oh my God, this will be a disaster to do this kind of thing,'" Craig Robins, founder of Design Miami, said. "It's the opposite. It's not about a bunch of people flying in from around the world. It's about a bunch of people spending the season in South Florida and doing things that they feel are within boundaries that are responsible." Mr. Robins said he already had a model in place: the luxe retailers that fill 18 square blocks of Miami's Design District neighborhood, of which he and his partners own about 75 percent and where they have mandated strict health protocols since May for some 200 tenants who remain open, including Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Gucci. Adding the Design Miami fair to that mix by installing it in the district's Moore Building, he noted, was a natural fit. "From a consumer point of view, what's the difference between luxury fashion or high jewelry and art or design?" Mr. Robins was also renting nearby spaces to pop up art galleries from New York, coming down for the week, from seasoned players like Jeffrey Deitch and Mitchell Innes Nash to the scrappier Ramiken. For now, a virus minded countywide midnight curfew remains in place, but would that discourage the late night bacchanals that were the hallmark of many Design Miami and Art Basels of years past? "I wouldn't be going to any of those dinners," Mr. Robins insisted. "This is not for people who want to come to the party, because there won't be one." Not everyone appears to have gotten Mr. Robins's memo. The New York socialite Libbie Mugrabi, fresh from a divorce settlement from her powerhouse art dealer husband David Mugrabi which reportedly netted her upward of 100 million said she was not only winging into Miami, but also intended to host a Miami Art Week event "with only A listers and artists" at the Faena Hotel. "Do you remember Aby Rosen's dinners at the W Hotel?" she asked, citing that developer's celebrity studded Miami Basel gatherings. "Every year it was the talk of the town." This year, she promised, "My dinner is going to replace Aby Rosen's dinner." Beyond hosting a memorable evening, she intended to reinvent herself as a cultural impresario in her own right: "Now I settled a divorce and I have a lot of money," she said matter of factly, while declining to provide financial specifics. "And I can do whatever I want with it. It's my choice. And this is what I want to do." Ms. Mugrabi brushed aside concerns that her dinner was a potential superspreader event with strangers from around the country. "It'll be like 50 people max," she said. "Everybody that will be at the dinner will have to submit Covid tests or be tested there. I will send a tester with a rapid test." And the notorious unreliability of rapid tests? "They can wear a mask if somebody wants," she said. "I won't wear one, but other people can." The rest of Ms. Mugrabi's schedule in Miami seemed like old Basel times, with a dizzying array of product launch promotions: "I'm starting a brand where it's all about the healing. It's about art, the art of fashion, the art of beauty, the art of art, the art of of whatever." The challenge for some was how to promote homegrown talent in a city where large numbers still refuse to take basic precautions against the coronavirus. The Miami artist William Cordova and his collaborators believe they have solved the problem. Enter the A.I.M. Biennial, organized by Mr. Cordova with Gean Moreno, a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Mikhail Solomon, director of the Prizm Art Fair, and Marie Vickles, director of education at the Perez Art Museum Miami and a curator at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex. They selected 69 multigenerational artists largely from Miami including Mark Handforth, Jessica Gispert, Kerry Phillips and Onajide Shabaka to create site specific installations in far flung outdoor spots, many in neighborhoods endangered by climate change. A.I.M.'s name shorthand for "Art in Movement" highlights its driving spirit: these are places literally sinking beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Best to see this art now. "Miami is constantly changing, it's very fluid," Mr. Cordova said. "There is a chance that something will be flooded and won't be visible. There is constantly a chance that a space will be demolished or painted over." Of course, installing large weatherproof sculptures in a vacant lot is one thing. But what about the traditional painters invited to participate in A.I.M.? Were they expected to just hang their work where it could be rained on, or taken home by an overenthusiastic art lover? "I wanted to prod practitioners to be more resourceful, more improvisational, to not let them forget that they are creative problem solvers," Mr. Cordova said. He pointed to the painter Kristen Thiele, known for her beguiling oil on canvas evocations of studio era Hollywood films. For A.I.M., she returned to her earlier days as a screen printer, creating a large poster of a 1950s movie house audience wearing 3 D glasses, emblazoning it with the credo "SCIENCE is not FICTION." Multiples of the poster were plastered onto the facade of a boarded up theater near her studio. "For some of the younger artists who are still in school or who just graduated, they have a different experience of art," Mr. Cordova said. The pandemic and its initial shutdown of not only gallery sales, but the day jobs so many artists depend on as art handlers and installers made it painfully clear that artists would have to adapt. "But if you've been working in South Florida for the last 20 years," Mr. Cordova said, before an art market boom and its ancillary economy existed there, "it's like a stick shift, you just change gears. You don't have to have a budget or a museum to sponsor you." The more familiar Basel model was already showing surprising strength though, as evidenced by the flurry of sales over at the Allapattah neighborhood's Spinello Projects, which focuses on Miami artists. A pre Thanksgiving opening featured the solo debut of Reginald O'Neal and the second solo outing from Jared McGriff. Each painter's work addressed topical issues from policing in the Black community and the carceral state to the hospitalization of family members. Mr. McGriff's ethereal depiction of two policemen in plantation whites, "Overseer, Overseer, Officer," fuses an otherworldly sense of beauty with the more troubling note sounded by its title. Mr. O'Neal's portraits of his incarcerated father and younger brother both in their prison jumpsuits are tender, and all the more striking for their directness. The ICA Miami and the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale have already purchased works from both shows; the remaining four paintings by Mr. O'Neal have just been acquired by the Miami collectors Mera and Don Rubell. Mr. O'Neal, in an interview, said that he had conflicting feelings about Art Basel's influence on Miami. Having grown up in Overtown, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, yet right on the edge of the Wynwood neighborhood as it became ground zero for Basel's satellite fairs and pop up galleries, he said he'd seen firsthand how art fueled gentrification transformed a once affordable area. Yet that same carnivalesque atmosphere was precisely what pulled him into the art world. "Wynwood changed my life, if I'm being honest," he admitted, recalling the street art and spray painted murals as the initial draw. But he soon found himself captivated by classical techniques drawn from the old masters. Nearly a decade later, the art "kind of got watered down," he said. Yet Art Basel also focused the entire city on art even those who rarely set foot inside a museum. In that light, a Miami Art Week without a big Basel party could be a possible blessing, allowing the city's own talent to take center stage and avoid being overshadowed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
A new study on the harms of sedentary living published in the journal Diabetologia found that breaking up sitting with short bouts of standing and light intensity walking was even more effective than an equivalent amount of a concentrated traditional exercise (in this case, cycling) in controlling the blood sugar of patients with Type 2 diabetes. Rather than proselytize, Mr. Adams prefers to teach by example, introducing people to healthy foods and providing helpful information. "I don't want to become an annoying vegan," he said. "My hope is that by having people focus on adding healthy things to their plates, rather than unhealthy things, they'll eventually only have room for the healthy ones." Mr. Adams hopes to encourage more people to make "reasonable alterations" in how they eat and move through a series of initiatives, including a newsletter, a cookbook of healthful recipes, community and business events that incorporate healthy eating, speaking engagements and fliers distributed to the public at train stations. He's also planning a competition for schoolchildren to identify the most effective way to go from soil to plate with wholesome foods. "At every event, I talk about how health is the cornerstone to our prosperity," he said. The changes he's made in his eating and exercise habits have done a lot more than reverse his diabetes. "All my numbers improved in just three months," he said, including his blood pressure and cholesterol levels, which are now in a healthy range, thereby lowering his risk for heart disease and stroke. He bemoans the dependence of most Americans on processed foods and meals prepared by many stores and restaurants that are laden with unhealthful ingredients. Relying on such foods not only can be bad for your health; it also deprives people of a "spiritual relationship" with the foods they eat, he said. "I never cooked before; now I love cooking, and I've become very creative in my cooking ability." He has learned to add spices like cinnamon, oregano, turmeric and cloves into many of the foods he makes. "Food should be tasteful and enjoyable," and it can be without using sugar, salt and fat, he maintains. Most patients with Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, are prescribed medication to reduce the amount of blood sugar released by the liver and enhance the body's sensitivity to insulin. But even though there is no known cure for Type 2 diabetes, lifestyle factors can have a big impact. Numerous studies have demonstrated that losing weight (for those who are overweight), eating a diet low in refined carbohydrates and sugar, and being more active can reduce a person's dependence on medications and sometimes eliminate any need for drugs. A loss of just 5 percent to 10 percent of body weight can often control the disease in people who are overweight. Among people who are obese, going on a very low calorie diet or inducing extreme weight loss through bariatric surgery often can reverse the disorder. In one small study in England, Type 2 diabetes went into remission in nearly half the people who consumed a very low calorie liquid diet for eight weeks and stayed in remission for six months after they resumed normal eating. However, for most people, the changes they make in their eating and exercise habits to control or reverse diabetes must be maintained indefinitely to keep the disease at bay. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
An acclaimed Singapore set mystery hits Netflix. And Denzel Washington stars in a 2016 remake of "The Magnificent Seven," airing on USA. A LAND IMAGINED (2019) Stream on Netflix. This sophomore feature from the Singaporean filmmaker Siew Hua Yeo won the top prize at last year's Locarno International Film Festival, a Swiss festival with a long history of supporting Asian cinema. The film, a thriller, concerns the disappearance of a worker at construction site in Singapore. While it initially centers on the detective investigating the case (Peter Yu), it soon shifts its focus away from that noirish setup to follow the worker, Wang (Xiaoyi Liu), an insomniac immigrant from China, in the lead up to his disappearance. IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (2018) Stream on Hulu; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Barry Jenkins's follow up to his Oscar winning "Moonlight" creates vivid, rhythmic onscreen life out of James Baldwin's 1974 novel of love interrupted by injustice. Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) are the lovers in question; they were also childhood friends. Their attempts to live and love in peace repeatedly push up against the racism around them, culminating in a false criminal accusation that lands Fonny in prison. As the film dances between Tish and Fonny's stories pre and post arrest, Jenkins builds up a picture of love in 1970s New York that is both beautiful and infuriating. "This is a period piece about New York," Jenkins told The New York Times earlier this year. "It's James Baldwin's sometimes acrimonious love letter to New York, but a love letter nonetheless." Regina King, who plays Tish's mother, won an Oscar for her acting in the film. HUGE IN FRANCE Stream on Netflix. Not many people move to Los Angeles to shed their celebrity status. That's not exactly what the French comedian Gad Elmaleh does in this series, either but moving there does have that effect. The premise of the show involves Elmaleh (who plays a version of himself) moving to the States in hopes of reconnecting with his teenage son (Jordan Ver Hoeve). He arrives to a child more interested in his modeling career than his funnyman father, and many variations on the greeting "Aren't you popular in, like, France or something?" THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (2016) 8 p.m. on USA. This remake of the 1960 film "The Magnificent Seven" itself based on Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" is, Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, "as fresh as recycled recycling suggests." But watching Denzel Washington, its star, lead a band of misfits on a revolver toting frolic through the Old West is still a fun outing. AMERICAN MASTERS: JOSEPH PULITZER 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Joseph Pulitzer's journey from 19th century Hungarian immigrant to staggeringly influential media mogul involved fighting for the Union Army during the Civil War and working as a waiter at a storied St. Louis restaurant. This documentary, narrated by Adam Driver, charts that journey. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
BETTER THINGS 10 p.m. on FX. Our critic called the second season of this comedy series a "tremendous leap forward" from the first. The third season, beginning on Thursday, promises to be a seismic shift: It's the show's first since one of its creators, Louis C.K., admitted to sexual misconduct and was removed from involvement with the series. Now, the show's other creator, Pamela Adlon, has taken full control. It's still the same series, still an absurdist, semi autobiographical take on Adlon's life and family, with Adlon as a mother struggling with aging while raising three daughters: Max (Mikey Madison), Frankie (Hannah Alligood) and Duke (Olivia Edward). "So, where did I want to go with this season?" Adlon asked in a recent interview with The New York Times. "What I really wanted to do was say, 'Sam's a mess. Max is a mess. Phil's a mess. Frankie's a mess. Duke's a mess. Sunny's a mess.' I wanted to see these women kind of unraveling. I wanted the theme of the season to be about the changes of your life, and honoring that." RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE 9 p.m. on VH1. After 10 seasons of ornate drag competitions, RuPaul Charles's pioneering reality competition series has become a household brand, having hatched multiple spinoff series and, over the years, probably used enough makeup to dress a small stadium. It has also challenged gender expectations and pushed boundaries, as its 11th season promises to continue to do. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Ernest J. Sternglass, whose research in radiation physics laid the foundation for important technological advances and who became a prominent opponent of nuclear weapons, died on Feb. 12 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 91. The cause was heart failure, said his son, Daniel. Early in his career, Dr. Sternglass figured out a basic interaction between electrons and metals, which was developed into cameras that could take images in dimly lit places. NASA adopted the technology for a television camera on Apollo 11, taking video of Neil Armstrong descending to the surface of the moon. He later pioneered technology for the use of solid state electronic sensors instead of photographic film for taking medical X rays. Before those successes, in 1947, when he was a recent college graduate working at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, he had a formative meeting with Albert Einstein. Dr. Sternglass was conducting experiments in which he bombarded a piece of metal with a beam of electrons. The beam caused other electrons to be ejected in a process called secondary electron emissions, and the military thought the process could be used to see in poorly lit areas. Dr. Sternglass wrote to Einstein, challenging the prevailing theory for explaining such electron emissions and offering his own ideas. Einstein invited him to visit him at his home in Princeton, N.J., and they spent an afternoon in discussions. Dr. Sternglass later recounted that Einstein discouraged him from pursuing theoretical physics and gave him unexpected advice: "Don't go back to school. They will try to crush every bit of originality out of you. Don't go back to graduate school." The two continued corresponding, and Einstein encouraged the electron research. Dr. Sternglass did go back to school, but he followed Einstein's advice to focus on the practical. After earning his doctorate in engineering physics from Cornell in 1953, he joined the Westinghouse Research Laboratory, and his work there on secondary electron emissions led to a highly sensitive camera tube that was used in the video camera on Apollo 11. In the 1960s, Dr. Sternglass and other researchers concluded that medical X rays harmed developing fetuses. Babies whose mothers had X rays, they found, later had higher rates of infant mortality and childhood leukemia. That, in turn, led him to testify at a Senate committee hearing in favor of a treaty to ban aboveground nuclear testing. The radioactive fallout from such tests, Dr. Sternglass testified, was similarly harmful. The Senate ratified the treaty. "He felt that was one of the major achievements in his life," Daniel Sternglass said. In 1967, Dr. Sternglass left Westinghouse to become a professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. That same year the Atomic Energy Commission proposed Project Ketch, which would use nuclear weapons for a peaceful purpose: an underground explosion of an atomic bomb in central Pennsylvania to create a cavern to store natural gas. In the 1981 book "Nuclear Witnesses" by Leslie J. Freeman, Dr. Sternglass recounted learning about Project Ketch from a friend who was an editor at The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. "These people are crazy," Dr. Sternglass recalled telling his friend. "This is the heart of dairy country. Millions of curies of radioactive iodine would poison the milk all the way up to New England, all the way to New York, Washington, down to Philadelphia. This is madness." Dr. Sternglass wrote an opinion article opposing Project Ketch and became a frequent critic of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, making controversial claims such as that fallout from nuclear tests was to blame for a halt to a two decade decline in infant mortality. He argued that from 1950 on, such fallout had contributed to the deaths of 400,000 babies in the United States alone. "He believed very strongly that these correlations existed, and these effects were real," Daniel Sternglass said. Other scientists, however, questioned many of his assumptions, as well as his conclusions. After the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, Dr. Sternglass measured radiation levels at the Harrisburg airport, two miles from the reactors, and found them to be 15 times higher than normal. "This corresponds to a major fallout pattern from a nuclear bomb test," he told The Associated Press. Critics accused Dr. Sternglass of inflaming fears. "Dr. Ernest Sternglass, a perennial campaigner against nuclear power, is accused by neutral health authorities of mishandling data to demonstrate health damage," an editorial in The New York Times said. "Even in nuclear fables there are people who cry wolf." George Wald, a Nobel Prize winning biologist at Harvard, took note of the criticisms in his foreword to Dr. Sternglass's 1981 book, "Secret Fallout: Low Level Radiation From Hiroshima to Three Mile Island." "At times in this book I had the feeling he was going a little far," Dr. Wald wrote. "But then I never could be sure, once I had read over carefully what he was saying, that it was too far. The truth is that once one starts down this path, it's hard to know where or whether to stop. And on the fundamental issues, Sternglass is dealing with a very strong case." In the 1980s, Dr. Sternglass, along with Donald Sashin and other colleagues at Pittsburgh, demonstrated how to record medical X rays with solid state sensors rather than photographic film. The sensors, more sensitive than film, reduced radiation doses. With the images stored digitally, computer algorithms, now commonplace in image editing programs like Photoshop, could easily increase contrast to allow doctors to more easily see tumors and other details. Ernest Joachim Sternglass was born on Sept. 24, 1923, in Berlin. Both his parents were doctors. When the Nazi SS surrounded a section of a city where a large number of Jewish professionals, including Dr. Sternglass's father, had offices, one of the SS agents, a patient of his father's, allowed his father to go home. The family soon left Germany, moving to New York City in 1938. After earning his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Cornell in 1944, he served in the Navy and then began working at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. In 1948, he returned to Cornell to begin his graduate studies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Brodie Van Wagenen, the Mets' new general manager, was majoring in communications at Stanford when he was invited out to dinner with his future wife, Molly Knight, and her family in the fall of 1993. Van Wagenen was an outfielder on the baseball team, Knight was a diver, and her mother's partner needed no introduction: She was soon to marry Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. The occasion turned out to be a two hour meal. In all, Neil and Carol spoke for about eight minutes. "Every quiet period, I filled it," Van Wagenen said. "I had diarrhea of the mouth." When Molly and Brodie got in their car, he worried aloud that he had talked too much. "Oh, I forgot to tell you," Knight said. "Mom and Neil, they don't talk much." "That would have been very helpful to know before dinner," Van Wagenen recently recalled saying as he stood by the Mets' batting cage before a spring training game in Port St. Lucie, Fla. "I fill dead space, always have. Sometimes, maybe, to a fault." The Mets are learning that talks with Van Wagenen are forever ongoing. His first impressions with people across the organization have been indelible and largely audible. He has wasted little time becoming the voice of the team, taking over after the eight year tenure of Sandy Alderson and immediately bringing in veteran players, new staff members and a win now philosophy and doing so while keeping up near constant conversations inside and outside the organization. "I always err on the side of overcommunication in hopes that people will appreciate my transparency," he said. "I have a hard time turning off my brain." Omnipresent in Prada sneakers with his hair gelled just so, the former agent patrolled his new fief with an energetic gait at the Mets' spring training base. He jotted notes in a black pad and covered his mouth with it when he knew he was in the outfield camera's frame sitting behind home plate. He pulled up stools in the clubhouse to speak with former clients, like outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, and offered fist bumps through chain link fences. "He brings a kind of swag, a confidence," said outfielder Brandon Nimmo, who was a Van Wagenen client. