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Wayne McGregor will make his choreographic debut at American Ballet Theater next spring with a new setting of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," the company announced on Thursday. Mr. McGregor's work, "Afterite," will have its premiere on May 21 at Ballet Theater's spring gala, ushering in the annual Metropolitan Opera House season, May 14 through July 7 at Lincoln Center. "Afterite" is his first dance for Ballet Theater, but Mr. McGregor's work has been around New York in recent years: He has a piece, "Outlier," in repertory at New York City Ballet; "Tree of Codes," his collaboration with Olafur Eliasson and Jamie xx, was at the Park Avenue Armory in 2015; and the Royal Ballet, where he is the resident choreographer, performed "Infra" when the company visited in 2015. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
This is an updated version of an article published on March 15. Hardly anyone likes the alternative minimum tax, a provision that both President Trump's skeletal tax plan and the House Republican overhaul would eliminate. At its most basic, the A.M.T.'s goal is simple: In a tax system with enough loopholes to fill a macrame tapestry, the idea was to ensure that the richest taxpayers were not able to skip out on paying altogether. A version was introduced in 1969 after Congress discovered that are you ready? 155 taxpayers with taxable incomes over 200,000 paid no tax. But critics across the political spectrum have long complained that it has failed to live up to the promise. Both Mr. Trump and the House Republicans' proposed overhaul of the code would eliminate the individual and corporate alternative minimum taxes. During his Democratic presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont suggested replacing the A.M.T. with a flat 28 percent rate on deductions for high income households. Even the National Taxpayer Advocate within the Internal Revenue Service once called it the most serious problem facing taxpayers. The minimum tax has gone through several iterations, but the essential intent has not changed: to limit the amount of deductions available to the richest Americans. Over the years, though, inflation has eaten away at its effectiveness as has the exclusion of interest and dividend income, which insulates the richest Americans. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
SINCE 1976, the Honda Accord has been the car for people who don't want their car to say anything about them. It doesn't boast or gossip or tell lies. It's not glamorous, showy or racy. It's a stalwart car that does everything well except call attention to itself. The all new and all better ninth generation Accord does nothing to betray that or the car's enormous, well established and self actualized customer base. The 2013 Accord, which goes on sale on Wednesday, is so thoroughly pleasant and capable that its buyers may even be tempted to admit enjoying it when pressed, and only after explaining that they never think about cars, and after consuming a couple of sensible cocktails. Maybe Manhattans or Old Fashioneds. The Accord swims in the deepest part of the mainstream where the currents have led virtually every manufacturer to the same midsize sedan formula: front wheel drive, unibody construction, a wheelbase of about 110 inches, a standard transverse mounted 4 or 5 cylinder engine displacing about 2.4 or 2.5 liters, a base price hovering around 22,000. In fact, one of the Accord's most distinctive engineering elements, the double wishbone front suspension used since the third generation model of 1986, has been sacrificed on the altar of conventional wisdom in favor of a MacPherson strut system like all of its competitors. Honda says the struts are simpler and lighter and they now work as well as wishbones. After all, even Porsches and BMWs are using struts, too. As of now, only one Honda retains those once beloved wishbones the low production experimental FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel cell car. As before, the Accord comes as either a two door coupe or a four door sedan. The coupe is nice, but it's the sedan that sells most often as the base LX model with a 4 cylinder engine. My test car, however, was the EX L sedan, near the top of the line with a V 6 engine, leather upholstery and a G.P.S. navigation system and a sticker price of 32,860. A new Touring model rules from atop the heap, at 34,220. A plug in hybrid model will be available in early 2013 as a 2014 model, with a "two motor" hybrid to follow next summer. Honda didn't have an LX sedan with the 6 speed manual transmission ( 22,470) at the press introduction here, mere blocks from my house. But it did have the 4 cylinder EX ( 25,395) equipped with a new belt driven continuously variable automatic transmission. At 2.4 liters, the in line 4 is the same size as last year's, but now features direct injection of fuel and a new double overhead cam cylinder head with an integral exhaust manifold that feeds forward directly into a huge catalytic converter mounted just behind the radiator. Rated at a robust 185 horsepower, the new 4 cylinder feels strong and runs relatively quietly. The continuously variable automatic saps some of the thrust, but is one of the sweeter examples of the breed, with a Sport mode that sharpens its reflexes. Paddle shifters to manually engage virtual gears on the C.V.T. are available on the new Sport model and on all of the coupes, though it is not available with the LX and EX sedans. Honda credits the C.V.T. for helping the fuel economy of 4 cylinder sedans to rise to an estimated 27 m.p.g. in the city and 36 m.p.g. on the highway. The new sedan retains the traditional Accord proportions of a low cowl and raised rump, and the low window sills running counter to the recent trend of bunkerlike cabins contribute to good visibility and an airy feeling. The wheelbase has shrunk an inch while the width has increased just a bit. More heavily sculptured flanks make the new car appear more substantial while the front grille makes it seem wider. And LED headlamps make the car look more expensive and contemporary. But the Accord is still a car that blends into the sprawl like a Starbucks; you only notice it if you look for it. The Honda's evolution is most pronounced inside. All new Accords have a standard rearview camera that displays in an eight inch LCD display atop the center of the dashboard, and the various available media elements Pandora, Bluetooth audio, USB linked devices, SMS messaging, perhaps even live miniature yodelers are covered by a second, smaller LCD touch screen below it. The big kick, though, is an optional rear facing camera embedded in the right side view mirror. The camera looks back along the Accord's flank, providing in the larger screen a nearly panoramic view of the lane to the right whenever the right turn signal is engaged or a button is pressed at the end of the stalk. Honda calls this system LaneWatch, and it works brilliantly. Too bad there isn't a way to instantly post lane changes to Facebook. But the lane departure warning system was annoying after a few miles, and I turned it off. The interior is restrained in design and executed in materials that seem both higher in quality and better tailored than most cars in this class. The rear seat is roomy enough for three across, but all the seat cushions are rather shapeless and lacking in thigh support. The buttons and switches operate with the sort of precision and determination expected of world class biathletes. And the Accord is quiet. Very quiet. Besides the buttery smoothness of Honda's 3.5 liter V 6 also found in the Pilot crossover, Odyssey minivan and a slew of Acuras every new Accord uses electronic technology to cancel out unwanted noise. Two microphones collect noises entering the cockpit, and a computer then generates a countervailing, out of phase sound out through the speakers to counter it. With 278 horsepower, ample torque and a new sweet shifting 6 speed automatic transmission, the Accord V 6 sedan rips to 60 m.p.h. in just 6.1 seconds, according to Edmunds.com's Inside Line. That's nearly a full second quicker than the previous generation car and a tenth of a second better than the Altima V 6. And the Honda V 6, which still lacks direct injection, an increasingly common technology for efficient use of fuel, does this while kicking back excellent E.P.A. numbers of 21 m.p.g. in the city and 34 m.p.g. on the highway. That's largely because of technology that shuts down up to half the cylinders when they are not needed. In 191 miles of mostly freeway driving, I got 28.7 m.p.g. So the Accord is quick, yes. But sporty? No. The suspension is softly tuned and relies on modest 17 inch all season tires that are built for fuel economy and comfort, not ultimate adhesion. With almost two thirds of its weight on the front wheels, the Accord will push its nose through corners. The electrically assisted power steering has a light and precise feel, but it's not particularly quick. Four wheel antilock disc brakes are aboard, but the lazy tires and an unloaded weight of more than 3,500 pounds conspire against particularly short stopping distances. The basic designs of midsize sedans are so similar that it's tempting to lump them together and assume that each is as good as the others just go with the one that has the most features you like. And almost all of the cars in this market segment are very good. But this new Accord is excellent. The lackluster Civic introduced last year made me question whether Honda had strayed from its true path. This Accord restores my faith in the company's chi. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Stefan Herheim, one of opera's most innovative directors, on the grounds of the Glyndebourne Festival in England, where he is staging Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande." When his productions fulfill his visions, the viewers can't ignore what's happening, Mr. Herheim, one of opera's most innovative stage directors, said. "That's a feeling I absolutely adore, when the audience doesn't just lean back and agree, 'This is lovely, this is beautiful, this is happiness, this is exactly what we expected.'" What he expects is for them "not to be bored," he added in an interview after a rehearsal for Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande" at the Glyndebourne Festival here; his much anticipated staging opened on June 30. Bored, watching a Herheim show? Never. Dazzled, yes. Bewildered, probably. Over the past 15 years, he has become celebrated for immensely complicated stagings of works we thought we knew, like "La Boheme," "Parsifal" and "Les Contes d'Hoffmann," that are both bombastic spectacles and intellectual disquisitions. They're full of blinding coups de theatre but replete, too, with playful minutiae you might see only on your fifth time around. They create glittering collisions between a work, its history and our expectations of it. Born in Oslo, Mr. Herheim, 48, practically has opera in his blood. As a young boy, he sat at the side of his father, a violist, in the pit at the Norwegian National Opera. At about 6, he started putting on his own productions at home, using puppets. As he grew, he studied the cello and helped out at the opera house as a production assistant, learning how a company operates behind the scenes. He set up a puppet opera theater that toured Norway. By 1994, he was studying in Hamburg, under the influential director Gotz Friedrich. Nine years later, he won a prestigious directing prize named after his teacher. "Stefan Herheim is the rare stage director who can have his cake and eat it, too," Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said in an email. "He meets the demands of the cynics who think the only good stagings are radical ones, while never abandoning his excellent narrative storytelling skills." Mr. Gelb added that the Met plans to bring Mr. Herheim's production of Verdi's "Les Vepres Siciliennes," which originated in London in 2013, to New York in a future season. For a time, it looked as if Mr. Herheim would make his Met debut in 2019 20, with a reprise of a fanciful "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" that wowed the Salzburg Festival in 2013. It was one of several notable Wagner productions that cemented his reputation, most important among them a "Parsifal" at the Bayreuth Festival in 2008. But the Met's "Meistersinger" was not to be; it was canceled after problems arose in redesigning the sets for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, another of the producers. Mr. Herheim is perhaps not a natural fit for the Met. He has an apt taste for extravagance, but Franco Zeffirelli he is not. While his stagings are intensely musical during "Pelleas" rehearsal, in which he was a busy, perfectionist presence, one was struck by the sheer number of scores in use, by the precision with which the singers' movements were tied to the sense of the notes they are vertiginously complex. Mr. Herheim creates a kind of meta opera, telling multiple stories at once by layering a work's cultural context and reception history on top of its plot. Much of his artistic philosophy takes aim at opera's conservative traits particularly its unquestioning fetish for the past. "Traditionalists," Mr. Herheim said, "will say, 'Why don't you do it as it was supposed to be?' Of course, you can do that, but that's not the point of art. This is music that wants to be transferred, and wants to have an immediate effect on your life." Art, Mr. Herheim said, is "about grabbing away everything that seems so solid, which we stand on, to make us fall through and say that, actually, this is where we come from. Here we find a lot of dead bodies, and we shouldn't celebrate them. It's our demons that we trace, when we mirror ourselves in art." That mirror is not just a metaphor for him, but a matter of stagecraft. At the end of Mr. Herheim's "Parsifal" which made famous his multilinear style by simultaneously relating Wagner's plot, the history of the Bayreuth Festival and Germany's tortured past a giant mirror turned to face the public as the redemption music played. Like many of this director's productions, it asked what the audience would do with what they had seen. "For me," Mr. Herheim said, "the history of music this last 100 years is a catastrophe." No fan of extreme atonality, he praises composers now working in warmer idioms, and singles out Thomas Ades. His diagnosis is otherwise bleak. (He will get a broader canvas for his repertory choices as the artistic director, starting in 2022, of the brave Theater an der Wien in Vienna.) "We are a bit lost culturally," Mr. Herheim said. "We are reproducing a quite narrow repertoire of dramatic music. It turns into directors' becoming what earlier the composers were, because we are trapped in this situation, having to tell these old stories again and again and again, forcing ourselves often to be perhaps too original." That struggle to remain faithful to a work's spirit, while saying something new challenged him in "Pelleas," he said, because "the piece is so conceptual, and on its own terms, that it's hard to be smarter than it." After rejecting the idea of putting the characters on a spaceship, Mr. Herheim eventually decided to set the opera in a replica of the Glyndebourne manor's organ room, an echo of others of his productions placed specifically in the milieu in which they'll be seen. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
For eager newcomers trying to hustle a life in New York City, there are certain time honored means of staying afloat: foaming lattes as a barista, selling books at the Strand, or shepherding spaniels as a paid dog walker. Now, it seems, they can add to that list professional cuddler. In recent years, cuddling billed as therapeutic, nonsexual touch on sites like the Snuggle Buddies and Cuddlist has become the latest thing in wellness, beyond yoga and meditation. A quasi movement that dates back more than a decade thanks to snuggle mixers sponsored by the nonprofit group Cuddle Party has morphed into a cuddle for hire industry of one on one sessions. For 79, practitioners who sign up for Cuddlist, for example, receive about 10 hours of training. Once trained, pro cuddlers promise a physical and psychic salve through spooning, arm tickling and deep embraces. Think of it as a blend of talk therapy, yoga and improvisational bodywork, the free jazz equivalent of massage. One such practitioner, at 80 an hour, is Brianna Quijada, a 30 year old native of Tempe, Ariz., who moved to New York in 2008 and lives in Astoria, Queens. A manager at a vegan restaurant on the Upper East Side by day, she recently discussed her second career on the Cuddlist network, plying the world's newest profession by night. This interview has been edited and condensed. Why did you move to New York? I was successful at acting and performance in Arizona and even had my singing audition air on a season of "American Idol." My entire life I was told I had potential, and to me there was no better place to discover that than New York City. But I became very unhappy with auditioning and daunted by the competition. That's why it was great to find something new. How did you first hear about cuddling? A friend of mine had mentioned it. It was casual: "I think you'd like a cuddle party." I was like, "Do they exist?" Sounds very swingerish. Is it like a key party? It's nonsexual, so there's rules in place, like keeping your clothes on the whole time. They're usually held in a yoga type studio, with yoga mats, pillows, blankets. You come in, take off your shoes, put a name tag on. The first 45 minutes are icebreakers: getting to know each other, going over rules about consent, communication. What is the value of touch? When I experience consensual touch, I am more in my body, I'm more comfortable. It's like a feeling of being understood. It raises your oxytocin, it calms the fight or flight response. At the same time, there's a feeling of vulnerability, so it's a really interesting way to connect. What kind of people go to a cuddling party? It's people from different walks of life, most of them in their mid 30s to mid 50s. One man I met went to Burning Man several times. But then there are people in the corporate world. There are also a lot of varsity cuddlers there to help. It's your imagination; there's no limit. Me, specifically, I loved being able to put my head in someone's lap, and having my hair played with. I love being the big spoon. I like little arm tickles. And the ears. The ears are awesome, just to play with them. Or even playing footsie, that's one, too. It's seriously like drugs. You're done with the party and you're stoned from the cuddling. So why did you make the leap to one on one cuddling? I always felt I was the kind of person who could make people comfortable with me. I thought I could be good at this, if it's legit. What do private clients ask for? It could be hand holding, synchronized breathing, eye gazing. I've done cuddling while sitting, whether it's an embrace, holding hands, or their head in my lap, or standing and holding each other. They come to me for relaxation. I don't host sessions where I live, so I've been renting rooms at Breather which rents meeting rooms by the hour in Midtown and Union Square. They're basically small conference rooms with a white board and a futon or couch. I've also gone to people's places and hotel rooms. A lot of people don't want to host, so they'll get a room, even though they live in the area. Aren't you afraid to go to a hotel room alone? There's always that little bit of fear. There was more in the beginning. But I screen people really well. There's a safety protocol. I talk to people on the phone or Skype, or meet them at coffee shops. But I don't go into it thinking people are going to be creepy anymore. Do clients ever try to get frisky? We start off by agreeing if at any point either one of us is uncomfortable with anything, we're going to speak up, so that takes that off our minds. I basically say my boundaries, that I'm not comfortable being touched in any areas that would be covered by a two piece bathing suit, basically. Someone once asked me to wear shorts, and I wasn't comfortable with that. That's like the worst of it. What do you do when clients become noticeably aroused? Sexual arousal happens, and it is a natural human reaction. The idea is not to encourage it or manipulate it by simply changing positions. Taking a break, and talking about how we are feeling in the moment can help redirect our energy back to agenda free cuddling. What was your first session like? My very first client ever was a younger man, maybe 19. He was in college. It was sweet. He wanted to hold me. That's what we did for the whole time. We listened to a Jack Johnson playlist, and he talked about school. Why not just get a massage? For massage, there's this feeling that you're being worked on and healed. It's not mutual. It's a completely different energy with cuddling. It's a mutual, consensual experience, consensual, not in the sense of, "Sure, I'll do that," but in the sense that both people want what's happening. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
SIN CHA HONG at La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theater (May 25, 7 p.m.; May 26, 3 p.m.). The 13th annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival features eclectic local and global artists and is curated, as it was from the beginning, by Nicky Paraiso. This week Hong returns from South Korea to New York, where she spent 20 years dancing and choreographing. On this visit, she brings "Mirror," a work in which she wonders, "Who am I?" It's a question she poses to the audience as well, and one she attempts to answer through quiet, contemplative gestures in a minimalist American modern dance tradition that is also shaped also by Korean folk dance and her years of studying meditation in India. 212 475 7710, lamama.org NIALL JONES at the Chocolate Factory (May 27 June 1, 8 p.m.). Jones's new work, "Fantasies in Low Fade," explores ideas about temporal and spatial transitions and human proximity by allowing the audience to experience both. Viewers begin in the Chocolate Factory's basement to observe Jones and two other performers up close before being guided upstairs to two distinct areas, each with its own unique visual design and expressive, sometimes intense lighting. The process of moving through the space, inhabiting its changing scenes and many moods, is meant to evoke the shifting nature of social life. 718 482 7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org LIMON DANCE COMPANY at the Joyce Theater (May 29, 7:30 p.m.; May 30 31, 8 p.m.; through June 2). This company, founded in 1946, preserves the works of Jose Limon, the Mexican born pillar of American modern dance. This season's offerings include "The Moor's Pavane," a 20 minute take on "Othello" from 1949 that is one of Limon's most enduring works, and "Psalm," an ensemble work from 1967 that was revamped in 2002. Joining these are "The Weather in the Room" by the company's artistic director, Colin Connor, and "Radical Beasts in the Forest of Possibilities" by Francesca Harper. 212 242 0800, joyce.org NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater (through June 2). After a few more performances of the "All Balanchine" program, which includes "Scotch Symphony" and "Sonatine" (Friday and Saturday evening), and another program called "Symphonic Electronic," with works by Balanchine and Justin Peck (the Saturday and Sunday matinees), City Ballet heads into the final stretch of its spring season with performances of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," beginning on Tuesday. Balanchine's 1962 take on Shakespeare's rom com features a beloved patchwork score by Felix Mendelssohn, as well as all the requisite fairies, frolicking and enchanting pas de deux that remind us how well ballet is suited for conveying the meeting of magic and love. 212 496 0600, nycballet.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Hidden pyramids and massive fortresses in the jungle. Farms and canals scattered across swamplands. Highways traversing thickets of rain forest. These are among more than 61,000 ancient Mayan structures swallowed by overgrowth in the tropical lowlands of Guatemala that archaeologists have finally uncovered using a laser mapping technology called lidar. The discoveries, published Thursday in Science, provide a snapshot of how the ancient Maya altered the landscape around them for more than 2,500 years from about 1000 B.C. to 1500 A.D., and may change what archaeologists thought they knew about aspects of the ancient society's population size, agricultural practices and conflicts between warring dynasties. The ancient Maya flourished in what is today southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras. They left behind a rich written history painted and inscribed on wood, stone and ceramics. Detailed in their intricate hieroglyphics were tales of kings, queens and war. "You're looking at a series of kingdoms all involved in this 'Game of Thrones' political story where they are marrying, fighting, killing each other and backstabbing," said Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College and an author of the paper. "Lidar reveals the stage in which these dramas recorded in texts played out." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Outside a securities firm in Tokyo on Thursday as the Nikkei index dipped to its lowest level since early April. HONG KONG The battered Japanese stock market lurched into bear market territory Thursday, after a tumble of 6.4 percent took the combined decline in the Nikkei 225 index since a peak on May 23 to more than 21 percent. A pronounced sell off in the morning and early afternoon accelerated shortly before the markets closed in Tokyo. The Nikkei ended down more than 840 points at 12,445.38, its lowest level since early April. Global markets reacted badly at first, with the Euro Stoxx 50, a benchmark for euro zone blue chips, down almost 2 percent in morning trading. But European shares later recovered most of their losses, and stocks on Wall Street opened quietly after new reports showed recent improvements in the American economy. The drop in Japan on Thursday was one of many sharp declines seen in recent weeks, since a feverish six month rally in Japanese stocks incited by optimism over the government's aggressive efforts to reinvigorate the listless economy came to an abrupt end. The Nikkei 225 soared more than 80 percent between mid November and mid May, but staged a sudden about face with a 7.3 percent plunge on May 23. Sentiment has been fragile and trading volatile ever since, as investors have taken stock of the challenges that face "Abenomics," the economic policies of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and weighed the pros and cons of taking profits after the rally. A renewed rise in the yen also has eroded a factor that, for months, had worked to support Japanese stocks. The yen weakened substantially between November and May a welcome development for Japanese exporters as it made their goods less expensive for customers overseas. But the currency's move, like that of the stock market, reversed in late May. On Thursday, the yen traded around 94.00 to the American dollar, its strongest level since early April. In Tokyo, Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet secretary, brushed off the market plunge. "I feel it's important not to swing from joy to sorrow every time stock prices rise or fall, and keep on doing what we need to do," Mr. Suga said at a news conference Thursday morning, as shares fell. "The Japanese economy is steadily improving.'' The Bank of Japan governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, met with Mr. Abe on Thursday to exchange views on the economy, according to local news reports. Mr. Abe told the governor he was determined to do his part in putting a growth plan into action, Mr. Kuroda later told reporters. Mr. Kuroda told the prime minister that the central bank was committed to supporting the Japanese economy through monetary stimulus. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Mr. Kuroda also said he expected markets to soon "calm down to reflect positive developments in the economy," according to the Nikkei Web site. On Monday, the Japanese government revised its first quarter gross domestic product figures, saying its economy grew at an annualized pace of 4.1 percent between January and March, better than the 3.5 percent it initially reported. But that upgrade has not been enough to calm investor jitters. Factors beyond Japan also have helped send markets lower around the world. In China, which is a key engine of global growth, the flow of economic data in recent weeks has reinforced the picture of an economy that is struggling to regain momentum. And in the United States, comments on May 22 by Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, that he and his colleagues might consider paring back their bond buying programs "in the next few meetings" if the economy shows signs of improvement have helped fan global nervousness. Investors and analysts have struggled to assess the implications of even a small withdrawal of the bond buying that has supported markets in recent years. In the United States, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard Poor's 500 stock index have sagged 3.2 percent and 4 percent, respectively, in the past three weeks. The DAX in Germany has fallen about 4.5 percent and the CAC 40 in France has dropped more than 6 percent. Key markets in the Asia Pacific region have tumbled even more. The Straits Times index in Singapore and the S. P./ASX 200 in Australia have lost more than 9 percent since May 22, and in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng has shed more than 10 percent. A pessimistic outlook issued Wednesday by the World Bank added to the gloom, with Kaushik Basu, the bank's chief economist, noting in a news release that "the slowdown in the real economy is turning out to be unusually protracted." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Don't get too excited about the prospect of Steve Coogan playing an American right wing radio host. The British actor's comic wings are clipped in this sincere but unwieldy film about an abrasive radio personality whose heretofore unknown African American teenage niece shows up at his fancy New York City apartment. Tess (Taylor Russell) has left home after her mother returned to rehab, and while the by the bootstraps blowhard Lionel Macomb (Coogan) doesn't believe in handouts or charity or even kindness, he reluctantly lets her stay. His publicist and girlfriend Valerie (Neve Campbell) is nicer to the girl, and soon, points of view are being challenged and upsetting family memories are being unearthed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Because a room with a view has always been preferable to one without, the price of air in New York City is becoming more expensive. Yes, the air is for sale, but not on sale. And not the dodgy urban air the city's eight million inhabitants breathe as they scurry around the boulevards, but the rarefied and fast disappearing air overhead where condominium towers do not fear to tread, and rooms with sunlit windows can make the lucrative difference between a legal three bedroom residence and a mere two bedroom with a den/office. With Manhattan's skyscraper proof bedrock in finite supply and the city's fixation on housing and envelope pushing office buildings on the upswing and also the impetus behind the proposed rezoning of 70 blocks around Grand Central Terminal called Midtown East the sky is not only the limit, it's the solution. Ubiquitous developers about town like Gary Barnett, Harry B. Macklowe and the Zeckendorf brothers are all not so secret members of the air appreciation society. "When I tell people outside of New York that I'm buying air from other building owners, they look at me as if I've lost my mind," said Kenneth S. Horn, the president of Alchemy Properties. His 18 story Isis Condominium at 303 East 77th Street acquired air rights from two adjacent tenements; it cantilevers eight feet above the roofs of both of them beginning at the sixth floor. The payoff for this complex and expensive undertaking is 360 degree views, more spacious apartments, abundant light and higher resale value. "If the real estate gods line up," Mr. Horn said, "and I find a site in a friendly neighborhood where I can and do buy air rights, and then let's say I can't build any higher, but if they let me cantilever, I can create views and add square footage to my project." Air rights are, in actuality, not fluffy chunks of available or orphaned air. They are unused or excess development rights gauged, like building density or lot size, by the square foot and transferable, when zoning permits it, from one buildable lot to another. They have become the reigning currency of the redevelopment realm, major components in the radical vertical transformation of the city's skyline. These days developers don't just tailor their blueprints to the lot they own: they often annex, for fees that can run into the multimillions, the airspace above and around their property. The process, essentially an invisible merger of building lots that tranlates into taller, heftier towers with increased profitability, is emerging from a minislump dictated by the economy. "The trading of air rights is more prevalent than it's ever been before," said Robert Von Ancken, an air rights expert and appraiser who is the chairman of Landauer Valuation and Advisory Services, "and it's why you're seeing these monster buildings springing up all over town. All of these new supertowers that are changing the look of the city's horizon, they couldn't happen without air rights transfers." Unless the property doing the selling is a designated city landmark, these deals are usually restricted to properties that share at least 10 feet of lot line. Landmarks can sell their unused air rights to neighbors across the street or down the block. Not all small fry neighbors opt to sell: "We get turned down more often than not," said Michael Namer, the chief executive of Alfa Development, who bought air rights to expand two of his downtown condominium projects, the eight story, 36 unit Village Green on East 11th Street, and the nearly completed 14 story, 51 unit Chelsea Green on West 21st Street. Both are in height restricted neighborhoods. "There are people who believe in skyscrapers and people who don't," he added, "and you can't do the Hudson Rail Yards and you can't do One57 without air rights, but that's not really the issue. The city Planning Department has taken steps to ensure that the way we sculpt our city is something that makes sense in terms of light and air. The reason behind the big increase in air rights trades is that, bottom line, they can make the difference between a marginal and a profitable project." Post recession, the air above New York City is its own best marketing tool. "It's coming back with a vengeance," said Robert A. Jacobs, a land use specialist and partner at Belkin Burden Wenig Goldman. "The technology available is such that if you're a developer of a residential property you should build as high as you can, because you get the higher sales price for the higher floors. The race to accumulate light easements and air rights is tied to the mandate for these high priced condos to offer views worthy of the purchase price," added Mr. Jacobs, who lectures on air rights at the city bar association. If there is a danger inherent in them, it is the potential, Mr. Jacobs mused, for a city dominated by towers that overshadow the rest of the landscape. "Is the future of the city going to be this series of 200 story towers with stultified buildings in between?" he asked. "You wonder how this will affect the street life, the trees. You wonder about urban plazas surrounded by 50 story walls: what would grow there, mushrooms?" Before 1916, air and light were not an inalienable right of New Yorkers, but since then zoning rules have imposed varying height restrictions on new construction. The concept of air rights, also called transferable development rights (T.D.R.'s), as a salable commodity came about after a 1961 revamping of city zoning regulations that established density quotas for every block. The restrictions are defined by the ratio of floor area to lot size; the floor area ratio (F.A.R.) determines a building's permissible bulk and varies by zone as well as by its position on a block or boulevard. Corner and boulevard sites have fewer restrictions than side streets, particularly in matters of height. As Donald J. Trump demonstrated with his 72 story black glass tower at 845 United Nations Plaza, which was at one time the tallest residential building in the city, it is possible for a tower to, well, tower over its neighbors if it has successfully transferred sufficient air rights. Mr. Trump performed a dominolike maneuver and legally stockpiled air rights from at least seven low rise properties that had F.A.R. to spare, merging their lots with his. Then presto he maxed out the block's allowable density in the form of a single slender tower. Controversial when it was built, Trump World Tower has its defenders. "You could subscribe to the theory that towers like these are the Empire State Buildings of the 21st century," said Joshua Stein, a prominent commercial real estate lawyer. "In the real estate market," he added, "some projects are very buffeted by the economic winds and some aren't, but residential development projects are often the first to get buffeted. And now we're in a market where people are developing again, which is why we're talking about development rights again. Whenever you see a potential rezoning, like we're seeing with Midtown East, you create unused development potential: you're dumping a whole lot of untapped value on property owners." In the last six months of 2012, Robert I. Shapiro, the president of City Center Real Estate, a brokerage that specializes in land assemblage and development rights deals, was involved in the negotiations of 11 transactions totaling 291,623 square feet of air rights, with an aggregate worth of 75 million in sales. He has, he said, been busy. "That's what I do for a living, I sell air, and there is a lot more to doing air rights deals than knocking on the door of the guy who owns the property next door," he said. "The art of land assemblage and the acquisition of air rights is a high stakes poker game, and because some of these transactions can take a decade or more to complete, you need the patience of Job." The accumulation of air rights for 432 Park Avenue, the site of the former Drake Hotel and the future site of the city's tallest residential tower at 95 stories, began back in 2004, even before the involvement of Mr. Macklowe, who visualized the luxury skyscraper, and CIM Group of Los Angeles, which now owns the property. When the Host Marriott Corporation sold the site to Mr. Macklowe for 418.3 million in 2006, it had already acquired nearly 115,000 square feet of buildable air rights, according to Mr. Shapiro. Perfect fodder for an 82.55 million penthouse. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Supply and demand dictate the price of air rights: 20 years ago, 45 a square foot was considered a reasonable fee, but in recent years the norm in prime neighborhoods has crept toward 450 a square foot. According to one real estate professional, along the High Line corridor, a 21st century development rights hot spot, the air rights of a low rise building desired by a high rise condominium traded for more than the land beneath it. "There's a price on everything in New York, and the air is no exception," said Ross F. Moskowitz, a partner at Stroock Stroock Lavan who specializes in land use and zoning. "From the viewpoint of real estate, air is simply invisible land, because you can build on it. Sometimes the air above, behind, to the left or right is worth far more than the building that carries the rights to it; it's a potential pot of gold for many properties. It's found money." Think of One57, the unfinished Midtown juggernaut that soars 90 stories above 57th Street; two duplexes there have already sold for more than 90 million each. Its developer, Gary Barnett of Extell, who is generally considered the grandmaster of the chess game that empowers air rights assemblages, spent more than 15 years, and umpteen millions, buying up unused air rights from a string of smaller properties surrounding his tower. His objective: vertiginous height accompanied by this city's notion of priceless perfection: enhanced Central Park views. One of Mr. Barnett's stops along the way to piling up the mountain of air rights that helped make his trophy tower possible was Joyce Manor, a 10 story prewar co op at 140 West 58th Street. When Amy Casey moved into a tiny penthouse there in 2004, she was told that it came with air rights attached; she envisioned someday expanding her 600 square foot space, perhaps creating a duplex with enhanced views of Carnegie Hall. She found out her air rights were worthless in terms of personal expansion: zoning did not permit it. But the aggregate air rights owned by the co op were salable, and Mr. Barnett was buying. "I owned something that was worthless to me," said Ms. Casey, a vice president of Halstead Property, "but when One57 came along, we sold our air rights to Gary Barnett just like every other midrise on the block. I didn't get money in my pocket, but our co op got 5 million, so it was a win win in the end." Well, not quite. "Now One57 blocks my view of Carnegie Hall." Bolstered by the recovery of the condominium market, with developers tripping over one another to build ever taller and more luxurious residential towers, air rights deals are buzzing again, after having foundered along with the market in 2008. That is why the Alexico Group, the developer in 2007 of a 57 story condominium tower at 56 Leonard Street designed by Herzog de Meuron, agreed to pay New York Law School 150 million for the land and air rights to the site. When completed (construction had stalled during the recession), it will have extra bragging rights, as the tallest, and presumably the most luxurious, condominium in that neighborhood, with prices from 3 million to 35 million. Hines came on board as a co developer of the project in September 2011. For a new TriBeCa condominium development of somewhat less gargantuan proportions, the Warren Lofts, an 11 story building at 37 Warren Street, Sonny Bazbaz, the president of Bazbaz Development, found himself suddenly in need of an additional air and light easement. Mr. Bazbaz bought the building, which was in foreclosure, for 15.5 million in 2011; his plan was to offer 14 apartments in the original seven story loft building and four floor through three bedroom penthouses in an ultramodern four story addition perched on the roof. But when he approached the Department of Buildings about marketing his penthouses, he was informed that three of the four were ineligible as three bedroom units because bedroom windows faced a lot line and could, technically, end up being blocked by a wall. So he needed more air rights, and fast. "Three bedroom apartments sell at a premium in TriBeCa," Mr. Bazbaz said, "and besides, who really wants a two bedroom penthouse? I had thought the previous transfer of T.D.R.'s from a building at 37 Murray included the light and air easement, but it turns out it hadn't." He went to 37 Murray with an offer of 80,000 and was rebuffed. "They told me they wouldn't sign anything for less than a million dollars," he said. "So I took a look at 41 Murray, which is adjacent to the rear of 37 Warren." End of story: he got the easement for 400,000 and an unexpected bonus. He was able to apply the easement to nine units that had bedroom windows facing 41 Murray, which agreed not to build taller and block them. Mr. Shapiro of City Center Real Estate has negotiated both sides of air rights transfers for nearly 50 years. "It can be very much like playing three card monte," he said. "Air rights are like the tail wagging the dog, and to understand them, you've got to understand every nuance of New York City zoning." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
At least over the summer, shows will have no intermissions, to reduce the likelihood of lines for bathrooms, and there will be no matinees, to allow plenty of time for disinfecting. The box office will be moved outside, where there is more room than in the theater lobby. And all ticket holders will be required to wear masks. "I wanted to see if I could find a way to do live theater, because that's where my heart and soul are," said the artistic director, Julianne Boyd, who was a founder of the company in 1995. "Toward the end of summer, some people may want to go out. And it's important to me to make the attempt." Boyd said she does not expect to make money with this plan ticket prices will be slightly lower than usual but she hopes the productions will break even because of low running costs. Barrington Stage is not the only theater that will try to present shows this summer. The Berkshire Theater Group nearby hopes to begin an abbreviated season in August, while in St. Louis, the Muny is imagining an abridged season starting in July. And it remains unclear how theaters in states with relatively low numbers of coronavirus cases will proceed as restrictions are lifted in those areas. But Barrington is among the first to detail such an exhaustive set of programming and physical modifications as it tries to envision how live performance might continue during a period in which large assemblies are considered high risk. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LONDON "Coronation Street," Britain's (and the world's) longest running soap opera, which has chronicled working class life near Manchester, England, since 1960, is introducing the first black family in the history of the series. "Say hello to the Bailey family," the show's producers said in an announcement on Saturday. "A brand new family moving to Weatherfield in June this year!" they added, referring to the fictional town based on Salford, an industrial city about two miles west of the center of Manchester. The announcement did not address the family's race or ethnicity, but the show's network, ITV, said the black family would be the show's first. To many observers, the addition, while welcome, came astonishingly late for a show, known as "Corrie," that debuted in December 1960 and that has been watched by up to a third of the British public including, reports say, Queen Elizabeth II. "How have the producers managed to get away with this for almost 60 years?" Matthew Xia, a theater director, told The Guardian, saying he was stunned it had taken so long for the show to reflect Manchester's multicultural character. "It's about time, a street right in the heart of Manchester and they've never had a black family live there," one Twitter user, Carly Purland Goodey, wrote on Saturday. For decades, the set where the show was filmed was in central Manchester. In the 1970s and '80s, the show was broadcast in the United States, first on public television to a lukewarm reception, and then on cable. The show's producer, Ian MacLeod, told ITV News that he did not know why the soap took so long to introduce a black family. "Manchester has a large proportion of black residents, so it did feel sort of overdue we did this and represented modern Manchester a bit more accurately," Mr. MacLeod said. "Coronation Street" has had individual characters who are black or members of other racial and ethnic groups before. In 2013, a character of Pakistani origin appeared, followed shortly by members of his family, the Nazirs. (In 2016, Marc Anwar, who portrayed the father, Sharif Nazir, was fired over anti India posts on Twitter.) The series, based on the residents of fictional Coronation Street, has been a British favorite for years alongside "EastEnders," set in East London, and "Emmerdale," set in Yorkshire. The story lines revolve around lives that viewers can easily identify with and have produced quotations and characters that are firmly engraved in British culture. The shows have given rise to some of the most popular television celebrities in the country, including Pat Phoenix, who played the glamorous Elsie Tanner on "Coronation Street," and Barbara Windsor, who appeared as Peggy Mitchell, the protective pub owner in "EastEnders." Both shows are so iconic that they appear in guides to British culture that applicants for citizenship have to study to take the test. "Coronation" was anointed the world's longest running TV soap when "As the World Turns" aired its last episode in 2010 on CBS, according to the Guinness World Records. In recent years, soap operas have seen a decline in viewership, according to a report published in 2018 by the Office of Communications, or Ofcom, Britain's telecom regulator. In 2007, "EastEnders," "Coronation Street" and "Emmerdale" averaged 8.7 million viewers among them. By 2017, that figure had dropped to 6.9 million, the report said. In contrast with the aspirational settings and improbable plots of American soaps, the British shows have lured viewers by portraying daily life with all its difficulties, such as joblessness, poverty and raising children as single parents. Still, their plot lines have been criticized for being nostalgic for a bygone era and tone deaf to the changes in modern Britain. The addition of the new family to "Coronation Street" appeared to be an attempt to address those issues, especially with the character of James Bailey, the 19 year old younger son played by Nathan Graham. A talented footballer, the character will face the challenges of coming out as gay to his family and teammates. The rest of the family includes the father, Edison, a builder, played by Trevor Michael Georges; the mother, Aggie, a pharmacy assistant, played by Lorna Laidlaw; and the older son, Michael, played by Ryan Russell. The new family will make its debut on the show in June. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
'This Close' Is by and About Deaf People, but That's Only the Beginning LOS ANGELES The need for more diversity in Hollywood is a popular topic of conversation these days. But at least one group tends to get left out of the discussion. "There have been some deaf characters on television, but they are usually there so the hearing characters can learn something from them," Josh Feldman said. "And then they send the deaf characters back into the shadows." He said it with his hands. Sitting in a mellow cafe on a dilapidated strip of Melrose Avenue, he and his writing partner, Shoshannah Stern, carved shapes in the air to tell animated stories, volleys of sign language zinging across the table between them and their two interpreters. It was at this cafe that the pair first conceived a comic web series about two deaf best friends like themselves living in Los Angeles. On a warm winter morning three years later, they returned to discuss the television show that resulted from it: "This Close," debuting Wednesday, Feb. 14, on SundanceTV's streaming platform, Sundance Now. Created, written by and starring Ms. Stern and Mr. Feldman, the show follows the adventures of two deaf pals in Los Angeles. But the characters' deafness figures as just one sliver of an effervescent dramedy about friendship, romance, sex and ambition, its sweet but gritty tone inspired by series like "Looking," "Girls" and "Transparent." Kate (Ms. Stern) is an exuberant entertainment publicist determined to make her way in the world without any special accommodations; neither her boss (Cheryl Hines) nor her fiance (Zach Gilford) make much effort to use sign language, expecting Kate to keep up with their conversation. Michael (Mr. Feldman) is a melancholy gay graphic novelist tortured by writer's block and trying to blot out the pain of a broken relationship with liquor and sex. The six episode show is adapted from "Fridays," Ms. Stern's and Mr. Feldman's rom comish web series that so impressed Sundance the channel decided to make "This Close" the debut offering for its new digital streaming service. "I thought to myself, have I ever seen a show where the characters are deaf but it doesn't define them?" said Jan Diedrichsen, Sundance Now's general manager. "This felt like a fully realized vision of a life where deafness was just one part of it." Ms. Stern grew up in the Bay Area dreaming of becoming an actor, even though there were few deaf role models on screen. For her seventh birthday she asked her mother for an agent. (The answer was no.) Later, during her senior year at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts college for the deaf in Washington D.C., she flew to Los Angeles for an audition and decided to stay. "I thought, I will just convince people that it would be interesting to see me on screen and that it won't matter that I'm deaf," she recalled, signing emphatically. Ms. Stern's first major role came as an antiterrorism expert in the short lived 2003 ABC series "Threat Matrix," and she has since become one of the most visible deaf actresses in Hollywood, appearing in series like "Weeds, "Lie to Me" and "Supernatural." "I was always the sole deaf person on set," she said. She met Mr. Feldman, an aspiring novelist and screenwriter, through mutual friends, and tried to help him get a foothold in Hollywood as a writer's assistant. But people were generally unwilling to meet with him. "They would ask, 'How would we communicate with him?' and 'How can he write dialogue if he doesn't speak?,'" Ms. Stern said. She decided that one way to change ideas about deafness, on screen and off, was for the duo to collaborate on a script. Mr. Feldman had never tried to write a deaf character, he said, because "I thought no one would want to pay for anything that had deaf people in it." But Ms. Stern inspired him to try, and the result was "Fridays." After shooting a pilot for 250 with themselves in the lead roles, the duo put it on Kickstarter, hoping to raise enough cash to produce four episodes for YouTube. Pledges quickly shot past their 6,000 goal, much of the money donated by people who weren't deaf, Ms. Stern said. Also intrigued was Super Deluxe, an entertainment company owned by Turner. Super Deluxe produced five polished web episodes and screened them at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where Mr. Diedrichsen saw in the show's "singular vision" an ideal original series for Sundance Now. Ms. Stern and Mr. Feldman revamped the concept to delve into pricklier emotional territory, with the help of the director Andrew Ahn ("Spa Night"). Much of the material in "This Close" feels universal: Love affairs blossom and shatter, family members create emotional turmoil. But some of the stories naturally hinge on deaf specific experiences, like a harrowing scene based on something that actually happened to Ms. Stern's brother in which a drunk Michael is yanked off an airplane, utterly confused and unable to communicate with airport police. At the center of the show is Kate and Michael's codependent friendship, which sometimes leaves hearing characters feeling left out. "We did a lot of two shots so that you could see both Josh and Shoshannah signing together," Mr. Ahn said. "It makes it feel like they are in a bubble of their own." Making television from the perspective of deaf characters forced everyone involved to rethink the usual ways of doing things. "So much of narrative filmmaking convention is based in a hearing world, but if you have a super tight close up, you won't see the hands," Mr. Ahn said. The director shot from low angles in order to capture both the characters' faces and their signing hands. Offscreen dialogue was mostly eliminated because "to understand a line, you need to see it," he said. The production also hired many deaf crew members and actors (among them Marlee Matlin, who plays Michael's mother). "It changed the rhythm of shooting a little bit, because you have interpreters at all times," Ms. Hines said. "But it's like when you shoot in Montreal and the crew speaks French it feels different but becomes normal very quickly." One of the elements Ms. Stern was most interested in experimenting with was, perhaps surprisingly, sound. Movies and TV shows often portray the deaf perspective in terms of dead silence. But even when Ms. Stern turns her hearing aids off, she said, "I am always feeling the blood pulsing through my veins and I am aware of what is happening inside of myself. That is my sound, and it is not a lack. It feels full to me, and I want to represent that through the soundscape of the show." In one episode, viewers get a hint of how ordinary conversation filters through to Kate's ears: as a confusing muddle of staticky noise. However Michael, like Mr. Feldman, is profoundly deaf his relationship to sound comes via its physical vibrations. This is expressed most strongly in a scene in a gay club, where he shimmies ecstatically, immersed in the sensuality of thumping bass all around him. A novice actor, Mr. Feldman flinched when he realized that he would have to strip for a graphic group sex scene. He had only himself to blame after all, he was a co writer in the episode in question. "I knew that I had to do it, and I didn't want it to be inspirational sex or sweet, tender sex," he said, explaining that he "wanted it to be dark" to help ensure that the characters would not be mistaken for idealized role models. "We don't want to feel we have to educate people or represent our community well," he said. "We just want to tell a story about two people who are deaf." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Gravediggers at the Vila Formosa Cemetery buried victims of Covid 19 in Sao Paulo last month. Despite the scale of the pandemic, researchers still are uncertain how lethal the coronavirus is. More than six months into the pandemic, the coronavirus has infected more than 11 million people worldwide, killing more than 525,000. But despite the increasing toll, scientists still do not have a definitive answer to one of the most fundamental questions about the virus: How deadly is it? A firm estimate could help governments predict how many deaths would ensue if the virus spread out of control. The figure, usually called the infection fatality rate, could tell health officials what to expect as the pandemic spreads to densely populated nations like Brazil, Nigeria and India. In even poorer countries, where lethal threats like measles and malaria are constant and where hard budget choices are routine, the number could help officials decide whether to spend more on oxygen concentrators or ventilators, or on measles shots and mosquito nets. The question became even more complex last month, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data suggesting that for every documented infection in the United States, there were 10 other cases on average that had gone unrecorded, probably because they were very mild or asymptomatic. If there are many more asymptomatic infections than once thought, then the virus may be less deadly than it has appeared. But even that calculation is a difficult one. On Thursday, after the World Health Organization held a two day online meeting of 1,300 scientists from around the world, the agency's chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, said the consensus for now was that the I.F.R. is about 0.6 percent which means that the risk of death is less than 1 percent. Although she did not note this, 0.6 percent of the world's population is 47 million people, and 0.6 percent of the American population is 2 million people. The virus remains a major threat. At present, countries have very different case fatality rates, or C.F.R.'s, which measure deaths among patients known to have had Covid 19. In most cases, that number is highest in countries that have had the virus the longest. According to data gathered by The New York Times, China had reported 90,294 cases as of Friday and 4,634 deaths, which is a C.F.R. of 5 percent. The United States was very close to that mark. It has had 2,811,447 cases and 129,403 deaths, about 4.6 percent. Those percentages are far higher rates than the 2.5 percent death rate often ascribed to the 1918 flu pandemic. Still, it is difficult to measure fatality rates during pandemics, especially at the beginning. In the chaos that ensues when a new virus hits a city hard, thousands of people may die and be buried without ever being tested, and certainly without them all being autopsied. It is never entirely clear how many died of the virus and how many died of heart attacks, strokes or other ills. That has happened in both New York City and in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. Normally, once the chaos has subsided, more testing is done and more mild cases are found and because the denominator of the fraction rises, fatality rates fall. But the results are not always consistent or predictable. Ten sizable countries, most of them in Western Europe, have tested bigger percentages of their populations than has the United States, according to Worldometer, which gathers statistics. They are Iceland, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Britain, Israel and New Zealand. But their case fatality rates vary wildly: Iceland's is less than 1 percent, New Zealand's and Israel's are below 2 percent. Belgium, by comparison, is at 16 percent, and Italy and Britain at 14 percent. Both figures the infection fatality rate and the case fatality rate can differ quite a bit by country. So far, in most countries, about 20 percent of all confirmed Covid 19 patients become ill enough to need supplemental oxygen or even more advanced hospital care, said Dr. Janet Diaz, head of clinical care for the W.H.O.'s emergencies program. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Whether those patients survive depends on a host of factors, including age, underlying illnesses and the level of medical care available. Death rates are expected to be lower in countries with younger populations and less obesity, which are often the poorest countries. Conversely, the figures should be higher in countries that lack oxygen tanks, ventilators and dialysis machines, and where many people live far from hospitals. Those are also often the poorest countries. The W.H.O. and various charities are scrambling to purchase oxygen equipment for poor and middle income nations in which the coronavirus is spreading. And now, new factors are being introduced into the equation. For example, new evidence that people with Type A blood are more likely to fall deathly ill could change risk calculations. Type A blood is relatively rare in West Africa and South Asia, and very rare among the Indigenous peoples of South America. Before this week's meeting, the W.H.O. had no official I.F.R. estimate, Oliver Morgan, the agency's director of health emergency information and risk assessment, said in an interview in early June. Instead, it had relied on a mix of data sent in by member countries and by academic groups, and on a meta analysis done in May by scientists at the University of Wollongong and James Cook University in Australia. Those researchers looked at 267 studies in more than a dozen countries, and then chose the 25 they considered the most accurate, weighting them for accuracy and averaged the data. They concluded that the global I.F.R. was 0.64 percent. The C.D.C. relies on a "symptomatic case fatality ratio" that "is not necessarily equivalent to the number of reported deaths per reported cases." The best estimate for the United States is 0.4 percent, according to a set of planning scenarios released in late May. The agency did not respond to requests to explain how it arrived at that figure, or why it was so much lower than the W.H.O.'s estimate. By comparison, 0.4 percent of the United States population is 1.3 million people. The 25 studies that the Australian researchers considered the most accurate relied on very different methodologies. One report, for example, was based on diagnostic PCR tests of all passengers and crew aboard the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that docked in Japan after it was overcome by the coronavirus. Another study drew data from an antibody survey of 38,000 Spaniards, while another included only 1,104 Swedes. The current W.H.O. estimate is based on later, larger studies of how many people have antibodies in their blood; future studies may further refine the figure, Dr. Swaminathan said. But there is "a lot of uncertainty" about how many silent and untested carriers there are, Dr. Morgan of the W.H.O. said. To arrive at the C.D.C.'s new estimate, researchers tested samples from 11,933 people for antibodies to the coronavirus in six regions in the United States. New York City reported 53,803 cases by April 1, but the actual number of infections was 12 times higher nearly 642,000, the agency estimated. New York City's prevalence of 7 percent in the C.D.C. study was well below the 21 percent estimated in a state survey in April. But that number was based on people recruited at supermarkets, and so the results may have been biased toward people out shopping during a pandemic often the young, who have been less affected. The global fatality rates could still change. With one or two exceptions, like Iran and Ecuador, the pandemic first struck wealthier countries in Asia, Western Europe and North America where advanced medical care was available. Now it is spreading widely in India, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria and other countries where millions are crowded into slums, lockdowns have been relatively brief and hospitals have few resources. But the death rates may also shift in wealthier northern countries as winter approaches. Most of the spread of the virus in Europe and North America has taken place during mild or warm weather in the spring and summer. Many experts fear that infections and deaths will shoot up in the fall as colder weather forces people indoors, where they are more likely to infect one another. Discipline about wearing masks and avoiding breathing on one another will be even more important then. In each of the eight influenza pandemics to hit the United States since 1763, a relatively mild first wave no matter what time of year it arrived was followed by a larger, much more lethal wave a few months later, noted Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. More than a third of all the people killed by the Spanish flu, which lasted from March 1918 to late 1920, died in the short stretch between September and December 1918 about six months after a first, relatively mild version of what may have been the same virus broke out in western Kansas. "We will go much higher in the next 12 to 18 months," Dr. Osterholm said. Because this is a coronavirus, not influenza, it may not follow the same pattern, but it is "a much more efficient transmitter than influenza." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In September, President Trump, the first lady and two of his top health officials gathered in the Oval Office to announce they would take what Mr. Trump called "very, very strong" action against the fast growing epidemic of teenage vaping: a ban on the sale of most flavored e cigarettes. Groups representing thousands of vape shops around the country quickly mobilized. They created a "We Vape, We Vote" social media campaign aimed at Mr. Trump, hired a pollster who had worked for the president's election and even ran a television ad in Palm Beach, Fla., where Mr. Trump spent the holidays at his Mar a Lago club, featuring voters who urged him not to follow through with the ban. On Thursday, the administration announced a policy that reflected a partial victory for the industry groups, but also seemed aimed at appeasing parents (including the crucial voting bloc of suburban mothers) and public health officials worried about nicotine addiction among teenagers. Federal officials said they would forbid the sale of most flavored e cigarette cartridges, but would exempt menthol and tobacco flavors, as well as flavored liquid nicotine sold in open tank systems at vape shops. In a call with reporters, the officials said that starting next month they would take action against companies that were still making or selling e cigarette cartridges or pods in mint, fruit or dessert flavors, as part of an effort to reduce the soaring rate of teenage vaping. "By prioritizing enforcement against the products that are most widely used by children, our action today seeks to strike the right public health balance by maintaining e cigarettes as a potential off ramp for adults using combustible tobacco while ensuring these products don't provide an on ramp to nicotine addiction for our youth," said Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary. The announcement reflects the complicated politics that Mr. Trump faces, as well as tensions within his administration, after initially weighing a full ban. Concerned about teenagers like the president's own son, Melania Trump, the first lady, and Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, wanted tight restrictions, while some of the president's advisers, industry lobbyists and conservative groups fought the move. Around the West Wing, polling data was circulated that had the imprimatur of one of Mr. Trump's pollsters, John McLaughlin, showing that in battleground states, the president's supporters opposed regulations against vaping. But the poll was commissioned by a vaping industry group, and ultimately, those resisting any crackdown, such as the president's 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, lost to the advisers who wanted to keep flavored e cigarettes away from young people. Enough of Mr. Trump's advisers, including Ms. Conway, assured him that the move would appeal to suburban mothers who the campaign presumed had abandoned the president. "The past administration failed to address the rising crises with opioids and fentanyl, which have claimed countless lives and devastated communities," Ms. Conway said in a statement. "The president and the first lady refuse to look away when data show over five million youth are illegally using e cigarettes and vaping products. The F.D.A.'s guidance balances the protection of children's health and the protection of adults rights." Officials held their last meeting with the president shortly before he left for Mar a Lago the week before Christmas. One person briefed on what took place said he was unambiguous at the time about the ban being what he wanted to do. Still, when asked about it on New Year's Eve, he left himself a loophole, describing it as "temporary." Companies had complained that a full ban on flavored e cigarettes would put thousands of vape shops out of business, and punish adults who had switched to e cigarettes from smoking. In recent months, Mr. Trump has publicly acknowledged the potential adverse effects on businesses and the industry, whose trade groups had lobbied White House officials regularly over the potential ban. Administration officials have also pointed to surveys showing that teenagers prefer flavors, like mint and fruits, much more than menthol. It is unclear to what extent young vapers use open tank systems, which require that flavored liquids be added to devices that then convert them into an inhalable aerosol. Mr. Azar said that young people "overwhelmingly prefer cartridge based e cigarette products," partly because they were easy to use and, because they were smaller than open tank devices, to conceal. Flavored pods sold by Juul, in particular, had become extremely popular among teenagers, a trend that prompted public and regulatory backlash against the San Francisco based company. Juul has withdrawn many of its flavors from the market under public and regulatory pressure, and faces several federal and state investigations into its marketing practices. Companies with e cigarettes and accessories like pods have been allowed on the market under extensions granted by the F.D.A. No substantive evidence or review process has indicated that the products are safe for long term use, or that they are successful in getting people to stop smoking cigarettes. But an F.D.A. review process is now underway, with manufacturers required to submit applications by May to try to prove that the products are not a public health risk. That means that some of the products targeted under the enforcement action announced Thursday could ultimately be approved and re enter the market a possible reason Mr. Trump may have referred to the ban as temporary. Public health experts have long called for a ban on flavored e cigarettes as a way of curbing youth nicotine use. In 2016, the Obama administration backtracked on a proposal by the Food and Drug Administration to ban flavors in e cigarettes and other tobacco products, and similar proposals by the Trump administration have also failed to materialize. In 2018 and last year, the F.D.A. began to propose curbs on sales of certain flavors and cracked down on stores selling to minors in an effort to reduce the use of e cigarettes by teenagers. The administration's decision to largely spare vape shops from the flavor ban reflects an intense lobbying campaign by the vaping industry. Just this weekend, the Vapor Technology Association, an industry trade group, said it had bought television ad time on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC to air its "I Vote" commercials to catch the attention of Mr. Trump while he was at Mar a Lago. The growth in teen use of e cigarettes specifically the sleek Juul device has mirrored a proliferation of thousands of flavored products with names that seem to target the tastes of children, such as cotton candy and unicorn milk. Recent government data showed that a quarter of high school seniors have vaped e cigarettes in the past month, even as their use of traditional cigarettes has fallen. The American Medical Association was among a number of medical and public health groups that called the new restrictions a good step, but not enough. "If we are serious about tackling this epidemic and keeping these harmful products out of the hands of young people," the association said in a statement, "a total ban on all flavored e cigarettes in all forms and at all locations is prudent and urgently needed." It also said it was "disappointed that menthol flavors one of the most popular will still be allowed." The tobacco and vaping industries fought hard against a menthol ban, and were confident weeks ago that it would be exempted from any flavor restrictions. Mr. Azar said the administration was swayed by new survey data suggesting that very few teenagers preferred menthol. But public health officials worry that the absence of other flavors will lead teenagers to menthol, especially now that mint is off limits. The current debate over a flavor ban was set off by youth vaping and the recent outbreak of severe lung injuries largely related to vaping THC, the high inducing ingredient in marijuana. Various lobbying groups pointed to measures other than an outright ban of e cigarettes as a way to reduce usage by teenagers. The vaping and tobacco industries lobbied lawmakers and the White House to back raising the national age to 21 for sales of all tobacco and e cigarette products, which Congress passed late last year and Mr. Trump signed it into law. Although the last quarter results have not yet been reported, the vaping and tobacco businesses are on track to beat their 2018 lobbying spending. The Vapor Technology Association, which represents mostly small vape companies, had spent 240,000 lobbying the federal government in 2018, and for the first three quarters of 2019, had already reported spending over 336,000. The total amount spent on lobbying by the tobacco and vaping business was 23.5 million in 2018, and for the first three quarters of 2019, it was more than 20 million. Juul increased its spending to 3 million in the first three quarters of 2019, from 1.6 million for all of 2018. The industry has also been a steady contributor to numerous conservative groups that made up the coalition opposed to a flavored vape ban. Amanda Wheeler, a vape shop owner in Prescott, Ariz., who started the "We Vape, We Vote" campaign in Arizona and Colorado, said she was amazed that the efforts against a full ban had worked. But while she and other shop owners say that their products help people to stop smoking, the Food and Drug Administration has not accepted that argument. In a legal brief filed on Monday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the agency wrote, "It is far from clear that e cigarettes help smokers quit in meaningful numbers, although it is possible that e cigarettes provide less unhealthy alternatives to combustible tobacco products." For vape shop owners like Ms. Wheeler, the next challenge is the May deadline to apply for F.D.A. approval to stay on the market. She sees it as another hurdle that can kill her business. Her products include 1,700 different combinations of flavor nicotine strength and other variations, and she said she lacked the resources to apply for approval for each one. Mitch Zeller, who heads tobacco regulation at the F.D.A., said the agency would do "everything we can, especially for small businesses, to help guide them through the process." "But at the end of the day," he added, "they are subject to that May 12 deadline." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
"Being a heavily insecure person myself, I didn't want people to hate Jimmy because I didn't want people to hate me," said Chris Geere on his "You're the Worst" character. On 'You're the Worst,' Chris Geere Got His Ever After. Now What? Chris Geere, the star of FXX's "You're the Worst" sat in a chair and pressed each of his hands into a blue metal brick as a camera whirred. The camera would capture his aura at least that's what the poster in the window of Magic Jewelry, a tiny crystal studded shop just off Canal Street in Manhattan's Chinatown, claimed. On "You're the Worst," which just aired its finale (so yes, spoilers follow), Geere played Jimmy Shive Overly, a pompous English novelist with bone deep daddy issues. Over five seasons he lied, cheated, abandoned his girlfriend (Aya Cash's Gretchen) just after proposing and months later sent her a text that read "Hey ..." Jimmy's aura ought to look like a waste dump with seepage issues. But that's why they call it acting. Geere's picture, taken a week before the finale aired, showed a buttercup sunburst cradling a fuchsia heart. Charlene Chen, the Magic Jewelry worker who interpreted it for him, called it, "Bright, big, strong and sunny. Happy looking." "We'll take that," Geere, whose skin looks like it has never seen a U.V. ray, said brightly. Though Geere, 38, is based in Manchester, where his wife and young son live, "You're the Worst" shoots in Los Angeles and he has fallen hard for California mysticism. Though this was his first aura photo, he has seen a couple of psychics and recently had his tarot cards read. ("I got the Death card and I was like, 'Oh expletive great,' and she went, 'No! This means the end of something.'") He also saw a palm reader who told him he should cry more. "I'm just a big believer in positive change and getting reminded that you're still alive," he said. Geere grew up all over the United Kingdom with brief stints in Hong Kong and Phoenix, Ariz. his father had a job reviving failing newspapers and attended the Guildford School of Acting. He had guest roles on a couple dozen different series before playing a drama teacher in the soapy BBC drama "Waterloo Road," but "You're the Worst" is the show that has made him almost famous. After the reading, he went off in search of bubble tea, clowning in front of a window full of lacquered ducks along the way. Middle aged Chinese ladies kept stopping to smile and wave. Maybe they recognized him. Or maybe they also liked ducks. As part of a mini wave of anti rom coms that also includes "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," "Catastrophe" and "Lovesick," "You're the Worst" deglammed the genre, making it available to more realistic (if still very attractive) characters in more realistic pain. In the final season, most episodes began with grim flash forwards, hinting that Jimmy and Gretchen, two damaged people, would never make it to happily, let alone ever after. "We knew it was never going to be: Jimmy and Gretchen walk off into the sunset. Cut. It was always going to be far more complex than that," Geere said. But the show, at its not so shriveled heart, was always a romance, and if Jimmy and Gretchen ditched their own wedding, they did not ditch each other. The last shot finds them scarfing down pancakes, together. "It really did feel right," Geere, who had known the ending since the season began filming, said. "They were never not going to be together. That would have been foolish. If the show had ended and they had split up, I would have been upset." Personally, Geere is a staunch romantic, even a sappy one. He described his courtship of his wife, the jazz singer Jennifer Sawdon, saying, "Put all those aspects of your life to music, then everyone's got their own little rom com, don't they?" (Do they?) He had always pulled for Gretchen and Jimmy, even though he used to open his scripts, look at Jimmy's lines and say to himself, "No! What is he doing! What is he doing!" When Jimmy left Gretchen after the proposal, "I felt like a villain in a superhero movie," he said. "It was horrendous. And I was worried because, being a heavily insecure person myself, I didn't want people to hate Jimmy because I didn't want people to hate me." The bubble tea arrived, his first, and he sucked up the tapioca through a wide pink straw. "What is that? Quite tasty." Jimmy, he realized, had to bottom out before he could grow up. Five seasons gave the characters time "to understand about compromise, about change, about relinquishing control," he said. In many romantic comedies, external obstacles keep the characters apart. But Jimmy and Gretchen had nothing to get over except themselves. The question was never will they or won't they they went to bed the first night they met. It was, could they evolve enough to stick the landing? They could. "In the end I think it was just a love story," Geere said. It was a love story that cuddled up to a lot of darkness, and was praised for its nuanced treatment of both clinical depression and PTSD. Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it wasn't. As Geere said, "It was messy and complicated and that's far more interesting and relatable, isn't it?" Now that the series has finished, Geere has received several offers to go dark again, playing Jimmy adjacent characters. So far, he has passed. "I think I need to shed him for a bit," he said. He has a part in the Pokemon movie "Detective Pikachu" that he couldn't discuss and a role in "This Way Up," a comedy produced by Sharon Horgan, one of the creators of "Catastrophe," among others. That's hush hush, too. What would he really like to do? "A superhero thing," he said. He mentioned that the Captain America comics include a character called Captain Britain, though he couldn't remember his superpower. Tea making? Or denial? "Do you have a problem?" he said, putting on a superhero voice. "I'll sweep it under the carpet." With his coconut bubble tea half drunk, he headed back to the crystal shop where his manager was waiting. She'd bought him a citrine orb to use while he meditates. (He does 10 minutes every morning and 20 minutes every night, "because I think too much.") Chen told him the citrine would help his digestion and that it would also make him more popular. A few minutes before he had told me that he was much happier having been part of a cult show like "You're the Worst" than something that would have changed his life too much. But he accepted the crystal happily. Could he feel it working? "I'm far too popular to talk to anyone right now," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Ever since our labradoodle, Rocket, arrived on the scene earlier this year, our furniture has taken a beating. Sofa corners have been gnawed, throw pillows have been destroyed and sisal baskets have become chew toys. And this all happened while someone was at home to supervise him. Contemplating the prospect of leaving Rocket alone, outside his dog crate, was nerve racking. So like other pet owners before me, I turned to technology for peace of mind. Among the latest gadgets vying for a slice of the estimated 72 billion pet industry, these Wi Fi enabled cameras come loaded with features to entertain animals and assuage their absentee owners' guilt, including treat dispensers, laser pointing games, and two way audio that lets you hear and talk to your pet remotely. One device even offers two way video, so your pet can see you. And it's all controlled by a smartphone. What could be easier? To find out if pet cams are really all they're cracked up to be and to see what our dog would do when left on his own I installed a few in the living room. This sleek, cube shaped camera was the most compact and attractive of the bunch. And setup was easy: Just plug it in, download the app and follow a few prompts. When Rocket barked or moved around, a push alert popped up on my iPhone screen. Opening the app allowed me to see what he was up to: usually nothing more interesting than looking out the window or sleeping. But the images from the wide angle, high definition (1080p) video camera were always sharp, and could have been recorded, were I so inclined. The device also offers digital zoom and two way audio so I could listen to Rocket and reprimand him, if necessary with very little lag time. But if you want a multiday video history or more advanced alerts, including 30 second video clips, you have to pay a monthly fee that starts at 3. Petcube Play comes with a laser pointer game that seemed promising, although we were initially concerned about the long list of warnings that accompanied it, cautioning us to avoid "prolonged direct eye contact with the laser beam," among other things. That didn't turn out to be the problem, though. The game is supposed to be controlled remotely via the app, by dragging your finger across the phone screen. Rocket was unimpressed; he either didn't see the laser dot or ignored it. But when we were home and could point at the dot darting back and forth across the rug, Rocket obsessively chased it. We were also able to link the device to our Amazon Echo Dot and ask Alexa, the digital assistant, to play with him. Her version of fun, however, involved encouraging the dog to chase the laser across the sofa and over the kitchen counter. (Not a chance, Alexa.) Petcube also allows you to give your friends remote access to your pets; they just need to download the app. We weren't that keen on the idea of sharing Rocket (or an inside view of our home), but we did enjoy scrolling through the photos and videos posted by others on the app. The device was fairly glitch free. I did lose the connection a couple of times while trying to connect to the camera remotely, but refreshing the app resolved the issue. For good measure, I also had David Templeton, an analyst on The New York Times's information security team, check out the camera to see if it could be easily hacked, and he reported no red flags. Your dog comes when you call him, but are you ready to come when he calls you? In addition to live video streaming, motion detection alerts, two way audio and a built in treat dispenser, PetChatz has an LCD screen so your pet can see you. For an additional 99, you can buy a PawCall button, which allows your pet to get in touch with you. A light on the paw shaped button tells the animal when you're available, and he or she can then press the button to dispense a treat and send you a text message to initiate a call. Don't expect the dog to be able to do this on the first or even the fifth try. Rocket and I went through PawCall's training routine several times, which involved repeatedly taking his paw and touching it to the button, then allowing him to eat a treat. According to the directions, there is "no verbal affirmation required" because "the treat dispense sound" a little noise the PetChatz device emits whenever it releases a treat "is the pet's audible affirmation." That may be sufficient for some dogs, but after repeating these steps 10 times and then taking a break and doing it all over again a couple of hours later, Rocket still hadn't gotten the hang of it. He had eaten a lot of treats, though. In fact, he seemed more interested in the treats than in my face, which popped up on the PetChatz LCD screen anytime I wanted to talk to him remotely. And I couldn't see his face very well, either. The device, which is a fairly bulky 11 inches tall, is affixed to the wall with screws on top of an electrical outlet, so no cords are exposed. (Alternatively, you could pay 60 for a portable mounting stand or get some zip ties and attach it to a dog crate.) But because the camera was positioned at the electrical outlet level, I had a hard time seeing the dog's face remotely whenever he came up close to get a treat. Instead, I caught glimpses of random body parts. Lisa Lavin, PetChatz's founder, said she had the same issue with her standard poodle, Hattie, and dealt with it by training the dog to lie down before the treat was released, a trick Rocket and I haven't mastered. PetChatz also offers the option of streaming DogTV through the video screen, for an extra charge of about 10 a month. (With all this, who needs a laser pointer?) When I asked Mr. Templeton, of The Times's information security team, to test PetChatz for hacking vulnerabilities, one potential weakness emerged: "Customers are vulnerable to someone nearby sniffing their Wi Fi password during the initial device setup," he said. In an email response, the PetChatz security team acknowledged this, but pointed out that the window is narrow and the potential hacker would have to be close by: "While it is possible that the password would be susceptible during the time in which it's entered (say 60 seconds)," they wrote in an email sent through a publicist, "the individual or system aiming to access the information during this time would also need to be inside the same residence/home or yard of the Wi Fi being accessed." BOTTOM LINE: At around 300, PetChatz is not cheap, but the various features including free alerts, automatic video recordings and treat dispensing help justify the cost. Getting your pet to interact with you through the device may require patience, but even in our short trial, it was easy to see how the treat dispenser could be used to reinforce good behavior. Rocket became so obsessed with the treats, however, that he nearly knocked the device off our TV console. And while double sided tape is included to allow you to stick the device to a tabletop, I wasn't willing to risk damaging the veneer. I also wasn't sure the tape would be any match for our energetic dog. Moving the device to a higher shelf solved the problem, although the view was slightly obscured. Furbo, like its competitors, will send push notifications to your smartphone when it detects barking. But you can only record videos if you are watching the live stream. That means you might miss the chance to record your pet begging for treats (or destroying the sofa) if you happen to be in a meeting when you get the motion alert. Victor Chang, who founded Furbo's manufacturer, Tomofun, with his wife, Maggie Cheung, said the company is testing a "dog nanny" service that it hopes will provide a workaround. For a paid subscription, the service will automatically record and save short snippets of video; it will also snap photos whenever the animal faces the camera and will create a highlight video of the animal's daily activities, among other things. Of more concern, though, was our hacking test, which uncovered several vulnerabilities. "The iOS and Android apps both do not verify HTTPS certificates during account login," Mr. Templeton told me. That means a remote attacker (or whoever runs your Wi Fi service) could break your secure connection, and identify and extract your user name and password. In other words, he said, "I would be able to log into your account and watch your live video, and feed your dog treats." The company said it is currently investigating the issue. "Any vulnerabilities will be addressed immediately via firmware and/or app updates, and we will continue doing so for all devices in perpetuity," Ms. Cheung said. "The security and privacy of Furbo users' data is a first order priority for Tomofun." To protect users' privacy, the company releases monthly app and firmware updates and performs regular security audits, she said, adding that there have been "no known breaches to date." To deter potential hackers, Mr. Templeton recommended plugging the Furbo into a smart outlet, like the WeMo Mini from Belkin (this works for any other smart camera, as well). "If someone wanted to access your camera, they'd have to hack both the outlet to turn it on, and then the camera to see the video," he said. "This double hack requirement is an insurance policy against a single insecure smart device." But "this only works if the outlet and camera are from different development teams," he cautioned, "and you normally keep the outlet off." BOTTOM LINE: Furbo's treat tossing function can be fun and addictive (for you and your pet), but it might not be enough to make up for the potential security vulnerabilities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe? The question, one of the biggest in studies of human evolution, has intrigued scientists for decades. In a series of extraordinary genetic analyses published on Wednesday, researchers believe they have found an answer. In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. The three teams sequenced the genomes of 787 people, obtaining highly detailed scans of each. The genomes were drawn from people in hundreds of indigenous populations: Basques, African pygmies, Mayans, Bedouins, Sherpas and Cree Indians, to name just a few. The DNA of indigenous populations is essential to understanding human history, many geneticists believe. Yet until now scientists have sequenced entire genomes from very few people outside population centers like Europe and China. The new data already are altering scientific understanding of what human DNA looks like, experts said, adding rich variations to our map of the genome. Each team of researchers tackled different questions about our origins, such as how people spread across Africa and how others populated Australia. But all aimed to settle the controversial question of human expansion from Africa. Early studies of bits of DNA also supported this idea. All non Africans are closely related to one another, geneticists found, and they all branch from a family tree rooted in Africa. Yet there are also clues that at least some modern humans may have departed Africa well before 50,000 years ago, perhaps part of an earlier wave of migration. In Israel, for example, researchers found a few distinctively modern human skeletons that are between 120,000 and 90,000 years old. In Saudi Arabia and India, sophisticated tools date back as far as 100,000 years. Last October, Chinese scientists reported finding teeth belonging to Homo sapiens that are at least 80,000 years old and perhaps as old as 120,000 years. In 2011, Eske Willerslev, a renowned geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, and his colleagues came across some puzzling clues to the expansion out of Africa by sequencing the genome of an Aboriginal Australian for the first time. Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues reconstructed the genome from a century old lock of hair kept in a museum. The DNA held a number of peculiar variants not found in Europeans or Asians, raising knotty questions about the origins of the people who first came to Australia and when they arrived. Intrigued, Dr. Willerslev decided to contact living Aboriginals to see if they would participate in a new genetic study. He joined David W. Lambert, a geneticist at Griffith University in Australia, who was already meeting with Aboriginal communities about participating in this kind of research. In collaboration with scientists at the University of Oxford, the researchers also obtained DNA from people in Papua New Guinea. All told, the team was able to sequence 83 genomes from Aboriginal Australians and 25 from people in Papua New Guinea, all with far greater accuracy than in Dr. Willerslev's 2011 study. Meanwhile, Mait Metspalu of the Estonian Biocentre was leading a team of 98 scientists on another genome gathering project. They picked out 148 populations to sample, mostly in Europe and Asia, with a few genomes from Africa and Australia. They, too, sequenced 483 genomes at high resolution. David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues assembled a third database of genomes from all six inhabited continents. The Simons Genome Diversity Project, sponsored by the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation, contains 300 high quality genomes from 142 populations. Examining their data separately, all three groups came to the same conclusion: All non Africans descend from a single migration of early humans from Africa. The estimates from the studies point to an exodus somewhere between 80,000 and 50,000 years. Despite earlier research, the teams led by Dr. Willerslev and Dr. Reich found no genetic evidence that there was an earlier migration giving rise to people in Australia and Papua New Guinea. "The vast majority of their ancestry if not all of it is coming from the same out of Africa wave as Europeans and Asians," said Dr. Willerslev. But on that question, Dr. Metspalu and his colleagues ended up with a somewhat different result. In Papua New Guinea, Dr. Metspalu and his colleagues found, 98 percent of each person's DNA can be traced to that single migration from Africa. But the other 2 percent seemed to be much older. Dr. Metspalu concluded that all people in Papua New Guinea carry a trace of DNA from an earlier wave of Africans who left the continent as long as 140,000 years ago, and then vanished. But when the last wave came out of Africa, descendants of the first wave disappeared. "They may have not been technologically advanced, living in small groups," Dr. Pagani said. "Maybe it was easy for a major later wave that was more successful to wipe them out." The new research also suggests that the splintering of the human tree began earlier than experts had suspected. Dr. Reich and his colleagues probed their data for the oldest evidence of human groups genetically separating from one another. They found that the ancestors of the KhoiSan, hunter gatherers living today in southern Africa, began to split off from other living humans about 200,000 years ago and were fully isolated by 100,000 years ago. That finding hints that our ancestors already had evolved behaviors seen in living humans, such as language, 200,000 years ago. Why leave Africa at all? Scientists have found some clues to that mystery, too. In a fourth paper in Nature, researchers described a computer model of Earth's recent climatic and ecological history. It shows that changing rainfall patterns periodically opened up corridors from Africa into Eurasia that humans may have followed in search of food. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
At a certain age, or so we have come to believe, a singer loses her voice. Her vocal cords stiffen and slow. Her high notes dry up. But that is not what has happened to Judy Collins. At 80, Collins sounds as clear as a spring wending through a field of wildflowers. The ethereal soprano that guided listeners through the 1960s the "gentle voice amid the strife," as Life magazine proclaimed on a May 1969 cover still resonates in 2019. This has earned Collins an almost supernatural perspective. When audiences come to see her perform, which she does about one out of every three nights, they are transported. "They're thinking about their youth," Collins told me. "They're thinking about their hopefulness. They're thinking about their dreams, when they hear me." Your voice is like a time machine, I said. "It's a time machine," she said. "Oh, very much. Very much." Her home had the feel of an overstuffed time capsule, as if its curator kept lifting the lid to add important new artifacts. Thirteen umbrellas overflowed from the umbrella holder. Clinton administration ephemera dotted the space, which she called "the environment." On the walls of the environment hung her Life magazine cover, and small photographs of Western landscapes and Walton Ford's artfully disturbing paintings of birds. The environment was lit by dragonfly stained glass lamps and softened with pillows embroidered with messages like "Friends Are the Best Present" and "One Can Never Have Too Many Cats." Collins has three. They are Persian cats with luxurious coats and celestial orbs for eyes. At my request, she hunted them down, and when each was discovered the tuxedoed Coco Chanel, the blue gray Rachmaninoff and the all white Tom Wolfe Collins greeted the cat in a high, fluttering soprano. "Hello there," she said. "Do you want to say hello?" The cats stretched and scattered, and Collins zagged through a bathroom and into her own bedroom. A folded New York Times crossword lay unfulfilled on the bed. (Recently she spotted a friend in a Monday clue: "Jong who wrote 'Fear of Flying.'") Around the room's perimeter, an array of leonine wigs was assembled. Collins's voice is unchanged, but the hair is new. Two years ago, she had surgery on her hand, and when she awoke from the anesthesia, her hair fell out. "I had fabulous hair," she said; silky hippie goddess hair. Collins was unimpressed with how it grew back, so now she has it all shaved off: "My hair was so good that there's no comparison." It is here, in the environment, that Collins does the work of maintaining her time machine. "Most days, I do a number of things," she said. "I practice. I sing a little. I write something. I do my crossword puzzle. I write in my journals. I try to do something exciting. I go to a funny movie. I get together with friends who are funny," she said. Collins is always collecting jokes and stories and curious observations to fill out her sets. She used to stand onstage and close her eyes and just sing songs one after the other, but when she got sober, in 1978, she began to speak. "I found out that I had an awful lot to say, which I had not realized," she said. In 1965, when she was 26 years old, Collins did lose her voice. She was so hoarse that she could barely talk. She called up the vocal coach and activist Max Margulis, and once she convinced him that she was not a flighty folk singer but a serious person, they embarked on a 30 year course of study. His technique was not about the mechanics of Collins singing from her head or her lungs or her chest. It focused on the clarity and precision of her phrasing. It was about meaning what she sang. "If you're in the forest," Collins explained, "and there's a bear following you, and you want to alert your family, you raise your voice and say so, because if you don't, your family might die from the bear." Whether you're in the woods of Colorado or the clubs of New York City, you must always be ready to use it. "The voice," Collins said, "is actually meant to last forever." In the 1960s, when folk singer songwriters were multiplying in the West Village, Collins was best known for singing other people's songs. She sang "Both Sides Now," by Joni Mitchell, and she made Joni Mitchell famous. She sang "Suzanne," by Leonard Cohen, and made Leonard Cohen famous. She had an intriguing curatorial range. She sang old standards, and contemporary folk songs, and the Beatles, and Sondheim, and a medley based on the music of "Marat/Sade." Collins encouraged Cohen to sing his own songs, and he encouraged her to write her own songs, which she approached the same way she did everyone else's songs. You have to write them, she said, but "then you have to figure out how to sing them." The art of singing other people's songs is not fully appreciated beyond the cabaret circuit, or maybe it's a little bit lost. Folk singers used to be called "collectors" of songs, and Collins is a master collector. "I feel as though my voice is capable of doing anything," she told Life in 1969. "I don't question that I can make a sentence mean anything I want it to as long as I know what it is I want to say. I don't know why I seem to be able to do it, but I do, and I think people are pleasured by it." This fall, the artist Justin Vivian Bond performed a tribute to Collins at Joe's Pub, singing songs from writers that Collins had surfaced. Listening to her music as a child, Bond was struck by her interpretive skill, by "her sense of how to sing a song," Bond said . "She's a great actress, in that regard. And I think that's how a great singer is a great singer by acting the story of the song." Collins's latest album, "Winter Stories," out Nov. 29 , is a collaboration with the Norwegian singer Jonas Fjeld and the bluegrass band Chatham County Line. It's a hygge folk collection, perfect for curling up with three cats, but it also holds unexpected emotional power. On it Collins sings Mitchell's "The River," and her own "Mountain Girl," and "Highwayman," Jimmy Webb's song about a man who is reincarnated as a thief, a sailor, a dam builder and a starship captain, which was later covered by Glen Campbell and then the country supergroup the Highwaymen. She had contemplated recording it for many years. "I never really had the nerve," she said. The song seemed to be owned by "the guys," as she put it. "And then I thought, what the heck?" Collins's version is unlike any other. In translating the masculine country anthem into her gossamer voice, she has dismantled and rebuilt the song into a testament to female resilience. After hearing it, the recordings by the other versions sound somehow muted. It's Judy Collins's song now. Collins turned 80 this year. The news release in advance of the event read: "Judy Collins Celebrates 80th Birthday on May 1, Forecasts Another Prolific Year." Her family assembled a fantasy dinner party of guests to fete her, including Gloria Steinem, Robert Caro and Joan Baez. "You have to see the jacket that Joan bought me for my birthday," Collins said, disappearing into her closet and returning with a pink sequined number. "It's hysterical," she said. "She and I would never have worn this." But a lot has changed since then. Last year, Baez released what she said was likely to be her final album. "I asked my vocal coach many years ago when it would be time to stop," she said, "and he said, 'Your voice will tell you.' And it has it's a muscle, and you have to work harder and harder to make it work." Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen are dead. Joni Mitchell rarely surfaces publicly , and she will not answer Judy Collins's letters. A whole generation of artists has fallen silent, but Collins is still singing. She is transforming old songs through her voice, and through that process she doesn't just revive them she remakes them. "I notice that in old cultures, when someone is ill, they say we have lost our song," Steinem, who has known Collins since the '60s, wrote in an email . "Judy's magic is that she gives us back our songs." There is a tendency to cast older artists as shadows. We go to their performances and listen for an echo of the star in their prime. But Judy Collins is the thing itself. "I'm a better singer now," she said. "A much better singer." Recently she kicked off a stretch of shows at Joe's Pub in New York City with Fjeld and Chatham County Line. She emerged onstage in a pink sequined top she owns multiple pink sequined tops and a warm, daffy persona. She introduced Fjeld, and then, as she coolly tuned her guitar, she asked him, "Where is Norway, exactly?" When they launched into "Mountain Girl," I noticed that the men onstage looked as if they were engaged in a strenuous form of exercise. But Collins was still. Her guitar appeared to be made of air. She chased the song's highest high notes with the relaxed air of a woman, in her environment, summoning her cats. When Collins sang her "Highwayman" "I am still around, and I'll always be around, and around, and around" I felt transported, not into the past, but into Judy Collins's present. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A few days ago The Times published a long, damning article about how the Trump administration managed to fail so completely in responding to the coronavirus. Much of the content confirmed what anyone following the debacle suspected. One thing I didn't see coming, however, was the apparently central role played by Italy's experience. Italy, you see, was the first Western nation to experience a major wave of infections. Hospitals were overwhelmed; partly as a result, the initial death toll was terrible. Yet cases peaked after a few weeks and began a steep decline. And White House officials were seemingly confident that America would follow a similar track. We didn't. U.S. cases plateaued for a couple of months, then began rising rapidly. Death rates followed with a lag. At this point we can only look longingly at Italy's success in containing the coronavirus: Restaurants and cafes are open, albeit with restrictions, much of normal life has resumed, yet Italy's current death rate is less than a 10th of America's. On a typical recent day, more than 800 Americans but only around a dozen Italians died from Covid 19. Although Donald Trump keeps boasting that we've had the best coronavirus response in the world, and some credulous supporters may actually believe him, my guess is that many people are aware that our handling of the virus has fallen tragically short compared with, say, that of Germany. It may not seem surprising, however, that German discipline and competence have paid off (although we used to think that we were better prepared than anyone else to deal with a pandemic). But how can America be doing so much worse than Italy? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The makeup artist Pat McGrath, considered by many to be at the top of her profession, is trying a new way to reach potential consumers. On Monday, she will be selling a collection of cosmetics from Pat McGrath Labs via a most unlikely channel: the Spotify shop of the teenage pop star Maggie Lindemann. In the last few years, beauty retail has shifted away from department stores and toward direct to consumer models driven by social media (Kylie Cosmetics, Glossier), multibrand stores made for play and engagement (Sephora, Ulta) and highly edited lifestyle selections at fashion chains (Madewell, Urban Outfitters). Ms. McGrath is well versed in selling via social media, through her website and addictive Instagram (1.6 million followers), and she wields brick and mortar might through a Sephora partnership. But rather than head to a fashion store to introduce her new makeup, as one might expect, Ms. McGrath chose Spotify because of her love for music. Additionally, she wants to keep things fresh. "I have always believed in finding new ways to disrupt the marketplace and engage with my fellow beauty junkies where they live," she said. And, surprisingly, Ms. McGrath chose a rising star to work with rather than reaching out to her stable of famous muses, among them Kim Kardashian West, Naomi Campbell and Charli XCX. "I like a real mix," Ms. McGrath said. Whereas traditional beauty campaigns may bet on household names, she finds it more "modern day and interesting to feature girls of all different levels." She points to her affiliations with less familiar names including the model Paloma Elsesser and the musician Maxine Ashley. "It's amazing to be an incubator," Ms. McGrath said. "Many of my muses have gone on to other brands." She discovered Ms. Lindemann, 19, while scrolling through Instagram. "She reminded me so much of a modern interpretation of a '60s Italian cinema goddess very Antonioni," Ms. McGrath said. Within three months, the two had an official collaboration: The debut of Ms. McGrath's makeup on Spotify will be timed to the release of Ms. Lindemann's new song, "Obsessed." The products three lipsticks, three eye palettes, two eye pencils and two lip pencils can be found by going to Ms. Lindemann's artist page on Spotify and scrolling down to the Merchbar activation. This is the first time Spotify has sold beauty products. Jordan Gremli, the company's head of artist and fan development, sees the partnership and the foray into beauty as a way for Ms. Lindemann to "facilitate meaningful connections" with her fans. In an interview with Billboard magazine earlier this year, Ms. Lindemann griped that she is often known largely as a social media star (she has 2.4 million Instagram followers) and feels "looked past for being a singer." Yet it is through her social media channels that she has established herself as something of a makeup connoisseur with a signature look strong brows, winged eyeliner and eyelash extensions that is instantly recognizable. "Beauty is huge right now," Ms. Lindemann said. "It's a way to express ourselves." She is well aware of the power of having the look and social media prowess. "Creating a buzz is very important," she said, "and it's a convenient way to keep in contact with your fans." But, she said: "I don't think it's everything. I do want to do more beauty collaborations down the line. But for me, it all goes back to the music." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Silvercar, which has won notice for avoiding the problem of lines at car rental counters, recently announced plans to add five more destinations to its lineup before the end of year. Currently available at eight airport locations around the country including Los Angeles International Airport, Dallas Love Field and Denver International Airport, the service will launch at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport on May 15, Chicago's O'Hare in mid June and then add a city every month or two thereafter. The chief executive of Silvercar, Luke Schneider, said the company was created to eliminate the frustrations that can come with car rentals. "You usually don't know exactly what kind of car you're going to get, and you have the waiting in line and the lengthy process to actually get into the vehicle, and we want to take away all the hassle," he said. The experience is meant to be virtual: the only vehicle option is a silver Audi A4 loaded with Bluetooth, navigation system and Wi Fi, and users reserve one through the company's site or on its app for iPhone or Android. After a flight lands, customers turn on their phones and find a text from Silvercar telling them to push a button on the app when they're ready to collect their car. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
While the beach may be a preferred destination for Independence Day travelers, Asheville, N.C., a city that rests seamlessly among the Blue Ridge Mountains, puts a unique spin on summer relaxation. With the Pisgah National Forest nearby, as well as the scenic grounds of the Biltmore Estate, a French Renaissance chateau built by George Washington Vanderbilt, the North Carolina Arboretum and the Carl Sandburg Home in Flat Rock, among many other sites, the region embraces tranquillity. The city (with roughly 87,000 residents) is also known for its quirky characteristics, with its liberal political leanings in a traditionally conservative region, along with its numerous streetside music performances. Downtown Asheville is humming with tourists and locals alike and with its highly walkable streets and collection of local shops, there is a lot to take in. Richard Fausset, chief of the Atlanta bureau of The New York Times, travels throughout much of the South and has spent time reporting in the city. Naturally, he's sought out a hearty meal to start the day. "The best breakfast I had was at the Over Easy Cafe," Mr. Fausset said. "I'm not sure if there's anything more Asheville than a cozy homegrown neighborhood restaurant with a breakfast menu that encompasses buttermilk biscuits and tempeh." Looking at the menu, one can find staples like classic French toast, prepared with Challah bread and served alongside fresh fruit (with options of a half order for 7.50 or a full order for 10) and a cup of homemade granola ( 4.25), along with more adventurous options like the Jackson Omelet, filled with bacon, onions, sauteed kale and smoked Gouda ( 10.75), and the Sunburst Omelet, which includes smoked trout, roasted garlic and goat cheese ( 11.75). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