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. That attitude was welcomed after back to back losing seasons in Flushing. An all hours operator, Van Wagenen promised to bolster a lineup in dire need of depth. He followed through with investments in analytics and veteran fielders, and commissioned studies of sleep patterns. He put his own schedule to the test this week: About 48 hours before opening day, he signed Jacob deGrom, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner and a former Van Wagenen client with Creative Artists Agency, to a five year extension worth 137.5 million. In the final day of negotiations, Jeff Wilpon, one of the team's owners, Van Wagenen, deGrom and his agents sat in a room in Sarasota, Fla., to complete the transaction. When deGrom got hungry after hours of listening to the general manager and the agents go back and forth, Van Wagenen made a run to 7 11 to buy mini tacos for deGrom. Van Wagenen viewed the extension as the last word of his first off season. "We haven't been shy about who we want to be and how we plan to get to that place," Van Wagenen said. "There are risks associated with saying what you want out loud because then you have to hold yourself accountable." Van Wagenen hasn't been shy about maintaining dialogues with his former co workers and their clients since taking the Mets job. He has courted fresh perspectives, including hiring the ESPN broadcaster Jessica Mendoza, another C.A.A. client, to help with player evaluations as she travels around the majors for television. The move drew attention, both good and bad, but he considered her to be another innovative addition to a collection of staff members he billed as "the best and the brightest." "Some days, I'm like: 'Hey Brodie, I've got to take my daughter to preschool. I've got to go. Can you wrap this up?'" Wright said. "I think he just loves talking the game." One of the first calls Van Wagenen made when the Mets hired him was to Pete Alonso, the team's top prospect. They arranged to meet at Los Sombreros, a Mexican cantina in Scottsdale, Ariz., that Alonso chose. Alonso, then 23, was in Arizona for the Fall Stars Game and had yet to log an inning in the majors. That was part of the reason for dinner. Despite hitting 36 home runs between Class AA Binghamton and Class AAA Las Vegas, Alonso did not get called up to Queens in September. The Mets were out of the playoff race, but the front office's reluctance to call him up centered on the manipulation of Alonso's major league service time so the Mets could control his future longer. In Arizona, Alonso ate lamb adobo as he listened to Van Wagenen, who told him he wanted to "be a bridge between players and management." "Extending that branch was very meaningful," said Alonso, who made the opening day roster after a stellar camp. "Huge, really." Shortly after bringing back reliever Jeurys Familia via free agency, Van Wagenen joined front office members and ownership on a trip to the Dominican Republic. Omar Minaya, the former Mets general manager who is now one of Van Wagenen's assistants, arranged for the contingent, which included Robinson Cano, Familia and shortstop Amed Rosario, to visit an orphanage in addition to the team's baseball academy. His years of trying to win over amateurs who he believed could turn into major leaguers have informed his approach. Todd Frazier, the Mets' third baseman, goes back with Van Wagenen the furthest. He recalled first meeting Van Wagenen in his parents' living room in Toms River, N.J., when Frazier was a junior at Rutgers. Charlie and Joan Frazier had raised two professional baseball players by the time they took the measure of Van Wagenen as Todd's potential agent. Van Wagenen ended up representing him for 12 seasons. "Your agent becomes family if you're with him that long," Frazier said. "He is whip smart and always has been. He's someone I respect and always will." As an advocate, Van Wagenen's voice was always heard above the din. In 2018, when the free agent market slowed nearly to a halt, Van Wagenen, who was an agent for 18 years, charged that owners were colluding to suppress player salaries. DeGrom one of eight Mets, including three of the five starting pitchers, on the roster whom Van Wagenen once represented was in the middle of a historic season last year when Van Wagenen publicly suggested at the All Star Game that the Mets should trade his client if they were not willing to extend him. Three months later, Van Wagenen informed deGrom that he no longer represented him. He was his boss. "I'm hoping my understanding of the player mind set will be an advantage when I'm communicating internally here," Van Wagenen said. After he crossed over to management, however, an extension for deGrom was one of the few topics on which Van Wagenen remained silent this spring, highlighting the delicacy of his pivot from his past profession. Tony Clark, the head of the players' union, expressed concern regarding Van Wagenen's switch. While the Mets billed Van Wagenen as an unconventional hire, the agent Scott Boras, his formal rival, noted ethical worries about the inside information Van Wagenen could bring to coming negotiations involving his former clients. Van Wagenen, who is not a lawyer, divested his stake in C.A.A. When he visited Mets' camp last week, Clark said discussions with the team had been held "to make sure everybody knew the parameters that everyone was going to function in moving forward." Van Wagenen is well versed in all aspects of the collective bargaining agreement. In 2013, along with Jay Z, he helped negotiate a 10 year, 240 million contract for Cano with the Seattle Mariners. Five years later, Cano was suspended for 80 games after testing positive for furosemide, a diuretic he said was for a medical condition. It is also used as a masking agent, to disguise banned substances. Cano served the ban. A month after the World Series, Van Wagenen traded for him. Wilpon, the owner, said he was "very comfortable" with Van Wagenen's explanation of Cano's situation. Though he has long been in the picture with the Mets, Van Wagenen is now in the family portraits, too. He noted that his three children and wife will now have one team to root for, a departure from the days when his older son, Rafe, operated like a fantasy owner, supporting his father's clients rather than a team as a whole. Van Wagenen's family also knows the ins and outs of the profession. They live near Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman in Connecticut, and Rafe and Cashman's son, Teddy, came up through the same schools. Van Wagenen taught his son the importance of keeping information confidential at a young age when Cano was a free agent in 2013. "At certain times, I said, 'Rafe, you can't tell Teddy what's going on in the Cano negotiations,'" Van Wagenen said. Van Wagenen was proud of his son's strategic reticence, but he recently realized that another form of communication may be a concern. His wife now tunes in to WFAN, the radio station to which Mets fans often call to vent about management's decisions. "She's been listening," he said, "for better or worse." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
NORMAL PEOPLE Stream on Hulu. In one of their first scenes together, Marianne (Daisy Edgar Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal), the Irish teenagers at the center of this series, have a conversation about that most weighty of adolescent subjects: their school grades. "You're smarter than me," Connell says. Marianne's reply comes quickly, in a matter of fact tone: "Smarter than everyone," she says. Based on the best selling novel by Sally Rooney, "Normal People" follows the pair as they ricochet through an on again, off again romantic relationship. Their bond highlights issues of social class, as the pair one wealthy, one poor move from secondary school to university. In his review for The New York Times, James Poniewozik called the series "a complex study of power wrapped up in a heartfelt teen soap." A SECRET LOVE (2020) Stream on Netflix. Lovers from a different generation look back at their life together in this moving documentary. The film profiles the professional baseball player Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel, two women who for decades kept their romantic partnership largely hidden, but were finally liberated from that secrecy late in life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. After President Trump tweeted disparaging comments about Representative Elijah Cummings and his Baltimore district, the late night hosts rushed to defend the city and its rats, too. "What a thing to say about a city in America. The man who tells us 'love it or leave it' has now attacked more cities than Godzilla." JIMMY KIMMEL " Imitating Trump singing God bless America, except Baltimore. They've got rats there, no MAGA hats there. I avoid it because they are poor." STEPHEN COLBERT "Of course it has rats. But you know which other cities have rats? All the best cities in the world Paris, London, New York they all have a rat problem. In fact, I'm starting to think if your city doesn't have rats it's because you live in a boring ass city and your food sucks because rats rats want to have a good time, too. Everyone's seen the photo of Pizza Rat. but people don't realize later that night he changed into Opera Rat. He has many tastes." TREVOR NOAH "Many people say Trump's words are clearly racist, but Trump says it's the black people who are the true racists because they keep bringing up race every time someone says something racist." TREVOR NOAH " As Trump I'm not the racist, he's the racist. After all, I wouldn't have said anything racist at all if he was white!" STEPHEN COLBERT "Trump has also gone after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and called the people of Iowa stupid. At this rate, he's going to take the flag and replace half the stars with poop emojis." STEPHEN COLBERT Trump also took aim at former President Barack Obama on Friday, saying the Obama administration was to blame for faulty air conditioning in the White House that made it difficult to work there. "Well, maybe it's hot because you're president, and this is hell and maybe it's freezing, because when you were elected, hell froze over." SETH MEYERS "You see, this is what happens when you run out of things to blame Obama for. It's almost as if Trump is looking around the room for new material. He's like, 'You know, this office wasn't always oval. It used to have beautiful corners but Obama stole them!'" TREVOR NOAH "Never in the history of the world has any black person wanted to make their office colder. That's not a thing! When God was making the earth, he gave everyone winter and then he got to Africa and they said, 'No, we'll just take the sun, thank you very much!'" TREVOR NOAH "It seems to me the president may be having trouble regulating his body temperature, which I looked it up and there may be a medical reason for that: drop in body temperature linked to dementia. I'm sure it's a coincidence, though." JIMMY KIMMEL Colbert skewered Trump for associating himself with the first responders on Sept. 11. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The tested minicars were all 2013 or 2014 models, although in some cases the ratings apply to earlier models as well. Minicars that received an overall rating of Marginal in the institute's test were the 2014 Ford Fiesta (built after August 2013), the 2012 14 Kia Rio, the 2011 14 Mazda 2 and the 2012 14 Toyota Yaris. Those given a Poor rating were the 2013 14 Fiat 500, the 2009 14 Honda Fit, the 2013 14 Hyundai Accent, the 2014 Mitsubishi Mirage, the 2012 14 Nissan Versa sedan and the 2012 14 Toyota Prius C. (The Versa sedan ratings do not apply to the Versa Note hatchback.) The new small overlap evaluation, which the institute added to its repertory of crash tests in 2012, replicates what happens when the front corner of a vehicle collides with another vehicle or with an object like a tree or utility pole at 40 miles per hour. It is especially difficult to get a good rating on this test because the impact bypasses most of the vehicles' front end crash absorbing structure, making it difficult for a vehicle to absorb crash energy before it reaches the passenger compartment. As a result, the compartment can collapse in a crash. And every minicar, including the Spark, was rated Marginal or Poor for structural integrity, which is one component of the overall rating. "Automakers need to invest in making changes to these vehicles that they have been making to their high volume models," said Russ Rader, a spokesman for the insurance institute. "This is a relatively new test, and it requires in many cases a redesign, and some of these haven't been through a complete makeover. And, when you are talking about a vehicle that weighs less than 2,500 pounds, there is an inherent disadvantage to riding in a small, lightweight car. If safety is a priority, it's better to move up even one class size." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the filing but declined to comment further. Apple's streaming service, Apple Music, was introduced a year ago, and it has earned the support of many power players in the music industry including Taylor Swift because it does not offer a free version, but instead charges about 10 a month. Spotify, begun in Europe in 2008, has both free and paid versions. This has led to a tense relationship with record companies and music publishers, who say the service's free tier does not pay enough in royalties and devalues their music across the board. The battle over free music has extended to YouTube, which the music industry has been campaigning against for months, arguing that the service does not pay enough in royalties and that the availability of so much free music on the site has hampered the growth of paid services. Both Spotify and YouTube counter that they have paid billions of dollars to the music industry. Last month, Apple said that Apple Music had 15 million subscribers, and Spotify reported that it had 30 million paid users and another 70 million who listen free, with ads. Although Apple Music has a three month free trial period, the company has stood staunchly by its model of paid music. "We agree 100 percent with artists that they should have the right to decide where their content is available whether it's free or when it's free, when it should be paid or how much it should cost," Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of internet software and services, said in an interview this week with The Hollywood Reporter. Apple's filing was made as part of a proceeding by the Copyright Royalty Board to set statutory rates for downloads and interactive streaming services from 2018 to 2022. Spotify, Google, Pandora, Amazon and the Recording Industry Association of America were all expected to file their proposals by Friday, but the panel has not yet made the filings public. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Ivan Penn, who covers alternative energy for The Times from Los Angeles, discussed the tech he's using. Q. A lot of alternative energy is basically technology. What are some of the most unusual ideas around alternative energy you've seen break out over the years? A. Much of the energy sector these days focuses on energy storage that's where a lot of innovation is taking place. Because solar and wind energy are intermittent, utilities look for ways to capture the unused power for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Lithium ion batteries are commonly known, but engineers are also working on storing compressed air generated by using excess solar and wind and releasing it later to power a turbine. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power proposes to turn Hoover Dam into a giant battery by making it a hydro pumped storage plant. The dam already generates electricity, but the utility wants to pump water back into the upper reservoir to produce more electricity using solar and wind electricity to power the pump another form of storage. But storage isn't the only focus. Engineers continue to study other forms of energy, like capturing the power of ocean waves. And some countries are using the internet for peer to peer electricity trading of the solar power they generate. Battery technology is something that everyone wants to see improve. What are the challenges to broader deployment of batteries in the energy sector? The biggest issue has been cost. Batteries have been very expensive, but that's changing fairly quickly. Just as with the rapid drop in price in solar panels, batteries to store electricity have rapidly declined in cost, most likely making them more affordable within the next few years. How has tech changed the power grid as a whole? Just in the last decade, the 100 year model of utilities producing electricity and selling power to consumers was turned on its head. Improvements in solar panel efficiency and lower product cost enabled consumers on a wide scale to produce their own power and sell it back to the electric grid. The grid was never designed to be a two way street. So that has led to a reimagining of it. Utility companies must rethink the services they provide. No longer just power companies, utilities provide new services like vehicle charging stations for the growing number of electric cars. Along with producing their own power, people now benefit from improvements in energy efficiency, which has resulted in flat or reduced electricity use across the country another adjustment for the power companies. Light emitting diode (LED) bulbs, highly efficient appliances and smart technology have changed the way we use power. What kind of tech setup do you have for work? The alternative energy beat often is data driven, so tech is critical. Google Sheets and Excel help me manage data from the United States Energy Information Administration, the Solar Energy Industries Association and the California Solar and Storage Association. Outside of work, what tech do you and your family love? How do you use it? Our house is full of computers, mostly Apple MacBooks, iPads and iPhones though we use other tablets as well. The gadgets get their fair share of schoolwork activity, but they're also tools of social media, music, art, websites, programming, Hulu and Netflix. Entertainment is big. So there are several gaming systems, old and more recent, like various Nintendo systems as well as Xbox. But as if all of that weren't enough, my sons built their own computer with money they made during the summer at a fast food chicken restaurant so they could play and make video games they hope to sell. So far they're planning more than developing, but perhaps that might fall under the category of research. How has the tech industry swept into Los Angeles? And how has the city changed as a result? Without a doubt, energy technology is a staple of Southern California, given that the state is the leader in solar power. Residential solar is prolific. But technology is really changing transportation. Of course, there are Uber and Lyft, but electric vehicles have also given rise to new companies like Tesloop, which will take you from Los Angeles to San Diego in a Tesla for as little as 29 (snacks included). Prices go as high as about 84, and all users have to do is register and request a ride online. My daughter sometimes uses the service to get to and from the University of California, San Diego, where she goes to school, or uses ride shares through social media. And the Bird app, which connects people with electric scooters, has become increasingly popular, and perhaps annoying to some. Some areas have banned riding and parking the scooters in their communities. It has changed much of how people live, move and interact. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In early February, the outdoor sports website Teton Gravity Research posted a video of a skier plunging down an alpine chute in thigh deep powder, slaloming through evergreens and yelping with joy as clumps of snow pelted his goggles. It was typical midwinter fare for the site, except that the skier wasn't at Alta or Squaw Valley or any of the other big name, high altitude Western resorts. He was at tiny Mad River Glen in Fayston, Vt., a ski area a mere 3,600 feet in elevation. The accompanying headline put it bluntly: "The East Coast Is the Best Place to Ski Right Now." As back to back snowstorms have engulfed the Northeast over the past three weeks, taxing the area's collective shoveling strength, ski resorts in Vermont and New Hampshire have witnessed a curious phenomenon for New England: powder. And lots of it. As of Feb. 23 more than 261 inches of snow has fallen at the Jay Peak Resort in Vermont; Stowe and Stratton have gotten 225 and 144 inches, respectively; and at Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire, three feet of snow accumulated in the first half of February alone. Compare that with the measly total of 115 inches at Park City, Utah, or to Sun Valley, Idaho's 113 inches. From Jackson Hole to Whistler Blackcomb, maddening warm spells have Western powder hounds tearing their hair out, while in the Northeast, parts of which have started to resemble the Khumbu Icefall, skiers and snowboarders are beginning to talk of an epic year. "The West has a real mess on its hands," said John Witherspoon, a former pro extreme skier and instructor at Jay Peak. "In the East, it's been snow snow snow since mid January." The number of visitors to the resort is up 7 percent over last year, and if the weather holds, some locals say Jay might just catch its 2000 2001 snowfall record of 576 inches. "Easterners who might've gone out West to ski are asking themselves, 'Why would I fly to Whistler when it's not even snowing there?' " Mr. Witherspoon said. "Instead, they're going to Vermont." In mid February, I was among the East Coasters eager to cash in on the deluge. More storm clouds were gathering over my home tundra, Boston, where the term "snow rage" was gaining currency. So I scrapped a Western ski trip and fled north over ominous, blizzard crazed thoroughfares, undertaking a New England version of British Columbia's famous "Powder Highway" pilgrimage, which passes through that region's deep snow country. At Stratton Mountain, groves of red spruce and balsam fir seemed to wheeze under the weight of so much snow. Vast fluffy promenades tumbled down hidden glades and swept into broad, sugary chicanes. I skied through piles of snow stashed away in the trees, floating weightlessly into high gliding turns that lunged here and there over untracked divots. Part of the beauty of Eastern skiing is the ingenuity it takes to find fresh tracks. Trees are the surest bet, and while the East lacks some of the West's terrifying grandeur, not much beats the full bore thrill of a classic Vermont tree run. Heading north again, the roads turned implausibly white. My mind kept drifting to the snow maze scene in "The Shining." By nightfall I'd reached Jay Peak at the northern edge of the Green Mountains. The resort's usual January thaw failed to materialize this year, and its daily snow reports had become increasingly euphoric, almost unhinged, as if Jay's minders were desperate to get the news out to the rest of the world. There was even talk of a magical "Jay Cloud" that forever floated over the summit, spitting snow onto the slopes while everywhere else stayed dry. "It's of mythological proportions, but true," said Patrick Haugwitz, 47, a longtime Jay season pass holder and affirmed powder snob. "It just sits there and dumps snow. Every day you wake up and there's more of it on the ground. We call it Champagne snow, light and fluffy." I emerged the next morning to a world totally encrusted in the stuff. Icicles the size of church steeples clung to the tram's massive stanchions. It wouldn't have surprised me to see reindeer stepping through the mist. Unfortunately, it was also 14 below zero. Most skiers had retreated to the Pump House, Jay's cavernous indoor water park, and the chairlifts were deserted. Led by Mr. Witherspoon, 49, and wrapped in about 12 layers of fleece and Gore Tex, I squeaked out a half dozen runs in dense hardwood gullies stuffed with loose powder, before heading inside to warm up. Again I was reminded of the big drop, hard core powder terrain of the West, though minus the price point. With a summit of just 4,000 feet, Jay tops out where many Western mountains begin. But its 78 inbound trails loped and dipped with the same pleasing unreality of Vail or Steamboat. And just over its southern ridge lay the daunting, powdery backcountry of Big Jay. In New Hampshire's White Mountains, the wind picked up and whipped snow into little tornadoes that hammered my windshield. Cannon Ski Area (home turf of the Olympic gold medalist Bode Miller) in Franconia Notch State Park beckoned with eight inches of freshies, while back in Boston, another storm was brewing. Charlie Baker, the governor of Massachusetts, had declared a state of emergency. Blood oaths were being sworn over parking spaces. But for the moment, even with arctic blasts knifing across the slopes, I was happy to count myself among the luckiest skiers in the country. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