An artist's impression of a possible ninth planet. It would be quite large at least as big as Earth with a thick atmosphere around a rocky core. There might be a ninth planet in the solar system after all, and it is not Pluto. Two astronomers reported on Wednesday that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away something that would satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short. "We are pretty sure there's one out there," said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to start revising mnemonics of the planets. In a paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin laid out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet's existence in what astronomers have observed: a half dozen small bodies in distant elliptical orbits. What is striking, the scientists said, is that the orbits of all six loop outward in the same quadrant of the solar system and are tilted at about the same angle. The odds of that happening by chance are about 1 in 14,000, Dr. Batygin said. A ninth planet could be gravitationally herding them into these orbits. For the calculations to work, the planet would be at least an equal to Earth, and most likely much bigger perhaps a mini Neptune, with a small but thick atmosphere surrounding a rocky core and mass about 10 times that of Earth. That would be 4,500 times the mass of Pluto. Pluto, at its most distant, is 4.6 billion miles from the sun. The potential ninth planet, at its closest, would be about 20 billion miles away; at its farthest, it could be 100 billion miles away. One trip around the sun would take 10,000 to 20,000 years. "We have pretty good constraints on its orbit," Dr. Brown said. "What we don't know is where it is in its orbit, which is too bad." This would be the second time that Dr. Brown has upended the map of the solar system. In January 2005, he discovered a Pluto size object, now known as Eris, in the Kuiper belt, the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune. The next year, the International Astronomical Union placed Pluto in a new category, "dwarf planet," because in its view, a full fledged planet must be the gravitational bully of its orbit, and Pluto was not. The first indication of a hidden planet beyond Pluto had come a couple of years earlier. The Kuiper belt extends outward from Neptune's orbit, about 2.8 billion miles from the sun, to a bit less than twice Neptune's orbit, about five billion miles. Astronomers expected that beyond lay mostly empty space. Thus, they were surprised when Dr. Brown and two colleagues spotted a 600 mile wide icy world at a distance of eight billion miles that remained well outside the Kuiper belt even at the closest point in its orbit. No one could convincingly explain how the object, which Dr. Brown named Sedna, got there, and the hope was that the discovery of more Sedna like worlds would provide enlightening clues. Instead, astronomers looked and found nothing, deepening the mystery. Finally, in 2014, Chadwick Trujillo, who had worked with Dr. Brown on the Sedna discovery, and Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, reported a smaller object in a Sedna like orbit, always remaining beyond the Kuiper belt. Dr. Trujillo and Dr. Sheppard noted that several Kuiper belt objects had similar orbital characteristics, and they laid out the possibility of a planet disturbing the orbits of these objects. "It was the best explanation we could come up with," Dr. Trujillo said. But the particulars of their proposed planet did not explain what was in the sky, Dr. Brown said. "The theorists didn't really take it seriously," he said. "They figured it was all some observational effect. The observers didn't take it seriously, because they figured it was all some theoretical thing they couldn't understand." Still, the peculiarities of the orbits appeared genuine. Dr. Brown said he and Dr. Batygin "sat down and beat our heads against the wall for the last two years." First, they focused on the six objects in stable orbits and disregarded others that had been recently flung out by Neptune. That argued for the force of some unseen body guiding Sedna and the others. Dr. Batygin, a theorist, tried placing a planet among them using computer simulations, which scattered some Kuiper belt objects, but the orbits were not sufficiently eccentric. Then he examined what would happen if a ninth planet were looping outward in the opposite direction. That, Dr. Batygin said, gave "a beautiful match to the real data." The computer simulations showed that the planet swept up the Kuiper belt objects and placed them only temporarily in the elliptical orbits. Come back in half a billion years, Dr. Brown said, and Sedna will be back in the Kuiper belt, while other Kuiper belt objects will have been pushed into elliptical orbits. Another strange result in the simulations: A few Kuiper belt objects were knocked into orbits perpendicular to those of the planets. Dr. Brown remembered that five objects had been found in perpendicular orbits. "They're exactly where we predicted them to be," he said. "That's when my jaw hit my floor. I think this is actually right." Dr. Morbidelli said a possible ninth planet could be the core of a gas giant that started forming during the infancy of the solar system; a close pass to Jupiter could have ejected it. Back then, the sun resided in a dense cluster of stars, and the gravitational jostling could have prevented the planet from escaping to interstellar space. "I think they're onto something real," he said. "I would bet money. I would bet 10,000 bucks." Dr. Brown said that he had begun searching for the planet, and that he thought he would be able to find it within five years. Other astronomers will most likely also scan that swath of the night sky. If the planet exists, it would easily meet the definition of planet, Dr. Brown said. "There are some truly dominant bodies in the solar system, and they are pushing around everything else," Dr. Brown said. "This is what we mean when we say planet." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Friday night, the Facebook co founder Mark Zuckerberg went on his vast social network to convince an expanding chorus of critics including the departing president of the United States that he honest to goodness wants to combat the "fake news" that is running wild across his site and others, and turning our politics into a paranoiac fantasy come to life. "We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously," he wrote. "We've made significant progress, but there is more work to be done," he continued, listing various steps Facebook was taking, like making it easier to report bad information and enlisting fact checking organizations. It was heartening to hear, especially after his earlier assertion that it was "crazy" to believe that misinformation on Facebook had affected the presidential election in any real way despite copious evidence that it was disturbingly in the mix, whether it directly swung the result or not. But as Mr. Zuckerberg went on to say that Facebook had to be careful not to mistakenly block "accurate content," he added this: "We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves," which was why he said Facebook would continue to rely on "our community and trusted third parties." His statement pointed up how much Facebook struggles to find the balance between its mission to be a free expression utopia for its 1.8 billion users and its responsibility to protect them from all that is defamatory, dangerous (like terrorist propaganda) and untrue. But more to the point, it appeared to buy into the notion that truth is relative at a time when that notion has to finally go away. Do you really need an outside arbiter to determine whether a video suggesting without basis that Hillary Clinton was involved in John F. Kennedy Jr.'s fatal plane crash in 1999 should be allowed to stand? Really? Truth doesn't need arbiters. It needs defenders. And it needs them now more than ever as the American democracy staggers into its next uncertain phase. With a mainstream news media that works hard to separate fact from fiction under economic and political threat, Facebook which has contributed to that economic threat by gobbling up so much of the online advertising market is going to have a special responsibility to do its part. Then consider what it may look like when Mr. Trump pursues policies regarding Muslim immigrants and undocumented immigrants. It's not so outlandish to envision Mr. Trump's attempts to sell his plans getting a lift from the likes of Mr. Jones or a fake site out of Macedonia perhaps claiming that Democrats are working with ISIS to use undocumented immigrants to poison local water supplies or some such. President Obama seemed to have had something like that in mind when he told reporters in Germany on Thursday, "If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not," and "if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems." Mr. Obama knows of what he speaks. He had to muddle through the first wave of this. You might remember how his health care plan was marred by a false accusation that the plan included so called death panels that would decide who lived and who died based on their "level of productivity to society," as former Gov. Sarah Palin put it (on her Facebook page!). The false "death panel" allegation was partly based on proposals to reimburse doctors for optional consultations with families over end of life care decisions. The accusations took on such power that even Newt Gingrich signed on to the falsehood despite the fact that he had previously expressed bullish support for end of life planning. (He explained himself in a 2009 letter to The New York Times.) News organizations, including this one, debunked the myth. But the bill's authors stripped out the provision just the same. And by then the "death panel" fiction had negated any shot at a reasoned, ideological debate you're joining the Democrats' plan to kill our infirm children and parents?! As Dan Pfeiffer, who was the president's chief communications strategist at the time, so grimly put it to me last week, "The faux death panels were the canary in the coal mine about the coming death of truth." Things have advanced since then. Today's fake news is limited only by the imaginations of its inventors and the number of shares it can garner on Facebook or Twitter. That's why people who care about the truth citizens, journalists and, let's hope, social media giants like Facebook, too will have to come up with a solution to this informational nihilism, fast. It's easier said than done. The combination of attacks seeking to delegitimize serious news organizations and a drop in overall trust in the news media has made many people wary of legitimate fact checking. And, as my colleague John Herrman noted last weekend, politicized voices can easily drown honest journalism all too easily on social media. There is growing talk of an ambitious journalistic collaboration to beat back the tide. Industry thinkers and leaders are coming together online to brainstorm solutions, as Jeff Jarvis, the City University of New York journalism professor, and Eli Pariser, the Upworthy co founder, have done. (Check them out online.) And I'd say it's high time that television news with its still huge audiences gets into the act with more than just token gestures at fact checking. But this much seems clear: The moment calls for some sort of hyperfactual counterinsurgency that treats every false meme as a baby Hitler to be killed in its crib with irrefutable facts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The musical adaptation of "A Bronx Tale," Chazz Palminteri's semi autobiographical coming of age story, is closing on Broadway. The show's final performance at the Longacre Theater will be Aug. 5, the producers said Wednesday evening. The musical opened in late 2016; at the time of its closing it will have played 29 previews and 700 regular performances. The musical is the latest version of the story, which Mr. Palminteri performed as a one man show in Los Angeles in 1989 and then Off Broadway. It was adapted for film in 1993, and arrived on Broadway as a solo play in 2007. Then came the musical, which began at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey before transferring to Broadway. It features songs by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, and is directed by Jerry Zaks, who also directed the one man Broadway version, and Robert De Niro, who directed and starred in the film. Mr. Palminteri is currently performing in the cast as the gangster, Sonny. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
George Braziller, whose small, independent publishing house introduced Americans to groundbreaking novelists, poets and new voices from abroad, including those of Jean Paul Sartre and Orhan Pamuk, and the works of 20th century and classical artists in fine reprints, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 101. His death, at the Mary Manning Walsh Home, was confirmed by his son Michael Braziller, the publisher and editorial director of the publishing house George Braziller Inc. In a 2015 memoir, "Encounters: My Life in Publishing," Mr. Braziller recalled his century of contrasts: a son of Russian immigrants and a high school dropout, whose father died before he was born and whose mother sold old clothes from a pushcart. Yet in 56 years in publishing, he found fame and a glamorous world of friendships with Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso and a host of major poets and novelists. For serious writers, Mr. Braziller was that rare New York publisher seemingly more dedicated to literary quality than profits. Starting in 1955, he searched for offbeat, often unknown talents with original ideas for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and short stories. He found them in Europe, Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Many had already been published abroad, but he brought them out in English for American audiences. The hundreds of authors and titles in his literary pantheon included the existentialist Sartre ("The Words"), the Turkish writer Mr. Pamuk ("The White Castle") and the French novelist Claude Simon ("The Flanders Road"), each of whom won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Sartre declined to accept his.) Other Braziller stars included the Russian born Nathalie Sarraute ("Portrait of a Man Unknown"); Nigeria's Buchi Emecheta ("Second Class Citizen"), and Australia's David Malouf ("Remembering Babylon"). Mr. Braziller's most enduring publishing relationship was with New Zealand's Janet Frame. It began with her first novel, "Owls Do Cry," which he published in 1960, and continued for 30 years with eight more novels and volumes of short stories, poetry and an autobiography. His roster of dozens of poets included the Serbian American Charles Simic, who won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, and the Americans J. D. McClatchy, Madeline DeFrees and Carl Dennis, who won a Pulitzer in 2002. Mr. Braziller's art books were often limited editions, with high quality prints to achieve colors and shades that, critics said, rivaled original plates. The subjects included medieval illuminated manuscripts of the 14th and 15th centuries; "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo," the celebrated 19th century landscape prints of the Japanese artist Hiroshige, and works by Joan Miro and Marc Chagall. Mr. Braziller said he used "the finest paper, the highest quality printing, the best of everything." "That was his driving goal and ambition to bring good writers and artists to the American public," Joel Braziller, the publisher's son and secretary treasurer of the Braziller publishing house, said in an interview for this obituary in 2015. "He was not interested in money. He published great writers and series of books on great artists and architects, and he did it in affordable editions." "Bravo for George Braziller, Inc!" The New York Times Book Review said in 1959, when his "Great American Artists Series" appeared with works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Winslow Homer and others. "For the first time American Artists have been treated by a publishing house with a respect and faith heretofore reserved for their French counterparts." In 1967, Mr. Braziller won the Carey Thomas Award for distinguished creative publishing, for his full color facsimile edition of "The Hours of Catherine of Cleves," a 15th century illuminated manuscript that had been acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York in 1963. It was a Book of the Month Club selection, received unanimous critical encomiums and accolade of accolades was given an entire window at Macy's. Mr. Braziller scored another triumph in 1968 with his two volume, 1,000 page facsimile edition of William Caxton's 1480 translation of Ovid's epic poem "Metamorphoses," a British treasure. He was also hailed for keeping Caxton's original manuscript intact at Cambridge University after part of it was bought by an American dealer. Mr. Braziller donated proceeds from the sale of 1,200 copies to ransom the work. In 1980, Mr. Braziller, who issued about 35 titles a year in literature, philosophy, science, urban studies, architecture, environmental studies and other subjects, again won the Carey Thomas Award, sponsored by Publishers Weekly, which cited his "exceptional publishing program, embracing art books and innovative fiction from the United States and abroad." George Braziller was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 12, 1916, the youngest of seven children of Joseph and Rebecca Braziller. He and his siblings spoke Yiddish before learning English. He attended public schools in Brooklyn and in Huntington Station, on Long Island, after his mother remarried. But he dropped out after the 10th grade to work as a shipping clerk. In 1936, he married Marsha Nash. They had two sons, Michael, the publisher of Persea Books, who succeeded his father as publisher and editorial director after he retired in 2011, and Joel. Mrs. Braziller died in 1970. Besides his sons, Mr. Braziller is survived by three grandchildren. In the early 1940s, he founded the Book Find Club, buying unsold books, called remainders, cheaply, and selling them to subscribers. Under his wife's supervision, the club grew rapidly during his World War II Army service in Europe. After the war, it had as many as 100,000 members. He also founded the Seven Arts Book Society. Both were sold in the late 1960s to Time Inc. Not long after he ventured into publishing, Mr. Braziller was invited to a weekly poker game with Cass Canfield of Harper's, M. Lincoln Schuster of Simon Schuster and Bennett Cerf of Random House. But he soon quit their game. To compete with such established publishers professionally, he decided to go abroad in search of innovative writers. "As a young publisher, I was just beginning to understand what it meant to develop a list and to introduce new ideas to the public," he recalled. "I realized that there were no established guidelines regarding what to publish. I had to determine the guidelines for myself." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Deno's Wonder Wheel, a 15 story signature feature of the Coney Island skyline, first spun to life in the wake of the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago. Now, as the coronavirus casts a growing pall over the storied amusement district, the family that owns the wheel says that the whirling behemoth will almost certainly go the entire season without carrying passengers for the first time in a hundred summers. An ingenious Ferris wheel and roller coaster hybrid built by Italian, Irish and Russian immigrants three years before the construction of the famous boardwalk its park adjoins, the Wonder Wheel was the jewel of the showy, boomtown Coney Island that rose along the newly widened beach in the Roaring Twenties. And it is the oldest surviving ride to operate continually there. But a grand centennial celebration of the Brooklyn landmark has been put on indefinite hold as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's phased reopening of New York State's economy has kept amusement parks shuttered during crucial warm weather months they rely on for their income. "Trying to keep busy," he said. "Getting everything ready, in case we open." But by early August, with no definitive word from the state on if or when amusement parks might be permitted to operate this year, optimism about a possible reopening was hard to muster. "We haven't given up hope, but it doesn't seem likely," said Dennis Vourderis, whose family has owned and operated the Wonder Wheel since 1983. "It's very sad and financially devastating. To us as a seasonal operator on the boardwalk in Brooklyn, August 15 would be much too late to open for the season." "The property we bought next door is in jeopardy," said Mr. Vourderis. "It makes me realize how fragile we are." Denos Vourderis, Dennis's father and the clan's patriarch, first had designs on the Wonder Wheel back in 1948, according to family lore. A Greek immigrant who peddled hot dogs from a pushcart, the elder Mr. Vourderis proposed to his future wife, Lula, with a grandiose promise: "You marry me, I buy you the Wonder Wheel." In 1983, after 35 years running increasingly large food businesses, he made good on his promise, purchasing her the biggest ring of all. The entire story of the Wonder Wheel is one of immigrant gumption, as the author Charles Denson observes in "Coney Island's Wonder Wheel Park," a rollicking history that is being published this month by Arcadia. Enlivened with vivid photographs and diagrams, the book presents original research on the enterprising immigrants "with little formal education" who designed, built, ran and ultimately rescued the complex 200 ton machine. "Coney Island was a place where immigrants could realize a dream," Mr. Denson, the executive director of the Coney Island History Project, said in an interview. "It was pretty much a laboratory for invention." The Wonder Wheel was the brain child of Charles Hermann, a native of Romania's Transylvanian Alps, who immigrated to the United States in 1907 after being trained as a machinist. Hermann, who spelled his last name two ways sometimes with two 'r's was an inveterate tinkerer who came to hold multiple patents, including one that his granddaughter, Freddi Herrmann, described in an interview as a "cowcatcher for cars that would push people away instead of running them over." Garms persuaded Hermann to redesign the machine as an amusement ride they called Dip the Dip the future Wonder Wheel and William J. Ward, a prominent Coney Island landowner, provided a lot on Jones Walk in exchange for a stake in the venture. "So you have these two uneducated immigrants who wanted to achieve something," Mr. Denson said, "and they built this magnificent machine that's really a work of art." Though Garms had no financial training, he sold stock to family and local business owners and resisted union interference by bringing steelworkers into the company as shareholders. The result, Mr. Denson said, was "the most successful business in Coney Island it has outlived everything else and has a perfect safety record." Hermann, a dreamer who cared nothing for money, sold all his shares in the wheel to raise money to help realize his vision. Without ever earning a dime from his invention, he moved on. The Garms family ran the Wonder Wheel for six decades, spending summers in a home beneath the spinning ride, much like the family in the Woody Allen film "Annie Hall" that lived below a rumbling roller coaster. Freddie Garms, one of Garms's sons, was the very model of the Coney carny, promoting the wheel by surfing the tops of its swinging cars untethered and adorning the ride with its now famous neon. A Scotch enthusiast, he was buried with a bottle of Chivas Regal and a mink bow tie, according to Walter Kerner Jr., whose father co owned the wheel in the 1970s and early '80s. "To avoid problems with the Mafia, they hired off duty officers to work the wheel," said the younger Mr. Kerner. "Some worked more than others, but their presence kept the Mafia out." Coney Island fell on hard times after Steeplechase Park closed in 1964, but Wonder Wheel Park was protected at night by a pair of German shepherds, one at the base of the wheel and one on the roof of an adjacent building. In the morning, the wheel operator would stop the ride with one of the cars alongside the roof, and the guard dog knew to get in, as did its four legged compatriot on the ground. There were food and water in the car, and the dogs just rode around together all day. "They loved it," recalled Mr. Kerner. "It was something about the hum of the wheel and the breeze off the ocean." In 1983, Freddie Garms offered to sell the Wonder Wheel to Denos Vourderis, who had previously bought the adjoining kiddie park. Coney Island was blighted by this time, and a homeless man stabbed the Vourderis patriarch in the chest with a screwdriver. As he was recovering, his children visited him in the hospital and tried to talk him out of buying the wheel. Their father would have none of it. "He said, 'I got guts. You got no guts; tell him I want to buy it,'" Dennis Vourderis remembered. The family bought the ride for 250,000. One of the more frightening challenges came after the Vourderises' first season operating the ride, when the previous owner informed them they needed to lift the gargantuan wheel off its axle to replace some worn steel rollers. "You ever put your car on a jack and you worry your jack will give out?" asked Steve Vourderis, Dennis's brother. "Well, this is a 150 foot tall, 200 ton wheel up in the air, and you're up there 75 feet in the air working on it, worrying the whole thing could come down." In the end, the Vourderises completed a handsome restoration of their prize possession. The wheel was designated a city landmark in 1989, and it has been spinning every summer since until this year. But even as the financial math becomes more vexing with each week the park remains closed, the family has not abandoned hope for the long term. "If there's one thing I learned from my dad, it's that I have faith in Coney Island, and I know it'll come back," Dennis Vourderis said. "So I kind of grew some guts as well as a gut, from being in quarantine." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"DNA," the fifth feature from the French actress and filmmaker Maiwenn, opens in clamor and closes in calm. In between is a journey taken by Neige (played by Maiwenn and inspired by her own life) as she moves away from the fractious embrace of her extravagantly maladjusted family and toward her Algerian roots. A downcast single mother, Neige becomes consumed with reclaiming her ethnicity after her grandfather, an Algerian immigrant to France, dies. As Neige's rambunctious relatives gather to plan the funeral, the script (which Maiwenn wrote with Mathieu Demy) whips up a froth of vitriolic arguments and barbed confrontations. Old grudges and new hurts swell and subside, each sniping altercation a note in a symphony of dysfunction and deplorable behavior. (At one point, Neige's mother, played by a blazing Fanny Ardant, roughly shoves her daughter aside as she tries to read a eulogy.) This tumult, though undeniably invigorating, soon becomes overwhelming, frustrating our ability to determine who's who and what's what. So when we meet Neige's estranged father (a blessedly laid back Alain Francon), it's easy to understand why he has kept his distance. And when the film's focus shrinks to Neige's troublingly obsessive quest, isolating her in a lonely world of DNA tests and Algerian history and a possible eating disorder its tone becomes as wan as her undernourished reflection. Telling us virtually nothing about Neige beyond her fixation, "DNA" struggles to engage. Even so, there's a dreamy contentment to the movie's final moments as she wanders, bathed in golden light and Stephen Warbeck's lovely score, a woman who has found something she hadn't known was lost. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI NUCLEAR POWER STATION The part above ground doesn't look like much, a few silver pipes running in a straight line, dwarfed by the far more massive, scarred reactor buildings nearby. More impressive is what is taking shape unseen beneath: an underground wall of frozen dirt 100 feet deep and nearly a mile in length, intended to solve a runaway water crisis threatening the devastated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan. Officially named the Land Side Impermeable Wall, but better known simply as the ice wall, the project sounds like a fanciful idea from science fiction or a James Bond film. But it is about to become a reality in an ambitious, and controversial, bid to halt an unrelenting flood of groundwater into the damaged reactor buildings since the disaster five years ago when an earthquake and a tsunami caused a triple meltdown. Built by the central government at a cost of 35 billion yen, or some 320 million, the ice wall is intended to seal off the reactor buildings within a vast, rectangular shaped barrier of man made permafrost. If it becomes successfully operational as soon as this autumn, the frozen soil will act as a dam to block new groundwater from entering the buildings. It will also help stop leaks of radioactive water into the nearby Pacific Ocean, which have decreased significantly since the calamity but may be continuing. However, the ice wall has also been widely criticized as an expensive and overly complex solution that may not even work. Such concerns re emerged this month after the plant's operator announced that a section that was switched on more than four months ago had yet to fully freeze. Some also warn that the wall, which is electrically powered, may prove as vulnerable to natural disasters as the plant itself, which lost the ability to cool its reactors after the 45 foot tsunami caused a blackout there. The reactor buildings are vulnerable to an influx of groundwater because of how the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, built the plant in the 1960s, by cutting away a hillside to place it closer to the sea, so the plant could pump in water more easily. That also put the buildings in contact with a deep layer of permeable rock filled with water, mostly rain and melted snow from the nearby Abukuma Mountains, that flows to the Pacific. The buildings managed to keep the water out until the accident on March 11, 2011. Either the natural disasters themselves, or the explosive meltdowns of three of the plant's six reactors that followed, are believed to have cracked the buildings' basements, allowing groundwater to pour in. Nearly 40,000 gallons of water a day keep flooding into the buildings. Once inside, the water becomes highly radioactive, impeding efforts to eventually dismantle the plant. During the accident, the uranium fuel grew so hot that some of it is believed to have melted through the reactor's steel floors and possibly into the basement underneath, though no one knows exactly where it lies. The continual flood of radioactive water has prevented engineers from searching for the fuel. Since the accident, five robots sent into the reactor buildings have failed to return because of high radiation levels and obstruction from debris. The water has also created a waste management nightmare because Tepco must pump it out into holding tanks as quickly as it enters the buildings, to prevent it from overflowing into the Pacific. The company says that it has built more than 1,000 tanks that now hold more than 800,000 tons of radioactive water, enough to fill more than 320 Olympic size swimming pools. On a recent visit to the plant, workers were busily erecting more durable, welded tanks to replace the temporary ones thrown up in a hurry during the early years after the accident, some of which have leaked. Every available patch of space on the sprawling plant grounds now appears to be filled with 95 foot tanks. "We have to escape from this cycle of ever more water building up inside the plant," said Yuichi Okamura, a general manager of Tepco's nuclear power division who guided a reporter through Fukushima Daiichi. About 7,000 workers are employed in the cleanup. Engineers with the wall's builder, the construction giant Kajima Corp., estimate that it will take about two months for the soil around a pipe to fully freeze. Solidifying the entire wall, which consists of 1,568 such underground pipes, will require 30 large refrigeration units and consume enough electricity to light more than 13,000 Japanese homes for a year. The technique of using frozen barriers to block groundwater has been used to build tunnels and mines around the world, but not on this scale. And certainly not on the site of a major nuclear disaster. Since the start, the project has attracted its share of skeptics. Some say buried obstacles at the plant, including tunnels that linked the reactor buildings to other structures, will leave holes in the ice wall, making it more like a sieve. Others question why such an exotic solution is necessary when a traditional steel or concrete wall might perform better. Some call the ice wall a flashy but desperate gambit to tame the water problem, after the government and Tepco were initially slow to address it. Adding to the urgency is the 2020 Olympics, which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan helped win for Tokyo three years ago by assuring the International Olympic Committee that the water troubles at Fukushima Daiichi were under control. "It's a Hail Mary play," said Azby Brown, a Japan based researcher for Safecast, an independent radiation monitoring group. "Tepco underestimated the groundwater problem in the beginning, and now Japan is trying to catch up with a massive technical fix that is very expensive." Supporters and skeptics alike will soon learn if that gambit will succeed. After two years of work, Kajima finished installing the pipes and refrigerator units to create the ice wall in February. At the end of March, it switched on part of the ice wall for the first time roughly half a mile that runs between the reactor buildings and the Pacific. Most of the other, uphill side of the wall was activated in mid June. This month, Tepco told the nuclear agency that the seaside segment of the ice wall had frozen about 99 percent solid. It says a few spots have failed to solidify because they contain buried rubble or sand left from the plant's construction a half century ago, which now allow groundwater to flow through so quickly that it will not freeze. Tatsuhiro Yamagishi, a spokesman for Tepco, said the company was trying to plug these holes in the ice wall with quick drying cement. "We have started to see some progress in temperature decrease," he said. Even if the cement helps make the ice wall watertight, skeptics question how long it can last. They point out that such frozen barriers are usually temporary against groundwater at construction sites. They say the brine solution used to chill the pipes is highly corrosive, which could make them break or leak. It is also unclear whether the system could break down under the stresses of operating in a high radiation environment where another earthquake could lead to another power loss. "Why build such an elaborate and fragile wall when there is a more permanent solution available?" said Sumio Mabuchi, a former construction minister who has called for building a slurry wall, a trench filled with liquid concrete that is commonly used to block water. Isao Abe, a Kajima engineer overseeing the ice wall, said his company had made the wall more durable by installing underground pipes that are easy to replace if they corrode. He also said the ice wall was self sealing, meaning that if another earthquake caused cracks, any incoming water would freeze right away, restoring the wall. He also said it would take months for the wall to thaw, giving engineers ample time to restore power even if the plant has another outage. Mr. Abe said the wall was intended to operate until 2021, giving Tepco five more years to find and plug the holes in the reactor buildings, though skeptics say this difficult task will require more time. Mr. Abe also pointed out that the ice wall was part of a broader strategy for containing the radioactive water. Before installing the ice wall, Kajima also built a conventional steel wall underground along the plant's border with the Pacific last year. Tepco says that wall has already stopped all measurable leaks of radioactive materials into the sea. However, some scientists say that radioactive water may still be seeping through layers of permeable rock that lie deep below the plant, emptying into the Pacific far offshore. They say the only way to eliminate all leaks would be to repair the buildings once and for all. Even if the ice wall works, Tepco will face the herculean task of dealing with the huge amounts of contaminated water that have accumulated. The company has installed filtering systems that can remove all nuclear particles but one, a radioactive form of hydrogen known as tritium. The central government and Tepco have yet to figure out what to do with the tritium laced water; proposals to dilute and dump it into the Pacific have met with resistance from local fishermen, and risk an international backlash. For now, the only visible sign that the freezing has begun are silver dollar size patches of ice that have formed on top of the aboveground, silver pipes. At one spot, the No. 4 reactor building loomed, an enormous cube six stories tall with concrete sides that showed large gashes left by the tsunami. "The water is here, just three meters beneath our feet," said Mr. Okamura, the Tepco general manager, who stood near the pipes wearing a white protective suit, goggles and a surgical mask. "It still flows into the building, unseen, without stopping." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
No matter who crosses the finish line first at the Daytona 500 on Sunday, it is all but certain what the winning driver will do: stop his car in front of the main grandstands, rev his engine, and then delight the crowd with a smoky burnout as he sends his car spinning in big loops. "You're so hyped up after winning that you want to do something destructive," said Jimmie Johnson, the 2013 Daytona 500 winner. Victory donuts as those exuberant, rubber burning celebrations have come to be known might be ubiquitous in auto racing now, but they were not common in Nascar until 1998. That is when Dale Earnhardt artfully used his spinning tires to carve a "3" his car's famous number in the grass between the track and the pit lane after his first, and only, Daytona 500 victory. Two decades later, after Joey Logano won the 2018 season's final race to clinch his first Monster Energy Cup series title, his celebration was similar: looping donuts with his yellow Ford before and after grabbing a championship flag. "The big smoky ones, to me, don't really do it," Logano said recently. "Anyone can park the car and burn the tires out." But although the donut may be the most recognizable postrace tradition for winners, that does nor necessarily mean fast driving translates into beautiful celebratory spins. Jeff Gordon, now a Nascar analyst on Fox, won 93 Cup races during his Hall of Fame career but said he was never all that good at doing postrace donuts obliging only because fans would have been "let down and disappointed" if he didn't. "I remember making some comments about doing my first donut," Gordon said, "and I don't think I did a very good one. But I said I saw all these kids doing it, so I'd definitely have to do it, too." Zanardi, who came from Formula One, started out in the pole position each of his first two races in his second year in CART but finished out of the top three in both. In the third race, on a street course in Long Beach, Calif., Zanardi started second but passed Jimmy Vasser with 12 laps left and held on to win. After the victory, he took his car to Turn 1 and whipped his car around in a donut. "It was basically a fantastic way to start the season, and I was so happy," Zanardi said in a recent interview, adding: "People made a big thing out of it, like, 'Wow, yeah, he's spinning donuts!' So they encouraged me to do it again. "It wasn't long before fans would call me Mr. Donut, Donut King, and so on. People would start to show up with a case of doughnuts." But CART officials were not as enthused, telling Zanardi to cool it with the donuts out of safety concerns for reporters and photographers near the track. His peers did not immediately fall in love with the celebration, either. Zanardi said: "Other drivers would say: 'I'd never do something like that. Come on. That is beyond the limit. It's dangerous, and it's showing off too much. Be happy with your race win you just earned.' " So he held off on the donuts after back to back victories in Michigan and Ohio, but picked it back up after a third win, in Wisconsin, en route to his first CART title. The donut came to Nascar courtesy of the veteran driver Ron Hornaday Jr., who executed them in the Craftsman Truck Series in 1995. They were not appreciated by the truck's owner, Earnhardt, who thought it was too hard on the transmission. Earnhardt, who died in a crash at Daytona in 2001, told Hornaday to knock it off, but the idea, it seems, grew on him until he was willing to use it himself. Johnson, a seven time Monster Energy Cup Series champion, has become something of an expert on donuts simply because of how often he has won. His favorite donuts, he said, are those by the former Cup driver Greg Biffle and the 28 year old Logano, who has won 21 Cup races and "is pretty cool to watch" doing donuts, Johnson said. Zanardi, who lost his legs in a crash in Germany in 2001, said it was not all that difficult to do a good burnout and donut on a car with a standard transmission: Put the car in gear, he said, let out the clutch "quite brutally" so the wheels start to spin, and then turn the steering wheel as the tires spin to twirl the car around. Johnson discovered the hard way that the best method was to put the car in second gear before spinning the wheels. After his first Cup victory in 2002 in Fontana, Calif., Johnson tried doing celebratory donuts, at a high cost to his Chevrolet. "At first, we had this discussion where we wanted to do a burnout in reverse," Johnson said after the race. "And I tried that, and I blew the transmission out of it. And then I was doing the donuts and I burned the motor up. "So it was just a bad last five minutes there on the racetrack, but I wanted to do some donuts and boil the tires off this Chevrolet." Zanardi, 52, has won four gold medals in paracycling at the Paralympics, and in January raced a specially fitted BMW in the Rolex 24, a 24 hour endurance auto race, at Daytona. He said he could have used a traction control button on his steering wheel to do a donut if his team had won, but, unfortunately for Zanardi and fans of donuts, it did not. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The Giant Haskell Minnow. In 2003, Lang's sold one at auction for 101,200, setting a record at the time for antique fishing gear. Ellis Whiteaker, 11, didn't know what he might find when he went hunting in his basement in Fayetteville, N.C. But he had seen a call for fishing antiques on a social networking app he uses (he's been an avid fishermen since age 4) and knew that his grandfather, a former Air Force pilot who passed away before Ellis was born, had left some very old stuff in boxes. What he found were six antique rods one with a handle carved in the shape of a baseball bat. He looked it up, and a similar model on eBay was selling for around 700. "It was really neat looking," said Ellis's mom, Sarah Whiteaker. And, of course, the value of the item "made him feel excited." Vintage fishing gear falls into a category of collectibles sometimes dubbed "mantiques," which includes hunting paraphernalia like antique rifles and duck decoys. But unlike antique cars, say, which can't be hidden for decades in the basement of one's home, antique fishing lures and reels can be packed away and appreciating in value for years, unbeknownst to their owners. John Stephenson, a buyer for the British fishing auction house Thomas Turner, said he fields 10 to 20 phone calls a day from people inquiring about items they've found. Of those, he estimates, one in 10 have some value. Once a month, someone brings in something to his auction house that is worth five figures. "There are many more people looking for them now than there were 50 years ago," he said of fishing antiques. Over the past several hundred years, there have been endless variations of fishing tackle rods, reels, flies and lures providing fertile ground for collectors, who thrive on subtle distinctions and rarity. "The 1850s period to the 1950s is the golden hundred years, where after that point fishing tackle became virtually all mass produced, and it lost the handmade appeal," said Jim Schottenham, the valuator for Lang's Auction, which specializes in fishing tackle. One item on the Lang's wish list is a reel and rod set from 1876 inlaid with gold and topaz; if found, it's expected to sell for more than 100,000. According to Mr. Schottenham, the market for fishing antiques accelerated in the late 1970s. In 1985, The New York Times reported that an antique reel fetched 5,000 at auction. In the 1990s the market got even bigger, as buyers and sellers began connecting online. Today, fishing auction houses advertise heavily, encouraging people who aren't necessarily fishermen to go sifting through their attics and basements. One of the holy grails for collectors is the Giant Haskell Minnow, a large hammered copper lure with a flexible tail that wiggles in the water. Patented in 1859 by an Ohio artisan named Riley Haskell, the lure was "a real masterpiece of craftsmanship," according to the fishing antiques dealer Fred Kretchman. Only a handful of Giant Haskell Minnows have ever been located; in 2003, Lang's sold one at auction for 101,200, setting a record at the time for antique fishing gear. The amount shocked collectors and sellers, and brought new buzz to the market. "Somebody said to me, '50 grand or something is a lot of money for a Haskell,'" recalled Mr. Stephenson (referring to the sale figure in British pounds). "I said, 'Well, it's bigger than a diamond.'" Today, people are often shocked by the value of objects they find. In a 2018 article for the American Museum of Fly Fishing, Mr. Kretchman described a client who brought in an antique rod her husband's father had received as a gift from a craftsman. When he told her it was worth 8,000, "you could have knocked her over with a feather," he wrote in the piece. "She was speechless." Nick Lyons, the fly fishing author and publisher, believes the draw for collectors is connected to romantic myths of American frontiersman identity, citing Huckleberry Finn and Daniel Boone. Fishing has one of the deepest repositories of literature of any sport: tens of thousands of books have been written on the subject, dating back to at least 1496, when an English prioress named Dame Juliana Berners wrote an instructional overview titled "A treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle." And rare fishing texts are as collectible as tackle. The Lang's listing includes the "Preston Jennings Book of Trout Flies," written in 1935, which sold at auction for 94,400 in 2007. But even more appealing to collectors than a literary pedigree is a fishing item's nostalgia factor. "I don't know any adult male or female who fishes who doesn't want the rest of his family to fish," said Mr. Lyons. "There's the affection; the great mystery of what's under the water." Many people grew up spending afternoons on the water with parents or grandparents. Decades later, those memories exert a powerful hold. To that point, Ellis Whiteaker didn't end up selling the valuable rod he found. "To him, it's worth a million dollars; he will never get rid of it," Ms. Whiteaker said. "It's his connection to my dad, who he's never met." As for the other antique rods, Ellis plans to divide them among his first cousins. "It's the right thing to do if we split them up," he told his mother, "and let everybody have one." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A single new fossil can change the way we think about human origins, but discovering it deep in a cave or buried in rock remains a daunting struggle for hammer wielding paleoanthropologists. "It can take years and luck to find the right one," said Aurelien Mounier, a paleoanthropologist at the French National Museum of Natural History. Now researchers like Dr. Mounier are using computers and mathematical techniques to reconstruct the appearance of fossils they have yet to find. On Tuesday, Dr. Mounier and Marta Mirazon Lahr, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge in Britain, unveiled a virtual skull belonging to the last common ancestor of all modern humans, who lived in Africa about 300,000 years ago. The rendering of this ancestral skull, described in the journal Nature Research, is strikingly similar to fossils of about the same age found in East Africa and South Africa. The scientists propose that modern humanity arose through a merging of populations in these two regions. "We're starting to look at the paleontological record in a different way," Dr. Mounier said. "We're more aware of a lot of diversity and complexity." The ancestry of all living humans can be traced to Africa. Studies of DNA indicate our common ancestors lived somewhere on the continent between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago. But how those early humans evolved is an enduring puzzle. The fossil record in Africa from that period doesn't offer easy answers. Over the decades, researchers have found just a few remains, with a strange mixture of traits. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In 1986, for example, paleoanthropologists discovered a fossil in Kenya between 270,000 and 300,000 years old. They called it "archaic Homo sapiens." Other experts argued it belonged to another species altogether. And others have simply thrown up their hands. Two years ago, a team of scientists working in Morocco offered a major new clue. They discovered a set of fossil remains, about 315,000 years old, that belonged to Homo sapiens the oldest remains of our species yet found. But these humans were different from modern humans in some important ways. They lacked chins, for example, and had a long, low braincases. Dr. Mounier and Dr. Lahr aimed to understand how enigmatic fossils from around Africa are related to modern humans. The researchers developed mathematical techniques to compare the structure of the skulls , searching for evolutionary links. The first challenge was the fact that people today do not share perfectly identical skulls. From person to person, there is a lot of variation. Populations have slightly different skull shapes on average, but those averages can be misleading. "We know that within a population, there can be much more variation than between two populations," Dr. Mounier said. "We're all very similar, and yet we're all very diverse." No one person's skull can stand in for everyone's. So Dr. Mounier and Dr. Lahr worked their way backward from this modern diversity to what they believe was the skull of a common ancestor. They took CT scans of 260 skulls of people from a wide range of populations from the inhabitants of African rainforests to Pacific islands to the coasts of Greenland. They also scanned 100,000 year old skulls found in Israel that are clearly similar to those of living humans. Then the scientists placed all of these living and extinct individuals on an evolutionary tree. In doing so, they were able to trace the evolution of skulls along each of the branches, arriving at a picture of the skull of the common ancestor of living humans. "More or less, it's quite a modern human," Dr. Mounier said of the skull. "But it doesn't really correspond to any current population it's something different." The rendering of this ancestral skull shows the same vaulted braincase that we have today. But it also has heavier brow ridges and a protruding lower face. Dr. Mounier and Dr. Lahr compared their ancestral skull with real African fossil skulls from the same period. The researchers found a number of differences so many, in fact, that they think the fossils belong not to a single population, but to three. The Moroccan fossil belongs to one population. Another fossil, found in Tanzania, represents the second. The third population includes two fossils from two sites that are thousands of miles apart: South Africa and Kenya. This third population, the researchers concluded, most closely resembles the ancestor of modern humans. The evolutionary lineage that gave rise to modern humans produced a number of populations across Africa around 350,000 years ago, Dr. Mounier and Dr. Lahr speculate. These humans all had big brains and made increasingly sophisticated tools. But there were clear differences in their anatomy. In Morocco, for example, early Homo sapiens had a very Neanderthal like appearance. "It's clearly not the closest candidate to play a role in the evolution of modern humans," Dr. Mounier said. The populations from which the Moroccan and Tanzanian fossils come from may have died out without contributing to the gene pool of living humans. But other groups may have come into contact from time to time and interbred. That's what may have happened to ancient humans in East and South Africa. "The idea is that they merged to eventually form our species," Dr. Mounier said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany who was not involved in the new study, called it "a really great way to test hypotheses about the fossil record." But she cautioned that any reconstruction of our common ancestor depends on the skulls scientists examine. Along with the fossils from Israel, she would like to see other fossils of modern humans added to the analysis. The additional data might alter the virtual skull and perhaps even theories about our origins. Dr. Mounier sees the new study as a framework for studying human origins, not the last word. "There are a lot of things we can do, even without new fossils," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
When Alankrutha Giridhar boarded her flight on Monday, she was understandably more concerned with finding overhead luggage space than meeting her seatmate. Then she got a closer look at his face. "When I sat next to him, I was like, 'I'm 100 percent sure it's him,'" Ms. Giridhar said, "but I didn't want to prod or be weird or creepy." The man sitting next to her in economy class and the middle seat, no less was Timothee Hal Chalamet: the 23 year old Oscar nominee (for "Call Me by Your Name"), Frank Ocean fanboy and early adopter of the luxury fashion harness. Er, bib. For the first hour and a half of the journey, Ms. Giridhar tried to conceal her excitement about sharing limited legroom with Mr. Chalamet. But when he asked her when the flight would land, Ms. Giridhar couldn't help addressing his fame. She told him she knew who he was and asked him why he was in economy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
NEW ORLEANS The director Lileana Blain Cruz had never been here until she took a recent four day trip to do research for her production of "The House That Will Not Stand," Marcus Gardley's 2014 play that begins performances July 11 at New York Theater Workshop. The drama, a loose adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's "The House of Bernarda Alba," is set in 1813, a time in the city's history when whites, blacks and "free people of color" mingled. It follows Beartrice Albans, a woman of privilege thanks to her long term relationship with a white man, and her three unmarried daughters, as the racial rules were being rewritten. The director, whose other credits include "Pipeline" and, also at the Workshop, "Red Speedo," said she didn't often get to travel to research a project, but it seemed important for this production: "I wanted to connect to the city at the heart of the play, so that I could bring that energy and life to the stage," she explained. The Times asked her to chronicle the visit on her iPhone. Here are edited descriptions of some of what she saw, and why it stayed with her, with references to stage directions and dialogue from the play. Even the food, she reported, felt relevant. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The first known epidemic of extensively drug resistant typhoid is spreading through Pakistan, infecting at least 850 people in 14 districts since 2016, according to the National Institute of Health Islamabad. The typhoid strain, resistant to five types of antibiotics, is expected to disseminate globally, replacing weaker strains where they are endemic. Experts have identified only one remaining oral antibiotic azithromycin to combat it; one more genetic mutation could make typhoid untreatable in some areas. Researchers consider the epidemic an international clarion call for comprehensive prevention efforts. If vaccination campaigns and modern sanitation systems don't outpace the pathogen, they anticipate a return to the pre antibiotic era when mortality rates soared. "This isn't just about typhoid," said Dr. Rumina Hasan, a pathology professor at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan. "Antibiotic resistance is a threat to all of modern medicine and the scary part is, we're out of options." Typhoid fever, caused by the Salmonella Typhi bacteria, is a highly infectious disease transmitted by contaminated food or water. It causes high fevers, headaches and vomiting. About 21 million people suffer from typhoid each year, and about 161,000 die, according to the World Health Organization. Typhoid is endemic to Pakistan, where poor infrastructure, low vaccination rates and overpopulated city dwellings persist. Doctors in the Sindh province were not surprised by an outbreak in November 2016 until cases proved unresponsive to ceftriaxone, used to treat multidrug resistant, or MDR, strains of typhoid. Only four isolated cases of extensively drug resistant, or XDR, typhoid had previously been reported worldwide, according to Dr. Elizabeth Klemm, an infectious disease geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in England. The outbreak's origins were clear: Early case mapping revealed large clusters of victims around sewage lines in the city of Hyderabad. Dr. Hasan's colleagues visited the region and found water sources that could be contaminated by leaking sewage pipes. Four deaths have been reported so far, according to the National Institute of Health Islamabad. At least one travel related case has been detected in the United Kingdom. The findings were disturbingly simple: XDR strains can materialize in one single step, virtually anywhere where the H58 strain and the added plasmid are both present whether a sewer system or even a single human gut. "There are multiple worst case scenarios," said Dr. Klemm. "One is that this strain spreads to other regions through migration. But the other is that it pops up elsewhere on its own plasmids with drug resistance are everywhere." But the accumulation of resistance genes in the Sindh strain was hardly an ambush, according to a commentary by vaccine experts at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The 1948 discovery of antibiotic treatment for typhoid plunged the infection's fatality rate from almost one in four to just one in 100, triggering "an epic thrust and parry duel" between powerful drugs and "a wily bacterial foe's stepwise acquisition of resistance to them," wrote Dr. Myron M. Levine and Dr. Raphael Simon. Doctors still prescribe an estimated 50 million doses of antibiotics for typhoid globally each year. In Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, antibiotic resistance is increasing by 30 percent each year, according to the W.H.O.; at that rate, all typhoid cases in the city will be resistant to multiple drugs by 2020. Physicians are treating the Sindh strain with azithromycin and other more expensive treatments that must be administered in hospital settings. "Once we aren't able to treat this effectively, we're going back to the pre antibiotic era. That would mean a lot of fatalities in our future," Dr. Klemm said. To preserve the last line of defense, public health officials have launched a campaign to vaccinate 250,000 children in Hyderabad using a new typhoid conjugate vaccine, Typbar TCV, recently prequalified by the W.H.O. The vaccine lasts at least five years and can be given to children as young as six months old, according to the W.H.O. Experts are also reinforcing hygiene habits for prevention: washing hands frequently, boiling drinking water and eating well cooked foods. In the longer term, modern sanitation infrastructure is needed. The vaccination campaign has faced local opposition, according to local news reports, amid rumors that the vaccines have been poisoned in a Western effort to harm children. Similar suspicions have persisted since 2011, when a posed hepatitis B campaign helped gather intelligence before the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Two polio vaccination workers were killed in Pakistan this January. GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance, a public private global health partnership working to increase access to immunization, has pledged 85 million to ensure that typhoid vaccines reach developing countries. "It's a global concern at this point," said Dr. Eric Mintz, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Everything suggests this strain will survive well and spread easily and acquiring resistance to azithromycin is only a matter of time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
There's the strange stuff that happens at Plantworks, for instance, like the friendly dog who inadvertently spends the night in the flower lab and emerges unfriendly. Around that time, Alice's colleague, Chris ( Ben Whishaw ), expresses romantic feelings for Alice, but then becomes more concerned with the well being of Little Joe. Later, Alice faces accusations of ignoring virus protocols in developing the plant, but before she can even get defensive about it, the issue is shrugged off. Hmm. The movie's story line, concocted by Hausner and Geraldine Bajard , recalls that of the much remade classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," in which emotional humans are replaced by unfeeling drones hatched from pods. The droll joke of "Little Joe" is that it frequently looks and feel like a "Snatchers" reboot as directed by a pod person. The tone is locked in with Alice's own coolness. Hausner frequently frames shots with Kubrick evoking one point perspective. She uses lenses that make the distances between two people sitting in an ordinary size room look enormous. The deliberateness of the styling makes the story's predictability feel more like inexorability. The events may be familiar, but their stagings are unusual and often uncanny. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov once mocked professors, and, by extension, other critical types, who approached art works with the question: "What is the guy trying to say?" "Little Joe" frequently invites the question for the deliberate purpose of resisting any answers. Is the movie a satire on Western society's arguable overreliance on psychotropic drugs? Maybe. But the film also suggests a potentially metaphysical dimension. "Who can prove the genuineness of our feelings? Moreover, who cares?" one character asks when disputing the idea that Little Joe's control over its owners is something to be frightened of. When such concerns of authenticity are put aside, what is our ideation of humanity left with? That's a scary thought. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