I'm not claustrophobic or fidgety. I love music, though I'm not a musician. For all the times I had written about neuroscience studies that rely on the brain mapping technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or F.M.R.I., I had never seen a scan performed. This was my chance. Take me, I begged Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at M.I.T. Take me through the experiment recently reported in the journal Neuron and show me where in the brain my brain the music specific pathway resides. Let me lie in the dark, narrow chamber of the scanner with my head braced in place as I listen to a series of carefully selected sound clips. I assured her the enclosed quarters would not make me panic. I promised I would give good, clean data, by remaining as still as roadkill and avoiding the little head wiggles that are the bane of F.M.R.I. research. Dr. Kanwisher agreed to my request, and I was ushered to the scanning room, in the basement, by Sam Norman Haignere, a postdoctoral fellow and an author on the new report, who is thin and light eyed and looks a little like a Renaissance troubadour, and Alex Kell, a graduate student with a cheerful smile and a blond beard. A magnetic resonance imaging device uses radio waves and powerful magnetic fields to track blood flow in the brain, an indirect measure of neural activity. I was instructed to remove my boots, belt, earrings, anything metallic that might interfere with the magnetic coils. My titanium dental implants? I asked anxiously. Not to worry: They'd be fine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
BERLIN Tanit Koch, the first female editor in chief of Bild, Germany's best selling newspaper, said on Friday that she was resigning after an apparent power struggle with another executive at the publication. Ms. Koch's departure as top editor of Bild, a mass market tabloid owned by Axel Springer, the German publishing giant, comes a little over two years after she took up the post. Bild, which is known for its heavily populist bent, flashy headlines and pictures of scantily clad women, has an average daily print readership of 1.46 million. The move closes a chapter on a stunning rise for Ms. Koch, who went from being an unpaid trainee to the paper's most senior editor in the space of a decade, and stands against efforts by German media groups to integrate women into senior newsroom and media roles. At issue, German media reported, was a dispute between Ms. Koch, 40, and Julian Reichelt, who heads all Bild titles. Mr. Reichelt, a former war correspondent, was promoted to his current post, which is more senior than Ms. Koch's, last winter, just over a year after Ms. Koch's appointment. The two appeared to have clashed over the day to day management of the paper. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
"Todo tranqui" it's all good! is a phrase you get used to hearing when you spend time in Uruguay. This small country has a laid back vibe that's like Xanax for the soul, plus some of the best beaches in South America to boot. Exploring them usually means renting a car in the capital, Montevideo, and cruising northeast to discover peaceful hippie communities, chic fish restaurants by the sand dunes, a newly lively water sports scene and off the grid villages where you can sleep in a hammock and commune with sea lions. And you can do it on a budget: As of September, the government has discounted restaurant and rental car bills by 22 percent when paid with a foreign credit card (foreign travelers don't pay the country's value added tax, or IVA). Foreigners don't pay the IVA on hotels, either. This regulation is in place until April and makes a huge difference in making the country affordable for visitors. While Uruguay is still mostly off the radar for North Americans, tourism numbers last year were up by 50 percent in some places. While the summer season runs from late December until the end of February, the warm weather actually begins in November and lingers until the end of March. Driving up the coast could take five hours or, if taking time to explore each town, five days. Car rental companies the usual international names like Hertz and some similarly priced local companies are scattered throughout the city and at the airport. The two lane highway that curves up the coast from Montevideo is rarely crowded, except on Sunday evenings headed back into the capital, and you're more likely to be stuck behind an old rattletrap of a truck than to hit a line of cars. The road is well maintained, too, with gas stations along the way advertising hot water dispensers, essential for locals who go nowhere without their yerba mate tea. The countryside is flat and green, dotted with sheep and cows but few buildings once you leave Montevideo. A few miles away lies Punta del Este, favorite vacation spot of well heeled Argentines and Brazilians, who party until dawn in the clubs and recover on the beach all day. It's the biggest concentration of glitz and glam in a country where jeans count as formal wear, and while it doesn't hold much appeal for the frugal traveler, it's worth stopping for a stroll along the beach and a quick selfie with Los Dedos, the "hand in the sand," an enormous sculpture of fingers emerging from the beach. For meals, avoid the pretentious overpriced dining rooms and head instead to Cantina del Vigia, where steaks, pizza and vegetables all take a turn in the twin wood fired ovens before arriving at the simple wooden tables. Dinner for two, around 2,000 pesos. While Punta is all high heels and champagne, Jose Ignacio, a small beach community 45 minutes farther up the coast, is understated wealth. The dirt streets are home to elegant boutiques, and its top restaurant, La Huella, is a beach bar though a beach bar with outstanding grilled fish and elegant cocktails. It's so popular that even if you make a reservation, you can easily wait an hour for your table; in laid back Uruguayan fashion, there's no hurry. Sip on a chilled glass of a local sauvignon blanc as you wait; if the sea breeze gets chilly, they'll lend you one of the chic wool blankets they also offer for sale. It's more of a splurge: Lunch for two with drinks is around 2,500 pesos. Jose Ignacio's modernist concrete and glass beach houses are some of the most beautiful in the country, and staying for a couple of nights to spend afternoons on the pristine beach is well worth it. Airbnbs are easy to come by, and a weekend in March in a well equipped one bedroom a block or two from the beach can be had for 250. Cruising north from Jose Ignacio on Route 10 brings you to a singular quirk of infrastructure, Puente Laguna Garzon. This is a ring bridge designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Vinoly, and it makes a circle across the water of Laguna Garzon. Tempting as it is, you can't just drive around and around (it shunts you off) but you can walk around and take in the views of the kitesurfers practicing nearby. Wind sports have taken off in Uruguay in recent years; now it's not just the fishermen who make their living from the lagoons. Surf schools have opened up, and you're likely to see kitesurfers and windsurfers making the most of the Atlantic breezes wherever you go. The farther up the coast you get, the more bohemian the country becomes, but before driving to more northern beach towns, take a detour about 30 miles inland to Bodega Garzon, the country's premier winery. Built from local stone and glass, the modernist winery boasts extraordinary views of vineyards, rolling hills, ponds and beautifully tended fields from its hilltop perch. The absolute quiet of the space, disturbed only by the occasional hare, capybara or long tailed lizard, is a reminder of how empty much of the country's interior is. The winery's temperate climate and proximity to the sea make the wine, especially its albarinos and tannats, some of the country's most complex. An afternoon here particularly if you splurge on lunch at the on site restaurant, where the menu was conceived by Argentine fire master Francis Mallmann is a delight, and a last gasp of upscale indulgence (with concomitant prices) before entering the department of Rocha, where everything immediately becomes much more laid back. Tours with tastings range between 800 and 2,500 pesos depending on the wines sampled, while a five course lunch comes in at 4,300 pesos, not including booze. In the high season, turning off the highway in Rocha onto the main street in La Pedrera means encountering a swarm of people. The strip, Avenida Principal, is filled from morning to well after midnight with holidaymakers ; in La Pedrera, you'll encounter everyone from groups of 20 somethings staying at campsites and forming drum circles to parents herding gaggles of young children down to the beach. Craggy rocks make for fabulous views, but the beaches themselves, especially Playa del Barco to the south and Punta Rubia to the north, are wide, clean and good for swimming. After an afternoon in the sun, settle in at one of the patio tables at Costa Brava, overlooking the crashing waves below, with a plate of the ultimate Uruguayan beach snack, bunuelos bright green dough balls with seaweed fried to crispiness (350 pesos) and a bottle of cold white wine. Book ahead to reserve a second floor room at Brisas La Pedrera (doubles start around 150), around the corner from the Avenida Principal. They come with balconies facing the ocean, and beach chairs and sun hats are provided. What's most striking about Uruguay's coastal towns is what they don't have: high rises (except in Punta, which even has a Trump Tower), chain restaurants and hotels, overdeveloped beaches. Each beach might have a parador, where you can buy a cold bottle of Zillertal, one of the national beers that's big enough for two, but otherwise they're mostly empty of commercialism. Someone might stop by your beach chair to try to sell you a sandwich, a pot cookie or some handmade jewelry, but because this is Uruguay, they're never pushy, taking rejection with perfect equanimity and a smile. Get a glimpse of local life with a lunch stop 10 miles south of La Pedrera. On the edge of the Laguna de Rocha, separated from the Atlantic by a narrow strip of land, is a wooden deck dotted with plastic chairs and tables. This is Cocina de la Barra, a small restaurant run by the wives and daughters of the fishermen who make their living from the lagoon. The stock of fresh shrimp, crab and delicately fried fish come straight from the small fishing boats into the kitchen, a delightful community partnership that began three years ago. Lunch, eaten off plastic plates, is a bargain at around 800 pesos for two. If you want to truly get off the grid, Cabo Polonio is perhaps the country's most desirable spot. Though it's the least accessible coastal village in Uruguay, sitting within an undeveloped national park, it's also one of the most beautiful. It requires some forethought to reach: trucks that can cross the sand dunes barring the way depart on regular schedules from a bus station off the main road (round trip 230 pesos, plus another 100 if you want to bring your surfboard), or you can walk along the beach the six or so miles from Valizas, the next town to the north. Cabo Polonio's remoteness is treasured by its handful of year round inhabitants. While the town's hostels and bare bones restaurants get busy in the summer, there's virtually no Wi Fi and electricity is minimal: Generators create enough refrigeration for a cold beer at an open air restaurant, but not for a light in your dorm room (a bed in a dormitory in either the Viejo Lobo or Cabo Polonio Hostel costs around 30 a night, cash only). You can hear honking from the colony of sea lions gathered under the lighthouse, and it's possible to see whales from September to November. This part of the coast can still feel wild, particularly in the off season, when the only thing you'll encounter on the beach is the occasional cow that has lost its way. Most shops will close between 2 and 5 p. m. inconvenient if you're a North American who likes to dine at 6, but perfectly normal for a country that has dinner at 11. If you're here in the off season, bring plenty of cash: A.T.M.s are only brought in for the summer months, and not every place takes a credit card. A series of shops selling fresh fish and seafood line the street overlooking the beach, although many locals still prefer to grill beef on the parrilla (grill) of their rental house (and you won't find a rental without one). V.R.B.O. and Airbnb have plenty of good options, but book as far in advance as possible, especially if you're here in the high summer. It's worth spending an evening at Il Tano. This small restaurant with a tidy menu of housemade pastas and beautifully tender fresh shrimp also has a diverse wine list with plenty of Uruguayan options, including merlots, tannats and blends. It's one of the fancier restaurants in Punta del Diablo, but almost all the guests (and staff) will be in T shirts. Dinner for two with wine comes in around 2,500 pesos. Spend the night at Posada Lune de Miel (doubles start around 80), a collection of red painted cabins arranged around a pool. Each has a small living space that includes a tiny kitchen that's useful for stays of more than one night. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
ATLANTA A day after helping lead the New England Patriots to their sixth Super Bowl title, Brian Flores was named head coach of the Miami Dolphins on Monday. Flores worked with the Patriots for 15 seasons, most recently as the linebackers coach though he was also responsible for defensive play calling. He leaves New England on a high note after the Patriots' defense held the Los Angeles Rams to just 3 points in the Super Bowl on Sunday. As the 13th coach of the Dolphins, Flores will have a lot of work to do. Miami has qualified for the playoffs only twice in the past 17 years, and has had only one winning season in the last decade. He succeeds Adam Gase, who went 23 25 with the team over three seasons and was fired and subsequently hired by the Jets after going 7 9 last season. "We're going to do everything possible to win games and build the culture, and build a winner here," Flores said on Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Aleksandr Kogan, the academic who was hired by Cambridge Analytica to harvest information from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, defended his role in the data collection on Sunday, saying he was upfront about how the information would be used and that he "never heard a word" of objection from Facebook. Yet Mr. Kogan, 28, a psychology professor who has found himself cast as the villain by both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, expressed regret for his role in the data mining, which took place in 2014. "Back then, we thought it was fine. Right now my opinion has really been changed," he said. "I think that the core idea we had that everybody knows, and nobody cares was wrong," Mr. Kogan added. "For that, I am sincerely sorry." Read The Times's coverage of how Trump consultants exploited the Facebook data of millions. Since the full scope of Cambridge Analytica's data collection was revealed last month by The New York Times, both Facebook and Cambridge, a political data firm, have been under intense scrutiny and eager to shift the blame to Mr. Kogan. They have said that he misled them about how the information was being collected and what it was being used for. Facebook has even banned Mr. Kogan from the social network and deleted his profile. But in his first extensive interview since reports about Cambridge Analytica were published in The Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian, Mr. Kogan insisted that he was upfront about the Facebook app used to harvest the data, and that no one seemed to care. "The belief in Silicon Valley and certainly our belief at that point was that the general public must be aware that their data is being sold and shared and used to advertise to them," Mr. Kogan said in an interview with "60 Minutes" on Sunday. Founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, a wealthy Republican donor, Cambridge Analytica rose to prominence for its work with President Trump's campaign in the 2016 election. The company claimed it had developed analytical tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior and that Facebook data had been used to help create so called psychographic modeling techniques. Mr. Kogan was hired on a contract by Cambridge Analytica in June 2014 the same month the company was founded and harvested the data throughout the summer by asking Facebook users to take a lengthy personality questionnaire. 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 questionnaire was not actually on Facebook. It was hosted by a company called Qualtrics, which provided a platform for online surveys. Respondents were asked to authorize access to their Facebook profiles, and when they did, an app built by Mr. Kogan performed its sole function: harvesting the data of users and all of their Facebook friends. Their names, birth dates and location data, as well as lists of every Facebook page they had ever liked, were downloaded without their knowledge or express consent. Facebook has said that those who took the quiz were told that their data would be used only for academic purposes, claiming that it and its users were misled by Cambridge Analytica and Mr. Kogan. Cambridge Analytica has said it was told that Mr. Kogan's app complied with Facebook's own rules. But The Times reported last month that the fine print accompanying Mr. Kogan's questionnaire told Facebook users that their data could be used for commercial purposes. That was an outright violation of Facebook's rules at the time, but the company did nothing to stop Mr. Kogan's app from collecting the data. "This is the frustrating bit, where Facebook clearly has never cared. I mean, it's never enforced this agreement," Mr. Kogan told "60 Minutes." "I had a terms of service that was up there for a year and a half that said I could transfer and sell the data," he continued, adding: "Never heard a word." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
In an election season in which audiences for primary debates have shattered cable news records, the coverage of the Iowa caucus also achieved big numbers. On Monday night, the three main cable news networks drew their largest audiences ever for coverage of the Iowa caucus. Fox News had 4.5 million viewers in prime time Monday night, with CNN bringing in 3.7 million viewers and MSNBC drawing two million. All three totals represent enormous gains on previous election coverage of Iowa: CNN had 2.4 million more viewers than it did for its 2012 coverage in prime time, Fox had 1.8 million more and MSNBC had about 800,000 more viewers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
WASHINGTON Outfitted with a trendy name and infused with the enthusiasm of developers and city planners, the NoMa neighborhood here had high hopes riding on it as it took shape a decade ago. As the recession set in, though, questions arose over whether the construction boom in the neighborhood, north of Massachusetts Avenue NW, would pay off in establishing a thriving commercial district, while also attracting new residents. Today, NoMa named to mimic New York City neighborhoods like SoHo and TriBeCa, and situated near the Union Station transportation hub is making progress in establishing a live work play environment. And the opening late last month of a 52,000 square foot REI store is being celebrated in helping the neighborhood build its identity. "It's definitely an up and coming neighborhood," said Kevin House, REI's director of flagship stores and strategy. "It's one of the fastest growing in D.C., has a well organized business climate, and there is lots of potential for development around us." The area had been largely undeveloped, sprinkled with new, but vacant, office buildings; a department store warehouse had also been converted to offices. In 2007, an initial federal presence arrived with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in a structure designed by the architect Moshe Safdie. Now, more than three million square feet of residential, retail and office space are under construction in the neighborhood, according to the NoMa Business Improvement District, a public private partnership formed to promote the area. Currently, there are 360,000 square feet of occupied retail space, and 129,000 more are expected in 2018 and 2019. "What you're seeing in NoMa is just the surge," said Douglas Firstenberg, a founding principal of StonebridgeCarras, based in Bethesda, Md., which recently broke ground on its third office building in Constitution Square, the largely government leased office complex next to the Metro station. Joining REI to the east of the rail line will be 40,000 square feet of retail or office space, and two more new residential buildings with Foulger Pratt's conversion of the former home of the National Capital Press Company. And Trammell Crow is planning a mixed use project nearby, which is to include two residential towers with 650 total units, a 200 room hotel and 50,000 square feet of retail. NoMa now has about 6,400 people living in about 3,800 apartments; there were none in 2010. About 2,550 more units are projected for 2019. The newcomers live in buildings like the Avalon First and M, which has amenities like a rooftop pool and a dog washing room, or Flats 130, which has a large Harris Teeter grocery store on its ground floor and is just steps from the Metro stop. Mike Ponticelli, a native Washingtonian who has also rented in New York, has lived in both of these NoMa complexes and appreciates the perks of living in newer buildings. Compared with living in New York, he said, the area is "an amenities arms race." He currently pays 4,000 a month for his two bedroom apartment in Flats 130. Mr. Ponticelli, 32, who works at the commercial real estate news service Bisnow, has lived in NoMa for three years. He frequently travels to New York for work and likes his location, which is a short ride to Ronald Reagan National Airport or a 15 minute walk to Union Station, where he can catch an Amtrak train. Above the REI store, which opened on Oct. 21, are three floors of offices. One floor is unrented; another has 44,000 square feet leased to Regus, a firm offering shared work space; and the top floor, which has a view of the Capitol, will soon be occupied by Douglas Development. Douglas acquired the deteriorated building in 2004, when it was a waste transfer station, and it was last used as a parking garage. The principal of Douglas Development, Douglas Jemal, has made a career in this city of buying properties in distressed areas and waiting for the market to catch up. "I wait a long time for the right tenants to come along," he said. "I'm patient. You destroy a piece of property, you destroy it for a lifetime. Put REI in there, you uplift a neighborhood." The growing federal presence, at about 27,000 workers, is a notable shift for NoMa. Over the last few years, the government started to move offices to NoMa to take advantage of cheaper rents, though now those rents are rising and vacancy rates are at a low 4.5 percent. "You've gone from a neighborhood that felt out on the edge," said Robin Eve Jasper, president of the Business Improvement District, to one that is "in the middle of all the new hip stuff going on today." Now, she added, "we have buskers and panhandlers, unlike in the old days, when we had no one." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Responding to criticism from federal regulators that it is acting too slowly, Chrysler says it is accelerating production of a trailer hitch needed for the remedy of an already year old recall of an estimated 1.6 million Jeeps for a fire hazard in rear impact crashes. Chrysler agreed to recall 1993 98 Grand Cherokee and 2002 7 Jeep Liberty sport utility vehicles in June 2013. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the vehicles were prone to fires in rear impact crashes because the gas tank was behind the rear axle and extended partly below the rear bumper. But the automaker recently told the safety agency that it would not begin fixing vehicles until August, when it received the first of the trailer hitches it needed to complete the repairs. Chrysler's delay prompted the agency on July 2 to issue a special order to Chrysler saying that at the current pace, it would take too long to repair all the vehicles, depending on how many owners wanted the part. "The agency has no intention of allowing Chrysler, or any other manufacturer, to delay recall completion to the detriment of safety," the order said. The automaker responded late Wednesday, saying its supplier was increasing production and that there should be enough parts by next March to fix all the vehicles. That would be about 21 months after the automaker agreed to the recall. However, installing the trailer hitch on all the vehicles could take longer, depending in part on how quickly owners responded, Chrysler said. Chrysler estimated that the recall would cost 151 million. The agency often asks automakers for information about a recall, but sending a special order is unusual because it requires a top official from the automaker to make a sworn statement about the accuracy and completeness of the answers under threat of an investigation by the Justice Department. The agency this year sent General Motors a special order demanding answers to 107 questions as part of an investigation into the automaker's handling of the ignition key defect now linked to at least 13 deaths. But the special order sent to Chrysler was much shorter, had fewer questions and included the agency's version of its handling of the case. "My impression of the special order is that it is 90 percent public relations and 10 percent of a soft inquiry to Chrysler," said Allan J. Kam, a safety consultant in Bethesda, Md., who worked for the agency for more than 25 years. In an unusual move criticized by some consumer advocates, Chrysler proposed, and the agency approved, the use of the trailer hitch to protect the gas tank in rear impacts. That approval came despite the automaker saying in a report that the hitches would only "incrementally improve the performance in certain types of low speed impacts." The agency conducted its own tests of the hitch last year and concluded that "the risk of fuel tank ruptures and fires in lower to medium speed rear end crashes will be successfully reduced by the remedy." No tests were conducted at speeds above 43 miles per hour, and some were run at speeds as low as 35 miles per hour. Critics, like the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, which prompted the N.H.T.S.A. investigation leading to the recall, said that tests should have been conducted at higher speeds because some people survived the impact of higher speed crashes in the Jeeps, but died because of burns. Since the automaker agreed to the recall more than a year ago, there have been at least four rear impact crashes resulting in fires in which three people died, the center's executive director, Clarence Ditlow, wrote in a July 2 letter to David J. Friedman, the agency's acting chief. Chrysler built about 2.5 million of the recalled Jeeps, but told safety officials that a check of current vehicle registrations indicated that only about 1.6 million were still on the road. The automaker estimates that 1.3 million of those may need the repair. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
The other day, my 7 year old, having gotten wind of President Trump's Covid 19 diagnosis, asked me point blank, "Mommy, are you glad that Trump got the coronavirus?" I am a moral philosopher, and yet I had a hard time coming up with an answer. The question demands we grapple not only with the moral meaning of the president's illness but also with our complex and contested reactions to it. To be clear, I am not debating whether it is morally wrong to wish for the president's death. It is wrong. Full stop. Nevertheless, now that Mr. Trump has been declared healthy enough to return to work, I think it is important that we assess the moral significance of the positive reactions his run in with Covid 19 has produced. Mr. Trump's diagnosis generated an immediate torrent of glee, gloating and schadenfreude on social media. It was followed by an equally quick and ferocious attempt to tamp it down. Joe Biden and Barack Obama, among other Democratic politicians, offered well wishes for the president and his wife, while left leaning columnists rushed to wish them a speedy recovery. Many went on to admonish those rejoicing in the president's misfortune, suggesting that such apparent meanspiritedness is but one more symptom of the moral rot that has come to consume our political culture. While I agree that the gloating over Mr. Trump's illness is morally concerning, I also find it fair to ask whether certain less celebratory but still positive reactions to his disease are entirely blameworthy and without moral merit. Ambivalent reactions to President Trump's medical condition become more understandable when we appreciate that valid moral principles are often in tension with one another and can pull us in different directions. Condemning the pleasure that his misfortune has produced is certainly correct from one moral perspective, but there are also valid moral reasons to regard his illness as a potentially positive thing. Judging the moral meaning of Mr. Trump's bout with Covid 19 and our reactions to it is no easy task. The same bedrock moral principles that life is sacred, that all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect make it wrong both to wantonly endanger others and to wish suffering and death upon any individual. We appeal to these principles in objecting to the glee and schadenfreude that engulfed Twitter in the wake of Mr. Trump's diagnosis. From this perspective, it does not matter how morally corrupt he may be, nor the harms he has inflicted on others, wittingly or unwittingly, directly or indirectly. This is all beside the point when we consider that the president is a person with dignity or, as columnists more often put it, "a man with a family." According to this line of thought, we should not wish to see Mr. Trump fighting for his life on a ventilator, no matter what he has done, and we are right to be concerned by attitudes that seem to contravene this principle. But while it is true that life is sacred, and we must honor the dignity of all persons, including Mr. Trump, society also has a legitimate moral interest in seeing wrongdoers face consequences for their actions. The sense that justice requires punishment for wrongs runs deep and is not the same as a mere thirst for revenge or a desire to get even. On the contrary, punishment plays an important role in any healthy moral ecosystem. When the moral order has been ruptured, punishment for wrongs helps to repair tears to the social fabric and to reinforce the validity of the moral expectations that were violated. Imagining Mr. Trump's illness as a metaphorical punishment for his misdeeds helps to satisfy at the level of fantasy a legitimate need to see justice done. Because Mr. Trump contributed to the illness and death of so many Americans, it is understandable that many feel satisfied in seeing him forced to contend with a harm to which he has exposed so many others. The moral complexity becomes greater still when we consider that from a purely consequentialist point of view, there are reasons to view Mr. Trump's potential incapacity as the best moral outcome. Most famously associated with the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, consequentialism is the philosophical position that affirms that what is morally right is whatever makes the world best in the future. If one believes that Mr. Trump has unleashed a tremendous amount of suffering and death through his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and that he is likely to continue causing harm on this scale, a consequentialist argument can be made that his speedy recovery from Covid 19 would not be the best moral outcome. The consequentialist argument, while repugnant from the perspective of human dignity, tells us that a world in which Mr. Trump is unable to commit harm would be morally better than a world in which he continues to harm freely. This philosophical approach to weighing moral outcomes conflicts with the principle of individual human dignity and offers no easy guideline for reconciling these powerful yet opposing ways of thinking about what is best. So where does this leave us? Can those who rejoice in Mr. Trump's misfortune claim the moral high ground? Not so fast. Those who regard Mr. Trump as the enemy may simply wish to see him suffer. Such a wish may be entirely untethered from concerns about justice or the consequentialist moral appeal of a world where he is too ill to campaign effectively. For these reasons we are right to be skeptical of their reaction. Moreover, the principle of human dignity tells us that even the president, for all the wrong he has done, deserves our good will. Here's how I explained the moral quandary to my 7 year old: I am sad that Mr. Trump got sick because in general suffering is bad, and I don't want anyone to suffer, but on the other hand I think he should suffer consequences for the harm he has done. This answer seemed satisfying enough at the time, but it left out an important distinction. What I did not try to explain is that the punishment that Mr. Trump's bout of Covid 19 represents is merely symbolic, a stand in for the real punishment he deserves, which is necessarily social in character. Mr. Trump deserves to be punished at the ballot box and to be held accountable for any possible criminal wrongdoing in a court of law. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
In 2013, Kim Zarins was looking for authors to teach a workshop on writing fantasy for children and teens, part of a California State University summer arts program she was organizing. "I had two qualifications," Ms. Zarins, a professor of English at Cal State, Sacramento, recalled in a phone interview. "You had to be an excellent writer and a generous teacher." Ms. Duey wrote more than 75 books for children, middle grade and young adult readers. "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron," a novelization of the DreamWorks film of the same title, made the New York Times best seller list in 2002. Another of her books, "Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic," a fantasy novel and the first in a planned trilogy, was a finalist for a National Book Award in the young people's literature category in 2007. And as a teacher, she made a lasting impression. "One student said for the longest time that she had one of Kathleen's words of wisdom on her desktop: 'Every artist of every kind takes a leap,'" Ms. Zarins said. "That's what she did for my students. She showed them how to leap." Ms. Duey died of cardiac arrest on June 26 at her home in Fallbrook, Calif. She was 69. She had struggled with dementia in recent years, said Karen A. Bale, a novelist who was Ms. Duey's close friend and collaborator. A member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, Ms. Duey, with her long red hair and gift of gab, was a beloved presence at the group's conferences. An avid gardener, she would bring her editor, Ellen Krieger, avocados plucked from her backyard. Ms. Duey gained a reputation within the organization as someone who lent her time and talent to aspiring writers, said Bruce Coville, a fellow author of children's literature. He got to know Ms. Duey in the 1980s, when she was the one starting out and in need of a confidence boost. "She didn't yet understand how incredibly talented she was," he said. Ms. Krieger, who was Ms. Duey's editor at Avon books in the early 1990s, said in an interview that Ms. Duey had taken her work "incredibly seriously," even when publishing paperback originals like "Double Yuck Magic" and "Mr. Stumpguss Is a Third Grader," a chapter book about an adult visitor to an elementary school classroom who turns out to be illiterate. "It was not ephemera," Ms. Krieger said. "Her writing meant everything to her." Kathleen Elaine Peery was born on Oct. 8, 1950, in Sayre, Okla., to William Ralph Peery, a geologist, and Mary Eileen (Finlay) Peery, a homemaker. The family relocated to Fort Collins, Col., where Ms. Duey graduated from Fort Collins High School. She attended the University of Colorado for a year but dropped out, Ms. Bale said. The two women met in 1985 at a book reading Ms. Bale gave in Fallbrook, an agricultural community north of San Diego. By then, Ms. Duey and her husband, Steven Duey, had settled there, and Ms. Duey was beginning her career in earnest. "She said: 'Hey, I'm a writer, too. Would you mind calling me?'" Ms. Bale recalled. "We talked almost every day on the phone for three years before we met in person. Because she didn't drive." Ms. Bale asked Ms. Duey to edit her novels, and starting in the late 1990s the women collaborated on a middle grade series, "Survival." Each book was set amid a historical catastrophe, like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. "She was very passionate that children have access to books and reading materials," Ms. Bale said. "She just wanted everyone to enjoy reading." Ms. Duey poured her creative energy into the "Resurrection of Magic" trilogy for years. It is a complex story set in two worlds: In one, magic has been banned; in the other, in the future, magic is controlled by the wealthy. Like the Harry Potter series (though Ms. Duey had conceived the idea years before the world knew of Hogwarts), the story features a magic academy and a lead character with extrasensory powers, though the tone is darker. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Easter Sunday was a typical day for Martha Donaldson and Sharon Wheatley. Ms. Wheatley, 49, performed as Diane in the matinee of the Broadway musical "Come From Away" at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Ms. Donaldson, 52, worked backstage at the Belasco Theater where she is the production stage manager for the play, "The Glass Menagerie." After their shows, though, Ms. Donaldson, gussied up in a white Vince Camuto pantsuit, escorted Ms. Wheatley to a performance of another kind: their wedding. They wandered through a throng of tourists in Times Square while holding hands, a group of well wishers clapping as they entered Manhattan Plaza, where 100 guests waited for them in the Duke Ellington Room. Many of them had just come from shows themselves and were there to celebrate a romance that had all the plot twists of a Broadway love story: a reluctant bride, a meddling family and a commotion at the end that led to a proposal. The two met in spring 2015 in San Diego when they started rehearsals for "Come From Away," which was originally produced at the La Jolla Playhouse. "I had people contacting me who said you have to meet her," said Ms. Wheatley, who was previously married for 21 years and has two daughters, Charlotte Meffe, 19, and Beatrix Meffe, 9. A native of Cincinnati, Ms. Wheatley has acted on Broadway in "The Phantom of the Opera," "Les Miserables" and "Avenue Q." Ms. Donaldson was gay and single, a buoyant personality with a lot of friends. She was born in Suffern, N.Y., and, in high school, moved to Claremont, Calif. She has stage managed several shows, including last year's Tony Award winning revival of the Arthur Miller classic "A View From the Bridge," directed by Ivo van Hove. She described herself as a "lone wolf" and not the marrying kind, although she did try online dating for a short while. "I haven't been in a lot of relationships," she said. "I defer. I'm afraid to express myself." Dating, she said, "scared me." Ms. Wheatley said she tried to set Ms. Donaldson up with dates, but to no avail. As spring turned to summer, the two attended cast parties and took walks on the beach. They saw each other daily at the theater. When Ms. Donaldson's parents moved, she and Ms. Wheatley went to the house in Claremont to clean it out. They sifted through old boxes and commiserated over how to care for their ailing parents. Then, Ms. Wheatley realized her friendly stirrings were turning romantic. "The person I am supposed to set you up with is me," she said she told Ms. Donaldson. "We went out for tacos and I talked about my kids." She added, "Being in this relationship is not about me coming out of the closet." That is how Ms. Wheatley explained it to her brother's family in January 2016 after she and Ms. Donaldson began dating, and the show left San Diego for Seattle. The two went to Cincinnati for the funeral of her mother, Mary Jo Wheatley, a former hospital administrator at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. (Her father, Charles Wheatley, is retired.) Buzz Wheatley, her brother, recalled having coffee with the couple at his house with his family after the funeral. "Sharon was talking about how she didn't identify as gay," he said. "And my daughter, Elizabeth said, 'You are Martha sexual.'" The explanation sufficed. But if Ms. Wheatley was increasingly sure about her feelings, Ms. Donaldson was less so. "Sharon had to hunt me down," she said. "I said, 'You are great, but I don't want to be in a relationship.'" Ms. Donaldson had not spent a lot of time with children. "She was afraid of kids," Ms. Wheatley said. "I said: 'I don't need you to be good with kids. I just need you to be good with my kids.' I was so certain of it." The couple moved in together in August and, last fall, were in Toronto for the debut of "Come From Away," in which Ms. Wheatley continued to perform. Her daughters were more than happy with their mother's girlfriend, who became a grounding presence. "Mom is much stronger and happier with Martha," Charlotte said. Beatrix, though, wanted a more permanent arrangement. So, during Thanksgiving, in a Victorian house the couple rented, Ms. Wheatley said Beatrix bent down on one knee and "popped open a ring box and said, 'Will you be my stepmother?' Charlotte said: 'Me too! Me too!'" Ms. Donaldson said yes. But even so, she was preoccupied with doubts. "I said the reason you don't really believe in marriage is because for so many years you weren't allowed to get married," Ms. Wheatley said. "It didn't mean anything. Well, she said, 'Be careful what you wish for because when I turn the corner, I'm really turning the corner and I may be more than you want.' And I was, like, bring it on." A month later, on Dec. 25, Ms. Donaldson and Ms. Wheatley unwrapped their Christmas gifts from Charlotte: a set of "Mrs. and Mrs." hand towels, a present that didn't go over well. "I was feeling: 'Hey. Hey. Everybody cool it,'" Ms. Donaldson said. "But it was important to Sharon that she be married. And I was, like, we can be together forever. Then we got into an argument about whether we were going to get married. She said, 'I'm going to take a bath.' I said, 'I'm going to take a walk.' And as I was walking I thought: 'What am I waiting for? What is the difference?' For her, there was this fear that I was going to leave. And, for me, there was comfort that I could leave at any moment." Ms. Donaldson roamed