A New Jersey man died after being infected with Naegleria fowleri, also known as the "brain eating amoeba," a rare infection that is contracted through the nose in fresh water. The man, Fabrizio Stabile, 29, of Ventnor, N.J., was mowing his lawn on Sept. 16 when he felt ill from a headache, according to his obituary and GoFundMe page. His symptoms worsened and he was taken to the hospital after he became unable to speak coherently. A spinal tap revealed he was infected with the amoeba, and he died on Sept. 21. It is the first confirmed case of the infection in the United States since 2016, an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Jennifer Cope, said on Monday. Mr. Stabile fell ill after visiting the BSR Cable Park and Surf Resort, a surf and water park in Waco, Tex., said Kelly Craine, a spokeswoman for the Waco McLennan County Public Health District. She said in a telephone interview on Monday that the C.D.C. sent epidemiologists to take samples from the park to test for the presence of the amoeba, and those results could come this week. There are no reports of other illnesses at the Waco park, the C.D.C. said. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The amoeba is a single celled organism that can cause a rare infection of the brain called primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, also known as PAM, which is usually fatal. It thrives in warm temperatures and is commonly found in warm bodies of fresh water, such as lakes, rivers and hot springs, the C.D.C. said, though it can also be present in soil. It enters the body through the nose, and it moves on to the brain. Infection typically occurs when people go swimming in lakes and rivers, according to the C.D.C. The amoeba got its nickname because it starts to destroy brain tissue once it reaches the brain, after it is forced up there in a rush of water. Before it enters the body, it happily feasts on the bacteria found in the water. "It turns to using the brain as a food source," Dr. Cope said. "It is a scary name. It is not completely inaccurate." The amoeba can also hide in pipes that are connected to tap water, the C.D.C. said. You cannot get infected by touching contaminated water or by swallowing it, and the infection cannot be passed from one person to another. What are the symptoms of infection? Signs of infection include headache, nausea, vomiting and confusion all typical for people with any type of meningitis, Dr. Cope said. Patients who are admitted to the hospital with these symptoms should tell a doctor if they have recently been in a freshwater park, pool or body of water, she said. How many people have died from it? The infection is extremely rare but almost always leads to death, according to the C.D.C. In the United States, there were 143 infections between 1962 through 2017, the last year for which data is available. All but four of them were fatal. More than half of the infections occurred in Texas and Florida, the C.D.C. said. The amoeba is not found in salt water. How can I avoid being infected? Most of the infections happened when swimming in warm lakes or rivers. Swimmers or divers should take steps to prevent infection, such as blocking water from entering the nose. "Hold your nose or use nose clips," said Dr. Tina Tan, epidemiologist for the New Jersey Department of Health. "Avoid putting your head under water, such as in hot springs, and stirring up the dirt or the mud." Most of the infections occurred in Texas and Florida because they have warm climates and large populations, and water sports are popular, Dr. Cope said. Precautions should be taken for activities like diving and water skiing that have the potential to force large amounts of water into the nasal cavity. It depends. At least one person contracted the infection through nasal rinsing: A 47 year old man in the Virgin Islands died in 2012 after becoming infected during a nasal ablution that he performed in preparation for Islamic prayer, the C.D.C. said. The amoeba was detected in untreated groundwater from a well and rainwater from a cistern that he had used as his household water sources. At least two cases of infection have occurred in people who used neti pots, which are ceramic or plastic pots used to clear sinuses, the C.D.C. said. Water should be boiled for one minute (or three minutes at elevations higher than 6,500 feet), left to cool and filtered before rinsing, the C.D.C. advises. Otherwise, distilled, sterile or disinfected water should be used. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
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. 'ANTIGONE IN FERGUSON' at Harlem Stage (performances start on Sept. 13). An ancient tragedy gets an agonized update in this show from Theater of War Productions. First performed in 2016 at Michael Brown's former high school near Ferguson, Mo., the play riffs on Sophocles, considering personal loyalties and public responsibilities in a world in which some black lives have not mattered nearly enough. This bare bones production features a choir and a rotating cast, including Samira Wiley, Paul Giamatti, Chris Noth and Tamara Tunie. Tickets are free, though reservations are required. harlemstage.org 'COLLECTIVE RAGE: A PLAY IN FIVE BETTIES' at the Lucille Lortel Theater (in previews; opens on Sept. 12). A damsel in redress story. This play by Jen Silverman ("The Roommate," "The Moors") finds five women named Betty gathered together to stage the play within "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Will they experience transformation, too? Mike Donahue directs a cast that includes Dana Delany, Lea DeLaria and Adina Verson. 866 811 4111, mcctheater.org 'THE EMPEROR' at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (previews start on Sept. 9; opens on Sept. 16). In this adaptation of Ryszard Kapuscinski's 1978 book, the deposed Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is limned by 10 servants, all played by one woman. At Theater for a New Audience, Kathryn Hunter ("Kafka's Monkey") is joined onstage by the Ethiopian musician Temesgen Zeleke in this survey of power and its lackeys. Walter Meierjohann directs. 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'FINAL FOLLIES' at the Cherry Lane Theater (previews start on Sept. 12; opens on Oct. 2). Better late than never. Primary Stages pays tribute to the playwright A. R. Gurney, who died last year, with this production of three short plays: "The Love Course," "The Rape of Bunny Stuntz" and "Final Follies." David Saint directs a cast that includes Betsy Aidem, Colin Hanlon and Deborah Rush. 866 811 4111, primarystages.org FORCED ENTERTAINMENT at the N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (performances start on Sept. 8). The celebrated English company commandeers the Skirball for a pair of marathon storytelling sessions. In "And on the Thousandth Night ..." a handful of actors will greet the dawn with a bedtime story that never quite ends. And on subsequent nights those same performers will act out the complete works of Shakespeare in 36 solo performances with an assist from common household objects. 212 998 4941, nyuskirball.org 'GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY' at the Public Theater (previews start on Sept. 11; opens on Oct. 1). A Depression era drama with occasional harmonica, Conor McPherson's play, studded with Bob Dylan's plaintive songs, arrives from London. Set in a Duluth, Minn., boardinghouse in 1934, the show borrows from the whole of Mr. Dylan's discography, sung by a cast that includes Mare Winningham, Marc Kudisch and Todd Almond. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'HEARTBREAK HOUSE' at the Lion Theater at Theater Row (in previews; opens on Sept. 9). In this bittersweet fantasia, modeled on Anton Chekhov's plays, George Bernard Shaw substitutes cups of Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches for Chekhov's samovar and pickles. Revived by the Gingold Theatrical Group, the play invites itself to an Edwardian house party as a world war looms. David Staller directs. 212 239 6200, gingoldgroup.org 'INTRACTABLE WOMAN: A THEATRICAL MEMO ON ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA' at 122CC (previews start on Sept. 13; opens on Sept. 23). Because of her reporting on human rights abuses in Chechnya, the journalist and activist Anna Politkovskaya was threatened, detained and possibly poisoned. Then in 2006, she was murdered. Written by Stefano Massini and directed by Lee Sunday Evans for the Play Company, this show uses three actresses Nadine Malouf, Nicole Shalhoub and Stacey Yen to bring Ms. Politkovskaya and her stories to life. 866 811 4111, playco.org 'THE REVOLVING CYCLES TRULY AND STEADILY ROLL'D' at the Duke on 42nd Street (previews start on Sept. 7; opens on Sept. 19). Thousands of children go missing from foster care every year. But only one has a foster sister (Kara Young) willing to turn relentless detective. For the Playwrights Realm, the writer Jonathan Payne, a social worker by day, offers a stylized exploration of a system and its failures. Awoye Timpo directs. 646 223 3010, dukeon42.org 'UNCLE VANYA' at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College (previews start on Sept. 7; opens on Sept. 16). In his "Apple Family Plays and the Gabriels," the playwright Richard Nelson offered a melancholy hat tip to Anton Chekhov. Now he's paying homage more directly. As part of the newly formed Hunter Theater Project, Mr. Nelson will direct a new translation of Chekhov's melancholy comedy with a cast including Jay O. Sanders, Alice Cannon and Yvonne Woods. hunter.cuny.edu/kayeplayhouse/tickets 'WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME' at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on Sept 12; opens on Oct. 1). Can the playwright and performer Heidi Schreck form a more perfect union? Maybe. She can almost certainly guarantee a more exciting theater season. This play, shown last year at Clubbed Thumb Summerworks, returns Ms. Schreck to her roots as a high school speechmaker, touring American Legion halls to earn cash for college. Oliver Butler directs. 212 460 5475, nytw.org 'CAROUSEL' at the Imperial Theater (closes on Sept. 16). Having blown high and blown low, this latest revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, starring Jessie Mueller and Joshua Henry as horse crossed lovers, will whirl off Imperial's stage. Though Ben Brantley called Jack O'Brien's revival only "half terrific," he also wrote that "the love story at the show's center has never seemed quite as ill starred or, at the same time, as sexy." 212 239 6200, carouselbroadway.com 'LITTLE ROCK' at the Sheen Center (closes on Sept. 8). Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj's play about the fraught 1957 integration of an Arkansas public high school closes its books. The historical photographs sometimes overwhelm the drama, and that's all right. As Laura Collins Hughes wrote, "The weight and shame and triumph of history are the very oxygen" of this show. 866 811 4111, sheencenter.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SAN FRANCISCO While on the campaign trail last year, Donald J. Trump lamented the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and set his sights on companies like Apple to help rectify the situation. "I'm going to get Apple to start making their computers and their iPhones on our land, not in China," he said. While it did not announce a new manufacturing facility with thousands of manufacturing jobs, Apple, the world's most valuable public company, said it planned to dedicate resources to American job creation with a 1 billion fund to invest in advanced manufacturing in the United States. The company said it would announce the first investment from its new fund later this month. The fund "can be the ripple in the pond," Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, said during an interview with CNBC in which he announced the new fund. "Those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them." Carrier, a furnace maker that had been excoriated by Mr. Trump for potentially outsourcing jobs to Mexico, decided to keep 800 of 1,400 jobs in Indianapolis. SoftBank, a Japanese company that has invested in many businesses worldwide, told Mr. Trump it would use a 100 billion technology fund to create 50,000 American jobs. This week, Infosys, a tech outsourcing company based in India, said it would hire up to 10,000 American workers. Some critics have suggested the Trump administration is too focused on manufacturing, as opposed to more quickly cultivating service occupations in the leisure and hospitality or health care industries, for instance. But for the roughly two thirds of Americans who lack a four year college degree, manufacturing remains one of the few sectors that can deliver a middle class income. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical factory worker earns more than 26 an hour, compared with 14 an hour for the average hotel and food services employee. Even if more manufacturing jobs are created, however, there may be too few Americans with manufacturing skills to fill them. LinkedIn's most recent monthly report on employment trends found there were not enough people with manufacturing skills in areas like New York City, Los Angeles and Denver, which lack the industrial bases found in cities like Cleveland and Detroit. Many high school graduates avoided going into the sector in recent decades as it shed jobs, creating a labor shortage as older workers retire. Apple's focus with its new fund is on a slice of the industry known as advanced manufacturing. That is a catchall term, but typically it involves the production of high value added products in sectors like technology, aerospace, automobiles, sustainable energy and medical equipment. In some cases, that means making much smaller batches than mass production oriented assembly lines churn out, or using robotics and 3 D printing to create bespoke items. Mr. Cook's announcement of the new fund came midway through his interview with Jim Cramer of CNBC, when he was asked what he was doing to create jobs. Mr. Cook answered that Apple gave back in job creation and that the company had asked itself, "How can we get more people to do advanced manufacturing in the United States?" Mr. Cook did not address whether the fund was influenced by Mr. Trump's policies and statements on manufacturing. Asked by Mr. Cramer about working with the president, Mr. Cook said there were always issues to agree on and disagree on with any administration in any country. But "you look to find common ground and try to influence the things you don't," he said. Mr. Cook added that Apple would announce initiatives to support its current employees and add to their ranks, and to aid the software developers who make apps for Apple's phones, watches and computers. Apple, which reported its quarterly earnings on Tuesday, had 257 billion in cash and marketable securities on its balance sheet as of April 1, so a 1 billion fund is relatively paltry for the company. Much of Apple's cash is held overseas, but Mr. Cook told CNBC that the money the company was using for the fund is "U.S. money." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
You Don't Need to Go to the Dark Web to Find Hateful Conspiracy Theories You don't have to go deep into the internet to find the baseless conspiracies that provided a backdrop for mass murder in Pittsburgh and the recent pipe bomb mailings to Barack Obama, the Clintons, George Soros and CNN. They are served up in plain sight, for profit, at airport bookstores, at movie theater chains and on cable television. They come by way of publishing houses like Hachette and Penguin Random House; film distributors like Universal Home Studios and Lionsgate; theater chains like AMC and Cinemark; and 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News. Those companies have all helped feed a segment of the media business that should be called what it is the Incitement Industry. It rakes in profits by serving up agitprop that targets liberals, Democrats and "deep state" operatives who are said to be plotting to destroy America for the benefit of darker skinned migrants or a shadowy consortium of elites. You can see this kind of thing in the pages of "Liars, Leakers and Liberals" by the Fox News opinion host Jeanine Pirro. Published in July by Center Street, a division of the Hachette Book Group, Ms. Pirro's book lays out "the globalist, open border oligarchy" that, the author asserts, is seeking to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. "The perpetrators of this anti American plot include, but are not limited to, the leadership at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and perhaps even the FISA courts," she writes. "Liars, Leakers and Liberals" has spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. Another recent best seller in the same vein, "Resistance Is Futile!" by the conservative provocateur Ann Coulter, was published by Sentinel, an imprint of the publishing giant Penguin Random House. It argues that the "resistance" that sprang up in the wake of President Trump's election is "nothing less than a coup." And it lights into a conveniently vague villain "the media" in a chapter titled "For Democracy to Live, We Must Kill the Media." A similar point of view characterizes the films of Dinesh D'Souza, the polemicist who had pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions in 2014, only to be pardoned by President Trump this year. Moviegoers did not have to go out of their way to catch Mr. D'Souza's most recent effort, "Death of a Nation." The film had a wide release last summer, playing in more than 1,000 theaters, including those belonging to the AMC and Cinemark chains. The film makes the case that the Nazi platform was similar to that of today's Democratic Party. Prominent among its villains is George Soros, who was allegedly sent a pipe bomb by Cesar Sayoc Jr., who also is accused of sending similar packages to Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama. "The progressive Democrats are the true racists," the film's narrator intones. "They are the true fascists. They want to steal our income. They want to steal our earnings and our wealth and our freedom and our lives." The PG 13 rated film had a box office take of roughly 6 million, which paled next to the 33 million brought in by "Obama's America," a 2012 film by Mr. D'Souza that claimed Mr. Obama, as the president, sought to destroy the United States from within to sate the "anti Colonialism" impulses of the African father he hardly knew. "Death of a Nation" will have a second life on the streaming platforms Amazon, iTunes and Google Play, as well as on DVD, sold at Walmart, Best Buy and other retailers. The distribution is being handled by Quality Flix and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. 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 Incitement Industry can also be a driving force at Fox News, which has lately featured guests who have asserted without evidence that Mr. Soros financed the migrant caravan making its slow way toward the southern border of the United States. Someone who shared that view was the man charged with killing 11 congregants during a hate driven shooting rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Another guest on "Lou Dobbs Tonight," the author Sidney Powell, likened the caravan to an "invasion" that was leading to "diseases spreading across the country that are causing polio like paralysis of our children." In that case, Mr. Dobbs pushed back, saying, "You can't very well blame that disease on illegal immigrants." The hysteria led Bill Kristol, the conservative Republican who was once a regular on the Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News, to tell Brian Stelter of CNN that it was time for Fox's owners and investors to take a hard look at the rhetoric spilling out of its news channel. And the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who has become something of an in house ombudsman for the network, told his viewers on Monday, "There is no invasion. No one's coming to get you. There's nothing to worry about." There is certainly enough hyperbole to go around. Earlier this week the GQ correspondent Julia Ioffe apologized for saying on CNN that Mr. Trump had "radicalized so many more people than ISIS ever did." Violent acts, it should be noted, are the responsibility of those who commit them, and the perpetrators have various ideological motivations. But the grist for emotionally disturbed or just plain violent people has never seemed so readily available. "It might be fun or profitable for people to take up a megaphone against others," said James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong in Washington, the site of the internet's "pizzagate" conspiracy. "The fact is, it takes just one individual to decide to take violent action." Mr. Alefantis's livelihood suffered last year when a gunman who was supposedly "investigating" the theory that the restaurant housed a Clinton run child prostitution ring fired an AR 15 rifle at his place of business. Alex Jones of Infowars got rich by promoting conspiracies like that one, as The New York Times has reported. While he is in his own category, Mr. Jones got his message out to a mass audience through the tech giants YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Apple which eventually cut ties with him under intensifying criticism of their failure to curb the spread of misinformation. That, in turn, fed complaints among some conservatives that Silicon Valley, under pressure from liberals and the news media, was guilty of thought policing. But where is the line between falsehoods that may incite violence and good, old fashioned American political hyperbole? And should book publishers and entertainment companies be more careful about the products they send out into the world in a tense sociopolitical atmosphere? "I don't want some publisher telling me that something is beyond bounds," Mr. Kristol told me in an interview. "I'm a libertarian on points of view and even interpretations of history." But after noting that conspiracy theories of recent vintage have whipped up fear and hatred, Mr. Kristol added, "There are things that normal fact checking would rule out. It's not a matter of ideology; it's truth." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Nets point guard Kyrie Irving had arthroscopic shoulder surgery on Tuesday, and the team called it "successful." He will miss the rest of the season. Irving, 27, was signed as a free agent last summer as the Nets made a splashy retooling of their lineup. But after playing the first 11 games of the season, he sat out with the shoulder injury. He returned in January and put up a 54 point game against the Bulls. But he was playing in pain, the team said, and nine games into his return he ended his season. "It gets to the point where you say enough is enough," General Manager Sean Marks said when the surgery was announced last month. "Again, it goes to long term health, and the best prognosis right now is to shut him down and get this taken care of once and for all." The Nets' other marquee signing, Kevin Durant, has not played at all this season after tearing his Achilles' tendon in June during the N.B.A. finals with the Warriors. Entering Tuesday night's game at Boston, a third big signing, DeAndre Jordan, had played in all but eight of the Nets' 59 games this season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Sometime around 1984, a group of inebriated drag queens left the Pyramid Club in the East Village in Manhattan and wound up at Tompkins Square Park, where a spontaneous performance before a bunch of homeless people turned into a festival called Wigstock. For a decade and a half, it was an annual rite on New York City's L.G.B.T. calendar, a "circuit party" for people who wouldn't normally be caught dead on the circuit. It outgrew the park and moved to the piers along the West Side Highway. Then something happened, according to its founder, Lady Bunny. "It rained," she said. Not once, but two years in a row. Some of the queens scheduled to perform were annoyed about their running mascara, but the bigger issue was ticket buyers, who largely stayed home. With money reserves depleted and a downturn in night life (as part of Mayor Giuliani's quality of life initiatives), Wigstock died in 2001. Now Wigstock is coming back to life this Labor Day weekend, on Sept. 1 at the newly rebranded Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport. And it's easy to see why it's happening. The audience for drag is ballooning. "RuPaul's Drag Race" is an Emmy award winning series on VH1. The show has spawned its own festival, DragCon, which takes place in New York next month. And drag's sway in popular culture can be found everywhere these days, including music (see Katy Perry and Lady Gaga), television ("Pose" and "Saturday Night Live" skits) and musicals (the revival of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," first starring Neil Patrick Harris). The idea to resurrect Wigstock came from Mr. Harris's husband, David Burtka, an actor and chef. Mr. Harris had never attended. Back when the festival was in full swing, he was based on the West Coast and not fully out of the closet professionally. But he had heard a lot about it, especially when he landed "Hedwig" and moved to New York. (He and Mr. Burtka now own a townhouse in Harlem.) "It seemed so nasty and exciting and, even kind of horny," Mr. Harris said. Why allow it to become another thing mourned on the website Jeremiah's Vanishing New York? So he and Mr. Burtka reached out to Lady Bunny, who welcomed the chance to work with a celebrity whose stature will only grow in six inch pumps. Mr. Harris will also be performing and producing this year's Wigstock with Lady Bunny. The two brought in other partners, including the Oscar winning producer Bruce Cohen ("American Beauty," "Milk"), the production company Matador ("Banksy Does New York"), Gay Men's Health Crisis and Pride Media, which publishes Out magazine and The Advocate. If the list isn't dominated by "RuPaul's Drag Race" personalities, that's perhaps by design. "A lot of people only see drag on TV and they're watching people lip sync because they're about to lose," Mr. Harris said. "I want to see people doing song after song of what they do best, and let everyone applaud and appreciate on their terms." Also, there's a friendly rivalry between Lady Bunny and RuPaul. The two were roommates in the West Village in the early 1990s and have a complicated and competitive history. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The comic strip "Alley Oop," starring a loin cloth wearing cave man of the same name, went into hibernation in September but will be back in January. A new creative team, the writer Joey Alison Sayers and the artist Jonathan Lemon, will chronicle the exploits of the title hero six days a week, Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, they will tell the story of Li'L Oop, a new preteen version of Alley Oop that will focus on his early middle school years. Sayers said she hoped to add more humor to the strip, which has created by V.T. Hamlin and focused on Alley Oop and his life in the prehistoric kingdom of Moo since its debut in 1932. In 1939, it introduced Dr. Elbert Wonmug, a 20th century scientist who sent the cave man on time travel adventures. "I want to make it a little zanier and just have a little more fun and draw readers in," Sayers said. The Sunday installments, she said, would likely not involve time travel. They will be a little more slice of life and coming of age type stories, she remarked. The strip is preserving its history, she noted. "It's not that the stuff in the past doesn't exist," she said. "It is still the same characters, but circumstances have changed. I definitely don't want to alienate the old readers, but I want to create a starting point for new readers." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
MILAN Riddle me this: How is the theater of fashion like an operating theater? With this question raised by the Gucci show set: an antiseptic hospital gown green space with piercing overhead lights, medical beds strategically arrayed beneath the Milan women's wear collections got into gear. Elton had gone vintage shopping at the flea market and come back in full on personality play mode which is to say, it was Mr. Michele's usual mixed bag of magical misfit muchness, taken to a newly accessorized extreme: not with bags (though they were there, too, in all sizes and shapes) but rather knitted face masks of all creepy kinds, copies of models' heads tucked in the crooks of their arms, rubber "dragon puppies" (that turned out to be baby dragons) clutched to the chest, and a third eye blinking from the broad expanse of a forehead. When, at the end of the show, a group of black suited security guards emerged, joined hands and formed a human chain, protecting ... it was not clear exactly what, and then began to whisper among themselves in confusion only to disappear whence they came, it only served to underscore the head scratching nature of it all. "We are all the Dr. Frankenstein of our lives," he said with a shrug. "Inventing, assembling, experimenting" with identity as expressed through clothes, which "can accompany you while you develop an idea of yourself." We are all, he added, "hybrids" now. Make sense? You know, it kind of did. Riddles, when they are good, make you think: They stick in your craw and keep you up at night mulling the answer. Mr. Michele's Gucci may be absurd in many ways, but it's impossible to ignore and not just because it is so ubiquitous that it has become an adjective unto itself ("that's so Gucci"), but because he has managed to encapsulate a messy moment of transition. It's a period of "what if" ing and magical thinking; horror stories and alternative facts. Why not try on a new reality, literally and metaphorically, and see how it plays out? Alberta Ferretti did, and it went like this: What if a woman were at the center of the universe? What would we all look like then? It's a relevant question and, to underscore it, Ms. Ferretti put an enormous metal sculpture by the Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn in the middle of her show space. Titled "Gravity," it depicted a naked women hanging by her hands from a crouching man. Gone was the fragile Ferretti woman of yore, all floaty chiffon filigree frocks and fairy tales; welcome the new, football pad shouldered 1980s Ferretti, with a leather cape, a studded belt and a bit of disco shine amid a whole lot of black and dark denim. Also, some grape and burgundy suede. It was a step in a different direction, for sure. And she was not alone Max Mara also had an '80s moment, with a cacophony of corporate punk in pinstripes, leather (a lot of leather: bomber jackets and pencil skirts and pegged pants and gloves), angora print leopard and branded concert type tees. Not to mention leather suspenders hanging off pretty much everything. They were supposed to be provocative, but mostly looked pointless. After all, the woman in the sculpture faced the future, and these clothes faced the past. Looking backward to go forward may be a strategy, but that does not make it an advance. We've been there, worn that, bashed against that glass ceiling. Let's not repeat it, please. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
On Wednesday, ABC announced that Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, will participate in the new season of "Dancing With the Stars." On one level, I suppose, you could say that being cast on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" is punishment enough. It is not generally a sign of a thriving career. You don't have to be a scandal subject or a public joke or an "Oh yeah, it's that guy" to get cast on the show, but it doesn't hurt. All of which may be reason to ignore the fact that "Dancing" has cast the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, heretofore best known for tap dancing to his boss's tune and waltzing past the photographic evidence to insist that President Trump's inauguration crowd was the largest of all time, period. Certainly I'm giving the show precisely what it wanted when it cast Spicer, which is publicity. And I'm probably giving Spicer what he wants, which is attention as he takes one more step toward an imagined life in which he's no longer a buffoon, where people shrug off his mendacity and say: "Hey, what was he supposed to do? Everybody's gotta keep the boss happy, right?" Besides which, it isn't cool to get mad about things like this. It's so strident. It's so earnest. If you high mindedly wrestle with a goofy sideshow like "Dancing With the Stars," you just get glitter all over you, and the show gets ratings. But this is one time when we should get uptight. "Dancing With the Stars" is just a silly, innocuous reality show, that's true. And that's exactly why it shouldn't be helping Sean Spicer dry clean his reputation. I'm not saying there's nothing funny about Spicer. There's always something funny about incompetent deception. Melissa McCarthy, playing him as the administration's hapless Baghdad Bob on "Saturday Night Live," made him hilarious. Since he resigned from his job in 2017, Spicer has tried to use the jokes as a giant whoopee cushion to land on, bounce back from and move on to some undetermined, respectable future. At that year's Emmys, he showed up behind a moving podium, playing McCarthy playing him. He's tried, not much more artfully than he spun in the press room, to walk a line between sort of apologizing for his behavior as press secretary and sort of remaining a defender of the administration for which he set his credibility on fire. His 2018 book, "The Briefing," neither an apology nor tell all nor loyalist defense, was not well received. Now, look: It's not as if reality shows cast only paragons of honesty. But this is not simply a matter of Sean Spicer's having lied. It's a matter of Sean Spicer's being a liar, professionally. That is, he's not a famous person who happened to do something dishonest. He is a person who is famous singularly, even in an era of "alternative facts" for spreading disinformation, about the inauguration, about the president's claims that he was wiretapped by the previous administration, about Michael Flynn's resignation. At least publicly, dishonesty is his brand. So, O.K., maybe "Dancing," like the Emmys, sees the casting as a joke that Spicer is the butt of. At Wednesday's announcement, the host, Tom Bergeron, gibed that Spicer would be "in charge of assessing audience size." Later, he seemed to dissent from the casting decision on Twitter, saying he had wanted the season to be "a joyful respite from our exhausting political climate": In the past, "Dancing" cast Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader indicted in a money laundering scandal, without reviving his political career. But it's not as if people don't come back, and even benefit, from being stunt cast as the joke on "Dancing With the Stars." The former Texas governor Rick Perry did the show after an excruciating mental short circuit at a 2011 presidential debate in which he forgot the name of the Department of Energy. He now heads that department for Donald J. Trump. (And if you still don't think a reality show can burnish and enlarge a public reputation, maybe Google what President Trump was doing from 2004 to 2015.) I know it's not as if ABC just hired Sean Spicer to anchor the evening news. I know I might sound like a humorless scold for attacking the stunt casting of a silly reality show. But that's just the point. To treat Spicer, and his reason for notoriety, as a harmless joke is to whitewash the harm of what he did, which was to say things so absurdly false that he invited his political side to join him in denying their own eyeballs, to encourage people to believe that facts don't matter if they hurt your team. To put him on a silly reality show is to say that he committed a silly offense and that you're silly if you still make a big deal about it everybody lies, everybody does what they've got to do to get by, everything's a joke, just stop being such a fussbudget and enjoy the show. Letting Sean Spicer tango onto prime time this fall is not the largest disgrace of all time. But it's still a disgrace. Period. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Banksy's effort to deter merchandisers from cashing in on his graffiti paintings was dealt a blow Monday when the European Union's intellectual property office declared the pseudonymous artist's application to use his famous "Flower Thrower" as a trademark was invalid. In 2014, Pest Control, Banksy's authentication bureau, applied to the office to register the Bethlehem mural of a rioter hurling a floral bouquet as an official "trademark without text." Artists traditionally use copyright law to protect their works from knockoffs, but copyright action would have required the British graffiti artist to reveal his long concealed identity. (One of Banksy's stenciled murals declares "copyright is for losers.") Last year, Full Colour Black, a British based greeting card company, applied to the E.U. to have Pest Control's attempt to trademark "Flower Thrower" declared invalid. Banksy responded by creating "Gross Domestic Product," a pop up store in Croydon, south London, in an effort to show he was actively using his trademark to make and sell his own merchandise. It included a three panel "Flower Thrower" print. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
In "Life According to Saki," the British children's book writer Katherine Rundell has reimagined a sampling of these stories as they might have been told by their author in the trenches of World War I, in which he served and died. As introduced by Munro (David Paisley) and performed with music hall virtuosity by his fellow soldiers, these narratives come to represent British bravado in the face of disaster, the equivalent of whistling a happy tune when afraid. Under the direction of Jessica Lazar, the rendering of his stories, including several lesser known ones and two incomparable classics, brings out their most accessibly theatrical elements the Oscar Wilde esque epigrams and the comic grotesqueness of pompous members of the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie. This approach allows for some spirited horseplay, literally in the case of one sketch in which two Mayfair ladies, wittily played by Caitlin Thorburn and Phoebe Frances Brown, encounter a hyena while riding to the hounds. And the blithely protean ensemble offers many charming acts of instant metamorphosis. They are assisted by a design team (sets by Anna Lewis and lighting and sound by David Doyle) that turns a theater of war into storybook theater. But it's the show's life size puppets (by Clair Roi Harvey and Suzi Battersby) who come closest to evoking Saki's eerie sense of avenging nature, especially in the "Sredni Vashtar" sequence, in which a dying boy makes a god of a pet ferret. Ms. Rundell has made a few adjustments. A proposed hoax of a scheme in one story now involves the elimination of people with mustaches instead of Jews. And Saki's figures of speech are occasionally tweaked for contemporary ears, not necessarily for the better. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Addiction is a handy tool in fiction because it causes characters to behave in dramatically destructive ways. And fictional characters don't need to sober up because fiction does not require redemption they can just perish. But there are no good memoirs about being a drunk and staying a drunk. Memoirs about addiction are always recovery stories and, fortunately, recovery is a great subject. If addiction is an attempt to medicate bad feeling, recovery forces the writer to experience it straight, like everyone else. In fact, for all the "this was living" justification of her drinking life, Jamison's book actually becomes more alive and more interesting in the second half, when she starts wrestling with her demons sober, which is to say really wrestling. Jamison's prose is strikingly uneven. The writing itself seems tipsy: It can be energetic, colorful, fun, buzzy, affecting and spot on, but also loose, sloppy, digressive and excessively poetized at moments, veering into nebulous grandiosity. In "The Empathy Exams," Jamison's acclaimed book of essays, her writing benefited from the tighter form of the essay, whereas in this book, like a drunk spinning a colorful yarn at a party, she sometimes loses track of her audience and what we need to know. Her tale is bloated with detail about what she and various boyfriends did together too, while far too little is said about more central questions such as the curious lack of attempts at intervention by those boyfriends, not to mention her accomplished parents and her brothers. Perhaps she wants to preserve her family's privacy, but, of course, the need for privacy is at odds with the needs of a memoir. The redeeming grace of the book is Jamison's honesty. She shared at an A.A. meeting that before she gets out of the car, she makes sure to turn the radio from the pop station she was enjoying to NPR in order to impress her boyfriend, and a woman in the meeting laughed and warmed up to her and so will readers. Just when her self indulgence becomes wearying, she cuts through it with a critique of her own self absorption. She chooses to share many unflattering moments, both large and small. There was the time, for example, when she was living with her dying grandmother in order to take care of her, but instead she spent her nights holed upstairs in her room drinking wine she pinched from the hotel where she worked and her mornings trying to write her novel about alcoholism through a hangover. (In fact, her sense of moral failing was so keen that she was driven to ease her guilt with more booze.) Emotional, as well as factual, honesty is the sine qua non of a memoir. Yet this kind of deep honesty the merciless self examination and exposure that Jamison displays is increasingly rare in memoirs now that readers can, and will, attack them online. And many memoirists no longer feel the literary necessity of self scrutiny, as the advertisements for myself style writing on social media has been culturally validated. The book is at its least successful when Jamison diverges from alcoholism to the larger social issue of criminalization of drug addiction, including the persecution of pregnant drug abusers and the targeting of minorities in the war on drugs. She trots out familiar arguments (that addicts should be suffering from a disease, not criminals) that may be true, but fail to advance the conversation. Attempts to link those arguments to her story seem more than a little strained. She writes about the infamous case of Marcia Powell a mentally ill prostitute and crystal meth addict who died of heat exposure in 2009 in an outdoor holding cell in the Arizona desert. "My story included the woman who died in a cage in a desert, or her story included me; not just because of my guilt the guilt of my privilege, or my survival but because we both put things inside our bodies to change how we felt," she writes. The analogy seems like such a stretch that it belies the truth of each of their experiences. Jamison writes that while society would prefer to view the two women separately, she rejects that narrative an assertion that seems like a clumsy attempt to ward off potential (unfair) criticism that her social privilege makes her own suffering an unworthy topic. Likewise, at the close of the book, she writes of the recovering alcoholics she met in A.A.: "In Iowa, in Kentucky, in Wyoming. In Los Angeles, in Boston, in Portland. I could say I wrote this book for all of them for all of us or I could say they wrote this book for me." Identification rendered that broadly the fantasy that the similarity between her and other addicts is so great that those strangers could actually have written her memoir feels fulsome and so simplistic as to be almost silly. The book is dedicated to "anyone addiction has touched." Such readers will doubtless relate to her story and be grateful for her honesty and insight. But what about readers who do not have a personal interest in the subject? Jamison's book falls into that vast category of good books that tantalize the reader with all the ways in which they could have been better. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The Food and Drug Administration this week accused the drugmaker Pfizer of failing to properly investigate reports of malfunctioning EpiPens, including incidents when patients died or became severely ill after the device failed to work. Pfizer manufactures the EpiPen, which treats allergic reactions, for the drugmaker Mylan. In a warning letter issued Tuesday, the agency said Meridian Medical Technologies, which is a unit of Pfizer, did not adequately look into problems with a crucial component of the EpiPen the mechanism on the device that insures that it fires and delivers the proper dose of epinephrine, which stops an allergic reaction. The F.D.A. said the company failed to conduct a proper investigation even though it received numerous complaints about problems with activating the device. "Our own data show that you received hundreds of complaints that your EpiPen products failed to operate during life threatening emergencies, including some situations in which patients subsequently died," the agency said in the letter. A spokeswoman for Pfizer, Kim Bencker, said in a statement that the company was "very confident in the safety and efficacy of EpiPen products being produced at the site" and noted that it has shipped more than 30 million EpiPens since 2015. "It's not unusual to receive product complaints, especially when the product is frequently administered by non medically trained individuals." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
More than any other American military operation since the invasion of Iraq, the assassination yesterday of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran's Qods Force of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, is a seismic event. The killings of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leaders of al Qaeda and the Islamic State, were certainly meaningful, but they were also largely symbolic, because their organizations had been mostly destroyed. Taking out the architect of the Islamic Republic's decades long active campaign of violence against the United States and its allies, especially Israel, represents a tectonic shift in Middle Eastern politics. To see just how significant Mr. Suleimani's death truly is, it helps to understand the geopolitical game he'd devoted his life to playing. In Lebanon, Mr. Suleimani built Lebanese Hezbollah into the powerful state within a state that we know today. A terrorist organization receiving its funds, arms and marching orders from Tehran, Hezbollah has a missile arsenal larger than that of most countries in the region. The group's success has been astounding, helping to cement Iran's influence not just in Lebanon but farther around the Arab world. Building up on this successful experience, Mr. Suleimani spent the last decade replicating the Hezbollah model in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, propping up local militias with precision weapons and tactical know how. In Syria, his forces have allied with Russia to prop up the regime of Bashar al Assad, a project that, in practice, has meant driving over 10 million people from their homes and killing well over half a million. In Iraq, as we have seen in recent days, Mr. Suleimani's militias ride roughshod over the legitimate state institutions. They rose to power, of course, after participating in an insurgency, of which he was the architect, against American and coalition forces. Hundreds of American soldiers lost their lives to the weapons that the Qods Force provided to its Iraqi proxies. Mr. Suleimani built this empire of militias while betting that America would steer clear of an outright confrontation. This gambit certainly paid off under President Barack Obama, but it even seemed to be a safe bet under President Trump, despite his stated policy of "maximum pressure." Mr. Trump was putting an economic squeeze on Iran, and popular protests in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon were adding to the pressure, but Mr. Suleimani assumed that, in the end, control of military assets would win the day. Mr. Trump, it seemed, feared getting sucked into a war. Washington, in short, lacked a ground game. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
GAP, Pa. Since 1988, philanthropy and a highly successful brand of soft pretzel have combined to provide marriage counseling and other family services to this community in Lancaster County, some 55 miles west of Philadelphia. The rise of Auntie Anne's pretzels from a local market stand to an international franchise empire paid for the construction of a family center that includes meeting rooms, medical offices and a cafe, on 94 acres of former farmland in an area best known for its inhabitants' horse drawn buggies, straw hats and flowing skirts. Now the center, together with four other buildings and the undeveloped land, zoned for commercial or industrial use, is being sold in two auctions that offer a renewed opportunity for development and some 106,000 square feet of commercial space. The land along with a commercial building housing the family center and a private residence is being auctioned by sealed bids, which are due by Dec. 5. Another private home, together with a 53,000 square foot professional building and an early 19th century house that has been restored for office and conference use, will be sold by open outcry auction on Dec. 11, according to the New York real estate firm Madison Hawk Partners, which is managing the sales. The assets on the property known collectively as Houston Run may be sold individually, but all are subject to auction at the preset times rather than being sold on the open market, a process that can be prolonged, Jeffrey L. Hubbard, president of Madison Hawk, said in an interview. The owners, Jonas and Anne Beiler, a couple who grew up in Amish and Mennonite families, are moving to Texas to be near one of their daughters and want to dispose of the Pennsylvania property quickly, Mr. Hubbard said. "It's an efficient portfolio sale," Mr. Hubbard said in an interview. "It offers all of the properties at the same time but individually." The private homes include the Beilers' residence, a six bedroom home on 2.78 acres, and a 5,600 square foot home currently occupied by the couple's older daughter. Also up for auction is the 6,000 square foot Ellmaker House, dating from about 1820. It is the current headquarters of the Beilers' corporate and charitable activities, and contains offices and conference spaces. Mr. Hubbard declined to speculate on sale prices for the properties. According to the Madison Hawk website, the professional building previously had an asking price of 4.65 million, and has a suggested opening bid of 1.9 million. The commercial building has an estimated net operating income of 367,000 annually. Some of the buildings had been offered for sale individually but the transactions were not completed because of the lengthy process of selling them that way, and the Beilers' desire for a quick conclusion. "They are just interested in accelerating the process," said LaVale Reavis, one of their two daughters. She is chief executive of the JoAnn Group, which manages the company's real estate and investments. The undeveloped part of the property farmland and grassland lies along Route 30, a busy corridor through Lancaster County. Sixty acres is zoned for industrial use while the remainder is zoned commercial. The land overlooks a distribution center operated by the apparel company Urban Outfitters, next to which the company is building a 105 million order fulfillment center. The new building, which is expected to create some 500 jobs, is also expected to raise interest in the auctions. Ahead of the auctions, there has been "continuous interest" from industrial, commercial and residential developers, and others interested in leasing offices in the professional building, Ms. Reavis said. After relocating, Jonas Beiler, 66, plans to continue his philanthropic activities, and Anne Beiler, 64, will pursue her career as a professional speaker, Ms. Reavis said. Mrs. Beiler is in demand as a speaker, Ms. Reavis said, because of the success of the pretzel company, which had its origins at a market stall in Downingtown, Pa., in 1988. It was sold for an undisclosed sum in 2005 after growing to some 850 franchises in 17 countries. The pretzel company is now based in nearby Lancaster. The couple, both of whom started with only an eighth grade education, succeeded because of their hard work and Christian faith, engendered by being raised on Amish farms in Lancaster County, Ms. Reavis said. Their Amish upbringing "has totally influenced how they do business, and their desire to give back," she said in an interview. "The values that they learned growing up Amish have definitely helped them be successful." The area's Amish heritage can still be seen in and around Houston Run. During a recent visit, two horses hitched to gray buggies waited in a shed next to a parking lot outside the family center. On the far side of Route 30, a team of horses driven by an Amish man drew a plow across a field. The family center grew out of a desire by Mr. Beiler to offer marriage counseling services like those he and his wife benefited from when they earlier lived in Texas, Ms. Reavis said. "When they moved back to Pennsylvania, his hope was to be able to provide free marriage counseling to this community," she said. So that her husband could devote himself full time to counseling, Anne Beiler took a job at the Downingtown farmer's market, a position that led to the formation of Auntie Anne's Inc., their daughter said. The success of the business allowed the couple to purchase the two farms that make up Houston Run and to build the current complex. Although the Beilers say they hope that the family center will continue to offer its services when the building is sold, they recognize that its fate is uncertain. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
JOHN ESCREET at the Jazz Gallery (May 11, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). The music of this keyboardist and composer is concerned with questions of sound and texture, density and motion. He allows those interests to lead him down a lot of different paths. Last year Escreet released "Learn to Live," one of the more compelling electro fusion records in recent memory. But he's also fond of restless, freely improvised excursions, and that's likely what is on the bill here, when he performs with two primo avant garde improvisers: the saxophonist Evan Parker and the drummer Ches Smith. 646 494 3625, jazzgallery.nyc NICOLE MITCHELL at the Stone (May 14 18, 8:30 p.m.). Mitchell, a flutist who was recently selected to head the University of Pittsburgh's prestigious jazz program, has friends in many high places. One of the most esteemed performers and composers on the jazz avant garde, she will gather a different group of collaborators every night during this five day run. Highlights will include the trio appearing on Tuesday, with Val Jeanty on electronics and Chad Taylor on drums; Mitchell's team up with the Matthew Shipp Trio on Wednesday; and a group she's calling Funkish with Andre Lassalle, known as Dre Glo, on guitar, Jared Nickerson on bass and Calvin Gantt doing spoken word on May 18. thestonenyc.com DAVID MURRAY WITH SAUL WILLIAMS at Birdland (through May 11, 8:30 and 11 p.m.). Among the most prolific tenor saxophonists of his time, Murray, 64, is always chasing after the next big idea. But he knows a good thing when he's got it, so he has spent the past few years deepening his creative relationship with Saul Williams, a poet whose masterful volatility and political acumen make an excellent match for Murray's incendiary improvising style. Here Williams joins Murray as he helms a quartet featuring excellent younger musicians: the pianist David Bryant, the bassist Rashaan Carter and the drummer Nasheet Waits. 212 581 3080, birdlandjazz.com JEREMY PELT at Jazz Standard (May 9 12, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Pelt's trumpet tone can wander into the mist during a ballad, then come roaring out with a scorching solo when the energy rises. He spends a lot of time somewhere in between those two places on "The Rodin Suite," a five part work that dominates his most recent album, "Jeremy Pelt the Artist," which came out earlier this year. While his nominal inspiration was the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, the musical influences are at least as apparent particularly the 1970s fusion records of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis. This weekend he appears with most members of the band that played on the album: Victor Gould on piano, Alex Wintz on guitar, Chien Chien Lu on vibraphone and marimba, Corcoran Holt on bass, Allan Mednard on drums and Ismel Wignall on percussion. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com TERRAZA BIG BAND at Dizzy's Club (May 13, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). This band's natural home is Terraza 7, an intimate club in Queens where the 18 piece group has held down a monthly residency for the past four years, developing a repertoire of soaring, self propelling original compositions and a tight group rapport. But on Monday they will venture into Manhattan to celebrate the release of their debut album at Dizzy's. So unified has this band become that they recorded the entire record an impressive document, featuring nine complex, splendidly woven tunes in a single day at the recording studio. The album's title? "One Day Wonder." 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys BEN WENDEL at the Village Vanguard (May 14 19, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). With his technical fluency, strategic melodic thinking and cleanly dusted tone, Wendel has become an idol to an entire generation of young tenor saxophone students. He's perhaps best known for his work in the contemporary fusion band Kneebody, which released a new EP last week, but at the Vanguard this coming week, Wendel appears with the band from his most recent solo album, "The Seasons," which collects 12 originals devoted to the months of the year. That group includes Gilad Hekselman on guitar, Aaron Parks on piano, Matt Brewer on bass and Eric Harland on drums. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
BAE Systems, Europe's largest military contractor, agreed on Friday to plead guilty to two criminal charges and pay nearly 450 million in penalties in the United States and Britain to end long running investigations into questionable payments made to win huge contracts overseas. Under its settlement with the Justice Department, BAE will pay a 400 million fine and plead guilty to one count of conspiring to make false statements about having an internal program to comply with antibribery laws. The Justice Department's charge related to just a small part of the billions of dollars in payments that BAE is thought to have made to Saudi Arabian officials over a 20 year period, and to more than 200 million of business that the company won in arms deals involving the Czech Republic, Hungary and other countries. BAE, which is based in Britain, made the payments through a network of middlemen and Caribbean and Swiss bank accounts to win contracts for fighter planes and other equipment that American military companies were also seeking, the Justice Department said. BAE said it would also plead guilty in London to an accounting violation for failing to properly record commissions paid to a marketing consultant involved in its sale of a radar system to Tanzania in 1999. BAE said it would pay about 50 million in Britain in fines and a charitable payment to Tanzania. The investigation began in Britain. But Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, halted the British efforts to investigate the deals with Saudi Arabia in 2006, after Saudi leaders threatened to stop providing the British government with tips on terrorism, according to documents later discussed by a British court. Still, the inquiries have long represented one of the most prominent efforts by prosecutors in both countries to investigate claims that many large companies have passed bribes through middlemen to win overseas contracts. BAE, which had previously denied any wrongdoing, said in a statement that it "very much regrets and accepts full responsibility for these past shortcomings." The company said that the last of the illegal activities had taken place in 2002 and that it had since changed the way it did business. British press reports last fall had said that Britain's Serious Fraud Office had pushed for hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties in return for any settlement. But BAE had rejected that offer. Richard Alderman, the director of the Serious Fraud Office, described the 50 million settlement as a "pragmatic" one that would allow BAE to put the investigations behind it and allow his office to redeploy investigators to other cases. But British advocacy groups that had fought several unsuccessful court battles to force authorities in Britain to investigate the company for corruption in arms deals involving Saudi Arabia and other countries criticized the settlement. "This settlement means that the truth about these serious allegations against BAE will never be known," said Nicholas Hildyard, a campaigner for the Corner House, a social justice advocacy group. "The U.K. fine may well be unprecedented, but it may easily create the perception that alleged bribers can simply pay their way out of trouble." Liberal members of Parliament also complained that with the company's guilty plea, the full details of the British government's role in supporting its arms sales may never be known. The Serious Fraud Office also announced later on Friday that it was dropping charges against Alfons Mensdorff Pouilly, an Austrian count who acted as a marketing consultant to BAE in helping to arrange leases for fighter planes in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Justice Department officials said that while the guilty plea would end their investigation of BAE, they were continuing to investigate some of the individuals involved in the case. The department has stepped up its investigations in recent years of possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and prosecutors believe that some of the convictions have helped deter business executives from paying bribes. BAE also generates a significant amount of its revenue in the United States, where it is one of the Pentagon's largest contractors. The criminal information filed by the Justice Department said the company's American subsidiary was not involved in any of the illegal activities. The criminal information document said BAE had set up a network of "marketing advisers" and encouraged them to organize offshore shell companies to disguise the identities of any foreign officials to whom they passed money. It said BAE itself set up an entity in the British Virgin Islands to conceal its relationships with the agents. BAE then paid about 225 million to the agents through that entity without formally tracking what they did with the money. But the company's activities in Saudi Arabia, where it had an 80 billion contract since the 1980s to supply fighter jets and other military hardware, have long attracted the most interest. It has been reported that BAE made payments to Saudi officials, including 2 billion that it deposited into bank accounts of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the kingdom's former ambassador to the United States. Peter Gardiner, a crucial witness in the case, has also identified Prince Turki bin Nasser, who controlled the Saudi air force, as a recipient of BAE's money favors. The criminal information did not name either of the princes, and neither of them have ever been charged with any wrongdoing. But the document described substantial benefits for an unnamed Saudi official that Mr. Gardiner said on Friday closely matched the company's relationship with Prince bin Nasser, who has never commented on the deals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks star, won his second straight Most Valuable Player Award, after another stellar regular season, the N.B.A. announced Friday. He became the first repeat winner of the N.B.A.'s top individual honor since the Golden State Warriors' Stephen Curry in 2015 and 2016. At 25 years old, Antetokounmpo is the first back to back winner at that age since LeBron James in 2009 and 2010. Antetokounmpo bested his numbers from last year, averaging career highs in points (29.5) and rebounds (13.6) in fewer minutes, while leading the Bucks to the league's best regular season record. He also won the N.B.A.'s Defensive Player of The Year Award. Antetokounmpo's coronation as the most valuable player comes at an awkward time: The Bucks lost their second round series with the Miami Heat in five games after being favored to go to the finals. They instead fell short of last year's conference finals appearance, with Antetokounmpo relegated to the bench in the final game after sustaining an ankle injury in Game 4. It is reminiscent of 2007, when Dirk Nowitzki won the honor weeks after the top seeded Dallas Mavericks were knocked out of the playoffs by the eighth seeded Golden State Warriors. "Obviously, I would love to be still in the bubble, keep playing games, be in the Eastern Conference finals, you know, fighting to get an opportunity to play in the finals," Antetokounmpo said in an interview on NBA TV from Athens, adding that he was "grateful" for the award. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