the streets of Toronto for more than an hour and returned home. "I was yelling at myself: 'Don't screw this up. It's the best thing that ever happened to you,'" she recalled. "It is by far the most mature relationship I have ever been in. But I had to talk it out. There was nothing else I was waiting for." The next morning, Ms. Donaldson got down on one knee and proposed to Ms. Wheatley. Charlotte and Beatrix squealed with delight. During the wedding ceremony which was officiated by the actor B. D. Wong, who was ordained for the occasion by American Marriage Ministries Beatrix wore a white dress and a crown of posies, and carried a rainbow colored lollipop with "Sharon" taped to one side, "Martha" on the other. Charlotte also opted for white, and a flower crown, while Ms. Wheatley wore a blue floral dress from Lord Taylor. Ms. Donaldson beamed as she looked at Charlotte and Beatrix. As part of the ceremony, she agreed to "marry" them too. "Thank you for welcoming me into your life and for allowing me and encouraging me to marry your mom," she said. Guests wiped away tears. Some later suggested that Ms. Donaldson's "lone wolf" persona was solely a defense. "That wasn't really true," said Ellen Bonjorno, a friend from Port Townsend, Wash., who has known Ms. Donaldson for more than two decades. "I think she was afraid to hope that she would ever have a relationship like this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Babies born to Zika infected mothers are highly likely to have brain damage, even in the absence of obvious abnormalities like small heads, and the virus may go on replicating in their brains well after birth, according to three studies published Tuesday. Many types of brain damage were seen in the studies, including dead spots and empty spaces in the brain, cataracts and congenital deafness. There were, however, large differences among these studies in how likely it was that a child would be hurt by the infection. One study, published by The Journal of the American Medical Association, assessed 442 pregnancies registered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between January and September in the continental United States and Hawaii, most of them in returning travelers. That report found that 6 percent had birth defects. None of those birth defects occurred in infants born to women infected in the second or third trimester. By contrast, in a study of 125 Zika infected women in Rio de Janeiro done by Brazilian and American scientists and released by The New England Journal of Medicine, almost half of pregnancies had "adverse outcomes," ranging from fetal deaths to serious brain damage. Of the 117 infants born alive, 42 percent had "grossly abnormal" brain scans or physical symptoms, the authors said. Other studies from Colombia, Brazil and French Polynesia have suggested that brain damage rates are between 1 and 13 percent. But each one uses different measurements of brain damage and different definitions of which mothers to include, so the question remains unanswered. The women in Rio were first selected for the study because they had rashes, and all were confirmed by testing for the virus itself, rather than by less accurate antibody testing. Several scientists said the symptoms suggested that the women had more serious infections and were more likely to have damaged infants. But a study author, Dr. Karin Nielsen Saines of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that other work by her group showed that women with no symptoms could have viral loads as high as women with rashes. Other studies that used antibody tests, she said, might have accidentally included women who never had Zika. Dr. Deborah Levine, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, noted that many of the Rio women had previous infections with dengue virus, which might have worsened their Zika infections or prompted more intense immune responses, in turn damaging their babies. Both studies showed that only a very small percentage of the babies with brain damage had full blown microcephaly, which is defined as a head size three standard deviations below the mean for the baby's age. "This shows once again that microcephaly is just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr. Albert I. Ko, a Yale epidemiologist who has worked in Brazil for years. The Rio study also counters the idea that only first trimester infections are threatening. The authors found that 55 percent of first trimester infections produced bad outcomes, 52 percent of second trimester ones did, and 29 percent of third trimester ones did. "You can't just say that the first and second trimester are the risk periods, and the third is not," said Dr. Roberta L. DeBiasi, the chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Children's National Health System. In the third study, released by Emerging Infectious Diseases, a C.D.C. publication, the Zika virus was shown to be still replicating in the brains of infants days or even weeks after they were born. It was also shown to persist in placentas for up to seven months. For that study, C.D.C. scientists analyzed autopsy brain tissue from eight infants who were born alive but died later sometimes within a few hours, in one case after two months. The virus persisted "much longer than we expected," said Julu Bhatnagar, the head of molecular pathology for the C.D.C.'s infectious diseases pathology branch and the study's lead author. The virus was also found in the placentas of mothers whose babies appeared healthy at birth and came up negative on both types of Zika test. That suggests that all infants whose mothers have had Zika should be monitored after birth, Dr. Ko said. Dr. Ernesto T. A. Marques Jr., an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Brazil, said that study was consistent with what he had seen in Recife, Brazil. Some of the 370 children being followed there appeared to be still infected with Zika and were still being damaged by it even a year after birth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Two fully restored 1840s townhouses on the same leafy street in the Greenwich Village Historic District, though separated from each other by Fifth Avenue, have sold, according to city records, and were the most expensive closed transactions of the week. The pricier of the two, at 32,000,000, is a 25 foot wide house at 16 East 10th Street that was bought by a mystery buyer from the developer David Amirian of the Amirian Group and his business partner, Warren Hammerschlag, an orthopedic surgeon. The townhouse had been listed for 38.5 million. The two purchased the property in 2012 for 11.2 million from Pen and Brush, a nonprofit organization for women artists and writers after Sarah Jessica Parker and her husband, Matthew Broderick, had previously walked away from a contract to buy it. They spent the next three years refinishing the exterior, renovating and upgrading its five main stories and adding, among other things, a 27 foot "endless" swimming pool with a Jacuzzi, gym, steam room and wine cellar to the basement. The brown stucco house with Italianate style detailing, which has 112,000 in annual property taxes, was built in 1848 and had been a private residence until 1923, when it became the headquarters and gallery for Pen and Brush, which has since relocated to the Flatiron district. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
From 5,390 Dominican pesos, about 120 at 44.75 pesos to the dollar. A gallery of black and white photos in a hallway behind the front desk tells the story of this Art Deco hotel, built in 1956: The dictator Rafael Trujillo stayed in a penthouse suite during his brutal reign; big bands blew their horns in the lobby; the actors William Holden and Rock Hudson stopped by; and Al Pacino filmed a scene there for "The Godfather: Part II." Although the hotel is hardly the most luxurious in beachside Santo Domingo, on the Dominican Republic's southern edge, it has a busy and colorful new lobby, with numerous guest rooms overlooking the ocean and a pool across the lawn from a huge banyan tree. The Occidental chain, which runs 14 Latin American hotels, concentrated on the lobby in its 5 million renovation completed last December. The wide main floor contains a bit of everything bright white chandeliers, a grand piano, couches, plants and modern artwork and, at the center, the new walk up Gastro Wine Bar. The hotel also updated all of its 278 rooms. Of the top hotels in Santo Domingo, El Embajador is one of the farthest from tourist centers like the historic Zona Colonial (about four miles) and the oceanside Malecon strip (about 10 blocks). But the hotel will procure a cab for guests. And while the walk to Zona Colonial is long and hot, it passes ice cream shops and parks. My brother and I picked a Superior Room, the least expensive. Its furnishings included a wide desk and a modern office chair, as well as two soft double beds and soothing, dark brown headboards and lamps. The best feature was the medium size balcony, though it had just two white plastic chairs and a plastic table. Our view caught just a glimpse of the sea, but the hotel's palm trees and other greenery made for a pleasant tropical ambience. An event at the hotel's Garden Tent below our room meant booming music for two nights, but closing the windows and curtains mostly solved the problem, and we fell asleep easily. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Coming up with the right story for a new musical is notoriously difficult. Yet the measures that Chris Berry took to get the narrative for "The Legend of Yauna" still count as extreme. Mr. Berry, a musician of European descent, has said that the tale came to him in Zimbabwe, through a spiritual medium, from people who lived 12,000 years ago. The fable sounds familiar enough to be believably prehistoric, even if parts jibe suspiciously with contemporary sensibilities. Trying to reunite with his wife and children, a man named Yauna goes on a quest through mythical lands (Mr. Berry's website, banukuma.org, explains a whole cosmology) and endures various trials. The lessons he learns are admirable: Forgive; make love, not war. After "The Legend of Yauna" debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Fishman Space on Friday, its director and choreographer, Maija Garcia, described it as a workshop performance. There had been many technical difficulties, but the problems went deeper than that. The fable, being a fable, is predictable, but it's also rough with holes and contrivances. Ms. Garcia's direction, though clear, doesn't sustain much momentum. Mr. Berry's score gives some help. A large band of musicians plays drums and other African instruments and also takes on roles. The music, drawing from several African traditions, is generic and lulling, but the moments when the drumming grows intense or voices open up in simple harmonies are the best moments in the show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Minor league baseball may be the only sport where there's no way for a fan to lose. When the weather's warm and the crowd is genial, the quality of the game can feel almost superfluous. Such are the low risk rewards of "Bottom of the 9th," a baseball drama that finds the amiable Joe Manganiello turning his life around as a player on the fictitious Staten Island Empires. Manganiello plays Sonny Stano, a formidable hitter whose youth was spent in prison after he accidentally killed a man in a street fight. Wracked with guilt and insecurity 20 years later, Sonny is released from prison and plans to re enter society quietly, leaving baseball behind. But Sonny can't help attracting attention. His former girlfriend, Angela (a somber Sofia Vergara), notices him at the supermarket, rekindling their romance. Soon, a veteran minor league coach (Michael Rispoli) seeks Sonny out, offering him a job with the Empires first as an assistant, then as a player. With a community supporting him in the stands and the dugout, Sonny begins the process of nursing his bruised confidence back to fighting form. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Mercury's magnetic field is nearly four billion years old, researchers have found. A planet's magnetic field is generated by the flow of liquid iron deep in its core. While Earth's magnetic field helps shield life here from solar radiation, Mercury is unlikely to be harboring inhabitants that need protection. Still, the information is useful because it "is dating processes in the interior of the planet, and it basically tells us something about Mercury's past," said Catherine Johnson, a geophysicist at the University of British Columbia and an author of the new study, published in the journal Science. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. ABARUKAS (Friday and Saturday) The Japanese choreographer Yoshito Sakuraba moved to New York in his late teens, started dancing, and ultimately founded his own company, Abarukas, in 2012. His new work, "Bernadac," blends subtle storytelling with Mr. Sakuraba's tense, sharp movements to explore a woman's journey to death. That somber theme is found in other works on the program, "The Master" and "No Man Is an Island," as well (2:00). Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., GK Arts Center, 29 Jay Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn, 212 600 0047, gkartscenter.org. (Brian Schaefer) ABRAHAM.IN.MOTION (Wednesday through Nov. 5) Inspired by John Singleton's vital 1991 film "Boyz n the Hood" about gang members in Los Angeles, Kyle Abraham's 2012 work "Pavement" reimagines the story as a dance drama in his native Pittsburgh. With spurts of dialogue, an eclectic musical score ranging from Vivaldi to Sam Cooke to contemporary hip hop artists, and movement that similarly embraces classical and street styles, Mr. Abraham paints an abstract, beautiful and haunting portrait of young black lives in urban America (0:55). At 7:30 p.m., Fishman Space, Fisher Building, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 321 Ashland Place, near Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Schaefer) AMERICAN BALLET THEATER (through Sunday) Ballet Theater's fall season concludes with three more performances of Jessica Lang's newly commissioned work "Her Notes" to the music of Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix's talented but stifled sister, paired with Frederick Ashton's delicate "Monotones I and II" and George Balanchine's "Prodigal Son" (Friday and Saturday afternoon). On Saturday evening, Balanchine is swapped for Benjamin Millepied's Greek inspired "Daphnis and Chloe" which is then subsequently joined on Sunday by Ashton's intimate midcentury study in pure classicism, "Symphonic Variations." At various times. David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, abt.org. (Schaefer) BAAD/JACK (Thursday through Nov. 5) The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance and JACK, an experimental performance presenter in Brooklyn, team up to showcase four artists from those boroughs. Filip A. Condeescu presents a romantic duet for two men; Milteri Tucker Concepcion blends modern and Caribbean folk dance; Isabella Diaz uses interviews to address disability; Niall Noel Jones calls his work a "disruption," a "manipulation" and a "fantasy" (1:20). Thursday and Nov. 4 at 8 p.m., Jack, 505 1/2 Waverly Avenue, near Fulton Street, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, jackny.org. Nov. 5 at 8 p.m., Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, 2474 Westchester Avenue, at St. Peters Avenue, 718 918 2110, baadbronx.org. (Schaefer) BALLETCOLLECTIVE (Friday) As a member of the New York City Ballet corps, Troy Schumacher often performs classics. But as a choreographer, both for City Ballet and BalletCollective, his own plucky troupe, he likes to experiment with collaborators. This week, he introduces two new works that take inspiration from music and architecture, pairing the architects Carlos Arnaiz and James Ramsey with the composers Judd Greenstein and Ellis Ludwig Leone. A handful of Mr. Schumacher's City Ballet colleagues do the dancing (1:15). At 7:30 p.m., Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 La Guardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, 866 811 4111, nyuskirball.org. (Schaefer) JEROME BEL (through Monday) Known as the "philosopher of dance," Jerome Bel is more concerned with concepts than choreography, challenging ideas of what constitutes dance. The results can be brilliant or amusing or infuriating, or some combination. The Crossing the Line Festival offers a broad look with "Jerome Bel" (0:50), a starkly pared down duet between a man and a woman, both nude (Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 255 5793); and, through Monday, "Artist's Choice: Jerome Bel/MoMA Dance Company" (0:30), featuring museum staff performing sporadically throughout the day in the museum's atrium. At various times, Museum of Modern Art, 212 708 9400). (Schaefer) COMPANY XIV (through Nov. 12) The Judgment of Paris is a Greek myth in which the mortal must choose the fairest of three goddesses. Company XIV, the flirty collective created and directed by Austin McCormick, offers an adults only interpretation of the tale and transfers it to a French dance hall where opera flair blends with burlesque naughtiness. The company's signature style embraces elements of ballet, circus and cabaret with song, dance and overall seduction. Contains partial nudity, 16 and older (2:00). At 8 p.m., Irondale Center, 85 South Oxford Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, companyxiv.com. (Schaefer) GIBNEY DANCE COMPANY (Wednesday through Nov. 12) Gina Gibney has been busy with the opening of a major new downtown dance center, finding little time to create in recent years. "Folding In" is her first new work since 2013, made for five members of her revamped dance company. It arrives in time to celebrate the troupe's 25th anniversary. With family like intimacy, "Folding In" is an abstract reflection on the process of development, featuring music by the Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guonadottir (1:00). Wednesday at 7 p.m., Thursday through Nov. 5 and Nov. 10 11 at 8 p.m., Nov. 12 at 5 and 7 p.m., Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Schaefer) BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE COMPANY (through Nov. 6) Dora Amelan is a 95 year old Holocaust survivor; Lance Theodore Briggs is a survivor of the 1980s. They are both, individually, the subject of Bill T. Jones's latest project, a trilogy of biographical dances called "Analogy" that arrives at the Joyce for two weeks. "Analogy/Dora: Tramontane" and "Analogy/Lance: Pretty a.k.a. The Escape Artist" use interviews, a range of evocative music and Mr. Jones's often clever and deeply meaningful gestures to bring two tales of endurance to the stage (1:20). Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Schaefer) JULIE MAYO (through Saturday) The title of Julie Mayo's new work, "Novatia Tryer," is composed of nonsensical words that came to her in a dream. The Brooklyn based Ms. Mayo and five dancers have sought to infuse them with meaning through abstract movement that resists any sense of narrative but rather, as she has said, "performs the unrest of the imagination" (0:50). At 8 p.m., Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, 280 Broadway, near Chambers Street, Lower Manhattan, 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org. (Schaefer) PLATFORM 2016: LOST FOUND (through Nov. 19) A generation of dancers and choreographers was swallowed by AIDS, and that open wound is the subject of this year's Danspace's Platform series. Thursday through Nov. 5, the series honors the influential downtown dancer and choreographer John Bernd, who died of AIDS in 1988 at age 35. Friends and colleagues present a collage of his reconstructed work, drawing from solos, duets and ensemble work, including "Two on the Loose," which he performed months before his death (1:00). Various times and locations; more information at danspaceproject.org. (Schaefer) VAIL DANCE FESTIVAL: REMIX NYC (Thursday through Nov. 6) Ten years ago, the former New York City Ballet principal dancer Damian Woetzel headed west to lead the Vail International Dance Festival, infusing it with adventurous programming and inspired cross genre mash ups. This week, New Yorkers get a taste. Each evening's program is different, composed of a handful of short works by well known names like Balanchine, Ashton, Wheeldon and Ratmansky and performed by top local ballet stars as well as the tap virtuoso Michelle Dorrance and the jookin ambassador Lil Buck, among others. Thursday through Nov. 5 at 8 p.m., Nov. 6 at 3 p.m., City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. (Schaefer) VANGELINE THEATER (through Monday) Seeing the Japanese performance art Butoh, which was born in the ashes of World War II, can already be a haunting experience, but the contemporary Butoh artist Vangeline plays up the association for Halloween with her work "Butoh Beethoven: Eclipse," which honors one of the form's founders, Tatsumi Hijikata, and that long dead German composer. Dressed like a bride of Frankenstein, Vangeline interprets the well known music with grotesque and frightening physicality (1:00). At 8 p.m., Royal Theater, the Producers' Club, 358 West 44th Street, near Ninth Avenue, Clinton, vangeline.com. (Schaefer) WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL (through Nov. 16) The modern dance master Mark Morris has long been smitten with classical Indian dance. For this Lincoln Center multiarts festival, he shares his enthusiasm as the curator of the "Sounds of India" series. On Sunday and Monday, the Kerala Kalamandalam Kathakali Troupe presents a dance drama in the stylized folk dance form of Kathakali. Mr. Morris's company presents two solos, a duet and a new work informed by his visits to South India (Saturday, Thursday and Nov. 5). On Wednesday and next Friday, the celebrated all female Nrityagram Dance Ensemble performs in the ancient, expressive Odissi style. At various times, Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street, Clinton, 212 721 6500, whitelightfestival.org. (Schaefer) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"The last four years, you have promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, but you have never in these four years come up with a plan, a comprehensive plan " "Yes, I have." " to replace Obamacare." "Of course I have." "Well, I'll give you " "We got rid of the individual mandate." "I'm going to give you an opportunity " "Excuse me. I got rid of the individual mandate." "I'm not here to call out his lies everybody knows he's a liar." "But you agreed Joe, you're the liar." "I want to make sure " "You graduated last in your class, not first in your class." "I laughs God. I want to make sure " "Mr. President, could you let him finish, sir?" "The question is, the question is " "A lot of new Supreme Court justices, radical left " "Will you shut up, man?" "One of the big debates we had with 23 of my colleagues trying to win the nomination that I won were saying that Biden wanted to allow people to have private insurance still. They can, they do, they will, under my proposal." "That's not what you've said, and it's not what your party has said." "That is simply a lie." "Your party doesn't say it your party wants to go socialist medicine." "My party is me. Right now, I am the Democratic Party." "And they're going to dominate you, Joe, you know that." "I am the Democratic Party right now. The platform of the Democratic Party " "Not according to Harris." " is what I, in fact, approved of." "Is it true that you paid 750 in federal income taxes each of those two years?" "I've paid millions of dollars in taxes, millions of dollars of income tax. Let me just say something, that it was the tax laws. I don't want to pay tax. Before I came here, I was a private developer, I was a private business people. Like every other private person, unless they're stupid, they go through the laws, and that's what it is." "I'm going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts." "Good." "And we're going to, I'm going to eliminate those tax cuts " "OK." " and make sure that we invest in the people who in fact need the help. People out there need help." "But why didn't you do it over 20, the last 25 years?" "Because you weren't because you weren't president screwing things up." "You were a senator " "You're the worst president America has ever had. Come on." "You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out antifa and other left wing " "That's right." " extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups " "Sure." " and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we've seen in Portland." "Sure, I'm willing to do that, but " "Then do it." "Go ahead, sir." "I would say, I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing." "So what are you, what are you saying " "I'm willing to do anything I want to see peace." "Well, then do it, sir." "Say it. Do it. Say it." "You want to call them what do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me a name." "White supremacists and " "Go ahead, who would you like me to condemn?" "Proud Boys." "Who?" "White supremacists and right wing militia." Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what. Somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right wing problem, this is a left wing " "His own F.B.I. director said the threat is " Are you questioning " "No, I think masks are OK. You have to understand, if you look, I mean, I have a mask right here. I put a mask on, you know, when I think I need it. Tonight as an example, everybody's had a test, and you've had social distancing and all of the things that you have to but I wear masks when needed. When needed, I wear masks." "OK, let me ask " "I don't wear masks like him every time you see him, he's got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from he shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen." "Masks make a big difference. His own head of the C.D.C. said if we just wore masks between now if everybody wore masks in social distance between now and January, we'd probably save up to 100,000 lives. It matters." "And they've also said the opposite. They've also said " "No serious person said the opposite." "The fact is that there are going to be millions of people because of Covid that are going to be voting by mail in ballots, like he does by the way. And this is all about trying to dissuade people from voting, because he's trying to scare people into thinking that it's not going to be legitimate." "As far as the ballots are concerned, it's a disaster. A solicited ballot, OK? Solicited is OK. You're soliciting, you're asking. They send it back. You send it back. I did that. This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen. The other thing: It's nice, on Nov. 3, you're watching and you see who won the election. And I think we're going to do well, because people are really happy with the job we've done. But you know what? We won't know, we might not know for months because these ballots are going to be all over." "Now that millions of mail in ballots have gone out, what are you going to do about it? And are you counting on the Supreme Court, including a Justice Barrett, to settle any dispute?" "Yeah, I think I'm counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely. I don't think we'll I hope we don't need them in terms of the election itself, but for the ballots, I think so. I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that's what has to happen. I am urging them to do it. I am urging my people I hope it's going to be a fair election. If it's a fair election " "You're urging them what?" " I am 100 percent on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that." "Here's the deal: They count the ballots. As you've pointed out, some of these ballots in some states can't even be opened until Election Day. And if there's thousands of ballots, it's going to take time to do it. No one has established at all that there is fraud related to mail in ballots, that somehow it's a fraudulent process." "It's already been established." "He has no idea what he's talking about. Here's the deal. The fact is, I will accept it, and he will too. You know why? Because once the winner is declared, after all the ballots are counted, all the votes are counted, that will be the end of it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Two more luxury aeries have officially sold at , the supertall skyscraper in the heart of Midtown's Billionaires' Row, and were the week's most expensive closed transactions, according to city records. In another big sale this past week, the philanthropist Joy Fishman sold co op No. 6D at the venerable twin towered San Remo co op building, at 146 Central Park West, between 74th and 75th Streets. The price was 10.75 million, with monthly maintenance of around 8,000. Ms. Fishman was the wife of Dr. Jack Fishman, who died in late 2013, and was best known for helping develop naloxone, a drug used to counteract overdoses of heroin and other narcotics. The Fishmans had also owned No. 6E/F, a 6,150 square foot residence that was sold in August 2014 for 26.4 million. Unit 6D has three bedrooms and five bathrooms, in addition to formal living and dining rooms, an eat in kitchen and a large gallery, according to the listing with the Corcoran Group. Dan Fishman and Benjamin Gernandt of Corcoran were the listing brokers. Rosette Arons of Stribling Associates brought the buyer, identified as Nancy Lee. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Responding to evidence that its tools had allowed ads to be directed at users who used racist comments or hate speech in their profiles, Facebook said Wednesday that it would change how ads can be targeted. That its ad targeting tools could be used in such a way was "a fail" for the company, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said in a post. She added that Facebook would add "more human review and oversight" to its automated systems to prevent further misuse. Ms. Sandberg, who was directly addressing the social network's recent advertising issues for the first time, also said the company would do more to ensure that offensive content including that which attacks people for their race or religion could not be used to target ads. The announcement came after a report from ProPublica last week revealed that Facebook's online ad tools had allowed advertisers to target self described "Jew haters" or people who had used terms like "how to burn Jews." The terms automatically appeared in Facebook's ad system because people had apparently filled them in under "education" and "employer" on their profiles. "Hate has no place on Facebook and as a Jew, as a mother, and as a human being, I know the damage that can come from hate," Ms. Sandberg wrote. "The fact that hateful terms were even offered as options was totally inappropriate and a fail on our part." Ms. Sandberg said the company "never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way and that is on us." Facebook has grown into one of the world's most valuable companies by offering advertisers the ability to quickly and easily target its users based on a vast array of information, from the type of home they live in to their favorite television shows. But the company is facing a new wave of scrutiny over how those tools can be misused, particularly after it disclosed this month that fake accounts based in Russia had purchased more than 100,000 worth of ads on divisive issues in the run up to the presidential election. The site has also been criticized for not anticipating that its technology could be put to nefarious use. "The appearance of these offensive terms was embarrassing for Facebook and reflects the tendency of Silicon Valley companies to overly trust algorithms and automated systems to manage advertising," said Ari Paparo, chief executive of Beeswax, an advertising technology start up in New York. "The media business is all about people and influence, so there's a necessary role for human moderation and control." This is not the first time that Facebook has faced issues stemming from a lack of human oversight. Earlier this year, after a series of violent acts appeared on Facebook Live broadcasts, the company said it would add 3,000 people to the 4,500 member team of employees that reviews and removes content that violates its community guidelines. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. But this was the first time that Ms. Sandberg, who is responsible for Facebook's entire advertising organization, has directly addressed the company's high profile ad issues in public. Ms. Sandberg, a veteran of the digital advertising industry, grew to acclaim in Silicon Valley by developing Google's sales organization in the search giant's early days. She joined Facebook in 2008, and was asked to do the same for the social network. Facebook has faced thorny questions about race and its ad targeting tools before. Last fall, ProPublica reported that advertisers could use those tools to exclude certain races or what the social network called "ethnic affinities" from housing and employment ads, a potential violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Facebook, which assigns the updated term "multicultural affinity" to certain users based on their interests and activities on the site, no longer allows that classification to be used in ads for housing, employment or credit. "A whole bunch of problems have come up for Facebook over the past year that are going to have consequences," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group who closely follows Facebook. "It's something between sloppiness, an absence of consideration on a range of issues, and the simple challenges of managing a massive company growing at an unparalleled pace." Facebook's annual revenue, nearly all of which comes from online ads, has more than tripled in the past four years to 27.6 billion in 2016, when it posted a net profit of 10.2 billion. Separately, the company has also been working to repair its relationship with major advertisers after it disclosed about a year ago that some of its measurement tools were not delivering accurate results. Facebook, which restricted how advertisers could target users after the publication of last week's report by ProPublica, reinstated 5,000 of its most commonly used targeting terms, like "nurse" and "teacher," after manually reviewing the options, Ms. Sandberg said in her post. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The singer John Legend at a "One Saturday to Dream Fearlessly" event, sponsored by American Family Insurance, in Minneapolis in August. Have a Drink on Us. And Tell Your Friends. During Prohibition, tourists arriving at the Havana airport were often greeted by Rafael Valiente, a popular bartender in Cuba and the first brand ambassador for Bacardi rum. Mr. Valiente, known as Pappy, would frequently take them to Bacardi's private bar in its Havana office building and treat them to a rum cocktail. Bacardi's strategy was simple: It believed that people who sampled its rum would turn into regular customers. Decades later, the spirits company is trying something similar though this time without Pappy Valiente. Last month, 3,000 employees of Bacardi Limited made their way to bars throughout the world. The goal: Interact with bartenders and other patrons in an effort to generate good will and sales. Besides Bacardi rum, the company's brands include Grey Goose vodka, Dewar's Scotch and Bombay Sapphire gin. The one day initiative, called "Back to the Bar," was partly the result of brainstorming sessions involving the consulting firm Instinctif Partners and thousands of company employees that began last summer and continued through early January, said K. C. Kavanagh, Bacardi's global communications officer. Videos showing employees how to talk with bar staff and how to take pictures of cocktails for social media were posted on the company's intranet and shared by email. It is also another example of how companies are going beyond traditional advertising and trying to attract customers through direct contact. "One thing that came up with everyone was that you have to get closer to the business, to its roots you can't be stuck in your office," Ms. Kavanagh said. "There's so much to learn in the market. You can't just sit behind a desk, or we'd be an accounting firm." Bacardi executives said their initiative was inspired, in part, by the OptOutside campaign of REI, the outdoor retailer. Since 2015, REI has closed its United States stores on Black Friday, paying its 12,000 employees to enjoy the outdoors with family and friends; it has also suspended online sales on that day. Since last year, MillerCoors has sponsored events in three key markets "Cheers to Milwaukee" in that city and "We All Sell Beer" in Denver and the Dallas Fort Worth region that sent hundreds of employees, with varying responsibilities and seniority, and distributors to hundreds of bars. The employees, including the chief executive, Gavin Hattersley, bought beer for customers and socialized with them and the bars' staff and owners. All events also featured free concerts. Each event featured celebrities (the singer John Legend in the Twin Cities, the N.F.L. star J. J. Watt in Madison) who participated in community service projects with local American Family employees and agents and local volunteers. Among these was a "dream academy" in Atlanta, with activities designed to show young people that "when it comes to dreams, the sky is the limit." The events were created with the assistance of agencies like BBDO and Mindshare. 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. Community initiatives appear to be producing positive results for the companies that sponsor them, quantifiable and not. Alex Thompson, vice president of brand stewardship and impact for REI, said eight million people participated in OptOutside last year by spending Black Friday outdoors, up from 1.4 million in 2015, based on social media engagements. Over 600 organizations, including companies like Subaru, Google and Unilever, as well as groups like the National Park Service and Sierra Club, have become involved in the campaign. James Kanter, MillerCoors's general manager for Wisconsin, said his company's initiatives helped it "sell beer and build community relations." Its recent Texas event took place in Fort Worth on Friday, Texas Independence Day, and Saturday, when a free concert, with free food and beer, was held at its brewery there. Such events, said Telisa Yancy, chief marketing officer of American Family Insurance, are a different way to engage customers that is "relevant and aligned with the current zeitgeist." Research confirms "our belief that consumers want to support brands and companies that go beyond transactional sales to create social impact," she added. As Ms. Kavanagh of Bacardi said, "Who needs focus groups when you can go to the local bar?" Tulin Erdem, chairwoman of the marketing department at New York University's Stern School of Business, said the "Back to the Bar" initiative created a "nice experience for customers to see Bacardi employees, for community building, and for employees to see how customers relate to the brand." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Previously on "One Bruise at a Time" (a.k.a. the first two "Fifty Shades" outings): Ana and Christian (Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan), our slap and tickle surrogates, bonded through bondage and a shared affection for flattering lighting. Now, with "Fifty Shades Freed," we've reached what the publicity notes are pleased to call "the climactic chapter" of this titillation trilogy based on the heavy breathing novels of E.L. James. If another sequel shows up, though, I'm going to have to use my safe word. Layering a damp squib thriller subplot beneath what appears to be an ad campaign for the one percent lifestyle, the returning director and screenwriter (James Foley and Niall Leonard) test the newly married couple with an inconvenient pregnancy and an unconvincing car chase. There's an out of left field abduction and a marital tiff over email addresses; but these narrative fragments, lazily tossed together alongside a neglected supporting cast, are no more than a flimsy causeway connecting bonking sessions. Invariably accompanied by wailing makeout music and sometimes a dairy product, these function simultaneously as the movie's raison d'etre and its creamy topping. Yet with the couple's power dynamic seemingly settled he's a controlling chauvinist, she's mostly fine with that the rods and restraints are no longer necessary negotiating tools. Now, it's just married sex, albeit more rippling and racy than most. As popular as this window fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior "9 1/2 Weeks" instead, then I will have done my job. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Murray said she liked poodles because they do not shed and are thus hypoallergenic. And despite her prim and elegant appearance, Siba, she said, was just a family dog who "knows when to tone it down and sleep on the couch," one who enjoys playing with Murray's toddler son and tracking in mud from the fields near their Pennsylvania home. Siba has only one regular requirement: she prefers chicken. On Monday, when Murray couldn't find any before the judging in the nonsporting group, she turned to the closest available option: chicken sandwiches from a nearby McDonald's. Siba gobbled them up, and then had the same meal for dinner on Tuesday. The only thing fancy about her, it seems, is her haircut and her full name: GCHP CH Stone Run Afternoon Tea. Daniel, a golden retriever, was the clear crowd favorite in the final judging. The champion representing one of the most popular breeds in America, Daniel was attempting to become the first golden to take the top prize in a competition that was first held a decade after the Civil War. A cheerful, flowing gem of a dog, he glided around the ring to the delight of a roaring crowd eager to see him make show history. But his breed's wait, now 144 years and counting, will go on. "Do the group winners from last night have the advantage going into best in show? Or do tonight's group winners have the edge?" He call its "the classic rest vs. rust debate." Sarah: The answer is, Not really. It's not like you need special stamina to compete in a dog show or anything. You're not lifting, sprinting, throwing or skiing, for instance. You just have to show up with a certain amount of enthusiasm, eat your treats, look pretty, open your mouth when the judge wants to examine it, and then run a short distance until you get to rest again. Andy: Still, the real champions want the leash around their neck at crunch time. You know who does sound ready? The best in show judge, Robert H. Slay. He's been sequestered, and has no idea who he will see on the floor in a few minutes. No worry for him, he says. "I've been in this five decades, I've watched a lot of dogs," he says in a North Carolina drawl. "I think I'm ready." He knows he's not competing, right? Sarah: Here's what happens next: we'll see the dogs in the two remaining groups the working group and the terrier group choose their winners. And then the winner from each group will slug it out in the final round. So far, it will be the golden retriever vs. the Shetland sheepdog vs. the standard poodle vs. the Havanese vs. the whippet. Andy: The problem now, I guess and any golden owner will get this is that they have to get a really excited golden retriever to relax for a couple hours now. Sarah: Or the golden can just fetch his ball incessantly while using his tail to knock things off the grooming table. Andy: Too bad he can't go outside and dig a hole for a while. Or chew up a shoe. Sarah: Goldens are not known for having every biscuit in the basket. But I shouldn't talk. My dog, Hershey, loves his tennis ball more than perhaps anything else in the world. After playing for a bit, he gets thirsty and has a habit of dropping his ball in his (shallow) water bowl, and then looking at the ball with what appears to be total incomprehension until one of us goes and fishes it out. The Irish water spaniel, looking a bit nervous, has been sent away by the judge! Sarah: What just happened there? The spaniel seemed to lose his nerve and jump off the table. Andy: It looks like he's been excused by the judge, which is a very dog show way of saying he's been kicked out without being judged. Sarah: There's a difference between being excused essentially, released without charge and disqualified. Dogs are disqualified when they do something very bad, such as bite the judge. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