BIDEAWEE Renters have found this East Hampton house through various listing services, some local. RICHARD JOHNSTON used to rent out his two bedroom farmhouse in southern France in a way that seems quaint two decades later: by buying advertising in publications like Harvard's alumni magazine or The New York Review of Books and waiting for Francophiles to respond. "You had a brochure you printed out on your dot matrix printer and you mailed it out to people and they booked," recalled Mr. Johnston, who lives on the Upper West Side. "The season lasted from May until October, and I would get 15 weeks rented." But as more vacation home owners have entered the rental business, with help from a growing collection of Web sites that make it easy to post listings, the competition to attract tenants has become fierce. Though Mr. Johnston has upgraded his kitchen with a Bosch dishwasher and an Italian coffee maker, adding a terrace and building a Web site to market his home, he has had few renters in recent years. "My rental business has disappeared completely," Mr. Johnston said. "Last summer I had one renter, this summer I have none." He admits he is not willing to drop his price about 900 per week to compete with neighbors charging much less, and he does not market his house aggressively because he paid off his mortgage. But his experience is a cautionary tale for anyone thinking about taking the plunge. "Real estate agents who want to sell you a house will tell you that you can make money off it," Mr. Johnston said. "Well, I did 20 years ago, but I don't anymore." There is often money to be made in vacation homes, but as the number of listing services has increased, so have the number of properties posted for rent. For example, HomeAway.com, one of the most popular sites, says it has more than 300,000 rentals worldwide. Numbers like that are forcing casual landlords to learn how to make their homes appear higher in search results, to track prices by monitoring their neighbors' listings, and to deal with customer service headaches like a negative Yelp style review from renters. A co owner of a rental house near the Catskills, speaking anonymously in order to avoid trouble with future renters, said: "We had a couple who did some damage to the house, and when we told them about it they said that it wasn't them. We decided it was better to eat the 150 repair rather than risk having a bad review." This homeowner said the number of houses for rent in her community had doubled in the past five years, giving potential renters more options and more incentive to haggle over the price. "The other day I quoted 1,850 for a week in July," she said, "and the most one guy would pay was 1,250. Now, if someone makes an inquiry it often doesn't turn into a rental." HomeAway listed 304 homes for rent in the Catskills in 2008; now it has roughly 520 homes available. Along the Jersey Shore over the same time frame, listings increased to 2,200 from about 700; in the Hamptons they jumped to 750 from 270. HomeAway owns another popular Web site, VRBO, which stands for "vacation rentals by owner." But at these and other HomeAway sites, homes posted by professional property managers now account for 27 percent of the listings. "We see that as a net benefit for our travelers," said Jon Gray, HomeAway's vice president for North America. "It gives more choice to them." FlipKey charges 299.99 a year to list a home for rent, with a 60 day free trial. HomeAway charges 329 a year for a basic listing, but is shifting to a tiered pricing system with more options for additional fees. Customers who upgrade to a "bronze level" membership ( 429 a year) appear in the search results above the listings in the lowest tier. The highest level, "platinum" ( 999 a year), offers a top ranking in the search results and rotating promotion as a "featured rental." Gary Gilbert lives in Boston with his wife, Donna Brezinski. The couple own two rental houses in Provincetown, and tried upgrading one of their HomeAway listings to the "gold" level (just below platinum) earlier this year. That increased the number of people who viewed the house by about a third, he said, but the impact on bookings was less clear. He and his wife bought the two houses as rental properties in 2010, choosing both for their chef caliber kitchens and their ocean views. The houses rent for 4,000 to 6,000 a week in the summer. "I think the first key to our success was shopping carefully for properties that would be desirable," Mr. Gilbert said. "We probably looked at 20 places, but I don't think there were more than three that had a good chance of making a profit." He estimates they broke even last year and will probably make money on both houses this year. Renting them out required more time than he expected, as well as attention to details like the photos he posts. He and other homeowners say that hiring a local caretaker helps minimize the headache of managing a rental from afar, and that form letters and contracts save time and eliminate confusion. Sites like FlipKey and HomeAway also offer tools to make it easier to manage bookings and payments, including credit card processing. With the aid of both HomeAway and VRBO, Grainne Hodgins rents out a house on Lake Rescue in Ludlow, Vt., for about 1,500 a week in the summer. She says she prefers credit card payments because she can authorize a hold on the card rather than ask for a security deposit. But that kind of paper trail can be a problem for homeowners who choose not to report their rental income to Uncle Sam. "We run this as a business," Ms. Hodgins said, "so we do report all the income." She and her husband live in Rockville Centre, on Long Island, and bought the Vermont house in 2009, intending to use it occasionally but mostly rent it out. Their lakeside location attracts summer renters, while nearby ski slopes keep business brisk in the winter. "Right now," she said, "it's almost paying for itself. That's what we hoped for at the beginning." A recent survey by the National Association of Realtors found that 22 percent of vacation home buyers plan to rent out, at least part of the time. Nhadine Leung and her husband, who live in Brooklyn, bought a house in East Hampton last spring primarily as an investment, and bought ads on Google to attract potential renters to their Web site, EastHamptonEscape.com. Their summer rates range from 8,000, for June, to 20,000 for August (or 40,000 for the season). Ms. Leung says she also pays for a listing on VRBO, but has had more luck finding renters through Craigslist and local parenting listservs, especially for off season rentals. The house is also listed with multiple brokers, who still dominate the summer rental market in the Hamptons. Brokers generally charge 10 percent or more of the rental fee, depending on the area and level of property management. But even if you are willing to pay a real estate agent to market your property, getting on brokers' radar in popular places like the Hamptons is a bit of an art. "They go with houses that they know and know there's a good rental history," Ms. Leung said. Lisa Levitin, a partner in Rosehip Partners, a real estate brokerage that operates HamptonsRentals.com, says that although some homeowners choose to handle their own rentals, others are willing to pay an agent a 10 percent fee to find a tenant and to answer questions like how to turn up the heat on the Jacuzzi. Agents also have ongoing relationships with trusted renters. "We have a lot of repeat tenants, who come back year after year," Ms. Levitin said. "Landlords like that." Online listing services have their own drawbacks. Owners need to respond to multiple inquiries, sometimes from prospective renters who have blasted the same message to dozens of landlords without reading each home's rental calendar closely. "They'll ask for time periods that are not available, or aren't available for short term rentals," Ms. Leung said. And while in the past an owner might have avoided some sales and lodging taxes on vacation rentals, enforcement of these tax obligations has been stepped up, said Rob Stephens, the founder of HotSpot Tax Services. He has partnered with HomeAway to calculate and pay sales and lodging taxes on behalf of vacation homeowners, for a fee of about 10 a month. Mr. Stephens said the taxes varied by state and county, but were roughly 11 percent of gross rental income. Another issue for owners of vacation homes is whether their insurance covers the property. Loretta Worters, a vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, says standard homeowner policies do not include coverage for a business, so anyone who rents out a vacation property frequently should consider taking out a landlord policy to cover the home and its contents and offer liability protection if a renter is injured. Liability is the reason some real estate agents avoid handling rentals. Harris Safier, the chief executive of Westwood Metes and Bounds Realty in Ulster County, N.Y., says his company helps clients find and vet seasonal renters. But it is only a tangential part of his business, since a 10 percent fee on a 10,000 summer rental can be wiped out if the agency gets drawn into a dispute with a tenant. "Over time, more people are tackling rentals on their own," he said, "but it can be fraught with problems. It's fraught with problems even when you're a real estate broker." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
After their tennis club in Finale Ligure, Italy, was shut down in early March, Vittoria Oliveri, 14, and Carola Pessina, 11, were challenged to come up with a way to stay in shape. Their teammates (and Roger Federer) posted videos of themselves hitting balls against walls or practicing in stairwells. Vittoria and Carola took it to the next level, creating a court between their rooftops. They had to avoid various objects, like boiler vents, as they played. "It was their idea," their coach, Dionisio Poggi, told Agence France Presse. "They know each other well, they're friends, and they live in neighboring buildings." "This is next level TennisAtHome," Austin said. "I don't think this can be topped. Keep the ball deep." Federer and Rafael Nadal, you're up next. Come on, guys, these quarantining rules are serious business. And the authorities aren't going to just let them slide. Even if you're Tom Brady. Brady, of course, is now a Tampa, Fla., resident. He is staying at Derek Jeter's mansion, which has seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms and more than 30,000 square feet. He was exercising in a public park in his new hometown only to be approached by a worker who told him the park was closed. In a news briefing, Mayor Jane Castor of Tampa said: "Our parks are closed down, and so a lot of our park staff, they patrol around just to make sure that people aren't in contact sports and things. They saw an individual working out in one of our downtown parks and she went over to tell him it was closed, and it was Tom Brady." Mayor Rick Kriseman of Tampa's sister city, St. Petersburg, who was also at the briefing, responded with unfeigned excitement, "Oh my goodness. Wow!" In a tweet, the city of Tampa said: "Sorry Tom Brady! Our Tampa Parks and Rec team can't wait to welcome you and our entire community back with even bigger smiles until then, stay safe and stay home as much as you can to help flatten the curve." He was sighted, the city confirmed, not cited. There was no immediate comment from Brady on the park incident. VICTOR MATHER It probably isn't fair to call Rudy Gobert the Patient Zero of the coronavirus in sports. But he was one of the first high profile athletes to contract it. And before testing positive he had made light of the virus by jokingly touching every reporter's microphone and notebook at a news conference. His positive test was also the immediate cause of the N.B.A.'s shutting down its season on March 11. And a teammate, Donovan Mitchell, soon tested positive as well. (Both players are now clear of the virus.) Gobert, whose case of coronavirus was mild, is back to joking around, although this time thankfully without potentially putting anyone in danger. It started when Evan Fournier of the Orlando Magic, a close friend of Gobert's who has defended him in recent weeks, elected to shave his beard. Perhaps Fournier thought he now looked a bit like Freddie Mercury; he wrote a caption for a photograph of his new look with the title of a Queen song, "I Want to Break Free." Gobert disagreed, thinking Fournier looked more like a waiter. He retweeted the photo with a quip in French: "I'll have salad with tomato, onion and samurai sauce, and a small fries, s'il vous plait." (Samurai sauce, popular in France, is made of mayonnaise, ketchup and chili peppers.) Twitter has, of course, replaced the Catskills as the spiritual home of the one liner, and many athletes with time on their hands are using it to try out new material. The hard living golfer John Daly created a minor stir when he advocated drinking a bottle of vodka a day as a way to get rid of the coronavirus. The situation was magnified when Trump Golf retweeted the video. Daly responded to the kerfuffle by assuring everyone that "I did a video for fun to put some laughter in us through this tough time." He threw in a shot at the World Health Organization and, uh, members of the news media: "Grow up reporters, Y'all are a joke!" We'll try, John. VICTOR MATHER | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A 4 YEAR OLD GIRL twirled and jumped in what is normally a parking lot to the music of Monko, telling her mother it was her favorite band. Monko, named after its singer songwriter guitarist Kevin Monko, was playing under an awning at the east end of the weekend Collingswood Farmers Market, hard by the elevated tracks of the commuter train from the New Jersey town of Collingswood to Philadelphia, about six miles away. Mr. Monko, 58, is a commercial photographer who just happens to love putting bands together. This one has a bass player, a mandolin man, a drummer and himself. "When I am playing music, I can't get much happier," Mr. Monko said. "All of the people who play with me are better than me. I am lucky enough to get people to play with me in a variety of bands and we go play in different places, make a little money, and just have a lot of fun." Mr. Monko is just one of many baby boomers who, near or at retirement age, are trying to recapture their musical youth; if not exactly expecting Taylor Swiftian riches, they are at least hoping for modest remuneration and a place in the lights. "Boomers have been imagining life stages since they were born," said Emilio Pardo, president of an AARP division called Life Reimagined. "They always want to embrace what they feel is their calling. It is no surprise that as they have gotten older, they have reached out to their musical pasts." There was a time, in his 20s, when Mr. Monko worked a variable schedule in restaurants, when he thought he might be lucky enough to not just make a little side cash, as he does now, but maybe make a real living playing music. Then life, as it so often does, intruded, and he started on a different career path, married, had a couple of children and moved to the suburbs and away from the music scene. It did not quite gnaw at him, but the thought of playing remained with him. Little by little, mandolin players and trombonists came into his life again, if more in his spare time than before. Since then, he has released a CD of his quirky semi rock music, and he plays at farmers' markets and coffeehouses and the occasional party. Paul Stiegler, 63, was an enthusiastic member of a campus a cappella group at Carleton College in Minnesota in the early 1970s, and he once even competed in a hollering contest in the Great Smoky Mountains. He never really thought of basing a career on his vocal prowess, though, and became an emergency room doctor and medical clinic owner. He took some vocal lessons in the 1990s and played parts in community musical theater, but in 2007, Craig Kaemmer, an old friend from Carleton, sent him a CD he had made. "I talked to him on the phone for two hours and got hooked," said Mr. Stiegler, who then took time off work to go to Nashville to take songwriting classes. By 2013, he had a CD of his own, a cross between country and soft rock. He performs when he can, mostly around Madison, Wis., where he now lives, and gets support from a songwriting association he found online and from a Nashville based mentor. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' "That is another difference between the generation before and now, in regards to music or anything like that," Mr. Pardo of AARP said. "You can go online and find someone who has done it, or is trying to do it. There is a support in social media, at the least, and you can connect with others in a way your parents couldn't." Tom Moon didn't have any trouble with connections. For more than two decades, he was the rock music critic for, first, The Miami Herald and then The Philadelphia Inquirer, often contributing work to NPR and major magazines. While at the University of Miami, and just after, he played saxophone in a number of salsa bands often for only 50 a night so when the writing gigs started, he went all in. When he got to Philadelphia in the late 1980s, in fact, he signed an agreement that he would not play music professionally, so as not to compromise his reviewing. In 2004, though, he took a buyout to write a book, and when he finished the book in 2008, he felt a little lost trying to return to his journalistic career. "I found myself picking up my horn and that is when I started to play," Mr. Moon said. "I became convinced I had sold myself short as a musician. I was not a great talent, but I could play." He began to go to jam sessions in Philadelphia and found that what he called "young and vastly talented" people from local universities wanted to play with "the old guy." Now 54, he plays several times a week in the better Philadelphia jazz clubs, sometimes still making 50 a gig, but often earning several hundred dollars a show. "These young guys threw me a lifeline," Mr. Moon said. "The odds against anyone, not just someone old, making it are great, but to play something beautiful, there is a value in that. I can appreciate it all the more having had the long term perspective." Jack Scott, 67, practiced law for 37 years in Wallingford, roughly 15 miles from Philadelphia, but for the last 12 years he has been playing the guitar he put down as a teenager. He performs at least once a week in a bluegrass club. He also teams with a fiddle player, charging 300 for gigs, "though sometimes, of course, we have to take a little less." It is hardly what he made practicing insurance law, but for now it is at least as satisfying. "I don't want to be some guy with a guitar at an open mike," said Mr. Scott, who also writes his own bluegrass songs and sometimes teaches a class in songwriting at Temple University. "It's funny when someone hires us, they say the audience is going to want covers of songs. We 'yes' them to death, but when we get to the gig, we play my original songs, because they work. People come up to us afterwards and say, 'Where do these songs come from?' We know our act works and it is wonderful when it does." Sometimes the return to music later in life is fortuitous. Soon after Roberta Foster, 60, of Whippany, N.J., retired from teaching four years ago, her husband, Allen, also 60, bought her a ukulele for Valentine's Day. "I said, 'Where is my jewelry? Where is my chocolate?' " Ms. Foster said. Her husband was a good amateur guitarist and he thought a ukulele, which is a little smaller and easier to pluck, would be a good starter instrument for her retirement. Ms. Foster gave it a try and ended up loving it. She found there was a ukulele jam in nearby Morristown the first Wednesday of every month. Now the couple play as a ukulele guitar duo at nearby clubs, nursing homes and parties as the Long and Short of It, since he is 6 foot 4 and she is 5 foot 4. She has also done some recording. "One day I was an elementary schoolteacher and now I am a professional musician," she said. "All because my husband was smart enough to give me this crazy ukulele." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
IF you have young children, you've most likely endured caring for an ear infection or two. Or perhaps you've experienced a mysterious rash. Those situations generally mean a trip to the doctor's office and time away from your job, if you work outside the home. But what if you could snap a photo of your rash, or your child's ear canal, and send it to your doctor? That's the idea behind a new breed of apps and devices that increasingly put medical tools in the hands of consumers. CellScope Oto, for instance, combines an app with an attachment that lets you turn your iPhone into an otoscope the tool physicians often use to examine the inside of your ear. Various apps and online services now let you communicate with your dermatologist by snapping a photo of a rash or mole and transmitting it electronically. And with an app and attachment combination called AliveCor, you can turn your smartphone into a heart monitor, record an electrocardiogram and send it to your doctor. The trend of do it yourself examinations and tests is part of a shift in health care toward consumer participation that began with online health information sites and is accelerating with advances in mobile technology. Consumers are increasingly comfortable using walk in medical clinics for minor ailments, and they see at home digital tools as yet another level of convenience, said Ceci Connolly, managing director of the Health Research Institute, an arm of the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. "We know from our research that consumers are very interested in these conveniences, as opposed to going to sit in a doctor's office," she said. Erik Douglas, co founder and chief executive of CellScope, said ear infections were a top reason for visits to pediatricians, so the Oto device might help eliminate unnecessary trips. With AliveCor, your smartphone can send an electrocardiogram to your doctor. Robert L. Quillin, a pediatrician in Webster, Tex., has used CellScope's Oto for several months during the device's testing period. Shaped like a traditional otoscope, it fits over the phone's camera, has a plastic tip that is inserted in the patient's ear, and uses the phone's camera to take photos or video of the ear canal and eardrum. Dr. Quillin can show the image on the phone directly to the patient or to medical students, to educate them about ear infections. Ultimately, he said, a physician or nurse practitioner must interpret the image, make a diagnosis and prescribe any necessary treatment. "It's a great tool for teaching parents and young doctors," he said. Joseph C. Kvedar, founder of the Center for Connected Health, part of the Partners HealthCare system in Boston, said that in these relatively early stages of mobile health tools, doctors might be most comfortable using them to expedite follow up care, or to treat conditions with a relatively low level of risk. For instance, a patient who is doing well under a treatment plan for acne may be able to send photos and answer a few questions for the dermatologist to feel comfortable advising the patient to continue a treatment plan without an in person examination. "For something like acne," he said, "probably the time has come." Right now, he said, these new digital tools help expedite evaluation and diagnosis by a doctor. But in the long term, he said, they may become more disruptive and controversial as they begin to use algorithms and large databases to diagnose conditions and recommend treatment, without a doctor being directly involved. Here are some questions about do it yourself health tests and apps: Can I buy these tools now, for use at home? Some are available now, while others are expected to become available shortly. AliveCor is sold online for 199 (it used to require a prescription, but does not anymore, according to the monitor's website). There are several available online dermatology services, like DermatologistOnCall, currently available in a half dozen states, that connect you to dermatologists you may not know; various mobile apps connect you with your own doctor. Typically, you'll pay a fee of 60 to 70 to submit an image for review. CellScope Oto is expected to become available to consumers by the end of the year, Mr. Douglas said. Does insurance cover consumer use of these tools? In general, you can expect to pay out of pocket for using such services. (The reimbursement policies followed by Medicare and other health plans were cited as one barrier to further adoption of telemedicine options, in a study released this week from the RAND Corporation.) "Right now, reimbursement is still a hurdle in our health care system," said Ms. Connolly of PricewaterhouseCooper's Health Research Institute, so "many entrepreneurs and new entrants are thinking about devices that consumers are willing to pay for out of pocket." The tools may, however, be covered by your flexible spending or health savings account, which lets you cover health expenses using pretax dollars. It can take a little practice to learn to use the tools properly. And patients should understand that while becoming more involved in their health care is a good thing, they are in effect shouldering more responsibility by using do it yourself tools, Dr. Kvedar said. Sending an image of one mole to your doctor electronically, for instance, means the physician isn't examining the rest of your body for other, potentially more serious, moles. "You, as the patient, own more of the execution," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Whistle blowers are needed now more than ever. They must be persuaded that while there are always risks, the system can protect them. We served as the attorneys for the intelligence community whistle blower, and every step of the way we sought to protect them from reprisal, threats and disclosure of their identity. The last six months have tested the boundaries of the integrity of our country's whistle blower protections, not just from the framework of the law but also with respect to public perception. We were honored to represent the whistle blower, who has smoothly transitioned to new counsel but we will continue to work, as we have for years, to strengthen the intelligence community whistle blower system for future whistle blowers. This case showed that the whistle blower disclosure process can work, although there is much to be done to reinforce it. After the complaint was filed with the intelligence community's inspector general in August 2019, it made its way to Congress for oversight. Though the White House and the Department of Justice sought to block its progress, pressure from the legal team, Congress and the public forced the system to work. Was this perfect? No. But it ensured the serious allegations of misconduct reached the right people. Our former client faced, and still faces, a sustained public campaign of intimidation including repeated tweets by President Trump and other senior figures that the whistle blower must be publicly outed despite having participated in an established and encouraged process that guaranteed them certain protections under the law. Even members of Congress, individuals within the very body that created the statutory protections that exist for whistle blowers, sought to expose the whistle blower for political purposes and created harmful doubts concerning the integrity of the system. Joseph Maguire, until last week the acting director of national intelligence and himself an appointee of Mr. Trump, stated in public testimony last September that the whistle blower "acted in good faith and followed the law every step of the way." The whistle blower demonstrated that one can ensure that legitimate oversight occurs within the confines of the law and the policies and procedures of the intelligence community. Whistle blowers play a particularly critical role in Congress's ability to oversee the intelligence community. As the executive branch controls classified information, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are reliant on inspectors general and whistle blowers to conduct their constitutionally mandated oversight over federal agencies and even the president of the United States. In correspondence dated Oct. 22, 2019, the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, composed of dozens of appointees, made it clear that "whistle blowers play an essential public service in coming forward" by reporting their reasonable belief of waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct and that whistle blowers "should never suffer reprisal or even the threat of reprisal for doing so." Significantly, the letter quotes Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, chairman and a co founder of the Senate's Whistleblower Protection Caucus, who noted recently that whistle blowers "ought to be heard out and protected" and "we should always work to respect whistle blowers' requests for confidentiality." Members of the intelligence community, whether they are federal employees or government contractors, must follow the law in disclosing their reasonable belief of a violation of law, rule, regulation or an abuse of authority. They cannot avail themselves of whistle blower channels available to other federal employees because they deal almost exclusively with classified information, the unauthorized disclosure of which could cause grave harm to our national security. It is for these reasons that Congress created a specific process where members of the intelligence community may disclose such information lawfully through an Office of Inspector General. So when certain members of Congress attack a lawful whistle blower, as our former client is, they jeopardize their own constitutional right to conduct oversight over the executive branch and intelligence related matters. Rather than weakening the system, members of Congress should seek to strengthen it so they can be effective in their constitutionally mandated oversight role. That could include, but not be limited to, imposing penalties for exposing or intimidating lawful whistle blowers and their attorneys, broadening the definition of whistle blower retaliation beyond employment related actions and creating a more direct path for intelligence community employees to report wrongdoing to Congress involving White House officials and even the president. We are ready to work with congressional members on both the left and the right to strengthen the system. We hope our former client's moral courage and personal integrity will inspire others to follow the law and speak up when they see something they reasonably believe to be wrong. All government leaders should encourage the process: Protecting whistle blowers should never be a partisan activity. Lawful whistle blowers should always always be protected from reprisal. That is the foundation of our democracy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
MADRID One of my first assignments as a reporter, in 1996, was to interview an alleged lover of the king of Spain, Juan Carlos de Borbon y Borbon. My editors at El Mundo asked me to look into whether Barbara Rey, a Spanish film and television actress, demanded money from the state in exchange for keeping her relationship with the married king secret. In the end, I didn't get the interview. Under pressure, Ms. Rey chose to remain silent. Thus our king's two great weaknesses women and money remained the country's worst kept secret for another two decades. It's time we Spaniards acknowledge that we always knew the king had no clothes, but we chose to look the other way. An outdated culture of allegiance, the opacity surrounding the Spanish monarchy and a Constitution that exempts our kings from any criminal responsibility sent the monarch the message that he was above the law. His immunity from prosecution, designed to give stability to the institution of the crown, was used to amass a fortune primarily through millions of dollars in presumed kickbacks from Arab dictators. He acquired such wealth that in 2012, in the middle of the Great Recession that left 25 percent of Spaniards unemployed, he transferred 65 million euros to his lover Corinna Larsen, a German businesswoman. The revelation of this royal "gift," which Ms. Larsen attributed to "gratitude and love" and investigators consider an attempt to hide illicit deals and large sums of money is just the tip of the iceberg of a scandal that has forced the monarch into exile. Juan Carlos I left the country on Aug. 4 and his whereabouts is unknown to us Spaniards. This strategy of keeping him out of the spotlight, after a secret negotiation between the Royal Household and the government, shows that we have learned nothing. The former king, who abdicated in favor of his son, Felipe, in 2014, should be in the country he ruled for almost four decades while he is under investigation in Switzerland and Spain, including for receiving 100 million euros from Saudi Arabia in 2008. The royal bounty under suspicion, accumulated over decades, includes Ferrari cars, a yacht, luxury trips, land in Morocco and a London flat valued at more than 62 million euros, a gift from the sultan of Oman. It would be naive to think that such generosity didn't come at a price. The Spanish Supreme Court is investigating whether the donation of 100 million dollars from the Saudis was a commission paid to Juan Carlos I for getting Spanish companies to build the high speed train between Medina and Mecca at a value of 6.7 billion euros. We now know that for years the head of state led a double life as a lobbyist and that in return, his beneficiaries obtained decisive influence in Spain. How much influence? The authorities have only minimal interest in looking under that rock. Parliament has blocked the creation of a commission that could have revealed the geopolitical implications of the former king's behavior. The citizens thus miss the opportunity to ask the past four prime ministers of Spain what they knew about the king's business dealings and their influence on Spanish foreign policy while his immunity from prosecution, which ended when he abdicated, protected him. Back in 1995, a well known businessman, Javier de la Rosa, told the executive director of El Mundo at the time, Pedro J. Ramirez, that Kuwait paid 100 million as a reward for persuading the Spanish government to join to the coalition against Saddam Hussein during the first gulf war. For decades, Spain has been a main supporter of Arab dictatorships that, thanks to our monarchy, have found a way to achieve international legitimacy. In November 2018, amid outrage over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia showcased that Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who some accused of ordering the killing, still had friends: A photograph of a friendly greeting between Juan Carlos I and the crown prince appeared in Saudi news media. Even as we await the decisions made by the judges in Switzerland and Spain, there is no doubt about the immorality of the behavior of the king, who for decades was the most admired man in Spain for his role in helping to lead the country from dictatorship to democracy. But the accumulation of evidence and the progression of the investigations hardly matter: The same political class, business community and courtly press that draped a mantle of impunity over the king has come to his rescue. What should be a question of decency and accountability is instead a polarized debate for and against the monarchy. The emeritus king's defenders proclaim that despite his faults, his legacy as the father of Spanish democracy is indelible. They consider it paramount to protect the institution at a time of great political fracture and territorial tensions, including Catalonia's government bid for independence. The argument is legitimate, but loses its meaning when cloaked in conspiracy theories about a coordinated attack by the country's enemies to overthrow the monarchy. No one has done more to sabotage the monarchy than the former king himself. European monarchies are relics of the past whose role has been reduced to tasks of diplomatic representation, patriotic symbolism and, let's face it, entertainment for the masses. The dissolute lives of the monarchs themselves (and their families) have traditionally been accepted, within certain limits. But when scandals involve a network of child abuse, such as the recently revealed connection of Prince Andrew of England to Jeffrey Epstein, or suspicions of corruption, as with Juan Carlos I, that tacit pact is broken and the question resurfaces: Do we need the monarchy? An institution like the Spanish one cannot be saved by seeking a placid retirement for the former king. Shielding him from the consequences of his actions and maintaining the usual opacity sends the message to the current monarch, Felipe VI, that he would receive the same treatment regardless of his actions. What we need is an open debate on the model of our state and deep reforms that adapt the monarchy to the times, starting with putting an end to judicial impunity and establishing a culture of transparency. The idea that in the 21st century, kings can appear unclothed, as in Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale, and expect their subjects to simply look the other way can result only in an unhappy ending. David Jimenez ( DavidJimenezTW) is a writer and journalist. His most recent book is "El director." This article was translated by Erin Goodman from the Spanish. 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 |
Ashley Carlson called out homework instructions across a large lawn to her first grader, who was leaving with a babysitter after having practiced cartwheels on the grass, and then turned her attention to her 3 and 4 year old sons. The two boys, with matching white blond hair and blue polo shirts, were clambering up a low stone wall and leaning on a painstakingly restored early 1900s ornate iron fence. Between the familiar parental refrains of "Don't pull on that!" and "Oh, don't do that," Ms. Carlson touted the virtues of the lawn. "We live a block away, and we come here all the time," she said early this fall. "This is sort of like a backyard. A stylish backyard." The 7,600 square foot garden of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, on East 90th Street just off Fifth Avenue, reopened late last year, the final chapter in a top to bottom renovation of the museum. A lawn that began as the private Manhattan garden of Andrew Carnegie and was later made available for neighbors who paid for a key has since become a hangout for local parents of young children and the people charged with taking care of them. There is no fee to enter, and it is open to the public, no museum visit required. A cafe sells lattes, sandwiches, gelato (popular with the child set) and wine (popular with the chasing the child set). Ms. Carlson said that security guards have had to reprimand her boys just once, reminding them that "they're not allowed to stand on the artwork." On a recent day, the lawn was the bustling play space of nannies pushing strollers, a towheaded preteenager balancing on an orange spinning chair and a preschooler in a pinafore having lunch from a gourmet grocery bag. "It still manages to be really tranquil even though there are quite a good number of kids running around," said Marguerite Rogers, who has made the garden a regular stop with her 4 year old son, Jamie. An elevated pathway, with a brick wall overlooking the main yard and steps to a back entrance (now closed) to the mansion that houses the museum, is lined with colorful yarrow and coral bells, and is one of her son's favorite places to play, Ms. Rogers said. Parents said they are drawn not just to the flower filled pathways, but also to the eclectic mix of Upper East Siders, international tourists and artist types who don't frequently visit an uptown neighborhood that to some can have an almost suburban feel. "It's not like when you go to a Gymboree type place where it's all mothers and babies," Ms. Rogers said. Recently, she said, she met and had an actual adult conversation about culture with a Juilliard trained singer. Toddlers and high design may seem like strange bedfellows, but there is nothing for children to break or destroy in the garden. "My aim was really to be the friendliest place on Museum Mile," said Caroline Baumann, the museum's director, who hopes it will draw more people inside. "The garden, for me, is the gateway drug for design." For the parentarazzi who like to artfully document their children's every move (and even their naps), there is plenty of Insta bait. The outdoor furniture includes spare tables and chairs (designed by Stefano Giovannoni and Jasper Morrison, and donated by Herman Miller), curvy black and white modular "Copabananas" benches in the grass, and Yves Behar ipe wood and aluminum benches on the walkways. The most popular photo backdrops seem to be the off balance rotating orange and gray chairs, designed by Thomas Heatherwick. One woman deemed them "much more comfortable than they look" as she swayed front to back and kept an eye on a girl drawing in a notebook in the grass. Near the Fifth Avenue gate is a blue Ping Pong table, a selection by Ms. Baumann, who played daily as a child and regularly challenges colleagues to matches. (Maintenance work has blocked parts of the lawn and displaced some furniture this month, but the museum expects to restore it within days.) As Ms. Baumann, wearing sunglasses with bamboo frames and a short sleeve knit dress that matched the bright orange of the chairs, surveyed the garden, Lance Somerfeld and a couple of members of his NYC Dads group were wrapping up a long play date. His 1 year old daughter had spent much of her time pushing around a toy stroller. "It's just a beautifully landscaped area," said Mr. Somerfeld, who added that he has come with his wife as well, to enjoy adult time and a glass of wine. His group meets there regularly to "chain a few blankets and just kind of relax." With access to bathrooms with changing tables, they sometimes stay for hours. Ms. Baumann said she is trying to maintain the garden's quiet, sophisticated vibe. "The museum is monitoring the crowds so that it always remains comfortable," Ms. Baumann said diplomatically, and some rules have been implemented. "We can't have soccer games in here. We can't order in 14 boxes of pizza for your kid's third birthday." The museum has built in some landscape features to try to impede small feet from stamping through growing plants. For example, a foot high rope was installed around the backyard's "rockery" a legacy of the original 1901 design of the space. But it will come down soon, both because the thyme has grown in and the barrier did little to dissuade children, including Ms. Baumann's own son, Hugo, 19 months old. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The morning after President Trump announced his coronavirus diagnosis, a relative who supports him texted me. "OMG Trump," she wrote. "It's the end." My relative was adamant that Mr. Trump's bid for a second term was finished. So adamant, actually, that it sounded as if she wanted it to be over. I noticed a similar attitude of resignation, even relief, from Trump supporters I follow on social media. They expressed strangely little anxiety that Mr. Trump would get very sick or die. Compassion for his suffering, yes. Anger at Democrats' schadenfreude, yes. But no fear he would be swept off the political stage. My relative mentioned she was listening to Rush Limbaugh's radio show. The gist of the segment, she said, was that "love him or hate him, Trump was larger than life." She made Mr. Limbaugh's monologue sound like a eulogy, and I tuned in just in time for a caller to tell the pro Trump host: "I would have thought you were eulogizing the president." You were talking about him, the caller continued, "like he was in the past tense." I grew up in a conservative social circle, and I talk weekly with friends and family who voted for Mr. Trump. His approval rating has come in consistently around 40 percent, which leads many to conclude that Americans who like him support him staunchly. But I've come to believe that some people who publicly support the president don't fully want him to win. They have to put up a fight for their sense of dignity. But even those who definitely plan to vote for him again privately admit ambivalence or even a wish that he could be magically swept out of the White House without a straightforward ballot box defeat. Commentators focus on a category they call "shy Trump voters." These are voters who supposedly support Mr. Trump but won't acknowledge it publicly. But I think there's another category developing under the radar: "Shy Trump doubters." These are public Trump fans who, in private, acknowledge that his tweets are humiliating, his crowing about his victories is tasteless, his policy flip flops are dispiriting and some of his statements are hurtful and damaging. They won't say they're tired of him to a pollster. It can be as embarrassing to admit you liked Mr. Trump and now fear him as it was to admit you were attracted to him in the first place. Mr. Trump's critics portray his supporters as fools, and to say you only now realized he has problems seems to concede the point. Trump ambivalence goes back to 2016. The morning after his victory, a friend who voted for him sent me an anxious Facebook message: "This presidency is going to be weird." He had wanted the election to be tight to serve as a rebuke to Hillary Clinton and to supporters who preened about her inevitability. But my friend had believed the polls. He didn't actually like Mr. Trump. His vote was a protest. My relative was more upset. She called me near tears. "What's going to happen to your health care?" she asked. (I rely on the Affordable Care Act.) She never thought Mr. Trump would occupy the White House. Her vote was a form of trolling. She might admit this sounds juvenile, but she felt Democrats deserved it. In her view, the American left had long denied being moralistic while acting relentlessly moralizing. Early in 2016, yard signs sprung up in her majority Democratic neighborhood: "Hate Has No Home Here" and "In This House, We Believe No Human Is Illegal, Love Is Love, and Science Is Real." They implied that, if you didn't put up such a sign, you were a monster and your home was filled with hatred, or if you questioned whether paper straws made a serious difference to the environment you "didn't believe in science." Democrats seemed to display an "extreme moral vehemence" matched with a vehement denial that they were intolerant. "I thought there were a lot of people going around saying things they didn't really believe. They didn't seem to feel any contradiction between their own conspicuous consumption and their leftism." Her perception was that they frequently demanded apologies from conservatives, but "the apologies never did those people any good." President Bill Clinton was a prime example of this double standard; he represented a party that insisted it and only it supported women's empowerment while he preyed on a female intern. Not long into the Trump presidency, though, my relative began to talk about what would happen if he were "driven out of office." Other Trump supporting friends used this phrasing, too, and I began to wonder if it was a sublimated yearning. It would accomplish two things: first, make Mr. Trump a martyr to leftist intolerance, and second, get him out of office. Their perception of Mr. Trump crude, immodest and uncontrolled had always been far closer to the Democrats' portrayal than Democrats seemed to understand; during his campaign, they found it funny when people bent over backward to prove he was vulgar. Trump fans knew that it was the point. His crudeness drove Democrats crazy and, in these voters' view, revealed their true colors, driving them into a moralistic frenzy over "norms" and "decency." Mr. Trump's shtick became less satisfying when he was president. My relative found his demonizing of Baltimore appalling and confessed she'd had to stop looking at his tweets. "Reagan was very genteel," another pro Trump friend complained to me very much unlike Mr. Trump. But how do you admit you used your ballot that sacred thing in a democracy as a weapon to prod your adversaries? Many Americans who oppose Trump have spent the past four years asking, "How could so many of my countrymen love this man so much?" The answer may be simpler than we expect: a lot of them don't. Perhaps it is actually disturbing to consider that Trump fans' intense public enthusiasm may be a front, because that would mean a proportion of them had a wish to throw the country into chaos. They don't think America looks good right now, either. They think it looks bad, and they possessed and probably still possess such anger and cynicism about American politics that they risked a conflagration. It's worth listening for shy doubt about Trump, though, because it still provides an opening. There might be more agreement right now than we realize. That doesn't mean all or even most shy Trump doubters will abandon him at the ballot box I suspect most won't. But it is something in an era in which we believe people with different politics live in separate realities. There may be one dominant reality, and it's one in which Mr. Trump, as president, has been a misfortune. Eve Fairbanks has contributed to The New Republic, The Washington Post and other publications and is working on a book about South Africa. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The truth is, the lives of the Garcias were not much like my own. I arrived in the United States when I was 3, so I could not relate to the traumas of being a new immigrant; I did not remember enough of the "old country" to truly yearn for it as they did. But I relished and latched on to everything I recognized: Spanish words or phrases specific to Dominican slang ("antojo"; "jamona"; "U'te que sabe"); the fact that everyone had a nickname ("Lolo"; "Mundin"); and that the parents were called "Mami" and "Papi" instead of Mom and Dad. The girls, like cousins of mine who came to America later than I did, were placed in a grade below their age group to make up for their lack of English. Carla, the eldest, wears her hair in a "tubie, using her head as a large roller," and when Yolanda returns to the Dominican Republic, her aunts lament that she and her sister "get lost" in the United States, which is to say that they stay away and don't come home. The Garcia girls lived in a household where "the rules were as strict as for Island girls, but there was no island to make up the difference," their parents "worried they were going to lose their girls to America." This latter fear, especially, loomed over my childhood that I would become too brave, too free or too loose. I was threatened with "island confinement" if I stepped out of line, a threat the Garcia girls' mother followed through on when she found a bag of marijuana behind her daughter's dresser. When the Papi in the book, ready for a night out, turns to the girls and says, in a show of charming arrogance, "A handsome man, your Papi," he could have been my father, feeling himself after a fresh haircut. "Garcia Girls" depicted, also, the troubling aspects of my community, specifically the ingrained colorism. Sandra is the most beautiful sister because of her blue eyes and "peaches and ice cream skin," while Sofia, the youngest, "was considered the plain one, with her tall, big boned body and large featured face"; Sofia brought "good blood" into the family by marrying a German with "fair Nordic looks." The maids were all brown or "black black" and from the country, campesinas who, in many ways, were iterations of me. Alvarez rendered my reality a little more tangible by putting it in words, but more than validation, the book proved to be premonition. Yo's fear that she "would never find someone who would understand my peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles," would arise for me in college, when my upbringing became a marker of difference. As an adult, I returned to my little island, finding, like Yo, "what she has been missing all these years without really knowing that she has been missing it." Alvarez's novels were an alternate education. Through the Garcia girls, I learned about feminism, and my feelings of injustice, which had always been dismissed as childhood naivete, were reaffirmed. I checked out more titles by Alvarez: "In the Time of the Butterflies," a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo, only to be brutally tortured and murdered by him; and "In the Name of Salome," told from the dual perspectives of the famed Dominican poet, Salome Urena, and her daughter, Camila, a queer writer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