SAN FRANCISCO Airbnb agreed on Monday to settle a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco, putting to rest litigation that could have hampered the company's efforts to expand and go public. In the settlement, Airbnb essentially agreed to San Francisco's demand to be more transparent about its hosts and to help enforce existing registration laws. It followed the company's dropping of a lawsuit in December over a New York law that fines people who illegally list their homes on short term rental platforms. Taken together, the actions mean Airbnb has cleared up outstanding litigation in two of its biggest markets in the United States. The latest settlement removes a regulatory cloud over the company as it readies itself for a public offering, even though Airbnb, which is based in San Francisco and has a valuation of about 30 billion, still faces legal disputes in a handful of markets. The company's chief executive, Brian Chesky, said this year that the company could be ready to go public in a year. Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who studies the so called sharing economy, said, "As Airbnb gears up to go public over the next couple of years, creating a stable environment with less regulatory uncertainty is good for them." He added, "While it is well past the point where regulations pose an existential threat to the company, regulatory issues are still the biggest source of uncertainty about its future revenue streams." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP IN EUROPE From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day By Sheri Berman Far right nationalists are now in power in Poland and Hungary, in coalition governments in Italy and Austria, and in parliaments in Germany, the Netherlands and France. In anticipation of European Union elections next month, a group of far right populist parties has formed a new alliance, led by Italy's Instagram loving interior minister, Matteo Salvini. How surprised should supporters of liberal democracy in Europe be? Not very, according to Sheri Berman's "Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day." In her study of European political development over more than 200 years, Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard, shows that the story of democracy in Europe is complicated. The ultimate goal, she believes, is liberal democracy, with elections, respect for the rule of law, individual liberties and minority rights. But that's a rare, and hard won, achievement. A step forward is often followed by a step back. Contemporary questions are obviously never far from Berman's mind, but she devotes only a few pages to European politics today. Most of the book's chapters are case studies, examining when and why democracy or dictatorship flourishes, with examples that range from Britain's Glorious Revolution in 1688 to the fall of Soviet style Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. These cases convey nothing so strongly as the fact that "the legacies of previous political regimes both positive and negative weigh heavily on the development of new ones." Building a liberal democracy requires, among other things, strong states, cohesive national identities and political cultures in which citizens and politicians buy into what she calls "the rules of the game." But impediments to them can span generations. Consider Italy. In the early 19th century, the Italian peninsula, dominated by rival kingdoms and city states, was derided as a "geographical expression" rather than a country. To forge a state, Italy went through a top down consolidation, led by the more prosperous north, and requiring coercion and corruption to incorporate the rest of the country. The result was a weak state that, even after the expansion of universal manhood suffrage in 1912, was susceptible to Mussolini and the Fascisti. Liberal democracy only fully arrived in Italy after World War II thanks, in part, to Mussolini's centralization. Even today, the legacy of those early years persists. Is Salvini an heir to the Fascisti, though? An instructive point in Berman's book if not a central one is that antidemocratic forces mutate as frequently as anything else in politics. In the push and pull between democracy and dictatorship in France, for example, 18th century monarchists were replaced by new types of anti liberal nationalists. Every era, it seems, gets the right wing it deserves. This is a valuable reminder to those today who apply labels like "fascist" to far right politicians: It's better to conceive of them in modern terms. If there's a fault in Berman's book, it's her lack of imagination about what an even better democracy might look like. Despite her keen eye for how politics constantly shifts, she seems to believe that in Western Europe politics reached its highest stage after World War II, when capitalism was tamed by social democracy and liberal values were broadly adopted (or imposed) all under an American security umbrella and funded by Marshall Plan cash. She rightly condemns the changes in recent decades as the social welfare state has been rolled back and the European Union became less democratic and more "technocratic," and she sees the rise of the far right today as a response. But she hopes, it seems, only to return to that previous golden age. Who can blame her? The years between the end of World War II and the rise of neoliberalism look pretty rosy in retrospect. But isn't it possible that even that model could have used a step forward, once again, toward something more democratic? If the defenders of democracy on the Continent want to fight off Salvini and his allies, they will have to offer more than nostalgia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Most wedding day survival kits are equipped with an arsenal of essential items to help brides avoid any mishaps or unexpected hiccups. Double sided tape, bobby pins and a bevy of pills, ranging from aspirin to allergy medication, can certainly prove useful. But here are some additional products to help you get ahead of any potential stressor whether a pesky facial breakout or an overbearing relative. The was a collaborative creation by Nina Endrst, who owns a wellness practice in New York, and Trish Baden, the founder of Flores Lane, a West Hollywood, Calif., company that creates handmade soy wax candles. Both women believe that the sense of smell has the ability to transport and calm. The features a blend of the fragrant wood palo santo and rose, which creates a calming, heart opening experience that helps you to focus on your love and union. The night before the wedding can be especially stressful. If you're worried about getting a restful night's sleep, the all natural, roll on sleep aid Sleep Well, by Saje Natural Wellness, might help. It features a relaxing blend of essential oils, including jasmine, chamomile and orange, designed to lull you into a deep slumber. Apply on the soles of your feet, under your jawline or on your wrists just before bed time. You can also combat nervousness and anxiety on the day of the wedding with the Stress Release roll on of essential oils. It can be added to a tissue and inhaled or dropped into a warm bath. Innisfree, a Korean beauty brand that is now available in the United States, has developed a brightening and pore caring sleeping mask, enriched with vitamin C to improve the texture of your skin while you sleep. The lip sleep pack with canola honey oil, which also works overnight, is a balm that provides moisture through a combination of petals of canola flowers and canola honey from Korea's Jeju Island. Both overnight treatments will allow your skin and lips adequate prep time for flawless makeup application on your wedding day. Meditation is the practice of slowing down your thoughts and focusing on breathing, which can result in an overall feeling of calm and even joy. The Happy Not Perfect App, which can be used on or before your wedding day, brings this practice right to the palm of your hands with easy guided meditation sessions, some as quick as five minutes long. The sessions are designed to help release stressful thoughts. Popping a sedative might not be the best way to calm your nerves before walking down the aisle. Instead, consider CBD, also known has cannabidiol, an ingredient that is said to decrease anxiety. The CBD infused gummies from Veritas Farms, a brand of CBD infused beauty and wellness products, might be the perfect "chill pill" to help ease wedding day stress. The mixed berry flavored CBD edibles are made of organic ingredients, CBD isolate and melatonin, which is said to help with mental focus, pain management and stress relief. Skin feeling congested? Don't have time for a facial? You can turn your bridal suite into a sanctuary of self care with a quick D.I.Y. treatment using Soap Cherie Facial Steam Detox. This clarifying product combines a mix of dried herbs and flowers to create a tea like concoction when poured into hot water. To experience the purifying and softening agents of the aromatic blend, add two tablespoons to a bowl of steaming water, cover your head with a towel, and rest your head a few inches above the steaming mixture for five to seven minutes. Have late night planning sessions and tear filled wedding events taken a toll on your eyes, leaving them dark or puffy? Hemp oil, which is pressed from the seeds of the hemp plant and rich in vitamins A and E, could be the solution. The Gold Q 2 in 1 Daytime and Nighttime Hemp Infused Eye Repair, which combines hemp oil with natural ingredients, helps to create smoother under eye skin and improve the look of dark circles and puffiness. 8. Fresh Breath On the Go Fresh breath should be the least of your wedding day concerns. Mints and gum have been a longtime staple for a quick pick me up, or to erase the sudden onset of bad breath. Listerine Ready! Tabs provides the freshness of mouthwash in a tablet that you chew, swish and swallow just before the walk down the aisle. 2.99; available at Target, Walgreens and Walmart Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion, and Vows) and Instagram. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Pandora the World of Avatar opened in May at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., and travel companies that specialize in Disney vacations were ready and waiting with Pandora packages. Robert Merlin of SmartFlyer received several hundred phone calls in the last few months from people interested in trips to the fictional world depicted in the "Avatar" movie of 2009. "The mad rush to experience the attraction is unlike anything I have ever seen," he said. The Grove Resort Spa Orlando has Avatar: Take Flight, including accommodations in a one , two or three bedroom suite, a one day pass for four to Disney's Animal Kingdom, and welcome gifts including a 100 credit at the resort's Alfresco Market. Nightly rates from 300. Book by July 31 for stays through Dec. 31. B Resort Spa offers a package called B on Avatar, with late checkout and round trip shuttle service to Animal Kingdom. Nightly rates from 139 with the promo code BAVATAR. Available through Sept. 1. Book online or call 866 759 6832. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
President Trump may think his move to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat signals his strength and reinforces his appeal to evangelicals. Actually, though, it reveals his fear that he won't be re elected. If you're confident of winning, why rush the process? And Mr. Trump the transactionalist should realize that once the evangelicals get their Supreme Court justice, they may abandon their thrice married, pay off the porn star president. Watch out! Democrats are howling that it would be immoral to name a new Supreme Court justice before the election. Is there anyone who doesn't believe that if the roles were reversed, the Democrats would be doing the same thing? In the unseemly political fight already underway over the vacant seat, there is an important consideration regarding the composition of the Supreme Court that should not be overlooked. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
THE HARDHAT RIOT Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working Class Revolution By David Paul Kuhn The nation, we keep hearing on television and in social media blather, is politically divided as never before. Nonsense. The ostensibly united states have been disunited many, many times, and "The Hardhat Riot," by David Paul Kuhn, vividly evokes an especially ugly moment half a century ago, when the misbegotten Vietnam War and a malformed notion of patriotism combined volatilely. They produced a blue collar rampage whose effects still ripple, not the least of them being Donald Trump's improbable ascension to the presidency. Let's remember what the United States was like in 1970: a country torn apart after years of political assassination, unpopular war, economic dislocation, race rioting and class disharmony. The last thing it needed in 1970 was more open fighting in the streets. But that's what it got on May 8, days after President Richard Nixon had expanded America's Southeast Asia misadventure into Cambodia and Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four students during antiwar protests at Kent State University. Kuhn, who has written before about white working class Americans, builds his book on long ago police records and witness statements to recreate in painful detail a May day of rage, menace and blood. Antiwar demonstrators had massed at Federal Hall and other Lower Manhattan locations, only to be set upon brutally, and cravenly, by hundreds of steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the nascent World Trade Center. Many of those men had served in past wars and viscerally despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft dodging, flag desecrating snotnoses. It was a clash of irreconcilable tribes and battle cries: "We don't want your war" versus "America, love it or leave it." And it was bewildering to millions of other Americans, including my younger self, newly back home after a two year Army stretch, most of it in West Germany. My sympathies were with the demonstrators. But I also understood the working stiffs and why they felt held in contempt by the youngsters and popular culture. 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. New social policies like affirmative action and school busing affected white blue collar families far more than they did the more privileged classes that spawned many antiwar activists. For Hollywood, the workingman seemed barely a step above a Neanderthal, as in the 1970 movies "Joe," about a brutish factory worker, and "Five Easy Pieces," in which a diner waitress is set up to be the target of audience scorn. (Come 1971, we also had "All in the Family" and television's avatar of working class bigotry, Archie Bunker.) It was, too, an era when New York was changing fast and not for the better. Corporations decamped for the suburbs and warm weather states. Kuhn notes how between 1967 and 1974 the number of Fortune 500 headquarters in the city fell to 98 from 139. Whites moved out in droves. Crime rose, and if you proposed getting tough on felons you risked being labeled a racist. Roughly one in three city residents was on public assistance. Municipal finances were in tatters. In short, 1970 New York was a caldron of misery, one rare bright spot being its basketball team, the Knicks, neatly integrated and en route to its first championship. Kuhn quotes the estimable Pete Hamill as observing back then that the workingman "feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored." One could go further. Many blue collar workers felt scorned by the wealthy, by the college educated, by the lucky ones with draft deferments, by every group that qualified as elite. They sneered back, especially at the patrician New York mayor. The way many of them referred to Lindsay, you'd have thought his first name was not John but, rather, an all too familiar obscenity. Understanding hard hat resentment, however, does not translate into excusing the violence that hundreds of them inflicted that May 8, the 25th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in World War II. Self styled paragons of law and order, they became a mob, pounding and kicking any antiwar youngster they could grab, doing the same to bystanders who tried to stop the mayhem and justifying it in the name of America. Kuhn ably and amply documents the cowardly beating of women, the gratuitous cold cocking of men and the storming of a shakily protected City Hall, where the mayor's people, to the hard hats' rage, had lowered the flag in honor of the Kent State dead. "A tribal tension had infused downtown," Kuhn observes. Among the tribes were the police, who were anything but New York's finest that day. Mostly, they stood aside while the hard hats ran amok; examples of their nonfeasance abound. Some of them even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hard hats moved menacingly toward a Wall Street plaza, a patrolman shouted: "Give 'em hell, boys. Give 'em one for me!" Yet the police were never held accountable for failing to stop the marauding, and "few hard hats owned up to the extent of their violence." Kuhn favors straightforward journalistic prose, with few grand flourishes. In setting scenes, he tends toward a staccato, some of it overdone: One speaker "exuded Establishment. The jacket and tie. A WASP face with a Roman nose. The side swept hair, straight and trim with delicate bangs, a tidy mustache, pinkish skin." Hardly every antiwar protester merits his go to characterization of them as potty mouthed hippies. But over all, this is a compelling narrative about a horrific day. In their fury, the hard hats left more than 100 wounded, the typical victim being a 22 year old white male collegian, though one in four was a woman; seven police officers were also hurt. Kuhn concludes that while the workers plainly came loaded for bear, their tantrum was essentially spontaneous and not, as some believed, part of a grand conspiracy. That said, they were just what some conservative strategists were looking for. Patrick Buchanan, then a Nixon aide, said of blue collar Americans in a memo to the boss, "These, quite candidly, are our people now." He wasn't wrong. Republicans have since catered as ever to the rich but they have also curried favor with working class whites, while Democrats seem more focused on others: racial minorities, gays, immigrants. Thanks in good measure to white blue collar disaffection, Trump in 2016 narrowly won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, a hat trick he may yet pull off again in November. In a way, Vietnam continues to cast its shadow. A short walk from those 1970 streets of chaos, there is a memorial to the 1,741 New Yorkers who died in the war. Its dominant feature is a wall of thick glass etched with reflections on combat, including part of a haunting letter sent home from Vietnam in 1968. "One thing worries me will people believe me?" The Navy lieutenant Richard W. Strandberg wrote. "Will they want to hear about it, or will they want to forget the whole thing ever happened?" Indeed, most Americans forgot about Vietnam long ago. The same has been true about the shameful hard hat riot of 1970. Until now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Those seeking a primer on how to start a gallery could look to Bridget Donahue. Having opened on the Bowery just two years ago, she is by any estimation going gangbusters. Two of her artists are in the current Whitney Biennial: Jessi Reaves, who makes furniture sculptures (functional chairs, tables and sofas) out of foam, plywood, sawdust, plexiglass and auto parts, as well as Susan Cianciolo, a former fashion designer who for the biennial created a pop up Japanese inspired tearoom, serving lunch to the installation's visitors for a few days at the Whitney's restaurant Untitled. But Ms. Donahue can go on at length about any one of the seven artists she represents how Mark Van Yetter recently had a show at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway, for example, or how she is traveling to Cologne, Germany, with Monique Mouton, who is having a solo show there. "My little exploding stars," Ms. Donahue said. "I'm so proud of them." Ms. Donahue didn't always want to be in the art world; she considered becoming a journalist, then an anthropologist, since she was studying textiles and economics. Work with textiles led her to the art of Rosemarie Trockel, which in turn led Ms. Donahue to answer a want ad for a job at the Gladstone Gallery, which represents that artist. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Open Thread is a weekly email from Vanessa Friedman. She'll even answer your toughest fashion questions! To get it by email, sign up here. Hello, and happy day after National Handbag Day! Did you know that was a thing? I did not. Otherwise, it's been relatively quiet in fashionland, mostly because well, impeachment. In fact, I think my favorite style moment of the week may have been the photos of Vladimir Putin's birthday jaunt to the fields and wilderness of Siberia. Rarely have I seen so much army green employed to such a picaresque extent. President Putin is, of course, known for his exciting photo ops (a.k.a. propaganda for the Instagram age), which often feature him in various roguish, he man poses. He has posed shirtless on a horse, shirtless while fishing thigh deep in a lake in camo pants, hunting with a big gun, in a wet suit and riding a motorbike in a black leather jacket. In fact, he has become so associated with leather jackets that one British company, Matchless, named a style after him in 2017. This time around, however, the look is much more soulful, and also accessorized. There he is with a fishing hat and dark shades and a shell and cargo pants all in matching shades of olive, hiking through a field of waving grass, walking stick in hand. Here he is reclining on a craggy peek in navy fleece. There he is later, with the same fleece slightly unzipped to show his muscle tee beneath, clutching some wildflowers in one hand and staring wistfully into the distance. And here he is, with a puffer vest added to the outfit, looking through binoculars into some far off future. The visual is of a man who is not to be messed with, as always the Pantone palette can pretty much be boiled down to base camp soldier chic but who is nonetheless appreciative of the environment, understanding of the environment, at one with the environment. As opposed to exploiting its natural resources for personal gain. Can it be a coincidence that Russia, which is the world's fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, just ratified the Paris Climate Accord? Maybe, but I doubt it. You can't say Mr. Putin doesn't know a messaging opportunity when he can make one. Someday this may be a subject of study. Every week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader's fashion related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or Twitter. Questions are edited and condensed. Q: I'm not a flashy guy. I wear decent off the rack suits (Hugo Boss, mostly) for workdays when that is required, in a state government job. A while back I started buying skinnier ties, often from consignment shops, because I liked their fabric and designs, and since many of the old ones need a clip to keep the tie in line, I started buying tie clips. I found that they draw just the right amount of attention. Is there a corresponding accessory for casual, no tie days? I don't wear body jewelry, except my wedding ring, and I'm not eager to pick up bracelets. I gave up watches for my smartphone. Can you think of anything casual, small and different that I could try? Carlos, Sacramento A: You have discovered the power of the signature style choice which is another way of saying a very effective kind of personal shorthand that, when worn repeatedly, becomes so linked with your image in other people's minds that it provokes Pavlovian associations. This is what Anna Wintour and Andy Warhol achieved with their unchanging hairstyles, which became stand ins for (in Ms. Wintour's case) extreme rigor, decisiveness, sharp edges and lack of fuss, and (in the case of Warhol) an embrace of kitsch that elevated it to a different realm. And it is what Gianni Agnelli achieved with his watch worn on the outside of his shirts cuffs (an appreciation of the best engineering as well as a willingness to break the rules) as did Steve Jobs with his turtleneck (attention to the life of the mind and design). In all cases, the look served to provide a stand in for certain defining values. In your case, it sounds like the tie pin symbolizes a certain balance between individuality and professionalism. As for what could replace it, in the absence of jewelry, on no tie days, Guy Trebay, our men's critic, has an idea. He said: "Assuming there is still a jacket in the picture, pocket squares are the obvious answer. There are limitless options (color, pattern, fabric, trim I buy white ones in Italy whose hems are cross stitched in thread of contrasting hue) and a thousand ways of folding (mine are squared off) or tucking that give you the opportunity to be playful and signal style awareness without lapsing no origami shapes, no matchy match into self parody. Plus, they don't have to cost much, particularly if you mine vintage stores, eBay or buy off cut fabrics and sew them yourself." All classic tailors will also sell a pocket square (like suits, they can get quite pricey), but some more off the beaten path places include Sid Mashburn and Madame Magar. (You've heard of farm to able? Madame Magar is seed to square; the shop even grows its own indigo for the dye.) And, there's always Alexander Olch and the pocket round, if you really want to mix things up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