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Olivia de Havilland in a promotional photograph for "Gone With the Wind" (1939), in which she played Melanie Hamilton. Olivia de Havilland, an actress who gained movie immortality in "Gone With the Wind," then built an illustrious film career, punctuated by a successful fight to loosen the studios' grip on contract actors, died on Sunday at her home in Paris. She was 104 and one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood's fabled Golden Age. Her death was confirmed by her publicist Lisa Goldberg. Ms. de Havilland was both a classic Hollywood beauty and an honored screen actress whose very name and bearing suggested membership in a kind of aristocracy of moviedom. Though she was typecast early in her career as the demure ingenue, she went on to earn meatier roles that led to five Academy Award nominations, two of which brought her the Oscar, for "To Each His Own" (1946) and "The Heiress" (1949). She had shown similar grit a decade earlier, in her breakthrough role, when she held her own against her formidable co stars Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard in "Gone With the Wind." The 1939 Civil War epic was briefly pulled from the HBO Max streaming service last month and returned with an introduction saying that the film presents the Georgia plantation at its center as "a world of grace and beauty, without acknowledging the brutalities of the system of chattel slavery upon which this world is based." As Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, the fiancee and then wife of Mr. Howard's Ashley Wilkes, Ms. de Havilland brought intelligence and grace to her portrait of a woman whose shy, forgiving, almost too kindly nature stood in sharp contrast to the often venomous jealousy of her high spirited sister in law, Scarlett O'Hara (Ms. Leigh). Ms. de Havilland's performance led to an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress, though the award went to another member of the cast, Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, Scarlett's enslaved housekeeper. (Ms. Leigh won in the best actress category.) By then she had established herself at Warner as a heroine in some 20 films and had begun a long collaboration with the prolific director Michael Curtiz, encompassing nine films. Most notable was a string of action features and costume dramas opposite the dashing Errol Flynn, among them "Captain Blood" (1935), "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1936) and "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938), in which she played Maid Marian. Ms. de Havilland and Flynn were such a popular onscreen couple that rumors flew of an on set romance, fueled in part by Flynn's reputation for bedding his co stars and reports that he was infatuated with her. By all accounts there was no truth to the whisperings of an affair, though some years later Ms. de Havilland admitted to having had "a great crush" on Flynn and suggested that "circumstances at the time" he was married when they met stood in the way of a romance. "So naughty and so charming," she said of him. One exception was "Hold Back the Dawn" (1941), in which Ms. de Havilland played an American schoolteacher who is seduced in Mexico by a wily European exile (Charles Boyer). Her performance earned her another Oscar nomination, but this time she lost to her sister, Joan Fontaine, who won for "Suspicion." The two were rarely on speaking terms after that. (They are the only sisters to win best actress Academy Awards, and their sibling rivalry was called the fiercest in Hollywood history.) The formula roles kept coming. When Ms. de Havilland complained, she was told that she had been hired because she photographed well and that she wasn't required to act. The studio had misread her determination. She began to refuse roles she considered inferior. Warner retaliated by suspending her several times, for a total of six months, and, after her contract expired, insisting that because of the suspensions she was still the studio's property for six more months. Ms. de Havilland sued. The case dragged on for a year and a half, but David finally beat Goliath when the California Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in her favor in 1945. What became known as the de Havilland decision established that a studio could not arbitrarily extend the duration of an actor's contract. When she resumed her career, Ms. de Havilland appeared in four films in rapid succession, all released in 1946. In one, "The Dark Mirror," she played twins, one good and one evil. In her Oscar winning performance in "To Each His Own," she was an unwed mother who must give up her infant son when his father, her lover, a World War I flying ace, is killed in action. Ms. de Havilland soon took on one of her most demanding roles, in "The Snake Pit" (1948), playing a young bride who becomes mentally ill and is sent to an institution. The film, directed by Anatol Litvak, was an unflinching study of mental illness and the treatments available then, from narcotics to electroshock. Ms. de Havilland was nominated for a best actress Oscar but did not win. She captured her second Oscar the next year with "The Heiress," directed by William Wyler and adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz from their Broadway play based on Henry James's "Washington Square." Ms. de Havilland presented an affecting portrait of a repressed, spinsterish young woman dominated by her rigidly protective father (Ralph Richardson). It was one of Ms. de Havilland's favorite roles. "The films I loved," she said in 1964, "the great loves, are 'The Snake Pit,' 'The Heiress' and, of course, 'Gone With the Wind.'" But she did not love Hollywood, and in the 1950s she startled the town when she abandoned it to live in Paris with a new husband, though she kept her American citizenship. "For Olivia," William Stadiem wrote in a profile of her in Vanity Fair magazine in 2016, "there was a whiff of decay and disappointment about Hollywood." Olivia Mary de Havilland was born on July 1, 1916, to British parents in Tokyo, where her father, Walter, a cousin of the aviation pioneer Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, ran a firm of patent lawyers, though he was not a lawyer himself. In 1919 her mother, Lillian (Ruse) de Havilland, an elocution teacher, moved with Olivia and Joan, her younger sister by 15 months, to Saratoga, Calif., near San Francisco. The de Havillands divorced, and Lillian married George M. Fontaine, a department store executive. (Olivia's sister, Joan, took her stepfather's surname as her stage name.) Ms. de Havilland was married twice. Both marriages ended in divorce. The first, in 1946, was to Marcus Aurelius Goodrich, a Texas born novelist, screenwriter and journalist; they had a son, Benjamin, and divorced in 1952. She married Pierre Galante, the author of military histories and at one point editor of the magazine Paris Match, in 1955 after the couple had met in France. They moved to Paris, had a daughter, Gisele, and divorced in 1979. Ms. de Havilland's son died in 1991. Before she was married, she had romantic relationships with James Stewart, Howard Hughes and the director John Huston, with whom she reunited for a time after her first divorce. By her account she also turned away a smitten young John F. Kennedy, who was visiting Hollywood after his PT boat service in World War II. She is survived by her daughter, Giselle Galante Chulack. Joan Fontaine died in 2013 at 96. She returned to Broadway in 1952 for another brief run, in Shaw's "Candida," and was last seen there in 1962, when she starred with Henry Fonda in "A Gift of Time," adapted by Garson Kanin from Lael Tucker Wertenbaker's book "Death of a Man," about the last days of the author's husband, Charles, who had died of cancer. The movies kept calling, however. In 1952 she starred in "My Cousin Rachel," based on the best selling novel by Daphne du Maurier. She played the bride of an older man, and Richard Burton, in his Hollywood debut, played the son who thinks his attractive new stepmother may be capable of murder. By the time she traveled to Italy to film "The Light in the Piazza" (1962), in which she played the protective mother of a beautiful but mentally impaired young woman (Yvette Mimieux), Ms. de Havilland had appeared in some 40 movies and was living in semiretirement in Paris. She also published a book, a 1962 collection of lighthearted observations about life in France titled "Every Frenchman Has One." Ms. de Havilland made only a handful of films after that. She was in her mid 40s by then, receiving fewer acting offers and finding many scripts too prurient for her tastes. She was in the news and in court once again in 2018, when she sued the FX network and Ryan Murphy Productions over her portrayal by Catherine Zeta Jones in the mini series "Feud: Bette and Joan," about the rivalry between Ms. Davis and Ms Crawford. She maintained that her portrayal constituted unauthorized use of her name and likeness and showed her in "a false light" as a hypocrite "with a public image of being a lady and a private one as a vulgarity using gossip." A California appellate court dismissed the suit, ruling that the portrayal was "not highly offensive to a reasonable person as a matter of law." Ms. de Havilland's readings of scripture on Christmas and Easter at the American Cathedral, on the Avenue George V, became annual events in Paris. In 2010, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of France, awarded her the Legion d'Honneur. He association with a distant era of Hollywood glamour had made her a living legend in her adopted city. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Dozens of surfboards bobbed on the Pacific waves rolling in as the sun came down on yet another perfectly clear, piping hot day in the Nicoya Peninsula beach town Nosara. This hard to reach spot has pulled in surfers since American expatriates discovered it in the late 1960s. But something radical has changed on the beach. The 10 a night flophouses that once housed the bohemian surfer crowd have largely been replaced by high end boutique hotels, and more than a dozen new restaurants have opened in the last year alone. They have helped lure affluent travelers to a once sleepy yet still decidedly laid back beach town, including waves of families who usually vacation in places like Telluride, Colo., Montauk, N.Y., or the south of France. Accelerating its shift upscale has been the entry of an unusual hotelier: John S. Johnson III, the Brooklyn and Nosara based co founder of BuzzFeed, whose great grandfather started the giant global pharmaceutical and personal care company Johnson Johnson. Mr. Johnson, himself a surfer, first came to Nosara about 15 years ago in search of a wintertime surf spot closer to the East Coast than a home he had in Kauai, Hawaii. "Costa Rica in my mind, back then, you sum up my impression of the country in three ideas: Closer. Waves. Spanish speaking people," he said. He soon found that there was more to it. Costa Rica has garish, party scene resort towns like Tamarindo, just 40 miles up the coast. But Nosara puts a premium on natural preservation. No new development is allowed in beachside conservation areas within about 200 yards of the ocean. There are no high rise buildings, no fast food restaurants, very few beach bars there are not even chaise longues on the beach. It is, in effect, the anti resort resort. Ostional, one of the four area beaches, is itself a wildlife refuge, as its black, volcanic sand is a breeding ground every July until early December for hundreds of thousands of Olive Ridley sea turtles. They climb onto the sand to lay their eggs, and a fraction emerge approximately 60 days later as newborn turtles. The ocean waters are a gathering spot for humpback whales, which migrate through the region during the same months. And the nearby Reserva Biologica Nosara boasts at least 270 types of birds, such as orange chinned parakeets, cinnamon hummingbirds, long tailed manakins and black hawks. "There is a freshness in Nosara that is pretty compelling," said Mr. Johnson, in torn jeans shorts and a patterned, partly unbuttoned, short sleeved shirt during a recent visit. "It's kind of an analog to a little ski town, like the early days of Telluride." There was one other critical ingredient that Mr. Johnson found here: Susan Short, a naturalist, filmmaker and also a surfer, whom he met on one of his early visits to Nosara and who is now his wife and partner in their business endeavors. The couple have gone on something of a buying spree in town, purchasing two small hotels; two unfinished condo developments; and even the local weekly newspaper. They are determined to prevent large scale, resort tourism from taking hold, and have enough available capital to actually stop it. One of the hundreds of thousands of Olive Ridley sea turtles that breed on Playa Ostional from July to early December. Toh Gouttenoire for The New York Times The centerpiece of this effort, at least so far, is the 24 room Harmony Hotel, which has the aura of a Lana Del Rey music video with its 1950s era tropical decor, its super attractive, super fit clientele, its juice bar and healing center with classes like Yin Yoga Nidra. The Harmony is not a place that pampers its guests, despite the premium price: The rooms are relatively small and hardly luxurious (and lack televisions), and room service is not offered. (Rates range from 210 for a basic room in low season to 990 a night for a two bedroom bungalow over the Christmas holiday.) Mr. Johnson is proud of the fact that it serves no sugary sodas or junk food. Even the minibar is stocked with treats like a homemade granola bar and artisanal chocolate. It is just what the regulars come for. In this unpretentious beachside spot, the lobby at times seems more like a family room. Children hang out while their parents are at the pool or dining on plates like ceviche and Costa Rican casado in the nearby bar and open air restaurant. A lush, tropical garden connects the hotel lobby to the nearby bungalows serving as home to howler monkeys, hummingbirds and other wildlife and the hotel's yoga center, day spa and juice bar. Mr. Johnson is going to open an organic supermarket nearby soon. The hotel does no advertising outside Mr. Johnson's website, yet it has become an impromptu gathering place, particularly during the peak season, of filmmakers, fashion designers, journalists, Silicon Valley tech executives and New York bankers, their spouses, and children, as well as a sprinkling of European families who somehow heard about the place. Almost all of them know Mr. Johnson or his wife personally, or someone else who does. "This is a surfer yogi's spiritual Beverly Hills Hotel," said Coralie Charriol Paul, creative director of the Swiss watch and jewelry brand Charriol, who was there with her husband, Dennis Paul, a New York investment manager, and their children, after an evening in which they had drinks at the hotel bar with Roopal Patel, the fashion director for Saks Fifth Avenue, who also happened to be in town. "It has just got a great energy." There that same day was Alan Bibby, the television commercial director whose clients have included Mercedes Benz and Google, with his wife, Alice Bertay, the fashion stylist, whose own roster includes Nike and Target, and their 6 year old son. They took a break from several hours of surfing for some sushi and a bottle of wine at the Harmony for lunch. "This place is very much made for gringos let's be honest," Mr. Bibby said, conceding that he was a bit uncomfortable to be a part of this affluent, New York centric crowd. "But at the same time, I am a hypocrite. I am here." The success of the Harmony has spilled over to a collection of other hotels nearby, including the Sunset Shack, which Mr. Johnson and his wife also bought, next door. Nosara, at least, does still offer some decidedly less expensive and still comfortable options, such as the Living Hotel, and even some of the original surfer spots, like the Gilded Iguana. But there is not a single large scale resort hotel. It's just not a town that travelers come to if they are looking for all inclusive, walled off resorts. Since there is little night life here the most popular spot is perhaps La Luna, a restaurant right next to Playa Pelada, one of the four beaches just about everyone seems to be in bed by about 10 p.m. The busiest scene comes at the first light of dawn, when surfers of all ages start streaming toward the beach. All of this physical activity surfing, yoga, zip lining, horseback riding, paddle boarding and the deep pockets of this new generation of out of town guests help explain why the restaurant scene here in Nosara is also on fire. A dizzying array of food options is available, including the super popular Burgers Beers (the menu is just that), as well as Rosi's Soda Tica (classic Costa Rican dishes) and Go Juice, a food truck, which in addition to its juices and smoothies has a delicious Tuna Poke bowl, a classic Hawaii surfer's meal made of raw tuna over sushi rice with ginger, sesame and soy sauce. Among the best new restaurants in town there are too many for any visitor to try them all on a single visit is Tibidabo, a tapas bar across from the Harmony Hotel. It was opened by a Barcelona native and his Costa Rican wife, and the menu includes classic (and excellent) dishes such as patatas bravas and croquetas de jamon, along with local, Spanish inspired seafood dishes. The chef was trained at El Bulli in Spain. Playa Garza, about four miles up the road, is a sleepy spot, with a largely empty beach frequented by local Costa Ricans and home to the family run Restaurant Bahia Garza, which offers some of the area's best ceviche, served with chips baked fresh in an adjacent stone oven. Reaching Nosara remains a bit of a chore it requires a bumpy two hour trip across mostly dirt roads from the closest major airport, in Liberia. And do not rely on Google Maps it will tell you to take a hazardous mountain pass road. But in a way, that is just how everyone wants it to stay. Make it any easier, and Nosara, as it is today, will disappear. "This is an amazing town I don't really know how you would keep it from growing," Liev Schreiber, the actor, told a reporter from The Voice of Guanacaste, the small weekly paper Mr. Johnson bought in town, after a visit to Nosara. "As the world gets smaller, places like this become fewer and farther in between. I guess more than anything I hope it continues to grow in a nice way because there's not too many spots like it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
THE FIRE IS UPON US James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America By Nicholas Buccola In 1965, the year of the Selma to Montgomery marches and the Watts riots, an ancillary skirmish played out across the Atlantic. James Baldwin, then at the height of his international reputation, faced off against William F. Buckley Jr., the "keeper of the tablets" of American conservatism, in the genteel confines of the Cambridge Union. The proposition before the house was: "The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro." For Baldwin, who would roll his eyes more than once during the debate, the question indicated glaring ignorance. The American dream was a nightmare from which he was trying to wake. For Buckley, the American dream was a giant bootstrap that American blacks refused to employ. "We will fight ... on the beaches and on the hills, and on mountains and on landing grounds," he told the audience of students that evening, channeling Winston Churchill. Only Buckley invoked the imagery of plucky guerrilla resistance not against a Nazi invasion of the British Isles, but against Northern radicals bent on uprooting the Southern way of life. Nicholas Buccola's "The Fire Is Upon Us" is both a dual biography of Buckley and Baldwin and an acute commentary on a great intellectual prizefight. Baldwin and Buckley were, to put it mildly, from opposite sides of the tracks. Buckley was the son of an oil speculator who grew up in a Connecticut mansion stocked with tutors and servants. He honed his debating skills at the family dinner table and at Yale, where he was triggered by the presence of secular, left leaning faculty members on campus, and later, in "God and Man at Yale," called for a ban on hiring them. Lack of godliness was less of a problem in Harlem. James Baldwin learned how to lock and load the English language as a child prodigy storefront preacher. Buckley's postcollege trajectory included a stint in the C.I.A., while Baldwin's extra literary activities earned him a thick F.B.I. file. By the early 1960s, Buckley had gathered disparate right wing tribes together in his magazine, National Review. Baldwin, despite his growing renown, would remain more of a loner. By the time he reached the Cambridge Union, he was already at odds with both the separatist agenda of the Nation of Islam and the arid progressivism of the Johnson White House. Enshrined on YouTube and in countless documentaries, the Baldwin Buckley debate remains an uncanny exchange. The grainy black and white BBC footage shows an overpacked Cambridge Union, with a sea of mostly young white men in jackets. The way Baldwin swings his body and thrusts his hands in his pockets and barely refers to his prepared notes makes him seem much closer to our moment than to the one that surrounds him. When he finally stands up after the two brittle speeches on either side of the motion by Cambridge undergraduates, he twists his eyes to the upper gallery where his sister Gloria was seated. Slowly, then quickly, he makes the alien hall his own. Buccola, a professor of political science at Linfield College, deftly guides the reader through the rhetorical and philosophical moves of Baldwin's speech. Baldwin adopted the tone of a preacher "a kind of Jeremiah," as he put it who wants to readjust his audience's "system of reality." He tries to get them to imagine the black American experience from the inside. "It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians when you were rooting for Gary Cooper that the Indians were you." Did the American dream come at the expense of the American Negro? For Baldwin, the obtuseness of the question demanded a pronoun switch: "I am stating this very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else's whip, for nothing. For nothing." "The Fire Is Upon Us" becomes revelatory in its interpretation of Buckley's performance. We learn, for instance, that the Cambridge students had first tried to get Strom Thurmond or Barry Goldwater to debate Baldwin, only later settling on Buckley, who seems to have been eager for the publicity. We also learn that Buckley's speech that evening was based on an article he had commissioned for National Review by Garry Wills. Wills, a young Catholic ultra, who would later break with Buckley over racial questions and become an indispensable interpreter of the American scene, drafted a fierce response to Baldwin's famous New Yorker essay, "Letter From a Region in My Mind." Part of the trouble with Baldwin for Wills was that he was treated as a savior by his white liberal readership and not afforded the dignity of scrutiny that he would have received if he were white. Wills believed that Baldwin went too far in his condemnation of the West. "When a Dachau happens," Wills wrote, "are we as Baldwin suggests to tear up all the Bibles, disband the police forces, take crowbars to the court buildings and the libraries?" This was a selective reading of Baldwin, who, as his Cambridge speech makes clear, was if anything more committed to upholding the legacy of the Enlightenment than National Review's editorial board was. But what would come to gall Wills even more than Baldwin was that his boss Buckley not only lifted from his piece (before it was published) for one of his own columns but also distorted Wills's honest reckoning with Baldwin in the interest of his own, more facile and racialist prong of attack. Buccola shows how Buckley in his Cambridge speech was developing a new kind of conservative maneuver. In his war on the New Left, Buckley's method both on his television show "Firing Line" and in other public appearances was less to engage than to expose. (The method backfired on occasion, as when Huey Newton, a founder of the Black Panther Party, began a segment of "Firing Line" by out Buckley ing Buckley with a loyalty oath question: "During the Revolution of 1776 ... which side would you have been on?") Charm, wit, eye twinkling and rapid deployment of stray factoids were among Buckley's chief rhetorical assets. His main form of reasoning consisted of forced analogies. The Freedom Riders were compared to National Socialists in the pages of National Review. In the Cambridge speech, Buckley dialed the comparison down, comparing the Irish in England to American blacks. Had the Irish gotten the vote because of, or in spite of, English civilization? Buckley asked. "The engines of concern are working in the United States," he assured his audience. "The presence of Mr. Baldwin here tonight is in part a reflection of that concern." The full force of Buckley's argument was that blacks should aspire to the condition of whiteness, however unattainable that might turn out to be. The suffering and humiliations of blacks were real, he conceded, but this was more a testament to the fallen state of man than something that could be corrected swiftly. "I am asking you not to make politics as the crow flies," Buckley told his audience, quoting the philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Buckley's stress on the gradualness of any accommodation told Baldwin all he needed to know: Why, after 400 years of being in America, did blacks not have access to the same bounty as their fellow Americans, including those who, like the Kennedys, "only got here yesterday?" Baldwin's views of race relations seesawed considerably in the '60s, from a kind of cosmic resignation that, in the words of Ta Nehisi Coates, "perhaps struggle is all we have." But on that February night in Cambridge, Baldwin envisioned a different endgame. "We are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other," he told his audience. He suggested it might be possible to create a new political synthesis if white Americans were prepared to recognize what they had done, both to blacks but also, crucially, to themselves. Alongside his more apocalyptic visions, Baldwin harbored a wary utopian presentiment that Buckley believed ignored man's true nature and endangered America's delicate hierarchies. It is tempting to view the Baldwin Buckley debate as a small victory for the idea of racial equality: Baldwin carried the floor vote 544 to 164. But part of the wisdom of "The Fire Is Upon Us" is that it leaves the import of the evening open to question. The debate, and his subsequent encounters with Buckley, left Baldwin with a bitter taste: "He's the intellectuals' James Bond," he once said. Buckley believed he had gained much more from their night in Cambridge: "the most satisfying debate I ever had." He would lose again, badly, later that year when he ran for mayor of New York. Curiously, his main support came not from the WASP establishment of Manhattan but from white voters in the outer boroughs. Buckley's knack for historical analogies continues to flourish. The money manager Stephen Schwarzman compared an Obama administration proposal to raise taxes on hedge funds to the Nazi invasion of Poland. After the last presidential election, Buckley's son, Christopher, took to Vanity Fair to argue that his father's politics had nothing to do with those of the outer borough vulgarian who had landed in the White House. It would have been more becoming had he simply tipped his hat to one of the shrewder authors of our predicament. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
We've learned that wrongheaded policies cost lives. Mike surely knows that gunshots and shrapnel to one's body is a good reminder of the personal effects of bad policies. Yet knowing all this, Mike was predicting Mr. Trump's defeat based not on policies but on his failure to live up to an abstract set of leadership traits. But were they really abstract? As voters cast ballots last week, I wondered how many agreed with certain Trump policy positions but could not forgive him for his fundamental lack of leadership and the qualities traditionally ascribed to that word. I fell into that category on certain issues; I approved of Mr. Trump's renegotiation of NAFTA, appreciated his reluctance to engage in foreign wars and thought his measures on criminal justice reform made sense. I also wondered how many voters disagreed with many of Mr. Biden's policy positions but forgave him those choices because of his strong leadership. Again, I was one; I believe in school choice and am hesitant about Mr. Biden's track record on foreign wars. But I find it far, far easier to forgive the president elect on the issues where I disagree with him than I do to forgive Mr. Trump. That's because Mr. Biden understands leadership, and it is leadership that matters more than anything else right now. In his address to the nation on Saturday night, Mr. Biden said, "Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end." Forgiveness is the key to that beginning. The 75 million Americans who voted for Mr. Biden are not going to suddenly erase the 71 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump. The 146 million people who voted all have some reconciling to do if we hope, as a country, to heal. For our own sake, for the sake of our children and for the sake of our nation, I couldn't agree with Mr. Biden more strongly on this point. There's no policy paper that can guide us in the work of forgiveness. Only a leader can do that. Which brings me back to Zach, with whom I often disagree but who, like our president elect, is a good man. At his event he gave a speech outlining his vision for New York City. He shared an anecdote about one of his instructors in the Marines, Capt. John W. Maloney, who was later killed in Iraq. Like Zach, I remembered the grim realities of war our instructors prepared us for, one of which was that the mission always took precedence over not only your own life but also the lives of the Marines you led. This was an understandable if zero sum view of actual war that any die hard partisan can recognize in today's political conflicts. Yet Captain Maloney was different. He rejected this trade off between the mission and the Marines as a false choice. "Instead," Zach said, "he taught us that if you take care of your Marines, they will take care of the mission." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Apple's "Elephant Queen" was one of about 130 original nature series airing last year, according to Nielsen. At a time when millions of species are at risk of extinction and deep pocketed streaming services are spending billions on content, an old television genre, the nature show, is booming. On Saturday, the latest big budget nature documentary series from BBC Studios, "Seven Worlds, One Planet," will make its debut in the United States across various AMC cable networks like BBC America and SundanceTV. The first installment of the series, which is a follow up to the recent ratings hits "Planet Earth II" and "Blue Planet II," will focus on Australia. There has never been more to watch for fans of the genre. Netflix, Disney and Apple are investing heavily in wildlife programming as part of their efforts to lure subscribers to their streaming services. And nature shows are thriving on cable and public broadcast networks, with roughly 130 original nature series airing in 2019, more than the previous three years combined, according to Nielsen. "I don't think I've ever seen quite the attention on natural TV programming across such a broad range of audiences and platforms and organizations," said Michael Gunton, the creative director of the natural history unit at BBC Studios. Interest has been renewed as environmental coverage has migrated from scientific journals to mainstream news outlets, a change that coincided with the rise of high definition television and streaming services. Netflix and its rivals consider wildlife programming a smart bet because it is appropriate for all ages and works well internationally. "It does travel well," Mr. Gunton said, "because it's educational and the animals do not speak in any particular language." In October, BBC America, known for thrillers like "Killing Eve" and "Orphan Black," turned over its Saturday lineup to wildlife programming. The result was a 35 percent gain in viewership during Saturday's prime time hours. Nature shows also bring the network a different audience, said Courtney Thomasma, the channel's executive director. "It's more heartland than our typical network skew," she said. Bill Gardner, the vice president for programming at PBS, the broadcaster of "Nature" and "Nova," attributed the surge to the fact that more people are engaged with environmental issues. "For this particular subject area, I think there's just this broad awareness in the zeitgeist that this is about more than entertainment," he said. "It's just the issue of the age." "Seven Worlds, One Planet," the BBC's latest, includes scenes filmed in 41 countries. In response to the devastating wildfires in Australia, BBC America will broadcast the Australia episode first, instead of the originally planned episode on North America. Though the episode was filmed well before the crisis, BBC America will inform viewers how they can help with relief efforts. "Seven Worlds, One Planet" is narrated by Mr. Attenborough, 93, a particular beneficiary of the boom, winning back to back Emmys for his work on "Blue Planet II" and "Our Planet." Discovery, a leader in the genre, has the streaming rights to the back library of BBC's "Earth" series and plans to roll out a "definitive collection" this year on a streaming service now in development, Discovery's chief executive, David Zaslav, said. "Serengeti," a nature series produced by Simon Fuller, the manager of the Spice Girls and the creator of "American Idol," was a ratings hit for Discovery in August, performing especially well among young male viewers and families. A sequel is underway, and Discovery will also broadcast "Endangered," a BBC Studios series produced by Ellen DeGeneres on vulnerable and endangered species. Other Discovery series in the works include "Mysterious Planet," "Perfect Planet" and "Deep Planet." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
PARIS American Airlines announced on Wednesday a record order for 460 single aisle planes from Airbus and Boeing in a deal worth more than 38 billion. The order breaks the longstanding monopoly that Boeing has had with the airline and forced a significant shift in the company's strategy. American, based in Fort Worth, Tex., said that it planned to acquire 260 of the Airbus A320 aircraft and 200 Boeing 737s half of which will be equipped with a new, more fuel efficient engine. The move is a clear commitment by Boeing to revamp its best selling 737 with new engines rather than develop an all new version of the plane a strategy that until now it had said most of its customers preferred. The deal, which American described as the largest commercial aircraft deal in history, also includes options and purchase rights for as many as 465 additional planes through 2025. The airline said Airbus and Boeing had provided a combined 13 billion in financing through lease transactions, which it said would fully cover the cost of the first 230 deliveries, set to begin in 2013. American said it expected to begin receiving its first Airbus and Boeing aircraft equipped with the more advanced engines starting in 2017. "Today's announcement paves the way for us to achieve important milestones in our company's future, giving us the ability to replace our narrow body fleet and finance it responsibly," said Gerard Arpey, the chairman and chief executive of American and its parent company, AMR. "With today's news, we expect to have the youngest and most fuel efficient fleet among our peers in the U.S. industry within five years." The order represents a coup for Boeing's European rival, Airbus, which has not sold new planes to American in more than two decades. American retired its last Airbus jets a handful of A300 widebodies in 2009. "Not only have they sold jets to American, but they have forced Boeing's hand into pushing for a re engined 737," said Saj Ahmad, an analyst at FBE Aerospace in London. Of the 260 Airbus jets on order, 130 will be for the A320neo, an upgraded version of its A320, which Airbus expects to bring to market beginning in 2016. Airbus has been promising fuel savings with the A320neo of as much as 15 percent over current engines. The new plane is also expected to run more quietly, cost less to operate and be able to fly farther or carry heavier loads while emitting less greenhouse gases. "This is significant for Airbus, but even more significant for Boeing," said Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC Partners, a London brokerage. Boeing, he said, had been "chastened" by the market response to the A320neo, "which is making better headway than anyone had expected." Mr. Ahmad of FBE Aerospace agreed. "Boeing has said for months it wouldn't rush to a decision. But now that they have had to react to this deal, they, too, will capture new swathes of orders." Airbus has said it expects to spend around 1.5 billion on the enhancements, and Boeing has placed the costs of fitting a new engine to the 737 within that range. Analysts had estimated that developing an all new replacement for the 737 would probably have cost Boeing as much as 12 billion. The 737s and A320s, each of which typically seats 150 to 180 passengers, have formed the backbone of the air travel system for decades. More than 10,000 of them shuttle passengers between large airports. Boeing predicted last month that North American carriers would purchase more than 7,500 new airplanes between now and 2030, valued at 760 billion. Nearly three quarters of those are expected to be single aisle jets. Boeing currently holds a 51 percent share of the North American market, according to Ascend, an aviation consultancy based in London. As recently as last month, Boeing had appeared reluctant to commit to a significant redesign of the 737 as it faced delays with the 787 Dreamliner. The company, based in Chicago, indicated at the Paris Air Show in June that it did not expect to make a decision until the end of this year on whether to revamp the 737 with new engines or to develop an entirely new single aisle jet for delivery around the beginning of the next decade. American trails Delta, United and Southwest among United States carriers in terms of number of passengers. The new orders will help American update a fleet of more than 600 planes which, with an average age of 15 years, is one of the oldest among the six top United States airlines. Its stable of single aisle workhorses includes more than 200 McDonnell Douglas MD 80s, which average more than 20 years of age and went out of production in 1999. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
They are among the most challenging prostate cancer patients to treat: about 150,000 men worldwide each year whose cancer is aggressive enough to defy standard hormonal therapy, but has not yet spread to the point where it can be seen on scans. These patients enter a tense limbo which often ends too quickly with the cancer metastasizing to their bones, lymph nodes or other organs sometimes causing intense pain. Now, for the first time, researchers have results from two independent clinical trials showing that two different drugs help these patients giving them about two more years before their cancer metastasizes. That means two additional years before pain and other symptoms spread and they need chemotherapy or other treatments. "We're going from rags to riches," said Dr. Judd Moul, a professor of surgery and director of the Duke Prostate Center, who was not involved in either study. "Up until now, we haven't had anything for these guys. We just had to tell them 'We'll keep an eye on it.'" The studies, each involving more than 1,200 patients in countries around the world, were presented Thursday at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco. They used very similar drugs both androgen receptor inhibitors, which block testosterone from binding to prostate cancer cells and entering them. The study of an experimental drug called apalutamide was published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The other study of a drug called enzalutamide, currently approved for treating prostate cancer that has already metastasized, has not yet been peer reviewed for publication, the authors said. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men worldwide. The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2018, there will be about 164,690 new cases and about 29,430 deaths. Worldwide, there were 1.1 million new cases and about 307,000 deaths in 2012, according to the most recent data available from the World Health Organization. The patients in both studies were men who had previously received some treatment for prostate cancer, such as surgery or radiation, but who later began to show rapid increases in their prostate specific antigen or PSA, a protein associated with prostate cancer. They did not respond to the standard treatment to suppress testosterone, called androgen deprivation therapy. Each year, about 30,000 to 50,000 American men and about 150,000 worldwide, fall into this category, called nonmetastatic castration resistant prostate cancer. (The medical term for blocking male hormones is chemical castration.) Globally, about 200,000 of the four million men with prostate cancer are estimated to have this diagnosis, said Dr. Matthew Smith, director of the Genitourinary Malignancies Program at Massachusetts General Hospital's Cancer Center, who co led the apalutamide study with Dr. Eric Small, deputy director of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at University of California, San Francisco. In the studies, two thirds of the men took one of the androgen receptor inhibitors, while a third took a placebo. They all continued to receive androgen deprivation therapy. In the study of men receiving apalutamide, it took, on average, 40.5 months for cancer to spread to the point where it could be detected by conventional scans. For men receiving the placebo, the cancer spread in 16.2 months, on average. In the enzalutamide study, metastasis took 36.6 months on average in men receiving that drug compared to 14.7 months with placebo. "Delaying median time to metastases by over two years is a big deal," said Dr. Scott Eggener, a urologic oncologist and professor of surgery at University of Chicago, who was not involved in the studies. He said the studies were also important scientifically because they show that "maximally decreasing testosterone production and its ability to bind or enter cancer cells leads to meaningful clinical improvement for these men." Still, he said, while the studies both show preliminary indications that the drugs might extend patients' survival, researchers will have to follow the patients longer to know. Both studies were funded by the companies that make the drugs. Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson Johnson, the maker of apalutamide, has applied for approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which has put it under priority review, Dr. Smith said. The developers of enzalutamide, Pfizer and Astellas Pharma, have applied to the F.D.A. for approval to expand the use of the drug, marketed as Xtandi, to patients in this category, said Dr. Maha Hussain, deputy director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. She co led that study with Dr. Cora Sternberg, chief of medical oncology at San Camillo and Forlanini Hospitals in Rome. Both drugs appear to be safe with relatively few serious side effects, experts said. Negative effects for some patients included fatigue, hypertension, rashes, fractures, falls, nausea, and mild cognitive and memory slippage. Ron Scolamiero, 72, of Marshfield, Massachusetts, a patient of Dr. Smith's, began taking apalutamide in 2012 for an earlier phase of the clinical trial. He still takes a four pill dose daily. In the drug's initial formulation, side effects included hot flashes, diarrhea and nausea, but those diminished greatly after it was reformulated, said Mr. Scolamiero, who owns a financial services company. About 18 months ago, a tumor that developed at the site of his prostate had to be removed, but his cancer has not metastasized to other parts of his body. "It's controlled my cancer," he said. "I'm so grateful." Still, some experts said enthusiasm about the new drugs should be tempered by other changes occurring in the prostate cancer landscape. "I don't want to say this is the best thing since sliced bread it's not," said Dr. Oliver Sartor, medical director of Tulane Cancer Center. "You're taking a person with no symptoms and potentially giving them side effects, definitely giving them an expensive drug. And it is unclear if this is the optimal management of these patients." The current list price of enzalutamide is more than 10,000 a month; a price hasn't been set for apalutamide, which is not yet on the market Dr. Sartor and others noted that another androgen receptor inhibitor, abiraterone, which is used to treat cancer once it metastasizes and is also produced by Janssen, is likely to go off patent soon and will become much cheaper because generic versions will be produced. Since abiraterone operates on the same biological pathway, experts expect that it will be tried for patients with cancer that hasn't metastasized and could end up working as well. Increasingly sophisticated imaging techniques are allowing doctors to spot previously undetectable signs of metastasis. While some patients in these trials might have had cancer spread that was not detected by conventional scans, Dr. Smith said what matters is that they were early in the cancer trajectory and the drug helped them stay in that early state longer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Mike Banning may have dropped out of favor as a Secret Service agent in the third installment of Gerard Butler's "Fallen" series, but not in the eyes of domestic audiences. Lionsgate and Millennium's "Angel Has Fallen," the action packed political thriller, hit first place at the box office on its opening weekend, grossing about 21.3 million in the United States and Canada. It brought in nearly the same amount as its prequel, "London Has Fallen," did when it opened in 2016, making roughly 21.6 million in ticket sales. The first film of the series, "Olympus Has Fallen," earned 30.3 million over its opening weekend in 2013. In the film, Butler reprises his role as Banning, a Secret Service agent who, despite successfully protecting the president against terrorist attacks in the earlier installments, is accused of masterminding an assassination attempt on the new commander in chief (Morgan Freeman). Read our critic's review of "Angel Has Fallen." "Angel" didn't receive the warmest reviews from critics (the movie holds a mere 39 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes). But its star studded cast, which also includes Jada Pinkett Smith and a grizzled Nick Nolte, presumably contributed to its success with audiences. According to Comscore, which compiles box office data, the movie had a stronger opening weekend than was expected. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
BERLIN In Germany, the dividing line between books and plays is astonishingly fluid. Most English speaking visitors here would probably be surprised to see names like Thomas Mann and Dostoyevsky adorning theater marquees. Perhaps the phenomenon can be traced back to Goethe, whose two part "Faust" a central text of German literature is an "armchair drama," meant to be read rather than staged. (Goethe didn't think the latter was possible; a production of the complete epic in 2000 lasted 21 hours.) Goethe aside, directors here love finding ways to bring books to the theater. In a recent trend, international literary best sellers have been appearing onstage with considerable speed. In Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, there have been versions of Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel "Submission," Miranda July's "The First Bad Man" and Kamel Daoud's "The Mersault Investigation," among others. (The Hamburg production of "Submission" began touring Germany a mere year after the book's publication.) Now the Berlin Schaubuhne has brought Edouard Louis's "History of Violence" to vivid, shocking life. This autobiographical novel caused a stir when it was published in France in 2016, and was released in the United States this week. "History of Violence" is a personal examination of class and sexuality that is also the story of an assault, rape and attempted murder. In the course of the novel, the narrator's effort to reconstruct his traumatic memories becomes an indictment of an intolerant society. Walking home at 4 a.m. after Christmas dinner, a young man named Edouard lets himself be picked up by a handsome stranger of Algerian origin. The initial tenderness of the encounter evaporates later that morning, however, when the stranger robs Louis and then rapes him at gunpoint. At the police station, at the hospital and, later, talking to his sister, Edouard tries to process the nightmarish incident. Time and again, people's prejudices about both gay men and Arabs stand in the way of genuine interest in his story or concern for his well being. Thomas Ostermeier, the Schaubuhne's ingenious artistic director, adapted the book along with the author and Florian Borschmeyer. One of the producers is St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, which earlier this year presented Mr. Ostermeier's Schaubuhne production of "Returning to Reims," based on the memoir by Didier Eribon (a sociologist who is one of Mr. Louis' foremost influences). In Mr. Ostermeier's intense, involving production, four actors animate Mr. Louis's crisp, self reflexive writing, often videotaping one another using iPhones, with the results then projected in grainy close ups on a white wall behind the nearly bare stage. The events of Edouard's fateful evening are revealed piecemeal, through a series of monologues and interrogations that tumble forth over an intermissionless two hours. Laurenz Laufenberg, one of the Schaubuhne's most captivating young actors, plays Edouard with a remarkable blend of strength and vulnerability. Renato Schuch gives a terrifying and complex performance as the perpetrator, Reda, investing the character with disarming charisma before exploding in an outburst of brutality mixed with self loathing. Alina Stiegler and Chistoph Gawenda play Edouard's antagonistic older sister and her husband, a truck driver, with a bit too many working class cliches, but are more convincing as detectives, doctors and assorted others. The redemptive power of narrative is also a subtext of "The Decameron," the 14th century compendium of ribald tales by Giovanni Boccaccio. To escape the ravages of the Black Death, 10 young aristocrats retreat to a secluded villa. Over 10 days, they regale one other with stories of folly and caprice from the world they have abandoned, to safeguard against the peril lurking at the door. An immersive four hour production of "The Decameron" in the Berliner Ensemble's small house lies at the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum for literary adaptations from "End of Violence." Unlike Mr. Louis' first person account, which easily lends itself to being spoken in a play, "The Decameron" is told by many voices. We hear very few of them, however, in Thomas Bo Nilsson and Julian Wolf Eicke's riff on Boccaccio, billed as a "theatrical installation." After climbing up a clattering metal outdoor staircase, a group of 30 spectators is ushered into what looks like a haunted house. Take it all in: the black, ash strewn antechamber; the blood splattered operating room; and the group of young performers in frilly undergarments huddled together on the floor. Savor the first 20 minutes in ignorance and expectation, because once the audience is divided into smaller groups and led upstairs to the actual performance, spread over numerous rooms where 10 of Boccaccio's tales, one from each day of the "Decameron" play out, it won't be long before you start to plot your escape. Sadly, there isn't much beyond a cool concept, which is hardly enough to sustain interest over four hours. Often, the production feels like being trapped at a lame party. If only the directors had given as much attention to the acting as they clearly did to the lurid decor. Many of the attractive performers calling them actors would be a stretch were recruited, several said privately, from Instagram and Craigslist. At the premiere, the energy was generally pretty low, save when the actors were quarreling with one another (unscripted) or harassing the audience. Several actors with Down syndrome from RambaZamba Theater, a Berlin troupe that works with disabled people, seemed the most engaged and ready to improvise. It is a frustrating experience that leaves one wishing for the type of conventional dramatization most common in Germany: an adaptation that takes inspiration primarily from the plot and themes of its literary source. From Franz Kafka to Gunter Grass, modern classics are the ones directors here seem to take the most relish in turning into theater. An energetic and fast moving adaptation of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" at Munich's Volkstheater is a tightly choreographed ensemble piece featuring sweaty performances, bright lights and outlandish costumes. The eight person cast refreshingly (and stylishly) embodies Huxley's vision of the future, although I do wish that the director, Felix Hafner, had found ways to relate Huxley's predictions to our contemporary world. (This season's new production of "1984" at Vienna's Volkstheater, with Donald Trump as Big Brother and Bernie Sanders as his nemesis, Emmanuel Goldstein, did a much better job of updating that dystopian classic.) Discussions of a literary canon are increasingly suspect these days, but one of the most salient features of a "classic" is the way it takes on a life of its own. In Germany, that often means that the words of great authors fly off the page and onto the stage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Nancy Meehan, a highly original choreographer and dancer whose evocative, plotless works on nature themes found a special place amid opposing trends in experimental dance after the 1960s, died on Nov. 23 in Manhattan. She was 85. Her husband and only immediate survivor, the painter and architect Tony Candido, said the cause was pneumonia. Ms. Meehan's early mentors were Anna Halprin and Erick Hawkins, two very different innovators and pioneers of American modern dance. Ms. Halprin, who is still a potent influence on younger choreographers, repeatedly broke down traditional definitions of dance. Ms. Meehan performed with her company in San Francisco before coming to New York, where she joined the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. A tall, striking dancer who combined sensuous grace with nuanced force, Ms. Meehan came to notice as a leading soloist in the Hawkins troupe from 1961 to 1970. She took naturally to Hawkins's new fluid dance idiom and shared his inspiration from Japanese theater and aesthetics, just as her love of the outdoors in a California childhood led her to share Ms. Halprin's early concern for the health of the planet. Ms. Meehan founded the Nancy Meehan Dance Company in 1970 and introduced her style with "Hudson River Seasons" in a dazzling premiere. Simple but startlingly inventive in its pared down vocabulary, the work, in four parts, suggested the seasons through imagery: The open space of the "Summer" section, for example, contrasted with the dancers twirling and scurrying in "Autumn." Over the years, Ms. Meehan formed a team of regular collaborators. Mr. Candido designed costumes, which could delight with calligraphic markings on leotards and also surprise: Strips of hemp, for example, when attached to costumes, flew into the air as the dancers whirled, adding shape to movement. The experimental composer Eleanor Hovda provided the commissioned scores and the live music. The lighting designer known as Blu added to the required atmosphere. Nancy Catherine Meehan was born on March 20, 1931, in San Francisco. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1952, she performed with the Ann Halprin Welland Lathrop Dance Company from 1953 to 1956 and also taught there, as she did later at the Erick Hawkins school, at numerous colleges and at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina. In 1960, shortly after moving to New York, she and two fellow Californians, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, rented a studio to improvise dances together. Two years later, Ms. Rainer and Ms. Forti became founding members of the influential avant garde Judson Dance Theater, which often used concepts by John Cage as springboards. Unlike those choreographers, who initially rejected dance technique, Ms. Meehan insisted that highly trained dancers execute her own nonballetic idiom with refined precision. "Almost always, there is a feeling of rightness to Ms. Meehan's ordering of the dance's expansive microcosm," Jennifer Dunning wrote in The New York Times in 2006. In Dance magazine in 2006, Karen Hildebrand singled out Ms. Meehan's originality, writing, "The music and movement were of one universe, the product of an odd, organic and unique artistic voice." Ms. Meehan remained a proud outlier. She defined her aesthetic in an interview with the dance historian Constance Kreemer in 2003: "Dare I say I am trying to make beautiful dance movement, beautiful moments, beautiful dance?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In one of the best scenes from the N.W.A biopic "Straight Outta Compton," Dr. Dre instructs Eazy E, struggling in the recording booth: "Say that expletive like you believe it, man!" Corey Hawkins, who played Dr. Dre, takes that piece of advice to heart in his current project, a Broadway revival of "Six Degrees of Separation." His character, Paul, is a suave swindler pretending to be Sidney Poitier's son so he can worm his way into genteel families. But no matter how outrageous the fibs, Mr. Hawkins makes him sound utterly sincere. "I guess I lean into the honesty and the innocence of Paul a little bit more," he said. "He truly believes these cons." Trip Cullman, who's directing the new production of John Guare's 1990 drama at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, concurred. "That to me is the great secret weapon that Corey brings to his portrayal," he said. "You do feel that Paul is telling the truth." And thanks to Mr. Hawkins's easygoing charm, Paul is able to hoodwink both the other characters and the audience. Since his breakout role in "Straight Outta Compton," Mr. Hawkins has added a new shine to his resume: He landed the lead on Fox's "24: Legacy," the network's reboot of its "24" franchise, and appeared as a geologist in "Kong: Skull Island." Eagle eyed fans would also know him from a recurring role as the bespectacled supply runner Heath on "The Walking Dead." Looking dapper in crisp denim, white sneakers and a black baseball cap on a recent spring morning, Mr. Hawkins, 28, exuded an upbeat forthrightness. While many actors' smiles stop at the mouth, his actually reached his almond shaped eyes. This is someone you would buy a bridge from, making his current character's seductive powers all the more credible you want to believe, too. Mr. Hawkins now has the kind of fame that earns him a front row seat at Paris Fashion Week he sounded simultaneously giddy and incredulous talking about the invite and it was earned via screens big and small. But "Six Degrees of Separation," in which he shares top billing with Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey, brings him back to his first love, theater. Growing up in Washington, Mr. Hawkins was shaped by the combined influence of his mother, a police officer, a storytelling grandmother and a great grandmother who preached in her own church. "There's something about a pastor getting up there and telling these stories, especially in the Baptist church because it's so fervid," Mr. Hawkins said. "You're just: 'Oh my God, Jesus did what? The disciples did what?' You see people fainting and catching the spirit. It's something I've always believed in, that collective energy. It's sort of what you're doing when you watch theater: You're allowing yourself to disappear into that, and submit to that, and have faith that this show is going to take you where it needs to take you." After high school, Mr. Hawkins attended California Institute of the Arts for a year before transferring to Juilliard. "I was told I would turn into this classically trained robot, but I wanted to add to my toolbox," he said. "I remember bringing a scene from 'Macbeth' to class, and Michael Kahn, who used to be the head of the drama division, ripped it to shreds. I set up lights in the staircase I was trying to put on a performance instead of doing the scene and he showed me the truth in playing the language and hearing the musicality." In 2010, Mr. Hawkins won the school's John Houseman Prize for excellence in classical acting, and three years later he made his Broadway debut as Tybalt in "Romeo and Juliet" not the worst practice for the N.W.A rhymes to come. Like Dr. Dre, with whom he spent a lot of time before and during the film shoot, Mr. Hawkins is a hard working perfectionist who's keenly aware of what he's up against. "As young black men, young black people in general in this country, I was always told at a very young age that you have to work 10 percent harder than everyone else," he said, then immediately corrected himself: "Not even 10 percent: 50 percent, 100 percent more than everyone else just to be seen as good enough, good as every other person. And that's something that I found to be very true." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
George Caleb Bingham's painting "The Verdict of the People" (1854 1855), which depicts the results of a small town Missouri election, is in many ways a celebration of democracy. That is why the St. Louis Art Museum made it available on loan as the centerpiece of Donald J. Trump's inauguration luncheon on Jan. 20. It is also why two St. Louis area women in the arts are fighting to reverse the museum's decision. In a petition on Change.org, the art historian Ivy Cooper and the artist Ilene Berman called on the museum to cancel the loan, which was initiated by the United States Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. "We object to the painting's use as an inaugural backdrop and an implicit endorsement of the Trump presidency and his expressed values of hatred, misogyny, racism and xenophobia," the petition states. "We reject the use of the painting to suggest that Trump's election was truly the 'verdict of the people,' when in fact the majority of votes by a margin of over three million were cast for Trump's opponent." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
If you're visiting Florence, Italy, you've got to see the world famous Uffizi Gallery. But why? Because that's what one does in Florence? Because you feel compelled to post a selfie in front of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus"? Those are obviously terrible reasons. We shouldn't go to places because they're world famous; we should go to fully appreciate the thing that made them world famous an unparalleled collection of Renaissance art, for example. But that requires a thoughtful, well planned visit, not just following the masses, snapping pictures and checking it off your bucket list. I spoke with those in charge of some of the world's great attractions to glean strategies for making the most of a visit, both substantive improvements and simple beat the crowds techniques. Because, no matter how great the view is from the crown of Lady Liberty, you don't want to wait in a long line to get there. The ultimate way to avoid crowds is to visit during the off season; in other words, not now. Many dismiss off season travel as unviable because of school schedules, but remember American Thanksgiving and spring breaks (if they don't fall over Easter week) don't mirror other countries' vacations. Some American habits can play to your advantage. "Americans love to eat early," said Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi Galleries. "Have an early lunch, and get to the Uffizi something like 1 p.m., when the vast majority of people head off to eat." Timed tickets can often be bought days in advance and are increasingly available at crowded attractions around the world. At the Uffizi, they cost 4 euros extra (boosting admission to 16.50 euros, about 18) and take care of waiting in line, if not the crowds. You can buy them at the official Uffizi website, uffizi.it, if you can find it. Unofficial sites that look official are rampant. They often look good and sometimes contain good information, but look out. "You can pay 30 or 40 on a fake website," Mr. Schmidt said. "And sometimes the tickets do not exist" that is, they're fakes. Even when they're just reselling real tickets, look out for markups. For example, uffizi.com, one of the unofficial sites, charges 24.99 euros (about 27.35), and it even marks up the audio guides. Between planning and traveling, a lot can change. Keep up to date, Jade McKellar, the director of visitor experiences at the Sydney Opera House, said in an email. "If you're looking for inspiration," she said, "follow us on social media and sign up for our newsletter." The Opera House's Facebook page, for example, recently posted information on the free two day Homeground festival in October, featuring indigenous musicians from around the world. In another development somewhat lower on the cultural scale, the Statue of Liberty's Instagram account recently noted a new wave of visitors to Ellis Island: Pokemon. Ms. McKellar noted that too many visitors "stop at the selfie." Even without planning, visitors can often buy tickets for events that run 363 days a year. But like many sites, a true visit means dedicating a full day, something a rushed traveler might be loath to do but should do. You may want to append to a tour of the Sydney Opera House a pretheater dinner at the locavore Australian restaurant Bennelong, and an evening performance. (Just be aware that reservations at Bennelong need to be made well ahead.) Another reason to set aside more time: Visitors skip the less famous but equally worthwhile, often beautifully complementary sites nearby. Susan Greaney, the senior properties historian at English Heritage, which oversees Stonehenge, recommended a trip to the nearby Wiltshire Museum and the Salisbury Museum, local history museums with Stonehenge relevant exhibitions, each less than a 30 minute drive away but apt to be missed by anyone on a day tour from London. Mark Thomas, the western district director of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation a fancy title that involves oversight of Niagara Falls State Park recommended the New York Power Authority's Niagara Power Vista, a free attraction that was recently overhauled and reopened, 10 minutes away from the park. Mr. Schmidt noted that the copy of Michelangelo's David on the Piazza della Signoria near the Uffizi was indistinguishable to nonexperts. Lines to see the real one at the Accademia Gallery can run hours if you don't buy tickets in advance. "If someone has just three days in Florence, do you want to waste three hours in line when you can see a very faithful copy?" he said. Sometimes, the skipped over attraction is even part of the same complex. Mr. Amato noted that this year Liberty Island would attract 4.4 million visitors, while the Ellis Island Museum of Immigration will attract just 2.4 million. That's preposterous, considering that the boat to Liberty Island also stops at Ellis Island, which costs nothing extra and (in my opinion, not his) is far more interesting. But again, it means killing a day. Reading up on the attraction can make a vast difference in how much you appreciate it. I slogged through "The Conquest of the Incas" by John Hemming before visiting Machu Picchu for the first time, and it made for a rich experience. But there are easier ways. Mr. Thomas recommended visitors watch Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 film noir picture "Niagara," set at and near the falls. And in the next six months, Mr. Schmidt's book about the Uffizi should come out. (Exercise some discretion for example, Ms. Greaney of English Heritage did not mention the Stonehenge scene from the 1984 mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap," and for good reason.) Some final recommendations: Be an active visitor, engaging guides, rangers or docents and exploring lesser known corners. For hard to reach monuments, consider a more adventurous alternative route to avoid crowds walking the steep hill to the Peak viewpoint in Hong Kong or hiking up the rain forest path to Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro instead of taking the crowded trams that lead to each. Even if you're not traveling with children, I recommend inventing a game before you go even adults run out of steam on a long day of sightseeing. My favorite, applicable to any museum with abstract art, is "Name the Picasso," in which you guess the name of a painting ("Death in the Jungle") and then compare it to its real name ("Nude in a Black Armchair.") Of course, you can also simply skip the world famous attraction. If you're sick of museums by the time you get to Florence, forgo the Uffizi and take advantage of other things Florence has to offer. Perhaps a gelato (or tripe sandwich) crawl is in order? Don't worry about what your friends will think. You can use Photoshop to show them you "saw" "The Birth of Venus." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
PARIS "Anything could happen" on the street, the photographer Bill Cunningham said in what would turn out to be one of the final videos he recorded before his death. It was one in which, with customary enthusiasm, he noted a "gale force explosion," in the vogue for tattered jeans. Observing that one gentleman he had photographed Kanye West, whom Bill didn't identify attended the 2016 Met Gala dressed in laboriously raggedy trousers and a bejeweled Balmain jacket, the seasoned octogenarian took this latest turning in the evolution of costume in stride. "It's just clothing," Bill said. "What's the big deal?" His was a wonderful perspective. By taking the long view, Bill maintained not just a journalist's necessary detachment but something rarer, an ability to experience with perennial wonder the passing parade. One thought of Bill a great deal during the past weeks he died Saturday after being hospitalized this month as a result of a stroke and the pleasure it would be to share with him afterward both laughter and a sense of pleasure afforded by the rich and varied and, not infrequently, wacko things designers sent onto the men's wear runways this season. Rendering many of the clothes in peekaboo shower curtain PVC, Ms. Kawakubo bundled the entire enterprise into one of the protest statements she has increasingly made part of her otherwise often gnomic brief. For once, Ms. Kawakubo's thoughts required little translation. In response to the information barrage so defining of contemporary culture, she referenced Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 parable of the emperor's new clothes. It was a child who, in innocence, pointed out what was clear to everyone in the throngs assembled to greet an emperor in his new raiment: his nakedness. Bill Cunningham was no childlike naif. Not only was he impossible to hoodwink, he stubbornly declined to be party to his own burgeoning myth. For him, heaps of random facts are not equivalent to knowledge. Work is the only verifiable truth. In this he had a lot in common with Ms. Kawakubo, an artist of similarly ornery stripe. But Bill was neither a grouch nor the ascetic people liked to imagine, fashion's own St. Teresa on her bed of logs. True, he slept for years on a cot in his studio, surrounded by file cabinets. Yet simultaneously he was living a life that, for someone by nature voyeuristic, was of the greatest indulgence. There is categorically no one in New York City who attended as many diverse parties as he did in a given night, often bicycling from one to another and sometimes back again. Once, at a party given at the Plaza Hotel to benefit the American Academy in Rome, Bill waited futile hours for the socialite Daphne Guinness to rise from her table in order to capture her walking in a pair of heelless cantilevered Nina Ricci shoes. Eventually, he gave up and rode home to have a sandwich. Then, determined to get his shot, he bicycled back again to the hotel at 11 p.m., by which time the call of nature had finally forced Ms. Guinness to stand up. Bill loved to laugh, loved night life, loved the group of creative New Yorkers through whom I first met him many decades ago. For those people the illustrator Antonio Lopez, a show of whose work is on view at El Museo del Barrio; and the assorted madcap beings they attracted like the Warhol superstar Donna Jordan, the model Pat Cleveland or any of the characters that populated the multiethnic fun house that was 1970s New York Bill was a boon companion, always up to follow the party wherever it went. One thought again of that Bill at the Kenzo show last Saturday morning, a fantasy of a New York night life largely improvised by gay people over the decades and now effectively kaput. "Night life is the soul of any city," Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, the impresarios behind Opening Ceremony and the Kenzo designers, said in their press notes. "The collection pays homage to the club lore that narrates our past and paves the way for tomorrow. Long live the venues and parties that will create and incubate the legends to come." Whether a label that was acquired by LVMH Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton can generate anything resembling the euphoric experience of a night at Flamingo, Paradise Garage, the Tenth Floor, the Sound Factory, Twilo, Boy Bar, the Pyramid Club, Click Drag, Jackie 60 and other clubs with names too raunchy to record here remains to be seen. Yet Bill would have been I certainly was persuaded by the sincerity of the effort: the dance trousers, the blue and lime tracksuits, the slightly cheesy ribbed knits, the trousers slung low enough to reveal printed boxers hiked bellybutton high, zip up boots, the Pop printed hoodies emblazoned "Brilliant," the shorts cut to embarrassing gym class lengths. (The performance artist John Sex rocked that look for a minute; Madonna soon "adapted" it from him.) Held in the long, waning light of a northern summer evening, the music for Riccardo Tisci's fine Givenchy show had a similar drum and bass vibe reminiscent of late nights at the disco. And you could almost read into his decision to add dresses to a men's wear show parallels to a specific club demographic: of the 65 looks, 13 (roughly 20 percent) were clothes from the women's haute couture. That is about the same proportion of women to men you might find on the floor of a typical gay dance club. Mr. Tisci called his men "happy warriors," and said the show was about power and money, as what is not anymore? Power here took the obvious form of military references on nylon sportswear with zippered panels at the hips and canted at kidney level; money was signified mostly through computer generated graphic camouflage pattered from dollar bills. The slicked down hair on the models brought to mind the street toughs of Mr. Tisci's southern Italian background, as did a casting that skewed in a traditionally masculine direction and well away from the northern climes and the representative pale ephebes favored now by many designers. Mirror discs on the clothes glinted from hems and peplums. Though these were allegedly references to couture techniques, they had more of the D.I.Y. look of the sparkly stuff favored by a druggie glow stick crowd. This has been an odd season for some of the more reliable talents, people like Junya Watanabe, whose sneering bad boy collection featuring models heavily inked and adorned with gnarly tufted theatrical beards that suggested someone had gone bonkers with some yak and a bottle of Ben Nye spirit gum was rife with references to mob henchmen, darkly humorous Eastern European movies and Russian prisoners. The result was a fairly banal commercial collection of biker jackets with quilted arms, tweed tailored coats, paisley and flash tattoo patterns, tropical prints. Another reliable reflex in fashion is to reference rebellion, sedition the smoke screen for one of the most conformist of cultural undertakings. Kris Van Assche erected a funfair for his Dior Homme show, roller coaster tracks illuminated with multicolored flashing lights. He used it as a backdrop for a collection of wide trousers and tidy suits that alluded to '80s Punk and New Wave, as though adding grommets and D rings, metallic staples or Frankenstein lacing to a garment automatically renders the wearer as cool as Arto Lindsay of DNA, say, or the '80s filmmaker Amos Poe, or James White, the lead singer of James White and the Blacks. And so it seemed particularly appropriate that Thom Browne's inspired and eccentric men's wear show, which ended the current fashion cycle, began with the designer asking the assembled to pause for a moment of silence in honor of the "incomparable Bill Cunningham," and then proceeded to show the magic that can be conjured using ordinary means. The shrewd Bill Cunningham who said of fashion, "It's just clothes," understood better than anyone that fashion is far more than that. One can imagine him sitting in the front row of Mr. Browne's show as models in white face and wearing outsized boiler suits paraded onto a set resembling a beach of black sand, centered on a palm tree that looked post apocalypse and to the ominous opening bars of John Williams's score from "Jaws" shimmied out of those suits, revealing themselves to be wearing, say, a trompe l'oeil all in one wet suit with a red nylon slicker high armhole Chesterfield overcoat, a white dyed mohair jacket and white pin cord low rise skinny trousers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Patricia Emerald is one of the largest uncut emeralds in the world, weighing 632 carats. Many of the qualities that make rubies, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds so exceptional their hardness, brilliant coloring and rarity are also key to their scientific value.Credit...M. Shanley/American Museum of Natural History The Patricia Emerald is one of the largest uncut emeralds in the world, weighing 632 carats. Many of the qualities that make rubies, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds so exceptional their hardness, brilliant coloring and rarity are also key to their scientific value. Around 1920, Justo Daza, an experienced mine worker, and Fritz Klein, a mining engineer, were scrambling over the steep mountainside terraces of Chivor, a legendary emerald site in northeast Colombia. They were breaking rocks apart with long iron poles and explosives packed into drill holes. They were hunting for new emerald veins and not finding any. Let's move on, Mr. Klein said. This area is dead. No, no, no, Mr. Daza insisted. There's emerald here, I know it. Mr. Klein shrugged. O.K., one more shot but that's it. They upped the dose of explosives and blasted open a gaping hole that revealed promising glints of a mineral vein. Mr. Klein thrust his arm into the hole and began rummaging around. He fished out bits of quartz, feldspar and apatite a phosphate mineral like that found in bones and teeth. The prospectors had unearthed what would come to be called the Patricia Emerald: a dazzling 12 sided crystal roughly the size of a soup can, with a weight of 632 carats more than a quarter of a pound and a verdant color so pure and vivid you'd swear the stone was photosynthesizing. Mr. Klein sold the find for tens of thousands of dollars, while Mr. Daza, predictably enough, "was given ten dollars and a mule," said Terri Ottaway, museum curator at the Gemological Institute of America. Yet the public arguably got the best deal of all: the stone was later donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Today, the Patricia remains one of the largest uncut emeralds in the world, and will be a featured star when the overhaul of the museum's gem and mineral halls is finished in 2019. In its raw, columnar beauty, the Patricia encapsulates an often overlooked feature of gemstones, especially the ones we deem "precious" diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. We may covet the stones for personal adornment and status flashing; we may imbue them with romance, exoticism, the titillation of the Hollywood jewel heist. But their real power lies in what they reveal about the dynamo that forged them: Planet Earth. For scientists, a gemstone is a message in a bottle. Except the message is the bottle, a glittering clue to the extreme physical, chemical and tectonic forces at work deep underground. Moreover, many of the qualities that helped loft the Big Four to prominence in the first place their exceptional hardness, the depth and brilliance of their coloring, their rarity are also key to the jewels' scientific value. Precious gems are born of strife, of shotgun marriages between hostile chemical elements, and they're tough enough to survive cataclysms that obliterate everything around them. "Earth is an incredible, giant chemical laboratory, and it's a dirty place to grow crystals," said Jeffrey Post, curator of the Smithsonian's National Gem and Mineral Collection. But those impurities grant gems their color and character "and give us vital information about the crystal structures themselves." The rules of gem science are not cast in stone. Researchers lately have been astonished to discover that some of the world's largest and most valuable diamonds, which can sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, originated 250 miles or more below the surface, twice the depths previously estimated for Earth's diamond nurseries. Some diamonds turn out to be surprisingly youthful, a billion years old rather than the average diamond's two billion to three billion years of age. Other researchers have linked ruby creation to collisions between continental landmasses and propose that the red jewels be called "plate tectonic gemstones." A team at the University of British Columbia analyzed newly discovered sapphire deposits in Canada's Nunavut territory and concluded the stones there were generated by a novel three part geochemical "recipe" unlike any described for sapphire formation elsewhere in the world. Dr. Harlow suggested that precious gems gained their reputation in part by their association with gold. As insoluble stones, the gems ended up concentrated at the bottom of stream beds, often in the vicinity of similarly insoluble gold. Long prized for its ductility, beauty and resistance to oxidation, gold was considered the property of rulers and kings, so why not the glittering stones found beside it? The word diamond stems from the Greek terms for "indestructible" and "that which cannot be tamed," Dr. Harlow said, "and those attributed metaphysical properties made the ruler seem even more important." Diamonds are not indestructible, but they are the hardest substances known, given the top score of 10 on the Mohs scale of hardness that is, resistance to scratching. Behind a diamond's untameability is its three dimensional structure, a repeating crystalline lattice of carbon atoms, each one strongly bonded to four neighbors atop, below and to either side. Persuading large numbers of carbon atoms to lock limbs in all directions requires Stygian whips of high heat and pressure, as until recently could only be found underground. In theory, the earth's mantle, which is thought to hold about 90 percent of the planet's carbon supply, is practically glittering with diamonds at various stages of formation. Getting those jewels to the surface in bling worthy condition is another matter. Diamonds must be shot up from below quickly say, through a volcanic eruption or they'll end up as so much coal in your stocking. Researchers have discovered diamonds that had blundered crustward slowly enough for their carbon bonds to expand, leaving a stone with the shape of a diamond but the consistency of graphite. Gareth Davies, a professor of geology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and his colleagues have recapitulated the reversion process in the laboratory. "Yes, we get diamonds and turn them to graphite for research," he said. "And my wife wonders why I'm such an idiot." Researchers can also fabricate diamonds in the laboratory, although the results are more often destined for industry than Tiffany. Nor can scientists create anything remotely as celestial as the Hope Diamond, the world's largest deep blue diamond, with a back story to match. The diamond was discovered in India, sold to King Louis XIV of France in 1668, stolen during the French Revolution, reappeared 50 years later in the collection of the Dutch banker Henry Philip Hope hence its name sold by Hope's bankrupted heir and then passed from hand to sometimes unfortunate hand, picking up an aura en route of being "cursed." After the jeweler Harry Winston donated the diamond to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958, blithely sending the massive jewel from New York to Washington through the mail, the diamond's fame exploded. When Jackie Kennedy, then the First Lady, arranged a one month loan of the diamond to the Louvre in Paris, Washington's National Gallery of Art got Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" in return. Researchers have since plied the 45 carat diamond with every noninvasive tool in their arsenal, seeking to understand the precise distribution of boron atoms that lend the Hope its steely blue tint and why the diamond will glow, or phosphoresce, a spectral shade of blood orange when exposed to ultraviolet light. Dr. Post suspects the phosphorescence is the result of interactions between boron and nitrogen impurities in the diamond's near flawless carbon frame. Coloration mechanics figure more prominently still in the genesis of colored gemstones. After all, sapphires and rubies are built of the same basic mineral, corundum, a crystallized collaboration of aluminum and oxygen that would be transparent and colorless if not for some artful chemical doping. With a Mohs hardness score just a point shy of diamond's, corundum becomes a red ruby through the timely addition of chromium atoms. Recent research suggests chromium is shoved up to the crust from Earth's mantle when continental landmasses bang together. "It's called intervalence charge transfer," said Dr. Harlow. "You almost can't measure the amount of iron and titanium, but the small effect produces a dramatic color." Emerald is the softest of the precious stones, with a Mohs score between 7 and 8, and at its finest it's a piece of fossilized swamp. Its mineral base, beryl, is mostly aluminum and silicon, with a critical infusion of beryllium, a light, rare and extremely toxic element. "If you're thinking of making your own emeralds, don't," said Dr. Ottaway. Emeralds form during mountain building, as shale and limestone rocks are uplifted and compressed. "It's a giant squeegee effect, moving hot solutions around," Dr. Ottaway explained. Salt dissolves in the hot sludge, turning it to brine, and the brine gets trapped in pockets that then act like wetlands, absorbing organic matter and toxic metals, including beryllium, which is then incorporated into growing crystals of aluminum silicate. The coloring agents are trace amounts of vanadium and chromium, which may turn a ruby red but in the context of beryl's structure reflect green. For emeralds born in the mountains of Colombia, the green is chromatically, spectacularly clean. Pyrite deposits soak up any iron in the area that might otherwise adulterate the crystal and muddy beryl's refractive powers. "That's why Colombian emeralds are so fabulous," Dr. Ottaway said. "You can become so absorbed looking at one of these incredible stones." Forget about the mule or the money, or three wise guys with myrrh: This piece of evergreen is pure holiday cheer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
"I feel like I finally found my home," Joseph Boudin said of his new studio in East Harlem. "This place is a palace compared to the last place." In New York, almost every living situation involves a trade off of some kind. As Joseph Boudin discovered during his first few years in the city, figuring out how to balance the pros and cons of various locations, rents, roommates and apartments is a difficult art to master. Since moving from Alabama four years ago, Mr. Boudin, 25, has lived in five apartments, each a brief attempt to find a long term home. After a year in Manhattan, he moved to Staten Island to save on rent, although he was working in Midtown East. When he discovered the commute was miserable, he overcorrected by moving into a Hell's Kitchen room share where his rent, at 1,875, rivaled that of a studio apartment. And he still had to travel across town to work. Then he found a 1,200 a month bedroom in an Upper East Side walk up that turned out to be his worst calculation of all. Going in, he knew the accommodations wouldn't be deluxe. The two bedroom apartment was small, shabby and on the sixth floor. "When my best friend moved me in, she said, 'Joseph, are you sure you want to live here?'" Mr. Boudin recalled. "There was a hole around the bathroom pipe that was the size of a dinner plate." What he didn't know was that his roommate's brother would go from temporarily sleeping on the living room futon to permanently living there. Or that his roommate would frequently rent his own room through Airbnb to make money, during which time he would also sleep in the living room. Making the cramped conditions even more unpleasant, Mr. Boudin also had to contend with the brothers' Labrador retriever. Contrary to the breed's reputation, it was anything but friendly. "The dog was huge and vicious it really didn't like me," Mr. Boudin said. "I'd come home and the dog would be barking. And I couldn't ever be in the living room because there was always a dog or a person in there." Everyone, including the brothers, agreed that the setup was less than ideal. They were on good enough terms, however, to decide that finding a larger apartment together was the answer. The three were moving forward with plans to rent a three bedroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when Mr. Boudin reconsidered. "All the red flags were up: First of all, it was too small. Second, we'd still have the dog and the brother with us. The brother also wasn't employed, so we would have had to pay his fee. And then there was the L train shutting down," said Mr. Boudin, an account executive for a furniture company in Midtown. Earlier in the search, Mr. Boudin and his roommate had found a place through Rezi, a company that leases apartments wholesale from landlords and rents them to tenants at market rate. There is no broker's fee, and once tenants are approved they can rent any Rezi apartment their income qualifies them for in Mr. Boudin's case, up to 2,300 a month. But the roommate hadn't met Rezi's qualifications, so they looked elsewhere. Now, browsing the company's listings, Mr. Boudin found several East Harlem studios for under 2,000 a month. If he could afford to live alone in Manhattan, he thought, he wasn't going to live with roommates in Brooklyn. Occupation: Account executive at Walters, a furniture company. He immediately liked the apartment's location: "There's a park, a church and a school nearby those all seemed like good signs to me. There's also a Target, Costco, Marshalls and Aldi. And one of the No. 1 restaurants in the city is right down the street from me, Rao's, although I've never been there. I asked how long it takes to get a reservation, and they said two years." Still, it's fun to live near Rao's: "You'll walk down the street at 5 or 6 p.m. and see Maseratis, limos coming down the street." Except for the smaller than average refrigerator, Mr. Boudin loves the apartment's renovation: "All the fixtures are so nice, there's a washer dryer, and I think the layout is great." Friends in the neighborhood: Mr. Boudin convinced a friend from Alabama to take an apartment a short walk away also a Rezi listing and now they frequently cook for one another. He has also started volunteering at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue and 90th Street. In September, he signed a lease for a newly renovated, first floor apartment on 114th Street, for 1,725 a month. "I feel like I finally found my home. This place is a palace compared to the last place," Mr. Boudin said, marveling that he had gone from a bathroom with broken tiles and a gaping hole in the floor to one with black marble and a waterfall shower head. Although his new living situation is more expensive than the previous one, it is still less than he was paying for the Hell's Kitchen apartment. And his commute, on the Second Avenue bus, takes about 25 minutes. He also loves living on the first floor. "The building is a walk up, but I don't have to walk up, so it's like living in a luxury building," he said. And despite facing the street, he added, the noisiest thing in the apartment is usually the steam pipe. "One time people were talking outside it was late so I opened the curtains and said, 'Boo! Can you please be quiet? I'm trying to sleep,'" Mr. Boudin said. "They said, 'Oh, sorry,' and left." Even the difficulty of making it to an Equinox gym, where he had a membership, turned out to be a blessing in disguise: He joined a nearby Planet Fitness for 10 a month, a fraction of what he had been paying. Living alone has also meant being able to his use his Ralph Lauren china and Tiffany crystalware packed away after several mishaps at the last apartment on a daily basis. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
There was no red carpet at the Independent Handbag Designer Awards, held at the SVA Theater in Manhattan in June, but if there had been, nobody would have recognized any of the labels. Forty five eager finalists from around the world were there, drinking room temperature rose and mingling with the buyers, merchandisers and journalists who might anoint them the next Rebecca Minkoff. Emily Blumenthal, a former designer who started the awards, flitted through the crowd in a black and gold cocktail number, which she was calling "ice skater chic." The garment was composed of two vintage dresses, which she had deconstructed and reassembled for the occasion. "I 'Pretty in Pink' ed it," she said, referring to the John Hughes movie in which Molly Ringwald, short of money, makes her own prom dress. That Ms. Blumenthal, 45, is still making her own clothes from thrift store finds epitomizes her scrappy, entrepreneurial ethos. She began making and selling bags with no design training. "I bootstrapped my line," she said. "This is a hard journey and a lonely one." Ms. Blumenthal was much inspired by Kate Spade, the designer who recently died and who also lacked formal training. "She did her first samples out of construction paper, so that's what I did," Ms. Blumenthal said. In 2000, while attending the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University, she created Yasmena, a beaded evening bag with a wrist strap and loop for the middle finger, intended to let one carry with unobtrusive ease. "I was 26 and thought I was splitting the atom," she said. She convinced a handful of professors to make her company a case study for their classes. "It basically built my business," she said. In 2001, after spotting Rebecca Weinberg, a costume designer for "Sex and the City," at a party, Ms. Blumenthal began waving her Yasmena around, trying to catch attention. Four months later, Ms. Blumenthal received a call: Yasmena samples were wanted on set. She was working her first trade show at the time and had her mother swoop up almost everything on display and cart it over to Silvercup Studios in Queens. Of course, there was no guarantee that the bag would make it on air. "I watched every episode," Ms. Blumenthal said. "And then I saw it for a millisecond and it was gone. All I needed was that freeze frame." What Sarah Jessica Parker is holding in Season 4, Episode 15 of "Sex and the City" is more blur than bag, but it didn't matter. Ms. Blumenthal sent the shot to every media outlet she could think of. When the show was syndicated to basic cable, she would wait for the episode to reair and then send a new round of emails. She secured a patent for her finger loop and sold the license for Yasmena to a small leather goods manufacturer who could make a cheaper version, the Yazzy Bag. "I knocked off my own bag," Ms. Blumenthal said. "I needed to do it before somebody else did." But knockoffs were the least of her problems. "I had a lot of retail anxiety," she said. "In every store, I'd be looking around: 'Did they have my bag? Did they not have my bag? Who's the buyer? Who's the floor manager?'" Exhausted, Ms. Blumenthal decided to give up her company for a role as educator and mentor in the industry she loves. "I guess the old adage holds true," she said. "'For those who can't do, teach.'" Along with overseeing the awards, she teaches entrepreneurship at the Fashion Institute of Technology and has written a book, "Handbag Design 101: Everything You Need to Know About Designing, Making, and Marketing Handbags." "Emily is like the mother hen, she nurtures careers," said Lauren Parker, editor in chief of Accessories magazine, which sponsored the Audience Fan Favorite award at I.H.D.A. It was won by Joy Egbejimba Nuciano of Nigeria for a marigold colored box bag with a turn lock, called the Aurene. "People think you ship that first order and you're golden," Ms. Wilson said. "But it requires more to sustain a business." The awards get about 1,500 applicants each year from 200 design schools around the world. About 20 of these schools include the awards application in their curriculum, and 10 make it mandatory. This year, 11 finalists came from the Savannah College of Art and Design alone. Aimee Kestenberg, a designer who sponsored one of the award categories this year, was majoring in accessory design at Parsons when she applied to I.H.D.A. in 2010. She entered a category sponsored by Swarovski, in which the challenge was to submit the sketch of a crystal embellished bag. Her intricate design resembled an octopus. "I didn't think I'd make the cut," Ms. Kestenberg said. Then she received an email; she had three weeks to make the bag. "And I thought, 'you can't make this bag,'" Ms. Kestenberg said. She spent the next 21 days applying 3,000 Swarovski crystals by hand. She won, and the bag was showcased on the global page of Swarovski.com. "Buyers are used to coming to see globally renowned brands," Ms. Kestenberg said. "But the buyers who I cold called for my first collection were actually interested." By the end of 2018, Ms. Kestenberg estimates, her company will have 60 million in sales. Winning meant a booth at a major accessories show with full marketing and promotion, financial mentorship and a brand consultancy with the Accessory Think Tank. Ms. Yucelen had never been to the United States before. "Coming to New York and taking the attention of someone like Emily it's happening," she said. "It's real" This year, the awards' 12th, wasn't a typical milestone, but Ms. Blumenthal decided to make it one. "I'm calling it the bag mitzvah," she said. Next on the agenda: a television show and two children's books about entrepreneurship, one of which is a picture book about a little girl who starts her own handbag line. "How do you encourage kids to start a business without doing it for them?" said Ms. Blumenthal, who has three children. Well, in her home, you make "Shark Tank" household viewing. And you start them young. Her 10 year old daughter, Zoey, has worked at the awards since she was 8, and each year she sends her mother an invoice for services rendered. "How much do you charge an hour?" Ms. Blumenthal asked, as Zoey shadowed her during the awards cocktail hour. "You gave yourself a raise?" Ms. Blumenthal said, and then beamed. "I guess I'm setting an example," she said, adding, "It's important for them to see their mother at work." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The politicization of everything corrodes social and constitutional life. That is especially so when the locus of politics is loyalty or opposition to whomever is president. The coronavirus pandemic may mark the first time it started killing people. Especially early on, people's views of the gravity of the situation aligned with party identification. Whether a malaria drug is an effective treatment for the virus, a purely medical question, has become a partisan issue. And there is little doubt that the death toll for the delayed American response to the coronavirus influenced by President Trump's desire to minimize its severity and maximize his poll numbers will run well into the tens of thousands and possibly beyond. The problem is less partisanship than politics, which now distorts all our judgments, even on matters that are not political. Long before this pandemic hit, politics was overtaking the sectors of civil society that used to buffer the individual from the state. The particular challenge today is the convergence of that trend with the lengthening shadow the presidency casts over the political realm, especially given the cult of personality that surrounds Mr. Trump even more than his recent predecessors. Outsized antipathy or allegiance to Mr. Trump is now the defining feature of American political life. It infuses campaigns from City Council to governor to Congress. This has both corrupted the constitutional system and distorted the public's response to the coronavirus. The Madisonian system, about which we seem to learn more during crises than in civics classes, assumes that majorities and minorities will shift from issue to issue, so that a winner is chastened, and a loser comforted, by the knowledge that their roles might be reversed during the next controversy. For James Madison, this was the key reason it was irrational for voters to exploit momentary advantages to violate liberties: The tables might turn on them quickly. When all of politics is seen through one person, those realignments harden into the uniform and often unchanging views of the president. Presidential politics bulldozes the subtleties and nuances that should define serious politics. The president's perceived advantage or disadvantage defines every coalition and controversy. At the same time, the proper constitutional distance between the president and the public is erased. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 71 that a president might have to protect the public against itself: When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed, to be the guardians of those interests; to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. This requires a distance that the accelerating personal relationship between presidents and voters does not allow. As George F. Will has emphasized, Franklin Roosevelt began his fireside chats by addressing his listeners as "friends," suggesting that there was a personal relationship between presidents and their constituents. Yet presidents are not friends. As Mr. Will notes, their job is to lead the executive branch of government. We expect different qualities from personal friends and public leaders. Conflating those roles makes it more difficult for leaders to do the job we assign them with the distance and judgment it requires. The coronavirus crisis has taken this personal presidency to an insidious new level. Recently, the Trump administration took two steps that historians may register as landmarks of the personalized presidency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mailed households a postcard blaring in all capital letters: "President Trump's Coronavirus Guidelines for America." And Mr. Trump reportedly indicated his preference that relief checks from Congress's 2 trillion stimulus plan bear his personal signature. Through measures like these, the president emerges not only as our friend, which was problematic enough, but also as our personal caretaker. We are now to see public relief as beneficence flowing from one man. The hijacking of the C.D.C. to serve the obvious electoral interests of a president seeking a second term is dangerous not only constitutionally but also to public health. There is always a delicate balance between politicians deferring to experts and making their own judgments. Unsupervised experts can display too much certainty and too little ability to balance the myriad competing ends involved in politics. But plastering the president's name all over the C.D.C. postcard was not about supervising medical experts. It was a hostile takeover of their expertise to serve electoral ends. Given the intensity of feelings about Mr. Trump, how many people threw the postcard away on the assumption that it was campaign propaganda? Worse, how many people waited for Mr. Trump's guiding hand before taking precautions that medical experts had been recommending for weeks? Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, apparently fell into the latter category. A Trump acolyte, he did little to slow the coronavirus outbreak in his state until suddenly switching course not on the basis of medical evidence but rather on what he called an evolution in the president's "demeanor." Many of Mr. Trump's most ardent supporters still see this pandemic not only through his eyes but also through his electoral advantage. Right wing pundits and conspiracy sites are attacking Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases because he has not parroted Mr. Trump. Dr. Fauci's loyalty has even been judged by insufficiently adulatory facial gestures. Jerry Falwell Jr., a fervent Trump loyalist who minimized the pandemic from the beginning as an overhyped media attempt to bring down the president (while always leaving himself a little wiggle room just in case), reopened Liberty University even after widespread closures of similar institutions in Virginia. Several students soon reported symptoms associated with the coronavirus. There is a perilous irony lurking beneath this. Mr. Trump's base is strongest in areas where the social fabric has been decimated by economic dislocation, addiction and other ills. Declaring an end to "American carnage" in his inaugural address, Mr. Trump promised to rebuild these communities. But what makes social ties vibrant is their genuinely personal and independent character, not the hollowness of purported friendships with public figures. The conquest of these social ties by politics erodes rather than restores them. Mr. Trump signer of checks, provider of health tips, filter for medical reality is offering a diluted and delusive aura of a personal relationship with him as a substitute for the true relationships that constitute communities. What is disturbing is the extent to which the public has taken on this perspective, whether through the lens of support or of opposition. The president has always made outlandish claims. But for his supporters, these abstractions have often been rescued by a patina of plausibility. Now, we have entered a bizarre space in which Mr. Trump makes concrete claims refuted by objective reality that people can see with their own eyes. We are supposed to wear masks and gloves: They are difficult to find on store shelves. He has claimed that everyone who wants a coronavirus test can get one, a falsehood disprovable in most circumstances by asking for one at a local clinic. He hoped the virus would "miraculously" vanish with warmer weather. It has not. Based on Mr. Trump's claim that at least 100,000 Americans could die from the virus, most people will know someone who has battled or succumbed to it. Will it still be a hoax then? It is unsurprising that this president, whose narcissism is the stuff of Greek myth, is interpreting all these events through himself. For the sake of the Constitution, the social fabric and, now, people's lives, that does not compel the rest of us to do so. Nor does it compel us to think about this problem only in terms of one president. Democrats, too, have had their infatuations, and many now have their reflexive enmities. It is plausible that had Mr. Trump taken aggressive measures against the pandemic from the beginning, there would have been plenty of Democrats who would have instinctively opposed them simply because of their source. Constitutions that endure pay attention to institutions, not individuals. There will be other presidents and other crises. The personalized presidency is accelerating under Mr. Trump. It is unlikely that it has reached its peak. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Jimmy Kimmel had Arie Luyendyk Jr. and his fiancee, Lauren Burnham, as guests on Tuesday. Luyendyk shocked viewers of "The Bachelor" when he proposed to Burnham in the season finale. 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. Jimmy Kimmel struck back at President Trump during his monologue on Tuesday night after Trump ribbed the Academy Awards show for its low ratings. Kimmel, who hosted the Oscars, initially responded on Twitter, saying that Trump had the lowest approval rating of any president in history. During his monologue, Kimmel said, "Trump always has a problem with the Academy Awards, which is surprising because I really think he would love the best picture winner, 'The Shape of Water.' The movie, if you haven't seen it, it's about a monster who has sex with a woman who can't talk about it. Basically, it's like his life story. Right?" Awkward! And yet, strangely riveting. Arie Luyendyk Jr., a villain in pop culture for his actions in the finale of "The Bachelor," joined Kimmel as a guest along with his fiancee, Lauren Burnham. He had proposed to her after backing out of his engagement to another contestant, Becca Kufrin. The couple said they had yet to dine out. "You haven't been to a restaurant together?" Kimmel said. "Oh, you should definitely get married right away." And Now for Something Completely Different (and Terrifying) ... Over at "The Daily Show," the correspondent Desi Lydic explored the world of robots. More specifically, the spicy world of sex robots. "It is good to be alive and to stay that way because we just found out that North Korea is willing to talk to the U.S. about giving up their nuclear weapons. And not the usual way they talk about giving up their nuclear weapons: by dropping them on Seattle." STEPHEN COLBERT "Mr. President, please. We can't lose any more allies. At this point, it's Israel, the U.K., and whatever country your wives are from." STEPHEN COLBERT "Kellyanne Conway has been accused of violating federal ethics laws during TV appearances in 2017. If found guilty she could be forced to leave her job, or even worse, stay." JIMMY FALLON "In an interview, President Trump claimed there is no chaos at the White House. What he said. Yeah. Just then, a pair of chimpanzees crashed through the Oval Office on a stolen snowmobile." CONAN O'BRIEN "In Minnesota, a 14 year old boy announced plans to one day become America's first Muslim president. Yeah. After hearing this, President Obama winked and said, 'You mean second.'" CONAN O'BRIEN "Trump said there's still people in the White House he'd like to replace. Yeah, we'd all like to replace someone in the White House." JAMES CORDEN | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
To view the hustle and bustle of pedestrian traffic as a kind of dance is a poetic way of looking at city life. It is also a choreographic cliche, and Jane Comfort and Company's "You Are Here" doesn't transcend it. The work, which had its New York premiere on Thursday as part of the American Dance Institute's season at the Kitchen, is skillfully made. Ms. Comfort can begin with a single commuter following a purposeful path; add six others, one by one; fold in swerves and collisions; and build up a composition of complexity. But that opening sequence, like much that follows in a loose, day in the life structure, has the feel of a familiar formula. Ms. Comfort divides and recombines her dancers with finesse, but nothing in the work's pacing gives it life, neither its patient accumulations nor its sudden accelerations. In light, comic bits, the performers take turns going down the line, as in a classroom exercise. Little seems freshly observed. And the received ideas that are presented come through rose colored lenses, soft focused and low key. The dancers occasionally push and shove, and at one point take on the role of police officers to thrust someone spread eagle against the back wall, but there's no convincing aggression, violence or malice not even everyday irascibility. This is New York? Ms. Comfort's vision of urban living is entirely too comfortable. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
SEATTLE Amazon customers will soon be able to watch live football games as part of the retailer's growing online video service. The National Football League has reached an agreement with Amazon to allow Amazon Prime customers to stream 10 "Thursday Night Football" games in the coming season, N.F.L. and Amazon representatives said. Prime customers spend 99 a year for a membership that includes free shipping and a video service with a library of movies and TV shows. Amazon agreed to pay about 50 million for the streaming rights to the N.F.L. games, according to a person briefed on the deal who asked for anonymity because the price was confidential. The amount was about five times the roughly 10 million Twitter agreed to pay the N.F.L. last year for streaming rights to "Thursday Night Football," this person said. The agreement represents another step in the delicate dance between tech and entertainment companies as more viewers shift their viewing habits to the internet and digital devices. Amazon and Netflix are pouring money into their video services, both licensing content and producing original programming. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The palace in Kota Yamazaki's imagination is neither made of pink plastic nor is it where princesses sneak off to dance the night away. It is stark, sealed off and vaguely forbidding. Mr. Yamazaki, a Butoh trained choreographer, titles "OQ," performed Friday at Japan Society, after the phonetic sound of the Japanese word for "palace" and draws inspiration from utakai, or poetry readings by Japanese aristocrats, and renga, collaboratively composed linked poems. With his company Fluid hug hug, Mr. Yamazaki relishes contradictions. To him, a person is fluid like water; his choreographic approach is to blur the lines between training and approach. His background is telling: After studying fashion design in Tokyo, he discovered Butoh, started his own successful dance company in Japan and then disbanded it while working in Senegal with the choreographer Germaine Acogny. His stellar cast is just as diverse: The sultry Lauren Cox started out in competitive rhythmic gymnastics and has danced for Alicia Keys. Leah Morrison, lean and sensitive, was a member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and the doll like Mina Nishimura, with training in Butoh and African dance, is both featherweight and potent. Ryoji Sasamoto moves like yards of seamless silk, and then there is Silas Riener, the tenacious, daring former member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. At several points during "OQ," he seems to be the prince of Mr. Yamazaki's castle. Yet while their singular qualities are apparent throughout "OQ," they're not enough to keep this stringent production flowing. Split into two parts, which Mr. Yamazaki refers to as kyo (imaginary) and jitsu (real) though, like Rubin's vase, the sections could fit in either category "OQ" begins exactingly, as the dancers, standing apart, make subtle shifts with their arms, their shoulders, their heels. An object reminiscent of a hang glider, designed by the architect collective SO IL, dangles from the ceiling. Along with costumes, Masahiro Sugaya's score changes in each half, from a collection of ordinary sounds to spare piano. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Contrarians on Stress: It Can Be Good for You MANY workers now feel as if they're doing the job of three people. They are on call 24 hours a day. They rush their children from tests to tournaments to tutoring. The stress is draining, both mentally and physically. At least that is the standard story about stress. It turns out, though, that many of the common beliefs about stress don't necessarily give the complete picture. MISCONCEPTION NO. 1 Stress is usually caused by having too much work. In essence, boredom is stressful. "We tend to think of stress in the original engineering way, that too much pressure or too much weight on a bridge causes it to collapse," said Paul E. Spector, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida. "It's more complicated than that." Professor Spector and others say too little to do or underload, as he calls it can cause many of the physical discomforts we associate with being overloaded, like muscle tension, stomachaches and headaches. A study published this year in the journal Experimental Brain Research found that measurements of people's heart rates, hormonal levels and other factors while watching a boring movie men hanging laundry showed greater signs of stress than those watching a sad movie. "We tend to think of boredom as someone lazy, as a couch potato," said James Danckert, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and a co author of the paper. "It's actually when someone is motivated to engage with their environment and all attempts to do so fail. It's aggressively dissatisfying." It's not just the amount of work, Professor Spector said, also but the type. The professor recalled that when he was younger, he worked in a contact lens factory, where the work was constant but tedious. He lasted only two months. "You can be very busy and a have a lot to do and still be bored," he said. The job whether a white collar managerial position or blue collar assembly line role also needs to be stimulating. In a 2011 paper based on the doctoral dissertation of his student Kari Bruursema, Professor Spector and his co authors found that the stress of boredom can lead to counterproductive work behavior, like calling in sick, taking long breaks, spending time on the Internet for nonwork related reasons, gossiping about colleagues, playing practical jokes or even stealing. While most workers engage in some of these activities at times, the bored employee does it far more frequently, he said. Professor Spector noted, though, that what might be dull to one person might suit another just fine. One of his colleagues at the contact lens factory, he said, was perfectly content. "It drove me crazy, but he was very happy working eight hours a day at the same thing," Professor Spector said. "And he did it well." MISCONCEPTION NO. 2 Stress is always bad. The classic idea of stress too much to do, too challenging a task is common. But even that kind of stress should be rethought. The trouble, said Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist, is that stress is seen "as inherently toxic, and that can motivate people to avoid it rather than engage with life." Research has shown that if people learn to view stress with a different mind set as helpful rather than disabling then they can learn to better handle its effects. Alia J. Crum, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and her colleagues, performed an experiment with 350 employees of a company that was laying off 10 percent of its work force. One third of the employees watched three videos that emphasized the positive aspects of stress. The videos focused on how hormones released under stress help the body cope, sharpen cognitive functioning and speed up the brain. As an example, one video shows basketball superstar LeBron James sinking a free throw under pressure. The videos also talk about how even the most traumatic stress can help people grow by developing mental toughness, new perspectives and greater connections with others, "not in spite of but because of the stress," Professor Crum said. Negative feedback, for example, from a boss can offer an opportunity to learn. Being fired from a job can force individuals to re examine their priorities. Another third of the employees watched videos that demonstrated the downside of stress: depression, anxiety and people crumbling under pressure. In this instance, a video featured LeBron James missing a free throw. The last third of the employees didn't see any videos. All the symptoms mentioned in the videos are possible, she said. But most people, she notes, are familiar only with the negative effects of stress and that can become self fulfilling. In Professor Crum's experiment, workers who were shown the first set of videos, about the positive aspects of stress, demonstrated better work performance under pressure. "This doesn't mean we need to seek out more stress or simply accept the stressors that we face," she said. But neither should we assume that the effects are always harmful. "The true nature of stress is not so simple," Professor Crum said. Stress or at least reshaping the perception of it may actually keep us healthier. Studies have shown that people who believe stress is having an adverse effect on their health suffer more serious health problems. Research published in The European Heart Journal last year, using data from a 29 year health study of thousands of London based civil servants, found that those who believed stress affected their health "a lot or extremely" had 50 percent greater risk of dying from a heart attack even after adjusting for biological, behavioral and psychological risk factors. Further casting doubt, some of the initial research that helped provide a basis for those common held beliefs about stress was largely funded by tobacco companies. For the last decade, Mark Petticrew, director of public health research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and his colleagues have been analyzing tobacco industry documents archived online in the late 1990s as part of a legal settlement with the companies. Professor Petticrew wanted to look at the tobacco industry's efforts to "undermine the scientific evidence on smoking and health," as he wrote in a 2011 paper. What he came across surprised him. The tobacco industry financed a great deal of research of Hans Selye, an endocrinologist who laid the foundation for much of the modern day thinking about the physical and mental effects of stress, a connection detailed on National Public Radio. Dr. Selye's research, for which he was nominated repeatedly for a Nobel Prize, found that stress could lead to poor health, particularly lung cancer and heart disease. The tobacco companies used his findings to say "it was stress of modern living, not the 70 carcinogens in tobacco, that cause these diseases," according to Professor Petticrew. While some of Dr. Selye's research is valid, it is "impossible and misleading" to talk about it without acknowledging his close working relationship with the tobacco companies, notes Professor Petticrew. That relationship, he said, was not just about the funding from the tobacco companies but also the suggestions on how to frame the research. The point, Professor Crum said, is not that stress is harmless. Instead, it is to recognize that "all of our good efforts to warn people about stress might be creating a mind set that makes it more damaging." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The walls and ceiling of the apartment's 24 by 6 foot entrance gallery are clad in straw marquetry panels in a herringbone pattern and were fabricated in Paris. There are custom waxed plaster walls in the great room, which has a wood burning fireplace and a ceiling height of 12.4 feet. The adjoining kitchen has a wall of glass that faces north, Miele appliances, a large stone center island, a built in banquette, and lacquered resin cabinetry. The 19 by 14 foot master suite has a wall of windows on the park, upholstered walls, a custom sycamore walk in closet/dressing area and a built in safe. There is a powder room off the gallery, and a rear corridor leads to two bedrooms with en suite baths; one of the bedrooms is currently used as a den. The 2,873 square foot residence is being sold by Ed Snider, the chairman of Comcast Spectacor and the longtime owner of the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League. Mr. Snider, who is based in Philadelphia, said a lifestyle change had prompted his decision to sell the Gramercy pied a terre, where his favorite room is the one Mr. de la Torre converted into a consummate man cave with padded walls lined in tobacco brown leather and a wall size TV "perfect for watching games." Mr. Snider, who commissioned the yearlong renovation, added that "the only reason I'm selling it now is that I'm commuting between Philadelphia and Montecito, Calif., and spend so little time at the apartment that it's not right to keep it." The apartment "has something that most simply do not: multiple wow factors," said Roger Erickson of Sotheby's International Realty, the listing broker, citing its park frontage, ceiling heights and luxurious renovation. Mr. Erickson found the apartment for Mr. Snider, who paid 7 million for it three years ago after the asking price had been reduced to 8.7 million from 10.2 million. "It's hard to imagine a more beautiful place to call home, and it has all the benefits and services of the Gramercy Park Hotel, right next door, to indulge in." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