LONDON Do you remember? Don't you remember? Can't you remember? Why can't you remember? Variations on those unsettling words both explicit and unspoken echo through the wrenching final scene of Tom Stoppard's "Leopoldstadt," which opened Wednesday night at Wyndham's Theater in London. They are addressed to a mid 20th century visitor to Vienna, a youngish, defensively British man of slipping poise who appears to have forgotten most of his early childhood. But you could also argue that these questions have been posed, in a sustained murmur, from the very beginning of this richly embroidered portrait of Jewish life in Vienna in the early 20th century. They are questions aimed directly at us, the audience and, by extension, at a wider world conveniently prone to historical amnesia. That would include, above all, the man who wrote this play. A tone of instructional reproach is hardly a quality associated with Stoppard, whose six decade career embraces a host of exuberantly cerebral plays, from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1967) to the time traveling "Arcadia" (1993). But "Leopoldstadt," which has been polished to a burnished sheen by the director Patrick Marber, holds a singular position in its author's canon. For starters, Stoppard, 82, has said this will probably be his last play. And, more than anything he has written (including his rueful "The Real Thing"), "Leopoldstadt" feels like an act of personal reckoning for its creator with who he is and what he comes from. It's not difficult to see "Leopoldstadt" as one man's passionate declaration of identity as a Jew. Judaism never figured conspicuously in Stoppard's earlier work. For much of his life, he never thought of himself as Jewish. Born Tomas Straussler in a small town in Czechoslovakia in 1937, he grew up largely in Britain, taking the name of Stoppard from the Englishman his mother married after his father's death. As Stoppard writes in program notes for the play, his mother rarely spoke of her own history. It was only when a previously unknown Czech relative made contact with him in the 1990s that he learned about his mother's family, many of whom had died during the Holocaust. The image of a hand printed family tree is prominent in "Leopoldstadt," among the black and white projections and photographs that hover evanescently between scenes. For the record, it is not Stoppard's family that is portrayed in the play, but a prosperous fictional Austrian clan in Vienna. When the play begins, the family is assembled at the comfortably upholstered apartment occupied by the matriarchal Grandma Emilia Merz (Caroline Gruber) and her son, Hermann (Adrian Scarborough), who runs the family textile business. It is Christmas Day, 1899. Yes, that holiday is being celebrated in this Jewish household, a commingling of traditions that finds droll expression when a child mistakenly tops the towering Christmas tree with a Star of David. For Hermann whose wife, Gretl (Faye Castelow), is Catholic cultural assimilation is a fait accompli as Austria moves into a new century. Or is it? The group assembled before us may represent a sort of cosmopolitan melting pot, in which conversation touches on the latest play by Schnitzler, the painting of Klimt (for whom Gretl is posing), higher mathematics and the theories of Freud. (This is a Stoppard play.) But as Hermann speaks of his hopes for future social and professional advancement, you sense insecurity pricking at his complacency (an uneasiness that is subtly and expertly conveyed by Scarborough, in the show's most fully realized portrait). That disquiet assumes dramatic form before the first act ends, when a romantic triangle or quadrangle, depending on how you look at it (again, this is a Stoppard play) forces anti Semitic sentiment into the open. In the second act, with scenes set during the Depression that followed World War I and in 1938, on the eve of Austria's incorporation into the Third Reich, that sentiment festers into full blown, terrifying form. Thus we watch the once resplendent Merz household become increasingly shabby and bare, as what once felt like a familial fortress is transformed into a defenseless sanctuary. (Richard Hudson's artfully evolving set is lighted in a sepia haze by the masterly Neil Austin, and images of the entire clan, posed as if for posterity, become a heartbreaking motif.) We are introduced to new generations of Merzes (in changing times costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuel), whose political allegiances and cultural tastes vary widely. But being Jewish is no longer a choice for them, not in the age of National Socialism. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of European history will know what to expect when the family freezes at the sound of someone pounding on the door. That does not make watching what follows any easier. In the final scene, in 1955, a man we had earlier met as a boy returns to the now abandoned apartment. Played by Luke Thallon, he is a successful writer of comic literature and, as far as he knows, a proper Englishman. It seems safe to say that he is a surrogate for Stoppard. More than any previous Stoppard play including the sprawling "Coast of Utopia" trilogy, a 9 hour dive into the Russian Revolution "Leopoldstadt" is a group portrait, and one of uncommon density. (You will probably feel the need to consult the family tree in the program.) The 40 strong cast is, to a person, very good, and they embody their characters with spiky defining detail. That they threaten to get lost in the play's panoramic sweep is partly the point here. But it is also hard to avoid the impression that they exist as illustrative figures in an admonitory history lesson. There's no denying that lesson's emotional power, nor its frightening relevance in 2020, when anti Semitic acts and language seem increasingly on the rise. That means that although "Leopoldstadt" is set in the past, it is Stoppard's most topical play. It is also his most conventional drama by far. A writer who reliably bent time into pretzels in earlier works, Stoppard hews to a fully linear structure here. And while "Leopoldstadt" is replete, to the bursting point, with historical fact and political theory, it is mostly devoid of the intellectual jeux d'esprit that have been its creator's signature. This may be the Stoppard play for people who don't normally cotton to Stoppard. It is as if the playwright felt that what he had to say here was too urgent to be filtered through his usual cerebral playfulness. The unreliability of memory, an abiding Stoppardian concern, is briefly flirted with in the final scene. But ultimately, memory isn't the capricious, fragmenting prism of classic Stoppard. Here, recollection is a laser, a tool to be focused on a past teeming with harsh and essential lessons for the present. It seems fitting that, for once in a Stoppard work, words aren't what leave the most lasting impression. It is instead the vision of people frozen as if for a photograph, beckoning with poignantly immediate life from a distant time before they dissolve into anonymous darkness. "Leopoldstadt" demands, with gravity and eloquence, that we never let those visions disappear. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SAN FRANCISCO Dara Khosrowshahi's family immigrated to the United States from Iran in 1978, when their country was convulsed by revolution. They were not particularly welcomed in America, and were broke. "Every one of us cousins had a chip on our shoulders, having lost everything to the new Iranian government," said Hadi Partovi, a cousin of Mr. Khosrowshahi's. "We had a desire to build anew as entrepreneurs." Mr. Khosrowshahi, 48, is on the threshold of becoming one of the world's most prominent entrepreneurs. On Sunday night, he was selected to be chief executive of Uber, the ride hailing company that is the world's most valuable start up. The deal is almost official, according to the travel reservations site Expedia, which Mr. Khosrowshahi currently runs. The news follows six months of extraordinary turmoil at Uber. Mr. Khosrowshahi will succeed Travis Kalanick, an Uber co founder and the company's driving force, who was forced to step down in June as the business was rocked by one scandal after another. His task will be to repair the internal culture, which had moved beyond gung ho start up to a company known for its divisiveness and tolerance for harassment. He will have to build Uber's business while preparing it for a self driving future that competitors hope to dominate themselves. Sooner or later he will likely take Uber public. There is also the wild card of Mr. Kalanick, who might seize on any trouble to mount a comeback. And finally, he will have to manage all this under a much brighter spotlight than he has worked under before. Mr. Khosrowshahi was a long shot candidate whose name did not become public until he had the job. Expedia is based in Bellevue, Wash., which makes him a Silicon Valley outsider. He had not commented on his new job as of Monday afternoon. At the same time in June that Mr. Kalanick was noisily being ejected from his company, Mr. Khosrowshahi had a problem of his own his parents. Glassdoor, a site where employees rank their companies, released its 2017 list of the top chief executives. Mr. Khosrowshahi's score had dropped. His parents weighed in with that combination of celebration and criticism that many immigrant children know well. As Mr. Khosrowshahi reported on Twitter, his mother said, "Nice! You made the top 100!" But his father pointed out: " 39 is good but you were 11 in 2015." His parents, Lili and Gary (short for Asghar) Khosrowshahi, were prosperous members of the Iranian elite in the 1960s and 1970s. Gary was an executive at an industrial conglomerate, where he worked with relatives. They fled as the government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi collapsed. The family made it to Tarrytown, N.Y., and lived with relatives. "For the grown ups, it was a difficult transition," Dara Khosrowshahi told Bloomberg Businessweek this year. "The kids were able to party together, so it was fun." Four years later, Gary went back to Iran to take care of his ailing father, and he was detained for six years before he could return. Lili raised three children alone. "His mom raised him to be direct with people," said Mr. Partovi, the cousin. "By far the biggest challenge he faced, which is what all of us faced, was having to come to a new country and assimilate. Being an Iranian in America in the 1980s was not pleasant. People were singing 'Bomb bomb bomb Iran.' " But the tense environment also pushed them to succeed. Mr. Partovi and his twin brother Ali were early investors in Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb and, as it happens, Uber; Dara's brother, Kaveh Khosrowshahi, is a managing director at the investment firm Allen Company; another cousin, Farzad "Fuzzy" Khosrowshahi, played a major role in the creation of Google Docs; yet another cousin, Amir Khosrowshahi, is an executive at Intel; and Avid Larizadeh Duggan, also a cousin, is a general partner at Google Ventures. Mr. Khosrowshahi, in 2015, was the highest paid executive in America as calculated by Equilar. Thanks to a large stock option grant, he made 94.6 million. In 2016, without the grant, his pay was 2.5 million. Mr. Khosrowshahi, in addition to running Expedia since 2005, joined the board of The New York Times Company in 2015. His route to success took him to the investment firm of Allen Company, where he spent most of the 1990s as an analyst. Barry Diller was a client, and Mr. Khosrowshahi eventually went to work for the media mogul. In 2001, Mr. Diller acquired Expedia, a travel booking site founded by Microsoft. Four years later, Mr. Khosrowshahi became Expedia's chief executive. The site has flourished, acquiring three major competitors in 2015 alone. Shares in the company, which is now publicly traded, have risen 35 percent over the last year, despite competition from Priceline on one flank and Airbnb on another. "If Dara does leave us, it will be to my great regret but also my blessing he's devoted 12 great years to building this company and if this is what he wants for his next adventure it will be with my best wishes," Mr. Diller said in a note to Expedia employees on Monday. Uber, like Expedia a decade ago, has enormous promise but also faces enormous challenges. Mr. Khosrowshahi's supporters believe he can fix the problems. "He's a global travel executive he understands competitive dynamics, geopolitical challenges, and the operating challenges of running a sprawling global travel company," said Brad Gerstner, founder of Altimeter Capital, an investor in Uber as well as Expedia. Under Mr. Kalanick, some Uber executives were considered untouchable, which contributed to a poisonous atmosphere. Shana Fisher, who worked with Mr. Khosrowshahi at Mr. Diller's IAC and is now a venture capitalist, said, "People don't get an excuse with Dara. They have to be good and good. Good and good. He doesn't have tolerance for less than that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
1. FERRARI 458 ITALIA The world's best sports car, a racing video game come to life in three gorgeous, thrilling dimensions. This is the car I would buy tomorrow if I inherited 250,000 today. 2. JAGUAR XJ In one swoop, this flagship sedan has been transformed from Prince Charles (stiff, conservative, tradition bound) into David Beckham (athletic, fashionable, devilishly handsome). The XJ, especially in its supercharged versions, is not only the lightest and fastest of the big luxury sedans, but it is the most cheeky and vital. 3. CHEVROLET VOLT Let me get this straight: General Motors, after being criticized for (supposedly) killing the electric car and for lagging Toyota in green technology, develops a plug in hybrid that outdrives the Prius and returns better overall economy than any other new hybrid or clean diesel. And G.M. is excoriated for doing so, not just by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but by some greenniks. G.M. just can't win. 4. PORSCHE BOXSTER SPYDER Among sports cars, the Boxster is like the golden retriever at your feet: Loyal and eager to please, but so old and familiar that you trip right over it. The Boxster Spyder solves that as a lightened and toned version that reminds you that this midengine stalwart is one of the sweetest performers around and the world's best handling sports car to boot, according to Car and Driver magazine. The only drawback is its contraption of a manual top: it looks and fits great, but takes several minutes to put down or up, making the Spyder suspect as a daily driver. 5. AUDI A8 By the high flying standards of Audi design, the tranquil exterior is a letdown. But all is forgiven when you jump into the A8 and drive. The cabin blends near bespoke luxury with intuitive technology to set the new interior benchmark for large luxury sedans. And the Audi is an amazingly versatile dance partner, able to waltz, tango or mosh, depending on its driver's mood. 6. HYUNDAI SONATA Never thought I'd say it, but if I were buying a straight up family sedan I'd take the Sonata over Honda's Accord, the perennial front runner. Consumers have noticed, handing the handsome Sonata in regular, turbo and hybrid versions the year's biggest jump in unit sales up roughly 90,000 of any car in America. 7. NISSAN JUKE When I first saw the Juke at an auto show, I didn't know whether to chuckle or upchuck. But this moon buggy turns out to be the year's most unexpected success, a tall hatchback with more muscle and spirit than the youth centric crossovers from Scion, Kia and others. A 188 horsepower direct injection turbo 4, available 6 speed manual transmission, torque vectoring all wheel drive and a winning interior filled with cool details, all for around 25,000. What's not to like? 8. FORD EXPLORER The name sounds like a nostalgic holdover from a VH1 show. But this is the new Explorer, and all I can say is, Welcome back. Aside from the lack of a honking V 8, you won't notice much difference in dynamic on road handling, quietness and comfort between this Ford and much more expensive S.U.V.'s like the Land Rover LR4 or Mercedes GL Class. It's that good. 10. LOTUS EVORA Driving enthusiasts often profess love for the nano scale Lotus Elise or Exige, but few show their love by buying such a track focused toy. The midengine Evora makes just enough compromises to be accommodating it's larger, heavier and more deluxe, with a roomier 2 plus 2 layout but it still feels exotic, adventurous and every bit a Lotus. DESIGNER IMPOSTOR Sure, it's a relative bargain, it comes with a free iPad and the Hyundai dealer will fetch the car for service while dropping off a loaner. That's all great, but if I'm going to drop 60,000 on a Hyundai, there's only one real issue: is it really a stand in for flagships like the Mercedes S Class or Audi A8, or even the smaller BMW 5 Series? The Equus does not even come close. Dated and dowdy on the outside, a pale imitation of Lexus on the inside, it doesn't drive or satisfy like the real McCoys. FREE WILLY By the standards of full size luxury S.U.V.'s, the redesigned Infiniti QX56 blows away the last version. But who at Infiniti approved the swollen shape, Beluga whale grille and excessive bling? The QX is so obliviously unfashionable it should come with a trucker hat. ROCKY TERRAIN Another S.U.V. that didn't get the memo about changing tastes, the GMC Terrain is a parody pile up of every Hummer inspired styling theme to emerge from G.M.'s studios: tacky chrome rims, steroid pumped sheet metal and an overwhelming air of half bakedness, from its straining engines to its sloppy transmission. WHAT A HAM For the Kia Soul, the return of the hip hop hamsters was the year's most watchable car ad. (I especially enjoyed the rodent cheerleaders, the Hamsterdam Avenue street sign and the stoned looking drummer.) Best of all, the funky Soul is as endearing as its ad campaign. THE HEARTBEAT HAS FLATLINED The worst car company slogan of the year, perhaps among the worst ever: Chevy Runs Deep. What, like a submarine? A tunneling gopher? A wide receiver? By the time you figure out what Chevy's talking about, the message (and your brain) are vaporized. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
ABOVE a side entrance to the Abingdon, a newly converted condominium building at 320 West 12th Street in the West Village, are carved the words "Laura Spelman Hall," a reminder of the 1905 structure's early life as a home for working women. It was later a nursing home, with beds for 200 residents. The 7 story building will have just 10 units, all larger than 3,200 square feet and some several times that size. The side door, flanked by granite columns, will serve as the private entrance for one of the larger units, a 6,000 square foot duplex "mansion" that is already in contract, having been priced at 12.995 million. Two duplex penthouses, which listed for 21 million and 19.5 million, are also in contract; the latter is being combined with a 3,200 square foot unit below it, and will total 8,400 square feet over three floors. Sales of the smallest units, which take up half a floor each and start at 8.75 million, began on Thursday. The strong early interest may be a sign of larger trends: that people with a lot of money are comfortable spending it again, and are interested in spending it in the West Village. Or it may reflect the particulars of the building, a prewar brick structure across from the tiny and picturesque Abingdon Square, with extremely large new apartments. "You take a 21 footer in the middle of a block," Mr. Kully said of one such hypothetical town house. "It's gorgeous, it's fantastic, Sarah Jessica Parker, whatever. But it's dark." By contrast, he said, all of the units at 320 West 12th Street which was formerly known as 607 Hudson Street are on a corner, with windows on at least two sides. The building has amenities like a gym and a sauna and the services of a doorman and a porter. And, Mr. Kully said, even the smallest units offer usable square footage in town house size quantities, without spreading it over multiple floors. The larger units are bigger than West Village town houses. A 9,600 square foot three floor apartment across the lobby from the 6,000 square foot unit is under construction and will have a private entrance, a library with a fireplace, and a cavernous entry foyer. The person who bought the smaller "mansion" was a surprise bidder who had been there for a private viewing of a different apartment, said Mick Walsdorf, a managing partner at Flank. Having glimpsed the separate entrance and raw space, he said, the buyer "put us in a situation where 'no' was not really an option." The timing of the conversion, with work finishing as signs point to a robust condominium market in the most coveted Manhattan neighborhoods, is a happy accident for the developers, Mr. Walsdorf said. They entered into a contract in 2007 with the nursing home's operator, Village Care of New York, that was structured to make the sale final only after a replacement nursing home could be built. That facility opened in October 2010 at 214 West Houston Street, clearing the way for work to start. "We thought it was going to be a two year contract; it ended up being a four year contract," Mr. Walsdorf said. "Which was fine, considering what the years in between were like." During the worst of the real estate slump, Mr. Kully said, the notion of a wealthy person spending 20 million on an apartment was considered unseemly, even by many who could afford it. But that moment has certainly passed, at least in Manhattan. Mr. Kully and Mr. Walsdorf, who both live nearby at 385 West 12th Street, which Flank also developed, said that beyond being large, the Abingdon's apartments were structured to provide enough distinct spaces so that a large family could coexist peacefully. The design, Mr. Walsdorf said, eschews the "great room" concept of many recent large apartments, in which bedrooms are oriented around a vast, multipurpose public space. Taking a page from prewar design, he said, the Abingdon's apartments have distinct kitchens, dining rooms and dens. The master bedroom suite, he added, is "literally the farthest point from the television room in the apartment and that is intentional." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
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