James Silberman, a revered book editor whose meticulousness, intuition and patience helped propel the publishing careers of a distinguished roster of authors, including James Baldwin, Marilyn French, Hunter S. Thompson and Alvin Toffler, died on July 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93. His son, Michael, said the cause was complications of a stroke. Mr. Silberman was "a man who knows how to edit a manuscript, to read a manuscript and to publish a manuscript," another of his authors, Elie Wiesel, told The New York Times in 1991. Mr. Silberman's career path was serendipitous. A government major at Harvard, he enrolled in the Radcliffe Publishing Course (now the Columbia Publishing Course) after graduating in 1950, then got hired in the shipping department of The Writer, which, he recalled in an oral history, was in the business of "selling a magazine to aspiring writers, telling them how to become rich and famous." He found an advertising job at Little, Brown Company, then became a publicist for the Dial Press in New York in 1953. When the company's sole editor left to have her second child, he was promoted to replace her and assumed the title that would define his vocation. After Alfred A. Knopf, James Baldwin's first publisher, rejected "Giovanni's Room" because they felt its gay white characters might alienate Mr. Baldwin's Black audience, Mr. Silberman scooped it up for Dial. He went on to edit Mr. Baldwin's "Another Country" and "The Fire Next Time." In 1963, Mr. Silberman was lured to Random House as senior editor by Bennett Cerf, the company's co founder, who later named him editor in chief and publisher of adult trade books. Joining an impressive editorial team that included Robert Loomis, Jason Epstein and Joe Fox, Mr. Silberman published Hunter S. Thompson's "Hell's Angels" (1967), Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" (1970), Stewart Brand's "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" (1971, in association with the Portola Institute), David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" (1972) and E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel" (1971) and "Ragtime" (1975). Mr. Silberman left Random House in 1975 after refusing to fire Selma Shapiro, the company's vice president for publicity, with whom he was having an affair and whom he later married; he blamed the company's "moral rigidity." He was immediately hired by Richard E. Snyder, Simon Schuster's competitive chairman, to launch his own imprint, Summit Books. "Jim could see things in what I was doing as a reporter that I did not see," Mr. Hersh said by email, citing his books on Mr. Kissinger and John F. Kennedy. "Amidst constant negative pressure from the subjects, he never flinched and had my back all the way." Mr. Silberman lost his job at Summit in 1991 when the imprint was eliminated to cut costs. He was a vice president and senior editor at Little Brown until 1998 and then established James H. Silberman Books. Over the course of his career, his authors also included Muhammad Ali, Betty Friedan, George Goodman (who wrote about economics under the name Adam Smith), John Irving and Chris Matthews, whom he encouraged to write "Hardball: How Politics Is Played Told by One Who Knows the Game" (1988). "He spotted a piece I'd done for The New Republic as Tip O'Neill's guy going to daily war with the Reagan White House," Mr. Matthews said by email. "He asked me to write a book about the inside political world to match 'The Money Game,'" Mr. Goodman's influential 1968 book. "It became 'Hardball.'" Invoking the editor who fostered Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Mr. Matthews said, "Jim was my Max Perkins." James Henry Silberman was born on March 21, 1927, in Boston to Henry R. Silberman, who ran a news clipping service and was the executive director of the Massachusetts Progressive Party, and Dorothy (Conrad) Silberman. After graduating from Cambridge Latin School, he served in the Army after World War II and then attended Harvard. He married Leona Nevler, an editor, in 1960; they divorced in 1976. In 1986 he married Ms. Shapiro, who survives him, along with two children from his first marriage, Michael and Ellen Silberman; his sister, Dorothy Altman; and four grandchildren. Mr. Silberman was a natty dresser, a dashing wheelman (he became an amateur pilot at 50 and drove a Mazda RX 7 convertible sports car on weekends) and a scrupulous wordsmith who at 86, even after suffering a stroke, finished editing two books. Mr. Cerf, who took pride in all his top editors, said in the mid 1960s that "the best one of all for the purposes of great corporate handling of manuscripts is Jim Silberman, who is now being made editor in chief, because he's the one willing to do all of the dirty work of seeing what happens to all of these manuscripts." Among the authors with whom Mr. Silberman had especially tortured relationships was Mr. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who wrote books about "Fear and Loathing" and whose struggle to write a book tentatively called "The Death of the American Dream" is recorded in his letters to Mr. Silberman in books edited by Douglas Brinkley. Mr. Silberman once said of Mr. Thompson, "Your method of research is to tie yourself to a railroad track when you know a train is coming to it, and see what happens." And, when Mr. Thompson killed himself at 67 in 2005, Mr. Silberman remarked, "He spent his life in search of an honest man, and he seldom found any." Coaxing a book out of Mr. Thompson, or for that matter a more conventional writer, meant "helping the author write the best book he or she can write at that moment in time," which requires that "every time you turn that page, you are open and hopeful," Mr. Silberman once said. "It's very difficult to think your way into a story," he added. "You have to feel your way into it, which requires you to approach the manuscript with a certain kind of naivete. You have to return to the kind of reader all of us once were." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. He arrived in Columbus, Ohio, from Cheyenne, Wyo., where the state was commemorating 150 years of women's suffrage, and then moved on to Williamsburg, Va. Before beginning this journey, I didn't realize how often I'd be traversing time, as well as space. Like a sci fi sojourner crossing dimensions, I've found myself in places I didn't recognize, not just because of unfamiliar terrain, but because it felt like I had landed in another era. There was the time warp in 1960s Las Vegas and, in Santa Catalina, Panama, two timelines for the future: one of rapid development, another of peaceful seclusion. But nowhere has the demarcation between past and future been as clear to me as it was in Columbus, Ohio, a city obsessed with its future, and in Williamsburg, Va., a place dedicated to its past, even as it reassesses it. Admittedly, Columbus had long been a blank spot in my understanding of the country. Not so for my Instagram followers. I had more people send direct messages to me about Columbus things to do, favorite restaurants, offers to act as tour guides than any other place so far. The capital of Ohio, one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, lives largely in the future tense: There's a palpable energy when walking through yuppie centric Short North, drinking with strangers around a bonfire in the still bohemian Olde Towne East, or strolling along the new riverfront. Unlike many former industrial hubs in the Midwest, Columbus feels like a city on the move. I sensed that when I got a preview of what an old friend described as a "crazy art thing coming to the city." Opening in April in a 32,000 square foot warehouse on the outskirts of town, Otherworld will be an immersive experience that combines storytelling, interactive art and escape rooms. Jordan Renda, a 26 year old Ohio State graduate and the founder and creative director of Otherworld, gave me a tour of the space, which is in its finishing stages. As I made my way from room to room, things got stranger and stranger there's a fuzzy monster you can climb into, vertical LED lamps that respond to movement, and stations where you can alter the experiences of other guests. More than 40 artists have helped create installations in 47 different rooms. "I figured this is the perfect spot to bring something brand new like this," Mr. Renda said. "There are so many young people gravitating toward this city right now, not just because of the university, but because of big tech companies moving in." It felt like the future walking through those tripped out halls, and it wasn't just the science fiction theme it was the excitement emanating from Mr. Renda and others in the city. I wanted to know how Columbus got where it is today, with bold art projects, new breweries and millions of dollars being poured into a "smart cities" initiative that aims to revolutionize mobility through self driving cars and electric transportation. I arranged a meeting with Cameron Mitchell, a local who worked his way up the restaurant business to where he is now: running Cameron Mitchell Restaurants, a 25 year old empire that includes 37 restaurants in the United States, with a concentration in the Columbus area. In his plush office in the Arena District, over a bottle of chardonnay, he explained how he got where he is today. None The Book Loft, in the achingly cute neighborhood of German Village, is a national treasure. Its 32 rooms of books, each with different music creating a genre specific soundtrack, can eat up a whole day. It took all my willpower not to fill every available inch of my suitcase with new books. None I spent a glorious afternoon at the Franklin Park Conservatory, where visitors can walk through climate controlled rooms highlighting the flora of various environments. It's home to a large permanent collection of glass pieces by Dale Chihuly, adding an element of the surreal to the experience. None The new National Veterans Memorial and Museum is an arrestingly beautiful building, a spiral that seems to spring from the ground. The thoughtfully curated exhibits take you into the lives of veterans from every major war the United States has been involved in, starting with the Revolutionary War. Its design facilitates reflection, even more than education. In the early 1990s, Mr. Mitchell said, Columbus "was a total meat and potatoes town. Downtown cores were dying, people were moving out to the suburbs and becoming landlocked they weren't coming into the city for dinner." Wondering where Seb is right now? You can hear from him by asking Alexa to "open the 52 Places Traveler." You can learn more about Alexa and The Times at nytimes.com/voice. Restaurants and bars including Mr. Mitchell's were a driving force in the redevelopment of the city center. Like all stories involving gentrification, it's a double edged sword. High Street, the backbone of the Short North neighborhood where Mr. Mitchell has five outposts, underwent a familiar urban evolution from derelict to artsy to what it is now, a shiny strip of shops, cafes and trendy places to eat. Of course, stories of urban development are never quite as neat as the "all boats rise" narrative Mr. Mitchell presented. Orange construction cones are ubiquitous around the city, and new apartment buildings are aimed at 20 somethings working at biotech companies. But I also heard about community organizers and city planners preserving diversity through mixed income housing. But the best meals I had were prepared by young upstart chefs. At Ambrose and Eve, Matthew Heaggans and Catie Randazzo serve comfort food inspired by family recipes (the restaurant is named after Ms. Randazzo's grandparents). At Service Bar, Avishar Barua offers cheeky takes on everything from the Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch (replace the tortillas with Bengali fry bread and throw some brisket in) to Caesar salad (deconstructed to a single, loaded lettuce wedge). I was impressed with both those meals. But Mr. Mitchell told me he'd still give the Columbus food scene two and a half stars out of five, not because it's mediocre, but because he sees so much potential. "I'm not trying to downplay what we do have," he told me. "But I have aspirations for the city to go to a whole other level." I was giddy with excitement when a woman dressed in a bonnet and apron said, "Good day to you!" as I walked by, and when a stern man in Yorktown demonstrated the loading and firing of a musket with all the gravitas of an 18th century infantryman. I could hardly blink during the portrayal of Colonial era citizens put on by actor interpreters, the cast members who make Colonial Williamsburg a living history museum. Most of all, I was inspired to find that in the Historic Triangle (Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown) history isn't dead it is evolving as these places face painful stories about the past and make an effort to unveil the nation builders that didn't make it into (because they didn't write) the history books. This year marks 400 years since the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Va. Just three weeks after that, the governor, his council and 22 elected representatives convened the first General Assembly, laying the foundation for a democratic, independent United States. Visiting the Historic Triangle now makes one understand why it's impossible to pry those two narratives apart. Williamsburg is also commemorating 40 years of African American interpretation it wasn't until 1979 that Colonial Williamsburg started including stories of black residents. An exhibition at the Raleigh Tavern, "Revealing the Priceless," includes a video, shown to the public for the first time, of the controversy that unfolded in 1994 when Colonial Williamsburg reenacted a slave auction, drawing criticism from groups like the N.A.A.C.P. for what some regarded as trivializing. I saw one African American interpretation. "My Story; My Voice," is the heart wrenching tale of Betty, a woman who was enslaved by a wealthy family in Williamsburg. Put together from the fragments of documents that remain, the one woman show charts Betty's childhood, including the moment her mother is sold to another family and, later, Betty's transfer to the family plantation. Records show, the actor interpeter Margarette Joyner told the audience, that by the time she was 50, Betty was listed as "worthless." Stephen Seals is the program development manager for the 40th anniversary commemoration, and also an actor who interprets the life of James Lafayette, a slave who worked as a spy under the Marquis de Lafayette during the Revolutionary War. "You have to be willing, when you're acting, to allow someone to treat you as if your humanity is not there," Mr. Seals said. "And that's really hard, because as a black man in 21st century America, I already have to worry about that walking down the street." The educational component of what Mr. Seals and his colleagues do undercuts the idea of Colonial Williamsburg as a quaint, whitewashed portrayal of a young United States. "The goal is to tell all these stories in a way that they become as much a part of the American character as Thomas Jefferson or George Washington or Patrick Henry," Mr. Seals said. "These are stories that people need to see as American stories" stories, he added, "that we can be proud of." None The reimagined American Revolution Museum at Yorktown does a wonderful job of delving into the political intrigue, brutal battles and larger than life figures of the American Revolution. The highlight is a theater that puts you on the battlefield with surround sound musket fire and smoke machines. None Black and Native American experiences aren't the only narratives being given more attention these days. The small, but illuminating "Tenacity" exhibition at the Jamestown Settlement dives into the untold stories of the women of the early colonies, and includes many artifacts from the early 17th century. None Williamsburg isn't exactly a destination for foodies: Options are dominated by chain restaurants and a baffling density of pancake houses. But I had a great meal of Thai style mussels and roasted brussels sprouts at Amber Ox Public House, the rare kind of microbrewery where the food menu is as enticing as the draft list. Seven miles down the tree lined Colonial Parkway, another team is shedding harsh light on that history. At Historic Jamestown, the site of the 1607 James Fort and the settlement of Jamestown, I spent my final afternoon in the Triangle with David Givens, director of archaeology for the Jamestown Rediscovery Program. He wanted to show me something. "Here, we have the alpha and the omega of enslavement in North America," Mr. Givens said, pointing at some tall brick walls and, next to them, an archaeological site where two women in dusty galoshes pored over clipboards. The walls are what remain of one of the last plantation houses on the island. When the Union army came through in 1862, they freed the slaves and told them to live in their former masters' homes. The adjacent archaeological site is where the home of Captain William Pierce once stood and where Angela, the first documented enslaved African landed in North America. During this anniversary year, Mr. Givens and his team are trying to uncover pieces of Angela's life. "We're starting to ask hard questions of the past and projects like this are where the American public actually want to be." Flipping history on its head through archaeology seems to appeal to Mr. Givens. At the Archaearium, an on site archaeology museum, instead of an exhibition on Pocahontas, there's one on the world of Pocahontas that uses archaeological evidence to show the sophistication of the societies that existed here before the arrival of British colonists. "We study the past, but we don't have to suffer from the past," Mr. Givens said. "It's upsetting for some people to not see Jamestown as just John Smith and Pocahontas that it also potentially shows the beginnings of enslavement in our country. " The sun was just beginning to set over the James River and a chill was setting in. Here in the Historic Triangle, I had learned more about early American history in four days than I had in 30 years. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
When the journalist John D'Agatta wrote a play called "The Lifetime of a Fact" in 2003, he couldn't have known that it would one day become a terrifically engaging Broadway drama starring a boy wizard. Please note that there are six to eight mistakes in that sentence, depending on what you consider a mistake. For one thing, "D'Agata" has only one "T." The show that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, starring Daniel Radcliffe along with Bobby Cannavale and Cherry Jones, is not a drama but a topical comedy, and it's called "The Lifespan of a Fact" not the "Lifetime." Also, the play wasn't written in 2003, or by Mr. D'Agata; rather, it was written, more recently, by a threesome whose official credit I would prefer to omit because, well, I just find it clumsy: Jeremy Kareken David Murrell and Gordon Farrell. If you think that's lordly of me, wait until you get a whiff of the play's ripe caricature of Mr. D'Agata, especially as inhabited by the swaggering Mr. Cannavale. "I'm not interested in accuracy," he crows. "I'm interested in truth." Which is why he doesn't consider himself a journalist (that's mistake No. 6) but rather a lyric essayist, for whom atmosphere takes precedence over facts and rhythm over reliability. So does that mean he can just make stuff up, or fudge details, as I have been doing? "The Lifespan of a Fact" is based on a book of the same name that Mr. D'Agata wrote with Jim Fingal in 2012. That book, in turn, was based on an argument that began when Mr. Fingal, as a young intern, was assigned to fact check an article sorry, essay that Mr. D'Agata had written about a teenager's suicide at a Las Vegas resort in 2002. As portrayed deliciously here by Mr. Radcliffe, who has now put the boy wizard persona well behind him, the character of Fingal is D'Agata's spiritual and physical opposite: scruffy, small, awkward and perseverant. He is a mosquito to Mr. Cannavale's lion. Assigned by the editor of a glossy New York magazine to fact check the 15 page essay, he produces a 130 page spreadsheet outlining his queries. Some address tangible if arguable details: Were the resort's paving bricks red, or, less interestingly, brown? Some are epistemological: How could D'Agata have known what he couldn't have witnessed? And some suggest that the author has trespassed deep into the territory of flat out fiction. Never more than now, with accusations of fake news flying, have these questions bedeviled writers whether journalists or essayists or critics. Mistakes and lies and opinions are interchangeable with facts in the Twitterverse, creating a nimbus of doubt (and opportunities for "artistic" embellishment) around everything. And The Believer's checking process, which in reality stretched to seven years, gets compressed in the play to a five day ordeal with a looming deadline at the printer. Which wouldn't matter except that, to anyone in publishing, the idea of plugging so many gaping factual holes in so little time seems ludicrous. We can at least be grateful for one of the authors' liberties: the invention of Emily Penrose, the fair but tough minded editor of the magazine. Without her, "The Lifespan of a Fact" would just be two sides of an unchanging argument, repeated with variations ad infinitum. Actually, that's what it is anyway, but Penrose, serving as the fulcrum of the argument, gives it nuance and real world meaning. She sees publishing in the context of a deteriorating ecosystem of knowledge, with enormous political and societal implications. The role also gives Ms. Jones the rare chance to shine in lighter material than her customary Broadway assignments. Having her way with snappy, curse speckled dialogue, she suggests a blend of Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson, the sparring editor and reporter from "The Front Page." That she is also, like those archetypally male characters, a totally professional creature makes this the rare play in which the female apex of the triangle is not a romantic figure. I give "The Lifespan of a Fact" big Bechdel points for this but also some engagement demerits. Foreclosing on every attempt Fingal makes to suss out details of her personal life, she forecloses on us as well. If that's dry, the dryness is in some ways a fascinating choice. There used to be a genre of Broadway comedy meant to be topical but not emotional. Plays like "Take Her, She's Mine," "Fair Game" and "Norman, Is That You?" treated current social issues the generation gap, divorce, gay liberation and such as touchstones for an evening's light entertainment, and were welcome as such. So is this one. But "The Lifespan of a Fact" clearly wants to be more than that, even if its raw material isn't strong enough for drama. (For one thing, the original essay, eventually titled "What Happens There" and excerpted in the dialogue, is so purple it hardly seems worth the fuss.) The authors compensate by inflating D'Agata's supposed artistry to Didion like proportions and Fingal's tenacity to mania. Though compression and exaggeration are key writing tools I'm using them now they are perhaps more suspicious in a play about the dangers of compression and exaggeration than in the kind of boulevard comedies that "The Lifespan of a Fact" otherwise resembles. Here they serve to disguise the "fact" that the variously conjoined authors never solved the problem of how to keep the conflict moving toward some climax any more than D'Agata and Fingal ever agree on a definition of truth. After 95 minutes of plausible arguments on each side, the play ends with a shrug. They're both right! And both wrong. So was I mistaken or just selectively truthful in calling "The Lifespan of a Fact" "terrifically engaging" just 20 paragraphs ago? It might have been more accurate, if less marquee ready, to have written "terrifically engaging but not as smart as it thinks." That this doesn't much matter as the play pingpongs along is the result of a terrific comic staging by Leigh Silverman. With its cast, its dead on timing, its perfect set by Mimi Lien and sound design by Palmer Hefferan, it would probably nail its laughs even without the dialogue. It's what you call a good time. Of course, I can't prove that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The interiors of Demi Moore's penthouse were designed in a Southwestern mission motif with cherry wood. The actress Demi Moore finally closed on her triplex penthouse atop the south tower of the landmark San Remo. It took two years to reach a deal, and a 30 million reduction from the original asking price, which had included a two bedroom maisonette. The 45 million sale of PH26C last month, minus the additional apartment, was still the highest price ever paid for a residence at the twin peaked, Emery Roth designed building at 145 146 Central Park West, between 74th and 75th Streets. The previous record, 26.4 million, was set in 2014. Ms. Moore's sale was also the priciest for an Upper West Side co op, according to CityRealty, which tracks apartment transactions. In other notable transactions last month, the director Oliver Stone acquired a waterfront apartment in Battery Park City, the sports anchor Mike Greenberg bought a new condominium near Madison Square Park and the model Petra Nemcova sold her terraced unit in TriBeCa. MS. MOORE'S SAN REMO PENTHOUSE was first listed in April 2015 for 75 million, with unit 1H, a two bedroom two bath lobby level apartment, thrown in. With no takers, the price was slashed to 59 million last June, and the additional unit removed. Adam D. Modlin, founder of the Modlin Group, was the listing broker; Roger Erickson of Douglas Elliman Real Estate represented the unidentified buyer. The monthly maintenance is 19,322. Ms. Moore and her former husband, the actor Bruce Willis, acquired the San Remo triplex in 1990; the purchase price was 7.73 million, according to the appraiser Jonathan J. Miller. The other unit was bought for 485,000 in 1992, he said. The penthouse underwent significant renovations. Bold new windows were installed in each of the 14 main rooms, and the interior was designed in a Southwestern mission motif with cherry wood. Some of the original architectural features remained, like the plaster rosette molding and bas reliefs in the ceiling of the library. The best features perhaps are the spectacular views. Wraparound terraces provide 1,500 square feet of panoramic park, river and cityscape vistas from the 28th floor. Ms. Moore declined to comment on the sale. THE FIVE STORY WILDENSTEIN MANSE on the Upper East Side, a block from Central Park, was sold to a limited liability company linked to Roy Liao, the chief executive of HNA Property Holdings, an affiliate of the Chinese conglomerate HNA Group. The previous record for a city townhouse was the Harkness Mansion, at 4 East 75th Street, which sold in 2006 for 53 million. The 21,072 square foot townhouse on East 64th Street had been home to the Wildenstein Company art gallery since 1932, and at various times, family members had lived there. The building, designed by the architect Horace Trumbauer in the Beaux Arts style, has 20 foot ceilings, along with a paneled elevator and sweeping staircase, according to an August 2016 listing with Cushman and Wakefield that carried a 100 million asking price. It was not known what Mr. Liao or HNA planned to do with the property, which is actually zoned for commercial use. HNA did not respond to a request for comment. The Wildensteins' broker, Carrie Chiang of the Corcoran Group, declined to discuss the deal, which appeared to have been done privately. The closing was years in the making. In 2014, the nation of Qatar agreed to buy the house for 90 million. It later backed out of the deal and was sued by the Wildensteins in federal court; both sides reached an out of court settlement. The Ukrainian born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, the owner of Warner Music and an investor in the Broadway musical "Hamilton," also wanted the house. Last year, he filed a state lawsuit, which was recently dismissed, accusing the Wildensteins of reneging on an agreement to sell the building. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Somehow, about a year ago, I found myself backstage at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Rachel Bloom, the star and my co creator of "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," was about to perform some songs from our show in Lincoln Center's prestigious American Songbook series, and she had invited me to do a number with her called "JAP Battle." Me, 50 years old, onstage, rapping. Everyone else who was about to be onstage (Rachel and Jack Dolgen and Adam Schlesinger, the "Crazy Ex" songwriting team) was a seasoned songwriter and performer. Me? I was about to perform in public for the first time since my high school graduation in 1985, when I sang, very out of tune, the Kenny Rogers classic "Through the Years" with my friend John. So there I was at Lincoln Freaking Center. I'm from New Jersey; I grew up calling New York "the City." So, yeah, Lincoln Center has a "freaking" in the middle of it. The giant floor to ceiling windows of the Appel Room made me feel like I was about to perform on the streets of Manhattan. I was scared, but what comforted me was the knowledge that I would be looking into the eyes of my supportive stage mother, Rachel. Yes, my stage mother is a woman in her very young 30s. And this is the story of how this young woman, and the other young people and women on our show, made me into an honorary millennial. My first years in Hollywood, in my 20s, I worked on assignments for movie studios and wrote and produced television pilots. I learned my craft, sure, but it was also an apprenticeship in the ways and language of the older people who ran the business. These were overwhelmingly male people. I'm an opinionated person by nature, but I quickly learned that women and especially, female screenwriters do best by getting their opinions across in other ways. One way is to learn to speak Man. Luckily, I was already proficient in this language, as the doted on daughter of a brainy father with whom I spent hours in conversation. I'm also quite proficient in Apple Polishing, a hard won talent earned through years of trying to get good grades. Even with the ability to speak in these codes, it was not easy sometimes being the only lady in the room. Over time, though, I developed a carapace. I learned to shrug off the comments, swallow my upset and say something suitably unconfrontational. (Occasionally, my true feelings would leak out, such as when a director I was working with exclaimed, in front of a room full of mainly men, seconds after he had met me: "Oh bummer, you're engaged? A The only thing I could think of to do was to spit out an expletive. No one laughed. But he never said anything like that again, so ...) When it came to my work, however, screenwriters, male or female, learn to be careful how they communicate. Too many opinions can get you easily, quickly booted off a set or off a project. And so, against my nature, I learned how to communicate obliquely. But then, in 2014, I started working with Rachel. I was 46, and she was 26. In selling and managing the process of making the pilot, I was able to use my political skills to good effect. But I also found myself admiring the directness and confidence with which she expressed her opinions, to anyone who was listening or even just standing nearby. Also, since doing an out there, super feminist musical TV show was never in my career plan I had a day job writing screenplays I never felt a need to conform or compromise. So we didn't. Instead of shaping what we were doing to fit what others wanted, we built enthusiasm for what we wanted, by talking about the show with passion and by listening to other people's opinions. And, ironically, it turned out that those tactics worked better than any of the rather complicated court of Versailles dances I'd done to try to protect my work earlier in my career. When we embarked on shooting "Crazy Ex Girlfriend," we staffed the senior ranks with mostly women. Our writers' room was (and remained) seven women and three men. So now my collaborators were not just a single young woman, but a group of many women and many young people. Along the way, over four years and the 61 episodes, I found that I related more to these younger writers than I ever would have expected. I learned quickly that their thoughts, opinions and values really spoke to me and to how I liked to work. This process made me feel ... free. On our show, we did the kind of jokes and stories I'd never been able to do in years of writing for movie studios, things I'd always wanted to write about. We did stories on abortion and menstruation and bisexuality and orgasms. We dealt with the messy details of being a human, creating flawed characters who did troubling, complicated, wonderful things. As a screenwriter, I'd been bludgeoned with the need to make characters "likable." We're in a new era now. "Interesting" is the new "likable." Rachel, in particular, has often blown me away with her fearlessness. This is how, over the course of our show, she has ended up sailing through the air on a pretzel or licking a hamster water pipe or tap dancing while singing about anti depressants. Rachel's wild creativity stems from her conviction that she is entitled to follow her instincts and express her feelings. This is often cited as a critique of her generation, but, man, I found it refreshing, especially in light of the careful sublimations and apologies I'd learned to make over the years. This openness is a major contributor to Rachel's "let's put on a show and include everyone" vibe. She put me in one of her comedy videos. She encouraged me to make a cameo on our show (which I did in our last season, playing a prosecutor who was quite mean to Rachel's character, Rebecca). So that night about a year ago, when I stepped onstage at Lincoln Center, the City glittering at my feet, I was scared, sure. But I knew all I had to do was look into the eyes of my much younger partner, see the steady support in her eyes and let it rip. I danced and rapped and did not care about being judged. They say Rachel's generation lives for participation trophies because their parents rewarded effort over achievement. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. But don't you dare touch the participation trophy I got from Ms. Bloom. Our show has wrapped. Four years of my life. I could never catalog all the things I've learned. I can never thank all the people who worked so hard and gave so much. I also have to thank Rachel, my young friend, for setting me free. People ask me what it was like to discover Rachel. In some ways I did. But I always respond that, to paraphrase Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," she discovered me right back. Now I'm comfortable onstage. Rachel and I have done a few performances together of "JAP Battle" (including one at the 92nd Street Y, where I blanked and Rachel stopped and started us over, like a patient parent). I still get nervous, but I'm more confident with the spotlight on me now. Which is what led me to say yes to the next show Rachel asked me to be in, the one she's doing with the cast on May 14 and 15 in New York. Look for me to be there. For about a few minutes, I will be front and center, beside Rachel, at Radio City Freaking Music Hall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
According to the promoters, the stakes are nothing less than the existence of Woodstock 50. Without the requested injunctions, they say in their filing, they "will be unable to produce the festival, secure the permits, retain the talent and attract the ticket purchasers." Up to 9 million is needed in the next four to six weeks, they say. The war of words between the festival organizers which include Michael Lang, a producer of the original Woodstock in 1969 escalated this week, after Lang released a public letter on Monday accusing Dentsu of trying to "destroy an American cultural icon." Dentsu fired back, saying that production delays gave it the right to take control of the event and cancel it. As a Dentsu spokeswoman said at the time, "we simply recovered the funds in the festival bank account, funds which we originally put in as partner." Representatives for Dentsu declined to comment on Thursday. Court documents filed by festival organizers include a copy of its 23 page financing contract, which states that a Dentsu subsidiary would provide up to 49 million for production expenses. It also said that Dentsu had approved a budget under the assumption that Woodstock 50 would sell 150,000 tickets and draw 22 million in media and sponsorship sales. But those targets were never met, and talent agents said warning signs about Woodstock 50 began to appear early on, like a much delayed lineup announcement; the mysterious departure of an announced headliner, the Black Keys; a date for the start of ticket sales that came and went; and, most troublingly, the lack of essential state and local permits. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
THIS IS CHANCE! The Shaking of an All American City, a Voice That Held It Together By Jon Mooallem A thrill junkie who embraced every tempest of nature, John Muir was in Yosemite in 1872 when an earthquake made him feel like a sailor on the deck of a sea tossed ship. "A noble earthquake!" he shouted in wobble legged joy. "A noble earthquake!" It's unlikely that anything close to Muir's exuberance was heard in Alaska on March 27, 1964, when the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America remade the topography of the fledgling Last Frontier State. It was a monster. Measuring 9.2 in magnitude, the megathrust quake shook the ground for more than four minutes, as 600 miles of fault ruptured and moved up nearly 60 feet in places. Large buildings were knocked from their foundations, houses slipped and crumbled, sidewalks and sewer mains twisted and broke apart. Beaches became cliffs, and cliffs flattened into beaches. Much of downtown Anchorage looked like "the devil ground his heel into it," as one reporter wrote. The J. C. Penney, the city's cherished department store, was largely rubble. The quake shook Seattle's Space Needle, more than 1,400 miles to the south, and rattled many parts of California. The tsunami that followed was a lethal punch, drowning at least one coastal village in Alaska, nearly overwhelming others. In all, at least 129 people died, mostly from landslides and huge waves. The Great Alaska Earthquake, also known as the Good Friday quake, left behind a graphic tutorial in the power of plate tectonics, which was then still mostly a theory. Today, if you drive southeast of Anchorage, along Turnagain Arm, you can still see scraps of the ghost forests, trees that were plunged below the briny surface and frozen in place. It's an earth science lesson that even those who failed Geology 101, Rocks for Jocks, can comprehend. This colossus of crustal upheaval is at the center, though it's not the star, of Jon Mooallem's nonfiction account of a handful of quirky characters who rose to the occasion on that dreadful Friday. His story is built around Genie Chance, a part time radio reporter at KENI in Anchorage, a mother of three who became the voice of reason, sanity and vital information at a time when Alaska felt as if it had been cut off from the rest of the planet. The book is a portrait of a young woman, a young profession and a young city. 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. Chance's journalism on the fly was heroic. When other voices went for hyperbole and panic, she was measured and mesmerizing. It won her a large following, and a near cultlike status in the state where she later served as a legislator. She was a feminist before that word came into wide use, an Alaskan original by way of her native Texas. Imagine Sarah Palin without the you betcha malaprops and the political grievances. She also suffered under the blunt northern variation of institutional sexism, and from the physical blows of her husband, who regularly beat her when he was drunk. Her life was "the whole women's movement in a nutshell," as one colleague said. On that Friday when the earth moved in Alaska, Chance more than met her moment. Anchorage was barely 50 years old, with a metro population of around 100,000. Chance was 37, "lithe and bewitchingly beautiful," with a charismatic smile, in Mooallem's sketch. She was in her car with her son at 5:36 p.m. when everything changed. Electrical wires snapped overhead. The ground started to roll. People who'd been strolling suddenly tumbled; it was impossible to walk. The pavement didn't instantly crumble, but rolled in waves, rippling like sheets in the wind. Amid a showering of glass, Chance heard men shouting, "Fourth Avenue is gone!" Chance would soon be on the air, her station powered initially by emergency generators. She tried to vet information before going live with it, and passed on pleas and updates from family members looking for loved ones. Over the next three days, the state experienced 52 separate aftershocks, 11 of them greater than 6 on the Richter scale. Through it all, while racing back and forth to take care of her family, she remained calm. She understood, better than most of those around her, that mass hysteria would lead to mayhem. She asked grocers to open their stores, and cautioned people against hoarding. "I was responsible for reassuring them that the world had not come to an end," she said later. Mooallem does a nice job of showing the domino of damage in cinematic slow motion the crevasses opening in city streets, the land slinking and sliding, the indiscriminate collapse of homes of both the rich and the poor. And he's astute in explaining the science: the crust of the Pacific Plate pushing under the North American Plate. It's no exaggeration to say that Anchorage was nearly unrecognizable after the quake. He also brings to life a half dozen or so ordinary people who acted in extraordinary ways. The old saying of how women feel about Alaska men the odds are good, but the goods are odd certainly applied. But these oddballs were heroic, each in his own way. There was a psychology professor, Bill Davis, who marshaled the volunteers of his Alaska Rescue Group into action. A theater director, Frank Brink, was determined to stage "Our Town" soon after the disaster, to prove that life and storytelling go on. A sociologist, Enrico Quarantelli, doggedly documented human behavior under extreme duress. And Alaska's first governor, William A. Egan (no relation), proved as steady as Genie Chance. But this is a very strange book. The big land of Alaska and the outsize people who inhabit it have long inspired some terrific tomes Jack London's "Call of the Wild," John McPhee's "Coming Into the Country," Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild." The main problem with "This Is Chance!" is that it fails to rise to the drama of the event. That would be fine if the character drama played out in a satisfying way. But here it comes up short as well. The book moves about in time, jumping ahead and then back again. It's one thing to leap off the chronological ladder, quite another to leave the reader confused or worse caring less about people in the story. Our hero fades and then disappears rather suddenly, with many pages still left in the book. At that point, the author appears, a "wry and sometimes laconic seeming writer with an off kilter jaw," as Mooallem writes about himself. This is trouble, and things go downhill from there. All due respect to my fellow scribe, a bright and resourceful writer, but I wanted more of Genie Chance and less of her chronicler. Chance divorced the abusive husband, had a good run at state politics, but then suffered illness and family tragedy at a relatively young age. She got dementia and died at 71, in 1998, at the Juneau Pioneer Home. She left behind many recordings, not just of the days when she was a lifeline through the airwaves, but of her experiences as a true pioneer in a state where that tag is too easily thrown around. The quake certainly has its place in history. This remarkable woman deserves her own. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN FRANCISCO Christine Johnson, a public finance consultant with an engineering degree, was running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. She crisscrossed her downtown district talking about her plans to stimulate housing construction, improve public transit and deal with the litter of "needles and poop" that have become a common sight on the city's sidewalks. Today, a year after losing the race, Ms. Johnson, who had been in the Bay Area since 2004, lives in Denver with her husband and 4 year old son. In a recent interview, she spoke for millions of Californians past and present when she described the cloud that high rent and child care costs had cast over her family's savings and future. "I fully intended San Francisco to be my home and wanted to make the neighborhoods better," she said. "But after the election we started tallying up what life could look like elsewhere, and we didn't see friends in other parts of the country experiencing challenges the same way." But California also has a pernicious housing and homeless problem and an increasingly destructive fire season that is merely a preview of climate change's potential effects. Corporations like Charles Schwab are moving their headquarters elsewhere, while Oracle announced that it would no longer stage its annual software conference in San Francisco, in part because of the city's dirty streets. "Shining example or third world state?" a recent headline on a local news website asked. "You get depressed if you listen to everything going on, but you can't find a contractor and the state continues to create jobs," said Ed Del Beccaro, an executive vice president with TRI Commercial Real Estate Services, a brokerage and property management company in the Bay Area. Whether it's by taming bays and mountains with roads, bridges and power lines or grappling with a lack of water and crippling earthquakes, California is perennially testing the limits of growth. Its population has swelled to 40 million and the state's economy has grown more than previous generations had thought possible, cramming more cars and more people into cities that were supposed to be tapped out, while seeding new companies and new industries as old ones died or moved elsewhere. But today it has a new problem. For all its forward thinking companies and liberal social and environmental policies, the state has mostly put higher value jobs and industries in expensive coastal enclaves, while pushing lower paid workers and lower cost housing to inland areas like the Central Valley. This has made California the most expensive state with a median home value of 550,000, about double that of the nation and created a growing supply of three hour "super commuters." And while it has some of the highest wages in the country, it also has the highest poverty rate based on its cost of living, an average of 18.1 percent from 2016 to 2018. That helps explain why the state has lost more than a million residents to other states since 2006, and why the population growth rate for the year that ended July 1 was the lowest since 1900. "What's happening in California right now is a warning shot to the rest of the country," said Jim Newton, a journalist, historian and lecturer on public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It's a warning about income inequality and suburban sprawl, and how those intersect with quality of life and climate change." You can see this in California economic forecasts for 2020, which play down the threat of a global trade war and play up the challenge of continuing to add jobs without affordable places for middle and lower income workers to live. You can see it in the Legislature, which has raised the minimum wage, and next year is poised to debate a bill that could reshape the state by essentially forcing cities to allow multistory buildings near transit stops. You also can see it in the stories of people like Ms. Johnson and other highly educated workers who have gone elsewhere. But the underlying fault lines were still there. Rents and home prices stayed high, especially in the coastal areas where job and income growth was strongest. As the economy picked up and housing costs resumed their rise, lower paid service and professional workers moved to distant exurbs, while homelessness spiraled to the point that local political leaders are all but declaring they are out of solutions. Elected officials in Los Angeles have urged the governor, Gavin Newsom, to declare a state of emergency over homelessness, while the governor is in turn telling the federal government that a state with a 215 billion annual budget cannot solve this on its own. But President Trump has belittled California's homelessness problem and repeatedly sought to punish the state, whose 55 electoral votes went to Hillary Clinton in 2016. With their traffic and trash, California's biggest cities have gone from the places other regions tried to emulate to the places they're terrified of becoming. There are increasing complaints in Oregon, Nevada and Idaho that rents and home prices there are being pushed up by new arrivals fleeing California. A recent election in Boise, Idaho, was seen as a referendum on California style growth. And Oregon's decision to essentially ban single family house neighborhoods has been billed by lawmakers as a bold intervention to pull the state away from a California like trajectory. For now, voters and businesses are less concerned about where growth will come from and more concerned with figuring out how to address its discontents. In a recent poll, by the Public Policy Institute of California, homelessness was tied with the economy as voters' top concern, the first time it has been a top issue in the 20 year life of the survey. Another survey by the institute showed that almost half of Californians have considered leaving because of high housing costs. Restaurants and other businesses are hiring fewer workers than they might because they can't find enough people who can afford local housing costs. It's also an issue for giant technology companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, which have pledged a total of 4.5 billion to build subsidized housing. Greg Biggs is adding more machines and moving jobs to cheaper locations. Mr. Biggs is the chief executive of Vander Bend Manufacturing, a company in San Jose that makes metal products including surgical components and racks where data centers store computer servers. Vander Bend has doubled its head count over the past five years, to about 900 employees, and pays 17 to 40 an hour for skilled technicians who need training but not a college degree. The problem is he can't find enough workers. The unemployment rate in San Jose is around 2 percent, and many of Vander Bend's employees already commute two or more hours to work. To compensate, Mr. Biggs has bought several van size robot arms that pull metal panels from a pile then stamp them flush, bend their edges and assemble them into racks. He has opened a second location 75 miles away in Stockton, where labor and housing costs are a lot lower. This is in most ways a success story. Vander Bend is raising wages and training workers. The machines aren't replacing jobs but instead make them more efficient, and the company is bringing higher wage positions to a region that needs more of them. But for workers, even substantial income gains are being offset by rising costs. A decade ago Manuel Curiel made 22 an hour as a production worker at Vander Bend. Today he is 37 and, after several promotions, makes a six figure salary. Almost anywhere else, that would be a shining example of how the longest economic expansion on record is reaching more workers, including those, like Mr. Curiel, who dropped out of high school. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
In this episode of Modern Love: The Podcast, three actresses read Modern Love essays as a part of the WNYC Studios Werk It podcast festival, which ran through June 17. The Broadway actress and musician Lauren Molina reads Rosemary Counter's essay, "A Craigslist 'Missed Connection' Lure"; the actress Amirah Vann ("Underground," "Girls") reads Elizabeth Fitzsimons's essay, "My First Lesson in Motherhood"; and the actress Michaela Watkins ("Casual," "Veep") reads Amy Sutherland's essay, "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage." You can also hear the episode on iTunes and Stitcher. After, hear the Modern Love editor Daniel Jones in conversation with Iris Adler, executive producer of the podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Kevin Conway, who brought intensity to roles large and small on the screen and the stage, including memorable turns in the 1970s in the plays "When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?" and "The Elephant Man," died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 77. Geraldine Newman, his longtime partner, said the cause was a heart attack. Mr. Conway got a late start on his acting career, but by 1969 he was making his Broadway debut in Arthur Kopit's "Indians." His first significant film role was in "Slaughterhouse Five," George Roy Hill's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, in 1972. Early on, he often played explosive characters and tough guys. In 1978 he worked opposite Sylvester Stallone in both "F.I.S.T.," a tale of organized labor and organized crime, and "Paradise Alley," in which he played a hoodlum in the mean streets of 1940s New York. Mr. Stallone, he said, had suggested that he get a tattoo of an eagle on his forehead to make the character more memorable. "I told him I wasn't crazy about the idea," Mr. Conway told People magazine. "A thing like that could cut down your employment opportunities." Mr. Conway was also seen on TV in numerous series and mini series. In 2007 alone he appeared in the short lived NBC series "The Black Donnellys," about Irish brothers caught up in organized crime in New York, and the mini series "The Bronx Is Burning," about the 1970s Yankees, in which he portrayed the team executive Gabe Paul. He made good use of his compelling, slightly raspy voice as well, providing narration for television shows and commercials. He warned New Yorker subway riders to say something if they saw something. He was the voice of Mark Twain in a 2001 Ken Burns documentary. At about the same time, he was the creepy Control Voice for a remake of the science fiction anthology series "The Outer Limits." "There is nothing wrong with your television," he advised viewers as eerie static materialized. "Do not attempt to adjust the picture." Kevin John Conway was born on May 29, 1942, in Harlem to James and Margaret (Sanders) Conway. His father was a mechanic, and his mother worked for the telephone company. After graduating from Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn in 1959, he spent time in the Navy and then took a job at IBM, starting in the mailroom and working his way up to sales. On a whim he enrolled in nighttime acting classes. Eventually, he said, he asked IBM to fire him so that he could collect unemployment while pursuing an acting career. He began getting stage roles and delivering charged, attention getting performances. In the early 1970s he was in a long running Off Broadway revival of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Dale Wasserman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel about an asylum, playing the wildly disruptive McMurphy, the role played by Kirk Douglas in 1963 on Broadway and by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 film. In 1973 he had another Off Broadway success in Mark Medoff's "When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?," playing an amped up man with a gun who disrupts a diner. "Mr. Conway lights up the stage with his half amused, half vicious personification," Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. "Rarely can alienation have been exposed so mercilessly and, this is revealing, so understandingly." An entirely different sort of role came his way in 1979, when he played Frederick Treves, the doctor who befriends the title character in "The Elephant Man," Bernard Pomerance's play about a Victorian era Englishman with deformities. Treves was nothing like the brash extroverts Mr. Conway usually played, and nothing like Mr. Conway himself. "Treves is much more uptight than a modern character," Mr. Conway told The Times. "He's a guy who tends to sit on his emotions, whereas my instinct is to let them go." "Yet," he added, "someone like Laurence Olivier gets better as he gets older." As Mr. Conway got older, the fiery young characters gave way to more mature ones, requiring a restrained bluster or even pathos. In a 1995 attempt to adapt the 1954 film "On the Waterfront" into a stage play, he was the racketeering boss Johnny Friendly, the role played by Lee J. Cobb in the movie. The Broadway production closed quickly, but Mr. Conway drew praise. "Easily the most riveting contribution is Mr. Conway's as the murderous union boss," Vincent Canby wrote in an otherwise unenthusiastic review in The Times. In the film "13 Days" (2000), about the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Conway was the hawkish Gen. Curtis LeMay, who locks horns with the Kennedy brothers. In "Invincible," a 2006 movie about Vince Papale, who made the roster of the Philadelphia Eagles as a 30 year old rookie, he played Papale's father, a man who is not used to showing emotion but who chokes up with pride at his son's accomplishment. (Mark Wahlberg played Vince.) Mr. Conway also directed plays, including several productions of Jerry Sterner's "Other People's Money," in which he starred when it played Off Broadway in 1989. Mr. Conway's marriage to Mila Burnette ended in divorce. Ms. Newman said that in addition to her, Mr. Conway, an animal advocate, would have listed his survivors as his three beloved pets: a cat, Chico, and two dogs, Cotton and Dorothy. Decades earlier, when appearing in "The Elephant Man," he would sometimes think of another pet dog, Jingles, when conjuring up the tenderness his character was feeling toward Merrick, the Elephant Man. "It's not that the relationship is that of dog and master," he explained to The Times, "but that a pet will sometimes do something that really pleases you. Well, Merrick occasionally does things that surprise and delight Treves." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LONDON The Victoria and Albert Museum, the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, is completing its biggest building project in a century: a new courtyard entrance and foyer, opening on June 30, that's intended to make it easier for the public to gain access. The museum is also inaugurating a vast exhibition gallery. The British architect Amanda Levete and her team have dug into an underused corner of the Victoria and Albert Museum here to create a nearly 12,000 square foot temporary exhibition space that will be among the largest in Britain. Until now, the museum's blockbusters including a 2013 show on David Bowie and a 2015 one on Alexander McQueen have been staged in Victorian rooms converted into galleries that visitors enter through a maze of corridors and collection displays. The new director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tristram Hunt, a 43 year old historian and former member of the British Parliament, said in an interview that the redevelopment was needed because there was "this totally dead space of technical services and old huts right in the heart of the estate of the museum." "The crucial driver was creating a really top of the range exhibition space, because at the moment we're slightly higgledy piggledy in our exhibition galleries," he added. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
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